Showing posts with label The Medusa Frequency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Medusa Frequency. Show all posts

Tuesday 4 October 2022

The Medusa Frequency, thirty-five years on : Some musings for Autumn 2022

The Medusa Frequency, thirty-five years on : Some musings for Autumn 2022

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 October

The Medusa Frequency, thirty-five years on : Some musings for Autumn 2022





More to come...






































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 13 May 2022

Bluebell season : When the colours start to fade

Bluebell season : When the colours start to fade

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 May

Bluebell season : When the colours start to fade




There are still sporadic bluebells to be seen


Occasionally, they are yet in full flower - and, in some places, can even be seen en masse


They are, however, last flowerings – the dying embers of their lively showing


For another season, the time to be with them in bright profusion has passed


In woodlands, the mantle or torch of colour has, nonetheless, been handed on


These flowers, now in blooms, have their own eerie luminescence


More individual, they seem less dependent on available shade and the direction of light



Nothing is for ever ~ Gösta Kraken


The song 'Candlemas Eve' - on one of Kate Rusby's Christmas albums, Sweet Bells - catches this feeling well





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 5 February 2021

More #Homophones (or near-misses) than in a PayPal Bull !

More #Homophones (or near-misses) than in a PayPal Bull ! (An accreting collection)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 February

More #Homophones (or near-misses) than in a PayPal Bull ! (An accreting collection)





































































































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 20 January 2021

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 January

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*


Well, as Emmae Gibson points out, Russ was born in 1925, so - on 4 February, the day of SA4QE**, when people remember him (now and in his mortal years) - it will be Hoban at 96.

I suggest that we respond withGnome at her***, since time is an illusion, and - as Russ himself, at least twice, said in print**** - Nothing is forever. [Nothing, except love, as the waves and particles of Russ' novel Pilgermann, as Emmae has reminded me, suggest... ?]







































End-notes :

* This Tweet refers to where material from the original hoban2005.co.uk can now be found :


** The Slickman A4 Quotation Event, named after its initiator, Diana Slickman, and during which [on (or for ?) 4 February] a distribution of quotations from the works of Russ is made.


Depending on the assiduity of the participants, the 4ations (as they are called) are usually shared via http://www.russellhoban.org/sa4qe, on or after that date.


*** Those who have read Hoban's second novel Kleinzet (1974) may have indulged a fascination for atrocious puns, or what - on Twitter - this writer collects as #Homophones.

**** The same (exactly ?) long paragraph appears in the consecutively published novels The Medusa Frequency (1987) and Fremder (1996).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 26 January 2013

The Vermeer girl

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


27 January (updated 10 February)

When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here



The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.

Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.

Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.

However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings



So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)



Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.

We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.

On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…



Post-script

Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :

1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco

2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund

3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)

4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...



End-notes

* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.


Wednesday 17 October 2012

Blighter's Rock

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


17 October

Russell Hoban wrote a short piece, included in the collection of various bits and pieces The Moment under The Moment, of that name, and elsewhere, in his novels, gave characters that Spooneristic phrase to describe their predicament.

I have always inferred, since first reading the words, that they were, if not dear to Russ' heart, then at least acknowledged as part of his own experience: I find that he is a writer who does not keep you at arm's length, in that way, from what he has known or seen, and I see The Medusa Frequency, in 1987, as having come out of a very particular encounter with Medusa's powers, for ill and good. The previous novel, Pilgermann, had come out in 1983.

The fact that there was another such long gap and then, instead of a novel to follow Medusa, Moment came out in 1992, suggested that something had happened, and that the volume attempted, by bringing various things into one place, to maintain an interest / following. The next novel, Fremder, was not published until 1996*.

Although, for my money, both Medusa and Fremder are flawed by their ending, they are, nonetheless, masterpieces, linked by containing the same piece of text about occulting views and the rate at which the retina refreshes, making films possible, because of the persistence of image. Fremder, especially, though both books are short, is costly on dedication to read. It seems to me that the road to these novels had been a hard one, and likely that there had been prolonged stays on Blighter's Rock, before and after Moment.

What is characteristic of Russ is that he creates something out of the impossibility of creation, converting the self-pitying writer's block (being 'blocked' doesn't sound good) to something that happens to blighters. In other words, not taking himself or it too seriously.


End-notes :

* Data courtesy of http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/, known as The Head of Orpheus.


Monday 24 September 2012

Fly Australian Airlines to nowhere

This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

If you want to see Kylie play a cameo as an airline hostess*, you’re clutching at straws, and would be better off queuing for one of her stage-shows than watching Holy Motors** (2012): if you watched the film first, you’d have no desire to hear her version of any other song. The other song was just mawkish dross about time, regret and the past – or was that Kylie’s song instead / as well, and trauma has bereft me of remembering ?

I have Tweeted that Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Subway (1985) meet in a mortal embrace, and it is a fight that kills off the best of both, leaving a facile scene in a warehouse-sized garage at the end that was apt to make the ritual close of t.v.’s The Waltons seem profound. It did not even visually convince that so many similar vehicles had been assembled, not least since they insisted on drawing attention to their artificiality by flashing their brake-lights.

Could anything worthwhile have preceded such a banal ending, little better than imputing significance to the fact that the vital club in Enter the Void (2009) is called – wait for it! – The Void? A few moments did, but only a very few in the whole 115 minutes, comprising : an erotic dance; a building that I could swear owes something to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (but I could not spot it in the credits); the bizarre pastiche of a beauty, a beast and a photographer; the first of several humorous grave-stones; and a terrific interlude (called such), in which a gathering group of musicians, centred on an accordion ensemble, processed around a large church.

After then, and despite some intrigue concerning a crime and its ritualized repetition, it was a decline, not just musically, as a continuation of the episodic. Simply put, there was simply almost no interest in how (or even why) it all hung together, and it became, if possible, less and less significant. It was as if a premise of The Matrix (1999) that, when plugged in, Neo, Trinity and the others, can enter the machine-world had been stretched out to become some sort of secret, kept to the end.

I would happily have walked out of Holy Motors, at around the point that I describe, but, as my friend did not evince the desire to leave, I stayed so that we would have both seen all of it to discuss afterwards. He thought it a sort of purgatory for M. Oscar, I thought it a purgatory for me in this parade of the pointless, and that any notion that it meant more than the following quotation*** was vain speculation (though I was, also, reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd):

As the gom yawncher man passed me I recognized him as the man in the broken-rimmed hat who'd spoken to me in the underground when I was on my way home from Istvan Fallok's studio with electrodes all over my head.

'Hello,' I said.

'Nimser vo,' he said.

'You weren't talking like that the other day. How come?'

'I must've been somebody else then.'

'How's that?'

'Economy. You have a little chat with a stranger now and then, right? So do I, so does everyone. How many lines has the stranger got? Two or three maybe. There's really no need for a new actor each time, is there?'

'So you play them all.'

'The same as you.'

'What do you mean?'

'Yesterday you were the conductor on the 11 bus and you also did quite a nice little tobacconist in the Charing Cross Road. Actually London hasn't got that big a cast, there's only about fifty of us, all working flat out.'

'Are you writing a novel?'

'Novel-writing is for weaklings,' he said, and moved on.




After which, not only go to [to come], for an unfavourable comparison with The Night Elvis Died (2010), but here for a further conceit



End-notes

* I have never heard the male equivalent called ‘a host’.

** Surely a take-off of the Batman dialogue.

*** From The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, Pan Books (Picador), London, 1988, p. 56.

Wednesday 29 February 2012

What satisfaction does a good - or better - novel give?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


11 March

Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.

That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.

So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.


Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?

Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?

Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.

And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).


End-notes

* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!