Greyfriar's Kirkyard 10
Originally uploaded by byronv2

Since it is Halloween, the night when the realms of the living, the dead and the supernatural intersect, I thought I'd stick up one of my more Gothic images from my Flickr set.

Ah broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! — a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? — weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung! —
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young —
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
"And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her — that she died!
"How shall the ritual, then, be read? — the requiem how be sung

"By you — by yours, the evil eye, — by yours, the slanderous tongue
"That did to death the innocent that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel so wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride —
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes —
The life still there, upon her hair — the death upon her eyes.

"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
"But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!
"Let no bell toll! — lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
"Should catch the note, as it doth float — up from the damned Earth.
"To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven —
"From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven —
"From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven."

"Lenore", Edgar Alan Poe, 1845

Tttttttthththt That's all folks!



This incredibly cool set of Looney Tunes characters such as Wil E Coyote and Bugs Bunny (one of my personal role models as a child, which might explain a lot) as skeletons is for the Day of the Dead and was snapped in a Hollywood cemetery where the great Mel Blanc (a saint in my Church of Seventh Day Cartoonists) is also buried - the item on the lower right is apparently a rubbing from his headstone. It comes from Superape's Flickr stream, via Boing Boing. Happy Halloween and a macabre Sahmain to you all.

How to protect America from dangerous British politicians

Boing Boing has a story which is hilariously funny (and a bit disturbing) on so many levels it ain't true - British Member of Parliament and government minister Shahid Malik, a Muslim, has been stopped for a second time by airport security in the USA. Airport security and immigration have never had the best rep )and US immigration always had a lousy rep for being officious and unfriendly) and since 9-11 they've been even worse, with some obviously delighting in abusing the extra (usually downright stupid) rules and powers they can wield - complain and they can make it even worse. They've even stopped a UN diplomat travelling on a white passport (which should clear customs almost immeaditely as far as I am aware), now the same British minister twice, presumably because he is Muslim.

The fact he is a member of America's strongest ally's government doesn't seem to have entered into their minds and you have to assume if it is a second time then presumably their superiors don't give a crap about insulting an allied government in this manner either, which makes you think what can any of us ordinary citizens expect when trying to enter America these days - not sure I'd care to travel there right now, to be honest. Ah, but it gets better - on both occasions the MP was in the US to take part in talks on how to co-operate more closely on fighting terrorism and tackling extremism! Talk about farcical... Don't y'all feel safer with these fartknocker protecting borders?!?!? Strange we don't often hear of US senators being harassed at UK immigration.

Heroes

If like me you've been following Heroes and thinking it is one of the best things on TV right now (whether you are a comics fan or not) you've probably been wondering when they might start creating some tie-in material to go with it. Well, DC has a graphic novel collection coming up soon which collects the comics material created online to go along with the series, available in two different cover editions, one by Jim Lee and one by Alex Ross, so if you're trying to think on something for a Heroes fan for a present, here's a big, fat, superpowered hint!

Saudi King says Brits not doing enough to fight terrorism

Despotic ruler King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of diplomacy ahead of his state visit to the UK, declared that Britain had not done enough to fight terrorism. Asked to explain further an aide commented "well, you went and invaded Iraq with those trigger happy Yankees when you'd have been better bombing the crap out of our country - its where most of the 9-11 bombers came from and the funds for their murderous campaign. Clearly if you were serious about stopping terrorism you'd have flattened Saudi."

A morning of mists

Chilly in Edinburgh this morning, cold enough in the early morning and after sunset to see your breath; I can taste the winter on the air. Cold, but beautiful - the mist which often falls in Edinburgh, especially in autumn, lay over the city. By the time I was on Princes Street the sun was just barely above Castle Ridge; the Castle and buildings of the Old Town were faint through the mist, like fading dreams evaporating in the light of morning, or perhaps the reverse, perhaps the daytime city was dreaming itself into being as I watched. The copper-red sun struggled above Ridge, fuzzy and indistinct through the mist, making it glow like a living thing as it curled around old buildings, battlements and the peaks of Arthur's Seat. An hour later it was a clear, blue sky, crisp, sharp, as if the mist had never been, the world solid and defined, but I saw it change from dreamstate to waking world and know that both are, in their own ways, real and imaginary at the same time.

On the way home tonight the sun had just set, staining the sky red in the west; a darkening sky in the east and a huge, full moon rising in the sky even by 6 o'clock. The mist was rising once more, following the line of the setting sun, like a great, soft blanket being pulled over the city from east to west. The city changes again, slips herself into another form, another reality, another dream. All cities are both real and dream places, their ever-changing faces as much how we see them as any subjective view, presenting perspectives to those who will look and appreciate her special gifts.

Have a heart

A friend of a friend has been in training for his first ever marathon - the Snowdonia marathon no less - and is aiming to raise funds for a very good cause: the British Heart Foundation. He's trying to spread the word so after sticking my name down I said I'd do my good deed for the day and post a link here to his page on JustGiving, a site to let people raising money for charities take donation securely online, so if you are feeling generous please swing by and see if you can help.

Sweeties!

Traditional sweets seem, like many things, to be a dying breed these days. Not hard to see why - those traditional big glass (or plastic) jars of hardboiled sweets in dozens of varieties take up a lot of shelf space for a small shop and it takes the shopkeeper time to take them out, weigh them and stick them in a bag. Selling pre-packaged sweets like Skittles is a heck of a lot easier, simpler, faster and more space efficient. So it isn't surprising that traditional sweet shops are scarce these days - I'm lucky in that I know a couple in Edinburgh which still do them this way.

Not that I eat hardboiled sweeties very often (I prefer chocolate most of the time!) but I do get the urge sometimes and have to treat myself to some Gibb's Soor Plooms, a traditional, bright green sweet from Scotland. If you miss that old range and don't have any shops nearby who still do them then a friend recommended A Quarter Of..., a website dealing in just those classic sweeties you remember from your sticky-faced youth. Mmmm. I may have to try the handmade Soor Plooms.

Teeth and fat

Gosh, I seem to have had one of those weeks which didn't leave much time to blog, but a couple of news stories in the UK did catch my eye - the continuing lack of dentists who will work on the NHS and the obesity 'epidemic'. Other than being health-related they seemed unconnected to the mainstream media, but we at the Woolamaloo Gazette like to think more deeply than the hacks of the Street of Shame and realised that none of the traditional media had come to the conclusion that the projected obesity epidemic (apparently we will all be fat bastards in just a few years, except, one assumes, for supermodels) is quite clearly a fake story. In the lack of NHS dental services story it was revealed some desperate (or possibly just mad) people had resorted to removing their own teeth, with one man allegedly having pulled 14 of his own teeth. As the nation's dental state decays (sorry, pun intended) further in the next few years the supposed obesity wave will fade away as fewer and fewer Britons retain teeth with which to eat their high-salt, high-fat diet. One problem solving another.

Popeye Vs Anime

Two separate cartoon cultures clash as Popeye comes face to face with Anime and has a similar reaction many folks not clued up in the genre have - what the heck is this? Warning, contains scenes of silliness, violence and spinach.

Seachd - the Inaccessible Pinnacle

At the weekend I caught an absolutely beautiful Scottish film, the Gaelic-language Seachd: the Inaccessible Pinnacle. A man returns home from Glasgow to his dying grandfather back in the Western Isles, which leads to a series of tales - in many ways it is a story about stories. Rather fittingly, since Gaelic has an immensely rich oral tradition, a seam of folklore and tales told and retold by bards, singers and just ordinary folk generation after generation. In one scene the grandfather - who may have a much more personal link to the stories of centuries past he tells - talks to his wee grandson, angry and bitter after the death of his parents, rejecting his upbringing, calling it stupid and his grandad's stories false and tells him "no-one can tell the truth. We all tell stories."


(Angus Peter Campbell/Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul as the grandfather. A man well suited to play a storyteller since he was taught by Iain Crichton Smith and then later encouraged by Sorley MacLean at University. He is a published novelist and poet and it shows in his performance - like any good poet he has a feel for the fabric and rhythm of storytelling)

As a lifelong reader its hard for me to argue that point - narrative, story, is central to the human condition, it informs who we are in a personal day to day life (how was your day? You don't just say I did this, this and this, you tell it like a short story) and on the grander scale (the older stories which tell us on a deeper level who we are as a people, stories that repeat again and again - Arthur, the Iliad, Beowulf, Ramayana, the songs of the Dreamtime. We are story, we are words and images - we think in words and images, we talk in them, write and draw and sing in them. They're encoded into our DNA. And Seachd is stories within stories, stories defining and illustrating history, culture and the individuals too.


The film is beautiful to behold - much of it is shot on An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, better know to most of us as the Isle of Skye and the mighty Cuillins range. Even in scenes shot on gray, dull, overcast (very Scottish weather) days the imagery is stunning, clouds reaching down to the tops of the mountains, like angel's wings caressing the earth. The music (which is what is playing from the embedded player I got from the official site over on the left of the blog here) is also wonderful.

It makes my blood boil that the numpty heids at BAFTA have decided not to support this Scottish film and put it forward as their non-English language selection for Oscar consideration - not because they had something else they preferred to put forward either, they just didn't put Seachd or anything else forward, which totally undermines their supposed commitment to supporting British film-making (and nice to see London still haughtily mistreats Gaelic culture, some things never change it seems). BAFTA has attracted a raft of criticism, starting with the Scottish arts community, the Parliament and now worldwide condemnation for this shameful and inexcusable lack of support and rightly so. With the fine reception the film is receiving it makes BAFTA's ignorant decision look all the more foolish and ill-informed and I hope they are quite humiliated by their disgusting actions.



But enough negativity - the film itself is truly beautiful and moving; the seemingly simple idea of an elderly storyteller telling story after story doesn't convey the feel of the film. As with any story it isn't just the story, it is how the storytellers tell the story that often makes it and that's the case here. Its hauntingly beautiful, stories that you can feel on those deeper levels that the truly good stories can reach. Go and see it.

Anatomical

Last weekend was the annual Doors Open Day, when buildings not normally open to the public let people into visit. I'm still sorting a stack of photographs I shot as we tramped all round town, from designer make-overs by local architectural practises in old mews buildings to places like the observatory on Calton Hill and the Royal College of Physicians in the New Town. I'll post a few more when I get time to sort them out, but I thought I'd kick off with these few shots taken in their two libraries; these are rare 17th century medical volumes, which the College Fellow on duty in the library was kind enough to let me photograph as long as I obviously refrained from using the flash (in stark contrast to the folks at Scottish Heritage who didn't allow any photography even of the Georgian rooms, which seems extremely backward to me if you are inviting in visitors, especially if you are a public body - bad marks to SH, big thumbs up to the RCP who really made an effort to make visitors welcome and encouraged photo-taking).


(click the pics to see the larger versions on the Woolamaloo Flickr stream)



Apologies for the reflections here, but as the books were under glass there wasn't really anyway round them - it was either reflections of the lights or stand right over it and get my camera in the reflections, but the quality of the draughtmanship here was far too good not to try taking a pic. These books pre-date the Act of Union between Scotland and England.



Just look at the detail in this anatomical study of the human skeleton and musculature; the cross hatching and shading is amazing. More so when you consider this is around three centuries old and an artist created this by hand and another artist would then have laboriously created a negative inscribed into a copper plate for printing. Books like this, being disseminated all over Europe by groups like the Royal College, are physical artefacts of the birth of the modern era, the move from superstition to reason and science, exploring the natural world and our own physiques to find new wonder even the greatest minds of Classical Antiquity could never have dreamed of. They are also gorgeous works of craftsmanship and art. A modern Gray's Anatomy (a standard text for most doing medical degrees) may be more informative and accurate, but it lacks the elegance and beauty of this work.

Welcome to the Space Age

As Russians mark the 50th anniversary of planet Earth's first satellite, Sputnik, taking flight IEEE Spectrum has an interview with the legendary grand old man of science fiction, Arthur C Clarke (link via Boing Boing). Clarke, of course, before becoming the hugely influential SF writer he would later become (we're talking about a man who talked to presidents and kings as well as scientists and writers - also one of the few who was so respected he was friends with both astronauts and cosmonauts during the Cold War) wrote a speculative paper in the 1940s in which he imagined using geostationary space stations to act as relays for beaming radio signals across the entire globe, pretty much what we now have with a legion of satellites linking us up in ways we don't even think about anymore - we use phones and watch TV largely without considering the world-changing technology which brings it to us so damned easily. All starting with a little silver ball called Sputnik going beepbeepbeepbeep around the world.

Seachd




+ your site | + in Gaelic

The moon and the sun

It's that time of year when you can look up on a bright, autumnal morning and see the sun in on direction, rising from the sea and look the other way and see the moon hanging in a clear, pale blue sky at the same time. Somehow seeing the moon in daylight always make me think on a scene from the old 70s show Space 1999...