Poem for Friday

Hawkins Stable
By Jean Valentine

It was years before you could climb
back up over the fallen stalls, and knock at
the Hawkinses' old door

                 —they were gone,
you could just look in from the road.
Field after field.
Your eyes looked two ways at once.

                        Under the fields,
the dense tongue of the cow—
and the horses' eyes—
and the water from the hand pump in the sink,
racing as horses race.

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Another from this week's New Yorker.

I spent a very lovely afternoon with Dementor Delta, shopping, eating and watching a movie. We were only planning to stop in The Icing so she could get an Eiffel Tower earring rack after I showed off mine, but we ended up visiting Sephora (which does not have the Barbie makeup tins in stores, only online), Fire & Ice (which has stunning dichroic glass snakes and snails), and Brighton (where we only very narrowly escaped buying charm bracelets). Then we picked up burritos at Qdoba and ate them while watching last year's film of Brideshead Revisited, which cannot compare to the miniseries but is very pretty -- both the men and the scenery.

I suppose I should read the book, because in both productions it seems outrageously unfair to me that the damaged Flyte children blame Mummy for their "woes" -- which are laughable after Oliver Twist. Because the events of the movie are so compressed, it looks like Charles falls in love not with Sebastian or Julia, but with their house, and he is willing to sleep with whichever of them is more likely to give him perpetual summers at Castle Howard. Plus it really looks like Lady Marchmain's Catholicism only manifests in her desire to control her husband and children's sexuality, not that it's a deep spiritual commitment, which is quite irksome. That said, the visuals particularly early in the film in the falling-in-love sequences are absolutely stunning. I want to watch it again just for those.


One final set of photos of the David Wills House in Gettysburg, recently restored and open to the public.


A tintype of Private Wilson D. Race of the 149th Pennsylvania Infantry, wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg and carried to a field hospital in in St. Francis Xavier Catholic church, where he died. Wills saved items from soldiers to try to return them to their families.


Wills also campaigned for a national cemetery at Gettysburg and a permanent place for all the items left behind by soldiers killed and wounded in the war.


On the first floor of the Wills House is a large diorama of the center of town at the time of the battle (complete with miniature outhouses).


You can see that the warehouse in the diorama above is still standing in the circle.


The Gettysburg Hotel is not in the diorama yet but it has stood in the circle since 1797, directly across the street from the Wills House.

TV Thursday night was the Star Trek episode I need to review tomorrow, followed by Xena's "Between the Lines." Oh, and I have truly entertaining entertainment news: Alan Doyle reports on Great Big Sea's web site that he will play Allan A'Dayle in Russell Crowe's upcoming Sheriff of Nottingham film! In which Alan says Cate Blanchett will co-star, though I didn't think that was confirmed yet -- it would make me very, very happy! "I went, Lute in hand, to read and sing for the part and must have done all right, as I've been offered and accepted the gig," wrote Doyle. Hee, this movie is going to rock.