Category : Books, Poetry

in Books, Poetry, Life of Giang

A List With Many Rules

Hello, I took this meme from you. ;) / wave

Here are the rules:

These are the top one-hundred-six books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Dear God, will it ever END!)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (“Joyce is the devil” – YES!)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre****
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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
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
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The 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
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
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 : A Novel
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
The Three Musketeers

in Art, Design, Photography, Books, Poetry

Do you like werewolves? Well, do ya!

One of my guild buddies Fish Fishwell (clever pseudonym of [the clever pseudonym] Matt Maxwell [he insists that is his real name, but we know better]) is the writer of a comic book (graphic novel) called Murder Moon (clever new-do-nym of the comic book [graphic novel] formerly known as Strangeways). Check it out. It’s pretty cool!

A little background…
http://www.highway-62.com/blog/archives/2007/09/the_story_so_far_2.htm

And a trailer!

in Books, Poetry, Games, Life of Giang

Fel Priest!

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What is more resplendent than the act of whoring out Yeats to gaming? ;)

So, the Monday WoW group is back together – new and improved on Tuesday nights! It’s good to be back where everybody knows my name, and it’s Dezember, the Spirit-Loathing Badass Fel Priest Extraordinaire, Wielder of the Mighty Snow Of Woe, The Alt-Tab Bringer of Death and Corpse Runs! Yarrr!

/Insert Segue Here

Exercising is not fun for me. I hate it. I do it because I don’t want to be fat again. I’ve teeter-tottered my whole life, and would like to keep fighting the good fight, so I try hard (some days harder than others) to keep up with it. While I was making the long commute, exercising was relegated to the back burner to make time for cooking, laundry, and errands. Several weeks ago, Curt went out and came back bearing his Joe Weider home gym. He thought it would be a good alternative to running in the dark, or Tae Bo (I feel dumb kicking into the air, especially when the man telling me to do it is in a giant flourescent blue Speedo.) I’ve been working out on it ever since. The other morning as I was shifting my weight in bed, my hand brushed across my leg, and I felt a muscle that I could swear to you has never been there before. I am not sure what it does, but there it was, all the same. Making my thighs bigger. Giving me lethal-dose ostrich legs. What der farken.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and my first night of class. Boy vehemently eschews the idea of Valentine’s Day, so he is most likely (not-so) secretly glad that I will be glued to a chair somewhere far from the reach of any (not-so) surprise Valentine’s Day flowers that I may have bullied him into sending me. It’s not that I care much for the day – it’s just that I have the insatiable lust of the braggadocio in my heart, and love his public adoration. It’s vile, isn’t it? :)

I am going to start that book tonight, and write a page every night until I have finished a story. Maybe I will post it.

Sleepy bed place time.

in Books, Poetry, Life of Giang

Face

This is my face, several times. I’m told I don’t look like myself when I smile. What the heck does that mean? I’m a happy person, damnit! Happy, and with happy thoughts! Garrrrrrrrrurur.

It is funny sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror (shaddap). I wander around all day and forget what I look like, because I’m busy having thoughts. And then, I wander past a mirror (or peak into my bird mirror), and I think, “Oh – you again.” Funny to me to associate my thoughts and my mental life with the face I see in the mirror. Funny that the thing that I had the littlest to do with determines so much about how, or even whether, people interact with me. It all makes sense, yes – but how funny it all is, when you sit and really think about it. How funny, funny we are.

It is the menstrual time: that special time of the month during which I leak blood, and will eat anything, all the time. Today, I ate a lot. Yesterday, I ate a lot. Tomorrow, I will probably eat a lot. And really – it only makes horrible sense. I am bleeding. I will continue to bleed for four days. I need to replenish. Chinese food and Taco Bell provide nourishment, or at least, fill up the spaces where The Nourishment is supposed to go. I feel bad, but so…full of food.

Raise your hand if that was gross to you! Nah, it wasn’t bad. You’ll be fine. Onwards!

The last three fortune cookie fortunes I’ve gotten:

1. You will have great fortune in love.
2. You are appreciated more than you realize.
3. You have a charming way with words and should write a book.

Heh. ;)

I went to work, came home, played WoW, and talked to my Boy: I am happy tonight. I am going to bed now. Much love to you all. Tomorrow – pictures of the zoo! :)

“What Do Women Want?”
by Kim Addonizio

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.

in Books, Poetry, Life of Giang

Write

This morning: I love to clean. Love of cleaning exceeds love of work, therefore, I go to work longing to clean. I am the messiest damn clean person ever.

At work: I realize the irony of procrastinating the ordering of a “Rush” stamp. (I have been. Naughty me!)

Lunch: With Doddsy (thereby thwarting Brother Wonk’s desire to have lunch with him – HA!) We talk sense in nonsense language. I am dubbed the Vexxer, admit I am an attention whore, and resist the urge to eat the fries. Well, most of them. ;)

After work: I hike around in the foothills for three hours. I forgot to bring 1) water 2) a warm-bringing article of clothing 3) a person who can read maps. I got lost three or four times, but climbed a big hill and saw many bunnies.

After that: I buy Raspberry-Blueberry Oat Bran Muffins from Trader Joe’s. What is not good about that mixture? NOTHING. Yuuuummm.

After after that (that?): Curt calls. Adore Curt. Adore Curt like he were an aggregation of the fluffiest, cutest, squeezable-est, doey-eyed-est bunnies ever. My boyfriend ftw!

Tonight: Cloud layer obscuring stars tonight. Love stars. Love clouds. Some night soon, it will rain, and then afterwards, the clouds will blow away, and the stars will be there still. It will be beautiful.

Me: I get discouraged and tired and restless and sad – but somewhere in all that, I hope the most daring things ever hoped by a fussy worry-horse, and I keep them all inside of me. They burn there, like little stars: some night soon.

For me, for you, for your monkey (and so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight):

from “The People Yes”
by Carl Sandburg

The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps,
the people march:

“Where to? what next?”

in Books, Poetry, Life of Giang

All Good Things

I’m drowsy, and suffering a bout of sentimentalism. The phrase above ends with “…must come to an end.” So they do. But I rail against that statement, thusly: here’s to hoping that the good things in life for the people I care about, and the people they care about – have the good grace to end at the end of life, and not before. I know it’s a silly, childish, and naive hope – but a hope all the same, born of more fondness for you all than I can fitfully shake a stick at, since it is late at night, and – as I’ve said – I am drowsy. In somno veritas. Much love. Many bunnies. Where is my lavender, my darling, darling, darling boy?

Zzz…

from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by William Shakespeare

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

in Books, Poetry

Miss-Chief

Outrageous shenanigans shall be afoot:

She’s a hunter. Hehe. :)

“The Penitent”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,
“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning –
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep –
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!

So I got up in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, “One thing there’s no getting by –
I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I:
“But if I can’t be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”

in Books, Poetry

Night Verse

Stymied, I am. So, poetry.

“First Fig”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!

That’s is alright. Only a faint whiff of death – Edna really likes to talk about death. Death of life, death of love. Let’s see what I can scare up…

“Dirge Without Music”
by Edna (Again)

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, – but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, –
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

But then, there is this, gentler:

“iii”
by The ED-NA

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow;
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon; all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show;
And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.
You go no more on your exultant feet
Up paths that only mist and morning knew;
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
Of a bird’s wings too high in air to view, –
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair, – and the long year remembers you.

And then something completely different…

“My Dream”
by Ogden Nash

This is my dream,
It is my own dream,
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

And now, I’m going to bed.

in Books, Poetry, Games, Life of Giang

Not Giving A Fuck

Oooh, I cussed.

It was an okay day. Everything went haywire at work, my bosses were both on edge, and it took me 1 hour and 15 minutes to make my 20 mile drive home. But then I got home and I thought – you know, taken in perspective, it does not really matter. I did not do anyone any harm today, and even helped, in my small way, to make the days of the people around me run a little bit smoother. It’s not Albert Schweitzer, but it was – you know – okay.

It was also the weekly designated ‘out’ night – ‘out’ away from gaming, away from work, away from anything I am even close to thinking about worrying about (as I am of the worrying variety of odd-duck). Felt good. Wanna see? ;)

Sis Quyen and her boyfriend Jason – this pretty much sums up their relationship. ;)

Some silly monkey wearing glasses that don’t belong to her. And yes, that’s just the glow of good health and excellent (80 proof) spirits in her cheeks.

Our obliging waiter. Rock on, dude.

Sometimes there are just moments of lucidity. We are all very silly creatures living in a big sea monkey globe, after all. There may be no absolute goods or absolute evils, but you know – I can tell when people are being assholes. That’s enough. I’m on it. On it!

Soooo. What was I saying?

Yesterday, we ran Zul’Gurub. We concluded at Mar’li, and there was some spankage. Opinion rages in the Insufficient Light mailing list on whether we were down healers, or we needed better poison control. It is both, really. We were down two healers from our usual group, and down to 16 or 17 players overall, and with our one shaman on poison and our druid running poison backup, and only two priests…it was a little rough. But I have faith that our thinkers will out-brain the wench, and on that day, I will bring you another triumphant silly picture. Till then, only images of death and destructification. Okay, and Murky, too. ;)

It’s true what they say: a leper’s best friend is her murloc.

Play dead, Moo! Oh. Waiiiiit…

And, I am for bed now. One last thing, but I am saying goodnight now, my much-loved sillies. ;)

excerpt from “Journal”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
“She really used to think that way.”
I do not write it to survive
My mortal self, but, being alive
And full of curious thoughts today,
It pleases me, somehow, to say,
“This book when I am dead will be
A little faint perfume of me.”

in Books, Poetry

A Better Post

I don’t want that last post to be the front runner anymore. It’s a beautiful day. I’ve had juice, and string cheese, and am fairly certain I will not have to brave the outside world again today for anything. Happiness settles in, when these things align. :)

“Afternoon on a Hill”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

Cheers, duckies. :)