Context

It seems strange that only a few weeks ago I was spending my days drinking coffee and reading while basking in the sun. There's still coffee. And reading. And sun. It just doesn't seem nearly as enjoyable. It's funny what a little change in context will do.

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good

I'm rereading the Harry Potter series right now. After seeing the final movie I figured I should get it in before I'm swamped with school-related reading. I'm a little over halfway through Prisoner of Azkaban. You know, the one where Harry gets the Marauder's Map and there's a secret passage that leads to a trap door in the cellar at Honeydukes? I think the Marauder's Map is fabulous. Next to the bag Hermione charms in Deathly Hallows so that she can put as much as she wants in it and still be able to carry it around, I think the map is the thing I would want if the Harry Potter world was real. The bag wins though. I mean, the map is amazingly cool, but the bag is would just be useful. This book also happens to be the one where two of my favourite characters show up, Sirius and Lupin. Yup, an all-around good one. But as I was reading today I came across this:

Harry climbed the spiral stairs with no thought in his head except how glad he was to be back. They reached their familiar, circular dormitory with its five four-poster beds and Harry, looking around, felt he was home at last.

This just seemed so appropriate in light of yesterday's musings on home. As we were leaving the wedding on Saturday night, and during brunch on Sunday, my friends and I were talking about how weird it is to not be returning to dorms. I'm working at the school right now and orientation excitement is building all around me and it is the weirdest feeling to not be getting caught up in it. Because this is exactly how I felt every time I headed back to dorms. 
Ah, books and your amazing ability to capture any situation perfectly and to be mysteriously related to whatever is going on in my life at that moment.

Mission Packing: Phase 1

Your mission, if you should choose to accept it, is to take everything you own and put it into boxes. Don't forget to retain clothing, towels, toiletries, and anything else you may desire in the next two to three weeks.

So, packing, not so much fun. I've never enjoyed it, but every time I have to do it I am just reminded all over again how completely un-fun it is. It's time consuming and exhausting and inevitably give me a headache and insomnia. Today, thanks to some help from my mother and Sally, I managed to pack all of my kitchen stuff, all of my books (which, let me tell you, is no small feat), all of my movies, frame and pack my new art, and start on my clothes and shoes. Tomorrow is phase II: clothes and shoes. Wish me luck.

Little Obsessions

I'm one of those people that kind of becomes obsessed with things. When I find a song I love, I play it over and over and over. When I find a food I enjoy, I eat it way more often than I should. When I find a book I love, I will often read it twice in a row. When I am enchanted by a film, I'll watch it more than once in a two week span. It's just how I roll. I think this is okay though as long as whatever I'm obsessed with isn't injurious to my person. It's all part of my commitment to surrounding myself with beauty. I find these small things that make me happy, so why not spread them throughout my life liberally. So, despite the fact that last week was a bizarre roller coaster of emotions, here are a few of my newest little obsessions.

1. Taking the book jackets off of hard covers. I always used to hate buying books in hard cover. Most of this had to do with the dust jacket, which would never stay put while I was reading. Well, I've bought a few different hard cover books this summer and have discovered that if I take the dust jacket off there is a beautiful book waiting underneath (like the one pictured above). I suddenly love hard cover books. They are simple and elegant and make me feel fancy.
2. Hummus on sandwiches. I pretty much can't eat any condiments, nor can I have cheese, and this makes sandwiches pretty much the most boring food around. (With the exception of fried egg sandwiches, which are another one of my obsessions, although much less recent). I love hummus though, and so recently my mother and I decided that it would make an excellent addition to my sandwiches. Let me tell you, it is so delicious that I actually crave sandwiches now.
3. Bio-pic kinds of films. I've been deep in these kinds of films lately. I've always enjoyed them, it's just that I've been watching them all the time lately. Here's a few I would especially recommend: The Young Victoria, Coco Avant Chanel, Julie & Julia, Sylvia, Bright Star, Eat Pray Love. If anyone has any other recommendations, please send them my way.
4. Online magazines. Seriously in love with Matchbook and Kinfolk. So much inspiration for life is found on these (digital) pages.

Does anybody else ever find themselves obsessing over things? What are some things that have been making you happy lately?

Raw

I've been reading a lot of what would be considered 'young adult' fiction lately. This rather arbitrary division of fiction bothers me a little bit, but that's not what I want to write about right now. I want to write a little bit about why I've been loving these books. Now, I should take a moment here to note that yes, there is a lot of garbage out there in the world of YA fiction; however, this problem is not unique to YA fiction, it is a fault of fiction in general. I mean, seriously, look in any fiction section and you are bound to find garbage. Goodness knows I've had to read some of it. So, I'm not saying that this is applicable to all YA literature any more than my praise of other books is applicable to all books that fall in that category. 

My particular reason for loving these books lately can be summed up in one word: rawness. I was having a conversation with Sally the other week about YA fiction and I told her that one of the reasons that books in this category are often so wonderful is that they don't shy away from that sensation that you have when you're a teenager that everything is so important. Every moment, every experience, every inconsequential detail is freighted with significance. At least, I know that's how it felt when I was a teenager. Reading back through some of my journals can be downright painful and leave me wondering how anyone managed to put up with me during those years. Everything is intense when you are a teenager and emotions run close to the surface. As a teen this was what drew me to books. It made me feel less alone.

At some point I tried to stop having my emotions so near the surface. Intensity began to scare me. So I tried to stop. For a long time I made a concerted effort to just not feel much of anything. (This, by the way, is not healthy.) But lately I've been wondering why as adults we shy away from this kind of rawness. What is it that makes us think that it is better to stop feeling deeply? Why do we stop letting little things matter? I'm not saying everything should be as intense as it is as a teenager (remember, my journals from then do make me cringe now), but maybe rawness is not a bad thing. In fact, maybe we should embrace it a bit more. I've been thinking about this and realized that this is exactly the quality that draws me to my favourite authors. Yes, I have books I love because they are beautiful or interesting works of art. Yes, there are authors I love because they simply tell a good story. But the ones that I return to over and over again are characterized by the same rawness I'm finding in the YA books I've been reading lately. Finding significance in things. Allowing your heart to be open. This is dangerous, I've been discovering, but it is also where the potential for beauty lies. Fully experiencing life: this is what I find in Sylvia Plath and Anne Michaels, John Steffler and Michael Ondaatje, Stuart McLean and Alexander MacLeod. It's also what I find in Ann Brashares and Stephen Chbosky, Sarah Dessen and Meg Cabot. And this, I'm discovering, is the best way to live.

By the way, if you are ever wondering what I'm reading, you can check out my relatively new tumblog (a word I despise by the way) At the gates of a new city. This is where I'm chronicling the passages that strike me in the books I'm reading at any given moment. It's more for my own personal record than anything, but you're welcome to check it out for inspiration or to build a reading list for yourself.

To break into the poems of others

The Trouble with Poetry
Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night -
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky -

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti -
to be perfectly honest for a moment -

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.


I know I have been inundating you all with poetic posts lately, but I think that another part of the trouble with poetry is that reading really good stuff makes you want to read more. Actually, that's kind of the problem with literature in general for me. I read something incredible and am struck with this momentary feeling that I should never pick anything else up again, but then I am like an addict who just needs a fix. I break into others' poems on a regular basis. And the more I do it, the more I want to do it. Poetry begets poetry, whether writing or reading it.

Justification

I had a conversation today with someone I count as a friend that really bothered me. In this case it's not what was said, but how it was said. It's that incredulous tone people adopt whenever I talk about school and my academic world. The tone that says, "why would you do that?" and "that sounds like a total waste of time and energy." The attitude that causes people to say things like "I want to do so much more than research. I don't want to sit up in an ivory tower researching pointless things. I want to do something that has actual meaning and significance in the world." The attitude that constantly prompts the question, "And what are you going to do with an English degree?" or "What can you do with a Master's of English?", and not in a genuinely curious way either. I am tired of justifying myself to others. In part this is because I have yet to successfully translate my passion for literature into something that can truly be conveyed to others. So, a lot of my frustration is with myself. But it's more than that. It's the fact that people write off what I'm passionate about so flippantly. I know that I am guilty of this myself on occasion, but I am trying lately to be very conscious of it. I grew up with a group of people who, by and large, knew exactly where they were headed in life. Many of the people I grew up with are in school to become, or are already, doctors, teachers, engineers, nurses, veterinarians, computer experts and government workers. And when I am in those circles of people I often feel judged for not pursuing a "traditional" and "meaningful" profession. Even the people I've met in university who have no idea what they want to do now that they've graduated sometimes seem to think that their degrees hold more value than mine, or that because they've chosen to go into the workforce rather than go back to school they are somehow contributing more to society. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to go to graduate school. It is not for everybody. Sometimes I'm not even sure it's right for me. Nor do I wish to disparage those, or any other, professions. They are wonderful pursuits and I am thrilled when, for example, my friends who are going to be teachers light up with passion for what they are learning and doing. I'm irked, however, by the idea that going to school and finding a job are somehow not on equal footing when it comes to their intrinsic value. And I am even more bothered by the idea that seems to be so prevalent in society that choosing to pursue research (unless perhaps you are searching for a cure for cancer or alternative fuel sources or something) is not as important as other professions. No, I'm not curing cancer. I understand that. But literature holds such power and importance in human lives. We are inherently linguistic creatures. We are people of stories. We construct ourselves by telling our own stories. We understand ourselves by our own accounts of our stories. We come to understand ourselves better through an interaction with other people's stories. As Michael Ondaatje says in his novel Divisadero, "We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell." Literature, and art in a broader sense, has the power to be transformative, to be healing, to be enlightening. Again, Michael Ondaatje writes, "sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third person voice protects us." Is it not worthwhile to spend time deeply examining something that holds so much sway in humanity? Is it not worth time to try to understand what our literature is saying about us? I think it is. This is what excites me most about literature and language: the human expression, the fact that it simultaneously reveals and shapes us. Even if you are not the direct reader. Literature seeps into popular culture. It influences everything you see; advertisements, television shows, movies, are all permeated by references to literature. It's role in defining us is so immense that I don't think the full extent of it can even be understood. There are so many other things that I could say this of, art and music come to mind immediately, but the one that I have chosen to pursue formally right now is literature. So, that is why I am doing what I'm doing. That is my rambling and possibly unclear explanation of why I am passionate about literary research and studying. And I'm sorry if that is not good enough for you.

Oh How I Loathe Thee

I hate finals.

I realize that no one really loves finals. I have yet to hear, in all my years of schooling, someone say "Yay finals! This is my favourite time of the year!" or anything of a similar ilk. However, I really hate finals. I would rather write a paper. And if I have to write an exam then I would rather it be a take home than an in class. Exams just stress me out way more than papers. I think part of it has to do with the fact that studying isn't a finite task. I never really feel like I am done studying. It is more that I just run out of time and have to go write the exam. Papers I can feel like I am done. Studying just goes on and on and on...

I hate studying. And I am not good at it on the best of days. Today, however, it is exceptionally bad. See, I have one final exam left in my undergraduate career. One. It's tomorrow afternoon. By three o'clock Thursday afternoon I will be free. This alone would be enough to make studying a difficult task. To top it off though it is in a class that I just don't care about at all. It was a topic I wasn't particularly interested in to begin with, we had a horrible prof, and overall I feel like I learned very little. My notes are pathetic. And not in the this-prof-is-so-deep-I-don't-know-what-to-write way, but in the we-actually-didn't-discuss-this-in-any-sort-of-detail way. It's awful. Consequently I have very little motivation to study.

I'll still be panicking tomorrow though. Darn perfectionism.

Marginalia

Marginalia
Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - 
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. 
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page -
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil -
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet - 
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."


[Billy Collins writes incredible poetry.]

Surrounded by Books

We had a tiny flat and our kitchen table - my father's huge wooden worktable where we ate all our meals - was in an alcove, surrounded by four walls of book. Without getting out of our chairs, we could simply reach behind us and, yes, pluck! the appropriate book off a shelf. That was my father's idea, so that there would always be active discussions at meals, and so that I or any guest could find a reference in a trice. My father loved to call out directions from his end of the table like a mad navigator on a small boat: 'A bit more to the right, nine o'clock please, forty-five degrees left...' Over the years, certain thick or oversized volumes became landmarks by which we steered: 'The grey cover two inches to the right of The Child's New Illustrated Encyclopedia ("new" about forty years previous), below One Thousand and One Wonderful Things; about ten inches above Engines and Power...' And when the book was retrieved successfully from the shelf, my father would let out a sigh, as if just the right unreachable itch had been scratched. (Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault)

As much as I love the idea of having a dedicated library in a house, there is also something infinitely appealing about having books simply surrounding you in the spaces you live in. I love the idea of a living room lined with bookshelves complete with rolling ladders (like the ones in Beauty and the Beast). In fact, when I opened the September 2010 issue of InStyle and found the pictures of Diane von Furstenberg's house I absolutely fell in love with her living room. Not the furniture and art so much, but the walls of books with rolling ladders. It is perfect. The other day I was reading The Winter Vault and came across this description of Avery's childhood dining room. I think I re-read this passage about ten times. And I read it out loud to at least three different people. Books in a dining room. How brilliant! Why have I never considered this possibility before? Perhaps one day my house will simply have books in every single room. How delightful would that be? I also love his father's relief when the proper book is pulled from the shelf. Selecting the perfect volume, finding the right book, can be such a wonderful feeling that it is almost healing.

Yesterday I told you about how much I love to be completely immersed in literature. Today I spent the whole day doing layout for Ballyhoo with my co-editor. It was probably one of the most delightful days I've had in a long time. I was actually so engrossed in it that I didn't even think about eating dinner until 8 o'clock. That hasn't happened in a long time. It feels good to be passionate about something. In light of my day and yesterday's reflections, I felt like this was an appropriate quote.

In case you haven't guessed...I adore Anne Michaels.

Bibliophilic Delight

bibliophile (n)
a person who collects or has a great love of books

My name is Breanna and I am a bibliophile.

I seriously adore books. Particularly old books. In fact, for quite some time now I've been craving a trip to The Wee Book Inn in order to wander through their top floor and explore all the old books up there. There is just something profoundly beautiful about old books and the sensation of being surrounded by them is something I've been longing for. This afternoon my grandmother took me to her friend's house where I was allowed to peruse this woman's collection of old books and take a bunch home with me. It pretty much filled all of my bibliophilic fantasies as of late. Beautiful volumes dating from the late 1880s. Poetry and novels, embossed covers and leather bindings. There are even tiny margin notes in a lot of them. Delightful.

What book would you die by?

One morning with nothing to do but wait for lunch, we sat in the long grass and discussed Aunt Bett's brother, Uncle Victor. For some reason he held a morbid  fascination for us, and it was usually Owen who started us off.

     Avery imitated the haughty angle of Owen's head.

     'They say he died when a book fell off his library shelf and knocked him senseless.'

     'What book was it?' I asked him.

     Owen sighed disdainfully.

     'Who cares,' he said. 'That's not the point, is it?'

     Owen, Avery explained, was disturbed that a man who had survived being a soldier in the Great War could die so unheroically.

     'It certainly is the point,' I argued. 'What book would you choose to die by?'

     There was a moment's silence while we all contemplated this question.

     'The Bible, I suppose,' said Tom.

     'Oh, don't be so melodramatic,' said Owen.

     'I'd choose Browning's Portuguese Sonnets,' said Nina.

     'Not thick enough,' I said.

     Then we heard my mother calling and as usual Owen, being the eldest by almost eight years, had the last word.

     'I'd choose Grey's Anatomy or a medical encyclopedia, just in case there was a slim chance of resuscitating me...'

(Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault)

So, what book would you choose to die by?

To Make Love Necessary

I know I must honour Athos's lessons, especially one: to make love necessary. -- Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels 

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in a casket or coffin of your own selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. -- C.S. Lewis

Every so often I find that there is a topic that comes up in my life over and over again. This semester one of the topics we discussed in Psyc-Lit was the connection between vulnerability and love. It came up in at least three of the texts we discussed, including Fugitive Pieces which I adore, and I wrote two papers on this idea. It's something that has been popping up in my personal life too. I've been doing some serious thinking about the state of my heart and how I treat it. Then awhile ago one of my friends posted some lyrics from The Frozen Ocean's "In the Garden" as his Facebook status. This reminded me how much I really like The Frozen Ocean and sent me searching through my iTunes for their music and then listening to it over and over again. One of their songs, "Lost at Sea", starts with a reading of this quote from C.S. Lewis. I've been having some deep conversations with a girl who is quickly becoming one of my dearest friends, the kind of conversations that require trust from both parties. One of the things that she pointed out to me not so long ago is that one of the themes that seems to be emerging in my life is "make love necessary". It's true too. If I had to choose some touchstone words for my life as I head into 2011 I think they would be "love", "balance", "vulnerability" and "beauty". I like to think that when something keeps popping up in your life over and over again it is something you should probably do some serious thinking about. So I am. Just thought I would let you know that.

Reading Love

Michaela forgets her body for hours at a time. I love to watch her while she's thinking or reading, her head leaning on her hand. On the floor or in a chair, her limbs abandoned to gravity. The more intense her concentration, the more abstract the problem she contemplates, the further her body roams. Down long roads, her legs swinging, or across open water, her hair wandering down her back. This is her body's truancy, its mischievousness. Freed from Michaela's disciplining mind, it runs away, goes outdoors. When she looks up and catches me watching her, or simply stops reading - "Jakob, Hawthorne actually pretended to be ill so he could stay home and read Carlyle's essay on heroes" - her body is there again, reappearing suddenly in the chair. And I feel deep appreciation for those heavy, sneaky limbs that have defied her mind's authority without knowing. She looks at me, all presence. While her body and I share our delicious secret. (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

 I just started Anne Michaels' second novel, The Winter Vault, today. I am not that far into it yet, but so far it is every bit as strikingly beautiful as Fugitive Pieces. I read Fugitive Pieces in one of my classes last semester and fell in love with Anne Michaels' writing. There were moments last semester where I profoundly struggled with the question of why I am doing what I'm doing with my life. It is writing like Anne Michaels' that reminds me of the answers to this question.

The above quote is one of many from Fugitive Pieces that float through my mind, haunting me, weighing on my very soul in the best way possible. So much of our class discussion of the novel centred around love; I even wrote my final paper on the connection between language and love in the novel. I find Jakob's description of Michaela as she reads incredibly beautiful. Perhaps this is partly because I too have a wandering body. I will stop reading only to find myself sitting in a chair at the coffee shop in one odd position or another and I always wonder if people have been looking at me. I think if someone watched me with Jakob's intensity, and with his deep affection, I would be won over. Now that I've written that I realize that it probably sounds weird. Oh well. What can I say? The way to my heart is through literature.

Why do I do this?

Because it matters.

Because I believe that words are powerful.

Because I believe that art can change the world.


[Just a reminder to myself that this is where I am supposed to be and this is what I'm supposed to be doing.]

Character

Not too much to say lately, thus the lack of posts in the past few days. Actually, I keep thinking of things to post, but can't seem to find any pictures to go with said ideas. I think this is a sign that I need to find somewhere new and exciting to wander around taking photos. Anyone have any ideas? Anyway, I thought I should put something up on here. I really like this image a lot actually. I've talked about the really old dictionary that I have before. Well it isn't exactly in mint condition, but since I love it for the very fact that it is a dictionary and not for any potential monetary value this doesn't bother me. In fact I kind of like that a bunch of the pages are all curled up. It gives the book character. This seems to be a recurring theme in my posts: the idea that imperfections and strange details are what make things interesting and beautiful. I certianly think life would be more boring if everything and everybody was perfect all the time (as lovely as that may sound some times).

Wanderlust

I spent most of today with one of my dear friends. One of the things we talked about for quite a while was travel. I haven't been anywhere in quite a long time. Actually, it's been just over a year since I went to Victoria and that was the last trip I took. Talking about traveling and places that we want to go has really given me a case of wanderlust. Sadly I really am not in a place in my life right now where travel is an option. But hey, it's nice to dream a little.

I've mentioned my 1934 Webster's Dictionary on here before, but I don't think I have ever shared any pictures of it. This is really a shame, but I am correcting it today. Oddly enough, the first pictures I'm showing you from a dictionary are maps and not words. Oh well. I'm odd, so this is just par for the course. One of the appendicies in the back of the dictionary is "A Reference History of the World from the Earliest Times to the Present" which has a bunch of different maps from different time periods. I love maps, especially old ones, so I was quite excited when I discovered them and simply had to take some pictures. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Motiveless Malignant

Here is the latest addition to my collection of old books. Courtesy of my grandmother, I have accquired a book containing Shakespeare's four major tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. Now I am not the biggest fan of Shakespeare ever. I have an appreciation for his work, but after taking a Shakespeare class I'm a bit...unenthralled. Regardless, I do sincerly love Macbeth and Othello. The second picture from this set is Lady Macbeth's famous "unsex me here" speech. She is one of the most fearsome ladies in all of literature. Fabulous. And her speeches are incredible. This particular one is from Act One, Scene Five and is just chilling. Especially when delivered by a great actress. The third picture is from Othello and is the last part of a speech by Iago, the best example of pure evil one can find in Shakespeare. I love reading his speeches for the same reason as Lady Macbeth. The word choice is just so powerful and epic. Iago fascinates me because he is entirely motiveless. As a play, Othello fascinates me for so many other reasons, but linguistically it is all about Iago.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I love taking pictures of words (witness examples here and here). I think it's because I can combine my love of language with my love of photography and end up with an image that, for me, conveys such a depth of meaning. Plus, I just like how some words look. And I think that books sometimes deserve to be looked at in new and unique ways.

After 17 pages I have a rough draft...

Welcome to my life this week. I just finished a rough draft of final paper 2 of 5 and it is 17 pages long. My brain is shot. Unfortunately I need to edit it still (and if you know me then you know that editing is not a quick, throw-away kind of process) and then I get to start on the paper that is due on Thursday. Such is the life of an English major. Particularly one who is as bad for procrastinating as I am. It's the Easter long weekend this weekend though so even if I still have copious amounts of reading and research to do I at least get to go home and don't have to go to classes.

So this is a bit of a photo essay of sorts, all images taken during late night paper writing sessions over my university career. First up we have a lovely paper in the process of being edited. I'm pretty sure this one was on the depiction of Natives in early Canadian literature. I find it rather amusing that the part of the paper that is in focus uses words such as 'cannibalism' and 'killing' multiple times. Somehow that seems very appropriate for the mood that I hit around 3 in the morning. Next up is a stack of paper writing essentials: Oxford English Dictionary, a good Thesaurus, and an anthology. Swap the anthology with my Canadian Writers' Reference Guide and you would have the three books that I must have within easy reach during any paper writing session. I have no idea what anthology that is though. I do know the picture is from last year some time. And last up we have a stack of library books (that is a pretty baby stack actually...given that I have more books than that out for my Shakespeare paper right now...) coupled with my giant Art History textbook and huge literary theory textbook. I'm willing to bet that those books weren't all related to the same paper but somehow ended up piled on my desk. Picture is from sometime in the insanity of last semester.

All right. There you have it. A slice of what is eating my life this week (and the weeks to come). I better get back to my Victorian Lit paper.