Happy Halloween!

via The Fish Flies at Night

Wow! I'm in Business!

Hurrah, hurrah! The day has finally arrived: I opened my little Meska shop at last. I never ever hurry things or get them done very quickly; as a matter of fact, I am the Ultimate Last Minute Girl. And, boy, did it take a long time to get my act together, create an account, and put my goodies out on the virtual market of handmade products. (And when I say long time, I don't mean weeks or months, but a whole freakin' year!) 

Nevertheless, I finally did get it done this morning, and I am having a really successful opening day, for I have already sold two of my brooches. Yay! Double yay!

So, You can find my shop here.

I hope you are having a lovely day, too!

Happy Birthday, Sylvia!

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Plath, American writer/poet. She would have turned 78 this year. 

Quite a few friends of mine know that I am a total Sylvia Plath junkie. My obsession begun  a bit more than three years ago, about the time I entered  university. Surprize, surprize, it all started with Gilmore Girls.

Most of the things I know about American culture, I learned from Gilmore Girls, for I am such a huge junkie that I look up here every allusion that is made during the dialogues (and there are quite a few of them in every episode, believe me). Plath is mentioned several times from the very beginning, for Rory is reading the Unabridged Journals in Season 1, then she is also mentioned on several other occasions. So I looked up SP (on stupid Wikipedia, where else?), then watched that pretty poor movie that is made of her life, and grew even more interested. I read The Bell Jar and the Hungarian translation of her edited journals during the first, autumn semester at the university, and it may sound corny, ridiculous, and like an utter cliche, but I was thinking at every other page that this woman is reading my mind, writing my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences, and my fears. This woman is my soul sister. I quickly realized that I wanted to write my bachelor's thesis on her. Then during the winter exam period I should have been preparing for stupid exams, but I got Letters Home from the library, which is her correspondence with her mother, and once I started it, it was impossible for me to put down, because I adored the way she wrote, and I wanted to get to know her even more.  I kept digging myself deeper in the subject, got the originial English version of the Unabridged Journals and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams for my birthday the following spring. Boy, the Journals were most certainly not an easy reading, it took me months to get through it, but by the end I felt that I completely understood her, as a matter of fact, I knew her better than even she herself did. Then I started looking for refence books on her, but there's hardly anything my library has, yet, the ones I could find, mostly biographies, I read. Lucky me, the university has an American Modern Poetry course that also covers SP, yet, unfortunately only one class was dedicated to her, due to lack of time. I also discovered several other great writers/poets through her, for she mentioned them in her Journals, such as Anne Sexton (lucky me, I got to know her! Another poet I cherish.), Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, et al. I love her prose, especially The Bell Jar, I drink up every single sentence of it like it is oxygen. Her journals are also utterly close to me, for there are so many entries, thoughts, and feelings I can identify with, just like they were my very own. Although, SP is primarily a poet, I am least close to her poetry, I may not be mature enough for it yet, for I find it too abstract, too difficult to relate to at several times.

So now, here I am, years later, still a junkie, about to dig even deeper, read all her works again, for the time has come to start doing the research and writing my thesis. I wonder how our relationship will be  by spring, by the time I am done with writing.

Anyway,
Happy Birthday, Sylvia!

Just Go To The Record Store and Visit Your Friends

"I always tell the girls, never take it seriously, if ya never take it seriosuly, ya never get hurt, ya never get hurt, ya always have fun, and if you ever get lonely, just go to the record store and visit your friends." Penny Lane

 Are you familiar with this quote? It's from Almost Famous, this great movie about a high school kid who gets the chance to accompany an up-and-coming rock band on their concert tour in order to write an article on them for Rolling Stone Magazine. It was directed by Cameron Crowe and won an Oscar in 2001.  (Not that Academy Awards really matter when it comes to truly good movies.) Penny Lane, who, I believe, is one of the most famous groupies, was played by Kate Hudson, and this movie is pretty much the only one in which she played well or showed that she has some kind of  a talent when it comes to acting. 

Anyway, I love this quote just as much as I adore the  movie, and whenever I wander into a bookstore to browse their stacks it pops into my mind. Although music is utterly important to me, my real good friends I find in bookstores. Whenever I feel blue or lonely, and I'm in need of cheering up, I go to my favorite second-hand bookshop, and start searching, digging, and, most of the time, finding and purchasing. The exact same thing happened to me a couple of Fridays ago when on a gloomy morning I felt like visiting my good old friends, so I decided to pop into Red Bus... and then an hour later I found myself leaving with a large bag in my hand filled with books and a wide smile on my face. This is the result of my hunting:

•  Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan - I won't even get started on the importance of Betty Friedan and Feminine Mystique. However,  if you are not familiar with her name, here are a few hints: Friedan was one of the leading feminists of the 1960's, the co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and dedicated all her life to fighting for women's equality and emancipation from their traditional role.  Her book, The Feminine Mystique marks an era, as it depicts the roles of women in industrial societies, especially those of the full-time homemakers. It also raises awarness for stepping out of those traditional roles and purse en education. This woman and this book is so freaking important that she's taught in US  History classes even in Hungary. Although I consider myself to be an independent and  courageous young woman with a strong sense of self, I am not a feminist. I'd rather have a steady marriage, be a stay-at-home mom and raise children than have a successful career but no family to go home to. (Should any of the feminist teachers of the American Studies Department at my university read this, they would slap me in the face, right before kicking my out of their classes.) Yet, The Feminine Mystique is a must read, especially since I am writing my thesis on Sylvia Plath whose whole existence was about the lifelong battle of either being a lover, a wife, and a stay-at-home mother or becoming a poet with a successful career . Despite of the importance of the book, my library has only one copy of it and even that one you cannot lend, so I simply had to buy it, especially since it was a buy-one-get-one-free bargain for 600ft.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - Another classic that I am yet to read, I had been keep coming across it both in bookstores and on the internet, so I finally bought it.
• One Fifth Avenue by Candance Bushnell - Honestly, I do not know why I bought it. I guess I need rubbish, cheap chic-lit every once in a while, because it's easy, meaningless, and utterly fluffy. There are times when you fancy some junk food, you eat it and you won't even remember 5 minutes later that you had it. Yet, the next time when you have a good old home-cooked meal you'll enjoy and appreciate the real thing even more. That's exactly why I consume stupid chic-lit every once in a while.
• Ecstasy by Irvine Welsh - I have never read anything by Irvine Welsh before, not even Trainspotting, although I loved the movie. It was the other half of the buy-one-get-one-free bargain, plus it's time I dug myself into this genre as well.
• The Art of Sylvia Plath by Charles Newman (ed.) - As I have mentioned before I am writing my thesis on Sylvia Plath, and it is almost impossible to come across a reference book on her art, so no wonder I almost jumped out of my skin when I spotted this volume on the shelf. Not even for a split second was it a question whether I would buy it or not.

I found some real treasure, didn't I? Except for the Bushnell novel, of course.

.

Guess What!

Today is the 1st birthday of this very blog. You may not remember but I kicked off Random Thoughts of a Scriboholic (although it had a different title at the time) exactly one year ago with this and this post. To be honest, I did not really think back then that it would survive until its first birthday; as a matter of fact, I had been pretty sure that I would lose interest and stop writing by January 2010.  But apparently the blog is still alive and kicking twelve months later. I do enjoy blogging, I get the hang of it by now, I just have some issues with consistency. (I am pretty sure you have already noticed that.) I am just not I the kind of gal who can do things on a regular basis, I enjoy irregularities too much and doing things when I feel like doing them. So by now I am pretty sure that Scriboholic will have its 2nd birthday,  I am only much less sure of the frequency of posts that are to come until then.:)

And now let us celebrate the big day with a couple of posts!

Happy Sunday!

I hope your Sunday is just as cosy & relaxing as it is mine! I just returned home to Miskolc yesterday evening for my (not so) well-deserved autumn break. This year the autumn break is really long, I have ten long days ahead of me just to enjoy the last sunny days of the season and the comfort of my cosy room. As always, my To do list is way too long (and ever growing), I am planning to read at least four books, have movie and Gilmore Girls marathons, do a few creative projects - sew dolls and make brooches, go to the cinema a few times, visit my Grandma's and my Dad's, and just simply wander around in town and in the surrounding woods, and take plenty of photos of the ever so beautiful autumn. I already know that I will not have time to do even the half of all the things I have just listed, yet, I hope to get done quite a few things and enjoy myself meanwhile. Let the games begin!

"We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing." Anaïs Nin from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.5 (1954)

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you." Doris Lessing

via Happythings

I have done #1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13. (Will do #10 on Wednesday.)

Indeed, I have had an utterly lovely day!:)

Budapest on a Crispy Monday Morning

Today I had to wake up rather early, at 6.30AM which for most of the people is nothing special, but my classes at the uni don't start until mid/late morning, so I usually don't get out of bed before 8AM. (Yeah, yeah, what a lazy person I am, aren't I?) But today I had an early meeting in an office right on the river bank at 8.30AM which meant getting up at half past six. It was totally worth it though, as today was another bright and shiny Autumn day with an amazingly blue sky, and I even saw the sunrise this morning while having breakfast. It's probably the best way to start a new week, I reckon. Then after the meeting I still had a couple of free hours on my hands before my class was to start, so I decided to take a walk, enjoy the marvelous Budapest sight, and indulge myself in the warm sunshine. ... And of course, I could not resist getting my camera out and taking a handful of photographs. Here are the results. I hope you like them.:)

Btw, I really should wake up earlier on some days at least, wander around and take photos, because Budapest is utterly beautiful in the morning. 

And so is She during the day.

And at night, too.

The Books of September

I do know that it's October 10th already, yet, I cannot not write about the books I enriched my ever-growing library with in September. The first month of the beloved Autumn brought me five books:

• Empire Falls by Richard Russo
• Lipstick Jungle by Candance Bushnell
• Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott
• In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner
• The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster 

With the exception of The Book of Illusions, I must thank all of these to BookMooch. I believe I wrote about the very first package I got via Bookmooch, then Empire Falls was followed by three other books. I am still yet to read Russo's novel, but hopefully I will get around it during Autumn break. I have kept bumping into this book lately, so I grew curious about it, then I looked it up, and realized that I have already seen the TV film it was adapted into and pretty much liked it. (Leading characters were played by Paul Newman (!!), Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Ed Harris, et al. Sounds good, doesn't it?) ...And then I just could not resist mooching Empire Falls.

A few weeks ago I started watching Lipstick Jungle, the TV series. At first I found it rather odd, yet somehow I got hooked and could hardly stop watching... As you can see it is written by Candance Bushnell who is also the author of Sex and the City. You may remember that I read that book during summer, wrote a pretty long post about it, and basically loathed it all the way through. I still believe that that novel (?) is nothing but a pain in the you-know-where, but since everyone deserves a second chance, I thought I would try another one of Bushnell's works. (Had I not given another chance to Kerouac, I would never have read On the Road... What a shame it would have been!) I did a little bit of research before mooching Lipstick Jungle though, and learned that it wasn't a bunch of short short stories thrown into a pile like Sex and the City but a "proper novel" with one big storyline and three main characters. Those characters I have already grew fond of while watching the tv show, so I wasn't putting my money on a (very) dark horse... I am currently  reading it, and it's way better than Sex and the City. (A more proper and longer review should come some time during next week.)

Louisa May Alcott's Good Wives is a novel I had wanted to put my hands on for such a long time! It is the sequel of Alcott's best known novel Little Women which is one of my favorite books. I have read Little Women at least half a dozen times and will probably read it for another half  because it is such a beautiful, heart-warming story. (If you haven't read it, you really should!) But before I got this book for my 15th birthday, it took me such a long time to find out what the exact title and who the author was! I only remembered watching the film about ten years ago, but I could not remember the title... Then I learned that Little Women was Joey Potter's favorite book in Dawson's Creek because of her resemblance to Joe March. (Yes, I am one of those geekish girls who grew up loving Dawson's Creek and having Joey Potter as their (sort of) role model... Along with Gilmore Girls, DC pretty much defined my teenagerhood.) And that's how I found out that the author is Louisa May Alcott while the title is Little Women. LMA wrote a number of sequels to LW, and Good Wives is the first of them. I can hardly wait to read it! Hopefully it is as good as LW and I will love GW just as much... and then I am planning to get the rest of the series. I adore the character of Jo March so much!

In Her Shoes is yet another chic-lit novel, but I just can't help myself, I love chic-lit just as I love the big classics... Chic-lit is my guilty pleasure, I guess... I have been getting too much of it lately though, so I will put it aside for a little while and I will read more serious volumes in the next few months. The reason why I mooched In Her Shoes is because I saw the movie a few years ago (starring Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz) and liked it quite much. Although you should never judge a book by its movie, I do believe that if I like the movie adaptation I cannot really find the book it's based on that bad, can I?

And finally, The Book of Illusions I did not mooch, but purchased, for this is compulsory reading for one of the courses I am taking this semester, titled "The Chemistry of Passion: Eroticism in Contemporary American Fiction". The reading list is really interesting (in a good way), we will discuss some works of Auster, Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Bret Easton Ellis, and Annie Proulx. Shame or not, I haven't read anything by Auster, in fact, I had not even heard about him before. Well, this fact is about to change!:)

You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. — Ray Bradbury

“ If I go to university I’m going to read what I want, and listen to what I want. I’m going to look at paintings and watch French films, and talk to people who know lots about lots." An Education

“ I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." Jack Kerouac

You Are So Beautiful To Me

"No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one Autumnal face." John Donne

As it turns out, this  long weekend of mine is not about being curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea in my hands and just reading, writing, and hanging out. But to be honest, I don't really mind the change of plans, since the weather is absolutely marvelous and it would be such a shame to lock myselp up between the four walls of my room. I am pretty sure we will have more than enough  of cold, dark, and long winter nights when I really won't have nothing better to do than sit inside and enjoy a book or the company of my journal in this warm and cosy room of mine. But for now I shall indulge myself in the stunning autumn sunshine, especially since today is another lovely day and in a couple of hours I am leaving for my Grandma's. I can hardly wait to take over her garden and shoot plenty of macro photos.

Yesterday I went to see my Dad & family who live in a village nearby the small town I grew up and lived in until I finished high school. It was a beautiful bright and crispy autumn day with lots of sunshine and superpretty lights. Naturally I could not resist taking a few several photos in the garden. Then on my way back to Miskolc I had some time to fiddle until the departure of the bus I was to take, so I took a long walk in that good old small town of mine. I like wandering around on the streets of Tiszaújváros, it always brings back so many memories, after all I grew up in that town, I spent most of my years there. Yet, I know that I could not be happy, should I have to still live there, for my thing is big city life, and in such a small town I would suffocate. (Like I did start suffocating during my teenage years.) Anyway, it's not at all bad to take a walk down on Memory Lane every once in a while. 

And now let the photos speak for themselves. 

Enjoy!

Hello, October

So you realized that it's October already, right? I just did, and I can hardly believe it. It feels like that it was still summer a couple of days ago, we just started school yesterday,; yet, a whole month has flown by incredibly fast. I really don't know what I have been doing with my days, where and how all those precious hours of each day slip. I guess I really should get back down to keeping a journal on a daily basis, because then I would know how I spent my days. 

I do remember starting university three weeks ago, being back in the dorm, reuniting with the remaining members of our little company. It was the night before the first day of school, and boy, had we been looking for that day! Most of us was back by the evening, we all sat out in the dining room around the big table, chatting, talking, ranting, going on and on at the top of our lungs because we had so much to say to each other after more than two months of hiatus, and because it was simply pleasant to be together, sitting next to each other, elbows rubbing, feet touching under the table, some puffing fags uncounted, some having a beer or two, and just chit-chatting. Celebrating that our unorthodox urban family got to stay together for another academic year, and we don't have to start that really-adult, very responsible and often so ruthless real life just yet. We got to stay in our comfort zone for another year, we got to remain in the bell jar, safe and sound.

Then shcool started, and we slowly settled into our good old daily routine. Since this is my fourth (and hopefully last) year as a BA student, I have hardly any classes left; in fact I have school only on Mondays and Thursdays, the rest of my week is relatively free. Yet, days go by, and I cannot find time to do so many things I am dying to do: I haven't read a single book in the last month (SHAME ON ME!), neither have I written a single word, no poems, no journal entries, hardly any blog entries. No sewing, no painting, no any other creative projects, no going to the cinema, museums, or any other exhibitions. 

Then what have I been doing all these days? ...Well, if I think about it, I do remember spending several hours roaming the streets of Budapest, just wandering around, looking for and finding real treasures on the streets,  being lost in my inner world, enjoying my solitude and the breathtakingly beautiful autumn in Budapest. Yep, I have been photographing quite a lot (you can find photos here), taking long walks in the Castle, on Margitsziget (Margaret Island), at Normafa, and in the ever so charming narrow streets of the City. The everlasting beauty and romance of Budapest will never cease to amaze me, I shall be in deep love with our capital for the rest of my life. (Because true love lasts a lifetime. - That's the thing we all learned from Love Actually.) 

And I guess, the other true love in my life right now is photography. Who would have thought just a year ago, that I would fall so madly in love with photography, and we would have this beautiful, blooming and productive love triangle: my camera, the World, and I. Don't get me wrong, I am not praising myself, but it's surprizing and wonderful how much I progressed, got better photography-wise since early January when I started Project 365. The difference is clearly visible, and I often feel embarrassed when I bump into the photos I took in winter and early spring: how could I take and pick such poor pictures as Photo of the Day? However, I am pretty sure that, should I stick with photography in the future, when I will look at the photos of Autumn 2010 in a year or two, I will find these rather poor also. That's a good thing though, because it means that I am actually getting better, or at least more critical. Anyway, what I sure learned about photography in these past 9 months is that you have to take photos each and every day, even if you don't feel like it - you know, the first shoot is  the most painful, then it gets easier - shoot hell of a lot, but then you have to be very critical and delete most of the photos, not just the bad ones but the mediocre ones too. And most importantly: you have to be patient. Practice and patience ALWAYS pays off. You just have to wait it out, you have to be patient enough, for pay-off time may come later. Finally, the last thing that you have to accepct that there are bad days photography-wise too, days, when no matter how hard you try, no matter how many pictures you take, there will not be one single good one, there may be a few mediocre ones but those aren't good enough either, simply because you are having an off-day.  The trick is to go on and continue the next day.

Okay, enough with all these rambling and sharing my not-so-wise and not at all wisdomy wisdom with the world. The point is that I am having a long weekend at home in Miskolc, I won't return to the dorm until Wednesday, so hopefully I will have enough time to do the things I have been procrastinating: curl up on my bed with a large cup of tea and  just read, write, blog, sew, paint, etc...

I hope you are having a happy and sunshiny weekend too!

Andi