List: Suggested Names for Future SyFy Channel Disaster Movies

Meteor Smoosh

Super Duper Nova

Asteroid vs. Serial Killer

The Moon Is Falling Apart!

Does It Seem Windy?

Lava Pop

Cloud!

Sunspotstorm

9.1: A Big One

Crikey, It's Hot

Poem: Reading Arabic

I

This week we read the words aloud,

their meaning less important

than the work of glottal stops

and vagaries of breath and tongue.

Our teacher translates gently:

Bahyd, eggs. Jhutheth, corpses.

Bass, enough. Nine-to-five words.

II

If you stare at a letter–say, yaa’–

long enough, it winds away

from sound and word, curls

into a quiet shape:

the shell of a snail, or the spin

of creekwater as it winds down

into the pipe beneath the street.

III

Bowls of letters swell and taper,

chambers fill, half-fill with air.

Body-shaped words fall prone

in sleep, or sit with a cup of tea

on a bench in the marketplace,

pressed in quiet gossip

among a row of ample women.

(appeared in Faultline, 2001)

DVD Review: Lost in Austen

Over the years, I’ve become a reluctant fan of Pride and Prejudice in all its incarnations. I say “reluctant” because, on the surface, it’s a fluffy romance, the prototype of a jillion stories of star-crossed-lovers. (But oh, underneath—such depth, wit, and barbed social commentary.) So I was surprised to find that I’d missed this four-part BBC miniseries when it aired in 2008. But that’s what Netflix is for.

Lost in Austen’s premise is simple: Hip urbanite Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) finds that she’s mysteriously swapped places with Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice, via a little door in her shower. In an echo of Peggy Sue Got Married, Amanda can’t quite believe that she’s been transported to the early 19th century, but she can’t get back and has to muddle through the next few weeks in the strangely familiar setting of the novel she knows so well. (Elizabeth, meanwhile, is marooned in 21st-century London.)

Stranded in the Bennets’ house, Amanda finds that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is just getting underway: New neighbor Mr. Bingley pays his first visit and soon introduces his brooding friend, Mr. Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Amanda, plopped down in Georgian England with her pageboy haircut, leather jacket, and lip gloss, claims that she’s “a friend of Elizabeth’s from Hammersmith,” which the family seems to think is explanation enough.

Amanda looks on in wonder as her favorite novel unfolds, but there’s a problem: Elizabeth isn’t there to meet Mr. Darcy at the first fateful ball. And that flaw in the plot sets other flaws in motion: Bingley falls in love with Amanda, not Jane; Jane, not Charlotte, is wooed by the creepy Mr. Collins; Charlotte threatens to chuck it all and move to Africa; and Darcy has about as much charm as an ingrown toenail. Amanda tries and tries to get the plot back on track, but her schemes spin off more chaotic results. Before long, it’s a mess—not at all what Jane Austen wanted, as Amanda keeps thinking. And how will she ever get Elizabeth back to the 19th century, where she can marry Darcy and complete the story?

The best part about Lost in Austen is that it transcends the parody genre, although it’s funny throughout. At some point, you (and Amanda) have to just throw out the plot of Pride and Prejudice; this story has become a different animal, and old characters begin taking on new dimensions: There’s much more to Mr. Wickham than meets the eye, Mrs. Bennet (Alex Kingston) displays a backbone she never had in the book, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh cheats at cards. Even modern Amanda, who seems made out of snark, shows another side when the question becomes her own destiny and happiness. In the end, she has to write her own novel—as we all do, one way or another.

List: Plausible but Untrue Explanations for Why I Named My Cat “Iniki”

Named for a Finnish hockey star I once slept with, except I was really drunk, so it might have been that guy from Dallas.

Lakota Sioux for “able to locate and step on lymph nodes.”

Named for the Pacific island on which I did all the brave humanitarian work depicted in the Lifetime movie about me, from which I made diddly—well, four thousand dollars.

Named after my Uncle/Aunt Iniki, who was much more cool after the surgery.

Named for Thor Heyersen’s boat.

It’s almost “Bikini” spelled backwards, except that “Inikib” would have sounded weird, and just calling her “Bikini” would have brought up Barbie connotations. All a reminder of my half-assed “environmentalist” phase.

Can’t spell “Inky.”

Poem: Convertible Women

Convertible women

know how to knot

the scarves that dance

off the racks.

Their hair laps

in ribbons at the nape

of their necks.

They have friends

with names like Nat

and Barb who swing

slightly on the turns

and suck their passenger-

seat cigarettes

with sage indifference.

Convertible women

meet the wind

and bend it around

their opaque

sunglasses.

They split the air

like red bullets.

All the brown hard-top lives

could flip

and still have something

to save them.

Convertible women

stick their necks

right out.

The wind escorts them

through the stop sign, past

the Chinese take-out

and the carpet emporium

and all the way out

to the dream roads, just them

and sound and sky.

(appeared in Free-Wheeling: Poems About Cars)

List: Most Alarming Things to Cats

Dishwasher (fill cycle)

Vacuum cleaner

Electric guitar

Man riding lawnmower down middle of street

Whistling tea kettle

Three-legged dog ringing doorbell, pretending to be flower-delivery person, then massacring cats inside

Garbage truck backing up street

Veterinarians running amok with giant Q-tips

Raccoons at back door