12/31: a loopy, lovely lear

Now that Timon of Athens is done, I'm on to King Lear in my Shakespeare project. For this play, I bought a surreally illustrated version--all Shakespeare's words, but presented in a graphic-novel format with pictures by Ian Pollock. (You can view it at Amazon.) It's interesting to read Shakespeare this way: it kind of combines the experiences of watching a performance on stage or film and of reading the text on one's own. And I'm really loving Pollock's off-beat illustrations.

12/30: finally understanding something

I've read "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" by Fitzgerald a number of times over the years. And I'm puzzled afresh every time: why is it so quick and insistently breezy, only to turn serious and sad at the very end? Today I think I understood why. I went to see the film that's very loosely based on the story, and everyone in the film works hard to do a good job. But the film seems to be aiming for the wrong tone and scale. Unlike the short story, it tries to be epic, and it saturates itself with poignancy. And it doesn't work. The subject matter is both so odd (a man who ages backwards) and cutting-to-the-quick (mortality) that maybe one of the only ways to keep the story afloat and keep it from becoming melodramatic or sentimental is to be quick, breezy, and serious only at the end. A genius move on Fitzgerald's part, though I don't think I would have realized it without seeing a film that tried an alternate route.

12/29: shakespeare resumed

In early 2007 I started working through Shakespeare's plays in the order in which they were (probably) written. I hoped to finish by early 2008, but I got distracted by various things. I still have 10 left, and I'm going to read Timon of Athens right now so that by tomorrow I'll only have 9 to go!

12/28: flannel-lined chinos

How prosaic! But also how perfect! I recently bought a pair and wore them for the first time this afternoon on a sunny-but-wintry kayak outing. They enabled me to paddle in warmth and comfort while seeing some beautiful things: the sunlight glimmering on the water's surface, a sky of ever-changing clouds, turtles sunning themselves, and birds, birds, birds--herons, moorhens, seagulls, geese, ducks, and even an eagle.

12/27: business interrupted & a rainbow

I had originally posted a notice here that I'd be offline for a few days because I was planning to be on a business trip to San Francisco. (Thanks for the good wishes, Sam & Wolfidy!) But my flight was cancelled, and the airline couldn't re-book me to get me to California in a timely way. There's just so little margin for error for travel during the winter holidays, I guess. So I'm back at home, already unpacked. And I just came in from photographing (or trying to photograph) a rainbow arching over the northeast. The photos are dark, but so is the day--making the rainbow all the more welcome.

12/26: top-bar hive is okay

Right now, we keep our bees in three locations: 5 hives here at the house, 3 down on a farm, and 1 at a friend's house. The hive at the friend's house isn't the traditional kind; it's a "top-bar" hive that Chris built out of scavenged wood. It's cool. But to check it causes more disruption to the entire hive than checking a traditional set-up, so we've mostly been leaving it alone. Which means that every time we drive by it, we cross our fingers that it's still alright. The past two days have been mild, even balmy, and we've stopped by the top-bar hive to see--happily--that the bees are indeed flying.

12/25: an unplanned morning

We don't really celebrate Christmas in anything like a traditional fashion, but there are certain things we do almost every Christmas: take a walk or hike, cook good food, watch a film. We knew that we'd do these things during the afternoon and the evening, so this morning we just charted our course as we went. By mid-morning we were both sitting in my home office, with warm yellow sunlight coming in through the windows (to the delight of the cats). Chris was searching for relatively obscure but nevertheless lovely holiday songs on the web and then playing them for us through his Mac. I was binding some notebooks for the upcycled notebook program I run, off and on, at school. The rest of the day has been good, but I especially liked spending the morning this way.

12/24: a lake view (unexpectedly)

We live above a lake, but there are so many trees between us and the water that we don't have what you could call "a lake view." Today, however, the setting sun was reflected on the surface of the lake, and I could glimpse it through the dark bare branches of the trees. The reflection was so bright, and the color so strong, that at first I didn't even realize that I was looking at the lake painted a glowing orange.