The Original Drama Queen

The awful cold I had turned into bronchitis, so I’ve spent the past week laying low and trying to get a lot of rest. I’ve been through my course of antibiotics and am almost done with my inhaler. I still have a bit to go in getting better, but I don’t cough as much, I can actually talk, and people tell me I seem a lot more peppy than I did last week.

This weekend, I saw Antony and Cleopatra, the second play in the Roman Repertory going on at the Harman Center Shakespeare Theater. It still had the “Rome-by-way-of-Japanese-steakhouse-décor” sets, but by now I was used to them. This was a very exciting and moving production, and although being a tragedy, the humor in the piece came through and added an extra umpfh to the play.

The woman who played Cleopatra seemed to be channeling Bette Davis/Joan Crawford, which was rather fun – it IS a rather dramatic role, since Cleopatra did seem to be the original “drama queen.” (Ba dum bum!)

This is the last week of both of the Roman plays, and the next set of Shakespeare plays doesn’t start up again until September. By now, my friend J and I have seen eleven (out of 40 or so) of Shakespeare’s plays performed here in DC (and several in multiple versions.) It is an accomplishment that I am very proud of and I hope to be able to let the streak of playgoing continue this Fall.

In other news, with all the rest I’ve been forced to get by being sick, I have been able to plow through several books in the past couple of weeks:

Moneyball – Michael Lewis
A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

I really enjoyed all of them, but I think the one I enjoyed the most was Kavalier and Clay. I do recommend all of them though (even Moneyball – I was a huge fan of his Liar's Poker and The Money Culture and this book is actually more about reasoning processes than sports, but you certainly learn a lot about baseball, that’s for sure!)

I hope everyone is doing well!

Yet Another Random Book Meme

These are the top 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

It’s really weird because a lot of the books that I haven’t read, I actually DO have in the stacks somewhere waiting to be read. Those I’ve marked with an asterisk . . .

I’m kind of bummed and embarrassed that I can’t check off more, since I do love reading so much, but I have been so lousy at the concentration thing recently. Now funny thing is that over the past few months on Saturdays I often end up in coffee shops and in parks where it’s pretty easy to just settle in and start reading. Once I do that, I’m pretty focused and tend to plow through pages, just like when I was younger. But when I get home, oy! The focus is gone. There’s too much other stuff distracting me . . .

*****

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel*
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote*
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel*
War and Peace*
Vanity Fair*
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (saw the miniseries w/Gerard Depardeiu, which was AWESOME!)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath (reading right now)
The Poisonwood Bible (I hated it)
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present*
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces*
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (I hated this one, too. It annoyed me to no end)
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion*
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (working on right now)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences*
White Teeth (I don’t know why I couldn’t finish it – I just couldn’t get into it . . .)
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

*****
I hereby tag any person who wants to take the time to do it, otherwise just feel free to comment!

The Smell of Jasmine Flowers

My friend J and I saw the movie, Persepolis, on Saturday – If you haven’t seen it: RUN, don’t walk to your nearest theater, it is so awesome! I read Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel first and while the plot of the movie is slightly different it still effectively captures both the main plot and the tone of the graphic novel. If you aren’t moved by this film, check your pulse! I have read that they are coming out with an English dubbed version (the movie was made in French), but the version with English subtitles worked just fine for me, and I really can’t imagine it in English now. Also read the book if you can – it is definitely a work that makes you rethink your concept of what a graphic novel can be.

For the Oscars, Persepolis is nominated for Best Animated Film, but probably won’t win because it is up against Ratatouille and Surf’s Up, and it is just a travesty that it is being put against those “lighter entertainment” movies.

I have my Econ mid-term tomorrow, so I’m a bit tired and a bit numb. I met with my professor on Tuesday and while he is still on the extreme leftist side, he genuinely seemed very nice and accommodating and was quite a dear in spending time in answering my questions and working through problems. I was incredibly anxious beforehand, but I do feel a bit better about the class and where I am in it now. I’m still glad I got in another discussion section, I’m certain it will prove helpful in the long term.

I’ve been feeling kind of restless and down in the evenings, not being able to concentrate very well, doing lots of sleeping, having trouble being fully awake in the morning - even after an hour of reading the paper, showering and getting ready. I get to work very early now, since Mr. Random drops me off on his way in to his office, and I end up staying late waiting for Mr. Random to come pick me up. Like I said in an earlier post, I would gladly walk home, but it isn’t the safest neighborhood to be walking in alone at night. I feel slightly better on days when I go to school, and on weekends, since I’m usually out and about doing things I like doing.

There was a meeting at the Random Non-profit yesterday in which the guy in charge said he didn’t know why everyone was walking around so traumatized. Aren’t we starting to do some great things? You shouldn’t complain unless it is to someone who can do something about it, like him. Oh, by the way, he knows that we are down a lot of staff members and we are overburdened with work, but we should figure out on our own what we can stop doing. Oh, another by the way, another staff member is resigning as of the end of this month . . .

Gee, why would I feel so down?

On the happy side, next week starts the play-going season again in earnest. Yay! Going to see Hedda Gabler and Macbeth and maybe even Major Barbara .

What else is going on? I finished reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food , which is something else I highly recommend folks check out. It doesn’t say anything really that we don’t all know deep down in our hearts, but it does make you want to internalize it a bit more. It has managed to do for me what reading Fast Food Nation didn’t, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s so simple: Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants. Then you realize how easy it is to NOT eat real food, how much of what we eat in the name of eating healthier and low fat/low cal isn’t real food at all but stuff full of all sorts of chemicals and syrups that mimic real food . . . and how we really aren’t that sure how good that stuff really is for your body.

I know that COTW at A Little Off Kilter already has this way of eating down pat. If you read her blog for any length of time and look at the pictures of some of the meals she’s had – yum! She makes eating healthy look sooo easy and sooo tasty. That’s definitely what I aspire to . . .

I’m sorry I haven’t been “blog traveling” that much lately, but know that I read your comments and they bring me great joy! I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still kicking around and thinking of you. I hope everything is going well for everyone . . .

Wading in Knee Deep

I am surrounded by piles again.

It happens every so often – I look up and there are piles of papers and magazines and books, all waiting to be sorted and/or read.

Over the weekend, one of the shelves of one of our bookcases collapsed rather suddenly, breaking glass in the pictures frames that sat on one of the shelves and bringing several other shelves down with it. Many books thudding to the floor.

At first Mr. Random thought “Earthquake!” when he heard the noise, being from Southern California and all, but then thought better of it. My first concern was for Random Cat – luckily, she was sitting in another room at the time – and then my concern was for the pictures.

The pictures that sat on the bookcase shelf are family photographs, the kind that are collected over the years and can never be replaced. Pictures of Mr. Random and his family, when his father and both sets of grandparents were still alive. Pictures of his grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day. Pictures of family moments sprinkled from a span of about 30 years. Whew! The frames were broken, but the pictures were intact. Hooray! Hooray!

But after the collapse we looked at the bookcase, and then looked at its partner a few feet away and decided to would be best to take all of the books out of them and eventually get new ones . . . and not cheap Ikea ones either! We just bought those a few years ago, when we bought the condo – you would think they would be able to handle lots of, um, books. So we’ve learned our lesson, no more cheap bookcases. And now we have about roughly 200 or so paperbacks and hardcover books sitting in piles in our living room. Lots of history and politics and law and philosophy. Many, many hours of reading and studying and learning sitting on the floor. I try to quickly walk past those piles – if I pick up a book, I will start to read it again and many hours will pass. Too much to do, but they call out “read me!” I have to persevere . . . I hope one day to be able to have the luxury to sit with them again . . .

So lots of piles. Piles that mock me. Piles that make me proud. There’s something about a house full of books . . . It just feels like home. You can pull one down from the shelf and curl up in a chair and be comfortable. Of course, our chairs and couches aren’t that comfortable which is why I don’t do it much any more. But if they were, say, nice comfy couches and chairs – if we win the lottery some day – my joy would be complete.

I have walked into homes that didn’t have any bookcases around and I immediately feel cold. Like, well, what do you all DO? What do you all read? What do you talk about? You can tell a lot about people by the reading material they have around. Yes, I’m judgmental that way. I guess you can call me a snob.

But when I was little, my parents didn’t have much, but they always had books around. Lots of worn paperbacks. My mom loved to read and always had a book in her hand. My dad always read the paper. Reading was a big thing. Reading is what you did at home. It was a safe thing. A comfort thing. Your day could have sucked royally, but you could come home and lose yourself in a book. A blanket and a book.

So piles of books I have. Piles of magazines and newspapers and stuff printed out to read. In fact, right now I have next to me a copy of the new NEA report on reading, To Read or Not to Read, that I am about to dig into. I have to read it myself to get a sense of what it is saying, whether I really am part of a vanishing breed or not. Right away, the coolest thing about it is this quote from Virginia Woolf at the end. It speaks to me for some reason:

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”

Random Weekend Paragraphs

I did not receive our copy of the Harry Potter book until this morning, so it will be a while before I’ve finished it. However, I have availed myself of as many of the book discussions going on as possible, just because. No, it doesn’t spoil reading for me – it rather helps in a way. Lots of times I read reviews before reading this book to get a sense of what I’m going to be delving into, and this book is no exception. The whole hoohah about people not wanting to see any reviews before the book came out just struck me as annoying as heck – if you don’t want to read them, don’t read them – but some of us do want to read them . . .

I happened to go into two bookstores on Saturday and you could see all of the detritus of the late night Potter parties, complete with empty tables and bleary, cranky staff. One store didn’t close until 2:30 in the morning and then they still had to show up the next day. One clerk talked about finding kids settled into nooks in the store, reading intently, but the staff really wanted to go home. They had to nicely say stuff like “You know, this isn’t a library . . .”

In one bookstore, my friend took a peek at the last page of the Harry Potter book, and I also sneaked a view. Afterwards we could honestly chortle that we knew how the book ends!

I had a very lovely weekend, with only two mosquito bites. I now don’t consider it a good day out unless somehow I’ve been munched on by a bug or two. I forgot to put insect repellent on my neck and upper shoulder blades, which I guess the buggers found very inviting, despite the fact that I had enough DEET on elsewhere to eradicate a locust plague . . .

After the Fringe Festival ends on Sunday, my friend and I have decided to take a rest in August from playgoing. We have to start saving up more money because these things are pretty darn expensive! Let’s see – we’ve seen 8 plays in the past few months and after Sunday we’ll have seen 10 . . .

It’s beautiful out today – not too hot and not very humid – I do hope this weather holds for a while . . .

I hope everyone had wonderful weekends!

Spring 2007 Culture Post Mortem

Summer’s finally here!

While at this time of year most people tend to put up a reading list of what they want to read for the upcoming Summer season, I’m going to be a wuss and just note what I finished reading this past Spring:

• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
• Good in Bed – Jennifer Weiner
• 2 Noam Chomsky books (One was 9-11, the other title escapes me at the moment)

. . . And the following Shakespeare plays (along with the accompanying overview chapters in the Marjorie Garber book):

• The Tempest
• Coriolanus
• Love’s Labors Lost
• Titus Andronicus
• Twelfth Night

Gee, that doesn’t seem like a lot, does it? But if we add in all of the newspapers, magazines and blogs that I read on a daily basis, that pushes the reading count up quite a bit!

However, I can quite happily say that I have seen the following plays performed live: Edward III, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labors Lost, and The Tempest.

I carry around Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon in my purse to read while I’m waiting for stuff, so that should be finished soon. I know that I will be reading Hamlet and Macbeth pretty soon, since I’m going to see those plays within the next month or two.

I hope that my end of summer list will be a bit fuller and have a bit more variety, but I also am really excited that I will also get to see some more live performances.

Does anyone have any Spring accomplishments they want to boast about?

Article: Revisiting Fahrenheit 451

Found in today's ArtsJournal: Interesting article about Ray Bradbury and how his novel, Fahrenheit 451, has been misinterpreted all of these years:

http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/16524/

It's not really about government censorship - it's more about censorship by groups coupled with the rise of television.

Do give the article a read and let me know what you think . . . I'll have to re-read this book this week - it must be about 20 years since I last read it . . .

Attention: Book Lovers!

Hello, everyone:

I just read Scott McLemee's article in Inside Higher Ed about the National Book Critic Circle's campaign to save the Book Review sections in newspapers around the country.

As someone who reads both the Washington Post's and New York Times' sections religiously every week and always finds at least a book or two to add to my growing list of "must reads," I know that I would be rather lost without them. I cannot imagine a paper getting rid of them, but many are . . .

I know many of you are huge readers (and some of you are actually writing books too!) - So please do what you can to spread the word and keep this community asset in your papers.

Some simple things that us little folks can do are:

**Go to the Critical Mass blog and get the lovely beige sticker to put on your blog.

**Write to your local newspaper’s publisher to express support for its book coverage. (It lets the paper know that people do read it and care about it.) And if your paper doesn’t have such a section, ask why not.

**Spread the word to other folks who would also care.

Thanks so much for your time and attention. We will soon go back to my usual random mutterings . . .

Oh, Yeah . . . It's Poetry Month Again!

Noting that my blog is over two years old now, I realized that I forgot to mention that this was National Poetry Month. Two years ago, Justrose over at the Anonymous Rowhouse had been sharing her thoughts on the month which, in turn, served as the nudge to start my own blog. That year, I think I showcased other people’s poems that I thought were interesting . . .

Last year, I inflicted my own horrible attempts at poetry on you all. I promise to NEVER, EVER do that again . . . because good grief, those certainly sucked a lemon . . .

This year, I was going to be more low key. I bought a book, Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, as a way to learn more about the structures of poetry so I can begin to more intelligently appreciate poems and the ways in which good ones work.

I also bought The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, because he is a Harlem Renaissance poet that I really wanted to learn more about. In school, I only learned about a few of his poems, but those were only the tip of the iceberg of his body of work . . .

As you know, my month has been crazy busy (as usual) but I am still committed to this little project of mine. However, I’ve just started reading the Fry book and it will take me a bit to work through it. (I highly recommend the Fry book – it is very witty and readable . . . and you’ll learn a lot! It also helps if you can imagine Fry’s British accent as you read it – He is best known here in the States for playing Jeeves next to Hugh Laurie’s Bertie Wooster.)

Here are a couple of Hughes poems that struck me the first time I glanced through his book . . .

The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

Silence

I catch the pattern
Of your silence
Before you speak.

I do not need
To hear a word.

In your silence
Every tone I seek
Is heard.

Sleep

When the lips
And the body
Are done
She seeks your hand,
Touches it,
And sleep comes,
Without wonder
And without dreams,
When the lips
And the body
Are done.

I Dream a World

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn.
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black and white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind –
Of such I dream, my world!

It's Not an Addiction, I Swear!

As promised, here are all of the books that are stacked up by my bed at the moment. Mind you, these are just the books sitting BY MY BED and not in the living room, den, guest room, and elsewhere in the bedroom that are also begging to be read - such as Mr. Random's major stacks.

When I was younger, I could tear through books in a few days - some in only an evening! - but these days with work and everything going on, my reading output has dwindled to a trickle. I blame the multitudes of interesting blogs for that . . .

Do you all have some interesting books waiting to be read? (and I hope your stacks aren't as big as mine . . .)