Drivel for Nice People

So I have this friend, Blubbering Vlad, who's the type of guy who you want to be around when there's trouble brewing. Not that he's all that handy, or good with his fists, or even all that smart; he's just a hell of a lot of fun. And he's likely to help keep the heat off your trail acting as a distraction to any authorities who may be inclined to give you a second glance.

Needless to say, when I go on the prowl, his place is one of the first stops I make on my way out of town.

But when the phone rings and the miracle of modern caller ID tells me that it's Blub, I will not ever pick up. Never. Because, fun and useful as he is out running through the swamps, trying to have an actual conversation with him on a phone is excruciatingly dull, dull, dull. The guy simply has nothing to say and uses way too many syllables to get that nothing conveyed.

Reading today's blog (A Hundred Indecisions) reminded me of my dear friend.

The author, who reveals her name very reluctantly and tells us virtually nothing at all about herself directly, is 24 year old Gini from Delhi, an architecture student, and .... Well, shit, that's kind of it. She writes in complete sentences. Complains about poor spelling in text messages. Seems to grouse regularly about the life she has laid out before her, as though she is powerless to effect a change. Hell for all I know, she is. But it seems pretty fucked up that she seems to have virtually nothing positive to say about becoming an architect for all the time she seems to devote to it.

What does that leave me with? I am left with another iteration of the same old question -- what the hell are you writing this for? You do not seem possessed of literary demons that must be unleashed, lest they eat you up inside. If anything, you seem to have literary kittens that occasionally need a ball of yarn to play with or to have their bellies scratched. I am not transported within your words, I am instead driven to fits of ADD. The remotest shiny bauble captures my attention over your words.

So. What the hell can you do about this? Is it so awful? No, not awful. Just dreadfully mundane. And I suspect that this is a direct result of Gini writing this blog before she has experienced anything.

No, that's not true. She has. As a newly hatched from the nest High School grad she traveled alone from her home in Delhi to Chennai, over two thousand km distant, and took up at school there, trying to fit into a culture very different from what she was used to. A writer would have wrested an entire novel from that setup alone.

So, let me leave you with a question and then a rating. First the question: Gini, when you sleep at night, what do you dream of?

And now for the rating.



Meh. Meh. Meh.

Figure out why you're doing this, and if you aren't doing it because your muse will fucking kill you in your sleep if you don't, don't submit for a review from a bunch of clove cigarette smoking, beret wearing, edgy, aging hipsters like us. We'll all be that much happier. I promise.

Yellow Submarine

I've been terribly late (that's what she said? oh shut it) with this review, and I apologize. In fact, I still don't quite have the mental bandwidth for a big ass review, so read this post thrice if you feel it's too short.

I've mentioned before that we retreated to underground bunkers when life top-side got a tad predictable. Boy bands sealed the deal, we'd rather take lava pits than listen to Ronan Keating's soporific voice. No guitar solos? What the fuck were you humans getting into? Anyway, curiosity gets the better of us and we check on you cultured apes now and then. A great way to jump from shore to shore is reading, and blogs are a great way to get around. If they're written right. If they're not gaudy enough to make my retinas bleed. If the author doesn't peddle shit in lieu of writing. If no opportunity to tell a story is squandered. If opinions are brutally honest. Right.

Today we visit the exotic shores of India, where a billion people are apparently on the road trying to get somewhere (have you seen the blasted traffic there?). Jil Jil Ramamani is a blog maintained by a lady whose name is not Jil Jil Ramamani. I'm not sure what language the about me is in, and I sense a wall of culture I'm about to run into. There's something about why the blog is called what it is, it could probably be modified and used for your "prophyle". The design reeks of local pop-culture, and if that's your thing, sure. All that colour was a tad overwhelming, but I have a memo here that says no one gives a shit anymore. Navigation is piss-poor, I couldn't figure out how to get to the previous pages without using the archives. You do want your readers to linger, don't you?

The latest post is emo - so whoop-de-doo, "NEVER FORGET" (old inside joke Sindhu, never mind). You aspire to be a biker chick and I like that. Just wear some goddamn deo, ok? I get the feeling you're a college kid, and I guess life is exciting even when it's a fuckin' 120 degrees all year long. English isn't your first language (nor a Raptor's) so I won't nitpick about grammar and the like. I'm averse to blogging with lists, especially long ones, but yours' give me an insight into life on the other side of the globe, even if it isn't intentional. There's coming-of-age writing, some musing and other random shit I won't bother linking.

Thing is Sindhu, while I find your blog readable, your writing isn't always tolerable. Writing and talking are two separate things, and blogging like you're yammering about some female teenage shit I can't be arsed about makes me want to drink a gallon of bleach. I'm sure you like the loudmouth, constantly chattering you, but I can't be the only one who hates it. Knock that shit off, respect the medium you're on. I'm going backwards on your blog and since I'm hating it more and more by every post, you've probably gotten better over the years.


Since you like lists, here's one for you:

1) Edit, proof read and edit some more.
2) Use colloquialisms more sparingly, and with better context if you want international readership.
3) Don't write like you're cooing over the phone.
4) Write more often. And I'm not talking about "whee I'm back" posts.
5) Enough of the damned gtalk conversations.
6) More stories, more opinions.
7) Stop selling shit on your blog. If you must, use a separate website and link it up on your sidebar - it's shiny as it is.


Meh, back to my single malt.

Dick Move, Jargon Juggler.

I am an American. For the most part we are an English speaking country, but there is no amendment or law that explicitly states, “We speak English here, take your other worthless language and go suck on a dead dog’s nose.” Of course, this is a good thing, because other languages aren’t worthless at all, especially not to the people who speak them.

Similarly, there’s no official language of AAYSR. It’s not like we called together a reviewers gin rally and debated the semantics of our FAQ over bucks and Tom Collinses (Tom Collinseses?). Since the FAQ is written in English, we arrogantly assumed like the vainglorious dicks we are that all submissions would subsequently be in English.

Obviously, some asshole out there decided that he was entitled to a review, even with having less an a third of his posts written in a language I understand, as if he's testing me. You sonofabitch, I got a 34 on my ACT because I test so good. Pop quiz, jargon juggler: who's got two fists full of round bombs with fuses of scorn for bilingual bloggers testing my lexical patience? This girl. Dick move, jargon juggler. Dick move.

But I thought, you know, hey--this guy’s got to have some reason for doing this. Hopefully he'll reveal himself as some kind of pretentious fuck, and then we can set him on fire with leftover bottle rockets from this past weekend's patriotic debauchery. Maybe he'll be counterfeit and full of shit. Maybe he'll nearly plagiarize but not quite, and circumvent any accusations of plagiarism because of the nature of the concept he's addressing, thus brilliantly demonstrating the idea he's floating--but did he know that I've read that book? Does it matter?

Fine, so I didn't necessarily predict he would do that last bit, but motherfucker did itnonetheless.

And by golly, I fucking like him. He turned out to be feisty and hilarious and obnoxiously ostentatious because he is totally a Bombay hipster (which he would adamantly deny, true to hipster code), and I love that kind of unapologetic bastardization of self. Sure, some of this poetry crap is just nonsense, but I assure you: although it doesn't look like a standard poem, this blog is all poetry, even if a little wordy and rugged (the entry at the bottom), even if sometimes he comes across as a kind of drunken swan, where you can see how elegant he could be if he weren't such a flashy fuckdunce.

His template is horseshit, the navigation is a sterile, complicated hospital nightmare, sometimes the links lead to streams of shrapnel html and most of the writing is in fucking Hindi. Opening each quarter-monthly archive link is like passing around a live fucking hand grenade. There is no profile, no comments, no way to go back to a homepage, no way to click on an individual entry. He hasn't posted in a couple of months, which makes me believe he either joined Facebook or Twitter, where his brevity could be more immediately appreciated by his peers.

This guy is good. This guy is really, really good. And he fucking knows it. I'm guessing he's a professional (apparently he has already written some film scripts). He's above detailing his life or personality for any potential readers, because if they don't get it, if they cannot just deduce his dreams and self from his poetry, which "does not burnish on paper as much as it embers in the mind," why would he want them reading his blog?

So, Manish Fuckwad, you are a cocksucker.

I want you to take your superior word choice, your smooth, jerkface prose, and your aloof, cryptic layout back to Bombay's version of Brooklyn and dump it in a trash bin at the local ditchwater coffee shop.


Then I want you to straighten up your thick-rimmed emo glasses and start over with a simple template with a plain, classic header that's just your title and a drop-down archive. I want you to tag your posts with "English" or "Hindi" so people can just skip to whatever language they understand or feel like reading that day. And I want you to write more often, because I want it.