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11.17.08 Monday

real estate.

“A move…yes. A move will be good. We’ve soiled the nest, in many respects,” her husband had said, in the circuitous syntax and ponderous Louisiana drawl that, like so much else about him, had once made her misty with desire and now drove her nuts with scorn. “Think about it, honey,” he’d said after the reconciliation, the first remission, and the initial reconnaissance through the realtors — after her feelings had gone well beyond rage into sarcasm and carcinoma. “We should probably consider leaving this home entirely behind. Depending on what you want to do — or, of course. If you have another home in mind, I’m practically certain I’d be amenable. We would want to discuss it, however, or anything else you might be thinking of. I myself — though it may be presumptuous of me, I realize — but then, hey: it wouldn’t be the first time, now would it? I myself was thinking that, if you were inclined —”

“Terence!” Ruth clapped her hands twice, sharply. “Speak more quickly! I don’t have long to live!” They’d been married for twenty-three years. Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically. “And please,” she added, “don’t be fooled by the euphemisms of realtors. This was never a home, darling. This is a house.”

+ Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate”

comments (View) | posted at 08:29 pm in books

» Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC | Threat Level from Wired.com

The choice of the duo strongly signals an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policymaking that’s characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC.

This March at a telecom policy conference in Hollywood, for example, Crawford bluntly told Ambassador Richard Russell, the White House’ associate director on science and technology policy, that he lived in a fantasyland when he asserted that the United States’ roll-out of broadband is going well.

“I think it’s magical thinking to imagine that we’re somehow doing fine here, and I just want to make sure that we recognize that even the [International Telecommunications Union] says that between 1999 and 2006 we skipped form third to 20th place in penetration,” she noted acidly at the annual Tech Policy Summit, a gathering of top officials in the world of tech policy (of which Wired.com was a participant and sponsor.)

comments (View) | posted at 12:41 pm in links

It’s the sound of something awesome: Amy Poehler hosts Smart Girls at the Party. Today, a 10-year-old writer and scooter enthusiast. And then Will Arnett shows up for the dance party. Woo hoo! Support your girls, ladies.

comments (View) | posted at 10:42 am in video women

Come in my friends, take comfort, be well, have a seat, eat a book. Any book. We’ll have tea at five and stories to tell.

+ {this is glamorous}: {purple reign}

comments (View) | posted at 09:48 am in dream house

“ Most election-related threats have so far been little more than juvenile pranks. But the political marginalization of certain Southern whites, economic distress in rural areas, and a White House occupant who symbolizes a multiethnic United States could combine to produce a backlash against what some have heralded as the dawn of a postracial America. In some parts of the South, there’s even talk of secession. „

+ After Obama’s win, white backlash festers in US - Yahoo! News

comments (View) | posted at 09:31 am in quotes

11.16.08 Sunday

that silent evening.

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in low, silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back
at our tracks twining out of the woods,
where the branches we brushed against let fall
puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence,
like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch
among the trees, which is the sound that dies
inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge
hits it off center telling everything inside
it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up
but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome,
and yet also—how could we know this?—happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow,
not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing
not to meet until heaven, but here and there
making slubby kissing stops in the field,
our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
Everything that happens here is really little more,
if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,
are almost ready, already, to bandage the one
whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when
we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches
from this moment to that. Then I will go back
to that silent evening, when the past just managed
to overlap the future, if only by a trace,
and the light doubles and shines
through the dark the sparkling that heavens the earth.

+ “That Silent Evening,” Galway Kinnell

comments (View) | posted at 05:46 pm in poetry

Un Conte de Noël (“A Christmas Tale”)

Ze French family films, they are like Russian novels, non? And ze queen, she grows ever more interesting to watch, oui? “He comes from my womb,” she says of the cast-off middle son who will give her, begrudgingly, his bone marrow: “I’m taking back what is mine.” C’est magnifique, for ze rare five stars. (And yes, I see why the French might hate us. Or me. It’s the life, as they say. Right? And all for the love.)

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

comments (View) | posted at 04:50 pm in movies