From the Pen of Thoreau

We're studying a chapter of Walden tomorrow in my American Literature class, so I'm catching up on my reading. Our hilarious professor had intended us to take a nature walk to the creek for our discussion, but the fact that the creek has over-spilled its banks makes that unlikely. Alas. The transcendentalists would not approve.
I thought I'd share several passages from the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" that I found interesting and enjoyable.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Classic Thoreau, sort of a manifesto if you will. Next, Henry David tells us why mail and newspapers are a waste (I wonder how he would feel about text messages and Yahoo! News).

The penny-post is, commonly, and institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned or one vessel wrecked, one one steamboat blown up or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter-we never need read of another. One is enough.

As a student journalist, I must say that I don't believe news is useless, but I get his point.
One more for good measure, one of my favorites:

Let us spend each day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

Ironically (as it is my life long quest to find irony and produce it where there is none), some club on campus had baskets of foam fortune cookies (I don't understand either) in the college center this afternoon, each with a slip of paper containing a quotation. The one I grabbed had a quotation by Thoreau about the importance of writing only when the impetus to write is hot upon you. Have you ever noticed that certain things seem to follow you in life? Words, stories, writers that pop up in various people and places that are unconnected to each other. This happens to me all the time, and lately it has been Henry David Thoreau.
I think it's time to officially upgrade him to Literary Crush. He makes me laugh, we could take nature walks, he likes the quiet, but doesn't seem dull- I like him. Although according to the pictures, he probably could have benefitted from a shave to get rid of that mutton chop/beard combination, but he has very soulful eyes. Besides, he's got a great cabin in the woods, and I've always said my ideal man is a rugged nerd. Yeah, this one has promise.

In the Words of Mark Twain...

"A Classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." (Here's looking at you Epic Book Blog)
Even though my reading has been sporadic this summer between moving, working, trying to write, my cat having a bladder infection, I have conquered my shameful secret of never having read The Great Gatsby and it was rather enjoyable. I'm almost finished A Farewell to Arms now, though it's depressing me greatly. Still there are so many other classics I really ought to read. None of them are as shame-making as Gatsby, but still. Here are some books I'd like to tackle soon:
Moby Dick by Herman Mellville
Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Dubliners by James Joyce
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Middlemarch by George Elliot

What is your list of unread classics (shameful or otherwise)?

New Short Story: "Target Girl"

I wrote a new short story last night, I have no idea where it came from. It's very short as all my short stories are, about 800 words. It's about a knife thrower's assistant. It's called "Target Girl". Obviously, it's very new and needs some editing, but I like it.
Most of my short stories are more like a quick scene or two that show a glimpse of a relationship or a situation and imply the back story. Sometimes I am irritatingly ambiguous (apparently)and I am quite obsessed with backstory. So, in this go round the short fiction carousel, I tried to make the front story just as interesting and active as the back story that is hinted at, and I make my ending more definative and less disputable.
Perhaps it's because as a reader I enjoy stories that leave a lot open to interpretation and are less literal that I usually write like that. Sometimes it seems to piss people off. I took a "Sudden Fiction" class two semesters ago which was structured like a workshop. We would read and discuss our work as a group. I found many of the other students wanted to be told exactly what was happening at all times, exactly how the story ended. They felt very strongly about it. I'm too young to be quite so set in my ways that I won't try new things. I hope that some experimentation will kick up inspiration for a novel length story I've been having trouble with.
So here's my first paragraph as it stands in all its rough draft grit:

Laura slid her hands down the sides of her body feeling the stiff boning around her waist and the sequins like scales that draped, barely covering her hips. She squirmed slightly hoping to make the skirt seem longer. The fading sunlight warmed her little canvas dressing tent. With a pitted looking glass, she applied her powder and slipped on her feathered headband.

I've always believe in brevity in openings. It certainly departs from my usual stories. I've always been fascinated with traveling shows of the late 19th early 20th century anyway, and what's more captivating than the impalement arts?

Teaser Tuesday

I almost forgot, Tuesdays are a bit crazy; work, newspaper nonsense, rehearsals. Even though I am in the midst of two novels, I have been mostly reading poems by Keats and short stories by Hemingway the past few days.

"Everything tastes of liorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."
-The girl, "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

"...I have been half in love with easeful death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath...."
-Stanza VI of "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats

There will be a review of Bright Star as well as another novel for my What's in a Name? Challenge next week.

From the pages of Agnes Grey

I came across this incredibly long, yet grammatically correct sentence today:

"Then having broken my long fast on a cup of tea, and a little thin bread and butter, I sat down beside the small, smouldering fire, and amused myself with a hearty fit of crying; after which, I said my prayers, and then, feeling considerably relieved, began to prepare for bed; but, finding that none of my luggage was brought up, I instituted a search for the bell; and failing to discover any signs of such a convenience in any corner of the room, I took my candle, and ventured through the long passage, and down the steep steps, on a voyage of discovery."

Bolded is one of the funniest phrases I read all day. I will never feel bad about the amount of commas I use ever again. It reminds me of a word-count padding NaNoWriMo dare; write a one hundred word sentence, actually Anne managed 104 words if my count is correct.