Great toothbrush, pity about the novel

On the rise of the online moron

How good is the average customer review on Amazon, and what does its quality tell us about the health of Western civilization? Or, to ask a less boring version of the same question, how bad is the average below-average review on Amazon, and exactly how fucked are we? Below, selected entirely not at random, is a customer review from the Amazon page devoted to Lucky Jim. The review is entitled “Time Have Changed My Perception.” Feel free to insert your own sics:

Years ago, when I had the first oportunity to read this book, it seemed to be real fun, while today it is just description of general problems of academic enviroment, it looks that nothing have realy change or will change. The stagnation of academia is a pemanent dilema: today teachings are the absolite truths, defended by the old guards.

Reading this, I had a brief dilemma of my own ... [read more] 

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]