Interlude - walt whitman poetry

I needed a quick break today so I decided to find something online to read. It had to be short and it had to be striking. Poetry (well, good poetry) fits the bill and this is what I ended up with A Woman Waits For Me by Walt Whitman

I particularly liked these lines:

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,
In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,
The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers, 35
The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,
I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,

Dark Tower 3

Finished up book two of the Dark Tower and have started on Book 3. So far, I am liking this one better. I think what I didn't like too much about the other one was the jaunts into "our" world. I am much more interested in the world that has moved on and is inhabited by lobstrosities and gigantic parasitically-infested cyborg bears.

I got the Battle for the Abyss - a Black Library book about Warhammer 40k but decided to wait til my trip next week to read it.

So yeah, so far, Book 3 is good.

Oh, also, I downloaded The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen from project Gutenberg after hearing Stephen King mention it as inspiration for one of the stories in his new collection of short stories.

Now that I am starting to get the logging of books read more as a habit I think I might start posting some thoughts, lines I liked, things I didn't - stuff like that.

Dark Tower 2, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

For English I had to read "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock" by T.S. Eliot. The first time I read it I thought, "meh." Dr Berchin made us read and reread it and then write papers on it and told us how wrong we were and sent us back to it. I have to say, at this point, with just a bare understanding of it, I am really starting to like it. It is a classic and for a reason. If you haven't read it yet, it is in a zillion places online - here I will save you the trouble of googling it.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock

This line jumped out at me the first time I read it and it strikes me every time I reread it - "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"



I am now reading book two of The Dark Tower series by Stephen King - I am about half way through and so far it feels almost more like 3 novellas tied together by Roland than it's own story - presumably that will change. King is very good at creating characters that I don't particularly like as people and can be a bit folksy in his writing, but that is something that I love about him. Art is about feeling, no?

As an aside - it was a pain to find that cover - I didn't realize I had a UK version (got it at the old Page One Too before it was merged.)

And I'd like to close with this nugget of wisdom from Jim Phillips, front man of the great rock band Lousy Robot -

"Lots of things are gonna screw you in this world. Art never will."

Finished Titanicus

Finished Titanicus up last week. Haven't really started anything new yet. Titanicus was pretty awesome. I was just reading it along thinking, okay this is a standard kinda good Abnett book, then about 2/3 of the way in he drops the bomb and it is like, woah...

Another satisfying read from Mr Abnett.