I got these glasses because

A. ZOMG I NEEDED TO SHOW THE WORLD MY LOVE FOR JOHN LENNON AND THEY WERE SO WORTH THE MONEY
B. I wanted an excuse to photograph my unmadeupsickpersonwookiebrows face
C. I secretly miss men in speeding white vans shouting ‘Harry Potter’ at me

BTW the answer is B + C, I am still bitter and resentful that the only round glasses I could get were dead white guy-branded, and that the dead white guy in question was not Tommy Judd (I would contend that you completely can be dead if you never existed, thank you).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to fight Voldemort with my newfound ability to decimate up to 10% of any piece of household furniture any time I move.

The whole garden seemed walled in by great leaves, mosaic’d with dark gold, like temples in a forest.  It was a place of slow and peaceful growth, a place for slow and imperishable love, thought Anna, where
My vegetable love shall grow
Vaster than empires and more slow

At the same time, I confess that the last person I’d ever want to be is Anna (though it doesn’t seem much fun to be Essy or Hare himself either).  When Hare promises that she will be the only woman he will ever call his friend, what he’s really after is a looking-glass in which one sees oneself ‘at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size’ one really is.  It’s important to be ever so careful with these things, hard as it is to control them.  At the very least one can avoid the fate of Marie de Gournay – the thought of repeatedly stabbing oneself with a hairpin in the presence of a man who has in print expressed resentment toward breast-feeding babies ought to be a sobering one.  At least I think so.

Belonging to the mirror class of things is dangerous if it becomes a substitute for any kind of inner life, but I often think (and apologies, this is really just a bunch of things that may not connect at all really) about Paris Is Burning, and Yukaghir hunters seducing their prey, and the Kuna people.  There’s a nice interview with Hanna Schygulla that I half-remember; she says that Fassbinder believed (along with von Sacher-Masoch and numerous mothers and aunts of girl-children throughout history) that in any relationship one person always loved more than the other.  Fassbinder thought that the one who loved least was strongest, but Schygulla disagreed because, she said, the one who loved most had the ‘greater capacity’ to love.

Hare really thinks himself a giant.

You mistake us – beings like myself.  We are not men.  We are some kind of monstrous creature, giants upheaved out of a rough, difficult and terrible earth.  Have you ever dreamed of the lives we have lived, enclosed in our experience? [...] Little tendernesses!” he said to her.  “Small marks of consideration!  They are for small men, Anna.  But that is what women want; that is all they care for.  They know nothing of the vastness of life, and they care nothing; they are incapable of a great conception.

But this is sort of funny.  He’s always looking at the people he calls Pygmies with a sort of scorn and wonderment and jealousy, as if he weren’t dependent on them for a sense of his own magnitude.  I think it must be harder for the giant to enter the mind of the Pygmy than for a rich man to enter Heaven.

Then again, I am biased.  I am not a giant, real or funhouse-reflected.  Nor are any of my favourite authors – they are all sprites concerned with the smallest, most delicate details, and that is why they are my favourites.

Fancy watch and Jessica McClintock dress that I’ve worn basically whenever I haven’t been at work.

Lidl Buck’s Fizz for breakfast and croissants by SW.  Don’t pretend you aren’t jealous of how fancy we are (or baffled by how blurry these photos are; my camera is increasingly intractable).

Maison Bertaux is still awesome even when one has to sit in the secret Noel Fielding cave.

That is all.

Blouse – Jaeger via work
Dress – Laura Ashley via work (and you know I got it four/five years ago, so I’m not one of those fairweather nerds your mother always warned you about)

I dooo think about things other than costuming myself, but just now trying to marshal those thoughts is like herding slippery cats.  For instance, the other night I wrote until my hand cramped up and then the main thing that happened was my being unable to sleep because I had written something at the bottom of the sea – it was only in the morning that I could sift through it all and make sense of it.  So, the horrid solipsism of someone bonkers like Corelli, and maybe sour old von Aschenbach living like this and never like this, and then being very prickly maybe like I imagine Fanon must have been before writing Black Skin, White Masks.  Sorry, everyone.  Will resume normal(er) service soon.  My birthday present to myself is to transform back into a human.

Avocado bubble tea and luxury toast (red beans and matcha ice cream) at Boba Jam (Bobassistants show every sign of having forgotten that one drunk time.  Which I still blame entirely on Henri).

Not like this is the best picture, but Bebaroque tights from work for a quid yes thank you thank you I take now

Blurry faluda from Mandalay stfu yeah any faluda is the good kind?  I hope you won’t suspect me of hyperbole when I say I actually feel like crying a little bit whenever I have faluda, it just makes me SO HAPPY.

Visit to Undillons/Notdillons proved fruitful and actually quite inexpensive (they were all remainders apart from the Turnbull, which was cheap and secondhand).  Plus I ate a huge cream donut, but I just realised that a picture of a donut is less interesting than a picture of some blurry faluda even.

And a pretty dress from work.  I was going to show you what neat work I had made of repairing the shoulders, but evidently the thread is too thick and I will have to redo them with patches of chiffon or something.  50s, but when I put it on I say to myself very sternly, “Go and brush your hair.  You look like Lillian Gish.”  And then I am quite content.

I rewatched If….  because I finally want to watch O Lucky Man! too.  It was kind of faintly odd watching it as a self-righteous 24-year-old and not a self-righteous tween – that Girl is totally unnecessary, by the way.  When I was a kid I dimly thought that I simply didn’t like the ‘tiger’ exchange and random nude rolling because nothing sexy had happened to me yet.  Turns out it is just silly.  You win, Prude Tween Me!  Four for you.

But the atmosphere and texture and details and rituals are absorbing.  I’m mainly not writing some essay about the whole thing because probably when I do it will end up being about clothes again… in which case, might as well just roll it all (with Cracks (still think that name horribly inappropes) and Another Country) into some school stories megapost.  It’s funny, because when you’re little you think you won’t ever leave school, and evidently I haven’t.

Also who needs to write a lengthy post instead of going to a Burmese restaurant and eating their own weight in leafy fritters, omelette curry and faluda?  Heaven forfend you should imagine that I’m such a person.

But I do, I think, prefer it when Jean Vigo’s schoolboys Have Their Day – though it was a different day, I guess.

(Was going to be stills of the dancing girls from A propos de Nice, but I realised I don’t have that any more.  Then I was going to go on.  And on.  About Boardwalk Empire just the way everyone who’s ever started watching it does.  And although I am only just beginning the second season, I know spoilers about the spoilers, and Gillian is effing crazy for kissing spoiler’s spoiler (spoilercest quite apart).  What about Lucky’s slightly dinged-up spoiler?  I mean he’s so pretty.  You’ll see in a second.)

Finished work and ready for Christmas.

(source)

(ikr, told you)

(here)

I can’t help that I’m shallow, so I think of Chanel too (having a little trouble forgiving Gabrielle for being a Nazi, but anyway).  And yesterday I put this necklace in my hair like a genius.