Pruning

A sudden spate of people reading this blog - over a hundred - leaving no comments - what triggered that?

Discovered a new blog to follow, entitled Long pauses, (see here) mainly film reviews, good reviews.

The name Long pauses is a quote from the English poet Denise Levertov, in her 1987 poem entitled Making peace:

"Making peace"

A voice from the dark called out:
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war."

[...]

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentences our lives are making
revoked its affirmation of profit and power
questioned our needs, allowed long pauses...

There is much more, see the blog.

The Long pauses blog put me onto a (for me) new director, Nathaniel Dorsky (San Francisco, US), who makes short non-narrative films that are as yet unavailable here. A good description might be contemplative. He calls his style Devotional Cinema, and has written about it in a short book of that title, also unavailable.

We watched an Afghani movie entitled Osama last night, a story focussing on ordinary women in Afghanistan under the Taleban. The director is Siddiq Barmaq: the film is beautifully shot (in Aghanistan) and stringently cut - one of the sources of its power. It said somewhere that he decided during the editing to remove any trace of hope. The film won countless awards.

Have dragged myself around all morning unable to work because of the hopelessness. This has happened before, had sworn to avoid films like that.

Reviewing my own poems last week: cut, cut, cut.
Like pruning the roses.