Quite simply: a blog about books by a literature student. May include brilliant insights, not-so-brilliant insights, cover designs, articles, frustrated rants, quotes, and passionate arguments about which Austen man is the dreamiest (spoiler alert: it's Mr Tilney).
My personal blog has a lot more Doctor Who on it.
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the “hamlet spoilers” tag is a gem
Gwendolen, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II (via vyvyan-holland)
I’ve seen this quotation going around simply attributed to “Oscar Wilde”. I think it’s really important that we properly attribute quotes like this, otherwise we lose the sense of just how great Wilde’s female characters are. Gwendolen is witty and self-possessed, and she knows how to run rings around the men. The ladies in Wilde’s plays are so thoughtfully characterised, it’s a shame to take away their voices.
(via virtuouspagans)
When the beautiful young man drowned—
accidentally, swimming at dawn
in a current too swift for him,
or obedient to some cult
of total immersion that promised
the bather would come up divine,
mortality rinsed from him—
Hadrian placed his image everywhere,
a marble Antinoüs staring across
the public squares where a few dogs
always scuffled, planted
in every squalid little crossroads
at the furthest corners of the Empire.
What do we want in any body
but the world? And if the lover’s
inimitable form was nowhere,
then he would find it everywhere,
though the boy became simply more dead
as the sculptors embodied him.
Wherever Hadrian might travel,
the beloved figure would be there
first: the turn of his shoulders,
the exact marble nipples,
the drowned face not really lost
to the Nile—which has no appetite,
merely takes in anything
without judgment or expectation—
but lost into its own multiplication,
an artifice rubbed with oils and acid
so that the skin might shine.
Which of these did I love?
Here is his hair, here his hair
again. Here the chiseled liquid waist
I hold because I cannot hold it.
If only one of you, he might have said
to any of the thousand marble boys anywhere,
would speak. Or the statues might have been enough,
the drowned boy blurred as much by memory
as by water, molded toward an essential,
remote ideal. Longing, of course,
become its own object, the way
that desire can make anything into a god.
“American Gods” by Nicolas Delort
This is an embarrassing confession for an adult to make. In their idle hours Winston Churchill and Noël Coward painted. For fun and relaxation Albert Einstein played the violin. Hemingway hunted, Agatha Christie gardened, James Joyce sang arias and Nabokov chased butterflies. But poetry?
[…] An adolescent girl may write poetry, so long as it is securely locked up in her pink leatherette five-year diary. Suburban professionals are permitted to enter a jolly pastiche competitions in the Spectator and New Statesman. At a pinch, a young man may be allowed to write a verse or two of dirty doggerel and leave it on a post-it note stuck to the fridge when he has forgotten to buy a Valentine card. But that’s it. Any more forays into the world of Poesy and you release the best that lurks within every British breast - and the name of the beast is Embarrassment.
And yet…"
Writing therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page?"
Jonathan Safran Foer takes a walk in his main character’s shoes from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
