The shadow of barbarism

On Clive James's essays

Halfway through this new collection of essays, in a piece about A.D. Hope, Clive James finds himself obliged to deal with an academic who has attempted to make sense of Hope’s notebooks using a high-falutin theoretical concept known as the “rhizome”. Here is part of James’s rejoinder:

The word “rhizome” has an affinitive similarity to the word “rissole”, the classic Australian term, drawn from the culinary arts, for something being reduced to a wreck. (Used as a noun, the word “rissole” denotes a kind of proto-hamburger, but used as a verb—as in “Strewth, we’ve rissoled the Holden”—the same word means that the machinery has ceased to work.)

As excellent as this sort of thing is, we should always remember that the funny stuff isn’t what Clive James does instead of the serious stuff. It’s what he does on top of the serious stuff ... [read more]  

Down with dogs

A few weeks back I found myself faced with a revolting question of modern etiquette. I was staying as a guest in somebody else’s house, at a time when my hosts happened to be looking after a third party’s dog. My hosts were out, leaving me in sole charge of the dog. The dog seized the opportunity to defecate, horrifyingly, on the key stretch of floor between the couch and the big-screen TV. The mess looked like something Jackson Pollock might have produced if he’d ever elected to work in the medium of putrid gravy. It was so extensive, and so centrally located, that there was no way I could plausibly pretend not to have seen it. So I had two options. I could clean it up; or I could exercise my right, as a non-dog person of over thirty years’ standing, to wait for an avowed dog-lover to get back home and put his passion into practice.

I cleaned it up.

Let’s say I’d decided not to. Let’s say I’d just left it there, and tried to get on with my doomed ambition to live a life dedicated to a non-involvement with dogshit ... [read more]  

The higher horseshit

On Richard Flanagan's intellectual style


Not long ago, during a TV documentary about the writer Richard Flanagan, no less a literary pundit than Baz Luhrmann proclaimed Flanagan "the Australian Hemingway." These days, of course, it's quite permissible to go around passing such judgements without necessarily having read any actual books by either party -- and indeed it emerged, as Baz fleshed the comparison out, that what he mainly had in mind was the fact that both guys were quite keen on the outdoors. But he did, I think, throw in a token reference to the excellence of Flanagan's prose after that.

So how sound is Baz Luhrmann’s literary taste?  Here, free from the Web, is the overture to Richard Flanagan's 2006 novel, The Unknown Terrorist:

The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth ... [read more]

Muddy waters

Bluesfest turns 20

On about day three of this year’s Byron Bay Blues Festival, I saw the guy with the world’s oddest job. He was part of a zydeco band. He wore a metal vest that looked a lot like Ned Kelly’s, although it was made of a shinier and less hefty element, possibly aluminium. The lower part of it was corrugated, so that from certain angles the guy appeared to be wearing a giant strap-on cheese-grater. His job was to dance around in front of a nipple-high microphone while hitting and stroking himself with a pair of wire brushes and generally looking like he was having a hell of a lot of fun. Looking like you’re having fun while listening to a piece of zydeco music for the thousandth time can’t be easy, but grater-boy did a pretty good job of it.

This is the beauty of the Bluesfest, which has just turned twenty. Part freak show, part musical cornucopia, part crash-course in things you never knew existed, it lets you stick your head in on a lot of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise get to see. Sometimes you stick your head back out again pretty fast. But now and then you’ll stumble in on a musician so brilliant – a Sonny Landreth, a Jon Cleary – that you’ll wonder how on earth you’ve managed to get through your life without having heard of him. The festival has six performance tents these days, going more or less simultaneously. If you can’t find something diverting in at least one of them, you’ve probably come to the wrong event. Even if you have, you can always repair to the food tent, where you can get an organic donut the size of a steering wheel, a crêpe served with authentic French insolence, or a Mayan hot chocolate hand-made by an actual Mayan out of small brown beans, at a pace that might well explain why Mayan civilization collapsed in the first place: maybe they all perished of thirst while waiting for their mothers to finish making their beverages ... [read more]