June 15, 2008

Hats off

In his essay on George Gissing, George Orwell mentions something that was news to me - as late as about 1918, men who dared to go hatless in public "were booed at in the street." If Orwell was basing this observation on personal experience, I wonder if he examined the possibility that people were in fact booing his hairdo. In his later years at least he looked like Cosmo Kramer with a central part. But I say that with the greatest affection, and with obvious regard for the stringent post-war rationing of hair products.

Just tonight, watching a slightly dull match from the European Football Championships, I found myself wondering about a slightly related question. In the history of professional football, what is the most radical alteration that a player has ever made to his personal appearance during the half-time break? For example: has a player with dreadlocks or elaborate braids ever shaved himself totally bald during the interval? Has a player with a beard ever shaved off just his moustache, or everything except his moustache? Players are big on dyeing their hair between games - but how about during a game? To my knowledge these things wouldn't violate the laws of the game, and they would, for the first few minutes of the second stanza, wreak havoc among the opposition ranks. I seem to recall that Jim Courier once caused a mild stir in the tennis community by reading a copy of Tales of the City during a change of ends. This is the precisely kind of provocative happening I'm calling for. The fact that no footballer has ever so much as tried such a thing is a sad commentary on the regimented nature of the modern game.

Here's another one for you. In the whole history of the world, what is the most mind-bending practical joke ever played by a pair of identical twins? I suppose there's a whole secret history of twin capers that will never come to light. What self-respecting pair of dead ringers, for example, hasn't at least discussed having sex with each other's partners? But that is speculation. What, I ask seriously, is the best recorded twin stunt of all time? I hereby pledge to chase this matter up online and get back to you with some answers.

 

June 13, 2008

The Fury of the Filth

You'd think from watching TV that the police force was some kind of elite agency dedicated to stamping out crime. Is it really? The other night, watching some fictional lab-coated guru tweezing dog fibres off a blanket, or blanket fibres off a dog, I found myself thinking about some of my own more farcical real-life dealings with the law-enforcement community. Here, from my own personal files, are a few cold cases that are destined to remain cold forever.

1. Some years back, at about eleven on a Saturday or Sunday morning, a uniformed police officer knocked on my front door. It would transpire that he had been called to the area by some old lady whose house had been getting rocks thrown at it by some local youths. Anyway: my brother, who happened to be wearing a baseball cap at the time, answered the door. Why he was wearing a cap indoors I can't recall. The point is this: the cop took one look at it and was seized by the bizarre conviction my brother had been one of the malefactors. Perhaps a baseball cap had figured in the old lady's description of the youths. Or perhaps this cop had danced with his fair share of cap-wearing hombres in the past. Either way, I have to tell you that this guy's dirtbag radar was one sorry piece of equipment. My brother was at the time about 23 years of age; was clean-cut and studious in appearance; was, in other words, a perfectly respectable dude who just happened to be wearing a baseball cap. On any rational assessment, his days of throwing things at old people's houses for fun were clearly a good ten years behind him. But this officer thought he knew otherwise, and pursued the point with such aggression that in the end he really had only two places to go: either he should have got my brother straight into a lineup, or he should have issued him with a humble and preferably written apology. Instead he departed with a knowing shake of the head that more or less said: you may be getting away with it this time, sunshine, but next time you don't throw rocks at some old lady's house I'm going to take you into a world of hurt. 

2. Once, on the way to get a bus, I had a very odd experience. A sharp-looking Italian guy in an impressive car pulled up and beckoned me over. In broken English he told me the following story. He had been in town for some sort of fashion expo. He now had to go and get his plane. But he had this carload of top-notch Italian suits – Gucci, Armani, whatever – that he desperately needed to offload before he left the country. A couple of them happened to be roughly my size. How would I like to take them off his hands at a rock-bottom price? I must say I was seriously weighing this offer when my bus came round the corner. With some reluctance I chose to get the bus rather than the suits, and as the day wore on I began to think I'd blown a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get my hands on some killer Italian threads. Later that day I recounted the incident to a friend. She was laughing before I was half-way through. It turned out that this guy was a well-known con-artist - well-known to followers of the interstate media, anyway. The suits that people bought from him had a tendency to fall apart the minute his car was over the horizon. And now he was apparently operating in our town.

Now, I don't particularly like ringing up public authorities. I avoid it wherever possible. But in this case I felt that I had a pretty clear civic duty to call the cops. So I did - on a non-emergency number, naturally. And I knew at once that I'd rung myself a real jagoff - the kind of guy who makes you feel that you've already ruined his day just by making him pick up the phone. This guy had the opposite approach of the one described above. He listened to my story without any interest and then informed me, in fairly abusive terms, that no crime had taken place, and that I was therefore wasting his time. I made some kind of protest to the effect that a crime had surely been attempted, and that the police, being broadly speaking anti-crime in outlook, must surely be interested in that. "But you didn't give him any money," the cop pointed out. Yes, I said, but somebody else might. The cop said that they'd cross that bridge when they came to it, and hung up. I'll say this much for this guy. If he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, he was at least a tool.

I can't speak highly enough, by the way, of the con-man's work. He was much nicer to me than the cop was. And he was considerably better at his job. Even when it became clear that I was going to leave and get my bus rather than give him money, he didn't break character - he just started merrily shouting "busso! busso!" which I can only assume is Italian for bus. Full credit to him. I kind of hope he never got caught.

3. One chilly morning about a year ago I found a large fire extinguisher on my back lawn.  This explained, retrospectively, why I had been roused from sleep the previous night by something that had sounded almost exactly like a couple of drunken arseholes punting a large fire extinguisher along a public laneway before lobbing it over some poor bastard's fence. So what do you do when you find a large fire extinguisher on your lawn? Still carrying the psychic scars of incident 2., I felt a potent disinclination to ring the police about it. But for some reason I did. This time I got an officer who, to give him credit, wasn't a twat or anything.  He was simply, like any decent ordinary Australian, not remotely interested in doing his job. 

I suppose I had some dim idea that the owner of the fire extinguisher might have reported it stolen, or might do so in the near future, so that ultimately we might sort of reunite the crime victim with his stolen property. I also hoped - I admit that this was a bit fanciful - that the police might care to send out a car to take the thing off my hands. But the switchboard guy had other ideas. He had me bring the fire extinguisher to the phone and look for identifying marks on the bottom of it, the top of it, the side of it etc. For a while it sounded as if he knew what he was doing - i.e. I thought we might be looking for some kind of serial or i.d. number that he would then punch into some national database. But it emerged, fairly quickly, that he was simply hoping that the fire extinguisher might have the name and address of the place it had been stolen from written somewhere on its surface. It further emerged that he thought I might like to take the thing back there myself once we'd pinpointed the address. But there was no address on it. I think the cop then tried to interest me in conducting a random doorknock of local businesses asking them if they'd recently mislaid a fire extinguisher. But I sensed that he was giving me a sly green light to do what I now fully intended to do, which was to say goodbye and chuck the thing in my bin. So I did that. At least the guys who stole it had the fun of getting to kick the shit out of it for a while.

 

June 11, 2008

Vexatious D

I probably went a little overboard on Dostoevsky yesterday - even though this is a blog, not a serious literary forum. I should at least have given an honourable mention to Notes From the Underground, which is a crucial early example of the "voice" novel. I suppose I can stand one self-loathing and self-pitying voice per novel. But I draw the line at the dozen or so of them that rant away so indistinguishably in Demons. You might even argue that Dostoevsky is too good at this sort of thing - that he draws these shabby and semi-crazed ideologues so well that all you want to do is get the hell away from them, precisely as you would if you ran into one at a bus-stop.

 

June 10, 2008

Ditching Dostoevsky

Just days after venturing A HALF-ASSED METAPHOR ABOUT CONSTRUCTING A SMALL TOWN OUT OF MATCHSTICKS, I came across this bizarre digression in Demons (or The Possessed, or whatever you want to call it):

Andrei Antonovich [having just been rejected by a girl named Amelia] did not weep much, but glued together a theatre made of paper. The curtains rose, the actors came out, made gestures with their hands; the audience sat in their boxes, the orchestra [etc.] ... It was all made of paper, all designed and assembled by [Andrei] himself [no shit]; he sat over this theatre for half a year. The general purposely organized an intimate little evening, the theatre was brought out for display, all five of the general's daughters, the newly wedded Amelia [etc.] ... attentively examined and praised the theatre; then there was dancing. [Andrei] was very pleased and soon consoled.

I insert the ellipses because we haven't got all day, although Dostoevsky sometimes writes as if we do. I also use the single name "Andrei" instead of the three or four different names that this character goes by in the course of this one paragraph. I have a recurring experience when reading anything by Dostoevsky. It generally comes about half-way through the book, at a point when you're finally starting to think you've got a nice firm grip on who's who and what's what. And then you abruptly find yourself reading a conversation between two or three or four characters of whom you can identify not one. Quite often they'll be talking about two or three additional characters that you haven't heard of either. Then a couple more fuckers you've never heard of come piling in the door like the Marx Brothers.

I was about to say that you press on anyway. But no. I'll give you an exclusive: I think I'm done with Dostoevsky. I'm dumping The Possessed at the midway point for about the third time, and I doubt I'll ever pick it up again. I can't stand the sloppiness, the hysteria, the sense that you're reading something written by a maniac, the feeling that you're in a runaway vehicle with a fairly obnoxious crackhead at the wheel. He's not boring, I'll give him that. But I like my writers to be on top of things, in control.

Once, in the course of writing a thesis, I worked up a very good acquaintance with The Brothers Karamazov, so I know what can be got from Dostoevsky if you put in the effort. And in my view the effort isn't worth it. Yes, he's interesting, as an extreme case of negative capability - i.e. as an extreme example of the kind of writer whose creations run away with him, so that he can, despite being a pretty narrow-minded reactionary crank in real life, create characters who put the revolutionary or atheist case much better than he puts his own. But I have a lot of trouble believing that he's a first-rate mind. The best critical remark I've seen on Dostoevsky came from V. S. Pritchett: he said that his characters' stories hang out of their mouths like dog's tongues. So really it comes down to whether you dig that sort of thing. I don't. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a more vastly over-rated novelist. I really can't. And I know I'm in a minority here - Christ, I just read on the web that even Joyce hailed him as a pioneer of modern prose. Still, I wonder how many people read him because he's an "important" writer whose novels have murders in them - after about 800 pages, mind you, and long after you've ceased caring. I may return to this topic at some future date, and put the boot into him at greater length.

 

June 7, 2008

Keep your nose out of it

The other day I noticed this odd phrase on the back of my supermarket receipt: Men - you can last longer! New nasal delivery technology! I have to admit I was sceptical: if I'm ever reduced to delivering with my nose, I don't want it to go on longer. I don't even want it to start. Nevertheless, in an entirely scientific spirit I went and checked out the website of these jokers. It turns out that what they're peddling is a viagra-like substance that you spray up your own nostrils. There is an animated video of a nude man administering this spray to himself. You can watch the spray molecules make their brisk way down his transparent torso and arrive triumphantly at his cartoon Johnson. You have to be over 18 to view it. If you're under 18 and you're shopping around for such a product, you're really in trouble.

 

June 6, 2008

Advice to young writers: quit while you still can

This is from W. H. Auden's "The Cave of Making," which is dedicated to the memory of his fellow poet Louis MacNeice:

After all, it's rather a privilege/ amid the affluent traffic/ to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into/ background noise for study/ or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,/ cannot be "done" like Venice/ or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon/ being read or ignored: our handful/ of clients at least can rune.

These days the handful of literature's remaining clients is even smaller than it was then, and I think it's fair to say that all of the above has come to apply just as sharply to works of prose as it does to poems. Disagree? Try getting people to read an unpublished novel. I can't overstate how difficult the task is, how monumentally indifferent people are to any piece of writing that they don't have to read. In A Clockwork Orange it was possible to make Malcolm McDowell take in music and images by the simple expedient of strapping him to a chair and clamping back his eyelids. But you can't imagine a similar contraption for making people read something they don't want to read. Reading requires application: it's a talent, a creative act, in itself. And before people make that effort, they generally require some kind of push or incentive: they need a friend or a critic to assure them that the effort will be worthwhile. Either that or they need the cojones to approach a book alone and make up their own mind about it.

Sometimes I wish that I had, instead of writing a novel, devoted the countless hours I spent writing it to the creation of something far more concrete, something with immediate visual impact, like a tiny but incredibly detailed town made out of matchsticks. The result, believe me, would have been impressive enough to blow you away at a glance, and quite possibly to make you spontaneously give me money. But a 400-page typescript by a talented writer looks exactly the same as a 400-page typescript by a madman, or a monkey, or a moonlighting model, or John Edward. Only if you have the inclination and the talent to read it are you going to be able to tell if it's any good. And of course if a manuscript is by John Edward, or by a model's ghostwriter, a publisher doesn't really need to read it, does she? She can just slap a cover on it and publish it. Otherwise the thing will just sit there, stubbornly insisting on being read or ignored. And guess which one of those things is easier to do, especially for an idiot.

 

June 3, 2008

Who'll stop the rain?

Does it ever not rain at American funerals? These days the classier kind of Hollywood film almost invariably features a funeral at which every single mourner is to be seen, usually from above, wielding a large and glistening and pricey-looking black umbrella, with a wooden handle as thick as a cricket bat's. Does every American own an umbrella of this kind? Or do their funeral parlours always keep large stocks of them on hand? And why must they always be identical? Just once I'd like to see a mauve one sticking up from the pack, or a see-through PVC one with a dancing-pieces-of-fruit motif. Failing that, I think it's time that the phalanx-of-umbrellas crane-shot is quietly retired.

 

 

 

 

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