Oooooooooh! Thanks for posting that, JZ. Yum.

JZ, weren't you going to post a literature-something something?

Tep, yeah, but I'm all swamped with work and such.

Sorry.

It's my very favorite booky metaphor ever

I am not nearly smart enough for this thread. I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

JZ, that metaphor makes me heartbreakingly happy. I'll have to read the book it's from.

P-C, I read about 3/4 of Wuthering heights a few years back, and then something shiny distracted me. Perhaps I'll finish it this weekend.

Thousands of books, one show per thread. Occam and Soul Coughing suggest that Correlation is not Causation in this case.

I. Love. Plei.

(This post brought to you by the Plei and Soul Coughing Adoration Society)

Sean, my only "flame" is that your comment belongs in the Music thread, where the people who hang out there can respond to your accusation of elitism there.

Fair enough, except that my point was less to accuse the Music thread of snobbery than to try and remind people that snobbery is in the eye of the beholder, and that before one goes complaining about the weeds in their neighbor's lawns, they should double check their own back yard, first.

Amazing how a good quote will suck me in.

And connie nails why I fucking love Shakespeare. He has some of the most amazing quotes in all of literature (as far as I'm concerned)....

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by and idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

I mean, fuck that's good.

Henry the Fifth, and the St. Crispin's Day speech? Amazing.

Hamlet? I maintain that play is misclassified among Shakespeare's work, and should be counted among the comedies, though it's the blackest of black comedies. It was the Reservoir Dogs of its time.

Richard III? The ultimate anti-hero.

I love, love, love Shakespeare quotes.

I am not nearly smart enough for this thread. I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

Pish and tush, m'dear. You're good enough, you're smart enough, and what with the writing classes and the essays you got to read on the radio, you already have an apartment in the City.

Wow. Literature as Sang Sacré - there's a metaphor I can get behind.

Heather [if you were talking to me], I'll try to find time to do that this weekend. One caveat: the book's subtitle is "why middle-class mothers and fahers are going broke" and it's clearly aimed only at people with children. The authors argue that kids=financial instability, at least as things are set up in the US these days.

I maintain that play is misclassified among Shakespeare's work, and should be counted among the comedies, though it's the blackest of black comedies. It was the Reservoir Dogs of its time.

Aaaand, now I'm adding Sean to my internet boyfriend list. Also thinking about rereading Hamlet for the upmtieth time and watching Resevoir Dogs to flirt with him- and to test the theory.

I am not nearly smart enough for this thread. I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

I am one with this feeling, also. Confession time: I'm shockingly poorly read, in terms of The Classics. Every single one of my teachers & professors were big on trying to get people to read (yay them), so they gave the students a lot of wiggle room in what we were reading. Which is good and all, but none of them really pushed me to go read anything outside of my fantasy/horror 'hood.

So, oh People Better-Read Than Me, what do you recommend? I've read Wuthering Heights (and wanted to beat Cathy & Heathcliff with a stick), most of the Shakespeare plays (yay!), and Great Expectations (kinda yay, in some parts). I can't think of any other Classics with a capital C that I've read.

Help?

That's cool Dani. I have no kids, and really don't plan on having them. It's just that when I think of us or my married friends having them, I have no idea how they'd manage the costs. I mean doctor's visits alone!

Sean, I will add to your list with this (which should NEVER be split in half. Yes, Mr. Gibson, I'm looking at you):

Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing--no, nor for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i' the throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha!

'Swounds, I should take it. For it cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
Oh, vengeance!