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 guysee, 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 MINDOk 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 contestantRight-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
Here's how this birder's getting around during the autumn migration!
The flower is about a foot across, counting the petals and stuff. Nice!
I've never seen a double-yoke egg! So that was cool.
I think it's a red slider. He was craning that little neck of his, trying to warm himself.
It was still soggy! Looks to me like a bunch of cricket exoskeleton parts. Ick! But it is my first pellet! (And of course it made me wish I could've found the pellet from that 
