Critic Cal

I'm normally asleep when the year begins, and up and about before the rest of the world has quite recovered from revelling... NEW YEAR'S DAY   At 6am on New Year's Day While next door's lengthy Hogmanay Was resolutely still in play I wearily arose. My brain was buzzing, anyway, Too much to much doze.  I dressed, and found an old cagoule (Remembering the forecast squall) And stuffed it — an ungainly ball — In my fleece pocket. Then crept down to the downstairs hall And made my exit.  The streets were dark; it felt like night The more so for the frequent sight Of homeward-headed revellers, tight And waxing verbal. One stopped, and asked me for a light For something ‘herbal’…  I drew the odd uncivil jest From trendy cliques in party best Who were distinctly unimpressed By my appearance; I scowled, and scorned “such shallowness " With silent vehemence.  Towards the centre of the town Were several nightclubs of renown Where people

The 'real' Saint Nicholas was a 4th century Bishop of Myra associated with many miraculous events of varying historical attestability. My favourite of these for sheer exuberant oddness has to be the one about the three young boys, murdered by a butcher during a time of famine, chopped up ( chopped up! ) and pickled in brine for seven years ( seven years! ) before being miraculously restored in answer to the bishop's intercessory prayers. A  16th century French song  on the St. Nicholas Centre  website tells the tale in the good old bluntly gruesome way of good old-fashioned folk rhyme. Meanwhile our modern songs have tragically watered down the contemporary hybrid Santa character beyond recognition, blandly censoring all of the most interesting bits of his biography. Well! I for one won't stand for it a moment longer ...            HITHER COMETH SAINT NICHOLAS OF MYRA           Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus,           Riding over the plain;

In which I manage to say about Christmas a lot of the stuff that I most want to say about Christmas... MORNING It was dark before the dawn; the night Reached back as far as memory, made a myth Of day, a wish-fulfilment dream of light, And shadows, all, of kin and ken and kith. We went on shadow foot, each step more slow; We climbed the hill and turned, and strained our eyes To see the shadow valley sunk below The creeping pallor of the blank slate skies. No chirping chorus prophesied the break Of morning; all those brooding mutterers Were silenced by the cold. But in the wake Of wind, the fallen leaves made susurrus Of something sought, and fled, and close at hand, That darkness cannot overcome, nor understand.   Carolyn Whitnall, December 2013. NOTES Isaiah 8-9 "And when they say to you, “Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of

I've been writing sporadically about my dawning realisation that patriarchy really is a thing and that we need to be intentional about resisting it. But there's a word I've been avoiding, a label that I duck away from like a conference-goer trying to dodge the smiley person with a roll of stickers: Feminist. So ... am I? Do I need/want that sticker? I know I didn't used to be. I used to be, I'm sad to say, the archetype of an  internalised misogynist . Women were tiresome; inequality hardly surprising given our inferiority; feminism just one big petulant fuss. I've written elsewhere about my  serious re-think . Still got a lot to learn, of course (a  lot ). But I have very much come to recognise the strikingly sexist nature of human-on-human oppression. And I feel a growing burden to find ways to actively oppose that (starting with myself!) That certainly  sounds  like what it means to be a feminist ... at least, as I understand it. I have some reser

On a bad day on the inside of my head, of which there were many, my arms were the arms of a gorilla. On better days, they were the arms of a man. On no day at all did they pass as the arms of a female teenager, or indeed a female anything. Except maybe a female gorilla. This was just one of the many many points on which I failed to meet the spec. I was desperate to bring myself up to it somehow ... but how? Not a clue. I'd picked up some hints about things  not  to do. For example, attacking the excesses with razors precipitated an increase of future excesses. So ... what exactly? If anyone of my acquaintance was an expert on the subject, they kept that shameful fact appropriately quiet – but, even if I'd known whom to approach, I doubt it would ever have occurred to me that such a drastic measure as asking was a legitimate option. So I just dragged my gorilla arms around with me, one on each side. And, along with them, the weighty consciousness of them. They (and other

A thing that I made for  Sophia Network's Poetry Month  ...                  JARRING                  ...that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.                 She was always giving him lip                 these days; she used                 to hold her peace, at least, he mused.                 He was the pain in her neck that would                 not lift; she’d left                 too much too long too unsaid.                 She had been a thing he could handle –                 once; her new stance                 was in spite of the manual.                 He would shoulder her over, at                 ev’ry turn; God                 forbid he be less than above her.                 She came with a body for flaunting;                 she taunted him,                 wanting him endlessly wanting.                 He still tried to pull the old ‘foot down’                 routine; as if                 that decided al

I used to watch a lot of films. We married in a liminal age; a time when people still rented DVDs, but selected them online and had them home-delivered like a very slow and ultimately inedible pizza. As frugal students we made meticulous use of our LoveFilm account, steaming through as many acknowledged must-sees of the cinema world as the speed of Royal Mail allowed. But I got old; fidgety; conscious of the finity of hours and more greedy to create than to consume. I'd like to say that I preserve my sapped appetite for screen time for the cream of the cinema crop. That I ponder over the Watershed program in careful search of a foreign language arthouse opus worthy of my next quarterly big screen pilgrimage. That I attend in solemn state supplied with fine red wine and an elegant Moleskine notebook in which to neatly print my cannily-observed remarks for later contemplation. But the sad truth is that my selection criteria has descended to "whatever's free on Amazon

I am endlessly intrigued by allusion to Jesus in literature. Intentional or inci-/accidental, affirmatory or critical – it all expands on the conversation; all highlights and reinforces the permeation of his shaping presence in reality. There's lots of examples to choose from. Writers, it seems, are themselves endlessly intrigued by him – at least, within the largely Western, recent centuries' traditions that encompass most of my reading choices. It's the subtle instances that most delight me, like the following scene in the pleasingly quirky  White Noise  by Don DeLillo [1]... The family of college professor Jack Gladney – along the rest of their town and the inhabitants of the surrounding region – are displaced by an 'airborne toxic event'. They are temporarily housed in an abandoned scout camp. The place is rife with uncertainty; rumours of varying degrees of extremity proliferate; concrete information is scarce. Anyone boasting a claim to knowledge, howeve

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.  (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, c.1609)  Was ever arrogance so eloquent! He's basically saying, "Look, love, you're a bit of alright. And I can write, right? In fact, I'm a big-shot playwright. Will's words won't wilt, I'll warrant you. Some centuries' time this rhyme'll be a rite of educational passage for school kids up and down our Scepter'd Isle and where'er else our native tongue be known." Only, he's Shakespeare, so he's saying it in words so Shakespe hear ianly splendid as to render them self-fulfilling. (Well, four hundred years and counting, at least ... so far, so good). Many of Shakespeare's sonnets are pre-occupied with the idea of immortalisation through the written word. The fact that most are addressed to a man (scholars are unable to unambiguously conclude that the relationship was a romantic one but much o

When The Snowden Revelations first broke in late May 2013, I couldn't help but notice his date of birth: June 21, 1983. A mere 20 days away from my own. Which means that we were both of us in the messy process of turning 30 when it happened. My experience of said process inclines me to conjecture that it may not have been altogether without bearing on his decision to go public. A costly act of selfless bravery, or a desperate bid for significance ahead of a conspicuous personal landmark? Or, if my own (far less internationally consequential) attempts at 'meaningful' adult life are anything to go by, a complex blend of both ...                 A CRITICAL AGE                 And it came to pass in his thirtieth year                 He found that he could not not speak                 A world watched and watching needed to hear                 The impulse unseating his quiet career                 Arrived at its zenith its peak                 And it came to pa

And the scribe and plutocrat brought unto us a man stated in obscenity; and when they had set him in the press, they say unto us, Reader, this man was stated in obscenity, in the very act. Now Murdoch as a rule commanded us, that such should be panned: but what sayest thou...? What we  did  sayest said more, I suggest, about us than about the Prime Minister [1]. How delighted we emerged in the emergence of such unparalleled grounds for disgust! Twitter was awash with pork puns, suggestive pics, quips about the Pig Society, and a derogatory spoof account,  conspicuously followed by the UK Russian Embassy; someone inevitably had the genius idea of putting the word 'gate' at the end of the descriptor of the implicated creature, thereby concretising the allegation as an official political scandal; my favourite societal prognostician , Charlie Brooker, had to publicly clarify that no, he had not heard any such rumour when he penned Black Mirror episode The National Anthem  

So ... you're a woman, in the guise of a man, living as a monk, when this pregnant girl -- knocked up by a soldier -- starts telling everyone you're the father! and her dad's furious , and the abbot's all like, what?! in full-on castigation mode -- they're gonna make you leave the monastery and everything ... So, what d'you do? You accept the punishment, bring up the kid with all the care as if it were yours, and go on living a life of poverty, service and prayerful asceticism until you die. Obvs.                  FATHER MARINA                 Her fellow brothers staggered back, wide-eyed:                 The husk of him, respectfully undressed                 In preparation for the grave, belied                 The guilt her silence seemed to have confessed.                 Not one shred of the case against him held;                 Wherever was the means? the will? And yet                 She'd borne the sentence, exiled in the worl

world-view   n.  [after German Weltanschauung  n.] a set of fundamental beliefs, values, etc., determining or constituting a comprehensive outlook on the world; a perspective on life; = Weltanschauung n.  ( OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 15 August 2015 ). I've been endeavouring through  N.T. Wright 's  Resurrection of the Son of God . It's a weighty tome in both senses (or would be if I hadn't opted for the e-book version) but he does have a lovely clarity of thought and expression which renders complex academic ideas comprehensible even to (reasonably determined) laymen. I especially appreciate his framework for describing and comparing world-views via the answers to five major questions: Who are we? Where are we? What is wrong? What is the solution? What time is it? The exercise of unpicking cultures and belief systems on this basis seems highly instructive, at least when he attempts it (more on that later). But the mere mention