Totally Out of the Loop

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There’s been a disturbing trend amongst many of my friends of late; they all seem to be surprised that I’m out of the loop when it comes to current affairs or social conventions. Let me just say this: I watch very little TV and the little I do watch I rarely remember because after 15 minutes whatever’s on TV just fades into the background and I start thinking about whether or not dwarvish women should enter into some of Faerie’s beauty contests. I live my whole life in a box – it’s a sad, sad existence I know but it suits me just fine.

To all of my friends who get exasperated because I don’t know the name of some celebrity whom even people in Timbuktu know about and because I have no idea what happens in some movie that’s apparently a classic and everyone in the universe watches it twice a year, please bear with me. When you talk to me always assume that I have no clue what you’re on about, go as far as thinking of me as an alien visiting the planet for the first time. I’m surprised that so many people talk to me in the first place! It’s a miracle I thank God for.

This little post is just to remind you guys that Charlie is a freak who has no idea how the world works. All I know is that there seems to be some sort of activity everywhere and that the Dark Tower still stands. I’m not good at real life and that’s why I just don’t participate in it.

Thank you.

Amazingly enough, Lady Leigh and Sleuth know this and they are the only people who seem to be able to roll with it.

The Change We Need

"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." - Morpheus, The Matrix

Yesterday was a monumental day in the history of our planet – the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44th president of the US of A and the formatting of my hard drive. President Obama promises to be a breath of fresh air in the world's polluted political landscape and my hard drive just needed some spring cleaning. Whether you like it or not, the US is the nation that we all look up to as the standard of wealth and prosperity. As the guiding light of the world the US is always under the scrutiny of critics and when they become a fallen people the world is catapulted into doom and gloom.

Yesterday Obama promised the American population the change (for the better) that they need and my PC seemed to think that it too needed a certain change, a fresh installation of Windows XP. I was trying to install the Windows 7 Beta and I forgot to back up some of my data, only to have W7 crash halfway through the installation. I did what any person who is unhealthily attached to their PC would do, I cried. It would have been better if I'd been dumped by a girl. Luckily, though, I'm of the same stock as the lovely (and somewhat imaginary) Mrs Lorrie Tock, I'm an indefatigable optimist. I'm always cheerful, come crashing PCs or gun toting clowns – the latter being quite disturbing and potentially fatal.

As the world watched and listened in awe as President Obama delivered his inauguration speech promising Americans (and the world to a lesser extent) the change that we need I was installing Windows XP onto my PC and giving it the change it so desperately needed.

I wish President Obama a wonderful and successful term in office and may his bright vision inspire each and every one of us to become better human beings.

P.S. Remember kids, change is an important and necessary part of life – especially when it comes to things like underwear.

P.P.S. Is it just me or does Obama sound a little like Morpheus?

"I believe it is our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds, for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives. This is a war and we are soldiers. What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for?" - Morpheus, The Matrix

From the Elder Days to the Dark Tower

I had a sense of eucatasptrophe (what Tolkien calls the good catastrophe) this morning as I was reading Wolves of the Calla. It happens when Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy go todash (courtesy of Black Thirteen) and land up (in a manner of speaking) in New York. They go visit the rose that might be a doorway to the Dark Tower or the Tower itself. When they see the rose there is a sound of many voices singing:

“Here is yes. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness that you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.”

Every age has its great stories: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, and many other tales besides. In terms of sheer epic scope J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legendarium stands head and shoulders above any other work of the 20th Century and that mantle has been passed down to Stephen King I think. I’ve read many fantasy books where the blurb compares the story to The Lord of the Rings but they all just don’t live up to that high standard. SK does not try to create an epic story of a world gone but rather he writes about a world that’s moving on, a world that’s dying . . . our world. Tolkien starts his story when the world is yet new and already evil has entered into it and stops in a time where the world has forgotten the beauty of old and the power of Elves and Men has declined. SK’s epic story starts with a lone gunslinger, the last of his kind, following the Dark Man across the desert. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Roland is the last true hero of a world on the edge of oblivion. At the centre of SK’s epic story is the Dark Tower which holds all worlds together and what I love about SK’s corpus is that all of his work is somehow connected to the Dark Tower, all his books are interconnected. In SK’s universe everything means, when things are said it’s best to pay attention because ka is at work.

What I love about good stories is the storyness of them; their text-ure, that warm feeling they give you as a reader. Great stories are an echo of life, not the humdrum everyday sort of thing but the sort of life where anything might happen at any time. In a way stories are more real than ‘real’ life. In books people get killed and it causes the reader real grief, in real life people die every day and we don’t give a damn. We turn on the news and we think, Conflict in the Middle-East, I’m so bored by this. Stories give us our humanity back so that we may care about people dying in senseless conflicts and maybe even do something about it. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy says:

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

The stories Tolkien and SK write are like that, you never grow tired of them because they don’t try to trick you into liking them – they simply reveal certain truths about the human condition. The theme of these stories, like Christianity . . . like life, is eucatastrophe – the good turn. No matter how dark things become they remind us that there is light and beauty forever beyond the reach of the dark cloud as Sam realised when he spotted the lone star from the slag heaps of Mordor.

If you want great stories that deal with a magical world of old, read Tolkien. If you’re looking for something more modern but just as epic, read SK.

There's Life After the Party

My sneaky plan for this festive season was to fly under the radar and not be noticed but, alas, that didn't work. I had my hiding corner all kitted out with everything comfy or edible lying around the house so I can read the days away. My corner was discovered and I was immediately dragged, kicking, biting and screaming, to the nearest pub where I now have my own honorary table and beer mug. After a week of drinking beer and eating pub food I'm super tired. I left the pub this morning and waved goodbye to my pub friends and the waitress I had a minor crush on. I got home and went straight to bed and prayed, thanking God that I'm still here on this blue ball called Earth :)

I had a good time at the pub but I have to go back to being a bibliophile.

A prosperous new year to everyone on Earth, Mars, Oogle Google or wherever you are :) God bless.