Marjorie in Qatar

This week is Banned Books Week in the States, which is according to the Banned Books Week website "the only national celebration of the freedom to read."

This is one of those freedoms that may not seem like a big deal, but you begin to appreciate it a lot more when you live in a country that decides for you what you're allowed to read.

Behind the cut is the list of the most frequently banned and/or challenged books of the 1990s. (This decade is still incomplete, so no data yet, though you can see the top ten of 2008 here.)

The ones I've read are in bold.

( Banned Books Meme )

A few months ago I read an LJ entry that discussed a book on the author's problems with Christianity. My LJ friend listed maybe 10 such problems; the only one I remember stated that progressive Christianity isn't any more useful than traditional Christianity, because it interprets Christianity in the light of an external value system and therefore adds nothing that can't be found outside religion.

If anybody knows what the heck book I'm talking about, please let me know.

I absolutely adore spam that's made up of pieced-together sentences. Here's today's:

He didnt know how to answer her.

The landlord had rats in his basement.

So now theres a requirement? Paul put his hands on the wheels of the chair, not at all sure where he intended to go or what, if anything, he meant to do when he got there ? to the kitchen for a knife, perhaps? Another side-effect, a rather more serious one, was respiratory depression in sensitive patients.

Her good friends the Roydmans?

When the police come tomorrow looking for their missing lamb, she said, we dont want the to see anything out of the ordinary, do we, Paul? She stayed away fifty hours before. At that she had not scrupled. "The state cop stared at him. He might have murdered her. Only the name of the unfortunate Miss Charlotte Evelyn-Hyde, late of Storping-on-Firkill, the village just to the west of Little Dunthorpe, was sufficient to bring a scream tearing from her. Its the r- Then Annies thick, blood-grimed fingers poked under the door and tugged mindlessly at his shirt.

Isn't it great?

In more macabre spam news, I got classic Nigerian scam mail with an Iraqi twist. Has anyone else seen this one? It kind of freaks me out. ( Iraqi Nigerian scam )

Just for kicks, today I translated my favorite Spanish short story into English; it's Los Ojos Verdes, a fun Romantic tale by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Just right for Valentine's Day!

Translation turns out to be harder than I thought. In Spanish this is all beautifully worded, Yeats-ish, but I couldn't make it come out right. The voice is inconsistent, and I spent absurd amounts of time trying to work out how to translate things like "Fuente de los Álamos," because "Poplar Headwaters" just doesn't roll off the tongue. So enjoy, and be gentle. :-)

( Green Eyes )

From nicodemusrat: Post a favorite poem. Now this is a cool meme that's far more informative than a quiz or questionnaire!

To make sure I didn't post something redundant I went through all the poems I've already posted on my LJ: EE Cummings' It may not always be so (with additional links to Gerard Manley Hopkins' Carrion Comfort and No Worst, There is None and TS Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), Shakespeare's Let me not to the marriage of true minds, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Spring and Fall, EE Cummings' Take for example this:, and of course, the silly Google-translated poetry contest.

I think what is missing is some Rumi. There are a lot of Rumi poems I love, but let's try ( Moses and the Shepherd )

...Although, really, today I am more in the mood for the Reed Flute's Song:

...Days full of wanting,
let them go by without worrying

that they do. Stay where you are
inside such a pure, hollow note....

You should also read Nic's pick here... and then post your own poem du jour!

I like today's Dhammapada readings:

Overcome the angry by non-anger;
overcome the wicked by goodness;
overcome the miser by generosity;
overcome the liar by truth. (223)

O Atula! Indeed, this is an ancient practice, not one only of today:
they blame those who remain silent,
they blame those speak much,
they blame those who speak in moderation.
There is none in the world who is not blamed.
There never was,
there never will be,
nor is there now,
a person who is wholly blamed or wholly praised. (227-228)

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were just announced.

If you haven't heard of the Bulwer-Lytton, it is a contest for the WORST opening line of a (non-existent) novel, named after the guy who started his 1830 book Paul Clifford with this infamous sentence:

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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

This year's winner is the following sentence, by Microsoft analyst Dan McKay:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

The list of other winners and runner-ups has a lot of sentences I like better, though. This one's my favorite:

Patricia wrote out the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night' exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of 'He's Just Not That Into You' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she'd always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

This is of, at best, passing importance to others, but I'm recording it here for my own convenience, so I can keep track of all the books about which I've said, "Hey, I should read that while I'm in the States."

( Books to find and read this summer )

Of course I invite suggestions about books I should add to the list.

My favorite radio station here plays an incredibly cheesy radio soap opera called The Love of Qays and Layla. It's about a woman named Layla, who is in love with Qays despite her upcoming marriage to someone else, and Qays' devolution into a madman due to his love for her. So far we've heard two episodes; in the first, Layla was receiving the sage advice that she could be true to Qays by refusing to have sex with her soon-to-be-husband, and in today's episode she sent Qays away and got married to the Other Man. This soap represents BAD acting at its finest, although I have to say Qays' despairing "Nooo!" was about twice as believable as Annikin's.

I just looked up the radio station's claim that this cheesy and overly romantic tale is "based on a centuries-old Saudi Arabian love story," and it is indeed true. The famous version of it -- Layla and Majnun, majnun meaning "madman" -- was written in the 12th century by a Persian Sufi poet named Nizami. It was set in seventh century Arabia and is based on an oral tradition that, at least according to some, may actually date back to that period.

According to something random called the History News Network, this story -- though unfamiliar to most of us in the West -- has influenced a number of classic Western love stories, such as Romeo and Juliet and, of course, the Eric Clapton song.

And, since I've read a bit about the epic, I now know that Layla is NOT going to have sex with her new husband, and that they're all going to die tragically. Hope that doesn't spoil the plot for anyone else.

Each grain of sand takes its own length and breadth as the measure of the world; yet, beside a mountain range it is as nothing. You yourself are the grain of sand; you are your own prisoner. Break your cage, break free from yourself, free from humanity; learn that what you thought was real is not so in reality. Follow Nizami: burn but your own treasure, like a candle -- then the world, your sovereign, will become your slave.

-from Nizami's version of Layla and Majnun

marialuminous says it's National Poetry Month, so in honor of National Poetry Month, here is the poem that was going around my head when I woke up this morning.

( Take for example this: )

         -E.E. Cummings