(no subject)

[doyle]

Memes, gakked from vanilla_tiger

Instructions:
1. Copy and paste this: [font color=othercat][b]othercat[/b][/font] into your journal.
2. Replace my username with yours.
3. Replace [] with <> .

doyle_sb4

1. Take five books off your bookshelf. [Or on your desk, for the lazy]
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house. A great soaring, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-conquering eagle with piercing eyes and mighty wings and talons that dripped with the blood of the pig! You send a flash to the sun. Depending on the underlying hypothesis, the penis is assumed to correlate either directly or inversely with the dimensions of one of these other body parts. Then, starting home, he walked towards the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.

1. Coraline by Neil Gaiman
2. Making History by Stephen Fry
3. The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry
4. Ignobel Prizes (this is a terrific book - awards for scientific endeavours that 'cannot or should not' be repeated)
5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

I substituted Coraline for my first choice of American Psycho because the opening sentence is about 200 words long.

Back to the revision or my degree will be pastede on yay.

(ETA: but first. Poetry spam. Because I won't see Troy for ages and my f-list is full of Troy stuff and this is vaguely related.

Parting in Wartime

How long ago Hector took off his plume,
Not wanting that his little son should cry,
Then kissed his sad Andromache goodbye ­
And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

Frances Cornford)

Comments

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Ever read Michael Longley's Ceasefire?

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Haven't, but I think I've read something of his...

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

He writes really great poems about the North - unbiased ones, too, as far as I can judge. (I studied him for the Leaving Cert.) Ceasefire's at the top of this page (http://www.wfu.edu/wfupress/longleypoetry.htm) - it's about the Iliad, but was inspired by the announcement of the IRA ceasefire.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Oh, never read that poem, but I love it.

There's Patrick Kavanagh's Epic, too:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's great. And the transition being made from the Iliad to World Wars, you should read this one (also Longley; the rhythm in the Kavanagh reminded me of it):

Here are two pictures from my father’s head—
I have kept them like secrets until now:
First, the Ulster Division at the Somme
Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’
‘No Surrender!’: a boy about to die,
Screaming ‘Give ’em one for the Shankill!’
‘Wilder than Gurkhas’ were my father’s words
Of admiration and bewilderment.
Next comes the London-Scottish padre
Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,
With a stylish backhand and a prayer.
Over a landscape of dead buttocks
My father followed him for fifty years.
At last, a belated casualty,
He said — lead traces flaring till they hurt —
‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’
I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.

Now, with military honours of a kind,
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
A packet of Woodbines I throw in,
A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Paralysed as heavy guns put out
The night-light in a nursery for ever;
Also a bus-conductor’s uniform—
He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before they could turn the television down
Or tidy away the supper dishes.
To the children, to a bewildered wife,
I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Love that one too (my great-grandfathers fought in WWI so it just sort of resonates)