“We watched a speech given in 1938 where the newsreel people cut from a close-up [of the king] to spectators in the crowd,” says Hooper. “Whenever they come back in this profile close to the king, you just can see in his eyes — he just wants to get it right. That’s all he wants to achieve. But he keeps getting caught in these horrible, painful silences in which he drowns and gathers his thoughts in silence. Colin and I both saw this and were extremely moved.”

This look of wanting to get it right is always there, magically and shyly conveyed by the wonderful performance by Colin Firth, who plays King George VI in the movie. There is much more I want to say about this movie. I will write on it once I finished my research work in March, perhaps in the early April.

- Will Keen’s Macbeth lacks a savage hunger. Like a good boy seduced by his wife, played by Anastasia Hille, almost sexually, he never reaches the audience as a ambitious Duke with evil hidden deep in his soul. He was literally pushed on this path, and the evil inside is never manifest. The whole murder is simply an impulsive mistake. And seriously, I dozed off during his soliloquy after he murdered Duncan, seeing nothing but his disconcerting hand wiggle and hearing nothing but his panting.

- Even if this misrepresentation of Macbeth twisted personality could ever be compensated by seeing Anastasia’s Lady Macbeth as the other “Macbeth”, in which interpretation Macbeth is double played by both Macbeth and his wife, who respectively presented one of the two sides of Macbeth’s inner struggle, the split is a task uncompleted in the play. She is like a house murderer in modern TV series: hysterical, over-nervous, yet woman-ish, self-deceiving, and ultimately weak. The spooky and eerie air surrounding the character is destroyed by a realistic and pretentious acting.

- I like the part whenever Macbeth or Lady Macbeth plays soliloquy, in the middle of some public activities, the light changes to dark blue, and all the other cast become still and silent. The stage suddenly bears a new dimension, thrusting the original screen and reaching forward to the audience. Also, during the soliloquy the other actors/actresses hide behind the wooden “columns” and move like drifting statues, as if looming spirits were eavesdropping the secrets one’s mind accidentally released.

- The stage is aesthetically simple, very powerful. The large empty space in the middle constantly reminds me of the heath, thundering and lightening at the beginning of the play, where the three witches come up. However, the total abandonment of props is not helpful at all.

- David Caves as a particularly good Macduff. I am totally captivated by his reaction to the death of his family. I still remember our English drama teacher Alex from Yale: the best action is inside. David Caves’s silence before his explosion of agony, desperation, hatred, and deep sorrow, is astonishing and beautiful.

- The lighting of the banquet scene is superb, especially when the apparition of Banquo enters the stage. Threatening, breath-holding, and delicately designed by Judith Greenwood.

- Perhaps Will Keen has the right haunted look of Macbeth, but Anastasia Hille is too gorgeous and noble for his spooky and warped wife.

Last night a line appeared,Unbidden, unsigned;
It had eight memorable
Syllables. I’ll keep you,

I said, falling asleep.
It’s gone now,
And I write this to requite it,
And to mark its passage.

To an Unborn Daughter

If writing a poem could bring you
Into existence, I’d write one now,
Filling the stanzas with more
Skin and tissue than a body needs, Filling the lines with speech.
I’d even give you your mother’s

Close-bitten nails and light-brown eyes,
For I think she had them. I saw her
Only once, through a train window,
In a yellow field. She was wearing
A pale-coloured dress. It was cold.
I think she wanted to say something.

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

By Vivian Ding

Your facial muscle twisting, eyes red,

Tears, a welkin of fog

You scream, in a low and piercing decibel

I am never good at breathing

Such a condensed air

I grab my book and leave,

Through shelves of rocks, the air in between

The wind raking the ocean, transporting the smell of

Fish, coral reefs, sharks, dead corpses of penguins,

Only silence. I look back, seeing myself still sitting with you,

Caressing you, comforting you, desperate, at a loss.

I walk on. I passed a polar bear. The one that killed you this morning.

Finally a tundra. No more rocks blind the sun.

No more wind resurrects the penguin.

Out of nowhere. Out of reach.

I look back, you are in my arm, crying.

by c.

Biting the straw flat,

I suck the ice up from the bottom of the glass

And chew it behind my sealed lips.

It chews like crisply crystal chips.

A girl I probably have known for years is giggling

Opposite to me, jabbering

An enthusiastic confession of a woman.

A few weeks ago, at the crossroad in Central,

We didn’t recognize each other

In the tides of passengers, arising and ebbing,

When the light turns green.

Now he sits next to me, introduced as Sir N.

Sir M sits on my diagonal, a distance in between

I can never calculate with enough ink.

Perhaps we had lost our spots in the distance, which grow infinitely long now?

The Thai restaurant is like a temple—-huge statues of Buddha and carmine linings of wall.

We are a dinner of pilgrimages

Murmuring desire to the sacred air above us

Piously begging the Buddha to lead it to the right end.

Nowadays we think a person is dead if he stops breathing.  Science tells us the blood no longer circulates when a person stop breathing, but our ancestors seemed doubtful about it. The question is, if a person is not dead when he ceases to breathe, what happens during the several hours in between?

John Leslie ‘s review on the December 8 issue of TLS put into comparison The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose. I didn’t know anything about Penrose’s theories before reading this article. Distinctive from the M-theory in The Grand Design, which proposes a “fluctuation, like bubble in boiling water” version of universe, Penrose’s universe is of another picture:

The gist is this. The universe continues expanding and cooling, for what you might think would be eternity. How, you ask, could eternity ever end in a new Cycle, a new Bang? Well, even infinite time doesn’t look infinite to photons, “particles of light” without mass (more technically, without “rest-mass”). To a photon, traversing an infinite distance seems to take no time at all. Particles possessing mass are tiny “clocks”. The photon isn’t. It doesn’t “tick”. And, immense ages after all black holes have evaporated entirely through the process discovered by Hawking, the universe may contain nothing that could act as a clock. Particles possessing mass may one and all have become massless very, very gradually. Well, in Einstein’s world clocks are crucial to measuring distances. If eventually there were no clocks, just any distance could readily be traversed. Not only could the universe stop getting older and older; it could actually lose its vastness. This would allow things to carry over smoothly into a new Bang.

Penrose’s theory of the universe is a series of Big Bangs, compared with separated “bubbles” in Hawking’s multiverse theory. It is as difficult to imagine for us as to visualize a walking person gradually disappearing into nothing on the path. Also, Penrose argues that during the Big Bang, the horrendous disorder cannot be that easily to smooth away, as “a balloon’s wrinkles disappear when it is inflated”. The disorder, when the Bang suddenly underwent a brief acceleration which expanded the universe enormously, is a material process that cannot slip away from serious scientific research.

Our problem is one of adapting our social training to a widely literate culture. It is clear that the highest standards of literacy in contemporary society depend on a level of instruction and training far above that which is commonly available. For this reason it is still much too early to conclude that a majority culture is necessarily low in taste. The danger of such a judgement is that it offers a substitute righteousness–the duty of defending a standard against the mob. Right action is not of this kind but is a matter of ensuring that the technical changes which have made our culture more dependent on literate forms are matched by a proportionate increase in training for literacy in it full sense….Loutishness is always easy, and there can be few things more loutish than to turn, at the end of a long training, and sneer at those who are just entering on it, and who, harassed and insecure, are making the inevitable mistakes.

He (Tony Judt) also loved public transport, and is lyrical in the description           of the trains, buses, and ferries of his youth, which have declined sadly                  since:

I would park my bike in the luggage wagon at Norbiton Station on the Waterloo line, ride the suburban electric train out into rural Hampshire, descend at some little country halt on the slopes of the Downs, cycle leisurely eastward until I reached the westerly edge of the old London to Brighton Railway, then hop the local into Victoria as far as Clapham Junction. There I had the luxuriant choice of some nineteen platforms—this was, after all, the largest rail junction in the world—and would entertain myself with the choices from which to select my train back home. The whole exercise would last a long summer day.

Whenever I need some air and personal space, I will resort to public transport, looking at the passing building and the swarming people. Sometimes I can spot interesting stories, sometimes not. It is also a way of reading, when I put down my books.