Homeless
"Evicted" by Erik Henningsen (1892)
At a recent symposium on the homeless, a number of aspects arose in a policy and legal sense. Access to Justice and availability of work were naturally to the fore. The futility of fines and the false panacea of cheap grog and drugs loomed large. There was no talk of starvation and in fact, in these days of safety nets there would not appear to be any need for indigent people to go without food for five days (the ‘standard’ complaint in Down and Out in Paris and London). Intriguingly, public or affordable housing did not feature at all. Dare…
Continue Reading →The Lost Landscape
(by Joyce Carol Oates). Joyce Oates wrote this:- “‘My sweet little blue-eyed girl,’ he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with [Connie’s] brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him – so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.”* Surely one of the most chilling and sublime sentences in American fiction. So I pre-ordered the first volume of her memoirs (excluding “A Widow’s Story’) with alacrity and…
Continue Reading →The Peninsular War
Further undermining Wellington's faith in the Spanish - Battle of Castalla (by Jean-Charles Langlois)
(by Charles Esdale) We can be thankful that Napoleon, like that chap Hitler, ridiculously over-extended himself. Exhibit ‘A’ is the seven year war on the Iberian Peninsula, which ruined Spain (and Portugal) for decades and created a schism there that lingers today. It also, fortunately, hived off necessary men, arms and resources that weakened the French Emperor’s efforts to subjugate the continent. This comprehensive book, based on old as well as up-to-date and diverse sources, offers a complete overview of the bloody campaign, the struggles of the various Fields Marshal and in particular the intricate politics. It is dense but…
Continue Reading →Robert De Niro’s Waiting
"You talkin' to me?"
Yes, he’s waiting…for a decent script or at least a decent role. Unfortunately, however, he is not lazy, which means that De Niro has made almost 100 films (and we must admit to not having seen all of them). Great film stars manage to accumulate half a dozen classics in their careers and on this scale, Bob is right up there…but what a waste of talent most of the time, and particularly lately. Actors apparently have to eat and have a nervous imperative to keep working while the luck holds, but there is something a bit sad about the number of…
Continue Reading →Glengarry Glen Ross
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac Elderado...3rd prize is you're fired."
(Written by David Mamet) (Dir. James Foley) (1992) The sales staff get the leads, such as they are. They go out on sits, when (in various guises) they descend on the unsuspecting and try to sell them what sounds very much like swampland. The salesmen are driven less by greed and more by fear because as the motivational guy has just confirmed, failure to close the deal is death. This film of Mamet’s play is stagy (of course), but with top-shelf power acting (by Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin and Jonathon Pryce), it amounts to…
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