Eat, Prey, Hate

I wanted to like it. I really did but when I finally got around to seeing the hit film of the summer, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the first thing that struck me was that it appeared to be called something completely different in its home language. Män som hatar kvinnor appears in the credits. If my knowledge of Swedish serves me right (and doesn’t it just serve me right!) that has nothing whatever to do with dragons or even tattoos, but means ‘The men who hate women’ or possibly ‘men are those who hate women’ (I discounted an early reading which involved hats).
Well, that’s me told, isn’t it? A no-nonsense title, that. Radical, separatist feminists might have worn that on button badges in the 1980s or spray-painted it on walls while they were coming home from their book groups where they read Valerie Solanas’ Manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men. Another popular book from that time was Misogynies, a cheery tome which urged women to creep up behind random men and shove them into the path of speeding trains. My heart sank. Was this film going to be a sequel to that? Would it turn out to be Exploding Misogynies 3: Total Annihilation?
Well, it did and it didn’t. It had at least one male character who failed to prove a woman-hater or a murderer, but just the one, mind you. Woe betide you if you’re the remotest bit kinky or fetishistic, though, because then it goes without saying that you’re a rapist and molester you evil pig bastard. You must be punished! Let’s just say it’s not exactly a sex-positive movie. Shortbus it ain’t.
However, in the end it was not its politics that made me twitch. I kept thinking: ‘I’ve seen this before. Where have I seen this?’ Now that really bugged me. This plot was very, very familiar, but how could it be? This was a brand new film of a fairly new book. It wasn’t until they got to the meatballs that it clicked.
No visit to Swedish furnishing giant Ikea is complete without a plate of meatballs, eh? Once you’ve got them rattling around inside you, it’s time to tour the hangar-sized sheds in search of home-assembly wardrobes. As our hero cooked his meatballs I realised that Ikea was the inspiration for the whole plot of Men Hate Women (as I intend to call it from now on). It is constructed from ready-mades, painted in bright colours and slotted together. But where did the pre-fabricated pieces come from? Two novels by another writer had been chopped up, put through the mincer, reconstituted into one big ball and cooked in sauce. Or, to put it another way, they had been disassembled, then screwed back together to make a massive walk-in closet instead of two perfectly formed cupboards.
The first of these source novels had the splendid title of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and the second was called The Skull beneath the Skin. Don’t know them? If you liked Men Hate Women then you’d love them. Come with me back to the 1970s... (Oh, and I should at this point, of course, say ‘Spoiler Alert!’)
Once upon a time, British crime-writer P.D. James decided to mess around with the idea of the gifted amateur, the likes of Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey, say. As an antidote to these untrained but infallible detectives, P.D. James created Cordelia Grey, a young secretary who inherits her boss’s private investigation firm when he commits suicide. Cordelia launches into her new career with gusto. Gifted she most certainly is, but her amateur bungling nearly costs her her own life and taxes the other players in the drama even dearer. Trying to clear up the trail of murder, mayhem, burning cars, destroyed families and ruined reputations at the end, Inspector Dalgliesh is convinced Cordelia was behind it all, but can’t pin a thing on her. No surprises there. He has only himself to blame. Who trained her boss when he was in the police? Dalgliesh did.
Amazingly, this was not Cordelia’s last case. In the second book she is hired as a bodyguard for a woman who goes to a mansion on an island and is in fear of her life from a murderer whose identity only she knows. On top form, Cordelia’s body-guarding skills are such that her poor client doesn’t even last the night.
What has this to do with Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, Men Hate Women? Maybe nothing, but there are some odd coincidences. Oh, one or two would have been nothing more than that - coincidence... but there are maybe a few more than one or two. Consider these plot snippets taken from Dame P.D. James’ two Cordelia Grey novels...
A detective is invited to find out who killed a rich and powerful man’s child many years ago (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). The killing took place on a small island where there was no access to the mainland. The island was a haunt of Nazis in the past and there had been at least one other death associated with them (The Skull beneath the Skin). The detective uncovers a vital clue in a strange coded message, found on the back page of a book the child once owned. It reveals the family secret that threatens everything (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). The detective finds a clue in a photograph of a crowd at a pageant. The detective thinks the murder victim must have seen someone in the crowd who wanted to be hidden and finds that the original photograph is missing. On visiting someone who has copy of a local newspaper with the photograph in it, the detective sees the rich man himself in amongst the crowd (The Skull beneath the Skin). There is a very serious attempt to kill the detective but, on escaping, the detective chases after the would-be murderer who leaps into a car, drives off at high speed and crashes, dying in the fire (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman)...
Starting to sound familiar? Meatballs repeating on you, eh? That’s right, it’s the entire plot of Men Hate Women, but it’s only now when I write it out that I see author Stieg Larsson had been very crafty in his borrowing... he’d done it in badger stripes! One bit of the first James’ book, then the second, then the first again... The actual ending of his story is less P.D. James and more Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister) but then Dame P.D. did tend to go for complex, morally fraught conclusions, so best to plunder someone else there.
The one original thing Larsson did was to divide Cordelia Grey into two separate characters, the girl with the dragon tattoo and the journalist, but they both come straight out of P.D. James. Mind you, I had to say I liked the new English title. The girl did, after all, have drag on. And it was tat, too.

The (Clockwork) Orange Catholic Church ready to be wound up

Under the plan, the Pope will issue an apostolic constitution, a form of papal decree, that will lead to the creation of “personal ordinariates” for Anglicans who convert to Rome. These will provide a legal framework to allow Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving distinctive elements of their Anglican identity, such as liturgy.
But, but, but... if it is now possible for Church of England vicars to achieve full communion with Rome and yet still remain Church of England vicars, if the Anglican liturgy is to be incorporated into the Catholic creed... then Rome cannot any longer be Rome. It will have become, at least in part, the Church of England. The Reformation has reached the Vatican.
Of course, I dare say that Archbishop Cranmer would never have seen the Reformation as fully complete until the conversion of the Jews, that being their obsession back then, but I think he might have settled for the conversion of the Pope as a fair compromise. The Jesuits of his day, however, would have demanded an auto da fe and stuck Benedict on top of it themselves. To them, Holy Mother Church would have welcomed the Protestant heresy into its very heart.
Benedict is smiling at the supposed cleverness of his plan. Thousands of Anglicans will defect to his new half-way house, his modified Catholicism, and this will be a deadly blow to the enemy. I would humbly suggest he may not quite thought this through... so uncharacteristic of the present Pope. If married clergy are absorbed unchanged into the Mother Church, are not existing Catholic priests going to feel snubbed? Is it not as likely that disgruntled cradle Catholics may also defect to this new constitution as Protestants?
The Pope has already shown his determination to reunite Christendom at almost any price, welcoming back the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X despite a Holocaust-denying bishop in its ranks...
The Vatican is acting like Seth Brundel, just after he has been through the telepod. It feels masterful, renewed, all-conquering. After a while, though, evidence of the weird mutation it has undergone will to start to appear. It is not going to be pretty. It will dawn on Catholics around the world that their faith has become a completely new animal, one they thought could never exist in nature.
Maledict could win 400,000 disgruntled Anglicans now, and lose far, far more Catholics later. He could forfeit all of Brazil, for instance. Evangelical missionaries are gaining ground in South America and they now need only point out to hesitant converts that there is no risk to their souls in making the leap, as the Vatican has already smoothed the way!
St Malachi’s prophesy is fulfilled. Maledict is indeed the last ever Catholic Pope. He has destroyed the church, as it was foreseen that he would. As I commented when Mr Blair converted, I trust that the bears’ personal sanitary arrangements remain unchanged, but in future, whenever anyone asks “Is the Pope a Catholic” the answer will have to be ’...er, well, no actually...’
See also: 400,000 former Anglicans worldwide seek immediate unity with Rome
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article6879293.ece

Dead or No Dead?

I just spotted this report on the website of the German newsmagazine Die Stern. It is all about a new game show on Japanese television. It is not unlike the 1980s British prime time, er, ‘entertainment’ Game for a Laugh but this one, though, ramps up the fear factor a little bit more than Jeremy Beadle used to. Just a little...
The German-language commentary starts off roughly like this:

“Do you find hidden camera shows boring? The Japanese do. That’s why they’ve taken to ‘pranking“ people with fake terror attacks in the popular “Candid Camera” style show, Panic Face King. The unwitting victim in this edition thinks that he alone has survived a terrorist onslaught - how his friends and the audience laugh as he tries to escape what he thinks is certain death...”

You shouldn’t need much in the way of translation after that. The pictures speak for themselves. This makes The Endurance Game that Clive James made his name laughing at back in the 80s look, well, almost gentle. I think the bit that gets me the most is the inset picture of people laughing. What a great joke!
“Der Clip hat im Netz zweifelhafte Popularität erlangt the reporter comments, noting that the YouTube videos from the show are proving a massive, though morally dubious, hit.
What next for Japanese TV fun? Well, The Endurance Game is still going and I recall seeing a report not long ago after a contestant lost all his fingers in one of their stunts, so there is only one place left for them to go. Saw, Hostel and My Little Eye the gameshow... but the twist? It’s a comedy! Laugh as they die! It’s hilarious. Naturally, they will want Noel Edmonds as a consultant. He's got previous on that one, of course. Which box has the Semtex under the lid, eh Noel?

Pithead Ballot

Good ol’ Normo Tebbs. Bless him. Such an innocent lamb. Heard him last night on the radio reacting to the visit of the now-released Brighton bomber to the Houses of Parliament. Cracking stuff. All about how he hopes there is a Hell so that the bombers can suffer the worst punishments in the lowest pits of all. Classic! I love the way he thinks his Earthly snobbery is going to be continued into the afterlife. Those dirty working-class terrorists are going to be at the bottom of the nastiest, grungiest dungeon, whereas my mate, the Devil, is going to have a Lake-of-Fire-side penthouse apartment ready for me on the upper levels, where I can look down on you in your pain and grin. Really, Normo? Is that what you think? That’s what it’s going to be, then? Listen, sweetheart, Lord Satan is going to sort out your ironically-appropriate torment soon enough, straight after you check in. Quite frankly, at your age, I wouldn’t go putting any ideas into his head. If the Dark Prince knows you don’t want to be near any Irish terror-merchants, where’s the first place he’ll put you? You’re not so naive as to imagine he’s going to reward you for being such a good servant of his up here, do you? Sorry, Norm, but it just doesn’t work that way. Read the instruction manual again. They’ve got their own class system down there. See, unless you’re one of the original angels who fought with him against God, then... Sorry? What’s that, Norm? You’re not going to Hell? You’re going to be up in Heaven, with the Baby Jesus? No, it’s okay. I am still listening. It’s just that you’ll have to excuse me because I think I’ve just given myself a hernia laughing...

Let us now praise famous men

When I saw the phrase “Minor tears in PM’s eye” on the BBC website I did wonder if Gordon Brown’s heart were melting, at last. Was he feeling a tinge of sorrow for the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe sympathy for the victims of the recession? I was, just for a moment, touched that he might cry for us all, instead of just for himself.
Then I heard it pronounced and realised it was the other kind of tear, the one that rhymes with bare. Oh well.
As for Obama’s peace prize, I was surprised, but pleased enough. Why not? As I was fond of saying when he was elected, it is good to see an Irishman back in the White House and so this is yet another Nobel peace prize success for Ireland... Of course, I was being silly about O’Bama sounding like an Irish name, but then I flicked through a recent copy of the Irish Enquirer and discovered that County Cork’s finest genealogists have outdone themselves, proving that both he and Michelle Obama are as Irish as the shamrocks. Well done to them. I wonder if they can do as well for former Japanese prime minister Ohara.
Anyway, it is a good omen. On the bright side, I suspect that the prize was given more in hope than anything else... and was that not his poster campaign slogan? On the dark side, I have a horrible suspicion that the Norwegian committee have chosen to laud him now because they secretly fear that he may not be with us the next time they convene.

Out Cold

A curious boxing story, pointed out to me by the ever-watchful Savage Hamster. It seems that our brave boys have had the diarrhoea kicked out of them by a little girl. In a battle royale of the kind not seen since Ken Airconditioningsystem hung up his gloves, Ashley Wolfe, twenty-four years-old and five foot three in her stockinged feet, cold-cocked a contingent of Coldstream Guards in Canada. As the Vancouver Sun puts it:

A petite Vancouver woman is being sought by an English court after wiping the floor with a collection of Britain’s premier soldiers...

Well, her floor must have been spotless by the end of that little lot. Not even Cilit Bang could clean up that well!
It seems the soldiers were making unwelcome advances, so she knocked a sergeant out “cold with one punch after pushing two other guardsmen to the floor.”

Woolwich magistrates have had the audacity to try this Mighty Atom over the incident in absentia, as though British courts still had any jurisdiction over events occurring in Canada... which ceased to be a colony of ours some good few years ago now, I believe. Though I dare say the army may be embarrassed at the outcome of the fight and want the wigs and gowns to take revenge for them. The tone of the Vancouver Sun article is such that I doubt the Canadian authorities are going to treat the call for an international arrest warrant any too seriously, though. Patriotic pride mixed with equal parts smirking humour come across strongly in the reporting, I would say. On the basis of this story, I think we would be well advised not to start any wars with Canada.

To see a dramatic, artist’s impression of the fight, click here:

http://www.metrokitty.com/blog_files/min_page.jpg

As Savage Hamster says, Rule Britannia!

La Mer, qu’on voit danser...

Merely passing on a few links here, courtesy of one of my favourite bloggers, the wonderful Agnès Giard who writes for the French daily, Libération. That’ll be political, then, eh? Pas de tout! Agnès’ blog, Les 400 culs, devotes itself to La planète sexe and this week reports from Venice.
The Divine Annie Sprinkle has been there, conducting a mass wedding in which artists and lovers marry the sea. This is the Blue Wedding, to match the Red, Green and Yellow ones previously enacted. It’s a four elements thing.
See the pictures here:
http://thefearsociety.wordpress.com/
and read the CVs of the Big Blue’s marriage partners here:
http://loveartlab.org/our-bios.php
Also highly recommended, while you’re on her page, is Agnès’provocative essay La fellation - acte rebelle which views the Ur-Eve, Lilith, from a radical new angle: elle fait l’amour d’une façon mystique, recevant le phallus comme une hostie, à genoux devant le fétiche qu’elle embrasse, éblouie par la grâce…
In poor taste? Er, hardly!