Candice Bushnell books have crabs

Click through for a larger image and to judge my taste in books

If the old adage is correct, this picture should be worth 50% of my assessment for this component of my English subject (which is going to take over the blog for a little while. As opposed to the echoing silence which was previously in command)

In this picture we can see:
My book collection, obvs.
Four elephants.
Three giraffes.
Two Eleventh Doctors.
One Ood.
One Captain Jack Sparrow.
One crazy cat lady.
One painting, a housewarming present from my aunt.
Hours of time wasted maintaining the chromatic arrangement of my books, at least half of which were spent trying to figure out where silver fits in the colour spectrum.
And KARL, Sofa of Legend.

One of the teachers for this course mentioned 'books as furnishings' last week, and I had a bit of a guilty vision of this bookcase, which is probably (next to KARL) the focal point of our flat. I don't think there's anything WRONG with that, but the presence of the Books sometimes does make me nervous that I'm not living up to their high standards. I've heard the Wiley Style Manual muttering about my cavalier attitude towards the distinctions between 'that' and 'which', and I know for a fact that Annie Proulx and Philip Roth have been complaining about how much time I spend slumped on the sofa not doing anything of any use to anybody with an interest in the nuances of The Human Experience.

This is probably why I'm so keen on ebooks now. Files can't judge you for listening to Blink 182 even though it's 2010. (I HATE YOU ALL, YOUR MOM'S A WHORE - how can you NOT want to listen to that?) There are a couple of branches to the 'ebooks are sucky IRL books FTW' argument, all of which annoy me.

1) Books smell good.

Yes, they do. If I rub my face in Roland Barthes he does indeed have a faintly musty smell. That's awesome. But I don't read books by pressing them against my nose. And I suffer from quite severe allergies.

Tangent: when I worked at the second hand bookstore a customer once asked me in a secretive murmur, what kind of parasites lived in the books?
Err, silverfish? But they're not really a parasite, as such...
No no, not silverfish, something small and itchy.
Uhh... where did you come into contact with this... creature?
At Berkelouw's.
Right. Did you sit on the sofas?
Oh, yes, but it was the books...
Pretty sure books don't harbour crabs, lady. Candice Bushnell's might.
But I was handling all those old books and...
Sofa. Fleas. You have fleas, from the sofa. Books don't have fleas. BTW, don't touch me.

But you know what? Files don't have silverfish OR crabs. And spiders can't hide behind them.

2) 'I don't fancy curling up in bed with an iPad.'

My hands aren't small, right, they're normal adult sized hands. But in the same way that I have trouble reaching all the notes required for a dramatic chord in Beethoven, I sometimes find books a bit weighty. The week after I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I couldn't get the lid off anything. Ebook readers are designed so you forget you're reading an ebook. I was reading a book on my iPhone this morning and at one point I flopped it over to have a look at the blurb. If you can't forget the medium you're reading in, you're doing it wrong.

PLUS I know that one day I'll be able to open a French book in an ebook reader and when I come upon a word or phrase I don't know I'll be able to highlight it and search for it instantly, and that the application will save the definition for me so the next time I see it it'll know what it means. This is what I call 'convenient' and what other people have called 'an eternal state of distraction which prevents meaningful involvement with the text'. My film lecturers are all 'Don't watch the films on your computer because you'll just be answering your email and checking your bookfaces every five seconds and you won't be able to EXPERIENCE the EXPERIENCE so instead stay behind on Monday night until 7.30pm watching them in this cold musty room, k?' and I'd be interested to know if English lecturers have a similar problem with ebooks.

Link to an excellent and amusing grammar lesson I have unsuccessfully tried to teach to my students. Also this blog entry is not actually intended to be part of my assessment submission.

HUMBUG

This quote pretty much sums up my feelings about hen's nights, weddings, 21st birthdays, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and church:

"The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that's the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That's the tradition, they explain." - Nicolas Chamfort, 1741 - 1794.

And this is how I feel about the opinions of people I might offend by being against said absurd customs:

"Other people's heads are too wretched a place for happiness to have its seat." - Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860

Yes, I'm reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton, and I'm enjoying the 'Intelligent Misanthropy' section VERY MUCH INDEED.

Here comes the battery hen...

Narrow and I have to go to a buck's and a hen's night, respectively. We are TERRIFIED.

I don't understand the purpose of buck's and hen's nights. The etymology even offends me. The connotation being that while the man is a free roaming wild creature, virile, powerful and independent, the woman is a clucking, broody, fat little thing stupidly running around in circles, scratching in the dirt and building up her nest to lay her many eggs.

A hen's night is a celebration of the things a hen represents: fertility, dependence, the catching of a man with your tiny malicious talons. A stag night is the mourning of the loss of all the things a man is supposed to want: wildness, freedom, ceaseless rutting of any and all things with tails.

Aside from the names, then there's the actual activities these nights entail. The female party celebrates the impending marriage with rituals of sympathetic magic: the construction of wedding dresses from toilet paper by the bridesmaids (to bring about weddings for the unmarried girls), the sculpting of plastic phalluses (beseeching the gods to endow the groom with rigidity and largesse), and the pinning while blindfolded of the penis onto the poster of the naked man, a ritual to bless the bride with seductive arts in the bedroom. And all the while, huge quantities of strawberry daquiri must be imbibed, to sustain the illusion that what they're doing is sexy and fearless, rather than sad and unimaginative.

In the meantime, the groom's friends must try their utmost to steer him from the path of self destruction he has taken. The method is quite simple - parade in front of him the many wonders he will no longer know once he is married: never-ending geysers of beer and Jagermeister, bars full of roaring drunk men, and of course a naked woman.

Under no circumstances should the two groups meet, regardless of the many other nights which they may have enjoyed as a co-ed group. If they did, the mutual disgust each group would feel for the behaviour of the other would result in an instant break of the union, and those of any other couples therein, a kink in the space-time continuum which would change the pattern of history.

That the happy couple must be divided in order to enjoy the evening, and that there is an air of mourning around the male celebration, and one of self-conscious raunch around the female one, is really just sad. To me, the upshot of feminism should have been that men and women would view each other not as adversaries but as friends, as essentially the same and equal. Instead, after nominal equality was gained, it all went right back to where it started.

Only now, instead of being fetishised by men, we fetishise ourselves. By participating in these outmoded rituals we only entrench the idea that women are worthless if they aren't sexy, and that men are deeply different and apart (although not necessarily superior). Why the hell would you want a stripper at your buck's night? You are going to be LIVING with a woman, who will be naked at least twice a day, for the rest of your life! It's particularly pointless these days, where most likely you've already been living with that woman for years.

The same goes for the hens - dicking around with plastic penises as if you've never seen one in your LIFE and it's so HILARIOUS because it's so NAUGHTY to play with genitalia! Go find me a pack of pink straws shaped like vaginas and I'll tell you that we're on an equal footing. Although I'll grant you they're less conveniently designed for ease of drinking.

Not to mention that if you're a couple with an engaged pair as friends, you BOTH have to go to these nights, or even whole weekends, and it costs a FORTUNE. We're going to end up in the poorhouse, and we're not even going to enjoy ourselves on the way.