Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a.... WHAT?"

Ever wondered how Franz Kafka came to write his famous Metamorphosis? This really, really brilliant short film follows his struggles to come up with a good idea for his new story. It's dark, odd and funny. Richard E. Grant is brilliant as Kafka and the film was written & directed by no other than Peter Capaldi, who by the way won an Oscar for it in 1995.
Not historically accurate, but a great piece of work!

 

This sketch made me learn the poem by heart & introduced me to Wordsworth.

The Language of Comedy (Swearing & The Thick Of It extended)

Peter Capaldi says it as it is

The Art of Swearing & The Thick Of It

WARNING: This post will contain strong language. Just so you know.

In an earlier post here, I mentioned the beauty of swearwords and said that the two people I love hearing swearing most are Terry Hall and Stephen Fry. Let me correct that: It's actually Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in Armando Ianucci's brilliant The Thick Of It (and the spin-off film In The Loop). The characters in this series are constantly swearing, employing rude similes and extremely visual metaphors – but no-one more so than Malcolm Tucker, the undisputed star of the show. I think it helps that Peter Capaldi is Scottish, it just makes it sound even better (same goes for his side kick Jamie aka 'the crossest man in Scotland').
I must say I only recently got into the series, because I always thought it's one of those programmes that use insults and foul language to get cheap laughs – how wrong I was! I began to be more interested in it when it was mentioned on Fry's Planet Word (and you should know me by know – if Stephen Fry approves, it's worth checking out!). When I learned that the shows has its own swearing consultant (how cool is that?!) and actually contributed a new word to the dictionary, I thought it would be worth giving it a try. Of course there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of swearing, especially the wonderfully versatile fuck, but it's not just mindless abuse – it's actually art! The language is extremely creative, incredibly well-paced and some of the similes and metaphors or nicknames are simply hilarious! It's not just the swearing though, there sometimes are dialogues that are brilliant on their own, completely without swearing – but the foul language just adds that extra bit of brilliance.
I do hesistate to put a youtube compilation on here, because some of the figures of speech lose their impact when taken out of context and put together into an endless stream of abuse and fucks. However, clickhere for some very creative examples (all Malcolm Tucker, though the other characters have great lines too, he usually gets the best ones). And one that works all the time, Tucker's Law:

Just listen to the rhythm of that, just stunning! It all comes together, the two most powerful swearwords (more on those in my next post), a great pace and rhythm and a gorgeous Scottish accent! 
Though sometimes, the build up is very important, just to let that little bomb explode skillfully at the end:

These are only a few examples, they're even funnier in the context of the show & when you hear the delivery.
So if you're okay with swearing, I do implore you: Go and watch it!


I'll be analysing the beauty of swearing more closely in my next post.
Until then,
Fuckety- bye

Wordplay

There are many ways in which you can manipulate words and play with them, some more elaborate and/ or complicated than others. Some are simply ingenious. Here are some of my favourites:


Lipogram
means writing a sentence or paragraph but omitting one letter or a group of letters of the alphabet. The most challenging here is of course trying to omit vowels, especially E, which is the most common letter in the English language. There is a variation to this called pangrammatic lipogram, where you have to use every letter of the alphabet except one. Example: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog (includes all letters except S)
other examples:
Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa – this one is amazing. The first chapter consists solely of words beginning with A. The second chapter also allows words beginning with B and so on, until in the 26^th chapter all words are permitted. In the next 26 chapters he reverses the process.


Gyles Brandreth – he has rewritten some of Shakespeare's works as lipograms! E.g. Hamlet without the letter I ('To be or not to be, that's the query')


Clerihew

after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a four-line, sort-of biographical poem. It normally pokes fun at famous people, but without resorting to satire or abuse. The four lines of the poem are irregular in metre and length, the rhyme structure is AABB, the rhymes often forced. The first line of the poem always contains, and often consists solely of, the subject's name.

One of Bentley's best known clerihews is this:

“Sir Christopher Wren

Said, 'I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls

Say I am designing St. Paul's.'“

  but I also love this one, not by him:

"Did Descartes
Depart
With the thought
'Therefore I'm not'?"

 Palindrome 
the good old palindrome, a word / phrase/ sentence that reads the same forward and backward. Finding a single word palindrome is rather easy (e.g. noon, madam), but whole sentences that make at least some sense are much harder – well-known examples are 'Dammit, I'm mad' (a whole poem by Demetri Martin) , 'Step on no pets' (the second one even uses correct spacing) or ''Madam, I'm Adam'. The longest palindrome according to the Oxford English Dictionary is the onomatopoeic 'tattarrattat' which first appeared in James Joyce's Ulysses. There are also two whole palindromic novels (!): Satire: Veritas by David Stephens and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo by Lawrence Levine (no, I have not read them). 

Spoonerism can be deliberate or merely a slip of the tongue; it means swapping consonants, vowels or morphemes between two words, e.g. a 'smart fellow' becomes a 'fart smeller' (yes, hilarious example, I know) 

Anagram a classic. It means reassembling the letters in a word or phrase to construct a new one. Some great examples, found in Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: 
 Mother In Law – Woman Hitler 
William Shakespeare – I am a weakish speller
 Funeral – real fun 

And here a brilliant Monty Python sketch that includes anagrams and spoonerism. I read somewhere that Eric Idle can actually speak in anagrams and backwards, which is pretty cool. They also performed this sketch when I went to see them at the O2 a few days ago (yes! Be jealous!)

quote of the day

"My reputation swept back home in drag"

 - 'The Width Of A Circle' by David Bowie (from The Man Who Sold The World)

Jane Austen House in Bath

I forgot to mention I went there a few weeks ago. Austen lived in Bath for about five years, not exactly in the house the exhibition is in, but in a very similar one a bit up the road. I can recommend it to people who don't know a lot about her biographical background. If you already do, there won't be much in it for you, as there is only a very basic introductory talk, about 10-15 minutes, which sort of outlines the major events in her life and focusses of course on the Bath years. After that you can walk around the house and read stuff about life and society in Regency Bath and a few details about Austen's life, with quotations from her letters, or have your photo taken wearing Regency costumes. The talk only deals with the books, but the last room of the exhibition is dedicated to the many film adaptations of Austen's novels and even features a letter from Emma Thompson, who sent a copy of her Golden Globe acceptance speech, which she delivered Jane Austen style.

So it is definitely worth checking out if you are new to Jane Austen, or have read her books but want to find out a bit more about the historical and biographical background. They've also got a lovely tea room upstairs, and if you're a student you can get in a bit cheaper.

Watch Emma Thompson's infamous acceptance speech:

Translations II

A few weeks ago I wrote a small piece on translations and the potential problems and / or shortcomings of translating prose or verse into another language. I found an extract that basically makes the same point but more elaborately and with a nice concrete example. It is rom G.K. Chesterton's book on Thomas Aquinas, chapter VI (The Approach To Thomism). He is talking about how St Thomas describes his basic and universal philosophic idea (it would be too complicated to go into that here, and I have to say I'm not sufficiently informed anyway) with the Latin word Ens:

“...anybody who can read Latin at all, however rudely, feels it to be the apt and fitting word (…) it ought to be a matter of logic (to understand St Thomas' concept); but it is also a matter of language.

Unfortunately there is no satisfying translation of the word Ens. The difficulty is rather verbal than logical, but it is practical. I mean that when the translator says in English 'being', we are aware of a rather different atmosphere. Atmosphere ought not to affect these absolutes of the intellect; but it does. The new psychologists, who are almost eagerly at war with reason, never tire of telling us that the very terms we use are coloured by our subconsciousness, with something we meant to exclude from our consciousness. And one need not be so idealistically irrational as a modern psychologist, in order to admit that the very shape and sound of words do make a difference, even in the baldest prose, as they do in the most beautiful poetry. We cannot prevent the imagination from remembering irrelevant associations even in the abstract sciences like mathematics (…) Now it unfortunately happens that the word 'being', as it comes to a modern Englishman, through modern associations, has a sort of hazy atmosphere that is not in the short and sharp Latin word. Perhaps it reminds him of fantastic professors in fiction, who wave their hands and say, 'Thus we mount to the ineffable heights of pure and radiant Being', or, worse still, of actual professors in real life who say, 'All Being is Becoming; and is but the evolution of Not-Being by the law of its Being' (…) Anyhow it has a wild and woolly sort of sound; as if only very vague people used it; as if it might mean all sorts of different things.

Now the Latin word Ens has a sound like the English word End. It is final and even abrupt; it is nothing except itself...“

Not everything in that passage is directly concerned with the problem of translation, but I left most of it in, because Chesterton's style is too nice to be interrupted. I have underlined what I think is the central point he is making here, and it sort of adds to the point I was making in the other post. Translating can cause problems on several levels: The sound and rhythm, but also the meaning, especially through associations as Chesterton notes. In my post, I focussed more on the form, the beauty that can get lost, but I also mentioned how translation can change the meaning of ideas or concepts, like Chesterton shows here with the Ens-Being example. And on a side note, I do agree with him that those two words do seem to describe completely different concepts, only by their sound.

Cambridge Summer School

It's been a while since I have posted anything on here, and I do apologize for that, but I have spent the past weeks reading frantically, as a preparation for the Cambridge Summer School I'm currently attending. Miraculously, I have now found a little time which is not dedicated to lectures or reading, and as the weather is not particularly nice, I now find myself sat in the beautiful library of Gonville and Caius College, updating this blog.

So far, it has been absolutely fantastic and I have found new interests in fields of fiction I hadn't really thought about before, or had thought I didn't like. I just had a lecture on mercy & forgiveness in Victorian fiction by Dr Jan-Melissa Schramm, which made me see Victorian authors like Dickens in a completely new way. I must confess I don't really like Dickens, but now I think I might come back to him and maybe be able to appreciate him more. The gist of the lecture was that Victorian authors like Dickens or Gaskell were of the opinion that reading (the Bible, of course, but also increasingly fiction (which in my eyes the Bible is anyway, but you know...)) enables us to enlarge our capacity for compassion and to take on different perspectives. Dickens and Gaskell both made their readers sympathise with characters who had done wrong and both wrote very strongly about the importance of mercy and forgiveness. This was especially due to the historical context: The Fair Trial Act in 1890 was just one sign of the increasing want for more humane punishment for criminals; but the Industrial Revolution as well as growing poverty also caused social unrest, which as Dr Schramm argues had Britain on the brink of a civil war by the end of the 19th century. She suggests that Dickens and Gaskell promoted the concept of forgiveness to aid reconsiliation.
This is of course only a very rough version of what she said, and I'm not sure I agree with her on everything - one thing that came up during the questions afterwards was Dickens' 'hypocrisy' of often killing a character (e.g. lady Dedlock in Bleak House) that he spent so much time making his readers sympathise with. One could argue that he felt the need to ultimately punish her anyway, or maybe he just thought it would make people sympathise with her more; but the lecture certainly gave me a new angle on his work.

My other, regular lectures are on G.K. Chesterton and Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice and Mansfield Park. I have to confess that I only took Chesterton because everything else was booked, and I had never even heard of him before. My preparatory reading included some of his Father Brown stories, some of his essays, some og his poems and his novel The Man Who Was Thursday.
Now, initially I wasn't very keen on him. I (still) don't really like the Father Brown stories (even though the lectures have made me appreciate them a little more) and when I read that he was an active Roman catholic, I almost gave up on him. Silly me! His essays are really very good (he produced something over 4000 of them in his lifetime! Plus short stories, poems, books... they are not only very witty but they do make very valid points. One I particularly like is The Travellers In State (this site has a lot of his essays, just read a few!). One thing that really shines through in all of them is Chesterton's craftsmanship, his joy in assembling sentences, of rich and especially playful language, that makes me think of Stephen Fry (yes, there he is again! No post would be complete without a little Fry). Chesterton himself described his essay-writing style thus:

There are essays 'that are really themes and themes that are really theses': 'They represent what may be called the Extreme Right of rigid right reason and militant purpose, after the Latin model.'Chesterton preferred those 'very English' essays that are 'none the less beautiful because they twist and ramble like an English road.'

His style really often is like an English Road, beautifully paced - as indeed is his poem The Rolling English Road. His use of humor as well as seriousness (not solemnity!) to tackle quite serious and abstract topics works very well, because these two contrast in a way that makes his message much more striking and often catches the reader off guard and makes him/her think again. Similarly to George Orwell (although they couldn't be further apart in everything else), he also uses everyday examples to explain abstract concepts. People often debate whether his work is just to be enjoyed, or whether there is a deeper meaning to it. Personally, I do think he makes quite a lot of often very profound points, but  I do also think that stuff like The Shop Of Ghosts is just there to be enjoyed. In any case, his essays make great reading, and they're not very long.

I will go on to The Man Who Was Thursday, but right now I have to go to my next lecture - Chesterton, incidentally. Until then, farewell!