Dante's Inferno

Last night I was playing on my two new PlayStation 3 games which I got yesterday. Dante's Inferno was a kind of action horror game which was very, very loosely based on the first part of The Divine Comedy a poem by Dante Alighieri. In the poem, the poet Dante is taken on a tour through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven to find his beloved Beatrice. In the game, Beatrice is captured by infernal forces and Dante, now a Crusader, has to fight his way through Hell in order to rescue her, with the help of Death's magical scythe and various magical powers to fight his way through the nine circles of Hell, fighting monsters and jumping over pits and other traps. It is a really fun game, with some really spectacular graphics. It probably also enjoys the distinction of being one of the very few action video games to be based on 14th century Italian poetry.

The other game, Heavy Rain, was really different. It was really a role-playing mystery thriller, where you have to search a rain-soaked American city for a serial killer, "The Origami Killer", before he kills his latest victim. The game got a lot of attention for it's very innovative control system where you can interact with a lot of your environment, and also hear what your character is thinking at various points in the game. The decisions that you make in the course of the game can really affect the outcome, so it's one of those games that you can play a number of times and not play the same game twice. Again it is a really amazing looking game. Two very different games, but both really good in their own ways.

Today was the start of a new week at work, and once more it was very slow, with a lot of admittedly minor but very annoying irritations. I decided to take a half day on Tuesday and a day off on Wednesday, so that should be fun. There's no real reason for the time off, I just thought that it would be a nice change. The weather was really warm and sunny again today, and I hope that it continues like that for the rest of the week.

The Martians and Us

Last night my internet connection was down for most of the evening (which was why I didn't post yesterday). I watched a DVD of a Doctor Who story called "The Five Doctors", which was a twentieth anniversary special from 1983. Later on I saw an episode of a documentary show called The Martians and Us, a history of British science-fiction. This episode involved the theory of evolution as seen through the works of writers such as HG Wells, John Wyndham, Olaf Stapleton and Arthur C. Clarke as well as the Daleks from Doctor Who.

It was another quiet and dull day at work. I had to go to an hour long lecture on new updates to bankruptcy laws. At work I was reading a book called Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen. It's a collection of his poetry and song lyrics. I got home at around six o'clock.

The streets of the city are a complete mess at the moment due to some industrial dispute about collecting the rubbish.

At the moment I'm listening to the Torchwood radio plays from last week. The show is back on TV today.

I'm still working on my plans to move over to Canada. There is so much to arrange and work out that it is all very over-whelming but I am committed to the idea and the more I think about it, the more promising it seems.

Poetry

I was watching an episode of Peep Show on DVD last night. I really like that show. I think it's one of the funniest comedies around. It's a sit-com about two guys who share a flat, one of them is a neurotic loan manager whose main interest is history, and the other is an over-confident, unemployed, would be musician, whose main interests are women and drugs. The main feature of the show is that the whole thing is filmed from the point of view of the characters, with the inner thoughts of the two main characters revealed through voice-over narration. It's often really dark and quite savage at times but it is very clever and very funny.

Today was really quiet at work. I wrote out some of my favourite quotations on yellow Post-It notes and stuck them around the edges of the computer monitor. Just something else to look at while at work.

I had a look through my old notebooks where I used to write poetry. I used to do it all the time, but I haven't written anything in ages. I wrote the following gibberish to see if I could still do it. I don't really think I can.

CITY BY NIGHT

The night breaks open
Incandescent fragments fall
In one brief flash
The city lies illuminated.
The knife buildings
Piercing the heart of the night
The eyes look up
Empty and lost
Whirr, click
The camera records.
Life lies projected
Onto a shattered mirror.

More From The Twilight Zone

Last night I was watching a couple of episodes of the fourth season of the original The Twilight Zone. The first one was "Mute" about a young girl who is brought up to communicate soley through telepathy, and has never learned how to speak or listen, but when her parents die in an accident she finds herself trapped in a world with which she is unable to communicate. The second story was called "Death Ship", a creepy science-fiction ghost story, in which the crew of a spaceship explore a mysterious planet only to discover a crashed ship that seems to be identical to their own, with a dead crew on board which look exactly like themselves. Both of the episodes were written by Richard Matheson, author of I am Legend.

I was also watching an episode of a 1960s show called Adam Adamant Lives!, about an Edwardian "gentleman adventurer" who finds himself frozen in 1902 by his enemies and is revived in the 1960s, where he gets into various bizarre adventures (including one I saw about a group of killer charity workers who conceal weapons in their collecting tins). The main character never really worried much about killing his enemies, but he was always very polite about it.

I subscribed to a couple of books last night from a site called Daily Lit, which sends books in short daily segments via e-mail, and it's free for the older books. I subscribed to The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, and another thing called Poems of Inspiration, which I thought might help cheer me up when I get depressed. They were both free.

The rest of the day has been really quiet, and dull, as usual.

Not After Midnight

Last night I was reading a short story called "Not After Midnight" by Daphne du Maurier, in which a lonely schoolteacher from England goes on holiday to Crete to do some painting. He soon discovers that the last person who rented his chalet died in unusual circumstamces a couple of weeks earlier, and that he had some connection with a mysterious American couple who are renting the chalet next door, he soon finds himself reluctantly drawn into the mystery and very quickly comes to regret it. It was a pretty effective story.

Today I went out to the sales and bought The Simpsons Movie and a box-set of all five movies in The Omen series for £15, and a volume of the first two books in the 'Discworld' series by Terry Pratchett (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic), so that was really good. I bought my groceries on my way home and also got today's copy of The Guardian which had a free CD of poets reading their own work (the poets included on the CD are Siegfried Sassoon, WH Auden, TS Eliot, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney).

Back home I watched a movie on TV called Strangers on a Train, a 1951 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, from a novel by Patricia Highsmith with a screenplay co-written by famous crime writer Raymond Chandler. The film concerns two men, successful tennis player Guy Haines (played by Farley Granger) and wealthy playboy Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who meet for the first time on a train. It turns out that Guy's estranged wife is refusing to divorce him so he can marry his girlfriend, while Bruno hates his father, and so Bruno proposes that they 'swap murders', basically he will kill Guy's wife and Guy will kill Bruno's father, so there's nothing to connect them. Guy refuses. However, Bruno dosen't take the hint and murders Guy's wife at a fairground. Guy is immediately the prime suspect, and Bruno soon starts trying to make him fulfill his part of the bargain. It's a good film, which is pretty suspenseful and does have some really effective set-pieces in it.

End of the Week

I set off for work early again today. On the way I stopped off for the latest issue of Radio Times and The Guardian for the Great Poets of the 20th Century booklet (which today focussed on Philip Larkin).

Work was pretty much the same as usual, and as usual for a Friday there was hardly anyone in. One good thing is that I have next Friday and the following Monday off. So I'll have a four day weekend next week.

As I was walking home I had only got half way there when it started to rain really heavily, so I ended up getting pretty wet.

Don't Look Now

Last night I was reading a short story called "Don't Look Now" by Daphne du Maurier. It concerned an English couple who take a holiday in Venice to help them get over the death of their daughter. While they are there they encounter a couple of elderly Scottish sisters whi tell the wife that they can see the ghost of her daughter and that she is happy. For the first time, the wife manages to feel comforted and happy, but the husband refuses to let himself believe it. When his wife has to travel back to England, the husband finds himself stranded in Venice, which is being plagued by a serial killer. He starts to see glimpses of what he believes to be a young girl in distress, and decides to go and help. Which turns out to be a big mistake. The story is pretty creepy and unsettling. It was adapted, fairly faithfully into a film, directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

I also watched the final episode of The Worlds of Fantasy which dealt with role of fantasy in the modern world, and dealt with the work of authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and film-maker Guillermo Del Toro. It was very interesting, and it's a pity that the show is the last in the series. I also had a reply from Michele who thanked me for my text message and said that she had had a great day.

On my way into work I got The Independent for the Great Poets booklet which today focussed on William Blake, along with Christopher Smart and Thomas Gray, and The Guardian for the Great Poets of the 20th Century which had a booklet about one of my favourite poets, Sylvia Plath.

I also got the comments from my evening class tutor for the individual tuition. here are some of the comments:
" There's much here that is skilful and eye-catching.
You are good at creating believable and convincing atmosphere. You can cast a spell over the reader and get him/her to relax into your story-telling.
Plotting is a strong point also. And in this piece your dialogue is generally very naturalistic.
Carry on with your story-telling because you have a great fluency and imagination."
So that was nice. She did say I needed to tighten up my prose a little, and that it ended too abruptly, but then it was only an extract from the beginning of something much longer.

I walked home after work today, for a change. It only took me about ten minutes longer than it would on the bus.

Book Group

I ran out of bread last night and so this morning I had to buy a ready-made sandwich on my way into work, along with today's copy of The Independent for the Great Poets booklet which today discussed the life and work of John Milton.

Work was more or less the same as usual, and was very quiet. After work I went down to the Victoria Bar for the meeting of my book group. I haven't been for a few months, but I went along today and it was good. This month's book under discussion was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and everyone loved it. It went down really, really well. There were about five other people there, aside from me and I was the only man. We left at around half past ten, and I walked home.

Rebecca is a good book. It was published in 1938 and concerns a young woman who works as a paid companion for this wealthy older woman, and while the two are on holiday in Monte Carlo the young woman (who is never named in the book) meets the mysterious Maxim de Winter who owns the large mansion of Manderlay in England. After a whirlwind courtship the young woman marries Maxim and moves with him to Manderlay where she meets the sinister servant Mrs. Danvers and starts to learn more about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca. The book is kind of slow to start for the first few chapters, when it's mroe like a romance novel, but when the mystery and sinister elements start to take hold it does become quite gripping. It was made into a very good film by Alfred Hitchcock.

I wrote my story for tomorrow's evening class last night. This class is the one where I'll have my turn at the one to one tuition. Should be interesting.

Start of Another Week

Last night I was watching a couple of episodes of Tales of the Unexpected, the first one was about a doctor who is distraught when his beautiful wife leads him and then later turns up as a hit-and-run victim, but it soon turns out that things are not what they seem. The second one was about a successful English novelist doing a publicity tour in New York where he begins to be plagued by abusive phone calls threatening his life. Both of them were kind of disappointing with fairly predictable twists.

Today has been fairly quiet. Mostly it was a fairly average day at work. I left at around quarter past six and on my way home I bought a copy of The Independent for the latest in the Great Poets series (today the booklet discussed John Donne, Ben Johnson, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell).

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Last night was fairly quiet. I spent most of the time watching TV, but there wasn't really much on worth watching.

Today I went along to my parent's house for my lunch (which was salmon, potatoes and peas, followed by vanilla ice cream covered with a kind of red wine). The new issue of Fortean Times had arrived during the week, so that's always fun to read. I also managed to get the latest in the Great Poets series from The Independent, today it was the turn of William Shakespeare. It also discussed a number of other Elizabethan poets (Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe). My parents are busy with a major redecoration project at the moment. So it has been a fairly quiet day.

At The Movies

Last night I was watching a film on television called Naked, a 1993 film directed by Mike Leigh, about the uglier side of urban Britain in the 1990s. The film opens with Johnny (played by David Thewlis) fleeing Manchester to London, after comitting a violent crime. He heads off to hide out at the flat of his ex-girlfriend, Louise (Lesley Sharp), but wastes no time in seducing her flatmate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge). Louise very quickly gets sick of him and throws him out, and so Johnny takes to wandering the London streets, encountering various other characters whom he regales with his witty, intelligent but bitterly cynical rants about life and philosophy. It's quite a long film, and very talky. The film was almost entirely improvised over an eleven week rehearsal period (the original script was just 25 pages long). The film is intelligent, very bleak, quite brutal and at times very funny and surprisingly compassionate. David Thewlis turns in a superb performance, making an utterly repulsive character weirdly sympathetic, if never actually likeable.

I got a letter today telling me that I do not have to appear as a witness in court later this month as the case has been adjourned. I don't know whether it has been cancelled outright or if it has just been delayed. I daresay I'll find out soon enough, though.When I got my groceries today I got a copy of The Independent newspaper because they are giving away a booklet every day for the next two weeks about The Great Poets. Today was Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales.

This afternoon I went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw Diary of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero, the fifth in his series of zombie films which started with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. In this film a group of university film student are making a bad horror about a Mummy when they find themselves under attack when the bodies of the dead start coming back to life to kill and eat the living. The film itself purports to be a spur of the moment documentary they are shooting about what's happening around them, as they attempt to find help and safety. There is a lot of social commentary in the film which at times breaks up the momentum, but it was still good, being very suspenseful, gruesome and at times very funny.

After the film I went for a drink before going back in to see There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is set in the early years of the 20th century and tells the story of Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), a silver miner who decides to seek his fortune in oil mining. After he manages to become fairly wealthy in oil, he finds out about a massive oil deposit underneath the small town of Little Boston in California. However he soon comes into conflict with the local preacher (Paul Dano). It's a truly epic film and has a great performance from Daniel Day-Lewis (who won the Best Actor Oscar for this film). I think it atually deserved to win more than it did, although i know that it was nominated for a lot of Oscars.

After that film I went back to the bar and had a burger with chips, onion rings and coleslaw and a pint of beer, so that was nice.

Doctor Who

Last night was pretty quiet. I spent most of the evening watching Doctor Who on DVD. I watched An Unearthy Child, which was the first Doctor Who story broadcast back in November 1963. In the story, set in London 1963, two school teachers are curious about a girl who displays an unusual amount of knowledge of science and history, so they follow her to her home, which is nothing more than a junkyard. They follow her inside and confront her strange, elderly gradfather, The Doctor (played here by William Hartnell), who they accuse of having locked the girl up in an old police telephone box. Breaking in, of course, they find that the telephone box is in fact a vast time and space machine and that the girl and her grandfather are aliens. They are soon whisked back to the Stone Age and spend the next three episodes involved in a leadership struggle amongst a tribe of cavemen. The original conception of Doctor Who was that it would be primarily an educational series about history, and that most of the stories would involve The Doctor and his companions traveling back in time and interacting with historical figures, with occasional stories set in the future or on other planets with aliens and whatnot. However the purely historical stories were abandoned very quickly.

I also watched a Doctor Who story called Remembrance of the Daleks, which was first broadcast in 1988. In this story the seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and his companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) travel back to London 1963, where they and a military task-force are caught up in a battle between two rival factions of Daleks over a powerful device created by the Time Lords, which the Daleks want to use in their endless attempts at universal domination. It was a good story. They were both very good actually.

I went to my parent's house today as usual. Since it was my mum's birthday on Friday, we went out to a restaurant called Howies for lunch. I had a venison burger with onion relish and melted mozarella cheese, and chips, with a chocolate brownie cake topped with vanilla ice-cream for dessert.

I was listening to a show on the radio this afternoon called Adventures in Poetry which this week was discussing a poem called "Matilda Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death" by Hilaire Belloc, which was very amusing.

MATILDA WHO TOLD LIES AND WAS BURNED TO DEATH.
by Hilaire Belloc

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes;
Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth,
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth,
Attempted to Believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her,
And would have done so, had not She
Discovered this Infirmity.
For once, towards the Close of Day,
Matilda, growing tired of play,
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the Telephone
And summoned the Immediate Aid
Of London's Noble Fire-Brigade.
Within an hour the Gallant Band
Were pouring in on every hand,
From Putney, Hackney Downs, and Bow.
With Courage high and Hearts a-glow,
They galloped, roaring through the Town,
"Matilda's House is Burning Down!"
Inspired by British Cheers and Loud
Proceeding from the Frenzied Crowd,
They ran their ladders through a score
Of windows on the Ball Room Floor;
And took Peculiar Pains to Souse
The Pictures up and down the House,
Until Matilda's Aunt succeeded
In showing them they were not needed;
And even then she had to pay
To get the Men to go away!
It happened that a few Weeks later
Her Aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that Interesting Play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
She had refused to take her Niece
To hear this Entertaining Piece:
A Deprivation Just and Wise
To Punish her for Telling Lies.
That Night a Fire did break out—
You should have heard Matilda Shout!
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To People passing in the Street—
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence)—
but all in vain!
For every time she shouted "Fire!"
They only answered "Little Liar!"
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

Another Week Starts

Last night I finished reading Dr. No by Ian Fleming. The story opens with secret agent James Bond seriously injured after an attack by an enemy agent. In order to aid his recuperation, his boss "M." sends him to Jamaica to look into the disappearance of a British agent and his secretary. The obvious assumption is that the two have run off together, but Bond is not so sure. He soon discovers a connection between their disappearance and a seemingly uninhabited island owned by the mysterious and reclusive Doctor No. This was the seventh James Bond book published and achieved the distinction of being the first one filmed in 1962, with Sean Connery in the lead role. The book features plenty of action, adventure, glamour, danger and suspense. The familiar ingredients of beautiful women, villainous maniacs bent on world domination, secret bases and armies of disposable henchmen are all present and correct. The main difference between the James Bond novels and the films are that the books don't feature any of the film series' trademark gadgets or much of the humour. Fleming writes well, making Bond more of a flawed anti-hero than the films do. He is also very good at the action scenes. However, the books, at least judged by today's standards, are very politically incorrect at times and there is a surprisingly strong sadistic element to Fleming's prose. If you enjoyed the early Bond films, or if you enjoyed the most recent Bond film, Casino Royale, than you would probably enjoy the books.

I also watched a film on TV last night called Stephen King's Thinner, directed by Tom Holland. The film tells the story of a very successful and very overweight lawyer, who accidentally runs over and kills an elderly gypsy woman. However, the lawyer and his friends, the local policeman and judge, manage to rig the inquest so he gets off completely free. The woman's father touches the lawyer on his way out and mutters the word "thinner". The lawyer soon finds that he is losing weight every day. At first he is overjoyed, but then he realises that the weight continues to drop and no matter what he eats or how much he eats, he can't gain any weight. It wasn't a very good film, with lots of very silly elements, such as a cursed strawberry pie.

Of course it was the start of a new week at work, and as dull as ever. Everyone seemed to be in a really sour mood today, presumably because it was a Monday and a week and a half until payday, so no-one had any money. I bought today's copy of The Times for the weekly poetry section they have started running on Mondays, written by Freida Hughes (daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and a noted poet, painter and author in her own right).

I didn't go out after work and instead just went straight home.