five things

[jade_sabre]

i live! and lovie lives with me! these are all excellent things. like my job! but i will say nothing further about that for now. for now i just have links[ys].

1) can anyone give me the name of a good Napoleon biography? I feel like if I am going to be an obsessive coup-de-foudre fangirl of his I can at least know aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the stories behind the heartache described in these kate beaton comics.

2) is it sad to say this changed my life? perhaps not changed, but threw it into startlingly beautiful perspective, if only for a moment. And I was content.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the desk,
Rubbing its back upon the Windows PC;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the icons that you meet;
There will be time to murder and respawn
And time for all the Chrome and Firefox
That drag and drop a website on your plate;
Time for .doc and time for .ppt
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred fanfics and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the players come and go
Talking of their scores on Halo.

it is like being seventeen-year-old me reading Prufrock for the first time in AP English and knowing that it would be an awesome class and that here I had a poem that I could take with me for the rest of my life and just enjoy the language of it and wallow in the meaning and just hold. I--am having trouble articulating my relationship with Prufrock, which makes it difficult to explain just what about this loving parody touched me so deeply. But it did.

3) Speaking of going back four-or-five years, someone on Facebook mentioned that Folk Choir is going to sing Biebl's Ave Maria, to which I scoffed a tiny bit because Folk Choir is good and all but this is not their kind of song, and also because freshman year of college I went to a ND-and-Michigan-Glee-Clubs concert, from which I discovered Guster due to the Michigan's-version-of-the-Undertones's cover of Mona Lisa (the only track I still have from the sadly lost CD). Anyway, they had the boys onstage and also in the balcony behind the stage, and the chant solo in the middle was sung from up there, and it was just--

The concert was in Leighton, which has among its many interesting amenities a balcony seating up above and behind the stage, so that you can...watch the back of the performers' heads? (Actually, I really want to sit there one day. It would be really cool.) So during the Michigan part of the performace, the ND Club sat back there. For this song, most of them moved down to the stage, but a bunch of tenor Is and maybe some tenor IIs (I couldn't tell, but I know some of them were tenor Is) stayed up there and moved around to the side a little, so they would be better picked up by the acoustics.

One of these guys up there I was just writing to my friend about how cute he was, and then he had a solo, a gorgeous soaring falsetto solo that just completely stole my heart and flew it up to him. The song itself was soaring, beautiful, gorgeous, prayerful--I closed my eyes and mouthed the chorus (Ave Maria) along with them and just let my soul fly. That concert hall is the most beautiful performing places in the world--I haven't been to too many, but I just know it. It was...fulfilling. Beautiful. I loved it.

4) Speaking of college, or things I learned in college, or rather a lot of conversations I have been having recently about women in college and the like, or perhaps just feminism: Maureen Johnson on the whole "boys aren't reading!/don't have anything to read!" outcry (or, how a penis makes what you write suddenly interesting to the populace at large).

5) New Glee! WHY IS MY FLIST NOT DISCUSSING THIS MORE. Please do not tell me I got into Glee just in time for everyone else to be bored and ditch it, because so much happened, and it was all pretty cool! *sob*

♥


EXTRA BONUS LIMITED-TIME-ONLY LINK: romanitas graciously agreed to un-flock this hilarious, almost Growing-Up-Cullen-esque Merlin...joke...parody...hilarious thing that she and her friend did. READ IT BEFORE SHE FLOCKS IT AGAIN.

Comments

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Andrew Clements is wonderful. His kids are not smarter-than-the-adults smart-alecs (even in Frindle, it turns out that the seemingly unsympathetic teacher was actually not). They are realistic. The stories are believable, the characters are human - I just love his books.

And Gordon Korman's early books (haven't read any of the recent ones) make my tummy hurt from laughing so much.

I plodded my way through My Antonia and hated it. Haven't read any Gertrude Stein. My problem is not so much that they are women as that I'm not at all fond of most adult 20th-century literature. Austen and the Brontes I love. Children's books and some young adults' authors, probably the majority of whom are women, I love. The adult-aimed literature I find largely alien and unpleasant.

[beth-shulman.livejournal.com]

I know :) And while sometimes I can read and appreciate books about awful lives and awful people, most of the time I like to believe that people are generally good and nice and kind and every other cliche that is actually some of the nicest compliments you can pay people. (That is a muddled sentence, but it's late and I can't think of a way to make it better. I hope it's semi-coherent.) Andrew Clements writes books about people I either know, feel like I know, or wish I knew. I like when authors acknowledge that good people actually exist.

Some of Gordon Korman's best books are the old, out-of-print ones. I love them. The only funny current one is Losing Joe's Place, in my opinion. It was hilarious.

I had to plod my way through My Antonia as well. Although our tastes are different in other areas, because I don't like Austen or the Bronte sisters. And there are so many people who disagree with me (vehemently) that I reread a book by one of them every so often, and I still don't see the genius. Which bothers me, it really does. I'm not in any way putting down your taste, if anything, I'm in a tiny minority because more people love Jane Austen than dislike her.

What do you think about, say, The Great Gatsby, or The Sound and the Fury? Or are you referring to later 20th century?

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Haven't read Gatsby or The Sound and the Fury. I read short stories by the two authors in a class, loathed them, and felt disinclined to read anything else by them. (Same with James Joyce and several others). I don't like Dickens, either, or several other pre-20th-century folks.

I'm not offended that you don't like the Brontes or Austen, any more than I think Dickens fans should be offended at my not liking him. Tastes differ! What do you think about Sir Walter Scott? I absolutely adore Ivanhoe and The Talisman, but when I convinced a friend (and this was an adult friend, not when I was in school and first read it) to try Ivanhoe, she gave up after a few pages. On the other hand, I didn't much like Waverly - of all the useless pathetic *losers* our "hero" took the cake.

The Bruno & Boots books are great. And the three whose titles will maybe come back to me in a minute - the kid who travels on a class trip raking in money in the most amazing ways, and the kid who went reluctantly to summer camp, and Who Is Bugs Potter? - are if possible even funnier.

And I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph, which is quite coherent to me!

[beth-shulman.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly a fan of James Joyce, either, but if you have time, give Gatsby a try. It's a great book. And it's seriously got some of the most amazing writing I've ever read. Ever.

*confession* I haven't read Ivanhoe. I will add to my list, though!

I love Bruno and Boots. And the one about the summer camp - I can't recall the title either - is hysterically funny. I think I fell off my friend's couch while reading it because I was laughing so hard.

There's that one about the kid who thinks he's royalty? From some nameless country? And he comes to a new school and joins some sort of after-school group? Oh! The Twinkie Squad! That was hilarious as well.

PS Who's the person in your icon? I can't place it, though it looks oddly familiar.

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Well - *maybe* someday I'll read Gatsby. Though it does sound dreary and depressing, from what I've heard about it.

I don't think I've read Twinkie Squad. Must find it. I wish I could order the earlier books for my school library (I had them in my old one). *Why* must they be out of print?

My icon is John Grahame of Claverhouse, first Viscount Dundee. If you've read Rosemary Sutcliffe's Bonnie Dundee, that's him (or rather he). If you haven't read Rosemary Sutcliffe's Bonnie Dundee, it's still he, and you should immediately go out and read Rosemary Sutcliffe's Bonnie Dundee!

(And this icon is Dundee, too).

[beth-shulman.livejournal.com]

Haven't read it, in fact, I just got The Eagle of the Ninth from my library. It will be the first book by her that I read. I have no idea why your icon looks familiar, because I've never heard of him. Hmmm.

The Twinkie Squad is one of his most outrageous books, I think.

And I love The Great Gatsby, so I'm biased, but I didn't think it was dreary or depressing. If I was ever forced to pick one book as the Great American Novel, it would be Gatbsy. It's so - timeless, oddly enough, even though it catalogs a specific time :)