Critic Cal

Thanks, Spotify, for kicking off with Moby's ' Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad '. How did you know? Disappointment is hard to deal with, even if it's nothing more poignant or eternally significant than a paper rejection (see email dated 28/04/2012 14:27). When you invest so much of yourself into something it is hard not to feel such a rejection on a personal level. So, OK, it sounds a little melodramatic to speak about this as 'suffering', in the grand scheme of things and all that. It is pretty resoundingly a 'first world problem', as Mr. W would be only too happy to point out to me... if he wasn't the one who'd have to pick up the emotional pieces afterwards. Because there is just no escaping that, on the spectrum of feelings it is possible to feel, this one certainly falls some distance from happy. And yet: "…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces

Greater London ain't. It's pretty lesser I'd say. We had a choice of rundown three-screen cinemas, all of which were two bus-rides away, Selbourne Walk shopping centre (boasting an Our Price music store and a Mark One ) one very slow bus ride away, and a bowling alley in some bewildering, unlocatable industrial estate that was definitely a parental taxi ride away. Within walking distance was a library, a town hall (venue for craft fairs and the annual 'Churches Together' performance of Graham Kendrick 's The Gift [1]), a selection of Chinese and Indian takeaways, and a video rental store offering last year's top 10 and an odd assortment of nondescript mid-80s action flicks. Such were the dominant features of my 'cultural experience' prior to university. (Things could have been so different if only I had discovered the delights of not-so-distant-after-all Central London a bit sooner...but, as the over-protected firstborn of nervous parents, it was n

I know you're not allowed to 'not like' Moby Dick, but in honesty I didn't enjoy it very much, and my laborious pursuit of the final page of the ample tome is material enough for many a frivolous analogy with Captain Ahab's own undertaking. I liked the start -- it was mostly about people. After that, save for tantalisingly occasional people-oriented diversions, it was mostly about whales. This, perhaps, should not have surprised me as much as it did. But it was *really* about whales…not just in a symbolic or allegoric way so as to indulge the would-be poet/philosopher in me, but in a detailed, nuts-and-bolts, zoologic/mechanistic type way that showed up the short attention span of my should-be scientific mind. The cetological taxonomies are wonderfully emblematic of what I eventually found all too wearying about the book. This excerpt from Chapter 32, for example: "First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into