Synecdoche and Metonymy

I wanted to write a really angry piece about someone but I cannot be bothered as his or her misdemeanour is so low-life that reacting to it in any specific way is pointless. I know the anger inside my head and where it is directed and that is enough.

I used to think that my being insulted at school for being the kid who wanted to read a book rather than play football was because I was in the wrong and I should be more like the rest of the kids. But it is a sudden realisation that this attitude is the mild end of the dislike of difference that this country still seems to be ingrained. The difference between the attitude of kids at school and that of the people I went to college with was marked. I may have been lucky iin that I went straight from school to college and into a course where most of the other students were significantly older than me (at least three of them should have retired by now). I am right and all those anti-intellectual morons are wrong. Still they are happy with the level of stimulation that goes into their heads so why should I worry. This force-feeding of popular culture is like the novel-writing machines of nineteen-eighty-four. Why bother to convince someone that there is a whole world - many worlds - within books? Keep it elitist I say. It is a pity that there is no 'Ironic' setting for the font, a sledgehammer signifier for which I apologise.

Anyway, no irony here; I am right and they are wrong.

Music is - A Biography of the Rev. Absalom Dawe by John Surman

Tell me about your chldhood. No!

All that sounds so pompous. Why should I bother about anyone else? The world goes on without me worrying about it. The tree in the quad is still there.

I am still in the middle of The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. I know I am not supposed to talk about it but I have found myself so emotionally detached from the story as to be relatively comfortable about it. I cried at the end of Laurie Lee's biography but no Sylvia Plath book ever made me any more than slightly unhappy. Thinking about it, they actually made me quite chirpy trying to unravel the attitudes of the main character. For instance, the current chapter is simply called 'Boys' and that is what it is about. The book does not run chronologically and each chapter is about a single aspect of Plath's life. It is true that apart from the first chapter which describes her death, the subjects have been chosen so that they take us through her life in the general direction which lives play out in but there is a great overlap between them. The concept of each major event fades in and out as the chapters progress but you don't feel any more than a general sense of time. Occasionally I feel that the author is simply lifting analyses from other biographies and especially from The Bell Jar - which he always indicates. You can always sense the Author pussyfooting around the 'fair-use' clause about copying poetry.

How on earth is the film going to be meaningful without lots of the poetry? Maybe they have poetry wranglers like the music composers who write songs in the style of popular music to get the exact mood of a piece without falling foul of the copyright. I read somewhere recently that it is often not the exact order of notes which defines the real essence of a piece of music but the feel of the sound. It is possible for someone to be convinced that a piece in a style is the original on which it is based. "Give me ten lines of Plath style poetry about .. er ... death and stuff, by tomorrow."

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose.