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Thursday, August 01, 2013

There is nothing so uncertain as a sure thing

"You've never been in Sydney, have you?"

"No."

"We have quite a literary and artistic set there. Not much in my line, but sometimes I couldn't help myself. Women chiefly, you know. They talk a lot of tosh about books and then, before you knew where you were, they'd be wanting to pop into bed with you."
-- The Narrow Corner. The City of ExilesW Somerset Maugham (and gin) solve all travel problems.

‘I have the ghost of you pressing against my ribs like deep water.’
Loneliness. Its long white feathers drop and gather around my feet…’
~ End of Love

Regardless of whether you've had an amicable or tumultuous divorce, when you finally come out the other end single, the future can appear daunting Malchekeon & Media Dragopn In The Seventh Year of Bliss Does modern poetry czech its passion at the door Defending the Poetry of Affect Rule No. 1 of arts journalism, I tell my students, goes like this: "Never sleep with anybody you write about." Terry Reachout

One of my favorite scenes in modern literature is in Joe College by Tom Perrotta. The scene describes a down-on-his-luck "townie" who is standing on the sidewalk staring at a young undergrad from Yale University undressing in her dorm room. There's this great language describing a moat between the sidewalk and the dorm, and it of course represents the gulf between the Ivy League scholar and this local yokel.
When I first read the novel, this particular symbolism seemed a little too easy, so I walked down the street from my home in New Haven to check out where the author sets the place. Sure enough, there is a medieval-looking moat right where Perrotta says it is. I then walked around campus and found that the architecture of the university is largely made up of big stone walls, locked iron gates and moats (yes, moats) that wall off the school from the rest of the city. If you are lucky enough to get through a secured gate you'll find yourself in the middle of an idyllic quad surrounded by high academic buildings. A freshman waking up in a dorm room and walking across campus would never know that she was in the middle of a gritty city with an above-average crime rate. Placing Literature: Where Book Meets Map

Librarians in the movies:
Evelyn: Look, I... I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am.
Rick: And what is that?
Evelyn: I... am a librarian.