Monthly Archives: June 2007

Of Icebergs, and their submerged bits, as the Globe Warms

In the continuing hunt for the self-justificatory, Jerome Dobson’s article in the latest ESRI ArcNews (Bring Back Geography!) has lots to munch upon, but I’m particularly taken with Jay Merryweather’s graphic representation of the discipline:

All that underwater stuff is what I spent about 40 years agitating about, to mostly deaf ears, in anthropological and library settings. “Told you so” is sort of beside the point, but be it Recorded that I DID.

Father Mowbray nails it

One of those time-shiftable bits from Brideshead Revisited:

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.” (pg. 186)

Dept. of Co-incidence

I’ve enjoyed Brideshead Revisited as novel and film, multiple times. Lately the Penguin version has been reposing in the bathroom, recovering from the latest bout of reading, and recently it was joined by another Penguin edition, The Best of Betjeman, which I picked up as a give-away in a roadside restaurant. I was planning to blog a so-English verse I just happened to read last night:

And Nurse came in with the tea-things
Breast-high ‘mid the stands and chairs–
But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
And the things were alone with theirs.

(from “Death in Leamington”, pg. 15)

…and I thought I should inform myself about the details of Betjeman’s life. I knew he’d been Poet Laureate, but I didn’t know that Waugh had modeled Sebastian Flyte’s bear Aloysius after Betjeman’s Archibald Ormsby-Gore, or that C.S. Lewis had been Betjeman’s (much-despised) tutor. Don’t miss the 1959 BBC interview (1:45, on life at Oxford, hearties and aesthetes, being sent down). And The Times offers a picture of Archie and Jumbo, and more delicious details.