Anna Karenina: List 1

So I’m reading Anna Karenina for AP English summer work and I love it. It’s been looming (and this book is enormous so it LOOMS) on my bedside table for a week and before that it had taken up residence in the depths of my closet, like some unconquerable beast. A cyclops horror of a novel, at the edge of my consciousness always. And now I have started it in my 7 hour stint at the local coffee shop.

But I have found that even aside from the fact that reading this in a public place makes me look damned smaht, I am enjoying it. I may not understand why Tolstoy finds it completely necessary to call his characters by several different names in the space of one page, but I’m just going to approach it as him being light years ahead of me as far as planes of thought go. Which is proven in the extensive vocabulary of this book. While every page has it’s footnotes (I have to flip to the back of the book!? Curse you publishers. I am beginning to feel the wrist strain from lifting those 800 pages to reach your ill-placed glossary every five minutes), the translators apparently do not seem to feel it necessary to define such terms as turbot. A turbot, by the way, is a variation of European flat fish.

“You do like turbot?” he said to Levin, as they drove up.
“What?” asked Levin. “Turbot? Yes, I’m terribly fond of turbot.”
- Page 33 of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

So until I have completed this novel I will be listing the words that Mr. Tolstoy has so kindly decided to teach me. Maybe I’ll put some sort of progress tracker in the sidebar. Oh. And from now on I will be putting my paranthesised tangents as footnotes, conveniently at the bottom of the post. Ha, Penguin Classics. Ha.

With Steadfast Intellectual Commitment,
Hanz

1) I was thrilled that the first page of this book said only “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” Hooked me.

2) Levin’s adoration of Kitty is sweet beyond all measure.

——-

Scabrous- having a rough surface because of minute points or projections

Turbot- a variation of European flatfish

You Know Those Nights…

When you simply can’t sleep? I’m having one of those right now. I just can’t stop thinking. About the boy, about my play, about why in hell I took three one-hour naps today and slept in until 10:30, about my current craving for that pineapple-coconut HaagenDazs ice cream (just a pint would do).

So I find myself posting at 11:55 on a Sunday evening with the school week before me and my parents snoring just down the hall. Apart they cause tremors, but together they call to mind apocalyptic quakes. But about the school week. I cannot even explain to you, dear reader, how much I am looking forward to the end of this term. I have senioritis and I’m only a junior. I can feel my will to do anything academic sapping out of my follicles. If I get a haircut, I’ll be powerless. It can’t be good to be this resigned this early. I’m worried for myself.

Aaaaand the dragons wake. Save. Post. Avoid grounding at all costs.

The Peter Pan Complex

^ That's me ^

Life is a storm.

And just when you’ve become comfortable with that lull at sea and have pushed that pressure in the air to the back of your mind, it starts raining all over again. I guess its a good thing I like the rain.

Because when you’re 17 and too busy to breathe and afraid of being alone, it rains all the time. And when all you want is to get out of the backwoods and into the wilderness of the “Real World”, all you can do is hope that one day it pours just enough to flood you down the street and into adulthood. But that’s only some days, because I spend most of my time dreading the future and crossing my fingers that I can stay young for as long as humanly possible. I suffer from that Peter Pan complex where every time I reach one of those major milestones of growing up, I cross my arms and stomp my foot and very petulantly declare “No.” Not literally, of course, but you know what I’ m saying.

I’m not entirely sure what I want to be. I have so many interests, and luckily an arsenal of half-sharpened talents that I could turn into a future. Should I pursue the fashion industry or would the aggressive vapidity of its glittery denizens pull the soul right out of me? Could I study history and become a teacher? Should I pull a starving artist and write books until an editor decides that I’m good enough to invest in? Or maybe I could be the editor and help feed some starving artists. There are so many options, I just don’t know what to do with myself.

So maybe writing about it will help me organize my thoughts as that has always been a fairly effective method in the past. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll strike a chord within a reader somewhere, who knows exactly what I’m talking about. And maybe that reader will come back and read some more. That would be ideal. Storms can be pretty hard to weather when alone.

I apologize in advance for any terrible puns you may encounter while in the process of reading this blog.

Most Sincerely,

Me ∞