Category Archives: books

Art, books, History, Movies, Music, Poems, Stories, Uncategorized, Words

Public Domain Day

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Two years ago, when Dale retired from the Trail, I didn’t know anything about usage rights and although I had heard the phrase “public domain”, I didn’t really know what it meant. Dale taught me quite a bit about it and then I did further research to make sure we don’t get ourselves in trouble.  That’s why Renee and I sometimes question photos and for the most part, don’t copy poetry and lyrics of other writers.

Since 1998, a work enters public domain 70 years after the life of the author. Before 1998, it was 50 years; to clear up the complexity of that change, they put a moratorium on releasing anything into public domain for 20 years.  That 20 years is up and as of Tuesday, everything from 1923 is now officially in the public domain.

Some of the items now free to share are The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair, The Color of a Great City by Theodore Dreiser, The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, Rootabaga Pigeons by Carl Sandburg and New Hampshire by Robert Frost.

So in celebration of Public Domain Day, here is a poem that last week we could not have posted here legally!

Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Do you pay attention to expiration dates?

books, Media, Movies, TV

Here I Stand

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I’m doing my best Martin Luther impersonation this week. His words “Here I stand. I can do no other” were supposedly uttered at the Diet of Worms where he was having to defend his statements of faith before the secular authorities.  It’s a motto I think I have to adopt.

You all know about my Sherlock Holmes fixation. I’ve enjoyed not just the original stories but just about every other form of Sherlock that I’ve encountered.  Graphic novels from Japan, fiction about his later adventures with his wife, Sherlock in movies, Sherlock on TV, young Sherlock, a farcical comedy with Sherlock and Watson played by women and even Sherlock Bones, with Sherlock as a dog (actually two different authors have written about Sherlock as a dog).  I even read a mash-up last year pairing Elizabeth Bennett from Pride & Prejudice with Sherlock Holmes!

But I’m drawing the line this week. There is a new Sherlock movie out and I just can’t do it.  I just can’t.  Not only slapstick, which I am not fond of in the least, but one of my least favorite actors.  On. The. Planet.

So even though I like to think I’m open-minded, I guess there are dark rooms that I just won’t go in, and this is one of them!

Tell me about your least favorite movie.

books, Family, Food, Uncategorized

Back to Basics

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Husband outdid himself yesterday and made the most wonderful bread. It is sourdough barley bread with sage topping, or Gerstenbrot.   You can see it in the header photo.  The recipe called for fresh yeast, which is something I haven’t baked with for years and years.  I was surprised to find that the grocery store still stocked it.  I think that the yeast made a huge difference in how the dough turned out.

The bread recipes in the Nordic baking book I received for Christmas from my son and DIL call exclusively for fresh yeast.  Given the results husband got from the fresh yeast, I can see why. I now have a new anxiety-will the store continue to stock fresh yeast?  Going back to basics isn’t easy sometimes.

What have you abandoned, only to come back to later?

books, Family, Uncategorized, Words

Descriptive Language

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For some reason that I can’t fathom, I thought of my dad today and about something he said once about one of his aunts.  I don’t remember which aunt it was, although I think it was the wife of one of his father’s brothers.  He described her as “like an old sow that eats chickens”.

Dad said this in a very matter of fact way, and was just being descriptive, not necessarily mean spirited.  He wanted me to understand what his aunt was like (to him, at least), and used some pretty descriptive language to do so. I asked two of my coworkers if they had ever heard this phrase, and they had, used by  older relatives of my father’s generation. It was their sense that this was descriptive language to indicate that someone was a hag.

Tell of some  memorable descriptive language you have run across lately or recall from the past. 

books, Fifty Words, Uncategorized

Who?

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Daughter and a friend are celebrating the end of their respective grad school semesters at a Hobbit Hole in the mountains around Tacoma. I gather this place is a resort built to look like the Hobbit Holes in Lord of the Rings.  How fun! Perhaps they will pretend they are hobbits.

What character in a book would you like to be?

books, Media, Poems, Words

Words!

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I lamented a few months back the loss of one of my favorite daily websites, “The Writer’s Almanac”. Well the good news is that it’s back! Not on MPR, mind you, but back nonetheless. The same comforting music and narrative voice and the same format: notable birthdays or events in history and then a poem. And now I get an email every day instead of having to remember on my own.

About the only difference I can tell is that many more of the daily poems are public domain than not, which says to me that he has a much smaller budget for this than MPR did. This is not a problem for me.

Today the poem was by John Milton, to commemorate his birthday. One of the fun facts was a list of some of the more than 600 words that Milton coined: dreary, flowery, jubilant, satanic, saintly, terrific, ethereal, sublime, impassive, unprincipled, dismissive, feverish, fragrance, adventurer, anarchy. I can’t imagine a world where there words don’t exist and it makes me wonder how often I need a word that doesn’t exist yet.

For example, I need a word for the feeling that comes on me when YA isn’t home at the agreed upon time, worry and irritation at the same time. Worritation?

What new word do YOU need?

 

 

 

books, Food, Gatherings, Stories, Uncategorized

Dairy Ephiphany

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Thanks to Charles Dickens for setting the scene….

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And in the midst of the chaos it sat, surrounded by its golden foil wrapper. Artisanal butter – a golden yellow color, soft and salty.  It made believers of us all.

Do you have a secret indulgence?

Art, books, Media, Movies, News, Uncategorized

RIP Stan Lee

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I’m not a huge comic book or graphic novel fan. Not sure why since I AM a super hero fan; probably  because super heroes have special powers, not unlike wizards and witches.  The last several years have been a real boon for super hero lovers and Stan Lee was behind a lot of that:  Spider Man, Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Black Panther, X-Men.  It was fun to see Stan Lee in small cameos in all the Marvel movies, a little like seeing Alfred Hitchcock showing up in the films that he directed.

Stan Lee passed away on Monday at the age of 95 from pneumonia. I’m sure his characters and movies will live on but it won’t be quite the same.  I’ll miss you, Stan.

What super hero would YOU like to be.

books, Family, Uncategorized

Lost in Translation

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I believe it was PG Wodehouse who remarked that Don Quixote was thought to be the world’s greatest novel, although all the literary critics he knew only took that on faith, since none of them could read Spanish, and the English translations were so poor as to make them unreadable. I mentioned this to Husband this week as he showed me the two translations of Don Quixote he bought on his recent trip to Denver.

“Who needs two translations of Don Quixote?” I asked. “Well, why do you have two translations of the Odyssey?” he countered.  He had me there. (One is a verse translation and one is a prose translation, but still).

I have always wondered what we lose  when great works are translated. Is Balzac more dramatic and fast-paced in the original French? What is War and Peace like in the original Russian? Is Don Quixote really the world’s greatest novel?  It will probably take Husband more than a year to get through his new books, if he ever does, so I will have to wait for his thoughts on it.

What do you think is the world’s greatest novel? What books do you wish you could read in their original languages? Have you ever read Don Quixote from cover to cover?

 

books, Media, Movies, Music, Nature, Poems, Seasons, Songs, Stories, Theatre, Uncategorized, Weather

Hunter’s Moon

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There was a beautiful full moon last night-The Hunter’s Moon. It is the second full moon of autumn, and was named by the Algonquin tribes as the moon for the time to go hunting and prepare for winter. The sky was quite clear and the moon was huge as I drove home from work at 7:00.  It had an orange tint.  The night before last it was almost full, and there were wavy wisps of clouds in front of the moon, making it look like the perfect backdrop for a a witch on a broom.

Tell about all the books, plays, stories, poems, and music you know of that are concerned with the moon. What are your own moon stories? Why is the moon so inspiring?