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Chris P

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I've never read that Tennyson poem before. It seems.simple, but there's surely deeper levels to it. And I think I've posted before that Charge of the Light Brigade is one of my favorites.

Thanks for the Anne Tyler recommendation! I'll check her out.
 

Kylabelle

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Charge of the Light Brigade is a wonderful poem, I agree. As for this one, I don't know about deeper layers, but the craft of presenting something simple with such grace is not easily achieved, and that's what makes it special to my reading. The music, the rhythm, the pacing and rhymes -- all of that is inobtrusively perfect. Mastery!
 

shakeysix

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Charge of the Light Brigade is the poem that Alfalfa is reciting in front of the class when Porky and Buckwheat torch the firecrackers in Alfalfa's pocket with a magnifying glass.

"Cannons to the right of me!" Bam! Bamm! Bang!
"Cannons to the left of me!" Sizzle bamm! Bang!
Alfalfa goes running out of the classroom, his pants on fire! Every kid of the fifties knows that one--s6
 

Kylabelle

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:D

Good morning.

The Writer's Almanac for October 26, 2014


Looks like maybe our resident poetry enthusiast (Maryn) is away, which is too badif so because I think she'd really enjoy this poem. I can sure relate! The turn on the word at the end is one I always find effective even though it's used quite frequently; I've used it myself. Still, it seems to retain some freshness and doesn't make me go, Oh, that old thing?

Lots of interesting stuff in here today, Benjamin Franklin is always good for stories and speculation. And, well, other stuff happened, you can read all about it.
 

Chris P

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Ha! Great poem! I thought I was the only one who sometimes thought inanimate objects would be sad if I didn't want them. "But I work so hard for you. Wasn't I enough? :cry:"

Okay, confession time. A guy I knew where I used to live is a regional writer, with about half a dozen titles with subsidy and small publishers like iUniverse and Treble Heart Books. He was nice enough to sign the books "To Chris P. Thanks for the support blah blah blah." I was all excited at first, but then I read the books to find out . . . um, they weren't to my taste, which is the RYFW way to say . . . yeah, let's not go there. So in my massive life purge before I went overseas (and I'll confess here too that a large part of me didn't expect to ever come back voluntarily) I got rid of almost everything I owned, including signed copies of books from people I know. But I couldn't give the books to the local thrift store, as I could imagine the author seeing his books on the shelf and I can hear his voice--hear it, I tell you--saying "Gee, I wonder why Chris got rid of my signed copies of my books." So I donated them 1000 miles away where my parents lived. I assuage my guilt by saying I'm helping to get his name out there.
 

shakeysix

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When we lived in another town, every year the little neighbor girls used to bring us a plate of home made stained- glass Christmas cookies on a Christmas tray. They were awful! (The cookies not the girls.)

It was a small town, 288 people, so we used to drive 26 miles to throw the cookies in a trash can in another county. The really weird part is that there was a town just 17 miles away but we drove past it, to the next town over because we were afraid that someone would recognize us and the cookies if we stayed in the same county. --s6
 
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Chris P

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When we lived in another town, little girls next door to us used to bring us a plate of home made stained- glass Christmas cookies. They were awful! (The cookies not the girls.) It was a small town, 288 people, so we used to drive 26 miles to throw the cookies in trash can in another town. The really weird part is that there was a town just 17 miles away but we drove past it, to the next town over because we were afraid that someone would recognize us and the cookies if we stayed in the same county. --s6

Oh, cookie stories, is it?

Back in grad school we had a Chinese post-doc working with us. He went back to China to visit family, and he returned with authentic Chinese almond cookies. Excited, we dug in, and quickly found out that non-American cultures use WAY less sugar than we do. Like, none. There were (almost) the worst sweets I've ever tasted (yeah yeah, respect your fellow baker, whatever). We were afraid to offend him, so we one by one snuck the cookies to the insect rearing room, where we dropped them in the cockroach tanks. Problem solved!
 

shakeysix

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When I taught adult ed I had class after class of Vietnamese students. When the Tet rolled around they would all bring me red boxes of candy. They were all pretty weird. After dozens of boxes I found a kind of dried carrot in honey that I could choke down. After six years of exposure I got to craving them. Now I can't find them anywhere--s6
 

Kylabelle

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Love the stories, you two! I'd never have imagined a need to throw something out in the next town over, but I can imagine how it might come about when your town is that small.

The Writer's Almanac for October 27, 2014

This morning's poem captures two distinct moments and puts them together in the narrator's mind, poignantly. I suspect Maryn will appreciate this one, if she gets to read it.

Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas share a birthday today with Zarie Smith, an author I'd not heard of.

Which is one reason I enjoy the almanac, by the way; I learn about these people who've done fine work, whom I'd likely never otherwise encounter.
 

Maryn

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You know me too well! I did indeed like today's poem.

I am returned from a lovely weekend away, blessed by gorgeous weather and a staff which realized our assigned seats should not have been sold to anybody, since a baby grand stood between us and the performer. They moved us to very good seats instead.

Oh, and we saw a really good play on Broadway, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," which, if you've read it, you know would be brutally difficult to stage. But they did it, and very well. It was the best drama I've seen in a number of years, and we do theatre regularly.

Maryn, all cultured and stuff
 

shakeysix

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"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light" Dylan's advice to his aging father. I used to think it was tragic, wrenching and wise. Now I think the damn light has to die sometime--s6
 

kuwisdelu

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Oh, cookie stories, is it?

Back in grad school we had a Chinese post-doc working with us. He went back to China to visit family, and he returned with authentic Chinese almond cookies. Excited, we dug in, and quickly found out that non-American cultures use WAY less sugar than we do. Like, none. There were (almost) the worst sweets I've ever tasted (yeah yeah, respect your fellow baker, whatever). We were afraid to offend him, so we one by one snuck the cookies to the insect rearing room, where we dropped them in the cockroach tanks. Problem solved!

Hmm. I tend to find Americans use WAY too much sugar in everything lol.

And when we don't, it still has artificial sweetener!

It's hard to even find good bottled tea without tons of sugar or sweetener.
 

Shadow_Ferret

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Mmm. Sugar. When I was a kid I used to make myself a glass of sugar water.

Just the other day my wife was baking cookies for work and rolling the raw balls in sugar. When she finished, she told me to throw the sugar away. That seemed so wasteful and I got a spoon out. "You aren't... eating the sugar, are you?"
 

Chris P

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Hmm. I tend to find Americans use WAY too much sugar in everything lol.

And when we don't, it still has artificial sweetener!

It's hard to even find good bottled tea without tons of sugar or sweetener.

I get a good laugh out of "diet iced tea." Seems unsweetened tea is as "diet" as it gets and there wouldn't be any need for a diet variety.
 

Chris P

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I can't say I get the poem today. I suspect I would had I been with the same partner for years and years, but sadly that's not how my life has played out thus far. I can sort of relate by connecting the seven-year-old stepdaughter (the age she was when I started dating her mom) to her 19 year old self today, or by connecting the different woman I dated from age 20 to 27 to who she is today. I see her 9 year old son and realize that he would have been mine if we'd stayed together. Time has a way of smashing you in the face with a frying pan every once in a while, doesn't it?

I read Dog in the Nighttime last winter, and yeah, I can't even picture how you could adapt that to the stage. It was grippingly written, just on an interior level without much action to see. I'd love to see how they pulled it off.
 
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Maryn

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The stage floor, back wall, and side walls were a time-space grid on which Christopher drew or wrote, from smiley-faces (and other expressions, since they mostly baffled him) to graphs. It was all electronic so what he drew on the floor could be moved to the walls. Way cool, and probably very expensive. There were no sets as such, just six cubes which served as whatever they needed to be, from seats to file cabinets to luggage. They've got to justify those high ticket prices somehow, right?

Maryn, who wants to reread it now
 

Kylabelle

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Good morning, sweet tea and unsweet tea drinkers. :D Ferrett, if you get really good tea (which is hard to find) then sweeteners are more like pollution. But for most tea, I agree, it needs a little something.

The Writer's Almanac for October 28, 2014

The poem today is a simple thing. But the two writers whose birthday it is, Anne Perry and Evelyn Waugh, have had very interesting lives. Especially Anne. Whoa.
 

Chris P

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That's quite a story about Anne Perry! You can't even write 'em like that.

Evelyn Waugh (and yeah, I'm still, after all this time, struggling with picturing anyone named "Evelyn" being a guy) is one of my early influences. I read Handful of Dust back in high school. At the time, my very first lady love had just left (hours after the prom!), so I couldn't see the book as the satire it was. A novel about a marriage failing was just too accurate! But Guns N Roses had just gotten hot, so when the main character Tony runs off to South America and gets malaria, I pictured Axl Rose appearing in Tony's fevered vision and saying "You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby! You're gonna diiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee!!!!" I reread it about a year ago, and enjoyed it much more. Come to think of it, my marriage ending and me running off to Uganda kind of fits the novel. Spooky.