Monthly Archives: March 2016

Easter 1916

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The Easter Rising took place a hundred years ago.  It was an idiotic, doomed adventure that caused hundreds of deaths and maybe led, years later, to Irish independence:

Almost 500 people were killed in the Easter Rising. About 54% were civilians, 30% were British military and police, and 16% were Irish rebels. More than 2,600 were wounded. Most of the civilians were killed as a result of the British using artillery and heavy machine guns, or mistaking civilians for rebels. The shelling and the fires it caused left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

And, of course, it led to a great poem.  If you’re a terrorist (or, maybe, a freedom fighter), you should hope that you have William Butler Yeats around to make you immortal, to turn your dreams into myth. Here’s the final stanza of “Easter 1916”:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Here’s the proclamation of an Irish republic, signed by some of those whom excess of love bewildered:

Who stole Shakespeare’s skull?

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According to this New York Times article, it was a guy named Frank Chambers.  First, researchers used radar imaging of Shakespeare’s grave site at a church in Stratford-upon-Avon.  The imaging indicated that the skull was probably missing.  This led them to an account of a doctor named Chambers robbing the grave in 1794:

“We’ve done lots of research literally trying to pick holes in this story,” Mr. Colls said, adding that the group had looked into the names of Chambers’s gravedigger accomplices, the inns they visited before and after the heist, and the depth to which they were said to have excavated; all the details checked out. “If the grave-robbing account is a made-up story,” he said, “then it’s unbelievably accurate in all its details.”

What I like about this piece is its consideration of whether the researchers’ imaging technique “moved” Shakespeare’s bones, which would mean that the inscription above the grave — “Curst be he that moves my bones” — would apply to them:

Whether the archaeologists beaming radar into Shakespeare’s grave were able to escape the curse printed above the grave depends on how much you believe in quantum physics. Radar waves, like every other form of electromagnetic radiation including visible light, carry energy and momentum, a lesson every schoolkid learns when asking where a comet’s tail comes from: particles of cosmic fluff pushed into a stream by the pressure of sunlight. Indeed, scientists have suggested that spacecraft with giant foil sails propelled by sunlight or powerful lasers might be the cheapest form of interplanetary or even interstellar travel.

One of the ineluctable rules of quantum mechanics (and perhaps journalism) is that you can’t observe something without disturbing it and influencing it in some way. For Shakespeare’s remains to be detected, electrons in the atoms of his bones would have to absorb energy and momentum from the radar waves and then kick it back out. So to see Shakespeare is to give him a quantum tickle. Safely embedded in the ground, the bones might not have moved much or at all, but they knew someone was watching.

Good stuff.

Here is Shakespeare, back when his skull was attached to his body:

A nice review of “The Portal”

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Here’s a nice review someone just posted on Amazon for my novel The Portal:

The story is riveting from beginning to end. Two preteens far from home but in fact not far but in a parallel universe is a fascinating concept all by itself. Throw in the time travel, dangerous situations, an array of interesting characters to interact with, and the emotions evoked as they experience privations and loss, and this becomes a captivating story you don’t want to put down until the very end. Recommended for teens and adults.

I couldn’t have said it better myself!  I’ll probably post more of these when I get closer to publishing its somewhat long-awaited sequel.

Did I really write that sentence?

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I have finished the third draft of my novel.  It’s now five thousand words longer and considerably better.  I think I’m pretty close to being done.  Here is how this works, in my experience:

  • First draft — I figure out what I want to say.
  • Second draft — I say it.
  • Third draft — I clean up the mess.

Here’s an example of the mess.  I came across this sentence the other morning: “After a few hours we stopped to eat and feed the horses.”  Wait, what?  How can you feed the horses after you have eaten them?  I guess maybe that wasn’t what I had in mind.

Was I asleep when I wrote that sentence?  Drunk?  No, I was just working through the action and not paying enough attention to the style.  So that sentence is fixed.

Now I need to read through the whole thing again.  You know, just in case.

Hardly a man is now alive…

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I went to a funeral on Nantucket yesterday.  The island was cold and deserted, but still beautiful:

2016-03-12 15.58.40

The woman who died was a relative of my wife’s.  I had known her for a long time, but I didn’t know this about her until yesterday: she was present during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Her father had been stationed there, and after the attack the Navy brought her family to California, from which they took a cross-country train back to Massachusetts, and home to Nantucket.

It occurred to me that the Second World War is slowly turning from memory to history as men and women like this die.  I work with a woman whose father was present at the first atomic bomb blast at Los Alamos, but he is over 90. How many of those folks are left?

All of which reminds me of the great final scene of From Here to Eternity, when Donna Reed’s character starts turning memory into myth as she stands on the deck of a ship leaving Hawaii after Pearl Harbor — inventing a story about her relationship with Montgomery Clift’s character as the leis float out to sea.  She, like my wife’s relative, will never go back.

George Martin

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George Martin has died at the age of 90..

I can’t begin to tell you how much pleasure George Martin has added to my life. Here is “In My Life,” which includes the famous piano bridge written and performed by Martin:

And this is how Wikipedia describes the bridge:

The song was recorded on 18 October 1965, and was complete except for the instrumental bridge. At that time, Lennon had not decided what instrument to use, but he subsequently asked George Martin to play a piano solo, suggesting “something Baroque-sounding”. Martin wrote a Bach-influenced piece that he found he could not play at the song’s tempo. On 22 October, the solo was recorded with the tape running at half speed, so when played back at normal pace the piano was twice as fast and an octave higher, solving the performance challenge and also giving the solo a unique timbre, reminiscent of a harpsichord.

It’s hard to believe that this song has been around for over 50 years.