Cavalorn ([info]cavalorn) wrote,
@ 2008-10-07 13:39:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Kiplin' versus Palin.

You can't be a Sussex boy like me and not be overshadowed by Kipling. The house I was in at secondary school (yes, we had houses, just like in Harry Potter) was called Kipling after him.[1] My mum lives down the road from his house, 'Batemans'.



[1]Another house was called 'Fuller', after local popularly-believed-to-be-nutjob-but-quite-a-clever-bloke-really 'Mad Jack' Fuller whose accomplishments included being entombed in the world's most incongruous pyramid. Legend has it [2] that he is entombed upright within, seated in a chair, in full evening dress, top hat and all, a glass of port held in his hand.



[2]In this, as in so much else, legend is completely wrong.

(Post a new comment)


[info]valkyriekaren
2008-10-07 12:52 pm UTC (link)
This may be one of those cases where, as I believe Tony Wilson once put it, the legend is more true than the facts.

(Reply to this)


[info]alison_lees
2008-10-07 01:03 pm UTC (link)
I suppose somebody drank the port, replacing it with ribena so that no one would notice...

(Reply to this)


[info]brock_tn
2008-10-07 02:12 pm UTC (link)
I've thought for years that Kipling is the most underestimated poet in the English catalog. Problem is, most people don't want to actually read what he has to say. ROger Cohen is dead on in applying "The Gods of The Copybook Headings" to Sarah Palin's rhetoric. I think Kipling would have been proud of him.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]ihcoyc
2008-10-07 02:35 pm UTC (link)
Exactly. Kipling was a great comic poet, and an occasionally good serious poet, who just happened to have a world view that was deeply unfashionable through most of the late 20th century. And that aspect is exaggerated; most of the most shocking statements are satire, or at minimum put in the mouths of unsympathetic fictional characters.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]brock_tn
2008-10-07 04:05 pm UTC (link)
He's also one of the better pagan poets out there. Witness works like "A Tree Song," "Puck's Song," "The Song of the Red War Boat," and "In the Neolithic Age," which if they are not explicitly pagan suggest at least a worldview that would have been sympathetic with modern paganism.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]patchworkkid
2008-10-07 03:16 pm UTC (link)
Christ, but being confronted with the photo of the columnist was like seeing a ghost. He's almost a dead ringer for what Douglas Adams might look like, had he not died on a treadmill in Montecito.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]valkyriekaren
2008-10-07 04:05 pm UTC (link)
Woah, I see what you mean. That's spooky.

Poor Douglas - such a loss.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go shooting past."

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]the_themiscyran
2008-10-07 05:27 pm UTC (link)
You have Fuller. Here in Kansas, we have Samuel Dinsmoor and his Garden of Eden. He is, in fact, embalmed and buried in plain sight in a mausoleum on the grounds. Aside from his rather bizarre cement artistry, he also dug up his first wife (after she died of natural causes) and reburied her, encased in cement, on the grounds. Nice.

(Reply to this)


[info]laudre
2008-10-07 06:31 pm UTC (link)
If that pyramid was not used in an old Dr. Who series, it should have been. Seriously.

(Reply to this)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…