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We will tell them building bridges, and be off and on our way
1. It's spring and the anthologies are starting to bloom. Here, We Cross—a chapbook of queer and genderfluid poems collected from the first seven issues of Stone Telling—is now available from Stone Bird Press. The table of contents includes work by Michele Bannister, Jack H. Marr, Dominik Parisien, Amal El-Mohtar, Jeannelle Ferreira, Lisa Bradley, Adrienne J. Odasso, and I'm not even naming all the ones that impressed me. Also in that lineup are my poems "Persephone in Hel" and "The Clock House," the former written for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks, the latter for Christopher Morcom and Alan Turing. Yes, you could read them off the website, but you could also have them in beautiful print and support a small press besides.
2. I must confess that my first reaction to this article about the creation and debunking of two recent historical hoaxes was: next time, put more research into your marks. (And remember that there is more to the internet than Wikipedia.) I look forward to seeing what happens next year.
3. I didn't realize there was a Canonical List of Weird Band Names. It doesn't seem to have been updated in some time, but it confirms my belief that any time the phrase "That would make a great band name" is uttered, somewhere, someone does. Also, I listen to some of these bands.
4. I will probably not hear any of them on WFNX, because the station has been sold to Clear Channel. That is not good. I have no idea what my brother is going to listen to when we drive anywhere in Boston now.
5. This article reminded me that I have been meaning to rewatch The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) for years. It is not a great film. I find myself saying that by way of disclaimer whenever I bring it up. It is a three-hour spectacle within which exists about an hour of good movie, mostly to be found in the interactions of the supporting cast—Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer, Sophia Loren; unfortunately, the lead is Stephen Boyd and despite his strong work along similar lines in Ben-Hur (1959), he has here the charisma of a grocery bag and doesn't seem able to act his way out of one. He has so little chemistry with Loren, I don't even feel like making the effort of an amusing simile. Sometimes the script wants to be contemporary political commentary in the guise of costume drama and more often it's just swords and sandals. There is an attack of German tribesmen which I would swear was organized by rounding up whoever was loose on the lot at the time, handing them all blond wigs and different pieces of fur, and telling them to scream and run that way. And yet it furnished me with at least two performances I remember very fondly and I found myself writing once toteenybuffalo that the funeral of Marcus Aurelius is genuinely something from another world. It is winter, leaden overcast among the black pines of Germany; it is wordless or nearly so, because I remember no speeches, just the files of soldiers that fill up the stone court foursquare and the torches they carry, like ragged banners in the wind; if there are not trumpets, there is certainly the dull heartbeat of the drum and mourners' moans. It begins to snow, sputtering and snapping onto the torches. The wind blows back Timonides' hair; he is not a young man, the emperor's body-servant who was once his slave, and he looks it now, bareheaded in the cold, holding the lit brand for Aurelius' pyre. Livius takes it from him, but it is Commodus who whispered, "If you listen very carefully, you can hear the gods laughing." It sounds to us like the crackle of flames, the soft hiss of falling snow. But he has never been stable, and soon he will be mad, and he might very well be right. Just for those scraps of another time, I'd sit through scenes like the one where Sophia Loren is supposed to prefer Stephen Boyd to Omar Sharif.
rushthatspeaks, the latter for Christopher Morcom and Alan Turing. Yes, you could read them off the website, but you could also have them in beautiful print and support a small press besides. 2. I must confess that my first reaction to this article about the creation and debunking of two recent historical hoaxes was: next time, put more research into your marks. (And remember that there is more to the internet than Wikipedia.) I look forward to seeing what happens next year.
3. I didn't realize there was a Canonical List of Weird Band Names. It doesn't seem to have been updated in some time, but it confirms my belief that any time the phrase "That would make a great band name" is uttered, somewhere, someone does. Also, I listen to some of these bands.
4. I will probably not hear any of them on WFNX, because the station has been sold to Clear Channel. That is not good. I have no idea what my brother is going to listen to when we drive anywhere in Boston now.
5. This article reminded me that I have been meaning to rewatch The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) for years. It is not a great film. I find myself saying that by way of disclaimer whenever I bring it up. It is a three-hour spectacle within which exists about an hour of good movie, mostly to be found in the interactions of the supporting cast—Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer, Sophia Loren; unfortunately, the lead is Stephen Boyd and despite his strong work along similar lines in Ben-Hur (1959), he has here the charisma of a grocery bag and doesn't seem able to act his way out of one. He has so little chemistry with Loren, I don't even feel like making the effort of an amusing simile. Sometimes the script wants to be contemporary political commentary in the guise of costume drama and more often it's just swords and sandals. There is an attack of German tribesmen which I would swear was organized by rounding up whoever was loose on the lot at the time, handing them all blond wigs and different pieces of fur, and telling them to scream and run that way. And yet it furnished me with at least two performances I remember very fondly and I found myself writing once to
teenybuffalo that the funeral of Marcus Aurelius is genuinely something from another world. It is winter, leaden overcast among the black pines of Germany; it is wordless or nearly so, because I remember no speeches, just the files of soldiers that fill up the stone court foursquare and the torches they carry, like ragged banners in the wind; if there are not trumpets, there is certainly the dull heartbeat of the drum and mourners' moans. It begins to snow, sputtering and snapping onto the torches. The wind blows back Timonides' hair; he is not a young man, the emperor's body-servant who was once his slave, and he looks it now, bareheaded in the cold, holding the lit brand for Aurelius' pyre. Livius takes it from him, but it is Commodus who whispered, "If you listen very carefully, you can hear the gods laughing." It sounds to us like the crackle of flames, the soft hiss of falling snow. But he has never been stable, and soon he will be mad, and he might very well be right. Just for those scraps of another time, I'd sit through scenes like the one where Sophia Loren is supposed to prefer Stephen Boyd to Omar Sharif.
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The band names are excellent.
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I'd never heard the story. That's really neat: especially as people became aware and began contributing to the narrative. Thanks for the link!
I should send her an email....
You should.