The Marriage Plot
By Michael L. Umbricht / Ladd Observatory, Brown University
(by Jeffrey Eugenides) Another novel written by a man with a sensationally marvellously drop-dead gorgeous female protagonist. Madeleine is a well-to-do beauty in her early twenties (a little bit like Katherine Hepburn, a lot like Candice Bergen) graduating from Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island. Madeleine’s soppy friend, Mitchell, is in love with her but Madeleine falls for David Foster Wallace look-alike Leonard Bankhead. They meet in a semiotics class, which gives Eugenides the opportunity to lecture the reader about literary theory, which he knows a lot about. Madeleine doesn’t seem to notice that the only love her beau has is for his mental illness, which he coddles…
Continue Reading →Visconti’s Ludwig
(Dir. Luchino Visconti) (1972) Ludwig II of Bavaria led a life of the mind and was a genuine original in a time of puppet kings and jumped-up Germanic principalities. Therefore a period film of his tumultuous life, his reluctant ascension, his shaky romances, his celebrated patronage of Wagner, the night train and sleigh rides to nowhere, his decline into madness, his mysterious death…all sumptuously filmed in situ by the consummate Luchino Visconti, director of masterpieces such as La Terra Trema, Senso, The Leopard, Death in Venice…couldn’t miss, right? Wrong. It looks terrific, and Helmut Berger suggests something of the King’s inner torment,…
Continue Reading →O Happy Day
(image by Kaoz69)
January 26 – Australia Day Invasion Day, Survival Day, Moor-Your-Boat Day – an arbitrary dot on time’s spectrum was chosen as lucky little Australia’s modern, Gregorian, anniversary date. That’s when HMS Supply moored in Sydney Cove one choppy morning in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip and a small crew rowed ashore, and claimed the continent in the name of Mad King George III. There are roughly three camps who pitch their tents on our National Day – those who hold 26/1/1788 sacred; those who hold it as profane, and the great silent majority who view it through the lens of beer and barbeques. The genuine and perhaps…
Continue Reading →Twenty Thousand Roads
"Just because we wear sequinned suits doesn't mean we think we're great..."
Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (by David N. Meyer) (2008) Never meet your idols. Gram Parsons didn’t give us a chance, checking out at the age of 26 in September 1973. An insouciant, genial, audacious, southern-fried poor little rich boy, his devotees can credibly claim he fomented or drove the cross-over of American country-rock, a genre that, like its sires, has produced some inspired and much insipid music. Written, or rather, over-written*, in the excessively familiar, repetitive and talky style of books on popular music, Meyer has done his homework and manages to create a rich world…
Continue Reading →Classical Greek at the WEA in 2017.
Image courtesy of The Australian.
Hard to believe that we ten will be entering our fourth year of Greek with Dr Boria at the Adelaide WEA. I still haven’t got a hold of those progressive active participles. We love our lessons. Our books – Athenaze 1 textbook and workbook (yes, we are only now completing book one) – are tattered to various degrees – mine is the worst of all. Perhaps we will start on Athenaze 2 this year? (The Athenaze books are available at Dymocks in the city, or online). More εταιροι και εταιραι* would be welcome ….so please join us! No-one is made to feel stupid for their…
Continue Reading →