User Profile
Add Friend
Track User
Send Message
Send V-Gift
Everything After the Colon
...grasping at the absolute liquid madness and beauty of life
Created on 2003-01-24 13:07:25 (#870185), last updated 2008-02-21
5,148 comments received, 4,948 comments posted
Plus Account [Gift]
2,722 Journal Entries, 392 Tags, 201 Memories, 90+ ScrapBook Files, 0 Virtual Gifts, 15 Userpics
Basic Info| Name: | Thorn Bird |
|---|
BioIcon Love
'I made this.'
To borrow: credit and comment
Now Reading:
Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
Next up:
The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
Some of My Recent Reads -- August-November 2006
Flags in the Dust, William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Sanctuary, William Faulkner
The Unvanquished and associated previously published short stories, William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses and associated previously published short stories, William Faulkner
Light in August, William Faulkner
China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee
Native Speaker, Chang Rae Lee
Paradise, Toni Morrison
The Intuitionist, Coleson Whitehead
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (unfinished), Oscar Hijuelos
Bodega Dreams, Ernesto Quiñonez
Mother Tongue, Demetria Martínez
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexi
Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
"The Dead," James Joyce
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki
The Plague, Albert Camus
From Jose Luis Borges's Ficciones: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Funes the Memorious," "Death and the Compass," and "Three Versions of Judas"
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Born in Death, J.D. Robb
Movies I've Been Watching
American Dreamz 9
The Da Vinci Code 6
Take the Lead 5
Nanny McPhee 10
Chronicles of Narnia 3
Memoirs of a Geisha 8
Suggest a book, an author, or a movie.
Captain Kathryn Janeway is Love
Made by Sarah
Democrats Are Love
The weather is:
A Few of My Favorite Authors (more to come)
Links take you to the authors' offical sites.
Nora Roberts, aka J.D. Robb, author of the Eve Dallas books (and some romance stuff ;-)
Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta books
Nevada Barr, author of the Anna Pigeon books and Bittersweet
Kathy Reichs, author of the Tempe Brennan books
Peter David, writer of stuff--stuff like the funniest, most-involved Star Trek novels and episodes of Babylon 5
Douglas Adams, author of the five-book Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, the Dirk Gently series, Starship Titanic, and Last Chance to See
Laurell K. Hamilton, author of the Anita Blake (Animator and Vampire Slayer) series and the Merry Gentry (PI and Faery Princess) series
Jasper Fforde, author of The Eyre Affair and three other Thursday Next novels--an absolutely delicious blending. In the BookWorld, fictional characters work to preserve classic (and not-so-classic) literature with the help of the series heroine Thursday Next, a SpecOps agent from the Outland (the real world), trained for Jurisfiction by Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. The Real World is, in fact, a fantasy world where the Crimean Wars just ended, werewolves run amok, and husbands are erased from history--only sometimes, if they're Chrono agents, they're able to visit now and then. The similarities to our own world only make Thursday's more interesting. In July, the first of the Jack Spratt Nursery Crime series comes out. The web page itself is terribly amusing and loads of fun, filled as it is with such "dazzling displays of nonsense" as the Special Features (including deleted scenes and outtakes!) and updates on the migration of Mammoths.
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, authors of The Cabinet of Curiosities, The Ice Limit, and lots of other complex, fun reads filled with interesting characters (especially Agent Pendergast!)
Tell me yours!
Favorite Quotes:
I don't know about you, but I think it's perfectly legitimate for a woman to ask the tough questions in life, like why if you're God you select the female breast as the most prevalent site for terminal cancer. The breast is the fuel tank for every developing child in the world. What kind of engineer designs faulty fuel tanks straight into the blueprint?
In the 1970s there was a certain model of gas-burner that was famous for bursting into flames if another car so much as nudged its fender--they called it the Pinto. I was reminded of this car when my aunt Mary died, still undergoing radiation therapy, during my sophomore year in college. One of her fuel tanks leaked death everywhere in her lymph system, and she was gone in three months. So that's one of the very hardest questions. Creator, there is a never-ending plague on the breast. What is Your point?
But it's one of those questions that just don't get answered, ever. You have to either accept the fact that God isn't always up front with His plans and move on, or go insane.
from chapter 2 of The X President, Philip Baruth
"Grace under pressure is one thing, but I like to fight when the going gets tough, for what I want, and I was determined to make this work." - Kate Mulgrew, on the challenge of succeeding as Captain Janeway in the 'petri dish' of launching Voyager. The Star Trek Reporter, March-May 1998.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author." - Mark Twain
"Of course he has a knife--we all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians. How clear we make it.
Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war--not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government--nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars.
We carry it, like syphilis, inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten.
For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little? That's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.
- Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in Goldman's The Lion in Winter (1968)
If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.
It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who first realised this, and so discovered the interplanar technique most of us now use. [...] She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere--be anywhere--because she was already between planes.
from Changing Planes, Ursula Le Guin
The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Changing Planes, Ursula Le Guin
The book on top, a lover
staring into my eyes.
[...]
When I'm done with each word,
it gets up off the page
and lies down beside me in the bed;
soon I am surrounded by burrowing
words, who fall asleep before I do
and leave me alone under covers
like words in a book myself.
Bury me with books,
all of them cracked wide open.
No satin, only the feel of this legible
dry skin under my cold fingers.
Be sure my head is propped a little,
next to a reading light.
from "Lying in Bed with a Book," Philip Dacey
"She's a student," protested Coelle. "What will I tell her parents if...if she doesn't..."
"I don't know," said Sabriel. "I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than to do nothing, even if the cost is great."
from Garth Nix's Abhorsen, Book Three of The Old Kingdom Trilogy
Fun with Words
Merriam-Webster Online: Word Game of the Day
Merriam-Webster's Word for the Wise
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
OED Word of the Day
Literary Terms and Definitions
Reverse Dictionary
Looking for a Few Good Books?
The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel, James Hynes
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
The Lake of Dead Languages, Carol Goodman
Mirabilis, Susann Cokal
Mary Called Magdalene, Margaret George
I, Elizabeth, Rosalind Miles
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Sharpshooter Blues, Lewis Nordan
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells
Kate Mulgrew
Totally Kate
Gorgeous Kate
Tea at Five
Tea at Five Europe
Star Trek
This banner is too deliciously funny not to use...
A Sev Trek Favorite
The Rest
Hillary for President
VoteHillary.org Get your gear here.
Offical Site of The Abhorsen Trilogy
Same-Sex Marriage Laws by State from CNN
John Kerry's Official Site
Help President Bush Finally Learn to Read
Dance Shoes of Tennessee
Icons by![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
shipperchick -- including pro-Kerry, anti-Bush political icons
MY Administration:
The next best thing:
We feel:
My Fairy background came from:
romana03 ate my brain! Want a count?
User Info
Free Hit Counter
Recent Entries
Free Hit Counter
Now Reading:
Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
Next up:
The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
Some of My Recent Reads -- August-November 2006
Flags in the Dust, William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Sanctuary, William Faulkner
The Unvanquished and associated previously published short stories, William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses and associated previously published short stories, William Faulkner
Light in August, William Faulkner
China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee
Native Speaker, Chang Rae Lee
Paradise, Toni Morrison
The Intuitionist, Coleson Whitehead
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (unfinished), Oscar Hijuelos
Bodega Dreams, Ernesto Quiñonez
Mother Tongue, Demetria Martínez
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexi
Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
"The Dead," James Joyce
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki
The Plague, Albert Camus
From Jose Luis Borges's Ficciones: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Funes the Memorious," "Death and the Compass," and "Three Versions of Judas"
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Born in Death, J.D. Robb
Movies I've Been Watching
American Dreamz 9
The Da Vinci Code 6
Take the Lead 5
Nanny McPhee 10
Chronicles of Narnia 3
Memoirs of a Geisha 8
Suggest a book, an author, or a movie.
Made by Sarah
Democrats Are Love
The weather is:
A Few of My Favorite Authors (more to come)
Links take you to the authors' offical sites.
Nora Roberts, aka J.D. Robb, author of the Eve Dallas books (and some romance stuff ;-)
Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta books
Nevada Barr, author of the Anna Pigeon books and Bittersweet
Kathy Reichs, author of the Tempe Brennan books
Peter David, writer of stuff--stuff like the funniest, most-involved Star Trek novels and episodes of Babylon 5
Douglas Adams, author of the five-book Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, the Dirk Gently series, Starship Titanic, and Last Chance to See
Laurell K. Hamilton, author of the Anita Blake (Animator and Vampire Slayer) series and the Merry Gentry (PI and Faery Princess) series
Jasper Fforde, author of The Eyre Affair and three other Thursday Next novels--an absolutely delicious blending. In the BookWorld, fictional characters work to preserve classic (and not-so-classic) literature with the help of the series heroine Thursday Next, a SpecOps agent from the Outland (the real world), trained for Jurisfiction by Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. The Real World is, in fact, a fantasy world where the Crimean Wars just ended, werewolves run amok, and husbands are erased from history--only sometimes, if they're Chrono agents, they're able to visit now and then. The similarities to our own world only make Thursday's more interesting. In July, the first of the Jack Spratt Nursery Crime series comes out. The web page itself is terribly amusing and loads of fun, filled as it is with such "dazzling displays of nonsense" as the Special Features (including deleted scenes and outtakes!) and updates on the migration of Mammoths.
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, authors of The Cabinet of Curiosities, The Ice Limit, and lots of other complex, fun reads filled with interesting characters (especially Agent Pendergast!)
Tell me yours!
I don't know about you, but I think it's perfectly legitimate for a woman to ask the tough questions in life, like why if you're God you select the female breast as the most prevalent site for terminal cancer. The breast is the fuel tank for every developing child in the world. What kind of engineer designs faulty fuel tanks straight into the blueprint?
In the 1970s there was a certain model of gas-burner that was famous for bursting into flames if another car so much as nudged its fender--they called it the Pinto. I was reminded of this car when my aunt Mary died, still undergoing radiation therapy, during my sophomore year in college. One of her fuel tanks leaked death everywhere in her lymph system, and she was gone in three months. So that's one of the very hardest questions. Creator, there is a never-ending plague on the breast. What is Your point?
But it's one of those questions that just don't get answered, ever. You have to either accept the fact that God isn't always up front with His plans and move on, or go insane.
from chapter 2 of The X President, Philip Baruth
"Grace under pressure is one thing, but I like to fight when the going gets tough, for what I want, and I was determined to make this work." - Kate Mulgrew, on the challenge of succeeding as Captain Janeway in the 'petri dish' of launching Voyager. The Star Trek Reporter, March-May 1998.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author." - Mark Twain
"Of course he has a knife--we all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians. How clear we make it.
Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war--not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government--nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars.
We carry it, like syphilis, inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten.
For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little? That's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.
- Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in Goldman's The Lion in Winter (1968)
If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.
It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who first realised this, and so discovered the interplanar technique most of us now use. [...] She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere--be anywhere--because she was already between planes.
from Changing Planes, Ursula Le Guin
The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Changing Planes, Ursula Le Guin
staring into my eyes.
[...]
When I'm done with each word,
it gets up off the page
and lies down beside me in the bed;
soon I am surrounded by burrowing
words, who fall asleep before I do
and leave me alone under covers
like words in a book myself.
Bury me with books,
all of them cracked wide open.
No satin, only the feel of this legible
dry skin under my cold fingers.
Be sure my head is propped a little,
next to a reading light.
from "Lying in Bed with a Book," Philip Dacey
"She's a student," protested Coelle. "What will I tell her parents if...if she doesn't..."
"I don't know," said Sabriel. "I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than to do nothing, even if the cost is great."
from Garth Nix's Abhorsen, Book Three of The Old Kingdom Trilogy
Fun with Words
Merriam-Webster Online: Word Game of the Day
Merriam-Webster's Word for the Wise
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
OED Word of the Day
Literary Terms and Definitions
Reverse Dictionary
Looking for a Few Good Books?
The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel, James Hynes
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
The Lake of Dead Languages, Carol Goodman
Mirabilis, Susann Cokal
Mary Called Magdalene, Margaret George
I, Elizabeth, Rosalind Miles
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Sharpshooter Blues, Lewis Nordan
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells
Kate Mulgrew
Totally Kate
Gorgeous Kate
Tea at Five
Tea at Five Europe
Star Trek
This banner is too deliciously funny not to use...
A Sev Trek Favorite
The Rest
Hillary for President
VoteHillary.org Get your gear here.
Offical Site of The Abhorsen Trilogy
Same-Sex Marriage Laws by State from CNN
John Kerry's Official Site
Help President Bush Finally Learn to Read
Dance Shoes of Tennessee
Icons by
shipperchick -- including pro-Kerry, anti-Bush political iconsMY Administration:
The next best thing:
We feel:
 |
My Fairy background came from:
romana03 ate my brain! Want a count?User Info
Free Hit Counter
Recent Entries
Free Hit Counter
ConnectInterests (108):
academia, anna pigeon, anne rice, atlanta, babies, babylon 5, ballroom dancing, beverly crusher, billy collins, bond girls, books, boston public, catherine of aragon, cha-cha, charlotte gray, chicago, children, commander-in-chief, comparative linguistics, cooking, dancing, dialects, disney, douglas adams, dr. quinn, dr. quinn medicine woman, elizabeth corday, elizabeth i, er, eve dallas, fan fiction, fanfic, fantasy, female protagonists, fiction, gates mcfadden, gender bending, heroines, historical linguistics, history, icons, invasion, j/7, jacqueline carey, james bond, jane seymour, janeway/seven, jeri ryan, kate calloway, kate mulgrew, katharine hepburn, kathryn janeway, kerry weaver, kristin westphalen, kushiel's chosen, kushiel's dart, laura innes, les miserables, lesbian fiction, lestat, linguistics, lord of the rings, lost, major kira, marion zimmer bradley, mary poppins, mulder, music, musicals, my fair lady, my sisters' room, mystery novels, nana visitor, nicola griffith, nominalization, ocean's 11, p/c, peace, philip baruth, philip dacey, picard/crusher, poetry, politics, professors, puttin' on the dyke, reading, religion, rhumba, scarlet o'hara, science-fiction, scully, shag, star trek, star trek: voyager, stephanie beacham, swing dance, swing dancing, tango, tea at five, teaching, waltz, waltzing, west wing, william faulkner, women, writers, writing, x-files
External Services:
 | darkling_thrush@livejournal.com |
Friends [View Entries] Friends (77):
50ft_eyesores, agentrosecotton, alex_voy, ate_the_coffee, athena4lynn, aunty_pasta, babsmackenzie, baggers, baqhnara, berglaug, blackcloud42, breaking_beauty, cardiac_melody, cat_willows, chancie, chaodai, cina_kim, cptncb, dk2022, dsthomas, ex_blushingp662, feedmefiction, fuyu_ginga, greenpeas, gritkitty, gtmartini, hibernate, his_dbl_feature, icemaiden013, ingole, janevok, jennyo, jessruth, jukeboxalarm, just_to_say, juxtamacguy, katarina712, katrin_folly, kosmickway, krazykitkat, kringey, lady_evangeline, ladyvivien, lifeinwords, lishesque, lkr, michellek, mikee_pm, milostea, missfoxie, mmmbopthis, monnie_doggett, musicalsilver, myfigurefemale, northbard, nostalgia_lj, odalisque, papiyon, pattik1, pyrplerose, quasiradiant, redtoffee, rfkfortheusa, sangerin, saragoose, sezabelle, sixminutesspare, skywaterblue, sweetly_savage, thebitingfaery, thewildorchids, trektoday, trendy_nihilist, twisted_badger, violetsnvalium, vlsmarble, xensorcelledx
Friend of (45):
agentrosecotton, alexlivshipper, baqhnara, berglaug, buffytheslayr, cardiac_melody, cat_willows, cina_kim, cptncb, deborahactress, dk2022, dsthomas, feedmefiction, gritkitty, his_dbl_feature, im_tired1977, jessruth, juxtamacguy, katarina712, kosmickway, landofthefaery, limited_bouncin, lishesque, lkr, metropoledancer, michellek, missfoxie, odalisque, purdysmile, pyrplerose, quasiradiant, redtoffee, rfkfortheusa, sangerin, sezabelle, sixminutesspare, sweetly_savage, thebitingfaery, thebitingfaery2, thewrywriter, trendy_nihilist, twisted_badger, violetsnvalium, vlsmarble, xensorcelledx
Communities [View Entries] Watching (78):
__beananon, __broomcupboard, __ladylike, afewfansmore, allthumbs, arthur_icons, atlantalesbians, bytheleft, cj_fangrrl, clinton_2008, commandernchief, conflctofintrst, deltaquadrant, drabbles100, drop_the_u, ds9agogo, dykes2watchout4, even_angels_, fandomvideos, fanfic_resource, fantazy_icons, ffwritersanon, garfieldfans, girlslash, great_fanfic, i_make_icons, iconsensual, imho_recs, ineedthissong, inthetallgrass, ironjawedicons, ivy_rachel, janewayfic, janewayites, jslash7, katemulgrew, kushiel_trilogy, ladypresident, lawandorder100, liberal_icons, linguaphiles, linguists, lj_maintenance, lyrical_icons, mp3_share, myfandom_icons, neutral_zone, philologist, photoshopless, prettywordsrecs, revelations_nbc, revelationsshow, revelationstv, shayari, simplybases, startrekicons, the_hollows, thecouple, thursday100plus, thursdaynext, trek100, trek_fanfic, trek_fic, trek_requests, trekfemmeslash, trekslash, trekwisdom, trekwomen_daily, tww_icons, ursaminorbeta, uss_rainbowtrek, vc_icons, viresse_icons, voy_stillness, voyager_fans, voycons, wga_supporters, xfile_stillness
Member of (50):
__broomcupboard, afewfansmore, arthur_icons, atlantalesbians, cj_fangrrl, claim_a_voice, clinton_2008, community_promo, community_quest, deltaquadrant, drabbles100, ds9agogo, even_angels_, fandomvideos, fanfic_resource, girlslash, great_fanfic, imho_recs, ineedthissong, ironjawedicons, ivy_rachel, janewayfic, janewayites, jslash7, katemulgrew, kushiel_trilogy, liberal_icons, linguaphiles, mp3_share, myfandom_icons, neutral_zone, paidmembers, revelationsshow, revelationstv, the_hollows, thecouple, thursdaynext, trek100, trek_fanfic, trek_requests, trek_stuff, trekfemmeslash, trekwisdom, trekwomen_daily, tww_icons, ursaminorbeta, vc_icons, voy_stillness, voyager_fans, voycons
Feeds [View Entries] Watching (2):
