Public Address - Up Front (Home)

The Classics Are Rubbish Too | Oct 28, 2008 13:10

You've all been so terribly negative lately, have you noticed that, my poppets? You're all with the moaning even when you're asked to be nice, and your debates have turned into who's crapper: Iain Banks or Iain M Banks. You've already pushed Graham over the edge.

Well, this is not going to be the only time I ever get left out of a bitch-fest.

Last year I ran a bitching competition on my blog. That one was about films:

Let's hear it: the worst films you've ever seen. To make the list, you need to have seen the movie in question all the way through. No slagging off stuff you haven't seen, or didn't make it all the way to the end... But I don't wanna see anyone getting all precious and bitchy about their poor little baby favourite film, okay? This is a flaming-only forum.

The only change I'd make to the list in that blog is to replace Forrest Gump with Die Hard 4. Here's a hint: when your movie is two hours long and you can remove an hour without losing a line of dialogue, you're doing something wrong.

That's largely shooting fish in a barrel, though. Movies are low culture, easy to hate. You wanted to spend more time talking about books.

I love books. It's not just good prose. I love the tactile experience of a well-made book. I love pretty covers and strong heavy pages and good type-setting with just the right amount of white space. I love the way books smell and the neat way they line up on my bookshelves. This may be some kind of illness, as I even like it when library books smell of the last reader's stale cigarette smoke.

Ploughing my way through an English degree I've read many of the classics. My shelves are full of Worthy Books, the kind that people always mean to get around to reading but somehow never do. And some of them are bloody awful.

The worst good book I've ever had to read is Robinson Crusoe. I believe reading it produced some kind of temporal dilation effect, slowing the passage of time in the same manner experienced by people trapped in a theatre during a Samuel Beckett play. I am older than my biological age because of that book.

I have a high threshold for heavy prose and slow plot. The book we read before Robinson Crusoe was Walter Scott's Old Mortality, which I'd loved. So it couldn't just be the ponderous prose and the overt preachification that made me want to shove it through a mincer without necessarily letting go first.

No, what happened was that after two hundred pages of smug insufferability, I noticed something: absolutely nothing had happened. I know that seems an odd thing to say, what with the shipwreck and everybody dying and stuff, but that's how it felt. Solid eventless pontificating - now I think about it, the exact reverse of Die Hard 4.

After about a week, Robinson Crusoe achieved a singular honour. It became the first set text I didn't make it to the end of. It also became the second book to be hurled across the room, bouncing off my mantelpiece to the accompaniment of a hearty 'fuck's sake!'. (The first was Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast.)

I don't mean to be too harsh on Defoe. There are plenty of other Worthy Books that suck almost as much as his. Imagine, for instance, that you're watching one of those very pretty Merchant-Ivory films, looking perhaps at long lingering shots of Venice with a slow score drifting along underneath, and you're just starting to think 'alright, nice scenery, but shouldn't something happen soon?'. Now imagine this goes on for three or four days and the scenery is all trees. Welcome to reading Last of the Mohicans.

Every now and then I get ruthless, and a few of the classics find themselves taking the Long Walk from the bookshelves to the garage. Last time it was The Rainbow and The Magus, joint winners of my Dullest Rude Book prize.

I must be mellowing in middle age, because it pains me to be so comprehensively negative about my beloved books. If you want a Worthy Book that's Worth Reading, I recommend Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Its featuring a gentle piss-take of Robinson Crusoe is entirely coincidental.

(302 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

A Word From the Ministry for Learning People Things | Oct 20, 2008 13:30

The markers of last year's English exams said choice of text film, novel, play, poem or short story is critical to students' success, but many teachers are making poor choices. Level 1 markers said they were concerned that lots of poems and short stories studied were "of a disturbing or brutal nature".

Films that produced good marks included The Piano, Billy Elliot and Gallipoli, while Shakespeare and classics such as Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies produced good answers in the novel exams.

More modern books such as Tomorrow When the War Began and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, also gave good scope but Level 2 students struggled to get top marks studying blockbuster movies Bend It Like Beckham and The Matrix trilogy.

I mean, honestly, what are these teachers thinking, choosing these texts? This isn't a Robin Williams movie you know, it's not about being cool and hip and in with the kids. It's about giving them the tools they need to pass exams.

I blame this new crop of trendy liberal young teachers. Everyone knows art students should take a few years between finishing university and starting teaching – time for their blood alcohol levels to drop and the disillusionment to set in. Next thing you know they'll be letting the kids choose their own texts to write on and wittering about 'engagement' and 'developing a love of reading'. How's that going to benefit them in the real world? Can you imagine trying to get a raise on the basis of your love of reading? Fastest way to the Artists' Dole if you ask me.

And nobody thinks about the markers, do they? A quarter of all kids wrote on the Shawshank Redemption. I had to watch it. The Shawshank Redemption! How can that possibly be suitable? It's only fourteen years old, and it's got Morgan bloody Freeman in it. What's next, Nurse Betty?

Except it wouldn't be, would it, because that's not horrible enough. No, you want to 'engage' these kids, we'd better show them Se7en. This taste for dark, nasty, violent texts is just disturbing, and it has to be discouraged. We need a return to the good old days of set texts when the Ministry for Enabling Kids to Pass Exams got to choose their books for them. Good, wholesome, uplifting books like The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and Brave New World.

Forget movies, that's like giving the lazy little bastards credit for watching television. Plays were good enough for us. Send them back to the Bard. But the original texts, not that Baz Luhrman depravity. Quite how he managed to turn Romeo and Juliet into something full of sex and violence is beyond me.

These kids think they can write essays on anything now. Just the other day I was marking a paper where a student was talking about the intersection of racism, sexism and homophobia, the prejudices of immigrant communities, and a conclusion where a young girl defers a sexual relationship with an older man in order to further her career, and it turned out she was talking about Bend it Like Beckham. Ridiculous. If she wanted to blather on about pop culture like it actually matters she should wait until university like everybody else.

Well, we've done what we can to stop the rot. We've put together a couple of lists: texts that enable students to give successful answers, and text that lead to less successful answers. We all know, after all, that it's the quality of the texts that matters, not the ability of the students. So just remember, kids, if your teacher says you can write on The Matrix Trilogy, they're not cool. They hate you and they want you to fail.

Consider yourself warned.

(159 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Just Answer the Question | Oct 13, 2008 14:43

One of the great things about modern elections is the way voters can have so much more direct access to the candidates. These days, anyone can mail out a candidate survey and know they're going to get some kind of response. Much to my disappointment however, it seems nobody is asking the really tough questions. So here they are, the questions nobody else thought to ask. My candidate survey.

1/ Should stupid people be allowed to vote? If so, who should they vote for?

2/ If you were secretly an Arab terrorist, what would be the first policy you'd enact on taking office?

3/ Trevor Mallard and a Hector's Dolphin are stuck in set nets. You only have time to save one of them. Why is it the dolphin?

4/ All the current leaders of New Zealand's political parties are on a plane. It crashes into the Andes with no hope of rescue for weeks. Whose delicious corspe do you save for last?

5/ You are holding a dinner party for famous New Zealand political and historical personages. Who do you seat next to Graham Capill?

6/ John Key: hot or not?

7/ If you had to ban one race from entering New Zealand, which one would it be and why?

8/ Which gay MP would you least like to have babysit your children?

9/ What do you think your party could do to most degrade the quality of life of people on the Domestic Purposes Benefit?

10/ On taking power, which bureaucrats would you sack? Please provide names and addresses.

11/ What was the dumbest thing you've said in the last six months and what the hell were you thinking?

12/ Whose vote are you most interested in buying? Why isn't it mine?

The U.S. elections have shown the importance of being in touch with the common man. Let's see which common men you've recently touched.

13/ Without going outside to check, what make is your ministerial car?

14/ How many houses do you own? Bonus question for Labour candidates: how many houses does Marian Hobbes own?

15/ Who is your favourite New Zealand band? Prove it by posting a youtube clip of you singing one of their songs.

16/ Name three prominent New Zealand bloggers. Which one would you most like to punch in the face?

17/ How much did a one kilo block of Anchor cheese cost at Pak 'n' Save Moorhouse Ave last Tuesday?

There is a prize (and by 'a prize' I mean 'kudos') for getting the answer to question 7 correct (and by 'correct' I mean 'the same as mine').

(129 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Not Actually Blue at All | Oct 06, 2008 15:39

I've always liked tattoos. I guess because I knew a few guys with tattoos growing up, I've never had that expectation that they must be dangerous meat-heads. It wasn't something I ever had to learn. That I knew nice guys with tats, and bastards without them, wasn't surprising, it just was.

Chicks with tats, on the other hand, were skanks.

Still, as a teenager, I sort of vaguely wanted a tattoo. The main reason I never got one was that I thought people would decide I was just doing it for the attention, rather than for myself. Getting a tattoo at sixteen would have been try-hard.

Now I'm old, and I find as I get older that I increasingly don't give a stuff what other people think of me. The only person whose opinion I take any notice of is my partner, and this might be because he agrees with me a lot. Apparently it's just safer that way.

He certainly agreed that I should get a tattoo. Back in April, we were sitting in the hot pools in Hanmer people-watching, and noting that there was a lot of ink around. I was really impressed by the guy whose back looked like an illustration from the Tale of Genji. I expressed a vague longing, and Partner surprised me with his vehement enthusiasm for the idea.

Apparently chicks with tats are kind of hot.

I knew that I wanted a tattoo, and I even knew what I wanted it to be of. What I needed was encouragement enough to break the shackles of my Presbyterian up-bringing and not see it as a stupid frivolous waste of money.

I've just been writing a beginner's guide to getting a tattoo, and it got me thinking about it all over again. I had no idea where to go, where I could get a proficient and clean tattoo or how much it was going to cost me. A bad tattoo is like having a shitty haircut for the rest of your life.

Fortunately for me, I was still in touch with a bunch of slightly disreputable people to ask for advice, and there was even a consensus: Naith at absolution. So I went in to check the place out and make an appointment, and something very odd happened.

When I was at uni, 'we' used to refer to 'other people' as Normals. We could spot Normals by the way they dressed and spoke, and by the way they looked at us sideways like we were weird and possibly contagious. I wasn't really aware of it at the time, but we were just as snobby towards the Normals as they were towards us.

When I walked into the tattoo parlour, the guy behind the counter looked at me like I was a Normal, and maybe I'd got lost somewhere on the way to pick my kids up from soccer. I didn't belong. Being a life-long sufferer of Oppositional Defiant Disorder, I made the appointment anyway. I did go away feeling just a little worried that I was trying to be something that I wasn't any more, that I'd just got too old for this stuff.

Once I was booked in, that's when I started worrying about the pain. What if it hurt like going to the dentist, and I got sooky? What if it hurt like some other things hurt and I enjoyed it too much?

Much to my surprise, the actual tattooing experience was a delight, and one I recommend enthusiastically to other people. Any other people, pretty much randomly. Do it, it's great! My tattooist was friendly, helpful and open. Due to what I call the Christchurch Effect, this complete stranger turned out to be the good friend of a good friend of a good friend of mine. He's also the only person I've ever had get mildly annoyed that one of my breasts kept getting in his way. Every now and then he'd get completely absorbed in what he was doing and absently try to shove it sideways.

I've had no negative feedback on my tattoo at all, though we'll see what happens in summer when it's out and about more. Only one of my friends was brave enough to suggest that I was having some kind of mid-life crisis. It was particularly courageous of that individual, because I keep having to resist the temptation to nuke any argument with him by saying 'oh yeah? well you're boffing a choir-boy'. My elderly mother was delighted. "I've always wanted to get a tattoo myself," she told me, "to surprise the undertaker". My daughter is fascinated, full of questions, and obviously quietly thinking about getting one herself. I'm grateful for the restriction that stops her getting one until she's eighteen: not because I don't want her to get a tattoo, but because I don't want her to get a stupid tattoo.

The only real problem I have is that I now really, really want more tats. I don't know where or what of, nor can I really justify the expense, but I've gone ink-mad. So gratify me vicariously. I want to hear stories about tattoos or people's reaction to tattoos. I want to see pictures of tats. And I want to know what you guys think about social stigma around ink: does it still exist, and is it different for men and women?

(73 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!