Week in Seven Words #170

aflutter
The keeper of keys has bats in his belfry.

glowworm
He talks and talks, and the point of his talk is just outside our reach, like a firefly winking in and out of existence.

paper-thin
Her smile is brittle. She's only sure of herself among books.

porous
From spirituality to bagels. I'm walking the surprisingly thin line between profundity and absurdity.

saturated
The tulips are in Technicolor, saturated in red and yellow.

storyteller
Rumpled hair, a coffee cup loose between his fingers. The familiar crinkle in the corners of his eyes.

tether
During the group meditation, my mind floats and expands, then abruptly contracts. The process restarts. The mind rises like a balloon until it reaches the end of its string. Then it descends and hits the floor.

In the society of daffodils

There are pariahs:



Battles between different factions:



And sweet consolations whispered to friends and lovers:

Week in Seven Words #169

abandon
Playing freeze tag by the train stop, the kids slither onto the platform and sprint across grassy lots. They laugh and scream and occasionally curse.

balance
The cherry tree holds light and shadow between its branches in perfect stillness.

gaiety
It isn't an orchid show, it's a masquerade ball. Each orchid, a prince, a duke, an empress, wears a vibrant mask and sways to music in the garden.

grate
His face is pink and stubbled, and his laugh has as much joy as he can force into it.

perianth
The branches are weighed down by a mass of magnolia blossoms. Soon the blossoms will fall to the ground and rot, but now they're still in their full flush, a decadent pink, inviting people to draw them aside as a curtain and seek privacy.

rippling
Daffodils streaming down a rocky hill.

swept
The sound of the waterfall washes everything away, all the noise in our heads.

Worth Watching: Born Yesterday (1950)

Title: Born Yesterday
Director: George Cukor
Language: English
Rating: PG

In Born Yesterday, Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday) slowly emerges from the 'dumb blonde' persona she's buried herself under for years in order to get by in life. At the start of the movie, she's arrived in Washington, D.C. with her boyfriend, Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), a crooked businessman who's trying to bribe his way to greater political influence. Brock was born in Jersey and is in the junk business, sort of a 1950s Tony Soprano.

Billie drifts through life with her mind turned off. She gets furs and jewels and verbal, and sometimes physical, abuse from Brock, who also uses her as an unwitting stooge for some of his deals. However, he finds that when they try to mingle in D.C. society, she comes across as too crass and ignorant. (So does he, but he thinks she's the only one who needs more polish.) His solution is to hire a journalist, Paul Verrall (William Holden), to teach her about culture and proper speech.

Paul gives Billie a lot of books, shows her historic sites in D.C., and talks to her like one human being to another. She starts to think for herself, and they fall in love.


I like that Billie isn't dumb; she just acts dumb. Once she becomes less ignorant and naive and learns to think for herself, she's a force to contend with. She's also still recognizably Billie, not some polished socialite (this isn't My Fair Lady). I also like that Paul isn't her 'white knight.' He doesn't rescue her or tell her what to do, other than to keep reading and thinking. She figures out what Brock is up to on her own and thinks of a plan for how to stop him; only then does she recruit Paul to be her accomplice.

Holden is a sweetheart as Paul, and Crawford plays Brock both as a comical ignoramus and as a genuine menace who only understands two kinds of power: money and physical force. But it's Holliday's performance that the movie rests on, and she holds it together. Like the movie as a whole, her performance is a skillful blend of comedy and drama, as seen in the way she can toss off a funny line and then, in a heartbeat, look lost and vulnerable. Not all performers, or movies, would handle these transitions well.

*The image links back to its source (Flixster Community).

Gorgeous Orchids - Part II

After the show, these orchids got donated to nursing homes and hospitals in the Bronx.

Nonfiction Book of the Month: We've Got Issues

We've Got Issues by Judith Warner discusses different factors that account for the sorry state of mental health services for children and early intervention for learning disabilities in the U.S. There's much to debate in this book, but even if you disagree with some of the premises or feel that she needs to dig deeper into some of the issues, I think you'll find that her approach is refreshing, as she doesn't blindly demonize people, whether they be parents, psychiatrists, or teachers. She also points out flaws in much of how the media reports on children's mental health, including their misinterpretations of data and their use of children as mere symbols representing larger societal problems.

Week in Seven Words #168

bombarded
I keep hearing that we're living in an evil age, more evil than ever. I'm not convinced. People have always been capable of atrocities and day-to-day cruelty. Now, however, we have the Internet, which can tell us about every crime in every town the world over, giving us the illusion that evil has suddenly exploded everywhere.

compulsion
"Emile! Zola!" he cries, but his dogs have already broken free to chase a squirrel across the grass.

dissolution
While taking photos of flowering trees in the garden, I hear, beyond the shrubs, two people breaking up, their voices low and pained.

icing
Cherry blossoms frosting the rim of the reservoir.

invasive
When does news reporting cross the line into voyeurism?

pedantry
The argument over whether salt was expensive or not in the Middle Ages threatens to disrupt the harmony of the meal.

soaring
Some of the magnolia blossoms stretch towards the darkening sky. Others are captured in lamplight.