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Philip Larkin on inspiration
“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
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Thinking of home
Last Thursday night, I watched on live television as wave after wave assaulted the shores of my homeland, houses on fire rolling on a black crest of water across farmland, engulfing cars, vans, and trucks fleeing before the tsunami. I watched people die that night, helpless and powerless, transfixed by a TV screen thousands of miles away.
Since the Great Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami struck Japan last week, little else has been on my mind, and I return time and again to memories of the 15 years I spent there from birth through adolescence. I have vague memories of taking a boat ride among strange islands of greenery overhanging wave-carved stone. My father tells me that was Sendai, nearly 30 years ago. I wonder what they look like now.
Here I am circa 1977 in Hokkaido, ensconced in a tokonoma, lined up with a carved Ainu bear, iron kettle, water jug, and a sock monkey made for me by my great-grandmother.
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Surface archaeology on the streets of Dublin
“The farther one travels, the less one knows.” – Laozi (Lao-Tsu) in Tao Te Ching
Last time I visited Dublin, two and a half years ago, I barely looked up from the literary past as I followed the footsteps of Yeats, Joyce, and Shaw. Evidence of the country’s turbulent history is everywhere in Dublin, but the capitol of the Republic of Ireland is not some sort of ossified open-air museum content to obsess over its own past. What struck me this time, though, was just how modern Dublin is on the surface while still not diminishing its connection to history.
My photo above captures this perfectly, I think. A Luas tram stands at the St. Stephen’s Green station in front of the Royal College of Surgeons, its columns riddled with bullet holes from the 1916 Easter Rising (though they’re hard to see in the picture at this size).
This theme repeats itself across the city — generally as a wonderful synthesis of old and new, but occasionally in a jarring juxtaposition. Like this McDonald’s on the first floor of a Georgian building.
Nevertheless, I love Dublin for its many layers. I know I’ve only brushed a few grains from the visible surface, picking up a few stray artifacts along the way, and there are still stories from thousands of years left to discover — both in the past and in the future.
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The alleged BBC book list Facebook meme
It’s time to catch up on the bandwagons that passed me by over the past few months.
Without the pressure of feeling as though I needed to share my list alongside everybody else, I spent some time trying to figure out where this list really came from. Most importantly, there’s no such list on the BBC website. However, there is a similar list that the BBC published in 2003, with many of the same books in a different order.
There are interesting differences between the 2003 BBC list and the 2009-2011 Facebook version — both in terms of the list itself and the context provided with each. The Facebook version alleges that the “BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books,” while the original site only states that the BBC “began the search for the nation’s favorite novel, and … asked you to nominate your favourite books.” Variations also exist among the versions of the instructions that accompany the list, adding or removing formatting, asterisks, comments, and so on to indicate the variety of ways in which the individual has consumed the book.
Whoever compiled the list I’m using consolidated books in a series but also left individual books from the same series. For example, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe made the BBC list at #9, while both the book (#36) and the series (#33) made the list on Facebook.
What’s most thought-provoking to me, though, is how a list of books sorted by popularity among Britons at a particular point in time has been transformed into an apparent challenge from an authority figure and a competition within our social circles. How very American…
Verbatim, the instructions making their way around Facebook:
Instructions: Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt, and underline the ones for which you’ve seen the movies.My list (after the jump): (more…)
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The Anglo-Saxon pit-house was a big step backward from the Roman villa
Cross-posted from The Brothers Brick.
I just finished reading Peter Heather’s excellent The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.
After my visit to Room 49 in the British Museum a couple summers ago, I wrote in my Moleskine “Post-Roman Britain=Post-Apoc.”
So, does this diorama by Harry Russell (Karrde) featuring an Anglo-Saxon pit-house fall under ApocaLEGO?
Nah. But I’ll use any excuse to blog an archaeologically inclined LEGO model.
(Hat-tip to Legobloggen for helping me to catch up after a busy, busy month.)
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Speedboat to Polynesia!
Cross-posted from The Brothers Brick.
From Madagascar to Rekohu and from Hawai’i to the South Island of Aotearoa, the people we know today as Austronesians have occupied more of the surface of our planet than nearly any other group of related human beings.
This remarkable ocean-going culture expanded at an astonishing rate across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, resulting in hundreds of scenes like the one illustrated in LEGO microscale by Eldert (evhh):
The volcanic island dwarfs the tiny outrigger canoes, and for me symbolizes human ingenuity in the face of what might appear to be insurmountable odds. It’s achievements like this that make me proud to be human, and makes it easy to imagine tiny outrigger spaceships arriving on the shores of a distant island in the sky not too far in the future…
(Post title courtesy Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, And Steel
.)
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Traveling (through the Dark) from Portland to Tillamook with William Stafford
To get to Tillamook, Oregon, head west from Portland and veer left onto Oregon Route 6. The next 50 miles are a winding, sometimes steep road that takes you up and over the Coast Range, through parts of the Tillamook Burn, following the Wilson River down into a valley full of dairy farms that supply the famous creamery. My relatives have lived in Tillamook for as long as I’ve been visiting them (more than 30 years now), and I’ve traveled this route more times than I can count.
I first fell in love with William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark” when I read it in college. One of the most frequently taught and anthologized of his poems, I’m sure this poem was the first encounter with Stafford that thousands of other aspiring critics and poets had since its publication in 1962.
I may analyze poetry I read to pick up techniques and hone my craft, but the poems I love are frequently those with which I feel a more personal connection. (There are also hundreds of analyses of the poem online, so I won’t do so here.) Even though I liked “Traveling through the Dark” quite a lot, it didn’t become a favorite until I made that personal connection.
Reading You Must Revise Your Life just a few years ago, I learned that an experience on the same road between Portland and Tillamook that I’d traveled so many times had inspired Stafford to write the poem.
Rationally, I object to either the poet’s intent or biography influencing the value I place on a poem. It also seems downright silly that my “Oh, oh! I’ve been there!” reaction would influence my affection for a poem.
Nevertheless, the simple fact of shared experience with the poet makes William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark” one of my most beloved poems.
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Jane Eyre is a load of sloblocks
Well, at least a very curly-haired chap who looks remarkably like Stephen Fry seems to think so.
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James Joyce tweets from 1926
Clearly, I get blogging. For a writer, blogging seems the natural evolution of Samual Pepys’ diary. Even Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. I don’t understand the attraction of Twitter, though, except perhaps as a target of satire. 140 characters? RT? @whocares? I think not.
Update: I changed my mind. You can now follow @AndrewBecraft on Twitter.
Historical Tweets combines witty writing with an appropriate sense of the absurd. For example, what result would Twitter’s arbitrary length limitation place on a lovably prolix writer like Joyce?
Indeed.
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Rethinking The Road
There is a remote but distinct possibility that I may have been wrong about The Road.
The characters, story, and even snippets of McCarthy’s “pretentious, mannered style” (my words) have stuck with me over the last three months, and I find myself considering whether the novel may not be, in fact, utter crap. I hate being wrong, but positive comparisons to The Grapes of Wrath continue presenting themselves unbidden from the back of my mind.
Perhaps it’s time to set aside the wonderful writer Elizabeth’s Hand’s less-than-wonderful post-apocalyptic Glimmering and give The Road a second chance.
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