Life and Letters Today
Letters:
Since I lack the restraint to ignore any literary survey involving desert islands . . . here we go. (Spotted via the LJs of commonplacebook and proximoception)
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
If there was one book I had to commit to memory and continually recite aloud in order to prevent its disappearance, it would have to be the Iliad. After all, it was an oral narrative to begin with.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes. Too many to list - Mercutio, Will Ladislaw (Middlemarch), Billy Budd, Dorian Gray, Stephen Dedalus, Hans Castorp (Magic Mountain) . . .
The last book you bought is:
I'm waiting for the next Friday-after-midnight sale at Twice Sold Tales to purchase a backpack of books.
The last book you read:
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Both are brilliant, complex, and I daresay *essential* American novels (ostensibly the respective masterpieces of 20th-Century African-American and Native-American Literature, but such categories are meaningless when dealing with two universal writers of such a remarkably high caliber of talent/genius). I would recommend both to anyone.
What are you currently reading?
Half-way through both Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Provincial France and small-town America embodied.
Ten books you would take to a deserted island.
1. Homer - The Iliad (Loeb Classical Library edition with the Greek text)
2. Plato - Dialogues (with the commentaries of Proclus, as translated by Thomas Taylor)
3. Ovid - Metamorphoses (trans. by Arthur Golding)
4. Shakespeare - Complete Works
5. Goethe - Faust (a bilingual edition)
6. Emily Dickinson - Complete Poems and Letters
7. Gertrude Stein - any large anthology of her works
8. James Joyce - Finnegan's Wake
9. Ezra Pound - The Cantos
10. H.D. - Collected Poems
Life:
Slowly readjusting to American life. Good wine and cheese are outrageously expensive. Junk food is cheaper than fresh produce. One woman's feeding tube is more of an issue than war in Iraq, genocide in Sudan, nuclear weapons in North Korea, escalating tension between Pakistan and India, perpetual chaos in the Middle East, AIDS in Africa, human rights violations *everywhere*, and a rapidly deteriorating environment. Gawd blesh Amurikah. And a special note to all my American friends: Pharmaceuticals should be prescribed by a doctor, not advertised on television! Even if there are no sexual side effects. Honestly.
Meanwhile, there's a whirlwind of anxiety surrounding me right now, from friends with health problems to friends with relationship problems, but frankly I'm just too jet-lagged to elaborate. So I'm dyeing my hair "champagne blonde" in an attempt to a) eliminate the numerous streaks of grey caused by the last twelve months of grief and stress, and b) forget everything else that I should be dealing with. The overall effect is turning out to be more of a "chestnut" hue, which I can live with. If you're one of the many people on my MUST phone or email list (Shauna! Bri! Sol! Lelian! Brendan! Zara! etc. etc.), I promise you'll be hearing from me soon.
Since I lack the restraint to ignore any literary survey involving desert islands . . . here we go. (Spotted via the LJs of commonplacebook and proximoception)
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
If there was one book I had to commit to memory and continually recite aloud in order to prevent its disappearance, it would have to be the Iliad. After all, it was an oral narrative to begin with.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes. Too many to list - Mercutio, Will Ladislaw (Middlemarch), Billy Budd, Dorian Gray, Stephen Dedalus, Hans Castorp (Magic Mountain) . . .
The last book you bought is:
I'm waiting for the next Friday-after-midnight sale at Twice Sold Tales to purchase a backpack of books.
The last book you read:
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Both are brilliant, complex, and I daresay *essential* American novels (ostensibly the respective masterpieces of 20th-Century African-American and Native-American Literature, but such categories are meaningless when dealing with two universal writers of such a remarkably high caliber of talent/genius). I would recommend both to anyone.
What are you currently reading?
Half-way through both Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Provincial France and small-town America embodied.
Ten books you would take to a deserted island.
1. Homer - The Iliad (Loeb Classical Library edition with the Greek text)
2. Plato - Dialogues (with the commentaries of Proclus, as translated by Thomas Taylor)
3. Ovid - Metamorphoses (trans. by Arthur Golding)
4. Shakespeare - Complete Works
5. Goethe - Faust (a bilingual edition)
6. Emily Dickinson - Complete Poems and Letters
7. Gertrude Stein - any large anthology of her works
8. James Joyce - Finnegan's Wake
9. Ezra Pound - The Cantos
10. H.D. - Collected Poems
Life:
Slowly readjusting to American life. Good wine and cheese are outrageously expensive. Junk food is cheaper than fresh produce. One woman's feeding tube is more of an issue than war in Iraq, genocide in Sudan, nuclear weapons in North Korea, escalating tension between Pakistan and India, perpetual chaos in the Middle East, AIDS in Africa, human rights violations *everywhere*, and a rapidly deteriorating environment. Gawd blesh Amurikah. And a special note to all my American friends: Pharmaceuticals should be prescribed by a doctor, not advertised on television! Even if there are no sexual side effects. Honestly.
Meanwhile, there's a whirlwind of anxiety surrounding me right now, from friends with health problems to friends with relationship problems, but frankly I'm just too jet-lagged to elaborate. So I'm dyeing my hair "champagne blonde" in an attempt to a) eliminate the numerous streaks of grey caused by the last twelve months of grief and stress, and b) forget everything else that I should be dealing with. The overall effect is turning out to be more of a "chestnut" hue, which I can live with. If you're one of the many people on my MUST phone or email list (Shauna! Bri! Sol! Lelian! Brendan! Zara! etc. etc.), I promise you'll be hearing from me soon.