Re-entry trajectory
I've been on Substack for about a year now and I've been thoroughly enjoying discovering how it ticks. Although I can't claim any massive surge in likes, follows or subscriptions, I can tell you that I've met and had conversations with lots of great people here.
In terms of their guidance and welcome I'd especially like to thank (in no particular order)
, , , , , and .And I've read some marvelous posts from people like
, , , , , , , and to name a few.
My own posts have tended to capture cultural and other bright spots in my patch of sky: my travels and all kinds of places that intrigue me; visits to museums and galleries and the artists and relics they present; my responses to my natural environment; films and theatre performances; and my fascination with various ideas, especially the literary device called mise en abyme.
Mise en abyme
In fact I have become a little obsessed with mise en abyme to the point that quite a few people asked what the **** I'm on about. As I explained to a few of them, I'm not really sure but I feel I have discovered a thread that I want to follow and that all my writing on the subject constitutes an experimental series of attempts to understand its hold on me and my imagination, and why I feel it is such an important image of and for our culture today. And even that last sentence is an experiment in trying to describe what I'm doing with mise en abyme and what the **** I'm getting up to! 1
A labour of love
I'm just coming back to Substack after a very intense period of editing and rewriting to complete Love's Labours, a creative non-fiction book about Rowena Cade, who built The Minack Theatre on the cliffs near Porthcurno in Cornwall, and her sister, the novelist Katharine Burdekin, who wrote speculative and other fiction under her own name and as Kay Burdekin and Murray Constantine. My final draft is now out with a group of readers who will give me their feedback, and then I’ll plunge into another phase of editing.
Posting plan
I’m planning to post much more here on A Patch of Sky in the coming weeks and months, as I spend another week at Porthcurno with my family and then travel through Japan for a month with my wife Rosy and four friends. We'll be visiting Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Kyoto, Koyasan, and Hiroshima. Then Rosy and I are heading off to Naoshima for a few days before meeting up with our friends again in Tokyo for our last evening.
Serialisation
I’ve also set up a Sub-Substack entitled The Reward of Delay. Here, in the next few weeks, you'll find regular audio posts serialising my book of historical detective fiction, conveniently entitled The Reward of Delay. Each clip lasts about ten minutes, so ideal listening at bedtime or on a short bus ride. And each episode plays into the next automatically so you can enjoy listening on longer journeys too! Coming soon you'll find a short synopsis, notes on historical context and a character list, plus an album of related images and a Spotify playlist.
Mirror, mirror!
Last weekend I had a very enjoyable time with one of my daughters and her family in Preston, culminating in a trip to the cinema with two granddaughters aged ten and six to see Snow White, the new 2025 version produced by Disney. It's come in for a considerable amount of criticism and a lot of heat has been generated by adults discussing everything from the ethnicity of the actor-singer playing Snow White to the authenticity or otherwise of the CGI generated dwarfs, from the lack of memorable songs to the lack of memorable machismo. To see the film in the company of two innocent minds untainted by controversy or cinema ideology was illuminating and refreshing.
After the film, I asked the eldest what she thought the film was about. She said, 'The king, Snow White's father, loses his kingdom and dies. Snow White wants to reclaim the kingdom.'
From the mouths of granddaughters... A surprisingly wise and succinct précis.
Of course, conceptually the new 2025 re-make version of Snow White is embedded (mise-en-abyme-style!) in the 1937 classic version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and vice versa. My granddaughters had seen the 1937 original compared to which the new version has generated many column inches – if social media can be measured in that way – many of them as vitriolic as the poison with which the bad queen / wicked stepmother coats the apple Snow White will ingest.
But unlike adult reviewers, political commentators and opinionated oldie locks, young minds have an ability to hold two ideas in their mind at once without one collapsing under the ideological weight of the other. What my two nipote showed me was their ability to see with an innocent eye, even while what they are watching is the product or the received content of eyes and brains quite the opposite.
In watching Snow White with their special skills, they saw a story more about the absence of a father than the presence of nasty narcissistic stepmom. They 'read' a story about female empowerment and its consequence in the restitution of civil society and its liberties, rather than any diminishing of the male, for, as they seem preternaturally aware, men don't need any help in achieving that project.
All in all they saw a film depicting the joy of tolerance, the benefits of sharing and the wisdom of rebellion against authoritarian injustice, unfairness, and the greed and inordinate power of overly concentrated wealth.
In other words , whether Disney realise it or not, Snow White, her small chums and the disorganised rabble she leads undermine a system that closely resembles the American and Russian oligarchies, launching a devastating spear at the heart of Trumpian project. All achieved in a simple and quietly subversive children's film. There's one chorus in the finale song Good Things Grow, that should become a chant of protest groups everywhere.
No wonder it has come under attack from the cynical intellectual cadavers of the American fascists and all the people who can't cope with change, who have no respect for the dynamism of life and expect us all to bite the poison apple of dozy passivity and conventional dullness.
No one's claiming it's a cinematic masterpiece. But it's much more than the 'mess' some critics have condemned while pursuing their own dehumanising agendas in the hope of diverting attention from the screen. But the possibility for hope and change is not lost because a film uses GGI dwarfs!
Please, fathers, mothers – and wicked stepmums – take your children to see Snow White 2025 and see how they may open your eyes and minds.
I come across additions to my catalogue of mise en abyme all the time. Here’s a short section from the 2024 Booker prizewinner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey: “It's a painting inside a painting, his teacher had said - look closely. Look here. Velázquez, the artist, is in the painting, at his easel, painting a painting, and what he's painting is the king and queen, but they're outside of the painting, where we are, looking in, and the only way we know they're there is because we can see their reflection in a mirror directly in front of us. What the king and queen are looking at is what we're looking at - their daughter and her ladies-in-waiting, which is what the painting is called - Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies-in-Waiting.’”
I always enjoy your posts John, the writing is a joy, and I appreciate the thought and analysis you put into them. The story of Snow White will never seem the same again.
Your trip to Japan sounds fabulous. Can’t wait to hear more!
And thank you for the thank you!
Welcome back to Substack, John! Looking forward to hearing more about your book project.