asakiyume: (cloud snow)
Out my window, thickly.
The windows were often covered with hoar-frost; then they would warm coppers on the stove and stick them on the frozen panes, where they made lovely peep-holes, as round as possible. Then a bright eye would peep through these holes, one from each window. The little boy's name was Kay, and the little girl's Gerda ...

'Look! the white bees are swarming,' said the old grandmother.

'Have they a queen bee, too?' asked the little boy, for he knew that there was a queen among the real bees.

'Yes, indeed they have,' said the grandmother. 'She flies where the swarm is thickest. She is biggest of them all, and she never remains on the ground. She always flies up again to the sky. Many a winter's night she flies through the streets and peeps in at the windows, and then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful patterns like flowers.'

'Oh yes, we have seen that,' said both children, and then they knew it was true.

'Can the Snow Queen come in here?' asked the little girl.

'Just let her come,' said the boy, 'and I will put her on the stove, where she will melt.'
The Snow Queen, via Project Gutenberg

I've never pressed a hot coin to a frosty window, but I've melted circles by breathing on them--and then that freezes, but freezes clear.

How about that Kay! Bold and dangerous speech!
asakiyume: (black crow on a red ground)
I finally saw this movie, which [personal profile] sovay has written about eloquently several times. It's a retelling, more or less, of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring (and directed by) Leslie Howard, who played the Scarlet Pimpernel in the 1934 film. Pimpernel Smith was made in 1941 and set in 1939; in this version, it's a mild-mannered archaeology professor who spirits people out of Nazi Germany.

It's a *smashing* film. I loved the 1934 Scarlet Pimpernel, but I love this version equally well, maybe better. The ending soliloquy was like lightning, and if you feel dispirited about the voracious viciousness of the power structure today, it may electrify you as well. I'm going to quote [personal profile] sovay's post, because no one can say it better than she has:
The final soliloquy is still as good as everyone remembers—hauntingly prescient, spoken as prophecy in a year in which the outcome of World War II was far from assured. A thin-faced professor in the shadows of a railway station, unarmed at gunpoint, his eyes glinting like a cat's in the dark. An anti-Nazi picture made during the Blitz by a Jewish man, his half-immigrant's quintessential Englishness carefully learned, deeply felt. He did not live to see the winning of the war his character so confidently predicted; he vanished into history like the last word into a curl of cigarette smoke and shadows of their own spiraled up around his disappearance. If he foretold his own death, he made a spell of it:

"May a dead man say a few words to you, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred, and still you will have to go on—because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers, and one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words."

I have thought of them more and more often these last four years. He was right then, that ghost speaking out of the dark. May he still be right now.

If you want to see just the monologue--but really I recommend the whole film, because there are so many brilliant moments (bleeding scarecrow and aftermath! "American journalists" tour a concentration camp!)--you can view it here. The lines quoted above start at 2.21, but you won't want to miss what comes before (the whole scene is 5.30 minutes).

breadrocks

Nov. 22nd, 2019 06:17 pm
asakiyume: (november birch)
"Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?" (Matthew 7:9)

.... I think you might be forgiven for giving your kid a stone if you came across these loaf-like specimens. I altered the color (crudely; I blame my tech like the TOOL I AM like the tool it is?) so they approached bread color--but it's more the shape, the texture...

breadrock 3

breadrock 2

breadrock 4

breadrock 1

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