“Life Itself” – A New Direction for the Blog

Steve James’s documentary about Roger Ebert, Life Itself (2014), stirred up some feelings in me. It played on memories and sharpened regrets. Sitting next to a young man who ordered a little bottle of Jack Daniels every time the drinks cart came by on a flight from Istanbul to New York, wrapped in the post-production letdown of Swimming with Byron, I watched the movie critic I’d only ever known on television, and liked him the more I saw of him.  My father, a journalist from Ebert’s era, came to mind. So did my own 10-year career on newspapers, along with my own hopes for this blog when I started it.

The short story: I haven’t kept at it the way I meant to. I watched Ebert, unable to speak, jaw hanging off the bottom of his face as he fought throat cancer, blogging away, and admired his spirit, while blaming myself for my own lack of output.

This sort of thing leads to resolutions.   

Simplon Pass

Every scholar of William Wordsworth knows the moment I’m about to fail to repeat. In 1790, Wordsworth walked from Calais to the Alps, and expected to have a spiritual experience at the continental divide, the Simplon Pass in Switzerland.

It was August 17, 1790.

We’ll be one day and 225 years late, but our film recreates that walk in two days.

We joked about calling Swimming with Byron something else. Walking with Wordsworth was an option, and it would’ve made a lot of sense. So far we’ve been doing a lot of that.

Mountain living

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.

Copenhagen Sightings

We’ll miss our funky neighborhood in Copenhagen. All the bikes, the bike shops, the cafes, the various people. It’s been a lovely stay, but now we need to get on a train that somehow rides a ferry, south for Hamburg.

Remembering Mont Blanc

I had a great time catching up with Lisbeth Stammerjohann today. I met Lisbeth 11 years ago when I hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc, the grand hiking route of all the grand hiking routes in the Alps. Lisbeth was hiking alone, and we met several times as we wandered along the trail. It’s a 10- or 12-day hike, and you run into the same people time and time again. She was always fun to talk to, and a few times found a way to get ahead of everyone, even though she was hiking at a more leisurely pace while most of us moved through it as quickly as we could.

I wrote an essay about that trip, and the movie I’m making now, Swimming with Byron, really began with that walk and that essay.

So it was great to spend a day in Copenhagen with Lisbeth. We’ve stayed in touch over Facebook for many years. Today was our first meeting since the hike back in 2004.

I was glad to hear from her that she looks on that walk as one of the formative moments of her life. I do too (obviously). She wasn’t looking for Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and the sublime, as I was. But I think she did a better job of enjoying what she saw back then.

In a few days I take off from one point of that hike along the Haute Route in Switzerland. I hope to walk in Lisbeth’s spirit from 2004 and soak everything in.

Elsinore in the Moonlight After Hamlet

We saw an utterly BIZARRE production of Hamlet at Hamlet’s castle. Hamlet was the lead singer of an emo-metal band fond of looping sounds. And he sang a song called: “Something’s Fucking Rotten in the State of Denmark!”

And oh so much more. It was lovely, hilarious, absurd, intense. Germans really shouldn’t do Hamlet unless they overdo it, and boy did they.

This site of the castle, the moon, and the night greeted us when we left the show.

Bravo to all.

Hamlet at Elsinore (in German!)

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.

Danish Fire of 1795 and Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

 

Great Post on William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Walking as Subversive

Swimming with Byron

This post by Pamela Clemit in The Idler quotes from the letters of Godwin (which Clemit has been editing for Oxford University Press since 2011), and shows how walking could be considered walking in the time of the French Revolution.

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Mid-Production, and all’s well

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.