Echoes

I'm a little empty-headed right now, so some of the echoes bouncing around my brain are escaping onto the internets:

1) I finished Neil Gaiman's The Sandman graphic novel series recently. It was the second time around, much more elegiac and poignant. The Sandman is the personification of dreams, and so Gaiman tells stories that are essentially about stories. The only negative experience I had was that some jerk of the century tore out four pages of one of the ten volumes (I got them at the library). Unfortunately, these four pages were the climax of the entire series, so this time I didn't get to read it.

2) I started Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. So far, it is like fiction for scientists. Neat. I gather that there are pirates and court intrigue later as well.

3) Gaiman re-inspired me to read my Shakespeare. I've read a good number of his plays over the years, maybe 10, and the older I get the better they get. I haven't gotten around to it because I have trouble catching the allusions and deceptive vocabulary without little annotations. So I am thinking about getting the Norton Shakespeare or something for a start-of-next-semester present. Uh, to myself.

4) I can't call a post "Echoes" without mentioning Pink Floyd's opus, a song about twenty minutes long with jamming and whale song.

Cloudless every day you fall
upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the windows in the wall
come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the skies

It's on an album called Meddle, whose bluesy song "Seamus" was featured in the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I've seen the play live twice, and both times were very memorable, happy days. It's one of my favorite plays. I've been meaning to reread it as an adult, but the only place I've found it so far is at a used bookstore in Logan. Unfortunately, this is the kind of bookstore that checks online and charges full price for used books by looking up ISBNs. Needless to say, I've never been back to that store.

Stupid me just looked it up in the USU library. Guess I'll check it out for a while.