My poem "Scarcity Economics" has been accepted by Not One of Us, still publishing in defiance of its regular website being crashed all year. It has ghosts and a shopping cart and a railway bridge I walk under.
Especially now that it's readily accessible in reprint, I really need to read Rosalie K. Fry's Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry (Child of the Western Isles, 1957) because I was reminded this afternoon that so much of David Thomson's The People of the Sea (1954) reads like it went straight into John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), right down to the folk medicine of warming a near-drowned man between two cows or the description of the little girl learning from her grandmother how to smoor a fire in its own ashes of peat: "We rake this fire as the pure Christ rakes all. Mary at its foot and Brigid at its top. The Eight highest angels in the City of Graces preserving this house and the people till day." I know it could just be the common well of history and folkways, but the mention of Tech Duinn flashed out at me, the nineteenth-century punishment of the heavy straw collar of the cingulum for speaking Irish at English school, the old wariness of saving a drowning man. "What the sea will take, the sea must take—that's what my father would say. And there was many a story told in those days of men being saved that were innocent in their lives to the day they were taken from the sea, but turned wicked after." Toward the end of the book, Thomson turns to the stories of families with seal-blood in them, and while most of the stories he collects are not the well-known seal-wife's stolen skin, one of the variants he does retell contains the detail of the selkie in her own skin again, swimming around her husband's boat, sad-eyed. "It is given to them that their sea-longing shall be land-longing and their land-longing shall be sea-longing." I have loved for almost thirty years now Sayles' film and the generations of story layered into it. Wherever they came from, I wouldn't be sorry to find out.
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asakiyume: Hammond Diehl's "It Clings." As the name suggests, contains dybbuk.
Especially now that it's readily accessible in reprint, I really need to read Rosalie K. Fry's Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry (Child of the Western Isles, 1957) because I was reminded this afternoon that so much of David Thomson's The People of the Sea (1954) reads like it went straight into John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), right down to the folk medicine of warming a near-drowned man between two cows or the description of the little girl learning from her grandmother how to smoor a fire in its own ashes of peat: "We rake this fire as the pure Christ rakes all. Mary at its foot and Brigid at its top. The Eight highest angels in the City of Graces preserving this house and the people till day." I know it could just be the common well of history and folkways, but the mention of Tech Duinn flashed out at me, the nineteenth-century punishment of the heavy straw collar of the cingulum for speaking Irish at English school, the old wariness of saving a drowning man. "What the sea will take, the sea must take—that's what my father would say. And there was many a story told in those days of men being saved that were innocent in their lives to the day they were taken from the sea, but turned wicked after." Toward the end of the book, Thomson turns to the stories of families with seal-blood in them, and while most of the stories he collects are not the well-known seal-wife's stolen skin, one of the variants he does retell contains the detail of the selkie in her own skin again, swimming around her husband's boat, sad-eyed. "It is given to them that their sea-longing shall be land-longing and their land-longing shall be sea-longing." I have loved for almost thirty years now Sayles' film and the generations of story layered into it. Wherever they came from, I wouldn't be sorry to find out.
Courtesy of
asakiyume: Hammond Diehl's "It Clings." As the name suggests, contains dybbuk.
