Ave, Salve, Vale

My dear beloved readers (those of you who are still out there):

I'm shutting the blog down. The writing exercise that was Creating Text(iles) was useful to me, and I enjoyed it greatly, especially since it allowed me to meet so many lovely internet friends, but it's served its purpose.

I'm keeping the blog online for now, in case I decide to start up again in another persona. I love the title. Hate to let it go.

And I'm still reachable at the email addys given on this page.

For now, though, my internet presence is over at shelfari.com -- leave me a note there, sometime!

And as farewell, I leave a couple of treats:

First, a brilliant film over at you tube, with snippets of one of the most beautiful languages ever in the world;

Second, another brilliant film showing some of the most astounding kite-flying in the world. Ever.

Call for Poetry, in Honor of Brigid

Last year, Reya put out a call for a silent poetry reading across the blogs, in honor of Brigid. She got WAY more than she counted for. This year, Oak has taken on the job of calling out. So here's the deal:

WHAT: A Bloggers (Silent) Poetry Reading
WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2007
WHERE: Your blog
WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Bridgid, aka Groundhog Day
HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favorite poet or one of your own - to post February 2nd.
RSVP: If you plan to publish, feel free to leave a comment and link on this post. Last year Reya put out the call and there was more poetry in cyberspace than she could keep track of. So, link to whomever you hear about this from and a mighty web of poetry will be spun.

I'll post a poem then, but because Jill (see comments from last post) would like for me to mention my escapade yesterday, when the power went out JUST as the elevator doors closed, and I womanhandled the doors open and escaped, thereby adding further to my already considerable reputation on the 6th floor of College Hall, I will share a poem today, too, cause if you Google the phrase -- stuck elevator poem -- you find, among a vast array of other stuff, David Hernandez' excellent poem concerning a bee and an elevator:

Bombus sonorus

A bumblebee knocked inside an elevator.
Two buzzes overlapped: the trapped insect
and the halogen tube’s citrus light.
Fear made the suits and dresses wait

in the lobby, hearts knocking in their chests.
Let’s take the stairs overlapped with I hate
anything with wings. A citrus-bloused woman
waited with her coffee and poppy seed bagel.

A man knocked on wood. The shadows
of sycamores and employees overlapped
in the courtyard, the sun a ball of citrus
sitting on the sky’s table. While waiting

for the bumblebee to knock it off,
the secretary had two memories, overlapping
like film slides: a citrus tree mobbed
with these clumsy bugs and waiting inside

a stuck elevator, a fireman’s knocking.
There her life overlapped with a stranger
wearing citrus-scented cologne, her pulse
quickening as they waited to be rescued.

Weeks later he knocked on her door,
their bodies overlapped in the bedroom.
Weeks later he left, the scent of citrus polluting
her sheets. Still she waited for his return,

for his knuckles to knock, but their lives
overlapped once. When the bumblebee
fumbled under the citrus sun, someone asked
the secretary, What are you waiting for now?

Fat Lightered

The fireplaces at Bear's Retreat are all working now, and so we have fires in the kitchen fireplace, which bore the female cats but entrance the male.

While the other cats are sleeping elsewhere, Dara comes into the kitchen to watch fires whenever they're set. He watches the whole thing, from crackling kindling to glowing coals, probably cause he's waiting for it to escape so he can hunt it:

And because he is a fool for the cats, Sam now requires to find Fat Lightered.

As it's been explained to me (I don't remember hearing about this in East Texas, though lordy knows there were plenty of pine trees around; Dad, please explain further), Fat Lightered is, basically, pine stumps, cut up to light one's fire, and the loveliness of them, for our purposes, would be 1) entertaining Dara with the crackling of the pine, and 2) giving Sam further cause to tell stories of his youth.

Fat Lightered used to be quite a concern, I take it, involving dynamite and high drama. Sometimes the acquisition of Fat Lightered worked, in which case the dynamited pine stump heaved itself out of the earth and landed on the side of the new hole. Sometimes it didn't quite work, though the kids could then be used to pick up all the Fat Lightered chips. Sometimes it REALLY didn't work, in which case one's pickup truck blew up. (Hint: do not try to dynamite the stump DIRECTLY into the back of the pickup.)

So Sam needs some Fat Lightered, and they don't sell it around here, so he's planning on ordering it off the Internet from Oregon, which I think is not precisely the correct way for a rural South Carolinian to acquire Fat Lightered, but I don't care, cause I'm so amused just even by the name of the stuff, not to mention the potential cat entertainment value, that I'm all for it.

Nice to Hear From Margery Again

One of the most lovely things about being a medievalist is that occasionally, because one is teaching a class such as, in my case, Medieval Literature, or maybe Medieval Women Writers, one gets to put Margery Kempe on the syllabus and watch students' eyes bleed.

Margery. The girl you love to hate. She makes my students nuts, but I need her in the syllabus, because 1) she wrote the first autobiography in English; 2) she shows the range of activities available to women in the late middle ages (she got to Jerusalem twice!); 3)she gives us the opportunity to examine our notions of mysticism (hint: if Jesus comes to you and says that you are Even More Beloved to him than St. Brigid, wonder if it's really Somebody Else in a Jesus costume); 4) she gives us the opportunity to examine our notions of insanity (if Margery was sitting on a bus you got on, believe me, you'd NOT sit next to her, but though lots of people in her day thought she was either lying or suffering from heart illness, nobody thought she was actually insane); 5) she allows me plenty of chances to be hilarious.

So I appreciate mightily hearing that she attended the MLA in Philadelphia over the Christmas holidays. And! She's landed a tenure track job at a research university! This rocks! I think I'll tell our Speakers' Committee, cause my students would think it awesome, should she come to discuss her research findings. And I'd buy lots of Kleenex, so as to be ready for the inevitable crying fits she'll have when she's reminded of the Passion of Our Lord. Which happens lots anyway, but over at the Catholic University, there's LOTS of chances, more than usual these days, in society at large, on account of the decor.

She'd feel right at home here. We could go up to the Faculty Dining Room, give her lunch (a hard roll and some water), and watch everybody freak out while she lay on the floor and wept cause the rest of us were eating and laughing and generally serving the forces of hell.

Cheers me up, just to think of it.

Thanks, Jeff, for sharing the information!

We Punch Holes in Bear's Retreat

Quick recap of Bear's Retreat, for those of you arriving recently: historical landmark; log house built in 1790 by Jacob Bare, of Lancaster, PA, who named the house Bear's Retreat cause apparently he was Good With Puns; brick addition built in 1840 by later owners; now situated at the edge of a development in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, which has been built on what was the original farmland. Looks like this:

Further backstory available here and here and here.

Ok. Now that we're caught up:

So, when we moved in, the chimney, and therefore the fireplaces, in the log half of the house worked, and we've had fires in the fireplaces there, occasionally. But the chimney on the brick side wasn't lined, so we couldn't have a fire in the kitchen -- well, not a safe one; clearly we could take a match to the floor, but you know what I mean -- and this seemed to us Wrong. Wrong, and Bad.

So as soon as we could get the cash together, which is now, we wanted chimney fixers to come by to line the chimney.

What a to-do! Sam spent DAYS trying to reach the chimney experts who were advertising in the Yellow Pages. Only got voice mail, message machines, never got answers. Finally reached an actual human, whose disconcerting response to the statement "I'd like to have my chimney lined" was "Why would you want your chimney lined?" even though the firm's ad stated, Quite Clearly, "we line chimneys."

Well, part of the backstory that I haven't yet blogged has to do with the non-corporeal denizens of the land, who are legion. They're all beings of good intent, though I wouldn't be so foolish as to call them harmless. And we take them into consideration when we plan things.

Indeed, part of the impetus for getting the kitchen fireplace to work is the desire to lure house brownies back; they're gone now, but I figure a working hearth in the kitchen would be a big selling point.

So, after Sam had the bizarre conversation with the company which didn't want to sell what it said it sold, I said to him, in a loud voice whilst sitting in the kitchen, "well, you know, you're having a lot of trouble finding somebody to fix the chimney, but I bet the faeries would be REALLY GOOD at finding somebody to fix the chimney, cause they are EXCELLENT at that sort of thing, and I bet they'd really like to see the fireplace working." And Sam said, "Yes, you're right. I bet they could do it."

And then that day he called the next firm on the list and they got right back to him and they said of course they line chimneys, would he like them to come out and make an estimate. And Sam said yes. So they came out, and then they went away and the estimate was to come to us in the mail.

So when I heard this, I said, very loudly in the kitchen, "well, I bet the faeries are interested in us being able to afford this, so that we can not only have the chimney lined but also get lovely andirons, perhaps with interesting designs on them that beings such as faeries might like." And Sam said "yes, I bet that's true."

So then the next day the estimate came and is was for about $2,000 less than we'd been told it would be, by the home inspector.

So far, so good.

Now the chimney people have the kitchen in an uproar -- cloths all over the floor, giant vacuums in the fireplace. The kittens are ecstatic, cause they've provided a new collection of kitty toys, and also attention is being paid to the Swallow-Producing-Hole-In-the-Kitchen, of which the kittens are very fond. Sam's happy, too, though as a Victorian Scholar he has to admit some slight disappointment that the chimney people clean the chimney with a giant vacuum, rather than employing naked scrawny underfed orphans with giant brushes. He says that since they used a drawing of such an urchin, complete with brush, in their ad, he had a right to expect one. I say hey, time moves on, the absence of Victorian child abuse doesn't seem so bad to me.

The chimney people had to punch a hole in the thick brick wall of Bear's Retreat, so that they can put the furnace flue through the wall, instead of up the chimney, which is where it was. So, we've put a hole in Bear's Retreat. But over the last 200 years, the various generations of humans living here have done things to the house to make it livable according to the standards of their day -- the hole in the wall for the flue is just part of a long stream of change.

Last thing to happen was that Sam was back behind the house yesterday and saw, suddenly, suddenly, the outside faucet which we had seen when we first bought the house, but which had disappeared later; all summer Sam had to drag the hose around from the front in order to water the back hill. Where the faeries live. And we could NOT figure this out, cause we clearly remembered seeing the faucet. But it was gone. And now it's back. In full plain sight. Where it was NOT, this summer.

I'm just saying.

But I expect the brownies back any day now, cause I think the non-corporeal denizens are happy with the chimney people. And we're glad they gave us our faucet back.

The Child Takes a Hero

Sunday the child, who had been listening to Dar Williams CD's, wanted to know about Daniel Berrigan, cause he likes the song "I Had No Right," and he wanted the lyrics explained. So I talked about the Berrigans, and the draft, and napalm, and we googled the Berrigans so that we could find pictures and find out what Daniel's up to these days, and he spent the rest of the day upstairs singing the Daniel Berrigan song over and over.

One could do worse than choose Catholic activists as heroes; and I'm cheered by the fact that while Berrigan spent time in prison, he wasn't a martyr in the sense that my own heroes, when I was, like the child, 10, were. A child who takes Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell as her heroes is going to have a dicey relationship to survival. I'm lucky to have made it this far.

I figure that I may need to visit the child in jail later, or walk door to door trying to get the neighbors to sign petitions for his retrial, but maybe we can dodge the stake and the firing squad.*
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*Related remarks: last time I was in Albuquerque, talking to my mom, she reminded me that once when I was in jail for civil disobedience, I called her up. We were at the time refusing arraignment, in solidarity with somebody or other, I forget whom, and everybody else's mom tried to get their daughters to agree to plead, and therefore get out of jail, but my mom said, oh, honey, you have to stay in jail! You can't break solidarity!

Not your usual mom remark.

But as Berrigan says about his mom, "she was so clear. And she was so clearly on our side when very few would be."

Juliet in the Funeral Parlor: Just Say No.

At some point recently I promised to discuss the production of Romeo and Juliet: The Opera which I went to recently. I learned a lot. I learned that if you are producing a version of Romeo and Juliet, whether it's been transformed into an opera or not, and it occurs to you that making the Capulets into modern-day Mafia owners of a funeral home would add a lot to the deeper meanings of the plot, you should lie down for a while till you sober up, BEFORE you go on over to a meeting with the director and begin to throw your weight around.

I'm all for messing with the classics. Hell, I've got a sense of humor. No prob. So my objection to the version of the opera that I went to is NOT that people tweaked the holy works of Shakespeare (and Gounod, as far as that goes), when they should have left them alone on account of their sacredness. Nope. My objection is that if Juliet has decorated her bedroom with coffins, it just doesn't make any sense for her to get all hysterical at the thought of waking up from the poisoned sleep and seeing Tybalt's ghost. You can't buy it. She's been sleeping with ghosts all along.

Also, why are the Capulets having all their parties in the funeral home itself? Have they no home to go to? Are they ALL just so addicted to hanging out with the corpses they can't go home?

No. The Mafia part, fine. Hell. Set it in the city streets with New York gangs. I think the Mafia part could have worked nicely.

But having the Capulets spend all their time, waking or sleeping, playing or working, in the funeral home just. Does. Not. Work.

I was reminded of the classic livejournal page, "THE THINGS I WILL NOT DO WHEN I DIRECT A SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTION, ON STAGE OR FILM."* The site's up to well over 400 entries now, and I haven't got time to go through it all, but if the Capulet Funeral Parlor isn't the list, it damn well should be.
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*Oh, I love this site with a mighty passion. Some highlights:

"Lady MacBeth should never give her biggest speeches lying facedown on a green couch."

"I will not have Romeo and Juliet's clothes gradually become more modern as the play progresses, to symbolize that their love is eternal, especially if this means that Juliet has to wear a pink mini skirt for her death scene."

"Should I choose to portray Lady Macduff as pregnant, I will ensure that her bump is secure."

"I will not begin A Midsummer Night's Dream with a song and dance number featuring Puck tap-dancing."

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will not enter on a miniature train."

"I will remember that Much Ado is a comedy. I will refrain from having the company dress in funerial black for the wedding, dance to sombre music, and then die in a bombing raid. Even if am labouring under the misapprehension that this would be terribly artistic. "

Lord, it makes me want to go harrass Shakespeare just for the sheer fun of it.

Maybe that explains the funeral parlor......