Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Withnail & I
(dir. B. Robinson) (1985) Perfect homage to the strange death of swinging London. Withnail, I and Uncle Monty et al emblematize La Bruyere’s epigram that self-indulgence and severity towards others is the same vice. Looking up from our slim volume of Nigel’s poems, its pages stained with buttery tears from crumpets, we see the sky is beginning to bruise…home lads! To Vim under the sink and one bar on. (Look for more killer (and accurate) quotes from the film here). [See “Vivian & I” by Colin Bacon (2010, Quartet Books) for Withnail’s prototype, Vivian Mackerrell. Vivian & I available at Amazon.com]…
Continue Reading →The Young Poisoner’s Handbook
(dir. Ben Ross) (1995) 1950s Britain never looked so dystopian and between his grotesque family and idiot prison psychiatrists, you find yourself wanting young Graham to keep getting away with it. Of course, with silly, smug, progressive psychiatrists like Dr Ziegler to let him loose and call him cured, he’s a shoe-in!
Continue Reading →The Faerie Queene of Estonia
This is a Spenserian homage under construction. I reserve the right to alter or burn it. I welcome suggestions towards efforts with respect to the former. PMJ.
Continue Reading →The Greatest Game of Football Ever Played
I was ten years old in 1973 and already tempered by watching Glenelg lose Grand Finals. At the time, only the middle aged recalled our one Premiership season, a glorious against the odds win over Port (in 1934). Since 1967, the Club under Neil Kerley had gained new respect but that tended to dissipate each Spring.
Continue Reading →Shadows & Influence
Joan Lindsay was born (1896) when Romanticism still cast its attractively unwholesome shadow and wrote her unique novel (1967) at the height of the Summer of Love.
In this chapter we attempt, briefly, to rope and steer the stubborn and amorphous beast that is influence, with respect to Picnic, both in the writing and its subsequent appreciation. Time and space were not frames of reference for Joan Lindsay. Unlike most of us, who use them to gauge, respectively, succession and mass and, together, motion, she regarded them as metaphysical states of mind.
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