New Age Peer Pressure

Well there seems to be something going around tagging people and getting them to answer questions about literature on their blogs... Well at the sounds of the words 'literature' and 'blogs' I would normally have leapt at the chance. Unfortunately I had my ankles tied together with chicken wire so I fell flat on my face when I tried to leap. But nonetheless, I am susceptible to peer pressure and so who was I, really, to refuse this feast for the bored little mind?

Total number of books I've owned: What a quite amazingly stupid question. That's like asking 'how many minutes in your life have you spent asleep?' But in reality, two. You believe me? Then stop asking ridiculous questions.

The last book I bought: "For the Good of the Cause" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Cheap bargain, really.

The last book I read: "Lady Chatterley's Lover" - D H Lawrence. Didn't really care for it. It was like a strangulated modernist book, it was straining too hard to break through social taboos and as such lacked depth in plot or character and there was absolutely no chemistry between Connie and Mellors.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

1) "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie - My first taste of the greatest living novelist and still the best. It changed the way I saw literature, the world and my own writing... Especially when I noticed how similar my and Rushdie's styles are, no joke.

2) "The Liar" by Stephen Fry - This used to be my read and re-read book for a long time in high school. It also first inspired my curiosity with Victorian pornography, which I have harboured for a combined total of three seconds or so. It also in no small part inspired my pretentious way of talking and ranting.

3) "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" by Roald Dahl - Need I say more? It's a classic!

4) "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" edited by Steven Jay Schneider - This book singlehandedly gave me a purpose and goals in life. I know now what I must do before I can die a happy man. Sure, so 80% of them aren't available in this country at all, and a further 20% of that 80% aren't available anywhere, in the known universe, except possessed by the great-grandson of John D Rockefeller who was able to lay his hands on the original reel which would disintegrate if anyone ever actually tried to play it. But I'm on my way anyway... If I bothered to count, I've probably seen about...100? Maybe? So that's halfway there...

5) "Dirt Music" by Tim Winton. Because it finally added support to my hypothesis that Australian literature is shit.

Tag five people and have them fill this out on their blogs: Yeah, cos that's going to happen. When are you internet people going to learn that chains die with me, MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

My Dinner with Gavin

Yes that's right, the other day, I had my dinner with Gavin.

Well, it wasn't really a dinner. And it wasn't really mine, and I didn't have it, but if I were to accomodate all these factors into the title of this post, I wouldn't be able to include an obscure literary and/or film reference into the title, and that would be a far worse crime against humanity than taking a little poetic license. The fact is that this post is going to be, as usual, unutterably boring and pointless, so I must make the title as unfathomably amusing as possible in order to keep you reading. I hope I have managed that.

Anyway, the point to this post, which is sort of paradoxical since it really is very pointless and yet has a point *brief pause while Sam's rectum prolapses in utter confusion at this overwhelmingly self-contradictory statement*, is that the other day, Bec and I were walking along the campus of our delightful university for some reason that unfortunately now eludes me but as I was writing the word 'elude' suddenly no longer eluded me, we were on our way to our English tutorial from Fisher Library... Anyway, we decided to take the 'scenic architectural' route through the quad, which involves cutting across that delightfully colourfully blooming courtyard which my parents always seem to have stories about to which I never listen...

I hate to admit I've been sidetracked twice in the last paragraph already and have begun the next ramble with 'anyway' and I was so very close to doing it again with this paragraph... But yes, as we were walking through that courtyard, on one of the side benches was seated our delightful ocularly-misaligned vice chancellor Gavin Brown, who I don't think I've ever actually seen in person, or at least not since I've known who he is, and definitely not up that close (So lifelike, ooooh). Anyway, what was he doing but sitting, chatting to another old and important-looking individual in a similarly old and important-looking suit, and smoking a cigar. Pardon me for scoffing at the tragic destruction of another man's lungs, but what the fuck? We're talking 3 in the afternoon, and he's smoking a cigar? Where does he think he is, in 19th-century Suffolk? Cuba during the revolution? George S. Patton's general staff?

I don't think I'm the one who's totally out of touch, but honestly, who smokes cigars anywhere outside a poker night any more? And in public? It just seems funny to me, that while we're bombarded with casual socialists with Che on their t-shirts, emphatic feminists with 'I am part of the liberation movement' on theirs, or SUTECH members with green velvet jackets (You all know whom I mean), and yet at the top of the administrative pile there really exist these living, breathing anachronisms.

I'm not sure if my question is, what is our quaint, old-fashioned university coming to? Or, what the fuck is Gavin doing smoking a cigar instead of rolling up weed and singing "Give Peace a Chance"? (I think I may be slipping back a few years myself there, but I've already broken the artistic license barrier once in this post, so I think I'm entitled to a second slice from the artistic-license-barrier-breaking icecream cake)

But either way, it was quite a shock to my beliefs as a VSU-hating, tapas-eating, fouton-sleeping, mushroom-smoking arts student. I wonder what the vice-chancellor will be like fifty years from now... If he'll be sitting in the courtyard smoking pot and students walking past will say things like "Oh my God that's so gauche, why isn't he licking hallucinogenic toad poison?" Well you never know, que sera, sera etc.

The other type of "Experiment-gone-wrong"

Hello there (Presumably whilst holding cup of coffee and stroking dog in front of fireplace and ommitting articles from sentences)

I'm currently sitting in Griffith Taylor room 543, posing as a psychological experimenter and waiting for subjects to arrive. Subjects that were supposed to arrive at 12:00. The present time being 12:23, something tells me they just aren't coming. There are several reasons for this: Firstly, this clashes with a lecture for PSYC 3202 which it seems, nearly everybody who does third-year psych does. Largely because it's compulsory for honours entry. (Why I'm NOT doing it is another story). Secondly, the people who were supposed to be subjects I believe were only informed they were to be subjects, and when and how they could do so, yesterday, or late the day before. Thirdly, well I don't know but I wanted to have more than just two reasons why I'm so pathetically sitting alone in this room, occasionally opening the door to check outside for friends. Or rather, *if reading aloud, please change to high-pitched Eastern European accent during the next sentence* new victims for my ever-growing army of undead, MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Anyway, the scheduling for this particular experiment is so bad that even my fellow experimenter couldn't make it, and hence I really am rather sad and lonely right now. Of course, the rational and more inventive side of me is saying that since obviously nobody is showing up, I could easily toddle across the road and sit in Manning for half an hour or so... But the lazy, stubborn side of me says two things, firstly that since I'm giving a presentation in here at 1, why not just stay and ''prepare"... and secondly, that maybe, just maybe, someone will turn up... If not a subject than at least an Alicia Silverstone look-a-like who got lost on her way to a dress-up-as-a-Playboy-bunny party... I think I should probably stop there.

It's amazing how philosophical you can get while sitting in a psychology tute room with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. It's basically not-at-all. It's actually quite mind-numbingly tedious.

Fortunately however, there is the blog. And this particular entry has killed about ten minutes of the time I have left. Just in case you wanted an update, no, still nobody here. Maybe I'll do the experiment myself and pretend to be a subject. I could really screw up our results that way, BWAHAHAHAHA (See that's so evil even a MWAHAHAHAHA wouldn't have sufficed) the power of being an experimenter!

How cool would it be to like, do all experiments on animals that are viewed as unfeasibly unethical these days, like sit there, strap them in and shock them endlessly, just to see the effects of unusual and cruel punishment on rodents. Or even cooler, I could do it on humans. I know they're always saying you'll never get published that way, but just imagine, doing experiments like that, finding so much about the effects of cruel and unusual punishment, and then centuries from now some alien archaeologist unearths the remains of my studies and says wow, this "Sam" creature sure made huge advances, even WE haven't discovered such things about cruel and unusual punishment, and being an alien species living in the distant future we're obviously far more advanced and intelligent than the rest of his species was supposed to be, he must have been much smarter than his brother Jeremy, hey let's bring him back to life by using technology, he shall be our new God...

I think I accidentally slipped into Simpsons regurgitation there... Well apart from the brother Jeremy bit, that was all my original creation, all hail my genius. Or in the words of Oscar Wilde, all hail my Guinness.

God I'm bored.