We rode from Istanbul to Çanakkale on a regular city bus. Most of the route went took us across the northern, European side of the Bosphorus, which widens to become the Sea of Marmara, then across dusty farmland before getting to the ferry port in Kilitbahir. The bus took the ferry across to Asia and Çanakkale, and everyone got out to enjoy the crossing.
Our film crew (both of us) were the only non-Turkish people on the bus, and maybe the ferry. Continue reading “Interfaith dialogue”
“I’m an adult. I’m capable of making mature, adult decisions. What am I doing here?”
Curtis said that to me as we stood in a mass on a little ledge on the European side of the Hellespont just before the gun went off telling it was time to swim across to Asia.
Exactly, I thought to myself. Continue reading “Leander, Lord Byron, and Me: Swimming the Hellespont”
I’ve covered a lot of miles in the past few months. They don’t all get marked down here, but it’s been intense. England, France, England again, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France again, Switzerland again …
And in just a few days, Italy.
I’ve made it into the heart of the exiled Romantic. It’s utterly beautiful. It’s been three months, and I’m ready for the big, final three weeks. But I’m also ready for Texas in September after that.
I walked, straight up (almost), from Chamonix, where Victor Frankenstein went to escape his demons, and met his monster. I spent nights looking across to Mont Blanc and the Sea of Ice where he grappled with his monster.
Now, it’s up in mountains, down in valleys, through Switzerland.
The rest of the film crew gets here in just four days. It’ll be good to stop filming myself.
Lately, I set up the camera on a tripod, then run around in front of it and talk, then run back and turn it off. Then I walk for a while before repeating the process. This can’t be how Spielberg does it.
I found an Olympic-sized pool in Martigny and got in a couple of workouts. It felt slow and heavy. I think the water’s heavier at atmosphere, but studies are inconclusive.
Now I’m taking what the French call a “pause” and what we call a “break” for a couple of days. I have to write some syllabi and assignments before classes start.
Then, the film gets going again.
The Simplon Pass, Venice, the bay of La Spezia, Rome, then finally, the Hellespont.
We see Hamlet today at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore.We’ll film me talking a little about Charles Lamb’s and Coleridge’s essays on Shakespeare, and work out a little of Swimming with Byron‘s narrative for the camera.
And it’s in German!
Not to stereotype, but I don’t think of the Germans as a people who struggle making up their minds, so I can’t wait to see how “To be or not to be” sounds in a language I think of as saying:
“This is the way it’s going to be. If you don’t like it, take the Grexit on the left.”
The festival‘s been going on for years. It’s a major event that collaborates with major organizations like The Globe in London.
Next week, Al Pacino’s bringing his always subtle Merchant of Venice to the festival, with Jeremy Irons as Antonio and Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio. We’ll be happy with Hamlet, in German, with English and Danish subtitles.
William Godwin called Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (1795), the kind of book to make a reader fall in love with its author, so he did. He and Wollstonecraft were an unlikely couple, and their relationship was cut short when she died after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley in 1797.
Today we had a wonderful interview with Christian Holm Donetzky, a Danish historian why runs History Tours in Copenhagen. We wanted to talk with him to fill out information for the portion of Swimming with Byron that deals with Wollstonecraft’s trip here.
Christian had an excellent way of showing us around the parts of Copenhagen affected by the fire, which radically changed Copenhagen, and left people 6,000 people living in tents and in the ruins of the Christiansborg Palace, which had just been wrecked by fire the year before.
She wasn’t impressed by Copenhagen, and it wasn’t just because of what the fire had done:
If I say that the houses did not disgust me, I tell you all I remember of them; for I cannot recollect any pleasurable sensations they excited; or that any object, produced by nature or art, took me out of myself. The view of the city, as we drew near, was rather grand, but without any striking feature to interest the imagination, excepting the trees which shade the foot-paths.
We’ve been filming for several weeks now, and have a ton of footage. We’ve met a lot of interesting people along the way. An early view of our progress just appeared on the Wordsworth Trust blog – Swimming with Byron.
We’ve filmed in a variety of places, including a pub in Cockermouth, England, almost up to the Scottish border, on the ferry from Dover to Calais, along Wordsworth’s 1790 hike south through France, at the Royal Crescent in Bath, and in front of Kate Moss’s house (where Coleridge lived out the end of his life) in Highgate.
We’re in the last 10 days of our campaign.
Lessons learned:
I’m almost sure that last part’s a song.
But seriously, people are awesome. I hate asking anyone for anything, but over the past 26 days I’ve been asking everyone for things. I’ve been emailing, calling people (and I hate the phone), Facebook messaging, Tweeting, sending smoke signals …
I’m not saying I’ve gone from introvert to extrovert. (I won’t even get into the dinner I just had the other night with my girlfriend, my daughter and her new girlfriend. Four introverts at one table. Wow. I was desperate for an extrovert. Just one, or even half a one.)
But, back to the topic …
I’m just saying that I’m overwhelmed by the support of friends, colleagues, friend-colleagues, acquaintances, strangers … everyone. It’s been a beautiful experience.
This movie’s going to happen, and we’re going to do the best we can to live up to the faith you’ve put in us.
Eric Trimble’s a great photographer/cinematographer, and I’ll just ramble until he gets enough takes to use. That’s the whole artistic plan.
That, and …
That’ll add up to a movie.
And how, you ask, can you do that on a $17,500 budget?
Eric and I are pretty good at doing a lot with nothing. He does all the magical stuff, and I just blabber away in front of the camera, and get other people to blabber with me. (Only the first half of that’s true, actually. I can do some stuff, too).
But we’ll owe a lot to the Robert Rodriguez school of filmmaking, which is all about getting a lot out of a little.
We still need that little, of course, and we aren’t there yet, so we’ll be ever so grateful if you fill up the rest of our Kickstarter.
We’re over $9,000! Brilliant! We only need another $3,500 in the next 10 days. We’ll get it, we’re sure of it.
Because people are awesome.
(And stay tuned for our Italian update)
I’m teaching a seminar on space and place this semester. Great students, great texts, great fun. For me, at least. I think the students are enjoying it as well, but won’t speak for them.
Some came to the launch party for our Kickstarter project, and found some sort of connection between what I was teaching them and what I was filming. Guilty. But that’s the best way to teach a seminar. Focus on what’s most interesting to you at the time. It makes for a more involved class.
We read Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, Henri Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. All heady stuff.
But I just keep thinking about going camping with my parents when I was a kid. I’m introducing these students to challenging theory about space and place. My parents introduced me to the open road when I was 6. We went to Yellowstone one year, the Grand Canyon the next, eastern Canada all the way out to Prince Edward Island another year. We went to Washington D.C., St. Louis, Chicago, and eventually, Ireland and England.
My parents were nomads. They turned me into one as well.
So now I’m making a movie about space, place, and Romanticism. It wouldn’t have mattered what literary field I studied. I would’ve made Beowulf in Denmark, or Camus in Algeria if I’d picked one of those periods. Maybe even Willa Cather in Nebraska. I have fond memories of that place.
They also made me a movie freak. We watched all the classics. I can recite Casablanca. I’m pretty close with The Third Man. You don’t want to watch It’s a Wonderful Life with me if you haven’t seen it. We watched Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, tons of musicals.
The road, the screen. These have been my constant companions for decades, so it’s not at all strange that once I got to making a film, it’s about the road, and now that I’m going back on the road, I’m making a film about it.
Check out our Kickstarter, please. We’re getting there, but we’ll need help through the whole thing. Eric Trimble and I are a good team, and I’m confident you’ll like the film we’re making. But we can’t do it alone.
If you’d asked me a year ago if I’d be hitting up everyone I know and a lot of people I don’t know to back a film I’m making, I would’ve said: “That’s crazy,” or, “That’s not me,” or, “Don’t you know I’m a thin-skinned introvert? I couldn’t even sell Gem Cleaner for marching band when I was a high school student.”
But now I’m doing exactly that, and it’s going bizarrely well.
Every day I wake up thinking, “it’s all about to die and we won’t get another penny, and there won’t be a movie.” All the evidence is against that feeling, but I grew up in a house where my dad was always writing books and plays, my mom was writing books, and I was playing the trombone.
We worked, and worked, and worked, and still, rejections outnumbered the successes. But if you need to write, or take pictures, paint, play the trombone, whatever, you keep doing it, and you keep asking for support.
People have been wonderful. I don’t use words like wonderful easily or lightly, but it’s the only one that fits. We’ve raised $6,525 in two weeks. That means we have to raise $5,975 in the remaining three weeks, or we get ZERO $.
Mathematically it seems like everything’s great. But I’ve watched a lot of Bergman films. Optimism might not be my best thing.
If you’re still on the fence, please get off. I don’t want you to get splinters in your butt. The best way to avoid splinters in your butt is by clicking on the link and pledging your support to our film.
Parkinson's Disease Diary 