Category Archives: Quotes from the month

“Everybody is somebody’s Jew”: Quotes from May

Posted by —

2

Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.

So said Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz, and author of books including If This Is A Man, which I’ve written about here: Until the sea closed over us … Part I and Part II.


The quotation appears in the comments on an article about Levi written by Carlin Romano that I read in May. What was interesting about the article was the response of readers. Many commentors rebelled against what they perceived as Romano’s co-opting of Levi to make observations on contemporary dictators and events like Gaddafi and Libya. Nabokov called this kind of thing poshlost, and I think the readers smelt it.

Continue reading →

Shatterer of worlds: Quotes from March

Posted by —

2

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One …
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.

~ lines from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945.

*****

Also in March I had a conversation I’ve wanted to have for years: to speak about the philosophical roots of The Landmark Forum, roots which go back to 500BC, to the time of a Greek philosopher named Parmenides.

There cannot be many people walking into The Landmark Forum as uniquely fitted as I was that day in September 2008 to hear those roots speaking. Just a few years before, to my alarm and continual bafflement, I’d found myself writing a thesis on Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher of what it means to be, the branch of philosophy known as ontology (from the ancient Greek te on, meaning “to be”).

It was Heidegger’s great mission to overturn the last 2000+ years of philosophy in which what it means to be has been understood in two very limited ways: as “existentia” (the fact that something exists) or “essentia” (the form something takes). Instead, Heidegger looked back to the world of the pre-Socratic Greeks like Parmenides and attempted to show how this world had had a very different understanding of Being.  In this world, Heidegger said, what it meant to be was something like an arising or an abiding or a coming forth into presence. This meaning of Being, according to Heidegger, has been totally covered up and lost in the age we’ve lived in since around the time of Plato: the technological age.

Except, that is, until one arrives in The Landmark Forum.

When I walked in that day I’d been expecting something psychological. I was completely astounded a couple of hours later when the Forum leader began quoting Heidegger, and I realised we were talking about Being, the big daddy of all philosophy. Not only that, but we were talking about it as something that was of concern to every one of us in our everyday lives. At that moment I realised I had not understood one word of what I’d read or written in the three years it took to write the thesis.

It was also the moment I fell in love. I was at the very place I was meant to be at last. This was for me, and I was for it.

In one of my favourite novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (again with the B word!), Milan Kundera is funny and masterful about the role of such chance and destining in love. Tereza falls in love with Tomas at the moment her beloved Beethoven comes on the radio as she pours him a drink at the bar.

Rounding the counter with Tomas’s cognac, she tried to read chance’s message: how was it possible that at the very moment she was taking an order to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment she heard Beethoven?

The narrator concludes,

Necessity knows no magic formulae — they are all left to chance. If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.

*****

Matthew Parris is a writer for The Times in the UK, and a former Tory politician. I think he used to be known as the “parliamentary sketch-writer” for The Times, but perhaps now, so well-regarded is he, that he gets to write whatever he wants.

One of the things he has written is a little book called Scorn: With Added Vitriol. It’s an indispensable compendium of “putdowns and insults” made by the famous and infamous over the centuries. It’s guaranteed to give you hours of innocent pleasure.

Here are some from the “Curses” department …

May you be cursed with chronic anxiety about the weather.

~ John Burroughs

I fart in your general direction.

~ Monty Python and the Holy Grail

On “Women and Men”

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Beneath this stone, a lump of clay
Lies Arabella Young
Who on the 21st of May
Began to hold her tongue.

~ Epitaph, Hatfield, Massachusetts

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

~ Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

Mme de Genlis, in order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, always yielded easily.

~ Talleyrand

A woman’s place is in the wrong.

~ James Thurber

When his cock wouldn’t stand up he blew his head off. He sold himself a line of bullshit, and bought it.

~ Germaine Greer on Ernest Hemingway

On “Marriage”

All tragedies are finish’d by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage.

~ Lord Byron, Don Juan, III

On “Families”

It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

~ P G Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

*****

Images: Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being directed by Philip Kaufman (middle)

Too late? Quotes from January

Posted by —

13

In January I came across some great mysterious quotes. Mysterious because the sources of two are a bit hazy. One was unattributed when I saw it and I haven’t found the source via google. With the other I made the classic boo-boo. I thought, “I’ll come back later and get the details,” only to wonder later where “back” was.

If you know where they’re from, let me know.

*****

On a brochure I saw this …

Somewhere beyond the cortex is a small voice whose mere whisper can silence an army of arguments. It stands alone in final judgement as to whether we have demanded enough of ourselves and by that example have inspired the best in those around us.

~ unknown (I believe it was cited in The New York Times, June 28, 2007)

*****

On an ABC radio program one day I heard an Englishman expounding a theory with the immense poise and self-assurance of all Englishman expounding theories — in short, like it’s not a theory at all — that the signifier of the “tragic” in Western culture is the thought, “it’s too late,” and that this thought is totally absent from, say, Indian culture, in which, with its basis in Hinduism, it’s never too late.

Hence, according to this man, why Indian culture is not a tragic one.

The mysterious man could have been William Dalrymple who, when he’s not being the resident Brit historian in Delhi, is everywhere. I’m reading his From the Holy Mountain about his trip tracing the steps of the monk, John Moschos, who walked from Mt Athos in Greece through modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel to Egypt in 578AD and wrote one of the ancient world’s most famous texts, The Spiritual Meadow.

But if it was the honourable Dalrymple who had the great thought about too late/not too late I haven’t confirmed it.

*****

What I do know is that Deborah Ross wrote a piece on the retiring editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, in The Sydney Morning Herald in January. Roitfeld is very funny and droll with aitches in all the wrong places.

Ugg boots?, the interviewer asks her.”I don’t like. This boot is lazy and is huggly.” Crocs? “They are ‘orrible!”

She also has a charming way with the word, “really.” The interviewer notes,

When I tell her I was terrified of meeting her, she says, ‘Willy? You think I will be bitch?’

Roitfeld is 56, though as she says of Vivienne Westwood whom she adores, she is still very “rock’n'roll.”  And at one point she assesses her appeal by way of an actual rock star,

‘I have interesting face but I am not beautiful,’ she says. ‘I am too Iggy Pop-looking.’

Her husband too sounds like a card. The interviewer asks if she minds getting older (“Yes!”) and about the key to “looking good as an older woman.”

You need a husband like mine. ‘Orrible. He tell you the truth. Willy, he do. He say, ‘Okay, you have a nice silhouette and you don’t have stomach but a bikini is not good for you now. Okay, you have nice legs, but better to wear long skirt for the beach.’ I cannot be in competition with a girl of 20, so I have to be best in my category.

She concludes the interview with one piece of advice for the interviewer:

If you wear the heel, the man will help you with your suitcase, and if you do not wear the heel, the man will not.

*****

Images: William Dalrymple, photo by Jamie Archer at Flickr (top); Carine Roitfeld, photo by Tommy Ton (bottom)

 

Small Times

Posted by —

13

In 1883, somewhere in South Africa …

A young white woman named Olive Schreiner writes her first novel.  She calls it The Story of an African Farm and invents the pseudonym, Ralph Iron, under which it is published to great acclaim and controversy in London.

It is one of the first feminist novels ever published and contains devastating passages on the situation of women in relation to men.

It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn’t one.

It is not what is done to us, but what is made of us, that wrongs us. No man can be really injured but by what modifies himself. We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest — blank, and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says — Work ! and to us it says — Seem ! To you it says — As you approximate to man’s highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says — Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

Not only does the novel deal with the situation of women, it deals with racism, religion, atheism, “freethinking”, sex outside marriage, illegitimate children and transvestitism.

It breaks every kind of literary and cultural convention.  One scholar calls it a “literary platypus” whose “ungainly combination of parts and functions seem to flummox both classification and periodization.” (1).

The female protagonist chooses to marry a man she thinks a fool, she eschews marriage to her lover to preserve her autonomy, she goes on a quest and a man follows (rather than vice versa), a man validates his existence through service to a woman, a good and devout man is abused, the two protagonists die incidentally, justice and redemption do not arrive.

The dog jumped on to his back and snapped at [his] black curls, till, finding that no notice was taken, he walked off to play with a black beetle.  The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning; but Doss broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off its head.  And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for.  A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.

The whole is shocking, dreamy, discordant and strangely relaxing to read.

The book becomes a best-seller, and the young woman, famous for the rest of her life.  She marries her husband in 1894 and he takes her surname.  She lives out one of the key scenes of the novel when she gives birth to a stillborn child in 1895.  She becomes one of the leading figures in the female suffrage movement in South Africa and a champion of equal rights for all, black and white.  When she dies in Cape Town in 1920 at the age of 65 thousands line the railway along which her body is transported to its burial place.

While in Peru, in 1988 …

One of Latin America’s most famous and revered writers, the 52-year-old Mario Vargas Llosa, writes what The Financial Times calls an “audacious caprice of a book” involving, amongst other delicacies, the erotics of ear-cleaning,  tooth-brushing and defecation.

In Praise of the Stepmother (Elogio de la madrastra) features the story of Don Rigoberto, a middle-aged man newly married to his second wife, the beautiful and passionate, Doña Lucrecia.  Don Rigoberto is a sensualist of the highest order and, nightly, he and his wife climb aboard their bed to scale the erotic heights.

The Don and his wife have been afraid his young son from his first marriage, the golden-haired cherub, Fonchito, might be difficult.  But, au contraire, Fonchito begs his stepmother for kisses and nibbles on her earlobe as he whispers goodnight:

To think that her women friends has prophesied that this stepson would be the major obstacle for her … Deeply moved, she kissed him back, on the cheeks, the forehead, the tousled hair, as, vaguely, as though come from afar, without her having really noticed, a different sensation suffused every last confine of her body …

The die is cast, and it’s but a light and delightful hop from here to the full consummation between the 40-year-old woman and the ageless, pre-pubescent boy.  Along the way are the funny, erotic chapters on the Don’s ablutions, fantasies woven from famous artworks by artists such as François Boucher, Titian, Francis Bacon and Fra Angelico, and at the end, a lovely twist.

Reviewers search for coordinates and invoke, with relief, Oedipus.  However, he’s nowhere mentioned or implied.  What is implied is the annunciation and the Archangel Gabriel.  What might have happened that day if, when he called on Mary, his motives were false?

In short, Vargas Llosa writes a perfect little soufflé on “the mysterious nature of human happiness and the corrupting power of innocence,” a veritable pistachio sorbet to Tolstoy’s sumptuous banquet on wedded relations. All grace and light and play, to be tossed off on a hot summer afternoon, about perversion.

Just two years after its publication in Spanish, the “Stepmother” is translated into English.  It is the same year Vargas Llosa runs as a candidate for the presidency of Peru. He wins the first round with 34% of the vote, but is defeated in the run-off by a “then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori.”  (2)

As The New Yorker would go on to remark of the novel,

Startling … Not only would an American presidential candidate not have written it but the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn’t have given it a grant.

In 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The title of his acceptance speech nods to the “Stepmother.”

Meanwhile, in 2008 in Australia …

Christos Tsiolkas, a 40-something Australian-born writer of Greek extraction, writes a novel called The Slap about a slap.  A three-year old boy called Hugo is misbehaving at a family barbeque, and one of the adults slaps his face rather than looking away with the rest of the adults.  A large and carefully diversified cast of characters agonise over the question of whether striking a child can be justified.

The book is lauded as “controversial and daring.”  It wins many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2009 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, 2009.  It is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010.

A film is being made.

*****

Notes

1. Jed Esty, The colonial bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe

2. Wikipedia

3. All background information on Olive Schreiner courtesy The Sunday Times.

Images

Olive Schreiner (top); Memorial to Olive Schreiner, Kalk Bay, Cape Town, by Barbara Wildenboer, picture by The Sunday Times (second from top); The Annunication (c. 1437) by Fra Angelico (third from top)

Could you kill your partner?

Posted by —

10

All three novels I’ve read recently are transgressive, and all three concern the same subject matter: the possibility of romantic love between man and woman, especially between husband and wife.  I hadn’t realised the commonality till now.  Pure serendipity.  I think.

Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata is the most transgressive.  He began it in 1887 when he was 59, after the beginning of his ascetic or “moralistic” period, and finished it in 1889.  In 1890 it was banned in Russia.  In the same year the US Post Office banned the movement of newspapers containing serialised instalments of it. (1)

It wasn’t until Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, gained special permission from the Tsar to include it in the collected works she was editing that the novella could be openly read.

I like to speculate what exactly was contained in the citation to have it banned.  There are so many grounds from which to choose, though I bet whichever it was, it was the wrong ground.

The writer of the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition cites “explicit sexual content.”  But this cannot be right because even though sexual mores have changed between 1890 and today the protagonist, Pozdnyshev, doesn’t describe sexual acts; he only talks about them, and then using various ironic and bitter circumlocutions, eg, “swinish” behaviour, “pigsty existence”, “animal sensuality”, “… we had a reconciliation under the influence of the feeling to which we gave the name ‘love’”, and so on.

Elsewhere in the Introduction the scandal is attributed to “Pozdnyshev’s advocacy of total celibacy.”  That this aspect caused a great fuss is borne out by the fact Tolstoy wrote a Postface before the novel was even finished in which he states he agrees with Pozdnyshev’s stance.

For female readers, the Introduction seems to imply, it was the horror of Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife, though the implication is complicated by a statement contained in a letter received “from the provincial city of Voronezh about responses to readings of the work”:

‘The Sonata’ has had an extraordinary effect on everybody, struck them like the blow of a club.  Furious discussions flame up; some are for, some against.  Most adherents are women.  The common reaction to ‘The Sonata’ is: ‘strong stuff, very strong stuff!’ [...] Some women have said that they could not sleep the night after they heard it the first time.

But to ban the book on the grounds of advocating celibacy or depicting murder is to fiddle while the mightiest construction burns to the ground, the construction of romantic love no less.  Both Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev make it crystal clear that the main premise of the story is that romantic love cannot exist between man and woman, that it is the universe’s joke and that everyone is gulled.  Can’t get much more transgressive than this.  Yet I would be surprised to discover it was the ground on which the book was banned.  For that would be to open up an enquiry no-one could afford to have opened.

There is another ground on which to ban the book which is not raised in the Introduction except in that tiny hint: “Most adherents are women.”  The novel depicts Pozdnyshev’s wife as a full sexual being, with similar “animal” appetites to him and the sovereignty, despite his intimidations, to look around.  Here’s the wonderful, funny description of her, after having discovered contraceptives:

A kind of provocative beauty radiated from her, and people found it disturbing.  She was thirty years old, in the full flower of her womanhood; she was no longer bearing children; she was well fed and emotionally unstable.  Her appearance made people uneasy.  Whenever she walked past men she attracted their gaze.  She was like an impatient, well-fed horse that has had its bridle taken off …

*****

I got such a good laugh reading The Kreutzer Sonata.  Tolstoy is in earnest, but I can’t read the depictions of Pozdnyshev’s relations with his wife without cackling.  They are so funny.  They have the same effect on me as watching a Woody Allen movie or reading the novels of the Austrian and anti-Teuton, Thomas Bernhard.  I go all floppy from laughing, and for the same reason.  Because the writer is turning inside out the human psyche.  Bringing all the craziness that streams through our minds into the light and saying “here, look at this, and if you think I’m crazy …”  It’s the extreme which is not extreme.  The extreme which is the norm.

Pozdynyshev’s jealousy is my jealousy, his lightning oscillations between one view and its opposite are mine, his baiting and trap-setting, oh-so-familiar.  And could I kill my partner?  Of course I could.

The Introduction makes the point well:

Tolstoy’s rhetorical strategy in his fiction in general depends upon his readers’ tacit agreement that he is writing truly about emotional states that they themselves have experienced or imagined.  The strategy is tested most seriously when the reader is made to recall the bitter and shameful rather than the sweet.  If readers have been in love but fallen out of it; if they have wanted to kill their loved ones; if they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others: Tolstoy depends upon our own memories to entangle us in his later tragic stories.

*****

Quoting snatches from the novel doesn’t do it justice because the humour, and the recognition, lies in the escalation.  But you can catch the tone from classic passages like these:

We’d already given up trying to settle our arguments.  We each obstinately stuck to our own point of view about even the most simple things, but particularly about the children.  Thinking back on it now, I can see that the opinions I used to defend were by no means so dear to me that I couldn’t have got along without them; no, the point was that the opinions she held were the opposite of mine, and yielding to them meant yielding to … her.

Ah, the perfectly placed ellipsis.

When we were left alone together we either had to remain silent or else carry on the sort of conversations I’m convinced animals have with one another.  ‘What’s the time?  Bedtime. What’s for dinner today?  Where are we going to?  Is there anything in the newspaper?  Send for the doctor.  Masha’s got a sore throat.’  We had only to stray out of this impossibly narrow focus of conversation by as much as a hair’s breadth, and our mutual irritation would flare up again.

Just great.  And here, surely we’ve all been here …?

I used to boil inwardly with the most dreadful hatred for her! Sometimes I’d watch the way she poured her tea, the way she swung her leg or brought her spoon to her mouth; I’d listen to the little slurping noises she made as she sucked the liquid in, and I used to hate her for that as for the most heinous act.

Now really, tell me, could you kill your partner?

*****

Notes

1. Wikipedia

Images

The Kreutzer Sonata (1901) by René François Xavier Prinet (top)

 

A quiver of phrases: Quotes from the last bit of 2010

Posted by —

18

I may not have been being a blogger in the last bit of 2010, but I never give up being a reader.  It’s my first and most enduring career, and a sweeter exchange of labour does not exist.  Joy! Nourishment! Surprise!  All for a modest outlay of time that can be served in bed, or on a beach.

I’m what you’d call a hodge-podge reader.  I never read to a method or rationale; just whatever is at hand or speaks to me or is suggested to me.  I’m deeply suggestible.

I like to think I’m afloat on a river of literature and I’m being taken by the current where I most want to go.  Only I don’t know where that is beforehand.

After mentioning it earlier in 2010 I recently read Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. On Thomas’s recommendation, I read the surprising The Story of an African Farm, by the 19th century South African suffragist, Olive Schreiner.  I also read the odd and extremely piquant, In Praise of the Stepmother by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa.  About them, more anon.

Phrase of the Year

I also continued reading one of the blogs I go back to every few weeks, The Fluent Self by Havi Brooks and her trusty sidekick, Selma the Duck.  What awes me about Havi is two things.

Thing number one: her absolute commitment to transparency.  To the point of inducing frequent bouts of vertigo or nausea as she plays out in public all the fantasies and fugues of the ego.  Thing number two: an intuition of the creative power of language worthy of any Nobel Prize winner.  She completely gets that language creates the world.  Hence, she declared into existence “Metaphor Mouse” who in turn decrees that she runs not a “business” but a “pirate ship,” teaches “biggification” rather than “marketing,” and famously, that she does not want “to go to Bolivia.”

Her sensitivity to language was demonstrated in her recent post, And the Phrase of the Year prize goes to … , in which she thinks of those phrases that really made a difference in her year, the laughably simple phrases that disproportionately grease the wheels of our relationships.

They are the phrases of which we need a mere quiver, and the presence of mind to draw from it, to have everything go differently.  Like the one from my own quiver — “I have a different view to that” – or the one Havi’s already formulated for 2011 – “That’s a terrific idea!  Why don’t you do that?”

And being Havi, and remarkably intelligent and rigorous, she also measures the failures:

Sometimes when I think back on various Phrases of the Year, it’s hard not to think of all the hurt.  The misunderstandings, the pain, the missed connections.  The ways that I screwed up.  The residual frustration about all the ways that other people … weren’t able to be the people I wanted them to be, which is not their fault

The italics are Havi’s, and they’re mine too.  Never more so than in the last few weeks when I’ve tried again and again to reject reality.  Sigh.

Anyways, happily, I did get a neat lesson in 2010 for dealing with a very specific instance of this desire to resist what is so.  And like one of Havi’s useful phrases I can now trot it out at least when this scenario arises again.  Perhaps you might find it useful too.

Trick of the Year

The scenario is cold-calling, one thing that previously left me very cold indeed.  I would rather go for months without work than call potential clients.  And then this one day I finally had a breakthrough.  Now when I’m about to make the call, I do two things.

Firstly, I get really clear about the fear and what it is.  The more specific I can get about the fear, the better.  Contemplating calling a previous client who was about to offer me some work, I saw that I feared getting on the phone and “going all stupid”, a technical term you see, meaning I’d get on the phone and start grovelling, saying things like “Oh, you want me to do 6 weeks work in 2 weeks?  Of course, no problem!”  Or, “You can’t pay that amount?  Well, of course, let me cut it by 50%!”

When I get really specific about the fear, when I nail exactly what it is, it vanishes.

The second thing I do is that I create the person or the organisation in my mind before I ring.  By “create,” I mean I envisage in my mind what kind of person or organisation I’d like them to be.  I use whatever information I have at hand, sometimes just a name, and then I conjure them up as, say, a person who’s sitting at their desk waiting for a call from someone just like me, or as a company of great integrity and dynamism, or as an organisation that provides wonderful services to its customers, and so on.  I make up a reason for why I’m ringing that specific person or organisation.

And when I’ve done those two things – nailed the fear and created the person I’m about to call – I just make the call.  And it’s easy and even pleasurable.

Since I started doing it my consulting business has dramatically taken off.  In recent months I’ve never had so many requests for my services, and from such quality clients.

Anyway, where have I wandered to?  Ah yes, more about recent books I’ve read shortly …

*****

The idea of fun: Quotes from October

Posted by —

7

There’s a story about the work habits of the writer, Kingsley Amis, told by his son, Martin.  Each morning he would go into his study and for the next few hours all the family would hear would be the sound of laughter from behind the closed door.  To the boy outside, the boy who would go on to try, unsuccessfully, to emulate his father’s success, it must have hurt dreadfully listening to his father having fun without him.  No wonder he had all his teeth out in the 90s.

But it’s a different age now, and there’s a different type of Englishman abroad, one who, like Will Self, takes his fun in public, metaphorically running around Sainsbury’s in the nude, cackling and plotting, with an erection.

In fact, if you’ve ever want to know what writing for fun might look like, look no further than Self’s first novel, My Idea of Fun, which I started in October.  That Self’s idea of fun may not be yours is rather signalled by the opening couple of pages, surely the most obscene I’ve ever read.  It concerns necrophilia and not just any old necrophilia but necrophilia to the power of n(ecrophilia), as it were.  I like to imagine his publisher getting an eyeful of that little lot on opening Self’s email entitled, “First draft of my next.”  Blanch or what?

Will Self is fun gone monstrous.  His topics are so bizarre, his language so fecund, so motile – Julie Burchill blurbs about its “elegance and suppleness” but this is far too mild, probably the first and only time Burchill herself has known mildness – that reading anything else feels like standing still.  He’s spoiling me, corrupting me, for any other writer.

In this current novel, a young boy called Ian, growing up in his mother’s caravan park, is “apprenticed” to an insane megalomaniac with special powers of eidesis (from the Greek for image, a real, highly unusual ability, occasionally observed in children, of discerning and remembering visual images with perfect acuity) called The Fat Controller.

The bits I can communicate to you using the words of ordinary thought involve, amongst other things, penetrating people’s psyches at will, disappearing Ian’s acne with an incantation while rubbing in a semen-based mixture and murdering the woman who shushed him sitting in the next row of the theatre using a shot of curare dispensed from the hypodermic concealed in the ferrule of his cane.  Like Ian, a fledgling eidetiker, I’m battening down the hatches as we speak, sure in the knowledge that with The Fat Controller’s amour propre avenged, the fun’s only just started.

To give you a tiny, perforce, woefully inadequate taste of Self’s eerie ability, here’s an early scene, when The Fat Controller, or Mr Broadhurst as he is still known then, first arrives at the caravan park with two rough diamonds, two “gyppos”:

‘Do that, do that.  Do it now.’  His voice at first merely emphatic, gathered emotional force.  ‘Position the machine in the wings, so that the god may be ready to descend on a golden wire.’  The gyppos set down their mugs … and, addressing one another with glottal stops and palate-clickings, leapt back up into their truck.  Their black bushes of hair, their raven faces, the way they dressed in dark coats fastened at the waist with lengths of rope, the way they spoke and drank and moved, in short, everything underscored their moral insouciance.  ‘Do what we will,’ the gyppos seemed to say, ‘that is the whole of our law.’

But Mr Broadhurst … dared to order these Calibans about.  When he barked, they snapped to. ‘Mind out for my things,’ he shouted after them. ‘My impedimenta, my chattels, my tokens of mortal desire …”

And here he is on a psychologist called to examine Ian and his budding superpowers of imagery:

The blind swung their antennae heads in the general direction of this prodigy, training on me three pairs of clear-lensed glasses, behind which puffs of cotton wool were imprisoned, like some awful kind of oxidisation.

See this?  He makes cotton wool balls lyrical.  Fantastic!  Literally.

*****

Also in October, when I could tear myself away from the defilement of my soul being conducted by Mr Self (Will), I read an article by Roger Scruton in The New Atlantis entitled “Hiding Behind the Screen.”

Another Englishman — though of the grumpy-old-man-philosopher-who-writes-like-an-angel variety – he was trying to conceptualise the effect on human relations of the internet.  For which I give him points, especially as others in the field merely pontificate (“our brains are being rewired”) or re-label.

Scruton argues that human relations mediated by the screen are fundamentally different to other human relations because of the absence of risk.

For a start, I have my finger on the button; at any moment I can turn the image off, or click to arrive at some new encounter.  The other is free in his own space, but he is not really free in my space, over which I am the ultimate arbiter.

He goes on,

I enjoy a power over the other person of which he himself is not really aware – since he is not aware of how much I wish to retain him in the space before me.  And the power I have over him he has too over me … He, too, therefore, will not risk himself … There grows between us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundamentally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle.

Scruton contrasts this with Hegel’s idea about human freedom, an idea that has been of “enduring importance” and which appears in all kinds of guises and settings, most notably in the “writings of psychologists concerned with mapping the contours of ordinary happiness”:

Hegel’s crucial claim is that the life of freedom and self-certainty can only be obtained through others.  I become fully myself only in contexts which compel me to recognise that I am another in others’ eyes.  I do not acquire my freedom and individuality and then, as it were, try them out in the world of human relations.  It is only by entering that world, with its risks, conflicts, and responsibilities, that I come to know myself as free, to enjoy my own perspective and individuality, and to become a fulfilled person among persons.

If we only realise ourselves in the context of the other – the other’s freedom, the other’s sovereignty, and our necessary negotiation of this otherness – or, as he puts it, borrowing from Marx, in “going out”, in every sense of the term, to meet the other, how attenuated our opportunities for self-realisation are becoming as we increasingly live behind the screen.

*****

The Master: Quotes from September

Posted by —

15

In September I heard the mellifluous voice of the Australian artist, John Wolseley on Radio National’s Artworks program.  He said he gets annoyed with the view that he, as an artist, has some special thing most people don’t have. Everyone, he says, has a special gift for something, everyone is creative; it’s just that the desire for money and lack of time obscures it.

He went on to talk about Plato.  Plato, he said, when describing the different gifts of knowledge we possess, said that

in the mind of each person there is an aviary in which the various wild birds, doves and all manner of different creatures, live.

*****

In The Guardian Weekly I read about Reg Spiers, an Australian athlete who was aiming to compete in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  The “brilliantly named Commonwealth Games javelin thrower,” says journalist, Barney Ronay, “came to England to try out for the Olympics.”

Spiers was penniless, and at the end of his stay he

enlisted a fellow athlete to help him build a man-sized wooden box, in which he air-freighted himself back to Australia.

“Hunkered inside his crate,” Ronay says, “Spiers duly made it to Perth, despite having almost dehydrated on the runway during a stopover in Bombay.”

Ronay contrasts Spiers’s “heroic — albeit borderline delusionsal — gumption” with the squeamishness of many of the athletes contemplating two weeks in the athletes’ village at the current Delhi Commonwealth Games.  As one British triple jumper declared, he would not be travelling to the Games in the wake of the “complaints about the athletes’ village and the collapse of a stadium footbridge” because

I cannot take any risk whatsoever, no matter how small.

*****

Lastly, in September, I read half of Colm Tóibín’s The Master before hurling it across the room. What a horrid book. Hard to tell if Tóibín adds to the horridness — his track record up until The Master was published in 2004 was not inspiring, very much the over-inflated hack category — but it doesn’t even matter.  Because it’s the subject matter that poisons: the execrable Henry James. The man on whom I squandered precious weeks and months of my girlhood, a man who fed my tender young femaleness horror tales of the inevitable self-abnegation of women. His awful Isabel Archer and the doomed, Millie Theale, with their twin courting of mortification; what kind of models were these? Yet at the time I didn’t see the danger.  They were famous, fêted books and I was a sponge.

Now, however, reading this imagined life of James, the full misanthropy of these books is revealed.  For The Master is nothing so much as a catalogue of the homosexual James’s predations in regard to women.  One after the other, he feasted on the lives and deaths of his sister, Alice, his friend, Minny Temple, and the writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson (grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper), and made from them his cramped and squalid books, useless books in which one is never sure what one’s reading.

If you have a daughter, keep her away from Henry James.  And probably also Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  The latter two are not parasitical like James’s are, but they do traffic in the same tune: woman as doomed, woman in imminent danger of the abyss.

Give your daughter Jane Eyre instead, the inimitable Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece of woman triumphant.

*****

To hear John Wolseley’s honey tones, click here.

Image: John Wolseley in front of his Wild Cries Wild Wings of Wetland and Swamp, photo by Terence Bogue

The elephant and the bar-stool: Quotes from August

Posted by —

4

In August, I read the headline I’d been waiting for all my life:

Motorcyclist fined for wearing BBQ

In a nearby suburb on a late August day, Michael Wiles, a 29-year-old man drove merrily down the freeway on his motorcycle wearing a BBQ.  A report on Yahoo!7 news said that Wiles had

found a discarded BBQ on the side of the road, and decided to take it home with him.  Albeit, haphazardly.

After being tracked down by police with the help of an emailed photo which went “viral”, Wiles was fined $800.  Shortly after, he was approached by the retailer, Barbeques Galore, to appear in an advertisement.  Wiles is reported to have

refused the offer, copped his fine, and … been forced to admit the discarded BBQ was a dud.

*****

Also in August, a month of follies as it turned out, Mark Latham, cauliflower-brained contender in the Campbelltown corner, delivered a KO to his journalistic nemesis in the gallery, Laurie Oakes:

It’s like an elephant hiding behind a bar-stool.

I shouldn’t laugh, but I howled.

*****

August was the month of Fernando Pessoa.  Now, if I’ve heard this Portuguese writer’s name before, it must have been once a decade.  Then Harold Bloom, keeper of the Western Canon, anointed him one of the chosen.  And suddenly, Pessoa’s name leapt wherever I looked.  Including on the shelves of Dymocks where his Book of Disquiet palpated and disgorged a recommendation so compelling that September too will be the month of Pessoa:

This book has moved me more than anything I have read in years.  I have rarely encountered such exhilarating lugubriousness.

~ Daily Telegraph

*****

Finally, in August, I finished reading the wonderful Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.  Tatyana Tolstaya in the Afterword discusses some of the problems of the novel, including Turgenev’s obvious quandary about what to do with Bazarov once he’d brought the abrasive young nihilist to life.  In fact, Turgenev confronted the exact issue that must confront nihilists everywhere and in every time: what to do when nothing’s worth doing? So Turgenev had to kill him off.  But Tolstaya assures us Bazarov’s fame lives on, even today, as a hero of loutishness for Russian school boys and in the common noun bazarovshchina, meaning crude materialism, rejection of art, and so on.

Turgenev is a master portraitist.  With just a dab of paint here, a shadow there, his characters would up and take a turn in my heart.  Here are just a few delicacies:

Only the young men ate.  The master and mistress had had their dinner long before.  Fedka served, clearly bothered by his unfamiliar boots, and he was helped by a woman with one eye and a masculine face …

Dunyasha was happy to giggle with him and surreptitiously gave him significant glances as she ran past him like a little quail.  Pyotr, an extraordinarily conceited and stupid fellow, always anxiously wrinkling up his forehead, whose entire virtue lay in an obsequious manner, in being able to spell out his words and in frequently brushing his coat …

… she didn’t take her eyes off her son and kept on sighing; she was dying to know how long he had but she was frightened to ask him.  ‘What if he says for two days,’ she thought, and her heart froze.

In reading Fathers and Sons, I once again marvel at what the novel is capable of, what it once was capable of, and I wonder if we’ll see its glories again.

Tell me, why is it that even when we enjoy, for example, music, or a good party, or conversation with sympathetic people, why is it that all that seems to be a hint of some infinite happiness existing somewhere else rather than a real happiness, that is one we own ourselves?

*****

Images: BBQ man, courtesy of Yahoo!7 news; Fernando Pessoa, courtesy Wikipedia