*crunch*

[gfish]

I'm fairly resigned to my social world shrinking, but now my literary world is as well.

Datum 1: Growing up, we had a lot of weird old books laying around. One of them was a book of World War One poetry called Rhymes of a Red Cross Man. I rather liked a lot of it and ended up keeping the book in my room. When going through old boxes last month I found it, and flipped through it, but decided I should really ask before taking it back to Seattle. I put it to the side and promptly forgot about it.

Datum 2: On the Alaska trip, once we got north of 60 degrees, we started seeing references to a poet called Robert Service. He apparently wrote some poetry about the Yukon, and every gift store between Whitehorse and Anchorage had cheap printings of it. I glanced at a copy, was surprised that the first page of the first poem was actually pretty decent, and then forgot about it.

Saturday night, pondering the possible WWI movie project, I remembered Rhymes of a Red Cross Man. It would be pretty neat to be able to quote something from it. Since I was going to Powell's the next day, I did a websearch to find the author. I wasn't really expecting to find anything -- for all I knew the book in Spokane was the single remaining copy from a vanity run of a few hundred. Imagine my surprise to find 2000 Google hits for it. It's a Gutenberg book! And, yes, it was written by Robert Service.

My facefault was so violent that vixyish noticed and was concerned some horrible news was breaking. Nope, just a bit more of my mental topology.

Comments

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Robert Service is a True Canadian Hero! etc.

I just overheard, not 24 hours ago, someone remark that he claimed to be "the eatingest potato man in all of Canada".

Seriously, it was said like that.

Canada is weird. :)

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

I wondered whether he wrote any of the poetry on the money.

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure our current money poetry ... well, all I know of for sure is on the $10, there's a bit from The Sweater, which was originally written in French -- and I originally read it in French, but I can hardly remember it now -- it's just this so-called-classic story about playing hockey and stuff.

And Robert Service is not French.

[darlingfreak.livejournal.com]

I know how you feel.

Keep in touch. Your social world has some roots. :-)

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

I read his poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee" (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/8336/robertservice/sam.html) many, many years ago. His name has stuck with me although it became detached from the poem and just floated around randomly in my brain. I've probably encounted other poems of his here and there...

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Ah, I've read that one. Quite possibly even in Alaska (my dad lived there for a while).