Some unrelated topics

[brigdh]

There are several books I need this semester which I'm not particularly interested in and which I doubt I will ever read again once their class is over. Since I was walking by the Strand today, I thought I'd stop in and look, on the off-chance that they happened to have a cheap, used copy of any. Off of their lovely dollar racks outside, I bought:

Love's Labor's Lost, Shakespeare
Brideshead Revisted, Evelyn Waugh
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, Beverly Daniel Tatum (which I've wanted to read for several years)
Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters (used book stores have been doing particularly wonderful things to my poetry collection)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (the entire, complete, giant thing!)

I spent $4.50. Ha! Clearly I win at life. Of course, they didn't have any of the books I actually needed, but that's unimportant.

Randomly, I hate that no one on fst puts up individual song downloads anymore. I don't always want the whole zip. And really, people, with the prevalence of free upload sites, all it says about you is that you're too lazy to upload your songs, or don't actually care all that much about your playlist, neither of which are particularly appealing things to advertise.

springkink's prompts have gone up! First set here, second set here. You can't start claiming prompts to write until Sunday, but now's a good time to go through and pick out which ones you want. I'm having a great time trying to guess who submitted which based on the pairing and quotation given. And look: there are Swordspoint requests that weren't me! Given enough time, I will convert you all.

Comments

[chthonicsiren.livejournal.com]

Ahhh I LOVE Spoon River Anthology. The Norton is fabulous too. I just bought the Norton American Lit. Anthology, for a class actually, which is also amazing.

[weirdquark]

Hey, if you do convert everyone, there will be more writing. Good writers writing more is never bad.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Which Norton anthology is it? I had to buy one last semester, and another this semester.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

It is supposedly quite awesome.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I know: that's why I'm trying to convert everyone! I mean, getting extra feedback is always nice, but I really want people to write their own stories so that I have things to read. *grins*

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

The complete volume of English literature. I had to buy the Middle Ages section once for a class, but this thing is huge. And the pages are so thin and fragile that it's funny.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

I'm having a great time trying to guess who submitted which based on the pairing and quotation given.

*G* There should be a prize for guessing, though some of those are total gimmes.

I have some Norton anthology or another. *wavey hand* Possibly that one. I wanted the one of Women's Lit, which I nabbed from the local college library and read over the summer when I was in my twenties, but used bookstores of general awesomeness are rare in these parts, so I've not yet found it.

Yay for expansion of poetry collections! Though mine's going to fall over and bury me someday, since I keep a chunk of it in a stack on my nightstand. We have no bookcase in the bedroom yet, see, and this is where I do most of my computing, and I need to reference, see. It's a necessity.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Hmm I did a quick search on amazon and didn't see a complete version.
I have the The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, Volume 1: The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (Norton Anthology of English Literature) (Paperback) (http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-Eighth/dp/0393925315/sr=8-1/qid=1169273821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0878467-1813704?ie=UTF8&s=books) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century (Norton Anthology of English Literature (hardback) (http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-Eighth/dp/0393925323/sr=8-2/qid=1169273821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-0878467-1813704?ie=UTF8&s=books). Both are around 3,000 pages and have Bible-thin paper.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're right! I have Volume One. It's very strange: the title page lists both volumes, but if you actually go through the table of contents, it just has the first. My bad.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

They are excellent books!

[lynndyre.livejournal.com]

I'm curious what you'll think of Brideshead Revisited. I read it ... a while ago now.

(I was curious what you thought about my Swordspoint comments - has anyone else looked at any of the medical/scientific meta issues, or wondered about Richard's eyes?)

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Heehee it's okay. I was just like, is there one that has both of them together? Because that would be a huge book. One fun thing in the book is that on Pg. 1264/1265 there is a fun poem by John Donne. On the other hand I really dislike the translation of The Canterbury Tales in there.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping to like it; a friend of mine read it a while ago and did.

(I am meaning to reply! I just have a lot of comments sitting in my inbox right now that require actual thought, and I've been putting them off until I have time to be more articulate. Which, clearly, making new posts doesn't help with finding time, but I will get around to it. For Richard's blindness, there's a conversation in the comments here (http://rm.livejournal.com/852290.html), though we didn't figure out much.)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

There should be a prize for guessing, though some of those are total gimmes.

Heh, yeah. I think mine turned out terribly obvious as being, well, mine, but perhaps that will only make people more likely to write them. *grins*

Though mine's going to fall over and bury me someday

Ha! I don't have much of one, because I've always relied mostly on the internet for getting poetry. But I keep seeing them for fifty cents, or a dollar, and of course I have to buy them in that case...

Not that I'm complaining.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for the rec. I'll have to look that one up.

Hmm. This is the only translation of it I've read, so I didn't notice anything bad about it. Which do you prefer?

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

It isn't so bad to read, but our teacher was all, Let's read this out loud in class. I prefer the version in the Norton World Masterpieces anthology.


A soon as April pierces to the root
The drought of March, and bathes each bud and shoot
Through every vein of sap with gentle showers
From whose engendering liquor spring the flowers

to me sounds much better than

Whan that April with his showres shoote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
of which vertu engerdered is the flowr;

even though they are practically the same thing.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with you. If nothing else, the first is much more Modern English; the second one seems in a weird halfway place to me. If they really wanted to keep the feel, people may as well just read the original; it's not so distant that you absolutely need to have a translation.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

I agree. We read some other pieces that were translated where you had to look up the meaning of almost every word, but it "preserves the original bob and wheel formula blah blah blah." I was like, that's great you kept the original rhythm, but it doesn't mean much when I have to constantly stop to see what a word means. I like the translations that read easier and then footnote problem passages/words.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah. I think mine turned out terribly obvious as being, well, mine, but perhaps that will only make people more likely to write them. *grins*

That was my theory. *G* And it's not like there was pressure to be anonymous on this one.

Ha! I don't have much of one, because I've always relied mostly on the internet for getting poetry.

The internet's missing a lot of the good stuff, and you don't get the heft of the poetry in your hands, the interplay and connections of which poem follows which, and what comes before, and how, flipping through, random phrases catch your eye, building a new poem in your mind. The internet isn't as conducive to poemancy. ;-)