sovay | I can't make the weather do what I want

Current Music: Brown Bird, "Blood of Angels"

I can't make the weather do what I want

I learned today that my worries about technology were not unfounded: Craigslist has been treating all my e-mails as spam. I couldn't confirm the problem until this afternoon (thank you,

aedifica). I have a Gmail account now for these cases, but in the meantime I lost even the chance of looking at an apartment in Winter Hill that sounded near-perfect from the ad. The poster never saw my message. The listing was taken down this morning. Regardless of whatever might have happened, I am still rather upset.

On the other hand, this afternoon I went to look at a room in Allston that I'd heard about through a friend-of-friend-of-mailing-list-I-don't-read only to discover after an hour of conversation that the person who was showing me around and discussing Diana Wynne Jones and Romance languages and Yuletide is a friend of both

cirne and

rushthatspeaks, so the very small world that is not confined to Somerville strikes again. That was cool.

From Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways (2012), which is rapidly becoming one of the best books I've read in the last six months:

The existence of the ancient seaways, and their crucial role in shaping prehistory, were only recognized in the early twentieth century. Until then, pre-historians and historical geographers had demonstrated a 'land bias'; a perceptive error brought about by an over-reliance on Roman sources that tended to concentrate on the movement of troops, goods and ideas on foot and across countries. Certainly, the Roman Empire's road network transformed internal mobility in Europe and, unmistakably, Roman roads were the key to uniting the empire's dispersed territories, as well as generating its military and economic power. 'The sea divides and the land unites,' ran the Roman truism. But for millennia prior to the rise of Rome's empire, the reverse had been true. The classical sources misled subsequent historians—allied with the fact that the sea erases all records of its traverses, whereas the land preserves them.

One alternate history, please, in which the winning of the Punic Wars by Carthage preserves the maritime Phoenician way of looking at the sea as the linkage of the world rather than the foot-miles of Rome. (Don't tell me to write it: I have one classically-rooted alt-history already that stalled out in 2009. And it can't do without Rome; its entire raison d'inventer was to allow for a votive statue of Neptune in a student's room in 1968.) I'd like to think that in the same way "Mother Carey" is said to have come down through mater cara, there would be sailors' slang and superstitions deriving from Tanit in her aspect as the Venus-star, rising over sea. And treaties with the Etruscans and blue eyes on all the boats.

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Good luck with room-hunting. I'm sorry you've had grief.

M. John Harrison was raving about The Old Ways; he counted it as the best non-fiction of last year.

Good luck with room-hunting. I'm sorry you've had grief.

Thanks. I just have this fear that was my one stroke of luck with Craigslist and I've lost it. It was a resource I looked at in the spring and stopped looking because there was nothing in it of use to me: then I saw the listing on the 29th and it galvanized me, because it was the first possibility. I e-mailed immediately, same-day. And I might as well have sat on my hands for all the poster ever saw it.

M. John Harrison was raving about The Old Ways; he counted it as the best non-fiction of last year.

I might not disagree with him. Most of the nonfiction I read last year wasn't newly published, but this would be an astonishing book any year I found it.

Which reminds me! From the fifth chapter, "Water (South)":

I had first met Ian in Stornoway a year or so previously. He is—well, he is many things. A sailor before all else, determined by and for the sea, living mostly hand to mouth and with his eye always on the next adventure. His love of the sea is so keen that it might seem like greed, but it is more imperative than greed. Born and brought up on the Isle of Lewis, he was a coastguard in Stornoway for fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, before he gave the job up because it bound him too much to the desk. He is now a sailor, an artist, a storyteller and a lyric poet of real worth. For much of his life he has been fascinated by the sea roads that lead to and from the Outer Hebrides, and he has spent years sailing them, and rsearching the tales and songs that have moved along them. 'There are stories you meet different versions of at different points up and down the Atlantic coast,' he told me. 'When you encounter them, you know well that this is a story that's travelled by the sea roads.'

Following the stories is for Ian a way of mapping the routes of the roads, and sailing the roads a way of mapping the routes of the stories . . .

Ian in appearance: curly silver hair, a shallow white stubble, two thin silver earrings in his left ear, too fine to be piratical. Ian in manner: sharp, fox-like, generous, mischievous. Ian in voice: lilting, Gaelic-inflected. Ian in stature: small, almost boyish. He has an air of youthfulness to him, seems younger than me, though he's more than twenty years my senior. His physique, like his language, is compact and wiry, capable of reach and strength. Physically, he's whipped tight, made of hawser and halyard wire, but his character is full of flex. He passes in and out of moods of intense concentration, whose endings are marked by a quick grin, a register shift, an agile impiety. He doesn't take well to fools or frauds. The first time we met I felt gauged, appraised, quickly read. Eyes moved up and down me. I had the same sense of apprehension as when stepping through an airport scanner. Then—clear. Green light. No improper goods. Nothing falsely hidden. A test passed, for the time being at least.

For obvious reasons, I thought of you.

Wow, thanks. I'm going to hunt this down now.

Oh, that is an *excellent* quote, and yes. A sea-looking alternate history. (Or any, any fantasy set in South and Southeast Asia, with a focus on maritime travel, please... I will write it myself eventually if no one else does.)

The sea erases all records of its traverses, whereas the land preserves them.

Now *that* is poem worthy. The sea erases the past, the sea is the eternal present.

On the other topic, will that small-world connection result in a place for you to live, maybe?

A sea-looking alternate history. (Or any, any fantasy set in South and Southeast Asia, with a focus on maritime travel, please... I will write it myself eventually if no one else does.)

That will be all right, too. The Carthaginian trade-routes can shift eastward and meet the great sea-empires of those waters on their home waves.

The sea erases the past, the sea is the eternal present.

The sea is past, too. It's just not the kind of past that shows itself—or shows us in it—as readily. We like to leave records of ourselves: if not marks of passage, then the things we left by the way. If we can't see the old Roman road (or the ruined walls of Carthage) in anything other than the turn of the hill, we know some digging will bring the older strata of time to light, coins, potsherds, curse tablets, children's bones. There are few things you can drop into the sea that it will not take and make its own. It's what makes the Black Sea shipwrecks are as amazing and uncanny as Pompeii: it's one thing to imagine an amphora lying undisturbed in the earth, it's another to have it come up trailing wet ropes, with only a sticky web of sediments between you and wood that in other waters would have rotted millennia.

On the other topic, will that small-world connection result in a place for you to live, maybe?

At the moment, I think it is more likely it will result in someone else for me to e-mail and/or hang out with, but I am still considering.

it's another to have it come up trailing wet ropes, with only a sticky web of sediments between you and wood that in other waters would have rotted millennia.

--that sent a shiver down my spine.

There are few things you can drop into the sea that it will not take and make its own.

The sea: a universal adopter, but adoption with a price for the adoptee.

About the Black Sea, Wikipedia says (which you probably know, but I did not), The Black Sea outflow is cooler and less saline, and floats over the warm, more saline Mediterranean inflow – as a result of differences in density caused by differences in salinity – leading to a significant anoxic layer well below the surface waters. ---So that, no doubt, contributes to the uncanny preservation!

Thank you for the heads up on the Macfarlane book -- it sounds like something I need to read right away.

Sorry to hear that you've lost out on apartments due to stupid email crap. I hope that you find the very much right place soon.

Thank you for the heads up on the Macfarlane book -- it sounds like something I need to read right away.

Very much recommended. I seem to be unable to discuss it without quotation (here and above), which is generally a good sign.

Sorry to hear that you've lost out on apartments due to stupid email crap. I hope that you find the very much right place soon.

Thank you.

Dad got that Macfarlane book (no relation) for Christmas. I need to steal it.

Dad got that Macfarlane book (no relation) for Christmas. I need to steal it.

You really do.

I am sorry to hear that the Winter Hill vanished on you. The Allston does sound promising, and I hope that it works out. I am now curious whether I also know this person, because it's been that sort of year (365, not calendar).

I am now curious whether I also know this person, because it's been that sort of year (365, not calendar).

It's very likely. I was wondering going in, but we kept talking and nothing came to light: and then all of a sudden it became ridiculous. They recognized me by anecdote as well.

*I cup my hands to hold the tiny little world we live in*

I'm sorry to hear about the Craigslist fail. I hope the Allston possibility will work out, or that something else will come soon.

Thanks for sharing that quote. I'll have to order a copy of that book.

One alternate history, please, in which the winning of the Punic Wars by Carthage preserves the maritime Phoenician way of looking at the sea as the linkage of the world rather than the foot-miles of Rome.

Interesting concept--I reckon I'd read it. Although I'd have to say that the concept of the sea as a uniting thing's lived on in folk culture along the fringes of Europe. I'm thinking* on something I once read that said diocesan and parish borders in parts of Wales were at one time based on water travel rather than land, and I'm thinking I've read citations of papers on dialect-connections (in Welsh, in Irish, maybe Scandinavian languages? Not sure, as it's been an age) on the basis of water-connections as well.**

There's a poem I will share with you, soon's I find the book as it's not to be found online, or at least not to be found by me. I don't spell well in Shetlands, so I'd not trust myself to write it down from my memory.

*I started to write "I mind something..." Probably because I went looking to see if I could find the text online of a Shetlandic poem I'd like to share with you, the which I couldn't find, and as a result went on a sidewise wander through a blog in Scots.
**The local Norwegian in Bergen had the rhythm and sounds of northern English, to my ear. It was a bit odd to hear that, and then realise I was hearing Norwegian and catching my usual one word in ten.

Thanks for sharing that quote. I'll have to order a copy of that book.

It is one of those books that is actively improving my life.

Although I'd have to say that the concept of the sea as a uniting thing's lived on in folk culture along the fringes of Europe.

Much of the chapter is about this phenomenon, in fact: story-crossings, loanwords over the water.

There's a poem I will share with you, soon's I find the book as it's not to be found online, or at least not to be found by me. I don't spell well in Shetlands, so I'd not trust myself to write it down from my memory.

Thank you. I'd be curious to see it.

It is one of those books that is actively improving my life.

Definitely I'll have to get a copy. Only question is whether I'll get it on the Nook or go hunt up a paper copy.

Much of the chapter is about this phenomenon, in fact: story-crossings, loanwords over the water.

Excellent.

Thank you. I'd be curious to see it.

Couldn't locate the book this afternoon--I'll check other spots tonight. For now, here's another poem from Shetland, by a different author, which I posted some years gone: Christine De Luca: 'Da Nort Boat'

Thank you. I'd be curious to see it.

Found it!

Sie-Færin

Ayont da flat ært
o da boondries o sens,
he kens--

da wirld's choost
a roond bloo baa fok sirkil
t'wirk an liv.

A gloabil awaarnis.
Du spits ida oshin
an a drap myght rekk Æshnis.

Bit hoiest du a sæl
du gjings quhar du will
tæ njoo fun laand.

--Robert Alan Jamieson
from: Wish I Was Here: a Scottish multicultural anthology
Kevin MacNeil and Alec Finlay, eds. (pocketbooks; Edinburgh 2000)

As I think on't, I'll quote you the notes as well, as I think them worth the doing so:

Sea-Faring

The global consciousness that arose from the activities of the sailing men meant that the ocean was never regarded as an obstcacle to togetherness, but rather as the means to connect one place with another. The coming of everyday air travel in the loatter part of this century has meant that the sea is now regarded differently--though perhaps the learning brought home by the merchant seamen has been replaced, and improved upon, but the new technologies. The moment of enlightenment described by astronauts, when they are able for the first time to look back at our planet and see the beautiful blue ball as a whole for the first time, is not so far removed from the knoweldge of those who have cricumnavigated the world in their ships.

***

Beyond the flat earth of the boundaries of sense, he knows-
The world is just a great round ball folk circle to work and live.
A global awareness.
If you spit in the ocean, that drop might reach the nearest shore.
But hoist a sail, and you go where you please, to new found land.

####

That translation's a bit flat, but I'm not sure it could be Englished and not be. I wish I knew Shetlands better. There seem to be multiple ways of spelling it--some more like standard Scots, and then there's the more sort of Scandinavianish style Jamieseon uses.

Here's another Jamieson poem of which I'm fond.
And Kwarna Farna by Vagaland (T.A. Robertson).
ETA: Too lovely not to share, this, and especially with the audio on it: Fauld Up Da Feddoms by Lise Sinclair.
Oh, and here's Æshnis

Edited 2013-01-04 08:37 (UTC)

Sie-Færin

That's cool! Thank you so much!

(Part of what's lost in the translation is the specificity of Æshnis, which is not a generic "nearest shore": it's Eshaness, a concrete place in the Shetlands. The English runs the line breaks together into sentences for no reason I can determine, which makes the poem read as more prosaic than it is. And the vagueness is recurring: "If you spit in the ocean, that drop might reach the nearest shore" is possibly intended to sound like folk wisdom, a proverb, but "You spit in the ocean / and a drop might reach Æshnis" is arresting and immediate.)

I like "Bottles" a lot.

[edit] You edited your comment in the time it took me to complete mine; I found Æshnis as well. The Sinclair reads like it should be set to music.

Edited 2013-01-04 08:42 (UTC)

That's cool! Thank you so much!

I'm delighted to hear that. You're very welcome!

(Part of what's lost in the translation is the specificity of Æshnis, which is not a generic "nearest shore"...

I agree completely.

I suspect that what might be going on here is the idea that, once it's Englished and no longer in Shetlandic, it might as well be prosaic and genericised because it's no longer itself. The idea that Æeshnis is a place to be talked about in Sjetlands, whereas in English it might as well be the generic "the nearest shore" as Eshaness because in English we could as easily be talking about Block Island or Marathon Key. It's an extreme view, too extreme, perhaps, but I can sympathise, in a way. There are times when I feel very uncomfortable in the act of translation.

Actually, this is reminding me of the last meeting of the NYC Irish language book club when we were talking about Myles na Gopaleen's (AKA Flann O'Brian, AKA BRian O'Nolan) An Béal Bocht (1941). There is a translation, done in 1973, well after the author's death, which a couple of us had read at one time or another, but the general consensus was that it's not really right in English, because in a very visceral way it stops being ourselves laughing at ourselves in sometimes brutal fashion and becomes the middle class Anglophone world laughing at the poor savages in the Gaeltacht. The author himself didn't want it to be translated, and somebody brought up the rhetorical question of what he might have written had he decided to translate it.

I couldn't really articulate it at the time, but it came to me that what he might well have done, in that case, would have been to write a novel in English about an Anglophone ne'er do well from Dublin whose life story follows a parallel and equally hapless track (from birth to prison) to that of An Béal Bocht's narrator and protagonist, written as an affectionate-ish parody of the works of James Joyce and Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan in the same fashion as the Irish-language novel parodies the works of Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin.

[edit] You edited your comment in the time it took me to complete mine; I found Æshnis as well. The Sinclair reads like it should be set to music.

Sorry if I threw you off with that edit. I'm glad you did find. It hit me that I should do something about laying out the specificity and meaning of the place. I've a tendency to assume folk will look things up or ask if they don't know, but I know that's not always what works best for other folk. I reckoned you'd likely look it up, but obviously there's others might be reading this.

I agree about the Sinclair. Her reading of it's wonderful, but I'd very much like to hear a setting of it.

Edited 2013-01-05 08:15 (UTC)

I will join the populace in saying: oshit, cool, and cool.

I will join the populace in saying: oshit, cool, and cool.

Hah. Thank you.

*hugs*

preserves the maritime Phoenician way of looking at the sea as the linkage of the world

And then their worldview will travel on the waves, reach the Pacific, and find its cousin. And all will go to the stars.
(The star-spanning Pasifika far-future culture is in the slow-percolating gyre. Occasionally things like this poke at it).

Oh grief, email. Better certainty for future e-communications. /looks sternly at gmail to behave itself

And then their worldview will travel on the waves, reach the Pacific, and find its cousin. And all will go to the stars.

See

asakiyume's comment! I shoud like this history to be achieved.

(The star-spanning Pasifika far-future culture is in the slow-percolating gyre. Occasionally things like this poke at it).

Poke. Even the thesiscave must admit a small crack of sea-chanting light.

Oh grief, email. Better certainty for future e-communications.

Thank you. In the meantime, I will settle for Craigslist offering an apartment I want and can afford. It's happened before. (Once. That one time.)

Poke. Even the thesiscave must admit a small crack of sea-chanting light.

Hee! (and thank you. It's comforting).
Oh goodness. Now

ashlyme's Isis-cave is struggling to stay Lascaux-like and instead hearing the roar of the sea.
...maybe this can be multiple poems.

...maybe this can be multiple poems.

Cycle!

Wait who? Allston? My mental rolodex is confused, though I am certain I do know whoever it is.

Love you very lots. Email is back now.

Wait who? Allston? My mental rolodex is confused, though I am certain I do know whoever it is.

xenoglossy on DW. I don't know how to link that on LJ.

Love you very lots. Email is back now.

Yay, e-mail. I shall write to you. Love you so.

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