By Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Kabir Helminski
Lover whispers to my ear,
"Better to be a prey than a hunter.
Make yourself My fool.
Stop trying to be the sun and become a speck!
Dwell at My door and be homeless.
Don't pretend to be a candle, be a moth,
so you may taste the savor of Life
and know the power hidden in serving."
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I forgot to order Inferno for release-date delivery so I did not spend all day Tuesday reading Dan Brown. Shut up, I devoured Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, and if you're going to be a literature snob, I will send you all the unreadable literary theory I suffered through in grad school before I realized there were no tenure-track jobs and I no longer needed to say "the subaltern" or "the carnivalesque" all the time -- besides, I reread Les Miserables in its entirety recently, so I am entitled to formulaic historical schmaltz. As long as you're losing all respect for me, I will confess that my laundry-folding movie was No Strings Attached, which is as mindless as it gets and not even Kevin Kline could elevate.
But speaking of Les Miserables, since we have no Tuesday night TV, we watched the Depardieu-Malkovich miniseries in its entirety. It has some aspects that I really love (Malkovich's Javert, who like every single other version is not very much like Brick!Javert but without exception I've liked Javert better as a human I could believe in than Hugo's son-of-a-wolf Javert; Gainsbourg's more-substantive-than-most Fantine), some aspects that I mostly liked (Depardieu's passionate but just-a-bit-creepy-with-Cosette Valjean, Clavier's sharply-defined Thenardier), and some that I couldn't stand (I thought Marius annoyed me when he seemed young and pretentious, but Lo Verso may be my least favorite casting in any version of Les Mis). From last summer, Longwood's guard cat:
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