Weekend, dir. Andrew Haigh (2011)

Weekend, written, edited and directed by Andrew Haigh, opened in the UK on Nov. 3. It tells the story of Russell (Tom Cullen), a nice gay guy, pretty sorted, who has an ordinary life and good friends, who are mostly straight. After visiting his best friend Jamie, along with his wife and child and some of their friends, he makes excuses and goes home. Instead he goes to a nightclub where he (eventually) picks up Glen. The story turns on their weekend together. Little ‘happens’, in the sense that they spend time taking drugs, having sex, and especially, talking. Talking about nothing, talking about identity, about what each wants from life, what each gets from it. The film is about intimacy, about love, about intersubjectivity. It is nothing short of a stunning achievement and Tom Cullen’s performance is one of the best I have ever seen on screen. It is shot beautifully in Nottingham, with Russell’s 14th-floor flat observed with the power of someone who has lived there for a lifetime. The most powerful thing about this film is its ordinariness, its lack of veneer, or polish. It depends for its success on a magnificently moving script and a remarkable chemistry between both main actors (Tom Cullen and Chris New).

On the weekend of the ridiculously over-hyped opening of the Leonardo exhibition, I felt as if I had just discovered another masterpiece. High Art is alive and well.

Sir Denis Mahon (8 Nov 1940—24 April 2011)

Sir Denis Mahon at the National Gallery in London. On the left is Guido Reni’s ‘Rape of Europa’, which he had bought in 1945 for 85 guineas Photo: Ian Jones

The great collector, art historian, expert in the Italian Seicento Sir Denis Mahon has died.

Read obits here, here, here, and read an interview here.

Bolt from the Blue

via the BBC website:

This is the moment a lightning bolt appears to strike the Statue of Liberty in New York. New York photographer Jay Fine had spent the night braving the storm in Battery Park City, Manhattan, in a bid to get the perfect picture. Jay spent nearly two hours poised with his camera and took more than 80 shots before striking lucky with this particular bolt of lightning at 8.45pm on 22 September. He said he had been waiting 40 years to get the picture.

To capture the shots Jay used a Nikon D300s with 60mm f/2.8 lens on the following settings: Aperture: F/10, Shutterspeed: 5 seconds, ISO: 200.

Hallelujah for Leonard Cohen

The Hebrew word הַלְּלוּיָ means Praise the Lord (or more properly Praise Yahweh, being praise הַלְּלוּ and יָ the first two letters of the Tetragrammaton), an injunction to the congregation to join in praise. During Leonard Cohen's wonderful performance of his incomperable 'Hallelujah' at Lissadell House in Sligo, he innovated upon his own song by mentioning Yeats' County. In the first half of the concert he mentioned having learned one of Yeats' poems mentioning Lissadell House over fifty years ago and could not have imagined singing in its gardens. That poem has been much mentioned in recent reviews of these two concerts. It opens Yeats' 1933 collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems and is printed below in full, alongside the master himself singing.

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams —
Some vague Utopia — and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

(October 1927)

This is how they all (should) do it!

On Sunday, I'm off to Glyndebourne to see Così fan tutte, dir. Nicholas Hytner, with Barbara Senator (Dorabella), Sally Matthews (Fiordiligi), Allan Clayton (Ferrando), Robert Gleadow (Guglielmo), Anna Maria Panzarella (Despina) and Pietro Spagnoli (Don Alfonso).

Needless to say, I'm very excited about this.

For a little taster, listen to this:

'Soave sia il vento' from Mozart's Così fan tutte from Glyndebourne on Vimeo.

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books

1. The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.
2. Terms are to be included for conceptions that, except in this definition, appear nowhere in the whole book.
3. Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.
4. For concepts treated only in their general significance, examples should be given; if, for example, machines are mentioned, all the different kinds of machines should be enumerated.
5. Everything that is known a priori about an object is to be consolidated by an abundance of examples.
6. Relationships that could be represented graphically must be expounded in words. Instead of being represented in a genealogical tree, for example, all family relationships are to be enumerated and described.
7. A number of opponents all sharing the same argument should each be refuted individually.

in Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street' (selections), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed & intr Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986; orig. Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 79.

The Grimani Breviary

The publishing house Salerno Editrice, based in Rome, has just announced the publication of a splendid facsimile of Venice, Bibl. Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat. I 99 (2138), the so-called Breviario Grimani, named after its owner Cardinal Domenico Grimani. The manuscript comprises 832 folios, 28 x 19.5 cm (11 x 7 ¹¹/16); justification: 15.5 X 11.5 cm (6⅛ X 4½ in.); 31 lines of gotica rotunda in two columns; 50 full-page miniatures, 18 large miniatures, 18 small miniatures, 12 bas-de-page calendar miniatures.

The Grimani Breviary is the most elaborate and arguably the greatest work in the history of Flemish manuscript illumination. Purchased by Cardinal Domenico Grimani by 1520 for the enormous sum of five hundred ducats, it brought together the leading illuminators of the time, including the Master of James IV of Scotland (probably Gerard Horenbout), Alexander Bening (the Master of the First Prayer Book of Maximilian?), the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary, Simon Bening, and Gerard David. More important, each of these artists created for this manuscript some of his most exquisite and original miniatures.

Thus Thomas Kren, Maryan W. Ainsworth and Elizabeth Morrison in their catalogue entry, No. 126 in Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), pp. 420-424. One can hear the frustration in their tone when they wrote about the massive amount of work still to be done on this manuscript: 'Indeed, the two-day examination of the manuscript by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Thomas Kren proved woefully inadequate to the task of sorting out all of the stylistic and technical issues that the book raises' (p. 420), a frustration all more acute since the manuscript was not actually displayed in this exhibition.

After you finish drooling, read Michael Camille, 'The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Critical Inquiry, 17 (1990), 72-107; and see too Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe, (eds), Manuscript Illumination in The Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction (Evanston, Il: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2001).

If anyone would like to buy me this facsimile for a birthday or Christmas, or Easter, or really, any other day of the week, please feel free. It is selling, apparently, for €22,000.

Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel at the Old Vic (dir. Anna Mackmin), until May 9th 2009

Now in the last week of its run at the Old Vic in London, this production of Brian Friel's beautiful play Dancing at Lughnasa (pronouced Loooo-Na-Saa, for the non-pagans) can only be described as a remarkable triumph. The play is told in flash-back sequences by the young Michael Evans, who remembers his childhood in a rural Donegal house of five women. The women have just welcomed back Uncle Jack, a missionary priest for a lifetime in Uganda, who has returned in a state of confusion. His gradual recuperation, and the realization that Jack has been sent back from his parish for becoming more native than the natives themselves, is traced out against the backdrop of the annual Lughnasa festivals, especially the harvest dance. The women desperately want to go, and in a carefree moment of delight resolve to go, dancing around the kitchen in ecstatic excitement. Kate (Michelle Fairley), the eldest sister, the only one with a steady income as the local schoolteacher, has a change of heart and insists it would be improper for women of their age to be seen at such an event. And the chance of something fun and wonderful evaporates. And all that is wonderful (in the sense of being full of wonder) evaporates throughout the rest of the play.

The women desperately want to get away, and this yearning is palpable throughout. But responsibility is important too, and Christina, who has had Michael out of wedlock, takes a job in the local factory to earn an income and hates every day of it for the rest of her life. Rose and Agnes go off to England and die there, destitute. This is recounted in a truly heartbreaking moment by Michael, in what is a masterpiece of understated acting by Peter McDonald. The rest of the cast are extremely strong. Niamh Cusack plays Maggie with wonderful sensitivity, and Andrea Corr, playing Chris, is really excellent. There are moments in the play where it was clear that her tears were not acted. (I say this as I was blubbering myself!). The set design is super too, as it is part of the Old Vic's experiment with theatre in the round. The result allows for all sorts of interesting things, such as Michael's continual circling of the kitchen space, watching the sisters and what's happening to them. It adds to the poignancy of his memories as an adult.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a great great modern play, and this is a great production. GO TO SEE IT if you can.

McKeon on Toibin

Read Belinda McKeon's Irish Times article on the Irish writer Colm Tóibín here.
His new novel, Brooklyn has just been published by Penguin Viking.

Mieke Bal

Read anything you can get your hands on by Mieke Bal. I've just picked up a copy of her Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Indiana U.P., 1987) and am hooked on it. I've already read her Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre & Scholarship on Sisera's Death (Indiana U.P., 1992) and greatly enjoyed it. She's well known as a cultural theorist, biblical scholar, and feminist critic, but that's only the beginning. Her website gives an indication of the richness and breadth of her work. She also seems to have a good number of Irish graduate students, all working on really fascinating things.

Read Mieke Bal.

Women in Art

Writers' Rooms

One of the greatest pleasures meeting fellow academics is the chance to get into their rooms and have a look around at their books. I remember having terrible trouble concentrating during meetings with my supervisor(s) such was my curiosity to have a look around and enjoy the space. Sometimes, if I visit someone and I know them well enough, I simply excuse myself for fifteen minutes explaining that I'll be distracted unless I have a little newsy around. It's about admiration and enjoyment rather than wanting to know someone else's business.

It is perhaps for this reason that I so enjoy the Guardian's Writers' Room series, photographed by Eamonn McCabe. An exhibition collects these photographs together at the Madison Contemporary Art Gallery in London. A preview is available here. I realise that these photographs are about much more than the bookshelves (which often you cannot see that well). It's about the space, about an aura of creativity and a recognition of its mystery. This is especially the case when you find yourself saying "Oh I could never work there...". And the space itself has a kind of creativity, it is a negotiation, something that the occupant, the writer, chips away at over the years. The space is, in a way, another work by the writer. And it is this that I find so fascinating about these photographs.

above: Beryl Bainbridge's room.

Books Books Books

Help. I think that may be what I need. Help. I have gone a little insane on the old book buying front lately and this term have been adding significantly to the Biblioteca del Crazy Guy. Just before I moved over I found a lovely original copy, in two parts, of Rossetti's parallel text edition of Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. ms. 3943) compared with Boccaccio's Filostrato [London: Pub. for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co, 1873]). I also picked up some of those parallel texts transcriptions of Troilus MSS in the Chaucer Society series. Very pleasing. Still in Oxfam on St Giles, I found a (cheap-ish) copy of the Z-Text facsimile (Brewer, 1994), prepared by Brewer and Rigg. In BW's, I found a lovely discounted copy of Claire Donovan's The De Brailles Hours (BL, 1991) which I very much enjoyed reading.

I have also received some books in lieu, such as the excellent facsimile of Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 24, intro. Boffey & Edwards (Brewer, 1997), and Butterfield's collection of essays in Chaucer and the City (Brewer, 2006), which is extremely good. I also got some interesting Palgrave books, such as The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Chaucer (2006); Baldwin's A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (2007), which looks very good; Cooney's collection Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (2006); Edwards' Chaucer and Boccaccio (2002), which of course I'd read by did not own; Patterson's Temporal Circumstances (2006), most of which I've read before, but with a few new things; Tison Pugh's Queering Medieval Genres (2004); Martha Rust's Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books (2007), which I have not read yet but am looking forward to; and Elizabeth Scala's Absent Narratives (2002).

It was however, when I moved over that I discovered G. David, a rather well-known bookseller here in Cambridge. There I found some marvellous things, mainly Chaucer editions and criticism (about 15 items or so) but other stuff too, such as Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Paul Elek, 1976) which I did not know. These books belonged to the late and lamented Derek Brewer, which he'd sold off shortly before he passed away. I feel unworthy to have them, but glad too.

A visit to Oxford last weekend for a very enjoyable birthday party provided the opportunity to return to BW's where a distinguished don was selling his books after retirement. Gawd. I hardly knew where to look. What I'm particularly pleased with is Mary Wack's Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (UPenn, 1990); Smither's edition of Havelok (Oxford, 1987); and Vantuono's edition of Pearl (Garland, 1984), though sadly vol. 1 only. I'm not exactly sure how good it is, but it is rather full. Vol. 2 seems utterly irretrievable. Anyway, there was lots of Langland too, which I wanted, but I restricted myself to Justice & Kerby Fulton's Written Work (UPenn, 1997), and then Bloomfield's PP as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse and Robertson & Huppé's PP and Scriptural Tradition. Very pleased with that haul I must say.

By the way, I managed to find a paperback copy of Volume 1 Foster & Boyde's Dante's Lyric Poetry. Yes, a paperback was printed of the first volume only, which I had never seen. I'm still on the lookout for the whole thing in h/b, needless to say. But I'm getting there. I also picked up some volumes (1, 6 & 10) of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca (in 10 volumes, published between 1964-1998), but am still missing vols 2, 3, 4, 5/1, and 9, which I despair of ever seeing in the flesh. I also found a copy of Judson Boyce Allen's Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1982), which is very hard to find and looks now like it was printed during the war the paper is so yellowed (in every copy I've ever seen actually!).

I'm afraid that this is just a taster of what has been going on this term chez miglior acque but I admit I'll have to cool it for a while. I have now been banned from using my debit card or credit card for a number of months. I may also need a psychiatric evaluation before I'm allowed them back.

Prayer, by Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald's first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile was published by Oxford University Press in 1996 and she has followed this impressive debut with equally impressive collections Dart (2002) and Woods, etc. (2005). In 2007 Faber republished her first collection. She writes the kind of poems I would love to write, they are huge in their perspectives. She looks at her environment and she seems to see all that is important, like the world curving into the eye of an eagle. One of my favourite poems from this collection is called Prayer:

Here I work in the hollow of God's hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
I sense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.

And all I ask is this—and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish—
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it's done.

Jiminy Cricket! No Escaping This Grasshopper

My first stroll around Cambridge had me pass the Corpus Clock, just up the road, and it was a wonderful treat. This was something I'd anticipated, seeing articles about it on the BBC website, and elsewhere (here & here and see the video here). The enormous and ferocious grasshopper sitting on top of the clock is the clock's escapement, mechanism, a "grasshopper escapement" actually, a regulator developed by John Harrison and intended as an homage by the clock's inventor Dr John Taylor. What he has done is effectively to turn the clock inside out, so the escapement and escapement wheel become its major features. The grasshopper, exquisitely detailed, sits on top of the wheel eating away at time: the clock is called the "Chronophage". And an inscription on the outside ledge reads Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius (I John 2: 17). Time is not on our side.

The dial comprises a series of Vernier strips, beneath which are three discs which have a set of constantly lit LED lights. So the time telling is not digital but entirely mechanical.

But time is relative, too. So while Harrison's invention was an important step in the development of a clock that told the correct time (or rather a clock that told the correct time for a longer period of time), this clock is only correct once every five minutes. This is because it actually stops, speeds up, and slows down, making the viewer constantly aware of the passing of time. It does not just tell the time, it draws attention to time. It's a clever idea, and it is hard for me to express the discomfort felt when you actually see the clock stop. You almost hold your breath waiting for it to start again (like watching a patient flat-line!). The clock is supposed to remind us that tempus fugit, it confronts us with our own mortality.

As I start a research fellowship here in Cambridge, these are good and important things to have before me. Tempus fugit, so get on with it!

Egan's Gold

By Al Bello/Getty Images(L-R) Kenny Egan of Ireland kisses the gold medal of Zhang Xiaoping of China following the Men's Light Heavy (81kg) Final Bout held at the Workers' Indoor Arena during Day 16 of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 24, 2008 in Beijing, China.

This wonderfully composed photograph is on the front page of the Irish Times today. It shows Ireland's boxer Kenny Egan kissing the gold medal of China's Zhang Xiaoping, the light-heavyweight champion, who won 11-7 in yesterday morning's final. I find this image very beautiful. There is such tenderness in the gesture, such respect. Not just for the Chinese boxer, and it is clearly a compliment to him, but to the medal itself, to the place of the gold medalist. There is such beauty in the way these two boxers, men who fight for a living, at the moment of highest emotion and greatest pride, express themselves with such poise and dignity, with a kiss. And Zhang Xiaoping's face is entirely reciprocal. I see no triumphalism in his expression. It is an expression of understanding, of having been there, and there is grace in it. There is something very moving, too, about the way that Egan's own silver medal is just peeping out from under his elbow, just an arm's length away. There were lots of memorable moments in these Games, but this is the one I'm most moved by, and, in a peculiar way, that for which I am most proud of Egan.

Tom Phillips, Dante's Inferno

In April of last year, the Bodleian Library announced that it had acquired an archive of material belonging to the artist Tom Phillips, mainly concerning his translation and set of lithographs of Dante's Inferno. Some of this material was displayed in the Three Crowns Exhibition (which I posted about here). Readers of the rather wonderful The Poet's Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) will recognize the above Phillips as their frontispiece. I have recently come into possession of the Thames & Hudson 'facsimile' of the amazing 1983 Talfourd Press livre d'artiste edition and have been immensely enjoying making my way through it. I would love to see the original (I don't even know where to look), but the facsimile is not bad at all and I think it would be very good to teach with. There is something very appropriate about Phillips's relationship with the book and his work on Dante coming together, being a kind of Limbourg Brothers working on what must be like a Book of Hours for many of us.

The book figures prominently in the Comedìa. The word 'libro' interestingly only appears twice, first in the great Inf V 137, 'Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse'; and again in Par XXIII 54. The word with a higher register and prestige value is volume and it is only used to refer to God's book, the Scriptures, or His created universe. It is for this reason that the single appearance of the work outside Paradiso is so interesting. In Inf I. 84 Dante, speaking to Virgil, talks about the 'lungo studio' and the 'grande amore | che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume'. Here volume refers to the Aeneid. In Paradiso, the figure of the book appears eight times in all, though of course Dante uses the imagery of the book with other words, like quaderno or squadernare. In Pd II 76-8, 'sì come comparte | lo grasso e 'l magro un corpo, così questo | nel suo volume cangerebbe carte', where the moon is compared to a book whose pages are of varying thickness. In Pd XIII 121-3, 'Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio | nostro volume, ancor troveria carta | u' leggerebbe "I' mi sono quel ch'i' soglio"', the volume refers to the Rule of St Francis, a big word for a small rule. In Pd XV 50-51 there is the 'magno volume | du' non si muta mai bianco né bruno', where the volume refers to God himself, or divine foreknowledge. This use of the figure of the book for a divine vision is repeated at the end of the Pd, at XXXIII 85-87: 'Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna | legato con amore in un volume, | ciò che per l'universo si squaderna'. It all comes together in the end. The apocalyptic Book appears in Pd XIX 112-14, 'Che poran dir li Perse a' vostri regi, | come vedranno quel volume aperto | nel qual si scrivon tutti suoi dispregi?', where the echo is to Rev 20: 12, Et vidi mortuos magnos et pusillos stantes in conspectu throni; et libri aperti sunt, et alius liber apertus est, qui est vitae: et iudicati sunt mortui ex his quae scripta erant in libris secundum opera ipsorum' ['And I saw the dead, great and small, standing in the presence of the throne, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged by those things which were written in the books, according to their works.']

There are occurrences of the word volume and volumi which are from the Lat. volvere, at Pd XXIII 112; XXVI 119; XXVIII 14.

For more, readers may wish to turn to: John Ahern, 'Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33', Publications of the Modern Language Association, 97 (1982), 800-809; John Ahern, 'Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante's Comedy', in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Amilcare A. Iannucci, Major Italian Authors (Toronto; London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 214-239. Specifically on Dante see the article by Antonio Lanci, 'Volume' in Enc. dantesca 5: 1146. A simple search on the Dartmouth Dante Project will get lots of interesting material to chew over.

Poetry Now 2008

Over the past few days I've been going out to Dun Laoghaire to the Poetry Now 2008 Festival. It has been very worthwhile. And old and good friend was curator this year so I was going as both a moral supporter but also a bog standard member of the public, interested in the readings. On Thursday, Belinda McKeon gave a wonderful introductory lecture, 'Poem Springing', and discussed the idea of readings, citing Larkin's suspicions of readings. It was about poetry and diversity, the work of the ear and the work of the eye. [On the Poetry Ireland website, on the calendar of events, they've listed Belinda as reading her poem 'Springing', which I thought was a rather poetic misreading for her introduction 'Poem Springing'].

I got to several readings. Bernard O'Donoghue, Antonella Anedda, and Jamie McKendrick. It was such a pleasure. O'Donoghue is one of my favourite poets writing at the moment. He writes so beautifully about leaving home, about Ireland, about an Ireland of the 1950s that I recognize in veins of my own childhood, and in my own returns home. He helps me make sense of that and teaches me so much about the things I know so well they are a mystery. Anedda's work I did not know but found myself delighted to know it, and she was well served in the beautiful translations of the wonderful Jamie McKendrick. McKendrick occupies a space of happy Italian memories for me and to hear him read again made me think a lot about that time.

Later that evening, CD Wright and Seamus Heaney read. Wright's work, again (I say red-faced), I did not know and found it difficult and interesting and I enjoyed the hard work of it. Heaney was what he always is in readings: memorable, beautiful, modest, extraordinary. He read some new stuff, which was marvellous to hear.

On Saturday, I got to the final reading of the evening, Henri Cole, Mimi Khalvati, and George Szirtes. Again, this was an introduction to the work of Cole and Khalvati, but I shall certainly be reading more. And Szirtes read with that Central European urbanity that his poetry so beautifully expresses, the sadness of an exile.

Undoubtedly one of the highlights for me was meeting Alice Lyons, the poet and visual artist who was responsible for the fantastic Staircase Project in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim. We'd been introduced as neighbours, and a moment's puzzlement led to a spark of mutual recognition where I was identified as "Miglior Acque"! That's a first. It was a beautiful evening and I am glad of it.

Thank you Belinda for putting together a fantastic festival, and thanks to the poetry, for being so good.

In Bruges, dir. & written by Martin McDonagh (2007)

I don't think that I ever want to meet Martin McDonagh. I don't want to meet him because I do not want to know what a man like that is really like. A genius. An extraordinary playwright, who turns his hand to making a short film, and wins an Oscar, and who turns his hand to his first feature and comes up with In Bruges. It is not easy to take all of that in.

In Bruges is quite simply a marvellous film. I went with no expectations; I'd read no reviews, and heard one good report from a friend. I knew that Colin Farrell was in it, which slightly put me off, given the silly public profile he has. And then he goes and pulls of a performance that was sensitive and wonderful.

Two hit-men, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) hide it out in Bruges after a botched job that has resulted in the death of a child, an innocent bystander. They are to await instructions from the boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), but neither have any idea why they've been sent. Eventually, Harry telephones Ken and orders that Ray be killed, for killing the child. "You can't go 'round killing children, it's that simple", he says later in the film. But Ray has already hit rock bottom, and just as Ken is about to shoot him, he sees Ray lift a gun to his head. He stops him just in time, Ray sees Ken with the gun, and realizes that a hit has been ordered on him. They sit and talk it out. This is one of the very powerful scenes in the film, where Ray explains that he cannot go on living with himself for the death of the child. He breaks down, crumbles really, and it's quite something to see how Farrell controls it. Ken wants to give Ray another chance, a chance to make things right, to do something good and so lets him go. He then rings Harry to say that the job has not been done, and gets himself washed and dressed awaiting the furious, murderous, psychotic Harry to come and kill him. The way that Ken resigns to Harry is heartbreaking and I think that Gleeson does it beautifully.

There are several more twists and turns, and I won't go any further because they are rather enjoyable. That's what's so interesting about this film. There's a huge element of caper about it: Harry says to the hotel owner, as he and Ray, armed, are confronting eachother: "This is the shootout!". That kind of funny, meta-fictional, postmodern cleverness is nodded at, but not allowed to overpower. He's actually just telling her what they're doing, not making a comment on the characters' fictional self-awareness. It's something that postmodern never is, sincere. The film is shot in the beautiful city of Bruges, and the setting is a huge part of the story. Ray hates it, Ken loves it, and Harry has sent them there because of a childhood visit he remembers with nostalgia. The city is almost another character. McDonagh has taken the quiet anonymity of Belgium, more precisely its best preserved medieval city, as this wonderful, unnoticed, ancient place. Ray, narrating at the beginning, says that he didn't even know where Bruges was, there's a pause as the audience asks themselves the same, and then he says: "It's in Belgium". Harry's wife has the same question before he leaves, "Where is Bruges anyway?".

I suppose that is what the film is about, places we don't go, or places we don't notice anymore. Ancient places. Like the extraordinary scene where Ray and Ken walk around the art gallery enjoying the torturous hellish Bosch and those images of death handing a note to a man, his time is up. The literalness of their lives, shooting people for money, is given this deeper texture through the allegorical figures in the paintings and they are faced with deep questions of justice, innocence and guilt. We are not being asked to judge the two as hitmen, since we're assured that most of the people they kill are bad, or have killed themselves. Even the priest has done something. But the innocence life of the boy can never be brought back, the injustice, the sin of it is somehow absolute, irrevocable. And Harry orders the hit on Ray not because he's dangerous to him, but out of honour. Ray killed an innocent boy and so must die. Ken knows that he must sacrifice his life to give Ray a chance, and it is his love for Harry and his sense of honour that moves Harry and prevents him from killing Ken. And then Harry, the most furious man in the film, perhaps turns out the be the most honourable man in it.

Ancient, beautiful, unnoticed places: honour, justice, innocence, guilt. Like Bruges.

English as a Foreign Language, or I Can't Live Anymore