Because of the rehosting activity, I missed last week’s CD of the week posting. I’ll try to catch up…
This week’s CD is a little unusual, even for me. You can’t buy it in music stores, or at Amazon.com. I found it at a British goods shop in Newburyport, MA, along with the tea towels, Marmite, beer mugs, and Burbury coats. It’s produced by a small company in Worton, Oxfordshire called Classical Communications, that seems to specialize in “bespoke” CDs for musems and corporate customers. It’s run by a guy called Martin Souter, and this particular CD seems to have been a labour of love for him.
Some Corner of a Foreign Field is a collection of poems and music from the Great War of 1914-1918. It runs the emotional gamut, from fiercely patriotic to deeply cynical, from whimsical to heartbreaking. Some of the pieces are familiar – Kipling’s Recessional, Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier. Others are wholly new, at least to me – Philip Johnstone’s deeply sarcastic High Wood about postwar battlefield tourism, Edward Thomas’s As the team’s head brass, and Eleanor Farjeon’s Easter Monday. Perhaps the ones that touched me most unexpectedly were AA Milne’s throwaway piece OBE and May Cannan‘s The Armistice.
The music consists mostly of contemporary (and hence very scratchy) recordings of such songs as We don’t want to lose you (but we think you ought to go), If you were the only girl in the world (followed by the sarcastic If you were the only Bosch in the trench), A Mademoiselle from Armentiers (NOT followed by one of the ribald variations that I suspect are better known than the original), and Roses are shining in Picardy. The final sequence of poems is beautifully linked by passages from Elgar’s Nimrod and Mozart’s Adagio from Clarinet Concerto.
I’m not sure why this CD has grabbed me so strongly. In part, I suspect, it’s because of the power of the poetry: I’ve always thought that the Great War galvanized a generation of poets to produce some of the finest English poetry ever written. I wonder, too, about certain similarities between the war of 90 years ago and that of today. Of course they were tremendously different; yet both wars were marked by leadership of extraordinary stupidity and vanity, and by a reckless disregard for the waste of life.
I wonder what poetry this century’s folly will produce?
Five uneasy pieces (Iraq-related)
First, River has resumed her blog Baghdad Burning after a six week hiatus. As always, it’s both moving and informative, particularly her observations on the Christian churches in Baghdad. And then there’s the chilling note that:
Word on the street has it that email, internet access, and telephone calls are being monitored closely. We actually heard a couple of reports of people being detained due to the contents of their email. It’s a daunting thought and speaks volumes about our current ‘liberated’ status- and please don’t bother sending me a copy of the “Patriot Act”… this last year it has felt like everyone is under suspicion for something.
Second, Juan Cole wrote an excellent op-ed piece in the Washington Post about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr. Essential reading.
Third, Terry Karney proposes a practical way of dealing with the al-Sadr situation. Of course the chances of it being followed are slim to none….
Fourth, while everyone’s attention is on Baghdad and Najaf, it appears that the British forces have abandoned Basra. With separatist elements emerging in the south as well as the Kurdish north, the whole thing could be about to break apart.
And finally, as I was checking out various US media websites to see if and how they were reporting all of this, I came across an MSNBC page with a small sidebar entitled “IRAQ: the human cost”. Naively, I thought that this might actually address the real human costs: all the casualties (coalition and Iraqi, military and civilian), the effect on health, education, and humanitarian services in Iraq, and so forth. Not a chance: it was simply about coalition casualties. Now I’m all in favour of recognizing the sacrifices of those who have died, but why limit it to Americans? I guess that, for MSNBC, Iraqis simply aren’t human.
More Ogunquit pictures
As requested… a few more pictures from my trip up to Ogunquit, ME can be found here. Click on the thumbnails… you know the drill. Enjoy.
Rehosting successful
GeoffArnold.com has been successfully rehosted on Grommit.com – thanks, Steve. I’ll be tweaking a few things over the next few days, but we should be back to normal – or whatever passes for normal around here.
Sock
Vacation reading: Sock, by Penn Jillette. 
Brilliant. New York, sex, rock’n’roll, murder and philosophy chanelled by a sock monkey. Read it.
Ogunquit rocks
I’ve spent some time exploring the fascinating rock formations here at Bald Head cliff in Ogunquit, Maine. For those who want to follow me, I’ve put together a 2.2MB Quicktime movie with some overview and close-up shots of the complex stratification.
Ogunquit sunrise
Sunrise was at 5:42am, and I came out onto the rocks below the hotel to watch it. I was fascinated by the heavily striated rocks, which have been folded so that the strata are vertical. Differential erosion makes the surface rather hard to walk on (which is why the horizon isn’t quite level…).
Click the images to bring up 1600×1200 versions.
Getting away
Time to get away for a bit…. We’d originally planned to be in Scandinavia for two weeks (starting yesterday), but we had to cancel that trip for various reasons. 
So we’re just going to head up to Maine for a couple of days. No Internet… no blog.
Heads-up: Expect outages
I’m planning some major revisions to this site over the next week, and there may be occasional outages. (That’s above and beyond the recent outages due to Logjamming.) Bear with me….
"Learning Movable Type"
After spending far too long groping blindly around the Movable Type templates and Perl scripts that drive this blog, I’ve found The Source Of All Wisdom: 
at Elise.com. Thanks, Elise.
(Watch out for rampant and tasteless experimentation in the look and feel of this site!)