Fetch the howitzer! Some fool’s armed the robot with a pistol

Just read this article about the film Sylvia. It says far more about film making than it does about the film but it says enough about the film to tip me over into going to see it even if Frieda Hughes doesn't want me (or anyone else) to. I won't buy any popcorn (or peanuts). As usual when reading about Sylvia Plath, the music of Steve Reich is playing. Apologies for being boring but I was listening to Drumming on repeat when I read the final few chapters of Bitter Fame and so it always makes me think of the bitter winter of 1962/63 and that miserable flat.

Looking for the links above has revealed that Steve Reich has a new CD out. It is Three Tales but it is only available on Import so far. This is about The Hindenburg, Bikini and Dolly. I have to wait but cannot. My Wife will love it I am sure.

Some days you come in to work and feel inspired by what you have to do. Other days, like today, you feel that blogging would be much more productive. At least I have an hour before I have to get down to the real money earning work. I wonder what would happen if I just write poetry or blog all day. It would sound like continuous typing which is good I suppose. I would never do it really. The guilt would be too much.

We saw The Wonder Boys at the weekend. I say we. My wife got bored and went to bed but I stayed through the slow start and found it funny and intelligent. Vaguely like a John Irving Novel with extra self-reference. My eyes have glazed over and I am sitting here dissolving in Music for 18 Musicians again, seeing that empty flat and the piles of snow in my head. I wasn't born when this happened but I remember the piles of snow in the late sixties as we walked to nursery. It was the same time for all of us. I feel the cold and the fullness in my head. I am three and precocious, dressed in a black duffel coat and with red ears in the cold. The city roar sounds in the distance and I have no real worries beyond those which will last for a few minutes. However much you cry at three, nothing lasts long enough to be that sad. It is the sad, relentless breakdown of your carefree life into real-life problems, which makes all of us sad. I was left at nursery and threatened to run home. I never knew my mother worked but she was a Doctor and I think that maybe she did. I know that later she did some work but I never saw her go off with a black bag and cure people. I didn't care; she was not with me and that was why I was unhappy - but not for long enough. There is no reason to feel connected to Sylvia Plath but the weather links us all. It makes us think of things that happened when the sky was just so; when the wind blew from the same quarter and when the sun hit the side of the house just like now. I think I have absolute direction, like the Boy who spun. Wherever I am I know roughly which way North is. I am half pigeon. The tiny scraps of metal in my forehead tug at my brain and point me North. Maybe I have absolute Time. Who can say that now is now. Then exists just like now. We have no absolute time so we have no absolute place. I feel that we should be able to move time simply by us all thinking it. But if we all went back in time we would react to things as we do now and time would snap back. Time is definitely an illusion.