back-dated posts 6/6

6/6/2004 Newspapers filled with D-Day commemorations. Heading north on a Virgin luxury train to Aberdeen. Random thoughts generated by reading the newspaper – what is the significance of movies/books/etc where the title character never appears? Is Lily Chou-Chou really Godot? Just read an amazing review of the Pixies’ reunion tour. I like how the author rejects the logic behind the statement: “If there were no Pixies, there would be no Nirvana.” His version is more similar to mine: “If there were no Pixies, then there would be no Pixies.” That would be the more significant tragedy. James Joyce’s estate is putting a damper on ‘Bloomsday’ commemoration planning this year, especially since it’s the 100 year anniversay of the events in Ulysses. Apparently they want to collect royalty payments on any public reading of any part of the novel. Organizers are scrambling to find ways to either pay it, or avoid quoting from the novel at all.
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Yesterday (the 5th) summed up in a few phrases: Taiwanese guys, Edinburgh Castle crowds, “The Royal Mile,” angry Irish protestors (yes, in Scotland), “what makes a claymore a claymore?”, Three Sisters Bar (“because one is never enough”), the strange partying habits of British women (“hen parties”?) fag-hag, epiphany.
Perhaps it’s best to let these remain ambiguous.
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10:20AM Stonehaven (one stop before Aberdeen) walking the three miles to Dunnottar Castle along the Grampian coast. And after the dreaming, the North Sea. This is what I came here for! Climbing up a steep trail over the ridge, the wind hits me in the face and I am face to face what appears to be the default WinXP desktop. In the distance the castle ruins appear like dark lumps on the horizon. There are no words to describe those 2 miles over the pasture. Look at the pictures.
On the way back, got a lift from a friendly English couple traveling up from Manchester. They dropped me off back at the trainstation, and away I went down to Stirling, the ancient seat of the Stewart kings. Two hours back on a crowded train, but I was asleep most of the time since the damn hostelers kept me up to about 3:00AM the night before with their buffoonery. Stirling is one of the most popular tourist destinations in southern Scotland, but I entered Stirling Castle right before closing time, and the staff was busy cleaning things up, and the other tourists were hurrying out the door. No one paid any attention to me, and I rather enjoyed that. The bustle was dying, and a ghostly quiet was settling in. Compared to Dunnottar, which was purposefully allowed to remain a ruin, Stirling demonstrated the opposite approach to preservation. Because the castle was used for many different purposes since the 1300s, as a fortress, a royal palace, an armoury, and most recently as a training base for the Royal Scottish Dragoons during WWII, the grounds are a patchwork of buildings from different periods, and several important areas had to be reexcavated to discover their purpose. The emphasis therefore lies in recreating how the castle functioned in its earlier incarnations, and to employ this as a living heritage for Scotland. There’s even an initiative to train a new generation of tapestry weavers. Their model? The unicorn series at the Cloisters in NYC. They’re already reproduced three of them. Much of the displays in the rest of the castle also focus on the living functions of the castle community: artisans, cooks, tailors, even jesters. And from the top, looking down, you can see the geometric sculpted lands of the royal garden which was first built in the early 1600s. Sublime, subtle and symmetrical. When I tired of the castle, I climbed down past sheep pastures and a graveyard in the forest, and walked the contours of the garden. Sitting down in the middle of the middle circle, two dogs came up to me, one wanted to be petted, the other wanted to bite me.