1. I'm not sure we had a Hanukkah party tonight. I think we had a Hanukkah blitz. The first round involved many latkes, nearly as much chicken, my brother's onion rings, and the arrival of such persons as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thomasfreund, his excellent person who may or may not have a livejournal, gaudior, weirdquark, nineweaving, Thrud, ericmvan, bobcolby, and Eddy. Eventually most of us settled in the living room—I ran interference for drinks—and the conversation proceeded along all the usual points: opera, philosophy, religion, gaming, neurochemistry, whether or not there were walnuts in the fruitcake . . . The second round hit about two hours later and comprised fleurdelis28 and shmeislin, schreibergasse and G and the unconscionably cute Peter, Viking Zen and her husband, and Wes and his girlfriend, in a sort of intersection of flying visits. There was great carnage of potato and other things that can be fried. I did not have nearly enough time to speak with any one person. I will just have to see them all again in the near future. Especially since some of them presented me with one of the best gifts I have received, a dark red T-shirt printed front and back with D'Aulaires' Loki and his monstrous children—the figure for whom I kept taking Norse Gods and Giants out of the library and never returning it, the year I was in second grade; maybe the first trickster I ever learned. And all of them are the kind of people who make the world flower.
2.lesser_celery has rounded up the honors Not One of Us has attracted in the last year. In brief, we're pretty awesome. I will do that end-of-year accounting meme tomorrow.
3. Last night, I watched Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for the second time and the first since high school; thanks tonineweaving for listening to me afterward. Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif are two of the most beautiful people ever put onscreen alongside one another, certainly in the 1960's. But not conventionally. At twenty-eight, twenty-nine, O'Toole has a face like a classic piece of sculpture—an ephebe, not a Roman soldier—but as Lawrence all his body language is a half-step off, a missed beat, the kind of lanky inelegance that is all the more breathtaking when it resolves into grace. He looks like someone for whom the word fey was invented, here less for its sexual connotations than all the rest; off-key, unearthly, whimsical, doomed. (Can you be a cultural transperson?) In British uniform, he's the local odd bird, the gauche lieutenant with too much education and a trick of putting out matches on his skin. The desert looks the right size for mad knight-errantry, but it's like any other elemental force: it doesn't leave you anything but yourself, and if you don't know—or cannot accept—who that is? "Only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert—Bedouins and Gods; and you're neither." These words are said to Lawrence in the diplomat Dryden's office in Cairo, full of Egyptian frescoes and statuary, Sekhmet, Horus, Ra: sun-gods all. He's fair and fiery enough to stand among them; he blows out a match and the sun comes up over the desert. But it is Sherif Ali who is the dark falcon; he looks like a god of the desert, rippling out of mirage. Lawrence is a sun-god in the last downturn of his myth, Phaethon. No one is going to fish him up and put him back together. The match is blown out.
4. My mother took a surprising number of photographs on Christmas morning in which I figure, from better or worse angles; my brother got most of the photogeny in the family, but I am actually quite fond of this one. I should probably not caption it "I Can Has Consciousness?" because I was awake enough to enjoy the expression on my brother's face as he unwrapped one of his presents, but I am really not a morning person.
( The treasures from the darkness of that single night before. )
5. I am so tired, I feel like I'm hallucinating. I am going to read another chapter of House of Leaves, which probably won't help, and go to bed.
thomasfreund, his excellent person who may or may not have a livejournal, gaudior, weirdquark, nineweaving, Thrud, ericmvan, bobcolby, and Eddy. Eventually most of us settled in the living room—I ran interference for drinks—and the conversation proceeded along all the usual points: opera, philosophy, religion, gaming, neurochemistry, whether or not there were walnuts in the fruitcake . . . The second round hit about two hours later and comprised fleurdelis28 and shmeislin, schreibergasse and G and the unconscionably cute Peter, Viking Zen and her husband, and Wes and his girlfriend, in a sort of intersection of flying visits. There was great carnage of potato and other things that can be fried. I did not have nearly enough time to speak with any one person. I will just have to see them all again in the near future. Especially since some of them presented me with one of the best gifts I have received, a dark red T-shirt printed front and back with D'Aulaires' Loki and his monstrous children—the figure for whom I kept taking Norse Gods and Giants out of the library and never returning it, the year I was in second grade; maybe the first trickster I ever learned. And all of them are the kind of people who make the world flower.2.
lesser_celery has rounded up the honors Not One of Us has attracted in the last year. In brief, we're pretty awesome. I will do that end-of-year accounting meme tomorrow.3. Last night, I watched Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for the second time and the first since high school; thanks to
nineweaving for listening to me afterward. Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif are two of the most beautiful people ever put onscreen alongside one another, certainly in the 1960's. But not conventionally. At twenty-eight, twenty-nine, O'Toole has a face like a classic piece of sculpture—an ephebe, not a Roman soldier—but as Lawrence all his body language is a half-step off, a missed beat, the kind of lanky inelegance that is all the more breathtaking when it resolves into grace. He looks like someone for whom the word fey was invented, here less for its sexual connotations than all the rest; off-key, unearthly, whimsical, doomed. (Can you be a cultural transperson?) In British uniform, he's the local odd bird, the gauche lieutenant with too much education and a trick of putting out matches on his skin. The desert looks the right size for mad knight-errantry, but it's like any other elemental force: it doesn't leave you anything but yourself, and if you don't know—or cannot accept—who that is? "Only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert—Bedouins and Gods; and you're neither." These words are said to Lawrence in the diplomat Dryden's office in Cairo, full of Egyptian frescoes and statuary, Sekhmet, Horus, Ra: sun-gods all. He's fair and fiery enough to stand among them; he blows out a match and the sun comes up over the desert. But it is Sherif Ali who is the dark falcon; he looks like a god of the desert, rippling out of mirage. Lawrence is a sun-god in the last downturn of his myth, Phaethon. No one is going to fish him up and put him back together. The match is blown out.4. My mother took a surprising number of photographs on Christmas morning in which I figure, from better or worse angles; my brother got most of the photogeny in the family, but I am actually quite fond of this one. I should probably not caption it "I Can Has Consciousness?" because I was awake enough to enjoy the expression on my brother's face as he unwrapped one of his presents, but I am really not a morning person.
( The treasures from the darkness of that single night before. )
5. I am so tired, I feel like I'm hallucinating. I am going to read another chapter of House of Leaves, which probably won't help, and go to bed.
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