Critic Cal

When I finished primary school, my all-time favourite teacher gave me Cranford and Jane Eyre  as a leaving gift. It's taken me until now to realise that, as much as seeking to further my literary education, she was almost certainly trying to gently nudge me into feminist awakeness. Well, after a two-decade-long lie-in, I'm finally rubbing my eyes (sorry I'm late, Miss). I've not read either book for ages  – it's impossible enough keeping pace with the 'to-read' list without appending the many worthy 'to-revisit's. But I was recently delightfully surprised by the stage adaptation  of Jane Eyre in its second run at the Bristol Old Vic. I say 'surprised' ... it's a grumpy habit of mine to routinely and volubly disapprove of adaptations of anything , especially fiction to stage or screen. Too often (I maintain) it becomes an exercise in plot narration, neglecting all but the surface layer of the original material as well as the unique op...

Disney's  Frozen  is a powerful allegory about mental illness and the propensity of sufferers to shut down to the outside world ... No, wait, it's a parable about puberty and coming of age, and the temporary distance and awkwardness that it generates between family members ... Oh, or is it about the challenges of bringing up exceptionally gifted children, and the loneliness of mental superiority? ... Of course, it's really  a corrective on the damaging fairytale notions of romantic love ... It's a polemic against reductive and oppressive notions of womanhood, transforming the 2-dimensional Disney Princess into an aspirational fully-rounded smart, feisty and flawed character ... It's a celebration of sexual liberation ... A metaphor for coming out as gay ... An admonitory yarn about climate change ... A sympathetic observation on the discomforts of Raynaud's disease ... In short, it is a very human, very simple, very beautiful (IMO) story which most people c...

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.  (T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land , part I: The Burial of the Dead,1922) These lines have lingered in my mind the past few days. Eliot wrote The Waste Land  in the years following the First World War, when the landscape of humanity seemed perhaps particularly stark and bleak. The poem resounds with disquiet and despair: all glimpsed respite turns out to be illusory or faltering; it seems improbable that any grounds for real...

Being of an uncertain footing on the levelest and driest of surfaces, the recent wintry outburst marooned me in our house for four days straight, with little but my Bible, my Kindle, several bottles of red wine, and a dangerously diminishing supply of apples, carrots and peanut butter. I was panicked -- not just about how I would sustain myself without said staples, but about the potential repercussions of sustained solitude. It felt like a return to the 'bad old days', when sitting around on my own was my predominant activity, and I was worried that I would quickly re-adapt and would struggle to remember how to be around people once the sun came out and melted my excuse for isolation. The episode was not without its advantages though. For one thing, it gave me a good clear stretch to finish Robinson Crusoe -- a book which, I confess, I was not overly sorry to escape from. Less "rousing testimony to the triumph of human spirit in the face of adversity", more "...

I'm pensive as I pair the socks. A mournful sigh or two escapes my lips. There is a dramatic flourish to the manner in which I add each newly-reunited couple to the growing pile. "What is it, darling?" -- Mr. W, resigning himself to my woes in generous acknowledgement of my none-too-subtle signals. "Oh, I dunno, you know, the usual" -- I try to keep it brief. His magnanimity takes a turn for the mischievous: "Awww. Do you feel like the kid who didn't get the presents they wanted?" A horrifying, hilarious, humbling hiatus... I feel profoundly diagnosed, with no choice remaining but to laugh at myself and my hitherto noble sense of weighty sorrow. (The sorrow lingered, but its pride and self-satisfaction were sorely dented). Indeed, the major part of my more recent miseries could be aptly described in that way: I don't get the presents I want. 'Tis true I have, in my own way, had  ' stuff to contend with' over the years -- and by t...

Right, I need to stop subconsciously assuming the characters of the characters of every novel I read. So much for all that chat about being intentional, thoughtful, processing stuff carefully, etc etc -- apparently that only works if the fictional examples I encounter behave likewise. Latest example, The Post Office, by Charles Bukowski (a postmodern triumph!). Lots of drinking, lots of fearless bluntness, lots of job dissatisfaction. Cue an evening of unchecked work-misery-plus-too-much-red-wine-fuelled mouthing-off and generally being an arse. Followed by a morning of self-reproach-plus-back-to-work-fuelled misery, and a definite longing to chuck it all in and turn poet, if only I had Bukowski's lyricism -- I never saw such stark, brief language used to such effect! In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. Thing is, Bukowski's three-quarters-autobiographical lead character, Chinaski, actually hides a go...

"Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble… and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something." ( Samuel Beckett , from 'Molloy', 1951) [1] Days when 'only Thom Yorke understands' are likely to be punctuated by the odd trip to the ladies' room to shed a few self-pitying tears; days when 'only T.S. Eliot understands' are probably best spent working from home where I am less likely to make a nuisance of myself; days when 'only Beckett understands' I would perhaps ...

[Edited to add (02/06/12): I keep taking this down and putting it back up again, because it was written in a moment of high emotion and it all seems a little bit too much about 'me', and 'feelings' and all that -- which, believe it or not, was not at all my intention when I started writing stuff. I hope I will find some more interesting things to write about in the future, but for now I will add this to the mix lest anyone think I am setting myself up as some sort of example of how to go about all this learning-and-thinking business. I am but come to it lately myself and have many mistakes yet to make...] In the words of Jeff Buckley (albeit the song's a cover ), "I think more than I want to think; do things I never should do". But I will stop there, because, mercifully, the drug references do not apply. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." ( Ecclesiastes 12 :12b) Over-zealous introspection, naiv...

Online privacy (or rather, the lack of it) has been making lots of people cross recently, with Facebook and Google the objects of particular wrath. Most of us who do the whole 'social network' thing have a lingering sense that we have probably given too much away already and are conveniently resigned to the fact that it's too late to do anything about it now. Contact details, relationships, evidence of wild nights out (which canny employers may correlate with lapsed productivity), preferences and consumption readily monetised into advertising and endorsement (" if you're not paying for it, you're the product "). All of which amount to an amplified, more broadly dispersed, and more succinctly codified representation of the public-facing 'you'. It becomes increasingly difficult to manage 'who sees what', particularly when you factor in the potential for other people's online activity to misrepresent or distort your 'image'. ...

It was a nice surprise to find The Artist every bit as compelling and impressive as it was hyped up to be. There is something immediately profound in the level of complex communication that can be acheived without words; our shared experience as humans seems to enable us to reconstruct entire thought processes and emotional journeys from facial expressions and physical gestures alone. Particularly memorable was the image of Peppy physically enacting the imagined caresses of George with the help of his suit jacket as it hung from a coat stand -- a proficient bit of physical comedy, and at the same time so resonant of that near-universal longing for reciprocated love. No wonder, then, that the film took on some 'big' themes. The one that stuck out most to me was pride in the face of grace. With the advent of 'sound', silent superstar George is old news and rising 'talkies' starlet Peppy is the next big thing. But Peppy loves George and watches with sorrow, rath...