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Tuesday, May 25th, 2004 12:41 am
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 [livejournal.com profile] vixyish noticed and was concerned some horrible news was breaking. Nope, just a bit more of my mental topology.
Tuesday, May 25th, 2004 10:08 am (UTC)
I know how you feel.

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