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All night I heard two voices from out here in the hall
Today contained far more public transit frustration than it really needed to, but in the evening ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesser_celery came over and I showed him The Legend of Hell House (1973), which I love and he hadn't seen. It went over well. The obvious direction for next week is some other title containing the word "house," because he was joking that he couldn't remember if he'd seen The Haunting of Hill House or The House on Haunted Hill, but I am afraid that way eventually lies Obayashi.
I feel as though I'm writing more about my daily life than I have in a long time, but less about my thoughts. I find myself wanting to do something literary and unethical, like write in detail about the people I love: I don't know what point that would prove. I admire memoir as I do most genres I can't (have no idea whether I could) write, but I don't know if I want that much of myself in print for others. Then I don't know why I write that sentence, because it's not as though my recurring motifs are especially hard to decode. I think of myself as relatively transparent. It surprised me in January to find out how little I had let some people know.
(I looked to see what I was doing this time last year, in case it was diagnostic; looks like writing about British noir. Draw your own conclusions.)
That five-questions meme has come around again, this time set byrose_lemberg:
1. Late at night, inside an old theater, you meet a friendly ghost. Who is it? (bonus: and where?)
One should meet an acting ghost in a theater. That doesn't narrow it down much for me—I have too many actors and playwrights who are no longer alive. (Seriously, it made me so happy when I realized there were character actors nowadays I could follow as enthusiastically as the ones who floruit 1935–1970. I still can't believe I saw Karl Johnson onstage years before he mattered to me.) The temptation is to say something like a stagehand from the Old Vic who could tell me all the footlights gossip, the stories I wouldn't know from reading the reviews years later. Or Aristophanes in the ruins of the Theater of Dionysos, so I can make him pronounce that 171-letter word from Ekklesiazousai. Oh, what the hell, I was just talking about The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov at the Moscow Art Theatre. I could tell him his manuscripts didn't burn.
2. If you could choose only three poems to represent your work, which ones would they be?
I have absolutely no idea what makes a representative Taaffe poem, so let's say "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," "Drowning Like You Mean It," and "The Clock House." Ask me again in six months and I'm sure one of these will have changed.
3. What is your favorite piece of clothing?
That I actually wear? Boringly, I really like my green corduroy jacket. I bought it over the summer of 2005 when I had to start teaching in the fall; it was my attempted concession to professional dress. It's moss-colored and beginning now to fray at the pockets, because I fill them with wallet, keys, cellphone, change, pocketknife, earplugs, chapstick, and whatever else I forget to take out—I have discovered everything from the well-wrapped end of a chocolate curry bar to small stones from a sea I hadn't visited in months, although I don't ever think I have enough tissues. I wear it to conventions. I wear it on the street. I will cheerfully put patches on it when it gets old enough. It goes well with the runner-up to this question, which would have to be the many-colored scarfrushthatspeaks knitted for me two years ago: it started at six feet and wool stretches. I'd back it against Tom Baker any day.
4. A local museum is offering to decommission any piece of art from their collection and give it to you for free. What do you choose?
Oh, God. There are several objects in the MFA which I visit on a regular basis: Ellen Day Hale's self-portrait (1885), Childe Hassam's Boston Common at Twilight (1886), Joseph Stella's Old Brooklyn Bridge (1941), an Eighteenth Dynasty statue of Sekhmet, the cinerary urn of Aulus Folius Felix (when it's on view). I like Etruscan mirrors. I have a thing for ship's portraits and silver gelatin prints. It was only on display briefly, as part of the same exhibition where I got the words palissander and mazarine, but Giovanni Battista Piazzetta's Head of a Young Man Looking Down to the Left looked to me like the beginning of a story. But there is, in a glass-topped case of seals and gems from the ancient Near East, a beautiful little Babylonian stamp seal made of translucent bluish agate which I have been known to say I would steal if I ever went for art theft. It is in the shape of a duck with its head turned back against its wing; it leaves the stamp of a goat-fish—suḫurmāšu, symbol of Ea—with a little moon-crescent, I think, and an asterisk for a star. There do not appear to be any images available on the museum's website, but it looks a little like this. I've loved it since before I could read cuneiform.
5. Which city would you set to music?
Boston, because I know it less well than some cities where I've never lived. If it were a song, I'd have to learn it.
Comment if you want five questions of your own. On the interminable bus this afternoon, I thought of a title for a chapbook of ghost poems. There would still need to be more history.
lesser_celery came over and I showed him The Legend of Hell House (1973), which I love and he hadn't seen. It went over well. The obvious direction for next week is some other title containing the word "house," because he was joking that he couldn't remember if he'd seen The Haunting of Hill House or The House on Haunted Hill, but I am afraid that way eventually lies Obayashi.I feel as though I'm writing more about my daily life than I have in a long time, but less about my thoughts. I find myself wanting to do something literary and unethical, like write in detail about the people I love: I don't know what point that would prove. I admire memoir as I do most genres I can't (have no idea whether I could) write, but I don't know if I want that much of myself in print for others. Then I don't know why I write that sentence, because it's not as though my recurring motifs are especially hard to decode. I think of myself as relatively transparent. It surprised me in January to find out how little I had let some people know.
(I looked to see what I was doing this time last year, in case it was diagnostic; looks like writing about British noir. Draw your own conclusions.)
That five-questions meme has come around again, this time set by
rose_lemberg:1. Late at night, inside an old theater, you meet a friendly ghost. Who is it? (bonus: and where?)
One should meet an acting ghost in a theater. That doesn't narrow it down much for me—I have too many actors and playwrights who are no longer alive. (Seriously, it made me so happy when I realized there were character actors nowadays I could follow as enthusiastically as the ones who floruit 1935–1970. I still can't believe I saw Karl Johnson onstage years before he mattered to me.) The temptation is to say something like a stagehand from the Old Vic who could tell me all the footlights gossip, the stories I wouldn't know from reading the reviews years later. Or Aristophanes in the ruins of the Theater of Dionysos, so I can make him pronounce that 171-letter word from Ekklesiazousai. Oh, what the hell, I was just talking about The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov at the Moscow Art Theatre. I could tell him his manuscripts didn't burn.
2. If you could choose only three poems to represent your work, which ones would they be?
I have absolutely no idea what makes a representative Taaffe poem, so let's say "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," "Drowning Like You Mean It," and "The Clock House." Ask me again in six months and I'm sure one of these will have changed.
3. What is your favorite piece of clothing?
That I actually wear? Boringly, I really like my green corduroy jacket. I bought it over the summer of 2005 when I had to start teaching in the fall; it was my attempted concession to professional dress. It's moss-colored and beginning now to fray at the pockets, because I fill them with wallet, keys, cellphone, change, pocketknife, earplugs, chapstick, and whatever else I forget to take out—I have discovered everything from the well-wrapped end of a chocolate curry bar to small stones from a sea I hadn't visited in months, although I don't ever think I have enough tissues. I wear it to conventions. I wear it on the street. I will cheerfully put patches on it when it gets old enough. It goes well with the runner-up to this question, which would have to be the many-colored scarf
rushthatspeaks knitted for me two years ago: it started at six feet and wool stretches. I'd back it against Tom Baker any day.4. A local museum is offering to decommission any piece of art from their collection and give it to you for free. What do you choose?
Oh, God. There are several objects in the MFA which I visit on a regular basis: Ellen Day Hale's self-portrait (1885), Childe Hassam's Boston Common at Twilight (1886), Joseph Stella's Old Brooklyn Bridge (1941), an Eighteenth Dynasty statue of Sekhmet, the cinerary urn of Aulus Folius Felix (when it's on view). I like Etruscan mirrors. I have a thing for ship's portraits and silver gelatin prints. It was only on display briefly, as part of the same exhibition where I got the words palissander and mazarine, but Giovanni Battista Piazzetta's Head of a Young Man Looking Down to the Left looked to me like the beginning of a story. But there is, in a glass-topped case of seals and gems from the ancient Near East, a beautiful little Babylonian stamp seal made of translucent bluish agate which I have been known to say I would steal if I ever went for art theft. It is in the shape of a duck with its head turned back against its wing; it leaves the stamp of a goat-fish—suḫurmāšu, symbol of Ea—with a little moon-crescent, I think, and an asterisk for a star. There do not appear to be any images available on the museum's website, but it looks a little like this. I've loved it since before I could read cuneiform.
5. Which city would you set to music?
Boston, because I know it less well than some cities where I've never lived. If it were a song, I'd have to learn it.
Comment if you want five questions of your own. On the interminable bus this afternoon, I thought of a title for a chapbook of ghost poems. There would still need to be more history.
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We should get
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