downton abbey. and some smothering dream.
This isn’t a post about Downton Abbey. But it is a post about Wilfred Owen, and he seems to be popping up a lot lately because of Downton. Media Bistro recently published a “Downton Abbey Reading List” and The New York Times even did a piece about Downton and how publishers were using America’s interest in it to promote historical fiction and biographies of the First World War. Both mentioned Owen-Wilfred Owena British soldier and poet who wrote, with horrific imagery, about the horrors of war.
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face…
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from Horace’s Odes. Roughly translated: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Wilfred Owen was killed in battle one week before the war ended. He was twenty-five years old.
You can see the original manuscript, and other works, at the University of Oxford’s Great War Digital Archive.
regency
I spent the last few weeks eating pies and watching costume dramas and reading Claire Tomalin’s Dickens Biography. I gained five pounds, discovered the wonderfully squared jawline of a young Douglas Booth, and began to suspect that my favorite Victorian novelist was a wee bit fond of hallucinogenics (see: henbane). I also slept. A lot.
christmas. three things.
cast your fate to the wind
I’ve been listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas Album and various Vince Guaraldi holiday hits since mid-September. They’re all mildly sedative and put the calm in me.
I spent most of last week in the hospital. I didn’t get there on my own merit – a certain someone decided to have a stroke, and there I was. So there I went. Steph was two floors above me, with her own somebody. (Though my somebody was her somebody too.)
We told each other it was okay to cry. Then made a big exaggerated song and dance of it because we were still embarrassed to be doing it at all. We met at 3:00a.m. for cheeseburgers and doughnuts and didn’t even pretend to care about the heart charts on the wall. And we crashed in the 5th floor waiting room more than once and wondered aloud each time whether we were just that tired or “is that an earthquake causing the room to shake?”
As depressing as it all was, there was a certain kind of comfort in being forced to do it together.
I just went to the Apple website. Steve Jobs has died and, all of a sudden, I feel really worn down again because…if Steve Jobs can die, in spite of himself, then anyone can.
But Vince Guaraldi is on the iPod. And that’s something, I suppose.
she’s the zeal i wish i had
I started running again last week. Because everything hurts when I don’t and because it’s preferable to yoga. Because even though I’m a bit of a sloth, when it comes to exercise, I’d rather move than not. Also, you can’t eagle pose to Eye of the Tiger. That’s just a fact.
Steph drove over this morning and we cranked out three miles before getting distracted by macchiatos and cold black coffee at the farmer’s market. On our way back she did the limbo beneath a lavender tree. I thought about joining her, but didn’t. I’m about as bendy as a brittle old stick at the moment. That’s a sorry excuse for an excuse, I know. Made all the worse, considering Steph.
Steph had major surgery two months ago. Surgery that involved a thirty inch incision. To put it into perspective, she’s only sixty inches tall. She’s the zeal I wish I had. I’m thinking about kidnapping her and forcing her to be my personal trainer and all around cheerleader. That would be ace.
the brief wondrous
Junot Diaz made me cry. Twice. Not his writing . Because, I’ve gotta be honest. I haven’t read any of it yet. (Not yet.) But his voice. I have absolutely zero in common with the man. Our backgrounds are not at all similar. Our lives, current, even less so. But hearing him speak really lit a fire under me. It was one of those ‘remember this moment’ moments. And I shared it with Mal.
what i’m writing. southern goth.
Archie Bishop weren’t worth half a man. Not even on a good day. On a bad day there weren’t no point to him at all. He’d sit on that stump – out by the railroad where the boys from the mountain wore the path through the woods – and just stare at you like you was the most inconvenient thing he ever saw. But the thing you got to figure, is he was an old man when it happened. Not so old that he couldn’t own to what he did, but too old to do it by himself. And then there’s Mary Hubbard. She was the one who said she saw it. Now I’m not saying Mary’s a liar, but she’s been known to see a thing or two aint no way she saw.
sweet dreams
You know stress is getting the better of you when you wake up at 4:00am-screaming. I use to do this routinely. The Euro found it amusing, until he didn’t. Then he started sleeping in the guest bedroom because “you’re going to give me a heart attack and I’d really rather you not, thanks.” But that was then. Tonight he didn’t even budge. Tonight, someone could have killed me in my sleep and he’d have slept right through it.
It’s usually getting attacked by wild animals that brings me to the screams. When I was a kid I use to dream of goats and grizzly bears. I’ve always maintained that goats were little satanic creatures and once, when I was ten, I saw a grizzy bear haul up on his back legs. Hauled-up grizzly bears will scar a ten-year-old for life. I dreamed of that bear for fifteen years, and it was always tearing down walls to get to me. During college I’d dream of being chewed on by a wild boar. A big tusky thing with red eyes. It’d gnaw on my shoulder until I’d wake up in near epileptic fits. Tonight it was a jackal. You forget those things even exist until they start going down your stairs backward, then you remember there was one in The Omen.
I’m using my laptop as a nightlight at the moment and thinking I should probably get one of those dream interpretation books. But the last time I did that, I found out my maternity instinct was trying to eat me alive. I really don’t want to know what backward-walking jackals mean.
an unexpected gesture
I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. – Flannery O’Connor
mo and kev.
If you’re in London this summer stop by the National Portrait Gallery’s BP Portrait Award Exhibition and see “Mo and Kev” by artist Chris Holt.
I’ve mentioned Chris’s artistic talents before and you’ll see from his bio on the National Portrait Gallery’s website that he’s also a BAFTA nominated director, writer, and producer. So you know right from the get-go he’s a bit of an underachiever.
The first time I saw one of his portraits was in his parents’ garage. I was helping my not-yet-husband look for a pair of roller skates. And sitting in a corner….“Some stuff Chris left when he moved…I think he did that one in school.” I don’t know who it was, or what it was meant to be to Chris. But I know what it was to me. Preacher Granville Muncey, laying on hands and baptizing down in the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River.
The resemblance really was spooky and put me to wondering if Chris was with that group of English anthropologists who came to West Virginia in the eighties to watch the Pentecostals and write text books about them – because the man in the painting didn’t just look like Granville, he was Granville. But Brother Granville never got out of the mountains…so how did he get into Chris’s head?
It took a while for me to realize that not everyone grew up with the Appalachians shielding them from the rest of everyone else and it was entirely possible Chris could know about things like faith healers and charismatics when I didn’t know about things like Ikea and Father Ted. So I got over the spooky feeling. But just barely.
Artist Chris Holt: Saatchi Online
