swan-rād

Old English poetry was full of a metaphorical technique called kenning, in which regular words were replaced by compounds which gave a poetic flavour to the description. Thus 'sun' can become 'sky-candle', and 'warrior' can become 'feeder of war gulls' - a double modified expression, in which war-gulls refer to ravens, the carrion birds attracted by the dead after a battle (nice, eh?). And what of the sea? In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, mighty ships plough the sail-road, the whale-road and the swan-road.

The when light hits the surface of the water, it creates a dispersed pattern of reflection stretching from the horizon towards the viewer. As light scatters off the moving surfaces of the ripples, only those beams which reflect towards the observer are visible. The resulting twinkly surface is called a glitter-path, and when the individual twinkles are summed together (as in this long exposure), the result is a clear, bright bridge. Here, the moon-bridge stretches right across the bay to the old town of Swanage (Anglo-Saxon name: Swanwich, meaning... wait for it... swan-village). Anyone fancy a stroll along the moon bridge across the swan-road to Swan-town?

Captured at Boscombe, Dorset

grendel, your pea soup is ready...

It's the line of the poem. Most famous and best remembered: "ða com of more under misthleoþum Grendel gongan, godes yrre bær" He came off the moor, under the mist-cliffs, Grendel striding, bearing the wrath of God.

How could a thick fog at the cliffs not remind me of that line, and of Grendel's powerful, furious stomping... But also of the injured monster - retreating from his encounter with Beowulf, arm torn off, slouching back to his cave, to see his monster mum. A substantial portion of the poem is devoted to Grendel's mum (rather curiously portrayed by the foxy Angelina in the recent film). So perhaps she did brew him up some restorative soup, before heading out to slaughter Hrothgar's men in their sleep... thanx mum. x. gr.

there's clearly something about monster mums that i find absurdly amusing...

today, the sky-pigs are all jabberwocky!

geek is a synonym for lonely

some folks mock the elegant simplicity of Roget's Thesaurus 1805 invention as an outmoded form of scholarship. there's a school of computational linguistics which ties his hand-crafted word lists quite concretely to the ways in which the mind organizes language. in particular, network analyses of the interconnected web of concepts captured by this tried-and-tested old work show that it has the same mathematical structure as the thousands upon thousands of 'word associations' provided by hundreds of University of South Florida undergraduates, collected over a period of several years.

in one classy paper, it is shown that these thousands of word-to-word associative relationships can be defined as 'small-world, scale-free' networks, which, like a fractal, have the same structure the deeper and deeper you delve into their detailed complexity: a small number of words are massively hyper-connected to tonnes and tonnes of others, while increasingly small numbers of words are connected to increasingly small numbers of neighbours. the vast majority of words only connect to one other. it it's the same statistical structure as characterizes the links between websites.

so where does good ol' roget fit in all of this? his book of relationships has the same mathematical structure as the random moments of lexical spontaneity provided by generations of university students. good job peter mark, you started something quite special.

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also... there is a game involving dictionaries... but perhaps i should keep that one to myself...

boy you goin' down!

oh, shelley!

his first gothic novel was published in the year he matriculated to Oxford, where he attended precisely one lecture (on minerology - which he walked out of dejectedly before the end, complaining that all they were talking about was rocks, rocks, rocks!). he proceeded to follow his passion for chemistry and metaphysics -- experimenting in one discipline by burning gaping acid holes through the carpet in his college rooms, and experimenting in the other by writing an inflammatory pamphlet "On the necessity of atheism", which was Dawkins-like in the strength of its assertions that people follow religion out of intellectual laziness. he sides instead with the British empiricists, who follow reasoning deriving from sensory experience alone. unlike the politely academic metaphysicists before him, it was probably his social commentary on humanity's remembered fear of church power moguls, that got him in trouble... or perhaps the assertion that the clergy pretend knowledge of the divine (ouch!). he and his coauthor were sent down (read: kicked out), for the offense.

if you want to read the absurdly strongly-worded pamphlet, the 1811 version is online via the University of Maryland's Shelley Resource Page, or the 1813 version via the Secular Web.

alternatively, if you are more interested in the poet's coach-driver hair, squeaky voice, shambolic delight in dueling pistols, or natural propensity for the human steeplechase, it's all in the published recollections of his pamphlet co-author, and oxford sidekick du-jour, thomas jefferson hogg, whose 1832-3 account, Shelley at Oxford, has been digitized by Project Guttenberg.

finally there's kate beaton's delicious take on shelley's prophecy of his own death over at Hark A Vagrant, where the toussle-haired shelley and byron are some of my favourite melodramatic historic reinventions.

rococo

ah the rococo period of art and design. a mighty spewing-forth of unrestrained, fruit-laden, cherub-infested, gilt curliques, plaster frivols and hypnotically vertigenous architecture.

how about a gold cherub riding a lion? we can do that! or a painting of fruit, in a gilded, fruit laden frame finished off with the heads of two gold cherubs that look suspiciously like the might be kissing? why not. or a teapot in the shape of a leafy pumpkin? sure, it's the rococo man, the rococo.

i am not alone here - even good old Noah Webster weighs in on this! according to the well-worn, two volume 1880 New Edition With Supplement I've just dipped into, he comments that the rococo is...

A kind of florid ornamentation [...] by some [...] thought to be rich, though luxuriant;  and by others it is condemned as a weak attempt to refine and improve upon the purest models of art, producing capricious, fantastical, or childish results.

thank you noah. i see we are in agreement.

wot! crime? quick - send up the clue balloon!

following on from yesterday's post, a new solution to the colin dexter effect! cynan's genius idea. crime fighting, now solved!

clue balloon: episodes 1, 2, 3 ... and more!

another triple murder in this sleepy city?

hmmm... clearly lewis + gin = unique approaches to fighting crime. A necessary response to the colin dexter effect: a murder rate more becoming of some (i.e., any) groaning metropolis, rather than little-old oxford. Stay tuned...

clue balloon: episodes 1, 2, 3 ... and more!

gothic tower

presciousssss but fleeting

formality...

parhelion bound

because it's her job...

There is a Chinese story about the cowherd and the weaver maid, which begins with a princess weaving heavenly cloths for the Jade Emperor's wardrobe. It always reminded me of Yeats' 'He wishes for the cloths of heaven', and also -perhaps strangely - of the three fates whose endless job is to spin, measure and snip the thread of each human life. Sounds like a lonely job, weaving the whole damn sky...

The Chinese tale is a love story, which ends sadly. After offending the August Jade Emperor of Heaven, they are separated forever - two bright stars on either side of the Heavenly River. In his mercy, the Jade Emperor grants them this favour: For one day a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, all the magpies fly up to form a bridge across the milky way, where the lovers are allowed to meet.

Or is she more of a knitter... With a penchant for lumpy wool?

wake up! apocalypse calling!

so the week of ice haloes went on a bit longer with this bonus post by mistake...

sei shonagon's wish list

(the week of ice haloes continues...)

mrs ent says...

muchos miscommunicados

oh that poor first dude... so poorly understood. And the second dude, also has no clue. maybe they can still be friends...

juliet was right

something windward this way comes

aspirational

when i went to this place i took it all very seriously... watch a bit too much miyazaki late at night and look what happens - mixing my metaphors like there's no apre-diem!