The News from South Philly

In a lull between blooming plants. The last couple Christmas cactus blooms need to be pinched off, although there are a few late bloomers down in the second floor bathroom. No hippeastrum are showing any buds yet, although I suspect the thing poking up from the 'Exotica' may be a bud. There are some swellings on some of the leaves of the Nopalxochia phyllanthoides but I don't have my hopes up too far yet.

It was very cold (for Philadelphia) today. The thermometer never made it over 20F in our backyard.

The photo above is of something that made me do a double-take last week: fake wisteria scapes in a planter at the back door of the Union League. Very declassé, what *were* they thinking??? Also, the shrub is a fake. I shall have to write to the house committee and complain.

We've started a new program for the Union League docent corps -- the docents' lunch series. The idea is that we'll meet once a month, or once every other month, and one or two of us will research some work of art or other figure and present our findings. For the inaugural lunch, we're concentrating on the portraits placed in our sumptuously remodeled dining rooms. I have four to do and one is George Henry Boker, 1823-1890, poet and playwright and polemicist and one of the prime movers behind the Union League.

To prepare for this, I'm reading Sculley Bradley's 1928 biograpahy of Boker, which is a pure delight in itself. Bradley is a contemporary of Christopher Morley, whose Travels in Philadelphia, with their gentle and affectionate descriptions of city life, have always been a favorite of mine. Bradley's book opens with a description of what Philadelphia had been like in the year of Boker's birth -- pointing out that Boker would have been surrounded by older folks who were part of the Revolution, and linking him in memory to the country's founding.

I'm looking forward to savoring this biography for its language as well as its content, and have ordered a copy for my very own so that I can dip into it again after returning this copy to the Union League Library.

The fact that Boker translated Beowulf before going off to Princeton impressed me mightily. The fact that he remained close to his boyhood friends for all his life is also telling. And the fact that he has written some no doubt unintentionally hilarious faux Shakespeare in Anne Boleyn is pure gold.

By the turn of the 20th century, Boker's reputation as a poet and a playwright had ebbed, despite Sculley Bradley's heroic attempts to resusciate it. I am finding his life at least wonderfully complex.

Let's see...

Teh intarwebs are slower than molasses in a cold snap today, so replying to email is taking half of forever.

I've just had a "first" and hope it never happens again: I lost my grip on my coffee mug and poured 6 oz of black coffee into my keyboard. I am so glad I drink it black because after I turned the keyboard upside down and left it to drain on a dishtowel for a bit, it seems to be fine, although the action isn't quite as crisp as it used to be and a couple keys are threatening to stick a bit. Perhaps when it is completely dry. I hypothesize that the coffee has caused damp little mats of dust and cat hair that will break up after the keyboard dries out.

The hive mind of LJ has delivered unto me the name of a SF novel I read almost 40 years ago and couldn't for the life of me remember: Macroscope, by Piers Anthony. I have no idea what happened to my copy so I've just ordered up another one. It's a keeper. While I wait for it, there are the poems of Sidney Lanier, especially The Marshes of Glynn, that figure so prominently in that book. I am normally a prosaic soul, shying away from poetry, but the meter and the sonorities of Lanier speak to me.

Yesterday karenkay rode the only elephant in Michigan. Tonight Roy and I are riding The Ducks with a gaggle of Union Leaguers. Pictures will be posted.

I wanted to take some pictures of the Union League Lincoln Bicentennial open house, but I couldn't!

We had almost 1,600 people come for tours in one four hour period. I barely had time to take a sip of water between groups, giving my spiel at the Sully portrait and the grand staircase. We usually do tour groups of 10-15 people, but on this day we had to take 40 people or more to accommodate the crowds. With no mikes, the tour guides and stationed docents were pretty much hoarse. We pressed all kinds of folks into service to serve as tour assistants, keeping this mass of humanity moving.

But it was a pretty wonderful day. We docents are still higher than kites on the positive energy from the public -- or maybe from the drinks we all had in the Old Cafe after our visitors had left. Roy joined the frolic as a tour-herder, and we agreed this is one of the nicest Valentine's Days we ever had.

1. Do not go to the Asian supermarket the day before Lunar New Year unless you're more interested in teh spectacle than the shopping.

2. Do a real swatch before starting a major project, or risk winding up with Too Much Yarn. Srsly. The Ben.Ben.Blankie is almost half done and I've only used one quarter of the yarn I bought.

3. Something potentially life-changing has happened. The Union League has stopped charging members an additional fee for the use of its fitness center. This means that effectively Roy and I just got two free gym memberships. How cool is that?