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.

G Flaubert: On Art and Being Ropeable

My sort of observation is mainly moral. I would never have suspected that side of [the existence of a traveler]. The psychological, human, comic side is so plentiful. You come across splendid faces, iridescent existences that glisten and gleam, exceedingly various in their rags and their robes, rich in filth, in their tatters and their finery. And there beneath it all, the old immutable, perennial rascality. That is the simple fact of the matter. What quantities of it pass before one's eyes! Now and again, in one of the towns, I open a newspaper. We seem to be going at a rattling pace. It's not a volcano we're dancing on, it's the plank over a latrine and it looks pretty precarious to me. Before too long, society is going to drown itself in the shit of nineteen centuries, and there will surely be some loud squawking.

To avoid the commonplace you lapse into bombast and, on the other hand, simplicity is so close to the merely platitudinous.

What a splendid Ernest! There he is married, established and perpetually magistrate besides. Behold, a bourgeois and a gentleman! Defender, now more than ever before, of order, propriety and the family. He has nevertheless followed the normal path. He too has been an artist, has carried a dagger and dreamed up ideas for plays. He's been a frivolous student in the Latin Quarter; he had a local shop-girl that he called "his mistress" and I used to scandalise her with my talk when I went to see him in his fetid rooms. He sampled the cancan at the Chaumiere and he drank spiced wine at the Voltaire. Then he got his doctorate. Henceforth began the comedy of being serious, as a sequel to the serious pursuit of the comic. 

Republic or monarch, we won't get beyond all that stuff for some time. It's the outcome of protracted endeavours in which all have played their part from de Maistre down to pere Enfantin. And the republicans have done more than most. What is equality then if it is not the negation of all liberty, all forms of superiority, of Nature itself. Equality, it's slavery. That is why I love art. There, at least, all is liberty in this world of fictions. - Every wish is granted, you can do anything, simultaneously be king and subject, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits there; for you and your kind humanity is a puppet with little bells on its costume to be set jingling with a prod of the pen, just like the street-corner puppeteer who works the strings with his foot.

In my opinion one of the things that proves that art is completely forgotten is the quantity of artists there are swarming about. The more choristers there are in a church, the more it may be supposed that the parishioners themselves are not real believers. They are not concerned about praying to the Good Lord, nor are they concerned about cultivating their gardens, as Candide puts it. They are more interested in having splendid vestments. Instead of towing the public along, you let it pull you. There is more pure bourgeoisdom among men of letters than there is in the grocery business. What are they actually doing, if not endeavouring by every possible device to diddle the customer, while still believing themselves honest! (artists in other words), all of which is the epitome of  bourgeoisdom

Everything feeds into Affectation: oneself, other people, sunlight, graveyards, and so on. . .

If I had a more solid brain I would certainly not have fallen ill from the vexation of doing law. Instead of taking hurt, I would have turned it to my advantage. My grief, instead of sitting in my skull, trickled down into my limbs and twisted them with convulsions. It was a deviation. You often find children who are injured by music. They have real talent, they remember tunes after hearing them once, they become over-excited when they play the piano; their hearts flutter, they lose weight, they go pale, they fall ill. And their poor nerves, like a dog's, are wrenched with pain at the sound of the notes. They are certainly not the Mozarts of the future. The  vocation has been displaced. The idea has slipped into the body and there it lies barren, and the body is wrecked in the process. Neither genius nor good health can come of it.
Same thing in art. Lines of poetry are not made from the passions. And the more personal you are, the weaker you will be. I have always transgressed in that way; because I have always put myself into everything that I have done. For instance, it was me who was in the place of Saint Antony [in F's first-written novel The Temptation of Saint Antony. CS] The temptation was mine rather than the reader's. 187

That is why I detest poetry that comes out in phrases. When it comes to things for which there are no words, the eye is enough. The exhalations of the soul, lyricism, descriptions, I want it all to be done with style. Otherwise it is a prostitution, of art, and even of feeling. . . They are all essentially the same, all the people who tell you about their lost love, their mother's grave, their father's grave, their sacred memories, who kiss medallions, who weep in the moonlight, who go into raptures when they see children, swoon at the theatre, look thoughtful when they stand by the Ocean. Fakers! fakers! triple charlatans! who use their hearts as trampolines in order to reach up to something.

I am turning towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism (if those two words can go together), and I would wish it stronger. When you receive no encouragement from other people, when the outside world disgusts you, enfeebles you, corrupts you and wears you down, then decent and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. If society carries on the way it is going, I do believe that we shall see a revival of mysticism, as has happened in every gloomy era. Unable to find any outlet, the human spirit will be condensed. Perhaps the day is not far away when we shall witness the return of a universal apathy, of beliefs in the end of the world, of a new Messiah. But because the theological foundations are missing, where will this oblivious enthusiasm find its field of action? Some will seek it out in sex, some in the old religions, some in art; and the human race, like the jews wandering in the desert will chase after all kinds of idols. We have come upon the scene a little too early. In another twenty-five years the point of intersection will be superb. In the hands of a master, when that day comes, prose will be able to play a formidable humanitarian symphony. Books like the Satyricon and The Golden Ass could come back again, transposing into psychic excess everything that such books offered by way of carnal excess. 

When the brain droops, the cock stands up.

The best authors believe that they write tolerably well. (La Bruyere)

I do know that it is impossible to get published anywhere, at the moment, and that all the actual reviews are squalid whores playing the coquette. Pox-ridden to the very marrow, they pull a face at opening their legs to the healthy creations that are desperate to get in. So, the best way is to do what you do, publish in book form, it's more daring, and be on your own. F to Louise Colet, March 1853

We used to have a poor devil of a servant, a man who now drives a hackney-coach; this wretched Louis had - or thought he had - a tapeworm. He talks about it as if it were a real person who talks to him and tells him what it wants, and he always refers to this creature inside him as he. Sometimes he has cravings and he attributes them to the tapeworm: "He wants it," and Louis immediately obliges. Recently he wanted thirty sous worth of brioche; another time he had to have some white wine, and next day he would kick up a fuss if he were given red wine. This poor man eventually sank in his own estimation to the same level as the tapeworm; they are equals and they are locked in a dreadful battle. "Madame," (he said to my sister-in-law recently), that scoundrel has got it in for me; we are daggers drawn, you see; but I shall have my revenge. One of us will be left standing." Well it's the man who will be left standing or should I say the man who will step aside for the tapeworm. So as to kill it and get rid of it, he has recently swallowed a bottle of vitriol, and he is now dying as a result. I am not sure if you appreciate the profundity of this story. Can you see this man finally believing in the almost human existence of what was perhaps only an idea, becoming the slave of his tapeworm! I find it quite dizzying. What a strange thing is the human mind!

I think that the sufferings of the modern artist, by comparison with artists of former times, are like factories compared to craft production.

The political situation has confirmed my old a priori theories about the featherless biped, whom I regard as a cross between a turkey and a vulture.

Perhaps I would've been a great writer if language had not been so unmanageable. (Goethe)

If the moral sciences had two or three primordial laws at their disposal, as in mathematics, then they would make real progress. But they are groping in the shadows, bumping into things at random and wanting to establish them as axiomatic. This word, soul, has spawned almost as many stupid remarks as there are souls!

People write books for everyone, art for everyone, science for everyone, just as they build railways and soup-kitchens. The human race has a passion for moral degradation. And I am angry at having to be part of it.

One thing is for sure, I am part monk. I have always greatly admired those fine sturdy fellows who lead solitary lives, whether dedicated to drunkenness or mysticism. It was really one in the eye for the human race, for the useful, for general well-being.

exposition . . . the purest poetry. . . 

If you want to know my frank and confidential opinion, I have not written anything which I find fully satisfactory. There is in me, very distinctly I believe, an ideal (apologies for that word), an ideal of style, the pursuit of which leaves me gasping without respite. Despair is consequently my normal state of mind. It takes a violent distraction to fetch me out of it. And anyway, I am not naturally cheerful. Gross buffoonery and obscenity in unlimited quantities, but underneath it all is my lugubriousness. In short, life pisses me off considerably and that is the declaration of my faith.

Reread and rework your story. Leave it alone and then take it up again, because books are not sired like children, they are raised like pyramids, according to a premeditated plan, by transporting great blocks and piling them up one on top of the other, a back-breaking grinding toil. And it's totally useless! And it sits in the desert casting a prodigious shadow! The jackals piss all round it and the bourgeois come and clamber over it, and so on; extend the analogy. F to E Feydeau, October 1857

What is the best guise in which to give voice occasionally to one's opinion concerning the events of this world, without having to risk looking like an imbecile later on? This is a rather serious problem. I think the best thing is to portray, in all sincerity, the things you find exasperating. Dissection is a form of revenge.

Those who have no need for the supernatural are rare indeed. Philosophy will always be exclusively the portion of aristocrats. You can fatten up the human throng, bed them up to their bellies in straw and even cover their stables in gold leaf, brutish they will always be, whatever anyone says. The only progress we can hope for is that the brute can be made a little less spiteful.

Lucretius ought to be mentioned with some respect. I see nobody to match him except for Byron, and Byron doesn't have his gravitas, or the sincerity of his sadness. I think the melancholy of the Ancients runs deeper than that of the Moderns, who all more or less hint at immortality beyond the black hole. But for the Ancients that black hole was infinity itself; their dreams dawn and fade against a background of ebony darkness. No cries, no convulsions, nothing but a face fixed in thought. From Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when the gods had gone and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment when only man existed. Nowhere else do I find such grandeur.

I am suspicious of your novel about the theatre. You are too fond of them, those people! Have you met many who love their art? So many artists are merely bourgeois who have strayed from the path. F to George Sand, September 1868

In the days of Pericles the Greeks produced works of art without knowing whether they would have enough to eat on the morrow. Let us be like the Greeks!

Paganism, Christianity and now the Age of the Lout: these are the three great phases of human history. It is unpleasant to find oneself at the beginning of the third.

The downfall of the bourgeoisie has begun, because it shares the feelings of the rabble. I cannot see that it reads different newspapers, that it enjoys different music, that its pleasures are any more dignified. In both cases, there is the same love of money, the same reverence for the fait accompli, the same need for idols to overturn, the same hatred of anything superior, the same spirit of denigration, the same crass ignorance!

Because of your contempt for intelligence, you think yourselves full of common sense, realistic, practical! But people are only truly practical on the condition that they are a little more than that. . . You would not be enjoying all the benefits of industry if the only ideal of your eighteenth century ancestors had been material usefulness.F to the Municipal Council of Rouen, 1872

I am not a Nature man: I find it's "marvels" less moving than those of Art. It overwhelms me without imparting any "great ideas". I am inclined to tell it inwardly: "that's lovely; I emerged from you quite recently; in a few minutes I shall be back inside you; just leave me in peace. I have better things to do."

From: Flaubert, Selected Letters

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." 

The art of having something to say: Part 5 - Nestroy

For followers of the ongoing debate about the VCA taking place on this page – can anyone hear echoes of Sharman Pretty in the little interchange between A and B I’ve got down as my first quote from Nestroy? It seems the Melbourne University breadth agenda was invented in mid-nineteenth century Austria. If only the Dean of VCAM could be as clear in her fatuousness as this. Charming!

For those of you not in on the joke, Nestroy (1801 – 1862) was an actor-cum-satirist, who’s never caught on in English because half his characters speak a picturesque essentially untranslatable Austrian German. Everyone who’s studied German knows the tremendous verb “durchwursteln” which denotes the Austrian national trait of “muddling through” (literally “sausage-ing through”, or, if you like, “getting by in the shape of a sausage”. You know how when things go wrong in English they go “pear shaped”, well, in the glory-days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went right they went sausage-shaped.) Well, there are a whole lot of silly sausages sausage-ing through and coming out with some fairly porky untranslatable pronouncements in Nestroy.

Nestroy’s favourite two kinds of play are Possen (farces) and Travestien (travesties). Most come with songs – think Keating The Musical, but with more dialogue and the full range of comic plot devices that would probably be considered artificial and lame nowadays – servants insinuating themselves into balls by putting on disguise moustaches, Biblical heroes being seduced by men dressed up as women, clothes-baskets with stolen babies in them being mistaken for clothes-baskets with washing in them, etc etc.

For more of an idea, you need only have a look down a list of titles:

“Banishment from the Realm of Magic, or: 30 Years in the Life of a Lump”
“Freedom in a Cultural Backwater”
“There’s No Cure for Stupidity”
“The Girl from the Suburbs, or: Honesty Keeps You Keeping On”
“The Confused Magician, or: The Faithful and The Fickle”
“The Magic Journey into the Age of Chivalry, or: Embarrassing High-Spirits”
“Theatrical Tales of Love, Intrigue, Money and Stupidity”
“Big Chief Evening-breeze, or: The Gruesome Banquet”
“The Miller, The Collier and The Furniture Removalist, or: The Dream of the Shell and the Kernel”

Anyone who wants to try Nestroy out in English should look up “A Man Full of Nothing”, “The Talisman” and “Love Affairs and Wedding Bells”, translated – and “fondly tampered with” – by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry for Ungar in the 1960’s.

***

A: I’m a product of the school life. My education is tenuous but extremely widespread: a smattering of geography, a fraction of mathematics, a molecule of physics, just an idea of philosophy, a germ of medicine, and a pinch of the law.
B: How charming! You have learned much but not lost yourself in details. The mark of the true genius!
A: Ah, this explains why there are so many geniuses in the world!

Is there a better opportunity to make someone you hate unhappy than to marry him?

Man is a being who occupies the highest stage of creation, who even claims to have been made in the image of God – but God is probably not very flattered. Man is an insect, because he stings, bites, bugs you, gives you the creeps and is often for the birds. He’s also a fish, because he gets into deep water and does horrible things in cold blood. No less is man a reptile, for he’s a snake in the grass. He’s a bird, too, because he lives in the clouds, often makes a living out of thin air, and gets upset when he cannot fill the bill. And, finally, man is also a mammal, because he’s a sucker.

This is the moment I’ve anticipated and dreaded at the same time. I face it, if I may say so, with knee-shaking bravado and bold trembling.

It’d be great to be Fate. You could sit round picking your nose doing nothing all day and still get the credit for everything.

In a castle in the air even the janitor in the basement has a view of heaven.

It’s probably a will-o’-the-wisp, but I find it entertaining all the same.

It’s really a matter of the heart but all the heart does is flutter and dump problems into the lap of the head even if the head is up to its neck in trouble. I’m done in.

If you’re a man with seventeen diplomas on your wall, a science at the tip of each finger, five languages at the tip of your tongue, and an extra helping of ambition between your ears, you can expect fate to present you with a fat slice of the good life on a silver platter – that’s commonplace. But if your only diploma is from reform school, you have nothing at the tips of your fingers but your prints, no language but what you were born with, and your only ambition is to be unemployed – and you still haven’t given up the idea of getting rich . . . there’s something grandiose in that. To face Lady Luck like a cross between a pan-handler and a freedom fighter, to hold out your hand when you haven’t a leg to stand on, that is noble gall, an enviable itch. I appreciate myself – and why not?

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?)