Richard Cooper

An ancient carved stone tablet showing a bearded man wearing a sort of kilt thing and holding back a leaping lion. Behind the man is another kilted man without a beard and carrying arrows

A stone tablet recently excavated from the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur shows the hero Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, giving his cat a pill.

Still close to being my favourite movie, though.

Kurosawa buffs: do you have any views on the 4k version of Ran? Just watched it and thought the HD (but not ultra HD) version I saw a few years earlier looked better, but was wondering if that was just my imagination? Wary of ultra HD.

Yes, I love that cd.

Alaa's husband has lost both legs and the family is penniless, please help them if you can!

“things that can’t move learn to see.”

“Forgive me if I say I love you. The powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven by panic.”

Have it almost all by heart. Absolute favourite of mine.

“A hothouse flashed uniquely, hedges dipped and rose, and now and then a smell of grass displaced the reek of buttoned carriage cloth.”

“And that faint hint of the absurd, the little dogs under their feet.”

Help Nurse Hammam and his family in Gaza Hello !! My name is Sonia. I'm starting this fundraiser to ask for your help for my friend Hammam and his family, who currently live in Gaza 🇵🇸.

If ten people can donate €10 Hammam can buy a new tent for his whole family
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Please help Hammam and his family, they're having a terrible time:
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“”Killers from the egg, the malevolent aged grin, they dance on the surface among the flies. Or move stunned by their own grandeur over a bed of emerald, silhouette of submarine delicacy and horror, a hundred feet long in their world.”

“Your absence is inconspicuous. No-one can tell what I lack.”

“Quick, said the bird, find them”

Cosign Eliot,

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table

So much Eliot:

Prufrock:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Do I dare to eat a peach?

Waste Land:
Unreal City

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

And Anne Sexton: I am tired of being brave.

“Our wheels grazed his dead face” and “droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies,”both from Isaac Rosenberg

…“and can understand nothing but the unusual laughter, and starts to be happy.”

“A thrush sings, laurel-surrounded in the deep bare garden, its fresh-pealed voice astonishing the brickwork. ‘It will be spring soon. It will be spring soon.’ And I, whose childhood is a forgotten boredom, feel like a child, who stumbles upon a scene of adult reconciling…”

"The former prime minister is set to speak alongside home secretary Shabana Mahmood at an event on Wednesday. Ms Mahmood is tipped to be a contender should a challenge to Sir Keir arise"

Blair, there. Turning the crank, so we can all see the name of the show.

Deconstructing Harry and Tonto

The long good freaky friday
Memphis belle du jour
Jingle all the way of the dragon
My name is joe vs the volcano
Miami vice Versa
Charlie and the football factory
Phantom Menace 2 Society
History Boyz n the Hood

The cannibalism stuff was so trite

Pluribus is still desperately average stuff, and absurdly slow-paced for such thin material.

If you are a cis woman attending this conference I'm begging you to get it on the agenda and vote it down. Labour were cowardly over Clause 28. I have bitter memories of the way queer people were thrown under the bus. Don't repeat that disgrace!

More from the archive: on Nolan‘s Batman trilogy, on Ishiguro: richardhcooper.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-d...
richardhcooper.blogspot.com/2012/07/kazu...

Stranger Things We can see what the Duffer Brothers were raised on, but what might their children being raised on, other than new versions of those same things?

On Stranger Things for, appropriately enough, Strange Horizons, and on superhero movies for Salon: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/...
www.salon.com/2013/11/30/s...

Please help Hammam
chuffed.org/project/1580...