For those unaware of the initialism above, it stands for Simultaneous Blogging Experiment. At the exact moment, 12.00hrs BST, that this post first appeared, another 11 blogs also appeared. And they all link to each other.
This genius idea comes from Mairi Sharratt, who blogs at A Lump In The Throat.
It is an international experiment. The twelve participants are neatly divided into two camps geographically, and most probably linguistically: six are in Spain and six are in Scotland. We unify in theme, and that theme is Broken Conversations. There are no restrictions on what anyone posts – it could be poetry, prose, pictures, who knows? Just follow the links, all at the end of this post, to find out. That’s what I’ll be doing.
Meanwhile, here’s mine.
Broken Conversations
The Monster, El Monstruo
In the ‘wet, ungenial’ summer of 1816 four extraordinary people found themselves together on the shores of Lake Geneva, in the Villa Diodati. 1816 was the ‘Year Without A Summer’, this being the effect of the massive volcanic eruption of Tambora in 1815.
I shall let one of them, Mary Shelley, continue;
‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori has some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole – what to see I forget – something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.
I busied myself to think of a story…’
But the story did not come.
‘I thought and I pondered – vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations…’
Until an evening’s talk about the ‘experiments of Dr Darwin (I speak not on what the doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him)’ led to the nightmare vision:
‘I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken…’
And so Victor Frankenstein, and his monster, were born.
The novel ends with the suicide of the ‘being’, the ‘creature’ the ‘monster’, who says,
‘…I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create another as I have been. I shall die… He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish…’
It was not to be so.
Below are a mere dusting of images of Frankenstein’s monster as imagined, and used, by artists in the two centuries following the publication of Mary Shelley’s book. The most terrible being the anti-Irish political cartoons.
For just as the combination of four extraordinary people holed up during that wretched summer in the Villa Diodati led to the original creation, it was the combination of three extraordinary people in Hollywood in 1931 that led to this, the monster that will, I suspect, forever be the one we see when we shut our eyes. This, now, our acute mental vision.
Those three people were James Whale, Jack Pierce and Boris Karloff: the untried director, the respected make-up artist and the unknown actor. Two Englishmen and a Greek in an emerging Hollywood, who together were responsible for one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.
Broken Conversations in Scotland:
Mairi Sharrat - A Lump In The Throat
http://www.alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com/
Rachel Fox - More about the song
http://crowd-pleasers.blogspot.com/
Russell Jones - Russell Jones
http://poetrusselljones.blogspot.com/
Alastair Cook - Written in my hand
http://alastaircook.blogspot.com/
Peggy Huges/Scottish Poetry Library - Our old Sweet etcetera
http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/
Broken Conversations in Spain:
Roger Santiváñez
http://junin381.blogspot.com/
Cisco Bellavista
http://bellabestias.blogspot.com/
Jesús Ge
http://elgritocapicua.blogspot.com/
Ana Pérez Cañamares
http://elalmadisponible.blogspot.com/
Felipe Zapico
http://narcisoelvalvulista.blogspot.com/
Martaerre (Marta R. Sobrecueva)
http://miraletras.blogspot.com/
I thank you for your attention. Gracias!
Enjoy the tour...
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