I watched two films last night, both by mistake rather than planning, practically the only way I see films these days. Hamlet 2 I started watching this and in an early scene when Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) was emoting I turned to my friend and said “God I hate actors” which was appropriately misplaced as …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
apostasy
The conceit of the development of Renaissance humanism was that, like Hercules, “man” could perfect “himself” and become a God. The apostasy of Salman Rushdie was to take the word of God and relativise it, offering a human interpretation to something inspired and directed by God. In the Western intellectual tradition, the Western philosophical tradition …
God is Beauty (not a compliment I fear)
I was thinking about a friend going away for a week to The New Wine Convention with the Church of England group of which he is a member. I was thinking how could he possibly believe in God enough to go away like this? I realise this was a mistaken question. For me, now, finally, …
Leader notes
Yesterday, the 3rd August, I was listening to report on radio 4 of the endorsement of Hassan Rouhani by the Supreme Leader. I can’t find the audio file to link to it but there was in the background this extra-ordianary soviet style choral singing going on that seemed so unlike what I would have expected. …
Ramadan and Christmas
It is Ramadan once again. It is the measure of the year, a movable cycle that is both feast and beast. I met a Welsh convert the Ramadan other day and I asked him how long he had been a Muslim? He replied that this was his fourth Ramadan. I compared it to Christmas in …
A Good Muslim
A close friend of mine brought one of his closest friends to visit me the other evening. This latter man brought with him his daughter who was 28 years old. The occasion was a shared meal and he had driven up from 100 miles away to have dinner with my friend during Ramadan. Conversation continued …
Clay Pipes
Here is a selection of clay pipes which I had the pleasure of seeing at a friends house near Barnsley. They are a very small part of an immense collection, not particularly of clay pipes but of minerals, bottles, disease from the industrial past. They have been brought together by a man who coming from …
Mad and Saintly: Mental Health and Destitution
I have volunteered in a Night Shelter for destitute asylum seekers and refugees for five years now. Asylum seekers and refugees often come from countries and situations where their experiences include intense violence, torture, dispossession and, at the least, extremes of fear, where they are escaping from levels of intimidation and lack of personal freedom …
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snow
skyfall and ideological form
Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society. This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all …