Elly Jackson

Just a quick word to say: this woman is amazing.

Loads of people I know, both men a women, cringe at the mention of her, and others are in love with her, like me. For example, browse over the comments on the youtube video of Bulletproof:

she looks like more masculin that feminin.

shees...sooo.....HOT FUCKomg<3

ugly

what a werido.

uh, excuse me? did I miss something? how is she not gorgeous?
I'd lick her from head to toe.

she's not ugly... she's cool.

soooooo ugly

ugly so ugly...

her face really like a man..but cool

I LOVE her style!

It's like Marmite, except that unlike liking a flavour, I know clearly why I like her. It's because I do honestly find the look attractive. I'm so sick of seeing stereotypical faces of fashionably monofaced women who get their tits out and dance around like strippers become instant hits because of it.

It's as though the world of popular music thinks human beings only have one vision of what makes an attractive woman - or, to be more exacting, what men envisage to be an attractive woman. That is, one who they can plug into their wank banks. To be fair to men, I have heard a few praise her appearance, so it only goes to prove that the world of popular music may be wrong. People do not, after all, have one track minds, and can find unusual and refreshing faces intriguing and attractive, and will buy their music off the shelves just as they would from any other band.

Thank you Elly Jackson for existing, and thanks to all those who helped her become well known.

Ho Yes. More Work Experience For Gwenfron.

After waiting a month for a response on my CV from a news program on Al Jazeera, after several promised phone calls that never happened, I have got a thumbs up and a provisional date in my inbox for mid-October.

ARGH!

I am so ecstatic and so very uncool in my ecstaticness: I plan to buy a huge candle I've been eyeing up in the local shop as a pat on the back to myself, and quite possibly some chocolate. But I've got to be careful there. Unemployment has made me a little too well padded for the coming winter. Maybe I'll buy some celery instead - doesn't celery use more calories to digest than the human system can extract from it? No wonder. Disgusting stuff. Chocolate it is.

I wonder whether this Work Experience will be enjoyable? It's going to be for a whole month, so I hope they won't dump too much hard work on me. I'll be a runner, and though I've explained to several people what I deem the role to be, I actually have no idea what a day in the life of Gwen The Runner might look like.

Well, I suppose we'll be seeing soon enough.

ARGH!

On Being Unemployed

Well, it gets at you. Not because it's bad, chilling out, reading every single Harry Potter and playing your brother's copy of Zelda: The Windwaker, but because you know everybody thinks you're lazy and generally an unhelpful member of society. Not being on J. S. A. helps me maintain reasonably low levels of anxiety, but doesn't help me in that I don't have the fear of being placed in any old job hanging over me to urge me onwards into the world of work.

Since graduating I've done two weeks of work experience with William Hartston, and gone on a ten day holiday to France staying with my boyfriend and some of his friends in their rented villa. Wow. That was one crazy holiday. 60,000 euros for a bottle of Champagne, anyone? No? Then the cheapest thing on the table menu is a 300 and something bottle of vodka. Oh my. What excitement.

But that was an age ago. Since then, I've been on my own, starved of internet, starved of company (apart from a single friend living a street away, who has now moved back to her uni life at Aberystwyth), starved of TV channels ... when I tell the few people I do see of my lifestyle they are appalled. 'But what do you DO all day?' Meh. Read. Play Zelda. Watch Star Trek: TNG. Have long baths. Go on jogs. Worry about the size of my bum and eat chocolate. People are even more appalled at this reply. What a waste of time, all the things you do - it's as though you're only doing them to fill up the emptiness! Well, yes, but then everything we do is generally to fill up the emptiness of life. Jobs are a great way to get rid of time, get some meaning in life. I wouldn't mind having one, but I'm terrified, not of the concept of losing all of my free time, but at the concept of having to commit to something that I may not enjoy. That Saturday job at Clarks all those years ago really fucked me up. And I know I'm liable to depression, random crying jags and sweats of anxiety and paranoia. It's a horrible thought that whatever job I go for might destroy me.

And all this worrying seeps into other elements of my life. One day, when my boyfriend drove all the way down to see me, we decided that it was for the best that we break things off. Well. Oh dear. Needless to say it didn't last too long. Soon the break up lost the 'up' bit, and now, a few days later, the whole thing is healing itself like an accidental scratch.

I'm in the local Nailsworth library as I write this, crossing my fingers that the damn computer won't crash (ctrl-alt-delete doesn't have any effect so you just have to gaze pleadingly at the screen until it sorts itself out) and might, if I can face it, meander through potential jobs, have a panic attack, run from the library crying and return home to try and drown myself in the bath.

Wish me luck. For job searching or drowing. Not sure which is worse.

Graduation: The End of Warwick and Beyond

So. I got a 2:1. Just scraped at a 1st with my fingernails but it didn't stick. I was upset. Of course I was upset. But that's life. Not everyone can get one, and it's not like I'd been expecting one, or even imagining I could get one, for the majority of my student life.

So. I graduated. Got to wear the robes, say an official goodbye to Warwick. Shake hands. Show my gratitude to the two tutors who bothered to show up at the reception. Thank you George Ttoouli and John Rignall for being there.

So. I'm in London now. Right now. I'm sitting in a room in London. Right now. ARGH! True excitement. What a city, eh? I managed to secure a two week work experience with the Daily Express, with William Hartston, who does several features, including the Beachcomber column, the Alphabeaters and the Sudoku. I look up facts, respond to letters he gets. It is A. M. A. Z. I. N. G.

Wow. Firstly, he's a nice guy. Secondly, the Express's home is a funky glass building with amazing lifts. Thirdly, it's plonked down right by London Bridge and the Gherkin. Fourthly, I'm staying with friends near Hampstead Heath. Fifthly, I've been invited to apply to two other work experience positions. Sixthly, I'm not in Stroud. Simply fantastic. And, to top it all off, I'm going to Nice on the 6th of August!

It's enough to make me forget I'm actually unemployed in the middle of a recession! HURRAH for LIFE!

Time For A Star Trek Post

Having just stumbled across Justin's post on the same topic, and since I couldn't leave a comment, I needed a different place to channel my Trek filled thoughts into. So. As per usual, bloggypoos bears the brunt. Here it is.

One of the many funky posters - though I can proudly say I saw it on the 7th,
not the 8th ... must've come out sooner here than in the States ... wahey!

Firstly, I'm a fan of TNG, not TOS, so I went to the film only knowing the basics - the Kobayashi Maru, that Pike was the original Captain, that Scotty says 'I'm giving her all she's got!' and Bones is generally grumpy and stressed, etc - but I was still impressed. I was a fan who was looking for faithfulness to Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision (as mocked here), and so, like most other fans, was nervous on going in, almost expecting to be disappointed, especially after having seen J. J. Abrams in interviews saying things like 'I don't really like Star Trek ... I wanted to liven it up so it appeals to everyone, not just the weirdoes.' Humph.

But he did a great job. Shall I make a list? I think I will:

1. The cast was excellent, especially Spock and McCoy. It was fantastic that the central roles were played by actors I'm otherwise unfamiliar with - though unfortunately I was distracted by visions of Shawn of the Dead, Little Women, and House when I saw Simon Pegg, Winona Ryder and Jennifer Morrison.

2. The cinematography: the movement of the camera was effective, there was a great balance of wide shots for action and very intimate close ups. There was a lot of diagonal tilting and lens reflection which not only gave it unique style but a sense of appealing brightness which you don't really get in many of the older films...

The new, brighter bridge

3. ...which leads me on to design: I loved the reinvention of the old equipment and the transporter effects - quite beautiful, and takes nothing away from the older versions, only adds to them and reinforces the genius behind them. And that Romulan 'mining' vessel - well, blimey. It was awesome.

4. The plot. I really loved it - reminded me of many TNG episodes where there were problems which turned out to be revolved around time frames, parallel universes, etc. They were some of my favourite episodes - like the very final one, for example, when Picard is - sorry. I'll stop myself there. Anyway this plot was awesome on many levels: it ingeniously allows writers to take the old characters and play with them in original ways for future films, it allows for villains who are driven by real sorrow who are not just cardboard cut outs, and it puts the 'new' Star Trek into it's own, unique category, not just a 'remake'.

Now, to things I wasn't so keen on:

1. Aliens. Why do they keep adding more? There are so many aliens in the Star Trek world already, billions from all of the episodes which come and go, and I sort of wish they'd use them rather than just keeping on inventing new ones. Also I have to say I sighed a bit when Kirk was being chased by the massive monstor on the ice planet. It was a bit comic book cartoony, not at all like an animal - just a monstor to be scary, not a thinking predator. Even the scary and dangerous creatures in most Star Trek plots end up being exposed as creatures fighting for life ... like the crystalline entity. Ooh I'd love to see that in a modern film ...

2. Women. I know in the original Star Trek Uhuru was the only woman, but it kind of got on my nerves that this was being called 'a boys film'. In fact, I wasn't even thinking about that at all when I was watching - it was only when I got home and watched interviews with the actors that they were all saying 'oh it's a guys film, Uhuru's there to keep the boys in check' blabla SHUT UP! Star Trek is definitely a unisex thing, OK? Stop stereotyping and let's just remember what Star Trek's about, not what the people who shy away from it think it's about. Anyway, I could've done with a more TNG ratio for the female characters, rather than just have the mothers and the spicy love interests. Though I have to say I think TOS was better at getting the different nationalities in there than TNG was. I love Chekhov especially.

3. The Kobayashi Maru. I love the story, especially when Kirk (played by Shatner) reminisces about it in one of the older films, but was a little disappointed. I thought it was way too obvious he was cheating. He's completely incompetent in his instructions up until the point where the system shuts down, and when it starts up again he instantly manages to destroy the virtual enemy without so much as a second thought - how is it that Spock is the only one that suspects foul play? It's just a little too nonchalant to be realistic. The people of The Academy are, you will remember, some of the cleverest people in the Star Trek world. Kirk's cheat (as I imagine it anyway) was a great thing not only because it was brash and daring, but because it was ingeniously played out, which here I just don't think it was.

4. Er. Nope can't think of anything else. Though Justin's point about ranking was very valid. Go read his post.

So yes. Go see it if you haven't. It's a great thing. May Star Trek continue to be cherished by every new generation, I say ...

Rediscovering Music And Not Much To Do

I just finished a mind map of all my skills, while listening to music I had virtually forgotten about.

At the moment I'm staying in my room - yes, my own room! - so that Rupert can have peace and solitude to revise in. I myself have now finished, Eighteenth Century and all. They went ... OK? Truth is I have no way to tell. No disasters, but no real ebullience either (except for perhaps enjoying half of my Shakespeare exam, but that may've been fuelled by going in with the knowledge of that 76 I got on my coursework ... I just can't get over it). If you're curious, here are the Eighteenth Century questions I answered. They were a bit more straight forward than the questions of the other exams, requiring more regurgitation than thought, I felt:

Section A
2. Why is the travel narrative such an appealing vehicle in Gulliver's Travels?

Section B
6. What are the dangers associated with the sentimental identified by the young Jane Austen?

Section C
7. Write an essay on the self-consciously Enlightened traveller/explorer in the eighteenth-century. (I drew on Lady Wortley Montagu, Cook, Sterne and Crusoe ... perhaps to many ...)

Anyway, now, by myself, sleeping in my own bed, surrounded by my own things - wonderful. I feel ... weirdly free. I also have plenty of my down moments, as usual, but that seems to be how I am in general. The music is a really great thing, though. I feel like I'm finding myself again. And the mind map I just did - god, I'm skilled! Haha, well, it looks like I am on paper anyway. Truth is, even though I've done a bunch of things which should prove I have confidence (theatre, etc) I actually have very little, which is a bummer as it's one of the key things employers look for. I've got to find a way of staying bubbly and not falling into my ubiquitously hovering pit of despair. Which is an impossible thing to escape, by the way.

Even when I got my dissertation and fiction work back I was not as gleeful as I should have been - bad day - though now I can really relish it. I'm even thinking about submitting some short stories to magazines ... bloody hell, that's scary, eh? Well we'll see, I just emailed my tutor to gather advice on how to go about it.

So - what were my results on those things? Get on with it, I hear you cry! Well, I got 70 on the dissertation and 72 on the fiction ... argh!!!

So, actually, this is what my marks look like so far (including the four modules of last year):

EN227 Romantic and Victorian Poetry (62%)
15% Coursework 1 : Close Reading of On the Grasshopper and the Cricket by Keats, 1,500 words, 59
35% Coursework 2 : Discuss the exploration of sexual desire in Romantic and/or Victorian Poetry, looking at Anactoria by Swinburne, Porphyria's Lover and My Last Duchess by Browning, Goblin Market by Rossetti, The Beginning of the End and The Windhover by Hopkins, 3,500 words, 62
50% Exam : 63

EN232 Composition and Creative Writing (70%)
50% Coursework 1 : Portfolio of Narrative and Anti-Narrative Fiction, 1,500 word commentary and 4,000 word collection, 70
50% Coursework 2 : Research Project and short book analyses of Stuart, A Life Backwards and What is the What?, 1,000 word analysis and 4,000 word project, 70

EN238 The Practice of Poetry (68%)
50% Coursework : Portfolio of Poetry (with introduction), 4,000 words, 69
50% Exam : 67

EN245 The Nineteenth Century English Novel (67%)
50% Coursework : ‘The acutest men are often under an illusion about women … their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend’. (Shirley). Examine the ways in which any two novels endorse, adapt, or challenge these stereotypes, looking at Tess of the d'Urbervilles and North and South, 5,000 words, 64
50% Exam : 69

EN301 Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of his Time
50% Coursework : Creative Project : Cressida Complete, 1,700 word commentary and 3,000 project, 76
50% Exam : ?

EN329 Personal Writing Project (70%)
100% Coursework : Fiction : ‘Mary’, 2,000 word commentary and 10,000 word project, 70

EN330 Eighteenth-Century Literature
50% Coursework : Why do you think Richardson’s Pamela proved so vulnerable to misreading and parody in its time? Also examined the satires Shamela and Anti-Pamela, 5,000 words, 68
50% Exam : ?

EN236 Practise of Fiction : Contexts, Themes and Techniques
50% Coursework : Portfolio of Fiction, 4,000 words, 72
50% Exam : ?

Rupert and I have two bets going: £5 on whether I get a first (he's got the affirmative) and £1 on whether I get one or more Firsts for any of my exams (again, he's got the more optimistic side, though I know this is very unlikely - I've never gotten a First for an exam before). My logic in this bet is that if I do get a 2:1 then at least I have a little money coming in as consolation! If I do actually get a First (very unlikely, by the way) then I won't care about losing 5 or 6 quid.

The lowest First possible (that would be the one I'm aiming for, lol, and is so on the borderline it's not guaranteed they award it - god, I might have to go for a viva - sob) consists of 3 out of the student's 7 highest modules to each have scored a First, with a minimum average of 68. Well my average at the moment including my weakest module (Romantic and Victorian) is 68, and without it just rounds up to 70, so I'm definitely on the edge here. I've got 2 Firsts on modules over all, so I just need one more and to maintain the average and I've got it. But, again, no guarantee - it all depends on how those bloody exams went (don't call them bloody Gwen, you'll jinx it! I like you really, exams, you're the best things ever ... )

Don't know what's come over me. I've always loved getting high marks and good feedback, but I've never really expected it - or even aspired to it! I never imagined I'd even have the potential of getting a First back when I was a young carefree Fresher. Those were the days.

Well. We'll see how things go, eh?

Revision/Exams

WARNING: this will probably be a boring post, but since I have little else on my mind at the moment my blog is as good an outlet as any!

So.

Two down, one to go. Practise of Fiction this past Monday morning, Shakespeare and Selected Dramatist of his Time yesterday afternoon, and Eighteenth Century tomorrow at 2pm.

Practise of Fiction I felt went quite well, even though I only did two days of revision before hand to remind myself of the books/stories I've read and the contexts they came out of, and to familiarise myself with the layout of the exam paper and to do a practise paper. The exam itself was in the Panorama Room (on the top floor of Rootes - the first time I had an exam there and I much preferred it to Westwood) and was fairly straight forward. It helps that the other creative writers were all there and giddily nervous together, and that I sat behind Charlie, a friend of mine with a steadying effect on me. The questions I answered:

Section A (draw upon the work of three authors)
3. 'For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand ... But the terms are fluid.' (Margaret Atwood) To what extent do you feel genre divisions are helpful?

Section B
4. 'Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness.' (Karen Blixen/IsakDineson) Discuss the responsibilities of a writer in relation to your work and the work of three other writers.

Section C
1. Write a story (700 words) that uses this sentence from Balzac as its epigraph: 'These words represented in brief the thousand and one thoughts which floated through his mind.'
[here I could've done a story like Beckett's Ping, but I went for a first person narrative in the present tense, writing to the moment]

For the Shakespeare exam I arrived way too early in advance. Rain followed me there, which turned into a pounding thunderstorm on the roof of the exam room (very approapriately reticent of King Lear, though not the bit I was writing about), which in turn became ebullient sunlight when I at last walked free. This is what I did in that exam:

Section A (comment on the following as a theatrical text)
2. Extract from Othello, act 3 scene 3, from 'if she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!' to 'Is't possible, my lord?'

Section B
2. 'Our wooing doth not end like an old play. Jack hath not Jill' (Berowne, Love's Labour's Lost). With reference to at least two texts, discuss the ways in which Shakespeare fashioned his endings. [a question I actually enjoyed - I compaired Lear with Winter's Tale, saying they are very similar but the ending in the latter is a magically strange version of the former as the dead return to life, drawing on Othello, Hamlet and Much Ado from time to time, also examining the roles of the female characters in many of the play's endings]

I was quite surprised on coming out of the exam hearing how little work some people had put into revising for it - some people only did two or four plays, and some didn't even bother to revise different plays to those they wrote about in their coursework, so I'm a teeny bit proud of the fact that I revised eight (Lear, Othello, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Winter's Tale, Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and Loves Labour's Lost - though to be fair I knew three of those quite well pre-BA) and I actually (sad as it is) enjoy knowing about those plays now, and enjoyed answering the essay question above. Being a three hour exam (as all three of them are this year) with only two questions to answer, meant that you could really get your teeth into the second one. Let's just hope my misuse of the word 'trope' (which I realised on getting home - a word which I thought referred to a signature approach in style but actually is to do with metaphoric word usage) does not take too many points off it.

So, then, one left tomorrow - the one I'm most worried about: the dreaded Eighteenth Century. I'm revising only five things for this one for three questions: Montagu's letters from Turkey, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, A Sentimental Journey and Austen's juvenilia (plus maybe Cook's voyages today...) so I can only hope that the exam paper will allow me to write about these authors or else ... well ... I'm a bit screwed. Luckily I got 68 for my coursework which is worth half of the module, so I'd have to get anything above 52 to keep it a 2:1, which I hope I can achieve ... ach I've made myself nervous now. Better get on with life.