Special Blog Post:
The Book Meme
Noooo problem. Below is my flog on this dog of a blog jog.
You are stuck inside "Fahrenheit 451." Which book would you be?
- Uh, am I going to be one of the books that gets incinerated? If so, I'm going to be a big compilation of works by Henry David Thoreau. If I blow really hard, the flames will swiftly and completely engulf the book so the world will be spared Thoreau's excuses for and bragging about his self-absorbed, pathetically selfish existence, which far too many still mistake for liberalism from a man who fed the beast that would fester in its rightful form as the American brand of fascism. If I'm lucky, my flames will also take out some Ayn Rand drivel, too. If I really try hard, perhaps I can bring about a conflagration that also consumes the Left Behind bile.
If I'm going to be a book that people try to preserve, then I'm going to be the Holy Bible; but I'm certainly not going to be the King James Version: I'll take my chances being a better translation without all the silly, rustic, linguistic affectations that were silly, rustic, linguistic affectations even at the time the thing was first published.
If I'm going to be a book by a good writer, I'll probably be The Dark Wraith Has Spoken, provided such a New York Times slam-dunk best-seller is published before the flames start licking up around my dust jacket.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
- Good Lord, no. For Heaven's Sake. The Dark Wraith does not deviate from the tangible and entirely corporeal world. Sober, uncompromising, down-to-Earth reality: that's what it's all about for the Dark Wraith.
Sheesh.
What is the last book you bought?
- The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd Edition, F.N. Robinson, Ed. Purchased from a used books vendor at a country flea market. This one is in the original Middle English, and the previous owner had scribbled some interesting marginalia concerning dual and triple meanings with which Chaucer was playing.
What are you currently reading?
- This post as I type it.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
- The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser.
Simply stunning in rigorous poetic rhyme and meter through hundreds and hundreds of pages. It degrades modern poetics to blithering nonsense. - The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Irreverent, brutally honest, with masterful use of language to both reveal and conceal meaning in disparate lives brought together, their stories to be told. - London, by Edward Rutherford.
Sweeping account of a handful of families in London from the age of Celts to the 20th Century. - The Oxford English Dictionary
On a desert island, I would finally be able to make it through the entire thing, provided I wasn't constantly being bothered by the cannibal raiding parties from the neighboring island. - The New Penguin History of the World, by J.M. Roberts.
About as good as any for trying to figure out what the plot has been all along.
And now to pass the torch.
The Left Behind Child is herewith tapped because he is bright and has a refreshingly honest and ranging way of blogging.
Paradigm Shifter of Revolutionary Paradigm is also herewith tapped because he is exuberant, smart, and unafraid of learning.
And finally, Kiosan of Slightly Left of Center is tagged because she's a good blogger, and she deserves more notice. This might not get her much more notice, but it will surely cause her some aggravation, and suffering makes people stronger in their faith. (That's what people say, anyway. We shall see.)
The Dark Wraith has delivered the goods, and having delivered the goods, hands the package off to the next set of victims.
Published 4/12/2005 10:52:00 PM
<< 11 Comments Total
*applauds wildly*
I finished my assigment Dark Wraith...Those interested can read it at
http://revolutionaryparadigm.blogspot.com/
Be sure to set your IE view to "smaller" or you wont see the side bar....
Hey DW, I wanted to let you know that while I was over at Salon.com today looking at the Daou Report their blog aggregation page. It seems that Big Brass Blog was listed among the ones it was talking about.
I figured you'd like to know that Big Brass Blog had made it to a least a bit of the big time. :)
-Gary A
Good evening, Mr. Wraith, and thank you, by the way (or perhaps not "by the way," as it is my purpose in commenting) for tagging me on the meme. I admit I had hoped, though I'd little cause, that someone might tap little ole me. Eventually, anyway, sometime further off than now.
'Twas a good exercise, and made me resolve to read, again, those books I love but could not narrow to five, to ensure I'd made the right decision.
And that, Mr. Wraith, is the best thing to come out of the meme - making us go back and read, again, the old favorites and the new. And think, and muse, and refuse to succumb to The Bachelor culture in which we're all, hopefully momentarily, mired.
What are you currently reading?
This post as I type it.
Clever answer, but how about enlightening us on what book you are currently reading?
Now, that wasn't bad at all, was it?
Good evening, Old White Lady.
A chance for me to opine is an opening to one of my blithering blog blasts. I have been known to talk to the dead, thinking they would listen at length, only to have them arise just so they could tell me to knock it off.
And speaking of rambling, I wanted to tell you that I had visited your blog a while back and caught sight of a picture that was way down in a post that was going relatively unnoticed. The picture was of a grove of trees on a foggy morning, and it brought back good memories of my years as country boy.
Cold mornings were good mornings. The fog would hang over the forest out beyond the western field, and sometimes that fog was thick enough that the trees were like black giants standing silently amid heavy, gray curtains. As the sun would break across the barren earth, the fog would light up white as a sheet, and those trees would begin to emerge as the sheet lifted away in the warm sunlight.
I wonder how many kids today would want to just stand for a spell and watch the land come alive in its quiet way, the same way it has since long before us, the same way it will long after us.
The Dark Wraith misses the past... now that it is again shrouded in the quiet fog of memory.
And good evening to you, Mr. Goat.
Right now, I am committed to the project of carefully working my way back through An Anglo-Saxon Reader, by George Philip Krapp and Arthur Garfield Kennedy. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, ©1929) This edition was given to me when I was a child by an elderly professor who noted that I had listened enraptured as he recited some of Beowulf from memory one evening.
My skill in Old English has atrophied somewhat because I no longer have any opportunity to teach it, and more modern speakers of and writers about the language have a much less desirable sonic structure to their way than I favor.
This is part of a larger project I have been pursuing for several years now about a strange story that has an ominous arc that borders on horror. The neat part is that it's largely a true story. The frustrating part is that large chunks of the story were written or re-written by official scribes of the Medieval Catholic Church to rehabilitate a rather awful nobleman and his equally if not more monstrous wife. It's a great story, but it could never be written as anything other than fiction; and some important about what really happened are buried in words and place-names of Old English and Old Norse.
So, there you are, Mr. Goat. Do I know how to have wild and crazy evenings, or what?
The Dark Wraith just hates it when the audience doesn't even try to snore quietly.
Sorry about that, I was actually snoring, but then again I've been practicing my sleep disorder.
As a former voracious reader, I envy anyone who has the time to devour a good book. My reading, excepting news, op-eds, and a few good blogs, is limited to one to ten pages of some easy read novel before falling asleep. Anything of complexity takes forever to finish when you have to reread half of what you tried to read the night before.
Ah, another fog lover! (I should have guessed.) While I miss the fog in the valley at the bottom of the hill that I used to see as a boy on the school bus (having grown up in a hilly PA piedmont area close to the Delaware border), I find that the powerful fogs I experience living near the ocean north of Boston are even more enthralling!
- oddjob
Make that a third vote for foggy mornings and nights. I have the privilege of living 20 miles from my employment, where the drive is 90% highway through the Appalachian mountains. I also drive east in the AM, and the foggy valleys and pockets combined with risen/rising fogs on the hillsides along with the rising sun makes for some spectacular views. As well as som hazardous driving, but hey, nothing is perfect. Just for information, be it known that appreciation of fogs, sunlight, and sunrises/sunsets is being incultred into our 5 year old, so there is at least one child coming along who will carry the torch.