reapparitions are hamlet's affair;
I have done all the things. April is always an exceedingly busy month on my end, but this year, for some reason, it was exceptionally so.
I've signed up for holmestice (because another deadline is just what I need), submitted my end-of-year dissertation's first draft to my study director (which is due in June, because more deadlines! mother of god), saw a stunning performance of Measure for Measure at the theatre of the Odeon (in German, which was fantastic), saw My Week With Marilyn (disappointing, but Michelle Williams is excellent), saw Avengers (which is exactly as much fun as veronamay said it was; also Loki needs a huge Asgardian hug asap) saw Julia Stone live (dear god, this woman; her voice is amazing on record, but live she is phenomenal), completed the paperwork to get accepted into the ERASMUS european exchange program and consequently got assigned to King's College in London (which, HOLY SHIT, LONDON.), and am currently working my way through the application stages to ensure my place there is secure.
If all goes well, I'll be studying in London next year, which. Is equal parts exciting as fuck and incredibly terrifying.
That's if Shakespeare doesn't kill me first, but - King's has courses in association with Shakespeare's Globe, since its campus and English department are just across the Thames from it, and if the man doesn't slaughter me while I'm completing this year's dissertation then he certainly will at some point next year, if I manage to sign up for one of these courses. That's the Globe, guys. Jesus.
On that note of impossibly talented queer writers, I'm currently reading James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room - it's a gorgeously written gay-centric novel about a young American man who falls in love with an Italian bartender in Paris; it's a tragic story, and announced as such from the very first pages of the novel, and dear god it's going to wrench my heart out. For some reason, the end of the second chapter stuck with me as a stunningly emotional passage, so have it, here:
"Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming - God grant me the grace to live them: in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head."
The last time I fell so fast and so hard for an author's style was for E. M. Forster's A Room With A View. My god.
I've signed up for holmestice (because another deadline is just what I need), submitted my end-of-year dissertation's first draft to my study director (which is due in June, because more deadlines! mother of god), saw a stunning performance of Measure for Measure at the theatre of the Odeon (in German, which was fantastic), saw My Week With Marilyn (disappointing, but Michelle Williams is excellent), saw Avengers (which is exactly as much fun as veronamay said it was; also Loki needs a huge Asgardian hug asap) saw Julia Stone live (dear god, this woman; her voice is amazing on record, but live she is phenomenal), completed the paperwork to get accepted into the ERASMUS european exchange program and consequently got assigned to King's College in London (which, HOLY SHIT, LONDON.), and am currently working my way through the application stages to ensure my place there is secure.
If all goes well, I'll be studying in London next year, which. Is equal parts exciting as fuck and incredibly terrifying.
That's if Shakespeare doesn't kill me first, but - King's has courses in association with Shakespeare's Globe, since its campus and English department are just across the Thames from it, and if the man doesn't slaughter me while I'm completing this year's dissertation then he certainly will at some point next year, if I manage to sign up for one of these courses. That's the Globe, guys. Jesus.
On that note of impossibly talented queer writers, I'm currently reading James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room - it's a gorgeously written gay-centric novel about a young American man who falls in love with an Italian bartender in Paris; it's a tragic story, and announced as such from the very first pages of the novel, and dear god it's going to wrench my heart out. For some reason, the end of the second chapter stuck with me as a stunningly emotional passage, so have it, here:
"Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming - God grant me the grace to live them: in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head."
The last time I fell so fast and so hard for an author's style was for E. M. Forster's A Room With A View. My god.