Why crrritics must have no taste

For your Monday morning rumination: a thought provoking post on criticism from Maladjusted. It syncs very well with my long-held view that opinion (what Robert Brustein calls “Himalaya criticism”) is the least of criticism. An excerpt (emphasis mine):

Good criticism (of art, of music or whatever) has something in common with good philosophical and theological debate, both of which have nothing to do with the ‘I’ll name your beliefs and you name yours’ game which makes people rightly think that argument about things on which people have different proclivities is a kind of social disorder. After all, both philosophy and theology have their raison d’etre in uncertainty (which is why religious fundamentalists tend to hate theology as either dangerous sophistry or feeble equivocating). However, this doesn’t necessarily lead either philosophers or theologians to quietistic silence, mysticism or hand-waving. On the contrary, the fact that truth may be ultimately elusive, has never stopped anyone but the most bloodlessly indifferent people from thinking that it shouldn’t be sought, or reaching Socrates’ conclusion that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living.

…at the heart of criticism, there is always something apart from our desire to express to others who we are. Instead, there is a fascination with the object, with the thing that made us start writing, with music or art or literature (as a region in which certain beings, certain strange and shining creatures can appear to us in certain ways). It involves an implicit belief (and most beliefs are implicit) that there is something revealed to us in music, intimated in art, given to us in the things that we most appreciate, but obscured in the things that we do not. In this sense, a good critic is someone who lacks the glibness of the way we normally rack up tastes: she’s someone who wants to try and give voice to the strange language of the things that she’s witnessed, to act in fidelity to the truths that she has endured.

Nothing at all to do with theatre

This morning, I heard that Bree died. She was 29 years old.

Bree lived down the road, at the commission flats. I didn’t know her very well, but I knew a little about her life. Every now and then she would turn up at the front door. Usually she needed money. If we had it, we gave her some. Sometimes we were as broke as she was, and she got nothing.

She always had a story. Sometimes I knew it was true, sometimes I knew she was lying. I told her once not to insult me by making up stories, and after that I don’t think she did. Sometimes she needed $10 to pay for prescription drugs, or to buy toilet paper, but most often she spent it on alcohol. Sometimes she just wanted advice: she had a legal letter that she didn’t understand, or she wanted to know where she could find information about epilepsy. A couple of times she turned up because she wanted a hug and a kind word. “I’m so lonely,” she said once. “I’m just so lonely.”

Whether she was lying or not, whether or not she turned on the waterworks, the sorrow was real. I never felt able to judge her.

Over the past five years, we’ve been watching Bree kill herself. She had multiple problems: as well as her alcoholism – sometimes she turned up stinking of meths – she suffered from epilepsy, and a host of other illnesses that stemmed from her addiction. She had two children whom she saw occasionally, when they visited. They lived in Geelong with their father. She was a terrible mother, but she adored her son, a sweet-faced blond boy. A couple of years ago, she had another baby, but it died.

It wasn’t as if Bree didn’t understand that her life was shit. She was poor and ill-educated and sick, but she wasn’t stupid. She was ashamed of what her life had made her. For a long time, she struggled: she wanted dignity, she wanted to live a better life. Once she turned up, clean and shining with hope. She had got a job through the social services, and was on a program to combat her alcoholism. For a week, everything was looking rosy. Then she lost the job: she said it was because she had an epileptic fit at work and they told her they didn’t have the resources to cope with her illness. She might have just fallen off the wagon. I don’t know. But after that, something in her gave up.

She was sexually promiscuous. I’m also sure that she was raped. She was certainly often on the wrong end of violence. She stole things, although she never stole from us. She was despised by the people at the commission flats. “She was still warm,” said the woman who told us of her death. “And they were already ripping her to pieces”.

A few months ago, the doctors told her that if she didn’t stop drinking, she would die. The next day she was pissed.

There are no homilies to be drawn from her life. Many people tried to help her, and they couldn’t. She was part of the underclass that we won’t admit we have, and she couldn’t climb out of it. Too many things were against her: her poverty, her health, her class, her lack of education, the brutal facts of her life. I could never find it in me to blame her for wanting to escape into an alcoholic haze.

I can’t get over the sadness I feel at the terrible waste of Bree’s life. No, she wasn’t important, and she wasn’t good, and some people will say that trash like her won’t be missed anyway. But she was a feeling, living human being, and now she’s dead. And I want to pay my respects, because I have nothing else to give her.

It’s all happening in North Melbourne

A short note to alert you to some shows on at North Melbourne Arts House, because if you blink you’ll miss them. Three must-sees are running concurrently – David Pledger’s Not Yet It’s Difficult presents Strangeland, a collaboration between his company and the Wuturi Players from Korea, while the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed present their show Once and for all we’re gonna tell you who we are so shut up and listen (an Edinburgh Festival hit, which is also on later this month in Sydney). And finally, the acclaimed British company Forced Entertainment present their latest show, Spectacular. A spectacular mini-season indeed; and it closes this weekend, so hurry. Details here.

Quick note

Blogging from my iPhone here, at an Adelaide motel next to the airport at 2.30 am. O brave new world! I’ve been out of mobile phone and Internet range for the past three days, filming an ABC TV series. Tomorrow – meaning, a couple of hours later today – I fly to Hobart. Long story… I’ll be back at my desk (more or less) next week and will hunker down to my email and messages then. Meanwhile, my little chickens, be good, and if you can’t be good, be civil.

Holding note

Ms TN is nearing the end of what has been an extraordinarily high-quality, buzzy week of theatre/dance going. In fact, I’ve been so busy going that I have been doing little writing… but reasoned and perhaps even properly spelt commentary is, I assure you, on the way. First up on a rather long list is Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd: a brief consideration was in yesterday’s Australian but I’m meditating something a little longer here. Which will be up this weekend, I hope, with dance reviews hard on its heels. In the meantime, you need not lament for lack of reading: RealTime has been logging some heroic coverage of Dance Massive, much of it by some of our constellation of indefatigable Melbourne bloggers. Onwards!

Brain update

A state-wide police alert has resulted in several unconfirmed sightings of Ms TN’s brain, which disappeared without trace while on holiday last week. A police spokesman told media tonight that investigations were well in hand, and released the accompanying identikit photo. Anyone seeing a brain of this description is asked to contact the Missing Brains Bureau at once.

Ms TN pleaded tearfully for her brain to at least make contact. “I just need to know you’re ok,” she said. “Just a phone call will do.”

The disappearance of Ms TN’s brain follows a series of recent high profile brain abscondments among prominent government and financial high flyers. It’s a problem which police are beginning to describe as “an epidemic”. “In some cases, the brains have been missing for decades, but definitely things have got worse in the past few years,” said the spokesman. “It’s deeply concerning.”

Web fame – yesss!

This has nothing to do with theatre, but I can’t resist telling you about the new site for my fantasy series The Books of Pellinor, which went live today (marking the US launch of the third and penultimate in the series, The Crow), courtesy of my lovely American publishers, Candlewick. The 15-year-old in me is thrilled to bits.

Status update

A minor crash in the electronic cloudscape known as my brain means that my review of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Pyschosis, on at Red Stitch, is unavoidably delayed. Tech help has suggested I turn me on and off a few times, so ignore any odd flickering. Hopefully back online tomorrow.

Hmmmmmm

For reasons that utterly escape me, my feed is popping up old posts that I haven’t touched at all. Is there a doppelganger reposting whilst I slumber? I have no idea why this is happening, but my apologies for any inconvenience…

Holly, mistletoe and other un-antipodean things

As you all know, TN is a stickler for tradition. I even managed to arrange some snow for our bushfire-stricken Alpine regions and, since I believe that Christmas was invented by Charles Dickens, here present for your pleasure the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s A Christmas Carol.

(For those who get that far, Part 2 is here, and features a version of Baby It’s Cold Outside. Refreshing stuff as the wind clears the smoke from Melbourne skies.)

Merry Christmas to all TN readers, and here’s to a brillo 2007. And many thanks to all of you for your support, encouragement and contributions throughout 2006. TN’s 2006 round-up should be up by, well, the end of the year.