Germaine Greer has a new book, Shakespeare’s Wife, coming out any minute now. A long and interesting review in the New York Review of Books, where I seem to patch up my education nowadays (having little formal,) gives one a sense of the range of possibilities in life at that time, as well as how history is done. I find this sort of thing, readable scholarship, a relief. From? From the ever-floating body of, er, knowledge that is the Interwebs. Where one can read forever, find anything—yet who shall say what the core is? The canon. Canon in the sense of, say, polar opposite of bone stupid. Which seems to be having what must have been a long awaited field day, because anyone can blog about anything. The pity is that, in some atavistic reflex, we tend to assign some vague legitimacy to that which appears in print. Aha, but here the print is merely carefully arranged electrons, courtesy of your favorite blog service. It’s all an illusion. Machine language tells the machine what to make of it so as to become, as they say, Human-Readable. I write it myself, albeit in a simple-minded way, every time I post with HTML, and I can tell you … count on nothing. Wear your best tin-foil hat. Be careful out there.
No, in the end, it’s books we want and need. Books and the Internet being in no way interchangeable. One is a “river of news” with stream of sewage running through it, the other the equal of a lake or still pond. (Water is such a lovely metaphor for Time.) The river, depending on its speed, requires a great deal of thrash and struggle to stay afloat; it is not the purpose of a river to stay in one place. Kudos go to the heroic, the well-muscled, to the winner (yawn) go the links. But a book is a pond, a lake, into whose waters one may dive, may explore the vast and wonderful world of thought and dream outside the diurnal pressure of time.
Ah, literature, Where there are no popularity contests as you read, no page rank. I don’t know how the human mind develops, without this contemplative space. For in the act of reading, the mind makes the movie, submerged in the existential space of imagination. Imagination the very essence of the good.
The horror of fascist-state mind is freshly born in on us, just now. Whole great parts of the human experience—Not Allowed. Forbidden. It is forbidden to think, and in this foolish edict, the Chinese government grows within itself the seeds of its own helpless destruction. As does any fool—be it at the level of nations, be it at the level of ex-husbands—whose existence depends on a fantasy: the control of other people.
My fucking god, that this goes on and on and on. One wants to think that humankind progresses, over time. Fantasy, fallacy fascistic oppression, whatever you call it, the thing does not work. It cannot, nor can any amount of force make it so. The fruits of this wrong-headed view the same dreary harvest of death, lies, fear.
“Greer is often unnecessarily, stridently, and self-defensively combative She ends with a gratuitous insult to those whom she derides as ‘the Shakespeare wallahs’ who ‘have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women,’ as if she herself were not a Shakespeare wallah. But this is an important book in the challenges that it poses to received opinion. It will have a permanent and beneficial effect on attempts to tell the story of Shakespeare’s life.”
Germaine Greer may well be strident and combative; it is only what one would expect, and possibly what is really meant is, She doesn’t take any crap?
Or give a shit, for that matter, what you think? Poor man, poor Shakespeare wallah. Words can hurt, but when they are the stinging truth, only for a little while.
