Chapter Three

Time for a new post.

I'm going to be lame and go into my reading list. English class has me reading all over the place: American poetry, British poetry, Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye, Death of a Salesman, etc. It was in English class that I discovered my favorite poet of all time, Wallace Stevens. His writing goes in so many different directions. He has the profound and view-changing with "Sunday Morning" and with the classic "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Then there's the simple but powerful "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," the ever pleasing and very earthy "The Emperor of Ice-cream." There's the long and complex "The Comedian as the Letter C." I particularly enjoy this poem; every time I read it, I see more comparisons and connections within the poem and transgressing it. And, my favorite, "Bantams in Pinewoods." Ahem: (The underscores are because I can't indent:)

_____Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
_____Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
_____
_____Damned universal cock, as if the sun
_____Was blackmoor to bear your blazing tail.
_____
_____Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
_____Your world is you. I am my world.
_____
_____You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
_____Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,
_____
_____Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
_____And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

Try reading it outloud; try shouting it out loud. It's very pretty sounding. Does it make any sense? Not really. Let me draw you attention to the last sentence: "An inchling (singular subject) bristles (singular verb) in these pines, / Bristles (singular verb), and points their (wait, plural..?)" Go Wallace Stevens abusing grammar and making no sense whatsoever. It's a very beautiful poem though.

But I don't just read in school. I do a lot of reading on my own too. But this mainly falls into two catagories of reading. The first is physics. I read a lot of books about physics, right now I'm reading The God Particle by Leon Lederman. It's hilarious; if you have any interest in physics, I strongly suggest reading this book. The second category is Anne Rice. I love Anne Rice. She is my favorite author; all her books are fabulous (except Queen of the Damned, which was a little dry, but the movie is great (it has a very sexy Lestat) and makes up for it). I realize I could go off on a tangential rant about that other author, but I'm not going to. I don't want to flatter her, because she can't write worth a damn. Anne Rice has a very particular writing style. It's very detailed and very eloquent. She has a habit of doing months of research about the time period and place that she's writing about before she writes her books, so her sceneries are breathtaking, even in written form. You have to like reading that kind of thing though, or else you won't appreciate the series.

Other authors / books I've read include Isaac Asimov (just the robot series so far; I'm getting to the foundation series), those silly Harry Potter books, the The Golden Compass series (I'm really happy I just used the word "the" twice in a row legitimately), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Beowulf (the Old English version and Heaney's translation) and Grendel, etc.

Books I have not read but are sitting on my shelf include The Lord of the Rings - I know, I know, I should have read this already, but I got bored after I read The Hobbit. Also, Dante's Inferno, Darwin's Origin of Species, Atlas Shrugged, etc.

I also have seasons one and two of Ghost in the Shell on my shelf, because god dammit they're so amazing they deserve it.