Dilating accomodation

So people staying with us have moved out and the house now feels MUCH too big instead of just too big. I’m wishing there would be more on one floor/less open space at the minute, because it’s cold and I have to walk further to the bookshelf downstairs and because I’m here rarely enough during times when other people are that I’m not concerned about the noise of proximity at present. Even when I am, we’re in the same room and noise wouldn’t be significantly impacted. Part of an ongoing dissatisfaction with everything, I think.

I’d love somewhere smaller with carpets and solid walls painted twenty years ago in some inconceivable colour (as in, how could they have possibly thought that attractive?) and no need for stairs (unless it were a terrace, in which case stairs are permissible) and with no space for computers (I’d have to sell this thing and get a laptop instead) but room enough for one big desk — not in my room so I couldn’t put random existing-paraphenalia upon it (deodorant cans, clothes, random paper, keys, wallet, cameras) or the chair beneath it. The desk would have room at the back for an assortment of books within ready reach, but not impeding upon the workspace. I suppose that would make it about 115cm (45 inches) deep… it must also be wide enough for a laptop at one end that I could comfortably push out of the way.

A sun room would be excellent. One of those things you find in flats that’s completely useless for pretty much everything, but for the storage of books at one end of and reading in. West-facing, preferably, so one could enjoy a book in the winter afternoon sun after the room has reached a comfortable temperature over the course of the day. I may regret that decision in summer, but there are always curtains (or rolling shades; not blinds, they are too clinical).

The bedroom would be small with a separate wardrobe (the wardrobe itself is merely the object of nostalgia), such that there remained fairly little space–on the walls, especially. I have never had time for cultivating character in one’s bedroom — it always appears messy but I cannot commit to placing anything upon the walls. I will place a calendar there, dutifully, every year… and then forget to turn the pages. At present I am enjoying Leunig — I suppose I could arbitarily turn months to look at the pictures, as it is not as though the thing gets very much use. I live in the room next door for organisation (yes, IT) though the handheld now resides in my bedroom — I intentionally have wireless disabled to keep it out. My room is a haven for chaotic reading, hurried — but immensely enjoyable — academic consumption. Why I fail to spend more time in there is a mystery, probably in some way related to mess of clothes and so forth. Partially a rug instead of carpet, which means the chair gets stuck. Partially the chair being on wheels instead of fixed. Partially the desk being covered in aforementioned items (can you have forementioned items, meaning items to be mentioned in the hypothetical future? I refuse to believe aforementioned/forementioned can be synonyms). The actual reason why is a mystery cloaked in my own propensity to sit here and blog instead of just sitting down and getting things done.

One day, you see, I’m going to quit this web gig and uninstall my five browsers (well, four of them) and MSN and feed reader and email client and remove my network card and then start paying the university $2 a month for dialup and not bother to renew my domain name and stop checking my Gmail account and just use my uni email address (which I will check using the web interface tool, and have “Sent using Horde/IMP” appended to all my outgoing messages). Then, I’ll get rid of the mobile, and possibly my desktop computer. I’ll sit quietly reading books, papers, essays, and maybe even write something useful after a while.

Then I’ll discover that all I have done is transfer my focus, when I find myself growling at ridiculous ideas and writing angry letters, beaming hugely at characterful irregularities in works consistent with that in others and beginning to take advantage of the postal service. Then, the extent of the problem will be truly known, when even the humanities remain distinctly inhuman and detached.

Can’t I get anything right?

Walt Whitman and the Most Boring Lecture Yet

Well, it might be the simpler English course this semester, but that doesn’t mean its potential for frustration is in any way diminished. Some lecturer wasted an hour of my life today talking about the binding and cover of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the three metaphors in the title of that work, parroting some Emerson essay for about thirty minutes, and extolling the virtues of the American character as though it were some homoerotic process of creative inspiration. Oh. Dear. And I won’t even start on her ineptitude in the art of clicking “next” in Powerpoint. Shoot me now.

Unfortunately it is the same lecturer again tomorrow. I’m going to be getting an aisle seat close to the door.

Then there is (mercifully) a one-week hiatus, after which she will proceed to (probably) butcher Emily Dickinson — who looks vastly more interesting than Whitman to start with, but I fear this can only mean there is further to fall.

Of a lonely Manifesto

There It sat. Clad in a black and red jacket; beneath that, a murky darkness devoid of red. In a shelf betwixt hundreds of others, the weight of them calling against It. Theorists of what was, rather than what could be, called out around it; of things past (though now, of course, It had also moved into that same past); even the children sat oblivious to it. Within crawling reach, they debated what today’s would be — clearly, some ritual was being played out, sitting on the floor. The mother squatted, moving between the gaze of the two, leaning to turn a page, sometimes two. Its colours were crisp, but not against the pictures accompanying words (though words may first accompany pictures) in folio-sized glossy colour. The little red book clad in darkness said nothing against them, did not try to plead its case. The children were oblivious, anyway. Gradually, the mother grows tired of waiting and pulls out a (probably recurring) threat, another piece of the ritual: perhaps we won’t get a book this week? No, of course we shall. It is an empty threat — even the children know this. The book would splutter, groan at the bourgeois’ idleness and commitment to acquisitive ‘education’. But It could not, the superstratum of capitalism wrapped tightly around it, even as it is released unequivocally into the domain of the people. Destined to life on a shelf in a world as foreign as it has always been.

Communist literature

Everything on my bookshelf is left-leaning. I will prop them against the left side of the shelf with no difficulty incurred, but to right-align them is a recipe for revolution and/or spectacular suicide attempts — better dead than re[a]d takes on a whole new meaning. I have a feeling this is something to do with our reading from left-to-right, top-to-bottom way of doing things. Which, amusingly, would make the literature of some communist nations right-leaning.

Oh the irony.

Oh the procrastination, that I will sit here blogging about the politics of my bookshelf. Sigh (good sigh :))

99 Bottles of REGEX on the wall

Coolest. Code. Evar.