RosieBell

Long Distance

Leaving Heathrow at 10:30pm.  You would think I would be able to sleep.  No, of course I stay awake for the next 12 hours.  There is a pleasant young woman sitting next to me, and we chat a little, and then she falls asleep.  I read for a while, and wish for teletransportation or a stasis pod.  I watch the films on the little screen in front of me.  Southern China airlines were the cheapest I could get and they are absolutely fine – food, being Chinese, superior to average – but they have fallen down when it comes to films.  I could start learning about Chinese opera but I’m only fit for films. 

I watch a Russian film called Heat, about 4 young dudes who meet up again having started on their paths of life – one a sailor, one an artist and so on. It’s a bad sentimental film, but because they are Russians has a touch of the exotics.  A Russian rapper pretending to be an Afro-American is more interesting than a British one, and the same goes for the Russian skinhead fash who pursue him.

I then watch Hemingway & Gellhorn. Hemingway, who looks like Saddam Hussein, is a total jerk and buffoon.  Gellhorn, played by Nicole Kidman, has a nice arse in those loose 30s slacks.  She is a foreign correspondent, so there are many scenes of the Spanish Civil War where the two lovers are blended into the footage, in a way which insults the actual participants.  It’s disaster tourism.  Whoever wrote this should be shot, or taught something about crass vulgariy.  I stop it as I can’t bear it any longer and close my eyes.  But I can’t sleep.

I open the blind and look down on what I first think are clouds but then see a snowy landscape with irregular dark lines for rivers and straight dark lines for roads.  We are flying to Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and it looks as though we are over Siberia.  The sun is coming up.  However the steward tells me to shut out the light.


We are heading East and after a short day the sun is going down again when we arrive in Guangzhou at 6:30pm.  We have a six hour wait.  For some reason we’re put in the VIP lounge, so instead of a hard row of plastic chairs we lounge in comfortable arm chairs and instead of trying to buy local snacks with a credit card there is a buffet table of good East and bad West - spicy beef and noodles and seaweed crackers and cheese sandwiches on white sliced bread.  It’s a nicely designed place and I take a few photos inside as well as of the view of the airport, betting myself that someone is going to tell me to stop – as they do (there’s no way this could be a security risk so it’s automatic authoritarianism).

My seat neighbor and I go for a walk around the airport.  She’s looking for a Chinese conical hat, as worn in paddy fields, I’m looking for trinkets, probably of bamboo.  The shops sell jade, ivory (with assurances that it’s made out of mastodons they have dug up), panda key rings and tea, but none of it is attractive, most of it is expensive and I’ve seen similar in stalls in the West.  So though I’m willing to spend money with the neo-capitalists, they have not aroused my consumer desires.  Their Burberry and Mulberry shops were beyond me.  Except for dodging the passenger vehicles which are driven at full speed, there is not much excitement in the airport.

Back on the plane for another 11 hours, and catch up with the rest of Gemingway & Hellhorn.  It is gets no better, the shots of an upset Kidman fleeing the sights of Dachau being particularly repulsive.  Drink as much red wine that the highly camp steward will give me to put me to sleep.  I drop off for 20 minutes.  I’ve lost the nice young woman as a companion and have a rather dozy bloke instead (had waited 12 hours in Heathrow as he hadn’t understood the time difference).  

Next film, The Lucky One, about an Iraq war veteran with no personality at all whose life is somehow saved by the photograph of an attractive young woman.  He seeks her out - she has a kennels, a sassy grandmother, a cute kid, a hostile ex-husband.  Utterly shameless but watchable because it’s set in Louisiana among pretty leafy scenery and the attractive young woman is well played by Taylor Schilling.

Watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Pure fantasy of the rape victim’s revenge and a dull detective story – the Girl uses Google and leafs through archives and may as well be a research assistant in a university.  Violence extremely nasty.  The Girl though is a kind of Aerial spirit who can conjure knowledge out of the air – rather like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is a minor god that the hero must travel to in order to get the magic words.

Still no sleep, the light outside so bright and brilliant off the clouds that I open the blind a crack and shut it again.  I have finished the movies and turn to the CSIs.  One and a half of these, and then I realize that it’s nearly time to land at 5pm.  Auckland airport traffic is moving quickly, the duty free people are overly attentive, untypical of New Zealanders who are not hard sellers.  Then into arrivals, my sister is there and we head into Auckland, under a cloudy sky, so I am not hit by the usual bright hard light.  My family knows jet lag – they’re all great travellers – and they don’t expect much sense out of me. 

I walk around the beautiful garden just so as to touch some plants after being in a totally artificial environment, and then I hit the bed at 9pm, wake at 12.30am for tea and sandwiches, sleep again at 4:30am, wake again for breakfast, then am taken to catch a bus to Turangi – about six hours away, which seems nothing after being incarcerated in the cross-continental capsule for the last two days.

Into Christianity

Overheard on a walk yesterday from a crowd of young people:- "If you're into Christianity, you should visit Roslin Chapel."  Into Christianity, as if the religion which used to be half the consciousness of Scots and other Europeans was a diversion, like model trains or the history of the English Civil War. John Knox howled in rage. St Andrew fell off his cross.

The Youth Who Could Not Shiver

Grimm's Fairy Tales were first published on December 20th 1812. To mark the 200th anniversary of the publication the BBC ran a series on the tales which examined them from various angles - as expressions of nationalism and psychological states, feminist interpretations and so on.  The tales have mutated in all sorts of ways - bowdlerised for children's editions, cutified by Walt Disney, rewritten by Angela Carter.

When I was child I had a big format picture book of them which had been published in 1966.  The tales still contained cruelty which would be thought unsuitable for children today e.g  the wicked queen in Snow White being forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she was dead, Cinderella's sisters cutting off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper and the wood-cutter opening up the wolf's belly to rescue Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, then sowing it up again with stones.  Also Rapunzel had twins before she was married.

My favourite story was, and is, The Youth Who could Not Shiver.  The Youth in it has heard of people shivering with fear in graveyards and other creepy places, but has never felt it for himself.  So he goes about the world saying continually "Oh, if I could but shiver".  People get him to sit under a gallows where seven hanged men are swinging, or to watch three nights in a heavily haunted castle.  .

"When midnight came, a ringing and a rattling noise was heard, gentle at first and louder and louder by degrees; then there was a pause, and presently with a loud outcry half a man's body came down the chimney and fell at his feet. "Holloa," he exclaimed; "only half a man answered that ringing; that is too little." Then the ringing began afresh, and a roaring and howling was heard, and the other half fell down. "Wait a bit," said he; "I will poke up the fire first."

When he had done so and looked round again, the two pieces had joined themselves together, and an ugly man was sitting in his place. "I did not bargain for that," said the youth; "the bench is mine." The man tried to push him away, but the youth would not let him, and giving him a violent push sat himself down in his old place. Presently more men fell down the chimney, one after the other, who brought nine thigh-bones and two skulls, which they set up, and then they began to play at ninepins.

At this the youth wished also to play, so he asked whether he might join them. "Yes, if you have money!" "Money enough," he replied, "but your balls are not quite round"; so saying he took up the skulls, and, placing them on his lathe, turned them round.

"Ah, now you will roll well," said he. "Holloa! now we will go at it merrily." So he played with them and lost some of his money, but as it struck twelve everything disappeared. Then he lay down and went to sleep quietly.

On the morrow the King came for news, and asked him how he had fared this time. "I have been playing ninepins," he replied, "and lost a couple of dollars." "Have you not shivered?" "No! I have enjoyed myself very much; but I wish some one would teach me that!"'

This tale is comic, and I do wish some film company would turn it into a spoof horror movie.  The Youth is a really attractive figure, being so fearless and matter of fact when confronted by supernatural terrors.  The ending is good too.  The Youth wins the Princess, of course, but she and her chambermaid finally get him to shiver by natural instead of supernatural means. 

However, I was put out to find out in the series that that the Nazis picked up Grimm's tales for propaganda purposes e.g.  by giving the wood-cutter in Red Riding Hood a Nazi armband.  The Youth Who Could not Shiver was a Nazi favourite.  Of course they missed the point of the story, which they turned into Nazi uplift.

"Paul Diehl's 1935 adaptation of this story . . . was one of a range of silent short films made for the Reichstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm (State Office for Educational Films) and widely shown in German schools. The scene of the night in the castle, though it follows Grimm closely in parts, shows clearly this altered ideological orientation. The youth, now given the name Hans, is swift and violent in his dispatch of a variety of grotesque creatures. He skewers one on a fork and holds it over a flame. He fastens a cat in a vice, cuts its head off, and tosses it into the moat. Unlike the written text, in which the youth feels sorry for a dead body and tries to warm it up, Diehl presents him as pitiless. Since the film has no sound-track, teachers could talk over it and impose an interpretation: children were taught that the action in the film symbolized the necessity for German fearlessness in stamping out enemies of the state (Jews, gays, Gypsies, non-Aryans). In 1937 the film was given a gold medal by the government department for which it was made. Nine years later, however, a Unesco commission, charged with the task of de-Nazifying the teachers and materials that were to be employed in post-war German schools, came to a different verdict: ‘Though there is nothing that is specifically subversive in this film, there is much that is typically Nazi in outlook, with its approbation of killing and force, coupled with callousness.’ The film was therefore suppressed, and is today little known, despite the technical proficiency of its animation."

Among all their other barbarities, the Nazis had no sense of humour and no idea how to read.