Pseud's Corner: No. 4

Order of the Brown Nose

Julia Gillard wears power incredibly well. Sorry to use the verb "wears"; a colleague had warned against it. But as Australia's first female prime minister established the running order of questions at yesterday's press conference, her newfound authority fitted like a second skin. Her voice was steady, her gaze direct, her cheeks ever-so-slightly flushed. My eyes kept returning to her stylish necklace. Our Prime Minister chooses a necklace in the morning and not a tie, I kept thinking. Funny what a giddy, slightly nervous mind can latch on to.

As we stood around watching the press conference, one woman thrust her fist into the air and hissed, "Yes!" Another whispered "Finally", her eyes moist. No, I decided. Granted, the time for bursting into "I am woman, hear me roar" has long passed. And it is a challenge to mark this moment without lapsing into the sentimental or the patronising or the glib. It is a bittersweet, heartbreaking moment too; encompassing the shattered dreams of a man of great promise. But don't piss on this parade by claiming there's nothing to celebrate. . .

When Kevin Rudd became Labor leader in 2006, a reporter wrote about how sexy he suddenly seemed: a dusting of power being all it takes. So let's say it: Gillard was damn sexy too, even sexier than she was two days ago. If saying this undermines the [feminist] cause, the cause still has a way to go. (Julie Szego, "A feminist hero", The Age)

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This week's Order of the Brown Nose goes to Julie Szego for her reaction to the Gillard boil-over last week in The Age - not quite for sucking up, but for empty-headed cluckiness on the subject. "Funny what a giddy, slightly nervous mind can latch on to," Szego twitters as she catches herself in flagrante full of confused sentimentality; less funny is what such a mind is happy to splurge into its newspaper column: the worst of the lot is the cliche' that power is sexy - that Julia G is sexier than ever before now she's come by the highest office in the land. Szego knows the effect is pure media hokum - something that dissipates over months or can vanish almost overnight, as it did for Kevin Rudd; she says as much. But when it comes to Gillard, well. . . because she's feeling giddy, the cliche' doesn't just get trotted out as if it's true and interesting, it gets elevated to the status of a feminist nostrum; the logic seems to be - we all know that the power-is-sexy idea is bollocks, but - if women can be sexy in power just like men, it proves that equality of the sexes is another major step closer to full realisation.

The Age was at its worst in its coverage of Gillard's rise to power. In comparison to its 10-page spread, the Hun read like Tacitus. With more column inches to fill - and at such short notice, given the coup against Rudd took everyone by surprise - Age staffers were able to really indulge one of the mainstream media's worst habits: reporting on their own reactions to events (events that they in every sense tease into existence) as if their reactions were themselves the news. Maybe this kind of situation's made specially surreal in Australia by the fact that the national capital is a sort of anti-metropolis: the drama of Rudd's resignation, like so many a national-political story, took place in an almost wholly negative public space - in front, that is, of no one but an assembled mass of PR-bods, journos and camera-operators, with no street scene to function as backdrop, no vitally interested or plainly curious or merely indifferent group of burghers to raise the scene from out of its hyper-mediated sub-reality.

The best response to the civic vacuum, you'd think, would be to let events speak for themselves. Instead, Age sloggers like Szego and Tony Wright fill out their pictures of events with the reactions of fellow sloggers. The media stands around observing itself, ready to write up its experience of itself as news. There it is, front and centre of the story, crowding close to the "spectral" Kevin Rudd, hanging on the "dying words of the extinguished leader". Rudd's own media-team, together with other staffers, are captured accompanying him on his "final journey" - this is the journey into the prime ministerial courtyard outside his office for his last press conference: poignant spinners in serried ranks of three "march as a battalion across the cobbles, forming a sort of guard of honour." Wright really earns his place in the Corner of Shame with a little touch that comes in the middle of Rudd's speech: a nameless member of the media-pack bumps the sculpture in the courtyard and - you guessed it, it tolls like a bell - "the bell that has already tolled for Kevin Rudd, the vanquished prime minister." Tony, we feel, it tolls for you too, for all those dead phrases walking, the ritual changing of the words on the page. As you put it so aptly - it is all nothing more than a formality. Lead us, your lambs, to the slaughterhouse of prose. Vanquished yet expectant, we read on. . .
 

Such a long walk, the one to the gallows. Kevin Rudd, hands in pockets, Labour Party elder and keeper of the last rites John Faulkner. . . He had declared the night before he would fight; he would call a ballot and he would put himself in the hands of the party. But as the night wore on, it became apparent there was no point. A ballot would leave on the books a dreadful truth. He had no mates, or too few to matter. And so he was a dead man walking. The destination was a party meeting that was nothing more than a formality: a ritual changing of the guard. No ballot. The Australian people had elected him. The Australian Labor Party's fear of the Australian people had executed him. Within two hours, a spectral Kevin Rudd . . . stood for the last time in the prime minister's courtyard. A couple of hundred journalists crowded close, intent on capturing the words of the extinguished leader. Rudd's staff, all those exhausting days and nights behind them, their future uncertain, marched as a battalion in ranks of three across the cobbles, a guard of honour. "What I remember most about [the day of national apology was that] as they came in from over there - he gestured across the courtyard - they were frightened," he said. "Our job was to make them welcome." He could barely utter the words. The eyes welled, the silences grew, the crowd stood transfixed. Someone bumped a large metallic sculpture in the courtyard. It tolled like a bell. But the bell had already tolled for Kevin Rudd, the vanquished prime minister. . . Within two hours, Rudd would attend question time in the House of Representatives. He sat at the back of the bankbenches, determined to stay, hoping for redemption. . ." (Tony Wright, "Kevin Rudd's Long Walk" The Age)

Meanwhile. . .

There is an old Dale Carnegie saying: It goes - 'people don't care how much you know, 'til they know how much you care'. - Thought Leaders are knowledgeable people, often very objective and analytical around an issues that a business or person may be facing. I try to remember the importance of care factor. Without it, all your smarts, all your IP [Intellectual Property? Induced Polarisation? Intercessory Prayer?] is completely useless.
My friend and Thought Leader Darren Hill, would tell you it's simply increasing your Humanity. My dear friend Pete Sheahan, would tell me it's simply being Old School. My customer experience mate Iven Frangi, would tell you that it's Good Business. My technology and futurist friend Craig Rispin, would tell you it's being High Touch in a High Tech world. However you look at it, show you care. That's why so many profiteering [sic] businesses are getting all "do good" with corporate social responsibility and I think it's a great thing. Some may be faking it, but the power of kindness means that before long they'll be making it. (Matt Church, "Care factor 'zero'" Inspiring ThoughtLeadership)

Learning about Our City of Literature has been a personal journey. My great-grandfather, Frank Hobil Cole, arranged the lease for the Hill of Content back when A.H.Spencer needed funds to get his dream. started. Having historical connections to this iconic store was my catalyst for developing the "Melbourne by the Book" tour, which is sensory discussion about the heritage of reading, writing and storytelling in Melbourne. I believe that how and what Melburnians are reading is a historical indicator of the nature of our city, so the writers festival . . . is seeing history being made. (Fiona Sweetman on Melbourne as a UNESCO memorial City of Literature, an Age Writers Festival special)

This is a Godot which is accessible at every point and which refuses to acknowledge any lacuna or yawning gulf that doesn’t have its primary registration in a human sigh or shrug. . . At every point Sean Mathias refuses to formalise Beckett. The clowning always looks like the natural fumbling and frolicking of two professional chaps who know each other and the routines they share which constitute the forms of their intimacy, above everything else. In the great lyrical duet, the nearly liturgical refrain, about leaves and everything else that sounds in the silence, McKellen and Rees cut through the form of Beckett’s cadences to find unexpected human colour and surprise. And it’s that sense of tumbling, improvised comedy on the part of two old stagers that dominates throughout. Ian McKellen as Estragon has an encyclopaedic repertoire of ghoulish comic faces to pull and imbecile dances to dance and dogged cowardly lion growls to growl. It is a wonderfully warmhearted, baffled face he presents to the world as Gogo, almost a fluffy toy with the stuffing knocked out, and the fact that you can hear the great tragedian behind the bawling, long-vowelled northern tragic of a music hall man brings him to the heart of Beckett’s vision. Roger Rees as Vladimir is McKellen’s perfect complement, partly because his eroded matinée idol smoothness comes from a different planet which is, nonetheless, professionally compatible. It’s such a dapper, rapid performance style, as if he had fallen asleep doing Private Lives and woken up 30 years later on a dung heap.Of course, this Ian McKellen/Roger Rees Waiting for Godot is as much Shakespearean as it is sawdust. The magic, though, which releases Beckett’s sense of mystery, is in the lavishness with which these two masters of the technique of the classical theatre pay homage to music hall in order to convey their sense of the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. (Peter Craven reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot", The Spectator)

Pseud's Corner 2

It is odd, after reading glorious sample after glorious sample of Benjamin Law's pithy, stark, delightfully graphic prose (torn vaginas, anybody? Teaching your Malaysian migrant mother the word 'c**t'), to find the man in person
such a sweet, wholesome type of chap. Butter wouldn't melt. Smegma
might, obviously, which would no doubt lead into yet another brilliant
exploration of sticky honesty that Ben does so well. . .
There are very few Australian essayists who have the ability to make one LOL - which I believe is the correct term for someone of my increasingly idiot generation - and I feel so blessed that Ben has momentarily pried his talent from brief and inviting pieces in local magazines to focus on this particular collection of work. (Marieke Hardy interviews Benjamin Law)

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Well, it looks as though Pseud's Corner is going to have to be a fortnightly thing. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions - your favourite pompous wanky quotations from the Australian media-sphere are going to be in the mix as of today. For anyone who hasn't got the invitation yet: take your revenge on the worst writing you can find by emailing it or a link to

pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au

For the time being we're keeping the definition of the pseud-ish fairly loose. If you're looking to get a nomination for The Corner of Shame yourself, remember - the key is to strike a balance between pomposity and meaninglessness - between cliche' and an inflated sense of the importance of your own opinions. If that doesn't seem like specific enough advice, have a careful look through this week's success stories. Try inflating 5 minutes worth of googling (search entries: Tolstoy/literature/seafood) into an entertaining little thought-piece for the back-page of a broadsheet newspaper. Try taking a once-controversial truth that has since been repeated so often that it's become a howling banality and repeat it again - there's a plentiful supply of them in the life, the work, the novels and philosophy of the past. Don't just quote your once-dangerous verity, though, do a serious spot of over-writing. (Have a try with the idea that someone's sense of his own physical being makes a difference to the way he thinks and writes.) Basically - find a dead or dying horse and give it a really good flogging. Lavish all your tedious verbal ingenuity on other people's ideas as if they were your own.

Remember, above all, that words have no meaning. Or that when they are just tokens in the game of self-esteem you play with yourself, you can make them mean whatever you want them to mean. "Sublimation" can mean losing control of finer feelings and "precisely" can refer vaguely to something that you vaguely gesture in the direction of. Or perhaps to your very act of gesturing. Whether it's someone else's show that you're reviewing, the scene of contemporary culture that you're observing, a disaster in a faraway foreign clime or a farce unfolding on local tv that you're reporting on, remember - you are front and centre. Thoughtfulness, critical reflection - I mean, what are they but personal experience?

Today's edition of the Corner of Shame starts with something new. Every month - or will it turn out to be every fortnight too? - we'll award an Order of the Brown Nose. Pretty self-explanatory really. Like Pseud's Corner itself, it's another feature of the funny pages of Private Eye - a magazine we feel positively aglow in recommending to anyone who finds that first-hand experience of the Australian media reduces them to thoughts of self-harm. Congratulations to Marieke Hardy for a truly great feat of public brown-nosing in this month's Readings catalogue. Surely encomiums to literary friends have rarely been as pointlessly weird and disgusting and yet so authentically sucky. Can we promise Marieke the OBN every time she stages a public love-in like this and simultaneously declares herself and her readers to be complete dickheads? It would be foolish to promise.

Actually, no it wouldn't. Every time you do it again, Marieke, you can have the OBN automatically.
  
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I'm often attracted to artists who're physical. - They don't have to be he-men or world-class athletes. But I enjoy the obvious lesson: the seemingly cerebral work of writing is no impediment to physical labour.- And, more importantly, exercise and exertion contribute to literary work. They keep the blood pumping, the brain buzzing, and the mind undistracted by the ennui or itchiness of a lethargic body. Contrary to the myth of the drunk, absinthe-guzzling romantic, health can be good for literature. "Guy loves a couple or three streams in all his life," said Hemingway, on fishing, "and loves them better than anything in the world." - As Hemingway's writings on boxing, bullfighting and fishing suggest, it goes both ways: the experience of sport or physical leisure is enriched by literature. It clarifies the virtues of struggle and endurance; it shares the love of a bruised but pulsing will.- So when I read of Hemingway's fist fight with the poet Wallace Stevens, I don't react with disgust - not at the physicality, anyway. In the confrontation itself, I see two men of beautiful words, putting themselves to the test; striving palpably, rather than in the sometimes anaemic arena of words. . .
Hemingway v. Stevens is a tangible reminder that writers are creatures of ardent flesh. It's what can propel them into pages - the very paper that immortalises their embodied mastery, and records the thrill of physical virtue. - Writing is, in other words, a whole throbbing, sweating, panting life - not simply a desk, chair and paper. The hand that holds a pen can also be a fist - and more 'literary' for this. (Damon Young, "Hemingway's Fists", Darkly Wise, Rudely Great)

In Rabe's performance, we get a needy and manipulative woman whose finer feeling is sublimated into a grotesque and hilarious act, only barely controlled. Jagged anachronisms leap from the mannered gentility. Anna is as likely to shriek "Get off my tits," or "You pagan slut!" as she is to defend a lesbian assignation with a learned reference to biblical writ. . . Questions [however] lurk under the sparkling dialogue, elevated language and histrionic displays about the authority and inevitability of performance - those we give to the world, and the ones we reserve for our most intimate relationships. - In this production, the relationship's intimacy and power struggles aren't precisely embroidered into the linguistic corsetry. We are left to take the distracting jewels of Mamet's dialogue as they come. (Cameron Woodhead, "Marriage made in drawing room hell" - a review of MTC's Boston Marriage)

One sees Matt Preston's cravat and wonders if he had it rough as a boy. But there is method in Matt's sartorial high-jinks, for it is impossible to take insult from a man who dresses as a jester. One sees the pink pantalons and senses there must be some delirium hovering hereabouts. And one forgives. . .
As MasterChef  was ending I flicked to The Pacific on Seven and a young GI lay on the beach at Iwo Jima under an artillery barrage. Twenty years old and hellfire coming down on his head and his friends dying around him and his face gripped in horror. The look was familiar to me. Where had I observed this unholy dread before? Had I lived a previous life as a digger? Was I, long ago, a centurion? Had I halved Frenchmen with a broadsword. - No. I had seen the same expression moments earlier on Channel Ten as Jimmy Seervai plucked frantically at a lobster's alimentary tract in the MasterChef challenge while time ticked towards his ruin. . . And I didn't know who to mourn. The marine, giving his life so that we might live free; or the failed MasterChef, succumbing to a spiky gang of crustaceans in a studio-itchen amid a feast of hyperbole. And, yuck, when did my dinner begin to taste of life-and-death? (Anson Cameron, "A case of suffering for one's tart" The Age)

IT IS the start of autumn and the first televisions of the season have begun blooming on grass verges.- Or perhaps fallen from the trees along with the leaves. Summer's carefree days are drawing in, digital television broadcasting impends, and on the footpaths all around my place, there is a veritable harvest.- On a typical walk I pass about 10 of them, softening in the damp, cords growing into the earth. . .
My mum and I love hard rubbish. We drive along, our eyes scouring piles of wonky chairs, dismantled computer desks, old eggbeaters, sheets of chipboard. "Alert!" I cry, and we zoom over to peer and pluck.- Bricks to raise my potted plants into the sunshine, a raffia shelf, a jewellery tree, a photo album, a peeling old wooden box, we chuck it all in the back of the car. - My mother muses over a rocking chair with a broken strut. "I could fix it," she says hopefully. "Like the last three broken chairs you took home? The ones still in a pile in the shed? Those loser chairs?" "You're right," she says sadly, and walks away, but then turns back and seizes her prize. "It would be perfect to grow vines over! Novelty garden furniture!"- It's hard to resist the temptation of free treasure. And it's environmentally virtuous too: recycling and scavenging is all the thing, don't you know. In some poor countries a family could live off the crap on my footpath. . . (Kate Holden, "Footpath frenzy", The Age)

ANNA Karenina continues to be read and remembered for many reasons. Its beginning - Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way - is one of literature's most quoted starters. Beautiful, doomed Anna flinging herself in front of a steam-shrouded locomotive remains the very essence of romantic tragedy. Jealousy, adultery, lust, agricultural reform - Anna Karenina has it all. But what sticks in my mind are the oysters. - I once met some oysters in Avignon. They were asleep on wooden trays between layers of damp newspaper, a situation in which I myself have been found from time to time. A man was selling them from a van, shucking them to order for customers and stallholders at a makeshift bric-a-brac market across the river from the medieval ramparts of the Palais des Papes. We slurped them straight off the shell, washed down with a precocious young stubby of Stella Artois. [Ah, those precocious French boutique beers!] - The medieval popes in their fortress across the Rhone must have eaten such oysters, their souls unsullied by the experience. They ate clams, too, I imagine. There's a clam bisque in Madame Bovary that I wouldn't mind trying. Flaubert handles shellfish in quite a different way to Tolstoy, of course. And there, limpid on the half-shell, lies the difference between Russian and French literature. If Tolstoy were French, Anna Karenina would've drowned herself in a tureen of steaming bouillabaisse. (Shane Maloney, "The world on a half-shell", The Age)

Pseud's Corner (def) - "listing pompous and pretentious quotations from the media"

The aim, if you want to make it into future installments of Pseud's Corner Australia, is to somehow strike the perfect balance between pomposity and meaninglessness or between cliche' and an inflated sense of the importance of your own opinions (and preferably have yourself published in print or on-line). You'd think it'd be quite hard, but it's not - at least going on the following easy-to-access horrors from the past six months.

Nominations for July's Pseud's Corner are now open. Send all suggestions to: pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au   

Australia has been enriched, challenged and changed by taking a stronger and more complex place on the world stage, rather than just selling ourselves as a great beach resort populated by smiling out-doorsy larrikins. Now, I know this from my own experience. I know this from having worked recently with Benedict Andrews. I know this from seeing a growth in my own husband's work. We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not. . . The arts operate at the very core of human identity and existence. They operate at the cutting edge of a science that is now trying to unravel the puzzle of consciousness and identity. (Cate Blanchett, Australian Performing Arts Market)

"We have been continuously working on ways in which we may be able to interpolate the principles of Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) here at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries (NICAI). We are very excited by the potential of IE and greatly challenged to find an appropriate interpretation for our context. - We anticipate that students will be setting their own agendas and pathways of study by asking questions such as: "What do I need to know; who can I study with, and work with, to find out what I need to know; how can I apply this knowledge; and on whose behalf?" - These questions arise from the educational philosophy known as 'Intellectual Entrepreneurship' (or IE), developed at the University of Texas, Austin, under the leadership of Richard Cherwitz. IE aims to shift the model of learning and teaching from 'apprenticeship-certification- entitlement' to one of 'discovery-ownership-accountability'. Students come to accept responsibility not only for what and how they learn, but are also accountable to the community for how they apply that learning. IE students are encouraged to act as 'citizen scholars' and 'social entrepreneurs' with their intellectual capital leveraging knowledge for social good. . . In tandem with this IE initiative, NICAI is also working on change to graduate profiles. Through links with industry, we anticipate advances in industry-led teaching, with greater emphasis on generic capabilities, student internships in industry, entrepreneurial skills, and more professional learning outcomes, all of which will contribute to 'pedagogy for employability'. (Sharman Pretty, "Designing Context - A View from the Edge")

The simple answer is to say that Rothwell is a maddening writer who makes every effort to bend the world to his will and the reader along with it, so that the effort to resist him partakes of that derangement. He is, to adapt Falstaff, not only mad in himself but a cause that madness should be in others. - Of course, putting it like this is unfair to Rothwell, whose work is as moving and eloquent and imaginative (and as willing to stare down the truth no matter what mesmerising abyss it lurks in) as contemporary writing can be. But he is at the same time at an edge of artifice and distinctiveness where a lot of wise heads and smart money are liable to reject him. What was it that Dr Johnson said of Milton? That, as Ben Jonson had earlier said of Spenser, he writ no language, that he wrote a Babylonish dialect? And wasn't it Joseph Conrad, himself a latter-day Homer of the sea, who said of that most Miltonic of prose epics, Moby Dick, that it didn't have a single line of sincerity in it? - This is the hyperbole of the anti-hyperbolic. . . Rothwell is a remarkable writer and he has the exorbitant pretentiousness that goes with everything that is exquisite and mandarin and expectant about his whole endeavour. - Whether he's waiting for God or Godot in the desert doesn't matter, or only to him. His Northern Territory is a kind of junkyard of the detritus of a formidable if decadent European cultivation, but who could object, that's how Dostoyevsky saw the West and its gaming tables: with cold, engrossed eyes. (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the sublime", Australian Literary Review, The Australian)

Ah, dear old London, with your million deep-fried chicken shops, your "traffic calming", your excellent jackets and scarves, your bleak council blocks called Mandeville Close and your scowling, enduring populace. London, with your buildings black with grime and your unlovely rubbish strewn everywhere; your pockets of wild woodland in the suburbs and spires rising beyond grassy heaths. Yout sad-faced men; your relentless architecture of cream-piping terraces or terse Georgian facades for thousands and thousands of kilometres of streets; your bricks in a dozen hues of baby-cack brown; and your discount shopes jostling awkwardly in the ground floors of 200-year-old houses. Your august street names resonant of the Monopoly board and a hundred historical novels. Your riot of a peak hour in the Underground and your doughty buses. Your wonderful pubs and your awful Chinese takeaway. Your coltish maidens, your mulish old women, your cheery blokes, your oiks with slack mouths and one eye higher than the other. The way you make me inexplicably call older men "sir" here. The way people say, "Yer orright?" to each other in passing. The pockets of cosiness and pointy bits of charm. The sheer crammed, uncomfortable, elbows-in fullness of it. . . This is a town with 7 1/2 million people and a street layout from the Dark Ages. I wonder if Melbourne, much younger and more springy, has the same comprehension, the same understanding of past and therefore future needs. (Kate Holden, "Our streets paved with pigeon poo, the future takes wing" The Age)

"We wanted something that in a sense would be a finishing school for people who have a very good undergraduate qualification and are now wanting that kind of capstone degree that gives them depth and an entry to the more cross-cutting skills," Considine says. The EMA [Executive Masters of Arts] is part of the university's rollout of its Melbourne model, which focuses on professional and specialist graduate schools while providing generalist undergraduate degrees. . . Considine conceives the course as being a master of the liberal arts that will showcase the strength of the humanities. While there is strong backing for the course from the faculty, when he engaged consultants to test-drive the idea with employers and prospective students, the feedback was dismissive. People were unimpressed with the fluffy name, but from that came the idea to add a strong professional, or vocational, component and harden up the name. In some ways the EMA has taken ideas from the MBA in that it will have an emphasis on a strong cohort experience and networking. ("Arts master gets down to business". Andrew Trounson interviews Melbourne University Dean of Arts, Mark Considine. Weekend Australian)

This is Melbourne's fourth such festival, described as a cultural celebration of "light, hope and enlightenment," in which an array of artists gather at the square to poke coloured holes in the long, dark nights. . . Ever since we crawled out of the primordial soup, man has been fascinated by light and has gone to great lengths to replicate it. In Ireland, the prehistoric mound of Newgrange was built with utter precision to capture the sun from the winter equinox; in Egypt, the temple at Abu Simbel is a similar ingenious collaboration of science and architecture. From the first naked light bulb came the fairy lights, the floodlights at sporting events, lights in cars, stick-on wall lights, night-lights and flourescent wands. But light is so much more than watts and matches. We are all looking for a way out of the dark. . . . So where does that leave [Mexican artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's] Solar Equation? Operated by mathematical formulas but visually a metaphor for so much more. As it hovers above the square, 7 1/2 billion times closer to us that its prototype, it looks almost apocryphal, as if it has just tumbled out of a William Blake painting. The fact that today is World Environment Day adds resonance; we are at the mercy of this great big burning ball. Without it, we are nothing. (Kathy Evans, "A little enlightening relief" The Age)

Distraction draws on the lives and ideas of a surprising and illuminating collection of philosophers, writers and artists – from Plato to Matisse, from Seneca to Machiavelli, from Nietzsche to T.S. Eliot. ‘They are not heroes,’ says Young, ‘they are my peers. They are people who I talk to like to my friends. What I do with their advice is my business but I will certainly ask for it. In writing this book I have wanted to meet them. I have wanted to say to Seneca, “Dear Seneca, your death is an inspiration!”. I wanted to say to Ovid, “your poems have survived!” I wanted to say to all of them, “All this time later, we remember you!”’ (Maria Tumarkin interviews Damon Young)

Thankfully, however, all is not lost. Although the culture of traditional NSW pubs is inexorably dying in Sydney, numerous examples of this magnificent genre still exist elsewhere in the premier state. One need only travel two hours north from Sin City to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley to see that, thankfully, there is still somewhere in NSW that is keeping the dream alive. - While visiting this part of the world around 12 months ago I was inspired to see just how many old-style pubs it still had, and how many old-style blue-collar drinkers continue to exist in their unspoilt natural habitat. A day spent pub crawling around the Hunter Valley, immersing oneself in the simple pleasures of establishments such as the Boatrowers Hotel of Stockton, the Grand Junction of Maitland and the mighty Cessnock Hotel is an experience that truly rekindles one's faith in Australian culture. While Sydney continues to be redeveloped, desecrated and spivified, at least the heart of real Australia continues to beat strongly somewhere else. (Ben Davies, "The death of Sydney pubs", The Spectator)

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."