Picture this

what’s wholly
marvellous my

Darling

is that you &
i are more than you

& i(be

ca
us

e It’s we)

(via)

The holidays are coming

Got my first Christmas gift for the year in hardbound:

I’ve been on the lookout for this eversince I came across the book during my children’s lit class back in college. Thankfully, they decided to make a movie making the book less extinct as I assumed it to be.

Pure happiness. Thanks, Lois!

Starting over

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”

-Jeanette Winterson

The boyfriend’s sister gave me a Powerbooks card and I ended up with my first post-Ondoy book buy: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. Funny how I can’t concretely remember structured stories written by Winterson. All I can manage to squeeze out of my head is how lyrical her ode to love is every single time I read her book . I can’t wait to consume every thought.

On writing

Spent a part of my day looking up Vonnegut’s take on writing, inspired by Kottke’s post—

• How to write with style
• Eight rules for writing a short story

I also ended up with these:

• Words and expressions commonly misused (from The Elements of Style)
• Why literature?

I miss this kind of reading. I miss having some good ol’ reading time.

Dead Stars

Today, I emailed a link of Paz Marquez Benitez’s short story, Dead Stars, to a couple of my friends. I can’t believe they haven’t encountered this bit of Philippine lit so much glorified during my lit classes back  in college.

Love—he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.

I read it again just now and ended up having a heavy heart…