Beyond Selidor

When I was a child and teenager, I consumed stories with an urgent, hungry intensity. I reread favourite books again and again until I could quote them verbatim,* I wandered around the garden pretending to be Snow White or Ariel from The Little Mermaid or Jessica Rabbit.** I had a pretty constant narrative running through my head the whole time I was awake, for the most part consisting of me being the character of a favourite story doing whatever activity I, Ronni, happened to be doing at the time. (No wonder I was a such a vague child: every activity required an extra layer of concentration in order for me to figure out why, say, the dinosaurs from The Land Before Time would be learning multiplication at a Canberra primary school.) The more I learnt about literary scholarship, the more insufferable I became, because I would talk at people about how 'URSULA LE GUIN WROTE A STORY WHERE EVERYTHING HAS A TRUE, SECRET NAME AND THEN ANOTHER USE-NAME AND ISN'T THAT AMAZING IN WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT IDENTITY?!?!' For the most part, I don't inhabit stories to the same extent, and they don't inhabit me to the same degree, although there are rare exceptions to this.

The rare exceptions tend to be things that sort of satisfy my soul in some deep and slightly subconscious way.*** And the funny thing is that although I can write lengthy essays explaining why something both appeals to me on this hungry, emotional level and is a good work of literature (indeed, I have been known to dedicate a whole blog to this), I can also remember a specific moment when reading/watching these texts and they suddenly became THE BEST THING EVER. I can remember exactly what it was for all of them.

The following is somewhat spoilerish for Romanitas, Sunshine by Robin McKinley, Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Demon's Lexicon, The King's Peace by Jo Walton, Parkland by Victor Kelleher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Robin Hood: Men in Tights,
Ten Things I Hate About You, Cirque du Soleil, Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.


( Probably a closer look at my subconscious than is comfortable )

Do you have moments like that?
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*Which led to a very awkward moment in Year 5 when our teacher was reading Hating Alison Ashley out loud to the class, but would skip bits from time to time - whereupon I would correct her.
**(whose appeal was less that she wasn't 'bad, just drawn that way' and more due to the fact that she wore an awesome dress)
***I've seen people describe fanfic like this as 'idfic', but for me this tends to be a phenomenon of professionally published fiction.

I got back several hours ago from going to Strawberry Fair with three of my friends. It was loads of fun. We followed the dreadlocked, brightly-dressed, percussion-beating, stilt-walking throng as they paraded through central Cambridge to Midsummer Common (taking a slight detour and getting lost...). I felt a momentary twinge of regret that I was not one of the drumming multitude. Sometimes I miss my days of doing street theatre for Amnesty. I miss being one of the weirdos that everyone looks at.

Anyway, the fair was great. I actually ate decent food (a felafel roll that actually tasted like it was freshly made, from a vegetarian shop, a crepe with lemon and sugar, and home-made lemonade). We mostly spent our time people-watching. It was as if there was a whole different Cambridge, and it only came out once a year. Dreadlocked hippies. Goths in black lace and scary-looking platform boots. Girls dressed in day-glo leggings, ballet skirts and fairy wings. Emo kids in asymmetric haircuts and 'Team Edward' jumpers. Where have these people been the past eight months? Hanging out in attics on Mill Road? THESE are my people.

Oh, don't get me wrong, Cambridge does quirky, but it's a different kind of quirky. The kind that involves tweed, monocles and mispronounced Latin mumbled in thanksgiving before sitting down to dinner in Hall.

We spent the last hour or so at the fair listening to music and passively smoking way too much of the pot that the group behind us was smoking. That might explain why we came up with the brilliant idea of Pimp My Punt. We were talking about Pimms, and somehow my friend misheard it as 'pimp' and somehow this led to the idea of punts fitted out with subwoofers, lurid paint and bling. It made sense at the time.

Anyway, then I came home and reread Sunshine by Robin McKinley. My God. It's been a while since a book has possessed me like this one. I bought it yesterday and have already read it four times. I've been listening to Nightwish nonstop, which with me is always a sign that something epic is going on. When I came home from Watchmen, I switched on Nightwish and blasted my room. Same when I read the 'The Sound of Her Wings' Sandman comic.

( Entitlement? )