February 28, 2008
Reader feedback: some second thoughts
I went off the deep end THE OTHER DAY about "comments" boxes. The truth is, I'd just received a hostile email from a buffoon, and was therefore in no shape to approach the topic objectively. I've looked at a few other blogs in the meantime, and have to admit that reader comments tend to be far more civilized than I suggested. So: I've changed my mind. I do now plan to create a feedback area - eventually. I'd do so right now, if it weren't for two things. The first is that it appears to be freaking hard. I'm strictly an amateur HTML-er, so I'll need time to figure out how to do it. The second thing holding me back is pride. This is a newborn blog, with a laughably small readership. I'm not sure I want to advertise this fact by creating a lot of message boards that will just sit there staying flagrantly empty, like the hat of a talentless busker.
Hal was robbed
The standard argument against artistic and literary prizes is that works of art aren't in competition, and that it's folly to pit one against another. I think I have a better argument against them. Awards committees, even when presented with a clear opportunity to select an outstanding work ahead of a dud one, still have an alarming tendency to embrace the dud.
Take the Oscars. Clearly I should have known better, but I went into this week's ceremony hoping that good taste would prevail in just one tiny category. I wanted Hal Holbrook to win the Supporting Actor award for his performance in Into the Wild. Anything less would be an injustice.
I'll give this much to the Academy: prior to scandalously depriving Holbrook of the Oscar, they at least had the good taste to use the finest moment of his performance as his nomination clip. Playing an old and lonely widower, he screws up his courage to ask Emile Hirsch's character to become his adopted son. He knows the kid will almost certainly say no; he knows how much that rebuff is going to hurt; but he won't forgive himself if he doesn't ask. You can see the hope, and then the pain, in his rheumy eyes. How does Holbrook make his eyes do that? The scene epitomises the actor's craft: it shows what a good actor can do that a bad actor - let alone a non-actor - can't.
And then they went and gave the Oscar to … Javier Bardem, for portraying an only slightly more talkative version of the Terminator, or a slightly less hairy version of Chewbacca. For all I know Bardem might well be capable, if required to play an actual person, of acting Holbrook off the screen. But from what recognisable human milieu does his Oscar-winning lumbering weirdo hail? Real-life hitmen, no matter how emotionless they might seem, generally don't bother continuing to kill people when there is no longer a point. And Dahmer-style psychopaths - say whatever else you like about them - at least seem to derive a bit of pleasure from their crimes.
The answer, I fear, is that Bardem's character isn't even meant to be a real person. He's some kind of abstract force, a film-school metaphor for the slouching inevitability of death. Which is all well and good; but I don't see why the same role couldn't have been played, just as effectively, by Dolph Lundgren.
Obviously the answer has something to do with the mysterious "buzz" that attaches itself to certain films at certain times. For some reason this was seen to be the Coens' year. Never mind that No Country, although a perfectly good visceral thriller, is second-rate Coens. Never mind that it involves an almost total suppression of the brothers' verbal skills: aside from the sound of gunfire and shattering glass, and a bit of fake profundity involving the flipping of a coin, it's practically a silent movie. And yet they won best (adapted) screenplay for it! Why, I wonder, wasn't such "buzz" generated by earlier and much cleverer Coen films like Miller's Crossing, or Intolerable Cruelty, or The Big Lebowski - none of which got nominated even for its script? What a pity it would be if the idea were to get around that the "best" films are the ones from which warmth and wit are not just absent but deliberately withheld.
February 25, 2008
I notice that it's almost mandatory for a blogger to provide readers with a feedback window. So far I haven't installed one, and I doubt I ever will. I'll tell you why. Over the course of this site's life, I've received a pretty healthy trickle of reader emails. About ninety-five percent of these have come from intelligent and tasteful readers who've taken a lot of time to set out their thoughts. I hope that what I'm about to say won't imply that I don't appreciate such intelligent responses. On the contrary: they're indispensable. They're like bottles of Gatorade lobbed to some wretched figure running a marathon through a desert.
But in addition to the good stuff, there's always the occasional lout who considers this site a crime against humanity - and who for some unfathomable reason believes that I will be interested in hearing his views. Well, I'm not. Opening a negative email, even when it comes from a patent fool - and who but a patent fool would have anything bad to say about this site? - tends to ruin the rest of my day.
So I'm naturally wary about providing a feedback window. I've seen such windows on other sites, and I've read the kind of savage invective that piles up in them. And I have no stomach for that sort of thing. I don't want to engage in over-heated debates with strangers. I don't want to be lectured on points of style or grammar by people who haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. My only aim is to provide a bit of entertainment. If you're not entertained, you are entirely free to go away – silently. I suppose you're even free to badmouth me on other websites, such as your own. I just don't see why I should provide you with a facility to do so here. To me the concept seems a tad perverse, like building a wall in one's own garden for the use of passing graffitists.
By the way, is it an accident that online trash-talkers tend to hide behind handles or nicknames instead of supplying their real names? I think not. The anonymous handle must help the flame-artist forget that the so-called 'virtual' world is made up of actual humans, thus making it easier for him to behave in an inhumane way. A question for online flamers: would you, if you happened to find yourself in a store you didn't like, seek out the proprietor in order to inform him, at the top of your lungs, that his establishment is an offensive waste of his and your time? If you would, then you're an ill-mannered asshole. If you wouldn't, then why do you think it's okay to do the same thing online? Do you forget that your remarks will be read by a real person, who might have an aversion to getting mauled by nameless strangers?
So: intelligent readers are still permitted, indeed encouraged, to email me. But emailing me is fractionally less easy than leaving a line of feedback, and my feeling - or hope - is that people who don't have anything useful to say will be less inclined to make that extra effort.
I repeat: none of this means that I don't value the feedback of the thoughtful majority. The intelligent responses stay with you forever, while the bad ones quickly fade. The kindness of strangers matters far more than the insolence of oafs. Rationally I know all this. But when you receive a kick to the crotch, the reflection that your crotch doesn't hurt the rest of the time is of little consolation.
Yes chef
May I pitch you the idea for my new reality TV show? It's loosely based, I have to admit, on an existing show that I can't get enough of - namely, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, in which the foul-mouthed but strangely charismatic chef Gordon Ramsay once a week invades an ailing real-life restaurant and brutally attempts to turn things around. He castigates the chefs, humiliates the waiting staff, discovers ferrets living in the kitchen, and yet somehow transforms the place into a first-rate eatery in seven days. My own show, tentatively entitled "Free's Prose Nightmares," would apply the same concept to purveyors of substandard English. Each episode the team and I would descend, possibly unannounced, on some bakehouse of illiteracy - a small-town newspaper, an academic journal, the headquarters of a Russian spammer, Dan Brown's house. I would have a week to whip things into shape. We'd start by getting the head writer to sit down and type out a sample of his prose, with me watching over his shoulder muttering things like "fucking hell" and "do you really think people will want to read that?" At this early stage I might even - as Ramsay once did after being fed a dodgy scallop - run outside and vomit. Then we'd get back to basics. Just as Ramsay forces his wretched victims to make him a simple omelette, so I would require mine to write me a simple declarative sentence. I would blindfold them, read them a paragraph of James Joyce and a paragraph of Shane Warne's The Sheikh of Tweak Speaks, and challenge them to spot the difference. I'd put on a white apron, kick the boss off his own workstation, whip up a piece of five-star prose of my own, take it out onto the street, and blow away the local townsfolk by reading it aloud to them for free. "Now that's prose," they would say; or, "I'd drive here from Surrey to read prose like that."
Any takers?
A torrent of filth
One of the ickier aspects of running a website is reading your stats and logs. These tell you, among other things, how people have landed at your site. If they arrive via a search engine, as most of them do, you can see which words or phrases they've punched into it in order to get to you. And this is where things can get hair-raising. Because webstats provide a window onto human depravity that I never particularly wanted to open. Everone knows the web is awash with freaks. But not till you've read a visitor log do you really know the scale and the unbelievable specificity of human perversion. True, there's many a clean-living Googler who's arrived here by entering perfectly respectable search terms like "free online novel," or "work of genius." But all too often in my logs I see search strings that would raise the eyebrow of the Marquis de Sade.
I could probably go to prison just for quoting an example, so I'll refrain. Instead I'll explain the matter as delicately as I can. All the same, if you've just eaten, or if you don't particularly feel like an excursion into the darkest recesses of the human soul, then you might want to look away.
Here's how it happens. This site is mainly occupied by the text of a novel. In the pages of that novel certain four-letter words now and again occur. And sometimes they occur, through no fault of mine, quite close to certain other words relished by deviates (dog, nurse, huge, trombone, etc.) The accidental juxtaposition of these words creates quasi-pornographic word clusters on which fetishists will descend like seagulls onto a chip. For example: let's assume that one character, in a certain chapter of the book, calls another character a "cunt." So far, so innocent. Now: let's further assume that the word "grandmother" occurs, in an entirely different connection, fairly close by. Still with me? Finally, imagine that the novel's protogonist happens, in the same chapter, to relieve himself, so that the word "piss" is now also in the mix. While these three words might not be to everybody's taste, they don't by themselves constitute grounds for arrest. But when some shadowy onanist settles down to search the web for material in which all three of these elements are combined into one single nightmarish incident or act, a link to my humble site will appear in his Google results, amid what I can only assume must be a torrent of horrifying porn.
But here's the really mystifying part. Here's this solitary perv scrolling through the results of his unspeakable search. He may or may not be fully clothed. He knows, all too clearly, exactly what he wants. And he must be able to see, from the merest glance at its description, that my site isn't it. Yet he still takes a look at it.
Fortunately he tends to go away again pretty soon. But why does he come here in the first place? I don't know, and I don't want to know. Can my site really look that compelling? When I spoke of the darkest recesses of the human soul, I euphemized. What we're really talking about is the darkest recesses of the human dick. Which is a subject we can deal with later, or quite possibly never.
Two men in a tub
The TLS'S REVIEW OF MARTIN AMIS'S NEW BOOK (The Second Plane) begins thus:
In the foreword to The War Against Cliché, his 2001 collection of reviews and essays, Martin Amis recalls his early writing days with some nostalgia:
'My private life was middle-bohemian-hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly debauched; but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube; I always had about me my Edmund Wilson – or my William Empson …. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilization.'
Note that the ellipsis (…) is not mine: it's there in the TLS. So in what "locale", exactly, did Clive James hit Amis with his formulation about literary criticism? In the tube - or in the tub? Just how good a friend was he?
The problem, which any moderately competent reader will have spotted right away, is that a reference to some other "locale" has obviously been hack-sawed out of the middle of the paragraph, thereby making nonsense of the final sentence. (Flipping to Amis's original text, you'll find that the intervening reference was to pubs and coffee bars. You'll also find that the item of punctuation between "middle-bohemian" and "hippyish" is supposed to be a dash rather than a hyphen. A small point? Perhaps. But if the TLS can't tell the difference between a hyphen and a dash any more, then who can?)
I suppose I'm prepared to let the hyphen thing slide. But I refuse to view the other mistake as a negligible. Are there no literate editors left, even at the TLS, capable of spotting such an obvious distortion of meaning before it gets into print? Amis is a careful writer. Say whatever else you like about him (and most reviewers do), his meaning is never unclear. You have to wonder if a reviewer with such a dodgy ear has any business assessing his work.
As it happens, the rest of the review isn't as bad as all that. It merely follows the template of the standard British Amis-review: praise some of his previous works before putting the boot into his current one, having of course detoured for a quick mandatory piss on the grave of poor old Kingsley (in this case the work is done with a quote from a proxy urinator, the PC bore Terry Eagleton). The British critics treat Amis disgracefully. Here's a man who takes the writer's task - the writer's role, his obligations to society - with great seriousness. In my utopian view reviewers should thank him for this. Instead they put him in the dock. I've never heard one of them praise his writerly courage. He runs risks. When he feels an impulse, no matter how perverse or disreputable it might seem, he records it, confident that it's probably universal. He unwisely did this while talking to a journalist last year, and got himself into awful trouble. You might say that he'd be better off saving his more nuanced or controversial observations for his own books, where at least he can be confident they won't be read out of context. But they can be misquoted, even by the TLS.
Cuntgate: dirty talk from Jane Fonda
The web is a wonderful thing. If you weren't mortally offended and outraged by seeing Jane Fonda say "cunt" on live TV, you can call it up on Youtube and be mortally offended and outraged by it there. At the very least I'd rate it the four-billionth most atrocious thing I've seen online.
Personally, I have no issue with Jane saying "cunt." My only complaint is that her timing was out by about 40 years. There was a time, at least in theory, when I'd have crawled over half a mile of broken glass to hear her say it. Unfortunately I hadn't been born at that point, so one of us would have to do a little time-travelling first. I'm talking about the Jane of Klute and Cat Ballou. That voice! Above all I'm talking about Barbarella. If only she'd dropped the c-bomb while floating around in that suit!
How funny it was to watch the likes of Bill O'Reilly rise so predictably to the bait. "She only said it to get attention," Bill pointed out - while giving her a segment's worth of attention. There have been suggestions that Jane was making an effort to "reclaim" the word. But what a pity it would be if the word were to be deprived of its blunt power and rendered all boring and acceptable. I like it the way it is. It's the last really dirty word we have. Let's keep it nasty.
February 14, 2008
The ultimate spolier
I'm about to blow the ending of the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men - so if you haven't seen it, look away now.
Actually, it's the Coens who blow the ending. I'm just going to talk about it. Three-quarters of the way through the film, they kill off its central character: off screen. It's a coldly intellectual move, more likely to satisfy the film critic than the general viewer. It's calculated to make you turn immediately to the person sitting beside you, even if you don't know them, and say: "What the hell was that? Is that dead guy lying on the ground Josh Brolin? Surely not?" It's supposed to alienate and baffle you, and it works. Consider me alienated.
On the whole, I like the Coens. They made my favourite film of all time, Miller's Crossing. But I find it hard to like them unreservedly. They can be awfully cold at times. They have a tendency to come at their material from the outside in. It's as if they start off by saying: "What genre will we do this time? Let's make a screwball comedy." This approach can result in such weirdly bad films as The Hudsucker Proxy. In the case of No Country, you imagine that one brother said to the other at some point: "Hey, let's mess with the audience by killing off the protagonist early and off-screen." And you can imagine further conferences along the way: "Dude, are we really going to do this? Really?"
It reminds me a little of the case of David Foster Wallace, a brilliantly talented writer whose work is consistently marred by his apparent belief, no doubt acquired at some college writing workshop, that the reader must be messed with, irritated, annoyed, prevented at any cost from enjoying the book from beginning to end.
Clive slips up
I admire my countryman Clive James without any reservation worth mentioning. I consider him Australia's best living writer. His WEBSITE is exemplary: wise and witty, packed with top-quality content, and - in the proper spirit of the web - totally free. His latest book, Cultural Amnesia, is his masterpiece - at least in the field of criticism. (I still think autobiography is his forte, and Unreliable Memoirs his best book.)
But it pains me to have to note that the great man, who is a long-time campaigner against grammatical error, does, in this new book, perpetrate a few mistakes of his own. Actually, it's the one mistake, but he makes it a few times. Here he is on page 566: "Those who would like to believe that Thomas Mann was an anti-Semite have to deal with the undoubted fact that he reached deep into his pocket at a crucial time to save [Alfred] Polgar, whom he realized was his equal as a guardian of the soul of the German language."
The "whom" should be "who." If the sentence had read "whom he considered his equal," or "viewed as his equal", then "whom" would be right. When someone with James's grammatical credentials makes this mistake, it's almost time to raise the white flag. But not quite. See Fowler's Modern English Usage, who & whom, article 2. As far as I know Clive has never made this mistake before, so perhaps we can put it down this time to an overzealous but not-quite-fully-literate editor.
Weird science in reverse: a word against Botox
Does it bother anybody else that some of the world's best-looking women, and a few of its zanier men, are voluntarily turning themselves into less animated versions of Jack Nicholson's Joker? I'm no expert on the art of surgically fucking up the human face, so I can't say for sure whether the effect that I'm complaining about - the one whereby a once perfectly good human face is made to look like that of Dr Evil's cat - is arrived at by plastic surgery, the injection of industrial quantities of toxin, or both. It doesn't matter. My point is that sticking any piece of sharp metal into a face is almost always a grotesque mistake, except in cases of dire medical need. Dr Frankenstein has a bad reputation, but at least he was pro-life. At least he was a re-animator, not a de-animator. Whereas the Botoxer takes a perfectly healthy and mobile face and medically deprives it of life. One of the main charms of the human face is, or used to be, that it moves. It expresses things. Yes, it also grows old. But there are some things far more grotesque than growing old.