I've been having the best luck, I've been happy, a poem

Autumn
by Richard Watson Gilder

An Autumn Meditation

For Autumn days
To me not melancholy are, but full
Of joy and hope, mysterious and high,
And with strange promise rife. Then it me seems
Not failing is the year, but gathering fire
Even as the cold increases.

Gawd...

Simply have not made any progress on The Kite Runner. Haven't rd past the point i left off fr the Oct 12th post. Damn you Wikipedia?! Made the same mistake as i did with Atonement. Wiki gives the whole doggone plots of the books (turn away eyes! Turn away). With Atonement, Wiki alerted me to the fact that unresolvable things were ahd for characs i was alrdy uninterested in &, for the most part, unsympathetic towards. I figured there was no sense of carthatic feelings ahd for me to be sufficiently motivated to go on. I wasn't about to suffer through the whole thing only to be left more pissed off than ever-- that's what your job is for! I was already annoyed by The Kite Runner's rich brat of a protagonist, Amir, mean-spirited sense of entitlem't, those few chps in, so when Wiki informed me of the pile upon, piled on, betrayals ahead for the good-natured servant boy, Hassan, fr that conscienceless brat...it was a wrap. There is no amount of atonement that would make me like the grown-up Amir. His crimes, too far-reaching; his destructiveness, great.

On the upside, i'm still slowly making my way through Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. I've been rdg it for a couple of months now-- & i even have a copy that's a 1st edition cover! Also re-rdg Jacqueline Johnson's very excellent, small press published, collect'n of poems A Gathering of Mother Tongues.

Ladies

if you catch your man turning to check out young girls asses, my advice to you? Run. Christ on a stick, what does it say about men who look at adolescent girls butts-- girls that are two, three, four times their ages?! Nothing good. And if you stick w/ such a man, i doubt that the future looks too bright. So what if the teenage twit-- who looked to be about 14 or 15yrs old-- is dressed in white shorts w/ sheer stockings on a cold day in Oct (obviously desperate for attn)?! Should man after man, that i saw in front of me as i walked a distance behind the girl & her friends, should they be turning to look at her ass. I'm sure most of us were young & dumb at one point (i cringe sometimes, looking back down that dark tunnel)-- we needed saving fr ourselves long past the adolescent yrs. The drawbacks of the growing process are too numerous to list.

I know that, for a large segment of the populat'n, age certainly doesn't equal wisdom or even reason (sadly, i avoid a whole lot of ignorant older people on a daily basis). But watching these older men-- some who must have young daughters, nieces, etc. of their own-- putting a crick in their necks, they were trying so hard, to look @ this girl's behind, i felt only sadness for any young female unfortunate enough to be saddled into the permanent orbit of these men.

This is not intended for all the good men out there being decent human beings (and I'm perfectly aware that there are monstrous women out there too). But, statistically, it's been proven that women are much more likely to be protective of the beings that had sprung fr their bodies, having been snipped fr the cord that had connected them; the emotional/maternal bond tend to be stronger than the inexplicable paternal one. So Men: Have some decency. And Ladies: Beware.

Whoo weee!!!!

My littlest niece (but growing in leaps & bounds every day) is a published writer! Cheyanne Alexandra Rosier, check out her book on Amazon.com Where did the time go? It seems that only yest she was only nine yrs old... Oh wait, she is only nine yrs old! (Funny, i know ;-)

This book-to-movie rdg jag, that i decided

to go on, isn't going as well as i thought it would. When i saw Atonement, by Ian McEwan, in the lib, i had some vague remembrance of, kinda/sorta, wantg to see the movie vers when it had come out in 2007. I think the reason i didn't go & see it then, is prob the same reason i had to chuck it into the Mid-Manhat lib return bin yest: Snore! Didn't i learn my lesson w/ A. S. Byatt's Possession?!

Huge, huge, simply, humongous fan of A.S. Byatt's short stories: Sugar and Other Stories (Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice is exquisitely fantastical, magical?, realism @ it's very best). Matisse Stories? Natch. Through a vague recollect'n of the imagery of fleshy nudity & lush foliage (or i could just have been mixing it up w/ Jane Campion's movie The Piano: Hot!) of the 1995 movie vers of Angels and Insects. I, through the grace of god, had managed to slog through the first novella of that book, Morpho Eugenia, in the spring of this yr. After that fiesta, finishing the second part, Conjugal Angel, was out of the question. Questions of the failed desires & distorted complexity of the human soul? I'm all for it. But the meticulous Victoriana & hypertexuality of Possession was about to drive me to drink (mmmm, prob not a bad idea). Everytime i saw any kind of cursive writg-- an indicat'n of a journal entry--or some kind of long journalistic quotat'n that went on for pgs, i was ready to scratch my eyes out. I just couldn't take the whole thing anymore & eventually just skipped vast sect'ns of text till i got to the, relief, ending.

I swore i would go back and rd The Fairy Melusina (one of the, seemingly, endless passages of poetic text in the book), the obscure epic of the feminist-minded poet Christabel LaMotte. After rdg the ending I was just too happy to be done w/ the book to want to dive back into the minutiae. Sadly, an intellectual i am not. Anyway, it was the A Lamia in the Cevennes story in Elementals... that made me a Byatt admirer. The lamia seemed to be another aspect of the melusine myth. I thought i had a winner w/ Possession. But it seems to be a postmodernist romance more to do with academic & scientific realism; not much my thing.

But i underestimated my complete lack of interest in English, so-called, "drawing rm" fiction. Any of the "classics" that i never rd in my teenage/high school yrs just is not going to get rd. That goes for other post-war British novelists like Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day-- good memories of Anthony Hopkins & Emma Thompson in the movie-- and upper-class old New York chroniclers like Edith Wharton (thank god for books on tape/cd! It was the only way i was going to get through anything by her. Really enjoyed Ethan Frome though-- which i believe was a bit of a departure fr her usu style).

I may have to go back to rdg Atonement at some point because, fr what i've rd, one of McEwan's achievem'ts in the writing of it is his execut'n of the ideas of Metafiction. If you rd Wikipedia's article on metafiction you'll realize that, hey, i'm almost sure to win some kind of lit award w/ this technique! Anyway, i'm now rdg The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. I didn't have any desire to see the movie, & this book, i know, is going to involve, in scope and subject, so many different levels of heartbreak. Right now, only a few pgs into chap four; it's aight.

Oy!

This is suppose to be a, somewhat, lit blog. But, boy did i feel truly illiterate after clicking on
the link to this website-- Oy vay!

Vote Now for the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction






So embarrassing to admit that i haven't rd much of the "lit greats." (what have i been doing...?)

I gave up on Faulkner after giving up on " The Sound and the Fury"-- a few pgs in-- in High School. John Cheever? Never hrd of him. Ralph Ellison I know, of course, but i really doubt that i've rd the "Invisible Man" (can't be sure; due to the fact that i've gone through so many books, like a steamroller, over the yrs & the memory ain't what it used to be). Eudora Welty & Thomas Pynchon? Sadly, no (know who they are, most likely haven't rd anything of their's). Thankfully i can say i've rd &-- in some instances-- rerd Flannery O'Connor's short stories over the yrs (my one redeeming writer).

Now that Sept is practically over

I finally have the Sept quote (see: Quote of the Month).