The Trains Were Cancelled

[poliphilo]

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.

Comments

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Apropos nothing much, some of my favourite novels are, (in no particular order):

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I love Dickens. I would add Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend to your list of favourites.

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.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

I really liked "Our Mutual Friend" too.Some of the writing seems so contemporary with all those tortured psyches. I wondered how it could all be pulled together but, fortunately, in Dickens there is always some little ill-used man to pull a rabbit out of a hat and save the day.

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A Canterbury Tale is my favourite Powell. It comes close to being my favourite film of all time. Maybe it's because I know Canterbury so well.

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.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Not only Divine Deborah Kerr, but Vivacious Vivien Leigh! I know name dropping is a deadly sin but wotthehell...eat your heart out.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I just want to know more.

Might you consider posting about them?

[currawong.livejournal.com]

PS: The mesmerising performance of Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth in "Black Narcissus." has granted her some sort of immortality. Perhaps too individual looking and intense for mainstream stardom. She was unforgettable in that role. The scene where she puts on her lipstick is more erotically charged than any in your face American sex-fick could ever hope to be.

...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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes that film is perfectly cast.

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.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

The majority of Australians did, and still do, want a republic but our crapulous little PM, a genius at playing on fear and greed and the lowest common denominator, presented an arch-conservative model as the only option in the referendum...an option acceptable to precisely no-one.

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

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've just been reading an article by Tony Benn about the disjunction between the politicians in Westminster and the electorate.

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.