Opua: words
Opua: words
If I have lived a life of water, I have also lived a life of words.
Words mostly written, for although I have given speeches and may do so again, I spend most of my time alone and don’t talk much. In Evanston, during the work week, Carol is home only three or four waking hours; and here in Opua I don’t go ashore every day and even when I do usually only have brief conversations with people in shops.
Recently words have failed me--a line from a forty year old poem that I have not included on this site are “words fail” so this is not a recent development--in disturbing ways. In the boat yard a man asked what kind of anchor is on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s bow and I could not answer. It is a Spade anchor. But at the time the word was not there. Not the least connection. Only a void. And while re-watching UNFORGIVEN the other evening, I could not put a name to the familiar actor playing opposite Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. I had to wait for the credits to see that it was Gene Hackman. These may be normal lapses, but as I age I am aware and wonder about them.
The Internet has changed how I use words, both reading and writing.
Email has its own style--the ratio of letters I write versus emails I send is on the order of one to several hundred, and I don’t send that many emails. I prefer the email’s “Hello” to letter’s archaic “Dear,” but in other ways what I consider to be illiteracies are becoming the norm, such as ‘like’ for ‘as’; and I might be one of the few remaining writers who think infinitives read better un-split.
Of my own writing, the final article about the fifth circumnavigation is running in the current, April, issue of CRUISING WORLD. That won’t be for sale in New Zealand for another month, so I have not yet seen it. The editor asked if I minded if they ran it out of sequence, to which I gave the observation I have made here that time is an uneven medium.
I think they have two chronologically earlier pieces still to run.
And I have just begun organizing my thoughts and material for an analysis of the circumnavigation article.
Of reading, I recently finished two books: WOLF HALL and THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY.
Some of you may recall that WOLF HALL is the first, and thus far only, ebook I have bought, although I have read many other books downloaded from The Gutenberg Project on my computer and iTouch.
My appreciation of WOLF HALL, about the relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn told from the perspective of an exceptional man, Thomas Cromwell, may have been compromised by timing. I started it in Evanston and finished it here, a period of transition when I was never able to focus fully on the book, which won the British Commonwealth’s Booker Prize--for Americans this is the equivalent of winning a Pulitzer--and which I somehow think I should have enjoyed more. I found it a good journeyman historical novel, but that’s all.
One problem with some ebook software, including my preference, Stanza, is a lack of page numbering. Perhaps this is inevitable when the reader can choose font size, which naturally changes the number of pages. At the modest font I use, WOLF HALL’s 540 pages in hard cover became almost 2500 iTouch screens.
Stanza does tell me where I am in a given chapter and what percentage of the book I have read, but I like to have a feel for the entire work, and I often read a set number of pages, usually fifty a day. With WOLF HALL in ebook format this was not possible.
While I think ebooks have many advantages and are the future and I will continue to read them, I must admit that it was pleasant to hold a copy of THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY in my hands, and see from the beginning that it contains 228 pages. I finished it in four days. With distractions, and greater length, WOLF HALL took me four weeks.
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY purports to be fragments of alternative versions of the epic poem. With 44 chapters, each is short. In the first Ulysses returns to Ithaca after his twenty year absence to find Penelope has remarried. In another he returns to find Ithaca deserted. In one the goddess Athena, who has advised and protected him, asks him to come and be her immortal lover among the gods on Olympus. He laughs and she deserts him. In one, he tires of the fighting before Troy, deserts the battlefield, and wanders though Asia Minor, earning a living as a story teller by embellishing the facts of his life into what we now consider to be Homer’s ODYSSEY.
I like variations on a theme in both music and writing, and most of Zachary Mason’s are clever. Although the book is short, about ten of the variations are weak and it should be fifty pages shorter.
The others are worthy of the original. I can’t think of higher praise. I’ll read them again soon.
Thursday, March 25, 2010