27 July 2011

Haiku 2011/208

to climactic heat
shade is no impediment. . .
listless weeping clouds

8 comments:

Sibyl said...

Looked up from my summer of Trollope (free on the Kindle? I am THERE! I could go borrow them from my mom, but that would mean actually visiting her. >shivers<) and taking my daughter to various geek events (Fanime! ComiCon!) long enough to get back on the internet, and here I find this haiku. The second line gave me shivers (the good kind, not the visiting-my-mother-whose-peas-done-slid-off-the-plate kind). >silently gawping in admiration of 4 perfect words<

Patrick J. Vaz said...

Why, thank you! I have to admit I saw the comment via e-mail and had to rush to the blog to see what the line was -- I tend to post things to get them out of my brain.

What Trollope have you been reading? I re-read The Eustace Diamonds a few months ago. I should get a Kindle! Think of the space I'd save on my shelves and my satchel!

Geek events sound fun -- I actually thought about going to ComiCon this year, for no particular reason.My older brother always goes.

Sorry about your mother -- sounds as if there are some funny stories there, though. My own mother is a delight and I'm lucky to have her.

Patrick J. Vaz said...

This also reminded me of a friend of mine who used to make sure she read the entire NY Times before going to bed each night. She recently switched from the Times to Trollope, and is very happy that she did so.

Sibyl said...

The danger with a Kindle is that one can download books at, say, 2AM, and if one is a bit obsessive (as one is), one can download a LOT. Thank God the classics are free. So far the Trollope binge has consisted of Can you Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds, and I'm in the thick of Phineas Finn. I also went a little Gaskell-happy and have finished off Cranford, Mary Barton and North and South. Many people have bad things to say about the Kindle, but I love that I carry a veritable library around with me all the time. As I got mine for Christmas, I did not even need to debate the initial purchase price.

I love "shade is no impediment" because my reaction to it reminds me of one of my most fave of all time, "The sedge has withered from the Lake/And no birds sing." I have the degrees to tell me why this should be, but I'll fall back on the power of certain sounds in certain rhythm.

The geekery was fun. Spent all day at Con telling cosplayers dressed as the Doctor, "Fez's are cool," and feeling like an insider. I was a Lit major and I love opera, so you can imagine how often THAT happens.

Now I just have to figure out what to do about this SFO season. I got a mini-season and was going to trade my Carmen tix for Attila, but without Vargas, I worry, since they seem not to know who's in or out from one press release to the next. Your thoughts?

Patrick J. Vaz said...

This year I finally read Wives and Daughters, and have since been recommending it to everyone (well, everyone who might read Victorian novels) -- it's a bit different from Gaskell's usual work, though maybe more in the line of Cranford, though broader.

I suspect the people who say bad things about the Kindle have never used one and are simply working off some fairly silly principle, like those people who used to denounce computers just because. Everyone I know who has a Kindle loves it. Reading is reading, and it's certainly a handy way of carrying around a library. I look at my overstuffed shelves (since one is, as you point out, not only obsessive, but impulsive) and I can definitely see the appeal, though I must admit I haven't made the leap yet.

I'm not sure who the Doctor is (Dr Who, perhaps?) or what cosplayers are, so I'm definitely not an insider there.

Yes, I do have thoughts on the SFO season, which will be forthcoming; I have some entries I've been meaning to get to and then I was going to do some season previews, I hope before the season actually starts. My short-term solution to SF Opera is to go to the things I haven't seen before, and this year there are a surprisingly large number of them (five). So if you care to loiter, palely or not, I'll be blathering on about what to do, or at least what I plan to do (or at least hope to do).

Sibyl said...

Yes, Doctor Who, by which we are as a household fairly obsessed.

Loitering or anything else, should I do it, I do it palely.

I sort of go with operas I've not seen, or singers I want to hear. Occasionally, singers I want never to hear again leak into my decision-making process. I await your post.

Sibyl said...

Oh, and full marks for the La Belle Dame catch. A Lit major friend of mine and I used to play a game wherein one would give a line of great poetry and the other would have to turn it into doggerel. You can imagine how we arrived at, "I fear I need to eat some salt/It seems I am a-goitering." You may hate me now; I think maybe I hate me now.

Patrick J. Vaz said...

That sounds like kind of a horrifying game. But one of my favorite memories is V's illumination of Blake's The Tyger, back in college days: a fairly pompous biochem major announced to me that his favorite poem was William Blake's The Tyger, and he started reciting solemnly: "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" when V chimed in with "Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?" I fell over laughing. The biochem major stalked out of the room. I now can't think of that poem without thinking of "won't you guide my sleigh tonight?" As V pointed out, the rhyme and rhythm fit perfectly.

In fact about three and a half years ago I used it as the title for a post on Christmas music, which started as just some goofy jokes and grew longer and darker as I worked on it. Oddly enough starting about a year go it became one of my most popular posts, and I have *no idea* why -- despite having access to two different stat-counter systems, I don't know where these readers are coming from, or who they are, or who linked to it, or anything. Very strange.