Greyday

The day hangs heavy
loose and grey
when you're away.

A crown of thorns
a shirt of hair
is what I wear.

No one knows
My lonely heart
when we're apart.

--Maya Angelou

Read The Sacrificial Egg by Chinua Achebe

Link here.

The Vampire

A FOOL there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair—
(Even as you and I!)
Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste
And the work of our head and hand
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand!
A fool there was and his goods he spent
(Even as you and I!)
Honour and faith and a sure intent
(And it wasn’t the least what the lady meant)
But a fool must follow his natural bent
(Even as you and I!)
Oh, the toil we lost and the spoil we lost
And the excellent things we planned
Belong to the woman who didn’t know why
(And now we know that she never knew why)
And did not understand!
The fool was stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside—
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died—
(Even as you and I!)
“And it isn’t the shame and it isn’t the blame
That stings like a white hot brand—
It’s coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing, at last, she could never know why)
And never could understand!”   --Rudyard Kipling, 1897

Books worth re-reading

Hi there,

Summer is a great time to tackle big reads or to re-read some books that need a second chance or that were forced upon you to be read in a certain time frame that you could have been enjoyed if you were allowed to go at your own pace.  Passive-aggressive rantings aside, here is a list of books I would like to re-read sometime:

1. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov: the best impulse read I've ever bought in my entire life.  Snagged this before boarding a flight in 2008 and read it on vacation. My edition is all banged up as a result, but it's one of those books that I put down and never picked up again.  Might read it once I'm done my current novel.
2. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon: I don't think any novel has made me laugh as much as this one.  I burst out laughing in the library during finals, I burst out laughing in my room at 1 in the morning, I burst out laughing in a lecture hall.  I had to read this one for a seminar, so I was a bit rushed and had to think a lot about it, although I can appreciate it for just what it is without thinking too critically about it. 
3. The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis: I think I mentioned this before, but this novel is one of my guilty pleasures and I'm not even sure why.  I think it's because I like reading it just for the sake of reading it.  It's an easy read, it's hilarious, it's heartbreaking, it has a really good ending that makes you want to throw the book fifty feet away. 
4. Ulysses by James Joyce: I read this last summer and to be honest, I didn't get it, but most people don't.  I loved parts of this novel, and I actually have a quote from the novel stuck to my wall.  I feel like the next time I read this, I will need to have read Homer's Odyssey to better understand it and to appreciate the parallels.
5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: Rushed this one for class as well.  Very few books I've read are as beautifully written as Jane Eyre.  I have some reservations about the plot itself, but there is a part of the novel (somewhere at the end of the first quarter) that I absolutely love because of the dialogue between Jane and Mr. Rochester:  the marriage of intellect and vacillation in their discourse that leads up to the proposal makes it probably my favourite love story ever (just kidding, I love it because of its Marxist undertones).
6. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: I didn't get this one either and I had to read it for an AP lit class in high school.  I couldn't even tell you what it's about.  One of these days.
7. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky: A big read from 2009.  I spent half of my summer reading this, from taking with me on a three-hour bus ride to keep me company to reading it outside of my classrooms so I wouldn't have to talk to other people.  Also, a really good way to intimidate other English students.
8. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre: I need to re-read this to confirm that the ending does not involve accidentally selling out your friends to the Nazis, as my professor had insisted upon last semester.

And that's it!  Hopefully I can read them all this summer.

American Lit!

I posted a while ago about my favourite Canadian reads, but I have an affinity for 20th century American literature and poetry.  Here are my top picks (off the top of my head):

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison - I'm not one for ghost stories, and Beloved certainly isn't one, but it is creepy in its own way, and leaves you unsettled while keeping you drawn in (much like the eponymous character). 
2. Any Allen Ginsberg.
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - I love this book, mainly because of the trainwreck that is the Joad family.  It somewhat reminds me of As I Lay Dying (which I also recommend), except that I am in love with Steinbeck's prose.
4. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote - Like Daisy Miller, this is a great novella about the clashing of cultures; albeit, a little more raw and beautiful in its own way from the film.
5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - How could I not put this on the list?  I was completely mesmerized by these books, although I found the first to be more interesting than the second. 
6. Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates - Foxfire exceeded my expectations, although I don't quite know what I was expecting.  I suppose I was expecting some kind of sappy Lifetime-esque novel about sisterhood but instead it turned into a novel about a megalomaniacal seventeen year-old girl.  Ten  out of ten, would read again.
7. The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis - I feel like Brett Easton Ellis novels might be my guilty pleasure, except that I think you're supposed to be ashamed of your guilty pleasures.  Suffice to say, I guess I liked this book because I didn't have to do much thinking while I read it.
8. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner - I tried reading The Sound and the Fury and gave up after the first chapter.  After that, I swore off Faulkner, until I read A Rose for Emily, and then I swore him off once more.  But As I Lay Dying drew me in because of the similarities between it and The Grapes of Wrath (the poverty, the journey, etc.).  Eventually I warmed up to it, despite restarting it about five times.  And now it's on this list.

Thanks for reading!

To Elsie

                The pure products of America
                go crazy --

                mountain folk from Kentucky

                or the ribbed north end of

                Jersey

                with its isolate lakes and

                valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

                old names

                and promiscuity between

                devil-may-care men who have taken

                to railroading

                out of sheer lust of adventure --

                and young slatterns, bathed

                in filth

                from Monday to Saturday

                to be tricked out that night

                with gauds

                from imaginations which have no

                peasant traditions to give them

                character

                but flutter and flaunt

               sheer rags -- succumbing without

               emotion

               save numbed terror

               under some hedge of choke-cherry

               or viburnum --

               which they cannot express --

                Unless it be that marriage

                perhaps

                with a dash of Indian blood

                will throw up a girl so desolate

                so hemmed round

                with disease or murder

               that she'll be rescued by an

               agent --

               reared by the state and

               sent out at fifteen to work in

               some hard pressed

               house in the suburbs --

                some doctor's family, some Elsie --

                voluptuous water

                expressing with broken

                brain the truth about us --

                her great

                ungainly hips and flopping breasts

                addressed to cheap

                jewelry

                and rich young men with fine eyes

                as if the earth under our feet

                were

                an excrement of some sky

                and we degraded prisoners

                destined

                to hunger until we eat filth

                while the imagination strains

                after deer

                going by fields of goldenrod in

                the stifling heat of September

                Somehow

                it seems to destroy us

                It is only in isolate flecks that

                something

                is given off

                No one

                to witness

                and adjust, no one to drive the car

 

--William Carlos Williams, 1923

Recent reads

Here is a list of some works I've been reading lately:

1. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw - I really enjoyed reading this play.  I think it's one of the few plays I'd rather read than watch, and I am definitely glad I read it because there are countless allusions and parodies of the play in popular culture that I now understand better.
2. Home by Toni Morrison - I think this novel is one of Toni Morrison's more underrated works.  I fell in love with these characters, and started to draw parallels between the plot and Sir Orfeo, which is a work based on the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus.
3. Occupy by Noam Chomsky - A series of lectures, etc. on the Occupy movement.  A super-good read about the economic events that led up to the class uprising in the United States well-delivered by Noam Chomsky. 
4. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein - not sure how I feel about this one.  It's supposed to be a satire on jingoism and probably the future of citizenship given a despotic turn, but I can't get into this book just yet.

That's all for now.  In other news, I graduated this week with a bachelor's degree in Honours English!  I'll miss it, but I'll admit, it has left me with an amazing library and a new love for literature that I don't think I could have developed on my own.

Thanks for reading!