06.28.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:21 pm by Sarah
I liked this essay by Amanda Craig. Very up my street.
Â
Some quotes “Virginia Woolf mocked this standpoint: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”
“The domestic novel may no longer seem relevant. And yet, where else do most of us live? Where do most of the dramas, traumas and triumphs of our private lives take place? The home, and the family, is where we lead a great deal of our lives, particularly if we are women, and have children. ”
“Virginia Woolf imagined at the end of her great essay, A Room of One’s Own, asking an ordinary old woman what she remembered of her life, and said that apart from great national events, “she would remember nothing. “For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie” because, said Woolf, “those infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded.” ”
“They show what happens after the wedding bells are rung, and before adultery, divorce or bereavement. They seem to me to be taking any number of risks in holding up what they do, and in making up stories that are passionate, funny, stylish and sad. Furthermore, they shed light on an almost unnoticed tribe in the human race. For it is not only home-makers who get written out of the approved, masculine view of what are suitable subjects for literature. It is children. To me, the real tragedy of Anna Karenina’s life is not her loss of Vronsky or her suicide. It is her abandonment of her child. Dorothy Canfield Fisher was quite right to describe The Home-Maker as “a whoop not for ‘womens’ rights’ but for ‘children’s rights.” If you deny the domestic novel its place as serious literature, you deny not only the experience of women but that of children within the adult consciousness.”
Permalink
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 1:20 pm by Sarah
I just had a little flash this morning…now don’t get a fright. But for a second, it occured to me, that maybe, JUST maybe, John Waters has a point, and the white male gets a hard time these days. MAYBE, MAYBE, you guys are not soooooooooo very bad…
Â
Permalink
06.27.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 10:51 pm by Sarah
Joe takes the lid (but not the wrapper) off a problem I’ve been having…..
Permalink
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Uncategorized at 10:34 pm by Sarah
..has a blog. It’s pretty good. Such a pity he bats for the other team..he’s really cute. I met him once. Charming and smiley. I hope he wins a seat.
Permalink
Posted in Feminism at 7:16 pm by Sarah
From the Meath Topic, page 2
“The Gardai in Enfield have made a final appeal to locate the owners of three bicylces at present in their possession, after which the bicycles will be made available to the public.
Two of the bicycles are mountain bikes – the third is a Hitech Voyager racing bike…….”
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:07 am by Sarah
Regular readers may remember the Beckett discussion here. I thought I should give a progress report. I started Murphy. I regret to say I have felt no inclination to get past page 50. Some points.
1. I can recognise moments of genius in it. For example, when the security guard in the GPO tackles Wylie, he says:
” ‘Take my advice mister-’ He stopped. To divise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how we was to emerge? And before a hostile audience! Hsi embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie’s face, clamped there by the promise of advice.
“Yes sergeant,” said Wylie, and held his breath.
“Run him back to Stillorgan,” said the CG. Done it!
2. However, what I feared was true. The characters are odd and cold and unlikeable and I can’t identify with them or sympathise with them and therefore don’t care what happens to them – even care enough to turn the page.
3. HOWEVER, my cultural mentor John suggests I may have better luck with Malone Dies. I’ll give it a go. If I get nowhere then the Beckettites will have to accept that my dislike of him is qualified and I hope not assume due to any mental deficiency on my part.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:25 am by Sarah
Declan Kiberd has a great piece in the IT today…
Last Saturday, my son and his friends, celebrating the end of the Junior Cert exam, headed off to a rock concert.
“Who’s up next?” I asked. “Dylan” was the answer. Dylan. Not the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Nor the Arctic Monkeys. Nor Blink 182. But the Jokerman himself.
I couldn’t believe it, bit my lip and pondered those famous lines: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land/And don’t criticise what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.”
Forty years ago last month, I had sat in the Adelphi cinema, a whole year before my own Inter Cert, to listen to Dylan, then in Ireland for the first time. He sang Positively Fourth Street with the amps turned up loud and delivered entire songs with his back turned on the audience. Some walked out. I went home elated on the last bus: and when I played Maggie’s Farm, my father looked up from his Irish Times and said “what on earth is all that noise?”
The point about liking Dylan was that nobody other than true believers could fathom him. “Something is happening, but ya don’t know what it is/Do ya, mister Jones?” And his own followers kept splitting into rival factions – folkies, electric heads, country buffs. Because of his constant changes, there never could be an official Dylan style. He was the Last Modernist, who would struggle but never triumph, and in the end struggle in order not to triumph.
My generation – an odious phrase but widely used – had its own music, whose glory was that its secret codes were unbreakable by older people. They had contempt for Dylan’s voice, often compared to the howl of an animal whose foot was trapped in barbed wire. And we reciprocated with a fierce contempt for the crooning too-decipherable stars of the previous decades: Sinatra, Crosby, Clooney, Boone.
These people were straights. And nothing could be more anti-aphrodisiac than the styles of the recent past.
Even within the rock camp, the split was often the first item on any agenda. Softies liked the Beatles; beasties went for the Rolling Stones.
If you did admit to enjoying the Beatles, you had to decide between John or Paul, Revolver or Sergeant Pepper. In those days, to isolate something was to enjoy it – keeping the music mysterious and unavailable to others.
Then came the first dispossession. A priest clad in a Clancy brothers sweater arrived one day with a guitar at the start of a folk Mass. He began singing a revised version of Blowing in the Wind – “The answer, my friend, is living in all men/The answer is living in all men.”
We all felt terrible about this plundering – as badly as the poet WB Yeats must have felt on hearing the awful news that thousands of boy scouts in serried ranks had recited The Lake Isle of Inisfree under the baton of Baden-Powell on Salisbury Plain.
The second dispossession came much later, when rock classics of the 1960s provided the soundtrack for TV ads. The generation that had set its face against capitalist consumerism now watched as everything from processed peas to clean electricity was sold to the tunes of Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys and Dusty Springfield. Bob, at least, had the grace to refuse to release any of his songs for such misuse – though he did appear in a strange lingerie ad, for obscure reasons of his own. And he tried as best he could to defend his own classics by rejigging them, almost beyond recognition, in strange new arrangements.
Is this the third dispossession, when our very own children take trains to listen to the great man in Nowlan Park?
Today’s teenagers appear to have no problem in enjoying the songs their fathers loved. In fact, they can even enjoy the songs their grandfathers loved: Sinatra, Tony Bennett, the lot. And because pop/rock is old enough to have multi-generational history, these kids are set fair to become its profoundest historians.
They’re right to be open, of course. What made Dylan the genius he was back in the 1960s was his openness to the entire range of American music, from blues to country, from rock to gospel. Like all great artists, he was original enough to go back to origins, both humble and arrogant enough to believe that a whole culture might speak through him.
Which is all very well, if you’re a genius, able to put new electronic instruments to strange, unforeseen uses on old songs and paradigms.
But is there a danger that most of today’s teenagers may in time grow baffled and demoralised by the confusing range of choices available to them, in everything from music to food, from academic courses to careers?
One reason for the cult of French theorists on American campuses has been the promise of thinkers like Foucault or Derrida to link up all the disparate forms of knowledge; and to provide over-arching philosophies which give some coherence to a potentially baffling array of college courses. Perhaps Dylan has done something similar in the world of popular music. His Self-Portrait album showed him as early as 1970 to be the first synthesiser of its rich varieties.
Today’s teenagers seem to be following him in this and, by that very process, learning how to be his contemporaries. All of which proves that Bob really has mastered the art of staying forever young.
Permalink
06.26.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 2:33 pm by Sarah
Story in today’s IT
Report highlights cancer case figures
A number of hospitals across the State are carrying out only one breast cancer operation each year, figures provided by the Department of Health to its advisory body on cancer care suggest.
The data drawn up by the Hospital In-Patient Enquiry (HIPE) system for 2003 reveal that four hospitals – Mallow general, Cavan general, Louth county and Navan – carried out only one breast cancer surgical procedure.
…….The department’s report to the forum said that in 2003 there were 76 consultants carrying out breast cancer operations in more than 30 hospitals. It said that on average, each consultant dealt with 24 cases annually.
However, it said this disguised the fact that 17 per cent of patients were operated on by consultants who carried out fewer than 30 operations per year. The department’s figures maintained that 60 per cent of consultants dealt with fewer than 10 cases annually.
Senior department sources said this weekend that the figures backed up claims by Minister for Health Mary Harney at the launch of the new strategy earlier this month that the number of hospitals carrying out cancer treatment was excessive. The new Government strategy has recommended a centralised approach to cancer care.
It has proposed that treatment should be provided at eight centres across the State in four regional networks that would each serve a population of about one million people.
The HSE is to decide which hospitals should retain cancer services. It is also to appoint a national director to oversee implementation of the strategy.
The chief executive of the HSE, Prof Brendan Drumm, acknowledged at the launch of the strategy that there would be resistance to its recommendations. However, he said it was the responsibility of clinicians across the country to start accepting that they had to operate systems which were evidence-based and focused totally on the quality of outcomes for patients.”
 So here is what this means:
They will try and bring in centralisation of cancer care. This is a good thing. If you get cancer, who do you want to deal with? A doctor who has done 1 operation that year or a doctor who sees dozens of cases just like your’s and does similar operations therefore gaining good experience and improving his own skill. However, the public, doctors with big egoes and no common sense and bandwagon jumping public representatives will oppose this strategy tooth and nail. It’ll be the whole emotional “having to travel 100 miles for chemotherapy” argument. I’ll travel anywhere if its to the best doctor. I wish people would see this.
Permalink
06.22.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 8:04 pm by Sarah
This story has been getting a lot of traction in the past 24 hours
“Dublin’s Luas light rail system returned an annual surplus in 2005 making it unique among State-run mass transit systems in Ireland and only one of a few worldwide which does not require an operating subsidy.
The success was attributed at the launch of the 2005 annual report yesterday to the ability of the trams to continue attracting large numbers of passengers outside of peak times and into the evenings and weekends.
The 2005 surplus of just €0.2 million, while small, allowed the Railway Procurement Agency, the developers of Luas, to inform Minister for Transport Martin Cullen that his planned €2.32 million subvention would not be required. Last year was the first full year of operation for both lines.
The figures contrast with annual subsidies of €25 million for Bus Éireann, €65 million for Dublin Bus and €180 million for Iarnród Éireann.”
I presume this surplus is calculated entirely on running costs, and doesn’t take into account the €700m?? it cost to build the thing. If one is handed a brand new piece of infrastructure with the best new trams and equipment then this takes a sizeable chunk out of the re-investment required in any business. I would also guess that the €180m for Iarnrod Eireann includes money for the purchase of new trains and the massive upgrading project taking place on several lines. As usual none of these issues are mentioned in the newspaper and radio reports. They just read out the press release….
Oops! Didn’t explain myself well here and some objections in the comments. I clarify further down…
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:22 pm by Sarah
I insist that you watch these. They are hilarious. In particular, The Sunday Game, The Sky Sports ones, and Theo Walcott.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »