A penny for your opinions

Self-expression is the new entertainment, says Arianna Huffington. I would add that self-expression as entertainment is replacing information as the content most retailed on air and web.  Witness the comically misnamed Fox News, which is an expensive but effective way for Rupert Murdoch to express himself. Witness Alan Jones, whose part-ownership of 2GB makes him the equivalent of a self-publishing novelist. Witness, most recently, the regrettable Kyle Sandilands, who seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating that his value as a radio host is in inverse proportion to his contribution as a human being. (The exodus of his sponsors seems to indicate a downgrading of his currency, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t ever, ever go away.)

For these self-expressers, the least charge of misinformation yields the disclaimer ‘opinion,’ which in turn is sustained on the grounds of entertainment. Opinion doesn’t have to be truthful or civil, particularly when neither sells as well as violations of both. In fact to seek these qualities seems to spark wild declamations about freedom of speech.  The defenders of offenders like Bolt, Sandilands, Hadley and Jones seem to feel that censorship and tyranny are poised to choke our long-cherished freedom, and only await opportunity to leap from the shadows and silence the chorus of our democracy. Yet those arguing for freedom of speech as an absolute and without limits have radically undervalued the other values by which we manage to live democratically. It seems to me that we are most protective of those goods we are least in danger of losing. We are afraid of silencing diversity when we are most in danger of cacophony. We are afraid of losing our liberty when our more likely loss is liberality. And we are afraid of losing opinion when what’s ebbing away is truth.

Behold, I am making all things new

I'm a sucker for renovation shows - proper ones, I mean, not silly ones fixated on moronic conflict and ludicrous speed. I like the ones about real families creating over periods of months and years spaces they will actually live in. So I'm a fan of Grand Designs, and I've enjoyed the first two episodes of Caroline Quentin's Restoration Home, though it does resemble some of the more irritating British reality shows in being a tad repetitive and inclined to drama. It compensates amply with its attention to history and architecture, and its slightly earnest message about the salvation of Britain's heritage.

I think it's the element of salvation that gives the best renovation shows their zest. There's something richly satisfying about watching someone bring order, beauty and memory out of loss and disrepair; about watching the miraculous reversal of natural decay, and the recovery of something once entombed. It's more impressive than the ex nihilo creations of new build, and often more compelling because of its excavation of human stories and attachments. In the process, some figments of the past are restored to use, while others are laid more decorously to rest. In both, the past inhabits the present as the human family inhabits present and past at once.

Behind these felicities is, I think, the deeper recognition of a divine preference for salvage. The final phase of creation is not destruction but re-creation. In nature as in supernature, death follows birth, but rebirth follows death, and morning follows evening. It's the divine pleasure to re-purpose, to retrieve treasures from dust, to seek and save the lost.

Willful ignorance

It seems strange to defend Shakespeare against hacks who sacrifice history to entertainment, since that was his stock in trade, but I'm pleased to see Anonymous getting not a few critical thrashings. Here's one from Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, and another from Stephen Marche in the New York Times.

There's lots to say about a film that so lavishly entertains such a foolish premise, and I don't think Rosenbaum will be the last to castigate it as, in Macbeth's words, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Oxford theory, on which the plot depends, has been more than adequately debunked by any number of proper scholars, who wouldn't have given it attention it patently didn't deserve if its proponents hadn't been so damned irrepressible. As Rosenbaum moans, though every credible scholar has convincingly killed it, it won't stay dead. And I fear this film, in spite of the critical drubbing, will breathe life into it.

Of course the argument in defence of the film will be that it is, after all, just a film. Who cares whether it's true or not? Where's the harm in indulging a fantasy? You all liked Shakespeare in Love, riddled though it was with historical inaccuracies and aesthetic irritants - what's the difference?

First of all, no we didn't. It was awful.

Secondly, there's a great difference between a playful version of historical truth and a fantastic conspiracy masquerading as history. There's a difference of intent that this defence disingenuously elides.

Thirdly, the film, like Dan Brown's novels, gives lunatic theories cultural purchase they would not otherwise have had. It normalises nuttery and gives the flimsy fringe of speculation equal standing with the fruits of serious scholarship. The argument that “it's only a film” rests on the assumption that scholarship ultimately carries more cultural weight, though in practice films have radically overtaken scholarship as determinants of what is generally known and believed.

Fourthly, where good art makes explicit the temporary compact between teller and told, this kind of art rests on a shadowy pact where the agreement is never quite made. There's a wink and nudge with every fictive marker, a juvenile refusal on the part of the teller to acknowledge that what he is engaged in is, in fact, play. (For Shakespeare, the play was the thing.)

Fifthly, where a conspiracy interferes in history, very often the truth is much more interesting, compelling, and rich than the fantasy that displaces it, and it demands our attention. By ceding influence to untruth, we dull our receptivity to truth. If we have no capacity for truth, we render ourselves incapable of justice.

Finally, the persistence of the Oxford theory does injustice of the most ignoble kind to the greatest writer in the English language. Based not on any documentary evidence but on the assumption that a working-class boy with a grammar school education couldn't have written so beautifully and profoundly, it is an enduring insult to a miraculously good writer. Instead of spending energy on underserving conspiracies about these literary miracles, we should be striving to deserve them.

Micro-reviewing

My recent reads include Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen and Tim Winton. I'd love to dwell on them, but since time's scarce, here are my 140-character reviews:

Cloudstreet is the house where two ramshackle families shack up in a post war pact, on which Lady Luck and the Lord each cast their shadows.

The Corrections puts a modern family whose foibles border on surreal near the heart of a sharp critique of almost everything America now is.

Housekeeping’s reflections on sorrow and transience pool in the hollows of a gentle story of finding and keeping family in the face of loss.

The books not taken

We went by ship to Tasmania, spent half a week in the northwest and the other half in the southeast. Both were spectacular, and we were blessed with what locals thought uncanny sunshine. Packing Robert Frost was an afterthought, but one I was heartily glad of. I had decided not to take any fiction. Knowing myself, I knew any novel would sap the better part of my attention, and seduce me away from harder reading and from observation. So I took theology, philosophy, criticism - and Frost. By week's end most of the prose was still untouched, but I had read more than a hundred poems; by sunlight in the day, and by torchlight in our tent at night. There was something especially harmonious about reading Frost while living out of doors. There was scant resemblance to Frost's New England, but there was still a resonance in what I saw with what I read of tree and bird and apple blossom, of daybreak and nightfall. I relished Frost's quiet attention to his world. Without requiring too much interpretative labour, Frost's poetry gave me a liturgy for my enjoyment. Where fiction would have led me astray from where we were, his poetry led me to look more closely and see more clearly the road we travelled by. And that has made all the difference.