More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 December
Continuing from Nothing's fair in love and court cases
My guess is that too many people are going to be interested in the court case (and there are so many ways nowadays for news of it to be disseminated) for it to disappear : I have already outlined the tactical reasons that might lead to the decision not being appealed, and, with short time-limits usual within which appeals have to be put in, it will not be long before we know what has happened.
On the face of it, a judge finding a causal link between whatever schizophrenia is and abuse earlier in life more probable than not (the standard of proof being the so-called balance of probabilities). For those who found R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson's Sanity, Madness and the Family : Families of Schizophrenics compelling teenage reading, this ruling has been a long time coming, of course.
However, even if it depends on its own facts, it now legally challenges the orthodoxy that this loose bundle of symptoms called schizophrenia (where A might never hear voices, but B does, even if, say, they share (what is supposed to be) delusional thinking, paranoia, and numbness of affect) is heavily genetic in origin - and, whatever happens to this case, there will still be those who argue that there is a genetic predisposition* to respond to abuse in the way that the judge has found.
In the law of England and Wales, it is established principle in the law of tort (or some say of torts (which are just civil wrongs, some of them the non-criminal counterparts of criminal offences)) that one takes one's victim as one finds him. For example, the person negligently injured who has an egg-shell skull, and for whom the blow on the head was far more serious - on account of the fact that the person from whose negligence the blow has been found to result** is liable, he or she is liable for the complications that resulted (say coma, life-support, paralysis).
Bringing a claim for compensation for 'injury' (in its widest sense) resulting from abuse typically hangs back for any criminal case arising from the same facts to be brought, for the simple reason that the standard of proof is beyond reasonable doubt, so, although there are differences in approach, terminology and procedure between the civil law and the criminal law, a conviction is almost always going to establish the basic requirements of being able to prove a civil case., because another court, with a more stringent test, has already looked at it.
Some abused, perhaps, by Catholic priests, who went on to develop schizophrenia in their mid-twenties and who have been compensated may have agreed to settle all claims in return for receiving payment. Others may not have yet brought or settled their claims (and so would not need to test with the form of agreement had bound them and precluded future cases) might still have smoked skunk, known, in the unlucky few, to correlate not with the chilled experience that they sought, but with frightening psychotic experiences that they may no longer be free from.
A case to cite this Australian judgement, then, would best be brought by someone who was abused, whose abuse has been established but not yet led to a settlement or award, and who has not used recreational drugs, so that the picture is clear and not muddied. What stands n the way are likely to be several-fold :
* Availability of funding (even with insurance, one has to satisfy the insurers and their brokers that the chances are 51% or more of winning)
* The associated willingness of the legal profession (the advice of a solicitor or a barrister's opinion will almost certainly guide that assessment of the chances of winning)
* The calibre of the solicitor and barrister who take it on
How many years will it take for all this to be satisfied, and for a case to proceed to trial without the claimant (through pressure exerted by the defendant and its insurers and brokers and / or, as a result of tactical games, the claimant's own insurers and brokers) being induced to settle or knocked out in procedural wranglings prior to trial ?
Not to seem pessimistic, but I wouldn't be surprised at 15 years. If I'm wrong, take a case - surprise me, and prove me wrong !
End-notes
* We all know, of course, that even the behaviour of non-biological systems, let alone human nature, is in the DNA (as the phrase, for the nonce, has it).
** Charmingly known as the tortfeasor. It could have been indirect, in a road traffic accident (or RTA) - whatever occurred, if insurance is involved, the length of the case may rival that of Dickens' fictional Chancery one of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce...
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Bleak House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bleak House. Show all posts
Sunday 22 December 2013
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Drab git - or summat !
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
Oh, I know that there is that grand old tradition of The Grauniad, and I'm the worst for checking over my own postings before they go live, but I'm scarcely trying to tout celebrity stories to a global audience with this blog, whereas a typo in the relevant person's name might just damage the interest in or credibility of the guff in question, and thereby be to the detriment of the named Big Players !
As it was, quite a lot of people couldn’t have been doing their job of checking the web-site’s appearance and content, because the link was there for a long time. Yes, we do read what we expect to be there, and, for that and other reasons, reading a proof properly is harder than many imagine*, and I even think that some promotional material panders to the incorrect by using lazy English, which may be what their target customers would use :
By contrast with dfs, the unmistakable voice of Victoria Wood, sounding earnest and a bit posh, is now the voice of the Dyson brand (a few weeks ago she was, anyway, in the irritating pop-up advert before I could sign in and reach the comparative safety of my in-box), which one might not have envisaged – did our celebrated inventor leave that choice to others, or make it himself in an engineered way, one might wonder… ?
And, as some must know, from Freddie Starr ate my hamster in The Sun of late last century to some fire-fight or cattiness where X rubbishes Y’s work [interchangeable with looks], if X and Y agree (for others) to let it be known that they have their differences over these things (or how one of them supposedly treated Z), then it doesn’t matter a damn that it’s a made-up dispute as long as they do nothing to destroy the illusion that it is real.
And the newspapers, the Internet news-sites, the t.v., they know that it’s all hooey, but it goes all the way back to the closely kept secrets of Tinseltown, such as everyone knowing, and no one saying, that Rock Hudson was gay until the manner of his death (and choices that must have been made, leading up to it) made it known. We only know what we are meant to know, and, likewise, it was just generally accepted that it was better to interview Mary Pickford in the morning, before she had consumed ‘lunch’.
Just for good measure, that world of the law is no different : the various Companies Acts require various things of a company established in England & Wales, including that certain business (e.g. appointments of company officers) be transacted at the first meeting of the company. As one commercial lawyer, deputy senior partner in a City firm, said If Mr D. and Mr D.’s brother say that they met on such and such a day at such and such a time to conduct a meeting, who is to say otherwise ? - it was just for the Messrs D. to consult their diaries and say, for the purpose of the minutes, where this paper meeting took place.
Lying, any more than the story where Pitt sends some Tweet (as if a Twitter account were so personal to the individual that no one else could send it on his behalf, or at his cost) ? A legal fiction versus fabricated grudges, infatuation or rivalry ? Celebrity land and the world of law keep a foot in each camp, for who, other than the PR crowd (whose job, like the devil’s, is to persuade you that they do such extreme things that the innocuously everyday ones pass unnoticed), advises on the legal niceties of the deals that are struck behind the scenes for A to have it appear that B called her some name or whatever in return for payments to B and B’s sworn secrecy ?
Makes Bleak House and its grinding Chancery case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce seem like a fairy story !
End-notes
* Besides which, it becomes terminally uninteresting, in the way that it does for a commercial solicitor who never sets food in a police station (except to reclaim lost property) to explain how his colleagues can represent someone in court whom they ‘know is guilty’, to point out why a proofreader is not responsible ‘for all these grammatical mistakes that there are in books nowadays’
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
According to AOL, Bard Pitt tweets cryptic message !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2013
Oh, I know that there is that grand old tradition of The Grauniad, and I'm the worst for checking over my own postings before they go live, but I'm scarcely trying to tout celebrity stories to a global audience with this blog, whereas a typo in the relevant person's name might just damage the interest in or credibility of the guff in question, and thereby be to the detriment of the named Big Players !
Bard Pitt - I like the sound of that (much better than Brad), and wonder if he'll follow AOL's lead by adopting it...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2013
As it was, quite a lot of people couldn’t have been doing their job of checking the web-site’s appearance and content, because the link was there for a long time. Yes, we do read what we expect to be there, and, for that and other reasons, reading a proof properly is harder than many imagine*, and I even think that some promotional material panders to the incorrect by using lazy English, which may be what their target customers would use :
Laying, dfs ? Makes laying about look glamorous - or is that good enough for dfs customers ?!
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2013
Another gem from AOL : Mum fights python attacking child, where the unnecessarily extreme elision makes you believe it says python-attacking
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2013
By contrast with dfs, the unmistakable voice of Victoria Wood, sounding earnest and a bit posh, is now the voice of the Dyson brand (a few weeks ago she was, anyway, in the irritating pop-up advert before I could sign in and reach the comparative safety of my in-box), which one might not have envisaged – did our celebrated inventor leave that choice to others, or make it himself in an engineered way, one might wonder… ?
And, as some must know, from Freddie Starr ate my hamster in The Sun of late last century to some fire-fight or cattiness where X rubbishes Y’s work [interchangeable with looks], if X and Y agree (for others) to let it be known that they have their differences over these things (or how one of them supposedly treated Z), then it doesn’t matter a damn that it’s a made-up dispute as long as they do nothing to destroy the illusion that it is real.
And the newspapers, the Internet news-sites, the t.v., they know that it’s all hooey, but it goes all the way back to the closely kept secrets of Tinseltown, such as everyone knowing, and no one saying, that Rock Hudson was gay until the manner of his death (and choices that must have been made, leading up to it) made it known. We only know what we are meant to know, and, likewise, it was just generally accepted that it was better to interview Mary Pickford in the morning, before she had consumed ‘lunch’.
Just for good measure, that world of the law is no different : the various Companies Acts require various things of a company established in England & Wales, including that certain business (e.g. appointments of company officers) be transacted at the first meeting of the company. As one commercial lawyer, deputy senior partner in a City firm, said If Mr D. and Mr D.’s brother say that they met on such and such a day at such and such a time to conduct a meeting, who is to say otherwise ? - it was just for the Messrs D. to consult their diaries and say, for the purpose of the minutes, where this paper meeting took place.
Lying, any more than the story where Pitt sends some Tweet (as if a Twitter account were so personal to the individual that no one else could send it on his behalf, or at his cost) ? A legal fiction versus fabricated grudges, infatuation or rivalry ? Celebrity land and the world of law keep a foot in each camp, for who, other than the PR crowd (whose job, like the devil’s, is to persuade you that they do such extreme things that the innocuously everyday ones pass unnoticed), advises on the legal niceties of the deals that are struck behind the scenes for A to have it appear that B called her some name or whatever in return for payments to B and B’s sworn secrecy ?
Makes Bleak House and its grinding Chancery case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce seem like a fairy story !
End-notes
* Besides which, it becomes terminally uninteresting, in the way that it does for a commercial solicitor who never sets food in a police station (except to reclaim lost property) to explain how his colleagues can represent someone in court whom they ‘know is guilty’, to point out why a proofreader is not responsible ‘for all these grammatical mistakes that there are in books nowadays’
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday 29 December 2011
180 years since Charles Dickens sneezed publicly in Cardiff - to great acclaim
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
30 December
No, it's the 200th anniversary of birth or death*, as usual, and, since we never know which, we don't know what we are celebrating (and, to me, it seems inapt to celebrate the years since someone's death).
That said, if claims are to be made for Dickens, let them establish something that he would have thought worthwhile. And yet, on The Verb a few weeks back, Kevin Jackson told us that Dickens had innovated with the names of his characters, and with the supposed advantage over the big Russian novel (where, of course, we are willingly familiar with the tripartite system of naming, and cannot confess not even to trying!) that one could easily keep track of someone in, say, Bleak House because of the choice of name:
Well, as much as a name that I recognize in Dostoyevsky may recur and I recognize it by its shape, so names in that Dickens novel will be more easily identifiable and probably memorable, but it is a far cry from asserting that, on that account, I know what function that person performs in the novel. No, as with the less major characters in any novel, one sometimes has to look back to see who they are, and there the Russian novel anticipates the need with a Dramatis personæ.
Memorable names (and whether they are memorable just because quirky remains a separate, and unexamined issue - who can forget Tom Jones?) in a longer work do not, I believe, necessarily guide me as to who that person is in relation to everyone else, not least when (again in Bleak House) Dickens deliberately rattles on about the presumed oil-wells of the Reverend Chadband's countenance, or the perpetual need for a cushion to be readjusted, in such a way as to sabotage the progress of his own novel and distract our concentration.
Although, in Wemmick, for example, Dickens chose a very fitting name for its bearer, it is because I see him linked to his castle that I remember him for who he is, not because of the name per se.
At any rate, in a fanciful desire to laud Dickens for this above all else, the contributor to the programme dismissed, as their novels not containing comparably witty or descriptive names, both Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Henry Fielding (1707-1754). This, without giving a single example, whereas the eponymous heroes alone of the former's Ferdinand Count Fathom and Roderick Random make demands on our attention. As for Fielding, Mrs Tow-wouse in Joseph Andrews is foremost in my memory, but the novel's pages are peppered with Tom Suckbribe, Jenny Bouncer, Sir Thomas Booby, Mrs Slipslop, Peter Pounce, etc.
If Dickens excels, without the endeavours of other writers at least a century before Dickens even being considered, such as Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), but only Shakespeare (who was only credited with Aguecheek and Belch, because he allegedly took all of his names from his sources), then so be it, but why give Dickens a crown that he doesn't exclusively deserve, and which does not even typify the best things about him?
(In fact, anyone who has heard of William's contemporary Ben Jonson, or who ever took a look at The Alchemist, would find it hard to understand what the fuss about names in Dickens is...)
Since posting the above, and in looking vainly for somewhere on Radio 3's web-site to leave a comment, I've now found the following work, a slim volume published in 1917 by Elizabeth Hope Gordon:
The Naming of Characters in the Works of Charles Dickens
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
30 December
No, it's the 200th anniversary of birth or death*, as usual, and, since we never know which, we don't know what we are celebrating (and, to me, it seems inapt to celebrate the years since someone's death).
That said, if claims are to be made for Dickens, let them establish something that he would have thought worthwhile. And yet, on The Verb a few weeks back, Kevin Jackson told us that Dickens had innovated with the names of his characters, and with the supposed advantage over the big Russian novel (where, of course, we are willingly familiar with the tripartite system of naming, and cannot confess not even to trying!) that one could easily keep track of someone in, say, Bleak House because of the choice of name:
Well, as much as a name that I recognize in Dostoyevsky may recur and I recognize it by its shape, so names in that Dickens novel will be more easily identifiable and probably memorable, but it is a far cry from asserting that, on that account, I know what function that person performs in the novel. No, as with the less major characters in any novel, one sometimes has to look back to see who they are, and there the Russian novel anticipates the need with a Dramatis personæ.
Memorable names (and whether they are memorable just because quirky remains a separate, and unexamined issue - who can forget Tom Jones?) in a longer work do not, I believe, necessarily guide me as to who that person is in relation to everyone else, not least when (again in Bleak House) Dickens deliberately rattles on about the presumed oil-wells of the Reverend Chadband's countenance, or the perpetual need for a cushion to be readjusted, in such a way as to sabotage the progress of his own novel and distract our concentration.
Although, in
At any rate, in a fanciful desire to laud Dickens for this above all else, the contributor to the programme dismissed, as their
If Dickens excels, without the endeavours of other writers at least a century before Dickens even being considered, such as Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), but only Shakespeare (who was only credited with Aguecheek and Belch, because he allegedly took all of his names from his sources), then so be it, but why give Dickens a crown that he doesn't exclusively deserve, and which does not even typify the best things about him?
(In fact, anyone who has heard of William's contemporary Ben Jonson, or who ever took a look at The Alchemist, would find it hard to understand what the fuss about names in Dickens is...)
Since posting the above, and in looking vainly for somewhere on Radio 3's web-site to leave a comment, I've now found the following work, a slim volume published in 1917 by Elizabeth Hope Gordon:
The Naming of Characters in the Works of Charles Dickens
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