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Feminism, Sexism and Other Misunderstood Things

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I am probably currently contemplating my failure as a poet. Feel free to say hello. :)

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An S Club Party. Anyone? No?

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I miss Latin. :(

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Sea in the Tree Tops

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Saint in the Stained Glass Window

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Yes.

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Profile Information

What Kind of Nerdfighter Are You?

An English Literature, Italian Opera, Feminist, Atheist Nerdfighter.

About Me:

I like to write, sing and play the piano. And I fail utterly at sports. I correct people a lot. So often that they now come to me to correct their English essays.
I play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata to release stress. Some people think that would make you more worked up, but I disagree.

There are currently around 130 books in my small bedroom. I say around, but I counted. I'm just that kind of girl.

Please go ahead and talk to me, but spell correctly. Or I will correct you. Have no doubt about this.

Favorite Books, Movies, Music, and more

The Great Gatsby, A Doll's House, Three Sisters, White is for Witching, Revolutionary Road, The Colour Purple, A Great And Terrible Beauty, all Terry Pratchett books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Beloved, A Beautiful Mind, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, As I Lay Dying, The Crucible, The Catcher In The Rye, The Bell Jar; poetry by Sylvia Plath [Ariel, The Colossus], Gillian Clark, Simon Armitage; The Awakening, To The Lighthouse.. and so on..

What's your favorite thing to put on your head?

My blonde waves/curls, in a bun or a ponytail. Exciting, I know.

If you could do your happy dance with anyone who would it be with?

Sylvia Plath.

When did you start watching B20

2008

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Megan's Blog

Sea in the Tree Tops

Um, so.. yeah. I started about three terrible poems that I ended up completely crossing out before I got to this one, so who knows.

Sea in the Tree Tops

Winds slide as currents through branches
and stir from the leaves a gentle hissing
mimicking the rise and fall of waves,
pure and lilting along sand in
burbling surges of white-flecked clarity.

Sparrows weave through open air as
fish in deep emptiness dodge between currents,
sailing on breezes whistling invisibly
with silvered, air-lined bone… Continue

Posted on September 3, 2009 at 5:24pm —

Saint in the Stained Glass Window

New poeeem.

Saint in the Stained Glass Window

Welcome to your house.
Would you like to die here?
Pour your useless rubies forth
On to the forgiving floor,
Scarlet filling the cracks in the slabs
And soaking out with it,
Your pain, drenching the ground.

Floods of it that even Noah couldn't sail on.
I am interested by this.
They whisper before me, like
Little forgotten breezes stirring dust
And voicing the dwindling cries of the dead.

They think I cry when it rains.
I do not cry. I care nothin… Continue

Posted on September 2, 2009 at 4:56pm —

The Night Deer

Well, I actually quite like this one. I'm having a creative phase lately. Well done brain. *pats head* :)

The Night Deer

The quiet of midnight should be preserved.
It is of a liquidised moonsilver and
an almost-dew dark, cleverness
in the stillness of air that is fresh
as though shifted by some absent breeze.

Why they seek to disrupt it, I do not know;
with their sluggish, deadheart grey tracks
and lights burning as though they had
caught the sun itself and warped it
to their purpose;… Continue

Posted on August 18, 2009 at 4:30pm —

Lake

We're having a productive evening/morning, apparently! Ah, the joys of insomnia and hating all my previous work so much that I am simply forced to create more to share my loathing with.

Lake

Glass surface chills the death air
and herons pause in dense trees,
crowded close for protection
at the edge of the ominous pool.

The cold in the air stings and spreads
and the imagined snow falls
somewhere else, far away.

The exacting, pointed blue steals life
and replaces it with perpetuation
(… Continue

Posted on August 17, 2009 at 5:49pm — 2 Comments

Midnight Breaths

There is a fucking fly in my fucking room and it is determined to prevent my sleep. AAAAHHH.

Midnight Breaths

The walls are secretly breathing,
and the books and the slick cardboard
of stacked folders; all beating with an
unstoppable, inescapable pulse
which will search you out
and fill your mouth with words
and seep tendrils into your dreams -
until the noise of a fly disturbs you,
and you catch them moving
out of the corner of your eye,
sneaking little breaths and swelling.

Posted on August 17, 2009 at 5:30pm — 1 Comment

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At 1:46pm on October 26, 2009, emma said…: hi
just thought i let you know - you're very cute!

At 1:09pm on September 2, 2009, Adam J. M. Eagleton said…: No, I've never read Wuthering Heights, but I do love Jane Eyre. My sister has read it, though, and has decided to condemn the Brontë sisters altogether on that evidence. Which is very silly. Did you watch the new adaptation of Wuthering Heights the other day? I thought it was rather good, as period dramas go.

Goodness me. Chopin's Etudes are mostly monstrously difficult, but are some of his most intensely beautiful pieces, I feel. I can't help laughing whenever I hear that Etude in F minor, though, because it reminds me of a Monty Python sketch that is apparently not on YouTube.
Oh, no wait, it's on the end of this one:
I absolutely adore that Etude, actually. Oh, and I've now changed my mind about my favourite Chopin piece: it's this one —
I was told the other day that I look like Chopin, actually. I imagine she meant the Delacroix painting, rather than the photograph in which he's crumpled and swollen with a mystery illness (probably a mild form of cystic fibrosis).

"Any particular Pinter that I should read, then?" I'd recommend Betrayal, The Birthday Party, No Man's Land — here's a brilliant performance of it with Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson —
— The Homecoming, and my personal favourite, his last play Celebration. Here's a superb performance of it starring Sir Michael Gambon:

Also, if you're interested in learning more about Pinter, you should watch his Nobel Prize lecture, "Art, Truth and Politics" (this is the best version I could find on YouTube, regrettably):

You're right about old age: it can be a demeaning and terrible thing. I've seen people become unrecognizable through the process of old age, primarily my grandmother, but I've also had the privilege of knowing several glorious old people. I find old age an endlessly intriguing progression and state, and most of my work tends to involve it in some way, usually without my intention. I do worry, too, about how I'll be when I am elderly (assuming I reach that age, of course). I would like to think that I'd be a sort of Sir Ian McKellen figure, retaining and balancing joviality, nobility, presence and intelligence; but I'll most likely become the mad old poet who totters down to the post office to buy a newspaper and humbugs every day, and to whom nobody speaks because he lashes out at everyone. We'll see, I suppose.

Oh, February 17th is a superb poem, and incredibly moving. I heard him reading it on the Poetry Archive, initially, and it was such a remarkable experience that I bought his Collected Poems (I had already read Birthday Letters, which was my first encounter with Hughes). Hearing him reading his poems is far superior to reading them oneself, I have found.

"It must have been horrendous for him. Poor man." You're right, he was completely devastated by the deaths. When Sylvia killed herself, he wrote in a letter to her mother, "I shall never get over the shock and I don't particularly want to. ... Only in the last month suddenly we became friends, closer than we've been for two years or so. Everything seemed to be prospering for her, and we began to have happy times together. ... I had come to the point where I'd decided we could repair our marriage now. She had agreed to stop the divorce. ... I was going to ask her to come away on the Monday, on holiday, to the coast, some place we had not been. Think of how it must be for me too. ... I don't want ever to be forgiven. I don't mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it." I tend to look on Hughes's infidelity as a kind of wretched compulsion. When he was happy with one woman, he just had to experience the thrill of going off with someone new, and he knew fully that it was destroying the lives of those close to him, as well as his own.

Schoolwork, you mean? Have the schools gone back already? I lose track, and am still on holiday.

I think you'd love Roethke; he's one of my favourite poets.

Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke.

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

At 4:14pm on August 20, 2009, Padraic said…: Funnily enough, the time you chose to send me that link was liuterally a couple of days after I had first made the decision to listen to Bon Iver after at least a year of hearing them described by various institutions (Observer Music Monthly and Rough Trade to name but two) as the creators of the finest album of 2008.

I agree, it is a stupendous song, though personally I am more a fan of this song.

How have you been Hector?

I mean, aside from nursing a gradually growing seed of anxiety, along with every most Yr 11s nation-wide.

At 8:27pm on August 19, 2009, Charles Cranly said…: Okay thank you. Ya so I had only heard the first movement, which I still like the best. Holy crap from a holy cow that guy's fingers move so fast. I wish I could play the piano like that, hell I wish I could play the piano. But ya, the third movement was quite full of epic.

At 5:33pm on August 18, 2009, Her-mee-own said…: I was reading some of your poems, and they are beautiful!
You really have a way with words.

At 10:33pm on August 17, 2009, Adam J. M. Eagleton said…: Yes, the ending is rather disturbing (you should read Pinter: his endings are very disturbing, although occasionally alarmingly moving). I suppose they move on slightly, but his death does affect them, at least. There are some plays (or novels, novellas, poems, etc.) where somebody's death has no impact whatsoever, when you expect it to. "It scares me, the idea that someone can die and nothing will be greatly changed" It scares me, too. In fact, it terrifies me, if I'm honest. But, as Toozenbach says, "Look at that dead tree, it's all dried-up, but it's still swaying in the wind along with the others. And in the same way, it seems to me that, if I die, I shall still have a share in life somehow or other."

Howards End is a brilliant film. I absolutely adore it. I've yet to read the book, though. My experience of Forster is alarmingly sparse: just a few chapters of A Room with a View (the film of that, with Helena Bonham Carter, is also glorious).

That first song just . . . blew me away. It's wonderful, and she has such an unfathomably beautiful voice. The other two were excellent, as well. Thank you very much for introducing me to Priscilla Ahn. :)

"If they had to live in my head too, they'd know." Precisely. The problem that I keep encountering is that people judge me by their own standards and behaviour (as we all do, to varying degrees), and this causes all sorts of bother, because one just can't say, "Well, he behaves like this, so why don't you?" Very rarely, I encounter a person who starts their judgement of me from scratch, and I am always unimaginably thankful for their acquaintance. They tend to be elderly, though, but I enjoy meeting old people.

Oh, Beethoven's a nightmare, but brilliantly enjoyable, I agree. And that was a fantastic performance, I should add. I'm getting extremely annoyed with hearing poor performances of great music lately, especially on Classic FM. They'll announce an excellent piece, and then proceed to play what I can only presume is the worst recording of it, for Bob only knows why. They do play a lot of St. Martin in the Fields, though, so are redeemed slightly. Also, they don't play nearly enough Satie for my liking. Or Chopin. They do play a lot of Holst, though. And I've never heard them play any Marianelli, despite my requests. It's always Mozart and Handel and frigging Schubert all the time. Okay, I'll stop moaning now. I get pissed off with them, I really do.

That sonata reminded me of this, by the way. It's a brilliant parody of Beethoven by Dudley Moore (called "And The Same To You"), from Beyond the Fringe, my favourite comedy show ever, written largely by Peter Cook.

Here's another Cook and Moore sketch, written by Peter Cook, in case you're interested in learning more about him.

Here's a sketch from their first Derek and Clive recording (they made it just for themselves as a relief from touring). It's unlike anything else they made, and isn't particularly clever (and Cook's comedy otherwise is devastatingly clever), but is instead unashamedly and brilliantly profane.

Oh, and you might find this one interesting:

And this is my very favourite moment from Beyond the Fringe. Jonathan Miller is brilliant.

Thus ends the Peter Cook spam. ;)

Hm. I like Einaudi, but I have a major problem with him: so many of his pieces sound the same, and it's bloody frustrating. I want him to try something different, I'm urging him to venture out and experiment with different chords even a little bit, but he never does. Thus, most of his music is only worth being played when followed by a Take That song on a sad yet heart-warming charity appeal. Occasionally, however, he comes up with something distinctly powerful, such as the piece you posted, and this one:

I think I'll balance all this music and comedy with a couple of poems, just for the hell of it.

Country Fair, by Charles Simic.

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things,
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

Mists, by Peter Redgrove.

They do not need the moon for ghostliness
These mists jostling the boles,
These boy-wraiths and ogre-fumes
That hollow to a breasting walk;
They are harmless enough in all conscience,
Wetting eyelashes and growing moulds,
And do not speak at all, unless their walking flood
Is a kind of languid speech. Like ghosts
Dawn filches them for dews.
They wink at me from grasses pushed aside
And impart a high polish to my shoes
That dry in dullness, milky, sloven leather,
From walking in ghostways where tall mists grope.

Oh, and we'll have one by Ted Hughes, seeing as it was his birthday yesterday.

Crow's Fall (one of his many poems about Crow, a supernatural, eternal, and very strange crow).

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened —
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

'Up there,' he managed,
'Where white is black and black is white, I won.'

By the way, I bought a really old edition of Crow (which is my favourite Hughes collection) the other day. I absolutely treasure it. This is the cover:

At 9:20pm on August 17, 2009, Charles Cranly said…: I don't remember the moonlight sonata I heard having an movements just different parts. It was just the piano.

At 2:13pm on August 17, 2009, Charles Cranly said…: Moonlight Sonata is just beautiful isnt it? And I with you it relaxes me.

At 12:52pm on August 14, 2009, Hel said…: I just found the best picture =)

At 5:58am on August 8, 2009, Michelle said…: Hello! I stumbled across your profile on the ning, and I just thought you looked awesome. I just thought I would say hi, and DFTBA.