March for Quokkas Now!

Here’s wishing you the happiest World Quokka Day ever.  I hope you and your loved ones enjoy a load of quokka-related activities, but don’t overdo it with all those delicious but deceptively strong quokka cocktails!  

Before you check your calendars, I can assure you that partly due to an unfounded prejudice against the delightful grinning marsupials, printers almost always omit this festive occasion.  There is a World Jellyfish Day (November 3), but as a result of what can only be construed as shameful speciesism, the quokka has been neglected.  Can you imagine that not a single Ivy League has courses devoted to quokka studies and there are LITERALLY no literature departments teaching the works of Shakespeare or Dante through a quokkaist marxist lens!  What on earth are universities for?

The erasure of the quokka from history is a matter of shame, most evident in the visual arts. There is, of course, the 25,000-year-old legendary "Quokka of Willendorf," known only from drawings in Josef Szombathy's archaeological notebooks. Then there is the famous Cerne Abbas Quokka, dating from the late iron age and the putative quokka in the Book of Kells (c. AD 800).  However, one scours the works of the trecento and quattrocento in vain for images of the creature. It is only when one comes to Raphael’s celebrated Lady with Quokka that there is a belated depiction of one. The Byzantine icon featuring the noble beast, "discovered" in early 17th-century Lithuania, is commonly regarded as an  amateurish forgery.

I personally see this as institutional or - just possibly - insidious structural quokkaism and we should fight to remedy this outrageous injustice. The fact that I only invented the thing a few minutes ago is absolutely no excuse.

Note:
Educate yourself! A must-read is surely Grins Turned to Anguish: A Longitudinal Marxist-Leninist/Deconstructionist Analysis of the Dis(Mis)placement of the Quokka in Western Narratives available from all good bookstores.

A Club for Chatty Insomniacs

For those of us with recherché interests, insomnia, and an irresistible urge to impart knowledge in the wee small hours, life can be difficult. Of course, it is even more difficult for those unfortunate enough to be around us—our neighbours, our families, taxi drivers, and the local clergy.

Take, for instance, that time when it seemed a good idea to dip into The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in an attempt to ward off sleeplessness.   This turned out to be a mistake.  Although more of an agnostic than lapsed Catholic, the saint’s vivid description of the flames of hell got me into a bit of a state.  I decided that a call to the local priest would be in order as surely it was his job to deal with spiritual crises whatever the hour.  In this I was mistaken; a tired, Hibernian voice gave me advice straight out of Genesis: I should go forth and multiply forthwith.   

This very morning. I was mulling over the word “up” as used in expressions like “eat it up” or “she beat him up.” Clearly, the word functions as an intensifier, emphasising the completeness of an action, but how recently did it start performing this role? It feels modern, but then it dawned on me: it is Middle English! Just think of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “And Gawayn gef hit up, with a goud wille.”

I decided that my wife needed to know this at once, so I poked her in the ribs. Her response was perfectly apt and somewhat sacerdotal: “Shut the **** up!”

Undeterred, I headed to my study. I must tell the good folk of Half Moon Bay! They are bound to be awake! Perhaps those of us similarly afflicted could set up a club. Unfortunately, the server seemed to be down.

Philosophical Reflections on Dogs

Some of you have questioned the reality of Jasper Montgomery and have even suggested  he might be a cartoon.  

Concerning Jasper’s reality or ontological status, I often question this myself.  Certainly, there appears to be a hairy creature basking in the sun and nibbling plums at my feet.  While he does usually answer to that name, can I say with any degree of certainty that he is really Jasper?  Can I be quite sure?

When we got him as a small puppy, we thought that was probably his name - he had a Jasperish look - and have called him that ever since … but we might be entirely wrong. He has never expressed any objection in our hearing although that might be due to natural diffidence. Whatever the creature might be, it is extraordinarily well-mannered.

I guess this uncertainty goes for humans as well.  Many decades ago, my late parents decided I was ‘Mark’ and called me that throughout their lives with, perhaps, unwarranted confidence. As a teen, I did suspect that I might actually be Caratacus or even Wolfgang, but all my family insisted this was a profound mistake and that if I persisted in the matter I should be disinherited forthwith.

Is Jasper Montgomery a ‘cartoon’?  Well, to the extent that we  anthropomorphize the unfortunate creature,  ascribing feelings, thoughts  and profound sensibilities to him, then I guess he is.  But then, we do that to people too so perhaps everyone aside from myself is a cartoon?  This is probably better than being described as a philosophical zombie.

I would write more but I must take the creature formally known as Jasper for a walk.

Cordon Bleu - British Style

It is a lamentable affectation, but Eastern Europeans seem to look to France for matters cultural than to far, far more civilised England.  Think, for example, of Tolstoy’s aristocrats in War and Peace.  Prince Vassily doesn’t say “that absolute stinker, Napoleon, has bloody gone and nicked Genoa and Lucca” or something to that effect in Russian.  No, he twirls his doubtless heavily pomaded and perfumed moustache and announces “Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des pomestias, de la famille Buonaparte”.  Infuriating, isn’t it?

I thought of this when my good wife, who hails from Transylvania, glanced at the breakfast I had so beautifully prepared with a look of withering disdain.    What, on earth, is wrong with baked beans on Marmite toast accompanied by a mug of PG Tips?  Doubtless a couple of warm croissants would have gone down better especially if served with café au lait, but she is not getting it.   Nor, for that matter will there be anything resembling pain au chocolat or brioche.  

War has been declared on all things Gallic and my first move will take the form of tripe and onions served with steaming mushy peas.  Next there will be liver and bacon and that gustatory glory, a kind of mini haggis, but with a name that cannot be used in America.  This to be served with neeps & tatties.

Come Crispin Crispian (St. Crispen’s Day), we happy few will be drinking warm best bitter and munching roast beef, Yorkshire pudding with all the trimmings.  The grande finale will, of course, be steamed Spotted Dick.

Water, water, everywhere

It  puzzles the life out of me and it is something I see everyday as a teacher.  Almost all the children I encounter seem absolutely obsessed with their huge and surprisingly expensive water bottles, which they carry religiously from class to class and regularly refill at the plentiful water fountains on the campus. In fact, they remind me of a bunch of diminutive Ancient Mariners.

I am pretty sure this is an American thing … and I just don’t get it.  In England we occasionally carry a thermos filled with tea.  If I were wandering in Scotland, I might have a wee flask filled with a dram of the good stuff, but water! I suppose if you were some kind of Sassenach, you might add a few drops from one of the Highland streams, but you would risk Hibernian ire and that is about it.

I assume that this obsession with water is a recent fad  and evidence for this comes from the words of the late, great W.C. Fields, which I sadly cannot repeat here for reasons of obscenity, but which involves piscatorial copulation in the dank element. 

I don’t dare forbid the use of the distracting things in my class lest the poor dehydrated dears expire before my very eyes, turning into small puffs of dust rather like Count Dracula when exposed to sunlight. 

I should be grateful for enlightenment.

Small Dog and a Plum Tree by the Light of the Moon

After some 10 years, our elderly Chocolate  Labrador, Jasper Montgomery Esquire,  still puzzles us.  Over the last month he has taken to lying at the edge of our terrace gazing upwards.  My hypothesis was that it was an age thing and that was his favourite spot.  Of a similar vintage myself, relatively speaking, I tend to gravitate to a particular leather chair at the slightest opportunity.  “He just likes it there”, I opined.

My much smarter wife had already solved the mystery: he is waiting for the plums to ripen.

Great Waves and Ripples: Thoughts on ‘Japanese Prints in Transition’

There are a few very pretty things and a couple of absolute wonders in the current exhibition of Japanese prints at The Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  There are works by artists like Utamaro, Hokusai and Yoshitoshi that embody the courtly elegance of ‘the floating world’ and that are well worth seeing.  You should most definitely go, but be warned: there is also a lot of mediocre stuff.  After the courtly and hugely elegant Edo period, there is an abrupt falling off rather than a transition and the exhibition ends with what the gallery describes as Ukiyo Pop. The thing is to discriminate, but sadly discrimination is in short supply these days.

The problem lies in the homogenisation that is endemic in all areas of the art world.  Take the bureaucrats who run galleries and museums.  “OK, so we don’t have a Leonardo, a Piero della Francesca or a Raphael, but we have other works and they are all ART and, thus, priceless.  We have experts who tell us so.”  The academics  are biased though.  If you have spent five to seven years on a PhD, you are hardly likely to admit that the subject of your dissertation was an artistic nonentity.  No, he or - of you are lucky enough - she may have been an incredibly minor follower of some mediocrity who was vaguely connected to a relatively unimportant workshop or studio, but the artist was the producer of enormously insightful works that capture the very essence of the zeitgeist or that prematurely deconstruct the incipient dawn of the patriarchy.  Whatever the case, it is not tosh, but something deeply profound that demands a hell of a lot of verbiage.  

Then there are the trinket shops attached to the galleries and their themed merchandise.  The public will buy the coffee mugs and t-shirts whether they show works by Vermeer, Georgia O'Keeffe or - heaven forfend - Gilbert and George.  It is all the same; it is all art. The coffee-table catalogues are equally resplendent and equally costly whatever the artist.  It doesn’t really matter as no one reads the wretched things. The important thing is that when the worshippers emerge, they clutch some mark of culture that separates them from the philistine hoi polloi and it matters not a jot whether Hokusai’s ubiquitous wave graces a scarf, book, mug or tea cosy.  The object is a conspicuous sign of sanctity much like the smudged cross on the forehead of a believer leaving a  church on Ash Wednesday.

Is a lack of discrimination important if, as Oscar Wilde said, “All art is quite useless”? Well, I rather suspect that in an age like ours, where extremists flourish and hysteria reigns, where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity (to borrow the words of another Irishman), it is important to make nuanced distinctions and to have confidence in one's own judgement. In politics, as in art, the ability to distinguish quality and substance from mediocrity and superficiality is crucial. Without such discernment, we risk elevating the trivial and ignoring the profound, thus impoverishing our cultural and political life.