Hellmouth Munching

This image (from here), and the many, many others like it from the middle ages, have just provoked a belated relaisation in my brain. I had thought that the reason the medievals were so fascinated by the torture-porn of being eaten by a giant monster was that being eaten by a giant monster would be really painful. But, whilst that's clearly true, I wonder if a more potent aspect to the symbolism is that the medieval chappie liked to identify with predator not prey; that he regarded being eaten, over and above the pain involved, as enormously humiliating ...

Carry on

The Carry On films take their name from the first of them, Carry On Sergeant. Of that title, Wikipedia tells us:

"Carry on Sergeant" is a normal expression for an army officer to use. The title was used to cash in on the popularity of the 1957 film Carry On Admiral, which was written by Val Guest ... Carry on Sergeant had not been conceived as the start of a movie series; only after the film's surprising success did the producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas set about planning a further project. After reusing the Carry On prefix and some cast members in their next project Carry On Nurse (1959) and having success with that film, the Carry On series of films evolved.

It works not only (the obvious reason) because it taps into something profound, if slightly self-flattering, about the British psyche (that we get on with things, even in adversity, and laughingly too) but because it is self-reflexive. It directs our attention to what is being carried on, let's say to the stage, the visual scene of the film: what is transported (we are transported; that's us up there). But the irony is that these are films that in one sense do not 'carry', do not travel: foreigners do not find them as hilarious as we do.

Jamming

I'm not sure why, after many years, I'm suddenly finding myself annoyed by petty little lapses in Jam lyrics. 'English Rose', from All Mod Cons:

No matter where I roam
I will come back to my english rose
For no bonds can ever tempt me from she.

From her, Paul. From her!

Or there's 'Pretty Green', in which the colour is money. But it's 1970s banknotes that are green, not coins; and in the 1970s in England it wasn't possible ('I've got a pocket full of/Pretty green/I'm going to put it in the/Fruit machine'I'm going to put it in the/Juke Box...') to put banknotes into either fruit machines or jukeboxes.

I'm more of a pedant than I used to be. Perhaps it is spoiling my enjoyment of stuff ...

Clockwork Orange

'Queer as a clockwork orange', of course, is supposedly behind Burgess's title. But could it be that Burgess, that famously Catholic writer, was thinking of another sense of orange, inflected via, will-less automatism (all that marching)? The novel is typically read as being about free will, from a Christian perspective; but maybe it's more sectarian than that ...

Déjà vu

This New Scientist article ('Déjà vu: Where fact meets fantasy' by Helen Phillips) is interesting. Apparently only 10% of people claim never to have experienced Déjà vu (I'm one of that ten, actually); whereas for some people, at the other end of the scale, it becomes a veritable psychopathology:

Mr P, an 80-year-old Polish émigré and former engineer, knew he had memory problems, but it was his wife who described it as a permanent sense of déjà vu. He refused to watch TV or read a newspaper, as he claimed to have seen everything before. When he went out walking he said the same birds sang in the same trees and the same cars drove past at the same time every day. His doctor said he should see a memory specialist, but Mr P refused. He was convinced that he had already been.

The article rehearses arguments from brain chemistry to explain this widespread feeling (perhaps it is indeed 'the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall'). But I read the article wondering: could something as banal and everyday as this be behind Nietzsche's unflinching adherence to the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence? (A philosophical slogan: 'Eternal Return, the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall...')

Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus

One of the nicer John William Waterhouse canvases, dating from 1891 [you can click for a larger view, if you want to]. I like the detail of material strewn on the floor, the not-too-obvious swine carcass, and the way Odysseus appears only in the mirror (a nice riff on the story, on the edge of implying that she is real and he a reflection) although the composition has the perhaps unfortunate effect of giving the impression Od. has crept up behind the nymph and is sniffing her left armpit. Still, whatever lights your candle.

Obama's America

America (let's say not named after Vespucci) is so called because a Welshman, my countryman, sponsored fishing voyages to Newfoundland in the fifteenth-century. The name of this gentleman was Richard Amerike, or Ameryk, pronounced 'America' (c. 1445–1503), whose surname was in turn an Anglicisation of ap Meuric or ap Meurig, "son of Meurig". Meurig is the Welsh equivalent of Maurice; and Maurice is 'derived from the Roman Mauricius. It is of Latin origin, and its meaning is "dark-skinned, Moorish.' By this logic, America means 'Land of dark-skinned sons'. Which I like a lot.