We

¶ 11 July 05

Of all the things absent from today’s literary canon, satire is the most conspicuous.

The greatest satire has typically come at a time of great psychic upheaval, at a time when those in power were being particularly imperious, obtuse and wrong-headed.

From Aristophanes to Cicero to Swift and on, satirists have forced a society deep in sincere self-regard to laugh darkly at the state they’re in – though I suppose that it’s only those who already suspected their bathos who find real relief in that laughter.

Second only to Voltaire’s Candide, some of the finest and most powerful satire comes from Russia in the Twenties and Thirties. Sharp and brilliant and rife with pain, aside from the best Serapions, the works of Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Zoshchenko, et al are perhaps the only truly humane and reliable expressions of those times.

There’s also Yuri Olyesha’s Envy, which is a homage to Lewis’s Babbitt, one of the few successful American satires. (I’m tempted to add Henry James to this list, but I may be the only one who finds him funny. But then, I also find the over-the-top writhings of Thomas Hardy’s characters hilarious, so my authority here may be a bit shaky.)

So why the lack of (good) satire in our times? We’ve got sarcasm and snark and collegiate parody aplenty. We’ve got dark, dark humour and the ever-reliable scatology.

Maybe the glaring absence of satire is telling of an over-reaching attempt at compassion. While most will agree how ludicrous and reductive the notion of political correctness – to use an easy example – few will attempt more than a fleeting attack, tempered by the guilt of moral relativism.

If any time was ever ripe for satire, it is ours. But we’ve become so earnest in our desire to take a global view, so cheered by our sense of victimhood, so easily mollified, that we’re muting our ability to properly dismantle those foibles which are crippling our ability to act boldly and intelligently against the rampant stupidity, manipulation and just plain seediness of the overriding currents of power and measures of worth.

Comment [9] 

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City lights

¶ 9 July 05

My 14-year daughter’s careful façade – a sturdy amalgam of teenage ennui and profound self-involvement – recently crumbled under a tower of unbridled glee. For days, she was slapstick with giggles and grins and oh boy oh boys: she’s off for three weeks to Canada.

She’s off to steer her grandmother through glittering shops whose target market she emblemises; through the big city throngs and bustle that will thrill and alarm this small town girl. Then off to the rock and pine islands, to the loon cries and wide starry nights of the cool cool lakes of the north. (And waterskiing and tubing and flirting with preppy boys in speedboats. Oh my.)

So yesterday it was car to train to train to shuttle and, oof, to the Paris airport. 90 minutes in the check-in line filled with Oh Canadians – each maple leaf sighting making me a little more dreamy about long ago sweet easy summers. Dumb wrangles at the counter, more nudging and trudging then suddenly stuck in a bunched-up herd and being told, don’t move: it’s a bomb scare, bomb, that black bag, it’s a bomb.

We’re not really convinced, so jostling for a look at the great empty space between a crowd now split in two – lined up, staring like across the battle plain in Braveheart. They’ve cordoned off a huge area in front of the gates. Dogs have moved in, soldiers in fatigues and still their teens, machine gun-ready, badged personnel on walkie-talkies and nobody seeming too sure about procedure.

Elbowing and grumbling, we’re yelling out free advice. Then we remember, and near at once all fall still into a hush of reverence and dread. Full silence and slumping into a shared ugly daydream of smoke and shards and loss of immunity.

Wondering about headlines and what it is to be at the mercy of mindless imperialist thugs, dehumanised by the sudden ambush of all the worst that humanity has to offer. The lives of the strangers around you take on an exaggerated tragic nobility as you prepare mentally for the sadness of their (and your own) passing.

It ends without event, and your daughter has begun to move with the crowd to the gate – her cockiness fully restored by the thought of travelling over oceans alone. She kisses you and says, ‘Aw jeez, mom, don’t cry.’

 

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Xeno à la plage

¶ 5 July 05

One tourist
Two tourist
Red tourist
Beaucoup tourist.

Dutch tourist
Brit tourist
French tourist too
Belgian tourist? Yes,
There’s really quite a slew.

This one has a backseat bar
This one has a camping car
Say! What a lot of
Tourists there are.

Yes. Some are German. And some are Swiss.
Some are Swedish. And none I will miss.

Oh, why do they come
Every summer here?
To clog all the beaches
And drink all the beer.

Some throng the markets
And some hog the seats
And some pose for group shots
In the middle of the streets.

Few drive fast
And most drive slow
Clockwise instead of counter
Round the roundabouts they go.

From there to here
From here to there
These bloody tourists
Are everywhere.

Some stay two weeks
And some stay four
Some stay six weeks
And some stay more.

Where do they come from?
Oh, why are they here?
With any luck they’ll all go
Down to sunny Spain next year.

Comment [6] 

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Tried and true

¶ 29 June 05

Top ten plots of all time:

1) Boy meets girl (boy; a goat like no other; all of the above)
2) Boy meets money, boy loses money, etc.
3) Boy meets windmill
4) Boy meets whale
5) Boy meets gun (multiples thereof; may involve aliens)
6) Boy meets The System
7) Boy meets ancestors
8) Boy meets foreigners
9) Boy meets inner whiny self
10) Girl makes casual acquaintance with inner self, realizes she prefers to shop

Comment [14] 

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Wireless

¶ 28 June 05

One of my favourite cures for insomnia is listening to old time radio shows. Dramas and mysteries are the best of course; comedy only keeps me awake with constant waiting for the punchline.

My hat goes off to those writers of radio plays and their stunning ability to paint vast and small landscapes in your mind, steering it step by step through hot slithering jungles, dark alleys of terror or the claustrophobia of a hunt – more engrossing and intimate than anything on screen.

One of the best shows ever was the short-lived 21st Precinct. It has a weird naturalism that’s so damn enthralling even though/because the stories are often mundane, and lacks the usual booming hamminess meant to inform us of the gravity of the drama we’re listening to.

(I’m equally grateful for learning from Lux that Humphrey Bogart started out as a stand-up comic. That image alone is worth the price of a box of flakes.)

And even though they grate on the nerves by the 3rd time round, the goofy, sponsored by commercials are almost as entertaining as the shows themselves. I’m particularly fond of those peddling nauseating sauterne as a fine accompaniment to roast beef: That’s right! Roma wines! Don’t buy one; buy two! Now, Dr. Watson…

I suppose more than anything I appreciate their seeming candour: telling us exactly what they’re selling and ordering us to go out and buy the damn stuff – unlike today where the product is only a required accessory to a sunny morning lifestyle, this deodorant and those chips a guarantor that you are so going to get laid.

Overt corporate sponsorship has now shrunken to the arts (less and less since smoking became a proven evil) and athletes’ billboard jerseys – though it’s sure to return with online and mobile games offered in instalments like the old movie serials. In the meantime, advertisers’ slightly more subversive efforts are spent accessorising movie sets because nothing says Ah… after saving the world like a nice cold Coke, and a Mac is a must when hacking the Pentagon’s files in a flash (password: Jeff).

And, contemporary literature being what it is, Fay Weldon’s shame will no doubt lovingly be called trend-setting some day. (This is the sound of one wide-eyed reactionary weeping.)

Well now, that was some messy digression. While I’m at it, I may as well tell you that I can’t believe that a certain telco hasn’t yet used my idea for a jingle: “Mama don’t take my Vodafone away.”

It really is true: once you’ve worked in advertising, you’re ruined for life.

Comment [1] 

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Sweet as pie

¶ 23 June 05

Don’t try No Doz
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.

You know when you’re listening to the radio and some song you loved, just loooooved, when you were a kid comes on and your heart skips a beat – mind flooding with memories, full fast and vivid and puzzle piece. In the car with your brother and sister, that summer, new school, your best bosom buddy, skinny dipping with killer turtles and double dare, Archie comics that smelled of ink and candy, and that crush you had on and you’re singing along full blast, not missing a beat, throat getting tight with nostalgia…

So come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack Sprat sat on a candlestick and fire is the devil’s only frie-e–

Then suddenly you grind to a halt mid-word because some part of your brain has just pointed out: Hang on. This song is totally retarded. It’s all filler and cobbled clichés and…

So there you are at the stop light, a little winded, maybe a little glad to be growing up, but mostly sad that something sweet and dumb is lost forever, and knowing that each time you hear that song from now on you’ll remember this moment as much as the rest.

Comment [16] 

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Melting moments

¶ 20 June 05

All men become equal under the pummelling noonday sun.
– Anonymous

Aw, man, it’s 39° (108° F) here today and breezeless.

Branches and blooms and panting pups… everything is drooping. Birdsongs and bodies and brains: all is languor.

The cicadas alone are hyped, pumping out their tinny and trill spin cycle anthem – a bad piccolo player on amphetamines.

Oh, to be a 7-year-old – leaping through the sprinkler in sopping underwear, berserk with slipping and squealing and knowing that summer is still to come.

Comment [3] 

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Tag

¶ 16 June 05

So Gwen is preying on my lingering 10-year-old’s fear of breaking the chain. And that’s just evil. But at least I don’t have to write it out ten times by hand, so I’m game…

Number of books I own:
I don’t suppose I’m actually meant to count them. All I can tell you is that there are over a thousand of the damn things about, and that this pleases me to no end. Oh, and, although I fall short in the classification department, I do know that de Sade is in the WC. Make of it what you will…

Last book I bought:
But haven’t yet read (yeah Amazon bookseller, I’m talking to you): The Funnies by J. Robert Lennon

Last book I read:
The last outstanding book I read was Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

A.A. Milne’s When we were very young: the first book I remember being read to me, along with Pooh; the first I memorised thanks to my very patient mother’s constant rereading upon my pleading (for which I got payback when my own kids begged for Green Eggs and Ham every **%@#ing night for a year – ‘Hey, Mom, you forgot the fox in the box’). Its rhythms are deeply imprinted on my brain.

Camus’s L’étranger: the first grown-up book that sent me for a loop. Read and re-read till the pages called, ‘Mercy! It can’t possibly be that good.’ It is.

Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. Blew me away at a time when I (very mistakenly) thought I’d seen it all. And filled me with faith and delight in my own landscapes.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan for introducing me to graphic novels – allowing me to keep reading comic books while perpetuating the illusion of being all growed up.

At the risk of… well, you know. Joyce’s Ulysses. The book we all wished we’d written.

And so to pass the baton onto others (ha ha, suckas!):
Susan
Margaret
Ruth
Mark (in an arm-twisting attempt to get him to take off that super hero mask for just a minute)
Jon (if only to confirm that he and Heather also read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War when honing their parenting skills)
Michael
and Dale.

And, of course, invite you all to play along.

Comment [12] 

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Send in the clowns

¶ 13 June 05

Comedy is a representation of common life: its end is to show the faults of particular characters on the stage, to correct the disorder of the people by the fear of ridicule.
– René Rapin

So why are writers of “serious” prose more respected than those who go for the funny?

I know that many have wondered this, but – being guilty too of this probably misplaced value – I’m still looking for a convincing answer.

Why, for example, is P.G. Wodehouse – prolific and ne’er a word out of place – considered a lesser writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald who really only wrote one great book, and who has no sense of humour at all?

Aside from the blithe what-ho and naivety of it all, I suspect part of it has to do with the misconception that writing comedic texts is somehow a perfunctory act – despite the many tortured admissions to the contrary.

Writers of satire get ranked somewhere between the two, hailed for incisive social commentary but still perceived as somewhat limited, and maybe not quite humane enough to cuddle up to.

There is a presumption that those who write about despair, decay and destruction have a deeper understanding of the human condition than those who see life as a farce. I take this as an admission that we’re all more familiar with the dark and dull battle than with giggles and glee – the elation of laughter a welcome but only occasional interruption of the mainstay gloom.

We place more value on the serious because we want to be taken seriously. No matter how pedestrian, we want our daily dramas to have weight.

Of course there are those like Bellow, Kafka, Joyce, Chekhov and early Roth, etc., who manage to combine existential angst and bordering on the burlesque comedy. But it’s interesting how many readers fail to see the humour – preferring them as companions in misery.

And then of course there’s the pervasive archetype of the sad clown. We like that one in particular – a smug reassurance that those who earn their living peddling the funny side are even more miserable than we are.

Alas, alack, and pass the rubber chicken.

Comment [11] 

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Miscellany

¶ 9 June 05

Things that have entertained me this week:

…In keeping with the precepts of Scientology, Cruise, who condemns modern psychiatry and mind-altering prescriptions of any kind, said Shields should have used ‘vitamins and exercise’ instead. ‘I care about Brooke Shields because I think she is an incredibly talented women, [but] look at where her career has gone,’ he said.

Shields, who is enjoying a career resurgence, both on Broadway and as the author of a book about postnatal depression, retorted that Cruise, ‘should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women suffering the condition decide what treatment options are best for them’. She then offered Cruise and Holmes two tickets – one adult for him, one child for her – to her London production of Chicago.

[Stephen Fry] said: ‘It’s now very common to hear people say, “I’m rather offended by that”, as if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. “I’m offended by that.” Well, so fucking what?’

The Bucks County man who pleaded guilty to growing marijuana plants on Springfield Township property owned by a former police chief has been sentenced to a work-release term requiring him to perform community service as a translator for Spanish-speaking people.

Whenever a story is set in a distant time and place and dramatized, as this one is, we usually call it historical fiction. But Kathleen Ann Milner’s story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn has an interesting claim on historical accuracy. Milner believes she was Boleyn in a past life. She details the evidence for her belief in the second half of this fascinating book, and makes a convincing enough case that the story presented in the first half appears in a whole new light.

Thought by some to be the first ever translation: Gilgamesh! It’s a story! A Musical! A very slow flash animation! A scary book! An upcoming movie starring… wait for it… Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif! (I guess doing commercials for off-track betting in France weren’t everything he’d hoped.)

Now, what’s the silliest thing you’ve seen in the news this week?

Comment [8] 

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