Tattered Notebook

First Book of the Year: The Son of Neptune

2012-01-31T16:50:00.000+08:00

Yes, this book for young teens was the first book I finished for the year. Hurray. I finished it in one sitting. That's how easy it was to read. The Son of Neptune is the second installment in the Heroes of Olympus series, which is a follow up to the Percy Jackson series. I loved Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, so even before I started this book I already knew I was going to enjoy it. I read The Lost Heroes last year. It had the same fun and excitement as the Percy Jackson series. The Son of Neptune is no exception. Although there seem to be more and more little stories cropping up probably because there are a lot of characters involved and they have their own stories to tell. Anyway, anything based on Roman and Greek mythology is always interesting.

Pieces of me (unfinished)

2011-11-04T19:29:00.000+08:00

These words came to me in a slow trickle as I was staring at myself in the mirror earlier today. The sunburnt skin on my face was just starting to peel and I was itching to remove the thin layers in unbroken pieces. But dead skin is soft and fickle and I could only remove them little piece by little piece. Little dead pieces of me. I pressed on my face and flattened my nose to get at the skin on the slight curves and angles. As I was doing this, the words just formed in my mind.

I am made from many pieces. Big and small, soft and hard pieces. I don't know how many they are, but I know they make up who I am. When I was a small child I was sick and I remember my mother cupping my face in her hands and telling me if only she can take the sickness from me into herself. That day I understood as a small child understands the greatness of a mother's love. Knowing my mother's love became the one rock solid piece that would hold all my other pieces.

My other pieces are made of different things. My sister's strong will, my brother's strength, my father's faith. My family's love for music. My own independence. My pieces are made from people I love, people I met, people I want to meet.

(Note: This essay doesn't feel finished. I don't know where this is going. Wahaha.)

Books to Movies - Battle Royale (Batoru Rowaiaru)

2011-07-27T15:38:00.005+08:00

Thuuuper delayed books to movies pothst coming up! Thuuuper delayed! Imma make this brief then.

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. Bloody good story. Since I already knew what it was about I already knew what to expect. Blood and gore, Japanese style.

For those who didn't know, Battle Royale (Batoru Rowaiaru) is about a class of high school kids who find themselves in an island where they have to kill each other until only one of them survives. That storyline itself is pretty hard core. AND irresistable. When I got hold of the book, I was just itching to know how it all went down.

Well, the book gave me exactly what I expected and a little bit more. I was bracing myself for the gun fights, knife fights, sword fights, slicing, dicing, dismemberment, and raw jungle survival mode action that the small twists and the little stories about each character took me by surprise. I thought, "Good Lord, there are feelings and life stories in this book." The emotional aspect wasn't overdone or anything though. It was just right. For me at least. The book tackled each of the 42 students' lives in one way or another, so in some way the reader is able to understand why each character is the way he or she is.

The movie was awesome, too. Slight differences to the storyline, but pretty much the same blood and gore. It didn't tackle each character, but I guess I can understand that. It would have been very difficult to squeeze all those histories and backgrounds in one movie. The movie was still pretty cool and stayed true to what essentially made the story great. I loved the track that was playing at the credits.

photo source

Okay, my verdict. The book and the movie were both great, but I liked the book more because of the - wait for it - "feelings and life stories." Yeah, I am a sap.

To read the original post from White Sky Project, click here.

Writing for the right reason

2011-06-29T17:28:00.002+08:00

Came across this Writer's Manifesto by Jeff Goins while I was checking out She Writes and Rights one of the writing blogs I visit once in a while. It's basically saying that writers should go back to writing for the love of writing and not for the love of being read. Sometimes writers care too much whether readers would love or hate what they wrote that they lose the real reason for writing in the first place. This was actually a perfect time for me to read the manifesto because I've been trying to write and I've been worrying too much about how it will turn out. It doesn't really matter as long I write something. I don't need to think too much. I just need to write.

Get a free copy of Jeff Goin's The Writer's Manifesto by signing up here.

Books to Movies Challenge - The Children of Men/Children of Men

2011-06-28T11:46:00.000+08:00

Aha finally this wretched post is finished. Took me days and during those painful days I realized that I do not like writing reviews. Haha. But I have joined this challenge out of my own free will and I must do what I must. I'm being melodramatic, and I must warn you, this is a damn long post. With spoilers. (Do you still call it spoiler if it's about a friggin' old movie??)

So, anyway, I think I saw the movie on cable a few years back. When I decided to join the Books to Movies Challenge, I had just bought the book a couple of days before that at a sale for a hundred bucks. That made it book choice #1 for the challenge. Holy convenience, Batman!

Now the thing I hate most about seeing the movie first is that I always end up picturing the actors when I read the book. When I first read Lord of the Rings, for example, I couldn't help but picture a strapping Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. I tried so hard to come up with my own image of the characters, but I failed. Good thing Viggo Mortensen was not bad as Aragorn. In fact, I think he achieved the right balance of broodiness and kingliness, so I was fine picturing him in my head while reading the LOTR books.

ANYWAY. In the case of The Children of Men, when I had the book in my hands, I could only remember the movie vaguely so I couldn't quite match Clive Owen's character in the film to the one in the book. I was getting confused until I realized, several pages into it, that of course the damn book was not exactly like the movie. The characters, though having the same names, were different. The plot a little different. The book and the movie had the same base storyline, but apart from that they were way two different things. The movie totally different from the book?!? Yay me for this totally unoriginal realization. Hah.

Anyway, let me mention the base storyline. It's the 2020's and there hasn't been any babies born since the mid-90's. It seems mankind is doomed to extinction. Societies and governments have collapsed, and it turns out England has the most functioning government. The immigration of refugees is heavily controlled. Suicide kits called Quietus are legal and available. There's mandatory fertility testing. Of course, nobody's happy in this world so there's bound to be a little group of restless people who want change.

In the book, the main character Theo, an Oxford professor, is cousin to the Warden, who is really the dictator of England, and he is approached by Julian, a member of a little group of five restless people who call themselves the Five Fishes. She asks him to talk to the Warden about the changes that their little group wants. Theo visits his cousin and the council, but of course nothing really happens with that except they now know Theo's had contact with the Five Fishes. Theo ends up helping the little group evade the Warden's minions because Julian turns out to be a pregnant, er, fish. Oooh.

In the movie, Theo (Clive Owen) is a former activist who's just trudging on with life. He gets up, goes to work, goes home, and does it again the next day. One day he is kidnapped by the Fishes, a rebel group of some sort. Their leader is Julian (Julianne Moore), Theo's estranged wife. She asks for his help in getting transit papers for an African refugee named Kee (Clare Hope Ashitey). Theo manages to get papers from his cousin, a government minister, but he has to accompany the bearer. While on the road, they get attacked by armed people and Julian gets killed. They go to a safe house where Theo finds out Kee is pregnant and Julian had wanted to take her to a group called The Human Project to keep her safe. Anyway, Theo ends up helping Kee flee from the Fishes, who want the baby for political reasons, and get to The Human Project, amidst fighting between the military and insurgents and the Fishes. It's madness.

So there. This is one of the few times where I liked the movie more than the book. The book was a little boring for me although I liked some of the little details like how people celebrate pets' bdays or births. People hold bday parties or christenings for their little pets. Women walk around with strollers with baby dolls in them and people would peek and indulge those (kray-zay) women. To me that showed how the two decades of infertility has really affected people emotionally and mentally. For me the movie was grittier and darker. I guess I liked it more because it really showed how degraded everything was. I can't imagine living in a world like that. I liked the scene towards the end where the fighting stopped when everyone heard the baby crying and Theo and Kee with the baby were able to walk past the soldiers and refugees before the fighting resumed.

You can find the original post from White Sky Project right here.

100 Best First Lines from Novels

2011-06-09T09:53:00.001+08:00

Sometimes I dream about writing a book. But then writing a short story is already daunting to me, so I cannot imagine how I can even begin to write a novel. I think I can start it, but then I don't know if I can write a middle and an end. Maybe I should try short stories this year.

Anyway.. check these 100 Best First Lines from Novels, taken from American Book Review.

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn't. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Books to Movies Challenge

2011-06-07T09:48:00.003+08:00

So I joined the Books to Movies Challenge on my primary blog (White Sky Project), and since it is somewhat related to writing, I decided to also post the entries related to the challenge on this blog! I'm hoping the challenge will help me with my review writing skills (or lack thereof). Good luck to me!

Now what is this Tattered Notebook all about?

2011-04-20T11:01:00.001+08:00

I started writing in 6th grade when I got picked to be a columnist in our school paper. My English teacher told the class to write an essay on a topic she gave and that she would pick a few who would write for the paper. The school paper was handled by the high school kids and only a few grade schoolers were chosen to represent the grade school. I really didn't think about it. I didn't have any feelings towards writing or the school paper for that matter. It was just another English essay. But then I got picked and that changed something. I don't know why I was chosen, but it made me realize that I had stumbled on to something. I think that was the initial spark. Later into the year, I placed second in an essay writing contest for Civics Week. That turned the spark into a raging fire.

I started writing a lot. Mostly poems, free verse, short prose. Nothing spectacular, mind you. I didn't think (and I don't think now) that the stuff I wrote back then were any good, but written words became my secret weapon. I kept a diary and a separate notebook for scattered, broken thoughts. That Other Notebook was for the rush of words I could not contain inside myself. I didn't share my work though. It was my private thing and I was okay with that.

I wrote during high school and I wrote during college, but less frequently. I discovered blogging and I stopped keeping a journal. I also stopped writing in Other Notebooks. The fire didn't go out, though. It just became a slow steady flame. It's still there.. simmering below the surface. Like a slow and persisting heartache. I think that's actually worse than a blazing inferno.

Which is why I want to use this blog to keep on writing. I already have a personal blog, which in many ways serves as a journal or diary of sorts. This is the Other Blog.

This is a pretty long explanation for this blog. I think mostly this explanation is for me.

Jeffrey McDaniel

2011-04-15T08:04:00.002+08:00

I discovered Jeffrey McDaniel on one of my blog hopping adventures. I instantly loved his work! He writes my kind of poetry. He writes somewhat like E.E. Cummings, doesn't he? Free-flowing and descriptive and emotional. I really love their styles.

The Archipelago Of Kisses

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don't invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey.
It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

The Secret

When you were sleeping on the sofa
I put my ear to your ear and listened
to the echo of your dreams.

That is the ocean I want to dive in,
merge with the bright fish,
plankton and pirate ships.

I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you
and ask them the questions I would ask you.

Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke
rising from a chimney?
Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?

I don't wish I was in your arms,
I just wish I was peddling a bicycle
toward your arms.

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

E.E. Cummings

2011-04-10T10:18:00.003+08:00

I discovered E.E. Cummings in my senior year of high school. The first time I read "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" was somewhat life-changing because I realized that I didn't have to stick to rhyme or syllable counts to write poetry. I also discovered the significance of creative license. I felt more open and free in my writing from then on.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

dive for dreams

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at the wedding)
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for good likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds
-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

Robert Frost

2011-03-30T08:03:00.002+08:00

Robert Frost was another literary great that I discovered in high school senior year. I think "The Road Not Taken" is such a famous piece of work because it speaks to so many people. The poem is basically about decisions, whether to take the easy one or the hard one, and people, including myself, always have little battles within themselves.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

Dreams or Money

2010-11-03T11:41:00.000+08:00

Wake up to the usual
My self feels too heavy
To lift from where I lie
I want to walk away
Want to up and go
But I just can't
Having nowhere to go
Roots me to the spot

Self Preservation

2008-11-03T18:07:00.000+08:00

You know you've known
You are nothing
But a good fuck
The ice cold beer
To a parched throat
Heroin rush
To a lost soul

So walk away
Unclasp his grip
Drink him out fast
You've known you will
Have to ignore
How his skin sings
To keep yourself

recall

2008-09-22T16:02:00.003+08:00

there i go again
cutting my own veins
setting myself up
for the new, the same
utter wretchedness

i feel it coming
fast and expected
i tend to forget
this familiar part
the anguished bleeding

i want the whole world in my hands

2008-09-01T14:01:00.003+08:00

i want to craft with words
i want whatever is inside
to take form, be malleable
i want a good guitar
i want whatever is inside
to bleed out of my fingers
i want a tattoo
i want whatever is inside
to gather itself
find axis on an inscribed mark on my skin
and be soothed
i want a place of my own
i want whatever is inside
to hold comfort in its own sanctuary
i want you, most of all
i want whatever is inside
to release itself
dare passion
risk pain
own the world
as I know it.

Untitled

2008-08-15T08:29:00.001+08:00

I am haunted by the thought
Of you crushing me
And you don’t even have a clue
Of the many things I want you to do
You are so ripped
It drives me to the wall

That Time of the Month

2008-08-04T19:40:00.001+08:00

I miss it
The mesh of skin
The tangle of arms
Legs wrapped around
The taste of someone
The soft warmth
Breath against the neck
The soft hum
The pulled sheets
I miss the feeling
Of being enveloped
Like in a cocoon

Ink

2008-02-13T19:38:00.001+08:00

Not really about details
Or differentiating
Standing out
Shining bright
Defying the usual
Not really about change
Metamorphosis
Insisting uniqueness
What it is
Is standing ground
Staying constant
Staying true
Taking flight
Albeit alone
Because you are
Already stunning

Suspended

2008-01-08T15:32:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I wonder how many pieces I have to break off of myself before I can be whole. The world can be so unkind it leaves me bewildered, but I do not know how not to sacrifice a portion of my mind or my soul or my skin to someone or something. It is the only way I know to feel like I am part of this world. Her world.

Yesterday she came by again during the odd hour of the darkness when the nocturnal creatures have stopped making their sounds and the air is still as if it was waiting for the cry of a prey. I did not know she was coming but I had hoped, and the tapping on my window made my skin tingle. The tingling did not stop.

She left all too soon and I could not tell whether the hours of darkness were too short or too long. In the cold night I felt like I was going to die of a slow persisting fever.

Father's House

2005-11-14T15:04:00.000+08:00

She stood by the open doorway of the old apartment building. She looked down at her hands and saw her fingers quivering slightly. She took a deep breath, clasped her hands together, and closed her eyes. Just a little while more. She felt the soft heat of the sun as she lifted her head and looked expectantly down the street. Still no sign of his car. She fished out her mobile phone from her bag and looked at the time. It was almost eleven o’clock. Maybe she should send him a message asking where he was. She held the small blue phone with both of her hands and began typing with her thumbs.

Where are you?

She pressed the button and waited. Less than half a minute later the small blue phone let out an equally small beep.

Almost there.

She slid the phone back inside her bag and relaxed her arms on her sides. She stepped out of the doorway and felt a soft breeze gently sweep the loose strands of her hair from her face. She turned her face to the sky and saw that it was a nice shade of blue. The fluffy white clouds moved slowly like cotton being brushed lightly against a blue screen. It was looking like a good day for new beginnings. She could not help but smile. Yes. She felt the gentle breeze on her face again.

The silver car stopped in front of the old apartment building. She walked towards it and opened the passenger door. He turned in his seat and greeted her with his boyish smile.

We’re not so late just yet.

She smiled back. He stepped on the pedal and then they were on their way. As they drove past the houses and the buildings, curiosity and anticipation and slight nervousness filled her again. She wondered about how the place would look inside and about the people who go there. She wondered how this would design things between them. She glanced at him who had asked her and remembered how she had told someone else that he must not be part of the reason why she would join them. She had turned down the first couple of invitations from that friend. But then he himself had asked her and she could not say no.

A few minutes later they were parking outside a very modern building with blue windows. We’re here, he said. She followed him up the steps and into the doors. She could hear strains of music and joyous singing. He led the way up the stairs and into a huge room full of people. The music and singing greeted them warmly as they entered and were ushered to seats up in front. She looked around and breathed in the obvious presence of something greater than anything in the world. I’m here. She felt the music and the words wash over her.

Home.

* * * * *

When they were walking back to the car an hour later, her thoughts were still on the words they had listened to inside the modern house of blue windows. She knew the same words had moved both of them in similar and different ways. And as she felt him walking beside her, she realized that he had been part of everything after all. She looked down at her hands. They were not quivering anymore. She suddenly felt light and warm inside.

You sent him to come for me after all, didn’t you?

It was almost one o’clock and the sun was beating down fiercely on their infinitesimal part of the world. But she felt the soft cool breeze lovingly caress her face.