Restless
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXmMsOBrx9g&w=420&h=315]
Shelagh Delaney (film made about Shelagh Delaney’s Salford by Ken Russell in 1960). This is such a refreshing piece 52 years later.
Shelagh Delaney also sadly died recently.
Ken Russell has died. His death creates a reflection on his work and contribution and reminds me of how important Glenda Jackson was to me in my twenties. A divine inspiration! Not least because she turned on her heel from acting and went into politics.
I’ve been rewatching some of his early films and The Music Lovers (never realized Melvin Bragg wrote the screenplay for it) for as Virginia Woolf noted, as soon as someone is dead we long to know more of them.
And since deaths are cumulative, his reminded me today of another loss Derek Jarman. I used to go to the National Film Theatre at the Embankment to see Jarman’s super 8 works projected, pieces like The Last of England and many others. They were the lamp posts that kept me going in those angst-ridden, stumbling, wondering years.
Russell told an anecdote in a interview reshown today about getting a reply from Channel 4 that said the script he’d sent them (in recent years) wasn’t cinematic enough!
I am very curious about Ken Russell’s 1958 documentary called Lourdes, but cannot find it.
I woke up at 5.20am this morning and had a further thought about Irene Baird’s novel John (publication date unsure but it’s out of copyright so must be 1920’s/early 30’s). The Danae woman character is a feisty woman. There’s one scene I recall where she sits down in a boat, her hair is described as cut short in the wartime style (not an accurate quote but some such) and she hides the fact she’s several months pregnant from the postman John. (There are a few Johns in this book) She already has a son John, and I missed where that young son was exactly.
The main man aforementioned rural John (the postman) is quite a curious creation because compared to say Bertrand Sinclair’s men of the same period he’s not nearly as troubled, distressed, angry or misunderstood. He’s a gentle, satisfied bloke who carries on with his days. I’ve just gotten to the point where the new neighbour (cue battle scene music) moves in.
The prose and pastoral romance do very little for me, except the humour I find in the peculiarities, but on waking I had to consider her characters against what else was being written at that time. I am also deeply curious as to how she went from this novel John to her formidable later novel Waste Heritage. They are so distinct from each other, that in itself is worth noting, since it’s an achievement to produce very separate works.
Library by night has a strange rumbling to it, accompanied mostly by chairs scraping, the click of keyboards, bags opening and closing, and sneaky phone calls being whispered like the one I just received telling me we have won a football match.
I was just knitting and puzzling my way through a digitized version of Irene Baird’s novel John. (a pastoral romance, a kind of breathless Jane Austen in a BC lake/boat/postman setting). I am glad there was a digital version as I would not like to have put aside drafty time in rare books (where the only hard copy is) to discover this was what awaited me.
Something resonant in this paragraph:
“Those were the sort, John would reflect after an evening spent in their presence, who had never discovered how good life was for its own sake. Where you spent it was not half the urgent matter that most people supposed. ”
And downright peculiar in the final line of this one:
“The sort of man, John I can’t imagine un-faithful. There are some men like that — rare ones perhaps — to whom disloyalty, once they marry, never seems to occur. That’s how he is, John; that’s how he’ll always be and yet — ”
She broke off and began nervously to twist up the hairs on John’s cuff. …”
In case on a rainy Saturday you are wondering what the hell the following word means, you will now not have to rummage into a chemistry textbook on google to find out. Mrsokana providing more than the weather:
texturology (texture, Latin: feature of a structure of something considered as a whole, caused by an arrangement of its components; and logos. Greek: doctrine or knowledge
A Man of Our Times
This really is an incredible resource where you can read Rolf Knight’s books
I had an engrossing time today reading A Man of Our Times The life-history of a Japanese-Canadian fisherman (1976, 105 pp).
A brief life history of a Japanese-Canadian fisherman, logger, socialist union organizer and editor from his arrival in British Columbia in 1910 to the early 1970s. Includes an overview of Japanese-Canadian labour history and is unique in its account of the internal class struggles within that community as well as the struggle against racism.
1935 was an interesting year for sports in Vancouver between boxing, golf & swimming, however the snippet that really charmed was this one:
“In badminton, Eileen Underhill, who had been four times B.C. mixed doubles champions (1928-31) did it again this year. ”
Source: The History of Metropolitan Vancouver (Chuck Davis)
We take our badminton seriously in this family, especially the males, both Vancouver-born males who both play badminton very well. Once I was playing “mess about” with my son at the community centre and this fella wobbled up. He was from Kitimat and used to play badminton quite seriously. He was an older, retired man who had since seriously done in his knee. He took my raquet and went a few rounds. You could really see the player he’d once been, in Kitimat way back. He was in his element, despite only have one reliable leg to land on. Badminton has that unifying effect on people. Except me. I am hopeless at it and prefer knitting while others play. At least it is not played inside an icerink. For that I am grateful.
Here’s a picture of Eileen Underhill.
