tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45871268716238243292024-02-23T07:43:51.723+00:00Kathz's BlogIdeas are for sharing. Read. Think. Discuss. Question. Protest if necessary. And please post a comment.Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.comBlogger193125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-9623186268619382392013-10-12T09:59:00.001+01:002013-10-12T09:59:20.530+01:00Museum by night<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was an anxious cluster of people outside the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were reading the hoardings that had appeared. "NEW RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT" it proclaimed, and a second line added, "</span>AT PRIME CULTURAL HERITAGE LOCATION."<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I could hear what the people were saying, although their voices rarely rose above a quiet mutter. "They're selling everything off." "I never thought we'd lose the V&A." "It's such a shame - I'll miss it." But although passers-by really thought that the government had decided to convert one of London's great museum into luxury housing, none of those I heard suggested a protest. They minded, they were upset, but not one of them even suggested wearing a badge or writing a letter to an MP. This was what the government was doing and they would have to put up with it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I'd have been there with a banner and loud-hailer if I thought the government was selling off the V&A to property developers. I've loved this museum since, as a London child, I wandered through its galleries and got lost amidst its marvels. There used to be a reproduction of the Bayeaux Tapestry on rollers so that you could view it in stages. I lost count of the number of times my brother and I surveyed it, looking for the figure we believed was Harold with the arrow in his eye. The huge and detailed <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/image/0007/200041/29873-large.jpg" target="_blank">Raphael cartoons</a> were another attraction and for some reason I was fascinated by the sculpture of the serpents entangling Laocoon and his sons. There were even visits to the cast gallery, if I could persuade an adult to take me past the sign which banned unaccompanied children under 15. I don't know if this was to project the fragile casts or to keep us from the replica of Michaelangelo's David with which I was obsessed, though more for the expression of his face than for his nudity. Fortunately I rarely had any problem in finding a grown-up to escort me past the museum guards. If only for the strength of my memories, I would fight to preserve the V&A for future generations of children.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But I knew that, for now at least, the V&A is safe from property developers. I was on my way to see the Elmgreen and Dragset installation and, after a moment's shock, came to the conclusion that the hoardings were part of the game they were playing with visitors. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It was Friday evening. I've never been to a late evening opening at the V&A before and the feel of the museum is different. As the skies darken outside, the light in the museum changes. Visitors seem more hushed and slightly tentative, as though they fear they're trespassing. And because some of the galleries were closed, I had to find new routes and, as usual with so large a museum, I found myself in unfamiliar rooms. I couldn't work out if I'd seen the Turners before and hurried past but on Friday evening they were luminous and compelling. I've only just begun to appreciate Turner after the hackneyed reproductions of The Fighting Temeraire that appeared on so many biscuit tins in my childhood. But after spending time in the small room of the National Gallery where <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-dido-building-carthage" target="_blank">two Turners</a> are hung with two paintings <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-seaport-with-the-embarkation-of-the-queen-of-sheba" target="_blank">by Claude</a>, I have gradually come to realise, some years after falling for Claude, that I've learned to like Turner as well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I wanted to linger by the Turners but I had come to the V&A to see <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/tomorrow-elmgreen-dragset/about-the-exhibition/" target="_blank">the Elmgreen and Dragset installation, called Tomorrow</a>. I loved the idea of the installation: five galleries of the V&A have been turned into the apartment of a rich and unsuccessful architect which he has been compelled to sell but has not yet left. Visitors are encouraged to snoop on the invisible inhabitant while the museum guards, dressed as butlers and maids, stand about and respond to queries with deferential courtesy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At first I thought the installation was great. My sense of being an intruder matched my sense of strangeness at being in the museum at night. There weren't many other visitors just then, and I wondered if some of them were part of the installation. Nervously I picked up items, stroked them, read postcards and bills, leafed through newspapers (lots of stories of the London riots) and perched on sofas and chairs. There were a few moments which added to my uneasiness - but not many and, for my taste, not enough. In the end I wasn't sufficiently engaged with the setting nor with the film script which was provided to accompany it. I was left as cold as I was by Elmgreen and Dragset's <a href="http://images.dazedcdn.com/786x700/dd/860/3/863638.jpg" target="_blank">consciously kitsch sculpture on the fourth plinth</a> in Trafalgar Square. It's the only fourth plinth sculpture that I've actually disliked. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I've been trying to work out why I was so unengaged by the installation. I know other visitors have liked it. There were elements I enjoyed: the unwashed coffee cups, the unmade bed, the sound of the shower, the fireplace in the living room and the vultures. But in the end I was uninterested in the people that the room conjured up - apart from the servants. The servants were great and I'd like to have known more about them. I leafed through the postcards and photograph album and worked out, from the pictures, that I was supposed to understand that the rich inhabitant of the flat was gay and liked looking at attractive young men - but why was this presented as a puzzle? It seemed to be presenting the character's sexuality as a not-very-hidden secret, which would have made some sense forty or fifty years ago but is a little strange now. I looked at the architecture posters and models and wondered what point was being made, then found that I didn't much care. The installation seemed to be about wealth and people to whom wealth came easily. In real life I feel much more uneasy in such a world than I did in the installation. I left unmoved.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But then I found myself among the drawings in the V&A's collection, and I was riveted. Here there were people and scenes I could care about. There was clear craft as well as art, and surprising experimentation. A <a href="http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O93466/view-on-the-stour-dedham-drawing-constable-john-ra/" target="_blank">startling ink drawing which Constable made in old age</a> caught my attention, and I looked with care at some of the tiny oil sketches he had made too. I particularly loved those of <a href="http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O125137/hove-beach-with-fishing-boats-oil-constable-john-ra/" target="_blank">the seashore</a>. I fell into conversation with people who had taken a different route to the museum and been distracted by the small Constables on their way to the installation. They were more knowledgeable than me and could trace the influence Constable had on twentieth century artists. I couldn't stay long enough but I want to get back to see the Turners and Constables again. It seems that my views of Constable have been unfairly limited by exposure to frequent reproductions of his paintings of Salisbury Cathedral and the Hay Wain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">So it wasn't the temporary installation that awoke my sense of wonder but the familiar seen anew. I left <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/" target="_blank">the V&A</a> determined to return again soon - and on a Friday evening if I can. </span><br />
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<br />Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-7992033519055620312013-10-09T16:10:00.001+01:002013-10-09T16:10:56.547+01:00Back to the blood tubs: the amazing spectacle of Charlie Peace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">When I was a child, I was fascinated by a particular kind of penny-in-the-slot machine - the sort you found in the arcade at the end of the pier, if the pier's attractions were particularly run down. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In those days pennies were really big copper coins - bigger than any coin in use today. If you held them tightly in your hand and your hand sweated, you would acquire a green stain on your palm.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The coins were old. too. Particularly sought after were "bun pennies" with their image of the young Queen Victoria, with her hair in a bun - though it was sometimes hard to make her out on the battered and faded coins. But those were coins that had been shiny new in Charlie Peace's era, though he was ambitious for more wealth than a mere penny represented.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I don't know if the penny-in-the-slot machines I loved were around in Charlie Peace's lifetime but I suspect some, at least, represented the moment of his death. Public executions might have ended in Britain, and parents no longer gave copies of the <a href="http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ngintro.htm" target="_blank">Newgate Calendar</a> to their children as a dreadful warning, but end-of-the-pier machines showed, as well as haunted houses and "what the butler saw," a variety of executions, including the French guillotine and the British "long drop." While they were bleakly macabre, they also offered the final episode of an unknown story - something to spark the imagination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Early in Michael Eaton's new play about the Victorian burglar, murderer and folk-hero Charlie Peace, there is just such a tableau. It's part of an entertainment that harks back to Victorian and pre-Victorian popular culture. It doesn't belong with the sedate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squire_Bancroft" target="_blank">cup-and-saucer dramas</a> intended for upper-middle-class audiences " or the slightly later <a href="http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/the-second-mrs-tanqueray-iid-128235" target="_blank">problem play</a> which barely questioned middle-class morality. This is part music-hall entertainment, with its master of ceremonies, music and spectacle, and part the kind of melodrama that might have stemmed from one of the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_gaff" target="_blank">penny gaffs</a>" or "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrey_Theatre" target="_blank">blood tubs</a>" that came into being when "legitimate theatre" was restricted to England's few <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_theatre" target="_blank">patent houses</a>. There are also elements of broadside ballads in some of the songs while either side of the set are huge playbills in the Victorian mode. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The great achievement of the play and its excellent cast is that it demonstrates that this kind of spectacle, so often sneered at by theatrical critics, still works for an audience, and works exceptionally well. While most performances in this mode are either pantomimes, which have to work for a family audience, or slightly superior mockeries of the genre, <i>Charlie Peace</i> engages with the mode and celebrates it. At the time, I was too caught up in the plot to analyse my response but I recall laughing, gasping, sitting on the edge of my seat and admiring the craft and dexterity of the actors. And while the play is not about careful characterization or anguished doubt, Peter Duncan was entirely credible as the kind of friendly villain who could be charming, anguished, angry or ingratiating depending on the company in which he found himself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There is something serious going on too. The play led me, at any rate, to consider why I find law-breakers like Charlie so engaging and why apparent villains have such a hold on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96rC4X_KWl4" target="_blank">the English popular imagination</a>. Plainly class is an element but it's not just that. I wonder if Charlie Peace has a similar hold over the imagination of people who always expect the law to protect their own interests. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But you need to see the play for yourself. It's <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">at Nottingham Playhouse until 19th October</a> and then it moves<a href="http://www.belgrade.co.uk/event/charlie-peace-his-amazing-life-and-astounding-legend" target="_blank"> to the Belgrade Theatre at Coventry</a>. I don't know if it's touring any more widely but if I was running a theatre capable of staging it, I'd try to get this play with this cast if at all possible. Get to see it if you can. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I would like to praise the director but unfortunately I mislaid my programme - or perhaps Charlie snitched it (it's the sort of thing he might have done) so I don't know who the director is. The sets, by graphic artist Eddie Campbell, are marvellous and the stage technicians have evidently worked hard, to very good effect. </span><br />
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Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-59424811695230982912012-11-18T12:20:00.001+00:002012-11-18T12:20:53.556+00:00Surround sound<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">First there was one bell. It wasn't the tone of a church bell nor a small tinkling sound - and it didn't come from the usual chords of the musical stave. It came from somewhere behind me, compelling and mysterious. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">After a while another bell joined it. Then I saw the musicians, entering the theatre from different points but creating working together to create a soundscape in which they and the audience existed together. It was as though we entered another form of space, a place in which sound was chief among the senses.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At last the four musicians stood together on the stage, playing their bells - Ghanaian instruments in music which came, I think, from the Siwe people. By this time I was in the place that they had created. And this was just the beginning of the concert by <a href="http://www.ensemblebash.com/" target="_blank">ensemblebash</a> at Nottingham's <a href="http://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/" target="_blank">Lakeside arts centre</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I first encountered ensemblebash a couple of years ago, at Ignite, an exceptional free festival in Covent Garden's Royal Opera House. They were performing for free, sometimes joined by pianist Joanna MacGregor. If I'd been asked in advance, I wouldn't have thought a percussion quartet would be much to my taste. But it was free and gave me chance for a sit-down so I settled down with an audience which ranged from small children to regular opera-goers and prepared to give ensemblebash a courteous hearing. I was soon entranced and excited - and so, I think, was everyone else who had crowded in to listen. This was performance with wit, intensity and magic - like nothing I had heard before. So when I saw that ensemblebash were finally visiting the East Midlands I had to be there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I knew some of the music from ensemblebash's recent album, <a href="http://www.signumrecords.com/catalogue/new-releases/a-doll~s-house/sigcd294.html?PHPSESSID=485a2678c2d2d09b53acc97e966cf9ec" target="_blank"><i>A Doll's House</i></a>. But listening to a CD on fairly unsophisticated equipment is quite different from hearing pieces by David Bedford and Howard Skempton in a theatre - not to mention the added dimension of seeing them performed. With percussion the visual element is a particularly important extra dimension, whether it comes from watching four players hovering over a single marimba, the blowing of a conch shell or the way music can be made from a donkey's jaw-bone. The absurd and hilarious dinner-party of Stephen Montague's Chew Chow Chatterbox, in which the musicians use voice, chopsticks, bowls, wine glasses and bottles, couldn't work half as well in a recording as on stage since the players enact the roles of host and dinner guests.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I loved the varied programme which ranged from Peter Garland's delicate variations in a single chord in Apple Blossom to an arrangement of free-form jazz evolved from Max Roach's improvisation with other drummers. As I lived in the world of sound, I found my emotions shifting from moment to moment in response to the music. At times it even seemed that I could see the sound hovering like a cloud above the players as they made the air vibrate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The evening ended with an exuberant performance of John Cage's Third Construction, using a range of found (but carefully-tuned) instruments. And I bought two more ensemblebash CDs. The CDs may not match up to the wonders of performance but they have introduced me to still more percussion music and have already been a source of considerable pleasure and well worth the money I spent. The CDs will have to suffice until ensemblebash return to the East Midlands. I hope they come back soon.</span><br />
<br />Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-84980972229764125242012-11-04T13:01:00.000+00:002012-11-04T13:36:00.567+00:00The satyr dances<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I don't feel comfortable in Piccadilly. It's the province of the rich, who can afford its casual extravagances. Suited and cloaked doormen - they are always men - stand at the entrances of buildings. I would be reluctant to risk their contempt. In Piccadilly, Fortnum and Mason's is mid-range while Pret-a-Manger is dangerously down-market.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's partly my uneasiness with Piccadilly that keeps me away from the Royal Academy exhibitions, and partly the high cost of admission. It's expensive even with an Art Fund card. But when I saw the picture of the dancing satyr, I knew I had to brave Piccadilly, pay the admission price and see the exhibition in which he appeared. It's called "<a href="http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/bronze/" target="_blank">Bronze</a>" and bronze is the linking motif between all the exhibits. It's about the material and its qualities rather than a period of history or changes in ideas. Its focus is what stays the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> It's not just the material that is a constant in the exhibition. There was also a repeated response to it from numerous visitors throughout the exhibition. The gasps of awed admiration began as visitors opened the door to the exhibition and saw the first piece: the dancing satyr, in a room by himself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The satyr is a recent discovery, <a href="http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/740225" target="_blank">found by fishermen in the sea off Sicily</a> only fifteen years ago. He's slightly larger than life-size and displayed so that viewers have to look up to him. After his long immersion in salt-water, he's acquired a greenish patina and a slight roughness. This only seems to aid the satyr's fluid movement. It's as though his ecstatic dance continued without pause, whether he moved through air or water. There's a smoothness about the curve of the limbs and body that made me want to reach out and touch him - but the flung-back head and the blank eyes speak of possession and tell the watcher to keep a distance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">So awe was there at the beginning and it continued. There are massive statues: of saints, statesmen and peasants. There is even Rodin's Age of Bronze which conveys uses the material to convey masculinity - or perhaps masculinity to convey the material. There are tiny works. Perhaps the most disturbing are the tiny copulating grasshoppers, whose image was cast by encasing them in molten metal. There are gods and domestic objects. Men ride horses, and panthers, battle monsters, suffer agonies of torture or gaze sternly on the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Women are less in evidence. There are goddesses and rulers; a stern and prickly Catherine de Medici, showing off the fashion of the day, is particularly memorable. There are grief-stricken madonnas and a wonderful South Indian sculpture of the infant Krishna with his wet-nurse Mukhara. And there are objects of desire - often small pieces presumably intended for private collectors. Venus (naked, of course) removes a thorn from her foot, a satyr uncovers a sleeping nymph and, in another piece, a satyr and nymph are engaged in enthusiastic sexual intimacy. It's a mark of the exhibition's focus on the craft of casting that my first thought on seeing this explicit and detailed piece was awe at the skill involved in creating so fragile a scenario in bronze. Most of the workers in bronze have traditionally been men, so far as we can tell, but two twentieth-century pieces by women sculptors had a considerable impact: a large Louise Bourgeois spider mounted high on the wall and a curved abstract piece by Barbara Hepworth, which seemed to echo the sea evoked in the dancing satyr.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's impossible to go into detail about all that is wonderful in an exhibition so far-ranging. The Royal Academy has borrowed pieces from many parts of the world, inviting viewers to make comparisons across cultures and time. I found myself particularly struck by a small chariot from Denmark made of bronze and gold in the 14th century B.C. No-one knows its purpose or why the horse is placed within the chariot rather than pulling it along. It is tiny, delicate and magical in its incomprehensibility - and the gilding on the circle which may be a sun, a shield or a great wheel is a thing of wonder. And, as the films shown in the exhibition display, it was probably made by one of the two main methods still in use all over the world today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Coming away from this exhibition, I knew it had changed something in the way in which I saw the world. It had encouraged me to make comparisons and connections across cultures. It had helped me look at art through the materials it uses rather than just the period in which it was made. And it showed me the flexibility of that material in conveying a huge range of emotions and evoking numerous responses. I wondered if there was any emotion it could not show or evoke. Then I realised what was missing from that range which included desire, ecstasy, pride, fear, admiration and awe. A word trickled into my mind and reminded me that one emotion and response had been absence. Maybe bronze is for every emotion, every response - except love.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-41662110293557952912012-10-06T14:08:00.001+01:002012-10-06T14:08:47.585+01:00After, and before<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">A colleague showed us a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg9UrejyJDQ" target="_blank">video from youtube</a>. A newly-married couple came out of a church. The camera panned along the street. There was a brief glimpse of a young girl looking out of a window, curious to see what was happening. She could have been any girl of 12 or 13, watching the adult world and anticipating her own future. This young girl's life is well-documented and her diary is translated into numerous languages. Her name was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank" target="_blank">Anne Frank</a>. She wasn't quite sixteen years old when she died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">For most of the photographs of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Sander" target="_blank">August Sander</a>, now on display at Leicester's <a href="http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council-services/lc/leicester-city-museums/museums/nwm-art-gallery/" target="_blank">New Walk Museum</a>, as part of a touring exhibition sponsored by the <a href="http://www.artfund.org/" target="_blank">Art Fund</a>, viewers can know little of how people began or ended. Sander's initial aim was to present a study of German life, using individuals to represent different types within German society. But however determined Sander's categorisation, the people he photographed resist being mere types. Some perform their occupations, often surprisingly. A farmer in the 1920s still ploughs with oxen Another, in 1952, sows seed by hand, scattering it from a basket. Others pose with the implements of their trade. Almost all gaze straight into the camera, leaving the viewer with no more information that the brief labels provide. The more I look, the more I understand the impossibility of reading a whole human being from a face.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I never have the sense that Sander's photography mocks or diminishes its subjects. I always see them as complex, interesting human beings. If I wish, I can build stories. I have to set those stories in the time through which they lived. Almost all of them were confronted by the dilemmas and persecutions of Nazism. But when I start wondering "How did that farm-worker vote?" or "What did that woman do when the Nazis came to power?" I can't answer the questions I want to ask. People's actions don't always harmonize with their faces. An SS officer in one of the photos of Nazis looks benevolent and slightly unsure of himself. His uniform does not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I can and do make guesses. Some of the circus people in the photo above are plainly not Aryans. I hope they got away. I would like to imagine a happy future for the gypsies, the children with severe disabilities, those who are simply labelled "persecuted people" or "political prisoners." But I know most didn't get away. The exhibition ends with a portrait of the death mask of Sander's son Erich, who died towards the end of his ten-year jail sentence. Escapes are temporary. None of us ever walks out of history or politics, however hard we try. I wonder what future generations will think, if they ever look back on photographs, film and videos of the time in which we live.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">August Sander didn't lead the life that was mapped out for him at childhood. He was supposed to be a miner. One day, working at the mine, he helped a visiting photographer and looked through the lens of a camera. He never forgot what he saw - the sky, the movement of clouds. That moment gave birth to one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. He was part of his time but the records he made speak to the future.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I have paid one visit to the August Sander exhibition so far. I hope to visit at least once a week while the exhibition is in Leicester. I want to look more closely at many of the portraits. I would like to commit them to memory, which is another way of letting the people of the past live on. I also want to spend more time on Sander's pictures of human hands and of landscapes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But I can't spend too long in the gallery with Sander's pictures. There's too much humanity there, real people set to face a dreadful future. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I think if I stayed too long, I would cry.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-48853107754228811152012-07-29T20:56:00.000+01:002012-07-29T20:56:08.576+01:00An opening<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Cynic though I sometimes am, I warmed to the Olympics opening ceremony. Yes, I know it cost a lot and I know the performers were volunteers and that there are numerous problems with <a href="http://dropdownow.org/">corporate sponsors</a> and the <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/07/28/jon-day/outside-the-stadium/">treatment of dissent</a>. I might not have watched the ceremony had my daughter not been one of the volunteers but, once I'd got used to the style, I found a great deal to love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It's easy to be critical of the account of history, especially since there was so little time and so much was going on. I glimpsed the suffragettes but only learned later that the <a href="http://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/young-jarrow-marcher-s-olympics-ceremony-honour-1-4782414?showResult=true&pollContentId=7.114398">Jarrow marchers</a> were also present. Perhaps the Chartists were somewhere around though I don't think the Tolpuddle martyrs or the Diggers were included. They didn't represent the the Commonwealth either - perhaps the execution of Charles I was judged unsuitable for all sorts of reasons - and Britain's uncomfortable colonial history was omitted. But Blake's "Jerusalem" made a good starting point and the complexity of the Industrial Revolution - with its excitement, achievement and damage - was stupendous. I'm still thinking about the implications of conflating Shakespeare's Caliban with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel">Isambard Kingdom Brunel</a>. Perhaps because it appeals so strongly to my imagination, it's made a slight adjustment to my views of the 19th century.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I expect most viewers took what they wanted from the ceremony. Some of my friends lauded J.K. Rowling. There was great enthusiasm for James Bond, the Queen and the corgis. Mr Bean had even more fans than Simon Rattle. I was thrilled to see a huge CND symbol in the arena, even though I understand that it was there as part of the history of Britain in the late twentieth ceremony. But a huge number of people were excited when the letters "NHS" appeared. Most people in Britain still agree that being able to go to the doctor and be treated in hospital when necessary without worrying about money is one of the great achievements of Britain's welfare state. As the story of the health service was entangled with children's books, it wasn't surprising that villains from children's literature appeared to attack children in hospital nor that nurses and a number of Mary Poppinses finally defeated Lord Voldemort.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But perhaps the best thing about the opening ceremony was that it showed so many people what they love about Britain: its countryside, its industrial achievement; its literature; its music; and above all the huge mixture of ordinary people who mostly live happily together, enjoy life and like one another. It was an optimistic and hopeful picture of life here today, appropriate for the short period in which, in theory, there should be an <a href="http://www.olympictruce.org/Pages/History.aspx">Olympic peace</a>. I liked the way the peacemakers handed the Olympic flag to representatives of the armed forces, because, if we're ever to build peace, we'd be wise to involve armies in the movement away from violence. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The parade of the athletes, many grinning broadly as they entered the stadium, fitted well with the show as a whole. I know it's not always like this but I'd like to think of the Olympics as somewhere in which competitors form friendships across national boundaries and despite suspicion and conflict. I'm also happy to celebrate the huge variety of people who take part in sports for love of it and who often aren't very well-known. Since I joined a fencing club, I've learned about the amount of dedication shown by people in "minority" sports. At my fencing club the coaches are unpaid (but qualified) volunteers and members of the committee donate their skills in such roles as web-designer, accountant, social secretary and armourer so that the club can keep its fees down and welcome members of the basis of interest. It's given me a great respect for people involved in sport.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It seems that <a href="https://twitter.com/JulianSimpson1/status/228983013676040192/photo/1/large">Danny Boyle's vision</a> is one of peace, freedom and equality - one in which the contributions of all people are valued. It's a fantasy, of course, and I see the strength of the objections. People say it all costs too much in an age of austerity, that it's a bit unreal and that sport isn't for everyone. People quote Juvenal and talk about "bread and circuses" - some of them go on to ask "where's the bread?" I can see their point. They see sport and the arts as an extravagance when we need to to campaign once more: for the health service, for workers' rights, for food for the hungry, for an end to torture and oppression, for the welfare state, for equality, for freedom. I want all those things but I want circuses as well. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Juvenal saw <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses">bread and circuses</a> as something that distracted the people from Rome's serious political purposes. He didn't like the people much. For him they were the enemy of political decency - and he didn't reckon he belonged among them. But I am happy to be one of "the people." For me </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">there's a different way of expressing what I want. Just over a hundred years ago <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses">a poem</a> declared that a life devoted to work and survival was not enough. Two lines have often been repeated:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;</span></i><br />
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<i> Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!</i></div>
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<i> </i>I want a world in which people experience delight as well as having enough to eat. I don't think art and sport necessarily turn us into passive consumers of whatever the government says. They can bring people together and widen their knowledge and understanding of the world. They can set the imagination and intelligence alight, and bring people who would not normally encounter one another the joy of engaging in a shared activity. They can give us some idea of how much better the world might be, even though they leave us with the task of achieving it. </div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Photo by Nick Webb, courtesy of wikimedia commons. </span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-77522011858230987922012-07-25T17:23:00.001+01:002012-07-25T17:26:03.691+01:00A touch of class<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFOZMqk7IxQY9-LGBeIKSffKXmYeeXDvAMgHG1rEkYht7OpzS1v0gaH_ZonA-nthp4eBomNXu_DQqBZVB2NhCLqYfyK9fq9x-lAwJw0-wDQtVH-Ap_AqpiyQsTOFZx0iPG8rIuzYycOqqE/s1600/dorrit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFOZMqk7IxQY9-LGBeIKSffKXmYeeXDvAMgHG1rEkYht7OpzS1v0gaH_ZonA-nthp4eBomNXu_DQqBZVB2NhCLqYfyK9fq9x-lAwJw0-wDQtVH-Ap_AqpiyQsTOFZx0iPG8rIuzYycOqqE/s320/dorrit.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I haven't read <i>Shades of Grey</i>. Having seen numerous blogs and articles about the book, I used Amazon's "look inside" feature to get some idea about it - and I peeked inside a copy in Waterstone's. At my age, I don't need to worry what other people think of me, and I expect fellow travellers </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">assume I'm reading erotica when they see me with my kobo. (At the moment I have James Joyce's </span><i style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ulysses</i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> open and Zola's </span><i style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">L'Argent</i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> - both pretty dodgy books in their way and immensely enjoyable.)</span><br />
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However the fuss about <i>Shades of Grey</i> has led me to think about the kind of book it is. It's fanfic, obviously - and because it's <i>Twilight</i> fanfic it's not much to my taste. It's porn so not rooted in realism or good writing. And it's also romance with all the usual baggage that entails. Its heroine is young, innocent and adoring while the hero is enormously rich, terrifically sexy, and enormously damaged. Her role is to rescue and adore him. His role is to give her extravagant presents, including - and this is where I'm almost hooked - a valuable first edition.</div>
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Romance is an odd genre with a curious descent. Part of it is a male genre - it comes from the seduction narratives of courtly romance. In these the woman are praised for their exceptional beauty and virtue. There are traces of this in Elizabethan sonnet sequences. <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1041">Shakepseare's sonnets</a> reverse some of the usual conventions; the fair youth is praised for beauty and virtue while the dark lady is seen as both desirable and dangerous. This enables Shakespeare to emphasise another aspect of this kind of romance: the suffering endured by the male lover. </div>
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Romance also has roots in the spiritual journals often kept by Puritans. This may sound unlikely but, because they were concerned with the soul and the interior life, spiritual journals naturally recorded emotions. Samuel Richardson's 18th-century novel <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela;_or,_Virtue_Rewarded"><i>Pamela</i></a>, which is clearly a fore-runner of today's romantic novels, comes out of that tradition, with its focus on the struggles of a very young maidservant to retain her virtue as he male employer makes repeated attempts to seduce and rape her. In the end her virtue and beauty win him over. Richardson was an influence on Jane Austen, who turned his third novel, <i>Sir Charles Grandison</i>, into a play, and I think it likely that the plots of his novels, if not the novels themselves, influenced Charlotte and Anne Bronte.</div>
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It's also common to find the roots of contemporary romantic fiction in fairy tales, particularly those written or adapted by Perrault, such as "<a href="http://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/perrault06.html">Cinderella</a>" and "<a href="http://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/perrault01.html">Sleeping Beauty</a>". But although the structure of these stories is quite like contemporary romantic fiction, the stories themselves lack two aspects that are key to romance as written today. They don't have an interior narrative and the women tend to be curiously passive in terms of the romance plot. The heroines marry princes because that is expected of them and not because they love or desire princes. Fairy stories of this era are largely concerned with actions and appearances. The feelings of the character are irrelevant.</div>
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Contemporary romance has quite a lot going for it. It values women's feelings and says that their desires are important. It also suggests that the choice of a partner is both difficult and important. However, there are also shortcomings to the form. It tends to treat the achievement of a partnership or marriage as the culmination of women's lives, though sometimes there is a brief epilogue, usually involving pregnancy or the birth of a child. Plainly this ignores most of women's lives and relationships.</div>
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Heterosexual romantic fiction (the vast majority) has another worrying aspect. The hero is typically richer, more powerful, older and taller than the heroine - and usually of a higher social class. The attraction of the heroine is almost always based on a combination of innocence (not necessarily virginity but relative inexperience), modesty (she doesn't realise how attractive she is) and adoration of the hero despite his flaws. But while the heroine looks up to the hero, she is often also a mother-substitute who tends to some hidden anguish or moral flaw - she has to heal him while she adores him. The heroine is permitted some liveliness of speech - today she is often characterised as "feisty" - and she is allowed a character and a career. But the only model for romance that women are offered involved both admiring and tending to the hero.</div>
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There's nothing wrong with admiring some aspects of a partner. Indeed, it's pretty normal given that adults prefer partners of whom they think well. And there's certainly nothing wrong with caring for a partner who is in need of care. But there's something wrong with the kind of transaction romance offers if on one side the man provides money and power while the woman offers adoration and nurturing. It's not an equal relationship - and surely all of us, men and women, want more than that, even in our fantasies.</div>
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It was reasonable for Elizabeth Bennett to fall in love with Mr Darcy when she saw what a big house he owned. In the early 19th century a woman of her class without much money was much better off if she could marry a fortune. In the mid 19th century, Jane Eyre followed the conventions of her time by insisting on legal marriage, although her inherited wealth would have passed to Mr Rochester when that marriage took place. Perhaps it was as well that, when they finally married, he was maimed and even less attractive than before.</div>
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But isn't it time for a different kind of romance in which the partners share what money they have - and it may not be much - and help and nurture one another? I recall the ideal of a loving, equal comradeship, which was not unknown when I was younger. It's present even in some unexpected 19th century novels.Perhaps the most unexpected is Dickens' <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/963/963-h/963-h.htm"><i>Little Dorrit</i></a>, with its conclusion of a marriage in which both partners together "<i>Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness</i>", without the corruption of great wealth. Although the novel ends with marriage, it doesn't treat that marriage as the culmination of the characters' lives. Instead it indicated that they have a future. </div>
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The final sentence is one of my favourite endings of any novel: </div>
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"<i>They went quietly down into the roaring
streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine
and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and
the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.</i>" </div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">That's the kind of partnership in which I'd like to believe - and it may be a more enjoyable and plausible one to imagine in these difficult times.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-35260832986195815822012-07-08T09:56:00.000+01:002012-07-08T09:57:22.245+01:00Saying [uz]<br />
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I didn't mean to go to
London. I'd thought about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Harrison">Tony Harrison</a>'s poetry reading. I saw it
advertised and considered buying a ticket. Then I realise it was on
the evening of a day when I was working and that I'd have to rush to
London after work and get home again the same evening. I thought
about how tired I'd be, and how much the train tickets would cost.
Plainly it wasn't sensible.</div>
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I blame Twitter for
what happened next. I just glanced at my Twitterfeed – I don't
have time to read every tweet of every person I follow – and saw a
quiz question from <a href="http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/">the Poetry Society</a>, offering tickets to Tony
Harrison's reading as a prize. I knew the answer. I didn't stop to
think but tweeted back to them – and won the prize. A journey to
London still didn't seem sensible but, after a little dithering, I
began to realise it was inevitable. I wanted to go.</div>
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I first became aware of
Tony Harrison as a playwright and translator. I was still at school
when I saw his translation of The Misanthrope – into heroic
couplets, I think – at the Old Vic. It was clear and witty. It
was more than a translation; instead of its original setting in the
time of Louis XIV, Moliere's play was transposed to the Paris of
Charles de Gaulle. And despite the outstanding acting of Alec
McCowen and Diana Rigg, what struck me most was the pulse and
neatness of the verse.</div>
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Harrison's poetry took
longer to reach me. My reading has always been a chancy affair.
Then I chose books following from the advice of others, because a
couple of lines quoted in a review startled me into a response, or
because of an encounter in a library or bookshop. I found Tony
Harrison's collection<i> Continuous</i> in a second-hand shop and, in a
quick glance through the poems, realised that there was something in
the voice that interested me. It took me a while to read more but,
as I did, I recognized not only the complexity and the wordplay.
This was a poet who was saying something important – and something
that mattered to me.</div>
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Harrison's work is
grounded in his two experiences I share: a sense – emphasised by
certain teachers at his schools – that he could never fit into the
cultural life of his country because he was born into the working
class, and a yearning to acquire knowledge and articulate it. These
experiences are part of what fuels his sequence <i>from the School of
Eloquence</i> but they are amplified by his awareness that in gaining the
education he desired he lost the close communication with his parents
that he knew in childhood.<br />
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I'm not sure how much that was caused by
education. Children often do find a separation from their parents
and education may be merely a convenient way to name it. However
when a child begins to move in cultural circles which are peopled
mainly by those who seem rich and self-confident, the child's
apparent confidence among such people can add to the parents' sense
of awkwardness, even as they enjoy their child's success. When that
is allied, as so much is in Britain, to a rigid class system, the high class barriers – which really do exist – are bound to
underline and intensify the separation of child and parent.</div>
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Harrison's reading at
the Purcell Room began with some of his public poems, which
characteristically move from a small personal perception: in one poem
the starting point is fish-scales scattered as cormorants fly with
gasping fish in the sky above Lindisfarne Castle. From this sight, glimpsed through a train window,
the poem moves to consider history, war, politics and the tragedies of
past and present life.<br />
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The length, scope and formal exactness of his public poems - often published on the news pages of a newspaper - makes them unusual. When Harrison said that his chief
influence and model for these works was the messenger's speech in Greek tragedy, I
suddenly understood what he was doing much more clearly. The
messenger, who arrives towards the end of the play to explain what
has happened, is not a major actor in events. He is
someone who is on the edge of the action, who is not in himself
particularly important but whose role is to tell what he has seen as
he saw it. It's a good position for a political poet since it is
neither powerful nor directly preachy. It is based in the “I” of
personal experience.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I was glad that
Harrison's reading included some sonnets from the <i>School of Eloquence</i>
sequence. They are what is known as “Meredithian sonnets” and
have sixteen lines instead of the usual fourteen. This allows for a
more sustained conclusion or reversal than is possible in the
fourteen lines of the Shakespearean sonnet. The poems were
interspersed with illuminating anecdotes. Before reading “Classics
Society,” Harrison explained that, as a schoolboy, he was
instructed to translate all Greek and Latin into a high-flown
language. This led to some absurdities. Translating a comedy by
the Roman playwright Plautus, Harrison had a character who was the Roman equivalent of a
policeman saying “Move along there.” The schoolmaster crossed
this through and substituted the more elevated command: “Vacate the
thoroughfare.”</div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Harrison also recalled
overhearing a woman in the audience for <i>The Misanthrope</i> say (and I
paraphrase from memory for I was listening too intently to take
notes): “What a command of the English language, my dear – even
though he comes from Sheffield” This led Harrison to address the
question of his own articulacy. He added to the little poem
“<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/heredity/">Heredity</a>” the recollection of his father's deep shyness.<br />
<br />
This
made me return with renewed understanding to Harrison's concern to
speak for the working class now and in history. The idea of someone
speaking on behalf of a class
makes me uneasy. I think that the problem is not so much that the
working class are silent but that they are often unheard. The
problem lies with the powerful who may mock but rarely listen.<br />
<br />
But I share is Harrison's anger – an anger which plainly lives
on. I have heard recordings of Harrison reading his paired sonnets
“Them and [uz]” but I have never heard such anger in them.
Harrison takes the teacher's contempt for him and his Leeds accent,
expressed in the lines “You're one of those/ Shakespeare gives the
comic bits to: prose” and turns it back against the teacher,
using his knowledge to insist that poetry does not come only in
Received Pronunciation. The voices of poets of the past have, as
Harrison says, been “dubbed” into RP as a foreign language film
is dubbed into English – and much is lost in the translation.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I can't give details of
all Harrison said or all that he read. I was moved – as he was –
by the poems grieving at his parents' deaths. There was also a more
hopeful poem – though against a dark backdrop – which Harrison
had addressed to his grandson Alfie. On this occasion he read it for
the first time at a reading with his grandson in the audience. But
one of the final poems came from a play – Harrison's adaptation of
Sophocles' <i>Trackers of Oxyrhyncus</i>, which exists only in fragments of
papyrus. I have neither seen nor read the play but when I heard the
speech I wondered how I could have missed it.<br />
<br />
Harrison's
introduction explained that the play had made allusions to the
cardboard city that grew up beneath Waterloo Bridge and in other
sheltered spaces on the South Bank in the 1980s. It was where the
homeless lived and established a community. I remember walking past
on occasions; it was not a dangerous place. In the end they were
moved on, their homes were dismantled and the area was cleansed. I
don't know where the people went.<br />
<br />
But the fate of cardboard city and
its people was beyond the scope or Harrison's reading. Instead he
offered a speech in voice of the satyr Silenus, brother of Marsyas,
who was flayed alive on the command of Apollo for daring to learn to
play the flute. The satyrs – half man, half goat – are allowed
to be comical and inexpert but the Olympian gods will not permit them
to be are capable of art and culture. In the speech Apollo stands
by, playing the lute as Marsyas is tortured to death. At the end of
the speech Silenus resolves to conform and know his place – to take
the safe option.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's a while since
Harrison has given public readings. He claims that he was prompted
to resume by the discovery that newspapers are updating his
obituaries ready for use. But judging from this reading, he's still
unwilling to take the safe option. His anger persists and he still
uses his poetry as a weapon to attack cruelty and injustice. And the
rhythms still sing and the words play on.<br />
<br />
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My very brief visit to London brought another joy. For the first time in more than thirty-five years I encountered the English teacher who taught and encouraged me in my last year and a half at school. She was also at the reading. She was an excellent teacher who shared her love of literature and I owe her a very great deal. Thank you, Miss Hann.</div>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-22074803287614716362012-07-02T19:42:00.002+01:002012-07-02T19:49:26.365+01:00Professional demands<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAqwQrZ8_JxP8WlRGH7MhcNmmz0OgG2JmNtN1pWYhd-EXqomHoiL6otQT9SlH2Brp32qM1t-qI_2Fq_zbEmhbaEX1CMhgf_WHRuEcU4a6_XmACM8ZCzniu_PuNxrkEhxF9IrRcnfbdJdm/s1600/pro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAqwQrZ8_JxP8WlRGH7MhcNmmz0OgG2JmNtN1pWYhd-EXqomHoiL6otQT9SlH2Brp32qM1t-qI_2Fq_zbEmhbaEX1CMhgf_WHRuEcU4a6_XmACM8ZCzniu_PuNxrkEhxF9IrRcnfbdJdm/s320/pro.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I do not want to be called "professional."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Some of my friends and most of my colleagues think this is odd. After all, the word "professional" is a term of praise - isn't it? </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But if you go back a little bit, you can find other uses of the term. There are many theological attacks on those who are called "mere professors of religion." They are seen as people whose entire concern is with formalities and outward show rather than real belief and action. Within my lifetime the term "professional woman" signified a prostitute. And the <i>Shorter Oxford English Dictionary</i> offers a sense in which "professional" is uncomplimentary, giving examples of people who treat themselves as commodities. One of the examples is the old term "professional beauty." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It may seem rather strange to go back to earlier meanings of the word. We all know that language develops and words change their meaning. But in an important sense, those older meanings of the words cling around the term "professional". </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I'm not so worried about the idea that people are paid. I like my job - well, most of it - but I do it for money and I don't need to be coy about the fact. If I weren't paid I couldn't do it. But jobs - particularly those jobs that are labelled "professional" - can take more than the energy and dedication with which most employees perform their primary work. They can, by degrees, sap the integrity of those who work.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Behaving in a "professional manner" often means acquiring a veneer of false confidence which creates a distance between the "professional" and any member of the public. This isn't something that I would always criticize. When I go to see my doctor, for instance, I accept that she will adopt a confident and reassuring manner, even if she's just had a bad weekend and is personally feeling a little unsure of herself. I don't mind the distance either. She really can't ask all her patients to be her personal friends. But I hope her determination to appear confident never gets the better of her honesty. If one day she can't work out what is wrong with me, she'd do best tell me so and send me for tests elsewhere. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">While professionalism distances professionals from the public, it also draws professionals together in their workplace and can begin to separate them from the world in which others live. Here it can be closely related to the kind of corporate loyalty which leads employees to forget to question what they are doing and why. An<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9368430/Libor-scandal-How-I-manipulated-the-bank-borrowing-rate.html"> inside account from an unnamed bank</a> suggests how easily a number of professionals forgot about the ethics of banking practice and their responsibility to the wider society. Instead they showed their loyalty to the well-being - primarily the financial well-being - of their employer and, as a group of professionals, broke the law. Manipulating the Libor rate had an effect on the wider economy and on numerous individuals but some of the professional employees of the banks involved put the banks' interests first. They placed the good of a corporation and the good opinion of their colleagues above the good of individuals. They may also have broken the law, though that isn't yet clear. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Almost all employers have a rule somewhere that employees must not damage the reputation of the company or institution for which they work. It's a vague rule which employees have come to accept - not that they have much choice. But what does that rule really mean? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I take for granted the idea that I shouldn't tell lies about my employer and that I should behave in a reasonable way and work hard at my job. I worry that the reputation rule may give my employer the right to police my private life or my public life away from work. Suppose I, acting in a private capacity, go on a demonstration against the government or the arms trade, and am recognized by someone who knows me through my job. Would this be regarded as bringing my employer into disrepute? If my employer were dependent on government funds and good will, or if my employer wanted to make money by hosting a reception for arms traders, I might find myself in a difficult position. I hope the clause doesn't extend so far. If it does, it gives government and global corporations a very easy way of stifling dissent. And it means that an employer can control my free time as well as my working hours.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But what if I wanted to tell the truth about my employer? There are circumstances in which honesty would be seen as "unprofessional." So would <a href="http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/ResolvingWorkplaceDisputes/Whistleblowingintheworkplace/DG_10026552">whistle-blowing</a>, although society as a whole owes a great deal to whistle-blowers who have seen where their wider loyalty lies. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The best employers I have worked for have encouraged open discussion and haven't been afraid of criticism. They create an atmosphere in which the workers do their best but know that they aren't perfect. Anyone who needs help or advice can ask for it. If a worker sees that something isn't working, that worker is free to say so. The aim is not to hide behind the mask of professionalism but to do the work as well as possible.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">These days, however, the market is more firmly and forcefully present. Everything seems to be for sale: sport, arts, education, health. Every public good is forced into competition and instructed to sell itself and explain its value in solely economic terms. Organisations concerned with sport, arts, education and health are told that their primary aim is to acquire customers, and that the approval of those customers is the means to acquire and retain sponsorship. Every school and GP's surgery is busy competing with others and every sports team and art gallery spends days and weeks writing funding bids, surveying customer opinion and producing the kind of jargon that will enable them to keep going. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">No-one tells employees to lie but the rhetoric everywhere is about "marketing," "branding," "presentation" and "networking." Apparently these are key elements of professionalism. In these panicked times they make employees look inward, focus their attention on the survival of their own jobs, and discourage them from looking at any question larger than the immediate good of their own company or institution. When the competition is so fierce, there's a danger that the competition will focus only on the first impressions of the "customer," whether a patient, a parent, a pupil, an enthusiast for museums or the local football team. There's no time to consider the longer term or the good of the "customer" in five or ten years. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But humans have a tendency to ask questions and make ethical judgements. I can't stop questioning what my work is for and what its value is, and should be, in society. These are difficult questions and may produce answers that go against my personal interests and the interests of my employer. It's a dangerous path. If I think too much, I may find myself saying something my employer doesn't like. I could even be accused of damaging my employer's reputation. Yet I believe in freedom of speech and I believe in speaking the truth. It's a matter of integrity - and, next to integrity, professionalism looks pretty hollow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I hope my employer agrees.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-57622113507783527322012-06-30T00:07:00.000+01:002012-06-30T00:07:14.052+01:00The absence of Zeus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I wasn't planning to see the Olympic flame. There's so much that's wrong about the Olympics, especially as it's currently run. I worry about the way <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clays_Lane_Estate">Londoners were uprooted</a>, and the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/feb/22/london-olympics-security-surveillance">excuse for surveillance</a> and repression - similar concerns have been raised about most cities where the Olympics have been held. When I'm told that London's aim is to rival Beijing, this adds to my concern.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Then there are the lesser worries. The sponsors are omnipresent and often absurd. There are concerns about drugs and cheating. These aren't new. The Victorian establishment may have idealised sport, by which it meant the amateurism of gentlemen, but <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/22/olympic-games-ancient-modern">the roots of the Olympic games are rougher</a>. I've been looking at the kind of competitive sports described by Homer - for instance, the funeral games described in <a href="http://records.viu.ca/%7Ejohnstoi/homer/iliad23.htm">Book XXIII of the <i>Iliad</i></a>. There's nothing gentlemanly about them. The competitors want the very costly prizes promised to the winners and they are quite happy to cheat if that will help them win. The most common form of cheating involves asking for help from a friendly god, as the gods are usually willing to skew the results by tripping up an opponent or giving horses extra speed and strength. And when the event is over, there are rows between the competitors and appeals to the judges. Modern-day sports seem pretty fair and restrained by contrast.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But the Olympics evoke the idea of Greek sports so perhaps it's only right that I ascribe my encounter with the Olympic torch to the intervention of Zeus.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">My plans for the day were simple: I would mix some necessary work with a trip to the supermarket and a necessary journey to the bank. If I got those done in the morning, I'd have the rest of the day clear. I didn't count on the rain.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It wasn't ordinary rain. It was a long, drenching downpour accompanied by long rumbles of thunder and occasional lightning. It was more dramatic than any rain I've seen this summer - and that's saying a great deal. I noted that the Olympic torch relay, which had reached Nottinghamshire, had been halted by the weather - and that the torch itself took a lunchbreak. That was when I began to blame Zeus. After all, he's the king of the Olympian gods and responsible for thunder and lightning. I wondered idly whether Zeus sent the weather as a sign of his displeasure or a particular indication of his pleasure. Whichever it was, it delayed my plans.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I reached Nottingham and the bank just before closing time. There was a high stage in the Old Market Square. To one side was a large, shiny cauldron, ready to receive the flame. Crowds and souvenir-sellers were beginning to assemble. There was a light drizzle and the sky was getting greyer. I wondered how long it would be until the next downpour.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Curiously, I began to wander round the sponsors' stalls. They wanted to give me free things - strange items that made loud noises, objects with a possible sporting connection or even free drinks. There was the opportunity to be photographed with an Olympic torch. I took it, as the queues were short. I had no problem with accepting gifts from a bank, an electronics firm and a soft-drink manufacturer - after all, it wouldn't make me more likely to buy or recommend their products. I noticed that Nottingham people were much keener on collecting freebies than on buying officially branded Olympics souvenirs - there wasn't much enthusiasm at the stand selling mementos of the torch relay.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Gradually the dark clouds receded. Instead the sun came out, the rain evaporated from the pavements and Nottingham was filled with an unfamiliar warmth. Perhaps Zeus was being benevolent - or perhaps he had lost interest in the torch-bearers. Most likely he was absent. I know from Homer that he often goes on trips, sometimes pursuing women but often to attend feasts. Once Zeus had departed, the weather had an unfamiliar warmth. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I strolled away from the market square towards <a href="http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/">Nottingham Contemporary</a>. A few people were sitting on the base of Weekday Cross and the outdoor tables of the bars and cafés were all occupied. A waited and gradually a gentle crowd - mostly parents with young children - gathered. Mostly they were quiet but a group of Brownies sang while brandishing a large replica torch made from cardboard. Sponsors arrived and distributed flags and souvenirs. The Nottingham Contemporary zebra emerged from the gallery and shook hands with the children. Community police and organisers erected barriers to close the road but there weren't enough barriers to line the pavements - but the children sat patiently on the kerb, waiting. If there was any shoving or complaining, I didn't see it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The first part of the procession was a convoy of police on motorbikes. The children applauded and waved their flags. Some of the policemen waved back. There were lorries, cars and vans (several from the sponsors) as well as occasional cyclists. No-one was sure whhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/o they were but we applauded generously as they smiled and waved. A coach driver did an imitation of the royal wave - or perhaps his arm was getting tired. One cyclist carried a typed sign telling us that the flame would arrive in six minutes. Suddenly I realised that the people smiling and waving from one of the cars were <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_lvx7jmS30">Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean</a>. They had an Olympic torch with them and had been skating with it in the Ice Centre. Now they were on their way to take the torch at the next stage and run together with it to the Old Market Square. I managed to take one, rather blurred photo - proof that I had seen them. Then we waited again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Eventually there was another convoy and we could glimpse the torch behind a coach. Then the torch-bearer came into view. Someone said he was called Baz and that he ran a boxing club. We clapped, cheered, waved and made a noise - and, as the torch-bearer raised the torch aloft, I found I was unexpectedly moved by the event. The wasn't a glossy star or a photogenic youngster but an older man who looked like someone I might meet in the post office, greengrocer's, library or bus queue. I was pleased with how he looked and that I could applaud a local man who had <a href="http://www.london2012.com/torch-relay/torchbearers/torchbearers=barry-o-dowd-2495/index.html">helped others through sport</a>. He ran holding the torch with the smoothness of an athlete. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I suppose we saw him for a minute at most. He ran comfortably down the hill to the next "kiss-point" - the toe-curlingly embarrassing name for the point at which the flame is passed from torch to torch. But for a moment I did feel, against all my expectations, that I had witnessed something that mattered - something as simple as a man holding a torch and running down a Nottingham street.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">It doesn't solve any of the problems with the Olympics and I still have considerable respect for the <a href="http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk/">anti-Olympics protesters</a>, who are asking necessary questions. But the part of the torch relay I saw was impressive, for all <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Flame">its questionable history</a>. I hope that the children who watched and cheered remember the event. I'd like to think that they might take from it a sense that they can witness and take part in history and that important events take place in their own streets. Unlikely, perhaps, but there was a gentle kindness in the occasion that let me dream, if only for an hour or so.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Later I mingled with the huge crowds in the Old Market Square. There too I noticed an unfamiliar gentleness. Local schoolchildren were performing on the stage as the flame burned in the cauldron. Then the flame was transferred to a small lantern and taken away. Apparently even the Olympic flame has to be put to bed at night.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-84877805977637210322012-06-18T00:10:00.001+01:002012-06-18T00:10:32.689+01:00Pretty policemen and agents provocateurs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/pirates/images/act22_sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/pirates/images/act22_sm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">When I arrived at university, one of the first stories I read in a student publication was about police spies. It said that for the entire summer vacation, two policemen, disguised as hippies, had been instructed to punt up and down the rivers watching out for students or other layabouts smoking pot. They may have enjoyed their summer but they never managed to catch anyone. A cartoon accompanying the story showed two policeman, dressed as stereotypical hippies but wearing policemen's helmets.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I don't know whether the story was true. I do know that, in the three years of my first degree, I was never offered cannabis or any other illegal drug.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At the time, the story just made me laugh. It fitted with the comforting view that the police were so incompetent at going undercover that, if they tried, they'd fail amusingly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">A little later I became aware of a more disturbing story circulating about the activities of some police forces - and I heard this so often and from so many different sources that it seemed quite evident that it was true. This was all back in the 1970s when homosexual acts in private between consenting adults aged 21 or over had only recently ceased to be a crime. I suppose this affected the arrest totals of many police forces. However it remained illegal for a man to solicit sex with another man, raising an interesting question as to how gay men were ever to form sexual relationships. Several police forces went beyond looking out for gay men meeting one another. They sent policemen in plain clothes (known as "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS8J-Hddz84">pretty policemen</a>") to places where gay men met so that, if a man mentioned the possibility of sex, they could whip out the handcuffs and arrest the man. There were stories of pretty policemen who did their best to ensure gay men would make advances to them. It all seemed fairly disgraceful to the policemen and forces involved and I'm glad to say that the practice seems to have died out. I don't think today's police would countenance such activities. I don't think the government would allow it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But I have been disturbed by what I've learned in the last year or so about the activities of undercover policemen. There are plenty of cases of companies going under cover to spy on their opponents. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_Case">McLibel</a> case in the 1990s revealed that <a href="http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/story.html">seven spies working for McDonald's had infiltrated the small London Greenpeace group</a> so that at some meetings the infiltrators were in a majority. The campaigning organisation <a href="http://www.caat.org.uk/about/spying.php">Campaign Against Arms Trade was infiltrated</a> by a man who worked with them first as a paid volunteer and then as their paid Campaigns Co-ordinator. He was also being paid through a company working for arms muanufacturers British Aerospace. According to the <i>Sunday Times</i> story which uncovered this espionage, he was one of half a dozen paid infiltrators. Although it's a national organisation, CAAT is pretty small. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At least when McDonalds or BAe engage in infiltration and spying they merely lower my already low opinion of them. I had occasionally visited McDonalds with my children when the McLibel trial began but after I heard about the infiltration and spying, I initiated a family boycott. Some people may find James Bond glamorous but I reckon there's something rather sickening about spies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">For a long time I've heard stories about state infiltrators in political groups. I didn't think too much about who organised them. I'd probably have thought it was the secret services, whoever they are. I wanted them to be something shady because I didn't want to put a face to them. I've been involved in some left-wing, mainly pacifist campaigning. I don't want to discover that my friends aren't my friends at all - that they're pretending to like me and share my ideals so that they can spy on me, for money. And I don't want to look at the people who really are my friends with suspicion, because if I began to do that, how could any friendship survive?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But in the past year or so it's become evident that that the state infiltrators might be quite close to home. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kennedy_%28police_officer%29">Mark Kennedy</a> worked as a serving police officer by infiltrating protest groups, some of them near where I live. I don't know if he went on the same anti-war marches but it's possible. He looks vaguely familiar but that's all. At least I wasn't one of the women campaigners with whom he had affairs, while concealing the existence of a wife and family elsewhere. As the story of his spying became public, other spies were unmasked. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/20/undercover-police-children-activists">Some of them had affairs with activists too. Some of them fathered children</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The police response to this was to say that the spies were "grossly unprofessional," "morally wrong" and "rogue." My assumption was that at least, after this, the behaviour of police spies would be reined in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I was wrong. The <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2012-06-13/nick-herbert-its-important-police-are-allowed-to-have-sex-with-activists/">Home Office minister Nick Herbert has stated that police acting as undercover spies should be allowed - in certain circumstances - to have sex with activists</a>. I don't know what that makes the government. Paying someone to have sex with people as part of a job isn't quite the same as being a pimp, although morally it seems roughly equivalent. In a few countries encouraging the deception might count as inciting rape - but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_deception">this wouldn't be the case in English law</a>. I expect the women who have been deceived feel pretty damaged by it - especially if they have had a long-term relationship and a child with the spy. But it's not something I want my government to permit, organise or encourage. I think it's wrong.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I'm relying a lot on instinctive reactions here. So I thought I'd better consider other circumstances. What if the police spy was infiltrating an extreme right-wing group? Would I think this worthwhile?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I dislike extreme right-wing groups, particularly those which incite racism and carry out racist attacks. I want them to stop doing this. It's possible an effective infiltrator would find a way of stopping them. But I'm still not happy about the spying.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Anyone who infiltrates a group has to take part in its activities. Police spies risk arrest when they break the law - Mark Kennedy was arrested on more than one occasion. If they reach a position of power - which must be their aim - they need to suggest activities and encourage them. So the police spy infiltrating a racist group might need to establish his or her credibility by abusing people on the grounds of their race, by spraying racist graffiti on walls, by suggesting groups to be targeted on a demonstration - even by initiating or taking part in racist violence. This comes close to acting as an <i>agent provocateur</i> by encouraging people to break the law. I don't want any police officer to do this, however noble the initial aims. Nor do I want any police spy to be expected to have sex with a racist as part of his or her job. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Doubtless some people - including members of the government - will say I'm being naive. But I think members of the police who go undercover as spies cease to act as upholders of the law and move into a shadowy area of questionable morality. When Nick Herbert endorses undercover policing and says that police spies may have sex with activists to reinforce their cover, he may speak for the government, but he doesn't speak for me. I wonder whether the majority of voters - or the majority of police officers - would agree with him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-83651391765055471382012-06-12T18:16:00.000+01:002012-06-12T23:53:39.554+01:00The battle of e-readers<a href="http://www.the-ebook-reader.com/images/kobo-wifi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://www.the-ebook-reader.com/images/kobo-wifi.jpg" width="129" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I resisted for a long time. I like paper. I like the sensation of holding a book in my hands, feeling its weight, leafing backwards and forwards. I like using postcards and bus tickets as bookmarks - I leave them in the books I have finished, then find them years later. This helps me reconstruct the experience of reading. "Ah yes," I think, "that is where I was so concerned about Jean Valjean that I missed my stop," or "How sunny it was when I first followed Little Dorritt across the iron bridge."</span><br />
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My children persuaded me. Indeed, they forced my hand by giving me, as a most generous mother's day gift, a kobo e-reader. I'd begun to wonder how e-reading would feel but resisted the experiment. Now resistance was useless. I had an e-reader pre-loaded with a hundred books.</div>
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When they chose a kobo, my children respected my concerns. I do my best to avoid Amazon and won't have anything to do with the kindle. There are many reasons for this. Amazon has <a href="http://www.housmans.com/boycottamazon.php">a bad record for its treatment of employees</a>. It <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-british-operation-corporation-tax">avoids paying British taxes</a>. Worst of all, it is trying to take such a position of power in the international marketplace that it risks establishing a near-monopoly position in which it would control authors, editing, bookselling and the way in which people read new books.</div>
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A monopoly in the production and reading of books would be a disaster, not just for book-lovers but for all who value history, free thought and the exchange of ideas. Imagine a world where one company provided the only access to the means of reading and also controlled and selected what was available to read. Even if the company began with the most benevolent motives, it would be bound to select certain titles for promotion above others and to give low priority to those it reckoned would be least profitable. (All companies have to take account of economics.) I'm not a great proponent of free-market capitalism but, when it comes to books, I'm with Milton in believing that we get nearest to truth - or progress - when ideas from numerous sources are allowed to clash with one another. My preference for avoiding Amazon is a small act of resistance. And in the matter of e-readers I was particularly determined to avoid Amazon. </div>
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As I understand it (and I'm not highly technically aware) mobi - the format used by the kindle - locks readers into the kindle and Amazon. By contrast epub - the rival format - allows users to switch from one kind of reader to another and import books from a range of sources. While this over-simplifies the conflict - it is, for instance, to have a kindle-reader installed on a pc or an ipad - there are plainly problems in Amazon's approach and these are intensified by their offer of better terms to self-published authors who are prepared to make their work available through kindle only. I can't comment on the quality of their books because I shan't be reading them.</div>
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For me, the kobo will never supersede books. It does less than them. However it does mean that I can leave the house knowing that I have, at the latest count, 176 books in my handbag. They are mostly 19th century works - free and out of copyright. I have most of them as paper books as well. But there are exceptions. I've managed to find books that are obscure and out of print - and I've obtained books in French that aren't easy to find in England. It's great for bus and train journeys and I'm old enough to appreciate the ease with which I can enlarge the font when my eyes are tired.</div>
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So far I haven't read a great deal on my kobo. I enjoyed <i>Bel Ami</i> (in French with the original illustrations) and, in honour of the Dickens bicentenary, I re-read <i>Little Dorritt</i>. Now, attracted by the title, I've turned to Zola's <i>L'Argent</i>. It will take me some time to get used to Zola's sentence structure. </div>
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But I've noticed something about reading on the kobo that I hadn't expected. It makes me focus on smaller sections of text - just because the page is smaller than the double spread of a paperback. That means that the books which are most pleasurable are those which are densely written or which require careful attention. The works of Dickens and books in French are ideal but I can't imagine wanting to read a modern thriller in English on my kobo. I can't read poetry on it either - epub seems to lose the layout which is such an important element. So it's a rather old-fashioned means of reading and I'm enjoying its old-fashioned elements.</div>
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I wonder if e-readers will last in their present form. I rather hope they do as they're very convenient and a good aid to concentration. But the popularity of multi-media tablets suggests that literature in its wordy form may give way to something more complex, where words, sounds and images are mixed and where pathways through the work are multi-linear and even driven by chance. The literature of the future may mutate into a cross between the experimental novel and the computer game. It may even return to its oral roots and become more of a social and communal experience as readers take the opportunities offered by the internet to read and respond together.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But meanwhile I'm loving my solitary experience of the 19th century. As my train passes flooded fields I'm plunging back in time and wandering through the crowded backstreets of London and Paris. I recommend the journey.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-68987099115063984592012-06-10T00:56:00.000+01:002012-06-10T00:58:29.156+01:00What's so bad about Cyclops?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://hummelherojourney.pbworks.com/f/1268376201/pic4.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://hummelherojourney.pbworks.com/f/1268376201/pic4.gif" /></a> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As I mentioned in my last post, I'm re-reading the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Odyssey</i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">. It's many years since I last set out to read it cover to cover. On this occasion I've chosen the E.V. Rieu translation, published by Penguin - not poetry but a quick and pleasurable read in prose. It's probably the best translation if you want - as I do now - to read for the story. </span></div>
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At times I'm struck by how familiar the people seem. I've reached Book IX, where Odysseus meets Nausicaa, the young princess. It's a hilarious encounter. Nausicaa is by the stream with other young women, doing the laundry when Odysseus, who has been shipwrecked on the shore, wakes up from the bed of leaves he has made in the nearby woods. He needs to ask for help but is faced with a problem - he is completely naked. In the end, he does he maintains his modesty by holding a branch in front of him - and decides it is best not to ask for help in the usual way by kneeling before the princess and clasping her knees.</div>
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The comedy of Odysseus' situation develops - and then it gives way to something rather different. Odysseus becomes a guest in the household of King Alcinous, and, after all the rituals due to a guest (bathing, feasting, libations, drinking and so on), Odysseus starts to tell the story of his adventures. For instance, he explains the way in which he and his men would raid settlements, kill the men, rob the settlements and enslave the women. There is no moral justification for this - it's treated as a perfectly ordinary way of carrying on so long as there is no breach of the obligations of hospitality. By contrast, the behaviour of the Cyclops is seen as deeply shocking, in ways that the editor of the Penguin edition points out.</div>
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If you know anything about Cyclops, you probably know that they are one-eyed giants who practise cannibalism. But in the world of the <i>Odyssey</i>, their size and cannibalism aren't the only strange things about them. There are also two important things they do not do. They don't build ships - and as a result they don't trade or have the habit of visiting other communities. And, even more significantly, they don't meet in assemblies to conduct business and make laws. Although there are social interactions - Cyclops listen out for one another and come to one another's help - each family has its own individual laws and customs. In other words, they don't take part in politics (the word comes from the Greek <i>polis</i>, which means the city state). They live entirely private lives.</div>
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Odysseus and a group of his men are trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. There they observe his domestic arrangements. He is an efficient farmer - even a kindly one, by today's standards. He lets his flocks into the cave at night where he milks the ewes before putting their lambs back beside them. This seems to suggest that he takes only the superfluous milk, which he uses to make cheese. In the morning he lets the sheep out to graze. But he starts to eat Odysseus' men, two at a time.</div>
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When Odysseus sets out to trick him, he does so through a version of gift-exchange, which Polyphemus seems to recognize in a limited way. He gives Polyphemus fine and very strong wine and Polyphemus reciprocates by promising that he will eat Odysseus last - not a very adequate response. But the wine renders Polyphemus drunk - there's a particularly disgusting description of him vomiting as a result, and bringing up chunks of the men he has just eaten - allowing Odysseus and his men to blind him. This will give them the opportunity to escape when Polyphemus next opens the cave.</div>
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This set me reflecting that, while we would agree that Polyphemus is wrong to eat people, the other standards by which Polyphemus shows his lack of civilization apply less today than they did thirty or forty years ago. We may not eat strangers but the idea of hospitality as a virtue seems to be slipping away. In the <i>Odyssey</i>, whenever a courteous stranger arrives and asks for help, the rules of decent behaviour dictate that he will be given a bath, food and drink before he is even asked his name, that he will be provided with somewhere to sleep and will be given generous gifts.</div>
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In the time of the <i>Odyssey</i>, a properly-evolved society is also seen as one in which there is a widespread obligation to take part in political decision-making: to work out, through talk with others, what laws should apply. There aren't equal societies - slaves don't take part in politics and women's status is mostly based on their relationship to men. But it's not a dictatorship either - decisions are made after discussion. Speaking well in public forums is valued as much as action.</div>
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When I think about society today, it has more in common than the life of the Cyclops than I would like. The life we live is largely private - solitary or with family and friends. Most talk and grumbling about politics takes place in the private sphere and without any sense that it will change anything. Our society doesn't do much to welcome strangers either. At least we don't eat them.</div>
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<br /></div>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-19060446552894656342012-06-06T16:28:00.000+01:002012-06-06T16:29:55.626+01:00a tentative return<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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I'm not sure that I've missed blogging. I've been away for almost a year - not away from home, or away from my computer, but away from the practice of sharing selected thoughts with anyone who is tempted to stop by my blog.</div>
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It wasn't a momentous decision. For some months I'd been running out of time to blog. I had plenty to say - my brain didn't stop working and I continued to react to the world. But work was taking over much more of my time and I also felt an inclination to spend more time in writing poetry and fiction. And, as I stayed away from the blogosphere, the idea of a return seemed increasingly momentous - and I feared the extra demands it would make on my time.</div>
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Perhaps I also needed some time away. Sometimes an absence from engagement in a particular activity provides a useful opportunity to reflect and gather thoughts together. I'd like to think it's been a helpful pause as well as a hectic one.</div>
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But I've decided to return, and for no better reason than this: it's a rainy afternoon and I felt a sudden inclination to go back to Blogger. If I were living in the time of the Odyssey, I'd say a god moved me. That's what people in the Odyssey say when they make a decision for which they can't account in any other way. I'm re-reading the Odyssey in the moment so that way of seeing the world is much in my mind.</div>
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I had a few ideas about what to say in this post but I'm still distracted by blogger's latest re-design. Like most people, I'm conservative in familiar practices, which is a way of saying I don't want to relearn things I think I already know. (I still cook in pounds and ounces.) I'm still trying to work out how to find the various functions I need on the dashboard, and hope I am doing everything right. It's uncomfortable to be so uncertain about something I thought I could manage. Perhaps soon I'll be used to the new design.</div>
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Meanwhile, I think I'll leave this where it is, add a few labels, press publish and see how this works. If all goes well, I may post again soon. If so, I'll try to write something with a little more substance, in case my readers are still out there. And if you are, hello!</div>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-41794755511749590962011-09-07T08:08:00.005+01:002011-09-07T11:10:22.394+01:00Bringing home the Ashes<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images.newarkadvertiser.co.uk/articles/2e92d78f-2503-102f-8e38-fc59c7dcf53b_001.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 225px; height: 185px;" src="http://images.newarkadvertiser.co.uk/articles/2e92d78f-2503-102f-8e38-fc59c7dcf53b_001.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">They made me play cricket at school. Looking back, I approve. Cricket was widely seen as a boys' game and it was good to have the opportunity. I didn't even mind too much at the time. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Like every sport, cricket had its dangers. There was the hard ball hurtling in my direction and the scorn of the games mistress - and fellow players - every time I ducked or missed a catch. But I soon developed a strategy that made the game a source of pleasure. I made sure I had a book in my pocket and volunteered to field on the boundary line. Very few teenage players - boys or girls - can hit a cricket ball to the boundary and there was a convenient hedge nearby. I and my book would adjourn to the other side of the hedge where I would read in the sunshine. Books I enjoyed at the time included Dorothy L. Sayers' </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:georgia;" >Murder Must Advertise</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">. I quite like fictional cricket matches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">This probably doesn't make me the ideal audience for Michael Pinchbeck's new play, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:georgia;" >The Ashes</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">, which I saw at its final preview performance - it runs till late September. I wasn't really in the mood for theatre when I headed to <a href="http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/whats-on/drama/the-ashes-2011/">Nottingham Playhouse</a>. It didn't help that the lovely Cast bar, where, as a Backstage Pass member I have a discount, told me there was a 45-minute wait for food - even cold nibbles. It was only 50 minutes to curtain up. I settled down with a beer and surveyed the crowds. They were mainly male, which had a definite and unusual advantage - no queue for the ladies' loo.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It looks as though </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:georgia;" >The Ashes</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> will be a popular play. Harold Larwood, the cricketer at its centre was a Nottinghamshire lad who played for the county. The crowds in the bar included more cricketers and cricket fans than I usually observe at the theatre - but perhaps I was just more aware of conversations about cricket. It could be a tricky audience, I reflected, picking out flaws in details or cricketing stance. Looking at the length of the two parts of the play, I was further concerned. The first half was a mere 45 minutes and the second 75 - against the usual logic which makes the second act shorter than the first. I was full of doubts as I settled down to watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I already knew something of the subject of the play. The </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyline">Bodyline</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> tour, as the 1932-3 Ashes tour of Australia is known, is still discussed, often in relation to class as well as sporting ethics. In the 1930s the distinction between "gentlemen" (upper-class amateurs) and "players" (working-class professionals) remained an important one, although the national team drew from both groups. Discussions of the bodyline strategy, in which batsmen risked serious injury from fast bowling, often focus on the contrast between the public-school and Oxford-educated team captain, Douglas Jardine, and the two Nottinghamshire ex-miners, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce. This, as a friend pointed out, set up the risk that the play would be worthy and obvious. I settled in my seat without great hopes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Within the first five minutes I realised that the play was going to work. It doesn't aim at naturalism - just as well, since the Playhouse stage isn't big enough for a cricket pitch - so all the actors, including the leads, took other roles as required, changing both attitudes and accents. However the actors convinced within each role they took. The cricketers in the audience plainly approved too. They were quickly receptive to references I found obscure and their appreciative laughter made the theatre a comfortable place. It was plain that the play was not going to be dully worthy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Pinchbeck's play places the emphasis precisely where it needs to be: on character and events. There are ethical dilemmas but they are explored through the complex characters at the centre of the drama: Harold Larwood, played by Karl Haynes and Douglas Jardine played by Jamie de Courcey. The performances in these roles were stunning, even within an excellent ensemble cast. When I think of Larwood and Jardine in future, I suspect they'll always be embodied by Hayes' slight and determined figure and de Courcey's humourless intensity.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;">Class mattered, of course, but these characters weren't cardboard cut-outs but people for whom class was one part of their complex individual experiences. The only slight problem came from the inevitable passivity of Lois Larwood (Sarah Churm) whose role was largely limited to staying in Mansfield, following the match at the cinema and expressing an admiration for Gracie Fields. But her final speech conveyed a depth of feeling that went far beyond the words she was given to say.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">As a viewer, I was caught up in the English team's determination to win at all costs. This tour came, after all, in the wake of the Great War and members of the team must have spent part of their youth anticipating battle for king and country. But I winced when I saw film footage from the tour, showing the impact of bodyline (or "leg theory") bowling on the batsmen.</span> And the longer part of the play didn't seem long at all as I was riveted by the tensions within the story.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I emerged from the play with a much greater respect for cricketers. As I stood in the bus queue afterwards, some of the cricketers from the audience were still discussing the ethics of bodyline as well as explaining theories of bowling or small aspects of the story omitted from the play. And that, I think, is how it should be.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Please note that the play has an undeservedly short run - you need to see it before 17th September. And apologies for my long absence from blogging. I was simply tired and needed a break. I'm back now.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-70283362598861498652011-06-04T12:59:00.011+01:002011-06-04T16:03:08.757+01:00Bread and circuses<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH00ws-GWdP6BAfxTsREqIOejby6fLfvwBTFYPUSgzTldlO_0nNMZYOuuYl95D89TyjvQQo3KMi4neG73COkAVmcmQDDpHyUr0DHENG4p-QnJuOhG7dunjYqdnwuKSiFZcSde7iZO0OoLd/s1600/June+2011+005.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH00ws-GWdP6BAfxTsREqIOejby6fLfvwBTFYPUSgzTldlO_0nNMZYOuuYl95D89TyjvQQo3KMi4neG73COkAVmcmQDDpHyUr0DHENG4p-QnJuOhG7dunjYqdnwuKSiFZcSde7iZO0OoLd/s200/June+2011+005.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5614333432819140690" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">After a busy period at work when I haven't found time to blog, I'm experiencing the delights of bread and circuses.<br /><br />The bread is literally bread. I've finally explored one of the Polish shops near work and discovered a range of central European breads: heavy rye bread, bread with sunflower seeds and so on, reflecting the cuisine of various countries - not just Poland but also Latvia and Lithuania. They seem to me better than the supermarket "specialty" brands - and cheaper too.<br /><br />I went to a circus as well - the <a href="http://www.moscowstatecircus.com/">Moscow State Circus</a> which was touring near me on the day of the Royal Wedding. It was a good counter-balance to that other circus. It had a story too. If I grasped the moral correctly, it was something about taking money from the rich and spending it sensibly so that everyone could enjoy the arts. Just now that seems a pretty good idea.<br /><br />All round me there's anxiety. Friends find their jobs at risk. (I seem to be safe - at least till next year, and that's ages in the present economic climate.) Health and social care are in the news. The <span style="font-style: italic;">Financial Times</span> has picked up a story about health authorities and <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6f497560-8e1a-11e0-bee5-00144feab49a.html">hospitals at risk</a>. In many cases the risk has been caused or worsened by the involvement of private companies, who were quick to enter into Private Finance Initiative agreements that safeguarded profits at the expense of the ill, the injured and the dying. Meanwhile <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/its-not-our-fault-southern-cross-is-on-the-brink-say-financiers-2292495.html">the big companies that make money out of caring for frail elderly people and those with disabilities have in their turn been brought close to collapse by private equity companies</a>. From the point of view of profiteers, it seemed a neat arrangement: sell the homes to other companies, agree an ever-rising rent, trust the market - and <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21084f7e-8e2a-11e0-bee5-00144feab49a.html">get out quickly</a> when the economy falters.<br /><br />Obviously I should have arranged a better pension for myself, according to the right-wingers. That's the same right-wingers who object that my public-sector pension will be too generous (if I ever get there) and who tell me I should find ever more to spend on my children, my parents and every cause and charity near to my heart. But if I do my best, it's never quite enough. According to them, I should also spend more on insurance and save more - but in the present economic climate insurance companies can go bust. Even banks, which may be bailed out, seem a bit of a gamble. They depend on the markets, which depend on an ever-increasing chain of gambles and exploitation.<br /><br />So besides bread, I comfort myself with circuses. I may have visited only one actual circus in the past month, but I've been making up for it by enjoying other activities which give me pleasure. They remind me that life is more than a dragged-out existence. Life isn't just about duty - we need pleasure too. For some people that means getting out into a new place, whether it's roaming the countryside or strolling through towns. Others enjoy dancing or sport - and my regular experience of wielding an epée makes me understand that these can be sources of intense pleasure. For other people it's watching sport going to gigs that's important. My circuses involve engagement with the arts.<br /><br />I headed to London to see my parents, travelling as lightly as I could so that I could sandwich my visit with artistic pleasures. I was a groundling for a matinée of <a href="http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/on-stage/alls-well-that-ends-well"><span style="font-style: italic;">All's Well That Ends Well</span> at the Globe</a> - a difficult play that's rarely performed. It's not just its unfamiliarity that makes it one of my favourites. There's a pair of determined, assertive young women - even though the times mean that the best either can hope is an attractive, wealthy husband to lord it over them.<br /><br />I've seen <span style="font-style: italic;">All's Well</span> twice before - and in both productions the focus was on the central relationship between Helena and Bertram. The comedy was played either as abstruse courtly wit, at a distance from the audience, or a cue for over-emphasis with lots of "isn't this funny?" expressions in the hope that the audience would laugh. The revelation of this production was that, for the groundlings at least, the comedy worked and was genuinely funny. It comes, I think, from the shape of the theatre which encourages the actors to establish a relationship with the audience. Comic lines were played with the clarity of the successful stand-up - and were irresistible. I engaged with the play as a whole - how could I do otherwise with my forearms leaning on the front of the stage? - and, when the final scene of reconciliation came, my eyes filled with unexpected tears.<br /><br />I stayed overnight with my parents, still in their own flat so less immediately threatened by the private profits of the market. We had supper and a quiet evening. In the morning I left with them when they headed out to the shops but my aim was a further exploration of London.<br /><br />I was unsure of my destination but eventually decided on the <a href="http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Leisure_and_culture/Museums_and_galleries/Guildhall_Art_Gallery/">Guildhall Museum</a>, which I hadn't visited before, followed by the <a href="http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/">London Museum</a>, which I hadn't seen for many years. Walking between and around the two, I found myself in a many-layered city, where modern structures of glass and metal loomed high above small Wren churches. There are traces of an even older city. I glimpsed the old London Wall through a museum window and saw what's left of the Roman amphitheatre in the Guildhall Museum basement.<br /><br />That's the kind of structure Juvenal meant when <a href="http://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_juvenal_satire_X.html">he talked about bread and circuses</a>: a place where shows of all kinds were put on, including gladiatorial combat and public execution. Being in some ways a typical Roman of his class, I don't suppose he minded the gladiators or the executions. But he was concerned that the citizens of Rome, once the source of democratic power, had been diverted from their proper concerns for the state to making demands for bread and circuses.<br /><br />I agree with Juvenal that people should recognize and exert their democratic power. But I think he's wrong to dismiss bread and circuses. We all need food to live - not just food for the body but something that nourishes the imagination and tells us that life is worthwhile. It's also the circuses, whether we find them in physical activity, travel, music or the arts, that open us to a wider imaginative understanding of the world. They nourish curiosity and sympathy. They offer laughter, tears and reconciliation.<br /><br />Yes, Juvenal - I want democratic involvement and responsibility. But I'll take the bread and circuses as well.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv1juI9gCC3uMdDdyWby0q09KKqQPQc2fZd6L1caXEQC81n_c2_B3pxjHo1sPceyHTaJafr2jT5CdPWFVKKzxxzIF5xLFvB_HTF4MjMTme1Tfd-pLkM5WNsclAfRnomjpJL10vi6te79-d/s1600/June+2011+025.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv1juI9gCC3uMdDdyWby0q09KKqQPQc2fZd6L1caXEQC81n_c2_B3pxjHo1sPceyHTaJafr2jT5CdPWFVKKzxxzIF5xLFvB_HTF4MjMTme1Tfd-pLkM5WNsclAfRnomjpJL10vi6te79-d/s200/June+2011+025.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5614376387687383538" border="0" /></a><br /></span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-72442125530409307202011-05-30T09:43:00.008+01:002011-05-30T13:49:54.018+01:00Hidden stories and imagined worlds<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAdkMxlVty3wR5VbRFhVwe6R2NGqaF07Fxi163Ao8qjBh45uK0dN3Tl16BZfaZlGFIu4AyKnJi3hyphenhyphennE-tUmXIQYBQU5itM2YTLlm6HnxfbDISzQS4vxbBFurPIl1Lyt312GXRhQ1HAqry8/s1600/ulrikeeamon1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 75px; height: 75px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAdkMxlVty3wR5VbRFhVwe6R2NGqaF07Fxi163Ao8qjBh45uK0dN3Tl16BZfaZlGFIu4AyKnJi3hyphenhyphennE-tUmXIQYBQU5itM2YTLlm6HnxfbDISzQS4vxbBFurPIl1Lyt312GXRhQ1HAqry8/s200/ulrikeeamon1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612429839637941106" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;" >It seems that there are demonstrations and protests in several European countries.</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> Every so often there's a brief mention in the press - but it's usually an aside or footnote to another story. A fellow-blogger, travelling to Madrid on business was startled to find <a href="http://alan-baker.blogspot.com/search/label/Spain">every square in the city under occupation by protesters</a> - and it seems that other Spanish cities have been occupied as well. The Barcelona occupation did get a mention in the British press - in the football reports. Apparently <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j5WvcWBAasYxyHa2nFvIw86HRpnA?docId=CNG.5aaa76d8d4835eaec051fad8fe61eb1d.291">there were fears that Barca would be unable to celebrate in the usual square, as it was occupied</a>. A search on the internet quickly brought up video of the Spanish police trying to disperse the protesters with considerable force.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It seems that <a href="http://www.demotix.com/news/704241/spanish-style-protests-reach-greece-thessaloniki">Greece has large protests too</a>. Syntagma Square in Athens may still be under occupation and I found mention (in Greek papers in English) of further protests in Thessaloniki and Patra. Then there were references to <a href="http://www.liberation.fr/societe/01012340226-a-bastille-les-indignes-veulent-une-insurrection-civique-et-pacifique">protests and occupations in France</a> - not just in the Place de la Bastille in Paris but in other cities as well. Struggling through information from a variety of courses and a variety of languages, I discovered that people in each square came from a variety of political and non-political background - but were almost always outside the mainstream - and that they worked co-operatively and consensually to write their own agendas for change.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">This may all fade away. People may just accept the poverty and exploitation which comes with finding their country "bailed out" from a crisis caused by their government, bankers, and multi-national countries. But I find it far more interesting than the sex-life of bankers or the dresses worn by the wives of a president, a prime minister and the heir to the heir to the throne. And I wonder why the British press is ignoring it while similar actions in some Middle Eastern countries merit front page coverage. I have, however, noted that protests in some Middle Eastern countries get more publicity than others - the press now has little to say about Syria, Tunisia, Morocco Bahrain - and last Friday's protests in Egypt were barely mentioned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">When so much is happening abroad - and when there are plenty of political struggles at home - it seems slightly bizarre to spend time at a theatre festival. But </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.neatfestival.co.uk/#">NEAT11</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, Nottingham's new international arts and theatre festival is practically on my doorstep. If I wished, I could walk to some of the events. And while some are rather expensive (Opera North still offers too few cheap tickets), others are cheap or even free. I made a few extravagant bookings and promised myself hours of indulgence away from the anxieties of the Age of Austerity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It didn't quite work out like that. Who would have thought that Henrik Ibsen wasn't always a gloomy Scandinavian but a writer of political comedy? </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/news/the-league-of-youth-reviews/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The League of Youth</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, receiving its professional premiere in Britain nearly 150 years after it was written, was one of Ibsen's most popular plays in his native Norway, at least during his lifetime. And, more surprisingly, it turns out to be a satire on Nick Clegg. I came away from the Playhouse both cheered and musing on the effects empty rhetoric still has on voters who are fed up with the current system and desperate for something better - and a chance to be heard. </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:georgia;" >The League of Youth</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> runs till Wednesday so there's still a chance to get tickets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I also made it to a free play-reading of </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Yablonskaya">Anna Yablonskaya</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">'s play </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:georgia;" >The Irons</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">. Yabolnskaya is one of two people associated with NEAT11 to be killed in an act of terrorism this year. (The other is </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/news/tragic-death-of-juliano-mer-khamis/">Juliano Mer Khamis</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">.) She was killed in a random and barely-explained bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. I thought the knowledge of her death might affect my response to the reading but it was so complex, even in a semi-staged reading, that I was caught up in the characters and events. But again it led me back to the world of politics. At the centre of the play was a young man collecting irons and ironing the flags of countries that no longer exist - and this wasn't just some intellectual metaphor but part of the characters' experience, reflecting a world that was both known and imaginary.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The reading I attended was a shortened version of the full play (which is being read in full next week) and was followed by a discussion of theatre in Central Europe, with representatives of a Hungarian theatre company, a Kosovan theatre festival and Natalia Koliada of the </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://dramaturg.org/?lang=en&menu=theatre">Free Theatre of Belarus</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. While theatre in Hungary has experienced cuts and press attacks - and may suffer in the future under a recent Media Law - it is in a far stronger position than Kosovan theatre, which is desperately under-funded and suffering the effects of war, poverty and unemployment. But the problems in Belarus made others seem insignificant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Natalia Koliada is living in exile; she has been warned not to return since her arrest and imprisonment last year. Her country is a dictatorship, torture is routine and her theatre company is prevented from giving public performances. Requests to perform plays by British playwrights including Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Edward Bond were turned down. One of the reasons given was that the plays show homosexuality, suicide and mental illness, which "don't exist in Belarus". So I was back to politics again, marvelling at the power of the arts and fictional worlds to upset those who rule and administer totalitarian regimes. I marvelled too at the courage of those who continue to make art in difficult circumstances, finding something within them that will not bow to the demands of authority.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">These theatrical experiences were shared with other members of the audience and quite easy to discuss. I also chose two solitary theatre experiences. For one I had to download tracks to my MP3 player; for the other I was provided with a mobile phone.</span><br /><br /><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://twp2009.wordpress.com/ears-wide-open/threads/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Threads</span> by Andy Barrett</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> is the more conventional drama. It's also free for anyone with access to a computer and MP3 player. In a way, following </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:georgia;" >Threads</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> round Nottingham's Lacemarket is like listening to a radio play. But there's something different about following a play which asks you to look intently at your surroundings while listening - it requires an acuteness of visual observation and risks being interrupted by external factors such as a crowd of clubbers or loud conversation in a bar. While the events of the play are fairly slight, it's the accompanying visual intensity that stays with me - and the play itself demands that the listener look at people and places anew.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">More disturbing is </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_ulrikeandeamoncompliant.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ulrike and Eamon Compliant</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> which was devised for Venice but has been rethought for Nottingham. As the solitary audience member, I picked up a mobile phone, turned it on and listened attentively. I was asked to choose one of two identities from the real (historical) terrorists Ulrike Meinhof and Eamon Collins. Clutching the phone to my ear I walked through streets that were suddenly unfamiliar, made choices, followed orders and heard snatches of Ulrike Meinhof's experience until my identity began to blur into hers. I did not entirely stop being myself and a pacifist but for half an hour or so I saw Nottingham - and the wider world - as a terrorist might see it: angry at the injustice and cruelty of the world, prepared to sacrifice myself and others for the dream of a better world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Sometimes - often at its best - theatre challenges its audiences to imagine things they do not want to understand. I felt at times that being Ulrike, even for half an hour, had messed up my brain and my identity. But I also knew that I undertook the experience voluntarily - and paid for it too. In a world as complex as ours it may help to understand. Just at the moment, theatre seems closer to world events and dilemmas than anything I find in the British press.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">As I made my way to the bus-stop after a day of theatre, I passed the Old Market Square. No-one was demonstrating. If anything it seemed slightly emptier than usual at that time of night. But suppose it had been occupied by a peaceful protest camp of people wanting to change the world, I wondered if I'd have been able to read about it in the next day's papers. I'm glad I don't live under the kind of totalitarian regime that people experience in Belarus. But perhaps in Britain too there are some things that aren't mentioned in the press because they don't happen here. And who knows what anger that press silence would evoke?</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV0i7wGQLUHux2vFJB1qoxjoGxkltfYIPd37OvjB_xYrGAMaaZGVXU_OMHqAEvqJ_4zsHfCaH_DsppGmBixuZenOu7OBbeI731BAzjhHeB6ghudtQ1BgGUwAwGiXio8Cyjmdpirr4gbn3i/s1600/May2011+005.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV0i7wGQLUHux2vFJB1qoxjoGxkltfYIPd37OvjB_xYrGAMaaZGVXU_OMHqAEvqJ_4zsHfCaH_DsppGmBixuZenOu7OBbeI731BAzjhHeB6ghudtQ1BgGUwAwGiXio8Cyjmdpirr4gbn3i/s200/May2011+005.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612481399772129330" border="0" /></a>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-21261267371738863812011-04-26T16:21:00.004+01:002011-04-26T16:38:52.338+01:00Pina and the stereoscope<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3dguy.tv/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/pina-bausch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 167px;" src="http://3dguy.tv/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/pina-bausch.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I decided to give myself an Easter treat. Having found suitable eggs for my parents, who like milk chocolate; my son, who is a vegan and my daughter, who doesn't like chocolate very much, it seemed time to give myself a present. I determined on an Easter Day trip to <a href="http://www.broadway.org.uk/">the cinema</a> and resolutely ignored the demands of house, garden and work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">My first idea was to see the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438216/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Oranges and Sunshine</span></a> by Jim Loach. I still hope to see that some time. The scandal of children shipped from Britain to Australia, where many were abused and exploited, has particular resonance in the East Midlands, where the story was first brought to public attention. Jim Loach's film, which tells that story, is well-cast and has received excellent reviews. But I wasn't sure I wanted to be distressed on Easter Sunday, which is supposed to be a day of rejoicing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">A glimpse of a good review turned my attention to Wim Wenders' film, <span style="font-style: italic;">Pina</span>. My daughter studied <a href="http://www.pina-bausch.de/en/pina_bausch/index.php">Pina Bausch</a>'s work at university and her views shifted from mild dislike to enthusiastic appreciation. It isn't easy to shift my daughter's views and I thought I would like to learn more about the choreographer who achieved that. While dance isn't one of my greatest interests, every so often a dance work does excite me and Pina Bausch, who used the term <span style="font-style: italic;">Tanztheater</span> (dance-theatre) for her work, seemed the kind of creator who would at least be interesting. And when I heard of <a href="http://www.wim-wenders.com/">Wim Wenders</a>' enthusiasm for 3D, my choice was settled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I've never taken 3D cinema seriously before. I've enjoyed a couple of 3D cinema experiences – at least, I think I have – but while they were probably exciting at the time they had the quality of theme-park rides: intense at the time but ultimately unmemorable. Yet 3D is a logical development of cinema which includes the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/AbXOp2MySEKWPCDS3k_eYw">stereoscope</a> among its origins.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I like stereoscopes. I've peered through them in museums and seen two similar, apparently-faded sepia prints spring into something resembling solidity. They recapture an unalterable past and give it a brief air of tangibility. The images shimmer into solidity before my uncertain gaze. I wasn't sure how 3D would work for dance but it seemed an appropriately elegaic mode for this subject – Pina Bausch died just as Wenders was starting work on a film about her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The film Wenders has made is an elegy. Dancers' words recalling Pina are heard as they gaze silently into camera. There are also clips which show <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm70fMM3JAk">Pina dancing</a>. These are, of course, in 2D but the stereoscopic effect is achieved by the use of an on-screen audience, reminding us that what we watch belongs to the past and cannot be recreated. The inclusion of 2D footage also has the effect of ensuring that the 3D effects remain vivid and startling – the brain isn't allowed to become acclimatised to the novelty of the experience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I'm not sure I understand Pina Bausch's work. Even if I did, it resists being put into words. As she says during the film (so far as I can recollect), dance is an ideal medium for things which can be hinted but not spoken directly. Once I start describing what the dancers do and how they move, I know I'm diminishing their work. More than for most art-forms, the meaning of dance is unsayable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Moreover the dances Pina Bausch created work, like most dance, by repetition of movement. A sequence which is initially startling – often because of the skill employed by the dancers – ceases to astonish and appeals to the emotions as it is performed again and again. My brain can't unscramble the effects but I can feel them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">At times, of course, my concentration flagged. Sometimes all I saw were the startling 3D effects as dancers moved towards me and away. That may have been because I was tired, because I'm insufficiently familiar with the vocabulary of dance or even because Wim Wenders is not yet sufficiently in command of 3D cinema and its effects. But my interest never fell away and I emerged from the darkened cinema feeling that I'd seen something that isn't usually available away from the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">“After all,” I reflected on the train home, “3D is never quite so intensive and exciting in the real world. The 3D of reality is flatter than that.” And then, when I left the station, I looked up and was suddenly aware of distance – between sky, houses, trees, road and lamp-posts. It seems that the film has re-educated my brain. The world I see now has sprung back into its real, 3D perspective.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-45715321811372482342011-04-25T10:23:00.005+01:002011-04-25T11:06:30.327+01:00Enduring freedom<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDHO5kZMTvKLNh7pGAe4humMgGv648dEDZICU_abBrv6ynUjTobeVLTeHrcaaQRbn2SN0RVx09DKSX6rF7nJX_MEv8y3qLh3QLsAOYMpwwKyPJAA-bkymFi5VJ_i1Yi4D_ec0wOu1XxJK/s1600/April2011+128.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDHO5kZMTvKLNh7pGAe4humMgGv648dEDZICU_abBrv6ynUjTobeVLTeHrcaaQRbn2SN0RVx09DKSX6rF7nJX_MEv8y3qLh3QLsAOYMpwwKyPJAA-bkymFi5VJ_i1Yi4D_ec0wOu1XxJK/s200/April2011+128.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599449858137458962" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-family:georgia;">I took another look at the peace-camp on Saturday. It's been shifted to the pavement in Parliament Square while the grass, which London mayor Boris Johnson said he wanted to preserve for the people of London, is closed off with tall fences and patrolled by security guards.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />The peace-campers' tents are neat and there's plenty of space for pedestrians on the pavement. I was one of many people visiting to read the banners. But it's still hard to reach the traffic island – I've yet to find a set of traffic lights that enable the public to reach the island. I had to employ my usual technique of a quick dash as the third lane of traffic slowed.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />I suspect there will be an attempt, on some pretext or other, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/07/royal-wedding-parliament-square">to remove the peace-campers before Friday's Royal Wedding</a>, even though they offer no more risk than a fairly quiet protest on a range of issues, most – but not all – related to war. One man's banners announce that he is undertaking a hunger strike because he has been unjustly imprisoned. If he were in Tripoli the British press would probably declare him a hero. As it was, none of the campers even offered me a leaflet. I read their hand-made banners without interruption. Theirs is a quiet, enduring protest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">If the peace-camp is cleared, it will make the streets more home-like and welcoming for the despots and their representatives who are attending Prince William's wedding. The Crown Prince of Bahrain has finally pulled out, citing troubles at home – these could include the brutality his own and Saudi troops are showing to unarmed demonstrators and the doctors who treat them. But <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/royal-couple-face-rogues-gallery-of-despots-in-abbeys-front-row-2274412.html">London and the Royal Family will still welcome representatives of Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland</a>.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Looking at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-files-lift-lid-prison">summaries of the Guantanamo files</a>, I can't help thinking that these tyrants have much in common with our other allies – and perhaps with our own, more secretive activities elsewhere in the world. Apparently the United States military didn't just take people to Guantanamo because they thought they were terrorists. They also kidnapped and imprisoned people who they thought might have useful information. A taxi-driver, for instance, was reckoned to have good knowledge of a particular region because his work took him through it. One man – a British citizen – was held because he had been imprisoned by the Taliban and was therefore likely to have good knowledge of their interrogation techniques. A 14-year-old who had been kidnapped and was known to be innocent of all terrorist activities was kidnapped again – this time by the Americans – because he might have knowledge of the Taliban and local leaders.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />As for evidence of terrorist activities – the U.S. military didn't need much ground for arrest, deportation and torture. Visiting Afghanistan after 9/11 was enough. So was <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-files-casio-wristwatch-alqaida">possession of a Casio watch</a>, although the models the U.S. found suspicious are cheap and widely available.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />I expect the United States ambassador will be at the Royal Wedding. After all, the North Korean ambassador has been invited – as have kings, queens, princes and princesses from several countries that have been republics for a long time. I hope that none of them – and none of the “ordinary” people invited – are wearing Casio watches. That could set off some serious security alarms.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />More than that, I hope the peace-camp survives Will and Kate's special day. It would be good to think there's still a small patch of pavement in London where freedom survives, despite the actions of the state.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh86Kl9BD7LP9rt1fRbgW-0W0h5sTO586bTBT1qAX5kAwCasZHV37EGqdk4gpCuhdU7Stl-56Uod-7RTwr4pVMKKNZP5RG_rfk_1vFZINBZNNFFwHa5VVYmaFnlX-yvnwcqJiHsbHdf1Yee/s1600/April2011+124.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh86Kl9BD7LP9rt1fRbgW-0W0h5sTO586bTBT1qAX5kAwCasZHV37EGqdk4gpCuhdU7Stl-56Uod-7RTwr4pVMKKNZP5RG_rfk_1vFZINBZNNFFwHa5VVYmaFnlX-yvnwcqJiHsbHdf1Yee/s200/April2011+124.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599458313607247730" border="0" /><br /><br /><br /></a></span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-50609164951323832102011-04-04T17:16:00.003+01:002011-04-04T17:36:28.344+01:00The Harrods of the ancient world<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://arabnews.com/lifestyle/offbeat/article296273.ece/REPRESENTATIONS/large_620x350/off_treasure.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 310px; height: 175px;" src="http://arabnews.com/lifestyle/offbeat/article296273.ece/REPRESENTATIONS/large_620x350/off_treasure.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">How could something so fragile last so long?<br /></span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br />I gazed at the remains of brittle gold bowls and goblets. I could see where the stem of the goblet should be. The amazing thing is not that it has vanished but the thin, ridged bowl should have survived. I peered closer to make out the outlines of bulls on part of a bowl. A craftsman scored them gently into the gold around four thousand years ago. They are evidence of a vanished civilization of which little else is known. They come from Afghanistan.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />I was hesitant about visiting the <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/afghanistan.aspx">Afghan Treasures exhibition at the British Museum</a>. I thought uncomfortably of conquerors, loot and triumphal processions. Exhibitions often arrive with an agenda, especially when they have been negotiated by diplomats. But this exhibition seems to have a gentler and more laudable cause. The British Museum has been restoring ivories that were stolen in the looting of Kabul Museum and recovered by an unnamed philanthropists. The British Museum staff have been working with the staff of Kabul Museum and the exhibition, however dependent on diplomatic goodwill and corporate sponsors, comes out of their joint work. The exhibition tells another story too – of museum staff who hid the treasures so that the history of their country could be preserved.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />The history of Afghanistan is not well known. There is much that has not yet been recovered or understood. Western history books have tended to simplify the region as a place of romantic barbarism which briefly encountered civilization with the arrival of Alexander the Great. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great">Alexander the Great</a>, who married an Afghan wife and adopted local customs, may have viewed it differently.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />So far as I can gather and recollect, the region had two reasons for importance in the world. It was a source of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapis_lazuli">lapis lazuli</a>, which was rare and much in demand. And although its terrain is difficult by contemporary vehicles, it stood on major trade routes, bordering India, China and the Persian Empire. Traders went as far as Greece and Rome, although the journey each way would have taken a year. The treasures they brought back, particularly to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram">Begram</a>, are protected in glass cases in the exhibition.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Captions show the uncertainty of the curators about the exhibits on view. There is a head of Silenus, clearly recognizable, but did the Afghans really know who <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silenus">Silenus</a> was? Its unclear whether the owners of valuable items purchased deities or just attractive statues – rather as a modern mantlepiece may bear statues of Ganesh or the Buddha without necessarily demonstrating any religious allegiance or knowledge.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />There's glass, too – Roman glass most probably or perhaps made in Egypt - the curators cannot be sure how it reached Begram from Rome since the way was blocked by war with Parthia. One piece is enamelled with full-length figures which even I can see are Roman in style. Another's delicately ornamented with vines made from the glass itself. But beside these are statues carved in turned ivory – chair-legs, the inscription suggests – each with a swaying female figure in what seems to me an Indian style. There are glass fish, a face that resembles a Greek or Chinese theatrical mask. There are Corinthian columns and finials. Some items must have been made in Afghanistan by craftsmen who had learnt skills from crafts practised elsewhere. But many items are imports, suggesting a place like Britain today where beautiful objects from all over the world can be prized and owned.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Half-way round the exhibition, I realised something else that was troubling me, though it's not unusual. I had little sense of the lives of the people who owned these objects, other than that they were very rich and could afford goods imported from far-off places. It was as if, one day far in the future, someone were to excavate Harrods and, finding only a few of the goods on show, tried to understand life today on that basis. Perhaps that is what has survived. Perhaps these expensive, traded goods represent the Harrods of the ancient world.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />As I wandered through the exhibition, the past seemed both more distant and more familiar. I couldn't grasp past Afghan cultures but then, if asked, I couldn't give a simple account that took in the whole of west European culture today. Artefacts left by Afghan trading centres, which drew goods and influence from across the world, speak of a complex, varied society. This shouldn't be surprising or unusual. But I began to realise that many exhibitions treat the past as a collection of small, separate societies. They don't just assume that societies are culturally pure – they often treat cultural purity as something good in itself. The textbooks I studied at school were wary of cultural mixing. Rome's interest in things Greek was regarded with disdain although the Renaissance interest in Greek art and sculpture was excused as a means of regaining artistic purity after the confused muddle of the Middle Ages. </span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Looking at the wide range of objects on display and marvelling at their variety, I realised how much ancient history has been filtered through subjective and questionable value judgements. I suppose curators have to simplify – just as their displays provide the kind of neat, comforting pattern humans are trained to prefer. But in real life I like variety and complexity – and am glad that human existence resists a neatly moral narrative arc.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />At last I neared the object I recognized from the posters for the exhibition: the gold crown once worn, so the captions assured me, by a nomad princess. I expected something bright and golden but I hadn't realised the tiny golden discs would tremble continuously, as though there were a breeze or breath inside the glass case. I read that the crown could be packed away and folded – and that all the nomad treasures, buried two thousand years ago, could be carried easily on horseback. In my imagination an Afghan princess rode through wild landscapes, the trembling crown on her head and a gold-studded cloak behind her. It's an improbable fantasy. I have no idea what the concept “princess” means in terms of nomadic people two thousand years ago - I wonder if the women were princesses in any way we can understand.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Little seems to be known of Afghan nomadic life beyond the six graves in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillya_Tepe">Tilya Tepe</a>. But the adornments found in the tombs of five women and one man link the items closely to the humans who wore them. It's not just the photos showing how the bodies lay when the tombs were opened or the glass case where the golden items mark out the shape of a human form. It's more to do with the sense that these items once touched living flesh and the the gold was caught on wisps of cloth the tombs were found. I peered as directed to see that the bracelets show signs of wear – in contact with an arm over time, gold diminishes. </span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />The exhibition isn't big or cheap (I got in for half price – £5 – with my <a href="http://www.artfund.org/">Art Fund</a> membership). Space inside is limited because items are small and, when I visited on Saturday, that meant queuing briefly before reaching most cabinets. I haven't carried away a neat package of knowledge about an obscure culture. Instead I have grounds for wonder and wondering – more than enough.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.thefirstpint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Crown.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 232px; height: 201px;" src="http://www.thefirstpint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Crown.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-16390879098161138922011-03-30T16:42:00.003+01:002011-03-30T17:03:51.517+01:00Berkoff and Dionysos<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/reviews/images/oedipus.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 315; height: 220px;" src="http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/reviews/images/oedipus.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Last week, I realised I'd never seen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King">Sophocles' <span style="font-style: italic;">King Oedipus</span></a> on stage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Few people would be surprised by that, but I was. These days I don't get to the theatre as often as I'd like but I still think of myself as a theatre-goer. In the past, I've sought out obscure productions of Greek plays – in Greek as well as in English – because of the challenge they pose to today's theatre.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm not an expert but, when I struggled through two happy years to achieve a weak pass in Greek A-level, I supplemented my tussles with verbs and syntax with reading everything I could find on Greek history and culture. According to the curriculum, my school didn't offer Greek. Greek, like writing Latin verse, tended to be the preserve of boys' grammar and public schools. But somehow I wangled my way into Greek A-level, which was taught intensively from scratch in the Latin teacher's spare time. I've been grateful to her ever since. I was an unpromising prospect with nothing except a desire to learn to recommend me. There must have been considerable doubt whether I would pass. But the teacher – her name was Miss Blench – did her very best for me, setting plenty of work and urging me to read as much as I could. I think there were four shelves of books about Ancient and Classical Greece in the school library. I probably read every one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I don't suppose any school would let a pupil take that risk nowadays, what with league tables and so on. But I'm more proud of the grade D I attained (a clear pass!) than any other academic achievement. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">My teenage passion for things Greek has subsided now but I still turn to Greek texts from time to time – often in translation with the original Greek beside me, if I can find it, so that I can have some idea of the sound and the way meaning is made. But heading to <a href="http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/whats-on/drama/oedipus/">Steven Berkoff's production of <span style="font-style: italic;">Oedipus</span> at Nottingham Playhouse</a>, I couldn't find a Greek text. I had to make do with a few extracts in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Oxford Book of Greek Verse</span>, which were far too difficult for me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Instead I thought of the problems posed by staging Greek tragedy today. It's never going to be the same for us as the Greeks. A director could offer a singing, dancing chorus and principle actors in masks and elevated shoes, but it wouldn't have the same effect. The Greeks were as familiar with that convention as we are with drawing-room comedies or Shakespeare framed by a proscenium arch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nor does theatre have the same role in society. These days there's a debate about the purpose of theatre and whether it should be funded. There's always someone to say it's superfluous and that, if people want theatre, they should pay for it, however high the prices and however limited their means. The defenders of theatre talk of heritage and culture. They even act like economists and produce charts showing how much money theatres bring into their towns and cities. Meanwhile <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12892473">the government imposes cuts</a> which are made at one remove, leaving the lovers of theatre and custodians of culture to decide whose potential will be stifled and whose lives they will impoverish</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">None of that would have made sense in Athens, when Sophocles' play was first produced at the Great Dionysia. Performing plays and going to the theatre was a religious duty. Citizens attended to honour the god Dionysos. There was a fund to ensure that those who couldn't afford the tickets could still join the audience. And it was an honour to be the wealthy citizen who sponsored a playwright's work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">As I remember – it's a long time since I worked through those books – the Great Dionysia was also a theatrical competition. A small jury would vote for the best set of plays (three from each playwright and a satyr play). However not all the votes were counted, giving the god a chance to intervene. And the plays were all on familiar topics so the question was not what the story was but always how it was told – and how it honoured the god - in the vast Athenian auditorium.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">There was no way Steve Berkoff could offer that experience for an audience seeing a single play from the comfortable seats of the Playhouse. I did wonder whether he would try to bring the audience to a state of catharsis – the state of purification from emotions which <span style="font-style: italic;">King Oedipus</span> achieves, according to Aristotle. But I'm not convinced such a state is possible today. We see the world differently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">One of the main differences is the set of questions we can't help asking about Oedipus: what did he do wrong? what could he have done differently? does he deserve his punishment? But these aren't, I think, the questions Sophocles' original audience would have askes. (These aren't my own ideas. I'm following classical scholars. I don't have my books to hand but I believe I encountered the arguments in essays by E.R. Dodds and Erich Segal.) </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sophocles' first audience believed in curses and prophecies. They probably didn't think about it all the time but the question could even enter politics. When things were going badly, citizens would mutter that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcmaeonidae">there was a curse on the family of Pericles and Alcibiades</a> – not because they thought there must be but because the curse was a matter of historical fact. Electing a leader from a cursed family could cause problems for the city as a whole.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">The baby Oedipus was no more than three days old when the prophecy was pronounced – and it derived from a curse on his family. From the time of his birth it was inevitable that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The Christian idea of sin doesn't come into it because his fate was always inescapable. So is the punishment he and his family must endure for his actions – not because Oedipus has committed any conscious or willed wrong but because father-murder and incest are punished by divine law, even if they occur accidentally. What the play shows is not the way we should live but the way the power of the gods and prophecies work out. If it has a moral – and I think it does – it is simply that humans should believe in oracles and honour the gods.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I can see those views at a distance and understand logically that people held them but, like most people, I'm too wrapped up in a world that believes in personal guilt, human responsibility and the innocence of babies to feel what such views mean. Although people today often suffer for the actions of their rulers, few would find it just that a whole city should suffer from plague because its king has acted in the way the gods or Fate ordained. Because our understanding of the world has changed, ideas like this don't work in the theatre of today. Actors need characters they can inhabit and audiences need to sense a world that isn't too distant from their own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">In Steven Berkoff's production (<span style="font-style: italic;">after</span> Oedipus rather than an exact translation) it's surprising how little this difference matters and how much of Sophocles' play survives. Berkoff may have created an Oedipus who is something of a mobster or mafioso rather than a king but Stephen Merrells' arrogant boss fits the play – he is the sort of man who, unfortunately for him, is bound to attract the notice of the gods.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I admired Louise Jameson's Jocasta too. She seemed softer than I would have expected – sympathetic and believable. I don't shudder in the way the original audience would have done when she repeatedly denies the power of oracles – to the watching Athenians this was the kind of blasphemy that could threaten the city as well as the speaker. For a modern audience this is more understandable. She's a mother who has lost her child and her husband and whose love for Oedipus is, in consequence, tender and protective. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">What interested me above all was how the play itself would work. After all, telling a well-known story can mean there's little suspense. But just as children like to repeat the same suspense-filled journey, grown-ups can be interested in how a familiar story is told – and knowing the ending doesn't necessarily spoil the excitement.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I was surprised how well the tension builds. As members of the audience we observe the unfolding of events, alert to every little irony and clue. When Oedipus promises, with an oath as binding as an oracle, that he will punish the murderer of Laius with exile, we already know that he is promising to punish himself. And when we're told of his similarity to Laius, we know this is because he is Laius's son. Yet the inevitability enthralls the audience, <a href="http://davidcottis.blogspot.com/2011/03/terence-rattigan-and-slasher-film.html">as I suppose it enthralls the audience of a slasher-movie</a>. And I found that, whereas I would watch <span style="font-style: italic;">Hamlet</span>, which I've seen many times, for how the play is staged and acted, with <span style="font-style: italic;">Oedipus</span> most of my attentions was given to the way in which the story unfolds. I suppose in that respect the modern audience is very like the Greek audience, who would have seen a number of plays on the Oedipus theme.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">There were two points where I was less certain of the production, though this may suggest I'm something of a purist when it comes to Greek theatre. While at times the stylised mime of the chorus worked well – when performing clear emotions or recognizable actions, as, for instance, when a member of the ensemble suddenly became a horseback messenger – at other times I found the movements too vague in intent, though performed with complete conviction. But what a pleasure it was to see such a range of faces. Each chorus-member was both part of an ensemble and a human individual, whose face could at times be transformed into the fixed pain and astonishment of a Greek tragedian's mask.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">For me one of the highlights of Greek or French classical drama is the messenger's speech when an actor tells the story of horrors that happen offstage. I'll never forget Robert Edison in the Phedre of Racine, holding a full theatre still and on edge as his mellifluous voice painted a succession of cruel catastrophes. The horror that occurs in my imagination is always more terrible than any that can be shown on stage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I was unhappy, therefore, at the decision to show Jocasta's suicide and Oedipus's eye-gouging on stage. Even a simple dumb-show distracts from the power of language to shock. The conclusion did allow a moment that moved me deeply: when Oedipus gently embraced and kissed his dead mother-wife. But that gentleness somehow made the ending less bleak and powerful. The play moved me but not to the extent that I felt purged and purified by having seen it. Good as the production was, it offered me no catharsis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">But then, I didn't go to Nottingham Playhouse to worship Dionysos. I'm not sure I believe in him.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-49697464407719046092011-03-15T22:00:00.007+00:002011-03-15T23:41:02.308+00:00Against the dark times<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.leftlion.co.uk/images/1/image/shoestring150.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 115px;" src="http://www.leftlion.co.uk/images/1/image/shoestring150.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I have succumbed to temptation again.<br /><br />The Flying Goose café hosted one of its regular poetry readings and I returned with books by the three poets who read - <a href="http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/index.php/drawing-water-ann-atkinson">Ann Atkinson</a>, <a href="http://alan-baker.blogspot.com/">Alan Baker</a> and <a href="http://wayneburrows.wordpress.com/front/">Wayne Burrows</a> - as well as books by the Australian <a href="http://www.the-write-stuff.com.au/archives/vol-7/andrew_sant/index.html">Andrew Sant</a> and the Dutch poet and children's writer <a href="http://netherlands.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=6431">Toon Tellegen</a>.<br /><br />As I carried my shiny treasures home I reflected that these are not the kind of books you see in Waterstone's. They come from small presses - <a href="http://www.shoestringpress.co.uk/">Shoestring</a>, <a href="http://skysillpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/skysill-news.html">Skysill</a> and <a href="http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/index.php/smith-doorstop">Smith/Doorstop</a> - and are, like so many books from small presses, lovingly made. While mass market paperbacks can seem impersonal - made to fit in with a marketing officer's idea of what "brand" each book fits - small press books often show the personal care of the tiny teams that put them together. The smallest presses are run by people who make no money from them but work for pay elsewhere. The books small presses produce have a personality which seems to come from their close link with both publisher and author.<br /><br />These carefully-crafted books and the skilfully-managed poems within them cannot compensate for the horrors on the news. The optimistic and peaceful protests in the Middle East seem to be ending in bloody repression and torture by regimes to whom the British government has been - and in most cases still is - <a href="http://www.caat.org.uk/press/archive.php?url=20110217prs">selling military equipment</a>. The threats and massacres that silence dissent have been knocked off the front page by the pain of Japan for which I have no words.<br /><br />I can't look at the television for long - it's not just the sense of helplessness I experience that prevents me but the fear that if I look too long I'll be a mere voyeur - or worse, be hardened to ignore the devastation and anguish of others.<br /><br />But literature (and art and music and many other sources of beauty and pleasure) still have their place in the world. I was reminded of this by <a href="http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2011/03/14/to-my-readers-in-japan/">a short blog message to her Japanese readers from the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin</a>, who posted at the request of her translator and friend. Reading this - and the first comment that followed - made me feel reassured that there is nothing wrong in the refuge I seek in words, art and music. These have many roles. They deepen understanding and cause us to question. They also nourish and console, in part because of the care with which they are wrought.<br /><br />So I feel less bad about the joy I take in music on Radio 3, in sunshine, in books, in poetry. These good things exist in the same world in which humans and nature cause great damage. I'll campaign and write letters and even march against great wrongs. I'll try to work out how the world might be better and say what I think. I'll never have most of the answers but can try to contribute to debate and trains of thought - the more people share ideas and work together, the better hope for humanity. And I'll pay attention to things that are quite small and made with love.<br /><br />This Saturday Leicester hosts <a href="http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/">States of Independence II</a>, an independent press fair where small and independent publishers will display their wares and writers will read, talk and answer questions. It's a free, all-day event to which members of the public are welcome. It's a chance to celebrate words and the makers of books. However dark the world, these remain worthy of celebration.<br /></span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-56542178279756474662011-03-06T16:25:00.007+00:002011-03-06T20:36:41.091+00:00The problem with patrons<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://tiny.cc/1azje"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 203px; height: 277px;" src="http://tiny.cc/1azje" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I was almost impossibly tired when I arrived at the National Gallery. I'd had a good but busy week</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> and was still recovering from the amazing and absorbing experience of hearing </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore">Alan Moore</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, the Magus of Northampton, read aloud from his novel-in-process. [Note to anyone who hasn't come across Alan Moore: he is not only a remarkable writer but also one of the kindest and most courteous authors I have encountered. His reading held everyone in a huge lecture theatre spellbound for nearly an hour and he spent a further hour and a half speaking to everyone who had queued to have their books signed.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The day after Alan Moore, I was on my way to visit my parents, unsure I was sufficiently awake to take in </span><a style="font-family: georgia;">the Gossaert exhibition but knowing that I was unlikely to find another opportunity to see it. I also had my new Art Fund card with me - at last I've fulfilled my resolution to join, not just for the very welcome benefits but also because I have benefited from </a><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.artfund.org/">the Art Fund</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> through a lifetime of gallery visits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The route to the exhibition took me past many familiar paintings. On one side I spotted </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-the-virgin-suckling-the-infant-christ">a favourite Titian</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. Through the entrance to another room I thought I glimpsed </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/johannes-vermeer-a-young-woman-standing-at-a-virginal">a Vermeer</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. There was </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.backtoclassics.com/images/pics/bartolomeestebanmurillo/bartolomeestebanmurillo_self-portrait.jpg">Murillo</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, staring out of his frame like a competent marketer of his own paintings. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">In my susceptible state of mind, even Rubens seemed set to lure me from my path toward Gossaert. After all, </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-the-judgement-of-paris">Rubens</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> was not only free but there were comfortable padded benches from which his work could be admired. (I don't usually admire Rubens that much.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I forced myself to make the long trek to the basement of the Sainsbury wing where the Gossaerts were displayed. It was worth it. I realised that I had seen and admired individual paintings by Gossaert in the past but I'd never seen them in relation to one another before. I hadn't even registered the artist's name.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">There are six rooms in the exhibition. Gossaert's drawings and paintings are complemented by the work of artists who influenced him - a startling range from Northern European artists like Durer to the classical tradition of the Italian Renaissance. Although he's only mentioned in the timeline at the start of this exhibition, it's easy to see Holbein as the heir of this remarkable combination of influences.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">There's more to Gossaert than his portraits but these are the most obviously remarkable part of his work. The </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/gossaert-elderly-couple-NG1689-fm.jpg">people he paints</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> in portraits convince as human beings, simultaneously familiar and unknowable. This isn't just true of his secular portraits. There's a lavishly clad </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://arttattler.com/Images/Europe/England/London/National%20Gallery/Jan%20Gossaert/X6926-Mary-Magdalen.jpg">Mary Magdalen</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> with sly glance and dirty fingernails. But he also paints relationships, including erotic relationships. There are various works showing </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/gossaert-adam-eve-L14-fm.jpg">Adam and Eve</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, including some copies of lost originals, but all convey an astonishing blend of tenderness and desire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">The work that stunned me most - and nearly moved me to tears - was </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/gossart.jpg">a painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. It's a dark painting - even the red robes of the flying angel and the sleeping St John are barely lit. An elderly figure - St Peter, perhaps, lies on his back, asleep in the foreground. He has the pallor of exhaustion. But at the centre is the kneeling figure of a youthful Christ, beardless, confused and close to despair. It's not an attractive figure but terrifyingly recognizable. It's the expression of any child confronting an incomprehensible horror. It could be Libya or Afghanistan - or, too often, the U.K.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">At the end of the exhibition I couldn't give an account of Gossaert. I had no sense of the man who painted the pictures, except that he could see and reproduce with pencil on paper or paint on canvas. He had, it seems, some human understanding that didn't take a verbal form. And he had the luck to be taken up by a succession of patrons who took him within reach of the influences he needed to develop his art.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It was luck. That's the problem with patrons. While Gossaert had the right patrons for his development as an artist, he was limited to painting what they required: a portrait of a marriageable daughter, erotic works for a private collection, an altar piece, a sketch for a tomb. There is no way of knowing what Gossaert would have liked to paint. It's lucky that some of his patrons' requirements suited a style that we can now appreciate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It's luck too that has made me so familiar with the works in the National Gallery - the luck of living near a free art gallery and being encouraged by my parents to look inside. I was brought up to take advantage of free and cheap culture - to see culture as a good that should be shared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It was shocking, therefore, to read, the day after my visit to the National Gallery, of </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/06/tristram-hunt-entrance-fees-museums">a Labour MP calling for the introduction of admission charges to London's museums</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. He's not just any Labour MP. The </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_Hunt">Hon. Tristram Hunt</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">, son of a life peer and a historian with a proclaimed interest in radicalism and the working class, has written an introduction to a recent edition of </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php">Robert Tressell's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists</span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. In this book, Robert Tressell, through his main socialist characters, argues that </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.unionhistory.info/ragged/browse.php?Page=1373&Book=The+Ragged+Trousered+Philanthropists">culture is one of the necessities of life and should be available to all</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. I assume Tristram Hunt read the book before writing the introduction. It's a shame he didn't take in its arguments.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">It's fair to say that Tristram Hunt wants free admission to the museums in his own constituency of Stoke-on-Trent and, by extension, to other regional museums. I think they should be free too. But I don't think the country's great art galleries and museums should become the preserve of the wealthy. And I'm not interested in any party that can consider excluding the poor from culture, which is not just an education but a means to nourish imagination.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Had there been a charge for the National Gallery, I might have visited once or twice when I was growing up. I know I wouldn't have gone there often - and I wouldn't have learnt much about the history of art. I remember when Mrs Thatcher introduced admission charges for museums and galleries in the 1980s. I was poor then and on many occasions I was stuck outside, wishing I could afford to go in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">Now I've joined the Art Fund. I make donations because museums and galleries were free in my childhood and it's time to say thank-you. If there had been a charge, I wouldn't have bothered. I'd have known museums and galleries weren't for the likes of me.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-33567189084633731272011-03-04T11:52:00.004+00:002011-03-04T12:43:32.715+00:00Banishing the mouse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRdtmGUvIG6x0-UrNdAkRKRaZJrZkD9sHmNLRz2FEenZDmF6yZGsULygo2G1i44I4cGCSpztLVHnAI6EereWGF9YhLQ7vB4s_-T4m1Mhlfr08uFI5tCIKMDOr30iLJX4ofQjLDdZWK7Vnm/s1600/earlySeptember2010+065.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRdtmGUvIG6x0-UrNdAkRKRaZJrZkD9sHmNLRz2FEenZDmF6yZGsULygo2G1i44I4cGCSpztLVHnAI6EereWGF9YhLQ7vB4s_-T4m1Mhlfr08uFI5tCIKMDOr30iLJX4ofQjLDdZWK7Vnm/s200/earlySeptember2010+065.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580192481677427410" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm in danger of succumbing to a new addiction. In the past few weeks I don't just come downstairs desperate to ignite the gas beneath the espresso-maker. I also tune feverishly to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/">Radio 3</a>.<br /><br />It began with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_B%C3%BCchner">Buchner</a>. I read his plays years ago and have twice seen excellent productions of Berg's opera <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck"><span style="font-style: italic;">Wozzeck</span></a>. But I've never seen the original plays performed. So when, by chance, I noticed that <span style="font-style: italic;">Danton's Death</span> was being broadcast on Radio 3, I tuned to the station - and didn't tune away.<br /><br />In the past Radio 4 has been my default station. But the new and views have weighed on me, as has the immense wordiness of it all. I spend so much of my life with words that every so often, I need a break - and the music on Radio 3, at its best, provides that.<br /><br />But this week started unfortunately. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dukas">Paul Dukas</a> is composer of the week - and that should have been excellent, because I know so little about him or his work. It was a shame that, early on, the compiler of the programmes felt compelled to play his most famous work, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I'd have liked to consider it in relation to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice">the Goethe poem</a> on which it was based but I couldn't. I've seen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasia_%28film%29"><span style="font-style: italic;">Fantasia</span></a>. My mind was flooded with images of Mickey Mouse.<br /><br />It was a relief, therefore, to find a piece of music which I could experience simply as music - which didn't crowd my mind with words and images but existed in sound and space, on its own terms. <br /><br />I was at <a href="http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/cultural-exchanges/">De Montfort University's Cultural eXchanges festival</a> - an annual event that offers a range of cultural events, talks and debates - mostly for free - to locals in Leicester and the wider East Midlands. I've managed to attend a number of sessions but the one that stands out for me is the one that's hardest to describe and explain. Its resistance to description and explanation is one of the things I liked best about it.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/departments-staff/staff/simon-emmerson.jsp">Simon Emmerson</a>'s <span style="font-style: italic;">Memory Machine</span> is an installation. I didn't know what to expect. What I found was a darkened studio - there were coloured lights and bean-bags. We entered in small groups, advised to walk carefully andlet our eyes adjust. Some people chose to sit or lie on the floor. I remained standing and, from time to time, walked around. My interest was in the sound.<br /><br />When sound doesn't conform to the normal expectations of music - when it isn't in a definable strict form and doesn't include words - the only thing to do is to experience it and either succumb or not succumb. There were occasional sounds that seemed familiar - the fall of water, for instance - that conjured up ideas and past experiences. But other sounds I seemed to feel physically - in my body as much as through my ears. The sound came from different directions at once - the balance changed as I moved (as quietly as I could) across the studio. I felt at times excited - and at others intensely relaxed.<br /><br />I couldn't stay as long as I wished. Perhaps that is as well. If I'd stayed too long I might have felt I was floating. As it was I had found, briefly, something I craved - a way of being that was neither speech nor image.<br /><br />I suppose some people would dismiss such work as "avant-garde" or label it "difficult." I found it neither - but I know little about music. All I know is that sometimes, when I choose to experience a new work and am ready to accept what it has to offer, I discover new and unexpected sources of delight.<br /><br /><br />Note: The photograph is not associated with Simon Emmerson's composition. It was taken during a performance of Ligeti's Poeme Symphonique for a hundred metronomes at Covent Garden last year.<br /></span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4587126871623824329.post-19217411976297703072011-02-26T15:09:00.002+00:002011-02-26T15:28:46.604+00:00Freakshow frolics<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Freak_show_1941.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 280px; height: 212px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Freak_show_1941.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">I haven't quite given up watching TV but I'm nearly there.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />It wasn't something I planned to do. Given the right mood, I can enjoy an evening with the television. I don't just watch serious shows. I can sink into programmes that are merely pleasant and those that counterfeit an undemanding friendship between presenter and viewer. When real friends aren't on hand, fakery will do.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />These days, while I still sit down to enjoy the occasional film or music programme, I try to avoid much of what TV offers. That skews my criticism - I ought to know more about the subjects of my discomfort. But there's a limit on how long I can endure some of the latest trends. Sometimes that limit allows me to watch for two or three minutes. Occasionally I last nearly half an hour. Often I reach for the remote or the off switch in a matter of seconds.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />My discomfort began many years ago. The council estate on which I grew up was a popular haunt for TV documentary-makers, eager to present all of us who lived there as feral creatures, alienated from society by whatever the bogey-man of the moment was, from modern architecture to the innate stupidity and violence of the working classes. We gradually learned their methods. They would move in smilingly, ingratiating themselves with the locals, praising anyone who would embody the director's views in a speech direct to camera. </span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />There's always someone who wants to be TV. It's easy to find someone with a grievance – or genuine anguish – who can be treated as typical of a whole community. Teenage youths with a sense of bravado are prepared to declare their involvement in gangs, threats, mugging – anything the pretty young interviewer wants – because it's better to gain her smiling approval than to admit the uncomfortable truth that they're only 12 or 14 and their mum won't let them out after 7.00 p.m.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Television lies. It doesn't often tell direct untruths but it lies by selection and omission, by choosing a single person, a small group or a set of episodes to stand for a class, a racial group or a community. This is not governed by the laws of libel – and TV companies usually know how to stay within the guidelines laid down by those who control broadcast media.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Besides, TV offers what the audience and the tabloids demand. It feeds into prejudice, hatred and contempt. I can't talk with authority about <span style="font-style: italic;">My Big Fat Gipsy Wedding</span> because I knew from the advance publicity that the programmes would drip with contempt for the people they persuaded to take part – and that it would add to the daily contempt and hatred which too many members of the Romany and Traveller communities have to endure. I didn't watch. After transmission I listened to anguished voices of a number of intelligent travelling people and their descendants. I noted that they didn't even sound angry – the misrepresentation and the attitudes that programme-makers encouraged in the viewers were too familiar to cause anything but <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/this-portrayal-of-traveller-life-shows-huge-ignorance-ndash-but-not-from-the-gypsies-2215064.html">resignation to pain</a>.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Freakshows used to be a staple of travelling fairs but they're dying out now. I've mixed feelings about them. No-one wants to be defined as a freak but the people who toured the country, exhibiting themselves in booths, seem to have found some kind of camaraderie as well as a regular income. Some – like the fat man <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lambert">Daniel Lambert</a> – achieved respect for their courtesy and intelligence. It's hard to think that the freakshows on television offer such an opportunity.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />TV freakshows want two things: outlandishness and suffering. The ideal freak-star should have an agonising past with a few ex-friends or embarrassing relations who are prepared to sell their stories to the tabloids. It helps if the freak-star is working-class and lacks the means or confidence to question or challenge the freakshow system. Then the freak-star should have outbursts of unacceptable behaviour – the sort of outbursts any of us might have if watched round the clock and required to perform for cameras that follow every move. The more polite freak-star will recognize the outburst as misconduct, subside into tears and apologise. The badly-behaved freak-star defends her or his conduct and can be held up for further contempt.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Any freak-star who attacks the system is blamed. Good, pliant, commendable freak-stars talks of their “journey” and praise the system. The reward is more TV exposure. Occasionally the freak-star achieves financial gain, though this is usually short-term.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Sometimes a freak-star tries to trick the system – or is incited to trick the system – by falsely representing a past as tragic or impoverished. You can't become a freak-star without overcoming illness, grief, abuse or addiction. You have to make your exploiters cry for the cameras – so long as they don't smudge their carefully-applied make-up. </span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />But if you lie to elicit those much-needed tears, the tabloids and public will turn on you. They want authentic suffering, a real journey – and you mustn't deceive them. If you do, they'll turn away from you at once. There's always another outlandish figure or group to hate, despise or pity. The trickster who tries to exploit the freakshow system is condemned to isolation. The TV companies and their bosses rake in their millions. <br /><br />And the audience stays smug in a contempt which provides warm insulation from most of the pain in the world.</span>Kathzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13008903556114337963noreply@blogger.com3