When I'm drunk, I sing; When I feel wild, I dance; When I sober up, I stop.

[extemporally]

Proof that going to university on a 8-week term drives you crazy: negative-first week restlessness. I am back in Oxford and THERE IS NOBODY AROUND... Except for the flatmate that stood me up for lunch for her boyfriend and hadn't bothered to tell me beforehand, but whatever. The point is: slowly being driven crazy through solitude, abandonment issues, and work guilt. Always the work guilt. :(

On the bright side, I have never seen so many movies in such a short period of time in my life. I make it a point to never see movies during term time because there are so many other things I could be doing... peering at a screen you can do anywhere! Over the past couple of days I've seen Winter's Bone (ohhhh lord. If you ever remotely enjoyed Jennifer Lawrence's performance in THG, you NEED to see Winter's Bone yesterday. It's just a really gorgeous film, and Jennifer Lawrence's performance is wonderful. I'm not surprised she got nominated for an Oscar for it - I haven't seen The Blind Side, and I'm unlikely to, but she should have won instead of Sandra Bullock, whose movies I've never really enjoyed), Zombieland (funny, but nothing will convince me that Jesse Eisenberg wasn't essentially playing himself), and The Artist (a masterpiece, or overhyped? probably both). The last I saw at the Ultimate Picture Palace, which is like a century old and awesome for that reason. Also, I went running yesterday! Maybe I should make that a regular habit, or something.

Also, I read some books.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.

But autobiography or not, this is worth a read. Two easily, even. Actually, this is just the most compelling depiction of mental illness I've encountered in fiction, no big deal or whatever:

I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size seven patent leather shoes I'd bought in Bloomingdale's one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocket-book to match. And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were working on - drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lame bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion - everybody would think I must be having a real whirl.

I knew it was going to be bleak, but what no one talked about was how funny Sylvia Plath is:

'I'll have a vodka,' I said.

The man looked at me more closely. 'With anything?'

'Just plain,' I said. 'I always have it plain.'

I thought I might make a fool of myself by saying I'd have it with ice or soda or gin or anything. I'd seen a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snow-drift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was some day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

Me too, Esther :')

I can't be coherent about this book, but auuugh, the passages that strike a chord:

That afternoon my mother had come to visit me.

My mother was only one in a long stream of visitors - my former employer, the lady Christian Scientist, who walked on the lawn with me and talked about the mist going up from the earth in the Bible, and the mist being error, and my whole trouble being that I believed in the mist, and the minute I stopped believing in it, it would disappear and I would see I had always been well, and the English teacher I had in high school who came and tried to teach me how to play Scrabble, because he thought it might revive my old interest in words, and Philomena Guinea herself, who wasn't at all satisfied with what the doctors were doing and kept telling them so.

I hated these visits.

I would be sitting in my alcove or in my room, and a smiling nurse would pop in and announce one or another of the visitors. Once they'd even brought the minister of the Unitarian chuch, whom I'd never really liked at all. He was terribly nervous the whole time, and I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace.

My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet training, and I had been perfectly trained at a very early age and given her no trouble whatsoever.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.

'Save them for my funeral,' I'd said.

My mother's face puckered, and she looked ready to cry.

'But Esther, don't you remember what day it is today?'

'No.'

I thought it might be Saint Valentine's day.

'It's your birthday.'

And that was when I had dumped the roses in the waste-basket.

'That was a silly thing for her to do,' I said to Doctor Nolan.

Doctor Nolan nodded. She seemed to know what I meant.

'I hate her,' I said, and waited for the blow to fall.

But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, 'I suppose you do.'

Like I said, it's one of the most compelling depictions of female mental illness I've come across in a long time. I'm uncomfortable calling it a feminist classic (though it is), because it's so racist in parts. (Omg! I got in the elevator and I was all smudgy-eyed! I was as ugly as a Chinese woman! Fuck you) Obviously, you can make excuses for it being a product of its time - much like Jane Eyre's racism was a product of its time, maybe, but it makes me wonder where the cut-off point is, exactly. Just for once I'd like to read an purportedly acclaimed feminist classic and not be blindsided by its racism.

Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance, trans. Li-li Ch'en.

Oh well, it's not like I would ever have made it through the original anyway! On the bright side, it isn't too lengthy, so if I ever felt like making myself feel completely inadequate I could totally get an original and try to work my way through it. (Oh hey, totally available online here!)

The way this is structured - prose and song alternated - means that you get someone narrating an action, and then it being expressed in song, which is incredibly theatrical, in a self-aware sort of way, esp. the way the narrator frequently interrupts himself by saying: 'And how do I know this really happened? Because of Master Yuan's The Story of Ying-ying!' (aka the original, which in fact involved an unhappy ending that was changed for this particular iteration). It makes me want a TV adaptation where that sort of theatricality (especially because the characters are so archetypal!) and self-consciously cliched hilarity is seized upon:

[Prose]

Finding each other congenial, they behaved like old friends. Fa-pen inquired about Chang's background and Chang said: 'I am trained in Confucian scholarship and I intend to take the next metropolitant examination. At present I am traveling in the provinces to seek advice from men of discernment. I chanced to come to your temple and am delighted by the silence here. If it is possible, I would like to rent a room to review my studies.'

(Pan-she-tiao mode)

Nocturnal Visit to the Palace

Chang replied thus:
'I'm a poor scholar from Hsi-lo
Taking a study tour in the provinces.
I happened to come to P'u-chou,
Thence to your temple.

The moment I arrived, I felt liberated from petty worries.
May I have a study here?
Of course, I shall pay full rent.
Reverend abbot,
Please grant my request.'

Of course, I'm not saying that this style is in any way unique to the drama of that period - it just strikes me as funny, and reminds me of nothing so much as an endless series of matryoshka dolls. Someone dramatise this, stat!

Also there are just some really good bits of poetry in here:

Heaps of fallen coins - elm seeds - cover the ground,
Yet they can't buy the permanence of spring.

&:

'A year ago,
I went to Chang-an,
Ying-ying and I were separated
like clouds blown apart by the wind.'

(I strongly suspect that 'like clouds blown apart by the wind' is actually a pretty common cliche in Chinese verse, but it's still really pretty.)

Also: the positive delight they take in having the villain of the drama kill himself. It's so obvious it's silly! ♥