A girl mad as birds

Love in the asylum

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

By Dylan Thomas

Philosophizing about life and literature

Which in my world basically mean the same thing...
Each holiday I make a huge list of books I plan to read, which I never end up actually doing because I find other books to read in stead. Well, I'm not giving up.
This time I feel like reading a few classics, and some I think should end up being classic (mind you, I'm saying this even before I've read them...):
- Jack Kerouac's On the Road, I actually have two different versions of this book: the original manuscript and the one that ended up being published - I don't know which one I'll read.
- Allen Ginsberg, I love his poems and I've gotten a hold of his whole production, I might not read it all, but I'll definitely read his collection Howl and other poems.
- Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
- Joseph Heller's Catch-22.These are all books I was supposed to read last fall, but never got through them (I took a class in 1950s American Literature).
- James Joyce's Ulysses - the original 1922 text, apparently without interference - what ever that means.
- Miguel de Cervantes Saaveda's Don Quijote - I've read it for a class earlier, but never finished it.
- Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls and To Have and Have not - I'm not sure I'll read them both, we'll see.
- Amalie Skram: Constance Ring - One Norwegian made the list!
- John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath - I have started reading this book so many time, it's about time I get past chapter 4
- Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo - saw the movie the other day, it made me want to read the book.

And the non-classics:
- Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - I love Murakami, he is one of my favourite authors.
- Paul Auster: The Book of Illusions - I'm reading this one because I promised a friend I would a few years ago, but never did.

But before I read any of these books I'm going to read Chris Cleave's Little Bee - which I will be writing a review of for a journal (? På godt norsk: tidsskrift). Yesterday I was at a book meeting where Chris Cleave read from the book, it was so much fun. He is really good at presenting himself and his book.
A friend of mine and I got up really early to go to the book meeting at Aschehoug, and all I could think of when I was there was how much I wanted to work there. <- and that's the life part of this blog

The usual suspects

Bob Dylan love six times over x2