Been thinking a lot about Virgil's Aeneid these past few years, in particular the story of Aeneas and Dido. How he has to choose between a happy family life, and the pursuit of his destiny. He has to give up the life, and indeed the person he loves, because he knows he is meant to do something greater. Every time I'm safe and comfortable ( Read more... )

The less people you talk to on a regular basis, the more emptiness you see ahead of you ( Read more... )

Today I tried listening to an audiobook version of "Shalimar the Clown" by Salman Rushdie, and also listening to a few albums a stranger had recommended by a band called "The Decemberists" which I enjoyed ( Read more... )

What happened today: It was a day at work. I read on the bus there and back. I listened to some music and tried listening to an e-book I had downloaded, but the tracks were in the wrong order so it wasn't going to happen. Instead I listened to some sad music that I love, or some serious music, a little of both. I'm such a downer ( Read more... )

A neat little exercise in a book I'm reading about novel-writing. Finish these two sentences with paragraphs ( Read more... )

For the first time in years, I must write, and for the first time ever, I must write for selfish reasons. My brain has come to resemble a child's messy room, full of old objects that are either out of place or no longer necessary. So I must separate the garbage, the dirty laundry, and the dirty dishes from my misplaced treasures, in order to clean ( Read more... )

I read Prometheus Bound the other day and wasn't all that impressed. It's basically Prometheus whining to passersby (of literary significance) about how he's trapped. One neat insight into his character is that he's spiteful, and brought fire to mankind at least partially to piss off Zeus (I got the same impression of this from reading Hesiod). ( Read more... )

All through the winter break, and all through last night, I had been having an anxiety attack over the inevitability of getting back an essay that I wrote about William Blake's "The Sick Rose." I've been obsessing over a ton of little problems I could recall in the essay and had decided I'd be happy to get a B on it. Several failures to use MLA ( Read more... )

what's worse... when three of the medieval lit papers in a second-year course refer to people from the middle ages as "middle aged people," or when two of them refer to the Trinity as "the Trilogy?"

Added: Franz Kafka, because I loved The Trial (but didn't understand the ending) and will probably carry that over into some further reading.

Removed: Jacob Boehme, because I read him a long time ago and don't really remember what it was he was talking about. Come to think of it, maybe I never did. Crazy mystics...