Epistulae Vagulae

New Hub on the Roman Month

2014-09-28T14:59:00.001-07:00

I've published a new Hub on Roman time reckoning - The Roman Month: Hours, Days, Nundinae, Kalends, Nones and Ides I'm thinking of making it part of a series on Roman everyday life, religion, festivals etc.
I'm sure that kind of thing will be useful to people researching for school projects and the like as well as those who just have an interest or are reading or writing historical fiction. The site seems to have gone into hibernation mode for the Sunday so I shall see how the hub seems to fare in the week.

Bubblews: A New Ongoing Project

2014-09-19T13:43:00.002-07:00

The development of the Greek Myth website The Garden of the Hesperides remains a work in progress, in conjunction with accompanying ebooks.

Meanwhile, I've also joined a new quick and easy content site Bubblews. This is a site which encourages numerous small posts on a range of topics including diary-like observations on one's day, recipes, news items and statements on the meaning of life. The revenue model seems simple and satisfying - a cent for every view, a cent for every like, and a cent for every time someone comments on your post. You are eligible for a payout as soon as you reach the $50 mark.

Naturally, it's an internal sort of world of people liking and following each other. It seems a not unpleasant and easy way to make a few dollars here and there and I've found its no pressure, informal setting makes it easy to experiment with writing on a wider range of subjects. I'll report back after I've used the site for a while and have more of an overview.

Meanwhile, Hubpages continues to generate a small but steady income. I've had quite a surge in hits this September, which I'm guessing is due to students going back to school and college all over the world and needing to brush up on their mythology. I'm finding still that some Hubs are getting many more hits than others equally good, which are getting virtually ignored. Perhaps when I've mastered the Dark Arts of keyword research and other arcana I shall be better able to predict which topics will glean more attention from the world...

New Greek Mythology Site - The Garden of the Hesperides

2014-07-13T13:44:00.001-07:00

I've been away for a while - in the meantime, I've continued writing for Hubpages which generates a small but steady revenue per month. I've also returned to a plan I've nurtured for some time of building up a multi-page website on Greek mythology. It is still at the early stages of development but you can see its beginnings here.
I'm enjoying doing more in-depth research into the subject, developing an interest in the shadowy Minoan-Mycenean history lurking behind the myth and of course it's always good to delve in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

In the longer term, I'm aiming to write some accompanying ebooks to be sold on the site, so I'll update when I'm further forward on that.

It's a nice feeling of independance to be focused on creating ones own content at will in contrast to the restrictions of writing for bigger sites, though they have their own obvious advantages.

The Gardens of Lucullus, a site I set up some time ago has not been altogether forgotten. Once the Greek mythology project is well established, it will possibly also be transferred to Weebly and developed as a horticultural sister-site with the Hesperides.

I'm finding Weebly quite easy and enjoyable to work with so far, though it's early days. It's easy to design a multipage, monetised site with them but we shall see in the fullness of time what fruits the Garden bears.

New Article on Athene and Pay-Per-Click Sites

2012-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

I've put up a new article on the Goddess Athene on Hubpages. Hubpages actually seems to be doing fairly well at the moment, with pageviews looking healthy and the Hubpages Earning Program delivering small but visible results rather quickly (speaking only of my own recent revisiting of the site).

Suite 101 seems to be looking a mite happier over the past couple of days or so, but it is too early to tell if this prefigures a significant reversal of its current languishment.

On the fora of such sites, one is frequently advised that the key to these pay-per-click gigs is persistence, that eventually you will find your niche or somehow get lucky. No doubt there is an element of truth in that and the saying of it always makes me feel that I should pull my socks up and try harder. On the other hand, if someone were to say to you 'come into work every day and one day, maybe, you'll get paid,' that would seem an unreasonable proposition.

Actually, thinking about it, that is how rather a lot of the more interesting creative occupations work these days; you are expected to have put in a substantial amount of volunteering before they will consider you for a paid post. People must be bribed or cajoled to do routine and unpleasant work, but if the job inspires passion like writing, people will queue to do it for free.

Hello Again

2012-01-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

Goodness, I've been quiet on here for a while, haven't I? Sorry about that.

Protracted Death of the Online Content Sites
Meanwhile, it seems as though the world of online content writing has gone belly-up. Six months ago or so, there was paid work to be had from Ehow, Brighthub and WikioExperts, that short-lived and mysterious site which offered small sums for random articles. All these sites seem to have undergone varying degrees of radical transformation boiling down to the fact that they no longer pay for articles or, if they do, not for articles from me.

The revenue sites haven't died, as such, but Suite 101, for example, is not a happy bunny.

Return to Blogging

The answer, in as far as there is one, seems to be a return to blogging. Hi :) Giving content sites rights over your work and a large percentage of any income you make from it seems somewhat pointless when you begin to suspect you have as much chance of attracting as many views as they do to your own little blog - not because you attract so many as that they... also blogging offers the pleasures of experiment and doing things the way you want rather than conforming to a set formula, and that suits me very well.

News from the Gardens of Lucullus
Meanwhile, my little classics site, The Gardens of Lucullus has lately acquired a growing online library of links to Latin texts and accompanying English translations, with an emphasis on sourcing fresh contemporary translations rather than the stilted and censored old stuff that is such an excellent advertisement for reading in the original. Have a look, here (if you're interested in Latin Literature, that is).

Right, that's about all I have to say for myself here for now. I'll try not to leave it so long, next time.

New Classics Blog

2011-10-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog which will be exclusively devoted to my writings, reviews and discoveries of Greco-Roman antiquity The Gardens of Lucullus. At the moment, it mostly just has links to my existing articles but I will be building up posts of work that will be posted there. At the moment, writing sites are so volatile that I am starting to feel one might as well stand alone with one's own blog and then at least reap the full share of such meagre rewards as may be gleaned rather than post to sites, get few views and get only a small percentage of the scrapings from that. I shall carry on posting externally as well though, as it is wise to cast one's net far.

I will be continuing to post here every so often and will also provide a link here, at least initially when I post something on the other blog. If you have found my classics related posts here interesting, it is worth checking out this new blog.

Pyramus and Thisbe

2011-08-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

Pyramus and Thisbe is my latest offering on Hubpages. This tragic love story intrigues me. Found in Book 4 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, it does not actually appear to be a myth as such but rather a popular tale emanating from the Near East ( it is set in Babylon). It doesn't deal with gods or heroes but with the love of an ordinary boy and girl who live next door to each other, in a terraced street. This essentially familiar urban setting reminds us that the kind of crowded civic life we associate with modernity was already ancient by Ovid's time.

Very much part of the same sentimental tradition as Romeo and Juliet, or the Greek Romance novels, popular in the Roman Empire, it invites the reader or listener to sympathetically weigh the powerful emotions of lovelorn adolescents against the rights of parents (especially fathers) to make decisions about their children's marriages.

How did the mostly patriarchal Romans feel about these stories privileging sentiment over prudence? How did they feel about their sons and daughters immersing themselves in such tales? It is tempting to wonder whether they ever played a role in softening the attitude of a stern parent or strengthening the resolve of a stubborn teenager. Of course, there is no word of blame in Ovid, for the parents of Pyramus and Thisbe. The couple are perhaps only tragic because the gods cursed them with a love that was not fated to be fulfilled in marriage; the Metamorphoses is littered with many other such unlucky loves.

In writing news, Suite 101 seems to be picking up a little after months in the post-Panda doldrums. For some I believe the improvements have been dramatic; so far for me they have been modest but notable. I feel motivated to started getting more articles in and have one in the pipeline on ancient pantomime, which I hope to have out in the next few days.

Ehow, I'm finding less lucrative at the moment, with a preponderance of titles demanding very specific and technical knowledge to write successfully, however I check back hopefully now and then.

Writing for Bright Hub

2011-07-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

Recently, I started writing for Bright Hub on the Books channel. Bright Hub can seem initially somewhat confusing to the prospective writer, as you have the options of applying to join a variety of different channels, which operate in different ways. A simplified way of understanding Bright Hub would be to see it as a combination of an upfront payment site like EHow and a self-publish, revenue-sharing community like Hub Pages or Suite 101.

Like EHow, Bright Hub editorial channels offer a $15 upfront payment for accepted articles. You do however have to work somewhat harder for your money - the minimum wordcount is higher and you are not writing according to a pre-determined formula. This does mean however that writing for Bright Hub can be more enjoyable and stimulating. There are also requirements with regard to formatting the article and improving SEO that seem initially fiddly and confusing, but, no doubt, become second nature, in time.

Articles written for the editorially managed channels are subject to detailed editing, before approval. There seems to be a much greater level of personal communication with editorial staff at Bright Hub, than with EHow, which does help to foster a feeling of greater professionalism as well as of being supported.

Articles are either picked by the writer from an approved list or you can suggest an article title to an editor to be approved (something I have yet to try). The self publish channels allow you to create your own article titles to write.

I actually got a lucky break, in that I applied and was accepted to the Books Channel when it was a self publish channel, only for it then to be taken over as an editorially managed channel, offering me the chance to make some ready cash and thus the incentive to write!

Only the editorially managed channels attract upfront payments; the others just acrue revenue, in the manner of Hub Pages or Suite 101. A nice extra is that the editorially managed articles also yield revenue for the author, in addition to the upfront payment. This obviously makes sense from the point of view of the site, as it gives writers an incentive to actively promote their own articles on Facebook etc, whereas with EHow for example, there is no incentive to give your article another thought, once it has been successfully published.

So far, for Brighthub, I have written an article on critical responses to A Streetcar Named Desire, which actually constituted my introduction to that play, which I thought very powerful, dark and brilliant so I am glad I was thus prompted to not only read, but reflect on it.

I've also written two interrelated articles on wise and sophisticated young adult (childrens?) novel Walk Two Moons.

Review of the Swan Thieves and Discussion of Writing Site Wikio Experts

2011-06-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

I've just written a review of Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Swan Thieves (a fine novel) on Wikio Experts, a writing site I joined recently.

The site works on similar principles to Demand Studios, in that, once approved, writers choose from a selection of titles to write and submit within a few days. Wikio Experts is a little different in that payment is a mix of revenue and outright payment, so that for some articles you will definitely get a set amount, say 5 Euros (the site pays in Euros), while for others, you can earn "up to" 15 Euros. It is early days so we'll see how it works out, but another site offering outright payment to non-US writers is very welcome.

Joining Wikio Experts happens in two stages; you initially fill out a brief application form, then, if approved, you submit trial articles on the topic areas you want to write in and if the articles are accepted, you can then select articles to write. At a maximum of 400 words, the articles are not too onerous to write.

The selection of topics at Wikio is as random as at Demand Studios, but, at the moment, there seem to be much fewer titles available. With Demand, it is usually possible to find something doable, once you've scrolled through the weirdness and the impossibly (for me) technically specific, but, with Wikio, I wonder whether supply will meet demand. It seems like a good thing, on the whole.

Izanagi and Izunami

2011-04-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

I've just published a new article on Hubpages Izunagi and Izunami A Japanese Creation Myth.
As I am most familiar with Greek mythology, I was particularly interested to notice the striking parallels between this story and the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Like Orpheus, Izunagi goes in quest of his beloved dead wife, to the very land of the dead. Like Orpheus, Izunagi is told that he may get his beloved back as long as he does not look at her. When he does so, he loses all hope of their being reunited and she is condemned to remain in the land of the dead.

There are also correspondances with the story of Persephone, as, at first, Izunami says she will not be able to return because she has tasted food in Yomi, the House of the Dead. Later, Izunami is transformed into Yomotsu-o-kami, a goddess of the dead.

Another interesting correspondance that struck me, this time from the book of Genesis, is that Izunami, the primal mother is, like Eve held responsible for things going wrong because she spoke out of turn and took the initiative. Both stories contain elements seemingly intended to justify male dominance as the rightful norm, although of course throughout the centuries, some readers and listeners must have been provoked to read 'against the grain' and ponder the fairness of the tale being told. By appearing to offer answers, myth can prompt us to ask questions.

The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin Review

2011-03-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

This is a novel set in Argentina in the 1980s about a young gay man called Richard who is half Argentinian and half English.
Following the death of his father, Richard is brought up by his proudly English mother, and as he comes to adulthood he continues living with her in their low rent apartment, working at an undistinguished job at a language school. He lives a quiet, somewhat lonely life, satisfying his sexual urges with furtive, anonymous visits to saunas.

Although the "disappearances" - the secret arrests, torture and probable murders of political dissidents goes on around him, he claims, in retrospect, to have very little awareness of this and is later shamed when angrily challenged that he must have known about the disappearance of a girl he studied with. He seems to move through his world in a kind of fog, to be curiously disengaged. Ironically, it is when he is caught up in the patriotic fervour of Argentina's war with Britain that he feels truly and proudly Argentinian. That he is both of Argentina and yet something of an outsider, speaking perfect English, with an English accent is what draws the attention of an American diplomatic couple Susan and Donald who find work for him, when he finally walks out of the hated language school. Although his life takes on a new dimension, he still remains within his mother's fusty apartment, which he neglects to alter in any way, though he feels embarassed on the rare occasions he brings anyone back. The apartment seems to symbolise some kind of refusal to grow up, to fully live in the world.

Through the first two thirds of the book, we watch Richard floating on the edges of power, of the changes that are taking place in his country, partly through his agency. He remains fairly apolitical, though he is sickened when Susan confesses that she and her husband were in Chile, during the time of Pinochet's brutal repression and did nothing. Through Richard's eyes we gains some interesting impressions of Argentina during that period, though always from a certain distance.

In the last third of the book, the tone changes, becomes more focused and gripping, as Richard finally becomes emotionally engaged and is astonished to experience love, happiness and vulnerability. Harsh realities intrude but he does finally repaint his apartment and we get the sense he is finally, fully alive fully himself.

A delicate, subtle, sad and romantic book, whose meandering progress mimics the drifting quality of the hero's life and somehow draws you deep into the world of this elusive individual.

Romulus and Remus

2011-03-12T20:54:00.000-08:00

I've just published a new article on Romulus and Remus, basically giving an account of Livy's version of the story and briefly exploring the relevance it would have had to Livy, who had seen Rome suffer through years of civil war.

It's an interesting story that I might like to explore in more depth, at some point - why would a civilisation have, as their founding myth, the story of one brother killing another? It is remniscient of the story of Cain and Abel of course but also of the Romans' relish of the idea of their own nastiness. Their early history is full of stories of heroic men who put loyalty to the city above family ties, such as the Horatii, who killed their sister because she loved an enemy of Rome. By killing Remus, as he disrespected the walls of the city, in essence invading, Romulus was setting a precedent of protecting the city's boundariesat all costs.

I wonder if the killing of Remus could also be interpreted as a sacrifice to propitiate the gods at the founding of the city, or so that his spirit would be embedded as protector - an idea that seems to lie deep in many ancient belief systems (or else I've been reading too much Peter Ackroyd on London or Alan Moore on Northampton.

I've started to read a book on the myth by T. P Wiseman Remus: A Roman Myth and I'll come back with a review.

The Bona Dea Scandal

2010-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

Just written an article about the Bona Dea Scandal

An escapade by the young P.Clodius Pulcher, the aristocrat who, a couple of years later would become a radical tribune of the people. The individualism of the period of the Late Republic does fascinate me; men and women seem to have been able to do and say fairly much what they wanted, with little in the way of repercussions.
This is in contrast to the greater social control exercised by Augustus a generation later, with his marriage legislation which made people's personal lives became a matter for the criminal courts and his successor Tiberius, with his tribe of informers that made people afraid to criticise the powers-that-be. I wonder if anyone has written about Augustus' daughter Julia, politicising her promiscuity (always a loaded term!) as the action of an old fashioned, reprobate Republican, refusing to have her personal life legislated for. Something to explore, possibly. Of course the Late Republic was also a time of violence, instability and corruption and politicians used their daughters and sons as pawns in marriage alliances but still things seem more open and equal than under the dead hand of tyranny.

2010-12-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

Hipparchia

2010-10-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

Just had my article on the Cynic philosopher Hipparchia posted to History in an Hour.com. She's a fascinating character, who applies her understanding of Cynic philosophy to her own situation and decides that normal rules about women and what they could and couldn't do simply don't have to apply to her.

http://www.historyinanhour.com/blog/

Diogenes Laertius is a horrible writer (out of some kind of wierd, misplaced humour he feels the need to sometimes end his biographies of philosophers with nastly little poems about their deaths) but he offers an absorbing compendium of characters and anecdotes in his Lives of the Philosophers. His very lack of discrimination and his wholesale dumping of detail from his sources, some of which he clearly doesn't really comprehend himself makes him so invaluable as a repository.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0258

Really enjoying Gore Vidal's Julian at the moment - can't believe I never read it before.

Handling the Undead John Ajvide Lindquist Book Review

2010-02-18T16:52:00.000-08:00

This book, by the author of the acclaimed Let the Right One In presupposes a scenario in which the recent dead of Stockholm revivify, one excruciatingly hot day. As we might expect from this author however, the novel offers far more than the standard zombie entrails-fest, instead it is, in part, an eloquent meditation on human responses to loss and grief.

We observe events unfolding through a range of perspectives; the first sign of what is to come is relayed to us from the viewpoint of a chance observer whom we never meet again. A larger scale perspective is offered by several bulletin style summaries of what has been happening across the city as the dead begin to awaken and the authorities and ordinary people struggle to formulate their responses. There is an underlying fear that the unprecedented crisis will prompt the state to take sinister and unaccountable measures - where are the dead being taken? Why are their relatives being discouraged from visiting? Should the reliving be classified as corpses or people with rights? There seems to be a thin line between ruthless authoritarianism and well-meaning bureaucratic bungling by human beings who don't really have a clue what to do next.

The primary focus however is on three families who have all suffered recent bereavements and have to deal with very mixed feelings as they discover that their dead have returned to a (sort of) life. It is one thing to long for your beloved to return from the grave, quite another when they actually do. Among those whom we meet are Flora, a teenage Marilyn Manson fan blighted (rather stereotypically) with self-harming tendencies and her devout Christian grandmother. David, a stand-up comedian and his young son Magnus and retired reporter strangely named Gustav Mahler and his daughter Anna. These characters are convincingly drawn, in particular David and Flora are brought to vivid life for us.

The ‘zombies’ themselves are virtual blanks; although sometimes frightening, they are more subtle than the crazed brain-devouring monsters beloved of film, but the living characters struggle to find in them the person they once knew and loved. They are essentially alien, exiled, non-functional.

In a sense their presence is like the dreams one has of those dead in which they are somehow both with us and yet not with us, we are glad to see them again yet sense that all is not right, cannot be right.

There is much in the book that remains mysterious and unexplained (though I think it is a book that would well repay rereading) but it delivers its own strangely beautiful redemption.

Being Human, Some (slightly obsessive?) thoughts

2010-02-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

I've been really enjoying the series of Being Human since it started. By chance I got to see the original pilot and long after G and I would say wistfully 'if only they would bring back that programme with the vampire and the werewolf and the ghost!' It quite escaped our attention, of course, that there actually was a massive online campaign to get the show put back on - we thought it was just us who had noticed and liked it.

It was a delightful surprise then when it did come back, although it took me a while to get used to the new Annie - she seemed slightly too posh and bland compared to the small Northern woman who had played her before, but I'm used to her now.

What is so good about it? Partly that vampires in general just are good. Werewolves of course are inherently less charming but George's pained humanity ably contrasts with and compensates for his bestial condition. Annie the ghost, I do have reservations about, but we'll come to that, at any rate as a female third, she balances out the household dynamics.The combination of these beings with their flat in Bristol, their hospital jobs the ordinary life that surrounds them is particularly satisfying. I like Trueblood very much but it is so much within a tradition of Southern Gothic that it seems quite natural that there should be vampires, just as there are alligators which seem equally unlikely (I haven't travelled much). I think some of my favourite episodes were in the first series for example when they tried to integrate with the local community and Mitchel befriended a small child - only for the household to be branded as paedophiles.

In this second series I have found the whole concept of the vampires and how they operate problematic. There seem to be an awful lot of vampires in Bristol and if they had all previously been in the habit of killing at whim, it is hard to see how this could possibly have been covered up, however skilled their network of support - we're potentially talking about hundreds of people a month found dead and exsanguinated. There would be an outcry!

Mitchell's authoritarian attempts to impose total abstinence on all the vampires also seems absurd when the possible compromises seem so obvious. Vampires apparently don't need blood to live - they're capable of living off normal food, though in an impaired condition. (Vampires that don't really need blood is another concept I'm not too happy with.) If they have this marvellous network that seems to enable them to get away with practically anything why don't they simply enjoy moderate amounts of the blood of the willing? - like that poor Emo girl that Mitchell appears to have quite gratuitously chained and terrified, despite her initial willingness. Then Mitchell could legitimately crack down on those who wantonly attacked and killed members of the general public. Alright, then, arguably, there would be no story, but it bothers me, possibly because I am in the midst of writing a vampire novel and trying to cover all angles of how it could and couldn't work, I'm sure I've left logic gaps.

The ghost is just too solid, it would be better if she flickered a bit or moved around in a sort of jerky stop motion way. Sometimes it's easy to forget she's a ghost - at least now they've stopped the whole thing with her being able to interact with the general public - I've liked her better these last couple of episodes.

The sinister man who appears to just like bursting werewolves is good, I'm afraid I have to hide my eyes when werewolves get put in the werewolf bursting machine.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Review

2010-01-17T13:52:00.000-08:00

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

This is one of the books I got on a 3 for 2 offer, using a kindly Christmas GiftCard. Sarah Waters is one of my favourite contemporary writers. She plunges one very vividly into dark, gothic Victorian landscapes with intricate plots and, in Affinity and Fingersmith at least, an undertow of despair. I didn’t get on so well with The Night Watch, the book completed just previously to this one and set in the Second World War, but that may be because I was sulking about being so briskly weaned off the claustrophobic Victorian Gothic I so enjoyed. Perhaps I will reread it soon.

The Little Stranger is set in the Post-war period, but is very gothic indeed.

The surviving members of the Ayres family: Mrs Ayres, her son Roderick and her daughter Caroline live in Warwickshire in the once elegant Hundreds Hall, an eighteenth century mansion, now in a state of decay. They are visited by a Dr Faraday, who is called in to attend upon the servant.

Central to this book is the depiction of the changes in the social fabric of Britain in the Post-War period. The Ayres family and Dr Faraday can be seen as representative of the old order and the new. The Ayres are, in some sense, dinosaurs, struggling to maintain their crumbling mansion, but living on a level of genteel poverty and hardship that the working class families, who are moving into the council flats with all mod cons that are being built nearby, would no longer expect to tolerate. Dr Faraday, by contrast, is the son of a servant, who has achieved the middle class status of doctor through his ability, hard work and great sacrifices on the part of his parents. The old order still holds sway however: it is something of a shock to learn that the Ayres keep a fourteen year old girl as their live-in drudge. It would be a year or so yet before the school leaving age was raised to 16.

Following Dr. Faraday’s initial professional visit, he gradually becomes an indispensable friend of the family and a witness to the troubles which descend upon their heads.

As misfortunes are visited upon the family, the increasingly omnipresent Dr Faraday struggles to reassure them that there can only be rational explanations for the happenings that plague the Ayres, in the face of their growing insistence that the house is tenanted by some uncanny evil. Their struggle to hold on to the decaying mansion with its closed off, derelict apartments becomes more desperate even as this reader, at least, could not help inwardly urging the characters to just pack up and leave. The family’s efforts to keep up appearances and maintain their status arouses both sympathy and exasperation. Caroline the sister is an intelligent, capable woman, who enjoyed life in the WRENS, during the War. She is seemingly doomed to spinsterhood, being a plain awkward woman in her middle twenties. She wanders around the countryside with her dog, picking berries and helping with the milking. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that she could simply get a job and bring in an income. Roderick, a once bright and promising young man, was seriously physically and mentally scarred by a “smash” in the RAF. His life is bedevilled by great mounds of paperwork on his desk that represent the financial troubles of Hundreds Hall.

Discussion of social analysis in the novel must not detract from the fact that this is a genuinely scary, creepy book. The atmosphere of the decaying old mansion and its inhabitants, marooned in time is brilliantly evoked by Caroline’s reference to the fact that the stopped stable clock was once playfully manipulated by them as children so that it matches the permanently stopped clock of Miss Havisham. Even at an early stage in the narrative Caroline recognises that the joke has worn distinctly unfunny.

The atmosphere is quite similar to that of Affinity, where uncanny events are afoot and there is an atmosphere of malevolence, but unlike in Affinity, we are not provided with a rational explanation at the end, or not one that conforms to contemporary ideas about what is rational. Reminiscent of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and also, to me, of stories like Maupassant’s The Horla in which the reader has a rather clearer apprehension than the narrator that all is far from being well. Very much recommended.

A Good Deed

2009-12-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

Trying to get to a temp job on the outskirts of town, I used an online journey planner and made efficient notes on how to get there. I successfully caught the required bus and spotted the correct stopping point. It didn't look right though, so I queried with the driver whether this was the location I was looking for. No, I was miles from there. I got off the bus and stood in the High St in a little place, which as a Londoner I would be tempted to arrogantly describe as "in the middle of nowhere". For a few minutes my mind was blank, I didn't know what to do, I was quite disorientated. I had no more change in my purse to pay for another bus ride and I hadn't even saved the number of the agency in my phone. Eventually I decided what to do; I went to a cash point and took out £10, cursing because this was one of those terrible outlets that take money from you for using them. It annoys me to think that that is maybe the only cash machine in the High St, so the locals have little choice other than to be regularly fleeced.

Anyway, I looked up and down for a cab office, but not seeing one, I went into a little newsagent to ask if there were a cab office nearby. There was a woman in the doorway talking to the man behind the counter. When I asked about the cab office, he shook his head but passed me a Cab Card. Then I asked how far I was from the place and was relieved to be told it was only a couple of miles - it could have been ten miles for all I knew. I phoned the number on the card, but it went to answer phone, I suspect it was just one driver and that was his mobile. When I asked if he had another number, the woman spontaneously offered to drive me to the place. In the car the radio played Mahler's Symphony No 9. In the end I was less than five minutes late.

When I told people what had happened they accepted it as normal but to me, being from a big city, it seems amazing that someone would give a lift to a stranger. I am so grateful to that woman.

The Rape of Lucrece Performance by Gerard Logan Review

2009-11-29T14:03:00.000-08:00

A couple of nights ago, I went to the theatre to see a performance of Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece delivered by Gerard Logan.

The poem is based on the story told by the Roman historian Livy about the rape of a virtuous Roman matron Lucretia, by Tarquin son of King Tarquin Superbus ("the Proud"). Lucretia tells her husband Collatinus what has happened before witnesses and then kills herself. This inspires Marcus Junius Brutus to swear an oath that they will be avenged against this grievous assault upon Collatinus' wife. Ultimately this leads to Tarquin being driven into exile and the inauguration of the Roman Republic.
The actor was wearing a sort of dun coloured salwar kamez which was remeniscient of a Roman tunica (the trousers were a wise addition for performance in the winter months). Over his shoulder he draped a length of white cloth to produce the effect of a Roman toga. The cloth was to fulfil many roles in the course of the narrative. The actor came and stood alone in the centre of the unadorned stage, with only drumroll from offstage as accessory. He spoke the parts clearly, most of the time powerfully conveying the emotions of the protagonists, Tarquin as he debates with himself talking himself round his doubts about the propriety of outraging his hostess.
When he spoke the part of Lucretia the effect was a little jarring in a way that was possibly deliberate. Shakespeare starts by laying cloying emphasis on her helplessness and purity calling her "dove", "lamb" and such like. Too whole hearted an expression of this depiction of the heroine can leave the reader/speaker in the uncomfortable position of joining with the rapist in objectifying Lucretia, the building up of her chastity and vulnerablility rendering her violation the more piquant. It was perhaps his discomfort with or wish to question these lines that seemed to give his expression of Lucretia's pleas and distress a kind of mocking falsetto. Later, when the raped woman finally pulls herself together, giving expression to anger and thoughts of vengeance and of how her honour might be restored, his delivery of her voice improved, although admittedly it also became more definitely masculine, scarcely distinguishable from the raging Tarquin so it could just be a limitation of range that produced the effect.
Lucretia's self condemnation arouses a complex of responses and interpretations. On one level she seems to be acquiesing to the Roman cultural assessment of the rape of a respectable woman as significant as an egregious insult to her respectable husband. There is little sense that she personally has been violated or only in so far as she is a wife rather than simply a human being. She insists that though innocent she must die or else her example may allow other adulterous women to get away with it. On the other hand, Lucretia's taking of her own life is arguably the only way she can regain control over her own body and situation, her act of violence in which she anniliates herself can be seen as both negating and confirming the annihiliating act of Tarquin. As the poem drew to a close, the white cloth had become Lucretia's corpse, first mourned over by husband and father who argued over who had the greater claim upon it and later paraded about the streets of Rome as a political tool.

Paranormal Activity Film Review

2009-11-25T09:07:00.000-08:00

Watched Paranormal Activity last night. I came to it with high expectations, based on a review I had read in the Guardian, recommending it highly for its subtlety. It is a film very much in the Blair Witch tradition - the unfolding action viewed through a camera set up by the protagonists.

Without spoiling too much, I think I can say that the basic premise was that a young couple, bothered by possible paranormal activity at night in their home have set up a camera in the hope of capturing concrete evidence. At first they are light hearted, perhaps only a little self-consciously displaying their affection for each other in front of the camera and before others. The intrusion of the camera is an amusing novelty in their lives. Inevitably things turn darker and escalate. I was left speculating how far the dark force that haunted them came from within or without, how far was it nourished or engendered by the tensions simmering beneath the surface of their happy relationship?

I must say I found some of the action a little slow and repetitive, even inconsequential; perhaps the refusal to deliver resolution offers more in the way of verisimilitude than tidy plot development but half way through, I found myself becoming impatient. Yes there is something in the house and it moves things around, no, wandering around in your underwear shouting at it won't help.

The exorcism reference (cut from some versions of the film) was absurd with its hints about unfortunates chewing off their own arms.

On the other hand I was clearly sufficiently influenced by the film to be just a little disturbed when my laptop started inexplicably making noises on its own in the middle of the night...

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino Review

2009-11-14T20:02:00.000-08:00

At the moment I am enjoying rereading "Grotesque" by Natsuo Kirino. It is a compelling and disturbing book focusing on the twisted lives of a group of young women who attended "Q" an elite school/university (apparently the two can be combined in Japan) in which there is a polarisation between the super rich girls who have been there since elementary school and the hard working less privileged girls who are admitted later through their hard work. Like her previous novel "Out" it is a dark tale but with characters that appeal even less to the reader's sympathy. In the earlier novelthere was at least initially a grizzly cameraderie between the group of women factory workers as they rallied round their friend. In this novel the principle protaganist is almost entirely unsympathetic as she coldly watches and even gratuitously hastens the disintegration of those around her. She is a lonely and twisted character, deeply affected by the constant comparisons made between her and her beautiful sister Yuriko. Prostitution and murder blights the lives of the other main female characters. A friend of mine who had enjoyed "Out" was repelled by this novel seeing it as self-hating and anti-feminist. To me the novel seemed instead an angry indictment of the competitive, image obssessed society that shaped and distorted these women. The initially over-achieving character who ends by taking a bizzarre pride in the fact that she juggles being a business woman and a prostitute seems to mirror the twin expectations of and pressures upon women in contempory society to be both beautiful and sexually appealing while at the same time be successful career women. Glossy magazines such as Cosmopolitan exhort women to not only work hard but look good, go to the gym, buy the right products, cook the right meals and have sex with an equally successful if less well groomed male in a variety of positions. The prostitute/businesswoman character who boasts of her career to sexual clients and sneers at her female colleagues for not venturing into the world of prostitution is indeed a grotesque image of someone trying to meet all the expectations thrown at the modern woman.

Another aspect of the novel that I really enjoyed was the vivid portrait of the Chinese character Zheng's life in a remote Chinese village and his epic and horrendous train journey to the big port city to find work. The novelist brings the world of a snobbish private girl's school and the world of a desperately poor immigrant to life with an equally unflinching eye.

The Burning of Bridget Cleary

2009-10-06T18:41:00.000-07:00

Been reading a fascinating if disturbing book "The Burning of Bridget Cleary" (Angela Bourke 1999). It explores a bizzarre and notorious case occurring in Tipperary in 1895 in which a woman was burned to death by her huband, accompanied by a group of her own relatives. They apparently believed that the Bridget, who had been in bed for some days sick with bronchitis, had been stolen by the fairies and what remained in the bed was a Changeling or substitute. By burning the Changeling, the hope was that the imposter would be driven out and the real Bridget would return.

While it is impossible to get to the bottom of what really went on that night - were the bystanders really as helpless as they claimed to prevent Patrick's burning of his wife - why was a fairly common folk belief acted upon to such scarcely precedented extremes? - the book explores the event from a number of interesting angles.

The incident and responses to the incident illustrated the gulf between two worlds existing side by side - Victorian Modernity with its Police Force, telegraph, compulsory schooling, doctors and "rationality" and the thought world of the Irish rural peasantry with its complex lore about fairies, fairy doctors and other supernatural elements. Bourke explores whether talk about such things always equated with a literal belief in them or whether talking about fairies was a coded way of dealing with problems of daily life. The rejection of disabled children for example was explained or excused by raising the possibility that the child was not the parents' real offspring but a Changeling. Saying that a woman was away with the fairies could be hinting in fact at her infidelity. Bridget Cleary was known to be "haughty"; a smartly dressed, attractive milliner with her own Singer Sewing Machine and a flourishing poultry business. Was the assault upon her in part initially intended merely to humble her?
Much of the British and Irish press, in particular those of Unionist sympathies leapt on this story as evidence of how unfit the Irish clearly were for Home Rule, comparing them with those in further flung regions of the British Empire. Victorian racist discourse was ready to see the Irish as possessed of an inherent inferiority that would preclude self government. By coincidence the Oscar Wilde trial was simultaneously taking place in London and was also used against the Irish - if an anglicised and educated Irishman such as Oscar Wilde was incapable of conforming to Victorian norms what hope was there for his less privileged countrymen?
Of course this was also a period in which Irish folklore was becoming a source of interest to scholars particularly of a nationalist bent. W B Yeats and Lady Gregory were questioning countryfolk and recording their stories about fairies and the like. Lady Gregory emphasised that ill treatment of suspected Changelings was actually disapproved of in traditional fairy-lore - any abuse meted out to the fairy impostor was liable to be visited in vengeance upon the abductee. In that way such lore could in fact act as a safety valve urging tolerance of and explaining the behaviour of family members who might be suffering from periods of mental ill health such as post-natal depression - the person was "not themself" but with patience and kindness they might be hoped to return to themselves. As we know standard Victorian treatment of the mentally ill could be a lot less "civilised".

Genji Monogatari

2009-09-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

Currently reading The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu - a substantial novel from tenth century japan. It's a lovely volume with accompanying woodcuts. It is one of those books that I have been trying to read off and on for years now - I read a little of it, get distracted, come back to it, start again and so on. In part I blame the size of the thing - it's too big to casually walk around with to the bathroom or as a work-book i.e a book to be read on the train to and from work and at lunchtimes (very anti social I know).

I suppose also the culture of Heian Japan is often baffleing. People get upset about very obscure things, such as hearing the coarse voices of ordinary people from within the house but seem to accept being abducted and possibly raped (it isn't quite clarified) as fairly normal if potentially embarassing. I suppose the more I read, the more I will understand. Interestingly though I find Heian women's accounts of their real lives are by no means so alarming as in this fictional creation. I can't see Sei Shonagon tolerating strange men (even princes) carrying her off in the middle of the night. It seems a bizarre conceit as well that these women are depicted as so small and frail that they can just be picked up and carried around like dolls or infants. All sorts of questions could be raised here about women writers and readers and the propensity in certain circumstances to romanticise a less liberated state than the one actually prevailing. Look at the craze a few years ago for wretched Bridget Jones and love of all things Jane Austen.

Went charity shop foraging again yesterday and came away with purple and black cotton/silk dress knee length and also rather serious full length black linen dress with lots of buttons.

Successful Foraging

2009-09-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

A successful charity shop forage produced a linen/cotton mix grey striped suit for my interview this week - £15. Before that had omlette and chips in a cafe with G- who I met up with in town after morning volunteering in Patients' Cafe. The chips were a bit too dry and healthy. Then we had a nice sunny walk back along the front.