Claustrophobic Space

It's a term coined by Roland Barthes, to describe the Racinian tragic stage: all the characters talk about leaving, but none of them ever do. The tensions created by the stong, opinionated and slightly fucked-up characters in the claustrophobic space is the making of tragedy. Which doesn't bode very well for our college at the moment. Roland Barthes has pretty much encapsulated what college is like at the moment: people dreaming of the longed-for day in June when their exams end, planning holidays, planning their last month in Cambridge with all the garden parties and balls, and often dealing with their 'Tripositis' by drinking too much in the evenings. Nobody sets foot outside of the college gates. It has all the makings of a good drama, although admittedly some of the characters (myself included) are going to have to work on their dialogue and move away from the constant refrain of "aaarrrgggh!!! I haven't done enough revision! Why didn't I start revising months ago?! I'm going to get a 2.2!!!'.

I mean, it wouldn't exactly sell tickets, get bums on seats now, would it?

We can trust James...

... because he's a doctor! Finally got the nod from the English Faculty today, my gorgeous husband will soon be Dr Smith. He's frightfully clever, you know!

exam strategy

This "interweb", as the young kids call it, is an extremely useful procrastination tool. It's 1040 and I've not yet started revision thanks to sites like this

In other news, last night's anxiety dream involved sitting the tragedy paper, with my head crammed full of quotations, theories and clever ideas about tragic art stretching back to the fifth century BC, only to discover a page full of questions about such things as sustainable cod fisheries (The question started "We all like a bit of battered cod with our chips from time to time, but ...."). My voice went up an octave: "I can't answer this!!!! I can't fucking answer this!!!!! The Bastards!!" (and, yes, the multiple exclamation marks were indeed necessary).

Mad Irish Julie - would you like to entertain my readers with that wonderful answer from your linguistics exam?

A Far More Interesting Read!!

Simply click here, my friends, for the same blog, but with a slightly different narrative voice


I love the bit about hearing my own voice "rapping `bout Hegelian dializzles" - it just makes so much more sense!

Nothing to see here...again!

I have what is known in Cambridge as Tripositus. It's a painful affliction that necessitates long periods of isolation, usually in the library or 'quiet room'. Common symptoms include:

• a slightly higher-pitched voice and the propensity to talk at some speed and length about such things as 'exam strategy', 'essay dumping', 'conflicting notions of tragedy' and 'gobbits'*;
• a notable downshift in one's physical appearance and dress sense;
  
• extreme fatigue and flickering eye syndrome;
• intense dreams, during which one hears one's reading voice talking about Hegelian dialectical conflict; and
• the inability to write an interesting blog entry.

So don't blame me, fair readers, blame Tripositus. Together we can conquer this terrible illness, or at least promote understanding for its sufferers. If you all deposit £100 into my bank account, that will at least be a start...

*a gobbit isn't, as I'm sure some of you may suspect, another nasty illness; it is, however, something nasty they sometimes give you in exams.

Tales from Cambridge Yesteryear: Limerick lessons

"Excuse me", says a German tourist, who has approached us in the Copper Kettle, where Simone and I are eating cake, drinking coffee and giggling over our homework, "Are you Cambridge students? You look like you're having great fun doing your work!"

And indeed, fun is exactly what we were having. We had been instructed, nearly a week before, to write two limericks: one happy, one sad. It was supposed to teach us about generic expectations, and the difficulties of subverting form with content. We had half an hour left until the class, when we would have to hand our poems in. Mine had already been done - my sad limerick bewailing the demise of an affair with a married man (a fictional case study, of course!).

Simone had not been so well organised and thus it came to pass that we were trying to find poetic inspiration with not much time remaining. Her other poems (10 lines of iambic pentameter and 10 of trochaic tetrameter, if you must know) had all been about squirrels - she had composed them in the Wolfson clubroom as the squirrels scampered around outside. So we decided it would be best to continue the theme in her limericks, in order to turn her work into a ready made poetry collection. Here is what Simone, poetess of squirrel love, came up with:

There once was a squirrel called Skiffy
Who could nip up trees in a jiffy
Along came a whore
with an AK-44
And now Mr Skiffy's a stiffy

Now, there is one obvious flaw in the poem: namely, the confusion over weaponry. Thankfully, we noticed this before she handed the poem in, so she footnoted the fact that the AK-44 was an early prototype of the now more common AK-47. And we didn't have time to write two limericks, so she also put in a note, helpfully pointing out that this limerick was tragi-comic and therefore sufficed to represent both a happy and a sad limeric simultaneously.

Fast-forward to the following week. We get our homework back, and the tutor has presented his comments on our work in the form of limericks.

This was mine:

Alas! You are telling no lies
Extra-marital screwing's unwise
And you'll find quite apart
from the pain in your heart
Greater joys behind bachelors' flies.

Hm. It felt a bit wrong, and I hope he knew it was a mature student he was writing it to, as it would have been slightly wrong had I been an 18 year old.

However, the best comment of them all was to Simone:

Simone! Why the squirrel fixation?
Dirty nuts get no standing ovation
And I'm afraid Mr Skiffy
Whether lively or whiffy
Does not help your versification.

He'll regret his cruel words when Simone becomes famous as the Cambridge Squirrel Poetess. He shall rue the day, I tell you - in fact, he has probably starting rueing already!