Writing in the language of hurry

Today's title is 100% accurate for me right now. I've had a busy couple of days which is why there wasn't a post yesterday. The quotation I've used comes from Forster's Howards End; funny when literature is exactly applicable to real life situations, eh? Aaanyway, tomorrow should be much more relaxing, I only wish the weather were supposed to be nicer! We've had such a great run of mid-20s temperatures for the last couple of weeks, but now we're in for several days of rain and only 10 degrees on Sunday. Yuck! I would protest in the name of Mother's Day if that would have any impact whatsoever.

China Glaze "Coconut Kiss"

On a nicer note, here's the next shade I'll be painting my nails! Odd like the weather, this colour is called "Coconut Kiss." Why do I feel like the nail-polish-colour-namer-people were sleeping on the job when they came up with THAT? Oh well, still a gorgeous purple and great colour for summer. Maybe a few coats of this will coax the warm weather back!


Any special plans for Mother's Day? I'd love to hear about them!

-C

P.S. The name of this polish reminds me that my best friend is on vacation in Haiwaii right now. Lucky, lucky girl!

Collecting new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts

I've been taking my time with Howards End, and today's title quotation comes from this novel. This weekend has been pretty busy and scattered so I'm just squeezing this post in before dinner. I'm sorry that there isn't a haircut picture here for you today. I did get it all chopped off (gosh, there was a lot of hair on the floor!) but after coming home and showering (and subsequently re-straightening my hair) I realized that it might need a night to be slept on before it looks quite presentable. Right now, because it's sooo short and straight, it looks kind of. . . stiff? Do you know what I mean? Like me, it obviously needs a night to relax.

So for tomorrow I'm thinking a full OOTD combined with haircut pictures. Tuesday will be another OOTD so you should feel sufficiently spoiled that I'm giving you two in a row. I'll be going to see Iron Man 3 on Tuesday with a friend of mine and it kind of makes me wish that I had a really dorky (not actually) superhero t-shirt to wear. Even though that piece of clothing wouldn't get worn much. Plus, I don't actually like the Iron Man series (more about my mixed feelings on comic book series here). This still feels like a blasphemous thing to say, but they are my friend's absolute favourite movies, so I might be taking one for the team here, but I'm not ruling out the possibility that it will be great and I'll love it.

This makes me think fondly of an amazing (to me) t-shirt that I used to have. It said "I love Italian boys" on it and was accompanied by a picture of Mario and Luigi. I've regained my affection for it, but now have no idea where it is! It might be a fortunate thing that I haven't found it sooner though, because I might have been tempted to wear it to Italian class (I'm studying for a minor in Italian Language Studies at my university) thereby making prof and students alike either laugh or feel uncomfortable.

Do you have a favourite graphic t-shirt (that others find dorky)? Are you planning to see the latest Iron Man installment? Are you a superhero film fan generally?

-C

Butter AND Jam

Every once in a while, we seem to get just about everything we want. Today's title comes from the fourth Pants novel, Forever in Blue, and actually wasn't at all planned until I was inspired while having breakfast this morning. Literally, I had butter and jam on my toast. Cutting edge stuff here, people. Anyway, the combination doesn't have be butter and jam, but any two things that make you feel good and happen to occur together. I feel like I'm getting the jackpot this weekend. Family and books (thank you, public library). Shopping and haircut. Technically that's four things, but I feel like the first two are simpler pleasures.

I'm getting into E.M. Forster's Howards End at the moment, and really enjoying it so far (for more Forster, see my mentions of A Passage to India from last summer here, here, and here). After having taken a class in Modernism last term at my university, I feel pretty good about myself when I'm able to identify an allusion without having to turn to the novel's endnotes. I won't be posting tomorrow because I'll be pretty busy with family, but expect a new post (and haircut, SO excited!) on Sunday.

Happy weekend, all!

-C

His life, though vivid, was largely a dream

The quotation for this post comes from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Today's composition will be my 27th blog entry; not exactly a typical landmark, but it did strike me as I was beginning to write this that almost every one of these posts has been introduced with a quotation. Repetition is a wonderful thing- the more I say, think, or write something, the more likely I am to remember it for ages and ages. I've always delighted in recording lines from books. Events in real life often recall almost-forgotten song lyrics. The frequency with which I introduce film speeches into everyday conversation is almost obscene. When I see all of my past titles lined up along the side of my blog, it's like a row of little gems I've picked out over the recent days, weeks, months, and years of my cultural experience with film, literature, and television. For me, it's pretty much the best of the best; C's "greatest hits," if you will, in the form of snippets from a million (27) individuals moments of joy at stumbling across a line I just loved.

The act of finding, recording, rediscovering, and transposing each of these separate moments onto my blog is a feeling similar to the Forster quotation I've used today. Each one has the dreamlike quality of a memory, but possesses a sharp vividness in my mind from being especially selected for the purpose of being remembered.

In terms of the real meat of this blog post (yes, I did just go from a sort of poetic attempt at explanation to "meat"), I can connect the most recent novel I've completed to this same half-imagined reality. This book would be L. M. Montgomery's Anne's House of Dreams. I don't feel as though I really need to review this; either you've read the Anne series, or you ought to. These are certainly not works for children alone. Characters (Anne especially) spend as much time in the world of imagination as they do faced with very real, difficult, life-altering challenges.

Giving myself a break from Montgomery for now, next on my reading list is A. S. Byatt's The Shadow of the Sun. So far I've only read the introduction, but honestly, even that was extraordinarily interesting. Though this is near blasphemy for a student of English literature, I must admit that I usually skim or skip entirely over introductions in novels (not to be confused with prologues which are actually a part of the fictional text). I was prepared to do the same for this latest work, but I found myself captivated as Byatt reflected on her novel (N. B. the introduction was added 20 years after the original publication), drawing parallels between her life and her characters, these characters and figures of her other texts, and how she has come to see her novel in a new way, making fresh connections she was previously unaware of in her own book. Imagine coming back to something you'd finished decades before and feeling as though you were seeing aspects of it for the first time! To me, this certainly counts as a mark of a great author.

I'll be watching the Italian film "Don Giovanni" in a little while, so I should have a post about that up tomorrow or the following day. Also on the blog roster are items from a recent shopping excursion, which will be compiled into a little skincare and fashion haul. I didn't think it would be exceptionally interesting to display these items as a pile of stuff (some of it wrinkled, none of it laundered), so I'll be giving reviews of the cosmetic products alongside pictures of them, but just describing briefly the clothing I bought. Out of personal preference, I'm going to save images of fashion pieces for OOTDs to give you a better idea of the actual size and shape of each article as it exists on an average-heighted/weighted person, outdoors, in natural light.

Have you been enjoying your weekends? As always, feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you've been reading/watching/wearing or any recommendations you might have for me!

-C

A return voyage to India? Nearly. . .

If you've been keeping up with my aggressively optimistic summer reading list, you'll know that I recently read E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India (first mentioned here). If you've been following my blog for a while, you'll also be aware of the fact that I love word play. I thought that for this post, I could be tremendously clever (not really) and link my previous literary experience to a new NOTD, but you know what they say about the best laid plans. The polish I selected was just not feelin' it today. It went on just okay, and then three nails got almost immediately flubbed (to use the technical term). Rather than persevere, which today, with so, so, so much heat, would likely have just let me frustrated, I instead threw in the towel and wiped my nails clean.

OPI's "Jewel of India"

I'm sure I'll come back to this particular colour of polish eventually, which, by the way, is called "Jewel of India"; hence the opportunity for word play between it and Forster's novel. In the meantime, I'd like to fill you in with a review of the most recent film I've watched: "Il Deserto Rosso." I mentioned this movie, along with a couple of others, in the post immediately preceding this one, so if you'd like to see what will likely be next on the movie review roster, feel free to scroll on down! I'm now thinking of the announcer on "The Price is Right" (it's a long running TV game show if you've never heard of it) telling the next contestant to "Come on down!" Please tell me I'm not alone in my enjoyment of cheesy game shows. Please?

Anyway, back to the film. This movie is from 1964, was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, and starred Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. If you would classify yourself as a somewhat casual movie watcher, meaning you see movies just for the mindless entertainment of it, then DISCLAIMER: this is not the film for you! If I had not been so committed to seeing this film the entire way through to get the benefit of hearing spoken Italian, I would quite possibly have found myself banging my head against the wall before it even reached the halfway mark. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a horrendous movie by any means. It's just a very artistic film that meets you with odd dialogue, drab colours, and less than thrilling '60s haircuts at every turn. I can appreciate this film as a work of art, but it won't be one of my go-to favourites in the years to come. 

"Il Deserto Rosso" deals largely with the theme of depression and an existential nihilistic mentality which pervades throughout all aspects of the film. If you can watch a clinically depressed woman stagger about in landscapes of poison-spewing factories and lakes yellowed by the ooze of toxic waste, then more power to you. It's certainly an interesting movie, and one that juxtaposes an attempt to find meaning in life with man's own destruction of his environment in a very striking way, but I feel fairly certain that I would have better enjoyed the same concept displayed in a series of photographs at an art gallery (I'm thinking of something along the lines of Ed Burtynsky).

If this concept appeals to you, and you, like me, appreciate foreign films, but would like a little more action and intrigue, I would suggest the 2008 Italian film "Gomorrah." I'm not going to review this movie on here, but if you are interested, it deals with multiple plotlines surrounding the Mafia in southern Italy; one of which examines the effect of political corruption on the environmental decisions being made, decidedly underhandedly, in the country.

-C

Embarking on a passage to India

Before anyone gets excited, no, I'm not actually going to India. At least, not right now. My title today refers to the latest novel I've picked up: E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. I've only just started reading it, so I can't comment yet, except that I know it's meant to be quite a good film as well. I've never watched it myself, but I probably will once I've finished reading the book.

The most suitable post to accompany such a title would probably involve something interesting or exotic. Unfortunately, I haven't done anything befitting said descriptions lately, so today we're going to have to settle for "hot" as the unifying adjective between my OOTD and a novel about India. And by hot, I mean that the temperature is extremely warm so I've been keeping my clothing pretty cas (as in casual. . . I'm so lazy I even neglect to spell out a full word). Another notable aspect of my outfit is the prevalence of coral. As I mentioned in my first post, I called my blog "C of Corals" because coral has been my absolute favourite colour for several years now. I figured I ought to start living up to my name, wouldn't you say? I own so many things in this colour. . . it's actually ridiculous. Expect to see this shade again in the not so distant future!

Top: Hollister; Capris: Aeropostale; Flip-flops: Old Navy

Watch: Fossil; Bracelet: present from a friend; Bag: Fossil

What have you all been doing to keep cool? Do you have a go-to colour this season?
-C