There's 104 Days of Summer Vacation and School Comes Along Just to End It.

"So the annual problem for our generation is finding a good way to spend it."
Thus are the immortal words of the Phineas and Ferb theme song. And they couldn't be more true, even for a college student. Free time is on a premium especially in college, and now that the semester is over I have all this time on my hands that I definitely do not want to squander. In addition to doing re-writes and editing of my book. I have an ever increasing stack of books I'm hoping to accomplish reading over summer break. And oh yeah, start working on my thesis. That would be good too.
Currently my reading list consists of these titles in no particular order:

Bone, Fae Myenne Ng

Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis

Perelandra, C.S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler

A Sound Of Thunder, Ray Bradbury

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

I'm sure it will be added to as I find more books, but I think right now this is a manageable list and I don't want to get too distracted and not finish some of them like last summer. (some of these are actually left over from last summer's reading list).
I've tried to keep a balance between more literary titles, short stories, and fluff books. I do want to keep up on reading good literature but also it is summer break, so fun silly books are a nice respite. Plus I have a good amount of more serious books to read as I've received several books from Professors this semester.
As a writer and an English major it's important to read a wide variety of genres and not just get stuck in the rut of what you are more interested in. For instance, I write fantasy, so I try to read some current and classic fantasy just to keep up with the trends and tricks of the genre, and because I enjoy it. However, I also try to read outside that genre in more literary or general fiction type books. Recently I've been on a kick of reading books that are retellings of stories from classical mythology. I think reading Orpheus Lost by Jeanette Turner Hospital sparked that interest. As the title would suggest, that novel is a modern take on the Orpheus tale. Two of the books on my list also retell myths, Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie is another retelling of Orpheus. Needless to say I am really excited to start tackling this book list.

C.S. Lewis wrote poetry?

Honestly who knew? I didn't. I was doing some research for my Senior thesis on Tolkien, Lewis and their contribution to the fantastic genre via the Inklings circle and I stumbled across an entire book of poems by Lewis, published posthumously.
Looking through it, I found this awesome little wonder which is quite good. He basically is writing about how he is not like the great poets. Best of all, he harshes on T.S Eliot and Wordsworth a little.
Here it is:





A Confession, By C.S. Lewis
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things…peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

When finding a poem like this I can't help but get ecstatic. So of course I had to read it at the Annual Poetry Bash at OU. It was fun times. The Poetry Bash is always great but I was a tad disappointed there were less people there this year. Maybe it was the wonderful weather. Which makes no sense because nice weather makes me want to read more poetry and literature. Anyways it was still a great time with the people awesome enough to show up.
So now I think this is going to be one of my favorite poems ever. Definitely going on the list along with Ballad of the White Horse, The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, and The Eve of St. Agnes.

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.

First post

Taking Modern British Lit, has enabled me to read some very unusual novels. It seems that any literary genius to break all the rules and write in the strangest fashion still managed to get published. And now they will haunt the reading list of English majors for years to come. Needless to say I've had to read various authors' takes on the stream of consciousness style. This can be interesting, but very difficult and occasionally annoying to read. Maybe I'm just finding a lot of things annoying because I'm suffering from the 3rd cold I've contracted this semester.

While reading all these works of insane literary geniuses, I've managed to find new ways to distract myself, since the delights provided by Facebook offer merely minimal deterrence from literary enlightenment. I've become addicted to a couple sites that provide a respite from the political propaganda thrown at you by checking CNN.com on a daily basis.
The first of these new addictions is Office Tally. Being a fan of The Office, I find the site quite enjoyable. It contains deleted scenes from current episodes, pictures from fans, Halloween costume tips, and spoilers on upcoming episodes. I find it very diverting. I mean, isn't everyone concerned with whether Jim and Pam will really get married?
For more fanciful fun, I stumbled across this website of a writer who found some very entertaining obscure fairy tales in her research for her book. Ms. Durst posts her findings and her commentary about their randomness.
Well, there's my first post. I hope you find these sites as diverting as I did. I hope to post again soon about my novel and its plot. This post should also explain the title of my blog as well.