No real reason at all to post this except to say “Mal, dollface, call me!” and “I’m getting tired of all this text.”

Nothing goes to lighten up Hazlitt and Homeland Security like a party for a three year old. Photo taken in January, at very same party.

I’m really tired of dealing with the folks at Homeland Security. I understand they have a job to do but there’s only so many times I can be asked to hand over $600 before I feel like pulling my teeth out. Next thing you know the Home Office will be asking me to cough up another grand to solidify my UK visa. Wait a minute…they already have.

I know it could be worse. I could be having to hand out money to an overpriced solicitor as well. Or I could be stuck in limbo somewhere mid-Atlantic because neither country will let both of us land. But that’s just me being melodramatic - something The Euro says I MUST work on.

I’ve been filling out immigration forms pretty steadily for about ten years now; wholly by choice because if you fancy living in a country other than your own it’s just the price you pay. But these last two years have become really tedious.

To be fair, immigration procedures are pretty straight forward* as long as you read the manual. But reading the manual isn’t something most people like to do. They’d rather pay Joe Barrister to do it for them. And even those of us who do read it get bored after a while. Especially if we’re following the instructions.

*Small caveat: Straightforward if you’re a normal Brit trying to get into America or a normal American trying to get into Britain.

I’m reading William Hazlitt and enjoying it. I read most things twice these days. Once for style. Once for entertainment. I’m still on style.

I’m not sure when I quit reading for the sake of a story; when I became more concerned with the way words were used and strung together. I’m thinking it was probably around 2001.

Just after 11 September when I picked up some bit or bob from Waterstones and had to read and re-read and re-re-read it because nothing sunk in or made sense in those days. Internalisation didn’t seem to matter when the external world was going to hell. It all seems very dramatic and probably counter to itself now but that’s exactly how I felt then.

And the more I read the words to understand their meaning, the more I didn’t care. I mean, I did. But only for the words. Only in so far as they were what they were. Not because they told a story or led to anything new or separate on the next page.

I love words - even though I don’t use them so well as I’d like - and they sometimes get in the way because I find myself stopping, as with Hazlitt, and ooohing and aahhing and underlining things like “drab coloured Quakerism of mortality” and “mixed motives of human character” and not getting on with the main…which is reading. So in that way they’re a nuisance.

Anyway, here is Hazlitt. I think. Flynn will tell me if I’m right.

Silas somethin-or-other was his name. But they called him Poor Boy. I forget why. Ever’body was poor back then so him not having no money wouldn’t been the reason. Anyway, they say it was Poor Boy what done it. That he just walked in one day and yoked her up side the head with his grandma’s skillet.

Later, and this is just what they say…me, I ain’t never been one for gossip myself…..but them what are say he drug her back on that mountain and dropped her in a well somebody’d went and dug and forgot about. Covered it up with whatever there was to cover it up with and left her there.

Whether she died in that house or down in that hole, I guess only Poor Boy knows.

I’ve been diagramming Shakespeare tonight. I called my seven year old niece for help but she was busy explaining the merits of water birthing to her mother who was busy explaining the demerits right back.

I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) twice over the weekend. That’s eight hours. Give or take, but mostly give because I kept rewinding the scenes with Horatio and Ophelia.

I’m thoroughly smitten with Branagh at the moment. He’s both brilliant and beautiful in the role. I stand by this in spite of Flynn’s exclamation…“Kenneth Branagh! Fo’ real??? I find that odd”.

I’ve just booked Steph and me tickets to see The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe next month because, you know, might as well.

I should probably call and tell her.

Last night we saw The Dark Knight. (No spoilers, BTW.)

The first thing I noticed was Christian Bale’s mouth, and how well it suits a mask. After that, the only thing I noticed - was the other mouth and the way its owner used it to help create himself.

The interrogation scene in particular…terrifically disturbing.

The Joker’s “Great Social Experiment” and the one who first turned it on its head - reminiscent of The Misfit and the themes that surround him in another similarly seasoned story “A Good Man (Is Hard to Find)”. Maybe that’s just me reading too much Flannery. Or maybe that’s the genius of writer/director Christopher Nolan. A true hero…is hard to find. It’s not such a reach, you see.

The Euro made the case that Heath Ledger’s death made the movie. And of course he’s probably right. There’s no denying the added dimension. Doubtful most of us would try, as we will, to understand the core of a character Nolan and Ledger made such an effort to layer up, if the man behind it had not seemed, if only in an urban myth sort of way, to have become it.

Earlier this week I read about Oscar fanfare that would never be because Hollywood is apparently quite the cad when it comes to honouring late actors. That Ledger’s performance will be all but forgotten by the time nomination season rolls around.

I rather doubt it.

Edward Darling decided five years ago that he didn’t want to be anymore. Life was meaningless; God, a trick of the mind; and that soul he made such fuss about, nothing but empty space.

And if it was all just empty space, which he now knew it was, and squashed up organs, which any doctor would tell him was so, then that thing..that one single thing that separated him from everything else that wasn’t…him…wasn’t much of anything at all.

Edward Darling was a tree. He was a dog. He was an algae growing on the underside of a water tank. He was a dandelion.

He was all these things because they were just…things…that got on with living without worrying about life.

Edward Darling, was a frog.

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. This is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety.

But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.

Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

-Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

“It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything”.

– Virginia Woolf

All I want to do is go to bed with a good book. Something light and fluffy that doesn’t make me think too hard or long to write in the margin. I also want to eat sushi. Or nothing at all. Because nothing at all is preferable to anything else I can think of. Except sushi. Spicy tuna rolls. Yum.

Flynn just sent me this email: ‘Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.’ Hemingway, Snows of Kilimanjaro. It made my day.

The other night at a ‘do’ The Euro looked at me and said “Make yourself useful. Get me a drink.” I walked away and thought about leaving for Peru - Peru’s been on my mind a lot you see - and all the things I would have said and done if he had said the same thing two years ago.

I remembered Steph’s admonition, “Choose your battles.” And Mal’s ever-constant reply, “Ok. I choose this one!” And then ran into both of them at the door. I felt better, and turned around and ran into him. He said “I’m sorry” and gave me a champagne flute filled with diet coke and ice. Because that’s his kind of drink.