Brain Dead

It has been a while. I have been trying to finish up the semester by writing two papers that were kicking my butt. I turned them in on Friday and then was out of town over the weekend.

I don’t really have an April summary other than: Waiting for Godot, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pedro Páramo, The God of Small Things. Those were the books I was writing my papers on. If you want to read a great contemporary novel, read The God of Small Things, by Arundahti Roy. I think it is amazing. It was the last book we read in my global lit class. It was our reward for getting through the semester. I am no good at doing reviews, so, if you can, just trust me. I think Reena Jana from Salon.com said it best when she said Arundahti Roy is “butt-kicking good.” If you are into literature, read it. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t take suggestions just because they aren't your suggestions, then, if we see each other or you post a comment here, you don’t have to admit to hearing about it through me. You can lie and rub it in my face and say you were way ahead of me, and that you read it ten years ago if you want. I don’t care. Just read it.

I can’t think of anything else to say. School starts again a week from today. I think my brain really is taking this week off.

Johnny X's February

“What is with the stop in the “stop, drop, and roll” bit? When I catch fire, the last thing I’m going to be doing is stopping.”

“Good point.”

“I tell you what, I am going to go ahead and skip the stop part, and just go straight to roll. Drop and roll, man. Or really, just roll. I mean, if you are going to roll, isn’t the dropping implied? You have to drop to roll, and I believe everyone can do the drop math when needing a roll. It’s a good thing we’ve never caught on fire before this.”

“It seems like I heard someone else talking about that the other day.”

“Probably."

“Did you watch Flight of the Conchords?”

“No, I don’t like it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, it’s not like I don’t like it, I guess, or would like it, rather, but I just get so sick of listening to everybody talk about it that it makes me angry. Yes yes, you like it, everyone likes it, now shut-up about it.”

“You would like it.”

“Probably.”

“Well, I haven’t watched the new one yet, you should come over and see it. I know you’ll like it.”

“No.”

“Why do you not like stuff on the count of other people liking it?”

“It’s not that. It’s the fact that I could probably quote the entire series and I have never even seen an episode. I liked Napoleon Dynamite and Borat when we first saw them, but then all I heard for the next six months were awful impressions everywhere I went. There is a girl at my work who can’t even talk normal now because all she did was do Napoleon Dynamite impressions for a year, and now her voice is stuck, like how you weren’t supposed to make ugly faces when you were little because they would eventually just set.”

“Well, you’re missing out.”

“I’m sure I am. You know what I want to do? I want to find a good barber.”

“A barber?”

“Yeah. Go in, get a cut and a shave, and then he takes the razor to the back of the neck and gives you that powder stuff. I have only been to a barber once, and it was awesome.”

“Hey, that kid kind of looks like that Diggable Dave guy?”

“Who?”

“That guy. Right there.”

“Oh. I never met Diggable Dave.”

“You don’t remember Diggable Dave?”

“I remember him, I just never met him. That was before I got home.”

“When Rob and I first got home, we went to his house to play Ping-Pong. I was pretty confident going in, but then I noticed he had to change into his Ping-Pong shoes; I then refused to play.”

###

Favorite Onion News Ticker: MARINE BIOLOGISTS DISAPPOINTED AFTER DISCOVERY THAT THE NEW SPECIES OF 8-ARMED DOLPHINS IS JUST AN OCTUPUS


February YouTube Vid: You know when he falls apart/he listens in the dark/to the records turn/I'll never learn

Favorite Piece of Literature: She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufference of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburts of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on. - Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Songbook

I recently finished reading Songbook by Nick Hornby. It is a collection of essays he wrote about songs he loves, or “…a kind of prose equivalent of the mix-tape,” and like when you discover a great song or movie and want to tell all your friends about it, I figured I would share a few of my favorite parts of the book.

“…if I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I’d choose Zeppelins’s “Heartbreaker,” from Led Zeppelin II. I’m not sure that me going “DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA DANG” would enlighten him especially, but I’d feel that I’d done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks.”

“A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I have loved over the previous months, and every time I finish one I can’t believe there’ll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can’t wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you’ve got a life worth living.”

“There is no doubt, though, that lyrics are the literate pop fan’s Achilles heel. We have all lived through the shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic belief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the T.V. “What does that mean, then?” my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. “ ‘Get it on / Bang a gong’ How long did it take him to thinks of that, do you reckon?” And the correct answer—“Two seconds, and it doesn’t matter”—is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shutup, while inside you’re hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.”