*charlotte sometimes*

I'd like to meet:

People with ideas. I want to meet people who actually think and form opinions. Considered opinions. Opinions they can intelligently justify. And maybe I'd like to meet some people who share my opinions... or can at least understand them!

Music:

Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Rufus Wainwright, The Cure, Elvis Costello, Sisters of Mercy, Travis, Frank Sinatra, Radiohead, Nirvana, The Postal Service, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, The Tragically Hip, Depeche Mode, Lloyd Cole, The White Stripes, U2, Blue Rodeo, Tchaikovsky, Tommy James and, oh, so much more...

Movies:

The Princess Bride, Dangerous Liaisons, anything by Peter Greenaway, Galipoli, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner (the director's cut - it really makes a difference not having the running commentary) The Philidelphia Story (actually, ANYTHING with James Stewart and/or Katherine Hepburn), Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, This is Spinal Tap, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Gaslight

Television:

CSI, House, Dead Like Me

Books:

Jane Austin, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskill, Anthony Trollope, Leo Tolstoy -- because the best way to understand what life was like in any particular era is to read the fiction of that era. Christopher Marlowe, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg (yes, he was a misogynist, but he wrote well), Anton Chekhov. I’m one of those weird people who read Shakespeare for pleasure… The Complete Sonnets and Poems is definitely on my desert island list… Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson (who drinks at the pub ‘round the corner… so if I can develop a taste for scotch, I may actually meet him someday…) Minette Walters, Josephine Tey, Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Don Coles, Leonard Cohen, Dorothy Parker, John Donne, Sylvia Plath, Robert Burns, Bertrand Russell. Particular books include Stephen Lewis’s The Race Against Time, How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman, Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, anything by Ray Buckland, The Witches’ Bible by Janet and Stewart Ferrer, Sutton and Mann’s Druid Magic, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins…. The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, which sits perpetually open on my bookshelf, bible-like, a testament to my love of language....

Heroes:

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!-
powers and people- and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me. I have faith in nights. From Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

"Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world."
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"For my part I know nothing with any certainty but the sight of the stars makes me dream."
-Van Gogh

Venus and the Sun

The scented flames of the sun throw me,

Telling me how to move--I tell them

How to bend the light of shifting stars:

I order their curved wash so the moon

Will not escape, so rocks and seas

Will stretch their elbows under her.

I am the sun's toy--because I go against

The grain I feel the brush of my authority,

Its ripples straying from a star's collapse.

If I travel far enough, and fast enough, I seem

To be at rest, I see my closed life expanding

Through the crimson shells of time.

But the stars are still at large, they fly apart

From each other to a more soulful beginning;

And the sun holds good till it makes a point

Of telling itself to whiten to a traplight--

This emptiness was left from the start; with any choice

I'd double-back to the dullest blue of Mars.

-- Medbh McGuckian

What does that mean?

A winter Goddess?

There's no where to go but up?

From darkness into light.

From death to resurrection

-- and back again?

Venus TransiensTell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli's vision
Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds
He tossed his lady
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you
To cover your too great loveliness
As with a gauze
Of misted silver? For me,
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds,
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)