Past, Present, Future
In many ways nothing much to report, despite the portentous title. Exhausted as I often am on a Saturday, the day consisted of extra sleeping for myself and our two feline residents. Blitzen popped out several times to play chase with Ms Sox in the garden. Donner padded to the catflap (closed for him until next weekend, I'm afraid) and stared out while Ms Sox, silent and thoughtful, stared in at him. Then he retreated back to bed, rather doleful. I do think he's perked up a bit this evening though - at least he's had company from us all today.
I caught up with episode three of Paradox - one of those 9pm BBC1 dramas which are never quite as good as you think they're going to be (Life on Mars was the big exception here). This time of year I have a real hankering for late evening TV, just because the rest of the day's duties are so unrelentingly stressful I guess. Last year I was the same with Apparitions and the re-vamped Survivors. Paradox is reminding me of Survivors, with its loud music, clunky week-by-week stories, thirty-something characters with vague crushes on each other, and lots of race-against-time destruction threats. Very much in the BBC drama house style. The premise is interesting none the less. A weird scientific satellite project led by Christian King (surely some significance in that name?) receives, intermittently, photo sequences documenting some murder or other death & destruction from the near future. The select police team have to try to avert the future facts. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. We still don't know the why or how or in what way the series will end.
Can you in fact change the future - is it a fixed, photograph-able point in time? Is whatever it is that's going to happen come about anyway? Or are there multiple potential futures dependent upon actions taken here and now? And if you avert a disaster - or a single murder - are there consequences which magnify the thwarted murderous intention further into the (changed) future? That was this episode's head-bender: a suspect caught as he was about to murder someone. But of course no proof, so he's left free to murder elsewhere. This is something Doctor Who has taken stronger steps to address recently - suggesting that there are fixed points in time, which might well involve a disaster or death - must occur, or time lines are badly altered. That was the premise of 'The Waters of Mars' special, which was the darkest episode I've seen for years - possibly ever.
Such various (postmodern?) ficional alternatives would not have concerned the queen of romantic novels, Dame Barbara Cartland. An incongruous switch I know, but I have to mention her because in the autobiography class this week we looked at a manuscript extract from one of her autobiographies (she wrote four), 'How I would like to be remembered' - courtesy of the Women's Library collection and their wonderful education officer who I rely on for one of the sessions. Barbara Cartland, much pilloried, was absolutely mistress of her own narrative. It's true she made extensive use of the ellipsis ('and then he kissed her...') but not to offer alternative hidden stories so much as to leave the more explicit scenes of romantic passion to the reader's imagination (not for her the danger of being nominated for the yearly 'bad sex awards' for over-explicit novels).
Her manuscript had absolutely no hesitation or ambiguity about anything - from the 'honey and special vitamins' which kept her youthful into her nineties, to the recipe for a happy marriage ('do as I do, and your marriage will be as long and happy as mine' - involves yearly visits to the Madeleine church in Paris to light a candle to St Joseph), to absolute certainty that the soul continues after death (proven by the scent of carnations from her late husband, and clear reasons why he would do this). Everything fitted the storyline Cartland had set herself. How I envy this, on reflection. But such a strategy might just get on other people's nerves.
But what do you do when there is no sense of being in control of your own narrative, and certainly not of the possibility of changing the future, or averting pretty certain destruction? This is what I've been thinking about this evening - mainly because I'm reading up on second world war poets for class this Wednesday. There is a great sense of weariness and detachment to the poetry I've been looking at - Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Henry Reed, and Hamish Henderson. The romanticism of war had died entirely; the First World War Poets could not be bettered for poetry, pity, or technique. Instead poets like Keith Douglas turned to a bleak, almost bloodless, documentation of events and of their own reactions. 'Extropective', as he described it. It created poetry which was deadpan and chilling. The pity is there too though, especially in such tragically early death, which Douglas no doubt saw coming and could do nothing to avert.
I caught up with episode three of Paradox - one of those 9pm BBC1 dramas which are never quite as good as you think they're going to be (Life on Mars was the big exception here). This time of year I have a real hankering for late evening TV, just because the rest of the day's duties are so unrelentingly stressful I guess. Last year I was the same with Apparitions and the re-vamped Survivors. Paradox is reminding me of Survivors, with its loud music, clunky week-by-week stories, thirty-something characters with vague crushes on each other, and lots of race-against-time destruction threats. Very much in the BBC drama house style. The premise is interesting none the less. A weird scientific satellite project led by Christian King (surely some significance in that name?) receives, intermittently, photo sequences documenting some murder or other death & destruction from the near future. The select police team have to try to avert the future facts. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. We still don't know the why or how or in what way the series will end.
Can you in fact change the future - is it a fixed, photograph-able point in time? Is whatever it is that's going to happen come about anyway? Or are there multiple potential futures dependent upon actions taken here and now? And if you avert a disaster - or a single murder - are there consequences which magnify the thwarted murderous intention further into the (changed) future? That was this episode's head-bender: a suspect caught as he was about to murder someone. But of course no proof, so he's left free to murder elsewhere. This is something Doctor Who has taken stronger steps to address recently - suggesting that there are fixed points in time, which might well involve a disaster or death - must occur, or time lines are badly altered. That was the premise of 'The Waters of Mars' special, which was the darkest episode I've seen for years - possibly ever.
Such various (postmodern?) ficional alternatives would not have concerned the queen of romantic novels, Dame Barbara Cartland. An incongruous switch I know, but I have to mention her because in the autobiography class this week we looked at a manuscript extract from one of her autobiographies (she wrote four), 'How I would like to be remembered' - courtesy of the Women's Library collection and their wonderful education officer who I rely on for one of the sessions. Barbara Cartland, much pilloried, was absolutely mistress of her own narrative. It's true she made extensive use of the ellipsis ('and then he kissed her...') but not to offer alternative hidden stories so much as to leave the more explicit scenes of romantic passion to the reader's imagination (not for her the danger of being nominated for the yearly 'bad sex awards' for over-explicit novels).
Her manuscript had absolutely no hesitation or ambiguity about anything - from the 'honey and special vitamins' which kept her youthful into her nineties, to the recipe for a happy marriage ('do as I do, and your marriage will be as long and happy as mine' - involves yearly visits to the Madeleine church in Paris to light a candle to St Joseph), to absolute certainty that the soul continues after death (proven by the scent of carnations from her late husband, and clear reasons why he would do this). Everything fitted the storyline Cartland had set herself. How I envy this, on reflection. But such a strategy might just get on other people's nerves.
But what do you do when there is no sense of being in control of your own narrative, and certainly not of the possibility of changing the future, or averting pretty certain destruction? This is what I've been thinking about this evening - mainly because I'm reading up on second world war poets for class this Wednesday. There is a great sense of weariness and detachment to the poetry I've been looking at - Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Henry Reed, and Hamish Henderson. The romanticism of war had died entirely; the First World War Poets could not be bettered for poetry, pity, or technique. Instead poets like Keith Douglas turned to a bleak, almost bloodless, documentation of events and of their own reactions. 'Extropective', as he described it. It created poetry which was deadpan and chilling. The pity is there too though, especially in such tragically early death, which Douglas no doubt saw coming and could do nothing to avert.
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