a)An account of Jade Goody funeral by one who was there.
b)A review of Kenan Malik's book on the Rushdie affair and after.
c)A travel piece on Australia.
d)An interview with Russell Crowe and Kevin Macdonald about their film State of Play.
Links tomorrow. Here they are:
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I predict the movie version of "State of Play" will not be better than the British TV version I saw with spectacular acting by Bill Nighy, James McAvoy, et al.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard ever to beat Bill Nighy.
ReplyDeleteI hope they're not stretching you too thin. you'll be doing the telly next...
ReplyDeleteIt took you a long time to write up on your Aussie trip? 6 months or so? did you have writers block?
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part of Oz is Ningaloo reef up in the north west, its outback and reef with no inbetween and the reefs are better than the barrier reef as they are largely untouched by tourism.
Broome is also good fun, a fabulous beach with a crocodile patrol to keep you on your toes and the best restaurant in Australia, the Zoo Cafe, and you can guess that everything is on the menu.
Aboriginals are a dying culture I am afraid, in many ways the underclass here in the UK remind me of them.
Brilliant article on Jade.
ReplyDeleteI'd not read anything till today, apart from one lunchtime late February, when The Sun was all there was in a local greasy spoon and I read the lot. I found myself more sympathetic than perhaps I expected to the red-top. Dying isn't often done well in our culture. In the light of that this wasn't all bad.
Then there was your account of yesterday. I doubt I will feel a need for anything else. That is a real service.
All comfort to her children, dear Lord.
Does anyone else have problems connecting to The Times? - i haven't been able to read any of the articles, nor the Chaucer one from last time, damn page won't load.
ReplyDeleteWell, I got back home this morning, micro-managing a vicious stag-do hangover, and flopped onto the bed to peruse the Sunday Appleyard.
ReplyDeleteStarted with the Crowe article and made it as far as the first appearance of the famous cowboy boots - celebrity footwear now as dear and familiar to me as any of my own - before a wave of nausea hit and I had to sleep for two hours. I awoke refreshed and read the rest of the paper in awe at the roll you appear to be on.
The Jade piece is perfectly judged, the State of Play a brilliantly controlled three-way interview (don't get many of those), the multiculturalism review concise and unerring, and this insight is surely wasted in the holiday section:
Australia has a long story that is only partly about white settlement. It’s also about the sacred land of the Aborigines and about animals — millions upon millions of animals. ...It is, perhaps, the contrast between the way the white humans seem to be clinging on to precarious footholds, even in the big cities, and the black ones still wander and worship.
Peerless stuff. Must be the diet.
A bit too much sympathy for the idea of sacred landscape in that Australian article, if you ask me. Must be something in my make up, but while I can find landscape beautiful/pretty/impressive, I can't say that a mountain or oversized boulder has ever given me a sense of the numinous.
ReplyDeletePerhaps its partly because, living here, one has seen too many cases over the years where one or other group of aborigines have claimed (sometimes, quite fraudulently)that a particular run-of-the-mill natural site is sacred as a way of stopping development they don't particularly care for.
Finally got onto the Times. Excellent pieces and nice 'roo photo - you really do look like an elf with those ears, very strange.
ReplyDeleteI believe we are living at the very end of western civilisation. Here, in part, is why - http://tinyurl.com/c7fsvc
ReplyDeleteNice info.
ReplyDelete