Like Loaded Guns

Because I've been a slacker on my blog lately, I'm continuing the tradition by just posting some music that I've been loving lately. Nothing much more.





(This music video is so strange but the song is so fantastic)

It's a Matter of Beauty

The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse, 1888

I was studying this painting tonight as my British Lit class talked about Pre-Raphaelite poetry. I think it's pretty beautiful. The mix of the christian themes and the pagan themes, mixing of earthiness with heaven, mixing realism and legend. The bright colors and patterns, the sensuality as a rejection of Victorian prudishness. Looking back at Shakespeare, at Keats, at King Arthur, at the Bible because the painters world was filled with smoke stacks and gray horizons and the wish to avoid the realistic world though its full of realistic details. Beautiful.

The Library Can Feel Like a Dungeon

So last Saturday I was doing research and the book I needed was in Special Collections. If you've never been to Special Collections, let me tell you--it's pretty different. You fill out all of this paperwork and they lock, yes lock, you in a room with only a few scraps of paper and a pencil. I stayed there for two hours going over this book called The Dungeon of the Heart: Human Isolation and the American Novel. So there I was, by myself (everyone else was at Saturday's basketball game), locked in a room, reading a depressing book on isolationism in the bowels of the library.

Ironic, isn't it?

And the book was from the 1960's, not that old at all. I don't know why it was even in Special Collections.