Self-Portrait, 1969
By Frank Bidart
He's still young -- ; thirty, but looks younger --
or does he? ... In the eyes and cheeks, tonight,
turning in the mirror, he saw his mother, --
puffy; angry; bewildered... Many nights
now, when he stares there, he gets angry: --
something unfulfilled there, something dead
to what he once thought he surely could be --
Now, just the glamour of habits...
Once, instead,
he thought insight would remake him, he'd reach
-- what? The thrill, the exhilaration
unraveling disaster, that seemed to teach
necessary knowledge . . . became just jargon.
Sick of being decent, he craves another
crash. What reaches him except disaster?
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I had a funny LiveJournal experience today: someone had apparently recced one of my alter ego's RPS stories on a community based on a specific interest, and I got a whole bunch of e-mails asking for that particular (not very good) story, and apparently outed myself to people who didn't know she and I were the same person whereas I thought everyone knew by now. All this while I was working on converting one last story to Snape's POV, though it's rougher around the edges than the previous two; I just like parts of it and wanted to salvage it. I still can't write Snape/Lockhart; I may have to offer
It was another glorious spring day in the DC area, with everything in bloom from the trees to the tulips and high fluffy clouds that turned an amazing pink at sunset. I had lunch with the lovely
Thursday afternoon always means carpools, as one son has a violin lesson while the other stays late at school for math club, so I wrote articles in between running around and trying to catch up on post-trip phone calls that I still hadn't managed to make. I must admit that I really enjoy writing about Desperate Housewives; it's a very guilty pleasure, but today I got to write up bits of the infamous Vanity Fair article and the other day I got to write up an interview with the show's creator in which he described recreating his coming-out experience with his mom on the show.
Ahahahaha. Tonight I watched the fifth episode of The Barchester Chronicles (in which Alan Rickman and Geraldine McEwan SO deserve each other and I SO want to watch her make him have nasty filthy sex with her but she's playing an uptight bitch even though he's playing a sleaze). Then we watched the special on Peterborough Cathedral, which was fascinating -- apparently it had been an abbey, but Henry VIII spared it, in part because Catherine of Aragon is buried there and in part because the abbot had a friend at court. It has a spectacular painted ceiling and in other ways reminded me of York Minster and Durham Cathedral, so it made me nostalgic and now I want to go there next trip. Oh, and I was reading about Anthony Trollope, who wrote Barchester Towers, and apparently the reason there are all the mean jokes about how Rickman's character, Obadiah Slope, changed his family name from Slop to Slope is that Trollop(e) did the same thing.
The Nationals won their first home game. I would be more excited about this if my UPN affiliate was not pre-empting the only shows I ever want to watch on that stupid network in favor of baseball. Now I am bowing to my allergies and going to bed, so that tomorrow perhaps I will have the energy to clean up all the stuff I didn't bother with today, as obviously I had to take a walk and watch the glorious sunset.
Silbury Hill, the largest manmade prehistoric mound in Europe, just south of Avebury. Long believed to be a burial ground, no skeletal remains or significant ancient artifacts have ever been discovered in this 4600 year old enigma. Note for
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