The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
His Girl Friday
(Howard Hawks) (1940)
High speed comedy with no feelings spared. Cary Grant’s and Rosalind Russell’s finest hour.
Hilde has left Walter and the newspaper business behind, or so she thinks….
Gyn/Ecology
(by Mary Daly)
The Gravity’s Rainbow of feminism, an inspired sample-bag of misogyny, a panoply of male sadism. Arguably an insane tract, nevertheless the facts are there – they are indubitable and to this mere male reader, quite compelling.
Continue Reading →The Green Man
(by Kingsley Amis)
The landlord of “The Green Man” pub has an alarming drinking problem and wandering hands. Also, there is some monolithic horticultural product about, that could cause further alarm. Amis senior’s famous book, Lucky Jim is superior to this slight work but this novella is so weird and perverse it is almost decadent.
Continue Reading →The Great Terror
Robert Conquest (photo Rob C Croes)
(by Robert Conquest)
It is hard to understand why so many intelligent people admired the socialist experiment of Soviet Union c. 1934-1940. These useful idiots defended and lauded systematic mass slaughter on an industrial scale. Conquest’s book, originally appearing in 1968, helped convince those still impervious to, inter alia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The case is made, with solid and well sourced evidence, that Stalin basically topped anyone who looked at him sideways, or didn’t look at him, or whatever.
Nor were the good and great spared: my battered 1971 Pelican edition has, as Appendix D, a list of Full and Candidate Members of the 1934 Central Committee and of those, I have made notes that 49 of them were shot, mostly in the 1930s and 7 of them died in prison, under interrogation or by suicide. Osip Mandelstam died in the Gulag in 1938, largely because of a poem he wrote about Stalin, containing the lines : “the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he tows with the tributes of halfmen…He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.”.
Vale Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) – he was someone who followed facts, not ideology. Facts led him from an early flirtation with communism, and he learnt not only from his own mistakes, but, impressively, from those of others. One imagines him in a celestial library, gazing out of golden windows down at Stalin’s useful deniers, the whole gang of them floating in a sea of burning pus. Appropriate Conquest footnotes..
Continue Reading →
The Great Gatsby
(dir. Baz Luhrmann) (2013)
We were in glamorous Station Street, Birmingham, which turned out to contain “The Electric”, the UK’s oldest cinema. So The V.C. went to see Gatsby in 3D. Looked great but Baz has not nailed the brief: who could? Joel Edgerton looks like Tom Buchanan but talks like Ron Burgundy…Jordan Baker, Meyer Wolfsheim, Owl Eyes, have walk-ons and nothing to do. Gatsby is played like a sad sack with Asperger’s…Luhrmann should take a tip from Visconti when he filmed “Death in Venice”: forget revision, in fact, forget a script – just film the book.
“The Electric” in Birmingham
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(dir. Sergio Leone) (1966)
The western as grand opera, with a poke at the Civil War thrown in. See in particular the late Eli Wallach scrambling about for the grave with the buried treasure.
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God’s Funeral
(by A.N. Wilson)
A beautiful & rich review of Victorian and Edwardian thinking, as God’s life support was unplugged and how later generations may come, in time, to feel the need to apply resuscitation. As Kenneth Clark observed, heroic materialism and Marxism aren’t enough. We need something more.
Not the Hand of God, the hand of Nietzsche
The Glass Bead Game
(by Hermann Hesse)
Hesse’s ideation of his own life as a monk is a heavy but worthwhile read.
Continue Reading →The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress
(by Beryl Bainbridge)
An odd, slight, oddly touching and slightly naff story of a road trip to oblivion, culminating in the death of RFK; but is the dysfunctional, libidinous Rose ‘the girl in the polka dot dress’ who exclaimed, ‘We shot him!’ as reported in the LA Times on 6 June 1968? Bainbridge’s last, almost finished novel is, unlike The Original of Laura, worth reading.
The famous horrific photo of the dying RFK by Bill Eppridge of ‘Life’ Magazine
Continue Reading →
The General Strike
(by Julian Symons)
13 May 1926 – the General Strike in Britain ended this day. People thought Marxism was through in Britain as a result but like Mao in exile, it would return.
Calling a strike requires keen judgment because the reaction of the public as a whole might be sympathetic, hostile, or mixed. One example is the pilots’ strike in Australia in 1989, which resulted in the pilots, and their union, being blown out of the sky. Another famous campaign was the Miners’ strike of the mid 1980s in England, when organized labour found out that the majority of the country thought they were the pits.
For 9 days in 1926 a number of sections of the British working classes engaged in a general strike, initially in sympathy for underpaid coal miners. This grew into a national civil war, without the blood, and citizens divided into broad groups; those who supported the strike, those in bitter opposition, and those who sympathised with the workers but disagreed with the strategy.
It galvanised a reaction that polarized the kingdom while unifying the various classes within it. Stanley Baldwin PM played the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party like a harp, stoking fears of anarchy, and the whole thing fell dismally flat, with miners generally worse off than before.
Symons’ book is a fascinating portrait of a revolution that (almost but) never was, brilliantly analysing the various forces at play; it is venerable but still the best account.
