Lindy Hopping

After a short sabbatical in terms of blog posting (mostly due to a distinct lack of internet at my new home), I've decided to make more of an effort. In slow bursts. My most recent blog is dedicated to Lindy Hopping, something I have recently started. My eventual aim is to be like this:



which will probably take some time...

he said he had no room in that thick old head

procrastinating and dissertation writing.

The Sick Rose (not me)

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Dead dogs

There is something tragic about seeing a dog in an old photo. It is sad because (to me at least) the dogs in questions are almost definitely dead. They probably died a long time ago whereas the humans they are pictured with at least had a better 'innings' and may even still be alive. Old, but alive. To capture a dog in a photograph is to capture that essence of friendly familiarity we all get from seeing our canine friends, and to create a relic to the relative shortness of their lives.

Sad veiled bride, please be happy...

Call me a pessimist but Miss Havisham is someone who always springs to mind when I think of marriage and of love. Although she is obviously a literary creation, an exagerated figment of someone's (Dickens') fusion of romantic and tragic imagining, she still resonates with me, haunting me during moments of loneliness and, during periods of singledom, threatening and menacing me with promises of what may be. Miss Havisham is my hero.

For those unfamiliar with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Miss Havisham is the elderly lady made mad by being jilted at the altar many years before.She lives in a rotting mansion and still wears her wedding dress, refusing to let go of the heartache that characterises her. She stops the clocks that surround her hermitage at twenty minutes to nine - the exact time she discovered her lover had gone forever and wears only one shoe - the exact state of dress she was in when her lover abandoned her.

This is her view of love and the legacy of her suffering:

Then, Estella being gone and we two disappeared alone, she turned to me, and said in a whisper,--

"Is she beautiful, elegant, well-grown? Do you admire her?"

"Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."

She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my person in charge close down to hers as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?"

Before I could answer (if I could own answered so difficult a question at all) she repeated, "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces,--and as it gets older and stronger it will break deeper,--love her, love her, love her!"

Never had I seen such passionate speed as was joined to her utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the light arm round my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her.

"Hear me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and learned her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!"

She said the word often enough, and there could be almost certainly that she
meant to say it; but if the often repeated word have been hate instead of love--despair--revenge--dire death--it could not have sounded from her orifice more like a curse.

"I'll tell you," said she, in indistinguishable hurried passionate whisper, "what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the total world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter--as I did!"

When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught her round the waist. For she rose up within the chair, in her shroud of a dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon own struck herself against the wall and fallen dead.

Can you really smell a ghost?

I was sat working at my computer the other night and my nostrils were met by an overpowering smell of flowers. No - I do not have flowers near my desk or, in fact, in my house at all yet the smell was so distinct, as if someone had placed a fresh flower underneath my nose and kept it there, lingering, moist and fresh. I looked all around me expectantly (though what I expected to see I can't say) and was met with nothing apart from the vacant air. Where did this sweet smell come from? Did I imagine it? Why did I imagine it?

My mind naturally (as it is in my character to) reflected upon hearsay regarding ghostly phenomena and ways in which they make their presence noted. I remembered a story of a woman whose sister had died in childhood but was comforted by the fact that she smelled the sweetness of peaches at intervals throughout her life, as a sign, she said, of her sister's presence.

A prominent psychic magazine offers an explanation for this:

Science has proven that scent and memory are very tightly connected. Those close to you may wish to let you know they are present without sending you into a panic with the sight of a full-body apparition or making you question your sanity looking for the source of an unseen voice. Using a scent that you are sure to notice or that can instantly trigger a past event is a gentle way for spirits to communicate without causing alarm.

The most commonly reported odour associated with spirits is the smell of fresh flowers. Rose, lilac, and jasmine, three distinctly different aromas, are attributed to the ghosts of those who have recently passed. Sometimes a floral scent can be connected to a loved one with a particular fondness for a certain flower instead of someone who just crossed over.

Mamet Mamet

I'm just about coming to the end of a long affair with Mamet. I've been teaching his 1992 play Oleanna for the whole academic year and have my last class tomorrow. My ideas regarding this work as well as my interpretation of the themes and issues presented by Mamet have changed dramatically over the course of the year and I'll explain why...

First of all, for those who are perhaps unfamiliar with Oleanna, here is a brief synopsis: written during the late eighties/early nineteen nineties and amidst the emerging media hype surrounding cases concerning sexual harassment, Oleanna relates the story of a university professor and a student. At the play's start, we feel as though we are witnessing a simple tale teacher-student relations: John, the professor is going to help Carol, the student who does not 'understand' his lectures and who is, as a consequence, failing the course. Somehow, during the course of the play and as a consequence of both characters' actions, John is accused and will be charged with attempted rape, will lose his job, his house and all promises of securing tenure at his place of work.

Power struggles

Without wishing to spoil the plot for those who have not yet read or seen Oleanna, I wont go into anymore detail except to say that Mamet's evocation of these characters considering the play's context is very astute. Criticism of the play tends to lean in favour of one or the other character as being 'in the right' and justified in their actions but I feel that such arguments miss a fundamental point. The play is about the uses and interpretation of language and of the characters' actions between the two characters and in a way that cleverly mimics the contemporary accusations of sexual harassment and what is deemed to be politically correct or not, Mamet illustrates the difficulties of such interpretation. In other words, and perhaps rather obviously, if everything boils down to subjective interpretation, no-one can ever be right and no-one can ever be wrong. The publicity surrounding the play regarding extreme audience reaction cleverly taps in to the media induced hype of the early nineties' obsession with political correctness and sexual harassment and replicates this mania through a very cleverly structured play that seems to highlight the futility of taking the moral high-ground in any scenario.

David Mamet Society