My fiancé, who teaches 1st grade, received the following letter from one of her students:
Dear: Ms. Marshall
You have to do a lot to teach us. I love you!! Do you teach hard? You are the best person ever! Do you and Mr. Baggs kiss I think so? Thank you for saying my hand writeing is good. Can you bring pictures of your dog.
2009.
My grandmother died today. She was 88, a complex, difficult, beautiful human being. Here she is a year-and-a-half ago in better health, wearing one of my t-shirts with my dad, my sister, her husband and their daughter Katie.
“I pick her up and light is shining through her skull, wrapped in its silvery tissue like a Christmas fruit. I wake her for her feed, scrape meaning from her faint and random exclamations of surprise, spoken through morphia. […] My mother’s name is Sylvia. Her death is animal; passive and dignified, too bright to look at.”
Alan Moore, The Birth Caul. Illustrated by Eddie Campbell and published by Eddie Campbell Comics, Paddington Q, Australia, 1999. 2, 9.
Amanuensis –noun. A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Excerpt from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment,” originally written in 1797 or 1798 and published in 1816; reprinted online by HistoryofIdeas.org, University of Virginia Library, 1999.
Amanuensis –noun. A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.
“‘I’ve always had a soft spot for London, the patched and tattered cloak of its history (some of my best work, obviously; I felt the same about old Byzantium), its dog-earred wisdom and inky humour. You know—you provincial British humans know—what it’s like when you crack under the weight of lost love or ingested desire and Move to London: the city’s ready for you. You take your precious miseries there and unpack them—only to find that the city’s already assimilated them, centuries ago, along with grand Elizabethan passions and mortal Victorian sins. The assimilation’s encoded now—in the chemistry lab colours of the Underground map, in Trafalgar’s punk pigeons, in the thousands of ticking stilettos and caffeine yawns and downed pints and adulterous snogs. You turn up on a rainy Monday afternoon proud of all your woeful particulars—and London humbles you with its wealth of generals. You’ve seen your life. London, it turns out, has seen Life.’”—Lucifer, in an excerpt from Glen Duncan’s novel I, Lucifer, printed on the album art for The (Real) Tuesday Weld’s I, Lucifer, based on Ducan’s novel.
At the end of last week’s episode of Lost, many of us were upset to discover that we’d have to wait two weeks for the season finale. As always, however, we should have had more faith in the foresight and wisdom of the Lost creators, who, like God, surely make no decision that cannot be satisfactorily explained later.
The reason for postponing the Lost season finale? So our Thursday night would be free for the premiere of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, of course!
“The face under the fiery hair is, and always has been, difficult to describe. It was handsome, but the bones of the nose, cheeks and chin were drawn too sharply; youthful, but the skin was lined and weathered; merry, but the eyes were cold and unkindly; wise, but the thick red lips were drawn into a cruel and stupid smirk. It was the face of someone who could see no difference between looking for trouble and looking for fun and who, though since the beginning of time he had succeeded in stirring up no end of trouble, had seen nothing of fun in a very long, in much too long, a time.”
Michael Chabon’s description of the character Coyote in his slow but beautiful novel Summerland (New York: Miramax Books, 2002. Pages 220-221). Coyote is a mixture of various mythological trickster characters, most notably Loki, Prometheus and, you guessed it, Lucifer, although Coyote has his own thoughts on the last fellow:
“‘[… T]hat Satan business is a bunch of bologna […]. It gives me a pain. All right, I’ve pulled a few fast ones over the years on you people. Ha-ha, oh, my goodness, yes, okay, I grant you, there have been times when I’ve been just awful. But that’s only part of the story. Name one thing you enjoy in that woebegone world of yours. Go ahead. I guarantee you, I’m responsible for it.’”
Referencing my blogg entry yesterday on the word “fuck” as an intensifier rather than an obscenity, my girlfriend Audrey said, “That’s why I love the word ‘hella.’ It’s an intensifier and a quantifier, like, ‘I smoked hella weed.’”
She’s full of wisdom like that. She teaches kindergarten and once said, “It’s nearly impossible to get kids to eat or sleep. But that’s all I want to do.”
