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GalaxySong9's Livejournal

30th April, 2009. 11:22 pm. i read far from the madding crowd for funsies

So I kind of put a moratorium on posts during playoffs, unless I go to a game and have significant impressions that I want to record for posterity, and it's working out pretty well for me. Sort of. They don't call us the Cardiac Caps for nothing, though I can't help but feel I'd be under a lot less academic stress if I were a Bruins fan (who swept and therefore haven't had to take a vested interest in hockey for at least a week). Anyway, there's a few days before the Caps play again, so I will take the opportunity to make a real, non-hockey related update. There is only one hockey pun in this post after this paragraph.

I have a huge fucking hard-on for Thomas Hardy. I cannot get Phaneuf of him. He is fucking fantastic and reading him is like being thrilled and embraced and comforted and entertained. He writes beautifully about a time and place I find endlessly fascinating. His characters are interesting and engaging and I even like the ones I dislike - or perhaps would dislike is the more accurate turn of phrase. And in the background are the salty locals, characters with names bordering on the ridiculous (Henery, because that's how it's pronounced, or Solomon Longways, or Abel Whittle), who are always hysterically funny, which is amazing when you consider how Hardy hates happy endings. Even if you think the ending is happy - and it's not necessarily dead tragic, for you think "Oh, well the two characters that belong together are together in the end!" - it's not straight-up happy. It is, at the very least, bittersweet, or there is no promise of further and continued happiness. He has a realistic outlook on life, and the last paragraph of The Mayor of Casterbridge sums up my worldview just as much as it does Elizabeth-Jane's, and in fact she is much more a heroine every girl should strive to emulate rather than Elizabeth Bennet.

That's a wee bit of an exaggeration. She is a trifle too passive by today's standards, but rather be her than the overly headstrong Bathsheba Everdene. But I wonder if I would rather have the strong, silent, faithful farmer Gabriel Oak than the passionate Fitzwilliam Darcy (for he is passionate, much as he would deny it). This comparison, by the way, is born out of having to read both MoC and Persuasion for Brit Lit II, and enjoying Hardy millions of times more than Austen. Not that I still don't adore Austen, but fuck man. Hardy. Damn.

Funnily enough my mother has been recommending Hardy to me since the beginning of time. It's unsettling how, as I grow older and learn more, I realise that my mother is always right.

Okay, I lied. Red Wings in 7; Canucks in 5; Bruins in 5; Capitals in 6.

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