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Text of the page (random words):
hed this photo from the archives of the toronto star it s the finals of the 1500 me 16 years ago the fallen working on a dream it s been a while but out here the nights are long the days are lonely i think of you and i m working on a dream i m working on a dream now the cards 17 years ago life in the jing 11 days left and still no tickets this morning i went with kimberly in the last and final attempt to score some tickets for the olympic games well that was something worth writing about 18 years ago salon the economist television without pity textually active bear s battlestar blog blog archive march 2012 1 august 2009 1 october 2008 1 june 2008 4 april 2008 1 march 2008 2 february 2008 1 december 2007 6 november 2007 5 october 2007 7 september 2007 6 july 2007 2 june 2007 1 january 2007 4 december 2006 4 november 2006 6 september 2006 2 august 2006 1 june 2006 7 may 2006 8 march 2006 2 february 2006 7 january 2006 5 november 2005 1 october 2005 4 september 2005 9 my shelfari bookshelf shelfari book reviews on your book blog art gallery the kiss by gustav klimt hamsa damayanthi by raja ravi varma daniel in the den of lions by rubens yoshitaka amano school of athens by raphael saturday march 10 2012 fixed is not unbroken in school we had to answer the question what do you want to be when you grow up we wrote our answers down on this a4 sized manila card which tracked your answer every year i always wrote the same thing penulis writer i never thought twice about it and yet i had never really written down anything you keep hearing about various authors who start writing in diapers etc etc except an ill conceived poem about the wind it always blew when i was about 5 or 6 my stories were in my head in it i spun confident yarns juggling several at one time occasionally trying out dialogue aloud when asked to baby sit various cousins little r than myself i would try out these yarns on them they listened wide eyed and fell asleep only when the tale was done and with promises of more tomorrow and still every year i wrote writer on the manila card the parental units of course were off on a frolic of their own envisioning other professions for me i doubt i ever told them what i wrote on that manila card professions which as i grew up and shed my dreams one by one i began to take as my own ambitions but yet through it all i wrote writer year in year out a mantra of course i wrote little pieces here and there in fact until i went to law school my essays in whatever language garnered the requisite as but never a story never anything of consequence my parents however did cotton on to my talents and utilised me to write important greeting cards or letters to the huge extended family that spanned the globe and filled me with trepidation with their criticisms and comments once after having read a greeting i had written to the woman who raised my mother my father turned to me and looked at me with eyes filled with wonder wonder that he had created this creature who could make words sing you though made me write little stories little snippets i thought it was because you believed in me but it was more of the same really the need to own me and control me i guess deep down you always knew i was never really yours when the dust had settled and i had picked myself up i checked and found no bones broken all organs in place and a heart that beat steadily and surely as usual you and yours receded into the stuff of nightmares no biggie i thought i am whole none the worse for wear but fixed is not unbroken something s got to give and sure enough the words dried up in dribs and drabs yes but soon everything became tawdry even the stories in my head i welcomed the silence embraced it even tried to live outside myself for once but the emptiness within myself gnawed becoming a cavern in which all good things swirled and disappeared one day the head stories came back bubbling out of me like a spring demanding to be written down to be heard of a man with a shock of white hair sitting in shadow telling the warrior god and ghost that there were forces at work in this modern land of steel and stone this land that he had built the citizens had forgotten their roots chasing after holes in the sky and pieces of paper that certified your intelligence he humbly and he was not a humble man by any account asked for their help of two children walking hand in hand trudging a dusty path she said i was a dead weight around their necks the boy whispers to his sister that we were better off dead its ok his sister answers we are going to where they love us she did not know that they would love only him and send her away of a a great king who loved his queen so much he built her a mausoleum of marble but he died a prisoner blinded even of the sight of her tomb just because he had loved one son more than the other one daughter more than the other of four sisters named after queens one died young unmarried and childless one died young with her husband and all her children around her another died old in a foreign land having lived her whole life with a man who had loved her youngest sister the most beautiful of them all who died young having forgiven the man who abandoned her but the words still refuse to sing so i shush the stories in my head i will tell your tales i promise them just let me sleep for now meanwhile i name myself after a desert and wait for the rain to come posted by scarnet at 1 08 am 1 comment monday august 10 2009 a denizen of the floating world i come alive at night when the scent of possibilities are strong and the wind blows out to the sea in the day i sleep for this is not my life this not my world this bustling of suits and egos not my reality mine is the floating world diaphanous smoky half lit and beautiful in shadow i had given it up these many moons to find meaning and purpose in the sun but my soul withered my eyes died then i saw you we debated chemistry or biology in the twilight time between worlds it is the same thing i thought to myself po tah to po tay to possibilities french fries but you were a creature of the sun of stark realities of pragmatism and practicalities we could only meet in the in betweens so i curled myself into a tight ball and only touched you in my dreams posted by scarnet at 7 21 pm no comments saturday october 11 2008 masters of rome those who know me well have been privy to my frequent obsessions when assailled with one there is nothing much i can do except sail along until the obsession wears thin i have been obsessed with people living and dead theories fields of study schools of thought and activities nowadays with wikipedia the internet and the easy accessibility that singapore affords to to gorge myself i get over my obsessions fairly quickly in less enlightened times these obsessions could last for years while i scoured libraries and books and classes now and again i get enamoured with a historical period over the years i have been obsessed with the tudor period in england the french revolution the khmer rouge period in cambodia go figure england under richard lionheart and his father before him and brother after him the crusades in all its permutations including the children s crusade france under louis the xiii and louis the xiv fine fine the three musketeers period if you must know and india under the mughals i remember freaking out the 17 year old nephew of my aunt when i was 12 by happily naming the mughal kings in chronological order yeah the obsessive trait started pretty early p but one era of history i have never quite gotten over is rome circa caesar and no i have not read the rise and fall of the roman empire nor do i care to i didn t care about the empire as such i can t quite figure out the attraction was it caesar himself i don t really think so as i was never completely taken with the whole rome had become too big and needed an emperor to rein it in thesis was it the culture what culture really an amalgamation of rome in the time of the kings and greek culture at best was it the preponderance of long names publius cornelius scipio africanus was my favourite i remember fondly a boyfriend who would recite like a litany the full names of all the famous romans i don t rightly know self awareness has never been my strong suit p i do know though that there has never been a more exciting canvas on which so many incredible and larger than life men and women have been painted after all caesar must have had something in him such that he is still deified in movies and books more than 2 000 years after his bloody demise so when i came upon colleen mcculough s masters of rome series i was completely enthralled finally an account of those wonderful personages in palatable novel form no less mccullough s research was painstaking and she painted her numerous characters with a deft hand in the appendix of each of her books she even gives reasons for her decisions to depart from historical norms it could be argued that creative licence was taken but i agree with mccullough in that history was not complete and occasionally we had to fill some gaps based on the information we were given e g 1 what exactly did caesar say when he crossed the rubicon 2 how exactly did caesarion die in mccullough s books he dies by the hand of the reluctant to kill him but realises he must if he is ever to rule rome octavian 3 was cleopatra s and anthony s famous sea battle accurately rendered after all the victors do re write history and what we know could have been manufactured by the politically savvy octavian 4 why did gaius marius and sulla have such a good relationship initially at least how could such different characters the soldier politician and the bisexual metrosexual politician meet and become such good friends mccullough invents quite plausibly a younger sister another julia to marius famous wife julia caesar s great aunt who marries sulla so for a time there were brothers in law and had to co operate 5 why was servillia such a bitch perhaps an abusive childhood had the same effect in antiquity as it does today in total there are 7 books in the series the first man in rome 1990 spanning the years 110 100 bc the grass crown 1991 spanning the years 97 86 bc fortune s favourites 1993 spanning the years 83 69 bc caesar s women 1997 spanning the years 67 59 bc caesar 1998 spanning the years 54 48 bc the october horse 2002 spanning the years 48 41 bc and anthony cleopatra 2007 spanning the years 41 27 bc mcculough had originally intended the october horse to be her last novel as she opined that the roman republic ended with the battle of philippi and brutus death but fans including the prime minister of australia apparently lobbied for another novel in any case most historians are of the opinion that the battle of actium and the death of mark anthony truly sounded the death knell for the republic frankly i hope mcculough goes on with the series and writes about rome s first 5 emperors octavian known as the emperor augustus has always interested me more than caesar anyway a puny non soldier like asthmatic who purportedly hid during the battle of philippi he went on to launch the roman empire also the scheming and intrigue during the time of the emperors augustus tiberius claudius caligula and nero could rival any modern day soap opera a case in point was tiberius strangely enough tiberius was not even octavian s hereinafter augustus son he was a step son the son of augustus wife livia drusa with another man augustus fell in love with her when she was pregnant and despite the fact that both her father and husband were against him the marriage lasted 51 years and augustus cherished livia drusa and deified her as augusta elevating her two sons from her previous marriage to his heirs augustus and livia drusa never had any children anyways back to tiberius he was groomed very early on by augustus and proved worthy both in the arena of war and that of politics he was married to augustus favourite general and best friend agrippa s daughter vipsania agrippina the marriage was successful and the couple loved each other dearly unfortunately agrippa died in war leaving his wife julia free now this julia was a prize catch as she was augustus daughter not by livia drusa of course and her husband would be the next emperor of rome augustus out of love or the tyranny that he was soon to be known for ordered tiberius to divorce his beloved vipsania marry julia and become his augustus heir apart from being the emperor of rome augustus was also the paterfamilias and his word was law tiberius did his bidding but he was never again happy he once even famously ran away and his governance of rome after augustus death reflected his conflicting emotions the story is that tiberius once ran into vipsania again and proceeded to follow her home crying and begging forgiveness soon afterwards tiberius met with augustus and steps were taken to ensure that tiberius and vipsania would never meet again julia turned out to be the original whore of babylon flaunting her lovers in front of her father and her husband and thus began the decline of the roman empire almost as soon as it was born one can only hope that mccullough will one day decide to write about caesar s descendants addendum mccullough also does drawings and sketches of the characters based on descriptions or busts of the period which i should upload here but i am too lazy to p addendum2 when i first heard about rome the tv series my excitement knew no bounds but within a couple of viewings i was disillusioned the liberties taken with history was just too much and worse still merely for the purpose of enticing viewers it was not a case of piecing together discordant information to make a coherent whole really atia was the whore of babylon and had a relationship with her future son in law mark anthony who she continued to sleep with after he married her daughter octavia atia who was known historically as the exemplarary mother well there is more but this is not a post about rome so i shall quit snivelling and hope i have gotten rome and the cunning wily beautiful octavian out of my system once and for all somehow i doubt that posted by scarnet at 5 55 pm 2 comments saturday june 07 2008 jhumpa lahiri s unaccustomed earth lahiri s voice is still rising and falling with a quietly confident cadence that i sometimes imagine her native bengali must sound like an educated guess at best to my knowledge i have never heard bengali p lahiri does not write action hers are the quiet walks on stormy uninviting beaches long aimless drives through small town america and extended dinners indian families excel in where the silence is so profound you can detect who is eating what from the different timbre in the chewing sounds with her latest book lahiri returns to her strongest form the short story a structure first seen in her pulitzer prize winning first novel interpreter of maladies at the beginning there are...