Monday, July 13, 2009
The Concept of Stark, Primera Espada
I can be too amused with coincidences, even thrilled by it in more cases I can count. To speed things a bit, I’m reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, and though I may not be in the right authority to decide whether it’s made of something I might wanna call shit, I still am a consumer who’s entitled to designate thoughts on it. To start with, there’s too much emphasis on the enigma it aims to convey that, apart from labeling it something it’s not supposed to be, I’m beginning to imagine the book’s physical condition going under severe maltreatment. This doesn’t exactly bode trash bin and most certainly doesn’t mean my mind has ceased to care about where the story is leading my imagination to. But, criticisms aside, the focus of the story is this man who fancies himself a wolf of the Steppes (don’t really know what this is). The essence centers on this man who has a dual personality, the kind of which stands quite apart from schizophrenia or insanity. From what I understand, he has two beings living inside him; one’s a man and the other a wolf. Stark is composed of two individuals, as what’s been revealed in one chapter. Now, the wolf aspect of the man is savage, ruthless, and animal-like and often stands in conflict against his human side. Stark’s release form is a wolf-man who argues incessantly with Lilineth, his other half. The human within the man is subdued, is resigned to constant contemplation, and delights in his spiritual freedom. Stark hates to move around, is lazy, and reluctant to take orders. Lastly, Stark is supposed to represent an aspect of death, which is loneliness. Harry, the Steppenwolf, suffers from this sadness whose origin is yet to be revealed in full scale. Further on, this lonesomeness is being emphasized in the book in a manner that nothing more could be conceived of the man than the fact that he’s lonely as shit. Well, this is just a predilection; I’m not so far along it anyway.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
There can be no other way to start this in a less lame way than saying, I hate Twilight for countless valid reasons, but that’s just how it goes. I believe I already posted something prior to this which very much expresses, in candid terms in fact, why I find the entire saga lamer than any shit I can, or can’t, endure. I’m going back to this goddamn issue because one of my colleagues has promptly accused me of having ungrounded hatred towards the goddamn novel. For one thing, it’s a fucking insult to my fucking brain---or anyone’s for that fucking matter, and, for another, it’s ugly as it is and nothing else. And then shooting out of nowhere are shit like, ‘don’t like, don’t read’; ‘if ya didn’t like it, then why did ya read it?’; and all other bimbo-like arguments you’ll tire of answering. The fact is, I read it in so complete an absence of any strong expectation, negative or positive. I was thinking it would be linear, the sort of stuff that wouldn’t require REAL THINKING, shallow--in a manner of speaking. Twilight is none of these things. Twilight defies ugliness as I’ve always known it. It’s even difficult for me to consider it or relate it to any form of literature. I reckon garbage disposal instructions yield more sense than the saga does. As this post won’t lend any clearance or justification to what I think about Twilight, it would be a good point to enumerate here the things I find repulsive in the shit of a saga by Stephenie Meyer, who is a cow. So buckle up because here goes the bomb:
1. It is shallow. The protagonist doesn’t get to experience serious agony that might prove she can traverse past something worthy of putting into paper. There is practically no strife, therefore decay persists in the plotline, which would especially mean ‘boring’ wouldn’t even cut it. DECAY.
2. The conflict and resolution don’t represent anything except this ridiculous contrivance of events which would be absurd even in fiction and fantasy COMBINED (and throw in delusion while you‘re at it). Additionally, convenience is a good thing, but overdoing it is another, as in the cases of how every mess is solved and how the ‘vampires’ here turn out to be UNBURDENED by whatever afflictions real vampires are supposed to suffer--to fucking start with, they should have those. Honestly, one has to wonder why there is no curse involved in their plight which doesn’t only disrupt the balance of whatever order stories have to comply with but also redefines predictability in the most extreme fashion . As a rule, there has to be a more or less equivalent trade to anything, am I right or someone else is wrong?
3. It has no significance in all aspects of literature. Frankly, a 12-year old fanfiction writer could be ten miracles short of coming up with cheesiness of this sort. I’m more inclined to think twelve-year olds who wet their pants over Zac Efron would be too embarrassed to publish their sick fantasies. After all, being a twelve-year old renders one too young to spread harmful shit.
4. It doesn’t convey any special message that you could extract a shit from to apply in real life.
5. The characters are so one-dimensional. For instance, Bella and Edward have no identities outside being in love with each other.
6. The turn of events involves the least of difficulty for the heroine that she might as well have walked into candyland and lived happily ever fucking after. Again, convenience can only be too fucking abundant.
7. The delivery is so amateurish you could actually and easily mistake the texts for a macaroni painting done by your four-year old sister. For the most part, it’s pretty hard to imagine it as something apart from a parody of some teeny bopping crap you’ve encountered elsewhere, except that this time, it's ten times more abysmal. And when I started to thrust it in my head that Meyer was being absolutely sincere about her works, well, I could just make out with Vicky Pollard.
8. It’s a complete and utter pile of shit.
9. The author is a goddamn cow.
10. Fuck this, really.
Now, I don’t wanna hear shit like, ‘Some books are meant to be read only for the story. Some don’t necessarily have to drop moral lessons and promote the good…’ because I’ll have to ask you how in fucking hell do you separate the STORY from the MESSAGE of the book, and then I’ll be convinced that only a moron says shit like that. And I don’t talk to morons. Take in mind that every little fucking thing on this planet yields an opinion, otherwise it wouldn’t deserve to be given any meaning at all. Meaning, as it is, can be identified by classifying and generalizing the fucking object as opposed or according to what you fucking observe, with a considerable assistance from the material world and one‘s personal experiences. Do you fucking understand? Going back, you either get to designate the effing purpose of the shit and find the laws of its being or spot the goals towards which it moves. Thus, in saying Twilight sucks harder than a hoe, I am actually expressing in words what I think it aims to send forth, its inward significance, which in Twilight’s particular case is to insult people’s intelligence altogether. If that’s not it, then you go ahead and tell me. In plainer terms, reading a book solely for the purpose of knowing what it’s about WITHOUT any concern other than that and without afterthoughts and dependency to what people might wanna call reaction is entirely impossible.
disclaimer: some analogies/philosophies here i got from plato, aristotle and heraclitus, and kant, in some ways, i believe.
Friday, July 10, 2009
That’s right, I ain’t too happy about it; pissed in fact. For someone who’s been following the series for 13 years, I could say with good reasons that Archie Andrews is proposing to the wrong woman. Perhaps this has been etched in stone for donkey years now, considering how he has always favored Veronica Lodge over Betty Cooper in more occasions than he’s done the reverse, but I always took comfort in this belief that this sort of long-running love triangle wouldn’t, for the life of it, meet its end. Apparently, the case is otherwise. The matter is closed, so why don’t we lay the argument to its final abode, the oh so lovely sweet conclusion.
Yeah, right.
Truth is, I was never a Betty fan and the romance between her and the carrot-top was never something I could get ideas from, either in the sense of real-world application or fiction-writing activities. And, also, the girl has always seemed to me the perfect embodiment of a Mary Sue girl-next-door, whom the gods have and will always favor, the sort of character who gets to win in the end in spite of the little misfortunes along the way. She’s a Mary Sue, for crying out loud. More than being the teacher’s pet and neighborhood crush, however, there’s this other particular thing she represents; the ideal woman from whom any man could make a perfect married life-- not just in certain measures but in all. I know she’s seventeen and hardly eligible to take on responsibilities akin to that but, maybe OR for sure, that’s what she’s meant to become in the years to follow.
And now Archie really proposes to Veronica, makes jaws drop around the globe, and ultimately breaks a heart whose owner he could only care too much about. The issue will be out soon, this coming 19th. While everything remains unsettled until the digest hits the shelves, the fact shall remain that he’s gotten down on his knees, arms drawn, a lovely ring upon his palm, to ask a hand for marriage. The finality of it all is to upset people by the thousands. Yeah, this can be just this huge leap in one issue, where the course of the story is given the best thrill it could potentially provide only to go back to square one where the unending love triangle persists among all things else. Maybe some screw-up would turn up in the last minute, making Archie revert his decision. I wouldn’t know. This has to yield an opinion from me, naturally.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist on DVD, all 51 episodes of it. what's uncool is, i turned on the TV today and caught Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood on cinemax. the effect on me rather tilts on my emotional side, so to speak, perhaps due to the fact that i'm still in the process of recovery from, er, the conclusion. embarassing as it is, i'm more inclined to dwell on the afterthoughts it left when the epilogue started rolling down the screen, along with the credits. i'm pretty satisfied with the entire message of the series, notwithstanding its deficiency on its focus on other matters. it just leaves too much room for sequels, or anything that might put everyhing to a close. but maybe not knowing would lend it the novelty it's aiming for in the first place. well, just maybe.
that aside, i left Tennessee Williams' Three Plays (Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rose Tattoo, The Night of the Iguana) in our place in antipolo. i wouldn't mind half as much if i were only halfway through it, no. problem is, i only have 50 pages more to go.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
if i had wanted to read shit from catechisms, i would've unearthed the stupid textbooks i had in grade school. forgive me, but this has gone juvenile enough to subtract eighteen years from my age. believe me, i wouldn't mind half as much if the whole train of long-winding, pointless discourse offered anything more than the shit i could dig from some cheap children’s bible from the stands. I expected something of value, anything that might hold a remote connection in the things I agree with and am interested in. instead, James Joyce had to be a total fucker who liked to boggle the shit out of me by writing the worst pointlessness imaginable. This rambling doesn’t even have a shit to do with the fact that I’m pretty much the last person you’d suspect of going to church on her own accord, much less with disinterest or indifference toward religion. It, in the foremost, roots from his insubstantial delivery. I ain’t saying I could do better but it would do me good if I knew how the hell did the author manage to come up with 101 variations or paraphrases of “Hell is a fucking eternal fire from which you can’t fucking escape” and squeeze them in one fucking, awful chapter. Repetitive doesn‘t even cut it, man. Like hell, I got the whole message faster than a fucking 3-year old, anyone would, but it seemed to me like the fucktard of the fucking novel couldn’t rest content with all the friggin’ mind-numbing redundancy it’s suffering from, thus the fucking priest went on to yap for 34 pages or so---about hell and how impossible it is to gauge the torment to which the grave sinners are sentenced. Fucking please.
Towards the end, for some purpose and cause I failed to recognize, Stephen, the protagonist, went on to be a low-profile agnostic. So get this: all the while I was made to understand that the dude was being supplied with catholic principles whose kind extended to, er, strict clerical guardianship, and in all likelihood he would do good for a goddamn priest, with all the requirements for total apostleship. Even at home, his father commands quite a sense of authority, of which religion might’ve been the core. His classmates are no different; no surprises. Hence you might wanna wonder what influenced him to go the other way. Well, it just so happens that Stephen, as he hits the prime of his puberty, decides to chuck off religion-- with no further clarification on his part other than the fact that he can’t subscribe to it. God. Fucking. Damn. It.
There are no redeeming qualities in this shit that can salvage it from whatever curses I still have in reserve. Although Stephen has some elaborate, mind-opening definitions of esthetic beauty, human pity and suffering, I still can’t see the whole point of wasting 300 pages of words just to annoy readers, unless of course James Joyce was a freakin’ imbecile, in which case I excuse him, or the memory of him.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
there doesn't seem to be anything you might wanna call progress in the stupid novel, a portrait of an artist as a young man, by James Joyce. it's been ten pages in the nth chapter and the dialog doesn't hint on an end of some sort. the worst part is, it talks about religion, of heaven and hell and salvation and judgment day, topics which were dinned in my head in my grade school and high school days, forcefully even. point taken, case closed, but the damn priest in the novel isn't gonna cut it with his yapping. as a response, i have to exert every feeble effort i have in my power to refrain from skipping texts, at which i have been painstakingly successful. thanks, really. and then i'm starting to think i should save myself the trouble of disappointment, knowing that something so critically acclaimed as this is prey to over-rating. truth is, i don't get it. it seems to me no more special than some linear narration of a boy's life in college with no tragedy and deviation to monotony, nothing i could gasp at in tow. i'm sorry. and it's a pity that i could use some neat lines on a few pages-- not that Joyce could've given Henry James or Thomas Hardy a good run for their money anyway. as such, i can just leave it alone. and finish it one way or another.
what's sadder, though, is that i know no one from the circle i move in who might be sharing the same interests with me. i doubt if any of them has had the pleasure of flipping a fucking page off a worthwhile shit. i'm sick of this. i'm sick of listening to this tormenting daily office rants. i'm sick of spending 8 hours of my day with people who can't recognize disinterest if i shoved it down their throats.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
to my misfortune, i had to attend this meeting with my boss, on whom i have a really huge crush, and scale the whole length of edsa boulevard with him on the driver's seat and me on the passenger's--for lack of company drivers' availability. to my even greater misfortune, the dudes who happened to be our clients turned out to be so fickle-minded that they were almost childish.