confused about the ceiling

I recently revisited Agatha Christie, rereading A Murder is Announced and reading, for the first time, Death on the Nile  and Five Little Pigs . Coming back to Christie made me think about the particular pleasure of her novels (and probably other whodunnits).

Così fan tutte  has always been the problem child of the Da Ponte operas. Critical favor has elided it in favor of  Figaro  and Giovanni , it's more illustrious siblings. This is partly because  Così 's  tone (or message -- or moral -- etc.) has been so difficult to pin down. This is a story of two young couples who have their sense of self and beliefs in love systematically dismantled. But the ending is happy, with all being forgiven and a double marriage!

Richard Hugo is most famous for this devastating little villanelle, called The Freaks at Spurgin Field Road . I just finished his first book, A Run of Jacks . I'd no idea it was his first book. I'll excerpt two stanzas from a poem called "Northwest Retrospective: Mark Tobey." (Mark Tobey was a painter.) Beyond Van Allen rings, the stars don't glitter, arrogant as moons. When did we start? Light-years ago. Why did we come? No matter. We are not returning to that world of ditch and strain, the research terms: cryogenic fuels, free radicals, plasma jets, coordinated fusion. Only the last, in all this void, applies. A universe is fusing in our eyes.

I'm reminded of the magnificent last lines of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude:" [Aureliano] had already understood that he would never leave . . . races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Yeats had the tremendous ability of manipulating space and time in his poems. He can maintain tension even while focusing on a single image over two stanzas: ...Imagining that I could A greater with a lesser pang assuage Or but to find if withered vein ran blood, I tore my body that its wine might cover Whatever could recall the lip of lover. And after that I held my fingers up, Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran Down every withered finger from the top; But the dark changed to red, and torches shone, And deafening music shook the leaves;...

A. Sima Qian's account in his seminal 史记 ( Shiji , History Record - usually translated as 'Records of the Grand Historian') of six assassins is probably the most absorbing part of that work. But why would Sima Qian devote a section on commoners in a work that otherwise considers only nobility and rulers? Perhaps the better question is: what's the effect of this inclusion on us?

Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990 Herta Mueller, The Land of Green Plums Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches Albert Camus, The Plague Don Delillo, White Noise Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions John Ashbery, Planisphere * Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air Shakespeare, The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint