Assorted Pieces (or, The Mixed Bag)

So, for those of you keeping score Pneumonia Boy is more or less back on his feet by this point. Hooray! Not so well that I'd be willing to fight a duel with him and consider it an even match (but someday, my nemesis!) but he's not going have to miss the rest of the semester due to deathly illness.

In the fiction class of joy and...other things, no real travesties to date but last night's viewing of Star Wars Episode III (besides completing the first stage of my Jedi training) has also confirmed that there was really no original detail in that story that I was writing about. Sigh. So now what do I do? Furthermore, our beloved Lori Huth (fiction prof. extraordinaire) is leaving to have a BABY! She also goes to my church group thing and is generally an awesome person and so this is beyond exciting news. There's a baby in her tummy and soon it's going to come out of her tummy and into the world! When you really think about it, that's rather fascinating, how does that even work, a person, inside of another person, coming out of that person to live an independent life. How bizarre. Oh, but also on the fiction front, I definitely found some consecutive pages of somebody's story in the recycling bin of the print center when I was looking for some paper the other day. Definitely featured a stallion from the plains of Amythrec with a curling mane and shadowy forelocks, or something like that. Why do I keep bumping into this stuff?

And, just for fun, I am including Kubla Khan by Coleridge. I have long been fascinated by this poem, particularly the last stanza, and what it says about the mystic power of the writer to create worlds and the fear that that ought to inspire. Maybe it just feeds my ego...Something more profound later, friends, I'm just not up to it tonight.

Kubla Khan
OR, A VISION IN A DREAM.
A FRAGMENT.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.