Culture Mulcher

The Hollywood strangle, and a broken bowl

September 9, 2009 – 11:23 am, by W H Chong

On my morning surf, I found buried deep in The Age’s website this fascinating article by Paul Kalina. (Micro-rant, rhetorical query: Why are the arts sections [not even dignified by the word "Arts"] of Fairfax websites so shite?) Kalina has written about the indie doco Into the Shadows, recent joint winner of Best Australian Film at MUFF (Melbourne Underground Film Festival).

From the MUFF site: Into the Shadows “tracks the development of Australian film from its inception, through the glory years of the 1970s to the travesty of today … Featuring exclusive must-see interviews from Andrew Denton, George Miller, Rolf De Heer, Scott Hicks, Bruce Beresford, representatives from Disney, Sony, Madman [the list of interviewees is extraordinary] … It’ll open your eyes, move you, enrage you … for anyone … who despairs at the state of our nation’s film industry, who laments the dominance of the multiplex over the independent theatre, and asks – why?” [added italics]

It’s the last sentence Kalina picks up on: “One doesn’t need to look far these days for an opinion on what’s wrong with Australian cinema. Films that are too dark? Too preoccupied with drug addicts and criminals? Not funny enough? Everyone, from senior industry players to casual filmgoers, seems to have an opinion*. But according to many of the insiders who have lined up to offer their expertise in a new feature documentary, Into the Shadows, it is access to screen time that’s the real problem.”

He writes how Australia has 2000 screens and an independent (ie non-Hollywood backed) Australian film “will be seen on fewer than 10 per cent of cinema screens, while studio blockbusters take up as much as one-third of total screens.”

For example: “While a middling US film might be released on up to 200 screens, the well-credentialed Australian films Disgrace and My Year without Sex made it to only 24 and 25 screens across Australia respectively.” (The figures don’t quite dovetail with the previous paragraph. Dunno.)

Thus we have a year when Aussie films have done relatively well, taking in over $11 million (excluding Luhrman’s Australia), the total box office was $954 million. Therefore local films took in all of … 1.2% of the market. Gently weep, my guitar.

It’s a most interesting piece, have a look; and check out the trailer above. Meanwhile Into the Shadows is slated for a “limited theatrical release in late October.” The irony, the horror.

_____

*See Luke Buckmaster’s Cinetology blog for his consideration of last year’s crop of Aussie films.

+++

The fragility

The bowl on the bench must have been from last night so I reached to take it away. At my touch, just a finger’s touch, the bowl split in two, rocking back. I could feel my … psyche(?) … hunching. The very air seemed fractured, the clock ticked louder.

Not that it was a herald of mortality; more a whisper of fragility. Things have their time – as George Harrison once sang, All things must pass. It was a ceramic shudder, and then the bowl fell apart.

_____

Recent posts:
Literature is only a genre
Reading without merit
Kay Ryan – concise, memorable
Compared to what?

Comments (0) | Permalink

If Sci-fi is a genre, then so is Literature

September 8, 2009 – 11:54 am, by W H Chong

Okay I’m not buying into the fight. (As Sophie Cunningham said, a few days ago: “When someone is clearly picking a fight, the temptation is just to ignore them.”) That’s the one over the Big Fat (1500 pages) Anthology of Australian Literature. But if you are interested in it, here are the links.

The most provocative bit of Peter Craven’s review in the September Australian Book Review is pictured below.
_______

__________

The links:

Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham’s response to Craven’s review, in Crikey (see her Meanjin blog). She interrogates his “highly theatrical review”.

Heat editor Ivor Indyk’s review in the Australian, which contains this: “Indigenous writing was excluded altogether from the Oxford anthology; in the Macmillan it was restricted largely to authors with established literary credentials. Here you get writing with real power, but it leaves you wondering about the boundaries of the literary.” Prof. Indyk also had a few critical things to say at a symposium on the book at the State Library of NSW.

Kerryn Goldsworthy, who edited ‘fiction and drama since 1950′ blogged a fascinating eye-witness account of the launch and sitting through Indyk’s critique of it in the symposium. Her factual response – she counted entries by criteria – makes you wonder about critical readings – that criticisms delivered from Olympian heights may prove to be as subjective as the editorial judgments under review.

James Bradley’s judicious and measured take on the whole kaboodle, gives serious consideration to Craven’s and Indyk’s remarks: “Kerryn Goldsworthy … has responded to the criticisms Indyk made in the same piece about the under-representation of migrant writers … but it seems to me that both Indyk and Craven are, in slightly different ways, touching upon a real question about how we define literature in this context.”

And Simon Hughes‘ response to Sophie Cunningham, also in Crikey.

+++

Who writes literature?

Here’s the thing: the questions about the indigenous component of the anthology are over its quality as writing. But there is also a big sidelong question about what is admissible as literature.

Bradley: “My sense (on a pretty cursory read, it must be said) is that the editors have attempted to straddle this divide, presenting a range of writing which seeks to offer a glimpse of the textures and variousness of the Australian experience, and its processing into collective and individual consciousness. Whether they’ve been successful at this or not is an open question. Indyk and Craven think not, others are more positive. But it seems to me they’ve made the right decision in principle by giving away strict definitions of the “literary”.

Cunningham: “Craven wants the Australian canon to be built on exclusion. I, like the editors of the anthology, am interested in an Australian literary and cultural heritage that is based on inclusion.”

Goldsworthy: “The ‘What is literature’ question came up in the Book Show interview that Nicole Moore, Prof Rob Dixon and I did with Ramona Koval on July 31. We argued to Ramona that the documents in question had literary qualities, including the use of rhetoric to persuade and to move the reader, and that this was enough to make a place for them in an inclusive anothology like this one.”

Indyk: “I am happy to embrace the possibility that any kind of writing could have literary qualities but there is a danger here: if, out of a sense of crisis, you include in an anthology of Australian literature all that you think is necessary for its appreciation, then the entity itself might easily go from a state of threatened non-existence to a state in which it included so much that it ceased to be an entity at all.”

Craven makes this claim in his review: “In 1940 no one would have thought there was an Australian Literature.”

Hughes: “Sophie Cunningham admires [the book's] broad inclusiveness and decries Peter Craven’s desire to see the parameters of the anthology narrowed. By all means make inclusion a plank of Australian literature but please may we include examples that enrich the national literature rather than make it seem (as sometimes in this anthology) a political construction.’

And Hughes also makes this metaphor [which I'm going to mess with]: “There is no doubt that Peter Craven has been a gatekeeper for Lit Land — or considered himself so — for a long time. He has tended the canon rather like a gardener, weeding out the ordinary and the adventitious, encouraging variegated blooms and hardy perennials both. Which makes it, naturally, Peter Craven’s garden.”

+++

The end of Canon Rd, the opening of Literature Garden

So, still not buying into that fight, we might consider instead the question of inclusion and exclusion.
The thing is, perhaps we have got to the end of Canon Rd.

We used to have all these “genres” – lesser beasts in the literary zoorarium. Sweet and funny little children’s books. Sweet and advisory Young Adult books. Quirky and silly science fiction. Happy and sad and happy romance fiction. Angry and bloody and stupid crime fiction. Fast and stupid thriller novels. So many beasties.

Maybe the time has come when the gatekeeper – to the exclusive high worth garden, ie anthologisable quality only – must reconsider her role. No longer is it a question of which kind of beastie may enter the garden (because now the garden has been opened to outsiders, to the zoo inmates), but how powerful and shapely and beautiful it is.

And if now all beasties have, in principle, a right to enter the garden, then the ones already in the garden are just another kind of beastie, in varying conditions of power and shapeliness and beauty.

We currently have a comely modifier, thus “literary” crime fiction. And “literary” everything else – young adult novels, sci fi, cookbooks.

So, to make it plain – it seems to me that “Literature” is now a genre. Just another genre. It occupies one of many sections in the platonic (and my actual, local) bookshop. Perhaps it’s a little messy in categorical terms, but you go there for, oh, something markedly “literary”. A more literary feeling, sensibility, cover design. It’s a tricky category because it’s not about the what, it’s about the how. It’s about “literary” style. You might go there for a book by Kazuo Ishiguro about cloning in a dystopia (Never Let Me Go), but you wouldn’t go there for, say, real science fiction. Real science fiction would never be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, because that’s a prize for the genre called Literature. Sci-fi books win Hugos and Nebulas.

It’s a game. And canon-making is a game, too. The winners of which fit in a little category occupying the three or four shelves that capitalism, if not academe, offers it. Not that commodity values are the only criteria to have bound it. Globalism has made accessible dozens of overseas manufacturers of these once exclusive weapons. And we are now aware of being surrounded by other canons.

______

Recent posts:
Reading without merit
Kay Ryan – concise, memorable
Compared to what?
Griffith Review: sexier ideas

Comments (2) | Permalink

Reading without merit

September 7, 2009 – 11:43 am, by W H Chong

Some days I can barely bare to read anything. Barely a thing. It goes in one eye, casting a shadow, a shadow of the eye, an eye shadow, goes where one knows not.

The phrase popped into mind: Reading without merit. Merit is maybe the Buddhist equivalent of Catholic good works. Reading for necessity (manuals, directions, recipes) likely has no karmic consequences. Reading for pleasure is more problematic. I imagine reading the scriptures or sutras would be meritorious.

(In a book lent by a friend, The Elegance Of The Hedgehog, the precocious heroine – Paloma is totally into the examined life – intuits that what one reads over breakfast is a telling indication. Her father, a minister of the state, reads Le Monde over a strong coffee (an “aggressive” drink); her mother, catalogues and coffee; her irritating older sister, coffee and France Inter (French public radio) and herself, hot chocolate and manga. [But one recalls Nietzche's aphorism: 'Early in the morning, at break of day*, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book – I call that vicious!'])

+++

Mecca for secularists, and its weekly bible

In any case, on the days I can barely bare to read anything at all, I take comfort in my subscription to the New Yorker. It has many virtues, this weekly encasement of American elitist-isms – not the least of which is that it comes from a global village we can feel related to without feeling the least responsibility for (it’s like Mecca for secularists). I have attained an almost Buddhist relationship with the magazine, albeit of the meritless kind; I am learning to read it without desire. A whole New Yorker can pass by without my finishing even a single article, and without my feeling any guilt about that. Indeed, some weeks pass when I don’t even open its plastic envelope.

It might be called unconditional affection. It asks nothing of me; I do not expect it to require my attention for the good of my soul, or readerly ethics. It’s like a certain aspect of friendship.

A couple of friends, siblings whom we had not seen for a longish while, dropped around for dinner last night. It produced that appealing mix of gossip – who, when, where, what!? – and personal history, and mutual acquaintance commentary, and praising and dissing of stuff recently seen or read or heard. It is entirely possible we will not have a return engagement like that for years. Or it might happen again next week.

It was a dinner without merit. Reading without merit. There is no obligation … We go on.

______

*’Early in the morning, at break of day...’ – Is there a horrible pre-echo here of Paul Celan’s Todesfuge?

______

Recent posts:
Kay Ryan – concise, memorable
Compared to what?
Griffith Review: sexier ideas

Comments (0) | Permalink

We are always really carrying a ladder, but it’s invisible

September 4, 2009 – 11:46 am, by W H Chong

As it is officially spring one turns towards poetry, much as Moe of the Stooges turned towards slapstick:

‘Niagara Falls! … Slowly I turned … and step by step, inch by inch I walked up to him and I smashed him, I *&% him, I $#@ him, I ±@* him, and I knocked him down!’

Niagara Falls! Or, in this case, Niagara River: Poems, by Kay Ryan, the US Poet Laureate as of last year. She is a recessive one, Kay, as is the way her compact poems are so unlike the overflowing “hullabaloo” of current American poetry, which tends towards the garrulous – like so many poems published in that yardstick, The New Yorker: Bruce Smith’s rambling The Game, or vaguely incomprehensible, as in the famous Anne Carson’s Epithalamium NYC (admittedly one of her more translucent pieces), or both windy and wooly as in the even more famous John Ashberry’s Pernilla:

Please don’t apologize for pissing me off, you were
probably right, and I was halfway out the door
anyway, the living-room door, leading to the hall
and all it contains. How is it that things can get
shiny and be peeling simultaneously? Seriously, Pa,
we would have come over if we’d knowed
the combination for long, and then folks’d have pointed
toward us, miming birdsong and the like.

which goes on like that for 39 lines.

But no, lucky us, Kay Ryan is tight and sharp. The NYT turned it neatly in a 2005 review of Niagara River: ‘A Kay Ryan poem is maybe an inch wide, rarely wanders onto a second page, and works in one or two muted colors at most … a Ryan poem sticks the reader with a little jab of smarts and then pulls back as fast as a doctor’s hypodermic.’

When Ryan was made Poet Laureate middle of last year, I looked up her work and delighted by its brevity and precision (and sense), I scuttled off to the poetry shop (there is such a thing) and failing to find any of her books asked at the counter. Alas, the woman had never heard of Ryan and I was cast back into Amazon. Many months later I’m still reading Niagara River. Or rather, re-leafing through it. Here are a couple of favourites. Note, these are the complete poems:

On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up

One does not stack.
It would be like
a mouse on the back
of a mouse
on a mouse’s back.
Courses of mice,
layers of shivers
and whiskers,
a wobbling tower
mouse-wide,
with nothing more
than a mouse inside.

And

Backward Miracle

Every once in a while
we need a
backward miracle
that will strip language,
make it hold for
a minute: just the
vessel with the
wine in it —
a sacramental
refusal to multiply,
reclaiming the
single loaf
and the single
fish thereby.

Every once in a while we need a backward miracle … What a thought! The ironically long title of this post comes from the poem Carrying a Ladder. See it and other Ryan gems at Poetry Foundation. And do get Niagara River – Niagara River! Slowly I turned…

Happily we can report that Ryan’s Laureateship has been extended for another year to mid-2010. It is a great pity she wasn’t asked to do the inauguration poem for Obama. Elizabeth Alexander was a mistake: see her longish earnestish drearyish effort. But here is Kay Ryan, amusingly introducing and reading Home to Roost, and talking about finding her poetry in a comic strip:

_________

Image at top is from the University of Washington blog on a three day poetry event held last month.

_________

Recent posts:
Compared to what?
Griffith Review: sexier ideas
Home Sweet Village

Comments (2) | Permalink

Compared to what?

September 3, 2009 – 10:31 am, by W H Chong

What do you say when someone calls you a dill? And not just that but a super-dill?

That’s what Victoria’s Minister for Water was called after he was rescued from his two-night ordeal, feared dead, in his state’s Alpine region. Opposition MP Bernie Finn: ‘The ordinary Joe from the suburbs who goes walking by themselves in winter in such an area is a dill. For a minister of the Crown to do it is just super-dill.’

At his press conference yesterday Min. Tim Holding said, ‘I thought I was going to die. It was … I slid very, very fast and if you’ve ever slid in the ice before you’ll know, you start slowly and you slide faster and faster, and you gather huge momentum. You think about a lot of things. It’s amazing how much you can think of in such a short period of time.’

To his credit he intends to go hiking alone again, but with the now famous EPIRB*: ‘I think it would be very disappointing if the message that goes forward from this is that you shouldn’t hike alone. I often encounter other people who are hiking alone. We live in an age where it’s good to get away and clear your head and just be away from things…’

On being called a super-dill by Bernie Finn he said: ‘Bernie could have a tracking device but people have got to want to find you.’

+++

An even faster mouth belongs to the distinctive US House Rep. for Massachusetts, Barney Frank. Rumpled of dress, sharp of tongue. The latest of his wicked mots happened a few weeks ago at one of those quaintly democratic “town hall” meetings where constituents gather to hurl brickbats at their representative. This was on health care policy, the reforming of which has caused waves of ulcers among politicians.

The Youtube is brief and delightful viewing, but this is the exchange:

Young, tense woman in a stressed voice: ‘Why are you supporting this Nazi policy?’ (Jeers, cheers, general noise.)

Barney Frank: ‘When you ask me that question I’m going to revert to my ethnic heritage [Frank is Jewish] and answer your question with a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?’

(Applause, hollers.) ‘Do you want me to answer that question? Yes. You stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis. My answer to you is, as I’ve said before, it is a tribute to the first amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.

‘Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.’

That exchange has now propagated itself with biblical fecundity. The YouTube clip has collected 1.25 million hits and the line has achived memedom:

+++

But my favourite Barneryism is actually a steal.

Q: ‘How’s your wife’?
A: ‘Compared to what?’

Frank once explained to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show that he had come to rely on the Henny Youngman punchline. As shown in this first paragraph from a Time story of last year:

Barney Frank is on the line. I ask the Massachusetts Democrat, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, if he thinks the housing bill that he and Senator Chris Dodd are on the verge of pushing through Congress will really do much good.

Frank: … ‘Compared to what?’

+++

For those who feel they’re exhausting the usage of ‘Whatever” (why are you lookin’ at me?) this would add colourful variety and judo technique: ‘This is a really good/bad movie/meal/book.’ ‘Compared to what?’ … ‘How’s life?’ ‘Compared to what?’ … Maybe even – ‘You’re a dill.’ ‘Compared to what?

_____

*EPIRB: Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons

_________

Recent posts:
Griffith Review: sexier ideas
Home Sweet Village
Tarantino and “comic violence”

Comments (2) | Permalink

Griffith Review: sexier ideas

September 2, 2009 – 10:17 am, by W H Chong

In September’s ABR (Australian Book Review) there is a full page ad for the new issue of Griffith Review. The headline reads:

We’ve always been smart – now we’re sexy too.

It goes on: ‘Presenting Griffith REVIEW 25: After the Crisis, the first edition with our new partners at Text Publishing and featuring an elegant redesign. (etc etc)’

I so didn’t write that headline, but I will admit to authoring the redesign (ok, this is a somewhat self-serving spruik but, I’d like to think, also telling you about A Good Thing). Griffith Review is ‘a quarterly of writing & ideas’ from Griffith University in Brisbane – in other words, one of Australia’s treasure trove of “little magazines”.

Left, a pile of previous GRs; right, the new GR cover

They seem to have been around forever, but the oldest, Meanjin (based at Melbourne University), is “only” 68 years old. Melbourne has a bunch of them – Meanjin, Overland, ABR, Eureka Street, Arena, Quadrant. Sydney delivers Heat and Southerly. Westerly from the west, and the venerable Island from Tasmania. And for six years now, Griffith Review from Brisbane (the women’s issues Hecate also comes out of Brisbane).

All of them all adopt a national, if not international position, but there’s no doubt their place of origin inflects their interests and contributors, and a good thing too. Island is not named that for nothing. GR is one of the most idea-driven of the lot with its themed issues on everything from ‘In the Neighbourhood’ (Oz-Asian engagement) to ‘Essentially Creative’ (the place of arts in the national agenda) to ‘Family Politics’ (have a guess). As Phillip Adams says, ‘Griffith Review is a wonderful journal. It’s pretty much setting the agenda in Australia and fighting way above its weight.’

+++

The redesign

The new design is “simply” a scrubbing down and a polishing up of the vessel in which the material is served. Well, yes, I also did break up the original vessel – that’s redesign for you. Not so much a renovation as a de- and then re-construction. Page margins, typefaces, line leading, folios, footnotes et al … the long list of “furniture” that goes into a house design. And of course, that ever contested ground – the cover. (Like homepages on websites, all the different departments want their bit of dedicated real estate on a magazine cover.) But that’s what editors are for, and Julianne Schultz has ensured that the cover is as sleek as a tailored jacket. Incidentally, Julianne, the driver of this idea vehicle, has recently been appointed to the ABC board of directors (which has its irony because a bit before that ABC Books had decided to give up publishing GR, thus necessitating a new publisher, and thus a new design). Onya Schultz!

Among my preferred bits of the new “elegant” interior are the Fiction pages, which I think are cool and fresh but classic (as an ex-editor of mine used to say). And the year-end issue of GR will be the Fiction number, so that will be something to go with your martinis, and Negronis, and Cinzani on ice.

The new Fiction page design

Article ending and article start

PS: The Reportage opener above is for a piece by Barbara Gunnell on historical high finance in London and the GFC. I mention this because I met Ms Gunnell recently (I suspect we were underintroduced) and within two minutes she had winkled out where I was coming from, what I was doing and where I was going, before the penny dropped. I subsequently read her piece in the new GR and it is superb. Barbara turns out to be comment editor of the Observer (UK) and a contribuitng editor of the New Statesman. I had been micro-grilled by a laser-focused London reporter.

_________

Recent posts:
Home Sweet Village
Tarantino and “comic violence”

Comments (0) | Permalink

Home Sweet Village

September 1, 2009 – 9:30 am, by W H Chong

foresthills_square

This isn’t a neat little town in Bavaria. It’s a hundred-year-old planned community called Forest Gardens in Queens, New York. And those timbered buildings are made from … pre-cast concrete slabs. Have a look at the Slate slideshow of this fantastic bit of retro-visionary town planning – designed with those modern buzzwords, walkability and heterogeneity, in mind.

Walking past some new houses recently, I was wondering why we let some of them go up, and how or if it is possible to achieve any sort of harmony today, without suppression of novelty. Of course the truth is that most housing “design” is mediocre – is, in fact, undesigned, or only designed in the sense of a builder offering some basic plans which are no good to begin with.

When I visited Rockhampton, Qld, my expectations for any kind of urban interest was about as low as a beer mat. So, the great surprise and delight of Rocky’s townscape.

There are quite a few fine late 19th century buildings standing in the city’s southside. But the jewels are the Federation Queenslanders lining the streets all the way from Fitzroy River’s edge and up the hill to the Botanic Gardens. Many of them – in the poorer areas – are pretty shabby, but that they are extant in these numbers is a marvel. How long can this last?! Probably until a big boomtime rolls in, and brings the sharks in its wake.

It is fascinating too, to comare the poorer streets on the flatlands to what our B&B host called the “doctors’ houses” on the hill towards the gardens.

The lowland houses of Rocky

The "doctors' houses" of Rockhampton

Comments (0) | Permalink

Tarantino and “comic violence”

August 28, 2009 – 12:26 pm, by W H Chong

NB: Includes mild spoilers to Inglourious Basterds, Violence and Language.

Here’s the big joke: eight vengeful Jewish American soldiers roam the fields of France between 1941-44 killing German soldiers, and under the direction of their hillbilly Lieutenant (Brad Pitt), scalps them. Literally. In close-up technicolor. If they are allowed to live, for propaganda purposes, a large swastika is carved into their foreheads, with an enormous Bowie knife. We get to see that too.

The Melbourne critic Karl Quinn makes a direct address: ‘Was it really necessary to show men being scalped in such close-up detail?’

Quinn’s answer: ‘Yes, it was necessary. On the terms that Tarantino set for himself, at any rate … It serves a dual purpose, moral and aesthetic. It makes us squirm (a familiar pleasure-pain of a certain type of cinema), but in refusing the quick cutaway that usually diffuses the unpleasantness, it actually makes us feel the violence. Arguably, Inglourious Basterds isn’t just a reimagining of the war movie, it’s a reimagining of how we tell stories of war and brutality and sadism, so that we feel something of their horror. It is, if you will, a necessary evil.’

Quinn’s reading is contestable, but unusually subtle. Compare:

Paul Byrnes, Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Naughty, apocalyptic fun … There are many scenes that do shock — the scalping is particularly gruesome, as is one scene where one of the basterds … takes a baseball bat to a Nazi officer.’

David Stratton, At the Movies: ‘The whole thing is handled with an almost child-like glee … it’s violent, of course, but hey, World War II was a violent business and war movies were never like this before!’

Leigh Paatsch, News.com.au: ‘Irreverent, irrational and irresistibly entertaining … Tarantino’s trademarked, highly stylised use of blood, guts and violence still bursts to the fore on occasion.’

Louise Keller, Urban Cinephile: ‘Drama, horror-fest, romance, spy thriller and comedy with tinges of slapstick are lovingly and theatrically style-slapped into shape by the fearless Tarantino, whose child-like enthusiasm infused with graphic violence, is easily imagined.’

Jim Schembri, The Age: ‘Of course, you shouldn’t make fun of the Holocaust. But there’s nothing in the movie rule book that says you can’t have fun with the Holocaust … what really makes Inglourious Basterds stick out … is its sheer playfulness … a comic burst of violence (Aldo loves etching swastikas into the foreheads of his Nazi captives)…’

Everyone remarks on the amount of violence on display, but then it serves ‘a dual purpose, moral and aesthetic’, does it not?

+++

Comic violence

I think it was the novelist Don DeLillo who coined the phrase, in a remark something like this: It took America to create comic violence.

Basterds has a full super-sized serving of the ol’ ultraviolence, but it’s all okay, because of its: ‘almost child-like glee’; ‘child-like enthusiasm infused with graphic violence’; ’sheer playfulness’ – because it is ‘naughty’; ‘irreverent, irresistibly entertaining’.

None of this would be of moment except that the film is riding at the top of the Aussie box office, and at the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it has scored a rarified 88% “Fresh” score. (See below for some contrary, negative reviews.)

And who would be so churlish as not to applaud a mission leader who vows to ‘dee-stroy those gnatzis’ and proceeds to do so with those all-American symbols: baseball bat and Bowie knife? (He equates Germans to Nazis: ‘The Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty they endured at our hands.’)

So in that frame of mind let us see how the American Empire is faring in the corners of one of their more recent, factual wars. This is from Salon’s indispensable Glen Greenwald who has recently posted the bluntly titled ‘What every American should be made to learn about the IG [Inspector General's] Torture Report’. Which is, according to US Attorney General Eric Holder, “a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.” Greenwald’s post includes these funkily redacted items from the report:

Threats of execution:

Threats to kill detainee and his children:

Threats to rape detainee’s female relatives in front of him:

+++

Rather less violent than Tarantino…

But hey wait, Tarantino’s film is just fun, right?! It’s just a jolly jape. It begins with the words ‘Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France…’ Code: a fairy story, right? And after all, as Karl Quinn noted, the filmmaker is only working ‘on the terms that Tarantino set for himself, at any rate.’

It should be recognised the whole film is a revenge-fantasy, and therefore nothing can be taken seriously. But that’s not quite true, because Tarantino manipulates you, requires you to take one thing seriously – that the German/Nazi, each and everyone, is a vicious, merciless, evil monster. This is the prerequisite for enjoying all the fun times ahead.

*MILD SPOILER ALERT* He does this in the very first scene where a German officer, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, psychologically tortures, with prolonged sadistic pleasure – which is, of course, a sadistic pleasure provided by the film director – an otherwise virtuous French farmer to give up the Jewish family* he is hiding, implying he will let the farmer’s own family live. On the betrayal the officer has his men kill the family in long, protracted rakes of their guns across the floorboards.

And at every step of the way right to the end the German/Nazi is shown that he cannot be trusted (only one German woman is featured and she is a double spy, on the side of the angels); that he will be ruthless and murderous, and if given even the tiniest opening – as in a particularly mean moment adjunct to the climax – he will kill you. So, Tarantino forces your assent that these vermin – German/Nazis – deserve the cruel worst. And then Tarantino applies, in ironic film-buff, film-theorist, postmodern fashion: comic violence. Which provide catharsis and laughter.

Karl Quinn’s final words on the matter:

‘Then again, it could just be a vile piece of exploitation cinema. It’s a bloody good one though.’

+++

I must have known what was in store; I’m sure I did. Apart from a long, draggy talky scene, it wasn’t boring; Tarantino gives good fireworks. But I have to say I’ve lost my tolerance for American gore. With comic violence. It’s all of a piece, what’s on the screen eventually spills over on the streets. Life imitates art. Rah rah rah and so on. But it’s not the intellectualising – it’s the brutalising. When I stop feeling brutalised by multiple scenes of brutal violence, comic or not, is when I’ll need to have a long sabbatical in a quiet country town in the South Island of New Zealand, like Gore or Clinton.

Tarantino in the Guardian: ‘Well, if people are offended by it, I don’t care,’ he snaps. ‘I’m going to do what I do.’

Quite. Yup. It’s only a movie, only Hollywood. Not like, say, Reality TV. Or actual war. The Americans, after all, are famously able to separate fact from fantasy.

_____

*Jewish farmers (!) in the French countryside in 1941 (!) called Dreyfus (!) Now that’s fast and loose.

Some negative reviews:

Crikey’s Luke Buckmaster: ‘Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is leader of the Basterds, who improbably survive for years in France, enjoying – and I do mean enjoying – a rampant killing season with the ultimate intention of finding Hitler and sending him to hell. The premise sounds action-packed but it’s mostly hot air and yackety-yak.’

The New Yorker’s grouchy David Denby, with a really serious, malicious *SPOILER* which I will resist repeating: ‘Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager … Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish boys … spolier removed …), but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated.’

Lee Siegel at the Daily Beast turns the tables with a wild and wicked rant, in Tarantino mode, right at the end of his calibrated piece. No Spolier but lots of Language, Violence:

‘So let me try for a new type of criticism that might match idioms with Tarantino’s films and rise to meet them on their own terms. I would like to challenge him to a fight that will decide the validity of hollow, movie-think violence. More particularly, I would like to knock his fucking teeth out of his mouth, break the bridge of his nose and push it up into his head. To hell with seven types of ambiguity, the objective correlative, and the anxiety of influence. Let the blood flow out of his ears, and then let him watch as I shatter his kneecaps, pulverize his ribs, and—yes, indeed—rip the scalp off his fucking vacant head.

‘I’ll meet this glorified videogame programmer anywhere in Manhattan he wants. (As long as I’m home to pick my son up at nursery school at 5.) And don’t let him tell me that my invitation is out of context, full of movie-talk, and juvenile. I’m not buying that. Not anymore.’

_____

Previous posts:
Obama’s holiday reading list (and, Books I’ve Bought But Haven’t Read, Vol. 1)
The Joy of Irrelevance

Comments (8) | Permalink

Obama’s holiday reading list (and, Books I’ve Bought But Haven’t Read, Vol. 1)

August 26, 2009 – 12:09 pm, by W H Chong

obamabooks

2,400 pages. That’s what President Obama’s vacation (to use the Yankeeism) reading entails according to the White House, as reported by Slate’s invaluable John Dickerson:

The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York’s Lower East Side;
Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
John Adams by David McCullough;
Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

‘What does this list of American authors tell us about the president? Well, it’s not as fun as the year Bush decided to read Camus’ The Stranger. George Bush reading a French Existentialist is like Obama reading a Cabela’s [huntin'-fishin' sportswear] catalog. Plus, it was a story about a one-time layabout turned unrepentant Arab killer, which, if you wanted to overinterpret things, gave you enough material to get you through a few packs of Gauloises.’

Dickerson concludes in pre-emptive double-guessing Beltway style that as the list is all white male authors, and ‘given his aides’ penchant for cleaning up little things like this, we’ll soon see the president with a copy of Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women.’

+++

As a rather distinguished writer himself of both books and speeches, I’m sorry that Obama’s selection doesn’t excite me at all. Richard Price is a terrific crime writer and crime is a perversely good hoilday choice, but allowing that he needs a change from his mountain of briefing papers one might have expected quirkier or brighter and comic titles.

But those who read in a glass library (if only) should resist picking up the first stone.

The President’s list prompted me to consider the books I have bought in the last while in the unrealistic hope of quiet hours absorbed with pleasure. Here is one list below. Among that group are US & UK hardbacks, a kind of book object I love, which eventually find their way to the discount table at my local independent bookshop. No doubt I’m part of a sizable demographic which often enjoys coveting and buying a book more than reading it. (But only if, of course, that book already has the it factor.)
___

booksbought1

___

My Sister’s Hand in Mine – The Collected Works of Jane Bowles.
Giving Up the Ghost – A Memoir, by Hilary Mantel.
Between Stations, by Kim Cheng Boey (immigrant autobiographical “travel” essays.)
The Heart of Things – Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century, by A.C. Grayling (heard him on Late Night Live a few months back.)
Against the Machine – Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, by Lee Siegel (actually reading this! – in which Siegel interrogates the claim that the web encourages individualism; he concludes that it often does the opposite. He is an acerbic critic – check him out at the Daily Beast.)
How Fiction Works, by James Wood (bought on Amazon; slowly sipping at this fine distillation by the book critic.)
Equals, by Adam Phillips (essays by the head Freudian: on the one hand, trashed in the Guardian and on the other, praised in the Observer! Interesting to note the scalar relationship between author and title type. )
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All – An Unlikely Love Story, by Christina Thompson (an American academic washes up in NZ and marries a Maori named Seven; a mash-up of colonial history and autobiographical romance. I know someone in the States who’s a friend of Thompson so I feel very inclined to read this – certainly didn’t buy it for the cover, which fails the splendid title.)
Baking – From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan (fantastic reading, or leafing – have made the irresistible peanut butter cookies, left.)
The Sight of Death – An Experiment in Art Writing, by T.J. Clark (two Poussin paintings observed daily over six months: halfway through, but very dense and intense so gave it a rest a month or so ago; it’s in danger of being dumped.)
The Cultivation of Whiteness – Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, by Warwick Anderson (a beautifully packaged Aussie hardback that promises great things.)

Mm, no novels in this block! Most likely because the novels got read, finished, returned to the library (& as I read fiction manuscripts all the time, the novelistic promise has to really sing.)

Comments (0) | Permalink

The Joy of Irrelevance

August 25, 2009 – 11:04 am, by W H Chong

khayyam

Just to make one thing quite clear: This blog is irrelevant.

Hope that’s alright, then. But, what’s this all about?

Yesterday I posted on The September Issue, a film about US Vogue and its editor, Anna Wintour. A reader commented:

‘Ho hum. A blog about a film about a magazine about an unreal narcissistic pseudo-world. Could this any less relevant?’ [sic]

I see his point (he is “Stevo the Working Twistie”). And I raise his point: not only was that post irrelevantish, this entire blog is irrelevant.

I do not, of course, speak for that other “unreal narcissistic pseudo-world”, Fashion (worth $300 billion a year in worldwide jobs and products).

Here is a semi-irrelevant aside. From the Marxist/Catholic/BritLitCrit Terry Eagleton:

‘[God is] every bit as gloriously pointless as [atheists] tells us he is. He is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.’

Right right, no, I’m not equating the contents of this blog with the mind of god. Or that anything one might read here approaches a critique of intrumental reason.

Why, some of my best friends are reasoning instruments.

Only that – all of the time, some kind of truth resides in beauty. And if much of the time it is hard to parse that truth, we can still feel sure of its presence.

Only that – what interests one is always relevant. (Dr Johnson: ‘no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.’) But then again, we’ll never all agree on what’s of interest.

Only that – if we have an amiable conversation in pleasant surroundings, that is sufficient reason, if not of an instrumental kind…

11
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

(Omar Khayyam, trans. Ed. FitzGerald)

Now, that’s glorious pointlessness. And I guess that’s quite enow.

Comments (2) | Permalink

The Hollywood strangle, and a broken bowl

If Sci-fi is a genre, then so is Literature

Reading without merit

We are always really carrying a ladder, but it’s invisible

Compared to what?

Griffith Review: sexier ideas

Home Sweet Village

Tarantino and “comic violence”

Obama’s holiday reading list (and, Books I’ve Bought But Haven’t Read, Vol. 1)

The Joy of Irrelevance

About

From the Latest

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Pages

Categories

Archives

Crikey Blogs