You got the look the gods agree they want to see

[sovay]

I have had a multiple-front stressful day of the kind that leaves a person sort of uselessly vibrating, but a dear friend who is not on DW has just e-mailed me with the news that the Cerne Abbas Giant is neither a pre-Christian artifact nor seventeenth-century political satire but an early medieval . . . something and I am delighted. Or as I said elsenet, "The giant chalk dick has a date on it!"

(I am amused that the hold music I am currently stuck listening to is a kind of lounge muzak version of "On the Street Where You Live," but that's different. [edit] It was not so amusing that I felt obliged to listen to it after the first half-hour.)

Comments

[nineweaving]

Synchronicity! Just yesterday, I was looking for a passage in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters that I wanted to quote on my panel, and lighted on another. Ralph Vaughan Williams had decided that he needed to see the Cerne Abbas giant again, and had stopped by her house on his way. She didn’t say why RVW wanted to visit Chalk Dude, but recorded their conversation:

“He had asked me, a little sternly, why I had left off composing, and I explained that I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t do it authentically enough, whereas when I turned to writing I never had a doubt as to what I meant to say. But if I were reincarnated, I added, I think I would like to be a landscape painter. What about you? Music, he said, music. But in the next world, I shan’t be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.”

Nine

[tree_and_leaf]

I am SO HERE for the mediaeval weirdness.

Hold music from hell

[jesse_the_k]

Really having to listen to hold music at all is hellish.

However, why is it that both my clinic and my city use the same damn song and have been for 30 years. It even has the warbly atonal quality that made me glad to abandon cassette tapes.

[ashlyme]

*"The giant chalk dick has a date on it!"*

I really should have responded to that with "Thanks for the heads-up. So to speak." Or perhaps not. It's fascinating to pick up the story; the last I heard was about the medieval snails and I love the idea the Giant may've been forgotten and rediscovered over time.

[ethelmay]

"I'm a tall white man with a great big dick/Sometimes I get a date, but it never sticks/I'm old enough I oughta have class/But you gotta admit, my ass is grass..."

[cmcmck]

So those early historians who thought he represented Helis may have been right after all! :o)

[selkie]

I think it's entirely likely he vanished under the shrubbery for a good long while, and then the updating microclimates revealed his endowments to the locals once again. How interesting.