icepixie | Long entry is long.

Adrienne Rich died on Wednesday. She was such a big influence on Boland that she naturally colored my thesis quite a bit. It's weird to think she's gone.

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In my continuing quest to watch every TV show Canada has ever made, I watched the first eight episodes of Robson Arms, which is a half-hour quasi-anthology series about the quirky tenants of a ramshackle Vancouver apartment building that aired from 2005-2008. It does have reoccurring characters, but each episode focuses on different ones, or the same ones in different combinations. Some of the situations can be a bit stock, but they do a really good job of putting an emotionally weighty, original spin on them. So far my favorite is the episode where the younger half of a May-December gay couple feels resentful about eventually having to take care of his older partner, only to discover that at age 30, he has cancer, which upends everything about the relationship. I also enjoyed the one where a teenager bonds with his kickass burlesque dancer grandmother.

Apparently half the Canadian television community acted in this series, because I am constantly going, "Hey, It's That Person!" Examples:

Gabrielle Miller and Fred Ewaniuk (Lacey and Hank Corner Gas)

Mark McKinney (Richard, Slings & Arrows)

William B. Davis (Cigarette-Smoking Man, X-Files)

Gabrielle Rose (the Redverse psychologist in "Olivia" on Fringe; other guest roles in Vancouver-filmed shows)

Alisen Down (Barolay, BSG)

Kevin McNulty (assorted guest roles)

Apparently Dave Foley and Peter DeLuise are going to show up at some point as well.

Anyway, it's good, and it's on Netflix. You should watch it!

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In my continuing quest to read everything ever written about Amelia Earhart, fiction reading ensued: Jane Mendelsohn's I Was Amelia Earhart, which is a beautiful little novella that follows Earhart and Fred Noonan on the round the world trip and then postulates that they crashed on a deserted tropical island and survived there for a year before they reach a point where "there is no difference between being rescued and being captured," and so when they spy a plane that might be American, might be Japanese, and has definitely seen them, they take the Electra up again and presumably crash into the ocean and journey to an afterlife that is another version of their island.

The dreamy style is a bit self-conscious, but that actually works in its favor because Earhart seems to have been quite self-conscious herself. My only quibble is that the switching from first- to third-person POV with seemingly no rhyme or reason didn't entirely work for me. I would've stuck with first-person all the way through, although the third did give the reader some nice views into Noonan's head, such as, ...he measures the passage of time less in terms of his own experience than in the changing expression of her form. // When she is old, gray-haired, he will love her for all of the seasons she contains.

(There is, perhaps predictably but no less nicely-done, a lot of bickering and fighting in the first part and then a love story. Or I suppose really the whole thing is a love story in its way, including the fighting, but you know what I mean.)

Two more excerpts I was particularly taken with:

These are very good, he says.

We don't talk much, but then one day he asks me if I like coconut. I tell him, somewhat formally, because I haven't been speaking much, that I have never been introduced to coconut.

I never met one I didn't like, he says.

He hands me a coconut, teases me. I look at it. I turn it around and around, the liquid splashing inside. I wonder how to get at it. It's like a human head, maddening, inaccessible.

You have to shell a coconut to get at its fruit, and for that you need a machete. I don't know that, so I try to break it on a tree. I hit the tree with it, but nothing happens. When I throw the coconut at the tree again, we both start to laugh. Then I throw the coconut at him, and he catches it, and he falls backward, still laughing. He takes his knife out from his pocket and starts to shell the fruit. When he splits open the white skull, the milk drips over, and I realize how hungry I am. We've been eating fish and drinking the water we collected, but I realize that I'm hungry for something sweet.

I notice that for the first time I'm noticing him.

He says he feels sorry for me because I've never eaten a coconut before. Never had the experience, he says. I say I don't need his pity and anyway, here I am, about to taste a coconut. He hands me half the coconut to drink from, and I take it, the liquid almost painful it's so sugary. I feel it travel from my mouth all over my body. He asks me if I like it. But I don;t hear him at first; I'm just looking at him and listening to the sea. He asks me again and before I can answer he hands me another piece. I feel something deepen inside me, very gently, like the sand soaking up the water after a wave. I feel that I've absorbed something.

Love is so transparent that if you are unprepared for it you will see right through it and not notice it.

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Finally, pictures from a recent outing to Centennial Park:

The internet suggests there was a vogue for reinforced concrete at the beginning of the twentieth century. So to show off the figurehead for Spanish-American War cruiser Tennessee, someone made a concrete bow that looks "like a ship that had been driven ashore in the shrubbery."