i just realized

I'm a bit happier. The warm weather this week felt and smelled uneasily like last year and put my head back there, but there was some distance. Talking to someone about depression at the weekend I said, truthfully, that I'm okay right now - eating, sleeping, functioning. Not skipping around exactly, but better, like coming out of the far side of grief and noticing progress. Not miserable. It's easy to forget how miserable you can be, what that feels like. It's like drunkenness, being drugged, sex: sensations that can't be accurately called to mind outside of the moment.

You know, instead of writing my own blog I could pretty much sit back and let Ian write it for me. He just posted this video to his facebook wall (I utterly despise facebook now and may suspend my account, but it has its uses). The song - Autumn Story by Firekites - reminds me of The Kings of Convenience. Ian, tell me how you came by it when you next swing by.

busy

I finished Two on a Tower yesterday. It's obvious why it's not viewed as one of Hardy's great novels. It's a general fault in his writing, but more so in this book than in his others: he can't resist foreshadowing every plot twist, dropping hint upon hint. I wonder now whether I'd enjoy Tess and Jude as much if I read them again. What's interesting is that, despite being one of the world's best-known and most respected novelists, both in his own lifetime and now, a century later, he actually saw himself foremost as a poet. And his poetry is very, very good. 'After a Journey' is one of my favorite poems. I've written about it here before. He had a pretty miserable life, full of regret.

What else? I keep wanting to write more about Rilke, but I think I'd just end up typing out the whole damn book. There's a particularly insightful passage on male-female relationships, when he writes with great foresight about the emancipation of women and how that will change romantic relationships:

"This advance will change the love-experience, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

Marcus and Christie, my oldest friends in NYC, are leaving for the UK this week so Marcus can work his political magic for the Labour Party and Christie can do her MA. The thought of this makes me sad.

My brother and his girlfriend are in town; there has been much eating and drinking and well-timed sunshine.

Just as a little insight into Korea, here's the view from the office I work in when I'm there. This is from the VIP Suite - most people don't get windows, and there's a very strict hierarchy regarding who gets to sit nearer to the windows. Also, this is the clearest day anyone had ever seen in Seoul, which is why you can see a mountain in the distance:

A helpful series of posters decorates the wall, guiding your approach to your work. I find this diagram especially inspirational:

their dignity has no value

Arg, even though I'm going to Korea tonight, I feel good. Yesterday was sunshine and beer, haircut, friends. Everything gets a sensory upgrade in the sun. Beer tastes amazing. Skin smells wonderful. I'm reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. A young writer named Franz Kappus started writing to Rilke in 1903 and they entered into this extraordinary correspondence, with the older man giving him advice on everything from writing to sex to managing depression. I can't recommend it enough, especially if you're an aspiring writer. Here's a good little passage:

"...if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad like that and happy, - and if you think of your childhood you live among them again, among the solitary children, and the grown-ups are nothing, and their dignity has no value."

home

Ha. Yes, yes, yes. They must do this. Like I said.

I was home for 5 days. It was so lovely. It's silent at night; I can never remember even trying to fall asleep and I wake up ready to jump out of bed. There are blue tits nesting in the garden. They're pretty crazy. They keeping flying at the window and next door's cat is trying to eat them and they mated, rather immodestly, on the washing line while my dad and I cheered them on. I hope they survive. I played football with the kids and went to the beach and saw friends. My dad is researching his family tree. You know you can now view the census right back to 1841? Not just the information, but the actual scanned pages? You can look at the handwriting of your great-great-great-great grandfather, in my case. There are all sorts of secrets and weirdnesses and questions that come up. It's fun; I recommend it.

On the flight back yesterday, I read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale. It is brilliant. If you like detective novels or reading about true crime or you have an interest in Victorian fiction (or fact) or you just enjoy a good mystery, you'll love it. She draws heavily on Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White - one of my favorite Victorian novels - was being serialized at the time of the crime. The move from abstract, Gothic, fantastical horror to these household sensationalist novels was a turning point in literature and the background she gives on that is fascinating. The realization that a horrific crime committed within a regular home was actually more unnerving than monsters and castles led to some of the most enduring books of the age by Dickens, Collins, Braddon, etc. as well as a heap of largely-forgotten stuff.

Unbelievably, I have to go back to Seoul next week, but I'm not going to talk about that.

let me out

I sit awaiting my flight in the airport lounge - the architectural, cultural and culinary highlight of this trip - trying to think of a single anecdote that will convey quite how awful it was. Sometimes it was pretty funny. I offer my facebook updates:

Erin is lost in Seoul. Finally found someone who knows where the LG office is, along with 2 words of English: "Long way. Looooong way."
Erin: trying to pronounce "Gwangjang-dong Gwangjin-gu" while the taxi driver studiously reads the address upside-down. Successful transit to hotel: unlikely.
Erin surveys the 'Western' lunch option with interest: deep fried chicken cordon bleu curry. With a jam sandwich on the same plate, for that authentic Western touch.

(You cannot be vegetarian here. It is impossible. Everything comes sprinkled with bacon or soused with beef stock. )

I have never been somewhere I didn't like on some level. In fairness, I worked 7am-1am every day, so stress and exhaustion are no doubt playing a part. And the people I worked with were sweet, the taxi drivers adorable, the hotel workers friendly. But there's this vibe in the city that I can only describe as unambition. Not from the people, but in the physical being of the city itself. Everything is so ugly and functional and just crap, really. Amusingly so, in a Lost In Translation manner, for the first few days, then you start to get a feeling for what it would be like to live here and not just be a hapless visitor, and it's utterly depressing.

Over the whole trip, the only time I wanted to take a photo was when I spotted a sign that said 'Seoul Forest', backed by perhaps 30 sapling trees, on an embankment. But I didn't have my camera.

I got Seoul

I'm in the Korean Airways lounge at JFK, focused on getting very drunk before I depart for 9 days of business stuff. It's my first trip to Korea and I'm excited to see it, even if everyone I know who's been to Seoul seems to hate it. I'm hoping I get to see something other than my hotel and the inside of the LG Twin Towers, where I have my very own cubicle (whoop). Apparently it's all 1984 there, silent hoards queueing for the elevator, lunch taken at midday exactly, and so on. We'll see. Then I'm going directly home to Newcastle for Easter where I'll say stupid auntie things to my nephews and niece like, "look how big you're getting!" and cuddle them a lot. Then back to NYC, where I live, apparently, although I feel like I just visit for a few days here and there.