dampnacioun.

This is your surgeon... on laudanum.

2008-04-14T19:40:00.006+05:30

New year's day is a good time to make the last post here. Over summer break i will read much Patrick O'Brian and, i hope, somehow become a considerably less awful person. Rereading the previous sentence i am impressed by the implied causality.

Really; the year is not very old yet and already such sadness(es). Why. I cope and then i can't cope and be like an awful person which adds to sadness; i cannot even work which takes away from the little i have (left).

So here is my fist coming down on the table with a business-like thump. Enough! it says. Enough.

at times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers

2008-03-19T22:15:00.002+05:30

shite, i'm reading six books, this is the life!

note to self, never take blank verse for granted.
i have wise professors.

i need summer clothes but i can't be arsed to go shopping.

i'm looking for frank o'hara.
the new york school has saved my life.

i have nothing to say except the following. bebo valdés is an excellent musician and anybody reading this should drop everything to go listen to him.

2008-01-06T23:32:00.000+05:30

ddgdgdgddgdgdgdgdgd;;;;;;;;dgdgdgdhhdddg;;

sudden urge to see 'jurassic park'.

fact: i still like dinosaurs.

today was good. very good. yes.

2008-01-05T23:43:00.000+05:30

people who put their hands between their thighs when it's cold;
people who put their hands under their armpits;
people who rub their hands together;
people who hold the rhythm for the first four measures using their fists and their knees;
people who count your pulse;
people who cup their palms behind their ears;
people who light cigarettes (once, twice, thrice);
people without fingerprints;
people without fingernails;
people who put their hands on your back and push (the softer the harder);
people who put their hands around your feet and pull (harder)

and whyever not

2007-12-23T09:45:00.000+05:30

Rules:
1. Put your MP3 player on shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write the name of the song no matter what. No cheating!

IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY?” YOU SAY?
"let me explain", sonny boy williamson ii.

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
"mater ora filium", the hilliard ensemble.
(i think not...)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
"superstylin'", groove armada.
(heh, not really.)

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
"get out of town", caetano veloso.

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
"bad luck and trouble", john lee hooker.
(sounds about right.)

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
"all for one", qntal.
('i must go walk the woods so wild, and wander here and there in dread and deadly fear, for where i trusted, i am beguiled, and all for one.'
yes. yes, ok.)

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
"dancing in my head", the raincoats.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS?
"men of good fortune", lou reed.
(no. except the 'me, i just don't care at all' part.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
"orange ball of hate", the mountain goats.

WHAT IS 2+2?
"i'm going on a journey never to return", t bone burnett.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
"walking with a ghost",
tegan & sara.(not that i have a best friend, ha.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
"love goes home to paris in the rain", the magnetic fields.
(n/a, but; marry me mr merritt.)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
"elephant gun", beirut.
('let the seasons begin, it rolls right onlet the seasons begin, take the big king down.'
this makes me happyish.)

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
"the rain song", led zeppelin.
(bootleg! i am hardcore! 'this is a slow one, it's got nothing to do with being silly'. quoi? non! vraiment?)

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
"prince moth mothy moth moth", autechre.
(really rather insectoid burblings, gurglings and thumps. i wonder what this could signify.)

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
"i put a spell on you", nina simone.
(HAHAHAHA. ahem. ha. hahahhaha.)

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
"do your best for rock 'n roll", linda thompson.
('the party’s nearly over, the guests are all but dead; take ‘em to the graveyard, lay ‘em down instead.'
priceless. i'll take it.)

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
ravel's "scarbo".
(frankly i cannot imagine anything better than some excellent classico-romantic piano playing to quickly distract everyone from the main event.)

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
"four left feet", the ditty bops.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
"locomotive breath", jethro tull.
(could be worse, could be... halitosis.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
"five years", david bowie.
('i never thought i'd need so many people.'
shoot me in the head.)

WHAT SHOULD YOU POST THIS AS?
"pie jesu", sissel kyrkjebö.
(i see we're still on the christianity theme. for the record, i loathe the sprinkly disney soundtrack effect used for this version.)

gunmetalmouth

2007-12-22T23:07:00.000+05:30

Fruit tree, fruit tree
Open your eyes to another year.
They'll all know
That you were here when you're gone.

If I turn the music off I think and that's not good not good at all. So I turn the music back on. I'm afraid that one day I will wake up and find that it stopped working.

i tell you, my eyes are black as iron

2007-11-20T00:55:00.000+05:30

Comorbidity is the new black.

2007-11-07T14:51:00.000+05:30

Twothousandseven, why you hate my body so.
Not used to long prescriptions or elaborate drug-taking schedules, I invariably fudge up. And then bad things happen.

On the other hand, Fionn Regan's voice, damply resonant.

.

2007-11-05T23:48:00.000+05:30

touching from a distance

2007-10-26T00:35:00.000+05:30

A review of the new Anton Corbijn film appeared in a recent Telegraph (the Cal one, natch) tabloid edition. I felt vaguely ill the rest of the day, because it seemed to me quite absurd. 'Control' will never be released here - in fact, it's probably out on 'limited release' anyway. Why review it? Here I bite off a long tangential rant on good movies never making it to my city because it's beyond obvious. I've wanted to see 'Control' since I first heard of it a few months ago. Some form of band-related OCD kicking in, no doubt, as I declared myself officially Over Them last year. (New Order is more to my taste right now, shock horror.) But teenage angst is more splendid and memorable than, well, a lot of other, more worthy events in one's life. Do I generalize unfairly? Paint those burgeoning years of indie fandom in too-flattering hues? What could possibly be more depressing than endless afternoons listening to songs like 'Transmission' and 'I Remember Nothing' on repeat, being something surely far worse than being the nineteen year old misfit (id est the nineteen year old underachiever)? Ach. Beware of the cookie cutter.

But it's music. By its very definition - perhaps 'description' suits better - it is life. Signs of, affirmation of, reason for.

And... I'm only doing this because I think the first post on this blog featured a picture of Blixa Bargeld: Einstuerzende Neubauten have apparently released 'Alles Wieder Offen'. That's right, folks, they've been doing this who-needs-a-record-label stuff longer than Radiohead. I have not, need I mention, heard any of EN's new work, but I hope it's a step up from 'Perpetuum Mobile'. They're an interesting example of a (literal-) deconstruction band with pronounced centripetal tendencies. (Oh gosh that sounded so good in a sort of wanky left-field-music-critic way.) I also admire that Bargeld continues to write and perform his lyrics in German - and that, going by translations, they're really very good.

I shall now fling a terrible navel-gazing trivia question into the void. Which bands alongside Joy Division form my personal (un)holy quintet of Bands From Manchester Whose Songs I Have Played On Repeat During Endless Miserable Afternoons? (And No, It's Not Bleeding Oasis.)

rabies parachutes

2007-10-14T15:32:00.000+05:30

This is the exact moment I was supposed to have turned into a vegetarian. It is a highly self-conscious moment, a moment that announces itself as poignant and epiphanic. I am standing with my mother, we are up to our wrists in potatoes, rotating, scrutinizing, our hands are dusted a soft yellow, the man sitting behind the dizzying mounds of potatoes is discreetly scratching his crotch. We fill up one of the plastic baskets with hand-picked tubers. Their eyes are winking at me. We know we'll end up with some rotten ones anyway. Or maybe we won't. I am too cynical sometimes. On the other side of the potato seller is the man with his cage bursting with chickens. There is a boy beside him, together they are a well-greased, blood-slicked machine. The boy lops the dirty white wings off with two motions Hemingway would have given his arms for. The squawking amputated chickens are thrust at the man, who bends them over something and hacks their heads off. The bodies catch up a little late, pretending to swim free-style in the ripe air of the market.

Do you see the poignancy?

Do you?

I was supposed to have been transfixed by the brutality of this sight. 'Never again,' I was supposed to cry (on the inside), 'Shall I assist in the perpetuation of this brutal cycle of violence and genocide.' I was supposed to dream of dancing headless chickens, to drop my fork in horror the next time I laid eyes on the corpse transformed, marinaded and paraded, flesh unto meat, and quiver like a good little consumer whose ignorance and hypocrisy had been exposed.

Why am I writing this when I haven't finished my final piece for college?

Perhaps I shall write about headless wingless chickens.

Perhaps I shall write about potatoes.

Perhaps I shall write about how hard it is to be a vegetarian.

The reason I don't write here

2007-10-14T00:28:00.000+05:30

is that I hate everything else I've written here. I think I will delete everything. A fresh start. I have a new camera. Afraid to even start looking at the user manuals yet, this is the most intimidating mass of technology I have held in my hand. So many fiddly bits, what if I click the wrong one? What if I ruin it on the first day. Hello anxiety disorder. I will take pictures of factories. And crows. A series on crows. I made friends with one when I was fifteen. He would peer at me from up on the windowsill and purr when I sat down to my lunch. I always shared. I would like to take pictures of people at university but I think I'm too shy to dare. But maybe this is what a camera is for? A kind of courage, once removed.

The new Babyshambles: I like the jazzy songs. I like that Pete is pulling himself out of the mire. 'There She Goes' is still one of my favourite tunes, I love the shuffly beat to it. I love that clearly it is about Carl - the Northern soul reference seals it - and shut up shut up it is not about anybody else.

"Your joys are counterfeit"

2007-09-18T19:25:00.001+05:30

I love misreading things. One of my more peculiar hobbies, I am told, although I think it is something people simply don't admit to. You have to cultivate whatever talent you have for a truly fruitful and substantial experience. And so, while reading an Alan Garner interview, the exquisite expression failed Triassic scarp. Can you imagine a more complete failure? Discredited to the very bones of the earth. Too bleeding lazy to even stand up straight, a geological slouch, a Mesozoic mess, pitiably stoical in its inadequacies. Come to think of it, maybe it collapsed, couldn't take all the environmental abuse. All it had really wanted was to be a nice safe boring plateau. And what was up with all those flying dinosaurs, anyway? If you think your life is sad, spare a thought for that towering natural edifice of crumbling hopes and dreams.

Quote of the day (not that there is such a tradition around these parts): "They wouldn't let me onstage because I'm a girl" - Kim Gordon, on turning up late for the Sonic Youth set at Coachella '07.

lkdjslkj;lkfjdlkjfd;lk

2007-08-16T21:29:00.000+05:30

Somany toomany somany things. Somany. Sounds like a soap. Somany Moisturizing Body Soap. Or tiles. I think there actually are Somany tiles. Somany things include a sixtieth birthday (plees, let them eat cake), the usual disarray of knee-tremblers (out of the gutter, ok?) on the world news, my own dillicate constitution, boogeriffic EXAMS.

So what do I do? Naturally I draw crap. Aw, innit cute.

Free drinks for ladies with deez nuts.

2007-08-13T21:56:00.000+05:30

And you thought 'Trespassers Will Be Prostetuted' was funny.

Found this on the corner bracket above the phone, which means I owe my father thanks for saving it from the indiscriminate maw of the rubbish bin.

Is it not brilliant and beautiful and life-affirming? Are you not suddenly eager to seek out this resort and spend all your hard-earned (or hard-wheedled) money on its various delectables?

This may be a good place to announce my Official Position on Engrish. I must respectfully disagree with everyone who has suggested that being a connoisseur of Engrish is a subtle or blatant form of racism, of making fun of those who do not know that hegemaniac tongue well enough to produce boringly correct slogans and signs. I love mistakes. I love the accidental misreading, the typo, the freudian slip. I love Engrish for what it finds in translation. I love its pokerfacedness, its spirit of joyful (in)appropriation*, its excesses and abscesses.

Viva la Engrish! Long may the Cuntry Club prosper as a haven for cunning linguists across the world.

* Ha! test-driving the jargon.

falsa larm.

2007-07-31T18:26:00.000+05:30

I do not like the new blog anymore.
So it is now the ex-blog.
My new new blog is the old blog.
Id est this one.
My drawing blog also lives.
Alleluia!

I glanced at the previous entries.
They are childish!
And exasperating!
And about as profound and moving and well-executed as Donald Trump's haircut!

Alas, they must remain.

I have taken this up again partly because I am now in a course called 'Writing in Practice' at college.
And partly because I can't wait to fill a speck of the internet with more of my rubbish.

It is a noble plan, and effective immediately.

NIGHT OF THE TRANIBORGS.

2006-11-03T19:00:00.000+05:30

I'm writing SF, apparently. To the perfectly wonderful and incongruous soundtrack of rembetiko classics. You can tell from the title of the post that 'Utopia' is somewhere on my mind, although I feel the need to declare that my slow, softboiled SF effort is neither inspired by More's or anyone else's 'Utopia'.

I cannot, of course, guarantee that my story will not be called 'Night of the Traniborgs'.

I got back negatives for my holiday photos. All distressingly dull, as usual, but I'll excuse myself, because most of my holiday was spent climbing boulders and skipping waves. And the damned camera, the damned camera is an automatic. What can I say.

I recently translated a Bangla children's story into... into Scots, and will be posting it here as soon as I can preface it with the most articulate disclaimers possible. I wasn't expecting a standing ovation or a gift certificate, but I had mentioned that I'd be translating into Scots the previous day; the professor seemed comfortable enough reading it out; and then to say 'this is not English'. I mean: no, it's not English. Nor is it Scottish Gaelic. It's Scots. I'm not an authentic writer of Scots and I wasn't trying to pull that off, but whatever I did I did consciously. Is there something disconnect between what I was supposed to take from that observation and what I did? As a somelongtime fan of Scots-in-writing I found it fascinating. It's not perfect, it's probably laughable, but I understand the politics of this, I think, and some of the resonances between the languages made it worthwhile and pleasurable enough to pursue. So. There. Shrug.

Doshomi.

2006-10-02T20:18:00.000+05:30

Hello. I haven't gone out yet, but art and writing and footy have kept me happy. I guess my mum's cooking helps, too. Isn't it always supposed to? Imagine the cultural embarrassment when your mum sucks at cooking. Enough salt to burn your throat and squeeze your tongue out of your mouth - na, maa, akdom noon kom hoi ni!

My brother got me to sit down to watch 'Rang de Basanti' today. It's very well-made, and the boy banter is almost hilarious. Apart from this - the trope of Earnest Young White Woman reintroducing existential-crisissified Indians to their historical heritage or things of similar, exalted nature, where have I seen this before? And ok, yay for parties. I am underwhelmed. Don't mind me, I'm just a cynical hater.

STOIC CHEESE.

2006-09-27T22:09:00.000+05:30

Rivets in my spine. A long metallic grin.

This Tavener fellow and his Protecting Veil. I don't hear holy, I hear hole in the ground.

But their connection: woolly. Expound. Argufy. Give examples.

Project Objectify. Keepin' it light and oh-so-tight.

2006-09-25T21:35:00.000+05:30

Look. I was gonna say stuff about, y'know, THE SPORT ITSELF, because even with my limited knowledge of skatesthetics/jargon I know Plushenko is hardcore brilliant. I was gonna try to pad and puff my post with absolutely scintillating trivia, such as the fact that, apart from being a superachieving ice star, he is also apparently in the Russian Army. I was gonna post pictures - naturally not the slightly scarring one where he's grinning at Vladimir Putin.

Then I thought, to hell with that shit! Ladies, laddies and all other gentlefolk of the world - I present Evgeni 'Sex Bomb' Plushenko.

Edit: barring the next Project Objectify post, all frothy frivolosity re footy will rest over at DLG.

the unimaginable zero summer

2006-09-21T19:37:00.000+05:30

Dear October:

Please be quiet.

Hmm.

2006-09-18T08:45:00.000+05:30

The local rickshawallahs are dragging out their Bishhokorma Pujo celebrations. Which include playing music really loudly. It's always Rabindrasangeet and classic Bangla film songs in the morning, and Hindi filmi hits in the afternoon. Really, it's like an unwritten rule. You know how specific ragas are associated with specific hours/periods of the day? Reminds me of that.

Last night after a weekend's worth of gnashed teeth and high blood pressure I ended up watching both English Premier League matches on tv - Chelsea-Liverpool and Arsenal-Man.Utd, each ending 1-0. I'll spare this little blog my match babble, except I am a goalie fan and I cannot lie even by omission. Petr Cech was wonderful, which made me root for Celsea even though I don't exactly support either team. See how complicated football fandom is? And in the other one, green (erm, literally, too) boy Tomasz Kuszczak did his 'mates proud. Of course Arsenal were once again criticised by the commentators for being slow starters, for not capitalising on all their chances, for their lack of Thierry Henry. I mean, I agree with the second one, but English footy seems to have this unhealthy obsession with madscramblethud!action. It makes for excellent dorkiness, of course, but I suppose I'm used to a slower, more Machiavellian oh did I just type that? scratch it more calculated style of play.

Oops, babbling despite myself. Jens Lehmann almost got his darling face broken while blocking from - was it Cristiano or Wayne Rooney? One of the brats, anyway. That was close. Over during Milan-Parma, though, poor ickle Gilardino's match ended in blood and stitches. It's not serious, but again. Close.

This morning, among the many appalling news stories I woke up to, this one gave me a bit of hope. Not the bit about the actual fact of the commercial, but the fact that Vasselli isn't taking this shit as the 'harmless joke' the men responsible for it so conveniently thought it was. You know how feminists are, always getting their knickers in a twist over yet another harmlessly jokey jab at their historical and innate incompetency at, well, everything including recognising 'irony'.

Two steps forward, three steps back: or, internalised misogyny is such a bitch (ooh, I was being ironic, don't you know). If that's depressing, have a non-sexist giggle over this!

Of bards, boys and birds.

2006-09-13T08:44:00.000+05:30

We are studying 'Hamlet'. I am geeking out on the textual studies geekery of it.

I want. Not fond of this unhealthy obsession with the EPL, although so many of my favourite players are there. Butbut Scottish, Dutch and French league matches! I haff neffer seen those! Now if only someone would show some Bundesliga and Liga Argentina... Oh who am I kidding. I barely ever have time to watch anything, much as I'd love to. And it is frustrating to watch footer on tv anyway, imagine myopic eyes swimming in a sea of icklebickle pinpickle, and the camera whorishly following the ball even though it's almost as much fun to watch one of the goalies keep himself awake at the far end... And I still haven't decided whom to make that subversively fruity Project Objectify (a.k.a Hot Male Athletes Are Just That) post on. Aishwarya decided on Rafael Nadal, he-who-is-too-young, and Supriya on Thierry Henry, who is like an ice dancer except on grass not ice and with a ball not skates. Um.

Um. Yes. So. In my frivolous froufrouey way, the only news I will comment on has little to do with war, horror and woe, not because I don't care or have my head under sand or anything, but because this blog is now officially frothcentric. Until the next white-hot feminist rant, at any rate. The news is this: a new bird species has been discovered in India, specifically in Arunachal Pradesh. It has been named the Bugun Liocichla and it is most darling to behold, assertively coloured (guessing the picture in the paper is of a male) and spiky-capped. I read also that it has a beguiling song. How lovely is the loveliness. There doesn't seem to be too many of them, which is a situation that one hopes will change. If only there were incentive packages for the reproduction of birds, eh? (I think that rant is about to explode on to this blog very soon.)

WWJD? Whom would Jesus do? It could be... YOU!

2006-09-10T16:09:00.000+05:30

So I rediscover an old song whose violiny bits I rather liked. Ah, it's 'Flames' by Vast. Slow and schmoopy and simple, good song for a not-yet-rainy afternoon. And ah, there are the angsty violiny bits. And ok, so the lyrics are utterly useless... 'Close the door, leave your fears behind, let me give you what you're giving me...' And then the guy goes, 'Just put me inside you, I will never ever leave.' Repeats this, more insistent now. Then crooning and violins. By now the song's spell, however cheap and brief, has been utterly broken.

I suppose the reason I collapsed into snickers has to do with a story a friend related this morning, from today's paper (I shall have to ask which one). Something about a group of nuns bringing in a hysterical rickshawallah. The rickshawallah moaned and writhed and rolled his eyes before his anxious audience - some of whom thought the poor man was going through a heart attack. But what was really happening? 'Jesus had come in him'.

Anyway, I'm going to listen to some nice Mahmoud Ahmad songs now and attempt to write something that resembles verse.

Hwæt!

2006-09-06T18:42:00.000+05:30

My internet and computer both seem to be working, and, shockingly, in synchrony! Praise them with great praise. And I have rather neglected the blogosphere for a long time, haven't I? Have kept busy, though, with medieval texts on virginity (damned if you do, damned if you don't), trashy cable telly, and before I forget to underline this, league football

During the World Cup I remembered why and how much I'd loved the whole sprawling mess; by now, I'm keenly aware of the perilous state of my blood pressure. Because I realised: this is why I stopped watching. God, the corruption, the conflicting rumours of transfers and public statements, the conspicuous lack of any football beyond the bloody EPL on tv (rodeo boys, golfers and cricketers of the world, never have I hated you more)... But it is exactly this helpless and cynical excitement I seem to crave. I suppose I can live with the collateral damage - worrying over whether the bloodthirsty moneybags who run the business will tear Jesusboy Kaká away from AC Milan, or why Alessandro Nesta is selling Gatorade instead of spumante. Anyway, it is a beautiful game, and I'm touched by the vanity and the sublimity. Despite myself.

Regarding Steve Irwin, whose death prompted the Telegraph, my current Englang daily, to print two obituaresque articles in yesterday's paper. He seems either to be adored for his all-too-easily caricatured Australianisms and love of wildlife, or to be demonised for trying to feed his son to a crocodile and generally Disneyfying everything with teeth and scales. I actually thought immediately of Timothy Treadwell, alias the 'Grizzly Man', who got himself and his girlfriend killed by bears three years ago. Treadwell made the monumental mistake of thinking himself very like a bear, which bit of delusion proved fatal. On the other hand, people dying on the job - happens all the time, why bring convoluted notions of karma/ the animal world 'taking revenge' (Germaine, Germaine, you are not very germane) into it? What a singular connection to have made with a sea creature. Poor bloke.

2006-07-21T23:05:00.000+05:30

I am so happy I finally got to see 'Stage Beauty'. It's heady - not with the stench of inch-perfect period drag and perfume, but with thought and insight. It is spirited and cheerful about its anachronisms. It even has a smart soundtrack. The fact that Billy Crudup has incredible hands also helps. For some reason I cannot now remember I had expected to be troubled by its treatment of gender, but that final exchange between Maria and Kynaston, where Maria asks him, 'And what are you now?' and Kynaston answers, 'I don't know', repeats this, almost awed by the revelation yet utterly at ease with it - I could have wept yes. Yes to this film, damn your cynical damnations of the human psychology, yes because 'I don't know' is a more powerful and true and audacious answer than 'this' or 'that'.

I am listening to the B-52's and my two-year old stash of Italian pop. False nostalgia reigns.

And the fangirls screamed.

2006-07-10T17:15:00.000+05:30

OH GOD I AM REALLY DOING IT.
I AM WRITING TO STEPHEN FRY TO TELL HIM HOW MUCH I LOVE HIM.

Wonder if I can insert a salacious little epistle, codified of course. A double dose of pleasure, don't you see, first the cerebrum-wriggling exercise of deciphering the message-within-the-message, and second the trouser-squirming delight of ... well... having deciphered it.

Classes, semester three, year two, day one: Excellent. Remind me again why we didn't have Old English in the first semester?

Aishwarya keeps hinting at me to blog about things that are consequential. In fact, now that I mention it, I welcome suggestions from all quarters! I can't ever seem to be serious on this website, but I suppose there's no harm in trying. I'm game.

UGH.

2006-07-02T20:24:00.000+05:30

Anyone from my college who's reading this - please confirm or deny the rumour that classes start on the 10th.

Working on my Bullshit Detector (tm). The zero-tolerance setting, that is.

I could explain, but I know enough about people not to trust them. So.

Notes to self.

2006-06-27T23:39:00.000+05:30

1. Penalty shootoutss are mildly traumatic, when not downright entrants into the 'trainwreck' category.
2. FIFA's giving them referees some kinda crack and it is NOT JIVING.
3. Oh Brazil, how sick and tired I am of you. How sick and tired exactly? I wrinkle my nose and yawn the moment I see Ronaldo tumbling towards the goalpost.
4. ESPN India telejourno hack with glasses? Shut your pie-hole. Failing which, just, like, die or something. Thanks.

Memeage.

2006-06-21T09:32:00.000+05:30

Got tagged by Aishwarya. Not tagging anyone in turn because my blog readership beyond the other people she tagged is er doubtful at best. So here goes.

I am thinking about
Sunnyside up, eggs.

I said
'We all know which of them really was hired for being pretty.'

I want to
Draw.

I wish
That gorgeous book on Schiele didn't do the inanimate-object equivalent of dancing naked in front of me. With bells on.

I miss
The news, sometimes.

I hear
Lebanese pop. Vot?

I wonder
If I should write to Stephen Fry (oh my god, my palms are so clammy they're practically clams, how do you write to that man without exposing yourself as a witless loutish spewer of metaphoric botty-dribble?).

I regret
School.

I am
Your daddy.

I dance
Like Moz.

I sing
Songs by The Smiths, operatically. I am awesome. *inserted pointed look from taggee in general direction of tagger*

I cry
For my country! Alas ehui hay bhogobaan.

I am not always
This patriotic.

I write
In cursive. Ain't nothin' sexier.

I confuse
Death metal bands with other death metal bands.

I need
Money to spend on books.

I should try
Sushi.

I finish
With a clean plate.

Ta-ta for now.

Fame fame fatal fame.

2006-06-20T11:21:00.000+05:30

It's been a rough couple of months, my little honeylumps, sugarcrumbs and other assorted antipastry. Did you miss me? Aww.

I have the cough from hell, very puerile of old Luci to poke me in the alveoli with his silly cutlery every two and a half minutes. It's summertime and the weather is fine for the sweet oblivion of sleep and misery. I now have no idea if I should pick up a Middle English reader or a copy of 'How To Read D.H. Lawrence's Fiction Without Wanting To Commit Random Acts of Homicide - For Dummies' because this optional course business is just sparkly and unpredictable like that.

There seems to be a copy of 'Trainspotting' in the Film Studies library, which is exciting but sad because Ewan IS SO NOT Rent Boy.

What else? VH1, please stop showing Arctic Monkeys videos. As India's resident expert on British 'indie' rock, I declare them provincial, overrated and just plain sorry.

I fail to understand what I've recently identified as a folkloric obsession with the procreative powers of snot, but I guess it's all good.

God the heat.

2006-05-27T17:30:00.000+05:30

I've been licking the fridge clean of all kinds of yummy summer fruits. Aam, well, of course, but also talshash and lichoo - such chastely pale watery jellyish things.

While writing songs - rather heavy on the lyric side, alas - I occasionally stop and think, why do I even need a defined 'chorus'? Or for that matter a 'bridge'? But the basics are basics for a good reason. The real challenge of songwriting is not even the songwriting part. And yes, one of the songs is dedicated to an oddly charming, quite alarming man with a disproportionately large head on his queenly shoulders. It promises to be by turns lustful, worshipful, scathing and cold. (I've been learning from the Wainwright-McGarrigle school of the politics of lovehate.)

I was almost forgetting. Last night I watched an entire episode of a reality TV show! It was called 'The Cut' - you know there's plenty of design school wank to be found where people have 'clothing artist' after their name. These shows never fail to amaze me - we have here successful (well, one measure of success at least), smart young people who are getting The Big Opportunity to prove to the world their successfulness and smartness, but all they manage to prove is their (callow) youth. Tommy Hilfiger (did I spell that right?) is the Donald Trump, here, as the ugly corporate panjandrum with hair that would be ashamed to grow on the arse of an... ass. And the tagline? Is the brilliant, cutting 'You're out of style. Take the runway.'

Um! Let's see. There were pushy, desperate, people, of course. Poor teamwork, predictably. On one team there was a straight white woman who had to work with a gay black man;she harrassed him and in doing so made an revolting clown of herself. On internationally broadcast telly. People must have really fucked up brains if they can take so unquestioningly to heart that all publicity is good publicity.

I have a tremendous distaste for any smart successful young person who can say without collapsing into self-deprecating humour that they are the best and they always win and they don't know what being second is. Crass, crass, crass. But then reality TV was never supposed to be about reality - it's about TV, and this sort of earnest pronouncement is good for a laugh. Because suspense is impossible in a medium where every day brings a new cliffhanger.

But this is old hat. I missed this week's 'House', bah.

'... of nothing in particular'

2006-05-23T18:49:00.000+05:30

I looked at the first Sin City book today. The story bored me to death but I was hooked to the gorgeous stark art. Come to think of it, I thought the artwork was unnecessarily fussy. Comic geeks, feel free to kill me for the sacrilege.

I have a Holy Bible now. The inside cover says

Presented to :-
Dr B.D. Agarwalla F.R.C.S.
4 Bishop Lifnoy Road
Cal-20.

With best of compliments of :-
Michael Bhattacharjia
Gideon Association.
C/o "Waldorf"
24-B Park St. Calcutta 16.

Today was a beautiful day. Today was a beautiful day in Kolkata. Today was.

A gem! Truly, a gem!

2006-05-20T07:10:00.000+05:30

Found in a PoCo theory book:
... whereas Western gynocriticism heralds the pen(is) as responsible for fathering texts and the female ink/milk as a possible lubricant for the blank page.

I read gender theory and literary theory and it's a lot more fun than you'd think, but the sheer hilarity of it shines through, sometimes. As it does up there.

One of the recent Da Vinci Hullaballoo articles somewhere quotes flamboyantly gay actor Ian McKellen. What? Ian is one of the least flamboyant actors around. He brings the snark, you idiot journo, prepare to be decimated. But it reminded me of how much of a cliche it's turned into, like troubled rockstar, only more pervasive. If you're gay you are by default flamboyant. If you're straight and you regularly talk to the press about your sexual exploits, you're not labelled flamboyantly hetero (Eva Longoria, I'm looking at you). The undertone is, however, that 'flamboyance' is somehow disturbing. The world likes its gays withdrawn, depressed, closeted, dead. Woe unto them if ever they express a lack of shame or guilt! Of course, Lesbians Don't Exist, except in the liberated (COUGH) fantasies of straight men, so there are no flamboyant lesbians. But wait, what does it then mean whenever the players of the Brazilian football team are written up as 'the flamboyant striker' etc etc. ? Oooh.

When I was at school, a lot of girls who watched the football World Cup were mocked by the boys for supporting teams because the players were attractive. I call bullshit. First of all, boys, there happens to be something aesthetically delightful about grown men piddling around on grass in shorts and translucent jerseys clamouring after a BIG BALL. (Incidentally, going by the spirit of the PoCo book sentence I quoted, perhaps the reason why goalies are so frequently villified is that they're in the sole feminised role in their team? Their job is to resist, if in vain, penetration? I like this little theory of mine.) Second! Make fun of your fellow fans only when you've pulled that twice-life-size David Beckham poster off your own wall.

You can crush us, you can bruise us, but you have to answer to...

2006-05-18T21:34:00.000+05:30

Increasing reluctance to reveal much of my thoughts. The world filtered through my ego, slick/shoddy rainbows in puddles of petrol.

I've been drawing and writing, though. And have rediscovered the Clash.

So. Hello, of sorts. Recommend a contemporary work of fiction in either Bangla or Hindi. Sharp, smart, bitter, possibly on crack. Go on, I've bookworms burrowing my brain through and they demand tastier morsels.

Beastly!

With Gaaaa-wd on our saaaa-ide

2006-05-12T23:48:00.000+05:30

I am ITCHING to skip straight to the Johnny Cash.

Reader, let it be understood without any doubt remaining whatsover that music is above almost everything else, for me. Even above literature. There, I said it. No big deal, really, multitasking brains and opposable thumbs, y'know. But still. I can't claim to have heard more music than anybody or the coolest bands or anything - and I don't care to, that sort of declaration has nothing to do with music and everything to do with the distended, diseased ego even so-called 'music experts' often fall prey to.

However, my musicobsession should not be construed as indicative of an indiscriminately open mind. I am willing to try anything twice - I will make the effort I sometimes I do not even make for books or for people - but I will not stand being talked down to - my experience as a musician and a listener deserves simple human respect, and a little more from hacks who take the easy route and say, for example, oh, you don't get Jimi Hendrix, you're a loser.

I don't get Jimi Hendrix. What does that mean? Precisely that. I don't get Jimi Hendrix. What it doesn't mean: that I'm somehow 'inferior' or 'ignorant' because I don't enjoy his music.

Oh, and by the way: the next person who says that Queen the band are 'not worth talking about' needs to... do either of the following:
1) Listen to their damned music already. Don't open your mouth before you've opened your ears, idiot.
2) Accept that this is their own opinion and that it does not allow them to stomp childishly over people who like Queen. Music is not about power, or at least it should not be and why perpetrate when you can progress?

I think Frank Zappa is the shit. It's ok by me if you think it's shit. You want to discuss it? Let's agree to disagree and START FROM THERE. Let's shake hands. Or just shake your hips. Music is fun. It's not your kingdom and bands are not your phantom army. Listen and let listen.

Five things.

2006-05-08T22:38:00.000+05:30

1. My mother apparently watches Animax. I'm speechless.

2. I am making a new mixtape. This one's for my useless arse of a brother. Haven't planned the tracklist yet, but Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' has to be in there somewhere. Because, as we all know, it's a song of great social and political import. I am a potentially compulsive maker of mixtapes. I don't make them for people I like or love, I make them for people who want to listen to new things. Surprisingly few people, would you believe it. And this puts me in an awkward position, because my brother does not want to hear new things. He wants to vegetate under the influence of Eurotrashy technotrica. I'm ashamed of him :[ Or maybe they think I'm going to stuff their ears with artery-splitting industrial rock. Which, for the record, I rarely listen to, and only two or three bands. Mixtaping is so horribly indie, but I get an enormous satisfaction out of introducing music to people. I like to hear things like: 'Wow, I thought she was a a certain kind of singer, you know what I mean? But actually she's amazing.' This is the best, though: 'I listened to it, and I want more!' Loyal readers (yeah, right), feel free to ask for one of these spifftacular compilations, and I'll come up with one sometime after the first week of June.

3. 'My' room in this flat is an utter downer. One wall is all desk and shelves, another is tedious porcelain and glass goods I am told would make us thousands at the auctioneer's. Another is window and door. The one wall I have relatively free is badly lit. I've decided to put up a noticeboard there, to pin photos, drawings, reminders, quotes and other miscellany on. Is that a very teenage thing to do? I'm afraid I can't care. Waking up to the sight of Morrissey waggling bouquets of flowers and wearing one of his blinding 80s shirts would be heavenly. And I'll finally remember to do all those chores I'm supposed to.

4. Last week I saw my first Pasolini film - his take on the Canterbury Tales. It was hilarious, it was porny, it had Ninetto, it was - well, almost everything I expected a Pasolini film to be. I'm actually more familiar with his literary work - read his first two novels and many of his poems in translation. And of course I've read about him. I don't think I was prepared for the level of slapstick sexviolence, although I think I took to it better than, oh, twenty- or thirty-odd other students in the AV room did. A lot of nervous giggles and meaningful silences in the air. The last sequence, with demons in lurid body-paint shitting out churchmen and welcoming the new denizens of Hell with some thorough buggering, nearly had me in splits. And that's interesting, because the joke of this film, the comedy if you will, was so blackly malicious it wasn't really funny anymore. Ah, don't you love tortured avant-garde cultural icons. They're there to make you feel better about yourself. If you dare.

5. Bob Dylan is gonna be a radio jockey. Cue news items starting: Hey Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me... There're rumours of a new biopic on him featuring five or six different actors as Dylan. Very cool idea, especially as it seems they're not going for physical resemblance. The article also said that Julianne Moore is going to be in it, but not as Dylan. Bah, why not? A woman playing the Sainted Not-yet-dead White Male Bard of Classic Folkrock - that would be cooler than Antarctica. Although let it be stressed that these are rumours - which when Dylan is concerned are cranked out with unholy speed and regularity.

mapless

2006-05-06T10:56:00.000+05:30

you've conjured the snow. now make
a circle, inhale
with caution. learn this tongue
of precious metal. do not
call, for it will come
in its own time: that sullen
wing, that slow reverb.

I just wanted to tell you

2006-05-03T20:42:00.000+05:30

that if I were any more in touch with my inner child I'd probably be a paedophile.

Here, have this.

Also, the Tim Supple Dream was seriously delish. And had some seriously dreamy and funny actors, too. For some reason I misread the brochure and thought we were going to walk out onto the greens with the play. That would have been quite interesting, though.

Exorcising the Klimtmonster.

2006-04-29T19:47:00.000+05:30

Didn't think about this. Argh. How expensive is gold leaf??

Oh but I may as well try and catch the wind...

2006-04-28T10:13:00.000+05:30

He's like a hobbit. He even looks like Billy Boyd. It's silly-making, to hear this floofy pixiehobbitminstrel burring about black-eyed native girls. ~~We all know what boys like him do in Mexico.~~

So I voted. A deformed purple exclamation mark on my left index fingernail proves that yes, indeed, I voted. What is there to say? I stood in line for half an hour early in the morning. It was breezy and nice. I said to my father, 'Look! A cat!' and pointed up at the ninth floor of a high-rise. My father did, and gravely replied, 'Your eyesight must really be failing. That's a pigeon.' I suppose I did wonder for a moment how the cat could swivel its head like it did... But I was far from the only person present with failing eyesight.
A little old lady with frizzy triangular hair scolded her not so little old husband as other old ladies snickered or looked away. The first polling officer outdid many of the hard-of-hearing voters: he was completely deaf. 'I haven't voted before.' 'WHAT?' 'Here's my library card.' 'WHAT?' The second polling officer was hard of seeing, and succeeded in detaching entirely my photo from said library card because he couldn't find the stamp. Eh.
I'm almost sure the machine I voted on was rigged. But no matter. It's not that kind of democracy anyway, and judging from the hysterical news coverage later in the day 'first-time voting' is overrated beyond all reason. As I said, no matter. My parents bribed me with yummy greasy fried breakfast; after which I promptly fell asleep, waking up not before three hours had passed.

'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Reread this last night, am going to the Tim Supple production later today. I'm quite excited by the prospect, although like any narrow-minded middle-class maiden I am a little worried about having to travel so late in the evening. Worse than any monstrous mouse, I tell you.

2006-04-25T13:08:00.000+05:30

I was in the room when my mother was watching one of the Bangla TV programmes - you know the kind, with segments on cooking and health and law and fashion. The latter my mother watches to 'check out the competition', as I like to call it. Today's fashion segment featured a stinking rich, greasily complacent woman boasting about how she gives jobs to 'underprivileged children'. Um... does she know how creepy that sounds? My mother told me about this fifteen year old girl. She was hired by a boutique owner to do extensive embroidery on a sari. It was the girl's first real job, and did it with complete enthusiasm, staying up nights to finish it by lamplight. When she was finished, the boutique owner gave her... thirty rupees. The girl went home and cried because she would have thrown the money in the woman's face except when you're poor thirty rupees is better than nothing and it was - it is a form of prostitution but what can you do? I can't not hate these women with their fluorescent orange hair (a hundred henna treatments all gone wrong), with their mincing little-girl voices, with their expensive jewellery, going on these fucking 'women's shows' and making their name out of someone else's labour, the someone else invariably cheated out of her deserved pay.

Submitted my L&OA paper yesterday. It's twelve pages of doublespaced but solid prose. I'm quite sure it won't be boring, although I felt a little twinge of regret looking at everyone else's papers, all prettily foldered-up, with pictures to complement the text. I'm not big on the funky fonts, though, this is a paper and not a fan website. I have great hopes for my paper, I'll work on it some more.

Rap, or, I'm Not Kidding.

2006-04-23T12:11:00.000+05:30

Re: my new fascination for rap as a form. I say rap as a 'form' and not as (misguided definiton of) 'lifestyle', because I have seen pictures of stupid NRI gangsta-rappa-wannabes and I cannot understand why people should wish to ghettoise themselves. I will be honest and admit that what I dig most about music is melody. And I haven't been listening to any rap lately. I also know very little about the history of rap beyond what was mentioned by the ubiquitous Professor Lal in one of the Lit & Other Arts classes. By the way, I like the name 'the ubiquitous Professor Lal', it has a lovely gangsta feel to it, I shall call him that from now on.

I took an interest in the work of Tupac Shakur and of Notorious B.I.G. - see, any art form or instution will be rife with Dead Males, whether Black or White. No I will not quote Michael I-love-children Jackson, thank you. Who else? Hmm, does Eminem count? I think him tiresome, immature and masturbatory to a disturbing extreme. Yes, and of course Public Enemy's 'Fears of a Black Planet', whose cover I once spectacularly misread as 'Fears of a Black Plantaganet' (I blame History cramming, but it's still charming).

Let me put it this way. I am going to listen to rap this summer and contemplate how a young brown middle-class feminist can appropriate and transfigure that experience. I have been writing rap, and because the internet is a crazy place and I am a crazy person I shall record my songs in .mp3 and force my friends to listen to them. Thence, naturally, to a lucrative record deal. Don't expect any gyrating women in the video, though - oh, all right, I'll throw in some dashingly pretty multiracial dancer boys. Happy? Good.

It is like a vacation.

2006-04-19T23:29:00.000+05:30

Vocative.

O ... o. o. o.

The stench from the canal.

Only connect.

2006-04-16T19:50:00.000+05:30

Everything is wonderful.

2006-04-16T16:10:00.000+05:30

I have to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Thank you for the teenage angst.

2006-04-06T17:14:00.000+05:30

I don't dig the sleazy businnessman/sex tourist look you've got going on, and your obsession with your testicles is about as bizarre as your militant vegetarianism, and to be fair I don't even like most of your songs, but there's just something about you, you silly old man. I will hear you sing a cover version of Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' before I die. Or you do. Dear me, I'm so cruel. In any case, you shall have some of these digestive biscuits, for I have too many.

Endsems may be delayed by about a week because of voting. So I hope and pray. Who needs one and a half months of summer holidays anyway?

I have to buy at least five books, all college-related. This decision made after coming to the sad conclusion that I cannot borrow them, and it would be impractical in the extreme to make photocopies. It would be so nice to have a scholarship. Bah.

A man of means by no means

2006-04-04T20:49:00.000+05:30

Reading by candlelight is interesting. If I'm really caught up in the book, the flickflickshadowflick makes it such a sensuous experience, even if the book itself is, say, Jung's 'Modern man in search of a soul' (you know what depths of despair a person is plumbing when they dredge up that title). So, yes, summer is here. Summer in Kolkata is always going to remind me of woesome things like mortality, and winter of freedom and warmth and wellbeing. Oh the joys of varying perspectives.

'Brokeback Mountain' on Sunday, the cheapest ticket, which was a meagre one-thirty rupees. My pockets have phantom pain. It was beautiful. It wasn't perfect, but if I put aside the criticism and consider what it means to me, it means a tremendous lot. As it did to many other viewers, I am sure. This may or may not include the group of giggling high school boys sharing the same row at Inox Forum (all dressed in virginal white...). I'm in half a position now to contribute, if belatedly, to the BBM-vs-Crash debate, but I don't particularly care for the Oscars (anyone in their right mind will tell you it's all about the gowns, and even the gowns are getting ugly), and after everything I've read about 'Crash' I can't come away wanting to see it instead of BBM a second time - or even saving up for 'V for Vendetta'.

Speaking of theatres and films. Apparently it's unusual, for someone like me (read 'J.U.D.E student') to not be a regular theatre-and-or-cinema- goer. Apparently this means I am stodgy (what I heard before college as, inevitably, 'bhalo meye, podashona kore, disco-fisco-e jaye naa') and lead a sad, sad life. I do actually have a sad, sad life, but not sad-as-in-pathetic.
There were some screenings of the 'right' kind of films, recently, that I saw posters of and wanted to go to. I'm talking about ~~the Fell Beast~~ Fellini. I should have gone. But I had no time. Horror of horrors, that must mean she's cramming for exams that are, well, a whole month away!
I've suspected this for a while: people who are ambitious, even aggressively so, but do not go around tooting and tuttling trumpets - there's this popular assumption that they're so radical they must be not radical at all. The seventh circle of Pomo hell. Occasionally, I admit, I feel like promoting my various talents (how many people in college who know me know that I sing? I paint? I swim?), but screw that. I'm going to do things my way, and not because I need the most impressive resume/a raving fanclub/whatever. That's what punk is all about.

You saw it here first.

2006-03-31T08:16:00.000+05:30

What is Dishwalla's 'Opaline', sonically, but sweetly angstful Calipop washed with electric guitars too sensible to explode? Nevertheless I listen. It's great morning music.

I've been working and took a tea break to read the newspaper. And. And. And. I'm a little shocked, because Brokeback Mountain is in town. Now that I can go to see it I'll hate it, I'll hold it up standards and find it lacking, I'll fall off my seat laughing at Gyllenhaal's 70s porno moustache. I will blink a little stupidly because I expected Owen Wilson to pop out of nowhere (because Owen Wilson would be my first choice for this movie, I don't have to explain why). But Canada, she acts with madness in her method. I know this simply by looking at the stills. And yet I know her beauty is the beauty of motion. She has something of Middle-earth, so sentient is she. Oh my, Brokeback made it this far.

I wish I'd read Kannada literature before. In a way, because I still haven't, because I don't know the language. Sensitive, these issues. Everything is so interesting.

Unpleasant reminder

2006-03-30T19:19:00.000+05:30

that I am all too human: I completely forgot about the double period with ADG on mediaeval Christianity. While the classes were going on I was tucking happily into a book of poetry at the DL. Ragini had completely forgotten as well, and there's nobody else in Ugh One with Chaucer and Langland.
I can't quite believe it. Missing one class wouldn't be too horrible, I suppose. Missing two... ye gods and little green fishes, my mind is going.

I was petting a George Harrison book - lavishly laved with photographs, of course - at one of those swanky chainbookstores and realised that to me, as to countless other fans, the Beatles don't represent anything particularly radical. They're comforting and familiar. Here there be perils, such as questions about art, scepticism over a celebrity-philia that falsely equates pictures of rockstars with the contents of family albums in terms of emotional value, and the simple fact that, horror of horrors, this has nothing to do with the music.
Screw that, I say. I'd have bought the damn thing, but the price reminded me of the real world and nasty things like capitalism and professional leechcraft. Haha.

The personal is political. And vice versa.

2006-03-28T21:21:00.000+05:30

I put my caramel coloured shirt on the wrong way. I noticed while pouring myself a glass of water, and cannot be bothered to put it on right now.

Filling out forms is a bit of a nightmare, because I'm always afraid I'll write something that'll disqualify the wrong document. One little detail... Reminds me of Algebra exams, where invariably I would finish with flourish - after having written two x instead of two x squared. For someone who loves details in so many things I'm dangerously casual. So my endsem exam form is still tucked away in my notebook.

Thinking about the semester that's about to end I'm terribly disappointed. Not in myself. Careful and frequent analyses of the situation, and I'm convinced I've been getting a lot of really bad vibes off the two core courses. Correction: the way the professors have handled them. Yes, I'm criticising professors. I've been reading about education and thinking about it since I was in junior school; now that I'm in college, the real fun's just begun.

So it goes like this: Postcolonialism is exciting and vitally important, but there are too many texts, not enough theory, not enough time. Much of it is new to me, some of it I already knew, but as I see it, the point of this is to increase awareness and enable us to articulate. Instead, we've been going through subtle or not-so-subtle guilt therapy sessions. As for Literature and the Other Arts, our esteemed course leader's favourite hobby... wait, it's actually his profession... is to demean his students; his most visible tactic, to tell them to think for themselves but really expect them to agree with him on everything; his catchphrase, 'you should all know this by now'.

'The educational system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give.' -- [Pierre Bourdieu]

I'm not going to add a little disclaimer here - no offence meant! I'm no expert I'm just giving my opinion! Really he's the greatest guy ever! I'm going to say: since when was university teaching about telling students almost all the time that they're stupid, they're shallow, they don't know anything, even their 'own culture'? Why does he think we turn up for classes, participate even at the risk of being the target of yet another needless insult to our basic intelligence, bother to read up on topics not within the confines of the syllabus? Perhaps I'm alone in feeling this way. I hope I'm not, because that would be, well, doubly troubling.

Because there is something too easy about this brand of cynicism, this kind of reckless sarcasm. There's something loathesome and self-congratulatory about it. I'm not upset because I'm not doing fabulously this semester. I'm upset because these two courses are amazing, or would have been, and I could have finished my college experience remembering them above all others simply because of how radical they are. Clearly I won't. I've been painting more than reading. Thank you, professor, you've indirectly (oh, the blinding irony!) led me to take up again something I had neglected for years.

Being unempowered and brainwashed and loserly as I am, I shall end this post with a picture of the beautiful, always surprising Peter Murphy, because beauty is balm for the soul.

And yes, those are fishnets.

2006-03-27T20:41:00.000+05:30

Shanti.

Creak squirr yaaaawn

2006-03-27T08:36:00.000+05:30

Suddenly I want to go to Turkey. It snows there, in some parts, sometimes, as I've read, but I'm sure it's just as elaborately stifling as... here. Or perhaps not. To sustain such a fantasy one must improve on its basic mechanisms. The same principle as any 'plausible' fiction.

Sometime this week I'll take a whole day off, sleep on it. Maybe I'll come up with something interesting. But it doesn't work like that.

I still remember how personally cheated I felt when I read that what they call an eye transplant is merely a corneal transplant. All our pudding men crumble. A dab of icing, and his smile falters. His body is a feast of ants. We feign surprise, although they have only followed the path through our clumsy walls.

I'm getting addicted to Animal Planet again. Watched a documentary about crocodiles in Mauritania yesterday. Field-toned naturalists who don't hump animals and screech about how beeeyoooiful they are - most refreshing.

One two three check

2006-03-26T19:22:00.000+05:30

My sketchblog is up.

Fannish nostalgia and general soppiness.

2006-03-25T21:34:00.000+05:30

turn your face to the green world
use well the days

I don't apologise for the fact that, despite everything, I'm a Ringer. Tolkien geek. Wishful Middle-earthian. Potential wearer of Frodo Lives! buttons.

Because, come on. Frodo lives. Seriously, really, truly does.

'All the water of Bombay', hahaha

2006-03-24T23:01:00.000+05:30

The 'Filmi Shakespeare' paper was quite interesting - although I'm not surprised at my utter ignorance. Movies don't like me very much. Even really good ones. They shy away from me and mine. Let's hope frustrated cinephiles in theatres across Kolkata never find out.

A friend has been telling me all sorts of horrific gossip about Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst and such. I'm really into gossip these days - listening more than spreading, I'll admit.

Tomorrow is a very special day. It's not on any conventional calendars. It's silly and magnificent and pathetic and profound, and I'll probably make a post about it.

Have rediscovered the music of Cher. She's one of those pop stars who simultaneously think they're better than they really are/are better than they seem to think. The first song I heard by her was her cover of Marc Cohen's (I think it was this way round...) 'Walking in Memphis'. Since then I've had the mixedfortune of listening to several of her other hits, often accompanied by puzzling music videos, where often she resembles fantasy/scifi heroines from alien worlds. I'm convinced this is something pop culture theorists have not looked into too closely yet. I've even seen 'Moonstruck'. I think vocoders are evil (except when used by Imogen Heap) and should be kept out of her reach. I wonder how many facejobs it took her to look like a mummy at the far end of 50. That was not a typo.
It has been said that, after a nuclear holocaust, only cockroaches and Cher will survive.
I hope she goes on making guilt-inducingly addictive pop songs well into her 80s. Because I'd pick Cher over cockroaches any day. Although I love cockroaches and harbour them in my home as if they were beloved pets.

In case this has not been passed around many times already.

2006-03-22T16:20:00.000+05:30

Take kep! - Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog.
Includes the most creative Brokeback Mountain spoof in recent history. Or in all its brief history.

Taken out of its filmic context 'I wish I knew how to quit you' sounds rather less emotional. But what about: 'I WOLDE I KNEWE HOW OF THEE I MIGHT BE QUITTEN!'

Heee.

My Perfect Man. Hearts and flowers optional.

2006-03-21T00:08:00.000+05:30

A while back I got tagged for this meme.

MY PERFECT MAN.

It's impossible to write or read that phrase without wanting to cringe. Not just the heterosexist assumption -or the dubious status of that word 'perfect'. It's just one of those sentences, along with 'I can explain' and 'I accidentally pushed a marble up my right nostril when I was sixteen', that are inherently embarrassing. Fact.

So I couldn't decide whether I'd like to declare that my perfect man doesn't exist because nobody's good enough, or ironically list every pedantic requirement I can spontaneously concoct, or simply post another picture of Hugh Laurie looking stubbly and pale and intellectual and distant and sexy, or just talk about MY PERFECT WOMAN instead.

All of those would be equally do-able.

But for once I'm taking a meme more seriously than perhaps it could ever be worth. I'm going to tell you what would make a man my perfect man.

Being (pro-)feminist.

'Man is a political animal', they write in textbooks all the time. Interchangeable with 'rational', 'scientific', 'social'. The curious thing about this rational, scientific, social, political animal is that he has constantly proved himself, to carry over the generalising 'he', a venomous, appalling, needlessly violent, malicious, murderous WOMAN-HATER.

The bad news, which is not really news at all, being that even men who are not overtly misogynistic contribute more or less directly to the hysterical hatred of the 'other' (sex) to the point where people can write books with titles like 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' and be taken seriously. That's one piddly little example. I could spend my lifetime listing others and I'd never exhaust the inventory.

I don't need to, because there's a handy little word to effectively sum it up: patriarchy.

So that the most radical and convincing thing a man could ever do, in the context of this perfect-man-for-me-shit, is to be, unequivocally, actively, painfully, wholly consciously be counted of his own free (hah) will of this number, this thing called 'feminism' that is so reviled, so un- (as opposed to mis-) understood.

Because hair colour, sense of humour, taste in music? Those are all negotiable. Or even non-negotiable. Those are all small things, secondary things compared to this.

This is what is important. If you think I'm exaggerating beyond all hyperbole, and that it's really very simple, and you can name lots of men you, why, personally know! who qualify for this ONE criterion, think again. You can probably count them on one hand (or finger, if we're reading by joints). If at all.

Art Supplies R Us.

2006-03-20T18:15:00.000+05:30

I wish I could emulate that mirrored 'r' shape here.

There are some people who ooze complacence but haven't the slightest idea exactly what they're dealing with. One of the shop assistants at Kumar's Concern - I've always known he was a smirky patronising wet turd, and I should have remembered that that combination is always inherently pathetic. I want watercolour inks, you walking talking oil slick, and that means watercolour inks. What are watercolour inks used for? Why, what a profound question. I believe they do what they say on the label - then again, how dare I presume to tell art store people about art supplies?

I'm not a cheerful believer in the 'customers are always right' school of thought, but I don't think I ever signed up for the one that goes 'the people running the shop are less likely than anybody else within a ten mile radius to be an arsehole'. He came up, at any rate, with something called 'photo colour'. Then someone else made one of those faces condescending old men always find it necessary to make at younger women and said he had never heard of watercolour inks. Well, isn't that marvellous.

-----

In PoCo we've moved on to Caribbean poetry. I think we had two classes on the Cambodia issue. Pitfalls of the semester system, yes, but sometimes I have the feeling that the B.A. English course at J.U. is like Englitt: A Crash Course. We're certainly breaking speed records. Then the scramble for exams. Perhaps I ought to be sitting with my nose in a book twenty hours a day. Or agonising over my dangerous, insulting involvement in the perpetration of stereotypes and spreading the poison of a colonised mindset. O may my poor brain not break under the pressure.

Have wiped two years' worth of dust off compoota screen.

2006-03-19T22:51:00.000+05:30

Cannot believe how shiny all the pictures look now!

I love Ray Davies' voice so so much.

2006-03-19T11:12:00.000+05:30

I need my Kinks fix, this weekend. I listen to these beautiful songs and feel a little angry that people hardly talk about them. It's like the 60s canon has only room for four or five people, and everyone else is 'not as good'. As I discover more and more of these bands, I'm a little shocked by how many of them are generally, criminally neglected. And as the header says, the voice. Not even the Beatles had a voice like this, a voice I hear and immediately want to sing along with.

Currently stuck on 'Waterloo Sunset'. It is love.

TV is fascinating. Just yesterday I caught two very hmmworthy shows.

One: America's Next Top Model. Because tv, especially this brand of 'reality tv', is so carefully scripted, it's amazing how much shit people are capable of spouting. So we have six girls travelling to Japan to be judged on their 'commercial value', literally and literally.

One of the things they have to do is act for an advertisement for some kind of Japanese food. One of the girls can't make herself swallow it; she ducks under the table and spits the food out into a glass. Reality tv is all about moments like these. As the judges put on various faces of malicious delight barely disguised as horror, you get the sense, shit, this girl's in trouble. And she is. Tyra Banks, who hosts the programme, looking remarkably like a sour blanched b-movie vampire, shakes her head, says things: 'As a model you have to respect the product.' The others chip in gravely, clearly enjoying it. 'A model has to have humility.' 'You have to CONNECT with the product, you have to convince people.' And, here is the crucial part, 'You want to be a top model, you gotta suck it up.'

To be a top model, you have to suck it up. Because that proves your dedication. Your determination, your desperation, your reason for being.

As a model, you have to respect the product. Because as a model, you're no better than a product. Bow down before it, for it provides your livelihood. Don't shit where you eat- eat what you shit.

But wait. There's more. The Japanese client, who doesn't speak English, consults gravely with his translater, who informs the girl that she has 'insulted the client, Japanese food and culture and the Japanese people'. When that girl spat out a lump of something she couldn't swallow because it made her gag, she obviously didn't realise the symbolic portentiousness of that simple act. She failed to grin and bear it. THUS SHE INSULTED JAPAN AND ITS PEOPLE AND ITS FOOD OMG!!! Now, I'm all for certain forms of what is dismissed as 'political correctness', but the line is sometimes quite fine. This is crossing it. Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together seriously watch a tv commercial and assume that whichever actor/model is DOING THEIR JOB by HAWKING that product loves it and uses it all the time? That is fucking ridiculous. The tv ads/ reality show industry is based on lies, on hypocrisy. It is so funny that it's not funny at all, that the already dehumanised human model is supposed to bow to THE PRODUCT.

And hey, I hate sushi. Maybe I shouldn't go to Japan, because if I did I'd be polluting the country with my anti-Japan sushi-hating. Hahaha.

Two: It's the Christian channel! And, gasp, we are looking at... Biblical muppets! Longhaired Texan Samson is being milked of his secretz by falsetto-voiced Delilah! But before you laugh - cuuut. It's really a little cowboy lad watching them muppets on the teevee. And his mother is not amused. 'CHORES COME FIRST', she declares, busting a few blood vessels as she faces her lazy bum of a son. The son is not amused. He whines. Then he goes out and cuuut. Little cowboy lad meets littler cowboy lad. The following hilarious exchange occurs:

Little cowboy lad: Let's go down to the old mine-shaft.
Littler cowboy lad: But I'm afraid we'll get caught!
[they go anyway]

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M THINKING? Damn straight.
Or not so straight. Giggle.

I AM A RAPPER NOW.

2006-03-15T21:51:00.000+05:30

A rapper-in-training, that is. I don't have street cred and I don't have bling, but who cares when all you need is RAP?

O blaring trumpets of atonal sapphire perfectibility! O curmudgeonly cormorants. Beware, I say. Beware, as Gaiman made someone say somewhere in a grungy comic book, of the ideas of March!

I lied.

2006-03-10T19:42:00.000+05:30

All of this is a lie. Or multiple lies, symbioticking. Nobody knows me, least of all myself.

We will stop with that. Our important public service message ends there. To proceed.

I love 'House'. I love Hugh even more. He looks so different and yet not different at all, here. You know there's hope for mainstream teledrama yet when a character can be this disconcerting. Oh his gorgeous gorgeous bloodshot eyes.

I'm listening to the 'Brokeback Mountain' soundtrack. I'm thinking of starting over, none of this hopeless eraser-jobbing. Rather palimpsests. The heart of the onion. An onion by any other name. Skinned deep.

To proceed.

2006-03-04T08:30:00.000+05:30

I found myself listening to the Sgt Pepper album almost 24/7 recently. Does anyone else feel an inexplicable urge to turn the volume down when side 2 starts? We were taaaaaalking, shhh shh sh-sh-SHUT UP. It's a little embarrassing.

Anyway, here is the sort of thing I do in class while industrious others are busy taking notes or staring and nodding at the professor.

2006-02-28T18:09:00.000+05:30

Last night I watched a film on, was it, Zee Studio. It was called 'Fateless'. I think Zee Studio is doing what most other 'English-language film' channels are doing - trying to gain viewers by airing previous Oscar-nominated flicks. I'm sure Star Movies has already shown 'Titanic' three or four times, haha. The difference seems to be that Zee Studio is also airing films nominated in the foreign film category. So, here we are. It's a Holocaust film in the most direct sense - we see an adolescent boy wrenched from his home, cattle-trucked to the grimly obscene irony that is Buchenwald. To do labour, not to be gassed, but that doesn't make it any easier, does it? I haven't read the original novel, and I had to divide my attention between visuals and subtitles, and I don't have any film jargon. What I can say is-

It had some especially good moments. Seen as a whole, it's more of a collection of snapshots, or of anecdotes, which is not a bad thing, but then you have the very artsy use of colour filters, and the slightly annoying way scenes have of fading into black. Abrupt cuts would, I think, have served the material better.

I have no idea what Daniel Craig was doing there.

Probably the most disconcerting thing about 'Fateless' is how beautiful the protagonist, Gyuri, played by some kid called Marcell Nagy, is throughout the whole hellish mess. Even after he's broken and reduced to this naked will to survive - and even after he comes close to wanting to lay himself down and die - he's painfully, painfully beautiful. Now perhaps I'm more of a paedophile than I'd be comfortable accepting - but really, I don't think it's what I mean. It makes more sense at the end. Gyuri goes back to face the hypocrites, the spouters of meaningless platitudes, the spooners out of empty sympathy, and the film ends with his asserting that he will go on- there was happiness to be found even in the camp, and nothing is so unbearable that it cannot be endured. Perhaps what I found beautiful in the character (I don't know how good Nagy is, but I felt for him, and it didn't feel cloying, so he was doing something right) is that. The defiance, despite it all. The will to survive, which is too often said to be 'animal', therefore vulgar, therefore ugly like truth. But this, too, is truth. Clumsy, clumsy paraphrasing. I'm teetering on the edge of dangerous words, words like 'transcend', like 'vital'. Then again, 'vital' is right, subversively, utterly right. It made me think, and I'm still thinking. I'll probably have to read Primo Levi again.

Graffiti I saw on campus today: one of the many anti-Bush slogans that have cropped up seemingly overnight. Rather unimaginative, but oh well. What made me smile, though, was that the 's' in 'Bush' was stylised into a swastika. Equating, naturally, Bush with Hitler. Whoever painted that either believes that, out of respect, the swastika should always stand as a sign for 'Nazi', for hatred, for genocide, for Evil. Or has conveniently forgotten that it's really a symbol that has been around for ages, a symbol belonging to many cultures, a symbol that was appropriated by the Nazis, a symbol that anyone walking about right here in Kolkata will find on anything from coconuts during a pujo to crusty chairs at outdoor functions. That a swastika is not always or everywhere a shorthand for 'Nazi'. There are arguments for both sides, of course, but I just wonder if they knew. If we're protesting against George W. Bush, shouldn't it be a properly indigenous, or indigenously clever, protest? Shouldn't it be more than sad little micchhils that end at the main gate? GEORGE BUSH DOORE HOTO. That walking talking steaming pile of poop? He's not coming near us, comrades, if that's any comfort (best served cold).

Prematurely senile, that's me. Someday I shall have enough decency to be embarrassed by these rants.

With the ritual breaking of glass

2006-02-19T05:41:00.000+05:30

we begin our day.

Well, I freely admit

2006-02-15T19:33:00.000+05:30

that today's L&OA class was tonnes better. Somehow I knew it would be the moment I heard that not-really-whoopsy drum burp 'Like A Rolling Stone' starts with. I don't want to miss tomorrow's Beatles ~~listening party~~ ~~class~~ listening party! but I do have Chaucer&Langland during that period. Sigh. Choices.

Defacing pictures in the newspaper is a highly therapeutic activity. Everyone must try it.

I saw one of the teachers doing something today I cannot get out of my head, will not for years. I couldn't believe my eyes for a moment, but six or seven other witnesses were present and now I'm wishing I had a little camera I could carry around all the time with me. It was. God. It was one of those little miracles of life. Haha.

I may be going

2006-02-15T08:49:00.000+05:30

to College Street today. With my pockets padded. All right, not really. I'm (perhaps naively?) hoping to find exactly what I mean at exactly the price I can afford right now. The last time I was seen rummaging through piles of discarded comic books was so long ago. I'm almost nostalgic.

It occurred to me that some people at uni think I'm a class clown. I don't think anybody knows I can actually 'do' anything except say provocative things (various degrees of 'provocative', here). Which always amuses me. Unlike a few people I have to endure in class, with their constant braying need to assert their smart(arse)ness and general overcompetence, I'm so. Laidback? I work for pleasure, I am pleased by relative obscurity. I am given to understand, however, that this is no way to be, the world being what it is. It remains to be seen if not being to push my way with brute force to the front of the crowd is truly a sign of overall ineptitude. I think it's not so bad yet. Or maybe it is and I'm being optimistic, although I usually don't bother to be.

My mother just came armed with a piece of fruit for to rub on my face. Apparently it's 'good for the complexion'. Oh my sweet mummy, I am happy with my burnt brown skin, and you'll have to put up with worse once the swimming (pool) season starts this summer.

O.

2006-02-14T23:54:00.000+05:30

I am writing.

Donut dishturb.

So we are all to be converted

2006-02-14T09:58:00.000+05:30

to the Church of Dylan?

What can I say except announce that I am rebelling by listening to lots of J-pop. Especially songs by Gackt, who is marvellously androgynous as well a damned good musician.

I thought the Litt&Other Arts classes were going to be the best in this semester, but C&CB take the honours here. The rock lyric classes are a little tiresome, as in: I am already tired of being condescended to because I am one of those people who are not walking-talking encyclopaedae of American folkrock history or whatever. I am already tired of the effortless, empty cynicism, the gross (both senses) assumptions, the general and overwhelming sense that I am considered a loser simply because I have not had the opportunity, the privilege, of growing up with the kind of cultural capital - or hell, the capital - needed to, say, have 'heard things not on the Billboard Top Twenty'.

Anyone who knows me probably also knows how much music I listen to and how varied my tastes are. I can't exactly claim to not be a bit of a music snob myself. But the planets do not align, the spheres do not resound, I do not even bother to speak up in class because I know that even when I'm right I'm wrong.

And I'm tired of the conflicting messages. 'Think for yourself'. Well, thank you sire, I do, and I think, I really think that I do not appreciate having my intelligence no matter how indirectly demeaned by all these little throwaway oh-so-sarcastic comments.

I don't dig Bob Dylan despite the fact that he's a genius? I can deal with that. And I think it'd be good if everyone else could, too. We're not all the same.

I have to listen to Bob Dylan sooner or later? All right. In fact, I am. I like it. But I doubt the subliminal arm-twisting is going to turn me overnight into a Fan. Incidentally, why isn't all this stuff on the DL computer? Instead of retarded pop videos. Whose brilliant idea was it to load that ludicrous Guns and Roses video, by the way? the one where Axl Rose or whatever his name is cavorts around the stage wearing bright red hot pants. Such a straight man, that one. Haha. Too bad he's just a filthy mess.

Also, Simon and Garfunkel fucking suck. If I want sweetness and sensitivity I can play the Beach Boys. But for now I'll listen to ambiguous-looking popstars with lyrics I can't decipher because they're in a different language. Go me.

Notes

2006-01-27T18:10:00.000+05:30

- On becoming addicted to a teevee soap mostly about American teenagers in suburbtopia:
A friend expressed puzzlement over the fact that 'All the women wear *orange* lipstick and even *look* suspiciously orange!' I told her that 'I'm guessing that's why they call it the Orange County.'
I trust that more horrendous jokes have been and will be made.
Really it's about the character of Seth Cohen, played by Adam Brody, that would be the Hair Brody as opposed to the Nose Brody. You have to see him to see the appeal. In any case, he gives good subculture. Comics and emo songs and plastic horses over waterpolo and skeletons in drag anyday, 's what I say.

- On writing poetry again:
No we will not pinch our collective nose and plunge into the brackish depths of pseudosemantics. A poem is a poem is a not what is a poem, savvy? It feels good to finally move out of neurotic essays about Byron's dieting habits and occasional bursts of diaristic, or should I say diarrhoestic, hee hee, prose.

- On hypothetical pets:
A snake would be too expensive. Keeping a dog is not terribly different from raising a human child. Birds do not belong in houses. I am not bored enough to buy a hamster, set it on a wheel and trip out on the trippy circling motions - so far out it's, well, *out*. Etcetera rrrhmmm this leaves two options: a cat or a tortoise. I am temperamentally best suited to cats, but not to the persistent stench of catspiss. A tortoise is delicious (not just in a soup, bless it) but lacks the eminent pettability of feline fur.
In the end I will decide to spend the money on a lavishly illustrated and utterly useless book about watercolours.
The tortoise would be named Don Juan, the cat Staples.

- On comments made and promptly deleted by the commenter:
The very acne of wit.

- On difficult decisions:
C&L? L&C? C&L? L&C? Alas ehui lol zzz...

Angry.

2005-12-21T19:06:00.000+05:30

Five things you, generic you, although of course this comes out of a specific situation, should know about me.

1) You are completely free to look at a piece of art and give the following commentary: Wow. Fuck. Mad. Totally mad. Fuck. Fuck, man. And I? Am equally free to give the following commentary: Haha, ok, groovy eyeballs, I like the gel pen stuff, but objectifying women, borrowing liberally from Dali and CD covers? Yawn.
That's right, you hypocrite, my commentary is as valid as yours. You do not get to complain that I don't 'get it', or say in a condescending manner 'that's what you think'.

2) Art isn't sacred, and I will laugh at you for being overdefensive of your friend (if I'm correct)'s work.

3) Your friend, against whom, despite your apparent opinion, I have nothing.

4) You do not get to be the same person who tries to be sarcastic about my discussing the syllabus and who tells me to 'relax' when I react to your arrogance. You are not entitled to that multitudinousness. You make Walt Whitman cry. That's not wise of you.

5) You and a lot of your peers are stuck in a time warp and it's narrow and symptomatic of this mind-numbingly cool West Bengal college culture scene. I won't say 'grow up', I'll say 'get a fucking move on already'.

--

Ugh. What else. Christmas? Bahumbug. Shoot yourself and pull the other one, brothers and sisters of the revolushun.

I'm a monster.

2005-12-12T21:33:00.000+05:30

The sooner I can adjust to this the better. For everyone around me. Even the ones who don't quite realise.

There's a beautiful layered sound that can be made with three guitars and one piano, a sliding tumbling water sound. Like drinking from a cup of tea and tasting a trace of poison at the back of your throat after you've swallowed.

Maudlin, maudlin, cliche, cliche.

A disaster.

2005-12-02T21:15:00.000+05:30

Oh for a sugar daddy. But I'll stick with my bitter one, because I love him. I'm that noble, sure, but there remains the little problem. How to make money. Not perhaps a great amount or even overnight. I need a steady income of my own. It's impossible to get the books I need(/want) otherwise. I need a job that requires me to think and that pays. They usually call it 'intellectual prostitution'. It sounds cool, see?

Haha, I'm pathetic. And poor. Oh my heart could break.

Take your glasses off, scrunch up your face.

2005-12-01T21:21:00.000+05:30

This evening on campus we saw a (water?)snake on land. Zigzagging softly across our field of vision. In the streetlight it seemed bronze, dark stripes. It slid back into the jheel, and we started talking about snakes.

Or were we talking about snakes when it appeared?

I go through intense periods of loathing for this game.

2005-11-28T22:26:00.000+05:30

Then I sit down to dinner one evening and am sucked inexplicably into the vortex of madness that is twenty-two men plus A BALL plus an audience bursting its collective vein plus assorted field people and trembling managers PLUS MAGICAL ROLLING ADVERTISEMENTS.

That whooshing sound you just heard was my brain. Oh, football.

That whooshing sound is not, as I would in my delusion dare to believe, the sound of a torturously stressful month passing finally by. I will probably be sixty before I can breathe. And then I'll go and ruin the fun by dying. Hah.

While waiting for my (splendid, majestic but all too rare to behold) tutor in the corridor today I was treated to delicious slow sunlight and free music. All right, they were playing Nirvana (I think?) and early Beatles songs, ergo yawn, but sunlight and music. So good.

I have been wonderfully gay for quite a while now. I mean 'gay' in a certain way, of course. I don't mean 'lesbian' or 'stupid' or 'maddeningly, poetically, archaically cheerful'. I do mean 'shamelessly, flammably campy'. It's interesting, because in temperament I am quite the opposite. I don't think I need to stop. Not yet. There's something liberating about a pose, a pose which is deliberately a pose and delights in that blatant deliberation. Poseur pose posy Bosie all roads lead to Wilde...

Everything beyond this B.A. Honours thing

2005-11-24T22:20:00.000+05:30

is pitch black to me. I'm afraid to imagine, afraid to anticipate, afraid to suppose. I'm reasonably certain I don't want to be one of those people whose happiest memories are of bunking college classes, but I have such low selfesteem that I can't even think of anything going my way.
I do know that whatever I choose to do, the world will do its best to break me. And that I'll make it worse for myself by resisting.

--

Now who do you think that sort of kinda hmm maybe slightly perhaps donchathink looks like?

Today while struggling to construct a decent argument

2005-11-23T20:05:00.000+05:30

in a Browning essay (dramatic monologue, what else), I was for a moment overwhelmed by love. For Browning's poetry. I chose to discuss (and again, we shall relax our usual standards about these words) 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'My Last Duchess', but I sneaked looks at 'Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister' and kept splitting my face into silly grins.

Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps--
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)

This Spanish cloistermonk bloke... gr-r-r, so CUTE!

--

Saw a very funny Hungarian artfilm today. I wish I had been allowed to sign up for a Film Studies course. I never get to see films, ever, and shut up, HBO/Star Movies doesn't count. It's unfair, utterly unfair. I can't even buy them, no home video players. And considering my financial situation, very unlikely I ever will.

Yes, that's why I resent it when people around me talk about films.

--

My but JU is an interesting place to be. Not that I didn't know before - having lived on the campus for years - but. Chemistry lab fire yesterday, stupid accident, too. The people who work in the office - I suppose almost everyone is used to things like these, one shakes one's head or shrugs, says, that's life, this is the system, quit whining and suck it up. Except I can't. And I know a few people who can't, either.

The chocolate bomb(s?) in the department loo was less than hilarious. I would like to keep my eardrums, thank you very much.

Be careful what you wish for.

2005-11-22T18:49:00.000+05:30

I split my left big toenail on a table leg this morning. This coming less than a month after the same injury to my right big toenail. But that's not all. In the evening I fell down most ridiculously and skinned my left knee. It was outside the college canteen, there's a little slope and I was too busy blathering to even notice. And tipsy tippy shoes. Fortunately I had just bought some chocolate and fruit juice - I am such a baby. And no, I didn't cry. An old man sitting under one of the trees leaned in gravely and advised me on proper ointments. I remember the red stuff, from the time I had my ears pierced as a child.

Dabbed a bit of Dettol on the area. You must realise I have very few experiences of casual injuries, which every parent obsessed with The Cult of Health believes every youngster has a respectable list of. I don't have a history of fall-down-break-my-leg-so-what-LOL, mostly because my sporting activities have largely been restricted to water. Which, er, hasn't bent my bones. Yet.

Another realisation - I tend to become slightly hysterical when I sustain physical injury. Not really so-what-LOL, it's just strangely exhilarating. But then I'm usually a morbid person.

I wonder if Coleridge had dimples.

2005-11-21T23:48:00.000+05:30

He looks like he would have.

I really must stop doing this.

2005-11-19T12:36:00.000+05:30

Sometimes I think a lot of things would be easier for me if I were less interested in almost everything. Or better at balancing many different interests. Because I want to do everything justice and end up doing justice to absolutely nothing.

The simple and sour example of the moment? The 'Hard Times' business. I don't like his works much, I don't want to spend time on them, I told myself, but I went and got myself fascinated. This tendency (trait? habit? temperament?) would be a source of much joy but for all these real-world limitations. I hate that we get so little time to find out stuff, in the semester system. I hate that I'm an ignoramus (but no use crying over the past, is there). I hate that one day I'll have to choose something to specialise in. I want to know everything, but I don't want to specialise. Which would be... wonderful, except I'm not a genius.

Utterly ridiculous.

--

I watched 'Master and Commander' last night, nursing my frozen right shoulder against the wretchedest pillow in the world. The film brought back all these memories. Haha, nothing interesting, just... being in ninth grade and reading Patrick O'Brian and being a nerd about sailships. And why did that get cut off so easily? Because I couldn't get all the books I wanted. Because I realised I'd never get to actually see a sailship for myself. Because I felt bitter.

Story of my life.

I can say from my (limited) knowledge that casting Paul Bettany as Maturin was the best idea ever. Maturin... think of Gray's Anatomy, except done in watercolours. Paul is like that, too, he is perfect in this role.

I hope they make decent sequels or something. With lots of Aubrey-Maturin story and lots of sailship love.

Move, you dummkopf of a computer maus!

2005-11-19T12:14:00.000+05:30

The phone is dead (the phone has more lives than the average human being, how amazamacating is that?), so I am working on dad's machine. Now, dad's machine is quite odd - the internet connection isn't so slow that it makes me twitch in impatience, but the mouse! *nudges it* *curses*

I got meme-tagged by Srin... let's see if I've got this right...

Seven things I plan to do

Scrounge a little more German, purely for my own satisfaction.
FINISH THIS GODDAMNED ESSAY.
Write poems. A lot of them.
Back exercises, oof.
Stop being embarrassed by myself.
Stop embarrassing other people?...
Two words: Time. Management.

Seven things I can't do

Swim in December, although I'd love to :(
Stop being "so serious".
Stand on my toes (except in water, hahaha).
Cut my hair.
Be feminine.
Eat chocolate without making a mess.
~~Jack Davenport~~.

Seven things I say quite often

"OMG"
"But where are all the pretty gay boys??"
"The problem with this patriarchal society is..."
"Oh god, that is disgusting" [usually follow with something even more disgusting in reply]
"I can't decide, help me decide!"
"Fuck off, it's my decision to make."
"HI KIDS!"

Seven blogs - a) that i read but do not personally know the author of; b) which are not connected with the media; c) which are random discovery blogs

Oi... can I do this one later? When I've read at least seven such blogs? *silly grin*

I tag

Anyone who wants to do it, I guess. :)

Let's just say

2005-11-16T22:29:00.000+05:30

that I have two new quotes for my 'No! S/he did not just say that!' file.

The feesbook remains lost to me. It is gone, it has gone beyond the Sea, to Valinor...

--

It happened again today. I walk around on campus a lot, I walk around in the department corridors a lot, and every five seconds I'm bang in front of a professor. It's usually either ADG or the Head. And I'm usually in the middle of a conversation (with someone else) or a song (to myself!), and I have half a notion I should say 'Good morning' or something polite like that, but all I do is stare like my brain has temporarily vacated my cranium. I'm reasonably sure the Head doesn't notice, he seems to be in a hurry most of the time, but I'm not sure about, for example, ADG. I don't take up extra space or have my foot stuck out inconveniently, but it's... weird. I don't know if I'm supposed to say 'Good morning' (a bit awkward, I can explain why) or WHAT. I don't want to look creepy, either.

Advice? Please?? And if you laugh I'll hunt you down and kick all your teeth out. Hmph.

My feesbook

2005-11-16T08:35:00.000+05:30

is nowhere to be found.

:(

A stageful of ballerinas.

2005-11-15T09:57:00.000+05:30

But it looked like the infantry caught in split-second rewind-replay mode. Those are not arms, those are ... bayonets? That's not a stage, that's the Theatre of War?

What? (Favourite question, no wonder I sound drunk most of the time.)

Whenever I open my mouth, things fall out

2005-11-15T09:14:00.000+05:30

that hurt other people. I really must learn to shut up sometimes. I swear I'm not in love with the sound of my own voice that much.

And I'm listening to German... rap? It's surprisingly palatable. Either I picked a good rapper, or something about the combination of German and xcore rap cancels out the harshness. Or maybe I'm seriously biased now, and finding German as... aesthetically? pleasing as I used to find, say, Portuguese.

But, with the shutting up. Must work on that.

O what?

2005-11-13T22:25:00.000+05:30

I have been singing all day, because this bad cold imbues my voice with a bizarre hoarse erotic quality, and no more fitting tribute to Jeff Buckley could I possibly imagine... Naturally, after doing this all day my voice is now a husk, my throat hacking and burning with the fruit of its labour. If I haven't sung my heart out, I have certainly made an attempt to evict my lungs.

God, what the fuck? Dickens is contagious. I finished 'Hard Times'. It's a good time, in my life, to be an English major. I can't believe my luck. Which will all dissipate by 3 PM tomorrow, of course. Grr.

I doubt if there are many things as pathetic

2005-11-12T07:59:00.000+05:30

as blawging at eight in the morning on a Saturday.

This is going to be a shitty week.

I play breakfast rock (a voice like the snooze button, guitars like scrambled eggs) and reschedule the day around my books. Again.

You know they've done a sloppy job in the costume/makeup department

2005-11-11T19:58:00.000+05:30

when the edges of the pillow are poking at the surface of a woman's pregnant belly. Ahh, bangla serials!

I was disturbed to note that the husband stood around outside the operating room (or 'operation theatre', as they so fancifully call it). 'He should be inside, with his wife. What the hell is he doing?' But I am informed that this is not an embarrassing oversight or personal preference - apparently in India the husband isn't allowed inside.

I don't know if it's true. Or, if it's true, for how many people - just the husband? Are female relatives/friends excluded, too?

If it's true, it's... disgusting. What is it supposed to do, save the poor menfolk from the traumatic vision that is the birth of a child? Butchered bodies, burning buildings, rinse repeat ad infinitum, but childbirth... shudder!

--

Nothing happened today. I didn't 'study' much. Still haven't made much headway with 'Hard Times'. I want to see some Fillum Feshtible movies, but I can't find anyone to go with me. I told myself last year during exams, 'I will next year, I simply must', and this year I can, except again I can't. This fucking stinks.

Outside it was beautiful today.

2005-11-10T22:39:00.000+05:30

One, a square of treeful backyard as seen through the double filters of yellow sheet glass and early-orange sun. Two, the call-and-response of quick feet up slow stairs.

What tiny things.

Gelignite

2005-11-10T07:30:00.000+05:30

is a sexually ambiguous word.

I'm overdosing on tea, beginning to feel ill again.

An eventful life.

2005-11-09T09:15:00.000+05:30

I'm giving Jane Austen a second chance. I made that sound so pompous. Do I have a choice in the matter? Haha. There's something wrong with me, or with Austen: all this talk of 'exquisite development of plot' and 'skilfully built-up suspense' and what-have-you when from the very beginning I was reading with the assurance that Mr Knightley and Emma Woodhouse would hook up. In an Austenian way they are so perfect for each other, and only that marriage could ensure the sort of conclusion to an Austen novel that Austen would have written. What with Emma being too happy and comfortable with her life at home with her father and not wanting to move away, and Mr Knightley being the arrogant, upright, rational creature that he is... I'm surprised to find that it was meant to be some kind of revelation to the reader.

In other news I have a cold.

*hits head against desk* I wish there was something a little more exciting that I could do.

LOL I remembered my password!

2005-11-07T21:28:00.000+05:30

I won't be pedantic and say 'my favourite mezzosoprano!' The fact is, Cecilia Bartoli has long been one of my favourite voices. How much is this connected to my (scattered, shamefully poor) knowledge of opera? To be honest I haven't been keeping up with all the major mezzosopranos, so I don't know with any degree of objectivity who's who these days. In the past couple of years, for example, I've heard some Zajick. That's about it.
I was singing along with her on the Rossini, but after all these years I still haven't figured out whether I'm a contralto or a mezzosop. Or one of those pesky, delicate in-betweens.
Oh well, let's resort to cutting long stories short - all hail Cecilia Bartoli! I hope she forgives my confusing her last name with the olive oil manufacturer, although in my defence I was only nine at the time.

---

Whoever told me today in class that they (not that person, the Powers That Be) are going to start airing 'Coupling' on the telly... will be murdered if I find out it's not true. Look at Jack! I mean, really, look at this bloke. The fact is that if I stare at his mug for too long it looks like an amalgamation of various other celebfaces. Mel Gibson, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs. The last two aren't unpleasant to be reminded of, of course. But!
Thankfully, if I stare for even longer it all goes away and leaves me with a merciful, artful and masterly (artly and masterful?) face that can barely hold itself together for all the British snarkiness. He needs to work more! More more more. Work is life, Jack my lad; besides, you can't seriously want to disappoint all your fangirls by hiding yourself away in those damned sitcoms.

My mother and I

2005-10-23T22:59:00.000+05:30

have been making up a poem in which she kills me and cooks me in a frying pan. In rhyming couplets. We're a weird family.

She's watching Veer-Zaara right now. During the whoa!holdit! taut!emotional!dramatic! scene where the kids hug in front of the girl's parents and fiance and there's DRENCHTASTIC RAIN and semi-ironic background music, it occurred to me that they could have turned this movie into a profoundly sickening cinematic gutpunch. But they had, of course, to go the easy way, with eye candy, song and dance et al. Oh well.

I'm sketching stuff. The rain here has stopped, but I have no reason to believe it won't start up again with a fury by the time I have to go to bed.

2005-10-20T23:05:00.000+05:30

colourcoded collar coda coddle cooler
bluecollar colourcoded
whitecollar
yellowhat
yellow hat mellow hat mellow collar coded cossack cossack blue prussian blue navy blue navel blue
yellowbelly

white

The suspicious urge to fill notebooks

2005-10-17T20:27:00.000+05:30

with meaningless minutiae. And then the (fortunate?) discovery that all my notebooks are pretty, so ineffably pretty, so pretty I feel ashamed to ink a scratch on a single pretty offwhite page. I need a dirty ratty writerly notebook. Only the ego behind the crabbed twists and turns of my handwriting.

I need to write something that's not about these wasted days, about me, or even about my parents.

Parents want a trip.

2005-10-11T17:20:00.000+05:30

Haha, not that kind of trip.

For the whole family. Somewhere safe and boring. They're thinking of Digha. Three or four days right after the Pujos. I'm showing my lack of enthusiasm, but I don't know if they notice. And if they do notice there's bound to be disappointment and anger. The truth is I don't feel like going anywhere with my parents. Not because, as they think, as indeed the reason usually is, they're embarrassing, but because going anywhere with them makes me worry. I don't feel invincible on account of my youth but still, I doubt I can enjoy myself in such a situation. All the talk about safety makes me roll my eyes, do they think they can put up much of a fight?

Also the fact is I'm not in a mood to appreciate the beauty of Nature right now, I want to finish five books in two weeks, I don't want to miss swimming, I don't want silly fears of bus accidents, earthquakes and tsunamis creeping under the anonymity of hotel bedroom covers with me.

I don't even have a camera to take pictures with. At the very best I might be inspired to write, but it's been a while since I thought of my writing as something that required inspiration. No balmy sea breeze for me, tea on time by my greasy sad pillow and warm October sun is quite enough...

I'm bored.

2005-10-09T19:00:00.000+05:30

Maybe if I had any interests beyond litt and music. But they turn out to be really the least expensive.

I hate earthquakes. I mean, I have something against them personally.

En noo ee.

Ge n e rat ion

2005-10-09T03:02:00.000+05:30

Gott weiss ich will kein Engel sein

I believe there is a line between not being nice and being an arsehole. I also believe that this distinction is not as wildly arbitrary as one would think, that people who think treating other people like shite is somehow cool are ridiculous.

And I am quite certain that I stoop to downright arseholery very rarely.

Many wry congratulations to my parents for making me doubt even that.

My ears have always been into creative hearing.

2005-10-08T10:20:00.000+05:30

When I was three I went to a place called Egg Cartons that turned out to have been Lake Gardens.

And right now I just misheard a song lyric as 'We were buried under cherry trees'. Still kinda romantic, but, eh, I guess I can live with the permanent earfungus colony. It amuses me, unlike a lot of people around me.

Must. Not. Get. Emo.