Masterclass

Here is a masterclass in nuanced screen acting, showing how much can be achieved with the merest hint or fleeting shadow of an expression. On the big screen, less is indeed more.

The Alice Thomas Ellis Revival Starts Here

Over on the Dabbler, I write about The Inn At The End Of The World and urge everyone to get reading Alice Thomas Ellis...

By the way...

Don't miss the chance to win a Christmas Fox. Lovely little books they are...

A Call to Arms

Enough frivolity - it's time to get serious and get behind the gay griffons of Munster (in a non-sexual way of course). These blameless birds, exercising their basic griffon right to express their sexual identity with a bit of hearty man love and nest-building, are to be forcibly separated by the heterosexist authorities. Naturally the gay community, in solidarity with its feathered brethren, is up in arms about this monstrous infringement of griffon rights. And no wonder - when it comes to gay birds, Germany has form - remember the gay penguins of Bremen, brutally torn asunder in the name of heterosex. First they came for the penguins and we did nothing. Then they came for the griffons...
I'm thinking of starting an e-petition... Or, on reflection, perhaps not.

Afterlife Again

Reading John Williams's novel Stoner (of which more later), I came across this passage, describing his hero William Stoner's reading as a student:
'He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marvelled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.'
Doesn't this perfectly express what's right about the 'pagan' attitude to death and what's wrong about the Christian attitude - the one that leads all the way to Dylan's 'poor immigrant' who 'passionately hates his life and likewise fears his death'? The pagan's relaxed equanimity in the face of personal extinction seems attractive and humane. In fact, the more I learn about evolved late classical paganism, the more attractive it seems, and the more mystifying the takeover of Christianity becomes. The religion of late classical times seems to have been such an easygoing matter, to do with asserting cultural identity rather than searching one's conscience, observing the cult rituals rather than wrestling with the knotty business of belief. With due observance made, a person was free to go about the business of enjoying life, untroubled by thoughts of death and judgment. The supernatural world seemed very present but largely non-threatening and taken for granted, the gods very much like ourselves, apart from their special powers. The afterlife, in as much as there was one, seems to have been a hazy affair that was most unlikely to involve an ordinary person in eternal torments - there was nothing to be feared. Compare this with the ever-present horrors of Christian eschatology and the demands imposed by the Christian belief system on the individual conscience. How did such a joyless and painful world view make headway against the pleasures of pagansim? Perhaps it didn't - perhaps the reason for the phenomenal success of early Christianity was simply the power and beauty of Jesus's actual teachings, before they were distorted into the ugly forms of Christendom as The Church arose. Also, of course, Christendom was very clever at adopting and adapting the externals of paganism (and no doubt brutal in its suppression). I don't know - I'm no historian - but that the comfortable, civilised late pagan world embraced Christianity so quickly and completely (apart from Julian the Apostate's attempted fightback) has long seemed to me a great mystery. It surely can't all be explained by the conversion of Constantine - can it?

Wagtail

Watching a pied wagtail busily trotting about on a platform at Clapham Junction this morning got me thinking about how dramatically the bird life of town and suburbia has changed in my lifetime. When I was a boy, you would only ever see pied wagtails in the country, always by rivers - ditto herons, which were also very much scarcer than the wagtails. Jays and magpies were country birds, only rarely seen in town - as were long-tailed tits - and crows never appeared in the vast numbers that are common now. Cormorants had been absent from London's river for centuries, and kingfishers were a rare sight anywhere near town. The only bird of prey you might (if you were lucky) see was a kestrel, egrets were unheard of, and the collared dove an exotic vagrant. No one would have dreamed that squadrons of screeching ring-necked parakeets would one day be overflying London's parks... How things change - and it's good that not all the incoming birds are of the broad-shouldered, bullying, scavenging kind. The dainty pied wagtail, with its 'rather sprightly' manner (as the RSPB describes it), is always a joy to see. I first realised just how urban it had become when, one winter dusk, I came across a loudly twittering town centre tree. Taking a closer look, I saw that it was full of roosting pied wagtails - maybe a couple of hundred - settling down for the night, in the full glare of the streetlamps, untroubled by the loud bustle of human life around them. These urban roosts are quite normal now. Wagtails have also been known to roost at sewage treatment centres, riding around through the night on the rotating arms of the sedimentation tanks. That I would like to see...

Birthday Girls

On this strangely productive day in 1887 were born the artist Georgia O'Keefe (hence the picture) and the poet and unlikely celebrity Marianne Moore. I keep finding out new and strange things about Miss Moore - the latest being that she wrote the liner notes for Muhammad Ali's spoken-word album I Am The Greatest! She was also invited, in 1955, to come up with 'inspirational names' for Ford's big project, the E-Car. Among her suggestions were Resilient Bullet, Mongoose Civique, Varsity Stroke, Pastelogram and, in a flash of true inspiration, Utopian Turtletop. And what did Ford do? They ignored all her suggestions and called it the Edsel. No wonder it flopped - if they'd only gone with Utopian Turtletop, they'd surely have had a hit on their hands... Anyway, to mark the day here's the inimitable Marianne in full flow:

The Paper Nautilus

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters' comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.

Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely

eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram'shorn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten

by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,--
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-

laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.