you can't just say i'm peas.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

The double edged sword for the literary scholar is the ingrained and unyeilding quest for meaning. So when a friend passes on a book, you can’t help but wonder if they are really handing you a secret message wrapped up in the words of an author.

Instead of asking what Jean Rhys was conveying to her reader in Good Morning, Midnight, I was wondering exactly what my friend was trying to tell me through the words of the narrator, Sophia Jansen.
 

Rather quickly the wonder grew to worry.

There is no spandex here, no archetypal hero, and no easy escapism – only the uncomfortable yet compelling voyeuristic position of watching self-destruction.

Sophia wanders through hotel rooms and bars, clothing shops and hat boutiques; she is always looking in mirrors and obsessing over her looks and I am always wondering how pretty she is. Rhys, always ahead of her time, has brought out in me the exact reaction that women in the 1930s were facing and women today still face. Judgement. Yet society still hasn’t caught up with Sophia’s solitary absinthe binges – how many women do you see enjoying a drink alone in a bar late at night?

I don’t want to admit that at times I relate to Sophia (unlike the way I readily wanted  to be like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s ) yet Sophia is so artlessly frank about herself and feelings towards her life, I feel a little ashamed at my sometimes affected positivity and avoidance of the negative.

When Sophia admires a new dress, or searches for a change of hotel room; the fact she adopts a new name, buys a new hat, dyes her hair blonde conveys her attempts to adopt a new persona, to inject freshness from the tangible. These are vain attempts to change the unhappy to the happy with immediate results; attempts we are all guilty of.

Good Morning, Midnight is a compelling read and Rhys’ style is a gripping force of rhythm, flashback, paranoia and dark humour. The novel acts as mirror reflecting the nature of woman and renders me simultaneously proud and ashamed.

As for hidden meaning, the day I find my friend alone in a dark, quiet bar drinking an absinthe and welling at the eye, I’ll ponder awhile at the question of art reflecting life or life reflecting art, then impose myself on her story and save her from herself.

Part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 12th April, Informatics Forum. Prof. Richard Sharpe, Prof. Chris Kelnar, Prof. Richard Anderson.

‘Gender..? Man or Woman.’ This was the first question of an equal opportunities form I found myself filling in recently. ‘Shouldn’t that say, ‘Sex…? Male or Female?’ my confused neighbour queried.

I was tempted to omit the tick from the woman box and insert an estimated (fluctuating) percentage into both boxes - Woman, 73%; Man, 27%.

Afraid of conforming to gender stereotypes whilst vaguely believing there is no smoke without fire and conscious of using gendered language to the point of writer’s block, I sought out the Edinburgh International Science Festival talk, Gender: More than X versus Y because you can’t argue with science.

On one side of the room, the built in wardrobe is approximately one half of the width of the wall. On the opposite wall, the window also owns literally one half. It is not that the wardrobe is particularly large or the window a grand feature bay but that the room has similar dimensions to that of a rabbit hutch. Not literally, but approximately. When the blind is drawn down, I am boxed in and I like it.
 
The room feels self-contained and suspended like a hot air balloon hovering in the midst of a built-up city. I do not think of its interdependency on the hallway to the right, the kitchen behind my head and the main bedroom with en suite beyond. When the door is shut and the blind drawn, the room and everything in it ceases to exist. No-one thinks about the room. Or thinks about me being in the room. The room is mine and exists only to me. Outside of room and I, we are invisible.
 
There is a scratch at the door, the room is not suspended anymore. As the cat creeps through the creak in the door, I lift the blind in and let her leap into her spot on the windowsill. The window is a perfect sqaure frame holding one perfect solid square glass panel. It frames the world perfectly like a glass panel in an aquarium, tropical fish swimming in and out a line of vision. The fish exist only in the present. No one can see where they came from or where they go to. This is my aquarium window except the fish are people and they do not swim but walk and cycle and encase themselves in moving vehicles. The scenery is not plankton and plastic castles but other windows and buildings and carparks.
 
From where I sit the sky fills four fifths of the window. It takes its hue from a paint brush coated in navy and plunged into a clear, still glass of water creating white and light dappling. Soon, fusion will be complete and the night sky will relax into solid blue unmindful of day. A flickering of red and yellow light races through the last of the silver linings. It takes approximately seven seconds for the aeroplane to cross my window screen from stage left to right. I watch in amused bewildermint as I imagine this tin shell with wings exporting and importing hundreds of little people across the Firth of Forth into Edinburgh Airport.
 
No one knows that I have sat in this box of mine that to you in your areoplane does not exist and that I have saw you fly across my line of vision imposing yourself into my existence and that you will never know me who watched you.

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

A book.

The graduate must earn and save and pay off debts and in current times, the graduate nust take what is going.

Thus, the graduate finds herself earning and saving and paying off debts in the most tedious, monotonous job there is going.

On the upside, the graduate has begun, by a process of elimination, to uncover what she does NOT want to do. This process is one of ineffeciency.

While earnig and saving and paying off debts, the graduate considers adding to her story of life through night classes, volunteering, work experience, new experiences, learning.

The graduate, without realising, longs for the feeling of educational learning which has been the basis of life for nine years.

Enter, the violin.

The thought is to relearn the violin, and create an amateurish band of lost graduates, each relearning an instrument of their youth mainly to pack out our boat named ‘All in the Same’ and create a feeling of camaraderie.

The Disillusioned Graduates Orchestra has a certain ring. In name alone.

Exit, the orchestra.

For we are all sitting in the orchestra looking at the chorus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestra#Other_meanings_of_orchestra

For a lost arts graduate, the above question is a compulsory beginning. Without knowing which vegetable one is, one does not know which dish one may enrich.
A lost arts graduate looks for any means of help to find focus.

The lost arts graduate is talented and motivated and determined and would employ all three traits effectively would the arts graduate know what their talent is, their motivation directed at and the direction in which their determination is to be channelled.

The professionals at Facebook, of course, are able to answer this question resolutely.Faced with a screen tempting to me find out what vegetable I am, I clicked.

Lo and behold, peas.

Now, many would feel affronted at the suggestion they embodied such a base and common vegetable as peas. Others might snap at the realisation that they consist of not one single entity but a whole shoal of peas hinting at an underlying multi-personality disorder.

I am not a pea; I am peas.

Trouble is, peas go with EVERYTHING.

I am nowhere closer to finding my purpose in life except that I am easily accepted by many mains as a suitable accompaniment.

Fashion Styling in Leeds

Jenny Guy and I

Breakfast at Tiffany’s