The Vorrh (by B Catling)
Inside cover of the Coronet issue of "The Vorrh"
It is said that jetlag is the effect of the traveller’s soul lagging behind the body. A European city, “Essenwald” is transferred stone by stone and reassembled in Africa, at the edge of the Vorrh. One train track goes into “the abyss of the Vorrh”, “the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species, and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate. The banded foliage and vast trees that breathed its rich air offered much to humans but could also devour a thousand of their little lives in a microsecond…
Continue Reading →Collective Birthday Cake
22 January finds a number of salient birthdays: Lord Byron, 22 January 1788 The Great Romantic Poet, the great romantic, beloved of Goethe. “I may not overlap the eternal bar Built up between us, and will die alone, Beholding with the dark eye of a seer The evil days to gifted souls foreshown, Foretelling them to those who will not hear. As in the old time, till the hour be come When Truth shall strike their eyes through many a tear, And make them own the Prophet in his tomb.” (The Prophecy of Dante) Conrad Veidt, 22 January 1893 A…
Continue Reading →Faust
"Hey, little fella"
(By Johann Wolfgang Goethe) (Part I, 1808, Part II, 1832) While a student, Goethe conceived his epic poem. (The story itself is an old one, first dramatized at length by Marlowe in 1593.) He tinkered with it through the 1770s, put out a fragment in 1790, published the first part (honouring Schiller) and then put it down – for 17 years. He eventually finished Part II (commonly recognised as the most daring portion – it is remarkably “out there”, quite heretical in fact) and then sealed it for posterity. It has been estimated that you’d need a day (i.e. 24…
Continue Reading →Khe Sanh
Songs in Our Heart # 71 Khe Sanh (by Cold Chisel) (written by Don Walker; released May 1978) [On 21 January (1968) the North Vietnamese forces commenced an attack that became the four-month battle of Khe Sanh. And in 1978 Cold Chisel released this wonderful, rolling, almost-formless, sad adieu to that terrible campaign, where a disillusioned vet remembers the troubled times in that benighted country, synthesising the post-war mood (and foreshadowing the film The Deer Hunter). “I’ve been back to South East Asia but the answer sure ain’t there…the last plane outta Sydney’s almost gone.”]
Continue Reading →The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(Directed by Luis Buñuel) (1972) As a card-carrying petit bourgeois, wishing in vain to join the haute bourgeoisie, I write in fearful admiration of this film and of the sublime, formless way in which it communicates its comedy of terrors. For whom amongst our class does not relish that arcane and secret ceremony known as the luncheon or dinner party? What a delight – to dress, eat, drink, prattle before friends and show-off…so many comforting displays of mouths and hands…there is no more delightfully bourgeois ritual than that! Now to apply the black smudges to our painted drawing-room comedy: the six fashionable friends…
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