Newspapers have been with us for such a long time

I anticipate with regret and concern the passing of the real, physical daily newspaper with the sound of rustling paper, the dry smell of newsprint, the yellowing and then crumbling of old articles cut from a paper months and years before. With the ever greater decline of original content, the costs in comparison to a free display on the computer and with the disconsonant weltanschaung of most papers, their demise does seem only a matter of time and I hate to see their passing. I hope that I am wrong and that technology and desparation will lead to better content that people are willing to pay for.

All this brought to mind by Richard Henry Dana's comment in Two Years Before the Mast. Having departed from his Boston home, family, and studies at Harvard, he has been abroad in California for a year and half when mail and papers are delivered. He first observes:

After all, there is nothing in a strange land like a newspaper from home. Even a letter, in many respects, is nothing, in comparison with it. It carries you back to the spot, better than anything else. It is almost equal to clairvoyance.

He then goes on to tease out just how it achieves that transportation.

The names of the streets, with the things advertised, are almost as good as seeing the signs; and while reading "Boy lost!" one can almost hear the bell and well-known voice of "Old Wilson," crying the boy as "strayed, stolen, or mislaid!" Then there was the Commencement at Cambridge, and the full account of the exercises at the graduating of my own class. A list of all those familiar names, (beginning as usual with Abbot, and ending with W., ) which, as I read them over, one by one, brought up their faces and characters as I had known them in the various scenes of college life. Then I imagined them upon the stage, speaking their orations, dissertations, colloquies, etc.
, with the gestures and tones of each, and tried to fancy the manner in which each would handle his subject, ----, handsome, showy, and superficial; ----, with his strong head, clear brain, cool self-possession; ----, modest, sensitive, and underrated; ----, the mouth-piece of the debating clubs, noisy, vaporous, and democratic; and so following. Then I could see them receiving their A. Bs. from the dignified, feudal-looking President, with his "auctoritate mihi commissa," and walking off the stage with their diplomas in their hands; while upon the very same day, their classmate was walking up and down California beach with a hide upon his head.

Semper Fi Cervantes

There are certain writers who transcend their times and their culture - writers who are enjoyed by readers everywhere: Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, de Montaigne.

It is easy to box them up into tight thumbnail sketches and then overlook the lives they actually led. I suppose it is the burden of fame that everyone thinks they know you.

I came across this little fact yesterday which I actually learned a few years ago and then forgot. The great Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), novelist, poet, and playwright, wrote one of the classics of Western literature and indeed world literature, Don Quixote. Cervantes, before becoming a world reknowned author, was a soldier - in fact, what we would today call a marine. In that capacity, he sailed in the western naval armada that fought and defeated the invading Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. The victory of the Holy League temporarily halted the Turkish incursion into Europe. In the Battle of Lepanto, Cervantes was shot twice in the chest and once in his left arm, a wound so severe that it led to amputation.

It is so easy to think of authors as quiet people writing in rooms and to forget that many of the best of them were indeed men and women of the world first. The fragility of circumstance is also highlighted - here is one of the towering figures of world literature so nearly extinguished before pen was ever put to paper.


Independent Reader

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and retold by Martin Jenkins. Ilustrated by Chris Riddell Suggested

Young Adult

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and tranlsated by Peter Anthony Motteux Suggested

Adult

Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley Suggested

Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton

Think of the knowledge of history that Chesterton presumes of the reader. I wonder to what extent this is even read in schools any more, even in Europe.

Lepanto
by G.K. Chesterton

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run,
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold.

Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world.
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain - hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,-
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, 'Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces - four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.'
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still - hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed -
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke ,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives, sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign -
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade...
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

"I'm the 82nd Airborne"

The other day I was watching a documentary about the Battle of the Bulge with my twelve year old. I told about a couple of men I knew that had been there. We spoke of the chaos and the disorganization and how whether the line held in a particular area often depended on the actions of single soldiers making the decision to stand or flee. I had heard a great story relating an incident in that battle and couldn't quite recall the details.

I had heard it told on the Australian ABC Radio years ago. I went back and found it here.

Chris Bullock: Colonel Grossman concluded with a story from World War II, when Americans were retreating in terror through a forest, pursued by Nazi SS. Reserve troops and paratroopers were called in to stop the Nazi advance under very difficult conditions.

David Grossman: And this is a true story. There was a photographer there, and a reporter there, and what happened was this. There's one American tank, 30 tons of death, fleeing down the road, and this one lonely paratrooper walks out in the middle of the road. And he's got hollow, sunken eyes, three days growth of beard; an M1 dangling from his hand and a bazooka on his shoulder and he walks up and he stops the tank and looks at the tank commander and he says, 'Buddy, are you looking for a safe place?' The guy says, 'Yes.' He says, 'Then get behind me because I'm the 82nd Airborne Division and this is as far as the bastards are going to get.'

The Convergence of the Twain by Thomas Hardy

The Convergence Of The Twain
by Thomas Hardy
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls-grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .

VI

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate
For her-so gaily great-
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Ambrose Bierce - <em><strong>Write it Right</strong></em>

Bill Bryson is a marvellous writer and I have all of his books and have enjoyed each for their own merits. While I enjoy his travel writing the most (for example, In A Sunburned Country, Notes from a Small Island, and The Lost Continent) followed by his autobiogaphical and other works (such as I'm a Stranger Here Myself, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and A Short History of Nearly Everything), there is one odd ringer in there. Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors is primarily a reference book and is, to my mind, an extremely eclectic collection of information that might be of use to a writer.

While I don't hold it in the same regard as his other works, it is still intriguing. Every three or four months I have to, owing to constantly acquiring new books, winnow my collection and consign some portion to storage. Which books do I absolutely have to keep to hand, which ones am I likely to read in the next few months, which ones might be useful? Despite being an odd little volume, Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors has survived several clearance cycles.

Among the reasons for its durability are the surprises. Looking up some other item, I came across Bryson's discussion of the use of "over" for "more than" in which he references Ambrose Bierce's Write it Right. Bierce I know from his ascerbic The Devil's Dictionary, as well as his short stories such as An Incident at Owl Creek.

Write it Right is not simply a writer's guide to style, but is, in Bierce's fashion, A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. It is still in print (as linked above) but on backorder. Gutenberg has a free electronic version of Write it Right, A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, should you want to see what was on Bierce's pet peeve list. As Bryson says, it is "a usage book teeming with quirky recommendations, many of which you will find repeated nowhere.

Russian Sailors

From Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast. It is the 1830's, California is still a remote part of Mexico, and his ship has been trading up and down the coast of this strange and foreign land. They have now sailed up to San Francisco.

This large bay, which lies in latitude 37° 58', was discovered by Sir Francis Drake, and by him represented to be (as indeed it is) a magnificent bay, containing several good harbors, great depth of water, and surrounded by a fertile and finely wooded country. About thirty miles from the mouth of the bay, and on the south-east side, is a high point, upon which the presidio is built. Behind this, is the harbor in which trading vessels anchor, and near it, the mission of San Francisco, and a newly begun settlement, mostly of Yankee Californians, called Yerba Buena, which promises well.

Here, at anchor, and the only vessel, was a brig under Russian colors, from Asitka, in Russian America, which had come down to winter, and to take in a supply of tallow and grain, great quantities of which latter article are raised in the missions at the head of the bay. The second day after our arrival, we went on board the brig, it being Sunday, as a matter of curiosity; and there was enough there to gratify it. Though no larger than the Pilgrim, she had five or six officers, and a crew of between twenty and thirty; and such a stupid and greasy-looking set, I certainly never saw before. Although it was quite comfortable weather, and we had nothing on but straw hats, shirts, and duck trowsers, and were barefooted, they had, every man of them, double-soled boots, coming up to the knees, and well greased; thick woolen trowsers, frocks, waistcoats, pea-jackets, woolen caps, and everything in true Nova Zembla rig; and in the warmest days they made no change.

The clothing of one of these men would weigh nearly as much as that of half our crew. They had brutish faces, looked like the antipodes of sailors, and apparently dealt in nothing but grease. They lived upon grease; eat it, drank it, slept in the midst of it, and their clothes were covered with it. To a Russian, grease is the greatest luxury. They looked with greedy eyes upon the tallow-bags as they were taken into the vessel, and, no doubt, would have eaten one up whole, had not the officer kept watch over it. The grease seemed actually coming through their pores, and out in their hair, and on their faces. It seems as if it were this saturation which makes them stand cold and rain so well. If they were to go into a warm climate, they would all die of the scurvy.

The vessel was no better than the crew. Everything was in the oldest and most inconvenient fashion possible; running trusses on the yards, and large hawser cables, coiled all over the decks, and served and parcelled in all directions. The topmasts, top-gallant masts and studding-sail booms were nearly black for want of scraping, and the decks would have turned the stomach of a man-of-war's-man. The galley was down in the forecastle; and there the crew lived, in the midst of the steam and grease of the cooking, in a place as hot as an oven, and as dirty as a pigsty. Five minutes in the forecastle was enough for us, and we were glad to get into the open air. We made some trade with them, buying Indian curiosities, of which they had a great number; such as bead-work, feathers of birds, fur moccasins, etc.

(. . . )

Friday, December 25th. This day was Christmas; and as it rained all day long, and there were no hides to take in, and nothing especial to do, the captain gave us a holiday, (the first we had had since leaving Boston,) and plum duff for dinner. The Russian brig, following the Old Style, had celebrated their Christmas eleven days before; when they had a grand blow-out and (as our men said) drank, in the forecastle, a barrel of gin, ate up a bag of tallow, and made a soup of the skin.