Sumer is icumen in!

Whee! May Day is fast approaching, and today was the first truly hot day of the summer: here's to many more like it.

At this time of year, I always find myself going round singing 'Sumer Is Icumen In', and so I post here the splendid Old English lyrics in celebration of my approaching favourite season:

Sumer is icumen in:
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springst the wde nu.

Sing cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Llouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteh, bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singes thu cuccu,
Ne swik thu naver nu!

If you don't know the tune, you might like to check out this page, which offers midi files of the different elements in the round, plus a translation of the lyrics into modern English.

Ardent students of linguistics may like to note that there is a debate over the precise meaning of the phrase 'bucke verteth'. On the basis of the preceding lines about ewes bleating after lambs and cows cooing after their calves, it's likely that the bullocks and the bucks would be doing something similar to one another: hence the line often gets translated as 'The bullock leaps, the deer capers', or something along those lines. But another distinct possibility is that 'verteth' actually means 'farts'.

I look forward to seeing as many Oxfordy types as possible at the forthcoming May Day celebrations next Saturday morning. I shall definitely be there for the choir-boys at dawn, but may have to renege on my earlier intention to stay up all the Friday night, on the grounds that I have a job interview in Nottingham during the day on Friday, and am likely to be mentally and physically exhausted by the end of the day. I'll see though - maybe I will be so buoyed up by the experience that pulling an all-nighter is no bother? ;-)

In any case, I'm still fully determined to organise delicious picnicky joy for the morning of the 1st (strawberries, sparkly booze, a thermos full of coffee and pain au chocolat are just some of the things I have in mind: further suggestions welcome). Anyone who wants to play picnics, wants to stay up all night and has a good venue in mind for this, or just generally wants to come along to the tower, do let me know so we can all meet up. Anyone who owns a thermos flask and wants to volunteer to fill it with coffee will also be much appreciated.

Hmm... apparently Jesus had about 500 pints of blood...

... that's according to The Passion of The Christ at least, which I have just seen with James, Hugh and Zahra.

I've heard stories about churches buying tickets for this en masse in the belief that it will convert people, but having seen it I really can't see why. As a committed non-believer (nay, heathen), it just came across to me as a story about stupid people getting whipped up into stupid actions by religious extremism, with stupid and contemptible results. Not understandably misguided and tragic: just stupid. And I'm afraid I include Jesus in the category of 'stupid people' there.

The Passion is definitely capable of being put across in a more compelling way than this. Bach's Passions (the St. John and the St. Matthew), and the relevant parts of Handel's 'Messiah' (which I'm listening to right now because a biblical quotation at the start of the film brought it instantly to mind[1]) make this very clear. OK, so they could never convert me either - but at least they have an emotional impact on me. Bach and Handel make the story seem like an regrettable human tragedy, but somehow Gibson's failed to engage me emotionally in any way.

I think the problem could be phrased as being that the film was 'plot-driven' rather than 'character-driven': in other words, we just got a sequence of canonical events from the gospels, rather than any recognisably human scenes which might help us to relate to the characters or make sense of the transitions from one event to another. There was one scene which almost managed this, which was when Jesus fell down while carrying his cross to Golgotha, and Mary ran towards him to comfort him, which was interspersed with a flash-back of her running to pick him up when he fell and grazed his knees as a child. That gave us a chance to feel human pity for the motif of a mother losing a son she had raised. But other than that it left me cold (except for the occasional 'yuck' at the abundant violence).

I asked James, who is training to be a priest, whether it engaged him on an emotional level. He basically said that it had stirred the same sorts of emotions in him as a regular meditation on the stations of the cross would have done, but that these were emotions which he'd brought with him into the film from his church experience, rather than emotions which the film had stirred in itself. Yet obviously it has stirred great emotional responses in some viewers, because there are stories in the recent edition of The Cherwell about people confessing to long-undetected crimes after having seen it. I wish I could understand how it managed to do this: possibly those people also had to bring pre-existing emotions into the film, which were then sparked off onto a new level by it?

I wasn't too happy with the Latin either. I'd need to see it all written down to decide what I thought of it properly, but many of the sentence structures sounded very English, I spotted at least one example of someone not using the vocative when they should have done, the soldiers who are scourging Jesus inexpicably start counting from eight after they have turned him over to start whipping his front[2], and all the Romans used pronunciation which was a cross between medieval Latin and modern Italian. Plus, why were the Romans speaking to people like the Jewish high priest in Hebrew? At least, I presume it was Hebrew, although I can't distinguish Hebrew from Aramaic: but it certainly wasn't Latin or the actually-more-likely Greek. That doesn't fit with my knowledge of Roman provincial administration, although I'll admit that Judaea wasn't entirely a typical province, and I don't know much about its specifics.

And on top of all that, they also rather gave the game away for the sequel by showing him sitting up in his tomb at the end! So much for Passion II: The Resurrection.

Ah well, at least I've seen it now... I expect to enjoy 'Troy' a lot more when it comes out next month.

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[1] Isiah 53.5: 'He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement
for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed'.

[2] And no, they're not carrying on from where they'd got to on the previous side, because they'd reached about twenty-something on his back.