Illiterature

Love it or (more often) hate it, poorly formulated and mindnumbingly trivial quizzes are an everyday feature of the Facebook world. This particular description of someone’s quiz result, I think, really takes the biscuit.

I just love the way it on the one hand purports to shed light on literary talent while suggesting that attention to grammatical correctness is as socially acceptable as B.O. Plus who the Dickenson is that author it mentions?

Whoever came up with this should be the very last person to be laughing about it, wright?

Cycles of nature

Mellow fruitfulness

A long and rambling account of a bike tour I did – it is mainly intended as a personal log and probably only of interest to anyone else if you like cycling, are a map nerd or are interested in this area and in the very diverse range of flora / seasonal produce it offers.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of cycling lately, partly because I have more time now that term is over, partly because I need and want the exercise, and partly because the weather has been (mostly) really good of late. It’s also wonderful to live in a place where you are out in open countryside within a matter of no more than a quarter of an hour.

There’s a fantastic network of cycle paths and less-travelled routes suitable for bikes in this area. You can get special maps and guides for cyclists, though I have got into the habit of just looking roughly where I want to go beforehand and then watching out for the well-placed signposts, which give distances, meaning you can adopt an ad hoc “yay or nay” approach to whether you want to go via a particular place.

Today I decided I wanted to do something other than the there-and-back type tours I’ve done frequently, opting instead for more of a circular route. I identified a 33km route described in a guidebook and decided to base my tour on that. In the end, it was such fun that I widened the circle and it was about 45km in all, and it took 3 hours from leaving the house to returning. There were short breaks to drink lots of water en route, and a couple of points where I got slightly lost and had to double back.

After negotiating the inner-city ringroad (which has a cycle lane), I got onto the cycle path that runs along the Dreisam river and went north-west-ish to Umkirch. The river is quite straight (due to human intervention) and slightly dull as a result, but it makes for easy progress. Towards Umkirch you hit the maize fields, which accompanied me for quite some distance today. Oh, and there are some rather impressive blackberries for the picking just past the bridge in Lehen on the south side of the river.

After Umkirch I went in a more southerly direction for quite some time, passing through Waltershofen, Opfingen and Tiengen. Opfingen is definitely asparagus country, and it was interesting to see that whereas the asparagus fields are not much to look at during the early summer asparagus season (as most of the growth is underground, white asparagus being the favoured variety here) and are mostly covered in plastic during that time (this extends the harvest, apparently), by August the wonderful feathery leaves have grown to quite some height.

More maize fields followed: in one there was such a growth of convolvulus tendrils among the corn plants that it looked as though they had these weird white flowers. I also saw some sunflower fields and some extensive cabbage patches, though not nearly as many as I saw on another route a couple of weeks ago. I always wish I’d brought my camera when I go past the sunflowers…

After Tiengen I toyed with the idea of going on to Breisach and maybe over to France, possibly to visit the star-shaped fortifications at Neuf-Brisach, but I’ll do that on another day and via a more direct route. So on I went in the direction of Schallstadt and it was at this point that I took a couple of wrong turns, even going up quite a steep hill unnecessarily (but it reminded me that I have leg muscles, so hey ho!). I passed a number of apple and pear orchards and the fruit was looking juuuust ripe enough to eat (but that would have been naughty!).

Schallstadt proving difficult to locate, it was at this point that I decided to extend the tour and make for Bad Krozingen (via Mengen and Offnadingen), and from there I almost made it to Staufen, the medieval town associated with the Faust legend, but the signposting was a bit weird and I only saw the prominent castle mound of Staufen when I was already on a perpendicular route heading more back in the direction of Freiburg, which to be honest seemed rather more appealing at that point (plus the last time I was in Staufen it was overrun with both tourists and a plague of flying ants, so I wasn’t too awfully disappointed).

It was uphill then to Pfaffenweiler, but I love this area (known as the Markgräflerland) as it is full of vineyards and time-forgotten villages with higgledy-piggledy houses and the odd sleepy hostelry. By now I knew I was about two-thirds of the way through my tour and so I kept up speed even though I was flagging.

I even managed to find Schallstadt on the way back – hurrah! – and although the route wasn’t quite so picturesque after that (mainly being next to a busy road), I was still absolutely staggered by the amount of edible stuff just growing by the wayside. Along this stretch of a few kilometres alone, I could have found enough to make a lifetime’s worth of jam and other preserves: a lot more blackberries; plum, damson and mirabelle trees; blackthorn sporting lots of sloes; heavy sprays of elderberries; and a whole avenue of walnut trees bearing a lot of (still unripe) fruit.

Now I’m not an idiot when it comes to knowing that fruit grows on trees etc., but this bounteousness really was pretty staggering even though I grew up in a rural area. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite such diversity of food growing – quite a bit of it wild – for a long time.

Re-entry to Freiburg after St Georgen had a certain bathetic irony to it – no longer was I noting this or that fruit tree or crop field, but there, suddenly, were the golden arches of McDonald’s looming in front of me. Needless to say, I did NOT go in!

But I do wish I’d taken along a container to pick some of the wild blackberries and the like…

Ommmm…

It’s been a stressful few weeks of juggling all sorts of commitments on different levels, disrupted schedules, travel, a hectic social life, opportunities and disappointments, “what ifs” and “what nows”. The long and the short of it is that the uncertainty is over for the time being and I know that the status quo will remain the same for the next few months at least.

Despite the disappointment of not getting picked for this or that, I actually felt a lot of relief initially at not having to face huge logistical shifts of one sort and another in the next few months, within a timeframe that would have been too tight for my actual needs. Now, though, I feel as though the stress I managed to keep in check over the last few weeks is bubbling up to the surface in an unpleasant way and making me feel panicky and vulnerable.

In an attempt to put all of this into perspective, I think I need to remind myself (again!) that the sky is not falling on my head. This is for my benefit and might not be of much interest to others, but hey ho, what’s a blog for if not for self-indulgent introspection? (I’m sure I’ve said that here before, so sorry if I repeat myself in the following…)

I’ve had all these folks rooting for me over the last few months (and continuing to do so): family, partner, friends, colleagues, even casual acquaintances – people have put things my way, shared the highs and lows of their own experiences, offered advice and contacts, been a shoulder to cry on, a pillar of strength and a wellspring of optimism. Thank you all so much!

Also, the status quo is on balance positive. Yes, of course there are significant geographical inconveniences in one important area, BUT I am not on the edge of a cliff like the numerous people I know who have lost their jobs, been worried about their contracts coming to an end, have to work in a place they hate and where they have few friends, who have experienced situations that have made their work lives unbearable, who are unable to work due to illness or disability, who can barely manage on the money they have available, or who simply hate their job but have no other options. There’s an awful lot in there that I have to be thankful I’m not facing, and an awful lot of people I know out there who need support more.

And then there’s the other person whose life is equally affected by all this. He’s been utterly unselfish about it all and has been behind me all the way, pushing me where necessary when I was being inert, inept or childish, picking me up when things went wrong, listening to my rants, calming me down, building me up, making sure I had what I needed (be it bacon sandwiches, a hug or a good night’s sleep) and saying silly things to make me laugh when seriousness, a bad mood or gloom threatened to consume me.

He’s one in a million, and I can fight on with someone like that behind me

If I can just calm down a bit, everything will be fine.

My life according to Morrissey…

Time for another meme, since further inspiration eludes me currently. This one came to me via the proprietor of http://www.nerdpress.de via Facebook.

Pick an artist, and using ONLY SONG TITLES from only that artist, cleverly (preferably) answer these questions. This is harder than it seems! ADDITIONAL RULE: You cannot use the same artist I did, or duplicate song titles even if they were performed by another artist.

Artist: Morrissey

I chose Morrissey as he struck me as having had some really good and unusual song titles over the years. I don’t like all of them, but there are plenty I do like. I wish I could have used my favourite one, which is “Every Day Is Like Sunday”.

1. Are you a male or female: Tomorrow

2. Describe yourself: The more you ignore me, the closer I get

3. How do you feel about yourself: Something is squeezing my skull

4. Describe your EX boyfriend/girlfriend: [sorry, going to chicken out of this one for reasons of tact & sensitivity to third parties]

5. Describe your CURRENT boy/girl situation: Last of the famous international playboys 

6. Describe your current location: In the future when all’s well

7. Describe where you want to be: Redondo Beach

8. Your best friend: Our Frank

9. Your favorite color is: Irish blood, English heart

10. You know that: Alma matters

11. What’s the weather like: Sunny

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called: Sing your life

13. What is life to you: Piccadilly Palare

14. What is the best advice you have to give: Hold on to your friends

15. If you could change your name what would it be: Dagenham Dave

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Five more things…

My friend Kavey suggested a new Five Things meme in which you tell someone else what you associate with them, and ask them to elaborate. So, here are the things she came up with for me.

1. (Foreign) Language and Literature

I’ve always loved language in general, and especially the way that the systems of different languages relate to one another. It makes for a complex puzzle of logic, with a degree of illogicality thrown in to keep it interesting. I have done languages not so much to increase my chance of communicating around the world, but more for this systematic / systemic approach and the window it gives you into different thought systems in different cultures.

Doing foreign literature was initially a necessary evil rather than a choice, but I did enjoy aspects of it. Favourite sorts of literature experienced include the Expressionist poetry and drama I did a course on during my BA, and the wonderfully named MA module “Sex, Lies and Manuscripts” in which we looked at medieval antifeminist (and protofeminist) literature from France, Italy and England.

I ended up doing a PhD on medieval German poetry. I’m not too sure how I feel about that at the moment – let’s say that it sometimes has something  albatross-like about it in both conversational and vocational terms – though the title “Dr” comes in handy occasionally.

The best move ever was to do A-level English literature. I cursed it at the time, but it taught me a lot more about my cultural heritage than anything else I have done (with the exception of O-level history).

2. Germany

Germany is where I have lived for the last almost 12 years.

Why? OK, I studied German, but that is only part of the story. There were family connections and school / orchestra exchanges that also influenced me positively when I was growing up, plus we had an excellent German teacher at school, ergo German outlasted French in my education.

Actually moving to Germany was not an entirely conscious choice. In 1997 my PhD scholarship was running out, and my supervisor suggested I go for a teaching job at one of our partner universities, Tübingen. Got the job, breathed a sigh of relief in financial terms, swallowed hard in emotional terms and told myself it was only for two years and that it might look good on my CV…

I’m not going to go into a “what I like / don’t like about Germany” excursus at this point. If anyone wants to know anything specific, you can ask me

3. Photography

I had very, very little interest in photography until May 2006. I was recovering from an icky bout of depression at the time and looking for new impetus creatively and socially, plus my then partner was into photography. I tagged along (I choose that expression deliberately) to one of the get-togethers organized by Kavey in London, armed with a point-and-shoot that my Dad had given me, to try to disguise the fact that I was a hanger-on. It was a daunting experience in the sense that I was still somewhat nervous around strangers and the technical talk went over my head at a million miles an hour, but everyone was so lovely and I suddenly found myself on an exciting treasure hunt, looking around for things to take pictures of and takng time to compose my shots. To cut a long story short, I was soon hooked. Here is one of the shots I took that day.

I pursue colour, detail and form in my photography, very much aesthetic goals rather than photojournalistic or purely technical ones. I like my pictures to look like the kind of paintings I like – abstract, expressionist, colourful. Occasionally purists will rail at me for boosting the colours beyond what looks natural. But hey, they are my pictures and they portray what I want to see / be seen.

4. Wales

I guess I’m one of those people who feels a greater attachment to where they are from if they are further away from it. I never felt particularly Welsh when I was living in Wales, but these days I sometimes feel very Welsh, depending on what is going on (be it a rugby match, exposure to some annoying Little Englanders, hearing a particular piece of music or whatever). Don’t ask me to define how this feels – it is neither static nor entirely definable.

It can be tough being a Welsh person in Germany. You find yourself sounding like a broken record when you tell someone for the nth time that no, Wales is not in England. Likely outcomes of this is that they think you are some nutty insular equivalent of a Bavarian separatist, you are a pedant, or you are indelibly marked down in their memory as That Exotic Welsh Person who is wheeled out on social occasions to provide quaint Celtic charm and required to give the Welsh angle on everything under the sun.

I wish I could speak Welsh better, as I said in a recent post here. For the first few years at school, we were subjected to a trendy, apparently antiauthoritarian approach to language teaching that omitted the grammar bit. Disastrous for me, as it meant I couldn’t extrapolate anything and didn’t have my beloved linguistic system to lean upon. The upshot of this was that I was far more resistent to speaking Welsh than to other languages.

5. Teaching

This is going to sound boastful, but I am proud to be a part of the fourth generation of teachers on both sides of my family, and the second generation of university teachers.

Having said that, until I was 26 the one thing I could say with any certainty that I most definitely did NOT want to do for a living was… guess what! The thought of having to be authoritative, knowledgeable and command people’s respect and attention was something I thought I simply didn’t have in me.

And then I ended up in a full-time teaching job in Tübingen, as mentioned above, and to my great surprise loved it from day one. It was a combination of things: the students were around my age so there was a peer-group atmosphere that we all enjoyed rather than a scary hierarchical relationship. They seemed dedicated on the whole, and to my great surprise they seemed largely to appreciate what I did for them, even expressing enjoyment at times. I, meanwhile, was on a very steep learning curve in terms of both subject matter and teaching methods, but I loved the challenge and the feeling that I was imparting knowledge and skills in a subject area that really mattered.

Nowadays, of course, the students are younger (!) and the atmosphere in class perhaps not quite so matey, but I value the fact that students tend to comment on the positive, motivating atmosphere in my classes, and they seem to continue to enjoy what I do (within reason – there are boring bits that I still need to work on). It’s a hugely rewarding job for me.

What about you?

If you’d like to leave a comment on this post, I’ll be happy to nominate five things that I associate with you, which you can then expound upon in your own blog (or we can find some other solution, if you don’t have a blog ). Also, if there are other things you associate with me more strongly than these things, I’d be intrigued to know and would be happy to comment on those.

Do please provide a link to your blog if you do your own version of these five things.

The colour purple*

* I am thinking of this or this, not this.

Hands up who remembers the 80s, when so-called jewel colours were all the rage and teenage would-be fashion victims (viz.: me) would clad themselves from top to toe in said hues, sometimes wisely tempered with a liberal element of black or white, though more than occasionally resulting in wardrobe malfunction, judging by the photos.

Magenta, jade green, royal blue, mustard, purple – these are the kind of colours we mixed, matched and accessorized. Jade green and royal blue I wasn’t keen on and was pleased to see the back of; likewise mustard, which makes my skin look sallow or jaundiced. Magenta was alright, it satisfying a fondness for pink that has never gone away, but it was purple that remained the colour of choice for me.

The colour purple, rich, regal and exotic. I was fascinated by the existence of the Land of Purple with its tiny molluscs; this was the colour that Nero decreed was to be worn by the Emperor alone, with Henry VIII enacting a similar kind of dress code later in history. You can trace important developments in social, economic and art history through purple-tinted glasses…

I spent a lot of the 90s wearing purple: it combined well with the slightly Gothic-inspired look I favoured and with my penchant for things Victorian, medieval and Celtic. I had scarves, pullovers, jeans, socks, dresses, tights, underwear, nail varnish, jewellery, Doc Martens in varying shades of it. I even made purple silk roses to decorate a hat which I wore to a wedding (together with a purple dress, shoes and handbag, of course).

Anyway, to cut this long excursus short, I must have reached saturation point eventually, and I’ve been wearing less and less purple the last few years. The old garments have worn out, don’t fit any more or are passé in style, and I obviously haven’t found new ones that appeal.

But the odd thing, and the direction this pre(r)amble (purple prose?) has been heading in, is this: purple, it seems, is de rigeur for Spring 2009, and the shops are chock-full of it; but it leaves me totally cold.

I feel all purpled out – I have only to look at one of these garments and I immediately feel uncomfortable. Why? It can’t be just that my hair is now more brown than black and thus a bit more likely to clash, and it certainly isn’t the case that my skintone has changed significantly. Nor do I honestly believe that I am being subliminally affected by the poem that begins with the line “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”.

Has anyone else found that their taste in colours has changed in a weird way like this, and do you have an explanation?

Five things…

So… here we are, almost two months into 2009, and this is the first blog post I’ve managed. Pathetic, I know. I’ve either been too busy to write about the things I wanted to say (and forgot about them as a result), or I’ve been (overly?) critical about whether anyone would want to read them.

Anyway, today I admitted that I was suffering from “blogger’s block”, asked around for some suggestions to kickstart me, and coolcat came up with the “Five Things” meme. So here we go…

Five things in my bag

• Purse: a great brick of a thing, unfortunately not because it contains wads of banknotes but because I am a great hoarder of receipts, cards and small change
• Passport: I wish I could say this was because I like to go abroad on a whim, but actually it’s just so that I have valid ID on me
• Mobile phone
• At least two lipsticks, variety being the spice of life and all that
• Pen: there is nothing more annoying than being on a train with a crossword and no pen!

Five favourite things in my flat

• Pandig, my bear, who has been my almost lifelong companion
• My dining table and chairs, which not everyone likes but I love (the chairs are a classic Chippendale design and the whole set belonged to my grandparents)
• Prints of my own photos hanging on the wall
• The spiral staircase and gallery (great for supporting topheavy trees and trailing plants)
• The dishwasher: my life would be a mess without it!

Five things I really like at the moment

• This genealogy site: every month it feels as if Christmas has come when they update their parish record transcripts
• Inspector Lynley: I have just read Elizabeth George’s latest crime thriller, Careless in Red, which I thought was better than the last two. I hope I get to see more of the televised versions with Nathaniel Parker soon, too…
• Ham, cream cheese and beetroot sandwiches on dark rye bread
• Jeremy Paxman’s TV series The Victorians: I’ve always been fascinated by that period and Paxman is always riveting, I find
• Black tights with zig-zag patterns on them

Five things I have always wanted to do

I thought this section would be very hard as I am a person of few ambitions, but hey presto, I could have found more than five. Here are five relatively non-cheesy ambitions…

• Study Art History (had I enough world and time, and, these days, money to boot): I did tangential bits at university under the auspices of courses on music, German and history, and now that I am also fascinated by photography and fashions within that, I’d love to have something that tied it all together
• Renovate an old house (within reason)
• Find a photo of a family member that shows a true resemblance to me (only once or twice have I been told that I look anything like a relative)
• Paint a picture that I would be proud to hang on the wall (I have not painted a picture since I was a child)
• Be able to speak Welsh properly

Books

I was an avid reader as a child and teenager, but my eight years spent as a student and having to read stuff constantly for university largely – and sadly – put paid to the idea of reading for pleasure. However, a couple of years ago I was invited to join an English-language reading group here in Freiburg, set up by a friend together with a colleague of hers, and I’ve grown to love it.

We meet monthly to discuss a book, and the suggestions for books to read come from within the group. We’re fairly international, with three Americans, two Brits (one Scottish, one Welsh), a South African and three Germans (all with absolutely excellent English), and I think all of us come from a background where we have studied, taught and/or been engaged professionally in some other way with English literature.

Here are some brief comments on my six favourites out of the books we have read. NO spoilers here:

What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt

A wonderful tale about two families in New York. The head of one is an art historian, while the other father is an artist whose work has become a source of fascination for the former. The reader explores the interaction between these families over a period of 25 years, which covers triumphs and losses, struggles and success, and it is a wonderful intermingling of personal fate and ways of looking at and living with art.

The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd

This book explores the complex relationship between the famous literary siblings Charles and Mary Lamb and the well-known forger (of Shakespeare, among other things) William Henry Ireland. It is wonderfully evocative of 19th-century London and contains elements of a love story, deceit, social pressures derived from a factual background.

Headlong – Michael Frayn

Art history and criticism form the main basis for this book, too. A philosopher married to an art historian discovers some paintings in an old house and becomes convinced that he has discovered lost work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It’s a wonderful detective story about determination, red herrings and someone who is willing to risk everything to prove the discovery of the century. A cast of amusing characters completes the picture.

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

I read Smith’s White Teeth a few years ago and remain convinced that it is the best portrayal of multicultural life in late 20th century Britain that I have read. On Beauty didn’t quite measure up in this sense, but it is a wonderful variant on the campus novel, focusing on a British academic and his American rival. Art history, literary and cultural theory provide the academic strand here (again!), but the interactions and (mis)understandings between the two families are the main source of interest. Since then I have read David Lodge’s Small World, which I found similar in some ways (academic milieu / rivalry, trans-Atlantic differences), though Smith’s take is more serious and intricate, while Lodge’s is more flippant.

Possession - A. S. Byatt

This has to be one of the best books I have ever read. It has an awful lot in common with the other books already mentioned, in that it is a literary mystery, this time spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, intertwining the story of Victorian poets and their 20th century scholars and biographers.  Social mores, academic rivalry and the notion of “possession” in the sense of relationships and academic criticism are explored in an extremely intricate work that I found utterly convincing.

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

I have always loved Victorian novels, and this is a modern novel set in the Victorian age. The fate of a poor girl who has grown up among thieves and diverse other “dishonest” types becomes indelibly linked with that of a “poor little rich girl” who has ostensibly been shielded from all of the above. Needless to say, many things are not as they seem initially, and the narrative takes the form of an unusual love story that spans social gulfs, cruelty, fetishism and madness, and which takes numerous unexpected turns in the process. It really makes you wonder about the saying “be cruel to be kind” and its opposite.

In January we will be discussing Kazuo Ishiguru’s When We Were Orphans, which was my suggestion for our next book. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes down…

In the meantime, if any of you have read any of the books discussed here, or books by the same authors, I’d love to receive some feedback on whether you liked them.

My current to-do list

Various friends have been putting their to-do lists on their blogs, generally with the line of thought that some public scrutiny might spur them on better to get things done. Well, let’s see if it works…

As of this morning, I had the following list put together

• Correct and grade 22 translations
• Correct 25 phonetic transcriptions
• Make a start on Christmas shopping (I only have 3 freeish weekends left)
• Send snailmail to 3 family members
• Post teabags to someone who commissioned me to bring them from the UK
• Catch up on clothes laundry
• Exchange the summer duvets for the winter ones & wash the summer ones
• Make a salad or bake some finger food for a party tomorrow
• Get some job-related paperwork done and submitted
• Send some genealogy data I’d promised someone
• Take some new self-portraits
• Sort the pile of post and magazines on the dining table (Got this done in the end, though it took a while!)
• Go through bathroom cupboards and throw out any “obsolete” items
• Tidy up my photo library
• Spend less time online

Right, watch this space to see whether I actually get all of this done – it looks like a LOT now that I have it all listed. Given that I’m off out to a party tomorrow night and hoping to see the new Bond film on Sunday, I’d best get a move on…