Recommended Television Programmes

[Mal]

I like this, from the top of Google search:

"'the ineluctable modality of the visible'... If you are anything like me, you started to become confused at the word ‘ineluctable’ and by ‘modality’ any hope of this phrase being meaningful had vanished..."

https://www.calvinchristian.school/the-ineluctable-modality-of-the-visible/

"‘Ineluctable’ is a fancy word for ‘inescapable’. ‘Modality’ simply means a form of sensory perception."

So you get "The inescapable form of the visible".

[Dermot]

and know something of the geography of Dublin including features no longer there like Nelson’s Column.

Nelson's Pillar or, to generations of Dubliners, just the Pillar.

Yeats said that Dublin was the only capital city to have statues of three adulterers on its principal thoroughfare, although this is now thought to be unfair to O'Connell.

Leopold Bloom is a marvellous creation, but I find Stephen Dedalus tiresome in the extreme.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Nelson's Pillar or, to generations of Dubliners, just the Pillar.

Yeats said that Dublin was the only capital city to have statues of three adulterers on its principal thoroughfare, although this is now thought to be unfair to O'Connell.

Leopold Bloom is a marvellous creation, but I find Stephen Dedalus tiresome in the extreme.

Pillar of course - but it was a lot taller than the word pillar implies. One thing could you really walk to the top of it ? I guess so otherwise the sequence in Ulysses doesn’t make sense .
I think SD a is supposed to be tiresome . Buck Mulligan more or less sums him up doesn’t he ?

[Serial_Apologist]

That's hard.

With the help of a dictionary, and hard thinking, today, I translate it as: "The visible present themselves in different ways, or perhaps more, perhaps my way of thinking about them presents them in different ways."

But alma classics says it means something totally different:"that which is inevitably certain of being seen". Now I'm stuck with seeing how alma classics get to this translation! If I eventually work it out then I need to work out of if my translation or alma's is better.

Or are both wrong?

Is Joyce trying to show that Stephen is cleverer than you, cleverer than any critic, and these are thoughts specific to him, so you'll never work out what he means! If you were one of his unlearned mates you'd just let his words wash over you, not bothering to get the meaning, and then press on, with him, to the pub and wait for some lighter moments. So is that the approach a reader should take?

The next sentence is just as hard! And the next, and the next is in a foreign language (Italian?)... If I was an unlearned mate I'd be telling him to knock off the high falutin' stuff and ask him about the weather or political situation! But, unfortunately, we are stuck in Stephen's stream of consciousness.

In that one paragraph, less than a page long, alma has eight annotations, most longer than that paragraph! They themselves introduce perplexities... they reference Aristotle, Homer, Boehme, Johnson, Berkeley, Lessing... Do we need to master Aristotle's colour theory & biography, Greek myth, Boehme's mysticism, Johnson's biography, Dante's poetry, and Berkelian idealism to read this paragraph?

You could spend a lifetime unpacking that one paragraph!

In the rest of the chapter we get allusions to Lessings aesthetics, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Blake, pre-Homeric myths, lots of obscure specifics of Dublin geography, Scottish English, obscure French artists, complex poetics, more Italian, the lesser doxology Gloria Patri, obscure German vocab,...

I think what Joyce is doing is valid - giving us the raw, immediate thoughts & feelings of a first rate intellectual with a vast education, photographic memory, profound language skills, specific geographical knowledge... and that Joyce needn't provide translations, travel guides, & philosophical summaries...

But how should the average novel reader deal with this? I think I'll stick with alma classics, read the annotations and/or think very hard, until I get one reasonable take on the sentence, and then immediately press on - no diverging to read Aristotle etc. (!) Previously I got bogged down by endless analysis wondering if I'd *really* grasped a paragraph, stuck like the critics that Joyce mocked... and then gave up.

Just as well that Ulysses didn't reference The Waste Land, since that could have involved referring to multiple references within references, if you see what I mean...

[johncorrigan]

Watched the first couple of episodes of 'KaDeWe - Our Time Is Now', new German drama on BBC 4 last night. Very promising, I thought.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001cjtc/kadewe-our-time-is-now-series-1-1-city-of-women

[alywin]

Oh good. I've recorded it but haven't watched any of it yet.

[Jazzrook]

This excellent BBC4 documentary by Lindsay Johns, 'Children of the Caribbean Revolution', deserves a wider audience:

https://www.bbc.co.UK/programmes/m001d03r

JR

[Serial_Apologist]

This excellent BBC4 documentary by Lindsay Johns, 'Children of the Caribbean Revolution', deserves a wider audience:

https://www.bbc.co.UK/programmes/m001d03r

JR

I strongly second that recommendation.

[johncorrigan]

I have just caught up with Harry Enfield's 'The Love Box in your Living Room' - this history of the Beeb done in the style of Adam Curtis, was both clever and very funny. The great Paul Whitehouse was much in evidence too; never a bad thing in my book.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001dk9y/the-love-box-in-your-living-room

[Stanfordian]

Watched the first couple of episodes of 'KaDeWe - Our Time Is Now', new German drama on BBC 4 last night. Very promising, I thought.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...-city-of-women

We are enjoying KaDeWe too. We have been in the magnificent Berlin store a number of times.

'Babylon Berlin' is my favourite programme - now up to season 4.

[Braunschlag]

About to ressurect my NOW TV sub for BB4. An exceptional series- without divulging spoilers Stanfordian, does Series 4 have another wonderful song? I really love ‘Zu asche, zu staub’ from Season One and that superb one from Series 3, the one with the accordion. Fabulous production and a really atmospheric soundtrack - looking forward to it.
I rather whizzed through KDW. I was a little puzzled by some of the street scenes where, I think, some of the background included modern day cars/trams. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.

[Braunschlag]

I wish some streaming platform would run Weissensee - a very good GDR period piece.

[Nick Armstrong]

'Babylon Berlin' is my favourite programme - now up to season 4.

A recent recommendation from a trusted friend: can’t wait! Season 1 is next up on my newly acquired 4K Firestick/Now (bought for House of the Dragon - which was also extremely good! Paddy Considine… )

[Ein Heldenleben]

About to ressurect my NOW TV sub for BB4. An exceptional series- without divulging spoilers Stanfordian, does Series 4 have another wonderful song? I really love ‘Zu asche, zu staub’ from Season One and that superb one from Series 3, the one with the accordion. Fabulous production and a really atmospheric soundtrack - looking forward to it.
I rather whizzed through KDW. I was a little puzzled by some of the street scenes where, I think, some of the background included modern day cars/trams. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.

I noticed that and put it down to either Brechtian inspired v-effect or more likely :
Lack of budget to pay for street filming , street marshals, AD’s , police , vintage cars and all the other myriad cash drains involved in film related street closures including cash bribes for wags who try to photo bomb…

[Historian]

I noticed that and put it down to either Brechtian inspired v-effect or more likely :
Lack of budget to pay for street filming , street marshals, AD’s , police , vintage cars and all the other myriad cash drains involved in film related street closures including cash bribes for wags who try to photo bomb…

I think the second is possible, despite the multi-national funding. However, the subtitle for KaDeWe 'Our time is now' led me to believe that maybe it was trying to make a point that the people portrayed were living their lives in the present not in 'history', if that makes sense. It was interesting anyway and I enjoyed the series, although it did stretch my limited German when I was trying to ignore the subtitles.