From trash poem to welcome sign

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

A sign bearing these lines stand in Upper Manhattan's Fort Tyrone Park. They are beautiful, aren't they? asks a visitor as she finds the words to be poetic: they make her feel wanted.

She is then on a mission to track down the source of these lines. Upon Googling nothing shows up. The lines are then discovered to be fragments, carefully chiseled out of a longer early 20th-century poem:

Friend,
When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

This isn't a poem of sweet cajoling, but one with a scolding attitude, "grumpy lines" as the visitor calls them. The history of the poem is part of the burgeoning history of trash and trash talk in post-World War I Britain, a time when, liberated by rising economic fortunes and goaded by a desire to cultivate leisure, members of the British working and middle classes took to traveling from the cities to the countryside either in motor cars or on bicycles. The countryside, for so long a pristine habitat reserved for the ruminating walks of the upper class, was seen to be everybody's public space then.

Forced to contend with the despoiling of the countryside, the elite began to express deep chagrin about the litter that the lumpen visitors tended to leave behind.

In his book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless records the backlash against the new tourism which really was a backlash against the violation or a "flagrant breach of the national good form."

So, in short, the two lines that comfort the modern visitor to the Manhattan Park is in essence clipped from a longer trash poem that in class-conscious Britain had issued moral caveats.

A conversion table for Britishisms

British politeness is no different from American politeness in that sometimes it's just plain rhetorical.

The Britishers, like their counterparts in the United States, say things they don't really mean.

The following is a conversion table that translates British expressions of politeness into the unpleasant truths which such politeness disguises:

WHAT THE BRITISH SAY	WHAT THE BRITISH MEAN	WHAT FOREIGNERS UNDERSTAND
I hear what you say	I disagree and do not want to discuss it further	He accepts my point of view
With the greatest respect	You are an idiot	He is listening to me
That's not bad	That's good	That's poor
That is a very brave proposal	You are insane	He thinks I have courage
Quite good	A bit disappointing	Quite good
I would suggest	Do it or be prepared to justify yourself	Think about the idea, but do what you like
Oh, incidentally/ by the way	The primary purpose of our discussion is	That is not very important
I was a bit disappointed that	I am annoyed that	It doesn't really matter
Very interesting	That is clearly nonsense	They are impressed
I'll bear it in mind	I've forgotten it already	They will probably do it
I'm sure it's my fault	It's your fault	Why do they think it was their fault?
You must come for dinner	It's not an invitation, I'm just being polite	I will get an invitation soon
I almost agree	I don't agree at all	He's not far from agreement
I only have a few minor comments	Please rewrite completely	He has found a few typos
Could we consider some other options	I don't like your idea	They have not yet decided

The king in bare bones

Regal Bones

I got introduced to Richard III (till date that remains my sole interface with the medieval English king, descending from the house of the Plantaganets), through Shakespeare's Richard III.

I loved the play, though, the king himself was portrayed as evil incarnate. I had the rare experience of reading a Shakespearian play where the protagonist is also the antagonist.

But, in a way, I kind of liked Richard III as well as prayed for his demise. He sounded heroically humble when in that fatal battle of Bosworth, having tumbled off his horse, he had shrieked out the famous lines: "A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse." This willingness to barter on such humble terms, indicated a flexibility of spirit that the king, when he was alive and ruling, never showed. 

Throughout the play, Richard was inveterate in his evilness where getting and keeping the "kingdom" was concerned.

So, I liked Richard at the moment of his death, is what I mean to say. I'm thus delighted to know that his skeleton (the skeleton of the real king, that is) has been found under a parking lot in Leicestershire. The ignominy of a legendary king's remains being found under a 21st century parking lot is great, but the discovery of the remains, in and of itself, is testament to the fact that these figures had once lived.

Personally, for me, the bones humanize a fictional hunchbacked king who menaced subjects, enemies and women in Shakespeare's play.

A bit of a biographical detail is in order: Richard wasn't all that evil at all. In fact, the historical Richard was the victim of decades of systematic denigration by his Tudor successors on the throne. He was a reformist king, who introduced kinder laws for the poor and the incarcerated, and most importantly, he eased bans on printing and selling of books. In short, he was a progressive king of his time. My guess is that Shakespeare couldn't have shown the real Richard the way he was because his play was produced during the time of the Tudors.

The isles of wonder

There is a strong Shakespearean subtext to the London Olympics opening ceremony.

The ceremonies are on for tonight, Friday, July 27. Famed British film director, Danny Boyle, has "directed" the ceremonies, and it's thus no wonder that the title of the show is "The Isles of Wonder."

I mean, Boyle is known for championing the underdog in his movies; remember Slumdog Millionaire? "The Isles of Wonder" is inspired, as Boyle has said, by a speech made by Britain's very own Shakespearean slumdog, Caliban.

In one of Shakespeare's later plays, The Tempest, Caliban, is a "savage". But he is also the rightful heir to the island, which, has been occupied by Prospero, an outsider from "civilized" Europe.

Prospero has cast Caliban into servitude, and it is in one of his slavish moments of reflection that Caliban says the following about the "Isles":

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; 

and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, 

Will make me sleep again; 

and then in dreaming, 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, 

that when I waked I cried to dream again.

Caliban here refers to magic that Prospero uses to keep the island in his control. Caliban is a recalcitrant fellow who won't be subdued through civilization, so Prospero keeps him spell-bound.

Prospero rules through the spectacle of magic. As Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, an English Professor at Kenyon College, notes, British monarchs, whether fictional or real, have traditionally used the power of spectacle to establish hegemony over the isles especially during times of tension and trouble.

The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics promises to be an extravagant spectacle with a budget surpassing a billion or so pounds. And Britain is currently in social and economic trouble with extreme budget cuts in essential services, unemployment and tears in the social fabric of the nation. So a spectacle might serve the purpose of projecting unity. Lobanov-Rostovsky notes:

The British can no longer conquer the world with yeomen’s cries of “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” but the world still tunes in to watch their spectacles with fascination. And more important, so do the British. These spectacles allow them to regain their composure after a season of bad news, but also to compose themselves as the Great Britain we know so well, turning the well-worn face of majesty to the world once more.

Regal Diaries

The diaries of Queen Victoria can now be read online. The project is a collaboration of Oxford University, ProQuest and the Bodeleian Libraries.

According to The NYTimes:

The diaries, which run to 141 volumes and more than 43,000pages, begin when Victoria was 13 and end 10 days before her death in 1901, at age 81. They cover subjects ranging from the early days of her romance with Prince Albert to her own Diamond Jubilee in 1897, which she recorded as turning the streets of London into "one mass of beaming faces." 

Moments like births of her nine children are also glimpsed at in observations like "Dr. Snow administered "that blessed Chloroform'." Victoria's chief chef was a native from India and her household servants were of the same ethnic ilk, and she has noted "I am learning a few words of Hindustani to speak to my servants [...] It is of great interest to me."

An afterthought: the painting of the young Queen--she does eerily resemble Emily Blunt, the British actress who played the role of the young queen (The Young Victoria)