I’ve thrown my hat into the ring for a Bodleian Libraries project to memorialize the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death by having his 154 sonnets hand-printed by printers the world over.

I’ve requested Sonnet Nº 55 and I’m awaiting confirmation that it’s not otherwise spoken for. Once I get the go-ahead, I’ll have until September 30, 2016 to design, set and print the sonnet. There’s considerable flexibility offered: postage stage up to poster size, tweeted the organizers.

The process of selecting a sonnet led me to the 2002 album When Love Speaks, where Sonnet Nº 55 was read by the late actor Richard Briers.

I found the album on Spotify, and was excited to see that Sonnet Nº 145 was contributed by Mississippi John Hurt:

When I pressed “play,” however, the voice that came out of my headphones sounded suspiciously not like one would expect the Yoda of the Blues to sound like.

A metadata issue, it turns out: further research revealed John Hurt, no-Mississippi, as the reader.

While no-Mississippi John Hurt did an excellent job on Nº 145, I’d give anything to hear a rendition by the with-Mississippi John Hurt​.

The first two stanzas of Sonnet Nº 55 from here.
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

For the five years, 1995 to 2000, that [[Catherine]] and I lived on the Kingston Road, Clow’s Red & White in Hampshire was our lifeline. Bobby and Verna and Norman and their staff were a daily part of our lives. 

The store is still there – one of the last few rural general stores left on the Island – and I make a point of gassing up my car there whenever I’m in the area. Even though I haven’t lived nearby for 15 years, and am only in the door once or twice a year, they still call me by name at the cash.

Coming up on Saturday, February 6th, from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., Verna Clow will present “The History of Clow’s Store” at the Riverview Community Centre in Clyde River as part of the Clyde River Lectures for 2016:

Country stores were an important part of the fabric within Island communities over the years. Many did not survive, but Clow’s Store in Hampshire is still thriving. Verna will talk about the history of their store from the early days when Albert Clow first founded it. Her presentation will include photos of the store over the years and how they changed with the times while maintaining strong customer loyalty. She will share some of her favourite stories.

The inclusion of Hampshire in the Clyde River Lectures is part of a broadening for this year:

…this year, we decided to go a little beyond the boundaries of Clyde River and move up Hampshire and Emyvale way and down to North River. It only makes sense considering how closely knit our communities have been over the years. Just check any of your ancestors’ diaries and inevitably you will find that they were visiting some sort of relations in those communities. Their visits could very well have been documented in The Guardian under “Clyde River Notes.”

It promises to be an interesting talk by Verna; I’ll be there and I encourage you to attend as well. There is promise of “warm hospitality with coffee/tea and homemade treats along with tours of our large collection of artifacts and photos highlighting the history of the community,” which makes it simply too good an opportunity to refuse.

As proof-positive of the suggestion that Clyde River Notes was a repository that in part documents the connections between the community and those, like Kingston and Hampshire, that are nearby, here’s a snippet from the April 10, 1929 edition of The Guardian:

Since learning of the 11 escaped German prisoners yesterday, you’ve probably been waiting with bated breath for the rest of the story.

And in the following day’s paper came the answer: captured.

After he left Amherst, Nova Scotia, Leon Trotsky’s life – if you can believe it – got even more interesting.

As told in this tale of how his personal papers came to be owned by Harvard, he ended his life in Mexico, banished and largely abandoned by the world.

After making arrangements to sell his papers to Harvard, in 1940 they safely arrived there, and word was sent to him informing him of the arrival:

In the preceding months Trotsky had been deserted and renounced by some of his closest associates, including his Mexican protector and benefactor, the painter Diego Rivera. And in May, 1940, Trotsky’s home was subjected to an armed-raid, apparently at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. Around 4 a.m. a group of assailants broke into Trotsky’s home and pumped about 200 machine gun bullets into Trotsky’s bedroom. Although the attack left him miraculously unharmed Trotsky became increasingly concerned about his own safety and the safety of his papers.

After months of anxiety the telegram from Harvard must have been a great relief. Ironically, that same day, the very day he learned that his papers would be preserved and protected, Trotsky was assassinated. A man calling himself Frank Jacson, who had connived his way into Trotsky’s confidence, crept up behind him while he was at work in his study, and crushed his skull with an ice axe.

Of course between Amherst and Mexico there was also becoming Russian Commissar for Foreign Affairs, founding and leading the Red Army, etc. But that’s another story.

The front page story “Eleven Germans Escape from Amherst” from the January 19, 1919 edition of The Guardian caught my eye this morning:

The camp at Amherst is most famous for its most famous prisoner, Leon Trotsky; as he relates in his book My Life:

The Amherst concentration camp was located in an old and very dilapidated iron foundry that had been confiscated from its German owner.  The sleeping bunks were arranged in three tiers, two deep, on each side of the hall.  About eight hundred of us lived in these conditions.  The air in this improvised dormitory at night can be imagined.  Men hopelessly dogged the passages, elbowed their way through, lay down or got up, played cards or chess.  Many of them practised crafts, some with extraordinary skill.  I still have, stored in Moscow, some things made by Amherst prisoners.  And yet, in spite of the heroic efforts of the prisoners to keep themselves physically and morally fit, five of them had gone insane.  We had to eat and sleep in the same room with these madmen. 

The tale of how Trotsky ended up imprisoned at Amherst is summarized well by Silver Donald Cameron.

At the time of this escape, though, all that was more than a year in the future.

The Guardian on today’s Twitter outage:

The company initially confirmed the outage by, somehow, tweeting, from its @support account. We were unable to see the tweet, because Twitter was down. Twitter emailed the text of the tweet to the Guardian, which read: “Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.”

I love the “somehow.”

You write J. J. Steinfeld’s name like this: J. Period. Space. J. Period.

I know this because, two years ago, I set an excerpt of his Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation in metal type and I needed to know.

It was the space that I was concerned about: I could have gone either way, but I deferred to J. J.’s preference and so J. Period. Space. J. Period. it was:

Even now I’m not sure that I took the right path. In The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst writes:

Names such as W. B. Yeats and J. C. L. Prillwitz need hair spaces, thin spaces, or no spaces at all after the intermediary periods. A normal word space follows the last period in the string.

So perhaps I should have mixed J. J.’s preference with some typographic wisdom and used a thin space rather than a full space? So J. J. rather than J. J.

But it is too late now and I must live with my decision.

This Wednesday, January 20, 2016 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., the aforementioned J. J. Steinfeld will launch his latest book, Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (buy it online) at the Bahá’í Centre, 20 Lapthorne Avenue here in Charlottetown.

Not only is the event a book launch, but it’s also an open mic night, where we members of the general writing public are invited to read 3 to 5 minute pieces of poetry or prose. I believe I might give it a go (readers can sign up at 7:00 p.m.). Perhaps I will see you there?

I’m in Summerside this afternoon, wearing my Hacker in Residence hat, to talk about open data with the Instructional Development and Assessment group in the Department of Education, Early Learning and Culture.

They have a beautiful office space in the Holman Building: bright, open concept, lined with substantial pillars: the kind of space you’d like your curriculum being developed in.

The table markers at Samuel’s in Summerside are named after the Island’s township lots. I scored Lot 16. I once bought a schoolhouse in Lot 16, so this is entirely appropriate.