I think the whole office will be restless today.
There is some treasure hidden in the heart of summer
everyone remembers now, and they can’t be sure
the lives they live in will discover it.
(From “Santa Barbara Road,” Robert Hass.)
I think the whole office will be restless today.
There is some treasure hidden in the heart of summer
everyone remembers now, and they can’t be sure
the lives they live in will discover it.
(From “Santa Barbara Road,” Robert Hass.)
1. Things I have done at work this week (unrelated projects): Researched the difference between a multi-level marketing scheme and a pyramid scheme; used more exclamation points writing one web site than I have in my entire professional career; and learned about the growing mainstream market for total-body cleanses. My job is awesome!
2. Speaking of advertising, let’s watch some Precious Roy Home Shopping Network (from the most brilliant show ever to appear on MTV, Sifl & Olly):
3. And to end the week on a more highbrow note, I came across an Elizabeth Bishop quote that, for me, defines the reason literature exists: “Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it.”
Last night I discovered that ivy has pushed through the outside bricks, into the walls, and is trying to sprout through the baseboard in the bedroom. And that is thoroughly creepy. Not because I think that ivy will suddenly come shooting in to attack us in our beds, but because the ivy has been slowly, slowly working its way in and is probably not going to stop now. (I am so glad I rent, by the way.)
Something that inexorable and vegetative reminded me of a couple of science fiction stories–there’s one by Bradbury in S is For Space about mushroom kits that kids order and start growing; the mushrooms then turn out to be a weird alien life that takes over the world and smothers all the kids’ parents. And Ursula LeGuin wrote “Vaster Than Empires, and More Slow” which I don’t recall as well, but is about a planet whose plant life slowly strangles the explorers, I think. (I mostly remember that the title comes from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress“: My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow.)
So maybe if I hadn’t read so much science fiction I wouldn’t be nervous about walking by the spot where I saw the ivy pushing in. I think the landlord can deal with this…
This poem was on the Writer’s Almanac this morning and it reminded me of the first long chapter of Dandelion Wine where Douglas realizes he’s alive (well, mortal; he’s 11 in the book so obviously he’s been alive and known about it for some time).
Anyway. Good old Mark Strand gives us another lovely poem:
My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.
The short answer: Buying things for the yard. (And working in it, too, but mostly buying things.)
Mr. Isbell expanded the front stoop into a patio and I bought some chairs:
(And a new hose! and hose storage!)
And I bought a lot of marigolds and potting soil:
I did finally get the yellow dot fabric from two weeks ago cut out last night, but someone decided to impede progress as much as he could:
Look at that stubborn face. He wasn’t about to move.
This movie made it onto the Netflix queue because I was considering the books for trashy summer reading (along with Anne McCaffery and some Ian Fleming) and I thought the movie might give me an idea of how bad the books might be.
And let me tell you, it was bad. Not so much bad dialogue, or a bad plot (well…), but bad for teen girls all over America: How did a book that teaches you that it’s ok to throw all your love at someone who will hurt you–who might even kill you–become a worldwide bestselling romance? Because in real life the person you’re throwing your love at isn’t a sparkly vampire; he’s just going to give you a broken arm. Or worse.
So I don’t think I need to read the books–I’ll spare myself that frustration (and spare Mr. Isbell the rants about women perpetuating these behavior patterns). (Seriously, Woman Author and Women Director and Producers? You think that because a secondary character asks a boy to prom that this makes your book/movie modern and empowering? Wow.)
The movie ended with a Radiohead song, though. I didn’t see that coming.
1. How cool are these Blue Note album covers from the 60’s? Even the names of the albums are cool:
You can see a lot more here on what looks to be a Japanese site.
2. Seriously, I can’t take the coolness. If anyone browsing in a thrift store finds any old jazz albums, I plan to buy a turntable someday. Hint.
3. I stumbled across an essay on perfume that does as good a job as anything can describing a smell, in the purplest prose imaginable. Which is a good thing, because it gives us paragraphs like this:
“The best way to describe Bigarade is to say, first, that it is a vast smell. And second, that it smells like a human being in the summer in a complex weather system; whoever this person is, we can smell them, they’re showered but they have a smell all the same, and the lovely, intricate smells of summer are all around and clinging to their skin, and also it seems to have just rained because there’s the scent of rainwater on pavement and perhaps a bit of ozone, plus some flower petals and grass that got washed into the puddle they’re stepping in. “
Today is the birthday of Johannes Brahms AND of Piotr Tchaikovsky. Poor Brahms was in love with Clara Schumann his whole life, which was tricky because Robert Schumann was his good friend and mentor, and poor Tchaikovsky was gay at a time when that was illegal in Russia. (Hell, it still might be.)
I recommend listening to the Brahms string sextet #1, which I found online here (pretty good, but find the Berlin Octet recording). And for Tchaikovsky, you can watch The Music Lovers, but then you’ll be depressed, so you’d better just put on the 1812 Overture.
I found this in my online reading yesterday: A site with the premise, “If we started a movie on the day you were born, and stretched it over your lifespan, this is where you’d be in that movie.”
You enter your birthday, how long you expect to live, and pick a movie (Ghostbusters, 2001, Star Wars, etc.), then the results tell you where you are in that movie, if that movie were your life.
Apparently, I’m in that long fantastic scene in 2001 where Dave is jogging in the round part of the spaceship. I don’t know how that helps me with my Wednesday at all, but such is the internet.
Thing #7 from the 29 Things is “Knit Christmas stockings, starting with Toby’s.” I got the yarn a few weeks ago and finally started last week. I’m to the heel now but, since it looks like a stripey tube, I’ll wait on a picture.
Mr. Isbell saw my yarn colors (orange*, turquoise, and a weird green) and said, “Those aren’t Christmas colors!” But they are:
*Toby gets the orange one, of course.