Very sad news about the Ahmedabad blasts, and more bombs are being found in Surat.
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080059451
http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/31/stories/2008073161531000.htm
MIFF starts any day now. Don’t know which quote I like more:
“If I’ve learned anything from big budget action movies it’s that complicated global problems are best solved by one lonely guy.” - documentary filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me)
OR
“I hope your balls turn to bicycle wheels and backpedal up your arse!” - Barry McKenzie
What I’ve been up to. Last week:
Total hours alive: 168
Awake, maybe 100. At least 80, or maybe 70 something…
Teaching: 2 hours
Writing secret project: 5 hours
Studying/reading: 51 hrs
Reading all 4,000 lines of Hamlet aloud: maybe next week.
DVD viewing: 10 hrs.
Cooking: 3 hrs
Sitting at the cafe: 2 hrs
Thinking: 5-10 minutes.
Driving little brother to an audition/waiting in the car reading Shakespeare: 2 hrs.
Sport: 2 mins (20 push ups). Hey, at least I’m honest.
That’s about it. Received a dozen paperback copies of PATRIOT ACT: awesome. Found a typo in the unedited ’sneak peak’ of BLOOD OIL in the back pages, fuuuuuuck. Invited to Dolly Teen Choice Awards: WTF? That could only end badly. Had a laugh with a courier who delivered a carton of beer to my building: watched him punch in my apartment number… sweet. “Free” slab of VB from Fosters who are sponsoring some book event I’m doing later in the year: very niiiice. Although I’ve still given them about $170k over the past 14 years of hard drinking.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: if there’s an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.
You’ll recall I recently compared McCarthy’s Boy IN THE ROAD to the Son of Macduff. It seems it resonates with me to this day; perhaps I am growing something of a paternal nature. Maybe it’s an awakening of the anxiety of influence. Certainly, I am always not too far from Shakespeare in my thoughts, writerly and otherwise. Still I cannot comprehend much of what makes Hamlet such a character at what, twenty years of age? Perhaps it’s that I see Shakespeare’s own son in Hamlet’s eyes, as I see the Bard as the Ghost, who we know he played on stage. This has been on my mind for years now, and I release upon rereading my own text that there’s the skeleton of both Hamlet and his father’s Ghost in the Lachlan Fox we meet in BLOOD OIL. I’ve written in such territory before, only it’s more thinly veiled now; Shakespeare, who named both father and son Hamlet in that play, lead to germ of an idea in a short story that I wrote titled “Soliloquy for One Dead.” Indeed it is a soliloquy, because if there is one thing that I am more keenly aware of over anything else, it’s that Shakespeare taught me this: how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.
I don’t follow a particular faith. My parents were raised Catholic and decided to teach me all religions, something that I am eternally grateful for. There is suppressed Judaism in my ancestry and I attended a primary school where we sang Hebrew folk songs in class more often than any Celtic traditionals. As an adult, I’m probably more drawn to Buddhism that any other organised belief, though not without subjectivity. I take few pains to point out that I am open to all reasonable beliefs of faith and respect all those before me; I’m sure this is evident to those who know me. All this said, I am a steadfast follower of Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, which should be even more of a secular religion than it already is. His plays are the outward limit of human achievement, never to be reached by us mortals, and I belong to the school, of which Harold Bloom must be the headmaster, that acknowledges Shakespeare as the inventor of humanity. Bloom posits this by saying that his plays abide beyond the mind’s reach, that we have no hope of catching up to them. But more on that another day.
I bring up religion here because I went to a christening the other day, the Catholic baptism of an infant. I can’t agree that babies are born into original sin (which is the one element of baptism that I am talking about here); it seems to me odd that such an innocent should pay for sins that Jesus himself paid the ultimate sacrifice for, let alone the fact that a months old human has the capacity to sin. After the christening, I said this to some of the attendees, and when pressed I gave the age that I thought such a cleansing of the soul to be seven. This is the age of mens rea, I said, to which they looked dumbfounded, which disappointed but didn’t surprise me. I joked that I could perhaps be baptised that day as well. They laughed and said: you’re too old. I’m twenty nine, I said. Far too old, was chorused, even a couple laughs. Jesus was twenty nine when he was baptised. More dumbfounded silence, accompanied with uncomfortable looks. I was left wondering how many of them knew the Book by which they lived, and which version they knew. Instead, I quipped that Christopher Marlowe died at twenty nine, and wondered aloud what would have happened had John the Baptist accidentally drowned Jesus at twenty nine. Or if Marlow’s friend Shakespeare had left us at twenty nine, how the world would be a different place because we would think and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare’s ideas before they were our own. Bloom taught me that much and Shakespeare has proved it to me time and time again in ways that go beyond literal meanings. Frye too has added to my understanding of the symmetry of verse in almost every text I read, stemming from the work of Blake that Frye took to the point of conviction by articulating that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature.
Most of us, like those present that christening day, would probably cite the King James Bible as the version de jure, even if it is the product of the Church of England and the Book of protestants. In true Australian form, most of my ancestry hails from Ireland, so the irony here is not lost. Certainly, I find the KJ version the most lyrical of biblical prose that I have read, and it seems ingrained in my consciousness as I hear its metre when I read Hemmingway and Steinbeck and Lincoln and now in Obama’s oratorical timbre in the audio book version of his refreshing “An Audacity of Hope”. That this version of the bible was written in Shakespeare’s time fascinates me to the point that I will write about it fully some other day.
This thinking about the purity of children’s souls had me thinking as I watched two films the other night: The Kite Runner (2007) and The Italian (2005). There’s something in the performances of these child actors that belies their age and in their inherent innocence something transcends expectations and moves me so. The two young actors in the Kite Runner were more than worthy at playing the roles of Hosseini’s creation and their portrayals will stay with me for some time. I am a fan of Marc Forster and he did exceptionally well here. The Italian, part of a recent vanguard of remerging brilliance in Russian cinema, was not as technically proficient as Forster’s film but then I didn’t expect it to be. The boy in this film carried the beauty against the beast of the system that was necessary to make us care beyond the ordinary; the final shot of the film, in the context of the story, was perfection.
Reminiscing here, some of my other favourite child/adolescant performances have been Salvatore Cascio as the little boy in Cinema Paradiso (1998 – original version only), Giorgio Cantarini as the son in La Vita e bella (1997), and Oksana Akinshina in LILJA 4-EVER (2002). Each one of these performances has had that artistic quality that like Shakespeare, like Mozart, like Caballet, like so many great artists, has emotionally moved me in ways that literal meanings can’t. Without Shakespeare, without the writers of what became biblical texts such as the J writer (who I love to believe was a woman), without Aristotle and Plato, I can’t imagine we would have had the cognitive power to comprehend such emotions, let alone have the ability to create such artistic material. And it’s in this artistry that defines us as human. Indeed, in my career as a novelist, every day I am working within the limitless confines of the novel, which can, beyond any other art, encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity. I am, forever, deeply entrenched with an anxiety of influence of genius that I cannot know how to touch but I’d hate to live a life without the hope of attempting to try.
I’ll leave the last word here to Bloom, on the study of Shakespeare… “We have to read Shakespeare, and we have to study Shakespeare. We have to study Dante. We have to read Chaucer. We have to read Cervantes. We have to read the Bible, at least the King James Bible. We have to read certain authors…They provide an intellectual, I dare say, a spiritual value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief. They remind us in every sense of re-minding us. They not only tell us things that we have forgotten, but they tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them, and they reform our minds. They make our minds stronger. They make us more vital. They make us alive…Shakespeare is universal. Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage…I don’t know who Shakespeare was. He has hidden himself behind all of these extraordinary men and women…One cares about wisdom, and in the end one wants to be judged by wisdom. If one hasn’t got it, one has to ask the biblical question “Where shall wisdom be found?’ And I suppose, for me, the answer is: wisdom is to be found in Shakespeare, provided you get at it in the right way.”
Final quote from: “Harold Bloom Interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel”
Queen’s Quarterly v102, #3 (Fall 1995) PAGES 609-19.
