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So - hello and thank you if you have read any posts before and wanted to come back. I've had another lovely week of lunches and catch-ups with a few academic bits and pieces and of course quite a lot of vampires thrown in.
Last week I focused more on Imperial City than the friends I ate with so I will try and put that right in this blog. The friends I had dinner with at Imperial City are very special to me - it has been a strange and sometimes confusing world we've lived in and without their humour and support it would have been a lot less bearable.
This week I caught up with an old friend over coffee and that was lovely. As we talked I realised just how much change there has been within the company and also how clear it is that there is a good life outside. I also had some very enjoyable lunches with other friends, looking at pictures of Washington (making me wish I was going there soon), Florida (making me wish I was going to Disney), talking with a friend who has recently left the group and looks much more relaxed for it and on Friday fish and chips with a great friend! It's so lovely to be able to share time with all of these people and now I have another week of it - lucky me!
Other than eating I have been doing some work and studying. T has edited my final essay for my OU course (clarity and spelling only of course), so now it's just a case of printing, sending and then waiting until August for the results.
In the Modern American Novel we started looking at As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. It's a modernist novel with 15 narrators and stream of consciousness. I don't particularly like it but I can and do admire his technique. Basically it's about a family, with a useless father, taking their mother home for burial in Jackson, Missisippi (sp?) and their thoughts about their lives and their journey. Would I recommend it - yes if you like this kind of style.
This week we are looking at Ceremony which I know absoutely nothing about so I am really looking forward to that and Sense and Sensibility on the Jane Austen course. I am supposed to go to a talk on Thursday by CK Williams who is an American nobel laureate and poet but at the moment I just don't feel too enthusiastic. We'll see how that goes!
I'm jumping around a bit but last week I went to a Royal Society of Literature event with Penelope Lively and Edmund de Waal. They were talking about memoirs and how memoirs have changed from something very conventional ' I was born in X ....' to something far more complex so de Waal's Hare with Amber Eyes mixes his inheritance of his uncle's netsuke with the fate of his family over the twentieth century. I really enjoyed it and am now wanting to read his book (another for the summer - just as well I have so much time off). Before I went into the talk I had a look at the exhibition in the forecourt of Somerset House and took some pictures:
I also went a bit mad on my Southern Vampire mysteries (hence the fact I have to hope I love Ceremony and can read it in a couple of sittings). I am now on book 9: Dead and Gone and things are getting much darker. I'm not going to give the plot away because you really should read them - they're not too much in the horror genre - but I really, really am on Eric's side now and I can't believe how far we are from the TV series. I was supposed to be leaving some of the books to read on holiday so I'm really going to have to restrain myself.
This week I have an open evening at King's (College, London) on Wednesday night where all people holding offers for post-grad courses can come along, have a tour and listen to some sample lectures. I'm both excited and nervous - what if I'm the oldest person there? What if I'm older than the lecturers (and I'm bound to be older than some)? What if everyone else is so clearly brilliant they'll make me stand in the cornr with a D on my head! I'll report back next week.
Thanks again for reading (if anyone is reading this) and have a good week
Sandra
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