Evolving English

It's moments like this one needs a Tardis. Keen to see Evolving English: One Language Many Voices at the British Library - an exhibition that traces the social, cultural and historical influences on the English language in an interactive, hands-on, 21st century-cool kind of way. 
So if one happened to be in London right now, one could pop along and check out 'the roots of Old English, slang dictionaries, medieval manuscripts, ads and newspapers from around the world, everyday texts and dialect sound recordings' from all over the place.
It also has an audience-participation section where people can record themselves reading the kid's book Mr Tickle - the text of which apparently evokes a wide range of sounds present in the English language - the idea being that as people participate the exhibition experts compile a living 'voice map' of where we English speakers of the world are today and what we sound like. Go on, record your voice here.
This one, however, happens to be in Sydney right now. So instead I got my word-geek fix at the Gleebooks summer sale. Picked up a copy of Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler and it's bursting with stuff-one-needs-to-know.
Stuff that makes perfect sense in this Y, Z, Whatever Gen world we live in, where kids write essays on iPhones using animated emoticons, words of one syllable or less, no vowels. And some of them have never in their life felt the dewiness of grey finger-printy digits smudging the tablecloth after an hour with a real, hard copy, freshly minted newspaper. 
Stuff like this, from the cluey old Greek dude Horace - who may or may not have realised the weight of his words way back in 70BC - when he wrote: 
'Many words that have fallen will be reborn, and many that are now in honour will fall, if usage wills it, for that holds the judgement, the law, and the standard of speaking.'
I, for one, believe a Renaissance is due for the word 'behoove'. It would behoove us all to remember our words and use them wisely so that our language may flourish.
Which words do you think deserve a newfound appreciation?

Territories of hope

Today I came across the best piece of writing I've read throughout the devastating floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria - and let's not forget the Gascoyne region of West Australia before Christmas - and it was written not in relation to our apocalypse, but on a world scale that pertains to all of us.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many essays and books, including her 2009 volume A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster, written amid the rubble of Hurricane Katrina and examining human bravery in the face of natural disasters.
With respect to the quality journalists who unfortunately number among the minority, forget the garbage that's been spewing ad nauseum from the mouths of hack reporters on our commercial TV stations since the rivers broke their banks. 
Read this instead. 
In her piece for the website TomDispatch, Solnit talks about her hopes for humanity in 2011 and it illustrates beautifully what we're seeing in our communities during and in the aftermath of the floodtide.
A couple of excerpts:
'When I studied disasters past, what amazed me was not just that people behaved so beautifully, but that, in doing so, they found such joy. It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.'
And this:
'....These individuals and organisations are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it's been here all along...'
Go on, read it through to the end.

Art & Letters Daily

One of my favourite websites and a sure fire place to find inspiration and information about worldly matters one never knew one would find so enriching is Arts & Letters Daily.
Vale Denis Dutton, founder and editor of the site, who passed away over Christmas and whose shoes will be mighty difficult to fill. The Chronicle of Higher Education, owner of the site since 2002, has vowed to continue publishing Arts & Letters Daily 'in the spirit in which Denis created it'.

Philosophers on film...

'Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost completely ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have fallen in its grip.' - Kit Fine, American philosopher.
Photographer Steve Pyke has spent the past 25 years capturing philosophers on film, resulting in his collection of 200 portraits of philosophers which will be published in book form in 2011. 
'Our museums are filled with busts and paintings of long forgotten wealth and beauty instead of the philosophers who have so influenced contemporary politics and society,' says Pyke. 
'My aim in this project has been the modest one of making sure, for this era at least, there is some record of the philosophers.'
In compiling the book Philosophy, Pyke asked his subjects why they had devoted their lives to philosophy.... check out an excerpt, it's an interesting read.

Happy birthday blog!

It's your very first birthday - whoop whoop! To celebrate, Blog, you get.... a facelift! I know * sigh * they start so young these days.

Did a little digging around to see what other auspicious literary occasions occurred on 18 October and this is what I found:

1831: William Blake's wife Catherine died at their house in Fitzroy Square, four years after his death. She reportedly 'called continuously to her William, as if he were in the next room, to say she was coming to him and would not be long now'...

1855: Franz Liszt's Prometheus premiered. Yes it's music but he composed it as a 'symphonic poem' - a piece of orchestral music in which the content of a poem is evoked - based on the Greek myth Prometheus.

1859: Henri Bergson was born, French philosopher and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1927) for The Creative Evolution. Bergson must have had an eye for literary genes, he married a cousin of Marcel Proust.

1869: Henrik Ibsen's De Ungers Forbund (The League of Youth) premiered in Christiania, the city now known as Oslo. The story of a young political idealist who mounts an election campaign in a small Norwegian town became one of Norway's most popular comedic 19th century plays.

1910: E.M. Forster published Howard's End, the classic tale of class conflicts in Edwardian England, considered along with Passage to India to be his finest work.

1967: Walt Disney releases the animated film based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

So for a birthday wish, a few lines from Blake, who believed that a bigger force than himself worked through him. He held the pen, the graver or the brush. He was its agent, never its master, the possessed rather than the possessor... 

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

  - William Blake

Picture courtesy of artist Madeleine Stamer at Little Birdsville.

On dreaming...

dream /drim/ n: A vision voluntarily indulged in while awake; Daydream; Reverie; A wild or vain fancy; A hope that gives one inspiration; An aim. - Macquarie Australian Encyclopedic Dictionary.

Not sure which one of those best describes my dream - maybe all of them! - but I do know that when your dream starts pounding ever louder in your head it's time to start listening.

Sir Laurens Van Der Post was onto something when he wrote of the Kalahari Bushmen: "Only a fool ignores the tapping within". (A Conversation with the African Bush; Wilderness and the Human Spirit, 1996.)
Living a nomadic and stark existence on the world's oldest continent, the Bushmen were way ahead of their time. Van Der Post recalled an incident just after WWII when he was on an exploratory mission in the Kalahari Desert for the British Government. 
One day his Bushman tracker broke apart from the group and parked off under a thorn tree. Impatient to continue, the intrepid adventurer asked his interpreter to get the man moving.
"No," he was told. "I can't do it. He is doing very important work. He is listening to his tapping." He went on to liken the Bushman's tapping to a white man's telegram.
"Don't you know we Bushmen have telegrams inside ourselves. This tapping tells us of things that are still to come, things so far away that we cannot see them yet, and that man there is listening in to his tapping to see where he must take us today. Only a fool will not listen in to his tapping when he hears this tapping starting up inside himself."
Here hear.
I'm hoping the tapping of my dream will match the tapping of the keyboard over the next 12 weeks as I try to give voice to my dream of writing a book. This blog is more of a self-motivator than anything, to track the process of writing. And maybe, just maybe, it might even be a story in itself... Wish me luck! R

9.20am today: my writing room, engine room for my dream. 

9.21am: watching from the balcony as 16 yr old Jessica Watson sails away on her dream voyage around the globe.