Poem for Monday

Paradise
By George Herbert

I bless thee, Lord, because I grow
Among thy trees, which in a row
To thee both fruit and order owe.

What open force, or hidden charm
Can blast my fruit, or bring me harm,
While the inclosure is thine arm?

Inclose me still for fear I start,
Be to me rather sharp and tart,
Then let me want thy hand and art.

When thou dost greater judgements spare,
And with thy knife but prune and pare,
Ev'n fruitfull trees more fruitful are.

Such sharpness shows the sweetest friend:
Such cuttings rather heal then rend:
And such beginnings touch their end.

--------

I was slow getting up this morning since the kids were not at home, and while I was lying around in bed I realized that all my familiar fannish daydreams had abandoned me, same as they did right after I saw ROTK. Perhaps they are merely re-sorting themselves and I will have fic in my head in a few days, but mostly what I had were additions/corrections I wanted to make to my post of last night and an increasing sense of disgruntlement about certain characters. I wonder whether my deep and abiding adoration for one character will override everything else. On the other hand, I have certain suspicions about where, inevitably, he must be headed in Book VII, and that alone might be enough to deter me. After Voyager and La Femme Nikita and so many others, I am craving something with closed canon and no new wrenching things to work around, like Highlander or O'Brian, to feed my late-night and early-morning mental drift. But O'Brian fandom is small and intimidating -- I am not really interested in doing the painstaking nautical research necessary to tell some of the tales that have occurred to me, and I already know the disgust I may incur if I do not. When I do that kind of research it's for original fiction these days...I just can't spare it for someone else's playground. And I KNOW so many people in HP fandom, people who cross over with every other area of my life, from previous fandoms to prior interests like Tarot and photography...there is a big compulsion to stick around for that reason alone. I am reading the book aloud with my kids now and their reactions are so interesting because they have such different focal points than I do...

This afternoon we saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I loved so much more than I was expecting...partly because the things I like about the older movie really can't be duplicated, but partly because there is a lot I do not like about the older movie, which I find creepy and disturbing in some very not-nice ways. I am amused, though, because I did not believe it was possible to feel as thoroughly not-attracted to Johnny Depp as I felt during the movie -- it was like watching Michael Jackson mid-sex change. The very perverted Wonka family psychology in the backstory appealed greatly to me, as did the nearly-as-perverted happy Bucket family with the giant bed-and-table for four grandparents in the middle of the house (where did the parents sleep, if Charlie had the attic to himself? Not sure I want to know). The film is very, very funny, so much more so than I was expecting from the previews -- both warped Wonka jokes and in-jokes from Tim Burton, with Depp quite as fearless as he was in POTC, though obviously very different. The visuals were amazing, the music amused me -- I feared comparisons to the tacky numbers of the first film but these tacky numbers were very much their own animals -- and I really loved the aggressive, pushy little girls, who were so much more memorable than the piggy boy and the TVaholic and quite striking in their greed and ambition -- maybe I was just in the mood, after HBP, for that sort of female character, because the more I think about the sexual politics of HBP the more they bother me, from the pre-teens through the senior females. I shall post more about this when more people have read the book, so people don't stay out of my LJ for fear of spoilers!


Boat and Drum Point Lighthouse of the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons.