Wanderlust: Ireland Edition

Have you been to Ireland?  I haven't, and I would love to go!  My darling sister Ursula wants to live there when she grows up... and I must say, I don't blame her!

Rolling fields and winding stone walls...

High cliffs and cold Northern oceans...

And ships for my darling Kuzu!

Have you been to Ireland?  Tell me about it!

(photos from here)

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Or, I Get Excited About Books

On Tuesday Dave lent me David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," a collection of short stories and essays and general DFW musings.  I've read it before, but it's been a little while and I forgot how lovely it is.  This happens with books for me, which is quite nice.  I love being able to get excited about books, to gasp audibly when something happens even when it's a book that I've loved forever and ever.  I get excited and nervous every time I read "The Silver Chair" or "The Subtle Knife," the books I grew up with.  I can read "The Bone People" over and over and still be absolutely astonished at the incredible quality of the writing (Keri Hulme, I love you).
Do you re-read books?  Do they still make you happy and excited and scared?
(Picture drawn by the incredible Julianna Swaney of Oh My Cavalier!)

Treehouses

Today, this is where I would like to live:

It's a treehouse for grownups!  Doesn't it seem like the perfect place to eat steel-cut oats and apple cider on autumn mornings and play the guitar on summer nights?

From here.

So I Really Like Autumn

It's interesting getting used to Portland in the fall.  A work in progress, definitely: yesterday the rain threw me for a bit of a loop, to be honest.
But I love autumn the best - I love the trees changing and the way it smells like snow and apple cider (hot or cold) and the way the wind bites through your jacket.   And I love studying biology and gossiping with my girlfriends and eating popcorn and drinking hot chocolate until midnight (which may or may not have been exactly what happened last night).
What is your favourite season?
(photo from here)

Attendance

My lovely friend Anna made me a biology study guide the other day (it's incredible), but she also does other super-incredible things.
One of those things is her webcomic, Attendance, which you should all go read.
I'm serious.  It's beautiful.  Thank you, Anna!

Happy Centennial Weekend!

This weekend at Reed it's the centennial, so my school's been around for 100 years!  That's exciting, no?  Today there'll be concerts and tomorrow there will be explosions courtesy of the chemistry department and - well, it's sure to be amazing, is all.
Tomorrow my boy and I are going on a breakfast picnic down in the canyon and then watching Doctor Who... what are you doing this weekend?
(flowers make me kind of happy.  From here.)

Consider The Lobster, or, DFW, Again

Today I finished “Consider the Lobster,” a collection of essays and articles by David Foster Wallace, and I have mixed feelings about it.  Finishing it, I mean.
Today is a good day for me to finish it on one hand.  I like symmetry and balance and literary elegance in reality, and this fits that bill to an extent.  The boy who leant it to me (who has appeared here once or twice as D, I think) leant it to me exactly a week ago, and to give it back to him after (or before) a cappella, in some ways a reminder of who we were a week ago, is nice.  And the stories were excellent: grammar and the 2000 McCain campaign and Dostoyevsky and the rise of talk radio were all thrilling and engaging and my friends got quite sick of me carrying the book everywhere and strong-arming them into talking about it with me, even though they hadn’t read it.  And I like the feeling of completing something, of accomplishment and reflection that finishing a book incites for me.  I like that I will be able to go back to Dave (I think it’ll be okay if I use his actual name here) and tell him how much I loved the stories, how unbelievably grateful I am to him for lending it to me.  I am excited to talk about the book as a whole and not just do what we’ve been doing, talking about each story one at a time, because although they were published at different times and in different things, seeing the anthology as a whole book is really nice.
You may recall some blog posts on Infinite Jest.  I remember picking it up in Shakespeare & Company and reading it on my April holiday, being totally engrossed in the world of the Entertainment and tennis and the AA program while sitting in Paris and Morocco, unable to tear myself away from the book.  I remember practically begging Mike to read it (sorry, Mike) and being slightly disappointed (again, sorry, Mike) when he got stuck some two hundred pages in with footnotes and the need for the OED and stopped.  I love Infinite Jest.  I love how DFW somehow pulled me into this alternate Massachusetts, where suddenly bits of home were recognizable and others weren’t, where a bit of French was hugely helpful to understanding what was going on, and for the first time in my life a footnote made me cry.  I remember finishing Infinite Jest and feeling so full, so glad that I had read the book, but also empty.  That book was done, there wasn’t going to be another first time for me to read it, and I had devoured one of the finite DFW tomes out there.
For those of you who don’t know, David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008.  He has written some short stories and two finished novels and some essays in different anthologies, and one huge unfinished novel.  But that’s it.  After I’m done with those, there is no more David Foster Wallace for the first time, no diving into encyclopaedic tomes that are almost too heavy to hold up for a while, no more excitement of finding that next book.  At some point, I will have read all of them, and it will be over.
So today in the library, after I had read all of the bio stuff for our exam on Tuesday, I finished “Consider the Lobster” and just sat there for a while.  It feels empty to have finished this book and to know that there aren’t a million more out there, a million more that he’s writing right now.  I think, though, that it’s probably the right day for me to finish these.  I’ve had them for a week, and enjoyed them hugely, devoured them at dinners with friends and breakfasts alone with tea before everyone else is awake and in my room when I should be doing my French homework.  These stories, these essays and articles and reviews are done, and that’s okay.