Blog! You've finally arrived

So, I just realized that my last post was the 100th one!!! I think that means I'm serious about this blogging business. I feel like there should be cake or something. :)



Currently, I'm attempting to read four differnt books simultaneously. Not a wise choice, my friends, but I think my lifestyle as a literature major has molded my habits, perhaps forever.

One is a book I found at the flea market for the delightful price of three dollars. Not only was the outside aesthetically nice with a sage green cover and art deco-like design, but the inside pages have that wonderful old musty book smell. If your're a book afficionado like myself you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Yeah, that smell. And, I really like the way this guy writes. The book, Where the Bong Tree Grows by James Ramsey Ullman, is actually a non-fiction (woot woot non-fiction) compilation of Ullman's journal entries as he travels to the South Pacific.

Ullman has a lot to say on an individual's sense of place. He writes, "...I can only submit that if years of travel have taught me anything, it is that it cannot be said of anywhere--as of Miss Stein's famous rose--simply that a place is a place is a place. It is also what each traveler brings to it in his mind and heart."

He also talks about writing in general:

"I was a writer. Sometimes I have thought, 'God help me, I am a writer.' At other, and I believe sounder, times I have thought, 'Thank God I am a writer.' And I have thought it in both pride and humility, for writing demands greater devotion and bestows richer rewards than most men have ever dreamed of." :)

And words:

"Take words alone. Lagoon is a lovely one. So is atoll. Who of us, in his time, has not conjured vicarious magic out of palm, breadfruit, pandanus, copra, schooner, outrigger, reef, trade wind, Kanaka, beachcomber, pareu, hula? But that is the trouble: we have conjured too often. They have been written, composed, painted, and photographed into a huge encompasing cliche--to the point where one hesitates to use the very phrase South Sea Island without a cough of apology."