Today in Charity Shops

I may have gone a little overboard. After a few months of trying not to spend anything on books or clothes, and just make do with what I had, today, I got a black and white stripey t-shirt, a book of Oscar Wilde's children's stories, a collection of short stories by female authors edited by Susan Hill, a copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, and a make your own bunting kit. But they're all so amazing!

I also found a little book called The World Book Day The Children's Book of Books 1999, which was a collection of extracts of stories and poems, was available with the £1 book voucher every child in the school was given on that day, and which contained a poem that absolutely scared the crap out of me. It was by Roald Dahl, and it was called The Tummy Beast:

One afternoon I said to mummy,
"Who is this person in my tummy?
"He must be small and very thin
"Or how could he have gotten in?"
My mother said from where she sat,
"It isn't nice to talk like that."
"It's true!" I cried. "I swear it, mummy!
"There is a person in my tummy!
"He talks to me at night in bed,
"He's always asking to be fed,
"Throughout the day, he screams at me,
"Demanding sugar buns for tea.
"He tells me it is not a sin
"To go and raid the biscuit tin.
"I know quite well it's awfully wrong
"To guzzle food the whole day long,
"But really I can't help it, mummy,
"Not with this person in my tummy."
"You horrid child!" my mother cried.
"Admit it right away, you've lied!
"You're simply trying to produce
"A silly asinine excuse!
"You are the greedy guzzling brat!
"And that is why you're always fat!"
I tried once more, "Believe me, mummy,
"There is a person in my tummy."
"I've had enough!" my mother said,
"You'd better go at once to bed!"
Just then, a nicely timed event
Delivered me from punishment.
Deep in my tummy something stirred,
And then an awful noise was heard,
A snorting grumbling grunting sound
That made my tummy jump around.
My darling mother nearly died,
"My goodness, what was that?" she cried.
At once, the tummy voice came through,
It shouted, "Hey there! Listen you!
"I'm getting hungry! I want eats!
"I want lots of chocs and sweets!
"Get me half a pound of nuts!
"Look snappy or I'll twist your guts!"
"That's him!" I cried. "He's in my tummy!
"So now do you believe me mummy?"
But mummy answered nothing more,
For she had fainted on the floor.
(From this website.)

When I first read this, aged 8 or 9, it scared the living daylights out of me, and I think it is the source of my unusual fear of tiny, borrower-style people (glimpses of a tv adaptation of Gulliver's Travels and snippets of the film Honey I Shrunk the Kids can probably be blamed as well). The book seemed vast to me when I was younger, but looking back on it, there's only one or two pages of each story extract, and they're on tiny pages with massive writing. There was one page of Harry Potter in there! How is that supposed to convince you that you like the book enough to buy it?! I also remember being frightened by a short extract featuring a malevolent imaginary friend. I think it was so scary because the story was unfinished, so in my imagination, anything horrible could have happened.

However, it was strange to come across something so evocative of my days in primary school in the middle of a chaotic charity shop.

Guitar

Been playing guitar again today for the first time in ages. It's so difficult! I suppose I'm making progress, because I didn't use to be able to strum and sing at once, but I still sound pretty terrible, haha. Also listened to Florence & the Machine, finding odd songs that weren't on albums and generally being overwhelmed by her talent. She has so much imagination! She's never straightforward with her lyrics. She puts things in stories, metaphors and myths, and it has so much emotion behind it.

Ach, I really need to start writing again.

Nostalgia

I've recently discovered a couple of American tv shows from the nineties. I'd seen a lot of pictures of the main character from Daria with quotes from the show circulating on sites like tumblr, but never actually twigged it was a real show. I thought it was just some cartoon that someone had done and put funny quotes over the top.

Turns out Daria is real

And Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is great - I've only managed to watch one episode the whole way through so far, but basically the storyline of being trapped out in space by an woman (awesome evil lady-villain) who wants to see how long it takes for someone to go mad by forcing them to watch awful old B-movies is a thinly veiled premise for the characters to make silly and funny comments all the way through stupid old films that are out of copyright. If you have a spare hour or two, give it a watch. The guys who did this show now do rifftrax, which are commentaries you can download and sync to films which you watch, with the same stupid and funny comments. I've only listened to the one for The Room, that infamous film, and it made me laugh through it all over again.


There's something really nostalgic about both these shows, even though I've never seen them before. Even though they're old and dated, the image quality and the sound quality aren't as good as shows today, there's real warmth and humour in these shows that I feel is missing from a lot of tv today. Sure, tv shows today look flashy, but there's nothing at the heart of them.

The only thing I've found recently that is as fun is Flight of the Conchords. I bought the first series in a charity shop, and me and my sister watched all of them back to back in a whole day in a woozy haze when we were both ill. I love how it's just a show about two friends messing around and being silly.

Flight of the Conchords, doing their thing

Incidentally, I only found out about Daria from watching Nostalgia Chick videos, which I found from a link on Feminist Frequency's twitter page. Nostalgia Chick talks about how there are a lot of great bromances in tv shows (e.g. Scrubs, Flight of the Conchords), but not so many of the female equivalent, and the relationship between Daria and her friend Jane is one of only a few examples. I'd love to see more of that in tv shows today, rather than walking pink stereotypes talking about shoes and shopping. What I think we really need to see is more of people just messing around and having fun, doing stupid things (a la FotC). That sort of thing appeals to everyone with a sense of humour.

Guardian Articles

So many good articles in The Guardian today!

Feminists can be Christians, too

Victoria Coren - it's the Church's job to stand up for the poor

Julie Burchill on moaning women giving feminism a bad name

This last one is particularly interesting... and controversial.

"But moaning about men doesn't make you a feminist – it just makes you a moaner who can't get along with men for reasons that are probably at least as much to do with your failings, flaws and foibles as they are with some imagined horridness on the part of men."

'Why Men Hate Women'

Time to dump another interesting article! This time it's from one of my favourite magazines, the New Internationalist, but from way back in their archives. Slightly inflammatory title but interesting reading.

 Insert inflammatory article name here

Here's a little extract that does a good job of explaining why forcing men into a hyper-masculine role is so damaging for both men and women:

"Why do men express such hatred of women? Psychoanalysts suggest that men's gender identity is very fragile because, within typical child-rearing practices, girls can identify with their primary care-taker while boys have to separate themselves from their mother in order to achieve and assert their masculinity.

'The whole process of becoming masculine is at risk in the little boy from the date of his birth on; his still-to-be-created masculinity is endangered by the primary, profound, primeval oneness with the mother.'⁶ It is only by setting woman apart as Other, by resisting intimacy with her, by treating her with contempt and aggression, that men assert their own independent and fragile masculinity.

And because men have distanced themselves from 'the weaker sex' over the ages, setting themselves up as superior, it must be unbearably humiliating to need and desire women so much. [...] In heterosexual intercourse men risk discovering in women an unsettling power which contradicts and undermines their own more obvious social, political and physical power. No wonder male sexual desire is so desperately tormented and full of conflict"

Adding to my 'to read' list, link from Miss Representation:

Get Over It: Men and Women Are from the Same Planet

"There is something about avidly trying to prove men and women are different, or the same, that makes people lose their mind a bit. No matter how much some want it to be true, it is just not that simple; there are no clear cut and easy answers to why we do what we do, and why men and women sometimes have problems getting along. To ignore the enormous wealth of data on how men and women are similar AND different and to try to tackle this enormously complex reality via one-dimensional approaches is just poor science."

Advice from Harper Lee

"Back in 2006, a young reader named Jeremy who liked To Kill a Mockingbird wrote a letter to Harper Lee asking if he could have a signed photograph of the author. Being Harper Lee, she denied the photo portion of his request, but did send him back a hand-written note offering a piece of solid advice:

"As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, 'I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.' ""

Source

Original source with Lee's own handwritten note