SHERINGHAM DIARY No 132 - The Early Morning Scroll

We headed out to Hunstanton for our usual twice yearly visit. This year, in March before the season really kicked off, and late October when it's in the last half hearted pangs before closing up. A lovely vegan lunch in The Old Town Beach Cafe, Old Hunstanton, was an excellent preparation for the mile or so walk along the front into the main 'newish' Hunstanton. 

Hunstanton is your classic working class seaside town. Beautifully kept formal gardens, with fun fairs, amusement arcades galore, numerous chippies, fast food outlets, scuzzy pubs and cafes. Off season, its quieter and you get the sense of a place more than two thirds dead to the world. Each time we visit, another cluster of shops have closed. Gradually Hunstanton's High Street offering, outside of the tourist orientated area, is in rapid decline. Locals with real money live in the villages outside it, further inland. Most likely frequenting the posh shops and restaurants of Thornham and only, if really needs be, a venture into the urban scuzziness that is Kings Lynn. 

The further west you travel in North Norfolk, the flatter the landscape becomes and the more sparsely populated. As you drive through them you can tell these are not thriving communities. Beautifully kept and regularly valeted perhaps, but essentially the majority of houses, nay, entire villages, have become picture book holiday lets or second homes. This means these surrounding coastal villages, though preserved to an enviable level of perfection. are sterile, idealised versions of a North Norfolk village. Basically uninhabited deserted places outside of weekends and holiday periods. The local economy is virtual, and thus in practice non existent. The sort of place that has no independent shops, no village store, but does have a Bespoke Kitchen Design outlet. The whole idea of their being local people inhabiting here, has completely vanished. Swallowed up by a glossy holiday brochure.

On the way back, we travelled, not along the coast road but further inland. This cuts about half an hour off the return journey. And here you pass through villages that do seem to have a bit more going for them. They have their focal point in the village hall, either an old converted nissen hut from the war, or a larger knapped flint shed big enough to house a hundred villagers, at a push. As we passed through one village, my eye was caught by a poster advertising a Race Evening. And the perverse quality of my mind given the present zeitgeist, briefly imagined and outrageously flirted, with the idea that this was where all the local white folk gathered together to share their collective solidarity, receive some vital white culture nourishment and support each other in the fight against multi-cultural wokism, plus to co-ordinate a plan action against a chinese takeaway opening by the village pump. But, no, its actually an evening of betting on the races, still probably entirely populated by local white folk, but come together to have a bit of a flutter, a natter, get pissed, then drag themselves home via the pristine sanctum of their pure white Audi S7.

'Talking of Thornham, only bloody well in the news again. Local Thornham Deli, not as small as you might think, by the way. Has absolutely pan loads of customers flying in on their ruddy helicopters to buy their favourite tipples and nosh, from the savoury meat counter. There bye circumventing the convention of a long and arduous journey via the unpredictable agency of a road. Local gammons hence, in vertiginous uproar at the sheer efrontary and tech millionaire gall of the blighters. Its a bit like queue jumping, don't you know, never liked that sort of inherent lack of decency. The sense for one's true place in the hierarchy of things. Arrive in a car, and go to the back of the queue, you self entitled nouveau riche twats.'

I'm making a conscious effort to read a compendium of poetry by the US poet W.S.Merwin. It is a gargantuan volume. I've had it for a number of years, and my progress through it, despite a lot of the poetry being extraordinarily good, has been slow. But now I'm dedicating a moment everyday to reading a poem or two. I've tried reading poetry in bed before sleeping, but the imminence of slumber tends to detract one's attention far too much. In the mornings, before or after meditation and Tai Chi, I appear to have my poetry head on, have opened up my receptive heart, and hence they tend to speak much more directly and meaningfully to me. They become these tiny reflective gems, short multifaceted journey's into another way of seeing and being. And the more I read the better attuned to that I become.

This is unlike today's ragamuffin collection of controversy and stories of imminent catastrophe that You Tube offers me most mornings. Is there really ever a time for such things? My off then on experience of an internal state of alarm, that can seep into my life and slumber record. That existential panic, is the result of one too many morning scrolls through the doom laden streets of this sort of fucked up media. Not engaging with any of that early in the morning, at the very point where I've just awakened and got up, sometimes the very worst for not sleeping well, is proving healthier for my mental well being, to cut out completely the early morning scroll. That's my new campaign slogan - Abandon the Early Morning Scroll!

My woolovers photo shoot

I'm not the fast or dextrous knitter that I used to be. My hands, its my hands darlings, there's a limit how much faffy knitting they can handle these days. So its little and often.. But I have recently finished my first completed garment in many a decade. Its a men's sleeveless waistcoat, which has come out the right size, fits me well, and has blocked nicely. Just in time, as we are on the early storm slopes of winter, so its already getting a lot of wear. 

The new sleeveless I've started

I've had another waistcoat project hanging in abeyance. It was a gansey style knitted sleeveless waistcoat. It was really intricate stitching wise, and had three pattern elements too it, that did not run in parallel. Now in the 1980's this would not have phased me at all, the more intricate the pattern the better. Nowadays, creative hurdles need to be more carefully moderated, to be achievable. Whenever I took a break from this project, if that were to turn out to be months long, returning to it became a tricky learning curve to reestablish quite where I'd left off. Well, I decided to abandon that and frogg what I'd knit so far. My interest in it as a project, was not there anymore. Hubby has found me a simpler, but still interesting, cable waistcoat pattern that I'll be starting soon. 

Cower at my cowl

Meanwhile I have a cowl to knit in a thick grey aran, that is, unsurprisingly progressing rapidly towards being wearable.  

Smile for Barbara

Have you ever thought whether your car appears friendly or not? I hadn't until the other day we were in Fakenham walking back to the car, and I looked at the front of our car and had a revelation. I remarked to Hubby how our car 'Barbara' had a Welcoming Disposition. Because some cars do not, their front grills, frown and gnarl at you, with their hooded angular lights and pronounced black network of slit vents. Some high performance cars have this sinister aggressive scowl, like they were made to reflect the character of an evil Marvel comic book villain. Others simper or look like someone's punched them in the face. Take a look, I guarantee you'll be intrigued...or unnerved.

POETRY - W.S. Merwin's - The Flight

The Flight

At times in the day
I thought of a fire to watch
not that my hands were cold
but to have that doorway to see through
into the first thing
even our names are made of fire

and we feed on night

walking I thought of a fire

turning around I caught sight of it

in an opening in the wall

in another house and another

before and after

in house after house that was mine to see

the same fire the perpetual bird.

Taken from W.S. Merwin - Migration - New & Selected Poems
Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

FEATURE - W.S.Merwin (1927-2019)

 

'What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass' **

As I'm reading his poetry at the moment, I thought I'd see what I could unearth about W.S.Merwin and his life. Whilst there is not an awful lot of detail, he nonetheless had a long and extraordinarily productive creative life. By the time he died at the age of ninety one, he'd published thirty four volumes of his own poetry, plus twenty eight translations, three plays, nine prose works and edited two poetry anthologies. He'd been given most of the poetry awards available in the US. Winning the Pulitzer Prize twice, for the Carrier of Ladders (1970) and The Shadow of Sirius (2008) being most significant. And was the United States Poet Laureate, also not once, but twice, in 1999-2000 and 2010 -11. So he was no bohemian slouch. 

I Have Been Younger In October Than All The Months Of Spring

Sweeping in to New York to be born on the last day of September 1927, William Stanley Merwin always had this rhapsodic appreciation for the welcoming in of October. In 1936 his family moved from New Jersey to Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. Uncannily precocious by the age of five William was already writing hymns and illustrating them. His love of nature was also apparent, coupled with an instinctive mind that found history embedded in the fabric around him. Providing a sense of the ancestry of a place. 

By A Swooning Candle, In My Porchless Door.

After finishing a degree at Princeton, William then embarked on the first of his three marriages, number one was to Dorothy, moving with her to Spain, where there were two significant meetings, one with his hero Robert Graves and the other was with Dido Milroy, his second wife, with whom he later live with in London, where he was actively sought out and befriended by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, followed by much Trans-Atlantic flip flopping, till recently divorced from Dido, he relocated to Hawaii, later to marry Paula Dunaway, with no biological offspring to bring up, but inheriting her two. 

I See Only The Flatlands And The Slow Vanishing of Windmills
Poetry rarely feeds and clothes you. Merwin like every jobbing poet, took other associated work or adjunct literary commissions, such as playwright in residences, poetry fellowships, poetry editor at The Nation, and became a respected translator of literature in nine different languages.  Meanwhile, privately, he continued writing his poetry, which began by being influenced by Robert Graves with epic thematic verses on mythological legends. But by the mid 60's his poetry had become strongly autobiographical, political and ecological in focus. Never afraid to campaign and protest, he became a significant strong voice in his opposition to the Vietnam War and environmental degradation.

Inside This Pencil Crouch Words That Have Never Been Written

His poetic evolution required an ever shifting emphasis on the exploration of poetic structure, abandoning the conventions of punctuation altogether, dito standard line breaks and sentence structure, imagery folded half between lines, or snapped in two mid sentence. Sometimes his poetry stretches its long limbs across many a page. And then there are those concise freeze dried poems that expand once your eyes land upon them. Merwin's poetry never seeks to force feed you an idea, but opens up an exploratory space, where your imagination can make its own compositional sense out of what it is reading. Sometimes, it's as though he opens up a crack in the ceiling and you briefly glimpse a brighter sky.

On The Last Day Of The World I Would Want To Plant A Tree
In his later life living in Hawaii, Merwin would spend his mornings writing and his afternoons planting out palm trees, bushes and a wide variety of other plants. There was always a deep appreciation of nature and ecology running throughout his poetry. Capturing his momentary feelings and responses, as they flitted from noticing one thing to another, encapsulating how he was struck by it, what it had communicated to him. This was one characteristic of his constantly evolving writing style, it was so intimately personal, though this often remained half opaque to the reader. That all this wonderfully colourful imagery you bathed in, was sometimes left without a frame of reference the interpreting explanation of Merwin. They are snapshots of an experience, that then is move on from. Sometimes you just receive perceptions unadorned, and at other times you do receive the full multi-dimensional perspective. What a glory that is when this happens.

Where Did You Come From This Late Morning?

In 2010 Merwin turned eighty, and ideas about how to preserve his legacy began to be pondered. His papers, a collection of 5,500 items and 450 printed books were housed in The University of Illinois. He and his wife Paula were primarily concerned to provide a means of maintaining his eighteen acre property. Which over the decades he had transformed from a rough piece of scrubland, into a beautiful dense jungle like reserve, where the largest bio-diverse collections of rare palm trees in the world resides. A non-profit organisation The Merwin Conservancy was formed to preserve his hand built home and surrounding estate. His last book of poetry Garden Time, published in 2016, was a meditation on the loss of his eyesight, aging and living in the present moment, dictated to his wife.

Even Our Names Are Made Of Fire And We Feed On Night

Legacies are a difficult thing to plan for and sustain. Books and manuscripts once filed in libraries gather dust. Merwin has undoubtedly been a significant poet and influence upon US literature in his time. It remains to be seen how long after his death that survives. His name is hardly known at all here in the UK, or Europe. Partly I suspect, that in the sixties the Beat Poets somewhat over shadowed his work. His poetry is not overtly counter cultural, its far less vocal, attention grabbing and decidedly un-flashy. Its thoughtful, though often really paired back, almost as if its trying to evade you capturing it alive. We all want to comprehend what any poet is attempting to express. And sometimes, W.S Merwin just will not spoon feed you one single morsel.  Quite prepared is he to leave your hunger unfed.

'Some day it will rain

from a cold place

and the sticks and stones will darken their faces

the salt will wash from the worn gods

of the good

and mourners will be waiting

on the far sides of the hills' ***

***

Taken from the poem As Though I Was Waiting For That
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems 

By Copper Canyon Press. 2005.

**

Taken from the poem A Contemporary
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems
By Copper Canyon Press. 2005

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Horses by Patti Smith - 1975

 

In this the penultimate album of the first series of My Most Loved Albums, we find ourself once more circling around and back to 1975. It was at this point in the Mid -1970's when the previous music press murmurings about punk finally landed at our shores. And so we have the intriguingly malformed beast that is Horses, and the arrival of Patti Smith. Not on the musical surface sounding all that trad punk - a very arty eclectic version perhaps. But her insouciance, well its all there in its stylish album cover. This iconic immaculately executed Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, captures the essence and feral spirit of his close friend. The look of indifference in those eyes stares straight at you, the confident swagger of that the jacket slung over her shoulder conveys. This is the quintessential performance poet and musician. She might have rode in on the wave of punk, but she doesn't feel remotely beholden to it, nor to anything really. Much more closely affiliated to Rimbaud than to The Ramones. She introduces a feverish level of artistic expressiveness into rock'n'roll that hasn't quite been matched since, by anyone, even by her.

I remember, on first hearing I was not at all sure I liked this alien species. Where was this woman coming from?  Introduced to punk in the UK by The Damned and The Sex Pistols, the New York CBGB's punk scene was producing these really idiosyncratic counter cultural punk bands, as diverse as Jayne County and Suicide. These weren't quite what anyone here thought of as punk in the UK. But they were defiantly so in attitude, and that made them interesting. I'm noticing as I comb through my music collection, looking for My Most Loved Albums that US Punk bands are still present. But UK punk. not a whisper, because our home spun version of punk was orientated towards independent singles, self promotion, punk magazines. There was an alternative ethos at work, in which albums felt middle aged and so out of fashion. Albums in the UK became closely associated with the corporate record industry, the behemoths of Progressive Rock and the West Coast hokey earnestness of singer songwriters. US punk bands seemed instinctively to be Post-Punk, years before anyone here understood what that might mean. Because punk, though it moved fast, became tired and ran out of road very quickly.

And here we have Patti Smith singing, well, more screaming, whelping and drawling, her half sung half spoken surreal hallucinatory poetry. Wildly expressive outbursts triggered, as though in the midst of a psychotic episode. 

'The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,

but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames.'*

So, yeah, that felt challenging. Patti Smith sounds so permanently wired throughout the entire proceedings, really worked up and pumped. These days when I listen to albums from this early punk period, I hear lots of potential, that generally is never subsequently fully explored. Rebellious creatively tends to have a very short fuse, before it inevitably enters the dominant mainstream. This is what punk did, quickly become a convention, and disappear up its own anally retentive clenched buttocks. And then, when I listen to Horses, I think, more music as as radical and as experimentally out there as this, that would have been really good.  Ah, the persistence of dreaming of what punk might have been.

Fifty years later Horses has attained and is now firmly grounded in its seminal, much lauded, status. In the same way The Velvet Underground and The Stooges had become godfathers of punk from earlier eras. You have to hand it to Patti Smith, she did single handedly make performance poetry legit, and launched a whole host of other performers as a result. Her subsequent artistic career is more than admirable, so today she is revered as this no nonsense rebellious feminist icon. Nothing, however, has quite equalled the derisory drawl of Gloria's much quoted, opening coda, being transgressively thrown in your face -' Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.'*

*Lyrics by Patti Smith taken from the album Horses, released by Arista Records November 10th 1975.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW - No 38 - It Comes In An Effin Tin !

 

Friends of ours sent us a What's App message saying they had bought something specially for me, fresh that day. This was the mild level of teasing mystery we have come to expect. Then another message said - we've left it on the patio in your back garden. So, by the time we got home later that day our curiosity was fully roused. What exactly had they left 'for me'. We found a bag from a North of England  cafe/bakery chain called Heavenly Desserts, singularly devoted to serving desserts, cakes and confectionary. Inside the bag, was the gift of a tin with a label declaring it contained a carrot cake within. Ah, now I understood what all this was about. A subsequent message confirmed the intent with a - Looking forward to the review! I was being goaded into assessing this -carrot cake tin thing. 

Well I was, initially, tempted to not deign to respond to such blatant arm twisting. But my response to this confection in a can, did create a near compelling need to cough up a bit of catharsis. This could not pass uncommented upon, surely! Of course the 'in a tin' concept is essentially a gimmick. But it did have one very practical application that I don't really have to vex my imagination much with. You can buy a tin sized piece of cake, and without having to ensure its carefully packaged in a confectionary box or nurse it like a delicate vase, travel all the way down the A1 with it.  As a concept this evidently does work.

Whilst on holiday I'd seen probably the very same thing on sale in York, and was quite frankly dismayed at its mere existence. I mean how much further could you descend in turning finely crafted traditional confectionery, into a travesty? Well, not far, because that particular benchmark has frequently been transgressed. Read past reviews I've written, for the tawdry road of shame full sized proper carrot cake confectionery can drag you kicking and screaming down. 

The tin is aluminium, about the size of a small tin of car sweets. Once opened, what you discover is not a neat piece of cylindrical cake in a tin, more a chaotic melange. The cake and the frosting roughly mixed up. It is in essence not a proper carrot cake, no layers, no fine finishing touches, more cake rubble shoveled in. It appeared to have all the right carrot cake ingredients, though definitely not in the right order.

You might say, does this really matter Stephen? After all this was a kind gift, so let us be kind about it. Aren't you just being a bit too prissy here? What does it actually taste like? Let us hear the review. Well, to my crestfallen surprise, the cake was not awful. In fact, if I hadn't actually been wolfing it down out of the said tin, my enjoyment might have been excessively perked. The cake mixture tastes as if its got a reasonable amount of carrot, and hence texture, to it. A sufficient suggestion of a spice mix, but not overwhelmingly so. It felt to have the right amount of weighty heft,  perhaps teetering mildly onto the wrong side of doughy. The frosting was an effective butter cream. You could casually encounter bits of catering quality chopped nut, of an unspecifiable origin, without being unduly alarmed by flavour. Dried fruit? Well, I really can't remember being struck by any shrivelled moistness, so I want to say none. No marzipan carrots, which is forever a blessed relief.  In a blind taste test, this would clearly have ticked some primary boxes suggesting approval might be to follow.

Begrudgingly, I have to admit this tinned carrot cake spoiled things, by taking the sting out of my desire for a vitriolic outpouring. To unreservedly and publically castigate it for its self-evident horrors. So I will restrain myself to emitting muted approval, the classic English equivocation of - it was not bad. If you're willing to completely overlook the tin that it's in - which I'm not. So with (qualifications ) the scores are in.

CARROT CAKE SCORE (Without Tin ) - 5/8

CARROT CAKE SCORE (With Tin) - 2/8

PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Long Grass with Butterflies (1890)

Van Gogh is recovering in the psychiatric hospital in San Remy. He'd taken himself there of his own volition after a serious mental health crisis, which had resulted in the infamous incident of self harm. So far as documents tell us, he was there for around a year. But definitely left in the May of 1890 once his doctor deemed him 'cured'. Within two months of him leaving San Remy, he was dead. The result of a, possibly accidental, gun shot to his chest. Nothing in his written communications immediately prior to this, to his brother Theo, indicate that he was having suicidal thoughts. But given his history of mental instability perhaps this was just assumed.

Van Gogh before going to San Remy

It maybe Van Gogh himself spoke of it as being accidental, but no one really gave this statement that much credence. Why was he carrying a gun about his person anyway? How do you accidentally shoot oneself in the chest?.Whatever the explanation, Van Gogh lived on for two whole days after the fatal shooting, before he died. Time enough for brother Theo to hurriedly come down to see him. So surely they must have talked between themselves about the hows and whys of itl. And there are after all, Vincent’s poignant last words, as reported by his brother ‘The sadness will last forever’ Which points towards a sort of eternal fatalism existing inside of him, feeding his disturbed psyche.

Dr Paul Gachet

Long Grass with Butterflies, was painted during his stay in San Remy. Its dated 1890, so we have a clearly short time frame of a few months within which he was to paint it. Dr Paul Gachet, his doctor whilst at San Remy, was a huge art lover, and had actively encouraged Vincent to begin painting again. He saw it as a vital 'creative' remedy to passify his agitation. He painted Doctor Gachet and his daughter Marguerite. The latter, yet another example of a women with whom Van Gogh developed an unrequited dependence upon. He wasn’t so much a man unlucky in love, but a really clumsy one in romantic relations, often inappropriate or weak, with an underlying need to save supposedly ‘fallen’ women.

Marguerite Gachet

Apart from these portraits, he primarily painted views from his hospital window. Mostly looking down upon the garden and the meadows that surrounded it. It was a recurring theme in his late paintings, to find expressive force in the wilder untamed undergrowth of woods and countryside. The possible simile with his own mental state could perhaps be too easily retrospectively applied to this. However, whilst in San Remy, he was always inside, looking down upon a far less controllable existence than even his own. Engaging with such a rough cut form of nature and painting it, he might well have found this in some way consoling to his febrile nervous system and heightened sensitivity. This externalising of an internal response in oil paint, was inherently a cathartic act to him.

The painting itself, is 25 x 32 inches and perhaps easily overshadowed by its eight other companion pieces hung in The National Gallery in London. Containing the more famous cypress strewn Arle landscapes, Sunflowers and Van Gogh's Chair. Long Grass with Butterflies on a casual glance, seems a lot humbler, perhaps of less significance artistically. But as you draw your attention in, perhaps bending down to examine it in closer detail, you enter a wholly different world of insight into it, an expressive reinterpretation of what the concept of landscape could include. The surface of this literally fizzes with the electric energy contained in those inimitable brush strokes. Slashes of purple blue suddenly appear from in the midst of the coarser green blades of the long grass in the foreground. He indicates with a flock of fluid white dashes in the background, that a wind is forcing the undergrowth to undulate and flicker in the blistering sunshine.

This landscape is an uneven cleft, with a scumble of hedge and yellow gorse visible in the far distance. It is an unkempt coarse meadow, suitable only for grazing sheep on. A grey path scratching its way across the top left of the painting indicates that this was not a place to idly or romantically wander through, but to pass by quickly on your way to somewhere else. It’s not especially beautiful in any classical sense. On a practical level Van Gogh, as ever, is making the best of what he has infront of him, as he was unable to go anywhere else. Such limitations are often the prompt to greater creativity. Being forced to look more closely, Van Gogh identifies qualities in the view that he appreciates and attempts to highlight.

The primary thing to remind oneself of here, is what this painting is called - Long Grass with Butterflies. That is the dynamic Van Gogh saw most visibly at play here. The foreground of the painting is a scruffy, half dried out scrap of the meadow, where the darkest of greens fights against the encroaching parched ground. The vigorous implacable grip these grasses have upon the ground they are growing in, is dense with wide spreading roots. The blades of coarse grass are sharp edged. Hovering over these well established mounds of grass are white butterflies. They are almost too light and insubstantial, one could imagine them being blown out of existence by a strong puff of wind. They flutter and flounder and flutter, rising and falling in out of the grasses. They may only have a brief few days of life, but their efforts to propagate and feed themselves are slow but assiduous. This coexistence of the long life and rugged nature of the long grasses with the light short lived ephemerality of the butterflies, feels like this painting is a metaphor for human existence. We posit ourselves as substantial influential beings, but we come and we go, our flickering conscious awareness is soon lost, Whilst the long grass of reality carries on doggedly still harbouring new instances of life.

SCREEN SHOT - Civil War (2024)

 

Civil War has broken out in the US. States wanting to leave the union have formed their own army known as The Western Forces, and all the indications are that they are on a final winning frontier. But the President is holed up in the White House, making encouraging announcements to camera that his forces are effectively pushing the rebels back. A small group of a photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and a couple of journalists Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), are travelling across dangerous and still contested terrain, trying to get to Washington to photograph and interview the President. Along the way they pick up a young adult photographer Jessie ( Caliee Spaeny) a bit naive and green, but who idolises Lee's work and wants to be like her. Lee, much to her frustration, is forced to take her on and teach her how to operate and stay safe as a photographer, when combat and fatalities are going on all around you. The personal civil war here is to stay alive and still sane.

I've seen Civil War twice now, and each time I am struck by how this film does not pull any punches in showing you the horrors of war. The political set up is believable, particularly with the current US political regimes behaviour. But the film, however, is not really about why the civil war is happening, or the rights and wrongs of it. Its really concerned with what documenting it does to your mental state. Primarily its what this has done to the photographer Lee. Whose character traits bares strong echoes of what happened to Lee Miller. She is as hard as nails, battle hardened. Very effective as a photographer in difficult situations. She sees something of herself in Jessie, but steadfastly resists romanticising what war photography requires of you. You can see that some part of her is emotionally inactive, deadened almost. You are given a palpable sense for how oddly inhumane the war photographers task is. People are suffering and dying right in front of you, and rather than help or console them, they are taking a photograph of them in the process of dying. Its uncomfortable to watch, because it shows you just how weird that is. A tragedy happens later in the story, and only then does Lee completely lose her stern composure and mentally falls apart.

Alex Garland wrote and directed Civil War, and it has all the feeling for prescience and character led drama one expects of his movies. A pivotal scene, is a master class in show not tell, where the group encounter a White Supremacist (Jesse Plemons) in the midst of committing an unspeakable atrocity, and this is the most nerve wracking unsettling scene in the entire film. Very few words spoken, but the tension is absolutely unbearable. The films scenario is extraordinarily believable. Civil War echoes contemporary issues and dilemmas without turning its entire narrative purpose into a political piece of propaganda or moral tub thumping.  Kirsten Dunst's performance is the real cold hearted, yet mesmerising, hub of this entire movie.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

SCREEN SHOT - The Creator (2023)

 

Gareth Edwards has made his name writing and directing sci -fi action films. His breakthrough film Monsters (2010) was a low budget marvel. Since then, giving him larger blockbuster level budgets has produced very mixed results. The best having been Rogue One, the worst a Godzilla movie which was quite undistinguished, testing, boring, pick your adjective. So I came to The Creator wondering quite which side of the fence opinions would fall this time.

The films basic premise is a future world is at war over AI robotics. America having almost been destroyed by it, has become evangelical in its desire to eradicate it from the world. Whilst New Asia (by which it really means China) has gone hell for leather in developing it. For those looking for contemporary relevance Trump and China have adopted similar political- economic orientations of late.  In the film, there is intelligence that an AI creator called Nirmata has developed an AI hack that is designed specifically to destroy NOMAD a brutally destructive weapon that the US is employing to devastating effect. If this happens then the war will be over, and New Asia will have won. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) is an undercover agent living with his pregnant wife Maya ( Gemma Chan) when a NOMAD destruction mission blows his cover and his abducted wife is caught in an explosion. His mission, however, remains to locate Nirmata and to destroy whatever it is they have created.

For all its highly developed and certainly impressive visuals, The Creator suffers from two cripplingly deficient qualities that are unfortunately intrinsically entwined - a lack of credibility - and underdeveloped characterisation and flimsy mise-en-scene. The genuineness of the love affair between Joshua and Maya gets insufficient time to develop depth before the first action sequence barges into it. The dubious nature of this covert operations 'love affair', that makes Maya angry when the truth is revealed, exposes a moral quandary that is never adequately accounted for. This fundamentally undermines the subsequent crestfallen intensity of his eternally smitten love for Maya, that apparently propels him throughout the movie. Making one of the prime emotional axises of the entire movie, an almighty plot hole down which our investment is continually swallowed.

That New Asia is populated by AI robots dressed as though they're ordinary peasants, or worse still Tibetan Monks.This requires more context to make this idiosyncrasy seem understanable. at all Otherwise we simply assume this world is occupied by every Asian trope and cliche a white screenwriter could come up with. Though it has plenty of large scale spectacle in its action sequences, its importance all feels terribly over egged. The sense of peril perishing under the sheer invincible avalanche and massiveness of its tank onslaughts. Hence, I found I was never really engaged with the apparent jeopardy everyone was supposedly in, under heavy handed US military hegemony. 

The movie sort of happened, it was sort of predictable where it would go, it sort of went there and we sort of did not care that it went there, it sort of had scenes of love and redemption and still we sort of did not care. Because it sort of hadn't really put in enough work to make us sort of want to root for it. It felt sort of...shit. With an empty heart emoji, and a shrug.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Live At Dublin National Stadium - Alan Stivell - 1975

 

A feature of the early seventies was folk music suddenly becoming cutting edge, shifting heavily into folk-rock-fusion territory and cross fertilising a few tropes. This was a delayed repercussion, of Bob Dylan going electric ten years previously. A European pioneer of this fusion was Alan Stivell. Who had almost single handedly salvaged Breton folk music and introduced us to the romanticism of the Celtic Harp and the Breton Pipes. And having done all that hurled them both into the centre of progressive rock music. He moved from folk purist to folk rock star, then later on, to world and new age music. You get the feeling Alan Stivell is one of life's explorers, a musical enthusiast and boundary crosser, always able to respond positively to the possibilities of fresh musical terrain. 

This live album, in folk rock circles has become something of a revered classic. It captures the feeling, the stirring spiritual power of what, in his prime, Stivell could achieve. Because he is also in possession of a lyrically beautiful voice, with solid wide range and a unique sensitivity. Give him an old Breton folk song and he'll bewitch you with its simple uncut beauty. This is 1975, so Stivell has long dark hair and a beard, in his early thirties, and is a handsome man. You can hear as he performs an almost messianic magnetism, a magical charm that entrances through the music.

Many decades later, I cannot recall quite how I first came across this album. His was certainly a name frequently mentioned in the music papers of the time. Most likely my buying of this album was the result of one of my 'take a gamble' trips.  A strategy I increasingly used during the seventies and eighties. I'd go down to the local record store or HMV and collect a handful of records, tapes, or later CD's I'd never heard of before, but caught my interest, and buy them just on the off chance they might be good. I discovered all sorts of brilliant stuff this way. 

These days you can just cruise Spotify or You Tube if you want to know what a group or singer sounds like, and don't have to commit to purchasing at all. The algorithm guides you towards stuff it thinks you might like. But there was something a bit more random and likely to challenge your personal tastes about what I used to do. Yes, it was wasteful on finances and resources, because not everything I bought as 'a gamble' I found interesting. Other things I slowly grew to love. Those duff purchases, when I lived in London, went straight down to the record and tape exchange in Camden.  

Live in Dublin, still packs a punch today, and doesn't feel that dated either. Over the years I've re-purchased it in different playing formats, which I guess is as good an indication as any, just how much I still love and value it.

FINISHED READING - On Mysticism by Simon Critchley

You know, I can usually tell early on if I'm going to get along fine with a book. But this one On Mysticism, it tricked me, by starting off very well, just the sort of over view I thought I was looking for, an interesting chapter on Eckhart. And then it gradually started to grind my engagement into dust, with chapters on Anne Dillard, Anne Carson, Julian of Norwich, TS Eliot. Now, it maybe that this is all just me. I do appear to repeatedly find Christian explanations of their theology and approach to practice, more than a tad incomprehensible. I am looking to grasp hold of something, or better still someone with a clear head to guide me through it. But my mental synapses keep finding it turns into mush and suffocates my psycho-physical being under its philosophical goop. I keep thinking, this really should not be that difficult to understand, surely? Study, if it holds any function, should not obscure, but further enlighten and open out ones understanding. 

If one encounters complicated multi-layered explanations, there is always the potential to become lost very very easily, particularly if you can't follow the logic, if indeed there is any. Then imagine trying to explain Christian Mysticism, which is very far from following any conventional route of practice, at the best of times. My understanding of mystics, Christian or otherwise, is that very little in their approach will be useful to other people. The mystic approach to religious practice appears, in my reading of it at least, to be the very definition of a one off non-transferable experience. 

Religious experience generally seems to be like that. Other people's brush with God, or Enlightenment experience, though encouraging, doesn't necessarily help others to follow in detail their example, to obtain the same result. The Buddha thought initially he'd be wasting his time trying to communicate his Enlightenment experience, and he was right. He was convinced to teach anyway, and spent the next fifty years trying out all sorts of different approaches, none of which were a guaranteed foolproof method. Two and a half thousand years of Buddhism continued this search. Because, fundamentally, although the Buddhist teachings have pointers and practices, which are certainly helpful, you still needed to discover what the way forward was like - for yourself. This was inescapable.

With that contextual qualification now given a voice. I will express a general opinion about this book. Somewhere in the middle of this huge blancmange of ideas, there is a fine book on mysticism fighting to be liberated from its opaque metaphors and obfuscating language. Undoubtedly Simon Critchley knows and has thought about this subject matter a lot, but a clear seamless exposition this is not. It lacks one coherent over arching vein of thought or theme, one that keeps resurfacing to bind all this multiplicity of ideas and disparate sources together. It reads, more often than not, as a whole lot of tangential flailing for meaning.

By the end he is rambling onwards about the modern mystical muses within music. Specifically Krautrock, and their influence on punk and post punk, Julian Cope and Nick Cave. Whilst this is not necessarily an unreasonable thing to assert, there might even be something in this. A whole book exploring this could prove insightful. But in the context of this book, it does feels like he's desperately throwing a few last remaining subjective ideas at a wall and seeing if any of them will stick. 

CARROT REVIEW - 

RISING UP MY BOOK PILE - October 2025

Fractured - Jon Yates 
I saw Jon Yates being interviewed on The Sacred podcast, and the guy has a decent assessment of what is happening to our society and how we might mend its parlous state.
A Birthday Present
Currently Reading

The Less Dead - Denise Mina
One of the Scottish noir writers of detective fiction. Having read Conviction, I can tell you Denise Mina is probably one of the best such writers around. Looking forward to reading this one.
Bought from a Charity Shop

Alice Roberts - Domination ( NEW )

I've read her previous books on ancestry and burial practices. Like her TV presenting, her books are approachable, informative and immensely relatable. This one is about how the end of the Roman Empire coincided with the rise of Christianity.
Bought from The Whitby Bookshop

Zombies In Western Culture - Vervaeke, Mastropietro & Miscevic

A slim volume of what I suspect is more an academic outline than a fully fledged book. But I've heard John Vervaeke talking about this subject and its seems a more useful analogy than you might think. That the dominant presence of zombies in our popular movies is a reflection of our cultures unease with the loss of meaning. 
A Birthday Present
Currently Reading

The Mystical Thought Of Master Eckhart - Bernard McGinn
In my reading of Christian history and literature  I've been meaning to investigate the mystic apophatic tradition, of which Eckhart seems pretty central. This book has a favourable reputation as a broad introduction to his thought.
A Birthday Present

Migration.- W S Merwin 
Its a compendium of Merwin's poetry who is almost unknown in the UK, but a much lauded man of US literature. His poetry varied in quality and length over his lifetime, sometimes it is a real blissful joy, other times not so much. Presently it is peerless. I'm reading a couple of poems a day, but at over five hundred pages it might be a while before I finish it. I'm currently nearing half way.
Ordered from Holt Bookshop
Currently Reading

Beliefism by Paul Dolan ( NEW)

An apparently helpful book about how to avoid becoming polarised in our beliefs, and unable to hear opinions that don't accord with our own. A somewhat timely book. I believe I need a little help in this area myself, so lets see what this has to offer.

Bought from Book Hive Aylsham 

Poetic Diction - Owen Barfield
Subtitled -A Study In Meaning, Barfield was one of the 'Inklings' along with Tolkein & Lewis. An influential thinker whose ideas and theories about poetry and language are probably more wide ranging in their influence than I realise. I want to read this to see if I can get a grasp on what the fuss is about. Wish me luck, cos I think I might need it.
A Birthday Present

The Devil You Know by Dr Gwen Adshead & Eileen Horne
Again someone I've seen being interviewed on The Sacred podcast.  I'm always fascinated by people whose job is to interact with darker vile and unacceptable people in our society. Adshead is a forensic Psychiatrist whose patients are serial killers, arsonists, stalkers. Basicly the sort of folk the tabloids would label 'monsters'.
A Birthday Present

On Mysticism - Simon Critchley
A general introduction to mysticism as a phenomena. All part of my intention this year to read more about this area. 

Bought from Book Hive, Aylsham
Currently Reading ( Ooops just finished it -read the review )

On Friendship by Andrew O'Hagan ( NEW)

I could read the Yellow Pages if it was written by this chap. But also his reflections on friendship is a subject I am interested in his experience of. So win win.

Bought from Book Hive, Aylsham

BOOKSHOPS

Book Hive, Norwich

Book Hive, Aylsham

Holt Bookshop

The Whitby Bookshop

WATCHED - The English ( Series from 2022)

 

Another fine series from Writer & Director - Hugo Blick ( The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising, The Shadow Line ). This has all the usual gorgeous stylistic polish and uniqueness of his productions. Set in 1890's mid western America, with all the background of mythic pioneering and entrepreneurial ventures one finds in stories set in this era. The English, however, takes you on a very unusual journey through it.

Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer) has ceased being a scout for the army. He hopes that he now can buy a homestead and land, to be left to live the rest of his life how he wishes. There is pain in his background, civil war atrocities, the loss of his wife and son. Realistically, no whiteman would ever let him own anything, nor leave him alone to live out his dream. But, still he has hope.

Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) is an Englishwoman, initially a bit out of her depth in the mid west. She is searching for her former boyfriend Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes), who is out here running his own cattle ranch. She knows him to be in some danger from David Melmont (Timothy Spall) his former business partner. Cornelia, however, has her own pain that she carries with her, the locket of hair from her recently deceased son. A talisman that only gains in significance.

Cornelia and Eli hook up with each other, because each finds themselves without a home to go back to. But somehow this unlikely pairing of Indian Scout with an English Lady brings out the fighting spirit in both of them. As the series progresses the real reason why she is here in the free wheeling mid west looking for Melmont emerges, and the emotional bond with Eli grows ever deeper. As both their past histories converge on the same place and the same man.

This series holds it's hidden secrets tightly to its chest, that are then allowed to arise slowly into awareness. It is a compelling watch. I don't think I've seen Emily Blunt act better, as she gradually blossoms out of her inhibited crushing loss into this fully fledged vengeful vigilante. Chaske Spencer plays Eli with aloof mystery, amid this regret filled life history that weighs so heavily down upon him. The real delightful surprise was Timothy Spall, so often cast as the genial lightweight, here gives us a truly monstrous creation in Melmont, about whom nothing good could ever be said. Without giving anything away, the ending of The English, is just truly gut wrenchingly tragic.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

Available on BBC I Player & Amazon Prime.

FEATURE - It's Never Too Early For Singing Christmas Reindeer

 

Those who know me, will know I'm not big on Christmas happening too early. But wandering around Aylsham Garden Centre we encountered these, which were a complete hoot. The staff must be driven towards madness by hearing it over and over again, that or become completely brain dead. But that's retail for you!

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Blue by Joni Mitchell - 1971

 

Though released in 1971 I arrived late to the Joni Mitchell party, fifty years late in fact. Tail end of the sixties singer songwriters, well these were just not my bag in the seventies. It was all progressive or glam rock, or punk, post punk, or whatever music trend I was briefly affiliating myself with at the time. I would say the guiding star of Joni Mitchell's career, is that she rarely fully embodies the ethos or zeitgeist of any time or era. She wrote the song that encapsulated the spirit of Woodstock, a festival she was never to perform at.  Always doing entirely her own thing, continuing to write these idiosyncratic personal songs that stretched the envelope of how and what she could express or encompass. Pushing herself forward, when even her fans wanted her to stay put exactly where she'd just been, for a little while longer.

Always the first in many aspects, the first of her generation to coruscatingly bare her soul through her songwriting. The first woman of her generation to resolutely forge her own career path in music, beholden to no one. And then there is the purity and ever expanding reach of what that remarkable voice could express. As free as a bird, going wherever it felt was right, in whatever manner that was right. Her work continues to sound totally unique as a consequence. In terms of longer term cross generational impact there are few from her era to match or keep up with her. You underestimate the importance, life force and reach of Joni Mitchell's recorded work at your peril. 

Her first few albums were for whatever reason, the production or Joni still finding her feet as an artist, appeared to waver in their level of confidence and assuredness.  On Blue, finally everything comes together to create one perfectly heart rending album.  And boom she was right there, and never appears to lose total grasp of it. Listening to Blue, I'm amazed people were so taken aback and annoyed by Joni exploring Jazz quite so thoroughly later in her career. The inflections and scat are all in essence there on Blue, in the way she vocally skips and scampers across her lyrical landscapes.

Now I guess everyone who listens to Blue will be struck by different tracks for often quite disparate reasons. But I would be completely in love with any album, if it contained one love song as good as A Case of You.  'I can drink a case of you, and still be on my feet' she sings. Expressing both her intoxication with the lost love object, whilst also stating she's still upright and capable of being fully herself. She is not subsumed into submissiveness or contrition by her continuing desire for this persons love. Its complicated, and I guess that is why this still rings so true.

MY OWN WALKING - October Journal 2025

 

In an online talk by American Zen Buddhist teacher Jisho Sara Siebart, she remarked that we shouldn't always be - ' looking for drama to keep our minds active' - that - 'if things are not in alignment with the true Dharma, then we should pivot - and can we do that?'  As a person whose not been averse to indulging in a bit of self stoked melodrama over my life, these comments struck an embarrassing chord. I'm finding it useful to checkout my motivations with this question - Is this Dharma or Drama? 

There are categories of personal drama, each with a varying intensity. There's the Historical Drama, the Melodrama and the Psycho-drama. All dramas, regardless of our level of investment in them, are founded on some very common elements of pleasure or pain, gain or loss, fame or infamy, praise or blame. The Buddha designated them as Worldly Winds, that would buffet you around like a ship on a storm tossed sea, if you let them. These are the sort of elements present in all novels, theatrical plays, movies and TV Soaps which thrive on exploiting there dramatic potential. 

Due to there always being a degree of fictionalising, of scene setting involved, in how we recount our personal dramas. We are mostly retro-fitting our present experience into this readymade semi-fictional tale. One through which we tell ourselves who we think we are, what we are capable of, what we can and cannot do, what we believe the world is like, why other people are behaving in the way they do towards us, etc. You can spot these because they usually begin with - This is how it always is with me - I never get (this that or the other) - I seem destined to be (this that or the other). Basically, an element of fatalism is present.

This is what I'm labelling Historical Drama. Explaining every new experience through the narrow optics of a much rehearsed personal history.  Its an ongoing reinforcement, of a usually detrimental self view. There was a period when I would regularly experience a sense of being trapped in a situation. And that was rarely actually the case. I was more often than not feeling imprisoned by me. There were options, ways out, but I'd not take them because I didn't think I could pull them off or was actively risk averse towards, or scared of the consequences. 

At other times I'd feel a sense of meaninglessness or lack of direction, usually because I was resisting making a clear commitment to an action, and the entropy summoned up, just dragged my mood downwards into a pit of despondency. And that despair completed a self reinforcing negative cycle from meaninglessness to despair and back round again.  Whether I overcame any obstacle I encountered came down to how much initiative, confidence or esteem I believed I had. Even my recounting and attempts to reframe them here, is a form of re-fictionalising, re-editing and re-fixing the story. Tweeking it to show a certain level of retrospective self awareness

There is a difference between Historical Drama and Melodrama and it comes down to how long you are prepared to actively wallow in this state of squandering your time. To intensify the self dramatics and allow yourself to passively flounder and flail. Whenever I've experienced my susceptibility to melodramatics, its been executed as a clearly conscious act. In the fading embers of a love affair, whether the love was reciprocated or not, the tendency to play the tune of 'woe is me' proves irresistible. 

I remember living in my one room bedsit on the Great North Road in East Finchley in the 1980's, donning my headphones and listening loudly to The Smiths - Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want This Time. There was nothing like a melancholy Morrissey lyric to turn up the self pity to tearfulness, in this gay man's romanticised pose. You desire company when you wallow. So lacking a friend, a bit of fellow feeling coming at you through the music deck, makes you feel less completely alone with it. Cranking up the music and the lyrical poetry, would often fulfill that need for me. But, you get my drift, melodrama does require you to over act, to ham it up, to indulge in the melancholy, and to do so with all the self conscious languor you can muster. It delays or conceals any personal necessity to snap out of it, under a comforting duvet of mushy emotionality.

Up to this point all the Historical Drama and Melodrama has largely been an internal conversation within oneself. One that affects one's outer life to a degree. We think certain things, but at the same time we know this is just us, and will prove to have little to no substance if exposed to reality. The Psycho-Drama, however, starts to believe in the reality of those internal misconceptions. Becoming obsessed with the Worldly Winds to an exaggerated extent. Fixating on perhaps one of these - pleasure or pain, gain or loss, fame or infamy, praise or blame, and begin to lose a grip on sanity through it. I personally have no experience of this. Though I guess like many of us, we can sense, even in our internal small talk, the seeds of something unhealthy, that if given too much credence and belief could potentially unhinge you. We, might instinctively back away, but some sadly tip right over into it. 

Then it comes to the concluding part of Jisho Sara Seibert's comment -'if things are not in alignment with the true Dharma, then we should pivot, and can we do that?'  In the 1980's when I found myself in trough's of despondency, I'd eventually tire of myself being in this state, with its incessant wallowing and pivot out of it. Usually I found a new direction to move in, beginning some new project or pursuing a fresh interest, but it could sometimes be simply changing the furniture around in my flat, or more dramatically moving to a new town, or starting a new job. 

At some point I came to realise any nihilistic tendency only went so far before an equal and opposite force kicked in. That somewhere inside of me I had hope, a confidence in the possibility of things becoming better. The nihilism never fully accords with my core beliefs. This positive resilience, a faith in the good, though hard to hold onto is worth reminding oneself of. It does not permanently solve anything, you will undoubted have further dark nights of the soul, you're human after all. I personally have found practicing Buddhism has helped me immensely, in moving away from becoming too involved in internalised Historical Dramas and unhelpful worldly concerns. And I imagine other faiths may provide a similar direction for someone to reorient themselves towards. Learning how to pivot towards whatever is positive and real, is a life skill worth acquiring.