Love is like oxygen...

... You get too much you get too high,
Not enough and you're gonna die,
Love gets you high.

That are the lyrics of the song "Love is like Oxygen" from the band "Sweet".
Sam's discription of his feelings on page 57 made me think about this song, and I think that this lyrics fit together with what Sam is feeling. Well, it's like he's addicted to Alicia...
For Sam, love means: not seeing someone you love is like not breathing.
But what means love to other persons?
Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of "absolute value," as opposed to relative value. Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz said that love is "to be delighted by the happiness of another."
Rob Sheffield says in his book "Love is like a mixtape": "What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan, Frank Sinatra, would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times agree that they want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple: love is a mix tape."
Talking about love often means talking in poems... so, here are a few poems which want to explain what love is:

• The Definition Of Love by Andrew Marvell: http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/the_definition_of_love.html

• A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-red-red-rose/

• 685. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: http://www.bartleby.com/101/685.html

•  My second thoughts condemn by W.H. Auden:  http://ine.250x.com/auden.html

Apart from the definition of "Love is a mixtape", my favourite definitoin is by Andrew Landon

Take a pause to think about what love means to you...

Here's the video to the "Love is like oxygen"-Song performed by "Sweet"... Old but pretty cool I think =):



Greetings
Victoire*

The world isn't that messed up as I'd thought

Here we are again! :)
I think that the 2nd chapter is the longest and in contend the richest chapter in the whole book. This chapter tells about everything important: From Sam’s social and familiar milieu, over the meeting with Alicia, and finally it tells about both of them having sex with each other for the first time.

The most important passages were when Sam tells about that every single person in his family has been pretty good to bang up their lives. And this is also the reason why Sam’s mother was still very young (16 years old) when she was pregnant with him. But Sam wants to break with this tradition: 

“I wanted to be the first person in the history of our family to get a qualification in something while they were still at school. (…) I’d be the one to break the pattern.”

Therefore Sam’s very motivated at school. In some way he’s not satisfied with his life how it is going on right now (living in a small flat, his mom’s working all the time, etc.), and also with Alice he feels inferior when he says on page 43:

“If she found out that none of [my family] (…) had ever been to college, then she might not have wanted to spend any time with me.”

In his imagination he wants to have a big house with lots of bedrooms and a swimming pool, a pool table and no girlfriend and no parents living there. But the most important thing is that he has a goal, something to work hard for.
The first hint to a “Slam” in Sam’s life with Alicia was the statement when Alicia’s mom asked Sam’s mom for bringing Sam with her to a birthday party. Sam thinks that Alicia’s mom was trying to find a boyfriend for her daughter that she approved of:

“Well that all went wrong, didn’t it?!” (page 16)

In the first moment I thought that the both will have a car accident, when Sam drives drunken and Alicia will be killed. But the fact that they have sex and that the early becoming of pregnancy of Sam’s mom is mentioned a few times, maybe it leads to that Alicia gets also early pregnant.
To sup up, after this chapter I think that Sam is a very rational and decent young person, because of the scene on page 45, when he and Alicia are talking about the wanting condoms before having sex:

“I’d always thought that if I needed anything, I’d know well in advance, because that’s the way I am.”

And I also think that he isn’t that cool as he pretends to be; anyhow an a way he gets pressured by Alicia having sex, although he has doubts, because of the possibility she just wants to pay her ex something back.

“It was like she was saying that we ought to sleep together quickly, before she stopped liking me the next day, so we had to do it that night.” (page 50)

But at least, there’s an inferior-complex.

“At least I was with someone who wanted to have sex with me.” (page 46)

There’s someone who loves him, probably a new feeling for him, so he has to do everything to keep it.
So, Sam is just an ordinary guy with ordinary fears.
I thought about the right soundtrack for the first meeting of Sam and Alicia at the party. On page 22 Sam says indirectly that he likes Green Day… He's a skater so he HAS to like Green Day! :) So, I think this is the song which fits =) :



Greetings,
Victoire*

Tony Hawk - He was who I wanted to be...

... the best version of myself. Sam's biggest (and almost the only...) idol is the skateboarder Tony Hawk (also known as "Birdman").

Born May 12, 1968 Tony Hawk landed his first contest win at the age of 11 and turned pro by the age of 14. Tony gained enormous fame for completing the first 900 (The 900 is a 2.5-revolution (900 degrees) aerial spin performed on a skateboard ramp) at the 1999 X-Games as well as his licensed video game titles distributed by Activision.

But just as like as in life of Nick Hornby, also in Tony Hawks' life was a turning point. When he was nine years old, his brother changed his life by giving him a blue fiberglass banana board.
On his official web page tonyhawk.com it says:

Before skateboarding Hawk was a self-described nightmare. "Instead of the terrible twos, I was the terrible youth," he said. "I was a hyper, rail-thin geek on a sugar buzz. I think my mom summed it up best when she said, 'challenging."

When Tony was a child, he had a mental disorder and he was aggressive. But this story turns good. When he was 17, he became worlds best skateboarder and after 1980 he became world champion 11 times, one by one.

1999 he made the 900. Today he just skates for fun and has sometimes whistle stops in TV.
Here are some examples:

Tony Hawk feat. The Simpsons:

The simpsons with blink 182 and tony hawk - MyVideo

Tony Hawk for "SCARRED"

In the acknowledgment of "Slam", Nick Hornby thanks also Tony Hawk - and really: In the german "Wikipedia", there is a mentioning about Tony Hawk's emergence in "Slam" under "Trivia", which says that "Slam" is the only novel Tony Hawks has something to do with.

... Cool guy! :)

Greetings,

Victoire*

So things were ticking along quite nicely...

A Slam is an accident while skating. So, I already expected that the content of the book „Slam“ will tell about something negative…

After reading the introducing chapter of „Slam“, my opinion about this book hasn‘t changed yet, even though now I am more informed about the plot.

For the 15-year-old narrator and main character Sam „things are ticking along quite nicely“. After a time when there had always been something wrong and something to worry about, now Sam‘s life becomes a clear line, a structure. Although his parents are divorced and had fought, now the whole situation has calmed down and also Steve, the boyfriend of Sam‘s mom, who Sam didn‘t like, has left. In school Sam is working well and in fact his chances are good to do art at college. Also a girl called Alicia is mentioned as someone who means something to him.

But in spite of everything, I think that Sam is just a teenager with teenage-problems. In my opinion he seems lonely and no one is listening to him. That‘s the reason why he prefers to talk about his problems with a Tony Hawk-Poster in lieu of talking to his mother. He takes the answers to the questions he asks Tony Hawk out of his biography „Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder“ (see http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/0060198605.asp).

This biography has a special meaning to Sam - it‘s like his bible. After reading it about fifty times, he thinks that this it the best book ever written, mainly because Tony Hawk tells in his book about his life with all its Ups and Downs.

"If there was nothing in the book that was exactly right, then I had to make some of the sentences fit as best as I could."

He talks to Tony hawk and Tony answers him as good as he can. And Sam thinks that Tony Hawk is interested in what he tells him - and that‘s the most important fact for me, because nobody‘s really interested in what Sam does I think. Neither his mom nor anybody else cares about what great skate tricks he copes with, and which means a lot to him.

As I said, in my view Sam is just a normal teenager, whose problems many teenagers have. I am sure that I always can talk with my friends and with my parents about (almost :)) everything without being worm out. But I think many friends of mine have also the problem that they couldn‘t speak with anybody in their surroundings.
So, I think that the problem having the feeling that nobody cares about you has (or had) each of us. That has probably also been the reason for Nick Hornby to create Sam‘s person a way, almost all of his readers could identify with.


All in all I‘m really confident reading this book but I‘m a little bit worried that I won‘t have finished this book until 7th December…


Greetings,
Victoire*

About A Boy...

Hello again! :)
That's him:

The British author Nick Hornby while reading "Slam".

Born on 17th April 1957 in Redhill, Surrey (UK) and educated at Cambridge University (English) and Highbury (Football/Facts of Life), he previously worked as English teacher, TEFL teacher, Host for Samsung executives visiting the UK, Journalist and Pop Music Critic for the New Yorker.

"I started by writing plays. They were sort of screen-cum-radio-cum-TV plays, and they weren't very good … When I left university and I tried to write, everything came out sounding like bad essays, so I thought I should stick to dialogue. I hadn't done enough reading-not of the things I wanted to emulate-so it took me a while, a long while, to grapple with voice … everything changed for me when I read Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Lorrie Moore, all in about '86-'87 … voice, tone, simplicity, humour, soul ... all of these things seemed to be missing from the contemporary English fiction I'd looked at, and I knew then what I wanted to do."

That's a citation from his official website http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/nickhornby/index.html .
In this statement Nick Hornby tells about a turning point in his life. And after this point there were many very successful books created.
It says that „Slam“ is vintage Hornby for teenagers and I think this is right. I haven't read the book yet, but because of other Nick Hornby-Books, I am able to figure that Nick Hornby is often writing about youth and Pop-Culture. And I think also "Slam" is about this topics.

Here are some more Web links dealing with Nick Hornby:
http://www.nicksbooks.com
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth51
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hornby


At least a personnel review from Zadie Smith about Nick Hornby, for Time magazine:

 

For adding my result: Nick Hornby stayed young and because of this fact he writes the way young people understand - fresh and clearly without any fears of contacts.

If you are interested in what Nick Hornby thinks about "Slam", watch this!:

Greetings,

Yours Victoire*

First Thoughts

Hello everybody! :)
I’m about to read the book “Slam” written by Nick Hornby, because of my English teaching.
I think that reading this book will bring me lots of fun, at least because I already know other Nick-Hornby-Books, like “31 Songs”, “About A Boy” and “A Long Way Down”.
In my opinion Nick Hornby is a very cool and modern author, who incorporates the subjects of today’s society problems into his books.
In my view, reading English books as a not-native speaker of English is the best way to internalize English grammar and style. Pinning my hopes of becoming better in fluent speaking, that’s the reason why I have already read a few books in English outside the classroom, like “Moon Palace” (Paul Auster), the biography of Edie Sedgwick, “Twilight” (Stephanie Meyer), “When I was five I killed myself” (Howard Buten), and a lot of poems, among other things written by Sylvia Plath, W. H. Auden and Thom Gunn.
In school I read “Rosso” (Phillip Hewit), “Betrayed” (Carl Taylor), “They’re after us” (Allen J. Woppert) and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (Mark Haddon) - except the last one, books, which were trying to impart morals of certain problem situations just in a few pages. Out of this, there were no really GOOD books created.
I know that “Slam” isn’t this sort of book and I’m sure reading will be fun. So, I’m glad that we’ve got the chance to work on more school readings, which are standing for more good literature.
... Hey! Ho! Let's Go! :)

Greetings,
Yours Victoire* x)