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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| The Human Experience--Lessons From Literature I've noticed that I'm really into "ethnic literature". I used to dodge such works of fiction because I've always felt like I wouldn't be able to relate to it. But in the last few years or so I have been swimming in a sea of multi-lingual books. I'm especially fond of Russian literature, contemporary Chinese fiction, and African-American anthologies. True, I might not be able to relate to the cultural references in these works but what I find most satisfying is finding universal truths in the beautiful prose of such writings. It's an anthropological journey and at the same time an enlightening experience. Within a single paragraph I find the humanity this fast-paced modern world lacks. Words filled with passion, humility, tragedy, ecstasy, and wisdom that surpass transcontinental borders become embedded in my own soul and with that I feel more and more like a human-being. As we grow older and rack up more mileage in this journey through life we begin to find common ground, common experiences, with each other. The human experience--that is what great literature can convey.
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| Invisible Lines The line between reality and my illusionary world is thining by the minute, and one day that line will become nonexistent.
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| The Magical Memory BoxI saw your profile pic on Twitter and I think I fell in-love with you again. I love your hair, your lips, your smoothe angelic face. I want to fuck you; get deep inside you and stay there forever. I want you to be mine. But it's a fact etched in stone that it will never happen. I respect and understand why you never want to talk to me or see me again. I know you want to erase me from your memories. It's fine with me. They're your memories too, but I think I'll keep my half of the property. I want to remember all that is good associated with love. I still want to believe in magic.
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| Would You Ever Have Someone's Name Tattooed On You? I have a tattoo of my grandmother's name on a banner with a red rose and a cross on my right bicep. She raised me when my parents were in the U.S. She loved me and I loved her deeply. She passed away when we were living in New York--I was maybe 7 at the time. It was the first tattoo I ever had. I was 16 when I had it and I remember the excitement I felt as I was getting it. I even remember a perfect bloody imprint it left on my white Catholic school boy uniform after it was finished. | | |
| English Major from Harvard University's English Department page on the English Concentration program: To attack the insoluble and to represent the invisible; to track the mind of a suicide before the act; to speculate on heaven; to mimic the construction of a modern city; to ask why the beautiful is inveterately destroyed; to speculate how we might feel about marriage –this is what literature attempts. To create a plausible taxonomy of the bewildering genera and species of ancient and modern literature – this is what poetics does. To ask why a work seems to "click," why a line is memorable, why a character looms large in literary history – this is to inquire into the intrinsic workings of a work of literature – a work as complex in its function as the human genome. To ask how and why writers of different times and places have represented men and women (or the rich and the poor, or the colonizer and the colonized) as they have done is the question that compels cultural studies – a form of history and anthropology combined. To argue that Melville's poems are not "failures," that Wallace Stevens is not solely a cerebral poet, that Keats's odes are not merely freestanding poems, but comprise a sequence – this is to put forward literary theses. To defend a work as intelligible that has been called a hoax, to defend a work as beautiful that has been called obscene, to defend a work as interesting that has been called tedious – this is to make literary argument. To unravel the allegory written by a writer under political censure, to explain the connection between censorship and literary creation, to inquire into the history of literary suppression – this is to understand the connection between history and literature. "The most marvelous bishops of heaven," said Stevens, "have been those that made it seem like heaven." How does the literary artist make the work seem like reality? Or redefine reality? | | |
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