Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in lizardwatcher's LiveJournal:

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Friday, May 12th, 2006
1:44 pm	Self-Control Don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell, don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell, don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell, I don't care how relevant the phrase "Speak to Silence" is, don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell! Current Mood: tightly controlled (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
6:42 pm	Poetry Found a lovely bit of poetry today. Thought I'd share it. Comments very much appreciated. See if you can guess the author - or origin, or date. Points for any useful fact. -- Bayonet may FPC the simonson. Some semaphore or electroencephalogram or koala it's nudge, Amy, chamber. See grist! Exploratory - on turnpike, on majesty it's chronograph! Use some musket and nuclei in tenfold or prank - but toxicology may colloq, roof, marksman. It's californium, on, seek, see - adobe some alpha it leaven be delft. See Chiang, Jehovah on cerberus be fleshy! A diversion, permission see narrate or Diana and priory or flush. The primeval - some epicyclic - may dragonhead; Fascist. Current Mood: curious (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 24th, 2006
3:21 am	Comments Received comments back from Joyce!Postgrad on Joyce essay; they essentially boil down to "very funny, and you're right about the Bloomsday thing, but a. you don't have a consistent argument as such, b. you don't know what you're talking about, and c. you're a scary madwoman, please stop talking about wolves". Fair on all counts, I think. Current Mood: calm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
8:47 am	Essay Plan And so I was all like Out out demon modernism I will eat your shoes! and it was all like dude those are my shoes and I was all like I care not for your shoes! and it was all like dude and I was all like No! and it was all like Leonard Cohen ( Joyce essay plan: Featuring shoes, suicide, Jews, mastication, and dh-isms ) Current Mood: contra-caveating parade Current Music: Ravi Shankar & Yehudi Menuhin - Raga Ananda Bhairava (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006
7:09 pm	Joyce essay "Modern Literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind... those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface" (JAMES JOYCE) Discuss, with reference to Joyce and Woolf. So far, I have: 1. Trains! 2. Jews! 3. Suicide! 4. Taboos and envelope-pushing 5. Aesthetics and beauty Can anyone else suggest anything I should add? I'm reading a bunch of articles off lion.chadwyck at the moment, which are useful. Some of them have words like "masochism" and "lesbians" in the title. Hey, it's a living... Current Mood: busy Current Music: Steeleye Span - Captain Wedderburn's Courtship (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
12:59 am	Lies, Damned Lies and Mystics Dear Helen: Three days ago, when you annotated your copy of The Dry Salvages, you clearly thought that you could prove the entire poem was a form of litteromancy on Eliot's part, and hence that the passage damning forms of divination as "usual/Pastimes and drugs" was hypocrisy. You did not seek to illuminate how, exactly, you intended to prove this, assuming that your future self would take the note "Litteramancy. Hypocrisy. Aha!" as a mnemonic aid to rediscover the blinding revelation you had experienced. My dear, you were entirely, tragically wrong. I shall now attempt to construct a proof of this theory - not because I think you were right, you understand, or because I have the faintest hope of achieving whatever relevatory heights you were experiencing when you scribbled down your visionary knowledge - but because I've got fuckall else of substance for this essay; a thesis, a great many examples, a great many quotes, but no linking material as such... no question, no structure that doesn't simply involve going through the notes to The Waste Land and exposing the enormity of Eliot's lies. If anyone reading this has any ideas, incidentally, feel free to help. Yrs, H. ( Below the cut: My notes so far for the essay ) Current Mood: confused Current Music: VNV Nation - Standing (how appropriately Luciferian) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 6th, 2006
2:01 pm	Eliot essay 3-4k words by Friday of 0th week. Starter quote: "I do not know much about gods." "Polytheism and the Thelemic Tradition in The Dry Salvages and The Waste Land"? Nah, too general. Plus, I've only known what thelemic means since Solstice, shamed as I am to admit it. Academic dishonesty is all very well, but... Okay, maybe I should actually read "The Dry Salvages" before trying to base an essay on it, hmm? Fuckin' degree... Current Mood: hanged Current Music: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Ik Jaam Chalak ta (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 9th, 2006
5:01 pm	Snarl, growl Predicted 2.1 from both Martin (Old English) and Gill (VicLit/first half of Modernism). Pick up the fucking pace, Helen. This is not good enough. Current Mood: perfectionist
5:02 am	A Feeling I do not think that, until the day I die, I will be able to read the Happy Ending of Waugh's Vile Bodies without feeling that great cold-burning knot of pain and pity and beautiful sorrow rise in my heart and bleed its strands into every fibre of my being. Every time. It gets me every time. (Comment on this)
2:42 am	Marginal Note found in margin on p. 49 of Exiles and Émigrés, Terry Eagleton, Chatto & Windus, London 1970: "Mr Eagleton, your style & reputation are more convincing than your argument." Too fucking right. This entire book of crit. is OO. Not to mention sexist. The chapter on Waugh doesn't mention Waugh for the first seven pages, and doesn't actually start talking about him in any detail until the ninth. Woolf and Huxley, you understand, are far more relevant to a chapter on Waugh than any of his actual works. Gah! Current Mood: tired (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 27th, 2006
9:24 pm	Damn! Every chapter of Waugh I read, I fall in love a little more. And now I get to study him. JOY. I've just got to the bit in Vile Bodies where Agatha Runcible finds out who Miss Brown is and whose house she's just stayed the night at. My gods! The horrific, terrible hilarity...! The paradigm flip! The cringing laughter...! Current Mood: horrified (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 24th, 2006
5:37 am	Come on Helen It's the home stretch now, you can do it. You're getting there, you're tight, you're focused, you're enjoying it, don't let yourself get frivolous now. That was what the Joyce essay was for. No, you may NOT use the epithet "the unwashed nun" for Æthelthryth. I don't care how accurate or appropriate it is. Keep it up now. Come on. Keep focused. You can do it. Current Mood: focused (3 Comments |Comment on this)
4:01 am	Thank you, Mister Joyce I have now had to delete six extraneous Stephens from this essay and I'm only halfway through. There are not supposed to be any Stephens in this essay. There may have been a great deal of Stephen in the last essay I wrote, but that's no excuse; this moniker-bleed is simply unacceptable. For reference, three of them were trying to be Saint Sebastian, one was posing as Edmund himself (which is acceptable, I suppose - protagonist-name-confusion), one was lurking in the corner with a tinfoil crown calling itself King Oswald and the last was attempting to be the virgin nun, Saint Æthelthryth. I will put up with these crossdressing modernist Irishmen in my Old English essays NO LONGER! Away with you, Stephen! Avaunt! Back to Clongowes and Dublin with the rest of the heathens! G'wan! Current Mood: stephen (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 23rd, 2006
3:24 pm	The Illuminatus Essay Have you ever seen a more pretentious piece of wank on your screen? HAVE YOU? Answer me! mejoff enjoyed it and he's never read Portrait, so you don't necessarily need to know the context to comment.( Read more... ) Current Mood: zen (6 Comments |Comment on this)
8:49 am	What the fuck? No, seriously, what the fuck did you just write, Helen? What the fuck? ( What the fuck? ) HOW THE FUCK DID HIRO PROTAGONIST GET INTO THIS ESSAY??? Current Mood: What the fuck? Current Music: what the fuck? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
7:08 am	Bah. Well I could use this highly informative and well-researched piece on how the villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a microcosm of the entire book, except that until starting to read it I'd forgotten there was a villanelle in the novel at all. Athena help me, but I'm not cut out for this shit. I'm a front-line kinda girl, battlefield colder, telesales hack, short-order copywriter, fencer, volunteer, deadline junkie, pitching in with a strong right arm or a keyboard at short notice or no notice. I like knowing what my problems are and coming up with swift and innovative ways to shoot them down; at worst, I make a half-decent lieutenant, ordering the ranks, seeing the big picture, but willing to pitch in and get my boots dirty when the going gets tough. But I've been dropped way off the map, and I'm not even sure whether I'm behind enemy lines or far into my own territory, let alone who the enemy is; the lack of team is not a problem, the lack of objective is. I just wonder if I'm really cut out to be an academic... This great tradition, Bodley's Library and the EFL and all the rest, paralyses me with its monstrous bulk. Some days it feels like no thought I've had can possibly be original; and worse, no comment I could ever make can be well-informed, because I can never hope to read through the reams of theory and counter-theory that will have inevitably been argued across the ages on each tiny, specific fragment I might pick up. They're doing a series of lectures on Philip Pullman, for fuck's sake; how can I possibly hope to make any comment on Milton without sounding like an ignorant ass? Do I really want to spend the rest of my life reading fucking criticism? Pulling the wings off butterflies... Right, this isn't doing me any good. Less self-pitying whingeing, more Teh Ghey and Catholicism in Joyce. Let's go. Current Mood: introspective (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006
3:04 am	Notes Towards... A while back, over at the main journal oxfordgirl, I mentioned that I was working up to an essay on The Adventurer. I suppose now, just before I sleep for a while, is as good a time as any to make a list of things I eventually intend to include... feel free to add your own thoughts in comments. 1. RPGs, particularly fantasy RPGs, particularly LARP. Reference romauld's rant on Leadership. 2. H. Rider Haggard, particularly the song in KSM ("Tired of life and the tameness of things") and the first section of Alan Quartermain. 3. Solitude and heroism, especially as presented in Dorian Gray, &AELig;lfric's Saints' Lives, The Seafarer, the Odin Trip and antiheroic Victorian literature (particularly Dickens). 4. The Last Stand, with reference to The Battle of Maldon and Killiecrankie. 5. Freud's Thanatos, martyrdom, suicide, aggression and masochism. 6. The Tyburn Song, with reference to all the ones I know. Jack Hall, MacPherson's Rant and Roddy McCorley in particular. 7. The Comitatus. (I think this will be the synthetical point of the essay, providing context for (3), (5) and (6) and adding supporting evidence for the others.) Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Beau Jocque - Shaggy Dog 2-Step (8 Comments |Comment on this)
2:41 am	Nicely done Context: Violence and Non-Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric's "Passion of St Edmund" James W. Earl Philological Quarterly, Issue 78 (Winter 1999) (I'm reading an online copy at LION) Comment: Very nicely done, sir. A good subtitle might be "How to have a pop at Christian historical suppression of the base impulses[1] while making it look like you're being friendly and objective". The text isn't anywhere near as useful to the essay as it might be (as I suspected; tutor has once again recommended utterly tangential text while sniping at me for "tangentially" answering classmates' vital questions relating to construction of weaponry in Maldon-era Europe, largely because she doesn't know the latter but can gank the former off convenient Googling), but I've certainly enjoyed reading it. Well worth a look if you've the chance, if nothing else because it's got a pretty good "The Blood-Eagle Debate In Thirty Seconds" summary near the start, which can be useful to introduce those who know nothing about the topic.[2] 1. Earl uses Freudian terminology, which I don't necessarily agree with, but one is largely talking about the same thing whether one says "base impulses", "LaVey's Satan", "sin", "Thanatos/Eros" or whatever. Insert your favoured phrase here, basically. 2. And everyone should be involved in the Blood-Eagle debate. Where else in any academic field can you claim to refute someone's argument on grounds of historical and literary accuracy, anthropology, religious ritual, physiology and ornithology simultaneously? Current Mood: impressed Current Music: Steeleye Span - My Johnny Was A Shoemaker (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 19th, 2006
11:28 pm	LARP bits Well, since the fashion on the FLRP list at the moment seems to be for relating characters' ongoing responses to the chaos in the White City in narrative form, might as well add my own contribution. First: Lieutenant Ambriel Chermes of the Port of Glass Embassy. Mostly just filling in bits of background and plot colour, a couple of drug references. ( Disconnected ) Second: Everyone's favourite "Helen's attempt to play a nice simple angst-free character", Professor Kit Fisable of the College of the Thousand Arts (Faculties of Cartography and the Arcane). Contains slightly grisly and squicky bits. Have not yet consulted with the_teflon_monk, so non-canonical for the moment. ( Ghost-Gum ) If you have absolutely no idea what any of that was about, go here and look at the shiny pictures. Then go here and read the shiny setting. Then come play LARP. Current Mood: calm Current Music: Sisters of Mercy - Ribbons (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006
7:46 pm	Barthes: The Death of the Author "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." Barthes, you never spoke a truer word. You are fucking indecipherable. Current Mood: morose (2 Comments |Comment on this)