Critic Cal

The title of this post is guaranteed to make at least one person extremely nervous (should she see it) and any number of others darkly curious...but I confess outright that it is little more than shameless clickbait. I will be introducing a mother-in-law eventually, but not my one (not that I would struggle to find lots of wonderfully positive things to say, but I suspect that she would prefer to be spared even that). I was rather intrigued, the other day, to stumble on the concept of the Bechdel test  -- a set of criteria for assessing gender bias in works of fiction. To pass, a film or book must have 1) at least two women in it, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something besides a man. The idea (and the name) come from a 1985 comic strip by American cartoonist  Alison Bechdel : a character who has made this the guiding principle for her own cinema-going laments that the last film she was able to see was Alien..."the two women in it talk to each other about ...

Aargh, stupid flippin' irking sequels; dumb-ass mindless whatsit film industry. These days 's'nothing but an over-promoted sequin-smattered hamster wheel of money-spinning franchises, sparkle flying off with each deteriorating cycle. And of course the audiences flock , 'cause that's just what you do  -- to briefly shush the inner monologue of metaphysical anxiety, and give you all some shallow communal experience with which to fill the silences whilst hovering, disconsolate, by the broken tea urn in the office kitchen. And hype and healthy ticket sales are grist enough to the mill regardless of artistic merit so the wheel turns again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and -- surely not? but yes, indeed, again again, and no-one thinks to stop or ask if anybody actually enjoys or is remotely nourished by a cinematic diet of recycled pap.  OK; enough with the sheepishly-minced oaths and the inadequately-homologous metaphors... Suffice to say that there...

sonnet_cxvi_v2_cw2013 Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it finds weetabix-encrusted bowls, Nor bends, when bending to remove socks from the bedroom floor. Oh no! It is an ever-fixèd mark, much like the one left on the wall by that ham-fisted DIY attempt, That looks on tempests, and does not excuse itself from taking out the bins. It is the GPS to every long car journey back from stressful family events, Whose worth's unknown, although for goodness sake, don't leave it on the front seat to get taken. Love's not time's fool, though time-worn jokes may fall within the compass of a scathing glance; Love alters not with lengthy working days and weary weeks, But bears it out, and even finds the energy, come Saturday, to hoover to the edges of the living room. If this be error, and myself accused, Will never writ, nor I his words abused. (cf. an earlier draft ) Bearing with one another doesn't ...

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Sunk in these thoughts, my hapless self despising, I turn for balm to Sonnet Twenty Nine But two-thirds down, I feel my rancour rising... The Bard recants his woe, and says he's fine! Well, thanks a million, Will: my misery Was reckoning on yours for company.  ( Shakes et Cal. And I do apologise... ) So, feeling low, and low on fellow human low feeling, and betrayed thus by the Bard,  Pessoa  beckons -- as companion to my own disquiet I find him quite disquietingly meet: "I question myself but do not know myself. I've done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my li...

"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...