general stuff

I bought this book by Evelyn Waugh on a recent trip to the bookstore, as an experiment, to see if he wrote well and if it was likely I’d be reading more of his titles in the near future. I stumbled upon his name on Wikipedia while randomly searching for something I can’t remember now, and what caught my eye was the fact that he wrote stories that were “darkly humorous.” That kind of appealed to the dark side of me—everyone’s got one; don’t pretend otherwise—and I decided to buy one of his books the next time I went to a bookstore. This particular book is called “Brideshead Revisited,” and I don’t know if “Revisited” is supposed to imply that there was an earlier book that I should have read first, but judging from how this one began, seemingly independently of anything, I should think not. What I like is that he, like authors like Somerset Maugham, Wodehouse, and Churchill, didn’t shrink from using uncommon words and flowery language. Unlike the authors of today—and please don’t get me started on this or I’ll go on for another two hundred lines or so—who seem to think that writing short, amateurish, acutely uninspired phrases defines that sacred form of art called “literature.” Read books by Robin Cook—better yet, David Baldacci—to see what I mean. Those guys would never come close to understanding how to use language in an artistic way. Their words, even when they sporadically use an “uncommon” word for which I’m supposed to have a blind predilection for, don’t flow with the continuity and fluidity as those of the authors I mentioned up there. My point is that Waugh’s words do flow and that’s what makes it a pleasant read. The very fact that makes it “unputdownable” is that this quality of the words flowing makes you feel that stopping at any point is going to break the flow of the tale. In contrast to this, in a book by David Balcacci, even if one assumes that his trashy language has “the flow,” the chapters are too small for it to be of any consequence. As a result, I shall continue keep my distance from present-day authors, thank you very much.

Another thing that I deemed terribly uninspired was Bleach Chapter 376. There was nothing in it that would warrant a one-week wait. I’m disappointed. For one thing he gave that wuss Wonderweiss more attention than he would deserve any day, which would inevitably lead one to believe that he still had some tricks up his sleeve, but surprise, surprise, he didn’t! He was being kicked around by Mashiro for half the chapter, and if anyone found that engrossing, I salute them. In the end when Mashiro cracked under the weight of her cracking mask and received a blow from Wonderweiss, Kensai was there to save her. Anticlimax of the century. Now he’s going to fight that wuss for the next two chapters, I’m guessing, so that Kubo can fix that blunder he made in the last chapter, viz. killing Halibel when all facts pointed in the opposite direction to the reason Aizen had for doing so. Oh, and we also got to see Aizen’s clichéd move in this chapter. What a bore.

Another thing, it’s been raining pigs (as I happened to put it, purely by accident, when describing the thing to my brother, who pointed out that the phrase was “cats and dogs”) for the past one week or so, and I think it has something to do with the situation in the Philippines and that island that was recently hit by a tsunami—you know, with all the changes in pressure and all that. So yeah, it’s just been rains for this city, but I am to understand that the neighboring districts, at least a couple of them, have been flooded pretty badly. There’s this River Tungabhadra or something that has, according to the newspapers, started flowing “wildly,” and I think River Krishna that’s also turning insurgent. The dams on these rivers are also starting to overflow, and as a result this 1200 MW hydroelectric power plant was shut down. It rained a great deal today, too, and meteorologists anticipate more and heavier showers. The crops, as the news channels say, have died.

My phase test’s on Monday, and here’s what progress I made thus far: Physics—about everything, pretty thoroughly; Chemistry—about everything, not so thoroughly; Math—about everything, not thoroughly at all. Clearly I need to devote more of my attention to Math, which I never liked that much. And it’s obvious that I love physics; always have. Nuff said.