As Mr. Cohen said in his recent concerts...."But cheerfulness kept breaking out"
Article completed, space in head, time for celebrating. Even if wonderment is "child like' i could do with some. Sometimes I think I read too much, but only when I can't find the quote I'm looking for. I'm sure someone claimed that "Lavender's Blue" is one of the most beautiful love songs in English.
It is. The tune is beautiful, the lyrics do everything they have to do in a very short space.
Lavender's blue dilly dilly
Lavender's green
When i am King dilly dilly
You shall be queen
Call out your men dilly dilly
Set them to work
Some to the Plow dilly dilly
some to the cart
Some to make hay dilly dilly
some to make corn
While you and I dilly dilly
Keep ourselves warm.
I have been wallowing in both "the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes" and the Broadside Band's "Old English Nursery Rhymes" Cd...
Flickering at the edges of all this enjoyment is the awareness that some of these songs worried me when I was little and I want to think about that, but later. The "nasty ones" like "three blind mice" and "ding dong dell" didn't bother me. But some of them created a vague feeling of unease: something had slipped and was unstable that should have been solid. For reasons I can't fathom, "Johnny's so long at the fair" (Oh dear what can the matter be) verged on the frightening and "Boys and Girls come out of play" was like listening to a nightmare, evoking shadowy images of empty lamp lit streets where bad things were about to happen. (The unease was part of the pleasure, but it was there).
Though I'm not sure why these songs should be the exclusive province of kids. "I had four bothers over the sea" (which I'd never heard before) is a clever lyric in the riddling tradition, a good tune and performed beautifully on the cd.
I'm sure I heard Mick Hanely sing a version of this one:
As i went over the water
the water went over me
I saw two little blackbirds
Sitting on a tree
One called me a rascal
one called me a thief
I took up my little black stick
and knocked out all their teeth.
He sang: As i went over Blackwater....I think...
"A frog he would a wooing go" would work as a straight "folk song" and reminds me of "Tidy Ann" on Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhniall's "Idir an da Sholas" cd....which I will now go and listen to...
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Teaching Poetry in the Qld School system
The image I have is from a zombie movie; the poems reduced to the infected undead. massing in the murk, they lurch forward, driven across the foggy graveyard by mindless appetite and the insatiable desire to destroy and infect every unprotected reader. So we are SUPPOSED to huddle in our bunkers, preaching literature’s version of totally safe sex: don’t touch the poem until you are wrapped tightly in the protective clothing of resistant methodology, smug ideological superiority and can spot a suspected infection at twenty paces and know how to destroy the poem before it has a chance to…..
What?
Who knows.
I have the suspicion that most of the people teaching poetry in schools don’t read it. Don’t care for it and are quite happy to trash it because it’s far too difficult.
And I think anything that defines awe as childlike and something to be guarded against is such a small minded, weary, suspicious way of looking the world.
How did Saint Augustine get hold of the QSA syllabi?
What?
Who knows.
I have the suspicion that most of the people teaching poetry in schools don’t read it. Don’t care for it and are quite happy to trash it because it’s far too difficult.
And I think anything that defines awe as childlike and something to be guarded against is such a small minded, weary, suspicious way of looking the world.
How did Saint Augustine get hold of the QSA syllabi?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Hammering Le Fanu's Carmilla#2
‘The vampire lovers” does escape its own banality. Once. And it’s a scene not in the story. Carmilla is trying to escape with a dying Laura. The Governess, previously vampirsed, crawls to the top of the stairs and begs Carmilla not to leave her. Carefully putting Emma (Laura) out of sight she rushes up stairs and finishes off the Governess. Enter the (handsome?)sword waving (hero?) as she descends.
Laura has seen her eating habits and is obviously disgusted and terrified. Carmilla is stranded, literally and figuratively between the satisfaction of her desire, the fact that she is disgusting to the person she loves, and the immanence of her own death.
Oh where was Lacan when we needed him. If desire can truly only be the desire for the desire of the other, then Carmilla is the loneliest person on the planet.
But that moment is brief and it soon passes.
I’m not sure if it’s Carmilla or Le Fanu who gets staked and beheaded in the film. He deserves so much better.
Herzog? Of course. (See previous Herzog post re “The definitive love scene”.)
Laura has seen her eating habits and is obviously disgusted and terrified. Carmilla is stranded, literally and figuratively between the satisfaction of her desire, the fact that she is disgusting to the person she loves, and the immanence of her own death.
Oh where was Lacan when we needed him. If desire can truly only be the desire for the desire of the other, then Carmilla is the loneliest person on the planet.
But that moment is brief and it soon passes.
I’m not sure if it’s Carmilla or Le Fanu who gets staked and beheaded in the film. He deserves so much better.
Herzog? Of course. (See previous Herzog post re “The definitive love scene”.)
Friday, April 24, 2009
Hammering Le Fanu's Carmilla
Having watched two films that claim to be based on Le Fanu’s marvelous story, one so bad I've erased its name from my memory, I finally tracked down Hammer’s “The Vampire Lovers’ which is the first of their Karnstein trilogy and supposed to be a reasonably faithful rendition. It’s a good example of what happens when form, style and content get separated.
The ambiguity at the centre of Laura’s written narrative was always going to be vaporized in a film unless handled with care. But to switch, mindlessly, the first person narration, with all its carefully constructed ambiguities, for the flat third person stare of the camera, was guaranteed to kill what made the story interesting as a piece of writing.
So let us consider the erotic potential of a predatory lesbian vampire. Didn’t take long did it? For those who respond to that phrase with the same excitement as they would to ”the mould on last week’s custard” the repeated sight of the leading lady dropping her clothes at every possible opportunity is unlikely to cover up the holes in the plot, the bad dialogue or the generally crummy acting. Though you gotta love those painted castles with their slightly wrong perspectives on the painted backdrop. Unfortunately someone decided “predatory lesbian vampire” was a free ride to the box office, without actually stopping to think why or if or how that could be made unsettling or frightening or even interesting. Carmilla isn’t a “horror Story” as such. But it’s not Victorian porn either. “The Vampire lovers” isn’t a horror story either, rather a series of events that provide opportunities for actresses to get undressed.
Give the scriptwriter his dues, having decided his focus, he follows what’s left of the story. But his next mistake is to set everything out in chronological order. Le Fanu reveals his plot like a modern Asian horror film, so that the exposition is part of the climax. In terms of simplified sequence the written story goes: C.B.A.D. Not the Hammer version. B must follow A and be followed by C. Straightening out the chronology is a mistake. It’s now obvious from the start that Carmilla is a vampire and preys on young girls (we get the general’s story, B, in full before what should be Laura’s narrative C), and so Carmilla’s arrival at Laura’s schloss is no surprise.
The written story gains its effects because of the narrator’s inability to understand what is happening, (even though the reader sometimes does), her paradoxical attraction and repulsion to Carmilla, and the equal ambiguity of Carmilla’s feelings for Laura. Because it’s told first person we are positioned to share Laura’s confusion and much of the story doesn’t make sense to her until the end. But in the film there’s no mystery about Carmilla’s actions. Given the obvious desire to run with the sexual element the disturbing slippage in the story, where it’s never really clear what’s happening, is dispersed. In the film it’s made very clear exactly what is happening.
There’s some minor plot tinkering, some of it to acknowledge perhaps at least a hundred years of Vampire fiction between Le Fanu and the film. The only major additions are the governess’s switch from fat and old and friendly to young and pretty, the disappearance of the nanny, the introduction of the idiot butler, (who plays the policeman in part two?). The father’s absence which provides the governess with some small moral dilemma…and the murder of the doctor.
Oh and the compulsory “good looking” young man who can "save" Laura and reassert the hetro-normative discourse.(I never thought I’d get to use that phrase). Though why they change Laura's anme to Emma is indeed a mystery.
The ambiguity at the centre of Laura’s written narrative was always going to be vaporized in a film unless handled with care. But to switch, mindlessly, the first person narration, with all its carefully constructed ambiguities, for the flat third person stare of the camera, was guaranteed to kill what made the story interesting as a piece of writing.
So let us consider the erotic potential of a predatory lesbian vampire. Didn’t take long did it? For those who respond to that phrase with the same excitement as they would to ”the mould on last week’s custard” the repeated sight of the leading lady dropping her clothes at every possible opportunity is unlikely to cover up the holes in the plot, the bad dialogue or the generally crummy acting. Though you gotta love those painted castles with their slightly wrong perspectives on the painted backdrop. Unfortunately someone decided “predatory lesbian vampire” was a free ride to the box office, without actually stopping to think why or if or how that could be made unsettling or frightening or even interesting. Carmilla isn’t a “horror Story” as such. But it’s not Victorian porn either. “The Vampire lovers” isn’t a horror story either, rather a series of events that provide opportunities for actresses to get undressed.
Give the scriptwriter his dues, having decided his focus, he follows what’s left of the story. But his next mistake is to set everything out in chronological order. Le Fanu reveals his plot like a modern Asian horror film, so that the exposition is part of the climax. In terms of simplified sequence the written story goes: C.B.A.D. Not the Hammer version. B must follow A and be followed by C. Straightening out the chronology is a mistake. It’s now obvious from the start that Carmilla is a vampire and preys on young girls (we get the general’s story, B, in full before what should be Laura’s narrative C), and so Carmilla’s arrival at Laura’s schloss is no surprise.
The written story gains its effects because of the narrator’s inability to understand what is happening, (even though the reader sometimes does), her paradoxical attraction and repulsion to Carmilla, and the equal ambiguity of Carmilla’s feelings for Laura. Because it’s told first person we are positioned to share Laura’s confusion and much of the story doesn’t make sense to her until the end. But in the film there’s no mystery about Carmilla’s actions. Given the obvious desire to run with the sexual element the disturbing slippage in the story, where it’s never really clear what’s happening, is dispersed. In the film it’s made very clear exactly what is happening.
There’s some minor plot tinkering, some of it to acknowledge perhaps at least a hundred years of Vampire fiction between Le Fanu and the film. The only major additions are the governess’s switch from fat and old and friendly to young and pretty, the disappearance of the nanny, the introduction of the idiot butler, (who plays the policeman in part two?). The father’s absence which provides the governess with some small moral dilemma…and the murder of the doctor.
Oh and the compulsory “good looking” young man who can "save" Laura and reassert the hetro-normative discourse.(I never thought I’d get to use that phrase). Though why they change Laura's anme to Emma is indeed a mystery.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
St. Augustine
The picture shows Leofric, kneeling and present at one of King Edward’s miracles. It’s not a portrait in the modern sense. More “Rich Anglo-Saxon male at prayer”.
Both Leofric and Godgifu were remembered as being pious and generous benefactors to religious institutions.
One of many great moments of researching Lady G was the discovery that she and her husband donated a reliquary containing the arm of Augustine of Hippo to their new foundation at Coventry. Good research opens up doors you didn’t know were there.
The idea that part of the writer of the Confessions etc ended up IN Coventry of all places is almost comic. The fact that Leofric may have been given it as his reward for his help in Edward’s raid on his mother’s treasury, given the status given to mothers and Grandmothers in Lady G, is my irony, not history’s.
Augustine is one of the great deniers. According to him four things vexed the mind and should be avoided: Desire, Joy, Fear and Sorrow. There were three sins: The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambitions of the world. Doesn’t leave a lot untainted. And you can see why people used to say that Catholics didn’t believe in life after birth.
The writings of a man who may not have been quite right in the head by modern standards had such an effect that over a thousand years later it was still shaping the way I was expected to behave from primary school onwards. That intrigues me.
Why is history the record of the followers of the great deniers and their attempts to impose their moral bleakness on the rest of us? Juxtapose a naked body and the long reach of a dead man’s withered arm. Why is the withered arm the default choice for so many?
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Raceclassgender
Derrida talks about those moments of rupture when it’s suddenly possible to think about the unthought or the unthinkable… those moments when an issue becomes visible.
For me Race was invisible when I was growing up but I can pinpoint the moment when it suddenly reared its ugly head. I grew up surrounded by Irish voices. At home, at school, at mass. I knew I wasn’t Irish. I don’t even think it occurred to me as odd that my parents were paying taxes to a government that was using their money to pay soldiers to go hassle their relatives in Belfast.
But sometime in the seventies there was talk of “Sending the Irish Home”. I don’t remember if some tub thumping politician seriously suggested this or it was just one of those stories that circulate, prefixed with “they say…” But I do remember one evening my dad mentioning it. He was dismissive, it was obviously a stupid idea. (One of the great beauties of England is that ethnic cleansing is an obviously stupid idea. It wouldn’t be long before such ideas were touted in other countries, about other ethnic groups, and the stupidity of the idea was lost in the actual barbarity of its attempt.)
And that was the point of rupture.
I grew up in Coventry, I was born there. Home was a specific house beside a very specific park. When I wasn’t thinking I spoke with a west midlands accent. But if they sent my dad “home”, would my mum (who is English) be allowed to go with him? And if she didn’t (as if she wouldn’t) what would happen to my sister and me? If we went to Ireland we’d be foreigners, but then if they were sending “foreigners and their children” “home” were we actually native to England…????? Where exactly , if anywhere, did we belong?
The rumour died away. The question remains.
And it drives "Talking Nothing to the Stone", the second poem in Lady Godiva and Me. The answer offered there:
I know this place but wouldn't call it mine
Mine is the space between the rising and the falling foot.
works on a good day.
For me Race was invisible when I was growing up but I can pinpoint the moment when it suddenly reared its ugly head. I grew up surrounded by Irish voices. At home, at school, at mass. I knew I wasn’t Irish. I don’t even think it occurred to me as odd that my parents were paying taxes to a government that was using their money to pay soldiers to go hassle their relatives in Belfast.
But sometime in the seventies there was talk of “Sending the Irish Home”. I don’t remember if some tub thumping politician seriously suggested this or it was just one of those stories that circulate, prefixed with “they say…” But I do remember one evening my dad mentioning it. He was dismissive, it was obviously a stupid idea. (One of the great beauties of England is that ethnic cleansing is an obviously stupid idea. It wouldn’t be long before such ideas were touted in other countries, about other ethnic groups, and the stupidity of the idea was lost in the actual barbarity of its attempt.)
And that was the point of rupture.
I grew up in Coventry, I was born there. Home was a specific house beside a very specific park. When I wasn’t thinking I spoke with a west midlands accent. But if they sent my dad “home”, would my mum (who is English) be allowed to go with him? And if she didn’t (as if she wouldn’t) what would happen to my sister and me? If we went to Ireland we’d be foreigners, but then if they were sending “foreigners and their children” “home” were we actually native to England…????? Where exactly , if anywhere, did we belong?
The rumour died away. The question remains.
And it drives "Talking Nothing to the Stone", the second poem in Lady Godiva and Me. The answer offered there:
I know this place but wouldn't call it mine
Mine is the space between the rising and the falling foot.
works on a good day.
Monday, April 20, 2009
pre S.U.R.G thinking...
When Donovan sang:
Yellow is the colour of my true love's hair/
In the morning when we rise
it's impossible not to wonder what colour her hair was in the evening when they lay down?
It's not on the same level as:
Star falls from horse after snapper ambush
where if you knew snapper is a fish, and didn't know a snapper was slang for a photographer you could be forgiven for thinking that the world was even more interesting than it is.
Yellow is the colour of my true love's hair/
In the morning when we rise
it's impossible not to wonder what colour her hair was in the evening when they lay down?
It's not on the same level as:
Star falls from horse after snapper ambush
where if you knew snapper is a fish, and didn't know a snapper was slang for a photographer you could be forgiven for thinking that the world was even more interesting than it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)