anyone live in a pretty how town

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Oh, I love this crazy man. LOVE. If he was still alive, I would camp out in front of his house and yell ‘Mr. Cummings! What kind of punctuation are you using on your latest piece?” and screech like a fan girl.

And no, it is not because I am a weird lover of all things grammar and punctuation. It’s just unique and interesting, plain and simple.
Many feel poetry is simply too girly, too lyrical, too ‘petals on dew, I love you forevermore nevermore, roses are blue’
Not the case, I say. Not the case at all. Cummings took poetry to a new level, in my humble opinion. He made true art with words by playing with the positioning and punctuation.
Your eyes are forced to dance around the page from phrase to phrase, and there’s something just purely…fun about it. I can read the same poem twenty times and discover some little detail each time to make me love it even more. It's a literary treasure chest! Hurrah!

Also, imagine getting this from your son:
FATHER DEAR. BE, YOUR FATHER-GOOD AND GOOD,HE IS GOOD NOW, IT IS NOT GOOD TO SEE IT RAIN,FATHER DEAR IS, IT, DEAR, NO FATHER DEAR,LOVE, YOU DEAR,ESTLIN.
He wrote that when he was 6! Can we say prodigy? When I have kids, if they write me something like that, I'm hunting them down a book deal right away. All I'm saying it, man was creative. Imagination up to the treetops.

So, if you hate poetry- I beg you to reconsider. Jump in to something unusual like cummings, and maybe you'll appreciate the whole genre a bit more.

Or maybe you'll hate it, but that's okay- my love for e.e.cummings can combat a thousand haters.

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. "
If anyone could turn me into an optimist, it is this man. Maximus love, Mr. Cummings.

Memoirs of someone supposedly important?

Memoirs, how I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

First of all, this is absolutely not saying that I hate all memoirs. There are some that are very well written which I enjoyed reading immensely.
However, often a memoir is simply a 300-page journal, leaving me thinking '...why did I need to read this? Do I really care?'

You have experienced illness. You have experienced family issues. You have experienced grief, pain, happiness, enlightenment, men, women, tomatoes, I get that.
But the question to be posed is, what makes your experiences worth a book while every single person has unique experiences, and they certainly don't write a book about them.

Some people have led truly amazing lives, or on the opposite side of the spectrum, truly heartbreaking ones. Do I need to receive a magnifying probe into your moments of deepest sadness and suffering? It's uncomfortable to read sometimes. It leaves me slightly uneasy, like I've been secretly spying into someone's life without permission.

Memoirs just feel intrusive to me. Like I have no right to be jumping into someone's head and splashing around in their sorrows.

That said, there are a select few that I have read a few times. Not because they are great pieces of literature, but simply because they deal with issues that are familiar to me, and somehow it makes me feel better to know someone else has been through it.

How's that for a downer post?

Spasiba!

Okay, who loves Russians? The lit slut does!
I'm not even going to lie. I love those little fur coat wearing, pipe smoking, father-killing citizens.

Raskolnikov? I loved that crazy bastard. If I ever planned a murder, that's how I'd do it. NOT THAT I'M PLANNING A MURDER! Don't turn in my blog, I swear, I'm innocent! To get inside his psyche was awesome, is all I'm saying.

Nabokov? Anyone who could write something as weird as Lolita is a-okay in my books. Not that I'm promoting child kidnapping and such. It was just really well written.

Oh god, we're getting off to a horrible start.

And how can you forget good old Gogol. Dead Souls? Loved the concept.

Sure, some say 'But I can't remember who's who? Why do their names all end in 'ski' and 'kov'? BECAUSE THEY'RE AWESOME, that's why.


Ahem.


Read some Russians!
Not in Russian, of course, unless you actually speak it, in which case you are officially awesome.

That's all.