When I first saw this photo I thought nothing of it apart from “What an iphone addict I am.”
Now, it feels like my “Before” picture.
And here’s my “After” picture:
Right.
Anyway, now that that’s posted, I think I’ve blown my 10k trumpet long enough, so I’ll not say another word about it.
Harp String (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out
of men’s bodies?”
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing Act II Scene iii
Cynical as Benedick may be, I think he has a point. It is a strange thing – the relationship between man and music.
Despite being generally, loosely “musical”, I have a deficiency when it comes to my emotional connection to it. It’s all physics and skill, ultimately. The musician is an illusionist. The sound, the feeling, the sense and coherence of a piece of music is a meeting of minds between the composer/writer and the audience through the medium of the musician. It’s a fabricated experience that is fundamentally inessential.
Don’t worry. I know I am probably wrong. I know that one day it is likely I will change my mind – but for now I am happy that ‘to be in a minority of one does not make you mad’.
Emotion through music is learned. The stressful music on Masterchef makes chopping an onion feel like a life and death moment. Soaring orchestral strains make a sweeping landscape all the more sweeping. Mute the TV and it’s an onion and a view.
We learn from infancy what scary music is, what happy music is – there’s pitch, key, tempo and probably hundreds of other factors that go into a musical moment – and we learn what we are supposed to feel as a response.
However – last night I witnessed sheep’s guts haling souls out of men’s bodies. Or as good as.
We had a harp recital in the church hall. (Hence yesterday’s post…) A harpist, a violinist and an audience. It was live, it was local, it was…
It was out of a world that doesn’t usually touch us here in suburbia. Music written so many years ago given a brief, ephemeral incarnation through the effort, focus and skill of the musicians.
In a way, the illusion I usually sense was refreshingly absent, in that every note could be seen being physically formed and sounded. The lack of illusion led to general sense of wonder that these skills and these instruments could come together as they did and present us with a very special and surprising evening. So simple, so human – and yet dazzlingly complex.
Did my soul succumb?
Not to the music, but perhaps a little to the whole experience. It was a brilliant night because it was a live, shared, community moment – echoing the past and creating a shared memory of wonder.
I set myself another pun-chline challenge. This time I was thinking up harp puns. Puns so sharp they were more like Harp poons…
Here are my punchlines. Please vote for your favourite – and if you have any better ones, please comment below
Today I skim-read The Great Gatsby and then went to see it. I wanted to read it one last time before letting Baz Luhrmann alter it in my mind for the rest of time. I was quite pleased that loads of it was just right – particularly the settings – and Gatsby had a pink suit which I worried might get traded for something more realistic – but there it was.
Di Caprio was a great choice for the Great Gatsby. He looked the part – just the right age, just the right face – and some great acting when he was having his keynote ‘why of course you can’ moment.
There were, of course, a zillion tiny inaccuracies and deviations from the text – but the worst one was at the most tense moment of the book – just after Tom and Gatsby have a verbal exchange in the Plaza suite. In the book, Gatsby has just ‘lost’ to Tom and Tom then makes a criticism of Gatsby and Carraway narrates:
“Then I turned back to Gatsby – and was startled at his expression. He looked (…) as if he had ‘killed a man’. For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.”
This subtle moment and observation was butchered in the movie by Gatsby having a passionate and violent outburst, lashing out at Tom. This was a deviation from the text at a key moment which I don’t think was needed to convey Gatsby’s emotion – the tension was very clear.
Generally, though, in the movie, tension was done well. The awkwardness of the afternoon tea at Nick’s was convincing and there were other tense moments when the various affairs threatened to surface.
The novel has some great surreal description and I hoped that Luhrmann would capitalize on it, like he did in Romeo and Juliet – but I felt that there were opportunities missed. I’m sure the director had his reasons, but I would have liked to have seen:
“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. The were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown in after a short flight around the house. (…) There was a boom, as Tom Buchanan shut the rear window and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”
I would love to have seen this done as a surreal flight sequence, with Jordan and Daisy floating around the house and then being lowered gently by the exclusion of the wind as Tom shuts the windows. Another moment I thought was a gift to the director was the description of Myrtle, through a drunken haze of the scene in the apartment in New York:
“Her laughter, her assertions, her gestures became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.”
I had hoped to see this through Nick’s eyes here – of this woman getting bigger and bigger and noisier and more dominant as he got more and more drunk. The depiction of this scene was a bit more… messy? than it was in the book – and the ending of that chapter is an intriguing snippet of a night lost in a drunken haze when he ends up beside MrMcKee’s bed – a lost fragment of time that the movie missed.
Another addition to the novel was the context in which Carraway ‘wrote’ the account. At the start of the movie he is being assessed in a sanatorium after becoming a depressed alcoholic insomniac. Fair enough – it gives a reason for it – but it was annoying as it isn’t in the book, whereas if it had been The Catcher in the Rye, well, it would have been.
And an omission was the moment when Gatsby sees Pammy. In the movie he never claps eyes on her – and that’s quite a significant moment in the novel when he is faced with a living, breathing ‘result’ of Daisy’s love for Tom.
In the movie there was the suggestion that Chapter VII, the climax, was going to be a planned ‘leaving Tom’ speech by Daisy – and that Jordan and Nick were to be there as witnesses. In the novel this is only a vague thought that Nick wonders:
“Something was up. And yet I couldn’t believe that they would choose this occasion for a scene – especially for the rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.”
That scene in the garden took place in the movie next to the pool and I thought was the acting high point of the movie – Gatsby’s frustration to get Daisy to understand his dream which Nick sees cannot be achieved without doing the impossible and turning back time.
Gatsby does seem to become increasingly unhinged – and a surprising thing in the movie was that I started to ‘like’ Tom – who seemed more and more rational and sensible as the movie progressed.
For all of these additions and omissions – I thought it was a great adaptation. The Valley of the Ashes was a striking contrast to New York and Long Island. The schooming over the water was the kind of Luhrmann moment I wanted more of. The girls in yellow were there, the movie star and plenty of cocktail glasses. The hint of a Nick/Jordan romance was underplayed though. The cars were great, the driving fast and careless. More blood was needed though – poor Myrtle suffered two violent moments – but very little blood. Gatsby too managed to get away without “a thin red circle in the water” – more of a cloud. And he was supposed to be floating on an inflatable mattress – but (and this was the acting low-point) he just was kind of sunken.
Okay. Enough nit-picking.
*tries not to mention the lack of lemon cakes*
So, I came in from a hen night where I had drunk a whole bottle of Shloer to myself, after previously dehydrating myself with a Pizza Hut box of chicken wings and a duo of fat and salty pizzas.
I flushed my disposable lenses down the loo, wiped off my eye make-up, got into bed and went to sleep.
I woke up with the thrill of race day in my gut. Or was that the pizza?… and my eyes felt a bit gunky. Bleary eyed I got up and ambled to the bathroom, thinking, “Rats, I’ve got conjunctivitis on the very day I could do without a trip to the pharmacy to get chloramphenicol”… I gave my face a wee wash and things looked a bit clearer…. too clear… almost… in focus? Was this a miracle of some sort? No – I had left my lenses in ALL NIGHT. Bu-wha-bu-wha? I had taken them out, surely? I could even remember!
Faced with my face in focus I had to accept: I am a numpty and had managed to weld my lenses to my corneas.
Suddenly visualizing a trip to A and E scuppering the race, I began feverishly googling what to do, how to get them out, whether I should even try, what would happen…? I filled myself a bowl of water and blinked and blinked like a fish, thinking Doh! Doh! Doh! And resolving to have to run in specs (assuming I could bypass the whole hospital thing).
What an eejit.
What a numpty.
I ate my pre-race ready-brek and considered my options. My hydration of my face seemed to have softened them up a bit, so I kept my eyes peeled…
So, I flushed my disposable lenses down the toilet and hoped that I really had this time.
Then I got new ones, and put them in – I wouldn’t have on any other day – but it was race day and it sure wasn’t looking what you could call “Dry”.
ANYWAY
As for the race –it was well organized and efficient and damp and cold. The advice was to get to 5k and then crank up the speed, so I thought I’d give that a go. The first k is always the worst as your body suddenly figures out what you are about to do to it and it puts the anchors on. After a couple of k it gets into the swing of it.
Because of my innumeracy I forewent the whole “watch” idea, and figured I’d wait until I could see a clock tower at the 5k mark – and I was just before the half hour (28:29 I later see) and so that was perfect for the hour target.
We took the turn into the park and it’s a bit less flat there – but getting up the two inclines takes your mind off the distance, so that was good – then there’s the moment when it’s going to be downhill until the flat last k.
Now, in the park I found myself being overtaken by a pace marker person holding a “Follow me for 55 mins” placard. I kept her in my sights, but her and her followers eventually got away into the distance.
Then another placard appeared from behind me and I thought “Oh, no, it’s the ‘Hour’ person about to overtake me and dash my whole ‘Hour’ plan”, but it was another 55 minute person.
And then another.
And then another.
So, by the time I got out the park, I figured that all the 55 minute people were ahead of me, but that the hour people might still all be behind me. I never noticed the 9k mark because the piper had moved away from the flag to shelter in a bus stop – but that was good as the race was suddenly shorter than I thought.
So I turned the corner and saw the time was at 57 and then I started doing my gazelle springs and poses and forgot to pay attention to the time when I eventually went under the banner thing, but figured it would be 57 or 58 minutes.
So I got in the end 57 minutes 26 seconds – three seconds short of a ten minute improvement since last year, so I am dead pleased. No need to sue. Funny that – the training works. No rocket science required.
So, for the afternoon I donned my shapeless and unattractive finishers’ T-shirt and went out for a celebration lunch. Hurray! (Wearing my Velma specs…)
So that was really stupid about the lenses.
Never mind. I appear to be okay eye-wise now.
Stella Bonasera (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Eek! The 10k is on Sunday! A year since I wrote this post about the race 2012.
Usually I look past the hype, the hysteria, the collective fixation on timings and pacings – but this year is different. This is it. You may not think it to look at me but this is as good as it’s likely to get.
Ten months of intense effort to sculpt myself into Stella Bonasera has met with limited success, but I’ll take it. My tummy may still have an uncanny resemblance to uncooked steak pie, but at least it looks like a small steak pie, rather than the oops-I-over-bought-why-don’t-you-invite-your-friends-and-family steak pie that it was last summer.
My six-pack is hilarious. There’s a Jessica Ennis six pack in there, it’s just the 7lb of puckered flesh draped over the top of it that I still need to deal with. I feel like one of those old-style upholstered chairs where the fabric is kind of riveted down with padding in between. The rivets are all in place, and if you half-shut your eyes you can see my poor old body doing its wee best to pull itself together. Not quite Velutha’s “divisions on a slab of chocolate” but as good as it gets.
AVIVA INTERNATIONAL ATHLETICS 2011 Great Britain’s Jessica Ennis does her parade lap at the Kelvinhall, Glasgow, during the Aviva International Athletics. Picture : Alasdair Middleton/Universal News & Sport (Scotland) GLASGOW/KELVINHALL Saturday 29th January 2011 Universal News and Sport (Europe) All pictures must be credited to http://www.universalnewsandsport.com. (0ffice) 0844 884 51 22 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am half a stone short of my weight target, but I have convinced myself that it has all turned to muscle and so I can discount it. And I have made real measurable progress with strength. I roughly doubled my sit-up count in two minutes and the same for press ups. My running up hills has improved; I no longer want to vomit with every incline. Just some.
So, my weight is “in the normal range” and I am “of average fitness”. Yay!
To get fit has taken a huge effort and probably worrying levels of selfishness. Two weekday evenings and Saturday mornings have been ring-fenced for training. A multitude of baby-sitters have been called upon to let me out to roll in the mud. The children have been dropped at people’s houses when I should have been helping with homework or bathing them or putting them to bed. On one occasion they were dropped off at a baby-sitter clutching McDonald’s happy meals – Oh the shame of it!… But how else to do it?
So, as race day approaches, I have my target of doing it in one hour. Last year I did it in one hour and seven minutes – so that’s a pretty hefty improvement I am looking for. Usually my goal is just to get round the course without stopping. One year I tried “going faster” but that just led to a tortoise and hare fiasco. This year I have to go at the right speed.
And that takes arithmetic. Sadly for me, time isn’t metric, so I can’t work it out. Six minutes a kilometre, apparently. And I don’t know if I could look at a watch, think a mathematical thought and run all at the same time. I’ll maybe just go like the clappers and see what happens.
I love tea.
The Daily Post asked "What non-exercise activity do you wish would keep you fit?"
I wish that drinking tea would keep me fit.
I love tea that is not any of the daft herbal, fruit or random teas. I like bog standard, "normal" tea. It has to be made with boiling water straight onto the tea bag in the teapot.
Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber to be an example of a charismatic religious leader. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the E100 we are well into the New Testament now. It is as if it has gone from black and white into colour. Everything seems more three dimensional and familiar and every story so far is very well known.
The last swathe of the E100 in the Old Testament was to do with the exile in Babylon. I felt that there was a whole chunk missing, when Ezra and Nehemiah bring the people back and bring back temple worship.
The Old Testament seems to be a cycle of hope and failure. It seems that God tells the people what to do, and then they plan to, but don’t. Then they find themselves far from God and then they decide to have another go at living God’s way and then forget that that was the plan. And so on.
In the New Testament it was interesting to read “The Sermon on the Mount” with the Old Testament as a backdrop. It was as if the people had got it wrong on two fronts. In one way, they had taken the Law too far. On the other, they hadn’t taken it far enough.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus revisits the themes contained in the Ten Commandments and then takes the spirit of the command to its full extent. So, although the “Law” was not to kill, Jesus stretches that to mean that one should not hate/be in conflict. The Law required justice to be done, but Jesus took it further and demanded mercy to be one’s instinctive response.
So, I liked to see that parallel between the Old and the New. There was the feeling that the people had missed the point of the Law. They had started to obsess over it, rather than catching the vision of human life, worship and social interaction that was within the Law.
There is a problem with the Sermon on the Mount, though. Jesus says:
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Now that’s a toughie. This was said in the context of loving one another – even one’s enemies.
What are people meant to do with a command to “Be perfect”? Do we think, “Fine, no problem: ta-dah!” and become perfect? I think that if you are told to be perfect, perhaps a more likely response it to think, “Well, that can’t happen.” It certainly provokes a small voice of humility within, if nothing else.
There is an interesting Old-New bit in Matthew 3 when John the Baptist is preaching. He is speaking to the teachers of the Law:
And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.
It seems that from John the Baptist’s preaching, the direct descendancy from Abraham is not enough to be in line for the inheritances and fulfilled promises that God made to Abraham. It seems that the faithlessness of the people – the missing the point of the Law – has invalidated their claim. John the Baptist is being controversial here by suggesting that the inheritors could be the stones – presumably meaning that the inheritors could be anyone from anywhere – assuming that they “got” the idea – the idea that Jesus then elaborated on during the Sermon on the Mount and through other acts and utterances.
So I am interested to see how it works out in the rest of the life of Jesus part of the bible. I am not sure, but it seems to me as if the Promised Land bit came and went – ending with the exile, despite the return – and the New Testament goes *sharp intake of breath * metaphorical – and the Promised Land is not really to do with the physical place that the Israelites were promised, but is to do with whoever catches hold of the spirit of the Law, in the way that Jesus describes and actually lives it. Then, they are living in a “promised land”, which perhaps (?) I don’t know – is that what is referred to as “The Kingdom of God”, which is when you live wherever you are, in whatever actual political landscape you do, with God as your King – obeying him within the spirit of the Law as expounded in the Sermon on the Mount?
So, does anyone know – is The Kingdom of God the metaphorical equivalent of The Promised Land?
English: Hole in denim fabric Deutsch: Jeansstoff mit Loch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
SOS has a project to do. It is a Denim Design Challenge.
We have had a wee brainstorming session and we are now entertaining visions of opening up a handicraft emporium…. 
Luckily it is his homework. I don’t do fabric.
There are some cute ideas online though – turning pockets into phone holders, purse and wee owls and stuff. I even had a real genuine idea! Draught excluder! I could be doing with one. (This is not a wish-list item. Please don’t take this as a gift hint). The lack of SPRING is getting to me.
I remembered that we have SOMEWHERE a whale made of denim… tee hee… he could take that in and claim that he ran it up himself…
SOS of course has come up with a perfectly sensible design board. We never got as far as cutting relevant swatches out of magazines. Or collaging with fabrics. But he has some diagrams and ideas. Phew.
I’d have liked to have recycled jeans when I was his age. But back in the day, we just bleached them, shredded them and wrote all over them, so they wouldn’t have been much use second time around…
And what with the carpal tunnel nonsense, I “can’t” sew unless it is an emergency.
And this emergency… isn’t mine.
Yass.
“This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”
Phew! I am glad I found this quote. It was drumming in my ears as I went on my training run this morning.
Elaine Scarry may have been referring to Education here, but I can’t really separate life and Education; life is education.
The idea that struck me was the bit about increasing your chances that you are in the right place to see something worth seeing, or to experience something worth experience, or to learn something worth learning.
, BBC weather presenter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This morning the Carol Kirkwood gave the forecast of sun, rain and hail – and she was bang on. I was doing my running-in-contact-lenses-in-the-rain trial – and in minutes the brooding dark became lashing hail and I was first of all soaked through and then covered with wee crumbs of ice. Halfway through the run, the ‘sun came out and dried up all the rain’ and the hail all disappeared and the world was transformed to one in bright and bold colour: green grass, blue sky, white clouds, yellow sun. The shades were out and on and the homeward journey was underway with the word “gazelle” leaping about uncontrollably in my mind as I bounded home.
The “willingness to revise one’s own location” is not a traditionally ‘Scottish’ trait, certainly in physical terms. If you were to wait until it were sunny to go out and do something, if it were sunny and you got yourself organized, by the time you were out there it would be raining again. The trick is to go anywhere as planned, despite the weather – and once there, there is at least the chance that you might catch a nice blast of sun, heat, or – whatever it is you are after. There is a pattern of Scottish behaviour that I am certainly guilty of; when the first hot day of the year comes, I spend that day making a mental list of things we could do with for the garden, and then going in the oppressive heat in the car to B&Q and buying stuff, bringing it back to the garden and then the midges coming out, the darkness falling and a return to depressing temperatures ensues. Favourable conditions just don’t turn up. You have to be out there making do – and anything good that happens is a bonus, or indeed a joy.
But Scarry, I think, is suggesting that this flexibility in location is to do with – perhaps – worldview? To see things from someone else’s perspective? To do a bit of a Scout Finch and stand on the doorstep and see how things look from within another person’s world.
It might sound a bit alarming to say one should “submits oneself to other minds” – but it is daft to argue with someone trying to show you something that they know about, or teach you a skill they have that you want to learn. This submission to an educator – in any context – makes sense. There is no point arguing – you have to trust them and listen to them to see if they do take you to the place where you are in a position to be aligned with “the path of beauty” – when you can see/do/make/experience what you hoped.
Whether or not this submission of the mind is a ‘good thing’ depends entirely on the mind to which you submit your own – for the purposes of your education. Is there’s a perspective worth seeing from? Should you stand on their doorstep and look out at the world?
I think that as long as you are aware that you are only walking around in their shoes and seeing things their way – that you have your own porch to go back to – then it is probably a good thing. You don’t need to adopt their world view – but you can be aware that that is what it is – and that is how things look from ‘over there’.
Of course, when you find yourself in the ‘path of beauty’ – and you are caught up in a moment of reality that is truly yours because of where you have been brought – then, that is yours – and becomes part of your perspective and experience.
Where do you want to stand for a while? What do you want to see? What do you want to learn?
