There are other American pronunciations besides Eye Rack; we know someone who borrows her books from a Lie Berry, a soft and fruity thing with a fine ripe pop. The books taste sweet and none of them tell the truth. She found her nearest Berry in a gated area in front of a school. Windows are not part of the normal architecture of most of the American schools I've seen, just passing by as I do, walking or riding, and whose idea was that I wonder: who decided that students should be blind, and what a horror, what a blank and inhumane thing, and someone should be ashamed of themselves for that idea but probably no one knows who that someone might be, and not even the person themselves, if there was a single person, and not, more likely, a cabal, not a physical cabal but a cabal in the air, a feeling, an impression, a vague message passed to and fro above the heads of children -- ah, it will be better for them if they don't have windows -- no windows for them! -- says this parliament of ghosts. If there are windows then the students will look out and strangers will look in and perhaps there will be a tree, and the child will not look at the teacher or at a book, they will look at this tree, and think, a tree, when they should be dwelling on George Washington or how to bake an apple pie or a hot dog or some other American thing. Then there will be neither apple pie nor hot dog nor awareness of George Washington and the whole nation will go to rack and ruin, to ruin and rack, and after writing that phrase twice it occurs to me to wonder where it came from. Why rack and ruin?*
The origin of rack and ruin is the kind of thing that children do not learn when they have windows to look out of, and trees, and passing strangers leering at them, all paedophiles and tuckshop ladies, or whatever the US equivalent is to a tuckshop lady. The pie was always half-cool and the flavoured milk was always half-warm in my brown paper tuckshop bag but what magic that was, and what an honour, to be the one who was chosen to fetch that black plastic tub at lunchtime, and a practical privilege too, because they let you out of class a few minutes early, and the school was quiet, everybody else still gluing paper to cardboard or writing the letter A, and you ran away from all of that, you and your partner, over the concrete pathways and under the awning.
What a strange unbounding you experienced in this silent mysterious landscape, which had the features of a school but the atmosphere of a deserted battlefield, and as you went on it became apparent that you could do anything you liked and no one would see -- you could climb over the fence and run away forever, or you could sit under a bush, and it was probably at moments like this that the idea of existentialism occurred to somebody -- to Sartre -- thinking the word freedom! as he was sent out to pick up the tuckshop bags with Simone de Beauvoir, who wore her hair wound on top of her head even at that age, which must have been about seven or eight. He let her bear most of the weight of the tub on the way back and she thought, why do all the boys behave like this, talking about themselves as he's doing now, jiggling around and smoking pipes, and why do they all have such short hair? I am the Second Sex.
Maybe the schools do have windows, but only in the walls facing away from the road. That's possible. I might be looking at the only windowless walls and thinking that this phenomenon extends all the way around the building, and is it a mistake to imagine that the full nature of an American school building can be discerned from only a single view of the walls? They might have bow windows on the other side.
The day after I made my last post, the New York Times ran an article that mentioned Mito, Oarai, and Kairakuen. Before that they interviewed a woman at Nakaminato, on the coastline east of the city, near the mouth of the Naka River, which runs through Mito to Hitachinaka, the site of one of those whirlpools. Another Timesarticle says that
In Oarai, a port about 150 miles south of hard-hit Sendai, fishing boats, truck and cars lay 100 yards back from the water’s edge, deposited in a jagged line like seashells left behind by the farthest reach of powerful waves. Some fishing boats had capsized; those swept into town by the tsunami teetered on their sides, or were tossed upside down.
Mito was struck by the earthquake and its aftershocks. Pavements cracked and sank, walls fell down, some houses collapsed. Lines have formed in the streets for food and water. The railways have stopped running out of the city to the north but when the Joban line train arrives from Tokyo the same recorded female voice still warns you to stand clear of the doors in case you hurt yourself. The bus service to Narita Airport has been suspended. Art Tower Mito has been mentioned on twitter. I don't know how the building is faring but everyone who worked there is fine. People stranded at a hotel received woollen blankets and two onigiri rice balls each. The weather is cold. The area is periodically affected by rolling blackouts, organised by the government to save electricity. The nearby Tokai reactor was in trouble yesterday but it has been successfully cooled. A tsunami swell moved up the Naka River. On the first day of the disaster the English-language online papers kept showing us a photograph of a damaged road, the Joban expressway, which runs out of the city. The caption is always vague: "somewhere near Mito." There was also a photograph of a retaining wall that had unrestrained itself on top of a row of parked cars. Japanese-language sources say that the Tokiwa highway has been closed. The Mito Hollyhock team will not be participating in J-League soccer events for a while and the J-League itself has come to a halt until further notice. Somewhere in the city a pet lovebird is photographed looking calm.
When I was in Japan I lived and worked a short train ride away from the coast, and sometimes on my days off I would travel east to the Pacific where I would walk along one of those beaches that are now underwater or else covered in debris, and if photographs are to be believed then two of the places I remember, one where I read Candide* on a rock on a breakwater, have managed to acquire vast, seething, and seductive offshore whirlpools; they are Charybdis, they drink down ships. I do not think that this part of the coastline, although it is good for shipping, has ever been internationally famous for anything until now, and I wanted to give out some picture of it as it was before this happened, because it was small and calm and modest and now it is not.
So this is how it was at this time of year: a greyish sky, milky-coloured, the sea a lint-blue calm and furry savannah, the two colours lying alongside one another in bars, one on top, one below, individual but related, as in a Rothko painting, sometimes melting together, sometimes distinguished, cool but not cold, everything mild in fact, not noisy, but quiet, a slight wind, and nothing in a hurry, not even the waves or the clouds; the town behind the beach all small houses, with small streets and a few people out, going into a small shop with their bags. It's a summer town off-season (is this memory taking place near Oarai?) with that beachside atmosphere of commerce waiting until the tourists come back with the heat, a sort of pausing desertedness and isolation, as if everyone who matters has stepped out like Lawrence Oates from his Antarctic shelter, and the rest of us are waiting for him to get back, but we know he'll make it and we're not worried. It's not a hostile or resentful isolation, and perhaps the town is not even that kind of town, but it has that kind of atmosphere. The children are still in school.
A little way inland the houses are larger, they become suburbs in the Japanese style, pale walls and still air, tiny gardens or none, architecture in straight vertical lines, not like the more relaxed and elderly houses right by the beach, brown and wooden. All of the footpaths are narrow. There is a railway station where you can buy the usual drinks in vending machines, beer, coffee, Pocari Sweat, and so on, and read the usual advertisements for phone companies and English schools. There is a line painted on the side of the platform, and when the train pulls up the doors will open exactly in alignment with this line. If the train is late then you assume a salaryman has gone bankrupt and thrown himself onto the tracks; you reflect that if you were going to commit suicide in this way then at least you'd hie off south and hold up the Yamanote Line. There is a certain familiarity in this cynicism; you feel you belong with all the other cynics, who are behind you buying the canned coffee.
Now if you go out into the countryside you will see rice fields, neat and brilliant green, and rows of firs and other tidy dark trees, with copses here and there, birds, herons, and tiny villages and occasional graveyards, rows of grey Jizō statues, some of them quite old, with the divine one's features worn to bumps and the cloth bibs around his necks blown to tatters. In the underworld on the bank of the Sanzu River he is letting the dead children crawl into his sleeves to protect them from demons.
If you want to go to a more populated area you will come to Mito City, the capital of Ibaraki Prefecture. People in Mito will apologise to you because their city is not as exciting as Tokyo, which is hours to the south-west. "Mito is boring." But Mito has a contemporary art museum, Art Tower Mito, the tower itself twisted like a DNA spiral, and it has other cultural centres; it has department stores and shrines, temples, historic buildings; and people come from out of town every year in late February to walk through Kairakuen Park while the plum trees are in blossom. The petals fall and the wind blows them out of the park and among the buildings where they form a pink mash in the gutters, and the breezes in the traffic intersections turn them into willy-willies.
You walk over a bridge, a turtle swims past, and if it is late on Friday afternoon then the salarymen will be coming home arm in arm, tipsy at the end of the week; the sun gets rosier as it goes down until it is the colour of a strawberry, then the sky is dark, the DVD store down the road is renting porn and Studio Ghibli films, a woman wearing high boots is walking a Pomeranian, the attendant behind the counter in the 7-11 is calling, "Irasshaimase," to a customer, the customer picks up the boxed plastic figure of a yokai, one of a series, thinking that he will add it to his collection, and there is a light moment of joyful song cut short when a lone salaryman walking past in sober suit takes out a mobile phone decorated with luminous danglers, and puts it to his ear -- "Moshi moshi."
* Which contains an earthquake. "Scarcely had they ceased to lament the loss of their benefactor and set foot in the city, when they perceived that the earth trembled under their feet, and the sea, swelling and foaming in the harbor, was dashing in pieces the vessels that were riding at anchor. Large sheets of flames and cinders covered the streets and public places; the houses tottered, and were tumbled topsy-turvy even to their foundations, which were themselves destroyed …" Translated by William Fleming.
Living in the US I've become more alert to Australians, not live ones -- there are no other live ones around here -- but their books, those toenail-clippings of the brain -- and it's always elation when I spot one, followed by other emotions: pleasure when it's Jolley's Sugar Mother, (WITHDRAWN from the East Mesa Branch Library, according to the stamp inside, and now for sale in Coolidge's Cellar of Books) and less pleasure when it's a fat and shallow romance called Australia with an orange Opera House on the front. (At this moment the word gaudy comes to mind because I caught Scarface on TCM a few weeks ago. "Kinda gaudy, isn't it," says an aloof bombshell to Paul Muni, looking at the gilt and plush in his new apartment, and Muni replies proudly, "Ain't it though!" as if he has personally invented sunshine.) "His arms wrapped around her and Jean knew that her years of loneliness were gone forever," burbles the last page of Australia, which is the sort of line you wish would be followed by, "and then she discovered he was a serial killer," or something else to wash away the taste of sugar-gum. Instead it gets even more gruesome, and "I love you," he whispers at last, although you could fantasise that the line after that, "and the peace wrapped around them both," is a hopeful sign that carbon monoxide has flooded the room and both nitwits have perished.
TCM is a stunner of a channel. In the last few months I've seen movies I'd often heard of but never met, not only Scarface, but also Little Caesar, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and The Woman in the Dunes. In one evening I saw three films, all featuring sulphur-crested cockatoos, none of them set in Australia, and Black Narcissus even threw in a bonus bamboo swamp infested with invisible kookaburras. "Nuns on a cliff!" I said to M., regarding Black Narcissus, but he wouldn't watch it. "Himalayan sex nuns!" Michael Powell showed you shots of the cliff until you waited for someone to fall off. Then last Friday Robert Mitchum was an Australian in the morning and an Irish schoolteacher in the evening. Irish, he removed his shirt, yet even shirtless he was not more beautiful than the west coast of his native adopted country, more lovely than the day and covered with cottage and beach. An Englishman with the mouth of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden appeared and all the soldiers in the seaside fort fell about with lust, as well they ought. Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight delivered a performance that should have been camp, yet wasn't. Weeping she collapsed onto chairs, knuckling forehead and losing her knicknacks. Not lost, though, Charles Boyer had hidden them. Angela Lansbury materialised, ten feet tall and aged eighteen, with skin smooth as an egg. It was revealed that Peter O'Toole was young once too, and also that he was King Henry the Second. "Who is that?" I wondered, watching the King fling himself on Richard Burton's bed, "and why does his behaviour remind me of Robert Downey Junior?" Burton pensively seated himself on a pillow.
None of the other American TV channels come up to the same standard. IFC might be bearable if it ditched the ads. There's no point trying to watch a horror movie if they interrupt it every fifteen minutes with fast cars and peanut butter. The horror movie was The Grudge, and it made me nostalgic for Japan. O Japan, I thought sadly as a little boy mewed like a cat and murdered people. O nostalgia! I wish I lived in that house. The house began to murder people too. A dead woman crawled down the stairs and I was reminded of a kabuki play I'd watched, a ghost-woman walking through a wall and terrifying her ex. Nothing in The Grudge asked you to suspend disbelief as thoroughly as the stout middle-aged Japanese man I'd once seen take the role of a beautiful noh fairy, although I've also seen, on film, Pavarotti take the role of a starving artist, and so fat was he that it seemed they must have invented paint brushes just to allow people like him to reach the canvas over a full tun of belly, so this kind of casting is hardly a Japanese thing.
We went into Phoenix and discovered that the Friends of the Phoenix Library had their own shop with window displays and glossy brochures and a copy of Patrick White's Flaws in the Glass for a dollar, which I nabbed. The Friends I used to be a member of in Australia had a tiny stale back room and a foyer like a corridor to hold the sales in, carrying books out of the room in boxes and staggering through the stacks with the tables one Saturday per month, ricking their backs and giving M. a permanent scar. The Phoenix Friends have their own warehouse, if you fucking please, and likely pens of tame and willing eunuchs to tote the boxes to and fro and fan the members with palm leaves, though these go unmentioned in the official literature.
But the most unexpected book so far, re. Aus.Lit., has probably been Jane Austen & Crime, discovered on a table at the annual secondhand book sale of the Rotary Club of Florence, Arizona, and written by Susannah Fullerton, who was, and is, the President of JASA, or the Jane Austen Society of Australia. It begins by introducing the reader to John Knatchbull, executed in Sydney, son of "a respectable Kentish family," known to the Austens, "and John Knatchbull was the half brother of the man who later married Jane's favourite niece, Fanny Austen Knight." Jane's aunt was arrested for shoplifting and released, writes Fullerton, and Austen herself once visited a gaol in Canterbury -- why? "My initial idea to develop a one-hour talk grew very rapidly into a book."
There'll be no post here this week. We're due out of this house tomorrow and still we're having conversations like this:
M: Should I keep this?
Me: Where else are you going to find a Summer of Cricket Warnie hat?
The paint on the walls is so old that I'm not sure whether the brown I'm cleaning off is filth or its natural colour. Large cracks in the plaster, but they were there to start with. The house spider has gone into hiding.
Some friends of ours are launching an album in Melbourne tonight. It's their fourth, I think. Dreampop, with dulcimer and flute and so forth. Nick is a demon on the strings. I'll exert all sinews to be there, but the wall-filth is calling.
All of my spare time this week has been taken up with packing. I've barely opened a book. I've barely read a thing. Instead I turn on the television. Almost without fail I end up with Rolf Harris telling me about dying penguins. His latest dying penguin is named Tilda. Tilda is a chick too young to swim or feed herself. She still has her fluffy grey waistcoat of down. Tilda screams for food. She is starving. "She makes her unique call," says Rolf. Her father is discovered by the camera some way distant, hunched over in a drainpipe. He has forgotten her. Barely fledged, she risks the ocean. We confidently expect to see her drowned by the next show.
I'm in the middle of Ephemera, which is, oh, boxes and boxes of papers: programmes for old plays, a bus ticket to Narita airport, a paper mask covered with dry mud, a postcard from Chloride, Arizona, a thesis titled Subspecies classification of the giraffe using DNA analysis with particular reference to the Melbourne Zoo population by Rachel Hawkin, and a doggerel poem written years ago while I was playing the aunt in an amateur production of Hedda Gabler.
Hedda Gabler Wilful gorgon Went and married Tesman, Jørgen.
Hedda Gabler Won't be fair Hates poor Thea For her hair.
Hedda Gabler Hates his aunt. He says, "Love her." She says, "Can't."
Hedda Gabler Winks at Brack Ruins Løvborg (He loves back.)
Hedda Gabler Babe impending Shoots herself And that's the ending.
Jørgen Tesman's Got some brains In arrear ...
He gets with Thea.
There are ribbons, stickers, pencil sharpeners, a volunteer worker's badge from the Zoo, a letter from L. who is dead (seeing his name I thought, "I haven't talked to him in years. I should --" and then I remembered why), a tight green pincushion surrounded by Chinese figures holding hands, a ball of red wool, a rubber monster that lights up within when you squeeze its stomach, a smiling yellow dinosaur, a paper doll, and a photograph of someone else's cat.
The Melbourne Arts Festival ended on the 23rd, but a Festival show called the Carnival of Mysteries went on for a few nights more. M. bought tickets. This Carnival, even though it never mentioned Christina Stead, was closer to her in spirit than I Write What I See.* Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith (the creators) might never have heard of Stead for all I know, but they had her willingness to go too far and to risk being misconstrued -- an act of faith in the audience, which was Stead's faith also.**
When I come across a production like this it reminds me -- and this is one of the reasons why I keep returning to Stead as well -- it reminds me that there is sometimes value in going beyond the point that seems normal and comfortable, and that, in fact, things can improve if you go too far (or put it like this: some ideas seem designed to be taken too far, as sharks are designed to swim), and if you have faith and dedication, for example, Moira Finucane standing naked on a low pedestal in a dim tent, her face tilted upward and rapt into the light, with the recorded sound effects of calving glaciers moaning and roaring around her, and the actor herself booming, "Don't touch it. It will burn you," then lowering her chin and opening her mouth and eyes in rectangles until she had the face of the Parco Dei Mostri ogre -- piling one idea on another -- a strange and archetypal figure, with her fingers splayed and tents of light descending between them to the floor.
There is no virtue in doing a thing like this halfheartedly. Either do it with a whole heart or look silly.
Stead, who rarely wrote halfheartedly, worked in an archetypal way too: Henny Pollit is a mother, but she's also a fairytale witch, "a charming slatternly witch" living in "a cave of Aladdin," Marpurgo in the Beauties and Furies is a seductive demon, and Edward in the People With the Dogs is a charmed prince.
Beyond Sam stood the physical world, and beyond Henny -- what? A great mystery.
By appealing to archetypes the show invites the audience to step into the roles played by Henny's children, witnesses to some colossal mystery, strange displays, unexplained behaviour that seems significant because it is being carried out with great conviction.
The Carnival's different acts were staged in tents and alcoves with fanciful names, for instance, The Tent of Miracles, The Midnight Pleasure Garden, while the performers were named The Handsomest Dancer Ever Born, The Man They Couldn't Hang, The Gothic Horror Librarian, The Queen of Abyssinia, Eye In Hand, The Daughters of Rasputin, but the execution was not whimsical -- by which I mean that it was not light, and not jokey -- any more than Henny is a joke witch.
They staged the Carnival in a downstairs room divided into different, smaller areas, the Tent at the centre, the Shrine in a little white space at the back, the Sideshow Alley like a set of boxes only slightly more significant than cupboards, enough to seat six or eight people each, with the performers about a foot away, clawing at the walls. There were three or four short acts running at the same time. These performances went for ten minutes, more or less, and after one act was finished, the people who had been inside that room came out, looked around, and chose another door.
If you ran all of those acts back to back (reckoned Finucane in interviews) then the Carnival would last for six hours, but the audience was only allowed in for an hour and forty-five minutes. After that there was a mass sing-along and you trailed away, up the pale square staircase, back to the street. So everyone saw a different Carnival. M. saw the Ice Queen, and so did I, but he was watching a magician disappear in one part of the Sideshow while I was watching Yumi Umiumare crawl across the floor in another part, and neither of us saw Garçon Gigolo (who, it's said, took off all of his clothes and stared you in the eye) or Eye In Hand -- what was Eye In Hand?
Then there were the decorations, for instance, a set of eyeholes cut unobtrusively into a wall, and if you bent down and looked through them you saw a dioramic painting of a grotesque battle. Eleven artists decorated the Tent of Miracles, eleven different painters, but I was so busy looking at the Shrine and the peepholes that I missed the work of every single one of the eleven.
“You know, Celeste, I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature," said Proust to his last housekeeper. "That is why it is never finished. Even when the construction is completed there is always some decoration to add, or a stained-glass window or a capital or another chapel to be opened up, with a little statue in the corner" -- In Search of Lost Time being similar to the Carnival in this way: a long, long experience embroidered with thousands of tiny moments you might miss.
As you come out the other side the person next to you asks, "Did you like the painting through the peepholes?" or, "Wasn't it funny when the Guermantes decided to tour the fjords?" and you reply, "What and where was that?"
One blogger who reviewed Carnivalwrote, "[U]nfortunately the limited time means that you will not see all of the performers," but the show was obviously designed that way (so it was not a misfortune but a plan) -- and that's one difference between this and a book -- you can go back to the book, but the Carnival ended last night, and I never will find out what Garçon Gigolo looked like with his clothes off (with them on he was tall, thin, straight, and bald, like a baton in a wrapper).
* Darryl Emmerson's Christina Stead biographical play. I wrote a post about it two weeks ago.
I'm about to mention the grand final again. At first I thought this was going to be a footnote to the last post, but it grew. We were at a Melbourne Fringe show on Friday night, a dance piece called Intimate Exposure, and at one point in this show the dancers began to speak. "I've got wool in my mouth," one of them said, and then, looking at a member of the audience who was holding a glass of wine, "I wish I had a drink." A different one commented on a woman's handbag. Then one of them was turning with her arms in the air, and she said, "Another grand final!"
I don't know if that was the line exactly, but it was something like that -- another grand final or the grand final again, or two grand finals or similar. She was talking about the replay on Saturday, which Collingwood won by fifty-six points.
That was going to be the end of my story, but then, thinking about the dance, I began to think about the art in the gallery above the rooms where the performance was taking place, and about the labels the artists had written for the exhibition -- there was a paragraph propped up next to each piece. We'd been up there the evening before, and I'd noticed that the language the artists used to describe their own art was sometimes inflated, and sometimes vague, as if they were describing an idea of an object, and not the concrete thing itself. Perhaps you could say they were describing their hopes for the thing, as if the thing itself had only been thought of but not constructed, as if it had remained in the realm of the possible without entering the material world, or as if they pined for what it had once been, an imaginary thing.* For example, one of the artists said that her work was "[a reinterpretation of] Hieronymous Bosch's triptych of humanity from creation to damnation.
Scenes from present existence and an imagined future are depicted in repurposed propylene. Cohabiting with sustainable ply they cast an elegant facade for the purpose of illumination."
It looked like a chandelier made of cardboard with white balls strung off the sides. Automatically I began to fret over the language. Why "cohabiting," I wondered. Of course they were cohabiting -- or coexisting -- she'd attached them to one another with string -- they were inanimate objects -- they had no choice -- why use a word that gave them agency? What did she mean by "cast an elegant façade"? The chandelier was casting a shadow, but a shadow isn't a façade, and casting a shadow doesn't serve "the purpose of illumination" except inadvertently -- shadows are a byproduct of illumination. Did she mean something closer to "constitute"? "Together they constitute a façade"? But why "façade"? The curved shape cut from sustainable ply wasn't the façade of the object, it was the object itself. If the chandelier was a façade then the real object of the artwork (its core, its true self, the meat behind the mask) was the lightbulb.
So I fretted and picked.
The obvious answer is, she's not sure about the word façade, she used the word "cohabit" not because the ply and the balls are creatures choosing their habitats but because she wanted to let the organizers know that she was in sympathy with the theme of the exhibition ("The city has a face, the country has a soul," or, the creep of the suburbs from the city into the country), and the word "cast" seemed appropriate to chandeliers because chandeliers throw out light. The application got a little muddled, but the idea is there. She's circling it. She reminds me of -- who does she remind me of? She reminds me of Françoise. Her written English is Françoise's spoken French, but where Proust attributes Francoise's inventions to her peasant background (picking up unfamiliar words she uses them wherever they seem to fit, placing them firmly like Humpty Dumpty ('"When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less"')) this artist seems to have come at hers from the opposite direction, from years at university or collage, or some other place where your superiors tell you to produce a work in the style of a well-known artist and then explain your process and goals. You, the student, you will be judged on this. And so, living in a universe where nothing is certain, you decide that you need an advanced degree of protection (Greek gods, if you could, but they're no longer available) and you erect a bulwark of words. Protect me words! you say. Make me sound smart, thoughtful, and accomplished! Propel me, O words, into the universe of my lecturers and judges! And then you write, with hopeful emotions, "façade," and "reinterpreting" or, if you are the people behind the Home Is Where The Craft Is craft exhibition, you summon a phrase from your old textbook -- oh yes, you think, "mixed medium" -- and you put the following note in the Fringe programme, "No longer obscured by it's residential location, creativity is expressed through home based mixed mediums," and with this spell you hope to project an image of power, O some great dark dominant phenomenon with eyes and teeth, or at least wisdom -- great and evident wisdom, flagrant and shining, your marvellous ambassador and bodyguard.
And it's a fact that once I thought of the chandelier artist as Françoise, I felt friendly towards her, I stopped fretting at the gap between the prose and the object (it felt as if the gap had been filled, even though nothing outside my head had changed at all), and I said to myself warmly -- Françoise, Françoise! It was an interesting transformation.
* Two days later in a gallery I saw a piece of computer artwork: a monotonous green screen with a red oval jerking to and fro at the centre. It was, said the artist on his label, a representation of a football being bounced at the beginning of play, but he had left out the figure of the umpire who was handling it. The sight of this work (he wrote) prompted the viewer to consider the nature of Australian masculinity. The chasm between the object itself and the effect it was meant to have was so extraordinary that I wondered if anyone would ever be able to straddle it. One of those times when the only bridge between the artwork and the outsider is a note. To the point where it feels to me as if the only reason he made the artwork was to give himself a reason to write two paragraphs explaining it.
I'm reminded of this quote from José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, which I came across a while ago on Mills Baker's tumblr page --
Take stock of those around you and you will ... hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which will seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to the reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual us trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. Life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’ are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic ‘ideas’ and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground.
-- and I wonder if this should help me to explain the irritation, the itch, that I feel when I see artists on their labels saying that "My artwork prompts the viewer to do such and such," or "I have created an allegory of so and so," and then the relief when I come across a more open-handed note, like this one in the Intimate Exposure programme: "'Intimacy,' 'exposure' and electrical energy sources led them [the dancers] to an interest in physical ramifications of invisible threats on the body; they have contemplated nuclear technology, atomic theory, personification of weaponry and the sexuality of war."
Not, "We have created an allegory of atomic theory," or, "Our dance piece prompts the viewer to think about the sexuality of war," (and there's nothing like these stark declarations to make the audience say rebelliously, "Well it didn't make me think about that," or, "Like hell you have") but more humbly, wisely, and helplessly: "We have contemplated it."
I might have been reading one of Greg Baum's articles when it occurred to me that some of the more imaginative football commentators, verbal and written, do as Dickens did, and superheat their prose with allusions, both classical and vernacular -- treating the classical as a more powerful and tweaked version of nonetheless natural language, so that if Dickens can, in chapter eleven of Bleak House, allude to Macbeth by writing, "It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby’s, in Cook’s Court, where Guster murders sleep by going ... out of one fit into twenty," then Greg Baum can allude to Romeo and Juliet with,
Perhaps also, it was Gary Ablett's valedictory as a Geelong player, for Gold Coast's bullion will weigh more heavily now. If so, this was parting with sweet sorrow; in a team that was crushed ...
Rex Hunt, calling Saturday's Grand Final on Triple M, urged the players on the field to, "Run like the Light Brigade!" meaning, I suppose, quickly and forcefully and in a heroic manner. This was delivered in a shout, at the heat of the moment, without preparation or special treatment, as if a reference to Tennyson is more or less the most natural thing in the world to summon out of your memory half-way through a Saturday afternoon in 2010 at the climax of the footy season.*
I'm not sure exactly what goes on here, but it seems to me that the emotion that collects around the phrase in its original context, plus the emotion of recognition, the extra scrap of mental effort that goes into making that recognition, the unexpected engagement of the brain in directions that it didn't expect to be engaged right at that moment -- the surprise -- the joke -- the reminder of the larger and less focused world -- coupled, in a contradictory way, with the comforting endurance of tradition -- gives the allusion its kick, its heightened burst, in an atmosphere that is already heightened by the tensions of the game; and wraps football itself in the mantle of history, as if those forty-four men and their Sherrin and a crowd of one hundred thousand and sixteen, are part of the same world as -- are unified with -- poets and warriors. Which, you could argue, they are, simply by being human, as the poets and warriors were human, and alive, as the poets and warriors were alive; and everything mixed together, a vast web of human behaviour, with Collingwood and the Saints tucked in there somewhere next to the Mayans, the Greeks, and Proust's imaginary Françoise, the cook who is also an artist, and her teased kitchenmaid, Giotto's Charity.
And the language used around football is intensified anyway, with slang, with ritual descriptions, and with a habit of grand phrasings, so that the game, in the prose of football journalists, is transformed into "the land," as in, "He's the fastest runner in the land!" or, "He's got the finest boot in the land!" as if the speaker is conferring magical qualities on knights and princes. Australian Rules takes on the enclosed attributes of a principality kingdom, and it becomes apparent that its true language is the language of mythology. Ablett, Baum writes, "is, as all the world knows, Gold Coast's cynosure and the club's ardent courtship of him has grown into a saga." In another article: "Football fans love signs from their gods: here were three." A team can be a "hydra." "Collingwood played its patented total football, marked by feverish, frenzied tackling, with lots of goalkickers, a hydra to deliver out a hiding."** When the final was followed by rain, then a vivid and symmetrical double rainbow, M. noticed that the last part of the rainbow to disappear was the leg that landed near St Kilda, and suggested that it was a prophecy.
* Although Tim Lane confused everyone around him when he decided that a game between Sydney and West Coast needed a direct quote from his lordship's Ulysses.
** I've seen Caroline Wilson use 'hydra' as well, but where that article is I do not know.
Why -- I'll add this in case you're outside the Rules umbrella and you're wondering -- why a prophecy? Because the game was a draw, and the two teams have to play again next week, and one of the teams comes from St Kilda, a bohemian seaside suburb in the process of returning like a greedy dog to its pre-bohemian state of gentrification. It took its name long ago from a schooner named Lady of St Kilda, which took her name in turn from a Hebridean archipelago where there never was a saint.
There's a radio interviewer in the States named Michael Silverblatt, who has a show called Bookworm, and a few weeks ago he interviewed the filmmaker John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Divine, etc), who said that The Man Who Loved Children is one of his five favourite books. He discusses this in a recent memoir called Role Models, which I don't have, but I've transcribed the Man part of the interview. Is it legal to publish transciptions on blogs? I'll start with the disclaimer I've seen on fan transcripts of TV shows: Disclaimer: This transcript is intended for educational and promotional purposes only, and may not be reproduced commercially.
MS: The next one is the magnificent novel, uhm, by Christina Stead ... is it Sted or Steed, do you know?
JW: You know, I think Sted, but I'm not sure. You know, I found out my book came out on audio, and I had to read the whole thing? Never write words you can't pronounce. And you'd be; you don't think of that. I mean, words you've written your whole life, read your whole life, but once you have to say them out loud, think, "God, is that right?"
MS: It's The Man Who Loved Children, which is a title that's sure to give you both the right idea and the wrong idea.
JW: Yup. He thought he loved them, yah, but his love was the most oppressive love, and this is the most angry book about a terrible marriage I've read, ever, I mean it's a true angry feminist ... It is a feminist novel but in a way that women hated this book when it came out too ... no one ... Mary McCarthy hated this book. I mean, this book had very, very little praise until it was released, what twenty or thirty years later, and even then, it's a tough book. I [indistinct] pick difficult books. This -- I love feel-bad books though. They make me feel good. I feel good anyway. Why do I think a novel has to make me feel better?
MS: Well, wonderfully, just recently, the New York Times Book Review had an essay by Johnathan Franzen, who chooses this as one of his books of all time.
JW: I was amazed. It was yesterday. I thought, "Suddenly this is a trend? [laughing] This obscure novel is like on everyone's lips?"
MS: Uh-huh. And, and look, in his description, it's a funny book. In your description it's a book about a terrible marriage. In my description it's a book about a daughter trying to escape her father.
JW: Well that's true too, yeah.
MS: And so, this is the big deal, everyone's experience of a book is different, not book by book, but person by person, you don't all have to agree. Agreement is what they teach you in school.
JW: We all love the books, because it's an extreme book, and we like, that I said we should perform, get, a Hate bookclub, and we should do the tirades of her against her husband. There are pages of venom that she says, that -- I get why he thinks they're funny. They aren't really funny, but they're so well written, and so angry that she can barely ... she flubs words because she can't even speak, she's spitting in rage, so to act these parts out, the neighbours would call the police, definitely, if you were having a book club reading. And if you're trying to escape your father don't you often marry another bad man?
MS: [laughing]: You must.
JW: Yeah. It's a tradition.
MS: That's Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children ...
You can listen to the recorded version online at the radio station's website. They start discussing Stead at about 16:30. The "her" who performs the tirades against her husband is Henny, of course. (Looking at this explanation, I realise that I probably would not have felt compelled to provide it if I hadn't written the line down. If, in other words, it had remained spoken. Why do words on the page seem to require more explanation and support, or is this my misunderstanding? How much scaffolding is provided by those ums and ahs and inflections that only really appear spontaneously among speakers?)
As for Waters' other four favourite books, they are Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure, Ivy Compton-Burnett's Darkness and Day, Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin, and Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles.
On the subject of Man's critical reception ("this book had very, very little praise ..."), Margaret Harris in The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead summarises it like this:
Stead herself was to speak of the novel as a failure: "It was first published during the war, when, of course, it had no relevance. It fell almost dead. The publishers didn't want to print it."
...
However, Randall Jarrell's comment in 1965 that The Man Who Loved Children had been "a failure both with critics and the public" (MWLC, p.36) does not hold up, for critics recognised the scale of its achievement, even when their praise was qualified. It was as a study in the drama rather than the politics of the family that the book was acclaimed (for example, by Louis B. Salomon in Nation) except in New Masses where Isodor Scheider's review was entitled, "In the Bosom of the Bourgeois Family." He observed that "The Man Who Loved Children may in a sense be considered a novelization of Engels' Origin of the Family, and it is a rare distinction of the book that it should succeed in this without prejudice either to the integrity of the ideas or to the embodying art." There were notable attacks, like that of Mary McCarthy on what she called "this peculiar, breathless, overwritten, incoherent novel." Even Fadiman faltered in his praise, though his criticisms -- including the charge that Stead did not render effectively American idiom and local colour -- were symptomatic of the syndrome identified by Louise Yelin. "The reviewers," she observes, "unable to assimilate the novel into the standards of the literary culture they inhabit, treat it as a grand anomaly, a literary lusus naturae or work of savage genius" which violates the decorum of women's novels, organic unity, and verisimilitude alike.
The Ragged Claws blog says that Melbourne Uni Press is going to reprint "a collection of titles" by Stead, "including her masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, and the remarkable novels Letty Fox: Her Luck and For Love Alone." "Including" had better mean more than just those three, I hope, since Man and Love Alone are the easiest to find in the secondhand shops here, and Letty Fox was reprinted by NYRB about, ooh, ten minutes ago. Challenge yourselves, people. Reprint House Of All Nations.
The lieutenant-colonel played the piano beautifully; the senior medical officer’s wife sang like a Conservatoire medallist. This latter couple, as well as the lieutenant-colonel and his wife, used to dine every week with M. de Borodino. They were flattered, unquestionably, knowing that when the Prince went to Paris on leave he dined with Mme. de Pourtalès, and the Murats, and people like that. “But,” they said to themselves, “he’s just a captain, after all; he’s only too glad to get us to come. Still, he’s a real friend, you know.” But when M. de Borodino, who had long been pulling every possible wire to secure an appointment for himself nearer Paris, was posted to Beauvais, he packed up and went, and forgot as completely the two musical couples as he forgot the Doncières theatre and the little restaurant to which he used often to send out for his luncheon, and, to their great indignation, neither the lieutenant-colonel nor the senior medical officer, who had so often sat at his table, ever had so much as a single word from him for the rest of their lives.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, translated by Moncrieff.
As a coda to my last two posts, here's a quote from Felix Holt, the Radical.
He had had to do many things in law and in daily life which, in the abstract, he would have condemned; and indeed he had never been tempted by them in the abstract. Here, in fact, was the inconvenience; he had sinned for the sake of particular concrete things, and particular concrete consequences were likely to follow.
George Eliot, like Helen Garner, reminds the reader of the difference between ideas as they are conceived in the head and ideas as they are carried out in the world. If the people behind Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton, and the scripwriter Linda Woolverton, saw the way I wrote about them in the last post, they could use Eliot's quote as an argument in their favour. "Your accusation of cowardice is an abstract judgement," they might say. "Do you really think we sat around saying, "We're afraid of the audience, let's make this film as stupid as possible"? Do you think we said, "Well, we could act like hypocrites or not-hypocrites, let's pick hypocrites"? It's not that simple. Read the interviews! Don't you see we wanted to make a coming of age story? Didn't you see the interview on the Disney website? Here," says my imaginary Tim Burton, "read me here --
What I liked about this take on the story is Alice is at an age where you're between a kid and an adult, when you're crossing over as a person. A lot of young people with old souls aren't so popular in their own culture and their own time. Alice is somebody who doesn't quite fit into that Victorian structure and society. She's more internal.
See? So this teenage Alice has to go to Wonderland and fight a dragon to develop some adult self-confidence. What's cowardly or hypocritical about that? If only you'd been there, you'd know that we thought about it very carefully."
And this is how Felix Holt measures both of us:
But these things [ie, cowardice, dishonourable behaviour] which are easy to discern when they are painted for us on the large canvass of poetic story [or, I'd add, in a newspaper report, or any outside analysis], become confused and obscure even for well-read gentlemen when their affection for themselves is alarmed by pressing details of actual experience. If their comparison of instances is active at such times, it is chiefly in showing them that their own case has subtle distinction from all other cases, which should free them from unmitigated condemnation.
The idea that "things, which are easy to discern when they are painted for us on the large canvass of poetic story, become confused and obscure … by pressing details of actual experience" is present in Garner as well. What does it mean to judge? What assumptions do we make when we judge? How do we see ourselves in relation to the judged person?
We saw Alice in Wonderland with friends a few nights ago. Tim Burton, who has never shown the tiniest desire to attempt Carroll's logical extremism in any other film, doesn't attempt it here. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen was so much like Miranda Richardson in the second series of Blackadder that even M., who was unfamiliar with the show until he migrated, picked up on it. Anne Hathaway floated through the role of the White Queen with gestures that M. (who adored them) described as "camp," holding her elbows cocked and her fingers wafting, like a woman waiting for nail polish to dry.
Hamish, the glossy young lord who proposes to adult Alice in the real world before she goes down the rabbit hole, was played beautifully by someone I'd never seen before. Leo Bill? He filled his minor role with the pantomime roundedness that Alan Rickman brought to the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the alertness and glee of this, the private fun he was having, made him seem awake while everyone else on screen was sleeping upright, tucking his jaw down chinlessly, and pootering on about his digestive tract. The other real-world actors played it straight, which was a mistake, because 'it,' that is, the script they were given, did them no favours. Clump, thud, plop, went the script, both story and dialogue dull.
So. And writing like this reminds me of Pepys criticising performances of Shakespeare, which he does several times in the Diary. The Tempest, he says, has "no great wit; but [is] yet good, above ordinary plays." At the Opera he "saw Romeo and Juliet, the first time it was ever acted [after the theatres were re-opened following the fall of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government].
But it is the play of itself the worst that ever I saw in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do"
At the King's Theatre he watched A Midsummer Night's Dream
which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.
The decision to turn Alice into a fantasy adventure seems to have been born of cowardice and nothing else; the script makes modest gestures at a kind of rote feminism -- Alice is sometimes forthright and sometimes not, to suit the plot, and she doesn't want to wear a corset -- but there is no other justification for it, other than the fear that audiences might be bored by Lewis Carroll. So, given that they've eviscerated the Nonsense and turned the Jabberwock into a standard fantasy movie dragon it's funny to hear the characters pop out lines about the importance of the imagination and the majesty of doing something new. In fact I'll go further: it's hypocrisy.
I've never loved the Alice books, or hated them either, but I remember, when I think back to reading them at the age of somewhere-under-ten, believing that Wonderland was a chilly and oppressive place. Alice goes to a world where everyone is smarter than she is, or, at least, more powerful, more knowing, more commanding, and these other people understand the way society works while she doesn't -- which is what life is like for a little child overall, if you think about it. You're ruled by adults who lay down laws in accordance with a logic that you are not privy to, logic which goes mostly unexplained, or explained in words that seem beside the point. "You have to go to bed now," they say, and, "No I don't," you reply, and "If you don't you'll be tired tomorrow," they tell you, but how, how, is that relevant to now? "No I won't be tired," you explain, and you're sure that this is true; why shouldn't it be true, and why should their guess about the future be more accurate than yours? How could they know? There is some mechanism back there, some knowledge, that they seem absolutely sure about. There's nothing you can do to penetrate their certainty. You will be tired tomorrow, they tell you. They're certain of it. When you're six this might as well be Nonsense-logic.
Few people can have opened so many ears to such a variety of music over the last four decades as Charlie Gillett, the author and radio disc jockey, who has died aged 68 after a long illness. Charlie wrote the first serious history of rock'n'roll and went on to become a central figure in drawing together the confluence of international sounds that became known, to the benefit of many artists whose work might otherwise have remained in obscurity, as world music.
I went to a local festival on Saturday afternoon, a carnival in a park, a row of food stalls, a band, and tents dedicated to paintings, crocheted flower badges, and New Zealand bone carvings. One of the stalls was selling Ethiopian food. When I saw the sign, I thought, "Mahmoud Ahmed." As he came into my head I prepared myself to enjoy a dramatic coincidence. My brain lifted itself to attention; it felt as skin feels when it erects its hairs to trap the heat. It became sensitive in pinpricked dots. "This time last weekend," I wanted to think, "I was watching Mahmoud Ahmed. Now I am here, looking at an Ethiopian food stall in a park …" but I saw the Addis Ababa singer on Friday and Sunday, not Saturday, so that piece of very exact nostalgia (which would have filled my mind with unshed tears -- oh Mahmoud Ahmed, who sang on Stage One twice without letting us know that he was racked with toothache!) fell through.
(Francis Falceto, compiler of the Éthiopiques series, told us about the toothache in an Artists In Conversation event at Womadelaide on Saturday night, apologising for Ahmed's absence. Ahmed was in pain, Falceto said. It hurt to speak. He was saving himself for his shows.)
At Womadelaide in 2009 I stood in front of Dengue Fever fretting and distracted like Proust's narrator when he sees Berma for the first time. Once home I found footage of the other musicians on Youtube and my emotions coalesced. The Narrator reached the same point with, I think, the help of M. de Norpois and a newspaper article. A few days ago I came across a passage in John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu that reminded me of it.
But I have had the feeling … that Fancy and Imagination are not two powers at all, but one. The valid distinction which exists between them lies, not in the materials with which they operate, but in the degree of intensity of the operant power itself. Working at high tension, the imaginative energy assimilates and transmutes; keyed low, the same energy aggregates and yokes together those images which, at its highest pitch, at merges indissolubly into one.
Lowes is proposing that Coleridge's imagination submerged a collection of different books in its "Well" until they emerged as the Ancient Mariner. But the idea of imagination assimilating and transmuting caught my attention. My brain had to stow the 2009 festival away in its Well for a while before it could pick out the highlights, and present them to me, transmuted into a whole impression, in other words, a mental object that I could walk around and judge.
These are the acts I saw this year, in the order I saw them. All of the youtube videos with the exception of the Calexico one were posted by a blog called Womadelaide Live.
Yamato, the Drummers of Japan. Japan is full of drumming hobby groups. Yamato is that hobby grown huge. They've worked out comedy routines -- one woman emerging above the biggest drum with an enormous stick, one man going berserk while the rest raise their eyebrows until he notices and looks sheepish. The boom of the drums rolls off the stage like a thunderstorm.
Ojos de Brujo Part of the Spain's nuevo flamenco movement, a combination of flamenco, hip hop, and other music. I saw them twice and didn't like them as much as I thought I would (I enjoyed their first album (not so much the next two) and imagined they'd have a strong live presence). The different musicians seemed disassociated from one another, as if they were gesturing across gulfs from pocket-sized stages of their own. Other members of the audience didn't come away with the same impression. I overheard them afterwards telling their friends what a wonderful time they'd had. The lead singer, Marina, was endlessly active -- possibly the most extroverted performer at the festival. Makes starfish with her hands as she talks. I sat two rows in front of her on the flight home.
Calexico I abandoned Ojos de Brujo to watch the second half of Calexico's act. Every year the organisers bring in one US indie-rock crossover-music band like this. Last year it was Dengue Fever (US/Cambodia), the year before it was Beirut (US/Balkan, with wobbly trumpets that make the professional world music reviewers humph with scorn, but they don't seem to understand that the group is working to an indie aesthetic, not the trad one that rewards tightness. I've noticed that the richer the country, the more likely it is that some portion of its audience will regard shaky or distorted playing as evidence of a valued authenticity. Lots of it in Japan, eg, Maher Shalal Hash Baz). In 2010 it was this US/Mexican group, "from Tucson, Arizona" (the announcers kept saying), which perked me up every time I heard it because M. was raised in Arizona. I told him. He didn't seem to care.
Éthiopiques The nightclub scene in Addis Ababa reached an apotheosis in the 1960s and early '70s before the Derg junta arrived to throttle it with eighteen years of curfew. (The word Falceto used was "strangled.") The only nice thing you can say about Mengistu is that he wasn't Pol Pot, who had Cambodia's urban musicians driven into the countryside and worked to death or shot. Mahmoud Ahmed, a youngish singer back then, still has his flexible, quavering voice and superb accuracy. The show ended in an audience roar of, "Mah-moud, Mah-moud, Mah-moud!"
Grrilla Step One of the Avalanches came up with the idea of combining krump and PNG log-drumming, which sounds, on paper, like the genesis of a novelty act, but there is nothing incongruous about the performance (although putting the krumpers, in their urban streetwear, on the same stage as a man in traditional PNG half-nakedness, might have seemed so, if both parties didn't acquit themselves so well): very fast, very forceful, the percussion suits the music, and the dancers move with an exactness that is exciting. The human body, which fails us, which decays, which ages, which suffers cramps, injuries, stumbles, shakiness, has here been willed into precision. They pop and twitch as if ghosts are grabbing at them.
The Skatalites Not the popular hit of the festival but the band with the loudest fans. The lead saxophonist, who was probably the only original member of the Skatalites onstage, was a stubby man with a round chin and catfish whiskers.
Gochag Askarov Mugham singer from Azerbaijan. I spent most of my time watching his tar player, Malik Mansurov, whose nickname in my head was Mr Severe for his silver crewcut and stern expression. Poking around in the CD tent I discovered that the Musique du Monde people put out a solo album of Mr Severe over a decade ago. (Musique du Monde is a good label for things like tars, or dombras, or other out-of-the-way instruments.) M.M. is extraordinarily dedicated, according to the album notes, a man who abides by tradition, resisting all calls to simplify or modernise his music, yet he is also modest and friendly. Onstage he looked as if he were about to shoot you or sell you hardware.
Mama Kin "[H]er highly personal songs of love, life and motherhood are brought to vivid life over a stomping piano groove," according to the programme notes. I sat in front of her trying to work out why I was so dissatisfied. Reducing interesting ideas to, "I was strong," I wrote in my notepad. She would tell us the story behind the song, and then sing the song itself, and the lyrics were, without fail, blander than the prose. The lightbulb came on two mornings later when I watched Jane Siberry sing at the Women's Voices workshop. The voice in Siberry's song was that of a daughter addressing her mother, and the lyrics began by establishing both parties in a place (the narrator asks her mother to "put that teatowel down" -- you can assume they're in a kitchen), then goes on to sketch out the exchange between them. The mother has sometimes exasperated the daughter ("Don't worry 'bout my health. / My body is just fine"), but the daughter loves her nonetheless. She tells her mother that she can rely on her. We might guess that she has had to overcome her exasperation to reach this point of sympathy. It is an emotion she has had to work for, it is not a straightforward baby-method of loving someone, it is adult, and it has weight. Think of Paul Kelly's "How to Make Gravy", which lets us know the singer-narrator is in prison without ever having him say, "I'm in prison," or Larkin's Myxomatosis, in which the act of violence at the centre of the poem is never named. Indirectness asks us to think a little, keeping us alert, waiting for the next clue. Mama Kin was too simple, too direct, and she didn't have those hints of place and character.
Besh o droM Hungarians, mixing traditional music with other ideas. "Hop-a hop-a!" at high speed. The djembe player grinned like a man who was doing the only thing in life he had ever wanted to do.
Los Amigos Invisibles Venezuelans, based in New York: Latin funk and disco. The keyboard player took his shirt off and the singer wore purple sunglasses. I took a photograph more or less up his nose.
The keyboard player still had his shirt on at this point.
Mairtin O'Connor Trio An Irish trio with O'Connor on accordion. Then there's a fiddler and guitarist. O'Connor lives near the site of an old monastery, he told us, and his white hair falls all around from a single point at the crown of his head like a friar's.
The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra A Melbourne-based Afrobeat band, with brass, dancers, socially-conscious lyrics, and the big-band Nigerian sound, but the cold was starting to kick in, and I wasn't paying attention.
Lepisto & Lehti I do not understand the Finnish enthusiasm for tango.
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble Witness: a man who can play the trumpet with one hand and grab his crotch with the other. From Chicago, an all-brass party band with effective audience management tactics. "Let me hear you say Yeah Yeah!" -- and bob up and down, while they played synchronised strutting urban horns -- which was huge fun. Respect to the man with the tuba, who had to keep both hands on his instrument and so got locked out of the crotch-grabbing and audience-waving-at sides of things. "Everybody, even the cool motherfuckers, all right, get down a little low."
Babylon Circus Some time after I saw them perform I walked past the table near the CD tent where they were signing autographs, and a quivering plump tween boy came to the front of the line, and said passionately, "That was so good. I am totally in love with you." He seemed more sincere than the girl who loved Eliades Ochoa. Someone had handed the band members a lilac-dyed long-haired chihuahua. One of them tucked it inside his jacket.
Eliades Ochoa Former Buena Vista Social Club member making the most of an adoring crowd. We were "alle grande familia," he said, or however it's spelt. My Spanish is on a level with his English, which seems to consist of one sentence: "My English is … no good." Nobody gave a damn about languages at this point, everybody loved him. Then he played "Chan Chan" and everybody loved him even more. (On the subject of languages, I've noticed that bands who come from non-European nations will address us with whatever European language they know, even if it's not English. As far as most of the crowd is concerned they might as well go on speaking Wolof or Mandarin. It would lead to less confusion. I think we once convinced a Tuareg we could all understand French because we shouted, "Oui, oui," obligingly during a pause in his speech when he looked at us. On the other hand, each performer usually attracts at least a small group of their -- what's the word I want here? Their home team? Who will understand the language. My mind has been arrested by the memory of the Portuguese who roared into Mariza's concert years ago, waving football scarves. Every time a Greek group plays we end up with a circle dance, which I love very much and sometimes even deign to get involved in.)
Gilles Peterson Late night UK DJ stationed near Gate Two. I hung around his set for a while on the way out. He was working through a string of African-American samples when I heard him: Nina Simone, and a rapper I didn't recognise.
Ross Daly & Ensemble Cretan music. Daly has the kind of dedication that Musique du Monde attributes to Mr Severe. Intricate, measured, intelligent -- music that the musician has to pay attention to in order to play it at all, and so, so do you, to listen. The impression you come away with is one of profound integrity, your brain washed clean and beautiful by the effort of listening. Ended with a circle dance, the leading man tucking one hand behind his hip, the fingers gathered loosely together at the tips.
Unified Gecko Turkish-Israeli-Australian folk-rock band. I recall liking them at the time but don't remember what they sounded like. Sorry, Unified Gecko. According to my notepad I was standing, waiting for them to start playing when I overheard this exchange:
"Are these guys Aussies? No. They're not Unified Gecko?"
"Yes."
"From Melbourne. Oh, Melbourne" as if this explained a lot.
On a tangent, I heard someone else at a different venue talking about their favourite Womadelaide act. "I think the best show I've seen was a few years ago, the overtone singers. Did you hear the Tuvan overtone singers? From Siberia?"
Mariem Hassan Nicknamed "The Voice of the Western Sahara." The Western Sahara is a sliver of ex-Spanish colony being jealously tusseled over by the nations around it. Last time I looked, months ago, it was part-sort-of Mauritania and part-limbo. Anyway, they want autonomy. Hassan's group is something like a minimalist version of the Tuareg groups that have become popular since Tinariwen stormed into our non-Tuareg lives a decade ago. There's electric guitars, and a woman on percussion. Hassan has one of those strong, abrasive, long-noted desert voices, and is a powerful ululator. At the end she wrapped herself in a flag. I thought, "Do we know what we're cheering?" We were cheering a general ideal of freedom, I think. How many of us knew the first thing about the Western Sahara, or what freeing it might mean?
VulgarGrad A band fronted by the Narcoleptic Agentinean from Moulin Rouge, here growling in Russian. A one-joke band, but they push the whole Russian-criminal-cabaret thing marvellously, and it was worth being there for Kolman's asides, which were all about black prison bread and the tears of little children. "Can you feel in your mouth [pause] the black prison bread? [dramatic glowering pause] Well you can sweeten it with rrrevenge." And they rip into the next song, which is probably about murdering someone with a broken bottle in a brothel.
The Armada A three-piece band led by Jeff Martin, formerly of the Tea Party. I hadn't thought of the Tea Party -- hadn't listened -- to the Tea Party for years, but when I saw that Martin was an ex-, I wondered if I remembered liking them. I think I did. Standing a little way ahead of me in the crowd I saw a black mohawk that seemed familiar, then, under it, the word Yamato on the back of the t-shirt and, yes, it was one of the drummers from Yamato. After the show one of the other audience members flew up to him, gushing. I worked my way surreptitiously around to the front and saw that he was wearing an apron.
Kathakali Dance Ensemble They spent four hours donning makeup. We were allowed to peek into the tent. Then two hours performing a story from the Mahabharata. (The moral of the story was that the human body is but a transient envelope containing the perpetual soul, therefore it is quite all right to knock your enemy down, rip open his stomach with your bare hands, smear yourself in his blood, and dance around with his intestines in your teeth.) The makeup came off and the demons and nobles were replaced by middle-aged balding Indian men, which seemed wonderful in itself, as if the whole six hours (seven, counting the one-hour interval) was only a lead-up to this, the one marvel that seemed really unbelievable even as I was watching it happen.
Dean & Britta A US indie duo providing a live soundtrack to Warhol's Screen Tests. Surging music.
LAFA & Artists Dance Company Modern dance company from Taiwan, performing "an extended version of its beautiful and acclaimed work Single Room." I enjoy dance but the price of tickets stops me going, so I was grateful for this.
Women's Voices Mariem Hassan, Mariem Hassan's percussionist, Amal Murkus (Palestinian singer), Marina from Ojos de Brujo, and Jane Siberry sang together to celebrate International Woman's Day, which made me uncomfortable, because I'm not so sure about having my consciousness raised through song, thank'ee all the same. After this I wished I'd managed to fit Siberry into my schedule somewhere else.
Young Wagilak Group I'm going to copy out the note I wrote for Whispering Gums. "A mob from Arnhem Land, dancing and singing. Everything but the dancing and singing was disorganised (they arrived ten minutes late to their own show, which was unprecedented in this tightly-run festival) but once they opened their mouths to sing their bodies and minds seemed to snap into focus. The man in the middle (whose name I didn't catch) was one of the best traditional singers I've heard -- an articulate voice with a firm backbone."
George Kamikawa & Noriko Tadano "I've seen that man busking in Bourke Street Mall. Haven't I?" Kamikawa was a salaryman for one year in Japan (says his biography) but he couldn't stand it, and for the past ten years he's been a blues slide guitarist with a confident zoom and zing. He's based in Melbourne. So is Tadano, and he met her there. She plays shamisen. A hard pluck stabbing through to the zoom. A lot of the stage patter revolved around alcohol. "Get pissed," Kamikawa ordered. "Where did you learn language like that?" Tadano asked. "What?" "Who taught you to talk like that?" "Aussies."
Arrebeto Ensemble I saw so little of this that my opinion can't be called informed. Clearly articulated instrumental flamenco nuevo, as far as I could tell.
Kamel el Harrachi An Algerian oud player, ripping into chaabi with panache and an expression of perplexed agony, thanks to the way he had to turn down the corners of his mouth when he sang. He seemed to be coming to the end of one song, then -- ha ha -- a few notes popped out of the tune -- and a rising pleasured moan of "Ah-h-h!" flew across the crowd because this was undoubtedly the beginning of "Ya Rayah", and who, who knows "Ya Rayah", doesn't love it, unless they've heard it a million times and have reached the point of wanting to strangle the composer?
Djan Djan I only saw a little of this group's set because the All-Star Jam was up next and I was itching to get into the pit and see what was happening on Stage Two. But the combination of kora, tabla, and guitar was rippling along on that easygoing lilt koras can adopt when they want to, and the tabla kept things from getting sleepy.
Ravi Shankar & Anouschka Shankar One show only, and his fame drew an enormous crowd. Womadelaide has sit-down shows and standing shows, designated as such, an intelligent and needed response to a problem that was bringing some performances down in an atmosphere of anger and nastiness. One group of people would settle on the grass, meaning to watch the musician from their rugs, then another group would come and stand in front, wanting to dance, and everything would devolve into shouts of, "Sit down!" followed by shouts of, "Stand up!" and it was ruining (as you can imagine) the performances. This all happened years ago. Sit-down shows on Stage One still have the ghost of this charge of mutual resentment running through them: the stage is huge, the crowd is huge, and in all this mass of people there's always somebody out there who's too tall, or wearing a hat. The Shankars were a sit-down show.
Dub Colossus A Town Called Addis was one of my most-loved albums two years ago. (The most-loved was Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara's Soul Science, in which the musicians do a lot with a little.) I was panging to see this group. The album leans so heavily on mixing that there was almost no way anyone would be able to reproduce it on stage without bringing out your big machine and sitting there, pushing knobs, so this was not so much 'Dub Colossus' as 'A live show based on Dub Colossus, featuring people who appeared, sampled and remixed, on the album.' Nick Page, the UK brain behind the Ethiopian mix, was present, looking like Bob Hoskins and being droll. He introduced the musicians. "This is" -- and he said the man's name, whatever it was. "Excellent piano player. Keyboard to you. Great player. Nice hat." A pause as the man stood there. "Taciturn."
I'm home from Adelaide after a weekend spent covering Womadelaide. I had a photographer's pass on a lanyard around my neck, my notebook and camera in one leg-pocket of M.'s BDU pants (which were on my legs, not his; his were at home), and an ordinary plastic bag in the left-hand arse-pocket for the wrapping up of the hardware in case of rain. I didn't think it would rain, because it never rains at Womad, or if it does then the rain is only a sprinkle and not worth worrying about -- think of the light shower during the All-Star Jam managed by Johnny Kalsi in 2006, for instance, arriving with a breath of cool wind from the direction of the clothing stalls that, every year, sell thick felt pixie hats, handbags made from recycled tyres, and a heap of cheap yukata. (The heap of cheap yukata has vanished now. Why, I wonder? I think the pixie hat stall is still there.) But this year it rained. By mid-afternoon on Saturday I was soaked, and by eight that night when Babylon Circus was about to perform I was shivering so much that one of the professional photographers in the pit in front of the stage spoke to me for the first time, saying, You're freezing.
These experienced photographers own serious camaras fronted with huge long lenses like rows of black plastic cups wedged together, and by the end of the weekend I was feeling lens envy. My camera is a small digital one, wearing nothing but the truncated lens it was born with, and when I caught sight of a picture one of the others was taking, I thought, "Ow, I want one of those cameras. I want to zoom, baby." The picture was a close-up of Anoushka Shankar. She was onstage and we were in the pit. What a scrum it was, that Stage One pit, during the Shankar performance. Everybody's editor must have told them to get a good shot of Ravi. ("I know who you've come here to see," said Anoushka, laughing graciously, and acknowledging that the vast half-invisible crowd in front of the stage would not be so vast or so restless if this had been merely her. She was gracious too when a couple approached her at the airport the following morning as the entourage was going through the check-in for their flight. We saw your father last night ... How do I know this? I was standing a few feet away, zipping my boarding pass into my bag, thinking, suddenly, "That man in that wheelchair looks familiar. Of course he does. I remember that head. Ten hours ago I was trying to get the forehead into focus. And that fluffy, floating, wispy hair. His legs are so thin.")
Stage One is the main stage, the highest in the festival -- about, what -- seven feet off the ground? I haven't measured it, but it's above my head. There's a raised vertical lip -- like a rampart -- running along the front of the stage. One of the professional photographers discovered this when she tried to balance her camera on what she thought was a solid floor, and had to react quickly when it began to fall over the other side of the lip.
When a musician comes on from the back of Stage One I can't see them from the pit until they're standing at the microphone, which is usually back a little way at the centre. Then I see them from the waist up. Sometimes from the hips, if they come forward. Stage Two is lower, and it has a dark ceiling with a visible lighting rig, where Stage One has a smooth white shell ceiling that goes upwards at a curve. Standing in the audience for the Armada's performance on Sunday, I saw, in the gap between the bottom of this shell and the very back of the stage area, dark grey clouds welling up into the blue streak of sky, and thought, "It is going to rain again, and the Reject Shop this morning was sold out of plastic ponchos. I'll be soaked, I'll shake, and someone will say again, You're freezing."
(During the walk back to the hotel on Monday, I spoke to a man who told me the following story: a friend of his was at Womadelaide years ago when Jimmy Cliff came onstage during a storm and sang, "I Can See Clearly Now." At that the rain stopped.)
Stage Three is only about two feet off the ground behind a fence covered in black plastic hessian. There's a gap of perhaps three feet between this fence and the stage. The photographers sneak along doubled-up behind the fence. The Ravi Shankars and Eliades Ochoas of the festival never appear here, so there's never a photographer-scrum. (Ochoa is one of the surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, and when he appeared on Stage One the crowd cheered and screamed and a teenage girl crammed against the barrier shouted, "I love you! I love you!" Ochoa is sixty-three years old.)
Stage Four has a similar gap, but this one is narrower, and as the ends are blocked off with earthenware pots filled with long ornamental bright green grasses I concluded that we weren't supposed to use it. Everyone else must have concluded the same because I never saw anyone in there. The speakers or lights or something at the front of this stage bulged out into the rain so the crew covered them with a tarpaulin stuck down with gaffer tape. Part-way into Mairtin O'Connor the tape came loose and the musicians, all seated, were obscured by a cloud of rippling blue plastic.
On the morning of the first day there was a media call-up before the festival opened. We gave our names and received manila envelopes. These contained our passes, a Womadelaide programme, a wristband, and two sheets of paper laying out the rules. There would be no filming of Ravi Shankar, there would be no flash photography of Ravi Shankar, and this year the media would only be allowed to remain in the pit for the first ten minutes of each show. (This was enforced by security. The guard on Stage One was the most brusque. "All right, time's up, fellas." People lingered over the final snap. Oh how the front row in the Shankar performance must have hated us. They all had to sit down (this was the only sit-down show on Stage One) while we, of course, were allowed to stand, and right up the front, too, going click click click click -- and this was audible over the sitar.)
After we had our envelopes we watched two short performances by Ochoa and Mariem Hassan, "The Voice of the Western Sahara." Once they were finished we were allowed to conduct interviews. I wondered who the starched-casual group of men were behind me; later when I saw them on Stage Three and realised that they were the mugham ensemble from Azerbaijan I wished I'd spoken to them. Ross Daly, who is a tallish man, was inclining his noble head over a small crowd of journalists, his white hair whisking around in the wind. Days later at the All-Star Jam a larger wind blew up and the hair streamed out to the right until his head was an immobile comet followed in its inert progress by a cone-shaped tail.
The Voice of the Western Sahara was being photographed next to her percussionist, a round woman swaddled in fine orange gauze. I thought of her as The Orange. The next day she wore a green set of robes and I thought of her as The Lime. On Monday she was in pink and I thought of her as a Strawberry Gelati. What she wore on Sunday I do not know.
The crew had tied red and white striped tags to the lower branches of some of the trees. Those were gone by the time the park opened for the festival that afternoon. Why were they there? Why were they removed?
What else? We had a Media Tent, with tables and chairs, a water dispenser, and an internet connection. I ducked in during the rain and found the professional photographers sitting in a group discussing their cameras. In the background, on Stage Three, the Public Opinion Afro Orchestra was chanting, "Rain, rain, go away," in a call-and-response duet with the audience. But Jimmy Cliff wasn't there, and it didn't.
"Geoffrey Hill, a poet regularly hailed as the greatest in the English language, died suddenly on 30 June at the age of 84." | "As if to enrage them further, he produced more and more oblique poems." | "There is no vast imaginative rupture between each of those phases, though there is a sad period of silence." | "Testimonies & other articles." | "I’ve been told he lived just long enough to cheer Iceland on." | G.W. Hill, Form 2L [via] | "It turns out he was something of a bluegrass fan." | "On 29th November 2013, I interviewed the poet Geoffrey Hill." | "It is a question that we might ask of Hill’s later poetry." | "He armored the poems." | "The following sermon was delivered at the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Hill." | "Somebody had the imagination to give Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to the policeman’s son."
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