Wagner & Fry

Watched a documentary called Wagner & Me by Stephen Fry yesterday in which he expounds his enthusiasm for Wagner's music.  Fry has loved Wagner since he was a child, and he was like a child in the way he reacted to coming for the first time to Bayreuth, and the theatre Wagner had built for his music-dramas.  His enthusiasm was certainly one of the high points of this otherwise rather sluggishly-put-together doco, in which the music is often heard but there is only a little sign of it being performed on stage.   (We see some rehearsals, but no actual performances, I don't think.)

Fry also examined his Jewish background in relation to the way Hitler had 'taken over' Wagner, and smeared the huge colourful tapestry that Wagner created.  He sits on the steps where the Nuremberg rallies took place and feels uncomfortable about being there.  He can't bring himself to stand up on the platform where Hitler stood, even though it's a well-known tourist spot.  Towards the end of the doco he meets up with a women who survived Auschwitz - she was a young cellist and played in the orchestra that was produced from the prisoners.  Fry discusses his quandary with loving Wagner's music when Hitler had so besmirched it and left his historical stain on it.  The woman, in so many words, tells him to get over it.  At the end of the day, Wagner's genius is far more important than Hitler's attempt to use Wagner for his own ends.  (Though Fry also points out that Wagner wrote a particularly nasty anti-Semitic article at one point in his life, possibly because two Jewish composers, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were much more popular than him at that point.)

There's one particularly delightful moment in the film.  A pianist whose name I didn't catch is playing and discussing the Tristan und Isolde 'chord' that only gets resolved at the very end of the opera.  (It's interrupted at one other point when resolution seems imminent.)  He's playing on Wagner's own piano, a Steinway that was presented to Wagner by that company.  It's a massive grand and still holding up well after more than a century of use.  Fry, who claims no great skills as a musician at an earlier point in the film, waits with enormous anticipation to play the very last note of the opera, when all has been brought to fruition.  And hits the wrong note!  His embarrassment and hilarity makes it worth watching the film.

The other interesting thing was seeing the inside of the Bayreuth theatre, which is an odd building.  It's design - inside and out - is fairly ugly, to be honest, and from the film it looks as though the stage is narrower than the audience area.  Yet every seat has a clear view of the stage, according to Fry.  The stage seems as deep as it's wide, which is an odd way to design a stage.  However, it obviously works, since it's been showing successful productions since it was first built.  We saw the stage machinery as well, both under the stage and high above it - very high, in fact.  And then there's the intriguing way in which the orchestra isn't in a pit at the front of the stage, but virtually underneath it.  Only the conductor is visible to the singers.  There are a few comments on it here in Wikipedia.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationships with Wagner's music myself.  Personally I think the music-dramas (he wouldn't call them operas) are excessively lengthy and exhausting for audiences.  They're self-indulgent in terms of how much Wagner thinks needs to be included.  And the best tunes, by far, are given to the orchestra.  In fact, it's the orchestral music that grabs me far more than the singing, which, while it might be dramatic in form, is often tuneless to the point of tedium.  The orchestral interludes in the operas make me wonder if perhaps Wagner mightn't have been a much better composer of symphonies, if he'd gone in that direction.  Though if he'd considered that those needed to be as long, comparatively, as his operas, I might struggle!

The Ode Less Travelled

I’ve just finished reading Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. He makes an enthusiastic case for writing and reading poetry (especially reading good poetry), and for learning to understand and use long-established techniques of meter and form. Not having an understanding of these, he says, means you’ll be working on shifty sands. (My cliché, not his.)
He marches his way systematically through every kind of metre and form you could imagine or want to know, as well as giving readers the chance to read his excellent and amusing examples. He also suggests plenty of exercises to do in order to understand the way metre and form affect the words, and the use of words. He wants to show that meter and form aren’t out-of-date and useless to the modern poet, but necessary.
Without his amusing and sometimes sardonically funny writing, and his poetry (which he claims he doesn’t normally present in public), the book would probably have appealed less. But he has such a passion for the subject, and such a knowledge of it, that he conveys enthusiasm to them to get on and write. (And read, of course.)
Readers should read the poetry in the book out loud - it isn’t just Fry’s poetry that appears, but plenty of good and great examples. He knows what’s worth reading and what isn’t and sometimes isn’t backwards about saying so. His own examples can verge on the scatological (though admittedly very amusingly). Unfortunately he also decided to include four filthy pieces of poetry in order to show that filthy poetry exists. This seemed to me to be a mistake, but maybe others will appreciate it.
Fry introduced me to many poets I didn’t know, and got my poetic juices going. Though I must say I was too busy reading the book to do the examples!

Rhyme or not to rhyme

The following paragraph (pg 163) comes from Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, a marvellous book looking at the technical aspects of poetry, which Fry infiltrates and invigorates with his daft and witty sense of humour.   At this point he's just spent quite some time discussing rhyme, and by dint of using the terrible disastrous William McGonagall poem on the disaster on the Tay Bridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Wreck of the Deutschland (Hopkins is obviously a poet he admires a good deal), Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain' (on the sinking of the Titanic) and Tennyson's superb (if all too familiar) 'Charge of the Light Brigade' has shown how difficult it is to use good rhyme in a poem intended to commemorate a disaster.  

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail.   I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming.  Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry [Fry enjoys it when it's done well]  it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words.  It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting 'ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace...' when surely a proper poet should be thinking high pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus.  Well, yes.  But a rhyme is a rhyme and won't come unless searched for.  Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme.  To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas.  It is one of the things we do.

This paragraph resonates with me, of course, because much of my time in the last year has been spent finding that elusive note or chord for the musical I've been writing - Grimhilda! - and trying to find rhymes that make sense, fit and don't take the verse off in a direction that has nothing to do with the plot.

 

Lacking Celebrities

There’s been a distinct lack of celebrities wandering around in the same places as we’ve been wandering since we came to England. In fact, the only celebrity we’ve seen is Stephen Fry, who was shooting a program called Kingdom (as far as I can make out) in Swaffham, the day we were there.
I’ve expected to see a celebrity in almost every supermarket or large store or main street or boutique shop. Nope. They’re very thin on the ground at present, or maybe in hiding during the summer. There was an older woman in the supermarket last night who seemed distinctly familiar from some tv progam, and I was tempted to check her out, but decided to let her have her privacy in the end. Plus it didn’t seem to be a very celebrity thing to do for her to be pushing her supermarket trolley from the wrong end, and then, when she kept getting her feet stuck in the back wheels, turning the thing sideways and having all four wheels going westwards.
Stephen Fry appeared on tv in a completely different program one night on tv: he was discussing the fact that he suffers from manic depression. And he interviewed several other people who had the same illness. Most of them, curiously, said they were happier in the end that they'd had it than not; only one woman said she would prefer to be dead. (One other bloke had tried to kill himself, by walking into a moving lorry. It had left him with severely damaged legs - and a will to go on living!)
Still, at least she hadn’t done what I did one day. I pulled the nearest trolley from the pile outside, thought it was a little large, found it quite difficult to handle, and only later discovered it was for the disabled shoppers.

In the Kitchen

When we get back from the UK, I think we’re going to have to replace some of our cookware. Our longstanding non-stick pans are no longer non-stick, and our wok rocks on the fire. Our fry pan delights in sticking to anything that’s placed in it, and you wonder what you’re eating along with the fried eggs.
In the course of getting sorted for the trip, we’ve thrown out some older kitchenware, and stored away still more. The kitchen and its cupboards are a great place for things to hide away for years, unused or unopened; or opened and forgotten, or dusting the shelf with pepper, or cumin, or curry powder. We’ve had a good clean out, but it takes constant surveillance to keep a kitchen spick and span. Spick – there’s an interesting word we never use in any other context.
In fact, anyone who delights in the English language must enjoy kitchen words: skillet, poacher, chafing dish, griddle, spatula, trivet, to name just a few.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

This is a delightful book, wittily and sharply written, and also full of humanity. It's the story of a retired man who, while at breakfast one morning, receives an unexpected letter from an old friend. Before the day is over he has decided to walk from the South of England to the North, in order to 'save' her from the cancer she has. His harridan of a wife is naturally puzzled by his sudden change of character, and is angrier at him than ever.  However, nothing in this book is as it seems at first, and gradually we discover that there are secrets we've not been party to early in the story that change our views of the two main characters, Harold and Maureen.  
 This could have been just a 'road' story, but Rachel Joyce makes it much more than that by gradually unpeeling the backgrounds of her characters' story. It's also a novel full of faith and hope and charity and forgiveness, even though the two main characters more than once claim not to be ‘religious.’ I’m not sure why this needs to be said: at the end of the book, Harold, who has by then walked hundreds of miles to ‘save’ his old - and long-lost - friend, Queenie, finds her dying in a hospice run by nuns, and the nuns are presented as warm and loving, not as caricatures as is so often the case in modern novels.
The book is perhaps more humanist in tone than religious: it has a basic feeling of the good that’s in humanity, even though some characters are either well off the rails (certainly at the beginning) or get right for a while and then go off again.  But the people Harold meets on pilgrimage, for the most part, are helpful and giving, without requiring anything of him.  And he learns to live with less and less as he goes on, because he knows that there will be people willing to provide for him.
It’s a complicated book – Joyce isn't however trying to say that everyone is good, and the world is all as it should be. Harold only proceeds with his journey because of an exaggeration a young and somewhat disinterested woman in the local garage tells him. Perhaps it's even a lie. We learn over time that neither Harold nor Maureen are entirely truth-tellers; their lies are hidden from us, the readers, and only gradually revealed. Furthermore, they haven’t acknowledged these lies to each other over more than twenty years, nor asked for forgiveness.  Neither of these characters are ‘saints’ so it’s not surprising they don’t call themselves ‘religious’, but the reader is certainly in sympathy with them. As we learn more and more about the crisis that precipitated the downfall of their marriage, we realise that Maureen, who starts out in the story as an absolute horror to live with, has never acknowledged that it’s not her husband’s fault that she’s the way she is, even though she’s blamed him. When she starts admitting the truth she begins to change, though not overnight.  
 Is ‘Queenie’ a saint, like those saints of old whose shrines people made pilgrimages to?  We never learn more than what Harold tells us. Given the nature of the other characters, it’s probably unlikely that she's a saint in any sense, but we do learn that she's had courage to stand up in the past to the only real 'villain' in the story. 
There's a sense of 'cleanliness' about this book.  In spite of the behaviour of the main characters towards each other, neither has ever been unfaithful in their marriage. This may be surprising given what we learn about the nature of Harold's upbringing, and the seeming designs the widower next door might have on Maureen.  But it makes a refreshing change: so many novels rely on characters committing adultery as an excuse for crisis or action.
Joyce is about to publish her second novel.  I'm pretty sure I'll be reading it!

Hobby Horse

In the thicket of bad poetry, we need a machete.  So writer Douglas Wilson heads up a very brief post which consists simply of the following: "We have to recover the older standards for writing poetry, and if we have the slightest inclination, we should encourage it as much as we can . . . The first stuff we write will probably not be very good, but we should laugh at it and keep going. We are labouring for the kingdom."   

This quote is taken from a book Wilson wrote called Beyond Stateliest Marble, which focuses on the poet, Anne Bradstreet, who lived in the 17th century, in Massachusetts.  Her first book of poetry was published (unbeknownst to her) by her brother-in-law - he gave it the rather embarrassing title of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, by a Gentlewoman of those parts.  Ouch.  (You can see two lovely poems she wrote to her husband here.)

I assume she's the writer of the quote above, and lest you think what she's saying is rather out-of-date, check out my post on Nicholson Baker and his book, The Anthologist - and the poem I wrote attempting to rhyme, something that proved more difficult that you'd expect.  (Or at least it did on this particular occasion.)  Baker's book is all about a supposedly fictional character who thinks that rhyming in poetry (and therefore, form) is due for a revival.  He'd agree with the opening sentence of this particular post, in fact. 

Stephen Fry, whose book, The Ode Less Travelled, has been a favourite of mine in the last few months (and was back in 2007, it appears, according to some notes I've just found), is also an enthusiast for form in poetry - and rhyme.   Not for him the standard strollers of many poetry books these days, those writers who couldn't rhyme if they wanted to, and whose metre makes a man with a limp seem normal.  I don't have any problem with free verse, but I think that if it's so free it doesn't seem to be anything more than a paragraph cut up into lines, then it should just remain a paragraph.   Take, for example, Sun Gazers by Stephen Dobyns.  Dobyns can write poetry, there's no doubt, because there are several examples on the site this is part of, but this poem just rolls on without any sense of rhythm....to me.

Enough!  I'm back on my hobby horse again...(which may be appropriate given that last poet's name...)

Two books

While travelling to and from the States in the first couple of weeks of this year I read two books (wasn't time to read more; plus, on the way over I had a cold and didn't feel like doing anything).   One - I read this on Kindle - was Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.   The other was a book I picked up because it was going for under $5US in a bookshop at San Francisco airport.  (Of course by the time they'd added on the tax  - why don't they just include it like sane nations do? - the book was slightly over $5, which niggled my NZ equanimity a little!) This one was The Anthologist, by an author unknown to me: Nicholson Baker.  This turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable book that I finished while waiting at the airport and on the flight home (including a patch at what was, by then, about 3 am NZ time).


This is listed as a novel, and it does tell a kind of story from the viewpoint of its narrator, a self-deprecating character called Paul Chowder, a sometime poet.  Chowder's lady friend has recently left him because he just can't, or won't, get on with the introduction to his anthology of poems that rhyme.  The suspense in the book hooks on these two facets: will he get his 40-page introduction done by the deadline?  Will his lady-friend return?

But far more of the book hinges on Chowder's (or perhaps Baker's) views on poetry that rhymes, and how that's much closer to the human soul than free verse (even though he has such a writer's block that he can't write such poetry anymore).   He also offers in the process his views on innumerable poets, giving snippets from their biographies, critiques of some of their poems, the connections between different poets and how that affected what they wrote, and much more that's related to the topic.  It's a grab bag full of wit and some wisdom, some strong views and some snide ones, and numerous hilarious stories about all sorts of things, related and unrelated to the novel's 'story.'   It's thoroughly enjoyable and quite unlike any novel I've read.  The subject matter appealed to me, which helps (it's not long since I finished Stephen Fry's book on writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled), but Baker is so engaging in this book, whether he's pretending to be Chowder or not, that I found it hard to put it down.

The author of the other book, Alan Jacobs, is someone I follow on Twitter (his Twitter name is @ayjay).  The quotes he collects that appear on one of his blogs - More Than 95 Theses - are worth following alone, but he's also written several interesting books, including one of C S Lewis (The Narnian) that is a better biography and discussion of Lewis' works than any I've read.

His new book is a paean to the joys of reading, a discussion of whether reading is going downhill or on the rise (it's the latter), a discussion on whether it's necessary to follow slavishly through books like The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You died, or whether it's better to read on a Whim (and he explains that a Whim with a capital W is somewhat different to a whim without the capital).   He shows that reading isn't limited to those books that are important, and that in spite of what such critics as Harold Bloom say, reading Harry Potter and the like (and even trashy novels) definitely has its place.  He also talks about the fact that we have different views of the same book at different stages in our lives: what seems wonderful when we're young can be dry years later (he found Absalom, Absalom! a revelation when young, but difficult to enthuse about a couple of decades later) - or vice versa: a book that's impossible for us to read in our youth may open itself to us when we've lived longer.

He writes about abandoning books without guilt - this is something we find hard when young; it seems 'wrong' to have got so far through a book without finishing it.  (I've begun to keep note of those books I've abandoned, with an explanation as to why I didn't persevere; perhaps this helps assuage the guilt!)  And, as he says, abandoning a book at one period of your life doesn't mean you can't come back to it at another stage.

He has a wonderful section on annotating books - whether we should do it with page-turners, and why we should keep a pencil handy when reading more serious works, particularly non-fiction.   His comments here reminded me of Billy Collins' poem, Marginalia.   (Billy Collins gets a few lines in Baker's book too: a few derogatory lines, because Collins is so successful and Chowder isn't!).  He discusses why we think we need to read faster.   (A blogger wrote that Mark Driscoll, the masculinist pastor of Mars Hill Church, claims to read a book a day.   Jacobs doesn't call that reading.)   And he looks at the value of reading poetry: a poem is usually short, its measure can be grasped quickly, but it requires several readings to get to grips with it.  This re-reading (and memorising too, if you can) is valuable for our overall reading.

Reading this book on Kindle meant I could highlight and make notes as I went along.  I think I've highlighted and noted more on this book than on any other recent one, such was my enthusiasm for what Jacobs has to say.  Of course, I believe deeply in reading anyway, so he doesn't have to convert me to anything, and much of what he says here is relatively familiar territory.   It's useful to have it under one cover, as it were.  Incidentally, he's a considerable fan of Kindle himself, and offers reasons as to why it's a valuable addition to our ways of reading.

Rhyme schemes - or not

Though I'm now using another blog to write specifically about poetry (and to include poems I've written myself), I've always included posts about poems and poetry on this blog too, so I'll continue to do so.

I've been reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled recently, and this time going through it in detail.  (I started to read it a few years back, after I saw it in a bookshop in England, but didn't go very far.)   In the section where he discusses rhyme, he uses that old system of detailing how the poem's lines rhyme by marking each line as a or b or c etc.   A common rhyme scheme, then, will be something like:
a
b
a
b. 

There are, of course, many more complicated schemes than this.   I've been reading through Les Murray's collection The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1983.   I've delved into it in the past, and am already familiar with some of the poems because they come from other collections that I have, but this time I'm working systematically through it (from the end to the beginning, just to be different) and am intrigued by Murray's oddball rhyming schemes.  If 'schemes' is the correct word. 

Murray's poems are a mix of the witty and humorous (Morse, which tells the story of a Morse Code operator who does surgery on a man by receiving instruction by Morse from a doctor miles away), or the ones in which he plays with sounds and rhymes almost overwhelmingly (The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter Colo Mountains - a crazy title that seems to have little to do with the poem which begins with the idea of a youth getting dogs to bark in the night), or the ones that philosophise about Art (Satis Passo), or ones that use foreign words and arcane English words or made up words (phallocrypt, single-bulged, cols, Orogold) that seldom or never appear in ordinary speech.   His breadth of language is always extraordinary, in fact. 


And then there are ones like The Smell of Coal Smoke which is a loosely biographical piece about his mother and grandfather.   In it he uses a common enough rhythm (though the lines are by no means always the same beat length) and mostly common language, and seems to be using a very common rhyme scheme:

aa
bb
cc
dd

This scheme comes a cropper in the second stanza where it goes to:

aaa
bb
c
a
c

The c rhyme happens to rhyme with the a rhyme in the first stanza....no doubt intentionally.

The third stanza has this scheme:

aa
bb
c
a
cc

Which appears to have nothing to do with the previous stanza, rhyme-wise.  The fourth stanza works this way:

aa
bb
cc
ab

Finally, stanza five works like this:

aa (a partial rhyme of frisson and Cornishman)
b
c
b
d
c (another partial rhyme, this time of Brown and soon - Brown has appeared more than once before)
d

Hardly conventional, and certainly disruptive if you think that he's going to go in a smooth direction, rhyme-wise.  It could be said that Murray doesn't know much about rhyme schemes.  It's more likely he does know and likes to break the mould.   Or that he's conveying something psychological by disrupting the expected flow of the piece, giving us a sense of how the boy who's 'narrating' the poem feels.   It's the same with the length of the lines, which sometimes are quite short, and sometimes seem to run out of breath.  You can read the whole poem here, and see what you think.

Busman's holiday

It's been a week or so of watching videos.  I'm kind of having a holiday after Grimhilda! you might say, although it's a bit of a busman's holiday, in that I've started on the ebook that I want to produce based on the musical, and I have a couple or three other projects in mind as well, including the sequel to Grimhilda!


The sequel?  At the moment it consists of a couple of pages of notes, but my collaborator and I haven't sat down and talked it through as yet (we only had a brief conversation one night after one of the performances) so it's early days.   And our church, Dunedin City Baptist (I feature briefly in their slide show at the top of their home page) - formerly Hanover St Baptist - is celebrating its 150th Anniversary next year, so I'm loosely thinking about doing something in the way of a drama/sound and light/something on Rosalie Macgeorge, who was the first Baptist missionary sent out by the newly-formed NZ Baptist Missionary Society.  We don't know an awful lot about her, but I'm hoping to be able to find out more than I already have (otherwise it might be a short piece!).  She was quite a pioneer, a woman well ahead of her time in how she thought about doing mission work, from her insistence on living with the people she was attempting to bring into the church rather than in a separate European compound, as was the norm; to her dressing as one of the people; to her refusal to take the wage paid by the Mission Society so that the people didn't think she was a wealthy foreigner.  She lived for only around six years in the mission field, became very ill and died on her way home to New Zealand.   She was only 31 when she died.

I've also been memorising poetry again - I'd stopped during the latter stages of the Grimhilda! production period because I found I just didn't seem to have the mental energy to cope with memorising.   Anyway, after reading Moonwalking with Einstein, I got going again, and have got four new poems pretty much under my belt, using some of the techniques Joshua Foer discusses in his book and some learned previously.  I've also started memorising music again, something that I've only done spasmodically in my lifetime, because I always felt I wasn't very good at it.  Like any kind of memorising, however, you only get good at it by doing it, and keeping on doing it.

For some time I've been 'collecting' poems from the Writer's Almanac that comes out each day as an email.  I don't keep them all, by any means, because some just don't grab me for one reason or another, but I've got about 160 on Evernote. One I'd like to learn, though it might be a challenge, is Barbara Hamby's Ode to Hardware Stores, a delightful poem with at least six beats a line and full of detail.  She mentions, at one point, nearly every nail you can think of, but she doesn't get onto acorn nuts, fortunately, or any of their innumerable brethren.  Equally naming her poem as an 'ode' is perhaps a little overstating the case, but it's done tongue-in-cheek.  As Stephen Fry says in chapter five of his book The Ode Less Travelled: 'In English poetry it [the Ode] was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for 'poem.'"  Hamby's ode/poem is a great chunk of a thing full of wonderful words, plenty of rhythm and lots of energy.

Anyway, back to the videos - or DVDs, I should say.   Last night we watched The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher, and Jim Broadbent as her husband, Dennis.   It's not a biopic in the usual sense.  Although it does take us through some of the political years, seen in flashbacks, it also focuses a good deal on the relationship between Maggie and her husband, and the dementia that was creeping up on Thatcher at the time the film is set.   Some American reviewers have complained that it's too British and doesn't explain enough about what's going on politically or historically.  That's right, it doesn't.  Some reviewers complain that it's not a 'proper' biopic, in that it doesn't take the person's life as the arc of its narrative.  And that's right too.  The scriptwriter and director (both women) have set out to do something different.  Being artists in what is still very much a man's world they have considerable sympathy with the way Thatcher was very much a woman in a man's (political) world.  But they don't forget that Thatcher was also domineering (especially in her later days) and wouldn't brook disagreement very readily.   She was unwilling to give an inch when the Falklands were invaded by the Argentinians, and was both loathed and admired for her strength in protecting what was still essentially a far-flung British colony.

But all this is undercut by the dementia she shows in the present - her continual hallucinations in regard to seeing her deceased husband (who keeps popping up to annoy her, it seems) and her very slow sense of what's happening mixed with occasional signs of her old passionate self.

Meryl Streep unfailingly gives reality to her portrayal of Thatcher; she has the ability to inhabit a personality in an almost uncanny way the voice, the behaviours, the stance, the characteristics of people she plays.  It's not just a performance; it goes way beyond that.  (Her uncanny and hilarious portrayal of Julia Child is a standout in this regard, but her performance in Mumma Mia was a disappointment, perhaps because she was playing such a one-dimensional character.)

Jim Broadbent and Harry Lloyd (apparently he's the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens) play Dennis Thatcher at different periods in his life; both are delightful performances, merging well into each other as the story swings back and forth in time.  The crazy humour that Dennis has is linked well between them.  I enjoyed the film, and was a bit surprised at the critics' dismissal of it.  Perhaps they didn't like the idea of a woman being at the centre either...?

Recent books

I've had a rash of finishing books in the last week or so; here's the list:

Orthodoxy – (re-read, on Kindle) – G K Chesterton – 18.7.13
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce – 19.7.13
Into the Woods – John Yorke – 24.7.13
Being a Christian – Helmut Thielicke – 25.7.13
Leadership and Self-Deception (on Kindle)– Arbinger Institute – 26.7.13

As noted, I'd read Orthodoxy before, but basically I remembered almost nothing of it, so I guess it's several decades since I first worked my way through it.  It was nothing like I expected, except that being a book by Chesterton it was full of wonderful inventiveness, delightful arguments against godlessness, and marvellous debunking of people who were his contemporaries.  It makes you long for a 'Chesterton' for the 21st century.  Unfortunately, he was one of a kind.  I highlighted so much of the book on Kindle that Amazon couldn't cope and hasn't recorded many of the later ones.  At least my copy on the PC and the Kindle copy, and the iPad copy, all synched, show all of the highlightings.  I just can't access the unrecorded ones via ClippingsConverter, or Kindle online.

Here's just one longer example of Chesterton in full flight (and he's only just getting started at this point):

I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull. Dullness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant. Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though, of course, I have had ordinary human vain-glory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths.

And a much shorter one, what might be called a Chesterton one-liner:

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

I've already written about Rachel Joyce's book in another post, so I won't elaborate further on it here. 

Into the Woods, which is subtitled a five act journey into story, has a blurb on the back from scriptwriter, Jimmy McGovern, along the lines of 'when I first saw this book I thought, not another book on scriptwriting.'  McGovern goes on to commend the book however, and overall, I would too.  I think its great feature is using examples from movies and TV shows we've all seen, though some of them it overuses (Thelma and Louise, in particular), and there is some other repetition which felt as though he'd run out of pertinent examples.  Yorke is good at insisting that the underlying structure (or the purposeful attempt to go against that structure) of virtually all stories has been around as long as good stories have; it's almost something we can't avoid if we want to make a good story.  Of course it's often used badly, and unimaginatively, but the essential structure also makes its presence felt in the best movies, TV and books.  If that structure is missing, or if the writer doesn't appear to be aware of it, the creation, in general, fails. Certainly the viewer or reader is aware that something is not quite right with the work. Yorke offers some argument against his own thesis, but manages still to say that even those who rail against the structure tend to use it unconsciously, and lays out the way in which they've done so: Being John Malkovich, for example, turns out to be 'properly' structured, even though its creator Charlie Kaufman claims it's not!

I picked up Helmut Thielicke's book earlier this year and have been reading it a chapter at a time when so inclined.  I don't know that it's his best book, by any means, but as always with Thielicke there's some good stuff in it.



Leadership and Self-Deception is a bit of a phenomenon, apparently.  I was alerted to it by a colleague who said that it could be useful for reading in relation to the pastoral supervision work I do.  Seemingly it's used in big and small companies around the world as a way of helping staff to work together for 'results' and good relationships rather than destroying each other.  But I found it's also useful in terms of thinking about my own relationships with other people, and I've been particularly reflecting on a work relationship I had a few years back that seemed to sour when it shouldn't have.  It gets to grips with blame, and self-justification.

It's written as 'fiction' though what that actually means is that the theory behind the 'getting out of the box' thesis is written out in dialogue form with three or four fairly cardboard characters instead of being presented as straight non-fiction.  The narrator comes across reasonably well as a 'person', but those teaching him are a bit bland in terms of personality.  Nevertheless, the material itself is of value, and, if taken on board, would certainly be of help within a family or a firm. It boils down, in essence, to do unto others as you would wish to them do unto you, and it's perhaps not surprising, when you go and investigate who the Arbinger Institute actually is, that the man who initiated the ideas in the book and its subsequent self-perpetuating life, C. Terry Warner, is a Mormon. His books in general, though listed as self-help, come out of a stream that uses Christian underpinnings to show people how to live (without necessarily having to become Christians).