Wanting

Richard Flanagan, Wanting (Knopf 2008)

Even though I’m addicted to print, or perhaps because I am, I approach most books with a kind of resentful suspicion. It’s as if I’m projecting onto the book an anxious feeling that Schopenhauer might have been right when he said, in the essay ‘Thinking for Oneself’:

Reading is thinking with some one else’s head instead of one’s own. … Nothing is more harmful than, by dint of continual reading, to strengthen the current of other people’s thoughts. These thoughts, springing from different minds, belonging to different systems, bearing different colours, never flow together of themselves into a unity of thought, knowledge, insight, or conviction, but rather cram the head with a Babylonian confusion of tongues; consequently the mind becomes overcharged with them and is deprived of all clear insight and almost disorganised.

I came to Wanting with my normal ambivalence, plus an extra burden of suspicion, because the only other novel by Richard Flanagan to have entered the cram in my head  was the abysmal Unknown Terrorist. I was willing to give this one a go because he writes compelling non-fiction, and the earlier, terrible novel was set a long way from his native Tasmania, in a place he clearly loathed and equally clearly didn’t know at all well, whereas this one is largely back in Van Diemen’s Land. Book Clubbers recommended it (that’s the Book Club, where we swap, not the Book Group, where we discuss). I took it home and eventually opened it up.

I wish I could say my suspicion evaporated within a couple of pages, but I can’t. A Protector of Aborigines, Charles Dickens, Lady Jane Franklin (widow of Sir John Franklin, Governor of Van Diemens Land and explorer) are introduced to us in a series of clunkily expository scenes. That would be all right, but the clunkiness comes with lashings of  heavy irony – the narrative voice is unpleasantly insistent that it knows better than the Presbyterian Protector, and really really wants us to know it doesn’t share the genocidal racism of all the white characters. Maybe things would improve once the story got under way, I thought. But there were other discouraging signs. On page 14, to pick the most striking example, the Presbyterian Protector, in 1851, sings some lines from ‘Lead Kindly Light’. That’s unlikely, I thought, given that the hymn was written by high Anglican John Henry Newman, no friend of Presbyterians. Fifteen seconds with Google revealed that though Newman wrote the words of the hymn in 1833, it wasn’t until 1857 that someone put them to music. So it’s not only unlikely, it’s a straightforward anachronism. And I don’t think that’s just nitpicking. If the novel, having already repeatedly pronounced judgment on this character, doesn’t care enough about him to know what hymns he would or even could have sung, why should I trust anything it says about any of its characters?

I did read on. But by page 55 I realised I was motivated entirely by some weird sense of obligation. There was no pleasure. I didn’t believe a word. I put the book back on the shelf. It may be very good. It may fully deserve the awards and critical praise it has attracted. It may successfully mirror the terrible anguish that accompanied the belief that Tasmanian Aboriginal people were about to die out, as an author’s note says it aims to do. It probably is a moving meditation on the conflict between reason and desire or some other Significant Dichotomy. I’ll never know. And I probably won’t bore you ever again with blog entries on Richard Flanagan’s work.

Our baskets and Awaye

Almost exactly a year ago I mentioned on this blog’s predecessor that we’d acquired three beautiful woven baskets. The artist, whose name I omitted to mention then, was Jim Walliss, a white man from down Nowra way. Yesterday on Awaye he received an honorable mention in a program about Boolarng Nangamai Aboriginal Art and Culture Studio in Gerringong, near Nowra. The Awaye link in the last sentence gets you the audio. Here’s the relevant bit, where Steven Russell, weaver, painter and print-maker is talking to Nicole Steinke from the ABC:

Nicole Steinke: How did you start with the weaving, because you’ve said you really love the weaving?
Steven Russell: It started back in TAFE, in 2000, when I first started TAFE. We were taught by this old fella, a whitefella –
NS: Is that Jim Walliss?
SR: Jim Walliss, yeah. He’s a pretty good weaver himself, and he told us stories about the Aboriginals and what they did. He showed us a lot, and we just took off from there and ran with it and haven’t looked back since. I’m just thankful for Jim, for knowing him, and teaching us something that should have been passed down by our ancestors, and which wasn’t.
NS: So was there a sharing there that went on?
SR: Yes, it was sharing, and he was honoured to teach us. He taught us a lot of things about weaving and styles of weaving. He taught us our traditional weaving and that’s something that we’ll cherish for the rest of our lives, and we’ll pass it on to our kids.

So our beautiful little baskets have some sweet connections.

More Glass family reading

J D Salinger, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction (1963, Bantam 1965)

What a rich vein the Glass family were for Salinger! I laughed out loud a lot during ‘Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters’, at one level a classic New Yorker comedy of manners, and I was hypnotised by the convolutions, involutions, circumvolutions of ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ as Buddy Glass is still coming to terms (coming to words?) with his relationship to his numinous elder brother a decade or so after his suicide.

‘I am an emotional creature’

Yet another video link, this time to a fabulous TED talk by Eve (‘Vagina Monologues’) Ensler, ‘Embrace Your Inner Girl’. You may find the beginning bits about the girl cell a bit oogie boogie, but do persevere: it’s a metaphor. I couldn’t find a way to embed it, sorry!

Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl | Video on TED.com.

Cromwell & Tucker

In this video Alastair Campbell, former mover and shaker in the British government, talks to fabulous film critic Mark Kermode about the In the Loop character said to be based on him.

I don’t know about you, but I was both amused and chastened.

Here’s a thought. Could it be that Malcolm Tucker in In the Loop and Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall are really the same character seen through different lenses?

Franny and Zooey revisited (not reviewed)

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961, Bantam 1964)

According to the little red notebook I kept at the time, I read Franny and Zooey in 1962, when I was 15. My eldest brother, Michael, who was then 24, introduced us younger ones to much that was sophisticated, including classical music (played loud ’so you can hear it properly’), rock and roll (danced with a slack-jawed deadpan expression I’ve seen nowhere else), Mad magazine, Jules Feiffer, sick jokes (‘Mummy, why do I keep walking in circles?’ ‘Shut up or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor’), and J D Salinger. So where other people found in Holden Caulfield a mouthpiece for their own teenage alienation, I read him dutifully in the footsteps of my luminous big brother. I moved on to Franny and Zooey in a similar mode, and what I remember is mainly that I was very pleased with myself for having read such a sophisticated book. Kerryn Goldsworthy blogged recently about how significant Franny and Zooey was to her as a 16 year old. The one moment that I retained, revelatory to me in its own way, was in ‘Franny’. Lane has been going on about his brilliant seminar paper. He pauses for Franny’s response. She says:

‘You going to eat your olive, or what?’
Lane gave his Martini glass a brief glance, then looked back at Franny. ‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘You want it?’

I couldn’t have told you why, but I felt I’d been allowed into a great secret at that moment. I had no idea what Lane was talking about – Flaubert, ‘capital-F Freudian’, the mot juste were droppings from the inscrutable world of adult discourse. But I understood that Franny found his olive more interesting than his monologue, and that his coldness was full of unspeakable emotion. The door to understanding the adult world was creaking open for me.

When I read it just now, I realised that the book had been much more influential than I realised. Everything I wrote from the age of 16 to 30, at least when I was trying to appear intelligent – aspired to sound like Buddy Glass (‘Zooey’’s narrator) sounding through it – the complex syntax, the self-deprecating hi-falutinness, the over-use of words like ‘rather’, and so on. Though I’d forgotten it, Zooey’s tirade about the importance of not moulding Jesus to fit one’s own psychological needs ranked with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (I read The Brothers Karamazov two years later) as a major outside perspective on my intensely held Catholic faith.

As I started ‘Zooey’ this time, I doubted whether I’d actually ever read it. maybe I’d listed it in my notebook as a bit of wishful thinking. But from the scene where Zooey sits in the bath and first reads a very long letter from his brother  and then has a very very long, snitchy conversation with his mother, through the conversations with Franny who is in the middle of a nervous breakdown, I was amazed at how intensely personal it felt. It’s not as if I remembered individual passages –more like I was reopening old neural pathways, as if the book hadn’t been remembered in a normal way but somehow stored at a cellular level. That is to say, I have no idea what I’d have made of it if I’d read it for the first time today.

It’s embarrassing. I’d thought all those people who talked about how Salinger’s work had changed their lives were, um, a bit phoney. Now I discover that if I’d kept closer – or perhaps smarter – track on myself, I would have been one of them.

My Book Group Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (2002, Penguin Australia 2008)

I read five pages of this when it was freshly published, and decided it was not for me. It’s rare for me to dismiss a book like that, so I dipped ahead reading a page here, a page there, and found absolutely nothing to change my mind. Then at the December meeting of my Book Group, a number of people were keen to put it on our agenda, and they won the day. So, eventually, I bought a cheap copy (all the libraries’ copies were out) and set to work. By the time the group met last night, I’d finished it, though I did skim the last 20 pages so I’d have time to cook the dinner. There are some very strong bits, as it turns out to be a story of a small Ukrainian village whose entire Jewish population was murdered by German soldiers, counterpointed by a ludic tale of the Jonathan Safran Foer’s forebears’ lives in that village.  I can see why the book received such acclaim, but pretty much the first half is taken up with ha-ha-I’m-being-funny humour and an awful lot of the shtetl story that felt contrived, inconsistent and disrespectful, like Isaaac Bashevis Singer off the rails; the thesaurus-driven voice of the Ukrainian Alex, who narrates the modern-day quest for the village, eventually toned down as it got to the point, but by that time I had endured too much that was weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. My moment-by-moment irritation robbed the narrative of almost all momentum. In the hope that mine was a minority response, I came to the group resolved to listen and learn.

The book found no stout defenders among us. Roughly half hadn’t managed more than 20 pages or so. The man who’d liked it most – we think he was the one who proposed it – had seen and enjoyed the film, and admitted that when he read the book he skimmed the bits that weren’t in the film, which meant all the shtetl stories, all the clever literary bits (some would say these were darlings that should have been murdered), and the worst excesses of the mangled-English narration.

The reason we’d chosen this book is that we wanted to see how it went if we watched a movie of the book under discussion. So after dinner we watched Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated. All O knew of the movie beforehand was from glimpses seen in Operation Filmmaker, the achingly funny documentary about an Iraqi intern on the shoot, in which Liev Shreiber and others came across as humane, generous and admirable people who clearly believed in their project. I don’t know that I liked the film all that much: the Elijah Wood character (‘Jonathan Safran Foer’) was too weird, and there were some awful saggy bits. It was fascinating to watch it so soon after reading the book. The ancestral story – roughly half the book – was sheared off. The second of the two revelations at the end was replaced with something much less interesting, less morally complex. A climactic action that almost made sense in the book made no sense at all in the film. And the upbeat ending was despair-inducing. Paradoxically, the film made me appreciate the book much more.

A pleasant evening was had by all, even the two dogs, who managed to bully someone into throwing a ball for them more than once. Next month, not Franny and Zooey or Arctic Dreams or The History of Knowledge or Wildlife, but Peter Temple’s Truth. We wanted a page-turner.

A US soldier talks about Iraq

Thanks to Antony Loewenstein for this, from Winter Soldier testimony in 2008:

Try not to read the comments, at least not the illiterate ones.

White Rabbit revisited

Yesterday we visited The Tao of Now, the new exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale, and had a very good time. The wonderful bright red pig car whose tongue soars to the ceiling and has another, golden pig and two other figures hanging from its tip – that and other pieces that were in the foyer previously are still there, but the three upper floors have had a complete makeover and the works are as fresh and surprising as the last lot.

As we were chatting over a display catalogue of Qin Fengling’s work, a tall silverhaired woman with a chihuahua on her arm (‘He will bite,’ she said later) joined our conversation, saying, ‘We have her red piece, though not in this exhibition.’ She flipped through the pages and showed us the piece she meant, and then went on to say that the Guggenheim had been interested in it, but she’d beat them to it because she didn’t have to secure a committee’s approval.

Aware of my solemn responsibility as blogger cum citizen journalist, and sharp as a tack as always, I said, ‘You must be … the owner.’ Those three dots represent the moment in which the name ‘Judith Nielson’ didn’t get past the tip of my tongue. She didn’t seem to mind. ‘Not the building,’ she said. ‘That’s my husband. But yes, I own the artworks.’

We chatted for a couple of minutes (there were five or six of us in the room – that citizen journalist thing was definitely a joke), and she said something that explained part of the appeal of the gallery: ‘I never buy something because of the explanation. If I need to read about a work to be able to enjoy it I’m not interested in acquiring it. But once we’ve bought it and have it back here, we have a whole machinery that swings into action to fill in the background.’ and it’s true: whether it’s the motorbike and sidecar crocheted out of bright blue wire, the interactive screens based on classic Chinese watercolour scrolls, or the giant painting of a headless Mongol archer looking out over Tien an Minh square, the works in this exhibition grab the attention first, ask questions later. It’s a bonus that there are attendants on every floor who are keen to raise and answer the questions.

I don’t suppose Ms Neilson and her tiny, dangerous dog are always there, but clearly they sometimes are, as an extra special bonus.

Bloom & Blair’s Islam

Jonathan Bloom & Sheila Blair, Islam: A thousand years of faith and power (Yale Nota Bene 2002)

I bought this book some years ago in the hope of finding some insight into how a religion that has sustained so many people for so long over such a geographic and cultural range could be used to justify the barbarity of suicide bombings and videoed beheadings. Since I don’t have much insight into how Christianity or Judaism can be used to justify mass murder either, and I’m already reasonably familiar with at least some parts of the former, maybe I should have expected my hope to be dashed, but it springs eternal, and trust in book-learnin’ is hard to shake.

The authors’ expertise, and presumably their passion as well, lie in Islamic art. This book was written to accompany a US television series, and despite its self-described aim as ‘to help Americans – of whatever and even no religion – understand the religion and culture of another place and time’, what it actually does is to provide background, to tell the grand, sweeping narrative of the beginnings, growth and spread of Islam in its first thousand years, with an inevitable emphasis military conquests and defeats, political struggles and religious strife, with a couple of welcome chapters on the flourishing of science and poetry between 750 and 1200 CE. The succession of dynasties and ruling elites – Abbasids, Barmakids, Chaghatayids, Fatimids, Ilkhanids, Mamluks, Mughals, Ottomans, Seljuqs, Umayyads – is as bewildering and at times as dull as the begats of Genesis.

I’m not complaining. In fact I wish I’d read the book 50 years ago as a supplement and antidote to the Eurocentric version of world history I received in my schooling. It’s bracing to read the stories, even in broad outline as here, of people and places that I know mainly as elements of  Orientalist decor: Saladin of the curly-toed shoes becomes Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub; Suleyman (isn’t that the guy from Lord of the Rings? – yes, I’m that ignorant) ruled the Ottoman Empire for 46 years, Marlowe’s Tamberlaine the Great becomes Timur, a Great Mongol conqueror; Samarkand, Timbuktu, Xanadu all existed outside romantic poems and fantasy literature. Many things I have assumed to be creations of Western culture are in fact borrowed from the Islamic world: romantic love I already knew about, but x as a way of representing an unknown in maths was news to me; The Divine Comedy wouldn’t have existed if Dante hadn’t read in translation popular Arabic stories of Muhammad’s mystical journey to heaven.

I’d just finished the book when I heard Romana Koval on The Book Show with James Delgado talking about his Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet. As Romana, helping out her audience by displaying her own real or pretend ignorance, wrestled with the difference between Khubilai Khan and Genghis Khan, I realised how glad I am to have read Bloom and Blair’s book. If I had read it 50 years ago, when my memory was much more retentive,  I might have emerged from it knowing who all those people were. As it is, I can expect the names to ring some kind of bell, and I’ll know where to look for a quick rundown – and yes, as well as a list of further reading, this book is blessed with a substantial index.