The Best Australian Essays 2015 (2 page)

And of all the subjects investigated in these pages, all the positions taken, the largest body of work by far is those ghost essays which should have been here, but aren't. To those of you not included, I can only say: I have been there; and I, too, dislike it. However, to admit the arbitrariness of my own final selection is to acknowledge a greater depth of talent and smarts in Australian letters than may be contained in one slender vessel. That is surely a Good Thing.

Finally, during the weeks leading up to publication of last year's
Best Australian Essays
, we lost Pierre Ryckmans. Pierre, who was published by Black Inc. and wrote under the
nom de guerre
Simon Leys, was one of the first Australian essayists I was drawn to read, and he remains one of our finest. His death from cancer robbed the world of a rare voice of sanity in the political realm, and it removed a large-hearted and urbane sensibility from the library corner of our republic of letters. I knew him only slightly as a man, but I was as close to him as an author as any reader can be. This volume is dedicated to his memory – and to his writings, which will endure as long as there are readers left to wonder, ‘How did he do
that
?' The accompanying image shows holograph notes for his final, unfinished essay on Saint Peter, on which he was still working on the day of his death – and which Pierre's splendid and indefatigable widow, Hanfang Ryckmans, generously lent me to read. I only wish I could have included the work in its entirety.

Geordie Williamson

Confronting the Unthinkable in Goya's Art

Sebastian Smee

There are many dimensions to the art of Francisco Goya, as ‘Goya: Order and Disorder', an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, goes to great lengths to remind us. With their slicing and dicing and reconfiguring of Goya's career – mixing media, discarding chronology – Stephanie Stepanek and Frederick Ilchman, the show's curators, have emphasised the range and unpredictability of this astonishing artist.

But as the show comes to a close, I find myself returning repeatedly to what feels almost too obvious about Goya – so obvious, in fact, that one hesitates to dwell on it, for fear of falling back on platitudes.

I am talking about Goya's insistence on the stupendous, the monstrous, the scarcely creditable stupidity of human beings.

Revisiting the show, and leafing through copies of the catalogue and of Goya's great print series at home, I find myself wondering: Is it permissible, today, in an enlightened, pluralistic society, to insist so vehemently on this stupidity, and in particular on the stupidity of violence?

Aren't we supposed to understand violence, the better to get to grips with it? Shouldn't we be more reasonable and tolerant, more enlightened than simply to insist on its senselessness? After all, there's always a cause.

Even in the most horrendous cases, isn't violence usually understandable, perhaps even forgivable, when we see it outside of a chillingly deadpan news report, a shocking photograph, or a black-and-white print – that is to say, when we see it in context?

I don't know. A recent scenario, one of hundreds on offer, springs to mind. I could say, ‘
Yo lo vi
,' as Goya wrote (and used as a title for one of his prints): ‘I saw it.' But the events in question, which unfolded in my hometown of Sydney, were in fact ‘covered' by CNN, and what we all saw was very limited. And maybe I'm grateful for that. (Goya didn't actually see most of the atrocities he depicted either. But you can be fairly sure they happened.)

So: a man with a record of criminality and religious fanaticism, big chips on his shoulder and delusions of grandeur walks into a cafe in central Sydney. He takes the customers and staff hostage for sixteen excruciating hours. He uses his hostages as human shields. He wears a headband inscribed with the words ‘We are ready to sacrifice for you, O Muhammad'.

He demands, among other things, the flag of the organisation calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to be delivered to him, and asks to conduct a conversation with the Australian prime minister on live radio. He forces several of his hostages to record demands that they must then post on social media.

The world waits. In the sudden and bizarre denouement – God knows what exactly happens in there – two people are killed. One, a 38-year-old barrister, was the mother of three children under ten and the sister of an old college friend of mine. The other was the 34-year-old manager of the cafe.

For what? Precious lives, nurtured and built, through love and luck and great labour, summarily undone by a pathetic, muddle-headed fool.

Is that what he was? It is always hard, of course, to find apt words for such narratives. Even harder, perhaps, to find words for the Boston Marathon bombing, the insane massacre of 132 school-children that took place in Pakistan on the same day as the two deaths in Sydney, the slaughter of twenty small children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, the routine, virtually random executions that take place in our inner cities daily, or – more dismally breaking news – the eye-rubbingly futile murders that took place at a satirical newspaper in Paris on Wednesday.

When words do flow, they tend to be uncomfortably heavy, or weirdly abstract. We say ‘evil', because what else could it be? We use ‘tragedy' and ‘nightmare' because – well-trained in empathy – we reflexively see things from the point of view of the victims and their inconsolable loved ones, and imagine that suffering and anguish on this scale must have a commensurate cause.

But usually the cause is not commensurate, nor is the effect, and there are other words that in many ways feel more accurate. Senseless. Idiotic. Pathetic. Grotesque. Feebleminded beyond belief. These are the words that I think Goya might have used, had he been interested in words.

He was not, of course – or not particularly. He had, instead, a genius for images. Look at his ‘Disasters of War' etchings, some of which are in the MFA show, and you see this genius in action. It is a genius that combines stunning virtuosity with a freewheeling, almost manic quality that is unlike anything in art, before or since.

Wild-eyed men are cut down at close range by soldiers with rifles. Women are yanked from their babies and raped. They retaliate with spears and stones, and spur on their menfolk to wilder, more brutish acts. ‘What courage,' writes Goya in one of his sardonic titles, and you know he is also thinking, ‘What madness.'

A man retches over a pile of corpses in ‘This is what you were born for'. Men steal clothes from the recently slaughtered in ‘They avail themselves'. A man and woman cover their mouths and noses over terrain strewn with naked corpses in ‘Bury them and keep quiet'.

Other images of base murder and its aftermath have telltale titles such as ‘All this and more' and ‘One cannot look at this'. Naked bodies are thrown in a hole in the ground: the image is called ‘Charity'. In ‘Rabble', a body, naked from the waist down (is it even alive?), is about to have a long stick shoved up its rear end.

Infamous etchings of clumsy, unceremonious lynchings, dismemberments and impalings have such titles as ‘This is too much!', ‘Nobody knows why', ‘What more can one do?', ‘This is worse' and simply ‘Why?'

Why, indeed. There is no reason. Reason is conspicuous only by its absence. Instead, Goya impresses on us, we are dealing with sheer derangement. Monstrous folly.

Our Age of Reason inheritance tells us that violence – even of the most egregious, vile, unconscionable kind – has causes, and that we would do well to study and come to terms with those causes. I am not ready to let go of this idea. I see its value. But Goya makes me realise that it is an idea of limited efficacy.

As his images of senseless violence accumulate, a deeper apprehension sets in – one that goes beyond diagnostics. It is a visceral registration of that which is most putrid and pitiful about humans. And that recognition triggers in turn a dangerous idea: the possibility that the most helpful response to these depredations may be not so much to shine the light of reason on them, the better to understand and digest them, but rather to swear never to come to terms with them, never to tolerate them.

Instead, we might be better off cultivating the art of intolerance, and doing so in the same spirit in which Goya produced the ‘Disasters of War' and ‘Caprichos' etchings. Bear witness, Goya was saying. Do not close your eyes, do not let things slide. But have no truck with catastrophic stupidity. Declare it for what it is.

In the meantime, love reason and everything it has given us, but recognise that reason is not a free-floating faculty that leads inevitably to the right answer, and ultimately on to Utopia. That illusion, a vestige of the same Enlightenment that produced Goya, met its comeuppance almost as soon as it was proposed.

In France, the comeuppance came in the form of the mob, the guillotine, the Terror. In Spain, it came in the form of the Inquisition and the Peninsula Wars, both of which Goya lived through.

The twentieth century did everything it could – everything we would wish not only undone, but unimagined – to prove that the divine faculty of reason was no match for human baseness, and was in fact more than willing to put itself in service to such baseness.

And the twenty-first century, on all the available evidence, seems bent on reiterating the point. Idealistic revolutions – in Egypt, in Libya, and elsewhere – are still being twisted into travesties of their original, often noble impulses. Powerful nations, meanwhile, blatantly betray their most loudly trumpeted ideals, perpetrating torture (with dogs and hoods, repeated near-drownings, anal penetration and unstinting humiliation), and then redefining torture with Orwellian shamelessness and utter impunity. They are surprised at the hatred this stokes.

A deeply troubled teenager in Connecticut, the offspring of a ‘gun enthusiast', is somehow allowed to spend most of his waking life playing dementedly violent video games and given free access to a whole arsenal of murderous weapons. In the wake of what ensues, the talk is of evil, and gun control, and care for the mentally ill. But none of it is remotely commensurate with what happened, minute by minute, in those classrooms that day, or with the trauma and grief that the surviving small children and their families still live with today.

It is called ‘unimaginable'. But Goya knew the reverse was true. It is all too imaginable, and it is stupid, grotesque and humiliating, is it not?

Back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya was extremely quick on the uptake. Reason, to him, was precious – and not only precious, but beautiful. In his art, he endowed images of its betrayal with a visceral charge, a haunted revulsion.

‘The unique power of his work,' wrote the art critic John Berger, ‘is due to the fact that he was so sensuously involved in the terror and horror of the betrayal of Reason.' He was an artist, after all, and art is a sensuous, not a rational medium.

Goya was never interested in making his art embody reason, decorum, hope, or anything approximating utopian thinking. He was far too alert to humanity's dark side. His most reasonable pictures are by far his most boring. Isolated from the others, they can make him look third-rate.

What he wanted to show us, with an eagerness and urgency that still scalds, was the remorseless, terrifying stupidity of irrational violence. Seeing it, I shiver, and occasionally think of something the Italian Curzio Malaparte wrote in ‘The Skin':

Goya was afraid, truly afraid, of exactly this smile, as all of us should be. It is the imbecilic smile one sees on the face of his ‘Dancing Giant', who capers about freakishly before a terrified huddle, as two heads howl monstrously in the background. And it is the smile one doesn't see but involuntarily imagines, just faded or about to break out, on the face of his ‘Seated Giant'.

You may wish to see it again before the show closes. Then again, you may not.

The Boston Globe

The World Needs Female Rock Critics

Anwen Crawford

Don't tell anyone, but I don't own any albums by the Rolling Stones. They're just so archetypal, so very rock and roll – and that, I find, can be a difficult thing to admire. Rock music has rarely offered women the same tangible promise of social rebellion and sexual freedom that it has given men – though plenty of women, myself included, have tried all the same to find those liberties in it. ‘Boy guitarists notwithstanding,' the journalist Lillian Roxon wrote to a friend, in 1966, ‘I don't think I can stand the sight of another bloody electric guitar.' I know just how she felt.

In 1969, Roxon – Italian-born, Australian-raised, an experienced journalist and a star of Warhol's back room at Max's Kansas City – would publish
Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia
, the first of its kind, a marvel of research and critical acumen. Within six months of publication, the book had entered its third hardcover print run, and Roxon was profiled in the
Times
. The book has now been out of print for decades. (Roxon died in 1973, at the age of forty-one.) Ellen Willis, a contemporary of Roxon's, was the
New Yorker
's first popular-music critic, beginning in 1968, but a collection of her music writing,
Out of the Vinyl Deeps
, was not published until 2011, five years after her death. This month, the American writer Jessica Hopper, a senior editor at the music website
Pitchfork
, publishes a book called
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
. The title is more provocation than statement of fact, but it is not entirely untrue. Books by living female rock critics (or jazz, hip-hop and dance-music critics, for that matter) are scant. In an introductory note to her book, Hopper names Roxon, Willis, the English journalist Caroline Coon, and the anthology
Rock She Wrote
, edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers, as precedents for her own work. ‘The title is not meant to erase our history but rather to help mark the path,' Hopper writes.

That path is not an easy one to discern. The most famous rock-music critics – Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Nick Kent – are all male. Bangs, who died in 1982, at the age of thirty-three, remains the most iconic of them all. Why? Because his hard-living, drug-taking, sunglasses-after-dark-wearing gonzo schtick made him as much of a masculine anti-hero as his rock-star subjects were. The pose doesn't work as well for female critics, from whom displays of bad attitude are seldom tolerated, let alone celebrated. Rock's rebel women, including its writers, are rarely assumed to be geniuses; often, they are assumed to be whores. In a 2002 biography of Lillian Roxon,
Mother of Rock
, by Robert Milliken, Roxon's young protégé, Kathy Miller, recalls being challenged by a male editor who assigned her to write about The Who and then asked for a blow job in return, saying, ‘What's the big deal? You're a groupie.' She replied, ‘I'm a woman who writes about rock and roll.' His answer: ‘Same difference.' Groupies have proved an enduring stereotype of women's participation in rock: worshipful, gorgeous, and despised.

Earlier this year, Hopper interviewed Björk for
Pitchfork
. In the interview, which is not included in the book, Björk reflected at length upon the ways in which women's labour and expertise – inside and outside of the music industry – go unnoticed. ‘It's invisible, what women do,' she said. ‘It's not rewarded as much.' She observed that her male collaborators are typically credited for the sound of her records; because on stage she mainly sings, there is a widespread assumption that she neither produces nor plays an instrument. ‘I want to support young girls who are in their twenties now and tell them:
You're not just imagining things
,' she said.

When I was about fourteen, I stood outside science class holding a folder that was decorated with an array of faces which I had carefully cut out from the pages of music magazines. Pointing to a photo of Björk on my folder, a passing boy sneered at me, ‘I bet you don't even know who she is.' (This would have been around 1995, when the music press was having one of its periodic crushes on Women in Rock.) I did know who Björk was, because my mother, who was young and groovy, had raised me on the Sugar-cubes, the Icelandic band that Björk was a member of before she launched her solo career. I don't remember raising this point with my accuser, but if I had I doubt he would have believed me. The record store, the guitar shop, and now social media: when it comes to popular music, these places become stages for the display of male prowess. Female expertise, when it appears, is repeatedly dismissed as fraudulent. Every woman who has ever ventured an opinion on popular music could give you some variation (or a hundred) on my school corridor run-in, and becoming a recognised ‘expert' (a musician, a critic) will not save you from accusations of fakery.

The problem for women is that our role in popular music was codified long ago. And it was codified, in part, by the early music press. In the effort to prove the burgeoning rock scene of the sixties a worthy subject of critical inquiry, rock needed to be established as both serious and authentic. One result of these arguments – the Rolling Stones vs Muddy Waters, Motown vs Stax, Bob Dylan vs the world – was that women came out on the losing side, as frivolous and phony. Whether a teenage fan or a member of a girl group, women lacked genuine grit – even female critics thought so. ‘The Supremes epitomize the machine-like precision of the Motown sound,' wrote Lillian Roxon in her rock encyclopaedia. ‘Everything is worked out for them and they don't buck the system.' Judgements like that are still routinely applied to female artists today. In Hopper's book, under the chapter heading ‘Real/Fake', appears a 2012 essay on Lana Del Rey, an artist whose look harks back to those big-haired, mascaraed sixties singers, and whose career has unfolded beneath a cloud of suspicion as to her credentials, musical and otherwise. ‘As an audience, we make a big stink about wanting the truth, but we're only really interested in the old myths,' Hopper writes. The myth of women's deceitfulness is one of the oldest.

For early female music critics like Roxon and Willis, the flash-point was Janis Joplin. Joplin, like the Rolling Stones, borrowed heavily from the blues; her ragged style seemed to mark her as the real thing. But her lonely position as, in Willis's words, ‘the only sixties culture hero to make visible and public women's experience of the quest for individual liberation' also left her open to attack. Joplin's sexual daring, and the contempt she faced for it, revealed the limits and the hypocrisies of the counterculture. ‘Writers rape her with words as if there weren't any other way to deal with her,' Roxon wrote. The frustration that many of Joplin's female fans felt at her treatment, and their sadness at her premature death, was something these women carried over, shortly afterwards, into the first stirrings of women's liberation. Both Roxon and Willis became involved in the feminist movement; Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch
, published in 1970, was dedicated to Roxon, whom Greer described in the dedication as ‘Lillian the abundant, the golden, the eloquent, the well and badly loved; Lillian the beautiful who thinks she is ugly.'

Academia, a step or two removed from the machismo of the newspaper room, has proved a more accommodating realm for women writing about popular music. In that sphere, essays and books by writers such as Tricia Rose, Daphne Brooks, Aisha Durham, Alice Echols, Gayle Wald and Angela McRobbie contribute to a rich and ongoing feminist analysis. Writing by these women appears only intermittently in the mainstream press, but forty years of critical feminist theory on popular music has slowly filtered into the outlook of younger critics; as Hopper noted in a recent interview with
The Hairpin
, online publishing has given rise to ‘this ferocious crop of really opinionated young writers writing about race, gender, queerness, the body – people coming in with a pretty immaculately formed critical framework'. Hopper, who started publishing her criticism as a teenager in the midst of the early-nineties punk-feminist upsurge known as riot grrrl, mentioned in the same interview that when she began writing she did not have ‘anything more than a high school education'. Her autodidact tendencies and her energetic, conversational writing style form part of another long music-press tradition, the looser and more playful side of that sixties push for seriousness – though Hopper's stylistic immediacy does not preclude her from covering difficult subjects, like the endemic sexism of punk rock, or the ‘banal and pernicious' contrivance of Miley Cyrus.

The often neglected path blazed by female music critics intersects with other related writing traditions. Memoir has long been used by female performers to reflect upon the pressures and contradictions of their roles. Kim Gordon's
Girl in a Band
, Tracey Thorn's
Bedsit Disco Queen
and Viv Albertine's
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
have lately joined earlier classics like Mary Wilson's
Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme
and Tina Turner's
I, Tina
to provide female perspectives on popular music. There is also a small but noteworthy strand of contemporary fiction by women that takes popular music as a primary subject, from Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize–winning
A Visit from the Goon Squad
(2010), with its sleazy music-biz manager, to Eleanor Henderson's impassioned treatment of eighties New York hardcore,
Ten Thousand Saints
(2011) and Dana Spiotta's mysterious
Stone Arabia
(2012), in which the brother of the narrator chronicles his strictly imaginary success as a rock star.

Perhaps fiction and memoir, more than criticism, provide space for female writers to dissect all that is maddening and wonderful about popular music: the spectacle, the chicanery, the beautiful lies it tells us. But there is plenty of need for female music critics yet. ‘Take it easy, babe,' Mick Jagger sang in ‘Under My Thumb', still as glistering a slice of unrepentant misogyny as ever it was, unredeemed by time or by the million screaming girls who wriggled beneath Jagger's commands. In a 1971 essay, Ellen Willis argued that Jagger's ‘crude exhibitions of virility' were less sexist than the ‘condescending' pose of a bohemian like Cat Stevens; insofar as rock, she wrote, ‘pitted teenage girls' inchoate energies against all their conscious and unconscious frustrations, it spoke implicitly for female liberation'. I don't entirely agree with Willis's defence of the Stones, but I do recognise the difficult trade-off she describes, between the freedom that rock can feel like, for a woman, and the subjugation that it might celebrate. It's between these boundaries that the female critic works, hoping to clear a path.

The New Yorker