T.S. Eliot love.

And now we shall delve into the world of another literary friend, T.S. Eliot. I seem to be finding that I long to read whatever literature I'm not actually studying at the moment. Last fall I was longing for Dickens, and now I'm ironically taking Victorian Lit.
But anyways T.S. Eliot is one of the insane literary geniuses of the modernist period. No he wasn't literally insane, his writing is just so crazy awesome I like to call him insane. I wish I could be him! No not really, I just really admire his style and genius. He wrote "The Wasteland" among other things, I read Wasteland last Fall. It was so mindblowing that the first time you read it, it hurts your brain and you have no idea what is going on. But then you re-read it, discuss it in class, and it becomes one of the most complicatedly awesome original, intelligent thought-provoking piece of poetry you have ever read.
The other reason I love T.S. Eliot, he makes up his own words. Polyphiloprogenitive. Basically it is composed of latin root words and means extremely prolific.
The word is found in his poem "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service." The line is: "Polyphiloprogenitive/ The sapient sutlers of the Lord/ Drift across the window-panes."
And if that doesn't give you a pretty good idea of just how epically insane he is, then I don't know what else will, unless you read more of his poems.

The other reason I love T.S. Eliot, he is oft quoted by one of my most favorite heroic male fictional characters: Fish, or Benedict Denniston from The Fairy Tale novel series by Regina Doman. Definitely some of my favorite books ever. I could go on forever about them, but I'll have to save that for another post. Let's just say that Fish is one of the best fictional heroes I have ever read about. He definitely knocks Mr. Darcy out of first place in my book.But Mr. Knightley did that already I guess so Fish takes 3rd or 4th place after Han Solo and Westley. He quotes literature, that's pretty attractive if you ask me.

But I am diverging, basically if you get the chance, read T.S. Eliot. You will not regret the choice to read one of the best literary geniuses of the 20th century. And now I must go back to my homework on Literature from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Our DLF, Dickens

I'm not sure if it comes from reading modern Lit, like Waiting for Godot, which is dry, sparse, and unfriendly to the alliterative and assonance-loving eye, or if it's the fun and fabulous festive season that is leaving me suddenly longing for Dickens.
Yes, I'm talking about our dear little friend Charles. You know, that guy from 19th century England who got paid by the word, causing his novels to be telephone directory sized, and the bane of the existence of all high school students for decades. I'm sure we all can boast of reading at least one of his works, or falling asleep during one of the obnoxious BBC dramatizations. I myself can boast of reading his A Christmas Carol as well as A Tale of Two Cities. Both of which are some of his most famous works and contain some of the best of his infamously penned lines. They also include some of the most hysterical, interesting, and sympathy invoking characters in the history of English literature.
Yes, I am longing for his excellent and melodious prose. I never thought I would say those words. It really seems that you don't appreciate genius like Dickens' until you find it lacking in the courses taught on the dry, hopeless and Godless modern English literature. I have the heart that longs to live in the magically flowing rhythm of a Dickensian sentence.

For instance: "Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster."--A Christmas Carol.
This line flows lyrically off the tongue and instantly creates the perfect image of Scrooge's cruelty, making him one of the most infamously characterized selfish villains in literature, which also makes his conversion at the end of the novel all the more beautifully touching. It's a story we come back to year after year. It's been retold in numerous ways, in particular, by my favorite troop of varied and lovable actors, the Muppets.
A Muppet Christmas Carol has definitely been one of my favorite Christmas classic movies to pull out and dust of when that time of year rolls around. The Muppets are in part responsible for introducing me to much of the great literature today (Wishbone and Bugs Bunny supplied the other half of the introduction).
One of the most creatively pulled of escapades of the muppet rendition of Dicken's classic novel, is having Gonzo the great supply the narration under the guise of calling himself Mr. Dickens. Included in the muppet fun and frolick of the tale, Gonzo, er Mr. Dickens, narrates in the lovely flowing style of Charles Dickens own words used in the original novel itself. How wonderful. This truly is literary culture at work. I cannot wait to pull out the old, time-worn, recorded off the Disney Channel VHS tape and watch it again this Christmas.