Meanings eluding me

If you see a phrase in this post that seems to lack good English language logic, don't be surprised. The Internet is full of surprises, and the lack of proper English is just one of them, though probably one of the minor ones.

Fender Telecaster musicians friend is a phrase which I've been trying to get to grips with for the last five minutes, and I'm wondering if it's poetry of some sort. I know what a Fender Telecaster is: an electric guitar (the kind that tends to obliterate other instruments when it's played). It's been around since the 1950s, apparently, and has been continually improved from its original state as a 'masterpiece of design and functionality.'

I'm not sure that the phrase Fender Telecaster musicians friend is a masterpiece of design and functionality, and the missing apostrophe annoys. It might work in its present state if translated into a foreign language where such curiosities are the norm. Maybe.

So is it poetry? After all poetry is a place where oddities of the language appear frequently. I came across just such a one this morning:

The heavy bear who goes with me,   

A manifold honey to smear his face...

I've been puzzling since what 'a manifold honey' might be, or why the line seems so at odds with normal language. Often such lines come right after repeated readings of a poem, or after you've memorised it and it suddenly clarifies itself when you least expect it. (I find this with poems by Les Murray, often, although sometimes certain lines of his elude me entirely, lines such as 

.....No one here will be

a visitor gnawed by lifelong celebration.

I have a rough idea what it's about, in the context of the poem, but it's by no means straightforward. However, that's the sort of thing you've got to take with poetry; it inhabits a language world of its own, one in which it surprises you by juxtapositioning words that don't like sitting beside each other, or wrenching the grammar around in such a way that you can't figure out a verb from a noun.

So perhaps what I should do is jot Fender Telecaster musicians friend into a notebook or file, and keep it until one day it suddenly decides it's the basis of a poem. (Though I think I'll be obliged to include the apostrophe, or risk my sanity.)

Marian Year Celebration?

In my last post I mentioned clearing out some stuff from one of our two attics.   The box of photos has been sitting on the floor waiting an opportunity to be sorted further, and I've just had a go at it.  Heaps of family photos - my children, in particular, but also photos of me with a number of other relatives.   And various other memorabilia.  I've had a bit of a throw-out, because there comes a time when some stuff just doesn't mean anything anymore.

There are a number of photos taken on a camera that was so small you could hide it in your hand.  It produced equally small photographs (9cm by 6.5cm - or 3.5 inches by 2.5).  Amongst these were about a dozen taken at some event in Logan Park (?) in Dunedin that was held - I'm guessing - in the 1950s.  I think I have a dim memory of being at this, but that may be only that I've seen these photos of a number of occasions before.   I've now thrown out a lot of these little photos because they weren't of a quality to make them interesting enough to keep: people's heads (or hats, rather) in the way of what was trying to be photographed, or the distance between the photographer (my mother, no doubt) and the subject being too vast to make what was photographed comprehensible.

But a couple of the photos had been blown up and I'm reproducing them here.   As you can see, there's a huge statue of Mary - so it was definitely a Catholic occasion.   I thought it had something to do with a visit from the Pope, but according to this site, only Pope John Paul II is the only Pope to have visited New Zealand, so it wasn't a papal visit.   It might have been a Papal Nuncio (Envoy) vis. it, however, but I can't be sure about this.

My other thought that it was a 'Marian Year' - that would make it 1954, I presume   Perhaps someone else can enlighten me?

Gilead - again

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead again. I keep wanting to mark something on virtually every page; the book just seems full of quotable material. And it's not the clever laying out of words so much as wisdom. This is one of the few novels I've ever read that is wise.
Don't ask me how she does it; probably Robinson is no wiser a writer than many other great writers. But something in this book has brought out the wisdom in her, and it shows time and time again.
Probably quoting from it wouldn't work that well, because you need to have read what's gone before and to have felt the tone of the thing. The apparent meandering, conversational tone of the writing (an old man writing to his very young son) seems almost as if Robinson had sat down, from day to day, and just let the thing pour out. But I suspect it's far better constructed, and structured, than that. And the writing is frequently vivid. There's nothing 'casual' about the way this book is put together, even though on the surface that may seem to be the case.
I'm about half way through it again (I first read it in 2006, I think, when it was relatively new) and it moves me as much as it did the first time; maybe even more. I've just been reading it at a cafe and kept feeling emotional about one thing or another in it.
Perhaps it's the whole father/son thing that appeals to me particularly. Because of my own history I've always been a sucker for books that deal with that subject. Perhaps it's the fact that the main character is a good man; there are very few really good characters in fiction - or in life, if it comes to that. Perhaps it's the fact that in the last couple of months or so I've had more concerns about death and ill-health than I've needed to have in a long time. The main character in the book knows he's going to die fairly soon, which is why he's trying to lay out his life and history for his son. But he doesn't dwell on the dying; he's constantly talking about life, and creation, and joy and celebration and the extraordinary things that make up the day to day. Death comes into it, of course, but it isn't the focus.
As he says in a page (126 in my edition) I've just read again today:
I have not been writing to you for a day or two. I have passed some fairly difficult nights. Discomfort, a little trouble breathing. I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earhtly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I had done, by dwelling on them.
This speaks very strongly to me at the moment, when the discomfort I'm dealing with day to day tends either to get right in the way of things or be put to one side as something I will endure without great anxiety. Trusting in the Lord is an element of it, but not necessarily the easiest path to take.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll write more about this wonderful book as I go on.

Various holidays

In NZ we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, not because we have nothing to be thankful about, but because it isn’t one of our history.

Quite apart from that the date is too close to Christmas, and because Christmas and the annual summer holidays all tend to run together in NZ, that time of year is already a big one in terms of ‘celebration.’

As it happens we don’t have any public holidays between Labour Day on the 22nd of October and Christmas. So by the time Christmas comes we’re really ready for days off.

I see that the US, however, has Veterans’ Day on the 12^th November, and then Thanksgiving only ten days later. A bit of a clutter in that month.

In Spain they have yet another holiday in that period: 1^st November is All Saints’ Day, 6^th December is Constitution Day and 8^th December is Immaculate Conception Day. Three holidays in December. That’s a bit over the top.

Of course in NZ we have Christmas Day and Boxing Day as statutory holidays, and then a week later New Year’s Day and the Day-After-New-Year’s Day, which apparently doesn’t have a name even though it’s a public holiday. These four make up for our lack of holidays in the previous couple of months, and also ensure that we get over the Christmas rush.

Not quite so celebratory

From the sublime reaches of theology to the elasticity of Spiderman – Spiderman 3, no less.
My wife and I went to see it last night – even made the effort to see it on the big screen, along with twenty other people. The spiritual underpinning continues, with forgiveness well to the fore at the end of the movie, and with lust for evil well-expressed (one character even ‘praying’ for Spiderman’s death). There’s also a lovely visual moment when Spiderman is seen as a gargoyle on the outside of a church steeple.
But beyond the spirituality? It’s an odd film: three villains coming and going, Spiderman having to find out who he is and how dark his dark side is - and still not getting the girl…quite. The fight scenes are even more comic book than before, and stretch credibility to its limits - though they’re extraordinarily well staged. But a number of shots of someone being hammered into something much harder than they are, and of people dropping from heights and getting up after a quick shake of the head, and people surviving explosions. Well, it’s all just a bit much. I don’t think it quite matches number two, and number two didn’t quite have something that number one had. What I think that was, was celebration! Spiderman the first was so celebratory that I went and saw it twice, evangelistically taking someone else with me. Toby Maguire was so boyish in the role then and Kirsten Dunst was just so lovely. But this third movie requires them to trade on those qualities again and again, without any real development. Maguire is now 32 and even though he still looks boyish, there must be a limit to how much longer he wants to go on playing a child/man. You get the feeling he wants to break out in this movie, and yes, he does break out, but it’s only to go back to the Spiderman/Toby that he was at first. There isn’t any real forward movement.
Sam Raimi is a great director of this kind of movie, and deserves plenty of credit. But I just didn’t feel moved by the film, in the way I was moved at the first in the series.