Pseud's Corner Part 7

For multiple disservices to literature and human dignity, this week's Order of the Brown Nose goes to Jennifer Byrne, host of ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. The list of the pseudy talents on display in her most recent First Tuesday website update really only starts with public brown-nosing of much-loved writers; apart from the general air of unreconstructed self-love and clubbyness, there's the excrutiating pretention ("we laughed like drains" etc), unselfconscious use of cliche's ("that grand old man" etc) and boganic glossy magazine slang (the Book Industry Awards could've been "glammer" etc). Oh, and the generous plug she gives her own interview with Christopher Hitchens in the same breath as announcing that he has cancer.CS

"Another week, another literary prize... last week it was the turn of young Craig Silvey, who took out the industry's Book of the Year with his terrific story of life and a mysterious death in a country town, Jasper Jones. I was sitting at the back of Paddington Town Hall next to that grand old man of letters Tom Keneally, - always blissful company - who scored big applause for his win in the non-fiction category. These Book Industry Awards aren't perhaps as glam as some others but what I like about them is they honour not just writers but the lesser-known people who make the publishing world spin: booksellers, distributors, illustrators, publishers. Though the anxiety in the room about the rise of the e-book was palpable. Lots of passionate speeches in support of the paper-and-ink version - the "heritage delivery system", as the marketers might say. - As for my own reading - well, you can't get much more heritage than Tolstoy's epic Anna Karenina, nominated by many as the greatest novel ever written. . .

Thanks for your reading suggestions last month. I can tell you which clubber suggested Curtis Settlefield's An American Wife, it was Amanda Keller on our Christmas show last year - along with the unforgettable Me Cheeta, a spoof celebrity biography by the world-weary chimp in the Tarzan pictures. We all laughed like drains - assuming she was joking - but had to eat our cackles [eat our own kaka?] when it turned up on the the 2009 Booker Prize longlist!

And even though it is the second Tuesday of the month, a reminder to tune in July 13 for my special half-hour interview with the brilliant, mouthy contrarian Christopher Hitchens. This is a man who could charm birds from the trees. And then roast them for dinner as punishment for being so easily seduced. Funny, pugnacious - and at the moment, I imagine, absolutely devastated. He was out promoting his 11th book and first memoir, Hitch-22, when advised that he'd been diagnosed with cancer; he immediately pulled out of the tour to start chemo treatment. But he's in scintillating form in this interview - and the full hour version will go up on the First Tuesday site." (Jennifer Byrne, "What I'm reading" First Tuesday Book Club online)

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On Fanoodling

It's been non-stop fanoodling here on The Great Stage since Julian Meyrick fanoodled his way to a really prominent corner of the Corner of Shame in edition no. 6 and revealed to us with the f*ck-you appassionata of a man of true conviction - not only that Beckett's immortal Waiting for Godot is a moral lesson in . . . waiting, but also what Vlad and Estr really get up to in the course of the play. Of course they despair, but, more importantly, they fanoodle. They fanoodle so significantly that the great gullet of Australian cultural unresponsiveness opens wide and emits . . . funny noises. Feeling almost certain that Dr Meyrick wasn't suggesting he'd seen Ian McKellen and co. "messing round on a couch" doing something "like cuddling, only better" - as a quick trip to the Urban Dictionary seemed to indicate - we asked readers to tell us what they thought Meyrick really meant - deep down. Today, the results are in.    

A SHIFTING, shuffling, furrowing, cogitating noise. A cross between a wheeze, a sigh and a snort of determination. This is the sound emitting from the Comedy Theatre at the moment. The sound of Australians facing up to Culture. . . That Waiting for Godot should be presented commercially 50 years after it was damned by New York critic Walter Kerr as "a play in which nothing happens, twice" suggests either the world has lost its mind, or changed it. Beckett's two tramps, fanoodling and despairing their days away waiting for a mysterious Godot who never appears, is stamped on our collective consciousness as the archetypal existential statement. A ditch, a tree, a few guys killing time. That's it, folks. After all the unwanted Christmas presents, great loves, political upheavals, promotions, demotions, technical advances, broken marriages and lost biros, that what we're left with. That's life. - A production of Waiting for Godot is a compelling event because it is still an affront to theatre-going sensibilities. Or once again an affront. Discontinuity is the dominant mode of the modern world, as we frazzle and fragment in unrelenting competitive locomotion. Harried, hurried and chronically overwhelmed, waiting of any kind has been banished, an unmitigated bad. So Beckett's tramps, who literally do nothing for two hours, is a poke in the eye, a ''f**k you'' from beyond the grave. Having to sit in the theatre and think for a prolonged period demands skills all but forgotten, like tuning a crystal set. Something more is required, a quality of attention we reserve only for things that touch us deeply. Things that really matter. (Julian Meyrick, "Beckett can teach us how to wait", The Age)

So, were Vlad and Estr fanoodling, as in:

(a) canoodling in fcuk apparell (Daniel Pilkington)?

(b) "fail-noodling" - i.e. failing to use their noodles - presumably to agree on a departure strategy once it became clear that Godot was putting in a no-show (Sam Waters)?

(c) squeezing the wrong end of the sauce bottle (Kevin Rudd)?

OR

(d) running around with their underpants on their heads being boisterously expressive, i.e. acting (Larissa Harrison)?

The free lunch voucher I think clearly goes to . . . Mr Pilkington.

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For my part – and in this forum for intimate, writerly expression – I’ve got to openly submit here to conceding that for the longest time I’ve resented the contention that a tactile, geographical environment impacts on the quality of an author’s work. I do, however, freely and cordially embrace the notion that a physical, authorial space administers a significant influence upon a writer’s work ethic. - For wherever I work – be this sprawling over and scrawling onto the leg of an armchair – be this conveniently adopting the Yellow Pages as both a makeshift desk and seer-stone for its infinite supply of barbarous character names – be this scrawling my linguistically anomalous breed of hieroglyph into water-choked moleskines, or onto the backs of lurid junkmail pamphleteering the services of professional suburban podiatrists moonlighting as dental technicians – be this writing with my fingertip into granulated mounds of sugar, or into nuggets of spilled coffee grounds, before palming my idle attempts at kitchen literature into my enamel-ware mug and consuming these same imperfect sentences with soy milk so sweet I can almost mask the bitter taste of haphazard syntax – for wherever my compulsion to write seizes me, my stamina for producing is dependent upon a space where personal comfort reigns supreme. (Kirk Marshall, "Kirk Marshall's Literary Space" LiteraryMinded)

The Advancement Solutions Consultant is responsible for analysing client requirements and providing complex data reports to the advancement community of the University. The position is required to play a pivotal role in the development and documentation of technical procedures for managing information across the Advancement system portfolio. Furthermore, the Advancement Solutions Consultant will develop standard reports that replace ad hoc reports using the business intelligence reporting tool (Microsoft SQL Server BI) by adhering to the report development lifecycle. - The incumbent will also be responsible for providing assistance and making business process improvements across the Advancement system portfolio. - Additionally, the Advancement Solutions Consultant will manage new customizations and configurations to advancement systems and conduct system and user acceptance testing on applicable environments with other team members. (University of Melbourne, "WANTED: Advancement Solutions Consultant - Advancement Office, Deputy Vice Chancellor (University Affairs))

By day three, we were total ratbags. Our American companion had morphed into ‘Dingo Dave’. Ascending a sharp incline, we found Jennifer Byrne [Why, hello again!] rolling on the ground in paroxysms of laughter. Linda Jaivin’s description of the plot twists in her Song dynasty opera scenario grew more baroque with every mile. Raymond, now bereft of any hope that we might be capable of shutting up for even the shortest time, announced that he had decided to let us talk. I pumped him for dirt on Doc Neeson and the Angels. Conversation ranged across topics from Cormac McCarthy to the difference between a cad and a bounder to cheap eats in Istanbul. Only rarely did we encounter other walkers, groups of older folk mostly, with serious expressions and ski-stock walking sticks. They looked scandalised as we trooped past singing selections from The Sound of Music. ("Shane Maloney opens his diary", The Spectator Australia)

[The latest album]'s many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google. A lot of the criticisms of M.I.A. have focused on her lack of a coherent politics, the questionable ethics of her aestheticization of poverty, and the hypocrisies of her privileged lifestyle. With albums as vital and original as Arular and Kala, it was easy to defend her deterritorializations as a valid artistic strategy, a method of salvaging the radical moment and making it resonate with a Western audience weaned on hip-hop's valorization of the outlaw. The Hirschbergs of the world are wrong when they attempt to bring M.I.A. to task for these perceived ethical violations, when her body of work is more productively viewed as a series of politically charged portraits in which that naïveté is essential to the revolutionary urgency she seeks to bring to the dancefloor. Unfortunately, this time out, M.I.A. just hasn't given us enough to work with. (Jonathan Dean reviews MIA, Tiny Mix Tapes. Tip of the hat for a close reading of this spasming hypertext to Matt Wendus)

Hyland’s writing, which has only increased in strangeness with each new book, emerges from a shifting of co-ordinates between cold-eyed clinician and artist’s empathetic heart. Her characters are constructed from the tension between autistic remove and panting proximity; her narratives energised by the insertion of wildly disturbed individuals into drab, constricted worlds. And her style? As Harold Pinter once said of his work, “What goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.” (Geordie Williamson, The Australian)


[Spotters: ONR, BG, CMcC, ACG] 

How unfunny is Catherine D?

Review: Catherine Deveney "God is Bullshit: That's the Good News"
 

Though it shouldn't dissuade you from becoming an atheist (or persuade you), the fact is that there have always been a fair number of them for whom the attraction is obviously the opportunity to have some rough fun at the expense of what other people take very seriously. These people are not so much born rebels as serial pests, Bart Simpsons in battle dress. If you wanted a technical name for them, it would have to be social scatologists - people whose atheism comes down basically to sticking their fingers up their bums, whipping them out and waving them round chanting gleefully that God, that pathetic non-existent fkn loser, hasn't struck them down for their sins yet. On the other hand, especially since the days religion started having to justify itself in the face of scientific enquiry, journalistic scrutiny and scatological provocation, there have always been quite a few testy metropolitans who have argued rather fatuously for their beliefs on the grounds of sheer historical necessity: religion has been taken seriously for the longest time and should therefore be taken seriously today. In a broadly secular society such as our own, the sort of ill-natured to-ing and fro-ing that goes on between the two groups seems like just another sideshow - an exercise in mutual irritation that the mainstream media is happy to bring to the boil, especially at the time of the two main Christian festivals, when the rest of the world is just taking a breather. Such is the eternal nil-all draw that seems bound to be replayed over and over again on the margins of the social realm.

Exactly why it's bound to be a nil-all draw is complex, but if I had to say in 30 words or less - what might, very roughly, be called the scientific view of the world has run into problems of its own, both intrinsic and extrinsic, but religion, including the Christian religion, has established itself as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that are advancing and have been for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get people to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that actually means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face at least of more literalist interpretations of the Bible. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most Christians and religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most and much more seriously than they are, and indeed can be, taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions, partly, as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism that permeates almost every aspect of the systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion is not going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the fact that large numbers of people put themselves down as nominal Christians or say they believe in some sort of transcendent or supra-worldly plane - such beliefs are normally so totally content-less and so devoid of practical consequences that they should hardly be called religion at all and certainly not Christianity; but it does have to do with the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, as the saying goes; well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group text your friends about (LOL) and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to go out there and FKN-WLL SHOP, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.

This brings me to Catherine Deveney, whose show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival I stopped by to see last night. Deveney, as I'm sure you already know, is one of the scatological atheist brigade, but before I get to that - a disclosure: I have been an un-fan of Deveney's for many years now - not so much because of what she writes - which is such a stew of smart-arsery and brow-beating that I rarely read it - but because of what she represents: the celebrity columnist, viz. at a once-serious newspaper now determined to turn itself into a super-size Who Weekly, whose fairly unremarkable life and equally unremarkable mind leaves her with nothing much to do in her thrice-weekly columns but talk about herself and aimlessly hang sh*t on people. Her stand-up comedy aside, Deveney's career has essentially been a variation on a theme whose monotonous key notes are filling up column inches and giving readers a sense of social superiority. The idea of the people who commission this stuff seems to be to give The Age's readers the chance to get themselves close enough over breakfast to the source of self-important snark (Deveney), quirky navel-gazing (Marieke Hardy), cosy principled "musings" (Kate Holden) or 2-minute-noodle-style literary knowingness (Shane Maloney), so that they can head out into the world - if not feeling an inner glow, at least feeling forearmed with someone else's ironies. - It's important to bear in mind, by the way, what all this guff - guff that undoubtedly knows it's guff - has come to edge out of the newpaper almost completely - that is, book reviews, film reviews and social criticism that fulfil the minimal criteria of grown-up commentary - talking about the topic for more than three sentences back-to-back and not using the elbow-room that new-style subjectively coloured journalism gives you as a pretext for talking about what bit of obnoxious or poignant behaviour you were witness to last time you were at the supermarket. - That The Age continues to employ Deveney as a tv writer is a sign of the deep downwards spiral it entered into long ago; the abrasive scatter-brained smugness might sometimes be amusing in a column devoted to Catherine's larger-than-life personality, but applied to a medium, tv, that would be well served being written about from a thoughtful informed perspective, it's inexcusable.

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We interrupt transmission to present you posthumously with no less than six epigraphs. Just in case you'd been tempted not to read on by so many preliminaries. . . CS

It is quite possible nowadays to rebel against rebellion by being conventional. Of course this doesn’t mean that all conventionality has just the right mystical rebellious qualities. . . But then how to stand out from the crowd if this is the trick you’re trying to play? That requires imagination. . . - Lion

Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them. - Lichtenberg

I flew too close to the sun – on wings of pastrami. - George Costanza

All theology represents an intellectual rationalisation of the possession of sacred values. No science is absolutely free from presuppositions, and no science can prove its fundamental value to the man who rejects these presuppositions. Every theology, however, adds a few specific presuppositions for its work and thus for the justification of its existence. Their meaning and scope vary. Every theology. . . presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. - Max Weber

Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualisation which we have been undergoing for thousands of years . . . Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalisation, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically. . . Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money – sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. . . It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather than one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualisation means. – Max Weber

The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked though to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a "meaning" of inner-worldly occurrences. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power. The extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely. Athansius won out with his formula [I believe because it is absurd] in his struggle against the majority of the Hellenic philsophers of the time; it does not seem inconceivable, as has been said, that among other reasons he really wanted to compel them expressly to make the intellectual sacrifice and to fix a limit to rational discussion. Soon afterwards, however, the Trinity itself was rationally argued and discussed. - Weber

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All of that said though - there's no denying that the larger-than-life personality does work for Deveney as a stand-up. In her promo material for the Comedy Festival she describes herself as "atheist eye-candy" - which is pretty much the sort of self-admiring tripe that her columns are full of. But when she stalks round on stage in high-heels and a low cut dress and hoots, Tallulah Bankhead style, about being atheist eye-candy she actually makes herself into what she says she is; instead of just writing egomaniacal comic IOU's, she gives herself the chance to play on or against the expectations that come with that sort of sexualised self-presentation. Likewise when she tells us the story of her pre-teen attempts at joining the ranks of Catholic altar boys at the start of God is Bullshit. What did they make her as punishment for even asking? A . . . liturgical dancer: down she goes on bended knee and swirls her arms bizarrely above her head, part matador, part calisthenics teacher - at last she's showing us the stupid side of religion. Or take this development of the show's mainline title:

"George Pell is doing a show at the Comedy Festival did you know? It's called. . . Catherine Deveney is bullshit."