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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, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 bothcirne 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.
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
--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!