It was Cameron’s movie that transformed the Titanic from a coterie phenomenon to a mass one. Since the late fifties there had been a core audience of Titanic buffs, sometimes dubbed ‘rivet counters’, who pored over deck plans and could rhyme off the launch times for all the lifeboats. But after Cameron’s blockbuster, it seemed as if everyone was a rivet counter. At school talks, eight-year-old boys would catch me up on the transverse bulkheads and the number of watertight compartments. Young girls knew all about the dogs on board. And at every book signing there was at least one person claiming that their great-grandparents were almost on the Titanic ––that they had booked tickets and then unaccountably changed their minds. Every Titanic historian I know reports hearing similar stories and it would take a thousand Titanic’s for them all to be true but I’ve stopped disabusing people of this notion. I find it touching that so many people wish to enshrine a connection to the Titanic, however apocryphal, in their family histories.
Hugh Brewster, on our enduring fascination with the mythology of the Titanic.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Let me put it this way: the expectation to be funny when you’re presenting a book about the Titanic can be awfully daunting. There’s also the pressure to satisfy the folks who expect Celine Dion to appear in the poems, but I’ll save my comments on that for another day.

I think I now understand how Whoopi Goldberg felt years ago when folks questioned how she, a sketch comedian, could play a role as serious as Celie in the film adaption of Alice Walker’s A Color Purple. What many folks fail to realize is the sensitivity that it takes to realize the happier parts of our psyches, is often the same sensitivity it takes to fully get the sadness.

The poet Billeh Nickerson, on his new collection of poems inspired by the Titanic, Impact.