(no subject)

I think Federico Garcia Lorca is my new reason to learn Spanish.

There is child-like sweetness in the calm of morning.
The trees reach down their arms to the earth.
A trembling breath covers the fields where they are sowing,
And the spiders lay out their silk paths
--Rays of the air's clean crystal.
In the boulevard a spring recites its song in the grass.
And the snail, peaceful bourgeois of the pavement,
Humble and unnoticed,
Contemplates the landscape.
The divine quiet of Nature gives him faith and valour,
And forgetting the shame of his home, wants to see the end of the path.

(It's of course better in the original--I translated this as a study thing, but there doesn't appear to be a better translation online).

(no subject)

I meant to post my thoughts on Hitchhiker's Guide, but then I forgot, which should tell you approximately how I feel about the movie.

I didn't hate it. I didn't love it. It was kind of there.
The parts with the book were great, the cast was pretty good (Arthur matched the way he looked in my head; Zaphod didn't, but the Zaphod of the movie made SO much sense, I like that version better than mine). The romance...

The thing is, it's very very hard to put True Love and The One in a setting where the universe is fundamentally absurd, occasionally astoundingly beautiful but more often randomly hostile. I think Douglas Adams pulled it off, in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but it seems like more people hate that book than like it, which just proves how difficult it is to do. And Trillian...gah. The books, and the movie, gave me the distinct sense that Arthur was better off without her. How long did he even know her? He described her as insane, and I think that's possibly not that far off from the truth, and a girl who'll run off with a guy because he's from another planet surely isn't the most dateable creature in the universe. The two of them had very little chemistry in the movie and much less in the books. So it did, distinctly, bother me that they tried to turn it into a love story when it's not supposed to be. And the tone of the movie was torn almost schizophrenically between "Twoo Luv" and "cruel, weird universe."

But still, it kind of won me over towards the end. Maybe because of Alan Rickman.