Category Archives: Quotes from the month

An exceedingly interesting man: Quotes from July

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In July, my father died and I discovered how much words matter and how little.  They were inadequate to so much of what was required.  To comfort my father and give him heart as he contemplated what was ahead; to give my mother courage, and my siblings, companionship; and to honour him at his funeral.

Yet we got by, even with the clumsiness, because words are also essential.  This quickly became apparent when we were planning the funeral.  None of us had had any experience of this, and each day brought another person asking for decisions on things we’d never expected to be asked, at a time when we were most unfit to decide.

One of the decisions was whether to have a celebrant or a priest lead the service.  My father was a very lapsed Catholic and probably hadn’t been to church, except for weddings and funerals, since he was a small boy.  In the hospital my sister had asked him straight out what he wanted, and he’d replied to the effect he “didn’t want all that religious rubbish.”

So a celebrant seemed the way to go.

However, as the day drew near, we found ourselves doubting.  My mother, not having a religious bone in her body herself, suddenly remembered my father crossing himself in reflex on entering the church at the recent Catholic mass of a friend, and she woke one morning feeling nothing but a priest could bestow the dignity and solemnity she now found imperative.

And this is how I felt too.  In particular, I wanted a blessing.  I once heard the writer Helen Garner speaking not long after the end of her marriage to Murray Bail, an event she fictionalized in The Last Days of Chez Nous.  She said how she’d been reading the Bible and had joined a church because “she wanted someone to bless her.”  Now I know what she meant.

In the end, the priest supplied the secular – a wonderfully apt poem by Bruce Dawe, which he chose completely unprompted – and we supplied the religious – the request for people to share in speaking The Lord’s Prayer and to receive Aaron’s Blessing.  In death, it seems only the telling of these ancient words, like beads on a rosary, can come close to doing what’s required.

Here, for those of you who may not have heard it for a while, or for those who may be needing comfort, are the words of Aaron’s Blessing from the magnificent King James Version:

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

(Numbers 6: 24-26)

*****

Also in July, I started reading Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.  Strange I should be reading a book with Fathers in the title.

I know very little about Turgenev, apart from the fact he’s in the grand tradition of Russian masters. It’s the first of his works I’ve read and I’m gratified to read in the Afterword by Tatyana Tolystaya (yes, a relative of Tolstoy’s) it’s regarded as his best.

She says, quite rightly, that it

has not aged to this day.

Written in 1862, and full of the realistic detail of a very particular moment in time – the end of serfdom in Russia – the novel could not be fresher or more alive.  It has that same quality Tolstoy has: the sensation of quickness — literally, life — pulsing through its ink.

There’s so much to enjoy about it.  For someone like me who enjoys pen portraits, there’s the wonderful, delicately comic portrait of the mother of Bazarov, the prat-cum-chief protagonist, for example.

Arina Vlasyevna was a true Russian gentlewoman of olden time.  She should have lived two hundred years before, in the days of old Muscovy.  She was extremely devout and sensitive, believed in all kinds of portents, fortune-telling, spells and dreams.  She believed in holy idiots, house spirits, wood goblins, unlucky encounters, the evil eye, folk medicines, Maundy Thursday salt, and the imminence of the world’s end.

The notes tell us, a propos of holy idiots, that the “mentally deficient were thought to be blessed by God and often lived off charity.”

He goes on.

She believed that if the candles at the Easter midnight service didn’t go out, then there’d be a good crop of buckwheat, and that mushrooms stop growing if seen by a human eye … She was afraid of mice, grass-snakes, frogs, sparrows, leeches, thunder, cold water, draughts, horses, billy goats, redheads and black cats …

That “billy goats” is priceless.

It gets better.

She hadn’t read a single book except Alexis, or The Cottage in the Wood, wrote one or at most two letters a year and had a good understanding of housekeeping, of drying food and making preserves, although she touched nothing with her own hands and generally didn’t like to move from her seat.

You can be sure that Alexis, or The Cottage in the Wood, was not a work to stretch the brain.

In her youth she had been very pretty, she played the clavichord and could speak a little French; but in the course of many moves of house with her husband (whom she had married against her will) she had lost her figure and forgotten her music and French.

There are many more bon mots from Turgenev and I’m only halfway.  More to come perhaps.

*****

Speaking of Tolstoy, also read great article by James Meek in the ever-reliable London Review of Books, about a swag of books just published on Tolstoy to mark the 100th anniversary of his death.

Was riveted by Meek’s discussion of The Kreutzer Sonata which Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a jealous husband who murders his wife.  Meek puts his finger on one of Tolstoy’s most distinctive skills:

The Kreutzer Sonata has passages – notably the murder scene – in which Tolstoy’s most unusual skill, his ability to take time and divide it into a series of discrete moments that are perfectly sequential and yet do not look forward or back to each other, is deployed with as much brilliance as ever.  When the husband takes down an ornamental dagger to kill his wife, the sheath falls behind the sofa and he thinks, ‘I’ll have to get it out afterwards, otherwise I’ll never find it again.’  The moment has no narrative lead-in and no explicit consequence, yet by breaking with the narrative conventions of contingency, it produces the perfect simulacrum of actual time.

Meek also tells us that Tolstoy wrote the book after he’d entered his “ascetic-born-again philosopher-prophet” period, and that he agreed with the murderer that

… his mistake wasn’t so much killing his wife as getting married, and having sex; in a sinful society, he would have been better off remaining a virgin.

He then tells us of a macabre consequence of Tolstoy’s preaching in this case, recorded by Sofia Tolstoy in her diary.

On 31 August 1909, she wrote: ‘This morning we had a visit from a 30-year-old Romanian who had castrated himself at the age of 18 after reading The Kreutzer Sonata.  He then took to working on his land – just 19 acres – and was terribly disillusioned today to see that Tolstoy writes on thing but lives in luxury.’ (Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary: ‘An exceedingly interesting man.’)

*****

To read Meek’s article, click here.

Fairytales for the 21st century: Quotes from June

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In June, I read two fairytales for the men and women of the early 21st century: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, the first two instalments of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

Larsson, following only a marginally more sophisticated “write-by-numbers” syllabus than the one Dan Brown used, gives us a female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, and a male protagonist, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who are apparently designed to fulfill one function and one function only: to live out on paper the fantasies Larsson attributes to every female and every male at this moment in history, and thus make him pots and pots of money.

Which all came true, except Larsson didn’t live happily ever after, but died rather promptly.

And what are those fantasies?  For men, it’s … sigh … sex.  Mikael Blomkvist shags every woman who crosses his path, from mid-50s neighbours and sheep graziers, to the mid-20s Salander who, of course, also happens to be bisexual, while at the same time continuing the affair he’s been having for decades with his Editor-in-Chief, Erika Berger, who, of course, regularly tells her husband she’s spending the night with Blomkvist instead of him.

Young women. Tick. Older women. Tick. Bisexual. Tick.  Open marriage. Tick.  Any he’s missed?

Then there’s the fantasy for the female readers.  This time, it’s revenge, served steaming hot, via the maniacal Lisbeth Salander, an anorexic computer hacker channelling Glenn Close-meets-The Terminator. Subjected to a vicious rape, she overwhelms her attacker and pulls out her tattoo kit to incise on his belly,

I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist.

Short of cash, she disguises herself as a Norwegian, hacks into the bank account of the baddie and steals billions of kronor with which, amongst other doo-dads including the entire contents of an Ikea store and some new t-shirts, she buys an 18-room apartment in the best street in Stockholm.

And then there’s the moment when the whole shaking, stinking pile of rubbish wobbles its last, when Lisbeth, first shot in the head, then buried alive, rises up out of her grave to avenge herself on her father, a Russian assassin, and her half-wit brother, a 200kg monster.

Vanquished creeps. Tick. Fabulous apartment. Tick. Month’s supply of pizza. Tick. Billions in a Gilbratar bank account. Tick. Someone to assemble the furniture. Tick.

It’s hilarious. And so poorly made.  For example, reviewers have latched on to the originality of the Salander character.  Now this is true in the way that writing a book about, say, a man being faithful to his wife is original.  That is, Larsson’s whole originality lies in having a woman as the central character.  And yet, having made the giant leap, what does Larsson do?  Why, he promptly leaves her out of half the second book, that’s what!

This, combined with Larsson’s lack of skill in plotting or pace, results in great tracts of pages which are just so much dead air; flat and completely lacking tension or interest.   I kept waiting for the books to start, until, particularly in the second, I realised I was about to run out of pages.

Really, don’t read these books. The only non-phoney part of them is the scenery.

*****

Happily, not all was lost to Mr Larsson and what passes for fantasy in June, because I also read Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, recommended by Thomas.  Unlike Larsson, Hegi is the real deal: a completely authentic and masterful storyteller.  Her story of Trudi Montag, the dwarf (or Zwerg) and her father Leo, living in a German town prior to, and during World War Two is a marvel.  I laughed, I cried, I was transported.

What Hegi’s done doesn’t lend itself to quotation.  Because it is a world Hegi has created, not merely a book.  Yet there’s one snippet I responded to which I think can stand alone.

‘About endings … Unless we do them well, we have to keep repeating them.’

*****

Something beaconed from the eye: Quotes from May

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In May I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one of the classics you feel you know better for never having read.

It’s slighter and rougher than I expected.  The star of the story turns out to be, not Dr Harry Jekyll and his alter ego, who are shades or bit players, but his lawyer, Mr Utterson, a man

lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.

A man whom at

friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye …

This is the key to Mr Utterson and the story: something eminently human up against something eminently inhuman.  On both sides, inconsistencies, dualities; on one only, compassion.

And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart.  ‘Poor Harry Jekyll … he was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.  Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo*, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.’

* On halting foot

*****

Also read this from Nabokov:

‘There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered, ‘  Nabokov said.  ‘He may be considered as a storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.’

~ Quoted by Ian Sansom in The Guardian Weekly in his review of Amos Oz’s book, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest.

In Oz, Sansom says, “the enchanter predominates.”  In me, Nabokov would have said, “the enchanter predominates above all other enchanters.”  Indeed, long before Nabokov became Nabokov – which is to say, progenitor of Lolita – he had written

a kind of pre-Lolita novella in the autumn of 1939 in Paris. (1)

The novella is called — what else? — The Enchanter.

*****

Also in May, considered buying and reading Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Picked it up, felt its massive 1000 pages and settled instead for its epigraph:

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

~ Voltaire

*****

Notes

1. Excerpt from a letter of 6 February, 1959 from Nabokov to the publisher, G P Putnam’s Sons.

Too beautiful: Quotes from April

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In April, have been reading The Blue Flower by the page, and Remembrance of Things Past by the line.  Proust is, I fear, too beautiful for me.  After a few paragraphs I want a bit of  Bukowski, say, and his drinking and vomiting.

In the meantime, the Flower is odd.  Written by Penelope Fitzgerald, it’s the deeply unpromising story of the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), a German mystic, poet and philosopher, who became famous under the name Novalis.

Fitzgerald has a strange style.  There’s some thing with the definite article — the youngest Hardenberg child is always The Bernhard — and the rhythm and emphases are never where you expect them.  The effect is kind of tantalising and provoking and doesn’t inspire trust.  I keep reading to see if it’s an accident.

In other departments, like irony, she’s slightly over-deliberate. This is the putative philosopher’s first day at university:

As a result he attended on his very first morning in Jena a lecture by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.  Fichte was speaking of the philosophy of Kant, which, fortunately, he had been able to improve upon greatly.

*****

Also watched, just last night, a very moving documentary on ABC about the lives of four people with Asperger’s Syndrome. Called Alone in a Crowded Room, it features the stories of James, a young man of 20 who’s always wanted to drive buses and is on his way to doing so; Wendy, a woman in her 50s wearing bright rose-coloured glasses who writes books about Aspergers and goes on speaking tours; Jeanette, a woman in her 30s who, during the course of the film, obtains a job in the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra; and Akash, a singer and composer, who coaches and manages The Four Divas.

If you’re feeling short on inspiration and hope, watch this film. You’ll feel entirely different afterwards.  For parents, in particular — those who wonder if things are permanently broken — hearing Jeanette’s father speak about what his daughter has made of her life will restore you.

I can hardly believe where she is now, it’s astonishing … she was a smart little girl, and she’s personable, she’s funny and … that’s the picture that was in my mind all the time and I knew that it was possible for her to get through that and carry on because that to me was who she was and who she is, not what was in between …

The film was written and produced by Lucy Paplinska.  To watch it, click here.

*****

Lastly, in April, a friend told me how she had lived in Aberdeen in Scotland with her parents-in-law about 40 years ago.  Her father-in-law was a baker and very proud of his trade.  He’d get up at the crack of dawn, go to the bakery and lavish on his loaves all the ingenuity and care of an artiste.  His four sons, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about baking, and each had gone into other careers.  When they’d talk about their work, the father would just shrug as if to say “why even bother talking about such a thing?”  No matter the exploit he was regaled with, he’d announce with an air of immense self-satisfaction,

oh aye, but you cannae create a smell now …

*****

Image: Illiers-Combray (Flickr by Álvaro M)

The lamb roared: Quotes from March

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Read a luscious edition of the The Guardian Weekly in March.  Didn’t know where to look first, so bursting was it with stimulation and that beautiful assured insouciance I don’t find elsewhere. The week after wasn’t a patch which just goes to show it’s a fine chemistry of reader, writer and possibly, weather.

Nancy Banks-Smith, the television writer, is always good.  Here she is on something called Famous, Rich and Jobless on BBC1 about the “down-and-outs,” Meg Matthews, Emma Parker Bowles, Diarmuid Gavin and Larry Lamb.

In case they’re not famous enough, she says, “Meg used to be married to a member of Oasis, Emma is the Duchess of Cornwall’s niece, Diarmuid Gavin is a landscape gardener and Larry Lamb’s an actor.”

Larry Lamb refused to even consider looking for a job.  Emma Harrison and Craig Last, who were there to comfort and chivvy, found him on the vast, bleak beach, happy as a sandboy.  “What a beautiful day!”  They pointed out that, in a perfect world, if you get a Jobseeker’s Allowance, you should seek a job.

Never was an actor more misnamed. The lamb roared.

“Patronising bullshit!  Excuse my French.  I don’t want to go drifting around knocking on doors, because I’ve got enough grub in my belly.  Forget about it.  Not doing it. You do it your way.”  (Lowers voice ominously.)  “I’ll do it my way.”

*****

There was also an article by Lucy Hughes-Hallett on the story of the woman who tried to kill Mussolini, The Hon Violet Gibson, whose father was Lord Chancellor of Ireland.  In 1926, Hughes-Hallett explains, at the time of their “bathetic encounter,”

Mussolini was a splendid figure of a man who liked to display his muscled torso shirtless.  Violet was tiny, emaciated and not much loved.  She was 50 years old but looked 60, and was odd enough in her behaviour to have been twice admitted to sanatoria for the mentally ill.

After her attempt on his life, Violet was again admitted, this time for 20 years.  Once that time had past, Hughes-Hallett says, “history might have endorsed [Violet's] political judgement,” the Duce having been defeated and lynched in his turn, but …

… two decades in an asylum had done nothing for her sanity.  She belaboured fellow patients with a broom handle.  She believed her moods created the weather.  She never came out.

Apparently, Mussolini was aghast at being shot.  “Fancy, a woman!” he’s reported to have said.

He was ready, he said, for “a beautiful death”, but Violet, one of the “old ugly repulsive women who come from abroad in groups”, was not the kind of person he wanted to be killed by.

*****

The same issue of The Guardian Weekly also featured a review of Ransom, the book by Australian, David Malouf, based on the episode of The Iliad in which King Priam visits Achilles “to beg for the body of his son Hector.”

The reviewer, Michael Dirda, quotes from the scene in which the “rough-hewn but voluble” Somax, a man who has lost all his sons and daughters, drives Priam to the Greek camp.  Somax offers to share his simple lunch:

“These little cakes, now, since they’ve caught your eye, sir — pikelets they are, or griddlecakes as some people call them — were made by my daughter-in-law.   Best buckwheat flour, good thick buttermilk, just a drop of oil … The lightness comes from the way the cook flips them over.  Very neat and quick you have to be …”

Dirda takes up the story:

Through his increasing admiration for the naturalness of the mule-driver, a new Priam begins to sense that “out here … everything was just itself.”  Whereas court life was ruled by formal discourse, in nature “everything prattled.  It was a prattling world.”

*****

And last but not least I heard a funny radio interview with the Australian novelist and short-story writer, Peter Goldsworthy.  Goldsworthy was discussing how he still practises as a doctor and how it helps his writing: it limits the time he spends in writerly isolation and gives him new material.

He cited an example.  A woman he’d been treating was in palliative care, dying.  She was 86 and he was visiting her to give an injection of morphine.  He prepared the needle and approached her saying, “It’s just a little prick.”  She looked straight at him, and said:

Never mind, dear, you’ve got nice eyes.

*****

Image: Violet Gibson’s mug shot (courtesy of The Nation)

To read Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of the book, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders, click here.

“A nasty little subject”: Quotes from February

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Somewhere in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom, the Yale English professor who in the 90s made the decision – probably shrewder than it was brave – to oppose postmodernism and defend the castle instead, says that Shakespeare “invented” the modern human.

Moreover, Shakespeare invented the modern human by virtue of one neat trick: the device of over-hearing.  Bloom points to the number of times Shakespeare has one set of characters speaking about something confidential in the centre of the stage while one or two other characters are in the bushes nearby, and deliberately or accidentally, overhear the conversation.

One of the classic examples is Twelfth Night where Maria, pretending to be Olivia, writes a letter to Malvolio, the cross-garter’d, and has Sir Toby and Andrew Aguecheek hide and “observe his construction of it.”

By this one innovation, Bloom suggests, Shakespeare expands exponentially the possibilities of plot and complexity of response because now there are plays within plays; or to put it another way, relationships within relationships.

Thus, ambiguity was born.

The other figure credited with inventing the modern human is Sigmund Freud.  You may not agree with Freud’s theories, you may think there are better psychoanalysts or you may think he’s a misogynist or a complete nutter.  In fact, each generation since his death has seen his theories go in and out of favour, and his status vacillate between founder of psychoanalysis and prose stylist.

Yet none of this matters. Nothing changes the fact that Sigmund Freud never had an unoriginal thought.

Before Freud, there was no unconscious, no drives, no interpretations of dreams, no understanding of the pre-eminent role of human sexuality; all this, and much much more he invented.  He was, and is, a giant of human history and I’m grateful I was a psychology undergraduate just before another long devaluation of his stocks ensued and the Skinnerians took over.

Which is why I was brought up short by a tiny snippet I read in February, to wit that William James — himself a psychologist and brother of the more famous Henry — later in his career called psychology

a nasty little subject.

Thereafter, James turned his attention toward religion and philosophy, “the passions that governed the rest of his life.”

The snippet appeared in a book of snippets, Lapham’s Quarterly on the theme of religion.  I’ve sometimes heard Lewis Lapham on Radio National’s The Book Show, but hadn’t read his journal before.

Is psychology “a nasty little subject”?  What did James mean by this?  I’m not sure, but I think there’s something in it.  It also reminded me how one of my friends, a psychologist, visibly shudders whenever I ask if she’d return to practice.  She always says, “It doesn’t help anyone.”

What also brought me up short about this snippet is that I’ve started reading religion and philosophy too.  In fact, aside from browsing Mr Lapham’s beautiful pictures, the only other thing I managed to read in February was a book about the Desert Fathers by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, based on the speech that captivated me in 2008.

The ideas in the book, called Where God Happens, are extraordinarily stimulating.  One of the most interesting discussions is about the common issues of our contemporary world which Dr Williams identifies as “the longing for individuality, the pressure to conform, the fascination with the will and the reduction of the will to choices in the market.”

He introduces the distinction made by the Russian Orthodox writer, Vladimir Lossky, between the “individual” and the “person.”

The person is what is utterly unique, irreducible to a formula, made what it is by the unique intersection of the relationships in which it’s involved … However, the individual is just this rather than that example of human nature, something essentially abstract.  It can be spoken of in clichés and generalities.  It is one possible instance, among others, of the way general human capacities or desires or instincts operate.

And whereas we might tend to think that choice belongs to the realm of the personal – “that the choices we make are the distinctive thing about us, what tells us and others who we are” – Dr Williams says Lossky see choices as “some of the least distinctive, even the least interesting, things about us.”

We might even say that the mature human being is not the one who has the most choices available but the one who apparently makes the fewest choices, who freely does what he or she is, without self-consciousness or self-assertion, without anxious fretting about what would be more authentic.

*****

Images: all from Lapham’s Quarterly; Jain pilgrim praying to a statue of Lord Bahubali, 1993 (photo by Raghu Rai) (top); The Angelus, by Jean-François Millet (middle); Evening at the Golden Temple, Amritsar, by Derek Hare, 2000 (bottom)

“I love you, but …” Quotes from January

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Dear Marukami san,

I love you, but … WHAT HAPPENED WITH KAFKA ON THE SHORE?

True, Mr Nakata has an excellent character, and his first conversation with Otsuka, the “elderly black tomcat,”  is very enjoyable.  And the episode with the school teacher having an erotic dream of her husband and it all getting mixed up in her mind with her period starting, the young boy finding the bloodied towels she’s hidden in the woods and her subsequent shock and shame is masterful.

But Marukami san, what about the rest?  That you, the author of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart, should have had anything to do with this tottering wreck … well, it pains me.

Marukami san, I know how much you are fascinated by time, just like me.  And yet, Marukami san, you let me spend a week of my life with this dunce of a boy, Kafka Tamura, and both of us know it’s a week I’m never getting back!!!

Please, Marukami san, ease off on the marathons and buckle under when you write your next.

Respectfully yours,
Ms Solid Gold

*****

He wrote like a radical in favour of the moderate.

– David Kaufmann writing in Tablet, Jan 20, 2010, about Jacques Derrida.

*****

“Meanjin” is an Aboriginal word meaning “rejected by The New Yorker.”

– Susan Johnson writing in The Age about the Australian literary journal.

*****

And finally this month, I read Elena Vosnaki writing in her excellent blog, Perfume Shrine.

‘One day soon you may be able to capture a fragrance snapshot of your environment and send it attached to a text message or email.’  Thus begins the fantasy of digitalised scents, the elusive captured into pixels that can be stored and transmitted, a concept that up till very recently seemed as wild as colonising Alpha Centaur with men.

Yes, that’s right.  It’s “teleolfaction.”  Move over iPad and iPod; soon, there’s going to be iSmell.

*****

A dash of nightgown: Quotes from December

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Anyone who reads this blog will know by now that I like a good contrast. Serious … silly … serious … silly … is how my mind works. Previously, I might have been described as having catholic tastes if only the word hadn’t died, if not by disuse then surely by association. If I’d been born in the 18th century and not a woman, I might have been described as a dilettante. 

Well, the catholic-minded dilettantes out there might just relate to this month’s round-up of quotations.  First, the girls at Go Fug Yourself (“fugly is the new pretty”), and second, David Runciman in the LRB on someone who became, unexpectedly, my favourite blogging character of the year: Bill Shakespeare (aka Clinton).

*****

If Heather and Jessica at Go Fug Yourself had been born in the 18th century and not women, they’d have been Jonathan Swift.  They nail celebrity “culture” as firmly as ever did the Houyhnhnms Gulliver.  They are merciless, very silly and extremely funny.  Here they are on someone called Daphne Guinness (could that be the beer heiress?) …

This is totally Lady Gaga plus Annie Lennox plus Elvira with a touch of Nefertiti and a splash of Anna Wintour — just a splash — multiplied by a head injury and then divided by a vat of absinthe.

(And if you want to know what something like that looks like, I’ll put it here (but be warned it’s seriously disturbing)).

Here they are on the actress Anne Hathaway in a deeply unfetching dress.

And I guess Anne Hathaway just didn’t notice that the bodice makes it look like her boobs sprang a leak and are slowly deflating. She’s going to be mighty surprised when she accepts delivery of the tiny bike pump I’m clearly going to send her for Christmas.

I get a laugh just out of their tags which include:  JUST … WOW, WTF, FRUMPATHON, OLD FOR HER AGE, and my favourite, SCROLLDOWN FUG.  Which looks like this:

And out of their imaginary dialogues, like this one between the two actresses, Christina Ricci and Mandy Moore.

CHRISTINA: Oh my God.

MANDY: What, what?

CHRISTINA: You are GIANT.

MANDY: Maybe you’re just small. 

CHRISTINA: Maybe, Gargantua, but you are TALL. You are a tall drink of water. Except you’re wearing black, so I guess that’d be unfiltered water.

MANDY: Your dress interests me. It’s very graceful and interesting, and yet it also looks like my bathtub after a shower, with all the hairs that fell out of my head lying tangled on the porcelain.

CHRISTINA: Poetic, Luke Skyscraper. And yours kind of looks like a cross between Angelina Jolie and Mary-Kate Olsen. With a dash of nightgown. I don’t know what to think.

MANDY: I think, somehow, we might BOTH be rocking it.

CHRISTINA: You might be right, Tallda Swinton.

MANDY: Okay, enough with the names, I get it. I’m tall.

CHRISTINA: Seriously. Your legs START practically at my boobs!

MANDY: Let’s just throw this to the poll and call it a night.

*****

David Runciman in the LRB also does funny, though as you’d expect from a Cambridge don in Politics and a former Guardian journalist it has a little more politesse (while I’m on the subject is it strange that he should end up a Cambridge don at early-40-something while starting at The Guardian? Is it a natural career path?  He is an heir to something, though definitely not beer, so perhaps that helps?) 

He’s also helped by his marvellous subject, my old friend Bill Clinton, as featured in the new biography by Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House.  He opens with a great study of George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s former aide and press secretary. 

Stephanopoulos, apparently, wrote a memoir of his time at the White House in which he made it sound “thrilling, monstrous, deranged.”  A time in which,

a group of super-smart men … fought around the clock to pin down their super-smart, hopelessly promiscuous president (promiscuous with his time, his interests, his attention, rather than in the more obvious ways).  Speeches got written at the last moment, policy was endlessly being reformulated, old enemies were reached out to while a train of new enemies was picked up along the way.

At the heart of it all, Runciman continues, there was George, “fixing, fighting, cajoling, despairing, scheming, outwitting, getting outwitted, and all the time feeding off the power.” 

Why do I keep thinking George Costanza?  Maybe because of this:

At one point, our hero (George, not Bill) takes a fancy to Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze’s costar in Dirty Dancing, and he gets his people to sound out her people about whether she fancies a date … He goes to gatherings of Greek-Americans and they crowd round wanting to know when he is going to lift the curse of Dukakis (which says that short Greek men can’t get elected president, because they look ridiculous in tanks.)

How’s that?  Even Clinton’s henchmen make for funny lines.  As for the man himself, Runciman via Branch paints a picture of an immensely vain, often odd individual.  Some quotes:

… Clinton has more kind words to say about Major than he does about Tony Blair, who was perhaps too much of an easy catch for Clinton’s tastes, as well as being a bit squeaky clean.  Clinton liked politicians who played dirty because they made him feel better about his own peccadilloes.

There are moments when his inability to waste any piece of information makes Clinton seem, frankly, a little mad.  After Major’s defeat by Blair in the 1997 election, Clinton tells Branch that he still has a soft spot for him, “despite their political differences, and remarked oddly that Major seemed to slump forward because the back of his head was square rather than round.”  How do you respond to that?  Branch [who was interviewing him at the time] doesn’t even try, and instead moves swiftly on to a discussion of Iranian clerical politics, about which, unsurprisingly, Clinton is very well informed.

The most compelling scene in the book comes near the end, with an extended account of the meeting Clinton had with Gore after the election was finally lost.  The ideas was for each man to say what he thought had gone wrong, in a spirit of reconciliation, but they are soon baring their teeth.  Gore can’t get past Lewinsky, and Clinton can’t get past the fact that Gore is still using Lewinsky as an excuse for all the failings of his campaign … Gore wants Clinton to apologise to him personally for what he did, whereas Clinton feels he has been doing nothing but apologising.

… Bill appears here to be genuinely fond of his wife, and genuinely frightened of her.  He is thrilled when she becomes a senator and he shows plenty of respect for her political judgement — she spots that Colin Powell is all medals and no trousers well before he does.

*****

Images: Go Fug Yourself (the women); George C’s mind (the man)

Of the meat: Quotes from November

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In November,  I read The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper. I know now why it’s won every literary prize Australia can award.

It’s the true story of the death in police custody of the Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, on Palm Island, a God-forsaken tropical flyspeck off the coast of Australia that had previously served as an Aboriginal ”mission” and open-air jail.

On November 19, 2004, Doomadgee was arrested at 10:20 in the morning for swearing at a white police officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. He was taken to the police station and put in a cell.  By 11:22 Doomadgee was dead on the floor of the cell, “with injuries like those of someone who’d been in a car or plane crash.” 

As Hooper writes,

The police said the man had tripped on a step, and the state-appointed pathologist reported no signs of brutality.  The community did not agree: a week later, a mob burned down the island’s police station and the arresting officer’s house.  The officer … went into hiding on the mainland.

The book is the story of what happened next: the inquest into Doomadgee’s death and the subsquent trial of Hurley for manslaughter. 

*****

Hooper’s book is not one that lends itself to quotation.  There are no rhetorical flourishes, no authorial showing off, just a ruthless subordination to observation.  Yet the following might give a taste of its power and importance, especially to Australians, and the tragedy and wretchedness of its subject matter.

First, one of the many plaudits, this one from Aileen Reid in the Sunday Telegraph (UK):

Chloe Hooper has written a parable of Australian history and a powerful non-fiction novel in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood … Hooper does write with almost indecent felicity.  She controls the events of the book with the mathematical rigour of a thriller-writer, building to the page-turning set-piece of Hurley’s trial for manslaughter.  But she is also mesmerised by the Aboriginal world, the lyricism of the Dreaming.

This is from during the inquest, when Hooper borrows brilliantly from Norman Mailer:

Steve Zillman stood up and asked for a brief meeting with his client.  The rest of us sat waiting in the courtroom, suspended in the moment  that Hurley reversed thirty metres to arrest Cameron.  One man had seen a black drunk, the other a white demon.  The next step was pure ritual.  It was hot, it was clammy.  It was, to quote Norman Mailer, “carnal.”  “At the moment of the arrest, cop and criminal knew each other better than mates … an arrest was carnal.  Not sexual, carnal — of the meat, strangers took purchase of another’s meat.”

 

During the trial there is a “dormitory reunion” on Palm Island in which “people came from all over Australia to see the men and women with whom they’d grown up.”  Hooper writes:

Outside the hall, the Gulf Country’s night sky was jammed with stars, the darkness vibrating.  In 1850, up to a hundred Aboriginal languages were spoken across Queensland alone; now, around Australia, less than twenty indigenous languages are in good health.  It is Australia’s great tragedy that most of the song cycles about these stars have also been lost since Europeans came.   The songs contained knowledge about the Dreamtime, about the ancestral heroes’ endeavours and epic travels — and therefore about Shooting Star Dreaming, Dingo Dreaming, Black Cockatoo Dreaming, Flying Fox Dreaming, Wind Dreaming, Hail Dreaming, Fog Dreaming, Sugarbag (wild honey) Dreaming … Songlines and ritual song cycles of phenomenal complication.

And then this plangent farewell:

Later I heard from one of the Palm Island women about the last moments of the dormitory reunion.  When it was time to leave, the ferry started pulling out and the women on board began singing old mission songs.  The women on the jetty — their sisters and cousins and friends — sang them back.  They hadn’t seen each other for thirty, forty years.  Most likely they would not meet again.  They kept singing until the boat was out of sight, everyone weeping.

*****

During November I also started reading the essay by Noel Pearson called Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia.  Pearson is that rarest of persons: a public intellectual in Australia, and an Aboriginal man. 

He opens his essay with a quotation from Jonathan Lear, the professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, about the “last great chief of the Native American Crow Nation, Chief Plenty Coups (1848-1932).”

For what may we hope?  Kant put this question … along with two others — What can I know?  and What ought I do? — that he thought essentially marked the human condition … I would like to consider hope as it might arise at one of the limits of human existence … Plenty Coups responded to the collapse of his civilisation with radical hope.  What makes this hope radical is that it is directed towards a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.  Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.  What would it be for such hope to be justified? *

*****

* my italics

Images: Chloe Hooper (top); Palm Island, photographed by Andy Zakeli for The Sydney Morning Herald (middle); Noel Pearson (bottom) 

 

 

My personal general-purpose eye: Quotes from October

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In October, as well as South, I read a stimulating article in the London Review of Books by Bridget Riley, the artist. 

It’s one of the best, blow-by-blow descriptions of the process of artistic discovery one could read.  It begins with the recognition of her ignorance:

For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out — the first thing that I discover is that I do not know.  This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic.  Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance — with the unknown — is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable.  It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness.  To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.

Movement in Squares_1961

Then she sets the background and the task ahead.  Her chosen field is abstract art, and the time is the early 1960s with all the terrors and potential that abstract act, after the pioneers like Mondrian and Kandinsky, offered then. 

She touches on the required sacrifices:

But to be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another.  To make a start, I had to sacrifice some hard-won achievements and joys.  For instance colour, about which I had only recently gained some understanding, now had to be laid aside until an abstract form equal to its purity could be found.

The first hint comes:

Although I had taken a few steps in the direction of abstract painting, I had not yet arrived at a point where I could establish a dialogue.  One evening on my way to the studio, I thought of drawing a square.  Everyone knows what a square looks like [...] a monumental, highly conceptualised form: stable and symmetrical, equal angles, equal sides.  I drew the first few squares.  No discoveries there.  Was there anything to be found in a square?

And then the moment of artistic felicity:

But as I drew, things began to change.  Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated [...] I drew the whole of Movement in Squares without a pause and then, to see more clearly what was there, I painted each alternate square black. When I stepped back, I was surprised and elated by what I saw [...] My experience of working with the square was to prove crucial.  Having been lately becalmed, now a strong wind filled my sails.

*****

Andy WarholI also read a review in The Guardian Weekly of a book called The Dream Faculty by Sara Stridsberg.  To the author’s surprise the book became a big hit in Sweden, her home country, and was voted book of the year for 2006.  It is a fictional biography of the real-life Valerie Solanas (1936-1988), an American “writer, intellectual, prostitute and feminist legend,” who became famous in 1968 when she shot Andy Warhol. 

Warhol survived, but only just, and Solanas went on to write the SCUM Manifesto (or the manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men). 

For the reviewer it is a work of ”radical irony,” one that had more in common with Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal than other feminist works.  However, with one murder attempt already under her belt, the irony sometimes got lost on the public.  Whatever it is, the SCUM Manifesto is very funny and bracing to read. She certainly knew how to write an opening sentence:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

Love that “thrill-seeking.”

Here are some other quotes:

Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service.  Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but instead is eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he’s doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job.

Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive.  He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is.  His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing.  Since he’s attempting to prove an error, he must “prove” it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate compulsive attempt to prove he’s not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.

Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy.  When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw … Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female.

Interesting how genuinely seditious they read.

***** 

To read the full Bridget Riley article from the LRB, click here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n19/bridget-riley/at-the-end-of-my-pencil

To read the full SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, click here:
http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm

Images: Movement in Squares, 1961 by Bridget Riley (top)