varifocals

I have new glasses.

I posted about the new frames a few weeks ago, and the frames themselves are an absolutely knock-out and they suit my face as if they were tailormade for it. I clearly have an 80s face (t'h has a 70s face; put a shoulder-length rocker wig on him and he looks to the manner born), and, if you remember, I bought myself some vintage 80s glasses from Retrospecs in St Alban's, Hertfordshire.

But now I have the lenses. And they are my first pair of varifocals evah (middle age, yoohoo, I'm there). Everything lists! Everything sways! My peripheral vision is drunk! I can't see my feet when I look down, and I have to cock my head to the side when I want to read a book, and EVERYTHING'S WEIRD.

I ran to my higher education establishment where I had the prescription made up and they said, 'oh it may take you up to six weeks to get used to varifocals'. Then I met a friend for coffee and she said, 'I've had my varifocals for a year and I'm still not used to them.'

ARGH. Yesterday, I had to take a paracetamol because my eye hurt and made my head hurt.

I am noticing, however, that my previous glasses have given me some bad habits. Because my previous prescription was rubbish, I got into the habit of reading with the book held about an inch away from my nose. The varifocals do not allow me to indulge in this habit.

HELP.

On the other hand, who cares if I can see? I LOOK fabulous.

Well, I will proceed to answer my own question. Who cares? I care.

Oh, and I have to adopt a special angle and stance when typing into t'laptop. Thank the something that I taught myself to touchtype at age 19.

racewin

So much has been written on racefail that I just want to say that last night t'h and I saw a fantastic film on DVD that is totally made of the awesome racewin. It is called Atanarjuat and was the first film made entirely in the Inuit language, filmed in Inuit territory in Canada, and made by Inuit film makers, crew and cast. Plus, it is a simply stunning aesthetic achievement.

I'd heard of this film for many years as a kind of answer to Nanook of the North, the amazing and very moving 1922 documentary of people in the Arctic region. But it's also more than that; it's fiction, based on an Inuit myth. It blends the fascinating ethnographic detail of material culture with a universal plot and theme. So you get wonderful scenes of women scraping the blood off hides and men spitting onto the runners of sledges to make the ice smooth and other such things plus you get a story that is very, very rooted in this strange, extreme, freezing cold, vegetation-starved environment but is at the same time totally accessible. Ultimately, the story (which I won't spoiler) reminded me of Helen of Troy.

What is really fabulous, though, and a very interesting, if modest, development in recent world film making is the strategy that some indigenous people are adopting (Atanarjuat and, in Australia, the fantastic Ten Canoes), and that is to set films in a mythic pre-colonial time. This does away with the whole problem of how to show the relationship of indigenous people to 'white' people, and allows a much freer and more nuanced treatment of the indigenous people as just 'people'.

There is still the potent force of the 'other'; both Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes interestingly feature a 'stranger' who appears and causes disruption in the community. I read this in a two-fold way: on the one hand, the 'stranger' is a classic narrative agent. A 'stranger' arriving to disrupt an equilibrium is one of the key ways of getting a narrative going. On the other hand, I also find it fascinating to consider the role of the stranger in pre-modern societies. These were communities (and we all go back to that kind of community, ultimately) where there were no strangers. There were no cities or towns or villages or hamlets. There was just a tiny family/kinship unit, where every single person counts for the purposes of survival, where everyone knows everyone, and where compromises with people whom you don't get on with or with people who are downright bad are essential for survival.

The 'stranger' in this context of a tiny community takes on a whole different meaning. There simply were no strangers so anyone unknown becomes an almost otherworldly, demonic, scary force, a thing-that-cannot-be. At one point, in Atanarjuat, the hero arrives in a distant place and is taken in by some 'strangers' but it very quickly turns out that they are not real strangers at all: 'Are you not the son of Sauri? Sauri and I share the same grandmother.' A relationship is soon established, and the stranger is, as it were, 'un-strangered'.

To get back to the point about these being all-indigenous representations. Here you have strangers but they are strangers within the context of their culture. They are not white others, and there is no 'othering' of the indigenous people. I love that.

It reminds me of the novels by Amitav Ghosh, and especially of his marvellous novel-cum-ethnographic study-cum-travelogue-cum-history book, In an Antique Land which is about the trade relations between Egyptian Jews and Indian Hindus in the Middle Ages, a network of relations that completely operated outside the purview of European influence.

And as if you need another incentive, but: Atanarjuat features total frontal male nudity.

Hooray for un-coy non-commercial films!

P.S. Does anybody know a good Native American / Native Canadian / First Nation Peoples film?