Long John Silver

"'I can't do without you,' he said.  Oh yes you can, I wanted to protest.  It will be inconvenient, but you can.  You changed your newspaper once and you can get used to it"--The End of the Affair

Felix: "Tsk, tsk, tsk!" Oscar: "You'll wear out the roof of your mouth doing that!"--The Odd Couple

"These boys are mature--they're seniors!"--One Day at a Time

Long John Silver: "There be fifty good years left in me!... Well, thirty."

There's always something interesting on YouTube.  The other day Paul on Language Focus posted a video about kanji--that's the words in Japanese writing that are taken directly from the Chinese script. And then I found old episodes of The Adventures of Long John Silver.

Long John Silver was a '50s syndicated TV series filmed in Australia (before Australians had TV!), with Robert Newton doing his classic Treasure Island anti-hero.  I'd seen a bit of it when I was young and recognized the opening credits with Newton waving his sword and going "Yaar!" Moira remembers being terrified by it.

Yesterday I went to Staples and bought a new attachment to play DVDs on my computer. (The old one went bust.)

Dawna, Debi and I saw some sitcoms this afternoon.  First we saw two episodes of The Odd Couple, then three of One Day at a Time, which Mother used to like.  Remarkably, both shows had a bit where a character denied feeling jealousy but his/her body language told a different story! (Some sitcom devices are especially basic.)

YOUTH

"That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy.  And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine, yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.  But could my vapour love that scar?  Than I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar"--The End of the Affair

"The pigs are in the street!  The party officials were promising to clean the sky, but they forgot to close the gate"--Youth

For Christmas dinner we didn't bother with anything fancy. Just omelette, cauliflower and apple pie.

Yesterday afternoon I saw the Chinese movie Youth with Moira, Puitak and Gordon.  It's about a Chinese revolutionary ballet troupe in the Cultural Revolution era, with two members who become heroes in the 1979 border war with Vietnam.  I got confused because all those Chinese girls look the same to me! (It didn't help that their clothes and hair were pretty identical.)

We've been watching Errol Morris' docudrama Wormwood on Netflix.  It's about a CIA man who got dosed with LSD in the '50s and jumped out a window to his death, and his son investigating the matter in the '70s.  Pretty unsettling.

I started a little firestorm on Twitter.  Some Tweeter mentioned the "dysfunctional" U.S. general election last year, and I commented, "So when to the Democrats admit their primary was 'dysfunctional'?" Clintonites are still insisting that the only dysfunctional thing about the primary was allowing Bernie to run in it! They look at the 2016 disaster and that's the only lesson they learn?  I still wish that you could remove from your notifications feed likes and retweets of replies to you!

I've been translating the John Metcalf story "Early Morning Rabbits." Its title in French, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese is "Les Lapins du Petit Matin," "Os Coelhos da Madrugada," "Qingchende Tuzi" and "Souchou no Usagi."

Feliz Natal

"I thought, I shall not be breaking my promise if accidentally on the Common I run into Maurice, and so I went out after breakfast and again after lunch and again in the early evening, walking about and never seeing him"--The End of the Affair

Frank (entering the hospital tent): "I'm here to relieve you." Hawkeye: "You do resemble an enema"--M*A*S*H

Earthling: "Ciao." Mork: "Pekinese!"

Saturday afternoon Dawna and I saw some Christmas-themed videos.  Magoo's Christmas Carol had predictably cheap animation but some nice songs, unlike the Albert Finney musical. (Which I haven't seen, but I heard that "Thank you very very very much!" was actually the best song in it!) There was also a Mork & Mindy episode with an appearance by Morgan Fairchild, and an episode of The Red Skelton Show where George Appleby got hypnotized at a Christmas party to think he was drunk when he got patted on the shoulder, and sober up when he heard the word "wife." I loved Red Skelton when I was young!

And we also saw a Christmas episode of M*A*S*H, built around Hawkeye writing a letter to his father.  If I were a M*A*S*H character, I think I'd be Henry the hapless commander.  In one scene Hawkeye grabbed Hot Lips and kissed her for about thirty seconds, and she was turned on! (That's the sort of thing male writers come up with.) I've always found Alan Alda a bit annoying.

We finished the second season of The Crown.  The episode where bloody-minded Prince Philip insisted on sending Prince Charles to Gordonstoun was a little much.

I'm still trying to reduce my email backlog.  I got it below 2000 the other day!

And I'm still having unusual dreams. One night I dreamed of being in an airport about to take a flight, and shopping for a camera in a downstairs shopping concourse.  Then the other night I dreamed of a thriller movie in the M. Night Shyamalan style involving machines rising up to kill people!

Pre-Xmas dinner

"He was too powerful for the room:  he didn't go with the cretonne"--The End of the Affair

Monday was the last meeting of my memoir groups for three weeks.  For something different, we're going to try writing a piece or two at home over the break:  the topics will be "people I've admired" and/or "hide & seek."

Last night we had a lot of the family over for a pre-Christmas dinner of Indian food.  For dessert, we had a fresh pineapple. (Unlike most people, I like to eat the tough part in the middle!) I was showing my nieces a photo I found of Mother when she was young.

The second season of The Crown isn't as great as the first, but it's still pretty good.  My other sister is still on the first season and didn't want to hear any spoilers, though I would have thought people know the story already!

I'm now rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder's These Happy Golden Years, the last finished book in the Little House series, which tells of her teaching school and marrying Almanzo.  I'm going to read some more of Oscar Wilde's children's stories too!

The Children's Hour

On coming to after a Blitz explosion: "My mind for a few moments was clear of everything except a sense of tiredness as though I had been on a long journey.  I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate:  my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness.  I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy"--The End of the Affair

Saturday afternoon I saw two episodes of the '70s scifi series Space:  1999 with Dawna.  Or rather, I saw one and a half--I had to leave because I was getting sleepy. (Doctor Who it isn't.)

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup. December is our month for children's writing, and I titled the event "The Children's Hour." I read a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek, a Hillaire Belloc poem about a kid whose balloon blew up his house, the poem "To a Monkey" written by a girl of seven, and Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince." In "The Happy Prince" you can see the influence of Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen!

Martha read a story she created with her Grade Two class, of trolls looking for a house to buy, with illustrations of troll dolls, Lego and stuff against green-screen backdrops.  Other reading was the part of A Little Princess where she found a coin in the gutter and bought buns but ended up giving most of them to a beggar girl; a Little Red Riding Hood spoof in Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes; and Wilde's "The Selfish Giant." (Wilde wrote those stories in his twenties, when he was flirting with Catholicism.)

I was just reading in The End of the Affair the part where Sarah tells Maurice, just before breaking up with him, "Everything must be all right. If we love enough." At first glance that seems sentimental, but there's something profound about it.  It reminded me of W.H. Auden's line in "September 1st, 1939": "We must love one another or die." (My interpretation is that if we don't love each other we'll die inside, like Mohammed Atta.) It's a very adult novel, not because of the sex, but because of the themes.

TOM JONES

"It is widely believed that too much wine dulls the spirit.  And so it will, in a dull man"--Tom Jones

On meeting in 1939: "We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain.  I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy; in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm"--End of the Affair

Wednesday night we saw a documentary about the Gallipoli campaign.  It was so grim that Moira couldn't finish it! (It's easy to forget that the Turks lost almost as many men as the British and their allies.) I just found out that the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was sent to Gallipoli before their annihilation at the Somme.

Last night I saw Tony Richardson's Tom Jones yet again, with Debi of the History Meetup.  It's a real scream! Richardson and screenwriter John Osborn's showing the dirt and ugliness of the 18th century--they'd previously made the "kitchen sink" classics Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer--makes the audience appreciate its beauty more! (Didn't Joan Greenwood have fine eyebrows?  When I saw her in The Importance of Being Earnest those were the main thing I remembered about the movie...)

Another vivid dream last night.  It was a story sort of like the Godfather movies, but even more violent.  The main thing I remember is a pack of attack dogs advancing in slow motion, and the gangsters furiously pedalling electric generators to produce a huge surge and explosion!

END OF THE AFFAIR

"'When you are miserable, you envy other people's happiness'...  And there--in the phrase--the bitterness leaks again out of my pen.  What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is.  If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man:  I would never have lost love"--End of the Affair

Sunday afternoon the Classic Book Club discussed A Little Princess.  We liked the book, but couldn't think of much to say about it, and dispersed rather early. (I hope John S. returns to the group!  He'd surely have a lot to say.)

I finished the book about Russia and started reading Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, for the next Classic Book Club event.

Yesterday was Tuesday, so I went to Ali Baba's near Ossington station to get the Tuesday special of falafel wraps.  It's turning into a weekly ritual!

We've started watching the second season of The Crown.  It looks like Her Majesty will be using her dirty look a lot this season.  One of the background events is the Suez Crisis. (Orwell said that Neville Chamberlain wasn't a monster or a traitor, but a stupid old man doing what he thought was right at Munich; you could say the same about Anthony Eden!) I can't help feeling that Prince Philip was a jerk, but that revelation will surprise few people...

The other day I left my library card at the library again! (It's those self-serve checkouts...) But I got it back the next day.

The last of DAMAGES

Tonight we saw the last episode of the last season of Damages.  It's a pretty good show, though the cryptic foreshadowing and nightmare scenes eventually got a bit tiresome.

Thursday night was my History Meetup, in which we discussed the Civil War.

This afternoon Dawna and I saw An American Christmas Carol, with Henry Winkler as a 1930s version of Scrooge.  It must have been a Canadian production, because there were quite a few Canadian actors, including R.H. Thomson as the Bob Cratchit equivalent.

Dreams

My shrink prescribed me 30 Cipralex pills instead of the usual 60, so as an experiment I'm taking them every other day instead of daily.  One side effect is that my dreams get more vivid.

Just last night I had a dream of moving into a new house in York Region much like our Sackville house, but outside the northeast corner there was a tent-like enclosure accessible through a glass passageway.  There were some kids watching a Kurosawa movie.  I also dreamed of being stuck watching a movie that wouldn't end!

Today Moira and I went grocery shopping and bought almost $100 of stuff!

I've finished translating "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me" into Chinese ("Dianche, Dianche, Ni Deng Woba") and started translating it into Japanese ("Densha-San wa Boku-o Matte-yo"). In French and Portuguese it's titled "Tram, Tram, Attendez-Moi" and "Electrico, Electrico, Espere-Me."

LIVE AND LET DIE

James Bond: "My name is--" Mr. Big: "Names are for tombstones, baby! [to his henchmen] Take him out and ice him!"--Live and Let Die

Saturday afternoon Dawna and I saw Live and Let Die.  It's the first of Roger Moore's James Bond movies, with a big motorboat chase, Jane Seymour reading tarot cards (Dawna's done that, and says it can get scary!) and Geoffrey Holder doing a voodoo dance.  It's all pretty goofy, of course.  Moore never had Sean Connery's style--though in all fairness, who does?

Friday I had lunch with John S. and went to see the train-set screwball comedy 20th Century again at a Robarts Library screening. Unfortunately, I ended up leaving early because I was sleepy.  Something about the sound of a moving train lulls me, like Arctic scenery. (When I saw the Inuit movie The Journal of Knud Rasmussen that made me sleepy too.)

I renewed my library card and borrowed the book Russian History:  A Very Short Introduction.  Oxford University Press has a whole series of those Very Short Introduction books!

On the latest season of Damages, Ryan Philippe is playing a Julian Assange type.  He's actually a pretty interesting actor, who's come a way since Cruel Intentions, which opened with him driving a car on the freeway. (That's one of the tritest movie-opening cliches!)

THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS

Scrooge: "I thought this was a ghost story, not a fairy tale!"--The Man Who Invented Christmas

Tonight I saw The Man Who Invented Christmas at Canada Square.  I enjoyed this movie about Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol:  like the original story, it's whimsical but ultimately moving.  Dan Stevens is a suitably theatrical Dickens, and there are several fine actors. (The part of the story that really gets to me is Scrooge being shown his schoolboy self choosing books over friends!)

I've decided to make Russia the subject of January's History Meetup, what with the centenary of the October Revolution (which was actually in our November, but Russia still went by the Julian calendar). I chose a short history for background reading, but when I tried to borrow a copy it turned out that it's time to renew my library card!

We finished Godless, which ended with the obligatory gun battle. That was an odd scene where the women were standing on the bar and singing about sex!  Now we've started the fifth season of Damages.

I got possessed to start translating some of those Canadian short stories I was just reading into foreign languages. (I was going to lend the book to John S., but no doubt he can wait...)