Bit peeved to find this morning that my Írafár CD still hadn’t arrived – I should have ordered it from skífan and not randburg.
I went into Oxford briefly to buy cheese from the excellent cheese shop there, and a few books from Blackwells: The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (so that I can read it ready for when the DVD of Adaptation comes out since I seemed to have missed it in the cinema), the Lonely Planet guide to Iceland (for research purposes), and a teach yourself languages set – Colloquial Icelandic – for some mad reason, possibly brought about by one of the following:
- two great holidays in Iceland
- falling in love with the country
- writing my novel
- an interest in language
I’ve decided that I would like to try and learn Icelandic. I’m probably being mad, and crazy, but I would like to give it a go!
I also popped into the 3jay artweeks exhibition (veeb, why was your work not switched on?). There were some interesting pieces on display, including some which I particularly liked: three pieces by Sushil Manaonkar, Growth, Relaxing and Death (the latter in a disturbing kind of way), Andrew Senior’s Cairn of Stones and Warnings of Gales.
It’s a good job I did go see it when I did, ‘cos as I was walking back past the the rooms the artists were dismantling and taking away the work…
erm, you know that Adaptation is not exactly based on the book, because the director came to the conclusion that the book was unfilmable, and ended up making a film about making a film about the book.
As such it may well be that you could see the film without affecting your perception of the book at all?
Then you could read the book anytime?
Are you sure Adaptation is completley gone? It might still run at the Prince Charles cinema? I think we might still have it up here, we did last month, but there we are! 🙂
Dunno
Alas, not sure. I heard that it wasn’t on either from another colleague who called in later, and can only assume that there was a power cut at some point, as it had been switched on. The computer pieces were auto starting, so they would have come back on, but mine looked suspiciously like it had really seriously reset itself when I came to take it down.
You can see an approximation of it here anyway –
i.e. you see the picture, you see the picture with a person in front of it on the telly, but that someone was there yesterday…
Glad you came in the end anyway – you were lucky to have seen the full show that day – as you saw, the others had to take theirs down very early!
You may know this, but there’s a community for those wishing to learn Icelandic (, and although it’s not very active at the moment, you might find it interesting if you decide to go ahead with learning the language.
If Icelandic wasn’t my first language, I’d probably never have wanted to learn it – way too much grammar for my liking (it’s on par with, if not worse than, German).