The Stars and the Cookie Jar

… that money just can’t buy

A few links some of you may appreciate:

Sometimes you just need to watch a video of 24 hopping baby goats. (via)

Incidental Comics gives us a handy guide to Proofreader’s Marks. (via a friend)

First footage of live colossal squid in its native environment.

---L.

Subject quote from Can’t Buy Me Love, The Beatles.

Apparently if permitted to sleep for nine hours, my brain presents me with a cheerfully escapist dream of meeting Dirk Bogarde at a film festival and then spending the rest of the afternoon perusing his library and forgoing dinner in favor of sailing, which was probably more my idea of a good time than his, but I like to think if I hadn't woken when I did, he'd have introduced me to Anthony Forwood.

I totally forgot to post this yesterday, which is possibly indicative of … something. So here, have it for Poetry Tuesday instead:

what if a much of a which of a wind, e. e. cummings

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives truth to the summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)
—all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die,the more we live

---L.

Subject quote from On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble, A. E. Housman.

Still toast. Successfully collected my father from the airport two nights ago. Would like my capacity for movies to get back online before I run out of month in which to write about them. Would also like our next-door neighbor to have ceased to use loud air-whining machineries after seven p.m.

I saw the news of the death of Pope Francis. If it was going to be one of his last public statements, the construction site of Hell was an incredibly metal image to go out on.

I was not expecting to see the news that Willy Ley had been found in a can in a co-op on 67th Street. The idea of sending his ashes to space is completely correct and I wouldn't put SpaceX anywhere near that gesture. I could rewatch Frau im Mond (1929) for his memory.

Playing Stan Rogers' "Macdonnell on the Heights" (1984) for spatch may actually have counter-observed Patriots' Day, but my point still stands that the song has successfully superseded its chorus, or at least one in ten thousand seems to underrate Rogers' influence.

Personally I would ask Nigel Havers about the 1986 LWT A Little Princess.

From my office window, I just watched a visitor deliberately smell a Bradford pear and regret it. The trees have really broken into bloom, so I took my camera out into the blotter-paper overcast that kept thinking about raining and then not quite.

( Once I was outside Penn Station, selling red and white carnations. )

spatch has been showing me Hill Street Blues (1981–87), which after a season and a handful I can see resembled nothing else in the Nielsen ratings of its time, structurally, tonally, perhaps even politically, since what I would not have expected from a cop show of the early Reagan administration is so much emphasis on what we would now call non-toxic masculinity as an ideal if not always achieved. Its attitudinal snapshots are fascinating. It is working seriously for diversity. Its interlocking narratives and human messiness make sense of it as the yardstick for J. Michael Straczynski in creating Babylon 5 (1993–98), which is how I heard of the show originally and what it is currently doing in my eyes. I am also enjoying the worldbuilding of its fictional city, whose geographical location is deliberately obscure but whose individual neighborhoods and businesses and sports teams are throwing out runners all over the plot. Actually, to my surprised pleasure, it reminds me distinctly of Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride.

I may be toast at the end of this week, but I would not trade the gorgeous double feature of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) with which rushthatspeaks and I wound it up. Late to the party, I saw Hoosiers (1986) for the equally first time last month and Dennis Hopper at the top of his game really could do anything. We were passing Porter Square afterward when we saw a loose collection of action along the sidewalk that turned out to be a troop of redcoats marching down Massachusetts Avenue, presumably on their way to fight Lexington. Thanks to the street we lived on in my childhood, my very favorite iteration of Paul Revere's ride was the year in which, instead of clattering under the window shouting per usual, he came in a truck and explained his horse had broken down. No kings.

So. :scuffs floor: Yeah. This is late. Over a decade late.

See, back when I was translating classical Japanese, I got a dozen poems into book XI of the Kokinshu before life pivoted me into learning Chinese. (Parenthood brings changes.) Which means I never got around to compiling those fragments—leaving them orphans not on my index of Japanese translations. So purely for the bookkeeping, here they are. Full disclosure: except for one wording tweak, these are unrevised reposts from the original posts. That said, without double-checking my understanding of the originals, I’m as happy as I ever am with the texts.

( A little bit of love goes a long, long way )

Index of Japanese translations

---L.

In the same way that I donate to SMYAL and Keshet in this country, Mermaids just got a multiple of eighteen from me because actually I like it when trans youth thrive and grow and with any luck or justice live to see the tearing down of laws which have nothing to do with what is right. I like it when trans adults can just get on with their lives, too. The feedback loop the world feels in right now is bullshit.

So, we really are TERF Island now. I'm scared, depressed, disgusted. Too distracted now for any of the obvious things that might help my head, so I'm spending as much as I can sitting in the back garden. We have blue tits nesting in the box on the back fence; lots of speckled wood butterflies passing through; various hoverfly species pause over the bench - I'm not sure why it's a favourite spot. There were high winds yesterday. I wanted them to carry me away from all this bullshit.

Books 869-872 of Complete Tang Poems is 谐谑, xiéxuè, banter/repartee—IOW, poems of humor and mockery. Do I want to dive deep into this? Yes—yes, I do. Duh. But for now, instead, here’s translations of a random handful that caught my eye.

I have even less standing to do this than I did the ghost poems. I can tell I’m missing wordplay and am even weaker on cultural context—and indeed, I failed to get anywhere with more than half the poems I tried. IOW, don’t make much of how three of the four are one specific genre—these were the easiest to make sense of, and Chinese humor ranges well beyond these examples.

Still, these few were fun.

---

In Praise of the Hedgehog, Li or Zhu Zhenbai
Walking, he seems a shifting pin-cushion,
At rest, he’s curled like a chestnut-burr.
He can’t be bullied like us big folks:
Who dares to casually punch the guy?

( There’s three more where that came from, including two more praising animals )

Yyyyeah, there’s reasons why I didn’t do more of these. Much harder to understand, let alone render well, than even the ghost poems and children’s rhymes.

Index of Chinese translations

Subject quote from Catwings, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Donuts are totally unpesachdik, but since I dropped my parents at the airport before six in the morning, I am eating a jam-filled from Gail Ann's. Outside the construction assembles with rumbles and beeps, but I am eating a fried object the size of a saucer and functionally indistinguishable from pączki. It covered me with granulated sugar instantaneously. The sunrise came up in gilt tissue and lavender and the fluorescent stipple of the windows of dawn-drowned trains.

[edit] No photographic evidence of the donut survived, only the smile on the face of the tiger.

I don't see why the cloudburst which held off until I had left the house to check on the state of the local flowering trees couldn't have hit this morning when a square of concrete was jackhammered out of our immediate sidewalk, but I did actually manage to sleep and dream most vividly of hanging out in a waking-stranger's garden-level apartment whose bookshelves seemed to be populated entirely by Michael Whelan-jacketed science fiction. My bookshelves in high school would have been heavily tilted the same.

Yesterday I walked to Porter Square Books, who in their new location further up Mass. Ave. are still only about thirty-five minutes from me on foot, which felt like a major achievement considering the vaporized state of my physical health for longer than I like to think about. I got two books for my father, whose actual birthday it was, after which I had to drop off my watch at the same repair shop in Harvard Square from which I had collected it right before leaving for D.C. I don't think it should stop twice in three weeks, especially if it was supposed to have been fixed in between. That said, D.C. as detrimental to the healthy flow of history makes a certain amount of sense to me right now.

Today I left messages with all of my elected officials about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, since an executive branch that no longer even pretends to play by the constitutional rule of law is beyond overstatement bad, not to mention that even without the additional monstrosity of administrative error, nothing about the present hell of any of America's for-profit deportees improves my safety or security and if by some atrocious miracle it did, still no. I was born into this house we don't ask what became of the previous inhabitants. I don't have to go looking for more rooms.

P.S. And then this rainbow and the sunset at the other end of the street. Tomorrow I can call about Mohsen Mahdawi.

The sidewalk jackhammers arrived directly in front of our house on the dot of seven and persisted on our street until the point in the afternoon when they moved off to torment an audibly adjacent block. The shallow nightmarish gasps I slept in were not enough. I can't do another spring at this pitch of sleeplessness. I can still hear industrial whines and trucks beeping up.

For Poetry Monday, another short poem from another language, this time with my translation:

Inscribed in the Temple of Mulan, Du Mu

I bend my bow in battle, serving as a man—
Within my dreams, as formerly, I paint my brows.
I often long for home, yet raise my cup at banquets.
Upon Fuyundui’s shrine, I pray to Wang Zhaojun.

题木兰庙
弯弓征战作男儿，
梦里曾经与画眉。
几度思归还把酒，
拂云堆上祝明妃。

Yes, this is the Mulan you all know, and yes, a temple to her—southern China has many Mt. Mulans, literally “magnolia mountain,” and when her legend spread in the 5th and 6th centuries, those with Daoist temple complexes started dedicating one of their temples to her worship. (One in Wuhan, founded before 700, can still be visited.) Du Mu (803-852) was a late Tang poet from the same Du clan as Du Fu, though they weren’t closely related. According to his biographies, this temple was near the Hubei-Henan border.

The speaker is Mulan during her army service on the northern steppes. Fuyundui is a pass near Baotou, Inner Mongolia, on the north bank of the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River, where Xiongnu and other steppe nomads would pray before raiding south into Han lands—just as Mulan wants to return south herself. Wang Zhaojun was sent by Han Emperor Yuan (so a few centuries before Mulan’s supposed time) to make a diplomatic marriage to the Chanyu of the Xiongnu Empire, and after his death was not allowed to return—making her another woman who went north in service of the empire and longed to go home. A lot of resonance in just one line.

Index of Chinese translations

---L.

Subject quote from Ticket to Ride, The Beatles.

I opened the door to the stranger. I made charoses after all. This afternoon I went for a walk in the misting rain.

( You put your soul in a beggar's bowl. )

I am feeling especially scraped thin and valueless, but selkie sent me a bonanza of tinned fish, so that for dinner I had coconut curry sardines and olive-and-pepper mackerel, and spatch brought me home a bag of intensely tropical Hi-Chews as a surprise dessert, all of which made a nice change-up from my traditional habits of eating treyf sandwiches on matzah. I read Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (2021) on the recommendation of N. and enjoyed very much how it functions like a Heinleinian hard sf novel where a level head and a slide rule can solve all problems only without the slide rule or the level head. Georgette Heyer's A Blunt Instrument (1938) could have done without its obligatory inclusion of antisemitism, but I appreciate the romantic pairing of its long-lashed, willowy, deprecatingly vague hero and its blunt-spoken, crop-haired, monocle-wearing heroine. She writes novels and he was last seen wandering around the Balkans. They should have a great time in a different mystery. sholio has written most excellent B5 fic. I like the idea of the Odyssey having a moment.

Because it is springtime in New England, it snowed this morning.



I am coming into Pesach furious, not with the holiday, but the circumstances under which it is happening. The most, the very most important part of the Seder as observed by my family, the stripped-down, fire-and-the-place-in-the-forest core, is to open the door to the stranger. To offer them shelter and succour, to share food and freedom, not to answer the Four Questions with FYGM. And I am living in a country that makes me feel maddened not even with its indifference but with its gleeful spectacle of cruelty toward the stranger which just makes me want to go with my bare hands. Of course I am glad of this amicus brief, but what's to be glad about the the necessity of it? For travel-related reasons, my family is not holding a Seder tonight, so I will open the door, offer the wine and the matzah, say the words, try not to scream them. Next year in freedom, my mother has said for years. Zero-sum games cost us everything.

We have just received notice in the mail that the concrete sidewalks of our street are going to spend the next week being replaced, thus explaining the sudden proliferation of no-parking flyers and the ear-juddering industrial noise around the corner to which I woke this afternoon. Adjacent streets will also be involved in this mishegos. After last year, I do not know if I can trust the official time estimate. I know the jokes about construction season, but I need to sleep ever again in my life.

theseatheseatheopensea invited me to make one, so here is a list of a hundred films noirs. It is non-completist. It is non-proscriptive. I had intended it to start with proto-noir and end with neo-noir, but it turned out I had far more than a hundred noirs of the classically defined period to winnow down from and any number of solid citizens and weird little ornaments had already been left by the side of the meme. Like all of the other lists, it will be different tomorrow. Anything on this one that I haven't written about, rest assured that I want to. I would, however, need to sleep more than an hour, which is how the last couple of nights have been going.

The hundred movies meme was even harder to assemble because I spent far more of my childhood and adolescence immersed in books than in movies and therefore many of the films on this list were not so much formative as illuminating once I finally started paying attention to cinema as an art form, and/or they wired themselves instantly into my brain and are quoted regularly to this day. A list of favorites might overlap significantly but not identically, I imagine tilting more heavily toward sff and noir. I feel it may be a much more mainstream list than my formative books, although still full of meaningful absences. (I sacrificed a number of classics as well as movies whose circumstances were potentially more important than their content, but just glitched on The Medium (1951) and Katerina Izmailova (1966), both of which I even own.) I find it very difficult to try to winnow accurately. I may just not be designed for this format of meme.