Quantification

If this is what it boils down to,
the residue of hopes no longer
triumphant over expectation
how might one measure that?
Does one weigh it in a balance
between all that seemed unlikely
and every thought that never flew
or pour it out into the glass to say
half full, or maybe not; half empty?
We dare not say or have no view
for knowing this, that fools rush
in where angels fear to tread,
the more or less we think we know
such thoughts hang by bare thread.
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Now Voyager?

Barely floating, like an ancient, leaky boat
from some lost age, with creaking joints
placed under too much constant pressure
but resistant yet; still together - just -
beneath the cracked and flaking skin,
once bright, once clear but fading now;
half-submerged in water on which once
it sat upright and maybe even perky,
defiant in those former days, those days
of bygone glory when (once upon a time)
no farthest shore seemed yet too distant,
no feint horizon failed to stir the impulse
to head out, to set out on a journey
over seas with neither map nor compass.
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How good is writing like this?

	Painter or Illustrator: Lynch, James Henry (d. 1868)    (Work signed) Writer: Abot, Eugene Michel Joseph (1836-1894) This leaflet is part of a series: Balzac, Pere Goriot, Sc life by., Calmann-Levy, Quantin, 1885 (Cash / No 0 / 10) Dating:  1885 Source text: Balzac, Le Pere Goriot (1834)

Painter or Illustrator:
Lynch, James Henry (d. 1868)    (Work signed)

Writer: Abot, Eugene Michel Joseph (1836-1894)

This leaflet is part of a series:
Balzac, Pere Goriot, Sc life by., Calmann-Levy, Quantin, 1885
(Cash / No 0 / 10)

Dating:  1885

Source text:
Balzac, Le Pere Goriot (1834)

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing like a gray shadow along the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his head a shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory handle in the tips of his thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed to conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken limbs; the thin, blue-stockinged legs trembled like those of a drunken man; there was a notable breach of continuity between the dingy white waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a throat like a turkey gobbler's; altogether, his appearance set people wondering whether this outlandish ghost belonged to the audacious race of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard Italien. What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What had he been? Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to which the executioner sends in his accounts,—so much for providing black veils for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom their Bertrands do not even know by sight; a pivot in the obscure machinery that disposes of misery and things unclean; one of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are prompted to remark that, "After all, we cannot do without them."

From Farther Goriot by Honore de Balzac
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Reading for dummies (like me)

I am procrastinating; avoiding the work that I really ought to do.  I can't be bothered because (five weeks into my new job) I'd sooner leave it than get stuck in.  I have formed an escape committee with Mrs Spiers.

Anyway, I took to thinking about how ill-read I feel.  I'm not illiterate.  I know that much.  But I was struck, not so very long ago, with how few books I had read from The Guardian list of the top 100 books of all time.  (It turns out, apparently, that the list was merely re-printed by The Guardian, from the original constructed by The Norwegian Book Clubs, of all the improbable points of origin one might think of.)  Over 50 of the texts can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, here.

Last year, again while procrastinating, I was likewise struck by how few novels on a list compiled by Time Magazine I had read.  It was described as the ALL-TIME list of the world's best 100 novels.  To be deemed eligible for consideration a novel had to have been written between Time's first publication in 1923 and 2010.

I combined the two lists, which contain 187 texts.  There are 9 texts on both lists.  I've read 32 of the texts (including 4 of the 9).  That's a paltry 17 per cent.  Time to get reading.

I've started with Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac, written in 1835.  In the first chapter I came upon the term "car of Juggernaut".  That struck me as a modern term for an early 19th Century author, which shows you how much I know.  Jagganatha, the Hindu deity translated as Lord of the World, is worshiped in temples that date from as far back as the 12th Century (in Puri, Orissa; North East India).  The picture is one of the Madrass car of Jagganatha.

Harriet Jacobs

I finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl today.  It's a remarkable text; an almost unbelievable tale (although its truth shines through ... and for any deniers or sceptics out there .... has been independently verified).  The full text can be read here.  How could we do these things to one another?

What a woman.  How much we owe her.

From the Harriet Jacobs web site:

"I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations." 

After nearly seven years hiding in a tiny garret above her grandmother’s home, Harriet Ann Jacobs took a step other slaves dared to dream in 1842; she secretly boarded a boat in Edenton, N.C., bound for Philadelphia, New York and, eventually, freedom. The young slave woman’s flight, and the events leading up to it, are documented in heart-wrenching detail in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, self-published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

A significant personal history by an African American woman, Harriet Jacobs’ story is as remarkable as the writer who tells it. During a time when it was unusual for slaves to read and write, self-publishing a first-hand account of slavery’s atrocities was extraordinary. That it was written by a woman, unprecedented.

From the Harriet Jacobs Wikipedia site:

Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813 - March 7, 1897) was an American writer, who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs' single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym "Linda Brent", was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured.
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Scrambled on Enmore Road

My breakfast at Scrambled, Enmore Road.  Spike made the better choice ... something Mexican ... but I seem to have deleted it from my phone.  The food was so-so; nothing to get excited about but decent enough to convince you that you'd eaten a hearty breakfast ... even at one o'clock or thereabouts.  We'd had a busy morning.

The cafe is worth visiting.  Friendly folk, mixed clientele, plenty to watch go bye on Enmore Road.  I'm not wildly enthusiastic about the smokers on the pavement tables just beyond the open shop-front.  If it's true that barely 17 per cent of adults smoke, I begin to think we've reached the point where smoking should not be permitted wherever food is served.  That's a Jack sentence, which one tries to avoid as much as possible.  Here's a simpler version: smoking ought not to be permissible wherever food is served.  Full stop.
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2,164 words later ...

... my essay is finished, after a 12 hour stint. Here's my penultimate paragraph:

Stam states that Genette’s architextuality, “has to do with an artist's willingness or reluctance to characterize a text generically in its title.” Based (as the credits state) on Orlean’s book, the title of Adaptation sets out its different terrain. It is not the film of the book that character Kaufman insists he must write. It is a knowing parody of self-conscious works of art organised in paradoxical and transtextual dialogue with itself, other works and readers.

Did I really say that? I'm happy enough with the essay. We'll see how I do later.
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Happy Birthday

Arabesk in a pub

And that's only lemon, lime and bitters

Some danced all night.  Not me.  But it was enjoyable to have some time in the pub with Simon, Dilys, Jon, Rosie, Amelia, Spike and my favourite Sydney band.

2,000 words by Monday

It's essay time for my Literature and Cinema course.  I'm answering a question on Charlie Kaufman's brilliant  script for the Spike Jones movie Adaptation.  The question is:

Explore the ways in which Adaptation addresses questions of origin and originality,creation and creativity.

So, lots of room to explore some ideas.  Too much room?  We'll see by Monday.  Right now I'm lost in the swamp of too many texts.  But I'll follow these paths (at least).

In Film adaptation and its discontents: from Gone with the wind to The passion of The Christ, David Leitch has written that;

“ … adaptation study has drastically limited its horizons by its insistence on treating source texts as canonical authoritative discourse or readerly works rather than internally persuasive discourse or writerly texts … [leading to] the primary lesson of film adaptation: that texts remain alive only to the extent that they can be re-written and that to experience a text in all its power requires each reader to rewrite it.'

and 

“ … we need to re-frame the assumption that … source texts cannot be rewritten … as a new assumption: source texts must be rewritten; we cannot help rewriting them.” 

There's a worked example given by Brett Westbrook in his essay Being Adaptation: The Resistance to Theory 

Take, for example, the 1964 film My Fair Ladydirected by George Cukor.  This film musical was based on the stage musical with lyrics and music by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe, based on a straight (i.e. non-musical) play by George Bernard Shaw, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, based on a Greek legend.  Out of all of these ‘texts” which is the pre-cursor text for the screenplay writer [credited as Lerner], for the director, for the performers, for the audience?

I tried the same for Adaptation.  Here's what I came up with:

The 2004 Film Adaptation directed by Spike Jones, written by Charles [and Donald] Kaufman based on the non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief written by Susan Orlean; developed from her New Yorker articles inspired by an article by [unknown] journalist working for the Miami Herald reporting a real event in 1994.  Add in Jonathan Demme and Edward Braxton, producers who gave the screenplay writing task to Charlie Kaufman.

Both Kaufman and Orlean cite / quote from The Origin Of The Species by Charles Darwin, published in 1858 – 4 years after Alfred Russell Wallace’s tentative paper got there first.

It's hard to pinpoint 'the original'.  Maybe we waste time by attempting to do so in this inter-textual world of ours.

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Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite?

There's a story in today's Sunday Observer about a woman called Kenza Drider, a French woman who lives in Avignon.  She wears the niqab and talks in the interview about her intention to do so on Monday, 11th April when the offensive ban is imposed by French law.  I'm neither a woman nor a Muslim.  Wearing the niqab is not something I'd choose to do.  But we've reached a very sad day in supposedly enlightened western democracies when the law dictates what a woman may or may not wear.

The full article is here.  This is what Kenza Drider says about the niqab and personal freedom.

Drider, whose parents were immigrants from Morocco, says wearing the niqab was her own personal choice. In this, according to a study by the At Home in Europe project of the Open Society Foundations, she is not unusual: nearly all of the 32 French women interviewed for the project say that they – and no one else – made the decision that they would wear the niqab.

"There was no mosque involved, no pressure from anyone. It is not a religious constraint since it is not laid down in Islam or the Qur'an that I have to wear a full veil. It is my personal choice," she says.

"I would never encourage others to do it just because I do. That is their choice. My daughters can do what they like. As I tell them, this is my choice, not theirs."

She adds: "I never covered my head when I was young. I came from a family of practising Muslims, but we were not expected to even wear a headscarf.

"Then I began looking into Islam and what it meant to be a Muslim and decided to wear a headscarf. Afterwards in my research into the wives of the Prophet I saw they wore the full veil and I liked this idea and decided to wear it. Before, I had felt something was missing. Then I put it on and I felt serene and complete. It pleased me and it has become a part of me."

Drider says it is only since Sarkozy's government began discussing the veil ban that she has been subject to insults, harassment and death threats. "When President Sarkozy said: 'The burqa is not welcome in France', the president, my president, opened the door for racism, aggression and attacks on Islam. This is an attempt to stigmatise Islam and it has created enormous racism and Islamophobia that wasn't there before."
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Bambi and Me

As part of my AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS unit at Sydney University we're studying a module on Disneyland.  One of the discussion topics of our on-line first assignment asked this question: How have you made Disney scripts your own in the course of your lives?

Here's what I wrote in response:

SPOILER ALERT if you’ve never seen Bambi.
 

In 1961, my mum and dad took me to the movies as a birthday treat to celebrate me becoming four. Naturally enough, they chose Bambi made in 1942 (when they were 11 and 12 respectively and probably saw it for the first time themselves). It was showing in Aberdeen, Scotland, where we lived at time, on one of its cleverly marketed periodic theatrical re-releases in the days before a family like ours owned (rented actually) even a black and white television; when video was still a thing found only in science fiction.

Apparently, in the deathly hush of the darkened cinema, at the point where the hunter shoots Bambi’s mother and she lay dieing, my barely-four me stood up in the cinema seat – mum one side, dad the other, pointed at the silver screen then cried out in the darkness … “don’t go – don’t die Mrs Bambi.” I am told that there was not a dry eye in the house. I obviously believed that what I was watching was real.

I mention this moment from a Saturday-morning showing almost exactly 50 years ago (my birthday is mid-April so I can place it almost exactly) for two reasons. The event has become part of that embarrassing family folk-lore we are all subjected to. At some stage in any relationship, when I brought home a new girl-friend, my mother or father would get round to me and Bambi’s mum at some point. Maybe my empathy as a four-year old might mark me out as a solid marriage prospect. Even when there was no girlfriend, from time to time when our extended family gathered for Christmas or New Year meals or birthdays some member of my mother’s generation would start again with the Bambi thing. It was one of many family tales, which, like Disney(land) itself, constituted part of a nostalgic, family-friendly evocation of something re-assuring about our mythologised and idealised past. Disney was, is and always will be part of our family’s safe territory of a past that was not always problem-free or without loss.

We had our first television by 1963. I know this only because I recall the UK’s monumentally huge, leading Children’s TV programme, BLUE PETER, interviewing a UK military police officer like those on duty for the State funeral of JFK. We were invited to wonder at the precision of the dog-handling, I suppose, which would have taken our 6-year olds’ minds off the assassination – the first of the TV era. 

My related point is that I probably started watching Disney on telly aged five, which means that with TV runs, programmes like Disney Hour, the Wonderful World Of Disney and theatrical releases and re-releases of Disney movies (from Snow White to Treasure Island and the original Herbie films, starting with The Love Bug in 1968) like many kids of my generation I probably saw every Disney cartoon or movie made until the early-seventies. Maybe it just seems that way but I think I may actually have seen most, if not all.

I’ve owned a Mickey Mouse watch, a Davy Crockett jacket (the Bartsow children were born in the decade before me), Donald Duck pencil cases. God alone knows how much marketing we’ve spent our family income on. There were three boys to satisfy in our family.  This is true - I had a Davy Crockett jacket years before my grandparents had a lavatory inside their house.  Our family was just like most Glasgow families so what kind of weird set of social norms does that belong to?

Disney just is. It’s part of my background; part of my growing up in much the same way as was one’s first train set, two-wheel push bike or fishing.

And Disney remains with me today. In the past year or so (I’m 54 remember) I’ve seen A Christmas Carol, The Princess and The Frog, Up, Toy Story 3, Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time and Alice In Wonderland (all Walt Disney or Touchstone Pictues).  I've seen serious, grown up movies too and have a proper grown-up's job but Disney is still with me.  I don’t own a television but I’ve seen Disney Channel programmes when I’ve stayed in hotels when I’m on business and have access to cable. Next time I go to California I’ll make a point of visiting Anaheim because in my other visits to LA I’ve been too busy for Disneyland. Even now, even me; I kind of feel that I won’t have done America properly until I’ve been to the Magic Kingdom. I know it’s all smoke and mirrors but I’ll still buy the ticket and enjoy the ride. It’s Disney after all, part of my life story for good or ill.

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Alfred Hitchcock's Rope

I've just finished watching Hitchcock's Rope for a seminar at university tomorrow.  From the minute it started until the last ridiculous shot I was willing any of the film's characters to step out of the screen and strangle ME with their rope. I HATED EVERY BIT OF IT.

It's clunky, shockingly badly scripted, hectoring, sanctimonious, misanthropic, self-serving awfulness.  James Stewart couldn't be more miss-cast.  Cedric Hardwicke clearly can't wait to get off the set.  The young male actors are barely competent. And, perhaps the greatest tragedy, a great movie-maker gives us the most un-filmic movie you can imagine.  Worse still you can see the joins and the making.

I hope my tutor has a good explanation as to why it's in my life, on my course, taking up valuable study time. Aaaaarrrrggghh!
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A Life Quite Ordinary

It has been a while since I've been here; a full calender month.   Although I'm not quite sure why I started blogging (nearly 8 years ago now) nor why I maintain the effort (intermittently) here I am again.  It's vanity maybe or ego.  From time to time I tell myself I do it so I can look back and murmur, "ah yes" with something that might approach confidence in the ever-diminishing memory of an aging man of ordinary means.  Is that how one spells aging / ageing?  The spelling checker seems to think so.

It's been a busy enough month.  That's a convenient enough explanation of my absence.

In the wide world there have been monumental events, most of which I've had no involvement with or personal connection to.  Earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan; the tsunami of course.  The near-endless re-cycling of mobile phone camera footage of the terrifying destructiveness of natural forces was at times overwhelming yet utterly irresistible.  What must it have been like to be caught in the middle of it.  Up north (and down south) Australia was windswept and flooded.  But here in NSW the sun shone in our gorgeous Indian summer.  In North Africa mass movements mobilised with varying degrees of success.  Ben Ali and Mubarak fled, Gaddafi clings on (at least for now) but in places such as the Yemen and Syria the system seems to be intact and brutally resistant.  In NSW we changed Government in the usual, bloodless way. 

For a news junkie like me there hasn't been far to look to find my daily fix. 

My own life has been busy enough.  I've been in my new job for two weeks.  It seems to be going well enough.  University started again and we're now fully up to speed.  I have an assignment to complete by the 8th for my AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS course and any essay to write by the 18th for LITERATURE AND CINEMA.  Amelia got married so I wore a kilt.  Spike had her pea-pod in an exhibition at the ESP Gallery in Marrickville.  We've been to exhibitions, openings and a few movies; none of them life-changing, none entirely without merit.  I've written some poems and submitted KABOOM to another agent.  Still no success.  I have an interesting idea for a novel.  We'll see.

Amidst all the true drama of big events in a world that has far from reached Francis Fukiyama's ridiculous idea of the end of history something drives me to blog about this small, ordinary but not entirely uninteresting life of mine.  Odd, isn't it?  But there you have it.
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