Dreams of a life ...

... is a film directed by Carol Morley about Joyce Vincent, an enigmatic beautiful woman living in London, whose dead body was discovered 3 years after she died.  It has been on my shelf waiting to be watched, but it is a difficult film at so many levels, raising so many pessimistic questions; Do we all truly die alone? Can we ever truly know someone?  It is a psychoanalytic minefield and the individuals I see at A&E take on a completely different meaning.... 


Watch me fall from grace
Disappear with no trace
As I try to erase you
Feel the pain and watch me bleed
Surely this is not what I need


Shut out everyone
And watch me run
Lay me under the sun
So cold I have become
Now that I have been undone

- "Undone" by Alice Temple

Democracy ...

... is a play by Michael Frayn and the production at the Old Vic was as dazzling as his "Copehagen" in my students days ... It is about Willy Brandt and his dream of daring more democracy ...

- Any scrap of information that helps us judge his intentions towards the socialist block.  

- “Reconciliation”, he says.  “Peace.”  But can we trust him? Is he really going to risk everything on such a gamble?  Is he really going to persuade people here to take their head out of the sand at last and recognize that we exist?  You and me?  The other Germany?”


- How can you see into someone’s heart if you don’t fall a little in love with them?

- You can’t help trusting him.  When you’re there in the audience. You look up at him – and there he is looking straight back at you.  You personally.  Talking to you alone.  One human being to another.

Margaret Mead ...

... once said: "One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder when you are coming home at night". The sense of loneliness is devastatingly palpable ...

The Great Gatsby ...

... is a short novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald about the golden jazz age ... I am not sure if it was golden for Gatsby at the end, but we all have our own green light, the goal of our existences, the summation of our dreams ...


"And as I set there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.  He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.  He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.


Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... and one fine morning - 


So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  


(the last line is engraved on the grave of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda).

Mark Grist

... is a poet I came across at Latitude this year and he read his beautiful "I want a girl who reads" ... it was one of the highlights of the festival for me (a little strange, I know) but everyone creates their own festival ... 

“So, what do you go for in a girl?”
He crows, lifting a lager to his lips
Gestures where his mate sits
Downs his glass
“He prefers tits
I prefer ass.
What do you go for in a girl?”

I don’t feel comfortable
The air left the room a long time ago
All eyes are on me
Well, if you must know

I want a girl who reads
Yeah. Reads.
I’m not trying to call you a chauvinist
Cos I know you’re not alone in this
but…

I want a girl who reads
Who needs the written word
& uses the added vocabulary
She gleans from novels and poetry
To hold lively conversation
In a range of social situations

I want a girl who reads
Who’s heart bleeds at the words of Graham Greene
Or even Heat magazine
Who’ll tie back her hair while reading Jane Eyre
and goes cover to cover with each waterstones three for two offer
but I want a girl who doesn’t stop there

I want a girl who reads
Who feeds her addiction for fiction
With unusual poems and plays
That she hunts out in crooked bookshops for days and days and days
She’ll sit addicted at breakfast, soaking up the back of the conflakes box
And the information she gets from what she reads makes her a total fox
Cos she’s interesting & unique
& her theories make me go weak at the knees

I want a girl who reads

A girl who’s eyes will analyse
The menu over dinner
Who’ll use what she learns to kick my ass in arguments
so she always ends the winner
But she’ll still be sweet and she’ll still be flirty
Cos she loves the classics and the classics are dirty
So late at night she’d always have me in a stupor
As she paraphrases the raunchier moments from the works of Jilly Cooper

See, some guys prefer asses
Some prefer tits
And I’m not saying that I don’t like those bits
But what’s more important
What supercedes
For me
Is a girl a with passion, wit and dreams
So I want a girl who reads.