Critic Cal

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 "...

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 ...

It's Bloomsday today, and Father's day tomorrow. James Joyce 's Ulysses , set on the 16th June 1904, is a phenomenal, bewildering, literary roller-coaster of a book which everyone should read [1] and which I would be fool to attempt to write about. Since previous posts have well-established me as such, here are my hasty scribblings. Still, points for topicality, no? Fittingly, fatherhood is a running theme. A father in search of a son: middle-aged Leopold Bloom, (the Odysseus figure), lost his infant son 11 years ago and feels emotionally estranged from his wife (the Penelope figure) of whose numerous affairs he is well aware. A son in search of a father: 22 year old aspiring writer, Stephen Dedalus (the Telemachus figure), has suffered the long-running neglect of an alcoholic father and has recently lost his mother. The story describes, in a variety of challengingly experimental literary modes, events in both their lives -- ranging from the basest of bodily functions...

"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 ...

When the greatest poet of the 20th century* writes a playful collection about cats targeted at children (albeit in such a way as to endow them with a pretty remarkable vocabulary by the end) it is, I guess, fair game for the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Actually, I really enjoyed 'Cats' as a 9-year-old. We had this amazingly inspirational and creative teacher, who (among many other things) taught us dance and read us poetry and took us to the theatre. So I've always remembered it with fondness -- a rich, multi-dimensional, culturally-expanding experience. Even in my musical-skeptical adulthood I don't mind what they did to 'Old Possum's' poems, pretty much preserving the fabulous words intact and matching them with energetic and atmospheric music/set/performance etc. BUT I made a discovery a few years ago which rather does grate with me... The big, crowd-pleasing, 'hit single' song from the show is ' Memory '. It's not from 'O...