User:MelancholyDanish

And if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison', it is almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later.

Many thanks go to Clio for the inspiration for this page ;-)

'That favorite subject, myself'

For the interested... Like N'oun Doare in the Celtic fairy-tale, or Alice in the enchanted wood, I have a name but can't remember what it is. For most of my life I've gone by Boze (it rhymes with Toes, and other words that rhyme with Toes), and that's how I'm generally known.

I've lived in Texas for all of my life, with the exception of one hundred glorious days last fall, and I'm a small liberal undergraduate at a university here. During the school-year I go to classes and pose as an English major as best I can, but for most of the rest of the time I'm lurking about in the library reading all the books that I can find and generally ignoring all the things I've been assigned. My Continual Delights are Nonsense, Wonder, Irony, Imagination, and the Sublime. Otherways I enjoy Literature, Mythology, Religion, History, and Psychology, though I prefer a good mix of the five (or even ten, when I can manage it). I'm especially interested in generating new patterns of thought in any way I can.

During the fall of my Junior year I studied abroad for three months in the Kensington area of London and gained a certain notoriety within my group for endless wandering of the streets. While I was there I also found my way over to Cambridge, Oxford, Stonehenge, Bath, Canterbury, Edinburgh, Durham, York, and Cornwall (where I had the good fortune to be trapped in the middle of a barren Gothic moor during the worst hailstorm of the last ten years).

My twin passions are Archetypal Psychology and Creative Writing, and I hope to attend graduate school for one or the other. (If anyone has a recommendation, I would appreciate the help, for lately I've been feeling lost.) I'm also involved in an overly-grandiose creative endeavor involving a series of children's novels set in a fantasy world.

Favorite Fictions

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

I first read the Alice novels when I was seven or eight; I've read the first one twenty or more times and the second at least ten. For sheer whimsy, nonsense, irony, and playfulness, there are no better novels, although I suppose it is the undercurrent of darkness which keeps us returning again and again. Lewis Carroll had a gift for creating atmosphere with the simplest of words which no one has ever surpassed.

The Life and Adventures of David Copperfield

Another childhood favorite, I first discovered David in a box of books when I was ten and read it twice in middle school. The sufferings and misfortunes of the main character, the dismal circumstances of his youth, and his aspirations as a writer quickly made him my favorite character of any novel, even if he is the dullest in the book. It scarcely matters, though, with Mr. Micawber and Betsey Trotwood and Dora Spenlow and Peggoty and Uriah and all of the rest running freely around. And Steerforth, lying peacefully there with his head upon his arm, just as he always did in school.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The most modern of all my favorites, JSAMN became a bestseller nearly the instant it was published in September of 2004. It's the story of a Regency-era Britain in which magic has been all but dead for the last three hundred years, until a bookish-little man named Norrell and his Byronic apprentice Strange initiate the Glorious Revival. Norrell makes all the statues within York Cathedral speak (their voices all have a curious gravelly sound) and Strange wins glory in the fields of battle under Wellington in Spain. But Strange is increasingly drawn to all the most perilous types of magic, and Mr Norrell's dealings with a certain fairy threaten to ruin everything that they're both trying to achieve.

The Man who was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Susanna Clarke was right: there isn't another novel like it in the world. This little book is so full of surprises that the central story is best left undescribed. The first modern spy novel (it was published in the same year as The Riddle of the Sands), it's also an eerily gorgeous prose-poem with an otherworldly atmosphere, a social comedy of irony and reversal, an existential nightmare, and a metaphysical thriller that confounds and mystifies. Chesterton was a giant among men, and Thursday is a giant among books.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Grandest and most haunting of the Harry Potter books - for now, at least.

Stuff and Nonsense

"We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." - Arthur O'Shaunessey (quoted in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)

"Once born, I never died. Almost but no. While oils glistened the gates and doors of the world, there was always one door, one hinge, where I lodged for a night, a year, a mortal lifetime. So I have made it across continents, with my own linguistics, my own treasures of knowledge, and rest here among you, representatives of all the openings and closures of a vast world. Put not butter, nor grease, nor bacon-rind upon my resting places." - Ray Bradbury, From the Dust Returned

"We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget." - G. K. Chesterton, "The Ethics of Elfland"