Am rereading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series of late. The lit snob in me can't believe how much I love these books, they are after all *romance* novels. But, they are impeccably researched. Gabaldon has a PhD and you can tell it from her texts. There's a whole Jacobite history within the pages of her tales, a history that it would take a professional researcher (oh, like let's say a doctoral candidate)to put together.
My point.... I guess, is that us overeducated types spend so much time around other overeducated types that we forget that those years in school really have taught us skill sets not commonly in play among the general population. Question it? Read 50 pages of any of the Outlander books, then read 50 pages of any other novel shelved near it, and I guarantee you'll simply be blown away.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Really... REALLY
All the early articles about Michael Jackson's death this week included this quote:
“No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow,” Michael Harris, 36, read from a text message a friend had sent him. “It’s like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died.”
Really -- A disturbed and likely criminal musician (however talented) as important to our collective consciousness as a visionary politician?
This Michael Harris is just a year or two older than I am and you know what I remember: I remember being at home watching cartoons when Ronald Reagan got shot; I remember being in math class, watching the launch out the window, when the Challenger exploded; I remember the high school halls being atwitter when the Berlin Wall collapsed; I remember a friend knocking on my dorm room door, ash faced, to tell me the federal building in Oklahoma City had been bombed; I remember studying for Comps with the Today show on in the background on September 11; I remember being in a hotel room in Georgia on election night 2008.
I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson, as tragic as he was, in life and death, isn't gonna be on my "remember when" list. And yes, I was a fan. He was formative to my musical youth. Thriller was the birthday present of choice my third grade year. My friends and I copied his choreography in our bedrooms and watched hour after hour of MTV waiting for his videos. But REALLY!
It saddens me, the heights to which our society elevates it's superstars, really.
“No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow,” Michael Harris, 36, read from a text message a friend had sent him. “It’s like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died.”
Really -- A disturbed and likely criminal musician (however talented) as important to our collective consciousness as a visionary politician?
This Michael Harris is just a year or two older than I am and you know what I remember: I remember being at home watching cartoons when Ronald Reagan got shot; I remember being in math class, watching the launch out the window, when the Challenger exploded; I remember the high school halls being atwitter when the Berlin Wall collapsed; I remember a friend knocking on my dorm room door, ash faced, to tell me the federal building in Oklahoma City had been bombed; I remember studying for Comps with the Today show on in the background on September 11; I remember being in a hotel room in Georgia on election night 2008.
I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson, as tragic as he was, in life and death, isn't gonna be on my "remember when" list. And yes, I was a fan. He was formative to my musical youth. Thriller was the birthday present of choice my third grade year. My friends and I copied his choreography in our bedrooms and watched hour after hour of MTV waiting for his videos. But REALLY!
It saddens me, the heights to which our society elevates it's superstars, really.
Friday, June 26, 2009
The Way We Get By
At 2AM they were there. At 10PM they were there. At 9AM they were there.
Every trip through Bangor, they were there. I couldn't be there, but somebody was. Too often our military is the center of philosophical discord and ideological debate; we forget its humanity; its heart and its soul; its anguish, its conflict, and its moments of joyfullness.
Not in Bangor.
They were there.
So glad they've made this film. Hope to be able to check it out
(btw it's not just senior citizens and it's not always a small group but it is always meaningful.)
http://www.thewaywegetbymovie.com/about-the-film/
Every trip through Bangor, they were there. I couldn't be there, but somebody was. Too often our military is the center of philosophical discord and ideological debate; we forget its humanity; its heart and its soul; its anguish, its conflict, and its moments of joyfullness.
Not in Bangor.
They were there.
So glad they've made this film. Hope to be able to check it out
(btw it's not just senior citizens and it's not always a small group but it is always meaningful.)
http://www.thewaywegetbymovie.com/about-the-film/
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
LOST -- losing me
I finally watched the season finale of LOST recently. (It got broadcast late in my world and then it took me a while to find the two hours to watch it) Are they really implying the past five seasons have been nothing but a chess match between Jacob and his nemesis or did I miss something? Really, that was the Cuse and Lindelhof "grand plan" we keep hearing about? I'm about as disgusted with it now as I was back in the 2005/06 season when we kept gettting meaningless revelation after meaningless revelation (well that and Niki and Paulo).
Maybe I don't get it? The thing with the bomb blast and it getting them all back to where they need to go. If it worked, then you don't need 16 more episodes to wrap up the series (and the whole series has been just one step above Dallas's dream season). If it didn't, then what was the point. I've really enjoyed this season; it's had a lot to feel good about, especially the 1970's stint for Sawyer, and before watching the season 5 finale, I was one of the people who trusted they had a point. Now,hmmmm, not so sure? I'm know I'm being tough on them, but if they hadn't kept insisting they had this mindblowing mythology driving the show then I wouldn't be expecting mindblowing mythology and would be super content with good storytelling and compelling characters (which they have a plenty).
Anyway, it definitely didn't leave me awaiting for the next season the way last years seasson's finale did. It left me pretty much not caring. I'm obviously going to keep watching. I've made it this far, so I'm not going to give up now, but these new developments certainly don't have me holding my breath until January.
Maybe I don't get it? The thing with the bomb blast and it getting them all back to where they need to go. If it worked, then you don't need 16 more episodes to wrap up the series (and the whole series has been just one step above Dallas's dream season). If it didn't, then what was the point. I've really enjoyed this season; it's had a lot to feel good about, especially the 1970's stint for Sawyer, and before watching the season 5 finale, I was one of the people who trusted they had a point. Now,hmmmm, not so sure? I'm know I'm being tough on them, but if they hadn't kept insisting they had this mindblowing mythology driving the show then I wouldn't be expecting mindblowing mythology and would be super content with good storytelling and compelling characters (which they have a plenty).
Anyway, it definitely didn't leave me awaiting for the next season the way last years seasson's finale did. It left me pretty much not caring. I'm obviously going to keep watching. I've made it this far, so I'm not going to give up now, but these new developments certainly don't have me holding my breath until January.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Power Up!
Hitting the reboot button on this space, because this kind of stuff is too involved for facebook, twitter, and all those other social networking sights and too, too, too, well too off topic, for the other places I write, so back to Brain Candy we go. And what better way to get restarted than yet another bookmeme.....
At some point, reviews of I am David, the movie. Benjamin Button, The Jane Austen Book Club, The Twilight series and a couple of other recent reads but first.....
1) What author do you own the most books by?
CS LEWIS
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
THE SCARLET LETTER
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
NOT A BIT
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
HAWKEYE
4a) What fictional character would you most like to be?
4b) What fictional character do you think most resembles you?
JANE EYRE
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD -- Harper Lee
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
ANYTHING NANCY DREW
7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
A PAINTED HOUSE -- John Grisham
8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS -- Sandra Gruen
9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
FARENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury, ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac, and The GOSPEL of JOHN (not a book, the actual Gospel) -- read all three together and you'll likely see a relational subtext. Yes, it's official, I'm *still* a Nerd
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
DOES anybody really ever deserve to win it?
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
OUTLANDER -- Diana Gabaldon
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
ANYTHING "classic"
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
TO DREAM you actually have to sleep, right?
14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
EVER SINCE I FINISHED SCHOOL, THEY'VE *ALL* BEEN LOWBROW
15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
RUSSIANS
18) Roth or Updike?
UPDIKE
19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
WHO?
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
SHAKESPEARE
21) Austen or Eliot?
AUSTEN
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
POETRY
23) What is your favorite novel?
ALL THE aforementioned ones AND the GREAT GATSBY AND so many more that I just can't list
24) Play?
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
25) Poem?
FIRE and ICE -- Robert Frost (simple yet exquisite, I think)
26) Essay?
A MODEST PROPOSAL-- Jonathan Swift
27) Short story?
SCHRODINGER'S CAT by Ursula K. LeGuin (just 'cause I love to teach that one --it's fun to watch students try to talk about it) but really, all things FLANNERY O'CONNOR
28) Work of non-fiction?
NICKLE and DIMED by Barbara Ehreneich
29) Who is your favorite writer?
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, the BRONTE(s), EDITH WHARTON, JOSEPH CONRAD, FITZGERALD, CS LEWIS, RUSHDIE
GABALDON, CUSSLER, FFORDE, SHREVE (so more a list of folks I tend to like)
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Most of my gradschool classmates (oh wait -- that's me being snarky.... bad, bad).
Otherwise -- GREGORY MAGUIRE (still don't get all the hoopla over WICKED)
31) What is your desert island book?
TOLKIEN'S collected works (including the SILMARILLION) -- Maybe on a desert island I'd actually read them ;)
32) And … what are you reading right now?
something by ALICE HOFFMAN (can't remember the title-- that's how riveting it is-- and I"m too lazy to go upstairs and check)
At some point, reviews of I am David, the movie. Benjamin Button, The Jane Austen Book Club, The Twilight series and a couple of other recent reads but first.....
1) What author do you own the most books by?
CS LEWIS
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
THE SCARLET LETTER
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
NOT A BIT
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
HAWKEYE
4a) What fictional character would you most like to be?
4b) What fictional character do you think most resembles you?
JANE EYRE
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD -- Harper Lee
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
ANYTHING NANCY DREW
7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
A PAINTED HOUSE -- John Grisham
8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS -- Sandra Gruen
9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
FARENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury, ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac, and The GOSPEL of JOHN (not a book, the actual Gospel) -- read all three together and you'll likely see a relational subtext. Yes, it's official, I'm *still* a Nerd
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
DOES anybody really ever deserve to win it?
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
OUTLANDER -- Diana Gabaldon
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
ANYTHING "classic"
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
TO DREAM you actually have to sleep, right?
14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
EVER SINCE I FINISHED SCHOOL, THEY'VE *ALL* BEEN LOWBROW
15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
RUSSIANS
18) Roth or Updike?
UPDIKE
19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
WHO?
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
SHAKESPEARE
21) Austen or Eliot?
AUSTEN
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
POETRY
23) What is your favorite novel?
ALL THE aforementioned ones AND the GREAT GATSBY AND so many more that I just can't list
24) Play?
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
25) Poem?
FIRE and ICE -- Robert Frost (simple yet exquisite, I think)
26) Essay?
A MODEST PROPOSAL-- Jonathan Swift
27) Short story?
SCHRODINGER'S CAT by Ursula K. LeGuin (just 'cause I love to teach that one --it's fun to watch students try to talk about it) but really, all things FLANNERY O'CONNOR
28) Work of non-fiction?
NICKLE and DIMED by Barbara Ehreneich
29) Who is your favorite writer?
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, the BRONTE(s), EDITH WHARTON, JOSEPH CONRAD, FITZGERALD, CS LEWIS, RUSHDIE
GABALDON, CUSSLER, FFORDE, SHREVE (so more a list of folks I tend to like)
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Most of my gradschool classmates (oh wait -- that's me being snarky.... bad, bad).
Otherwise -- GREGORY MAGUIRE (still don't get all the hoopla over WICKED)
31) What is your desert island book?
TOLKIEN'S collected works (including the SILMARILLION) -- Maybe on a desert island I'd actually read them ;)
32) And … what are you reading right now?
something by ALICE HOFFMAN (can't remember the title-- that's how riveting it is-- and I"m too lazy to go upstairs and check)
Sunday, June 22, 2008
book check
this meme is making the rounds...
The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread”. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
In a true testament to my own geekdom, some of these often-never-finished are among my favorites, specifically, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and then On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread”. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
In a true testament to my own geekdom, some of these often-never-finished are among my favorites, specifically, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and then On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
a bit of grieving
not in any melodramatic, a bad thing happened, or you should be worried about me kind of way, but I find myself taking time to be sad today, sad for what might have been.
I had my ultrasound this week and boy-by #2 is on its way. I'm not dissapointed, per say-- it's not that kind of sadness (and I imagine if boy-by had been girl-by I'd still be a bit sad). It's more sadness for the loss of possibility. I think there's something to be said, after all, for not finding out. The practical side of me who's hung on to box after box of baby clothes, however, had to know. So, I'm grieving a bit today for the little girl that won't get to a part of our family even as I celebrate the little boy who's on his way.
(Although boy-by #1 is still adamant he's getting a baby sister, but there's plenty of time to help him see baby brothers are cool too)
I had my ultrasound this week and boy-by #2 is on its way. I'm not dissapointed, per say-- it's not that kind of sadness (and I imagine if boy-by had been girl-by I'd still be a bit sad). It's more sadness for the loss of possibility. I think there's something to be said, after all, for not finding out. The practical side of me who's hung on to box after box of baby clothes, however, had to know. So, I'm grieving a bit today for the little girl that won't get to a part of our family even as I celebrate the little boy who's on his way.
(Although boy-by #1 is still adamant he's getting a baby sister, but there's plenty of time to help him see baby brothers are cool too)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)