Feil karrierevalg

I kantina i dag så jeg et underlig opptog. En dame som leide på en blind dame som slepte på en golden retriever som bokstavelig talt hadde satt seg på bakbeina. Og ja, hunden var i full blindehundmundur. Det så ut som en veldig praktisk ordning. Bikkja bør nok ha seg en alvorsprat med karriererådgiveren sin.

Gaudy Night-sitatmaraton V

«If I want tactful dependents, I can hire them. And fire them if they get too tactful. I don’t mean Bunter. He braces me by a continual cold shower of silent criticism.» (308)

«‘I’m quite capable to be killed for the fun of it. Who isn’t?’
‘I know,’ said the Dean. ‘It’s funny that we get so solemn about murders and executions and mind so little about taking risks in motoring and swimming and climbing mountains and so on. I suppose we do prefer to die for the fun of the thing’» (322)

«But if it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparallelled sort” (330).

«It was not one of the world’s great sestets, but it was considerably better than her own octave, which was monstrous of it.» (346)

Og til slutt, verdens beste frieri:

«‘Placetne, magistra?’
‘Placet.’»

Snufs. Hvem sier at det ikke er romantisk med spørrepartikler? For denne forventer snarere ja enn nei.

Gaudy Night-sitatmaraton IV

«The incident had that rich savour of the ludicrous which neither pity nor charity can destroy.» (236)

«Come and be bothered with me for a change. It’ll be a relief for you, like a nice go of rheumatism in exchange for toothache. Equally damnable, but different.» (272)

«One never failed to find Wimsey of Balliol planted in the centre of the quad and laying down the law with exquisite insolence to somebody.» (275)

«The protective male? He was being about as protective as a can-opener.» (291)

God tid

Når man har alenekveld med ungene, og når det er april og strålende sol og alle har vært på do, da kan man bruke god tid på hjemveien. Man kan spise kroneis på varme Blindern-benker og plukke hvitveis i hopetall.

Bildene er forresten tatt med den splitternye iPhonen min. Foreløpig har jeg kun to innvendinger:

1. Man blir helt forhekset av den lille greia, og får følgelig ikke gjort noe som helst annet.
2. Ungene syntes berøringsskjermen og bildeflippingsfunksjonen var så morsom at jeg straks fikk is på den lekre, blanke skjermen.

Mysesesong

Slottsparken i går. Full mysesesong, tid for is på parkbenk, og små grønne blader som holdt på å banke seg gjennom de aller siste tynne knopphinnene. Deilig.

Gaudy Night-sitatmaraton III

«Calling people names poor Miss Lydgate didn’t know existed – the worst she knows being Restoration Drama» (75).

«Harriet amused herself with wondering whether the Prince of Ruritania had been shot, or the Master-Crook of the Continent had brought off a fresh coup, or whether this was the International Conspiracy to Wreck Civilisation with a Death-Ray – all those situations being frequent in her kind of fiction.» (77)

«It’s disquieting to reflect that one’s dreams never symbolise one’s real wishes, but always something Much Worse. […] I wonder what are the unthinkable depths of awfulness that can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter’s embraces.» (103)

Et blikk utenfra

Når man har små barn, får man stadig se og høre interessante framstillinger av seg selv. Denne gangen er det snart-treåringen som har vært ute. (Det verste er at jeg jo ser at det er meg.)

Gaudy Night-sitatmaraton II

«I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar.» (28)

«Nobody likes being pitied. Most of us enjoy self-pity, but that’s another thing.» (36)

«Since Miss Lydgate had perfected, or was in process of perfecting (since no work of scholarship ever attains a static perfection) an entirely new prosodic theory, demanding a novel and complicated system of notation which involved the use of twelve different varieties of type; and since Miss Lydgate’s handwriting was difficult to read and her experience in dealing with printers limited, there existed at that moment five successive revises in galley form, at different stages of completion, together with two sheets in page-proof, and an appendix in typescript, while the important Introduction which afforded the key to the whole argument still remained to be written. It was only when a section had advanced to page-proof condition that Miss Lydgate became fully convinced of the necessity of transferring large paragraphs of argument from one chapter to another» (40–41).

«Harriet had long ago discovered that one could not like people any better, merely because they were ill, or dead – still less because one had once liked them very much.» (55–56)

«One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly, ‘Num …’ – a particle which notoriously ‘expects the answer No.’» (63)

Gaudy Night-sitatmaraton I

«All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to the well-regulated mind.» (19)

«As the Head of a women’s college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word ‘compromise’ had been omitted from her vocabulary» (22).

Alle sitater fra Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night, New English Library-paperback fra slutten av 90-tallet.

Askepott, de yngre år

– Men det sto ikke navn i skoen!
– Jo, her står det Askepott!
– Men ingen piker i kongeriket kunne lese!
– Nei!
– Og så ble vi så forelska at vi til og med måtte gå på kino etter hvert! Men ikke nå, da.

På oppfordring: mer værblogging

I dag har jeg feiret aprils komme, god værmelding og nesten-utsprunget forsytia i Slottsparken ved å debutere i vårkåpe og vårsko. Knallrød kåpe og splitter nye, barnetrygdfinansierte vårsko. Det var ikke for kaldt.

Bananfobi

Samme sted hvor jeg endelig skjønte hva Wimsey hadde å si til Harriet, fant jeg dette fortryllende Sayers-diktet:

I detest bananas,
A smug fruit, designed to be eaten in railway carriages
On Bank Holidays,
With a complexion like yellow wax
And a texture like new putty
Flavoured with nail polish.
Yes, we have no bananas,
Glory be!

Tenke seg til, ikke bare elsket min heltinne Bach og portvin og mat og lyrikk og Oxford, hun hatet bananer også! Vi bananofobe er i en sørgelig minoritet, men jeg gjør nå mitt ved å nekte å servere ungene bananer egenhendig, hvilket betyr at det ikke blir noen bananer når mannen ikke er hjemme. Dessuten flytter jeg meg demonstrativt når noen begynner å spise banan ved siden av meg på t-banen.

Malapropos

Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying, so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Jeg kom på Harriet Vane og Wimseys sonett ganske malapropos da jeg leste om noe annet i dag, men aldri så malapropos at det ikke er godt for noe. Jeg har nemlig alltid vært veldig svak for Harriets oktett, men aldri fått noe særlig ut av Wimseys (very conceited, metaphysical) sekstett. Men med litt graving på internett fant jeg følgende fortolkning her:

I think the sestet means that you can only have an ALIVE kind of stillness as long as you're spinning. If you stop spinning, the top falls over, and then you're merely dead. Love is what motivates us to keep spinning (love of a person, passion for a cause, etc); hence its whips. Paradoxically, you can only find and hold your real still center if you are in motion, living and acting in the world, rather than by sitting very still.

Heureka! Selvsagt var det det Wimsey hadde å si! Ja, ja, jeg har jo bare hatt Gaudy Night som yndlingsbok i 16 år eller noe.