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...

I wasn't going to write anything about 12 Years a Slave ; if ever there was a film which speaks for itself... But the morning after seeing it I was reading Habakkuk, and found in there a striking unison: O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted. […] You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he? ( Habakkuk 1 :2-4, 13) Much of the rest of the short book is about the terrifying judgment of the Lord. The sort of stuff that attracts a considerable amount of bad press around "the God of the Old Testame...

They don't call me Carolling for nothing. I love a bit of choral exertion this time of year. Bring on the way-outside-of-my-register top notes, the determined-but-disastrous descants, the I-don't-remember-that-one-from-before intervals, the oh-dear-are-we-still-on-this-syllable-I'm-about-to-pass-out slurs... But there's a handful of carols that I find challenging to sing for entirely different reasons -- and top of that list would have to be Away in a Manger : musically straightforward, theologically problematic. In fact, as far as my faltering understanding goes, I find it so debatable in places that I am driven to on-the-fly editing (for example, I'm not convinced about Jesus residing in "the sky", but I am pretty confident that he is "on high" -- which, conveniently, fits the rhyme and meter just as well), selective silence (I've read too much N.T. Wright to sing "fit us for heaven to live with Thee there" without worrying th...

CC from RyAwesome on Flickr I can feel the pull as far away as mid-September, when the first mince pies appear upon the shelves at Sainsbury's. The inescapability appalls me. I grasp at structure -- work, routine, the gym -- and thrash against the glitter, gluttony, commercialism, social obligation, expectations unmet and resented. Dragged disorganised, disoriented, struggling to think straight or maintain composure, losing sight of the important things in life and failing to be loving or restrain my raging selfishness...The Season sucks me in and spins me round and spits me out in January full of self-reproach and melancholy. Whilst Christmas has become, to me, a cause for annual dread, the Incarnation -- disentangled from the trappings -- draws me to increasing wonderment with every passing year. In the heart-stirringly good  Housekeeping , my new-favourite-novelist  Marilynne Robinson articulates it with compelling resonance... Memory is the sense of loss, and loss...

Quite what the professional (ahem) activities of Karren Brady  had to do with the anticipated proceedings of an away match in the West country remain a mystery to me even now. Nonetheless, defamatory speculations on this particular theme, resounding to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, comprised the central substance of the prologue to Swindon vs. Leyton Orient , which I attended, in great earnest, earlier this month. Once the action centre stage kicked off, the accompaniment subsided into the popular and versatile refrain most famously exampled by the 1998 classic Vindaloo : "Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urgh, Ori-urgh, Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urgh, Ori-urgh, Ori-urrrgh". I must confess I'm not entirely certain of the spelling. There followed a relatively uneventful twenty minutes or so, but for some mildly rankled recitative between a polite young lady spectator who wished to be seated, and a row of youths in front of her who preferred...

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...

"Who here is bad ?"... The speaker surveyed the congregation with spoof solemnity. It was a typical Sunday morning, the "bit before the kids go out" at church. I must have been about 6. "Who here is  bad ?"... I knew all about sin. I'd had it explained to me, and everything, and quite frankly it seemed to make a lot of sense. Disobedience, lies, unkindness; I could think of lots of things that I had done which would make me sad if someone else did them to me. And it made me sad that I had done them, and I imagined it would make God sad too, going by what I knew of God. So, naturally, I raised my hand. And everybody burst out laughing. "Oh, dear, dear", chuckled the speaker, "I'm sure you're not bad  -- maybe naughty occasionally, but not bad ". But nonetheless he summoned me up to the front, where I was made to hold a piece of paper emblazoned with that word in bubble letters as part of his interactive family-friendly warm...