When I got out to my parents' house this afternoon, I found my niece scrambling around the driveway with two of her friends, a rapidly vanishing bucket of stubs of colored chalk, and a puddle left over from last night's rain. They were covering the asphalt with wet chalk handprints in five colors. I told them that their art looked like cave paintings and they asked what I meant, so first I tried to describe Paleolithic hand stencils and then I went inside and got a book and brought it out and showed them. They asked how to get the effect of negative space. Technically we have red and yellow ochre in the house, but it occurred to me that trying to teach three seven-year-olds to blow handmade paint through a straw was a recipe for at least one coughing fit, especially since I have no clue how to do it myself, so I swallowed my sensory sensitivities and gave my rings to my mother and demonstrated how to outline one's hand with a handful of chalk glop and they took to it with great enthusiasm and experimentation, overlapping prints with stencils and sometimes filling them in with contrasting colors. When they were finished, they entitled their magnum opus Paint Dot Com. My father took a video of the artists posing in the middle of a sea of chalk hands and I went inside and washed intensively. I'll take a picture in the morning if the painting is still there. At least one of them signed it.
1. I liked this poem at once: John Challis, "Thames." It reminds me of U.A. Fanthorpe and Sean O'Brien and probably means I should check out the collection it comes from. I wrote a mudlark poem some years ago, though more specifically: "The Drowning of the Doves."
2. I can't figure out why I own British paperbacks of Michael Dobbs' To Play the King (1992) and The Final Cut (1995) and appear to be missing House of Cards (1989), especially when I can't remember reading any of the novels as opposed to watching the television serials. In any case, I started reading the first of the ones I own and while I haven't seen any of the series in decades, I am going through a mild phase of Colin Jeavons and am therefore extremely entertained that however his character was originally written, he is now played very recognizably on the page:
[Tim] Stamper had ideal qualities for the job—a lean, pinched face with protruding nose and dark eyes of exceptional brightness which served to give him the appearance of a ferret, and a capacity for rummaging about in the dark corners of his colleagues' private lives to uncover their personal and political weaknesses . . . 'Prime Minister.' He offered a theatrical bow of respect. 'Prime Minister,' Stamper repeated, practising a different intonation as if trying to sell him the freehold. He had a familiar, almost camp manner which hid the steel beneath, and the two colleagues began to laugh in a fashion which managed to be both mocking and conspiratorial, like two burglars after a successful night out.
How often does it happen that an actor's portrayal of a character influences the writing of the character from then on? I know it happened to John le Carré with Alec Guinness and George Smiley and to Dick Francis with Mike Gwilym and Sid Halley; most of the other performer-to-character instances I know about are serial numbers filed off, including my own. I would think it harder for Jeavons to keep getting compared to a ferret if I didn't like so much both ferrets and his face.
3. I promised![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie a translation of Pausanias 1.32.4–5, otherwise known as the haunting of Marathon:
All night there can be heard horses neighing and men fighting. Setting out deliberately to get a clear look has never done anyone good, but the anger of the spirits has never come out against anyone who is there unintentionally and for other purposes. The Marathonians name them as heroes who died in the battle and worship them, as well as Marathon from whom the deme gets its name and Herakles whom they claim they were the first of the Greeks to consider a god. They say that in the battle there happened to be a man equipped and looking like a peasant; he slaughtered many of the barbarians with a plough and was nowhere to be seen when the work was done. To the Athenians who came asking, the god gave no oracle concerning him but the command to honor Echetlaios as a hero. A trophy of white stone has been put up. The Athenians say that they gave funeral honors to the Medes, as it is universally a sacred duty to cover a human body with earth, but I could find no grave: neither a burial mound nor any other marker was there to see, but they had taken and thrown them however into a pit.
Always bury your enemies; mass graves get you ghosts. On the other hand, so does violent death. Marathon might have been screwed from the start, ghost-wise. Probably don't do battlefield tourism at Thermopylai, either.
1. I liked this poem at once: John Challis, "Thames." It reminds me of U.A. Fanthorpe and Sean O'Brien and probably means I should check out the collection it comes from. I wrote a mudlark poem some years ago, though more specifically: "The Drowning of the Doves."
2. I can't figure out why I own British paperbacks of Michael Dobbs' To Play the King (1992) and The Final Cut (1995) and appear to be missing House of Cards (1989), especially when I can't remember reading any of the novels as opposed to watching the television serials. In any case, I started reading the first of the ones I own and while I haven't seen any of the series in decades, I am going through a mild phase of Colin Jeavons and am therefore extremely entertained that however his character was originally written, he is now played very recognizably on the page:
[Tim] Stamper had ideal qualities for the job—a lean, pinched face with protruding nose and dark eyes of exceptional brightness which served to give him the appearance of a ferret, and a capacity for rummaging about in the dark corners of his colleagues' private lives to uncover their personal and political weaknesses . . . 'Prime Minister.' He offered a theatrical bow of respect. 'Prime Minister,' Stamper repeated, practising a different intonation as if trying to sell him the freehold. He had a familiar, almost camp manner which hid the steel beneath, and the two colleagues began to laugh in a fashion which managed to be both mocking and conspiratorial, like two burglars after a successful night out.
How often does it happen that an actor's portrayal of a character influences the writing of the character from then on? I know it happened to John le Carré with Alec Guinness and George Smiley and to Dick Francis with Mike Gwilym and Sid Halley; most of the other performer-to-character instances I know about are serial numbers filed off, including my own. I would think it harder for Jeavons to keep getting compared to a ferret if I didn't like so much both ferrets and his face.
3. I promised
selkie a translation of Pausanias 1.32.4–5, otherwise known as the haunting of Marathon:All night there can be heard horses neighing and men fighting. Setting out deliberately to get a clear look has never done anyone good, but the anger of the spirits has never come out against anyone who is there unintentionally and for other purposes. The Marathonians name them as heroes who died in the battle and worship them, as well as Marathon from whom the deme gets its name and Herakles whom they claim they were the first of the Greeks to consider a god. They say that in the battle there happened to be a man equipped and looking like a peasant; he slaughtered many of the barbarians with a plough and was nowhere to be seen when the work was done. To the Athenians who came asking, the god gave no oracle concerning him but the command to honor Echetlaios as a hero. A trophy of white stone has been put up. The Athenians say that they gave funeral honors to the Medes, as it is universally a sacred duty to cover a human body with earth, but I could find no grave: neither a burial mound nor any other marker was there to see, but they had taken and thrown them however into a pit.
Always bury your enemies; mass graves get you ghosts. On the other hand, so does violent death. Marathon might have been screwed from the start, ghost-wise. Probably don't do battlefield tourism at Thermopylai, either.
