Obama’s dreadful
error about the
‘Polish death camps’
Robin Downie
As I write on the morning of Burns’ night, distinguished people all over the world will be putting the finishing touches to their speeches. I hope ‘Burns and egalitarianism’ will be a common theme, in the UK at least. I expect bonuses and the huge discrepancy between rich and poor in a wealthy country will get a fair airing. On that theme I couldn’t help noticing how ill-at-ease Vince Cable looked when interviewed by Jeremy Paxman and pressed on what the government was going to do about the bonuses.
It is sad that someone who was once a favourite politician with the general public is now a down-at-the-mouth spokesman for a Tory government. The Tory Right just laugh at how little change there will be. At least Vince did have the grace to look uncomfortable.
Anyway, at the world-wide Burns’ suppers there will be the usual toasts to the lasses, who may just need to smile politely, if that does not get in the way of teeth-gritting. And as for the address ‘To a Haggis’, I think that any vegetarians had better keep quiet. Mind you, there is a very decent vegetarian haggis to be had, which I recommend to anyone who is not going ploughing first thing in the morning. What I dread most of all is the predictable and mindless sound of ‘Scots wha hae-ing’.
But I wish to draw attention to a totally uncelebrated side to the great man’s output. From time to time the Scottish (and perhaps English) newspapers carry indignant letters about the state of our roads. Lack of council funds and bad weather have contributed to an alarming deterioration of our roads. Poor surfacing and deep potholes are everywhere to be found. I have in fact seen a car with a rear window sticker saying ‘Not drunk, just avoiding potholes’. But Burns was on to this problem. In an epigram ‘On Rough Roads’, he expressed sentiments which local councils should take to heart:
I’m now arrived – thanks to the gods!-
Thro’ pathways rough and muddy,
A certain sign that makin’ roads
Is no this people’s study:
Altho’ I’m not wi’ Scripture cram’d,
I’m sure the Bible says
That heedless sinners shall be damn’d,
Unless they mend their ways.
SR Forum
A series of articles debating the issues around the referendum
Today: Jill Stephenson
What is this ‘Civic Scotland’ that has suddenly become a proper name?
Click here
Today’s banner:
Perth
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Islay’s Scotland
The man who holds the key to the universe – or, at least the key to my office. It’s Jordan at Timpson, near Central Station
A film embodying
the greatest of all
American themes
Andrew Hook
In Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Last Tycoon’ – unfinished at the time of his death – there is a rather strange scene in which Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood mogul, and Kathleen, the English girl with whom he is involved, meet a man described in the text as a ‘Negro’.
The couple are walking at night on a beach in California when they come upon this nameless figure. He is collecting pails of tiny silver fish called grunion being washed ashore by the incoming tide. What he really likes to do out here, however, is read the copy of Emerson he carries under his shirt. He asks Stahr what he does and learns he works in Hollywood. ‘Oh’, says the man. After a moment he added, ‘I never go to movies’. ‘Why not?’ asked Stahr sharply. ‘There’s no profit. I never let my children go.’ And filling his pails with fish, he disappears from the novel, ‘unaware that he had rocked an industry’.
What does Fitzgerald expect the reader to make of this encounter? That Hollywood and the movie industry were not doing enough to produce the kind of art Emerson had hoped America would bring to the rest of the world? Fitzgerald is not named in Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar-contending film ‘The Artist’, though a Fitzgerald look-alike does make an appearance as a ‘toy’ boyfriend of the film’s female protagonist, Peppy Miller. Hollywood and its history, on the other hand, are precisely what the film is about.
‘The Artist’ is neither more nor less than an extended ‘homage’ to mainstream Hollywood and its history. Its director is quite explicit about this. The film, he tells us, is ‘a love letter to cinema and grew out of my (and all of my cast and crew’s ) admiration and respect for movies throughout history’. When I was a student, film studies was at least a generation away from becoming an academic subject, so I’m no expert on the history of Hollywood. But this lovely film is clearly a richly intertextual montage of Hollywood movie-making. Its matinee-idol hero is called George Valentin, but he is as much Douglas Fairbanks and Gene Kelly as Rudolph Valentino.
So ‘The Artist’ embodies that greatest of all American themes: the rise
and fall of the American Dream. The decline of George is matched by the
rise of Peppy. But this is Hollywood.
