Andy

Simple choice, as an intellectual genius you have the opportunity to do more for humanity.

Set up a mobile libraries charity aimed at increasing literacy in African countries.

i'm making a point out of posting at least 200 words of something every night because i am a lazy fat-ass who won't ever get anything done. :)

-shy smile- it's work in progress, i was thinking about writing something for the ed challenge on mibba since i read some interesting stuff bibliophagy lately and it somehow turned into something that has to do more with the old testament and stories and words than skinny girls, but whatever.
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now it came to pass in the thirtieth year in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as i was among the captives of self-enchantment by the river of somes, that the heavens opened, and i saw not visions of god, but of something much more perverse and compelling, and i looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the dusty ceiling above the dizzy fan, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire, also out of the midst thereof came the likeliness not of four living creature bearing a pagan god's glory, but of a fleshy woman with clear emerald eyes and long curls of flaming hair pouring down her shoulders. her voice seemed to transpire through her immaculate skin, she radiated cold sounds that spread across the air in waves, in colors. she did not open her mouth, but she spoke to me. she called herself Miranda, a name proper for mirrors and wonders, but we both knew that was not her real name. she had no real name. she was not a real being, but a story i had made up.

there's more feeling and love in silvio rodriguez's politically mutilated songs
than in this whole album and in its I-am-against-authority theme.
love is just gentle, maniacal, blind, sorrowful,  not political.

so disappointing.


i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

it's never like the poems and songs, isn't it?

in this past month, i have devoured 9 novels (the life of hunger, the great gatsby, the virgin suicides, sentimental education, herzog, alexis, memoirs from the house of the dead, the hours, norwegian wood) not counting the two i couldn't finish (naked lunch and quo vadis), a book of short stories (the blue story), two novellas (the mysterious case of doctor jekyll and mr hyde and in vreme de razboi), a non-fiction book on the history of english literature, a philosophy of culture book (part of blaga's trilogy of culture -btw it was impossible to read T_T) and a midsummer's night dream and right now i am being devoured by thomas mann's magic mountain. i think. i can't remember ~exactly when i read those books. i just know it happened somewhat recently. or not so recently. magic mountain is screwing up my time perception. -shrug- anyway i felt the need to plunge into huge books with around 400 pages and into fast-paced books and books i would love. i like reading, so i read a lot, but then sometimes i need to read, it's like i'm thristy, i ~hunger for a good book and then things get tragic and i spend days doing nothing except for reading. 'tis all very lovely. i've slept a lot this past week because i have a cold and the medicines knock me out completely and then there was easter and i couldn't really read while at my grandmother because it'd just be really weird to sit alone and read while everyone else is either at church, or baking stuff, or getting wasted. -smile- i needed endless hypnotising novels that i could read fast, really really fast.

i finished amelie nothomb's the life of hunger in two or three hours last night. i wanted to finish the magic mountain first but i couldn't help myself. as i expected it, the novel was short, caustic, innocent and autobiographical. as i had not expected it, the chapter about anorexia itself lasts three pages and has a pathetic word count. it's like the author slaps you -ha, you fool, you thought this was going to be an angsty memoir about "battles" with eating disorders, well it's not. it's about the strange bibliophile daughter of a world class diplomate.- and it works.

mom's in paris. and she promised she'll buy me some books in french. i'm going to a latin translations contest next week and i have the day off tomorrow and most of next week's. 

by far the best book on food and hunger is arabian nights, i think i'll reread some of the stories this month.

in other news i'm making a point out of reading a lot of what antic (greek and latin) literature has to offer this summer, and i'm rather excited about it. i never really had the time to get into greek tragedy seriously or to read more/all of plato's dialogs. so. superexcitement. and since summer starts in may for me i'm starting on gilgamesh's epic, euripide's tragedies and the banquet and poetry by catul these days.

I've been thinking. I really love Flaubert's characters, not as much his plots -in all honesty and despite everything Zola says, Sentimental Education is boring. They just have something essentially human about themselves, they're all pathetic beyond repair, mediocre, confused -even Salammbo, or maybe especially Salammbo. When I open a book, especially if it's a really good book (a classic? oh that term has something snob about it), not an easy read, I expect to find something new about myself, a new shade of my personality/spirit, not an escape. Reading itself, the process of going over words is the escape, it's mindnumbing, it stops you from thinking about anything else, the books themselves, that's different. I love Emma Bovary, Salammbo, Matho, Charles Bovary, even Frederic Moreau and all his friends, but I wouldn't want to be any of them. I would perhaps want to take a peck at Salammbo's world -who wouldn't want to see 3rd century BC Carthage?- but that's it. I am already all those characters. I think our lives would be infinitely emptier and less humane if we didn't read. You just discover so many new selves in stories, feelings, identities, reactions, ideas of whose existence you had no clue. Yes, Flaubert's novels more than anything helped me complete my sentimetal education more than most other novels, their effect is comparable to that of Hesse's work.

I'm going to reread Madame Bovary now. I feel like rereading nowadays.

aw. currently I'm waiting for a -777 MB- version of the 70s adaptation of the Great Gatsby to finish downloading. I've spent the last two and a half hours trying to figure out a way to compress my 2.14 GB version into something under 2GB so that'd fit a normal stick. ;_; yes, I cried a little, it was so annoying. grrr. I can't do anything but bit my nails and wait. for. time. to. pass. by.
I'm giving a presentation on the novel tomorrow.
I hope that the movie will be interesting enough to distract everyone from what I'm saying, not that anyone'd listen to me anyway.
-sigh-

you know I really love this novel. I've read it twice integrally and parts of it three or four times. I've based projects on it.
it's not the little green light thing. the dreams. nothing of that sort. it used to be all that, but now it's not.
I've read books about Fitzgerald and Zelda, now it's all about them, their society, their damnation, the excess. the jazz and the champagne.
he's sweet in his hopelessness, Hemingway tries to make Zelda sound like a bitch but I like her too -how could I not take pity on someone who's psychotic?-
I do this with a lot of writers. I like their books out of pity. and then maybe it's more than that.
I like their books because their misery, knowing that they were real people, people who wrote because they needed to not because they were bored or for some other shallow reason makes me look at their books and try to find something to likable. I started to cry the other day while watching a documentary on Kerouac. but I cry at many things.
I have no idea what I'll say tomorrow. I really want to talk about the 20s as an age, as a way of life, I'll go from there.

I didn't want to talk about Gatsby, though.
I've read this short story by Borges a few days ago, it was called El Aleph. and what I found stunning was not the aleph itself -an aleph is a point that contains all points in the universe, somewhat like a magic mirror, read the story- but the fact that Dante, Beatrice and Borges are the main characters. in a way, a little. he is named Daneri and she's named Beatriz. he's a poet and she's dead. the resemblances are obvious. Borges  often put himself as a character in his stories the same way Dante was the main character of his. then the story is bitter, Borges is mean to Daneri and the poet is vain and melodramatic. Borges-the author mocks the great poet as he often mocks himself. it is my theory that Borges was secretly jealous of Dante for his love, the same way Dante the writer was jealous of Francesca in Inferno. Beatrice is firstly a salvation, not carnal love, actually their love is spiritual by definition, they barely see each other. so Dante is jealous of the couple, although their love had brought them ethernal damnation, not even hell can separate them. Borges on the other hand was jealous because he never experienced that kind of love, the one that saves you, he only fell in love in his old age.

there is an other beatrice that I can think of - Rosetti's wife. Elizabeth. the pre-raphaelities' muse.
I wonder if she brought him salvation. maybe this time she needed to be saved and he failed.

now I wonder if Dante scared the original Beatrice. it would've scared me. a little. only a little. that kind of intense love can be nothing but scary when it comes only from one side.
three days until easter break. :)

Nothing happened today, I swear. :/

Reading Perks of Being a Wallflower made me want to write book reports. I do write some for school and I like coming up with thesis as different from the conventional ones as possible, but I never really had a teacher that was cool enough to ask me to write reports on anything not in the curriculum. And currently, the curriculum contains solely Romantic poetry [which is fine, up to one point]. On the other hand I wish I had the willpower to gather and sort information, I like books, I think things about books, I tell people about books, I come to interesting conclusions, I can rarely bring myself to write them down. :/

When I was around 3 or 4 I used to travel by train with my mom a lot. Maybe not that much, but it's one of the few things I remember doing when I was little so I assume I did it a lot. I loved it, I loved the people that I met and just the feeling, the special occasion. I remember that mom read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to me on a few of those trips, I don't remember her reading anything else to me, I don't know if she read many books to me and I only liked the Wizard or if she just read that one. In February I bought an extra-cheap Penguin Popular Classics copy of the book [the type with green covers and recycled paper] and started to carry it around in my school bag as a book to read when I have only a few minutes to waste. I finished it yesterday morning. I didn't recall most of the plot, just the basics, I guess that made the story more interesting and intriguing.

While the story is catchy and I did like the plot, somewhat, but it disappointed me once I looked at it in comparison with other children literature classics. Firstly, Dorothy seems ...empty, she's just an empty character, half of the savor of Alice in Wonderland is Alice's character itself, the way she feels, thinks and acts, Dorothy never feels anything but standard emotions. Then the author -in an effort to mirror folk stories, I'm assuming- keeps repeating words and phrases, it gets tiring after a while. That and some unnecessary or cliche episodes. It's a nice story nonetheless, I would've stopped reading it if it weren't.

The Wizard of Oz is -indisputably?- the most read American children's tale and it had a big effect both American and world popular culture. Its popularity is partially due to the 1939 MGM movie- arguably the most watched movie in history. L. Frank Baum wrote 13 sequels [and I'm debating purchasing some of them, I'll probably end up wasting my money on something else, though]. Some say that the story is -just?- a parable meant to put Populism is a good light. I'm not denying the fact that Baum's opinions impacted his work and that he couldn't have written a story that'd contradict his views, but to write a political manifesto in a children's book seems to me pointless.

I'm watching the movie tonight. Since I remembered seeing it before I was shocked to read that the magic slippers were silver not ruby-red. At the moment I'm battling Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, I don't think I'll pick up another of his book for some while, maybe I'll finish Naked Lunch.

p.s. 1900 illustrated edition

I am a relic at the bottom of the antic ocean. of my bones are coral made; those are pearls that were my eyes: nothing of me that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. my dreams take the form of endless azure waves and dim sounds, nothing but green-bearded ghosts visit me in them. I can’t remember the summer sky, its cold stars nor its silver breeze. I am forgotten and I am as old as the ocean.

the title doesn't have anything to do with anything.
I just wanted something to make me happy.
my wearyweary eyes look too awful.