Spartacus: Blood and Sand

It is truly bonkers but the longer the series went on the more compelling it became as television.  John Hannah tears up the screen.  Lucy Lawless pouts her way to a cliffhanger of unimaginable gore.  Despite myself I loved it and it has seen me through too many days like today, stuck in bed with a hole in my buttock.
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The Booker Prize

Here's how bad it gets when you're confined to bed: you read everything you can find about the Man Booker prize long list (a Booker dozen is like a baker's dozen apparently).  I'm wondering if I should buy the lot to overdose on literary fiction.  With university reading lists I probably have enough to read.

I enjoyed today's podcast by Guardian Books.  The newspaper of choice introduces it thus:

Claire Armitstead hosts a discussion on the books that made the Man Booker longlist and talks to author Emma Donoghue about being longlisted before being published, and Sarah Crown meets the Forward Prize shortlisted poet Jo Shapcott.

Snakes and ladders

Maybe I mean two paces forward then one pace back (although the board game metaphor fits better with an idea Spike is considering for one of her course projects).  I'm back in bed.  It's not my abscess this time, which is present still but getting smaller.  No, it's damaged, tired, worn skin above my bottom. 

I'm sitting on a very temporary measure, a cheap, inflatable rubber ring that provides space and air exactly below the abscess site.  Something seems to be happening to an arc of skin corresponding to the rear portion of the ring.  I don't know what's caused the damage because last time (November last year) I didn't have this problem.  But the skin is in danger of breaking down so I need to be off it.  Need one say I've known more uplifting days?

In search of shelter

The rain persists. Remorseless winter's
downpour, it saturates not just your clothes
but seeps into your veins and soaks
old bones made cold and brittle, colder
now the work of ages and infirmity is done
so that the past, wrapped round the frame
a young man once defied his odds with,
reveals itself in aching joints, thin blood
so poorly circulating time forgot to count
and scars and scrapes just one mishap away
from festering sore and misery, infected
by the grime, the dirt, the bugs, the vile
contentions and assaults of being a bum;
a man who sleeps in doorways if he can,
who knows no more than where to hide
on rainy winter nights this world forgets.

I've been reading more of 1984 with its cold, dank Victory Mansions.  It's raining outside our window here in Sydney.  And it's cold.  As I pushed from my office block entrance to the corner of Campbell Street where my taxi waited I passed a woman, bare-footed, sitting on newspapers on the dry forecourt.  She was settling down for the night.  I've never seen here there before.  In search of something to put in my blog before heading off to my warm bed, maybe these disparate elements came together in something that may or may not be a poem.  Whatever it is, it is what it is.
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Orwell

I've started reading for my English course (Fiction, Film and Power) with George Orwell.  We've been asked to read Chapter 1 of 1984 and Politics and the English Language.

I'm a great admirer of the former.  I read it first at school (of course) and have read it several times since.  I think I'm more impressed with it each time I read it.  The first sentence retains its power to unsettle the reader as much now as it ever did:  "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

I'm underwhelmed by PatEL.  It's praised in many quarters as a key text on style and an examination of the ways in which language is debased and deformed to serve ideological and political purposes.  Beyond Orwell's observations about sloppy and unimaginative writing (he sets up some tired, over-used metaphors as 'Aunt Sallys' to be too easily knocked over) I react against the essay's innate conservatism and elitism.  It has the feel of a Little Englander howl against the way English usage and writing are going to Hell in a handcart.  A telling phrase used by Orwell is "the defence of the English language ..." as if it were an artefact or a building, a fine old church perhaps, threatened by the ruinous consequences of both the old (Greek and Latin words get a pasting from Orwell) and the new.  His constant refrain urging the deployment of Saxon words is rather too particular for my taste.  He doesn't quite assert that it's all the fault of William, the French and 1066 but his 'defence' is too narrowly focussed to stand up in his own day, let alone now.

Besides, history has shown him to be wrong.  Of course one can identify all kinds of bad writing, lacking in clarity, meaning and purpose.  But the language thrives, renews itself and good writing is all around.

I'll give him this though.  His rules of writing have merit even if his broader argument is riddled with holes.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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Back to university

Semester Two started today, which is both exciting and frustrating.  It's the latter because it wasn't until today that we could have access to this term's on-line course resources, including unit outlines, tutorial topics, essays, final reading lists and lecture schedules.  I'm annoyed to find out that one of the courses will not have taped lectures (contrary to pre-enrolment advice).  I'll need to alter my working hours, starting as early as I can on Tuesdays and Thursdays to compensate for early departures.  It'll work out if I commit myself to what needs to be done.  But it's bothersome.  Life would be so much easier if I could take in the lectures at home in the evening.  Circumstances are not made easier by a) my abscess and b) the absence of my van (back from Elio, the mechanic, by the end of the week I hope).

More positively, there's the excitement (some trepidation) of starting new courses.  I've signed up for two (and maybe Chinese for beginners in the evening).  There's ENGL1025 Fiction, Film and Power and ANHS1601 Foundations of Ancient Rome.  Both courses 'do what they say on the packet.' 

The Film / Film Adaptation course should be fun and well within my comfort zone.  I simply have to read the novels, articles and watch the movies.  We had our first lecture today.  It included a showing of Buster Keaton's Cops, which is still funny 88 years after it was made.

The Roman history course is an altogether different kettle of fish.  All those dates, dynasties, periods and the rest - challenging (to put it mildly).  It's a long, long time since I studied any form of history (not since Stirling University in the late 1970s when I took a couple of units in Modern European, British and Social history topics). 

Here I am though ... Romans at Sydney University!!  Not looked at them since second year at secondary school, which was not yesterday (nearly 40 years ago now I think on it.)

Bedside Manner

Diffidence speaks less, perhaps,
of nurture than of nature; more
of how you did not learn enough
than of the skills they tried to teach
when you were younger, I suppose,
and called to what you called vocation:
your desire to help, perhaps to heal,
at least to hold out hope.  At least.

But time moves on regardless
through lives we give a name to
seeking purpose, or at least a role
to play, both for ourselves and others.

You are a nurse and I your patient.
You dress my wound but cannot share
your name or look me in the eye
from first hello to walking out's goodbye.

I was visited by a community nurse who came to inspect and dress the wound left by my abscess.  I've no idea who he was.  He meant well, I'm sure but he has a lot to learn about listening.
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