First, an apology is in order. I’m sure our fanbase of 5-6 dedicated readers (Joe and I included) has been wondering over the course of the summer why we haven’t published any new articles for ages. Well, believe it or not, BTSB has been enjoying a well-deserved summer vacation. Now, I know we didn’t announce that we’re taking a hiatus, but I’m sure even the most dull-witted of you got the jist after staring at the unchanged front page of this site for days and days on end.

Apology accepted? Thanks.

Freshmen of the Department of English at the University of Helsinki: Welcome to the wonderful world of the Department of English at the University of Helsinki (cumbersome repetition due to my lack of skills as a writer). It’s great to have you here! I’ve already met some of you, and I’m happy to see what a lively bunch you guys are. As a 6th year student and a long-time member (of some good standing) of the department’s student organisation, I consider it my duty and obligation to guide, nay, to steer, nay, to coerce you to appreciate some facts about your future as an English major.

1) Remember to study
This is of paramount importance. Anyone with even the tiniest amount of ambition and goal-orientation (notice how intelligence has nothing to do with anything) should be able to graduate in the timeframe set by the University bureaucrats. No matter how much you get involved in the extra-curricular activities organised by the gazillion different groups within the University sphere, you have to remember to study. After the initial excitement is over, you’ll notice that some of the lectures are just dull and don’t live up to your expectations. It’s like when you have a crush on someone. First it’s all giggles and touching places but after the balance between routine and surprise begins to slant towards the former, you notice that your crush is hideous and puke-inspiring and you have to make a decision: should I stick with this one or look for something new. I suggest you stick, because, well, let’s face it, we’re not getting any younger and maybe it’s time to settle down.

2) Remember to socialise
This is important too. I’ve heard that there are people who feel uncomfortable in social situations and who have a hard time trying to make new friends. Error. Scoff. Objection. Now’s the time for you to turn your life around and become what you’ve always wanted to be. It’s time to pimp up your life! You could start by taking part in SUB’s meetings and parties. No matter how ugly, stupid, mucous or bulbous you are, you will make friends there.

3) Remember to eat
Just avoid the UniCafe at Metsätalo when they’re serving fish lasagnette and have run out of the other courses. Shudder.

4) Remember to sleep
When you’re looking at your schedule for the school year, pick one or two lectures per week that you’ll use for some quality napping. Just remember to rotate the lectures of choice so that you don’t get into too much trouble.

Just remembering these four points got me far. Granted, I forgot point number one because I was so involved with point number two for so many years. Point number three, with respect to the fact that I did eat the fish lasagnette, almost got me killed and point number four smeared my forehead with Henry David Thoreau’s musings as I chose the American literature anthology as my pillow during one very inspiring lecture. But now that I look back on my time as a student of English, I’m quite jealous of the new freshmen, since they’re about to embark on a beautiful adventure full of excitement and wonder.

Screw that, I just want to graduate.

With these words I once again welcome all students and friends back to the wonderful world of BTSB.

“May you not fall from the Grace of God,
for it is a long fall,
and you will hurt yourself,
unless you are a yo-yo,
or a pillow.”

Technorati Tags: fear, freshmen, snakes

What is it about poetry that is so satisfying? Is it just the words, the stanzas, the rhymes and the rhythm that so deeply occupy us, or is it the revelation that a poem is so much more than the sum of its components? I remember being awestruck when I first read Emily Dickinson. She had a way of weaving a beautiful tapestry of meaning from the simplest foundation. As someone once said, her charm was in “finding the extraordinary in the ordinary”. It’s wonderful when something commonplace is put under scrutiny by a poem, which, after a careful reading, arrives at revelations one wouldn’t have noticed before.

Sometimes a good poem is all we need to expand our horizons and arrive at new perceptions of the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “we know more from nature than we can at will communicate”, which would imply that in our minds we store complexities that are waiting for a way out. A poem can open our creative channels just as a nasal spray unclogs our sinuses. Vivid metaphors and similes can pair thoughts and ideas that wouldn’t hold together were it not for the poet’s genius. That’s why we need poetry. We need poetry to help us expand our sympathy to the world in order to aspire to a higher level of understanding and knowledge.

But in today’s world, what else could poetry design of it than a macabre tale of horror and war? How would poetry treat global warming? What about terrorism and the fear of it? If poetry truly expands our view of something worldly, do we really want that to happen? Don’t we not know enough of disaster, war and terror to be perfectly satisfied in our limited understanding of it all? I’m sure a lot of people would find it distasteful and unsettling to read otherwise beautiful imagery of dead bodies scattered in the aftermath of modern warfare. It’s just too close to us. Reading Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a delight, because he so tactfully treats the last stand of the soldiers and glorifies their memory. But who could read a similar poem from Afghanistan or Iraq, no matter how heroically the men and women are described?

We need poetry today as a counterweight to that described in the former paragraph. Something simple, something elegant, something that’ll give us hope and a smile, as we’re brought before the truth that this is not the beginning of the end of the world. It might be idealistic, it might be naïve, but as the terrors of the world are on everyone’s lips and in the headlines, we might be forgetting that there’s still the same wonderful universe out there; the universe so masterfully depicted in the poetry of Wordsworth, Frost, Keats and the rest. I foresee that the old wordsmiths will come back into fashion. Their words might be old but their ideas are timeless. It’s about time we focus on all that’s good in the world. Bring back the woods in a snowy evening! Bring back the waves that break on the foot of the sea’s crags! Bring back the urn, the oven bird, the sonnet and the rose, and we can all forget ourselves and the world for a while.

Technorati Tags: poetry, world, war, fear, hope

It’s that time of year again that fears are in abundance around the University campus. No, I’m not talking about the drunk Santa Claus trying to hit on you, nor stuffing yourself with Christmas delicacies to the point where the fat guy in the movie Se7en looks like mini-you. I’m talking about exams. The horror, the horror!

Fear of exams (failophobia) is an example of an irrational fear. How so? Well, if you’ve read well enough, there should be nothing to fear, right? And if you haven’t read enough, you don’t deserve to fear, because you don’t deserve a good grade. Simple as that. Now, don’t confuse fear with anxiety. You’re allowed to be anxious about exams, mainly because you never know what the lecturer will come up with in the test. Anxiety is a watered down emotion, totally controllable and easy to brush off with a whatever-attitude. We’re all anxious about stuff, but when we allow that anxiety to grow into a full-blown fear, that’s when we’re in trouble.

Because fear, my friends, is an age old recursive loop. Fear breeds fear breeds fear. If you had a near-drowning experience when you were a kid, lolling about in your parents’ swimming pool with chains around your ankles and a 10kg weight in the pocket (?) of your Speedos, you’ve probably still got a fear of water. Soon that fear of water probably evolved into a fear of being on water, and not just in it. You might fear cruise ships and sailing boats, or water skiing and wakeboarding. Or maybe you have a fear of heights, a perfectly rational fear. Maybe that fear has evolved into fear of airplanes, fuelled even more by the events of 9/11. And because you fear airplanes, your fear soon evolved and took the face of a bearded religious extremist hailing from the rocky hills of Afghanistan. Soon you feared all Muslims and misinterpreted their prayers for Allah as an incantation prior to setting off the TNT vest and blowing oneself to smithereens in the name of Jihad.

"La plume de ma tante"

All fear has to do with the unknown. While walking home in the middle of the night through a dark park with twisted paths and ominous bushes, you fear what might lurk in the darkness. I remember seeing The Exorcist when I was 15, and it was such a profoundly frightening experience that I made sure to walk in the middle of the road when going home that night. I was sure that a pea-soup-spewing, possessed young girl would jump up on me and shout something obscene like “la plume de ma tante”.

There’s also the other great fear that all students share: fear of the Future. We fear the future because we don’t know what’s in store for us. Our lives are like a slow-motion game of Pictionary, where all our experiences and memories gang up together to draw us a picture of our future, but we just can’t make it past the outlines: “Airplane pilot? No? Ah, a car mechanic! What, still no? Umm… ukulele musician? What? Close? Ok, I’ll think on that.” But my friends, there’s nothing to fear about the future! So stop worrying. Future comes as future goes, being afraid of it does nothing to further the process of growing up. You can tell the fear to shove it by actually waiting for the future and the surprises it brings along. Don’t fear aging, embrace it! Just imagine the life experience you’re gathering, and how you can look back in 20 years to your younger, student self and laugh at how afraid you were of nothing.

All in all, I’m glad to have fears. They make me human. I don’t trust anyone who claims they have no fears, because they’re the victims of the biggest irrational fear of all. I’m slightly claustrophobic, I have a strong fear of being misunderstood and forgotten, I have a moderate fear of commitment and I bloody well fear snakes. There, I said it. Now it’s your turn.

Technorati Tags: fear, anxiety, exam