Posts by Jolisa
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And for those of us who just get off on old, old gorgeous old, yummy old spaces... 4 Princelet St, an early 18th C merchant's house in beautifully conserved original condition. That green! That blue! That greeny blue! Those floors...
Yum, yum.
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It's strange, or perhaps it's not: I used to not mind mummies at all, although I found the idea of anything with visible facial features pretty off-putting. But mummies (or indeed the bog man) just seemed like objects; containers for people, but not people.
But then, I hadn't seen a dead person I knew.
Now, I can't look at the anonymous remains without also simultaneously seeing my Dad, or rather, what was no longer my Dad, but was certainly his earthly container and physical embodiment. And that overlay makes that part of the museum more disturbing, and a little bit wrong-feeling.
Obviously this is very personal, and it can't necessarily be extrapolated to a coherent argument. The Victorians saw dead people all the time and it didn't stop them gathering up boxes full of other people's dead people to put in their museums. And don't get me started on the resurrection men... yikes.
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Meanwhile, over in the hair art department, and especially for Danielle, because I desperately want to hear the word "hurl" again:* Tom Friedman's tarantula of hair, and soap sculpture with pubic hair
* and hairball assemblages and even more hair art by hair artist Diane Jacobs.
Hairy, hairy art. Made of hair.
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Ooh, Amy, you're on my wavelength, or heatwavelength. (Lucy, when do you arrive hereabouts? NO need to bring a cardie, obvs).
Salade nicoise - I always forget about that. And yes, the NYT watermelon salad, but the boys are petitioning loudly that I leave the watermelon on the side so they can eat it au naturel. Which is fair enough.
The snacking on the garden thing would work except that our peas just fried and the tomatoes aren't there yet and my salad crops were an abject failure. Banking on the peach and pear trees to balance it all out thought, in a month or so... they are heavily laden and looking healthy!
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And backtracking to David H. I'm leery of anything that looks too much like hard work, but d'you think the more long-winded literary wing of PAS (and I think you know who I mean, kemosabe) could sustain a sort of LRB-type supplement? My one hesitation is that if I knew I were writing for print, rather than onscreen, I think I would edit twice as hard and publish half as often, which would be... well, slow.
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Backtracking to Ben for a minute - that is a grotesquely accurate accounting of the business of "fast" food. Which I once read a brilliant academic article about, describing the whole process as the reanimation of dead food - removed from its paper or plastic sarcophagi, reheated, inserted into new paper or plastic sarcophagi for serving purposes, then consumed, after which the paper or plastic sarcophagi are themselves consigned to oblivion in the trash, while we get to work on digesting the dead food.... a sort of mummification interrupted.
Ugh. Yes, on balance, I think I prefer my food fresh* and my museums virtual.
*Am currently hard at work on a heatwave-proof stove-top/uncooked dinner to tempt our flagging appetites. Room-temperature Spanish garlic shrimp, a cold barley- watermelon-rosemary salad, the usual mozzarella-tomato-basil salad, some hard-boiled eggs, plus bread, nectarines, and snap peas. Probably the only thing I'm missing is lashings of home-made ginger beer!
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Ooh, Jackie, that sounds perfect. Teeny tiny freaky museums. Always more fun than the large kind, and no less educational in their own right.
I like the Tenement Museum in NYC, and the Asakura Choso Museum in Tokyo, which not only wraps around a spring-fed koi pond, but is full of bronzes of cats. (Can I get a Bookiemonster up in this thread?)
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her longevity, her years 1830-1996 according to hyperboleland.
Ha! That's even spookier. Maybe the preservative effect of the gingerbread?
I agree the animation is weird, but if you sort of look at it with your eyes unfocused it's trippy. Plus, not the poet's actual voice; we'll never know what that sounded like.
Mind you, not every poet's special poetry-reading voice adds to the experience. And sometimes just the dissonance between expectation and reality is jarring... I was shocked the first time I heard Sylvia Plath declaiming in her flinty New England contralto, having imagined something more girly (I don't know why).
And of course even photos tell lies - I stumbled on this rather unkind (but funny) piece about Jonathan Franzen the other day...
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Also, ta Grace for the name policing! I should hire you as my reputational minder.
Tis a small thing but also a big one. Sometimes when asked, I say I don't quite know what my parents were thinking -- but I do, because they told me: they didn't want me to be one of five Joannes or Lisas in my class. And lo, there were, and I wasn't.
M & D were also down on hyphens and mid-name capital letters, which, cool, but those might have been useful guidelines for the perplexed.
So I have spent a lifetime either correcting people's spelling or their pronunciation. And it was a moment of enduring trauma when my name went up on a certain honours board at school, and they couldn't remember how to spell it, only that I was fussy about it, so under a half century worth of fully spelt-out names there I was: J. WOOD. (as I was then).
I made them scrape it off and repaint it, though :-) Fussy as.
I actually get less trouble over here, because the name falls squarely within the ambit of creative urban African-American girl names - La/Ja/Do/Jo/Ka + middle syllable + final syllable ending in "a". [On which, there is a funny but borderline racist twitter trend at the moment]. Every now and then, usually in a supermarket, someone will call my name, and I will turn around to see a small black girl minding her mother.
I do sometimes wonder if I should just go with "Jojo", which is what anyone who is anyone calls me. But then there's that whole "dignified grown-ups should have dignified names" thing... hmm.
Getting up off the couch now - has it really been an hour?? Ta for the group therapy. Back later for more replies on mountains, mummies, and children...
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Oh, I love you guys! No such thing as TL:DR around here, no ma'am. And that goes for the comments, too. I love that I can throw out any old obscure literary rumination and you will run with it. Thank you so much.
Am torn between doing a formal David H style reply to each and all, or just chipping in conversationally. I like that there seems to be a correlation between length of post and length of comments.
But quickly for now, Danielle wins the roflnui prize for "Victorian booty call". And Ian, that animation is just plain SPOOKY! I love it, and all the others. How interesting that the animator used the disputed older-Emily picture.
Here's young Emily with another poem:
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I concur that your stream of consciousness ought to be captured more frequently.
Dammed, maybe? Or at least channelled into something entertaining, like the Bucket Fountain. But thank you.
Museums are good, and important, but they can be macabre.
True, eh. Like massive tombs of the ancestors, anybody's ancestors, only with labels. The mummified cat at our local gives me the willies, to say nothing of the mummified mummy, which the 4 year old finds quite perturbing.