More Intellectual Discourse

I would like to think that my first year at OXFORD UNIVERSITY has changed me for the better, both academically and as a person. After a year living alone with interesting people having my mine blown wide open, I have lost so many of my preconceptions. I’m more open-minded. I’ve stopped judging people based on factors which I do not understand. I now own a Trilby. I eat poached eggs. I occasionally listen to Radiohead [which I sometimes enjoy, usually when I am hungover or asleep, which I suppose means that my appreciation of music has increased exponentially].

Basically what I’m saying is that now I am so much more grown up and mature, I think that my blogging (although I feel that I have outgrown that word too, so from now on I’d like to refer to this as ‘Web-Logging’) should follow suit. So from this post on, I will devote my web-logging to the higher pursuits – literature, opera, the arts. Food for the soul. Perhaps that is what this web-log should be renamed – ChainS-oulFood Zombie. Now I know that this announcement may raise concerns in the (lardy, clogged, emotionally dead) hearts of my vast internet readership, which according to recent statistics is exponentially escalating towards the lofty teens – after all, you guys [I will not flatter myself to believe that any good-looking girls actually have time/inclination to read this] ‘log on’ every day to read my hi-larious musings on gays, racial prejudice, zit fetishists, paedophiles, the lead singer of Crazy Town, and the obese. You live in your parents’ basements and masturbate more or less constantly to poorly animated loli-porn. You poop into socks. You probably wouldn’t enjoy details of my thesis on the heroic poetry of Spenser, or discussions of the role of Christian iconography in The Dream of the Rood, or anything mentioning Philosophy that isn’t directly connected to Harry Potter. And that’s fine, but I think that, as a student of OXFORD UNIVERSITY it behoves me to shine a light of truth into the dark fetid sliming pits of ignorance that people you call lives. But I know that change is hard, and many of you have been so enmeshed in your ruts that getting out of them is terrifying, so, rather like an animal trainer teaches a dog to beg using Pedigree Chews, I discuss fine poetry using the only thing that you idiots understand: bands I don’t particularly like.

I will also use pictures. Like this one, which is of a the English Poet Matthew Arnold:



Now Matthew Arnold is famous for a couple of poems, including ‘Dover Beach’ and another one about how we’re all floating in the sea. I probably could have written a blog about them but couldn’t be bothered to link them to Limp Bizkit or Panic! At the Disco or whatever it is that you retards listen to, so instead I’m going to briefly talk about his ‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’. The poem, a typical example of Arnold’s role as the 19th century’s answer to Emo, is a long sad bit of froth about the death of English Poet William Wordsworth, Arnold’s personal poetic hero. Kind of like how when the lead singer of The Cartoons died in a plane crash and the cast of the Fast Food Rockers released the twelve minute long instrumental version of Witch Doctor on vinyl, it acts as a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of both Wordsworth’s life, as well as mourning the passing of other poetic greats who you haven’t heard of and simultaneously mourning the fucked state of the world. For reference, here’s the poem in its entirety:

GOETHE in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
But one such death remain’d to come;
The last poetic voice is dumb—
We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.

… blah blah blah something about an iron age blah blah blah isn’t poetry great blah blah blah I’m going to go cut myself in the toilets, blah blah blah hey guys I just used the word ‘furl’d’ I’m a POET motherfuckers blah blah blah…

Keep fresh the grass upon his grave
O Rotha, with thy living wave!
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Moving. Very moving. No, it doesn’t matter what Weimar, Goethe, Byron or Rotha are, don’t worry. Now, the few of you who actually read the above carefully, instead of just seeing verse form, instantly panicking, flailing your sausage arms in the air, flicking your Li’l Rascal Motorised Obesity Cart into reverse and careering madly into the huge stack of crumpled Diet Coke cans and empty pizza boxes in the corner of your rooms and knocking yourselves unconscious, you MAY have noticed something a little bit odd about the final words of both stanzas. That is, they don’t really rhyme. The first rhyme progression goes ‘Come -> Dumb -> Tomb’, and the second ‘Grave -> Wave, None -> Gone’. Now I don’t care where you’re from, neither ‘Dumb’ and ‘Tomb’, nor ‘None’ and ‘Gone’ have ever sounded alike eeeever. But so what. It seems in both cases that Arnold has ruined a perfectly nice bit of verse by jammin’ a word in there that sounds JUST about like enough that reading the verse aloud makes you either pause and go ‘wtf’ or, worse, twist the pronunciation to make it fit in with the last line. But its not like it was impossible to think of another rhyme. I mean the man managed to rhyme ‘eternal law’ with ‘reverential awe’, I think he’d have been able to come up with two words that rhymed with ‘dumb’ and ‘none’:

…
The last poetic voice is dumb—
And now all I can do is stand here and hum.
…
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, Wordsworth was my number one guy

see, that took me like two seconds of thinking to find rhymes that fit. Does that make me a better poet than Arnold? Probably, but the fact remains that even though MA was a total emo, he was a pretty good poet and the words he actually used, the ones that kind of rhymed, were used for a REASON. And that reason was purely for the effect that I mentioned earlier – the ‘wtf?’ and stumble over the timing and pronunciation of the rhyme. The INTENTION is to do an ugly bit of poetry, and why – because of the context of the line – Matty is presenting a new, bleak world, a world in which Wordsworth has left. The damage of Wordsworth & co’s passing is so great that it has damaged the poetry of the poem itself. I mean I can’t really believe I’ve spent this many words discussing half-rhymes, which are a pretty simple concept, but this is a very nice little bit of poetry and a concept that is seen dotted throughout the English poetic corpus. I could get very clever here and talk about the self-reflexive point of poetry, using the language and expectations of the fabric of the verse itself to support the themes beneath, bloating it to creating a narrative-structural dichotomy with the real meaning floating somewhere in between, but I fear that I would bore you and already your attention is drifting away from this lecture on half-rhymes and back onto Bittorrent to see how the download on those bikini photos of Kate Mulgrew from the beach scene of Star Trek Voyager S2E15 is going, so I’ll stop there and will introduce the MODERN YOOF CULTURE RELEVANCE to all of this, which is what got me thinking about this all over again.

Here is your second picture, which is of Mike Skinner, lead – well I want to say ‘singer’ – of the popular – well I want to say ‘band’ – “The Streets”:



Now Skinner is best known for a couple of songs, including ‘Dry Your Eyes’, ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ and (sigh) ‘Yeah Yeah You’re Really Fit But You Know It’, but for some reason I couldn’t find a way to tie any of those to the work of Sylvia Plath, so instead I’m going to concentrate on his ‘Blinded By The Light’. In essence, this presents a quasi-Eliotian dramatic monologue (sometimes even I hate myself) detailing the onset of a narcotic stupor; the main character enters a nightclub, pops a few pills, and the rest of the song follows his slow garbled descent as his voice is drowned by the music; this is underlied with a bubbling and dangerous undercurrent of romantic infidelity and fear. Sounds pretty good eh. Unfortunately the song is blighted by some of THE WORST lyrics I have ever heard which makes me wonder whether Skinner was writing it with his feet while hanging from a rubber tyre in a tree and throwing poo at schoolchildren. This is a standard verse:

I hate coming to the entrance, just to get bars on my phone, 

You have no new messages, so why haven't they phoned? 

Menu, write message, so where are you and Simone?
Send message, Dan’s number, where've they gone? 


“Seriously. Could you not think of better words to rhyme with ‘Phone’ than ‘Simone’, ‘gone’, and ‘phoned’ again? I know you aren’t the brightest head in the shed, Mr Skinner, but COME ON”.

^ that was my initial reaction to hearing that verse. Lazy, I thought. Lazy lazy lazy. Lazy Mike Skinner, an accusation that is more-or-less compounded by the more-or-less mentally defective rhyme scheme that runs through the rest of the poem/song. But then I remembered Matthew Arnold’s apparent inability to rhyme anything with ‘none’ and I think – is Lazy Mike Skinner actually Clever Mike Skinner – is the breakdown and repetition in the rhyme scheme an intentional construct built to directly mirror the breakdown of comprehension, paranoia and addled nature of our narrator’s mind? WAS RHYMING ‘DAWN’ WITH ‘SURE’ INTENTIONAL? IS MIKE SKINNER ACTUALLY A GENIUS. IS HE THE MODERN MATTHEW ARNOLD?


DID I JUST BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND

Ok so maybe that goes a bit overboard but it raises the question of the amount to which we credit our Artists with intelligence. I mean we only assume that Arnold’s half-rhymes were intentional because, you know, it fits in perfectly with the theme of the poem and, whatever, he’s Matthew Arnold bitchiz, he does what he wants. But they could have been a total mistake; he could have been writing his Memorial Verses in an opium haze at 3 in the morning to a deadline to get paid and fund his crack habit and simply didn’t notice them. Equally, Mike Skinner could be a dipshit who thinks that rhyming ‘beer’ ‘idea’ ‘appear’ and ‘here’ all in the course of four lines is really Neat. We have to sort of figure this out for ourselves. Which on the surface is ok because analysis and self-determination of art is an important part of our appreciation of it. I GOT NO PROBLEM WITH THAT YOU HEAR.

Unfortunately, allowing our own –often quite intelligent- interpretations of music or art to ‘pardon’ or ‘interpret’ the mistakes and failings of our artists as either intentional or ironic opens the door for a whole host of abuses, the greatest of which is the crediting of praise to certain singers who probably deserve to be strung up and tortured with weevils for their crimes against music. This naturally raises the third Popular Artist of this post, the musical group who go by the name of ‘Nickelback’, and their lead singer Chad Kroeger, and their song ‘Next Contestant’:



I can’t really be bothered at this point to detail the song, but whatever, here’s the first verse/chorus, make of it what you will:

I judge by what she's wearing
Just how many heads I'm tearing
Off of assholes coming on to her
Each night seems like it's getting worse
And I wish she'd take the night off
So I don't have to fight off
Every asshole coming on to her
It happens every night she works
Is that your hand on my girlfriend?

Is that your hand?
I wish you'd do it again
I'll watch you leave here limping
I wish you'd do it again
I'll watch you leave here limping
There goes the next contestant

Right-o. The rest of the song pretty much goes on like that – there’s some dude who is possessive about people coming onto his girlfriend, people come onto his girlfriend, he gets well angry and beats them up and they leave his girlfriend alone, his girlfriend is well happy, etc, etc.

Now when I first heard this song I thought ‘This HAS to be ironic. They have to be joking. There must be some clever twist; perhaps Chad has BROKEN UP WITH his girlfriend and he’s just a possessive and loserish ex-boyfriend. Perhaps the girl was never his girlfriend and he’s just a crazy stalker, sitting alone in the club night after night taking out his repressed macho pulsations on imaginary fights with combatants who he’ll never have the guts to fight. Perhaps this macho image that he portrays of himself is some kind of reflection on the modern condition of us as Modern Men, emasculated in a world that has moved on beyond us. Hey, this song is pretty good.’

But then I realised something: Nope. I’m wrong. It is literally just a song about Chad Kroeger being a big manly man and beating up guys who attempt to score with his fit girlfriend. That’s it. It’s just another ‘Chad Kroeger is a prick’ moment, which for some reason my inherent trust in the artistic form and my own freedom of interpretation has changed into some deep and meaningful discussion of modern man. But we know that’s not what it is. Chad Kroeger is a cock. Does that make my interpretation any less valid? Of course not, even though there’s not a shred of proof in the song itself to support it. But just because I happened to credit the song with some depth doesn’t mean that it actually has it. And it doesn’t mean that Chad Kroeger is less of a cock.

But this is the problem. I refuse to accept that Kroeger is being clever and witty just because, well, it’s Chad Kroeger, fucking look at him:


what a cock

… but at the same time I kind of automatically credit Matthew Arnold with cleverness for his half-rhymes just because he’s Matthew Arnold bitchez and he does what he wants. This isn’t really a good basis for judging poetry. We can’t really let our personal opinions of the writers interfere with how we understand their work –AFTER ALL, REMEMBER GUYS WE ANALYSE THE POETRY, NOT THE POET sez Wimsatt & Beardsley. And thus by that standard, we have to accept that the chances that Nickelback MIGHT have been being incredibly witty and have written a modern anthem to manhood in ‘Next Contestant’ are about equal with Arnold having intentionally failed to properly rhyme the last words of ‘Memorial Verses’.

…
hmm
…

You see this is why I fucking hate Intentionality. You end up inadvertently proving that Nickelback are geniuses.


'yay'



oh my god no



OMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM


Okay allow this, fuck blogging about the arts, next post will be about zit fetishists or horse porn or something, ok guys WHO'S WITH ME

The Seven Stages of Failing at Clubbing

Taken from the last time I went clubbing. Although, these stages being a universal and time-honoured feature of every time I’ve ever been clubbing, this article should probably be better named ‘The Seven Stages of Going Clubbing With Me’.

Stage One: Pride
The stage of Pride is tied fundamentally to two basic concepts: hope and self-deception. These concepts are in turn firmly linked to the act of preparing oneself to go clubbing; getting washed, dressed, and mentally prepared. In my case this usually involves staring at myself in the mirror from different angles for ten minutes. This is important. I’ve recognised that my face and hair and head is a weird shape and, rather like one of those works of art that looks like a big pile of dildoes but when you shine a light on it, the shadow on the wall is a smiley face, they really only make sense from one angle. So anyway after perfecting the angle in the mirror and doing the point ‘n click seven or eight times, I decided the tshirt selection; in this case I’d gone with the old standard green one that has ‘Similes are like metaphors’ written on it in bubble writing hahahhaha. I tell you what, every time I bust it out at the clubs at OXFORD UNIVERSITY (whenever my ‘Algernon Charles Swinburne is my nigga’ one is in the wash) it goes down a total storm and I was looking forward to Rocking The Worlds of the Kingston Ladies with my cute literary joke. I finished the look by slinging on my awesome nike kicks and my slim (NOT SKINNY) jeans, checked myself out, said “I have turned into quite.a.man,” then louchely slinked out of the door into the world – which was, at this point, my oyster.
[nb: I decided not to wear the fedora on this occasion]

Stage Two: Fall
The Fall in this case was the falling of my heart upon , my entrance into the nightclub. I immediately realised that not only had I misjudged the Literary Joke tshirt, but I had also misjudged my chances of being the Coolest One In The Joint. Guys, I don’t want to make excuses for myself but I am afraid that it was indie night. There were hipsters as far as the eye could see, wearing the skinniest of skinny jeans, Retro Lenseless Sunglasses and their dad’s pullovers. A girl wearing a ballgown with a huge flower in her hair and matchbox tattooed on her shoulder wandered past, hand in hand with a man in a jumpsuit and a checked shirt wearing a tiny top hat at a jaunty angle. I just wasn’t dressed right. In the interest of being able to see out of both eyes, my hair was in a quiff and not combed rakishly over my face. I felt a fool. DAMNIT, I thought, why didn’t I wear my Fedora? THIS WAS MY ONE CHANCE TO IMPRESS THE FASHIONATI AND I RUINED IT. My non-hatted head was a mark of shame. I felt that every lazy eye on the place was fixed on me. I needed booze, so hit the bar and nursed a lager. But even this highlighted my Otherness; to either side there were harpies drinking pink drinks that had shotglasses of blue stuff contained within. I felt like Luke Skywalker the first time he wandered into the Mos Eisley canteen. But even that metaphor was a mistake – DAMNIT I SHOULD HAVE QUOTED PROUST OR PERHAPS LAUREN LAVERNE or whoever it is that Indie people like. The situation was dire.

Stage Three: Optimism
I went to the toilet and pepped myself up. Come on Tom, I reasoned. You aren’t THAT offensively dressed. The witty English witticism isn’t immediately obvious on the tshirt and in this light it could be easily mistaken for either a retro advertisement for oranges or perhaps an ironic picture of genocide – two themes that seemed prevalent throughout the club that night. As long as you maintain the Angle, your face looks pretty much normal. And frankly you are taller than many of the midgets in here. Go get em tiger. So that’s what I did. I boldly karate-kicked the door to the toilet into splinters and leapt out into the ravaging hordes of pierced indiekids and venomous hipsters. It was no use trying to play them at their own game, I reasoned. They already have the laid back “Hey babe, whats up? Oh this? It’s just a cotton-weave potato sack that craftsmen in Paris have fashioned into a smock and a tattoo of Beth Ditto’s face on my ribcage, no I don’t support any war for oil, George Bush is Hitler, and the Russians should leave Georgia alone, want to go take heroin and ironically rutt in my WV Camper van?” schtick all tied up; no, it was time for me to pick up women in my own idiosyncratic style.
After ten minutes of standing blankly in the middle of the room hoping that a few girls would just come up to me and start chatting I realised that my own idiosyncratic style sucked. But I was still not defeated. I was still optimistic. So I bit the bullet and strode confidently up to the most confused and vulnerable looking blonde I could find and said hello. She said hello back. And we Got Chatting. And I realised that I had done pretty well. DING DONG she was a ballerina (ballet student, whatever). And blonde. And pretty fit. And she was studying dance and art at some uni I’d not heard of which meant that frankly my credentials as an English Student at OXFORD UNIVERSITY was enough to blow her little mind. And I tried, I really REALLY tried to seem interested in what she was saying about dance class and hand positions and I did a cute ‘Hey, show me a ballet move’ thing and she laughed and I was like yessssssssssssssss i rule at flirting at girls in nightclubs maybe I won’t die alone after all I AM A FUCKING PIMP, maybe I can find a fitter girl than this one to talk to

Stage Four: Disappointment
The Ballet Dancer’s friend came along and said ‘We are going dancing’ and I was like ok and then they left and didn’t come back. I considered going to find her, or just following her about for a bit smelling her hair and dancing near to her an ‘accidentally’* brushing her skin but then I thought ‘hey, you’ve already got to talk to a beautiful ballet dancer for a while, just be happy with that, it’s better to aim high and fail than to have to talk to any boring ugly girls’ so I was kind of pleased with that. Later on I saw her talking to a fat guy. A bittersweet ending. I had another drink.

Stage Five: Denial
The denial in this case is the denial of the steadily encroaching fact that the night is wearing on and nothing massively fun has particularly happened. This stage can also be called “Pretending that I’m really only here for the music”, in which I go onto the dance floor and am like ‘Oh yes, awesome, MGMT is on! WOW DAFT PUNK! AND NOW THEY ARE PLAYING MIA THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST NIGHT OF MY ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE’ and I madly dance ironically (I think this is best achieved by pretending that I’m having an epileptic fit), do bodypopping, the robot, hop about, hug everyone, leap into all the photos people are taking, hug my mates, grin a lot, high five, sing loudly along with the chora, etc, etc.

This stage lasts at most for four minutes.

Stage Six: Despair
I know that I’ve reached Stage Six when Stage Five wears off and I wander off the dancefloor and then go to the toilet, even though I don’t need to, for no reason other than that I can’t really think of anything else to do. Also, some variation of the following internal monologue is observed:

Oh my god I am going to die alone. Why is that guy so happy? He looks like a fucking frog yet he has that girl hanging off him. No, wait, she’s a dog Damn all of these smiling happy people. The thing about clubbing is that you need to go with a large group of people you already know, preferably fit single girls who want you. But I don’t know any fit single girls who want me? What we need is for loads of people to break up with their boyfriends and then I’ll just be like a rebound wall. Alternatively I’ll just wait until I’m well famous and important and then I’ll be beating off the girls with sticks. But what if they only want me because I’m rich and important and as soon as they leave they sell their story to the News of the World or something? I’d never truly be able to trust any girl who I got with while in a nightclub if I was rich and famous at the time. This is a terrible catch-22. Actually, no it’s not, I’ll just have a string of one-night stands with beautiful but shallow women and then marry my beautiful but sane and down-to-earth PA who knows exactly what’s good for me and will make a good wife. Yes.
I actually had this conversation with myself the other nightI’M NOT EVEN RICH AND FAMOUS YET

Stage Seven: Giving up and searching the floor around the bar area for loose change
I found like three quid on the floor the other night, it was awesome


Moral of the story: drink more, learn how to do coin tricks, be indier, wear the fedora

*!!!!!!