Still remembering after all these years

Courtesy DoctorsHangout.com

I've been talking a bit about memorising again in this blog, and have started to work my way back through the pieces - Scripture extracts and poems - that I've learnt over the years. After working over the last year on the huge Psalm 119 with its 176 verses (around about 360 lines; some verses have three lines as opposed to two) and its repetitions that vary marginally but can be confusing to keep in the right place, everything else seems a piece of cake.

It's been intriguing to come back to the pieces I'd memorised in the past - which I've revised more than a couple of times over the years - and find that they're mostly intact. I've now caught up with nine of them, and only one has proved hard to get back into. The others have mostly picked themselves up again during a half an hour's walk with the dog. Which has surprised me. I thought I might be starting almost from scratch, but in fact, the memory has kept hold of these lines over the years, parked them somewhere in the archives, went off and found them now that I need them again, and after a bit of dusting off and polishing, has brought them back into the main store.

As I say, only one has proved hard to get to grips with. Some of the lines were intact, but others took some real relearning. This was another Psalm, as it happens. Number 37, which, like Psalm 119, has quite a bit of repetition built into it. Furthermore, it doesn't flow logically from one thing to another. It's as if the writer decided he has a theme and he has to hammer it home, revolving around and around it until he's satisfied that he's covered all his bases. The fact that to the reader it seems like he's gone into a bit of overkill is another matter.

Another Psalm (139) came back much more easily, and there was a reason for this. Like 37, it has a focus and comes at it from all sorts of angles. But I'd first learned this psalm by adding a tune (of sorts) to it, and between the remembering of the tune and the revising of the words, it came back to me within the proverbial half-hour dog-walk.

All this is encouraging because I'm due to hit the big 70 next year (all things being equal, and God willing) and I'm heading into that time of life when things can go wrong with the body and the mind - if they haven't already. I could still get dementia/Alzheimer's (two blood relations, an aunt and an uncle, have had it) so I'm not assuming that doing all this memory work will necessarily stave off trouble with the brain. No one really knows, although we keep on saying that keeping the brain active and creative is supposed to help.

But apart from whatever might happen in the future, what this ability to remember stuff is saying is that the brain never stops enjoying working. The idea that our brains kind of go into old age mode after a while is a nonsense; it seems that they're much more likely to keep functioning even when the body is having problems if we encourage them. (By the way, I note that a recent movie is using the other piece of nonsense about us only ever using ten percent of our brains as its tagline. That bit of twaddle was discredited decades ago.)

Exile

We watched the three-part TV film, Exile, on DVD over the last couple of days. A seriously gloomy piece, but aided by a neat mystery that can only be solved if a man with Alzheimer's can be persuaded to reveal a secret. Improbable, I suspect, but the cast made it work.

John Simm plays a washed-out journalist who returns to his home town only to find that his father (Jim Broadbent) has developed Alzheimer's. His long-suffering sister (Olivia Colman) has been caring for the old man, and is at the end of her tether. She's not impressed to have her wastrel of a brother dragging her down further, and basically tells him to shape up or ship out.

He starts off badly but gradually picks up some of the slack, and then begins to try and find out why his father became so violently angry with him eighteen years before, an event that caused him to leave home. Alongside this, he starts an affair with his former best friend’s wife, causing ructions in a different area.

The film could have been very downbeat, but the casting is excellent, with the three leads at the top of their games, and there are enough twists and turns in the story to keep you guessing till the end.

Exit Lines

Reginald Hill was a prolific writer (he died last year) who not only produced some 24 very popular titles featuring the policemen, Dalziel (pronounced, roughly, De-el) and Pascoe, but more than 30 other books, some of them under the pseudonyms Patrick Ruel and Charles Underhill.  He wrote mysteries and adventure stories and historical pieces and sci-fi.  He also used varying structural conceits - one of the later Dalziel and Pascoe titles is written with a kind of Jane Austen language and thought - and the books are full of wit, literary references, words that no one in normal life uses, but seem apt for the occasion ('a reboant cantillation of obscene abuse', 'a usefully cunctatory bout of coughing'), crafty plotting, and superbly humorous insights into his characters. These are all mixed with ordinary everyday language, and the books shouldn't be thought of as inaccessible to the average reader.  It doesn't matter if you don't know what a reboant cantillation is - you'll get the idea from the context.  Hill once said: "When I get up in the morning, I ask my wife whether I should write a Booker prize-winning novel, or another bestselling crime book. We always come down on the side of the crime book."

I hadn't read anything of his until this year - there are always more authors around than you can manage to keep up with, even in a dozen lifetimes - and I started off with his book of short stories,  There are no ghosts in the Soviet Union, which we'd picked up secondhand somewhere.  The long title story is superbly written - a ghost story that works down to the last detail.  Some of the other stories are odd - one of them takes a Dalziel and Pascoe novel (one that's been filmed as part of the television series), takes us behind the scenes of the fictional television filming of the book, and makes the actor playing Pascoe a pompous self-centred ass, who, with some hasty rewriting of the script, gradually pushes Dalziel into a very minor role. Hill turns up as a character as well, the increasingly angry author who sees his popular story being turned into nonsense.

The only other Hill novel I'd had any contact with was Exit Lines, which I'd twice heard on CD while travelling to and from Christchurch.  When I say 'twice heard' I mean that the first time I heard about the first 60 pages, and then didn't hear any more, and then on a second trip, heard about 90 pages, and still didn't hear any more. So rather than trying to listen to the rest - I'm not good at just sitting listening to CDs unless I'm lying in bed sick - I bought a copy of the book, started it yesterday and finished it today. It's immensely readable, often very funny, and has a complex plot that Ian Rankin could easily have put together. The big difference is that Rankin's pervading gloom doesn't colour everything, and even though Dalziel may be on a par with Rebus when it comes to drinking too much for his own good, and may have a temper and sharp tongue to match his Scottish counterpart, there's such wit and humour from both the characters and the author, that you know you're in a different kind of world.

There's a strong theme of the difficulties of old age - people with Alzheimer's or trying to live on their own without family - and also the horror that many young people have for the idea of growing old. The story begins with the deaths of three old men, in fact; two of them may be accidents, the third appears to be the result of an attack. Nothing is quite like it seems, and the further the story goes, the more our original views about the deaths and their aftermaths are altered.  There are some wonderfully innocent people, and some surprisingly devious ones.  There are some that appear suspicious and aren't, and some that appear to be all above board - and aren't. Hill holds out attention right to the end, even though we think we've got to grips with what's going on at an earlier point. 

There are an endless number of lines that could be quoted (one character, Mrs Spillings, is almost Dickensian in her speeches), but Hill reserves some of his best lines for the taciturn, and ugly, policemen, Wield (a regular in the series of books). 

'Back door,' said Wield. 'Glass panel broken. Key in lock. Hand through. Open. Easy.'

Sergeant Wield was in fine telegraphic style.  He also seemed to have been practising not moving his lips, so that the words came out of his slant and ugly face like a ritual chant through a primitive devil-mask.

or

Wield looked at the new acquisition and raised his eyebrows, producing an effect not unlike the vernal shifting of some Arctic landscape as the sun sets an ice-bound river flowing once more through a waste of snows.

 

Old age and Tom Hussey

On the Sunday TV programme tonight they discussed dementia and Alzheimers, and some innovative approaches to dealing with the issue.  In one sequence they showed how the music from a man's early years had a profound effect on him in his state of dementia.  He became articulate and animated, whereas normally he was virtually dumb and sat in one position most of the time.  Another woman with some form of dementia who had been a concert pianist could still play without difficulty the pieces she'd learned years ago.  Music is a powerful force in the human mind. 

I've known for years how much easier it is to remember text that I've set to music.  The musical line somehow gives the words a structure that they adhere to more readily than if they're left just sitting with mnemonics to link them. 

But I wasn't going to talk about music, particularly.  In the programme they included several pictures by a photographer called Tom Hussey.  The pictures each had an old person in front of a mirror, and in the mirror was a version of themselves as a young person.  Sometimes another figure was included in the main scene.  These are wonderfully evocative photos, and the announcer mentioned the photographer's name and said his site was worth visiting.  It surely is.  There are portraits, photos of kids, action photos, groups, and photos taken to show a more creative element.  Much of the photography has what you might call a 'commercial' edge, in the sense of them looking like photos that could easily appear in a high class magazine as part of the advertising.  So it's no surprise to read in his biography that that's his main line of business. But plainly he takes photo for the pleasure of it as well.  There are also several short films, some of them made for ads, and some like mini-documentaries.

Check out the site and enjoy!

The wrong sort of build-up?

[Spoilers ahead]

I watched a film starring Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn a couple of nights ago.  It was called Lovely, Still.  Landau, who's still making movies at 83, made this movie back in 2008, and he looks very old in it even then.  Burstyn is about four years younger, but has aged rather better (or been helped to do so!)

The film, for almost 90% of the time, appears to be a love story between two elderly people who live across the road from each other.  There are one or two odd moments, but nothing to really get our suspicion levels up - or at least, they didn't get mine up, and I'm usually fairly well attuned to hints as to where a film might go.  It has some oddball comedy - nothing too outrageous - and seems as though it's all going to show just how good it is for old people to fall in love.

There are one or two questions, such as why this old man appears never to have been married before (the woman has been) and there's a scene at a Christmas party where the old man behaves more erratically than we might have expected up to that point, and doesn't know a child he obviously should know, but we're kept in the dark about these things.

Why we're fooled by what happens at the end is because the filmmakers have chosen to take an awful long time building up the romance (in fact I was beginning to think the film would have been better as a short), and more importantly, they keep letting us in on scenes that the old man shouldn't know about - in the light of what happens ultimately.   It turns out the old man has Alzheimer's and most of what we've seen during the course of the movie is nonsense.   He's been married to the woman for years; the younger couple aren't a couple but his children, a brother and sister, and presumably most of the rest of it is his imagination.   But looking back on it, this revelation in the last part of the movie is undermined for us because we've seen discussions between the wife and the daughter; we've seen an interview with the son and a prospective employee, and there are other minor things too.  Are we supposed to think that these were imagined by the old man?  If so, it doesn't quite work in the light of the whole movie, and for me this broke the 'pledge' the moviemaker has with his audience.

Some films get away with this: The Sixth Sense does it superbly; when we know the 'secret' we can look back over the movie and everything fits.  In this movie, things don't quite fit, and that's a pity.

Landau (who looks as times as though he's got a spray on tan even though it's winter) and Burstyn are great, and during the time when we're believing in their romance, they convince us entirely.   They hold us during the revelation at the end, too, but it's disappointing, somehow.

To show that I'm not alone in thinking this, here's Scott Foundas on the movie: ...don't even get me started about Lovely, Still—a first feature by 24-year-old directorNik Fackler screening in Toronto's dubiously named "Discovery" section—which can best be described as a very poor man's Away From Her as it might have been directed by a cut-rate M. Night Shyamalan. I realize the fact that this movie turns out to be about Alzheimer's disease is supposed to be a surprise, but any film grotesque enough to use Alzheimer's as a third-act, pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you twist deserves to have its beans spilled.

Hi Ho Silver!

I can remember the phrase, Hi Ho Silver!, but I’m lucky if I can remember the name of the actors who were in the films. Though I seem to remember that there was another horse called Tonto. Or was that the Indian’s name? Oh, dear.

Once I could quote you the details of umpteen films, naming the actors, directors and probably several other facts you didn’t need to know. Now I’m lucky if I recognise half the stars I see on screen.

And talking about silver, I can remember the fact that stocks of silver bullion are becoming hard to get, because I’ve had this fact hammered home to me on a number of occasions in relation to one of the writing companies I work for. But don’t ask me some other ‘facts’ I should know. I probably won’t be able to tell you.

I discovered that all this is perfectly normal. I suspected that it was, but I found a new book at the library the other day called Where did I leave my glasses? : the what, when, and why of normal memory loss. It’s by a woman who must now be getting on for seventy (she was a child in the forties) and who’s obviously been a top article writer for generations. Her name is Martha Weinman Lear, (of course I had to check it out on the book’s cover, because I’d forgotten), and she writes with great good humour and plenty of sense. She dispels the myth that most of us are heading for Alzheimer’s, and she includes plenty of sound scientific stuff in a very readable way.

She writes non-fiction the way I’d like to do it: plenty of information, but made so palatable that you just keep on reading. Years of experience probably helps, but for me it’s the sort of thing that’s quite hard. Maybe it is for her too. I don’t suppose she gets up in the morning and composes twenty pages on the trot without recourse to a few moments of thought.

I have written some good pieces in this sort of vein in the past – mainly for the NZ Listener – but I don’t seem to have the opportunities so much now. And many magazines have got deadly serious, so that humorous articles don’t get picked up readily. Just have to keep blogging then, to pay the bills.

Of course I should have checked earlier, but Tonto was the Indian. His horse was called Scout. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the name of his horse: The origin of Tonto's horse, Scout, is less clear. For a long time, Tonto rode a white horse called White Feller. In the episode titled "Four Day Ride," which aired on August 5th, 1938. Tonto is given a paint horse by his friend, Chief Thundercloud, who then takes and cares for White Feller. Tonto rides this horse, and simply refers to him as "Paint Horse," for several episodes. The horse is finally named Scout in the episode "Border Dope Smuggling," which was broadcast on September the 2nd, 1938. In another episode, the lingering question of Tonto's mode of transport was resolved when the pair found a secluded valley and the Lone Ranger, in an urge of conscience, released Silver back to the wild. The episode ends with Silver returning to the Ranger bringing along a companion who becomes Tonto's horse, Scout.