(3.3 Books/Month Average)
1. End of the Circle
2. Foley’s Luck
3. Tea & Sympathy
4. The Golden Ass
5. The Princess De Cleves
6. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
7. Candida
8. Agamemnon
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Lysistrata
11. Getting Beyond “How Are You?”
12. Hedda Gabler
13. The Farlander Papers
14. The Merchant of Venice
15. C.S. Lewis and His World
16. The Cherry Orchard
17. The Three Sisters
18. Much Ado About Nothing
19. Henry IV, Part I
20. Long Day’s Journey Into Night
21. Summer and Smoke
22. A Streetcar Named Desire
23. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
24. Hamlet
25. Orlando
26. The Trial
27. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
28. King Lear
29. Curse of the Starving Class
30. Jazz
31. Equus
32. Burn This
33. Anna Karenina
34. Neuromancer
35. The Novel
36. Jurassic Park
37. Count Zero
38. The Lies We Believe
39. The Last Command
40. A Chorus of Stones
41. Burning Chrome
42. Mona Lisa Overdrive
Books I Read in 1993
Irish Coffee
I have my first alcoholic beverage at a restaurant while out with my mom.
That’s right, I never touched alcohol until I was 21. Unless you count the diluted rumpopo my mom gave me as a child.
Dichotomy
The mood provokes writing. The dark steaminess of the bar envelopes me like I’m wearing a soaking wet trenchcoat. I’m smoking because it gives me a sense of adding something physical to the atmosphere; it is my aura. I sit there, looking through the wall, the scene, everything, and I think about ordering a drink. Something with a bite. Something that will make the bartender raise an eyebrow and the patrons turn their heads with my favorite mixture of disgust and respect. Continue reading →
When There’s Nothing Left to Say
When there’s nothing left to say
And I’m standing here breathing
Into the receiver which has been stuffed
With the black marshmallows of your silence,
And the phone is a plastic leech
Nursing warmly at my earlobe,
I realize that the picture on my wall
Of Bora Bora
Is not Bora Bora at all,
But a beach on Kokomo
That has been made to look exactly like
A beach at Bora Bora.
Now that I am on to the fact that
Someone is going around creating flawless facsimiles
Of tropical islands,
I had better be pretty damn sure
That Key Largo really is Key Largo
Because that’s where I’m going
To forget that “we” ever gave each other anything more than
Furtive glances.
I know you think that I’ll never carve pumpkins again
Because only “we” carved pumpkins
In that special exclusive way,
And I should want to keep those moments sacred.
But you’re wrong.
I’ll sit there on the beach at Key Largo
And carve a pumpkin every fucking day
And it won’t mean a thing to me.
Sometimes there’ll be a girl there
To help me carve the pumpkin.
Yes, hon, a girl; someone other than yourself.
In fact, there’ll be a different girl every day!
And when we’re done carving that pumpkin,
We’ll roll naked in the sand
And the pumpkin meat.
There’ll be little almond-shaped seeds
Plastered all over us
And I will not be thinking about you at all.
You, of course, are oblivious to all of this.
You believe I should be concerned with the fact that
One day you woke up to find that your safe little world
Was really made of slinkies and tinker toys.
I remain silent on the phone.
I let you think I’m thinking about you thinking that I’m thinking About what you thought I said to you.
But I’m not thinking that at all.
I’m thinking that I’d rather dangle my balls
In a piranha tank
Than give you the satisfaction of weeping into the phone,
Cracking open my heart,
Making me say “Sorry, I’m sorry. It’s okay.”
You’re not going to get that from me this time.
All you can hear now is the muffled bubbling of your voice
As I drown you.
I flush and flush,
But you won’t fit down the hole
And the coiled umbilical cord stretches taught,
Trying to stay attached to my world.
It doesn’t matter.
I’m gone.
I’m off to Key Largo
Or whatever the fuck they’re calling it today.
Dominique
My niece, Dominique, is born. At first I was angry with my sister for getting pregnant. Now I hate ever feeling that way. Dominique is beautiful and wonderful.
She shares her birthday with Dave.
Fake Dream
This is not a real dream. It was the fake dream I wrote for a “Fool the Class” writing exercise where the class had to guess which dream was real. The real dream was the Cow Catapult dream.
I floated along by the fountain beside the Union Building, except that the Union Building wasn’t there. It was some sort of convenience store or a video rental place. When I dream that I can fly, I’m always standing upright, levitating.
My roommate sat in a chair reading. As I passed by, I realized that we hadn’t started to unpack our stuff. School had been in session for several weeks and our room was still bare.
I turned to look across the street, but found the wall to my dorm room instead. I was inside, sitting on the bed. My schedule card was in my hand and I was trying to read it. But I couldn’t understand what it said. It was a punch card like they used in old computers. Everyone else could understand it except me. Somehow I realized that there was a class I had completely forgotten to go to.
I was with Dave again. I told him about my schedule. We were walking casually along, even though I was about 3 weeks late for a class. He was telling me about a new Star Wars movie that was coming out.
Cow Catapult Dream
The meadow and sky were digital, having the fuzzy electric glow around the edges like a television screen. Images flashed by like a deck of cards, an MTV visual assault. National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, Wild Kingdom. The Sudan. A dry tan prairie with a Joshua tree. Snap back to the meadow.
A cow stood in the meadow. Solid, thick, seemingly a statue. From offstage to the right, an unseen catapult flung another bovine into the air. It spun through the sky, unmoving, and landed on the other cow. They immediately began to mate. I was reminded of some Monty Python cardboard cut-out animation sequence. More cows were flung into the meadow, until there was a writhing mass of mooing creatures there in a single mound.
Grumbling, an undercurrent of narration spilled along in the background, as though the whole display was a nature documentary. I felt embarrassed. I turned away.
Friends and Lovers
Begin my junior year at DePauw. I am rooming with Dave, who will become one of my best friends. Ryan is the RA. He also becomes one of my best friends. We all live in Hogate. We live in an experiment known as the “Substance-Free Floor.” Ironically enough, I go on to violate just about every rule.
Upon my return from Fall Break, Dave and Ryan convince me that Dave has decided to pledge a fraternity. I fall for it, only because I believed that Ryan was unable to lie.
I break up with Kerry.
I meet Beth.
I meet Cathy.
I start creating the Chronicle of the Pages world, later renamed DreamPunk.
I meet Alex Arevalo, the crazy Columbian.
In the Cathedral
Andre Monserrat
The Novel
5/13/93
Final Paper
IN THE CATHEDRAL
The element of the religious in Kakfa’s The Trial
When examining The Trial, one can see Kafka’s satire of a labyrinthine bureaucracy on one hand and a commentary on the religious institution on the other. It is this latter commentary that I wish to discuss in this paper. While there are allusions to religion scattered throughout the novel, I would like to concentrate on the chapter entitled “In the Cathedral,” which I believe to be the most religiously saturated part of the text. Continue reading →
Books I Read in 1992
(1.7 Books/Month Average)
1. Johnathan Livingston Seagull
2. The New Testament
3. Leaving Home
4. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
5. The Horse and His Boy
6. Prince Caspian
7. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
8. The Silver Chair
9. The Last Battle
10. Mere Christianity
11. Dark Force Rising
12. The Devil’s Hand
13. Know Why You Believe
14. The Glass Menagerie
15. The Old Testament
16. Dark Powers
17. The Tempest
18. Death Dance
19. World Killers
20. Rubicon