Hazzard's no hazard
Unless you mind facing certain truths. Again I have found a writer whom I'd heard of, but in this case, don't think I've ever read: Shirley Hazzard, Autralian- born in 1931, won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2004 for her latest novel, The Great Fire. The title of a collection of her short stories seems familiar to me - People in Glass Houses - but I don't have it, so can't check to see if I've read any of it. Lately I have on the top of my TBR pile her novel called The Transit of Venus, and such a significant title it is, on many levels of interpretation. That's the least of what impresses me about her writing. Here, for example, is the scene of two young Australian girls seeing some objects one of their classmates' fathers had brought from America after WWII ended:
"One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Munitions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name - one's own for preference - and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. - No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: their power was conclusive, and did not appeal for praise.
It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. - The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials - serviceable, workaday - in contrast to these hard, high- coloured, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition.
Having felt no lack, the girls could experience no envy. They would have to be conditioned to a new acquisitiveness."
That's about the best little delineation of the advent of the crappy modern consumer age as I've ever read...
AND...This passage, regarding another character's post- WWII visit to Hiroshima to observe "survivors":
"A catastrophe of which no one would ever say, the Will of God.
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life - I have done this, how could I have done that - like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. -
Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he had already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity."
Yes. I think that is about our only choice these days, too, but we need many of those flickers in order to counter this century's version of evil.
"One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Munitions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name - one's own for preference - and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. - No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: their power was conclusive, and did not appeal for praise.
It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. - The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials - serviceable, workaday - in contrast to these hard, high- coloured, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition.
Having felt no lack, the girls could experience no envy. They would have to be conditioned to a new acquisitiveness."
That's about the best little delineation of the advent of the crappy modern consumer age as I've ever read...
AND...This passage, regarding another character's post- WWII visit to Hiroshima to observe "survivors":
"A catastrophe of which no one would ever say, the Will of God.
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life - I have done this, how could I have done that - like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. -
Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he had already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity."
Yes. I think that is about our only choice these days, too, but we need many of those flickers in order to counter this century's version of evil.
posted by isabelita at 10:06 AM
4 Comments:
Both great excerpts, I. Thanks. Yes, I guess a flicker off a clear celluloid pencil sharpener is about all the hope we've got.
Doesn't Ms. Hazzard kick ass?! She probably wouldn't find that observation to be very elegant, but what the heck. It's fantastic, although a bit overwhelming, to read excellent writers, particularly if you kind of want to try it yourself. Well, better to read fine examples rather than crummy ones, which I'd better not get into...
"A bloated pile of reeking protoplasm" is pretty good too for Rush Limbaugh. Thanks for your wonderful comments over at my place. So sorry about the Seattle Massacre. Damn near lost my cookies this morning when the TV News quoted some friend of the killer describing him and his twin brother as "two teddy bears". So this was what? A teddybear picnic? With assault rifles? Best to you and all the folks out there in Seattle. Poor kids. Jesus...
Neil, they have said the killer came from Montana, and he and his twin brother had an arsenal of weapons in their apartment, including a hand grenade. Very strange that the "rave" angle is being pounded, as if the music were part of the problem. So since the killer was into heavy metal, shouldn't that be flogged, too? D. Parvaz, a writer for the Seattle PI, has a piece this morning about that very issue. I hope more of the media is responsible like that, so this whole thing isn't slanted as "freak ravers mowed down by metalhead redneck." 'Cause that's where the fuckers are going with it.
Could it be...GUNS are the problem? Ya think?!
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