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.
The Screwtape Letters
(by C.S. Lewis)
Lewis was unsurpassed in winkling out a small dark corner of the soul and blowing it into toxic glasswork. Here we have one-way correspondence from a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood: a how-to manual for those who would catch our souls. Exquisite, even for those without the gift of faith.
My favourite lesson concerns the lady who quails at that offered, wheedling for “all I want…”. Screwtape’s comment: “Because what she wants is…less…than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.”
This delicious little book is now adapted as a short theatrical two-hander, to be reviewed here.
Continue Reading →Der Ring Des Nibelungen
(Melbourne, 2013)
As Barry Millington observed, it’s “the story of a man who buys a house and can’t keep up the payments.” But it is so much more of course.
The greatest music-drama yet concocted was staged by Opera Australia in late 2013, as well as could be done outside of one’s own head (save for Adelaide 2004). At the cycle’s end, you had the same feeling as when leaving the Sistine Chapel – that of awe and exhaustion. It was directed by Neil Armfield, conducted by Pietari Inkinen. Kudos all round.
Rijksmuseum Moments
We spent the better part of a day drinking in the marvels contained in this lovely Dutch pile of bricks.
A Franz Hals portrait of a couple reminded me of Rose & Freddy West. We didn’t think much of the Night Watch, we have to admit, preferring Rembrandt’s Denial of St Peter with its third-degree searchlight from nowhere. Rembrandts in wonderful abundance, recalling Wyndham Lewis’ observation that “No serious artist thinks or propagates the notion for his own use that anything better can be done than such works as hang above Rembrandt’s name in Amsterdam or the Hermitage.”
Corot never sold a painting. I wonder why? He spent two years getting the light right. It explains the trees. His use of mauve has been corrupted beyond measure; in his case, first was best. Then we took a canal cruise past Anne Frank’s house. There were folks from the West Country, who asked among themselves ‘Who’s Anne Franks?” in rich, mellifluous tones and gave the answer that she was some kind of Nazi. ‘He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it…..’ On a roll, TVC saw the Van Gogh museum and then smoked crack with some hookers.
Recollections of a Bleeding Heart
(by Don Watson)
A portrait both affectionate and sharp, of Paul Keating, Australia’s Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996, beautifully written and constructed by his ‘bleeding heart’ speechwriter (scribbling for him 1992-96). For all his faults, Keating was a remarkable polemicist and his panache, once he had got to grips with a concept, or a slip by the enemy, was extraordinary.
Best example: turning John Hewson’s budget reply charge that Keating would “pull everyone down to the lowest common denominator” into a lethal riposte: “Nothing Keating said in 1992 was as good as this. John Hewson had defined himself as Gordon Gecko. The Prime Minister would never quote it back in the awkward form of the original. He would say, ‘John Hewson says if you reach back for them, they will drag you down.’ Six months later he had developed such a way with the line you could sense a surge of shock and anger in the audience. Just as remarkably, you could sense it in yourself.”
Bill and Paul, the comeback kids (White House Archive, 1993)
The Problem of Knowledge
(by A.J. Ayer)
Ayer is a blind alley, albeit a convincing one. Yet logic and semantics will take us only so far and reading him, one thinks, “you’re too clever by half…..too clever for our good.”
asked and answered
We recently had a comment (by someone with the nom de plume “Butt Books”, has commented fit for posterity: “True – logic and semantics will take us only so far. The analytic tradition won’t venture into the realm of speculative metaphysics, obscurantism, and autofellatio. One must turn to the continental tradition for that.“
Continue Reading →The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(by James Hogg)
The protagonist, Robert Wringhim, finds himself spiraling deeper into a vortex of evil.
Luckily there’s a mysterious but nice young chap to ‘guide’ him on his way.
A towering, fascinating ‘mystery’ novel, revealing how dangerous it is to mix Calvinism and Old Scratch.
Goya’s goat
Primary
(dir. D.A. Pennebaker) (1960) (Redux 2013)
Very slight and grainy documentary by today’s standards.
Clearly an outsider’s view, despite the intimacy of the footage. Hubert Humphrey was the only candidate heard discussing policy: hence you knew he was doomed.
‘Let’s see if JFK swallows this…’
Power Without Glory
(by Frank Hardy)
Never mind that Hardy was an unreconstructed Commo; this is a great, great-big book, a scandalous roman-a-clef based on a Collingwood Mafioso, John Wren and his rise (and rise). Blessed with no literary touches but a lot of narrative drive, the book has become, in its unpretentious way, a landmark of Australian literature. Hardy had to overcome a myriad hurdles to get his work published and only then did his troubles really begin, in the form of various reprisals, including an almost ruinous trial for criminal libel.
That sweet old softy, John Wren (photo by The Sydney Morning Herald)
Picnic at Hanging Rock
(dir. Peter Weir) (1975)
“Bye, now.”
St. Valentine’s Day, 1900. The young ladies of Appleyard College are treated to a picnic at Hanging Rock, a volcanic pile in the heart of the Victorian countryside, near Mount Macedon. There is twittering around the teacups, too much cake and Australian sunshine, and whilst the party are having an al fresco siesta, people go missing. But while the film has aspects of a whodunit or a thriller, it cannot be categorised because it simply transcends classification. As F.R Leavis said of Wuthering Heights, you can call this a sport. Totally magical, mystical, ethereal, and beyond criticism.
The Varnished Culture has been obsessed with the book and the film for many years, watching the latter every Valentine’s day – it is a triumph on every level.
[Incidentally, your correspondents married on the staircase of what was the Fitzhubert Mansion in the film. We have stayed in Mrs Appleyard’s room at what is Martindale Hall in the Clare Valley, South Australia. We have climbed the rock and savoured its uncanny, eerie, atmosphere. We have deconstructed the literary influences on Joan Lindsay in writing a novel based on a myth so potent that it seems not only true as myth, and as an emblem of colonial propriety amid the romanticism of an aged, savage and mysterious wilderness, but seems to move from fiction to perceived reality.]LESLEY ADDS : The closest I have come to finding a description of the feeling which this film aroused in my upon my first viewing at the world premiere at the Hindley Cinemas in Adelaide is C S Lewis’s explanation of what he calls “joy” . This is from his memoir – “Surprised by Joy”. He is talking about “imaginative experiences” – “The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to “enormous”) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit-tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. Ἰοῡλἱανποθω[1] — and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” Lewis relates it to the German word “sehensucht”, or longing for longing, not for the satisfaction of the longing.
[1] – Oh, I desire too much.
UPDATE: We welcome the work based on the Picnic myth by Janelle McCulloch. McCulloch has been the literary equivalent of the trackers in Picnic, covering every inch of the Rock’s haunting mysteries, and she brings all of her ethereal style and exquisite taste to bear – see our review here.
Frederick McCubbin’s “Lost”
Picasso Exhibition
(Sydney Art Gallery)
I have to admit that the hanging I most appreciated said “EXIT” in illumined green and white…
Wyndham Lewis had this to say of Picasso (1881-1973) in 1940:
“Cézanne is the great influence: that, and the arts of primitive man…Picasso is parasitic…he is at the same time original. His originality is of a technical order…And were Picasso a musician, he would be able to play a dozen instruments, and be as adept with a kettledrum as with a harp. But he would not be a Bach or a Beethoven…He is such a great, luxuriant, voracious, plant: and he is a little too much of the liana – the prolific, tropical creeper – rather than the solid giant of the forest – to which description Daumier, or Cézanne, or Goya answers, but he does not.”
Weeping Woman 1937 Pablo Picasso 1881-1973 Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax with additional payment (Grant-in-Aid) made with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1987 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T05010
The criminal genius who stole one of Pablo’s repellent series of “Weeping Woman” works had the right idea – he swiped it from the NGV and stowed it safely at Spencer Street Railway Station, in a locker, where nobody had to see it – but then it was recovered. Picasso, the master showman / shaman of 20th century painting, would have approved.
We’re “sure” Dora Maar just loved Pablo’s 1939 rendering of her (NSW Gallery)
