Austria or Australia? A guide for the confused

Questions of national identity being apt to cause distress, the following guide is offered to commentators of all nations.

Austria	Australia
Natural beauty	Natural beauty
Beer	Beer
Blond, blue-eyed iconography	Blond, blue-eyed iconography
Remnant of once-proud 19th century empire	Remnant of once-proud 19th century empire
Child prodigy who went on to embody national aspirations in song: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Child prodigy who went on to embody national aspirations in song: John Farnham
Sachertorte	Vanilla slice
Reluctance to come to terms with history of racism	Reluctance to come to terms with history of racism
Thomas Bernhard	Richie Benaud
Reckon they do a better coffee than the Italians	Reckon they do a better coffee than the Italians
Sausages	Sausages
Sigmund Freud	James Freud
South-eastern Europe	South-eastern Earth

The Dark Knight Rises

ALFRED: ‘e grew up in a hellhole called the Philosophy Department of the University of Ljubljana.They call ‘im Badger.

BADGER: Grrr! Argh! Muhaha! Down with the oppressors! Less than nothing! Blood of the workers!

He twists the head off a rich puppy.

BADGER: Show trials for all! Violence! Dialectic!

He puts up a poster of Stalin and signs a book deal.

PETER LORRE: Hey, why don’t you condemn the Gotham City financial industry for massive systemic fraud and economic vandalism?

BADGER: Screw you, liberal.

He eats him.

THE GOTHAM CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT: Herp in the name of the derp!

THE BATMAN arrives in the The Batman Helicopter and punches and punches and punches and punches and punches and punches and punches and Oh, hey, look, there’s CATWOMAN.

CATWOMAN: Rrrrrrrowr.

THE AUDIENCE: Yay!

Alexander Cockburn

Sad to hear the news that Irish-American journalist Alexander Cockburn has succumbed to cancer at the age of 71. To borrow one of his metaphors, it was exposure to Cockburn’s journalism at a tender age, via a chance discovery of his 1988 anthology Corruptions of Empire, which inoculated me against the error of thinking that his friend Christopher Hitchens had an admirable prose style.

Here is a collection of his articles. It’s nice to see that this includes a piece about the excesses of New York dining. Most of the obituaries I’ve read are strictly about his political work, but Cockburn is one of the funniest and most acute food writers I’ve ever read, and I’ve never forgotten his gloss on a recipe for cold fish curry:

Short of lowering one’s naked foot slowly into the weeds at the bottom of a pond it is hard to imagine a more depressing experience.

Geek Mook

Geek Mook was launched last Friday – it’s an anthology of stories, articles and artwork, including my short piece on code comments as a literary genre.

Dhalgren

Samuel R Delany

I have been a fan of Babel-17 since I was a teenager, and I read and enjoyed the first two Nevèrÿon books a couple of years ago, but finishing Delany’s 1988 memoir The Motion of Light In Water earlier this year made me want to read as many of his works as I could lay my hands on. So I decided to start with the most notoriously unreadable.

Difficult books are all difficult in their own way: apart from a few pages of Wake-like babble and plenty of discontinuities in the opening chapters, Dhalgren isn’t especially demanding at the textual level, but it thwarts the conventions of sf in a way which would be very frustrating if one didn’t enjoy both Delany’s style and his company. A lot is said about the likeability of characters, but the likeability of the author is just as important for the enjoyment of fiction.

The novel’s setting is Bellona, an American city isolated from the outside world by a mysterious disaster, and its metafictional ambitions – the central character is an aspiring poet who writes in the facing pages of a found notebook which may or may not be the novel itself – impressed me less than its vision of what becomes of an abandoned city. Bellona is a sort of Temporary Autonomous Zone, but it’s also post-Katrina New Orleans or the shattered suburbs of Baltimore in The Wire. The novel has gained other resonances and echoes in the decades since it was published: the scorpions, street gangs decked out with holographic monster projections, come across at times like a New Wave Wu-Tang. (A futuristic genre of African-American thug poets, hyper-masculine to the point of homoeroticism: if hip hop didn’t already exist, Delany would have to invent it.)

Quite unexpectedly, Dhalgren reminded me of Patrick White’s The Vivisector. The books share a certain grottiness – 0ne is always aware that there’s not much running water in both novels – and the sex scenes in both books have a tendency to the grotesque.

Dhalgren is much more of a riddle, and it has its dull stretches, but I found it very hard to put down, and the effect of the final pages was bewilderingly touching in a way I won’t be able to understand until I read it again. Some novels are difficult in the same way that a large bottle of single-malt whiskey is difficult to drink in one gulp: Dhalgren is one of them.

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Hipster/poofter

If you replaced the word ‘hipster’ with ‘poofter’ you get perfectly-formed putdowns from the western suburbs of my childhood.

So does this mean that calling someone a hipster is a more sophisticated, ironic way of calling them a poofter? That anti-hipsterism is hipster homophobia?

Now I’m confused.

John Mytton

I found this lovely Folio edition of T H White’s volume of Regency gossip, The Age of Scandal, at Lambdha Books in Wentworth Falls.

Other forms of personal toughness were connected with the childish ‘dare’. Mytton drove a chaise across  country, by night, over hedge and ditch, until it collapsed: he jumped the iron railings of his park: he introduced a live bear at a dinner party: he galloped over a rabbit warren to see whether his horse would fall, which it did: in the end, to cure the hiccoughs, he set fire to his own night-shirt, and burned himself to death. It was to prove that he was not afraid.

– T H White, The Age of Scandal

(note: Wikipedia’s entry for Mytton upholds the story of the nightshirt but denies that he died of the burns it caused.)