Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.
I don't usually write songs that are targetted against one single human being, but sometimes people REALLY piss me off. This was Dido right before she started singing See You When You're 40 (lyrics). As the crowd started laughing I had to think of how it must feel to be the person the song was written about. To millions of people he was now known as an immature child, rather than his actual self. And this, of course, reminded me of Oliver Gogarty, a "friend" of James Joyce who became immortal as Buck Mulligan, a character in Joyce's Ulysses.
Gogarty befriended Joyce and let him stay in his apartment in a tower by the coast of Dublin (still an amazing place, for those who have not been), but was a cynic and often criticised and made fun of Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce transformed him into Buck Mulligan, Stephen's treacherous friend, and in turn portrayed Mulligan as the devil (the exact reason for this is complicated and irrelevant). Though Gogarty was immensely successful in life and was an accomplished surgeon and senator, he was and always will be best remembered as Mulligan, the treacherous cynic.
I find this ability of the artist to transform his/her own reality amazing: the power to change history and create "truth" through one's writing. And I find it wonderful that this still happens in modern music.