Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 164

T-1000 II in molten iron

Anybody remember the scene in Terminator 2 when the new Terminator, the one who can melt and reform and take any shape, finally is melted-dead in an iron foundry?

That scene where he's in the molten iron, trying to hold together a form, and he rears up, but inevitably sinks back down again?

That's what my thoughts and ideas are like sometimes: they rear up, almost taking a form, and then they just sink back into undifferentiated moltenness.



Actually this is before he's bazooka-ed into the molte...

a road

True story: I fell asleep in a chapel and woke up with a start, thinking, "but life does ultimately lead to death." (Duh. Asakiyume's epiphanies are the achingly obvious ones.)

And you know how in that transitional state, when you're still dripping with sleep, but have come out of its waters, random thoughts--that would be dream seeds or whole dreams if you were still asleep--come flashing in your mind (like heat lightning)? So these were the thoughts:

"When it all comes down to dust . . . (I...

A path, a fortress, a house

This path grows more green or less, depending on the weather. And depending on the green, the destination changes? Follow the emerald road . . .



There was once a grim cliff fortress, full of smeltings and clangings and wailing and moanings. And then . . . the wheel of fortune turned and the smelters and clangers took off for other parts, and the wailing and moaning ceased. In the shadow of the abandoned fortress, pastoral life resumed. The children explore abandoned cells and passageways and h...

Two fishermen pulled from icy lake

My town throws up ballad stories from time to time, and this week's paper had one. Three men walked out onto frozen Lake Metacomet to do some ice fishing, but about sixty-five feet out onto the lake, two of them fell through the ice, where the water was some 18 feet deep. Their friend also fell through, but where the water was only waist deep. He was able to wade to shore and call for help.

Two police officers and a firefighter responded (more firefighters were unable to respond as they were d...

snow deer

In Japanese poetry, they compare the snow, melting and giving way to the brown earth of spring, to the spots on a fawn.

I was imagining. . . somewhere there are snow deer. They are winter-white, like arctic foxes and snowshoe hares and ptarmigans.



They have their babies in those cold times, fawns who are completely white to camouflage in snowdrifts.



As the snow melts, the coloring of the fawns change too, speckled brown and white, like the ground around them.



In the summer months, like other dee...

An hour with Junot Diaz

I had an opportunity to hear Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which I haven't yet read, but want to read) and This Is How You Leave Her (which I read and liked very much) yesterday evening. He had a warm, intimate, humorous yet serious manner to him; it was just great.

He started by introducing himself as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and saying that for a land of immigrants, America is extremely uncomfortable hearing about the immigrant experience, and th...

Opinion versus fact

The healing angel was talking to me about the problems with how they teach kids to distinguish between opinion and fact--something they learn in fourth grade, apparently (the healing angel is in ninth grade, but a conversation with a fourth grade teacher got him thinking about the issue). He said, "Basically, the way they teach it, kids end up thinking that true statements are all facts, and that everything else is an opinion. But some things aren't opinions, they're just false statements. If...

Kirsty Sword Gusmão: woman of awesomeness

So, you're growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, and you're taking ballet lessons, and you're pretty dang good at it, good enough to think about being a professional dancer, but you find yourself thinking, "You know . . . it's a bit narrow. And I am not sure I can live up to my bladey surname as a ballerina." You've always loved Indonesia--you learned your first words of Indonesian at four--so you study the language in college in the 1980s, where you also come to hear about the plig...

Debate in East Timor over the place of mother tongues

Linguistically, East Timor is an interesting place. Portugal was the colonial overlord for centuries, so Portuguese was the language of higher education and opportunity. Then from the mid 1970s through 1999, Indonesia occupied the country, and Indonesia was the language of classroom instruction. Meanwhile, there are several mother tongues spoken by different populations. Tetun (Tetum) is the mother tongue of a large plurality of people, but there are other first-languages spoken, too.



Source:...

batik shirts

... I was very late finishing some Christmas presents, but I did finally finish them. (Although there are still others that are not finished!)

I had had the ambition to turn this wonderful quote into a shirt for my sister, and I did . . . except--and I call myself a copyeditor?--I got the name of the woman I quote wrong (this is especially tragic/ironic in that she herself is a copyeditor), and I mangled the last line. The cadence of her actual words can't be beaten, but my stumble can be the...