The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-----------ooo000ooo----------------

I have put this poem up because I have just been listening to Adventures In Poetry on BBC Radio 4. The programme or, as you Americans would say, program - was very listenable and included fragments of an interview with Frost himself. One contributor, Jay Parini, was especially pleasant to listen to and he highlighted how ambiguous the poem is. The penultimate line seems to sum things up neatly; it's all about the road "less travelled". But is it? Look back at how he stresses early on how very much alike the roads are - took the other, as just as fair and also Had worn them really about the same, and again both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. He couldn't make it more clear if he was banging you over the head with a book, could he! So what's he doing at the end? I shall be telling this with a sigh. He's telling "this" meaning the following:-
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by - But he's being disingenuous. The narrator knows that when he tells 'ages and ages hence' of his life he will pretend, with a regretful sigh, that he had choices which made all the difference, but he really didn't. The truth is in the third stanza where, with some false bravado he says:-
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
But acknowledging the truth that:-
.....knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Way leads on to way. We think we have a choice, but sometimes our path is marked out for us. I think that's the message of the poem. Isn't that right, Irish?

It was published in 1916 when Frost was about forty two. He died aged eighty nine.

Open University - TMA03 Classical Studies

It's been a struggle I must say. Now I've posted the thing, and it's two days late. The tutor did say she would allow us to post it over the weekend so it should be ok

Critically evaluate the relationship between form and function in three aspects of the design and construction of the Colosseum. Not more than 300 words.

Why were the games important for the Romans?
Not more than 900 words.

It's Snowing in Dalmatia

It's the kid's last night. He goes home tomorrow. I have really enjoyed his visit. We went to the movies tonight, to see Oliver Twist. I think he enjoyed it. It was snowing quite heavily when we came out of the movie theatre. We both liked that; snow gives a magical quality to a place, especially to this town which doesn't get a lot of it. We walked through the snowfall, looking up at the snowflakes falling earthwards, trying to catch them on our tongues, getting that flying upwards feeling that you get when all the flakes are rushing towards you. When we got to Kristjans we had hot chocolate, it seemed the appropriate drink.

We talked about great snowfalls we had had back home., how last year had been a white Christmas, how we loved it that we had a coal fire and could come in out of the cold wet snow to a blazing fire. Isn't that the most beautiful, loving, thing a person can do for you? To get up earlier in the morning than you and light a real coal fire, just so that you can climb out of bed and go through to the living room and see its heart-warming glow.

He asked where we had got our sledge and I told him how my grandmother had brought the 'Flexible Flyer' back from the U.S. in the nineteen fifties. It's not what it used to be but then, neither is the snow these days. Sometimes life is good, like tonight.

Trip to Solin (Roman name Salona)

We went to Solin today, the kid and me. I was looking for the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, he was just going along as it meant a ride on the scooter and, if I was feeling relaxed, a chance for him to go solo on it. We pulled off the road where a sign indicated that the ruins were to be found, but it turned out that the site was spread out over a very large area and we wandered around, wasting a lot of time before we came across the actual amphitheatre.
There it was in all its overgrown and ancient glory. The sun shone down on the verdant grass of the arena and, in the path of the gladiators’ entrance, a game of Croatian boules (locally called boče) was going on between two teams of local men. The sight of this ancient game, possibly introduced into Croatia by Roman soldiers, being played with wooden balls was strangely affecting. If it were not for the branded tracksuit tops of the players, and the assortment of cars parked nearby, we could have been back in time, two hundred years or more.
If you look east from Solin you can see the hilltop fortress of Klis. I was up there once. If I could revisit that scene I would, but life is not like that. The afternoon was over and the sun was sinking over the hills to the west. We climbed back on to the scooter. The kid held on tightly to my jacket and we headed back home. Are we close? Of course we are.

People Are Nice

I always like to think the best of people. I know that sounds, to some ears, naive but that's the way I am. Some of us live in a society these days where people are afraid to stop and help someone stranded by the roadside, for example with a car breakdown, in case they get caught up in some gruesome scenario where they can later be accused of assault, or where they get assaulted themselves by the people who are supposedly 'needing help'. It's very sad, and goes against the values that should be the building blocks of any decent society. What is society, other than the recognition that our lives, our individual lives and the lives of those who are near and dear to us, are intertwined with, and interdependent on, other people in the wider community? To me it is self-evident. A community cannot function; a country, its people, its economy, cannot thrive and grow without the communal efforts of the ordinary citizens. Within this belief it is implicit that we must have an optimistic attitude to others. This is also important for our own individual happiness and well-being.

Now this is not to say that we should open our doors to all and sundry, and let every freeloader and sponger walk all over us. Of course there are bad people in the world who don't give a shit about society. Of course we are in danger from criminals and all kinds of ne'er-do-wells. But do the bad people outnumber the good? Do their numbers even constitute one percent of the total? Who the hell knows. I'm not going to talk statistically because I haven't the faintest notion of what the statistics are, I just know what I know. And that is that a lifetime's experience tells me that most of the people I meet in my journeyings, and most of the people I know, are decent people. And it's good to recognise this because I also meet the kind of person who is too eager to generalise, who without even a pause for thought would tell you that "They're all criminals in that place/town/country/wherever" or "They're totally ignorant those Bosnians/Americans/Australian Aborigines/Germans/white/blacks/old age pensioners/whoever". And I just hate those Jeremiahs who are just so negative you've got to get out of their company as quickly as possible before you start to feel like hanging yourself, or just smothering them with the nearest cushion. So when something nice happens that confirms my faith in the fundamental goodness of people then I should celebrate it and also tell others. And in that way I make a small contribution towards making sure that the Jeremiahs don't succeed in poisoning all of our lives.

I had picked my son up at Dubrovnik airport and it's a 220 km drive back up the coast. There was the most horrendous rainstorm, it was just monsoon-like. As we were going through Makarska, about three quarters of the way home, I drove too fast into fairly deep water. The electrics got flooded and the car conked out. I managed to re-start it but once we got clear of the town it finally gave up the ghost. What to do? I phoned a taxi driver I know and asked him to come and collect us, and he agreed but it would take him an hour to get down to us. Shortly after I had talked to him a car pulled up beside us and a young woman shouted over asking if we needed help. She had two other people in the car, also female, and she had no reservations it seemed about stopping with an offer of assistance. I thanked her and said that help was on its way.

After another five minutes a car going in the opposite direction stopped and two guys came over. They gave me to understand that they were mechanics and perhaps they could bring some expertise to bear. They did try and sort the problem on the spot but to no avail. They then phoned a friend who had a wrecker truck and he came and picked us up. Now he was going to take us to his garage and try to fix us out but I asked him, with a rustling motion of my thumb and forefinger, how much he might charge to take us all the way home. He offered to do this for seven hundred kuna. Fine, I said, let's go and in the meantime I phoned back to my taxi driver and asked him to return to base, I'd settle his bill later. And so the tale ends happily with my son and me arriving in time for a formal dinner at the town's best hotel.

This is not the first time I have experienced such willingness to help from strangers in Croatia. Again it was a car thing. My friend's engine was over-heating. A car mechanic came over to us, saw the problem, took us to his place, spent almost an hour searching for and fitting a thermostat valve, and got us back on the road. And he charged us nothing. Now isn't that how society should operate. People are nice, they really are.

Open University - Results from TMA02

Well the first results are in and they are:
Art History - An analysis of An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life - 13/25 - 52%
Literature - An analaysis of the Keats' sonnet 'When I have fears that I may cease to be' - 14/25- 56%
Music - Appreciation of an excerpt from Petrushka 'First Tableau: The Shrovetide Fair' - 12/25 - 48%
Philosophy - Arguments; valid, sound, and inductive. - 20/25 - 80%.
Overall - 59%.

Well, fuck me gently. 59%! I don't know how I feel about that. I reckon my Art History offering was worth a little more than a measly 52%. I looks like I just scraped through on that. Do you think that's fair? Look below at my post on November 1st and tell me. Did I not cover it well? And the tutor doesn't even know what a shawm is. She put a question mark next to it!

The music only got 48%, which is all I deserved. I was just waffling and repeating myself on that one, plus I didn't really study it. And only 56% for literature. It was hardly worth my bother, trawling through every web site I could find on Keats' sonnets. And then 80% for the philosophy question. 80% for a load of old bollocks! Anyway, in fairness (What am I saying!) I hardly studied at all for the thing so I suppose I got what I deserved. I'm hardly studying at all for the next one, wasting my time as I am here bitching about it. Bollocks to it, I'd better get off and do something.

Being Chained to the Village Idiot

"Owning a penis is like being chained to the village idiot." I read that on someone's blog the other day. I wish I had said it. Well, now I have.

So, what else is on my mind. Well, the OU stuff is grinding along. At the moment it's a study of the Roman Empire with particular focus on the Colosseum. So far we've been reading on the origins and function of this famous amphitheatre and, I must say, it has been quite interesting.

Those gladiatorial games were awesome, and gruesome, productions. "At the hundred days festival given by Titus at the Flavian amphitheatre (Colosseum) in 80 ad, on one day 5,000 wild animals of various sorts were exhibited, and 9,000 tame and wild was the sum total of the killed (over the hundred days) ... " These inaugural games in the Colosseum are said to have involved "fights of up to 3,000 men in a single day". (Quotes from sources in the OU published course material).

The scale of it is mind boggling and it begs the question; who was in charge of production? maybe that's where the great blockbuster film directors like De Mille and Spielberg and Peter Jackson get their directing genes. If you think about it, there must have been their equivalent in ancient Rome. It wasn't just a bunch of mindless animal torturers; someone with great project management skills and an eye for theatre had to be orchestrating the whole gory business.

The course raises questions on how we view these events from a twenty-first century perspective. Was it all just mindless gore and crowd-pleasing bloodlust, or was it more complex? A way of keeping the Roman populace contented while controlling crime and rebellion? It's easy to be moralistic and condemn the barbarity of the people who staged such events, but modern liberal high-mindedness is not useful when studying events of two thousand years ago. For the Romans, to kill wild beasts was to protect mankind. Criminals and Christians during that period were regarded as having put themselves in the position of outcast. The games were a way of dealing with capital punishment, and the crowd could ameliorate their sub-conscious guilt by giving the criminals a "fighting chance". Some modern "enlightened" societies deal with capital punishment in a different, but equally self-deceiving way. Executions are carried out behind closed doors, out of sight and largely out of mind.

Good Blogs

I don't have a lot of time to read other blogs. I don't even have a lot of time to spend on keeping this one up to date, but. I do like to skiff through to the 'next blog' just taking pot luck on what I'll find. So it has to have an immediate impact to make me stop and look and read it properly. That why I like Lingo Slinger , she's always funny and to the point.

I came across Emerald Bile last night and I was rocking with laughter. Especially reading What The Fuck Is A Bagel! It reminded me of a time when I was stuck in this hotel in New York where they didn't serve you a decent plate of bacon, sausage and egg in the morning. All you got was coffee in a paper cup.. and bagels. After a while you just hate the things.

So then I found Twenty Major - Still Smoking In Irish Bars. It's a blog from the other side of Dublin from the one you'd be familiar with. I like it for the story-telling, and it's funny.

These people are good. I wish I was half as good. Anyway, if I can't be very creative right now, being a tad tired, I'll give credit where it's due and get the fuck out of here.

Is There Anyone Listening?!

No, I don't mean you. My millions of blog readers can relax, I 'm not having a go at you. If I did then I daresay the West Coast Ramblings Blog Readers Association, or WCRBRA as it is more familiarly described, would send me emails of objection at my impertinence, casting aspersions at the good character of the dedicated blog reader etc. etc. No, I repeat, it is not you it is the Open University. What the fuck is going on! I've been faithfully logging on, day after weary day, hoping for some sign of life from the on-line tutorial group to which I am attached, and which is under the tutorship of one Dr. Matilda Clench. Now I'm not an expert on tutorial groups but you would think, would you not, that it would, at a minimum, resemble a group? Yes, no? This lot are so invisible that they resemble nothing so much as a bunch of terminally shy geeks, too backward to punch a few bland phrases onto the surface of their human-machine-interfaces, and then send them serverwards so that we can all marvel at the vacuous drivel they are only just capable of producing. I mean I do my best, I really do; trying to draw them out of their miserable shells, but, to no avail. As for Dr. Clench! I know this for a certainty; She's not getting anwhere near my haemorrhoids. If she was the last doctor in the world I wouldn't trust her to lance my boils. Three emails I've sent her and not one reply, not one! Well I've had it. I have taken action. A quick inquiry to the student support mob in Embra and they were right on to the staff tutor for the Arts Faculty. He immediately sent back an email reassuring me that he would look right into it. Decent sort of chap. That's what we need, more men about the place instead of all these wretched old women with hardening of the bloody arteries. Got to go now, the Colloseum awaits.

Tutor Marked Assessment - The Open University

I am about to blow my reputation as an erudite student of the humanities right out of the water with the following. This represents the answers to the philosophy questions in Tutor Marked Assessment 02 in my course. It is, I will say in my defence, a level 1 course and therefore we mere students are only expected to skim the surface of the deep well of philosophical thought and knowledge that has been passed to us from Pluto, Socrates, Descartes, Nietsche, and others too difficult to mention.

The questions were about - What is an argument? - What is a sound argument? - What is an inductive argument, as opposed to a deductive argument? - and so forth. And you can see from the below the expert grasp I have on the subject. Now I know what you're thinking. Surely, you are saying to yourself, surely this is the work of a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters, or perhaps it is the work of just one monkey and a spell-checker. No, alas, no. It is I. Now the study guide I have open here beside me poses the question, Why study philosophy? And it answers itself by telling us; "One important reason for studying philosophy is that it deals with the fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. Why are we here? Does God exist? What is art? Why is there a monster under my bed?" And so on. So having grappled with these questions, and having practiced pacing up and down with our hands behind our backs for hours on end, we were given this assessment. I cannot tell you how relieved I was. I was afraid they would ask us - Could our lives be a dream?- or something. I had even started to formulate an answer to that one. I goes like this:
If my life is a dream and I wake up then I will exist in real life and therefore my life cannot be a dream. On the other hand if my life is a dream and I do not wake up then my life is a dream, or I am dead. On the other hand if my life is someone else's dream and they wake up then I am dead also. And on the other hand (that would be the fourth hand, wouldn't it) if my life is someone else's dream and they don't wake up then I hope it's a wet dream. 'S a fucking nightmare really!

An Analysis of a Poem by Keats

WHEN I HAVE FEARS THAT I MAY CEASE TO BE
JOHN KEATS

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

The repetition of the word ‘when’ has the effect of making the reader want to read on to discover the answer to what happens ‘then’, while the repetition of ‘before’ increases this sense of tension. The use of ‘never’ seems to lead the reader towards expecting the worst, and the mood is gradually blackened until at the end there is a feeling of desolation and fatalism.

In the octave the poet is reflecting on the transience of life; how his talents may be prematurely stilled, and how he may never experience the true nature of love or ‘high romance’. This inward reflection in the octave turns, in the sestet, to an outward statement directed at his love (‘fair creature of an hour’) expressing fear of love’s loss. The turn between the octave and the sestet ‘And when I feel..’ signals to the reader that the questions asked in the octave are about to be answered. Finally, the with the words ‘then on the shore’, the poet tells us how he comes to terms with whatever fate holds for him.

The rhyming of ‘brain’ and ‘grain’ emphasise the poet’s talents while, in the second quatrain, ‘face’ and ‘trace’ emphasise the poet’s skill at capturing nature’s beauty. The tone of the third quatrain is downbeat with the sadder sounds of ‘hour’, ‘power’, ‘more’, and ‘shore’.
The poet’s message in the final couplet seems to be that he will put no great store by transient fame or shallow love, and there is an acceptance of whatever fate will bring, with the emphasis on thought and solitude.

Now, the above is what I wrote for my Open Univerity analysis of this poem by Keats but what, dear reader, do I really feel? Well, you've got think, haven't yer, that the 'fair creature of an hour' - 's a hooker i'n'it. I mean stands to reason du'n'it! I know short time usually means thirty minutes but after he was waxing lyrical for a while it prob'ly took up the hour. She was prob'ly right browned off, prob'ly she was thinking 'I hope I shall never see thee more. You're doing me out of my bizness, you are. It's so brisk these days if I had anuvver pair of legs I 'd open a branch in Peckham', and you're lying back there going on about the faery power. I knew you was a poof straight off'. All poets are, stands to reason'.
Am I right, or am I right!

An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life

This is 'An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life' by Harmen Steenwyck 1621. As part of my OU course I have to write a descriptive account of this. Now as a self-styled 'bloke' I have almost never visited an art gallery and rarely on purpose so; how about this then:-

At 39.2 cm high by 50.7 cm across the objects in the picture would be rendered slightly less than life size and, allowing for viewpoint and perspective, the proportions would appear realistic. The perspective gives us an angle of vision low down, at just above the height of the table, as if the viewer is seated at a slight distance from the table contemplating the objects.

The objects are bundled together to the right of the frame, except the shell which seems to balance precariously on the left front edge of the table. The skull is prominent at the front of the composition, two thirds from the left and two thirds from the top. This placing makes the viewer focus on the skull, and then the eye drifts outwards taking in the other objects.

The picture is lit from above and to the left, as if from a high window. The light comes down in a shaft rather in the nature of a spotlight, highlighting the objects and leaving the rest of the picture dark. The room and background are bare and sparse, almost cell-like. The painter is saying ‘Look at these things. What do you see?’

The tonal range is wide, giving the objects a realistic and dramatic aspect. The colour range is mostly browns and gold, autumnal colours. The pink cloth is a counterpoint, perhaps to remind us of the gaiety of life in contrast to the more serious symbolic imagery.

The objects are: a lute, a shawm, a flute, two books, a dying taper, a shell, a Japanese sword, a chronometer, and a flask. The musical instruments symbolising the pleasures of the senses; the books, learning and knowledge; the sword and shell, wealth; the snuffed-out lamp and the chronometer, the transience of life; the skull, death.