Voices

posted on 14.06.09 Memory #1

The flashes of light came down from the sky in a rhythm drowned in humidity and haze. Sun broke through for a moment to dry the tears on our faces and then was swallowed again by the grey and purple. Everything flashed red as the signs flew by, and the temperature dropped. Green seas of heat and moisture, pianos, harps, and oh, red wine like the color of blood and raspberries. Sweet, sour, bitter, sad.

In the morning the haze had gone but the stomach was knots and butterflies. In the end there was no rest and everything changed. Profound, like the carving of a new canyon into the crust of the world. The haze came again and left. And then a darkness filled with white cold.

Will the red flashes return? Time skipped a step, folded in on itself. This should not be. The world has spun in retrograde, but not. The flashes came again, and the humidity and the haze. Red flashes did not return as the armour cracked. I wait for the storm to come once again, drifting through the green seas without aim.

posted on 02.06.09 20 read, a few started. this list is fundamentally flawed though.

Hamlet would be in the Complete Works of Shakespeare, as would the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe be included in the Chronicles of Narnia, and by that my total would be decreased to 18. Also why would you include some examples of trash between the literature? Da Vinci Code? It’s a fun read, don’t get me wrong, but it hardly belongs with the vast majority here.

Reposted from entropymorphoses

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

How do your reading habits stack up?

[bold those books you’ve read in their entirety,
italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

posted on 01.06.09

What’s the point of waiting
For life to come
I could go further
And no one’s surprised
Your plans collapse, run off or fall apart.

posted on 25.05.09

Background music: Ulrich Schnauss - Monday - paracematol

posted on 25.05.09

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Avaelin - Never Enough

Tried some things here. It might just sound like you are in an echo chamber though. I’m mostly please with it. You might notice the song is a bit unsure of itself. It wants to get louder and harder but ends up just mellowing back down. I suppose this is what happens when i write in little pieces and in very different moods. Enjoy.

posted on 21.05.09

Michael Jackson and Stephen Fry are actually the same person, it turns out.

posted on 14.05.09

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Avaelin - Thanks for Everything

More of an idea than a song. I couldn’t settle on a melody, and in the end I think I might have to rig up my harp and record it directly instead of sequencing it. General feelings of resignation and regret with a topping or sarcasm and a dollop of irony.

posted on 02.05.09 And now?

I just don’t know.

posted on 25.03.09 Atheist Coming Out of the Closet

This weekend I was visiting family friends at my Dad’s place, and on Sunday morning before eating breakfast we got to talking, mostly about books. He is someone who gravitates more towards non-fiction. I tend to read novels in my spare time, though I will slip in non-fiction from time to time. Currently one book that I read a few pages of here and there is Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages. It deals primarily with the influence of Christian thought on the word throughout the middle ages. That of course brought the question: ‘Do you discuss religion with your dad at all?’

The answer is no. Not because its something I avoid because he is my father, but because it is not something I often enjoy discussing, for the same reason I dislike political debates. Arguments with a person who believes in a religious or political viewpoint strongly enough to deny any logical arguments which he perceives to ‘attack’ or deliberately oppose their own viewpoint are exercises in futility and leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. To clarify, I’m not saying my father falls into this category.He is a spiritual guy, but its never been a real issue.

At any rate, I was asked if I believe in God. I said that I consider myself to be Agnostic. In that moment though I realized that I’m probably more of an Atheist at this point. I considered myself to be a spiritual person, but I think I mistook my reverence for things such as the natural world and for some of the more amazing things we encounter on this planet as spirituality, when it really just boils down to a desire to be amazed by something I’ve never seen, and subsequently learn about it (in a logical way).

Of course this also comes to mind from time to time due to the past couple of years. I was living a life where, though my core beliefs weren’t changed in any significant way, I was constantly having to show a side of myself that didn’t exist. A false spiritual face concocted to reassure people that I was a Good Person. I’ve become sick of it though.

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in spirits. I believe that we evolved from single celled organisms and I believe that the wonderful things on our planet are truly wonderful, but that they can also be understood and in that understanding we are truly enlightened.

posted on 19.03.09

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Avaelin - Moving

Not quite satisfied with this one yet. Here is what exists so far though. I do like the end. As for unoriginal things in this one, the guitar loop at the end is the only thing not written by me. The repeated single guitar string strum is also a sample. Its sort of a spring time song i suppose. Hammered instruments always get me in that mind set, thanks to Tortoise’s TNT album, which I discovered in high school.