It's time for some quotes. Recently I found this beauty in an old notebook, a nicely effective quote from Perec's
Life: A User's Manual. And frankly, considering the amount of wasted waterpaint and lozenge-shaped rooms in that book, I think it nicely pithy and abrupt:
Life, young man, is a woman on her back, with swollen, close-set breasts, a smooth, soft, fat belly between portruding hips, with slender arms, plump thighs, and half-closed eyes, who in her grandiose and taunting provocation demands our most ardent fervour.
Only, put it in the voice of an Englishman.
The next, one of the better descriptions of
Paris, is from
Octavio Paz:
I was exploring the city that is probably the most beautiful example of the genius of our civilisation: solid without heaviness, huge without gigantism, tied to the earth but with a desire for flight... In its most auspicious moments — a square, an avenue, a group of buildings — tension turns to harmony, a pleasure for the eyes and for the mind.
(From In Light of India).
OK now, I came to the song pretty late, but heavens, do I love that pounding rhythm of section of
No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age. All rhythm section. Yes, let’s not argue, it’s prime trio rhythm, Kyuss bass and guitar, and the one thing I do remember acutely from glimpsing the video: Dave G really working the drums, almost angry-heavy. Intense young man. The best heavy is simple heavy, I say. And the recording of the drums is superb, solidly dry and immediate, maybe just a little compression on it. If only everyone could be this tight.
More capsules, more pills
After a sickness and hospital-related absence, more news in brief. Finally,
Capturing the Friedmans. Bravely navigating the ambivalent line of non-judgement, sometimes Errol Morris-style, sometimes a little haphazardly but always well-edited and balanced time-narrative wise. As much about leading questions (leading suspicion and justice, leading hypnosis, leading interviews, direct leading statements from the judge) as the inability to ever really form a decided, jury-friendly opinion, I loved its ambivalence without overtly putting the viewer in the jury’s seat. I also got a suspicion that their community hung the Friedmans because they were dysfunctional in a way slightly un-American, possibly for being Jewish. As though dysfunction isn’t the recognised norm or in any way universal. Hence the punchy nature of the dinner table arguments: everyone raving and railing, the mother in denial and waiting to exploit her neutrality for her own inclination to divorce (she reminded me most directly of Sharon Osbourne, for guile), the sons appalled and screaming, and then the camera moves to the right to reveal… the grandmother, sitting there all along. And the mother hesitating, almost tactlessly, to embrace her son out of prison, near the end.
Finally I can flush the 700 pages of
Middlemarch down the memorial drain. Occasionally great prosaic insight; an amazing instalment of the social system novel, with the odd scientific parallel trimming and much psychological accounting — the kind that breaks the beginner’s writing rule ‘Show, don’t tell’ over and over again, proving the rule is shit (Balzac never hesitated to ‘Tell’). But, though the prose style is quite advanced or ‘adult’ as Woolf would have it (it brims with an intelligence, a fat faculty for fleshing motive, mind), and though it seems to occupy its own bubble-like range, circumscribed by mode, I felt this is one novel that cannot be read exclusively — you have to take frequent breaks or parallel reads with racier material, lighter alternatives — like Petronius would say, you have to change your chariot occasionally. It’s a bit like chewing on a floury English loaf for days on end. Though, again, in all fairness, there are moments of great fluency and plot management — I admit to occasional rivettings. The line from here runs direct to Lawrence (parallel opening chapter with
Women in Love). And the ref to Italians with white mice seemed to hark back to
The Lady in White.
So I padded the read with Durrell’s
Bitter Lemons. Great mature travel writing from a Mediterranean master. If only because I’m planning a trip to Cyprus before the year’s end. Hilarious account of buying a house with a wise Turk. A little short on conclusion — politico-historical (which might help understand the current mess), but great stabs of poetry, great longing and welcome. And also Octavio Paz’
In Light of India — more acute and shimmering poetry. Didn’t realise ‘till later that I’d picked out travel writing by two poets. And also more
Carver shorts. For lessons in economy and selection.
A bit of a peevish swipe at
Godard from
Camille Paglia, eternal 60s child, bemoaning our
short-attention-image-saturation culture. “Today's rapid-fire editing descends from Jean-Luc Godard, with his hand-held camera.” And then, a little further on, saying “the humanities curriculum should be a dynamic fusion of literature, art, and intellectual history.” I’m sorry, Miss P, but that is exactly what Godard is about, especially in his later works, which are as much meditations on image, lit and history as can be achieved in the medium. I admit I’m in a pro Jean-Luc mood, but that is just a shallow stringing of mealy facts, a surface reading.
Let’s talk about corporate social responsibility.
Companies that outsource to foreign workforces (ie exploiting cheap labour like call centres in India) should pay a tax for not contributing to the welfare of their own local economy. Or a tax incentive for employing their own. Because it is exploitation and it should be taxed somehow. It bolsters the ever-widening wage gap between executives and lowly employees by exploiting in turn the massive relative wage inequalities of poorer nations, because they can be exploited. It should be called an ethics tax.
