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The Trains Were Cancelled
We turned up at the station to find all the trains had been cancelled. Instead they were laying on coaches. Our driver complained that he hadn't been issued with a map.
We were supposed to stop at various stations on the way, but we sailed past most of them because the driver didn't know they were there. "I'm not worrying about it," he said.
The baby sitting behind us was sick.
The tutorial was mainly about Great Expectations. We were discussing whether Dickens is a realist or not. In a literary context "realist" means something like "unsensational", "uneventful", "unexciting"- and what that has to do with Reality I really don't know.
We had lunch at the Indian restaurant where we are now greeted as regulars. I had a vegetable Bhuna, Ailz had a huge plate of meat- half of which she wrapped in a napkin and put away in her handbag. "See you next week," said the owner as we were leaving- thus creating a sense of obligation.
The driver for the return trip (also map-less) managed to find all but one of the stations.
We walked home from Oldham Mumps. There was pigeon lying in the road. A car swung round the corner and ran it over. I tried not to look. "Oh well," said Ailz, "at least it died with a full crop."
At the bottom of our road there's a house called Arnhem. I've always imagined it as the home of an old soldier with fond memories of World War II, but this afternoon, as we passed, we noticed it had a huge Irish tricolor draped from the bedroom window.
So I guess the old soldier has gone.
We were supposed to stop at various stations on the way, but we sailed past most of them because the driver didn't know they were there. "I'm not worrying about it," he said.
The baby sitting behind us was sick.
The tutorial was mainly about Great Expectations. We were discussing whether Dickens is a realist or not. In a literary context "realist" means something like "unsensational", "uneventful", "unexciting"- and what that has to do with Reality I really don't know.
We had lunch at the Indian restaurant where we are now greeted as regulars. I had a vegetable Bhuna, Ailz had a huge plate of meat- half of which she wrapped in a napkin and put away in her handbag. "See you next week," said the owner as we were leaving- thus creating a sense of obligation.
The driver for the return trip (also map-less) managed to find all but one of the stations.
We walked home from Oldham Mumps. There was pigeon lying in the road. A car swung round the corner and ran it over. I tried not to look. "Oh well," said Ailz, "at least it died with a full crop."
At the bottom of our road there's a house called Arnhem. I've always imagined it as the home of an old soldier with fond memories of World War II, but this afternoon, as we passed, we noticed it had a huge Irish tricolor draped from the bedroom window.
So I guess the old soldier has gone.
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I have never once been in an authentic Indian restaurant--how many are there, really, in East Tennessee?
(I like curry, too.)
"I'm not worrying about it." How funny to imagine all the people at those stops shaking their fists at him as you "sailed past"!
Does this mean Frankenstein can be laid to rest until the Final?
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Hurry on across the Atlantic and we'll rectify that toute suite.
Ailz's next paper is a comparison of Frankenstein and Great Expectations, so we're not finished with Mary Shelley quite yet.
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We just got back from a lovely spring walk on a warm 70ish afternoon and I went Holga-ing. I got some "art shots" of the sun through clouds with greening willow boughs in the margin. We shall see...
While there, I saw (and took 2 shots, which accidentally double exposed because I forgot to roll forward the film) a family flying March kites in the park! The little girl's kite took a nosedive and she promptly sat down on the grass and began to sob. I wanted to take her photo, but felt I couldn't intrude on the family that much. (I am no Diane Arbus, and probably a good thing, too.)
I promise to take you up on your authentic Indian meal, and I would LOVE to go there by train!
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We've had very cold weather. I can't get warm. I feel chilled to the bone, or "fair clemmed" as they say in these parts.
I'm very shy about taking pictures with strangers in. I'm afraid they'll come up to me and ask for their souls back. I prefer to wait till my field of vision is empty.
And yet I love photographers like Cartier Bresson who went round snapping people promiscuously.
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LOL.
I had two shots left, and just ahead of me on the path were a very old man and woman. He was wearing a straw hat and was holding her hand. They were both rather feeble and were walking slowly along.
I popped the lens cap off and Holga'd them. I hope they wouldn't mind.
The Holga shutter is alarmingly loud.
I do hope it turns out. They were very touching.
There aren't many nuances on the Holga, so it is up to fate whether or not it was a good shot.
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I need a suitable subject. I want broken columns, I want ivy-covered walls....
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Highgate.
I have a book of black and white photographs from Highgate.
My brother goes there every time he is in London.
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Highgate cemetery is in the borough of Highgate.
My father, as it happens, went to Highgate School. It's some sort of minor public (that is to say, private) school.
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And I would love to see the results.
Broken columns and ivy galore.
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We have big Victorian cemeteries in the north of England, but nothing I know of that's nearly so grand.
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Jackie - going to see Tony and Ailz would be great fun. YOu can, though, get a great Indian meal in...Pittsburg. Or here.
Or Toronto.
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I'll give it a try there first.
So you went Holga-ing too?
Yes, I forget from time to time to forward the clunky thing.
And the flash battery fell out, so it was rattling around in the bottom of the plastic case!
I think I got about 8 shots, too...
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So is Ailz.
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Come for Thanksgiving, and we will give you a meal from history!
Sweet potatoes, corn, cranberries.
Or forget eating and we will go instead into the Great Smoky Mountains.
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And I think we will. Yes, we will.
But first, Ailz, like you, will have to conquer her fear of flying.
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Why not? You can see the South in all its glory.
We live near the Smokies and--well, a wonderful fresh water aquarium, and the Museum of Appalachia.
You could meet my mother and see the Norris Commons...
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To call Dicken's a realist seems a bit narrow to me. Yes, a realist, but also black comedian, master of the grotesque, lyric scene-painter, moralist, etc, etc...and for "Great Expectations" and "Bleak House" one of the two or three greatest novelists in the language.I love those books.
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Great Expectations
Bleak House
Lolita
Pale Fire
Gulliver's Travels
Ulysses
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony...(I don't know if this is a novel, but I don't know what else to call it. It's brilliant.)
The L.A. novels of James Ellroy, which become increasingly inventive with language as they progress.
The Dalziel & Pascoe detective stories...especially "Pictures of Perfection" and "On Beulah Height"
The Satanic Verses
Tom Jones
Grendel
Some of the greats, like Lawrence, George Eliot and Conrad and much of Henry James, leave me cold.
re; "The Satanic Verses".
Fundamentalisms of all kinds are the plagues that have rotted the foundations of civilization throughout history...whether in Madrid, Mecca, Salem or Salt Lake City. It is the duty of anyone with a mind to fight them with all their might, even if the battle seems to be a losing one.That a man of genius dared to think critically about the religion he was born into goaded the fundamentalist bullies to a fury because they know that independent thought will eventually bring their dreams of a worlwide theocracy to nought....and speaking as one with an inherent tendency to evil, that breathless bastard in Rome can expire along with his curia anytime he likes.
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I don't read novels with the enthusiasm I once did. I used to be mad keen on the Big Russians, but I can't see myself ever sitting down and re-reading War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov.
Chekhov maybe...
Somewhere along the line I transferred my affections from novels to the cinema.
Bergman
Kurosawa
Fellini
Welles
Hitchcock
Powell
I fully agree with what you say about the Satanic Verses. Fundamentalism of every stripe is the Enemy.
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Strangely, I have started "Little Dorrit" twice and wasn't able to settle into it. I know its reputation....maybe the timing was wrong. The long and reputedly excellent film adaptation was not released here...too good for for the ex-colonials I presume.
Powell is an interesting choice. He directed many of my favourite British films...and a candidate for one of the worst ever films.
I love "Peeping Tom"; "Black Narcissus"; "...Colonel Blimp";and "A matter of Life and Death" and "The Thief of Baghdad" I have seen "The Red Shoes" once or twice too often.
I enjoyed his early films"I Know Where I'm Going" (Wendy Hiller...what a woman!...eat your heart out J-Lo!) and "A Canterbury Tale"...( a very odd little film).
He also directed the execrable "They're A Weird Mob", a ghastly piece of stereotyping as gauche and insulting as anything perpetrated by any condescending Pom, anywhere.
He was, by all accounts, hell to work for...and I've heard it straight from the horse's mouth, if I can call Deborah Kerr a horse.
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That scene where the camera tracks down a bombed-out street and all the premises have notices saying the business has moved to such and such a place- it just makes me so proud.
Black Narcissus runs it close.
You've spoken with Deborah Kerr? Oh my!
Little Dorrit really got under my skin. I read it at 17 and fell in love with Amy Dorrit (weird, I know.) The film is good- and furnished Alec Guinness with a lovely swan-song.
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Might you consider posting about them?
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...and wasn't David Farrar cute in shorts?...come on, pretend you're gay for a minute or two.
...and Sabu was far too exquisitely beautiful to be sexy. He had quite a career for a mahout from the jungle.
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It's odd that Byron and Farrar didn't go further.
What I particualrly marvel at is how Powell and his crew created that Himalayan light without ever going out of the studio.
There's a rarely seen Powell called Gone To Earth (a vanity project for Jennifer Jones- which Powell later disowned) in which Farrar plays a lecherous, villainous Squire- right out of Victorian melodrama- and he's pretty good in that as well.
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When the torpid, sport obsessed, philistine Australian public finally gets sick of him, we may have a chance.Howard has never been seen at an opera, a gallery, a play or a concert. He was brought up the narrowest of Methodists but converted to low-church Anglicanism for his domineering wife, Jeanette.He is at present courting the happy-clappy, prosperity theology spouting, Americanised Hillsong Church Community...thus introducing the religious-right as a force in Oz politics.
The fact that big art shows and libraries have repeatedly been proven to be more popular than cricket or football here, has never been able to influence either our politicians or our trashy, witless media.
The Deborah/ Vivien sories can be found in an earlier entry on my blog about brushes with fame
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Politicians accuse the electorate of apathy. In fact people are simply cheesed off with the way politics is played by the power elite. People feel passionately about all sorts of grass-roots political issues, but, when- as with the war on Iraq- they take to the streets to make their views known- they find they are simply ignored.
Benn says that public opinion is now way to the left of our Labour government and this gives him hope.
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