Scarlet and Black

Some improvement

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:15:00 +0000

My mood has got slightly better, not least because I went to see Notes on a Scandal, which was great and very funny to boot. I very much enjoyed the novel, but wasn't sure how film would capture the first person unreliable narrator on which the whole book hangs. They did a pretty decent job, though it was a good bit more explicit than the novel, as perhaps it had to be. Anyway, the delectable Cate Blanchett could be acting in anything at all, however cliched and flat (anyone remember Veronica Guerin?) and it would still be worth the ticket price to watch her luminous lovelieness. Also, I got some sleep. Bonus.

I have just discovered the blog of a good friend of mine from Oxford who is living in Italy now and have added it to my links. Chris is fiercely clever, funny, kind, gentle and handsome. He is also Scottish, and has chosen to live in Italy, so you can see that he is an almost faultless specimen of humanity. Unfortunately I can't make any sense of his blog at all, since it is mostly about Italian political reform and the media, but perhaps if I begin to read it regularly then I will know what my Milan-dwelling brother and sister-in-law are talking about when they sigh with despair every time the Government is mentioned over dinner.

Idiots

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:29:00 +0000

And to make a bad day worse, anti-choice scumbags have plastered the intersection outside my department with disgusting pictures, past which I have now had to walk four times today. I am not above telling you that I find it extremely upsetting. Earlier on, before the pictures went up, they were giving out fliers but there was nothing to tell you what it was a flier for until you had it in your hand. As soon as I looked at it I ripped it up into little bits and walked over and threw them in the bin and made sure the idiot who handed it to me saw me do it. Despite my fury, I mind the vile misogynist propaganda rather less than I mind the enormous and revolting photographs which made me want to cry. Also, I am 99% per cent certain that one of their billboards was drawing a direct comparison between abortion and the Holocaust, which is in splendid taste, is it not? However, the images were so distressing that I actually couldn't bring myself to look at the thing for long enough to see in any greater detail what invidious association they were attempting to draw. It appeared to hang on the idea of choice and why this was a bad thing (?), and had the phrase "religious choice" above a picture of a pile of Nazi deathcamp victims. I am completely baffled by what on earth this line of reasoning (to grace it with a term it scarcely deserves) can be driving at. I am too annoyed and upset even to work this observation up into a piss-take of their manifest and thorough-going stupidity. Idiots. If I hadn't been in a filthy humour earlier today (and I was) then I certainly would be now. I don't know why the University/police/local authority allows it, but I intend to find out. If they were adverts trying to sell something there is no way it would be tolerated. Since they are only trying to sell dangerous woman-hating bile apparently that's fair enough. More idiots. Great.

Why pretend?

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:30:00 +0000

I am too dismal and badtempered and pissed off and homesick to summon up the enthusiasm for writing blog posts, so why don't I just dispense with any pretence that my blog consist of more than just descripions of films and list the things I've been to see in the last week.

300 (2007): Rubbish. The dialogue is appalling, and the visual spectacle is samey and cliched, and the bizarrely historically truncated plot effaces every nuanced and interesting aspect of the story itself. All the Persians were flamboyantly queer or deformed or both, which was dull and offensive enough, but the Spartans themselves were less attractive by far - revolting identikit pneumatic bodies devoid of any vestige of humanity, erotic appeal, or (absurdly) armour. The whole thing was a two-dimensional and crappily-acted nipplefest. If this is what graphic novels are like then I'll stick to Fielding, thanks. The high point was the credit sequence, which included the magical character description "Transsexual Number 3 (Arabian)". That's something to have on your CV.

The 300 Spartans (1961): quite funny. Leonidas as clean-cut, laconic (you do the jokes) all-American hero; Xerxes as mildly dastardly British army officer in the colonies, and as for Themistocles - well, at least he was in it. Artemisia was a cracking bit of steely-minded totty, and there was a touching and hilarious subplot about a simple Spartan youth who is desperate to fight at Thermopylae in order to win the hand of his sweetheart, with whom he frisks around the olive-shaded landscape. My favoutite bit was Ephialtes, portrayed as a dumbly brutish mountain-dwelling simpleton in a goatskin jerkin. Brilliant. His cackhanded attempt to grope the virginal Spartan maiden was black-hat/white-hat characterisation at its best.

A university production of Euripides' Medea: okay actually. They were using the translation I used to teach to 13 year olds, so that was a nice trip down memory lane. You could see the chorus' underwear through the armpits of their dresses when they moved their arms though.

Rome: a blast. I recommend it to all comers. My only regret is that we were watching it on a school night and therefore had to go home before the commencement of the promised affair between Octavia and Servilia. (To give non-classicists an idea of stupid this is, Servilia was the mother of Brutus, of "et tu Brute?" fame. She was the lover of Julius Caesar. Octavia was Caesar's great-niece. That's some age gap, quite apart from anything else). Best of all was, of course, JC himself, played by Ciaran Hinds. Caesar really is my heart-throb through the ages, which I dare say is highly revealing of some fascinating aspect of my personality blah blah blah. Anyway, I love him. The casting was the icing on the cake for me, since the last time I saw Ciaran Hinds he was in a BBC production of Persuasion playing Frederick Wentworth, the thinking woman's crumpet of the Austen corpus. A friend in the English department told me the other day that in my life here I remind her of Anne Elliot. I hope that means there's a Wentworth at the end of it.

The Queen

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:08:00 +0000

Newsflash on my never-ending cinema visits: last night I saw The Queen. Despite the reviews, I had been sceptical because really, it wasn't very long ago, and I paid plenty of attention first time round (it was hard not to). However, much flimsier commendations would still have been pretext enough for ditching Ovid, and it was, as everyone knows by now, excellent. Much more suprising, I found several parts of it very moving and even shed a tear, which cannot be said of my 16-year-old self watching it unfold at the time. I was entirely dispassionate: my abiding memory of the day she died was that I'd just got a kitten (yay!). My abiding memory of the day of her funeral is that I was up late in the loft apartment of my brother's flat, trying, and managing, to cop off with his best mate (sorry about that). The only emotion I can recall summoning up was a faint sense of distaste for the all the undignified howling over the death of a woman these people had never met, and a vague feeling that the Queen was behaving oddly. Well done to the film makers, then, for the fact that I found the funeral stuff genuinely very sad, and also felt overwhelming sympathy for the Queen. And didn't Blair's government look like twits? I must say that I heartily enjoyed that aspect of it too. My only regret was that Blair himself wasn't made to look even stupider, but luckily he's achieved that amply without the help of filmmakers.
I fear that this all goes to show that I am getting old: the senile lability, the establishment sympathies, the disdain for the anti-royalism of my youth. I can of course see that they did a very deliberate job of making the royals dignified and wise and timeless and the New Labourites petty and irrational and uncharitable, and to that extent the thing was highly manipulative. I admit I bought it though: at least for the duration of the film, and very possibly beyond. Did you?
PS Honourable mention to the stunning Aberdeenshire countryside which stole the show and made me feel even more patriotic than homesick. Go Deeside!

Bad Username Indeed

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:54:00 +0000

I just tried to sign in to blogger but got an error message indicating a bad username, which would have been scottishmelanie had I not missed out the "c" . Avid readers of my blog will probably think the revised epithet not without justification. Anyway, it delighted my childish heart, firstly because this egregious manifestation of my in any case sempiternally cack-handed typing probably owes something to the after-effects of the impressive volume of whisky sour I sucked back last night; and secondly because the shortness and ease of the step from Scottish to Sottish spoke to me at a deep level. My love of whisky sours may be the ultimate expression of my ethnicity: what other confection combines an irrepressable enthusiasm for hard liquor with the thrifty instinct not to waste whisky too rough for drinking neat? They say you are what you eat, so better Scotch than Polish, I suppose.

The History Boys

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:19:00 +0000

In another fascinating instalment of what I've been doing, I went to the Bloor to see The History Boys last night. I had been dying to see it ever since I spied the poster a couple of weeks ago, resplendent with Tom Quad as it was. Indeed, a handful of wist-inducing shots of Oxford quite made my day. There was also the usual witty Bennett dialogue and a thorough-going air of Britishness which was very comforting and funny. I would have liked more early 80s pop music myself (they tantalized us with the opening bars of Dead or Alive's "Spin Me Round" but never came good on the rest, damn them). More importantly, however, the transition from play to screenplay really hadn't been completed successfully. Lots of the dialogue felt declamatory, and highlighted Hyntner's failure to exploit the opportunities the screen offers for showing the audience something rather than telling them; set-piece dialogues and group scenes were stilted, obviously designed for the formal artifice of the theatre, but grating in the realism of film. And crucially, almost all the shots were far too - well, stagey. The most disastrous manifestation of this was the truly ludicrous way in which the Boys themselves roamed around in a pack - it looked absurd, like a herd of animals (which I appreciate is a not inaccurate way of presenting a congregation of adolescent males of any species, but it was still preposterous).

And why were all eight of them going for Oxford and none for Cambridge? I object solely on the grounds of realism, of course: the foregoing being, on my lips, the essence of the rhetorical question...

Farmyard animals

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:09:00 +0000

Who didn't have a toy farmyard when they were small? Well, Toronto has a toy farmyard with real live farm animals, and I went to it last Sunday. (Apparently there is also a big zoo somewhere for those whose childhood taste in toys tended in a more Noah's Ark sort of direction, but I am resistant to attractions which necessitate the use of public transport, which is why in seven months here I have never seen the lake.) Riverdale Farm is in a part of the city called Cabbagetown, which my guide, the incomparable Ms Guardiani, tells me is because it was first inhabited by Irish immigrants who didn't like to waste space and dug up their front lawns to plant veg. Now it is very chic, but also has a lot of quite low-rent and social housing behind the trendy main streets: a bit of an Islington, I suppose. (Though frankly this could describe virtually any suburb of London these days, since everywhere is "up and coming". Where on earth are the poor people going to live, that's what I'd like to know).
Here are some lovely baby cows, their spindly legs casting long shadows over the lingering snow in the late afternoon sunshine. They were very friendly. I liked them even more than the pregnant goats.

Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:13:00 +0000

I am unable to resist the temptation to post this picture of Alessandra, because it made me laugh. And for those of you who find baby photos boring, I can assure you that this much more interesting than anything I have done in the last two days, unless you are desperate to hear about such riveting things as which words I had to look up while reading the eighth book of Virgil's Aeneid, or how I ate some pasta and then got drunk. Honestly, I'm doing you a favour.

Evenings In

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 04:03:00 +0000

I have had another fine weekend, this time of Evenings In. I like Evenings In a lot: slopping around someone's flat doesn't make you feel glamorous, it's true, but while the small at-home gathering furnishes little occasion for truly fabulous heels, there is equally little occasion for taxis, having to work out the bill, drinking drink you don't really like because it's all they have, shouting to hear the conversation, etc. Besides, for someone so fond of shoes, I must confess that I am never happier than when barefoot, and one of the failings of bars is that taking off your shoes and curling your feet up under you while you sip your wine just isn't quite the thing. Other advantages of people's homes are that there are no queues for the loo, or queues for the bar, and you can listen to whatever music you like. And you are guaranteed only the company you like: since it's not as though I ever talk to stangers in bars anyway (what are street corners for?), the noisome proximity of other people's inane conversations has limited appeal.
Of course this is all rather predictable from the transient perspective of a rather downcast Sunday evening: ask me again next Friday night. If I am making myself sound geriatric and proving that I am lazy as well as stuck in my ways, this will come as no surprise to anyone, especially considering that by my calculations I have not been clubbing since approximately April 2004. I got bored of it when every night seemed to turn into a rerun of my pretty gay friends telling manky straight chancers please to leave me alone. Sometimes you don't know a good thing, eh?

Tempting Fate

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:49:00 +0000

On Friday night I had some beers and a bite to eat in a cool little bar along my street, and then to hear a band, chosen according to the time-honoured but highly unreliable rationale that someone's friend was in it. Not only was the band pretty good, but the act which came on afterwards was hilariously, uproariously and unintentionally stupid, which provided a comedic as well as a purely aesthetically satisfying aspect to the evening (the female lead singer kept doing these faux-naive baby-doll stylised dance moves, shaking her hair over her face, and, alarmingly, screaming; the guitarist, dressed in a Where's Wally?-style top and pudding-bowl fringe, would periodically shimmy to the front of the stage and back in a wide circular movement while exaggeratedly lip-syncing to the girl's lyrics with a deadpan face. Fantastic.) Then we went to another bar where I had fizzy lemonade (a drink which with my terrible lack of sophistication I frankly prefer to beer) and a good old blether with the ladies.

Alas, as I walked home I began to fear that I had jinxed Saturday night's dinner party by foolishly contriving to enjoy myself on Friday night, when, as any fule know, you can't have both. So I slept in till 11.30am to give myself minimum time for worrying (highly effective, no one frets while asleep). Then I shambled out into the mild midday to do my last-minute shopping of a) bread and b) wine, a combination which made me feel very wholesome and eucharistic. I will admit I felt less wholesome when I finally went to bed drunk at 6am, and not at all eucharistic when I subsequently missed Mass, but other satisfactory sensations arising from these divine substances were amply forthcoming: I don't complain about an 11-hour dinner party with a bevvy of charming gents, especially one that ends in hours of idle gossip, costly chocolates and bourbon.

Rising at a godless hour on Sunday (is it really breakfast at 1pm, even if it's toast and coffee?) I knew at once that I was bound, after such accumulated delights, to have a dismal time on the third and final day of the weekend (please don't anyone write in about how the weekend is only meant to be two days long - being an impovrsished student has to have its compensations). However, my coffee was interrupted by a phone call inviting me to the petting zoo, where I saw pregnant goats and funny chickens and a lovely cow who reminded me why Ox-Eyed is such a complimentary epithet in Homer, all in the new spring's glorious sunshine which justified (nay, enabled) a long bright walk there and back. To be whisked off to another dinner party afterwards, especially one hosted by a dashing chap with a dab hand in the kitchen who insisted on making us cocktails before, during and after every course, was surely more than anyone has a right to hope for.
I woke up puking at 4am after a bad mussel. Sigh. I suppose it wasn't the weekend any longer.

The Departed

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 01:40:00 +0000

I have just come home from seeing this film and it is absolutely superb. I have rather let the Oscars pass me by, so I only discovered this evening that it is the Best Picture winner, and I don't know what else was nominated and almost certainly haven't seen any of them, but a piece of me is still determined that this justly won. I suppose I could spout a lot of my usual pseudy rot about how it was so ingenious and thoughtful and well crafted. But in truth what struck me about The Departed is precisely that it wasn't that "hmm, how though provoking" sort of film: it was in the vein and tradition of the simplest, most formulaic good cop/bad cop/ganster plot-driven efforts of which we've all seen hundreds. It was just immeasurably better. It is a little violent, I'm afraid (though I've seen worse: Scarface, anyone?), but it is also tremendously moving. I actually wanted to cry towards the end, but the friend next to me is the kind who would mock me if I did, so I didn't.

Highlights, surprisingly, included Leonardo diCaprio, the appeal of whom as either thespian or pin-up has always resolutely passed me by, but whose character was so involving that for 150 minutes I became one big ball of heart-wrenched attraction and sympathy and hope. No adult woman should admit this, but there was a point when someone ran her fingers through his hair and I wished it were me. (It reminds me of when I went to see Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet at 16 and found myself hoping it would work out for the pair of them at the end. Durrr...). The Departed also has some excellent tragi-comic and meta-cinematic moments. There's some pseudery for you to counterbalance the hormonefest. What did others think?

Man shall not live, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 23:34:00 +0000

Last night I had a very delicious dinner in a French restaurant, complete with stinky garlicky snails and lovely pink rack of lamb and dense brambly Southern Regional wine. Yummy. I think there may have been two bottles of the vin, actually, but that only occured to me afterwards, since my powers of perception had already had the dampeners put on them by a couple of pre-prandial pints and a good sniff of gin and tonic. Once we had had our snails and lamb and pudding (delectable white chocolate mousse cake, I grieve to confess; the boys were classier and had the meltiest tarte au citron) we decided not to let the pre-dinner pints get lonely, and sent a couple more down after them. It was quite a night.

None of this, you will all be rushing to remind me, is very Lenten. Alas, you would be right. Now I realise that the tale I have just told is not exactly good evidence of this, but it is really not when I am out with the crowd that I find it difficult to stick to my Lenten disciplines. Nor is it when I am really hungry, nor when perusing the supermarket shelves, nor when it's cold outside (25 below yesterday and you could feel it too: thank goodness for the thock of the cork and a glass or two of Nature's Insulation). No, the time when it is hardest is when I have had an uneventful day and work has been a bit dull and I have no plans for the evening and I am missing people in Blighty (comme toujours) and I think "Oh, I'll just stop off and buy a sweetie (bottle of beer/doughnut/bag of crisps), then I'll have something nice to look forward to." Oh no you don't! Home to lentils and an apple, and be grateful, my girl!

Of course the whole reason for making eating a focus for Lenten privation, apart from tradition, is that since I for one am almost permanently either eating or thinking about eating, every time I do either of those things I shall be made to think of God. All very sensible, and indeed, it works. It must be owned, however, that after a long day in the library, contemplating the majesty of the divine Creator of the universe, while highly satisfying on one level, is not quite as immediate a comfort as, say, sitting in your jimjams guzzling a big bar of hazlenut chocolate. Festive occasions such as last night don't get a look in: if I get through an evening like this one without a trip to Dominion for a packet of biscuits I shall consider that a far greater temptation has been far more impressively withstood.

The Book of Alternative Services Rite wrecked my Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 21:50:00 +0000

I had not realised how steeped in High Churchery I had become until I arrived at Mass this morning. "Hmm," I thought, "no incense, how strange." Then I thought " What on earth are they doing with this psalm?". And then "These reponses are all wrong... hang on... NOOOOOOOOOO....! It's the modern rite!" Absolutely horrible, I could barely listen. And what on earth have they done to the Lord's Prayer? I'm afraid that at about the time they announced the peace (complete with ghastly stilted handshaking and forced uncomfortable smiles), I was forced to leave. This put me in a bad mood. At least I got some extra Horace reading done, I suppose. Now I will have to go to Evensong to get my weekly dose of solemn ritual. I should add that there was no warning at all in last week's intimations that the slight change of the Mass time would also involve a very major change of Mass liturgy, and I'm sure I can't be the only person whose Sunday has been ruined by this bit of sneakery on the part of the Rector. I do hope they aren't trying to convert us to these barbaric services: give me incense or give me death, oppressors.

Dydd Dewi Sant

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:32:00 +0000

That's "St David's Day" to us poor non-Welsh-speakers, and today is the day. I am half Welsh, but you wouldn't know because I don't sound Welsh at all: what I call Stealth Welsh. With a little investigation one discovers an extraordinary number of us Stealth Welsh around the place; so many, in fact, that Rhodri Morgan, the First Minister of Wales, has sweetly sent a Festive Message (hyperlink) to Welsh people living overseas. He says "Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus a llwyddiannus dros ben i chi gyd", which translates roughly as "Isn't this Labour government just perfectly marvellous?"* which I'm sure is exactly what I and others had been longing to hear on this day of national pride in our ancient culture.
Elsewhere I found a website usefully informing me that "the celebration usually entails singing and eating". This knowledge made me feel very proud and loyal as I was able to reflect with satisfaction that I both sing and eat every single day, and not only on St David's Day itself. What patriot could do more?
My favourite fact about St David is that his mother was called Non, a name which to my puerile mind has almost inexhaustible comic possibilities (quite incidentally, the philologically minded may care to know that Welsh doesn't really have a word for "no". Instead you negate the sentence you're replying to, truncate and restate it). I was delighted, however, to discover the motto associated with this 6th Century Abbot: "Gwnewch y pethau bychan", or "Do the little things", which is a fine thought to take away on a Lent day. Do the little things, indeed. Mony a mickle maks a muckle, after all.

*It actually reads 'I wish you a happy St David's Day', though if you read the rest of his touching missive you will see that my cynicism is by no means misplaced.

Speaking too soon

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:43:00 +0000

Remember that thaw? Hmm, not so much. In fact there is a blizzard blowing so severe that I have just taken the tube home although it is only one stop (and a stupidly short stop at that: none of your end-of-the-Metropolitan-line 20 minute jobs), and although it is only 5pm. The speaker-meeting at the department has been cancelled because the speaker can't get in from the airport. The university has officially closed as of an hour ago. The tube was so packed I had to get the second train, a thing which has never happened to me here (and evidently never to any other Torontonians, either, judging by their bemused and stilted inefficiency at packing into tube carriages: move down, for goodness' sake!). Annoyingly, yesterday was glorious, with dazzling sunshine and a blue and perfectly cloudless sky, whereupon I made the hasty judgement that it was spring. Which it's not. Spring, you see, would involve the kind of weather which makes going out in a mini-skirt and open-backed shoes perfectly reasonable; freak blizzards exist to teach the vain and optimistic that moonboots will be necessary till June.

Anyway, I don't know why I'm posting all this, since if you are in Toronto you probably don't need my blog to alert you to the dense and whirling snowstorm outside, and if you're not in Toronto (and congratulations on that, by the way) then the transport difficulties of a remote colonial settlement are simply so much otiose confirmation of the superiority of life in the Old Country. Apparently we're getting torrents of freezing rain later. Yum.

harumph

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:26:00 +0000

Apologies for silence - the web interface of this blog failed me for a few days, as did anything at all to report. I had a rubbish weekend, in which I went to bed with Sophocles (not a hot lay) not only on Friday night but also on Saturday, which was like taking a slightly sore spot and whacking it with a mallet. To add a salt and vinegar crisp to the cold sore of this spurning, among the excuses proferred was one which confirms that I am now officially more boring than Ovid. Good grief. This is what happens when, however nice your friends are, you only have twelve of them. At home in Britain I used to lament that I had so many friends I didn't always see them all in a year. I don't think we're in Kansas any more.
Anyway, Saturday was the kind of dismal solitary evening for which, as any single woman knows, the only remedy is a huge bar of chocolate and a bottle of wine. Even recourse to this was barred me, however, as it's Lent, and I have renounced that sort of splurging, so I satisfied myself with some psalms and an early night. It's really not the life I imagined for myself at 26, to be honest. It's not that I resent the Lenten business (I find it very invigorating, in fact, and it's astonishing how easy it is to old back from the pasties when you have A Reason), but I do think I ought to have more of a social life at university than I did when I lived and worked in a small girls' boarding school in rural Oxfordshire.
My very old and very dear friend James rang on Sunday night and we spoke for hours and hours, which made me as happy as I'd been all week. And also twice as sad. Why am I here again?

Ash Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 02:35:00 +0000

I went to a rather nice Mass yesterday, with the nowadays obligatory but nevertheless rather nice Allegri Miserere and the Byrd 5-part. Unfortunately I managed to miss half the service by the unusual expedient of having done nothing whatsoever all day except sit aorund waiting to go to Mass. Am I the only person who is only ever late when they are early? Being in good time is the utter death knell to punctuality in my life. I get it into my head that I have plenty of time, and then I always think I can fit one more bit of pottering in before it's time to go, and I can't, and I'm late. Whereas if time is pressing on me then I hop about to make sure I'm where I'm meant to be and that I know where I'm going and when and have all my bits and doings. Leisure is my enemy. Roll on the end of Reading Week (a sort of midterm holiday - I love the idea that in the life of a University, "Reading Week" should signify a break from the norm).
Right, I'm about to do it again, but this time with sour apple martinis in the bar down the street. I have been home for two hours, and now I need to be there in 17 minutes and I'm not even dressed. It is actually ridiculous.

A thaw

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:54:00 +0000

I got up yesterday and got dressed and went outside and it was warm. By which I mean that it was not cold. I walked to brunch (what sort of brunch joint doesn't sell pancakes on Pancake Day? What sort of brunch joint doesn't sell pancakes at all?) through streets running with water, although there neither was nor had been any rain. Very odd. Shopowners were out poking their canvas awnings with sticks to dislodge the melted snow before it dripped on potential custom. Passers-by were dodging the puddles. The drains ran and the mountains of snow piled up along the edges of every road and pavement shrank and thinned, and the sun was shining, and it felt like spring.
It put me in in mind of Horace Ode 4.7, which begins
"Diffugere niues", " The snows have scattered" and which A.E.Housman famously considered "the most beautiful poem in ancient literature". It is rather lovely, but not, I think, as lovely as Odes 1.4. I am conscious of the danger of this blog becoming tediously rebarbative to non-classicists, but on the truly astonishing upliftingness of spring, Horace has it nailed.
Besides which, thinking about this poem is an accurate reflection of What I Have Been Up To, since I have just spent the last five hours making a translation of it. Just for fun. I am not putting it up here, however, since making other people read your poetry is like making them smell your socks. If anyone is interested I'll send it to them.

Soluitur acris hiems grata uice ueris et Fauoni
trahuntque siccas machinae carinas,
ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni
nec prata canis albicant pruinis.
Iam Cytherea choros ducit Venus imminente luna
iunctaeque Nymphis Gratiae decentes
alterno terram quatiunt pede, dum grauis Cyclopum
Volcanus ardens uisit officinas.
Nunc decet aut uiridi nitidum caput impedire myrto
aut flore, terrae quem ferunt solutae;
nunc et in umbrosis Fauno decet immolare lucis,
seu poscat agna siue malit haedo.
Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
regumque turris. O beate Sesti,
uitae summa breuis spem nos uetat inchoare longam.
Iam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes
et domus exilis Plutonia, quo simul mearis,
nec regna uini sortiere talis
nec tenerum Lycidan mirabere, quo calet iuuentus
nunc omnis et mox uirgines tepebunt.

Malpractice

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 06:15:00 +0000

Update: the patient with tonsilitis turns out to have glandular fever. So much for Dr Scarlet. I am beating a humbled retreat back into the uninfectious (not to say uncommunicable) realm of classical philology, from which standpoint the most pertinent contribution I have to make is the quite harmless one that "Mono" (as glandular fever is called on these shores) is a pleasingly ironic name for the Kissing Disease.

Niece Again

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 22:44:00 +0000

I haven't bored everyone with pictures of Alessandra recently, so here she is. Hopelessly cute, no? When she was born we asked my brother whom she looked like, and he said she looked like me, which I do hope turns out not to be the case. Anyway, it's plainly not true even now, as I was by common assent an unlovely infant. One old amour called a picture of me aged 3 months "grotesque". When mother met Alessandra she said "She looks just like Scarlet when she was born, only MUCH prettier!" It's official: a face not even a mother could love.
Anyway, I have started writing letters to Alessandra, which even I, in my obsessional auntly doting, realise is a bit strange, since like most seven week old babies she can't read. Never mind, she may as well have an early introduction to her Zia's eccentricities, and better letters than stilettoes or vin. My darling.

Tristia Ex Toronto

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:55:00 +0000

I have just been reminded of Ovid, more's the pity, by Scottish Friend, who is grumbling about what rot it is. I wasn't able to offer him any consolation, since Ovid reminds me of the creep at a party who always thinks he can improve on the punchline of other people's jokes.
[Incidentally, Canadians have a similar problem, to judge by the greetings cards available here. For instance, a few weeks after I got here I was looking for a birthday card and was delighted to see some decorated with Gary Larson "The Far Side" cartoons, which my learned reader will be aware have rather witty one-line captions beneath them. However, these versions had been defaced by terrible lame quips on the inside of the card. Either the original bon mots are so subtle as to evade the grasp of the Canadian greeting-card market, or else there is some dreadful little Ovid working for Hallmark Canada Inc. who hovers, blue pencil in hand, over each tight, cleverly-wrought cartoon, scoffing "Call that a punchline? This is a punchline...". However that may be, it makes buying cards a trying task. There are always plenty of those bland ones of vases of flowers and sleeping cats and what have you, but it frequently happens that a reflective-looking bowl of peonies, a pair lace curtains billowing at a sunlit window etc do not strike the note one is after. Stylish cards, undefiled by inane addenda, are at such a premium that it is no wonder they cost about seven dollars each (a sum which will buy you a pretty decent lunch in this city, before tax).]
Anyway, as I was saying. The observant may have noticed that the subtitle of my blog has changed. The new title is a hilarious malapropism on the title of one of Ovid's very worst poems, the Tristia Ex Ponto (Sorrows From The Sea-Side), a load of repetitive self-indulgent whining about how much the poet likes Rome and how much he hates the freezing, wet, desolate dump he now finds himself in, devoid of culture and beauty and all his books, and how terribly hard done by he is and just wants to go home. The new title was suggested to me by Scottish Friend. I hope he wasn't making a point.

Call that a feast day?

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:13:00 +0000

Well, that was Valentine's Day. I realise that I'm not meant to care and should by this advanced age have cultivated the appropriate air of thorough-going disdain for the whole business. I haven't, of course, (maturity? moi?) and am gnashing my teeth with ill-temper at having received not one single solitary card, e-card, or even text-message. The only missives I had all day were from my mother, telling me about presents and pestering for news of similar largesse falling in my lap, and from my granny, telling me all about her roses, chocolates and lovely dinner out. Can it be right that my aged forebears revel in luxury and bask in adoration while I, a flourishing maiden in my prime, should trip downstairs to discover my matutinal doormat decked with not so much as a bank statement? That my evening hold nothing more romantic than a bag of crunchy cheetoes? That the sole hint of mystery in my day consist of attempting to decode Aeschylus' Agamemnon? (and quite mysterious enough it was, too).
Worse, not even my trusty exes came through, although there are at least a couple who can normally be relied on to do the good-ex thing and remind you that though it was never meant to be, you remain a goddess to them. Worse and worse, the morning's class was on the incomparable Catullus 64, which, while its brilliance cannot but be uplifting, could have done with being a bit less about weddings for my taste. That said, the real message of the whole work seems to be that if you are a nice girl and have a divinely and legally sanctioned wedding to a handsome and worthy hero, your issue will cause fathomless grief and wholescale bloodshed. If, on the other hand, you are an over-sexed harlot, you will devastate the bonds of family, law and public reputation, and cause wretched heartache to self and/or to the generation's greatest poet. So that's love, then. Perhaps I was better off with the cheetoes after all.

Dr Scarlet

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:57:00 +0000

Well, apologies for silence, but I haven't attempted to get any vaccinations for tropical diseases, nor have I housemates whose searing madness causes them secretly to decant my half-drunk coffee when I leave the room. And I have nothing to report from the weekend since no one has been sick on me recently. However, since sickness of various kinds is plainly theme du jour, I can report that I seem to have become the Classics Department's answer to House. Evidently the fame of my nursing exploits has led to a swift promotion.
Anyway, I had had the impression that the Woodbury Library was a small repository of philological resources, but this is clearly a trick of the elaborately wrought classical decor: in fact it appears to be the consulting room of some sort of General Practitioner who, I ween, looks not unlike me. Perhaps someone should replace the sign which must have gone missing from the door, and thereby spare the confusion of innocent graduate researchers into ancient languages who amble in for a quick squiz in Der Neue Pauly and instead find a wild-haired Scotswoman inspecting the anatomy of one or another comely youth. It turns out that I can diagnose tonsilitis, conjunctivitis and whatever it is that's making Hubristes' left knee all creaky, but if anyone would like to vary the diet then I can be found in there most days. I like to seem to be reading Hesiod, but in truth I am just waiting for my next case.
I do note, however, that everyone who has so far demanded that I fondle their neck, gaze into their eyes or stroke their knee has been a well-favoured young man; which, since they can have had no reasonable expectation of meeting with any medical expertise whatsoever, is rather intriguing. I wonder if I should abandon the high-minded pretence that anyone really wants me for my subtle manipulation of -mi verbs or cunning appreciation of Virgilian thematics and set up shop as a quack. I'd still get to be Dr Scarlet, but with a prescription pad. Oh, the fun...

And while I'm at it...

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:56:00 +0000

I frankly consider this to be among the finest things I have ever read. I have my friend Ben, the other half of my soul, to thank for this discovery.
The Vastest Things are Those We May Not Learn by Mervyn Peake
The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.

More emoting about poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Scarlet) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:37:00 +0000

My friend James has a theory that it is better not to do academic research into the writers whom one really loves. Similarly, my grandfather once said that at eighteen he fell in love with Yeats, but would no more discuss him with another man than he would his wife. I took issue with my beloved bro when he first reported, and supported, this latter dictum, but I think I was wrong.
It is true that I have had worlds upon worlds of beauty and truth and pathos, not to mention artistry and skill and brilliance, uncovered for me by being "taught" the works of certain authors; layers of meaning upon which, I am confident, I would not have happened unaided. For these I am more than grateful. However, there exists (for me, at least) a class of writing which speaks to one too intimately to wish to have it mishapen by the push and pull of academic rigour. Of course, one gains a great deal by the application of intellectual scrutiny. But a very different kind of satisfaction is also to be derived from certain works of literature, something akin to - or rather, something that is - emotion. And this you wish to dissect no more than you would wish to dissect the wordless joy of an embrace.
I do not allege that poetic effects add nothing to my apprecation of the sentiment (that would be positively nonsensical). I merely mean that mounting a laborious and closely-argued case about the historical importance or counter-cultural atrificiality of, say, Catullus XI does not cause me to find it more or less affecting. Of course, I can say many interesting things about the poem and why I think it fine, and that is one real and meaningful level of response, and worthwhile. But my deepest reponse to it is not rational and therefore is not open to rational analysis: I cannot *defend* my love of Catullus XI, or Catullus VIII, or Catullus LXVIII, any more logically than I can defend my love of my mother. I can point to admirable things about both, but as anyone knows who has ever loved anyone or anything, admirable qualities are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the kindling of that emotion.
So I could write criticism of these poems, but it woudl never say the things I would really want to say: that the fourth line of Catullus CI makes hot tears start to my eyes; that Catullus VIII evokes in me a longing to be loved with terrible passion. This all says a very great deal more about me than about Catullus. Which is why it may conceivably interest readers of my blog, but not, I think, readers of the Journal of Roman Studies.
(Catullus, btw, is the reason I am a classicist. Poems VII, XIII and LXXVI, specifically. Ah, to be 15 again.)