RosieBell

Yearning for Summer

I was out to celebrate Burns Night at the Captain's Bar, where various performers were doing songs and poems.  Neil Thomson, who was hosting, did a relaxed rendition of Now Westlin' Winds, (Song Composed in August)- a lovely evocation of late summer.  Here it is sung by Damian Nixon, using Dick Gaughan's arrangement. 

 

Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns
Bring autumn's pleasant weather
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather
Now waving grain, wild o'er the plain
Delights the weary farmer
And the moon shines bright as I rove at night
To muse upon my charmer

The partridge loves the fruitful fells
The plover loves the mountain
The woodcock haunts the lonely dells
The soaring hern the fountain
Through lofty groves the cushat roves
The path of man to shun it
The hazel bush o'erhangs the thrush
The spreading thorn the linnet

Thus every kind their pleasure find
The savage and the tender
Some social join and leagues combine
Some solitary wander
Avaunt! Away! the cruel sway,
Tyrannic man's dominion
The sportsman's joy, the murdering cry
The fluttering, gory pinion...[more]

Royal Coup de Grace

Broadcasting in Britain is controlled by the royal family - and they will force any television channel that criticises them to close down, Press TV revealed today.

Ofcom has revoked Press TV's licence, claiming that Press TV had not paid the £100,000 fine that had been demanded after it had broken regulations by broadcasting a "forced" confession from a journalist, and also for being controlled from Teheran rather than London. [more here]

Press TV's scoop:-

Ofcom is said to have close ties to Britain's royal family. And the cables released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks show that Press TV's programs on the royal wedding, which many in the country described as extravagant, angered the royal family.

The CEO of Press TV, Mohammad Sarafaz, is not daunted:-

Sarafraz stressed that Ofcom's bid to revoke Press TV's license will not prevent the channel from broadcasting the truth about the British Royal regime.

“It is futile to attempt to conceal the truth from the people of Britain, and those that want to hear our alternative voice will find a way despite your efforts,” he said.

In these internet streaming days, Mr Sarafaz is no doubt right. Those who are looking for the alternative voice on eg the "Holocaust", will not be thwarted. The fair-minded analysis of the brilliant literary stylist, George Galloway, will still be available. Lauren Booth will still speak her truths to power about Zionist control of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. and their persecution of the popular intellectual, Gilad Atzmon.

Hireling lackey of the British government and Welsh corgi poodle John Humphrys "covered" the story of Press TV on the BBC's Today programme this morning (second item from the end). He interviewed Yvonne Ridley, an employee. So afraid was he of any more revelations about the British royal family's stranglehold on broadcasting in Britain he did not once ask her to enlarge on this exclusive story of Press TV's.

Ms Ridley announced that Press TV could not pay the fine as there are sanctions on Iran's banks. As for her salary, barrels of unrefined oil are collected by her, Mr Galloway and Ms Booth at London's docklands where they hawk them in the street.

All right minded people should demand further investigation into the Royal family's death grip on the media of this country.

We know that Prince Charles is in the habit of interfering in political affairs - normally on matters of architecture, the environment and quack medicine. However, if he has been leaning on media outlets who question paying for Royal extravaganzas, that is the end of The Guardian, the New Statesman and letter writers to The Times.

Here's something that Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate should address:-

Listen matey,
To keep your job,
Act like mater
And shut your gob

Note from Ofcom:- Guards, take her away. (Clang of dropping portcullis).

The Celluloid Lady

When Margaret Thatcher saw the film The Iron Lady she wept for the painful memories of her time in office, and not for her dead husband, and her own confused old age, which are what the film deals with to the nth degree. Thatcher's being was that of an ideological politician and we saw her instead as a wife to the funny, supportive Dennis (especially endearing when young and played by Harry Lloyd with his charming smile).  It was as if they had done a film about, say,  Muhammad Ali and after a quick run through his rise to fame and a lot on his marriage and Parkinson's disease had touched briefly on his boxing matches.  There was another twentieth century British prime minister who had a vision of how Britain should be reformed, and whose policies changed Britain considerably.  He was also happily married - but if anyone was inspired (unlikely I know) to make a film about Clement Attlee, there would be ten minutes or so of his relationship with his devoted wife. 

The film became a love story - an Everyman's love story, for those of the population who grow old together, until one dies and the other is left to decay alone.  As a love story and a picture of the body and mind fading and falling, it was mildly touching.  Olivia Coleman was brilliant as Carol Thatcher.  With one slight expression she can look concerned and hurt - the look of the dutiful daughter always passed over for the negligent brother in her mother's affections.

Everyone agrees that Meryl Streep was stupendous in the role of the former PM and she will be buckling under the weight of the awards she will receive for her performance.  She did do a great feat of physical acting as Thatcher the shuffling aged lady and of mimicry as the politician in her prime ministership but I didn't feel I was getting a sense of what Thatcher was like.  What drove Thatcher was really portrayed by Alexandra Roach as the young Thatcher, the gawky grocer's daughter, earnest and single-minded, with notions that the economy is a chain of self-reliant families and small businesses.  (The shop-keeping self-employed class loathe the striking wage earning class).  How she enacted these ideas in policies was hardly touched on. 

That may be something that this kind of biopic drama can't deal with unless it is done totally differently i.e. leave out a half hour or so of Thatcher meandering round her flat sorting through Dennis's things and have some scenes with people who weren't Thatcher, or Dennis, or cabinet ministers - people who were in fact affected by her policies, not the angry rioters and bombers who appeared as a back drop.   That though would have been making quite a different kind of film, without the chance of a great central performance.  Biopics do this - everything becomes a set of planets orbiting the sun of the subject. 

The portrayal of the woman in a man's world part was pedestrian.  It was much better fun in The Long Walk to Finchley. For a tighter and more dramatic film on Thatcher I would go for the BBC's Margaret.   Lindsay Duncan played Thatcher, not doing a tour de force of acting dazzle but perfectly fine as the regal lady whose arrogance brought her down.  Margaret, dealing only with Thatcher's ousting,  had a dramatic tension and shape.  The effect was of a killer whale barrelling through the sea unexpectedly being mauled by Tory sharks and stung by Tory jellyfish until she sank.    The Iron Lady is a shapeless film although it's not dull or unwatchable.  Anyone interested in recent British history, or who lived through the eighties, can be curious about how certain events and people are portrayed.

Meryl Streep said she was a little awed at performing with a gang of Britain's character actors, who appeared as the politicians of Thatcher's day.  It was enjoyable seeing who would play which cabinet minister or leader of the opposition.  When Richard E Grant appeared as Michael Heseltine I, and no doubt 90% of the audience, immediately thought Withnail and I.  Heseltine always seemed a little louche and Richard E Grant was a pleasure as a long-legged high foreheaded take of him. 

In this modern world film actors are far more highly regarded than politicians. The reaction of the British media is to be overwhelmed at the honour that one of Hollywood's queens plays our former Prime Minister. 

Friends and Enemies

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...

Those of course are the last lines of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting.  The dead soldier tells what his life could have been to the soldier who killed him.  

This poem was brought to my mind by an item on the Today programme the other morning. 

During the Falklands War an anti-aircraft gunner shot down a fighter jet and thought he had killed the pilot.  He then found out that the pilot had survived.  The gunner went to meet him, now a retired Commodore and living in a village in Argentina.  The Commodore had no hard feelings and said:-"Each one of us had to fulfil our duties". 

It's common enough for soldiers to return from wars with admiration for the enemy's fighting prowess and bravery.   Soldiers, sailors and airmen who once tried to kill each other can meet, shake hands and say that was what they had to do. However, the torture victim cannot greet his torturer with such easy feelings.  He may agree to forgive, after something like a truth and reconciliation process, but this is not the meeting of equals.  Nor would the women of Berlin in 1945 be ready to say, it was your duty, to the Soviet soldiers who raped them.  The aftermath for them was horror and shame and suicide.  You can be shot at by an impersonal force, but not deliberately humiliated, tortured or raped.  You are in some kind of relationship between human beings that has gone grossly awry. 

So further to Robert Fisk's reaction to the Marines urinating over the dead Taliban,:-

If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.

For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.

There is a reasonable aspect to this argument. If atrocities are run of the mill, that should be known.  The public like to think that there can be such a thing as a clean war, not many hurt, everything sorted out.  With any war in the offing they should realise that it's not just the killing and maiming, destruction and mayhem but the chance for humiliation, rape and torture.  Also, remember that humiliation, rape and torture are a great pleasure for some men and that the taste for them can spread among a platoon or a regiment. Giving a man a gun is giving him brief and petty power - and some will become Caligulas and Uday Husseins.   So if bringing to mind the horrors of war can prevent more wars, all to the good. 

However I don't think "war is the total failure of the human spirit "- Auschwitz is, and Hiroshima is, and rape and torture and atrocities are.  But war?  All wars, for whatever reason?  

"For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses."

It's the Marine Corps' job to kill these men.  You can call it a terrible job, you can say they're involved in an unjust war, but that is how wars are conducted.  You kill or disable the enemy.  You don't inflict gratuitous humiliation on him, even after death.  Wars happen, and they are horrible.  It is better though that there are things like Geneva conventions and political leaders who are embarrassed when they are conducted with unnecessary cruelty (see Normblog on this). 

Pacifists say "war is murder".  But that is not generally accepted.   We don't do the dulce et decorum thing any more - Wilfred Owen was one who taught us not to - but we acknowledge the necessity of war in certain circumstances, carried out for certain ends.  Those fighting it will at their best regard those they are fighting against as caught up in something larger - duty perhaps, or professional pride or patriotism.  So they can meet afterwards without personal animosity.    They can say, I am the enemy you killed, or tried to kill, my friend. (Wilfred Owen was a soldier as well as a poet.)

But you can't say:-

I am the enemy you raped, my friend
I am the enemy you tortured, my friend
I am the enemy you pissed over, my friend

7 February 1812-2012 and beyond

I am not a huge Dickens fan. Of the great Victorian novelists I prefer Eliot, Thackeray, the Brontes and Trollope over Dickens. Philip Larkin said it for me:-

I should like to say something about this 'irrepressible vitality', this 'throwing a fresh handful of characters on the fire when it burns low', in fact the whole Dickens method - it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken. If he were a person I should say 'You don't have to entertain me, you know. I'm quite happy just sitting here". This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives -seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader. How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares. (1)

That crammed, teeming quality of Dickens - the never letting up - along with the melodrama, sentimentality and the coy saint heroines - puts me off reading him. I am happy though that there are so many adaptations. Dickens was a great creator of character and scenes, and his wardrobe of carnival masks makes for a fine Victorian resource, like the converted warehouses and rescued railway stations in British cities.(2)

Like most people I was really taken with the Great Expectations adaptation, especially the first two episodes, which were atmospheric and intense. The third episode was a bit rushed. There were so many plot pieces to bang into place and some, eg that Mr Jaggers' housekeeper was Estella's mother, were skimped. All in all though, I found it engrossing, but then I don't have strong feelings about the book, unlike Howard Jacobson, who complains that they missed out the comedy (which is half of Dickens) and that the whole thing was a travesty of Jacobson's own interpretation. 

It is always risky to watch the potential pig's ear that someone is going to make out of your silkiest purse.  I remember being furious at a scrappy Daniel Deronda a few years back. If you are not so engaged, though, arguing about how characters and scenes are presented is part of the fun. So I enjoyed Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham (3) and her appearance with the props of an emo video - bridal veil and the wicked fairy quality - a version of Kate Bush jilted. That made her house a place of bad magic, and Pip's love for Estella an enchantment like that of the palely loitering knight in the thrall of the Belle Dame Sans Merci.  I agree with those who said Estella wasn't beautiful enough.  You can get away with a moderately nice-looking Elizabeth Bennet, say, or Esther Summerson in Bleak House, as they are women of character and their words and actions make them attractive, but Estella has nothing to say except what a cold-hearted screwed up bitch she is, the kind of a woman a smart guy would not touch with a bargepole. She should be as lovely as a star, able to stagger men, and she wasn't.

Ray Winstone as Magwitch the convict. - no, I don't think he was a ham. If you were going to have anyone menace you in lonely marshes, he'd be the man, and in his later scenes he was given some humour and dignity, which he did well with his little eyes and ugly face. In a work though where the theme is snobbery, they missed the chance that he was in his own way a snob. It's in this speech in the book:-

And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look'ee here, to know in secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor ever you'll be!' When one of 'em says to another, 'He was a convict, a few year ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says to myself, 'If I ain't a gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm the owner of such.

Also, they didn't get round the howler that Magwitch could swim from the prison ship to shore with a hefty piece of iron chain around his ankle. Dickens' contemporaries bathed rather than swam, so they overlooked the impossibility at the time, but there's no excuse now.(4)

My favourite performance was that of Harry Lloyd as Herbert Pocket, with his sweet, light-hearted decency.

Another BBC shot at Dickens is Radio 4's Classic Serial production of Martin Chuzzlewit. It's called The Mumbai Chuzzlewits and set in modern day Mumbai amongst a Catholic community. It works well. The extended family plottiing against each other makes sense in that setting, as does the theme of hypocrisy versus true virtue among church going Christians. The Pecksniff figure (called "Pinto") (Rajit Kapur) hits the right note, with his little deprecatory laugh, that makes you want to strangle him. The old patriarch, Martin Chuzzlewit (Roshan Seth) is a delight, complaining about being served peasant food (dahl instead of gruel or slops), and angry at his own unjust autocracy which has brought him such sadness. Young Martin (called "Mickey") goes to Dubai rather than America as in the original and there meets misery among the immigrant workers.

One slight problem - in Victorian novels plots depended on miscommunicating (suppressed letters) and lack of information (missing heirs), so in this version they had to cobble up a bit of unlikelihood about why Mickey and his sweetheart Mary cannot email or text each other.

The first episode was preceded by an essay on the place of Dickens in India.  In order to make an Anglophonic and Anglophiliac civil servant class, education policy under the Raj included much English literature. It was taught in Indian universities before it got onto the Oxbridge syllabus. Dickens is still taught, still well known there, and his hypocrites, arrogant rich merchants and half-starved underclass in crowded cities are recognisable as part of India.

Another piece of Dickens was Amando Ianucci's Tale of Charles Dickens. Whatever the thesis - damning the literary critics (why? - there have been brilliant ones) - it did the trick for me by having various people read out chunks of Dickens, and enjoying his inventive imagery. I really was persuaded that I would re-read him some time.

(1) Letters to Monica

(2) The late Christopher Hitchens had evidently not read Dickens recently and slyly makes a virtue out of being a little uninformed about his subject. "You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time."

(3) Gillian Anderson in very good at embittered Victorian women, whether it's Lady Dedlock in Bleak House or Mrs Castaway in The Crimson Petal and the Rose. She suggests secret or semi-secret suffering that is deep and unalterable. 

(4) I filched this from John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre be Happy: More Puzzles from Classic Fiction. Sutherland also points out that although Magwitch as a Lifer returning from the Australian penal colony was supposed to have commited a capital offence, Pip and his friends aren't prosecuted for aiding and abetting the offender.

Update:- the last episode of The Mumbai Chuzzlewits was disappointing, full of Hollywood cliches.  "You must fight for her."  "You're coming if I have to make you."  "Why don't you get out of our lives?"  The best bit was old Martin Chuzzlewit snarling at his sardonic doctor, and even that is an old trope, the crusty elderly gentleman. 

On Motives

"It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one."

Christopher Hitchens from his essay Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet

Some of what was said about the author of that aphorism after his death backs up that statement.

Dark Days in Winter

After the death of Hitchens on 15 December some people flippantly remarked that he had spoiled yet another Christmas.  However, he did get a dig in at his least favourite time of the year.  In one of his, as usual, fine pieces of literary criticism,  he says of Dickens:-

Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.

CH - I am sorry you are dead, if only so you will not have someone point out to you that in your prose you overworked two adjectives - "moist" (here an adverb).  The other one is "fetid."    But also, my December and other people's Decembers are not darkened by "protracted obligatory celebration".  Dickens, it seems, loved walking through London on Christmas Day to see that in every house every person was involved in preparing for Christmas, and Christmas makes most sense as a collective celebration.  It is not like the kind of enforced show that you get in North Korea, but the taking part of something that is both publicly celebrated and to which each family will bring its own little bit of tradition - what time they open the presents or including a dish that a foreign family member once introduced.  

Now your December days were not dark - you earned money doing work you loved and were popular and successful.  For the rest of us dull drones though there is a lightening to the heart at the decorated trees, the Nativity scenes, the carollers in the supermarket and on the streets, the beautiful music being played, the sweet story itself - that of birth and hope for the humble.   You had a grand life, but those of us whose lives are more meagre find some passing delight in these things.   Christmas has been taken on by people of other faiths or none.

So though I shall miss you greatly I shan't miss your constant groans against Christmas.  To bring some brightness of tinsel and decoration in those dark short days - when some of us barely see the natural light -is an act of collective creativity.  Remember, a tradition is the democracy of the dead  as Chesterton, a great Christmas and Dickens lover, once said.