Smart Magazines

After going to ED's, I felt inspired to be intelligent again. I read a lot of her poems.

Here's my favorite:

Aurora is the effort
Of the Celestial Face
unconsciousness of Perfectness
To simulate, to Us.

It's not really my favorite. I just like to pretend she was talking about me.

After that, it was Friday. A long day. Ricky and I dropped Kelly off at the mall movie-theater at 9 for work. Then we went to Borders across the mall to get our number to pick up Harry Potter at midnight Saturday a.m. While I was there, I bought the April poetry month issue of The Believer. And also The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

We went home and I read my smart magazines for a while (does anyone have strong feelings about Stevie Smith?), then we went back to the mall to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Very weird, Mr. Depp. I recommend it to all. Then back home for more reading. But I watched Anchorman with Ricky and my mom while she cornrowed his hair. My mom laughed at us laughing at it. She doesn't understand how completely brilliant the dumbness of that movie is.

Back to the mall for the 9:40 showing of Wedding Crashers which was also enjoyable silliness, back to Borders to stand in Harry Potter line with about 1000 people (we were #28) and to pretend like I was excited about the whole thing. I said woo! a lot. Screechily. Ricky and Kelly were embarrassed by my behavior. I was tired and very amused by myself. I was smart and stupid all rolled into one.

It's nice when your sister works at the theater and you get to see all the movies for free. It makes the movies seem better than when you pay 7 dollars to see them.

Tomorrow we're off to Philadelphia for 3 days. Pictures and words to come.

Amherst Part II (Emily Dickinson)

Obviously a poet-type person can't go to Amherst without stopping by Emily Dickinson's house. Only my mom and I were there for the 1:30 tour, which was lead by a nice old man who went to Stanford a long time ago. He told us a lot of stuff about ED that I knew from reading her biography for the ED class I took with Toast 1st year. He made me read aloud a menu at the house next door (The Evergreens) which belonged to her brother (and his wife, who may have been her lesbian lover, according to one book, but the guide said nothing about that shameful controversy), and he made me read "I dwell in Possibility" aloud too. My mom wouldn't do it. The tour guide liked us until the very end when my mom's phone rang. He ring tone is the theme from Rocky (Flying High Now, you know).

It was weird to be in her house. Not so much at first, because there's not a lot of furniture, and the wallpaper is from the family that lived there after it went out of the Dickinson family, but upstairs, where her bedroom is, I started to get excited, and I had shivers when we went into her little room. Her bed is there, a simple sleigh bed, with her actual shawl, a beautiful autumnal paisley. There's a dresser with a facsimile of a fascicle and the actual basket she used to lower gingerbread to the children who played beneath her window. And her writing table, tiny, square. The light was lovely. There are a lot of windows facing south and west. I was surprised at how moved I was.

They don't let you take pictures inside but here's a picture of the house from outside.

Her bedroom windows are the two on the right of the second story.

The Evergreens (the first house in Amherst to have a name) next door has a lot more Dickinson family stuff, and it's a lot fancier. High Victorian with paintings, beautiful floors, intricately carved moldings and also mold. They're restoring it, but there's a lot of work to be done. Here's The Evergreens:


If you're ever in Massachusetts, I seriously recommend this place to all poet-types. It's fabulous. Here's the other side of ED's house. The tree in the foreground is a 150-year-old oak that was there when she was.

Maurice & Co.

Here's pretty Maurice:


Here's scary Maurice:


Here's a frog that was in our grass:


Maurice saw it hopping and tried to catch it, but it stayed very still and Maurice couldn't find it.

Amherst Part I (college)

Went to Amherst with little bro, his friend Andrew and my mom on Thursday. There's real Mexican food there, made by real Mexicans. La Verecruzana if you're ever there. It's across from the town green.

College towns are neat. Very unlike Irvine. Also, like all cities in the entire country that's not Southern California, there a lot of old pretty churches and things. I took lots of pictures.

We went on a tour of UMass for Ricky. The tour guide, who made 2 references to Saved by the Bell, told us that if no questions were asked after each stop, he would make us all ask a question, so I asked lots of questions about dorm food and on-line registration. It's a pretty nice campus. It's from 1863. Here's the old chapel:


It is nice to know, though, that even a lovely old campus has had it's bad moments architecturally. The student center is a massive gray concrete fin, very modern, uglier than anything at UCI, I'm happy to say, and all the administrative buildings look like this:


Ricky says he wouldn't mind going there if he doesn't get in anywhere else. He thinks he wants to go to Irvine. I'm trying to convince him otherwise.

Ricky seems vaguely jealous that Kelly's got a picture on the ol' blog and he doesn't. Here's a picture of Ricky playing the bass.


He's very good. His hair is in cornrows now.