I’m going to the beach town of Viareggio for the day. I read that Shelley died off the coast of the town (as you may know, it was very popular for English poets to die in Italy during the 19th century). Leafing through his wiki I found this (here are other references):
The day after Shelley’s death, the Tory newspaper The Courier gloated: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not.”
Bill E Pilgrim
Shelly?
Oh just a little one, medium dry.
Ah yes, lovely those Tories were sometimes, Christian charity knew no bounds.
kid bitzer
jesus, that paper needed an editor. i’d slap down a freshman for that run-on.
Bill E Pilgrim
@kid bitzer:
That’s a stylistic difference between UK and US English, to some degree. That one is perhaps dated, but it persists to this day. I used to edit UK writing meant for US audiences and I’d often just cut nearly every sentence in half.
Michael D.
Tough life. I’ll be spending 10 days in Oahu and on the Big Island at the end of the month. None of the beach stuff for me – this trip will be about traditional Hawaiian food, hiking onto an active volcano, going to an observatory, etc., etc..
In other words, there’s probably a lot more interesting things to do in Viareggio than the beach.
You wanna beach? Stay in America and drive a couple hours! :-)
Michael D.
Off topic, but if I may plug a site…. Podrunner. Awesome running or spinning music. The music mixes are about an hour long each and are built on beats per minute . You can get anything from 130 BPM to 180 BPM, depending on how fast your pace is. I find that it really helps me run and concentrate on breathing instead of screwing me up in the run when the pace of the music changes.
Oh well, that’s my plug. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress…
Bill E Pilgrim
Barriers going up all around central Paris for the Obama visit, motorcade of some sort tonight it appears.
I’ll have to see if I can figure out where might be a good spot, though any time I’ve ever done anything like that it’s pretty anti-climactic. Whooosh, there went Armstrong, the yellow blur in that last group of blurs.
It might be kind of fun to watch people being enthusiastic though, just to balance out the last eight years of having to tell people that I’m Irish. Which I am, card carrying, but still.
John S.
@Michae D.
Enjoy your trip! My wife and I have vacationed in Hawaii since our honeymoon, and we live in South Florida if that tells you something.
Oahu is not our favorite, but it can be fun if you get out of Honolulu which reminds me of what it would be like if New York and Miami had sex and gave birth to an Asian child.
The big island is fantastic. Hilo is a delightful little town, and very lush and wet compared to the Kona side of the island. Take a tour to the summit of Mauna Kea if you can, it’s amazing. The trip up there down Saddle Road is like traveling on Mars. But it’s a great island for exploring, and actually is quite large (as advertised).
If you go back again, I suggest Maui and Kauai. Those are our favorite islands. Biking down Haleakala is by far one of the most amazing experienced I have ever had.
Barbara
Spent a very nice day at viareggio — after beach, went to a little nearby park that give pony rides, and walked around Lucca, not far away — walled town, birthplace of Puccini.
I just remember that the rooftop bar at one of the beach hotels was not worth the price, however nice!
neddie jingo
This is exactly how Bach worked. The Well-Tempered Clavier from 130 BPM to 180 BPM, Depending on How Fast Your Pace Is is a recognized masterpiece. Not to mention The St. Matthew Passion at 145 BPM, a work that reduces exercisers to tears to this very day.
R-Jud
@Michael D.:
Eeeeeeeenteresting. Just when I was getting bored of my current running mix. Thanks.
I edited something for a UK colleague, and split many sentences into smaller ones. The result didn’t please her. “I read it out loud and I sounded like William fucking Shatner,” she said.
rock
ENGLAND IN 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,
A Senate–Time’s worst statute unrepealed,
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
smiley
@R-Jud:
That’s funny. I hope you told her Shatner is Canadian.
El Cid
Oh yeah? If we come from monkeys, how come ‘ere’s still monkeys? Huh?
maya
Why does that sound like something seen in more contemporary times? Oh, I know!
“Tiller, the baby killer, has been shot, now he knows whether there is a God, or not.”
Svensker
@rock:
He could rip out a good yarn, that Shelley guy.
I can see why the Tories didn’t like him.
Bill E Pilgrim
@R-Jud:
That’s hilarious. Not so much because he’s Canadian, because let’s face it there’s probably 98% sound in common, but because Shatner’s thing isn’t so much brevity or concision as it is halting awkwardly in weird places because he thought it gave it instant drama.
“Scotty I ……… know you’ve………..given her all you’ve got and don’t know……. how …..muchmoreshecantake but our …………….mission…..”
People tend to mush it all together re other countries, one American friend living in London told me that when she asked her friends there if they could imitate her accent, they did this huge twanging Southern drawl. And she’s from Boston.
It’s really ever since Hemmingway that we shifted into the short form big time, it became so popular to write like him. “We ate. It was good.” and so on. For a good demonstration of how it wasn’t like that earlier just look at all those letters home during the Civil War.
Garrigus Carraig
Ah, Wikipedia. The idea of news traveling from Italy to England in one day in 1822 made me laugh, but another reference makes clear that this was actually printed almost a month later.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Garrigus Carraig:
Which presumably gave Shelly time to really sit down and talk to God, so he could come back to the Tories as a ghost and say “Boy, are you guys going to be surprised what happens next!”
R-Jud
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Yep, I’ve run into that too. I’m from Pennsylvania; I live in Worcestershire. When my friend’s small son first met me, he said, “You don’t sound like an American.” I asked him how I should sound, and he put on a big Texas accent: “Howdy, pardner…”
At the gym, before I became known as “the American lady”, I would get asked if I was Canadian or even Irish.
…in addition to the vocabulary and usage, it’s the penmanship in those letters that kills me. Another lost art.
Michael D.
@neddie jingo:
I think this just made me laugh for about 5 minutes!
cosanostradamus
.
If Shelley were alive today, the same sort of snide sneering conservative critics would have him in Gitmo for suspicion of terrorism for publishing “The Revolt Of Islam.” Idiots. Let’s lock up the entire Right Wing.
.
Bill E Pilgrim
@R-Jud:
I actually took a screenshot of some of that writing and tried copying it. Trying to improve my writing and was copying things I saw that I liked.
I get the “you don’t sound American!” thing all the time. Only from non-English speakers though. And I do sound perfectly American, something to which my UK friends attest.
Being somewhat soft-spoken throws them off I think.
AnotherBruce
Yeah, so some monkeys were having some hot monkey sex and a few months later a human popped out. Youse expect me to believe that?
smiley
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I get the “you don’t sound southern” thing all the time. Accents are funny things. My mother was born and raised in northern Ohio but now sounds like a native-born southern belle.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@AnotherBruce:
Those Darwinists would have you believe that your grandparents came from the trees, instead of Ireland or Italy or whatever other Christian nation they came from. * Darwinist scientists go to Africa with great frequency, such is their lust to cavort with mountain gorillas and lemurs. Thankfully, the decent Africans have grown tired of this kind of sinning, and have taken appropriate actions.
* May not apply if your grandparents weren’t white.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Interesting result if you hit the asterisk in these comments.
R-Jud
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Yes, I’ve been told that I didn’t seem American because I’m not loud. Or fat, or caked with makeup, or shallow, or Republican, or a Christianist bigot.
Even bearing in mind that I live in the UK hinterland, it’s depressing how people think of us. When we’re in the States, though, people act surprised that my husband has nice teeth and didn’t attend boarding school.
Whispers
@Scruffy
Now, now, that’s not really fair. You’re discounting the importance of transitional species, like centaurs and minotaurs.
smiley
@R-Jud:
Not to get too personal but I once had a passionate affair with a woman from Greece. She was surprised I was capable of passion. So, another European stereotype of Americans: cold and dispassionate – like the Germans (just kidding).
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Whispers:
Mea culpa. Great-great-great grandpa monkey had sex with a unicorn, resulting in a monkey-centaur great-great-grandpa who had sex with a woman, resulting in a faun, great-grandpa, who had sex with a bull, grandpa minotaur, who got off the boat and was almost sent to the slaughterhouse by mistake. Instead, he got a job at that slaughterhouse. Best worker they ever had.
Thank God unicorns are extinct. Now if only we could exterminate the monkeys and the centaurs, we could probably have a relatively-pure human species one of these days.
Ecks
I have to say, this might be the first time in dozens of tries that DougJ has posted something under Burkean Bells that actually pertained in some way to Burkean Bells.
Brachiator
That’s OK. Even though I have some knowledge of English regional accents, I once ribbed an English co-worker by saying that he couldn’t really be English because he did not sound like Michael Caine.
On the other hand, I always get a laugh when American celebrities appear on the CBS Late Late Show and gush to host Craig Ferguson about how much they love England and how sexy they think English accents are.
Ferguson is from Scotland.
And he is also a bit of a nationalist.
SGEW
Win.
Also on topic, this obituary reminds me of the obituaries of Burke’s nemesis Thomas Paine, which railed against his supposed atheism.
Deists! They sure had it rough in the public eye back then. So glad that religious tolerance is the mainstream norm nowadays.
Linkmeister
John S:
Um. I live in Honolulu, and I think you’re exaggerating the size a little bit. And c’mon, the city’s legitimate; it’s not a bastard child!
Indylib
@Brachiator:
You’d think the son of Fergus part might give it away.
Wile E. Quixote
If you want to read an excellent fantasy novel about what might have been the motivating force behind Shelley, Keats and Byron check out Tim Powers The Stress of Her Regard. One of the scenes describes the death of Shelley and it’s incredibly chilling.
Not everyone could write a historical fantasy novel about the Romance poets, but Tim Powers did. He’s the man.
asiangrrlMN
Man. It’s depressing to know that the more things change, the more they say the same.
My favorite stereotype? The submissive Asian woman. Heh. Yeah. Good luck with that one with Asian American women.