Physician, Heal Thyself

BLOG: Godyears
AUTHOR: Pythoroshan. Indian. Male. Thirty-ish. Physician. Recently passed his examinations. A bit of a movie and food junkie.

Roshan, I sincerely thought I was going to hate your ass.

I count nineteen reasons why I gasped audibly when I first viewed your blog. That’s how many little useless gadgets and doo-dads are scattered around the perimeter. Although none are particularly intrusive – they don’t prevent the reading of the writing or slow the page loading or anything – their prominent display made me wonder and worry about what sorts of priorities you place on style versus substance.

And now, I am going to peel the curtain back a little on my process for reviewing a blog. I start with a brief scan of the two or three most recent posts. Then I usually look for an About Me page, if it exists, to get a sense of what the bloggers goal in blogging is. (I couldn’t find one here.) Then I survey the volume based on the archives. I then sample a random post or three from various epochs of the archives. And then I decide where to start my review from.

In this case, based on my initial assessment, I couldn’t go more than a year back. Although you’ve been writing for significantly longer than that, I felt that the earliest stuff was not truly indicative of the direction you are currently going in. And that wasn’t fair to you or me. Mostly me.

What I learned along the way:

• You are a bit of an idealist.
• You like to write movie reviews. (I don't agree with them, but that's okay.)
• You hold no truck with caste-based or religious divisions. You see bullshit and call it for the bullshit it is.
• You are worse than a hopeless romantic – you are a hopeful one. Ugh.
• You like to eat. (Little references interspersed throughout -- not a single link to use as an example.)
• You write fiction.

And having read what I did, I have to say, I like you. You’re the kind of guy I’d want to hang out with – fun loving, yet can get down to business when that’s the appropriate response. Funny and self deprecating, and yet not a gloomy gus who brings everyone down.

But, for the most part, I found your writing a tad bit turgid and clumsy. Too many posts were a bit of a chore to get through. I was down with what you were trying to say, but you just took too many words to get there. I suspect that you write the way you speak. A lot of people do. I just think that in a lot of these cases, less may very well be more.

As for the fiction, I liked what you wrote, but didn’t necessarily love it. I could probably provide specific feedback on your Guardian Angel piece, for example, with an eye toward tightening it up, making it better, etc. I’m not sure if that sort of constructive criticism is welcomed, so I will hold off.

What to do to improve: Try to write less densefully. Yeah, that’s not a word. I just made it up. But it captures the essence of what I mean. Sometimes this means simply rewording things. Sometimes it means you need to get out the scissors and excise an extraneous concept or two. And sometimes you can get a tad preachy in a way that I think undermines your intentions. Try to avoid that.

Your rating. One star.



Some artful editing and a bit more care in crafting your fiction will elevate this higher. you've got potential, my son.

Grass Stains

We are not amused. It’s August now and the sky is sulking like a petulant little bitch, her windy runt of a lapdog cocking its quivering leg and pissing down on poor Fanny and I as we are forced to abort yet another ruddy picnic and stagger back home through the mud and the filth to seek shelter by the three-bar fire and comfort in cocoa and gin. I swear on Fanny’s deep fat fryer that if I ever make it to heaven I will seek out St Swithin and punch him in the face.

When I was a whelp we had proper summers, endless ice-cream days of adventure. Fish bobbed and birds sang, bluebirds fastened our braces and lemonade tasted of lemons. And oh, the girls, the summer girls! All salt and skinned knees and little sunburnt snouts. That’s what I need, you know, to cure me of this malaise. I need a summer girl with feathers in her hair and frogs in her pockets to come and hold my parasol and put the Tabasco back in my Pimms.

And lo! What have we here? It’s Geo, who might be familiar to you from her comments on this very site. Not that her commenting here will make a difference to my review, you understand – if anything I will have to be particularly harsh to avoid accusations of favouritism. I do not believe in favourites. Just ask my Fanny.

Before we go any further, I must warn you that there is poetry ahead. Of course, whenever one attempts to inject a little poetry into proceedings one runs the risk of being called pretentious. Poetry can be dreadfully embarrassing. It is the kind of thing one keeps under one’s bed, along with the evidence and the books one reads with the hand. But we have known each other long enough not to have to rehash old material. You know my feelings on this. Poetry is bread and salt to me, the fodder and the savour, and I read it because it makes me better.

Geo is a poet, and by that I do not just mean that she writes poems – I mean she takes the world and boils it down to stock, serves it back up as a clean and elegant soup seasoned with her own special ingredients. She is delicious, and she nourishes me. Besides the poems she serves up delicate little parings of prose, juicy toothfuls that capture the fleeting moments of poetry and passion and the glory of the mundane. She has a trousseaux of treasured things, images, words and ideas that she takes out from time to time and holds up to the light and she, like Moomintroll, understands that sometimes gold looks better when seen through dirty water.

Of course, things are never perfect. I have a few minor quibbles that I feel I should raise. Some are of the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ variety – Geo is a little boy-crazy at times, but I suppose that goes along with the territory. I would probably be boy-crazy too, if I was young and beautiful and the sun was shining and Fanny was looking the other way. I would also like to never again have to read a recounted dream. ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader’, as someone who might have been Henry James once said. I skip over anything that begins ‘Last night I dreamt...’ unless it’s Daphne du Maurier. If you must recount a dream, just do it without telling me it was a dream.

There is a sense throughout Geo’s blog that she is sometimes doodling, that this is a sketchbook in which she records ideas for development later on. I would recommend that she keeps them in her pocket for a little bit longer and fingers them to a brighter sheen. Speaking of doodles, Geo has another blog where she keeps her artwork. Her pictures pleased me terribly and I would hang some of them on my walls. This would look lovely in the oubliette. I wish Geo did not separate her art and her words. I think her drawings would go very well accompanied by poems, vignettes, strange little stories. They each feed the other.

However, none of this really matters (well, some of it does), because what Geo does well, what she does far, far better than any other blogger I have reviewed here is hold up her world to me in the palms of her hands so I can have a right old sniff at every last bit. There may well be dissention in the ranks on this, but I think that when she is good, she is very bloody good.

I had a good hard think about the rating I would award Geo. Of course, there were things I would like to change, but is it fair to expect perfection where it is not intended? In the end, one has to follow one’s heart on these things (if one can find it), and I am a bit in love with Geo. If I were several decades younger I wouldn’t leave her alone. She makes me want to get more fresh air.

I fucking love you.

Hating you would be more satisfying than this

It’s summertime. Do you know what summertime means for an educator like myself? If I'm lucky, it means I get to experience the great outdoors for a few weeks and drink ridiculous amounts of wine and lay in the sun for hours enjoying a world with people who sit up straight, who don't mouth breathe all over me, who do things in a timely manner and who have sex rather than giggle about it. It means I get to watch the complete series of The Wire without any fucking half-assed distractions. Shit is getting intense up in Baltimore and my television NEEDS me today.

If I'm unlucky, I get dragged by my bleeding toenails back to summer session to put up with all the bored flunkees and the annoying overachievers mixed into one giant hell of braces, baggy pants and jolly ranchers. And that brings us to today. Look, there are beers to be drunk, tanning oil to be rubbed on me, pages to be turned with sand filled fingers and blissful naps to be had. I need to know if Avon is gonna find out the shit that Stringer pulled like I need food. I need to show up here, give you some condensed learning, give out a flaming finger or two, or an IFLY for being so goddamn clever and get the hell out of here and get back to my cooler and my janitor twined to a pine tree, you read me?

I am not in the mood for something in between. I don't need to be distracted with brain-sucking ambivalence right now. It's painful.

I’m not in the mood for someone full of potential to time and time again fail to engage me. Lazy, really fucking lazy, well I expected that; but at the same time likeable? I don’t know what to do with that. Not in summer session, I don’t. I don’t want to straddle things I want to read and things that make me so bored I want to start forest fires. I don’t want to read posts that start off good but then lose rhythm or finish with a paintball to the face of MEH. I don’t want to read something almost lovely and then read something that sounds like the tender scribbles of a pretentious tenth grader. I don’t want to read something so utterly satisfying and telling because it intimately acquaints the reader with the writer's person and culture to then read posts with titles like "A rather nice stew" or "What I did last weekend".

Bitch, please.

I don’t want to be teased with developed descriptive abilities to then be rioted and looted by exclamation points. Which, let me tell you all a little something about the exclamation point, in case you didn’t gather it last time: she’s a cheap fucking whore. She’s disgustingly easy and she’ll hump you behind a dumpster, but if you are looking for long lasting emotional depth, she’s out. She’s off giving tail to any other sentence with the same easy, predictable, stupid climax.

Chicu, I like you. I like what you stand for and I love how you see beauty in the darndest places. But please stop making me ask myself why the shit I'm reading your blog instead of playing Adam and Eve and stuffing my face with s'mores right now. Quit writing so your friends and family know what you're up to and start writing for YOU.

For dragging me out of my summer bliss to read something I don't know how I feel about, I give you a blank emotionless stare, twinkling with indifference.

For being genuinely likeable with some actual talent, you get a couple of stars.

In Which a Continent is Redeemed

I've been reading a couple of blogs written by Americans who had moved to Australia. It's been strange for me to see them write about their hosts as if they were normal people, considering my personal experience with the Down Unders. I've never told them about my Australian problem, because I'm a lover, not a fighter. But here it is now. My Australian story.

Fifteen years ago, I had been living in London, playing in a band that was going to rule the world. But just for a short time. We knew that very soon, all of us were going to have our names etched in rock encyclopedias. Then we were going to disappear. Some of us were going to live past the ancient age of 30, but even then, we'd live off royalties in secluded farm houses in Wales, because society sucked and nothing made sense and to be happy in a world gone bad meant to be blissfully unaware.

Many of the blissfully ignorant fools who were in London to have FUN had a particular name and accent. Their London wasn't about Keith Moon and David Bowie and Nick Drake and Waterloo Sunsets and blood sweat and despair. Their London was a good place to get drunk and bang Czech au pairs.

So reading Veronica Foale's blog, called... Let's see... Oh, Veronica Foale... it's great to realize I've been wrong about the country all these years. There ARE real people in Australia. There are people who feel pain and write about their internal conflicts. There are people who question their priorities as they take note of what's important in their lives, never giving out the simple, acceptable answers. There are people who are not afraid of their shadows. There are self-aware people who try to find their places in the world and online.

And if there's one Australian woman with a burning desire to find (and lead us toward) THE TRUTH by bravely digging into her own personal truth, then the whole country is redeemed. Congratulations, Australia! You're off my shit list (even if your Australian savior is from Tasmania and not from the main land. You get a pass. Now get out of my face before I change my mind).

Now, I didn't read all the way to the beginning of the blog. I only read the latest five pages, which frankly were enough for me to realize that despite that teeth-crunchingly annoying Nuffnang ad on the top right, I fucking love Veronica.

(Now, I've had issues other than that redundant ad. Veronica writes another blog, which is her main one. My guess is that she felt constrained in her other blog and decided to start this one to break free and be able to return to the basics of honest writing. Fair enough. But maybe Veronica should make up her mind exactly what this blog is, because right now, writing three times a month, it is still not clear if this blog is anything more than an experiment in honest writing, and whether she is committed to the blog as much as she's committed to her other one, the real one. Or maybe this one is the real one? In any case, I've been torn between four stars and an IFLY button, because how can I give her an IFLY if she's not committed? But maybe this review will help her commit to the blog, and maybe the IFLY will make her doubts go away. And really, this blog was written so well, that only an IFLY made any sense.)