'I do it, because I must. His hand on mine.'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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This is a place-holder for a review of the world premiere of Sally Beamish and David Harsent's The Judas Passion, as performed at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, Essex, on Sunday 24 September (after broadcaster Tom Service had hosted a pre-concert talk with them from 7.30 p.m.)

[...]

The story of Christ from an unlikely perspective: @sfbeamish & @DavidHarsent1 discuss their #JudasPassion @theoae https://t.co/PpRqkOLSDK pic.twitter.com/35FXuGwH6d

— BBC Front Row (@BBCFrontRow) September 22, 2017

Superb questioning of @sfbeamish and @DavidHarsent1, by the ever-acute / expressive @tomservice, before #JudasPassion WP at @SaffronHallSW !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 24, 2017

[...]

#Judaspassion rehearsals at the amazing Saffron Hall for @theoae. Apologies for lack of flash. Gorgeous place to play, fab crew. #happyperc pic.twitter.com/ehgbMgVmxn

— chris brannick (@chrisbrannick) September 24, 2017

You were terrific, @chrisbrannick, from deft tubular-bell chimes to the Judas chimes to the bass rumble and drum-beats of the work's close ! https://t.co/5Y9jUDOE8o

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 24, 2017

*blush* #humblebrag https://t.co/362AfUabYf

— chris brannick (@chrisbrannick) September 25, 2017

[...]


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

This is an hard saying; who can hear it ?¹

This is a pre-Festival review of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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16 August

This is the original pre-Festival review [ahead of what was published] of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

‘Now go, for one sole will is in us both,
Thou Leader, and thou Lord, and Master, thou.’
Thus said I to him ; and, when he had moved,

I entered on the deep and savage way.

Inferno², Canto II, 139–142

Two men in a forest does not sound as though it has significant filmic possibilities. [Sadly, in the case of Prince Avalanche (2013), one would be right (because one yearned for what makes The Odd Couple (1968) alive).]

A Catalan film for @camfilmfest will be amazing full size : its atmosphere, tension, uncertainty, and reminders of Beckettt, Dante, Borges !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2015

In the case of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014), though, one’s cultural resonance is not even with that play about which, in 1955, Philip Hope-Wallace thought himself drily observing that if about anything, [it] is ostensibly about two tramps who spend the two acts, two evenings long, under a tree on a bit of waste ground ‘waiting for Godot’. What it evokes more is Molloy, the two-character first part of the trilogy of Samuel Beckettt’s great mature novels (to which we return below), regarding which Beckettt described En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) : written as a relaxation from the rather awful³ prose I was writing at the time :

In our being with Judes (Marc García Coté) and Oriol Pla (Iu), we know, if not from the opening scene of the film (Jan Cornet’s sole appearance, with Coté), then from the quotation from The Bible that directly follows (Matthew 27 : 3–5), that, taking us from The Mount of Olives onwards, there is a scriptural grounding for what we see : as one will, it is exegesis, re-imagining, or re-interpretation of Judas, betraying Christ with a kiss for money, and how those pieces of silver weigh on him (in English, we refer to 'pieces of silver', because of the King James’ Version). (At times, they fascinate, horrify or even seem to reassure Judes (though he wanted to repel them), yet he also fears them being taken, so they give him care about losing them.) And, with cultures where there is a Spanish-speaking tradition, even if the language of the film is firmly Catalan, one is never far from Jorge Luis Borges – thinking, most immediately, of his daring short-story-cum-scholarly-paper from 1944, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (‘Three versions of Judas’) [the link here is to the Wikipedia® web-page for the story, and here to an English translation].

Not uniquely for him, Borges mixes fact and fabrication, bogusly ascribing quotations at the same time as presenting real ones (many a short story of his is headed with quoted words, such as ‘El milago secreto’ (‘The Secret Miracle’), citing The Koran). Yet there is also the level on which, not just through the transmission of thought down the centuries, different times merge and become confused in his canon : in ‘El milago secreto’, the miracle is the relativity of Time, where the writer Jaromir Hladík’s divine petition is answered by its stopping for one group of people, but not for him). So it is that, towards the end of the third of the learned footnotes to ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (Borges, in – and in spite of – his academic poise and style, is always prompting us to consider How much is jest, and how much am I in earnest ?), we read the passage that probably connects Borges most to Tots els camins de Déu⁴ :

He [Erik Erfjord] writes that the crucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receive the pieces of silver ; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple ; he continues to knot the hangman's noose on the field of blood.


And the foot-note ends with a comment in parentheses : (Erfjord, to justify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladík.) Yes, Borges (through this [real or imagined] Erik Erfjord, is relying on the same Jaromir Hladík who, in ‘El milago secreto’, prayed for a miracle concerning Time, and was granted one…



Self-referentially, whether this work by Borges was per se known to, and prompted, director Gemma Ferraté and her co-writer Eduard Sola then becomes immaterial, because the patterns of ideas themselves, as of events, will be subject to circularity, repetitiousness, even recursivity… Regarding the place that their film partly inhabits, Judas, as Borges’ quoted words have it, ceaselessly through all eternity […] continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple. And, in the same way, the spirit of Dante is present here.

For, in his great Divina Commedìa, right at the start of Inferno (and within just the first of a further thirty-three Canti) his personified self, too, finds himself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost, meets Virgil, his guide through Inferno and Purgatorio (as far as Canto XXX), and learns that he will be enlightened as to God’s perspective on his and other human lives. In the title of the work, the word ‘Commedìa’ is better understood as a cosmological, rather than a comedic, view [even if Dante does, of course, also delight in settling scores with political and other opponents in what he presents (e.g. in Canto XXXIII)] :

‘Through me the way is to the city dolent ;
Through me the way is to eternal dole ;
Through me the way among the people lost.’

Inferno², Canto III, 1–3

Those who know their Dante will know that the most lost of all – not exactly an Orwellian All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – are beheld in Canto XXXIV, in the three mouths of Cocytus. They are those who betrayed : Brutus, Cassius, and our own Judas Iscariot, so, in recursive terms, the film feels Dante-esque, and, by invoking Dante, leads us back to Judas ?

But also back to Beckettt, a talented linguist³, who relished Dante, and some of whose texts from the 1950s to the 1970s deliberately conjure up hellish place (or spaces, one even being called The Lost Ones¹ (Le Dépeupleur )), and whose two narrators, in his novel Molloy, are inextricably linked with each other [and with those of Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and The Unnamable (L’Innomable)] : Moran is sent to bring Molloy back, and Molloy has an other-worldly awareness that help is on its way. Both travel on foot (or end up travelling thus – both had bicycles at one point), if not, becoming more and more decrepit, crawling. Both have sinister encounters with others, en route, that feel close to the sometimes taut interplay between Judes and Iu, but there is also the more explicit co-dependency of Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) in Godot, although they do struggle with a desire for freedom / separation [as foreshadowed in Mercier et Camier].


In these terms, then, several dimensions away from the connotations of Prince Avalanche, and rather, in its cinematic resemblance, close both to the emotional darkness of the work of another Catalan director, Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font, with Otel.lo (Othello) (2012), and to its intriguing approach to an established text. [Before Preti Taneja’s (@PretiTaneja’s) article appreciative of the film appeared in The Guardian (@guardian), Al-Rahmoun Font (@Al_RahmounFont) was interviewed at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) (before, of course, having a punting lesson)].

Despite the physicality of Judes’ journeying⁵, this film is less like others such as How I Live Now (2013) and Lore (2012), though, where what we see Eddie and Lore, respectively, endure is part of what changes who they are when they get ‘home’ (but at least as big a part is reacting to what war does to them). Nor is it the Everyman-type temporal and scenic progress of Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973), but rather a voyage in the inner territory of the mind :

Nearly at the very end of the film, there is an exchange of dialogue, which the film, to begin with, makes us keep out of except to see it develop through gesture and body language. Then, when we are able to hear their utterances, we find that Judes and Iu have touched now on eschatological topics that have been present to our mind all along, and which a closing image, quoting Michelangelo, makes clear : Dante, Borges, Beckettt are all part of it, but there is also confirmation of how relevant, in some of the locations and the overall feel, all along has been the remarkable piece of film-making that is Hors Satan (2011).

‘Thee it behoves to take another road,’
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
‘If, from this savage place, thou wouldst escape […]’

Inferno**, Canto I, 91–93


The music of the film has been sparing and subtle [from two instrumentalists (Jens Neumaier / Maik Alemany) on guitars and keyboards (piano / synthesizers), and Sandrine Robillard on cello], but it is used to prevent us being in the early part of that conversation between Judes and Iu. At the start of the film, it only emerges, as snatches of sound that we catch at whether we have heard, and marking the first real point of contact between the men.

Previously, we have seen Judes, hesitating as to whether someone is really there behind him, and with long shots that linger until, from his point of view, maybe we see movement. At two other significant moments, which signal the place where a change of heart / mind then occurs, the kinds of motion are mirrored differently, first with a degree of energy by guitar and synthesizer, and, then with tentative elegiacism of keyboard arpeggios, against which the cello weaves its line. All in keeping with a film that is not so much meditative as contemplative – a reflection, as the literary parallels are, on life and its mysteries, and an encouragement to give due heed to the latter in evaluating the former.


Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord

Isaiah 55 : 7–8 (King James' Version)



End-notes

¹ John 6 : 60, in the King James’ Version, which both ends the section that began with 6 : 25 (at 6 : 44, No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day), and links with 6 : 61–71, which concludes with a parenthetical mention of ‘Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon’.

² The first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedìa, in Longfellow’s translation.

³ Not least since Beckettt begrudged deriving recognition for his works from Godot, it is unlikely that he meant ‘awful’ to mean bad in the sense of ‘of poor quality’ (and maybe actually in that of full of awe) ? He may well have written these words originally in French, his preferred language (although he was Anglo-Irish), since he had a master’s degree in foreign languages from Trinity College, Dublin, where he had studied Dante. (In Beckettt’s early prose work More Pricks Than Kicks, one of the stories / sections is even called ‘Dante and the Lobster’.)

⁴ Though there is also the poem ‘Matthew XXVII : 9’.

⁵ In the passages of rough-going, we are right there (through use of a close microphone and hand-holding the camera without a stabilizer) with Marc García Coté’s breathing, and the ups, downs and stumbles of the way, whereas we are more steady, and at a distance, for some shots when he seeks repose.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The best of Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 : in the John Akomfrah retrospective

This is a Festival review of The Nine Muses (2010)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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24 June

This is a Festival review of The Nine Muses (2010), screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015, in a retrospective of Director John Akomfrah’s work,
on Monday 8 June at 12.00 p.m.

The Nine Muses (2010) was easily the best film seen at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 (@sheffdocfest), and, this Tweet, from the previous night, proved prophetic :

So far, two main approaches from @sheffdocfest films : a broadly chronological unfolding (sometimes in real time) and complementary strands.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 7, 2015

The film opens with large, beautiful vistas, as if of Scandinavian fjords, across which we slowly pan, left to right.

They are perfect, but we sense the coldness in their perfection – and, when we come nearer to and look at the land from a craft, it seems washed out in a grey, inhospitable way (perhaps an effect achieved by colour grading ?). So these views stir something in us already, which builds with the accretion of readings from classic sources such as various episodes from The Odyssey and the opening Cantos of Dante’s Inferno (from The Divine Comedy*) : quite likely, director John Akomfrah intended, with this vivid, unmistakable choice of a land of ice and snow, that we should already be reminded – have stirrings – of ancient lore, such as in the following passages, mentioning a land of winter (and an ideal realm, too) ?

HYPERBOREA was a fabulous realm of eternal spring located in the far north beyond the land of winter. Its people were a blessed, long-lived race free of war, hard toil, and the ravages of old age and disease.

[…] To the south the realm was guarded by the bitterly cold peaks of the near-impassable Rhipaion mountains. […] Directly to the south lay Pterophoros, a desolate, snow-covered land cursed by eternal winter.

From Land Hyperborea

From that first implication, visual images of snowbound land- and cityscapes, and aural images of journeys, deception, captivity and slavery – as Odysseus and others revolve patterns of voyage, shipwreck, and escape combine and complement each other, whilst thoughtfully chosen archive footage** establishes a freezing Britain. Also established, by a title, is the theme of the Muses***, though it is probably harder to keep in mind the film’s apparent Muse-by-Muse taxonomy (or even to be certain whether that scheme is seen through to the end ?).

On a first viewing, certainly, it seemed more convenient to allow the film’s mutually reinforcing elements to work, as it were, impressionistically. For, apart from the ‘purely visual’, one is quite occupied with texts that appear on title-cards (e.g. from Emily Dickinson****), readings (much from Samuel Beckettt’s novels****, with some repeated passages), and music (such as Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel). (Director John Akomfrah went on to direct The Stuart Hall Project (2013), similarly rich in content for a single viewing, and seeming longer than its 103 mins.)

Meanwhile, as the film develops, with the specially shot scenes juxtaposing their more nearby context in the natural, material world with a figure***** in a synthetic jacket (sometimes two figures – if so, in jackets of different colour), we hear words of dislocation and disassociation from Beckettt (or Finnegans Wake, 'The Song of Songs', or Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy), and maybe reflect on the appropriacy of needing to belong where one is :

Beckettt, brought up in the halfway world of being Anglo-Irish, and all too easily appropriated as an English writer (though he actually learnt his craft by writing in French, and came to translate his prose into English), and finding himself by meeting Joyce in Paris and exiling himself in France – starting with Watt, for some, the worlds that he found to express in his novels, and which Akomfrah has fittingly and adeptly alluded to here by quotation.

Retrospective screening of our acclaimed #TheNineMuses today at @sheffdocfest by the visionary John Akomfrah! pic.twitter.com/D41rXeBsyA

— Miikka Leskinen (@Miikka_Leskinen) June 8, 2015

Achieving potency by its layering of material, The Nine Muses (2010) easily laid down a challenge to other film-makers at Sheffield to think to their craft (and worryingly many in the screening did not seem drawn by this work and willing to stay for the duration) – a challenge not, if this is regarded in essay style, necessarily to work within this format, but to remind them :

Cinema, when it is at its strongest and best, is not grounded or rooted in only the visual (and with what is found to accompany it), but in being a total entity, and, in a different sphere, one might think of the conception and execution of Tarkovsky’s final piece of work :

@ICALondon One for the diary... Tarkovsky. Amazing film maker, and artist. The Sacrifice was the film he made once leaving Russia..one year

— Katherine Da Silva (@KathyDaSilva2) June 23, 2015

Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* All were credited as being on Naxos Audiobooks.

** Sacrificing concern at any grainy quality (or other issue) to concentrate on content and significance of the imagery.

*** A title tells us that they are the nine female children of Mnemosyne (the Goddess of Memory), fathered by Zeus.

**** Also, T. S. Eliot ('The Journey of the Magi' ?), and e e cummings. With Beckettt, Molloy and The Unnamable are credited (though one could have sworn that Malone was there, too).

***** There are credits for wearers of a blue jacket, two yellow jackets (one of whom was Akomfrah), and two black jackets.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

From the archive : Much-delayed review of Max Barton’s No Magic – performance 6 March 2010 !

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12 May

As one who came to Cambridge’s ADC Theatre (Amateur Dramatic Club (@adctheatre)) that night clutching book 6 of Harry Potter (HP and the Half-Blood Prince), it was a distinct surprise – not to say ‘spooky’ – to find that the performance opened with Potter, and, within moments, Max Barton, as his own Harry, crying out Expelliarmus !.

In the flyer’s write-up, the play’s origins in Barton’s reading of Jekyll and Hyde are made explicit. However, for anyone with a background in the world of mental-health, they make one wonder whether, in his premise for the work, he has mistaken the symptomatology of multiple personality disorder (as it tends to be called, rather than split personality) for that of paranoid schizophrenia*.

In fact, the suspicion turned out to be justified, because, although it was suggested that Harry might have been hearing voices (as those with the diagnosis of schizophrenia commonly, but not invariably do (auditory hallucination)), there was great weight placed on the notion that he was acting under the name of Edward Catcher (we do not learn Harry’s surname) as a distinct personality, who has distinctly violent, even murderous, inclinations. [Touches of Hitchock’s Psycho (1960), not to mention Powell’s Peeping Tom from the same year ?]

As the drama unfolded, any belief dissipated (although it did occasionally revive) that Barton might have seen a more subtle parallel between Hyde and the apparent subject of his own work : it had been initally fostered by the fact that the programme notes, despite the flyer’s suggestion, did not mention Stevenson after all). There was also an increasing feeling that the seeming similarities with Sebastian Faulks’ novel Engleby**, itself clearly set in Cambridge, might be more than coincidental, and that maybe, when it came to the involvement of a lawyer in Harry’s unfolding case, implausibly so. Yet, Faulks’ novel, too, appears to have, as its proper subject personality disorder, its possible origins, and its public understanding.

Interestingly, in the scenes with the lawyer, and in Harry’s prior experiences at some unnamed Cambridge college, there was an allusion to the finding attested by an apparent body of research – the link, because skunk is a highly concentrated form of hash (specially cultivated for being stronger than the ‘traditional’ forms of hash), between its use and the onset of schizophrenia. Or, perhaps more properly, the sorts of psychotic experiences to which this label is frequently applied. What made this allusion relevant was the way in which Barton’s text appeared to suggest is that there might be a cynical manipulation of such research findings, by the legal profession, to exculpate the guilty from full responsibility for their crimes – a topic more fully and knowingly dealt with by Faulks’ eponymous Corpus graduate (Harry does not get to graduate).

The way in which No Magic and Engleby both fight shy of specificity are also, one can only believe, more than chance: Faulks renames a well-known pub in Bene’t Street, but, at the same time, makes it so clear, from the choice of alternative name, which one he is referring to, as one of Engleby’s largely solitary drinking haunts, that one wonders why he has bothered. Likewise, although Barton himself is at Cambridge, we are only told in a wry way that Harry is there, in a running joke, carried off to great effect by the cast. There is, though, no way of knowing at which college the 'real' Edward Catcher was an undergraduate (although, for no good reason, one suspects Fitzwilliam).



Postscript

If completed, this review would have dealt with the subjects whose headings follow, but the fact that it did not is why it is incomplete… [However, recollected comments, in square brackets such as these, have been added - there was some contemporaneous correspondence with Barton, which, when located, may provide more detail / confirmation] :


1. Blocking / staging
[The most vivid moment was one that reminded of the infernal scenes in What Dreams May Come (1998) (not to say Doré's illustrations of Dante), and the terror of Event Horizon (1997), in an effective combination of latex and lighting***]


2. Acting
[The principals were probably fine, with Barton as Harry****]


3. Ensemble
[Almost certainly generally tight enough, even if some scenes could have been dwelt on less in the playing]


4. Text
[As mentioned, there was a certain teasing coyness about where this place (Cambridge) might be, which suited the likely audience congratulating itself that it was 'in the know' - hard to remember now whether Barton's evocation succeeded, probably in the midst of in-jokes, in portraying a more recognizable Cambridge than Larkin did Oxford in his undergraduate novel Jill]


5. Further comments about pathology
[Only that the attempt to cover similar ground to Faulks also gave rise to somewhat cynical attempt to take down the whole justice system by association - a matter much in people's minds with Yewtree just now]



End-notes

* A useful confirmation can be found in the published diary of Phoebe Pluckrose-Oliver, who was the show's producer :

Last night I was up until 1am in the Homerton auditorium making 3.5m by 2m frames out of Lycra and scaffolding for the set we’ve devised for the play. [...]

The frames are an important part of the set for the play, which is called ‘No Magic’. Written by a second year student on my course, Max Barton, it’s about an undergraduate who develops paranoid schizophrenia.


** Hutchinson, London, 2007.

*** This aspect seemed to have attracted favourable comment from Nathan Brooker, the (more-timely) reviewer for Varsity (though issue 731 seemed to be having a dig and /or private joke with the last of its (festive) Predictions : Max Barton will resurrect his verse-comedy No Magic).

**** The resource of camdram.net is interesting...

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Eyes full of tears

This is a Festival review of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008)

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7 October

This is a Festival review of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008)

Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) is not an overtly flashy film, but – deservedly – it does make big claims on our attention, and on our hearts. As can be seen, it is being shown not because it was made in the last year, but it is a UK premiere, part of the Catalan strand, again curated by Ramon Lamarca after a successful first appearance at the Festival last year, which made many friends.

I have written elsewhere about another Catalan film at the Festival (also a UK premiere), The Redemption of the Fish, which I watched twice, and I would – if possible – gladly have done the same with this film, but it is quality that the films have in common, not their subject-matter.

This one concerns the Spanish Civil War and the power of memory – what is best forgotten about when Italian air forces bombed Barcelona, and what should never be forgotten. One review that I have read (maybe this one) challenges how the film is put together, and its story and pace, but, for me, these are what most attracted me to it, for it uses acted scenes, documentary, and faux-documentary, e.g. to introduce the men who were in the anti-aircraft batteries that ringed the city on a number of eminences.

We see men and women, down in the shelters and tunnels that also served to wait out air-raids, interviewed by the same woman who challenges a visiting professor, apparently a Dante scholar and visiting for a conference, and pesters to get to speak to him – what some mistake for the monotonous course of this film is actually provoking us to ask ourselves (if we have not just read up all about it beforehand*) what is real, what is not, and what remembered, what feigned forgetfulness.

In this, we are as much in a confused state as the main characters (Maria (Gabriela Flores) and Mario (Paolo Ferrari), played with great conviction), who think that they know what is right, and not preconception, until life throws them up in each other’s way. After all that we have seen and heard, the closing scenes, and the beautiful reading that the professor gives from the opening of the Inferno, are painfully touching, speaking for all who have been lost.

For the second time this Festival, I was moved to tears just by that simplicity.


End-notes

* My approach to a film is that it should, for good or ill, stand for itself : if I need to have read the book or play on which it is based, it has failed in its own terms, and, if it cannot speak for itself, it is just images.


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Experience, though noon auctoritee

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15 May (Posted at Paddington Station) [re-edited 31 October 2021]

So Geoffrey Chaucer had the Wife of Bath say. Chaucer was a poet, but also a civil servant, diplomat, ambassador (Ambassador, you’re spoiling us !), and knew a bit about life, and Boccaccio, French dream-poetry, Latinate Christian (?) philosophy…

His Boke of the Duchess, so magical, mysterious, moving – this persona he developed of a slow-witted dreamer, a little resembling Dante’s of himself in the Commedia, but less knowing, more innocent, and so stumbling across the man whom we suppose to be the inconsolable John of Gaunt (a nearby golf-club is named after John), weeping over the death of Blaunche.

Does Chaucer tells us, in the guise of the Wife of Bath, that we keep making the same ‘mistakes’, falling in love with the same woman, with a dream of a woman, the scent (or ghost) of a woman¹ ? Probably, as he has so much to say that I don’t know why people don’t seem to read him more – how about Brush up your Chaucer – start quoting him now !, and, if I weren’t drawn to that story about the man in black, I’d go to his House of Fame :

We think, in this emotionally, mentally and financially impoverished world, that we know it all, with our smartphones, Internet², and high-frequency trading. I suspect that Chaucer knew more in the fourteenth century, if we just hear what the poet has to say about spin, smear, slander – forget The Prince, for this man really knew what power and repute / reputation are, and how they are won, lost, granted and revoked.

So, in what remains of May, I’m going back to these works, to witness Chaucer - as wordsmith - wrestle with sleep, meet a goddess all in white, overhear the birds pairing up, and, if I’m finally up to it, let him tell me how to use an astrolabe³…


End-notes

¹ Only a surprisingly dirty-minded person (such as one woman with whom I once worked…) would think, nay openly insist, that to be an obscene and crude film-title.

² I knew someone else who aspirated it – is it really, though, the Hindernet (the technological equivalent of Hindemith), full of Blind Alleys, Red Herrings, Love-on-a-Stick ?

³ The former colleague in the first end-note should heed : if you don’t know what an astrolabe is (or aspirating²), don’t make up some coarse idea !


Post-script :

Chaucer's telling of the story of Chaunticleer ('The Nun's Priest's Tale') has more potential ? !

Or, if one has not deliberately misunderstood one about Constance ('The Man of Law's Tale'), there's that concerning Griselde ('The Clerk's Tale')...https://t.co/QyX72QYkS1

2 / 2 https://t.co/SpmzljCnQq

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021

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Complexity, perplexity and diversity

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16 March

I was feeling left out, with everyone I knew making pacts, leaving me feeling left out - oh, I've already said that, so that just shows that I'd be the perfect patsy for one of these 'I'll be damned!', Yes, you will... arrangements.

Anyway, wanting to know where I was going wrong, I called around on Faust, because, after all, he should know, with a pact named after him and all that. Turns out that he's packed and left for Vienna, wanting a word with Freud.

Quite an angry word, as it turned out when I next saw him, because, not satisfied with one thing to his name, he's upset that, for all the bedding of women that he did and in a highly cynical and opportunistic way (for which, of course, now he's repentant), Freud's only gone and called his relevant complex after Don Juan! Faust swears that the Don, apart from anything else, grossly inflated his tally, and besides he, Faust, isn't fictional.

I tried to intervene with the observation that maybe Oedipus was fictional, but he would have none of it, adjuring by his britches (though I prefer 'breeches') that he'd, many a time, had a session with old Oed down at The Golden Dog, and he could drink most men under the table. (Still, I think it could easily explain that rather gratuitous bit of charioteer rage* that caused him a bit of bother.)

Back at me knocking in vain outside Faust's house, who should come along but Dante! A lot of people stay away from him, because she was really rather young even for his day, and they like to lump him in with that Lewis Carroll, why did he have child friends and take photographs of them? rap, but he's OK, if a bit grumpy too much of the time (something to do with spots on the moon, I gather from Beckettt).


To be continued



End-notes

* I'm told that people, lulled by the alliteration, want to style this after the substrate, but you couldn't call what Laertes was driving on a road, and, anyway, the rage was directed at him, not at the road. When Basil Fawlty's car misbehaves, he breaks off a branch and, logically enough, beats the bonnet - hitting the road, unnecessarily violent as it sounds, is something else again.


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My 'favourite' browser (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 February

Just from the sound of its name, you understand, which is pleasing in the way that the gruff term 'browser' is: GranParadiso.

Although, it has echoes of Cinema Paradiso (1988), and, inevitably, Dante's canti, it reminds me most of a cheese (you know the one!).

And, within less time than it took to pen what appears above, I could know quite a bit more about this browser, thanks to another one, and, probably, even download it and set it as my default:

This software of whose existence I had been unaware until the lifetime statistics revealed that 21 pageviews had been made using it, some of them, perhaps, by you...


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