Top 10 countries this past month shows a few surprises with Bahrain & Sri lank making an appearance. That India tops the list is interest but that Bangladesh & Kenya are in the top 10 is a surprise. Most popular post was Clean Up – the ecology still remains a hot topic, my fave is Look At Me were Kazakhstan! Kuwait!
Picture Perfect: 106 sections, about 151,000 words posted so far with approx 33,000 to be edited then posted. I made more big cuts to the rough draft to smooth things to the eventual ending.
After we watched Clouzet’s ‘Quai des Orfèvres’ we went on to watch the equally amazing Le Diaboliques. I’ve seen it before but had forgotten the boarding school setting. The plot moves with the same clock-work precision as Quai. We have the Criterion edition & the extras are excellent. For censorship purposes the plot of the book was altered. The film has the husband ‘murdered’ – in the book it is the wife who is the supposed victim. Such overt lesbianism wasn’t allowable on the screen.
Reading: James Jones ‘From Here To Eternity’ that has been reissued intact. The original version (at nearly 900 pages then) had most of gay sections trimmed. To be honest I’ve never read that version so I don’t know how much was censored by the publisher. Set in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbour it is an endlessly detailed look at Army life on base & off. The gay life around the base is clearly represented – how soldiers exploited ‘queers’ for money, booze & sex. The men treat the women in the novel in such the same way. Jones’s depiction is more matter-of-fact than – look at those disgusting sad homos. He also doesn’t shy away from the reality of gay service men either. I can see why he was forced to make what cuts he made. By the time you get to the end of the novel you feel you’ve been through WWII. In the film the gay subplots have all been eliminated. Go figure.
I was disheartened & puzzled by the trucker convoy protests that accomplished nothing but irritating residents of Ottawa. What did they want? Attention, as much attention as they could get. A group that represented less that 1% of the population managed to grab 99% of the media. Too much, too late a many of their ‘demands’ were already slated to happen: loosening of passport & testing requirements.
The invasion of Ukraine is worrisome with the casual threat of nuclear taking me back to my childhood fears of anyone dropping the big one. That sense of powerless was puzzling then & now is merely depressing. Did we get through the pandemic only to be wiped out by brats playing dare you, Putin’s pride making it impossible for him to back down. I don’t see an upside to this for planet. At least Volodymyr Zelensky is great eye-candy in his endless supply of military green t-shirts.
Will there be a March recap? For sure, unless they drop the big one.
Hey! Now you can give me $$$ to finish my bomb shelter – thanks? paypal.me/TOpoet
TOpoet 