He's just upset about missing the Rembrandt exhibit at the National Gallery

[sovay]

1. We have a bed for real. We've been sleeping on a queen-sized futon mattress on the floor since the beginning of the year. As of this evening, the mattress is on a queen-size, non-futon slat frame and the smaller futon, which had been serving as a kind of intermittent alternate bed (derspatchel and I couldn't share a bed most of the time he had his cast), is now a living room couch. This is like receiving two pieces of furniture in one stroke. Someday we will want another, sturdier bedframe—this one is two generations inherited—but the salient point is that the mattress is no longer on the floor and I am really looking forward to sleeping no longer at eye-level with dust bunnies.

2. The History Blog, despite its rather generic name, is a one hundred percent bona fide time sink. As of page six, I am perhaps most fond of the sheep of the White House, the fixed prizefight in 267 CE, and the Emperor Claudius and the ithyphallic god Min, but the tattoo stamps of Auschwitz are awful and haunting. I had not known that was how it was done. I know that the generation of World War II is dying out, because that is my grandparents' generation and neither of them is any longer alive, but I had not thought so concretely of the living fact of those numbers disappearing, turning into symbol and signifier. Something to be evoked, like imperial laurels or no man's land. Everything turns into memory, but there has to be a way to keep memory real.

3. Rob took these pictures of me tonight outside the HFA. We hadn't gone to the movies; we were walking back from Kendall Square. I had broken a sprig of lilac from a bush as we passed and handed it to him; he put it in the band of my hat. "If this comes out," he said during the second photo, "you're going to look like a goddamn Rembrandt."

Fair cop.







I am going to take a shower and sleep on my non-floor bed.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

O my! How beautiful!

I like the dragon making out with Alexander's mum.

Nine

[spatch]

"you're going to look like a goddamn Rembrandt."

VER-MEER! VER-MEER!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Both my grandfathers fought through WW1. I still think of WW2 as comparatively recent history - kids born in the war were still teenagers when I was born - so it's always a shock to be reminded just how fast we are losing the last of the survivors.

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

Great smile! Thanks for sharing the pictures. Oh and I am so glad you got your bed situated.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You really do look like you've stepped out of a Rembrandt painting!

Has anyone done a time travel book like that? In either direction--either entering the painting and thereby going back in time, or having someone come out of a painting. The notion of entering a picture is in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and in Mary Poppins the princes from an illustration come to life, but I wonder if anyone's done it with actual real-life paintings.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

It is lovely to take a brief break from "all planning all the time" and see you looking so happy. Hooray for having a bed you don't have to be on the floor to sleep in.

In re: Everything turns into memory, but there has to be a way to keep memory real.

Do you know about this? batyatoon saw it at work and told me about it.