Wednesday, May 26, 2004
What I'm reading
Looking back, my days majoring in English (Lit) at Melbourne University in the mid-80s, were ones of Brideshead-ian languor, as suitably cut down for the time and place.
Externally, my then character (complete with blue mohawk) owed more to the cast of TV's "The Young Ones" than to anything drawn by Waugh. For the life of the mind, though, this was time of haute classicism - to which can be added a sense of exquisite urgency, as portents from the ever-darkening real world occasionally lobbed in.
The Eighties - such as they have come to be popularly considered - thus more or less passed me by. While the boomers were proclaiming "greed is good" on every downtown street corner, I was either not listening, or else didn't care. It was only in 1988, with the thin edge of the HECS wedge looming, that the massive social changes being wrought by Reagan/Thatcher fundamentalism became concrete for me.
Which is not to say that Melbourne's English Department of the mid-80s was some kind of ivory tower. Far from it, in fact - it faced downtown with arrogant cocksureness; a stance that later would be recognised by 22nd C anthropologists as a precursor ritual practised by academics facing the ten-storey wall of terror and delight called Theory.
The above story is told to explain why I don't often do "What I'm reading". It's because I'm super-sensitive to the Canon. I got there just in time to get homage (that's homm-arge, BTW) for it drummed into me, but at the same time to be told, in no uncertain terms, that the Canon was now closed*; i.e. that all subsequent writers of exceptional talent would have to find some other place to be filed for posterity under.
Anyway, to cut to the chase. I reckon I'm going to commit the unthinkable, by suggesting that a writer be added to the Canon - and a living (b 1936) writer at that. His name is David Caute.
(Cont'd 27 May 2004)
I'd never heard, or read anything of Caute until a couple of weeks ago, when I came across two volumes labelled The Demonstration and The Occupation. Having a middling interest in student protests, I thought (correctly) that the two books might be along such lines, and so dived into them.
In so doing (and I read very few books "cold", other than from a sense of duty or of specialised interest), I was reassured and encouraged by the fact/expectation that (i) the two books were part of a trilogy (and even better, that the trilogy consisted of a play, a novel and an essay), (ii) the author's versatility didn't just stop there, with an edited** Essential Writings of Karl Marx under his belt, and most importantly, (iii) that the two books, published in 1970 and 1971, might have something important and "new" to say about the 1968 generation, having been written and published in real time, as it were.
So far, this latter expectation has been abundantly met. The Demonstration (the play; 1970) is an intelligent and provocative exploration of the limits of student protest generally, and a time capsule about Western universities in the late 60s in particular. It also contains some great one-liners - I'm sure, the first and last of this sort ever written by one who has, of necessity, read great swathes of Karl Marx.
While I'm only about a third of the way through The Occupation (the novel; 1971), it's clear that Caute is no one-hit wonder. The protagonist of both play and novel, academic Steven Bright, is depicted with particular relish and realism in the novel as a dirty, dirty man.
Looking up Caute's subsequent biography, there is obviously much more by Caute that is going to be worthwhile reading.
The most recent book on the list, from 1998, comes with an attached sad story, though. A parody (and apparently a ripsnorter at that) on the S@lman Rushdee affair, it was rejected by more than twenty publishers, before finally being self-published by Caute.
Which goes to show that terrorist appeasement was in high fashion in the West, years before 2001. In more ways than one, Islamofascism is the true and only love child of 1968.
* A neat little precursor of HECS this one was too - in hindsight - HECS saw the drawbridge raised against GenX, who were then forced to buy their way into university, irrespective of academic merit, and irrespective of whether they were part-way through their courses
** Karl Marx should no more be read unedited than pornography be viewed for its narrative.
Looking back, my days majoring in English (Lit) at Melbourne University in the mid-80s, were ones of Brideshead-ian languor, as suitably cut down for the time and place.
Externally, my then character (complete with blue mohawk) owed more to the cast of TV's "The Young Ones" than to anything drawn by Waugh. For the life of the mind, though, this was time of haute classicism - to which can be added a sense of exquisite urgency, as portents from the ever-darkening real world occasionally lobbed in.
The Eighties - such as they have come to be popularly considered - thus more or less passed me by. While the boomers were proclaiming "greed is good" on every downtown street corner, I was either not listening, or else didn't care. It was only in 1988, with the thin edge of the HECS wedge looming, that the massive social changes being wrought by Reagan/Thatcher fundamentalism became concrete for me.
Which is not to say that Melbourne's English Department of the mid-80s was some kind of ivory tower. Far from it, in fact - it faced downtown with arrogant cocksureness; a stance that later would be recognised by 22nd C anthropologists as a precursor ritual practised by academics facing the ten-storey wall of terror and delight called Theory.
The above story is told to explain why I don't often do "What I'm reading". It's because I'm super-sensitive to the Canon. I got there just in time to get homage (that's homm-arge, BTW) for it drummed into me, but at the same time to be told, in no uncertain terms, that the Canon was now closed*; i.e. that all subsequent writers of exceptional talent would have to find some other place to be filed for posterity under.
Anyway, to cut to the chase. I reckon I'm going to commit the unthinkable, by suggesting that a writer be added to the Canon - and a living (b 1936) writer at that. His name is David Caute.
(Cont'd 27 May 2004)
I'd never heard, or read anything of Caute until a couple of weeks ago, when I came across two volumes labelled The Demonstration and The Occupation. Having a middling interest in student protests, I thought (correctly) that the two books might be along such lines, and so dived into them.
In so doing (and I read very few books "cold", other than from a sense of duty or of specialised interest), I was reassured and encouraged by the fact/expectation that (i) the two books were part of a trilogy (and even better, that the trilogy consisted of a play, a novel and an essay), (ii) the author's versatility didn't just stop there, with an edited** Essential Writings of Karl Marx under his belt, and most importantly, (iii) that the two books, published in 1970 and 1971, might have something important and "new" to say about the 1968 generation, having been written and published in real time, as it were.
So far, this latter expectation has been abundantly met. The Demonstration (the play; 1970) is an intelligent and provocative exploration of the limits of student protest generally, and a time capsule about Western universities in the late 60s in particular. It also contains some great one-liners - I'm sure, the first and last of this sort ever written by one who has, of necessity, read great swathes of Karl Marx.
While I'm only about a third of the way through The Occupation (the novel; 1971), it's clear that Caute is no one-hit wonder. The protagonist of both play and novel, academic Steven Bright, is depicted with particular relish and realism in the novel as a dirty, dirty man.
Looking up Caute's subsequent biography, there is obviously much more by Caute that is going to be worthwhile reading.
The most recent book on the list, from 1998, comes with an attached sad story, though. A parody (and apparently a ripsnorter at that) on the S@lman Rushdee affair, it was rejected by more than twenty publishers, before finally being self-published by Caute.
Which goes to show that terrorist appeasement was in high fashion in the West, years before 2001. In more ways than one, Islamofascism is the true and only love child of 1968.
* A neat little precursor of HECS this one was too - in hindsight - HECS saw the drawbridge raised against GenX, who were then forced to buy their way into university, irrespective of academic merit, and irrespective of whether they were part-way through their courses
** Karl Marx should no more be read unedited than pornography be viewed for its narrative.
