bladderwrack

http://flemmings.livejournal.com/215848.html

Not much to add to this except that I get it with people met in the flesh as well, like the girl I was with in Kras whose grandmother was invited to tea with Adolf Hitler, and who at the time was involved in a truly novelistic (or shojouesque, whichever you prefer) plot involving her ex-fiance getting engaged to her best friend (who was also in Kras, AWKWARDNESS ALL ROUND) -- or Indefinite, who is purportedly a Real Person but I'm not sure if anyone in the current generation of Anisoc knows his name. He is a philosophy postgrad (as if there could be anything more unreal...); he never comes to meetings in case the ending credits are cut off, but he does make a point of stalking anyone new who turns up on the forums, for intellectual interest. He also keeps a delightful blog which does nothing at all to dispel my notions of 'university: detached from Rest of World'.

iow I /cannot/ read this without thinking of Zetsubou Sensei XD

--

I Think I Will Not Hang Myself To-day

A Ballade of Suicide by G. K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay--
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--
I see a little cloud all pink and grey--
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call--
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way--
I never read the works of Juvenal--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational--
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

ENVOI
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

wordsofastory posted this a while ago. Putting it here for personal reference.



Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

La Foule: Basically my reaction to La Foule is 'You CANNOT go skiing in Switzerland in AUGUST ARGH wait is it even okay to demand this level of realism from an Ouran fic' |D

... this brought to you because I have been listening to the tribute mix on repeat, it's pretty cool.





Trying to occupy myself with things requiring a minimum of active engagement -- reading, mostly -- in an attempt to dampen emotional reactions, or to let them be elsewhere for a bit. My default state being one of sensory overload and inability to process, I'm drawn to people who have the ability to analyse, to speak of themselves from a distance. It's such a relief to be around them.




Why is the full stop a second function key on a French keyboard? Why is the arobase a third-function key, sob. OTZ

"the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. to go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! a better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary...more reasonable, more inept, more indolent, i have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books." - borges

William Butler Yeats. b. 1865

863. When You are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.



I'd probably not like this poem nearly as much had I not come across it while I was writing an essay on the poem it is based on, Quand vous serez bien vieille, which consists basically of the poet telling the object of his affections that one day he'll be an immortal star and she'll be an old hag, and she'll regret not having slept with him then, the frigid bitch. XD The latter poem is one that rewards study, actually -- it has a beautiful depth of construction -- but it's hard to get past how explicitly Ronsard shows that his poetic mission is to talk about himself, and how much he seems to hate the (mostly imaginary) women he addresses*. The Yeats is less demanding, less corporeal in tone -- quieter on both ends.

*You hear this a /lot/ in certain types of song lyrics. The tentacles of culture run deep, sigh.

dude, you really shouldn't be taking ... well, anyone in Evangelion as an example of working in a large organisation. orz



In point of fact, it's a comfort, lay off. idek orz

~

"Hey you," says a clear boy's voice, "are you a ghost or not? I don't remember."

The house is full of faint screams, but Tsuzuki barely even hears them now. What does bother him are these voices, talking quietly as if sharing a private joke.

"--disqualified from being human."

The other laughs in acquiescence. "I quite agree."

He used to know these people, he's sure of it, but lately they are always elsewhere.

Tsuzuki glimpses the boy in the corner of the room, drinking from a rusty tap. He smiles briefly in Tsuzuki's direction, and is gone.

~

Harry Potter's name is transcribed as 'Gary Potter'. Which makes it sound like the book takes place on a council estate or something.