Did the pond say finally and never? Well, hardly ever ...

 

The pond thought it should continue its travel feature with a few snaps of the desolate wasteland in which it found itself for the holiday season ...

Not a human bean in sight, whichever way you looked, and oh how the wind cut deep into the flesh, scouring whatever Xians imagine is the soul ...

Straight from the Antarctic it came, and not far to travel, and the pond wilted at the notion that you needed a wet suit to have a paddle ...

Not even an arty angle on a local attempt at Ozymandias could relieve the sense of oppressive desolation, the feeling that the pond was at last able to understand Robinson Crusoe's torment ...

That castle was like a footprint in the sand. Someone had actually been there, though all trace would soon be swept away by the incoming tide ...

Moving on to the film review section of the travel blog, the pond should note that it at last made it through the entire 2 hour 53 minute second section of Peter Jackson's absurdly long, if loving, memorial to the Beatles. 

The pond had to take it in two tranches, and paused before tackling the third, even though the rooftop performance will be buried in there somewhere. Sometimes too much is more than enough, and the pond actually had to play the finished tracks, just to remember that all this noodling and doodling actually amounted to something...

Back in the Xmas gulag, the pond did attempt a little light humour when there came the usual attempt to make a viewing of Love Actually compulsory ...

Luckily the pond had caught the keen Keane doing a rant ...

It's in full here, but you can imagine how quoting a slab like this went down ...

1. I hate Hugh Grant in his full-blown, floppy-haired Hugh Grantness. Grant these days is a superb character actor who elevates any material he’s in (witness how he acted Our Nic off the screen in that thing where he murdered that woman… oh, er, spoilers). But this was before he went 10 rounds with Rupert Murdoch (and winning), and he is at his insufferable worst.

2. I hate the heterosexual patriarchal normalisation implicit in it. Half the men are having relationships with women in positions of significantly less power. A prime minister has an affair with a staffer! Hello! On what planet is that OK? In a world where using the wrong pronoun can get you cancelled for life, how is this film still treated as acceptable fare? Billy Bob Thornton is supposed to be an evil lecher, but how is Grant any different just because of his diffident, slightly stammering English charm? They’re both predators. And where are the LGBTI+ relationships? Left on the cutting room floor, apparently, so we could spend some more time with the heterosexuals.

3. Speaking of Billy Bob, I hate the insufferably smug lefty British West Wing-style fantasy world it portrays in which a charming British PM stands up to a boorish US president. Hello — the very PM the Luvvie Left lionised in the UK, Tony “Cool Britannia” Blair, was at the moment this was being made cosying up with George “I’m With Stupid” Bush. Your only response to that is a circle-jerk about Grant standing up to the president?!

4. I deeply despise the way it co-opts 9/11 in a facile point about love. Creepy and evil.

5. Speaking of creepy, what’s with the normalisation of Andrew Lincoln’s weird stalker? That’s not love, that’s bordering on a criminal act. Instead of being pursued by the victim of his obsession for a kiss, he deserves to be pursued by hordes of ravening zombies.

6. I hate that some of my favourite actors — Bill Nighy, Alan “Cancel Christmas” Rickman, Laura Linney, Billy Bob — are defiled by their presence in this offensive dross.

7. I hate the whole cloyingly twee Richard Curtisness of it. How many times do we have to see a film involving Grant in which the entire plot is about people who can’t quite express their emotions but somehow manage to achieve relationship success? There’s a direct line back from this stuff through to the British literature of the ’30s and ’40s, best represented by Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, where too-fey-to-be-bothered-breathing middle-class men, who can barely sustain an erection let alone an entire novel, somehow make their way into the beds of beautiful, aristocratic women purely on the basis of their diffident charm, thereby enacting exactly the male fantasy that the authors themselves aimed to live off — gaining status without either being born to it or working for it. And I hate it!

Love Actually, is in fact a hate crime. It’s a hate crime against Christmas, against women, against LGBTI+ people, against people with any decency and, above all, against anyone with even the most basic taste in films.

Oh, wow. What else could possibly be said? While others retreated upstairs to watch, the pond stayed downstairs to pick fluff from its navel, an intellectually stimulating exercise vastly underrated up against actually watching Love Actually ...

Mind you, the keen Keane confessed he hadn't actually seen the film, but the pond actually has, once, by mistake, and can confirm the analysis. What's more, the pond could write a similar review of the absolute tosh involved in Spielberg fucking over West Side Story, so there's nothing wrong with that approach to film reviewing ...

Speaking of 'oh, wow', and rants, the pond was sad to hear that Joan Didion had picked the silly season to kick the bucket, but she was remembered at The Cut for this ... (amongst other things) ...

Forty-two years ago, Joan Didion — who died today at 87 — delivered one such delectable specimen. “Letter From ‘Manhattan’” was the restrained headline that appeared above her 1979 New York Review of Books essay on Woody Allen’s late-’70s oeuvre. And, if only in a certain sense, the essay that followed was restrained as well. Didion was not unleashing a tirade; tirades were not her style. Rather, she was describing — with exasperated precision — a body of work whose popularity she professed to find “interesting, and rather astonishing.” Allen’s characters possess “the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class,” Didion wrote. In their preoccupations and pretensions, they were overgrown teenagers:

These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder “what love is.” They have “interesting” occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating. Many characters in these pictures “write,” usually on tape recorders. In Manhattan, Woody Allen quits his job as a television writer and is later seen dictating an “idea” for a short story, an idea which, I am afraid, is also the “idea” for the picture itself: “People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.”

“What love is”: the scare quotes are chilling in their absolute disdain. This gives you the general flavor of the review, which is memorable — but the real coup de grâce, and the reason this essay most often comes to mind for me, was something that arrived only later. A few months after Didion’s review appeared, the NYRB published a selection of responses from readers. These readers were not pleased. Randolph D. Pope of Dartmouth College, no stranger to sarcasm, congratulated Didion on providing “a perfect example of how a mind too full with culture is unable to understand humor.” Roger Hurwitz (MIT) advised that she would “do better to be alarmed by than morally superior to the attitudes, concerns and mores Mr. Allen’s characters reflect.” John Romano (Columbia) spent 647 words chastising her for — among other offenses — treating Allen’s characters’ brand of self-absorption as tiresome and distinctly contemporary, rather than placing them in an intellectual lineage that stretched back centuries.

The NYRB also published Didion’s response to these letters. It reads, in its entirety,  “Oh, wow.”

Reactions like Randolph D. Pope’s or John Romano’s are hardly what any writer hopes for when sending a piece of prose into the world. Nonetheless, such reactions do arrive, and with them the temptation to reply — that is, to defend one’s self somehow. This impulse is not always doomed, but it usually is.

Which is, at least in part, what makes Didion’s response impressive. I think about this (as the Cut’s column would have it) a lot. I think about it whenever I say “Wow.” And I think about it now, looking back over Joan Didion’s career, a career that gave rise to countless lines that in the years since I encountered them have “never been entirely absent from my inner eye” or ear, as Didion once wrote of the Hoover Dam.

“Oh, wow”: unimpressed, unperturbed, over- but also underwhelmed. A “wow” delivered in the same spirit as Didion’s claim to find it “astonishing” that anybody actually liked the characters in Manhattan — as if bearing witness to behavior so pathetic as to be stunning. Roger Hurwitz of MIT is getting himself all worked up about “objective decadence cum subjective meaninglessness.” Didion is watching like he’s a particularly large beetle rolled on its back.

It is a response that distills the Didion persona down to five letters. She was ever the observer, surveying human folly from a deliberate distance, amazed and not amazed by what she saw. This was the posture she adopted when meeting a Haight-Ashbury 5-year-old on acid. “The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten,” Didion wrote in the title essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.” Years later, in an interview for his documentary on her life, Griffin Dunne asked his aunt what that moment was like. “Well, it was—” Didion said, and paused. “Let me tell you, it was gold.” (Oh, wow.)

Oh wow, Didion really did bell the Woody cat long before others did, and if you look at Manhattan these days, it seems more than a little creepy ... as well as vacuous, shallow, vapid and pervy.

But enough of endless beaches, and endless movies, what of the loons, shouldn't the pond make at least a gesture at loonery?

Well the reptile sabbatical continues, but there's more than enough loonery to go around, though perhaps the most dearly loved moment came to the pond with this yarn ...

It was in the Daily Beast, via Yahoo, and paywalled and otherwise too pointless to link to, but succulent, like the over-ripe mangoes in the kitchen ...

Oh, wow ... 

...and it went on and on, right down the rabbit hole, past the pool of tears and straight into the kettle at the Mad Hatter's tea party ...

Oh, wow ... zombies.

At some point a fierce argument broke out around the Xmas table as to what point conspiracy theorists might be classified as mentally disturbed ... but then the pond looked at the leadership in NSW and wondered if there was much difference between zombie-fearing loons and the domitable Dom ...

But back to that conspiracy ...

It turns out that the pond could easily fulfil its remit without a hint of reptile in the loon stew ... and yet we do have barking mad clap happies speaking in tongues to imaginary friends in charge of proceedings ...

Meanwhile, the loons were still carrying on ...

But is it all that different from the magical thinking we've seen over the years from our local Illuminati representatives?

Well the pond will soon be back in the middle of that madness, and suddenly feeling deeply alone on a beach just a few miles from Antarctica might seem like a more sensible solution ...

Oh and for all those who still insist Melbourne is woke, a left-over snap of a statue in a Melbourne park celebrating a notorious piece of riff-raff, a royal rascal and ne'er do well ...

Oh Melbourne, Melbourne, what a heart break town you are ...

WaPo here (paywall) ...

The eight Edwards of England have been a decidedly mixed royal bag. Edward I hammered Braveheart's Scots; Edward II was assassinated; Edward III sacked France; Edward IV fought the Wars of the Roses; Edward V was murdered before his coronation; Edward VI died unmarried, of consumption; and Edward VIII abdicated. Which leaves us with the jolly, lusty, drunken, defiantly philistine Prince Bertie, later Edward VII, King of England, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India.

Despite the magnificent title, which he acquired upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Bertie spent all but nine years of his life as Prince of Wales. In this respect, if few others, he resembles his descendant, Prince Charles, the son of another long-lived queen, and similarly doomed to endless heirdom. Stanley Weintraub's chronicle -- the latest in his cycle of 19th-century biographies, which also includes lives of Prince Albert, Victoria and Disraeli -- details how Bertie filled his days (and nights) for some six decades. Desperate to alleviate the tedium of doing nothing while his mother ruled the world, Bertie occupied himself with wenching, boozing, gambling, hunting, shooting, dancing, smoking and general carousing. When it came to learning, however, Bertie took after the 18th-century duke of Gloucester who, upon receiving the second volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, immortally exclaimed to its author: "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" Bertie's reading, what there was of it, was confined to newspapers and Punch magazine...

And so Melbourne being Melbourne, they put up a monumental statue to celebrate the wastrel ... 

Oh, wow ... oh, Melbourne, Melbourne, what a heart break town you are ...

What else? Oh has he gone away yet?

Oh, wow ... it's Boxing Day and he's still there? Dear sweet long absent lord, there's a bad omen for the new year ...

Oh well, oh wow ... and large black beetles everywhere on their backs ...