On flipping through a Versace book

I noted some very interesting things while looking through a Versace pictorial book--titled "The Art of Being You"...very ironic--my mother bought for my sister and I about a year back (as it was on discount, $10 from the original hundred-odd).

There are pictures of both male and female models, and one can divide the style of the pictures taken by the gender of the models as there is such a great disparity in attitude (of both the subject and the photographer/stylist/possibly Versace himself? well, with whoever took those pictures).

The women are beautiful. Perfect in every way imaginable, whether they're smiling, gazing soberly at the camera in the awareness that it's there, or looking away as if they thought they were alone. There's one startling similarity though, none of them are human. They look frigid in the untouchable way, almost like abstract pictures of...something else. Fitzgerald would have described their eyes as "absent of desire" (like his women, in The Great Gatsby particularly).

But the men, they're different. The photographs of the male models are more organic, whether in obscenely bright colours or in black-and-white, whether they're wearing Versace's totally impractical clothing (meaning that no real man would even think of wearing them) or glorying in their butt-nakedness with just 3 inches of that bit and the bum concealed by just the camera angle or through some other, more innovative means that I shan't go into here (no, seriously, just buy the bloody book and see for yourself--you wouldn't know what you were missing otherwise). They actually have that gleam in their eye, yes, of course they know what's going on. Of course, they're like, so totally aware that this is all an exercise in very Italian, very high camp in the tradition of the big daddy of all lovers of naked men--Michelangelo. They resemble
the giant nude figures sitting around the scene of the Creation of the world, doing nothing but revelling in their sheer size. Bigger than life.

In your face. Yes, you just can't look away, never mind if it makes you feel uncomfortable or anything. It stands out, it's a "very happy, very snappy, very gay" shout-out against the ordinary.

It never fails to put a smile on my face. It's just so unatural and humorous and bawdy and unexpected. It is wonderfully ridiculous. It laughs at itself, which is indeed very rare in this rapidly darkening, over-serious age.

Just finished up my prelims

It's Friday again and I've finally finished up my prelims! The last exam (today's) was a Physics practical, which also entailed the horribly boring "quarantine period" when we had to stay in this big, empty, cold room from 9: 20 am to past 1:00 pm. What a waste of time--we could have GONE HOME! Classmates decided to spend that time watching movies (some of them had brought the DVD disks).

But that's not important. I've finished my prelims...so now I'm on the internet as I've got free time tonight before I turn in EARLY (for the first time in weeks as I'm a typical nightbird who keeps on procrastinating on bed-time for the darndest reasons...such as brushing my teeth). And to celebrate, I will bring forth poems.

And then I will go on to make some confessions as I ride bravely tonight...with a mask upon my face.

Firstly, the poem.

By Kate Northrop, a new poet whom I found just last week while riffling through a poetry site.

Unfinished Landscape With A Dog

Not much of a dog yet,
that smudge in the distance, beyond the reach

of focus. It's just an impressionist
gesture, a guess. From the edge of the clearing, the farmhouse
materializes, settles

into wall & stone. The water,
making the surface

of the stream, makes
reflections. So why shouldn't the dog

accept limits, become

a figure? Is it like the girl who sits
in the hall closet and says she's not
hiding? She's inside—

listening without the burden
of sight, letting locations
release hold. Out of body,they seem lighter: her parents' voices no longer

hooked to their mouths. They seem
cleaner. Even the electric can opener;
the sounds of children

that rise from the yard, and fall; the opening window, these are no longer

effects, things expected
of a subject and verb. The world anyhow is too
straightforward.

Maybe the dog
does not want to be a dog, does not want
to be turned into landscape

but to remain in the beginning, placeless:

with the wind opening, the wind a vowel, and the stars and waters
that flash, recoil, and retch

unnamed as yet, unformed, unfound.


Her poems are great. They're out of this world.

They seem reluctant to obey the laws of this world; she seems determined on deconstructing the world, piece by piece to make us look at reality and our lives in a completely different way and see more. It's almost as if she were peeling layers of the world off, stripping life of it's firm lines, introducing doubt and telling us where to look and then leaving the revelation to us.


And now for my confession...you've been waiting for this, now aren't you? I'll bet you even scrolled all the way down, ignoring the poem and the other stuff just to see it. Well, I shan't disappoint you...

I DISLIKE Francesc Fabregas.

Yes, the footballer, yes.

Before you tell me that the WC's over and that I must be a little slow on the uptake, I must tell you that this has been inside me for ages. And this from a girl who doesn't even watch football.

The reasons:

1) Because he's rich and I'm not.

2) Because folks who don't even know him are fawning on him.

3) Because he's so smarmily perfect that he reminds me of the bright, pretty little kids whom the teachers in kindergarten (and all the way up from then...) drooled all over and favoured over me, and ignored me to fawn some more on. Not that I WANTED their attention, please. I'm not so needy, I just felt the bite of such unfairness.

4) Because he's got a promise of free shoes (I hear he has an endorsement contract with Nike or some other shoe company).

5) Because people on yahoo! Answers ask a billion questions about whether or not he has a girlfriend.

6) Because he has a fun life and I don't--I have to go to school and it's a lousy one at that.

7) Because he's likely the type that my mum would rave about in front of me if she even knew who he was...she already does that with her friends' kids (who are very smart and who study very hard). Of couse, I don't blame her and I understand...but I find it irritating.

8) Because he's nineteen years old and thus, just THREE years older than myself. It's just way too close for comfort...we're comparable on the success scale.

9) Because he's inescapable. Singapore newspapers keep a close watch on the EPL and he plays for Arsenal.

10) Because the above nine make such a huge dent in me that I'm actually typing up this shitty list.

Hey! Kaka really HAS a little brother!

...well, yeah, of course he has.

From Wikipedia:

Digão

Rodrigo Ifrano dos Santos Leite (born August 14, 1985 in Brasilia, Brazil), simply known as Digão, is a Brazilian footballer who plays in defence for Serie B team Rimini after having spent some time in the AC Milan youth squad.

Family
Digão's older brother Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, better known as Kaká, plays for Serie A team AC Milan and is one of the stars of the Brazilian national football team.He was on the 2002 World Cup winning team.

Trivia
He wears number 31 for Rimini.
Height: 194 cm
Weight: 93 kg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig%C3%A3o

More here: Profile at RiminiCalcio.com

A poem I wrote

Seeing that I'm not going to be published anytime soon...

This is a poem I wrote awhile ago:


Columbus, circa 1990s

A monument in the grass, knee-high as
a gnome, still as a shadow as the sun
gains a quarter-inch and as foreign as
the conquistador who sweats it out in
his shiny armour, impenetrable
as the terrible chain-mail found only
on the armadillo. This is alien territory,
marked only by flown huts and ash-white bones
of things with wings. He has come to claim it;
the explorer is a brave one and there
is nothing to fear, really. He only
cried when he was angry or frightened, and
now, presently, this land is all his for
the taking. The sun shines brightly and the
field grown with such mighty blades of steel is
drawn with the cold blackness of fainting sight;
this is the past of the earth, memory,
flown. He knows nothing of those who landed
before himself, the parched noise beneath
his feet; they say nothing, are nothing: the
language of ghosts is not a conscious one,
purely crafted of Nature's compulsion.
To him, it is the one place yet untouched
by God and the knowledge of God. Amen.

River Blindness

River Blindness

or,
Onchocerciasis

Onchocerciasis or river blindness is the world's second leading infectious cause of blindness. It is caused by Onchocerca volvulus, a parasitic worm that can live for up to fourteen years in the human body.

Life cycle
The life cycle of O. volvulus begins when a parasitised female Black fly of the genus Simulium takes a blood meal. Saliva containing stage three O. volvulus larvae passes into the blood of the host. From here the larvae migrate to the subcutaneous tissue where they form nodules and then mature into adult worms over a period of one to three months. After the worms have matured they mate, the female worm producing between 1000 and 1900 eggs per day. The eggs mature internally to form stage one microfilariae, which are released from the female's body one at a time.

The microfilariae migrate from the location of the nodule to the skin where they wait to be taken up by a black fly. Once in the black fly they moult twice within seven days and then move to its mouthparts to be retransmitted.
[edit]

Causes of Morbidity
When the microfilariae migrate to the skin they are a target for the immune system. White blood cells release various cytokines that have the effect of damaging the surrounding tissue and causing inflammation. This kills the microfilariae but is the cause of the morbidity associated with this disease.

In the skin this can cause intense itching that leads to the skin becoming swollen and chronically thickened, a condition often called lizard skin. The skin may also become lax as a result of the loss of elastic fibres. Over time the skin may lose some of its pigment; on dark skin this gives rise to a condition known as leopard skin.

The symptom that gives the disease its common name river blindness is also caused by the immune system's reaction to the microfilariae. The surface of the cornea is another area to which the microfilariae migrate, where they are also attacked by the immune system. In the area that is damaged, punctate keratitis occurs, which clears up as the inflammation subsides. However, if the infection is chronic, sclerosing keratitis can occur, making the affected area become opaque. Over time the entire cornea may become opaque, thus leading to blindness.

Treatment and control
The treatment for onchocerciasis is ivermectin (mectizan); infected people can be treated once every twelve months. The drug paralyses the microfillariae and prevents them from causing itching. In addition, while the drug does not kill the adult worm, it does prevent them from producing additional offspring. The drug therefore prevents both morbidity and transmission.

Since 1988, ivermectin has been provided free of charge by Merck & Co. through the Mectizan Donation Program (MDP). The MDP works together with ministries of health and non-governmental development organisations such as the World Health Organisation to provide free mectizan to those who need it in endemic areas.

There are various control programs that aim to stop onchocerciasis from being a public health problem. The first was the Onchocerciasis Control Program (OCP), which was launched in 1974 and at its peak covered 30 million people in eleven countries. Through the use of larvicide spraying of fast flowing rivers to control black fly populations and, from 1988 onwards, the use of ivermectin to treat infected people, the OCP eliminated onchocerciasis as a public health problem. The OCP, a joint effort of the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, was considered to be a success and came to an end in 2002. Continued monitoring ensures that onchocerciasis cannot reinvade the area of the OCP.

In 1992 the Onchocerciasis Elimination Programme for the Americas (OEPA) was launched. The OEPA also relies on ivermectin.

In 1995 the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC) began covering another nineteen countries and mainly relying upon the use of ivermectin. Its goal is to set up a community-directed supply of ivermectin for those who are infected. In these ways, transmission has declined.

Recent research suggests that the Wolbachia bacteria carried by O. volvulus may actually provoke the damaging inflammatory response rather than the worm itself, opening the possibility for antibiotic treatment.


See also
Carter Center River Blindness Program

External link
Pathology of Onchocerciasis(River Blindness)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onchocerciasis"
Categories: Parasites Roundworms Tropical disease Parasitic diseases Neglected diseases

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_blindness

What I'll share with you...

I like sharing the links that I find. It helps people with the same interests save some time...provided they find this place.

One Zero Zero Virtual Library
http://www.ccca.ca/history/ozz/english/books/rising_fire/rising_title.html
Some poems by Gwendolyn MacEwen, there's quite a number of them on the site, but it does not offer anything to go with them. So, if you're looking for notes, search up the same name on my blog and you'll find a previous entry with her links there.

I also tried copy-pasting the poems (as the site is really, really unattractive, huh?) but it all came out as jumble.


Also my school library has finally bought us kids some new books. Three of them were reccommended by me. Well, that's my legacy to them (yeah, the school's been trying to squeeze more and more and more money out of us of late for all kinds of nonsense that nobody even needs (eg. an arts conservatory for the silly dancing club and dopey school band; a Performing arts theatre before that, meant for the same bunch of noise-making folks, but which turned out to be too small, so...nobody uses it!). The three titles are:

1) A Dead Man in Deptford Anthony Burgess
2) The Memoirs of Hadrian Margeurite Yourcenar
3) Austerlitz* W. G. Sebald

*Not exactly what I reccommended, but by the same author. I had asked for After nature, but I guess they couldn't find it.

But, in addition to buying those three wonderful books (which I cannot borrow now as I shall be leaving the school soon), the school also bought a whole load of rubbish like the "Princess Diaries" series by Meg Cabot (it's more like "Royal Bastard" really, if you know the story) and other books which likely read the smae but just have different covers and which are purportedly written by different people.

An Arundel Tomb
by Philip Larkin

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

I love this poem. I first read it when I was thirteen, in an anthology of "Mourning Poems".

Larkin does not indulge in much sentimentality or sink into high rhetoric and drama, a deep sense of poignancy is evoked within every line. Just like the effigies he describes, the poem's "plainness of the pre-baroque hardly involves the eye", but brings our attention to something beyond the surface, beyond the apparent that is so easily seen, into what really matters--"our almost instinct [that] what will survive of us is love".

It makes me wonder what the Earl and Countess truly felt for one another, did their marriage count for something more than "the Latin names around the base", written in an archaic tongue no longer used, meaning that the names, "their identity", counts for nil in this day and age? The couple are lost, out of their own time into our day, it seems that only the love, or the image of love, between them still makes sense.

Perseus, by Sylvia Plath

My second post of the day.

The spacing is not quite right as I just copy-pasted. Click on Sylvia's name down there and you'll get the poem just as it was written.

Perseus
Sylvia Plath

The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering

Head alone shows you in the prodigious act
Of digesting what centuries alone digest:
The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow,
Indissoluble enough to riddle the guts
Of a whale with holes and holes, and bleed him white
Into salt seas. Hercules had a simple time,
Rinsing those stables: a baby's tears would do it.
But who'd volunteer to gulp the Laocoon,
The Dying Gaul and those innumerable pietas
Festering on the dim walls of Europe's chapels,
Museums and sepulchers? You.
You
Who borrowed feathers for your feet, not lead,
Not nails, and a mirror to keep the snaky head
In safe perspective, could outface the gorgon-grimace
Of human agony: a look to numb
Limbs: not a basilisk-blink, nor a double whammy,
But all the accumulated last grunts, groans,
Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million
Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,
And every private twinge a hissing asp
To petrify your eyes, and every village
Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,
And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast
Anacnoda.
Imagine: the world
Fisted to a foetus head, ravined, seamed
With suffering from conception upwards, and there
You have it in hand. Grit in the eye or a sore
Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe
Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks.
Those rocks, cleft and worn, themselves then grow
Ponderous and extend despair on earth's
Dark face.
So might rigor mortis come to stiffen
All creation, were it not for a bigger belly
Still than swallows joy.
You enter now,
Armed with feathers to tickle as well as fly,
And a fun-house mirror that turns the tragic muse
To the beheaded head of a sullen doll, one braid,
A bedraggled snake, hanging limp as the absurd mouth
Hangs in its lugubious pout. Where are
The classic limbs of stubborn Antigone?
The red, royal robes of Phedre? The tear-dazzled
Sorrows of Malfi's gentle duchess?
Gone
In the deep convulsion gripping your face, muscles
And sinews bunched, victorious, as the cosmic
Laugh does away with the unstitching, plaguey wounds
Of an eternal sufferer.
To you
Perseus, the palm, and may you poise
And repoise until time stop, the celestial balance
Which weighs our madness with our sanity.

TGIF! And Juventus...

Thank God It's Friday!

Yesss!!! Thank God it's Friday.

I've got a little time to spare, so I'm up here again. My literature tutor postponed the usual lesson (from 4.00 to 6.00 pm) to tomorrow.

Today I'll write about the seriously brave guys down at Juventus. I read an article about them in the newspaper yesterday. They're not doing too well in Serie B, not winning any matches. Wonder why.

I think it must have come to a shock to those who followed the club from Serie A to B, even to those who stayed voluntarily (Gigi, del Piero, Camoranesi...). Apparently, the stadiums that they're currently playing in are small (10,000 seats is counted as small) and are so old and dinged up that the paint is peeling off the walls. But...oh well, t'will be an experience to remember. I hope they can turn themselves around and go back to Serie A by the end of this season, they're such nice guys, so I think that they deserve it. Anyway, it'd be a terrible waste of their time as the career of a footballer is an awfully short one. It's already a tragedy (although I would only go as far as to say, a personal one) that they're NOT wowing the fans in the major tournaments.

However, I think that everyone should make it a priority in their lives to Live and die a decent person. After all, that's what we were all born human beings for, huh?

So I congratulate Gigi and company for having such integrity and loyalty. I hope that youth today can learn from such people.

Yup, I read all about the Euro 2008 qualifiers

Yes, I read all about how France beat the shit out of Italy in the highly anticipated Euro 2008 qualifiers. I mean, WOW, the score, 1-3. Sad.

I feel sorry for the Italians. Now, all because of a trivial match, silly, biased football fans and sports writers are going to say: The Italians did not deserve to win the World Cup, France (Zinedine headbutter Zidane) deserved it. Look at them now.

I mean, Oh, puh-lease! Just come off it already Francophiles. The WC was long over, you can't change the past. The fact remains is that your beloved Frenchmen chose the wrong time to totally fluff things (or rather, Zidane chose to throw a tantrum and get sent off, and Trezeguet's foot subsequently obeyed the rules of probability). Whatever their mistake was, France is not going to get the 2006 World Cup title back although they've won this match. Life's like that.

Also, I feel that the way in which football fans (France fans rather) treat this as a rematch and will go on to discount Italy's now long forgotten win is just plain stupid. If one were to treat it that way, and say that France would have won had Materrazzi had not provoked Zidane, then that opens up many more factors as to why a team would win or lose (besides the theoretically correct "The best man wins" thing). Say, wouldn't Spain have won over France if Thierry henry hadn't done his diving act, awarding his team a penalty and seriously, seriously demoralizing the Spaniards? wouldn't Portugal have won over France if the referee had not awarded France that penalty (and instead, had done as Carvalho later suggested, "play the advantage")?

If people are going to pick at things they should have let go of long ago (as a kind of excuse as to why they failed), then competition of any sort will inevitably lose what little meaning it ever had as it no longer proves who the better man is.

There, I've done my bit in offering some proper fan support.

Tuh, what a bunch of sore losers!

Article on Global Warming: Warming worry: Potent gas bubbling up faster

I always get worried when I see this kind of thing, it's enough to put me off my food and various other comforts of suburban life--literally. And very rightly too.

Look,

Guess what this is...

Methane 'coming out a lot, and there's a lot more to come out,' expert says. Methane bubbles are seen trapped in lake ice in Siberia. A glove is used to give a sense of their size.

Link:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14696694/?GT1=8506

Lebanon is important, so is 911, so is AIDS, but pay attention to this too!

7th September 2006.

Thoughts on W. G. Sebald

As much as I love this writer, I have very little to say about him. Oh really, I often surprise myself! I've read two of his books (after After Nature, I was starving for more more MORE).

I can't figure myself out. I guess I just never had very much to say on anything...since I'm always like this for practically everything.


So why do I like him?

I found the book, After Nature in the library as the previous year was drawing to a close (or at least the school year was) and checked it out without an inkling as to whom he was. Was, regrettably, he died in 2001, meaning no more books from his remarkable hand, no more visions and passions of his different sort.

Early this year, I bought his book The Rings of Saturn. I enjoyed it as well. It was a considerably denser book than the former.

His books, on reading, induce a terribly narcotic feeling. I'd liken it to being high on opium. Dreamlike. Like gazing at those half-musty misty portraits of nobles from an age ago; the sixteenth century, if you would believe me, smelt of the dust of libraries, which grows in old books, off the ink and the thoughts and the words. History and memory.

History and memory: that's what his books are about. About the nature of rise and fall, very natural patterns of the universe. However, Sebald's writings are anything but existential. More like metaphysical.

Sebald never wrote novels in the conventional sense, no characters, no John and Lily and Rose and Coriolanus. He didn't really write essays either--not in the pure sense at least. Whenever I read him, I feel that he is, or was, saying something. But then again not. He'd tell you something, elaborate but never drill a point hard into your skull. This makes getting his point an exhausting activity as the words just wash right over the reader like thoughts in the periphery of the mind sprouting from the subconscious.

He had an odd way of looking at the world. Like no other. His books are a little like geological rock formations, full of the history of the world that is with you, under you all the time but has never come to light. Until now.

The memory of life will wound the soul forever.

Peter Crouch

Since I can't talk about him in public... My sister says that it's embarrassing since people might think that I actually like the guy.

Well, I do like Crouchy. But knowing people, they always misinterpret the intentions of others, and knowing my classmates and parents, they'll be insane enough to imagine that I have the hotttts for him. No. No way. I'm far too young for that, and I also believe that I've got better taste.

Peter Crouch is definitely NOT a good player. Not even with his recent international goalscoring record, a lovely 10 out of 13 games. Those were scored against totally crap opponents. Of course he would have to score, he'd have to be really fourth-rate not to score.

But I like him. As a person. During the World Cup (the only time I saw him play), he seemed to be one of the only England players (along with Owen Hargreaves) who really cared and put in effort.

Go Crouchy!