get out of there cat. you are not a floaty summer dress or a pair of sandals. you might have a kitty passport but you definitely don’t have enough money for a plane ticket… yet.
My cat is on Get Out of There Cat tumblr. Excitement! Thanks @LaursRitchie
Need…
(Source: lovevynil, via bookwormshaven)
I came across this concept while reading a Guardian article discussing feminism.
I had no idea what it meant but in the article it referred to a ‘culture [being] so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, [therefore] how are you making genuine choices?’ This got me thinking.
I’m not claiming to have become an overnight expert on the theory, but having looked into it a little further, I am fascinated by the idea that people accept normalised ways of living that are not actually beneficial to themselves, but to the dominant cultural group. It rings true.
In terms of feminism it brought me back to the arguments for prostitution. There is an argument that women should be allowed to do whatever they like with their bodies, that they are making money from men that are willing to part with their cash and that they are empowered women.
If you disagree with this point of view you can be viewed as regressive and almost un-feminist. Surely it’s the purest form of equality when women can choose to make money this way?
However, viewed through the light of the Gramscian concept of hegemony we could argue that prostitution has been normalised by the dominant cultural group (men, capitalist society, the media industry?). The rest of the population has adopted this view because it has become normalised. Even if it is detrimental.
As someone who always wants to scream in defiance whenever anyone defends prostitution, (how can an industry where a tiny minority of workers prosper and the majority are exploited horrifically be ok?) it comes across as an interesting theory…more reading to do.
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I CAN haz cheezeburger
(Source: mochacafe.net, via leilockheart)
This bookshelf is amazing, I want.
(Source: avisoppugno, via how-novelistic)
I’ll set the scene, it’s Saturday morning (22nd Jan, at around 11.15am) and I’m on my way to a zumba class. I’m immensely proud that I’ve managed to get out of bed on a weekend and I’m off to do some exercise. I’m in a cab, half-listening to the radio which is tuned into a local radio station, Radio Spice.
All of a sudden the radio program grabs my attention as the presenter’s voice rises in pitch as she get more and more agitated. I listen in more closely and realise that the female presenter is berating the female caller. The situation seems to be that the presenter has phoned the lady, live on air, and is accusing her of beating her children…
Presenter: “These little children have tuned up in my office at school and they are crying and covered in bruises! How could you beat your children like this?! You cruel woman,what kind of mother are you?!! We will be going to the police, you won’t get away with this, you’ll end up in jail!”
Lady on the phone: “Look you have the wrong person, I have not done such a thing, you are wrong, you have the wrong person!”
This exchange becomes even more heated as it continues for the next five minutes. I sit in the cab, listening incredulously. Had I been the mother I would have told the rude, hysterically shouting caller to f*ck right off and put the phone down. However, this milder tempered lady carried on taking it until…
Presenter: “Stop right there, you are LIVE on Radio Spice! Hahaha!”
Lady on phone: “What…? Oh my god.”
Presenter: “YES! Hahaha. Your husband put us up to playing this prank, he’s the one behind it, hahaha.”
Confused lady on the phone: “What…? Oh my gosh, hahaha.”
Me: WTF. Had the father of my (hypothetical) children done that to me I’d be RAGING, not laughing.
Wow.
Summer is coming again, you can kind of tell cos even the rainy days aren’t so cold and there are more days when you can go outside and feel the sun touching you. Even though it’s so far away it can still reach out from the sky and you can feel on your arm that it’s there. Even with your eyes shut.
On the days when the grey clouds hang low across the sky, there are still people on the beach. Because the calendar says it’s summer they turn out in bikinis and sunglasses. You don’t have to be close up to see the goose bumps. If it’s cold I just wear my jumper.
I don’t go where they go either, they just stay on the bit of beach by the road, but if you keep walking along the track you get to the bit that they can’t be bothered to walk to. You can get out of the wind if you sit close to the groynes.
Most people don’t like the seaweed, I don’t like it that much, but you can just sit away from it, or run across it really fast. I like to look at the pebbles. They always look like things to me. Like animals mostly, a lot of them like hedgehogs. But all kinds of other animals as well.
Even though the stones are all lumpy, if you lay down and wriggle about they move to your shape. If you turn and look back up the beach you can see the houses, but when you build the stones in around you and look down at the sea, it’s like there’s no one else there.
The sea and the sun are though. Even with your eyes shut you can tell when the clouds break up and separate out, the sun tells you on your skin and you can see it through your eyelids, how the dark redness changes colour.
When I get hungry I go home.
Today I saw a little girl of about six years old walking out of the supermarket with a ferret on a lead. I did a double take and wondered how she could be sure that the ferret couldn’t escape, since there was just a single harness around its middle.
My mum always warned me about ferrets. She’s very anti-ferrets. When she was a little girl she patted a ferret at a fair. You know the type of fair, the ones that drive into town and pitch up on a field for a week, offering clouds of candy floss and stomach churning thrill rides of dubious safety. The kind of fairs that you meet boys at when you’re thirteen and still too young to sneak into the pub.
The ferret bit my mum’s finger in that true cartoon fashion where they clamp their teeth in to the bone and lock their jaws. Where you wildly thrash your arm around, desperately shrieking for someone to GET IT OFF GETITOFFGETITOOOOOOOFFF.
I tried to reason with my mum that maybe not all ferrets are like that. Maybe that particular one was sick of travelling with the fair, never having a place to call home and living off stale candy floss and toffee apples.
Seeing that ferret today, scampering along like a furry land-eel while the little girl chatted to it, I hoped that if you give a ferret a happy home you get a happy ferret.
Thanks thegirlandherbooks:
I have to admit, I’m a massive geek for these lists…
The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkein
1984 - George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Grapes of Wrath - John SteinbeckTo Kill A Mockingbird - Harper LeeJane Eyre - Charlotte BronteWuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
A Bend in the River - V.S. NaipaulThe Great Gatsby - F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Catcher In The Rye - J.D. SalingerThe Bell Jar - Sylvia PlathBrave New World - Aldous HuxleyThe Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Bible - Various
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Ulysses - James JoyceThe Quiet American - Graham GreeneBirdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Money - Martin Amis
Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
Moby Dick - Herman MelvilleThe Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahams
His Dark Materials Trilogy - Philip PullmanAnna Karenina - Leo TolstoyAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis CarrollRebecca - Daphne du MaurierThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark HaddonOn The Road - Jack KerouacHeart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Way We Live Now - Anthony TrollopeThe Outsider - Albert Camus
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Life of Pi - Yann MartelFrankenstein - Mary Shelley
The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
Men Without Women - Ernest HemingwayGulliver’s Travels - Jonathan SwiftA Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel DefoeOne Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken KeseyCatch 22 - Joseph Heller
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Divine Comedy - DanteThe Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde25/50…half way there!
(Source: thoughtsreadunspoken, via how-novelistic)
The new Haruki Murakami novel 1Q84 is due out in English tomorrow. Having sold over 1 million copies in its first month of release in Japan, the English version comes highly anticipated and with a huge amount of hype. According to The Atlantic, the novel is ‘a rethinking of George Orwell’s classic 1984,’ and ‘is set in Tokyo in an alternate, dystopian version of the year 1984.’
I have enjoyed Murakami’s work in the past but I’m slightly nervous about the explicit link to Orwell’s dark vision of the future, which brought us concepts such as Big Brother and Room 101 (and spawned TV shows of the same name, for better or worse…), I’ve got my fingers crossed for a sophisticated and intelligent nod to Orwell.
I was endeared to Murakami after reading this interview in the Guardian, which closes with his thoughts about the things in his life that consistently make him happy; “I like to read books. I like to listen to music. I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.”
Books, music & cats…what’s not to like!? (As I’m typing this my cat is trying to sleep on me…)
The novel will be released in three parts and the first two installments are out tomorrow (18th October), with the third part following on 25th October. I’m looking forward to getting a copy.
If you’re a Murakami fan - which are your favourites?
I was asked the other day; “What are your favorite books?” and there are so many I wasn’t able to answer on the spot. When I came to choosing my top five I ended up with ten…and many more besides those came to mind. So here is my top ten, in no particular order, as of right now…I reserve the right to change my mind though…!
The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
A beautiful series of vignettes which describe the coming age of a girl in Latin America. It’s written from her point of view and the simplicity of the language means it can be read by anyone from the age of 5 to 105 – it is moving and poetic. I love this book!
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
An alternative vision of the future in which fertility is declining. I’ve re-read this novel time and again and there are passages I know by heart. Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite authors; most recently I read her collection of short stories ‘Dancing Girls’ which has become a firm favourite too. I love the way she describes relationships, whether it’s between mothers and daughters, friends, siblings or couples. Like the very best writers, I get that ‘yes, that’s it!!’ feeling, where it seems as though my exact thoughts have been laid out on the page but a million times more eloquently that I could ever write myself.
Just Kids Patti Smith
I just finished Just Kids. This autobiography follows Patti Smith leaving her home town in the country to move to New York, her lifelong love story with Robert Mapplethorpe and their days with most influential characters in the 60s and 70s beat scene.
It’s not a literary masterpiece, but I loved the dreamy idealistic feel of it twinned with their gritty determination to stick with creating art, believing that someday they’d make it. The romantic in me loved the little gifts they’d give one another, a set of metal skulls strung on a necklace, shells and trinkets. Nothing of any real monetary value, but objects which the other would love.
She makes me want to roam around in flowing dresses writing poetry all day. Although I’d be kidding myself if I thought that I could go from week to week barely eating.
I didn’t know that much about Patti Smith before I read this and to be honest, I still don’t have a detailed understanding of her rise to fame, the book takes you just to the cusp of that part of her life. But that’s not the point of this book. It’s a beautiful meander down the path of adolescence. A tale of staying true to those you love and to art, despite the heartache both may bring.
Win
(via fawnicate)
Such a pretty tattoo ♥
The Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam. Used by the Viet Cong as a supply train, hideout, armory, escape route and much more during the war.
The original tunnels are tiny, as you can see from me only just fitting!
The widened tunnels are open to visit. It’s pitch black for the most part and really hot. You also get tired quickly from crouching as it’s not high enough to stand.
