Happy Birthday Bilyana
While walking with Kelly this evening, we found an unusually nice bit of Oxfordshire, accessible through a park near their new flat. If you carry on down St. Aldates and across the Folly Bridge, then farther on down Abingdon Road, you will eventually see a park on the right. There is a small waterpark and a pool. Beyond that is a reasonably large lake, which can be crossed using the bridge in the photo above. Farther on are a set of train tracks likewise crossed by that bridge and then fields and the village of South Hinksey. It is all very attractive and photogenic, and I am glad to have discovered it in such good company.
Tomorrow, I need to tie up final loose ends before the Scotland trip. Now that it has become clear that we will be driving more than thirteen hours each way, I am a bit daunted by this four day excursion. Hopefully, the drive will be pleasant and the two days of hiking will be spectacular. My fingers are crossed incredibly tightly that I will get both papers from my August tutorial students in time to print them before leaving. If not, I will have a very hectic period of work to be completed immediately upon my return.
If I am to get my paper into the next issue of MITIR, I need to have it submitted by the 31st. Since I will be in Scotland after the 27th, that means finishing it tomorrow. They haven’t been entirely clear on whether they just want a few stylistic changes and a few specific statistics, or if they are serious about the 4000 word maximum. If so, I need to boil away more than a third of the existing paper. Hardly something I can do in the day that remains to me. All that can be done is for me to revise the paper as well as can be managed, send it off before I leave, and then return home to find out what they have decided. It seems increasingly likely that I will also return home to finally find my new headphones.
The title ‘a sibilant intake of breath’ is borrowed from Vladimir Nabokov’s superb 1955 novel Lolita. The breath in question belongs to Annabel Leigh: the childhood sweetheart of the narrator who dies of typhus, and who is clearly an allusion to Annabel Lee, the last poem written by Edgar Allen Poe. Those who have not been exposed to this magnificently crafted, emotive, and powerful book should almost certainly visit a nearby library and pick up a copy.
‘Night’s Sindark Nave’, the previous title for my main blog, is taken from the James Joyce poem Nightpiece. Despite several concerted efforts, my appreciation of Joyce has yet to extend beyond his poetry.