The Little Review

Poem for Friday

2009-11-20T05:08:40Z

Psalm 104

King James Version

Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind:
Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire:
Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.
Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains.
At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.
They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them.
Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth.
He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.
They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench their thirst.
By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches.
He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.
He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;
And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.
The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted;
Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.
The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies.
He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.
So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.
There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.
These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.
That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good.
Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.
Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.
The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works.
He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke.
I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.
My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord.
Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord.

Catholic Apologetics Bible

Bless the Lord, my soul! Lord, my God, you are great indeed! You are clothed with majesty and glory,
robed in light as with a cloak. You spread out the heavens like a tent;
you raised your palace upon the waters. You make the clouds your chariot; you travel on the wings of the wind.
You make the winds your messengers; flaming fire, your ministers.
You fixed the earth on its foundation, never to be moved.
The ocean covered it like a garment; above the mountains stood the waters.
At your roar they took flight; at the sound of your thunder they fled.
They rushed up the mountains, down the valleys to the place you had fixed for them.
You set a limit they cannot pass; never again will they cover the earth.
You made springs flow into channels that wind among the mountains.
They give drink to every beast of the field; here wild asses quench their thirst.
Beside them the birds of heaven nest; among the branches they sing.
You water the mountains from your palace; by your labor the earth abounds.
You raise grass for the cattle and plants for our beasts of burden. You bring bread from the earth,
and wine to gladden our hearts, Oil to make our faces gleam, food to build our strength.
The trees of the Lord drink their fill, the cedars of Lebanon, which you planted.
There the birds build their nests; junipers are the home of the stork.
The high mountains are for wild goats; the rocky cliffs, a refuge for badgers.
You made the moon to mark the seasons, the sun that knows the hour of its setting.
You bring darkness and night falls, then all the beasts of the forest roam abroad.
Young lions roar for prey; they seek their food from God.
When the sun rises, they steal away and rest in their dens.
People go forth to their work, to their labor till evening falls.
How varied are your works, Lord! In wisdom you have wrought them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
Look at the sea, great and wide! It teems with countless beings, living things both large and small.
Here ships ply their course; here Leviathan, your creature, plays.
All of these look to you to give them food in due time.
When you give to them, they gather; when you open your hand, they are well filled.
When you hide your face, they are lost. When you take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust from which they came.
When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord be glad in these works!
If God glares at the earth, it trembles; if God touches the mountains, they smoke!
I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God while I live.
May my theme be pleasing to God; I will rejoice in the Lord.
May sinners vanish from the earth, and the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, my soul! Hallelujah!

Akhenaten's Hymn to the Sun

How manifold it is, what thou hast made!
They are hidden from the face of man.
O sole god, like whom there is no other!
Thou didst create the world according to thy desire,
Whilst thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts,
Whatever is on earth, going upon its feet,
And what is on high, flying with its wings.

The countries of Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt,
Thou settest every man in his place,
Thou suppliest their necessities:
Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned.
Their tongues are separate in speech,
And their natures as well;
Their skins are distinguished,
As thou distinguishest the foreign peoples.
Thou makest a Nile in the underworld,
Thou bringest forth as thou desirest
To maintain the people of Egypt
According as thou madest them for thyself,
The lord of all of them, wearying himself with them,
The lord of every land, rising for them,
The Aton of the day, great of majesty.

--------

It's already 11 p.m. and except for watching the Star Trek episode I need to find time to review tomorrow between New Moon with perkypaduan and gblvr, lunch with the two of them plus another friend, and dinner with my parents, I accomplished none of the things I planned to get done today. In fact, I overslept, having been woken up by a sick cat at 3 a.m., thus causing me to miss getting the rare Superpoke Pet chicken plushies for myself and younger son, and I'm way late on e-mail and comments and stuff because I was playing with AO3.

So I still have not rewatched "The Waters of Mars," and am going to shamelessly pillage things I already said in conversations with my kids and ethelking, but before I forget, I need to declare my undying love for Adelaide Brooke and express confusion why the Doctor did not simply grab her and abduct her on the TARDIS the minute he laid eyes on her, which is what I would have done. Why did the producers have to cast a 12-year-old companion for the upcoming 16-year-old Eleventh Doctor instead of Lindsay Duncan? Of course they'd probably write her with all the limitations with which they saddle Sarah Jane Smith, since apparently older men can be cool though not older women, but I'd take it: it's no secret that I love Sarah Jane more than I love any of her Doctors, and this latest installment just cements it.

Don't get me wrong: I like the Doctor finally explicitly declaring himself Lord of Time, the winner of the war -- he's granted himself this position and all the power and responsibility that go along with it whenever he's felt like it on and off for years now -- he wasn't just ready to die for Rose, he was ready to risk Earth for her, in fact he was ready to risk it for her father just because it was so important to her. He only plays at noninterference; how can he not know by now that when he visits a critical moment in human history, he'll end up being a critical player? Of course it's Pompeii all over again on Mars! When Adelaide pulled out the gun, I said, "She's going to kill herself," at the same moment that younger son said, "She's going to shoot him." But I knew she'd shoot herself because self-sacrifice is what RTD and his cronies consider truly noble -- hence what Jack has had to do to family members on Torchwood, since he can't die himself, but the Doctor has superhero accoutrements on top of his immortality, which is a very dangerous combinations. Of course power has corrupted him, and we finally see just how far around the bend he's gone.

Sarah Jane says in "School Reunion" that pain and loss define us as much as happiness, but she's thinking like a mortal, someone who knows that death will come for her as surely as everyone and everything she loves. But it's not true for either the Doctor or Jack, and they're both stunted because of it -- it makes it very hard for them to grow instead of letting griefs accumulate upon them. (It's the Buffy musical -- "All the joy life sends, family and friends, all the twists and bends, knowing that it ends, well that depends on if they let you go...") The Doctor told Jack that even the TARDIS ran away from his unnaturalness, but the current Doctor is even creepier to me, and I adored Adelaide blasting his arrogance -- it was obvious to me that she had to shoot herself because even without knowing that he could regenerate, she had figured out that it would hurt him more not to have been able to save her.

I can't pretend to be well-versed in Doctors before Eight, not even Four with whom I have a reasonable acquaintance, but I don't remember this obsessive-compulsive personality and these epic stakes all the time; when the Gadget Gadget robot showed up, I was hoping for a bit more of that older sensibility, a sense of wonder that isn't wedded to a sense of fatality and doom. I mean, when you live a ridiculously long time and can travel through time and space, you ought to be able to bring up pretty much everyone's obituaries from memory if they're important enough. Sure, it's very sad that that delightful Russian woman officer and the doctor with the gay brother and the rocket scientist all die, but I can't even remember their names, just like I can never remember the third guy who was in the lunar capsule while Armstrong and Aldrin were walking around on the moon. They're hardly significant to the Doctor either; they're Adelaide's supporting cast, as she is enraged to discover when he says that saving them or not won't change history.

And what was the Doctor thinking, bringing Adelaide home? If he'd told her the whole story, that she supposedly died on Mars -- obviously bodies were never found -- with the logical assumption being that she could not go home again, that she could only watch her granddaughter grow up from a distance, the obvious thing to do would be to invite her aboard the TARDIS and show her the universe, something for which I have little doubt she'd have forgiven him for interfering and it wouldn't have disrupted the timeline (I'm still confused why the evil creatures that show up whenever the timeline gets screwed up, like in "Father's Day" and "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith," don't show up here).

I could assume that the Doctor doesn't actually want Adelaide to be his responsibility, that he was only too happy to save her and run away with his conscience clear, but that isn't him -- this is still the same Ten who invited Sarah Jane to travel with him again after ditching her in Aberdeen all those years ago. This is the series writers wanting yet another tragedy dumped on his head, so that the prospect of his transformation actually seems a relief rather than the unhappy event that Nine becoming Ten was, at least for me. That isn't making me look forward to a new Doctor, though...it's making me think the franchise is burning itself out, new writers or no new writers.

I did like tonight's FlashForward despite no Janis; I like the philosophical musing behind the question of whether finding out that someone was going to love you and change your life would make you fall in love with them before you'd even met them, no matter who they were or what they looked like, and I like the way even what looks like a happy vision of the future can lead to a hellish present, particularly for a parent.

Adam petting a donkey in the farm at the Maryland Zoo.

The Chesapeake region also has wood ducks...

...local amphibians like toads...

...owls, birds of prey, and vultures...

...and snakes in the constructed cave.

There are also a lot of ducks, egrets, herons, and other field and waterfowl.

And the farm has a petting zoo with goats...

...where visitors can help groom the animals.</center>

Poem for Thursday

2009-11-19T04:44:20Z

Exercise
By James Longenbach

Because the Greeks didn't bother much about plagiarism
Poems by Anacreon, born in Teos around 500 B.C.,

Appear among the Anacreontea,
Imitations made by poets who loved him.

In a dream I saw Anacreon, who called to me.
As he stumbled, drunk, he lifted a crown of flowers from his head.

Stephanus translated the poems into Latin in 1554.
In Taintignies, using a dictionary

Small enough to carry on active service,
Richard Aldington made the prose translation I adapt here.

I bound the garland around my forehead;
When I sang about Cadmus, my lyre spoke of love.

In my copy of "The Manner of Anacreon," Egoist Press, 1919,
Hamilton Collier of Scarsdale, New York, has written on the flyleaf

My first real understanding of the Greeks.
I regret I am unable to agree with them.

Hephaestus, carve me a hollow cup!
The dark earth drinks, and the trees drink the earth.

The sea drinks the wind,
The sun drinks the sea.

I was a child in the hills of Phrygia.
The swallow of Pandion was once a girl.

--------

Another from this week's New Yorker.

Wednesday was supposed to be my catch-up day, but the wonderful gnomad provided me with an Archive Of Our Own account code early in the day, and I spent far too many hours figuring out how things worked there. In the afternoon I had four loads of laundries to fold, and because of a conversation with ethelking about "The Waters of Mars," I ended up watching "Tooth and Claw" and "School Reunion." I'd forgotten how good that season was -- I was still in mourning for Nine, I wasn't ready to fall for Ten (nor to have Rose fall for Ten), and ironically he seemed almost lightweight compared to Nine then -- hah, what a change in perspective watching now! I had remembered "Tooth and Claw" being quite dark, so I hadn't recalled, for instance, the Doctor's line about thinking Sir Robert was probably happy to have his wife away and be surrounded by tall muscular men. "School Reunion" is just wonderful from beginning to end, not just bringing Sarah Jane back to the franchise, but giving us Anthony Stewart Head as a giant conniving bat who wants to rule the universe with the Doctor at his side, and who can blame him?

So speaking of Sarah Jane, I promised notes on "Mona Lisa's Revenge," although I don't have a lot because on further consideration I don't think the episode deserves the attention. For one thing, it's practically the Luke, Clyde and Rani show -- there's almost no Sarah Jane in the two-parter, especially the second segment, and while I understand the producers wanting to show Luke growing up to be independent, I wish they'd had Rani being more directly involved in the problem-solving given that this particular installment was stuffed with ugly stereotypes about women, some literal ("She's really let herself go" and the ridiculing of Phyllis's dating profile), some metaphorical (pretty much everything about the characterization of Mona Lisa -- Adam, who doesn't know a great deal about art, said that Signora Gioconda would have had a less grating accent). I liked Sarah Jane's introspection about parenthood, and Mr. Smith trying to comfort her with work, and really the entire conceit of the French loaning the Mona Lisa to the British in a gallery without a full-time guard and next to the comic-book design winner of a school competition. The fact that Clyde is a pop culture nerd, and that he calls Luke "my padawan" and warns him not to go to the Dark Side, pleases me as much as Phyllis telling off the curator at the end. I just wish Sarah Jane and not K-9 had saved the day.

And I also promised notes on "The Waters of Mars," but I will save those for tomorrow since I need to talk about tonight's Glee, at least for long enough to say that I am sure it is wrong how much I loved the wrongness between Rachel and Mr. Schuester, which reminds me of every inappropriate crush I have ever had in my life, and I love it all the more because I'm with her in thinking that he protests waaaay too much (and frankly Rachel is more mature than Emma, not that I think Will should go there under any circumstances given his age and position and a whole host of reasons that teacher-student affairs only work in fiction, not real life). As for the baby storyline, I feel very sorry for Finn (whose mom is awesome) and a bit sorry for Quinn (I knew she'd have parents like that -- I can't really blame her for lying initially to the guy she thought was likely to put a roof over her head when her family inevitably threw her out, though it's now past time to tell the truth). I am really surprised Mercedes thinks Puck's role is to vanish into the woodwork. And I must confess that my favorite part of the entire hour was the Burger King ad with the old ladies and the construction workers fighting over Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. I am Team Buffy all the way, and couldn't care about that franchise, but I hope it's true that burly guys are arguing about Robert vs. Taylor!

I've always liked Johnny Depp, but I've never thought he was the sexiest man alive, though I much prefer him in his 40s to his 20s. Here are a sitatunga pair at the Maryland Zoo enjoying the gorgeous November weather:

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Poem for Wednesday

2009-11-18T04:55:41Z

Sad Verso of the Sunny ____
By Liz Waldner

Veldt? Sounds good to me.
Like melt. Back when you could eat Velveeta
and call it cheese. My grandfather's macaroni and cheese
featured a whole brick of Velveeta. I liked peeling away
its beautiful silver wrapper, Velveeta Velveeta all over in blue.

The expanses of time in which there was this grandfather
appeared endless when I was in them. Who
could see to the ends of the plains and so see her end
beyond them? Who could think to look? You
(like Ohio and its vowels) went on forever,
just ate your macaroni and cheese, relishing
the brown bubbles on top, then did the next thing,
were the next moment surrounded and held in it
by all the things you didn't know would end.
Nothing ceded. No portend.
Only geranium and melamine
and thank you,
everywhere preceded by some please.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I am still totally behind on everything because Adam wasn't home anywhere near the time he usually arrives, prompting a flurry of phone calls, first to the parents of his friends (who didn't know where the kids were), then to the school (which wasn't answering the phone), then to the county to see whether something happened to the bus, before Adam finally got around to calling himself to tell me that he'd stayed after school for a couple of hours for viola sectionals but he was going to catch the late bus home. So the laundry did not get folded. Then we went out to dinner at California Tortilla (and Baskin Robbins for the kids) because the middle school was doing a spirit event where local restaurants were donating a percentage of profits, so I was chatting with people and didn't get anything done in the evening either.

I did finish designing and ordering my fannish holiday cards, which involved spending lots of time hunting through photos on my almost unusable desktop computer, then copying them to my portable hard drive so I could make use of them on the laptop. My family holiday cards have arrived, but they're a big disappointment for the first time from Shutterfly -- I wanted a photo from the Bar Mitzvah and used one taken by a friend, but the image looks much more blurry and overexposed on the cards than it did on the web preview. Adam wanted to see the Penguins of Madagascar, so we watched the Merry Madagascar Christmas Special at 8, which was silly but entertaining, like the movies. So the laundry-folding has been postponed till tomorrow along with e-mail, comments, etc. Apologies!

A zebra in the Maryland Zoo's African region.

Also in the African area, a leopard...

...a warthog (you may commence singing "Hakuna Matata" now)...

...a dik-dik (you may commence making the same jokes my kids do now)...

...an elephant (the baby was in the back with his mother, having been out playing all morning)...

...a chimpanzee (whose baby clung to her until she chased him up the bars to play)...

...gazelles (surrounded by termite mounds and guineafowl munching in the grass)...

...and a lion (whose equally sleepy-looking mate was lounging in the grass a few feet away).</center>

Poem for Tuesday

2009-11-17T04:49:56Z

Stolen Moments
By Kim Addonizio

What happened, happened once. So now it's best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn't last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love's
merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

--------

I spent a delightful Monday with dementordelta, who came to visit on this warm, sunny November afternoon. We had vague plans to go out to lunch and watch lots of Due South, but the weather was so gorgeous that we decided we really should enjoy it and went to take a walk at Great Falls down to Olmsted Island and the river. Then we met my mother at our synagogue's annual holiday boutique, where we looked at lots of gifts and jewelry and shared a tuna salad sandwich in the cafe there. And then we ate chocolate moose pops while enjoying "Starman" through "Body Language," meaning that we got to howl through "All the Queen's Horses" with my kids who stuck around to see Leslie Nielsen. Here are some birds from the zoo yesterday:

Hornbill

Cattle Egret

Crane

Ostrich

Spoonbill

Macaw

Cormorants, Penguin & Seagull

Raven</center>

Watched Heroes, which keeps reinforcing my sense that no matter how irritated I've been with other shows that were just making crap up as they went along, ignoring or distorting their own backstories and changing the characters to fit the storylines, this one is in a class of its own. How is it possible that everyone has forgotten Matt's brief moment of fame wired as a bomb, even if it wasn't his fault -- even if he's been taken out of all the police databases, aren't there people who would recognize him from TV and react to him accordingly? I could go on and on and on and on. Tomorrow I will go on and on about Doctor Who but I am still playing catch-up from the weekend so I am going to put that off tonight! At least the Ravens won!

Poem for Monday

2009-11-16T04:59:30Z

Prayer
By Kim Addonizio

Sometimes, when we're lying after love,
I look at you and see your body's future
of lying beneath the earth; putting the heel
of my hand against your rib I feel how faint
and far away the heartbeat is. I rest
my cheek against your left nipple and listen
to the surge of blood, seeing your life splashed out,
filmy water hurled from a pot
onto dry grass. And I want to be pressed
deep into the bed and covered over,
the way a seed is pressed into a hole,
the dirt tamped down with a trowel.
I want to be a failed seed, the kind
that doesn't grow, that doesn't know it's meant to.
I want to lie here without moving, lifeless
as an animal that's slaughtered, its blood smeared
on a doorpost, I want death to take me if it
has to, to spare you, I want it to pass over.

--------

We spent nearly all day Sunday in Baltimore, first at the Maryland Zoo, then at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The zoo closes for the winter months since many of the animals can't tolerate being outdoors, and the indoor enclosures there aren't designed for large numbers of visitors -- today, however, the weather wasn't a problem for anyone, since it was 70 degrees and sunny. We went through all three major areas (Africa, Chesapeake, Arctic) and saw the penguins, giraffes, elephants, chimpanzees (who were very playful), polar bears, otters, and dozens of other animals. Then we went to the art museum, which has an exhibit on Matisse as printmaker -- not my favorite, I must confess, as it's lots of very simple line illustrations of faces and nudes, none of the brilliant use of color that makes Matisse's paintings interesting to me -- and an exhibit on Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe and the artists he inspired, which is brilliant, not only because Gauguin, Manet, Dore, and many other illustrators did brilliant adaptations of images from Poe's writings, but because there are brief summaries of his stories and poems to accompany the illustrations that are quite entertaining in their own right.

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We missed football in its entirety, which is probably why the Redskins won -- well, that and the Broncos losing their quarterback at the half -- and we spent the evening catching up on evil aliens with The Sarah Jane Adventures' "Mona Lisa's Revenge," which I did not love -- lots of stupid gender issues that this show usually avoids, and way too much adolescent behavior, from the adults as much as the teens -- then Doctor Who's "The Waters of Mars," which I really loved, even though I need to watch it again because I thought there was a significant inconsistency at one point and even though it both exemplifies and doesn't quite provide proper exposition on pretty much everything that bothers me about New Who; it suggests, at least, that the producers are aware of all the problems with the way they've constructed the character and his relationships with companions, particularly humans, particularly women, and may not let him or themselves off the hook. Plus the preview for the Christmas episode made me very happy. Proper commentary tomorrow, as I am really exhausted...oh but I don't want to lose David Tennant's Twittersode so here it is.

Poem for Sunday

2009-11-15T05:25:02Z

November 11 -- 2004
By Kim Addonizio

O everyone's dead and the rain today is marvelous!
I drive to the gym, the streets are slick,
everyone's using their wipers, people are walking
with their shoulders hunched, wearing hoods
or holding up umbrellas, of course, of course,
it's all to be expected -- fantastic!
My mother's friend Annie, her funeral's today!
The writer Iris Chang, she just shot herself!
And Arafat, he's dead, too! The doctors refuse
to say what killed him, his wife is fighting
with the Palestinians over his millions, the parking lot
of the gym is filled with muddy puddles!
I run 4.3 m.p.h. on the treadmill, and they're dead
in Baghdad and Fallujah, Mosul and Samarra and Latifiya --
Nadia and Surayah, Nahla and Hoda and Noor,
their husbands and cousins and brothers --
dead in their own neighborhoods! Imagine!
Marine Staff Sgt. David G. Ries, 29, Clark, WA.: killed!
Army Spc. Quoc Binh Tran, 26, Mission Viejo, CA: killed,
Army Spc. Bryan L. Freeman, 31, Lumberton, NJ -- same deal!
Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Larn, 22, NY, you guessed it!
O I could go on and on, for as long as I live!
In Africa, too, they've been starved and macheted!
The morning paper said the Serbs apologized
for Srebrenica, 7,800 Muslims murdered in 1995,
I know it's old news, but hey, they're still dead!
I almost forgot my neighbor's niece, 16 and puking in
Kaiser Emergency, the cause a big mystery
until the autopsy -- toxic shock syndrome,
of all things -- I thought that was history, too,
but I guess girls are still dying; who knew! I run
for two miles, my knees hurt, and my shins,
I step off and stretch for a bit, I go back outside
into the rain, it feels chilly and good, it goes on
all day, unending and glorious, falling and filling
the roof-gutters, flooding the low-lying roads.

--------

"The first time I visited The Wall, the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, I was overwhelmed by the power of all those names, each name a life lost. But each name also a life honored and remembered. I think that's one impulse of poetry: to name what passes, trying to hold it in our hearts a little longer," writes Addonizio in Poet's Choice. "The opening line of 'November 11' came into my head on Veterans Day in 2004 complete with that grandiose 'O' and exclamation point...the rain is for me the astonishing dailiness of all this death, so much of it from war and violence. I used some Iraqi women's names because that's what I thought about, the women there who were dying and losing their loved ones. And the four American soldiers were listed in the San Francisco Chronicle that day, part of the ongoing body count. The exclamation points are meant to be both sincere and ironic, just as the rain becomes both the beauty of being alive and the continuation of all of our forms of ignorance."

My family spent nearly all of Saturday celebrating the Bar Mitzvah of the son of my oldest friend, Linda, whom I have known since we were both six years old in first grade -- I was the new girl before she was the new girl. This is the friend whose family Super Bowl party we attend every year, and though I don't know many of her neighbors except for conversations held that one day a year, I've known her parents and local cousins for most of my life, plus her husband's parents and siblings since they got engaged nearly two decades ago. The service was at a big Reform suburban congregation, pretty sanctuary, lots of similarities to other such services I've attended (perhaps a bit shorter than my own kids' Bar Mitzvahs but my kids also had longer Torah portions). Afterward, there was a kiddush luncheon -- bagels and whitefish and cheeses and fruit and rugelach, all of which were delicious -- where I chatted with Linda's sister Alice, whom I haven't seen in the past five years, and many other family members and old friends.

We came home and relaxed for a couple of hours, then went in the evening to the reception which was held in one of the hotels on the lake at Washingtonian Center. The food was endless -- at least ten hors d'oeuvres, then a big dinner buffet with sushi bar, carving station, pasta table and salad bar, then dessert including cake, a sundae bar, and a chocolate fountain with a dozen dippable items -- and the party was a lot of fun, with a big game room for the kids with skee ball, table hockey, basketball toss, and other games including a big screen with some version of Rock Band including drum and guitar. There was a deejay, though we didn't dance much -- I was sitting with two friends from high school, Stephanie and Allison, and chatting with them when I wasn't hanging out with my kids -- and lots of light-up souvenirs and balloons. I am very sleepy, so here are some photos:

Here is the Bar Mitzvah boy up on a chair during the hora (a wonderful, long, very large one -- there must have been over 200 people at the party).

And here he is as a little boy in the slide show his mother put together.

My friend's father is an amazing man, a Holocaust survivor from a small town in Greece. He spoke about how when he was 13 he did not have a Bar Mitzvah, but a very dangerous job smuggling weapons to a Resistance leader. Despite all the things he witnessed as a child, he is one of the most upbeat people I have ever met.

Adam played guitar in Rock Band while Daniel held his food. Daniel was at a table with other older teenagers -- mostly girls he did not know -- which is not his most comfortable place!

The kids got t-shirts that say "Support Your Local Animal Shelter" on the back (which was the celebrant's Mitzvah project) and a Boston terrier on the front, since the family has two.

The kids also got these awesome light-up goggles. (Yes, I am ten.) Plus awesome light-up necklaces, glow sticks, etc.

Stephanie and I had to make do with these funky glasses. We love that Bar Mitzvah music remains the music invented during our era on the Bar Mitzvah circuit -- "We Are Family," "Y.M.C.A.," "I Will Survive," "Wanna Be Starting Something," etc.

Here's the table with the chocolate fountain and things to be dunked in the fountain -- cheesecake, muffins, Rice Krispy treats, Oreos, pretzels, biscotti, fruit, donut holes...heaven.</center>

And Penn won the Ivy title over Harvard, yay!

Poem for Saturday

2009-11-14T04:53:50Z

Ghosts
By David Harsent

They bring with them a coldness, as tradition demands,
and a light, dry odor of rot
much like worm in wood, and bring a chorus of cries

to fill the air as if it were birdsong, and bring in their open hands
tokens of themselves, a letter, a snapshot,
and bring some trace of their point of departure, a smudge

on the shoe, a stain on the sleeve, and bring the disguise
they lived under, stitched with their names,
hoping you’ll give them the nod, hoping you’ll recognize

something, perhaps, of the old times, the fun and games,
while they shuffle up as if they stood on the edge
of night so a nudge would tip them over, and bring

a dew of death that settles on picture frames,
on pelmets, on clothes in the closet, on books,
on your eyelash, to make a prism through which you get

a broken image of what must be a stage set
of the Peaceable Kingdom, a front
for that place you only ever find in dreams,

its undrinkable rivers, its scrubland of snarls and hooks,
horizons gone askew,
beasts hamstrung and walking on their hocks,

and bring their long-lost hopes, which they lay at your feet
then stand back, stand apart,
hairless, soft-skinned, their eyes bright blue

like the eyes of the newborn, and bearing a look
of matchless sorrow, as would, for sure,
stop the heart of whoever it is they take you for.

--------

I went to the doctor Friday morning, forgetting my blood pressure monitor which was the main reason I was supposed to have an appointment this week -- so she could download the readings and make sure it was calibrated right -- but she took my blood pressure three times while I was there and it was around 120/85 each time, so that was all good news. She had my CBC and had some recommendations based on that -- more vitamin D and calcium, multivitamins with iron because I was borderline anemic (I used to be the opposite, but I haven't eaten red meat for more than 10 years), and she wants me to have a liver ultrasound because some enzyme level was marginally boosted, which she suspected was from fat buildup that will go away if I lose weight but wanted to check just to be sure. I'm supposed to avoid both alcohol and caffeine, which fortunately is not great loss -- I miss sharp cheese much more than I'd miss either.

In the afternoon I posted my review of Next Gen's "Imaginary Friend" -- not one of the fifth season's best -- and took Adam and his friend to another friend's birthday party at Shadowlands, the laser tag place where both my kids have had birthday parties in the past. I was going to drop them off and let the friend's mom pick them up, but traffic was bad getting up there and the party was only an hour an 15 minutes, so instead I browsed in the used bookstore run by friends of our county library where one always finds treasures for $2-3 (in today's case, all three issues of the Magic Flute graphic novels, a low-sodium cookbook, a couple of books for the kids, and -- no laughing -- the Rankin-Bass Lord of the Rings and Return of the King on DVD for $3).

We had dinner with my parents (stuffed flounder, there can never be too much seafood), then came home and watched Smallville, which other than having yet another instance of Lois in need of rescuing was enormous fun, highly reminiscent of Superman II in some ways and hahahaha the Wonder Twins! Starring that girl from Warehouse 13! Plus I always love seeing Doug Witter from Dawson's Creek (and John Sheppard's brother too, as I recall). Then we watched Sanctuary, which I liked because it was a Henry episode with werewolf storyline, but found creepy otherwise, and it definitely wasn't one of Helen's finest moments not to have seen what was going on with her staff before it turned violent.

</center>

Poem for Friday

2009-11-13T04:34:18Z

I Heard You, Solemn-sweet Pipes of the Organ
By Walt Whitman

I heard you, solemn-sweet pipes of the organ, as last
         Sunday morn I pass'd the church;
Winds of autumn!—as I walk'd the woods at dusk, I
         heard your long-stretch'd sighs, up above, so
         mournful;
I heard the perfect Italian tenor, singing at the opera
         —I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet
         singing;
...Heart of my love!—you too I heard, murmuring
         low, through one of the wrists around my head;
Heard the pulse of you, when all was still, ringing little
         bells last night under my ear.

--------

Adam again had a half-day of school -- it's end-of-term week, the kids got report cards (straight As in Adam's case, an A average in all honors and AP classes in Daniel's case, so it was all good news), and the elementary and middle schools close early for parent conferences. Meanwhile the old middle school building, which was also my junior high school, is being torn down, so there were trucks going up and down the main street in the neighborhood with stuff from that. Since he was out early, I took Adam out for Thai food at the mall. At least, he had Thai food, and I had a peanut butter sandwich that I brought from home. I can only deal with yogurt so many times a week. My blood pressure has been pretty good all week, though, so no real complaints.

Loved FlashForward this week though I'm ready for them to stop the tease already about what caused the blackout -- I get that the government doesn't know yet, but Dominic Monaghan obviously knows, so instead of taunting us with that, I wish they'd just say it -- though I adore getting to see Merry Brandybuck playing poker with James Norrington. Also, I adore Janis. I got a wonderful present in the mail from valis2, who makes jewelry -- a necklace and earrings with a pewter Tree of Life pendant, with rhyolite beads and faceted pearls strung together on a gorgeous delicate silver chain -- I will have to take photos when I'm wearing it (maybe to the Bar Mitzvah we're going to this weekend) but I had to take photos in the box right after I got it:

I didn't take this photo, but I include it for posterity's sake: it's my son's middle school, my junior high school, being torn down.</center>

Happy Friday the 13th!

Poem for Thursday

2009-11-12T04:45:39Z

The Burglary
By Linda Pastan

They stole my mother's silver,
melting it down, perhaps,

into pure mineral, worth
only its own weight.

We must eat with our hands now,
grab for food

in this new place of greed,
our table set

only with memories, tarnishing
even as we speak:

my mother holding a shining ladle
in her hand,

serving the broth
to children who will forget

to polish her silver, forget even
to lock the house.

While forks and spoons are divided
from all purpose,

patterns are lost like friezes
after centuries of rain,

and every knife is robbed
of its cutting edge.

--------

Another from this week's New Yorker.

It was an unexciting day here -- Adam had a half-day of school so I had a bunch of chores I had to do in the morning, then I took him to the orthodontist when he got home, where we waited longer than expected as usual, but there is a new bubble tea place that opened in the same stall where the old bubble tea place closed a couple of months ago, so it was a good trip! Otherwise I have little else to report; I was reminded today in several different places why I no longer talk about politics except in locked entries where I trust everyone who is reading them, and moreover I was reminded that I can't trust everyone I tend to assume I can trust just because they've never said anything that upset me before, and even people who make perfect sense in blogs and journals tend to sound thoughtless when they only get 140 characters or the visible length of a status update.

Watched Glee, was relieved by the absence of several characters from this week's storyline, but I don't think I've ever been less emotionally invested in a gay character on a TV series before -- I miss Jack on Dawson's Creek, he seemed so much more real to me -- and I am so tired of the Jewish girl being nothing but the self-invested diva (am I supposed to find a way to read her ambitions as feminist empowerment, because it's not working). I love the musical numbers a lot, but I find myself wishing it was more like "Once More With Feeling" and the songs really struck home for me because I cared so much about the characters. Of course, I am cranky because Eastwick was not on and this will soon be a permanent situation on Wednesdays.

Here are some more photos from the Swedish festival we visited last weekend. I am not sure why wooden penguins are Swedish, since I thought they lived closer to the other pole, but of course Adam was pleased!

</center>

Poem for Wednesday

2009-11-11T04:51:16Z

Fireflies
By Dave Smith

You see them everywhere and hardly notice the one
cranking past as you pass on the sidewalk,
that mewling, watery eye, partly bloodshot, partly
focussed on you, or some apprehension of you,
or, shrunken, one in the Giant self-checkout line,
foul as a just risen pig, in slippers, and now
the puzzled, warty face turns to you, and you're
helpless, stunned, the routine ordinary signals are
suddenly hieroglyphics, you're punching out
answers, your life savings gone, and a bug's winking.

Better, unquestionably, to walk faster, left on Main,
take the boiling sun on your back, still broad
enough to hold whatever comes next today.
That's the trick of it all, knowing you can,
without thinking, navigate, slide, cut quick
the way kids on front yards do in that smell
of mowed grass, sweat, youth, not dusk yet,
a tumbling brush of bone and skin only sweet
proof of no intent, intersection and angle, the right
desire of things as subtle as what fireflies mean.

Once my wife and I, following the girlish Realtor,
opened a parlor door, brownstone dim, cool, two
bodies in pajamas pushing up in a musky bed
no one supposed to be there, husband and wife,
I've thought all these years. Their throats opened,
calls horrific as ungreased gears, dry pistons, us
already heeling out. Did someone later come,
explain who we were, snafus, that unlocked door?
Or did they lie, walls creaking, until dawn, bugs
at windows like words in their mouths, on and off?

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I finally managed to have a birthday lunch with vertigo66 -- practically a month late for her birthday, but it was the soonest we could both do it. We went to our usual hangout (The Corner Bakery) and afterward I went to Target, where I bought exciting items like new laundry baskets, a plastic container for storing dry cat food, and two summer shirts on sale for about $5 each. I think everyone in the store decided to check out at precisely the same moment I did, because the cash register lines were insane considering it was neither a weekend nor a holiday. Then I got into another delay driving home, because a gas leak had made people sick inside my local grocery store and caused the shutdown of the entire shopping center -- the police had roped off the entrances, there were several fire trucks and ambulances surrounding the buildings, everyone was trying to get out of the parking lots, and there was general chaos with people making u-turns and honking. I only barely beat younger son home.

I am very sad to report that we have now watched all of Due South, having decided that we weren't impressed enough with V to keep watching (we are in mourning for Eastwick, which we liked much better and which ABC axed last night, though they're going to finish filming the last three episodes and air all 13). As sad as I am not to have any more Due South, though, I cannot be sorry that the show left me wanting more instead of wishing the whole last season never happened, like with Voyager, La Femme Nikita, X-Files, etc. And I could not have asked for a nicer ending for those characters -- well, obviously they all ended up hanging out together at a cabin above the Arctic Circle having lots of sex, including Francesca (immaculate conception hahahaha), but that said, if Fraser was going to end up with one Ray and not the other, I think they gave him to the right Ray, because Vecchio is resourceful and independent and will get along all right without him, whereas Kowalski would be a basket case, as he made very clear.

And I forgive Ray K for everything because he was so willing to make that clear, with the conversation with Thatcher about not knowing who he is without Fraser (and then denying that's what he was saying). "So, we still partners?" "If you'll have me." Awww. I love the Rays being jealous of each other and then being totally understanding, though I don't buy Ray V would walk away from Chicago and Fraser that quickly -- from police work, probably, after being undercover for so long. I feel very deprived that we did not get to hear Ray K sing ABBA, but getting to hear Frobischer butcher Henry V makes up for that to some extent. And we all howled over "There's a soccer team eating each other!" Really nicely done, even the creepy Oedipal twist of having Paul Gross's wife play his mother...somehow with Fraser that makes some sort of sense.

Autumn trees at Calvert Cliffs State Park in the woods on the hike to the beach.

A narrow, sometimes deep creek...

...widens into a bigger marshy area...

...and then a broad wetlands.

We're pretty sure the beavers who built this lodge are in large part responsible for the wetlands.

Ducks also live in the marsh...

...as well as turtles, snakes, frogs, insects, and many other animals.

Unfortunately, the overlook that reaches furthest into the wetlands has been closed, since the wood is falling apart.</center>

The DC sniper was killed tonight by lethal injection after being denied clemency by Virginia governor Tim Kaine -- a Catholic who personally opposes the death penalty, but vowed to uphold Virginia law if elected, and I'm not sure how to object to this because I want Catholics who personally oppose abortion to treat the law similarly. I don't understand how an execution is supposed to bring peace to the families of the victims. It doesn't bring me any peace at all. It sure doesn't bring any of the victims back. I have no idea how to talk to my children about why it's supposed to be acceptable for the state to kill someone to show that murder is wrong.

Poem for Tuesday

2009-11-10T04:44:26Z

In the North (Westerbork)
By Alissa Valles

Winter came and went, spreading its iron grain;
the earth the color of ash, trees the color of bone.
In an interval between wars, spring and summer
passed, color advertisements for another country.
At a place where trains departed every Tuesday
a stick probes the exhausted mouth of morning;
the North shaves and washes in its cold mirror,
the trees claw at the doors of the earth and air.
The wind throws off its white sheet and wanders,
a wakeful child in a house deserted by the elders.
In icy furrows a thin wind is rubbing its face raw.
On a branch an oriole is punishing its one vowel.

--------

I had a quiet morning doing laundry and tagging photos, then I went with my mother to the mall, where I was looking for a birthday present for perkypaduan (who is in Sedona, so it is safe for me to post this) and where we got frozen yogurt with granola, which is my new favorite thing that I am actually allowed to eat in the mall (sushi, Thai food, and Qdoba all being off-limits nowadays -- on the bright side, though, all my rings are loose and I haven't had a single migraine in five weeks, though I cannot say for certain whether there is a direct relationship between avoiding sodium and the latter). She also got me Brighton's fabulous Washington, DC charm bracelet as an early birthday present! I only got half of Perky's present but since I don't expect to see her on her actual birthday, I have until the New Moon premiere to track down the rest.

I folded laundry while watching the two episodes of Dawson's Creek from the end of the second season -- oh shut up, I had a Mary Beth song stuck in my head and was in the mood to see the Outer Banks, and anyway it was the one where Grams agreed to let Jack move in with her and Jen even though he's gay and she's a Bible-thumper. We watched Heroes, which I liked better than the last couple of weeks -- I've been sick of Matt literally for years now, so I was hoping he was actually dead, though the previews made it pretty clear that's not the case, and I always like Bennet episodes and Claire hanging tough knowing to trust family over "family," though I was sorry we only got to see Louise Fletcher in the "previously on Heroes" segment and not in the episode. Then we watched Due South's "Hunting Season," which wins in every way -- I was betting Maggie was Fraser's sister about five minutes after we met her, and was sure when she could see his father, which made it that much more funny when Ray was crazy-jealous Fraser was paying attention to her. And then Ray dragging Fraser into the bathroom stall with him and locking the door...I would love the episode for that scene alone!

A dock and boathouse (and gull) in Solomons near the Calvert Marine Museum and near sunset.

Many boats were returning when we stopped to pick up crab soup at The Captain's Table.

The fishing boats we saw were in beautiful shape...

...and apparently the fishing was terrific.

There hadn't been a cloud in the sky for most of the afternoon.

This is Drum Point Lighthouse at the marine museum.

This heron was settled on a large nest as boats sailed past.

We left as the sun was setting with a swan circling in the water near these boats.</center>

Poem for Monday

2009-11-09T04:33:59Z

Two Gods
By Alissa Valles

Two men flew over Hiroshima,
hailed on return by General Spaatz.
Back home, one entered a monastery.
The other embarked on a life of crime
(leaving the money behind on the counter).
His sentence was reduced by the criminal courts
when experts explained his need for punishment.

God of pity, god of wrath.

--------

We spent what will surely be our last day at the beach for 2009 at Calvert Cliffs State Park, where we hiked the two miles from the parking lot to the beach after having a picnic near the play area. It was an unseasonably warm November day, 70 degrees without a cloud in the sky, so the perfect afternoon for a long hike in the woods and a walk by the Chesapeake -- access to Calvert Cliffs themselves is restricted since there's been so much vandalism (the region has a treasure trove of shark's teeth and fossils), but the creek we followed through the swamp empties into the bay and there's a narrow, pretty sandy beach with lots of shells, heavy clay-type stones, and bits of shipwreck that wash up (today it was more than bits, there were large pieces of rusted metal strewn along the shore).

Since we were so close to Solomons, we drove in and picked up The Captain's Table's wonderful Cream of Crab soup, of which I could only get away with eating a couple of spoonfuls but it was still worth it. The restaurant is fronted by a harbor with many sailboats, swans, and shore birds, while it backs up to an older boathouse, fishing dock, and the Calvert Marine Museum's protected wetlands and lighthouse, so the views are beautiful all around. We met a couple of fishermen who'd caught huge bass and were eager to show them off before we drove home into the sunset.

Paul and Adam inspecting shells at the beach by Calvert Cliffs. We found several fossilized ray dental plates and some pretty shells, but no shark's teeth this year.

A surprising number of trees by the shore still had their leaves, and the dune grasses were still golden.

Of course I had to take my shoes off and wade, though the water was quite cold -- a big difference from a few weeks ago when we went swimming in the bay at Flag Ponds State Park a couple of miles away.

The seagulls, loons, cormorants and other birds did not seem to mind the temperatures, however -- very warm for November.

The path to the cliffs goes through the woods alongside a creek and later a marsh.

This beaver dam undoubtedly is part of the reason why the wetlands thrive.

Despite the late autumn season, turtles came out to enjoy the sunshine.

In Solomons, this fisherman showed off his prize catch.</center>

We missed in their entirety both the Ravens and Redskins games, which it sounds like was a blessing since they both lost. Then we couldn't bear to watch the Cowboys-Eagles game -- being unable to root for Dallas and unwilling to root for Michael Vick -- so we watched Due South's "Dead Men Don't Throw Rice" and "Say Amen," both of which are delightful -- I preferred the former, which had us all screeching with laughter, but Ray K's cynicism and religious fanatics go so well together, too. Now I have lots of laundry to move before bed.

Poem for Sunday

2009-11-08T05:34:11Z

Terminal Étude
By Alissa Valles

not on paper but human and bitter
-- Miron Bia{lstrok}oszewski

We're only a little dead:
a shadow broke a window
and found its way to bed
warm enough for a word
narrow enough for a widow
only a fissure in Warsaw

in the middle of Warsaw
who is also a widow
(behind a broken window
she's only a little dead)
I was lying in bed
too tired to read a word

Without a single word
about your being dead
(it's obvious to a widow)
you lay down in bed
and told me about Warsaw
just outside the window

Holding shards of window
you said you had a word
known only to the dead
you whispered it in bed
it sounds a bit like Warsaw
from the mouth of a widow

We made death a widow
more bereft than Warsaw
falling through a window
in the middle of the bed
wrapped in that one word
we raised up the dead

A door leads to the dead
by a fissure in the word
so now all over Warsaw
down to the last widow
we're waiting by a window
till they come back to bed

Now all Warsaw is our bed
and your word is a widow
with a window on the dead

--------

"The title of this poem refers to one of the terminals at Fryderyk Chopin Airport in Warsaw," writes Valles in Poet's Choice. "I had been working for months on a translation of a magnificent long poem by Miron Bialoszewski (1922-1983), a Polish poet who remains virtually unknown to American readers...it begins 'I'm a little dead/and you're a little dead,' and like much of Bialoszewski's poetry it is a difficult poem to do justice to in English. I could not get his first two lines out of my head, and it seems that my poem was a way of trying to break that aural spell. It became, oddly, a poem both about the porous barrier between the living and the dead, and about the role language plays in crossing that barrier, which is one of Bialoszewski's great themes."

I had a pretty good day, but sorry, I'm sitting here seething as our president (whom I have had to un-follow on Twitter) is trying to force me to celebrate a health care reform bill that utterly betrays women as the greatest thing since Don't Ask, Don't Tell. You'll have to forgive me if I can't throw a party over the passage of a health care bill that gives a giant FUCK YOU to reproductive rights, as even Democrats agreed to toss abortion coverage out, meaning that even those of us whose plans now protect our right to choose will likely have to pay for the procedure entirely should we ever need it. Hey, Barack, who needs Roe v. Wade overturned when you can simply make women choose between being unable to get any health coverage or bearing children they don't want (or aborting them in back alleys, since the deaths or maiming of women surely isn't a problem for politicians)? Remind me again why I was supposed to see Hillary Clinton as the villain in the post-feminist Obamagirl fantasy of change...or never mind, don't tell me, I mean, we live in a country where Sarah Palin could almost become Vice President and Dan Choi could almost serve in the military, right?

Otherwise I had only minor frustrations on a lovely November Saturday. We went to the annual Swedish Bazaar held in a local church, where we only ever buy Swedish food (mmmm Swedish rye bread), but it's fun to look at all the straw goats and dalahast. We stopped briefly at Toys R Us because they were having a Pokemon event and the kids wanted to download to their games whichever Pokemon was available in the store -- I think it was Arceus but that name makes me laugh, so I may be misremembering -- and I may have bought a Barbie and Ken set, which may have been characters from a certain film I have vowed not to discuss, because, you know, Sparkly!Ken. Our plan was then to go to Sugarloaf Mountain for a hike, but the roads accessing it were closed unexpectedly because Frederick County was doing some sort of emergency repairs. So we stopped at Target to get younger son sneakers, where I am not at all ashamed to admit that I bought the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for $18.99 in a double pack, though I was very angry at Target because they're remodeling their bathrooms in Damascus and instead of letting customers use the employee bathrooms in the back, they set up two stinking, filthy port-a-potties around the side (I went to Wal-Mart, because give me a break, I'm not boycotting a store's clean bathrooms).

Since we were already up in that direction, we went hiking instead at Seneca Creek State Park, where there weren't many leaves left on the trees, but we saw deer, a woodpecker, the mill ruins, and other scenery that made up for it. We were there till sunset, when a park ranger pretty much escorted us out of the parking lot! I called my mother on the way home because I'd left at her house low sodium cheese that she bought me, and she invited us to dinner, so we ate with my parents again. Then we came home and watched this week's Sarah Jane Adventures two-parter, which I did not enjoy as much as last week's but it was pretty fluffy by comparison -- sure, it has Callum Blue whom I learned to love on The Tudors and now get to see regularly as Zod, but the stakes in the story seem so small. Okay, there are some great lines (Clyde: "This is creepy. This is Hogwarts, Tim Burton style." Rani: "This is worse than The Sixth Sense. Are you in for a surprise."), but as my son said, it's "Midnight" meets Scooby Doo...not the most profound of setups in either case. Still enjoyable, though, and better written than either show I watched on Friday night, so this isn't really a complaint, just don't have a lot to say the way I did about Sarah Jane last week.

Straw goats and tomtens for sale at the Swedish Bazaar at St. James Episcopalian Church.

There were also Swedish souvenirs...

...and imported food...

...and music.

Here is one of the deer we saw grazing in the open meadow at Seneca Creek State Park.

And this is the little woodpecker we saw in the woods.

The growing-bare trees were reflected beautifully in the water...

...and the setting sun made it a very pretty walk.</center>

Poem for Saturday

2009-11-07T04:43:18Z

Grief
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death--
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

--------

I had a pretty quiet Friday -- visit to the post office with insanely long line and only two windows open, walk in the gorgeous chilly late fall woods with lots of squirrels gathering acorns for the winter, and writing my negative-to-scathing review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Perfect Mate". Plus lots of getting up to shoo cats off the heating vents -- there are three vents on the main level of the house and three cats, so I have to check the front window, under the desk, and the back window, and by the time I'm finished, whoever I booted out of the front window is already moving back. This is how I woke up this morning (photos by amused husband who couldn't convince the other woman to budge):

Rosie's very favorite position for sleeping is smushed between Paul and myself, but if he's not there, she is content to smush me.

If I am very lucky, I also get Cinnamon smushed against my legs on one side and Daisy smushed on the other.

Of course, it is not necessary for a person to be in the bed for cats to take it over. They prefer it unmade or at least mussed from cat wrestling.

Daisy is in a submissive kitten pose because she knows she is about to get in trouble for sleeping on the vent. Rosie is, as always, unconcerned. Cinnamon at the moment of the photo is asleep upstairs at the foot of Adam's bed in a pile of stuffed animals.

Daisy's inappropriate spots for keeping warm are not restricted to other people's pillows or heating vents, either.</center>

thefridayfive: Seasons
1. Which one is more irritating - being too hot or being too cold? Too hot, unless it's absolutely arctic.
2. Were you born in the winter or the summer Winter. The 28th of Kislev, so during Chanukah that year.
3. What are your favourite foods to eat when you need to warm up and cool down? To warm up: hot bombay potatoes. To cool down: coconut bubble tea.
4. Which one are you more likely to suffer from - hayfever or flu - and does it run in your family? Seasonal allergies. No one in the family gets them much.
5. You are granted a day of perfect weather whenever you like. What day do you place it on and why? Whenever the next time I'll be in Glastonbury will be.

fannish5: Name 5 characters whose wardrobe you would love to have.
1. Morgana, Merlin
2. Olive Snook, Pushing Daisies
3. Minya, Xena: Warrior Princess
4. Kai Winn, Deep Space Nine
5. Eleanor Rougement, Eastwick

We watched our usual fall Friday lineup with football in between and after. Neither sci-fi show impressed me overmuch - big epic tragic stories leave me unimpressed these days, there are just too many of them, and I always expect reset buttons sooner or later. Smallville, at least, had some lovely lines and a guest star I had no idea about: Julian Sands! As Jor-El, though without Jor-El's memories or gravitas, really, so as happy as I was to see him, I wasn't emotionally engaged with his storyline. It was worth watching the entire episode, though, for Oliver's promise that he still has Clark's back, and Chloe's line when she found out that Clark kissed Lois: "You've had feelings for Lois since like the 1930s!" As for Sanctuary, I already saw I Am Legend, I absolutely don't buy that Will and Kate had a poor doomed baby together (Ashley's only been gone two weeks) let alone that Magnus went off to find out how to die slowly since she apparently doesn't have the guts to try beheading herself, and there was no Henry...definitely not my favorite hour of the series.

Poem for Friday

2009-11-06T04:39:32Z

Preludes for Prepared Piano 2: Sonnet for Caesar
By Estill Pollock

One of his horsemen conveys a letter in Greek characters.

Caesar requires more metaphors against decipherment:
ambition, corruption, power, up to and after
the Ides of March (zip file of this,
force-marched to the territory of the Nervii).

For my part, I haue walk'd about the streets
submitting me unto the perillous night,
in a public place, in a street near the Capital,
before the house of Brutus.

Caesar had minted the first coin with the image of a living Roman.

Elizabethan pronunciation of the likeness:
a portrait of storms and blood crazed crowds,
low string tremolandos, the tutti gesture
clearing to fanfares.

--------

I spent a very nice afternoon with gblvr, who came over (and even provided her own sushi because I am a terrible hostess) and brought the first season of Leverage. The first time I ever saw Arrested Development, I shrieked because one of the series creators is a boy I went through elementary school with, and I had a similar experience in that one of the creators and writers of Leverage is the guy who was the editor of 34th Street, the weekly magazine of The Daily Pennsylvanian, which is where Paul and I met. I feel that I am probably therefore too biased to evaluate the series intelligently, but I will say that the three episodes we watched were extremely entertaining, especially the comic wedding story our former editor wrote.

Roddy Road Covered Bridge near Thurmont, Maryland.

Only three of Frederick County's covered bridges still remain.

My kids climbed over the cement blocks that protect the original stones...

...surrounding the creek as it approaches the bridge.

Loy's Station Covered Bridge is surrounded by a park...

...that has play equipment and fields for sports.

This is a photo of my kids shortly before Adam managed to step in the creek and ruin his shoes.

At the right angle, you can see horses through the bridge.</center>

As for evening TV, I had read some information about the novel upon which FlashForward is based that gave me an inkling what this week's big shocker would be -- I knew that it was possible for people in the novel to commit suicide and thus change their futures, suggesting that other possible futures can be changed as well -- and I thought the guilt and panic were very well played, though I wonder where they're going to go with the girl who remembered dying and thinking she deserved it. Then I did something I never did before: watched a full episode of Supernatural! I'd read spoilers about the format of the episode and figured that might make it worthwhile, plus I had to review one of my least-favorite Next Gen episodes, "The Perfect Mate," afterward so I figured that even if SPN was as sexist as I've often been warned, it would only help give me perspective.

I am sure this week isn't remotely typical enough to draw any conclusions about the show, but we all did a great deal of laughing. The only misogyny I saw was a parody of the sexism built into sitcoms and soapy medical shows, with bikini bimbos and swooning over hot stud doctors by women who should be professionals. The fake herpes ad had us all howling, as did the slo-mo replays of the nutcracker hitting Sam, and "That feels really uncomfortable" when Dean opened his trunk when he was the car is one of the funniest things I've seen on TV all year -- tell me someone on the staff doesn't know about Winchestercest. The ending was kind of lame -- "I wish this were a TV show" -- but what a surprise (NOT), it's Highlander and in the end there can be only one. And I've just finished watching Jon Stewart's parody of Glenn Beck, so I did plenty of laughing this evening around rolling my eyes at Star Trek.

Poem for Thursday

2009-11-05T04:41:21Z

Southeast of Eden
By Glyn Maxwell

Together they took the least space they could.
Entered each other deeply, to be less,
to throw one shadow only, to be still
for all the world while moving for each other.

—So space, so barely dented, might not bruise
and cry, and time come running. To this end
breaths went untaken till the only end
of that (this side of nothing): the great sigh
that gives the place away . . .
And out they come,
exiting one another with the kiss
to heal the bruise and be the bruise and there
they sit. The only angel in this case

came only there to point them, in their first
amazing silence, to two peaceful desks.

--------

Another from this week's New Yorker.

I had a spectacularly uneventful Wednesday -- did a bunch of reading, worked on some job stuff, took a walk with a neighbor whom I've known for many years but only recently discovered has an amazing history (she grew up in Palestine, her mother taught Moshe Dayan, she fought in the Israeli war of independence). The county traffic lights are all screwed up because of a massive computer failure that has the lights all out of sync and I kept getting e-mails telling me that local roads were going to be clogged, so I stayed close to home.

I am depressed about a bunch of things from Election Day, but mostly I am infuriated at how the media -- even reporters who should know better -- are trying to spin two weak gubernatorial candidates as a referendum on Obama, and not even talking about the places where the Democrats made gains. Yes, the Maine vote is very disappointing, but as in California with Prop 8, it was very close and involved lots of money from a relatively small group of bigots...the numbers are shifting in the right direction even if it's not as quickly as they should.

Adam resting on the rocks on Catoctin Mountain last weekend.

Here he strikes a pose at the Hog Rock overlook...

...which I think was named for this rock, which doesn't look like a hog to me, though maybe a little.

The leaves were past peak, but there was still plenty of color...

...making the views gorgeous toward both Frederick...

... and the Blue Ridge.

There was also plenty of green on the forest floor -- thick spongy moss full of water when one stepped on it.

Here's one more of the color with the sun on the mountains.</center>

We started to watch the World Series and yet again disliked the way it was going early on -- plus we cannot stand the Fox announcers -- so we put on the third episode of the current season of Merlin, which I liked because it had lots of Morgana, but did not like because it was lots of shrieking, sniveling Morgana instead of the one whom Uther says never ran away from anything in her life -- if only Uther were in charge of her storylines. (And if only the Druids had anything to do with, you know, Druids, but that's a whole different rant.)

It's no Witches of Eastwick, which remains my favorite show of the new season, though it still hasn't been picked up for the season (and this being ABC, I am betting they pull a Pushing Daisies and don't actually cancel it but don't pick up the back end of the season, leaving it hanging). For once I felt like all three women's storylines were balanced, and I really liked what was going on with Joanna! I hope Joanna's replacement at the paper is going to be her new crush because he is so much hotter and smarter than Will, and HE will appreciate her super awesome powers.

And I don't want ANY of them sleeping with Darryl and am hoping Roxie comes to her senses later in the next episode than the preview shows, but I particularly don't want ALL of them sleeping with Darryl so I am all in favor of other boyfriends, even undeserving ones. Or Joanna/Penny, Joanna/Kat, etc. but particularly with Roxie and Joanna -- you don't Get Over Things just because you packed away your dead husband's stuff along with your dead boyfriend's, and you need something other than a lover to make you feel better about yourself when you come out of denial about not having a job, money, boyfriend, etc. Kat could probably have good mindless strings-free sex with Darryl which I bet is why she's the one least likely to at the moment.

Still, some things I adored: Darryl's ad for the wonder water of Eastwick, the psycho music they played whenever Joanna tried telekinesis, Roxie announcing "That wasn't the curse, that was just me shoving an old man into an open grave," Cybill Shepherd plunging what look like knitting needles into Bun's back and making red ants come out, and her last line, "We're going to have to kill him again" -- ahahaha yes! How can I not love a show with five awesome women, no matter what it's based upon? "You're not alone, you've got me" -- rock on, sister.

Poem for Wednesday

2009-11-04T04:34:24Z

November Philosophers
By Katie Ford

Nothing is nothing, although
he would call me that, She was nothing.
Those were his words, but his hand was lifting
cigarettes in chains and bridges
of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last.
It wasn't a year I could argue
against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl
killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild—
and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.
I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses
slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen
a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor
of my beaten house.
She seemed to see my whole life
by ordinance of some god
who wanted me alive again.
Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken
into the corners of violent sadness.
She wrote my address
across her chest
to let everything listening know
where my life was made.
We waited, either forgetting what we were
or becoming more brightly human in that pine,
in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,
not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting
from the yard part of what she required.
Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would
when the molasses warmed over the pot enough
to come into the brandy,
to come into the night
begun by small confessions—
that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,
that the woman he loved was with another man,
his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.
Then I told of the assault at daybreak between
the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward
the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script
and song. There must have been chanting,
as it was on the hour.
What we said was liturgy meant only for us
and for that night. Not for anyone else
to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.
Our only theories were inside of our hands,
flesh and land, body and prairie.
I reached to smoke down his next-to-last,
which he lit and made ready.
The poultry like a war ration
we ate all the way through.
What we wished, we said.
What we said, we found that night
by these, and no other,
means.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I spent a lovely day with melissaukgirl, who drove down from Columbia for what was supposed to be lunch out but ended up being an afternoon at Great Falls, a quick lunch at my house and then Voyager's "The 37s" and Due South's "Odds" (the hand-holding episode, as starfishchick says). I haven't watched any Voyager in half a decade and was startled by two things: how stiff the acting seemed and much I love the Janeway/Chakotay scenes, still, in spite of everything. Also, I still have very great affection for Sharon Lawrence's Amelia Earhart. The actor who played Fred Noonan, David Graf, died quite young of a heart attack, so the episode is kind of sad-nostalgic all around. By then we had realized that traffic was going to be terrible so I told melissaukgirl to stay for dinner and she got to listen to my kids go on about politics and Spore.

A snake wound around a tree by the river at Great Falls. It has a faint orange pattern on its back and much more orange underneath -- anyone want to guess what kind of snake it is?

The reproduction packet boat Charles F. Mercer has been raised out of the C&O Canal for the winter.

The river, running dark because of all the fall leaves, was relatively low today...

...though not as low as the canal, which had been drained empty in places for repair work and was covered in duckweed where there was water.

Water was flowing well at the river dam, however...

...and just below it, where these Canada geese were diving and eating off the river bottom.

You can see our shadows and the shadow of the bridge upon which we were standing across the bottom of this photo of one of the river's whirlpools.

I haven't been inside the visitor center in the tavern since they started renovating it, so imagine my happy surprise to find several new exhibits about history and life on the river.</center>

In the evening my family watched the pilot of V, which was okay yet not particularly good -- decently acted and fun to see a bunch of familiar actors, but predictable and slow to get going. Then we watched The Universe's "Science Fiction, Science Fact," which was a lot of fun in that it had many Star Trek clips (including a diatribe about the scientific implausibility of the destruction of a certain planet in the reboot, heh), plus interviews with Trek's onetime science adviser Andre Bormanis and BSG's Kevin Grazier, who had the best line of the night talking about communicators and noting that our cell phones have more technology than Star Trek's communicator had: "I mean, did you ever see Mr. Spock playing Tetris?"

At 10 we reluctantly put on the news, having already received e-mail alerts with expected bad news about the Virginia gubernatorial race. We watched as they called New Jersey for Christie, took some comfort from the fact that the Democrat had a healthy lead in the NY 23rd Congressional District race, realized that the Maine vote on gay marriage wasn't going to be tallied any time soon and put on Comcast's very good classical channel before Jon Stewart. I hope I wake up to good news.

Poem for Tuesday

2009-11-03T04:48:53Z

Rimbaud's Kraken
By Nicky Beer

Citizens, awake! These are not the low, mild
clouds of your usual daybreaks—behold
the slowly-advancing arms of the apocalyptic
monster, already filling with a pink, sinister light!

The city is a coral reef flaunting electric crustaceans,
a lewd feast laid out for him under the heavens.
He will fiddle harshly the nude steeple of the church,
thump the opera house roof in a savage tom-tom.

His music will make the pauper priests and debutantes
run wild in the street, shucking moth-eaten cassocks
and silk-and-diamond unmentionables to careen
off one another like lascivious pinballs.

Look out, schoolteachers! He's come to suck the bones
from your bodies, to toss your slumping skins
like hobo overcoats into the gutters where you'll
spend your last breaths belching out chalk dust.

The savage urchins, those diminutive monsters
who set fire to the backs of stray dogs—
all at once they'll shriek in terror to see
their fingers turn to sardines in his thundering shadow.

The public monuments will swarm with snails,
their slime-trails a griffonage of queer divinations.
Don't bother running to the sewers to hide—
the pipes have already come alive in their catacombs, ready to strangle.

Citizens, it's all his! Your only chance now is to sprout
another quartet of limbs and clear the way as he unfurls
down the thoroughfares a hundredfold, while the paving stones
squeal like spinsters under the thick, obscene banners of his arms!

--------

The kids had no school due to teacher's meetings on Monday, so we met my Paul's parents at the visitor center at Catoctin Mountain National Park. The leaves were a bit past peak but the weather could not have been more beautiful -- about 60 degrees with mostly clear skies -- so we hiked to two spectacular views at Hog Rock and Blue Ridge Summit Overlook. Then we drove to two of Frederick County's three remaining covered bridges, Loy's Station and Roddy Road, where there were more colorful leaves at the lower elevations. My in-laws took us out for dinner at the Cozy Inn, oldest continuously operating restaurant in Maryland run by the family that founded it, which regularly serves the staff at Camp David and has been visited by dozens of presidential visitors.

Daniel and Adam atop Hog Rock on a Catoctin Mountain nature trail.

They always appreciate the many rocks to climb on...

...like this one, which Adam scaled before we reached the base.

This is Loy's Station Covered Bridge, which the Union Army traversed during the Civil War.

Here is the bridge from the other side, with my family in front.

And this is Roddy Road Covered Bridge, which traverses a smaller stream.

Here is the entrance to the Cozy Inn, which has a caboose permanently attached.

The museum has a small Camp David museum with exhibits about each president at the retreat.</center>

We got home in time for Heroes, about which I have little to say (bored with traveling circus, fed up with history rewriting, no longer care about long-term regular characters, sick of resurrections of some first-season characters and rewritten backstories of others). Then we watched Monday Night Football, since Philly apparently plays better when we don't watch than when we do -- I am perfectly happy with the idea of the Saints as Super Bowl champions -- and Jon Stewart's team coverage of sports fans was a delightful ending to the evening.

Poem for Monday

2009-11-02T04:29:16Z

Octopus Visiting Your Garden
By Nicky Beer

Your fishes, violet and yellow-gilled,
bob on lengths of green twine in the light.
Bait or catch? I ask.
You cannot answer.

Your air is so very sad,
sadder still these winds, these staggering ponies,
these weak cousins to my moving waters.

It's like the touch of unbodied souls.

It's the difference between the oily surge
in your chest and the dish of blood
under the surgeon's table.

I will never understand your stones.
They seem shucked and stunned,
like they've forgotten
how to talk to one another.
They wear the faces
of senile men staring into the sun.

I love your grass, though, the way it tastes
in my arms. Pastoral, you say.

--------

We had a very quiet day after Halloween, in large part due to the weather -- we had intended to drive the two hours to Chestertown for the Sultana downrigging, but it was coming down hard at noon, and we reluctantly decided we didn't feel like traveling all that way in miserable driving conditions to stand in chilly rain on slippery ship decks. We briefly pondered going to the Day of the Dead celebration at the National Museum of American History, but by then we figured it would be very crowded, and having been to the fabulous weekend-long celebration at the Native American museum the past couple of years, we decided to pass. So we did terribly exciting things like grocery shopping, CVS, and (in my case) laundry, which is not going to get done on Monday since we're meeting my in-laws at Catoctin National Park -- the kids have no school due to teacher conferences.

Here are Paul, Daniel and Adam at Scott's Run on Sunday.

Here is the 2008 version of the photo...

...and the 2007 version...

...and the 2006 version...

...and the 2005 version...

...and the 2004 version...

...and the 2003 version, in which I forgot to fix the settings so I got a blurry photo, but it inspired me to try to do it right the next year and then it became a point of comparison in terms of how tall everyone is.</center>

It wasn't a bad football day -- the Ravens won by a big margin over undefeated Denver, the Vikings beat the Packers, we saw quite a bit of both games, and the Redskins had a bye week. In the evening we started to watch the World Series, but when the Yankees went ahead, we turned it off and watched Due South instead -- "Mountie Sings the Blues," which we all loved (Fraser singing, Huey and Dewey writing a terrible country song actually penned by Paul Gross), and "Good for the Soul," which was okay (I don't like over-the-top Fraser at this point, here he seems more like the guy from the first season who doesn't understand how police work actually works, and the mob figures are all caricatures). Oh and dark_cygnet made my day by pointing out that Zienia Merton (Sandra Benes from Space: 1999) was minister in Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith! Now we are hoping the Phillies pull this out, yay Pedro Feliz!

Poem for Sunday

2009-11-01T03:50:39Z

Post-Mortem
By Nicky Beer

To me, you have bequeathed
a half-dissolved
apple, a spider,
and three crescents
of your fingernails.

A large Y of black stitches
has split your trunk into thirds --
a child's rendition
of a bird migrating
towards your feet.

The arc of the scar
on your right calf
reminds me of a hooked trout
I once saw leaping
from the surge of a stream,

a curve of light shaped
by the moment between life
and the infinite space
just above it.

Smoke-browned fish on a white plate,
dawn-grey body on a silver table --
we do not like to linger
on how the dead may still nourish us.

Later, I will tell your family
what no one ever knew,
but you may have suspected:

you had two exquisite,
plum-colored kidneys,
lustrous and faultless
as the surface of a yolk.

--------

"Several years ago, I saw a fascinating documentary about medical cadavers called 'Still Life: The Humanity of Anatomy,'" writes Beer in The Washington Post Book World. "I was particularly touched by how the students endeavored to be respectful to their subjects, even going so far as to have a memorial service for them at the end of the year. Around the same time, I had to get an ultrasound of my kidneys. I remember vividly the sight of my bladder, ghostly and greenish on the monitor, and realizing that even though it had been working tirelessly on my behalf for my whole life, this was the first time I had ever seen it. These two experiences made me consider how relative the idea of intimacy can be. On the one hand, those medical students, necessarily, will never know the names, occupations, passions or fears of their subjects, but they will relate to the bodies in a way that is completely unique, inaccessible even to the subjects' loved ones."

We spent Halloween afternoon at Scott's Run, just as we did five years ago. The weather was gorgeous, quite warm for the season -- nearly 70 degrees. The leaves are just past peak here, still plenty of gold and orange on the trees beginning to turn brown, and lots on the ground with even more falling every hour (we had to sweep the porch twice before evening) so it was a perfect afternoon to spend in the woods and looking at the trees flanking the Potomac River. We saw many dogs, since this is a dog-friendly park -- it was at one time a private estate that the citizens of Fairfax County wrested away from a developer who wanted to cut down all the trees, voting to raise their own taxes to buy and protect the land -- and a heron on an island in the river. Then we came home to carve our pumpkin, which we hadn't managed to do earlier in the week.

Although I did not dress up, I did have my witch t-shirt and jack-o-lantern drawstring pants on. Want some candy?

Daisy, of course, had to keep up her tradition of "helping" to carve the pumpkin.

Here is how it looked fully carved on our porch at night fell.

Adam went as a hippie (that's a Peace, Love & Penguins shirt he's wearing). I am not sure what his friend is supposed to be other than menacing.

My neighbor, who grew up in Greece, is wearing a vintage European Carnival mask. I am wearing a $6 witch hat headband from Claire's.

These are some of the decorations on their porch...

...and in their yard.

This is the mother of Adam's good friend as the Cat in the Hat with her two little boys as Thing One and Thing Two -- she made all the costumes.

These are the decorations in front of their house, including a giant spiderweb, fog machine, strobe light, and her mother -- who recently moved here from Venezuela -- in the witch hat.

We always end Halloween at my parents' so they can see the kids' costumes, even though Daniel decided he was too old for trick-or-treating this year and didn't want to dress up. (The hat on Paul belongs to my mother and was stuck on his head for display purposes only.)</center>

When we got back from trick-or-treating at my parents, it was only a bit after 9 p.m., and we remembered that we were going to have an extra hour of sleep because the clocks go back, so we put on the 1931 Frankenstein with Boris Karloff as the monster. This bears very little resemblance to the novel, which I shrieked to see was attributed in the credits to "Mrs. Percy B. Shelley" -- oh, but her mother would have been displeased -- but it's the basis of nearly every ripoff and parody ever filmed, which makes it both unintentionally hilarious in places and unwittingly epic in others. I hadn't seen it since college, so had not realized how much "The Mob Song" sequence in Disney's Beauty and the Beast owed to this movie when I saw that. I suppose we really should show the kids the Branagh film but I find I'm more in the mood for the Mel Brooks version of the story now!

Poem for Saturday

2009-10-31T04:34:15Z

I Went To Heaven
By Emily Dickinson

Part Four: Time and Eternity
LIV

I went to heaven,—
T'was a small town,
Lit with a ruby,
Lathed with down.
Stiller than the fields
At the full dew,
Beautiful as pictures
No man drew.
People like the moth,
Of mechlin, frames,
Duties of gossamer,
And eider names.
Almost contented
I could be
'Mong such unique
Society.

--------

Poem for cidercupcakes in honor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date."

This is going to be an all-fannish entry, so if fannish is not your thing, you may want to move along. I wrote a review of Next Gen's "Cost of Living" -- which I love, though if you can't stand Lwaxana Troi, you'd be forgiven for not feeling the same -- while waiting for the second segment of "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith" to air. When my family got home, we watched both parts, and I love that episode even more, right from the start, when Mr. Smith and K-9 get jealous of each other's abilities and start competing. When I first heard the episode title, I predicted that Sarah Jane's husband was either going to be an alien villain in disguise or that he was going to be an innocent pawn who would nobly sacrifice himself for her sake, and I'm very glad it was the latter; it was more like the Doctor having to let River Song die, made both Sarah Jane and Peter Dalton stronger characters, and was touching if, well, predictable.

I laughed a lot too, and just as much during the first half, while Luke, Rani and Clyde were joking that they didn't want to have to watch grownups kiss in public (I loved Sarah Jane saying "Cheek!" when Luke said he didn't know people her age did those things). Having just watched the aforementioned Buffy episode "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date," I found it amusing as well as sad that Sarah Jane has the same problems with dating that Buffy does; how do you tell your boyfriend about your job, or hide it from him, without making him flee? Of course, none of the kids would have recognized the stuttering TARDIS sounds as such but I expected more alarm from everyone, not just Clyde, when Sarah Jane orders Mr. Smith to shut down completely right after detecting the anomaly. The whole idea that she needs someone reliable, she doesn't even know where to send the Doctor an invitation -- as if he'd come purely to be happy for her, and not to save the world -- that makes me sad. I actually prefer her relationship with Clyde! Though I did snicker at Clyde's line about hoping the Doctor is as good as Sarah Jane says, and the Doctor's reply that journalists are always exaggerating but he is pretty amazing. Also Rani telling the Doctor to call her Sarah Jane rather than Sarah and his reaction...hee!

Not sure about the whole "there's nothing outside" from either a sci-fi or visual standpoint; it was hard to look at the screen at times, particularly when Sarah Jane, silhouetted in painfully bright light, talks to Peter about his "angel" and suspects he was using the red kryptonite ring to manipulate her (I am very glad she accepts the proposal before she puts on the ring, otherwise there would be very icky consent issues since they apparently were together for two weeks afterward). But you'd think the Pantheon of Discord would know that Sarah Jane is not so easily tempted by now, and would never fall for a man who isn't strong enough to do the right thing once he understands what it is, that he's already dead...it's very much like Rose's father, living up to his greatest potential for love and duty just as he realizes he has to die. I bristle at Clyde deciding he needs to go fight the Trickster because "it's what Sarah Jane would do, it's what the Doctor taught her" -- all right, but she learned from plenty of other people too, and Peter has learned enough from her to do what he knows she would do.

The Doctor's implication when he finds her, I think, is that ultimately Sarah Jane is more important to protecting Earth than he is himself, talking about the things she's going to do. When she asks if this is the last time she'll see him and he says he hopes not, I assume that means he knows that the until-now Doctor does not see her again in her future...does "don't forget me" mean him, Ten, his current incarnation, or is he actually sort of jealous of his previous self and possible future self? It's a nice conundrum. I mean, Peter doesn't deserve Sarah Jane, but really I don't think the Doctor does either. And I'm really glad Peter loved her and made her realize she could have a happy love life with someone, just not him -- more Martha, less Rose, without the violent erasure that Donna got. Anyway, I was completely satisfied with this episode, and wish Torchwood would take some cues from Sarah Jane.

Painted pumpkins in the store at Jumbo's Pumpkin Patch.

In addition to pumpkins, a variety of gourds are sold there.

Plus there are Halloween decorations for sale, including witches...

...and painted gourds designed to serve as birdhouses.

The pumpkins at Jumbo's were so picked over, though, that we got ours from this small local market.

They sell excellent corn and vegetables all summer, and, at this time of year, many varieties of apple, all locally grown.

A cool spring and lots of rain during the growing season made this a tough year for pumpkins -- there are plenty of big ones, but a lot of them aren't fully orange.

Still, there's plenty that can be done to make a less-than-perfect pumpkin festive!</center>

thefridayfive: Memory and Desire
1. What is your happiest memory? Being at Stonehenge for the first time with my family.
2. What is the most important life lesson you've learned? Being poor sucks, but wealth is no guarantee of happiness.
3. What is the most difficult decision you've had to make? Whether to drop out of grad school.
4. What is the best thing about your life? My kids.
5. What is the biggest challenging you're facing right now? Finding a job that's enough hours doing something I actually want to do.

fannish5: Five favorite fannish Halloween costumes - that you have worn, or seen someone else wear. My tastes are simple and I am easily impressed.
1. Yoda from Star Wars, which I wore in college (it was a cheap storebought one, but I was short enough to pull it off better than most adults, heh).
2. Pikachu from Pokemon, worn by older son.
3. Harry Potter from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, worn by older son (who did not then need glasses, so he had fake costume glasses).
4. Bele from Star Trek, worn by Paul (created with black and white face makeup plus a neutral-color turtleneck and trousers).
5. Jim Morrison, whom my friend Suzy's then-boyfriend agreed to dress as because she had a total fetish (we're talking hundreds of old magazine photos taped inside her closet door). He didn't look much like Jim, but he must really have loved her to agree to try.

My parents are home from California but my father is sick, so we didn't have dinner with them; instead Paul made apple and cheddar strata with chicken in mushroom sauce, both of which were fabulous. Then we watched Smallville, which I didn't think was such a great episode -- it's like they can't figure out what to do with Oliver from week to week, though Tess is awesome and I love her -- but I forgive everything, even the stupid Good Morning Metropolis storyline, for the last few seconds when Clark and Lois finally kiss, though this is so much earlier in the season than I was expecting for that that I am now worried how many stupid ways they'll be split up in future episodes a la Clark and Lana. Then we watched Sanctuary, which also had some silliness, but also had awesome women -- I always love Magnus, and go Kate! (I don't think Magnus is fooled by her for a second, which is part of the fun.) Also, any episode in which a geek gives the Live Long and Prosper hand gesture to misunderstood alien creatures before becoming a successful comic book writer gets bonus points from me.

Poem for Friday

2009-10-30T03:44:38Z

The Pope's Penis
By Sharon Olds

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat-and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

--------

I spent a delightful afternoon with cidercupcakes, who forgave me for not having anything exciting to feed her and brought Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons one and five. First we had to get my irritable DVD player working; it had decided it was a Region 2 player, and rejected all my professional discs with a "Wrong Region" warning, requiring that the machine be restored to factory settings -- something not easy to learn from the minimal manual. But we figured it out, and then we watched "Teacher's Pet" and "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" (which I had not seen before, never having watched the first season), plus "Checkpoint" (which I had seen, but it's one of the best ever, with the Council of Watchers and Glory and how Buffy lays the smackdown on everyone and how Giles adoring her).

A turkey stealing food from a calf in a barn at South Mountain Creamery.

Since it was Fall Harvest Celebration weekend, there were cheese samples...

...and containers of cream to be shaken by hand to make take-home servings of butter.

A singer was performing in the large barn...

...where there were also ice cream samples, farm toys, and historic farm equipment.

This calf was only a couple of weeks old. You can see some of the adult cows behind her, outside near the dairy delivery trucks.

These two calves were sharing a stall, and a water bucket.

Alpacas don't live at South Mountain Creamery, but these (plus yarn made from their wool) were visiting from a nearby farm.</center>

I am liking FlashForward a lot, though I feel like that could turn on a dime if they killed off the wrong character in the wrong way or just screwed around and dragged things out too long. Right now the pacing is terrific and I like all the characters; I like that the men are as focused on their relationships as the women, and the women as focused on their careers as the men, and it's a reasonably diverse cast without too many obvious stereotypes. I particularly love Janis (the actress who plays her is terrific too), and I really like the Mark/Olivia/Lloyd triangle complicated by Dylan and Charlie's obvious attachment...it's messy and interesting and Lloyd obviously has all sorts of secrets much worse than the ones Mark is keeping from Olivia, so she's contemplating leaving one man she can't trust for one with with bigger skeletons in his closet.

I can't say that I enjoyed the World Series tonight, but a lot can happen in Philadelphia!

Poem for Thursday

2009-10-29T03:50:13Z

The Freshness
By Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

When it's cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,
you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can't explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.

--------

I don't have a great deal to report other than my delight at seeing President Obama sign the inclusive hate crimes bill into law -- the first time a federal measure has protected GLBT rights along with the rights of other citizens. Now if only he would keep his campaign promise to overturn Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I will feel better about him despite his backtracking on health care and Afghanistan -- it isn't as if Americans hadn't been explicitly told that he intended to overturn it when we elected him, he said so several times -- no one can complain he turned out to be a secret liberal! I had a nice afternoon in that there were three white-tail deer walking in the woods at the same time I was, and I wasted far too much time in the late afternoon and evening setting up a Superpoke Pets club, then inviting people and explaining clubs to them since Superpoke didn't bother to do so before having them go live (and promptly crashing a bunch of other things). I think I may have irritated a couple of people by making Adam an officer, but he wanted an officer badge, and what's a mother to do?

Me and my kids enjoying the fall color on High Knob at Gambrill State Park last weekend.

The tea house at the summit of High Knob can be rented out for weddings and other events at Gambrill.

This was the view from the overlook facing Middletown and South Mountain.

The color was even more amazing on South Mountain itself, looking down from the Washington Monument.

The color on this tree was already past peak at that elevation when I took this photo of Paul and our kids.

The approach to the monument follows the Appalachian Trail where it crosses through Washington Monument State Park.

This tree was in the parking lot by the picnic table where we ate lunch.

And the foliage all around was equally spectacular.</center>

We watched the World Series until Eastwick, and it was a happy couple of hours indeed...if the entire series goes this way, I will cease complaining about anything the Redskins do this season (I know I said I wasn't rooting for the Redskins till they changed their name, but I simply cannot root for Dallas or the Giants, and now that Michael Vick is on the Eagles, I would prefer the Cowboys in a crunch...the entire division makes me barf). I adored Eastwick this week -- an entire episode about female bonding in which men and what they want are secondary, particularly so far as Kat is concerned -- I am loving her character lately. I still can't warm to Joanna, she seems fundamentally selfish to me in a way that Roxie and Kat are not; her interest in exposing Darrell is not to protect the town but to become a celebrity news person. And yet she is intelligent enough to get Kat: "Will doesn't really know me...he certainly doesn't love me...you on the other hand walked through fire for me, if that isn't love I don't know what is." That's a lovely, lovely scene, and makes it easy to leave the bad witch/pagan stuff to the side.

Poem for Wednesday

2009-10-28T03:30:44Z

My Great-Grandmother's Bible
By Spencer Reece

Faux-leather bound and thick as an onion, it flakes—
an heirloom from Iowa my dead often read.
I open the black flap to speak the "spake"s
and quickly lose track of who wed, who bred.
She taped our family register as it tore,
her hand stuttering like a sewing machine,
darning the blanks with farmers gone before—
Inez, Alvah, Delbert, Ermadean.
Our undistinguished line she pressed in the heft
between the Testaments, with spaces to spare,
smudged with mistakes or tears; her fingers left
a mounting watchfulness I find hard to bear.
When I saw the AIDS quilt, spread out in acres,
it was stitched with similar scripts by similar makers.

--------

Another from this week's New Yorker.

I have absolutely nothing worth reporting -- it rained all day, I had a bit of a headache though managed to stave off a migraine, I did lots of dumb organization things and started playing around with holiday card ideas that I ended up scrapping because I didn't really love any of them -- does anyone have any brilliant suggestions for a holiday/New Year card with a Southern/New Orleans theme, preferably with some fannish tie-in that works for both the locale and the holidays?

A view of fall foliage through the Civil War Correspondents Arch at Gathland State Park.

Gathland was the home of Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend, built in Crampton's Gap, where William B. Franklin's Union corps fought Howell Cobb's Confederate force during the Battle of South Mountain.

This is the lodge where GATH (as Townsend signed his work) often had breakfast; the building above is the mansion.

These ruins are all that is left of GATH's library.

His books, however, have survived, and some remain in print. The Limoges candy dish was part of a set with the Gapland logo (as it was then known) in gold.

The museum has family photos as well, plus letters from Townsend to various colleagues and friends.

The War Correspondents Arch is the most famous structure at Gathland now. The Appalachian Trail crosses directly in front of it.

There are several memorials, national and state Civil War Trails signs, and descriptive markers around the barn ruins (at left), the memorial arch (at right), and the mansion (directly behind me as I took the photo).</center>

Since we have no Tuesday night chill-out show -- maybe when V premieres, if it doesn't suck -- we watched the second episode of the second season of Merlin, "The Once and Future Queen." I liked it much better than the season premiere despite an ongoing shortage of Morgana, who better get lots of screen time in upcoming episodes; I love Gwen, though, so I was happy to see her get so much attention, and I love that she'll tell off Arthur without any concern about their relative social positions. I don't think they have any chemistry -- she has lots more with Lancelot, and Merlin, for that matter -- but chemistry isn't exactly what Arthur/Guinevere is known for, anyway, though I am wondering how that will work on this series, since Arthur clearly won't be marrying the daughter of King Leodegrance if he ends up marrying Gwen.

Poem for Tuesday

2009-10-27T03:31:11Z

Letter to Tsvetaeva
By Nina Zivancevic
Translated by Charles Simic

Ah, now our time has come, Marina.
You visit me at night while I sit alone
with a glass of wine in hand
—you who do not need a key—
for you the most secret door of my room
is always open:
abandoned by our mothers,
we both loved children and poetry,
and hated Paris and poverty,
wearing the one and only dirty dress,
we kept clear of landlords and cops.
We both had blue eyes, many lovers,
and the incapacity to live with anyone.
Ah, I almost forgot: our fathers, too,
had similar jobs—they occupied themselves
with museums and art . . .
Still, I got angry yesterday
when someone called me Marina . . .
I'm neither important nor odd enough
to send daily reports to Beria . . .
How furious I was that you hanged yourself!
What courage, what a double cross, what a lie,
what a betrayal of poetry . . .
Marina, I'm a child as you can see,
about you and life I really know nothing.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

It was a busy yet unexciting day -- many dozen photos cropped, color-corrected and otherwise manipulated, three loads of laundry washed, sorted and folded, two packages wrapped, addressed and taken to the post office, one long walk enjoyed since the weather was gorgeous, things like that. I tried to read the news but between not being able to figure out who's standing where on the public health care option, not seeing what the problem is if there's no McDonalds in Iceland and not being happy with the direction of Change We Can Believe In, I decided to let Adam try to explain Spore to me instead -- which was probably an even bigger mistake! I did refrain from buying my penguin Tarot cards, which I consider an accomplishment -- I did not refrain from buying myself Tarot cards with my $5 plus 30% off coupon at Borders over the weekend.

Piggies enjoying pumkpins at Jumbo's Pumpkin Patch on Sunday.

There was a petting zoo that included these sheep...

...and some small round goats and chickens, who were sharing a pen.

It is rare for me to think that a cow is particularly pretty -- usually I just think they're adorable, if they're clean -- but this one had unusual markings and was really quite beautiful.

Adam got to pet another calf as well as several at South Mountain Creamery earlier in the day.

Smaller children could have pony rides at Jumbo's.

Here are my kids surrounded by a very few of the pumpkins for sale there.

I'm not sure what kind of squash these are -- I don't think I've ever eated one -- but they were my favorites in the "weird pumpkins" patch!</center>

After dinner (tuna pomodoro, mmm) we watched last week's two-part Sarah Jane Adventures episode, "The Mad Woman in the Attic," which despite being a reset-button episode was very enjoyable -- more so than the season premiere, I thought. I love that everyone still thinks about and talks to Maria even if she's not appearing and Rani resents how much attention she gets (are we to understand from the alternate future-forward at the end that Rani marries Luke and they go visit Maria in America?). I love the seaside resort, which reminds me of the one we visited in Plymouth a few years ago; younger son won a free game of miniature golf there, and still has the token to go back and use. I didn't mind Sarah Jane's expected speech about friends being all you need -- it reminded me of Lisa Moscatiello's song "In the Here and Now" (which, really, could be my theme song for Sarah Jane, and I'd make a songvid if I made songvids). I particularly love the flashbacks with previous Doctors, even alongside the prediction of Ten returning when such predictions always turn out to mean bad news in Whoverse.

Then we watched Heroes, which is like three different shows as it follows three different storylines, and as has been happening for the past two seasons for me, it feels so disjointed that I have trouble having any overall positive feeling. I am very, very tired of the Sylar-in-Matt's-head storyline, I don't think Greg Grunberg is a good enough actor to play it really well, of course they wrote Janice preferring Sylar in bed to Matt, it all feels vaguely icky and badly done. Whereas now that they got their gratuitous lesbian kissing out of the way, I actually really like Claire's uncertainty with Gretchen, which makes sense to me for someone who's been through what she has (and I'd sort of forgotten about the fact that she's a virgin). I'm wary of it because I have no confidence that these writers will do anything besides exploit the whole two-college-girls-together thing, but I appreciate how it was handled this week. As for HRG and Tracy, Ali Larter and Jack Coleman are two of my favorite actors in the franchise, but they seem to be floundering for things to do with them, and I only felt badly up to a point for the boy who can't help killing people...he could so easily have grown up to be Sylar.