Just a Snippet

I will write more soon, I promise :) But in the mean time, here is a new piece I wrote about Austin photographer Jo Ann Santangelo.

Some "yay"-worthy news and updates:

• The current issue of Dovetail Journal contains an article I wrote entitled "Darkness and Light." Though the journal focuses on interfaith couples that are Jewish and Christian, I wrote about my personal experiences being in a relationship that is (culturally) Hindu-Christian. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to access the piece, but I thought I would mention it in case anyone subscribes.
  
  
• An editor at Alive Magazine contacted me about publishing a travel piece I wrote. Pretty excited on that one, and will post a link when it's out (August issue).
  

TSS Week 11

I fell in love with The Accidental in the beginning. It is narrated by five different characters, and the first - Astrid, a 12 year old girl - totally captivated me. I loved her instantly and was hooked. The next, her 17 year old brother Magnus, was also done extremely well. The adults, however, were not as interesting. I found myself going through their parts just to get to the kids again.

The first half of the plot was intriguing, but after that, it just fell. Smith lost the magic and seemed to get away with no real resolution or ending at all. This disappointed me because it had such potential, and I had such high hopes. Kudos to her for creating a couple of fantastic characters, though.


I also just finished I, Lucifer, a novel I have been wanting to read since I saw it in a bookstore years ago. The cover says, "Finally, the other side of the story," which piqued my interest. I am well-versed in the Bible and Judeo-Christian traditions, and I love when people take a familiar story and redo it (The Red Tent is an all-time favorite). Anyway, this novel turned out to be less about Satan's retelling of cosmic history and more of an illuminating portrait of Satan himself. Who is he, what motivates him, is he really so bad? These are questions the reader finds her/himself asking. Duncan does a fabulous job of humanizing Satan without being unrealistic - every so often he reminds you that you cannot really believe a word he says. You learn to analyze Satan intuitively, without trusting his opinions of himself. The ending was perfect, fitting and satisfying. I loved it.

This is a meme I took from Stu. It is a list of banned books - I will be bolding the ones I've read and completed and italicizing ones I've sort of read :)

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran (excerpts)
#5 Arabian Nights (almost entirely)
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (children's version as a child)
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (excerpts for a class)
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (only read Song of Myself)
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (half)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (started it, abandoned it)
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (many times!)
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (started it, abandoned it when I was 19)
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (childhood)
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair (excerpts for a class)
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys (excerpts for a class)
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (read half, been meaning to finish)
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (many times!)
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (summer reading assignment when I was 13)
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud (excerpts)
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (many times!)
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George (in 5th grade, don't remember much)
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (childhood)
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (most of it)
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I have a brand new piece out at Nü Magazine about my friend and talented artist, Kate Payne.

Eight months ago, I was Asok the Intern. Now I'm Dilbert. Things are looking up. I am well on my way to becoming cynical and jaded in the workforce.

You are DILBERT...swept up in your surroundings, you, the average worker, just try to get along with it.

Which Dilbert character are you?

TSS Week 10

I am reading a book of essays by Ray Bradbury entitled Zen in the Art of Writing. I stumbled across it at the library. In the past, I read Fahrenheit 451 like most but didn't find it all that exciting. Instead, I have had a love affair for years with The Martian Chronicles.

This book of essays on our beautiful craft is already inspiring me beyond belief, and I only just started. Here are some fabulous quotes I came across so far:

• "First and foremost, [writing] reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
  
  So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
  
  Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.
  
  Not to write, for many of us, is to die."
  
  
• "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
  

I can't put it down; it has gripped me like non-fiction rarely does. Alternately, I also feel inspired to throw the book down and run and write every few minutes, which is exactly what such a book should make me feel.