Aspiration Area Don 2006

Another abstract title to tickle the minds of the many...

This posting is a psychotic interlude from my boring articles that the Western Mirror has been so courteous enough to publish, as part of my Brainwash and Unlearn Jamaica Programme.

First I will give you all my current reading lists and listening list as to allow you but just a glimpse into the mental realms of a Young Jamaican Megalomaniac(copyrighted MMV).

However I would like to speak on the maddening hours that happen to be x-mas eve, and the eve of x-mas eve. Here we are downtown MoBay... streets flooded... people, cars, music, noise, voices, cacophony, birds, wind, rain... the world is topsy turvy... children, ice-cream, confection, rum, smoke, scribs and clappers, retail wholesale... the world according to Christ has gone insane... in a celebration of one man more than 2000 years passed has decided to forget the man and move with a commercial plan...

Anyway current reading list...


1. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
synopsis: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins..." (big line from the book) Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

2. THE STRANGER by Albert Camus
synopsis: The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson

3. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES by Sue Monk Kidd
synopsis: In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

4. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA by C.S. LEWIS

5. SMALL ISLAND by Andrea Levy
synopsis: Andrea Levy's award-winning novel, Small Island, deftly brings two bleak families into crisp focus. First a Jamaican family, including the well-intentioned Gilbert, who can never manage to say or do exactly the right thing; Romeo Michael, who leaves a wake of women in his path; and finally, Hortense, whose primness belies her huge ambition to become English in every way possible. The other unhappy family is English, starting with Queenie, who escapes the drudgery of being a butcher's daughter only to marry a dull banker. As the chapters reverse chronology and the two groups collide and finally mesh, the book unfolds through time like a photo album, and Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with a humor and tenderness that is both authentic and bracing. The book is cinematic in the best way--lighting up London's bombed-out houses and wartime existence with clarity and verve while never losing her character's voice or story. --Meg Halverson


And now to the listening list:

1. Barrington Levy's - Vice Verse Love
2. Bounty Killer's - Who send dem (remix on the Nas' "if I ruled the world" riddim)
3. Jacob Miller (Every song)
4. Tupac's - Changes & Until the end of time (Just cause they are every gangster's anthem these days)
5. Biggie's - Notorious Thugs
6. Johnny Cash's - Hurt
7. Junior Gong's - Jamrock Album
8. Don Corleon's - Seasons riddim
9. Eddie Fitzroy (any song I can find)
10. Bob Dylan's - All along the watchtower
11. Lenny Kravitz's - Fly Away
12. Sarah Mclachlan's - Sweet Surrender
13. Bush's - Glycerine
14. Shawn Colvin's - Sunny Came Home

I'll now leave you with the words of a great man who is sometimes mad... "I am the Lion in Daniel's den" and "In school I learnt nothing, yet still come out to something, yet people grudge me for like mi do dem something, when I haven't done dem anything."

Hold a meditation on all of these things till the next posting all you lovely people...