kilt - a costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.
Krishna - a form under which the pretended god Vishnu became incarnate. A very likely story.
lap - one of the most important organs of the female system - an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal's substantial welfare.
last - a shoemaker's implement, named by a frowning Providence as opportunity to the maker of puns.
Ah, punster, would my lot were cast,
Where the cobbler is unknown,
So that I might forget his last
And hear your own. (Gargo Repsky)
laziness - unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
learning - the kind of ignorance affected by (and affecting) civilised races, as distinguished from IGNORANCE, the sort of learning incurred by savages. See NONSENSE.
lecturer - one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
Leveller - the kind of political and social reformer who is more concerned to bring others down to his plane than to lift himself to theirs.
lighthouse - a tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and a friend of a politician.
limb - the branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.
linen - "a kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails a great waste of hemp." - Calcraft the Hangman.
literally - figuratively, as: "The pond was literally full of fish"; "The ground was literally alive with snakes," etc.
Literature - the collective body of writing of all mankind, excepting Hubert Howe Bancroft and Adair Welcker. Theirs are Illiterature.
logic - the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
loss - privation of that which we had, or had not. Thus, in the latter sense, it is said of a defeated candidate that he "lost his election"; and of that eminent man, the poet Gilder, that he has "lost his mind". It is in the former and more legitimate sense, that the word is used in the famous epitaph:
Here Huntington's ashes long have lain
Whose loss is our own eternal gain,
For while he exercised all his powers
Whatever he gained, the loss was ours.
maiden - a young person of the unfair sex addicted to clewless conduct and views that madden to crime. The genus has a wide geographical distribution, being found wherever sought and deplored wherever found. The maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and her views) insupportable to the ear, though in respect to comeliness distinctly inferior to the rainbow, and, with regard to the part of her that is audible, beaten out of the field by the canary - which, also, is more portable.
man - an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
manna - a food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilising it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original occupants.
mausoleum - the final, and funniest, folly of the rich.
medal - a small metal disk given as a reward for virtues, attainments or services more or less authentic. It is related that Bismarck, who had been awarded a medal for gallantly rescuing a drowning person, that, being asked the meaning of the medal, he replied: "I save lives sometimes." And sometimes he didn't.
mind - a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. From the Latin, mens, a fact unknown to that honest shoe-seller, who, observing that his learned competitor over the way had displayed the motto "Mens conscia recti," emblazoned his own shop front with the words "Men's, women's and children's conscia recti."
Mormon - a follower of Joseph Smith, who received from an angel a revelation inscribed on brass plates and afterward revised and enlarged by his successor in the prophethood. While still an inoffensive people the Mormons were bitterly persecuted, their prophet assassinated, their homes burned and themselves driven into the desert, where they prospered, practiced polygamy and themselves took and hand in the game of persecution.
namby-pamby - having the quality of magazine poetry. (See FLUMMERY.)
oblivion - the state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground. Cold storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm clock.
pantheism - the doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.
phoenix - the classical prototype of the modern "small hot bird."
pilgrim - a traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.
pitiful - the state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.
plague - in ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharoah the Immune. The plague as we of today have the happiness to know it is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
platitude - the fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jellyfish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.
plaudit - the unit of currency in which the populace pays those who tickle and devour it.
pray - to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
precedent - in Law, a previous decision, rule or practice which, in the absence of a definite statute, has whatever force and authority a Judge may choose to give it, thereby greatly simplifying his task of doing as he pleases. As there are precedents for everything, he has only to ignore those that make against his interest and accentuate those in the line of his desire. Invention of the precedent elevates the trial-at-law from the low estate of a fortuitous ordeal to the noble altitude of a dirigible abitrament.
precocious - a four-year-old who elopes with his sister's doll.
Presbyterian - one who holds the conviction that the governing authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.
Presidency - the greased pig in the field game of American politics.
President - the leading figure in a small group of men of whom - and of whom only - it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
prime - enough to make a cat vomit. "Try our 5cent Havana filler" and see if it isn't.
rational - devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
retribution - the natural rock upon which is reared the Temple of Law.
revenge - sending your girl's love letters to your rival after he has married her.
riot - a popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.
rostrum - in Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origins in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh. Among the Jews the observance of the day was enforced by a Commandment of which this is the Christian version: "Remember the seventh day to make they neighbour keep it wholly." To the Creator it seemed fit and expedient that the Sabbath should be the last day of the week, but the Early Fathers of the Church held other views. So great is the sanctity of the day that even where the Lord holds a doubtful and precarious jurisdiction over those who go down to (and down into) the sea it is reverently recognised, as is manifest in the following deep-water version of the Fourth Commandment:
"Six days shalt thou labour and do all thou art able,
And on the seventh holystone the deck and scrape the cable."
Decks are no longer holystoned, but the cable still supplies the captain with opportunity to attest a pious respect for the divine ordinance.
sad - the efforts of musical debutantes:
"I'm saddest when I sing." Toodles
saint - a dead sinner revised and edited. "The Duchess of Orleans relates that the irreverent old Calumniator, Marshal Villeroi, who in his youth had known St Francis de Sales, said, on hearing him called a saint: 'I am delighted to hear that Monsieur de Sales is a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to cheat at cards. In other respects he was a perfect gentleman, though a fool.'"
sardine - a small and very palatable fish, to which many unpalatable persons hesitate to compare themselves.
saw - a trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.) So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. Following are examples of old saws fitted with new teeth:
"Half a loaf is better than a whole one if there is much else."
"What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do it."
"He laughs best who last laughs least."
"Strike while your employer has a big contract."
tedium - ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source - the first words of the ancient Latin hymn Te Deum Laudamus. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.
telephone - an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Trinity - in the multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with the power of combination, and must urge individually their claims to adoration and propitiation. The Trinity is one of the most sublime mysteries of our holy religion. In rejecting it because it is incomprehensible, Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological fundamentals. In religion we believe only what we do not understand, except in the instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an incomprehensible one. In that case we believe the former as part of the latter.
truth - an ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.
tzetze (or tsetse) fly - an African insect (glossina morsitans) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (mendax interminabilis).
weather - the climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
worship - Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Ambrose Bierce: from The Devil's Dictionary (A - J)
abatis - embarrassing circumstances placed outside a fort in order to augment the coy reluctance of the enemy.
or
abatis - rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.
abide - to treat with merited indifference the landlord's notification that he has let his house to a party willing to pay.
abridge - to shorten ("When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Oliver Cromwell)
Ace - the one-fourth part of the Hand of Fate.
acephalous - in the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had, unconsciously to him, passed through his neck, as related by de Joineville.
adamant - a mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
Adam's Apple - a protuberance in the throat of man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place.
adder - a species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.
address - the place at which one receives the delicate attention of creditors.
adipose - fat, ragged and saucy.
admiration - our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
advice - the smallest current coin.
"The man was in such deep distress,"
Said Tom, "that I could do no less
Than give him good advice." Said Jim:
"If less could have been done for him
I know you well enough, my son,
To know that's what you would have done." (Jebel Jocordy)
affectionate - addicted to being a nuisance. The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.
affiance'ed - fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.
affirm - to declare with suspicious gravity when one is not compelled to wholly discredit himself with an oath.
alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
ambrosia - the diet of the gods - the modern peanut.
aphorism - predigested wisdom.
The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism. ("The Mad Philosopher", 1697)
appeal - in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
appetite - an instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labour question.
ardor - the quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
He loved her with an ardor -
Such a hot one,
That her father had to guard her
With a shotgun. (Ovid)
arena - in politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.
armor - the kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
arrest - formally to detain one accused of unusualness (e.g. "God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh." - The Unauthorized Version)
bard - a person who makes rhymes. The word is one of the numerous aliases under which the poet seeks to veil his identity and escape opprobrium.
beggar - a pest unkindly inflicted upon the suffering rich.
betrothed - the condition of a man and woman who, pleasing to one another and objectionable to their friends, are anxious to propitiate society by becoming unendurable to each other.
book-learning - the dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impenitent ignorance.
bride - a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
cab - a tormenting vehicle in which a pirate jolts you through devious ways to the wrong place, and then robs you.
Canonicals - the motley worn by Jesters of the Court of Heaven.
child - an accident to the occurence of which all the forces and arrangements of nature are specially devised and accurately adapted.
dandle - to set an unresisting child upon one's knee and jolt its teeth loose in a transport of affection.
Deist - one who believes in God, but reserves the right to worship the Devil.
dejeuner - the breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
deliberation - the act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
demure - grave and modest-mannered, like a particularly unscrupulous woman.
There was a young maid so demure,
That she fooled all the men who knew her;
But the women they smoked her
And took her and choked her
And chucked her into a sewer. (Milton)
deposit - a charitable contribution to the support of a bank.
descendant - any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree.
Alas for the days when my baboon ancestral
In Japanese woods from the lithe limb was pendant,
Instructing, kind hearted, each babooness vestal
How best to achieve for herself a descendant. (Oscar Wilde)
desert - an extensive and fertile tract of land producing heavy wheat and vintage crops in colonisation prospectuses.
desertion - an aversion to fighting, as exhibited by abandoning an army or a wife.
dessicate - to make dry.
Now Noble to the pulpit leaps,
The mighty dessicator,
The audience profoundly sleeps -
Slow snores the great creator. (Shelley)
despatches - a complete account of all the murders, outrages and other disgusting crimes which take place everywhere, disseminated daily by an Associated Press for the amelioration of the world in general.
electioneer - to stand on a platform and scream that Smith is a child of light and Jones a worm of the dust.
emancipation - a bondsman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.
embassador - a minister of high rank maintained by one government at the capital of another to execute the will of his wife.
esoteric - very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds - exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found the greatest acceptance in our time.
ermine - the state, dignity or condition of a judge. The word is formed of the two words, err and mine - the one suggesting the tendency of a judicial mind, the other expressing, in a general way, the judicial notion of the rightful ownership of property in dispute.
euphemism - in rhetoric, a figure by which the severe asperity of truth is mitigated by the use of a softer expression than the facts would warrant - as, to call Mr Charles Crocker ninety-nine kinds of knave.
expediency - the father of all the virtues.
expostulation - one of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.
fatigue - the condition of philosopher after having considered human wisdom and virtue.
fear - a sense of the total depravity of the immediate future.
fickleness - the iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.
Flood - a superior degree of dampness. Specifically, a great strom described by Berosus and Moses, when, according to the latter's rain-guage, there was a precipitation of moisture to the depth of one-eighth of a mile in twenty-four hours for forty days. The former did not measure, apparently, for he simply explains (in pretty good Greek) that it rained cats and dogs. The learned author of the cunieform inscriptions from the Mesopotamian mounds draws a number of carpet-tacks on a brick to signify that it was "quite a smart shower considering the season."
flop - suddenly to change one's opinion and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turncoat by some of our partisan journals.
fool - a person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war - founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting - such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand has warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilisation, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilisation.
friend - an investigator upon the slide of whose microscope we live, move and have our being.
friendship - a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.
frontespiece - a protuberance of the human face, beginning between the eyes and terminating, as a rule, in somebody's business.
gas-meter - the family liar in the basement.
generous - originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.
ghoul - a demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefts than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads and an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in mor ethan one place at a time. Thge good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholson relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.
gnu - an animal of South Africa, which in its domesticated state resembles a horse, a buffalo and a stag. In its wild condition it is something like a thunderbolt, an earthquake and a cyclone.
A hunter from Kew caught a distant view
Of a peacefully meditative gnu,
And he said: "I'll pursue, and my hands imbrue
In its blood at a closer interview."
But the beast did ensue and the hunter it threw
O'er the top of a palm that adjacent grew;
And he said as he flew: "It is well I withdrew
Ere, losing my temper, I wickedly slew
That really meritorious gnu." (Jarn Leffer)
grip - ex-Speaker Parks's manner of fondling the property of the commonwealth.
groan - the language in which a Republican Federal office-holder expounds his view of the political situation.
Hell - the residence of the late Dr. Noah Webster, dictionary-maker.
homoeopathist - the humorist of the medical profession.
homoeopathy - a theory and practice of medicine which aims to cure the diseases of fools. As it does not cure them, and does sometimes kill the fools, it is ridiculed by the thoughtless, but commended by the wise.
hunger - a peculiar disease afflicting all the classes of mankind and commonly treated by dieting. It is observed that those who live in fine houses have it the lightest. This information is useful to chronic sufferers.
idiot - a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field or thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.
imagination - a warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
imbecility - a kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.
immaculate - not as yet spotted by the police.
inauspicious - not lousy with it in the crop. . . The author of this dictionary feels it his duty to explain to the Eastern reader that the appalling phrase immediately foregoing is not of his own invention, and that he employs it here, with reluctance, in order to be clearly understood in the mining camps of this state, where "English as she is spoke" on the Atlantic seaboard is altogether unintelligible. The author begs to assure his Eastern readers that the phrase in questions means nothing very disagreeable; it may be translated thus: "Not showing much free gold in the outcroppings." Let us now proceed.
incompossible - unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility let loose. Instead of such low language as "Go heel yourself - I mean to kill you on sight," the words, "Sir, we are incompossible," would convey an equally significant intention and in stately courtesy are altogether superior.
inconsiderate - imperfectly attentive to the welfare, happiness, comfort or desires of others; as cholera, smallpox, the rattlesnake and the satirical newspaper.
incorporation - the act of uniting several persons into one fiction called a corporation, in order that they may be no longer responsible for their actions. A, B and C are a corporation. A robs, B steals and C (it is necessary that there be one gentleman among them) cheats. It is a plundering, thieving, swindling corporation. But A, B and C, who have jointly determined and severally executed every crime of the corporation, are blameless. It is wrong to mention them by name when censuring their acts as a corporation, but right when praising. Incorporation is somewhat like the ring of Gyges: it bestows the blessing of invisibility - comfortable to knaves. The scoundrel who invented incorporation is dead - he has disincorporated.
indecision - the chief element of success; "for whereas," saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "there is but one way to do nothing and divers ways to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards" - a most clear and satisfactory exposition of the matter.
indigestion - a disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the western wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: "Plenty well, no pray; big bellyache, heap God."
infallible - not liable to error; dead-sure - as Frank Pixley, when speaking ex cathartica.
ingratitude - a form of self-respect that is not inconsistent with acceptance of favours.
inhumanity - one of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
innate - natural, inherent - as innate ideas, that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have "given it a black eye." Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one's ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one's country, in the superiority of one's civilisation, in the importance of one's personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one's diseases.
intention - the mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of the act intended by the person incurring the intention. . . When figured out and accurately apprehended this will be found one of the most penetrating and far-reaching definitions in this whole dictionary. It has taken the first premium at three country fairs and is prescribed by all respectable physicians as a dead shot for worms. It increased the corn yield of Illinois one million bushels in a single season, discovered the source of the Nile and saved the day at Shiloh.
interlocutor - the barometrical centre of depression at a minstrel show.
intoxication - a spiritual condition that goeth before the next morning.
intractable - stubbornly unwilling to adopt a course from which nothing can divert ourselves.
introduction - a social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this country, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of strangers."
ivory - a substance kindly provided by nature for making billiard balls. It is usually harvested from the mouths of elephants.
jealous - unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
jockey - a person whose business it is to ride and throw races.
joss-sticks - small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain rites of our holy religion.
Jove - a mythical being whom the Greeks and Romans ridiculously supposed to be the supreme ruler of the universe - unacquainted as they were with our holy religion.
or
abatis - rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.
abide - to treat with merited indifference the landlord's notification that he has let his house to a party willing to pay.
abridge - to shorten ("When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Oliver Cromwell)
Ace - the one-fourth part of the Hand of Fate.
acephalous - in the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had, unconsciously to him, passed through his neck, as related by de Joineville.
adamant - a mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
Adam's Apple - a protuberance in the throat of man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place.
adder - a species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.
address - the place at which one receives the delicate attention of creditors.
adipose - fat, ragged and saucy.
admiration - our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
advice - the smallest current coin.
"The man was in such deep distress,"
Said Tom, "that I could do no less
Than give him good advice." Said Jim:
"If less could have been done for him
I know you well enough, my son,
To know that's what you would have done." (Jebel Jocordy)
affectionate - addicted to being a nuisance. The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.
affiance'ed - fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.
affirm - to declare with suspicious gravity when one is not compelled to wholly discredit himself with an oath.
alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
ambrosia - the diet of the gods - the modern peanut.
aphorism - predigested wisdom.
The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism. ("The Mad Philosopher", 1697)
appeal - in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
appetite - an instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labour question.
ardor - the quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
He loved her with an ardor -
Such a hot one,
That her father had to guard her
With a shotgun. (Ovid)
arena - in politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.
armor - the kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
arrest - formally to detain one accused of unusualness (e.g. "God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh." - The Unauthorized Version)
bard - a person who makes rhymes. The word is one of the numerous aliases under which the poet seeks to veil his identity and escape opprobrium.
beggar - a pest unkindly inflicted upon the suffering rich.
betrothed - the condition of a man and woman who, pleasing to one another and objectionable to their friends, are anxious to propitiate society by becoming unendurable to each other.
book-learning - the dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impenitent ignorance.
bride - a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
cab - a tormenting vehicle in which a pirate jolts you through devious ways to the wrong place, and then robs you.
Canonicals - the motley worn by Jesters of the Court of Heaven.
child - an accident to the occurence of which all the forces and arrangements of nature are specially devised and accurately adapted.
dandle - to set an unresisting child upon one's knee and jolt its teeth loose in a transport of affection.
Deist - one who believes in God, but reserves the right to worship the Devil.
dejeuner - the breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
deliberation - the act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
demure - grave and modest-mannered, like a particularly unscrupulous woman.
There was a young maid so demure,
That she fooled all the men who knew her;
But the women they smoked her
And took her and choked her
And chucked her into a sewer. (Milton)
deposit - a charitable contribution to the support of a bank.
descendant - any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree.
Alas for the days when my baboon ancestral
In Japanese woods from the lithe limb was pendant,
Instructing, kind hearted, each babooness vestal
How best to achieve for herself a descendant. (Oscar Wilde)
desert - an extensive and fertile tract of land producing heavy wheat and vintage crops in colonisation prospectuses.
desertion - an aversion to fighting, as exhibited by abandoning an army or a wife.
dessicate - to make dry.
Now Noble to the pulpit leaps,
The mighty dessicator,
The audience profoundly sleeps -
Slow snores the great creator. (Shelley)
despatches - a complete account of all the murders, outrages and other disgusting crimes which take place everywhere, disseminated daily by an Associated Press for the amelioration of the world in general.
electioneer - to stand on a platform and scream that Smith is a child of light and Jones a worm of the dust.
emancipation - a bondsman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.
embassador - a minister of high rank maintained by one government at the capital of another to execute the will of his wife.
esoteric - very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds - exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found the greatest acceptance in our time.
ermine - the state, dignity or condition of a judge. The word is formed of the two words, err and mine - the one suggesting the tendency of a judicial mind, the other expressing, in a general way, the judicial notion of the rightful ownership of property in dispute.
euphemism - in rhetoric, a figure by which the severe asperity of truth is mitigated by the use of a softer expression than the facts would warrant - as, to call Mr Charles Crocker ninety-nine kinds of knave.
expediency - the father of all the virtues.
expostulation - one of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.
fatigue - the condition of philosopher after having considered human wisdom and virtue.
fear - a sense of the total depravity of the immediate future.
fickleness - the iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.
Flood - a superior degree of dampness. Specifically, a great strom described by Berosus and Moses, when, according to the latter's rain-guage, there was a precipitation of moisture to the depth of one-eighth of a mile in twenty-four hours for forty days. The former did not measure, apparently, for he simply explains (in pretty good Greek) that it rained cats and dogs. The learned author of the cunieform inscriptions from the Mesopotamian mounds draws a number of carpet-tacks on a brick to signify that it was "quite a smart shower considering the season."
flop - suddenly to change one's opinion and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turncoat by some of our partisan journals.
fool - a person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war - founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting - such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand has warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilisation, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilisation.
friend - an investigator upon the slide of whose microscope we live, move and have our being.
friendship - a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.
frontespiece - a protuberance of the human face, beginning between the eyes and terminating, as a rule, in somebody's business.
gas-meter - the family liar in the basement.
generous - originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.
ghoul - a demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefts than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads and an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in mor ethan one place at a time. Thge good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholson relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.
gnu - an animal of South Africa, which in its domesticated state resembles a horse, a buffalo and a stag. In its wild condition it is something like a thunderbolt, an earthquake and a cyclone.
A hunter from Kew caught a distant view
Of a peacefully meditative gnu,
And he said: "I'll pursue, and my hands imbrue
In its blood at a closer interview."
But the beast did ensue and the hunter it threw
O'er the top of a palm that adjacent grew;
And he said as he flew: "It is well I withdrew
Ere, losing my temper, I wickedly slew
That really meritorious gnu." (Jarn Leffer)
grip - ex-Speaker Parks's manner of fondling the property of the commonwealth.
groan - the language in which a Republican Federal office-holder expounds his view of the political situation.
Hell - the residence of the late Dr. Noah Webster, dictionary-maker.
homoeopathist - the humorist of the medical profession.
homoeopathy - a theory and practice of medicine which aims to cure the diseases of fools. As it does not cure them, and does sometimes kill the fools, it is ridiculed by the thoughtless, but commended by the wise.
hunger - a peculiar disease afflicting all the classes of mankind and commonly treated by dieting. It is observed that those who live in fine houses have it the lightest. This information is useful to chronic sufferers.
idiot - a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field or thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.
imagination - a warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
imbecility - a kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.
immaculate - not as yet spotted by the police.
inauspicious - not lousy with it in the crop. . . The author of this dictionary feels it his duty to explain to the Eastern reader that the appalling phrase immediately foregoing is not of his own invention, and that he employs it here, with reluctance, in order to be clearly understood in the mining camps of this state, where "English as she is spoke" on the Atlantic seaboard is altogether unintelligible. The author begs to assure his Eastern readers that the phrase in questions means nothing very disagreeable; it may be translated thus: "Not showing much free gold in the outcroppings." Let us now proceed.
incompossible - unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility let loose. Instead of such low language as "Go heel yourself - I mean to kill you on sight," the words, "Sir, we are incompossible," would convey an equally significant intention and in stately courtesy are altogether superior.
inconsiderate - imperfectly attentive to the welfare, happiness, comfort or desires of others; as cholera, smallpox, the rattlesnake and the satirical newspaper.
incorporation - the act of uniting several persons into one fiction called a corporation, in order that they may be no longer responsible for their actions. A, B and C are a corporation. A robs, B steals and C (it is necessary that there be one gentleman among them) cheats. It is a plundering, thieving, swindling corporation. But A, B and C, who have jointly determined and severally executed every crime of the corporation, are blameless. It is wrong to mention them by name when censuring their acts as a corporation, but right when praising. Incorporation is somewhat like the ring of Gyges: it bestows the blessing of invisibility - comfortable to knaves. The scoundrel who invented incorporation is dead - he has disincorporated.
indecision - the chief element of success; "for whereas," saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "there is but one way to do nothing and divers ways to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards" - a most clear and satisfactory exposition of the matter.
indigestion - a disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the western wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: "Plenty well, no pray; big bellyache, heap God."
infallible - not liable to error; dead-sure - as Frank Pixley, when speaking ex cathartica.
ingratitude - a form of self-respect that is not inconsistent with acceptance of favours.
inhumanity - one of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
innate - natural, inherent - as innate ideas, that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have "given it a black eye." Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one's ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one's country, in the superiority of one's civilisation, in the importance of one's personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one's diseases.
intention - the mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of the act intended by the person incurring the intention. . . When figured out and accurately apprehended this will be found one of the most penetrating and far-reaching definitions in this whole dictionary. It has taken the first premium at three country fairs and is prescribed by all respectable physicians as a dead shot for worms. It increased the corn yield of Illinois one million bushels in a single season, discovered the source of the Nile and saved the day at Shiloh.
interlocutor - the barometrical centre of depression at a minstrel show.
intoxication - a spiritual condition that goeth before the next morning.
intractable - stubbornly unwilling to adopt a course from which nothing can divert ourselves.
introduction - a social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this country, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of strangers."
ivory - a substance kindly provided by nature for making billiard balls. It is usually harvested from the mouths of elephants.
jealous - unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
jockey - a person whose business it is to ride and throw races.
joss-sticks - small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain rites of our holy religion.
Jove - a mythical being whom the Greeks and Romans ridiculously supposed to be the supreme ruler of the universe - unacquainted as they were with our holy religion.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Pseuds Corner Holiday Edition
The image that was very much in my mind, thinking about grandeur, was a story of boys behaving badly at school. It was a school trip on which two boys had picked on a third. And the ones who'd done the bullying were from the most affluent families.
For me that caused a sort of sacred rage. . ." (John Armstrong, in interview with The Zone, "Grand designs", The Age, 01/11/10)
It was pleasing the other week when that easygoing lady of the left, Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Human Services and Social Inclusion, took to task whatever blighted public servant it was who ordered that there should be nothing Christian in any of the displays in post offices, as if a nativity scene was the insignia of the Spanish Inquisition and nothing but the stench of infamy in the nostrils of all those fundamentalist atheists who march under the banner of Richard Dawkins. - Plibersek said, quite rightly, that the Christmas story was a thing to be treasured, and people should also be free to honour Hanukkah and Hindu and Muslim festivals. - Of course that's true. Christmas is the one, though, that underlies the Jewish and Greek influences that structure our world. - If you doubt the Jewish influence in Christianity, think of the stupendous, densely Hebraic accents of Mary's great prayer which is known to the church as the Magnificat. (Peter Craven, "Tale of Innocence and Joy", The Age, 24/12/10)
In the words of one prominent voice: "It's important that we don't allow the arts to become just a platform of observers; it's about participation; it's about artists. And in my view, an active arts community is a community where there's diversity, where the community is engaged with artists, where they're welcoming of artists, where the artists and the art forms are not institutionalised for their own sake, but they are ever-evolving - they're thoughtful, they're powerful, perpetually fresh, perpetually edgy". . .
An effective arts policy, collaborating with the independent arts, will create partnerships with those smaller organisations already immersed in artist development. A devolved funding approach overcomes the stop-start nature of project funding, securing the committment of expert organisations for programs such as mentorships, audience development, public space creation.
In 2011, Victoria's arts policy must take the creativity, diversity and sheer scale of the independent arts as its starting point. With a strong peer-review culture, and unencumbered by the art-form boards of the Australia Council, Arts Victoria is well placed to collaborate on new models. . . (Esther Anatolitis, wind assisted by T. Baillieu (aka "The Voice") - The Age, 17/01/11)
Friday, January 14, 2011
Eat, Pray, Throw Stuff Out
crikey review of Corinne Grant's Lessons in Letting Go: Confessions of a Hoarder
What can you say about the small number of people out there who can’t stand Corinne Grant? My theory about the Corinne-haters was always that Grant’s brand of humour is just a bit too cosy for some tastes. In her routines on “The Glass House” and the live stand-up scene you’d get hardly any of the snark with which other funny-men decapitate their fellow humans day after day, and none of the excruciating embarrassments that plenty of comedy relies on for comic effect. For more than a decade now, Grant’s schtick has been that of an ex-country girl who still gets herself in a tangle adapting to the big-smoke. Even when she’d try out a bit of lazy smut, or did take-offs of the freakshow of city street-life, she’d always keep enough of the girl-next-dooriness to save her routines from shading off into any sort of black; she’d fess up to her fantasies about coming home with the balls of the bogan on the tram wrapped in plastic, but then she’d hunch over or cover her mouth in embarrassment – and that was almost as funny as the gag.
Well, Lessons in Letting Go is here to tell us that it’s been harder work being Corinne Grant than we might have assumed. The book’s about being a hoarder – something Grant wants to tell us is a specific condition in its own right, a very serious condition, involving a pathological inability to throw out any of the stuff you’ve ever accumulated.
The tale starts in what is Grant’s recognisable comic mode. To warm us up, she rattles off self-deprecating stories about her days as a junior try-hard from Corryong, Victoria. Within a chapter or two, she’s down in Melbourne at uni, and we learn about her obsession with stuff as she shacks up with a guy called Thomas. The comic set-pieces follow a basic formula, which works well enough: as she moves between flats she digs up bits and pieces that remind her of moderately funny misadventures from the Corryong days. Pretty early on she meets comic-to-be, Adam Richard, who gets most of the best lines in the book and is there to offset Grant’s desperately straight ways with top-shelf gay self-parody. (If she’s the clueless country kid, he’s Liberace in tracksuit pants.) Boyfriend Thomas comes off second best as a character. Grant spends the greater part of the book grieving about what never was, taking advantage of Thomas’ patience as the friendly ex. The relationship that preceded all this is next to non-existent: Thomas is fundamentally decent, not obsessed with hanging on to his stuff (and therefore in Grant’s mind “brave”) - and, apart from that, he’s just there to calm her down and reason with her about her stuff.
Lessons in Letting Go tries out two types of explanations of her hoarding ways – straight ones and jokey ones. The second type often rings truer than the first type, making the second half of the book, when Grant’s efforts to come to terms with her obsessions get deadly serious, a bit of a drag.
Until she starts “de-hoarding”, one of the main things Grant can’t get a grip on is the difference between the social ritual of buying stuff for other people, which isn’t always a token of live human feeling, and the reality of genuine emotional bonds. She’s accumulated so much stuff because she’s never thrown away a single Christmas card or any of the 20 bottles of skin-cream she’s been gifted since the 1980s. This is the personal essence of the hoarding behaviour: it’s as if her connections with other people are so tenuous that if she bins the unused 20 year old presents she’ll be standing naked in the present, utterly alone; or as if her sense of herself depends so much on the past that she needs physical reminders of every little incident to know that she’s still alive in the here and now. She’s almost hysterical in her nostalgia, and she knows it. Every old scrunchy sends her bowling down memory lane, like an elasticised version of Proust’s madeleine.
The book though seems to toss up more questions than Grant herself can answer without the help of the psychological professionals. Is her hoarding a side-effect of the way she over-empathises? (She does it with things as well as people.) How does the localised problem – the fear of turfing out all the pressies and momentos – relate to her wider set of fears – the paralysing neurotic fear of offending people, appearing rude, appearing stupid, appearing timid, or the circular neurotic perception that it’s pathetic to have all those fears in the first place? If her habits as a hoarder open her eyes to a generalised anxiety – the classic existentialist heeby-jeebies – then how does sorting out the localised problem with excess possessions allow her to neutralise the wider anxiety, and do so without any neurotic remainders?
Neutralise it she does, with a dose of spirituality and some casual humanitarianism. Off she flies to Bali, for 10 days of yoga and psychic purging, some encounters with women who have done an impressive amount of their own letting-go, and a spot of what my anthropology lecturer used to call “exoticism”: a highly satisfying attempt to project a fantasy of wholesome simplicity onto the Indonesian natives she doesn’t really get to know. The best of all this is still the funny bits – the cute Dutch girl who says things like “Every Dutch person has class. We don’t have bogans. What is ‘daggy’?” (Corinne is tactful enough not to answer “straight young Dutchies.”) The worst is the self-helpy tone Grant gives to it all: her purpose in visiting this tourist-brochure “tropical paradise”, she tells us, is “to learn to let go of my pain”.
It’s hard to knock another person’s journey of self-discovery. Surely one human being’s journey of self-discovery is as good as the next? Yes, but is one person’s journey as worthy of a novel-length memoir as the next? The answer has to be no: whether the journey’s worth writing about depends on the depth of experience and whether it comes through in words and sentences. Now: if this seems to reduce a comic’s confession to very serious terms, with Lessons in Letting Go you have to get down to the serious stuff at some point. The book stops functioning like an extended stand-up routine quite early on. It wants to tell us that spiritual retreats, human companionship and contact with the suffering of the earth can make you into a better person. Who could possibly doubt it? The point is that most of us already know those kinds of things can change your life. So someone writing about them has to show us how with a lot more vividness than Oprah and her blithering guests, or else it’ll sound clichéd.
In the end that’s why Lessons in Letting Go sours its own fun: because what it comes down to is a lengthy, comically unreconstructed indecent exposure of Grant’s neurotic consciousness. “Unreconstructed” is the operative word here. Because obviously the material itself – hoarding, and the convoluted guilt, shame and attachment to the past that make Grant into a hoarder – could’ve made for some funny and perceptive summer reading: aren’t intense guilt and shame the neurotic feedstock of the routines we know and love in Woody Allen, or Phillip Roth, or Corinne Grant when she’s at her best?
There’s no comparison, unfortunately. The shamelessness with which Woody used to whine about being a loser is the motor of his best films: the shamelessness is what perversely suggests that he’s master of all the stuff that he’s telling us over and over he’s not master of. Midway through Lessons in Letting Go Corinne Grant enters into a vicious circle: she tells us how ashamed she is of her hoarding and showers us with the details, but that’s all. When she does eventually break the pattern, turfing out half a house worth of stuff, throwing a party and presumably deciding to write a book about it all, you realise how far she’s left comedy behind. Apart from a handful of good smartarse lines from Adam Richard, there aren’t that many funnies to speak of towards the end of the book.
In becoming a reformed hoarder, Grant seems to create for herself a safe domain of comfort, tidiness and self-contentment that she somehow fell away from during childhood. She returns wholly to a sort of comfort-zone, one that her fellow hoarders and the rest of us are supposed to find edifying.
Some people will find it edifying and some won’t. The reason it rings untrue is because you know the tidy ideal is exactly the kind of thing Grant in stand-up mode is expert at mocking.
Well, Lessons in Letting Go is here to tell us that it’s been harder work being Corinne Grant than we might have assumed. The book’s about being a hoarder – something Grant wants to tell us is a specific condition in its own right, a very serious condition, involving a pathological inability to throw out any of the stuff you’ve ever accumulated.
The tale starts in what is Grant’s recognisable comic mode. To warm us up, she rattles off self-deprecating stories about her days as a junior try-hard from Corryong, Victoria. Within a chapter or two, she’s down in Melbourne at uni, and we learn about her obsession with stuff as she shacks up with a guy called Thomas. The comic set-pieces follow a basic formula, which works well enough: as she moves between flats she digs up bits and pieces that remind her of moderately funny misadventures from the Corryong days. Pretty early on she meets comic-to-be, Adam Richard, who gets most of the best lines in the book and is there to offset Grant’s desperately straight ways with top-shelf gay self-parody. (If she’s the clueless country kid, he’s Liberace in tracksuit pants.) Boyfriend Thomas comes off second best as a character. Grant spends the greater part of the book grieving about what never was, taking advantage of Thomas’ patience as the friendly ex. The relationship that preceded all this is next to non-existent: Thomas is fundamentally decent, not obsessed with hanging on to his stuff (and therefore in Grant’s mind “brave”) - and, apart from that, he’s just there to calm her down and reason with her about her stuff.
Lessons in Letting Go tries out two types of explanations of her hoarding ways – straight ones and jokey ones. The second type often rings truer than the first type, making the second half of the book, when Grant’s efforts to come to terms with her obsessions get deadly serious, a bit of a drag.
Until she starts “de-hoarding”, one of the main things Grant can’t get a grip on is the difference between the social ritual of buying stuff for other people, which isn’t always a token of live human feeling, and the reality of genuine emotional bonds. She’s accumulated so much stuff because she’s never thrown away a single Christmas card or any of the 20 bottles of skin-cream she’s been gifted since the 1980s. This is the personal essence of the hoarding behaviour: it’s as if her connections with other people are so tenuous that if she bins the unused 20 year old presents she’ll be standing naked in the present, utterly alone; or as if her sense of herself depends so much on the past that she needs physical reminders of every little incident to know that she’s still alive in the here and now. She’s almost hysterical in her nostalgia, and she knows it. Every old scrunchy sends her bowling down memory lane, like an elasticised version of Proust’s madeleine.
The book though seems to toss up more questions than Grant herself can answer without the help of the psychological professionals. Is her hoarding a side-effect of the way she over-empathises? (She does it with things as well as people.) How does the localised problem – the fear of turfing out all the pressies and momentos – relate to her wider set of fears – the paralysing neurotic fear of offending people, appearing rude, appearing stupid, appearing timid, or the circular neurotic perception that it’s pathetic to have all those fears in the first place? If her habits as a hoarder open her eyes to a generalised anxiety – the classic existentialist heeby-jeebies – then how does sorting out the localised problem with excess possessions allow her to neutralise the wider anxiety, and do so without any neurotic remainders?
Neutralise it she does, with a dose of spirituality and some casual humanitarianism. Off she flies to Bali, for 10 days of yoga and psychic purging, some encounters with women who have done an impressive amount of their own letting-go, and a spot of what my anthropology lecturer used to call “exoticism”: a highly satisfying attempt to project a fantasy of wholesome simplicity onto the Indonesian natives she doesn’t really get to know. The best of all this is still the funny bits – the cute Dutch girl who says things like “Every Dutch person has class. We don’t have bogans. What is ‘daggy’?” (Corinne is tactful enough not to answer “straight young Dutchies.”) The worst is the self-helpy tone Grant gives to it all: her purpose in visiting this tourist-brochure “tropical paradise”, she tells us, is “to learn to let go of my pain”.
It’s hard to knock another person’s journey of self-discovery. Surely one human being’s journey of self-discovery is as good as the next? Yes, but is one person’s journey as worthy of a novel-length memoir as the next? The answer has to be no: whether the journey’s worth writing about depends on the depth of experience and whether it comes through in words and sentences. Now: if this seems to reduce a comic’s confession to very serious terms, with Lessons in Letting Go you have to get down to the serious stuff at some point. The book stops functioning like an extended stand-up routine quite early on. It wants to tell us that spiritual retreats, human companionship and contact with the suffering of the earth can make you into a better person. Who could possibly doubt it? The point is that most of us already know those kinds of things can change your life. So someone writing about them has to show us how with a lot more vividness than Oprah and her blithering guests, or else it’ll sound clichéd.
In the end that’s why Lessons in Letting Go sours its own fun: because what it comes down to is a lengthy, comically unreconstructed indecent exposure of Grant’s neurotic consciousness. “Unreconstructed” is the operative word here. Because obviously the material itself – hoarding, and the convoluted guilt, shame and attachment to the past that make Grant into a hoarder – could’ve made for some funny and perceptive summer reading: aren’t intense guilt and shame the neurotic feedstock of the routines we know and love in Woody Allen, or Phillip Roth, or Corinne Grant when she’s at her best?
There’s no comparison, unfortunately. The shamelessness with which Woody used to whine about being a loser is the motor of his best films: the shamelessness is what perversely suggests that he’s master of all the stuff that he’s telling us over and over he’s not master of. Midway through Lessons in Letting Go Corinne Grant enters into a vicious circle: she tells us how ashamed she is of her hoarding and showers us with the details, but that’s all. When she does eventually break the pattern, turfing out half a house worth of stuff, throwing a party and presumably deciding to write a book about it all, you realise how far she’s left comedy behind. Apart from a handful of good smartarse lines from Adam Richard, there aren’t that many funnies to speak of towards the end of the book.
In becoming a reformed hoarder, Grant seems to create for herself a safe domain of comfort, tidiness and self-contentment that she somehow fell away from during childhood. She returns wholly to a sort of comfort-zone, one that her fellow hoarders and the rest of us are supposed to find edifying.
Some people will find it edifying and some won’t. The reason it rings untrue is because you know the tidy ideal is exactly the kind of thing Grant in stand-up mode is expert at mocking.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Pseuds Corner - No.10
- an occasional selection of the worst of the Australian media-sphere, with particular attention to arts and political commentary that is pompous, pretentious, over-written, self-important, knowing instead of knowledgeable, name-dropping, euphemistic, cliche'd or sloppily written to the point of meaninglessness. . .
Cave's saturnine persona refutes Australian national optimism and its chirpy creed of "No worries". This is why he was so intent on colaborating with Kylie. One druggy evening in March in 1992, he persuaded a fan to give him a little pink and baby-blue plastic bag with Kylie's name on it, now on show at the National Library; he toted the candy-coloured trinket around the world, hoping it transmitted a message. In 1996 she fell for the bait and sweetly permitted him to slay her in "Where the Wild Roses Grow". They make an odd couple in the video. Frankenstein's lumbering monster has apparently convinced Ramsay St's fluffy, sugary Charlene to go out on a date. It was a sacrificial act, designed to ravage the suburban Australia of barbequed nature strips, trilling budgies and unstained laundry happily flapping on rotary clothes lines. - Cave has compared Australia to the Holy Land, but only because its terrain is so stark and unhallowed . . . "More flies than at the Cruxifiction", comments Euchrid in And the Ass Saw the Angel, futilely brushing away the winged filth that crawls on his skin. Who but an Australian, picturing Golgotha, would listen for the hum and drone of the blowies that surely converged on Christ's succulent wounds? (Peter Conrad, The Monthly)
I’m a morning person if you accept that morning is a state of mind, beginning when you decide it should. I think Descartes said something like you shouldn’t let anyone get you out of bed until you’re good and ready if you want to do decent mathematics. In a perfect world, it would be the same with writing, of course. But even on little sleep the morning can be golden for creative work, the brain surprisingly deft, somehow reborn. (Kristel Thornell on the meaning of morning, Melbourne Writers Festival blog)
I’ve been in a lot of aeroplanes lately – flying out from Melbourne, flying in novels, and in dreams. Sometimes the ports look similar. Familiar, unfamiliar. My life is literature, is writing, is reading, and always passion, and there are good and bad things about being intertwined with fiction, about consistent imagining. It can be expansive, but also irrepressible. It can thrill or bother me at three o’clock in the morning. - But then, flying somewhere to talk about it - to share on stage, in a workshop, over a glass of wine - these habitations of the mind, connections formed on the page, worlds opened up, emotional educations or confirmations. - The next chance to do this is somewhere close to where I grew up – Byron Bay. I can’t wait to dig my feet in the sand, and to dig deep into the minds of authors. (Angela Meyer on being a Busy Byron Bay Writers Festival Bee, Literary Minded)
Want to know my favourite sex toy? My wooden spoon. I use it to cook lamb stir-fry, sweet potato soup and Mediterranean vegetable frittata. Another bedroom aid? The duster, broom or nappy wipes. . . You can imagine the dream scenario: as I approach 35, my life is part Voltaire, part Viagra. When I'm not cooking three dinners, wiping snot out of my daughter's eyes, or impaling my foot on Lego starships, my wife and I are enjoying tender hours of lovemaking. . . I jest, but the 'Mentally Sexy Dad' is a real phenomenon. The brainchild of blogger Clint Greagen at Reservoir Dad, the competition celebrates men who're committed to a more balanced family life. It's a reminder: men who clean, cook and parent are hot stuff. . . This is the logic behind Reservoir Dad's competition. In an irreverent way, Clint is trying to highlight the attractiveness of alternative masculine domesticity. Of course this involves a little beefcake: bulging guns or tight bums in little undies. But this is only the most obvious allure. More than anything else, these are men who refuse to be bound by traditional gender roles. They can be tough, brawny and probably boozy - but they also wash, cook, clean and kid-wrangle. In this, the competition, also running the United States, is a celebration of today's real new age man: not stereotypically emasculated or wimpy, but caring, careful and committed. It's not a denial of what most men in Western societies do. It's an expansion of it: showing how their energy and perseverance can be broadened and enriched; how they can be bigger men, not in waistline, but in spirit. They're 'mentally sexy' because they've given their responsibilities and ideals thought, and demonstrated will, intelligence and foresight. It's about the allure of the soul, not just the biceps. (Damon Young, "Mentally sexy dads", ABC The Drum Unleashed)
Thank God I am not a squid, I think as I watch the unimaginable ordeals of so many animals; thank God I am not a gannet chick swallowed alive by a pelican; thank God I am not expected once a year to crawl up cliffs a million times higher than myself?. - Perhaps some of the gratification of nature documentaries is in reminding us of our own animal truths. . . Life reminds me of a favourite poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, simple and moving because it speaks of the knowledge we have when we shiver in cold, when we are hungry, when we are frightened: that we are warm, living beasts, no less, little more:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk
on your knees for a
hundred miles through
the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the
soft animal of your body
love what it loves. (Kate Holden, "A cosmos of wonders imparts its cosy glow", The Age)
I was startled by Professor Gillian Whitlock's reading of my essay 'After the Academy' (Australian Book Review, June/July 2002). She appears to think that my choice of 'romantic', 'organic' tropes and of such generally non-U discourses as 'settler autobiographics' was unwitting, and that I had somehow managed to get through seventeen years as a full time academic without achieving self-awareness in my own writing practice, and without being so much as touched by the ideas or the language by which I was surrounded. . .
There is, of course, no such thing as ME (I take it this was a laboured pun on campus-specific essentialist crimes; if not, it is now), and if Professor Whitlock claims to have no heart or soul then who am I to argue? As far as the development of the academic self over time is concerned, there can be no clear distinction between the 'sandstones' and the 'gumleaves', for most of us are the hybrid offspring of both, or perhaps I should say that our selves are constructed on the site where the various discourses circulating around both intersect. (Kerryn Goldsworthy responds to Gillian Whitlock, Australian Humanities Review)
The Almodóvar that was before us had all the suspense and sparkle in the world. - Yes, and by the grace of God, most of the acting was superb. Wendy Hughes had just the right kind of hauteur and quivering warmth as the famous actress who is besotted with her girlfriend and is the unwitting destroyer of the boy. This is a big handsome performance in the role that was recreated on the London stage by Diana Rigg, and Hughes gives it a sort of bewildered vulnerability in the midst of decaying magnificence that is splendid and also splendidly matched by Peta Sergeant, who sizzles with sexiness and self-pity as the damaged damsel who is her Stella and her Atthis. . .
Some of the other parts are, admittedly, played a bit cheesily. Katie Fitchett was too much a sketch of bouncy goodness and then long-suffering nobility as the nun who gets pregnant and then infected with HIV. And Jolyon James is far too effete and goonish as the actor who plays Stanley, but he’s a lot better as the missing father in drag. - This is not a flawless production but it is full of a wild energy and a counter-balancing grace that delivers a contemporary masterpiece full of all the dramatic and cinematic echoes in the world, which is all at once full of life and of the magic that gives it form. (Peter Craven, "Comedy and energy - and tears" Australian Spectator)
I’m a morning person if you accept that morning is a state of mind, beginning when you decide it should. I think Descartes said something like you shouldn’t let anyone get you out of bed until you’re good and ready if you want to do decent mathematics. In a perfect world, it would be the same with writing, of course. But even on little sleep the morning can be golden for creative work, the brain surprisingly deft, somehow reborn. (Kristel Thornell on the meaning of morning, Melbourne Writers Festival blog)
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk
on your knees for a
hundred miles through
the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the
soft animal of your body
love what it loves. (Kate Holden, "A cosmos of wonders imparts its cosy glow", The Age)
There is, of course, no such thing as ME (I take it this was a laboured pun on campus-specific essentialist crimes; if not, it is now), and if Professor Whitlock claims to have no heart or soul then who am I to argue? As far as the development of the academic self over time is concerned, there can be no clear distinction between the 'sandstones' and the 'gumleaves', for most of us are the hybrid offspring of both, or perhaps I should say that our selves are constructed on the site where the various discourses circulating around both intersect. (Kerryn Goldsworthy responds to Gillian Whitlock, Australian Humanities Review)
Some of the other parts are, admittedly, played a bit cheesily. Katie Fitchett was too much a sketch of bouncy goodness and then long-suffering nobility as the nun who gets pregnant and then infected with HIV. And Jolyon James is far too effete and goonish as the actor who plays Stanley, but he’s a lot better as the missing father in drag. - This is not a flawless production but it is full of a wild energy and a counter-balancing grace that delivers a contemporary masterpiece full of all the dramatic and cinematic echoes in the world, which is all at once full of life and of the magic that gives it form. (Peter Craven, "Comedy and energy - and tears" Australian Spectator)
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Peter Craven: Why I Can't Write
- with apologies to G. Orwell
A bit of a follow-up to the Peter Craven edition of Pseuds Corner a while back. A few things have been pointed out to me by the Stage's 5.5 readers that bear on the Craven case and I think are worth repeating.
The argument from one quarter was that the Special Edition neglected to give the impression that Mr C can at times write better prose than what was on display in the 7 extracts I picked on a few weeks ago. This recent op-ed piece was cited as an example:
"Would that politics in this country were as well run as the ABC's political panel show Q and A - on a good day. Television transforms our apprehension of politics by its vividness, its accuracy and the sense of occasion with which it presents it. - Q and A began only last year, but is already essential to the political landscape. It presents a panel that includes a member each from the government and the opposition, a couple of journalists or intellectuals, perhaps someone from business or a think tank - five in all plus the presenter (Lateline's Tony Jones) - and subjects them to live questions from the audience plus a sprinkling sent in electronically. The format works superbly, highlighting both the political skill of our politicians and the fact that there is a lot more to the governing of a country than mere party political differences." (Peter Craven, "Question: What makes tv great? Answer: Q and A" The Age)
There's no doubt it's better written, though I'd hardly say that makes exhibits (a)
through (g) from the Special Edition any more excusable, either from the point of view of Craven as a writer or that of his editors.
The argument from another quarter, precisely along these lines, was that the case against Craven's writing made in the Special Edition actually didn't go far enough. James of Coburg made the point that if he had submitted a single line of the prose from exhibits (a) through (g) to the editors of any of Australia's major literary publications then he would probably have been told straight-up that he was writing unpublishable drivel.
In the case of submissions (a) through to (g), professional editing would have meant refusing Mr Craven column space on the grounds of egregious lack of merit, coherence and substance, though some exceptions, James suggested, might be made for exhibits (c), (d) and (e), which, to quote James himself, "are more in the nature of a gossip column". (Decide for yourself whether the Lilian Frank persona Craven adopts for his Australian Spectator column is innocuous or intellectually offensive. I'm happy to concede James's point: lowering literary standards is fair enough if the only point of a piece really is to let Peter let the world know he saw Eddie and Carla Maguire at the latest Mary Poppins production.)
James's more important point though is that Mr Craven is being seriously indulged by many of the major editorial powers in the land, who, in publishing material of the - to use a Cravenism - loose baggy monstrousness of exhibits (a) through (g) are effectively refusing to edit. In this, I have to say, I agree. Like James, I find it hard to believe that a sane editor who'd been set the task of exercising his/her professional skills on exhibits (a) through (g) - from behind a veil of anonymity for instance - would have failed to apply the red pencil to every sentence even vaguely like this one:
"The easiest way into Rothwell is via Another Country, because that book makes clear without any overwhelming baroque turbulence that we are dealing with a cultivated sensibility, all but flypapered with the culture of Europe, the kind of bloke who jumped on a plane to see, as soon as possible, a newly rediscovered Titian in eastern Europe, who is steeped in the literary power of the 19th-century Australian explorers and is alive not only to his own desire for illumination and the potential for personal enlightenment and spiritual excruciation that comes from exploration (in all its literal and metaphorical ambivalence); but who is also, in a worldly sense, open to the fact that "spiritual tourism", like the taste for Aboriginal art, is a growth industry and a collective sussurration of which his own whispering is a part." ("Appointment with the sublime", ALR)
I also agree with James that there are aspects of grotesque awfulness to Mr Craven's prose - and his general mindset - that I actually left out of my initial collection. The list of excesses and foibles I started the Craven edition of Pseuds Corner with wasn't meant to be exhaustive and I now think I could've come up with a better list. At the top of it would have to go Craven's love of superfine comparisons between the works - or even the whole literary oeuvres - of his favourite literary geniuses - sometimes 4 or 5 per paragraph. To quote the above splurge about Nicholas Rothwell again:
"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."
"In one way it's a form of landscape novel writing in which the world of characters in an ongoing drama is replaced by the brooding consciousness of the narrator who, by necessity, arrogates to himself whatever more or less Wordsworthian fascinations interiority and its thousand minute modulations might disclose. - V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is one kind of locus classicus of this kind of writing, the fiction of Gerald Murnane is another. It is, in any case, a form of documentary fiction-making that realigns fiction (or non-fiction, because it confounds the distinction) with the long backward arch of Romantic poetry. You can no more argue with Sebald's The Rings of Saturn than you can with Wordsworth's Prelude or - if you want to change the game a little - with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Rilke's Duino Elegies." (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the sublime", Australian Literary Review, The Australian)
Prima facie, what we have here is a species of literary name-dropping, which was something I did suggest Craven did a lot of, along with (a) invoking High Art as a quasi-metaphysical value, (b) theatrically purporting to explain himself without explaining anything, (c) coining bizarre metaphors (d) badly imitating the earthy side of Robert Hughes and (e) referring to God for rhetorical effect. In a more rigorous survey of Mr Craven's prose-style though, the superfine comparisons and general analogy-mongering, I can see now, would belong in a different category to the vulgar "met Charlotte and Cate for lunch"-style shop-talk.
The reason why material like the ghastly Rothwell review belongs in a category of its own will be obvious to anyone who's ever opened the arts pages of an Australian newspaper looking for a critical interpretation whose basic line of thought he can follow: all the huff and puff about great writers in Craven's reviews endlessly defers the point where he has to justify his responses, as opposed to giving his readers unargued demonstrations of his own overwhelming knowledgeability. Yes, the tone is so snobbish it's ridiculous, based as it is on the premiss that normal readers of the The Australian could mentally reference the nuances contained in a library-worth of books with the ease that Craven appears to be able to do so. But much more important than that is the fact that writing like Craven's bears very little thinking about. Read it and imagine yourself putting the question to Mr C "How would you actually flesh out that grand-sounding analogy between St Paul and Montaigne, Nicholas Rothwell and Milton, Mahler and Cormac McCarthy, Kodi Smit-Macphee and the patriarch Abraham etc etc etc?" What could Craven possibly say? All I can imagine is a sort of authoritative pre-discursive groan, signifying something like "CAN'T YOU SEE I'M VERY CULTURED! (Get you gone.)"
However, bad writing created by a desire to seem massively well-read is maybe only part of Craven's problem. The other half of the problem is the result of a bad mental habit and here again more needs to be said about how Craven gets himself into it. My sense is this. For Craven, the basic game of reviewing is to indicate in a roundabout way what the aesthetic experience of a book or a film reminds him of, which turns out to be another aesthetic experience. The reviews then spend much of their time joining the dots between these singular points of personal aesthetic experience without communicating the least part of the content of that experience to the reader.
Another grave problem for Craven that I didn't mention in the Pseuds Special Edition are all those sentences choking on linguistic fetish-items: the "rich and strange" stock-phrases that read like the first things that enter Mr C's mind rather than fully-formed subject-plus-predicate-style thoughts about the matter at hand. When Craven is at his worst, the bold metaphors simply get thrown together to create a sort of chaotic high-toned poetry:
"In that respect, as in others, McCarthy is the heir of Hemingway, with a thundering command of action that enthrals, though his cadences are stately and artful and the feeling that runs through his books encompasses the pity and the terror and the tears in things. You begin reading All the Pretty Horses, which opens his Border Trilogy, thinking that you are experiencing the Platonic idea of escapist writing because you are enjoying a cowboy book for the first time since you were ten only to discover that this is no reanimation of the delights of childhood. It is a [sic] Kindertotenlieder. . .
From the outset, the film [of McCarthy's The Road] skilfully establishes the moral gravity that underlines the horror-style narrative momentum. The father's narration tells us that if God's voice does not come through the child, then he never spoke a word. And so it goes as father and son move over the bleached and devastated landscapes of some rural Pennsylvania or Oregon of the mind, some Montana that may be coterminous with a world where men rove like wolves."("Baby Dante and Apocalypse" ABR) [my italics. Ed]
What is basically at issue in McCarthy as a novellist and in the film versions of The Road in particular? What are the basic themes here? Isn't that the simplest question that the reader of a review might expect to get an answer to? Can Mr C answer it? Well, he can run through the plot of The Road, throwing in semantically unmotivated references to Platonic ideas, "literary high-jinks", the "tears of being", a "Montana of the mind", seeing various things through a glass darkly, "all that is red and tooth in claw" - oh and "the ineffable" (which he proceeds to say an eff'ing lot about).
But how does McCarthy's novel actually work? How does McCarthy's literary apocalyptic or Hillcoat's film version of it relate to the reality of our present world or that of the future? Admittedly these aren't the most sophisticated literary critical questions. But if as a reviewer you can't even give a vague sense of an answer, your review just doesn't belong on the arts pages of a broadsheet newspaper. The trouble with Mr C as a reviewer is that he rarely answers any of these sorts of entry-level questions about structure or significance and the constipated prose-style is part of the reason why: Craven habitually spends so much of his time in most of his reviews chewing and re-chewing the same pet phrases that he fails to give a critical impression of a book or get across a coherent line of thought about it.
If we were just talking about a literary tic that we had to ignore in order to get to the analysis, interpretation and evaluation that form the essence of any really substantial criticism then maybe it'd all be worth it. But in Craven's case, the reviews seem to be all tic and no text. On a good day, Craven can indicate, in a roundabout way (roughly as he does in his response to Q and A) whether he thinks something is good or bad, pointless or worthy: the evaluative bit. But most of the time, he's so busy tweaking silly phrases that analysis, interpretation and evaluation are nowhere in sight.
Six months ago, Gideon Haigh sparked medium-level controversy in the literary world by suggesting that Australian criticism is nowadays light-on and uninspired. Book reviews in particular, according to Haigh, are increasingly being farmed out to general staff writers who, in the absence of special knowledge, drown the reader in vague impressions and almost never venture strong-minded critical opinions. Yet while it's true nowadays that Australian literary editors seem to have a preference for favourable reviews, especially of local fare, there's a double-edge to this particular sword and I'm guessing Haigh is aware of it. The trouble is that there's something far worse than reviewers giving everyone who managed to get into print an encouragement award. And that's reviewers giving what they don't like an unargued critical caning.
"Bestial metaphor abounds in Shakespeare's tale of sexual jealousy. Director Peter King takes his cue from it, entering the jungle of physical theatre to deliver a production canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play. . . [Annie] Last's Desdemona carved out an unlikely wedge of dignity for herself. King's work, as he puts it, ''continues to disdain naturalism, whatever that may be''. - It's the kind of statement that makes naturalism seem like pornography: you can't describe it, but you know it when you see it. - In fact, Shakespeare is both naturalistic and not. To the extent that the burgeoning sensuality of King's conception accentuates the trauma at the heart of Othello, it's fair enough. - But this production seems more interested in playing with itself than to the audience, and some of its rude tricks seem to be compensating for a lack of technique." (Cameron Woodhead reviews "Othello" at fortyfivedownstairs, The Age)
Ignore the wretched word painting. (Anyone up for a ticket to a production "canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play"?!) There's another thing that Craven and his protégés are very good at. And that is filling out reviews with casual put downs. Take the pointless sneer from Mr C himself at the end of this paragraph:
"With the passage of the years Waiting for Godot has come to seem less like a shocking paradigm of absurdity and more like the deep sad comedy of a continuing condition (call it human if you must). As with Eliot’s Waste Land, the brilliance of the comic surface has almost outlived the existential insecurity it is shaping. - Sean Mathias’s quietly brilliant production takes this fact as its opportunity by constantly emphasising the mature human face of the grinding rituals through which his two ageing tramps wait and wander (wittily and witlessly) as Godot puts them through their paces in his failure to come. McKellen and Rees, in contrasted ways, have the rueful stoicism of age, and their comic embrace of catastrophe — McKellen’s boggle-eyed and flailing, Rees’s dapper and wincing — is light years from the contorted angst of young actors with the world before them as an enigmatic agony." (Peter Craven reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot", The Spectator)
Off we go again. The stars of Craven's literary canon twinkle brightly. In the foreground phrases get made, phrases get murdered, the storehouses of the English language are laid waste in the search for a maximally colourful figure of speech or an intermediate term in a world-historical literary analogy. The Craven caning that comes at the end of the paragraph is a model of how not to proceed as an intellectually responsible critic: spend most of your time cueing your readers as to how well-read you are, denigrate your critical object by rhetorically screwing up your face - never put it in a context in which its failings become comprehensible from a broader point of view.
The vague swipes are more than faintly insulting to artists and readers alike. And perhaps the only excuse Australian arts editors have for filling out review pages with tepid positivity is to avoid the negative consequences of badly-written reviews that attitudinise instead of arguing in just this style. Tepid critical praise for every work has one advantage over nasty pseudery. It avoids everyone involved in the arts, including your newspaper's dwindling readership, from feeling justifiably offended.
Now, there are people in the Australian arts world who are willing to call Craven on his sloppy intellectual habits and the poor standard of his writing. From memory, Gideon Haigh didn't single out Mr C for special treatment at Readings six months ago. Alison Croggon by contrast has been consistently willing to do so, for instance in this hard-hitting reply to Craven.
For the sake of background, here's a moderately pseudish snippet from the comment-piece by Mr C that got on Croggon's nerves:
"Naturalism and disruptive high jinks: the theatre needs both. Yes, we need a writer's theatre that is also an actor's theatre, where the director serves the text and highlights — and disciplines — the strength of the actor. We need Rush and Steve Sewell and a director such as Kate Cherry, who can quietly find the music in a Hannie Rayson play. Maybe in the end we need it more than the declamatory atonal music of Andrews and Kosky. - Half the trouble with Australian theatre is caused by talented directors who feel they are above realism and well-made plays. Often they cut their teeth with student theatre and have been too narcissistic to grow up. It's much easier to treat student actors like puppets and to improvise a text than it is to treat Judy Davis like that. Most cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings with classics make Joanna Murray-Smith look like Racine on a good day. But for every production such as Osage, there's hand-me-down cardboard rubbish of the traditional kind. - We want the best actors commanding the respect of directors who will allow the best of our playwrights to take their places alongside the Pirandellos and Greeks. A theatre which is ancient and modern, classic and cutting-edge, Australian and internationalist, with a deep instinctive sense that to make it new, you have to have a theatrical eye for the glitter of the old. Where is naturalism in all this? Well, we need a theatre that has emotional truth, and we need a theatre that understands the magic of its own artifice." ("The trouble with Australian theatre", The National Times)
As ever, the main argument gets lost in the muddy swirl of tenuous comparisons. It shouldn't take a paragraph with fifteen proper names to tell us that in Mr C's opinion Australian theatre needs to strike a balance between naturalism and experimental disruption. However, without a definition of his main terms (naturalism//"disruptive high jinks", mainstream vs experimental theatre, emotional truth vs deconstruction of traditions), even that relatively simple point evaporates into thin air. The run-through of recent productions by major Australian theatre companies in the rest of the piece contains plenty of examples that seem to fall on both sides of the apparent divide between naturalism and "disruptive high jinks", so you fast end up wondering what the complaint that there's too much "disruption" really amounts to.
Croggon's point is essentially the one about definitions and it's very well taken: surely no one who had thought a little about the term "mainstream theatre" would be silly enough to claim that most mainstream products are particularly "naturalistic", or that the popularity of mainstream shows follows from any notable adherence to "naturalism". In short, Craven - to the extent that he is arguing anything at all - is re-hashing an age-old debate between naturalism and its opponents - a debate which any sophisticated critic ought to know is completely unresolvable when framed in these simplistic terms. For anyone who didn't do Aesthetics 101, let it be said that in the Nineteenth Century, the advocates of aesthetic naturalism extolled naturalism as an escape from arbitrary stylisation, while the advocates of aesthetic anti-naturalism condemned it as a step backwards from the reality-sublimating and reality-subverting functions of art itself. Anyone with a rough grasp of the history of criticism can see that insisting on a "theatre of emotional truth", as Craven does, loads the dice against art which doesn't take truth or emotion as the measure of aesthetic significance. More than that, arguing for naturalism in this simple-minded way overlooks the relatively obvious point that naturalism is itself a form of artifice - one which in some circumstances becomes less than fully aware of itself and under the conditions of mass cultural spectacle often leads to nothing but the repetition of emotional cliche's and psychological stereotypes.
In any case, the sort of ideal Australian theatre that Craven manages to build out of his insistence on "emotional truth" is so vague as to be largely meaningless. A theatre with a "deep instinctive sense that to make it new you have to keep an eye on the glitter of the old"? A theatre that "understands the magic of its own artifice"? What on earth would that amount to specifically? I suppose here at least we can be glad that Craven's pseudo-ideal is captured in a sentence with a beginning that relates to its middle and end according to a principle other than literary free association. Still if the actual content of the ideal would make a meaningful difference to theatre programming or theatrical practice, then Craven leaves us clueless how.
If I had to guess what Mr C is trying to say at this point - it's that he wants to be emotionally moved when he goes to the theatre - that Great Art is deeply moving and so could be truly popular if it weren't being screwed up by "narcissistic" avant-gardists. Let's take it that that's what Craven would be saying if he weren't beating about the bush. Let's also take it that Mr C's desire to be moved by the theatre is basically irrelevant until it's raised from the level of a personal hankering and made part of some sort of meaningful critical discourse about the place of emotion in our responses to theatre. What of the idea that Great Art could potentially wow the masses - if not quite with the success of Mary Poppins - because of the way it invests spectacle with grand pathos? This is obviously the topic that's hidden behind the crotchety debate about Arts Festival programming. However, it's a topic that needs the attention of someone who's prepared to argue in a sustained way about the relation between art and wider society - a true critic, in other words - not a drunken phrase-maker with a license to kill.
There's no doubt that the position of art in society is changing radically in today's world; high culture in particular is fast turning into a kind of niche product and in the process fast ceasing to be what it was until recently - a much more coherent medium of enjoyment and self-understanding for educated people who saw themselves as setting the cultural tone of society. With high culture, and indeed art in general, transformed into a cultural commodity, a lot of arts journalism exists - in spite of whatever good intentions its authors might have - to spuriously glamourise the product. And this is what Craven, in refusing to communicate intelligibly about art, becomes the ever more tireless, tiresome producer of: bizarre glamorisations of an aesthetic tradition that has come into almost entirely new relations to the society it used to be so central to.
The deeper reason why Mr Craven can't write starts to become clear: because the great - and admirable - high-mindedness he wants to bring to the role of the arts writer becomes ridiculous when it comes into combination with the Arts Industry as it exists in the present day and age, with its anti-critical and an-aesthetic imperatives: maintaining an artistic star-system, depositing small references to the arts in as many places as possible, bringing the occasional controversy to the boil and artificially maintaining that aura of sublimity we all know art loses when it is rigorously subjected to the logic of sales-volumes and bums-on-seats.
Question: What happens when the imperative to glamourize the artistic product becomes the practical-social driver of your activity as a writer about art? Well, unless you drop the pretence of great critical grandeur, then at the very least the strain starts to show: above all, your language goes on an extended holiday - a round-the-world cruise maybe, on which adverbs go fly kites of their own, assonance runs riot, half of what you say sounds like it comes from a tourist brochure or a real estate catalogue and everything smells heavily of alcohol and sex:
"The novel pulsates with the portent and momentum of revelations Tranter either foreshadows to the point of obviousness or keeps putting further and more far-fetchedly [sic] out of reach. This makes the book's endless foreplay between its thriller elements and its loftily conceived moral dramas and soaring [sic] realism a little bit of a tease. But The Legacy retains a lot of magic along with its roughness. Full of suave and stunning [sic] evocations of Sydney and Manhattan, this sparkling and spacious [sic] novel captures the smell and sap [sic] of young people half in love with everyone they're vividly aware of, and groping to find themselves [sic] like the answer to an erotic enigma." (Peter Craven reviews Kirsten Tranter, The Monthly)
Oh dear. Let's hope there's an editor out there who still has the courage to call this stray ship back to port. The captain's drunk and is doing weird stuff on the bridge. The whole thing's totally sic!
A bit of a follow-up to the Peter Craven edition of Pseuds Corner a while back. A few things have been pointed out to me by the Stage's 5.5 readers that bear on the Craven case and I think are worth repeating.
The argument from one quarter was that the Special Edition neglected to give the impression that Mr C can at times write better prose than what was on display in the 7 extracts I picked on a few weeks ago. This recent op-ed piece was cited as an example:
"Would that politics in this country were as well run as the ABC's political panel show Q and A - on a good day. Television transforms our apprehension of politics by its vividness, its accuracy and the sense of occasion with which it presents it. - Q and A began only last year, but is already essential to the political landscape. It presents a panel that includes a member each from the government and the opposition, a couple of journalists or intellectuals, perhaps someone from business or a think tank - five in all plus the presenter (Lateline's Tony Jones) - and subjects them to live questions from the audience plus a sprinkling sent in electronically. The format works superbly, highlighting both the political skill of our politicians and the fact that there is a lot more to the governing of a country than mere party political differences." (Peter Craven, "Question: What makes tv great? Answer: Q and A" The Age)
The argument from another quarter, precisely along these lines, was that the case against Craven's writing made in the Special Edition actually didn't go far enough. James of Coburg made the point that if he had submitted a single line of the prose from exhibits (a) through (g) to the editors of any of Australia's major literary publications then he would probably have been told straight-up that he was writing unpublishable drivel.
In the case of submissions (a) through to (g), professional editing would have meant refusing Mr Craven column space on the grounds of egregious lack of merit, coherence and substance, though some exceptions, James suggested, might be made for exhibits (c), (d) and (e), which, to quote James himself, "are more in the nature of a gossip column". (Decide for yourself whether the Lilian Frank persona Craven adopts for his Australian Spectator column is innocuous or intellectually offensive. I'm happy to concede James's point: lowering literary standards is fair enough if the only point of a piece really is to let Peter let the world know he saw Eddie and Carla Maguire at the latest Mary Poppins production.)
James's more important point though is that Mr Craven is being seriously indulged by many of the major editorial powers in the land, who, in publishing material of the - to use a Cravenism - loose baggy monstrousness of exhibits (a) through (g) are effectively refusing to edit. In this, I have to say, I agree. Like James, I find it hard to believe that a sane editor who'd been set the task of exercising his/her professional skills on exhibits (a) through (g) - from behind a veil of anonymity for instance - would have failed to apply the red pencil to every sentence even vaguely like this one:
"The easiest way into Rothwell is via Another Country, because that book makes clear without any overwhelming baroque turbulence that we are dealing with a cultivated sensibility, all but flypapered with the culture of Europe, the kind of bloke who jumped on a plane to see, as soon as possible, a newly rediscovered Titian in eastern Europe, who is steeped in the literary power of the 19th-century Australian explorers and is alive not only to his own desire for illumination and the potential for personal enlightenment and spiritual excruciation that comes from exploration (in all its literal and metaphorical ambivalence); but who is also, in a worldly sense, open to the fact that "spiritual tourism", like the taste for Aboriginal art, is a growth industry and a collective sussurration of which his own whispering is a part." ("Appointment with the sublime", ALR)
I also agree with James that there are aspects of grotesque awfulness to Mr Craven's prose - and his general mindset - that I actually left out of my initial collection. The list of excesses and foibles I started the Craven edition of Pseuds Corner with wasn't meant to be exhaustive and I now think I could've come up with a better list. At the top of it would have to go Craven's love of superfine comparisons between the works - or even the whole literary oeuvres - of his favourite literary geniuses - sometimes 4 or 5 per paragraph. To quote the above splurge about Nicholas Rothwell again:
"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."
"In one way it's a form of landscape novel writing in which the world of characters in an ongoing drama is replaced by the brooding consciousness of the narrator who, by necessity, arrogates to himself whatever more or less Wordsworthian fascinations interiority and its thousand minute modulations might disclose. - V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is one kind of locus classicus of this kind of writing, the fiction of Gerald Murnane is another. It is, in any case, a form of documentary fiction-making that realigns fiction (or non-fiction, because it confounds the distinction) with the long backward arch of Romantic poetry. You can no more argue with Sebald's The Rings of Saturn than you can with Wordsworth's Prelude or - if you want to change the game a little - with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Rilke's Duino Elegies." (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the sublime", Australian Literary Review, The Australian)
Prima facie, what we have here is a species of literary name-dropping, which was something I did suggest Craven did a lot of, along with (a) invoking High Art as a quasi-metaphysical value, (b) theatrically purporting to explain himself without explaining anything, (c) coining bizarre metaphors (d) badly imitating the earthy side of Robert Hughes and (e) referring to God for rhetorical effect. In a more rigorous survey of Mr Craven's prose-style though, the superfine comparisons and general analogy-mongering, I can see now, would belong in a different category to the vulgar "met Charlotte and Cate for lunch"-style shop-talk.
The reason why material like the ghastly Rothwell review belongs in a category of its own will be obvious to anyone who's ever opened the arts pages of an Australian newspaper looking for a critical interpretation whose basic line of thought he can follow: all the huff and puff about great writers in Craven's reviews endlessly defers the point where he has to justify his responses, as opposed to giving his readers unargued demonstrations of his own overwhelming knowledgeability. Yes, the tone is so snobbish it's ridiculous, based as it is on the premiss that normal readers of the The Australian could mentally reference the nuances contained in a library-worth of books with the ease that Craven appears to be able to do so. But much more important than that is the fact that writing like Craven's bears very little thinking about. Read it and imagine yourself putting the question to Mr C "How would you actually flesh out that grand-sounding analogy between St Paul and Montaigne, Nicholas Rothwell and Milton, Mahler and Cormac McCarthy, Kodi Smit-Macphee and the patriarch Abraham etc etc etc?" What could Craven possibly say? All I can imagine is a sort of authoritative pre-discursive groan, signifying something like "CAN'T YOU SEE I'M VERY CULTURED! (Get you gone.)"
However, bad writing created by a desire to seem massively well-read is maybe only part of Craven's problem. The other half of the problem is the result of a bad mental habit and here again more needs to be said about how Craven gets himself into it. My sense is this. For Craven, the basic game of reviewing is to indicate in a roundabout way what the aesthetic experience of a book or a film reminds him of, which turns out to be another aesthetic experience. The reviews then spend much of their time joining the dots between these singular points of personal aesthetic experience without communicating the least part of the content of that experience to the reader.
Another grave problem for Craven that I didn't mention in the Pseuds Special Edition are all those sentences choking on linguistic fetish-items: the "rich and strange" stock-phrases that read like the first things that enter Mr C's mind rather than fully-formed subject-plus-predicate-style thoughts about the matter at hand. When Craven is at his worst, the bold metaphors simply get thrown together to create a sort of chaotic high-toned poetry:
"In that respect, as in others, McCarthy is the heir of Hemingway, with a thundering command of action that enthrals, though his cadences are stately and artful and the feeling that runs through his books encompasses the pity and the terror and the tears in things. You begin reading All the Pretty Horses, which opens his Border Trilogy, thinking that you are experiencing the Platonic idea of escapist writing because you are enjoying a cowboy book for the first time since you were ten only to discover that this is no reanimation of the delights of childhood. It is a [sic] Kindertotenlieder. . .
From the outset, the film [of McCarthy's The Road] skilfully establishes the moral gravity that underlines the horror-style narrative momentum. The father's narration tells us that if God's voice does not come through the child, then he never spoke a word. And so it goes as father and son move over the bleached and devastated landscapes of some rural Pennsylvania or Oregon of the mind, some Montana that may be coterminous with a world where men rove like wolves."("Baby Dante and Apocalypse" ABR) [my italics. Ed]
What is basically at issue in McCarthy as a novellist and in the film versions of The Road in particular? What are the basic themes here? Isn't that the simplest question that the reader of a review might expect to get an answer to? Can Mr C answer it? Well, he can run through the plot of The Road, throwing in semantically unmotivated references to Platonic ideas, "literary high-jinks", the "tears of being", a "Montana of the mind", seeing various things through a glass darkly, "all that is red and tooth in claw" - oh and "the ineffable" (which he proceeds to say an eff'ing lot about).
But how does McCarthy's novel actually work? How does McCarthy's literary apocalyptic or Hillcoat's film version of it relate to the reality of our present world or that of the future? Admittedly these aren't the most sophisticated literary critical questions. But if as a reviewer you can't even give a vague sense of an answer, your review just doesn't belong on the arts pages of a broadsheet newspaper. The trouble with Mr C as a reviewer is that he rarely answers any of these sorts of entry-level questions about structure or significance and the constipated prose-style is part of the reason why: Craven habitually spends so much of his time in most of his reviews chewing and re-chewing the same pet phrases that he fails to give a critical impression of a book or get across a coherent line of thought about it.
If we were just talking about a literary tic that we had to ignore in order to get to the analysis, interpretation and evaluation that form the essence of any really substantial criticism then maybe it'd all be worth it. But in Craven's case, the reviews seem to be all tic and no text. On a good day, Craven can indicate, in a roundabout way (roughly as he does in his response to Q and A) whether he thinks something is good or bad, pointless or worthy: the evaluative bit. But most of the time, he's so busy tweaking silly phrases that analysis, interpretation and evaluation are nowhere in sight.
*
Six months ago, Gideon Haigh sparked medium-level controversy in the literary world by suggesting that Australian criticism is nowadays light-on and uninspired. Book reviews in particular, according to Haigh, are increasingly being farmed out to general staff writers who, in the absence of special knowledge, drown the reader in vague impressions and almost never venture strong-minded critical opinions. Yet while it's true nowadays that Australian literary editors seem to have a preference for favourable reviews, especially of local fare, there's a double-edge to this particular sword and I'm guessing Haigh is aware of it. The trouble is that there's something far worse than reviewers giving everyone who managed to get into print an encouragement award. And that's reviewers giving what they don't like an unargued critical caning.
"Bestial metaphor abounds in Shakespeare's tale of sexual jealousy. Director Peter King takes his cue from it, entering the jungle of physical theatre to deliver a production canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play. . . [Annie] Last's Desdemona carved out an unlikely wedge of dignity for herself. King's work, as he puts it, ''continues to disdain naturalism, whatever that may be''. - It's the kind of statement that makes naturalism seem like pornography: you can't describe it, but you know it when you see it. - In fact, Shakespeare is both naturalistic and not. To the extent that the burgeoning sensuality of King's conception accentuates the trauma at the heart of Othello, it's fair enough. - But this production seems more interested in playing with itself than to the audience, and some of its rude tricks seem to be compensating for a lack of technique." (Cameron Woodhead reviews "Othello" at fortyfivedownstairs, The Age)
Ignore the wretched word painting. (Anyone up for a ticket to a production "canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play"?!) There's another thing that Craven and his protégés are very good at. And that is filling out reviews with casual put downs. Take the pointless sneer from Mr C himself at the end of this paragraph:
"With the passage of the years Waiting for Godot has come to seem less like a shocking paradigm of absurdity and more like the deep sad comedy of a continuing condition (call it human if you must). As with Eliot’s Waste Land, the brilliance of the comic surface has almost outlived the existential insecurity it is shaping. - Sean Mathias’s quietly brilliant production takes this fact as its opportunity by constantly emphasising the mature human face of the grinding rituals through which his two ageing tramps wait and wander (wittily and witlessly) as Godot puts them through their paces in his failure to come. McKellen and Rees, in contrasted ways, have the rueful stoicism of age, and their comic embrace of catastrophe — McKellen’s boggle-eyed and flailing, Rees’s dapper and wincing — is light years from the contorted angst of young actors with the world before them as an enigmatic agony." (Peter Craven reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot", The Spectator)
Off we go again. The stars of Craven's literary canon twinkle brightly. In the foreground phrases get made, phrases get murdered, the storehouses of the English language are laid waste in the search for a maximally colourful figure of speech or an intermediate term in a world-historical literary analogy. The Craven caning that comes at the end of the paragraph is a model of how not to proceed as an intellectually responsible critic: spend most of your time cueing your readers as to how well-read you are, denigrate your critical object by rhetorically screwing up your face - never put it in a context in which its failings become comprehensible from a broader point of view.
The vague swipes are more than faintly insulting to artists and readers alike. And perhaps the only excuse Australian arts editors have for filling out review pages with tepid positivity is to avoid the negative consequences of badly-written reviews that attitudinise instead of arguing in just this style. Tepid critical praise for every work has one advantage over nasty pseudery. It avoids everyone involved in the arts, including your newspaper's dwindling readership, from feeling justifiably offended.
*
Now, there are people in the Australian arts world who are willing to call Craven on his sloppy intellectual habits and the poor standard of his writing. From memory, Gideon Haigh didn't single out Mr C for special treatment at Readings six months ago. Alison Croggon by contrast has been consistently willing to do so, for instance in this hard-hitting reply to Craven.
For the sake of background, here's a moderately pseudish snippet from the comment-piece by Mr C that got on Croggon's nerves:
"Naturalism and disruptive high jinks: the theatre needs both. Yes, we need a writer's theatre that is also an actor's theatre, where the director serves the text and highlights — and disciplines — the strength of the actor. We need Rush and Steve Sewell and a director such as Kate Cherry, who can quietly find the music in a Hannie Rayson play. Maybe in the end we need it more than the declamatory atonal music of Andrews and Kosky. - Half the trouble with Australian theatre is caused by talented directors who feel they are above realism and well-made plays. Often they cut their teeth with student theatre and have been too narcissistic to grow up. It's much easier to treat student actors like puppets and to improvise a text than it is to treat Judy Davis like that. Most cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings with classics make Joanna Murray-Smith look like Racine on a good day. But for every production such as Osage, there's hand-me-down cardboard rubbish of the traditional kind. - We want the best actors commanding the respect of directors who will allow the best of our playwrights to take their places alongside the Pirandellos and Greeks. A theatre which is ancient and modern, classic and cutting-edge, Australian and internationalist, with a deep instinctive sense that to make it new, you have to have a theatrical eye for the glitter of the old. Where is naturalism in all this? Well, we need a theatre that has emotional truth, and we need a theatre that understands the magic of its own artifice." ("The trouble with Australian theatre", The National Times)
As ever, the main argument gets lost in the muddy swirl of tenuous comparisons. It shouldn't take a paragraph with fifteen proper names to tell us that in Mr C's opinion Australian theatre needs to strike a balance between naturalism and experimental disruption. However, without a definition of his main terms (naturalism//"disruptive high jinks", mainstream vs experimental theatre, emotional truth vs deconstruction of traditions), even that relatively simple point evaporates into thin air. The run-through of recent productions by major Australian theatre companies in the rest of the piece contains plenty of examples that seem to fall on both sides of the apparent divide between naturalism and "disruptive high jinks", so you fast end up wondering what the complaint that there's too much "disruption" really amounts to.
Croggon's point is essentially the one about definitions and it's very well taken: surely no one who had thought a little about the term "mainstream theatre" would be silly enough to claim that most mainstream products are particularly "naturalistic", or that the popularity of mainstream shows follows from any notable adherence to "naturalism". In short, Craven - to the extent that he is arguing anything at all - is re-hashing an age-old debate between naturalism and its opponents - a debate which any sophisticated critic ought to know is completely unresolvable when framed in these simplistic terms. For anyone who didn't do Aesthetics 101, let it be said that in the Nineteenth Century, the advocates of aesthetic naturalism extolled naturalism as an escape from arbitrary stylisation, while the advocates of aesthetic anti-naturalism condemned it as a step backwards from the reality-sublimating and reality-subverting functions of art itself. Anyone with a rough grasp of the history of criticism can see that insisting on a "theatre of emotional truth", as Craven does, loads the dice against art which doesn't take truth or emotion as the measure of aesthetic significance. More than that, arguing for naturalism in this simple-minded way overlooks the relatively obvious point that naturalism is itself a form of artifice - one which in some circumstances becomes less than fully aware of itself and under the conditions of mass cultural spectacle often leads to nothing but the repetition of emotional cliche's and psychological stereotypes.
In any case, the sort of ideal Australian theatre that Craven manages to build out of his insistence on "emotional truth" is so vague as to be largely meaningless. A theatre with a "deep instinctive sense that to make it new you have to keep an eye on the glitter of the old"? A theatre that "understands the magic of its own artifice"? What on earth would that amount to specifically? I suppose here at least we can be glad that Craven's pseudo-ideal is captured in a sentence with a beginning that relates to its middle and end according to a principle other than literary free association. Still if the actual content of the ideal would make a meaningful difference to theatre programming or theatrical practice, then Craven leaves us clueless how.
If I had to guess what Mr C is trying to say at this point - it's that he wants to be emotionally moved when he goes to the theatre - that Great Art is deeply moving and so could be truly popular if it weren't being screwed up by "narcissistic" avant-gardists. Let's take it that that's what Craven would be saying if he weren't beating about the bush. Let's also take it that Mr C's desire to be moved by the theatre is basically irrelevant until it's raised from the level of a personal hankering and made part of some sort of meaningful critical discourse about the place of emotion in our responses to theatre. What of the idea that Great Art could potentially wow the masses - if not quite with the success of Mary Poppins - because of the way it invests spectacle with grand pathos? This is obviously the topic that's hidden behind the crotchety debate about Arts Festival programming. However, it's a topic that needs the attention of someone who's prepared to argue in a sustained way about the relation between art and wider society - a true critic, in other words - not a drunken phrase-maker with a license to kill.
There's no doubt that the position of art in society is changing radically in today's world; high culture in particular is fast turning into a kind of niche product and in the process fast ceasing to be what it was until recently - a much more coherent medium of enjoyment and self-understanding for educated people who saw themselves as setting the cultural tone of society. With high culture, and indeed art in general, transformed into a cultural commodity, a lot of arts journalism exists - in spite of whatever good intentions its authors might have - to spuriously glamourise the product. And this is what Craven, in refusing to communicate intelligibly about art, becomes the ever more tireless, tiresome producer of: bizarre glamorisations of an aesthetic tradition that has come into almost entirely new relations to the society it used to be so central to.
The deeper reason why Mr Craven can't write starts to become clear: because the great - and admirable - high-mindedness he wants to bring to the role of the arts writer becomes ridiculous when it comes into combination with the Arts Industry as it exists in the present day and age, with its anti-critical and an-aesthetic imperatives: maintaining an artistic star-system, depositing small references to the arts in as many places as possible, bringing the occasional controversy to the boil and artificially maintaining that aura of sublimity we all know art loses when it is rigorously subjected to the logic of sales-volumes and bums-on-seats.
Question: What happens when the imperative to glamourize the artistic product becomes the practical-social driver of your activity as a writer about art? Well, unless you drop the pretence of great critical grandeur, then at the very least the strain starts to show: above all, your language goes on an extended holiday - a round-the-world cruise maybe, on which adverbs go fly kites of their own, assonance runs riot, half of what you say sounds like it comes from a tourist brochure or a real estate catalogue and everything smells heavily of alcohol and sex:
"The novel pulsates with the portent and momentum of revelations Tranter either foreshadows to the point of obviousness or keeps putting further and more far-fetchedly [sic] out of reach. This makes the book's endless foreplay between its thriller elements and its loftily conceived moral dramas and soaring [sic] realism a little bit of a tease. But The Legacy retains a lot of magic along with its roughness. Full of suave and stunning [sic] evocations of Sydney and Manhattan, this sparkling and spacious [sic] novel captures the smell and sap [sic] of young people half in love with everyone they're vividly aware of, and groping to find themselves [sic] like the answer to an erotic enigma." (Peter Craven reviews Kirsten Tranter, The Monthly)
Oh dear. Let's hope there's an editor out there who still has the courage to call this stray ship back to port. The captain's drunk and is doing weird stuff on the bridge. The whole thing's totally sic!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
G Flaubert: On Art and Being Ropeable
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
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