Cliche' Love Poem

   Cliche' Love Poem
There is a boy
with eyes as blue as the sky
And I think of him in the dead of night
His image brings a flood of tears
I love him to infinity and beyond.

He keeps me up all night
Tossing and turning like the sea
And even when I sleep
My dreams whisper his name like the whispering wind.

Alas, he doesn't bat an eye
At my attempts to bear my soul to him
He loves another girl
With hair of gold and eyes like the sea

But I love him like a love song,
and he's the one that I want,
I would die 4 him,
Cuz' baby he's a firework.

My Comfort Book

  So, a lot of things have been going on right now. If you add homework plus stressing about finals plus rehearsals for The Producers PLUS my older sister repeatedly injuring her mouth to the point where she's made several trips to the hospital and has an unchanging duck face, that's not a lot of time left for reading. But I have been reading, like the good, studious girl I am. It's just not really up to my normal standards.
   Ella Enchanted has always been my comfort object. Whenever I've been sad or stressed or just too exhausted to do anything else, I pick up my paperback which I stole from a lending library and start to read. It's seriously the best book for a rainy day. It's got all the elements: love, adventure, magic, honest-to-God hilarity and unfailing sarcasm. Ella, the main character, is alarmingly relatable, right down to her own internal monologue. I've read this book upwards of ten times and will continue to do so for probably my entire life. It reminds me that happy endings are difficult, but not impossible to achieve. That humor can solve virtually any situation. And that the perfect man has freckles and gives you baby centaurs for a present. I've noticed it's kind of a thing with me that the more I fall in love with the hero of a book, the more I end up enjoying it as a whole.
   I would suggest this book from anyone ages 6 to 7000. Because if anyone ever lives to be 7000 years old, the best thing they could do with their time is read a children's book.

A Sham of a Post

  So, I started reading this book called Nine Stories, which is nine short stories by J.D Salinger, and I'm liking it so far. I read a bit of Franny and Zooey and didn't like it, so I had sworn off of any Salinger except for Catcher in the Rye. But this book is good. I've only read the first story, and it's about a severely depressed man who kills himself after he is rejected by a little girl who he tries to reach out to. It was pretty tragic, but I enjoyed the way it was written and the way the characters came off. It was sort of sweet, even though he killed himself in the end.
  The thing is, guys, I'm really not in the mood to write tonight. I haven't been reading much because of rehearsals and homework get in the way, besides my rereading of Lolita (76% finished!!!) and that book by the Broadway station DJ, which was not mentally stimulating or worth a discussion. Basically, some gay guys hooked up and then put on a Broadway show. So I haven't got much to talk about. I feel really inadequate just posting this...but...I will. Here's a present.

Look at him. Look at that. He's just so beautiful I can't even stand it. 

 

Reader's Blog Post: Christmas Special Edition

 Happy holidays, my fellow book-readers! Hopefully your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Yule/[insert weird holiday that I have never heard about but feel the need to include so as not to offend you, ya weirdo] was everything you hoped it to be and more. As for me, I have received a plethora of new books, which I am very grateful for, as Carrie has been completed and I had been rereading old Series Of Unfortunate Events books out of sheer desperation. I got Tender is the Night, a Fitzgerald book which I had meaning to get to. Also on the list was Broadway Nights, an autobiography disguised as a work of fiction written by Seth Rudetsky, the DJ of Sirius XM "On Broadway", the all-showtunes station on satellite radio. I got The Importance of Being Earnest, which is an old classic but undeniably hilarious, and also the entire book of Batboy, which is one of my favorite Broadway flops based on that creepy picture of that kid with the huge bug eyes and giant, fanged mouth out of Weekly World News. It's obvious why this show failed, right?
   Last, but definitely not least, I received a brand new Kindle. Now, don't get me wrong, I have always been somewhat against Kindles. I relished the idea of reading and rereading a book until it has been ripped, dog-eared and tattered out of sheer love. That was how reading was supposed to be. But since this new piece of technology had been foisted upon me, I decided that the least I could do was give it a chance. I bought a few books on it (Bossypants by Tina Fey, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris,  those kinds of light entertainment that are just long enough to make you feel smart for finishing them even though they were full of penis jokes) and settled down for the plane ride to Santa Fe which I was taking that same day. Giving it a chance was a mistake. I was basically glued to that contraption for the entire week we spent in New Mexico. It was so handy! I finished two whole books on that thing, something I have never before done in the course of a mere seven days. There was no risk of reading a page, only to discover that you had just read that exact same page the last time you put the book down. If your D.H Lawrence became too heavy for you, all you had to do was press the little house button and select your favorite piece of teen romance trash for a quick brain-cleanser. Kindles are conniving evil geniuses, bent on brainwashing the human race into throwing away all their well-loved paperbacks in substitute for a cold, heartless piece of machinery and oh my God I love my Kindle so much.
   And so, all biases aside, I really do like having a Kindle. I started rereading Lolita three days ago and I'm already 64% through it! (I know this because it says so at the bottom of the page, not because I'm some crazy mathematician who calculates the percentage at which she reads things. That would be weird.) Oh, and for all you people who have read my Lolita-based blog posts, rereading Lolita is a really good idea. I missed so many important parts, along with unimportant parts that were equally beautiful. Humbert's obsession with Lo is rooted all the way back to his childhood, where he had a little love affair with a girl named Annabel who he tried to have sex with a couple of times, but was always caught by either Annabel's parents or some ribald-talking sailors. The girl died shortly after they departed from some disease which I can't remember. So in a way, Lo is a little recreation of his Annabel, made to numb the grief of an untimely death. I can't believe I missed that the first time. I mean, I read it, of course, but I didn't actually absorb it. Oops.
   Anyways, I know that this blog post isn't necessarily based on one certain book, but it does go into the details of several, so I figured it would be a suitable entry for a day when I wasn't even supposed to write a blog post in the first place. Whatever. I just wanted to rant about books and such. Enjoy the rest of your break, O reader, My reader! (O reader, My reader is a phrase used by Humbert Humbert several times in the book, and I found it sort of old-timey and romantic, even though in this context it's sort of uncalled for.)

Breakfast of Champions? More like Breakfast of What-fresh-hell.

Hi guys. It's almost ten am. I was not planning to get up this early. Also, my dog has eaten all the christmas stocking stuffers. So I needed some cheering up. This should help.
 So, last week, I was talking to my dad about books I had been reading recently, and how now that I was finished with all of them, I had nothing to read but the trashy teen novel I was given for free after volunteering at Trick or Trolley. He promptly took me to his inner sanctum (i.e the workout room/ library/ art studio/ place where he keeps his nice suits) and loaded me up with four books that he thought I would like. There was The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, which I knew nothing about but was attracted to by the epic red clouds on the cover. There was also The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, which didn't really look like the devastatingly beautiful and thoughtful fiction I was looking for. The third book was a couple of short stories by J.D Salinger. I actually did start to read that one, but I remembered my previous attempts of reading two books by the same author in succession usually just makes me tire of the author's writing style and compare it to the first book I read. Since nothing can be compared to Catcher in the Rye, I resolved to save the book for a later date. The final book was called Breakfast of Champions. It's written by Kurt Vonnegut, who can be most easily identified by his book Slaughterhouse Five.
  I read a good third of Breakfast of Champions before finally setting it down in temporary defeat. This book is weird. First of all, the narrator of the book refers to the way we know the planet Earth as a thing of the past, so it can only be assumed that this book is being written by someone who lives in the future but is old enough to remember everything from the past, though nobody else he is addressing seems to. He feels the need to explain to whoever his audience is what certain mundane things are, things that we of this time period would be very familiar with. He also draws what these things are. There are these crude little illustrations in the book. One of them is a butt hole. I am extremely perplexed as to why these people that the narrator is addressing wouldn't even be aware of what a butt hole looks like. He drew it like an asterisk. So, weird, yes, but also hilarious. Also, this narrator keeps talking about things like he has made them. I'm beginning to theorize that this book is supposed to have been written by God, or the Creator of the Universe, as characters in the book call him. It's an interesting idea, I must admit, but interesting as it is, it also makes the book really confusing.
  The narrator is not the only weird part of the book. One of the main characters is a writer of science fiction stories named Kilgore Trout. Several times so far, the book has gone into long descriptions of his stories. They are so long, in fact, that they make me forget the actual plot of the book and so I think that this is the plot, and then it goes back into some guy driving to a Holiday Inn and I'm more confused than ever. The stories are, in my opinion, a lot more entertaining than the actual plot of the book. All about aliens who go to see porn that's really just a family eating for hours and hours and then throwing a bunch of leftovers away. It's really, really interesting. The book will probably get more interesting as it progresses, but as of now, it's just confusing.
   I read Breakfast of Champions for a lot of the day yesterday, but at bedtime, I was beginning a chapter and I finally gave up. I'm going to save this book for when I'm in the right frame of mind, because right now it's just like I took a bunch of Nyquil and I'm having fever dreams. I started reading Carrie instead, which I know I like and am never confused by. I'll probably write about it tomorrow. As for now, sleep tight, ya morons.        

Lolita!

I finished Lolita last night. You know that good feeling you get when you finish a book and you close it and you're holding it and feeling the thickness of it and thinking "Yeah, I just absorbed all of that." Imagine that feeling, but then add it to the feeling of being completely emotionally drained. That was how I felt. I know I've said this before, but in case you didn't catch it: You must read this book. It's so good, you guys. I can't even. The whole thing is like one long, beautiful poem. I know that F. Scott Fitzgerald is my lover, and he always will be, of course, but maybe I could have a little something on the side with Vladimir Nabokov. He hasn't got that billion dollar face like Fitzgerald, but wow, the man could write. I would just have him write me things and then read them to me for hours and hours. Hold on. I'm going to go get the book so I can find you some quotes I liked.
  Oh my God, you guys, I couldn't find it for a minute and I almost pooped myself with fear. But it's okay. I found it. Anyways. This is the first line of the book.

   "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta"

 What alliteration. Seriously, for a man whose first language is Russian, he's really mastered the English language. It's fantastic.

  The way he describes Lolita is also truly magnificent. I didn't know there were that many beautiful words in the English language. He paints the most surreal, vivid images. I never want to see the movie that was made based on this book because I feel like they couldn't find a girl beautiful enough to live up to the expectations Nabokov has set for us.

 "I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint of her shorts..."

The part about the imprint made by her shorts was what got me. Talk about getting into specifics.

"We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night---every night, every night---the moment I feigned sleep."

That is possibly my favorite part in the whole book. It made me cry for five minutes.
Well, that's enough gushing as I'm sure you can stand for today. I'm at a loss for what book I should read next, so if you've got a suggestion or two, I'd love to see it in the comments.
 

Humbert Humbert needs to go.

Attention: Spoiler alert! If you plan on reading Lolita before your memory has the chance to lose this information, stop reading now!

For all the rest of you, I have changed my opinions drastically since my last blog post regarding Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's work of poetic genius. When we left off, I was sympathetic towards the shy, kindly pedophile, Humbert Humbert. I'm not saying that I completely hate him now, but there was a good long period in the book where I wanted to jump within the pages and punch him repeatedly in the mouth. There was a point in the book where a lot of things became clear to me, and they all came in rapid succession. "Jesus Christ. Lolita is twelve. She's twelve. Humbert took her away from her home. He lied about her mother's death for weeks and weeks. He made her pleasure him and gave her money for it. He used sexual favors like they were her daily chores. And he expects her to be grateful to him. That rotten, sick, twisted butt nugget." Humbert mentions at one point that ever since she left her home with him, she has cried herself to sleep every night, the minute that he pretends to be asleep. And suddenly I wasn't siding with Humbert anymore. He was, in a way, unspeakably cruel and thoughtless towards her. He put her through more stress and trauma and grown-up situations than any pre-pubescent girl should have to go through. He is in many ways as childish as Lolita is. He's shockingly selfish. He married Charlotte to get close to Lolita and never once thought of either of their feelings on the subject, or how he could hurt poor Charlotte. He touched Lolita, in her own home, while her mother was out. And she let him because it was exciting to her, to be touched by a handsome, older man. It made her feel good about herself. Humbert realized that, but he did it anyways. He took advantage of her. He is also jealous and possessive, in a way that is almost fearful. He controls nearly every aspect of Lolita's life. He hardly lets her participate in any socializing or activities after school for fear that she'll meet boys while she's out. He deprived her of everything that a girl should have when she's growing up. If you really think about it, he's only looked out for himself, ever. Sure, he claims that he's hopelessly in love with Lolita, that he would do anything for her, but he's never done anything for her. He buys stuff for her, but that's not enough and it never will be because he made her touch him while other people were around, and he drugged her the first time he tried to make love to her so that she would be asleep, and he lied to her and controlled her and trapped her in his love. It's gotten to a point where it's not devastatingly romantic anymore. It's just devastating.