"Why Are You So Quiet?"

"Oh I don't know, you why are you so fucking candid?"...

...Is what I'd love to say in retort to the people who ask me that. And oh there are plenty. Not everybody can be the same. But perhaps it's meant to be. You may need people like us so you can cast a colossal shadow upon with your tower of confidence. Like Montana says, you need the bad guys, to say there goes the bad guy, and thus feel satisifed in your goodness. Otherwise, how will you measure your boisterousness?

But no I can't utter those things because I am, after all, much too quiet.

Not everybody likes to hear the sound of their own voice. Not everybody speaks for the sake of speaking. Can't you respect that? Nobody is ever asked why they are so loud. But that's okay because apparently that's the norm. That's what we must all endeavour to be. Louder. Not generalising but this question appears to be on the lips of many an extrovert.

Sure we introverts can converse. We just can't talk as much as you can. Apologies!

Compelled to Eat My Words

Arrrrrgggh.

So you see that huge anti-Facebook rant I had a few blogs ago? Well...yeah. I'm abandoning my tenets and rekindling my relationship with the big, bad cyberworld that is Facebook.

That is all. Now leave me to hang my head in shame.

Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers

Just finished this 1999 book by British author Aidan Chambers. It was great. I admire his surprisingly young, bold sense of wit. I say 'surprisingly' in the nicest possible way, it's just he's not exactly, you know, young.

Prior to this one, I had my nose in another book with the similarity of WWII as a significant backdrop of the story - Rage Of The Innocent by Frederick E. Smith. The difference was, despite an interesting opening, it dragged on a bit and got terribly dull. So much so, that I abandoned the book mid-battle somewhere (think the Jerry were pretty much pissing all over us anyway.) That was strange for me, I think the first time I had ever voluntarily yielded up on a novel halfway through. Involuntarily, it would usually be a case of forgetting it on a bus or accruing a preposterously high library fine or something, having maxed out my renewals.

SPOILER WARNING

The novel is set in Amsterdam (which doesn't have  to mean all magic mushrooms and red light districts I learnt, somewhat grudgingly.) The beginning has a quote from the grandmother of protagonist Jacob Todd which goes:

"Amsterdam is an old city occupied by the young."

Jacob from England is visiting Dam, bringing with him his apt, colossal infatuation with Anne Frank. The story delves back in time to when his grandfather fought and died in the Battle of Arnhem, Netherlands. Jacob meets a he-she, Ton, who he mistakes for the latter until his hands are pressed against her crotch and a few things that shouldn't be there, are (he doesn't mind though.) He meets Hille, and they can't seem to stop kissing. He meets those old and young, but most importantly he encounters Geertrui on her sickbed, his beloved soldier-grandfather's other lover who she bore a daughter by. She regurgitates the story for Jacob by way of an A4-sized book. Thus it turns out he has a Dutch family but something far more disturbing irks his mind. Sarah Todd, his staunch grandmother back in England and suddenly his grandad's second missus, is totally oblivious to this truth. Once he returns home, should he enlighten her or leave her in blissful ignorance? For this decision, he seeks the two cents of all his new-found Dutch friends. We don't know what he decides but he does manage to bed Hille in the end which is something of a happy ending.


I realise my synopsis makes the novel sound like shit but it's not. It's really good. Here's a particularly vivid, somewhat horrifying part that stuck out to me. Jacob is recalling a dream he had after once, as a boy, poking a mouse with too much force, and accidentally killing it in a 'fatal skewering thrust':

"...the other mouse which has rolled onto his side and is curled in a foetal position, head tucked in to paws. It is lying very still. Is it alive? He pokes it with the lip of his metal probe. Nothing. He taps it lightly on the side of it head. Now at once it is a mouse no longer but a human child, with a large, much too large head, and a face that disturbs him. He taps it again, harder and on the temple this time. The child whimpers but does not open its eyes. He hits it again, and again,each time with deliberate increasing powerful force that he feels in hsi hand and along his arm and in to his bicep. Between each blow he carefully observes the child's reaction. After each hit the boy moans in pain and distress and has also grown larger and is closer to Jacob[...]after the fourth of fifth assault a wound appears on the child's temple and blood oozes out, thick bright red blood, but not in great quantity[...]excited by the blood, Jacob strikes him harder still. And harder. But now he is thinking to himself between each blow: What am I doing? I shouldn't be doing this! I don't want to do this! But goes on hitting him again and again till the child is in such big close-up the only part of him Jacob can see is his injured bleeding head. And the little whimpering cries the child lets out after each blow are more and more upsetting, more terrible than if he were screaming. Yet all the time the child's eyes are closed, as if he is asleep.          Then the eyes open, and Jacob sees that the child is himself."

You know, somebody better be reading this wondrously wonderful post because I just typed up a hefty passage from this book and that's not normally how I can be found utilising my time.

Anyway, it's one of those dreams that give way to the conscience, one of inexplicable happenings and strange, disturbing images. It's disturbing because Jacob's not at all a hostile character.

I also learnt an excellent Dutch mild expletive. You are a DOMPKOPF. Yes. you are. If you don't know its meaning, look it up DOMKOPF. Love it.

Now, I've just opened up what I'm sure will be a lengthy and harmonious relationship with Margaret Mitchell's classic Gone with the Wind, and what happens? I receive a book through the post - High-Rise by JG Ballard. It's from Kent University, where I am due to start in two weeks. However, a teacher perhaps didn't get the memo and has decided to set us reading work. It's good actually, I do fancy reading a bit of JG Ballard whilst inhaling shots in the club during Freshers Week...nah it's alright, apparently, just an excercise to help us undergraduates get to know each other. Still though.

Apologies Ms.Mitchell I'm compelled to put you on a hold thanks to some academic domkopf.