Everything Is Different Again

      . . . .  The desktop computer and 24" monitor ordered last week arrived on Sunday.

In other words, while still trying to do all the things one does and needs to do all the time, without enough time to do them, feeling ever more cramped, harassed and failure-ish, one is dealing with everything on screen being in different places, older stuff like Office not quite so compatible with the New! Improved! More Expensive! Office, which one no longer buys and has, like the Word program I have on the old laptop, but rents annually.  So yes, more expensive, as the last Word program I bought was from 2013, and it still operates just fine.  Plus, I'm so comfortable with it I never have to think about what I'm doing -- just write and do whatever.  This is different now, on the New! Much More Powerful! Blahblahblah Win10 machine.  Like everything else.

Plus, it's currently very cold, real winter!, and is staying that way into the foreseeable future.  Nights into the mid-teens, days, top temps under 40°.  I seem to have forgotten what this is like.  Which adds yet more tasks to the ever increasingly multi-task of dressing to do anything from going Out to going downstairs to do the laundry.  Why yes, we too are double masking now.

I suppose I will get used to it fairly soon.

What is puzzling though, is I don't feel as immersed in my watching of series and films and so on on this 24" screen as I do on the 17" laptop screen.  Watching on that screen, was literally tunnel vision, that blocked out everything else around me, which is o so welcome in These Times.  The larger screen -- well blocking out everything else isn't happening so easily.

If this were my and most of the world's biggest problem though, wouldn't it be a grand world indeed?

Gotta say though, that new monitor, on it, scenes such as this, just pop and sizzle in a way they didn't quite, no matter how sharp, on the laptop's more compressed pixalation.

The opening scene from The Flame Trees of Thika (1981) adapted from Elspeth Huxley's memoir (pub. 1959) of growing up in British East Africa -- Kenya, on the coffee plantation her family tried to establish back in 1913.  The series is currently available for streaming on Acorn TV.  I have read the book -- and other works of Elspeth Huxley, and I did see this quite some years ago, on dvd.  It's interesting to me how much more experience and knowledge I bring to this work,  and to the histories of African nations and culture generally, between then and now.

Roman Britain: History and Hoax + The Seven Years War + Last of the Mohicans

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins – review:

"A poetic, thoughtful travelogue that uncovers traces of Britain's Roman history"

From Higgins's book concerned with an historical hoax, which might be titled "Turning Bad English into Worse Latin":

While surveying, Roy also indulged a passion: his deep interest in Scotland's Roman past. He took detailed plans of numerous forts, camps and the Antonine Wall, the barrier built between the firths of Forth and Clyde in the 140s by the emperor Antoninus Pius. Forty years later, his work on the subject – Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain – was published posthumously by the Society of Antiquaries. "Military men," he wrote in his preface, "are naturally led to compare present things with the past; and being thus insensibly carried back to former ages, they place themselves among the ancients, and do, as it were, converse with the people of those remote times."

The Military Antiquities is a joyous book. Aside from a beautiful mapof the Antonine Wall, there is page after page of meticulous bird's-eye view plans of Scotland's Roman forts and camps, with the slope of hills shaded in tones of graphite and woodland indicated by delicately drawn individual trees, each with its own shadow. The combination of the Roman geometries and the swollen contours of the landscape often makes these images resemble abstract works of art rather than functional maps. Roy's copious text, though, is much less impressive, for the writings of this scrupulously empirical, careful mapper of the land were fatally infected. In common with his great-and-good antiquarian peers, he had fallen for one of British historiography's most successful and most damaging forgeries. 

It really interesting to historians of the Americas, that the hoax has a connection to the Seven Years Wars, known here in the U.S. as the French and Indian War (1745-1763, and which, very likely, the very young trigger happy or deer fevered George Washington started on this side of the ocean.* This war re-drew the boundaries of European control in North America, and, as part of paying for it, the British government chose to tax  the Atlantic colonies and billet soldiers in colonists' homes, leading to the movement for the War of Independence.

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* The French and Indian War led to James Fenimore Cooper writingThe Last of the Mohicans also, thereby starting that very popular for a very long time entertainment genre we have come to call the Western.  Which in turn caused a very large number of United States women to fall in love with a very young, very beautiful Daniel Day Lewis, who starred as Natty Bumpo a/k/a Hawkeye in the 1992 movie, (Bumpo, in the book, is anything but young and beautiful ....)

There's a BBC 1971 miniseries made from Last of the Mohicans, shot muchly in the Scottish Highlands, which contains the most hysterically ludicrous, fading Sixties' choreography sensibility of Indians dancing around a campfire you will ever see. However, excepting that scene, the series is very good.