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!

Read Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell

Link here.

Midnight, The Same Day

ii

Try to rest now, says a voice.
Another:  Give yourself time.
But rest is no act of will
and gifts to the self come back unopened
Milk will boil down in the iron pot
blistering into black sugar,
scalded vinegar lift
crispened layers
pages of a codex
in a library blown away

2005, Adrienne Rich

Read Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" online

Link here.

More literature you can read online

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Utopia - Sir Thomas More

Eunoia - Christian Bök

Dubliners - James Joyce (Multiple stories to read online!)

Common Sense - Thomas Paine

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

 plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                    A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

 --E. E. Cummings

Homework

If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran

I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,

I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,   

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,   

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,

Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,

Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie   

Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,

Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,

& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.

-Allen Ginsberg, 1980

Mad Girl's Love Song

“

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 
I lift my lids and all is born again. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, 
And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed 
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade: 
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said, 
But I grow old and I forget your name. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; 
At least when spring comes they roar back again. 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

”

-Sylvia Plath

A Litany for Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn

Kitchen Linoleum

The cockroach
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other’s shame.
--Audre Lord

The Love Song of Har Dyal

Alone upon the housetops to the North
I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die.

Below my feet the still bazar is laid--
Far, far below the weary camels lie--
The camels and the captives of thy raid.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

My father's wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father's house am I--
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die! 

-Rudyard Kipling, 1888

The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

               And should I then presume?

               And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

               “That is not it at all,

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

--T.S. Eliot, 1915

If--

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling, 1895

Quote of the Day

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.” 
--George Orwell, 1984

Quote of the Day

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
--Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955

Quote of the Day

"A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
… donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

—Kim Addonizio, 2000

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes, 1951

Canadian literature!

Canadian literature is so vast and rich that I feel very unqualified to make a list about it.  There is something very beautiful and sad about the way writers portray Canada, as this conflicted yet diverse space, full of different cultures, long histories, and dynamic power relations.  I can't say I've read all the Canadian classics, but here are a few novels that I feel are inherently "Canadian" that I have come to love:

1. Beautiful Losers: Also one of my favourite books in general, Leonard Cohen paints two very different scenes of Canada: one from colonial times that portrays a young Mohawk saint called Catherine Tekakwitha as she transgresses from her culture to Christianity; and another contemporary portrait of a love triangle among the nameless protagonist, his wife, and his best friend, F.  Cohen is able to wrangle transgressive 20th century topics, such as heresy, bigamy, and homosexuality while retaining a certain air of timelessness in this novel.
2. Three Day Road: If I didn't have to read this for class, I would have probably passed it over.  However, I'm glad I didn't.  There is something about fraternal bonds that I find surpasses a traditional romantic bond in literature.  Joseph Boyden's  Three Day Road deals with two young Cree men, Elijah and Xavier, as they engage in World War One, while also facing the effects of cultural colonialism and European influence in Canada. 
3. The Underpainter: This novel's ending broke my heart, but I won't give it away.  The Underpainter is another war-novel that chronicles the life of an American painter who falls in love with a Canadian woman, yet distances himself from her as he does the Canadian landscape in his work.  I found the binarism created between Canadian and American culture to be subtle yet inherent to the novel upon a closer look.  Each character is carefully constructed, and is complicated in a very unique way, making the narrative rich and complex, and leaving the ending unresolved.  Jane Urquhart writes this novel beautifully.
4. In the Skin of a Lion: I must confess, I love the way Michael Ondaatje writes.  I much prefer The English Patient to this novel, but the way Ondaatje describes Toronto in the early 20th century is almost too vivid to be words on paper.  For me, there is a strange nostalgia for a time I will never know in a city that has changed dramatically over the past century that is inextricable from the way Ondaatje writes.

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:

And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

--Lord Byron, 1815

Some short stories you can read online:

Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger

To Serve Man - Damon Knight

Benito Cereno - Herman Melville

How Much Land Does a Man Need? - Leo Tolstoy

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

The Pearl - John Steinbeck

The Stranger - Albert Camus

Song by Allen Ginsberg

I thought I'd share a poem with you that I really love, because poetry is just as important as prose.