No really.

I need this.

That’s right, folks. A tauntaun sleeping bag.

If you don’t know what a tauntaun is/why this is awesome, you may not be nerdy enough to be reading this blog.

Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salome, creating one of my favorite books ever because omg Beardsley is a genius illustrator. However—and perhaps not surprisingly—the two ended up not getting along very well. Wilde complained about the art, and in retaliation Beardsley drew this cartoon, responding to Wilde’s claim that he never did any research.

Why is it always the most volatile of artistic relationships that produce some of the greatest art?

Okay, putting all the names in a pile, lalalala…

and the winner isssssss…

GEORGE

send me your address! you know my email. :)

April 1891
To Arthur Conan Doyle

Between me and life there is a mist of words always. I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth. Still I do aim at making a work of art, and I am really delighted that you think my treatment subtle and artistically good. The newspapers seem to me to be written by the prurient for the Philistine. I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral. My difficulty was to keep the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it still seems to me that the moral is too obvious.
Oscar Wilde

From this book.

One more day to enter the drawing for Soulless! Click here.

So I just saw this trailer on ABC (in the middle of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! for those of you who are interested).  And I am kind of ridiculously excited, all things considered. All things being that it’s an ABC Christmas special and I’m an adult.

So I was born with a superpower.

I never get lost.

That’s right. You have no idea how awesome this is. I always know which way is north (although sometimes I have a few moments of frightening disorientation when I come out of a subway) and even if I don’t know what streets are doing I can point and say, “we want to be going that way.” Distances I’m not great with, but direction I got down.

And maps. I can look at a map once, figure out how to get from Point A to Point B, and get there no matter what. Even if I have to take a detour for some reason, I get there there 1-2-3 easy.

However.

My superpower appears to be horribly broken.

A couple of weeks ago it took me 30 minutes to walk to someone’s house 5 minutes from mine. I knew where I was going, I had looked at a map and received directions from my roommate, and seriously it was like 2 turns. 5 minutes. Took me 30. I do not know what happened. The streets just—weren’t doing the right thing. I’d find the right street and then lose it, even though I was on it. It was seriously like being in the twilight zone.

And then today.

I was on Boylston. And then I wasn’t. And then there was a train track in the way when I tried to circle back. It took me almost 45 minutes, again to go about two blocks. (I turned the wrong way at an intersection. If I had turned the correct way I would have been there in 5.)

So, seriously. WTF, world. You can’t just give a girl a superpower and then take it away without warning!! I am not used to being lost I don’t know how to handle it. HELP ME OBI-WAN KENOBI.

(scroll down about 3 posts for the book giveaway!)

So I kind of adore Orhan Pamuk. He’s last year’s Nobel Literature Prize winner and the author of Snow and Museum of Innocence, among other books, none of which I have read. But I’d heard that he gives good talks, and I like listening to authors talk even when I haven’t read them, so I toddled along.

And—I say this with love, Mr. Pamuk—he is an argumentative, crotchety old bastard. Maybe that’s a little harsh. But he obviously didn’t like his interviewer or the questions he was being asked. The man kept asking about how East meets West in Pamuk’s novels, but Pamuk kept being like, “That’s not the point.” But the guy kept talking about it. And Pamuk finally said, “YES. East meets West in Istanbul in my novels, because I write about Istanbul and that is what I see when I look out the window.“

Please note that these quotes are not exact. And speaking of…

During the question-and-answer session a crazy old guy stood up and said (paraphrase): “You’ve been accused of plagiarism in the past. You’ve never responded to this, at least not according to your wikipedia page when I checked it this morning, so do you have any response you want to give now?”

Pamuk (and this is exact): “No I do not. Next question?”

And in a good example of why you should never believe wikipedia, his entry now says this:

A group of writers claim that some parts of Orhan Pamuk’s works are exceedingly influenced by other works that belong to other writers[...] Orhan Pamuk responded to these accusations at the Boston Book Festival saying, “They are not true.”

Dear person who updated the page within the past few hours: THIS IS NOT WHAT HE SAID. Instead, he said what I wrote above, in a way indicating that he thought the question not even worthy of response.

Anyway.

He is absolutely a genius and I loved listening to him talk. I’m going to try to find the lecture series he just did at Harvard, I have heard rumors they’re online.

So overall I was thrilled with the Boston Book Festival.