Dark Water

Well well well, my guess was right. Old enemies of the Doctor once again. The idea of cyberspace was brilliant.

( Mini spoiler )

An excellent episode of this two part finale.

On Reflection

( Spoiler alert )

Birthday Greetings Malinaldarose

Happy birthday to malinaldarose. Hope you have a great day.

The Art Of Gothic

Finally got round to watching part two of the Art Of Gothic on BBC 4 over the weekend.

We come to the period when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and Thomas De Quincy wrote Confessions Of An English Opium Eater. Charles Dickens was mentioned , and in particular, his Bleak House, n which he depicts London as being that sordid Gothic underbelly of the respectable into the sewers of the debauched, mad and criminal.

Nothing is more Gothic than the Joseph Wright of Derby painting "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768 oil-painting)".



A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the formation of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright's day. The artist's subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting lit by moonlight and candles.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull,a momento mori of the passing of time, and the direction that life takes. I also think that the scientist looks more like a magi conjuring up tricks , casting a spell, and that sometimes science can lead us to dark places as much as horror does. That is why this painting is Gothic.

book 90 - Daisy Hay "Young Romantics"

Daisy Hay "Young Romantics : The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation" (Bloomsbury)





Incest! Suicide! Adultery! Child Abandonment! Ménage à trois! Revolution! Free love! Atheism! Vegetarianism! Counter-culture! So, an account of the 1960's? Try 1810's. As the subtitle proclaims, this is about "the Shelleys, Byron, and other tangled lives" - including Keats: "a story of exceptional men and women, who were made by their relationships with one another."

You might know that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was friends with the equally renowned poet Lord Byron and husband to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. You may even know the famous story of the novel's genesis in a challenge that each should write a ghost story. Mary was nineteen then. She was sixteen when she ran away with Shelley while he was still married to his first wife, who was pregnant at the time. Mary's stepsister Claire ran away with them, and would later give birth to Byron's illegitimate daughter. The coterie were advocates of "free love," which Claire in old age would condemn as a "perfect hell." This is also a tale that such free love can fester relationships and the wreckage it leaves in its wake, and this book gives plenty of fodder to confirm that assessment. Neither Shelley nor Byron come off well in this group biography, even if Shelley had the excuse of youthful idealism, and seemed more thoughtless than intentionally cruel.

They were all so young though. When this account opens, Mary was fifteen, Shelley twenty and Byron only twenty four. Shelley wouldn't reach thirty. Keats, who is my favorite of the poets that appears here died at an even more obscenely young age, twenty five. Not that Keats figures much here. I garnered more of his story from the introduction to my book of his poems than from this book. But the Shelleys are central, and with many of their letters and diaries surviving, Hay is able to paint a very intimate portrait that is psychologically nuanced and astute, and sheds light on the men's work. Keats may be a favorite, but I was underwhelmed by most of what I've read by Percy Shelley, and have read little of Lord Byron, which is perhaps to my shame. It's to the book's credit it left me wanting to give Shelley another chance, and Lord Byron a try. I might count myself lucky after reading this book not to be in their circle or that of anyone like them, but they certainly left a rich literary legacy. And this is more than a gossipy account of their scandalous "turbulent communal existence" andit grounds them in the intellectual and political ferment of their times.

Book 91 - Slavoj Zizek "In Defense Of Lost Causes"

Slavoj Zizek "In Defense Of Lost Causes" (Verso)







Well. This is definitely something. A book that has taken me around a year to read, on and off.

Zizek is one of the more baffling modern philosophers I've read. It's tough to follow his mental gymnastics. I find myself agreeing totally with him, and then blanching at what he says next. Some of his topics are utterly bizarre and yet engaging.

Either way, it is one of the chunkier works Zizek has produced, but well worth the effort of reading it. A intense political exploration that stands against most of the values we hold so dear today via Kafka, Spielberg, Mel Gibson, Agamben, Laclau and Mouffe, Badiou, Lenin, Hitler, and Heidegger. Always thought provoking, always interesting, always alarming.

Zizek is hardly coherent. But he is confounding and challenging, and damn if he isn't interesting, though. So , in summation, a thumbs up, but prepared for some close reading.