RosieBell

Reality is Iconoclastic

I hardly ever read a book these days as reading articles and blogs on the internet and writing blogs take up too much time. How C S Lewis would have despised the internet. He had hard things to say about people reading newspapers since he thought they get you into the habit of skipping superficially from one passing subject to another. But I abstained from the computer last night and sat down with A Grief Observed, a book about bereavement, in which Lewis’s powerful and honest voice speaks about the worst part of common experience. He describes how he tries not to substitute the image of his dead wife with her actuality:-

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.. .

. . .Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive – who are with us in the same room. Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture – almost the precis – we’ve made of him in our own minds.

Norm's Form Book

I am really chuffed to say that I have been profiled by that big beast in the blog jungle, Norm at Normblog.

Jobs for the girls

The young women in Jane Austen’s novels don’t have jobs. They have some home duties – sewing, visiting the poor – but they don’t exert their considerable intelligence and character in earning their livings.

When films and the television do Jane Austen adaptations they have to give the young women some occupation as acting business, thus we see them picking flowers, playing the harp or possibly drying their hair by candlelight. But those poor girls really do need to get out of the house and work so that they aren’t dependent on their parents and don’t have to wait around until some suitable young man makes them an offer of marriage. Here is my list of possible careers for them:-

Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland is the least intelligent of Jane Austen’s heroines so is probably not up to passing exams to become a vet, although she loves animals. Also, she is hopeless at practical tasks, her mother says. But she is sporty, enjoys the outdoors, played baseball as a child, and is kind to her younger brothers and sisters. She really should be training to be a PE teacher.

Her friend, Isabella Thorpe, is very pretty, affected and never happy unless receiving male attention. She is also on the make. She calls herself an actress but is in fact serving drinks at an upmarket club.

Elinor Tilney is clever, kind and bookish. She should be doing post-graduate studies in history and will stay in academia, where she will be deservedly popular with her students.

Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet is of course the most attractive young woman in English fiction – witty, intelligent and outspoken. She can play and sing, though not brilliantly ("more pleasing than capital"), that is, she can project her personality in performance. She can be lead singer of a rock band and will give great chat between the songs and wow them at interviews.

Spring

Spring is such a beautiful month with everything unfurling like flags.  Even that most prosaic of plants, rhubarb, looks beautiful, the young folded leaves like plush.

Adam Curtis and his Trap

I saw the other episodes of The Trap on BBC2 and came away as hazy as the director.

His thesis:- Positive Freedom - always accompanied by footage of wild-eyed revolutionaries - a bad thing because it ends up with a load of deaths.

Negative Freedom - always accompanied by footage of 1950's American suburbanites - a bad thing because it is a bit selfish.

So perhaps, he concludes hastily, Positive Freedom might turn out to be a good thing after all if handled better.

Actually, I experience Negative Freedom every day at 5pm.  And a double dose of it on Friday.  And it tastes like Sweet Freedom to me.

The philosophical impulse behind Positive Freedom, said Curtis, was Jean-Paul Sarte and the philosophical impulse behind Negative Freedom was Isaiah Berlin.  Sartre sat in a cafe in Paris encouraging people to find true freedom in revolutionary action  while Berlin's family had fled Russia and its revolutionary zeal to seek safety in Britain.

Said a philosopher Sartre
"Bourgeoisie should be taken apart
So can all you brothers
Blow up the others
At least you are making a start."

Said an essayist, Berlin, Isaiah
"A utopian dream is a liar
I saw it in Russia,
And it was a crusher,
So don’t ever trust a Messiah."

Eddi Reader in Glenrothes

P and I went to hear Eddi Reader performing at the Lang Spoon Festival at Rothes Halls. This meant driving up to Glenrothes, a new town famed for its roundabouts, but Rothes Halls is very pleasant and the evening was excellent value. The support act was a group called Po Girl, who were very good – young cuties dressed as ragamuffins from Canada, playing all sorts of instruments, and their main singer having a wonderful black woman’s voice, with rich textures and cracks, a brocade of a voice. She started off acapella with Oh Can Ye Sew Cushions, which she said she had learned from her granny who came from Inverness.

I had learned the tune when I had started playing the recorder. The words are beautiful, about an unmarried woman with her baby:-

Oh, can ye sew cushions and can ye sew sheets?
And can ye sing baluloo when the bairn greets?
And hie and baw birdie, and hie and baw lamb
And hie and baw birdie, my bonnie wee lamb.

I biggit the cradle all on the tree top
And the wind it did blaw, and the cradle did rock
And hie and baw birdie, and hie and baw lamb
And hie and baw birdie, my bonnie wee lamb.

The Omen - the 250th Out of the Bedroom

Out of the Bedroom had its 250^th evening anniversary on Thursday at the Canonsgait pub. After work I went to the upstairs bar to drink their good beer and eat their reasonably priced food but the place was like a parrot house with a few howler monkeys thrown in. There were gangs of hen parties or hen party clones with voices that were shrill, loud and grating. So I withdrew and went up to the Tass to sit down there with a book I had bought on the way and was looking forward to reading with my beer, then found I had left the book in the bookshop. I thought these were bad omens for my performance. I suffer badly from stage fright and it makes me superstitious. The Romans were very superstitious, watching the flights of birds and cutting open animals to look at their entrails and that suggests to me they must have been in a perpetual state of stage fright.  Which is quite possible in their kind of highly public culture where you are always on show - as people are in Mediterranean cultures today, parading in their best through the streets. (Someone else can do the research on this and write the thesis).

You will not play music well tonight, said the Oracle and when I went back to the Canonsgait it seemed to be coming true because musos were gathered outside. The power supply had failed in the downstairs bar and the organisers were looking harassed and making phone calls or had gone up the street to hunt down another venue.

While waiting to hear the news of our fate I went inside the bar, most of the noisy hen parrots having flown, and had a drink. A couple of other OOTB goers joined me and we began talking about the enlarged antique map of Edinburgh that decorates one of the walls. It shows the city in about 1780. There were streets like Fleshmarket Close, Lawnmarket and Fishmarket Close named when people would sell actual meat, cloth and fish at such places, a time when work was producing or finding actual physical things and selling them. It doesn’t happen these days, that streets are named after occupations. Where is the Corporate Lawyers Square and IT Support Wynd or the area known as Website? (Essay question:- explain the difference between working in a market and working in marketing.  Of the two, which is the most useful and should be most respected?)

Graffiti

Someone left graffiti on my front door and doorway the other day:-

My first thoughts were:-

I have enemies and this is a death threat; then

Has Banksy been past?  Has he, with a few waves of his spray can, made the door of my house an artwork that could be sold for half a million quid? 

That most delicious feeling - of receiving a large sum of money by lottery or legacy or (my favourite fantasy) by finding an unpublished Jane Austen manuscript buried in my garden which is then auctioned off at Sotherbys - poured over me.  And the fact that I couldn't understand the letters and they do not seem to be in English or even in Roman script widened the scope for dreaming of a life made more exciting by a stroke of fate.

However a friend told me it was a tag, a kind of signature that graffiti people put about.  And in fact it has been repeated on someone's gate and the pillar box down the road.  It made my house suddenly look worth £20,000 less and the whole street seem very dodgy.  I thought of the Mayor of New York's policy of no broken windows.  Yes, my house did look as though it was neglected and ill-used - like a woman with a black eye, who would then appear with broken arms.  It seemed far more vulnerable.

Well, said my flatmate, a white expanse of door like that must have been as tempting as a field of virgin snow.  You see it and you want to make the first foot prints on it.

So I sanded door and painted it dark green today, a sad waste of a sunny Saturday.  "What bastards they are," said one of the neighbours.  "Good luck,"  without much hope in her voice. 

What's Left?

Michael Walzer giving it to them at Dissent. I really admire his passionate polemic.

OUR MOST dangerous enemies right now are people who defend inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism idealistically, with ideological fervor and organizational discipline. We may not remember the idealism of the Nazis; we think of them as thugs, which many of them were, but without young idealists they would never have seized power in Germany. We remember communist idealism all too well, because so many people on the left were seduced by it and became apologists for a murderous and tyrannical regime. Today we need to be clear about our hostility to religious fundamentalism—in all its versions, but most important, right now, in the form of Islamic radicalism, because this is by far its most threatening form. Here we have idealistic hatred of everything the Western left stands for (or should stand for); here we have fanatical zeal, cruel intolerance, a cult of death, a passionate commitment to the subordination of women, vicious anti-Semitism, and a pervasive hostility to liberalism and democracy. And yet there are people on the left who insist that the dangers posed by this hatred are exaggerated (or even invented by right-wing politicians) or who make excuses for it, invoking cultural difference or imperialist oppression—as if our enemies were (secretly: it would have to be secret) advocates of multiculturalism and national liberation. It won’t be easy to maintain moral clarity here and do everything else that the left needs to do, but that’s what the times require if we are to maintain our rightful place in the political world, if we are to deserve not to vanish.

I wish I had the information in my tank to drive the engine of such eloquence.  I can pronounce on the same theme in verse and song, but not in prose.

Beloved BBC

Last night I listened to a programme on Radio 2 where Joni Mitchell was being interviewed. She came across as warm and wise and I liked the way she talked about song-writing as a craft. Do the music first and then the words will follow, and you will not fall into the trap of doing ABAB rhymes with the tunes that suggest themselves from that simple pattern.

I was glad to see that I was working on a song in AABCCB and that the lines were of different lengths. Though words and music tend to come at the same time for me.

She also talked about the puzzle part of writing lyrics - getting the words to fit the pattern, and I knew exactly what she meant - you're placing the rhymes correctly, making sure it all makes sense but having it sound natural.  It's building a canal but making it flow like a river.  It is the great and pleasurable difficulty of the craft.

Her first husband regarded her as a dumb blonde - he had an English degree and she didn't read so he didn't believe she would be able to write lyrics.

After that there was a programme with Guy Chambers showing how various pop songs worked with key changes, bridges and the like.

How can anyone moan about the BBC? I begrudge that £11.37 that I have to pay to them monthly less than anything else that I have dunned from me.