Happy Independence Day from this side of the Pond. We, too, must start mulling those words.
Holidays
Memorial Day 2014
Carbon Leaf: The War Was in Color
Neptunus Lex, when first posting a link to this music video, remarked:
They all are.
Announcing the Nautical Book Project
The Classical Unities are three principles of drama (derived , or perhaps misderived, from Aristotle) which, according to certain Italian and French literary critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, should govern the construction of any drama. They are:
–unity of action: a single plot line with no sub-plots
–unity of place: the events should be constrained to a single location
–unity of time: the events should be limited to the period of a single day
One of the reasons that nautically-oriented fiction can be so powerful, I think, is that by its nature it often establishes certain unities: the action typically occurs in a single place…albeit a moveable one, the ship…with a consistent cast of characters belonging to that place…and, although unity of time in the strict classical sense of all action occurring within a single day may be rare, another sort of unity of time is often established in that events occur over the course of a single voyage.
I’m launching an ongoing project to post reviews of worthwhile nautical fiction, recent and not-so-recent, well-known and not-so-well-known. All ChicagoBoyz and ChicagoGrrlz authors are invited to participate. Movies may also be included under this review category, as may some nonfiction books, especially personal memoirs.
Books/movies I’m planning to review myself, in the not-too-distant future, include: The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk…The Hornblower series, by C S Forester, and White Jacket, by Herman Melville. Also To the Last Salute, by Captain Georg von Trapp (yes, that Captain von Trapp.)
Other books definitely deserving of reviews as part of this project include the nautical novels of Joseph Conrad, Melville’s Moby Dick and Billy Budd, and Nicholas Montsarrat’s The Cruel Sea.
Please post your suggestions for worthwhile books for this project in comments; also, for Chicago Boyz and Grrlz and anyone else who feels especially motivated, any books you would particularly like to sign up to review. I see this as an ongoing project since the universe of books under this category is vast.
A Reminiscence of Easter in Greece
(Part of this essay is in a collection of reminiscences about living overseas – but Greece to me was very special, even in spite of a certain problem with terrorism in the 1980s. The opportunities to visit the Parthenon regularly, as well as other classical sites … well, I used to feel sorry for people coming through on a whirlwind tour. They had only a week or two to spend in Greece, but I had almost three years.)
2013: “Let it be past and over, and among the things that I have put away.”
I set this post to go up at midnight.
There is a faint freshness in the London night as though some strayed reveler of a breeze had left his comrades in the Kentish uplands and had entered the town by stealth. The pavements are a little damp and shiny. Upon one’s ears that at this late hour have become very acute there hits the tap of a remote footfall. Louder and louder grow the taps, filling the whole night. And a black cloaked figure passes by, and goes tapping into the dark. One who has danced goes homewards. Somewhere a ball has closed its doors and ended. Its yellow lights are out, its musicians are silent, its dancers have all gone into the night air, and Time has said of it, “Let it be past and over, and among the things that I have put away.”
As I said on a bygone New Years Eve:
I wish all our ChicagoBoyz contributors, readers, friends, families, and all people of good will, a heaping portion of good luck in [2014] and a mere dash of trouble, just enough to flavor the dish.
Fear God and dread nought.
Happy New Year.