Critic Cal

A friend of mine – male, and with some years on me – observed my gradual feminist 'awakening' respectfully but doubtfully. He – I'm going to call him Alan, because that's not his name – Alan would hear me out but struggled to see what all the fuss was about. Systemic sexism?! Many of his best friends were women, and they seemed to be doing alright. They could vote, drive and go to work, just like his male friends. And in their free time, they still got to do all those women-y things they enjoyed so much, like keeping house, looking after their families, dieting, shopping, removing excess body hair and ringing each other up to share anti-ageing tips. Best of both worlds! Then one day something clicked. Or seemed to. Alan met another feminist at a party and got chatting about the sensitive subject of internalised misogyny – when women subconsciously accept the superiority of men and demean one another and themselves accordingly. Symptoms may include body-hating , slu...

Cf. Like leaven Like mildew Like wildfire Like plague Like a rash Like a rumour Like rot Like a swarm Like an army Like sickness Like termites Like lice Like a stench Like dementia Like damp Like a yawn Like a snake bite Like gangrene Like cancer Like muck Like moths Like an oil spill Like acid Like rust Like infection Like locusts Like bindweed Like mould Like decay It is coming Unstoppable: Life. Carolyn Whitnall, 2016. So, I've been reading Leviticus lately, with some help from John Goldingay [1]. In case you're unfamiliar, it's the one with all the obscure and problematic rules and rituals that Christians like to pretend don't exist and that  Richard Dawkins et al.  like to quote . The book collects together a set of sometimes seemingly-absurdly specific instructions for the Levitical priests and for Israel as a Yahweh-worshipping community. On closer inspection, it is interesting to notice the effect of the practices ...

Ayoade et al. 's adaptation of  The Double  is set in what one might describe as a futuristic post-near-apocalypse version of the 1980s, as though something had gone terribly wrong in that decade and the world had frozen in dim dilapidation, indefinitely served by the same clunky, temperamental technology and entertained by the same particularly fuzzy sci-fi TV shows and bleak electro-pop. Along with some satisfyingly jarring images, a tense and (mostly) suitably restrained script, a sound-track which unsubtly but cleverly gives the whole the feel of an oncoming train, and some proficiently well-meaning-but-chronically-anxious fumbling on the part of Jesse Eisenberg , it does almost as good a job as the book of conjuring up a sense of claustrophobic loneliness and paranoid anticipation of disaster, as the protagonist finds his life usurped by a doppelgänger -- a man physically identical but temperamentally antipodal to himself, with all the self-assurance, social nous and...

First Witch When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? Second Witch When the hurlyburly's done, When the battle's lost and won. Third Witch That will be ere the set of sun. First Witch Where the place? Second Witch Upon the heath. Third Witch There to meet with Macbeth. (Shakespeare, Macbeth , Act I, Scene I) That fateful meeting on the heath plants the seed of a dark ambition: Macbeth is to be king of Scotland. He eagerly believes the witches' prophecy -- though not quite enough, it seems, to prevent him taking matters into his own hands. Spurred on by Lady M, he murders the visiting King Duncan as he sleeps, and frames his servants in the morning. Duncan's sons flee in fear, and Macbeth assumes the throne. And then, objective ostensibly gained, all manner of madness proceeds ... Macbeth, remembering the witches' other prediction that his friend Banquo would be father to a line of kings, is racked with anxiety at this thr...

A well-proportioned naked woman kneels at the edge of a raised open-air platform. Sombrely, she contemplates a scattering of onlookers reclined on picnic blankets, whilst two young girls arrayed as cherubs shroud her head with a transpicuous white veil. The girls depart; the woman rises slowly -- to display some rather unexpected (ahem) 'lady topiary' picturing, in vivid red, the communist insignia. Standing tall -- sinews stiffened, blood summoned, terrible aspect duly lent unto her eye -- she forms her full-lipped lipsticked mouth beneath the veil and fills her lungs and issues forth a fervid bellow: "io non ti amo!" She turns, and strikes the posture of an athlete at the blocks. A pause, to let her audience appreciate the moment of the moment. Then, she sprints: with unconstrained determination down the full length of the platform -- which, it happens, has been given the appearance of a road and ends abruptly with a wall -- and it is at this wall the woman ends her...