kilt - a costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.
Krishna - a form under which the pretended god Vishnu became incarnate. A very likely story.
lap - one of the most important organs of the female system - an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal's substantial welfare.
last - a shoemaker's implement, named by a frowning Providence as opportunity to the maker of puns.
Ah, punster, would my lot were cast,
Where the cobbler is unknown,
So that I might forget his last
And hear your own. (Gargo Repsky)
laziness - unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
learning - the kind of ignorance affected by (and affecting) civilised races, as distinguished from IGNORANCE, the sort of learning incurred by savages. See NONSENSE.
lecturer - one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
Leveller - the kind of political and social reformer who is more concerned to bring others down to his plane than to lift himself to theirs.
lighthouse - a tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and a friend of a politician.
limb - the branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.
linen - "a kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails a great waste of hemp." - Calcraft the Hangman.
literally - figuratively, as: "The pond was literally full of fish"; "The ground was literally alive with snakes," etc.
Literature - the collective body of writing of all mankind, excepting Hubert Howe Bancroft and Adair Welcker. Theirs are Illiterature.
logic - the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
loss - privation of that which we had, or had not. Thus, in the latter sense, it is said of a defeated candidate that he "lost his election"; and of that eminent man, the poet Gilder, that he has "lost his mind". It is in the former and more legitimate sense, that the word is used in the famous epitaph:
Here Huntington's ashes long have lain
Whose loss is our own eternal gain,
For while he exercised all his powers
Whatever he gained, the loss was ours.
maiden - a young person of the unfair sex addicted to clewless conduct and views that madden to crime. The genus has a wide geographical distribution, being found wherever sought and deplored wherever found. The maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and her views) insupportable to the ear, though in respect to comeliness distinctly inferior to the rainbow, and, with regard to the part of her that is audible, beaten out of the field by the canary - which, also, is more portable.
man - an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
manna - a food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilising it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original occupants.
mausoleum - the final, and funniest, folly of the rich.
medal - a small metal disk given as a reward for virtues, attainments or services more or less authentic. It is related that Bismarck, who had been awarded a medal for gallantly rescuing a drowning person, that, being asked the meaning of the medal, he replied: "I save lives sometimes." And sometimes he didn't.
mind - a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. From the Latin, mens, a fact unknown to that honest shoe-seller, who, observing that his learned competitor over the way had displayed the motto "Mens conscia recti," emblazoned his own shop front with the words "Men's, women's and children's conscia recti."
Mormon - a follower of Joseph Smith, who received from an angel a revelation inscribed on brass plates and afterward revised and enlarged by his successor in the prophethood. While still an inoffensive people the Mormons were bitterly persecuted, their prophet assassinated, their homes burned and themselves driven into the desert, where they prospered, practiced polygamy and themselves took and hand in the game of persecution.
namby-pamby - having the quality of magazine poetry. (See FLUMMERY.)
oblivion - the state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground. Cold storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm clock.
pantheism - the doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.
phoenix - the classical prototype of the modern "small hot bird."
pilgrim - a traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.
pitiful - the state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.
plague - in ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharoah the Immune. The plague as we of today have the happiness to know it is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
platitude - the fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jellyfish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.
plaudit - the unit of currency in which the populace pays those who tickle and devour it.
pray - to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
precedent - in Law, a previous decision, rule or practice which, in the absence of a definite statute, has whatever force and authority a Judge may choose to give it, thereby greatly simplifying his task of doing as he pleases. As there are precedents for everything, he has only to ignore those that make against his interest and accentuate those in the line of his desire. Invention of the precedent elevates the trial-at-law from the low estate of a fortuitous ordeal to the noble altitude of a dirigible abitrament.
precocious - a four-year-old who elopes with his sister's doll.
Presbyterian - one who holds the conviction that the governing authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.
Presidency - the greased pig in the field game of American politics.
President - the leading figure in a small group of men of whom - and of whom only - it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
prime - enough to make a cat vomit. "Try our 5cent Havana filler" and see if it isn't.
rational - devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
retribution - the natural rock upon which is reared the Temple of Law.
revenge - sending your girl's love letters to your rival after he has married her.
riot - a popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.
rostrum - in Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origins in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh. Among the Jews the observance of the day was enforced by a Commandment of which this is the Christian version: "Remember the seventh day to make they neighbour keep it wholly." To the Creator it seemed fit and expedient that the Sabbath should be the last day of the week, but the Early Fathers of the Church held other views. So great is the sanctity of the day that even where the Lord holds a doubtful and precarious jurisdiction over those who go down to (and down into) the sea it is reverently recognised, as is manifest in the following deep-water version of the Fourth Commandment:
"Six days shalt thou labour and do all thou art able,
And on the seventh holystone the deck and scrape the cable."
Decks are no longer holystoned, but the cable still supplies the captain with opportunity to attest a pious respect for the divine ordinance.
sad - the efforts of musical debutantes:
"I'm saddest when I sing." Toodles
saint - a dead sinner revised and edited. "The Duchess of Orleans relates that the irreverent old Calumniator, Marshal Villeroi, who in his youth had known St Francis de Sales, said, on hearing him called a saint: 'I am delighted to hear that Monsieur de Sales is a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to cheat at cards. In other respects he was a perfect gentleman, though a fool.'"
sardine - a small and very palatable fish, to which many unpalatable persons hesitate to compare themselves.
saw - a trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.) So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. Following are examples of old saws fitted with new teeth:
"Half a loaf is better than a whole one if there is much else."
"What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do it."
"He laughs best who last laughs least."
"Strike while your employer has a big contract."
tedium - ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source - the first words of the ancient Latin hymn Te Deum Laudamus. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.
telephone - an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Trinity - in the multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with the power of combination, and must urge individually their claims to adoration and propitiation. The Trinity is one of the most sublime mysteries of our holy religion. In rejecting it because it is incomprehensible, Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological fundamentals. In religion we believe only what we do not understand, except in the instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an incomprehensible one. In that case we believe the former as part of the latter.
truth - an ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.
tzetze (or tsetse) fly - an African insect (glossina morsitans) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (mendax interminabilis).
weather - the climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
worship - Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Ambrose Bierce: from The Devil's Dictionary (A - J)
abatis - embarrassing circumstances placed outside a fort in order to augment the coy reluctance of the enemy.
or
abatis - rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.
abide - to treat with merited indifference the landlord's notification that he has let his house to a party willing to pay.
abridge - to shorten ("When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Oliver Cromwell)
Ace - the one-fourth part of the Hand of Fate.
acephalous - in the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had, unconsciously to him, passed through his neck, as related by de Joineville.
adamant - a mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
Adam's Apple - a protuberance in the throat of man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place.
adder - a species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.
address - the place at which one receives the delicate attention of creditors.
adipose - fat, ragged and saucy.
admiration - our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
advice - the smallest current coin.
"The man was in such deep distress,"
Said Tom, "that I could do no less
Than give him good advice." Said Jim:
"If less could have been done for him
I know you well enough, my son,
To know that's what you would have done." (Jebel Jocordy)
affectionate - addicted to being a nuisance. The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.
affiance'ed - fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.
affirm - to declare with suspicious gravity when one is not compelled to wholly discredit himself with an oath.
alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
ambrosia - the diet of the gods - the modern peanut.
aphorism - predigested wisdom.
The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism. ("The Mad Philosopher", 1697)
appeal - in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
appetite - an instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labour question.
ardor - the quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
He loved her with an ardor -
Such a hot one,
That her father had to guard her
With a shotgun. (Ovid)
arena - in politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.
armor - the kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
arrest - formally to detain one accused of unusualness (e.g. "God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh." - The Unauthorized Version)
bard - a person who makes rhymes. The word is one of the numerous aliases under which the poet seeks to veil his identity and escape opprobrium.
beggar - a pest unkindly inflicted upon the suffering rich.
betrothed - the condition of a man and woman who, pleasing to one another and objectionable to their friends, are anxious to propitiate society by becoming unendurable to each other.
book-learning - the dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impenitent ignorance.
bride - a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
cab - a tormenting vehicle in which a pirate jolts you through devious ways to the wrong place, and then robs you.
Canonicals - the motley worn by Jesters of the Court of Heaven.
child - an accident to the occurence of which all the forces and arrangements of nature are specially devised and accurately adapted.
dandle - to set an unresisting child upon one's knee and jolt its teeth loose in a transport of affection.
Deist - one who believes in God, but reserves the right to worship the Devil.
dejeuner - the breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
deliberation - the act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
demure - grave and modest-mannered, like a particularly unscrupulous woman.
There was a young maid so demure,
That she fooled all the men who knew her;
But the women they smoked her
And took her and choked her
And chucked her into a sewer. (Milton)
deposit - a charitable contribution to the support of a bank.
descendant - any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree.
Alas for the days when my baboon ancestral
In Japanese woods from the lithe limb was pendant,
Instructing, kind hearted, each babooness vestal
How best to achieve for herself a descendant. (Oscar Wilde)
desert - an extensive and fertile tract of land producing heavy wheat and vintage crops in colonisation prospectuses.
desertion - an aversion to fighting, as exhibited by abandoning an army or a wife.
dessicate - to make dry.
Now Noble to the pulpit leaps,
The mighty dessicator,
The audience profoundly sleeps -
Slow snores the great creator. (Shelley)
despatches - a complete account of all the murders, outrages and other disgusting crimes which take place everywhere, disseminated daily by an Associated Press for the amelioration of the world in general.
electioneer - to stand on a platform and scream that Smith is a child of light and Jones a worm of the dust.
emancipation - a bondsman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.
embassador - a minister of high rank maintained by one government at the capital of another to execute the will of his wife.
esoteric - very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds - exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found the greatest acceptance in our time.
ermine - the state, dignity or condition of a judge. The word is formed of the two words, err and mine - the one suggesting the tendency of a judicial mind, the other expressing, in a general way, the judicial notion of the rightful ownership of property in dispute.
euphemism - in rhetoric, a figure by which the severe asperity of truth is mitigated by the use of a softer expression than the facts would warrant - as, to call Mr Charles Crocker ninety-nine kinds of knave.
expediency - the father of all the virtues.
expostulation - one of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.
fatigue - the condition of philosopher after having considered human wisdom and virtue.
fear - a sense of the total depravity of the immediate future.
fickleness - the iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.
Flood - a superior degree of dampness. Specifically, a great strom described by Berosus and Moses, when, according to the latter's rain-guage, there was a precipitation of moisture to the depth of one-eighth of a mile in twenty-four hours for forty days. The former did not measure, apparently, for he simply explains (in pretty good Greek) that it rained cats and dogs. The learned author of the cunieform inscriptions from the Mesopotamian mounds draws a number of carpet-tacks on a brick to signify that it was "quite a smart shower considering the season."
flop - suddenly to change one's opinion and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turncoat by some of our partisan journals.
fool - a person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war - founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting - such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand has warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilisation, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilisation.
friend - an investigator upon the slide of whose microscope we live, move and have our being.
friendship - a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.
frontespiece - a protuberance of the human face, beginning between the eyes and terminating, as a rule, in somebody's business.
gas-meter - the family liar in the basement.
generous - originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.
ghoul - a demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefts than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads and an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in mor ethan one place at a time. Thge good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholson relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.
gnu - an animal of South Africa, which in its domesticated state resembles a horse, a buffalo and a stag. In its wild condition it is something like a thunderbolt, an earthquake and a cyclone.
A hunter from Kew caught a distant view
Of a peacefully meditative gnu,
And he said: "I'll pursue, and my hands imbrue
In its blood at a closer interview."
But the beast did ensue and the hunter it threw
O'er the top of a palm that adjacent grew;
And he said as he flew: "It is well I withdrew
Ere, losing my temper, I wickedly slew
That really meritorious gnu." (Jarn Leffer)
grip - ex-Speaker Parks's manner of fondling the property of the commonwealth.
groan - the language in which a Republican Federal office-holder expounds his view of the political situation.
Hell - the residence of the late Dr. Noah Webster, dictionary-maker.
homoeopathist - the humorist of the medical profession.
homoeopathy - a theory and practice of medicine which aims to cure the diseases of fools. As it does not cure them, and does sometimes kill the fools, it is ridiculed by the thoughtless, but commended by the wise.
hunger - a peculiar disease afflicting all the classes of mankind and commonly treated by dieting. It is observed that those who live in fine houses have it the lightest. This information is useful to chronic sufferers.
idiot - a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field or thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.
imagination - a warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
imbecility - a kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.
immaculate - not as yet spotted by the police.
inauspicious - not lousy with it in the crop. . . The author of this dictionary feels it his duty to explain to the Eastern reader that the appalling phrase immediately foregoing is not of his own invention, and that he employs it here, with reluctance, in order to be clearly understood in the mining camps of this state, where "English as she is spoke" on the Atlantic seaboard is altogether unintelligible. The author begs to assure his Eastern readers that the phrase in questions means nothing very disagreeable; it may be translated thus: "Not showing much free gold in the outcroppings." Let us now proceed.
incompossible - unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility let loose. Instead of such low language as "Go heel yourself - I mean to kill you on sight," the words, "Sir, we are incompossible," would convey an equally significant intention and in stately courtesy are altogether superior.
inconsiderate - imperfectly attentive to the welfare, happiness, comfort or desires of others; as cholera, smallpox, the rattlesnake and the satirical newspaper.
incorporation - the act of uniting several persons into one fiction called a corporation, in order that they may be no longer responsible for their actions. A, B and C are a corporation. A robs, B steals and C (it is necessary that there be one gentleman among them) cheats. It is a plundering, thieving, swindling corporation. But A, B and C, who have jointly determined and severally executed every crime of the corporation, are blameless. It is wrong to mention them by name when censuring their acts as a corporation, but right when praising. Incorporation is somewhat like the ring of Gyges: it bestows the blessing of invisibility - comfortable to knaves. The scoundrel who invented incorporation is dead - he has disincorporated.
indecision - the chief element of success; "for whereas," saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "there is but one way to do nothing and divers ways to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards" - a most clear and satisfactory exposition of the matter.
indigestion - a disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the western wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: "Plenty well, no pray; big bellyache, heap God."
infallible - not liable to error; dead-sure - as Frank Pixley, when speaking ex cathartica.
ingratitude - a form of self-respect that is not inconsistent with acceptance of favours.
inhumanity - one of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
innate - natural, inherent - as innate ideas, that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have "given it a black eye." Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one's ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one's country, in the superiority of one's civilisation, in the importance of one's personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one's diseases.
intention - the mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of the act intended by the person incurring the intention. . . When figured out and accurately apprehended this will be found one of the most penetrating and far-reaching definitions in this whole dictionary. It has taken the first premium at three country fairs and is prescribed by all respectable physicians as a dead shot for worms. It increased the corn yield of Illinois one million bushels in a single season, discovered the source of the Nile and saved the day at Shiloh.
interlocutor - the barometrical centre of depression at a minstrel show.
intoxication - a spiritual condition that goeth before the next morning.
intractable - stubbornly unwilling to adopt a course from which nothing can divert ourselves.
introduction - a social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this country, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of strangers."
ivory - a substance kindly provided by nature for making billiard balls. It is usually harvested from the mouths of elephants.
jealous - unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
jockey - a person whose business it is to ride and throw races.
joss-sticks - small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain rites of our holy religion.
Jove - a mythical being whom the Greeks and Romans ridiculously supposed to be the supreme ruler of the universe - unacquainted as they were with our holy religion.
or
abatis - rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.
abide - to treat with merited indifference the landlord's notification that he has let his house to a party willing to pay.
abridge - to shorten ("When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Oliver Cromwell)
Ace - the one-fourth part of the Hand of Fate.
acephalous - in the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had, unconsciously to him, passed through his neck, as related by de Joineville.
adamant - a mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
Adam's Apple - a protuberance in the throat of man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place.
adder - a species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.
address - the place at which one receives the delicate attention of creditors.
adipose - fat, ragged and saucy.
admiration - our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
advice - the smallest current coin.
"The man was in such deep distress,"
Said Tom, "that I could do no less
Than give him good advice." Said Jim:
"If less could have been done for him
I know you well enough, my son,
To know that's what you would have done." (Jebel Jocordy)
affectionate - addicted to being a nuisance. The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.
affiance'ed - fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.
affirm - to declare with suspicious gravity when one is not compelled to wholly discredit himself with an oath.
alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
ambrosia - the diet of the gods - the modern peanut.
aphorism - predigested wisdom.
The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism. ("The Mad Philosopher", 1697)
appeal - in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
appetite - an instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labour question.
ardor - the quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
He loved her with an ardor -
Such a hot one,
That her father had to guard her
With a shotgun. (Ovid)
arena - in politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.
armor - the kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
arrest - formally to detain one accused of unusualness (e.g. "God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh." - The Unauthorized Version)
bard - a person who makes rhymes. The word is one of the numerous aliases under which the poet seeks to veil his identity and escape opprobrium.
beggar - a pest unkindly inflicted upon the suffering rich.
betrothed - the condition of a man and woman who, pleasing to one another and objectionable to their friends, are anxious to propitiate society by becoming unendurable to each other.
book-learning - the dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impenitent ignorance.
bride - a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
cab - a tormenting vehicle in which a pirate jolts you through devious ways to the wrong place, and then robs you.
Canonicals - the motley worn by Jesters of the Court of Heaven.
child - an accident to the occurence of which all the forces and arrangements of nature are specially devised and accurately adapted.
dandle - to set an unresisting child upon one's knee and jolt its teeth loose in a transport of affection.
Deist - one who believes in God, but reserves the right to worship the Devil.
dejeuner - the breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
deliberation - the act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
demure - grave and modest-mannered, like a particularly unscrupulous woman.
There was a young maid so demure,
That she fooled all the men who knew her;
But the women they smoked her
And took her and choked her
And chucked her into a sewer. (Milton)
deposit - a charitable contribution to the support of a bank.
descendant - any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree.
Alas for the days when my baboon ancestral
In Japanese woods from the lithe limb was pendant,
Instructing, kind hearted, each babooness vestal
How best to achieve for herself a descendant. (Oscar Wilde)
desert - an extensive and fertile tract of land producing heavy wheat and vintage crops in colonisation prospectuses.
desertion - an aversion to fighting, as exhibited by abandoning an army or a wife.
dessicate - to make dry.
Now Noble to the pulpit leaps,
The mighty dessicator,
The audience profoundly sleeps -
Slow snores the great creator. (Shelley)
despatches - a complete account of all the murders, outrages and other disgusting crimes which take place everywhere, disseminated daily by an Associated Press for the amelioration of the world in general.
electioneer - to stand on a platform and scream that Smith is a child of light and Jones a worm of the dust.
emancipation - a bondsman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.
embassador - a minister of high rank maintained by one government at the capital of another to execute the will of his wife.
esoteric - very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds - exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found the greatest acceptance in our time.
ermine - the state, dignity or condition of a judge. The word is formed of the two words, err and mine - the one suggesting the tendency of a judicial mind, the other expressing, in a general way, the judicial notion of the rightful ownership of property in dispute.
euphemism - in rhetoric, a figure by which the severe asperity of truth is mitigated by the use of a softer expression than the facts would warrant - as, to call Mr Charles Crocker ninety-nine kinds of knave.
expediency - the father of all the virtues.
expostulation - one of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.
fatigue - the condition of philosopher after having considered human wisdom and virtue.
fear - a sense of the total depravity of the immediate future.
fickleness - the iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.
Flood - a superior degree of dampness. Specifically, a great strom described by Berosus and Moses, when, according to the latter's rain-guage, there was a precipitation of moisture to the depth of one-eighth of a mile in twenty-four hours for forty days. The former did not measure, apparently, for he simply explains (in pretty good Greek) that it rained cats and dogs. The learned author of the cunieform inscriptions from the Mesopotamian mounds draws a number of carpet-tacks on a brick to signify that it was "quite a smart shower considering the season."
flop - suddenly to change one's opinion and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turncoat by some of our partisan journals.
fool - a person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war - founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting - such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand has warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilisation, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilisation.
friend - an investigator upon the slide of whose microscope we live, move and have our being.
friendship - a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.
frontespiece - a protuberance of the human face, beginning between the eyes and terminating, as a rule, in somebody's business.
gas-meter - the family liar in the basement.
generous - originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.
ghoul - a demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefts than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads and an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in mor ethan one place at a time. Thge good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholson relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.
gnu - an animal of South Africa, which in its domesticated state resembles a horse, a buffalo and a stag. In its wild condition it is something like a thunderbolt, an earthquake and a cyclone.
A hunter from Kew caught a distant view
Of a peacefully meditative gnu,
And he said: "I'll pursue, and my hands imbrue
In its blood at a closer interview."
But the beast did ensue and the hunter it threw
O'er the top of a palm that adjacent grew;
And he said as he flew: "It is well I withdrew
Ere, losing my temper, I wickedly slew
That really meritorious gnu." (Jarn Leffer)
grip - ex-Speaker Parks's manner of fondling the property of the commonwealth.
groan - the language in which a Republican Federal office-holder expounds his view of the political situation.
Hell - the residence of the late Dr. Noah Webster, dictionary-maker.
homoeopathist - the humorist of the medical profession.
homoeopathy - a theory and practice of medicine which aims to cure the diseases of fools. As it does not cure them, and does sometimes kill the fools, it is ridiculed by the thoughtless, but commended by the wise.
hunger - a peculiar disease afflicting all the classes of mankind and commonly treated by dieting. It is observed that those who live in fine houses have it the lightest. This information is useful to chronic sufferers.
idiot - a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field or thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.
imagination - a warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
imbecility - a kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.
immaculate - not as yet spotted by the police.
inauspicious - not lousy with it in the crop. . . The author of this dictionary feels it his duty to explain to the Eastern reader that the appalling phrase immediately foregoing is not of his own invention, and that he employs it here, with reluctance, in order to be clearly understood in the mining camps of this state, where "English as she is spoke" on the Atlantic seaboard is altogether unintelligible. The author begs to assure his Eastern readers that the phrase in questions means nothing very disagreeable; it may be translated thus: "Not showing much free gold in the outcroppings." Let us now proceed.
incompossible - unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility let loose. Instead of such low language as "Go heel yourself - I mean to kill you on sight," the words, "Sir, we are incompossible," would convey an equally significant intention and in stately courtesy are altogether superior.
inconsiderate - imperfectly attentive to the welfare, happiness, comfort or desires of others; as cholera, smallpox, the rattlesnake and the satirical newspaper.
incorporation - the act of uniting several persons into one fiction called a corporation, in order that they may be no longer responsible for their actions. A, B and C are a corporation. A robs, B steals and C (it is necessary that there be one gentleman among them) cheats. It is a plundering, thieving, swindling corporation. But A, B and C, who have jointly determined and severally executed every crime of the corporation, are blameless. It is wrong to mention them by name when censuring their acts as a corporation, but right when praising. Incorporation is somewhat like the ring of Gyges: it bestows the blessing of invisibility - comfortable to knaves. The scoundrel who invented incorporation is dead - he has disincorporated.
indecision - the chief element of success; "for whereas," saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "there is but one way to do nothing and divers ways to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards" - a most clear and satisfactory exposition of the matter.
indigestion - a disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the western wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: "Plenty well, no pray; big bellyache, heap God."
infallible - not liable to error; dead-sure - as Frank Pixley, when speaking ex cathartica.
ingratitude - a form of self-respect that is not inconsistent with acceptance of favours.
inhumanity - one of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
innate - natural, inherent - as innate ideas, that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have "given it a black eye." Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one's ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one's country, in the superiority of one's civilisation, in the importance of one's personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one's diseases.
intention - the mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of the act intended by the person incurring the intention. . . When figured out and accurately apprehended this will be found one of the most penetrating and far-reaching definitions in this whole dictionary. It has taken the first premium at three country fairs and is prescribed by all respectable physicians as a dead shot for worms. It increased the corn yield of Illinois one million bushels in a single season, discovered the source of the Nile and saved the day at Shiloh.
interlocutor - the barometrical centre of depression at a minstrel show.
intoxication - a spiritual condition that goeth before the next morning.
intractable - stubbornly unwilling to adopt a course from which nothing can divert ourselves.
introduction - a social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this country, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of strangers."
ivory - a substance kindly provided by nature for making billiard balls. It is usually harvested from the mouths of elephants.
jealous - unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
jockey - a person whose business it is to ride and throw races.
joss-sticks - small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain rites of our holy religion.
Jove - a mythical being whom the Greeks and Romans ridiculously supposed to be the supreme ruler of the universe - unacquainted as they were with our holy religion.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Pseuds Corner Holiday Edition
The image that was very much in my mind, thinking about grandeur, was a story of boys behaving badly at school. It was a school trip on which two boys had picked on a third. And the ones who'd done the bullying were from the most affluent families.
For me that caused a sort of sacred rage. . ." (John Armstrong, in interview with The Zone, "Grand designs", The Age, 01/11/10)
It was pleasing the other week when that easygoing lady of the left, Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Human Services and Social Inclusion, took to task whatever blighted public servant it was who ordered that there should be nothing Christian in any of the displays in post offices, as if a nativity scene was the insignia of the Spanish Inquisition and nothing but the stench of infamy in the nostrils of all those fundamentalist atheists who march under the banner of Richard Dawkins. - Plibersek said, quite rightly, that the Christmas story was a thing to be treasured, and people should also be free to honour Hanukkah and Hindu and Muslim festivals. - Of course that's true. Christmas is the one, though, that underlies the Jewish and Greek influences that structure our world. - If you doubt the Jewish influence in Christianity, think of the stupendous, densely Hebraic accents of Mary's great prayer which is known to the church as the Magnificat. (Peter Craven, "Tale of Innocence and Joy", The Age, 24/12/10)
In the words of one prominent voice: "It's important that we don't allow the arts to become just a platform of observers; it's about participation; it's about artists. And in my view, an active arts community is a community where there's diversity, where the community is engaged with artists, where they're welcoming of artists, where the artists and the art forms are not institutionalised for their own sake, but they are ever-evolving - they're thoughtful, they're powerful, perpetually fresh, perpetually edgy". . .
An effective arts policy, collaborating with the independent arts, will create partnerships with those smaller organisations already immersed in artist development. A devolved funding approach overcomes the stop-start nature of project funding, securing the committment of expert organisations for programs such as mentorships, audience development, public space creation.
In 2011, Victoria's arts policy must take the creativity, diversity and sheer scale of the independent arts as its starting point. With a strong peer-review culture, and unencumbered by the art-form boards of the Australia Council, Arts Victoria is well placed to collaborate on new models. . . (Esther Anatolitis, wind assisted by T. Baillieu (aka "The Voice") - The Age, 17/01/11)
Friday, January 14, 2011
Eat, Pray, Throw Stuff Out
crikey review of Corinne Grant's Lessons in Letting Go: Confessions of a Hoarder
What can you say about the small number of people out there who can’t stand Corinne Grant? My theory about the Corinne-haters was always that Grant’s brand of humour is just a bit too cosy for some tastes. In her routines on “The Glass House” and the live stand-up scene you’d get hardly any of the snark with which other funny-men decapitate their fellow humans day after day, and none of the excruciating embarrassments that plenty of comedy relies on for comic effect. For more than a decade now, Grant’s schtick has been that of an ex-country girl who still gets herself in a tangle adapting to the big-smoke. Even when she’d try out a bit of lazy smut, or did take-offs of the freakshow of city street-life, she’d always keep enough of the girl-next-dooriness to save her routines from shading off into any sort of black; she’d fess up to her fantasies about coming home with the balls of the bogan on the tram wrapped in plastic, but then she’d hunch over or cover her mouth in embarrassment – and that was almost as funny as the gag.
Well, Lessons in Letting Go is here to tell us that it’s been harder work being Corinne Grant than we might have assumed. The book’s about being a hoarder – something Grant wants to tell us is a specific condition in its own right, a very serious condition, involving a pathological inability to throw out any of the stuff you’ve ever accumulated.
The tale starts in what is Grant’s recognisable comic mode. To warm us up, she rattles off self-deprecating stories about her days as a junior try-hard from Corryong, Victoria. Within a chapter or two, she’s down in Melbourne at uni, and we learn about her obsession with stuff as she shacks up with a guy called Thomas. The comic set-pieces follow a basic formula, which works well enough: as she moves between flats she digs up bits and pieces that remind her of moderately funny misadventures from the Corryong days. Pretty early on she meets comic-to-be, Adam Richard, who gets most of the best lines in the book and is there to offset Grant’s desperately straight ways with top-shelf gay self-parody. (If she’s the clueless country kid, he’s Liberace in tracksuit pants.) Boyfriend Thomas comes off second best as a character. Grant spends the greater part of the book grieving about what never was, taking advantage of Thomas’ patience as the friendly ex. The relationship that preceded all this is next to non-existent: Thomas is fundamentally decent, not obsessed with hanging on to his stuff (and therefore in Grant’s mind “brave”) - and, apart from that, he’s just there to calm her down and reason with her about her stuff.
Lessons in Letting Go tries out two types of explanations of her hoarding ways – straight ones and jokey ones. The second type often rings truer than the first type, making the second half of the book, when Grant’s efforts to come to terms with her obsessions get deadly serious, a bit of a drag.
Until she starts “de-hoarding”, one of the main things Grant can’t get a grip on is the difference between the social ritual of buying stuff for other people, which isn’t always a token of live human feeling, and the reality of genuine emotional bonds. She’s accumulated so much stuff because she’s never thrown away a single Christmas card or any of the 20 bottles of skin-cream she’s been gifted since the 1980s. This is the personal essence of the hoarding behaviour: it’s as if her connections with other people are so tenuous that if she bins the unused 20 year old presents she’ll be standing naked in the present, utterly alone; or as if her sense of herself depends so much on the past that she needs physical reminders of every little incident to know that she’s still alive in the here and now. She’s almost hysterical in her nostalgia, and she knows it. Every old scrunchy sends her bowling down memory lane, like an elasticised version of Proust’s madeleine.
The book though seems to toss up more questions than Grant herself can answer without the help of the psychological professionals. Is her hoarding a side-effect of the way she over-empathises? (She does it with things as well as people.) How does the localised problem – the fear of turfing out all the pressies and momentos – relate to her wider set of fears – the paralysing neurotic fear of offending people, appearing rude, appearing stupid, appearing timid, or the circular neurotic perception that it’s pathetic to have all those fears in the first place? If her habits as a hoarder open her eyes to a generalised anxiety – the classic existentialist heeby-jeebies – then how does sorting out the localised problem with excess possessions allow her to neutralise the wider anxiety, and do so without any neurotic remainders?
Neutralise it she does, with a dose of spirituality and some casual humanitarianism. Off she flies to Bali, for 10 days of yoga and psychic purging, some encounters with women who have done an impressive amount of their own letting-go, and a spot of what my anthropology lecturer used to call “exoticism”: a highly satisfying attempt to project a fantasy of wholesome simplicity onto the Indonesian natives she doesn’t really get to know. The best of all this is still the funny bits – the cute Dutch girl who says things like “Every Dutch person has class. We don’t have bogans. What is ‘daggy’?” (Corinne is tactful enough not to answer “straight young Dutchies.”) The worst is the self-helpy tone Grant gives to it all: her purpose in visiting this tourist-brochure “tropical paradise”, she tells us, is “to learn to let go of my pain”.
It’s hard to knock another person’s journey of self-discovery. Surely one human being’s journey of self-discovery is as good as the next? Yes, but is one person’s journey as worthy of a novel-length memoir as the next? The answer has to be no: whether the journey’s worth writing about depends on the depth of experience and whether it comes through in words and sentences. Now: if this seems to reduce a comic’s confession to very serious terms, with Lessons in Letting Go you have to get down to the serious stuff at some point. The book stops functioning like an extended stand-up routine quite early on. It wants to tell us that spiritual retreats, human companionship and contact with the suffering of the earth can make you into a better person. Who could possibly doubt it? The point is that most of us already know those kinds of things can change your life. So someone writing about them has to show us how with a lot more vividness than Oprah and her blithering guests, or else it’ll sound clichéd.
In the end that’s why Lessons in Letting Go sours its own fun: because what it comes down to is a lengthy, comically unreconstructed indecent exposure of Grant’s neurotic consciousness. “Unreconstructed” is the operative word here. Because obviously the material itself – hoarding, and the convoluted guilt, shame and attachment to the past that make Grant into a hoarder – could’ve made for some funny and perceptive summer reading: aren’t intense guilt and shame the neurotic feedstock of the routines we know and love in Woody Allen, or Phillip Roth, or Corinne Grant when she’s at her best?
There’s no comparison, unfortunately. The shamelessness with which Woody used to whine about being a loser is the motor of his best films: the shamelessness is what perversely suggests that he’s master of all the stuff that he’s telling us over and over he’s not master of. Midway through Lessons in Letting Go Corinne Grant enters into a vicious circle: she tells us how ashamed she is of her hoarding and showers us with the details, but that’s all. When she does eventually break the pattern, turfing out half a house worth of stuff, throwing a party and presumably deciding to write a book about it all, you realise how far she’s left comedy behind. Apart from a handful of good smartarse lines from Adam Richard, there aren’t that many funnies to speak of towards the end of the book.
In becoming a reformed hoarder, Grant seems to create for herself a safe domain of comfort, tidiness and self-contentment that she somehow fell away from during childhood. She returns wholly to a sort of comfort-zone, one that her fellow hoarders and the rest of us are supposed to find edifying.
Some people will find it edifying and some won’t. The reason it rings untrue is because you know the tidy ideal is exactly the kind of thing Grant in stand-up mode is expert at mocking.
Well, Lessons in Letting Go is here to tell us that it’s been harder work being Corinne Grant than we might have assumed. The book’s about being a hoarder – something Grant wants to tell us is a specific condition in its own right, a very serious condition, involving a pathological inability to throw out any of the stuff you’ve ever accumulated.
The tale starts in what is Grant’s recognisable comic mode. To warm us up, she rattles off self-deprecating stories about her days as a junior try-hard from Corryong, Victoria. Within a chapter or two, she’s down in Melbourne at uni, and we learn about her obsession with stuff as she shacks up with a guy called Thomas. The comic set-pieces follow a basic formula, which works well enough: as she moves between flats she digs up bits and pieces that remind her of moderately funny misadventures from the Corryong days. Pretty early on she meets comic-to-be, Adam Richard, who gets most of the best lines in the book and is there to offset Grant’s desperately straight ways with top-shelf gay self-parody. (If she’s the clueless country kid, he’s Liberace in tracksuit pants.) Boyfriend Thomas comes off second best as a character. Grant spends the greater part of the book grieving about what never was, taking advantage of Thomas’ patience as the friendly ex. The relationship that preceded all this is next to non-existent: Thomas is fundamentally decent, not obsessed with hanging on to his stuff (and therefore in Grant’s mind “brave”) - and, apart from that, he’s just there to calm her down and reason with her about her stuff.
Lessons in Letting Go tries out two types of explanations of her hoarding ways – straight ones and jokey ones. The second type often rings truer than the first type, making the second half of the book, when Grant’s efforts to come to terms with her obsessions get deadly serious, a bit of a drag.
Until she starts “de-hoarding”, one of the main things Grant can’t get a grip on is the difference between the social ritual of buying stuff for other people, which isn’t always a token of live human feeling, and the reality of genuine emotional bonds. She’s accumulated so much stuff because she’s never thrown away a single Christmas card or any of the 20 bottles of skin-cream she’s been gifted since the 1980s. This is the personal essence of the hoarding behaviour: it’s as if her connections with other people are so tenuous that if she bins the unused 20 year old presents she’ll be standing naked in the present, utterly alone; or as if her sense of herself depends so much on the past that she needs physical reminders of every little incident to know that she’s still alive in the here and now. She’s almost hysterical in her nostalgia, and she knows it. Every old scrunchy sends her bowling down memory lane, like an elasticised version of Proust’s madeleine.
The book though seems to toss up more questions than Grant herself can answer without the help of the psychological professionals. Is her hoarding a side-effect of the way she over-empathises? (She does it with things as well as people.) How does the localised problem – the fear of turfing out all the pressies and momentos – relate to her wider set of fears – the paralysing neurotic fear of offending people, appearing rude, appearing stupid, appearing timid, or the circular neurotic perception that it’s pathetic to have all those fears in the first place? If her habits as a hoarder open her eyes to a generalised anxiety – the classic existentialist heeby-jeebies – then how does sorting out the localised problem with excess possessions allow her to neutralise the wider anxiety, and do so without any neurotic remainders?
Neutralise it she does, with a dose of spirituality and some casual humanitarianism. Off she flies to Bali, for 10 days of yoga and psychic purging, some encounters with women who have done an impressive amount of their own letting-go, and a spot of what my anthropology lecturer used to call “exoticism”: a highly satisfying attempt to project a fantasy of wholesome simplicity onto the Indonesian natives she doesn’t really get to know. The best of all this is still the funny bits – the cute Dutch girl who says things like “Every Dutch person has class. We don’t have bogans. What is ‘daggy’?” (Corinne is tactful enough not to answer “straight young Dutchies.”) The worst is the self-helpy tone Grant gives to it all: her purpose in visiting this tourist-brochure “tropical paradise”, she tells us, is “to learn to let go of my pain”.
It’s hard to knock another person’s journey of self-discovery. Surely one human being’s journey of self-discovery is as good as the next? Yes, but is one person’s journey as worthy of a novel-length memoir as the next? The answer has to be no: whether the journey’s worth writing about depends on the depth of experience and whether it comes through in words and sentences. Now: if this seems to reduce a comic’s confession to very serious terms, with Lessons in Letting Go you have to get down to the serious stuff at some point. The book stops functioning like an extended stand-up routine quite early on. It wants to tell us that spiritual retreats, human companionship and contact with the suffering of the earth can make you into a better person. Who could possibly doubt it? The point is that most of us already know those kinds of things can change your life. So someone writing about them has to show us how with a lot more vividness than Oprah and her blithering guests, or else it’ll sound clichéd.
In the end that’s why Lessons in Letting Go sours its own fun: because what it comes down to is a lengthy, comically unreconstructed indecent exposure of Grant’s neurotic consciousness. “Unreconstructed” is the operative word here. Because obviously the material itself – hoarding, and the convoluted guilt, shame and attachment to the past that make Grant into a hoarder – could’ve made for some funny and perceptive summer reading: aren’t intense guilt and shame the neurotic feedstock of the routines we know and love in Woody Allen, or Phillip Roth, or Corinne Grant when she’s at her best?
There’s no comparison, unfortunately. The shamelessness with which Woody used to whine about being a loser is the motor of his best films: the shamelessness is what perversely suggests that he’s master of all the stuff that he’s telling us over and over he’s not master of. Midway through Lessons in Letting Go Corinne Grant enters into a vicious circle: she tells us how ashamed she is of her hoarding and showers us with the details, but that’s all. When she does eventually break the pattern, turfing out half a house worth of stuff, throwing a party and presumably deciding to write a book about it all, you realise how far she’s left comedy behind. Apart from a handful of good smartarse lines from Adam Richard, there aren’t that many funnies to speak of towards the end of the book.
In becoming a reformed hoarder, Grant seems to create for herself a safe domain of comfort, tidiness and self-contentment that she somehow fell away from during childhood. She returns wholly to a sort of comfort-zone, one that her fellow hoarders and the rest of us are supposed to find edifying.
Some people will find it edifying and some won’t. The reason it rings untrue is because you know the tidy ideal is exactly the kind of thing Grant in stand-up mode is expert at mocking.
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