i finnally got the part time job i was looking for....i am now a book seller at one of london's largest book shops. ha ha, i think this suits me pretty well. the only problem is that after i pass my 3 month probation period, i get a big discount on all books....this is dangerous, i will have to restrain myself from spending my whole pay all at once! needless to say, if any of you guys have requests, please let me know....three months from now that is.
the fun starts this weekend....
31.10.06
29.10.06
art
For all of you who are in London and like art, i HIGHLY recommend the Velasquez expo on at the National Gallery. It is the first completely satisfactory expo i have been to since the Modernism one at the V&A in April. Ok, it wasn’t perfect, i went on Sunday, and the crowds were pretty dense, which meant that i sometimes had to wait or wiggle about in order to get a really good look at the various paintings. But the effort was worth it, the selection of paintings is really good. I also really appreciated it that they give you a complementary booklet to take with you into the expo that provides an overview of the different artistic periods in Velasquez’s career and gives mini-insights into the different paintings. The booklet was really perfect: the info blurbs on each painting was just enough to give you some valuable information to think about and to bring out some points that might not have otherwise been evident, but at the same time, all the blurbs were short enough that it didn’t feel like you were reading your way through the expo. Of course there were all the usual super expensive hard cover beautiful edition of books on Velasquez in the gift shop, but in terms of valuable information to actually improve you viewing experience, i found the free booklet really perfect.
There are a lot of court paintings of the 16th century Spanish monarchy, which effectively demonstrate that the Habsburgs were truly inbred. The booklet pointed out details such as “the infanta, aged eight, pictured in painting number 45 was engaged to her uncle….” And at painting 40 we learn that “Habsburg dynastic politics superseded genetic prudence in determining the choice of Philip IV’s second wife, who was his niece….” Of course, the Habsburg genetic issues are hardly a historic secret, but it was funny to see so many misfortunes displayed in one space.
So if you have time and six pounds to spare, i recommend going.
There are a lot of court paintings of the 16th century Spanish monarchy, which effectively demonstrate that the Habsburgs were truly inbred. The booklet pointed out details such as “the infanta, aged eight, pictured in painting number 45 was engaged to her uncle….” And at painting 40 we learn that “Habsburg dynastic politics superseded genetic prudence in determining the choice of Philip IV’s second wife, who was his niece….” Of course, the Habsburg genetic issues are hardly a historic secret, but it was funny to see so many misfortunes displayed in one space.
So if you have time and six pounds to spare, i recommend going.
28.10.06
obviously winter is coming
our place is getting colder and colder, especially at night. it is the end of october, and the season is clearly changing. my furry companion seems to have subconsciously realised this as weel as suddenly she has started eating very large amounts, even of the tapioca and manioc japanese food that she normally spurns. i assume this is some way of trying to bulk up a bit before winter sets in completely? her fur is puffing up also and she is starting to look like a little cotton ball instead of the lean mean tiger who killed mice all summer long. the down side of this sudden furry-body building is that there are more, um, malodourous physical manifestations of her eating binge. her box is constantly overflowing. i suppose this is the down side of the changing seasons!
25.10.06
stress
i havent been writing much lately. i have been very very busy. i have another interview today in about 2 hours, all for the same job. and i still know nothing about finance. i am waiting for them to start laughing at me.
meanwhile, i just got my computer back from the shop...i had been temporarily out of commision sue to a burnout fuse....or something like that. 90 pounds later it is working fine, but who knows for how long. it isnt new anymore, and laptops arent really made to last forever.
ok i am back to studying for my interview. fingers crossed for me, and for masyamba who has her comprehensive today at 5!!!!!!
meanwhile, i just got my computer back from the shop...i had been temporarily out of commision sue to a burnout fuse....or something like that. 90 pounds later it is working fine, but who knows for how long. it isnt new anymore, and laptops arent really made to last forever.
ok i am back to studying for my interview. fingers crossed for me, and for masyamba who has her comprehensive today at 5!!!!!!
19.10.06
oddities
here is a good laugh. after a couple of weeks of trying to find a decently paid job in my field, i get invited to an interview for a job i applied to practically by accident to work in FINANCIAL RECRUITMENT SERVICES about which i know NOTHING.
first they telephoned me, about 45 minutes after i sent the joke application. they told me on the phone that financial recruitment was a difficult sector to get into, and asked why i thought i might be good at it. i was still in a depressed and obnoixious mood, so i informed the interviewer that i was a genius and capable of doing anything. they told me that was an excellent answer and they invited me for a live interview the next day. they said i am what they are looking for and now i have SIX more interviews lined up. but as i was leaving the room...they told me to go out and buy a better suit....although the one i was wearing was BRAND NEW.
time to go shopping, with the money i havent got.
first they telephoned me, about 45 minutes after i sent the joke application. they told me on the phone that financial recruitment was a difficult sector to get into, and asked why i thought i might be good at it. i was still in a depressed and obnoixious mood, so i informed the interviewer that i was a genius and capable of doing anything. they told me that was an excellent answer and they invited me for a live interview the next day. they said i am what they are looking for and now i have SIX more interviews lined up. but as i was leaving the room...they told me to go out and buy a better suit....although the one i was wearing was BRAND NEW.
time to go shopping, with the money i havent got.
16.10.06
moscow retrospektive
lessons on how to destroy your credit card information.... put them all in the toilet and then set them alight and watch them sizzle. fortunately (or not) moscow homes are not equipped with smoke detectors, hence the neighbours will never know (unless they have good noses) what you are up to. furry creatures should be kept away however, as they are likely to get their whiskers singed.these are the results of m last roll of film from the motherland....next dstination: east london?
14.10.06
confessions
i confess: deep down i have no culture and i like IKEA.
harsh words, but i fear they are true. having spent my life passing through 55 different countries on 5 continents (and having spent over a year in 7 of those countries) even i sometimes seek consistency. some people travel and refuse, for example, to eat in a french restaurant in tokyo because they want to "experience" the local culture. then there are people who travel and dont want to "experience" the local culture at all. like the family of my old korean boss, they go to paris and only eat in korean restaurants, because they just assume the local offerings must be disgusting. (i know several french people who do the same when travelling abroad....i have distinct memories of croissant hunting in venezuela and other unlikely spots)
but personnally i feel too disoriented for either approach. one of the best italian restaurants i have ever been to was in bangkok, and i have been to plenty of good thai places in london.
furthermore, i find i shop generally in the same 5 shops all over the world. when i go somewhere and i see them, i am relieved. if they are not there, i feel nervous. i really sometimes like the generic and the globalised. this brings me IKEA, which is conviently located about 20 mintues from my present house. i like being able to walk into the same shop in any country and get the same things. it is comforting somehow. i have bought the same IKEA bedsheets in montreal, budapest (they are now masyambas, she inherited them), moscow, paris and london. this gives me the feeling of continuity, even as i change location. it is somehow comforting to be in the same bedsheets, even if you are in a different place. but then that is just my opinion.
harsh words, but i fear they are true. having spent my life passing through 55 different countries on 5 continents (and having spent over a year in 7 of those countries) even i sometimes seek consistency. some people travel and refuse, for example, to eat in a french restaurant in tokyo because they want to "experience" the local culture. then there are people who travel and dont want to "experience" the local culture at all. like the family of my old korean boss, they go to paris and only eat in korean restaurants, because they just assume the local offerings must be disgusting. (i know several french people who do the same when travelling abroad....i have distinct memories of croissant hunting in venezuela and other unlikely spots)
but personnally i feel too disoriented for either approach. one of the best italian restaurants i have ever been to was in bangkok, and i have been to plenty of good thai places in london.
furthermore, i find i shop generally in the same 5 shops all over the world. when i go somewhere and i see them, i am relieved. if they are not there, i feel nervous. i really sometimes like the generic and the globalised. this brings me IKEA, which is conviently located about 20 mintues from my present house. i like being able to walk into the same shop in any country and get the same things. it is comforting somehow. i have bought the same IKEA bedsheets in montreal, budapest (they are now masyambas, she inherited them), moscow, paris and london. this gives me the feeling of continuity, even as i change location. it is somehow comforting to be in the same bedsheets, even if you are in a different place. but then that is just my opinion.
12.10.06
11.10.06
maybe this world is too small
so a few entrees back i accused moscow of being an overgrown village. in the space of 24hours i had run into my ex-flatmates ex-girlfriend on tverskaia, followed by my ex-classmate who turned out to be working in the same office building as i.
well it seems the same must be said of London. today i was walking in central london when i thought i saw a familiar face. "impossible" i thought to myself....but then the face looked back at me with the same stunned expression and shouted "je crois pas mes yeux!"
it was limou, a senegalese girl i knew in paris. she had been a receptionist where i had worked, and now she is here trying her luck in london, and she was tagging along behind some guy named matheius whose nationality i couldnt figure out, but he obviously didnt speak french. Limou says a couple of our other acquaintances from that time are here.....she said everyone is going out for drinks saturday. i found myself searching for excuses and running off towards the library.
well it seems the same must be said of London. today i was walking in central london when i thought i saw a familiar face. "impossible" i thought to myself....but then the face looked back at me with the same stunned expression and shouted "je crois pas mes yeux!"
it was limou, a senegalese girl i knew in paris. she had been a receptionist where i had worked, and now she is here trying her luck in london, and she was tagging along behind some guy named matheius whose nationality i couldnt figure out, but he obviously didnt speak french. Limou says a couple of our other acquaintances from that time are here.....she said everyone is going out for drinks saturday. i found myself searching for excuses and running off towards the library.
8.10.06
Obituary: Anna Politkovskaya
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya won international recognition for her passionate reporting work on the conflict in Chechnya in which she sought to expose human rights abuses.
Detained on occasion by the Russian military, the Novaya Gazeta special correspondent was famous for her book The Dirty War, a collection of articles mainly about the second Chechen conflict which began in 1999.
In 2004, she was a joint winner of the Olof Palme Prize for human rights work.
The citation reads that she was "noted for her courage and strength when reporting in difficult and dangerous circumstances".
A visit to Hell
Born in 1958, she graduated as a journalist from Moscow State University in 1980 and worked on the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya for more than a decade.
Living streets full of dead eyes
Anna Politkovskaya writing about Groznyy
In 1999, she joined Novaya Gazeta, one of the few national Russian newspapers to take a consistently critical line on the Kremlin.
She frequently travelled to Chechnya and the North Caucasus where her dispatches described some of the horror of a war where most of the casualties were civilians.
In Hell, an article from July 2000, she describes the ruins of the Chechen capital, Groznyy:
"The city ruins are like a new Caucasus mountain range. African-style famine. Painfully thin children...
"Living streets full of dead eyes. Mad and half-mad people. Streets teeming with weapons. Mines everywhere. Permanent explosions. Despair."
Critic to the end
Her polemical style earned her many critics in Russia but her stories stood out from much of the mainstream Russian media and she pursued them at great personal risk, whether reporting from the war zone or receiving death threats in Moscow.
In October 2002, she was one of the few people to enter the Moscow theatre, where Chechen militants had seized hundreds of hostages, in a bid to negotiate.
In 2004, she tried to go to Beslan during the school siege but fell ill with food poisoning on the flight there. Some suspected a plot to incapacitate her.
The same year her book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy depicted Russia as a country where human rights are routinely trampled upon.
Politkovskaya's last known article for Novaya Gazeta, published on 28 September, is a condemnation of pro-Kremlin militias operating in Chechnya as part of Moscow's so-called Chechenisation policy.
"Chechnya was always her main subject," Vitaly Yaroshevsky, the newspaper's deputy editor, told Reuters news agency.
"Everything she wrote was on the edge."
taken from the BBC
Detained on occasion by the Russian military, the Novaya Gazeta special correspondent was famous for her book The Dirty War, a collection of articles mainly about the second Chechen conflict which began in 1999.
In 2004, she was a joint winner of the Olof Palme Prize for human rights work.
The citation reads that she was "noted for her courage and strength when reporting in difficult and dangerous circumstances".
A visit to Hell
Born in 1958, she graduated as a journalist from Moscow State University in 1980 and worked on the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya for more than a decade.
Living streets full of dead eyes
Anna Politkovskaya writing about Groznyy
In 1999, she joined Novaya Gazeta, one of the few national Russian newspapers to take a consistently critical line on the Kremlin.
She frequently travelled to Chechnya and the North Caucasus where her dispatches described some of the horror of a war where most of the casualties were civilians.
In Hell, an article from July 2000, she describes the ruins of the Chechen capital, Groznyy:
"The city ruins are like a new Caucasus mountain range. African-style famine. Painfully thin children...
"Living streets full of dead eyes. Mad and half-mad people. Streets teeming with weapons. Mines everywhere. Permanent explosions. Despair."
Critic to the end
Her polemical style earned her many critics in Russia but her stories stood out from much of the mainstream Russian media and she pursued them at great personal risk, whether reporting from the war zone or receiving death threats in Moscow.
In October 2002, she was one of the few people to enter the Moscow theatre, where Chechen militants had seized hundreds of hostages, in a bid to negotiate.
In 2004, she tried to go to Beslan during the school siege but fell ill with food poisoning on the flight there. Some suspected a plot to incapacitate her.
The same year her book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy depicted Russia as a country where human rights are routinely trampled upon.
Politkovskaya's last known article for Novaya Gazeta, published on 28 September, is a condemnation of pro-Kremlin militias operating in Chechnya as part of Moscow's so-called Chechenisation policy.
"Chechnya was always her main subject," Vitaly Yaroshevsky, the newspaper's deputy editor, told Reuters news agency.
"Everything she wrote was on the edge."
taken from the BBC
6.10.06
.....because it is wet and cold and i am procrastinating
the rain is pelting down on top of my attic and my furry compagnion has had the good sense to retreat under the duvet, installing herself in such a way as to leave me no room, even though it is a massively large bed and she is a rather petite beast.
i need to write that chapter.....
publishing a book is a lot of work
when i signed the book contract, it seemed everything what pretty much ready to go. i mean, the work is nearly finished already, and the editors just asked me to make a few final changes before sending it off to the final commission and then the press.
but damn those last little changes are taking me a while. everytime i walk into the library i find yet another book i havent considered but absolutely should, authors i have overlooked, articles, texts, images.....i spent 6 hours yesterday just editing my bibliography, which will be a small part in the back that no one except a few losers will bother to look at.
but things are moving along: i have a new title, some ideas for the cover, the set up , the font and so on. i have been given permission to take stuff out of a whole series of different london libraries since the stuff i need access to is pretty scattered. today i was at LSE trying to get various documents there, then back at my normal base of operations to take another few works out....and now i face the daunting task of trying to actually READ them all....when i will find the time i cannot imagine.
but damn those last little changes are taking me a while. everytime i walk into the library i find yet another book i havent considered but absolutely should, authors i have overlooked, articles, texts, images.....i spent 6 hours yesterday just editing my bibliography, which will be a small part in the back that no one except a few losers will bother to look at.
but things are moving along: i have a new title, some ideas for the cover, the set up , the font and so on. i have been given permission to take stuff out of a whole series of different london libraries since the stuff i need access to is pretty scattered. today i was at LSE trying to get various documents there, then back at my normal base of operations to take another few works out....and now i face the daunting task of trying to actually READ them all....when i will find the time i cannot imagine.
4.10.06
waiting
i have a meeting with my english supervisor in 45 minutes. until then i am killing time in the computer cluster in the building's basement. i am behind on my first chapter and i know it...i am bracing myself for the fallout....
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