Category Archives: literature

literature

Passion and Gratitude

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So I was talking to a recently acquired friend about my love affair with Chekhov. God help us all when I get to talking about Chekhov.

I don’t even know a whole lot about Anton Chekhov. I only know “Lady with the Pet Dog.”

Actually we were talking about what I would consider “good literature,” but even that was after the point of origin. We were talking about passion. Yes, that was it, indeed.

We were talking about passion, about living a passionate life, about what made one passionate.

So I started discussing literature, which, is as far as I’m concerned, started for me with Anton Checkhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog.”

Anton Checkhov’s story is all about passion, or rather, it culminates in what I consider to be the perfect example of passion. It’s a rather unoriginal story when reduced to its plot: man meets girl, man gets girl, man loses girl, man summons courage to get her back, and the end is left open, while optimistic (at least in the mind of the lovers) it is open ended and ambiguous.

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college, literature

Ferrets and Pron

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As you may have noticed, I’m rather fixated on this Cassie Edwards thing, and Smart Bitches in general.

Newsweek has picked it up, and one of the people that she has “allegedly” plagiarized has spoken up. The guy isn’t an expert on Native American life. She’s opted to “allegedly” steal (covering my tush, thanks!) hotter material than that.

He’s a ferret guy. She stole from a ferret guy. How can someone in good conscience steal from a ferret guy? His name is Paul Tolme and the write up is here at Newsweek. He’s a wildlife journalist and wrote an article about how the US government was harming the small black-footed ferret population in an attempt to kill prairie dogs.

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literature, relationships

I should be writing a paper, but…

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I just had to get this off my chest.

There are some books that are simply great reads. Books tattered and torn, scribbled in and folded, books in which passages are memorized and can be repeated at will. Books that, with every read, simply get better. There’s a frame of the familiar, and within the familiar, there is constant surprise. Whether it’s a new connection, a stunning simile, or simply an image that sits with you differently than it did the first time.

Tom Robbins is the example I typically use for this. His writing is magnificent, even blurbed as a roller coaster of prose. With that, I heartily agree. And yet he has characters that, no matter how many times you pick up the book, never change from the last time you picked it up. Sure, they’re not static within the confines of the paper, but within the book itself, they are as unchanging as the clock in Arizona. But set within a familiar story, new details can and do leap out at you when you least expect it, and often when you’re not looking.

I think a good relationship is like this.

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