{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar","title":"In Search of Ecstatic Experience","subtitle":"lookfar","author":{"name":"lookfar"},"link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"service.feed","type":"application\/x.atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom","title":"In Search of Ecstatic Experience"}}],"updated":"2023-12-16T21:42:20Z","entry":[{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:1084967","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/1084967.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=1084967"}}],"title":"Anyone Else Getting \"Transaction Failed\" from LJ?","published":"2023-12-15T15:20:27Z","updated":"2023-12-16T21:42:20Z","content":"LJ wants me to spend the princely sum of $17 per year (\"Pro Package\") to post more photos. I'm okay with that, except every time I try to give them my Visa card, I get a \"transaction failed\" message. Is this happening to anyone else? Damn Russians! No wonder they can't win their war."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:1071638","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/1071638.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=1071638"}}],"title":"Tidy-Up","published":"2023-08-31T11:48:55Z","updated":"2023-08-31T13:19:25Z","content":"I went through and cleared up my friends list, taking people who no longer keep a journal or whom I couldn't remember. Better to know who is in the room! If I removed you and you'd like to be friended, please comment here."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:993512","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/993512.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=993512"}}],"title":"The Michael Shur Effect","published":"2022-05-21T00:11:19Z","updated":"2022-05-21T00:11:49Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"navel gazing"}}],"content":"Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Good Place.<\/i> Here at the Far Pavilion, we have admired all of these TV shows, but I didn't notice the common ingredient until B99; they are all Michael Shur. What they all have in common: everyone, everyone<\/i> in the community gets to belong eventually, whether it's a workplace or the afterlife. Even the asshole is in some way a member of the band, and everyone is cherished for his eccentricities and allowed to both hug and learn, to paraphrase the creators of Seinfeld<\/i> on what they wanted to avoid.

\"B99-S8-KeyArt-Logo-Show-Tile-1920x1080\"

What's noteworthy, to my mind, is the gentle inclusiveness that never relies on family ties (a common 1980s sitcom trope) to provide community.

\"imgonline-com-ua-resize-HwYyIgNmR94ny7ZR\"

Honora and I have both noticed the Michael Shur effect, and we see it in our current show, Our Flag Means Death.<\/i> Everyone, even the most incompetent pirate, is loved and part of the community, and even the Designated Villain gets a sort of \"he can't help it, he's effed up\" sort of pass. Why, I wonder, is this kind of very gentle, inclusive, dreamy sort of comedy so popular now? I think about the groundbreaking All in the Family<\/i> or Sanford and Son<\/i> in the 1970s, that went so sarcastically hard at their characters; all assholes were clearly assholes.

Has the world become so terrifying and community bonds so fragile that this is what we really need when we settle down on the couch - to temporarily inhabit a world that promises to hold and cherish us, even outside the family? I think so.

Some of it I gather from Honora's fannishness, which has always been more intense than mine. I look at her friends - half of them under - or un-employed and still living with their parents at 26 - and I see a whole coterie of fragile young people who don't seem to feel that the world has a reasonable place for them. Maybe it's the internet, that 24-hour-a-day horror show, or maybe it's the reality of climate change or the falling standard of living guaranteeing that you will never attain the lifestyle you had at 12, but they seem to long for a safe place to be.

Maybe Michael-Shur-ville is it."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:804907","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/804907.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=804907"}}],"title":"Self-Quarantine, Day 29","published":"2020-04-25T00:06:57Z","updated":"2020-04-25T02:23:14Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"pandemic"}},"content":"I didn't have work till noon, and for once I'd had a good night's sleep, so I did Bikram for half an hour. I like this yoga method, broken up by drinking coffee, checking on the internet and taking care of things I can see in the the kitchen.

One thing I did was go out with clippers and cut the flowers offered me by my second-best lilac, Lil Rascal. These don't smell as great; in fact, I'm not completely sure she is a lilac, but probably she is, because she looks much like Miss Kim, who came with a plastic tag that identified her as a miniature lilac.

\"IMG_4560\"

Honora came in last night while I was still in the guest room and we experimented with downloading my file of laptop backgrounds to use as Zoom backgrounds:

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I worked from 12-2, then quick lunch, then 2:30 to 5:30, then had a Zoom Happy Hour with my brothers and my sister-in-law Karen:

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Toby participated but then left to sit on the other couch because he was overwhelmed by the shouting. Karen is Like Us, but Toby is Not Like Us, which is why I like him.

Dinner was Toby's specialty (so I say), bacon and onion smothered pork chops. He made this once a few months ago and I was OH BABy. Honora ate eggs upstairs, where her Shakespeare group was doing a reading.

Some newly observed pandemic phenomena:

- On the median over by the Home Depot a few days ago, I saw a guy begging with a paper cup on a selfie stick. He'd extend his cup to your car window if you waved a bill, I guess.

- On the street where we live - on which my window faces - an Amazon Prime truck, grey with the Amazon smile logo, stopped and put on its blinkers. Soon a second, identical, truck stopped right behind it in the parking lane. The two drivers, both African-American women, got out, and the front one went to talk to the back one. Then she opened up the back of her van and took out a big yellow Tyvek sack - packages, I suppose - and a green Tyvek sack as well, and there was some switching around. After a while, the front truck drove off. After another short while, yet a third Amazon Prime truck drove up next to Truck #2, and they had a short gam, while Truck #3 sat in the travel lane. Then they both drove off.

I found this mysterious and alluring.

- I really, really miss frozen yogurt from the frozen yogurt store, mostly because I can't have any.

- We've got five bags of stuff to go to the Goodwill store but I've been assuming that they are not taking donations. It appears I am wrong, so these bags will go out this weekend.

- Meanwhile, our president, who is a terrible person and an ignoramus, suggested that we might be able to conquer coronavirus by ingesting disinfectant, which shows that he has as much understanding of infection and disease as a not-too-bright sixth grader.

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Not having to do with the pandemic, I think,<\/i> but this afternoon I said to Toby, \"Hey I had a funny dream that I found a back scratcher with some souvenir writing on it and I gave it to you.\"

\"You did give it to me.\" He reached over and found the Cape Cod back scratcher on his book pile. \"You found it when you cleaned out your drawer.\"

Should I be concerned that I no longer seem to know the difference between dreams and waking?"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:779606","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/779606.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=779606"}}],"title":"My Fair Lady as a Retrograde Example of Erasing Women's Emotional Work","published":"2020-01-12T05:48:15Z","updated":"2020-01-12T13:52:47Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"musicals"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"the drama"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"plays"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"feminism"}}],"content":"Toby and I went to see My Fair Lady<\/i> at the Kennedy Center tonight; he got the tickets as a birthday present from his sister Ann and BiL Jeff.

So, you know the story of My Fair Lady<\/i>, right? It's the musical version of Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which is roughly based on the Greek myth, in which a sculptor, Pygmalion, makes a model of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with her. The goddess Aphrodite takes pity on this hopeless love and brings the statue to life as the woman Galatea. Well, that's all we hear about Galatea; she came to life and was granted to Pygmalion. Shaw took issue with this perhaps, as a feminist and socialist. In his play, the linguist Henry Higgins, on a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, undertakes the education of a lower class flower-seller - a \"guttersnipe\" - and teaches her to speak like a lady. His transformation of her is so complete that he triumphs by passing her off as a princess in disguise at an embassy ball. It's a very funny play and I recommend the movie to you, so that you can swoon over Leslie Howard.

The musical contains great chunks of the play's dialogue, but as musicals must have a resolved romance by the last curtain, it chooses to play up the romantic feelings between the irritable, irascible and self-centered Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, his pupil\/project. She falls in love with him in the middle of Act I (\"I Could Have Danced All Night\") when she begins to achieve her linguistic transformation (\"The Rain in Spain\"). And that so much makes sense, emotionally, because that experience, of someone who allows you to be the person you were meant to be - well, that is <\/i>the feeling of falling in love, right?

In both the play and the musical, Higgins feels that Eliza is more or less his project and fails to acknowledge her as a feeling human being; that falls to Colonel Pickering and Higgins' housekeeper. But the play stays the course; Eliza triumphs at the embassy ball, stands up to Higgins for his failure to treat her with respect, and leaves him to marry Freddy, a rather silly young man she has met in her short career passing as a lady.

But the musical has her return to Higgins. After standing up to him, she goes off with Freddy. Higgins is surprised and distressed at his feelings at her absence - he sings \"I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face,\" which we understand to be the plaint of man unfamiliar with attachment and tenderness, minimizing his pain.

And then Eliza reappears. Apparently, Freddy is a no-go. Without any discussion of their relationship or his treatment of her going forward, she slips into his library and assumes her old position of bringing him his slippers. In true 1956 fashion, we are meant to understand that Eliza has worked out how to resist his bullying and therefore remain in relationship to the man she loves.

Oh, great. She's going to put up with his nonsense and protect his emotional ignorance and sacrifice her chance to be openly loved and appreciated, so she can carry slippers and provide secretarial services to this oversensitive emotional jerk. And this is the happy ending<\/i>. It's amazing to me that it's taken sixty years for feminist criticism to catch up with this version of romantic love; the woman does ALL the emotional work for the privilege of being in a relationship with a man who, like King Lear, \"hath ever slenderly known himself.\"

Strangely, I still really enjoyed the music and watching it. I'm just more than ever hopeful that the young women I know don't buy into this idea of a happy ever after."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:766175","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/766175.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=766175"}}],"title":"The Pearl of Great Price","published":"2019-10-04T11:25:32Z","updated":"2019-10-04T11:26:48Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"health"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"navel gazing"}}],"content":"It's 6:20 a.m., one of my favorite times of day to be alone, especially if, as today, I was also up at 4:00 and went down to the porch to sleep. The sky was glowing, overcast behind the silhouettes of the trees, and even at 4 there was some traffic, but mostly the sound of crickets, thousands of crickets making themselves known as their lives draw to a close.

I didn't fall back to sleep, I think. Yesternight I went down to the porch at 3 and slept till 7. I was hoping for the same, but tonight I lazed about under the feather comforter, listening to crickets and drifting. Then I listened to Terrible Thanks for Asking<\/i> until 6, and then got up to enjoy solitude and coffee. I have a doctor's appointment at 8:30, and work at noon, maybe a short run in between those, unless I'm really tired, in which case a short nap.

When I went to see Carlene this week, I brought her a dream to talk about. This is what I remember about the dream (it's written in a book upstairs that I don't want to go get):

I was at a music or art festival in Vienna, and there was a large, complicated fountain with spouts and little waterfalls, that was made for people to splash in. Lots of festival-goers, who were mostly people in their 20s, were swimming about, in their underwear or naked. I jumped in, too, maybe in my underwear or maybe fully clothed. I noticed that some of the people were closer to my age as well.

Then I was walking down a curved, old street in Vienna. The shops were painted black with gold lettering, and at a certain point it was a perfect photo, so I took out my phone, but then I had to walk backward a little because my forward progress had changed the relation of the street curves to each other and made a less-perfect photo.

A bit later on the same street, I saw that there was a huge, glittering spiderweb that stretched across the whole street. Not the classic radial design of Charlotte Cavatica, but a tangle of lines going in all directions, shaped something like a suspension bridge. As I watched, a very, very small flying squirrel slid down one of the lines, gilded by the sun. I brought my camera up to take its picture, but I couldn't locate it with the viewfinder or else it had already gone. I wondered if it was really a flying squirrel and thought that maybe it was a hummingbird. But I was pretty sure about the flying squirrel, even though it was just a glimpse.<\/i>

As I told Carlene, I believe that I was dreaming about my soul.

Once or twice in our tenancy here, one of the cats has killed a flying squirrel. The first time it happened, I could hardly believe it; the thing was so tender and beautiful, with a face like a little otter and an odd, spatulate tail, with the hairs arranged in a chevron pattern, for gliding. But I was also utterly surprised that there were flying squirrels in my neighborhood. Where are they? No one I know here has ever seen one in the wild. So it is with the soul; it is something beautiful that belongs to you, and it is all around, maybe in the tree over your head right now, but it lives its own life and you will only rarely see it.

The thing is to cultivate the knowledge of it. Not even necessarily to know more about it, but to know OF it, to remember that it is somewhere nearby, and that it is a pearl of great price that you already own. And this is not so that you can produce or achieve something; it is only in the interest of remembering always the unseen world that surrounds you and inhabits you.

It is only possible to think about and discuss things like this as symbols; they are not reducible to definitions and facts.

Now a breeze is blowing dried leaves across the deck with a skittering sound. Next door, Tom and Amy's lights are on; they are getting their twins ready for preschool.

So this is where I am going right now, as I permit myself to focus on my inner development and let go of taking care of everyone else; I go to seek the pearl of great price.

It's been so peaceful to sit here in the quiet house and talk to you. Thank you for listening.







\u201cAgain, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.\" Matthew 13:45

<\/i>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:741468","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/741468.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=741468"}}],"title":"My Abandonment","published":"2019-03-17T20:00:23Z","updated":"2019-03-17T20:03:18Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"\"download\"

I finished this book at 2:30 this morning. I knew I would like it very much, because I liked the movie, although, because I am a book person more than a movie person, I wish I had read the book first and maybe skipped the movie. It's more my own when I have populated a book with faces of my own devising, with settings that draw more on my own experiences.

The story is about Caroline, who lives with her father hidden in the Forest Park in Portland, Oregon - how they live in a cave dug in the ground and covered with ferns, how they have a lookout hidden by branches high in a tree, how he has taught her to walk on the stones placed among the woodland plants to avoid making a trail, to see outsiders and slip away, to eat what can be made on a Coleman stove with water from a stream and pack every scrap out, how to carry herself when they go into town to avoid attracting attention.

Here<\/a> is the news story on which the book is based.

What happens to them? I won't tell you. Read this lovely novel."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:710742","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/710742.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=710742"}}],"title":"Pandemic Legacy","published":"2018-06-23T17:42:48Z","updated":"2018-06-23T17:43:29Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"family"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"games"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"vacations"}}],"content":"Pandemic is a contemporary board game in which the players work cooperatively to wipe out four global diseases before they overwhelm humanity. Honora and Tristan came back from their 2016 road trip raving about this game that they had played in Seattle, so I bought it to bring on a Virginia beach trip last summer. The kids and I really liked it; Toby doesn\u2019t like board games at all. I especially liked the cooperative aspect; I\u2019m not a decent strategist, but Honora, who can\u2019t do things like remember to take a half-eaten banana out of the car, can think of four different possible strategies and evaluate where each one will land us several moves out, and I love watching this. Basically, I\u2019m anyone\u2019s lackey in the game, but I don\u2019t mind.

Tristan bought Pandemic Legacy for me and Honora last Christmas. This is a version of the game meant to be played 12 - 24 times only, with each time changing the game board, players and play permanently moving forward. We started it tonight. People, it is amazing. There are eight compartments in the box that you don\u2019t open until you are told. There are rules on stickers to be added to the rule book in those compartments, but you don\u2019t know what they are. You will be discarding characters and some cities will collapse and be X-ed off the board. And your own character will acquire \u201cscars,\u201d new traits that you add when directed. Basically, it is the coolest thing you can imagine.

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\"IMG_3831\"


We lost the first round, although we eradicated the blue disease, so we got to name and mutate it. It is now called Blurgh Disorder and it is easier to cure because it got a \u201cpositive mutation.\u201d We got to choose an End of Game Upgrade, and we chose \u201cEfficient to Sequence\u201d against a permanent research station, which will speed the eradication of the remaining diseases. We will try January again tomorrow, with increased \u201cfunding\u201d and if we lose again, we go on to February with our scars, our new situations and resources."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:698735","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/698735.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=698735"}}],"title":"Phantom Thread","published":"2018-02-12T20:02:10Z","updated":"2018-02-13T00:36:32Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"movies"}},"content":"I LOVE a movie that makes me think and wonder. Maybe everyone does, but only certain things make me wonder. One of those is people behaving in ways authentic-seeming but unusual. This film kept me enthralled and guessing until the very end. I'm going to tell you the non-spoilery things about Phantom Thread<\/i> above the cut, then those who have seen it can read below the cut.

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So, Daniel Day-Lewis is a high end dress designer - think \"House of Chanel\" - in the maybe 50s. He lives, sews and shows in a posh multi-floor London townhouse, with his sister Cyril, who looks after the business end. He sells to duchesses and wealthy woman, bespoke only. When you meet him, he is a rigid and moody impresserio, and you briefly see him ignoring his live-in girlfriend at breakfast, whom Cyril offers to send away since the relationship seems to have ended.

On a trip to their country house, he goes for dinner in a restaurant and sees a lovely young and awkward woman, Alma, and asks her to have dinner with him. He is clearly quite struck with her, but of course, you know from seeing the girlfriend previously that he tends to move from beautiful girl to beautiful girl, so you expect that he will pick this one up, use her up and spit her out.

Alma is curiously confident with him, as well, although she is clearly much younger, less sophisticated, and inexperienced, maybe of a lower social class. On their first date, he picks her up in his fancy sports car, takes her to dinner, then invites her back to his country house where - no, not that - he takes her measurements and chooses fabric to make a dress for her.

On a later date he tells her, \"I feel as if I've been looking for you for a long time.\"

\"Well, you found me,\" she says. \"Whatever you do with me, do it carefully.\"



The Thread of the title- it's the secret words he puts into dresses. In the first conversation they have, he tells her of a superstition about not touching a wedding dress or you'll never marry. He himself has never has married, and he tells her about this supposed curse while recounting that he made his own mother's wedding dress for her second wedding, when he was only 14. No one would help him, so he sewed it all himself, a symbolic wedding to his mother.

He touched his mother's wedding dress and he is mother- bound and can't marry. But Alma removes the phantom thread from the wedding dress they sew for the duchess (it is hidden, and says \"never cursed\"), symbolically unbinding him. She continuously penetrates his resistance with her insistence on being herself and on opposing him, unlike the biddable models of his showroom.

When she poisons him, she chances killing him, but this brush with death allows him also to be reborn. She cares for him like a mother with a baby and receives him into his new life. I have to think that, after the days of sickness, when he comes down and finds her asleep guarding the wedding dress, he knows that she has poisoned him. And that is when he asks her to marry him; the words he uses are \"a house that cannot change is dead,\" calling to mind the cursed sleeping castle of Sleeping Beauty, or that of Beauty and the Beast, in which a monster is returned to his birthright by his awakened ability to love (or am I only thinking of the Disney version here?).

In the second poisoning, the filmmaker is playing with the viewer. It's only as he begins to eat the poisoned mushrooms, looking into Alma's eyes as they smile at each other, that you suspect it; he already knows what she is doing. It's what they do, as she says, because \"you just need to settle down.\" It's a kind of sex and love play, poisoning and saving, and the goodness of this arrangement is attested to by the final scene, in which you see that they have a baby in a baby carriage.

<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:696090","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/696090.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=696090"}}],"title":"Cleaning Up the Old Flist","published":"2018-01-19T01:07:49Z","updated":"2018-01-19T01:08:04Z","content":"I went through my friends list and deleted accounts not heard from in many a long year. If you are still reading mine and want to be added, just speak up. I think I've got it right, so I don't expect to hear from anyone. There was someone who disappeared about eight years ago, and I've always missed her, isn't that silly?"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:693819","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/693819.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=693819"}}],"title":"The City & the City, by China Mieville","published":"2018-01-02T02:41:58Z","updated":"2018-01-02T03:14:47Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"I am in transports of happiness over this book, and have been telling everyone to read it.

The City & the City<\/i> is a detective novel that takes place in two cities occupying the same space, separated only by social custom and rigorous individual policing of perception. Beszel, the home of the detective Tyador Borlu, is a slightly run-down Eastern European city - think, Prague in 1981 - while Ul Qoma is more like Lausanne, prosperous and modern. Relations between them are prickly. But here is the thing; although there are all-Beszel and all-Ul-Quoma areas, \"totalities,\" much of the cities overlap, so that a single street may contain houses or even apartments in Beszel, while the remaining ones are in Ul Qoma. A local park, which has a different name in each city, contains trees which are \"crosshatched,\" some part of the tree in Beszel and another in Ul Qoma, with anxious parents standing nearby coaching their children not to see the children of the other city climbing next to them. Citizens of each city-state are rigorously trained from childhood to unsee whatever is in the other locale, and failure to do so is punished severely and immediately by Breach, a shadowy body capable of disappearing offenders.

In the center of the cities is a large diplomatic building, \"Copula Hall\" in both languages, that is neither crosshatched nor a mix of static totalities, but a both-and-none arrangement. The gate underneath Copula Hall is the checkpoint through which one may pass, with the proper documentation, from one city to the other. When Borlu leaves Beszel and enters Ul Qoma, he must struggle for a moment when he passes his own house - but cannot see it, because it is in Beszel.

I don't want to tell you the story of the book, but the story in any case is not the main driver; it is the amazing world building, and what the lives of the people of Beszel and Ul Qoma suggest about our own rigorous social constructions, such as race and gender.

\"4703581\""},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:634913","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/634913.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=634913"}}],"title":"\"Where I'm From\"","published":"2016-07-04T02:25:28Z","updated":"2016-07-04T02:26:29Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"poetry"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"navel gazing"}}],"content":"After the service at church this morning I went to a workshop on writing a \"Where I'm From\" poem. Here <\/a> is the original, by the Poet Laureate of Kentucky, George Ella Lyon. The Worship Associates have all written them; there's a sort of rubric, like a Mad Lib, but they tell me that it comes out different each time. You don't have to focus on your childhood. I was interested in this because the Worship Associates have been introducing themselves by reading their poems in the service, and they are all sort of anodyne. I wanted to see if you could write one about an unhappy childhood.

Here's the rubric:

The \u201cWhere I\u2019m From\u201d Template
I am from (specific ordinary item)___________________________,
from (two product names)________________________ and________________________.
I am from the _____________________________________________________________ (home description... adjective, adjective, sensory detail).
I am from the ___________________________________________(plant, flower, natural item),
the ___________________________________________________(plant, flower, natural detail).
I am from _______________________________________________________(family tradition)
and _______________________________________________________________(family trait),
from _________________(name of family member) and ______________(another family name)
and ______________________(family name).
I am from the ______________________________________ (description of family tendency) and _____________________________________________________________ (another one).
From __________________________________________ (something you were told as a child) and _________________________________________________________________ (another).
I am from ____________________________________________________________________.
(representation of religion, or lack of it). Further description.
I'm from ____________________________ (place of birth and family ancestry), from
___________________ and ____________________ (two food items representing your family).
From the ________________________________________________________________ (specific family story about a specific person and detail),
the_____________________________________________________________________
(another detail about another family member).
I am from _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.(location of family pictures, mementos, archives and several more lines indicating their worth).


Adapted from George Ella Lyons\u2019s poem \u201cWhere I\u2019m From\u201d\tUUCA\/McEmrys\/Thompson\/Ullius, rev May 24. 2016

But really, you are supposed to write it in a group, because it is as much about revealing yourself to others as about writing poetry. I'll show you mine in the next entry.

Go ahead and show me yours!"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:578090","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/578090.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=578090"}}],"title":"Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid,and Sideways on a Scooter","published":"2015-07-04T00:57:16Z","updated":"2015-07-04T21:29:51Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"I decided to review these two books together because I've read them both recently, and I see that they represent a trend in my reading.

I read a review of Chasing Chaos,<\/i> by Jessica Alexander, and decided to get my hands on it because being an aid worker is a sort of \"no, never\" fantasy of mine - like, if I were a somewhat different person, less timid and reliant on routine, humanitarian aid would be a career in line with my values and ambitions.

Alexander began her career in humanitarian aid for some reason connected, but inexplicably so, to her mother's death. After her initial job, she realized that you have to have a master's degree to get a good position, so she came back to the States and did that. In her career, she has worked in Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Haiti - the worst crises, the worst suffering, the most chaos. But what comes through in her narrative is not those places, but the life of the aid worker. You are always arriving in the moment when people are having the worst time of their whole, already straitened, lives. You are always working with too much disruption, too few materials, insufficient communication, and whatever you do is inadequate to the needs in front of you. Alexander did not get jaded or cynical - a lot of aid workers do - but she did get concerningly accustomed to excitement and to temporary relationships. There is a lot of drinking and casual sex in humanitarian aid.

I got some insight into what doesn't <\/i> work in aid. Material donations are actually problematical in many ways; they are not what is needed, they require a lot of time to deal with (she cites a large box of Santa costumes that arrived after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist country); and often, distributing materials for free puts local small vendors out of business just when it is most important to rebuild the extant distribution network.

And I got my look into the more adventurous, adrenaline-soaked, alternate life that I didn't have.

Sideways on a Scooter<\/i> is Miranda Kennedy's memoir of living in Delhi as a freelance foreign correspondent in the early 2000s. Since India another fantasy life of mine - maybe someday I really will live there, though! - I was interested in her experiences as a foreigner in the rapidly expanding and globalizing India.

She tells the story of the \"new India\" in conflict with the 3000-year-old, traditional culture through that of her two best Indian women friends and their struggles with the importance of marriage and family, of the subsuming of individual women's identities in the maintenance of tradition.

Her friend Geeta lives without her parents in Delhi - although she was only allowed this because she lives with and takes care of the grandmother of family friends. Women living alone in India are regarded as possibly damaged goods - they may have been \"boyfriended\" and therefore fail to represent the chaste, pious and submissive model of an Indian wife - and have difficulty passing muster with the families who must agree to have them in an arranged marriage. Geeta wants a Bollywood love story, but she finds that it is not so easy to bring this about while maintaining the necessary image. During Kennedy's tenure, she finally finds her man on an Indian dating site and, breath-held, meets him, brings the necessary agreements about with both families (this is the arranged-cum-love marriage she has decided to pursue) and has the wedding. Then she is filed with doubt - the boy comes from South India while she comes from North India and she is unhappy living with his family - but in the end she and her lovely new husband break with tradition again and move to their own home, and she is happy.

Parvati is Kennedy's other friend and a complete rebel against the role expectations she faces. She has a \"friend\" but she cannot live with him, and in fact, he has a wife he has separated from elsewhere, and his wife has a baby by yet another man. But divorce would be so shameful that none of them even considers it. Parvati gets bitter before she finally turns it around and begins looking for land near the rural village of her childhood, with hopes that she, her lover and his wife can live there in peace.

Kennedy views herself and her own resistance to commitment through the lens of these women and their struggles. When she arrives in India, she has a boyfriend back in New York; to avoid censure, she tells people that she is waiting for this ersatz husband to join her. In fact, they have an open relationship and Kennedy pursues a number of short term affairs as she travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan on reporting jaunts and hangs out with other reporters in the boozy clubs they frequent. But of course, all of this must be hidden from her Brahmin maid and the Dalit woman who collects her trash! Kennedy explores the lasting practice of caste prejudice through these two women who work for her and either cling to their caste status or attempt to exceed it.

I gobbled this book up and felt as if I was having my own years in India. Of course, at times I wondered how Kennedy could remember these conversations and events of years ago, but who knows? Maybe she kept a diary."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:569403","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/569403.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=569403"}}],"title":"Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison","published":"2015-05-31T22:18:08Z","updated":"2015-06-01T12:40:29Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"I bought this book by looking up \"Best Books on Suicide\" on Amazon. I've read Jamison's other, famous, book on bipolar disorder, An Unquiet Mind,<\/i> which was a pleasure of silky, elegant, apt writing - and so was this.

I bought this a week or so after Paul committed suicide. I can't say why I wanted to read about suicide, or rather, why I felt as if it would comfort me, but it has. Maybe because self-murder seems inexplicable - I wanted to know why.

Normally, I have trouble finishing non-fiction books, but again, Jamison is a great writer and Night Falls Fast<\/i> is written with compassion and rigor. Despite the fact that I have suicidal clients sometimes, I have only occasionally had to send them to the hospital - probably three times in seventeen years - and I had never bothered to know more about suicide than the therapist's normal protocol.

Things I didn't know that I know now: suicide is almost exclusively the product of mental illness, not circumstances, and the three vastly preponderant illnesses at the root of suicide are bipolar disorder, depression and the personality disorders; suicide, despite often being preceded by months or years of suicidal thoughts, is very frequently impulsive, and the mentally ill most likely to commit suicide are those who also have a rash, violent or impulsive temperament and access to certain means; the drug lithium is protective against suicide to a great degree, even apart from how effective it is in treating individual mood dysregulation. That is to say, for unknown reasons, even if the lithium does not regulate your bipolar moods or your depression, it can protect you from suicide. Suicide does, indeed, occur in clusters, especially among the young - Plano, Texas; Leominster, Massachusetts; Mankato, Minnesota; Fairfax County, Virginia. That's us, Fairfax County. Different countries have characteristic means of suicide and when people immigrate, they bring these along until they have assimilated; they then adopt the means of the new land. For instance, more men than women complete a suicide except in China, where rural women have access to deadly pesticides and little access to emergency health care, but in the U.S., it's guns, of course, and men.

I understood this before but I understand it better now, after the struggles of the winter and my continuing difficulty in feeling okay all the time: people don't kill themselves from cowardice or rage or a wish to make other people sorry. They do it because they just can't stand how they feel anymore and they can't imagine it will ever change."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:559985","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/559985.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=559985"}}],"title":"In a Rocket Made of Ice: Among the Children of Wat Opat, Gail Gutradt; The Inheritors","published":"2015-04-16T19:53:18Z","updated":"2015-04-16T19:59:53Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"\"cover\"

This is a certain kind of book that I like to read, about a kind of person that most of us are not as good as, doing a kind of work that most of us can't do, but we can support. Wat Opat was founded by a former Marine medic and a Buddhist monk on a piece of scrap land in Cambodia as a hospice and orphanage for children with AIDS. Over twenty years, it became not only a place to die, but with the introduction of antiretroviral drugs into Cambodia, a home for children with and without HIV and sometimes their infected parents as well. Children at Wat Opat used to die before they grew up; now some of them have lived to attend college or to become independent.

Gail Gutradt has lived and worked at Wat Opat for six months at a time. She paints a portrait of Wayne, the former Marine, and the philosophy that has allowed him to keep Wat Opat alive, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, for twenty years - do what is do-able, don't overreach, and trust in God.

Also read: The Inheritors,<\/i> by William Golding. A review of another book mentioned that William Golding had written a novel about Neanderthals. Exciting! I didn't know that! I went to Paperbackswap to try and get a copy so I could embark on that right away, because I like prehistory. None available, but put it on the wish list. A few days later, I was tidying up the landing where there might be a few stacks of books. Maybe. And there was a copy of The Inheritors,<\/i> with the Paperbackswap trade slip still in it. I guess I'd already had that good idea.

But sadly, I didn't like the book. Golding writes from the point of view of a Neanderthal man with only limited abstract thought and some of the time I could not figure out what was going on. A group of people constructing something of logs - a lot of \"he stood the largest log on its end and wedged it between that and the mountain wall, then placed another log crossways\" - becomes a lot of incomprehensible description. I just lost track of the action sometimes. The Neanderthals could not figure out the Homo Sapiens' behavior and neither could I."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:555957","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/555957.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=555957"}}],"title":"Weird Dream Night","published":"2015-04-02T22:27:35Z","updated":"2015-04-03T06:02:46Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"dreams"}},"content":"Went to bed at about 11:30, woke up at 1:30 with this dream:

I was in a small house, upstairs, and it was getting to be dusk outside. It might have been David and Dan's house, or similar. I stood at a desk and looked out the window.

\"out_the_window_at_dusk_by_spoons1619-d2ys7l6\"

The tabletop phone rang.

\"images\"

I picked it up and it was David. He said, \"We're about to put Happy to sleep and I know you want to be with him and listen in.\" I was supposed to listen as they put their dog down (David and Dan's dog is actually named Pepper, but - double consonant, first and last consonant, pretty close). I was worried about being alone in the house and felt more and more anxious as the silence on the other end of the line continued. I needed them to be done because - something. I needed to do something about being alone in the house, maybe lock the door, or maybe I was afraid that an intruder was already in the house. I got more and more afraid, and suddenly I woke up.

I turned on my light to scrape the fear out of my brain. Went to the bathroom and then back to bed and fell right asleep again.

In the morning I dreamed this:

I was walking in a city in Maryland. A familiar sort of city center, like Dupont Circle in DC. Streets radiating out of the business district had smaller businesses on them. I walked down one street; there was a small, owner-operated soul food restaurant. The street was like the streets in small towns as they move out of the affluent areas; first the curb disappears, then the asphalt fills with potholes and mends, then there are dusty clumps of weeds and a broken sidewalk, then no sidewalk at all, just a path of packed dirt. At the end, I saw a seafood stand, the kind working class people put up by the side of the road - just a cooler, a plastic chair and an umbrella, with a sign. I was excited to go get some oysters for lunch and have the man open them for me (this is actually something I do at the farmers market).

As I got closer to the stand, I saw that the road dead-ended at a park. There was a brown rabbit on a green hill. I forgot the oysters because I needed a rabbit.

\"images\"

As I entered the park, I saw that there were many rabbits on the small hills, a miniature undulating landscape of grass and rabbits. I came farther in and suddenly I realized with joy that I was at the floating village. Yes, there was the visitors' center by the bay, its inside dark and closed at 4:00, and the hotel with its white trim. I couldn't believe it! Now I knew: the floating village is at the end of a disheveled road in Maryland! I could come back! I walked farther in again, marveling and filled with happiness. The grass, the blue bay, the small buildings, all were glowing with my happiness. The floating houses were not there that day, but I didn't notice.

\"BarHarborMorning-720x482\"

Just before I fell asleep again, I had this thought: \"But, Lookfar, you have never actually found the floating village when you were awake. You were mistaken to think you could find it; you never have. It's only in dreams.\"

Still, I woke up feeling happy, from a dream about getting my glasses fixed. I had many parts of glasses - lenses, broken frames, earpieces - in a box, and I was talking to the optician about putting new lenses in my current frames because I like them. It's possible that I had already had this dream before I found the village, because I may have been looking for the optician in Maryland.

~oo0oo~

What does it mean?

I think the dreams are connected. In the first dream, there was death and the death of happiness (Happy the dog). I dreaded the waiting and felt afraid of death - my own in the empty house and the painful wait for the dog's death. It announced the theme - all of us are waiting to be \"put to sleep,\" and all of us are in the inescapable small house of life, waiting for death. What do we see outside the window? What stands outside life?

In the second dream, I returned to a beloved place, and I was overjoyed to find that it was still there. I don't believe in Heaven, or an afterlife, but there is an afterlife insofar as we know that the story is not only about us. The floating village, the place I have longed for and am destined to dwell, is not me; after I have died it will continue and inasmuch as I have loved it and been part of it, I will continue.

As for the glasses? Maybe they were about seeing, about seeing the really big picture, which is hard with only the broken parts of glasses. When you have the full glasses - maybe with new lenses! - you can see, as they say in Nightvale, \"Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.\""},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:554225","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/554225.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=554225"}}],"title":"The Passage and The Twelve by Justin Cronin","published":"2015-03-16T00:15:44Z","updated":"2015-03-16T12:23:48Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"Someone here on LJ recommended The Passage<\/i> to me, probably when I read The Road<\/i> some years ago, as an antidote to that terribly grim post-apocalypse vision. I got it on Paperbackswap and saved it for when when I needed an engrossing read, because the recommender (was it you?) said it was a page-turner. Then came the butt-end of the winter and I needed one. It fulfilled all expectations.

Most of the first book takes place in The Colony, an isolated outpost of barely-surviving human beings, the descendants of a trainload of children taken out of Philadelphia when hoards of experimentally-created soulless vampires moved in almost 100 years earlier. Out of contact with anyone, radios banned because they attracted \"walkers,\" individual survivors looking for safe haven, The Colony doesn't know if they are the last human beings in California, on the North American continent or on Earth. The \"Long Rides\" of twenty years ago have been outlawed because of their high fatality rate; the \"jumps\" are hugely strong and fast and come out at night to tear people apart and drink their blood. All children of The Colony are born in the Sanctuary, an old, brick school building, shielded from the violent reality of their parents' lives until they leave the Sanctuary at age eight to take up training in the hard crafts of agriculture, animal husbandry and manning the walls at night to kill the jumps who approach.

Just that set-up and world building is handled so skillfully, it's well worth reading, but the plotting (mysterious half-vampire test subject who seems immortal, tensions in The Colony, people who want and need to see what's out there, changing nature of the vampire hoardes) and the interwoven plot lines had me completely hooked.

Book Two, like all sequels, seemed a little more jury-rigged (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter) and I didn't enjoy it as much, but I zipped through it because of the relationships I'd formed in Book One. There is supposed to be a third volume, to end at the trilogy, eventually.

So! Put this on your read-while-you-wait list, and thanks, whoever you are.

The Department of Puns

Why has no one found a use for the word \"apocalypso?\" What would it be? Would it be a really extreme version of Island music? Harry Belafonte singing as the world ends, maybe?

Also, Honora posted a photo of herself in bed holding a stuffed llama and I commented that she is a girl who says she would rather \"have a llama next to me than a laminectomy.\" I think I am so funny!"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:491397","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/491397.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=491397"}}],"title":"A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes","published":"2013-10-06T00:50:40Z","updated":"2014-04-18T17:55:21Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"movies"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}}],"content":"I searched this book out because I saw, by chance one time when I was a young teen, the movie version on television and remembered it ever after. I wasn't able to find it anywhere again, but I found the book.

A High Wind in Jamaica<\/i> was published in 1929 but takes place in the late 19th century, after Emancipation, in Jamaica and on the high seas. It opens with the five Bas-Thornton children, who are being raised with benign neglect by their plantation-farming parents. Much of English-occupied Jamaica is half-decayed or in ruins with the demise of slavery and the Bas-Thornton elders have moved the family into one quadrant of the old mansion and let the rest go to vines. The children have a blissful sort of life, swimming and playing and running wild, and the parents have very little idea of what goes on in their uncivilized little minds.

I have to stop here and note the casual racism. I rarely encounter this sort of thing in a book and it's, well, so disappointing and disgusting. Hughes treats the \"Negroes\" on the plantation as buffoons or comic relief, portraying them as ignorant simples or dirty jungle dwellers. I'm not just talking about the N-word, which, for instance, Mark Twain used because it was historically accurate, but without shorting the humanity and complexity of his black characters - it's the ugly and demeaning stereotypes that marred my experience here. But once the children leave Jamaica, there are many fewer instances of that, to my relief.

A hurricane blows the rest of the house flat while the family and the plantation workers huddle in the cellar, and the Bas-Thornton parents decide that they should send the children to England to school, where they will become proper, civilized English children. The plan is to put them on a ship in the care of the kindly sea captain, along with the two children of another family, as unaccompanied minors of a sort.

Everything goes well for the first few days, as the children explore the ship and enjoy themselves. Then the ship is boarded by pirates and in the sort of mishap that many pirates would slap their foreheads about, the pirates take the loot, and without meaning to, the children, away with them.

But the pirates are decent chaps - they are careful never to commit murder, which would bring more attention than they wish - and in time they grow accustomed to the children and the children in turn attach themselves to the pirates. Emily, age ten, is the main protagonist, and she grows to really love the pirate captain. The only part of this I found hard to credit is that the youngest child is Rachel, age 3, and I really couldn't imagine a three-year-old wandering around a ship safely or being sanguine about having no one really looking after her.

The Bas-Thornton children have quite a different time on a pirate ship than is assumed when they finally make it to England. In the end, there is a murder, and a betrayal which Emily does not fully understand at the time the book ends. The book is a meditation on the difference between childhood and adulthood, between the child mind and the adult. The children have spent a good long time as amoral little savages, so fully content that nothing in their experience is guessed by their parents or teachers afterward.

Oh, and I did find the film at last, on DVD from Amazon. It must have become available. It stars Anthony Quinn and James Coburn. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:487425","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/487425.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=487425"}}],"title":"The Golden Compass","published":"2013-09-08T14:10:50Z","updated":"2014-04-18T17:56:54Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"\"Scenes of great power and beauty,\" says the review on the back cover. Tristan and Honora read the His Dark Materials trilogy this summer. I am starting on the Golden Compass for the second time, but the first time was thirteen years ago, when Tristan was eight and I read it out loud. It feels odd to read it to myself and I recognize the plot and characters only when I come upon them.

I'm trying to make time to read. I like to read but the openings don't occur naturally, so I'm being more forceful about making it happen. I know that must seem odd to my flist friends, many of whom read every day and \"too much,\" but I also make myself busy so I don't always read for months at a time. By read, I mean books, as opposed to the internet and newspapers and magazines.

The Golden Compass is a wonderful book."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:481205","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/481205.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=481205"}}],"title":"Discovering Perigord Prehistory and Fifty Shades of Grey","published":"2013-07-19T14:08:51Z","updated":"2014-04-18T17:57:41Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"I tend to read a bunch of books at one time, usually one \u201cice cream\u201d book that I go through pretty fast and several non-fictions that linger and stop and start and are sometimes abandoned. I finished the Fifty Shades<\/i> trilogy last week (pure ice cream) and went back to work on Discovering Perigord Prehistory<\/i>.

First, Fifty Shades:<\/i> the Internet had such a good time kicking this one around that I was surprised at how readable it is. I'm not sure why all the hate, except that it was fan fiction that had the temerity to get published and make the author a fortune, sort of like that arrogant, insecure jerk of a guitar player you knew in high school who went on to become a famous rock star. It's full of Mary-Sueism and it is, after all, a romance novel, albeit with a Red Room of Pain and a rack of floggers, but for what it is, it's pretty good. I wanted to know what happened on the way to the happy ending (screwed up guy relinquishes his need to punish beautiful ladies but retains his Mad Erotic Rough Sex Staging Skillz) and I found Christian Grey a likable character and pretty believable, although his massive industrial empire\/charitable organization was not. It's a fantasy, you know? And in all romance novels, as far as I can tell, the woman's power of purity and love has to overcome the man's reluctance or damage or bad character; they are novels about women's power, but power that is never \"unfeminine\" in the old sense because it rests on traits that are considered womanly.

In the middle of this I read Venitia<\/i> by Georgette Heyer on the recommendation of <\/a>haggispatrol<\/b><\/a><\/span>. This was a witty little Regency romance in which the unusual heroine's wholeness and natural integrity allow her to capture the rake of the neighborhood, reform him and marry him to the dismay of her social set. Naturally, there is plenty of money involved. I've noticed that romances often solve the heroine's money problems as well, although in Venitia<\/i>, it is the heroine who has the cash. More than anything, I liked the copious Regency slang or - what do you call ordinary speech when it is not slang? I don't know. For days I went around saying, \"Don't make a cake of yourself.\"

I've had this prehistoric art book half-read for a while. I bought it as a recommendation from Paperbackswap.com. Four years ago, Toby and I went to France and visited the Dordogne region, which is sometimes called \"the cradle of civilization\" because of the well-preserved prehistoric art there (the actual birth of humankind took place in Africa, as we know, but the conditions of terrain there did not conspire to preserve artifacts). The Dordogne is full of things like this, that date from 17,000 years ago:

\"images\"

\"images-1\"

Here's how my mind works. It's taken me a long time to understand this, and what helped was to see how my kids are like Toby or me in their Myers-Briggs results. Toby and Honora are sensate; they find most interest in the actual, in what is in front of them or what really happened. Tristan and I are intuitive; we are drawn to what is imaginary, how things make us feel or dream, what could happen. When I read non-fiction, I sort of dream about it as I go. I don't remember the facts or chronology; what I like is what it stirs in me. I rarely remember the details, which makes me feel fairly stupid, but I remember the feel of it.

When I proposed the Dordogne visit to Toby, he was surprised, because I wanted to go mainly to see the caves. \"I didn't know you cared about prehistory,\" he said. Toby is the kind of guy who would enjoy reading a whole book about Pickett's Charge and when he was done, he could tell you the entire story - who flanked whom, when the first shot was fired, how many fell. All I can tell you after reading Discovering Perigord Prehistory<\/i> is Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and I had to examine the chart multiple times to remember that. But I find the story of those voices from 17,000 years ago to be immensely charged. Especially the story of Lascaux, discovered in 1940 by three teenaged boys and a dog named Robot when a storm uprooted a tree and revealed a deep hole - a pristine prehistoric cathedral, sealed for hundreds of thousands of years. Human beings have been making art for 300,000 years, and I find the thought of that stirring, humbling and comforting; what does it matter what happens to me now when I think of the billions of human beings who have lived and died unremarked since we became human? And on top of that, how brief our human tenure has been compared to the life of the earth? The dinosaurs were here for 135 million years. Human beings are just a flash in the pan.

\"150px-Venus_of_Tan-Tan\"

This is the Venus of Tan-Tan, 300,000 - 500,000 years old.

Anyway, since I rarely read non-fiction, I enjoyed finding identification points in this book. There were places I have been and names I recognize. Because of my dreaming nature, I sometimes feel that I don't live in a big enough world. I've been pushing in the last decade or so to make the larger world more real to myself. That's a big motivation to travel (and I realize that travel is a luxury), and why I will never go on a cruise; why spend money to see the inside of a boat, essentially a floating hotel, when the same cash could put you at the Parthenon? And if I ever get to see the Parthenon, ancient Greece will be more real to me than it could be by reading histories because I will have a peg to hang it on. I've discovered late in life that if I want to have any history inside me, I have to go there and look.

The ice cream category is now being filled by Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus<\/i>, and the kale category contains The End of Overeating<\/i> and Renaissance Florence<\/i>.

This post is in honor of <\/a>quietselkie<\/b><\/a><\/span>, who writes such nice posts about books."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:475747","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/475747.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=475747"}}],"title":"\"That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine\"","published":"2013-06-10T21:32:51Z","updated":"2013-06-11T01:40:13Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"navel gazing"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"music"}}],"content":"Here's a song by Andrew Bird:<\/a>

If memory serves us, then who owns the master
How do we know who's projecting this reel
And is it like gruel or like quick drying plaster
Tell me how long til the paint starts to peel

Is it like Pyramus or Apollo or an archer we don't know
Though history repeats itself, and time's a crooked bow
Come on tell us something we don't know

Now who's the best boy and the casting director
And the editor splicing your face from the scene
It's all in the hands of a lazy projector
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine

They say all good things must come to an end
Everyday the night must fall
How it all came to this, I simply can't recall
Too many cooks in the kitchen
How the mighty must fall

As I look into my coming life as a lady who doesn't take care of kids, I feel drawn to my past, reminiscing. Little moments from twenty years ago pop into my head, yet at the same time, I've been watching my past - my past being what I remember of the view from inside my mind and behind my eyes - erode. There are things I used to remember, like the names of my grade school teachers and people I knew in high school, that have disappeared. I take down the box labeled \"Grade School Teachers,\" and it is empty.

Sometimes I start to tell a story and then realize I am confounding two experiences, because it doesn't make sense the way I remember it, like something that happened at Christmas but involved fresh cherries from our tree. But I can't separate them again because I haven't got the necessary information.

But this: I kept a diary from age 13 until I got married at age 33. After that it was spotty, and soon after that, I started keeping baby books, which were sometimes full of lies because they were for the kids to read later. Then nothing from 1996 or so until 2004, when I met LiveJournal. But that first, twenty-year, set is sealed in cardboard boxes in our attic. I haven't looked at them since I was in my late twenties, which is to say, while I was still keeping them. I'm afraid to look at them, because I suspect that the first trip through will be like Proust's madeleine, a rush of remembering.* But after that, it will begin again to erode and I will remember reading and remembering, not the original remembering, and the forgetting, embellishing, lying machine will start up. Better to save them, to wait for the right time, and in the meantime, to forget.

*Also, I have a box of letters and cards that I sent to my parents that they saved. I looked into them once and it made me feel sick in a horrible way. Because what I saw was my entirely false determination to make them into a certain kind of happy, functional family by acting as if that was what was happening. And it was not."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:470804","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/470804.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=470804"}}],"title":"I Confess! I like Christian Grey.","published":"2013-05-01T03:03:17Z","updated":"2014-04-18T17:58:30Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},"content":"I didn't wanna do it. The writing is crappy. And I don't even like the porny parts; manacles and floggers are completely \"meh\" in my book. But there's a stealth hook: Christian Grey, the 50 Shades man, is completely f*cked up, and he needs Anastasia Steele to heal him and teach him to love.

Why didn't someone warn me? This is just a romance novel with whips. It's the classic power struggle between the man, who has the worldly power and allure, and the woman who overcomes him with her virtue, beauty and wholeness, winning him to love and thus claiming his power as her own without losing an iota of her femininity.

And now I have to find volume two.

In other reading news, I've gotten halfway through Renaissance Florence<\/i>, a book I saw on sale in the Bargello but bought used on Amazon. It's astounding for me to read non-fiction, only happens once a year and takes the whole year to finish. And while I'm scouting for Fifty Shades of Volume Two, I've got Eleanor and Park<\/i> and then Paula<\/i> by Isabel Allende; I heard her interviewed on the radio this morning and she talked about this book. It's about her daughter and the daughter's death and it sounded so wise. I went to the library on the way home. I go through periods of increased reading interest and then I lose interest again for a while."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:lookfar:469127","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/469127.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/lookfar.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=469127"}}],"title":"Morbid, or Magical Thinking? And a Poem.","published":"2013-04-19T02:03:02Z","updated":"2013-04-19T14:56:38Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"poetry"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"navel gazing"}}],"content":"Toby thinks that some of my thought trains are morbid, but I don't.

Sometimes I think about how many people would come to my funeral if it were held now, and I find that rather comforting. I am honored to count many fine human beings as my friends.

I also like to think consoling thoughts about various deaths. Like, my worst fear of death is to live long enough to be a demented and incontinent shade, tied into a nursing home wheelchair, full of confusion and fear. So it follows that if I turn up with, say, liver cancer (ptoo ptoo ptoo), or a swiftly moving brain tumor - not too soon, but before the nursing home - I might actually feel okay about that. Or I imagine that I might.

Also, I like to contemplate easy suicides. You know, painless and mess-free. I can't work out how you make it okay for your family, though. And of course, the only reason I would do it was if I were terminally ill anyway, because I love life, but when, exactly, do you, before you are too weak and sick to pull it off? My favorite is to slip off the end of the Nantucket ferry at night in the winter, tanked up on gin and Oxycontin; the whole thing probably takes less than an hour and you're food for fishes, never to be found.

Toby dislikes talk of death and illness because he has actually been ill unto death and has no romance with it. I think I might be doing some magical thinking - you know, that if I consider all the possibilities, my thoughts alone will keep them away.

ETA: Oh, I forgot the reason I thought of this post in the first place. Here it is: once you have children, the worst thing in the world would be for them to die. So whenever it's time for me to die, I'll be glad that I get to go before Tristan and Honora, because to see one of them die or to live in a world in which she or he had died would be unbearable. So in that imaginary place where you make deals with god, that's what I'm thinking: I promise to go with a smile on my face as long as Tristan and Honora live.

And now, because April is poetry month, here is poem about death by May Swenson.

Death
great smoothener
maker of order
arrester unraveler sifted and changer
death great hoarder
student stranger drifter traveler
flyer and nester all caught at your border
death
great halter
blackener and frightener
reducer and dissolver
seizer and welder of younger with elder
waker with sleeper
death great keeper
of all that must alter
death
great heightener
leaper evolver
great smoothener
great whitener<\/div>"}]}