Two Screen Adaptations About Orphan Girls Who Change the Lives of People Around Them for the Better

Title: Anne of Green Gables (1985)
Director: Kevin Sullivan
Language: English
Rating: G

This two-episode TV mini-series adaptation of the Lucy Maud Montgomery book is enjoyable for multiple reasons, including the stunning Canadian landscapes.

Shades of autumn, spring and summer greenery, the sparkling ocean - it's a feast of the four seasons, full of natural beauty.

The casting is good too. Both the roles of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry are played well (by Megan Follows and Schuyler Grant respectively). As for the adult characters, I love how Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth play Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, the aging sister and brother who initially wanted to take on an orphan boy to help them with their farm, but instead had Anne arrive at the local train station. I like how Marilla's hardness is tempered by a sense of justice and a wellspring of kindness, buried deep, that Anne eventually brings out. And how Matthew is pretty soft on Anne right from the start.

One thing I found both amusing and disturbing is how Anne often expresses emotions in a lofty, stage-like fashion, almost as if she is detached from them or afraid to discuss them more bluntly. It makes sense for a character who has dealt with loneliness and neglect by play-acting and disappearing mentally from a harsh environment to more beautiful imaginary worlds.

Overall, it's an excellent mini-series: lovely, engaging, spirited, and fun to become absorbed in for a while.

Title: The Secret Garden (1993)
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Language: English
Rating: G

One of the most beautiful parts of the movie is a time-lapse sequence showing the arrival of spring, with flowers opening, plants pushing slowly out of the soil, and the land becoming green. The images have a rich, visceral quality that I love.

This adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett book is full of such beauty. It's also a movie infused with hopefulness, where the dark neglected places in the land and in people still have potential for life, with enough nurturing.

I didn't find the adult characters compelling, and the movie is too rushed towards the end, but it's still delightful. The younger actors are excellent. Kate Maberly carries the movie as Mary Lennox. The child of wealthy but neglectful colonials in India, she becomes an orphan living in her reclusive uncle's estate in the Yorkshire moors and finds in herself a great capacity for self-sufficiency and love.

Dickon, the boy of the moors who can communicate with animals, is played well by Andrew Knott, and I enjoyed the peevish, wounded theatrics (and genuine pain) conveyed by Heydon Prowse as Colin. Also, Laura Crossley plays Martha, a housemaid and Dickon's sister, with a wonderful honesty and sweetness.

So much in this movie hinges on the sense of place. The large house with the echoing cries, drafty corridors, and abandoned rooms inspires fear and curiosity. And the garden has a character of its own, full of fairy-like enchantment and possibility.

Of Human Bondage: Explorations of Growth, Maturity, and Self-Destruction

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham follows Philip Carey from when he becomes an orphan in childhood and begins to live with his aunt and uncle, who is a vicar.

Set in England (and sometimes France and Germany) in the late 19th century, the novel shows Carey attempting to make sense of the world by adopting different ideologies. First comes the religion of the boarding school he's sent to. Once he sheds most of those doctrines, he tries to become an artist in Paris and subscribe to various theories of art and life. It's only later, when he works to become a doctor (and backslides into near-fatal poverty along the way), that he begins to accept the mess of human life - the behaviors that are baffling and contradictory, the great muddle of people who are all just trying to live, and who can't all be captured in abstract theories. He does this with some humor and greater compassion.

I like how, even as he sheds different creeds or ideologies, he sometimes keeps their more beneficial lessons. How does he determine what's beneficial and what isn't? It isn't always conscious. He discovers answers through difficult experiences - like his poverty, and his self-destructive love for (or obsession with) a woman who repeatedly hurts and abandons him, and just seeing the cases he comes across in his medical studies and as a doctor. He also has a clubfoot and learns early on how people use it as an excuse to be cruel to him. (His clubfoot, however, isn't his major impediment; he has a tendency towards self-destruction that battles with his thirst for life.) Pushing through the great mess of the world, Carey sometimes finds people and activities that help give his life meaning. Some signs of his increased maturity are his capacity to live with uncertainty, to take pleasure in more straightforward and wholesome joys, and to accept human frailty and the fact that no, he'll never fully understand everything and that he'll keep making mistakes, though hopefully not the same kind of mistakes (with the same magnitude) as those of his younger years.

Does he give up some of his dreams at the end, or does he find other dreams and sources of happiness that are just as good, if not better? He finds a place in the world where he can do some good. Throughout the novel, Carey tried to find a place for himself in ideas or in people who share his ideas, but never really was at home anywhere. By the end of the book, he can make a home somewhere. He may always feel different from other people (as each individual differs from any other), but he can live among people with greater peace and a sense of having a shared lot in life.

Carey's struggles in the book, his attempts to make sense of life and his tendencies towards self-destruction, moved me.

(I read this novel for the Classics Club Challenge.)

Week in Seven Words #277

accumulation
Ten open jars are spread out on her table, including two for peanut butter and one for pickles. A newspaper lies folded in half in front of her chair, next to a crusty fork and a lid that doesn't fit any of the jars.

beaming
The waiter is one of the most charismatic people we've ever met. When he glides up to our table, we kind of forget about the food. Radiant with warmth and good humor, he grins, tells jokes, offers vivid descriptions of dessert. We would pay him to eat with us.

cyclic
The boy hits replay again on Abbott & Costello's "Who's on First" routine.

echolocation
We're lost in a white hallway with a white-and-black checkered floor. "I'm here," says his disembodied voice, its path distorted by sharp turns and the high ceiling over the corkscrew stairs.

imploringly
She refuses only because she likes to hear us plead with her.

patzer
The dog slips between me and the chess board, her tail sweeping pieces off as she stares at me with a solemn expression.

relinquishing
The house belongs now to someone else. The tree she planted may be ripped out or cut down. Few people remember the work she put into that yard.

Week in Seven Words #267

aging
White linens folded in a pile. Beside it, a vase of brown roses.

defaced
Long scars on a lone tree. It looks like it's been whipped.

ferreting
On all fours, her nose to the floor, she searches for candy among people's feet.

flatness
The kid flops onto the floor. He stares at the ceiling, then rolls over onto his stomach. Thunks his forehead against the carpet a couple of times, rolls onto his back, and kicks his heel against the wall. "Ow," he says, and kicks the wall again. Any sensation is preferable to boredom.

fluorescent
Lime green graffiti lighting up a street soaked in rain.

tippy
An old man pedaling a bike, leaning into it. It's a purple bike, and he wears a Panama hat and black sandals. He shifts a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. The front wheel of the bike jerks left and right.

token
A barren nest tucked in a tree hollow.

Three Stories with Flowers in Their Titles

Title: At the Time of the Jasmine
Author: Alifa Rifaat
Translator: Denys Johnson-Davies
Where I Read It: The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories

A son goes home to attend his father's funeral. The funeral rituals prompt people to pay their respects regardless of their feelings for the dead. And by serving as the basic steps for what to do, the rituals can act both as a guide through a difficult time and as a means to free people's minds from the details of what they need to do, so that they can consider feelings and questions they've long avoided.

The son had drifted apart from his father. Now he asks himself why. He also considers duty and love. What did his father feel towards him - some mixture of both? At the very least, duty maybe, but perhaps more. What happened to their relationship, and was the son also dutiful to the father? Jasmine - its scent and its significance to father and son - traces its way through the story.

Title: Blue Poppies
Author: Jane Gardam
Where I Read It: The Garden of Reading

"Mother had been staying with me for a month, sometimes knowing me, sometimes looking interestedly in my direction as if she ought to."

A woman and her senile mother seem to talk across each other a lot. She takes her mother to the old estate of a duchess and duke, where there's a field of blue poppies that maybe the mother has visited before but can't remember. Both noble personages are on the scene, though they don't much look the part of nobility; the duchess is gardening, the duke sits outdoors looking forlorn, and they've opened up their home to public visitors to raise money. In the course of the story, the duchess acts both as a force that keeps mother and daughter apart at a critical time, and as a means of giving some awkward, painful closure at the end. It's told with a light touch that still lets darker emotions like grief and regret seep through.

Title: Roses, Rhododendron
Author: Alice Adams
Where I Read It: American Voices
I like the sense of place in this one, and the rich details. As a child, Jane Kilgore moves from Boston to North Carolina with her mother, who has taken up selling antiques; Jane's father has abandoned them. After some exploration, Jane finds the home of the girl who will become her childhood best friend: Harriet Farr. Harriet's personal qualities, parents, and home are everything that Jane hopes she could have. Some years later, after Jane moves away, she realizes that she was more important than she could have imagined to Harriet and her family. The story explores the girls' friendship and how they've imprinted themselves on each other - and even years later, after they've moved away from their childhood and from each other, their friendship can linger and show them new things about themselves.

Week in Seven Words #244

arresting
There are some sounds to which I fall silent and still.

present
The key is to appear clearly to yourself and think, "Here I am. Here's what I'm doing." And not have to shy away from either.

pretense
He makes the "both sides are wrong" copout. Yes, both sides have flaws - but for one side, it's a few typos, while for the other side it's the equivalent of ungrammatical chicken scratch handed in on toilet paper.

ribs
I'm imprisoned in the stories I tell about myself.

soggy
Rain puddling under a bench where we sit and share a bag of peanut butter cups.

soreness
Damp and tired, feet chafed, after a long walk in the park with inappropriate footwear.

version
Change the narratives then. Cobble together some new ones. Find out who you are after years of not listening, of treating yourself as second-rate.

Three Short Stories About Waking Up Later in Life

Title: New-Wave Format
Author: Bobbie Ann Mason
Where I Read It: American Short Stories Since 1945
The main character, Edwin, is a 40-something man in a relationship with a woman about twenty years younger. It works, at least at the start, because he hasn't changed much since he was her age. He's drifted through life in a kind of stupor, with little awareness of the world and understanding of himself.

Interestingly, it's his new job as a bus driver for developmentally disabled adults that pushes him to develop. (And this story isn't sentimental about his growing understanding and affection for them, and their attachment to him. It feels real.) As he gets to know them better and take responsibility for their safety when they're on his watch, he wakes up a little - and with this new maturity and awareness comes pain. The author doesn't shy from the pain of growing and the loss which comes with re-evaluating one's life and relationships. There might be healing but also a regret for the years, even decades, that have slipped by unnoticed.

Where does the 'new-wave format' come into this? Edwin plays music on his bus - first only oldies and then experimenting with newer more electric and frenetic music - while pretending to be a disc jockey. Music connects him not only to his passengers, but to different parts of his life. The older music, listened to in a new context, helps him revisit and better understand a past he's slept through. He ages mentally on that bus; the music helps to bring him up to date. In different ways, both the old and new music push him to the present moment and underscore the way he relates to his passengers. At the end, he's more mature - but this also means he can't slip back into the comfortable sleep that's cushioned him over the years.

Title: Revelation
Author: Flannery O'Connor
Where I Read It: American Short Stories Since 1945
O'Connor's stories sting; they're thoughtful and sharp, and sometimes funny in a dark way. Even when a character experiences some kind of redemption, the moment isn't necessarily hopeful. There's no easy redemption in her stories. This one begins in a doctor's waiting room, a good setting for bringing together people from different levels of the social hierarchy and pressing them into a confined space, forcing them to breathe each other's air; the setting also suggests that the people occupying it are in need of a cure of some kind, not necessarily medical.

The main character, Mrs. Turpin, is a woman who lives by social distinctions. She's a respectable white woman who knows exactly where she fits in relative to everyone else. Hers is an ordered world, and it feels like a gift she received for being the spotless creature she is. It's only proper that she command respect and own land with her husband.

Another person in the waiting room, a sullen, bookish teenaged girl named Mary Grace, takes a savage dislike to Mrs. Turpin. Their violent confrontation shakes Mrs. Turpin's complacency, her perception of her own goodness and the idea that the social hierarchy in the world around her somehow mirrors what's in Heaven.

From what I remember of the story, Mary Grace's mother is much like Mrs. Turpin; perhaps Mary Grace strikes out at Mrs. Turpin as an indirect blow to her mother as well - and a blow against everyone who maintains a society based on polite fictions, with genteel manners substituting for kind sincerity. Mary Grace's anger isn't misdirected and strange; it's the rage of someone who can see the lies but can do little to change anything. Nonetheless, she helps transform Mrs. Turpin, who takes Mary Grace's attack as a personal spiritual message.

Mary Grace and Mrs. Turpin are also similar (Mary Grace might as well be Mrs. Turpin's daughter, or maybe the teenaged version of her in an alternate life). Mary Grace's attack unleashes some of Mrs. Turpin's personal fierceness, which is usually masked by gentility and expressed in petty ways. When Mrs. Turpin's world gets turned upside down, her ordered world smashed, she rages. She shouts questions at Heaven. She has a kind of savage strength in her, and her faith is no longer a complacent feeling of well-being but more a cry of anger and fierce questioning.

Title: Rosendo's Tale
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Translator: Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Where I Read It: World Literature: An Anthology of Great Short Stories, Drama, and Poetry
The narrator's voice in this one pulls you into the story. He's a man who has killed someone in a knife fight and gets recruited, via a corrupt police force, to intimidate voters at the behest of corrupt politicians. He does this for years; a life where manhood isn't defined by near-constant physical violence seems unimaginable. And then at some point he sees the senselessness of it, including a key moment where he sees himself mirrored in another man - what he must look like himself as a brute. Could he have had that moment of recognition at any time in his life, or did he have to get worn away a bit by the passage of years?

[Edited 2/2015]

Week in Seven Words #216 & 217

216

helpless
No one knows who he is, only that he's fallen to the pavement and is sobbing so hard he can't speak.

needed
Garbage bags bulging with skirts, blouses and sweaters.

oasitic
Footsteps echo in the atrium, and faint voices, but all the sounds arrive as from a distance. Birds skim the vaulting glass. There's no breeze, but the trees rustle.

rigidity
He considers the model of masculinity people tried to make him live up to: No feelings, except for anger and physical appetites. No tenderness. An internal world made up of steel girders with huge blank spaces in between.

sapor
Knowledge is a treasure to them and a pleasure to all the senses. They taste new facts. They savor what they learn.

stricken
She looks perpetually stunned by the indifference and cruelty around her. The magnitude of it empties her eyes. She's left with a smile that creases her face but never reaches her eyes.

uninhibited
Actors try to banish their self-conscious impulses. They howl and prance in public. They pretend to be jaguars and squirrels.

217

body
I'm uncomfortable among people who are being cued to do the same thing at the same time: chant, scream, clap or stomp their feet. If they're a large crowd and look like they're really into it, this puts me on edge even more.

exhort
At her age, she's both exploring new opportunities and also warning younger people not to make the same mistakes she made. But they don't all agree with her on what is or isn't a mistake.

gall
She usually likes it when other people are worse off than she is. At the same time, she doesn't want to be uncaring. So she offers comfort and advice. Only there's a bitter satisfaction in her tone that make people turn away from her anyway.

nerves
Branches spasm in the wind.

persevere
Her first impulse is to say it's too difficult and to back off. But then she weighs the disappointment that might come from a failed attempt against the greater regret of never trying.

rumble
The ground is trembling with the trains passing beneath it.

sopping
The vestibule is soaked in the heavy smell of wet coats.

Worth Watching: About Schmidt (2002)

Title: About Schmidt
Director: Alexander Payne
Language: English
Rating: R

Who is Warren Schmidt and why does he have reason to despair?

Early on, we watch Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) at his retirement party. His best friend makes a toast and tells Warren that a man can be proud if he looks back on his life and sees a loving family, good friends, and meaningful work. And while, on the surface, Warren seems to lay claim to that legacy, it isn't long before he realizes that his life is empty. His years of work in insurance are irrelevant to the young man succeeding him on the job. He's disconnected from the community and from friends. Now that he's at home with his wife all day, he realizes that she's virtually a stranger. And though he thinks with fondness of their one daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), all of his fond thoughts center on her as a young girl. The adult Jeannie is a stranger to him as well.

Week in Seven Words #151 & #152

Week in Seven Words #151

affective
When the book I've worked on makes its way into the world I feel a nervous happiness.

kick
Short clips of improv comedy are like shots of an energy drink.

perpetual
The blink of the cursor measures time.

ploy
She tries to give me 'supercalifragalisticexpialidocious' as a mathematical solution. I am unmoved.

progress
Step 1: Recognizing a problem. Step 3: Doing something about it. Step 2: Inertia.

scattered
At the front of the line there's usually someone whose library card is lost among a hundred compartments in a purse or whose money is floating around in a bottomless coat pocket.

sheeted
The water is beaten down by the wind.

------------

Week in Seven Words #152

evacuation
He isn't toilet-trained but he's started to seek out privacy when nature calls. He tries to find a quiet spot in the house where he can stand or sit in his diaper, and if you approach him, he warns you off with a plaintive "No, no..." until he's done.

fluidity
I see the sculpture in the wan cloudy light of a winter afternoon, so I don't realize at first that it has color sliding through it - a pale lavender flowing like liquid through its metal veins.

impressionistic
The view from the window is one gray smear, like a Monet painting of London.

palimpsest
I like historical tours of downtown where you learn that criminals were hanged and traitors shot in the peaceful square where people now eat their lunches by the fountain and text each other.

pragmatically
His expectation of instantaneous results have given way to pragmatism; there's so much more work to do, so much farther to go.

prioritizing
I had a feeling she'd stop being angry with me, because she'd want to know how my date went.

shortcut
He's been asked to sort his toys neatly into drawers. But there are so many of them, and he'd rather be playing than organizing his room. So he labels one drawer the 'everything drawer' and piles as much stuff as possible into it. Unfortunately it doesn't pass inspection.

Week in Seven Words #106

bewilderment
Of all the emotions I read in the puppy's eyes (or read into them), bewilderment is most prominent. Why doesn't she get to piddle on the floor and run around wherever she wants and chew on the DVD player? Why do her keepers alternate between belly rubs and scoldings?

chafing
Some of them yield to a lack of responsibility, the close of their life where they can be tended to and spend their time drawing, watching videos, or staring out of windows. Others bristle, even gently, against the activities suggested to them. They shrink away or turn stony when someone addresses them in a patronizing babying voice. Their body or mind might be turning on them, and there might be no one left who bothers to visit, but they aren't going to settle happily before a pile of coloring pages and play with crayons.

chirography
I don't know what he's writing about, as he sits in the subway car with a notebook propped on his knee, but his hand-writing is beautiful. I hope the words are beautiful too. I think he could make art of a grocery list with his languid looping script.

heartfelt
Because she can't see so well, she dictates the Valentine to me, a week before Valentine's Day. I write her words out on a red, purple and pink construction paper heart, and I wonder if the person she's writing to is real, or still alive and living at the address she remembers. She has a great memory for addresses. Her words are straightforward - "thank you for visiting me, I'm sorry I couldn't see you at the time" - and I hope this person is real and that the Valentine arrives at the right place.

landmarks
An empty bandshell, the grand avenue of elms, an angel in a dead fountain. The bridge I cross shows up in sharp reflection on cloudy water.

promise
I hope to be worthy of the risks I'm taking.

ruction
Geese and ducks struggle over crumbs from bread and muffins. Two of the ducks whirl in a circle of combat on the water, a taut coil of movement, until one of them breaks free and skips away like a stone across the surface of the lake.

Week in Seven Words #39

bullion
Golden bars of sunlight on deep green grass.

cachinnate
When I learn with her, and we're sitting with our books in front of us, we tend to laugh, sometimes a lot. It seems that the laughter is what I remember the most afterwards.

groundwork
Infants are often thought of as amoral; they might squirm, smile, cry, babble, explore, but making a judgment about another person's actions might seem to be beyond their capacities. As it turns out, there's evidence that infants younger than a year do show preferences for people (and characters) who are helpful and kind to another person over those who hinder and thwart; from what I recall they also prefer people who remain neutrally uninvolved to those who actively undermine another person's efforts (and prefer those who actively help to those who remain uninvolved). Rudiments of morality, good deeds and a sense of justice are there, even before they can speak.

regard
He speaks quite eloquently about love. Not love in the sense of falling head over heels, or getting swept away, or any other conception of love that involves losing one's mind or will to passions that are beyond personal control. He speaks about love as a choice and commitment, as something that deepens and grows throughout life, that glows inside of a healthy self and spreads outwards in ever-widening circles.

stalwart
A son of one of the Bielsky brothers talks about his father's and uncles' experiences leading a Jewish partisan group against Nazis and Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe and saving over 1200 Jews (young, old, healthy, sick, men, women, and children). Several thoughts come out of the talk - the human spirit and human courage are amazing; heroes are flesh-and-blood imperfect people; and what's it like to live with this family legacy, to be the son and nephew of people who did things like that? (From this speaker I sense deep pride but also, especially when he was younger, a need to prove that he too has guts and can live up to the family name.)

unmotivated
Friday afternoon. People's primary concern seems to be whether there's any coffee or cookies left.

waxy
Yellow leaves on slicked pavement.

Extracts: "Worship and living are not two separate realms."

Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) starts this evening, and I'm reading these words now from Abraham Joshua Heschel's book God in Search of Man:

The problem of living does not begin with the question of how to take care of the rascals, of how to prevent delinquency or hideous crimes. The problem of living begins with the realization that all of us blunder in our dealings with our fellow men. The silent atrocities, the secret scandals... are the true seat of moral infection. The problem of living begins, in fact, in relation to our own selves, in the handling of our emotional functions, in the way we deal with envy, greed, and pride.

Worship and living are not two separate realms. Unless living is a form of worship, our worship has no life. Religion is not a reservation, a tract of time reserved for solemn celebrations on festive days. The spirit withers when confined in splendid isolation. What is decisive is not the climax we reach in rare moments, but how the achievements of rare moments affect the climate of the entire life. The goal of Jewish law is to be the grammar of living, dealing with all relations and functions of living.

Religion is trying to teach us that no act is trite, every moment is an extraordinary occasion.

The highest peak of spiritual living is not necessarily reached in rare moments of ecstasy; the highest peak lies wherever we are and may be ascended in a common deed. There can be as sublime a holiness in performing friendship, in observing dietary laws day by day, as in uttering a prayer on the Day of Atonement.

It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness.

Week in Seven Words #22

absorption
The intense focus of two dogs discovering a third. The two immediately strain at their leashes and begin to sniff; one of them attends to the third dog's face, the other delicately samples the hindquarters.

crotchety
My foot is slightly swollen and pained. It reminds me of a grumpy companion on a road trip, complaining about distances, uncomfortable car seats, and slight jolts along the way.

currency
The cashier is incredulous when a customer pays her in dollar coins; she at first thinks they're fake, like amusement park tokens. She's new to this country, but thought she'd learned everything about the money; she tells another cashier that a trip to the mint is in order.

elusive
The young child's mind is good at eluding experiments that try to tap into the earliest years of language use; a researcher can feel like a naturalist crouched in a tangle of vines and shrubs, hoping for a chance to cast a net at a sly and mysterious creature.

haft
In some other world, a character I've become acquainted with holds her sword at the ready.

nice
She's someone who's genuinely nice. I don't mean that in the bland way in which 'nice' may be used, when you can't think of a stronger or more interesting quality. She is a fundamentally nice person, and it's a pleasure to be in her company.

rudder
I think I have a firm grasp on the story, but the draft I'm working on drifts off course, and not in a mostly delightful or illuminating way. But at least I get some insights into the characters from this unexpected deviation, along with some words that I'd like to keep working with.

Bodies can tell such strange sad tales

This afternoon I visited the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.



It's a fascinating and disturbing place, containing collections of preserved skeletons, tissues and organs (including a large number of diseased ones), a woman's adipoceric corpse (where the decomposing flesh had changed into a soap-like waxy substance, adipocere, that has kept the body intact), and also a number of fetuses in jars.

The fetuses were particularly poignant and wrenching to look at. Many of them had serious physiological defects of some kind. The first one I encountered was a fetus with anencephaly - absence of a forebrain (which includes the cerebral cortex), and with it a flat skull. It was inexplicably placed in a jar apart from the other fetuses - in a bottom corner next to a section of intestine. Its tongue was protruding slightly. I didn't find this horrifying, just very sad. Other fetuses included triplets, all sharing a jar. Others were conjoined twins. There were others, tiny and embedded in tissue, who had arisen from ectopic pregnancies, which develop outside of the uterus and the amniotic sac in places like the fallopian tubes. What I kept thinking was that all of these fetuses were displaced from a uterus; they were in fluid-filled jars instead, locked inside of cabinets. Unclaimed and nameless and lost along the way.



This statue is from the adjacent herb garden. It was refreshing to go there afterwards. Butterflies, birds, flowers and herbs, along with a circle of benches:



I jotted down some of the other things I saw:
- an exhibit on Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth (including thoracic tissue taken from Booth's body during his autopsy), and also a parallel exhibit of James Garfield and his assassin, Charles Guiteau, (and some preserved skin from Garfield, who with better medical care probably would have survived instead of experiencing a lingering painful descent into death).
- Dr. Politzer, the "father of otology", a man who did groundbreaking work on the ear
- suspended skeletons, some of them with obvious blunt trauma to their skulls or horrible curvature to the spine (as seen in Pott's Disease)
- various brains, from fish to human
- an enormous colon
- a small collection of body-related art, including one piece ("Hide" by Christina West), which is a sculpture of a nude woman, bent over, her hands against the wall (to see the sculpture's face you have to squat - if it even occurs to you to seek out her face).

There's a story for everyone and everything (down to the slightest bit of deviant tissue - it came from someone, under some set of circumstances).

Displayed in the museum, a quote by Thomas Hardy:

Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?

We're frail. We know horror. We settle down and make our music anyway.

Week in Seven Words #8

assortment
We're the ones who don't fit neatly anywhere. Off the main room with the bright lights and song and long tables, we're in the semi-dark, five or six of us, whoever wants to drift in and talk about anything, from holiday plans to obscure historical details, and whether it's possible to both be cynical and hold onto cherished ideals. We're in the side room with the books, leftover crackers, and the windows facing sunset; in key ways we're beautifully different from one another, but seeking similar things - the pleasure of good conversation, along with room to slouch and stretch out our legs.

budding
The darling buds of March. They're set, in shades of light pink, against backdrops of gray sky or drab brick; they're framed by windows, where they seem to be looking in with rapt attention. Some trees have already flowered open, but on others the buds hold tight to themselves as long as possible; I'm expecting them to be especially spectacular when they finally yield to the season.

pantomime
To help someone out with a project, I agree to be photographed carrying out a number of different actions - playing cards, getting chased, sipping from a cup, reclining in a chair. I also need to mimic angry and violent actions - punching and kicking. I find it difficult to act those out, because I keep cracking up; I don't look angry enough. Finally I manage it but even then it feels like a comic sort of anger, as if I'm a cartoon character with steam coming out of my ears.

signal
He wants me to give him a signal if he's getting to be too long-winded in front of the guests. The signals we discuss range from the relatively subtle - three taps to the side of my nose, a beseeching stare - to the more obvious, like throwing my head back and letting out a huge groan.

steeped
The short thin raincoat isn't enough against the downpour. The rain soaks into my jeans and sweatshirt sleeves. I wear the rain on my skin for hours, cool against my thighs and wrists and the slope of my shoulders.

terrace
A light dinner beneath a peach and gray sky; the breeze for the most part is mild and pleasant. I sit alone and eat slowly. I stop often to sip my root beer and lean back in my chair.

underestimated
Very young infants are often underestimated. But there's so much that they can do, and many things that they're primed to learn. They have certain cognitive structures in place. They can pick up contingencies about the properties of the world and its objects. As the weeks fly by after birth, they show an ability to reason (in their own elusive, nonverbal way) about events in the world. The glimpses we get into their minds reveal amazing processes.