It is odd, after reading glorious sample after glorious sample of Benjamin Law's pithy, stark, delightfully graphic prose (torn vaginas, anybody? Teaching your Malaysian migrant mother the word 'c**t'), to find the man in person
such a sweet, wholesome type of chap. Butter wouldn't melt. Smegma
might, obviously, which would no doubt lead into yet another brilliant
exploration of sticky honesty that Ben does so well. . .
There are very few Australian essayists who have the ability to make one LOL - which I believe is the correct term for someone of my increasingly idiot generation - and I feel so blessed that Ben has momentarily pried his talent from brief and inviting pieces in local magazines to focus on this particular collection of work. (
Marieke Hardy interviews Benjamin Law)
***
Well, it looks as though Pseud's Corner is going to have to be a fortnightly thing. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions - your favourite pompous wanky quotations from the Australian media-sphere are going to be in the mix as of today. For anyone who hasn't got the invitation yet: take your revenge on the worst writing you can find by emailing it or a link to
pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au
For the time being we're keeping the definition of the pseud-ish fairly loose. If you're looking to get a nomination for The Corner of Shame yourself, remember - the key is to strike a balance between pomposity and meaninglessness - between cliche' and an inflated sense of the importance of your own opinions. If that doesn't seem like specific enough advice, have a careful look through this week's success stories. Try inflating 5 minutes worth of googling (search entries: Tolstoy/literature/seafood) into an entertaining little thought-piece for the back-page of a broadsheet newspaper. Try taking a once-controversial truth that has since been repeated so often that it's become a howling banality and repeat it again - there's a plentiful supply of them in the life, the work, the novels and philosophy of the past. Don't just quote your once-dangerous verity, though, do a serious spot of over-writing. (Have a try with the idea that someone's sense of his own physical being makes a difference to the way he thinks and writes.) Basically -
find a dead or dying horse and give it a really good flogging. Lavish all your tedious verbal ingenuity on other people's ideas as if they were your own.
Remember, above all, that words have no meaning. Or that when they are just tokens in the game of self-esteem you play with yourself, you can make them mean whatever you want them to mean. "Sublimation" can mean losing control of finer feelings and "precisely" can refer vaguely to something that you vaguely gesture in the direction of. Or perhaps to your very act of gesturing. Whether it's someone else's show that you're reviewing, the scene of contemporary culture that you're observing, a disaster in a faraway foreign clime or a farce unfolding on local tv that you're reporting on, remember -
you are front and centre. Thoughtfulness, critical reflection - I mean, what are they but personal experience?
Today's edition of the Corner of Shame starts with something new. Every month - or will it turn out to be every fortnight too? - we'll award an Order of the Brown Nose. Pretty self-explanatory really. Like Pseud's Corner itself, it's another feature of the funny pages of
Private Eye - a magazine we feel positively aglow in recommending to anyone who finds that first-hand experience of the Australian media reduces them to thoughts of self-harm. Congratulations to Marieke Hardy for a truly great feat of public brown-nosing in this month's Readings catalogue. Surely encomiums to literary friends have rarely been as pointlessly weird and disgusting and yet so authentically sucky. Can we promise Marieke the OBN every time she stages a public love-in like this and simultaneously declares herself and her readers to be complete dickheads? It would be foolish to promise.
Actually, no it wouldn't. Every time you do it again, Marieke, you can have the OBN automatically.
***
I'm often attracted to artists who're physical. - They don't have to be he-men or world-class athletes. But I enjoy the obvious lesson: the seemingly cerebral work of writing is no impediment to physical labour.- And, more importantly, exercise and exertion contribute to literary work. They keep the blood pumping, the brain buzzing, and the mind undistracted by the ennui or itchiness of a lethargic body. Contrary to the myth of the drunk, absinthe-guzzling romantic, health can be good for literature. "Guy loves a couple or three streams in all his life," said Hemingway, on fishing, "and loves them better than anything in the world." - As Hemingway's writings on boxing, bullfighting and fishing suggest, it goes both ways: the experience of sport or physical leisure is enriched by literature. It clarifies the virtues of struggle and endurance; it shares the love of a bruised but pulsing will.- So when I read of Hemingway's fist fight with the poet Wallace Stevens, I don't react with disgust - not at the physicality, anyway. In the confrontation itself, I see two men of beautiful words, putting themselves to the test; striving
palpably, rather than in the sometimes anaemic arena of words. . .
Hemingway v. Stevens is a tangible reminder that writers are creatures of ardent flesh. It's what can propel them into pages - the very paper that immortalises their embodied mastery, and records the thrill of physical virtue. - Writing is, in other words, a whole throbbing, sweating, panting life - not simply a desk, chair and paper. The hand that holds a pen can also be a fist - and more 'literary' for this. (Damon Young, "Hemingway's Fists",
Darkly Wise, Rudely Great)
In Rabe's performance, we get a needy and manipulative woman whose finer feeling is sublimated into a grotesque and hilarious act, only barely controlled. Jagged anachronisms leap from the mannered gentility. Anna is as likely to shriek "Get off my tits," or "You pagan slut!" as she is to defend a lesbian assignation with a learned reference to biblical writ. . . Questions [however] lurk under the sparkling dialogue, elevated language and histrionic displays about the authority and inevitability of performance - those we give to the world, and the ones we reserve for our most intimate relationships. - In this production, the relationship's intimacy and power struggles aren't precisely embroidered into the linguistic corsetry. We are left to take the distracting jewels of Mamet's dialogue as they come. (Cameron Woodhead, "Marriage made in drawing room hell" - a review of MTC's
Boston Marriage)
One sees Matt Preston's cravat and wonders if he had it rough as a boy. But there is method in Matt's sartorial high-jinks, for it is impossible to take insult from a man who dresses as a jester. One sees the pink pantalons and senses there must be some delirium hovering hereabouts. And one forgives. . .
As
MasterChef was ending I flicked to
The Pacific on Seven and a young GI lay on the beach at Iwo Jima under an artillery barrage. Twenty years old and hellfire coming down on his head and his friends dying around him and his face gripped in horror. The look was familiar to me. Where had I observed this unholy dread before? Had I lived a previous life as a digger? Was I, long ago, a centurion? Had I halved Frenchmen with a broadsword. - No. I had seen the same expression moments earlier on Channel Ten as Jimmy Seervai plucked frantically at a lobster's alimentary tract in the
MasterChef challenge while time ticked towards his ruin. . . And I didn't know who to mourn. The marine, giving his life so that we might live free; or the failed MasterChef, succumbing to a spiky gang of crustaceans in a studio-itchen amid a feast of hyperbole. And, yuck, when did my dinner begin to taste of life-and-death? (Anson Cameron, "A case of suffering for one's tart"
The Age)
IT IS the start of autumn and the first televisions of the season have begun blooming on grass verges.- Or perhaps fallen from the trees along with the leaves. Summer's carefree days are drawing in, digital television broadcasting impends, and on the footpaths all around my place, there is a veritable harvest.- On a typical walk I pass about 10 of them, softening in the damp, cords growing into the earth. . .
My mum and I love hard rubbish. We drive along, our eyes scouring piles of wonky chairs, dismantled computer desks, old eggbeaters, sheets of chipboard. "Alert!" I cry, and we zoom over to peer and pluck.- Bricks to raise my potted plants into the sunshine, a raffia shelf, a jewellery tree, a photo album, a peeling old wooden box, we chuck it all in the back of the car. - My mother muses over a rocking chair with a broken strut. "I could fix it," she says hopefully. "Like the last three broken chairs you took home? The ones still in a pile in the shed? Those loser chairs?" "You're right," she says sadly, and walks away, but then turns back and seizes her prize. "It would be perfect to grow vines over! Novelty garden furniture!"- It's hard to resist the temptation of free treasure. And it's environmentally virtuous too: recycling and scavenging is all the thing, don't you know. In some poor countries a family could live off the crap on my footpath. . . (Kate Holden, "Footpath frenzy",
The Age)
ANNA Karenina continues to be read and remembered for many reasons. Its beginning -
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way - is one of literature's most quoted starters. Beautiful, doomed Anna flinging herself in front of a steam-shrouded locomotive remains the very essence of romantic tragedy. Jealousy, adultery, lust, agricultural reform -
Anna Karenina has it all. But what sticks in my mind are the oysters. - I once met some oysters in Avignon. They were asleep on wooden trays between layers of damp newspaper, a situation in which I myself have been found from time to time. A man was selling them from a van, shucking them to order for customers and stallholders at a makeshift bric-a-brac market across the river from the medieval ramparts of the Palais des Papes. We slurped them straight off the shell, washed down with a precocious young stubby of Stella Artois. [Ah, those precocious French boutique beers!] - The medieval popes in their fortress across the Rhone must have eaten such oysters, their souls unsullied by the experience. They ate clams, too, I imagine. There's a clam bisque in
Madame Bovary that I wouldn't mind trying. Flaubert handles shellfish in quite a different way to Tolstoy, of course. And there, limpid on the half-shell, lies the difference between Russian and French literature. If Tolstoy were French, Anna Karenina would've drowned herself in a tureen of steaming bouillabaisse. (Shane Maloney, "The world on a half-shell",
The Age)
