I'm loving the sun (though soaking it is an ambition I leave exclusively to pop-rock princesses) and I'm loving how it's not hot. Spring lives up to the hype, more often than not, I find. But the supreme irony lies in the fact that it's the busiest, most deadline-crunchy time for us students.
Spring elegies. Heath says that Wordsworth wrote Resolution and Independence as a spring elegy, where nature is lovely but inside he's hurting and troubled. I can't be bothered to look for the reference - which is a problem when writing for Uni: I belong to the tribe that has to internalize and write or, failing that, be stuck and messy.
Am having fun converting one of the short prose pieces I had written for Creative Writing into terza rima. I love how it coils and uncoils back and forth with each middle-line exploding into a rhyme for the next stanza like a double-agent.
Poetry is fun and it reminds me that time needs to be made and crafted for you, it isn't going to come to you by itself. I hope this wise, earthy tone is understood by any who read it as tongue-in-cheek. I'm just reshuffling things around into a pleasing shape to please myself and nobody else.
Truth be told, I'm a bit stuck as to what to do next today. Yes, it's a Sunday and things are always like this. Free time can leave you spoilt for choice, which means you end up doing very little. This is given a real dimension and extended throughout the rest of the week: as having to study/cram for finals at least lets you switch from one literary era to another without guilt.
I think I could get into Shelley seriously though. The problem with the first generation of the Romantics was that they just lived for too long. I want Shelley's bullshitty nonconformism and genuine enthusiasm. He may have been a prodigy, but he never carried the premonition of death around him like Keats, it just happened. But give me Byron's anti-Romantic Romanticism any day.
Overall I'm feeling quite good: the panic is in the backburner and after I eat I will write and then read. Watching PulpSecret, the comics show on youtube (am really missing Erislaughs! Hope her hiatus doesn't go on for much longer) and I'm getting a bit of a buzz from their interviews with artists at the New York con. Still have no idea as to how my ambitions re writing/drawing are gonna pan out. Keats is handy here - wonder what would have happened were TB not to set in?

Sometimes I wish we'd celebrate Easter. And Christmas. The fact that the former fell on a Sunday - THIS Sunday, to be specific - makes me pine for an excuse for chocolate and celebration even more.
Still, I don't think that family lunches and a fed up stomach will make the evening any easier to bear than it is now.

Now, I am bloated with Keats biographies and looming doom. I guess the two are made to go together; and I guess I should appreciate that and suck it up as part of my thesis-writing experience. The fact is, Keats is infinitely relatable, too relatable, that I wonder how obvious any work I do on him within the context of my topic (the romanticisation of poets who die young) would come off as just very DUH!

I just love coming of age stories though. I'm a total sucker for them. Don't know when it started exactly, but it must have been at some point during my teens, obviously. Being a Spider-Man fan must have played a part somehow.

This staying indoors must be remedied. But I am dealing with Christians celebrating their Resurrection Man festival and therefore they have to undergo family lunches; and we would have to wrestle with inept public transport, we who are too lazy, too broke, too hesitant and too busy to start driving. Driving is a phallic activity.

I love how Sundays shuffle things up into inconsequence, though. I got back into drawing and realized how much my neuroses on drawing the body were for naught. Sure, you can never learn enough, but as long as you got your basic proportions right you can start heading towards SOMETHING. Am still drawing in that spindly body style. Looked back at some of my old sketchbooks. That's always a heartening experience, actually - not the painfully embarrassing one you would think (although that probably speaks volumes about my non-progress in that department in the last couple of years). So yeah, Sundays can leave me doodling and actually enjoying it. Feeling the fullness of being and doing things by accident.

Not much of my upcoming dissertation and finals deadlines can be helped by accident though. Despite the hellish six-week or so assignementating period, I can honestly say I have not as yet encountered as final, as excruciating a time, school-wise, since the A-Levels. Perhaps my final year finals will be as final as it gets and make me swallow my words with sadistic glee.

Not much to do today except skim over a few pages and browse around. 'The energy isn't right.' Yes, in spite of my persistent shooting down of other's half-baked ideas, I foetusize back into The Dude when things get tough. I'm not too impressive a person, integrity-wise, I suppose.

Back to the usual monsters: will I get that second upper? Will my dissertation be a last-minute mish-mash that flies widely off the mark of...well, anything? Will I ever leave this island and if so, will I remain alive for long?

Death and resurrection. Adonis was a resurrection myth too. I'm doing Adonais for my dissertation as well, and I found this book on Shelley's use of Goddesses which looks interesting. A look at a male's poet's obsession with maternality (especially interesting when you remember that his squeeze had written Frankenstein). Speaking of motherhood, watched Juno and was predictably smitten. I will re-watch in crises along with Garden State (and maybe Chasing Amy). Americans are good at warm coming-of-age stories, the kind I need. Brits aren't good at warmth.

Death, consolation, warmth, resurrection. Tags.

Happy Easter, all.

The sweat remains caked and shining in the sun, I wonder at its blind obstinacy an admire its independence from my body. On the airconditioning it will fan itself out, escape to all corners and then eventually evaporate. I admire this too, I admire the way it mutinies itself into thin air without complaint.

there was a point a few days ago, Thursday, when everything melded into one - I had just finished work, was off to Valletta to have my first real Platonic meeting with Miriam before she set off to Isle of MTV and I to pv - when the seams disappeared and I could leave life to itself and me to me.
It still hasn't worn off, and things seem more acessible. There's no voices breathing down my neck and my mind isn't running frustratingly faster to the world. Generally, I like it. I feel less hung up and less needy to prove myself. I just hope it isn't signaling mediocrity and stagnation.
Maybe I'm just getting more sleep (in spite of the heat, surprisingly) and not drinking as much coffee. Ever since I got back from London, it seems easier, even though I was late for work once. Maybe the island does it, it's OK to do that here.
I like the fact that Malta is small, at times, though everything else about it can be rather discouraging. It is indifferent, old, petrified and silent; whereas London I noticed to be man-made, man-run with a similar life-expectancy. overall though, I think I prefer the latter - I'd rather feel present - the mortality is more accessible, you can do more things while you're there, while Malta's infinitude isn't meant to be touched by humans.
There's very little going on most of the time, though I'm watching Shakespeare tonight if comps get through. At this stage I'd rather stay in and read Lodge (Therapy) but I'm sure I'll be OK once I get out.
a wave to anyone who reads, hope you're enjoying your summer.

Feeling a bit sad and insecure. I keep thinking that I'm a bore, that I'm inept and not enough of a fighter (considering what I want to do/achieve in life, that I'm feeble, hapless, easy to manipulate, with no voice of my own. I'm finding self expression increasingly tough. Whenever I speak it's like I'm not clear enough, so people chat amongst themselves and I have to raise my voice to be heard. I always seem to go for the wrong words and can barely shape out basic sentences without sounding awkward or a bit off. True, I probably pay more attention to these things because I want my language use to be special, but that makes it even worse: if I can't even experess the most fundamental things...
I don't know. It's like I labour things too much, like I can't do anything in a breezy, relaxed way. I feel like I'm doomed to being ponderous: a stiff, dull bore.
I was a host yesterday night: had a sleepover at my place, attended by Pete, Dav, Sylvie and Ellen. It seemed like I had to take each protest, each sign of irritation or boredom from any of the guests personally, and it was an icky feeling indeed. It was fun of course, apart from the unsurprising discomfort of 3 people sleeping in a stuffy room at the onset of summer (and I can now, amusingly, say without technically lying that I was in bed with 2 girls. But it brought all the above out, social events and people whose intelligence I trust are rarely a pleasant mix for me.
What's also very annoying is how I tend not to assertively squash out a lot of these internal squabbles and inadequacies when I know that I can. I just tell them to other people, and when they point out the steps I should take, which more often than not I already know, only then do I act on them. I suppose this journal would be a great distillation of this idea. Urgh.