A Film Review

Two reviews in one day. I must be trying to avoid something. Actually I am. I start college next Tuesday and there will be no time to read books, watch great films and write about them afterwards.

A review of an amazing film.

Dogville


a film by Lars Von Trier

What if God does not forgive us? What if, faced with the death of his one and only son, he decides to judge and condemn rather than forgive? These are some of the key theological issues raised by Dogville a film by Lars von Trier.

These issues are played out among the people of a small, remote and poor town of Dogville. Set during the thirties depression.

A woman appears after the sound of gunshots to the town. She is reluctantly taken in and given refuge by the inhabitants. She offers to pay for their silence and support by doing jobs for each of them. Gradually each person gives her work to do. These are good days. It is summer and she is highly valued and respected by the town. But when the police arrive looking for her the townsfolk feel she should work harder. This changes the relationship between Grace – the woman – played by Nicole Kidman – and the townsfolk. And gradually she becomes more and more exploited, humiliated and enslaved. The men exploit her sexually, the women become jealous and torment and torture her. And then one begins to realise to be discovered by the police would save her. It is her that needs protection and not as we have been led to believe the townsfolk. We see how each relationship descends into exploitation and corruption. The man who loves her makes the final betrayal. He is the man that persuaded the town to take her in and so they give her up to the gangsters that came looking for her at the start of the film. And it is at this point that the film pulls into a higher gear and changes direction in a surprising, disturbing and provocative way.

So here is biblical allegory played out on a minimal and stark set that intensifies the action. It is not an easy film to watch. However it is brilliantly acted and compelling to watch – almost three hours long – one is riveted to the end.

A Book Review

I've just finished reading this book. I bought it for Katy when it won the Booker Prize a few years ago but she did not want to read it. I started it when I was discharged from hospital in early Decemeber. I'd usually finish a book like this in a week but we've had so much to do I've discovered reading a couple of pages before the lights go out in my head.

I highly recommend it to you.

The True History of the Kelly Gang

Peter Carey

A wonderful book. Carey has taken Ned Kelly’s voice, full of passion and energy, and breathed life into a story that forms part of Australian mythology and legend. This voice is raw and semi literate. It ignores all punctuation – except for the full stop and is littered with abbreviations. And yet Kelly’s voice is at times, richly poetic, full of humour, starkly realistic and emotional.

The novel – a memoir, written in the first person chronicles the main – largely accurate events of Ned Kelly’s life aged thirteen to his death aged twenty-six.

The first part of the book concerns life in the Kelly home. We see the intense relationship between Ned and his mother and the young Ned struggling with his father and later after his imprisonment and death Ned’s conflicts with the lovers and suitors of his mother Ellen Kelly. Here is Ned full of energy and love for his family trying to be a man, trying to make a real honest life and home for his many brothers and sisters by farming Eleven Mile Creek.

However the emotional intensity and stress of life sharing leadership of the home with his mother’s lover’s forces him out of the home and he is apprenticed to one of his mother’s admirers, Harry Power. He is a highwayman, a bushranger and teaches Ned a different way to live. It is this relationship that sets the tone of Ned’s life.

In this second part of the book Ned is drawn further and further away from home and the ties with his mother seem to be loosening. He is a wanted man now and is on the run from the police. He meets and falls in love with a young Irish girl, Mary Hearn. And she becomes pregnant with the daughter he will never meet but to whom these chronicles are addressed. We see him killing one of his mother’s lover’s and eventually Harry Power is caught and imprisoned.

Throughout Ned has dealings with the police. And we see their brutal and corrupt behaviour. It is hard to be objective about the character of Ned. However the people he helps and his friends are extremely loyal to him. He is loved and admired by many ordinary people.
For the book is also about a way of life. That of the poor Irish – those victims of transportation and the British Empire.

The final section of the book concerns the small group of young men that surrounded Ned. He is their ‘captain’ . Mary Hearn leaves him and travels to America to safety and a new life. The police hunt him and his gang. They want him and the gang dead. It ends with the final shoot out at a hotel where dressed in home made armor he is shot in the legs and later hanged.

A strong, vivid account of Ned Kelly’s life. An Australian Robin Hood.

It is about time I updated my website don't you think. I'm in the process of re-writing some of the blurb and changing one of the pages. I also need to add some new poems as the poems have been up since the beginning of the site which may be 2001. Its been so long ago.

I'm not going to change things radically.

The booklet has still not seen the light of day. I've shown the layout to a couple of friends and they like the cover and the look of the pages. I may change the font. However one friend who has become a sort of editor over the years has been and still is rather unhappy with two of the poems. He says I should get rid of them completely. He said that they weakened the whole booklet. So now I'm wondering what to do with them. Shall I leave two pages blank? Shall I try and write something quickly to fill the space?

I do have ideas for poems but I have nothing written at all - no notes or any thing. So I do not feel very hopeful that I can get anything written in time. I have given myself a deadline for the end of January. And there is a lot to do before that. I'm back at college on the first of February and there is a lot of preparation for lessons. Also we are beginning to see people again after our Christmas hibernation.

The Troubadour season starts soon and I would like to go at some point soon.

I've been reading The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. The children know it off by heart. It is a beautiful poem. As a result I've been looking into the five simple machines. I've come to the conclusion that our whole civilization depends upon a red wheelbarrow.

Interesting Book

I've just come across an interesting book. Collapse by Jared Diamond. He is the author of Guns, Germs and Steel. This new book as GGS did is dominated by social geography and anthropology. This book explores the reasons why civalizations fail and are destroyed. Disturbingly the answer is the using up of primary energy resources. For many of these societies the main fuel was wood. And as you can guess this book takes an unflinching look at our own western/global civarlization. Read the review of someone who has already read the book at The Guardian Unlimited Books - I'd put the link in but it's too long and it messes up the blog.

Collapse seems to present a similar argument to another apocalyptic book called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Scarey but compelling reading too.

Starting college is very close now and I have to get into shape. Preparation is always the key, not necessarily to good teaching but to levels of confidence - which is helpful to me but vital to students especially if you meet them for the first time a third of the way through their course.

Here is a list of texts and writers I shall be working with over the next few months. I always find that my own writing is influenced by the writing of others.

Plays
The Tempest - Shakespeare
Othello - Shakespeare
Translations - Brian Friel

Poetry
from The Penguin Book of American Verse
Anne Bradstreet
Longfellow
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
H.D.
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
Robert Lowell
Allen Ginsberg
Sylvia Plath
Nikki Giovanni
Ai

This all seems rather optimistic looking at this list now, we shall see.

I went into college today to try and make peace with my fears. Try and get a feel of the place after so much of a gap. It felt as if I had not been away at all. When I start back it will swallow me whole. Take up so much time and energy. And a smiling student came running up to me so pleased to see me, could not wait till I was teaching again. It was good to see her.

Hi Happy New Year. I hope that 2005 is a happy, healthy and positive year for you all. We have had a quiet and relaxing time. There is a time for disease and a time for healing. And since the summer solstice we have been in a time of healing and transformation. I hope this time of growth and healing continues. We need a time of stability - and strengthening as we try and sell our house and move to one with wheelchair access.

Over this holiday time I've been finishing off the poems for a booklet called Slaying A Dragon. It's about the last eleven months when I had a relapse of a disease.

I've also been checking out "Blogging" to see what other people do. And that has been quite a disappointing revelation in most cases. However I have found a huge global network community out there, blogging every day, blogging three or four times a day. Blogging at work, blogging in bed, blogging at home, blogging at school, blogging. What about living? Is blogging a secular form of prayer I wonder?

So I thought I ought to drag my puny excuse for a blog into 2005 with a bit of a make over - a little nip and tuck. Hope you like it. Its in preperation for upgrading the website which needs some serious work on it.

Returning to work is very close now. 1 February. Very scarey. Lots of stuff to do for that as well as get mobile with a hands control car, moving - that means, selling, buying, adapting our new home, practice my walking, day to day children, Katy, the booklet. There is no time for anything least of all posting a blog.

Well here I am at the end of December and I have not finished writing. It has slowed down a little over the last few days but no booklet for Christmas. But writing is continuing and this has been good. There are now over twenty poems for this new section of the book. They explore different moments over the last nine months and the different emotional responses to those moments. What strikes me about the poems at the moment is how the poems can be divided into two sections. Firstly February to June and then June to the present day. The first section can be characterized by decline, isolation and illness. The second section characterized by incline, a sense of people and community and new health. Writing seemed to have its own mommentum, each poem introduced a new poem, each new poem seems to explore more deeply its subject.

Anyway the experience of writing has been positive. These poems are written quickly - then I move on to the next one.

I'll finish this blog with an example.

Amputation

One Monday, early June,
the surgeons finally cut me adrift,
freed me from
the iron like anchor of my legs
that bound me to the earth.

Amputation was the whisper that,
over the weeks,
gathered its own authority
and settled over everything.
Amputation was the obscene
healing they offered.

Afterwards part of me rose into the air
soaring over the heads
of family and doctors,
untouchable and unable to hear
their bad news
falling like grey ashes below me.

And part of me lay,
on the bed,
snapped off at the legs.
My hands and eyes
searching a strange, new,
disfigured wholeness.



© David Loffman

Hello. I meant to write something in November during my weekends home from the rehabilitation centre I am in to help mke walk again. However weekends were very precious times, and I wanted to spend as much as I could with my family.

So now I am home. I am walking again, rather slowly but I hope it will get easier and faster.

My other obsession over the months has been writing. It has been non stop.

In 1998 I collected together all the poems I had written about the experience of being ill with a serious illness. It was in two parts. The first included all the poems from when the disease started in 1976 until 1998. I wrote part two as a reflection on the illness that I had thought had burned itself out. I printed these out as a Christmas booklet, dedicated to my consultant who was about to retire. The booklet was called Touching The Dark.

However since August I have been writing very intensely about the violent flare up of the disease which began in january 2004. It forms a third part and I hope to be printing a these poems in a small collection for this Christmas.

However I am still in the middle of writing poems and time is running out.

You can read a few of these poems on www.loffman.co.uk

Take care

David

Hi. Well I'm writing. I have been since August almost continually. I'm trying to put the last six months into some kind of perspective. Finding words is a way of doing that although I don't expect sudden healing - writing can only go some way to healing. The poems need a lot of revision and editing.

I have been home for two weeks while my eye recovers from the op it had. As a result I've been able to spend quite a lot of time working on the poems. So I have been steadily revising the poems over the last two weeks. This is what I need to focus on now - quality of writing not quantity - although there are still some poems I need to write.

I've not been able to write about the amputations for example, or the time when I did not eat. I want to write about the incredible sense of liberation and energy I experienced after the amputations. Also I wanted to write about all the amazing visitors that came to see me in hospital. These will be hard to write but I have begun some brief notes. We'll see.

I want to get back to The Troubadour and the Merton writing group again.

If you are reading this and want to know more of what has been going on for the Loffman family over the last seven months visit www.loffman.co.uk

Hi well I have been writing again. This has been quite satisfying, however the poems are a little thin. The poems are about what has happened to us as a family over the past five months. For those that do not know I have had a serious disease that has become very active. As a result I have had both my legs amputated. The left above the knee, the right below the knee. I have also had some difficulties with my eyes. I am at a rehabilitation centre where I hope to be able to walk again. So much has been destroyed for us over this period and we are trying now to pick up the threads of our battered lives and make a new life for ourselves. I put together a brief selection of poems in a booklet as a thank you to all the staff at the hospital who were involved with my care. The hospital is called St Georges and my booklet is called Slaying a Dragon.

Here is a recent poem

Making Connections

I sit at my bed,
all Tooting is laid out
in 3.00 am
humid neon glare below.

With me, in the shadows
of the ward
the restless stirrings
of strangers sleeping,
wrapped up in their own darkness.

Last night,
- the first night for months -
I lay beside my wife,
retraced the shape of her body
and stared into her river blue eyes, again.

And in the morning the children came
running to our embrace.
His arms surrounded me,
her head leant into my shoulder
as I adjusted to their new height.

Lightening fractures the stifling night
and my pages lie exhausted
longing for the morning and home.


© David Loffman

Hi I seem to be online again but things have changed. Now I have no legs, I have a new computer and I've not written a serious poem for months. It has been an incredible year so far. Katy has been in hospital twice with minor but painful operations and I've been in hospital for five months. I hope to be at work again in January however it still may take some time before I can get to the limb fitting centre. Each delay will put Roehampton rehabitation back further.

I have spent some time writing and reading hiaku. I'll put these up on the webswite when I can work out how to do that again. I've forgotten so much. The Troubadour!

New Year. I feel like I'm in a poetry wasteland at the moment. Our health has not been good and family life demanding. I'm not reading much and the television flood gates have opened. I've lost my edge, and am retreating back into a numb, trivial emptiness. I need will and self discipline. I need a physical, mental and spiritual health. I don't mean that my ulcers are an excuse. I mean to be as fit as I can be. This must be my prayer. I am so weak willed.

Christmas was very relaxing and rejuvenating. Maybe I can work from this.

I did manage to get to The Troubadour in December for the poetry party and that was very encouraging. I intend to go back in January and Febuary. I hope I'll be able to read again in March - we'll see.

Well it seems to have been a very long time since I posted anything. I expect you have been visiting the site and expecting more posts, and sadly you turn away, disappointed. I don't blame you.

The truth is I've been busy. Poetry has had to take a back seat. I read at The Troubadour in July - and that was great and in August I received the last of four rejections from four poetry magazines.

Things have been very busy at home too. I'm teaching new courses and the family needs more and more of me. I think I've been using poetry as a hiding place - a wall to keep the world away - to some extent that means my wife and children.

That seems completely unacceptable to me when I look at it that way. So I'm putting writing poetry onto the back burner. I'll only write something if I can do it very quickly. That seems like a good exercise anyway. So don't expect much.

Poetry workshop in Leicester coming up.

Hi I just wanted to tell you about the 50 birthday celebrations at The Poetry Library. We went to the gala poetry evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Wednesday 14 May. it was an entertaining and magical evening. I didn't really want to come home.

The poets were Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Carol Ann Duffy, Roger Mc Gough and Patience Agbabi. I felt the UK poetry world was there and they all seemed connected in some strange web. We sat near to people we knew and the woman I sat next to knew Peter one of my colleagues. The whole evening was a real buzz. After I walked out onto the new Hungerford Bridge, I didn't want to go home.

I suppose I felt connected in some small way.

This is going to be a very very short blog.

I’ve just spent about 40 minutes writing an entry and then I lost it so I am really pissed off. I really wanted to start my blog like this.

Hi I’m back on line. We lost contact for a while- did you notice? Our computer went down with a very bad virus and I really though we had lost it all. But it is in the process of being resurrected as you can read I can at last make a blog entry.

Its late so this will be short and sweet.

The publicity is out for the reading at The Troubadour. There is also the poetry party later on the 14 July the theme is Paris. I’ve already started on something – but what shall I read?

I’ve been reading and writing a little. At the moment I'm reading Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, and just before Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. This is his portrait of his father though he could have been writing just about mine. I read Billy Collin’s new poetry collection – the line between stand up comic and poet blurs even further. At college we’ve been studying Frost, and for the first time for me Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. These poets have been refreshing and challenging, Dickinson's intense, dynamic and powerful writing is disturbing but brilliant.

I've been writing about my dad and still playing around with a poem called Sleepless. Since the computer crashed my writing has almost dried up. Clearly I am beginning to rely on the word processor too much. Sleepless has been fun. Recently I've been playing around with the shape and punctuation of the poem. It is an imagist poem but there is also aspects of stream of consciousness, experimental perhaps.

i am still watching DVD's from Blockbusters. I just can't keep on going there. Stephen reckoned Wimbledon Library has a great collection of videos. So perhaps New Malden Library will have a wider collection of films. We'll see. I think I can add two other films to my top ten. The Philadelphia Story and Terrence Malick's Badlands with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The Philadelphia Story is a film I video taped years ago and thought it was amazing. If I could not sleep I used to come down and watch it. I don't really know what attracts me about Badlands. Perhaps it is the narrator, or the escape from a father into a world of your own making - a secret world. Outsiders.

I hope I can maintain this blog and have some real writer's things of interest to put down. I hope someone else is reading this too. This feels a bit like doing an all night radio programme - you just don't know who is listening. Actually when Steve and I were doing late night shows on Campus Radio we always got a response, even if it was 4 am.

Take care and drop me a line if you can.

D

Hi I've got a date to read at The Troubadour. Fantastic. It will be on the 30 June at 8.0, The Troubadour, 265 Old Brompton Road, London. It costs 5.00 to get in. If you can come along that would be great. So I've got a bit of time to put together a reading programme. It will be similar to the Leicester and Canterbury readings but I want to put some new ones in. It should be fun. Don't forget it will only be fifteen minute read, I'll share the event with 5 other "New Voices".

I'm also reading two poems at The Troubadour on Monday 31 March. This will be on the theme of letters. I intend to read Ezra Pound's free translation of Li Po's The River Merchant's Wife - A Letter and my poem The River Merchant - A Reply. What cheek! But I just could not think of anything else.

Last week Katy drafted a letter for me and I sorted out 4 poetry magazines that just might be interested in publishing some of my poems. We've got to keep at it and get the letters out before the big read on the 30 June.

I've slowed down a bit in my writing. Instead I've been reading a few novels. The Reader, The Hours and right now Life of Pi. I don't mind the slow down although I hope the poems don't come to a full stop altogether. At the moment I'm writing a collection of imagist poems entitled Sleepless. It's about sleeplessness suprise suprise. I feel a little like Pi sharing his life boat with a tiger shipwrecked in the Pacific. He seems to be able to just keep going - his day filled with so many little victories. My writing feels a bit like this - very fragile, constantly worrying if it will all dry up and where is the next poem going to come from.

Finding time to write is still hard and now we have the TV space has become a problem. I'm still not watching it but just having it in the house is a pressure and a strain.

However I do watch DVD's. We rent some from Blockbusters and I want to buy my top 10 films. I don't know what they all are but I have bought Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Francis Ford Copola's, Apocalypse Now and Wim Wender's Wings of Desire. They are not perfect films but they all seem to address issues or themes that disturb, intrigue, haunt and facsinate me.

Last time I wrote I told you about all the poets I'm teaching with my students. Well it has not been as easy as I first thought. The AS year is very short and it is a race to get through the poems. The Penguin American Anthology Of Verse is a great anthology but just no time to dwell on the poems in too much detail.

Finally I seem to be developing a Blog routine. Just one a month one every 4 or 5 weeks. But you never know. Keep watching this space.

It seems to have been a while since I last wrote an entry. Which does seem rather pathetic. However there has been a lot of personal difficulties at home over the last few weeks and this has made writing rather difficult. These still seem to be going on but we are at at last trying to put them in in a reasonable perspective. So then...poetry.

I read Alice Oswald's TSEliot prize winning poem and loved it. I read it in two sittings. lots of different voices all submerging into one voice - the river - a great idea. A poem that seemed not really to have a beginning but just wandered and flowed eventually out into the sea. There was a real sense of her capturing individual characters, her own voice minor, self efacing letting others speak.

I won't be submitting anything to Magma this time. I wrote the poem - finished it off over half term. It is a good poem but does not address the theme of alienation or separation from home strongly enough.

Now I'm busy - desperate to be honest - to get a poem out for The Troubadour. The theme is letters. I have an idea but it is so outrageous I hardly dare use it. I just can't think of anything else at the moment.

Nothing on the 15 minute slot at The Troubadour yet. I'll let you know in good time, don't worry. I've completed 4 poems since the beginning of the year. I think that is a good record, so far. I enclose one of those poems here. Enjoy.

Seven Twenty-Five

Midwinter morning,
still dark, except my head lights
boring into the blackness
and an upstairs bedroom, flood lit
curtains drawn full back, no nets,
and a woman,
her bare arms
bent over her head
brushing long blond hair
staring into her mirror,
pale naked shoulders,
her flat belly
and small breasts,
caught in her bedroom light.

She stands oblivious
of my fleeting gaze
in the cold, frost coated, street below.


© David Loffman 14 January 2003

Hi there. Getting to the computer has been difficult these past couple of weeks. Katy's work has been very much tied up with the screen, even today my time the computer is very limited. But I am writing. Since the new year I have written two poems and am in the final draft stages of a third. This one I hope to send to Magma for publication in March. The theme is alienation or exile and I'm trying to write about my Jewish experience. I do have another idea for a poem on the same theme and might start on that after this one. They have to be submitted in February so there is much to do.
I am teaching a lot of poetry at the moment. Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath with the second years and later with one second year group Blake and Betjeman. With a first year group I'm teaching an anthology of American poetry. All of this will influence my writing in a direct way. Plath's imagery is so dynamic and powerful - I love her play with language and symbols, with Heaney I'm attracted to the emotional restraint - the carefully crafted image, and the rich, full sounds of his of his work. But we will see what eventually materialises, perhaps nothing.
Anne-Marie has offered me a slot in the next Epiphany at The Troubadour which could be in the summer. That will mean a 15 minute reading. I am very excited about that.
I want to make a response to the TS Eliot prize winner but have not had a chance to read it yet.

Hi this is blog take 2. Poetry is the main purpose of this Blog. Poetry exists in the cracks left over from family life and work. This does not amount to very much time at all. Poetry is one of the subjects of my dream life. One that I hope to make a reality. As presures on my time increases so the time for poetry is squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. As a result my expectations and hopes for my poetry grow and grow. Typical. So this is a journal of my dream life. One of my resolutions for 2003 is to become a published poet. And another one is to add to this Blog on a regular basis. Just watch this space!

Today we've spent some time updating the Conjuring Sunlight web site. I've added a new poem to the Landscapes page and I've begun a new page called workshops. I'm hoping soon to be able to add some photographs and a selecion of the poems produced from the first workshop in Leicester.

I am overwhelmed by my level of paralysis. So much needs to be done. Today though was a day of hibernation - we kept warm, fed ourselves, let the children watch TV, read. I have not been out once. Katy said it was freezing outside when she ventured out for ten minutes.