Literature & Language
Reading is the Ultimate Leisure activity for the body - and the best
workout for the brain. Unless you're reading pap. Although I don't think
of myself as having a thing for female writers, all of the authors I currently
list as favorites are women:
Poppy
Z Brite writes eloquently about many things dear to my heart: Louisiana,
the South, darkness and monsters, and beautiful gay bois. Recent things
I've read include Exquisite Corpse, Swamp
Foetus, Lost Souls, Drawing
Blood, and her Crow novel (which is
surprisingly good, considering it's a Crow
novel...).
Yet another woman with an amazing written voice is Pat
Cadigan. My friend Gary
Driggs (aka Visual Mark) introduced me to her work via Synners,
and I want to be Gina Aiesi so badly!
Possibly the Grande Dame of classic SF, Ursula
K. Le Guin's novels The Left Hand of Darkness
and The Dispossessed are brilliant.
My friend and co-worker Barb introduced me to books by Connie
Willis. her novel Doomsday Book is a
hilarious and intelligent novel about a young woman who goes back in
time to record the history of the years before the Great Plague - and
winds up right in the middle of an outbreak. Her collection of short
stories, Impossible Things, contains a story
I read many years ago in Omni magazine, and is really incredible.
Steer clear of Promised Land, however. She
doesn't appear to have an official site, but there are some interviews
and listings at
Lycos.
She's better known in feminist and Literature circles than the above
authors, but Marge
Piercy's SF novel, Woman on the Edge of Time
set me into paroxysm of joy and terror. I've enjoyed other novels by
her (most recently Summer People), but not
as much.
Another literary figure is Margaret
Atwood who is best known for writing The Handmaid's
Tale. The Robber Bride disturbed me
horribly, but I think it was brilliant. Cats Eye
was also excellent. When I'm not wallowing in the beautiful
and glorious misery of total emersion into the above goddesses' works,
here's some other literature things I like:
Wondering who to pray to for that special favor? Find out
at the Saints
Index
"Quotations
are always fun," -- Anonymous
Shakespeare said the darndest things, including some excellent
insults! Here are some
that he came up with, or you can generate
your own that just sound like you're a Bard with a Dirty
Mouth!
This is just plain funny: The
Jean Paul Satre Cookbook.
My own writing, while not great,
is not your usual goth poetry o' doom...
I'm a Word Geek. Here's a few related sites:
The
Hypertext Webster's Disctionary
ARTFL
Project's Webster
Dictionary.Com
Roget's Internet
Thesaurus
A
Web of Online Dictionaries
The Word
Wizard
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