Comments on: The Great War & Modern Enchantment http://hilobrow.com/2009/11/11/8113/ Middlebrow is not the solution Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:00:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Peggy http://hilobrow.com/2009/11/11/8113/comment-page-1/#comment-1110 Peggy Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:01:11 +0000 http://hilobrow.com/?p=8113#comment-1110 There is an impressive installation/environment in Second Life about WWI poetry, sponsored by Oxford University. For Dulce et decorum est (for one example), there is a slideshow with Owens' handwritten notes for the poem, someone reading it aloud, a WWI vet's account (from the recorded archives) about his first mustard gas attack, where they didn't even know what was happening to them (!!!!), and a swarm of words from both the poem, the account, and reports of the day, that permeated the trenches and bombed out landscape like weather, along with a poisonous green mist. Describing it makes it sound too literal; apologies, it was better than that. "Entrenched, over the top, no man's land; an enhanced sense of irony, a suspicion of sentimentality, and an overrun of euphemism - in many ways, this conflict wrote the world we live in." Some pix, links, and my travel tale here: http://pseudoreality.typepad.com/ There is an impressive installation/environment in Second Life about WWI poetry, sponsored by Oxford University. For Dulce et decorum est (for one example), there is a slideshow with Owens’ handwritten notes for the poem, someone reading it aloud, a WWI vet’s account (from the recorded archives) about his first mustard gas attack, where they didn’t even know what was happening to them (!!!!), and a swarm of words from both the poem, the account, and reports of the day, that permeated the trenches and bombed out landscape like weather, along with a poisonous green mist. Describing it makes it sound too literal; apologies, it was better than that.

“Entrenched, over the top, no man’s land; an enhanced sense of irony, a suspicion of sentimentality, and an overrun of euphemism – in many ways, this conflict wrote the world we live in.” Some pix, links, and my travel tale here: http://pseudoreality.typepad.com/

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