Babbling on.

I have no real point to make in this post, just a slightly fuzzy head and fingers itching to type. In a slightly Kafka-esque style, I will literally write my mind, and if anything intelligible or even legible turns up, then we shall call this post a success. Right, here we go...

Time. That background thing that we can never quite escape. It's a funny old thing, time. It's usually running out, healing wounds or placing enjoyable events as far away as possible from each other. A pretty busy character, is our time.
Recently, I've had a lot of time to think and essentially do nothing. These last 6 weeks have been filled with the slightly more taxing job of avoiding work, but largely, I have still done nothing. And d'you know what? I quite like it. Time is not a conscious being, but the way it acts on us as conscious beings is quite alarming, in the best way possible. It loosens ties to once dear things, it chops to-do lists down and down until you have very little else to do. And then, as a plateau is reached, time drops little parcels of things to do, by which point you are hungry and eager to do them. The second year of Uni has been a complete triumph over the first. I did not enjoy my first year studying English Literature. I enjoyed the people, I enjoyed the places, but the course was horrendous. Now in my second year, I have been able to cut the crap out of my learning and concentrate on things that appeal to me and only me. I've had a little saying for a few years now: 'Before you can enjoy the best in life, you must learn to appreciate the worst in life'. Studying ye olde Englishe did not appeal to me. Shakespeare didn't particularly interest me. Beowulf bored me. African Literature made me want to end my education. Modernism, however, captivates me.

Modernism is essentially the act of sticking two fingers up to whatever came before it. After the heavy, sterile, and middle-class Victorian novels, modernist writers (and artists, whom were the genesis of the movement) took a look at the artfulness that was on display and had a sit down. In all honesty, I would have done the same. What a masterpiece of feminist literature Bronte's Jane Eyre is. Dickens, what a fantastically talented and brilliant chap he was. Bravo. And then these modernists stood up, and, when trying to come up with their next piece of work, completely ignored the fantastic old Victorian style. Instead, they tackled different topics; topics of power, of everyday life, of being turned into bug and worrying about how they may have to miss work because of it. I have been taught that there is no real definition of Modernism, and I love that. With most literary movements, there are codes and conventions that define it. Modernism is the opposite. It is the breaking of the codes and conventions that define it. It takes some brain power to stand up and realise an opposite even exists. Just to make it even cooler (and maybe even justify the brain power involved), many of the writers and artists were fucking mental. Would I like to read a novel by someone who was about as stable as Piers Morgan is popular? Yes I would. Hand me that Virginia Woolf novel.

I think I see a little bit of myself in Modernism. I shouldn't fit in in life. I do not work hard, I scrape by on a cat's whisker in most cases. I've blagged my way through occasions that I should really know what I am doing and I've had the time of my life. I shouldn't have had so many fantastic experiences. I do not feel that I have deserved them, but still, opportunities creep up. Call it luck, call it what you will. Modernism is praised for being such a dick. I guess I've been a dick in the sense that I have no idea what I am doing and have ended up landing on my feet more times than I haven't. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's something that I treasure in a strange, retrospective way.

There was no real purpose to this post. It literally was me, as the title suggests, babbling on. I guess I'm just having my feet touch the ground again for the umpteenth time, and now the ground has started moving. I'm hoping that it is a floor, and not a treadmill on which I am landing, because some progress to something new and exciting would be most welcome for a dick like me.