The racist institution is Charlie Hebdo. The article is suggesting vigilance against the use of this attack to advance the dangerous Islamophobia that has plagued the European ideological landscape for a couple years now.

This is exactly what my final paragraphs were targeted at. It is simplistic to reduce Charlie Hebdo and similar publications (I'm not sure how generous to be — you've used "Charlie Hebdo" and "racist publications" interchangeably; I've said Hebdo is fairly representative of satirical comics) to a racist institution or, to inverse the words, racism at an institutional level. As a low-ground thought, Charlie Hebdo has put its sights to more than just religion. It had a freedom to say what it wanted, and sometimes targeted race. Also, I find it difficult to believe Charlie Hebdo has greatly propagated racism. In my eyes, it and similar publications are an aggravator rather than an instigator. I don't know if you find this point worth debating. According to the article, at least, I'm woefully under-qualified:

If you need to be convinced of this, then I suggest you do your research, beginning with reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, as well as some basic introductory texts on Islamophobia, and then come back to the conversation.

So although you've said "this isn't a discussion of institutionalised racism [necessarily]", I think it's important to establish whether or not it is actually the case. Which the author has avoided. Are you any more familiar with his reasoning here than I am?

Oh look, the response this article preempted totally happened

I'm not sure to what extent your Washington Post article evidences something that is not "backlash implemented by the state". You've corrected my interpretation of statist backlash by saying that it is anything by anyone that sides with the state intervening against Islam. I'm not going to claim any particular knowledge of the countries outside of the UK and France, but neither of those two subsections involve people or statistics since the event that are not intimately involved with the state. I would therefore maintain that we should wait longer before deciding that this is indeed a pre-emptive response to a backlash which, by your definition, involves anyone who desires statist measures against Islam.

I mainly want to get across that I feel this article is as knee-jerk and awkward as some of the statements that it plans to denigrate. Would you be more inclined to agree with my view if I said:

If deeming "the killers... possibly linked to Islamic State... exacting political retribution for the publication’s regular satirical attacks on Islam by executing its journalists" terrorism is a narrative assumption then surely so is the idea that the "use of this tragedy to justify Islamophobic ideologies which call for state response to some sort of "Muslim problem" will happen?

What "racist institution"?

If deeming "the killers... possibly linked to Islamic State... exacting political retribution for the publication’s regular satirical attacks on Islam by executing its journalists" terrorism is a narrative assumption then surely so is the ("preemptive") idea that the French population will willingly see institutionalised racism under Hollande's government? Perhaps I am confused by the ideas that this article is forwarding.

Even if the two individuals are not a "civilizational threat", their whereabouts and plan is currently unknown. I would like to see the author's thoughts on whether the man-hunt operation in the north of France is excessive, disproportionate, part of a political narrative, or intentionally deceptive. I cannot see any current European government instating "statist backlash" measures against Islam. If not, then shouldn't we be waiting?

I have believed bandes dessinees to be representative of a very shallow, populist left-wing vein of political commentary. Therefore: firstly, Charlie Hebdo gives us insight into comic strip criticism and that alone. Secondly, The UK also has some very prominent examples of this kind of satire (like Private Eye, although it is not nearly as forward) and I'm sure other European countries do too. They have an important cultural significance which I think this article overlooks. That is to say — did Charlie Hebdo publish racist cartoons? Yes. Should the freedom to do so change? No. And that's something bigger than what the state, or Hollande, or Marie Le Pen, or (over here), Cameron or Farage, can control. In short, I think the response to this issue will be French; and I think this article's response is American.

Originally I was going to leave this as an aside, but I'm going to include it proper in this comment because I think this article looks at things in 2D. I've started picking up French again and am really excited to see Houellebecq's new novel Submission released. I read Atomised in English and was really impressed by it. I'm wondering whether to struggle through on my crappy French and see how it goes, since the translation date is to be decided. Its cover is going to be on the cover of next week's Charlie Hebdo. In an interview with the Paris Review he responded to a question on whether novels can change the world that:

I think Marx’s Capital is too long. It’s actually the Communist Manifesto that got read and changed the world. Rousseau changed the world, he sometimes knew how to go straight to the point. It’s simple, if you want to change the world, you have to say, Here’s how the world is and here’s what must be done.

In many ways, I agree. Charlie Hebdo never rallied people against Islam and I don't think it can after these people's deaths either. They were part of a cultural fabric, what inferences were made from them is different. They are, in and of themselves, representative of freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that everything can be freely advocated; it means that anything can be freely said. It exists as ideological baggage. For the two suspects to take any such violent action against that is a clearly illegal. One should wait until the legal process before we start discussing institutionalised racism.

I see The Jacobin magazine posted here a lot. I find it increasingly suspect.

Dropping in to wish you congratulations and the best of luck. It's nice to see things come together for you.

When are you due to arrive there?

Rupert Murdoch basically has the power to choose who gets into power because he owns so many newspapers.

Don't fight fire with fire. This is exaggerated well beyond the truth.

For some reason, the BBC gives an overwhelming amount of coverage to UKIP despite the fact that up until recently they didn't have any members of Parliament. They give so much coverage that they could only ever help UKIP's cause. Which they have.

I've heard this being said increasingly as of late. Do you remember The British National Party controversy on Question Time? The BBC has to give a certain amount of representation to certain parties. Ignoring the dubious link that you've made — between BBC UKIP exposure, the inevitability of increased UKIP votes, and the increase in votes for UKIP — this feels hyperbolic. Whether or not you agree with Farage, his political input on a wide range of matters has demanded his party's representation in the media and it's only fair that it's received.

I've voted three times (UK) since I am but a wee bairn and I've only actually had the chance to go to three elections.

Out of interest, are these three elections all general elections? Or do you mean other types, such as the European?

To address the article: I'd be reluctant to apply too much of its theory to our own political situation. There are large distinctions between the United Kingdom's and America's political culture.

However, I think a sense of political ennui is common to both countries. Ergo: "Like half her generation... identifies with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats". I remember Noam Chomsky referring to this situation as 'narrow spectrum politics', where party differences are rather specious. In Britain, the three Big Parties have congregated around the centre for most of this century. People no longer have a place to find themselves represented. This creates more issues in the US than it does in the UK.

As an anecdote: I'm 17. My peers — my age and politically active — tend to be of extreme opinions. There's a good chance I'm more like them than I'd like to admit. UKIP in the UK has appealed to the 'youth conservative' movement and the increasing culture of tolerance and social justice has led to a fair amount of people who would consider themselves of a socialist inclination.

I think there is an important question here, and it's one of many that must be answered to reach this article's conclusion (which seems thoroughly unsupported here): "wooing young voters is of paramount importance". Ennui is indeed an issue, but the article places the onus of unilateral appeal on politicians. Not to discourage freedom of belief or idealism, but one must have realistic expectations of our system and recognise the virtues of its simplicity. You've implied concern over UKIP getting into power; I'd have similar doubts about any far-left party gaining actual power. And as a whole, I'd express doubts about the integrity of youth voting, the worth they have in terms of political issues, or that public debasement ("She has also danced the “Wobble” at a tailgate party and has helped a 28-year-old perform a “keg stand”"; "Obama told students that voting might improve their sex lives") is, in any form, an imperative responsibility of politicians.

I don't really have a thing for Andrew Motion, but I read one of his poetry collections recently. I can't say that I was particularly impressed with what I read. One poem, 'Dead March', however, really struck me. I've changed the formatting from that which I found on the internet to that which I remember reading in the book. I don't like how it starts, but I need a responsible adult with a defibrillator to get through the final stanza.

It’s twenty years (It’s not, its twenty-three-

be accurate) since you were whisked away

(I wasn't whisked away: I broke my skull)

and I was left to contemplate your life.

(My life. Ridiculous. You mean my death.)

Well, twenty or twenty-three. I can’t decide

if that’s a long time or no time at all,

or whether everything I've said since then,

and thought, and done, to try and work out how

the way we treat our lives might be involved

with how our lives treat us is more than just

a waste of breath. That’s right. A waste of breath.

You see, you’re always with me even though

you’re nowhere, nothing, dead to all the world

you interrupt me when I start to talk,

you are the shadow dragging at my heels.

This means I can’t step far enough away

to get the thing I want you to explain

in focus, and I can’t lean close enough

to hear the words you speak and feel their weight.

And if I could, what difference would it make?

It’s like I said. I can’t decide. It’s just

that having you suspended all these years

at some clear mid-point between life and death

has made me think you might have felt your way

along the link between the two, and learnt

how one deserves the other. Or does not.

I feel I’m standing on a frozen pond

Entranced by someone else below the ice,

a someone who has found out how to breathe

the water and endure the cold and dark.

I know I ought to turn my back. I can’t.

I also know that if I just stay put

and watch the wax-white fingers flop about

I’ll start to think they must be beckoning.

I stare and stare and stare and stare and stare.

It’s twenty years since you were whisked away,

or twenty-three. That’s more than half my life.

Until you actually try and sit down and write, all you have is theory.

I'm worried this is going to turn into a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, but I think we're in agreement on this point. Metre, form, rhyme, symbolism, and phonetics are all theoretical until put into practice. That's self-explanatory. The theory is, in my opinion, what practice should rest on.

Perhaps "must" was hyperbolic clumsiness, but I want to stress the importance of these things since it's something I sincerely believe in and something that was neglected in the other posts. At the very least the two should be worked with simultaneously — such that "writing poetry is going to help him learn to identify these elements."

There are many rules we don't learn until we break them, or whose intricacies we aren't aware of until we push the boundaries.

I've distinguished between the more basic theoretical features of poetry and more complicated ones that engender serious thought and discussion. Are you arguing that there are basic concepts that have not been codified? Could you give specific examples?

Fur Elise and Ophelia are finessed final products that were only created after and by mountains of experimentation and mistakes. I feel like saying that "poetry demands artistry" and pointing out these examples, you are elevating poetry to a very high standard that presents it as mostly inaccessible.

I agree that no one's first anything is going to compare with Keats, or Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or Matisse, or the huge range of artists that you can no doubt come up with yourself. The point that I'm trying to make is that these great artists are examples of technical mastery as well as expression and that in them we can see that one shouldn't "cower from dissection and analysis"; there's a real pride in confronting these theoretical elements, that shouldn't be seen as "pseudery or exclusivity", head on.

I think if all you want to do is express your thoughts in a few words, write a diary or journal.

Poetry is an art form and as such demands artistry. Für Elise or Ophelia by Millais are two very recognisable and poignant pieces of art. They required moments of inspiration (a relationship with 'Elise' and the character Ophelia). They also required an intimate understanding of composition: structure, tempo, pitch, key; colour theory, brush strokes, materials.

There are so many technicalities to poetry and these are the reason poetry has survived as a form of writing alongside prose and drama. Some forms, such as the alba, are very rare; others, like the limerick, can be taught to children. A clerihew is rare but is very similar to a limerick in it's composition. There is a huge range of tastes to acquire and experience and there's a lot of pride to be taken in proper expression. Other people have recommended reading poetry and developing tastes. This is essential. But it won't all come by osmosis: you have to understand what you're actually looking at and why it's enjoyable. Proper expression of yourself must go hand in hand with proper expression in language.

You should read books about poetry. I wouldn't advise poetry about poetry, it tends to be fucking horrific. Stephen Fry wrote a book called The Ode Less Travelled. By his own admission he's not an aficionado but he offers a very compelling and accessible introduction to metre and form. He says:

The point remains: it isn't a burden to learn the difference between acid and alkaline soil or understand how f-stops and exposure times affect your photograph. There's no drudgery or humiliation in discovering how to knit, purl and cast off, snowplough your skis, deglaze a pan, carve a dovetail or tot up your bridge hand according to Acol. Only an embarrassed adolescent or deranged coward thinks jargon and reserved languages are pretentious and that detail and structure are boring. Sensible people are above simpering at references to colour in music, structure in wine or rhythm in architecture. When you learn to sail you are literally shown the ropes and taught that they are called sheets or painters and that knots are hitches and forward is aft and right is starboard. That is not pseudery or exclusivity, it is precision, it is part of initiating the newcomer into the guild. Learning the lingo is the beginning of the right of passage.

I'm saying this because I think there's something implied in "My interest and creative energy in writing prose has all been obliterated by English classes at school." I think it's important not to cower from dissection and analysis. You've been told to experiment. What's the point in experimenting when you have no basis for your hypothesis? What rules are you disproving if you don't even know them?

Fry asks if you'd call a child smashing a piano — calling it 'self-expression', of course — art, because of that misnomer 'self-expression'. You may not like Arthur Schoenberg or Ferneyhough; or Malevich or The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, but these artists always knew the rules that they were breaking before they broke them.

There are issues that remain unresolved in literature. One might be mimesis — how much a representation bears resemblance to a reality. This has attracted people from Plato to Coleridge to Frank Kermode. Then there are the codified basics: metre, form, rhyme, symbolism, phonetics. These must be known.

You may like Chatroom by Enda Walsh. I've never read any of his work but Enda Walsh is quite a big name in Irish drama at the moment and is associated with Roddy Doyle (another famous Irish author who I know I don't like).

The epistolary format fascinates me, especially as applied to the modern age.

Agreed. I'm writing something at the moment in epistles. Keep practising and all of that.

I feel I represent a completely polar opposite political opinion to b_b. I got an hour's sleep last night so I could follow the coverage and results as they came in. I'm Scottish but unfortunately couldn't vote as one of the criterion was residency, and I'm based in England. My family voted No, and when the result came in at 6:10 this morning, I was very pleased but maintain that it's early days. I'll be following where things lead from here.

My greatest concern was the Yes vote. I'd encourage everyone to watch Gordon Brown's speech for the No campaign. Fundamental issues were not been addressed by the Scottish National Party. The Royal Bank of Scotland were not going to support a fully independent Scotland, a pound sterling union was out of the question, and EU membership - whilst a practical certainty, in my opinion - was unconfirmed and the waiting time was anyone's guess. Unless the plan was to barter in Irn Brus and virgin daughters, there was little foresight into basic economic concerns such as what currency would be used. I respect b_b's opinion, but would have been disgraced as a Scotsman knowing that an entire country could be enthralled by such romantic images and experimental notions. You don't have to go back too far to see what happened with assignats

What has interested me is the difficult task of ordering some kind of demographic information on who voted Yes and who voted No. Everyone in Britain was expecting a close call overall - and 55 majority, whilst statistically significant in a referendum is going to be bitterly close for people in both camps. What I expected however was much larger disparities within the 32 council districts themselves. My expectation was to be able to divide it on geographical lines. I did not expect a district like Inverclyde, so close to the major Yes bastion of Glasgow, to have an approximately 1 petcent difference in votes (0.8% IIRC); neither did I expect the Shetland and Orkney islands to be so mild in their rejections, nor Edinburgh to exert seemingly so little influence on Fife. These are just three examples. This morning, as the Fife vote was pending, the BBC predicted that Fife's vote would not be like Edinburgh's because of a larger portion of economically deprived people. This is certainly true and Edinburgh is an affluent city, but I also feel that the class explanation is too simplistic. It's well known that Scotland is a very left-leaning country (and I know many people who were very concerned about the Conservatives assuming total parliamentary power in the UK with an independent Scotland. I won't really go into this but I'd recommend people look into the huge Labour vote turnout in Scotland and the West Lothian Problem if they're more interested in the political relationship between Scotland and England). The values of equality and social justice are very highly valued by people across the board. To turn this into a them vs. us situation on the basis of wealth seems to me ignorant of sociopoltical values held throughout Scotland. My natural conclusion would be that this was ubiquitously a HIGHLY personal vote that defies easy categorisation on geographical / class / ethnic bases, but am extremely interested in some kind of psephological analysis in the future.

If my interpretation is even close to the truth, I am somewhat worried about how entrenched this makes any animosity between the two sides. The referendum has been celebrated for its pacifism, turnout, and fair democratic proceeding, but there will be tensions. And without an easy distinction as to where to focus campaigning and political education, that may continue.

Another interesting facet to this is Cameron's involvement. There is some speculation as to his confidence in the No vote. Some believed that he allowed the referendum to take place because he felt that few people would support an independent country that, as I have briefly noted, failed to take important considerations such as the currency, consitution, debt, and so on. In the final days of the run-up with polls become increasingly uncertain, the stress on Cameron was obvious.

But if we assume that at some point he had deeply believed in a No vote, he has succeeded today and the interactions between the SNP and Conservatives - as the right parties representing North and South - will be intriguing. Already Salmond has said that he is STEPPING DOWN as the leader of the SNP. With many more people believing that much of the Yes vote was a vote for Salmond in lieu of the Independent Scotland - as an ideology, state, way of life - this is a prime opportunity for Cameron to utterly sideline one party on his side of the spectrum, something that will be a smart move when the threat from UKIP is a new concern. Another political event that will be worth watching out for is the potential rise of Gordon Brown, like a particularly corpulent Phoenix from the ashes of his unpopular Prime Ministership. His rousing comments preceding the referendum may give him new life as a left-wing figure in Scottish politics.

However, talks in Westminister will begin soon about further concessions to the Scottish Parliament. This autonomy may include the right to modify major things such income and inheritance taxes. I withhold any opinions on these issues and feel they need to be dealt with pragmatically as they arise.

At an international level, I echo BLOB_CASTLE's sentiment. Foreign governments must and will react to this precedent. I reject the more frequent comparisons to Catalonia and the Basque regions in Spain and France. The nature of these movements has been more vitriolic than Scotland's national movements. Closer to home, Wales, Northern Ireland, Cornwall, and even metropolitan areas such as Manchester may not see total independence, but are hopeful for more federalist measures in the wake of Cameron's commitment to them (based on his speech in the early hours of the morning). Nascent movements such as that of the Frieseland in the Netherlands, which has seen some nationalist representation in the Dutch Paliament may also take note, but I don't clAim to be an expert in this matter.

Finally, and despite my weariness about the entire Yes campaign, I have the utmost respect for Salmond for acknowledging the precautions in the Edinburgh Agreement, for a binding and honest result in this referendum on Scottish independence. I can't say that if my own 'side' had been defeated in such a controversial matter today that I'd have been able to show the same level of grace.

Recently bought False Memories by Marcos Cabral

E: Finally found out how to put Youtube directly in or something.

My advice is to avoid as much as possible "learning about the world" from day to day news and articles.

I agree with this. I was recently reading an essay by Huxley in which he discussed the overwhelming amount of journalistic information that he read every single day. He argued that it was detrimental because all the reports segued into the next without giving time for a particularly distinct picture. This is part of why books are so important. Firstly you'll get an abridged and generally accurate overview of events and secondly you'll get some historiographical interpretation. "He who is closest to the event is the best witness but the worst judge."

I read The Guardian but can't recommend it alongside the BBC as others have done. At times, its left bias verges on the ridiculous.

The backpacking around Vietnam sentence was sarcasm. I can understand that my sense of humour is caustic, but I didn't mean to cause offence. Sorry and I hope you see something else in my reply.

If you think that my comments don't apply to your situation, then I invite discussion. Please don't be put off.

I'm not old enough to have been an active agent in any of my moves. You're not going to see my confessions here unless I'm being paid by the word, but the bottom line is I've seen three major moves and several smaller changes of scenery. There's now the prospect of moving to university. Naturally I'm not the one making the call on my own acceptance but I can at least choose where I might want to go.

Assuming you're asking for advice on your situation: I think the first thing that needs to be established is that moving will change your life. You've acknowledged that. Other people's posts are evidence. This:

Turns out that lots of places want to hire me for professions I've left behind because I didn't feel like they would take me places, but that is turning out not to be true. I've also been re-cementing friendships via creative outlets.

shows that you're not relinquishing control over your own life. That's good. My most recent move was 5 years ago when I was 12 and thus fell at the beginning of what I'd consider particularly formative years. I can't quite fathom how backpacking around Vietnam brought you closer to spiritual oneness. I can, however, appreciate that some circumstances will offer you opportunity and that the onus is on you to take it. I was disappointed with where I'd moved to — it was a proprietary downsizing, and that can be taken symbolically. The objective minimisation of what I could do (fewer jobs here, worse schooling, fewer friendships, etc.) led to a perceptual minimisation. It's only now — and possibly in light of the fact that there is more personal freedom coming my way — that I'm starting to do something with where I've moved to and the people I've met.

Firstly, nothing I'm doing in this year is going to be lasting, this is more of a stepping stone. I don't like where I'm living; there's not enough here for it to be more than a stepping stone. Nonetheless, I'm happy that I'm using it for a — any purpose — purpose and I wish I'd started sooner.

Your second question is nullified in my instance. I didn't do anything in the moving process and I didn't do anything once the moving was over. In the future, I hope to move into the city. I see the stupidity in my self-fulfilling prophecy of minimisation. I think moving to a city would only foster my rejection of that error.

I couldn't locate Boston on a map and even less do I know what it's really like but I can imagine you're going to feel your life accelerate a bit. There's going to be a lot to take in. You'll even have to familiarise yourself with such minutiae as the commute to work. I think that's good. I don't know the context of your "not having time" discussion, but it may seem that there is a lot of commotion around your tidy plan. You shouldn't let it infect though. You have plenty of time but do not waste it. Arrive and observe your situation and move on from there. You've implied that you're now seeing the possibility of progression in several careers and you're going to choose from those too. There are plenty of factors that decide which job you're going to wind up in. It might be a simple income comparison, or how passionate you are about the work, or whether you're buddy-buddy enough with the boss to bed for a promotion — the point is that it's all just strategy. Map out where you are and where you're going.

While conjecture is a sweet solace, I can't just do it all again and neither can you. That's implied by the very usage of the conditional could — so don't waste time. Cynical inaction is a habit for those with too much life left or those with very little.

What exactly do you mean by slanted?

Basically I mean from everything I'd heard about it, I thought it was going to be this year's emo shit and pop rock concert collective, which in retrospect was a poor judgement and I probably wouldn't have minded going. The people I heard about Reading from tended to be those who like their rock less arthritic than ACDC and less flexible than prog, which only added to my myopic bias.

Arctic Monkeys,

I heard there was almost no atmosphere at Arctic Monkeys. I like your judgement more though, because if they played R U Mine? and I was in the crowd, I would have gone full Napoleon Dynamite. My flailing epilepsy nearly broke the TV listening to it on Jools. I'll have to check out Gogol later.

Also woo Cambridge! It's so fucking boring here. I can't wait to leave in two weeks. I was at university in Brighton (Sussex) for the last three years and it really does not compare.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) I don't have the benefit of perspective.

That is not the same John Martyn who is covering the finest piece of music ever, is it? This is the only song of my John Martyn I've heard. They sound like polar opposites.

I went to the Reading Festival last weekend and heard some fantastic music, so that is what I have been listening to lately.

I heard it was pretty good. Unfortunately everyone I knew was going to the Blink 182, You Me At Six, Sleeping Sirens, et al. side of things so I passed on it. Looked up the line-up a couple of days before the event started and it looks like I missed out a bit. How crowded were the three bands you've picked? Whilst the line-up wasn't as slanted as I originally assumed, Clean Bandit and Metronomy stuck out like sore thumbs. I heard there were fewer than 50 people who went to see Elli Ingram -- sadness.

who you might have heard of for the song (at least if you live in the UK, not sure about elsewhere):

They really exploded, didn't they? I heard their debut single the night it was released and honestly thought they were going nowhere. Oh, eighty million views? Glastonbury? Reading now? ...

from my home town of Cambridge,

DOUBLE ...

So was it somewhat serendipitous that the two you found were in a similar location? Do a lot of people not have the means to visit all the universities that fulfill their criteria and if so do many people make 'blind' decisions?

I never answered your question about what I was interested in going to university for, but I've been seriously considering doubling up Philosophy with English Literature. All the power to you if you continue down that route. :-)

As I say, I preferred Book 1 to the other two. I think if you find the plot overwritten and the characters uninteresting, Book 2 will exacerbate that. Book 1 served as a decent exposition for a plot -- a foundation -- but as I said in my original post, the plot winds up assuming a very bland focus in the sequels. For me it was less an issue of a slow pace and more that it was completely meandering. It went from scene to scene and event to event but there was no implication that it had any real destination in mind. By Book 3 I was skipping entire passages of filler.

Can't really comment on Murakami's other work and I too stopped ASOIAF after the first book. I've had that enormous series taunting me from my shelves for maybe two years now and it's still not over.

So when you're looking around for universities, do you have to have a region or state in mind before you start applying? Surely you can't visit all the universities you might want to if these are the procedures you have to go through to reach them. Have you decided that the university you want to go to is definitely somewhere in New England, it's just a case of which? I find this crazy.

We attended a really awesome information session (my favorite of all the ones we saw, and they didn't even have a Powerpoint)

PowerPoint is essentially pointillist anhedonia. It makes me sad.

I take the Aunt camp's opinion further. 1Q84 is among the worst pieces of fiction I've read. The three books in the trilogy were my first reading of Murakami and remain the only books of his that I've read. I've looked around for opinions on his magnum opus and everyone seems to give different opinions. I bought Norwegian Wood and will sit down and read it eventually, but 1Q84 left a very bad taste in my mouth and I can't really encourage anyone to read it.

I don't know how far elizabeth is, but Book 1 was better than the two sequels. My first concern was probably the flatness of the writing. This was particularly obvious in the internal monologues of Tengo and Aomame which were so detached that they distanced themselves from any form of psychology or characterisation and instead bordered on stripped point-of-view narrative on the plot. This turned out to be a major issue as the main plot focus was on the separation of Aomame and Tengo, who seemed passionless, rigid, robotic, etc.

I might even be able to see the appeal of it as some kind of Tolstoyan statement on the meaningless of individuals in the march of history if Aomame and Tengo actually did something worth talking about in their time. Particularly in Book 3, and this is very meta-, the book just becomes a discussion of these two reading the newspaper, Proust, Dostovesky, Chekhov... When I finished the series, this ubiquitous intertextuality served as a grand list of authors I'd really rather have put time towards in lieu of Murakami.

It's like Shlohmo and Nosaj Thing got together to make a Venetian lullaby. This is really good.

I don't really know what you want opinions on but as a layman, I felt that the guitar and piano (?) could've been made looser on Stray Motion. Twangier, more reverb, or perhaps replaced with a different stringed instrument altogether (something oriental? I heard an instrument like that used to good effect recently, I'll get back to you if I can find the song). Moonlight Mentality was the weakest song. It seemed like you were auditioning the bass: bringing it in and then taking it back out before it had finished what it had wanted to do. I wanted it to come to a point where it did what it needed to and proceeded to synthesise with the track more, like Vegyn's Fresco Dome at around 2:10.

The last two tracks had a very different dynamic. They felt more metropolitan and paranoid and I preferred them for that. That is really nothing other than taste. In my opinion, Soon After was SO good. It responded to my criticism on the first two tracks and combined them in one, throwing in some really engaging drums and hermaphroditic vocals for good measure, absolutely loved it. Huge props.

Yeah, I know it, but Kavinsky puts way too much synth into 'synthpop' for my liking. If you like both of these bands, maybe try out Polica? Lay Your Cards Out, Warrior Lord, and Wandering Star are good tracks with Smug from their most recent album Shulamith being my favourite.

Sorry I'm not linking anything: I'm lazy and on mobile.

Been listening to their stuff for a while. Favourite song is without a doubt Nightcall. My main issue, and I think others felt this as well, was that there was a very similar tempo and structure to every song on the album. They start of slow and then get quite dancey towards the end. I don't know what made this particularly noticeable on If I Wait, but the iambic movement of every song gave the album a somewhat repetitive feeling.

Have you heard VAULTS? Check out Premonitions. It's a tad darker than London Grammar without being as dark as Banks, for example. The singer's voice is also quite husky at times, it reminds me of the singer from a rock band called Dommin.

You guys, I am so freaking excited for the next few weeks. Tomorrow I leave for my trip around the Northeast, going to tons of cool places and visiting my top 2 colleges (+ meetings with the directors of both honors departments, so cool),

In the UK, AS results day is tomorrow. Your thread about college had a lot of people talking about switching majors, but in the UK you 'declare your major' as a part of the application process. Therefore tomorrow defines, to some extent, where I can apply and what for. Fun times!

I recall reading the defence speech that Saro-Wiwa gave at a Nigerian military court. Your description of the case is as I remembered it to the word. It's a very permanent story and one that's worth looking into.

A translation of a Palestinian poem from a week or so ago. I didn't think much of it but you may find it of interest

This track feels incomplete. Those warm theremin sounds could have been off a chiptune and weren't really driving the song enough between those kind of schizophrenic drum beats. I think he would have benefited from deconstructing the song completely and played to the strengths of those drums, something like Stray & Frederic Robinson's Thumbprint which I've been listening too compulsively for the past month. I think you may be someone who can appreciate this track!