yesterday and this morning I have been translating swan poems. "Tuercele el cuello del cisne..." where the swan is really a nasty pretentious toad but you don't realize it until you kill it, and @gustini's poem where she is looking at the blank page and feeling very powerful and imagines the swan of modernism sailing up and she totally like, fucks the swan of modernism and his pink beak is lying dead and still and limp in her lap. Modernism is totally her bitch. It's so great!!! Now Darío's swan is next and I bet it will piss me off amazingly so it's good that I did @gustini first as a pre-antidote. (would that just be a predote? a foredote?)
We hung out in Golden Gate P3rk and then had dinner at Chow. i was feeling very cityish, riding N train with way-too-heavy backpacks and flouncy skirts, in a suburban-tourist way enjoying looking at people and large stone buildings with strange ornamentation and fire escapes and all the enticing windows of the stores and restaurants and the way everyone is somehow more purposeful and mysterious when they're strangers in a city rather than strangers in downtown My Town where... it's just different... people's time is slower and their purposes more carefree and they seem somehow unburdened or less burdened. I remember the feeling manhattan gave me - not a happy feeling but so tense and wound-up as if the bustling busyness and intentions of all the swarming people were crackling in the air making my skin crawl... it was a stressful city...in SF i feel an inexplicably happy wound-up feeling though. I wonder why?
I have still not made it to green apple books nor to the extra-cheap-tights store but maybe next week.
Chula played me 2 very silly songs about the W0mbles. Remember you're a w0mble! and their basic theme song. vastly amusing. i am definitely a w0mble. i must see the tv show! i also read a goofy kids book "SOS B0bomoblile" about a boy genius who builds a submarine and discovers the loch ness monster.
It is really good to be here but especially in the morning (oddly) i miss rook's sluggish waking up and Moomin's little piccolo voice politely requesting juice and the playing of Castle, and our whole morning routine, even the routine of me grumpily clutching my hot coffee and glowering at my computer and wishing I had a moment's peace and didn't have to make anyone's breakfast or lunch or put on anyone else's tiny socks. of course here i am with that moment of peace and i'm appreciateing it madly and have been working for hours on end on my translations. Yet at the same time i'm way homesick - go figure.
Why would Chula like the Wombles, did she live in England? I must have sat through a hundred hours of Wombling when the children were small. I'm not sure you are actually a Womble, or Chula from your descriptions of her.
Posted by: Iris | July 30, 2004 at 12:40 PM
I might not be one, but I can maybe get in touch with my inner Womble, which wobbles, warbles, and wears a wimple.
Posted by: badgerbag | July 30, 2004 at 01:47 PM
I did indeed live in the UK for several years as a child, and became a huge fan of Doctor Who, the Wombles, Magic Roundabout, Play Away, Blue Peter, the Beano, the Goodies, Captain Pugwash, Rupert the Bear, and countless other British contributions to kiddie trash culture. Speaking of trash, I'm not sure if badgerbag or I are really truly wombles. I do know that no womble would ever be caught dead wearing a wimple. Unless maybe it was Madame Cholet.
Posted by: Chula | July 30, 2004 at 05:03 PM
what if it were a recycled wimple made out of, like, used kleenexes or something?
Posted by: badgerbag | July 30, 2004 at 05:38 PM
Give me a 'P'. Give me an 'L'. I had forgotten all that - thank god now I am the one who chooses when to watch it.
Posted by: Iris | July 31, 2004 at 02:10 AM
A pre-antidote is a "prophylactic", an example of a useful general word which ended up being swamped by one specific application.
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | August 01, 2004 at 05:50 PM