www.andynewberg.com

http://www.andrewnewberg.com/books.asp And here is a summary of a book connected to the previous blogs.

www.andynewberg.com

http://www.andrewnewberg.com/ here is one of the links from Guardian Unlimited thsat refers to the previous blog.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Tests of faith

Guardian Unlimited Life Tests of faith I thought this looked an interesting article. Thought I ought to consider it's ideas and come back to it with reasoned Christian response.

Sonnets and Short Poems of John Keats, audio readings by Walter Rufus Eagles

Sonnets and Short Poems of John Keats, audio readings by Walter Rufus Eagles Here is a reading of the sonnet. It is not an easy poem to read as much of the first eight lines is a list that does not give much time to pause. However this reading is fairly true to the sonnet.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Keats's last sonnet

Guardian Unlimited Books Review Keats's last sonnet

Crumbs I'd almost forgotten about this one. I read "The Last Sonnet" at The Troubadour on Monday 21 February. My first visit back for over a year. It was a very enjoyable evening celebrating Valentine's day with a poetry reading bonaza of love sonnets. Each reader just one sonnet.

I spend some time ploughing through an anthology of love poetry and eventually was drawn to this one. I didn't know who wrote it at first. Once I'd worked out the poet I thought I ought to do a little research on it and came across the above article. Interesting??

Well the booklet is out and safely at home. As always - for me at least - a couple of mistakes but suprisingly less then others in the past. However still frustrating. For example I missed out a whole poem. I don't know how it happened. It was there in the first mock ups of the booklet but totally absent from the finished booklet. How is that possible??

I can think of some fairly good reasons for not including it - for example it would mess up the overall V shape of the collection and I would need another 4 pages, however it really should have been included.

So here is the poor missing poem

In My Wheelchair, Kingston

A late October, Saturday
the first Christmas crowds
gather in the shopping centre.

Rain and early glitter season the streets.

I’m in my wheelchair,
chest height to the tangled crowd
that glance down at me,
disturbed for a moment.
Horror is in the brief flicker
of their eyes
before they turn away.
Except for the children
eye to eye, face on, honesty,
their open stares
full of terror and fascination
at all my scars on the outside.

I zip myself up
against the growing cold and rain.

Looking at the crowd
is like looking into a mirror.
I see in their faces
my own sad and shocked reflection.

It has been a quiet week. A little writing, some time with the family. Keeping warm. Walking in Richmond Park. Friends. Walking the Millenium Bridge, Tate Modern. Reading.

This half term week last year the same friends we saw this week came to stay. Last year we were in Richmond Park too. What a year!!

BBC - Thought for the Day, 17 February 2005

Here is a link to the TftD by Giles Fraser. You can read the whole thing here. Thought for the Day, 17 February 2005:

BBC - Religion & Ethics - Thought For The Day

I don't know how long this link will be live but if you get a chance have a listen. I want to believe this - make it part of my own theology but my Christian culture and experience is evangelical and bible based. I don't know how I can fit this in. BBC - Religion & Ethics - Thought For The Day

Walking

Good day. I walked across the millennium bridge outside Tate Modern. I walked across, turned around and walked straight back. I have been wanting to cross it since it opened five years ago. It was closed, I think for over a year, then I felt so lacking in confidence about my walking I never got round to it. If I was ever up on the South Bank I was usually cycling. Well the cycling has come to an end - perhaps for good - who has ever heard of a bi lateral leg amputee cycling - watch this space you never know - there is always a first time.

Any way it was great to walk. I have rediscovered walking, something I have not chosen to do, and something I have found increasingly difficult and painful to do for over twenty years and certainly over the last six years. Suddenly I am enjoying walking, choosing to walk rather than getting a lift. I've even been walking to church - must be a mile and a half, at least.

Any way what has this to do with writing. Loads!! Walking is a way of composing. Walking is active reflection, walking is a re-connection to the earth. Walking is re-connection to the world. Here is a line I posted to www.oneword.com Smudge was the word.

"We drove fast, the country dissolved to a smudge of shapes and colours beside us. "

This was my relationship to the world. A fleeting smudge of colour through the window of a car. What kind of poetry can that really produce? Mediocre at best. No. I hope and pray from now on that walking will become a rich and fundamental part of my life. A creative act - perhaps even feeding rhythm into the poems. Who knows. It may not be as easy as this.

Coming back we picked up the booklets from the printers. All two hundred. So now the tug of war begins with Katy over selling and giving them a way. I'll write no more about this subject again. They look great. The printers did a good job.

Enough!!

Fully Devoted

I found this on someone elses blog and liked it. I thought others might too.

"FUN WITH WORDS "

Once again, The Washington Post published its yearly contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for various words.

And the winners are...

1. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.

13. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.

14. Pokemon (n), A Jamaican proctologist.

15. Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.


Smile!"

It Will Pass Like All Good Dreams

Okay I admit it. I don't come from Harrow I come from 1975. I was 16 and it feels like everything I am now is wrapped up in that year. The year I left school. The year I went out to work. The year I stopped dreaming and got out of bed and felt the cold hard pavement beneath my feet. The year..... . Okay I admit it. I've just finished watching the last episode of The Rotters' Club, a three part drama set in Birmingham, 1975-77. Three boys at a grammar School, struggling with family, music, girls and politics, you know. Against a constant sound track of The Top of the Pops their little lives are played out. And somehow despite the differences between their privileged, middle class lives and my own lower middle class, I traced my own history in a London, suburban boys Secondary Modern School, built during the second world war. They pulled it down eventually, but long after I left. And my concerns were the same - on a different scale of course, but the music, the appalling hair cuts, flared trousers, brown, yellow spirals, the Bernie Inn and the diminishing echoes of a lost psychedelic dream that had become over ripe and rotten to the core. Did it ever exist? I remember sitting in a squat, bare floorboards, dope being passed round in a pipe and Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets playing somewhere too close. No I think. But that is besides the point. The point is I'm surrounded every working day of my life by 16 year olds and I see in them as well, something of myself. No that is not the point either, the real point is nostalgia, the programme was a sentimental journey. That's all and as I'm alone, and its 1.25 am and have no one to talk to but you, I'm afraid you get it. Never mind it will pass like all good dreams. And it is watching the grains of sand slipping through my hands, half empty now, wondering what have I become - my little life.

Life. I'm Still Not Ready For It Yet.

It is getting late. Things are beginning to change. The house is quiet. Katy and the children are all in bed and I'm up waiting for a programme on the TV. Yes I am beginning to watch TV again after my long fast. Just a little I think. Enough to connect me to "popular culture" but most of it.... I could write about that subject for a while but not tonight, not now.

I have eventually got the booklet to the printers. I could not email it as I thought, so I copied it to disc and took it round on Friday, then met the children and Katy at the school. The walk was about a mile and three quarters. I was pleased with how far I got. I have rediscovered walking. A great exercise a great place to think. But I was exhausted.

I will be going to The Troubadour on Monday 21. My first visit since December 03. Quite an occasion. I hope to read a love sonnet if I can find a suitable one. Katy is coming too and Hugh will be there. So it will be safe.

In the high street today. Bright sunlight, blinding, a bitter gust of wind, an ambulance with its siren blasting out, deafening, Katy trying to make an arrangement, Iona wanting something, my left leg suddenly in pain, I had to stop and lean against something. My glasses full of rainwater and steamed up. All at once. I felt I could not breath, felt I had no space to move, a moment of feeling trapped, a desperate need to escape. I just turned around and had to walk away til the moment passed.

But that is life. And I'm still not ready for it yet.

A Film Review The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep

a film by Howard Hawkes

When I first watched this film while I was in hospital I lost the plot after the first scene at the Sternwood House. But as I was reading the book with a friend I thought I ought to watch it again. On the second viewing again the plot held me for ten minutes but then I was lost. After twenty minutes I was completely captivated by Bogart and Bacall. I didn’t care what was going on; watching these two on screen was ballet, hearing them was like poetry.

One thing I have learned about this film is not to get hooked by the plot. It is not the most important aspect of this film. Enjoy the dark, brooding, intense and claustrophobic atmosphere.

Censorship must have played some part in the film as it deals with some pretty sensitive issues for its time – 1946. There is the pornographic racket Carmen is involved with, her nymphomania, drug taking and the homosexual relationship between Gieger – head of seedy porno ring - and an employee. Even the book – and I’ve read it all – draws a curtain over some of these areas and hints and makes assumptions at others.

Let me try and get the plot written down before I forget it. There are in fact two strands to this story. At the heart of it is Carman Sternwood a young wild, vulnerable daughter of General Sternwood – a chair bound, elderly millionaire.

The first part of the film involves Carmen who is used as a model for pornographic photographs and the General is being blackmailed. Marlowe is brought in to quietly deal with the blackmailer – he has been before – by a man called Brody.

The second part of the film involves a search for Sean Regan a man employed by the General but has disappeared. We discover that Carman killed him after he refused to go to bed with her. This has been covered up, however Eddie Mars – a gambler is connected to both daughters and is responsible for six of the murders in the film.

Howsat as a plot summary. And I’ve not even mentioned Vivien Sternwood Rutleidge – the oldest daughter of the General’s – played by Lauren Bacall. She is enough to confuse any plot. At first she thinks Marlow is hired to track down her husband who has recently disappeared as well – we later find out he has left Vivien to live with Eddie Mars’s wife who we know has also disappeared.

I think I’ll leave the plot. There is more then enough to go on – much more than the two websites have anyway.

Don’t watch this film for the plot. Watch it for Bogart and Bacall they dazzle with tension and electricity. Watch it for the fast talking Marlow full of wit and love and honesty. Watch it for the gorgeous women that glide through Marlow’s life – including the General’s daughters.
Watch it because in the most unlikely of situations there is love, vulnerability and loyalty and this triumphs over a seedy world or corruption, greed and exploitation and murder.

Shall I give or should she sell?

I returned to college last week. A little work to start, just five hours of class contact time but after half term things will pick up more. It was an enjoyable week. The students were great. We are reading Othello together. It's our first reading so it will be quick - we are just getting the main plot and some key features of character, theme, language and symbolism.

At last I have sent the booklet Slaying a Dragon to be printed. There will be 150 copies. I want to give them away, Katy wants to sell them. Although I've proof read it several times I've already found one mistake - a revision of one line of poem. Typical! They should be ready on Tuesday.

I'm impressed by the Make Poverty History campaign. Christian Aid are building up towards the G8 summit in London, this July. The campaign is working to make poverty history by making trade fairer for developing countries, cancelling their debt and giving more effective aid.

Here is Christian Aid's url. I feel quite pathetic that it is not a link. How do I do that?http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/

Take care

Nelson Mandela's plea to world leaders

Nelson Mandela's plea to world leaders

I thought you ought to know about the speech that Nelson Mandela gave in Trafalgar Square London on Friday 4 February