The cruelest month...

Songs/videos in bad taste - almost every hip-hop song made between 2002 and 2007.

Songs about bad taste -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3J0F_Dgq9I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj9swNR5-lY


Can you tell the difference?

(Warning: Not for easily shocked parents. Please avert your eyes if under-aged or born before 1960).

The mud flowers of dialect...

Two poems by Seamus Heaney...

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens

Casualty

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman's quick eye
And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.

II


It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'

III


I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

Many things...

Been a long couple of weeks, and I haven't been able to even look at my blog, let alone actually contribute to it. Indeed, as I write this, I'm about eight hours short of my week's quota of sleep, with at least six of those eight coming from yesterday's abortive attempt to 'go to bed'. This is my twenty-sixth consecutive hour of wakefulness.

My rushed state of being did not prevent me from 'observing' my birthday. The verb is exact -- I watched my birthday pass by from a safe distance, as if it carried with it something catching. It was anticlimactic, April 4th -- I didn't do anything but run non-linear simulations as people called me from various longitudes (to wish me, of course).

Not that I regret it. Birthdays are inevitable, and hence not special. What deserves to be celebrated is strength of character, or the prevalence of sense in a world that is increasingly turning away from it. No, really. I'm convinced that we're headed towards societal self-destruction.

Not for the obvious reasons. I will not quote the proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example, or the...


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(A week later)

I'm not making excuses again, and indeed there can be nothing that excuses the inability to finish writing a blog post. I'm not writing Edwin Drood, for God's sake.

Anyway, I can't remember the reasoning that led to my meditations on the nature of society in the previous paragraphs, so I'm going to have to let it go. I will admit to feeling a little irked at this sort of self-imposed interruption -- I'm not used to having my nascent thoughts being put out by "the diurnal dynamics of student life".

And so I will turn to the Virginia Tech massacre, which has disturbed me beyond reason. In the past couple of days I've read everything I can about it, and I now know more about gun laws in the southern United States (and specifically Texas) than the average international student. I have also gotten my hands on specific 'literature' written by the perpetrator in question, and examined it at length, if a little breathlessly.

A few thoughts on the latter -- apparently Cho Seung-hoi, the gunman, was an undergraduate student in English, and had made a few attempts over the years to 'write' -- as of course, literature students must. His writings will be examined by millions nationwide, in the feeble hope of deconstructing this man piece by piece; the people who will read will be primarily those who would like to know what kind of a person he was,and what his motives were. I will not do the same thing.

Instead, I will examine here his writing, which is feeble at best, and not worthy of being pronounced as even an attempt at literature. It is shoddy, ungrammatical in many places, and is fraught with spelling errors.

Consider this line, for example, on the very first page of his 'play', Richard McBeef --

"Come on John. We need to have man-to-man talk."

No prizes for spotting the error. On the next page, we have this paragon of grammatical excellence --

"Richard gently rests him hand on John's lap."

and this--

"...you can get into my mom's pant!"

These are not the only transgressions. The entire play smacks of a lack of attention-span, and consists of little else but swearing and physical violence. There is no attempt at establishing depth of character, no endeavor to create even the tiniest smidgen of context. It is very badly written prose.

My point is this -- if this guy was no good at English, his major, then why was he allowed to continue? Why even put him under the impression that he was worthy of obtaining a degree from Virginia Tech (of all places)? Why didn't they just expel him for incompetence?

These are especially relevant questions. If they had in fact fired him, or flunked him out, then maybe he wouldn't have shot so many people. Maybe he would have just gone back to his home in west Virginia, sulked for a little while, and then become an engineer or something. By allowing incompetence to continue with impunity, the professors at the department of English at Virginia Tech have to take at least partial responsibility for his presence on campus, and (by proxy) his behavior.


But let us not "play the blame-game" here. I bet that there is no one reading this who has not, at one time or another, tolerated to a similar extent incompetence in himself, or in others. The former especially. How many times have you cut yourself a large portion of slack? How many times have you made excuses for yourself, your behavior, your performance? How many times have you told yourself that "it's alright"?

I thought so. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's our way of dealing with failure. Maybe it's our way of telling ourselves that we matter in this world. But at the same time, there should be a conscious effort at improvement, a concerted attempt at catharsis, a considered stab at betterment. Otherwise we become hollow shells caught in the nowhere between self-deprecation and hope, abject and imperfect representations of our true selves. And maybe when these things happen,maybe when we have within us only a mere shadow of ourselves, going on a shooting spree will begin to seem more...interesting.

Let us, then, for the sake of all the people around us, expect nothing but the best from ourselves. Let us hold our heads high and walk with an urgency that reflects our desire to excel, to rectify, to reach the truth. Let us finish our days as we start them -- with a smile on our faces, and the knowledge that we have come a long way, but still have a long way to go.

Let us uplift ourselves.