Happy 2009

It seemed silly to end the year with a Christmas tree post so here it is, the obligatory last post of the year. As I sit here listening to the wind stirring the wood mobile going clack-clack-clack against the window I don't feel any different. The anticipation hit a long time back. One year ago I was at the PY's watching The Gods Must be Crazy with two lovely women. We had chips, we cracked lame jokes, Hash complained the PY snored and somehow we ended up watching the fireworks from my house and harassing my hamsters. Truly, I didn't think anything then but certainly the gods must have been slightly less marbly after all because it turned out to be a crazy year. I am looking forward to seeing the new year through - I'll be graduating (fingers crossed), the world will be a warmer place, I'll go traveling, maybe I'll finally pick up driving, maybe - a whole lot of maybes lined up. And then, in another three hundred and sixty-five days, the world would see the first decade of the century.

I want to touch the curve of the sky, hear the wind in the trees, smell wet rain falling and watch the world spin on its slow axis to the sound of its own rhythm in space. I want to walk the streets of Greece and Rome, watch a kabuki play, chase the star-bursts down the promenades of Paris, visit haunted castles and museums and wide heaths and icebergs. I want to keep the scent of old books and the tranquil hush of the libraries by my side, the late night tappings on my keyboard and the echo of shoes on the many staircases too. I want to keep the nights out, the chilling out sessions, the tea, the uneven, narrow side streets and the numerous books and anime and films.

A toast to the old and to welcome the new.

2009/2010. 

Merry Christmas

It was a good day out today despite the hellish crowd. Thank you.

Merry Christmas to each and everyone of you. May 2010 be all the better!

B.A. in Idiocy

Introduction:

Welcome to the year 2009. It is ending now but I wanted to say a few friendly words before we part ways, forever, temporally speaking. I can only physically move forward, even if I think that I'll always have an eye turned over my shoulder to this point in time. Now that we are nearing the end, it is a time for reflection, for thought and for internalizing. The added bonus is unburdening, but we'll see about that.

Chapter 1: Zetsubo-sensei

Do not despair. Please kindly refrain from ever using this word (except in jest) if you ever have to mark someone's essay. I believe my professor was being kind but such things just kills. It doesn't help when at the same time, you're undergoing a crisis when you've suddenly to take on a majority of household chores because your mom's injured her arm. 

It may seem very sad for me to say this but I really agonized over which to prioritize. I felt that my essays were very important, but my mom felt a shiny floor and not eating out was. And one of my deep core beliefs that my parents cared about my education sustained a deep and irreparable crack. They certainly cared, they want me to have a stable job and money and a comfortable life, insofar as their own convenience was not unduly jeopardized. As, I was, naturally thinking the same, though in reverse (I didn't want to jeopardize my essay grade), I can't say I can fault them too much.

The fact is also that I wasn't always working on essays, which I had half given up the battle for made the guilt of not helping out more even more aching. It was a relief to hear somebody, anybody tell me that I had helped out more than enough even if I didn't believe it, it was nice to hear. Naturally I felt even worse because it indicated simply, the minutiae I can do for my parents, especially since I took on the housework very grumpily and fanned the flames of discontent a lot at home.

I'm a disappointment, really. Which is why and here is a lesson to all future parents: Never tell your child that she is useless. It is damning. It is also contractual. There was a point in time, when I ought to have been thinking about my ISM proposal that I was thinking more of a 5000 word essay on Tyranny.

Chapter 2: Bitter Fruit

This one is a joke made by another person. Every time we meet up and I've an opportunity to explain why I wasn't doing a thesis, she'll laugh and say, "Leong sounds so bitter every time". I don't. It was probably a good thing as I on average, score better grades in fields outside my major. The proposal exercise proved that I wouldn't have been able to sustain the rigor of a thesis. I lost interest in my topic. It was a struggle just explaining what I had in my head and I became frightened that I had sustained some kind of permanent mental damage. There is no way you can write clearly if you can't even articulate coherently your own ideas to yourself. 

My CAP went back up this semester, but just when I seriously needed a confidence booster, my grades were on a downhill slide. I would have liked to believe that I could do a thesis. I might have been less unsure of myself. But all those mights don't account for anything in the here and now, other than that in a way it is tedious the way it, like the early string of As I was getting this semester buoys hope up when all I had wanted was the peace of having accepted that I was an average student and average person.

I understand that I've not made as sustained a description of what bogs my academic life but some things remain too sore a point for me to talk about. Then I discovered that my opinion matters very little in the great scheme of things and that I should not be so concerned that I was wasting people's time having to bear through listening to my bewildered proposal.

Chapter 3: Death Wish

This has nothing to do with family or my education. It has to do with the only other thing left. This involves a person I knew from school, though only as an acquaintance. In a way, what I'm writing here is so watered down that it isn't even what transpired but I shall summarize pithily. It involved a bench, my idiocy, and a suspected perv. I don't know. I felt sorry for him but that has, in increasing days, turned to blood boiling. I was asked if I had a death wish following the idiot to the park at night. In a way I was outmaneuvered but still - I spent most of it being very uncertain if I was mistaking a fellow schoolmate of unholy designs or if he just liked me and was just stupid. And I was too polite. And nice. As usual. I have a very big range for accepted idiocy and strangeness in people you know. Just... don't take advantage of my open-mindedness. You'll induce me to feel pity - not very flattering for the person and anger. You would think alarm bells would be going off in my head and they were. And which goes to show how right Freud was when he spoke of the uncanny. I simply believed that Singapore was very safe and I was with someone I sort of knew, even if that someone was giving off very strange vibes. But everyone knows "safe" and "know" are easily turned on their heads. I just didn't think I would be the sort of person to attract creeps.

I however take this as a learning point and wake up call. There were several very strange things leading up to this 

Conclusion:

This might come across as a surprise to some people but, no, I don't trust myself. I said that maybe I ought to start but there are a lot of difficulties, and not two days after telling myself that, I committed the same mistake. No, I don't trust myself because I believe that people are inherently selfish and that includes me, of course. Being magnanimous is actually a struggle and a pain and it doesn't come easily and this year has been a dry year. I told a friend over prata that it would hardly matter if I simply disappeared; the world will go on and possibly even be the better for it. Less humans is always a good thing, these days and I point out, as a current example, Avatar. A human directed film where blue aliens trump humans - doesn't that say something? 

It has been an eventful year for me and I am grateful for small things. Tuition, while a sore point in terms of time constraints and aggravating children are all the better for making me feel happy and satisfied. I feel like I'm doing something for somebody, and the satisfaction it brings cannot be measured. I hope I will like teaching. The horror of my mom's friend's daughter when she heard me say that I was going to teach is priceless. 

So, too bad. This person doesn't want to be a blue alien. I want to finish my education. I want to see how chapter 3 turns out. I want to watch movies. Rediscover my love for books. I want to feel sunshine, listen to the rain and enjoy the sharp smell of wind. A salute to Life, and to Art. 

A couple of things

Children are morbid.

"The old lady had fractured her arms and legs. But she is fine."

Will all the forces of everything good and pure tell me how to mark this in compositions?

Unbelievably, I am going to say the following:

Avatar, in spite of being obviously and disgustingly overhyped, is actually worth your 6 bucks (if you're a student). I have it on good authority, trust me.

The meaning of happy

I love the view from up here, it is _____________.

1) pretty as a picture

2) gay as a lark

3) pleasant as a wind breeze (or obvious equivalent)

4) I forgot what but you get the sense of what is being asked.

Ask children what "gay as a lark" means and all I get are delighted smiles. Thank you, twentieth century for producing such a happy alternative meaning to the word. 

Note: The answer is 1)

UPDATE: And did I mention? I have to teach them cheesy composition phrases like "as eager as a bridegroom". And everyone knows what it is that the bridegroom is really getting excited about.

The Book Post: The Favourite

For the longest time, if anyone asked me what my favourite book was, the answer I had given was Yann Martel's Life of Pi. The story of an Indian boy (the epnoymous Pi) whose ship capsizes enroute to Canada to start a new life with his family, Life of Pi was no regular castaway tale. It can't be, not when one of Pi's liferaft companions is a full grown Bengal tiger. The book was special to me for a few reasons. It was funny, humurous and one of the few thoughtful and life affirming books I had read. What is writing? What is life? Why is art important? This book was the stuff of books and one of the few which I had re-read with pleasure time and again and I still urge people who haven't read it to go and give it a try.

But lately, I find that I do not immediately think of this book except as a fond memory. What is my favourite book? This is a tough one. I have many books that I love but none which I can say moved me above the others. I have moved on since I declared Life of Pi to be my favourite book. I am probably not much wiser or sadder than I was two years ago, when I was asked in an MOE interview what my favourite book was and I gave an admittedly unflattering answer because I was so stunned that they were asking weird things like this. But two years is a long time and even if it is only a little, I've moved on from then, taste wise.

I can however think of a few authors whose work(s) have given me that special feeling. Diana Wynne Jones. Eoin Colfer. Susanna Clarke. Neil Gaiman. Phillip Pullman. Yann Martel. Daniel Keyes. Eva Ibbotson. Margaret Atwood. Jane Austen. Oscar Wilde. T.S. Eliot. Edgar Allan Poe. J.R.R. Tolkien. J.K. Rowling. Enid Blyton. Isabel Allende. Georgette Heyer. Joanne Harris. The list goes on. And on. Not of all these can profess to being very literary. They can however, all profess to be books that people have enjoyed and possibly even loved and cherished by someone out there. If there is something I entered my major believing and will go out of it thinking, it is that books are meant to inspire and move its audience in all spectrums of emotion and thought.

So what is my favourite book? This is a difficult question with no forthcoming answer. In all honesty, there won't probably ever be just one again. There are too many good things out there for me to just like one.

Note: Martel has not published for a while and in lieu of this post, I did a google to find out what he has been up to and to my delight, it seems that he'll have a new work, Beatrice and Virgil out next year (which is another reason why 2010 will be a good year in terms of books and movies for me)

Scenes from Around Here

Elegy 8.6 KV

Here lies Sir N.U.S. Cable,

Who went to great lengths

Against the forces of darkness.

The Happy List

The Princess Bride
Great Gatsby
Middlesex
Year of the Flood
Blueeyedboy
The Enchanted Glass
Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex
Possession (gah! Finish already!)
Coraline
Anna Karenina
Alice in Wonderland
HP7
Bright Star
Summer Wars
Sherlock Holmes
Susanna Clarke's sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (I can wait. I can wait.)
Black boots
Grey tops
Navy tops

Turtle Tale

What happend to the turtle at home when there is no one but moi to feed it?

Yes. That turtle. The one that lives in the toilet.

I've never fed it before and it can't go without food for the 3 days my sis and mom are in Malacca. This turtle is a creature which I live with extreme ambivalence and I could draw up a list of all the whys of both feeding and not feeding it.

No, Not feed:
1. It is smelly.
2. It is gross.
3. It has claws.
4. The dried prawns which I've to feed it with stinks
5. The tank is gross.
6. The tank is also smelly.
7. I've to touch it if I am to feed it because I've to put it back in its tank
8. It doesn't look light

Yes, Feed:
1. Only because my conscience asked me to

So, after umm. possibly more than a decade sharing the bathroom with that creature whose sex we've yet to determine but which we all decided couldn't matter anyway, I doned two plastic bags over my hands and picked it up. It was surprisingly light, but I wouldn't be able to describe how it smelt like because I was holding my breath. I then placed it back in its tank.

We both stared at each other.

I stripped off the plastic bag and refilled the tank and fed it, holding my breath again when I opened the lid of the prawn can. My mom and sis claims it has the same aroma of prawn crackers. I would like to point out that if prawn crackers really smelled like that, no one would buy them, least of all, me.

The turtle didn't look happy to see the food. Or maybe it was just not happy to see me. It flailed about and tried to escape. I ignored the flailing and scrabbling and sprinkled the water with the food (all the while holding my breath) and quickly fled when I was done.

When I checked back several hours later, all the prawns were gone and I was feeling a little satisfied, that is, until I remembered that I would have to repeat the whole fracas one more time the next day.

Dog Tales

Everytime I visit Pet Safari I end up having to reaffirm why I am a cat person. Seeing all those doggies, those puppies and those little woofies and I can see why people are enamoured with them. Come on - those eyelashes on the golden retriever puppy are so pretty~ I am still a cat person and I will one day own a sulky black tabby (you know, the striped kind) called Milton. But, before this turns into a loving paean to all things feline, I should get back to why I think dogs and animals in general (with the exception of caterpillars, illamas, sea cucumbers and most manner of insects and some reptiles, amphibians and fishes) are so well-loved and cherished by humankind. This is a story as to why dogs anyway, are so well-loved.

Cindy was my uncle's dog. But because he worked and lived in IMH (he's a nurse in case you're wondering) where animals weren't allowed, he gave it to my aunt to take care of. Now, Cindy is not one of your fancy pedigree types and is by far more intelligent than most of her purebreed cousins - or - at least that is what I like to believe, having next to zero experience with real dogs. Now, once Cindy made a - as they say in a certain parlance used commonly with tai-tais on their chihuahuas or inane parents on their babies - boo-boo of a monumental kind. My grandma was livid. And to point out how just how angry she was, she took up a cane and whacked Cindy. Before you get the impression that my grandma is some deranged old woman, I should point out that it is my grandma who cooks Cindy her food, it is my grandma who shops for her sustenance and who, in all the decade they had owned Cindy, never once laid a hand on her.

Cindy was of course pissed but being a dog and an affectionate one at that, she simply ran away. So, later during the day when they realised that she wasn't in fact skulking in some corner of the house, my grandma panicked because Cindy is the beloved of my aunt. She then went out to search for her. After hollering the street up and down to no avail, my grandma went back home to cook dinner. She was clearly still worried because she went out a second time after that, and was successful in spotting Cindy trotting homeward, but - truculently covered in muck and about as apologetic as the indignantly righteous.

This is a dog I would have liked to have known better. Heh. Naughty dog.

Face Up

Having said that, grades are not everything but they are the most superficially in-your-face thing that I can deal with. There was a long period last semester when I asked myself what I was doing, whether I was suited for an academic life. Last semester was horrible – the constant string of B-minuses was crushingly depressing because I had worked at my essays. Each one, as far as I was concerned was a dialogue between me and the module and the measure of not only how much I understood from the module but a measure of me as a person. When you are a student and your life revolves around academia, grades while not everything, is at least a way of measuring oneself. That you, after 3 years still fail to be:
a) clear
b) organized
c) pertinent
d) reflective/insightful

is a crushing thing to hear.
I chuck those essays aside. And that, I quietly tell myself, is yet another sign of inherent failure of me – not as a student but as a human being. How will I improve?? Can I improve? I am on an inherent and unstoppable train further into failure because I dare not face up to that B-minus. I cannot read it without feeling disappointment, without feeling inferior and insufficient – in discipline and hard work and intelligence. And I dig a further hole because I can’t face up to how I will never be disciplined, or organized or insightful enough.

I am scared of failure – both how it is manifest outwardly as a grade and how it might be a sign of inward failure of me as a person, and that fear is so crippling that I can’t even look at it. This time round, I have yet to look at it closely either. Can I chuck it aside? I might and I will tell myself: you can do better than that. But, as a person I cannot do that when I haven’t even seen what is wrong about it. So, tonight I will look at it. And though the grade isn’t everything; it is a lot of things to me and it is something I want to give due to by facing up to it.
And maybe it’s there where I can start to be those things. It’s not too late. I am not a B minus person. It is a grade which I am given and I can take what it is and maybe that is where I can begin to be not a B minus. Denial

To tell myself that grades are not everything is to not accept that I do find them important. But should they be? I don't know. After looking back at little more about what we've said today, I think they are. They can be so much pleasure and why should I belittle disappointment because it's unpleasant? Denial gets me nowhere.

Monsoon

I put up there 'Monsoon', but when I think monsoon I think of wet plantations, coconut trees lashing in a murky grey landscape with rain at a 45 deg angle - things which are not happening here. You'll be hard put to find enough land for major crop growing anyway, here in sunny Singapore-land. So, really, maybe this post has nothing to do with the geographical imaginings though because it is the tropics, the rain we're having is probably part of a common geographical phenomenon in these parts.

It has been raining. And I have been feeling lazy, partly because the weather is so lovely but also because for 12 academic years, whenever it rained, it meant holiday. I'm feeling the instinct of 12 years telling me in that insiduous whisper, "Kick back. Don't you hear us? It's the end of the year. Time to chill. Time to do the things you like again. No more obligation to textbooks." So yeah, when the North wind doth blow, I feel unaccountably willing to throw that book/essay/proposal aside. Holiday is in the air and I do so love it even though it won't, technically, be here for another month.

The Week in Three.

1. Ice

Welcome November,

Good friend to wind, rain and ice.

A time to reflect.

2. Loathing

Come, essay time,

Like some rank, o'ergrown carpet

Requiring a trim.

3. After rain

There is much to love

In watery days, milky light,

And murmuring of chimes.

October Meltdown

Ok. Long post coming up. I've several things I want to talk about but which I hadn't for the past month because my vanity wouldn't allow it. The month of October is allowed only 5 posts, and as you can see, I made use of the first 4 in the first 4 consecutive days of the month. Those of you in the know would know why 5 posts. Remember - vanity. Anyway, onward!

#1 Ang Mo Kio Fiasco

Out of the goodness and kindness of my soul I attempted to help this nine yr old girl who was crying on the streets outside AMK Hub. Oh the meanness of the Singaporean soul! Nobody else walking up and down the crowded streets even bat an eyelid at her!

For good reason it seems.

I asked her where her mom was and she said 'at home'. I then asked her where she lived and she told me she lived in the very er, "very far away" Ang Mo Kio Ave 10. However, I suppose, when you're 9, anywhere more than 10 mins from your front gate is far. Being unfamiliar with the suburbia of AMK, I asked if she knew what bus to get home and we then proceeded to walk to this bus stop ahead (88 bus stop) which she claimed had her bus. Which, as it turned out did not in fact. We wandered back to another bus stop perpendicular to it (159 bus stop via Sengkang). Which also didn't have the bus. Mercifully, before I decided to resort to a cab (at the taxi stand outside the train station), I spotted one of the buses she mentioned turning into the very Hub which we had walked away from. My heart bled.

And so I took her back there, making yet another perpendicular right, though this time utilising the underpass as I could not bear waiting for the traffic lights anymore. Those of you familiar with that area would realize that I spent a precious 30 mins walking from one bus stop to another around the traffic junction near AMK Stn, trailing a sniveling girl with me under the evening sun. So yes, I hereby permit you to indulge in envisioning this pathetic sight for personal entertainment as long as you want.

On reaching, she recognized her bus and walked eagerly towards it, and leaving me to stare bewildedly at the board and wondering why the bus she wanted to take did not actually go to AMK Ave 10. Anyway, I was done with her. After giving her some bus money, I hastily fled to the upper floors, not daring for an hour to come back down in case she had taken an entire round trip on the feeder service and ended up at the interchange again.

#2 The Death of Duckie, aka Sheep-like Sotong, aka hamster

Rest in peace fat Duckie! You were always the stupidest. But that's ok. We still love you very much.

He is a sheep-like sotong for the simple reason that he was the fattest hamster with the longest fur and sheep appearance. He was also, in local parlance, very 'blur', like sotong.

Allow me to indulge in one reminiscence.

Once, I put him on this long wooden bench at home for walk. He trotted along the edge of the seat happily and then suddenly slipped off. He hung for a split second by his paws, blinked and then fell. Bottom too heavy I suppose. There was no strong sudden gust of wind. Nobody pushed/pulled him. He just trot and fell. So clumsy.

#3 Birthday
Spent it wretchedly with essay submissions. Thank you the lovely ladies who got me Chewy Junior and my presents!! I heart you all.

#4 Halloween Post
I posted some of my favourite poetry that had some relation to Halloween for the past 2 years. Stands to reason I'll do it again this year. I had originally intended Keats's The Eve of St Agnes but it's too long if it's sharing a post with other things. Keats incidentally was born today in 1795, if Wikipedia is to be believed. So, what I have is an excerpt instead:


I
ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told

His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith


’Hark! ’tis an elfin-storm from faery land,

“Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:

“Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;—

“The bloated wassaillers will never heed:—

“Let us away, my love, with happy speed;

“There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,—

“Drown’d all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:

“Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,

“For o’er the southern moors I have a home for thee.”


XL.
She hurried at his words, beset with fears,

For there were sleeping dragons all around,

At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears—

Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.—

In all the house was heard no human sound.

A chain-droop’d lamp was flickering by each door;

The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,

Flutter’d in the besieging wind’s uproar;

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.


XLI.
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;

Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;

Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,

With a huge empty flaggon by his side;

The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,

But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:

By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:—

The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;—

The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groan.


XLII.
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago

These lovers fled away into the storm.

You can see for yourself how long it is from the numbering above the stanzas. The original can be found here.

October. The Crazy Month. For all kinds of reasons.

Quote of the Day

"were all men always attentive to life, were we constantly to keep in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of strings or springs" Henri Bergson, "The Comic in Situations" trans. Brereton and Rothwell

And quite, quite suddenly, I think I might be beginning to understand Deleuze and Guattari from 19th Century class

The Original Letter from Crazy Peoples

This is what happens when you are doing research for essays and you come across this again. Below is a short excerpt which one critic cited and then cheerfully called the author "unmistakeably...a megalomaniac"

William Prynne (1600-1669)

Histrio-mastix.

The players scourge, or, actors tragædie, divided into two parts. Wherein it is largely evidenced, by divers arguments, by the concurring authorities and resolutions of sundry texts of Scripture, That popular stage-playes are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men. (the second full-stop here) And that the profession of play-poets, of stage-players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stage-playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians. All pretences to the contrary are here likewise fully answered; and the unlawfulnes of acting, of beholding academicall enterludes, briefly discussed; besides sundry other particulars concerning dancing, dicing, health-drinking, &c. of which the table will informe you.

Observe how the second full-stop is really a technicality, since he goes on to start the next sentence with "And".

Notice (updated)

Oh lookie. Deja vu.

My phone has died again. There really is something about me meeting up with my sec sch friends that it really doesn't like. Or something. Like how it wants to infuriate me in my fav month of the year perhaps.

Update: My phone died again in spite of the new battery. It looks as though I'll be using my dad's ancient nokia for a while longer. Sigh. My ear. my ear.

TV has never sunk so low

The scene - a nippy bankside at one of Singapore's water catchment areas
The cast -
one standard clandestine young couple meeting secretly
one standard story line about young girl being sent overseas by ambitious parent to pursue music career. They are about to be separated for 3 years.

They cross the small distance to clasp each other's hands. The girl is visibly distraught. She is, as they say, stuck to be filial, pursue her own career, and in the process leave her boyfriend behind. The young man is understandably upset but what happens next doesn't make sense, even as cheesy R&J speeches go.

Girl (rough approx of lines): It can't be helped, my mother has already paid them the money. I'll have to leave for 3 years!
(They hug passionately) Both are miserable at the cruel twist of fate.
Boyfriend: But, can you bear to let me go?
Girl (shaking her head in frustration): I don't know! I don't know!

Yeah. I sure don't know either. Let me go sounds kind of pathetic when it comes to comforting your girlfriend and it's unnecessary to ask such a stupid question in a scene that is already visually coded to yell happily-in-love-couples-to-be-separated.

Just wanted to say

Memoirs of a self-professed professional jaywalker

Today I had a brush with death - in the form of being nearly knocked into by a cyclist when crossing the short space between the bus stop seat and the bus. And I never even put one foot down on the tar.

Campion's Bright Star(s)

This just proves that if a teacher needs anything literary that has been made into a film, the BBC will have had a hand in it somehow. But still, this looks like a lovely portrayal of the life and love of John Keats. *rubs hands*