1 Samuel 17

Best thing yet from Paul Haggis (by a long way). Another brilliant performance by Tommy Lee Jones. Charlize Theron was very good, Susan Sarandon terrific (but under-used) and the rest of the cast spot on. Loved it.

In The Valley Of Elah: official web site

In the valley of Elah: authorised version (ho, ho, ho)

Who could tell?

Blissful, she said

Ode to a lemon

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium.

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it -
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

Pablo Neruda

A perfect Sunday

A history of evil

this is good, although it doesn’t know how to end

Borderlands

Must we look forever into lost dreams,
wondering where the change took place,
- never again quite able
to deal with choices we could not make?

Must we? What point is there in that?
What purpose might we serve by trying still
to ascertain what might have been,
what never was and, now, can never be?

The past may haunt us … haunt us
but will we always dwell in mythic landscapes,
treading paths we never dared to take
for fear of little more than maybe, maybe not?

There are days like these

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning

Yes to lunch on Monday

Cristina Ricci (not the movie star in case anyone thinks I'm delusional) suggested in an e.mail today that we meet for lunch next week. I said yes (of course). We keep ourselves amused by corresponding by (slightly silly) blank verse. This is today's response:

for you, my dear,
I would, of course, shift Heaven
and the Earth,
pass through the fiery gates of Hell,
traverse the frozen wastelands
of redemption
and renewal
and re-birth
and climb atop the pinnacle
of expectation's highest peak

for lunch
... on Monday
(the 11th):
here or close to here
(where sits a decent little Thai)

Cloverfield

Brilliant movie-making. It surpassed my expectations, lived-up to the hype and (at under 90 minutes) understood that even the Godzilla-like destruction of all that makes us feel secure (perhaps complacent) can be overdone and take too long. How well was the movie made? I guess the proof is found in the fact that it mattered to me how each character reached their story's end. This is no mean feat because the Director seemed to have set them up as irritating brats, cardboad cut-out charcters, in the first twenty minutes. So ... a film about accepting responsibility, the loss of innocence, courage, mortality, environmental damage, the folly of isolation, belonging, family, love, the insignificance of any one of us; ach, heaps of serious stuff (but I already read like a pompous oaf so that'll be more than enough). All of the aforementioned driven into our sub-conscious by a two hundred foot tall lizard with creepy-crawly wee parasites. It will be on everyone's list of films of the year. Folk will be watching it 50 years from now. A true classic of (post)modern cinema. Who would have thought it?

Alistair Campbell on Britney

I wrote the paragraph below in response to an article in The Times by Alistair Campbell.

Mr Campbell writes well and I share his view. (By the way, I do wish others would simply take his analysis at face value ... haven't we learned to move on from 'AC spin merchant incarnate'?). It's a little sad, however, that on the same page as AC's perceptive assessment of newspapers gone mad there are 8 links to crash and burn Britney stories plus a photo. Even The Times, it seems, is not wholly immune.



Read the full article here.