“Felski proposes a pragmatic approach to reading literature. Opposing the exclusive focus on otherness in contemporary literary theory, she offers a correction by balancing otherness with the acknowledgment of the presence of the self in reading literature.” (Choice Reviews, December 2008)
Oh for the (drawing) pen of Max Beerbohm.
A belated cheer for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi’s book combines memoir with an intimate account of reading for survival in the Mullahs’ Iran. Nafisi is an academic specialising in fiction. She believes passionately in ‘art as a human complication’ (James’s phrase). Complication as we encounter it in the best Western fiction is always intolerable to the orthodox. Some of us have lived through this conflict – in very comfortable circumstances – in respect to the absolutism of the Left, and later of the women’s movement (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ‘burn all the books’).
Nafisi describes how, in a class discussion of Daisy Miller, one Islamist declares simply: Daisy is immoral and ought to be killed. In this milieu, ambiguity and irony become heretical, to suspend judgment immoral, to doubt, a crime. Continue reading »
Some teachers giving kids the NAPLAN test decided to cheat. Most adults no doubt thought, Yeah well, there’s always a few, and got on with their lives. Not so the Australian Education Union. It’s the stress, you see. Anne Crawford, the Union’s Vice-President:
“I am not saying that Correne did not do this, but in any kind of process the circumstances and the context will make a difference,” Ms Crawford said.
“This is a highly politicised matter. But this should not mean that we have a teacher hung, drawn and quartered without justice.”
Ms Crawford said Ms Woolmer had found this year’s NAPLAN testing “particularly stressful” because of the essential place it now had in assessing school performance.
As it happened, I had just been reading about Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison in which the US military humiliated, maltreated and just plain tortured some prisoners. Continue reading »
At dinner recently, topic Wagner and Fascism, someone ran the usual defence: Wagner was ‘appropriated by’ Hitler. There was a good deal to appropriate, I reckon.
What was Wagner ‘s conception of the good life? Take Valhalla: as the music rolls out for the grand procession across the rainbow bridge Loge tells us that all is not well. This is Irony, the gods are doomed, yes, yes. But until that unhappy day, what are they actually going to do, this lot?
Wotan of course has plenty to occupy his mind. What about the others? Run the universe, presumably, but there is almost nothing to indicate what that involves. We get only one detail of home life in Valhalla. From Wotan and Brünnhilde we learn that there are lots of feasts attended by heroes who have died in battle. The heroes are looked after by ‘wishmaidens’ whom it is difficult to imagine, given the palpability of this heaven, will remain maidens for very long. So all in all, we have a dim impression of godly stuff going on in the background, storms to whip up, battles to intervene in, while in the foreground life centres on men who having fought, now qualify for feasting and fucking. As a dramatic conception, Valhalla is much cruder than (say) Camelot. Heaven for the under-18 rugby team. Continue reading »
In music departments around the world, the traditional course in the history of music – now called ‘Western art music’ – has been under pressure to give way to a course in the history of popular music (now called ‘music’). More inclusive, less élitist, all that.
I thought I’d help this reform along with some suggestions for the year 1911.
| New worklist | Old worklist |
| Hyacinth Rag | Bartok, Bluebeard’s Castle |
| Somewhere a Voice is Calling | Granados, Goyescas |
| Alexanders Ragtime Band | Nielsen, Symphony No 3 |
| I want a girl just like the one that married dear old dad | Rachmaninov, Études-tableaux |
| The Oceana Roll | Ravel, Ma mère l’oye |
| Gaby Glide | Schoenberg, Gurrelieder |
| Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold | Sibelius, Symphony No 4 |
| Little Grey Home In The West | Stravinsky, Petrushka |