Virginia Woolf

“But the books are the things that I enjoy — on the whole — most. I feel sometimes for hours together as though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger and larger, throbbing quicker and quicker with new blood — and there is no more delicious sensation than this.”

-- Virginia Woolf, The Early Journals 1897 - 1906.

Reading Life

After watching "Henry and June", I was in a mood to put off "Middlemarch" and begin "The Tropic of Cancer" and the Anais Nin diaries. I thought there would also be more quotes to be culled from these sexier books.

However, the opening excerpt to Miller's books does not look so great for me to put off a bona fide classic, particularly one that I have begun and am enjoying a little, even if it is one of those slow-moving, chaste Victorian novels.

Besides, I have already dropped John Updike's "Rabbit" tetralogy. I would feel bad about putting aside another big novel that I laid down good money for.

Lindsay Lohan

Lohan's money woes have escalated recently. She owes $16,000 to a storage facility or else her locker will go up for auction. She is also having trouble paying the rent on her $8,000-a-month Beverly Hills mansion.

Scores strip club is hoping to alleviate Lohan's troubles, TMZ reported. Scores is offering to pay the bill on her storage unit and cover the cost of her mansion if the "Liz & Dick" star agrees to do some hosting work for their website, ScoresLive.com.

-- ONTD

Hmm, I wouldn't mind getting a hot little lap dance from the falling star, with her burying her pretty face deep in my crotch. Actually, the job offer does not entail anything like that, not even nudity, but who knows how things will be in another six months.

Politics

Paul Krugman addresses all the political strife in Washington over taxes and spending and debt, laying out the case for how Republicans are acting out in their frustration over seeing their long-time agenda being discredited and defeated. He argues that we are not having a debt crisis but a political crisis, as the Republican Party implodes. Though, I suppose the Republicans woud say, "We aren't dead yet!"

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Pics

Hummingbird (sedonakin)

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Hamlet (3,3) On Delaying Revenge

A good discussion on the skillful use of the double soliloquy between Claudius and Hamlet.

_ _ _

Perhaps there is nothing so daring and deft as this double soliloquy scene in the whole play. It keeps the problem of rottenness and revenge before us on our way to the problem of adultery and incest [as Hamlet goes to talk to his mother]. We see the King stripped to his soul just as the Queen is about to be stripped to hers.

[...]

All Hamlet’s soliloquies are great arches that bridge the inner world of the play across which the themes pass from action to action in its outer world; but this one is the most ingenious of them all, and has to bear the greatest weight.... The purpose of the play-within-the-play has been achieved by giving violent certainty to Hamlet (and the audience) of the King’s guilt. Its effect cannot be allowed to cool or evaporate. But the story (in the source) brings brings Hamlet to the Queen’s chamber and to the murder of Polonius; and that murder can only be followed by the instant arrest and banishment of Hamlet. If Hamlet is to have a chance of confronting the King alone, in the white heat of certainty of his guilt after the play scene, it must happen before he is sent to England, and therefore before he visits his mother. But now as it is essential for the story that he be given this chance of taking his revenge, so it is equally essential that it should be impossible for him to take it. The King must be preserved for the end of the play, Hamlet must not stab the defenseless man in the back. This being so, the only thing on earth that could save Claudius from death at Hamlet’s hands would be some situation that gave him sanctuary. So the only safe place for him … is on his knees.

-- Nevill Coghill, quoted in Marvin Rosenberg’s “The Masks of Hamlet”

School Shooting in Connecticut

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with pistols and a semi-automatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack on Friday in an elementary school in wooded Connecticut. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two specific classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

-- The New York Times

Those murdered childred were between the ages of five and ten. A few days ago, there was also a mass shooting at a mall in Oregon, in which a few people were killed there. Watching the reports of today's mass-murder on TV, Pop asked, "Why are people doing this?" I said that I think it is Christmas. Christmas is a bad time of the year for this kind of thing. Happy holidays...

restless

About to shut down the computer for the night. But I am also feeling a little restless, and I wish there was something that I could click on, so that a pretty girl would show up on the screen and suddenly smile, "Oh, hey, Monk! What's going on?" And we'd talk and flirt. She really likes me, just as I really like her.