Katy Perry recorded “UR SO GAY”, which sounds homophobic, but of course, she’s using the other, fashionable version of the word, meaning anything generally bad. Anyone who thinks that sounds offensive should just Jew off. And stop being so bloody black about it.

(Simon Amstell)

The other day a friend of mine gave me a link and urged me to look at it. It was this:

It was a stamp that somebody had made and uploaded on deviantART. It said, “I use the word GAY as an insult. Don’t like it? GET OVER IT.” Reasonable, perhaps. But here was how the creator of the stamp justified his position:

Words change. And the insulting version of “gay” is now almost separate from “gay” as homosexual. Most people don’t even think of homosexuals when they say it.

Let me tell you a little story.

Once upon a time there was a Senator called Rick Santorum. Rick made the gay community very angry about something. It doesn’t matter what — he was probably being an arsehole. But anyway the gay community took revenge. How? They named something of theirs after Rick — something terrible — and the name caught on.

Now, whenever anybody Googles “santorum”, the top result is … an awful, awful thing. Google it yourselves.

People use his name to mean that thing all the time now, which really sucks for Rick Santorum (although he probably deserves it). But obviously, as long as people don’t actually picture Rick’s face every time they use his last name to mean that thing, then they’re not actually inflicting a personal insult at all. Words change. Santorum now means santorum.

And as long as you don’t actually think of homosexuals frolicking in a field somewhere when you use the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘shitty’, you’re not being homophobic.

As long as you don’t actually think when you speak. As long as you don’t worry about the actual definitions of actual words, but instead just open your mouth and let the words and phrases spill out like great gobs of santorum. As long as the highest ideal you could ever hope for in speech is to release a noise from your lungs that successfully conveys hostility towards one thing and solidarity with another thing — then no, of course you’re not being homophobic when you say, “That’s so gay.”

You’re being something much worse. You’re being a fucking idiot.

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.

(Orwell, 1984)

Hey guys. You know how some nights you’re in the shower, and you’ve already, you know, washed your hair and shaved your face and cried and thrown up dinner and mashed it down the drain with your toes and then you’re bored but you don’t want to get out because it’s cold?? Well here’s my advice: rather than simply stepping out of the shower and saving some water, scan your many products for entertainment! They are goldmines. Marvel at how quickly our English language is degenerating into marketing cant meant to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, meaning! So George Orwell was right after all. Don’t believe me? I guess it’s time for Jesse Reads Products.

TRESemmé conditioner

was funny to read, I thought, but not worth ranting about at great length. Although I did notice that the first ingredient was

Aqua (Water, Eau)

and since eau is just the French word for water, I can only assume that ‘aqua’ is made by combining water … with water. I don’t actually know whether eau is an actual thing in English, but probably not. Probably the creators of the Very Chic and Very French TRESemmé just didn’t want people to read the ingredients and see that the main one is just plain water. But anyway, I then spotted

Nivea for Men

And this one is worth ranting about. It says:

New. Nivea for men. Revitalising face wash. With exfoliating micro particles. With coenzyme Q10. Thoroughly cleans & revitalises tired, stressed skin.

OK, so there are two main selling points here: the “exfoliating micro particles” and the “coenzyme Q10″. Without these, the bottle basically just says

Nivea. Cleans dirty skin.

So let’s begin with the phrase “exfoliating micro particles”. What does that mean? If I was scanning the shelves and I came upon that phrase, I would probably get an image of a scientist in a laboratory, painstakingly picking tiny particles up with a pair of tweezers and dropping them into a lotion. But actually — “exfoliating” just means “cleaning” in this context, and the word “particle” has been redefined by every branch of mathematics and science ever, so that at its most basic it just means “atom” or “a few atoms joined together”, and since atoms are just about the smallest things in the universe, the prefix “micro” doesn’t make any sense. So basically all this phrase is saying is: “Made from atoms that will clean you.” Well I hope so, because everything is made out of atoms, and I did buy this face wash in the hope that it would wash my fucking face. So the bottle manages to generally sound scientific while actually saying nothing at all. See, I wasn’t being pretentious in referencing Orwell. That’s almost the definition of duckspeak.

And come on, creators — nobody knows what Coenzyme Q10 is. You know this as well as we do. So please, either tell us what Coenzyme Q10 is, or don’t mention it. Don’t just say, “Hey, buy this, it is enriched with New Science Thing,” and act all like we’re the stupid one because we haven’t heard of it.

Then we flip over to the other side of the bottle, and this lovely headline says hello:

REVITALISING FACE WASH Q10

That seems fair enou — wait, what? Why is there a Q10 on the end of those words? That doesn’t make any sense. I thought Q10 was an enzyme or something. You literally just inserted Q10 on the end of those words to make it sound more scientific. What the fuck. ‘Q10′ doesn’t mean anything there. It’s just meant to sound good. It’s like if I went to a pub to pick up men, and my pick-up line was, “Hey, my name is Jesse dicks, dicks, many dicks.” It doesn’t mean anything. It just makes you think, “Huh, that sounds quite good. Yeah. I want that on my face.”

SKIN COMPATIBILITY DERMATOLOGICALLY APPROVED

Approved? What? By whom? BY WHOOOOM? By your fucking mother? Was she like, “Yes, it’s lovely, dear,” because you approached her with Nivea for Men in your hand, like a cat with the corpse of a mouse hanging from its jaw, and she was watching her stories, and she wanted to get rid of you? Don’t let the word dermatologically fool you. It sure doesn’t mean anything here. All the word means is, “Related to the skin,” so as long as somebody approves of it then of course it’s dermatologically approved. It couldn’t be un-dermatologically approved! It’s like saying that the cinematography of a film was cinematographically bad, or that the music was musically good!

And anyway, what’s “skin compatibility”? Doesn’t that just mean that it won’t fuck your skin up? Because that seems to me like a fairly modest claim. “Nivea for Men is literally compatible with the skin of a human being. If you put this on your skin, your skin will, at the very least, not turn a nasty shade of purple and burn as though you had just stuck your face into a pile of hot coals.”

And that is why my mother knocked on the door of the bathroom and asked me why I was shouting expletives in the shower.

There are some other language-related things I’d like to rant about, but I’ll save them for another day.

For now, I’ll link you to the blog of my most excellent friend Nick, who talks about music frequently. Nick knows more about music than anyone I know (except for maybe Joe). Once, I told him that I was “really getting into” David Bowie recently. He said, “Meh, I’m not a huge fan. What album do you like?” And I said, “The ‘best of’ album?” And he said, “Which one?” And I said, “The one with his face on it and it’s kind of blue?” And he said, “I like the first few songs on that.” This coming from somebody who isn’t a huge fan of David Bowie. On his blog, he recommends and links to great songs and artists, which is good for me, because for most of my life I have just copied my sister in all of her music listening habits, and she left this house quite a while ago so I’ve just been sitting here with those old albums of Good Charlotte and Delta Goodrem on repeat. So go check it out!

Bye guys. Enjoy English tomorrow/today/yesterday.

Hey guys. Hey, you know I was joking, right, when my review of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians was so unconstructively negative that I ended up just taking the piss out of the author’s baby? Good. I thought so. Actually I loved The Magicians. I loved it so much that I wagged school today because the sequel, which is called The Magician King, “came out” — although I later learned that in fact today is the American release date, and the Australian one is in like two months. When I found this out I was scared, angry, and confused. When you lose a loved one, it’s the little things that get you: realising you’ve set a place for them at the dinner table; picking up the phone to call them only to realise that you can’t. I keep picking up my pen and notebook to write a review of The Magician King, and always I collapse, immediately, into tears, thinking, “I just have to write this review.”

Except the only part of The Magician King that I’ve read is the first paragraph, online. Oh well, it’s somewhere to start. The novel begins with this promising sentence:

Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks named Dauntless.

With white socks named Dauntless.

Wait, what? The white socks are named Dauntless? Why are the horse’s socks named anything at all? Who gives names to their socks, let alone to their horse’s socks? And if you are going to name your horse’s socks, and you love your horse’s socks enough to name them Dauntless, then why would you name them all Dauntless, collectively? That’s what the author is saying, right?

Oh, I’m sorry, the horse is named Dauntless, you say. Oh, yes, of course, I was being silly. Some sentences don’t need unambiguous grammar, because the sentence can only mean one thing logically. Like, if I say, “Walking down the street, the library came into view,” it is clear that I am walking down the street, and not the library (even though that’s what the sentence says), because the alternative is ridiculous. But in the case of the first sentence in The Magician King, even that flimsy argument doesn’t hold up, because, if you didn’t notice, this is a book in which horses wear socks. Have you ever seen a horse wear socks? Because I haven’t. Horses have no need for socks. If we’re just supposed to accept, in the space of a single sentence, that horses wear socks, but also we’re supposed to rule out the possibility that socks could have names, then I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this book will SURELY BE THE DEATH OF US ALL.

The first sentence is probably the most important one in a book. If, in the whole two years of writing The Magician King and poring, as all authors do, over the first paragraph, the author didn’t spot an obvious dangling modifier, then he is a terrible writer who will SURELY BE THE DEATH OF US ALL. But it’s worse than that. Nobody cares about grammar when the writing is boring to begin with, and the author can’t even come up with a better verb than rode. Reader, when I say, “Quentin rode a horse,” what image do you get? Almost no image at all, except for the fact that the man is on top of, rather than below, the horse. What if I say that Quentin “leaned back on the reigns of his horse,” that he “bobbed lightly on his horse,” that he “streamlined his body against his horse’s”? One specific word is worth a dozen vague, sissy sentences like Quentin rode a horse. So a good start!

The book continues:

He wore black leather boots up to his knees, different-colored stockings, and a long navy-blue topcoat that was richly embroidered with seed pearls and silver thread.

Apart from the clichéd phrase “richly embroidered” (a quick Google of the two words in quotation marks gives 430 000 results), there is something very wrong with this sentence. Can you guess? It’s the word “different-coloured”. How fucking vague can you get? Would you be satisfied if I told you that I had a number of ‘different-sounding’ opinions on this novel, and left the matter at that? Different-coloured could mean anything from “brown and a slightly different shade of brown” to “red and blue”. And even that’s assuming that he means “different-coloured from each other”, but he could well mean “different-coloured from black”, since he says that the “boots” were “black” and the “stockings” were “different-coloured”. I don’t like how much this author leaves to our imagination — everything. As a rule, the only time the word different-coloured, or different-sounding or different-smelling for that matter, would be of any use whatsoever would be to clarify an already ambiguous sentence in which it is unclear whether a group of things are different from each other or the same as each other. What an awfully mangled sentence that would have to be, though. In fact, I can only think of one example, in all the history of writing, where that would be the case, and that comes, of course, from The Magician King itself:

Quentin rode a gray horse with different-named white socks called Dauntless.

Etc.

I am, for the first time since The Deathly Hallows, quite excited about a book. In two days, the too-friendly sales assistant at Dymocks will hand me my copy of Lev Grossman’s new novel The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians, which was a bestseller in the U.S. but mostly ignored here in Australia. Many people called The Magicians “Harry Potter for adults”, which was . . . pretty not accurate. Harry Potter is good, while The Magicians is shit. But I still love it. It’s loveable shit. It’s the kind of shit you can rub into your eyes, or squeeze into your mouth, and feel quite sustained.

The Magicians is about Quentin, a young man on his way to Harvard or Yale when he finds himself instead going to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, where he learns to do magic and do the sex and all sorts of adult activities.

I can’t really decide whether I like it. It’s the sort of book you don’t want to put down, which is good, however if you don’t want to put it down it’s for two reasons: because it’s nice to escape into the fantasy world, and because it’s written simply. Which is all fine, but the fantasy world of the novel, to begin with, is not really original. The first half of the novel is basically Harry Potter and then half way through it becomes Narnia. I’m not exaggerating here. It’s pretty much plagiarism. And then, well, the writing isn’t great either. The book is an excellent page-turner, and it has some vivid images, but overall it’s written fairly lazily. Look, I’ll open the book at a random couple of sentences:

That was how Quentin’s first month at Brakebills South went. The spells changed, and the Circumstances were different, but the room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition.

There’s a nice little metaphor there, in “wastelands of repetition”, although can repetition really be described as a wasteland? When someone says “wasteland”, I think of the opposite of repetition. I think of a rubbish tip full of needles and stuffed toys and all sorts of objects, but no two of them are alike. It’s not repetition. And furthermore, it isn’t immediately clear what exactly are supposed to be wastelands. I guess it’s the “days” — the “days” are wastelands — but it’s not clear because rather than simply saying “the days were wastelands”, the author has decided to construct his sentence so that the “days” and the “wastelands” are separated by three, needless “always”es, a colon and three long adjectives (“empty, relentless, interminable”), which don’t sound euphonious at all, and which don’t really add that much to the sentence anyway. So the image of the days being wastelands definitely gets lost somewhere, and thus it just becomes a regular sentence. Why, novelist, why? Well, the thing is, it’s not really a good metaphor anyway. The author doesn’t want to realise this fact, so he shoves a bunch of cartilage into the sentence to avoid it from scraping against itself.

Obviously this isn’t a particularly bad sentence, by the book’s standards. Probably it is perfectly average; I opened to it at random.

And yes, it is definitely a valid thing to do to flip to a random sentence and judge a book based on that. For example, I’ll open up to a random sentence in Orwell’s 1984. And this is what I get:

Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room — a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face.

I mean, Jesus. Honestly I chose this sentence at random, but just look at the beauty of it. Firstly it’s shorter, but it says so much more. In the simple, fresh word “threading”, we get an image of a cotton thread, weaving in and out of fabric, just as Parsons weaves in and out of tables and people in the refectory. These is an assonance in “fair hair” and an alliteration in “froglike face” — not to mention a vivid simile. It’s just so much clearer.

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare current fantasy literature to Orwell. But all I’m saying is that, if a book is good, you should be able to open it up to any sentence and prove it. You can’t with The Magicians.

So I guess I will conclude here by saying that The Magicians is lovely, if trashy, fantasy.

However, there is one more thing. Perhaps it is also unfair of me to judge a writer based on his personal life, but I will do it anyway, with great amusement. Because all the characters in The Magicians have such lovely names — Quentin, Alice, Eliot, Josh, Janet — okay, not “lovely”, but simple and elegant. What is not simple and elegant is what the author named his own son: Halcyon. Fucking Halcyon. Apart from its eminent unpronouncability, it’s just a stupid fucking name which clearly only exists because the parents have a need to be constantly recognised as cool and unique and original. Parents, if you want your child to be a unique inividual, then raise him that way. Don’t name him . . . Halcyon. That’s just a kick in his tiny genitals.

And I mean, oh, god, imagine what it’ll be shortenened to.

Hal.

Hal.

As in the dad from Malcolm in the Middle.

Said in the whiny voice of the mother.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal.

William’s father owned a house, a crumbling wooden shack on stilts, located somewhere deep in the Australian bush. To get there, William’s father took the only road — a bumpy track of dirt that snaked through scrub for hours, with turns at random intervals. (A sharp right here to circumvent a spider’s lair, etc.) Just crickets, birds and horse-flies lived so far away from town.

In town, Will’s father, Mr Holt, worked at a desk, and William went to school nearby. Will’s holidays arrived more frequently and longer than his dad’s, and when they did, he mostly hung around his father’s work. Now he was ten, which was decidedly mature enough to occupy the house alone.

Today, as always, hit by morning sun, the shack-house groaned with great loud cracks like old men’s knees and Mr Holt fed birds outside while Will ate cereal. A brightly-coloured parakeet which Mr Holt was feeding swooped at him and pecked his finger, hard, then flew back to its branch and sat there, staring at the man with pointed disapproval.

“Ow,” said Will’s dad, coming in and sporting bloody fingers, ran his hand beneath a tap and took a bandaid from a drawer. “A bird bit me.”

“What sort?” said Will.

“Not sure,” said Mr Holt. “A parakeet.”

Another bird, a budgie William had named Toby, dragged its beak against its prison’s bars. “Want food?” said William. “Food?” he said, walked over to the cage and picked it up. He shook the bird’s cage up and down and swung it round as Toby screeched and flapped about inside. He loved his bird. (Yet if he put his fingers near the cage, then Toby bit and scratched them viciously. A feral animal.)

Holt watched as Will played helicopter games with Toby’s cage. He glanced outside, uneasily. The birds were watching — so it seemed to him.

“Don’t do that!” Mr Holt exploded suddenly. Will stopped. “My nerves can’t handle it today,” he said.

Then Mr Holt laid down the rules for William’s being home alone the day. And off to work he drove.

His father gone, Will loitered round the house. The wooden floorboards creaked beneath his walking feet. Particularly heavy walking caused the nearby furniture to wobble dangerously on its spot. Apart from that, the loudest sounds were crickets’ chirps and clock-hands’ ticks. So Will was bored. By afternoon he’d eaten anything remotely edible.

At four, he took the bird outside to demonstrate his football skills. He kicked the ball so high it crashed into the kitchen window. He stared, scared stiff by sound of smashing glass. He knew he had to call his dad and tell him. Better have him learn about the damage miles away than notice it himself, first-hand, un-warned. At dusk he phoned.

Meanwhile, his dad was giving Mel, a friend from work, a lift to hers. “Your phone is ringing,” Mel informed him.

“Can you grab it for me, please,” said Mr Holt.

Then three things happened simultaneously: first, Mel shimmied round to look for Mr Holt’s cell phone; second, Mr Holt turned right into Mel’s street at fifty-eight kilometres per hour; and third, a hungry owl, a Masked Australian, saw a mouse below and dove to grab it, but instead flew cleanly into Mr Holt’s left window. Pause. A super slow-mo, high-def action shot: the owl, the graceful creature, wings expanding, talons open, gliding through the window. Epitome of beauty – graceful even in death — or not. Inside the car, the owl then slammed head-first into the rolled-up window on the other side and flew about in helpless fright, unable to escape. Holt swerved the car, then lost control completely. Screech, went wheels. Car skidded sideways, wrapped around a pole and then became a silent, broken, smoking wreck.

When night had well and truly sat upon the bush, Will started worrying. Mosquitoes bit him (getting in the broken window). He went to his room and had a cry.

At nine o’clock he got a call. It was his father.

Mr Holt told Will about the accident. He left the dead owl part out of the story, wanting not to scare his son. “The car’s stuffed — I’m fine – Mel’s fine — couple scratches – miracle, really.” He didn’t sound fine.

William was about to press his dad for information on the accident, but then, remembering the broken window, he said, “Wait, Dad, ‘fore you tell me more, I need to tell you something. Um, this bird, today, it flew into the kitchen window. It, um, smashed it.”

There was no reply for ages. William held his breath.

“Our kitchen window — it was broken by a bird?”

“A couple birds,” said William quickly. “Big ones.”

“More than one bird tried to get into our house?”

“Well. Yeah.” He couldn’t tell if Mr Holt believed him.

“No,” said an astonished Mr Holt. Then: “No!” said an insane man. “My dear boy, the birds have gone quite mad!”

“I know!” said William, thnking that his father took the bait.

A lengthy silence. “Will — I need a favour, Will,” said Mr Holt. “Get Toby. Put him on the porch.”

“Okay,” said William slowly. Toby ran his beak against the bars as William grabbed the cage.

“Good boy. Now get my gun out of the cabinet. The key for it is in my sock drawer.”

“Why?” said William. There was no answer. Mr Holt was angry. Will obeyed. He’d never held a gun before, but now he took a pistol in his hands. “Now what?” he said into the phone.

“Now take my gun out on the porch. Good boy, I hear you are. That’s very good. Now – Will, I’ll know if you don’t do this – slip the barrel of the gun through Toby’s cage’s bars. All right? He’s biting at it like he would a finger?”

“Yes,” said William.

“Good. Now, William, can you cock a gun?”

“But why?” said Will.

“Because. A message needs to be delivered. Show the birds who’s boss here.”

“What?” said William.

“Do it now!” screamed Mr Holt.

And William screamed: “Dad, no! Okay! Look, I kicked a football into the window! Me! There were no birds!” He clutched the phone and sobbed for a good minute.

“Oh,” said Mr Holt. He seemed to wake a little. “Oh. Well, see what happens when you lie.”

“I do,” Will wailed.

“G-good,” said William’s father gravely. “I’ll be home tonight.”

Will hung the phone up, crawled inside and cradled Toby’s cage.

My mother never liked photos. Whenever anyone tried to take a photo of her – at a party, anywhere – she would always twist away from the camera, suddenly as slippery and bendy as an eel. Once, Mum was sitting on a roller-coaster seat before a ride, immobilised by the bar pinning her waist down, and someone tried to take a photo. My brother maybe. Mum just put her head between her legs. She sat like that until the ride had scraped to a start and taken her slowly away.

I never liked photos either. When I was little, if my class went to Dreamworld at the end of the school year, I would always abandon my friends on that day and tag along with the beautiful girls. I would bob up and down behind them as they strutted around the theme park; I would go on roller-coasters with them – always without a partner, in front of, or in back of, the party, too timid to speak up. And as the roller-coaster went past the camera at the end of the ride, the girls would give the PEACE sign to the camera and my hand would always be sort of meekly half-raised in mimic and then the photo would get developed and my hand would inevitably find itself directly in front of the face of the prettiest, meanest girl in the gaggle. And don’t get me started on school photos.

I don’t like photos. Never have. Neither has mum.

People tell me I look like her, though. Mum.

When my mother died I really regretted her hatred of photos. She’s dead, and all I have are a bunch of blurry action shots of her scrambling up trees and down manholes to get away from the camera. She’s been dead so long that’s how I remember her now. Forever running away, like she was terrified of me. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even picture her face anymore.

Sometimes I dream that I’m twelve years old, crying about having no friends and searching all around the house for Mummy and every time I turn a corner I see a glimpse of a shoe, slipping away, rounding another corner. And it doesn’t matter how hard I run or how loudly I sob. She doesn’t stop. And then finally I round the last corner and there she is, hanging like a ghost from the roof, with her horrible jutting-out eyes and black protruding tongue. That’s how I remember her face.

Not that the dreams upset me that much any more. I’m in my mid-thirties now. I’m over Mum’s death. I just wish I had one fucking good photo of her. Just one fucking good photo.

Shakespeare was a complete fucking genius. Even if you can’t understand a word of it while reading, the words themselves, together, are beautiful. There is a poetry to Shakespeare that is truly eternal. Shakespeare was probably the most intelligent and brilliant literary mind of all time. Because of this his writing was so profound that it reflected and depicted eternal human experiences and emotions. To suggest for a minute that anyone re-write Shakespeare is obscene, but to do so to make it more relevant is outright retarded.

If you can’t understand Shakespeare when you see it performed, you are too stupid to live. The point is, no one should be made to violate art for no reason, even more so if it’s just because someone’s parents were cousins. And that is why I will probably willingly fail English this semester.

I feel that compulsory subjects first of all give the impression that an inhuman system devised decades ago knows students as people better than they do, and that they completely fucking restrict learning to a small and carefully chosen range of things. And I think it’s just a little bit fucked in the head that any schooling system or institution should be actively discouraging people to learn.