Chi Rho: Christ Never Left Christmas

I've been a fan of symbols, logos, pictograms, and sundry glyphs throughout history. It's hard for me to say just when that fascination set in. Perhaps it was how quickly I learned to recognize and write my alphabet. Or maybe it was the realization that some symbols have fixed meanings and some are a bit more fluid. We are surrounded by them. Everywhere. And I think I recognized that early on. I certainly wanted to know, much to the frustration of my poor exhausted dad, what it all meant. What really cemented the intrigue, I think, was my sixth grade religion class. I think so because I have been working on logos for the holiday.

In truth, I am kinda peeved that so many "Put Christ back in Christmas" Christians have no idea that he never really left. So as I was preparing the counterpoints to the bouts of "It's Merry Christmas not Happy Holidays" garbage that are about to schmear my facebook page. Being peeved led to a retort. In the process of the retort I realized that the origins of my glyph glee had to have been my religion class. Specifically the discussion about THIS particular glyph.

This is the Chi Rho. It is one of the earliest symbols associated with Christ. It is as significant as the ichthys fish as it was also a sign meant to +protect early Christians from Roman persecution. The glyph is composed of two Greek letters which are superimposed over one another. The Chi, the X, and the P looking letter Rho. They are the first two letters in the Greek word KHRistos. Which is the word Christ.

I read somewhere long, long ago that the Eastern Orthodox churches prefer this reference of Christ as it resembles, somewhat, the caduceus, the symbol of medicine. The Greek Orthodox church and the Byzantines tended to view Christ almost exclusively as a Healer and a Shepard rather than the King of Kings that so many Western churches envision. To them, this would have been the most natural expression of Christ in the written form. And for a long while, the CHI RHO +mas was the preferred decorative form. Imagine how striking this symbol would have been an illuminated manuscript. So much addition symbolism can be assigned this form. The X very literally is a cross. The P very well might be seen as Christ on that cross. The P shares the shape of a shepard's crook, which if the loop is left open a bit on the bottom then the case is made.

The Chi Rho is beautiful as it is rich in heritage. Handwritten manuscripts lend themselves well to such a dramatic, non alphabetical glyph. And this symbol was used well into the Victorian era in what printers would call the display; a headline, the larger advert writing across the top of whole pages or ads. As print media became more cost conscious and the spacing restrictions for large volume printing became something of an issue, there needed to be a way to modify the symbol.

I could bore you with a lot of jargon but I won't. Just look at this line of print. The r,i,n,o and w are a standard height. This is called the x-height. the letters with stems that rise above are called ascenders and the letters with stems and bowls that dip below the writing line are called descenders. The Rho is most definitely ascending. And it gets in the way of making print in newspapers and magazines standard. So, having used the chi rho initially to save type (when it was all made from cast iron on teeny tiny little woodblocks) every time one printed Christmas, the chi rho was used. And then, to make things even easier the chi rho was simplified so that Xmas could be written easier.

And of course, because poster makers and typographers, printers and graphic designers love LOVE love anything new, avante garde or just a bit quirky X-mas became the norm in packaging and Greeting cards. For a very long time in America everyone knew what this meant. I don't know when and I don't know why people got the idea that there was a war on Christmas and the various greetings used through out the year became targets. All I can say is that public school kids don't get taught religious history and Catholic school kids have short memories.

This is SIXTH GRADE stuff!!!!!! This is stuff that we should all know about growing up. This is stuff that we should know so that we don't sound like uneducated asshats. I don't know who decided that there was a war on Christmas. I will guess, most likely correctly, that it was some Christian zealot with a lot of time and a little brain power. Now every fool that goes about with "Merry Xmas" on his greeting card is a candidate for a lynching. How very sad. No one is attacking the holiday. No one took Christ out of Christmas. But, someone did take the brains out of most of the people who have been caught up in the fever of this non-issue.

Text is Beautiful

I have always been a font junkie. Perhaps I mentioned annoying my friends by being able to call out a font used in movie credits... while they roll... in the theater and not just at home with the DVD player? No. Oh well, forget I mentioned it. Anywayyyy.... I have seen these cool looking text clouds in a bunch of places and wondered how they happen. At one point I thought that I would make one at PicMonkey but thought better of it. For now, at least. And it turned out, I didn't have to labor to do it.

Calligraphy. Typography. What ever you want to call the alphabet in its many guises, text is beautiful. And there is a website to prove it. There are a few options and it seems like you could have endless combinations. This is what the 6° blog's cloud looks like. This is what is going on in my head, a representation of the thoughts that I have shared here. This is what we have been focusing on here in Geekdom.

And  I think that I am glad that Dr. Freud isn't here for analysis. For the most part this is a pretty positive cloud, mostly silver linings. It is evident to me from the large green "loss" the large raspberry pink "depression" and medium sized "crap" & "depression" and the smaller sap green "wrong" that there are some dark things for which the larger brilliant words provide cover or succor. Most telling is that the largest word in the bright raspberry is "stories".

Every person on the planet is a living, breathing, walking, talking story. As a writer in general and specifically as a fan of novels, movies and songs, it should not surprise me that this is the word that comes through in a sampling of my blog posts. Several things surprise me about this cloud. But I think I am just going to look at it and appreciate it for what it is for a few days then analyse the hell out of myself later.

Shelfie #1

Michelle Ward started a thing a few years ago, a play on the word Selfie. Art has to have some kind of relevance and reflect its times but not be so obscured by the signs of the times as to completely lose its relevance. Selfies, I don't think, are ever going to die. And artists mostly would rather die than be on the recieving end of a camera's lens. It'a thing. I seem to recall a few conversations waaaayyy back when in which we decided that a person's collections say more than a portrait. Nearly 20 years ago I thought of the concept as a Shelf Life. And yes, the puns are strong with my friends and I.

Shelf Life or Shelfie... I still maintain that what you put on your shelf on display is more revealing than a 1000 self portraits. I don't think she would argue with that since she is the one who came up with the art challenge. But one thing I have to say about the difference between Michelle and I is that she is always going to be more relevant. She is either ahead of the curve or right there in the crest of the arc. My choice of Shelf Life is rooted, literally, in old school science on the Periodic Table. Her choice of Shelfie is fresh and blossoms out of our modern tech life. At any rate, I finally got around to doing something about my shelfies. Ok... one shelfie.


And, of course, it isn't even on the shelf. I don't have any in the room at the moment. Everything is still in storage, where it can be forgotten, left to languish instead of being out in the open as impetus to get back on my own two feet and not have to live with others. It is a very thin cross section of interests. By no means is it a whole picture. And it doesn't even really hit the highlights:

     • Science Fiction

     • Historical Fiction

     •Paranormal Romance

     •Cooking



Dr. Who is represented with a story of 11 sans companions dealing with Vikings and Celts while trying to find an interesting game of Chess. This was a fun read. Brilliant in that you can be right there in the story as if you were really watching it on the screen. It was a quick read too.... 4 hours.

The Last Templar and the Road to Jerusalem are novels revolving around Templar knights. I haven' read either of these yet. I have however seen the Road to Jerusalem. A Scandinavian company produced a miniseries that showed up on Netflix called Arn the Knight Templar. The subtitles made it a little more taxing on the grey matter. But it was a really good movie and I am looking forward to the book.

My Housemate got me hooked on Odd Thomas. Normally not a fan of Dean Koontz, I was kinda skeptical. These surpassed my expectations, to a point. I can not get into the Apocalypse. I am half way through it and I haven't been able to finish. It's been waiting for me since last October. So now it is in the stack of books to read this Summer. I found the last Odd Thomas book in the bargain bin somewhere and I want to finish that by the time I have money for another trip to the bookstore.

The two books by Sherrilyn Kenyon were cheap. The last one of her Dark Hunter novels I read was Archeron. I don't really like the Styxx character so I haven't gotten that to read. These were in the bargain bin recently. Retribution was cheap enough to try out and see if I really had outgrown the novel premise or if I was just shutting down a love of books as part of the tightening the purse strings. Turns out neither was the answer. I just had some literary indigestion.... I'd read so many so fast in rapid succession that I needed a good long break. I am half way through Time Untime.

And of course there is the Frug. Always the Frug. A 2.00 trip into the past can not be beat. I'll be borrowing some of the recipes in the Ancient Cuisines this Summer. Especially the Greek. Greek food just seems to say Summer. All Mediterranean food does. But the Greek foods have a lot of lamb options which I like better than beef.

So what is missing from this snap shot?

Gardening books • Comparative Religions • Christian Apologetics • Books of Hours

Speculative Fiction • History • Biography • English Classics

Language • Metaphysics • Philosophy 

Star Trek • Star Gate • Humorous Science Fiction • Humor

Romance • Women's Literature • Fairy Tales • Children's Literature (illustrated)

Hobby & Craft • Coffee Table Books • Art • Fine Art • Writing

Dictionaries

If I were a Vampire, collecting books would be a full time occupation and my collection would probably rival that of any Library on the planet, including the Bodelian. 

They Die in Real Life

I think I will just spend the rest of 2015 in tears. Jonathan Crombie died. He was 48 and so full of life and humor and goodness that is seems so unfair and tragical that his brain just burst on him. No one is ever going to be a better Gilbert Blythe.

Anne of Green Gables was one of those formative experiences of early adolescence that shape relationships, builds expectations and brings a bit of structure to the scope of ones imagination. Anne Shirley was of so sympathetic a nature that those of us who share her internal dimensions could not help but feel the kindredness of her spirit swirl out in a cosmic mist to envelop us, her friends on the other side of the pages. Each of the characters caught up in her energy were more that archetypal re presentations of personality despite being just that, nosey neighbor, long suffering adopted mother and the patient doting adopted father, the bestie and the teasing boy next door each had a vibrancy of their own which is rather uncommon in supporting characters, and the true testament on Montgomery's work. Even the children who were not touched in the same way that Anne was could relate to her struggles to define herself beyond the limits of her birth and the crazy mishaps that ensued.

While Anne's story is a romanticized telling of a coming of age it does not shy away from the hard topics. It is the perfect book to become a movie; the perfect movie over which to bond with a sister and those who are kindred in spirit. My sister and I will always have Green Gables. The girls in my Christian campus group will always have that weekend when we made the WonderWorks™ presentation a marathon of cookies, milk and anticipation as Anne gets her man which mirrored a good many of each of their experiences. Those of us not destined to pursue married life each had a variety of examples to chose from. For me, in a group of women who would become mothers because they desired so, I found definition and support for being single in the examples of the school teachers who chose to adventure in academia rather than child rearing. Much like the American tale of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables fed the imagination while offering up reality.

No one is ever going to forget the days of tears they shed when Matthew died. I always found Richard Farnsworth a sympathetic creature and gravitated toward him in whatever role he played. Matthew came to life with Farnsworth in the role in such a way as to make him as real and kindred to my dad as any of the aunts and uncles that I had. His death devastated for days. In fact, he made a guest appearance in some forgettable tripe on Hallmark a decade later and I cried all through the thing because it made me miss Matthew. When He died in 2000 I cried buckets then too.

Montgomery wasn't afraid of life in her stories. They are not escapist, though there is a fantastic amount of escapism that occurs. One never really gets to feel as if the pleasant days and dramatic incidents on the page will remain cheery vignettes. Death takes Matthew and Mrs. Lynde's husband. It threatens livestock, the Barry baby and creeps insidiously at the edges of Aunt Josephine's crinolines. But you expect death to come to the older characters as you do in life. You expect youth and enthusiasm to delay the inevitable. We expect that Anne will always moon over her daydreams and scorch something in the kitchen. We expect Gilbert to fail in his resistance to smile when he is being serious or scornful. With the illusion of video, we expect Gilbert to live forever despite having once come perilously close to death from a fever.

When we think Gilbert we think


And all of those times in which he tried to repent for this one mistake. It took years and years for him to win enough forgiveness to be able to ask Anne to marry him. Rescuing her from nearly drowning in her own imagination (quite literally) was not enough. Talk about long suffering!

Jonathan Crombie's Gilbert Blythe did more to shape my idea of relationships and what it is I should be looking for as someone who "suffers" with the burden of imagination and the creative spirit... if I were to ever really truly change my mind and commit myself to the rigors of marriage. There just are not many Gilbert's out there. I thought there might have been a few. But they are Gilbert on the outside. Without a deep and innate sense of caring for all things that Gilbert possesses anything reflective of the immediate sense one has of Gilbert Blythe is only the mirror. Gilbert has a practical way of caring for the less fortunate, the small creatures, and in dealing with disappointment that not many men possess today. Some call it a weakness to care. But when you watch Gilbert, and especially when you get through the first 5 books in the series, you see it is not weakness at all. There is a great strength in sheparding people. You have to be strong so that the weakness of others doesn't tear you down. I've met many a man in recent years who would just wipe the weak from the planet and be done with it.

I find myself always looking for the Gilberts in the world. As I get older I find that task more difficult. The archetype seems to be fading.

Characters die in real life. Somehow, with Jonathan's passing Gilbert is gone too. It was so hard to read the last books knowing that this would be an inevitability. And now... the illusion of immortality which I achieve by conveniently forgetting the end of the story in favor of the first 6 books has come to pass.

Yes. I am going to spend a good deal of this year in tears.

Green Gables

PBS introduced us to Anne Shirley with its Wonderworks production. I read the books much later. One thing that always impressed me was how much the house in the series looked like the island house in Elk Rapids. It became the public library a few years after my grandparents sold the house back to the city. When ever we were near Elk Rapids my mom would stop and we would walk the grounds.

At some point a large tree with gnarled branches sat on the river bank. There was a perch that would hold you over the water and let you dip your toes in the water. Each of us kids took a picture in that tree. It isn't there any more. But the island house is. And it still looks like Green Gables to me.

Marine Humor with English Lit

      

Of course the first thing I think of is the TV show. Which is actually hilarious because Netflix has it and the housemates have started watching it. 

Someone expects to catch a white whale? 

    

 

In for a Penny in for a Pound

Penny dreadful, the pre-cursor to the dime novel of the 50s, is the grand daddy of a genre of literature we know as Pulp fiction. Originating in Britain, what we now know as a magazine, born of newspapers, was a serial publication that featured gothic fiction of a macabre, dark and often salacious nature. Originally intended to be a cheap resource for content for working class adults and sold for a shilling (12 cents), this is the outlet where authors such as Dumas and Dickens could build an audience faster than with traditional book sales. With the popularity of these magazines such as the Strand, publishers began to expand their market share and developed a product aimed at teenagers. Sold for a penny and full of stories in the vein of Dracula, Spring Heeled Jack, curses of Egyptian mummies and the like these cheap editions were printed on pulp paper.

The stories in a penny dreadful are rarely of great literary value as would be Shakespeare. And the topics were of whatever lurid and unconventional spine-tingling subject could be imagined. As the Science Age expanded our understanding of the world, the imagination grew as well and in the 50s when the price climbed to a dime to be sold in stores like Woolworths or any corner drugstore they came to be known as dime novels rather than the penny dreadful. They grew from short serials to full length novels. The writing frequently matched the quality of paper it was printed on and then gained the moniker pulp fiction.

Pulp Fiction is a tawdry genre with characters of dubious honor, personal vendettas and little social convention. So of course it appeals to teenagers. The dime novel with its cheap thrills would lead the way to comics and graphic novels for generations that would follow. The bizarre and fantastic nature of the stories would not change but the characters would get more colorful. Literally.

Now in 2014 the Penny Dreadful returns in the persona of Showtime's blockbuster Summer hit of the same name. It begins May 11th. But showtime is airing a preview for a limited time. I am watching it tonight and I am absolutely mesmerized and a bit distracted with all of my literary history rushing to the front of my brain trying to run a MST3K style commentary while I am watching. Holmes began life in those penny dreadfuls as did the three muskateers. Jules Verne's work, while a bit more significant than appearance in the serials would indicate, found new life in the serial magazines of the day. And as I am watching this all manner of minutia I've gleaned about Victorian era medicine, London police investigations, how newspapers function (with their own morgues), the backstory on the when and where of how some of our most beloved stories were developed.... and I will have to watch it a few times to catch everything I have missed with this commentary in my head.

Penny dreadful stars Timothy Dalton. It is a supernatural show and after his appearance in Dr. Who one might wish he would have stopped there. But this character, Sir Malcolm Murray, is that combination of the great angsty characters that he does so well. He is passionate, determined and rife with guilt. And his wardrobe is all that you could want in Victorian era costuming without looking like he was hit with a plaid stick. (Sorry Ripper Street, but that is too much plaid.)

It also features a woman whom I refer to as "The Bitch from Merlin". The rest of the world knows her as Eva Green. She is a medium, spiritualist and supernatural hunter in the vein of the van Helsings. Her wardrobe is equally magnificent. and her character, is much more likeable than Morganna. Right now I still want to punch her.

Also in the mix is Josh Hartnett as an American gunslinger rescued from having to play at being another Buffalo Bill Cody and having smart Europeans call him out on his tall tales. His character will slowly develop.... I hope. Right now he is little better than the American in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but with potential to be more than a hired gun.

New to me, and looking like he could be Johnny Lee Miller's little brother is a kid fresh out of medical school, still enamored of research and so totally Sherlock in his determination to study to the exclusion of human interaction that unless you can drop a Corpse of Rare Decay on his lap he won't waste one arrhythmic heart beat on you. He is obsessed. When we meet him he is in the dissection room of a college preparatory morgue. And by that I mean, with medical science growing by leaps and bounds, doctors who couldn't make it in practice with the living, took up residence in underground mortuaries to prepare corpses as cadavers for college biology classes. If you know anything about da Vinci you know that he had a similar predilection for knowledge. He dissected when it was against the law to do so in order to learn the human form well enough to be a master in his art. Though amazingly still could not understand a woman's reproductive system.... Boys! At any rate, sitting with his back to the audience, and the rest of the cast, speaking with the huffy air of someone of both superior intellect and self esteem, he whiffs and poofs his disdain like a southern belle waves a handkerchief in the August heat. That is the young Victor Frankenstein for you.

Now once we meet the characters more hell will break lose. By the time we see Dr. F it is readily apparent that there is more to fear in this realm than a Demon Barber on Fleet Street and it is all as deliciously spine tingling as one of those demonic pies.

Penny Dreadful first strikes me as a kind of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen crew. Dorian Grey will appear later and we have our Doc Frankenstein. But those are the only literary names we are given so far. The best thing about this first episode is that we get the League and the fixes that might have made it more than a cult classic. The style of the sets is pure Victorian elegance and steampunk gothic chic. Color and humor come in the form of tertiary characters to keep the somber main cast from dragging us down. And every bizarre cultish practice from around the world is going to show up in some extraordinary way. Anyone who is into the minutia of these topics is going to appreciate the wit and humor of the writers who seem to be able to educate and make fun of the very things of which they are enamored.

One of the professors at a local London college (Cambridge, Oxford, I don't recall) is analyzing some hieroglyphs. He is flamboyant in dress and manner as if relieved to not be dealing with your run of the mill higher education bureaucrats and is housed in a flamboyantly appointed Office of a Victorian Aesthetic with two equally flamboyant birds of Holbein's Opera Pink. As he is explaining to Dalton that the hieroglyphs are 18th dynasty Hieratic (yay me, I knew that) he is waxing jovial about Egyptian style and says "Those Egyptians were a bit madcap when it came to things metaphoric."

I chortled. Out Loud because I have said the same thing about Egyptian Ways of Naming Things in a crowd of art history students. And I got the same response. Cue crickets. The extras and the tertiary cast will have to supply the humor and conviviality we've come to crave with Doctor Who, Sherlock, Ripper Street and Castle because the main characters are too resolute in their pursuit to find anything funny. And I suppose when you are staring monsters in the face and are bereft of Karl the Monk for comic relief (and poison arrow heads, goo 1000 times hotter than the sun) you aren't going to find any of this terribly amusing. Without the relief of people who are so unaware of what really goes bump in the night the show could be more gruesome than entertaining.

I can't wait to see how this goes. Since I don't have Showtime and the BF does this will be one of those end of the run marathons like True Detective was. How thrilling!

Undershaw Uncertainties

Over at the Undershaw Preservation Trust's Facebok page there is some concern that the trust's plans and desires for the home may not fully come to fruition. I am a little confused by the latest post. However, as with all things, one should not count the chickens before they have hatched.

Those of you interested in the outcome of the UPT campaign should stay tuned, participate where you can and keep your prayers going and your fingers crossed. There is significant support for this project from literary circles around the world. But as with cards and Sith Lords, someone always has something up a sleeve... celebrating now may be premature.

I leave the link up in the sidebar for the moment. Until we know for certain the final outcome, it is wise to keep this project in the forefront. Currently the boards are coming off of the windows, revealing the stained glass panels Doyle designed for the house.

Saved!

 

 

 

In what turned out to be a five year mission to explore alternatives to rabid redevelopment, the Undershaw Preservation Trust has successfully raised the funds required to purchase one of the former homes of Arthur Conan Doyle from the developer who purchased it in 2004. After years of languish the home will be restored and dedicated to use as a childrens school.

 

It is a far better use than ones I have suggested and I am excited that this will happen. Surely there will be a campaign to raise funds for the reconstruction costs. As developments unfold I will post updates.

 

Well done, friends, well done indeed.

 



Undershaw

I'm just a 40something kid from northern Michigan and very far removed from the politics of small foreign communities so there is little reason to listen to what I have to say. There is very little reason for me to believe that my voice matters at all. True, alone, it is nothing. Having made my disclaimer let me say that added to other voices I can change the world. And so, after years of wondering what I care enough about to which I could add my service & and apply my heart, I find a cause in Undershaw. But why?

Well, because I was once a 12 year old artsy kid that was too scared of the world to leave the house until I found Holmes as a protector.

When I was a 12 year old kid I found that I loved a good mystery, a puzzle of the non-jigsaw variety, and learned that observation is everything. First in art: you can not draw if you can not see. Second: introverts get run over in social situations because they do not see. True, some of us do not understand what we see when we see it. Mostly though we fail to see what is in front of our faces because we are too busy looking inward. Observation is survival. I learned all about observation through one of the purportedly greatest minds in history: Sherlock Holmes.

Of course like most American kids I got to Holmes through the torture of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, some Scooby Doo mysteries and sundry elementary adventures. It was my freshman year in High School that solidified Holmes as a literary hero. He had already been a larger than life legend for me as my mother recounted his exploits based on her memories of Basil Rathbone films. I was wonderfully surprised to find, through Mr. Trapp, that Holmes was really real and not just a Hollywood concoction. And for the entire reading of "The Speckled Band", which to my absolute horror was about a snake, and the biography of Conan Doyle as a means of introduction I was convinced that Holmes was real. And since it seems he is based almost solely upon Joseph Bell, a professor of Conan Doyle's, I shall maintain for myself the solidity of his person. I could not solve the Speckled Band as Mr. Trapp encouraged us to do as we read. In my defense I would have to have had encyclopedic knowledge of the animal kingdom as known in the Victorian era as it was a rare Indian breed that performed the hideous deeds. What was not, however, defendable, was my failure to recognize the human behaviors described by Conan Doyle and the Old Testament evil housed in the mind and body of Grimsby Roylance.

And that is where Holmes has made his most significant mark on me. Observe!

"You see but you do not observe."

& "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."

The one that gets me every time:

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

We assume. Or we do not care. Holmes taught me a lot about observations and how to formulate theories after observations rather than before. In truth, the failure to observe one's surroundings is likely the single most self-destructive thing that we can do. Mostly we blunder through our lives recovering from missteps more than we do following some kind of a plan. Cagey criminals and ruthless relations whose motivation is to prey on the unobserving masses create a maze of life situations that, were we more observant, could be avoided.

Holmes taught me to be aware of my surroundings at all times. He taught me how to protect my poor little introverted heart from the vagaries of those ruthless individuals who would prey upon me before submitting to the favor of praying for me. When I have suffered the most is when I have laid down Holmes' rules for the sake of civility or emotional satisfaction. When I assume something can not happen I am almost always proven incorrect.

Observation and Logic can make a cruelly solitary and cold life of once vibrant individuals. And so we have Watson to remind us of our human hearts and the compassion with which facts can be disseminated. Watson is the introverts guide through Life the Universe & Everything Human. Between the two of them I think we have the best teachers of social navigation. And neither of them would exist without the writing life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The writer's life informs every word written, every word that survives the red pen before it gets to the editor. Conan Doyle's literary life was lived at Undershaw for a decade. And what a significant decade it was. Arthur Conan Doyle took on the persona of his own creation, Sherlock Holmes, and solved two mysteries that lead to over turned convictions & were helpful in establishing Britain's Court of Criminal Appeal in addition to penning most of the Holmes adventures. Undershaw has welcomed literary friends and peers such as Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolfe and J.M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame. One does not have to spend much energy imagining what vivid conversations may have taken place while Conan Doyle was in residence at Undershaw.... nor what characters future vivid Undershaw conversations might beget.

If  there is a future.

Undershaw had been slated for redevelopment until a group of passionate fans and conservationists began the fight to block demolition and rehabilitation as luxury flats. In 2012 development was halted after a heated legal battle. Now the battle to fund the preservation and restoration ensues with the Undershaw Preservation Trust at the helm. http://www.saveundershaw.com/ Various campaigns around the world have begun to find funds for the venture. The latest one to come to me was in my Facebook feed this morning. I did not hesitate to sign this petition. Though I did hesitate to donate to the ipetions page.  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save_undershaw/I prefer to send money directly to Undershaw. Should you chose to send a gift, here is a direct link http://www.saveundershaw.com/pledge-page.html

True, Conan Doyle lived many places in England. Some of them are now private residences, there is a Sherlock Holmes museum. The argument for not registering the home as a historical landmark due to lack of architectural interest is certainly valid. In its glory days it was not that much different than any other manse of its time. Undershaw was not supposed to be a grand architectural statement like the home of Edith Wharton here in America. Undershaw was to be Mrs. Doyle's retreat to recover from illness and a place for Conan Doyle to write. The architecture is not the thing.

The Literature is the Thing!

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the writer's residence part of Undershaw were preserved? And not because Sherlock is a cultural icon, not because Hollywood needs another monument to its ability to franchise the hell out of anything but because the Literature really is the thing. A Writer's Residency program would be a tremendous tribute to Conan Doyle. While Thomas Hardy can be credited with the birth of the detective genre, and in fact was instrumental in creating Scotland Yard, Arthur Conan Doyle is definitely its most acclaimed teacher & proponent with many acclaimed authors in England and around the world following in his footsteps.

For my own part, living in a city that takes great pride in retrieving buildings of historic significance from the jaws of Decay and Despair while promoting respectful economic growth, I am partial to the idea of usable preservation beyond simple preservation. We are too numerous a species to let things sit upon a shelf so to speak. We must use what we love and love the things that we use. Selfishly, I would love to spend some bleak, misbegotten November at Undershaw under the pretense of writing my great American novel when in fact, I would simply be letting my spirit roam free in hopes of communing with whatever energy the man left behind. If I were to get a novel out of it all the better.

The following link is another blogger's take on Undershaw.
http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2012/03/holmes-home-saving-undershaw
I would hope that one of us would have some influence on the reader's here at 6° of Geekdom and spread awareness. There are a lot of things in this world that need our attention. Saving a smallish building may not seem like much in comparison to saving the Sea, Rainforests, Organic Farms, Wetlands, Endangered Species and our Sanity. It is in the small things that we find a voice and strength to then tend the larger things. Let this be a place to wet your toes before jumping into the ocean to rescue the whales if that should seem to large a task. Small steps lead to larger ones.