Visit: A Tale of Two Movies
Charity Alert: Six clicks, and you can help a lot: Animal Rescue Site
Weather: We have had snow falling every day for a week -- sometimes just a teaspoon full, but we'll take it all.
Wildlife: The snow seems to have driven the deer from the foothills. We saw a herd of over a dozen Whitetails grazing in Foy's Canyon.
In The Community: I'm going to do MY part in making sure the room is full for Sen. Conrad Burns' in-person "listening session" 10 A.M. on Saturday, April 2 at FVCC's LRC123 'quad' room. Topic: Social Security! It wll be tele-confrenced to Libby, Eureka via ITV, and possibly to Missoula and Butte, Montana too.
Another Honors Symposium lecture on Monday, March 28, this will be the only presentation at the college -- same room that Burns will use, at 7 P.M.
We started taping our Current Events show outside on Tuesday, but it was too cold to linger out of the buildings for long. We shot inside about half the time, despite all the carpet-laying and painting going on during "Spring Break."
Media Watch: I just finished a book about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their followers, illustrated by fairly large, full-color reproductions of their paintings. Rossetti's best works still have a lot of inspirational power. Arthur Hughes and Fredrick Sandys come off well in this book: Essential Pre-Raphaelites by Lucinda Hawksley.
As an art sudent, I looked at less-colorful reproductions, and even read William Holman Hunt's book about his madcap friends, and his own artistic career. I admired this group of idealists, and felt their influences in my life. Most of all, I looked up to polymath William Morris -- superb decorative designer, popular narrarative poet, Marxist idealist, and compelling fantasist, comparable only to George MacDonald.
(He was also the husband of Rossetti's favorite model, Jane Burden Morris, whose dark haunting beauty continues to stir the hearts of everybody who studies women in art.)
I believe Morris inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to write stories and novels in the Fantasy Genre. The late professor always touted Andrew Lang's colorful Fairy Books, but his own writing possessed more of Morris' 'Northern' vigor. I'll allow a healthy dose of Brothers Grimm, and MacDonald's entrapping whimsy, but the "Well at the World's End" lies in William Morris' shadowlands.
The Terry Sciavo case is painful. TV is too shallow a medium to deal with the facts -- but the hard emotions are flowing like cheap whiskey through the boob-tube anyway, with predictable, muddle-headed results.
