This the website for the English (but in fact Irish) journalist, author and book editor John Gill, author of Hype!, The Stars Over Paxos, The Rough Guide to Corfu and the Ionian Islands, Queer Noises, Essential Gaudí and most recently, Andalucía: A Cultural History, among others. The immediate next project is a self-published-and-be-damned orphan text on armchair astronomy, misleadingly titled Space Travel for Beginners, more of which at the icon to left. This will be followed in late 2010 by a cultural history of Athens for the publishers of Andalucía: A Cultural History, Signal Books, followed by a book on Todd Haynes’s film, Far From Heaven, for the British Film Institute’s Modern Classics series, in which queer theory goes postal... mischief involving sound sculptures in remote Greek island forests awaits… as do POD versions of earlier books...
The idea here is to build a web and email presence where friends and others can contact me, and hear about new projects, of which there are more than a few, not all of them entirely legal...
There’s a brief note about me in the sidebar at left, as well as a more conventional CV outlining my career as a journalist, writer and book editor. While I have plenty of work sitting on my Apple iMac desktop to be going on with, I am always open to offers...
This is a small site that will get bigger when I find time to upload the texts of earlier books now unavailable, out of print or listed for ridiculous prices on eBay. Siga, siga...
Meanwhile, there’s an excerpt from Andalucía: A Cultural History, available to read here in the sidebar, and the book is now available at amazon.co.uk and from Signal Books and in bookshops. The US edition is now available and can be ordered from amazon.com, although you can order it from any Amazon site, and elsewhere.
The reason for the Greek phrases peppered through this home page is that this web site is being run from a new base on a small Greek island, an adult-life-long obsession that has produced at least four books. Like Odysseus, I have finally come home.
The Shipping News
Sunny most days, but it can also snow in winter... Check back in at whim for the latest weather report from a room with a view over the Aegean with Alonissos on the sea horizon.
19 July 2010
Houses in motion
It was a toss-up between the title of one of my favourite Talking Heads tracks and one from a Jon Hassell album, Earthquake Island, but the Talking Heads title gives a better flavour of the event: a magnitude 5.1 earthquake that struck between Skopelos and Alonissos at 9.53pm last Friday, 16 July. The epicentre was deep below the seabed over the hillside in the photo above (that’s Alonissos in the distance). Earthquakes are common in this part of the Aegean (and elsewhere in Greece, too; the Greek Mediterranean is veined with tectonic fault lines), but they rarely nudge above the low Twos. While still this side of disaster, a Five-point-something is a biggie, a ‘moderate’on the Richter scale, but one where the amplitude, or shaking effect, rises at an alarming rate: a Five has ten times the shaking effect of a Four. Those much-maligned folks at Wikipedia reckon a Five-plus has a seismic yield comparable to the effect of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The effect was dissipated by the fact that the seismic jolt happened ten kilometres below the surface, or around nine kilometres below the sea floor, between the islands. When the first shockwave hit Skopelos, it was enough to make the house shudder and furniture start swaying, but there was no damage and none of our neighbours seemed unduly alarmed, so we returned to the sofa and a re-run of ‘Shameless’. Aftershocks continued every few hours or so, a particularly lively one waking us at six the following morning. Scampering to our trusty Macs, we found that the Sporades were the site of over twenty (smaller) earthquakes in the space of around twenty-four hours.
Below is a static screen grab of the northern Aegean from the Uni of Athens Seismological Laboratory, with the latest quake ringed in yellow just north of Skopelos. Click into the Laboratory’s interactive map here Real-Time Seismicity for the latest disco dance moves from the floor of the Mediterranean...
1 January 2010
This lighthousekeeper has just returned to his post after nearly a month away travelling to the rim of the world for a week sailing around the Galápagos islands, crossing the equator twice and missing the peak of the Geminid meteor showers almost entirely while anchored in the lee of one of Isla Isabela’s volcanoes. (There was, however, a possible sighting of a Geminid-related fireball over the flanks of one of Isabela’s volcanoes.) The yacht, a 120-ft motor cruiser once owned by Grace Kelly, moored at most of the major islands - Santa Cruz, Isabela, Fernandina, Genovesa, Bartolome, North Seymour and San Cristobal - and the expeditions took in most of the islands’ varied topographies (shield volcanoes, lava fields, dry and wet jungle, mangrove swamps, matorral) and their extraordinary biota: vast colonies of marine and land iguanas, Darwin finches, more blue- (and red-) footed boobies than you could shake a stick at, young albatrosses learning to fly, acrobatic rays, dolphins and sea lions, temperate-zone penguins, turtles mating in the waves, giant land tortoises, and even the rather sad Lonesome George, soon expected to become a father in his hundred-and-twenty-something year. A fittingly minimal selection of images snapped with a cheapo camera reluctantly purchased at Madrid aeropuerto (your correspondent sides with Walter Benjamin in believing the camera to be the handiwork of the devil) may make it on to a new page here as soon as we work out the cheapo camera tech, with accompanying text.
Your lighthousekeeper was pleased to find his quadrant of the Aegean almost as hot as the equator on his return. The past week has seen the islands bathed in glorious sunshine daytimes (the equator gets a lot of cloud cover at this time of year), even though nights have been cool. Neon etos paramoni - roughly, New Year’s Eve - here was magical: a full moon over the bay, a very John Carpenter-ish sea fog hugging Alonissos on the horizon, and the town spangling with the elaborate Christmas light displays the islanders love to use to decorate their homes. The return of expatriate islanders for the holidays even persuaded some of the summer bars on the paralia, seafront, to crack open, but soon they’ll be closing down again until Easter (early this year, beginning on April 4 in both the Roman and Greek Orthodox calendars). Until then, however, we will have one of the best kept secrets in the Mediterranean to ourselves: the Greek islands in winter...
Kronia polla,
John.
