eek

Reading an article in The New Yorker some years ago, I came across this definition of sophistication:

A sophisticated person is “knowing, a trifle world-weary, prone to self-consciousness and irony, scornful of conventional wisdom or morality, resistant to enthusiasm or wholehearted commitment of any kind, and incapable of being shocked.”

I was appalled then, and I’m still appalled now. I’d much rather be considered unsophisticated than be any of those things. It occurred to me recently though, when my boss asked me about writing a team blog, that most intelligent people still aim to project themselves as sophisticated in precisely the way outlined above. I told him I’d be happy to blog, but I gave him fair warning that I would probably not be witty, that I couldn’t write if I had to take a tone that mixed mockery, self-referential irony and flippancy.

I’ve got to admit, the more I come across people who exhibit the qualities on that list in the attempt to portray themselves as sophisticated and possessed of a superior understanding of the world and its vagaries, the more I find myself unable to muster the energy for social interaction. I wonder, when did we become a world where earnestness, unchecked enthusiasm and wonder were grounds for mockery?

Perhaps, if our generation was the one whose clapping hands were needed to bring Peter Pan back to life, there would be no miracle.

Also, just because this question occurred to me last night and I can’t for the life of me think why they would do it: why do football players take their shirts off when they’re happy? Not that I’m complaining one bit. But it just seems a bit odd that that’s the first thing they’d do.

you’ve got to soldier on

Solitude may just be my natural state.

A man who is ‘a university in himself to me’. Yes, that’s what I want. Someone who makes apathy and silence impossible.

…what a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle!

It’s Saturday night. I’m at home, recovering from a recent bout of ill-health.

This is one of those days when happiness is simplicity itself. I’m re-reading the Anne of Green Gables series (a great favourite with my fourteen-year-old self), listening to the soundtrack of Beauty and the Beast and feeling like the luckiest person alive. It struck me earlier today that it would be great fun to be married to someone called Mark. You could make lots of punny encouraging remarks, like “Go on, make a Mark on them today!” (when he has a big presentation due) or “Mark my words, you’ll be a force to reckon with” (when he has a particularly difficult meeting). Of course, he’d have to be a Mark with a sense of humour to appreciate them, but why anybody would want to marry someone without a sense of humour is beyond me.

When I was watching Fever Pitch (this movie about an obsessive fan of Arsenal and the highs and lows of being a maniacal supporter of a football club), the main character made a remark about how being a fan of a football club automatically makes you a part of a very large family. Being a “fan” of the Lord of the Rings (the word fan is in quotes because I think it’s too superficial to describe what I feel for Middle-Earth) makes me feel like I’m part of a very large group of kindred spirits.

For example, I posted on a message-board when I was working on my dissertation (over at theonering.net) and so many lovely people volunteered their knowledge and opinions on what I was writing about. It helped me to have discussions with people who really knew the books and could give my thoughts an entirely different direction. I posted recently to thank them for their help and to let them know that I received a distinction mark on my dissertation. And people replied! To congratulate me and thank me for bringing them such an interesting topic for discussion. It was all extremely sweet.

I cannot imagine not having one thing (among many others) that I love above all mortal beings. It’s a wholly different kind of love than it is possible to feel for human beings. To love something so purely and completely, with all your heart and soul, is surely life-changing. I know I speak about this far too often in the context of Tolkien’s work, but there are so many other things I love with a similar (if not equal) intensity. Victorian literature, for one. Old places. Graveyards. And if I didn’t have my love for these things, I wouldn’t be me. Is it possible that there are people in this world who don’t have “things” (for lack of a better way to describe them)? It would be dreary, I think, not to love something so much that it has the power to move you to absolute joy.

Then again, people feel differently. Some people feel in the moment, and forget all about it afterwards. Some feel very little, and some feel too much. It took me a long time to understand that people didn’t always feel things in the way that I did. I still don’t fully appreciate the fact, I think. Still, as much as I envy people who are less intense and more cursory with their feeling, I could never give up feeling the way I do.

On that note, good night!

there’s a drumming noise inside my head and it starts when you’re around

[Drumming Song - Florence and the Machine]

Someone recently asked me to recommend a book to them, and I found myself stumped. I feel like I’ve been getting progressively more selective about the sort of emotional universe evoked by a book than I ever was before. I heartily dislike (and avoid) books which drown in self-conscious experimentation and delve into the stormy waters of the inner self. I do enough delving and drowning by myself, and cannot bring myself to read about the emotional acrobatics of a character whose chief characteristics are irritatingly kitschy and charmingly off-beat (not). Yes, we are all sad, lonely human beings; our world is steeped in economic, social, moral and ethical dilemmas – but I know all this already. I think about it enough, I see it happening to myself and the people I know, and I cannot, I simply cannot read about it because it would confirm my fears that life is merely a random progression of events with no purpose whatsoever.

What I want, when I read, is story.

I want that comforting thread of narrative which moves from exposition to denouement; I want to be drawn into a life, to leave mine behind and become one with someone made only of words and the images in my head; I want my heart to race with apprehension or terror, I want to cry because a sentence touches me, simply because of how transiently beautiful it is; and I want to emerge from the experience as a different person. I firmly believe that books change lives. The right book, at the right time, could change you irrevocably. And that power awes me.

Which is why I find myself growing evermore impatient with the petty labels, and categories, and hierarchies that literature is riddled with. I am always painfully aware that I find the unfashionable riveting. I whole-heartedly detest some of the most celebrated writers in the world, and I’m shockingly traditional when it comes to how I like my stories presented to me. But besides my own personal prejudices, I find it supremely ridiculous that people read books they don’t understand or dislike simply because of their social capital.

A good book, to me, is something that has the power to grip you, to tear you apart, to put you back together, to challenge everything you ever thought about the world, to confirm your opinions, to teach you things you never thought to know, to fill the gaps in your knowledge of things you thought you knew, to comfort you, to unsettle you, to take you away and to bring you back again. I don’t know how to explain better, without resorting to the sort of hyperbolic and verbose rubbish that passes for literature so often today, but perhaps that’s merely a reflection of how difficult it is to express the sentiments of today with the words we have.

That, however, is a whole other blogpost.

silliness on a soporific saturday

So, I’ve been coming across things that make me giggle uncontrollably. And I’ve been finding these things in the unlikeliest places i.e., textbooks on computer science, engineering and such. Here they are, along with what I think they could really be saying…

1. Handling Mouse Events : An anti-stress handbook for neurotic housewives in a mice-infested town?

2. Describe and classify three types of intruder behaviour patterns: A question on an exam for security-system developers?

3. In general terms, how does a worm propagate?: A question for students enquiring into the reproductive capabilities of worms?

4. Suggest pros and cons for fat client and thin client strategies: Clearly, businesses someday will be very specific about how they target consumer groups.

5. Get rid of the old clunker! A slogan on a poster that might be found in a country that really doesn’t like old people.

What a pity poor, struggling humanities students like myself are missing out on so much wisdom!

Oh P.S: I absolutely LOVE being paid to do precisely the things I love best. The last two weeks have been pretty damn awesome.