(no subject)

[rm]

via genders via rosefox:

http://www.spirit-of-the-age.co.uk/jazz_age_garden_party.htm

Oh, if only ....
I need to win the lottery right now.

Because it didn't totally fill me with longing/break my heart until this:

http://www.spirit-of-the-age.co.uk/garden_party_image_gallery1.htm

I can feel what it would be like to climb up into that, _dammit_.

Britain makes me sad; it seems to have so many more mostly lost worlds than we do.

Comments

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Oh man, do want.

::whimper::

[marchek.livejournal.com]

My best friend from college spent her early childhood in England and remembered that her parents were always either going to or hosting costumed themed parties with their British friends. I think that the British just really like to dress up and manage to have a great sense of humour mixed with old world propriety.

It's just easier to have a strong sense of history when you are surrounded by so much of it on a daily basis. Something has to exist for over 200 years to even be considered somewhat "old".

I wish I were there.

Now I'm depressed.

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Well, technically, cultures have existed in the United States for well over 200 years. It's just not what we currently associate with America. But there are a lot of lost worlds here.

I realize that piping in about this seems overly PC and that's really not why it came to mind. It's more just that I've just been on a long bus tour of my state, in which the guide--a professor whose expertise is the cultural history of America, including tribal cultures--was so incredibly amazing I wish I'd known more. He had a neat way of opening our eyes to what's "old" that we never even think about--how landscapes and fauna can themselves be read as history. It was really beautiful.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I'm not depressed. To the British, the past is a living, breathing, thing, still present. History is part of the water in which you swim, the ancestors are the partners of the living.

My maternal relations are all recently British, and it is so.
I inherited their sense of this, paternal Southern Cracker ancestry not withstanding, and share this point of view.

Like them, for example, I am eternally amused by the North American attitude that anything three hundred years old is ancient.
"Goodness, we have cutlery older than that ,and it's not even the good silver!"

[weirdquark]

It's just easier to have a strong sense of history when you are surrounded by so much of it on a daily basis. Something has to exist for over 200 years to even be considered somewhat "old".

When I was in Italy last year I went to San Clemente, which is a 12th century basilica built on top of a 4th century basilica (with a few 9th century mosaics) built on top of a second century Mithraic temple built on top of a god knows how old sacred spring. The top layer had renovations done in various architectural styles over the years, with the most recent one being a 1719 facade and ceiling. Which clash go delightfully with the medieval mosaics and the classical columns they brought in from (several different) Roman temples.

So you have this building, where the newest bits are still older than most of the history of the US. This gives one an interesting sense of perspective.

Not to mention a one-stop look at architecture through the ages. ::g::

[tdanaher.livejournal.com]

I just can't see these worlds as being lost or even mostly lost. Hundreds of cars being there means hundreds or thousands of people showed up. Whole businesses exist just to surround and support events like this. The pictures of the children present are proof that generations yet to come are going to keep this kind of thing going.

My heart soars at the thought of Britain and all the historic worlds that will be there forever.

Britain makes me sad

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

North America makes me sad, Alberta more than the rest of Canada, the U.S. more than Canada, the South more than the North, the coasts more than the interior, the New England states and New York less than the rest of the Northern states. People who think past worlds unimportant always make me sad, in ways that I will never be able to express.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

Eh, that world for one is still going strong. A lot of its offspring appear to go to my college ><. The modern incarnations of same may appear vulgar and insufferable but to be fair, so were the old ones, and the continuity is all there. Waugh said he wrote Brideshead Revisited as a swansong for a world he thought was about to disappear, only to find that it reasserted itself with vigour after the war.

I'm not entirely sure who it was that said, England has history, America has geography. And it's true, I think; I can barely fit into my head the idea of a land big enough that you can walk across it for a week without human contact or evidence of human existence. I mean, the remote places in England can kill you, but it's though climactic hostility rather than sheer /size/. England is physically small but dense; the size is all in the fourth dimension.

[meirion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's May Week in Cambridge right now. As I write the Bright Young Things are out there living their Brideshead Revisited post-exam mania, while Tedious Old Farts like me complain about the noise from the College Ball fireworks displays (I exaggerate for effect).

Seriously, half the time Cambridge feels like it's still in 1908; the other half of the time it feels like it's a parody of that time.