Current Preoccupations

I have a pretty addictive personality. This can be good - I usually throw myself into things and get very enthusiastic about them. It can also be bad - everything in moderation, etc. Here is a choice selection of what's been preoccupying me over the last week!

SONG: "Don't Unplug Me", by ALL CAPS. This came out in 2010 but I've recently rediscovered it, and am obsessed. Previous obsessions (according to last.fm, which I only signed up to last January sadly - think of all that music being listened to unrecorded, so to speak) are "Pop the Glock" by Uffie, and "Beat Control" by Tilly and the Wall.

ALBUM: Still Foe's Bad Dream Hotline. Brilliant stuff - every track is worth a listen (or five - I actually had to buy the CD, thanks to Spotify's incredibly irritating five-plays-and-you're-out rule. I miss the old days).

BOOK: M.R. James's ghost stories (available cheaply from Amazon). I never read actual horror fiction (i.e. anything gory), since it just doesn't appeal to me, but these are chilling little gems: mannered, yes, but brilliantly effective.

FOOD: Salted chocolate (specifically the Lindt kind). I've also been making occasional batches of plain vanilla biscuits (courtesy of Nigella Lawson's must-own The Domestic Goddess). Also jelly - the kind where you snip up the cubes with scissors and make it yourself, obv. Nostalgia in a wibbly-wobbly spoonful. Strawberry or raspberry are the best flavours. And jelly should not have bits of fruit in it, since that just ruins its bizarre translucent glory. (Only possible exception: really good trifle on a summer's day.)

Not my jelly

YOUTUBER: Kathy from JustKissMyFrog. (It was actually her February Outfits video that reminded me of the addictive ALL CAPS song mentioned above, which makes her awesome already.) If you aren't already subscribed to her, I highly suggest you do so now! I absolutely love the eclectic (had to use that word) mix of videos she makes, which are hilarious, personal and insightful, usually all at the same time.

WEARING: Grey everything - jumpers, skirts, cardigans. My style at the moment is basically school uniform chic (and the "chic" part is questionable). From the ages of 11 to 16 I wore a black watch tartan kilt to school every day, and I now own three kilts in different tartans which I've found in charity shops and shortened to above the knee, to be worn with red or black roll neck jumpers. (Red is pretty much the only colour I wear at the moment.)

Dream jumpers

NAILS: Nothing! This is pretty revolutionary for me, since I wore nail varnish pretty much constantly since I left school (where we weren't allowed to wear it). I felt my nails deserved a bit of a break, since they weren't in great shape, so I haven't had nail varnish on since New Year. The downside of this is that my huge nail varnish collection (featuring Barry M and Models Own heavily) is sitting unused at the bottom of my wardrobe!

So, there you have a sprinkling of the things I'm enjoying at the moment. No makeup! I will be starting a hot or not, up or down style feature, which will be about makeup (of course), when I next take a break from the world's dullest coursework essay.

Till next time,

Josephine x

PS. Random photos are from weheartit.com.

Something a Bit Different: What I'm Reading

On a bit of a different note – my latest Amazon order arrived:

Betty Friedan, The Feminist Mystique (1963)

Kat Banyard, The Equality Illusion (2010)

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender (2010)

I came across a mention of Banyard’s book in a comment on a post on The F-Word blog (I think – anyway here’s the review), and for some reason this sparked off one of my occasional Amazon mini-binges. I'd been meaning to get hold of a copy of Friedan for a while, but never got round to it. During my time at university, I was completely spoiled for choice on the library front, with every book pretty much ever written (or close enough) at my disposal, so I've yet to adjust to the concept of Buying Your Own Books. I'll update you once I've actually read them, but for now, these are the newest additions to my bookshelf, which currently mainly consists of cheap copies of early modern drama and a lot of poetry.


Gender was always the critical perspective to which I was naturally drawn as an undergraduate, even though I deliberately abandoned it for the Masters as too cliched and over-done - but my instinct was to engage with critics and theorists from Judith Butler (even though Gender Trouble, while brilliant, is nigh-on impossible to read!) to the Shakespearean feminists like Juliet Dusinberre and Lisa Jardine. And of course I loved Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic as an eighteen-year-old fresher mad about Hardy and the Brontës. My favourite Finals project was undoubtedly the essay I wrote on gender and linguistics, during which I fell in love with the outspoken (and outdated, but that's another story) critics like Julia Penelope (the astonishing Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues) and Dale Spender (Man Made Language - see what she did there?).


Even writing these few paragraphs has made me regret all the books I didn't read when I had the chance, while they were sitting innocently on the library shelves! Sadly my student budget won't stretch to cover them all (especially given that debilitating addiction to blush), so I'll be pacing myself. And we'll have see how long my resolve to keep up "academic" (the in loosest possible sense - the essay-writing days are definitely over for now!) interests lasts in the face of impending law exams...


And speaking of blush - I have a feeling my next post will be on that very subject.

Till next time,

LL x