on tricking myself into writing and finally reading ulysses

a big thank you to judith for turning me on to 750words. it's a site with a lovely blank canvas (weirdly less intimidating than an open, fresh word doc), where you attempt to write 750 words per day. i tried it out for the first time this morning and got to 557 words before it told me the day was over and i would have to start a new day. this, at 9 a.m. my time. turned out my time zone was set to pacific time in california, so i cheated and pasted my 557 words (which i had written in 10 minutes) into the new day (after all, it had been friday for me all along) and continued. my stats will be a little off, since pasting it in takes a bit less time than it did to write the words in the first place, but oh well. i found it surprising how quickly i got to 750 words. maybe this writing thing isn't so hard after all?  it was just a bunch of drivel, recounting my day yesterday, so there's that, but nonetheless, it was a start.

i'm finding that reading and writing go hand in hand. i knew this, but i think what with obsessively reading the news on my iphone since mid-2016, i'd gotten out of the habit of reading books. i've been fixing that thus far in 2020 and i've already read four books. i'm currently reading hemingway's moveable feast, which contains a lot of advice about writing. i've also joined a book club through the library. we will read just one book - james joyce's ulysses. i took a semester-long course focused on just that book and wrote a 25-page paper on it without finishing the damn thing, so i decided that now is the time. it's one of those you probably should read. but already i can feel myself thinking i have to read a bunch of other stuff first - like i really should refresh homer's odyssey before i begin. and maybe dante's inferno too. and that would lead to goethe's faust, wouldn't it? where will it end?

just get reading already.

we've come a long way, baby

yes, that is one of wonder woman's fabulous boots on the couch beside her.
it snapped off my wonder woman christmas ornament and it has a kind of morbid hold on me.
so i included it in my photo. and this wonder woman comes in this set with her invisible jet. 

i'm reading jill lepore's the secret history of wonder woman. there's a whole lot more to wonder woman than just a comic book heroine (as if that wouldn't be enough). and although my love of her comes from the 70s television series starring lynda carter, i just love her even more now that i know she finds her roots in the whole suffrage movement and the attendant fight for birth control and general women's rights that women waged at around that same time.

here in denmark, this year is the 100th anniversary of women gaining the vote (that was why we had our wonder woman salon a couple of weeks ago), so that's part of why the topic has surfaced on my radar. and it's funny how once it's on your radar, you keep coming across things that are related to it. like these horrendous anti-suffrage posters that circulated 100 years ago. i don't think i'd fully appreciated how far we women had come and how much those early feminists did for us so that we have the rights and norms that we, quite frankly, take for granted today.

the jill lepore book is one of those where i find myself staying up late to read it and simultaneously feeling eager to turn to the next page to drink in the story (and this is actual history) and wanting to slow down and not come to the end of the book too quickly.

the inventor of wonder woman was a very strange man named william moulton marston. he was a harvard educated psychologist and the original inventor of the lie detector test (hence wonder woman's truth lasso) and generally a rather weird and possibly perverted guy. he lived in a very strange relationship with his wife and his mistress and their four children under one roof. because he was a polemic figure, he had a hard time keeping a job and his wife was the main breadwinner of the family, with the mistress playing nanny to all four children, despite only 2 of them being hers. and yet he was also quite a compelling figure - charismatic in a way and quite a prolific ideas man. and he believed that women were powerful forces to be reckoned with, so he couldn't have been all bad.

wonder woman came to life just as the US was entering WWII and thus there were many themes with a patriotic tinge to them. once she was allowed to join the justice league, things got a little less feminist for her, as another writer took over from marston and relegated her to secretary status, while the other justice league members went off to fight. not to make excuses, but that reflected the times as well, the men went off to war and the women stayed at home to handle the everyday duties.

it's also pretty fascinating, the insight into the early days of comic books and how they arose both out of the film and pulp fiction industries. all of the creative artists and storytellers and maverick publishers that did battle with censorship make you wish you had lived in a more dynamic time.

i'm only a little more than halfway through the book, so i'll wind down for now. i'm sure i'll be back with more thoughts on it once i'm finished. but suffice it to say, wonder woman is even more awesome than i ever knew.

making things and reading

i made soap yesterday. i took the easy route, buying a shea butter soap base at the craft store, but adding honey (from our own bees) and oatmeal and sprigs of lavender i picked last summer and dried. i'll make another run of it this evening at a "make things with honey" event at our local culture house. i'm also making all sorts of yummy honey-related things to eat. i convinced our local beekeeper's association to show people the wide variety of things you can make with honey! i love instigating such things. the soap was super easy and i'm going to tackle the more difficult cold process kind next time - using oils and lye and time. i like the idea of knowing exactly what's gone into the soap. husband wants me to get very ambitious and make shampoo as well. but one step at a time. he's done a marvelous job building a room that's made for such projects (he calls it the brewery), so once the sink is in out there, i will have a place to do such projects, conveniently located right next to the honey centrifuge.

thanks to faithful use of goodreads, i realized that i can manage to read at least 100 books before the year is out. my goodreads stands at 84, but i also did my annual reread of the harry potter series, so it's actually at 91. to round it out, i dug around in boxes and found my nabokov collection, as i've just read andrea pitzer's the secret history of vladimir nabokov and so i have a hankering to reread pale fire. the three hardbacks, i scored long ago in a used bookstore in scottsdale, arizona for a song. i've already delved into speak, memory, nabokov's autobiography, and i realized that tho' i've had it for years, i hadn't actually read it before now. i wonder how many more of those are on my shelves. maybe my goal for 2014 will be to read 100 books that i already own. most of this years reads have been from the library, as borrowing instead of buying fits my current lifestyle and philosophy much better anyway. tho' it remains hard for me not to write in the library's books. if i only read my own books, their loan rates are going to go down and we can't have that, so i guess it will have to be a mix.

* * *

if you love JFK (and i do), you have to see this collection of photos in the atlantic.

sharing my eclectic book list

remember how i told you about my reading out in the corners? well, it's about to get a whole lot more public. i've made a reading out in the corners reading list and a cute poster for a display at my beloved local library. we're going to share my diverse reading list with the other library users. it will hopefully inspire and also inform about what a great service the library has for bringing pretty much any book you might want nearly home to your front door.

i generally read in english if i can - it's much faster for me that way and i'm more able to get things read in time to return the books. on the list we're making available at the library, the books that are available in danish are listed with their danish title, tho' part of the point of this is to show people how very much there is available in english! very nearly anything you want. they go to great lengths to get a book for you if it's possible - "my" copy of the humument actually was borrowed from a german library and sent "home" to my local library for me. i think that's awesome. it's a great service and one of the few things in this country (and probably even the world) that's still free.

i really enjoyed making the poster and finally used some of my hoarded pretty papers and ephemera. it feels like they were at last put to good use. i chose books that had recently been on my bedside table, as well as a few old favorites and the list is by no means exhaustive. here it is, including capital letters, no less:

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (Translator)

The Passport
by Saul Steinberg

Joseph Anton: A Memoir
by Salman Rushdie

The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath

Wildwood: A Journey through Trees
by Roger Deakin

Hornet Flight
by Ken Follett

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel
by Tom Phillips

The Republic of Wine
by Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt (translator)

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
by Slavoj Žižek

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Art
by Yayoi Kusama

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin (Translator)

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams ; Pigs In Heaven
by Barbara Kingsolver

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy

Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Tartine Bread
by Chad Robertson, Eric Wolfinger (Photographer)

Ukrudt - en kogebog med nordiske urter
by Rasmus Leck Fischer, Katja Dahlberg

* * *

if you want to see what else i'm reading, hook up with me on goodreads, i keep track of it all there.

reading out in the corners

i am a frequent borrower at my local library. there's this brilliant service (bibliotek.dk) where you can order books from any library in the country and they send them to your local library. when they come, you get an SMS and then you pick them up and read them. i'm always ordering strange and esoteric things like postmodern theory from the mid-90s, books about early soviet textiles or artists that were popular in the 50s or else the entire collected works of whoever has just won the nobel prize for literature. as one of the librarians said today, "you're really out in the corners."

i laughed when she said it, because it really is true. but of course, i had to think about it afterwards as well. what does it really mean to be out in the corners? i hasten to say that it was said and meant in a kind way and was not at all an insult. we were laughing because very often when i go to check out my reserved books, the self-service machine won't allow me to do it - it always wants some other number or says that the book doesn't exist in the system or some such error. this means i very often have to go to the desk and have someone help me. in this way, i've gotten to know all of the library personnel very well. which is how the "you're really out in the corners" comment came about.

i took it as another way of saying off the beaten path. when i look for my books on the reserved shelves, i see a lot of self-help, how-to books, cookbooks, contemporary crime novels (i do order my share of those at times) and those infernal 50 shades books. those are all on the beaten path, down the middle, ordinary. today i picked up the tom phillips book (he's the artist who did the humument altered book i told you about a few days ago). at the same time i returned slavoj zizek's latest tome, less than nothing: hegel and the shadow of dialetical materialism. i'll admit i only read a couple of chapters of it, not the whole thing. i go for such a book occasionally to exercise my brain (this was, i will say, one of the more lucid zizek since sublime object of ideology) and to remind me of the thrills i found in grad school. but of late, i've also been reading douglas kennedy novels, which aren't exactly lacanian marxism.

which leads me to another aspect of what it might mean to read out in the corners - to read broadly, all over the spectrum, thoroughly in some sense, covering all the bases. i like that idea too. i read a lot and i love reading. i can't go to sleep at night without it. sometimes i want to read to relax. sometimes to think and be challenged. sometimes to help me figure out what my opinion is. sometimes to enlighten. sometimes to learn. sometimes just to be entertained. sometimes to get lost. reading can give you so many different experiences and feelings - the whole spectrum, really. and i guess that's what it really means to be out in the corners.

* * *

how charming are these diving pigs?

bunnies and books

don't mess with the sugar nose

this bunny is from a litter of 6, he's the littlest one, but he looks tough anyway, doesn't he? maybe he has to be, being one of 6. i don't know why i'm calling him he, i have no idea whether he is a boy or girl. it's too hard to tell with baby bunnies what they are. often you first find it out when they have just made some more baby bunnies. do you suppose it will damage his self image if i keep calling him he and he's really a she? do bunnies care about stuff like that?

just a little of the light reading that's on my nightstand. the bottom one about technology and urban development and the environment was written by my father-in-law in 1974. you'd be amazed how well the ideas about what makes a city livable hold up. he was a brilliant man. according to goodreads, less than nothing is the most lucid zizek in years. i love the loops he takes my brain on. it's kind of like how i imagine cocaine would be, only without all of the expense and needing to have clear sinuses. it's kind of interesting to think that libraries dispense something with the capacity to make your brain high on thoughts.

lest you think i've gone completely mad, here's the lighter reading on my nightstand. i've never read raymond chandler, but murakami loves him, so how could i not give him a whirl? i'm going to try to read them in order, but i don't always have control of when the books i've ordered come in at the library, so i've ordered the first four to start with.

that celebrating the third place book is full of stories of amazing places - plant nurseries, bookshops, cafés - that people love and use. we're working on something along these lines, so i want to read all i can about great third spaces. i've ordered the book by ray oldenburg that started it all - the good great place - and am impatiently waiting for it to come so i can read the theory behind the concept. roughly, as i understand it, the first place is home, the second place is work and the third place is somewhere you want to be. it can be a café, a library, a bookshop, a bar - anywhere that people gather because they desire to be there. such places develop a life of their own and i want to find out how.

other than reading, the weekend holds a party over on the devil's island and, as it's yet another long weekend with a monday holiday, lots of time in the garden. we've got to get planting now that the night frosts seem to be gone.

what are you doing this weekend?

monday enthusiasm

i often wake up on monday morning, full of energy, ready to face the week head on. it generally helps if there is sunshine. but monday mornings, i am full of ideas and full of enthusiasm. i always make a list for the week. oddly, i seldom refer to it as the week progresses, but i do often complete the majority of the items on it - somehow the act of making the list hones my focus. and odin knows i need that.

i think my reading of crossing the unknown sea has me feeling especially empowered and enthusiastic this morning. the book is a deep philosophical musing on the nature of work and how it shapes our identity.  i think the writer i can most compare david whyte to is alain de botton and his musings on architecture and travel. his words leave me fortified and feeling brave.

"whenever we attempt something difficult there is always a sense that we have to wake some giant slumbering inside ourselves, some greater force as yet hidden from us. we look for better work by first looking for a better image of ourselves. we stir this inner giant to life in order to find the strength to live out the life we want for ourselves." 

"to wake the giant inside ourselves, we have to be faithful to our own eccentric nature and bring it out into conversation with the world." 

i mentioned this book the other day and how i felt i picked it up at precisely the time i needed the words contained within, and then whyte said that himself, "a time when paths cross at exactly the moment when both writer and reader are ready to know something of the territory through which they have passed and a glimpse of the unknown future which might lie ahead." 

on a sunny monday morning, i feel an incredible impatience and unbearable exuberance for whatever that unknown future holds. and the strength and the will to shape it myself.

still pondering those photos from the crimean war

no. 1

no. 2

i went on a frenzy today and switched around our living room (read: room where we watch television) with our dining room (read: room where we never sat to eat dinner because we were too busy watching television). in the process, i messed up my thumb in a badly-installed door (grr to those people we bought the house from - i'm still bitter towards them) and dropped the extremely heavy and two-meter long unwieldy dining table on my foot (hello giant bruise). but after several hours of swearing, vacuuming and sweating more than i'd like to admit, the result was that we ate our cheese soufflé and simple salad at the actual dining table and then stayed there for and hour and a half, as a family, talking and drawing and laughing. wow, what a difference it made!

during our discussion i showed husband the two roger fenton photos from the crimean war. and interestingly, husband had an entirely new perspective on them, one not mentioned in the errol morris book (which i love even more now after chapter 4 - about the FSA photos taken by walker evans and others during the depression...more about that soon). and one definitely not mentioned by susan sontag in her take on the photos.

husband looked at them as a soldier and an officer. i told him there was controversy over the sequence of the photos. it was known that that were taken on the same day during the same shoot, but that the interpretations of the meaning of them were different depending on which one you thought was taken first.  you also recall that i didn't tell you what morris' conclusion was (i still think you must get the book - via your library, i'm not advocating consumerism (tho' i want to own this book now)).

husband's take is that no. 2 is first, because it represents a "before" shot - tho' after a barrage of shelling by the russians. before in the sense of before the road was cleared for the soldiers to pass with their wagons and horses and continue the war. no. 1 comes after it was cleared.

what do you think?

authenticity in photography

i picked this book up from the library yesterday (i've been waiting for it for ages). i sat down with it and didn't put it down again until the end of chapter 2 - the television remained off and dinner was leftovers warmed in the oven. i was riveted.

chapter 1 is an exploration and analysis of two photographs taken by roger fenton (famed as the first photographer of war) in 1855 in the crimea - valley of the shadow of death is the name of the photo. there are actually two versions - one with cannonballs strewn on the road and one without. the controversy is whether fenton staged the shot for dramatic effect by spreading out the cannonballs (as susan sontag suggested in her last book regarding the pain of others) or whether the cannonball shot was taken first and then they were picked up and recycled by the british soldiers.

here are the photos in question (i found them here):

without cannonballs on the road

with cannonballs on the road

morris goes through a fascinating journey (literally traveling to the crimea to find the spot where the photo was taken) and a compelling analysis of whether it matters which shot came first and why it seems to be so important to us, as humans, to assign meaning. after all, posing a shot isn't necessarily a deception, but why do we have an impulse in us to think it is?

and simply as a photo, there is definitely more drama in the shot with the cannonballs on the road and in my google image search to find the shots for this post, it is by far the more reproduced of the two shots. was it a decision made by the photographer for the sake of drama? or a coincidence that he came upon such a scene? what are the implications of trying to capture war in photos? (or in words, as he quotes tolstoy's sebastopol sketches as well (my favorite tolstoy, if i have to like something of his)).

as morris concludes, "...is it unnatural to have people move cannonballs? Or inauthentic? Aren't these photographs of human events--even if there are no people in the frame. They are photographs about war. The effects of war. Is war itself natural or authentic? The concepts of naturalness, authenticity, and posing are all slippery slopes that when carefully examined become hopelessly vague."

after subjecting the photos to extensive analysis (shadows, light, etc.), he does make a conclusion as to which photo came first. but rather than tell you what that conclusion is, i'll insist that you get this book from your local library (i'll bet you won't be able to restrain from writing in it either) and read it for yourself.

do come back and tell me what you think - i think the question at the heart of it is one of authenticity, something i think we're all desperately searching for in what seems like a world gone mad (which is probably why this book speaks to me so strongly).

i want to continue this conversation.

molding the territory of my own belonging

"i began to work the clay of my own life again, to mold the territory of my own belonging." - david whyte, crossing the unknown sea. 

i'm reading david whyte's crossing the unknown sea: work and the shaping of identity. i have this notion that we come to the books we need to read at the moment we need to read them. and if we come to them at the wrong time, they don't speak to us (the snow child is just not doing it for me and i'm going to return it to the library without finishing it). it's not the book's fault, it's something within. but when the book and your need align, hello! it's magical.

my encounter with last evening's troglodyte reminds me that i have spent a number of years trying not to be defined by what i do for a living. this is partially because i think that the nature of work is changing and partially because i don't think that my work (or my car or my house) is who i am, i'm far too complex for that.

thus, i only reluctantly listed my current (and several former) workplaces in my mini-bio on our group website because i have come to feel that it is expected of me. plus, the things i have done lend credibility to me and my story. no one in denmark can bring themselves to look down on someone who worked for denmark's biggest, most revered company and people also have respect for those who have their own business. so i have ended up in a position where i felt like i had to list those things to be considered legitimate. otherwise, i'm just some foreigner trying to horn in on local business. (if you can make out danish, you'll notice that many of the members have listed how long they're lived in town to boost their credibility.)

for two years, i answered the question of "what do you do?" with a list of the many things that fill my days - horses, kittens, chickens, cooking, laundry, writing, photographing, gardening, conversations, thinking, volunteering, sharing, laughing...but people look at you like you're mental when you do that. a few got it, but mostly, they acted like they thought my danish was bad and i had misunderstood the question. that begins to eat away at you after awhile, so you just revert to custom. perhaps i gave up too easily.

maybe it's time to begin to work the clay of my own life again, to mold the territory of my own belonging.

shoplift lit list

in one of those long, convoluted series of clicks, i stumbled upon a rather old (1999! - so last century) article from the new york observer by ron rosenbaum. it's about which books reside in the shoplifting section of a barnes & noble in NYC - they're on a special shelf where you have to ask the cashiers for them, because they are stolen so often that it's a problem for the store. the article is clever and witty and you should go read it, especially since i'm not going to go into the whole thing here.

what i am going to go into is my own personal list of books that i consider so essential that i would risk the incredible stupidity that is shoplifting to own them. but only if, for some bizarre reason, i had no other choice. i should note that i am actually really opposed to shoplifting and think it's a lame and not very nice thing to do, so i am in no way advocating the shoplifting of these or any other book (or makeup or trinkets or hair thingies or socks or razor blades (which are apparently the most shop-lifted item) or anything else). and really, what with libraries, we should, in theory, never have to shoplift any books at all. however, i will still make the list. because i love lists. and since now i've been going on and on about it for this long...

~ charlotte's web by e.b. white.  this classic has made countless children cry themselves to sleep.

~ little women by louisa may alcott. if i were one of the little women, i'd be jo (wouldn't we all?).

~ brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky. i would not only shoplift this book, but if i was allowed only one book in the universe, ever again, 'til the end of my life, this would be the one. it has it all...god, the devil, patricide, crazy brothers, saintly brothers, intellectuals, philosophy, religion and the grand inquisitor.

~ the bean trees by barbara kingsolver. i read this for the first time when i was in macedonia and it transports me there in a good way. tho' the book has nothing whatsoever to do with macedonia.

~ murakami - pretty much anything he's written, tho' especially wind-up bird chronicle and hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. 

it occurs to me that in a way, this is just a list of favorite books, but somehow, the shoplifting twist changes it a bit for me. it's not only favorites, but books you'd be willing to sacrifice yourself for, or encounter danger (sort of) for. books for which you'd take a risk. and that somehow seems different than mere favorites. tho' they are that as well.

what book(s) would make you turn to a life of crime?

i'm always getting lost in my book

i am often completely swallowed up and absorbed by what i read. i start wanting to spend time down a well when i'm reading murakami. i feel manic and a bit feverish and like offing my landlady (thankfully i do not have a landlady) when i'm reading dostoevsky. i want to dress in coarse brown robes and brew up some healing tinctures when i'm reading cadfael. madam bovary makes me want to have a passionate affair. and anna karenina gives me thoughts of throwing myself under a train.

my sister remarked yesterday that i was very negative and it was true, i spent a lot of yesterday in a negative state of mind - fretting about facebook's acquisition of instagram (that can't bode well), the republican primaries (not much positive there aside from the new nickname "mittens" i learned for mitt romney), the byzantine 1950s cave man attitudes towards women evident in a lot of places all of a sudden.  there was a lot to be pissy about. but really, i blame anthony bourdain.

i'm reading his medium raw: a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook. i've long admired his food/travel/adventure program on the travel channel. it seems to me that this guy has the best job in the world. he gets to go wherever he wants, eat everything in sight, drink copious amounts and say whatever the hell he wants about it in a humorous, witty and sardonic way. sounds ideal to me. but tho' he's got a razor sharp wit, he is just a weency bit negative. and it's rubbing off on me. and ironic negativity for comic effect? count me in. but i fear it's making me not very much fun to be around.

i've only got about 20 pages left, so it will be over soon. i think my family and my facebook friends will be glad of that.

*  *  *

and in the meantime, these texts from hillary will cheer you right up. 

liberating beauty

on a friend's recommendation, i acquired a book called skønhedens befrielse - forslag til en økologisk æstetik (liberating beauty: towards an ecological aesthetic) by morten skriver. a book by a guy whose last name is actually "writer" has to be ok, right?

i felt the book started off well. it really spoke to me with its condemnation of the horrible conditions under which animals are mass-produced for our consumption and of the mind-numbing sameness of suburbia and mall culture. and the underlying message that we must return to a place where we see that everything is connected to everything else and the choices we make matter is a good one.

but. (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) but, then i began to notice that citation of sources was sorely lacking. i came across ideas and thoughts that i know i've read before other places (thomas friedman, al gore, denis dutton), but no credit was given. granted that these are not presented as quotations, but neither are they original thoughts on the part of mr. "writer." i think mr. writer might have needed to work with a guy named mr. editor, who should have flagged this fact.

a book like this is very thought-provoking, but it makes me want to read more. i want to know who he has read - i want footnotes and end notes and a bibliography. because i'm certain a lot of research went into this book and it totally spoils it for me that citation of sources is completely lacking.  does he really think ms. reader will believe he came up with all of this himself? no way.

and once these doubts about him crept into my mind, i began to see that many of his conclusions were rather wild as well. he lays out good examples of how our consumer society has pushed us very far from an aesthetic and ethical way of living but then he tacks wild, leaping conclusions onto them. he uses the example of the golf course and the uniformity and ubiquity of golf courses as an illustration for what's wrong and how far we are from nature. i think it's an interesting example, but i'm not sure it proves what he thinks it does. because i don't think that people golf to be somehow closer to nature - they golf for the sport and the competition, not necessarily to see grass, trees and sand traps. the notion is interesting, but his conclusions are all off.

but i keep reading, hoping i'll be able to see the sources between the lines, so i can go directly to them and read even more. because i think that this notion of a return to a more natural state is indeed a way of both liberating beauty and being liberated by beauty and i think it's related (tho' i don't yet know if i can explain how), to this renaissance of craft and handmade. we are looking to turn away from the soullessness of the mall and the giant supermarket and get back to something that feels more real and more beautiful - even if it's just rhubarb from our own garden or curtains we sewed ourselves. we are turning away from the mass produced and towards the unique and beautiful.

but, mr. skriver, shame on you for not citing your sources. you've done yourself (and your name) and us a disservice.

accio morning tea

i'm rereading all seven harry potter books in one big harry potter marathon - shooting for finishing inside of ten days. i think in honor of halloween. i stay up late every evening reading them and if i wake up around 4 a.m. (which i often do), i read some more then. but i think it's affecting my brain. i had the strangest dream that husband fell into the fireplace, but tumbled himself out of it, unharmed, on the other side. that has to be harry potter-induced, what with floo powder and transport via fireplaces and all. but it was the kind of dream where you wake up heart pounding, with a dull headache. not a pleasant way to start the day, i must admit. on the bright side, the day can only get better from here...

need a cup of tea. now where's my wand?

reading dangerously in 2009

i'm participating in the estella's revenge 2009 year of reading dangerously. i haven't actually decided which dangerous books to read yet and since i've now had a headache for 24 hours straight, it won't be now that i decide my definitive list, but a couple of those zizek that are languishing on my shelf come to mind, as well as christopher hitchens' god is not great, which i bought awhile ago and haven't yet read.  

there is a great list over on the year of reading dangerously site and perhaps i will pick a few from it as well. but, for now, thinking just hurts too much. man, i hope this headache goes away before it's time to go to that new year's party tomorrow night. especially since i'm making the beef wellington main course.

if any of you have any great suggestions for dangerous reads, do let me know, as i need one dangerous read a month for the next 12 months!