Happy New Year, and stuff

Hello hello! Happy New Year!

I've just come back from a short and lazy holiday up in Otaki, and have been inspired to write a new post by having two comments waiting for me.

Hope you all had nice Christmases and New Years. We've had a very good friend staying with us, and so headed up the coast to stay in Sean's parents' house for some slouching around and reading and getting sunburnt time. (The sunburn wasn't deliberate, but was hard to avoid). Am back much relaxed, but haven't written a jot. I seem to be in a reading-rather-than-writing time just at the minute, and I'm of a mind to just go with that.

Got several fabulous books for Christmas, but I'm not reading any of them. Things I got include Cosmopolis by Don Delillo (very much enjoyed his White Noise, which I've read several times, but had never gotten around to reading anything else by him. So Sean helped me out by buying the shortest one. I've read it already and really liked it, but not as much as White Noise - mainly because it isn't as funny.), One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds, Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones, the two dreamhunter books in one volume by Elizabeth Knox, and, all the way from Edinburgh, a rather nice edition of The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, signed by Margaret Atwood. I did my masters thesis on Margaret Atwood. My friend was going to tell MA that when she got her to sign it, but there wasn't time. I told her this was probably fortunate because she apparently thinks people who write their theses on her are a bit crazy. (My thesis was called I'm the Plot Babe: Fairy Tale Intertextuality in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood. I took too long to write it, but read lots of novels, fairy tales and feminist theory, and wrote most of the poems in Abstract Internal Furniture, so it wasn't a wasted two-and-a-half years at all.)

What I am actually reading at the moment is The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene (of whom I'm becoming a bit fan - not long ago read The End of the Affair - brilliant, and had previously read Brighton Rock - also brilliant), and a book of interviews with David Lynch. I'm a bit fan of David Lynch. I don't care that no-one else except me and Sean and two or three other people in the entire world liked Inland Empire, I think the man is a genius. I'm inspired by his work and how you have to read them emotionally for them to make sense.

A week or so ago I finished reading a biography of Stanley Kubrick, who is another director I really admire. It was really interesting, and was looking back over his whole long career - but I was mortified to discover when I came to the end that not only was it written before he had died, but it was written before Eyes Wide Shut was released! So nothing about the finished film, and nothing about AI. I think I might find another, more recent, Kubrick biography and read the very end, just for the satisfaction.