Critic Cal

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.  (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, c.1609)  Was ever arrogance so eloquent! He's basically saying, "Look, love, you're a bit of alright. And I can write, right? In fact, I'm a big-shot playwright. Will's words won't wilt, I'll warrant you. Some centuries' time this rhyme'll be a rite of educational passage for school kids up and down our Scepter'd Isle and where'er else our native tongue be known." Only, he's Shakespeare, so he's saying it in words so Shakespe hear ianly splendid as to render them self-fulfilling. (Well, four hundred years and counting, at least ... so far, so good). Many of Shakespeare's sonnets are pre-occupied with the idea of immortalisation through the written word. The fact that most are addressed to a man (scholars are unable to unambiguously conclude that the relationship was a romantic one but much o...

Ever since I started trying to write poetry in earnest, looking back has generally been nauseating. How can it be that lines I am so proud of at the time of writing always seem so ... so ... well, so earnest (at best) six months later? Here's an early sonnet that I do still harbour some residual affection for. It is one of the less irksome outputs of a training exercise I set myself, to poetically connect passages in Acts with personal experience. The poem itself doesn't really rise above the status of 'exercise piece' but the process was a thought-provoking and prayerful one: Felix reminds me of a number of people I care about. HAPPY NOW Your head is full of knowledge, and your heart Of reticence. These strange ideas alarm — How they alarm! From time to time you start The Conversation: tap me on the arm, And take a seat, and sound me out. Until: “I’m hearing ‘righteousness’, and ‘temperance’ — What is this? ‘Judgement’ too — I’ve had my fill; Spar...

There's something pleasingly 'meta' about the way that  Neil Gaiman  interweaves intriguing fact [1], established myth, wide-ranging allusion [2], and his own ingenious fabrications: the reader is left having 'learned' an awful lot of fascinating stuff which may or may not be 'true', and is forced to confront the generally problematic nature of truth, how to get at it, and when and whether and in what regard it matters. As someone who likes to at least know the origins of the things I think I know, I found my reading of  American Gods  frequently interrupted by the urge to google. But, being as popular and influential as it is, much of the apparently corroborative evidence I turn up turns out to be rooted in the novel as an assumed 'authoritative source' in its own right, so that the internet (and, by extension, humanity...?) simply doesn't 'know' any more whether such-and-such a nugget of information pre-existed or was birthed in Ga...

Having read countless books of chivalry of days of yore and having filled his head with errant knights and ladies fair and noble deeds and devious enchanters ... in late middle age it dawns on  Don Quixote  that this is in actual fact his destiny. It is for him, and him alone, to bring knight-errantry and all the glorious feats and romances entailed therein bang-up-to-date for 17th century Spain. So he sallies forth -- accompanied by skeptical but willingly-deluded faithful squire Pancho and scrawny, disobliging noble steed Rocinante, to the great dismay of his housekeeper and his niece and in spite of the best efforts of his friends the barber and the local priest. His desire for adventure overwhelms him to the point where he is bound to find it even (or especially) where it isn't. And so, he battles fearlessly with monstrous giants (windmills), liberates oppressed captives (convicted criminals), triumphs in bloody combat with devious night intruders (hanging wineskins), take...

The ceaseless boundless thoughtless tribal head-to-head which is the social interweb plays host to many glorious, definitive, profoundly opposition-overwhelming JPEGs which are variously tweeted, posted, liked, re-tweeted, followed, commented-on, shared, reported, voted (up or down), removed from News Feed (hide all stories...? change what updates...? send feedback to [insert friend here]...?) and generally marvelled at in any of several possible senses for all of a matter of seconds before the page refreshes to deliver a fresh cavalcade of bite-sized resolutions to the deepest, most bewildering bewilderments of human nature and existence: Reality? Wow! Really? For sure? I mean...really? 'Cos, well, I always, like, totally wondered about that. What is the deal, then? All this stuff around me...the fabrications of Descarte's malevolent demon ? the projections of my own imagination ? What am I? a  brain in a vat ? a cell in a giant battery powering the Matrix ? if...

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.   (From  Snow  by Louis MacNeice)  Some people seem to find everything so straightforward. And that is why I must make everything extra-specially complicated, to compensate. At my university Christian Union, they got you to sign the UCCF doctrinal basis if you were nominated to serve on committee. (Cue horrified gasps from political idealists at student's unions everywhere…but our CU wasn't in the student's union and besides, there is a certain logic to the idea that the people running a 'religious society' be in some sense 'adherents'…) I signed it myself back in the day, and, although some of points a) through k) touch on things that I've still much to learn about, I reckon I'd sign it again in an instant. It is, after all, a pretty good summary of what I understand and believ...

Having so far avoided seeing Argo , Lincoln , or Zero Dark Thirty  does not seem to have prevented me from waxing vitriolic about my disdain for film adaptations of real events. [1] Perhaps if I can get it out of my system in the quiet of my own blog then I can stop inflicting my opinions uninvited on others. [2] My reasons for disliking true story films are many and varied. For one thing, I find a lot of them distasteful: they strike me as 'cashing in' -- financially, and/or in terms of recognition for those inclined to court award success -- on tragedy (e.g. Elephant ), or public sentiment (e.g. The Queen ), or other people's nobility and achievements (e.g. Schindler's List ). Secondly, I dislike the fact that they inevitably present fictionalised accounts and biased analysis as historical actuality (e.g. Braveheart , A Beautiful Mind , Pearl Harbor ). It is hard to escape the conclusion that we can never *really* get to *the* objective underlying reality of any his...

One of the many nice things about working in a place full of intelligent and interesting people [1] is that they tend to know about such intelligent and interesting things. A slightly unfortunate consequence of this is that I can't seem to have a conversation with any one of them without adding to my already infeasibly long list of things I'd like to read/watch/listen to/learn about. Gone, for instance, are the days when I could dismiss the entirety of contemporary fiction as unworthy of my attention; enough of it has found favour enough with my respected companions that I must resign myself to the likelihood that some of it may have some merit to it after all. Thus did I deign to read ' The Shadow of the Wind ', a novel 18 years my junior. And -- *sigh* -- it quickly won my begrudging affection with its warmth, compassion and convicting insight; even, in places (briefly, mind, and inferiorly) prompting comparison with ' The Brother...

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 ...