Lucky Jim
From the not-so-merrie film
(by Kingsley Amis) (1954) Grand-daddy of English campus novels, a funny yet serious tale of angry young man Jim Dixon who rebels yet wants in; despises and embraces the bourgeois groves of academe and despite some hilariously bad behaviour, flourishes. Sex and alcohol are pursued with as much fervour as learning: it was ever thus, we suppose. But you haven’t lived till you follow the account of Jim’s keynote lecture on “Merrie England”
Continue Reading →“I shall freeze after the sun”
Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) Anthony Bertram, in a note that is a masterpiece of concision, stated: “Dürer is one of the very few artists of whom it may be said that their craftsmanship was nearly too much for their genius.”`~ His level of detail is almost insane, but he was also a radical innovator in terms of imagery. As an illustration of his growth, stemming from troubled personal identity and the stirrings of the Reformation, consider the beautiful, albeit traditional, Sorrows: …and compare it to the painting of Christ among the doctors, in a dazzling modern rendering from Luke 2:47, and…
Continue Reading →Dante’s 750th
(Elder Hall, Adelaide University, 30/9/15) The Dante Society of SA gave a most agreeable concert to mark the 750th birthday of the Great Florentine, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Professor Diana Glenn gave two readings from The Divine Comedy – first from Paradiso, Canto XXIII, where Beatrice and Dante gaze up at the infinite sunbeams of redeemed souls, and Dante swoons (as he was wont to do). Then Mekhla Kumar (above) performed Liszt’s Sposalizio, inspired by Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin. Konstantin Shamray (below) played Liszt’s Dante Sonata with its slightly cartoonish swerve between the hell and heaven, with its different (hellish and celestial) keys…
Continue Reading →Macbeth
"Out, damned spot!" (Polanski version)
(by William Shakespeare) (1606) (Dir. Justin Kurzel) (2015) (Advance screening, Adelaide 29/9/15) [Films noted in passing: (Dir. Roman Polanski) (1971), (Dir. Orson Welles) (1948)] The Scottish Play is the Bard’s tightest, tautest, most nightmarish work, It contains his best poetry – in fact, almost every line is superb and has no waste. It’s personae encapsulate all of Freud and his successors, but says it better. Macbeth lays bare for us the fatal links whereby valour and honour, under the strains of chance, imagination and “vaulting ambition”, lead to evil acts, and ultimately, overweening psychopathy – a manual showing us how one good, or bad, step downwards leads to the next, and…
Continue Reading →Canaletto
Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697 – 1768) had perfect name for a master painter of Venice scenes but he adopted the diminutive Canaletto, which had been used to distinguish him from his scene-painter father. His hundreds of beautifully precise and detailed pictures of the city-state of his birth, suffused with wonderful light, have attracted veiled criticism as proto-photographic (camera obscura) and lacking imagination. Actually, his art exceeded that of photographs. Try comparing any of his works re-produced here at random with some Venice photographs produced by the singular professionals at The Varnished Culture… “[T]he Venetian school…was still lively enough to provide the swan-song of…
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