hi bored

today i'm trying to fine tune the bus 5 blog. so the only reason this entry is here is because i neeed to stuff the experimental blog

Famous quotations by Gilbert Chesterton:
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

To Laius, King of Thebes, an oracle foretold that the child born to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother. So when in time a son was born the infant's feet were riveted together and he was left to die on Mount Cithaeron. But a shepherd found the babe and tended him, and delivered him to another shepherd who took him to his master, the King or Corinth. Polybus being childless adopted the boy, who grew up believing that he was indeed the King's son. Afterwards doubting his parentage he inquired of the Delphic god and heard himself the weird declared before to Laius. Wherefore he fled from what he deemed his father's house and in his flight he encountered and unwillingly slew his father Laius. Arriving at Thebes he answered the riddle of the Sphinx and the grateful Thebans made their deliverer king. So he reigned in the room of Laius, and espoused the widowed queen. Children were born to them and Thebes prospered under his rule, but again a grievous plague fell upon the city. Again the oracle was consulted and it bade them purge themselves of blood-guiltiness. Oedipus denounces the crime of which he is unaware, and undertakes to track out the criminal. Step by step it is brought home to him that he is the man. The closing scene reveals Jocasta slain by her own hand and Oedipus blinded by his own act and praying for death or exile.

Kubla Khan was inspired by a dream. In the summer of 1797, the author had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton. He had taken anodyne (a pain reliever) and after three hours sleep woke up with a clear image of the poem. Disturbed by a visitor, he lost the vision, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images. Modern scholarship is skeptical of this story, but it reflects Coleridge's problems to manage practical life and finish his ideas.

Coleridge's collection Poems on Various Subjects was published in 1796, and in 1797 Poems appeared. In the same year he began the publication of a short-lived liberal political periodical The Watchman. He started a close friendship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, one of the most fruitful creative relationships in English literature. From it resulted Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and ended with Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. These poems set a new style by using everyday language and fresh ways of looking at nature.