Over-marked

I do quite a bit of transcribing of music using the computer programme, Sibelius. Transcriptions from printed copies or manuscripts are usually made so they can be transposed into another key. Sibelius, overall, makes the job very easy. I wish I'd had the programme when I was young and was first writing music, but of course at that stage there were no computers, let alone programmes like Sibelius. I often dreamed then of having a typewriter which you could use to print music, but the idea remained a pipe dream.

Anyway, the job of transcribing is generally pretty straightforward, except when you come across a piece of music that is so heavily marked by the composer with instructions as to how to sing or play the piece that you wonder whether he was having a bit of a fit on the day he wrote it.

A case in point is the piece I'm doing at the moment, Nocturne, by Michael Head, from a series of four songs under the general title of The Rim of the Moon. I really enjoy Head's music: it's a delight to play and the vocal lines are usually top notch, lying well for the singers.

Nocturne is a bit different. It's more dramatic in style than most of Head's work (though he settles down into his usual mode late in the piece). Consequently he's marked it very heavily, even with some contradictory markings. In one place the pianist is supposed to increase in volume when there's not actually anything to play. In another the tempo is marked both a tempo (go back to the original tempo) as well as Poco piu mosso (go a little faster). It's not actually possible to do that, as I'm sure Mr Head knew. Perhaps an editor got hold of the music and overwhelmed it with markings according to some reasoning we're no longer party to.

Half the notes in the vocal line and in the piano part are given stress marks. If you obeyed every one you'd never get to the end of the piece. And if there aren't stress marks there are accents, the sort that indicate you should give the note more weight than usual. There's a molto rit when the piece has barely started, and a poco rit only two bars after the a tempo. The singer, at one point, is expected to both return to a tempo and sing con moto simultaneously, which is rather like coming back to your normal walking pace while trying to go faster.

The first half or more of the piece is in a kind of recitativo style (that's indicated as well). So there is some excuse for giving the singer an indication of where to move forward and where to pull back. But most singers would do these things instinctively, and the excess of markings merely get in the way. IMHO.

It's like getting a play script from the director in which he's gone through and marked how you should stress each word, speak each phrase, where you should breathe, how loud you should be here and soft there. The lines of the original script would be buried beneath all of these markings.

Transcribing Mr Head's song would be fine except that as the transcriber I'm supposed to make sure I include all these extra details. I'm greatly tempted to leave them out, though of course that would mean not doing the job properly. It's very possible I'll miss one or two, even after a thorough proof-reading. But I'll grit my teeth and do my best.

The Mumbersons ˗ and the Blood Secret

I'm pleased to say that my co-writer on Grimhilda! has come in to help with the last stages of the book about the Mumbersons - the 'sequel' (of sorts) to the earlier book. Currently the title is The Mumbersons ˗ and the Blood Secret. 

She read it through a couple of weeks ago, or so, and said, Wonderful. Love it. That's very encouraging. And then of course the work started, rejigging lines, cutting phrases, sentences, paragraphs, adding in things that were missing, and tightening up the plot so that awkward persons (like herself) don't come along and say, But why.....?

Someone will always come along and ask, But why?even when you think you've covered all the bases, but you have to live with that. One of our aims is to see that these kind of people are in the minority!

The story's two main characters - Billy and Olivia - have been friends for a short while before the story starts, and together find themselves having to deal more than one curious thing involving Billy's blood, and why someone should want to have some of it. The connection with Grimhilda! becomes evident at the end of the first chapter, and increases as time goes on. More than this I'm not prepared to reveal just yet! 

I'm aiming to have it ready before Christmas 2014, and hopefully it will encourage people to go back and read Grimhilda! if they haven't already done so. 

National Shakespeare Schools Production

Last night we went to see the three mini-Shakespeare plays presented by the SGCNZ: the National Shakespeare Schools Production for 2014. Over forty senior school pupils from around the country came together for only a week and have had workshops and various trainings, as well as managing to put on, between them, three cut-down versions of Shakespearean plays. Cut down to about 40 minutes each, so still quite substantial. And these pieces were rehearsed only in the mornings of the week the young people were together, which makes the high level of performance and direction all the more astonishing.

We went to see the three productions put on two or three years ago, and one of those, Hamlet, was very compelling. But the other two didn't quite take off as well. This year all three are top-notch, full of wonderful actors, and so well directed that even people who find Shakespeare not easy to take would be enthralled.

Henry V was the first of the three, with Henry himself being played variously by seven different actors, boys and girls. The continual swirl of the action, the large groupings coming and going and the sheer enthusiasm made this a great start to the evening. My only disappointment was that the delightful scene between the French princess and Henry was missing. But it was probably too long to include, and would have been less effective cut down. In spite of that, this was a clearly directed piece that gave the young actors plenty of scope for drama, emotion and action.

Love's Labour's Lost came next. Pared down to its bare essentials it still managed to make the most of the comedy and retain some delightful scenes. The actors got hold of the comedy style with gusto and wonderful energy, the boys in particular making the most of every movement. It was good, in fact, to see young actors in this play, which focuses on the immaturity of young people (especially young men) when they fall in love, and how a 'gap year,' as it were, might well be more effective in making love stronger for the long haul.

In this play, for the most part, the boys played the boys' parts and the girls played girls, except for girls who played the delightful constable and the pompous Boyet and academic Holofernes. But whoever was playing whoever, there was such energy (for instance when the boys realise each of them has fallen in love and kept it secret, or when they're in disguise as Russians) and sense of comedy that the whole thing was utterly enjoyable and showed how Shakespeare, even when he throws long-winded words around like a whirlwind (long words are a theme in this play), is still amusing and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. (Even in the midst of Hamlet he lets Claudius mix up Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, something that audiences have done since the play first began; this was retained in the middle of all the seriousness of the rest of the play.)

Hamlet was played by two different actors (as he was in the previous version). This gave both actors time to refresh and bring renewed energy to this intense role. And were they intense! Sean Young and William Lu were equal to each other in strength and commanded the stage. There were some wonderful moments when they somehow swapped without your noticing, particularly at the grave scene where Ophelia (beautifully played by Rachel McLean) lies dead. At other times it was as if one actor handed over the role to the other. Beautifully done.

But the other actors in this piece were uniformly good: arrogant Claudius (Peter Thomson), emotionally-torn Gertrude (Maya Wyatt), pompous Polonius (Daniel Botha) and angst-ridden Laertes (Calum Hughes), to name just a few. The direction was full of invention (though my wife and I never quite figured out what people on the scaffolding were doing), including Polonius hiding himself inside his hoodie by having it on backwards when he was supposed to be behind the arras. And the fight scene with long duelling swords was as terrifying as you're likely to get. How they managed to get this rehearsed in the time allotted is beyond me.

What a climax this play has: not only the fight scene going on in front of the stage but Gertrude drinking the poison while her husband is trying to entice Hamlet to do so, deaths at the back, deaths at the front. It's a nightmare to put together and yet how wonderfully it works.

The performance is on again tonight, at 7.30 at Otago Boys High School's auditorium. Cash sales only at the door. Take the opportunity and see the wealth of talent there is around this country.

17.10.14 I'm pleased to see all those I mentioned here have been chosen to go on the trip to the Globe in London next year. And several of the main actors in Love's Labour's Lost have also been chosen to go. Excellent.

The uncompassionate poet and mother

Another extract from Margaret Forster's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Wilson was her personal maid for many years, from just before she was married. She took on the arduous task of maintaining the household in Florence, but also in other places on their travels, taught herself Italian from a book, and spent a great deal of time babysitting the Brownings' only son (known as 'Pen.') In spite of this, when she finally asked for a rise in her meagre pay after many years, the Brownings (who were not badly off) rejected her request. In this extract, some years later, she had fallen in love with the household cook, whose sleeping accommodation was even smaller than Wilson's - and Wilson's private room was smaller than Robert Browning's dressing room. Forster's irritation with the selfishness of the Brownings often shows through in the book, not only in this passage.

Wilson and the cook, Ferdinando, had had intercourse sometime prior to the events described here, resulting in Wilson becoming pregnant. By this time the two servants were married (a crisis in itself for the Brownings) and all four were in London for a few months.

Wilson, unable by the end of August to hide her condition any longer, told Elizabeth she was expecting a baby in a few weeks' time. Elizabeth was appalled. She wrote to Henrietta [her married sister] on September 6th that she was not only 'shocked' but 'pained.' Clearly, the baby had been conceived in the Casa Guidi [the Brownings' longstanding rented accommodation in Florence] by the unmarried couple. She does not appear, for all her acknowledged recognition of the power of sexual attraction, to have thought back to the living accommodation in Casa Guidi, to that room of Wilson's next to the even smaller one where Ferdinando slept. The proximity for two people in love was irresistible.
As usual, it was not only the immorality which shocked Elizabeth, that admirer of George Sand [infamously known for her many lovers], but the deceit. She hated to think Wilson had not confided in her. She had never given Wilson the least cause to be sure of her sympathy and tolerance in such a situation but she was angry that she had not been naturally trusted. But at least her affection for, and gratitude to, Wilson was sufficient to make her try hard in this crisis to 'think chiefly of her many excellent qualities and of what she has done for me...' as she put it to Henrietta.
Quite what she was prepared to do for Wilson in this hour of her need was not at first clear. Obviously, Wilson would have to go somewhere to have her baby: she certainly could not give birth in her employers' lodgings. It was arranged that she would go to her sister's who lived in East Retford (her mother had died two years before). Equally obviously, Elizabeth would need a new maid: managing on her own during Wilson's annual two week holiday was one thing, managing for six months another.
But these were trivial decisions compared to the underlying major one: would Wilson come back after the birth of her baby? Could she come back? Could she bring her baby with her? The Brownings' answer to that last question dictated all else: No, Wilson could not take her baby back to Casa Guidi. The apartment was too small, they could not afford another mouth to feed and Wilson would be unable to perform her duties properly. So they gave Wilson a choice: either she remained in their service, leaving her baby with her sister, or she left their service and kept her child. Where her husband Ferdinando fitted into this choice was for Wilson to work out. If she stayed in England, she lost him, unless he could miraculously find employment and support her and her child; and if she went back to Italy, she kept him but lost her child. She left for East Retford with no illusions, still undecided.
Nobody had offered her the only truly compassionate alternative: to keep both husband and baby, return with them to Italy, board the baby out nearby and continue working. Victorian employers though such magnanimity absurd. Elizabeth was a creature of her time in sharing what they saw as an entirely justifiable viewpoint: her peers would not have expected her to behave in any other way. But the author of Aurora Leigh [i.e., Elizabeth], so concerned with the plight of poor working women, so close to a servant who had proved her loyalty over and over again at considerable personal risk, cannot be judged by conventional standards. Elizabeth failed Wilson as Wilson had never failed her. To take Wilson and her baby back to Italy would have been impractical, inconvenient, unreasonably charitable - but it would have not been impossible for people as resourceful and courageous as the Brownings.  [pages 302/3]

The saga continues some pages later. Another maid went back to Italy with them for an interim period, until they returned to London again. 

There was one farewell Elizabeth was thankful not to have to make: Wilson was coming with them. She had at last made her 'choice'.  A year alone with a baby in East Retford had most effectively decided her. (In fact, she had made her decision within two months of the Brownings' departure for Paris the year before and had told them so but they had said they considered they were bound to her replacement, Harriet, until they returned to London.)
After the return from the Isle of Wight and Somerset, Wilson had her baby Oreste brought down from East Retford for a final leave-taking before committing him to her sister's care. Elizabeth described him as 'a pretty, interesting baby...with great black Italian eyes.' His parents proposed sending part of their wages back to East Retford each month to support him until they could be reunited. When that would be, or how it would come about, nobody was optimistic enough to speculate.
Nowhere in Elizabeth's correspondence at the time did she express any compassion for Wilson's agony. The mother who adored her own child and had been overwhelmed by the violence of maternal feeling, and the poet who was about to publish a poem full of the tenderness of women for children, and a defence of the exploited working-class girl [Aurora Leigh], both seemed untouched by her own maid's anguish. This was a severely practical matter. Nobody had exploited Wilson, nobody had forced her into marriage or motherhood. She was a servant, she had married, she had had a baby: the rules of the game were laid down and Elizabeth abided by them.
But it is not, strictly speaking, true that she was obliged to do so. It was not even true that no Victorian family could take in a servant's baby. Josephine Butler, soon to be famous for the campaign she led against the Contagious Diseases Acts, wife of an Oxford don, had already done so: she took in an unmarried girl who had been seduced by a Balliol man and had borne his child. There are enough isolated examples of that kind of courage, that sort of deliberate flouting of social convention, to suggest that Elizabeth could have taken Wilson's baby home with them if she had really wanted to, if her compassion had been large enough. [pages 315/6]

There is something of a 'happy ending'. After leaving the Brownings' service, Wilson eventually set up a boarding house in Florence, where she looked after the painter, Walter Savage Landor, among others. He had stayed with the Brownings in Florence some time before, after his wife left him. Wilson's son, Oreste, joined her at the boarding house when he was seven. (He had a younger brother by then, as well.) Later, she abruptly left Italy and returned to England, setting up another boarding house there, but this venture failed. She returned to Italy, destitute except for ten pounds a year Robert Browning had allowed her for old times' sake. When the Browning's son, 'Pen', brought the Plazzo Rezzonico, he remembered the old servant and took her in. She lived with him there, then went to Asolo with him, where she died in 1902. Her husband Ferdinando seems to have parted company with her in the late 1870s, but turned up later and was also taken in by Pen. Plainly the son had more compassion than either of his parents. 

Piece de resistance

When I was acting recently in the play, Hamp, I used an old book of poems by Robert Browning as my character's 'prayer book.' (I played a military padre.) I looked at the poems in odd moments during rehearsals: they were laid out in two columns per page, dense and in smallish print, and there were pages and pages of them. Perhaps a couple of hundred pages. Some of them were Browning's long dramatic poems which I think were intended for stage performance.

I'm not sure whether it was as a result of this that I looked a bit further into the poems written by Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Like her husband's poems, these seemed to me to have a kind of dated air about them, though some of them are still highly regarded.

Recently my son alerted me to the book, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, and I read it - very quickly, because it has one basic point and that's repeated in a variety of ways. But essentially it's about the need for artists to overcome the resistance to doing creative work; procrastination is a great bugbear for many artistic workers, and can excused on the grounds of 'writer's block' or other pseudonyms.

Shortly after this I began reading Margaret Forster's excellent and detailed biography of Elizabeth Barrett. It's long and there have been times I've been tempted to give up on it, but it's so well written that it's quite hard to put it down. Barrett suffered ill-health during much of her youth and early womanhood; possibly it was a major bronchial issue that was never properly dealt with. She traded on it to a degree, making herself something of a recluse in her own household, and excusing herself from going out because she was too 'frail' to exercise (the frailty was encouraged by her doctors, regrettably). It became a bit of a vicious circle, aided by her own father overdoing his concerns for her, and allowing her to keep herself from other people.

But Barrett also used this time to establish herself as a poet, and to learn, and to communicate (mostly by letter) with other writers. She published some poetry and made a small name for herself. This style of life continued well into her thirties and then her life changed substantially. By this time her mother had died suddenly and at least two of her brothers had also died, and her father's personality had become increasingly possessive of his remaining children. He refused to allow any of them to marry - though in due course some managed to.

Elizabeth began a correspondence with Robert Browning, and began to meet him secretly at her home when her father was out. (Browning never met his father-in-law face-to-face, amazingly.) In due course they made plans to be married, secretly, and after the marriage fled the country, going to Italy, where the climate was much more congenial to Elizabeth's health.

At this point, things on the poetry front became most odd. Here were two major poets living together with plenty of time on their hands in a country where they knew very few people, and where they had little in the way of domestic duties to contend with, yet they spent the first decade or more of their marriage barely writing a word of poetry! It seems extraordinary; they made excuses about one thing or another putting them off from working, and at times did make efforts to work, but very little was produced.

Browning had never had a real job in his life - his parents had subsidised him at home in London; Barrett, of course, being a woman in a well-to-do family, had never been required to work either. She had almost no domestic skills (Browning wasn't much better) and relied almost entirely on a long-suffering personal maid (who eventually also became the nanny to the Brownings' one and only child) to look after their every need. Their life-style was funded by some ongoing payments Elizabeth received in relation to a ship an uncle owned, and small amounts from their books, and an annual sum paid to them by a friend.

There was every opportunity to produce great poetry during this time, and yet both of them fell into the trap that Pressfield talks about. They put off the work continually, in spite of having no excuses for not working. Even when their one and only child came along, they were still molly-coddled in terms of actually looking after the child's physical needs: first a wet-nurse suckled the boy until he was well into his second year, and the maid, Wilson, basically cared for him in the day-to-day. Worse, Elizabeth was excessively indulgent of the boy, and even Robert regarded her mothering of him as most peculiar.

The moral of the story? If you have talent, don't waste it by procrastinating. You only have so long on this planet. Make the most of what you've given and use it.

Ditch the bookmarks!

Dorothy L Sayers, from a short essay entitled A Note on Creative Reading (from the back of a book called Begin Here, which was published during the Second World War and deals with economics and Germany and politics and a good deal more). 

Which reminds me: please burn all your book-markers - even the pretty one Aunt Mabel sent you last Christmas (or at least put that one away and only bring it out when she comes to call.) You cannot possibly be so bird-witted as to be unable to discover which page you got to by looking at it.
If the author mentions some other book in terms which make it seem important, whether he approves or refutes it, don't take his word for it: get the other book and read it, and judge for yourself. If he refers to something, or uses a word, which you don't understand, get a dictionary or work of reference and look it up. (Don't write and ask the author to explain; he is not required to be an Encyclopaedia, and you will only give him a poor idea of your industry and intelligence.) Especially, examine the sources of what he writes; to read Mr Somebody's critical valuation of Milton's prose or his examination of the economic effects of the Peace-Treaty is quite valueless if you have never read any Milton and do not know what the Peace-Treaty actually said.

How times have changed, you might say. I don't at all agree with her view of bookmarks because I'm plainly bird-witted enough to need them to find my place. It must speak volumes about my lack of attention to what I'm reading (!)
As for asking the author to explain: these days authors are all too ready to explain, and enjoy discussions with their readers. Or so we're led to believe. It's one of the joys and perils of the Internet. You can drop an author an email or even a tweet without blinking. And mostly they will reply...quickly. 

Sometimes the post just decides - for better or worse - to go its own sweet way

'Bye now,' says a friend, and I'm reminded that this expression sounds exactly the same as buy now, something that stores and online sites encourage you to do all the time. As if this might be your last opportunity ever to grab the bargain (which is often something you don't want or need).

It may be the last chance you'll have, of course...you might be dead of a heart attack before you get out of the store, or before you've finished closing off the tab on the browser. But that aside, there usually isn't the great imperative to get on and buy the thing now that the store would like you to think.

It's like those ads you see on TV which tell you that there's only ten minutes in which you can purchase a particular item. If you actually do ring up, you find there's a queue, and you hold on for fifteen minutes and find that the supposed ten minutes in which you were to buy the thing have gone, and yet, amazingly, the item is still well and truly available.

None of this has anything to do with percussion instruments. You're going to ask how I made that leap. Well, this is a postmodern blog, after all, and leaps which lack connection are commonplace here, as they should be. I've just been reading Terry Eagleton's How to Read Literature, and he informs us in there that postmodern writing is full of sudden shifts and disconnections. So accept that fact that I've made a sudden shift and disconnected, and you'll be all right again. You might have to go and get yourself a small sedative, but don't worry about that. You'll have noticed that now I've shifted from postmodernism to stream of consciousness anyway, and perhaps it's well and truly time to bring this post to a close.

If such a thing is possible in postmodern writing. Closure isn't what it's all about there. And how can there be an end to a stream of consciousness?

All too much for this time of the day, especially when you've been up since 5.30 am and busy ever since.

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.)

Do it properly!

You'll have all heard the acronym, LED, because it's everywhere these days, on TVs, tablets, you name it. But the acronym HID was unfamiliar to me, because I don't have much to do with cars in terms of doing anything more than driving them. I've never been someone who's accessorized his vehicle, so the car we have is the car we got. No frills have been attached. 

Anyway, HID stands for 'high-intensity discharge' in relation to lamps and headlights, and no doubt various other things that lighten up your particular world. Wikipedia tells me that these lights function by means of an electric arc between tungsten electrodes housed inside a translucent or transparent fused quartz or fused alumina arc tube. There you go. You're much wiser now. (I'm still having to check out what the various words mean that go to make up the explanation.)

The place many people will come across these lights are on cars - I suspect they're those ones that dazzle you as meet them face-to-face, or headlight-to-headlight, on the road. They're no doubt useful, but not when they're blinding the drivers of oncoming traffic. 

And it's wise, I understand, to use proper HID headlight instructions when you're installing them - if you're the sort of person who does this kind of at-home installation. (I've already told you I'm not.) The manufacturers are not liable for you putting them in backwards, sideways or any other way that isn't appropriate, or wiring up the wrongs bits of wire and setting your car on fire. So you've been warned. Do it properly, or else get a professional.

Today's bit of useful advice from me.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She [Elizabeth Barrett Browning] had decide that poetry, whatever language it was written in, was most certainly work. To write poetry was the most worthwhile work in the world because poetry was truth and there could be nothing more noble than trying to express universal truths. She did not feel shy about calling herself a poet - even when she recognised that she had only managed to produce 'sickly poetry,' She had absolute confidence that with time she would do better and that the struggle to do so was worthy in itself. A good poet was always 'one of God's singers.' Trying to become one of this select band was an ambition she was proud of and did not conceal. It had nothing to do with what she called 'versifying,' that scribbling in commonplace books so beloved of young ladies at this time. This she found contemptible and not to be confused with real poetry which was dignified, serious, sacred and pure. Her family accepted her interpretation of her vocation reverentially. Only her father was tempted to make the occasional facetious comment and he quickly came to appreciate that his daughter's poetry was no laughing matter.

Nobody at Hope End [the family home] sneered at or ridiculed the role of poet itself - in the first quarter of the nineteenth century poets were the most admired of all creative writers. The end of the eighteenth century had seen the beginnings of the Romantic Revival, marked by the publication, in 1798, of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. In the decade of Elizabeth's birth Byron published his first collection of poems (Hours of Idleness,1807) and when as a nine-year-old she was starting to write poetry herself, Queen Mab. Playwrights no longer dominated the literary scene though Drury Lane and Covent Garden were still enormously popular theatres, and novelists, in spite of Jane Austen, Richardson and Fielding, had not yet begun to do so. To be a 'real' poet was judged a most suitable occupation by Elizabeth's parents who had no objections just so long as this did not tax Elizabeth's health.
Shelley had just finished

...public acknowledgement was important: she was honest enough to admit that it was not sufficient to write poetry but that having it read was part of the process. It was more than that. Seeing her work in print excited her and she did not underestimate the significance.  Her excitement had nothing to do with feeling she was successful - she rated popular success as shallow - but was more a feeling of intense joy here was tangible proof that she was communicating through her poetry.

Pages 34/5 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Margaret Foster. 

Resistance is within

Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. "Peripheral opponents," as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.

Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art (p. 8)

'Resistance,' in Pressfield's terms, is that thing that holds us back from getting on and working at creative work. Procrastination is one of its most successful manifestations.

The Savages

We caught up with the movie, The Savages, last night. It stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Savage siblings, Wendy and Jon, whose father Len (Philip Bosco) is heading into dementia. Initially each of the three lives in a separate part of the USA, she in New York, where she's working as a temp while trying to get her plays funded for production; he in Buffalo, and the father in Sun City, Arizona. So there's a great deal of contrast in terms of locale from the dourness of New York, to the winter snow of Buffalo, to the blazing sun of Arizona - even in the winter.

The father has been living with an old woman who dies suddenly early in the movie. His actual wife is still alive, somewhere, but it's never said where - she's a bit of a mystery to all the family it seems, and wasn't able to do the 'mother' thing. Apparently the father had been quite brutal with his son, in the past, though this is never explored in much detail, even though it forms an important aspect of the play Linney has written.

It all sounds like a grim story, but in fact it's done with a curiously light touch, so that we can empathise with the characters in spite of their self-focuses. Linney in particular makes a wonderful job of alternatively making us very annoyed or sympathising with her inability to see herself as she really is. Hoffman plays in that wonderfully understated way he was so good at; little on the surface but much beneath. He's a warmer character, inclined to burst into tears at a number of things, but particularly in relation to his current girlfriend who's leaving to go back to Poland because her visa has run out. He has a wonderful scene in which he's strung up in the doorway trying to get his back (shoulder/neck?) back into place. The material looped under his chin means he can just speak and no more, and then Linney gives him a piece of toast which he can only just nibble at. It sounds like nothing, but Hoffman makes it a delight.

The movie, scripted and directed by Tamara Jenkins, doesn't explain itself too much. It lets us work things out for ourselves, because much of what we discover isn't actually spoken aloud. And there's a wonderfully ambiguous line just before the last couple of scenes when Linney finally dumps her adulterous older boyfriend (he can't even talk about the possible death of his beloved dog without immediately switching to talking about having sex). She calls down the stairs to him: It's not about us. It's in answer to a question he's asked and we think at first she's referring to their relationship. In fact, this proves not to be the case, and we realise a little later that she's finally matured in some areas of her life.

The film manages to walk the tightrope between comedy and tragedy by including a number of bit players in roles that verge on the absurd, and the opening scenes themselves, set in Arizona where elderly people fight the fight against ageing in all sorts of ways, are shot as visual jokes. The film was highly praised at the time of its release but seems to have been mostly forgotten since. However there's an article on Hoffman in Salon.com which mentions his part in it; the writer plainly thought the movie deserved better than to be forgotten.

Promoting the ebooks

While working on the sequel to Grimhilda! I haven't had much time to give to promoting that good lady herself, nor my non-fiction book, Diary of a Prostate Wimp. Both were published as ebooks earlier this year, one in January, the other in April, and while they had some interest from customers at the beginning, before I began writing the sequel (currently going under the name of The Mumbersons), they've languished over the last three months for want of sufficient attention. It's difficult to write and promote at the same time. The energy required for one tends to consume the energy required for the other.

Now that The Mumbersons is well on its way, and is awaiting a reading by a friend, I'm doing some work on getting the other two books back on their feet. I'd kept copies of a number of articles (on Evernote, of course) about promoting the books, and yesterday, while trolling through these looking for promotional ideas, came across a note about a site called Good Kindles, which, for a one-off (and reasonable fee) will promote your ebooks. I've listed Grimhilda! with them for starters, and we'll see how she goes. 

On top of that it was nice to find an unsolicited review of Grimhilda! had turned up on Amazon. Short and sweet, but nicely to the point: I was intrigued and delighted by this story. Great fun to read. It was contributed by a person who does a fair number of short reviews: Ruby,owl.  Thanks, Ruby!

Grimhilda! - a fantasy for children and their parents is available on Smashwords and a variety of other ebook sites, including Apple and Kobo.
The same applies to Diary of a Prostate Wimp.

Jonathan Lemalu masterclass

Last night Jonathan Lemalu gave a Masterclass at Marama Hall in Dunedin. Three young men - two baritones, Sam Madden and Tyler Neumann, and a bass singer whose name I missed - were given individual coaching on songs they presented to the audience (a much smaller audience than you would have expected, unfortunately).

Tyler was up first with The Roadside Fire from Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel. Like all the singers he was asked what the song was telling us, the audience. What story was he communicating when he sang? How did the accompaniment add to what was being said in the words of the song? How could he portray more by his stance, his intensity, by thinking himself into a kind of dramatic view of the song? And much more. He also sang Bright is the Ring of Words from the same song cycle a little later. 

Lemalu gently worked with each of the young singers, not concerning himself too much with their technique or musicality, but with their storytelling. Sam Madden sang Comfort ye, my people from the Messiah. Even this was seen as a 'character' (in this case, God, or his prophet) telling the audience something specific. 

The bass sang a solo by Dr Malatesta, from Don Pasquale. In his initial rendition of it he gave a 'performance', in Italian, but the message wasn't too clear. It helped to have Lemalu tease out what he was meaning, why Malatesta spoke/sung as he did, how this could be better conveyed through a more dramatised version of the song rather than treating it as an aria. It helped also when Lemalu became a 'character' onstage, helping the focus. 

It was interesting to see how the performers' interpretations changed substantially once they thought about what they were saying and how to put that across. Lemalu gave them all sorts of ideas, and let them hold onto particular ones at different times. It changed the substance of what was being sung considerably. He also played with them including while they were singing, which helped ease tensions but also made them focus differently. 

Lemalu is full of ideas, modest, still learning (he said this), changing approaches that seemed set in stone, being more relaxed while maintaining a very high standard of preparation. He's also a great entertainer. 

About Elly

Last night we watched Asghar Farhadi's 2009 movie, About Elly. Two or three months ago we saw a later film by Farhadi, A Separation. The latter film was something of a revelation. It changed my view of what modern Iran is like completely. (I wrote about it here.)  About Elly does the same: apart from the fact that the women wear headscarves all the time, there's little to show that we're in a Muslim country. All the trappings of modern life are visible, and there's (mostly) an easy enough relationship between the sexes. 

Both films are about lies and lying. Or alternatively, you might say, about truth, except that truth is very difficult to deal with, and for the characters in these two movies, lies are readily available, and, in the end stand in the way of the characters being able to move forward. 

About Elly starts off in a much warmer tone than A Separation.Three couples (and three small children), a recently divorced friend, and a young schoolteacher come together for a weekend of relaxation at a beach house. Irritating things happen, but not enough to stop the friends enjoying themselves. 

In the first forty minutes or so, the film seems to be little more than an ensemble piece with a wonderful cast almost improvising the script as they go along. So it appears. Characters come and go across the screen randomly while we try and sort out who belongs to whom (and it took us quite some time; we mismatched two of the couples). It seems that the young wife of the oldest man in the group has invited the schoolteacher along in order to match her up with the divorced man, and things are going fairly well. 

Except that underneath all the bonhomie are disturbing currents, none of which we can quite put our finger on. Disaster strikes - but it's not the disaster we think has struck, and Farhadi leaves us hanging for a great deal of the movie as we see the characters deal with what is ultimately a tragedy, by constantly changing their stories, accusing each other, blaming, finding excuses, finally getting to grips with the need to tell the truth, and then not being able to.

Farhadi has an enormous cinematic ease: the camera quietly appears to be just catching things out of the corner of its eye on many occasions, but in other scenes he uses the more disturbing process for the audience of a camera that jerks and shudders in moments of great tension. The actors appear to move as randomly as in real life, yet time after time we see movements in the background that add another dimension to what's being played out closer to us. His control of his cast is exceptional, including the three small children, who play vital parts in the story.

The young wife is played by Golshifteh Farahani, an actress who turned up in another movie we watched recently, The Patience Stone. This was a highly disturbing film set in Afghanistan about a young wife who's husband has been injured in the ongoing fighting, and has gone into a kind of coma. For much of the movie she sits and talks to him, telling him things she could never say when he was alert. It's a considerable indictment on relationships between men and women in that society, and I find it hard to imagine that it would ever be screened in the country it's set in. 

Carrying on listening

I've had some unexpected opportunities to sit and listen to other people's ongoing stories in the last couple of days, so it's been helpful to be reminded by Lynne Baab's latest book, The Power of Listening, that good listening can be affected by our own anxieties, or our desires to 'solve' problems, or our need to keep moving forward because we're busy - and much more.

One of the advantages of being retired is that time isn't quite so pressured. Whereas lunch times always used to be affected by the need to get back to work, that's no longer the case for me. And evenings aren't such an issue either, because I can work in the daytime and get want I want done then (such as walking the dog, or writing the sequel to my children's book, which is well on its way).

But being under time pressure isn't the only thing that gets in the way of good listening: our anxiety that we can't solve the problem(s) is another issue. And trying to solve the problem may be the last thing we need to be doing. The person may first and foremost just need to be heard. One of the things we learned when doing a course in pastoral supervision is that that someone with a problem may need most of all to talk out their issues. It's the fact of talking, and being heard, that's important, rather than your attempts at problem-solving. And frequently, in the talking out, the problems clarify for the person and some options to dealing with them arise.

Uriah Heep.
Artist: Fred Bernard

Lynne points out in one of her last chapters in the book that we require humility when listening to others. This can be difficult for people who live in an age when self-esteem, and self in general, are the 'important' things. Humility isn't something we moderns are very good at. That sense of putting ourselves aside in order to give someone else room - and doing it without making it a false action (like Uriah Heep at his worst) - isn't always easy for us.

I still haven't read the first half of Lynne's book, but the second half has been more than helpful!

Learning lines, and memorizing

I've mentioned recently that I was playing a part in the play Hamp, put on by Stageworks in Dunedin at the Playhouse.

With this play, and the one I did last year - The Sunshine Boys - I found something curious had happened to my learning of lines. In previous plays I've had to work endlessly hard to retain the lines, and even then not felt very secure. But with these two plays, once the lines have been learned, they're secure, and only a distraction (such as happened one night during Hamp) puts me off saying the right thing in the right place.

This is curious, because by rights, you'd think, being now at an exalted age, it ought to be harder for me to learn lines. And I'm not aware that I've changed my approach to learning them, except in one respect: I work through them one at a time until I can do a page or so of them from memory. Then I read the cue from the other actor, (either out loud or in my head) and (with my line covered up) recite my own line.

I learned the lines for Sunshine Boys very quickly with this 'method' last year, and the lines for Hamp came pretty quickly too, although, as always, there were one or two that remained sticky until late in the proceedings. But I didn't feel perturbed about that. I knew they'd come.

So maybe it's just a gain in confidence. Seems unlikely; I've been reasonably confident on stage these last ten years or so.

I do insist on one thing: that the lines are learned as they're written. If this isn't done, it's too easy to veer off course. You'd think that all actors (amateur actors, I'm talking about here) would learn the lines that the author gives them, but some don't. They have a tendency to partly learn them, and then, of course, they find themselves in trouble on stage, and have to paraphrase. The mind has the extraordinary ability to paraphrase, to substitute words with similar meanings, if we get into any trouble. But I prefer not to rely on that, and it's not ideal. It can be off-putting for other actors waiting on a particular cue.

Anyway, that's one aspect of memorisation. The other is that the only other thing I've really memorised over the last year or so is Psalm 119, that great hulk of a work with 176 verses, and a huge amount of similar lines. With this Psalm I had to use all the techniques I could think of to hold it together in my head. I got it to the point where I could recite it through, last year, left it alone for a while, and have been revising it this year, reinforcing things, and checking that I'm actually saying the right words in the right places.

The interesting thing is that even though I'd left it alone for a few months, the basic structural approach I'd taken to learning it survived, and kept the piece mostly in my head. Some details had wandered, and had to be pulled back into line, but having done that, the thing is once again on a secure footing. Furthermore, I'm now able to get past the techniques and listen to the words themselves, something that was quite hard to do when I was learning it.

A few days ago I wrote myself a note: now is not the time to give up memorising. I've memorised Scripture and poetry for years, mostly during the half hour walk I took to work in the mornings. But I haven't revised a lot of that material for some time, and the other day I felt it was time to put the revision work in and get some of those things back into my system.

I started with Hebrews chapter 12, something I learned many years ago. To my surprise, it was basically still intact, once I'd run through it a few times; the lines that had seemed hard to get under my belt all those years ago came back without too much effort, and already I'm feeling as though it's well within my grasp again.

The joy of memorising things is that you really get to know them. We can read something over and over and still find that we skim bits, or ignore some things. Once you start to memorise, you have to learn every word, and learn it right. This does something very good for the soul...

The Lavender Hill Mob

I don't remember ever seeing The Lavender Hill Mob before, though it's a film I've heard about since I was a kid (it came out when I was six) and have wanted to catch up with for a long time.

I finally caught up on it on DVD yesterday, and what a joy it is. It has a wonderful cast, led by Alec Guinness (with a wonderful inability to pronounce the letter R) and Stanley Holloway (seemingly full of his own importance, but a softie at heart), along with Syd James and Alfie Bass (as two small-time crooks brought in to help the completely inexperienced gold thieves, Guinness and Holloway). Charles Crichton takes T E B Clarke's daft script and gives it all he's got. What a team they were.

The premise is that the extremely mild-manned Guinness, who accompanies gold bullion from the factory to the Bank on a regular basis, has hatched a plan to snaffle the latest shipment. He just needs an accomplice who fits with his plan. Holloway, whom he meets by accident, runs a small factory making gewgaws (the Factory's name, in fact) for the tourist trade. Amongst these are metal Eiffel Towers which are painted gold and sold to tourists...in Paris. If the towers are actually gold, and not just gold-painted, they can be easily shipped to Paris and stored there for future sale to those who are in the market for illegal gold. The two work together and everything goes well, until...

Well, you have to watch it to see how complicated it gets, but the result is a delight. There are so many wonderful details: Alfie Bass is the tiny little crook, but his shadow as he climbs through a window is enormous; Guinness wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head as they pour the gold, an angelic smile on his face; the crazy attempt to get through French customs where they're constantly sent back for yet another check by the annoying French officials; the totally daft car chase at the end with police cars chasing each other rather than the 'villains', an American driver's car aerial getting entangled with the police aerial so that Old MacDonald has a farm goes out to all the police cars, and a policeman, hitching a lift with Guinness and Holloway rousingly joins in the song.

Or the old lady who lives in the same boarding house as Guinness and Holloway and who asks, in crime detection language, if the police have sorted things out. And the woman who owns the boarding house, a harridan of sorts who's only four foot something high. Or the way Guinness is supposed to be roughed up by his co-villains, and isn't, and has to do the job himself while tied up with rope and blindfolded. It's endlessly inventive, and much of the humour is hard to describe because of its particularly cinematic nature.

The wonderful Britishness of it all is another marvellous aspect. Was Britain ever really like this, with comic faces and eccentric attitudes on every street corner? It's hard to know, but those who made the Ealing Comedies certainly thought so, and they've left a picture of Britain for us that is heartwarming and hilarious.

Oh, and watch out for the tiniest of appearances from Audrey Hepburn, near the beginning of the movie.

The Power of Listening - making a start

I was sent a review copy of Lynne Baab's latest book - The Power of Listening - about a month or two ago. With one thing and another, I haven't had time to get into it properly, but I've dipped into it over the last few days, just to get the feel of it, in particular chapter 8 The Listening Toolbox, and chapter 9, Anxiety and Listening. Because I do a little pastoral supervision work, these chapters have both proved useful in terms of reminding me about the skills required for listening in a particular situation (supervision) and listening to people in general, in conversation, whether it's a conversation that's skimming the surface, plumbing the depths, or just being enjoyable.

It's very easy to put yourself at the centre of a conversation, and after having lunch yesterday with a group of people I know reasonably well, and travelling an hour to the venue and another hour back again, I had some opportunities to consider how I was doing in the listening area. Not 100% marks, maybe, but reasonably high. I enjoy talking with people about what they're doing, finding out more about them, hearing their views. Like so many conversationalists, however, I have to watch that I'm listening to what they're saying, and not preparing to put my oar in while they're still talking. Getting the balance right can be tricky.

Of course, it's not enjoyable to 'converse' with someone who spends the entire time talking about themselves (unless that's what the conversation is intended to be about) but equally it's not enjoyable for the other person in a conversation to feel that as soon as they've told you something you come in and 'top' their story with something you think is better. It's so easy to dredge up some old story
you think is relevant to the topic, give it some frills and make it the focus.

Anyway, thanks, Lynne, for a book that's helping in this department. Even though I've read it out of order, I'll get back to the rest as soon as I can!

Hamp over and done

The Stageworks production of the play, Hamp, is now over and done with, and I've wound up with a cold. Not the only actor, apparently; a combination of tiredness and a cold theatre (or at least cold on the stage itself) didn't help.
It's an odd play, as I noted in my last post, and I don't know that any of the actors felt they completely got to grips with it. Perhaps more rehearsal time and discussion about the characters might have helped, but we were constrained by a short rehearsal period, and so had to do our best with the time we had.
The audiences 'enjoyed' it. I put enjoyed in quotes because it's not a play you enjoy; you kind of endure it, because it's pretty obvious from early on that things aren't going to go well for the main character. It's a bit like how you feel about Hamlet. No matter how many times you see it, he's never going to come out alive.
I mentioned the following incident on Facebook, I think: one lady couldn't bear to watch it to the end and left her husband in the audience while she went out and sat in the car. 'That poor young man!' she told one of front of house people. There were tears from other audience members, and gasps each night when Hamp basically opens his mouth at one crucial point in the court martial, and lands himself in the poo.
One man, however, only got to the end of the first act: 'Not my sort of thing. Boring.' He'd already muttered all the way through the act, and would have been in line to be throttled by the cast if he'd carried on any longer. The first act is a long conversation between Hamp and his defending counsel - there are only occasional interruptions from other minor characters. It's the sort of scene that requires top notch intensity, because there's no real conflict between the two characters, not much for them to get their teeth into. But that's the way the author's written it...
The cast consisted of young actors, in their early twenties, and a bunch of older actors - apart from two guys who came in somewhere in the middle. As a group we got on well; there was no sense that the youngsters avoided the oldies. It's strange to think that in thirty or forty years time, if these young actors remember acting in the play, the older actors will have long been forgotten. It's unlikely any of us will live to be a hundred or more!

Members of the cast in the court martial scene:
Rob Hart as Prescott, Lindsay Smith as the Midgely, the prosecutor, Elliot Phillips as Hamp, Craig Storey as the Guard, Rob Monzari (at back) as the Corporal, and Brian Kilkelly as Hargreaves, the defending counsel.
Photo courtesy of Ian Thomson

Different viewpoints

We had the opening night of Hamp at the Playhouse in Dunedin last night. There was a very appreciative audience who were obviously deeply engrossed in the play: we hardly heard a sound out of them all night, except for the occasional chuckle at one or two of the lines. I was interested in particular to see that no one laughed at the part of the play where Hamp collapses (too much rum) during the communion service. Plainly my concerns that people might find this funny were unfounded.

In fact, my perceptions, from the inside of the play, are obviously quite different to the way in which people see the play, as a whole, from the outside. My character, the Padre, opens the second act, under cross-examination from the prosecutor at Hamp's court martial, and then vanishes for the rest of the act, only to turn up as an important character in the third act. A number of the actors, in fact, only appear in the second act.

This has given me, as an actor, a slightly dislocated feeling in terms of the rest of the play. Of course I've seen the first act in rehearsal, and last night listened to it again on the Tannoy system that lets those backstage hear what's going on onstage, but because I have no connection with this part, I have to come onstage cold at the beginning of the second act, when several of the other actors have already been well warmed-up for an hour.

It's rather like being a bit-player in a movie: you turn up for your couple of day's shooting without having experience anything of what the other actors have been involved in. Not that I'm complaining: I'm quite content with the role because it's actually an interesting part - and I don't have anywhere near as many lines to learn as I did in Sunshine Boys!

I just have to understand that what the audience sees isn't what I see, and that the author of the play, John Wilson, knew what he was doing.

Bekas

Bekas is a Kurdish word that's variously translated as orphans, complete loneliness, parentless. It's all of those things. It's also the title of a slightly odd but quite engaging movie about two brothers who, after seeing part of the film Superman in their home village, decide to go to America and meet Superman. Perhaps even ask him to come back to their home country and kill Saddam Hussein (who at the time of the movie's story, was causing havoc in Kurdistan).

The orphaned brothers are not very old. Ten-year-old Dana (Sarwar Fazil) has a bit of a romance going on with a girl who is somewhat ambivalent towards him (it's never going to work, but he doesn't know that), and is the ideas man. The younger one, Zana (Zamand Taha), is six or seven, strident, energetic, optimistic, seldom put down for more than a moment - a considerable feat in Kurdistan, where any adult male (in fact, any older male, including your brother) is likely to beat you at the drop of a hat, often with the least provocation. It's not a place for wimps.

The boys shine shoes for a living, and naturally struggle to make ends meet. In their attempts to walk or ride to America (which in their minds is only a few inches across the map and therefore can't be far away) they run into various troubles, are separated, joined up again and nearly killed. It's a grim life made bearable only by keeping your own spirits up. No one else will do it for you.

The film has some humour, but in general there's little understatement of the stark poverty the boys live in. They wear the same clothes day in and out, don't appear to eat very often, and even have to berate customers to get them to pay the proper price for their shoeshining. A few older people help them at times, but for the most part they're on their own. And at journey's end, things don't seem to have made a lot of progress, though at least they're out of Saddam's clutches, for the time being.

The cast is mostly amateur, which means that people turn up here who would never appear on screen otherwise, their faces marked in many cases with the sheer difficulties of life. The two boys are good-looking, and convey all the emotion needed in their roles. Taha has a voice that would kill a goat a twenty paces - some viewers have felt he has only one vocal mode: full-bore shouting. He may be excused in this because of the sheer need his character has to be heard when so many ears around him are deaf to his cries.

The film was written and directed by Karzan Kader, and is based on his own story of escape from Kurdistan. He had previously made a short film version of it; this full-length one has no feeling of being expanded for the sake of it.

Playing the Padre

I've been rehearsing the play, Hamp, over the last few weeks. It's a Stageworks production, and performances begin next Wednesday (the 13th, August).
I'm playing the otherwise unnamed 'Padre'. He doesn't appear until the beginning of the second act, when the court martial of the title character takes place. He has three pages of dialogue at that point with the prosecuting counsel, and then vanishes again until the third act, when he comes into his own.
He's a no-nonsense character, has a true Christian faith, but is deeply troubled by the events taking place around him: not just the War itself, but the particular problems relating to Hamp's trial. His anger rises to the surface quickly, and often, because he's forever having to face men who treat other men too casually, and who regard Army rules as of more value than human life. It's a difficult part to play, but rewarding.

Worth Dying For

Worth Dying For is the first Jack Reacher novel I've read. I've heard a good deal about the series of books featuring this character, so, when I was in need of something fictional to get into, I thought I'd give one of them a go.
This book is well on in the series (the 15th) and Lee Child, the author, writes with enormous confidence about his renegade, retributionist righter-of-wrongs. Reacher hardly ever puts a foot wrong - he's that sort of character - except on one occasion when he gets his nose well and truly busted, something that several other characters in the story also suffer. In fact, if you want to remember in future which Lee Child story this is, think broken noses. They're as common as daisies here.
Reacher is dropped off at a remote crossroads in Nebraska (we later learn there may have been more to this than mere coincidence) and walks into a situation. The local doctor is in the only bar for sixty miles, in a motel (the only one for sixty miles) and is pretty drunk. He gets a call to help one of his patients who's been beaten in what appears to be a domestic violence issue, refuses to attend, and then has to change his mind when Reacher's righteousness plugs in. Which conveniently unwinds all the rest of the intricate plot.
I found the violence almost too much at times (it often gets described in detail), and the revenge/retribution elements at the end of the book seemed to have an amoral aspect to them, however satisfying it may be seeing all the baddies gradually get their just desserts. Reacher is a vigilante kind of character - at least in this book. He seems to be able to act above the law without qualm because he knows he's right. And yes, the police in this story haven't done a very good job of sorting out the disappearance of a young girl many years before, nor do they have any great part to play in dealing with the present day situation. On top of this, Reacher aims to drag the local people up out of their victim status (they've been bullied for at least a couple of decades by a trio of brothers), and does, though it takes a good deal of doing.
In other hands this story might have been a piece of nonsense, but Child has absolute control over his material, whether it's describing a weapon or car in detail, or what a fight does to a human body, or detailing the bleakness of the winter Nebraska landscape and its isolated inhabitants. The dialogue is consistently good, and trying to stop at the end of any of the chapters is quite some task. Furthermore, there are some wonderful twists in the plot, mostly concerning who is driving whose car or vehicle at a particular time, and the consequences of doing so. The baddies dispose of minor baddies, and Reacher often gives them a helping hand surreptitiously. The finale is perhaps just a little contrived, but it certainly cleans things up for good.
I wasn't going to get another book in the series out of the library. But I have.

Letters to Father Jacob

Postia pappi Jaakobille, or, Letters to Father Jacob, is a movie by Finnish director, Klaus Härö. 
It has two main characters, a female ex-con, and an elderly and blind priest. A postman plays a smaller role, and there is a man at the beginning who asks where Leila, the pardoned prisoner, is going to go. That's the cast. The setting is a remote rectory with a leaky roof, and bundles of letters stored everywhere. The nearby church has been unused for some long time, it appears. 

Leila reluctantly accepts the offer of a live-in job not as the priest's housekeeper but as the reader of the letters he receives every day from people far and wide asking for prayer and help. She is also expected to write the replies he dictates. Leila is not much impressed with the job; she's obviously long since given up on God, and believes what she did that caused her to be put in prison is probably unforgivable. The priest has more faith than this, though he too has a struggle at one point in the story. 

The film takes its slow way forward, allowing for plenty of subtlety and reflection, and relies heavily on the skills of the two leading actors, Kaarina Hazard and Heikki Nousiainen. Though Nousiainen was only sixty-four when the movie was his face appears much older, full of lines and crags. He has been an actor since the late sixties, but because we don't know him, we can come to him fresh in this movie, without the baggage of having seen him in dozens of other roles, and can believe in the sanctity that surrounds his character. 

Finland is a country in which Protestantism is the registered faith of around 75% of the population, though few of those actually go to church most of the year. Christmas and Easter are the main times when people attend. So it would be easy to expect that the film would take a somewhat negative approach to Christian belief; in fact it presents a Christian faith as a perfectly reasonable thing, and doesn't undermine it at any point. 

clippings.io

I've been using Clippings Converter for two or three years. It began as a way of uploading clippings from my Kindle into a format like Word or Evernote (I prefer the latter) and being able to access them more readily while using my PC. They've now shortened their name from Clippings Converter to clippings.io, and are heading for another step up in their online journey, with added features that will enhance their site considerably. The main addition is the Google Chrome extension, which you can use to speed up the shift from the Kindle itself to your PC or Mac. There is a small charge per month for this extension (previously Clippings Converter was free), and no doubt there will be many people who take advantage of it. At $2.49NZ it's a good deal. With this extension you no longer have to plug in your Kindle to your PC; the extension will read clippings from your phone or iPad or other Windows devices. It'll be interesting to see how that works. 

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No sales tax

As an Auckland resident (which I'm not) I'm told that if I make any purchases from premiertablelinens.com I won't have to pay sales tax. Although that apparently excludes any shipments to Florida that I may make. I'm not sure if Florida has recently transplanted itself to Auckland, New Zealand, but I guess it's kind of possible. They have similar climates at certain times of the year, and lately Auckland has been getting more and more tropical weather of the typhoon/tornado kind. Aucklanders, who continually tell those who live in the rest of the country how badly off they are, have been losing their roofs, windows, trampolines and more in a series of hectic winds. We've never lost our trampoline, though it did shift place a little once. Nor have we ever had the roof blown away. Thankfully. However, glass from the glasshouse is prone to fly off and smash in a high wind, and that has happened to us. We can't be protected from all things down here in the South. 

The Promise

Over the last few days we've watched the four episodes of Peter Kosminsky's TV film: The Promise. Like much of Kosminsky's TV work, it's quite provocative, and your sympathies change as the story unfolds.

Two stories interweave: one is set in Palestine just after the Second World War. A young sergeant is caught up in the historic events of the time, when the British were keeping the peace - as far as possible - between the new Jewish settlers who'd returned to their homeland after the horrors of the concentration camps, and the Palestinians who had lived in the area for centuries and were suddenly finding themselves kicked out of their country by a people who apparently forgot, very quickly, what it was like to be treated badly because of who you were.

The second story is set in the present day: the Sergeant is now an old man dying in a hospital. His unsympathetic daughter and his granddaughter (who's barely known the supposedly grumpy old man) set about clearing out his house. The daughter, Erin, finds the old man's diary, with photos and newspaper clippings. Against her mother's orders, she keeps the diary, and takes it with her to Israel where she's going with a friend whose Israeli background means she has to go into the Army for two years. Erin is a typical know-all teenager who begins to find out a great deal more about the Israel-Palestine conflict than she would ever have learned in her native country, and also matures quickly as a result of trying to repair something that had gone wrong back when her grandfather was a young man.

The two stories gradually cohere. There are perhaps too many coincidences in the plotting, and the filmmakers slide over some questions about motivations that probably should have been asked, but for all that the film carries you along as you increasingly struggle - like Erin - to make sense of a country where a people who were hated almost universally for centuries (the Jews) and then were slaughtered in their millions, show almost no care or concern for a people who by accident live in the country the Jews claim as their homeland.

Kosminsky doesn't offer us easy answers: we begin by thinking that the Israelis are a pretty reasonable bunch of people, but gradually discover - as both the grandfather and the granddaughter do - that they have almost no sympathy for the Palestinians, and show little concern about killing them or destroying their property if the need, or mood, arises. Try as you might, by the end of the movie, it's likely your opinion of the Israeli people may be much less sympathetic than at first. Whether this is a more one-sided view on Kosminsky's part than is fair is left to our judgement.

Claire Foy plays the initially sulky teenager with ease - there are times when you want to wipe that sulky look off her face, even late in the film. Nevertheless, she makes the journey from sulkiness to a degree of wisdom effectively. Christian Cooke, as the Sergeant, has a face that often makes it look as though he's going to burst into tears, yet he convinces us that he's a man who can make wise decisions, is loyal, is strong in a crisis, and much more. He's particularly strong in his last scenes when everything he's tried to do for a Palestinian family goes wrong, and he's treated as a deserter and thrown into prison.

The rest of the enormous cast are superb, and with the film shot entirely in Israel (with places standing in for Hebron, Gaza, and the West Bank. Even the Ben Gurion airport stands in for Heathrow. The series in general received high praise when first shown, though there were a number of voices claiming that it was anti-semitic in tone, something which can be justified, if that's what you're looking for.

21.7.14
Since writing this review I've become more aware of the concerns that were raised over Kosminsky's series. This article goes into detail about these and provides some balance to the way in which Kosminsky nudges his viewers more and more into an anti-Israeli bias.

The Other Son

The Other Son is an intense, emotional film set in Israel and Palestine (there's a great deal of coming and going across the border between the two areas, and many views of the wall), and it's quite a tear-jerker, though in best sense.

It has a slightly improbable story, perhaps (although the starting point of the story is as old as the hills): two babies are literally swapped at birth because of fears of a Scud attack.One baby is Jewish but is given back to the Palestinian mother, and the other baby, of course, is Palestinian, and given back to the Jewish mother.This only comes to light when the 'Jewish' boy is about to turn eighteen and a blood test reveals that he couldn't possibly be the son of his parents. The other parents are informed, and there's a great deal of struggling to come to grips with the issue, both on the part of the two young men, but even more so on the part of the fathers. The mothers manage to begin to work through the problem much quicker than their husbands, of course, but even for them it's a major upheaval.

There are four languages spoken in the film: Hebrew, Arabic, English and French - the Jewish father is French by birth, and it appears that the family has spent some time there, but the 'Arab' boy has also been studying there.

The director is Lorraine Lévy, who also co-wrote the screenplay. She makes a fine job of bringing out the emotional aspects of the story (there's little 'action' in it), and is supported by a wonderful cast, all of whom are unknown to me, though plainly very experienced. When you see foreign movies you realise again and again what a vast world of actors, directors, writers there is out there whom we barely know about. We're so inundated with Hollywood and British movies and TV that we remain quite insular. 

This is a great story, and well worth catching up with. There's an interesting interview with the director here.

Writing and reading

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Anne Lamott

Bird by Bird

Payu2blog gone?

Over the years I've done a lot of posts here for a site called Payu2blog.com. It seems that they've run right down, however. I've had no assignments for a few months, and they're not answering any emails (not that they were ever very good at that). They've begun to use Twitter as an alternative to blog posts, but the Twitter approach doesn't seem to be working. I never got paid for the one assignment they offered that I've tweeted, and the latest assignment along these lines is so confusingly laid out, I've had read trouble trying to figure out what they're talking about.

It's a pity, because Payu2blog was a reasonable source of small income over several years; my PayPal account was kept topped up by it. Ah well, that seems to be the way of the Net. Some things have their day and then suddenly they're gone, when the crowd moves on...