The story that travelled around went like this: The victim, sometimes male, sometimes female, is sitting at a desk, studying. The desk was sometimes located in their room, which they rented for too low a price from an unsettling but unintrusive private landlord. Other times it was in a seldom used corner of the university library, or one of the computer labs high up in the mathematics building. One that used to allow twenty four hour access, but no longer did. Sometimes it was said the victim was studying for a final exam, or had found themselves forced to use a piece of esoteric software, maybe their own computer was broken. Something that suggested an aura of desperation, single mindedness, a reason to be awake, working at an unsociable hour in an antisocial place, alone.

Some people like to see logical events. One thing preceding another. People who liked to believe in their own sovereignty, that fates worse than death could be avoided with a due diligence that they were sure they possesed. When people like this told the story they normally said that the day before, or the year before, or the term before, the victim had stolen someone’s seat, generally by accident but sometimes on purpose, they’d taken the seat from an unsettling sort of character. Someone who didn’t seem to have any distinguishing characteristic outside of this. That is, someone whose lack of identifiable characteristics was in itself a sort of characteristic. Someone so boring that after they left, witnesses realised they didn’t know what their face looked like. They’d forgotten their gender too. And the sound of their voice, if they’d even said anything. Sometimes they didn’t say a word, just silently withdrew, picking up an ancient book (always ancient) and walking out of the library, even though there was plenty of other seats they could have taken. This was the back story, the setting, the victim and the villain.

The actual mechanics of what happen next are usually quite simple. The victim, whoever they are, ends up temporarily leaving their desk. The bathroom and the vending machine are the vanilla reasons, though some overexcitable types studying Drama or Media like to over embellish and suggest there was a sound which drew them away, or a Presence was Felt and Fresh Air was needed. Either way a complete departure is effected (affected?) and when the victim comes back, nursing a hot drink and a venomous sense of self pity, they find that someone has taken their seat. In an entire world of other places to sit, their seat has been sat on. If the desk is a private one the interloper is immediately assumed to be a housemate, even though all housemates are invariably out at the time, and wasn’t the door left locked? And anyway, it couldn’t be a housemate, because it doesn’t look like any of them, in fact no matter the location of the desk, the creature in the seat looks exactly the same as the victim, from behind at least, and as they approach they see that whatever it is dressed the same too, and they have the same slouch. And they’re running the same program, editing the same dissertation, spinning the same pen through their fingers. A doppelganger, identical down to their nervous habit of highlighting bits of text as they read it. This kind of detail makes the story seem more true, more realistic, more horribly personal.

And then? Well no one dies. Not immediately anyway. If they died then the story would run into one of those narrative dead ends. Who, exactly is telling this tale? The victim normally has a confrontation with their stoic doppleganger, they tend to start off shrill but quieten down as they’re given no response. The doppelgangers normally sit, absorbed by the screen, dead to the world. Ocassionally they don’t have faces, just blank skin, which they turn, slowly, to face whoever it is they’ve replaced.

Unimpressed.

Hey. Eat Pray Love? Eat Pray Love for James Franco purposes? Oh but I already have. And what an insightful, fruitful and joyous piece of heartburn it was.

Not the worst thing I did for a cute boy but by God, that movie insulted me. I felt pure, organic insult moving through my shriveled, unenlightened veins as one Movie Person after another pirouetted around a selfish Barbie to help her get even more selfish. She just keeps smiling at starving children and getting humbled by dirty elephants and other people’s pain, all the funny accents in the world are the soundtrack to her vapid mind. All because this is her Disney ride and she’s allowed to be on it because she’s This Tall now. Meanwhile, she wastes a perfectly fine Franco.  To put it more authorly: WTF.

I just can’t get over it, that.. that movie completely Gunther von Hagens’d my already acrid feelings about Julia Roberts. I’m stiffed by this wash of pity and embarrassment towards what may be the most shallow, ignorant and to be honest, infantile piece of narrative cut out for women as a road to resurrection and Javier Bardem. Seriously, that movie was the spiritual and mental equivalent of an 80s movie makeover.  And what everyone should and often doesn’t care about makeovers is that once the curls fall flat and the glitter eyeshadow travels to shady crevices, it kind of starts to matter that you didn’t do any of that work, someone else did it for you and now you don’t how how to replicate it artfully. The crux of the matter is: There are tomorrows of flat hair to be considered. Always. Do your own goddamn work.

“Idiot!” he cried, “that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I’ll sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come -oh, for a Caramel to take notes- and another winter and I shall be thirty and you and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me and singing. But after you’ve all gone I’ll be saying things for new Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and emotions of new Anthonys - yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans of summers yet to come.”

Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned

An Unnecessarily Extensive Literary Analysis of the film, A Golden Christmas in Three Parts: Pt. I

FIG I. “He-hey, fake snow, hurr.” Restoration of the order in the denouement.

The film opens in Anytown, USA. Although it’s Christmas time, and it’s a movie that makes use of Christmas symbology, the town doesn’t seem to be snowed in to the neck. In fact, the weather is quite fair and clement. Here Aristotelian tradition dictates that we have to predict what’s wrong in Anytown, and why “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air”, etc. What’s wrong with the weather reflects on the plot of the film. Our hero Jessica, recently widowed, has arrived in Anytown with her son, with the intention of buying her parents’ house. Patriarchal values are overturned and the eldest daughter, inheriting by monetary means the House of Public (their real last name is never given, highlighting perhaps the universality of hierarchical bureaucracy within domestic experience), will declare sovereignty of the domus. But like Oedipus, she will have to solve a riddle first.

Jessica (a federal lawyer, perhaps the rational Ivan Karamazov of the Public family) has the power to volitionally access the Lacanian “Real”, where she can conjure up images from her past without the need for any external stimuli. In such a sepia memory playing over the opening credits, two children are running in a magical forest with a dog of Christian pursuasion (and who, as we’ll soon learn, is a “sylvan historian”— to reference Keats) and they bury a time capsule and carve on a nearby tree the names “HAN + LEIA” from Star Wars — which as we very well know made use of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. A common ancestor text, perhaps? Then the boy (who will play Arthur to Jessica’s Excalibur — get it?) whispers something into the girl’s ear. Here let’s open a parentheses and mention Thing Theory, where we’ll see that about forty minutes into the movie, the time capsule thing will turn into a Heideggerian object and pervade the whole plot. Once the flashback ends, we see from both characters gazing into the middle distance that Henry, an otherwise useless and annoying tyke, too possesses this magical ability of entering and exiting the Real at will. But I digress.

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Four characters

• Narrator

  Obsessed with something secondary to the plot, but relevant to the theme; commute time, office politics. Legal

  Narrator lacks enough subtlety for cold sentences or flowery prose. Writes informally and definitively. No doubts, in love with the ability to decide.

• Protagonist

  Needs answers to questions. Logistics

  Disagrees with people via a prolonged “Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyes, but”

• Tertiary

  Assertively voices opinions. Technical Writing

  She bit so lightly into the apple that she seemed to be trying to use her tiny teeth to peel it.

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There is a lot of paperwork.  And I don’t mean collectively, I mean individually. Each one of them comes more loaded than the Van der Zee boy, and the Van der Zee kid had so much stuff on him, we actually split his life between the six of us and after reading everything, we all got together and recreated his life in my office. We thought that if each of us could talk in the voice of the Van der Zee boy, the baby kid, the kid kid, the teen kid, the adult kid, the present kid, we would end up hearing that detail, the moment he left the rails and started wandering at whatever the place you go to do stuff like that is called. I was the voice of the wandering kid, so I went last and told them all about the pictures of the dead people. And then when I finished we all sat in quietness, with a hologram of the kid lying at the centre of the table, until the kid’s opalescent arm reached up over his head and he pointed at Shirin, sitting at the top of the table staring at his hair, and Shirin snapped her fingers and said “got it, I just got it”. And we were able to reign the Van der Zee kid in, and when he called me last week he said he had never taken his camera to a funeral since then, not once, he said.

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I haven’t even properly revised my CV, but this post I’ll make time for. This goes on Word. This gets to be all .doc.

I am writing this minutes before I close my eyes to sleep, and a couple of days weeks before the official launch of The Roof. (It also took me four times to spell launch right so I guess it was a good idea to start early)

Speaking of useless diplomas: So I graduated, right? By far, Back to School Shopping Week was the hardest. Discount e-mails started dropping in my inbox like silver bullets. But this time around, I realized buying a Hannah Montana notebook would make me a pervert. So I was all, fuck the system, I’ll buy whatever I want… But I added some very professional looking ballpoint pens instead. The rebel in me saw the ballpoints, stiffened her shoulders and started dancing, she was all, I’m sixteen, fuck the system that tries to dictate my stationery shopping.

And then I shut down the computer.

Look, I suspect I’d always imagined it would be slightly like Reality Bites. I’d imagined I would be able to stylishly waltz into an unemployment depression in floral gauze dresses and brick lipstick but yesterday a Youtube clip reminded me how much I’d loathed each and every character in that movie the last time I saw it in 2009. Also, no florals for this old brick here, any instance of nature on my skin gives me hives. But never mind that, walk with me in Bradshaw mode – When you so desire to Angry Bird the very characters you thought you would resonate with one day, what are you really left with? Is this what quarter life crisis really is? I’ve been preparing for this shit for years, I’ve partly memorized the Wikipedia page for the Quarter Life Depression, only to find out that Wikipedia is useless in handing out advice. Listing symptoms just doesn’t cut it anymore, Jimmy.

I have also been seriously considering starting a secret make-up blog called The Scarlet Lipper that only involves reviews of red lipsticks, I even imagined a header with Father Gary Oldman’s face on it – which I guess should alarm all of my fellow Roofers and call them for an intervention. In the woods.

Help me before I turn into a greasy-haired Ethan Hawke with red lips and no plans. Help Cagla today.

(Guys, how’s this for a first post to to break the ice, to warm up the pebbles? I’ve officially set a Wet Blanketian tone. But here’s a photo for any readers doubting that this is going to be a fantastic blog:

Eurovision solves everything.)