Aphoristic Mixed Dips

The majority of Australians gifted with abnormal intelligence use it striving to be more normal than everybody else. The rest use it striving to be more abnormal than they already were.

 

Although we share fundamental beliefs, we differ on the fundamentals. I believe they should be articulated, he thinks articulating them is a crime.

How often has it come about that psychoanalysis has neuroticised the patient so that it may better learn what it feels it ought to talk to him about?

You have an inalienable right to beat up on yourself. But like most rights I have no idea where it comes from.

A true convention is one that people don’t know they’re scared to death of transgressing – until it passes away, when they become scared to death by its absence.

Moral philosophy. Every man his own police officer.

To annihilate clichés, to speak past them as if they never existed, to play with truth as with a theme are the three main works of genius. The work of journalism in general is turning truth into clichés, the speciality of the arts pages is discovering truth in cliché.

A man discovers what he thinks is a pandemic viral strain. But all he has to describe it are euphemisms and clichés. These communicate themselves. Everyone instantaneously catches the disease.

 

The easiest way of overcoming vulgarity is becoming a snob. 

The heavenly dispensation represented by the reign of communications technology will be a paradise indistinguishable at times from a devilish conspiracy to keep our dear ones at a distance, to garble their words of encouragement, to blur and invert their looks of warmth and love, to translate their deeds into gestures and their gestures into signs of problems.

My philosophy is a reflex to work off the bad impressions other people’s thoughts have made on me.

The essential work required in preparing to write a book is marshalling all the useable prejudices you have at your disposal.

The miners survived because of their inadvertent discovery of a Land of Culture they claim to have broken through to from their rocky prison 1km beneath the ground, the air of which they found they could breathe. In such assertions the public, the journos and tv crews easily recognize the true signs of death and proclaim a miracle – the miners’ rebirth from the spirit of mateship and egalitarianism, communicated to the subterranean regions via numberless media of hope and love.

In my notebook I write down all the errors and partialities I have at any time been subject to in the hope that I may no longer be subject to them and so that the foolish and the desperate might one day consider them a higher work of art that never bothered to compose itself.

A book that didn’t spend the main part of its gestation a lone affair of the author is an offence against the shame of book-writing.

The Armstrongians are those who begin inspired by Goethe’s universality and end trying to imitate his stolidity.

Never feel obliged by another man’s metaphors. Freedom consists in an essential sense in a relation to language.

A moralist threw a dress-up party the theme of which was mortal sin. Micky came as lust, tried groping the breasts of the hostess and was thrown out.

Australians have no traditions. But we mean them.

In comedy all misunderstandings are honourable occasions.

Most men and women who once acted with a degree of social or intellectual independence nowadays have to be their own secretaries. Which means they have to do the bidding of super-secretaries from marketing and accounts. The latter don't wield power absolutely, they wield it super-absolutely, mechanistically - in such a way that its cruelties, irrationalities and inanities appear to happen of their own accord.

His sabbatical was the intellectually most desperate six months of his life. He had no female undergraduates to garner ideas about himself from.

The bourgeois believes that culture consists in having good intentions.

The yob believes culture is an unsubstantiated pretence.

The snob believes culture consists in showing the yobs who’s who.

The intellectual believes culture is society’s duty to pay him enough to read books so that he can buy other books.

To the aesthete culture is the temple before which he stands guard – as one of the temple slaves.

To the artist it is a genuine mood in which his highest feelings and his darkest thoughts can equally have life and which, apart from that, he often curses.

The closest the bourgeois gets to revenging himself on his country for its injustices is having the newspaper delivered.

Animals are more truly amused by tv than any human being I know. They intuitively realise that what they see there are just human beings forming colourful patterns by going through the motions. Whereas human beings can’t help looking to tv for signs of a reality beyond tv that is either not there in any sense or that tv itself induces to purport to exist.

To resist the compulsion to abbreviate is the closest you can come to civil disobedience. Spelling your words is conscientious objection to the war on language being conducted every day by means of language.

Undergrad philosophy has degenerated into giving reasons why the young people might like to study philosophy. These are taken to be sufficient. The young people don’t bother any further with philosophy.

The explanatory/scientific = to trace the unknown back to the known.
The mystic/artistic = to re-submit the known to the tribunal of the unknown and unknowable.

Review: Corinne Grant at the Comic's Lounge

To one side of the conformism of public and workaday life, Australians are capable of much wry fun. They acknowledge many of the better jokes made at their expense, not just the cheap ones made compulsively by ferrets like Rove. At the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne the better jokes can be heard. Last night I felt as if I heard some of them, told by Corinne Grant and Adam Richards, the secret of whose art seems to me to be in positioning themselves to one side, though never too far to one side, of the comic and workaday conventions to which comedians and the rest of us conform.

On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.

We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.

. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)