On yonder hill there stands a creature

You may or may not know that the recently departed poet/playwright/Nobel laureate Harold Pinter wrote a characteristically blunt poem before the Iraq war. It went like this:

The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

During a mail conversation just after Pinter died, a friend of mine fulminated in a Pinteresque rant himself:

I’ll miss him.

When normal people get old and go batty, people ignore them and put them in a home and start spending their inheritance. If you've written 29 plays and are considered famous and one of the Hampstead "we're socialist, honest guv" set, then people continue to listen to you. Hence the "big pricks are out" etc, etc. Had any normal granddad written that, he'd be dispatched like a shot to some out of the way Colditz-on-the-Wold and we'd all be riffling around under his bed for the reddies. It reminds of a Jeeves and Wooster novel, where one of Bertie's uncles was discovered in the drawing room "sticking straws in his hair". Also, an Evelyn Waugh short story which has some old major "hanging by his braces in the orangery". I daresay there is some small window of wisdom that comes just after youthful ignorance, and just before losing your marbles but, generally: you get old, you go weird.

Such is life.

The person who came up with the above paragraph will soon be joining me in infrequently updating – or frequently not updating – the blog. He will be using a pseudonym. It is Hipparsus, which is marginally better than his original choice for a nom de plume, Benjamin Buttmunch. Hipparsus, by the way, was a student of Pythagoras who discovered the existence of irrational numbers (like Pi, or The Dark Knight’s domestic gross – SNAP). His name is more commonly spelled Hippasus, but Hipparsus is nothing if not unpredictable.

There is a chance another person might also join us in a few weeks. There’s a party in my blog, and everyone’s invited. It’s a pity party.

But back to that Pinter poem. In September 2004, The Private Eye did a send up of it in a section called “Harold Pinter’s Revised Book of English Verse.” And lucky you, dear reader, because you can find it below.

One caveat: In order to get the joke, one really should be familiar with the original poems.

Then again, one really should be familiar with the original poems anyway.

Arthur C Clarke 16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008

In the postscript to one of his masterpieces, Rendezvous with Rama, I think, Sir Arthur C Clarke talks about a modern day epiphany that he and a friend of his had in early 1940. Trekking around Buckinghamshire at dusk, conversing about the future (what else), the two came across a small hill. As they cleared its crest, they were confronted by a view that would haunt both men for the rest of their lives. There, in the distance, illuminated by the dying beams of a crimson sun, and ripping through the thick evening fog like Excalibur, were giant barrage balloons. Forgetting for a moment the destructive war the blimps heralded, the two men imagined a future with spacecraft punctuating the sky, signalling to the universe that man had set aside all his differences, and was ready to take that next step.

One of my favourite authors, and arguably the greatest visionary of the 20th Century, Sir Arthur C Clarke is dead. I am at a loss for words, and I must turn to him once more. How does The Nine Billion Names of God end, again? Ah, yes:

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

Alas.

Roy Scheider 1932 - 2008

He was a wonderful actor, and what a filmography – French Connection, Klute, Marathon Man, All That Jazz… And of course, Jaws. His face a tapestry of conflicting emotions, replete with the ravines of age and experience, one sly look, or one subtle smile, used to communicate so much. A great actor in every sense of the word, Charon will need a bigger boat.

Here is the advert he did for Orange a few years ago:

Update (12/02/2008): Check out this wonderful screen capture of Roy Scheider from All That Jazz at Peter Nellhaus's Coffee coffee and more coffee.

Heath Ledger 1979 - 2008

He was one of the finest actors of his generation with a promise of greatness that mirrored, if not surpassed, James Dean's. I am reminded of a quote by Robert Graves, who said of Shakespeare: "Despite the fact that everyone says he's very good; he really is very good." So was Ledger. He will be missed.

Jim Emerson's touching tribute can be accessed here: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2008/01/heath_ledger_19792008.html