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Someday a change will come and you'll be beside me one more time
So far today has been very full of work and catch-up. My brain feels like a rinsed-off slate. I slept eight and a half hours and I am not surprised, exactly, that I dreamed about trying to track down an obscure film or television play involving Dan Duryea and ziggurat astronomy, but I really wish I remembered more about the plot. I have a distinct, monochrome memory of Duryea's character standing at a shop counter or a bank window, pleading with an authority figure while a tense-faced girl waited edgily at his side, and another of a desert sky at night, vividly and obviously a painted backdrop. There were some crowd scenes, something like a town hall meeting; the star-watching structures were contemporary rather than archaeological, so we weren't in ghosts-of-Cahokia territory, but that doesn't then tell me where we were instead. I remember stray lines from articles I read about it, no dialogue from the film itself. There might have been a fire. Have some links.
1. These are the poems that have most recently struck me: David Lau's "Curtain Design for Victory Over the Sun," Peter Balakian's "Head of Anahit/British Museum," Merlin Ural Rivera's "Memoria," and M.K. Foster's "Volta."
2. Last Friday, because I was still living within ten minutes' walk of Harvard, I made myself leave the house in the middle of a difficult afternoon and spent the rest of it much more calmly at the Harvard Semitic Museum and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. At the former I was once again mistaken for a student; I explained to visitor services that I hadn't been affiliated with a university for eight years and never with Harvard and then regretted it slightly because the third floor, where I like to visit the cuneiform and the artifacts from Cyprus, turned out to be full of professors with office hours. I left at four o'clock anyway because it seemed polite. The Peabody had a small but intensely beautiful exhibit of feathered clothing and ornaments, including an Ainu woman's coat made from the skins of dozens of silver-black ducks, in the same room as two bilingual exhibits on Moche ceramic vessels and the many kinds of American ocarina. I really like the news about the Philistine cemetery.
3. The HFA has announced its annual all-night marathon and the theme this year is trains. I'm not sure how many times I need to see Snowpiercer (2013), and Night Train to Munich (1940) is a hot mess whose best feature is Paul Henreid cast not yet against type as a sympathetic villain, but I haven't seen Twentieth Century (1934) in a few years, I am always up for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), I know nothing about The Narrow Margin (1952), and I am very interested in Nayak (1966), which if I make it will be my first Satyajit Ray. I'm planning to try.
4. I continue to think that John le Carré looks like one of his own characters.
5. I just really like the sphinx on this 5th-century black-figure lekythos.
I write this post from the futon in the summer kitchen, where Hestia is washing herself on the cat blanket and Autolycus on the planter dangles all of his long black limbs like Anansi or Arm from Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994). I have conquered the internet issue! It just took something like thirty feet of ethernet cable. I still need to set up the box fan.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel is on his way over. We will camp out with cats.
1. These are the poems that have most recently struck me: David Lau's "Curtain Design for Victory Over the Sun," Peter Balakian's "Head of Anahit/British Museum," Merlin Ural Rivera's "Memoria," and M.K. Foster's "Volta."
2. Last Friday, because I was still living within ten minutes' walk of Harvard, I made myself leave the house in the middle of a difficult afternoon and spent the rest of it much more calmly at the Harvard Semitic Museum and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. At the former I was once again mistaken for a student; I explained to visitor services that I hadn't been affiliated with a university for eight years and never with Harvard and then regretted it slightly because the third floor, where I like to visit the cuneiform and the artifacts from Cyprus, turned out to be full of professors with office hours. I left at four o'clock anyway because it seemed polite. The Peabody had a small but intensely beautiful exhibit of feathered clothing and ornaments, including an Ainu woman's coat made from the skins of dozens of silver-black ducks, in the same room as two bilingual exhibits on Moche ceramic vessels and the many kinds of American ocarina. I really like the news about the Philistine cemetery.
3. The HFA has announced its annual all-night marathon and the theme this year is trains. I'm not sure how many times I need to see Snowpiercer (2013), and Night Train to Munich (1940) is a hot mess whose best feature is Paul Henreid cast not yet against type as a sympathetic villain, but I haven't seen Twentieth Century (1934) in a few years, I am always up for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), I know nothing about The Narrow Margin (1952), and I am very interested in Nayak (1966), which if I make it will be my first Satyajit Ray. I'm planning to try.
4. I continue to think that John le Carré looks like one of his own characters.
5. I just really like the sphinx on this 5th-century black-figure lekythos.
I write this post from the futon in the summer kitchen, where Hestia is washing herself on the cat blanket and Autolycus on the planter dangles all of his long black limbs like Anansi or Arm from Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994). I have conquered the internet issue! It just took something like thirty feet of ethernet cable. I still need to set up the box fan.
derspatchel is on his way over. We will camp out with cats.
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* We should really go to the Semitic Museum.
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I'll let you know if it happens.
We should really go to the Semitic Museum.
I would love to. It is a small museum, a neat one, and it has the advantage of being free. Most of their cuneiform is in the basement, the person at the visitor services desk told me apologetically, but there are some nice reproduction monuments on the third floor. The new thing since last I'd visited was the reconstructed chair of Queen Hetepheres, which is extremely cool.
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That sphinx is really lovely.
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It still counts! We had dinner and then we sat for hours with the cats.
That sphinx is really lovely.
She looks very feline and very modern. I know it was for the painter's convenience, but I like that I cannot see her face.