Little girls as witches? A nuanced, emotionally sensitive Macbeth? Of course I wanted to watch with an open mind, and to enjoy a new take on an old favourite. But it was hard to ignore my own child-self, looking grumpily over my shoulder and bristling at the prospect of betrayal: ‘those sisters don’t look very wyrd to me!’
Entries by Josh
The state does provide some safeguard against the Randian dystopia of totally unfettered dollar power dreamed of by capitalist libertarians. But the problems facing the 99% are fundamental ones that can’t be solved by regulatory band-aids. It isn’t a question of the state doling out a little less freedom to the few in order to protect the rights of the many. The state’s primary crime is not a sin of omission but of commission: legitimating, and enforcing, the tyranny of the 1%.
On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. The sight has the dimensions and composition of a picture-postcard: serene, iconic, a little too neat. Continue on, and you will find that the bridge to cross City Road, which is also brand-new. Which seems a little strange … wasn’t there a perfectly functional old bridge there a couple of years ago?
… The asides are like amusing marginalia scribbled on the pages of a well-thumbed library book; this irreverent approach is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the play. Shakespearean purists may object, but we should not pay attention to their oxymoronic concerns: there was never anything pure about any of the plays written by that master of adaptation, reinvention and hybridity — and least of all the comedies….
… [Barker's plays] are notoriously difficult to stage successfully. It is hard, as an actor or director, to tell if a moment ‘works’, when the drama operates on such unstable aesthetics, the very instability of which is central to the effect – or rather, the totality of many effects depending on the individual response of the audience member. It is like building a house during an earthquake: one has to accept that not the structure but its collapse is the object of spectacle – and hope that the result is as viscerally and intellectually disturbing as the material demands, and not merely baffling or revolting…
…Scarcity, or the prospect of scarcity, creates value (no-one was rhapsodising about the tactile pleasures of printed books fifty years ago), and as English spreads from one horizon to the other like a swarm of locusts, gobbling up minor languages in a few generations, we have begun to recognise that our linguistic ecosystem is a precious and vanishing resource. The international reach of today’s markets offer unprecedented access to the many literatures of the world, yet the choices we make as consumers of literature are dismally conservative…
My three-part series of posts on critique, cynicism and realism is up on Overland – excerpt:
So what are we left with? Critique is a way of retreating and retrenching, to maintain a degree of distance both from the world we inhabit and the life we lead. We are, each of us, so compromised by our involvement in a deeply cynical society, that critique becomes more a matter of psychic self-defence than an instrument of political change. One can pick over the old bones of ideology, pull apart this or that piece of discourse, and take a dismal pleasure in our own cleverness and freedom from illusion; but it is an empty cleverness and a bitter freedom without agency.
And links:
Part one: ‘Enlightened false consciousnsess’
Part two: ‘Keeping ‘em honest’
Part three: The Speculative Turn
The other day I listened to an episode in the La Trobe Philosophy podcast with interest: Dr Jack Reynolds was talking about the divide between Analytical and Continental philosophers. It was fascinating, but I wondered why Alain Badiou’s name did not come up, since he frames Being and Event with a discussion of the divide, critiques both sides, and explicitly grounds his thought in mathematics (‘mathematics is ontology’).
So I emailed the podcast presenters; they got on the phone to Dr Reynolds, who responded in a brief extra episode of the podcast. (Thanks very much!) Check both the original episode and addendum here.
At the beginning, a counter-cultural phenomenon, alien and insidious, begins to spread from the East (like a weed, as Morton puts it), considered thoroughly disreputable by respectable citizens: ‘a most mischievous superstition … again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.’ That was Tacitus, talking about the early Christians, but it could just as easily be a conservative American in the 1950s looking askance at the Zen-inspired notions of Ginsberg and Kerouac taking root in cosmopolitan San Francisco.
Issue 121 of Island Magazine is out. Among the essays, stories and poetry is my poem, ‘Good Works’.
