Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Something Happened
(by Joseph Heller) The best review of this amusing, desolate book was by Kurt Vonnegut in the NYTRB, reproduced in his collection, Palm Sunday, where he nails the essential bleakness of Heller’s worldview: “that many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.” ‘Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command.’
Continue Reading →Snooty Baronet
(by Wyndham Lewis) Lewis was an incendiary hater and this savage and hilarious trifle is worth a read for his acrid scenes involving his literary agent, ‘Humph’, including the delightful dispatching thereof.
Continue Reading →The Sistine Chapel
Image courtesy of Titimaster
Unless you have some Papal credentials, see the Vatican City with a proper guide. Not merely to jump queues but to navigate the treasures within. Giotto’s triptych; Caravaggio’s Entombment; the Laocoon; Raphael’s Transfiguration, Liberation of St Peter and School of Athens…some of the greatest mythical painting ever made and there it all is, before you, towering over the tourist hurly-burly, busy taking selfies. Blessed with a bit of height, the Varnished Culture could stake out some wall space and gaze over the sea of baseball caps. Down sparse casements and through subterranean galleries of truly hellish ‘modern’ art, up a…
Continue Reading →Silver Linings Playbook
(dir.D.O. Russell) (2012) Mad boy goes home to live with Mom and Dad (Jacquie Weaver and Robert De Niro, with little to do) finding love with a fellow screwball. You shouldn’t bet, but you can bet on this – the outcome is a fix from go to whoa. TVC saw this with mother. For a film about mental illness, it would have been nice to feature some authentic craziness but nooooo. Not a trace of subtlety or credibility – but Mum liked it!
Continue Reading →The Screwtape Letters
(by C.S. Lewis) Lewis was unsurpassed in winkling out a small dark corner of the soul and blowing it into toxic glasswork. Here we have one-way correspondence from a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood: a how-to manual for those who would catch our souls. Exquisite, even for those without the gift of faith. My favourite lesson concerns the lady who quails at that offered, wheedling for “all I want…”. Screwtape’s comment: “Because what she wants is…less…than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.” This…
Continue Reading →