Surpassing the sunset brighter than midday, somewhere becoming rain

-You're capricious, arrogant, self-opinionated, irrational, and you don't even know where we're going!
-Exactly!--Romana and the Doctor in The Armageddon Factor

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.--Jacopo Belbo in Foucault's Pendulum

But nowadays men can not love seven night but they must have all their desires: that love may not endure by reason; for where they be soon accorded and hasty heat, soon it cooleth. Right so fareth love nowadays, soon hot soon cold: this is no stability. But the old love was not so; men and women could love together seven years, and no licours lusts were between them, and then was love, truth, and faithfulness: and lo, in like wise was used love in King Arthur's days. Wherefore I liken love nowadays unto summer and winter; for like as the one is hot and the other cold, so fareth love nowadays; therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guenever, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore she had a good end. --Sir Thomas Malory. I love this quote so much. I'm not really sure what makes it different to other quotes of such kind, but I love it.

-There is darkness all over the world. Do you mean to fight the whole world alone?
-Not necessarily alone.--Remy Breffort and Mireille Bouquet, Noir

We already KNOW that the world is warped and that every living thing has malice in its heart. We're perfectly aware as it is. But it has nothing to do with True Nature.--Margaret Burton, Madlax

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails...and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.--rules of a mediaeval library. Books are Serious Business.
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Right. Now we've got the quotes cleared up:

I am called Nathan. I am a geek. I'm from the Pioneer Valley region of Massachusetts (which is part of the fabled land of Lovecraftian horrors and dairy farms called 'west of Worcester'), but spent large parts of my childhood in southern Vermont and central New Jersey (I liked Vermont a lot better). I'm a college student, still living to a large extent on the largesse of family and friends; my major is Japanese Literature and I write urban fantasy for a living. (WARNING: link goes to TVTropes. Do not click it if you value your time at all.)

My current obsessions include: Doctor Who (my favourite programme ever and One True Fandom; specifically, the First Doctor era, the later Fourth Doctor era, and the Eleventh Doctor so far); anime when it's good (which is, depending upon your prior opinions, either more often than you'd think or less often than you'd think); anything British, Irish, or Japanese that doesn't involve those cultures' ~*~issues~*~ (or, in a negative sense, even when it does); T.S. Eliot; religious music of the eleventh through eighteen centuries (Yeah. I KNOW); theology in general; and many more.

I ship a lot, which is a bit weird because I don't know of many other boys who ship at all. I shall not attempt to list my ships here because they become fairly obvious upon knowing me for a little bit. I like yuri/shoujo-ai/femmeslash rather a lot. I have gender issues.

I like dark and gloomy things, like moors, non-Disneyfied folklore, &c., but I'm a fairly unhappy person anyway and I don't like said dark gloomy things to actually depress me. I'm more interested in the 'delicious creepiness' range.

I'm proudly leftist (although maybe slightly more conservative than my mother, who wrote a hagiography of Louis Brandeis in law school), a devout if not at all ill-natured or exclusionary Anglo-Catholic (a form of Anglicanism with self-consciously Catholic attributes, NOT the other way around), a hugely sappy hopeless romantic, not a huge sports fan but a Boston Red Sox die-hard, and usually more than willing to gab at great and possibly annoying length about any or all of these things. Unless, of course, you don't want me to, in which case I won't.

I write and paint. I worship at the altars of the Inklings, mid-period Tanizaki, the Japanese feminine writing tradition (think Lady Sarashina and Ema Saiko), and Umberto Eco in the realm of books and Cimabue, Pissarro, and Ogata Kenzan in the realm of art. I talk about writing more than I do about painting in this journal.



Most fandom posts, Interwebs posts, political/news/'issues' posts, and other such oddments are open; most posts about personal specificies of my own life are friends-locked.

FRIENDING POLICY! If you feel as though you are completely uncomfortable with all of the above, don't friend me. I am, however, more than willing to talk to people who have differing views as long as you can be rational/pleasant/some combination of the two about them, and in general, my journal is one big-tent friending party. Some of my best friends are...uh...people I don't necessarily always agree with, even about important things like the sex-politics-religion trifecta.

Also, BeeTrain shows. BeeTrain shows have a tendency towards being wonderful. Oh, and Simoun. And, come to that, Type-MOON. Yes, I'm one of those people. Yes, I know that it's not always 'good'. I happen to think Kara no Kyoukai is still a remarkable achievement.

I should point out that I have a tendency towards self-effacement and excessively complicated puns, both of which are aspects of my personality that some people find annoying. Also, I'm slightly insane in a cracky but (usually) cheerful way. Okay, more than 'slightly'...

My journal title is from a song called 'Kouya Ruten', which is by Kajiura Yuki, unassailably my favourite living composer of music that could be vaguely called somewhat 'Classical', and from Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings'; the subtitle is the mantra that I used to survive my third semester of college; the title of my friends page is from the Norito.

Also, I am immortal, I have inside me blood of kings, and I was born to be a prince of the universe. But that's, you know, tangential to the real point and all.
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Now have some dialup-breaking images (now with fewer dialup-breaking images than previously!).

Hate is not a Christian value.

HE VAGUELY TOLERATES THEM ALL.