Lyric Prose

Lyric prose is supple, nuanced, accurate, exact; it is grounded, it illuminates.

This is lyric prose:

From the Fosseway westward to Isca Dumnoniorum the road was simply a British trackway, broadened and roughly metalled, strengthened by corduroys of logs in the softest places, but otherwise unchanged from its old estate, as it wound among the hills, thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness.

This is lyric prose:

With the coming of dusk the rain had stopped, but a mist had risen, creeping knee-high through the trees so that they stood like ghosts, and the grazing horse floated like a swan. It was a grey, and more than ever ghostly because it grazed so quietly; he had torn up a scarf and wound fragments of cloth around the bit so that no jingle should betray him. The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king's son. If they caught him they would have killed him. He was just eighteen.

Lyric prose is a horse.

This:

Ellie gawked like a child, unironic. She remembered something from schooldays: Janus, with his two faces, is the god of bridges, since bridges look both ways and are always double. There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher, Miss Morrison, drawing Janus on a blackboard, her inexpert, freckled hand trailing the chalk line of two profiles. With her back to the class there was a kind of pathos to her form. She had thickset calves and a curvature of the spine and the class would have snickered in derision, had it not been for her storytelling, which made any image so much less than the words it referred to. Roman God: underlined. The Janus profiles not matching. A simple image on a blackboard snagged at her feelings and Ellie had loved it because it failed, because there was no mirror and no symmetry. And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her.

is a hippopotamus.

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1 - Sutcliff, Rosemary, The Eagle of the Ninth, 1954, the first paragraph. There is the startling and exact "corduroys". The last clause "thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness" lays out the first half of the main action of the novel. The repeated "farther" plants the motion of "far" strongly in the mind of the reader, giving a sense of depth to the landscape and the reality of the setting.

2 - Stewart, Mary, The Crystal Cave, 1970, from the Prologue. "Betray" introduces the notions not only of danger but also, literally, betrayal. This is leads directly into "would have killed him".

3 - Jones, Gail, Five Bells, 2011, from chapter 1.The paragraph is 9 sentences long and contains 3 framing devices for the central image of Miss Morrison at the blackboard. ("She gawked" "She remembered" "There was the limpid memory".) They alone account for a lot of this paragraph's herkey-jerkyness. The phrasing of "And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her" is imitation middle-period White; it draws attention to itself as an imitation because there is nothing else to counter-balance or be seen or weighed against it. The answer to the question (of why Miss Morrison's calves reassured) is simultaneously raised and suppressed; nothing is either resolved or deliberately left hanging. Every sentence whipsaws between the abstract and the concrete, with no link to what comes next except the bluntly explicit.

"There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher..." We had been lead to believe that we were in Ellie's mind, and yet "limpid" in that position reminds us that we are not; Ellie's limpidity is more limpid than ours - the memory is over there, not here. "... made any image so much less than the words it referred to" is a stunningly awkward construction.

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This wouldn't irritate me nearly so much if Five Bells weren't being universally touted for its lyric prose, when its prose isn't lyric.

A Strange Case of Truth in Advertising

As we were unloading the car for the Gobshite launch, I happened to look up and see a - drop-down, vinyl? - banner on the building at the end of the street. Two sports heroes, one black, one white. The banner was huge, so the faces were larger, even, than the heads of statues of Lenin in the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union. The further from Moscow, the larger the statues: in Central Asia and Mongolia Lenin was, iconographically, a god.

I was surprised, but I haven't been downtown for a long time. The images might have been there quite a while.

The festivities finished. We left in full dark. And there they were, lit by streetlights: the gods of the night and the city. 

Night so much bigger than the other gods.

In the playback screen there was a white streak in the centre of a dark area, where I wasn't expecting one. I looked at the banner again, to see exactly what had happened to the camera I can't afford to repair.

There were strips of white light at intervals through the length of the black man's face - neon night-lights on the ceilings of the various floors the banner covers; under the banner - beneath the face, in terms of the photo - the lights continued on their way, obeying the laws of perspective.

Two brooding gods of the city. Both their tenures will be brief: sports careers are. But the godhead of the young black man is revealed as hollow, even while it's still his.

Tell the FAA

Well, yeah: but every one of these petitions

1) assumes & reinforces the idea of American exceptionalism
2) is written at a low middle-school reading-level
3) is couched, verbally & emotionally, as protecting small children from potential owies

I've signed it. I always do. But then I puke.

The Myth of Balance

It’s been clear to me for a very long time that my body and mind move in very long cycles of writing, not writing, or writing first muddles and drafts of complex things and then refining them, also over a long time. It is even more clear to me now that I've moved into another one of these periods of assembling the basic material for something new.

At work we have an employee program run by fellow-employee volunteers, called the work / life balance program. My HMO also recommends work / life balance and runs, sometimes, free classes for those of us having difficulty finding time for our actual lives.

It has escaped their notice however that jobs – such as are left to us – are not structured to accommodate this kind of cycle. And as long as the economy uses the employment / income model of roughly the last hundred years, they won't be.

There is no balance possible when I need a month or two to concentrate on what I’m doing – not because I'm a poncy pretentious artist, but because my mind cannot be in two modes at once. When I'm in this phase and totally preoccupied I can barely do arithmetic, let alone the myriad things I need to do to stay competent at my job.

This complete mind-fog is part of my fundamental cycle.

There is no balance possible. The job takes precedence: I have to earn our livings, housing, food, clothing, medical care.

It's very likely that most of what I feel ready to produce will never be completed, or maybe even begun.

Just don't tell me it's because I lack time-management skills.

The notion that work of originality or depth can be done without something close to total immersion – that promulgated, amplified, prettified, zen-veneered, pietistic, blame-shifting, money- and interest-laden notion – is false from top to toe.

It's (another piece of) industrial propaganda.

Tri-X, Carlton, April, 1975

Song for Moving the Winter Doona

Raise paw, lower paw,
Roar, roar.
Lash tail, breathe fire,
Roar.

(repeat as necessary)

Stow, Schepisi, White, Craven, Joyce, McCaffrey, Stow

7.8.10

Took A Counterfeit Silence to work to look at it. Towards midday I found I wasn't feeling well and looked forward to being lunch behind a closed door... Then I made what turned out to be the mistake of reading an article in The Australian.

Fred Schepisi filming The Eye of the Storm – Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush – Schepisi doing an Australian pic (at last, again), doing White, and I hadn't known, hadn't known, and it was happening, and it was going well –

Except that the article was by Craven. Sprawling, sloppy, fundamentally unorganized, reeking of stale alcohol (no Hepworthian lyric or charm, nor even Gopaleen anger/wryness); just critical gush about White, the sensitivity of Schepisi's direction and its necessary femininity in this case.

Now look: I've read enough over the years to know that Schepisi doesn't normally whisper emotions into his actors' ears. Rampling only had 3 weeks for the shoot. So this essentially feminine whispering, this seductive mesmerism, instead of being a function of Rampling's schedule, is, in Craven's universe, Schepisi becoming a Rampling-White Svengali, channelling gayness and White, bringing forth the hidden feminine –

Schepisi's never less than sensitive! Doesn't Craven remember Uluru at the beginning of A Cry in the Dark, remember how The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith turns on the difference between a cut and a dissolve?

But that's not enough. Now Craven has to claim that The Devil's Playground is "the greatest representation of an Australian Catholic childhood ever done"…

What does he know of Australian Catholic childhood? He doesn't know that nothing had changed since The Dead, not even the cooking: there were still heavy, thick, cut-crystal bowls at Sunday lunch, the big meal of the day (roast lamb, also had cold for dinner), long discussions about Irish tenors (the Irish tenor voice now in Gilbert and Sullivan, the G&S societies everywhere), lace curtains, Sunday afternoon visits, verbal political brawls, all held below hung portraits of those gone to The Great War and in front of mantlepieces with smaller upright photographs of those from Changi and Tobruk.

He has no idea how as very very small kid you dreamed in all but Gaelic, how those Sunday afternoon visits took you to the house of the great-aunt who remembers Sydney Kidman coming to say goodbye to her mother when he left for the interior, to create an empire and the over-grazing that has been Australia's bane.

He has no idea about the Pellegrini's, suppliers of incense & other necessities: rosary beads, prayer books, missals, scapulars, holy pictures, Immaculate Conception medals, first communion medals, confirmation medals, ordinary saints' medals, statues – he has no idea of the bric a brac made a Catholic childhood of that era, the happiness of the school holiday on St. Patrick's Day, the rose-petals on Holy Thursday (still weeping for Adonis)...

He has no idea that The Dead is more relevant to Australian Catholic childhood than Portrait of the Artist or The Devil's Playground. He doesn't mention Catherine Keneally's books at all. He doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, doesn't care because it doesn't matter: the copy's in, the paper's out, right, wrong, or blue in the face – no one's going to challenge it or him because Australia can only have one eminence at any one time – critic, climate scientist, poet, director, jurist.

Craven knows The Devil's Playground is a critique of the Catholic Church; he doesn't bother or have to bother to distinguish the church from the childhood. He's read Portrait, and there's a speech in Devil's Playground straight from it, so there's Irish Catholic Australian childhood for you: subject signed, sealed and delivered. The church stands in for the childhood and male stands in for all. There's your bloody article and that's that.

As for Devil's Playground itself: Arthur Dignam will never be convincing as a heterosexual, Thomas Keneally will never be convincing as anything; the speeches about The Rules, The Rules, are heavy-handed, forced and false; the ominous music by Bruce Smeaton laid over the opening shot as we peer around the bend in the very muddy river makes us wonder if Picnic at Hanging Rock has taken to the water. It's a far less perfect film than we thought it was or wanted it to be. It was a first feature by a new director; it was achieved against formidable odds; it was the work of a potentially great film-maker with an already impressive control of sound perspective and a visual technique that remains unique, and who has done outstanding work since.

So why does Craven even bother to make the claim? He doesn't know the subject or he'd know The Dead is more relevant than Portrait. He's telling us, again, that he knows more about everything than any of us ever will, no matter what experience or expertise we may have been forced to inherit or internalize, no matter what knowledge or experience he actually lacks.

And the writing! The badly-constructed sentences, the implicit dissing of everything he's not in the act of praising,  the self-aggrandizement via the utterly unnecessary inclusion of his own history ("now so different from reading it at 20"), the sheer sense of dissipation the prose always exudes: reading it's like being within reeking-range of a drunk man spewing.

A spewing drunk. That's what we've got for a critic. No wonder I feel ill.

And so, lunch. A closed door, some cold water. Some more cold water.

After a while I betook myself to the Stow. When he died I looked him up – Wikipedia, probably – and found a biography so painfully discreet it screamed. The first paragraph of The Merry Go Round in the Sea, quoted somewhere on the web, a detailed description of the central iron post of the of the merry go round rendered in terms of tailoring / costume, is not something any straight man would have written. Well, no straight man after Henry James.

And it was clear as I read, with greater and greater depression and horror, that Stow's closeting had destroyed the poetry: it was opaque, portentous, hysterical, and twee; lots and lots of borrowing from Judith Wright, and not much done with that… The best thing in the book was the adaptation of Lao Tsu, though at times he seemed to be calling the Tao God (I can see why, but no)… But if I want to read Lao Tsu I'll read a translation that starts at the beginning and goes through to the end.

It was miserable… I won't be critiquing Stow, though; I've heard and am glad to have heard that the novels and the stories are good.

For the rest of the day I read an inept Anne McCaffrey book, that being all the strength I had; it was derived from The Sword at Sunset and The Crystal Cave and the knife-fight at end of Dune; it had an utterly Sutcliffian plot-structure.

It seems I like the story of Artos the Bear getting horses from southern Gaul no matter how badly it's told – hope at the beginning of the tale set far in the past, all the arguments done with.