one month

I've been here a month now: day 31 on my spreadsheet tracking inflows (food; more than I should) and outflows (money; less than I'd feared). Like seemingly everyone else I've run into the past few days, I am fighting off a cold. In what is both cause and effect, I have not been sleeping well on my hard and tiny bed and everything feels slightly out-of-focus. My ears are all stuffed up but I talk to people so rarely that it doesn't matter much.

Last night was another great show, No Man's Land by Harold Pinter, starring, or rather sort of anchored by, Michael Gambon. Existential questions aside, it was a relief to see a play that did not end in the main character's suicide, as was the case with the last three things I'd seen. There is a certain emotional state that I associate with the opening of the second act of a drama, an eerie, drafty feeling that's half empathy with characters that one has come to know, and perhaps, identify with, and a cold appraisal of the fact that this is after all a performance and as such you are blessedly distanced from the unfolding tragedy to which, however performatively, you've passively agreed to watch unfold in front of you. Pinter starts with that feeling, with that sinister discomfort, and allows it to build unabated. The catharsis, such as it is, lies in your realization that this is, after all, only performance, only language, that the awfulness isn't intended to be taken as real in a certain sense (no one is getting stabbed behind an arras). But that, of course, is followed immediately by the realization, underscored by the play again and again, that that's really no better and perhaps ultimately no different. It's been a long time (high school?) since I've read Satre, but last night I had the desire to dig it out again. I didn't, of course, because I'm a dilettante and not a real intellectual honestly, it creeps me out and the Pinter was enough of that.

(Side note: the tickets were frightfully expensive. Pinter is a marquee hame, of course, as is Gambon: you may know him as Richard Harris's successor to the role of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. The other members of the four-man cast included David Bradley, who plays Filch in the same films and was all kinds of badass, David Williams, who is on Little Brittian, and Nick Dunning who-- exciting for me-- plays Thomas Boleyn, Anne's father, on The Tudors. He is a striking, snarling physical presence in person, and I found myself thinking of the parallels between the menacingly protective servant he played in "No Man's Land" and his scheming, ambitious Henrician courtier on TV. He looks better out of tights. Anyway.)

As I said, not reading Satre but, as I've been doing a fair amount of writing lately (a conference paper-- yuck-- but one which I think will provide some helpful internal links in the chapter I'm working on now) and I find it's good to balance these things, I've been indulging in some non-academic reading. Specifically, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, which turns out to be really, well, good. (I don't often read novels.) There is a concreteness and a specificity to her style that's immensely appealing. The last fiction I read was Anthony Trollope's The Warden (wait, I'm lying: it was Brokeback Mountain but I didn't like it so nevermind) and there's a social (rather than socialist) realism to both that I find especially compelling, a certain sense of the individual as something that exists both in and out of the community. Brick Lane is, so far, really quite charming, though I suspect I'd find almost any narrative to be so afte ra week spent poring over Gabriel Harvey's Latin verses (impressive, impenetrable, not charming) and scholarship from the 30's, 50's and 70's on the history of lexicography.

This last category, I have to admit, ranges from a bit dry to the mind-numbingly dull. Perhaps all the German essays that I can't as yet read are in fact engaging, playful, and provocative. Perhaps not. Either way, I hope that this piece I'm working on now will breathe some life into the subject matter, in this case an English grammar, written in Latin, from 1594, which is important for all sorts of reasons I won't go into. I do believe that it's always worth querying the categories we use to talk about things like language: that shit shapes reality, yo. No really: I went to my local pharmacy this afternoon, looking for whatever the UK equivalent of NyQuil is. Now, in the states, one is generally presented with a huge array of cold and flu remedies, and one generally finds the stuff that purports to decongest your nose, calm your cough, soothe your throat, and make up all the work you should have been doing while you were in fact laying on the couch watching "My Super Sweet Sixteen." Having located these products, you choose from the daytime or nighttime versions, or perhaps a combo pack, but that's stupid because it costs more per pill and you'll use them all up eventually anyway. I mean, it's not as dumb as a variety box of tampons, but still.

Not so here. One is confronted, instead, with a broad array of products identified as being either for a "chesty cough" (which makes me think it somehow has huge bosoms) or a "tickly cough" with no temporal inflection whatsoever. Eventually, I conferred with the pharmacist and left with a bottle of something labeled "for chesty coughs" and not labeled non-drowsy, but I've really got no idea what it will do (even if the 5% ABV and presence of diphenhyhydramine hydrochloride give me some clue). My point, simply, is that schematic categories have material implications, particularly across differences of time and place.

In not entirely unrelated news, I've joined a different gym. They very kindly worked out a deal that allowed me to join until the end of June only, but I had to pay up front so let's hope it works out. The one I was using, in the student union, was cheaper and had a pool (still does, actually), but the ceilings were low, there wasn't enough cardio equipment and the ventilation was very poor. It smelled like wrestling mats. This one lacks a pool, but has more machines, smells nicer, and generally appears to be a more civilized place. Plus, its location makes it impossible to avoid on my way to or from the British Library, removing a major excuse for non-attendance. An additional upside: they have a Power Plate, which I do not for one minute beleive is an effective form of exercise, but which I am excited to try none the less. A potential downside: I fear, based on passing comments, that this is the gym my advisor (who eats lunch; the other is too much to contemplate) uses when staying in London.