The Big Question 5/5 The End of the Beginning

Fifteen years of thought and reding led me to the conclusion that I drew in the last instalment. Should I ever run into Petunia (from the first instalment) again. And, should we talk long enough for the subject to come up, I will be ready to pounce like a theoretical puma in a forest of hypothetical trees. Unfortunately, I don’t have several years to wait in the hope of bumping into her so about a week ago, in the interest of rounding off this introduction, I looked her up on Facebook. To my absolute horror, I discovered she had become an English teacher. I would have been happier if she was working developing chemical weapons or testing cosmetic products on animals. I would like to elaborate on her Saul-like conversion to literature: explaining in detail how my earlier, much less though out, defence of literature had sparked a passion for literature in her that was only rivalled in intensity by the unending physical pain she felt at the regret of dumping me. However, she ignored my friend request so I am on very shaky ground.

I am currently burried in reading through Shakespeare and the publishers keep putting out quality book after quality book, so I'm behind on my this year's fiction. But I will try to keep updating this as much as I can.

Until then, keep asking: is literature what makes us human?

Anyway, until the next installment...

Comments

All the Bloody Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Not this clever! I wouldn't be the first person to point out that this play has some things in common with Allo Allo. Outrageous foreign accents, a plump libidinous protagonist (Falstaff) embroiled in a farce of misunderstandings and unseen comeuppances. Nor would I be the first person to notice that it's just God awful. There is a list of ardent bardophiles who have condemned the play. Being a natural contrarian I had been hoping to prove them wrong, but they're right on this one. It has all the hallmarks of bad Shakespeare comedy (animal jokes, xenophobia, flat characterisation and misogyny) without any of the clever prose. It's the worst. Allo Allo is self-aware, the Brits get as much of a roasting as the Germans and French. That's not really the case in Merry Wives, which takes more of an It Ain't Half Hot Mum approach (though, it has to be said, nowhere near as offensive). But, you say, Shakespeare was way ahead of his time doing funny acce...

Going to work is just awful

See, Bukowski gets it. I've just seen the #thingsIwillmissaboutlockdownhashtag trending. So, I'll say this, I will miss not having to go to work. Look, I know people have it bad. This Covid-19 thing is kicking the world’s economy right in the ass and taking down a lot of good people, both physically and financially. And yes, this post is coming from a place of privilege; because, if I were about to miss a meal I know I’d be happy to get back to work. Over the years, I’ve done some pretty humiliating stuff to make ends meet: from cleaning bottles of piss left by workmen on construction sites to lining up at an agency at 4am in the hope they might send me out for the day. Thankfully, that’s all a while behind me, and right now, in a usual year, I would be marking exams for 14 hours a day seven days a week to top up my meagre teaching wage. So, let’s be honest, work is shit. The average person with an average job, on average, earns below the a...

Flash Fiction: The Words and the Nausea

A theory gaining some ground in the scientific community is that the whole universe is an artificial creation, like a computer game or the Matrix. There are, apparently, lines of code in the fabric of the universe that make this a dead give away (philosophically speaking). The chances are that we all live in some cosmological playpen, like the Holodeck in Star Trek the Next Generation. And, yes the holograms became sentien t and have started to kill each other. The truly terrifying aspect of this concept is not that the thought that all life is meaningless and without purpose, or even that all of our suffering (the one thing we can truly hold sacrosanct) is for nothing. The truly terrifying aspect is the thought that I may have become stuck on the second level, got bored and spent my whole life playing the mini-games. None of this really concerned me much until one day as I was on my way to Tesco, I saw the evidence of it. In giant twelve-foot letters, covering both cloud and vapo...

Thomas Ouphe

Search This Blog