My Heart's In The Highland's. Again.

Inspired by reading this:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape#comment-48154388


By the graveyard, Luskentyre
From behind the wall death sends out messages
That all mean the same, that are easy to understand.


But who can interpret the blue-green waves
That never stop talking, shouting, wheedling?


Messages everywhere. Scholars, I plead with you,
Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?


Four larks are singing in a showering sprinkle
Their bright testaments: in a foreign language.


And always the beach is oghamed and cunieformed
By knot and dunlin and country-dancing sandpipers.


- There's Donnie's lugsail. He's off to the lobsters.
The mast tilts to the north, the boat sails west.


A dictionary of him? - Can you imagine it? -
A volume thick as the height of the Clisham,


A volume big as the whole of Harris,
A volume beyond the wit of scholars.


Norman MacCaig, October 1983

Kindle - Unintended Consequences

My friend Bill is visiting (the circumstances are sad, but it’s still good to see him).
We sat up into the night, as ever, swapping very bad impersonations of The Absorbing Man, and our views of current UK politics.
As the night went on, we kept referencing books we were reading, and what we had been watching on TV. Before we called it a night we’d watched three episodes of Season 2 of Agents of SHIELD and I’d pulled a pile of books down from the shelves for him. Most, but not all, of these were quality reprints of comics we’d bought in the mid-70s to lat 80’s. Jim Starlin’s “Thanos” stories (which sprawled across half a dozen titles, from Iron Man and The Avengers through Daredevil (yes, really – who remembers Angar The Screamer?) Marvel Two-In-One, Marvel Team-Up, Captain Marvel and Warlock. All of them brought neatly into a glossy reprint.
I gave him my spare copy of Wolf Hall, he showed me a travel book he was reading. We then came on to talk about “Stone Voices”, Neil Acherson’s frankly wonderful book about Scotland, and I tried to quote from the inscription on a Covenanter’s gravestone which sets off one of the final chapters. It’s a few lines long, but the language is magnificent, and you could unpack it into a Solomon Kane novel without much effort (in fact I half expect Bill to do that).
The trouble was, I didn’t have the book – I have it on Kindle. And without any devices to hand, I had to hack my way through a mangled remembrance of the words, doing them no justice at all.

(As a sidebar, let’s see if I can find them now. Yes, it turns out, but only as an image snipped from Google Book Search, found by searching on “This monument to passengers shall cry”. I'll post it as a separate entry)

Anyway, that was only a sidebar.
My realisation is that I couldn’t lend him a copy of the book, because I don’t have a physical copy to lend. Without having to try too hard, I can think of a couple of dozen books belonging to Bill which I have scattered around my shelves. He introduced me to James Elroy, after all, (The Black Dahlia) and Lawrence Block (Out On The Cutting Edge). He’s got at least as many of mine, and those loaned copies are a living, physical embodiment of the interchange of ideas and pleasures that has taken place between us over the last 25 years or so.

Does a link in an email serve the same purpose?

Somehow I don’t think so. 

They don't write them like that anymore...

I came across this in Neil Asherson's excellent "Stone Voices", a book with a lot to say about Scotland, and Argyll, and Kimartin Glen and our place in the landscape. It shoots off 100 ideas that need chased down, or written up, none more than the brief chapter on Scotland's own religious terrorists, the Covenanters (one of their exploits was to drag the Bishop of St Andrews from his carriage, and slash him to death).

He quotes the inscription below, crediting Thorbjorn Campbell (Thorbjorn Campbell!) for collecting it. There is an entire novel, or a fantasy series, compressed into the 14 lines, at least four book titles, and an image burned into my brain of flaming bullets cleaving souls from unshriven bodies.

Yes, they knew how to engrave in those days...