you just don't know your shit 'til robert louis stevenson
So, about six weeks ago, while riding a bicycle drunkenly around Rutherglen, I picked up a copy of R.L Stevenson's Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes, c.1879.
The weird thing is, I'm only reading it now and it would have been so much better for me as a human being if I'd read it oh, I don't know, the moment I was born or something. My first cat would have been called Modestine, uppity bastard that he was, and I would probably know what to do with my life.
In the words of Alastair McIntosh, Stevenson showed me the landscape that made me who I am. Where the fuck was this book in 2007? You can bet your ass it would have led me to the Cévennes, cheap 120 camera around my neck and journal in my pocket, ready for a pseudo-literary expedition of pretentious proportions. What's more, it would have been good for me.
The greater part of poetry is about the stars;
and very justly, for they are themselves the most classical of poets.
These same far-away worlds, sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like
a diamond dust upon the sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or
Cavalier, when, in the words of the latter, the had 'no other tent but
the sky, and no other bed than my mother earth.'
Stephenson, I want you to have my babies, but I'm taking Modestine in the divorce.
The weird thing is, I'm only reading it now and it would have been so much better for me as a human being if I'd read it oh, I don't know, the moment I was born or something. My first cat would have been called Modestine, uppity bastard that he was, and I would probably know what to do with my life.
In the words of Alastair McIntosh, Stevenson showed me the landscape that made me who I am. Where the fuck was this book in 2007? You can bet your ass it would have led me to the Cévennes, cheap 120 camera around my neck and journal in my pocket, ready for a pseudo-literary expedition of pretentious proportions. What's more, it would have been good for me.
The greater part of poetry is about the stars;
and very justly, for they are themselves the most classical of poets.
These same far-away worlds, sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like
a diamond dust upon the sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or
Cavalier, when, in the words of the latter, the had 'no other tent but
the sky, and no other bed than my mother earth.'
Stephenson, I want you to have my babies, but I'm taking Modestine in the divorce.