Episode 249: Of Power Outages, Poetry & Pop Music

Was on Central Campus for the better part of the afternoon. Had to pay Ellie for the Ugly Cousins Club hoodie and deposit money at the bank. Bumped into Shen Ting and ended up in the Library. Where there were two power outages within the space of about an hour. Why couldn't this have happened during one of my papers? It would've been a hoot. Both times, I secretly laughed at all the people using computers in the Library who had been on Facebook instead of actually studying. Serves them right! So after picking up some books that might come in useful for my last examination of 08/09, I settled down on a couch to read Chris McCabe's The Hutton Inquiry. This is where I admit that I feel quite strongly about poetry that doesn't seem to obey the rules of grammar. (Yeah, all you 'free verse' poets out there, I'm glaring at you. Free verse isn't actually free, and there's a biting comment on that right here. Scroll down to the bit on free verse, where it says: 'Do not flatter such work, as it will ultimately grow by flattery until its mediocrity becomes the rule. Good poets must murder their darlings; bad poets must have their darlings quietly removed from view and replaced with something healthier. A paintbox, for example, or a film.' Three thumbs up, as some of my friends would say.) McCabe's work, however, makes me more than a little jealous. I would love to be able to write like that, but all I seem to manage are variations on a theme in tidy lines that would form sensible, if somewhat odd, sentences once the line breaks were removed. I sometimes want to break language, but I think I'm too good at self-censoring for that. It isn't hard to tell which end of the harmonious-dissonant spectrum I'm nearer to, to borrow Alicia Ostriker's idea.

Right. Now that I've established in the previous paragraph that I am indeed possessed of some intellectual faculties, I'm now going to tell you about how I've been a bit obsessed with some pop music tracks for the past couple of days. Cobra Starship's 'Good Girls Go Bad', Darin's 'Desire' and V Factory's 'Love Struck', to be precise. I like many kinds of music, but I have particular genres I gravitate towards instinctively, and this kind of disposable, summery pop is one of them. If you'll believe me, I'm actually dying to see the video for 'Good Girls Go Bad', if only because Leighton Meester's going to be in it. I've also discovered Popjustice is exactly the sort of pop music website that I should be reading. Am not very sure if the new mix of FrankMusik's 'Confusion Girl' I heard there is an improvement over the original, as it just sounds like a weird remix gone wrong. Am impressed by Cascada's 'Evacuate The Dancefloor', even if it does sound a bit like Lady Gaga throughout The Fame. (I don't really care about chronology and who's been working on their music for longer. The sound of 'Evacuate The Dancefloor' is obviously aping that of RedOne, who seems to be the 'next big thing' for music production in the post-Timbaland era.) Oh, and I've also figured out what to make for cell dinner next Tuesday. Pasta bake and salad. It's going to be interesting. Me being in the kitchen, I meant. Not the food. That will be decent. How wrong can a pasta bake go?