Poem for Saturday

Not to Mention Love: A Heart for Patricia
By David Clewell

Not one more figure of speech, I promise,
not here, under the pressing weight of centuries
of metaphors insisting on the heart's unbelievable resemblance
to anything else we know. One more could finally break it
irretrievably, and I don't want that kind of metaphorical blood
on my hands. So this time around, let the heart be the heart
the surgeon discovers when he lays open the chest so gently
it's easy to miss the self-effacing beauty of precision,
the way he comes at it directly, the only way he knows.
And the heart, exposed exactly for what it is: homelier
than we'd like to imagine. And alive beyond compare.
Here, the heart is the heart, and isn't
a fist or a flower or a smooth-running engine
and especially not one of those ragged valentines
someone's cut out, initialed, shot full of cartoon arrows:
the adolescent voodoo of desire. Here nothing's colored
that impossibly red.

There's nothing cute about it. The heart
is the heart, chamber after chamber. Ventricular. Uncooked.
In all its sanguine glory. I couldn't make up a thing
like that. The heart's perfected its daily making do, the sucking
and pumping, its mindless work: sustaining a blood supply
that's got to go around a lifetime.
Sure, there's a brain somewhere, another planet
just seconds or light-years away, and maybe some far-flung
intelligence madly signalling for all it's worth--
but the heart wouldn't know about that. It has its own
evidence to go on. What's convincing to the heart
is only the heart. It doesn't have the luxury of stopping
to weigh, to reconsider, to fold and unfold the raw data of the world
until it's creased beyond recognition. Some days it can't distinguish
a single sad note from a chorus of exhilaration, but still
the heart has its one answer down to a science: yes. Over
and over, that iambic uh-huh. Whatever it takes, some kind of nerve
or unlikely grace: the heart never knows what to think.

* * *

If this poem has had its moments already
when I haven't been quite as good as my word--
when the heart's been anything less than the heart
or even the tiniest bit more--believe me, I've tried
hard to keep the heart in its proper place for once. It's not
in my mouth or on my sleeve or winging its way lightheartedly
in circles over my head. It's more or less right
where it belongs inside of me, no small thing. And not to mention love
even once by its own name, Patricia:
that's a proposition I never meant to enter into, anywhere.

So when you turn out the light
and this page goes as dark as the room you're lying down in
and for one night at least there are no more distractions,
it's my heart you'll be listening to. And it's yours.
We fit together so well sometimes it's not easy
telling whose lips, whose arms, whose heat in the groin,
whose very good idea. I'm not taking any chances
bigger than the one you've given me--your insistent heart
mixed up with mine: uh-huh, uh-huh, huh-huh,
and my heart has never been the heart it is right now.
It's what we've both been waiting for: I'm asking you
to make of it what you surely will, to take it from here,
in your love beyond these imperfect words, please
take it wherever you're going tonight from here.

--------

We had a nice, quiet last day of 2004 in uncharacteristic 60 degree temperatures at the Baltimore Zoo, then at home having comfort food for dinner (chicken soup, smoked turkey sausage and cheese and crackers), and then -- by unanimous vote of the other members of my family while I was out of the room, still under the impression that we would be watching either Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- we all sat down together and watched The Return of the King extended edition. I was the only one who had seen it straight through, and it seems in retrospect a very suitable way to end the year, as that will remain in many ways the movie of 2004 despite its December 2003 opening and I appreciate the movie much more now than I did last new year's eve. So my kids were awake after eleven, and we figured there was no real harm in letting them stay up to watch the ball drop -- first time we've all done that together. Now I'm drinking a miniscule amount of eggnog with brandy and laughing at the various things considered hip these days by Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve, which is clearly more a nostalgia-fest for people my age; what a pity that Barry Manilow isn't on there singing "It's Just Another New Year's Eve," or maybe he is.

Got wonderful mail today from (yum, we are all enjoying them!), (haven't installed yet but will send a report when I do) and (haven't watched yet but thank you so much), tossed a couple of articles up at TrekToday since I'm the only one in town to do so and my editor has made me very happy by offering to pay me next year to review the entire original series on DVD, talked to a couple of friends (though not my parents who are at the beach with their friends). So am mellower and more content than yesterday -- not having cramps makes a big difference here. The rest of the weekend is likely to be quiet, as older son needs to meet with a friend on Sunday about a lengthy school project and both kids are likely to sleep very late tomorrow. It's supposed to be quite warm again, so I am hoping to get some outdoor time in if they can handle more walking.

No resolutions, they're just exercises in bad self-esteem for me as I never keep any except incidentally (as in, not because they were new year's resolutions but for other reasons). Don't really feel like rehashing last year, which had a lot of very nice moments and a few I never want to live through again even vicariously. So Happy New Year everyone, and hope your 2005 has begun wonderfully!


Image above from photo taken while driving on I-95 between Baltimore and Washington just past sunset. The last light of the year could not have faded on a more beautiful note. I had hoped to take a photo of the Mormon Temple against the twilight, but due to beltway traffic that stops (or, rather, moves) for nothing, not even New Year's Eve, it was already too dark by the time we reached it.


Crested cranes in the Africa exhibit at the Baltimore Zoo -- one of the few sections of the zoo that is not undergoing extensive renovation in 2005 and will remain open as is. The zoo is closed for all of January and February with the exception of a couple of weekend tours of the polar bear exhibit.


The two female African elephants will both be inseminated in the near future as the zoo is hoping to breed them before they get too old.


The flamingo flock taking a late afternoon nap. By early evening when we left, they were quite actively eating and grooming each other.


The otters swim on both sides and overhead when one is walking through the plastic tunnel of the wetlands exhibit.


One of the snowy owls in the arctic exhibit, which also includes foxes and polar bears, who seemed to enjoy the warm weather as they were swimming and foraging quite enthusiastically.


Some of the large flock of African penguins. When we arrived one of the volunteers was feeding them fish, so they were in a happy circle around her while seagulls flew overhead crying out in envy.


And why not end the year with a little sex?

Poem for Friday

Stillbirth
By Laure-Anne Bosselaar

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn't my train — the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached —
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn't my train — the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone call out your name.

--------

Two for New Year's Resolutions drabble challenges:
: "In the Closet"
: "Catalogue of Failure"

So I might as well admit that I'm seriously thinking about one of my New Year's Resolutions being no more fan fiction until I've cranked out a sufficient quantity of non-fan fiction. In fact the main thing stopping me is that when I swear off fan fiction, I tend to get so many ideas that they overwhelm everything else in my head and demand to be written; I learned this in Voyager fandom, I learned this again with RPS, so I don't want to do anything stupid. On the other hand, the frustrations and trivialities are really overwhelming my enjoyment on so many levels at present. I'm tired of the cliquishness, I'm tired of feeling like there's always someone else I should be sucking up to if I want to have interesting conversations, I'm tired of the fact that things I really work on get three readers out of everyone on the planet -- my totally crappy erotica on which I spent less time and for which I got paid had more readers than that. I'm suffering from a be-careful-what-you-wish-for situation because, after being huffy over one of those exclusive communities a couple of weeks ago, I'm watching the usual "watch BNF rec 20 out of 23 stories and leave off the three by People We All Know She Doesn't Like, pretending that quality is the qualifier" bullshit go on in one such community; I should have stuck to my instincts and told my ego where to shove itself. My sense that this is not only a stupid waste of time but a too-often-poor way to make lasting friends is overwhelming my sense of community and love.

The thing is, I often think I organize and express my own thoughts better via fanfic than when I write reviews...there's a different kind of satisfaction from fic, even when no one reads it. But then what happens is that I meet people because of a particular fandom or a particular pairing, and I want to keep talking to those people about those characters, and I feel compelled to write with and for them, until I forget what was compelling the urge to write in the first place. My very, very best friends from fandom are writers or artists, and I met them because I was a writer, and I don't want to risk losing that...but at the same time, some of the people I thought I knew and loved best based on their writing and art have also not always proven to be the friends I thought they were, and I don't want to end next year feeling as frustrated as I am this year. I know I can change the things that are bothering me, it's just a matter of having the guts to say, "I am doing this, I am doing it now," and if fifteen people take me off their friends list in a single day or send me annoyed notes or just plain ignore me, I need to be able to keep the distance to say that those people were not really my friends anyway. There's a piece of me that's playing the "one more" game -- let me just finish this story that's already half-done, let me just sign up for this one more challenge, let me just write birthday fic for this one friend -- but I could go on doing that indefinitely, and when does it stop? How does it stop?

I am not in the best of moods. In fact I was running around a lot earlier, and between that and the time of the month, I am decidedly grouchy. For the fun part of my day, we all drove my older son to a friend's this morning so he could work on a school project and the rest of us could drop in on and (who looks wonderful) and their cats -- in fact they probably think we talk about nothing but cats, as we spent most of the time watching my younger son chase Georgie the kitten and trying to coax the three older cats into being sociable with us, which was really quite amusing though I fear I was not the thrilling diversion I had intended to be.

Then we went to pick up the van, which is finally, finally repaired...only to discover that the insurance company had not yet cut a check and our choices were to shell out more than $2000 of our own cash or to wait! This is typical of the idiocy in the business, I suppose: rather than overnighting a check so that we can pick up the van before close of business tomorrow, which would cost them maybe $15, they are paying for us to keep the rental van over the weekend (at a cost of $50 a day to them) and sending the check via standard mail. It took numerous phone calls and a very long wait in the body shop to no avail to learn all this. I cannot think what to say besides GRRRR.

Finished out the evening taking younger son to violin, doing some shopping in the plaza near his lessons, watching Better Than Sex while folding laundry which strangely did nothing to improve my mood (am definitely blaming the time of the month for that) and trying to get caught up, again, unsuccessfully. Tomorrow it's supposed to be nearly 60 degrees and we are going to the Baltimore Zoo, so hopefully this shall revive me!


This plane is not, in fact, in The Udvar-Hazy Center but in The National Air and Space Museum itself. It's Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega, photo taken several years ago, but well worth a look.


And another look. In this plane Earhart crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Of course her Lockheed Electra is not on display, having been missing since she and Fred Noonan disappeared in it over the Pacific Ocean, but it still makes me feel good to look at this one.


Enola Gay, first to carry and deliver an atomic bomb in wartime. She's a beautiful plane -- silver and shapely. It's hard to hate her for what she was used to do, and at the same time it's hard to imagine what the world might have been like otherwise...how long WWII might have lasted, what the political situation in the world might be now. Same with the Holocaust for that matter...would there be an Israel had it not been for the Nazis? It's really hard to play should have beens or might have beens with history.


View from above of the aviation hangar in the Udvar-Hazy Center. There's a Concorde, a 747, numerous warplanes from all sides, some early experimental flight vehicles and a Blackbird.


Pan Am's Flying Cloud. This photo is here just because she's such a beautiful plane. That bit of Air France logo behind her is on the Concorde.


Among the more interesting artifacts are astronaut food that looks inedible, and, worse, the waste elimination systems (apparently astronauts nowadays wear Depends during spacewalks in case of emergencies). I have known for years that I could never have been an astronaut because I'm too claustrophobic to survive in the capsules, and it's worse up close to this one.


The disc of sounds and images from Earth sent up with both Voyager spacecraft. If you saw Carl Sagan's Cosmos in your youth as I did, you remember some of the things on here!


From outside the Udvar-Hazy Center. The tower offers views of Dulles Airport and Virginia farmland.

Focusing on the bigger picture and the problems in the world now, if you're looking for a place to make a donation, here is the Amazon Honor System Paybox for tsunami victims (link via Amazon Associates, anyone who's an Associate can get your own and if it identifies you by name, it's because there's a cookie on your computer keeping you signed in to Amazon)...

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Poem for Thursday

High Flight
By John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew,
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

--------

I've posted this poem before, but it goes with the photos -- it was written by a pilot during the first world war, but the first time I ever heard it, Ronald Reagan was reading it at the memorial service for the Challenger astronauts. So of course I thought of it last February when Columbia failed to return from her last mission. Now, however, I have finally seen their predecessor with my own eyes, and -- I am about to confess to uber-geekdom here -- I feel quite possessive of the first space shuttle, because I was one of the thousands of Trekkies who wrote to NASA asking that the orbiter be named Enterprise in honor of Captain Kirk's. (In my defense, I also wrote to Gerald Ford asking why the US was not going to build a Halley's Comet fly-by, and got a nice letter back from someone in his administration assuring me that it wouldn't be necessary, so when the US was the only nation with significant capacity for spaceflight that did not study the comet from space and the newspapers were asking why, I could only harrumph.)

I know I promised to post various photos from the Smithsonian, Philadelphia and the Baltimore Zoo, but they will all have to wait, because since the weather report had changed, we decided to postpone the zoo until Friday and instead went to The National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center. My children had been there but I had not, and they were most entertaining tour guides -- they remembered where everything was and some of what they had learned from their previous trip. So I got lots of information about the tiles on the shuttle and which engines went with which rockets. Among the more interesting artifacts were astronaut food that looked inedible, and, worse, the waste elimination systems (apparently astronauts nowadays wear Depends during spacewalks in case of emergencies). I have known for years that I could never have been an astronaut because I'm too claustrophobic to survive in the capsules, and it's worse up close.

It's so strange seeing Nippon and US rockets next to one another in the space hangar, then walking into the aviation hangar and seeing the kamikaze planes and the Enola Gay, and realizing that these things were all built within my parents' lifetimes, as well as the Concorde and the 747 -- the planes and computers that brought the world together, and the ones that nearly tore it apart. I remember how, when my children learned that the first atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan by the United States, they were absolutely flabbergasted -- to them Japan is our greatest friend and ally, home of Nintendo and Sony -- how was it possible that during the century in which they were born, there could have been a war in which Japan was the enemy? I suppose this is how my grandparents felt when I didn't understand their residual knee-jerk superstitious Yiddish muttering whenever Germany was mentioned; my sense of the Holocaust when I was much younger was as ancient history, whereas to them it was something that had happened during their lifetimes to people they knew. And yet I understood when they explained their terror of Sputnik rather than any thrill that humans had put a satellite in orbit. My kids know Russia only as a big European country, not a piece of a terrifying bloc that could have triggered global annihilation, which was my sense of the USSR when I was in elementary school. The world feels so much safer than it did when I was younger, and I keep wondering how we've ended up with people scared enough to elect a president whose ominous lies about weapons of mass destruction has given him the power to make it less safe for the rest of us.

This evening, in keeping with the theme for the day, sort of, we watched Airplane II: The Sequel. The kids had seen Airplane for the first time not long ago, so they finally know why and I are always saying, "Looks like I quit the wrong week to quit smoking," even though neither of us has ever smoked, but they did not know the reference for, "First the earth cooled, and then the dinosaurs came..." whenever someone asked what happened. So now they do, and they also know that according to the insane producers of this movie, it was taken for granted not only that there would be commercial space shuttle flights to the moon but that gay marriage would be legal and unremarkable by the dawn of the 21st century (and, well, that all men would know about some clinic in Des Moines because the writers did not predict Viagra but you can't have everything). The sequel is still not nearly as good as the original but still a lot funnier than a lot of what passes for comedies these days anyway. And, you know, William Shatner turning out the lights on the bridge.


The shuttle Enterprise in the space hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center. Many of the tiles have been removed from the outside for use on later shuttles, and the inside contains no equipment (even the front viewports are gone), but this massive frame that once took off from the back of a 747 can be walked around completely.


Here's a rear view, with Spacelab on the right.


And here's one of the engines -- those big round things in the previous photo, including the interior wiring that can't be seen on the orbiter itself.


Just to give a sense of the size of the thing, here's a shot where you can see the people on the other side of the hangar from beneath the shuttle. For another perspective, there's also a suit from a space walk hanging from the ceiling.


NASA's astronaut quarantine facility for the first men on the moon, lest they should have brought rare lunar bacteria back with them. I'm sure this useless piece of equipment cost a fortune to build.


The descent module of a Vega spacecraft. The Soviet Union launched two, each of which sent a module to Venus where they broadcast for less than an hour about the planet's atmosphere and soil before burning up. The larger part of each craft then did a flyby of Comet Halley and revealed that its surface temperature was much warmer than expected. See, someone was doing the work on Halley...


A miniature R2-D2 on the model of the mothership used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which also has a cemetery, a Volkswagen, some airplanes, beer cans and other anachronisms built in that the model designers knew would not be visible in the film, given the planned angles and lighting effects. (You had to figure I'd get some more sci-fi geekery in, didn't you?)

I'm sad about Susan Sontag and Jerry Orbach, feeling odd for being sad about a couple of famous individuals when there are so many thousands dead, but it's always the ones who touched your life in some way whose loss you really feel, you know? I'm so pissed at how little money my government is willing to pledge and how US citizens affected by the disaster have apparently been left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, in the spirit of denial or at least distraction: apparently I am wrong about Harry being way, way too young for me, as I thought I was putting in the right answers to get Lupin or Black or Snape but noooo...


With Which Harry Potter Male Are You Most Sexually Compatible?
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Gratuitous Phantom Babble

and I stayed up far too late last night talking about The Phantom of the Opera, the book Phantom by Susan Kay, and some of the things that originally got talked about in the comments to this post, which contains spoilers for the movie. I am fascinated by how many fans -- women -- have told me that they wanted an ending in which Christine ended up with the Phantom, or how they would have chosen the Phantom themselves had they been her. Now, I completely understand why it would bother people that she ends up with Raoul, for reasons I stated previously. For me, Raoul is the Phantom Lite: many of the same character flaws and none of the charisma, eroticism or deep understanding of music as an art. That said, however, if Christine's only choices in the world are the Phantom and Raoul (both of whom she associates deeply with her father, which I find a little icky), I'm glad she went for the wealthy aristocrat who adores her and will at least apparently not try to stop her from singing, the way Prince Rainier apparently insisted that Grace Kelly stop making movies after she became Princess of Monaco.

So I understand that in Kay's book, which three people have now recommended to me, Christine does end up with the Phantom and ends up eventually dying for love of him. To me this is not a romantic ending and certainly not a better ending -- this is so typical of what happens to women too damn often in "romantic" literature, where they pay for their great passions with their lives and, worse, their other passions -- obviously Christine can't sing if she's dead. Her saving grace for me as a character is that she's an artist, who will make whatever sacrifice she deems necessary for her art, sort of like the Lady of Shalott: she speaks of the Phantom as her teacher and the man who inspires her voice long after she knows he's not an angel and he is a murderer. I like that she's a teenager in the film, rather than a grownup like all previous Christines I've seen onstage; it makes her naivete, her narrow focus and her selfishness easier to forgive. Does she react in a shallow manner when she finds out that her teacher and patron is hideous? Yes, but it doesn't help matters any that he goes on the attack the moment she removes his mask -- it's hard to tell whether she's recoiling from his ugliness or his screaming "Damn you!" and calling her names from the split second she sees his face. She says terrible things about what the Phantom looks like to Raoul later, but it's hard to say whether she's telling the truth about her perception or lying to Raoul and to herself. If she can deceive herself enough to believe that she's in love with Raoul at that point, she could certainly convince herself that it's the Phantom's ugliness she fears, rather than her own temptation.

Of course the Phantom is the hero of the musical and we're supposed to root for him. He has all the best music -- just like Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar and Eva Peron in Evita. I saw the latter when I was 15, apparently the same age a lot of people were first exposed to Phantom (being ancient by LJ standards, I was in college before that opened on Broadway). I will never forget sitting in the orchestra during "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" began, the point of which song is ostensibly to show how the people of Argentina were seduced by Eva, but the side effect of which is that the audience, sitting as an extension of the crowd below the balcony in the scene, undergo the same experience and if the show is done well, we're supposed to be just as seduced. All the political babble immediately afterward becomes promptly forgettable; we're there to see Eva, after all, like a Shakespearean tragic heroine, not to root against her. It's very similar with the Phantom; we're given excuses for his horrific behavior, while we're supposed to loathe and be disgusted with such relatively harmless beings as Carlotta, Andre and Fermin. They may be producing shitty operas, but the Phantom almost reminds me of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, bringing down the house (literally) when he can't get the music produced according to his own vision. The Phantom and Christine are the real artists in the show, while everyone else (including Raoul) is a dilettante or a capitalist or both. And since Christine is an ingenue in every sense, the Phantom is the only one we can really trust with the opera and the passions it inspires; he gets it in a way no one else does, except perhaps Madame Giry but more on her later.

I need someone to explain to me outside of sheer eroticism why any woman would want Christine to end up with the Phantom if one is identifying with Christine as a woman and an artist, rather than if one is identifying with the Phantom (which as pointed out to me makes so much more sense, as he's not only the smartest and most powerful character in the musical but also suffering the same fate as so many women who aren't born -- excuse me, who haven't Had A Little Work Done -- to look like Nicole Kidman and are therefore rejected as too ugly for society and for the careers and lovers they want). I still have a hard time with heroes who treat their heroines like crap, though, and even if, as he claims, he did it all for Christine, the Phantom does not treat her better than Raoul does. He isn't trying to liberate her voice and her sexuality for herself or for the artistic world, but to fulfill his own fantasies; it's never about her, no more than Raoul's search for a trophy wife is. They're so very similar to me -- less so in the movie where Raoul is closer to Christine's own age than her father's (they took out the line about her having been a gawkish girl since the London cast recording, though I think that may have been true when I last saw it staged as well). That's my objection to her with Raoul -- not that I wish she had ended up with a man who not only stalked her but attempted to maim and kill the competition and to shape a career for her not because it was her dream but because he wanted to hear her singing his songs.

I must admit I rather wanted Christine to get away from all of them, to become a star and have as many lovers as she wanted before settling down (or, if she really wanted Raoul because her life had had so little stability, then I imagine that after what she's learned and seen that he didn't get the lovely compliant girl he was expecting but a woman whose gravestone might have said "singer" as well as "wife and mother"). I wanted to see who she'd become without all these people pushing her around. With Raoul she might have had a chance for some independence -- he did not see her as "his voice," an extension of himself, in the way the Phantom did, and though perhaps if she chose him freely the Phantom would have stopped yanking her chains, I'm inclined to believe that someone whose entire life had been brutality and darkness would not forgive her for the first time he saw her laughing with another man. In the musical she asks if he's going to rape her -- "Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?" and instead of saying no, I would never, he says, "The fate that condemns me to wallow in blood has also denied me the joys of the flesh" -- in essence, "I wish I could but I can't"! My reaction is exactly like Christine's at that point: the tortured face holds no horror, it's his soul that's warped. So on rethinking, I rather like the ending. It's not as if I expect the teenage Christine to break free and take over the Opera Populaire. She has learned that she has this dark, erotic side and also that she can hold her own against any man, no longer passive, no longer willing to be the person whichever powerful man around her wants her to be.

All that said...the female character who intrigues me the most in the film, to my surprise, is Madame Giry. She rescues the Phantom in his youth, hides him, covers for him...then she offers up a girl whom she describes as almost like a daughter to him, knowing full well what manner of man as well as what manner of artist he is. Is she trying to help Christine? To protect her own daughter, who seems all to happy to be the pretty, sweet, unambitious dancer and chorus girl on track to end up a ballet mistress like her mother rather than a star? (Where is the Christine/Meg slash...oops did I say that?) The way Giry covers for the Phantom, the way she seems to have thrown Christine at him to protect her own daughter, seems interesting and fucked up to me. We get no backstory on her in the movie so all kinds of questions can be asked: who is Meg's father, how come Madame Giry is in charge of the girls in the opera dormitories and seems to have no more life outside the theatre than does the Phantom? And what's she looking for at the auction in the end that is also the beginning...is she buying souvenirs for herself of a long ago passion, or is she collecting for someone who dares not show his face? There is definitely material to be speculated upon there!

There are drawings of Gerard as the Phantom by Kim Schultz on her web page.

Poem for Wednesday

Imprisoned Music
By Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad

Oh, had I but the poet's voice to sing,
Then would the music prisoned in my heart
(Panting in vain its message to impart)
Hover around thee, Love, on trembling wing,
To tell thee of the soft-eyed hopes that cling
To Love's white feet, the doubts and fears that start
And pierce his bosom with a poisoned dart —
The smiles that soothe, the cold hard looks that sting!

But 'tis not mine, the soaring joy of Song:
I strive to voice my soul, but strive in vain.
Though passion thrills, and eager fancies throng,
Deckt in the varying hues of joy and pain,
Yet the weak voice—as weak as Love is strong—
Dies murm'ring on Love's throbbing heart again.

--------

Had a nice day in Philadelphia with my parents and kids. Went to the visitor's center to get tickets for the Independence Hall tour, ate lunch at The Bourse (Philly's original commodities exchange, now containing the food court where Diane Kruger hid from Sean Bean's cronies in National Treasure), walked to Elfreth's Alley -- the oldest residential street in the USA -- and Franklin Court -- site of Benjamin Franklin's house, post office and printing press -- then went through security to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, Old City Hall and the various buildings in the national park. On the way home we stopped in Baltimore to have seafood at the Inner Harbor, where we saw the Constellation lit up for the holidays. So I am very tired and shall discuss details better in the near future, as well as posting the Ben Franklin photos. Tonight, the cradle of American democracy...


Thomas Jefferson's walking stick resting on the table where it is believed the delegates from Virginia sat when the secret vote was taken to determine whether a resolution to declare independence from Great Britain would pass. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both brought into existence in this room.


Independence Hall from the outside. It was cold and overcast, and we did not get onto a tour until 3:30 p.m., hence the pale sky. We arrived here almost exactly at three as the bell was tolling the hour.


At the front of the room, the table upon which the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were both signed.


The courtroom for the colonies of Delaware and Pennsylvania, where an appointed judge of England presided until the revolting colonists tore down the seal of the king.


The original meeting room of the Supreme Court of the United States.


The most famous non-ringing bell in the United States.


A close-up of the crack that stopped the Liberty Bell from ringing -- it wasn't the big front gap that made them take it out of use, but the hairline that goes up from "STOW" through "LIBERTY."

In the morning we are going to the Baltimore Zoo, which is closing many of its exhibits after the first of the year to do reconstruction and removation. They swap memberships with the National Zoo so I think we can still get in for free and must take advantage of this while we can!

Poem for Tuesday

Revanche
By Edith Södergran
Translated by O'Paque

Should I not succeed in toppling
the tower in reality's city,
I will sing the stars from heaven
as no one yet has done.
I shall sing so that my longing ceases,
she who never yet stopped to rest,
that she pushes the lyre away from her
as if the riddle of the song were solved.

--------

Thanks everyone so much for DVD cap advice! Am still working on the ideal program for this system. I had a lovely day seeing A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I liked but did not love -- it was very well-made and I was entirely engrossed while watching, but there wasn't a single character I really loved, as much as I really wanted to love Violet -- it remained just a tad too cryptic, just a tad too mean-spirited, and I felt a kind of emotional distance from it that the witty parts actually made worse instead of better. I will say, however, that the acting was great, the cinematography was delightful and it may have the best closing credits of any film in history. I have read surprisingly few reviews by people here, and am very curious to know what other people thought; my kids loved it, my husband liked it, but we didn't talk about it for long after we left the theater, unlike Phantom which even my kids are still discussing. I had thought we would have one day without seeing my parents, but we ran into them at the movie theater -- they were on the way to Meet the Fockers.

On the other hand we may have thoroughly distracted them by going from the movie to the Winter Lights Festival at Seneca Creek State Park. Our original plan was to go to Red Lobster first with the gift card that received from his aunt and uncle for Christmas, but Red Lobster was mobbed, so we went directly to the drive-through light display. Every year I promise myself that I will make my own winter holiday music mix instead of listening to the awful stuff they broadcast within the park and every year I forget, but despite the cheesy music and the lack of snow on the ground this year, it was still very pretty, enhanced by a nearly-full moon. From there we went to a pizza-and-pasta buffet since it's inexpensive and always makes my children happy. We could have had leftovers with my parents again -- they invited us at the movies -- but I could not tolerate the idea of yet another serving of increasingly dried-out turkey and stuffing. Besides, we are spending all day with them tomorrow in Philadelphia; my father asked if the could join us, and we said sure.

Gacked from , the first of what I am sure will be several year-end memes:

Things that happened in 2004...
January: The C&O Canal froze solid.
February: I wrote my last two LOTR stories; the love affair must have been over.
March: My younger son decided he wanted to take violin lessons, thanks to Russell Crowe.
April: And while I'm on a theme...Master and Commander came out on DVD.
May: My older son's baseball team won the regional championship.
June: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban arrived onscreen.
July: My younger son got braces.
August: We took our trip to New England.
September: My older son's birthday; we went to two Renaissance Faires.
October: Leaves, apples, pumpkins, autumn parks.
November: It's not my fault -- I campaigned against him and I voted against him.
December: Two trips to Philadelphia, including the one tomorrow. Also, I finished 21, thus ending a year of sailing with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, which leaves me greatly satisfied yet bereft.

Things I'm looking forward to in 2005...
January: Superbowl party, visiting my sister in NY.
February: Valentine's Day.
March: Going to England!
April: Will still be in England when it starts, and what more does a month need?
May: Kingdom of Heaven. Oh, and I suppose Star Wars III: Revenge of George Lucas.
June: Going to Seattle for my husband's grandmother's 90th birthday.
July: My younger son's birthday; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince arrives in bookstores.
August: We are certain to get to the beach somewhere for at least a day.
September: My older son's birthday; also, my younger son will be old enough to be in the orchestra at school.
October: MD and PA Renaissance Faires.
November: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire arrives onscreen.
December: My birthday and Chanukah -- the only time of year I have enough money to get anything significant that I want for myself.

I have not made a dent in or posts, so you shall probably find no recs here. Glancing through the two holiday exchanges has really brought home to me how much more my fanfic preferences are influenced by fandom and pairing than by "the writing" per se, because everything I've read in (all Lupin/Black) has resonated for me on some level, while a lot of the Yuletide fic -- even recs in fandoms with which I am familiar -- this is going to sound awful, but after only the fourth or fifth story, they started to sound the same, despite source material that varied widely from historical drama to recent TV. There was lots of present-tense angst about recent-past-tense flashback, lots of odd breaks after portentious section-ending lines...maybe I just hit the wrong five stories in a row. But sometimes I really do think it's fanfic, and my own gets on my nerves as much as anyone's, and I can't even read pro genre novels because I start having the same issues with those too. I must be grumpy about life without new Aubrey-Maturin novels.

Two brief political notes: From , and man I hope this is true, "Kerry Preparing To Unconcede?" And from many sources, and you've all probably seen it many times today but in case someone meant to look up the link and didn't yet, The International Red Cross appeal for aid to help the tsunami victims in Asia. They had CNN on in the pizza place while we were eating, and I just have no words for what watching that feels like. I know I promised nautical and transportation exhibit photos from the Smithsonian today, but those will still be relevant in a few days, whereas the light show closes January 1st, so in the spirit of the season:


An almost-full moon over the swans and castle in the lake.


It was very dark, the car was moving, I was shooting through the window...most of my photos came out looking like this one.


There are a number of drive-through light tunnels like this one...


...leaping light animals that go over the road, like this squirrel...


...and the typical winter scenes like these skiiers.


There are also more secular Christmas displays than I'd prefer, like Santa being pulled by Rudolph et al (and no Chanukah or Kwanzaa-specific images), but what can you do? In our case, we go anyway...

Poem for Monday

Fishing in Winter
By Ralph Burns

A man staring at a small lake sees
His father cast light line out over
The willows. He's forgotten his
Father has been dead for two years
And the lake is where a blue fog
Rolls, and the sky could be, if it
Were black or blue or white,
The backdrop of all attention.

He wades out to join the father,
Following where the good strikes
Seem to lead. It's cold. The shape
Breath takes on a cold day is like
Anything else--a rise on a small lake,
The Oklahoma hills, blue scrub--
A shape already inside a shape,
Two songs, two breaths on the water.

--------

We went down to the Smithsonian with the kids to see The Beatles Backstage and Behind the Scenes and Mike McCartney’s Liverpool Life, two photo exhibits at the National Museum of American History which close January 2nd (both highly enjoyable, the Beatles photos in particular -- lots of backstage at Ed Sullivan and lots of publicity routines on the beach (you get a fine view of which way Paul McCartney dresses in his wet swimsuit). We also went through the wonderful fabulous America on the Move exhibit, with its cars, locomotives, subway car and movie about cars in movies, as well as Breaking Records, Breaking Barriers, an exhibit on great athlete-heroes and what they meant to different cultures. We drove home at sunset along the river and it was gorgeous, then got an unexpected invitation to my parents' for leftovers so went over there for dinner and the miserable end of the Redskins game.

Tonight we put on Doctor Zhivago on PBS, mostly out of curiosity because we all love Keira. I must admit that I do not remember the David Lean version very well, as I have not watched it since middle school -- the love story did not impress me and I didn't know enough history for it to hold my interest then, and for some reason I never rewatched it, which I suppose is foolish. But it's probably just as well, because I watched the Masterpiece Theatre version without any preconceptions or expectations and I enjoyed it a lot. For all I know they butchered the story, but I was quite engrossed by the Revolution as it played out in this version of the film and I thought all the lead actors were quite good (I love the way Sam Neill can make me love him in one film and loathe him in the next without my ever holding either one against any of his characters, though he's instantly recognizable -- unlike Hans Matheson whom we had to look up before we realized it was Mists of Avalon from which we were remembering him). I found it fairly predictable, down to the dialogue in places, but the actors made it all quite vivid and emotional.

We're having a pretty quiet holiday week: I think we're going to see A Series of Unfortunate Events tomorrow after the kids play with their friends, then Tuesday we are going to Philadelphia with my parents and the kids to sightsee. I haven't even started looking at the bonanza of new fic out there from various secret santa communities, and I haven't written anything complete besides this one drabble for , just because the bunny was there. Having kids home full-time requires a full-time entertainment committee! Tomorrow I'll post pictures from the maritime and shipping exhibits. Today:


Dorothy's ruby slippers as worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, on display at the Smithsonian.


The original Kermit the Frog, Jim Henson's creation. It's not easy being green.


Brian Boitano's skates from the 1988 Olympics.


One of Bobby Joe Morrow's gold medals.


One of Sandy Koufax's gloves from his career with the Dodgers. Koufax was a favorite of my father, a lifelong Dodgers fan, and one of a small number of Jewish sports legends.


A Miracle on Ice uniform from the 1980 US Olympic hockey team.


This is the wall just inside the second-floor entrance where the Star Spangled Banner used to hang, but that flag has been moved to a special lab (viewable by the public) for extensive cleaning and restoration; it will likely never hang vertically again. This large flag flew from the Pentagon from September 12, 2001 until it was given to the Smithsonian. I suspect the ash damage will never be cleaned.

Poem for Sunday

Monet's 'Waterlilies'
By Robert Hayden

Today the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
        I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
        The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
        that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
        each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

--------

From Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch in the Sunday Washington Post Book World. "There is always some transgression in writing about the visual arts, in approaching in words the work of a painter, sculptor or photographer," states Hirsch. "A border is crossed, a boundary breached, as the writer enters into the spatial realm. Works of art initiate and provoke other works of art. They brave the mystery dividing the seen from the unseen, image from text. They teach us to look more closely. They dramatize with great intensity the actual experience of encounter." The poet then writes about growing up in Chicago and visiting the Art Institute, with which I am intimately familiar from living in the city for four years as a grad student. He cites some paintings I love, like "George Seurat's monumental rendering of a bourgeois afternoon on the Seine" and Picasso's "Old Guitarist." Hayden's hiding from the news in Monet's "Water Lilies" feels particularly relevant to Hirsch this Christmas.

Someone has written me an absolutely wonderful fic for the secret santa exchange, "Culmination Of A Vague Idea". If you are reading this, Anonymous, thank you so very much! Those of you who listen to me talking about Harry Potter probably know that I often have issues with post-POA Remus/Sirius, because I often don't see how they can be together and be truly happy, yet I just can't bear any more angst for them; this story has angst and humor and an absolutely beautiful ending and may just be my perfect Remus/Sirius story. I can't decide whether I hope the writer is someone I know, because that would probably mean that person had been paying attention to all the stuff I've said about the pairing, or whether I hope it's someone I hardly know who simply managed to read my mind, because it's so wonderful when that happens in fandom.

I usually sign up for fic exchanges much more for the writing than the reading. Often the exchange is disappointing in that the writer drops out or does a self-confessed half-assed job -- I'm still waiting for my LOTR fic from last year -- but if I write something I'm happy with that fits within the parameters given me by the person I'm writing for, particularly if the reader really likes it, that more than makes up for whatever I get in the exchange. Lest I sound like one of those "it is better to give than to receive" holiday cliches, this is entirely selfish: if I've written something I'm pleased with, the sense of accomplishment in its creation usually outweighs the pleasure of any fic-as-gift I've been given. In this case, however, while I still have some issues with my own fic (will tell you all which one it is on New Year's Day though you are welcome to write me privately and guess, heh), I am utterly thrilled with the story I received and am really proud that someone wrote this for me.

As previously reported, we celebrated Jewish Christmas, meaning a movie and Chinese food. The Phantom of the Opera was superb, and I enjoyed every minute of it, though I do have some odd curiosity about whether I would be so pleased with it had the exact same film been made back during my serious passion for the musical in 1988-90. and I saw it on Broadway during its first couple of months while I was still in college, with the original cast from the CD, and wonderful as they were, we saw it again on our honeymoon in Toronto with Colm Wilkinson playing the Phantom and it was even better than with Crawford et al. The staging wasn't quite as elaborate but Wilkinson is just a wonderful actor as well as a very powerful singer; I'd known who he was since the original London album of Evita, and I'd seen him in Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center on its way to New York, and had been a gibbering fangirl of his ever since. During all the years when it was taken for granted that Crawford would get the film role, I was secretly hoping for Wilkinson, and by the time it was apparent that they were both too old to be considered, I had a lot less passion for the topic of who should play the role.

I think it was worth the decade-long delay, just as I ultimately thought Evita was worth the wait, but it's possible that I am just so happy to have a well-done film that I no longer have an ideal movie version of either. Visually Phantom is amazing: the opening, set decades after the ruin of the opera house, is in black and white like The Wizard of Oz, and then as Raoul remembers, the color comes up as the dust, damage and cobwebs are swept away. The Phantom's lair looks a lot like my impression of it from the stage musical, the same burgundy and gold and black everywhere and the music and instruments and gorgeous fabrics and that eerie underground lake that glows greenish...in general the costumes, makeup, lighting, etc. are brilliant and I love getting the glimpses backstage at the popular opera, even the garish over the top bits, in which regard it reminds me somewhat of Moulin Rouge. The scenes in the cemetery are well-done (somewhat unnecessary lengthy swordfight but they had to give Raoul something manly to do, I suppose) and the filming of the opera scenes themselves made me think of Amadeus (one of my favorite movies, so that is a high compliment).

Butler's range is perhaps not quite as impressive as others I've heard sing the part, but his physical performance is quite good -- we have to be able to read the Phantom's moods even when his mask-covered face is turned toward us, and we have to be able to pity him somewhat even after he's committing atrocities, and he does the tortured soul bit quite well. If I had been directing the movie, I would have told him not to stand so straight, not to emphasize what good shape his body's in; he seems a little too healthy and robust, not like someone who's been twisting himself into the shadows for all these years, but Schumacher must have known what he was getting when he hired an authentic hunk for the role and must have made a conscious decision not to make him look a little more Hunchback of Notre Dame-ish, so that's not really a criticism of Butler per se. Other than the facial scarring, which is "ugly" but not much worse than some pictures of people I've seen who've had smallpox and other diseases that probably weren't unknown in the late 1800s, there doesn't appear to be anything physically wrong with him, so his hatred of his face seems much more a psychological issue from his childhood than a reason he would really have been shunned everywhere -- shunned from high society, sure, but that was true of a lot of people, including the carpenters and most of the chorus girls he would have seen at the opera.

Rossum I knew only from that Jason Isaacs movie, Passionada, in which Sofia Milos rather than Rossum sang, though Rossum was very memorable and held her own as a fifteen-year-old onscreen with those two actors whom I like very much. So I was predisposed to like her, and she really made the movie for me; she's the first actress who's been able to make me believe in Christine as a full-blooded character, and I wasn't nearly as frustrated with the girl's passivity and self-delusion in part because I really bought her as a girl (the other actresses I saw were all obviously grown women, even if they were also good singers and doing their damndest to play ingenues). For the psycho-sexual story to work, she has to be believable as an innocent and yet aware of her own erotic power, first onstage, then off, and Rossum really pulls off that development.

I'd have preferred not to know that she eventually married Raoul and became a countess; what would be really interesting is if, after choosing the Phantom, she realized that for all his money and prettiness, Raoul is not really what she wants. Considering that the film and play both start with him buying her artifacts years later, it would be so easy simply never to tell us how her story ended. It's annoying that the Phantom and Raoul take turns making her decisions for her and all she can do is sing about it, but one gets the distinct impression that she's come into her own in the end...that she knows which choice she'd make before she is actually forced to make it and in some ways it's a relief for her to say aloud, yes, I understand this and I want this. What is it with Lloyd Webber that he can make me root for the Phantom, Eva Peron and Judas? Should I be afraid?

After the movie we went to an Asian fusion restaurant and ate a shocking amount (soup, spicy and saucy shrimp, panang curry, drunken noodles, sate...). It was absolutely mobbed and we only got a table because I'd made a reservation the night before, which enabled the management to tell a group of rude, pushy people just arrived from Meet the Fockers like a total stereotype that sorry but they were holding the table for us first. My kids were a little cranky because they got so little runaround time today but they ate well and then we had long phone conversations when we came home with a multitude of west coast in-laws. I also talked to , who is at home and reasonably well but somewhat drained and anyone who has her e-mail, please drop her a line if you have a chance because the holidays are an incredibly sucky time to be tired and uncomfortable.

One of the highlights of my day was seeing a pair of hawks right in my neighborhood, shrieking and cawing at each other from trees a little distance from one another. Here are a few photos. Hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas or just a lovely Saturday!


A hawk in one of the bare trees close to the sidewalk...


...and another in an evergreen at the edge of the woods.


Here I've put arrows in so you can see the relative positions of the birds, probably ten yards from my house. I've seen turkey vultures in this part of the neighborhood, but never a pair of hawks like these.

My uncle got me to take this quiz. Since I don't watch The O.C., is this good?


You are Adam Brody! You're adorable dorkiness is
absolutely contagious, not to mention you're
super cute! You're a bit more reserved than
most, and find it harded to open up, but you're
always there when it counts. What's behind you
doesn't really matter, because you're all about
the future, and the people there with you.
Which OC Cast Member Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Poem for Saturday

The Darkling Thrush
By Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
     When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
     The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
     Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
     Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
     The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
     The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
     Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
     Seemed fevourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
     The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
     Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
     In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
     Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
     Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
     Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
     His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
     And I was unaware.

--------

Have spent the last two hours watching Truly Madly Deeply and crying my eyes out so forgive me for any incoherence. I'd managed not to get around to renting it and it was on LOVE (one of those high-number cable channels) earlier, so I stuck in a tape while we were out hiking at Great Falls -- because it was in the 40s, and after the rain yesterday we figured the river would be spectacular, and the kids needed to stretch their legs -- then we stopped at the grocery store for last-minute necessities, had dinner with my parents, and when we got home, after eventually herding the kids into the shower and to bed, I put it on because I had no idea. I knew that Rickman played a ghost, but I think I was expecting something comic about the foibles of dealing with the afterlife.

I can't remember the last movie I've seen that hurt so much to watch; even good movies that deal with death via fantasy, like Finding Neverland, suddenly pale in comparison. In a way it was the perfect movie for the season for me; it deals with spiritual themes without resorting to mainstream religion, it's entirely focused on love and forgiveness and letting go and the things that never leave. It's on again on LOVE twice on the 28th and once on the 29th and Alan Rickman sings and plays the cello and is snarky and sexy and somewhat goofy and Juliet Stevenson is just phenomenal, and I cannot recommend it highly enough, though for people who want to stay in a festive holiday mood it might be better to record and watch it later.

Anyway, it was a low-key Christmas Eve around here since we don't celebrate when we're not with my in-laws, and tomorrow we are going with my parents to see Phantom of the Opera and then out for Chinese food. Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday, a wonderful break or at least a wonderful Friday night if you live in a part of the world that manages to be unaffected by Christmas. Oh, and The Theban Band has decided to give all us Aubrey/Maturin fans a present -- thanks to for leading me astray there.


Trees reflected in the half-frozen C&O Canal at Great Falls National Park...


...and ice crystals on the grass and leaves near the river's edge.


The Potomac River was very muddy and fast as a result of all the rain we got yesterday, and the park (which officially closed at two) was nearly deserted by late afternoon.


said the big rock formation at left looks like a big sleeping dog, but I took the photo because of the interesting cloud patterns...


...which later resolved into this amazing sunset (photo taken from Potomac Village gas station, sorry about all the clutter).


And here, facing east at twilight, the moon over a church. Not a great photo but it seemed appropriate for Christmas Eve.