The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova.

( They rode to the great city from the land of death: 'We are men of God, men from the Carpathians.' )

Fermat's Last Theorem, by Simon Singh.

( Since I first met Fermat's Last Theorem as a child it's been my greatest passion. )

The No To Rape campaign advocates one simple idea: sexual violence by any person, against any person, is criminal violence. Consequently, non-consensual sexual penetration, regardless of whether the victim and perpetrator are married to each other, should be treated as rape.

Hey, guys. Do you abhor rape? Do you think rape is bad? Do you think no one should be able to rape anyone and get away without prosecution?

Because marital rape is still legal in Singapore, I hope you'll consider signing the petition.

The last time I checked, people were criticising Afghanistan for almost the same thing.

Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell.

( But the women chanted, sweet and low, 'It's all the men, the dirty bastards!' )

Blah blah blah, I fill my days my reading!

The Boy Detective Fails, by Joe Meno.

( At the beginning of a silver line, and the end of another made of twine, if you have old lungs, the treasure you will find. )

At the top of my LJ there is a (privated) entry listing all the books I've been reading this year. I kept a record for the latter half of 2008, too. And now I'm going to try something different, I'm going to write down my reactions to each and every book I read (and reread?), so I can at least remember what I liked or didn't like about it. I read a lot of crap! So everything will be going behind a cut, and you can just scroll past these entries on your flist. Or if you wanted to, you could read about what I thought of a book, and talk about it with me if you've read it, too. Here goes:

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger.

( I think I'm beginning to look down on all poets except Sappho. )

Notes on Hamlet adaptations that will never be of any use in an A level exam:

1. BBC 1980 -- this one is really great, except I don't like Hamlet's facial hair.
2. Branagh version -- the name tells you all! Welcome to the most self-indulgent piece of bullshit ever.
3. Mel Gibson -- Hamlet has sex with his mother. D: D:

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:

4. Hamlet 2000 -- I haven't watched this (or 3; I don't intend to ever watch 3) but Julia Stiles is Ophelia! Best casting decision ever.
5. Olivier version -- IT IS NOT THAT GREAT, why won't anyone believe me.
6. Ophelia -- Ophelia fakes her madness and death, runs away to a convent and gives birth to Hamlet's son! Then she and Horatio fall in love. The end :) My favourite story!

I actually think Horatio is one of my favourite underrated characters. So... enigmatic! "La la la, I shall give everyone a history lesson in the first scene and be a visitor to Denmark in the second. Even though I am Hamlet's BFF Claudius and Gertrude really think that particular role is shared by Rosencrantz & Guildenstern; I guess they don't really understand their son. And Hamlet loves me; he told me so. Thrice. Even though he said I was poor that one time."

Lastly, I've been keeping this open in a tab for two days just so I can flick to it and giggle occasionally.

Hello hello hello economics went okay (in the sense that it will have gone less okay if you start talking to me about the paper and I find increasingly more mistakes I unknowingly committed, please don't talk to me about it!), and I have one paper left, and we went to Ion Orchard today (first time, I am a lamer), and we are going to the MPH warehouse book sale tomorrow, and I feel like a queen!

Here, have some McSweeney's. These two are funny:

Anticlimactic Retellings of Near-Death Experiences Rejected for Inclusion in a Forthcoming Talk-Show Segment Entitled "Life, Death, and Beyond"

If the Head Counselor at My Old Summer Camp Wrote a Household Q&A Column.

This one isn't:

Following My Creative Writing Teacher's Advice to Write "Like My Parents Are Dead"

Four days to study for Renaissance Literature, and my torrent for David Bowie's Absolutely Rare completed. Happy times are (nearly) here again!

Econs today was okay, I didn't fuck up the timing. But I don't see that anyone might look at my exam paper and in all good conscience give me an A.

BEST THING EVER:

Dumbledore's death in the style of ee cummings

i strain to see; Harry and Albus,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie Dumbledore was
more brave than me:more old than you.

*___________*

BEST THING EVER #2:

Max at Sea, by Dave Eggers

I have never read Where The Wild Things Are. I hold no childhood attachment to Where The Wild Things Are. I understand that this is a different beast (ahaha, pun) altogether! It's part of his new novel reworking of the storybook, but this excerpt is eight pages long and I'm pretending the whole thing is a story JUST FOR ME.

Goodbye!

Doctor Who made me cry.

SHUT UP IT'S A SAD STORY. /o\

3 moments in Diamond Dogs that are genuinely frightening:

• The mechanical noises at the end of the reprise of Sweet Things which sound like one million musical cranes hovering over the city looking to smash you to bits
  
• The beginning of We Are The Dead, eerie and hopeless.
  
• The Chant of The Ever Circling Skeletal where it's just a loop of bruh-bruh-bruh-bruh-bruh-bruh-bruh all the way until everything sounds like run run ruh... only you know you can't.

Maybe I am just projecting here. I have a headache, I feel weak and tuckered out. I will shower. I will write three essays. I will try to stop being or feeling weak and powerless and sad. And from which era does this little boy come from? Is he an actor, musician, writer, model, magician?

( Who is this man. Where does he come from. )

People will hold us to blame...

‽

( cut for slightly obscene image )

Diamond Dogs is one of my favourite albums of Bowie's already (slightly ahead of Aladdin Sane, on par with Hunky Dory perhaps). Usually I take a while to decide, but I downloaded it yesterday and started listening in the morning before SMU, wandering around in my bedroom tidying up and juggling folders and paper from hand to hand... it's an odd mixture, but simply brilliant.

(No, I am not dressing up as this Bowie for prom.)

Today at the bus stop I saw a Caucasian woman with frowsy grey hair, a bright pink housedress from the eighties, her feet clad in rubber slippers and her toenails unclipped... she reminded me of the illustrations in the kid's edition of The Canterbury Tales I never returned to the NYPS library, all of her blurred and softened by her figure and hair. I wondered who she was, she looked so unusual.

DEAR SELF,

STUDY.

NO LOVE ME

I forgot to say this... during the exam yesterday I kept imagining the bored examiner (somewhere in the UK, somewhere) flicking his eye restlessly down my math paper. It didn't help me do better and it didn't help me do worse.

Today we had KI. ( Read more... )

I hope everyone is okay. :(

Today when I went to school eklectique was telling about her dream.

eklectique: And I dreamt the paper said, 'How many window panes are there in this school?' so cheronl and I got up and looked! We counted all the window panes but when we got back the invigilator was like, 'What are you doing?' and wanted to give us a 'T', only we kept begging her until she was like, okay, just sit down and do the paper.

Well, they didn't make us count the window panes.

( cheerful description of maths within )

Live by request!



"Hi, David Bowie!"
"Hi, George!"
"Could you play Ashes to Ashes for me?"
"Ohhh, I'd love to! George?"
"What?" (music starts)
"Oh, never mind. I'll call you later."

Original!



PIERROT COSTUME, oh man.

I feel restless and angry and dirty tonight:

Myth

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the
wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what
made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said.
"When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include women
too. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's what
you think."

Muriel Rukeyser

Words are never just words.

Yesterday was another low point. I always get this way every month and think, oh no, this is it, there's genuinely something wrong with me, and the next day I get up and feel the start of cramp and think, oh, it's just that. Pain should not be this reassuring, to whoever has the power to decide such things. I am just saying.

Today I like these things:

01. O Sister, Where Art Thou?

In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners. Then they nearly all vanished forever.

( Read more... )

They're making a movie of this, with Jennifer Aniston in. I hope you don't fuck it up, Jennifer Aniston. What are you doing today? Wa-hey!

02. 300 Love Letters

So I'm telling this boy, one of the boys that lots of these love letters are to, about this project. "I'm writing three hundred love letters and sending them to strangers. The letters are going to be glued to the outside of the envelopes, so that the mailman, and presumably whoever the recipient lives with, will be able to see and read them. The letters aren't to the strangers, they're to people I know." The boy looks at me. We're walking around, after work, deserted streets. He says, "I don't understand. Why are you doing this?", and I answer vaguely, talking about crossing space and the kind of intimacy that I believe is lacking from our society. And I'm left thinking: Is this project complicated or simple, idiotic or interesting?

( Read more... )

03. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.

04. Star

Hammering piano (that fucking manic piano) and air-siren vocals. I could do with the money, you know that I--! I'm so wiped out with things as they are, you know that!

I don't think I get megaton_souffle

Things:

1. withoutart's eighteenth. Happy Birthday, Eeyore!

2. I'm sorry, it's now officially true: The Island Creamery and associated subsidies now fulfills all given dietary requirements. Burgers and ice cream! Now all that's missing is the Fifties-style diner with the bopping waitress and a stray barman singing about his blue-eyed baby.

3. Market structures.

4. Today we laughed so much I don't even remember what we laughed about but it owned.

5. David Bowie: the Complete Guide owns!

6. Am listening in on the Korean drama my mum is watching next door... I can't believe I actually watched it yesterday.

7. Today I made a list of all the Straits Times journalists I couldn't stand, but couldn't remember the name of the one I found the most offensive... possibly this is for the best.

8. I've heard of On the Road described as both a) a sexist, vacuous pile of antelope droppings and b) one of the most brilliant works of the Beat generation, and have not myself read a single word of it. Is it either? Can it be both?! Should I bother reading it at all?

9. I enjoyed this poem very much. It popped up on one of the JCs' lit prelims:

(from Mother any Distance)

My father thought it bloody queer,
the day I rolled home with a ring of silver in my ear
half hidden by a mop of hair. 'You've lost your head.
If that's how easily you're led
you should've had it through your nose instead.'

( And even then I hadn't had the nerve to numb... )

Simon Armitage