![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Week Four
Finally, internet at home. Still no flat rate, because my bank card details hadn't arrived until today, and I needed those to sign up for a flat rate, but at least I can go online for a precious hour or so every day. So, for what that is worth: I'm back! ;-)
Well, what have I done this week, except for getting the online trouble sorted out?
More reading, more university, some illness, and the job interview on Wednesday...
Let's begin with the job interview. Well, the people there – including the boss - were very nice, and my qualifications seemed to be just what they were looking for, but they weren't happy that I could only work two days a week. They weren't really looking for part time people. And, since I haven't heard from them since, I suspect that I didn't get the position. I will call them on Monday, just to make sure, and then I will check the Birmingham student guild's JobZone. Maybe some bookshop needs salespeople. *g*
As for the illness: that started on Tuesday, with me freezing all day at uni – positively shivering even during lectures – so I went to bed in the early afternoon that day, in order to be fit for the interview the next day. Well, I was okay the next day, and the day after that, but got worse again on Friday. In fact, I felt so bad on Friday that I mostly stayed in bed, apart from one ill-advised expedition to uni to copy some paperwork for my much-belated Bafög-application. Today I feel a lot better, though.
Being sick does have its benefits, though. One of these is that I feel entitled to indulge myself when I'm sick. So, instead of working for uni, I read, and watched Farscape and Doctor Who on my laptop (as I did Solaris on Tuesday, during my first spell of sickness).
I don't need to comment on Farscape here, I suppose ;-), but Doctor Who is weird. With trademark 1070s low budget BBC special effects and its peculiarly clown-like hero, it is difficult to take seriously (and I doubt that it is supposed to be taken too seriously). Still, watching the excentricities of the Doctor is quite entertaining, even if I find myself wishing for something a little bit deeper, like, maybe, character development? But I have only seen a few episodes, not enough to judge a whole show on. One thing that I do like about it, besides the Doctor himself, are the 1970s visions of the future it portrays. These are the futures I grew up with, even if I didn't watch Doctor Who as a child. Everything in those sets and costumes reminds me of earliest science fiction experiences – movies and tv shows caught more by accident than by purpose – that shaped my idea of what the future might look like. Now that I've grown up I find that my idea of the future has changed with time, and that the future of my childhood was little more but a distorted version of the present of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Still, or maybe because of it, I get nostalgic when I watch sf of that period.
I can't really say much about Solaris, except that it is a beautiful movie, well-fitted for a rainy day spent in a half-trance in bed. Its future, like that of Minority Report, is as much a version of our period as Doctor Who is of the seventies. It seems to be extremely difficult for us to imagine futures that are not, in many ways, just a mirror image of our present... Even movies like Equilibrium, which at least creates a different social order for its future society, are still shaped by contemporary ideas of stylishness, if nothing else.
And, speaking of different societies of the future, I need to mention the biggest temptation I've been facing this last week – facing, as I must admit, mostly unsuccessfully.
About two weeks ago I bought Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun', and although I still have other books to read, and had promised myself only to start reading it after I had read all the others, I find it impossible to ignore its siren call... This is a book I've been meaning to read for years – ever since I first heard about it – one that I have felt more intrigued by than just about *any* other book in recent years... and so, it's hard *not* to read it immediately. And, in fact, I succumbed to the overwhelming urge to read it on Tuesday, in the 'what the hell, I'm sick and indulging myself' mood, and again yesterday – enough to read about 90 pages of it; enough to get tantalising impressions of a decaying civilisation under a red sun, of a new ice age and a city whose towers are the husks of defunct spaceships, of totally foreign concepts of morals and ethics, of an age when space travel is not a dream of the future but a memory of ages long past... It is every bit as good as I imagined. Intense, dense world building. It totally and utterly creeps me out. The hero, if he can be called that, is a torturer's apprentice, and we see the world and the action from his point of view, tinted, or skewed, accordingly. Frell, I want to read the whole book now. But I need to keep something compelling to read for the trip to Germany in two weeks... I will spend such a lot of time on buses and in airports then... this would be just the right book to make me forget the hours when waiting for a plane...
Oops... that late already? I have to go, do some shopping. Sainsbury's closes at ten...
Well, what have I done this week, except for getting the online trouble sorted out?
More reading, more university, some illness, and the job interview on Wednesday...
Let's begin with the job interview. Well, the people there – including the boss - were very nice, and my qualifications seemed to be just what they were looking for, but they weren't happy that I could only work two days a week. They weren't really looking for part time people. And, since I haven't heard from them since, I suspect that I didn't get the position. I will call them on Monday, just to make sure, and then I will check the Birmingham student guild's JobZone. Maybe some bookshop needs salespeople. *g*
As for the illness: that started on Tuesday, with me freezing all day at uni – positively shivering even during lectures – so I went to bed in the early afternoon that day, in order to be fit for the interview the next day. Well, I was okay the next day, and the day after that, but got worse again on Friday. In fact, I felt so bad on Friday that I mostly stayed in bed, apart from one ill-advised expedition to uni to copy some paperwork for my much-belated Bafög-application. Today I feel a lot better, though.
Being sick does have its benefits, though. One of these is that I feel entitled to indulge myself when I'm sick. So, instead of working for uni, I read, and watched Farscape and Doctor Who on my laptop (as I did Solaris on Tuesday, during my first spell of sickness).
I don't need to comment on Farscape here, I suppose ;-), but Doctor Who is weird. With trademark 1070s low budget BBC special effects and its peculiarly clown-like hero, it is difficult to take seriously (and I doubt that it is supposed to be taken too seriously). Still, watching the excentricities of the Doctor is quite entertaining, even if I find myself wishing for something a little bit deeper, like, maybe, character development? But I have only seen a few episodes, not enough to judge a whole show on. One thing that I do like about it, besides the Doctor himself, are the 1970s visions of the future it portrays. These are the futures I grew up with, even if I didn't watch Doctor Who as a child. Everything in those sets and costumes reminds me of earliest science fiction experiences – movies and tv shows caught more by accident than by purpose – that shaped my idea of what the future might look like. Now that I've grown up I find that my idea of the future has changed with time, and that the future of my childhood was little more but a distorted version of the present of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Still, or maybe because of it, I get nostalgic when I watch sf of that period.
I can't really say much about Solaris, except that it is a beautiful movie, well-fitted for a rainy day spent in a half-trance in bed. Its future, like that of Minority Report, is as much a version of our period as Doctor Who is of the seventies. It seems to be extremely difficult for us to imagine futures that are not, in many ways, just a mirror image of our present... Even movies like Equilibrium, which at least creates a different social order for its future society, are still shaped by contemporary ideas of stylishness, if nothing else.
And, speaking of different societies of the future, I need to mention the biggest temptation I've been facing this last week – facing, as I must admit, mostly unsuccessfully.
About two weeks ago I bought Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun', and although I still have other books to read, and had promised myself only to start reading it after I had read all the others, I find it impossible to ignore its siren call... This is a book I've been meaning to read for years – ever since I first heard about it – one that I have felt more intrigued by than just about *any* other book in recent years... and so, it's hard *not* to read it immediately. And, in fact, I succumbed to the overwhelming urge to read it on Tuesday, in the 'what the hell, I'm sick and indulging myself' mood, and again yesterday – enough to read about 90 pages of it; enough to get tantalising impressions of a decaying civilisation under a red sun, of a new ice age and a city whose towers are the husks of defunct spaceships, of totally foreign concepts of morals and ethics, of an age when space travel is not a dream of the future but a memory of ages long past... It is every bit as good as I imagined. Intense, dense world building. It totally and utterly creeps me out. The hero, if he can be called that, is a torturer's apprentice, and we see the world and the action from his point of view, tinted, or skewed, accordingly. Frell, I want to read the whole book now. But I need to keep something compelling to read for the trip to Germany in two weeks... I will spend such a lot of time on buses and in airports then... this would be just the right book to make me forget the hours when waiting for a plane...
Oops... that late already? I have to go, do some shopping. Sainsbury's closes at ten...
Congratulations!
Hope you're feeling better today.