Critic Cal

There's this great bit in Brave New World where Helmholtz inadvertently re-invents the lost art of poetry. In a lecture 'On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement', he introduces a technical example of his own: 'Pure madness, of course; but I couldn't resist it.' He laughed. 'I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,' he added more gravely, 'I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!' He laughed again. 'What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I'm a marked man.' 'But what were your rhymes?' Bernard asked. 'They were about being alone.' Bernard's eyebrows went up. ( Aldous Huxley , Brave New World , 1931) Being alone -- or feeling any type of mental or emotional 'excess' -- is some achievement in Huxley's imagined world of r...

" If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”  “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.  “Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”  (Charles Dickens, from  A Christmas Carol ) Bah, humbug! -- Would that 'they' would let me be to keep Christmas my own way. But every year the same! Grrr. 'Be here', 'eat this', 'sing that', 'feel joy', 'talk to these people', 'smile now', 'say thank-you', 'wear this hat'... ('Drink up'...by which stage, it's usually '*sigh*, well, maybe I will...' :-/ ). If there's one thing that really riles me this time of year it's the 'magic' of it all (ferociously, disgustingly  monetised by the advertising industry ). Last year, I ...

"Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning." ( Joseph Heller ,  Catch-22 ,  from Chapter 8 'Lieutenant Scheisskopf ') Justice, injustice, and the aching arbitrariness of it all is a central theme of Catch-22 [1] -- summed up powerfully in Chapter 39, which finds the protagonist Yossarian (a WWII bombadier) wandering through the streets of Rome, hopeless and helpless in the face of human tragedy and suffering: The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash h...

Wimbledon is here. Wait, now... didn't Beckett's Lucky have something to say about tennis? Ordered to 'think', and supplied with his requisite hat, he spouts... “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast heaven to hell so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry […] waste and ...

We finally got round to watching ' Un Prophete ' the other day. It recounts the Machiavellian progress of a young inmate in a French prison, amidst horrendous violence, racism, injustice, corruption...it's pretty unrelenting, and if there's any sort of redemptive subplot I didn't find it. 'It was good, I liked it'...Hmm. Seems I'm pretty inured to graphic depictions of hopelessness and brutality nowadays. Perhaps that's partly because the brokenness of the world is not news to me...I agree with the film's 'diagnosis', so far as it goes. But it doesn't have (from my perspective) the whole picture : there is a hope, and it comes from outside of human nature. That film didn't recognise that hope, but it didn't challenge or undermine it, or offer any sort of alternative...it was just as though it hadn't 'discovered' it. So, for me, it inspired compassion for the world but not despair for myself. By comparison, ' ...