I am the Tanzer

FUNKY MONKS: Cross off what you've read (Average read is six)

draughtsofapathy:

antoinetheswan:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (will read this summer)

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (will read this summer)

The Bible - Council of Nicea

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 

Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 

Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (attempted/will read this summer)

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (will read this summer)

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 

Emma - Jane Austen 

Persuasion - Jane Austen 

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

Lord of the Flies - William Golding 

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Dune - Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

Dracula - Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

Ulysses - James Joyce 

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

Germinal - Emile Zola

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession - AS Byatt

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

Charlotte’s Web - EB White

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Watership Down - Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (attempted)

23…I’m pretty impressed with myself. :)

Link

Anonymous asked: Wait--but what happened to Miss Havisham? Is she no longer in California?

Surrey Blackburn, one of the amazing leading ladies of Dickens Fair and many other Faires and a true guiding force in our community, passed away on Saturday morning after a long and valiant fight with cancer. Who besides her could be our Miss Havisham is a question beyond me. 

Surrey Blackburn (May 19, 2012).

The Summerland Faire has gained another wonderful member. You are so missed, beautiful lady. 

Anonymous asked: So tell me what you want, what you really want.

Ummm…I’m just gonna leave this here, since I can’t find one gif to cover it all. Wait for the “I wanna“‘s to get my serious answer. 

Anonymous asked: I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves.

Anonymous asked: How do you feel RIGHT this second?

Anonymous asked: You're a kid in a candy store!:

Flying

Once, I had a dream

that I was a bird

of tawny feathers like shore sand

speckled with white like the foam

of the crashing sea

and that I ran against the current

across a cold rippling river

touching surface with the Jesus Christ lizards

and swooped up from blue to green

and you were there.

.

I dreamt you were a redwood,

young but so rooted,

straight-backed and tall

from hours of stretching towards the sky

sprawling underground

in veined patterns

bark calloused rough

by your busy, patient hands,

with bark brown almost-red

curved and patterned and curled

like your early morning hair.

.

My wingtips set your needles swaying

as I whirled about your branches

and from the way the wind sang through you

I could hear your softest whisper

sighing, calling to me-

the chirps tumbled out my ivory throat

hoping I was loud enough to be heard,

to reach your ears

eighty feet high.

and with a smile I rested in your shade,

claws pressing into your russet arm

like I’d fall if I should let go.

.

As it happens in dreams, I suddenly felt

that I was so tired, my shoulders aching

from ages of endless flight.

So many trees I had passed-

pines dark, willows soft, walnuts cold, oaks tall-

but I could not stop for them,

no matter how sweetly their leaves glimmered

in the rising morning sun.

On I had flown, wings batting at the breeze

from mountain to valley to palm-land pale

to places where there are no trees

but where the wind carries their seedlings

in vain to unforgiving soil.

.

Here I was, with my weary head

against the warmth of your rings

and I felt I would need wings no more.

I had been beaten by the gales

and tossed on cold winds

and deserted in high places

where only birds with no trees can go

and so far had I gone.

As my tawny turned to almost-red

and my feathers floated away

and I melted, flesh into wood

oh, sweet life, I knew-

I was flying to you.

.

©Dana Yovel, 2012

Ode to my Headphones

No one holds me quite like you do,

my black beauty.

Day and night you caress me

your padded curve gliding

soft and warm and fit across my head

wrapping my ears in a faux-leather squeeze.

And how omnivocal are your sounds,

sweet singer dear-

no one else I’ve ever heard of

that can both Skype and sing the blues.

Sometimes when we bicker-

your sound dropped during a call,

or perhaps I tugged your cord this time-

you like to shout at me

so loud my eardrums twitch

or murmur curses under your breath

so I leap to adjust my audio settings.

But in the end we make up;

you love it when I twist your wires just right.

And when I’m alone at night,

you’re there to hold me close

and from the way you’re playing that piano

I can tell, with a sleepy grin,

it means, “I love you, too.”

©Dana Yovel, 2012

lucynic83:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Frederic Austerlitz Jr.
(May 10, 1899 - June 22, 1987)

Once after a dinner party, Gregory Peck and I drove Fred Astaire home. Fred lived in a colonial house that had a long porch with many pillars. When we dropped him off, he danced along the whole front porch, then opened the door, tipped his hat to us, and disappeared. Wow! Greg and I couldn’t speak for a few minutes. It was a beautiful way to say thank you.
- Kirk Douglas 

(via dancesinglove)