Rabbit, rabbit! How is it March. It was several years ago the last time I looked around.
I have been up to my elbows in eleven-year-olds since the afternoon. The triplets loved The Wizard of Oz (1939). I was asked if the film was a hundred years old, if it was going to be in sepia tone the whole way through. I got the impression they knew some of the story already, at the secondhand reflection of retelling: "Is the Wizard good or bad?" Children of the twenty-first century, the Technicolor transition got them. "Whoa," one breathed, and another asked, "Is this the Land of Oz?" and another said knowledgeably of the stiff lustrous platters of flowers and the spiral of yellow brick, "It's over the rainbow." I had not seen the film since the centenary extravaganza of the Somerville Theatre in 2014 and I keep forgetting how much of it is stashed in my head, in the layers of memories from before I knew some of the idioms, or the humor, or the artifice. The Scarecrow remains talismanically important to me. (The Scarecrow has a terrible case of Tiny Wittgenstein.) I can read now that it was the vestige of a wisely deleted romance, but it always made sense to me that he would be missed most of all. It was not a sleepover movie, but the twins lingered with my niece afterward, spellbound by my mother's stories of her own Kansas twisters. "Was it the one in the movie?"
I opened the olive-green used hardcover of Jacquetta Hawkes' A Land (1951) which arrived as a late Christmas present from my brother and got immediately:
Midway in time between these contemporaries of our own and their earliest Ordovician ancestors, sea-urchins were abundant in the Cretaceous period and left the Chalk full of their neat fossil cones with fine inscribed lines radiating from the apex. Because their shape and these rays made them natural sun symbols, the Bronze Age peoples of Britain had magical uses for them, sometimes burying them with the dead. On Dunstable Down in a grave cut into the Chalk itself, a Bronze Age man was buried lying crouched within a ring of scores of fossil sea-urchins; for those who left him there, he lay underground warmed by as many suns.
We never had a fossil urchin in the house when I was growing up, just a blown-white beaded shell that used to sit on the sash of a window in my grandparents' house along with the rose quartz and what I heard once as a child as Venusian glass, although my grandmother actually said Venetian.
Слава Україні.
I have been up to my elbows in eleven-year-olds since the afternoon. The triplets loved The Wizard of Oz (1939). I was asked if the film was a hundred years old, if it was going to be in sepia tone the whole way through. I got the impression they knew some of the story already, at the secondhand reflection of retelling: "Is the Wizard good or bad?" Children of the twenty-first century, the Technicolor transition got them. "Whoa," one breathed, and another asked, "Is this the Land of Oz?" and another said knowledgeably of the stiff lustrous platters of flowers and the spiral of yellow brick, "It's over the rainbow." I had not seen the film since the centenary extravaganza of the Somerville Theatre in 2014 and I keep forgetting how much of it is stashed in my head, in the layers of memories from before I knew some of the idioms, or the humor, or the artifice. The Scarecrow remains talismanically important to me. (The Scarecrow has a terrible case of Tiny Wittgenstein.) I can read now that it was the vestige of a wisely deleted romance, but it always made sense to me that he would be missed most of all. It was not a sleepover movie, but the twins lingered with my niece afterward, spellbound by my mother's stories of her own Kansas twisters. "Was it the one in the movie?"
I opened the olive-green used hardcover of Jacquetta Hawkes' A Land (1951) which arrived as a late Christmas present from my brother and got immediately:
Midway in time between these contemporaries of our own and their earliest Ordovician ancestors, sea-urchins were abundant in the Cretaceous period and left the Chalk full of their neat fossil cones with fine inscribed lines radiating from the apex. Because their shape and these rays made them natural sun symbols, the Bronze Age peoples of Britain had magical uses for them, sometimes burying them with the dead. On Dunstable Down in a grave cut into the Chalk itself, a Bronze Age man was buried lying crouched within a ring of scores of fossil sea-urchins; for those who left him there, he lay underground warmed by as many suns.
We never had a fossil urchin in the house when I was growing up, just a blown-white beaded shell that used to sit on the sash of a window in my grandparents' house along with the rose quartz and what I heard once as a child as Venusian glass, although my grandmother actually said Venetian.
Слава Україні.
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