The Red Cross shop at 6 London Road was the only one I could call readily to mind.  It turned out to have say 11 shelves of books, say 450 volumes in all.  I noticed about 6 titles that I would have bought if I hadn’t already read them.  I came nearest to buying The Child that Books Built by Frances Spufford, but at £1-50 it was rather expensive for the condition (heavily tanned pages).

Then completely by chance I came across the Aldlife shop at 81-83 Dartmouth Road.  I didn’t know there was a charity shop there and I didn’t know there was such a thing as adrenoleukodystrophy either.  Anyway, the shop had about 800 books, excluding the separate children’s section.  It also had a nice polished wooden floor to sit on while looking at the books.  There was one copy of Atonement (as against two in the Red Cross and a couple of interesting-looking books in German (surely you should have German books in Forest Hill).  The nearest I came to buying anything was The Richness of Life, a selected Stephen Jay Gould in one volume for £1–but it had too much bulk and too little content that was new to me.

Finally I visited the Sue Ryder shop at 30/32 London Road.  I knew the shop was there, but I’ve never been sure of the difference between Sue Ryder and Ann Summers.  This one had 10 shelves of books, say 400 volumes in all, and the shelves were equipped with speakers relaying music loud enough to stop me concentrating.  There were quite a few books in the might have bought category–it looked like someone from Try Books! must have been taking their discards there.  The nearest I came to came to buying anything was Self Help by Edward Docx at £ 3-95 for a bulky hardback (I think paperbacks were £ 1-45).  No Ian McEwan this time, but plenty of Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda.  Like the Red Cross, this shop had a sign up saying they wanted more stock.

Cincinnatus (LH convict) and some clowns annoying him--picture from Theatre Collection Facebook page

After an impossible day at work something unpleasant and incomprehensible seemed just the job.  But this must be the least dramatic text ever to be staged in the legitimate theatre, though you do get this kind of thing when a composer decides to do without a librettist and set his own worthy maunderings to music in the belief they will become an opera.

As I understand it, our hero Cincinnatus has been condemned for the crime of being real in a land where everyone has to be the same.  Some Zamyatin-style anti-Soviet satire there.  Representatives of superficial vulgarity afflict him and try to drag him into their world–but he resists, shuts them out and at the end there’s a modest coup de theatre unfortunately heralded by the director having to tell the cast to turn the stage lights off.

As a piece of theatre, there are far too many entrances and exits and short scenes that fail to make their point.  Of course it’s not in any way a naturalistic depiction of life in the condemned cell, but the way the audience rigidly returned to their chosen locations after the interval as though that would ward off misfortune would have been more like it.

Actually, I wouldn’t mind going some other time and seeing what this company makes of a play.

The Bastard (Rikki Lawton) gazes at the deceased King John (Nicholas Osmond), who has recently failed to find cold comfort--picture from www.kingjohnplay.com

It is shortly after 1200 and we are at war with France. The good news is that we are fighting on their territory and the bad news is that it’s not going very well.  The question is who should be King of England.  King John (supported by his mother, Queen Elinor) is King, but maybe it should be his young nephew Arthur (supported by his mother Lady Constance and various foreigners).

I think the story is about the moral disintegration of King John, who as played here starts off perfectly reasonably and then plots to murder Arthur once he has captured him, which is paralleled by the dissolution of the realm as nobles fall away and the French invade and all of this has to be put right by the Bastard (illegitimate son of Richard I) who both energises the English campaign and relinquishes all thought of power for himself to ensure the succession of King John’s son–so he’s the opposite of King John and has been called into being to repair his misdeeds and restore the realm.

King John does literally call him into being at the beginning of the play when, adjudicating a dispute with his suppositious brother, he bids him arise Sir Richard, and Plantagenet.

We also learn something of the proper behaviour for women:  sweetly retiring and obedient as in Blanche of Spain is good–her marriage to the Dauphin Lewis almost brings peace, while Queen Elinor and Lady Constance almost manage to wreck everything with their scheming and Cardinal Pandulph the Pope’s legate does.  Women should know their place and the Pope should piss off and leave us alone.

The play was presented straightforwardly–there was little choice of course, since in this case the audience didn’t know the story.  Samantha Lawson as Lady Constance first of all attracted attention by being young, black and extremely beautiful and then delivered an outstanding, intense, abandoned performance on a different scale from everyone else.  Otherwise the actors had to be sure to put the story across and didn’t have the richest of Shakespearean material to work with–I thought they put in a very good team effort.

Well done to the Union Theatre for putting on something different and worthwhile, and for making a good job of it!

Another Try Books! book and the general reaction was that people were disappointed and had hoped it was going to be more interesting.  The same reaction of general but reasonably mild disappointment is all I can remember from reading it when it first came out in about 2004.

The book is in principle about how the author set up a reading group with some of her favourite (female) students after being forced to leave her university position after the Islamic Revolution.  In fact a lot of it is about her life and experiences at various stages:  as  a student in the US; during the Islamic Revolution; during the Iran-Iraq War; and so on.

The Try Books! members complained there was too much about books and not enough story.  Personally, I thought that the points she had to make on literature were generally both interesting and sound; but I did wonder about the idea of lack of empathy being the great sin condemned in literature from which (by extension) novel readers were at least partially free.  The problem with this is that (for instance) by all accounts Stalin had a genuine love of Russian literature and was also a fine Georgian poet in his youth.  So I don’t believe it.  Nafisi rather approximately refers to Nabokov’s concept of aesthetic bliss, which in his thinking is a free-standing spiritual experience, and I think this is closer to what you can hope to get out of literature.

Along the same lines, on page 48 of my edition (as illustrated above) we find:  I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives. However, the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book starts off: Aspects of characters and events in this story have been changed…to protect individuals…from the eye of the censor…also from those who read such narratives to discover who’s who and who did what to whom, thriving on and filling their own emptiness through others’ secrets.

That’s interesting in a number of ways:  most obviously, we are left wondering whether curiosity is a good thing after all.  But more importantly the language is dreadfully inexact:  it should really be I have changed aspects…since it didn’t happen as some spontaneous process.  It’s not really the censor who goes through stuff that has been published looking for indication of people to punish.  In English, I think it should be filling emptiness with whatever.

There are many examples of not-quite-English:  In my memory the iron gate acquires an elastic quality [p29]–no, from what follows it remains entirely rigid, whatever else it might do.  Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards [p211];  a screed is normally written, though it can also be spoken.  The female guards at the door, finding a blush in her bag…[p9] has a positively Lewis Carroll charm; presumably she means ‘blusher’ in place of ‘a blush’.  The air was mild, the trees a verdant green [p 339]–but ‘verdant’ means ‘green’; or perhaps ‘fresh green’.

None of this is so awful from someone whose first language is not English, but in her acknowledgments at the end Nafisi does in her own phrase wax lyrical about Joy de Menil and her meticulous editing.  One of these ladies has some explaining to do.

But my main problem with the book is that you have three levels:  the external events, the students and the books and they remain separate.  If you’re going to do do this kind of thing properly, you need to show the external events reflected in the characters and their relations with each other and how this affects their reactions to the books.  It doesn’t happen.  On the one hand, the attempt to obscure who these people actually were means that the reader never gets a clear idea of the different students in the book group while on the other I am too much of an academic:  I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narrative without pontificating [p266].

Let’s imagine you’re going to the opera and the person you’re going with says late in the day they can’t come.  It happens, to me at least.  What do you do?  It depends on the circumstances of course.  Let’s imagine that you bought the tickets.  Then you can generally get a replacement even if Mr or Ms X has got the original.  But you can’t return a replacement ticket for resale.

So the obvious thing is to email or text round your mates to see if anyone else wants to come instead.  If that doesn’t work, you can see if you can get a stranger to come with you and/or buy the ticket.  I suppose if you’re in need of (effectively) an immediate date you can try Craigslist .  Then you can try selling the thing for either a nominal or a real amount on Gumtree.  I think the nice people at ballet.co.uk will allow you to dispose of opera tickets there as well. (But their site is down at the moment.)  Then there are sites such as seatwave and viagogo , which would probably take too much time.

Then you can try Twitter, or your own website/blog if you have one.  After I was left with a spare ticket for Die Meistersinger over the weekend, I got as far as offering it on here for 4 minutes before a friend from the beginning of the second paragraph decided he could bear to pass up a film about General de Gaulle in favour of free Wagner and keeping me company.

I’m sure I’m missing something here–have a large number of friends with similar interests to yours, perhaps.

That looks like an American woman's gesture...

The first thing to say is that if you see this at Peckhamplex Screen 2 then it’s better to sit at the back:  there’s a defect or pimple in the middle of the screen that can be distracting if you can see it.

As everyone knows, the film follows the daily routine of an elderly, widowed Thatcher succumbing to dementia.  At the beginning she escapes from her minders to buy a pint of milk and at the end…well best not to say…

Meryl Streep certainly gets both the accent and the voice.  She also does a brilliant performance of your mother (well certainly my mother) when she’s losing it and the old charm will still work on you but it’s just embarrassing when she speaks to outsiders.

The politics is just put in as flashes of backstory–one woman doing it her way against all opposition.  The film doesn’t really tell you much about how or indeed why she did it.  And it’s not exactly true either–according to the Wikipedia article, it was marrying a rich (older, divorced) man and having her children young that enabled her to devote herself to a political career.

Denis looks just as young as Margaret here

I think there was some general melioration as well:  Alderman Roberts for instance was a much better speaker than small-town politicians are in my experience.

If you compare this with Aleksandr Sokurov’s  Taurus, which deals with a stroke-afflicted and dementing Lenin, it’s clear that the dementia is also somewhat prettified.  And if you want to convey the effects of dementia, it would be better to use some dimness and distortion, not just leave everything Hollywood-shiny.  The film suggests that Thatcher’s overconfidence on the Poll Tax was connected with the onset of dementia, when simple dizziness due to success is a much more straightforward explanation.

It’s also interesting that the trailer and the stills you can find on the Internet show scenes from political life when most of the film is the dementing old lady.

I think this is a film representing  Carol Thatcher’s viewpoint:  at the very least, since she’s the only one of the family in any position to sue she must have consented.  The justification for the film is probably that it will give an opportunity for discussing issues around dementia, just as Dreams of a Life was meant to foreground the modern absence of community.  These films share the problem that they try to conflate the older dead or demented heroine with the younger bright and sparky one and leave out what happened.

I really don’t know any more about Margaret Thatcher’s life and personality than is in in the Wikipedia article, but it seems more than likely that she was a driven, demanding, obsessive and perfectionist individual willing to sacrifice a very great deal for her career, and as such very like many people in Hollywood–possibly including the one Meryl Streep sees in the mirror several times each day–and not very like the one portrayed here.

In spite of all of this, I found myself buying into the film because of Streep’s brilliant portrayal of my late mother (if not Margaret Thatcher) in her declining years, and because it was about my time which will never come again.

This film is about Joyce Vincent, a woman who died alone in her flat around Christmas 2003 and remained undiscovered until 2006.  Since she was apparently a popular clever pretty young woman it was difficult for it not to be unbearably affecting.  But the film managed to deaden its impact by a confusion of approaches.  We had interviews with people who had known Joyce (friends, flatmates, colleagues–not her family).  We had reconstructions of scenes from her life and of the grisly process of clearing up her flat.  We had something of ‘Desperately seeking Joyce’ in the form of a whiteboard attempting to piece together her life and a taxi driving around with an advert appealing for information on its side.

I think that what you need is hard facts containing raw emotion, but there was neither here.  It would have been possible to at least establish what she did for a living and when–instead we were left in confusion as to whether she had a responsible position in the Treasury Department or was she just a secretary?  I suppose establishing the facts might have been a little difficult in the face of determined obstruction from her family.  But surely not impossible.

Then the film ended with a reconstruction of her last hours, but since they hadn’t decided what they thought had happened to her it wasn’t very convincing.  T S Eliot did it a lot better:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

In fact, Joyce Vincent seems to have been an absolutely typical heroine out of Jean Rhys, which once more gives me the feeling that this has been done before as well as better.

The question of time continues to worry me.  We learn that Joyce Vincent was 38 when she dies in 2003, so she was born in 1965.  The former boyfriend who relates holding a 21st party for her and then regrets not having saved her when she stayed with him later on is surely being too guilty–assuming she was in her mid-20s when they broke up that was ten years in the past.  More importantly perhaps, the colleagues and acquaintances interviewed are more or less Joyce Vincent’s contemporaries so they look pretty bad when contrasted with a beautiful 27-year-old actress in Zawe Ashton.

It is just not the case that the very young woman we saw being  played by Ashton died alone in her flat.  First of all she got older and at an age when she might have learned better she had a relationship with a violent man so that she was in a Women’s Refuge and then in her final flat.  So I feel the film is just being dishonest–it insists on showing us a beautiful young woman to engage our sympathy.

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Another Try Books! book, and one chosen by Judy’s daughter Jessica, who turned out to be doing a Ph. D. on Victorian novels (though not this one).

To start with, I was very despondent.

At the beginning of the book, Braddon describes a large house in the country in such a way that I couldn’t visualise it at all.  There was one room going off on a tangent from another–how?–a tangent touches  a curve in one point.  I think she meant the walls weren’t at right-angles.  Then there were the dreamy melodies of Beethoven and Mendelssohn–with the single exception of the Moonlight Sonata that’s hard to fit to Beethoven–presumably she was thinking if anything of that and Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Then we had the plop of the trout in the fish-pond.  Trout live in running water.  Carp live in fish-ponds.

I had also gathered from the rather good introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition that this was going to be a book where the action flowed from the demands of an elaborate and artificial plot, not from the characters themselves.

But I thought it would be impolite not to make an effort for our visitor, so I adjusted my expectations and soldiered on.

Once I’d done that, the experience was enjoyable.

Wikipedia has a plot summary and some other interesting information about the book here and an article about ME  Braddon here.

This was a further rarity in the BFI Sokurov season.  Before the film began, a man adorned with a red scarf appeared to tell us that what we were going to see was on tape rather than film.  I can’t say I noticed.  But I did notice that the titles were in English, and there this was called ‘Part 2′.  So what happened to Part 1?  The hard copy handout certainly described the whole thing…a whole thing that I’ve never seen…

To start off with, I was most interested in the health condition of the two subjects:  they both spoke like they’d had strokes, his worse than hers, and Vishnevskaya had a puffy steroid face.  And there was this grand celebration dinner packed full of crowned and titled nonentities; unlike Hitler, Hirohito and Lenin, Sokurov didn’t think that these ones were worth shrouding in darkness.

Then there was the description of their early lives over faded photos, the immense unbounded emotion and the cramped particular circumstances; and a stocky old woman in an unfortunate embroidered jacket rehearsing a young singer in the role of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Lyubasha (from Tsarskaya nevesta) and something happened I believed–it was worthwhile.  I even managed not to get to annoyed by Vishnevskaya drivelling on about the Russian national character.

That was worth seeing, even if only half of it was there.

Update 22 December

BFI have now emailed as follows:

Dear Member,

We are pleased to announce that the screening of ‘Elegy of Life Rostropovich Vishnevskaya’ on Wednesday the 28th December at 20:40 will be the full-length version.

The box office would like to offer free tickets to those who booked for 17th December screening or alternatively you can recieve a  refund for the previous screening.

Please contact the BFI Southbank Box Office on 0207 928 3232 between 11.00 AM to 08.30 PM daily (sadly we will be closed on Decmber 24th, 25th and 26th).

Thank you for supporting The BFI Southbank

Kind Regards,

BFI Southbank Box Office