The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence

[sovay]

Happy Bloomsday! I have no computer.

There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.

I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I texted derspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.

The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.

Comments

[sovay]

Especially poignant ahead of that Second war.

He had been writing it since the First. Jones is one of my favorite and one of the least-known of the war poets, possibly because he survived. In Parenthesis draws on his own experiences of 1915–1918 with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Battle of the Somme (especially Mametz Wood) combined with the Battle of the Trees and the Preiddeu Annwn; I think it is most often compared to The Waste Land or Ulysses, but it is much more like Alan Garner, where the myth is always breaking out from under the terrible everyday surface of things. There is realistic memoir, shell-shock, exhaustion, boredom, adrenaline whiteout and the proper way to clean a gun; there are boasts and catalogues of mythical battles. I have posted him for May Day, he writes the wood so well. Also for Armistice Day. The Anathémata (1952) is even harder to describe: it is something like the Matter of Britain written by an Alexandrian poet, so densely allusive, the words themselves become archaeology; it has also to do with colonialism, which tends to confuse people. He was an engraver as well as a writer and illustrated his own works. I wish more people knew about him.

Oh, there's a cruel poem. Butter for starvation and want, Beach for endless obstacle, Donkey for hope?

Great. Flip a coin to see who gets to be depressed enough to write it?

I just watched the entertaining if slightly flawed The Pirates: In An Adventure with Scientists (2012; not the US title), which does capture that heavy-browed face quite nicely in claymation.

I'm glad to hear a recommendation! It's Aardman, so I'd really been hoping. (And yes, here it's The Pirates! Band of Misfits, because there is nothing less likely to interest the great American moviegoer than an adventure with scientists. See the conversation this one is perpetually circling.)

(Also, the Darwin and wife relationship was done rather well in Creation (2009)).

Also useful to know. I like Paul Bettany (I discovered him as Stephen Maturin. It was guaranteed), but I couldn't tell from reviews how good the film had been at depicting the ideas of the story as opposed to just Victorian familial angst.

Which is a fascinating concept in itself. We seem okay with the young go-getter engineer, as forex every Iron Man depiction at present, the Edison-imago, but not for a scientist? I think you should write it: that endless play of evolving archetypes has strange attractors, and one can't play with loci until they are mapped and spun out to gold.

Once I've recovered from this last week, I shall see what I can do. It's a set of archetypes I've been thinking about for years.

[selidor]

something like the Matter of Britain written by an Alexandrian poet [...] it has also to do with colonialism

See, at this point in the paragraph my most focussed response became eee MOAR NOW. Fortunately, there's a uni library available and a weekend approaching.

(I'm unsure how Down Under ended up without WWI poets; we normally nick all the UK ones - possibly due to the country-mentality at the time. Either that or all the poets of the time were too busy dealing with forging a national identity, which became a nigh-on obsessive theme for a good thirty years about then).

Great. Flip a coin to see who gets to be depressed enough to write it?

Heh. It does seem that way! There's the boned edges of its structure in sight, but I'd need to know more about the Tarot to cast any poem that way.

It's a set of archetypes I've been thinking about for years.

Shiny poem-territory...
(I just came back from a function at Parliament to have MPs talk to women in science. My current impression of scientific archetypes is a roomful of women of all ages from mine to elderly, dressed for their own comfort & happiness rather than anyone's gaze, talking to each other animatedly at a great rate of knots. Archetypes party hard.)

[sovay]

Fortunately, there's a uni library available and a weekend approaching.

Thanks to a sudden access of paranoia (double-checking a statement I was about to make about the availability of Jones' poems), I have discovered that since I tracked down my copy of In Parenthesis, The Anathémata has also come back into print, which really cheers me up. I see also several other titles by Jones that I hadn't known existed and will have to look into. Maybe he's finally being noticed after all.

I'm unsure how Down Under ended up without WWI poets; we normally nick all the UK ones - possibly due to the country-mentality at the time.

Wikipedia thinks there is at least one notable one, but I do not know very much about him.

My current impression of scientific archetypes is a roomful of women of all ages from mine to elderly, dressed for their own comfort & happiness rather than anyone's gaze, talking to each other animatedly at a great rate of knots. Archetypes party hard.

I like the sound of those archetypes.