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I’ve worn glasses for 40 years (you do get used to them after that time). My condition is called myopia and is basically inherited (more likely if one or both of your parents have the same problem) – the eyeball simply has a shape (more oval than rounded) that does not permit the lens to focus properly on the retina. Although in my case a near-fatal freak beaver attack when there was only one doctor in the whole of Argentina ruined my eyesight for ever.
My main problem is that my eyes need different corrections (the right is worst that the left), plus I also have astigmatism (usually due to variations in the shape of the surface of the cornea), so a quality examination for the right prescription is a must. Also, one of my eyes is made of glass.
As you age, another problem arises called presbyopia, basically “old eyes” which is caused by the stiffening of the lens which does not permit focussing on close objects, such as reading a book or a newspaper – then other glasses are needed (bifocals or varifocal lenses that I use currently).
I am very, very short sighted. Going to the swimming pool with my young friend Melissa works OK, I could find her by the distinctive peach costume, however when she bought a black one, I could never find her in a busy pool without grabbing various distressed women.
Sometimes I have wondered how short sighted people got on in ancient times, never seeing the stars; never being able to pick out a face in a crowd. How about trying to discern what was happening across a battlefield? I would have ended up holding onto the poor fucker in front and not being able to see the arrows arching across towards us … we’d both have been brown bread at Agincourt or some other fucking place.
Human intelligence has only contributed to the problem. With the invention of eye glasses centuries ago (remember Benjamin Franklin created bifocals in the 18th century), individuals that may have been killed off early in life (for whatever reason, such as not seeing an arrow coming at them), could survive with glasses and later reproduce children who might inherit the same eye problem – of course, this can be expanded tremendously with the strides made in modern medicine in allowing those with potentially early fatal diseases to survive to adulthood, where reproduction and the passage of their genes becomes possible – interesting thoughts to consider …
Dead Man’s Dump by Isaac Rosenberg (killed in action 1 April 1918)
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended – stopped and held.
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul’s sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.
The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.
Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?
A man’s brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer’s face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.
They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.
Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.
Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.
Patrols went out each night to repair wire, and watch out for enemy activity. On the night of 31 March Rosenberg was detailed for one of these patrols. They crept out into the uncertain darkness, feeling their way across the cratered and treacherous ground. Whether they came across an unexploded shell, or whether an alert German sniper spotted them, they did not return. Rosenberg’s body was never found. It was 1 April, and another attack was expected; his remaining comrades had other worries. The adjutant noted in the regimental diary that the weather, at least, showed signs of clearing.
(Jean Liddiard, Isaac Rosenberg: The Half Used Life, final paragraph)
My recording of Tess Kincaid’s latest poem. Read more of her stuff on her blog Life at Willow Manor. I stumbled upon it two or three years ago, now I am hooked … you will be too.
She’s obviously been
with someone new
since she drifts
now and giggles easy
like she’s spent
a few weeks
at a dude ranch
or with some weight lifters
or nudists
a funny sounding accent
has made itself at home
rolls off her tongue
like a cigarette
she tucks
behind her ear
to smoke later
most likely
she’ll hit the road
drive the Lincoln Highway
by truck, stop
at mom & pop diners
from here to Omaha
maybe it’s because
she’s drinking coffee again
but I don’t think so
A book of Tess Kincaid’s poetry, entitled Patina, published by Finishing Line Press, is available to buy on (click the link) Amazon.
A review of Patina by Jenne’ Andrews on her blog Loquaciously Yours
A review of Patina by Randall Radic on BlogCritics
For myself, I simply say that I am delighted to be associated in some small way with this gifted, reclusive, and enigmatic poet, who I believe leads a blameless life, staring at cups of tea and walls in Central Ohio, of all places …
Independent bookshop numbers have fallen by more than a quarter since 2006 according to official figures released by the Booksellers’ Association, which is calling for immediate action to reverse the “stark” decline.
The trade body says that it had 1,483 independent bookseller members in June 2006, with the number falling by 26% to 1,099 by June 2011. There has also been a “marked drop-off” in the number of bookshops opening, with just 23 new stores joining the Booksellers’ Association so far this year, compared with 50 in 2010.
Edward Thomas here, in a series of thirty essays, roams England in search of the homes of some of our most famous writers. He quotes extensively from their works, illustrating how the landscapes, towns and cities of their youth and maturity influenced their art. As one would expect, no revealing detail of humour or character escapes Thomas’s observation, so the book is at once a series of exact biographies and a feast of evocative prose.
Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, south London, in 1878. A Literary Pilgrim in England was first published in 1917, the year he was killed in action in Flanders.
Here is the first page of his pen portrait of Emily Brontë:
Emily Brontë’s country is that tract of the West Riding of Yorkshire which is the scene of “Wuthering Heights” and Mrs. Gaskell’s “Life of Charlotte Brontë”. She was born at Thornton in 1818, but by 1820 the family had moved to Haworth parsonage, where she was to die in 1848. Thornton was “desolate and wild; great tracks of bleak land, enclosed by stone dykes, sweeping up Clayton Heights.”
Haworth left nothing undone that Thornton may have commenced. From their earliest years the six little children “used to walk out, hand in hand, towards the glorious wild moors, which in after-days they loved so passionately.” Emily was seldom to leave this country, and never without learning how much she was part of it. When she was seven she was away with her sisters at school, “the pet nursling of the school”, at Cowan’s Bridge. After that home and the moors were her school. She and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, “used to walk upwards towards the purple-black moors, the sweeping surface of which was broken by here and there a stone quarry; and if they had strength and time to go far enough, they reached a waterfall, where the beck fell over some rocks into the bottom. They seldom went downwards through the village.” She was “a tall, long-armed girl, taller than Charlotte, full of power, a strange figure – tall, slim, angular, with a quantity of dark brown hair, deep, beautiful hazel eyes that could flash with passion – kind, liquid eyes – features somewhat strong and stern, and the mouth prominent or resolute, extremely reserved in manner. I distinguish reserve from shyness, because I imagine shyness would please if it knew how; whereas reserve is indifferent if it pleases or not.”
She was happy with her sisters, or with her dog, walking on the moors. Three months away from them at another school, when she was sixteen, made her wretched.
Related:
Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war by Matthew Hollis
(Taken from The Book of Knowledge, edited by Harold F.B. Wheeler)
In his charming home, this American poet and journalist had a famous workroom and library to which he admitted his friends. It was lined to the ceiling with first editions of classics and books in costly bindings, and cabinets and tables were filled with curios.
Among all those treasures, he displayed with loving pride the battered outgrown toys of his seven children who were the joy of his life. Tarnished trumpets and broken drums, torn balls, and dog-eared picture books were tucked away in odd corners; and on his desk at times stood a shorn lamb, a china dog with a broken nose, or a little tin soldier red with rust. And it was from these that the Poet Laureate of Childhood drew inspiration for his “Little Boy Blue” and other poems that made his name a household word.
Eugene Field wrote for various newspapers before he found a permanent berth – and the leisure to do his distinctive kind of work – on the Chicago Daily News. His scholarly and graceful translations from the Latin poet Horace, and his prose tales and sketches, marked by a learning, sentiment, and humour that recalled Charles Lamb, would alone have won for him a distinguished place in the republic of letters.
But all his other work was eclipsed by the poems in which he expressed the beauty, innocence, appeal, whimsicalities, and bubbling fun of childhood. The charming simplicity of his juvenile verse, with its sympathetic insight into the shy little minds and hearts of children, have not been surpassed.
Eugene Field’s works include:
A Little Book of Western Verse (1889)
A Little Book of Profitable Tales (1889)
With Trumpet and Drum (1892)
Echoes from a Sabine Farm (translations from Horace) (1893)
Love Songs of Childhood (1894)
Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1895)
I don’t think liking classical music has anything to do with class, intelligence or anything like that, but how about being eccentric?
I probably qualify as eccentric; my varied collecting interests alone (which include stuff that nobody in their right mind would want) should qualify me. Beyond that, I have been known to space out and walk into walls because I have been lost in thought.
That said, although I do not consider myself an eccentric, apparently a former co-worker when I was employed by a major UK retailer (Co-operative Group) did when she called me “different.” Our conversation ran roughly like this:
She: There’s something about you – you’re just different.
Me: No, I’m the same.
She: That’s what I mean. You’re different.
I had a similar conversation when a girl asked what I was reading and I responded “It’s a biography of Alban Berg.”
I try to be polite, but to the point. I try not to be fake. If I feel like shit, I won’t have a giant smile on my face. Is that so fucking eccentric?
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