{"id":3802,"date":"2009-03-19T17:08:47","date_gmt":"2009-03-19T21:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=3802"},"modified":"2009-03-19T17:08:47","modified_gmt":"2009-03-19T21:08:47","slug":"wip-serendipity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/wip-serendipity\/","title":{"rendered":"WIP Serendipity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/welshswordrelics.jpg?ssl=1\" target=\"_blank\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Sword relics, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales (click for full-size)\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/welshswordrelics_sm.jpg?resize=250%2C200&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Sword relics, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales (click for full-size)\" width=\"250\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a>In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as &#8220;<a title=\"Froogville\" href=\"http:\/\/froogville.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Froog<\/a>&#8221; recently undertook some research for me. I&#8217;d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it&#8217;s cool; that&#8217;s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about it except (and this is all merely alleged at this point):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The scene is in the Vale of Glamorgan, in Wales.<\/li>\n<li>These are &#8220;restaurated&#8221; monuments.<\/li>\n<li>They are about two meters &#8212; roughly six feet &#8212; in length.<\/li>\n<li>The person who&#8217;d created the wallpaper could remember only that she&#8217;d come across the image on a page linked to from <em>somewhere<\/em> on Wikipedia.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I myself had been able to learn nothing further about the image or about what seem to be these three six-foot swords buried, tip-down, in the earth. Froog, likewise, <a title=\"Froog: comment on 'Being Here (Today)'\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/being-here-today\/#comment-3771\" target=\"_blank\">came up empty-handed<\/a>, despite a no doubt valiant effort.<\/p>\n<p>(He did make an interesting suggestion, though: check Google Earth. Great idea; anyone who thinks that Google Earth is just for geology or geography nerds clearly has not laid eyes on the product recently. It&#8217;s already led me to <a title=\"Cadw: home page\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cadw.wales.gov.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cadw<\/a>, an organization responsible for managing historic monuments and sites &#8212; what they call the &#8220;historic environment&#8221; &#8212; in Wales.)<\/p>\n<p>But he also said, almost by the way, that he&#8217;d grown up in a town close to the Vale of Glamorgan, a town named Monmouth.<\/p>\n<p>At which point I started to whimper for The Missus to come pick me up off the floor. (Well, not really.) As I said to him in my reply, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want or need to know anything about your real name; just reassure me that you&#8217;re not a seven- to eight-hundred-year-old man named Geoffrey.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Cryptic, eh?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The reference was to one Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th-century &#8220;clergyman and one of the major figures in the development of British history and the popularity of tales of King Arthur&#8221; (thanks, <a title=\"Wikipedia, on Geoffrey of Monmouth\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Geoffrey_of_Monmouth\" target=\"_blank\">Wikipedia<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Which provides me with the barest nubbin of a pretext for sharing with you the barest nubbin of something about the Work In Progress.<\/p>\n<p>One thing which excites me about the WIP is that it feels like the closest thing to a complete, original story that I&#8217;ve ever written. As you&#8217;ll see, it&#8217;s not <em>original<\/em> original, but it&#8217;s also not a knock-off. (Which feels very cool, I wanna tell you, to a guy with confidence in his writing but zip to no confidence in his storytelling ability.)<\/p>\n<p>The bulk of the action takes place in late 20th-century Pennsylvania. There in a newish subdivision cluster the book&#8217;s half-dozen protagonists, four of them retired guys, and three of <em>them<\/em> former officers of a small metalworking company named Castle MetalCo.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the main plot, in a series of (I think) five chapters, weaves a subordinate plot dating back two centuries before the main one &#8212; to the late 18th century, predominantly in Wales.<\/p>\n<p>An ale, first concocted by Welsh brewmaster Emrys ap Rhys, provides the principal element connecting the main to the sub-plot. This brew goes by the daunting name <em>Diwrnach Wyddel<\/em> (to pronounce it, think &#8212; roughly &#8212; &#8220;door-knock withal&#8221;); Emrys ap Rhys selected that name carefully, after much consideration, from the name of a character in an old Welsh tale oft told him by his grandmam. (The character in that tale was Irish, as it happens, but that&#8217;s immaterial: the legend, and the ale, are entirely Welsh.)<\/p>\n<p>(Er, and you do get that the ale is fictional, no? Not the tale of Emrys ap Rhys&#8217;s grandmam, however.)<\/p>\n<p>The latter-day Diwrnach Wyddel is the favorite brew of 20th-century Al Castle (founder and past chairman of the board of Castle MetalCo), and it&#8217;s the one which all the protagonists share at their regular Saturday-night pinochle games around Al&#8217;s kitchen table.<\/p>\n<p>And as it happens, Al and his friends, and Castle MetalCo, and Emrys ap Rhys, and Diwrnach Wyddel, the arcs of their pasts and their presents, <em>all<\/em> of them are about to converge at a single point.<\/p>\n<p>That point? Depending on your perspective, bird&#8217;s-eye or microscopic, it lies either in a brand-spanking-new corporate conference center along the Delaware River in New Jersey, or &#8212; more specifically &#8212; in the light glittering upon the surface of a very interesting flagon&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Now, &#8220;Diwrnach Wyddel&#8221; isn&#8217;t the only carefully selected name in the story. Every one of Al Castle&#8217;s friends has a name which is important in some way. There&#8217;s Larry Weston, and Pierce de Borron, and Wayne Wayce, and George and Bonnie Malory: every one of those four last names was the last name of a significant contributor (like Geoffrey of Monmouth) to the legends of King Arthur.<\/p>\n<p>But Geoffrey was first. Without Geoffrey, there&#8217;d likely have been no <em>Sword in the Stone<\/em>, no <em>Excalibur<\/em>, no <em>Once and Future King<\/em> or <em>The Natural<\/em>, no <em>Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/em> (and hence no killer rabbits, nor knights who say &#8220;Ni!&#8221;), arguably no <em>Lord of the Rings<\/em>. And certainly no <em>Grail<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>No way, in short, could I have touched &#8212; have <em>plundered<\/em> &#8212; his name.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why, when Froog said (in the context of a discussion about swords buried by their tips in the Welsh countryside) that he&#8217;d grown up in Monmouth, I had to stop and catch my breath. It felt like Geoffrey himself had reached out across the centuries and touched me, flicked my bemused brow, with a cold fingertip:<\/p>\n<p><em>Yo, Bub<\/em>, it felt as if Geoffrey were saying. <em>Forgetting somebody, maybe?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as &#8220;Froog&#8221; recently undertook some research for me. I&#8217;d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it&#8217;s cool; that&#8217;s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[593,37,5,324,515],"tags":[331,4143,1091,1092,1093],"class_list":{"0":"post-3802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-history-in-the-news","7":"category-onlineworld","8":"category-06_writing","9":"category-researchresources","10":"category-grail","11":"tag-froog","12":"tag-grail","13":"tag-arthur","14":"tag-geoffrey-of-monmouth","15":"tag-google-earth","16":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-Zk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3802"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3817,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions\/3817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}