Labels: Technology, web design
They consisted each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously sentimental conjunction. They exhibited a certain sameness of motive, and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms, may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting.Although the News of the World no longer used this masthead by its end, the source still seems appropriate. Murdoch's press came to view celebrities and crime victims, politicians and soldiers, as little more than performing monkeys for the "preposterously sentimental" delight of the masses; stories were written with a semblance of realism, all the while being cynical and vulgar. The News of the Worlds claims to have hacked blagged in the "public interest," but its pretensions to imitative truth were ultimately baseless, tasteless, and, yes, revolting.
Labels: Miscellaneous, News of the World
The answer is that it does, though in a somewhat reduced form. Although academics potter around, conferences are held, laboratories whirr into life with intense Summer research projects, a sense of vacancy pervades a university and its town. Pubs and libraries alike become emptier, lonelier places. Libraries and department offices close at five o'clock, instead of at ungodly hours into the evening. Mrs. Morris's flowerpots suddenly seem less prone to vacate her front garden and move to number 32 up the road. Traffic cones appear more rooted to their roadworks, rather than being alternatively employed as loudhailers.Labels: students, University Life
provides a sardonic and persuasive metaphor that puts paranoia about homosexuality in its proper place.I introduced the extract, saying that to enquire (as McKellen had done) if I was homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water.Just as the man in the desert wants water, and its precise variety is irrelevant, so any individual wants (is even at times desperate for) love, sex and companionship. It is - or ought to be - irrelevant whether this need may be satisfied by attachments to those of the opposite sex, or of the same sex. This humanitarian observation is one that those religious conservatives who are petrified of homosexuality would do well to take note of. To be concerned about sexual preference is to miss the bigger picture of why sex and relationships matter in the first place, as necessary as water to the full and nurtured human life, and not something which anyone should be deprived of or chastised for.
Labels: Alan Bennett, homosexuality, Miscellaneous, religion
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,By contrast, in Twelfth Night, Belch's horrid manipulation of Malvalio, which leads to Malvolio's outcasting as an apparent lunatic, goes unpunished. Whilst the comedy of marriage and disguise is neatly concluded - Viola revealed as a woman so she can marry Orsino, Sebastian able to marry Olivia - the comedy of bawdy humour that takes place at Malvolio's expense does not get resolved.
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
Clown. Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude; one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one. 'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad.' But do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? an you smile not, he's gagged:' and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.What is this whirligig of time that will bring in his revenge, morally chastising those, such as Belch, who have usurped and satirised the social order? In Henry IV we find out; later history tells us that Falstaff could not participate in Henry V's heroic and honest court to come, and so the play must make this judgement too. But in Twelfth Night Malvolio simply exits the stage muttering "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you"; the play ends on a song. As Twelfth Night was the Elizabethan festival involving the antics of a Lord of Misrule, it may seem appropriate not to have Belch punished on stage, just as there is no option but to judge Falstaff in the history play. Nevertheless, one still feels that in Twelfth Night, which is a set in the hyperbolically fictional world of Illyria which allows for much metatheatrical irony, it is the audience who are encouraged to recognise and reflect upon the limits of the comic genre for offering judgement on the world.
By my life, this is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's.It may look innocuous on the page, but when delivered by a good comic actor (and Malvolio last night was played by John Challis of Only Fools and Horses), the lines' audacious bodily humour can still draw a gasp from a middle-class audience in the twenty first century.
Labels: English Literature, Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
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