Following The Dust And Calling It More

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

– E.E. Cummings, ‘Love Is A Place’

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“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.”

– Margaret Atwood

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“YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook will all combine to create the most pointless website ever: it will be called YOUTWITTFACE! in the Year 3000.”

– Conan O’Brien

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Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

– Richard Siken, ‘Scherazade’

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“Beware of the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you’ll suck forever.”

– Brian Wilson

*

All this talk about English A1 HL Paper 1, and I’ve just decided to pick out the highlights of scrapofpaper’s first page of posts. That livejournal is a favorite haunt of mine: snippets of Atwood’s acerbic wit and insight are featured every now and then; but a quick glance can tell you that Charles Bukowski aka Lord of Enjambment is loved to bits there. I seriously don’t know why, I have issues with his poetry. They can be a little didactic and overlong, so he’s not for the faint of the weak attention span.

Am currently in the throes of Economics — and Marcel Moring’s In A Dark Wood. It’s a narrative of a Jew who has lost his parents and brother during WWII under the Nazi regime, and how he seeks to cope with the loss, shifting between descriptive and introspective. More interesting is Moring’s innovative use of typography and other visual styles that add further dimensions to the action of the narrative (not to mention, pretty novel and fun for the reader).

I bought it when I went book-shopping with Doug last week. It was a pretty difficult choice, because I also managed to spot new editions of several selected Booker Prize winners (including Paddy!), a couple of interesting Japanese-translated-into-English novels, and an uber-cool edition of Atwood’s uber-cool Lady Oracle.

I want! I want! (Now I know why I’ve been saving up for no apparent reason.)

yam.