Critic Cal

As someone with a healthy recognition of my need for the mercy of God, as well as a less-than-healthy capacity for shame and religious anxiety (people, we really need to help each other learn the difference), Psalm 51 – King David's great prayer of contrition and repentance – has long been close to my heart. Have mercy on me, O God,     according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy     blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,     and cleanse me from my sin! ( Psalm 51 :1-2) But I've had a growing unease with it ever since the following was pointed out to me. "Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight..." confesses David to God (Ps 51:4). Meanwhile, the short context-providing note at the start of the psalm explains the particular sin which has prompted this humbled outcry: "A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." If "...

Today I'm going to talk about you, and how woefully inadequate it is. Other languages have better options. The embarrassingly small handful of 'foreign words' I learned in school included the French tu (informal singular) and vous (formal singular, formal or informal plural), and the Spanish tú (informal singular), usted (formal singular), vosotros (informal plural) and ustedes (formal plural). Olden-times English disambiguated too: thou and thee for (subject, object) singular, and you and ye for (subject, object) plural. The latter could also be used in the formal singular case, just to confuse things (if anything we think of thee and thou as highfalutin now, at least in the south of the UK). But somewhere along the line we decided that we had suffered under the tyranny of common sense grammar rules for long enough and broke away from our European neighbours. The consequence being that second person subtleties are lost in modern English rendering, with int...

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 ...

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." ( The Good Soldier ,  Ford Madox Ford ) There's an opening line to draw instinctive protestation, if I ever read one. The world is over-flowing with sadness; we blind ourselves in order to survive. One's own feels no less unbearable for the realisation that it's only the tip of an unthinkable iceberg. For a story to self-advertise as "the saddest" takes some cheek. And yet, having now read to the end of Ford Madox Ford's mini masterpiece, I'm half inclined to say the same myself. The novel charts the miserable disintegration of two couples' marriages and lives. It is written in the most remarkably effective nonlinear, ' unreliable ' narrative, so that the true characters of the people involved, and the actual events, are revealed gradually -- piecemeal and out-of-order and repeatedly revised. The narrator's own understanding and perspective -- and his honesty with himself and with...

' Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ' must surely qualify as a work of genius purely on the basis that it makes sense at all, in spite of a completely nonlinear timeline and the seamless switching between the material world and the world of the mind (both in real and manipulated memory). But Gondry (for whom I've rather a soft spot) manages this so creatively that you are drawn into the twists and turns and get to have a pretty good idea of what the film is trying to communicate at any given point. And on top of that the film communicates a lot . Most obviously it deals with the nature of memory and dealing with the past, raising some interesting questions about how we would respond given the hypothetical option of re-writing our personal histories. But at the heart of it is a simple exploration of character and relationship. Clem and Joel have been left hurt by a whirlwhind romance turned tempestuous, and each (independently) decide to have all memories of each othe...