Thursday 27 January 2011

latest

So, coming up scarily soon is our CU's annual Events Week. It's the biggest thing in our CU calendar, and it's basically a week packed full of events for people to invite their mates to - there are talks with a free lunch on every day of the week, and events in the evenings like acoustic nights, curry nights, and sports matches. Great stuff! The whole idea is that people come along and find out what it means to be a Christian.

This year our chosen theme is "The God Delusions" (a clever take on the title of Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion) - basically we're focusing the daily talks around common misconceptions people have about God (e.g. "if there's a God, why is there suffering in the world?").

Anyway, I made a quick promotional film about it that we'll be littering Facebook with in the week before it all kicks off - here it is!

Wednesday 5 January 2011

camera

This post is making me feel like the hugest underachiever. To my shame, I haven't picked up my digital camera with anything resembling intent for bloomin' months

My attraction to
hulaseventy's gorgeous blog is somewhat bittersweet. In fact, the blogging world in general is at once beautiful and nigglingly irksome. Scrolling through endless pages of talented, creative people committed to whichever art form they have dedicated themselves to - photography, writing, film - is bound to provoke some twinge of unease.

Somehow they all find time to be gloriously creative!  Good grief. I need to sally forth into this next term with a much more determined focus - a focus on taking pictures in particular. 

Time to dust off the Nikon and look at the world with new eyes. 

Monday 3 January 2011

Mary

So, first of all, happy new year one and all! Here's to 2011 - it'll be a good 'un, I can tell.

Secondly. I am currently writing my dissertation (as I'm in my third, and final, year of uni), and I've chosen to write about John Keats and Mary Shelley. I'm focusing on their personal letters rather than their literary works per se, and am discussing their desire to be remembered and their work to be recognised, as well as the huge struggles they came up against despite being incredible writers/poets.


Well, it's a blast if you're into Romantic poetry.


Anyway, I was reading some of Mary Shelley's letters today and came across this passage written after the death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It's so stunning that it actually made me cry. This lady knows how to write grief. I've kept her spellings:


...I can at those moments forget myself - until some idea, which I think I would communicate to him, occurs & then the yawning & dark gulph again displays itself unshaded by the rainbows which the imagination had formed. Despair, energy, love, despondency & excessive affliction are like clouds, driven across my mind, one by one, until tears blot the scene, & weariness of spirit consign me to temporary repose...


The world will surely one day feel what it has lost when this bright child of song deserted her - Is not Adonais his own Elegy - & there does he truly depict the universal woe which should overspread all good minds since he has ceased to be their fellow la
bourer in this worldly scene...

Thus may I also say - The eight years I passed with him was spun out beyond the usual length of a man's life - And what I have suffered since will write years on my brow & intrench them in my heart...


Wow.


Don't worry, I'll post something perkier next time.