... not necessarily wiser.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Good question

What should one make of Ellroy?

He said of himself:

… I give the period novel a much more explicit thrust … and since this was a time where not everything was discussed ad nauseam, well it has a paradoxical power. I want to leave all of you with the weird, strange, ugly, pervasive sense of bad juju ramifications extending beyond the last pages of my books.  I don’t want to ever give you a type of book where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses on the last page or even where the bad guy wins and the good guy loses.  I want you to feel it going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on …

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction

And Andrew Pepper wrote ...

In the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, attempts by LAPD officers to nominate a deviant blackness as the root cause of criminal activities and societal problems ring hollow.  Instead what Ellroy’s LA Quartet illuminates is the constructed nature of whiteness, its parasitic dependency on blackness or a blackness represented as morally monstrous.  Strategies of domination implicit in the crime fiction of, say, Raymond Chandler, strategies that manifest themselves, for example, in Marlowe’s fear of the contaminating racial other, are made explicit in the revisionist grotesqueries of Ellroy’s fiction.  Yet by making these strategies explicit, by intensifying the racist rhetoric of his various white-cop protagonists almost to the point of parody, Ellroy shatters any pretence that what he is representing is somehow invisible or natural.  The distorting influence of social power is omnipresent in the often overblown rhetoric of his protagonists and cut free from its secure moorings, whiteness becomes a free-floating signifier, a Janus-like, schizophrenic figure whose efforts to convince as a beacon of civility are undercut by an ill-conceived propensity for barbarism and a neo-colonial desire to control or even annihilate dissenting voices. 

The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class 

(Edinburgh University Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 2000)

I worry that in Ellroy's worlds there is no one who is not tainted.  I fear he makes a fetish out of homophobia, misogyny, racism.  I understand that ghastly, appalling events occur perpetrated by sociopaths and psychopaths.  But there is decency too and ultimately, I believe, it is triumphant.

I'm not sure where that leaves me with the essay I have to submit next Tuesday.

One hand clapping

Wheezing like a tired, old dog
spreadeagled on a threadbare, faded rug
in an empty room on the ground floor
of a shack, two-miles out of town
on a long-forgotten, seldom travelled track

a man, no longer sure of why
or even when he came to sit and stare,
turns his slightly heavy head a fraction,
maybe less than that - to listen -
to try to hear once more that sound

he thought he might have heard before;
not an echo, not a whisper,
not the distant drum of some lost drummer
marching down the road to might have been
but still, he thought, the sound of something.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I watched the 2011 movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at home this evening.  It's very good, perhaps good enough to watch several times to catch all the tiny nuances.  The performances are uniformly excellent; Gary Oldman is sensational.

The director's view of the seventies seems to be brown, with the possible exception of the decorations at office Christmas party, Anne Smiley's dress and blood.  Maybe there's a symbolism there.  Maybe not.  But what a drab, horrible universe the film-makers created for us with virtually everything of the human spirit sucked out of living.  Can the Seventies have been that soul-destroying?  Maybe.  After all the decade ended with Thatcher's election victory.

Following a Google trail at the end of the movie I was sad to learn that the co-writer, Bridget O'Connor died before the movie was released.  She was 49 years old, clearly hugely talented.

Double Bill

Good Friday in Sydney is quiet; offices shut, shopping malls closed (in the case of the Broadway Westfield, padlocked - of all the old-fashioned technologies to use - at one entrance), light traffic on the roads and comparatively easy parking.  Spike had an afternoon's work at the Glass Artist's Gallery in Glebe so I went to Hoyts adjacent to the padlocked shopping mall.  I arrived just in time for Wrath of the Titans 3D to be the only option that didn't require me to wait an hour in the lobby so I paid my money and entered the cinema with a bottle of water, bag of crisps and a pair of 3D specs that might have fitted a teenager.

What can I say?  WOTT is less tedious than COTT.  It takes itself far less seriously so the light smattering of humour worked well enough.  It is silliness on a stick, of course.  But that's not necessarily a bad status to aim for, so long as there is fun along the way.  There wasn't quite enough fun for my tastes while there was way, way too much hand-held camera, in the thick of the action cliche that's well past its sell-by date.  There is a bit of me thinks that if you're going to enter the territory of the epic tale with gods, demi-gods and heroes on winged horses you have to commit yourself totally: step through the magical portal, suspend our disbelief and step back, impress us with the magnitude, epic qualities of an epic tale.   Close up and personal doesn't quite cut the mustard.  All the same, I've seen worse.  And it seemed mercifully short, which was just as well.

I was back in the foyer by 2:20, close to four hours still to go so I searched Glee Books (without success) for a copy of LA Confidential then returned to Hoyts.  My second choice was John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was sweet (but mercifully not too sweet), gently funny, genuinely poignant at points and not too heavily laden with the lessons and wisdom we may acquire with age.  The cream of British acting talent of a certain age performed impeccably - I could watch Tom Wilkinson in anything (he is truly great at understatement, which makes his rare outburst of passion always more thrilling) and Judi Dench was, well ... Judi Dench.  Maggie Smith, simply flawless (even though her narrative journey was implausible to the point of being fanciful).  Dev Patel gave a truly engaging performance, perhaps the standout of the piece (given those he was in the mix with).  He's clearly been learning his craft since Slumdog shot him to fame.

I was particularly amused at the coincidence of my choices that put the irrepressible Bill Nighy in both movies as the barking mad, brilliant and brave Haphaestus in WOTT and the hapless Douglas in TBEMH.  He was terrific value in both, possibly the best thing about WOTT and triumphant in a worm that turned kind of way in TBEMH.  Either way, worth his weight in gold.

All in all, an enjoyable Friday afternoon followed by cocktails and nibbles (rather more than that to be fair) at the excellent, friendly The Little Guy in Glebe Point Road.

Just write

William Wordsworth was 28 and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 26 when Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems was published in 1798.  It may be true that it is never too late to try but I'm already older than their years combined.

Ice on Ben Arthur, 1971

Bring back the way we might have been
with our half-remembered brightness
like those eager men the world had not yet seen

restless in pursuit, not of their greatness
but of truths that they or we or any mountaineer
might look for in the glint of winter's sun

skating on the frosted summit's skin
above us; out of reach and yet so near
we dare not cease until the climb is done.