Otter's Rock

I was assigned to remix one of fawatson's fics, and I'm pretty sure we matched on Vorkosigan fandom, but I saw In Which Pooh Finds Someone Lost and is Rewarded (a story about James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree's mother (from one of Milne's poems called Disobedience) appearing in the Hundred Acre Wood) and thought the idea was fabulous. I've always loved Milne's poems; as a child, my parents read extensively to me from the two Pooh books but even more so from Milne's two poetry books, and Disobedience is one I can still mostly recite from memory. I had this wonderful idea about her wandering through the rest of the poems. She got lost because she "tried to go down to the end of the town" and in my head that translated to "well, they're poems, what if the end of the town is like the end of the book? what happens in the space between the poems?" and things went from there.

Unfortunately, lately I have not been writing until/unless I am UP AGAINST THE DEADLINE and so I was really pressed for time. Not because I had to be, but because I didn't start writing and I didn't start writing and I just ... didn't start writing until holy cow I was almost at the deadline. Which, I can crank out a lot of writing in a very short time, but that works best if you're doing something ... short. And I wasn't. Part of the problem was I had "oh, she can go into this poem and this one and this one and ...." but not necessarily what the structure was going to be, what the theme was going to be, and how each one of those poems was going to fit into the overall structure. If I'd planned it out in advance I probably COULD have gotten all the stuff I wanted into it, but oh well. I'll probably never do a sequel, because I think doing it once has scratched the meta itch that the original gave me.

redrikki was the author who remixed me, and came up with After the Glory Fades (The Last Lesson Learned Remix), which is wonderful and you should totally go read it. (Wonder Woman, Diana mourning her aunt, General Antiope.)

Anyway, you should totally read the original and then go through the Remix and read lots of fic, there were many great ones.

Title: In Which Mrs. Jane Dupree Has An Adventure (The Finding Herself Remix)
Fandom: Winnie-the-Pooh and Milne's poems
Length: 9k words
Rating: G
Summary: Mrs. Dupree put on a golden gown and went down to the end of the town. And this is what happened when she went past The End.
Betaed by: the_rckthe_rck 

On AO3. On tumblr.  On Pillowfort.


Mrs. Dupree, of course, is from the poem "Disobedience" in When We Were Very Young, one of A.A. Milne's two books of children's poetry (the other being Now We Are Six). She then wanders in and out of other poems in those two volumes before finding herself finally in the Hundred Acre Wood. The other poems are, in order, "Halfway Down," “King John’s Christmas,” "Missing," “Forgiveness,” “The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak,” “Bad Sir Brian Botany,” “The Good Little Girl,” and “King Hilary and the Beggarman.”

---

LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY

There was nothing. She had come to see whatever it was, but there was nothing to see. Quite literally nothing; a white blankness with no form or texture, and flat somehow, as if it was almost insubstantial. The End.

( Only, it wasn't an end really, because surely that implied that things … stopped? But that also implied the existence of things to stop. And there was nothing here. )

from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert:

 

  Easter wings.

 

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,   Though foolishly he lost the same,      Decaying more and more,       Till he became         Most poore:         With thee       Oh let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day  thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. My  tender  age  in  sorrow   did   beginne:   And still with sicknesses and shame      Thou  didst  so  punish  sinne,        That  I  became          Most thinne.          With  thee        Let me combine     And feel this day thy victorie:   For,  if  I  imp  my  wing  on  thine Affliction shall  advance the  flight in  me.

Note: the poem is usually printed on its side, so that it looks more like wings.  If you tilt your head to the left, you can see what it's supposed to look like.

I have a choc_fic due today, and I'm scrambling around for a title for it (I know, but I'm really bad with titles). Anyway, in the scramble I came across my list of poems I've saved from various places. And now, I want to write a story for Sharon (Boomer) Valerii from BSG to this poem:

One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master,
though it may look like (write it!) like disaster.
-Elizabeth Bishop (1976)

It doesn't fit this story, but it fits her so well I have no idea why I didn't list it as a prompt back when they were calling for prompts.

One of my classes is Early Church and its Creeds; we spent most of the semester focusing on the first 300-400 years of Christian history and the writings of the great early theologians. Now we're going at speed through the Dark Ages in the west (i.e. the time between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages), because, let's face it, it was the Dark Ages. Nothing much was happening, theologically. As for the 'practical' history, aside from the reign of Charlemagne it was pretty much one d@*^ thing after another.

Anyway, one of the main figures of the end of the Dark Ages was Bernard of Clairvaux, and we have a short section on him in the reading for tomorrow. In it is a quote he said about Mary and Martha. (For those of you who don't know the story, Mary and Martha were the sisters of Lazarus. At one point when Jesus was visiting them, Martha was doing the housework while Mary was listening to Jesus, and Martha asked Jesus to make her sister help. Instead, Jesus rebuked Martha, saying that Mary had chosen the "good part." Bernard said that "Martha's part, if that is our lot, must be borne with patience." Luke 10:38-42)

It reminded me of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of my favorite poets. It's a great poem, about the people who get their hands dirty.

( The Sons of Martha )

Holy Sonnet: 14
Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

-John Donne, 1633


( Real Life Woes )

I need someone to beta a fic for me. I have no clue whether or not I'm getting the effect I'm trying for. It's a pre-season Teal'c fic, and it needs to get betaed and posted soon, since it's for a ficathon and I'm the back-up of a back-up writer.

Poem of the Day:

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07/m/378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community:
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

-W. H. Auden (1940)

It's funny, we analyzed this poem in one of my lit classes in college, and there were several radically different interpretations, each well-thought-out with justifications. What do you think about it?

Update on the Greek: I'm past the forms part, thank God, and into the actual translation. It's going much better now.

The Leaden-Eyed

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

-Vachel Lindsay

Okay, 99.9% of the people who read this aren't going to get it, but I've been trying to remember this limerick for a couple days and I finally did and I'm really glad so I'm going to post it here. I got it from Dr. Marvin Slind, a history professor at Luther, in a class called Rome: Republic and Empire. We were studying the latter days of the Empire, and since the Christian Church was one of the major players at the time, we ended up discussing a lot of early church history as well. Facts you need to know to understand this limerick: one of the early councils codifying Christian doctrine took place at Nicaea, and one of the doctrines they decided was heresy was called "aryan" because it had been thought up by a guy named Arius, iirc. It had to do with the nature of God, and after three years I don't remember all the details. The opposing view, that the Nicene Council approved, was trinitarianism, that God is one God made up of three distinct beings: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Anyway, for some reason a lot of barbarian tribes who converted to Christianity as the Roman Empire was crumbling preferred arianism to trinitarianism.

The heretical creed of the Arians
Appealed to many barbarians
They liked the idea
Condemned at Nicaea;
Not many became trinitarians

(Thanks, Dr. Slind!)

Today's poem is by W.H. Auden.  I've always loved the snarkiness of it.  It also proved once again how much of any poem or story is in the mind of the reader; when we discussed it in one of my poetry classes in college, there was quite a debate about what, exactly, Auden was criticizing--society, the individual, some combination of both.

Those of you from non-liturgical backgrounds might not know that today is Palm Sunday, which (in the Lutheran church, at least,) is also the Sunday of the Passion. I think the Catholics might break that up into two sundays, but I could be wrong.

This means we have two gospels. The first is the Palm Sunday gospel sometimes read in a processional: Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, with crowds singing Hosanas and lining his path with palm fronds and cloaks. The second Gospel reading is the entire Passion narrative, i.e. everything from the Last Supper through the Crucifixion. In my home congregation, we read it as kind of a dramatic presentation, with verses to the Gospel Hymn interspersed to break it up. This year, the lectionary is taken from the Gospel of Mark, the most concise of the Gospels. And we take out the sermon to make room. Still, it's a long service when you put in the whole Passion narrative. For those of us who go to all the Holy Week services, as I do, it means we hear everything twice: the Last Supper on Maundy Tursday, and the Crucifixion on Good Friday.

Anyway, there's a really cool poem by Robert Cording, called ( The Man Running Naked into the Dark )

It was written in 2004. I'm not that big on most modern poetry, and I don't tend to like free verse, and this poem is both. I heard it during Chapel my senior year at Luther College and fell in love with it.