By John Montague
In my grandfather's library
there were many volumes,
Bibles massive as flagstones;
heavy print my eye could trawl along:
the thunder of the Old Testament.
I climbed the Mount with Moses,
stood in the presence of the Lord,
or listened as he spake from a cloud.
For, lo, I had suffered the long exodus
from Brooklyn, and New York, where
they worshipped the Golden Calf
which now staggers, newly born,
rasped clean by its mother's tongue,
on the cobblestones of our farmyard.
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Another from this week's New Yorker. More Montague can be found in his Collected Poems.
It was a pretty uneventful Tuesday around here, though not a bad one. Every time I thought I was going to get out of the house, I ended up on the phone -- first with my aunt in California for more than an hour, catching up since I hadn't talked to her in forever, which was wonderful, and then with Gblvr whom I get to see on Thursday which always makes me very happy. Otherwise, both kids came home with planning packets -- Daniel with his high school guidance office's preparing for college packet, which includes a long questionnaire for parents and an even longer one for him about his interests, goals, and skills, Adam with his four-year high school plan, which led to a discussion about how he wants to quit orchestra and take theater (which is all right with me; I wanted him to learn to read music and to see what it was like to make music with others, but he's not really interested in pursuing viola and I think he'll be a lot more interested in acting and tech both).
Glee...sigh. As usual, I loved the music and liked little else about it besides Jane Lynch. Okay, there were some lines that made me laugh -- spoilers -- "When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist," "Madonna's a Hall of Fame MILF," "You have all the sensuality of one of those pandas at the zoo who refuse to mate" -- yet even as they're singing about how they have to take more time appreciating what it feels like for a girl, the men are portrayed with more interest and more sympathy, and the virgin-whore dichotomy they've now set up really pisses me off. Okay, it's fun to see "Ray of Light" performed on stilts with a death spiral, and there's no version of "Like a Prayer" that I'm not going to enjoy, but with the exception of Sue, who is a force unto herself, I have characters I only sort of like and characters I really dislike. It's the opposite of how I feel about, say, FlashForward, where even the characters whose behavior horrifies me don't make me cringe in disgust so much.
Some photos from Star Gazing Farm last weekend:
This goat inexplicably seemed to believe that he could straighten this tree with enough butting.
Whereas the baby llama seemed to think he was a horse.
The ducks enjoyed a mud puddle near the enclosure where the pig was enjoying the sun.
Very little seemed to faze the pig.
Whereas the mother hen did her best to keep track of her chicks...
...but some of them kept insisting on sneaking out of their enclosure.
The sheep were being shorn on the day we visited and were a bit out of sorts...
...yet this goat was feeling much more sociable and letting people pet him.
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