Jeeves & Wooster

Watching the TV series 'Jeeves & Wooster' which completely passed me by and I'm keen to fill in a cultural blank. I'm not sure it aired on Australian television at all and the first I heard about it was glimpsing a VHS copy at my local library.


I'm struck by a couple of things about Hugh Laurie's performance as the bright young thing Bertie Wooster. It's not the least surprising that he is a great and gifted comic actor. That was obvious since his turn as the idiot Prince Regent in the second series of Blackadder, but just how good he is is a constant revelation, particularly doing pure physical comedy. At these times, his resemblance to Stan Laurel is amazing, especially while doing a certain gormless, self-satisfied smirk.


I'm reminded of Stephen Fry's comment during his recent Sydney appearance that he was surprised, upon meeting young Hugh during their Footlights days, by his assured comedic chops. Laurie was a natural comedian who seemed to have been born with a full comic toolbox at his disposal.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'

Bertie attempting to describe a Member of Parliament upon making his acquaitance in Wodehouse's 'Jeeves and the Impending Doom'.

Ayn Rand's inner fruitbat

Marieke Hardy attempting to review Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged':

Rand is batshit crazy. By all accounts she used to swan about wearing a swooshy velvet cape adorned with silver dollar signs which may be considered a charming sartorial quirk on someone like Flavor Flav but is less appealing on a Benzedrine-addicted old fruitbat chewing her face off and squawking about objectivism. That she's still considered so 'influential' by a few raving lunatics who seem unable to fathom that Shrugged's gun-toting erection for deductive logic go hand-in-hand with its rather firm anti-Jesus beliefs says more about her followers than it does about the work itself.

Readers might also like to follow up with a viewing of 'The Fountainhead' (1949), which is surely one of the funniest serious movies ever made, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that Gary Cooper, playing Rand alter-ego Howard Roark, takes the whole thing utterly seriously.

Its striding, clench-jawed phallocentrism gives Freudians everywhere something to laugh at as Gary Cooper struggles vainly against the nonentities who surround him to achieve an erection (he is an architect) on his own terms.












So stand with clenched fists, feet apart, lift your chin, look to the horizon and repeat after me (keeping in mind that this is movie dialogue!):

Howard Roark: The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks, the parasite copies. The creator produces, the parasite loots. The creator's concern is the conquest of nature - the parasite's concern is the conquest of men. The creator requires independence, he neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power, he wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery. He claims that man is only a tool for the use of others. That he must think as they think, act as they act, and live is selfless, joyless servitude to any need but his own. Look at history. Everything thing we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every horror and destruction came from attempts to force men into a herd of brainless, soulless robots. Without personal rights, without personal ambition, without will, hope, or dignity. It is an ancient conflict. It has another name: the individual against the collective!

Lord of the Fries

Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, 2009

Eating eyren in Kent

William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the preface to Eneydos in 1490 in which he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the 'tamyse' for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer’s wife and “axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys” but was met with blank looks by the wife who answered that she “coude speke no frenshe.” The sailors had traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were eyren and would remain so for at least another fifty years.

From Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue: The English Language'.

Design for Obama

It was an experiment in linking grassroots activism with the political machine using new technology, and it is being studied by wonks around the world.

Hundreds of artists and designers expressed support for the Obama candidacy by designing posters and submitting them to designforobama.org for free download. Many of these were actually taken up by the campaign, and others just travelled the superhighway as viral emails, making their point on their own.

Taschen is publishing Design for Obama. Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology This selection of the best, curated by Spike Lee and Aaron Perry-Zucker, is a visual document of this most inspirational U.S. presidential campaign.

'Cold Comfort Farm'

I’ve just had a thoroughly good time reading Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, and marvelling that a satirical novel published in 1932 could still be so much fun, long after the sources of the joke have faded or disappeared entirely.

It was intended as a satire of the fashionable rural novels of the time, sending up authors who are mostly forgotten or of interest only because she did them over. The exception is D.H. Lawrence, who was only the most self-consciously highbrow exemplar of the style.

For a first novel by a young woman in her twenties, when most novels were not by young women let alone those in their twenties, it is astonishingly self-assured and full of energy. She was a journalist and book-reviewer at the time and I can imagine the implied pressure not to burn bridges with those she might bump into at the next cocktail party, not to mention those who might employ her in the future. What a gamble.

In a strange, knowing flourish, she even flags paragraphs with an asterisk when she’s being particularly naughty, on a scale from one to three. Hence:

*** The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman… Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-coloured, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his…

Phew! And the punch line:

He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros.

I have seen the more recent film of the book, directed by John Schlesinger and featuring Ian McKellan and Eileen Atkins. Even after reading the novel, I still think it is extremely good. It actually adds something to the experience of reading the book. I heard their broad rustic accents in my head as I went.

Some juicy bits. McKellan as amateur preacher Amos, discovers his gift move the humble folk of the Church of the Quivering Brethren with terrible enthusiasm:

"Ye miserable, crawling worms, are ye here again, then? Have ye come like Nimshi son of Rehoboam, secretly out of yer doomed houses to hear what’s comin’ to ye? Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins (if there is any virgins among ye, which is not likely, the world bein’ in the wicked state it is), old men and young lads, to hear me tellin’ o’ the great crimson lickin’ flames o’ hell fire?"

. . .

In novels, persons who turned to religion to obtain the colour and excitement which everyday life did not give them were all grey and thwarted. Probably the Brethren would be all grey and thwarted… though it was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

I kept wondering what George Orwell would have made of Stella Gibbons. As, I suppose, a good journalist, her prose showed all the virtues of concision and clarity that he regarded so highly. As a novel with a political heart, he would have found its lack of class consciousness highly questionable, and her feminism just a little beyond his definition of progressive, as limited by his time and place as that was. I searched the index of the ‘Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters’ without result. A pity, but she would have found his asceticism a bit much, not to mention his lack of a sense of humour. Cheer up you earnest old socialist and have a glass of champagne!

They would have bonded over a shared disdain for literary and cultural pretension. Here is Mybug, a sexually obsessed intellectual, as he attempts to engage in fruitful conversation with a visiting Hollywood talent scout, a Mr Earl P. Neck, on the lookout for the next matinee idol.

“’Have you ever seen Alexander Fin?’ asked Mr Mybug. I saw him in Pepin’s last film, ‘La Plume de Ma Tante’, in Paris last January. Very amusing stuff. They all wore glass clothes, you know, and moved in time to a metronome.”

The heart of the novel is Gibbons’ heroine (and alter ego, given that she was herself a smart go-getter under thirty) Flora Poste, a new woman, one of the bright young things, wilful, assertive, with a very low tolerance for self indulgence and a passion for tidiness in all its forms:

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.

One of the advantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.

All the inmates of Cold Comfort sustain themselves on various fruits of misery, which each of them invokes to justify their refusal to engage with life and its real potential. “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” screams the gothic Aunt Ada from her refuge and throne at the top of the house, where she is the master of all she can see.

The wordly-wise, sophisticated busybody Flora Post sees her mission in tidying up the place, which means making herself the catalyst for change and emotional resolution for each character in turn. This is framed at the beginning of the novel as Flora simply concocting something to keep herself busy, but the author's intention is quiet serious.

When she’s not being witty with extreme prejudice, Gibbons has a point to make, which she stitches seamlessly into the novel. It is something to do with life and way it should be lived in the shadow of the grave, which is to say, not in the shadow of the grave, but in the light. Life is other people.

A little later, as she sat peacefully sewing, Adam came in from the yard. He wore, as a protection from the rain, a hat which had lost – in who knows what hintermith of time – the usual attributes of shape, colour and size, and those more subtle race-memory associations which identify hats as hats, and now resembled some obscure natural growth, some moss or sponge or fungus, which had attached itself to a host.

An added bonus: it comes in the beautiful new/old Penguin Classics, in all their lovely orangeness.

Great Ideas, great design

I have mentioned Penguin's release of the Penguin 70s before. I had a vague feeling that they were connected with the very differently wonderful 'Great Ideas' series as part of some festival of republishing Penguin were indulging in.

The Penguin 70s were commissioned from many different designers, reflecting the eclectic nature of their unmatched back catalogue. While the Great Ideas are extremely diverse in style, I never knew the whole series originated with the same company, David Pearson Design.

Thanks to Daniel at Nevolution, I've been introduced to David Pearson's website which is itself a paragon of elegance, economy and simplicity, exactly the values the best Penguin book designs embody.

The first surprise for me was that there are two more 'Great Ideas' series (Blue and Green)...




...but there are also German-only editions with beautiful covers.



There is also a stunning series of 'Great Loves' editions, which are breathtaking. For an idea that could have been so corny, the result justifies the entire rerelease project. I want to see them and hold them in my hand, but most importantly, I want to read them.




I agree with Daniel, Tschichold and Lane would indeed be proud.

Court cites Lewis Carroll as precedent

It's not often you hear Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark' quoted in open court, but it's a habit that should be encouraged.

An American federal appeals court found that accusations against a Guantanamo Bay detainee who had been held for more than six years were based on slim, unverifiable claims, the New York Times reports. A three-judge panel said the government was affectively contending that its accusations against the man should be accepted because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the declaration by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll's 'Snark': "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

The Justice Department declined to comment. It is known, however, what Lewis Carroll would have thought.

Please, a real, 1940s, Cold War James Bond!

The 28th of May is the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth.

I read a few Bond books in my callow youth but I’ve never felt that they were as necessary a piece of pop-culture as, say, Raymond Chandler, whose books are a lot more fun.

The James Bond films on the other hand, are unavoidable. Even when they’re terrible, as they so often are, there is something effortlessly comfortable about the formula. I noticed this recently when local TV was running a season, and I watched most of them, but only up until the opening credits. As anyone familiar with the oeuvre would know, these are the bits containing a pointlessly thrilling action vignette which sometimes sets up the plot, and sometimes not.

By far the most pointless and irritating thing about Bond films is how they attempt to maintain the relevance of this sexist relic into the present day. To get a sense of what I mean, just try and imagine James Bond sitting in front of a PC trawling through hours of blog and Youtube posts for intelligence material, which is what most modern intelligence agencies spend a great deal of their time doing.

Watching one of the recent films (except Casino Royale, which is quite good), I often wish the ghost of Graham Chapman, in his Colonel’s uniform, would stride into shot waving his riding crop: “Stop it! Stop it! This is silly…”

Remember that Fleming's first Bond novel opened with the sentence: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning." If the producers had balls and really wanted to inject some life into the whole franchise, they would put James Bond back in the 1940s, where he belongs.

I want to see a real Cold War Bond, who fights shady Russian spies while Senator Joseph McCarthy rails on black-and-white television. A Bond who has a martini for breakfast, who is getting closer to the wrong side of forty. A slightly seedy Bond, who wakes up smelling bad, still in his crumpled tuxedo. A Bond who drops into MI6 headquarters for a briefing to find ageing military men lounging around on leather sofas in clouds of cigarette smoke and alluring secretaries behind big wooden desks with filing cabinets and pencil sharpeners. A Bond with a sense of cruelty around the eyes, capable of shooting a double agent without a hint of regret.

Think of the possibilities! We could still have the silly gadgets, but they would be elaborate mechanical listening devices that fit behind the face of a stylish vintage airman’s watch. Bring back the Walther PPK and code-breaking, shots of Stalin on the television, spies searching grimy hotel rooms for mechanical bugs, trading ration vouchers for information. James Bond in the dowdy world, when people still dressed for dinner. Bond in Graham Greene’s post-war Berlin, crossing over into the Russian zone like a character in The Third Man.

Someone, indeed, like this fellow:


Jason Isaacs, the perfect James Bond?

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

I picked up the third volume in the multi-part series of Picasso biographies by John Richardson with much excitement. It is very heavy and very expensive, not usually qualities that I look for in a biography but the first two were landmarks that I often turn to.

Unfortunately, the series is starting to get a little cranky and opinionated and Richardson’s interpretations of the works themselves a bit redundant, his grasp of the theory obscure. He uncritically accepts, for example, the greatness of the relatively short-lived ‘neo-classical’ period, when I believe Picasso himself quickly came to regard them as a dead-end. Whenever I’ve come across them in travelling shows, they have always looked overblown and empty compared with what came before. They look like battery-recharging exercises to me. Richardson intimates that they might have been done to impress his new conservative and socially ambitious wife, which chimes with Picasso’s ingratiating behaviour at the time.

There are several annoyances. Jean Cocteau was a constant figure in Picasso’s circle, often to his irritation, especially during the 1920s and the long association with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Yet Richardson never lets a mention of Cocteau’s name go by with attaching a derogatory adjective to it. Now, it is incontestable that Cocteau could be an annoying, craven, social climbing little greaser, who was constantly trying to ingratiate himself with any passing member of society with a healthy bank balance, a bit of talent or a good arse. But let’s not forget people, that we are also talking about the author of La Belle et la Bette and Blood of a Poet. I, the reader, am quite capable of coming to my own conclusions about Cocteau’s behaviour without the author’s constant editorialising.

And why the squeamishness when it comes to Olga’s illness? This is not an unimportant detail. Picasso’s apparent horror at her symptoms was exploited in the vast canon of works dealing explicitly with Olga throughout the 1920s and 30s, so I would say the question is a critical one. Several times, Richardson insinuates that it was a gynaecological condition that remained uncured or inaccurately diagnosed following Paulo’s birth. He suggests it was something (he won’t say what) that resulted in haemorrhages, hence the frequent depiction of Olga in the later works as a screaming harpy clothed in various permutations of blood red. Is it a fault of research? Or does it reflect Richardson’s own prejudices? The reluctance to ‘go there’ seems disappointingly sexist, if that’s what it is. By all accounts Olga was a difficult customer and probably a nightmare to be married to, whether one happened to be a self-obsessed macho like Picasso or not. She certainly seems to have been mentally fragile, but Richardson’s persistent habit of connecting this to her ‘woman’s problems’ seems to reveal an odd Victorian-era connection between the uterus and ‘hysteria’. Whatever, it is not good enough.

Still, Picasso is vividly present on the page. This volume covers his famous ‘sell-out’ period when he shunned his grubby bohemian friends and took up fine clothes, socialising on a big scale, grand villas both in the country and the city and a very big car for the sake of Olga and her social pretensions. Probably his social pretensions as well, as this wasn’t a brief moment in Picasso’s life, but a fertile couple of decades.

Olga Khoklova the former ballerina is the big hole in this volume. Her personality remains remote. We get very little sense of this strange woman’s qualities, the qualities that a man as complex as Picasso found so captivating. Richardson just seems to note Picasso’s friends’ dismissal of her as a blank without trying too hard to dispel the impression, which was surely wrong.

Picasso was a complete shit to the women in his life, but then that is hardly news. He did, however, have a few saving personal graces. I particularly liked Picasso’s habit of getting about in his enormous town car with its Erich Von Stroheim look-alike chauffeur while dressed in paint-spattered work clothes. As far as I can tell from the picture, we’re talking about exactly the kind of car Norma Desmond got around in in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. That’s class you can’t fake.

It’s interesting that we are talking about Picasso now at all. Certainly his life, his art and his career are absolutely at odds with our era’s preoccupation with the political consequences of identity. Interesting because one can’t separate Picasso’s identity from the art for long. To even begin discussing Picasso’s constantly anthropomorphic work of the late 1920s and early 30s is impossible without unpacking his idea of sex, which is deeply antifeminist. Reading the book, I kept imagining myself standing in front of a class of eighteen year-old shrinking violets saying things like “Notice the internal rhyme between the female figure’s mouth and her vagina”, and “See how the sleeping Marie-Therese’s profile becomes the artist’s penis”. I shudder to think of it.



Is it definitive? Certainly not. There is much to be thankful for, but still questions that remain unanswered.

A school for disenchantment

Looking at Modernism: the Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond by Peter Gay, I came across this passage in a discussion of Proust and what Proust called "the intermittences of the heart":

The expression tersely epitomises one of Proust's most disheartening, and most irresistible, conclusions about the vicissitudes of existence: the human heart fails when its endurance and judgement are most needed. Life is many things, to be sure, but most conspicuously it adds up to a vast array of mistakes, of mismatches, of sentiments out of phase with realities, of experiences not reflected in feelings. We get experiences wrong; everyone gets experiences wrong... Life therefore, is a perpetual act of revising, of correcting, what we think we know; it is a school for disenchantment.

Somehow I think Michael Leddy might agree.

Billy Wilder: "A little bit less"

I’m having a ball reading Cameron Crowe’s book of interviews with the great Billy Wilder. The book is a fount of hilarious stories and sharp observations from one of the funniest and sharpest men who ever worked in Hollywood.

This from a man who was then past ninety years old. He sounded like he still had a few films in him even then.

He is talking about Jack Lemmon, who was one of the great comic actors but whose broad, busy style is out of fashion now. Young Jack is working on his first movie with old pro George Cukor, and he’s trying a bit too hard.

His first day on a sound stage, with George Cukor directing, he’s all revved up. He rattles down half a page of dialogue – and then there’s “Cut!” and he looks at Cukor. Cukor comes up to him and says, “It was just wonderful, you’re going to be a big, big star. However… when it comes to that big speech, please, please, a little less, a little bit less. You know, in the theatre, we’re back in a long shot and you have to pour it on. But in film, you cut to close up and you cannot be that strong.”

So he does it again, less. And again Cukor says, “Wonderful! Absolutely marvellous. Now let’s do it again, a little bit less.” Now after ten or eleven times, Mr Cukor admonishing him “a little less,” Mr Lemmon says, “Mr Cukor, for God’s sake, you know pretty soon I won’t be acting at all.”

Cukor says, “Now you’re getting the idea.”

Untold Stories

One of the only nice things about having a birthday that more or less coincides with Christmas is that I usually end up with a stack of books I've received as presents with which to while away the January holidays. Last year was no different, and the first book I directed my attentions to was Alan Bennett's 'Untold Stories'.

This is a sort of sequel to 'Writing Home' which I read probably about ten years ago and which shot immediately to my mental list of favourites. I was watching his 'Talking Heads' monologues at the time, and began to collect every Bennett play I could find.

I'd previously been a passionate fan of that generation of British comedians who arose out of the 'satire boom' round about 1960. I'm talking about Peter Cook, Bennett, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Monty Python, Eleanor Bron, John Bird, John Fortune and all the many others. So I had a context for Bennett's humour, but this was the first time I'd really encountered his quizzical, melancholic, humane and occasionally biting way of putting the world.

This book, like 'Writing Home', is a collection non-fiction, autobiography and diary entries, that taken together, convincingly conjur up a whole world. Or rather several, since Bennett is the gay son of a Yorkshire butcher who went to Oxford, hung out with glamorous people, was funny in public, and became a deceptively substantial playwright and almost despite himself, a public figure. His observations are canny, finely observed and never lacking in compassion. Though there is in this book a tendency to go on a bit, almost certainly a result of the circumstances under which a good deal of it was written, namely a diagnosis of cancer with an uncertain future. I forgive him for it.

But within the pages of these two books is an outlook and an effortless literary style which probably stamps a life lived from the 1930s into the 21st Century just as definitively as Samuel Pepys did the late 17th Century. There are examples of utterly characteristic, well-crafted, funny observations on every page.

Like this one, in the piece called 'Going to the Pictures', written after he was made a Trustee of the National Gallery. He's talking about his first introductory tour of the gallery.

Mine was at nine in the morning, when I find it hard to look the milkman in the eye let alone a Titian.

Or this, spoken at the funeral of the fearlessly homosexual Russell Harty:

Cheek, though not quite a virtue, belongs in the other ranks of courage.

Does anyone else in the English language sound like this?

'Midnight in Sicily'

One evening several years ago I was driving home from Bendigo down empty country roads, and a voice on the radio began describing in the most voluptuous detail a market day in the city of Palermo; the colour, noise and smells of a city on the other side of the world that filled my ears, nose and eyes. The smell of the day's catch, the overpowering heat and colour of filtered Sicilian sunlight beneath awnings, hanging meat still dripping from the recent kill, the shock of colour in new-picked vegetables; and all the time, in my guts, I could feel a certain insistent menace tugging like a fish-hook.



This was the Vucciria, in the mid-70s, the marketplace in Palermo that gave Peter Robb his most powerful sensual charge on arrival in the ancient city. The voice I heard was a Radio National broadcast of the first chapter of this astonishing book.

That menace, which invisibly fills the pages like a secret translation, is made painfully concrete in the details of Italy's recent history which are laid out here. But this is much more than a history of the mafia and its collaborations with Italy’s political class, a history recounted with more detail elsewhere. It is a kind of thesis, which is never stated outright, but which is the implication of the book as a whole. The thesis is that it is impossible to separate the political, culinary, artistic, criminal, architectural, literary, geographic, social and historical aspects of Italian culture without doing violence to one or all of them. Mafia, just as much as gelati or the paintings of Renato Guttuso, is a product of the Italian character; and one can’t come to a complete understanding of one without at least a partial understanding of the others.

This is where the book’s quality and its strangeness lies. Reading the reviews on the Amazon.com website, you can see how challenging and even unsatisfactory many people find this. What kind of book is this anyway? they seem to ask, unable to accommodate the fact that it can be historical nonfiction, memoir, art criticism and food writing all at once, often within a single page.

I was reminded of this when I came across this statement by Giulio Andreotti, the former Prime Minister and associate of some very dangerous people, about Sicily:

"I found myself with my stomach full of marvelous but terrible food, the pasta con le sarde, the cassata; and not only did I not understand a thing there but I was ill too. I wonder whether there's a connection between food like this and the growth of the mafia."

I read this book a few years ago, prompted into finding it by that radio broadcast, and bought it for friends. The main effect it had on me was to awaken a burning desire to see Italy, in particular the mezzogiorno, to study the language and read anything I could get my hands on about Italy’s recent history and particularly the mafia. I’m finally getting to satisfy that desire later this year.

If I have a criticism, it’s with the final quarter of the book, which deals mostly with the painful last months and death of the Sicilian expressionist Renato Guttuso, who recorded the Vucciria in all its glory. By this time, the weight of all the corpses recorded in the previous chapters starts to burden the reader, and the blood and the corruption becomes tedious and depressing. Right when the book really should be gathering to its climax, it begins to fall away and ends with a whimper.

The book has no reproductions, even though a great deal of time is taken describing pictures, like the painting by Guttuso of the Vucciria. And the lack of an index is a serious flaw, especially given that this the sort of book you end up picking up and rereading as certain things come back into focus every time you hear those names again on the news. Because this is a very recent history indeed. More information is coming to light all the time about the events recounted here.

I notice that since this book was published, Sicily’s main airport was re-named after the heroic antimafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellino. This is a good sign in a country which officially didn’t even admit the existence of the mafia until the 1980s, years after the word had become a cliché in Hollywood movies.

The world looks to Italy with the same fondness it reserves for very few others, like Ireland maybe; countries we all recognise have given us something important. We hope the spirit of the nation wins out, despite the spivs and chancers like Andreotti and the repellant Berlusconi.

The quality of Peter Robb's writing which stays in the mouth after you’ve read it is its overpowering sensuality, tinged with blood. It has the quality of a testimonial, given with generosity but also with truth. After reading it again, I felt that these are the sorts of things that need to be said, the history that certain countries have got to live with if they’ve got any chance at all.

Author unaware of own book

Who would have thunk it? This woman has never read a book ‘in her life’.

The Age yesterday alerted us to this fact. It also alerted me to the fact that Victoria Beckham is apparently also an author, which is quite an achievement when you think about it. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing!

As the Age’s links time-out after a week, I thought I’d post it all here.

Posh's book boast
August 15, 2005 - 12:14PM

Victoria Beckham says she has never read a book.

Former Spice Girl singer Victoria Beckham, the wife of England soccer captain David, has confessed she has never read a book.

Despite struggling for a hit record for some time, Victoria Beckham said she never had a spare moment to leaf through anything more challenging than fashion magazines.

The Sunday Mirror newspaper revealed the shock admission after seeing a forthcoming edition of high society magazine Chic.

The confession is all the more startling given that it would appear to include her own autobiography, Learning to Fly, and that of her husband, My Side.

"I haven't read a book in my life. I haven't got enough time. I prefer to listen to music, although I do love fashion magazines," she was quoted as saying.

- AFP

We should initiate some sort of award for this sort of thing. Maybe it can be called the ‘Elle MacPherson Award for Services to Illiteracy’, in honour of Elle’s remarkable claim several years ago that she thought it improper to read words she had not written herself. Keep fighting the good fight, girls.

Thanks are due to Freeway 9 for this little bit of joy.

The real Harry Potter steps from the shadows

In shocking news today, the real Harry Potter has emerged from hiding to castigate the author J K Rowling for inaccuracies in her hugely succesful biographies of the troubled wizard.

Showing the terrible effects of years of Butterbeer abuse, and sporting a truly dreadful jumper knitted for him by his mother-in-law Mrs Weasley, Mr Potter said he was also in rehab, recovering from a long addiction to Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans.

It appears that all this time, Mr Potter was in semi-seclusion teaching Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, under an assumed identity as ‘Andrew Watson.’

Mr Potter is in negotiation with a leading publisher to sell the rights to his terrible story, and it is understood movie rights have been sold to Quentin Tarantino, who is in script development for the project to be titled ‘Kung Fu Quidditch.’

Ms Rowling is in consultation with litigation lawyers and is refusing comment. It is believed Mr Potter is claiming six-figure damages; money which he intends to split between the ‘Dumbledore Memorial Hospital for Aged and Bewildered Wizards’; and his gambling debts.


Before and after: Harry Potter counts the terrible cost.

'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'

Things have been a bit quiet this week around our house, as the place hummed with the silence of satisfied reading. This came to an end last night as I emerged blinking into the light clutching my daughter’s copy of the latest Harry Potter. A book, I might add, which has already been read by three other pairs of eyes since it was released a few weeks ago.

The aforementioned daughter announced that she had finished the book sometime on a Sunday morning, a little over twenty-four hours after booksellers first cut the thing from secure cardboard boxes and placed it on the store shelves.

I’m usually pretty immune from these mass pop culture obsessions that grip the population from time to time. I’ve never read the ‘Da Vinci Code’ for example, have never bought a Maria Carey album, still haven’t seen ‘The Blair Witch Project’ or ‘Titanic’. This doesn’t give me much to talk about to hairdressers, but I have an instinctive dislike for compulsory fashions in taste. I’m not saying I’m too good for them, but it’s just the unthinking conformism that I object to.

This has all come unstuck with the tribulations of Harry and the wizards of Hogwarts. Reading it, I felt like I was a participant in a global mind-meld, a mass exercise in group therapy allowing us all to forget about terrorist bombs and fanatics and the clash of uncivilisations, escaping into fantasy for just a few hours.

While acres of print have been dedicated to arguing about Harry’s relative worth or worthlessness in the cultural scheme of things, I’d like to at least own up to the opinion that Rowling’s writing possesses just enough of the spirit of Charles Dickens to entertain so deeply that you forget where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing while you’re reading it.

For those who might think that the comparison to Dickens is unwarranted, I’d just tell them to look to beautifully drawn minor characters and in particular, the utterly convincing description of the new teacher Professor Slughorn in the new novel. Caricatures they may be, but they’re stronger images for it; and what minor character in Dickens is not a caricature?

Millions of children might disagree with me, but I don’t find the major player in these books anywhere near as convincing. Rowling seems to struggle with Harry at times, and he often functions simply as a catalyst for the actions of others who are more finely drawn. This can be seen most clearly in the last book, ‘The Order of the Phoenix’ where he was more like the irritating teenager who keeps mugging for the camera and spoiling the family photos. I could be wrong here, as the motivations of teenagers are often completely inscrutable to adults (and often to themselves), so maybe it’s asking too much for a writer to open up a character to readers completely, especially when the writer is over thirty.

It’s interesting to consider the place of the movie versions of the books in the minds of readers, how they might actually alter the inner eye of readers of future books, unwritten when the movies were made. I find it impossible now to imagine Rowling’s descriptions of Ron without seeing the mannerisms of the actor Rupert Grint in the role, who completely steals every scene he’s in.

Dumbledore, on the other hand, has been played by both Richard Harris and Michael Gambon, quite different actors, and I find my image of Dumbledore hovers somewhere between the warmth of Harris, the eccentricity of Gambon, and some other qualities unique to the written image on the page.

Other adults, who haven’t read the books, have asked me what the appeal is, and I find this answer both easy and difficult to give. Easy in the sense that the original conception, before Rowling’s pen ever touched the page, is brilliant and does a lot of the work all by itself. Firstly, it’s an old-fashioned school boy’s tale, like ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’ and any number of others; a form at least as old as the British Empire - only it’s a school for witches.

(You can imagine the Hollywood pitch now: 'It's like Tom Brown's School Days - for witches!')

Secondly, it’s set in a recognisable present reality, where the Minister for Magic can suddenly appear in the fireplace at 10 Downing Street for an important discussion with a startled PM about a series of unexplained murders that have been mystifying Scotland Yard. In other words, the enchanted world is not some magical place far far away, but lurks and thrives just outside our peripheral vision, confirming the suspicion of every child that magic is really real, and not just a tale told by grownups in old books.

The other aspect of its appeal is a quality the books share with good science fiction — the fact that the fantastic world described here is internally consistent and therefore believable and could be an alternate reality as real as the one we occupy, at least for as long as we are in it. The book becomes the portal to this other world, which is why when a good fantasy story grips us, we can become slightly obsessed with the book itself, as if it has magical properties.

While Rowling’s literary skills have not always been quite up to the challenge of doing her conception justice, they have improved considerably over the time the books have been written. Chapters don’t meander any more, or get caught up in descriptions of repetitive business about getting to class; now the chapters are tight and propel the reader towards distinctive goals. And you can feel the confidence of the author every time she takes us round some hair-pin turn in the plot or kills off a much-loved character. ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ feels purposeful, not only in the mechanics of plot, but morally as well. Possibly motivated by current events, you feel the author is gripping her own creation by the collar and taking it somewhere she wants this whole generation of children, which are her audience, to go.

The bone-headed ‘Christians’ who condemn Rowling for turning their kids on to witchcraft and the occult obviously haven’t been reading their Bibles closely enough. There is no book more saturated in the supernatural than the Bible. The point is what you do with the knowledge, and I’m reminded that Plato thought knowledge of the truth had two faces: Logos and Mythos — both the real and the imagined. I suspect what Rowling is doing, and the reason these books have connected with children like nothing else for several decades, is that they reawaken the power of Mythos in an age where reality is becoming a little too real to bear.

Robinson Crusoe in the Waste Land

"Concrete Island" by J.G. Ballard

Ballard's universe is a cruel, airless and peculiarly British place, even when his dramas occur in an unspecific everywhere, a generalized Euro-city on the edge of decay.

I looked forward to reading "Concrete Island" as the scenario sounded so unlikely, and therefore possessing one of the qualities of Ballard's best stories. On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, everyman's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the grassy island below, where he is trapped, while the office drones speed past him on their way home from work, the talkback radio drowning out his screams.

Reading Ballard at his best is thrilling, like watching a circus performer on a tightrope. You're aware how precarious it must be keeping everything in the air, yet also appreciating the secret art of it, aware that it's supposed to look hard. The illusion doesn't quite succeed here. It is not quite the masterpiece "Crash" was, though it does share many of that books disturbing themes.

He describes a world like the one we know, yet drained of empathy and common purpose. People, like the figures who populate this "island", scratch about to survive, forced to compete self-destructively and violently for resources while the rest of us, oblivious, rush off to appointments or home for dinner. This is one of the most obviously and persuasively political of Ballard's books. It is however a pity, and a familiar limitation of his writing (and SF generally) that at no time do the characters transcend their function in the novel's machinery and step out to become fully formed creations.

He is a writer of images and ideas, obsessively visual and descriptive, but oddly lacking in the ability to give his characters independant existence.

[Pause] for reflection on Harold Pinter

"The Life and Work of Harold Pinter" by Michael Billington

This is a thoughtful and admirably complete survey of Pinter's life and career so far, even if it betrays the signs of being an "authorized" biography. I say so far because the author makes it very plain that Pinter is far from a spent force, either creatively or politically.

Given the boring and almost ritualistic bollocking (a very Pinteresque word) he receives in the British press every time Pinter signs a petition or attends a protest, the book comes on like a stern corrective, exposing the thoughtless double standard for what it is. Far from being a relatively recent fashionable pose taken by a celebrity intellectual, Billington makes clear that Pinter's political outspokenness is an organic consequence of his work in the theatre, which was essentially political from the start. Pinter's plays have followed a slow arc since the late fifties from the domestic to the more specifically political, but the overriding concern has been the same - the potential for language to conceal rather than to reveal meaning, even to corrupt our need to hope that transparency between people is attainable. Hope for Pinter lies in the potential for resistance to this process through imaginative identification with the sufferings of others.

If I have a criticism, it is the author's tendency to overstatement in sometimes irritating contrast to his subject's famous economy. Also, that equivalence between personal intimate action and political reality comes a little too easy. I mean what does the phrase "sexual Fascism" (p. 377) mean? I suspect that a victim of actual political Fascism might find that glib metaphor offensive. Such phrases, which appear here and there in the book, are an example of the verbal laziness that Pinter himself spends so much time fighting. However, thanks are due to this author for constant emphasis on the actual performance of Pinter's texts, whether written for the screen or the theatre. Billington's comment and analysis of the performances are always insightful and interesting.