pirates pirates pirates!

As all of you are no doubt aware, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 comes out today/has come out today. And this is a very exciting event. I am going to see it tonight, dressed as a pirate. In preparation for this I have spent the whole day in the library, dressed as a pirate. Luckily my pirate costume is not too outstandingly piratical, but I did feel that I attracted some funny looks on the way in to uni. Maybe I am just being paranoid/self-centred. But my pirate costume is fabulous :p

Anyway, that is very exciting and merits a post in itself. The rest of my day has also been exciting, if less so, and slightly less than ideally productive. I feel like I have been moving along on my thesis slowly but steadily until about a week ago, at which point my working practice broke down almost completely and I spent far too much time watching Rage. Now I am working on essays.
My major distraction today came from the books on level 9, the story of which I started last blog post but left unfinished. When on Monday I went to look at them a passing fellow book-looker-at-or informed me that they were free for postgraduates only, so I became anxious, perused them thoroughly and left them alone. Today I discovered that not only are they free for all (note that well dear reader, and feel free to liberate books and save them from certain pulping, but pass by lending services on level 3 first to get them de-sensitised) but also one of the books I marked out in my perusal was recommended to me as pre-reading for an essay! I was there in a flash, and on my way ran into my friend Theo, informed him of the free books, and we continued to level 9 together. So now I am the proud owner of: A Manual of the Writings in Middle English Volume 1: Romances, Arthurian Literature and Society and Eugenio Montale: Selected Poems (translated from Italian to English). The last was recommended by Theo, and as he is currently doing a PhD on Italian poetry I guess he should know. There are alot of good-looking books there, surprisingly as they have been giving them away for 6 months, on most subjects. Alot on DH Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Chaucer (from the English literature section) but also books on law, economics, education, and probably alot of other subjects that I wasn't bothered looking at. You might even find course text books.

During my search I found I was looking for some quite specific things, which they didn't actually have, and which led to me making up a list in my mind of Books I Want, which I thought was handy. I may go sometime and hunt them down with the aid of my trusty book vouchers. They are:
- Klaeber's edition of Beowulf
- A collection of poetry by WH Auden
- Collections of Folk and Fairy Tales (reminds me that I wanted that Annotated Brothers Grimm)
Actually I should use some of those books vouchers soon, so any book recommendations are welcome. (Thesis, what thesis?)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

famous first words

Skimming through the internet the other day I came across a reference to a line of startling familiarity, a line that made me realise some first lines stick in your head forever: "Sing Goddess, the rage of Peleus' son Achilles" (funnily enough,  I can never remember the first line proper until I see it, as my friend and I spent much of year 12 Ancient History misquoting it as "rage Achilles, rage on Agamemnon". We were also amused by the fact that 'Xerxes' backwards spelt 'Sexrex'. Yeah, mature I know.) From Homer, The Illiad Ironically, a first line that I find impossible to remember is one of the most recognisable for me. I'm not usually very good at first lines, but there are a few I'd know anywhere... "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote" My English classes at university drummed this one into me- the first line of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'. I think Chaucer is a genius, but this first line is not quite ...
Read more

To Start With, Quotes

From my little black book. Sign outside Branxton: "Drive carefully, we have two cemetaries, no hospital" Tombstone, Tilba cemetary: "Whiffo gone fishing A free spirited man who is forever in our hearts" "Heinz tomato ketchup makes food taste KETCHUPPY" - tomato sauce bottle "I was just wondering how I ever could have laughed at you" "I hope you'll always laugh at me" The Day Will Dawn, cheesy movie from 1942 "Each man kills the thing he loves" The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde Ad outside Japanese restaurant in Sydney city "Sexy chicken on rice" "I don't own a house or a car, all I have is a borrowed tv, but that's what you get when you take off and travel." Random bus stop conversation “She had a voice with hormones” ‘A Woman’s Secret’, 1949 movie “Oolong Imperial: A work of tea art” Tea rooms in the city “The burdens and the joys of being chosen to be more than a flu...
Read more

on verse

I had alot of time to kill on the bus trip back from Canberra, and so I was reading through my English textbook (The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, so not too bad at all)for about three hours. This is just so that you understand the cotext in which I came up with the idea for this post. Why do people always associate poetry with rhyme? It doesn't have to be the case. And I think that most people would know that alot of poetry doens't rhyme, or is at least not in rhyming couplets. This is not even a new idea. It's not just these new-fangled poets who dispense with tradition and so rhyme. Old English poetry doesn't rhyme, it alliterates instead. Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse which means NO RHYMING. Robert Browning doesn't always write in rhyme. In short, poetry doesn't necessarily equal rhyme even before the 21st century. Now, I have to confess that I am a bit biased in this as I always thought that rhyming couplets tend to sound silly. And abab...
Read more