Bookish Gardener

There's no place that I can be (updated)

I saw Serenity last night at its preview screening in Waukesha. The crowd was a good mix of a not-overwhelming number of previously initiated Whedonites, a lot of regular folk who'd (I'm guessing) won free passes from a radio station, and those of us in the couple of rows reserved for "press and bloggers". (Props to the studio reps at the theatre, who were professional, courteous and friendly, and made sure that seating for the screening ran like a well-oiled machine.)

With deftly paced plot progressions and quick-cut shifts from uproarious one-liners to soul-chilling moments of dread, this movie takes you on a ride that's over much too soon. I can't remember the last time I've been this satisfied by an "action" movie. In most things artistic, I prefer character over plot, but I've missed more Merchant-Ivory type films than I've seen, and some of my favorite movies feature a fair amount of action (er, violence): Die Hard, To Live and Die in L.A., Carlito's Way (and the only TV series I watch live on prime-time is 24). On the other hand, I've seen less than a half-dozen Westerns (though if you don't count The Seven Samurai, and Clint Eastwood's The Beguiled, which I suppose is a "Southern", not a "Western", then it's really only about three Westerns), enjoyed the even-numbered Star Trek movies but would not go out of my way to see any of them again, and was underwhelmed by Star Wars when it first came out and haven't bothered with any of its sequels or prequels. So I have no genre biases for or against something that's called "SF" or a "Western" or an "SF/Western". I'm just looking for a great character illuminated by a great story. In the imaginary words from the imaginary pen of the truly evil (yet imaginary) Chinese philosopher Shan Yu from the "War Stories" episode of Firefly: "live with a man 40 years, share his house, his meals, speak on every subject.  Then tie him up and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day you will finally meet the man."

Will you need to have seen Firefly to enjoy Serenity? Nope. The plot's not intricate, and anyone will be able to figure out who to root for in about three minutes. Some moments in the movie will be more resonant and affecting for Firefly fans who became wrapped up in the characters through the series. On the other hand, those who come to Serenity fresh can look forward to being able to get to know all of the characters in more depth by checking out the fourteen episodes of Firefly.

Different folks will get different things out of this film, but for me, it begins and ends with Mal: Captain Malcolm Reynolds, captain of his own ship in every sense of the phrase. He's not a hero writ large, a superhuman fighter or a rogue who can coast on his charm; he's a guy, living hand-to-mouth, who values nothing more than his autonomy, except when that pesky little thing called doing the right thing gets in his way. Then, he's impelled to choose good over freedom (or to live with unresolvable regret when he does not), for which he often pays a heavy price. He owes too many of his narrow escapes to dumb luck for us (and him) not to know that it's only a matter of time before his number is up—and then it will be as though he never was.

I'll have to go back, of course. A midnight showing has been added to the schedule here in town on Friday. I'll try to pick up all the lines I missed (drowned out by laughter, often my own), soak in more of the music score, savor my favorite lines delivered in Mal's choked-up mumble (a little bit Duke, a little bit Elvis), and spend a few obsessed fan moments trying to figure out what the heck was written in katakana on River's "notebook" (misutori - mystery?) and on the Tams' room on the ship (serisu - series?). My Japanese is quite rusty, and it went by too fast the first time.

See the show.

Update (September 30, 2005): Went to the midnight showing this morning. Stadium seats, triple-sized Ultrascreen, full house of Whedon devotees (Joss put the "cult" in "culture"). The katakana went by way too fast (again), but I saw enough to know that my attempted transliterations in the post above are mostly way off. The movie is even better on a second viewing. Whedonesque is collecting an impressively comprehensive list of reviews from all over; the list of Technorati links is not so impressively comprehensive (doesn't even pick up the posts from this blog, sniff) but it's long; it's Serenity all day, all the time (well, this week anyway) at The Flick Filosopher; this review at Blogcritics includes a helpful handful of links to other blogger reviews (many of which in turn include links to other reviews, and so on, and so on); but the best review I've read so far has been Stephanie Zacharek's at Salon. She gets it right: much as we all love the fact that this movie was able to get made (and shut eyes tight, everyone, and whisper "franchise"), we should lament the missed opportunity to sink our teeth into these characters over the full run of a TV series.   

O Captain. My Captain.

Don't fly away

At long last, the hummingbird fails in her attempt to elude the lens of the garden paparazzi. She's in and about the garden several times a day, even without any sugar-watered feeders to lure her. She favors the pink-orange agastache (Agastache x 'Desert Sunrise') most of all, but also appreciates the bright red dwarf cannas (Canna x generalis 'President'), and even the ink-blue Pitcher's Sage (Salvia pitcheri). She's gotten so comfortable that I've seen her perch upon the golden hops vine that drapes through the rungs of the arbor like a rope swing, and upon the arch of a swaying kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate. We startled each other one day as I stood up from turning on the hose faucet near the agastache patch to find her not more than two feet away. She zoomed toward and past my ear before disappearing, leaving the faint echo of a whirring helicopter rotor blade.

Since I found Serenity

Having immersed myself in Firefly this weekend (all fourteen episodes, in order), I'm appropriately frenzied about Serenity. I'm signed up for the screening for bloggers in Waukesha on Tuesday. (The quid pro quo for the free pass is to post the blurb below, include a link to the movie's web site, and tell y'all what I think about the film after I see it. If I get a seat, you'll hear from me on Wednesday.) In the meantime, I'll be shuffling and reshuffling my mental list of Firefly's top three episodes (today, it's 1. "Shindig"; 2. "The Message"; and 3. "War Stories"), and trying to figure out all the actors on Firefly who cross-pollinated 24 (and vice versa).

Joss Whedon, the Oscar®- and Emmy-nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family–squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

Fallen, fallen

Another autumnal equinox, another Rilke poem. As it did last year, Rilke's poetry came back into visible orbit for me via this summer's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival. The final program of the music series featured a performance of Peter Lieberson's "Rilke Songs", composed to five poems from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (I:4, "O ihr Zärlichen"; II:1, "Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!; II:12, "Wolle die Wandlung"; II,5, "Blumenmuskel"; and II:29, "Stiller Freund"). Wanting to familiarize myself with the poems before the program, I found myself in the poetry stacks of the B&N, four different translations propped open to the first of the poems, and relied on instinctive reaction to choose Edward Snow's translation, which, after more hours in its company, still reads just right to me.

I moved onto reading Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William Gass, which sends me into a little orbit of my own. The academic stilt of its title is misleading; this is a very personal and personable book. Rilke emerges as a three-dimensional human from the strokes of Gass's biographical sketch in the opening chapter. Somehow I'm unexpectedly relieved that the revered Rilke is flawed and real, not out of indulgence (I don't believe that it's okay to be a jerk so long as you produce great art) or sympathy (...nor that it's okay to be a jerk if you are oh so sensitive), but because unflattering truth is always better than hagiographical spin. Rilke, the poet of the Big Idea, believed in and worshiped passion...but mostly in his head. The existential losses of youth, love and life are celebrated in his poetry, but unsung, and perhaps unknown to the poet, are what he's lost by having passed up the chance to be a good father, and having never experienced an honest day's hard work. Why is it that Rilke's poetry is now even more appealing to me even after the unveiling of these hairy warts? Gass gets at this mystery in describing Rilke's poems as "lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself...lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength."

As advertised, the meat of Gass's book is the philosophy and practice of poetry translation. Gass lays out and examines selected stanzas in multiple iterations by several different translators (including himself), parsing them with time-honored methods of literary criticism, his own poetic sensibility, and sometimes just a little bit of Simon Cowell ("Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid", he says about their translations of the first stanza of II:12 of the Sonnets). After reading Gass, I'm grateful for the bounty of English translations available on bookstore shelves, and hopeful that I can get closer to the essence of the elephant by putting all the blind men in a room and listening to each of their stories.

But where were we? Oh, yes. It's the first day of fall. Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn"):

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Gass translates the first stanza: "The leaves are falling, falling from far away, / as though a distant garden died above us; / they fall, fall with denial in their wave."

"Herbst" is recited and sung in German, set to acoustic guitar accompaniment, here.

The way I want to hear this poem today is in the Edward Snow translation, set to music for voices by Joshua Shank (scroll down the post for the translation), which was brought to us earlier this year through the good offices of The Fredösphere. (Links to a sound file of its performance and its score can be found in the first paragraph of this post.)

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Made for the shade

This toad lily, Tricyrtis hirta 'Tojen', is a trouper. It sits in the toughest bed in the garden: north side, dank shade, indubitably zone 4 (in my combo zone 4/5 garden), with lots of sterile subsoil underfoot, and is subjected in winter to the near-daily insult of chemical icemelt from the concrete walkway that rings the bed. Its glossy, healthy green foliage bears no hint of the fact that I've watered it only about once a month during this rainless summer. 'Tojen' started blooming in mid-August, and opens more and more of its delicate orchid-like blossoms every day, which drop discreetly off their stems without deadheading. I had to fight off the bumblebees to snap this photo.

Chuseok

Chuseok began on Saturday, the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, and the final day of this holiday, which is sometimes analogized to a Korean Thanksgiving, is today. I'm no expert on this, mind you. My memories of the three years I spent in Korea as a child are rich and intense, but I don't remember celebrating Chuseok at all. After having recently read up on it some, my impression is that this is a holiday for extended families to get together, pay homage to ancestors by visiting their gravesites, enjoy special foods, and exchange gifts. Highways are said to be jammed with traffic as travelers go home for the holidays, leaving the capital city of Seoul a virtual ghost town. I'm curious about this tradition and whether it grew as a cultural phenomenon only after I left Korea in the early seventies...or maybe it was always celebrated with this importance by others, but not observed in the same way by our own family (for good reasons: the ancestral gravesites for the generations preceding my grandparents would have been north of the 38th parallel; we had three generations under one roof with the rest of the family mostly within the same city, so there would have been no need to travel to get together; and back then, most folks traveled by foot, bus, train or, occasionally, taxicab, and private autos were unusual for even the middle class).

I grew up on Korean food (so much so that it is a problem when I don't get my Recommended Daily Allowance of garlic), but don't seek it out in restaurants too much. It's a problem having had a grandmother, mother and aunts with extraordinary cooking skills. (Imagine making your own soy sauce for the year from scratch.) And although the entire Korean peninsula is only about the size of the state of Minnesota, there are noticeable differences in dialects from region to region, with similarly striking differences in cooking methods and seasonings as you move south down the Korean peninsula. Of course, all this has intimidated me from cooking Korean at home, which I need to change if I don't want to wake up with a big bowl of regret when I'm the last generation standing.

When I want to evoke Korea, I take a leaf of perilla (dul-ggae in Korean and shiso in Japanese) and, now that the perilla has flowered, a stem of the flowering stalk as it is forming seeds, and rub them to release the scent. It's an indescribable mix of mint, musk and basil...sort of. The leaves (which I used to think were grape leaves, that is, before I became a gardener), slaked in vegetable oil, are often served a condiment on the Korean dinner table. Maybe for dinner tonight, bul go gi (which I rarely order when I do go to Korean restaurants: it's tourist food, not home cooking!...but when seasoned properly, it's killer as carpaccio), which everyone will enjoy, and kaji namul (eggplant "side dish"), which I'm sure I'll have all to myself. And I'll telephone my mom, and wish her a happy Chuseok, for the first time ever.

 

No regrets, Coyote.

On her walk to school through the soccer fields behind our house, my seventh-grader happened upon the partially devoured hind-end remains of what she extrapolates was once a full-sized rabbit. Ah, the circle of life. (But when will the circle be unbroken for the j. beetles, who are still flouting their Labor Day curfew?)

Aside from her lesson in the law of the jungle, our daughter is enjoying more pleasant lessons in her Computers class. She brought home her first quiz yesterday. The first word on the test: "blog". (She aced the test.)

Here we go again

We returned to the Mall of America this past weekend, almost two years after our first visit. If you weren't among the, oh, three regular readers of this blog during its first month, you might have missed this earlier post about the first trip. It's reposted here, with a postscript.

He said: You must be joking, son--where did you get those shoes?
(first posted November 1, 2003)

Motley notes from our Halloween Eve jaunt to Mall of America. It's an easy (interstate with hardly any metro area traffic snarls) and pleasant (mostly unspoiled scenery of trees, rivers and geologic formations) four-hour drive away. We're not really shoppers, but thought the mall's indoor amusement park would be an economical (read: cheap) Disneyland-substitute for our three kids. We called it right.

Even after adjusting our price-point sensitivity to captive-audience levels, we couldn't see the, uh, logic of paying three bucks for a pretzel from Pretzel Logic, but were pleased to find that we could settle for the alternative of a Tazo iced tea in Starbucks' largest size (...in the land where "tall" means "small", large is called, what..."Gargantua?" "Brobdignagian?"), for under two bucks.

Junk food nirvana: Krispy Kremes, fresh from the in-store bakery. The "plain" dozen we got were almost hot to the touch, and melted in the mouth. (When you fall off Atkins, this best be the first thing in your mouth.) Background music in this shopping mall donut shop: a compilation of vaguely-familiar/vaguely-obscure British invasion tunes. (I'd buy that soundtrack!) Muzak is dead, and not a moment too soon.

The mall's shuttle bus driver passed along the stat that it would take 88 hours to pay a ten-minute visit to each of the mall's 525 stores. However, the mall is just a mall, and it turned out that the subset of stores that (a) were of any interest to me and (b) didn't already have locations in our area, totaled only two: the M-A-C counter at Nordstrom, and the Aerosoles store. At the former, refreshed my makeup collection with the help of an extraordinarily competent, and tattooed, sales clerk; at the latter, found two pairs of winter shoes embodying the oxymoronic: stylish, and rubber-soled.

Weird epiphany: I see an adult-sized Darth Vader costume in the display window of the mall's novelty/costume shop, and, in an admission that surely qualifies me for lifetime membership in the "slow on the uptake" club, realize that it's taken me only a quarter-century to figure out that (in the ersatz mythologizing of Star Wars) Darth is Don Giovanni's Il Commandatore, no?

Around dinnertime, our 4- and 6-year old were back for their Nth round on the merry-go-round and, since the crowds had thinned, had their pick of carousel animal. My 4-year-old climbed aboard the white rabbit she'd had her eye on all day. We had a deep philosophical discussion:

Daughter:  --I like the white rabbit. Me: --You know Mommy doesn't like rabbits, don't you? Daughter: --Why don't you like rabbits? Me: --Because they eat Mommy's plants. Daughter: --You know what I think you should do? You should just scare them away.

Followed by a most happy ride (proving that even rabbit-lovers and rabbit-haters can coexist amicably).

On the other side of the carousel, her older brother had chosen this beauty, which harkens back to the days when carousel animals were more art than kitsch:

But not all of us were lucky that day. My husband (whom we shall affectionately refer to herein as ".mac"-head) regarded this trip, in no small part, as the opportunity for a pilgrimage to "The Apple Store", and his first chance to see, feel, touch (and be healed by) the new G5 and Panther. "Honey," I said, "I heard that eight hundred people were lined up in Minneapolis for Panther last week." And "Honey," I said, "I heard that even Microsoft is using G5s--though the guy who spilled the beans on them got canned." Appetite whetted, location on mall map circled, my husband made the trek...only to be greeted by a construction barricade. "It's getting better all the time" the slogan on the barricade chirped. The store was closed for renovations until mid-November.

DisapPOINTed!

When life presents these little setbacks, sometimes we try to cope by looking for some deeper meaning, some higher purpose. "It's a Sign," my husband said. A message that it was time to go over to the Dark Side. By day's end, though, he was just plain dejected: "Five hundred twenty-five f[ill in the blan]kin' stores in this mall, and the only one I want to go to is closed." Apropos of the site and the occasion, this was Charlie Brown finding a rock in his trick-or-treat bag.

I'm so sorry, sweetie.

Postscript, September 12, 2005: We listened to the Steely Dan compilation Citizen Dan ("Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car...") on the drive up to Minnesota. As soon as we hit Camp Snoopy, my six-year-old looked at me with a glint in her eye and said, "I'm going to ride the rabbit, Mom." My husband and I pressed our noses against the window at the Apple store; or, actually, we did go in, and I got to hear Tom Jones' "She's A Lady" on the new iPod Nano. (We did not become Pod People this weekend, although if the new new thing pushes down prices of earlier models low enough, maybe I'll pick up a Shuffle on the aftermarket one of these days.) I replaced my down-in-the-heels shoes with new ones from the Aerosoles store, and picked up a complete line of facial beauty enhancers (including the lipstick "Dark Side") at the new M-A-C store. Our children were all tall enough this time around not to be barred from any of the rides, and as they wore themselves out, I sat on a bench, in the first opportunity I've had in weeks for uninterrupted recreational reading, with William Gass's impressionistic, subjective, dead-on, and marvelous Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Later, I took a break to stop in for an iced tea at the Starbucks. I was just in time to hear Wayne Shorter's saxophone solo from "Aja".

This year's models.

Feed your head.

Our Happy Campers.

Uniquely Fabulous Object

Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

The lone success from my morning-glory seed-sowing this season: Ipomoea tricolor 'Flying Saucers'. ('Heavenly Blue' and 'Grandpa Ott' are a-mouldering in their graves underneath the stork-leg stemmed kiss-me-over-the-garden-gates that they were intended to adorn.) Flying Saucers has a huge bloom, and, on the overcast day on which this photo was taken, stayed open until less than a hour before sunset, taking on a purple hue as its edges curled in.

The Meme is a Harsh Mistress

The Heinlein meme is knocking on my door, thanks to TexasBestGrok, inspired by this list from "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" in Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

For this meme, mark in bold those things that you can do:

• Change a diaper (If practice makes perfect, I am a virtuoso.)
• Plan an invasion (Other than a midnight requisition of leftover chocolate cake from the kitchen, um, no.)
• Butcher a hog (My favorite meat is post-butchered hog, but have you ever smelled a pig sty?)
• Conn a ship (I'll get back to you after I learn what "conn" means.)
• Design a building (I couldn't even design a sugarcube igloo.)
• Write a sonnet (Probably, but it wouldn't be poetry.)
• Balance accounts (Debits toward the file cabinet, credits toward the window.)
• Build a wall (with prefab, interlocking bricks? Why, yes!)
• Set a bone (which would require looking at the broken bone, not to mention handling it? No, mom, there was never any chance that I would make it to med school.)
• Comfort the dying (The most important skill I would like to have.)
• Take orders (Yes, dutifully.)
• Give orders (Yes, reluctantly...but decisively.)
• Cooperate (Yes, reliably.)
• Act alone (Yes, happily.)
• Solve equations (HP 12C at the ready, in reverse Polish notation.)
• Analyze a new problem (My talents are few, but this is the one that puts bread on the table.)
• Pitch manure (and peat moss, and top soil)
• Program a computer (Sorry. I am only a geek poseur.)
• Cook a tasty meal (Although my kids would say here: "Your mileage may vary.")
• Fight efficiently (Somehow I suspect that hundreds of hours of watching Buffy don't quite qualify as "training" for this.)
• Die gallantly (A worthy ambition indeed.)

If you are so inclined, have at it!