Category: General

February Competitions – Results

Well, I trust you are all enjoying St. David’s Day.  I am, especially after Saturdays match.

Lets start with  the Photo’s, some good one’s here.  Being a boaty type  I particularly liked Araminta’s varnished craft, spoiled only by the mooring line.  But  I have long admired the craftsmanship of the Zimbabwe ruins as shown in Sipu’s photo  they have a kind of alien order with their  flowing curves that is never seen in the more formal architectures.  So, well done Sipu the prize yours, and over to you for the next contest.

Yes, I will give the Poetry award to Soutie for his Haka, not only did it rhyme but it was good too.  Well done Soutie and set one that Janus can understand next time.

What a shock, nothing all month and then two gems for the short story.   I liked them  both.   Ara’s was as dark and tangled a web as only reality can be,  and saw the journey as a voyage through several troubled lives.  Pseu’s tale was strictly that of a journey, the trials and tribulations  of  preparations and separations.  Incomplete?  Maybe, but journey’s do  end when the destination is reached and story’s do not.  I liked it much.  Well done Pseudonym a prize for you, but maybe, like Laura a little more planning would be time well spent.

 

 

I’m Here, or Hereabouts.

Well not exactly.  I was there yesterday but then I moved out to the big city, well Great Missenden is a big place compared with the creek.

Today is the day for the comps, it’s the last day and there are only a few HOURS left.

A few observations

Apart from a goodly number from Janus which do not meet our rigorous standards of rhyme, I see only one entry for the pomes right Soutie?
Short stories are also very short this month, so far entries consist of a promise by Araminta.
Photos are a better represented but there is still time to enter before “Last orders please.”

Judging tomorrow early GMT.

Nice weather here.

A conundrum

How stupid have we become?

On Saturday evening we were out with friends supping the brown stuff (or wine for the women), now after a few glasses I had to go and make room for some more of the brown stuff.

Having done my duty and putting my apparatus away I turned to the sink to wash my hands to be greeted by a new tap. One of these automatic single taps, so no touchy to pick up bugs. Above the tap is a sign saying “Warning the water is very hot” actually it wasn’t it was bloody scalding. As I like my skin to be in one piece I did not wash my hands fully. Now next to this damn sign is another sign saying “Now wash your hands”. I tried to but the water is too hot. Continue reading “A conundrum”

Dagen H (Any resemblance to ice cream is purely coincidental)

While on the subject of films, but otherwise completely unrelated to the Oscars, so excuse me, I went to see the Hollywood version of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, a couple of weeks ago. I suppose at this point I should bow my head and admit to the shame of having read and enjoyed the Millennium Trilogy. Moving swiftly on, I found the film to present an accurate portrayal of the novel with the characters, settings and events, meeting my expectations. However, there was one incident, the details of which I have been trying to recall without success. The story involves a flashback scene to 1965 and a motor accident that occurred on a bridge. What I have been trying to remember is whether the film shows the cars driving on the left or the right. Some of you may remember that until 1967 cars in Sweden drove on the left. What adds a little bit of spice to the story is that Swedish cars were a ‘left hand drive’ as well. It should be fairly easy to spot such an anomaly, so if any of you have seen the film and can recall the moment, perhaps you can put me out my misery and let me know whether the producers got it right.

I am keen to see the Swedish version of the film which I know that some people preferred to the American version, though I suppose it is safe to say, ‘they would wouldn’t they’. I wonder whether they got it right with the bridge scene.

Note: the day on which the Swedes changed sides 3rd September 1967, was known as Dagen H. You can read more about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

Orientalism?

Oriental. Orientalist. Orientalism. The terms used to be simple with a meaning commonly agreed upon. From the perspective of the people who were charting new naval passages and drawing the maps, Asia was to the east. Hence, the use of the Latin term for it.
Logically a person who studied the Orient would be called an Orientalist, the study itself could be described as Orientalism. Things being as they were, it made sense. Then came that snivelling pseudo-intellectual twazek, Edward Said, and decided that he knew better and that everything would have to change because he wanted it to.

This leads me to, at long last, ask the central question — is it fair, or even relevant, to subject literature, scholarship, and art that was painted decades, if not centuries, before to a contemporary mindset?

This topic has come into my mind because I have just finished reading the Travels of Marco Polo. It was great fun. Perhaps the accuracy is dubious, but the stories are entertaining and the style quick and easy. The task for next week is to try to see if there was a vein “Orientalism”, using Said’s hijacking of the term, in it. It certainly did involve the East, the Orient. It was also told from the perspective of a Venetian from a different day and age. Was it world-class scholarship? Hardly. But does it deserve negative scrutiny, to be drug through the dirt because some prat writing in the 1970s decided that he wanted to kick up a fuss? Hardly.

It seems facile to accept Said’s perspective, to impose it on a different era. “Orientalist Painting” was simply an outgrowth of Romanticism. The fantastic, the improbable, the exaggerated in the paintings of the East were really not that much different from the depictions of the West at different times in its history — the romanticisation  of the Mediaeval Era, of the countryside. More broadly, was the use of East Asian motifs in 18th and 19th century Europe, UK, and the Americas really any different than the Ch’ing Emperors living in a summer palace that blended traditional Chinese styles with the Baroque? Cultural interchange has always gone both ways, not always evenly.