OK People,

Sometimes... all you need is a MuhASSIVE dance break in your kitchen. What you don't need is to forget to write down the name of the artist you were rocking out to on Radio3 because then you spend hours looking up all the electro-y bands whose names start with C and the list is long.

you know NO ONE IS WATCHING YOU... so go take that caraaazy dance break now.

and check out Radio3 cause you know... yer good ol' Canadian music is quite good, eh.

I'll post something more intelligent next time. peaaace.

the final sense (if the plot had been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact, something which might have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it straight away it would never have become beautiful.

The words of E.M. Forester quoted in a foreword to A Passage to India. I think they go quite well with my previous post.

I'm a pinko-gray

I'm in the middle of reading E.M Forster's A Passage to India, and, as I do sometimes when I find myself completely engrossed in a book (other than the fact that I start to talk and write like the book itself) I feel the need to share.

I'm not a literary critic, and I never will be. I found out after dropping my Professional Writing major for an English minor that the two are most definitely not alike. As much as I enjoy writing essays about books and stories I always approached them more as an anthropologist than as a critic. Pretentious English majors with their thick rimmed glasses, vests and cigarettes in hand were the bane of my existence; and I often found myself going head to head with their thick-headedness in class. I remember one particular fat-headed editor of a school newspaper once telling the class that censorship didn't exist in the world anymore. Quite matter of factly. Anyways, the point is not to make myself sound better than them but to simply state our differences.

Critics, in their oh so critical way, tend to strip a book or story of its essence. They leave the words bare and then try to make meaning of them. Picking and choosing symbols and motifs and squeezing out a quote to fit into their 'this is what the book is' schpeels. I'll say straight out - I don't think there's anything wrong with this. I think that literature should be a constant dialogue that is in flux, that changes depending on its reader, that is always up for interpretation and re-interpretation. What I don't like is when those critics believe their search will unveil an ultimate truth. It never will.

We sometimes forget that novels, and short stories alike, are works of art. Like when Picasso interprets his wife in a painting, so does a writer interpret their surroundings with words. A book is like a process of self discovery in which the writer tries to make sense of his or her experiences, society and so on. If we read constantly in search of the 'hidden meaning', the ultimate reason behind the book's existence, we'll inevitably miss out on those gray areas. Its the confusing bits where the writer contradicts himself, reveals his vulnerability, that the heart of a book lies. And it's here that I think we're most likely to find the value of literature; where we can open up a dialogue with the text and begin to challenge ourselves.

This is why I will never be a critic and this is why I love both reading and writing. A writer is a philosopher, who expresses not an ultimate truth but a million possible truths.

In A Passage to India one of our protoganists finds himself impersonating one of those gray areas, not quite sure how to fit into either of the two societies which surround him.

The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence - a creed ill suited to Chandrapore, but he had come out too late to lose it. He had no racial feeling - not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd-instinct does not flourish. The remark that did him most harm at the Club was a silly aside to the effect that the so-called white races are really pinko-gray. He only said this to be cheery, he did not realize that `white`has no more to do with a colour than `God save the King`with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote. The pinko-gray male whom he addressed was subtly scandalized; his sense of insecurity was awoken, and he communicated it to the rest of the herd.

Poor Mr. Fielding, in a way I feel that he is Forster, trying to articulate his place in not only the British Empire, but in the wider world itself.

story time

I'm writing a story. I haven't written one in a long time. If I finish it on time I might actually enter it into a competition, because it was the competition theme that inspired me to write it. I was just typing up what I've written so far (because I always write by hand first) just to see how many words I'm at and I thought I'd share this snippet with you:

When I was young I used to imagine what it would have been like if he’d made it home that night. If wrong turns hadn’t existed, as if everything was circular and no matter how far away you went you always ended back home. My imaginary life was filled with laughter and whiskery kisses on my cheek. But I stopped myself – for her. I felt if I imagined too much she’d know and I couldn’t bear the thought of betraying her.

Let me know what you think :)

overthinking, overanalysis

Time goes by way too quickly, just a minute ago it was 9:00 and now its 10:06.. ?!?!? and yesterday it was Dec 1st and now all of a sudden its the 12th??? I think time is cheating me.

This post will have two parts
1. Semantics:
I just had another thought about semantics. The way we always say "they" to refer to that group of others who produce our material culture, decide which courses to offer us at school, basically anyone who has decided what we have the option to consume and how we consume it as well. We all do it. We'll be standing in front of a magazine stand and one of us will wonder out loud "I wonder why they decided to put so and so on the cover?" and the other will respond with some possible theories or simply think "Do they ever have a reason for doing what they do?" We talk as if "they" are looming above us sending things down for us to consume... or at least that is how the idea manifests itself into my head. But why do we imagine this "they" as sort of higher up individuals, they are most likely walking among us as we gaze at the magazine stand. We could even be they. In fact, I know some 'they's. But for some reason the word, in this context, signifies a mysterious other. Someone we don't know, have no control over but has some sort of omniscient power over us.

Language is just such a big cultural signifier. In this "they" case I think it says something about the way we perceive power structures in our society today. "They" in many of our minds do loom above us giving us a sense of powerlessness to make change. We take they for granted as if they were always there and the decisions they make out of our control. Some people aren't even aware they exist.

2. English:
Since France, I've started to see English in a completely different way. Sometimes I'll look at the way I've spelt a word and second guess myself thinking it looks completely foreign (for example I actually did just dictionary.com 'they' because for a second there the combination of letters looked really bizarre to me). This happened a lot in France. I'd be teaching a class and then I'd look on the board and think my god English is a bizarre looking language. Having a bunch of French students spend a whole class laughing because "I put my foot in my mouth" is a common phrase really makes you look again at what you say. Like 'phrase' I mean why on earth did we put a p and an h together and make it go ffffff?!? Anyways, French makes more sense to me even if I'm not fully bilingual. I'll look at French and think yes yes that makes sense and I'll look at something in English and think it looks like a bunch of gibberish if it weren't for the fact that I understand it. What an awful Latin/Germanic bastard language that I somehow was born into. Oh but I love it. What an awesome language English is and what a horribly biased thing to say. It is so much fun. As this article  states " no masculine, feminine, neuter, acute, grave or cedilla" give English  "its witty flexibility, its gift for pun and double meaning". I'd like to see the exhibit that article is talking about. A bunch of words on old paper aaahhh what a beautiful site that would be.

Walking home from the station while the snow is decidedly falling on a horizontal angle is not such a good idea. However, the sparkles the snow makes when they reflect the lights is just so very pretty it makes the whole walk worth it.

So I've decided to give up this reverb thing. Mainly because I'm not so inspired by the questions they keep asking. Maybe they will get better? I will try and post my own thoughts on the past year and plans for the next as December lumbers on and maybe that on its own will have some interesting results...?  As my one of my "flatmates" from last year always said, "On verra..."

In the meantime here is a beautiful animation to entertain you:

no dipppp for my chiipppss...

Anyways the point of this post is to do the reverb10 question before tomorrow. I have 1 and a half hours. Here goes!

December 3 – Moment.
Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

This. one. is. really. hard. Mainly because of my mind for the past few years. It's just been on pause really while the rest of me does cool exciting things. I've met interesting people, been interesting places, traveled the farthest I've ever been away from home to visit one of my best friends, yet still I wouldn't use the word 'alive' to describe the way I've felt. So I'm going with the first thing that popped (almost wrote pooped there it's been a lonnng day) into my head. This would be that trip to London. Two days and only 2 hours by train from where I was living in France but this trip just continues to stick out in my mind. The weather was bright and cold (that nippy at your nose kinda cold where you're not too cold but in the perfect middly kind of cold). Went to meet someone I knew from York for drinks the one night we were there. Some people just manage to get you talking about things you'd forgotten you loved to talk about because no one had talked about them with you in ages, nothing particularly mind blowing but it was nice. Went to the Tower of London the second day of bright sunniness and I think if I could hug a museum I would hug this one. It was just very much worth my 14 pounds. It's like when I went to Monet's gardens in Giverny, it was just one of those childhood dreams to see the place that I had read about as a kid and never really had imagined I'd get to see in real life cause it was so far away. Anyways, to conclude, I think this was one of the only times this past year that I've felt my mind has really been fully present... in the present... and I think, in general, that when you're present like that and happy with it those are the times when you feel most alive.