Zoo in the head

Travis Bickle, thou shouldst be living at this hour

On Tuesday, the Curzon Soho cinema held a speed-dating event in combination with a screening of Shame, a film - so one hears - in which sex is depicted exclusively in a context of anomie, humiliation and self-loathing (Does sex happen in any other context, you ask. Or I ask, anyway). Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, describes the film's idea of a date as "an uncomfortably real transcription of a supposedly romantic evening: another long, static camera shot. It starts with stilted conversation, ends with a spark, but is followed by a catastrophic tryst in which there is nothing but emotional degradation."

The reason I know about the Curzon event is that a friend of mine was invited along to it; she made her excuses - she'd already seen it - and left.

I suppose there are worse date movies: inordinately long films, films about the Shoah (Claud Lanzmann's Shoah itself, all nine-and-a-half hours of it, may be the greatest bad-date movie), and films involving sexual violence or perversion (Irréversible, Cronenberg's Dead Ringers). It's interesting to note that Hollywood has already come up with some suggestions: in Annie Hall Woody Allen tries to drag Diane Keaton to Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity; and there's the best bad date-movie scene of all. It leaves me feeling I need to scrub myself down with Milton:

 

Big swinging dicks of the avant-garde

Shaun Whiteside pointed me in the direction of this, after I had enthused about a radio programme on Frederic Rzewski. (The programme was an episode of Music by My Friends on Resonance FM.) The music is very good - echoes of Charles Ives and Bruce Hornby - but I was disturbed to see that it had been uploaded by someone called John11inch. The phallocentrism of the world of classical music is well known, but I didn't realize anybody took it quite that far. Apart from Pierre "Lick My" Boulez, obviously.

Sing Sing sing

 Can't have done much for prison as a deterrent.

Potential T-shirt of the Day

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs" - G. K. Chesterton

Resolution

Dr Johnson in The Idler, October 21, 1758: 

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit: but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world; we do not so often endeavour or wish to impose on others as on ourselves; we resolve to do right, we hope to keep our resolutions, we declare them to confirm our own hope, and fix our own inconstancy by calling witnesses of our actions; but at last habit prevails, and those whom we invited to our triumph laugh at our defeat.

He said a number of things about resolutions, none encouraging, all woefully true to my own experience. Nor do I believe that calendars have magical powers, that because we've suddenly started giving a new name to the days we are living in, something has changed. But still the feeling is hard to shake, that New Year is a time to make resolutions. And so here I am, resolving to be a good little blogger this year, to try daily to say something or other, to create a bigger, brasher, brighter zoo in the head (oh dear: I think I'm bored with that name). Stay tuned!

The photo, of a sign at Wroclaw Zoo, is taken from Ilona Karwinska's Polish Cold War Neon.

I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving: having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming plans of a better life. I have done nothing. The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short. O GOD, grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

(One of Dr Johnson's prayers.)

 

What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Imperial lather

The Guardian publishes an extract from Richard Gott's new book, in which he works himself into a lather over the British Empire. It's somewhat overwritten, but that's not the same as overstated; the thrust of the piece is irresistible: that, however much we allow ourselves to be flattered by talk of good intentions or absence of mind or by comparisons with the Belgian Congo, an empire is necessarily violent and oppressive. (The best short version of this argument I know is Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate all the brutes'.)

A striking sentence towards the end, though:

The rebellions and resistance of the subject peoples of empire were so extensive that we may eventually come to consider that Britain's imperial experience bears comparison with the exploits of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun rather than with those of Alexander the Great.

Why let Alexander off the hook? In the New York Review of Books, Mary Beard questions the greatness:

In a now fragmentary passage of his treatise On the State, [Cicero] seems to have quoted an anecdote that would turn up again, almost five hundred years later, in the pages of Saint Augustine. The story was that a petty pirate had been captured and brought before Alexander. What drove him, Alexander asked, to terrorize the seas with his pirate ship? “The same thing as drives you to terrorize the whole world,” the man sharply replied. There were plenty of acts of terror he could have cited: the total massacres of the male population after the sieges at Tyre and Gaza; the mass killing of the local population in the Punjab; the razing of the royal palace at Persepolis, after (so it was said) one of Alexander’s inebriated dinner parties.

It seems to have slipped Gott's mind momentarily that empires rely on propaganda, projecting an image of relatively benign power, as much as on brutality.

Zoo news: Woofs on the loose

The first in a long while, I know. Telegraph TV has the scoop:

So much to enjoy here: "three or four woofs", "I'm gonna say the word 'mature'", and "Wild animals that you see on TV" for starters.

youtube users have left some valuable comments. AMANDATHEAWESOMEone says "OH MY GOD, I STILL CAN'T GET OVER IT. ALL OF THOSE EXOTIC ANIMALS BEING SHOT. THEY DIDN'T CHOOSE TO BE THERE! THEY DON'T DESERVE THAT!!!"

leprokahn138 counters: "I live off of Mt. Perry Road.. 7 miles away from where this happened, Look, this is America, and RIGHT HERE, is hickville USA, ALL OF THOSE animals WILL BE KILLED, that is a FACT, Americans think of nothing else other than FEAR when it comes to things like these ... Dont wrap your emotions into something that wont turn out the way you want it to, Go on with your life, worry about yourself, it sucks, but its true... I WILL SHOOT TO KILL!!!!"

I believe you, leprokahn, I really do.

UPDATE: The story is far more grim than I realized - it is reported that Terry Thompson, owner of the Muskingum County Animal Farm, set his animals loose then killed himself. Forty-eight animals were shot dead, including 18 Bengal tigers (perspective: the Bengal is the most numerous of the six surviving subspecies of tiger; but the most optimistic estimate of the total wild tiger population is 6,000). The other animals shot were: 17 lions, six black bears, two grizzlies, a baboon, a wolf and three mountain lions. Six animals were captured alive: a grizzly bear, three leopards, and two monkeys. Another monkey was eaten by one of the big cats.

Potential T-shirt of the Day

"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority"

    - T. H. Huxley

Hyenas: I forgot

The letterbox extrudes a new issue of the London Review of Books, which contains the following letter:

Much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s poem ‘Hyena’, I must point out that he has his hyenas crossed. The ‘giggle’ and pack behaviour referred to in the final stanza suggests the spotted (or ‘laughing’) hyena, but the first stanza (white mane, grey face, bat ears) describes the striped hyena, a solitary animal which does not ‘laugh’.

Mikita Brottman
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore

Which was the point that started me off on the poem, until I got distracted by falanoucs. Not much point doing zoology if you're not going to bother getting it right.