Beyond Selidor

I really need to not take Neurofen just before I go to bed. Although it gives me the weirdest, most awesome dreams (last night, I was hanging out with Thor and Loki and then an alternate universe robotic space-invader version of both of them started threatening the earth and we were fighting each other like in a video game with ever-increasing degrees of difficulty and better weapons and then I had to go on a journey into outer space with a bunch of ninjas because the world was ending and then there were swarms of insects trying to kill us and then it turned out the whole thing was a book being written by losseniaiel and I was a book character who'd gained sentience and agency and could control how the story ended), it also makes me so somnolent that I can barely wake up and when I do get up, I feel like I'm sleepwalking. It's 1.30pm, and only now do I feel properly awake.

I've blogged twice on my German blog, and the links are here and here.

I realise this is an extremely old post (and I think I read it when the original kerfuffle was doing the rounds of the internet), but it feels timely, in that last Friday, a guy tried to make me get into his car when I was waiting at a bus stop at 1am. (Before you ask, I'm all right, and he went away after I said, firmly, that I was waiting for the bus, but it could've been so much worse.) As Lindsay Beyerstein says:

Remember, these are women you like and admire, women whom you hope to charm and put at ease. It is in your best interest, as well as theirs, to approach them in a manner they find congenial.

Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It's nothing that's going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.

If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.

But if you really don’t care whether your “flirting” is making a woman needlessly anxious or uncomfortable, that's creepy.

In less depressing news, Eurovision is tonight! I love Eurovision. I love the cheesy songs, the ridiculous costumes, the snarky commentary. I even love the bloc-voting, which is as much a part of Eurovision as fake tan and badly mangled English. Which is why this post is so delightfully geeky. Martin O'Leary has used statistics and probability to attempt to predict this year's Eurovision winner. I love it.

I leave you with some of my favourite Eurovision music. The first two are from Ukraine, from 2009 and 2004 respectively:





And finally, a youtube party classic, from Armenia, complete with creepy Svengali-type record company figure in the video clip (with the immortal line 'I've got an avatar of my love to keep me warm'):



I leave with with this Scandinavia and the World comic about Eurovision. Since I'm in Germany right now, it's the one from 2010, when Germany won. 'Go away Iceland, I'm hugging Norway'.

Day 21: Your favorite subject to study.
Well, this is a difficult question to answer. Right now, I'm doing a PhD on medieval Irish literature (which involves knowing a bit about medieval history, theology, and other medieval languages and literatures), so I'd say that at the moment, that's my favourite subject to study. I love medieval literature for both its directness and elusiveness. It often explains things in very simple, clear language, but the meaning and intent are hovering somewhere out of reach. I also love medieval literature for the undercurrent of melancholy and regret that tends to run through it. It's very sad, but it's more beautiful for the sadness. People in medieval literature are fragile and flawed, but in such a poetic way.

As an undergraduate, I studied four subjects: theoretical linguistics, English literature (which swiftly turned into medieval Irish literature), Jewish history and Arab and Islamic history. After the first year, I dropped linguistics and Arab and Islamic history in favour of the other two subjects, which I enjoyed more, and I ultimately did Honours in literature (writing about the motif of fleeing to Scotland in a selection of medieval Irish texts). I think I liked Jewish history because I've always been drawn to stories of dispossession, and the Jewish story is in many ways about just that - about survival in the face of dispossession, about retaining an identity in exile, about living on the margins and finding a space for yourself. I ultimately dropped it because I didn't have the language skills to continue on in a further degree, but I am looking at some point to combine my background in Jewish history with my medieval literature studies.

At school, my favourite subjects were literature and history. I think I've always liked history because to me it is like a story. I'm not a natural historian (the meaning I want is more ambiguous and fluid than the certainties for which historians seek), but when I think of history as being like a narrative (or a series of narratives), I find it quite beautiful.

But ultimately, I think I am a scholar of literature at heart. The truth we can find in literature is to me more beautiful, because there are multiple truths, and because the writers of literature say things more indirectly and thus, I think, more powerfully.* Literature appeals to my belief in multiplicity and plurality: it says different things to different people, and while we can attempt to work out what its authors really intended to say, we can never be certain that we are right.

( the other days )

I've updated my German blog with a post about Easter eggs and nostalgia.

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* In my field, however, it's ridiculous to categorise things into 'literary' or other forms of texts, because their authors or compilers understood 'literature' in a very different way to how we do now.