Poetry Animations

This is both very cool and just a bit creepy. Jim Clark, a "videographer" based in London, has animated photos or paintings of long-gone poets, paired the animations with poetry and you get things like Lord Alfred Tennyson "reading" his Ulysses:

While I'm sure some of the animations will be removed due to copyright violations (Sylvia Plath? TS Eliot? Oh yes, their estates will be in touch), Jim Clark has many excellent (and, again, creepy) videos uploaded to YouTube. Try some of these:

+ John Donne: Go Catch A Falling Star + Ezra Pound: The Year Puts On Her Shining Robe + W.H. Auden: Musee des Beaux Arts + John Keats: Ode To A Nightingale

A good reminder that poetry is as much about hearing as it is about reading. And just a touch disturbing.

PS. Uncanny valley, anyone?

Structures Lost and Found

Two links: Abandoned Russian Lighthouses - a series of crumbling structures in beautiful natural surroundings. Add a healthy dollop of poverty and tragedy:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did [the] job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment.

The Linguistic Diversity of Europe - an interesting, if brief, look at how the linguistic landscape (literally!) may have looked as long as six millennia ago. Ringe makes a good case for how he constructs it (as we have very little, if any, hands-on evidence, obviously) and the comments are interesting too. I'm a sucker for (Proto-)Indo-European linguistic archaeology, anyhow even if that makes me sound vaguely geeky.