But I should tell you, I'm a really private person

Notes from a frustrating day of computer troubles and about three hours of sleep in forty-five-minute increments. It got much better in the evening when rushthatspeaks and I made dinner, set up cookies, and watched some television, but I still feel like faceplanting in my keyboard and I have an X-ray in the morning. I can't even see, on LJ, the icon I've chosen for this post. Anyway—

I can't remember why I wanted to see Hedda Gabler at the Huntington Theatre in 2000. I have little affinity for Ibsen outside of A Doll's House (and I wouldn't even realize that until 2008), so I think I must have been interested in Kate Burton. The production had some real problems. She was fine in the title role. The performance I walked away remembering, however, was Michael Emerson's Tesman. Instead of a stuffy pedant who couldn't spare the time to notice his wife's identity crisis, he played the character as a boyish geek absolutely bowled over by this force of nature that had for God knew what reasons consented to marry him, only to find by the end of their honeymoon that they had not a single interest in common. The audience can see her reasons: he's dazzled with her, it's flattering and it makes her feel fondly toward him, even if fondness is not love. But the audience can see with equal clarity why the marriage doesn't stand a chance. Brilliant he may not be, but Tesman lives in his head, an imperviously unworldly combination of easily distractable and easily obsessed—the kind of husband who takes his research on honeymoon with his new wife. By the play's end, he's bonding with Thea Elvsted over the notes left by his academic rival, genuinely dedicated to reconstructing a book that will eclipse his own uninspired contributions to the field. They exit talking excitedly about manuscript order. There was never anything in their lives together that Hedda could talk so enthusiastically to him about.

And so, as happens sometimes, the actor went on my radar immediately; I waited to see what he did next and what he did next was Lost (2004–2010). Not even for Michael Emerson could I bring myself to watch that show. I'm glad he was employed and I don't even slightly regret my decision. But then he was cast in Person of Interest (2011–) and I kept hearing mixed but intriguing things about it and tonight Rush-That-Speaks and I watched the first episode. (We chased it with the first episode of Leverage (2008–2012) and plan to continue this double-feature approach so long as the synchronicity of episodes and seasons supports it.)

I understand that one of the engines of this show is going to be the synergy between Reese and Finch. They have great chemistry of trust and withholding already. Jim Caviezel has a really interesting face and I look forward to finding out what he's like beyond his tragic backstory and his ridiculous deadpan competence ("No, Lionel. He's in the trunk"). Finch has wire-rimmed glasses and three-piece suits and the stiffly canted posture of someone who's had their spine fused (including some of their cervical vertebrae) and vertical Oppenheimer hair and odd vocal rhythms and an even more enigmatic backstory that is clearly one of the series mysteries, complete with moral ambiguity and second thoughts about the ethics of the world-changing instrument he invented for the government and this is like Van Heflin levels of stupidly interesting to me, all right? Dude lives in an abandoned branch library. I can't promise I wouldn't if I had the resources of an eccentric billionaire. At a time in my life when I've had the same migraine for about three days, I really appreciate the universe throwing this sort of thing my way. I may have types, but at least I know about them. Every now and then they get to be protagonists.

Take me back on the bay, boys

Today involved no sleep, a very early orthodontist's appointment with bonus braces-tightening, and a complete failure to nap in the afternoon thanks to derspatchel's current next-door neighbors waging the age-old battle of Power Mower vs. Hedge Trimmer (spoiler: nobody within earshot wins), but I also got several hours with my cats and a windfall from a library sale: Moods of the Sea: Masterworks of Sea Poetry (1981), edited by George C. Solley and Eric Steinbaugh of the U.S. Naval Academy. I had no idea this book existed. It's full of poets I would have included, like Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, H.D., Matthew Arnold, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Herman Melville, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, not to mention material from the folk tradition like the Odyssey, sea chanteys, and "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry," but it's also full of poets I wouldn't necessarily have expected or hadn't even heard of—Carl Sandburg and e.e. cummings among the former, Stephen Spender and R.P. Blackmur among the latter. The anthology was put together in the year I was born and I know it's arrogant to think it was waiting for me, but it was there on the shelf and for two dollars I regret nothing, but I wouldn't have regretted it for even more.

Appropriately, my poem "Ghost Ships of the Middlesex Canal" has been accepted by Not One of Us.

All dripping in tangles green,
Cast up by a lone sea,
If purer for that, O Weed,
Bitterer, too, are ye?
—Herman Melville, "The Tuft of Kelp"