Poem for Monday

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
By Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

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Another from Sunday's Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, in which Mary Karr admits, "It pains me to say it, but I used to hate Emily Dickinson. Her voice once struck me as cutesy and coy: 'I'm Nobody! who are you?/Are you nobody too?' Her meek posture reflected what the Victorian age demanded of women, and I couldn't get past it. How do you know if your antipathy to a poet is deafness to difficult but rewarding work? Listen to the poet's fans. If they invariably talk about the poet's ideas or historical role, they are steering away from the page, perhaps toward some ideology. Celebrating such a writer may make you feel smart or morally righteous or roguishly avant garde, but chances are, it's work you can skip. By contrast, Dickinson devotees always seem to reach for a book of her poems."

I spent Sunday being fangirly with DementorDelta, Adbaculum, Treewishes and RubyRoseRed at the home of the latter, first having fantastic Japanese food at a restaurant called Grace's, then watching Peter's Friends, which I hadn't seen in ages -- long enough, at least, that the last time I saw it, I had no idea who Hugh Laurie was. I watched it for Branagh and Thompson, though it's the most dated of their collaborations -- not surprisingly, given that the archive footage shows Brezhnev, Arafat, the last Pope, etc. and that the theme is pretty much the same as The Big Chill (or maybe Rent's "There's only us, there's only this, forget regret or life is yours to miss"). It also has Stephen Fry, Phyllida Law, Rita Rudner (who's hilarious) and Imelda Staunton (who's devastating) so worth seeing again, though I was mixing it up with a couple of Woody Allen films in my head. Meanwhile Paul took the kids to Iron Man, so I will certainly be waiting for the DVD to see it.


Reenactor farmers shear the sheep at Claude Moore Colonial Farm once a year.


This weekend's colonial fair was the day. Unlike other recent festivals we've attended, these sheep are shorn by hand, not electric clippers.


Here is the wool from the Hog Island sheep being shorn in the first two photos.


This very fuzzy sheep was next. I got to pet it; it had at least six inches' growth.


Here is some of the yarn for sale at the market.


Wool, both dyed and just cleaned, was for sale as well...


...while many of the dyes and ingredients were on display.

My kids wanted to watch The Simpsons season finale, and after that we put on both parts of The Sarah Jane Adventures' "The Lost Boy," which is really well done and confirms my belief that dismissing this as a kids' show is completely missing the point...the kids on this show deal as adults better than most of the supposedly sophisticated dark Torchwood, on which "adult" mostly means "sex and violence" just like on US television. Maybe it's just that people who don't have kids don't like to watch realistic kids on TV, because most kids on TV are plot devices or caricatures, not characters.

Spoilers: "The Lost Boy" is about Sarah Jane's loss, not Luke's; as she says to Maria's dad, no parent can bear to see their child in danger, it's easier for her to kid herself and say she's just not cut out to be a parent. The explanation here is nearly identical to her words to the Doctor in "School Reunion" when Maria asks what happened to never turning your back on the universe; Sarah Jane says, "Sometimes you have to. Sometimes it's the only way to survive." By the end, her father figure-crutch-computer Mr. Smith is utterly under her control rather than vice versa, and K-9 has made an appearance less gratuitous a lot of what went on in Baker-era Doctor Who. I have a feeling that if I ever write any serious Whoverse fic, it'll involve Sarah Jane and not a Companion or any of Torchwood's not-whole-without-a-man women.

Then we watched the beginning of The Tudors' endgame...god, Thomas Boleyn is despicable, he and Henry deserve each other, but his poor children. I appreciate the fact that Anne argues for the Reformation as a spiritual evolution, not for the profit of the King and Cromwell's friends, though she must have known that the King's actions had next to nothing to do with spiritual conviction and that she could quickly find herself in Katherine's position or worse. I've enjoyed this season a lot more than last season and am sorry only to have one more episode.