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2002-04-25
Walking, reading, listening, geeking
Today I walked home from work.
Not all the way, because it'd take me like two hours, but I walked from the office to the center of town, along the canal and past the castle.
It was really nice. I mean, wow, I need to do this more often, because walking along the road was just very soothing and relaxing and enjoyable. I got to look at all the things I see from the bus, and I just ended up really enjoying it.
I had my camera too, so I took a few photos along the way with my black and white film -- I'm close to having it finished, which means that I'll have black and white photos of Disneyland and Nottingham on the same roll. Man, that amuses me.
But just the things you see! They're all so wonderful and beautiful and freakish. The sunlight glinting on the giant space marine we have in the front of the building. A cat sitting amid a pile of broken bricks and construction work.
One of the new Volkswagen Beetles painted exactly like the old beetle from The Love Bug (complete with racing numbers, natch). The remnants of an old limestone cave carved out in the past. Houseboats moored next to Sainsbury's on the canal. The stairway up Castle rock that goes to a door embedded in the rock itself. Flowers growing out of straight walls. Tulips on a roundabout.
I love this town. I really do. Everything is so strange and wonderful here -- it's not New Orleans, it's a strangeness all its own and I love it.
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I've been reading a lot again -- I grabbed a few more books at the library on Tuesday and with the pile of books I have at home that I need to read, I'll be keeping myself entertained on bus rides for awhile.
I got my own copy of Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, which makes me very happy because it has everything that the Voodoo Gods version did -- including the pages of Haitian songs with music. So color me especially cheered over that.
And I started reading Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen, but I'm a bit iffy on it because of the fact that Deren's best known for experimental film work. And although I love Hurston's literary style and couldn't stand Metraux's dry and smug anthropological style, I don't know if I can really handle Deren's "I am an artist" style.
But we'll see.
I just read Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun, which I really liked and I'm definitely going to read more of him. I have to wonder if Banana Yoshimoto used Murakami as a basis for the author in np, though. A Japanese author who spends most of his time away from Japan and writes bittersweet stories about longing and loss...
Definitely liked this book. Definitely will read more.
I'm now reading Theo's Odyssey by Catherine Cl�ment. Which is Sophie's World, but with religion. Like, that's what all the critics say. And it feels like that's exactly what the author intended.
And I liked Sophie's World, because I didn't know that much about philosophy, but I'm getting quickly tired of Theo's Odyssey. Maybe it's because I know a lot about the topic at hand, maybe it's because it starts with the Judaism/Christianity/Islam conflict, I don't know. Sophie's World took a more chronological feel, which I really liked because you could see the progression. Here, it looks like it'll be big Western religions and then more and more obscure ones, which just means that you'll be comparing the lesser known religions with the Western religions and thinking that the lesser known religions took stuff from the Western religions instead of, y'know, usually the other way around.
Start with animism, go through the pantheons of ancient religion, slide up through the major ones and end up with the strange offshoots coming up now. It isn't that difficult, is it?
That and I'm slightly irritated with the cloying "I'm taking my nephew on an adventure and he'll learn all these things and have fun while doing it!" attitude. But that's probably because I've never liked getting my medicine hidden in lumps of sugar.
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I also recently got a new CD -- Lemon Jelly's Lemonjellyky. It's more of the trippy dance retro pop that I've been really getting into -- like Fantastic Plastic Machine and Pizzicato Five, but English instead of Japanese.
"The Staunton Lick," the song that I'm currently in love with, was used in the last scenes of the last episode of the second series of Spaced, and I'm realizing that I can pretty much buy anything played on that show and love it.
Well, everything but Prefab Sprout, but the point of them putting "King Of Rock And Roll" on their soundtrack was that it was crap.
Next -- Fuzz Townsend. That's what I need to look into. And building up my Fantastic Plastic Machine collection, because I'm just madly in love with that particular slice of hipster life.
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Man, I've been wiped out recently. I'm really starting to feel it. Yesterday, I spent my evening at a coworker's house playing board games for his birthday party.
I got my ass kicked. Severely. But we all had a serious laugh over it, especially since the questions seemed to alternate between five-year-old easy to die-hard-nerd difficult. "Who plays Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original trilogy?" "What does the middle button on a speederbike do?"
(The answers are Alec Guiness and jamming signals. If you were wondering.)
And tomorrow there's a big fuck-all meeting at work and then a short leaving-do for people moving to different offices in the building and then on Saturday the Out House (the eventual gay and lesbian resource center in Nottingham, not an outdoor toilet) is having a book sale, and...ooof. When did I end up running around a lot?
I'm going to need to walk home a lot more. Just to relax.
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