They’re Smart! They’re Organised and They’ve Got My Keys
I want one!
And for the sad people like me, some closure. I commented on the double StarWars link in The Smoking Room and whether anyone could find a third. The security guard in that was played by Leslie Schofield who was an Imperial commander in Starwars Episode 4 while Siobhan Redmond was in Bulman with Don Henderson who was in StarWars as General Taggi. I have now found my third link. Paula Wilcox was in Man About The House with Jeremy Bulloch who was of course Boba Fett. So link made and my status as sad git confirmed.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Friday, November 24, 2006
The Return of the Whovians
Today I found out where the phrase "Wilderness Taxidermy of Glendale" came from. No longer are these pages the only place on the web where you will find those words. They come from .... ahh - but that would be too easy. Go and find it for yourself. I remembered it as soon as I read it but that's no fun. Socially we are falling apart. I am so glad I do not wear black. Anyone for a game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy? Thought not!
It has been so dark today - like the quiet week, the start of every day, of every short story, a bleak cover to the beauties of autumn and what you will be remembered for. You could have gone with so much good behind you but that was really Mo and her super wig rather than anything you did. End one war and start another! That's the way to go. Admit it was a disaster? Never until the war is over.
Out of the this darkness comes the rush of winter gods, little gods but part of larger ones, each with their own little home behind the leaves, in the deep of the undergrowth, parts of poem maybe, like these lines are parts of a bigger story. Maybe you could take each paragraph as a separate thing, mix them all up, throw them up in the air and let them fall into their own new story. Or news Story.
I hear the low screech, the melodic buzz of some electronic device talking to another, linking thoughts more tightly than any humans could do. They link deep in to each other's minds; have a handle on the neurons and the very pulses flowing between them. Maybe one day we will tap into the memories of others in this way, picking up the tenuous hum of another person's mind. Falling in love is like that I think, a sudden understanding of the frequencies and handshaking parameters of someone else. It is just the accident of frequency and decency and how you want things to be.
I have lost the cursor; a new curse for technology. There are so many small annoyances caused by the lack of things we think we need just to survive these days. I’m not yet rendered blubbering by not having my phone with me, in fact sometimes I leave it behind because it means that much to me. Maybe one day I will understand irony. I am not even sure whether the Whale-Rider’s dilemma is actually ironic which in its broadest, simplest application means dichotomy between the effort and the outcome. I suppose that is the beauty of irony; that it is impossible to define without being able to understand it. My work is like that – sometime the mad rush to complete it leaves out the detail and it still works - never fails – ever. That is how beautiful irony is.
Time might go backwards. I have to put this paragraph in because it refers to the title which is my entry for an imagined competition in the way an acquaintance of mine has taken pictures from a non-existent movie, though that must be a common theme amongst photographers as much as making imaginary soundtracks is a favourite oblique strategy for some people. The brain has never done a soundtrack has he but his music is used to back all sorts of films anyway. Who are the Whovians? They live in a town that reflects back on itself, twists and turns though a dusty, Mediterranean landscape that seems to have been built on the exposed edges of a Möbius strip, never ending and having only one surface. I should take a giant pair of scissors and cut it along the centre band. Drinking from a Klein bottle is another difficult leisure activity.
I took a different route home yesterday, through the darkness of this countryside, listening to drumming - long drumming from some concert hall miles away, sounds that took the darkness and made it darker. I got lost for a few minutes, feeling like I was on the edge of the known world, that fiction of the table edge with the water falling away and the landscape fading away in my vision. Just before I imagined my fall to limbo patrum, I found a turning place and got back onto my proper road. I was not scared – though my end seemed inevitable for a few seconds – a fear of ceasing to be though not the blind panic of waking in the night with every possible future screaming through you. Safe in the company of dimness and winter trees, the demons slink back to their caves. You can never kill them – only lock them up.
I have exhausted the ideas I had for today until this idea of the end of ides came to me, a sort of extension of my old brain-jammer of trying to imagine everything in the universe and then instantly to try to imagine nothing at all, no space, no matter, no time and by extension no love. No cliché perhaps. The old architect of the War against Cliché was on the radio yesterday talking about his father and all the time I expected him to talk in this measured way designed to give him time to avoid the very mixtures of phrase and platitude that he rails against. He was eloquent and the odd stock phrase got away from him but it did not seem to worry him. I was waiting to hear him say he was a police (sic) but obviously he didn’t; he didn’t even mention the book it was from and I cannot remember. It was the best half hour of radio I have heard for a long time. They break us down to these little clichés and then build us up again into fully formed characters. Someone is writing me at this moment, deciding not only on how I am thinking but what I am writing at the same time, two levels of character in one. I bet no real writer ever really bothers in that way. I am back to my strange idea of not defining something completely and yet having it work all the time.
Today I found out where the phrase "Wilderness Taxidermy of Glendale" came from. No longer are these pages the only place on the web where you will find those words. They come from .... ahh - but that would be too easy. Go and find it for yourself. I remembered it as soon as I read it but that's no fun. Socially we are falling apart. I am so glad I do not wear black. Anyone for a game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy? Thought not!
It has been so dark today - like the quiet week, the start of every day, of every short story, a bleak cover to the beauties of autumn and what you will be remembered for. You could have gone with so much good behind you but that was really Mo and her super wig rather than anything you did. End one war and start another! That's the way to go. Admit it was a disaster? Never until the war is over.
Out of the this darkness comes the rush of winter gods, little gods but part of larger ones, each with their own little home behind the leaves, in the deep of the undergrowth, parts of poem maybe, like these lines are parts of a bigger story. Maybe you could take each paragraph as a separate thing, mix them all up, throw them up in the air and let them fall into their own new story. Or news Story.
I hear the low screech, the melodic buzz of some electronic device talking to another, linking thoughts more tightly than any humans could do. They link deep in to each other's minds; have a handle on the neurons and the very pulses flowing between them. Maybe one day we will tap into the memories of others in this way, picking up the tenuous hum of another person's mind. Falling in love is like that I think, a sudden understanding of the frequencies and handshaking parameters of someone else. It is just the accident of frequency and decency and how you want things to be.
I have lost the cursor; a new curse for technology. There are so many small annoyances caused by the lack of things we think we need just to survive these days. I’m not yet rendered blubbering by not having my phone with me, in fact sometimes I leave it behind because it means that much to me. Maybe one day I will understand irony. I am not even sure whether the Whale-Rider’s dilemma is actually ironic which in its broadest, simplest application means dichotomy between the effort and the outcome. I suppose that is the beauty of irony; that it is impossible to define without being able to understand it. My work is like that – sometime the mad rush to complete it leaves out the detail and it still works - never fails – ever. That is how beautiful irony is.
Time might go backwards. I have to put this paragraph in because it refers to the title which is my entry for an imagined competition in the way an acquaintance of mine has taken pictures from a non-existent movie, though that must be a common theme amongst photographers as much as making imaginary soundtracks is a favourite oblique strategy for some people. The brain has never done a soundtrack has he but his music is used to back all sorts of films anyway. Who are the Whovians? They live in a town that reflects back on itself, twists and turns though a dusty, Mediterranean landscape that seems to have been built on the exposed edges of a Möbius strip, never ending and having only one surface. I should take a giant pair of scissors and cut it along the centre band. Drinking from a Klein bottle is another difficult leisure activity.
I took a different route home yesterday, through the darkness of this countryside, listening to drumming - long drumming from some concert hall miles away, sounds that took the darkness and made it darker. I got lost for a few minutes, feeling like I was on the edge of the known world, that fiction of the table edge with the water falling away and the landscape fading away in my vision. Just before I imagined my fall to limbo patrum, I found a turning place and got back onto my proper road. I was not scared – though my end seemed inevitable for a few seconds – a fear of ceasing to be though not the blind panic of waking in the night with every possible future screaming through you. Safe in the company of dimness and winter trees, the demons slink back to their caves. You can never kill them – only lock them up.
I have exhausted the ideas I had for today until this idea of the end of ides came to me, a sort of extension of my old brain-jammer of trying to imagine everything in the universe and then instantly to try to imagine nothing at all, no space, no matter, no time and by extension no love. No cliché perhaps. The old architect of the War against Cliché was on the radio yesterday talking about his father and all the time I expected him to talk in this measured way designed to give him time to avoid the very mixtures of phrase and platitude that he rails against. He was eloquent and the odd stock phrase got away from him but it did not seem to worry him. I was waiting to hear him say he was a police (sic) but obviously he didn’t; he didn’t even mention the book it was from and I cannot remember. It was the best half hour of radio I have heard for a long time. They break us down to these little clichés and then build us up again into fully formed characters. Someone is writing me at this moment, deciding not only on how I am thinking but what I am writing at the same time, two levels of character in one. I bet no real writer ever really bothers in that way. I am back to my strange idea of not defining something completely and yet having it work all the time.
A Dream Diary
This is not about you! It's about me!
I had an interesting variation on my standard exam dream last night. I used to have these dreams a lot but they have been absent for at least five years. Last night’s dream didn’t really involve worries about exams at all until I thought back over what it might mean.
In it I was drawn to what promised to be a wonderful and lucrative new way of working which involved some sort of communal living experiment though how we would make money from it was obscured at the very start, only being revealed through obscure and strangely worded brochures and at the end of a long and boring video tape. We all had to move in to some glass-fronted building vaguely situated in London. At one point we were taken to a large room with many long, high tables lining the walls, with lots of magazines, books and comic books, which might have been chained up. Various people were sitting round reading these books and I speculated out loud that we were being set to read these books in order to look for patterns which might indicate some hidden information much like Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor. I think this was denied in a half-hearted way by some of the people there.
I eventually found out that we were paid only when we aped the actions of celebrities, acting out various tabloid-reported incidents though I never found out the rate of payment as this was only given at the end of the introductory video. I also discovered that low-level income could be gained by delivering Pizzas. This is all beginning to sound like some obscure and sad computer game. In my mind I was trying to work out whether I should give up college in order to join this weird collective. What’s all that about then?
This is not about you! It's about me!
I had an interesting variation on my standard exam dream last night. I used to have these dreams a lot but they have been absent for at least five years. Last night’s dream didn’t really involve worries about exams at all until I thought back over what it might mean.
In it I was drawn to what promised to be a wonderful and lucrative new way of working which involved some sort of communal living experiment though how we would make money from it was obscured at the very start, only being revealed through obscure and strangely worded brochures and at the end of a long and boring video tape. We all had to move in to some glass-fronted building vaguely situated in London. At one point we were taken to a large room with many long, high tables lining the walls, with lots of magazines, books and comic books, which might have been chained up. Various people were sitting round reading these books and I speculated out loud that we were being set to read these books in order to look for patterns which might indicate some hidden information much like Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor. I think this was denied in a half-hearted way by some of the people there.
I eventually found out that we were paid only when we aped the actions of celebrities, acting out various tabloid-reported incidents though I never found out the rate of payment as this was only given at the end of the introductory video. I also discovered that low-level income could be gained by delivering Pizzas. This is all beginning to sound like some obscure and sad computer game. In my mind I was trying to work out whether I should give up college in order to join this weird collective. What’s all that about then?
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Shouldn't it Have a Comma?
I’m not sure what it is but this blog seems to have lost some of the old style. It may be that I am just getting old and unable to concentrate but that seems at odds with my assertion that I am now able to keep going with ‘difficult’ books. Current reading is a true example. My wife gave me a copy of Brave New World some years ago and I never made it into the book itself, having given up after the Introduction, and biography and somewhere in the middle of Huxley’s own foreword. I started reading it again after its mention in The Martians and Us – part of BBC 4’s Sci-fi Britannia season and this time it seems so much easier. In a way it is a slightly more believable dystopia than that of nineteen-eighty-four because of the standard intelligence and behaviour of the main (albeit alpha male characters) as opposed to the downtrodden party members of Orwell’s book. There is the usual lag of technology where the book despite being set 600 odd years into the future still records everything on 80 cubic metres of card index. I suspect that most of the mechanical advances of the future would not amaze the sci-fi writers of the past. What will get them is the shrinking of information storage. I can’t be bothered to do the calculation but I suspect that 80 cubic metres of card index would easily fit into an empty corner of this very machine. The fact that the whole world is connected down this little cable to my left would knock anyone from the thirties to the floor. And yet none of this seems to have created the social revolution you might imagine. We all continue with our prejudices and desires for a normal quiet life. Who does the future belong to? – those who can understand the technology or even predict it - or to those who are comfortable with using it. Of course this is just a rewording of Arthur C. Clarke’s assertion that any sufficiently advanced society (civilization) is indistinguishable from magic.
There was one paragraph at the beginning of BNW which made me stop and re-read it as it chimes beautifully with this Government’s desire to identify potential trouble-makers almost from birth. The vision of conditioning of embryos before birth (decanting in Huxley’s terms) is only a slight modification of the idea of teams of bureaucrats like those in the film Brazil, wandering round with clipboards and staring down at crawling infants. It is almost identical to the terrible post-decanting conditioning of infants using aversion to deter them from a love of the countryside.
Oh dear, the little paranoid, conspiracy demons seems to have got me again. I realise that the BNW is not likely to be upon us immediately if ever but the present seems to be a creeping erosion of the society that has taken years to be built. There has been a hard struggle over the years to get us to the current state of free-speech and reasonably equal society and now it seems on the brink of a reverse, not maybe back to the dark ages but a perverse place where things that for the champions of our free society grate and annoy are seen by the over-complex brains of the people in charge as positive developments. Maybe the architects of this derosion seriously do believe they are doing good. They just don’t realise that cutting edge changes to society often only appeal to the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know elements, a group which too many of our politicians seem to belong to. Reform of the health service is a priority for both main parties but sometimes such a radical reform blinds the architects to the reality of what the service is designed to achieve. On top of this, the measurement of the service provided is not possible using the figure-based criteria that are defined. Numbers are blunt instruments when it comes to something as complex as health care. You need perceptions and good feelings, the confidence that you will be looked after with respect when you go for any health care. Start by making staff use family names rather than given names for every body. Calling everybody by their first name may be alright for those of us still in our first childhoods but it seems like lack of respect for a lot of us. I suppose I must be on the border of this distinction but even there I feel like the success of reforms is defined purely by numbers and of course you can do anything with numbers.
I’m not sure what it is but this blog seems to have lost some of the old style. It may be that I am just getting old and unable to concentrate but that seems at odds with my assertion that I am now able to keep going with ‘difficult’ books. Current reading is a true example. My wife gave me a copy of Brave New World some years ago and I never made it into the book itself, having given up after the Introduction, and biography and somewhere in the middle of Huxley’s own foreword. I started reading it again after its mention in The Martians and Us – part of BBC 4’s Sci-fi Britannia season and this time it seems so much easier. In a way it is a slightly more believable dystopia than that of nineteen-eighty-four because of the standard intelligence and behaviour of the main (albeit alpha male characters) as opposed to the downtrodden party members of Orwell’s book. There is the usual lag of technology where the book despite being set 600 odd years into the future still records everything on 80 cubic metres of card index. I suspect that most of the mechanical advances of the future would not amaze the sci-fi writers of the past. What will get them is the shrinking of information storage. I can’t be bothered to do the calculation but I suspect that 80 cubic metres of card index would easily fit into an empty corner of this very machine. The fact that the whole world is connected down this little cable to my left would knock anyone from the thirties to the floor. And yet none of this seems to have created the social revolution you might imagine. We all continue with our prejudices and desires for a normal quiet life. Who does the future belong to? – those who can understand the technology or even predict it - or to those who are comfortable with using it. Of course this is just a rewording of Arthur C. Clarke’s assertion that any sufficiently advanced society (civilization) is indistinguishable from magic.
There was one paragraph at the beginning of BNW which made me stop and re-read it as it chimes beautifully with this Government’s desire to identify potential trouble-makers almost from birth. The vision of conditioning of embryos before birth (decanting in Huxley’s terms) is only a slight modification of the idea of teams of bureaucrats like those in the film Brazil, wandering round with clipboards and staring down at crawling infants. It is almost identical to the terrible post-decanting conditioning of infants using aversion to deter them from a love of the countryside.
Oh dear, the little paranoid, conspiracy demons seems to have got me again. I realise that the BNW is not likely to be upon us immediately if ever but the present seems to be a creeping erosion of the society that has taken years to be built. There has been a hard struggle over the years to get us to the current state of free-speech and reasonably equal society and now it seems on the brink of a reverse, not maybe back to the dark ages but a perverse place where things that for the champions of our free society grate and annoy are seen by the over-complex brains of the people in charge as positive developments. Maybe the architects of this derosion seriously do believe they are doing good. They just don’t realise that cutting edge changes to society often only appeal to the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know elements, a group which too many of our politicians seem to belong to. Reform of the health service is a priority for both main parties but sometimes such a radical reform blinds the architects to the reality of what the service is designed to achieve. On top of this, the measurement of the service provided is not possible using the figure-based criteria that are defined. Numbers are blunt instruments when it comes to something as complex as health care. You need perceptions and good feelings, the confidence that you will be looked after with respect when you go for any health care. Start by making staff use family names rather than given names for every body. Calling everybody by their first name may be alright for those of us still in our first childhoods but it seems like lack of respect for a lot of us. I suppose I must be on the border of this distinction but even there I feel like the success of reforms is defined purely by numbers and of course you can do anything with numbers.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Four-Minute Warning
Out of town and out of luck,
away from warnings of the end of time
the disadvantaged countryside
falls to its sleep without the word
of missiles flying to us,
gifts from grateful enemies.
Late suppers finished
see us off to bed in silence
with the distance crowding down,
the weather undisturbed and failing
in its muffling and baffle,
while the screams of rockets
from the nearby politics
of civil war go overhead
without a touch to us.
The PC dozes, spilling drink
and books to fire-lighted floor,
his disconnected phone still flashing.
A clank of late-night feedings
streaks between these villages,
one metal impact, blanketing
the roar of traffic covering
the distant, powered ululation
warning of the war above.
The crank of our siren rusts,
has rusted here for years,
twined in the undergrowth
that pulses over it with seasons,
tides of spring, then autumn
hiding it from panic.
And only those who hear it die;
for all of us the world goes on
in peace and light and our desires,
cut from the universe of morals,
the fields and woods supporting us
without metropolis and poisons.
Out of town and out of luck,
away from warnings of the end of time
the disadvantaged countryside
falls to its sleep without the word
of missiles flying to us,
gifts from grateful enemies.
Late suppers finished
see us off to bed in silence
with the distance crowding down,
the weather undisturbed and failing
in its muffling and baffle,
while the screams of rockets
from the nearby politics
of civil war go overhead
without a touch to us.
The PC dozes, spilling drink
and books to fire-lighted floor,
his disconnected phone still flashing.
A clank of late-night feedings
streaks between these villages,
one metal impact, blanketing
the roar of traffic covering
the distant, powered ululation
warning of the war above.
The crank of our siren rusts,
has rusted here for years,
twined in the undergrowth
that pulses over it with seasons,
tides of spring, then autumn
hiding it from panic.
And only those who hear it die;
for all of us the world goes on
in peace and light and our desires,
cut from the universe of morals,
the fields and woods supporting us
without metropolis and poisons.
Monday, November 20, 2006
It Certainly Didn’t Have Any Depths
I finished Wuthering Heights at about 1:30 on Saturday morning. I wasn’t desperate to finish it, more like desperate to get it out of the way. The whole thing can be summed up by a single line (sometimes single word) analysis of each of the characters.
Catherine I – Neurotic.
Heathcliff – A Cipher in the sense that 0 is a cipher. Psychotic. He bribes the sexton to open the elder Catherine’s coffin for goodness sake.
Edgar – Effete blank.
Isabella – Blonde and with Ringlets – nuff said.
Hindley – Lush and Jealous
Hareton – The token intellectually challenged one (though I like him best because he overcomes the disadvantages that the author gives him)
Linton – Sick boy – effete – neurotic.
Catherine II – Nicer than her mother and makes a gentleman of Hareton.
Joseph – Token local who speaks nonsense.
Nelly Dean – Dea Ex Machina – the sensible one but then again she does everything that the author tells her to. She would have been sacked from a real job for all her concealments and tale-telling.
Lockwood – Ben Fogle I think.
All the others – I think all the men are Branwell Bronte and all the women either one of the other Bronte sisters or one of the servants.
I actually quite enjoyed the last bit where the younger Catherine makes friends with and educates Hareton. Heathcliff obviously upset the balance of the existence in Wuthering Heights and also obviously was needed to make this an interesting story which I suppose is the reason for writing it but I can’t help feeling that the ending represented a simple return to normality. As I might have suggested up there, I am glad that that’s over and the Earnshaws can get back to the normal scheme of things. Jane Eyre was much better.
Oh and Kenneth the doctor sounded a decent sort of chap.
I finished Wuthering Heights at about 1:30 on Saturday morning. I wasn’t desperate to finish it, more like desperate to get it out of the way. The whole thing can be summed up by a single line (sometimes single word) analysis of each of the characters.
Catherine I – Neurotic.
Heathcliff – A Cipher in the sense that 0 is a cipher. Psychotic. He bribes the sexton to open the elder Catherine’s coffin for goodness sake.
Edgar – Effete blank.
Isabella – Blonde and with Ringlets – nuff said.
Hindley – Lush and Jealous
Hareton – The token intellectually challenged one (though I like him best because he overcomes the disadvantages that the author gives him)
Linton – Sick boy – effete – neurotic.
Catherine II – Nicer than her mother and makes a gentleman of Hareton.
Joseph – Token local who speaks nonsense.
Nelly Dean – Dea Ex Machina – the sensible one but then again she does everything that the author tells her to. She would have been sacked from a real job for all her concealments and tale-telling.
Lockwood – Ben Fogle I think.
All the others – I think all the men are Branwell Bronte and all the women either one of the other Bronte sisters or one of the servants.
I actually quite enjoyed the last bit where the younger Catherine makes friends with and educates Hareton. Heathcliff obviously upset the balance of the existence in Wuthering Heights and also obviously was needed to make this an interesting story which I suppose is the reason for writing it but I can’t help feeling that the ending represented a simple return to normality. As I might have suggested up there, I am glad that that’s over and the Earnshaws can get back to the normal scheme of things. Jane Eyre was much better.
Oh and Kenneth the doctor sounded a decent sort of chap.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
I’ve suddenly just become able to feel semicolons
I was prepared for some naff and badly dated drama in The Day of the Triffids on BBC 4 last night. Instead it was threatening and frightening without anything actually happening – something that TV producers will not sanction these days. I read one review that said it had too much artificial explanation to develop the story which in the first episode was obviously directed at the tape player that Bill Masen was using to dictate the story of the Triffids for his colleague’s book. This will always be a problem with adapting John Wyndham’s books as he explains the background to the action in great detail; to stick to the story as this drama did, some sort of deep research type material is required just to keep the reader or viewer up with the plot.
I was prepared for some naff and badly dated drama in The Day of the Triffids on BBC 4 last night. Instead it was threatening and frightening without anything actually happening – something that TV producers will not sanction these days. I read one review that said it had too much artificial explanation to develop the story which in the first episode was obviously directed at the tape player that Bill Masen was using to dictate the story of the Triffids for his colleague’s book. This will always be a problem with adapting John Wyndham’s books as he explains the background to the action in great detail; to stick to the story as this drama did, some sort of deep research type material is required just to keep the reader or viewer up with the plot.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Three Days of the Wuthering Triffids
Oh where have I been? Not sure really but not quite out of this world yet. Big news for today is a reshowing of the early 80’s go at The Day of the Triffids from the BBC. Charlie Brooker seems to like it despite the Naff 80s look and bemoans the lack of genuine shocks on TV. I though my daughter might like it but she asked if it had a happy ending and when I replied that while not happy, the end was optimistic, she wanted to know what that meant out of ten. I had to say 4 which was met with the statement that she doesn’t watch anything under 5 on the happy-ending scale. I seem to remember it being genuinely scary, not because of the Clack-Clacking Giant Marigolds, but because of the accurate following of the book’s tale of the breakdown of civilization.
After my final capitulation as regards classic literature led to me reading and quite enjoying Jane Eyre, I have started on my fourth attempt at Wuthering Heights, sparked into it by it’s choice as one of the books in A Good Read on Radio 4. One of the guests, Professor Lisa Jardine said it was a standing joke that she had never finished this though for the show she managed it. She went on to complain at the main Narrator – Ellen Dean – who depending on the requirement of the plot either tells tales or withholds information. My thought that wasn’t this just a personification of what the novelist does anyway - but what do I know? I am not enjoying it as much as Jane Eyre, there is no real depth to the characters. What there is instead is a real whirlwind of passionate action all contained within this delicious little world of the moors and heights. The story does not seem to be much beyond the ramblings of what Emily Bronte would know about from her little world as filtered and arranged through the tales and actions of Nelly Dean. I suddenly thought about Mark Helprin and his book Refiner’s Fire which jumps around the world in a way which seems vaguely autobiographical but comes out seeming like a fantastic novel based on everything the author knows. Of course both Emily Bronte and Mark Helprin have literary ability which makes such fantasy possible. As I am over half-way through, I do expect to finish this though I am not sure it will leave me as satisfied as I have been expecting.
I have to go now and wore up all the phones in New York so no one can tell where I am calling from.
Oh where have I been? Not sure really but not quite out of this world yet. Big news for today is a reshowing of the early 80’s go at The Day of the Triffids from the BBC. Charlie Brooker seems to like it despite the Naff 80s look and bemoans the lack of genuine shocks on TV. I though my daughter might like it but she asked if it had a happy ending and when I replied that while not happy, the end was optimistic, she wanted to know what that meant out of ten. I had to say 4 which was met with the statement that she doesn’t watch anything under 5 on the happy-ending scale. I seem to remember it being genuinely scary, not because of the Clack-Clacking Giant Marigolds, but because of the accurate following of the book’s tale of the breakdown of civilization.
After my final capitulation as regards classic literature led to me reading and quite enjoying Jane Eyre, I have started on my fourth attempt at Wuthering Heights, sparked into it by it’s choice as one of the books in A Good Read on Radio 4. One of the guests, Professor Lisa Jardine said it was a standing joke that she had never finished this though for the show she managed it. She went on to complain at the main Narrator – Ellen Dean – who depending on the requirement of the plot either tells tales or withholds information. My thought that wasn’t this just a personification of what the novelist does anyway - but what do I know? I am not enjoying it as much as Jane Eyre, there is no real depth to the characters. What there is instead is a real whirlwind of passionate action all contained within this delicious little world of the moors and heights. The story does not seem to be much beyond the ramblings of what Emily Bronte would know about from her little world as filtered and arranged through the tales and actions of Nelly Dean. I suddenly thought about Mark Helprin and his book Refiner’s Fire which jumps around the world in a way which seems vaguely autobiographical but comes out seeming like a fantastic novel based on everything the author knows. Of course both Emily Bronte and Mark Helprin have literary ability which makes such fantasy possible. As I am over half-way through, I do expect to finish this though I am not sure it will leave me as satisfied as I have been expecting.
I have to go now and wore up all the phones in New York so no one can tell where I am calling from.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Sickert To Them.
Blackbird, an online literature journal has a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath called Ennui, a sonnet from her college years. I’m not sure I can read it correctly without actually reading it out loud but it is interesting. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the use of the word ‘jejune’ is self-referential; that would be consigning the poem to juvenilia wouldn’t it? I can have a go now I suppose.
Blackbird, an online literature journal has a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath called Ennui, a sonnet from her college years. I’m not sure I can read it correctly without actually reading it out loud but it is interesting. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the use of the word ‘jejune’ is self-referential; that would be consigning the poem to juvenilia wouldn’t it? I can have a go now I suppose.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Take a bit of Good Advice
There are plenty of new photos over at Flickr. There may be more. I just don't know. Don't pressurise me.
I am on a different site today. The chair I am sitting on is so much lower than the special back-pampering, twisty thing I have have at my normal place of work and all I can see over the partition are lines of ceiling lights fading to the vanishing point. The far wall is hidden so that the lights might be stretching to infinity like the infinite plain - all of which reminds me of a poem I read the other day called "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" You will have to try and work the link between the infinite plain and this - my blog archives hold the the only clue as far as I can see.
Long poems are in my head - well ones with unstructured and undefined purposese anyway.
There are plenty of new photos over at Flickr. There may be more. I just don't know. Don't pressurise me.
I am on a different site today. The chair I am sitting on is so much lower than the special back-pampering, twisty thing I have have at my normal place of work and all I can see over the partition are lines of ceiling lights fading to the vanishing point. The far wall is hidden so that the lights might be stretching to infinity like the infinite plain - all of which reminds me of a poem I read the other day called "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" You will have to try and work the link between the infinite plain and this - my blog archives hold the the only clue as far as I can see.
Long poems are in my head - well ones with unstructured and undefined purposese anyway.
