e a m harris

Archive for the category “Out and about”

25 May 2013
8 Comments

A milestone for me

Yesterday I reached a main point in my writing career – I signed and sent back a licencing agreement for a short story.

you me etc cover art

Coming soon

This may not sound like much, but, although several of my poems and stories have been published (see the Top People links on my side-bar for those wonderful magazines that have websites), I’ve never had an actual agreement before.

The story will appear in an anthology You, Me & a Bit of We: A celebration of writing in the first and second person from Chuffed Buff Books. It’ll be available in paperback and ebook.

It’s an interesting concept. I’ve never read any stories in a ‘we’ voice and rarely in ‘you’; I’m looking forward to discovering what the other contributors make of them.

Already published

Already published

Chuffed Buff have other anthologies out, including one of women’s poetry, Journey to Crone.

This will, IMO, resonate with many women’s experience. It looks at the traditional life passage from maiden to mother to crone.

Crone is not the negative life-stage many associate with the word. It’s the stage of wisdom, knowledge and clear-sightedness. The idea is commonly found in the pagan faith community, but also in others that emphasise respect for elders.

Other writers may find Chuffed Buff calls for submissions of interest. One is for a poetry anthology, Poetry & The City, and one for science fiction novellas/novellettes.

Anthologies devoted to a theme often bring about a rethink and reassessment of their subject. It’s like putting a concept under a magnifying glass and peering at its detail.

Posted in Books, Out and about, Poetry and tagged , , , , , ,
01 May 2013

May Day

Today, 1st May, is traditionally May Day and a day of celebration and holiday.

In the modern world it’s moved around to fall on the first Monday of the month and be added to a weekend. Only Christmas and New Year get to keep a mid-week position if they happen to fall that way.

In Britain there are a lot of traditions associated with today.

I can remember as a child at primary school being taught to dance around a maypole. In this dance each child holds one end of a ribbon the other end of which is tied to the top of the pole. As you dance you weave in and out of the other dancers and this causes the ribbons to plait into a complex figure a bit like a plaited tent – if you’ve done the dance properly. If you haven’t the whole thing ends up with some very interesting knots.

One of the things I inherited from my father, is an ability to undo almost any knot. He didn’t teach me this; I did it naturally from an early age. I find it interesting that every cell in my body contains DNA that codes for knot-untangling. So at school I was the one assigned to deal with the maypole-dance disasters. I liked doing it (exercising any skill is enjoyable) and it gave me a chance to slightly impress my fellow students.

May Day is an old festival and a joyful one, so not surprisingly there’s a good deal of poetry and song about it. In some the day is only mentioned obliquely, as in this one by Keats:

Fragment of an Ode to Maia. Written on May Day 1818

Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!
May I sing to thee
As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiae?
Or may I woo thee
In earlier Sicilian? or thy smiles
Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles,
By bards who died content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan?
O give me their old vigour! and unheard
Save of the quiet primrose, and the span
Of heaven, and few ears,
Rounded by thee, my song should die away
Content as theirs,
Rich in the simple worship of a day.

More recently, May Day has become Workers or Labour Day and its traditions include trade union demonstrations and workers’ conferences.

As such it will no doubt still be celebrated in the far future on other planets – outer space may not have a May but it will have workers.

Posted in Celebrations and events, Out and about, Poetry | Leave a Comment
17 Mar 2013
8 Comments

Moving house

We’re moving in to our new home. Also getting a new broadband etc. I think this means I won’t be around for a few days.

I look forward to reading new posts when I’m back on line.

Posted in Out and about and tagged ,
01 Mar 2013
2 Comments

St David’s Day

imageresizer

Today is the day of the patron saint of the Land of Song. If patrons matched their countries he should be known for his music, but patron-sainthood is bestowed by historical accident rather than logic. David seems to have been famous for preaching, founding a monastery and being a bishop.

Actually not much is known about him, but the National Museum of Wales has an article I found interesting.

When I was living and working in Wales our canteen used to serve a special meal of cockles, laverbread (a kind of seaweed) and bacon. We all ate it and thanked the cook for it, but I can’t recommend it.

The little girls wear their national costume to school, but I don’t think the boys have one. I haven’t sounded off about men’s lib on this blog before, but I think clothing is one area they need it. Why don’t the boys have something special to wear for the special day? Do they mind taking second place to their sisters?

I took the picture from the Visit Cardiff website which advertises a parade another chance to dress up, for adults and children, at the St David’s Day parade.

Posted in Comment, Opinion and Politics, Out and about and tagged , , , , , ,
25 Feb 2013
4 Comments

One of life’s pleasures – a guided tour

P1020860_2One of my favourite activities is going on a guided tour: never mind of what, any tour thrills me. Houses, gardens, cemeteries, caves, farms, factories, warehouses, exhibitions – all reveal their specialness under the leadership of a knowledgeable guide.

There you are in the company of a group of like-minded people, most of whom are out to enjoy themselves and hence are showing the nicest sides of their characters. Your guide points out features of the terrain you would never have noticed unguided and lets you in on snippets of history and its secrets:

… and here, concealed in the globe, is the hiding place of the first Lord X’s will leaving everything to his gardener.

There are numerous tours possible in your average town, most of them well supported, so I’m not alone in my appreciation.

My most recent one was a behind the scenes look at a library – books and store-rooms, old manuscripts and new purchases, the original chief librarian’s room and miles of stacks and corridors and staircases. Is there a better way of spending a couple of hours?

Posted in Out and about and tagged , ,
02 Feb 2013
4 Comments

Limbo and its literary uses

Our house move part two (into a new home) has not yet happened and we are still in a temporary place. A housing limbo with all mod cons, but not our own.

As a blogger I frequently use my own life as a springboard for posts – so I decided to look at literary uses of the idea of limbo.

Someone told me recently that the Pope has declared that limbo is not something Catholics should believe in, and a check of Wikipedia confirms that it isn’t part of core Catholic belief. But even the Pope can’t do away with something so useful.

A ‘place’ between/outside/on the edge (’limbus’ is Latin for ‘boundary’) – we have a need for that. All of us go there sometimes.

According to theology, this edgy realm is the afterlife home of unbaptised babies and the Old Testament patriarchs. Not much of a place for a good chat; babies have limited vocabularies and the Old Testament people apparently had limited interests.

Dante had a good deal to say about it and IMHO improved on it. He made it an inclusive place with unbaptised babies rubbing shoulders with the great-and-good non-Christians. Not surprisingly he included Classical poets like Homer and Ovid among its inhabitants  – they were, after all, his colleagues.

Searching the web I found a moving poem about slavery by Edward Kamau Braithwaite. This uses limbo as a metaphor for the state the slaves were in. Another of its metaphors is the dance of the same name.

There are other poems making powerful use of the concept. For example John Updike, stuck in an airport – a very limboish experience:

The plane was delayed,
the rumor went through the line. We shrugged,
in our hopeless overcoats.

Also Mary Karr on a flight that actually took off:

No sooner does the plane angle up
than I cork off to dream a bomb blast:

Seamus Heaney upends the traditional purpose of limbo with his sad poem about an unwanted child:

Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

Another metaphorical use comes from Dribbling Pensioner’s blog. This time limbo stands for the loss of mental ability.

I like this idea. When I’m old enough to have senior moments shunting nose to tail through my brain, I can say I’m in limbo, chatting to Homer, Ovid, Horace et al.

Posted in Out and about, Poetry and tagged , , , , , ,
17 Dec 2012
4 Comments

The Move – part 1

The first stage of our move is now complete. Having sold our house, we’re now in a temporary home for the next few weeks while the purchase part of the whole thing goes through (we hope).

I hope all my readers are enjoying rather than suffering the winter.

Posted in Out and about and tagged , ,
08 Dec 2012
6 Comments

On the move

After a lot of ups and downs and hanging on the cliff-edge of ‘will it ever actually happen? is it about to fall through?’ we are moving house.

We have only a short time to pack and finalise everything. I doubt if I’ll be able to post much during this time. I hope to have time to log in and read other people’s posts – they’ll be a lovely oasis of order in a desert of chaos.

Posted in Out and about and tagged ,
08 Oct 2012
4 Comments

World Space Week

Although I realise that economic globalisation has bigtime downsides, I always feel all warm and cheery when I hear or read about major global culture that anyone anywhere can benefit from and enjoy.

I also have a long-term interest in space. I can remember the thrill I felt when I first discovered science-fiction on the shelves of my local library (quite a few years ago now).

So World Space Week is made for me. I can’t think why I’ve not heard about it before, given that it’s been going for several years.

This year’s focus is particularly interesting – it zooms in on the use of space technology to help organise aid to disaster areas and pinpoint people at risk. Since the charter underlying the sharing principles that make this possible was signed, it has been activated about 200 times. Thousands owe their lives to those eyes in space.

The website has a lot of detail and is well worth a read.

Posted in Celebrations and events, Comment, Opinion and Politics, Out and about and tagged , , , ,
13 Sep 2012
6 Comments

On butterflies and books

Recently I’ve read two books on the random intersections and consequences of the characters’ stories: more or less the butterfly effect (a butterfly flaps its wings in Nepal and, because of the sensitivity of the weather system, sets off a chain of consequences resulting in a hurricane in Florida). The whole thing is far too difficult to predict, and looks like pure chance.

The books are Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December and Penelope Lively’s How it All Began – well thought of books by major authors.

Perhaps this is the new preoccupation – we control so much in the world but still who meets whom, who marries whom, who gets born (or not), who gets mugged or wins the lottery, is mainly outside anyone’s control and looks wayward and attractive.

What they do not write about is the other side of the coin – what doesn’t happen is as subject to butterflies as what does. Of course, the alternatives are unknowable and vast in numbers, a range of possible histories that no one can enumerate or describe.

Science fiction sometimes attends to some of them, usually on a macro scale: what if Hitler won the war? But behind such world-changing speculations lies, what if Fred and Freda never met?

Those who write about time travel may address the butterfly effect directly. What if I time travel to the Middle Ages and make one tiny change, would Hitler win the war? But would Fred and Freda meet in 1990 still tends to get short shrift?

In the actual world, Fred and Freda do meet, fall in love etc. The butterfly is still there, lurking in the future waiting to pounce. They can’t agree on their wedding day – she wants April, he wants May. So they toss a coin. Heads, and she wins. April it is. By the time they get to May, the little ball of cells that will one day be their darling Sally is alive and well in Freda’s womb and waging terminal chemical warfare on all Johnny-come-lately potential rivals. Sally gets born; Sadie does not. Sally marries John where Sadie would have married Tom. And so on. By 500 years later the entire population of the world is the way it is because of the toss of a coin.

C’est la vie – or not, as the sensitivity of the system of human affairs may have it.

Pics from Goodreads site.

Posted in Books, Comment, Opinion and Politics, Out and about and tagged , , , , , , ,

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