International Women's Day (IWD), also called International Working Women's Day, is marked on March 8 every year. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women to a celebration for women's economic, political, and social achievements. Started as a Socialist political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries, primarily in Europe, including Russia. In some regions, the day lost its political flavor, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love for women in a way somewhat similar to a mixture of Mother's Day and Valentine's Day. In other regions, however, the political and human rights theme designated by the United Nations runs strong, and political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner. This is a day which some people celebrate by wearing purple ribbons.
I had just come out of a brightly lit corridor after being ten –
one (washroom) and entered the dimly lit studio so wasn’t able to see
very well. I tripped on an I beam that was bolted to the floor.
ironically one that I had helped install weeks before
!. I was in a rush as I had to get back to set because they were about
to start filming ... I tripped on the beam and went down hard on my left
wrist, it was very painful at the time but I got up and dusted myself
off and hurried to set as after all ...the
show must go on!
I went and saw the first aid person after and she poked and prodded
and concluded that she didn’t think it was broken. My chiropractor also
looked at it and messed around with it and figured it was just a bad
sprain so I stupidly just left it at that .
It did start to feel better as time has gone by but ocaissionally I
will wake up after having slept on it a certain way and it’s still kind
of painful.
I wound up going to my family doctor and told him about it
so he sent me for xrays and sure enough there
is a small piece of bone floating around in there so he told me I
should go get a cast put on it which I now have . I will go back in a
couple of weeks to have it checked out again. Fortunately although
cumbersome I can manage most things although I will have
to see how it is having a rigid wrist on the bike. I’ll let you know
how it progresses. Much like Robo man I may complain a bit but ultimately will suck it up and soldier on!
Cheers, Al
I may not be able to attend or be late around 7:30 or a bit later. Cheers, Moe
P, let me know when you know about bridge Sunday. W
Thought you might enjoy this review:
In 1971, Audrey Death has spent half a century catatonic in Friern
mental hospital. Zack Busner – a radical psychiatrist just recovering
from coming under the influence of RD Laing – has an idea. He recognises
that she and several of the hospital's other long-term
patients may not be mad, but are actually suffering from the 1920s
sleeping sickness encephalitis
lethargica. Oliver Sacks-style, and somewhat outside the formal channels, he tries treating them with L-dopa.
They start waking up.
Meanwhile, if that's the word, we go back to Audrey's wartime past as a
munitions worker in the Woolwich arsenal, and those of her older
brother, Albert, a war office civil servant with an eidetic memory (like
Zack Busner, another old Self theme), and her younger
brother, Stanley, who goes off to fight in the war. A third strand of
the story shows us Busner, in old age, shambling around north London and
looking back on his life – a journey that is to culminate in a visit to
the now-decommissioned mental hospital.
Umbrella is
not, be warned, altogether easy going: 400 pages of unbroken
stream-of-consciousness dotted across three time frames, leaping
jaggedly between four points of view, and with barely
a paragraph break, let alone a chapter heading. I started out wondering
whether, as a prank, Self had decided to write the novel that Richard
Tull, the unpopular writer in Martin
Amis's The
Information, is
working on. Self's sentences themselves sometimes resemble Victorian
lunatic asylums refitted for 1970s use: ugly, overstuffed, clattering
with the moans of lunatics
and bristling with redundant gothic spires. The antic gurgles of
laughter you find in Self's earlier work are few and far between. In
their place, though, is a sustained depth and seriousness, and an
ambition of technique that I haven't seen in him before.
[Chloe Alexis Dunn shared a link.
Patrick James Dunn Wish Mom was still alive and knitting. She'd certainly have been more than delighted to knit jumpers for these lovely creatures!
Chloe Alexis Dunn She would have. Just like she clothed all my barbies, grandma got behind a project and gave if her all!!]
I don't mean to put you off. Umbrella is
old-school modernism. It isn't supposed to be a breeze. But it is, to
use the literary critical term of art, kind of amazing. To frame it in
terms of
the film Gremlins, if you fed Alan Hollinghurst's The
Stranger's Child after midnight, it might come out looking a bit like Umbrella.
Both share the historical range, the multiplication of perspectives,
the interest in architecture and
memory, and the central preoccupation with time. But where
Hollinghurst's mode is fastidiously naturalistic, Self's is the exact
opposite. Hollinghurst is interested in time's arrow; Self presents time
as a dangerously faulty artillery shell.
It's hard to précis what happens in Umbrella,
because it doesn't quite work like that. It's arranged like a vorticist
painting: a fractal proliferation of rhymes and symmetries; a frozen
explosion.
Hospital corridors are overlaid on London streets, are overlaid on
trenches at the front. The packing of an artillery shell rhymes with the
encapsulation of an antipsychotic drug or the manufacture of an
umbrella.
The encephalitis patients are frozen in time – but in their myriad tics
and autonomic circulations of the hospital they encode their pasts.
Audrey's tics see her turning artillery shells on an invisible lathe or
typing dockets at an umbrella factory. Busner
sees what they are doing only when he films them and slows it right
down or speeds it up, capturing "a flirtatious gesture that it took her
two hours and twenty minutes to make". Ticcing "links macro-and
micro-quanta.
Song fragments recur, tic-like, in Busner's head as in Audrey's (a nod
to Pynchon, perhaps), and – perhaps too showily; Self does like to tell
you what he's up to – shards of King Lear, Hamlet and TS Eliot spike the
text. Memory and hallucination interpenetrate,
and the narrative cuts between time streams mid-sentence. Busner
copulates with a medical technician in a mechanically detached way
(Ballard's a presence here) – her sexual responses analysed in clinical
terms that then give way to the vocabulary of trench
warfare. This is a world of constant recursion, of repetition
compulsion, of the paranoid-schizophrenic apprehension that everything
is connected.
Crucially, the book also contains human beings – Audrey, Busner, and a
supporting cast of characters on whose bones real flesh is to be found –
and is anchored in something approaching reality by a stupendous
density of research and observation. Self's London
or, rather, Londons are horribly alive – period details crammed in like
a cabinet of curiosities. The story of Audrey's younger brother,
Stanley – a machine-gunner in the war – contains some extraordinarily
well-imagined battlefield descriptions:
"Pull, rotate, pull, rotate … so the belt-filler makes use of its animal
components: pull, rotate … pull, rotate … On the far side of the
tumbled-down fence the jellyfish of camouflage netting rises and falls
soundlessly … in this ocean of noise – the gunners,
stripped to the waist, scamper about the heaving creature, their
devil's tails of braces bouncing on their backsides."
Read it. Then go and have a bit of a lie-down. It may not be his easiest, but I think this may be Will
Self's best book.
On another matter, I bumped into a friend, David Balzarini, a retired physics prof at UBC, this past Saturday. He had just returned from England a few days earlier. He was a judge at the World Pasty Championships, held at the Eden Project on Saturday 1 March, the Saturday before the national day of Cornwall, St Piran’s Day, I gather.
David was a judge, no less! Quite surprised, I asked him
how he came to be an expert on pasties. He replied that he had come
across notice of the Championships about four
years ago and sent a message to organizers asking for a poster. He runs
a small travel agency, out of his home, now that he is retired, and
said he would publicize event for any customers heading to England. With
his message he also included the fact that
since he was from nothern Michigan he ate pasties almost evrey day as a
child! I gather the Cornish miners who emigrated to work in the copper
and iron mines there introduced the food! He has been a judge for past
three years. He has to pay for his own airfare
but he says it is quite a lark so a most enjoyable time! I plan to
apply for next year!!!!!
You might pass the following along to Stefano as I learned, from Wikipedia:
Large numbers of Cornish people moved to the United States, and while some stayed in New York City and other East Coast ports after arriving, many moved inland to mining areas in California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
One such area was Mineral Point, Wisconsin, in which the largest group of immigrants were Cornish miners attracted to the lead mining opportunities, and by 1845 roughly half of the town's population had Cornish ancestry. Today the Cornish town of Redruth is twinned with Mineral Point.
For those of you who don't know Stefano,
his son, Mark, is married to Krissy, Derek's youngest daughter. Stefano
and Gudrun live in Redruth, not all that far from Blackwater, where we
inhabited Sydney House for all of August. If
you want to sell your house there you need to have an engineering
report commissioned to determine if it is likely to collapse into the
ground, such is the beehive of tunnels and shafts beneath the town, and
elsewhere in the county, left over from the tin
mining industry! Fondestos and Cheers, Patrizzio!
On another matter, I bumped into a friend, David Balzarini, a retired physics prof at UBC, this past Saturday. He had just returned from England a few days earlier. He was a judge at the World Pasty Championships, held at the Eden Project on Saturday 1 March, the Saturday before the national day of Cornwall, St Piran’s Day, I gather.
David was a judge, no less! Quite surprised, I asked him
how he came to be an expert on pasties. He replied that he had come
across notice of the Championships about four
years ago and sent a message to organizers asking for a poster. He runs
a small travel agency, out of his home, now that he is retired, and
said he would publicize event for any customers heading to England. With
his message he also included the fact that
since he was from nothern Michigan he ate pasties almost evrey day as a
child! I gather the Cornish miners who emigrated to work in the copper
and iron mines there introduced the food! He has been a judge for past
three years. He has to pay for his own airfare
but he says it is quite a lark so a most enjoyable time! I plan to
apply for next year!!!!!You might pass the following along to Stefano as I learned, from Wikipedia:
Large numbers of Cornish people moved to the United States, and while some stayed in New York City and other East Coast ports after arriving, many moved inland to mining areas in California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
One such area was Mineral Point, Wisconsin, in which the largest group of immigrants were Cornish miners attracted to the lead mining opportunities, and by 1845 roughly half of the town's population had Cornish ancestry. Today the Cornish town of Redruth is twinned with Mineral Point.
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