Thursday 29 November 2012

Ennui





All those that know me, will be aware that myself and my house mate Amelia, have been suffering from ennui for an extended period of time.

For all those who aren’t aware:

                Ennui: Listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement


Ennui raises its ugly head when you have too many assignments to do to allow yourself to go outside, but simultaneously you have no will to do any of them. So you compromise by sitting in the kitchen eating bread in your slippers and occasionally saying something a bit saucy about someone you don’t like very much, or reading really intellectual literature like “Why he thinks you’d make a flabby corpse,” in Glamour magazine.

My personal ennui has the following symptoms:

1.       Complete refusal to change my bin: At the moment my bedroom bin is like a disgusting game of ‘Rubbish Jenga.’ I have no will to change it and am simply balancing cotton pads, precariously, on top of its heaving mass.
2.       Unwillingness to eat a dinner that cannot by cooked in one saucepan: Everyone knows I’m kind of a healthy eating freak, I’m just a v. lazy one at the moment. So, most of my current recipes go like this: Step one: stir fry lots of veg. Step two: cover in tinned tomatoes. Step three: Add some sort of pulse so I don’t die of lack of protein. Et voila, enjoy your plate of steamy tomato mess. Don’t eat it too fast its heartburn in a semi-liquid form.
3.       Really boring outfits: For somebody who owns most of a retro warehouse, I have achieved wearing only jeans for three months and that’s on good days, most of the time its cow-print-dressing-gown-o-clock. Check out my mismatching slippers for further evidence that I'm becoming a member of the lost generation.
4.       Reiterating the same opinions cause making new ones is time consuming: I’m having to put Christmas baubles on my summer grievances as my ennui prevents me reading the paper, except for the stories about baby ducks.
5.       Anarchic washing systems: Take washing out of machine, spread all over banisters, leave for 40 days, throw in bottom of wardrobe.
6.       Refusal to do anything: Got a gig? I ain't coming. Got a poetry reading? I’m in bed. Any plans that normally I’d break off my arm and feed it to a dog to go to? I’m afraid you’ll be encroaching on my busy schedule of painting and re-painting my nails whilst not answering the door to the postman.
7.       Watching box sets I don’t care about: Heroes, Sex and the City, Roswell, various other vapid E4 9-o-clock heart-wrenched-teen shit. I hate all the characters, I don't empathise with their snotty lives at all, but dammit I'm in it til the bitter end.
8.       Listening to Belle and Sebastian on repeat: This can only be a bad sign.
9.       Writing false letters to Amelia, from the company that made her posh juice, claiming that she has wronged them and that they are terribly offended. (this last point of course involves carefully thought out writing, which I have done instead of anything productive.) I'm trying to make her paranoid. Its something to do.

So yeah, if anyone knows of a cure for ennui that does not involve getting sucker punched by a pseudo faith healer, let a spotty girl know eh?

Sunday 4 November 2012

Un-used Dissertation Questions


Last year there was much discussion, worry and some violent outbursts relating to how one could make the perfect dissertation question. This question should be so clever, so culturally relevant and well researched, that all other essay questions quivered in its presence and immediately dropped their knickers.

Here are some dissertation questions that didn't quite make it into a final 8000 words essay:

How does Shakespeare’s register indicate that he was actually a batty?

In what sense could reading Joyce’s Ulysses be considered a colossal waste of both yours and everyone else’s time?

Did Marlowe think Shakespeare was a bit of a prick?

‘Bird is the word:’ Discuss.

Look at the use of colloquial language in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. I bet you feel superior now, don’t you?

“The clothed hyena rose up and stood tall on its hind feet:” A critical analysis of the theory that Bertha Mason could actually kick Jane Eyre’s scrawny white ass.

How does Sixteenth Century conduct literature reflect the fact that everyone thought it was a bit funny that Elizabeth had gone bald?

“The tidal currents run to and fro on its unceasing surface:” In what sense does the water imagery in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness make you need a wee?

How does the characterisation in Wuthering Heights suggest that the Brontes needed to get out more?

In a psychoanalytical analysis of your classmates, employing techniques from Freud’s ‘The interpretation of Dreams’ how many of them probably had crap childhoods?

A Marxist examination of the suggestion that: The portrayal of class in the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy will not stop middle class teenagers from going to poetry parties, wearing berets and hand rolling their cigarettes.

Is there evidence that Salome’s milkshake bought all the boys to the yard? Was it Yazoo?

Did Seneca look like Helena Bonham Carter?

“Okoye was a musician:” When ‘writing back’ against the domination of colonialist rule is it important that Chinua Achebe knew to how to body-pop?