school updates and my literary progress

I’ll start by saying that, although school is extremely exacting, it is at the same time reasonably fun. At least more fun that I’d anticipated it would be. It’s mainly the English and French classes in which I have fun, because they’re the only classes where I can get along fine (great, in fact) without paying too much attention. That coupled with the fact that there’s this really funny guy who sits one place behind me whose wisecracks are not only witty but original and funny, too. Like I said earlier, I like my new environment. In a country like this where good English is really hard to come by, I find it really relaxing to be surrounded by people who actually know English. My ears no longer hurt that much when I have to play the role of the listener in a boring monologue. Anyway, I have a lot of fun, thanks to the aforementioned guy’s jokes. The French teacher himself is the focus of most of the hilarity because of his comically drunken mannerisms. While saying the word ‘oiseau’, for instance, he once said, “WAZZZOOOH!” The whole class repeated it in a similar fashion in order to mock him, which I found indescribably funny. Our English teacher has a lisp-like thing, which is hilarious. He says “yeff” for “yes”, and when another kid pointed this out to me, replete with a hilarious expression, I couldn’t help laughing discreetly for the entire duration of class. We get a lot of break time—more than is warranted, in fact. Out of 8 hours, we have one and a half hours’ worth of break. This gives me adequate time to meet up with my friends, who are not even on my floor, and stuff like that. This is my consolation for waking up earlier than I used to, and having to study a lot more.

Speaking of which, we have tests every Monday, and in different styles, for math, physics and chemistry. Tomorrow’s test happens to be modeled after the AIEEE, which is an engineering test for certain engineering schools. There are gonna be some 90 MCQs, divided equally into Math, Physics, and Chemistry, and we have three hours to finish it. Three fucking hours! How long do they expect a guy to sit in one place? I bet I’ll be done with the test at least an hour before those three hours end. I hope to heck that I’m not gonna be forced to sit in the classroom all the way to the end. I’m extremely sensitive to boredom, and sitting in one place and staring vacantly at a blank wall without any entertainment is the worst kind of unpleasantness I can incur, second only to, say, being fired at at close range by a bazooka.

Today I read a chapter in Henry James’ book The Portrait of a Lady. I must say, he was a total loser when it came to dialogues. I mean the setting and all are reasonably interesting. Definitely not as boring as the works of some of the authors who wrote before his time. I’m talking about people like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens, whose writings, which I concede were of great quality, are unbearably boring. Anyway, like I was saying, I think Henry James’ got carried away at times with his philosophical ramblings. He seems to have had a predilection for big paragraphs. At one point I came across this three-page long one. So sometimes he makes his characters speak in that philosophical, overly descriptive kind of language that doesn’t give his narrative a hint of verisimilitude or credibility. Maybe there was a handful of people who were known to speak like that in the latter half of the 1800s, but they had doubtless been dead for centuries at the time. Even Dickens and Hawthorne were total losers when it came to dialogues. I think Somerset Maugham was good with dialogues. He was among the few who were. His language was flowery, but little of this was seen in his dialogues. They were as normal as would befit normal people, which is what you want when you’re describing a conversation between two normal people. These authors might have been justified if the conversation had been between Shakespeare and Milton or people like them, but honestly, an impecunious old woman living in New England can’t possibly speak English like them (Nathaniel Hawthorne). Their lack of skill when it comes to dialogues makes their works distasteful, and whenever I come across a conversation, I get a strong urge to shelve the book. Maybe it was classy to have pretentious dialogues in books, or even in real-life conversations, at that time, but I for one can’t stand them. There can’t be so much formality among people of such longstanding intimacy as between childhood friends and such.