artistically caged…
Once again I find myself on the overground to London Fields…
Today was an expensive day. She convinced me to hit this fancy warehouse vintage popup (horrible phrase, sorry), and I ended up loving an obscenely overpriced dress that I just had to buy. I have it on now, and I do think I look pretty chic, but the demographic of this train is, of course, very fashion school-leaning, and I’m also boiling and I need to pee, which is harshing my vibe quite a lot.
I still need to get the ball rolling on my magazine article. ‘The Alyosha Problem,’ I’ve called it - ‘the question of whether the form of faith exemplified by Alyosha Karamazov is psychologically and existentially sustainable in modern contexts characterised by institutional distrust and heightened self-consciousness.’ Can religious belief survive the collapse of traditional authority? Can I write this paper without leaning too heavily on Kierkegaard? And, most importantly, will I get to the last paragraph and suddenly realise that Alyosha as a character and as a religious believer is entirely dependent upon the 19th-century Russian context in which he was constructed?
We’ll find all this out and more when I get my arse in gear, hopefully tomorrow. Either way, I’m excited about the project. I miss Dostoevsky, having spent this year out of uni and thus, for the first time in a long time, away from his work. Someone on Twitter once told me that ‘women like me’ love Dostoevsky because we’re too shallow to understand Nabokov. Not that it was intended to be, but I think it’s honestly an interesting sentiment. Nabokov smiled down upon us that morning.