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21 January
Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)
Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.
So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.
Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.
After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.
So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!
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Friday, 20 January 2012
Great books that bored me (and I didn't finish)
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20 January
So, maybe, they weren't so great...
At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:
Faust
Proust
When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.
So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.
And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.
For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:
Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;
Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).
In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...
* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.
** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.
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20 January
So, maybe, they weren't so great...
At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:
Faust
Proust
When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.
So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.
And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.
For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:
Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;
Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).
In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...
* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.
** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.
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Thursday, 19 January 2012
Every Veran helps! (1)
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20 January
Anyone who has ever used so-called predictive text (that terminology probably calls for a whole posting of its own) on a Nokia® phone will know that the software is programmed to know the name 'Nokia', but not the name that comes out as 'Veran', which, if you will ever be writing a text-message to say that you have called in to one of its shops and is anything needed, you will have to spell and save - but nothing will alter the fact that the first option always comes up as Veran*.
Well, my local Veran, in a sign prominently stuck on the self-service machine such that it impeded the scanner, proudly announced to-night that, between midnight and 6.00 a.m., I could use the machine - and, if I didn't want to, they would open a till! (I can see that being a really popular request - from the point of view of how it would be received, that is...)
The point was that not a single till was then operating, it was well before midnight, and so I was disenfranchised from this marvellous offer of having a human being serve me. The slogan 'Every little helps' may well have disappeared (it only ever was a little, and it helped damn all), so perhaps the new one is 'Lump it or leave'.
Plus whatever happened to their much-vaunted 'Value' range, whose products I realize, all of a sudden, that I don't recall seeing for a long time - were they so choked with toxic ingredients that you could buy a kilo of Value peanuts for something of the order of sixty-nine pence, but, within a week of finishing them, you'd have ingested such a high dose that planning a funeral would be in order?
* And I know well enough why that is - some geek's supposition, in setting it up, that, just as I am more likely to be writing 'Dear Nun' than greeting my own mother, I want to write about the verandah to the recipient of my message, not concerning a well-known chain of supermarkets.
(I've not tried the key-combination, but, as a message to Anna always comes up as 'Dear Bomb', for all that I know the phone is programmed with supposedly useful things like 'dacha', 'veldt', 'lebensraum', 'samovar', etc., etc.)
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20 January
Anyone who has ever used so-called predictive text (that terminology probably calls for a whole posting of its own) on a Nokia® phone will know that the software is programmed to know the name 'Nokia', but not the name that comes out as 'Veran', which, if you will ever be writing a text-message to say that you have called in to one of its shops and is anything needed, you will have to spell and save - but nothing will alter the fact that the first option always comes up as Veran*.
Well, my local Veran, in a sign prominently stuck on the self-service machine such that it impeded the scanner, proudly announced to-night that, between midnight and 6.00 a.m., I could use the machine - and, if I didn't want to, they would open a till! (I can see that being a really popular request - from the point of view of how it would be received, that is...)
The point was that not a single till was then operating, it was well before midnight, and so I was disenfranchised from this marvellous offer of having a human being serve me. The slogan 'Every little helps' may well have disappeared (it only ever was a little, and it helped damn all), so perhaps the new one is 'Lump it or leave'.
Plus whatever happened to their much-vaunted 'Value' range, whose products I realize, all of a sudden, that I don't recall seeing for a long time - were they so choked with toxic ingredients that you could buy a kilo of Value peanuts for something of the order of sixty-nine pence, but, within a week of finishing them, you'd have ingested such a high dose that planning a funeral would be in order?
* And I know well enough why that is - some geek's supposition, in setting it up, that, just as I am more likely to be writing 'Dear Nun' than greeting my own mother, I want to write about the verandah to the recipient of my message, not concerning a well-known chain of supermarkets.
(I've not tried the key-combination, but, as a message to Anna always comes up as 'Dear Bomb', for all that I know the phone is programmed with supposedly useful things like 'dacha', 'veldt', 'lebensraum', 'samovar', etc., etc.)
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More on AI: Boxie
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20 January
Another item that I find of interest at Writer's Rest, where I have posted:
Well, I have to ask: would an investigator from the IRS using such an interface remain as cute in many people's eyes for very long...?
And my AOL sign-on page bombards me with images of people getting hostile and rough with their no less cute PC in an effort to get me to sign on for their System Mechanic (another piece of sotware probably likely to make worse a situation of functionality that is tolerable).
The point being that for someone who sees beyond the 'face' and sees it in a reductionist way as housing just cameras, not real eyes, and the means of controlling the traction and 'the voice', there is nothing to like, and there is nothing capable of feeling any dislike.
It's not, after all, like shouting at the cat when she asks for food and then, if she persists, locking her out!
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20 January
Another item that I find of interest at Writer's Rest, where I have posted:
Well, I have to ask: would an investigator from the IRS using such an interface remain as cute in many people's eyes for very long...?
And my AOL sign-on page bombards me with images of people getting hostile and rough with their no less cute PC in an effort to get me to sign on for their System Mechanic (another piece of sotware probably likely to make worse a situation of functionality that is tolerable).
The point being that for someone who sees beyond the 'face' and sees it in a reductionist way as housing just cameras, not real eyes, and the means of controlling the traction and 'the voice', there is nothing to like, and there is nothing capable of feeling any dislike.
It's not, after all, like shouting at the cat when she asks for food and then, if she persists, locking her out!
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Teatime Tasties Ltd
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20 January
Either you will understand (and share) this compulsion, or you will not - I saw, just once, an HGV bearing this name and was so heartened by its old-fashioned ring that I had to record it. Now is its moment of flying more freely!
For another that puns on the name of a famous painter, this oft-seen one takes some beating:
Vincent Van Hire
I do hate to think what they ask for as a deposit...
A more curious one (again, seen but once) is not for what it obviously relates to - as there is a time of year when it and related matter is fluttering in the currents on our roads - as the choice of name:
R. F. Straw Services
'Would you have need of some straw services?', the pitch might go, I guess. (Beats that stupidly misused word 'logistics', when it means little more than 'haulage', even if the load is refrigerated.)
Finally, a friend has the initials RPC, so I am always tickled by:
RPC Containers Limited
PS And how could I have forgotten - except that I did forget:
Central Crushing Ltd
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20 January
Either you will understand (and share) this compulsion, or you will not - I saw, just once, an HGV bearing this name and was so heartened by its old-fashioned ring that I had to record it. Now is its moment of flying more freely!
For another that puns on the name of a famous painter, this oft-seen one takes some beating:
Vincent Van Hire
I do hate to think what they ask for as a deposit...
A more curious one (again, seen but once) is not for what it obviously relates to - as there is a time of year when it and related matter is fluttering in the currents on our roads - as the choice of name:
R. F. Straw Services
'Would you have need of some straw services?', the pitch might go, I guess. (Beats that stupidly misused word 'logistics', when it means little more than 'haulage', even if the load is refrigerated.)
Finally, a friend has the initials RPC, so I am always tickled by:
RPC Containers Limited
PS And how could I have forgotten - except that I did forget:
Central Crushing Ltd
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Merry birthday ! (1)
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19 January
If anyone can explain what has been raised by adapting some Christmas labels to identify whose is which of two presents being sent together, I'd be glad to know:
We say Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas interchangeably, but we only say Happy birthday*...
End-notes
* The same is true of Easter, actually - does Christmas especially embody merriment (a word used twice by friends this season, when it has no common place in our vocabulary)? Plus there is the word 'mirth', rhymed with 'birth' in the Sussex Carol in a line (or part-line) that goes something like 'news of great mirth': the birth of Jesus is not what we would nowadays think of as a subject for mirth. (I must check, but I think both that the words 'merriment / merry' and 'mirth' are cognates, and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may shed light on an older meaning of the latter... - it does, so see, if you will, Merry birthday ! (2))
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19 January
If anyone can explain what has been raised by adapting some Christmas labels to identify whose is which of two presents being sent together, I'd be glad to know:
We say Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas interchangeably, but we only say Happy birthday*...
End-notes
* The same is true of Easter, actually - does Christmas especially embody merriment (a word used twice by friends this season, when it has no common place in our vocabulary)? Plus there is the word 'mirth', rhymed with 'birth' in the Sussex Carol in a line (or part-line) that goes something like 'news of great mirth': the birth of Jesus is not what we would nowadays think of as a subject for mirth. (I must check, but I think both that the words 'merriment / merry' and 'mirth' are cognates, and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may shed light on an older meaning of the latter... - it does, so see, if you will, Merry birthday ! (2))
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Woody on Amazon®
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19 January
No, not Allen's opinion of Amazon®, although he probably has one and it may be a strong one (heaven help him, if he ever made a joke about Amazon® - the Keaton biographer would infer deep insecurity regarding Internet shopping!), but something that I have just read in a review of Stardust Memories, a series of eight mini-reviews of a boxed set (contrary to popular usage, they are not 'box sets').
If you want to see what K. Gordon rightly wrote, follow this link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Gift-Region-NTSC/dp/0792846052/ref=sr_1_52?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1326966006&sr=1-52
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19 January
No, not Allen's opinion of Amazon®, although he probably has one and it may be a strong one (heaven help him, if he ever made a joke about Amazon® - the Keaton biographer would infer deep insecurity regarding Internet shopping!), but something that I have just read in a review of Stardust Memories, a series of eight mini-reviews of a boxed set (contrary to popular usage, they are not 'box sets').
If you want to see what K. Gordon rightly wrote, follow this link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Gift-Region-NTSC/dp/0792846052/ref=sr_1_52?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1326966006&sr=1-52
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Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Let me dress you like a Hero!
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18 January
Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.
Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.
Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.
Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.
The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .
On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!
And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.
(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)
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18 January
Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.
Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.
Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.
Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.
The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .
On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!
And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.
(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)
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When a joke is an autobiography
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18 January
Take this:
For most of his childhood he was a loner, undoubtedly suffering from an inferiority complex. Consistently depressed and fearful of death, Allen learned to overcome his neuroses with comedy. His perception of his childhood and his inadequacies is now central to his humor. "I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood. I was breast fed through falsies," is just one example.
And this:
Nettie and Martin Konigsberg naturally didn't understand the prodigy they had brought forth [elsewhere described as 'semi-literate'], and were very hurt by his college performance. "My mother was a sensitive woman. When I was thrown out of college she locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles."
And this in a biography of not Allen, but Diane Keaton!
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18 January
Take this:
For most of his childhood he was a loner, undoubtedly suffering from an inferiority complex. Consistently depressed and fearful of death, Allen learned to overcome his neuroses with comedy. His perception of his childhood and his inadequacies is now central to his humor. "I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood. I was breast fed through falsies," is just one example.
And this:
Nettie and Martin Konigsberg naturally didn't understand the prodigy they had brought forth [elsewhere described as 'semi-literate'], and were very hurt by his college performance. "My mother was a sensitive woman. When I was thrown out of college she locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles."
And this in a biography of not Allen, but Diane Keaton!
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Monday, 16 January 2012
The Man Who Mistook his Novel for a Cookery-Book
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17 January
More interesting, though, is the one who made the opposite mistake, and wondered why it was so violent (all that dicing and slicing), intent on carrying out on its citizens all sorts of ritual passages through fire and heat, and always emphasizing that they must have qualities of rawness and freshness.
Better things were hoped for from the closing chapters, but still chopping was going on, accompanied by fairly regular beatings, and the whole sorry business seemed intent on leaving nothing unchanged apart from the occasional victor in the form of 'garnish'.
He'd heard about garnishee proceedings - perhaps a nice, juicy law thriller would be better with these people who seemed more content with being what they were...
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17 January
More interesting, though, is the one who made the opposite mistake, and wondered why it was so violent (all that dicing and slicing), intent on carrying out on its citizens all sorts of ritual passages through fire and heat, and always emphasizing that they must have qualities of rawness and freshness.
Better things were hoped for from the closing chapters, but still chopping was going on, accompanied by fairly regular beatings, and the whole sorry business seemed intent on leaving nothing unchanged apart from the occasional victor in the form of 'garnish'.
He'd heard about garnishee proceedings - perhaps a nice, juicy law thriller would be better with these people who seemed more content with being what they were...
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Russell Hoban topped up my anti-freeze last night
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17 February
Other people will tell you things like this, which, I agree, you may find unlikely:
Samuel Beckettt cleaned and polished my windscreen two days ago
However, what I have gathered through a mate of mine in the trade (he owns GY Motors) is that those who, on our view of things, appear to have died during their literary career (such as Russ Hoban last year) have instead really just no longer found themselves drawn as they always were to everything about writing.
Yes, they may still be found, over coffee, reading a column or two in The London Review of Books, but what energizes them now is no longer producing and spreading their writing. We have misinterpreted as their death the greater pleasure that they take in doing, as a favour for someone else, that little thing that keeps being forgotten about:
The one that niggles every time the driver is about to get into the car, and, again, there isn't time to do it and be in Northampton on time
That recurrence of need is what these working on our cars seek to remedy - that needless feeling of being screwed up that the wiper-blades still haven't been cleaned, or the washer-bottle filled.
My contact tells me that he can't be any more specific than that, but that this pattern is what he has gathered from Tweets that he has seen.
He doesn't know whether it's just novelists (and, as he says, Stevie Smith wrote a novel, so who is a novelist?), but he says that it's clearly just minimal maintenance jobs, so don't expect Thomas Hardy to do your 12,000-mile service, or you'll have a long wait!
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17 February
Other people will tell you things like this, which, I agree, you may find unlikely:
Samuel Beckettt cleaned and polished my windscreen two days ago
However, what I have gathered through a mate of mine in the trade (he owns GY Motors) is that those who, on our view of things, appear to have died during their literary career (such as Russ Hoban last year) have instead really just no longer found themselves drawn as they always were to everything about writing.
Yes, they may still be found, over coffee, reading a column or two in The London Review of Books, but what energizes them now is no longer producing and spreading their writing. We have misinterpreted as their death the greater pleasure that they take in doing, as a favour for someone else, that little thing that keeps being forgotten about:
The one that niggles every time the driver is about to get into the car, and, again, there isn't time to do it and be in Northampton on time
That recurrence of need is what these working on our cars seek to remedy - that needless feeling of being screwed up that the wiper-blades still haven't been cleaned, or the washer-bottle filled.
My contact tells me that he can't be any more specific than that, but that this pattern is what he has gathered from Tweets that he has seen.
He doesn't know whether it's just novelists (and, as he says, Stevie Smith wrote a novel, so who is a novelist?), but he says that it's clearly just minimal maintenance jobs, so don't expect Thomas Hardy to do your 12,000-mile service, or you'll have a long wait!
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Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Amazonspeak
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 January
If I query things with Amazon® by e-mail, the reply that I receive is often in quite obscure English, because many of its staff are from (maybe on) the continent.
It has now spread to routine error messages, where I am now trying to understand the astrological significance of the following, and how I am buying and selling in the same breath:
A card provider will often decline an attempt to charge a payment card if the
name, expiry date, or postcode you entered at buy-sell-leo does not exactly
match their information.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 January
If I query things with Amazon® by e-mail, the reply that I receive is often in quite obscure English, because many of its staff are from (maybe on) the continent.
It has now spread to routine error messages, where I am now trying to understand the astrological significance of the following, and how I am buying and selling in the same breath:
A card provider will often decline an attempt to charge a payment card if the
name, expiry date, or postcode you entered at buy-sell-leo does not exactly
match their information.
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Monday, 9 January 2012
A special screening of Trainspotting (1996)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
Well, Ewan McGregor amply demonstrates that he was lacking in something back then, and Robert Carlyle's performance was given largely by his ludicrous moustache. Yet, apart from the fact that the film dragged and went around in circles, it was fine.
The science talk about the biochemistry and physiology of addiction was a bit too much for one who had not long taken pain-killers, but the after-film discussion with the speaker was fun, and everyone had the chance to have their say.
Their next one in the series is MS and Hilary and Jackie, which seems a bit tenuous, when that is not only not remotely what the film is about, but does not even feature except as the background to the drama between the sisters, but still...
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9 January
Well, Ewan McGregor amply demonstrates that he was lacking in something back then, and Robert Carlyle's performance was given largely by his ludicrous moustache. Yet, apart from the fact that the film dragged and went around in circles, it was fine.
The science talk about the biochemistry and physiology of addiction was a bit too much for one who had not long taken pain-killers, but the after-film discussion with the speaker was fun, and everyone had the chance to have their say.
Their next one in the series is MS and Hilary and Jackie, which seems a bit tenuous, when that is not only not remotely what the film is about, but does not even feature except as the background to the drama between the sisters, but still...
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Antony Worrall Thompson masterminded attacks on my bird-feeder by marauding squirrels
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
The arrangement was that they’d split the proceeds 50:50, but you can never trust a squirrel to honour a deal when it’s influenced by nuts as trophies.
Seriously, I have no (operational – i.e. stocked and suitably hanging) bird-feeder, and I cannot claim that I have ever seen even one squirrel in my garden (apart, probably, from a plastic one, which my ex-wife thought pleasantly decorative: its fate is unknown to me, but not a source of sorrow).
Back to the story, what a back-handed compliment for the brand of shop (which I sha’n’t name – they don’t need the publicity) from which the items were taken: the endorsement that a top chef (at least, I take it that he is one) thinks their (if it was) cheese and wine worth running that risk for*!
Could this just be the beginning of the concept of celebrity approval by theft? Will tagged packets of condoms next be taken by your favourite man (or woman), and the name D---- or M---- just happens to get mentioned in the report?:
I always steal T----- condoms – why wait to pay when I can get it on and use them?
Of course, the whole idea might then backfire, if the public dared to copy its prize stars, and those rather ineffectual bleepers at the entrance to shops would be getting worn out. How would the line of defence go? Maybe, I only did it because she’s worth it.
* Or should this apology, reported on the Channel 4 News web-site, actually be read as showing that AWT admitted an error of judgement in his choice of products?:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
The arrangement was that they’d split the proceeds 50:50, but you can never trust a squirrel to honour a deal when it’s influenced by nuts as trophies.
Seriously, I have no (operational – i.e. stocked and suitably hanging) bird-feeder, and I cannot claim that I have ever seen even one squirrel in my garden (apart, probably, from a plastic one, which my ex-wife thought pleasantly decorative: its fate is unknown to me, but not a source of sorrow).
Back to the story, what a back-handed compliment for the brand of shop (which I sha’n’t name – they don’t need the publicity) from which the items were taken: the endorsement that a top chef (at least, I take it that he is one) thinks their (if it was) cheese and wine worth running that risk for*!
Could this just be the beginning of the concept of celebrity approval by theft? Will tagged packets of condoms next be taken by your favourite man (or woman), and the name D---- or M---- just happens to get mentioned in the report?:
I always steal T----- condoms – why wait to pay when I can get it on and use them?
Of course, the whole idea might then backfire, if the public dared to copy its prize stars, and those rather ineffectual bleepers at the entrance to shops would be getting worn out. How would the line of defence go? Maybe, I only did it because she’s worth it.
* Or should this apology, reported on the Channel 4 News web-site, actually be read as showing that AWT admitted an error of judgement in his choice of products?:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
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50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre
50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre
9 January
Do not misunderstand me - I have loved, even if I can never remember how to pronounce his surname, Poulenc's chamber works for a long time.
But to-day, a matter of weeks since it was played before on Radio 3, I have just heard again his Sextet for Piano and Wind, so some dubious anniversary must be afoot:
However, why not hear his glorious music more often just as a matter of course, as with that of Prokofiev (a proposition with which Susan Milan, who had just played his sonata for flute and piano at a recital, fully agreed and with the notion that he is underplayed in the repertoire)?
We really don't need these lame excuses such as its being 100 years since Groves pronounced somebody's music 'an abomination' to revisit them.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Treatment for Worrall Thompson
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
I have just heard reported, on Radio 3 news, the item that has been besieging me on various sign-in pages. It was then being reported as an allegation that Antony Worrall Thompson had been caught shoplifting, perhaps cheese and wine.
According to the news bulletin, he has now received a caution, and has described his behaviour as 'irresponsible'*, saying 'I need treatment' for it.
I wonder what treatment he has in mind... For sure, forgoing that illicit cheese-and-wine party, but perhaps having to eat Quorn® twice per week.
In any case, Worrall Thompson's reported way of referring to himself and what he had done might make one wonder if he was meaning to suggest that this had happened before, if there is a behaviour that needs treatment**.
Doubtless, more will unfold on yet another celebrity story - a rather different penalty, in terms of both criminal sanction and disapproval, from when Winona Ryder was caught, it has to be said.
* There was another adjective, but somehow it didn't stick.
** Well, according to the Channel 4 News web-site:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
I have just heard reported, on Radio 3 news, the item that has been besieging me on various sign-in pages. It was then being reported as an allegation that Antony Worrall Thompson had been caught shoplifting, perhaps cheese and wine.
According to the news bulletin, he has now received a caution, and has described his behaviour as 'irresponsible'*, saying 'I need treatment' for it.
I wonder what treatment he has in mind... For sure, forgoing that illicit cheese-and-wine party, but perhaps having to eat Quorn® twice per week.
In any case, Worrall Thompson's reported way of referring to himself and what he had done might make one wonder if he was meaning to suggest that this had happened before, if there is a behaviour that needs treatment**.
Doubtless, more will unfold on yet another celebrity story - a rather different penalty, in terms of both criminal sanction and disapproval, from when Winona Ryder was caught, it has to be said.
* There was another adjective, but somehow it didn't stick.
** Well, according to the Channel 4 News web-site:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
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Sunday, 8 January 2012
Anxious thoughts made apparent
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 January
There is some quotation from Paradise Lost that would do better than that tag-line, but it doesn't come to me*.
It would not be right to say that I like Erin Hogan's descriptions in her book Spiral Jetta, but only because I do not think that one should relish another's pain.
For what she does is to capture the type of content of anxious thoughts, fears that cannot be reasoned with and so will not be subdued by argument or otherwise abate:
I pulled off into what seemed the largest gap between two scrub bushes and parked the car. There were a lot of little bushes underfoot, and I wondered whether the undercarriage of the car, which had been running all day, might be hot enough to start a fire. I wasn't sure if this could actually happen, but the thought alone made me get back in the car and move it to the barest ground I could find.
Likewise (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
Still worrying, I checked the landscape and realized that, should I see a faint plume of smoke from wherever I happened to be, I would not have time to halt the nascent inferno, and my burned-out Jetta would forever be marked as the car--and I as the dumbass driver--that destroyed Mormon Mesa. My poor car would share the fate of the rusted-out amphibious vehicle and old Dodge truck near Spiral Jetty.
Further (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
The thought was too much to bear, so I moved the car again, took a liter bottle of water and poured it over the ground, then put the car back over the wet spot. What more could I do?
Beautifully written, and - so rare nowadays - perfectly punctuated, what Erin Hogan has written just does justice to the intrusive thoughts, with their very strong force, that can beset an experience and undermine one's (potential) joy in it.
Another quotation (from a page or so on):
Now I faced a new dilemma. Clearly there was someone else out there. But would they be friend or foe? I pictured a bunch of sixteen-year-old guys sitting on their tailgate, listening to ZZ Top, shooting their rifles at empty beer cans scattered atop the mesa. I magined what I would look like sauntering up to them out of nowhere. "Hey guys, how's it going?"
[...] I imagined my broken, violated body baking there on the top of the mesa. Snippets of Deliverance alternated with The Accused in my head. I debated going back to the car. Was that cowardly or prudent? Where, once again, was the line between legitimate concern and paranoia?
Maybe the above, if not an interest in US land art, will encourage finding this book. I should leave the final word to Erin:
Maybe it's the salt that keeps Spiral Jetty honest. The work is now almost entirely white. Salt has latched onto every available surface, blanketing it, making it a croûte en sel. It comes across as pink in all the recent pictures I had seen, and perhaps in a certain light it is. [...] But the color one feels overwhelmingly is white: bone white, bleached white, blinding white.
* On reflection, I think that it is 'darkness visible' (from Book 3 or 4).
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January
There is some quotation from Paradise Lost that would do better than that tag-line, but it doesn't come to me*.
It would not be right to say that I like Erin Hogan's descriptions in her book Spiral Jetta, but only because I do not think that one should relish another's pain.
For what she does is to capture the type of content of anxious thoughts, fears that cannot be reasoned with and so will not be subdued by argument or otherwise abate:
I pulled off into what seemed the largest gap between two scrub bushes and parked the car. There were a lot of little bushes underfoot, and I wondered whether the undercarriage of the car, which had been running all day, might be hot enough to start a fire. I wasn't sure if this could actually happen, but the thought alone made me get back in the car and move it to the barest ground I could find.
Likewise (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
Still worrying, I checked the landscape and realized that, should I see a faint plume of smoke from wherever I happened to be, I would not have time to halt the nascent inferno, and my burned-out Jetta would forever be marked as the car--and I as the dumbass driver--that destroyed Mormon Mesa. My poor car would share the fate of the rusted-out amphibious vehicle and old Dodge truck near Spiral Jetty.
Further (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
The thought was too much to bear, so I moved the car again, took a liter bottle of water and poured it over the ground, then put the car back over the wet spot. What more could I do?
Beautifully written, and - so rare nowadays - perfectly punctuated, what Erin Hogan has written just does justice to the intrusive thoughts, with their very strong force, that can beset an experience and undermine one's (potential) joy in it.
Another quotation (from a page or so on):
Now I faced a new dilemma. Clearly there was someone else out there. But would they be friend or foe? I pictured a bunch of sixteen-year-old guys sitting on their tailgate, listening to ZZ Top, shooting their rifles at empty beer cans scattered atop the mesa. I magined what I would look like sauntering up to them out of nowhere. "Hey guys, how's it going?"
[...] I imagined my broken, violated body baking there on the top of the mesa. Snippets of Deliverance alternated with The Accused in my head. I debated going back to the car. Was that cowardly or prudent? Where, once again, was the line between legitimate concern and paranoia?
Maybe the above, if not an interest in US land art, will encourage finding this book. I should leave the final word to Erin:
Maybe it's the salt that keeps Spiral Jetty honest. The work is now almost entirely white. Salt has latched onto every available surface, blanketing it, making it a croûte en sel. It comes across as pink in all the recent pictures I had seen, and perhaps in a certain light it is. [...] But the color one feels overwhelmingly is white: bone white, bleached white, blinding white.
* On reflection, I think that it is 'darkness visible' (from Book 3 or 4).
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Saturday, 7 January 2012
Tirza: an epilogue
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
At the time of the Festival, I established that the book from which this book was made, with the participation of its author, into a film was available only in the original Dutch and in a German translation (which, at a pinch, I could have read, but at great cost).
I now see that there is a French translation, which would not put me at any greater advantage, but none in English that I can find, and I wonder what the fate of the film is - if it is not going to get distributed here or in the States, the possibility of an English translation probably depends on it.
Well, I still think that it is a tremendous film, and maybe I shall look for evidence of reviews...*
I have found this, with which I would take issue (and will, given a chance):
http://jasperaalbers.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-best-and-the-worst-of-dutch-cinema-%E2%80%93-the-tirza-review/
But, maybe, I'd prefer you to look at (or what preceded it):
http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2011/10/attempting-to-address-tirza.html
* Contains spoilers *
In the meantime, my knowledge of German allowed me, belatedly and when it had to be returned to the library, to look at the Dutch original, and it may not surprise to know that the ending in the novel appears to differ:
If I didn't miss something, and it isn't a dream, Jörgen does not try to leave, but ends up going back to, Kaisa's dwelling, but makes it to the airport, and, despite her cries of Want company, sir?, boards a flight and labours his way home.
As I say, I was reading the text as someone who speaks German, so I could work out much of what was being said, but I may have missed something in the preceding pages that could indicate that it is Jörgen's fantasy that he makes this journey...
Since then (at the end of February, in fact), Penny, a friend who speaks Dutch, took a look at the closing pages, and found nothing to suggest that there is the intervention of a dream between getting back from Big Mama and leaving Namibia.
End-notes
* Well, I see that it has no reviews at all on the so-called Rotten Tomatoes web-site, and the first one that I found was from one of the Festival's own Take One crew - I obviously didn't submit something myself, or, as others didn't, it didn't appear.
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9 January
At the time of the Festival, I established that the book from which this book was made, with the participation of its author, into a film was available only in the original Dutch and in a German translation (which, at a pinch, I could have read, but at great cost).
I now see that there is a French translation, which would not put me at any greater advantage, but none in English that I can find, and I wonder what the fate of the film is - if it is not going to get distributed here or in the States, the possibility of an English translation probably depends on it.
Well, I still think that it is a tremendous film, and maybe I shall look for evidence of reviews...*
I have found this, with which I would take issue (and will, given a chance):
http://jasperaalbers.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-best-and-the-worst-of-dutch-cinema-%E2%80%93-the-tirza-review/
But, maybe, I'd prefer you to look at (or what preceded it):
http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2011/10/attempting-to-address-tirza.html
* Contains spoilers *
In the meantime, my knowledge of German allowed me, belatedly and when it had to be returned to the library, to look at the Dutch original, and it may not surprise to know that the ending in the novel appears to differ:
If I didn't miss something, and it isn't a dream, Jörgen does not try to leave, but ends up going back to, Kaisa's dwelling, but makes it to the airport, and, despite her cries of Want company, sir?, boards a flight and labours his way home.
As I say, I was reading the text as someone who speaks German, so I could work out much of what was being said, but I may have missed something in the preceding pages that could indicate that it is Jörgen's fantasy that he makes this journey...
Since then (at the end of February, in fact), Penny, a friend who speaks Dutch, took a look at the closing pages, and found nothing to suggest that there is the intervention of a dream between getting back from Big Mama and leaving Namibia.
End-notes
* Well, I see that it has no reviews at all on the so-called Rotten Tomatoes web-site, and the first one that I found was from one of the Festival's own Take One crew - I obviously didn't submit something myself, or, as others didn't, it didn't appear.
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Might I ask what our Sunday trading legislation is for? (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 January 2012
Does anyone have any idea now what the UK law on Sunday trading protects - and how?
We have a regime, recently changed to allow shops to reopen on the chime of midnight as Sunday ends, where the larger shops (as defined by square footage, principally*) can only open for six hours continuously, starting no earlier than 10.00 a.m. and ending no later than 6.00 p.m.
(I am not aware of any obligation to open for the full six hours, so, if I am right, it would be possibly to be open just from 12.00 till 3.00.**)
Does that protect the workers, if they presumably can be in later than on other days for a start no earlier than 10.00, and give them the possibility of some lie-in? Is that at the heart of the legislation's thrust, though it doesn't protect workers in smaller, local shops (we know that names and brands), who still might have to start at 8.00, if not 6.00 (let alone the 24-hour petrol-stations)?
Or is it to protect the poor consumer / shopper from shopping him- or herself silly every day of the week...?
In any event, the premable of the enabling Act of Parliament (there are bound to be Regulations made under it), the Sunday Trading Act 1994, says (with great economy) relatively little:
An Act to reform the law of England and Wales relating to Sunday trading; to make provision as to the rights of shop workers under the law of England and Wales in relation to Sunday working; and for connected purposes.
Oh, I forgot, there is the protection for workers of being able to opt out (and not be penalized) of working on a Sunday - notices to be served, etc., and changing one's mind***. Which, of course, for someone who wants to devote him- or herself to the family and / or religious observance, is fine and good, but where do those other limitations on opening hours come from and fit in, not least 17 years on from 1994?
End-notes
* Thus: “large shop” means a shop which has a relevant floor area exceeding 280 square metres.
** Actually, that doesn't appear to have been envisaged, and is, at any rate, not possible (and might mean that someone failing to open for the full six hours could be taken to task, bizarre though that seems, for all that I know):
A person who is, or proposes to become, the occupier of a large shop may give notice to the local authority for the area in which the shop is situated—
(a) stating that he proposes to open the shop on Sunday for the serving of retail customers, and
(b) specifying a continuous period of six hours, beginning no earlier than 10 a.m. and ending no later than 6 p.m., as the permitted Sunday opening hours in relation to the shop.
*** Section 4 of the Act is, to say the least of it, terse: 'Schedule 4 to this Act shall have effect'.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January 2012
Does anyone have any idea now what the UK law on Sunday trading protects - and how?
We have a regime, recently changed to allow shops to reopen on the chime of midnight as Sunday ends, where the larger shops (as defined by square footage, principally*) can only open for six hours continuously, starting no earlier than 10.00 a.m. and ending no later than 6.00 p.m.
(I am not aware of any obligation to open for the full six hours, so, if I am right, it would be possibly to be open just from 12.00 till 3.00.**)
Does that protect the workers, if they presumably can be in later than on other days for a start no earlier than 10.00, and give them the possibility of some lie-in? Is that at the heart of the legislation's thrust, though it doesn't protect workers in smaller, local shops (we know that names and brands), who still might have to start at 8.00, if not 6.00 (let alone the 24-hour petrol-stations)?
Or is it to protect the poor consumer / shopper from shopping him- or herself silly every day of the week...?
In any event, the premable of the enabling Act of Parliament (there are bound to be Regulations made under it), the Sunday Trading Act 1994, says (with great economy) relatively little:
An Act to reform the law of England and Wales relating to Sunday trading; to make provision as to the rights of shop workers under the law of England and Wales in relation to Sunday working; and for connected purposes.
Oh, I forgot, there is the protection for workers of being able to opt out (and not be penalized) of working on a Sunday - notices to be served, etc., and changing one's mind***. Which, of course, for someone who wants to devote him- or herself to the family and / or religious observance, is fine and good, but where do those other limitations on opening hours come from and fit in, not least 17 years on from 1994?
End-notes
* Thus: “large shop” means a shop which has a relevant floor area exceeding 280 square metres.
** Actually, that doesn't appear to have been envisaged, and is, at any rate, not possible (and might mean that someone failing to open for the full six hours could be taken to task, bizarre though that seems, for all that I know):
A person who is, or proposes to become, the occupier of a large shop may give notice to the local authority for the area in which the shop is situated—
(a) stating that he proposes to open the shop on Sunday for the serving of retail customers, and
(b) specifying a continuous period of six hours, beginning no earlier than 10 a.m. and ending no later than 6 p.m., as the permitted Sunday opening hours in relation to the shop.
*** Section 4 of the Act is, to say the least of it, terse: 'Schedule 4 to this Act shall have effect'.
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There is another Earth – and, wow, up there with Solaris! (terminal posting)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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Page layout and baking
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7 January
No, not a view of the night sky, with supernovae, galaxies and complete with meteors, but an arrangement of twelve prawn bites, creatures that sacrificed their lives to be put in the oven for my delight (as it turned out, this purchase of discounted party food was inspired) - I was interested enough in the challenges presented in setting them out, if one didn't adopt the mundane approach of rows of each one, to record the result.
And then we have this, to-night's effort with the same task (no, the previous ones did get cooked and eaten, not just put back in the fridge to be humiliated again by more facile designs made using them):
From which one takes what? Well, someone might like to compare them, and perhaps even psychoanalyse me on the basis of the significance of the similarities (or differences) in carrying out the same exercise more than once.
For me, I take the grandiose line, and return to the night sky, with an analogy to mandalas, those Buddhist sand-paintings that first so intrigued me when I read about then...
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7 January
No, not a view of the night sky, with supernovae, galaxies and complete with meteors, but an arrangement of twelve prawn bites, creatures that sacrificed their lives to be put in the oven for my delight (as it turned out, this purchase of discounted party food was inspired) - I was interested enough in the challenges presented in setting them out, if one didn't adopt the mundane approach of rows of each one, to record the result.
And then we have this, to-night's effort with the same task (no, the previous ones did get cooked and eaten, not just put back in the fridge to be humiliated again by more facile designs made using them):
From which one takes what? Well, someone might like to compare them, and perhaps even psychoanalyse me on the basis of the significance of the similarities (or differences) in carrying out the same exercise more than once.
For me, I take the grandiose line, and return to the night sky, with an analogy to mandalas, those Buddhist sand-paintings that first so intrigued me when I read about then...
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Friday, 6 January 2012
Crypt in Canterbury
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6 January
I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:
After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.
A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.
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6 January
I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:
After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.
A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.
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Vented ill-feeling and the Vento case
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6 January
Whilst looking for related case-law to that of Vento v. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2002] EWCA Civ 1871*, I came across another that, though not relevant to what I wanted to know, is nonetheless intriguing, probably in a salacious way, for the allegations made in it.
I wasn't there, so I only know what the judge said (and judges tend to be a little staid, even if they do not sit in the High Court or higher courts), but here is an indication of what looking at the case, Mitton and others v. Benefield and another [2011] EWHC 2098 (QB), reveals (amongst other things - see for yourself):
* I consider it clear that he [Mr Wilding-Mitton] has become or allowed himself to become obsessed with his neighbours and prepared to identify as sinister the most ordinary of suburban activities.
* Mr Wilding-Mitton maintained in his evidence that he has consulted experts on both sides of the Atlantic to enable him to tell me that from the outset of their relationship Mr and Mrs Benefield, who should be classified as psychopaths, had a planned campaign to destroy Mr Wilding-Mitton and his family. He said that he thought the matter, which he described as the hounding of an innocent person, to be of national importance. He said that they, by which I understood him to mean his family, were trying to defend themselves in an impossible situation.
* He said that Mr Benefield was a platinum smirker who had a moronic stare. A consequence was, according to Mr Wilding-Mitton, that his daughter, who in the witness box appeared an amiable teenager, had been subject to psychological rape or molestation. Nothing she said in her evidence came remotely close to that kind of categorisation. He maintained that Mr Benefield was a psychopathic narcissist and that Mrs Benefield had a psychotic disorder.
Read on, if you dare, at www.bailii.org ...
* A general Internet search, based on the name 'Vento' and trying to find a synopsis of what it established concerning awards for injury to feelings in discrimination cases, proved null, so I consulted a specialist legal database, www.bailii.org, not to be mistaken for what superficially pretends to be it at www.bailii.org.uk.
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6 January
Whilst looking for related case-law to that of Vento v. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2002] EWCA Civ 1871*, I came across another that, though not relevant to what I wanted to know, is nonetheless intriguing, probably in a salacious way, for the allegations made in it.
I wasn't there, so I only know what the judge said (and judges tend to be a little staid, even if they do not sit in the High Court or higher courts), but here is an indication of what looking at the case, Mitton and others v. Benefield and another [2011] EWHC 2098 (QB), reveals (amongst other things - see for yourself):
* I consider it clear that he [Mr Wilding-Mitton] has become or allowed himself to become obsessed with his neighbours and prepared to identify as sinister the most ordinary of suburban activities.
* Mr Wilding-Mitton maintained in his evidence that he has consulted experts on both sides of the Atlantic to enable him to tell me that from the outset of their relationship Mr and Mrs Benefield, who should be classified as psychopaths, had a planned campaign to destroy Mr Wilding-Mitton and his family. He said that he thought the matter, which he described as the hounding of an innocent person, to be of national importance. He said that they, by which I understood him to mean his family, were trying to defend themselves in an impossible situation.
* He said that Mr Benefield was a platinum smirker who had a moronic stare. A consequence was, according to Mr Wilding-Mitton, that his daughter, who in the witness box appeared an amiable teenager, had been subject to psychological rape or molestation. Nothing she said in her evidence came remotely close to that kind of categorisation. He maintained that Mr Benefield was a psychopathic narcissist and that Mrs Benefield had a psychotic disorder.
Read on, if you dare, at www.bailii.org ...
* A general Internet search, based on the name 'Vento' and trying to find a synopsis of what it established concerning awards for injury to feelings in discrimination cases, proved null, so I consulted a specialist legal database, www.bailii.org, not to be mistaken for what superficially pretends to be it at www.bailii.org.uk.
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Thursday, 5 January 2012
The real Diva
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6 January
In the film Diva (1980), it may be possible to argue that there is more than one diva, and that Paris itself is the other.
Leaving that aside, we have Cynthia Hawkins, a black American soprano (played by Wilhemenia [sometimes with a Wiggins] Fernandez), who seems to be living in Paris, but - although full marks for effort - whose French must have been a strain on the ears of the first audience: if that isn't just put on, why this choice of character, not necessarily actress, for the role?
Well, she does have a childlike trust and belief, and that quality is both important to the film and comes across very clearly, and it is probably quite relevant that she is the glamorous star from another country, albeit doing her best with her French. (It's said that Jessye Norman was in mind when the part was created (not to play it), although I do not know in what way.)
Her feeling about herself, about not wanting to be recorded or held to ransom because of a recording, is the thing that comes to the fore: with Jules, she is amazingly open and also forgiving, since he not only takes her dress, but the recording that helps create the film's kerfuffle, and he is not always the most direct about what he is doing.
So that, that quality, is what I guess makes Cynthia singing from La Wally, which she does splendidly, the diva in Diva: her naive belief, and following her instincts.
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6 January
In the film Diva (1980), it may be possible to argue that there is more than one diva, and that Paris itself is the other.
Leaving that aside, we have Cynthia Hawkins, a black American soprano (played by Wilhemenia [sometimes with a Wiggins] Fernandez), who seems to be living in Paris, but - although full marks for effort - whose French must have been a strain on the ears of the first audience: if that isn't just put on, why this choice of character, not necessarily actress, for the role?
Well, she does have a childlike trust and belief, and that quality is both important to the film and comes across very clearly, and it is probably quite relevant that she is the glamorous star from another country, albeit doing her best with her French. (It's said that Jessye Norman was in mind when the part was created (not to play it), although I do not know in what way.)
Her feeling about herself, about not wanting to be recorded or held to ransom because of a recording, is the thing that comes to the fore: with Jules, she is amazingly open and also forgiving, since he not only takes her dress, but the recording that helps create the film's kerfuffle, and he is not always the most direct about what he is doing.
So that, that quality, is what I guess makes Cynthia singing from La Wally, which she does splendidly, the diva in Diva: her naive belief, and following her instincts.
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Early Woody and Mere Anarchy (3)
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6 January
I am beginning to realize that the theme of Fool's Gold seems to link almost everything in this collection:
* A man offered levitation and special powers by crooks
* An actor who doesn't know his own status, duped into taking a poor part in a film
* The 2.6-pound white truffle that everyone wants is a fake
* The director who so believes his yes-men that he tries to film the LA phone-book
* The unwise purchaser of a property and hirer of the men to work on it
* The songwriter in analysis who is supposed to be the next Irving Berlin and pays his therapist with songs
* What to the witless might sound like a brilliant idea for working up the interrelated lives of Gustav and Alma Mahler into a musical drama
Those are just the ones whose themes I can recall, and only the one about the father whose son goes to 'film camp' and has the proprietor of the camp and him raging back and forth in correspondence breaks the pattern - even there, though, the $16m distribution rights seem fine until someone else is interested in a share...
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6 January
I am beginning to realize that the theme of Fool's Gold seems to link almost everything in this collection:
* A man offered levitation and special powers by crooks
* An actor who doesn't know his own status, duped into taking a poor part in a film
* The 2.6-pound white truffle that everyone wants is a fake
* The director who so believes his yes-men that he tries to film the LA phone-book
* The unwise purchaser of a property and hirer of the men to work on it
* The songwriter in analysis who is supposed to be the next Irving Berlin and pays his therapist with songs
* What to the witless might sound like a brilliant idea for working up the interrelated lives of Gustav and Alma Mahler into a musical drama
Those are just the ones whose themes I can recall, and only the one about the father whose son goes to 'film camp' and has the proprietor of the camp and him raging back and forth in correspondence breaks the pattern - even there, though, the $16m distribution rights seem fine until someone else is interested in a share...
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Early Woody and Mere Anarchy (2)
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5 January
I had wrongly thought that something appearing in The New Yorker might be a mark of quality.
However, the credits tell me which have previously been published there, and they are not the best: one is just demonstrating how to set out a screenplay (which Allen, of course, can do), but with few laughs; another, a ludicrous idea for a show, which, if the narrator had employed the little sense that he had, he would never have bought an expensive lunch to hear about; a third, a tiring story, loosely tied in with Dante's Inferno, about a very ill-advised choice of building and builder.
Doesn't exactly inspire one to read on (although, for completeness and despite what often seems to me to be lazy writing, I will), and the quality of the presentation of the text leaves a lot to be desires - I know that people no longer know what orphans and widows are, so cannot care about them, but for the last line of a page to end like this shocks me:
; fi-
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5 January
I had wrongly thought that something appearing in The New Yorker might be a mark of quality.
However, the credits tell me which have previously been published there, and they are not the best: one is just demonstrating how to set out a screenplay (which Allen, of course, can do), but with few laughs; another, a ludicrous idea for a show, which, if the narrator had employed the little sense that he had, he would never have bought an expensive lunch to hear about; a third, a tiring story, loosely tied in with Dante's Inferno, about a very ill-advised choice of building and builder.
Doesn't exactly inspire one to read on (although, for completeness and despite what often seems to me to be lazy writing, I will), and the quality of the presentation of the text leaves a lot to be desires - I know that people no longer know what orphans and widows are, so cannot care about them, but for the last line of a page to end like this shocks me:
; fi-
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Thursday, 29 December 2011
180 years since Charles Dickens sneezed publicly in Cardiff - to great acclaim
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30 December
No, it's the 200th anniversary of birth or death*, as usual, and, since we never know which, we don't know what we are celebrating (and, to me, it seems inapt to celebrate the years since someone's death).
That said, if claims are to be made for Dickens, let them establish something that he would have thought worthwhile. And yet, on The Verb a few weeks back, Kevin Jackson told us that Dickens had innovated with the names of his characters, and with the supposed advantage over the big Russian novel (where, of course, we are willingly familiar with the tripartite system of naming, and cannot confess not even to trying!) that one could easily keep track of someone in, say, Bleak House because of the choice of name:
Well, as much as a name that I recognize in Dostoyevsky may recur and I recognize it by its shape, so names in that Dickens novel will be more easily identifiable and probably memorable, but it is a far cry from asserting that, on that account, I know what function that person performs in the novel. No, as with the less major characters in any novel, one sometimes has to look back to see who they are, and there the Russian novel anticipates the need with a Dramatis personæ.
Memorable names (and whether they are memorable just because quirky remains a separate, and unexamined issue - who can forget Tom Jones?) in a longer work do not, I believe, necessarily guide me as to who that person is in relation to everyone else, not least when (again in Bleak House) Dickens deliberately rattles on about the presumed oil-wells of the Reverend Chadband's countenance, or the perpetual need for a cushion to be readjusted, in such a way as to sabotage the progress of his own novel and distract our concentration.
Although, in Wemmick, for example, Dickens chose a very fitting name for its bearer, it is because I see him linked to his castle that I remember him for who he is, not because of the name per se.
At any rate, in a fanciful desire to laud Dickens for this above all else, the contributor to the programme dismissed, as their novels not containing comparably witty or descriptive names, both Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Henry Fielding (1707-1754). This, without giving a single example, whereas the eponymous heroes alone of the former's Ferdinand Count Fathom and Roderick Random make demands on our attention. As for Fielding, Mrs Tow-wouse in Joseph Andrews is foremost in my memory, but the novel's pages are peppered with Tom Suckbribe, Jenny Bouncer, Sir Thomas Booby, Mrs Slipslop, Peter Pounce, etc.
If Dickens excels, without the endeavours of other writers at least a century before Dickens even being considered, such as Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), but only Shakespeare (who was only credited with Aguecheek and Belch, because he allegedly took all of his names from his sources), then so be it, but why give Dickens a crown that he doesn't exclusively deserve, and which does not even typify the best things about him?
(In fact, anyone who has heard of William's contemporary Ben Jonson, or who ever took a look at The Alchemist, would find it hard to understand what the fuss about names in Dickens is...)
Since posting the above, and in looking vainly for somewhere on Radio 3's web-site to leave a comment, I've now found the following work, a slim volume published in 1917 by Elizabeth Hope Gordon:
The Naming of Characters in the Works of Charles Dickens
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30 December
No, it's the 200th anniversary of birth or death*, as usual, and, since we never know which, we don't know what we are celebrating (and, to me, it seems inapt to celebrate the years since someone's death).
That said, if claims are to be made for Dickens, let them establish something that he would have thought worthwhile. And yet, on The Verb a few weeks back, Kevin Jackson told us that Dickens had innovated with the names of his characters, and with the supposed advantage over the big Russian novel (where, of course, we are willingly familiar with the tripartite system of naming, and cannot confess not even to trying!) that one could easily keep track of someone in, say, Bleak House because of the choice of name:
Well, as much as a name that I recognize in Dostoyevsky may recur and I recognize it by its shape, so names in that Dickens novel will be more easily identifiable and probably memorable, but it is a far cry from asserting that, on that account, I know what function that person performs in the novel. No, as with the less major characters in any novel, one sometimes has to look back to see who they are, and there the Russian novel anticipates the need with a Dramatis personæ.
Memorable names (and whether they are memorable just because quirky remains a separate, and unexamined issue - who can forget Tom Jones?) in a longer work do not, I believe, necessarily guide me as to who that person is in relation to everyone else, not least when (again in Bleak House) Dickens deliberately rattles on about the presumed oil-wells of the Reverend Chadband's countenance, or the perpetual need for a cushion to be readjusted, in such a way as to sabotage the progress of his own novel and distract our concentration.
Although, in
At any rate, in a fanciful desire to laud Dickens for this above all else, the contributor to the programme dismissed, as their
If Dickens excels, without the endeavours of other writers at least a century before Dickens even being considered, such as Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), but only Shakespeare (who was only credited with Aguecheek and Belch, because he allegedly took all of his names from his sources), then so be it, but why give Dickens a crown that he doesn't exclusively deserve, and which does not even typify the best things about him?
(In fact, anyone who has heard of William's contemporary Ben Jonson, or who ever took a look at The Alchemist, would find it hard to understand what the fuss about names in Dickens is...)
Since posting the above, and in looking vainly for somewhere on Radio 3's web-site to leave a comment, I've now found the following work, a slim volume published in 1917 by Elizabeth Hope Gordon:
The Naming of Characters in the Works of Charles Dickens
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
Food cats
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28 December
Yes, you'll be thinking as I do, all cats are 'food cats':
Food cats would naturally choose - yes, what would food cats choose?
Well, apparently it is revolutionary thinking to 'believe that cats know what they like when it comes to food', so maybe the makers of this food don't have a cat, and someone who does had to tell them.
Then they seem to want to know what I think of their food. OK, we know that some people stocking up with tins of dog-food are buying a cheap meal for themselves, but what is this all about?:
Why not try one of our other W***** varieties?
or
Have you tried W****** DRY?
The text below seeks to exonerate these questions, by stating that their meals contain 'succulent pieces of meat and fish to vary your cat's diet', but I'm sure that they think that I must have just a little taste before I serve it...
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28 December
Yes, you'll be thinking as I do, all cats are 'food cats':
Food cats would naturally choose - yes, what would food cats choose?
Well, apparently it is revolutionary thinking to 'believe that cats know what they like when it comes to food', so maybe the makers of this food don't have a cat, and someone who does had to tell them.
Then they seem to want to know what I think of their food. OK, we know that some people stocking up with tins of dog-food are buying a cheap meal for themselves, but what is this all about?:
Why not try one of our other W***** varieties?
or
Have you tried W****** DRY?
The text below seeks to exonerate these questions, by stating that their meals contain 'succulent pieces of meat and fish to vary your cat's diet', but I'm sure that they think that I must have just a little taste before I serve it...
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Saturday, 24 December 2011
The good man Philip and the railway service Pullman
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Christmas Day
Whatever one thinks of Philip P., if one has read any of his work*, the one whose title I'm parodying was not the snappiest, and more resembled the label of a Ronseal® tin in terms of subtlety.
For those not in the know generally, it appears that Mr Pullman has some issue with religion (maybe even Christianity as a formalized faith), and calling a book The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ is only a little less of a battle-cry than much of what Richard Dawkins naggingly wants to assert every waking minute of his life.
(Culturally or racially intolerant people want to bleat on about mosques, minarets and muezzins, but Dawkins is a foghorn in his own right, together with a blindingly white tower in one's view and a powerful light that he keeps shining in one's eyes.)
I can just imagine Alison Weir subtitling an account of Anne Boleyn's courtship and marriage The chaste, monogamous, home-loving king and his slatternly, unfaithful bitch of a wife - maybe she should try, if in need of boosting her sales: what about writing history for the masses in headlines worthy of defunct News of the World? (A sort of Horrible Histories of popular events, but for a different age-group.)
Anyway, back at PP: he's been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Moon, but the catch is that he has to go to collect it! (Presumably some bright spark's wheeze for keeping him out of the way for a while.)
Though that trick wouldn't work with RD, maybe, since he wrote The God Delusion, someone should write (something like) Dawkins: The Delusion of Anyone Giving a Frig - or God himself could prove that RD doesn't exist by dropping a huge tome on him called The Dawkins Delusion, a self-fulfilling title...
* Someone whom I know was so afraid, when reading the Dark Materials trilogy, that - and I quote - 'I would die before I got to the end' that he bunked off his lecturing job to make sure that the latter was completed before the former happened (although, for why it should have done, you'd have to ask him...).
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Christmas Day
Whatever one thinks of Philip P., if one has read any of his work*, the one whose title I'm parodying was not the snappiest, and more resembled the label of a Ronseal® tin in terms of subtlety.
For those not in the know generally, it appears that Mr Pullman has some issue with religion (maybe even Christianity as a formalized faith), and calling a book The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ is only a little less of a battle-cry than much of what Richard Dawkins naggingly wants to assert every waking minute of his life.
(Culturally or racially intolerant people want to bleat on about mosques, minarets and muezzins, but Dawkins is a foghorn in his own right, together with a blindingly white tower in one's view and a powerful light that he keeps shining in one's eyes.)
I can just imagine Alison Weir subtitling an account of Anne Boleyn's courtship and marriage The chaste, monogamous, home-loving king and his slatternly, unfaithful bitch of a wife - maybe she should try, if in need of boosting her sales: what about writing history for the masses in headlines worthy of defunct News of the World? (A sort of Horrible Histories of popular events, but for a different age-group.)
Anyway, back at PP: he's been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Moon, but the catch is that he has to go to collect it! (Presumably some bright spark's wheeze for keeping him out of the way for a while.)
Though that trick wouldn't work with RD, maybe, since he wrote The God Delusion, someone should write (something like) Dawkins: The Delusion of Anyone Giving a Frig - or God himself could prove that RD doesn't exist by dropping a huge tome on him called The Dawkins Delusion, a self-fulfilling title...
* Someone whom I know was so afraid, when reading the Dark Materials trilogy, that - and I quote - 'I would die before I got to the end' that he bunked off his lecturing job to make sure that the latter was completed before the former happened (although, for why it should have done, you'd have to ask him...).
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Has Will Smith been flyposting again?!
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Christmas Day
From a street in Cambridge:
IAMN
OTAR
OBOT
the lamp-post declared.
Never said that you were! I retorted.
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Christmas Day
From a street in Cambridge:
IAMN
OTAR
OBOT
the lamp-post declared.
Never said that you were! I retorted.
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The woman who wrote about pandas
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
Christmas Eve
Yes, I'm sure that Ms Truss' book did well enough, but, with 'Pandamania' upon us*, what if she'd waited...! (Perhaps those led astray by the cover may still be interested.)
But why would anyone punctuate (think of punctuating?!) a sentence about pandas eating shoots - which we now know are so costly (a bit like buying a chinchilla, and then finding that the only thing that it will eat costs as much as (maybe a cheap) caviar!) - by putting a comma slap bang in the middle of They eat shoots and leaves, or whatever exactly it was**?
Really, one would have to subscribe to the 'theory of punctuation' that says:
(1) Never use the semi-colon - no one else does, and no one understands where it belongs, which may be cause and effect, or vice versa (if not a symbiotic feedback-loop);
(2) The colon is good (as above) once in a while, just to bring you up short, saying 'Something important (probably) follows!';
(3) NB Ignore the semi-colons in this list, but, for advanced students, that's the only way to employ them. If still tempted, stick in a dash instead (much safer!);
(4) Blather on until you've had enough with that sentence. Then, at least, a full-stop, if not, which is worth considering, a new paragraph;
(5) Finally, just to show who's boss, stick a comma in from time to time to impress - if they are in the wrong place (wherever that is), no one will know, and they are as likely to think that you've done something clever that they don't understand as stuck it where it doesn't fit;
(6) If needing to talk about more than one comma, comma's or commas are both fine***.
Not very convincing, but maybe that's Modern English. (About as tenuous as turning, by mistake, the description You wiggle! into the imperative You, wiggle!?)
* Or, if you prefer, Pandamonium...
** Ah, yes! It was some alleged dictionary or encyclopaedia, saying The panda eats, shoots and leaves.
It could just as easily have said The panda, eats shoots and, leaves, only no 'humorous' story about it dining in a restaurant would ensue, just apoplexy.
*** No one understands the apostrophe (or plurals) any longer, so you can do what you like:
Potato's (meaning 'Potatoes');
Paninis (pluralizing an already plural word);
Premia or stadia (when adding an 's' to 'premium' / 'stadium' is much more natural, as these words are not Latin, but naturalized English) -
Whatever you like, dear student! (Sorry, that should be Whatever, you like, dear student!, or even Whatever you, like dear student!.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
Christmas Eve
Yes, I'm sure that Ms Truss' book did well enough, but, with 'Pandamania' upon us*, what if she'd waited...! (Perhaps those led astray by the cover may still be interested.)
But why would anyone punctuate (think of punctuating?!) a sentence about pandas eating shoots - which we now know are so costly (a bit like buying a chinchilla, and then finding that the only thing that it will eat costs as much as (maybe a cheap) caviar!) - by putting a comma slap bang in the middle of They eat shoots and leaves, or whatever exactly it was**?
Really, one would have to subscribe to the 'theory of punctuation' that says:
(1) Never use the semi-colon - no one else does, and no one understands where it belongs, which may be cause and effect, or vice versa (if not a symbiotic feedback-loop);
(2) The colon is good (as above) once in a while, just to bring you up short, saying 'Something important (probably) follows!';
(3) NB Ignore the semi-colons in this list, but, for advanced students, that's the only way to employ them. If still tempted, stick in a dash instead (much safer!);
(4) Blather on until you've had enough with that sentence. Then, at least, a full-stop, if not, which is worth considering, a new paragraph;
(5) Finally, just to show who's boss, stick a comma in from time to time to impress - if they are in the wrong place (wherever that is), no one will know, and they are as likely to think that you've done something clever that they don't understand as stuck it where it doesn't fit;
(6) If needing to talk about more than one comma, comma's or commas are both fine***.
Not very convincing, but maybe that's Modern English. (About as tenuous as turning, by mistake, the description You wiggle! into the imperative You, wiggle!?)
* Or, if you prefer, Pandamonium...
** Ah, yes! It was some alleged dictionary or encyclopaedia, saying The panda eats, shoots and leaves.
It could just as easily have said The panda, eats shoots and, leaves, only no 'humorous' story about it dining in a restaurant would ensue, just apoplexy.
*** No one understands the apostrophe (or plurals) any longer, so you can do what you like:
Potato's (meaning 'Potatoes');
Paninis (pluralizing an already plural word);
Premia or stadia (when adding an 's' to 'premium' / 'stadium' is much more natural, as these words are not Latin, but naturalized English) -
Whatever you like, dear student! (Sorry, that should be Whatever, you like, dear student!, or even Whatever you, like dear student!.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday, 23 December 2011
Mind charity shops and NAMH
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 December 2011 (updated 2 February 2013, 11 January 2015)
Seeing Paul Farmer's Tweet, I gave him the opportunity to comment. He did not do so (until 11 months later, when asked again...).
You will know the national charity Mind (it sometimes claims to be the leading UK mental-health charity, but Rethink and the Mental Health Foundation may not agree).
Some places where people live have a local Mind charity shop: the common misconception (which, for all that I know, some obscure notice on the premises may allegedly clarify, if you knew that it is there) is that giving items to or otherwise supporting the shop supports people locally who have mental-health issues (rather than Mind itself, the national body).
Some people also assume that 'Mind' means something, and write it 'MIND', as if it were an acronym, but it is actually just a trading-name that stuck to and was kept by what is really the National Association for Mental Health (or NAMH).
So, to summarize, Mind is really NAMH, and Mind charity shops don't support the Mind named after your area, e.g. West Norfolk Mind (if there is one and you lived there).
Now, other charities, say Red Cross, may be set up the same way - I don't know - but, in Mind's case, it's just several assumptions that it would be easy enough to prevent people making, if it mattered enough to stop them.
Now one wild, further, improbable step: imagine East Cambridge Mind (there isn't one, but let's call it ECM) providing services in the voluntary sector, receiving grants and funding, etc. They might offer somewhere where, using Mind's favoured terms, those with a personal experience of 'mental distress' can come for a coffee at certain times of the week.
Or there might be free counselling, or the artificial buddying known as befriending, where a volunteer commits to meet with a member of ECM every so often to allow social things like going for a walk or having a drink (maybe one then the other) that might seem harder to do on one's own. Services, anyway, that need staff and volunteers.
Mind doesn't employ the staff or manage the volunteers, because Mind (as NAMH) is a separate company. ECM is another. Mind lets ECM use the Mind name by agreeing to let it subscribe to be a Local Mind Association (or LMA).
OK, so Mind where you live will be a company (usually limited by guarantee) registered at Companies House. NAMH is another one, so they are separate, except for NAMH letting ECM have Mind in its name.
ECM subscribes (pays a subscription, amongst other things) to do that, but it remains separate. Two companies, never the twain shall meet, although national Mind does require these LMAs (such as ECM) to meet quality standards. The assessment, though, is largely on the basis of self-certification.
So to establish that, say, ECM supervises its staff regularly (maybe monthly) for that quality standard, what Mind actually does is to get ECM to fill in a series of forms that state how, where and when supervision takes place and is recorded. For example, ECM sets out how the manager meets the employee or volunteer every x weeks, spends at least y hours with him or her without interruption, and makes sure that z specified issues are discussed every time.
No other check is made - it may not happen at all, or, at least as often or as well as certified. As far as Mind is concerned, ECM is meeting the quality standard, just because it says that it is meeting the quality standard. That's fine, of course.
Or might you be saying this?:
Isn't ECM employing or having as volunteers people who work with vulnerable people, some of whom may be vulnerable people themselves, seeking 'to give something back'?
That's true.
OK, so aren't there at least three people's interests to protect?
(a) The person receiving a service through ECM;
(b) The person giving a service on behalf of ECM;
(c) The other staff / volunteers of ECM?
Yes, that's right.
And, in fact, isn't there a fourth (maybe a fifth) set of interests?
(d) The carers / relatives / friends of the person receiving a service (or those who otherwise come into contact with the staff and volunteers of ECM)?
You're still right, and some of those are the ones who are not disabused as to what they are supporting with Mind charity shops, too.
So, if something goes wrong, if a volunteer or an employee (or all of them) is not being supervised, and Mind is just being told that they are, it will want to know and will take action?
No, Mind just believes what it's told - it actually has no mechanism for an employee to go to it and complain of not being supervised, because it will just direct him or her back to ECM. ECM is a company, Mind is a company (NAMH), and, despite ECM subscribing to Mind, Mind says that it has no control over ECM.
It remains an internal matter to resolve with ECM, even if the staff member or volunteer is vulnerable because of mental distress, and is less well placed to challenge ECM's company approach or adherence to quality standards or its procedures. Mind will not help or get involved - the aggrieved person, who is not being supervised properly and / or regularly, must raise a grievance.
But that's OK, isn't it? It fits with the slogan (it's for For better mental health, isn't it?), and is just the model of governance you expect from the Mind name.
Good, knew you'd be happy - merry Christmas!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 December 2011 (updated 2 February 2013, 11 January 2015)
A good day for some early spring cleaning and take stuff to your local Mind shop.
— Paul Farmer (@paulfarmermind) February 2, 2013
But does one's 'local Mind shop',@paulfarmermind, raise funds that are spent *locally*, on services where one lives ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 2, 2013
Seeing Paul Farmer's Tweet, I gave him the opportunity to comment. He did not do so (until 11 months later, when asked again...).
@THEAGENTAPSLEY @MindCharity around £400,000 per year goes to local Minds in grants from the profits generated by our shops.
— Paul Farmer (@paulfarmermind) January 11, 2015You will know the national charity Mind (it sometimes claims to be the leading UK mental-health charity, but Rethink and the Mental Health Foundation may not agree).
Some places where people live have a local Mind charity shop: the common misconception (which, for all that I know, some obscure notice on the premises may allegedly clarify, if you knew that it is there) is that giving items to or otherwise supporting the shop supports people locally who have mental-health issues (rather than Mind itself, the national body).
Some people also assume that 'Mind' means something, and write it 'MIND', as if it were an acronym, but it is actually just a trading-name that stuck to and was kept by what is really the National Association for Mental Health (or NAMH).
So, to summarize, Mind is really NAMH, and Mind charity shops don't support the Mind named after your area, e.g. West Norfolk Mind (if there is one and you lived there).
Now, other charities, say Red Cross, may be set up the same way - I don't know - but, in Mind's case, it's just several assumptions that it would be easy enough to prevent people making, if it mattered enough to stop them.
Now one wild, further, improbable step: imagine East Cambridge Mind (there isn't one, but let's call it ECM) providing services in the voluntary sector, receiving grants and funding, etc. They might offer somewhere where, using Mind's favoured terms, those with a personal experience of 'mental distress' can come for a coffee at certain times of the week.
Or there might be free counselling, or the artificial buddying known as befriending, where a volunteer commits to meet with a member of ECM every so often to allow social things like going for a walk or having a drink (maybe one then the other) that might seem harder to do on one's own. Services, anyway, that need staff and volunteers.
Mind doesn't employ the staff or manage the volunteers, because Mind (as NAMH) is a separate company. ECM is another. Mind lets ECM use the Mind name by agreeing to let it subscribe to be a Local Mind Association (or LMA).
OK, so Mind where you live will be a company (usually limited by guarantee) registered at Companies House. NAMH is another one, so they are separate, except for NAMH letting ECM have Mind in its name.
ECM subscribes (pays a subscription, amongst other things) to do that, but it remains separate. Two companies, never the twain shall meet, although national Mind does require these LMAs (such as ECM) to meet quality standards. The assessment, though, is largely on the basis of self-certification.
So to establish that, say, ECM supervises its staff regularly (maybe monthly) for that quality standard, what Mind actually does is to get ECM to fill in a series of forms that state how, where and when supervision takes place and is recorded. For example, ECM sets out how the manager meets the employee or volunteer every x weeks, spends at least y hours with him or her without interruption, and makes sure that z specified issues are discussed every time.
No other check is made - it may not happen at all, or, at least as often or as well as certified. As far as Mind is concerned, ECM is meeting the quality standard, just because it says that it is meeting the quality standard. That's fine, of course.
Or might you be saying this?:
Isn't ECM employing or having as volunteers people who work with vulnerable people, some of whom may be vulnerable people themselves, seeking 'to give something back'?
That's true.
OK, so aren't there at least three people's interests to protect?
(a) The person receiving a service through ECM;
(b) The person giving a service on behalf of ECM;
(c) The other staff / volunteers of ECM?
Yes, that's right.
And, in fact, isn't there a fourth (maybe a fifth) set of interests?
(d) The carers / relatives / friends of the person receiving a service (or those who otherwise come into contact with the staff and volunteers of ECM)?
You're still right, and some of those are the ones who are not disabused as to what they are supporting with Mind charity shops, too.
So, if something goes wrong, if a volunteer or an employee (or all of them) is not being supervised, and Mind is just being told that they are, it will want to know and will take action?
No, Mind just believes what it's told - it actually has no mechanism for an employee to go to it and complain of not being supervised, because it will just direct him or her back to ECM. ECM is a company, Mind is a company (NAMH), and, despite ECM subscribing to Mind, Mind says that it has no control over ECM.
It remains an internal matter to resolve with ECM, even if the staff member or volunteer is vulnerable because of mental distress, and is less well placed to challenge ECM's company approach or adherence to quality standards or its procedures. Mind will not help or get involved - the aggrieved person, who is not being supervised properly and / or regularly, must raise a grievance.
But that's OK, isn't it? It fits with the slogan (it's for For better mental health, isn't it?), and is just the model of governance you expect from the Mind name.
Good, knew you'd be happy - merry Christmas!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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