I’m not what I was last summer, not who I was in the spring!

[Wild Young Hearts - The Noisettes]

I’m snatching a few minutes’ reprieve from work – I’m snowed under and I’ve got more deadlines to meet than I care to count – to write. I’ve been sitting with engineering and computer science textbooks for about 36 hours now, so forgive me if I sound less than scintillating (or happen to throw in a few computer sciency metaphors!). A colleague’s mention of the name of an author whose work I have never read got me thinking – do you judge the people you meet by what they read? Of course you do. I will happily own up to looking down my nose at people who read chick-lit, or the trashy new 100-rupee novels that seem to be what all the publishing houses in India are churning out by the dozen, these days. I’ve read extracts from these novels and looked at their liberally-punctuated titles and garish covers…and I’m not particularly itching to get my hands on them (except when I need a good laugh).

But then again, what counts as good reading? Should we care how our literary tastes might hold up to scrutiny? I wish I didn’t, but I know I do. I have friends who’ve read their way through post-1900s literature, in whose exalted company I feel dowdy and old-fashioned, as I carry around my George Eliots and Thomas Hardys (let’s not even get into Jane Austen and what she stands for, these days!). I have read barely any Rushdie, some Marquez, a respectable amount of Ishiguro, a smidgen of Ian McEwan, one novel by Atwood and no Salinger, Amis, Kundera, Murakami, Lessing, Chabon, Franzen, Wallace… well the list of the big-name authors whom I ought to have read could go on and on and on. I am annoyed, sometimes, by the assumption that a knowledge of and love for the works of these authors is something no contemporary, (self-professed) intellectual could go without.

There you have it then. This rant has been made on this blog many times, and from many angles, but the long and short of it is that I don’t like contemporary writing (by and large) and I don’t think I ever will. But what I resent is being made to feel guilty, inadequate and short-sighted for having the temerity to say so. Grr.

But this comes back to a debate that’s raged for years and years among that most audacious and verbose breed, literary critics. Should literature be didactic? Should it be enjoyable? Is a good read really one that is bad for you? Should literature mirror life, or push the boundaries of expression or teach us the right values and morals? These questions can be posed, and the answers to them can be argued about, but I doubt we can get away from the fact that everybody looks for different things when they read. Some people seek answers, and some seek questions; some want the comforting thread of a narrative that starts at the beginning and ends at the end…you get the idea.

So is there really a point in caring?

No?

Don’t I know it!

beautiful men.

So, for a very long time, I was hopelessly, slavishly dedicated to adoring Orlando Bloom in his avatar of Legolas. I mean, just look at him:

So I plastered his beautiful face on my walls, on my computer screen, into my notebooks and dinned his virtues into the heads of my friends till they were sick of me and my obsession for this beautiful man (who, they said, looked rather effeminate).

Anyway, the point of this blogpost is to introduce to you my new Orlando Bloom! Of course, I’m older and wiser and less of an idiot now, so I’m not going to be plastering this face anywhere (except here) and I’m certainly not pledging him eternal devotion, but again, just look at him:

This is the actor Simon Woods, who played Octavian on the HBO series Rome. Also, as I found out from a quick Google search, he was Mr Bingley in the recent Pride and Prejudice adaptation (a much better Mr Bingley than the one in the BBC adaptation!).

Then again, both these men only look breath-takingly gorgeous when they’re in period attire. Something’s got to be said for past eras’ sense of clothing. Jeans and T-shirts just don’t work the same way!

Twilight: a rant.

Since I’m bored out of my mind and I’ve been reading random articles on The Guardian website in an attempt to put my boredom to use, here’s my offering: a rant on Twilight.

I’m the kind of reader who needs to know what happens next. Give me the hint of a plot, and I’ll be hooked. Even if your characterisation is thinner-than-cardboard, your dialogues unintentionally provoke laughter, your story lacks depth – I’ll still go out and buy the next instalment of your sorry attempt at fiction because I need to know what happens next.

So, when I borrowed Twilight off a friend in a post-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows fit of depression, I was hooked. Despite a whiny, uninspiring and frankly insipid protagonist, and a male character whose major flaws seem to be everything a masochistic young woman with her head in the clouds mistakenly thinks she wants, I persevered, through the interminable rainy days in Forks spent listening to Bella whine and pine over her sparkly object of desire.

They’re ridiculous books, that’s easy enough to see. That they’ve even been published, when I’ve read fanfiction that’s much better, is shocking to me. I might as well try to sell any of my starry-eyed attempts at fictionalising my own naive teenage dreams of finding a young, aristocratic Englishman with an impeccable sense of social finesse by day and a distinctly domineering bedside manner by night, who would make me feel both loved and protected even while appreciating my independent spirit. That my shallowly disguised fantasy would make the bestseller list, I don’t doubt.

A lot of writing is about fictional wish-fulfilment, I think. Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice are the immediate examples that come to mind – but what saved those books was that they weren’t simply about wish-fulfilment. What’s more, while we might think of Darcy and Rochester as idealised models of manliness in this depraved century (and I don’t blame anyone who does. Men seem to have grown stupider, crasser and infinitely less discreet about both) I highly doubt they were seen as such in their own centuries. Not before they evolved through the narrative’s progress.

And that’s only one of the many things lacking in the Twilight books: Edward is too perfect and of course, can’t go either forward or back from that, Bella starts off whiny and stays whiny, Jacob begins confused and marginalized, and stays confused and marginalized (and creepily in love with a toddler). I don’t remember any of the other characters enough to comment on their lack of growth – a flaw in itself, I’d say.

Perhaps that’s why Twilight doesn’t foster love in those who read it – there isn’t a world to be entered into, there aren’t people to be loved. There is simply an obsessive, slavish addiction to the need to know what happens next.

only thing I ever could need, only one good thing worth trying to be

[Bottle it up - Sara Bareilles]

I have a beautiful red Dell laptop and his name is Dmitri. He’s a reformed communist, and having seen the error of his ways, is now my devoted slave.

What woman in the world doesn’t fantasise about being the bearer of Light, being the Florence Nightingale to a disgruntled soldier whose muddy war-wounds you would lovingly wash away; whose bitter temper and existential angst you wouldn’t soothe into witty conversation and adoring devotion to yourself? Oh go on, admit it – reforming a bad boy is your dream, your passport to being the tamer of the bull, or, if we’re going the way of pop-culture, to be the star of your very own story of redemptive love a la ‘A Walk To Remember’?

Despite being 21, and thus worldly-wise and wary of such deceptively idyllic romantic narratives, I can’t shake off the martyr complex. I’d like nothing more than to be someone’s saviour. As utterly ridiculous as it sounds, this is one battle where my passions outweigh my understanding, as Edmund Burke would have seen it.

Anyway, this is an utterly pointless blogpost written solely in order to facilitate my escape from wrestling with the sublime and all those dratted French theorists who wrote about it just so that they could make my life hell. For that sole purpose, yes.

GAH.

the dream was just the same

[Romeo and Juliet - Dire Straits]

I have favourite songs for specific moods. Yes, my subconscious suffers from a sad lack of innovation in the kind of moods it decides to be in: there’s angry, angsty/wistful/self-pitying/whiny, ecstatic, ridiculous, obsessive and resentful. Oh, there’s also temporary insanity tending towards social inappropriateness. And, err, that’s about it, I think.

‘Romeo and Juliet’ is my favourite song to listen to when I’m thinking about “love” [I can't think of it without mental inverted commas around the word]

Love is stupid, really. This is non-filial, non-platonic love, by the way. Yeah so, it’s stupid. All that talk of sacrifice and selflessness? Bollocks. I’m not sacrificing anything for some wretched human being who could walk out of my life at any moment on the flimsiest of excuses (“I just don’t feel the spark anymore!” I’ve found someone else!” “I’m sorry, I just don’t think this is going to work out”) and leave me feeling like a prize idiot for having proudly displayed him like the banner of my life’s achievement.

Yuck, I say. The very yuckiest of yuckness.

Grow a spine, for pity’s sake, and do what you want to do. In the end, the only person to blame if you fail is yourself.