Mid-Life Crises Come To Us All

Quentin Crisp as painted Gerard De Rose in the 1950's.

"I was asked if I ever had a midlife crisis, and I said, 'Men do not have midlife crises. Only women have them.' The woman then said, 'Oh, I don't agree. All the men I've spoken to said they have had a midlife crisis.'. I said, 'What does it consist of?' She said, 'Well, they realized that they were faulty and that they had lived longer than what they had expected to, and nothing spectacular in life had ever happened to them. So life was passing them by.' I replied 'I never thought about any of that because, as I have said before, my life was such a struggle that to live at all through one day was a triumph. I wanted to stay the same and change the world."

~ Quentin Crisp.

   

Reflections On The 'Director's Cut' of 'The Devils'

I would have been about 10 yrs old
when director Ken Russell unleashed
'The Devils' on the world, when the cinema
close to where I lived was closing down.
And for other reasons, apart from that,
I was unlikely to see such a Succès de scandale.
Other cinemas would defend the notriety
of the film better whilst raking in the takings. 

In the 1990s I was introduced to the film
by a means I least expected: I was gay
and my closet door was half open
to the local mix of shame and acceptance
that could smuggle itself thru the half open door. 

Through chances lost to shame and time
I met a Fransiscan friar who was also closeted
whilst 'living in the community' as part of his order.
He invited me to his flat, perhaps thinking
that in my youth I might be more confident
about the mix of sin, faith, and secrecy then he was,
though which of those three I'd be more confident in
at the time. or since, was for anyone to guess at/

His favourite film was 'The Devils'
which he quietly said he liked for the violence in it,
where I understood his reasoning: he had endured
more than enough machismo-as-entertainment,
though for me it came through the wrestling
that divided me as I watched it on television
 - by order of dad - since I was in short trousers.

It took him an age to explain how the film
'was more violent. before the censors intervened'.
He cued up his VHS video to the right points
to make our viewing it a shared experience,
I was more unengaged than repelled at what
flickered across the screen. I did not react,
but I thought the dressing up was impesssive.

I understood his point, which I'd never seen
expressed in such 'art house film' terms. 

You can guess what he wanted help with next.
I did not freak out, he was an ordinary old man
with a past that would have taken more time
to unpack than either of us had time for.
At some point I left him to watch more
of the on-screen violence on his own. 

If he were alive today would he join the public
to see the new unexpurgated version of the film?
Or would he only seek to re-enact his old fears
or love of violence by viewing the film in private? 

Doves, Albatrosses, And Vultures

Some families are an asset to their members
as they go through the different ages in life,
and progress through all the different stages,
towards seniority. They are doves to one another
as they honestly toil against the dying of the light..... 

Other families can be albatrosses - or worse vultures -
on the dependents who need the support of such families
whilst the values that the family projects
are presented as panglossian, the best choice
that the present day materialist world and society
they are part of could think to provide,
however losided it's generosity.

I would be happier with an inequality
that was more honest about it's selfishness
than all the soft soap pannglosian lectures,
full of nice words that later leave a bitter taste
in my mind, as I recall them.

Even as such honesty would be painful,
I'd prefer that, over the pain that remained
because I had been decieved,
and I had not noticed the deception
until too long after it happened.

False Attractions

A slow death from the iside out
from being forced to take part 
in too many poorly financed
and over-promoted sampler courses
in too many skills and subjects
all of which eventually led to nothing 
is surprisingly easy to effect and create
when factories, employers, teachers,
and other 'well heeled meaning adults'
see how much profit there is for them to make
for them supporting so many false attractions.

Many thousands of youths can attest
to when their parents said it was for the best
when they knew from days of old it was not
as employers playing 'trick or treat' on teens
with taunts of would be trainees on schemes
that permitted them no exit except slow moving time.

That was the way with Youth Training Schemes
 - nothing to get nostalgic about........  

Funny Money

When cyber money is stolen 
what disappears from where?
And where does it (whatever it is) go?

The 'it' is a series of ones and noughts
that their programmers have declared online
to 'constitute a currency', though no state backs it.
These ones and noughts attract real life currencies 
that states and banks do back through their reserves
thus depleting the supply of real currency to real people
and luring ordinary folk away from everyday reality.

But for gamblers the gamble is said to be 'worth it'.

These digital currencies are likely to be stolen
by states that are blacklisted, banned from trading,
by international decree for deeds they deny doing,
where countries across the world are not buying the denial.

So the theft-thru-trade of cyber money that they perform
is as near as they can get to any sort of internatinal currency,
whilst alarming those for whom their modern day currency
is their internet securiy which is said to be so secure
that the left hand and mind does not know what key,
on the keypad, the right hand is pressing when it types.

Such security is the ultimate in assuredness in a world
where the online life creates it's own shadows and ghosts,
it's thieves of wealth and peace of mind which was never as secure
as the inventors of all these systems claimed in the first place. 

Picture Set Of The Month - November - The Paintings Of Gerard Dillon

'Untitled', watercolour and ink is one of over 1000 paintings
and works on paper by Gerard Dillon, probably depicting
his beloved Roundstone in Connemara. 

'Man with Accordion - Connemara' as painted by Gerard Dillon,
for whom Connemara in County Galway was his 'home territory'
from which to draw characters from the mid 1940s onward.

'FullMoon over The Bog' by Gerard Dillon is one Dillon's many
landscapes that explain his love of place which would make the viewer
see that place and past seem still attractive.

'On the Beach' as painted in 1950 shows Dillon with one of his closeest friends
at the time in as near a position of near sexual intimacy and trust as he could 
in the era in which Dillon painted. Alas when his friend married
the friendship was rent assunder, never to be restored.    

A Full Quota Of Quiet Humour - A Review Of 'An Uncommon Reader' By Alan Bennett

  Most people who use public transport nowadays expect wifi, and expect to be able to play with their phones for free. I prefer to read a book. And if the book makes me laugh in a public place where laughter might be embarasing then I will brave that. I read 'Portnoy's Comlaint' by Phillip Roth on the bus, where if I tried to explain to anyone why it was funny I would have to say 'it is funny because it thilthy', which would be accurate. I did not read 'Venus In Furs' by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or 'Crash' by J.G.Ballard in the bus, and there are surely many other books that need to read repeatedly to 'get the trick' of how they test taboos whilst breaking them, whilst hiding how they test taboo. But for the second third time of reading 'Venus In Furs' I think I will take it on the bus with me.

  'An Uncommon Reader' made me laugh out loud so often that I lost count of how often I laughed. Whilst it is a compact, a novella, it brought joy to so many of my bus journeys that I wish it was longer.

  Bennett had an easy target - The Queen - who needs no further introduction but about whom few have any real clue as to what she thought about what she was so often seen to do when she and Prince Philip were both in robust health - when this was written. Nearly twenty years later we distantly observed their decline in public. On to this full-of-life blank canvas of The Queen, Bennett creates a landscape of modern popular reading habits. He mentions so many authors and books, and drew out more humour inherent from each book and author than I thought was possible. Google tells me that Bennett shoe-horns 55 different and distinguished authors onto The Queen's reading list, and offered to list the alphabetically for me. I declined. Most of jokes I found to be enormously funny, where the slighter the joke the funnier it seemed on the page. This led me to play a sort of authorial bingo as a read, where I could cross the author off if I had read them, could not cross them off when I hadn't.  

  This led neatly into my memory of first reading of the novella, where what I wanted to rediscover in better detail was what Bennettt gives The Queen to think when she enquires about infamous French author Jean Genet, a spikey non-conformist writer who survived being raised in a series of children's homes and borstals, who survived a criminal underworld that changed him for life. His writings were difficult for English readers, who had to work their way through archaic, some would say tortured, English grammar in the translations of his early books 'Funeral Rites' and 'Our Lady Of The Flowers', which were popular as items on the book shelves in the early 1970s in paperback editions but may have been less fully read as an author. This was where Bennett literary conceit either reached it's peak or collapsed, it is hard to say which, but a new plot kicked in. Marcel Proust is mentioned to The Queen to divert her away from the more subversive and opaque writings in English tranaslation by Jean Genet.

 From the start the plot revolved around The Queen and her senior equerries dodging each other and mostly talking indirectly about reading (the queen) or avoiding reading (what the equerries sought of the queen) as her majesty sought to find more books to read and more time to read them, whilst her staff resorted to hiding her books from her when they could do so without being seen to.  

  The chase around reading eventually wears thin for The Queen, who is consistently funny in a rather Prunella Scales sort of way, when she refers to herself in the third person as 'one', but breaks that habit with a certain bathos as on her own she write to herself 'I have no voice' as she conciders creartive writing to finding her voice after the example of Marcel Proust. Though the country knows more literally that how she actually spoke: in the voice that Gainsborough films studios coached it's actresses to speak in the films it made circa 1946 which became the model for Recieved Pronounciation.

  The book ends at curious point. It more stops than ends, leaving the reader wondering what might have come next - apart from the disguised decline of old age which comes to all who live long enough to adapt their embrace of such decline.