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Dec. 1st, 2023
Partially Crushed
Dec. 1st, 2023 09:19 am I had one dream in which things kept getting crushed. First my camera because I'd sat on it, next the corner of a tool box because I'd sat on that too. Then some galumphing idiot threw his son accross the room right into Ailz- who was sitting quietly on the settee, minding her own business- and broke her glasses. He was big and stupid and grudging and when I told him to apologize he did so in a passive agressive manner. "Never mind," said Ailz, "we don't really need glasses any more."
In another dream my mother absconded from the wheel of the car she was driving, leaving me to lean across from the passenger seat and wrestle it to a standstill. I caught up with her in a shop where she was having a swim in a swimming pool that was somehow suspended over our heads. She waved and splashed water down at us. The shopman was someone I knew I knew from somewhere else. It turned out he'd been a travel agent in Tonbridge. I asked him how he was liking the move and he burst into tears and showed me the four engagement rings he was wearing- implying he'd been dumped by four different women in succession. "I know it's sentimental of me." he said. "but it is Christmas..."
I'm feeling enfeebled after being ill (partially crushed like the objects in the first dream) and don't want to be dealing with anything modern and complicated and so I'm reading Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Stories from the 1890s. I love how everyone in fairy stories has only the most basic emotions and motivations and never suffers from scruples or doubt or guilt. Take the king in Tom-Tit-Tot who locks his wife in a tower and tells her to complete a task she can't possibly accomplish without supernatural help- or else he'll chop her head off- and how everyone is quite matter of fact about it. Who needs psychologial realism? Who needs moral complexity? Perhaps people were that much simpler back in the day. It would help explain Henry VIII....
The Fairy Stories are illustrated by John D Batten who was disiciple of Ruskin, an arts and crafts man and a painter in tempera. Here, sourced from wikipedia, is his painting of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
So very unDisney, innit!
(This was posted on LJ on the 29th and for some reason never cross-posted to DW. Well, better late than never. Besides there's nothing date sensitive about it)
In another dream my mother absconded from the wheel of the car she was driving, leaving me to lean across from the passenger seat and wrestle it to a standstill. I caught up with her in a shop where she was having a swim in a swimming pool that was somehow suspended over our heads. She waved and splashed water down at us. The shopman was someone I knew I knew from somewhere else. It turned out he'd been a travel agent in Tonbridge. I asked him how he was liking the move and he burst into tears and showed me the four engagement rings he was wearing- implying he'd been dumped by four different women in succession. "I know it's sentimental of me." he said. "but it is Christmas..."
I'm feeling enfeebled after being ill (partially crushed like the objects in the first dream) and don't want to be dealing with anything modern and complicated and so I'm reading Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Stories from the 1890s. I love how everyone in fairy stories has only the most basic emotions and motivations and never suffers from scruples or doubt or guilt. Take the king in Tom-Tit-Tot who locks his wife in a tower and tells her to complete a task she can't possibly accomplish without supernatural help- or else he'll chop her head off- and how everyone is quite matter of fact about it. Who needs psychologial realism? Who needs moral complexity? Perhaps people were that much simpler back in the day. It would help explain Henry VIII....
The Fairy Stories are illustrated by John D Batten who was disiciple of Ruskin, an arts and crafts man and a painter in tempera. Here, sourced from wikipedia, is his painting of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
So very unDisney, innit!
(This was posted on LJ on the 29th and for some reason never cross-posted to DW. Well, better late than never. Besides there's nothing date sensitive about it)
Christmas Standards
Dec. 1st, 2023 12:11 pm Our daughter in law has sent us a video tour of her Christmas decorations, accompanied by some guy with a voice like sherry trifle singing "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." Being tone deaf I can't tell whether it's Perry Como or Michael Buble (or someone in between) but whoever it is he's not wrong. Should I hoik the Christmas tree out from under the spare room bed? Hmmm. It's vey dusty under there. Maybe tomorrow....
Fairytale of New York has just acquired a new poignancy.
If it's Christmas it must be Dr Who. I stopped watching during the Chibnall era because his lacklustre writing drained the magic out of the show, but I still follow at a distance. I winced at the Disney takeover because Disney cheapens everything it gets its greedy little mitts on. As for the current brou-ha-ha over some glancing references to gender politics in the latest episode and Davros getting turfed out of his wheelchair because it's wrong to equate evil with disability, my own position is wokeness rules, only lets not be preachy about it...
Fairytale of New York has just acquired a new poignancy.
If it's Christmas it must be Dr Who. I stopped watching during the Chibnall era because his lacklustre writing drained the magic out of the show, but I still follow at a distance. I winced at the Disney takeover because Disney cheapens everything it gets its greedy little mitts on. As for the current brou-ha-ha over some glancing references to gender politics in the latest episode and Davros getting turfed out of his wheelchair because it's wrong to equate evil with disability, my own position is wokeness rules, only lets not be preachy about it...