On Saying What You Mean: Part I

I’ve been infuriated lately by language getting trapped in some Orwellian nightmare so here’s the first of three blogs that will dissect evasions and contradictions…
 
Headhunters
Trevor Johnston is something of a cult hero of Paul Fennessy and mine for his delirious ability to find some reason to watch even the most drivelling of films when he’s writing programme notes for them. But his take on Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters in the IFI programme this month infuriated me because of its internal contradiction, which seems to me to exemplify an entire system of thinking that is lazy and inherently ridiculous. “Aksel Hennie’s roguish, Steve Buscemi-like protagonist is about to have his life turned into a Coens-style ultra-black comedy, as confident director Morten Tyldum piles on the eye-watering moments. Head-spinning plot twists are not in short supply, yet we never lose sight of the story’s basis in male emotional fragility. A Hollywood studio has optioned it, but their version won’t be anywhere near as dark and sinewy as this.” (My italics) Um, mightn’t it? Suppose the evil Hollywood studio were to persuade actual Steve Buscemi and the actual Coens to actually make this film that so resembles their shtick? Would that film not be equally as dark and sinewy? Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo after all improves on the Swedish version by using his substantial clout to introduce more texture and a slower pace so that you watch a mystery with compelling characters rather than sketched-in characters dashing thru a thriller plot. Furthermore I’ve written extensively about how Let Me In improved on Let the Right One In by making it bleaker and removing the disingenuous happy ending and manipulative bogus ambiguity of the original film. The idea that Hollywood is one vast undifferentiated garbage machine has to be got rid of, as does the notion that anything filmed in a foreign language is instantly intelligent and brilliant. It’s a lazy generalisation, akin to the hilarious motto ‘Anything said in Latin sounds profound.’ But more than that a whole mind-shift needs to happen, because it’s ridiculous to speak in tongues and dream in Hollywood when it comes to discussing cinema. The shorthand that we use to discuss cinema comes mostly from Hollywood and the movies that people love for the most part come from Hollywood; and I mean this globally, not just in Anglo-American land, look at DVD stores’ catalogues in South East Asia. Johnston uses Hollywood movie-making as reassuring reference points for a good foreign movie; before slamming Hollywood’s tackiness. It makes no sense…
 
Anonymous
Some weeks ago Anonymous attacked the Vatican’s website and left a very confused message about their motives. I’ve been hunting about for a version of that statement that didn’t look like it was either written in Italian or translated into English by someone who was illiterate in two languages because I want to give Anonymous the benefit of the doubt. I finally pinned down a reasonably coherent diatribe purporting to be from Anonymous on the International Business Times website’s report on the incident. The Vatican was attacked for preaching absurd and archaic doctrines, they said, in a rant that covered everything and anything; “You have burned books of immense historical and literary value, you barbarously executed your fiercest detractors and critics over the centuries, have denied universally deemed valid or plausible theories, have led the unwary to pay to get access to paradise with the sale of indulgences”, and so on; before ending on the muted note that the attack was “not intended to target the true Christian religion and the faithful around the world” but was aimed at the “corrupt Roman Apostolic Church and all its emanations”. Hmmm. Well, no, that doesn’t really make sense. The Church is not a different entity to the Faithful, indeed the Church Militant on earth is only part of a wider church incorporating the faithful departed who make up the Church Triumphant. So, to attack the doctrines defined by the Vatican is to attack 1 billion Catholics as being utter idiots. Which is exactly what Anonymous meant to do, only it seems that having written the bolshy part someone thought better of calling over 1 billion people utter idiots, and put in a weak semi-retraction. But this is the conduct of a weasel…. If you have the courage of your convictions then say what you mean. If you want to say that Catholics are stupid beyond belief for what they believe then say it. Don’t savour hurting Catholics by ridiculing everything that they believe, and then weasel out of responsibility for the pain you gleefully inflicted by saying that technically your words didn’t apply to Catholics just the Church. If you want the benefit of hurtful words, admit that you used them hurtfully. I had no firm opinion on whether the cyber criminals were courageous crusaders or not before this attack, but now I think they must be classified as cowardly creeps.

O Holy Night

I’m putting the blog on ice for a while while I cook a duck for Christmas dinner, finally get round to viewing I, Claudius and reading The Talented Mr Ripley, and whoop up BBC2′s late night season of 1940s horror B-movies. Talking Movies will return in mid January with a Top 10 of 2011, previews of 2011′s best films and a review of Steve McQueen’s Shame. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Politik: Part II

After a lamentable fall off the wagon with a post-election political blog in April here is the even more disgusting spectacle of a pre-election political blog in October. Thankfully there won’t be any more political events until 2014. We hope.

Senator McCarthy as Requested
The two constitutional referendums to be voted on this Thursday have been alarmingly lost in the white noise of the hopelessly bilious Presidential campaign. Tom McGurk and Vincent Browne have both written cogent columns arguing against granting more power to the Oireachtas to conduct inquiries as the Government wishes. Worryingly this proposal seems to be liable to be passed by a landslide. Browne’s legal objections to the wording of the proposed amendment raise the terrifying spectre of these committees deciding that the people they call before them don’t have the right to legal representation, to face their accusers, or to know the charges brought against them, and that they don’t have the right to see if the courts believe that the committee has acted fairly by the constitutional rights of the person so victimised in striking this balance between rights and cost-effective enquiry. I don’t know if Browne is scaremongering or not, or whether it’s possible that Fine Gael could spend the entirety of this Dail investigating every member of Sinn Fein one by one for their own private amusement, as has been suggested elsewhere in a piece of definite scaremongering. All I know is that a committee investigated Ivor Callely over his expenses and its conduct was so ill-advised that when the courts were finished reviewing the proceedings Ivor Callely appeared like a victim whose rights were traduced by a witch-hunt. If the Seanad was incapable of properly investigating and making findings against one of its own friendless members, do you really want the Oireachtas to be given power to investigate ordinary citizens and make findings of fact against them without judicial oversight that they are conducting proceedings in a responsible fashion? Is an ill-informed landslide about to give us our own democratically requested HUAC?

James Madison is Disheartened
In the frenetic last days of his pursuit of a nomination David Norris made a petulant outburst when a county council voted against him which implied that a vote against his candidature was a vote against democracy itself, rather than say, a vote against his candidature. Norris in insisting that only the public should vote on his candidature appeared to be conflating a democracy with a republic, a distinction James Madison was always keen to make. In a democracy the citizens vote directly on matters affecting them, but in a republic they elect representatives to vote for them on such matters; this is what allows republics to grow in size. Madison expanded this exponentially in Federalist 10 by advocating a large continental republic as the best defence against vested interests hijacking government because there would be so many vested interests they would cancel each other out. So, if the county councillors are trusted enough by the voters to elect them as their representatives what is the substance of Norris’ complaint? It would appear to be either that the county council system is undemocratic because it denies citizens a public plebiscite on every issue (in which case he apparently has no faith in the concept of a republic) or, it would appear to be that the county councillors who voted against him were unqualified to represent the wishes of their electors on this and this matter alone but were qualified to represent the wishes of their electors on all other matters. The latter possibility would be an extraordinary interpretation of what Irish democracy is all about but then Norris was never really seriously questioned on the major contradiction of his rhetoric of appealing to the people, has he not just spent two decades representing a rotten borough?

First We Go Negative
Gay Mitchell’s bizarre campaign has been both hilarious and awful to observe. Churchill said that he never knew of a man who had added to his dignity by standing on it, and Martin McGuinness’s candidature seems to have been contrived as an in-joke to enable the Irish public to enjoy one of the funniest recurring spectacles in Irish politics, that of Fine Gael rabidly frothing at the mouth about “Law an’ Order, Law’n’Order, and the Foundation of the State!” But Mitchell’s self-destructive savaging of McGuinness set the tone for his whole campaign. Attacks on Mary Davis, carefully crafted under the guise of ‘research’ by polling companies, as reported in the Sunday Business Post, saw questions couched so as to vilify a candidate without seeming to. Imagine, for example, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for X if you knew that X had been convicted of burning a small town in Leitrim to the ground during the course of a drunken hooley in 1985?” (That example’s inspired by Neil Sharpson’s hilarious play The Search for the Real Jimmy Gorman) Gay Mitchell’s campaign was like watching a poor 100m runner kick all his opponents in the shins during the warm-up before the race in the misguided hope that this would allow him to win in his personal best time of 30 seconds. It wouldn’t. It would get you disqualified by the officials, or here public opinion. Gay Mitchell needed to articulate why we should vote for him, but he never did, instead he just told us ad nauseam why we shouldn’t vote for anyone else. It’s obvious the Fine Gael top brass never wanted him as a candidate but amusing themselves by joining in kicking everyone else’s shins rather than championing Mitchell has spectacularly backfired.

Flying Book Club

As a belated and tangential contribution to last month’s One City One Book focus on literature in Dublin here’s a plug for an interesting new venture just starting.

The Flying Book Club aims to offer an actual engagement with Dublin’s literature for tourists (and indeed natives) who want to discuss the celebrated literary works of the writers of this city rather than simply visit their old drinking haunts. There are four different programmes to choose from, covering everyone from old favourites like Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats, and James Joyce, to modern writers like John McGahern, Colm Toibin, and Anne Enright. Each programme includes discussions of the writers in question, readings of their work, walking tours of the literary city, and special guest speakers of the ilk of Hugo Hamilton. Experienced tutors lead the discussion sessions to offer a deeper critical engagement than the traditional book club but without turning the informal proceedings into didactic college classes.

The four programmes available are:

1 A General Introduction to Irish Writing

This would explore the key movements in Irish literary history; from the Irish Literary Revival and Irish Modernism, to the explosion of new writers in the 1960s and the current generation of prizewinning novelists and playwrights.

2 Ireland’s Four Nobel Laureates (Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney)

This programme runs the rule over the aesthetic development of Yeats’ poetry, the satirical didacticism of Shaw’s plays, the ground-breaking innovations of Beckett’s drama, and the developing abstraction of Heaney’s poetry.

3 The Author Based Programmes (James Joyce or Oscar Wilde or W.B. Yeats, etc)

Each author would have selected texts examined including Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Yeats’ Collected Poems.

4 A Bespoke Programme for your Book Club

At least 12 people would be needed for a book club to order their own bespoke programme on an author of their choice.

All programmes run over three days. Midweek programmes run from Tuesday to Thursday, with weekend programmes running from Friday to Sunday. All programmes include both discussion of the relationship between the writer(s) and the city of Dublin and visits to appropriate sites of interest, so the obligatory wander out to the Martello Tower in Sandycove would not be neglected. Programmes would also reflect literary events of interest in Dublin, like the Theatre Festival in October, and the Writers’ Festival at the end of May. All the programmes are designed to encourage understanding and appreciation of the works under discussion, and to help readers contextualize each work within a wider literary tradition.

More detailed information on each of the four programmes is available on the website www.flyingbookclub.ie

Politik

“Gil! Learn to be more politic…” – CSI: LV.

The hysteria of the general election caused me to write a few political tweets, satirical and serious, so here’s a brief excursion by the blog proper into the political realm.

The Vision Thing

I said that Fianna Fail had a vision of society, switched it for a vision of an economy, and now were left bereft of any vision at all. DeValera undoubtedly had a vision of the society he wanted to created, and tried to bend the world to fit it, as the presence of a Gaeltacht in Meath will attest. Whether you agreed with that vision or not, you could hardly deny its sincerity, and after all Fine Gael’s precursors had introduced censorship so their vision was hardly dissimilar. Lemass took the bold, almost insane step, of disavowing all he’d worked for over thirty years and starting again by replacing Dev’s vision of an ideal society with a more pragmatic vision of a functioning economy. This vision worked for a while, fell apart because of two oil-crises and the inability of politicians, of all parties, to figure out that spending cannot be infinite, and taxes cannot be raised to 58% on the average punter before he just leaves. Savage treatment got it working again and Fianna Fail took the credit, but after having become the natural party of government because of their economic credentials they then encouraged a bubble whose bursting blew out the tyres on the entire country rather than just the building sector. Having comprehensively set fire to their trump card, they’re now bereft of any vision. What exactly does Fianna Fail stand for? Who knows? Admittedly Fine Gael had the same problem not so long ago but it’s always a more pressing question when in opposition. Vision is a rarity in Irish politics. Fine Gael had a vision in the 1960s (quickly discarded) and in the 1980s (doggedly attempted) but right now their vision is not entirely clear. Fianna Fail are in the same position the Republicans found themselves in from 1932-1952, nobody will put them in charge again. But, unlike the Republicans, they don’t still have muscle at a lower level, they have been obliterated. And unlike the Republicans they don’t have the luxury of a two-party system allowing them the time and space to find some way to rebuild their credibility; as the Republicans decided to invoke socialism at home and communism abroad to paint the Democrats as elitist and unpatriotic before finally in the 1980s speciously managing to regain the mantle of being the economically ‘responsible’ party. Task: Vision, Time: Five Years…

Balanced Government

A man who has three lemons in one pocket and two in the other and throws away one lemon to have two in each pocket is balanced; if asked what he plans to do with all these lemons, he’ll answer ‘lemonade, obviously…’ The idea promulgated by Labour in their absolute panic during the last weeks of the election that one should vote for them in order to ensure a balanced government is much like saying a man with five lemons in one pocket and two oranges in the other should throw away three lemons in order to be balanced; ask him what he plans to do with this odd assortment of fruits, he’ll answer ‘God only knows, but it sure won’t taste nice…’ Incoherence in government is incoherence, not balance, and a government that apparently has no idea exactly what its second Finance minister is actually going to do doesn’t appear to have got off to a particularly cogent start. A Fine Gael majority government supported by the Fianna Fail rump would not only have been a delicious re-run of the Tallaght Strategy with the blame for screwing things up reversed, but might have given us all a chance to finally have a coherent left/right divide in this country. Not that two-party systems are particularly brilliant, but because the lack of first past the post and the inanity of our constituency and voting systems makes anything with a degree of clarity preferable. But then perhaps Irish politicians fear that precisely because then clarity would be demanded of them. HCG Matthew’s reading of Gladstone’s political genius is that he was able to find causes that managed to unite warring Radicals, Peelites, Whigs, and Liberals into something approaching a purposeful Liberal party – which then usually collapsed at the end of its governing term until the next cause was found to pull it together. Can any one party really sum up all the varied attitudes that make up a single individual’s response to the world? No, absolutely not. All parties are a poor substitute for the sort of direct democracy that a combination of Australia’s compulsory voting and direct secure internet referendums could produce. But short of such a space-age Athenian democracy in action it would be nice to have some sort of coherent oppositional ideological divide between two dominant parties rather than have to mumble embarrassedly about a civil war.

Club Med/The Piigs

As with the credit crunch and the housing crash anybody with an eye in their head could have foreseen the current difficulties of the Eurozone. Back in 1999 UCD Economics Professor Rodney Thom was heavily critical of the admission of what were then dubbed the Club Med countries; Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain; into the European Monetary Union. They were countries that had great difficulty in balancing budgets and maintaining fiscal restraint or stable currencies, and guess what, they’re, with the addition of Ireland, the countries now monikered The Piigs. In other words they were pegged as troublemakers before the Euro was even physically introduced and they’ve proven to be troublemakers. The reasons the markets are relentlessly targeting the Piigs is because the markets are working out the inexorable logic of economics not politics. The Piigs should never have been part of the Eurozone in the first place. Gordon Brown created economic tests for joining the Euro which he knew would never be fulfilled but in a very real way all he did was expose the stupidity at the heart of the project; which was privileging political aspirations over economic reality. A common currency area will work if each region’s trade is predominantly with the others involved, and if their economic cycles are synched, otherwise it will be ruinous. It was always obvious that France, Germany and the Benelux countries were admirably suited economically, but that no one else should join for economic reasons; and they didn’t, they joined for political reasons – the insane need to be seen as ‘good Europeans’. Ireland is now ruined largely because it gave away the power to set its own interest rates. The ECB kept interest rates farcically low compared to what a responsible Irish central bank would have hiked them to in order to cripple the housing bubble long before it got to its ultimate supernova status, and in imploding the property sector has taken down everything else. We joined an economic system for political reasons, and were happy to have a round economy ineptly hammered into a square political hole, because we thought it made us look like good troupers in the grand European project. The best thing the Piigs could do now is en masse to impose bank-debt-for-equity-swaps, belatedly leave the ill-suited Eurozone, and loudly point out that economies are too important to be sacrificed to theoretical political models.

O Holy Night

I’m putting the blog on ice for a while while I batten down the hatches during this snow. Talking Movies will return in mid January with a Top 10 of 2010 and a preview of 2011′s best movies.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Space, Technology & Modernity in Irish Literature & Culture

I delivered my paper ‘Competing Philosophies in That They May Face the Rising Sun’ to the ‘Space, Technology & Modernity in Irish Literature & Culture’ conference held in University College Dublin in May this year. With that paper now revised and submitted as a journal article I thought I’d look back at the proceedings held at the Humanities Institute of Ireland in UCD and organised by Graham Price and Liam Lanigan.
 
Friday 21 May
 
Panel 1: Beckettian Aesthetics
Chair: Dr Stanley van der Ziel (University College Dublin)
 
‘‘‘Antiquarians and Others”: Beckett’s Irish Modernists’
Alan Graham (University College Dublin)
 
‘The Phenomenology of Pain in Beckett: The Tedium and the Message’
Siobhan Purcell (University College Dublin)
 
 
Panel 2: Gender, Culture & Society in Ireland
Chair: Dr Anne Mulhall (University College Dublin)
 
‘Desire Lost and Found: Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour’
Maggie O’Neill (NUI Maynooth)
 
‘Kate O’Brien’s Modernism – Selves, Subtexts, “Mixed Media”’
Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka (Independent Scholar)
 
‘“A Sweet Colleen and a Salty Sinner”: Conceptions of Irishness, Catholicism, Homosexuality and Modernity in the Fiction of Emma Donoghue’
Annie Galvin (Trinity College Dublin)
 
 
Panel 3: Comparative Modernisms
Chair: Dr Sharae Deckard (University College Dublin)
 
‘“A Place on the Road to Somewhere Else”: The Fictional Writing of Colm Toibin in the “World Republic of Letters”
Sonia Howell (NUI Maynooth)
 
This Side of Princeton: Ireland and F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise’
Gavan Lennon (University College Dublin)
 
‘Adding “new beauties”: Joyce and Rushdie’s critical works’
Pauric Havlin (University College Dublin)
 
 
Keynote Address: Moynagh Sullivan (NUI Maynooth)
‘Space & Interspace: Medbh McGuckian’s Poetics, Maternal Aesthetics, and Matrixial Borderspaces’
Chair: Dr Graham Price (University College Dublin)
 
 
 
Saturday May 22
 
Panel 4: The Evolution of an Irish Modernist Aesthetic
Chair: Dr Lucy Collins (University College Dublin)
 
‘Modernism and Modernity in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland’
Stanley van der Ziel (University College Dublin)
 
‘“Pealing out a living message”: Sean O’Faolain, The Bell and The Artist’s New Ireland’
Muireach Shankey (University College Dublin)
 
 ‘“Dear Dirty Dublin” or “The Parable of the [Fair Trade] Plums”: Representing Dublin in Ulysses’
George Legg (Trinity College Dublin)
 
 
Panel 5: Consumption, Globalisation and Tradition in Recent Irish Fiction
Chair: Dr Graham Price (University College Dublin)
 
‘“A Simple and Genuine Sense of Homecoming”: Transition in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer
Eoin Delap (Trinity College Dublin)
 
‘Binge and Purge: Excess, Ekstasis, and the Celtic Tiger’
Niamh Campbell (Trinity College Dublin)
 
‘Competing Philosophies in That They May Face the Rising Sun’
Fergal Casey (University College Dublin)
 
There were a number of universities represented at the proceedings and an even greater number of writers. Beckett finally triumphed over Joyce by getting his own panel which illuminated his off-beat early literary criticism and the philosophy of pain in his mature work. Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Emma Donoghue were usefully placed in a continuum of female writers complicating received notions of gender and sexuality. Joseph O’Neill justified the Gatsby comparisons for Netherland by not feeling out of place after a paper on F Scott which brought out his Irishness to a surprising degree. Moynagh O’Sullivan’s keynote address meanwhile was a suitably dazzling display of theoretical fireworks used to illuminate the dense rich poetry of Medbh McGuckian. My own panel looked at work by Brian Friel, Kevin Power, John McGahern and Paul Murray, proving that not only is Irish literature engaging with modernity, despite the constant complaints by some commentators, but that a hefty reading list of must-read Irish novels of the last decade could be jotted down from texts cited in discussion of any one panel of this conference.
 
Ireland remains a republic of letters…

Mr Norris Changes Trains

Yes, as you may have guessed from the Christopher Isherwood referenceing title, this is the official announcement of a slight modification of the aims of Talking Movies.

Regular readers will have noted this modification in action over the last few months with several television and theatre thinkpieces and several theatre reviews popping up. I’ve knocked out 60 pieces in the 58 weeks since I started writing this blog weekly at the end of August 2009, and I feel it’s time to shake things up a bit. I set out to produce a weekly blog that mixed film reviews with film features serious and nonsensical, and to keep things interesting, funny and unpredictable to write as well as read. Talking Movies will, true to its title, remain predominantly a weekly film blog but part of keeping it interesting, funny and unpredictable for me as well as for you involves being more varied in content as well as form. There will be more theatre reviews, as well as features on books, music and television, mixed in with, but not replacing, the usual film reviews, features and colour pieces.

We live in an interesting world and there are many other mediums beside cinema which produce work worth writing about so it’s time for me to return to my eclectic origins in the University Observer where, before my film column, I was writing on comedy, theatre, television, books, music and occasionally even politics. I’d like to thank everyone who’s read the blog over the last year (sic), especially those who commented on it, linked to it, or gave feedback in other media, and hope that you regard this modification as enriching it rather than diminishing it. In the near future I’ll be writing pieces about The Corrections, CSI: NY and Auf Der Maur, as well as Alexandre Aja, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, 3-D, typecasting and nostalgia.

Well, that’s enough hostages to fortune to be going on with…

‘Keep watching the skies!’

Or at the very least this url: fergalcasey.wordpress.com

Ride the Lo-Fi Country

My beloved 1993 CD player died yesterday, forcing me to turn to its sister tape player for the first time in years, and muse over living lo-fi in a hi-tech world…

Not only is my beloved 2004 Auf der Maur album stuck in the CD player with no means of escape, I can’t listen to her new CD (which I just bought) on the thunderous speakers which echo around the room, instead I have to settle for throwing it into the laptop and listening to the tiny volume that it delivers in comparison. Small wonder that I’ve instantly turned to my long-neglected tape collection to still use the speakers and their great potential for noise. As a result I’ve spent the last two days listening to the Stone Roses, Bryan Ferry, The Beatles, and the Chemical Brothers. And that was just picking the tapes that were at the top of the pile. I know that somewhere in the dusty stash is The Goon Show not to mention the Pixies, Lightning Seeds, Bowie, Ash and The Doors.  And then there’s all the tapes I’ve forgotten I even made, which is going to be a treasure-trove of 1992-2004 time capsules for me to dig through.

But this has happened when I’ve just seen Tom Stoppard’s dazzlingly clever and utterly hilarious Arcadia which is nonetheless a simple enough play to stage, and as I’m ploughing my way through Jonathan Franzen’s epic family drama as state of nation saga The Corrections which is modern in style and content but very old in its ambitions, and as thoughts, possibly blog-worthy, possibly not, about each mull around in my mind. These pieces of work are very old-fashioned, lo-fi, if you will, but still impressive, just as the music I’m blaring from my tapes is fantastic, regardless of the ancient method of its delivery. It’s brought home to me just how at ease I still am at living a lo-fi life in a hi-tech world, how what’s dismissed as ‘obsolete’ is really often just ‘different’, and how the obsession with instant gratification can blind us to the qualities of older forms and the greater rewards provided by work that demands more active engagement. After all, filling out an 8-track led to Parklife…

I write a weekly blog but posting it can be the only time I venture on-line each week, as I write on a lap-top with no internet connection, about films which, for the most part, I have seen once in the cinema and then analyse from memory. This to me is normal, but I can imagine other people being crippled without access to IMDb or YouTube, just as I can imagine few people would be able to understand that I improvised dictation of nearly a year’s worth of articles down the phone to my co-writer for the University Observer, and wrote nearly half of my PhD thesis long-hand and had it supervised in that way.

I still am lo-fi, it’s just the world that upgraded.

O Holy Night

I’m putting the blog on ice for a while while I batten down the hatches at home, by which I mean stay indoors during this snow with the following tasks to keep me busy: cook a duck for Christmas dinner, watch the 5th Doctor Peter Davison in re-runs of 1980s period whodunit show Campion, and finally watch The Big Combo in BBC2′s noir season. Talking Movies will return in late January, Mery Christmas and a Happy New Year!