tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/art-for-trying-times-90143/articlesArt for Trying Times – The Conversation2020-09-02T19:57:27Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1436142020-09-02T19:57:27Z2020-09-02T19:57:27Z‘A doubtful gleam of solace’: reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH in difficult times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355004/original/file-20200827-24-ycoj9v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C0%2C885%2C901&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
by Samuel Laurence and Sir Edward Burne-Jones, circa 1840.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="146" data-image="" data-title="In Memoriam AHH, cantos 27 & 28, read by Darius Sepehri" data-size="2351437" data-source="" data-source-url="" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2025/in-memoriam-cantos-27-and-28-read-by-darius-sepehri.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
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In Memoriam AHH, cantos 27 & 28, read by Darius Sepehri.
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<p>Alfred Tennyson’s 1833 poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses">“Ulysses”</a>, was, he tells us, written under a sense of loss — “that all had gone by but that still life must be fought out to the end.” </p>
<p>Dealing with the inertia created by grief, and the will needed to resist and move ahead, the poem perfectly expresses what St Paul called the <a href="https://catholicexchange.com/the-meaning-of-the-christians-call-to-hope-against-hope">“hope against hope”</a>. Despite the heroism of the famous last line, (“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”), the poem’s defiance only makes sense in the light of the anguish animating it.</p>
<p>Tennyson’s book-length elegy <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/718/">In Memoriam AHH</a>, published in 1850, once among the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-in-memoriam">most popular poems</a> in English, came out of the same sense that the whole world was over — not <em>a</em> world but <em>the</em> world — and yet life must be lived, somehow. </p>
<p>I experience In Memoriam as a soulful and provocative artwork, not a “relevant” one or one merely to be mined for therapeutic consolations.</p>
<p>Despite its formal control and elegance, and what we may hear as dated language, Tennyson’s long poem is tumultuous, chaotic, and not only personal but social, deeply connected with <a href="https://jamescungureanu.com/2014/02/20/what-was-victorian-doubt/">upheavals in Victorian society</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351141/original/file-20200804-14-81egun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">An 1851 edition of In Memoriam.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ode-to-the-poem-why-memorising-poetry-still-matters-for-human-connection-121622">Ode to the poem: why memorising poetry still matters for human connection</a>
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</em>
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<h2>Passion</h2>
<p>Both Victorian and <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/experiment.html">modern</a> in style and composition, In Memoriam uses extraordinarily passionate language, tightly compressed. Its passion is directed by Tennyson at another man, his friend <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hallam">Arthur Hallam</a>, a brilliant philosopher. Tennyson and Hallam met at university. We know their first encounters were magnetic and catalysing.</p>
<p>When Hallam died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in Italy in 1833, aged 22, it violently changed Tennyson’s life. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351155/original/file-20200804-18-4t2ij5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Bust of Arthur Hallam by Francis Leggatt Chantrey.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>Tennyson took 18 years to write In Memoriam. The <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/contents.html">prologue and epilogue</a> attest to unshakeable faith in Christianity and in life’s continuity. The prologue’s first line addressed to “Strong Son of God, immortal Love”, and the last lines professing the eschatological completion of the world in “one far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves”, could hardly seem more assured. </p>
<p>And yet. The 131 cantos in between these bookends trace an agonising journey into suffering, doubt, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/54.html">helplessness</a> and the possibility of unredeemed pain that has no meaning or purpose. The rhetorical strength of some of these cantos is such that it puts the orthodox Christian position the poem professes elsewhere in serious question.</p>
<p>The way the poem tries to think through the many grand subjects it raises, such as <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/55.html">if God cares</a> for each individual being, creates a meandering journey, now confused, now suddenly clear. This feels right for grief.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="128" data-image="" data-title="Cantos 34 & 38 recited by Darius Sepehri" data-size="2064299" data-source="" data-source-url="" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2026/tennyson-in-memoriam-cantos-34-and-38.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
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<div class="audio-player-caption">
Cantos 34 & 38 recited by Darius Sepehri.
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<p>The poem spirals around its ideas, rejecting clean linear progression, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/imstruct.html">organised</a>
around three Christmas sections (cantos <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/28.html">28</a>, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/78.html">78</a>, and <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/104.html">104</a>) of heightened feeling. Coming back and back to things, seemingly obsessed, Tennyson speaks of “a loss for ever new”. There is no “closure” of the wound. Can Christ really fill it? The world and its goods cannot.</p>
<p>I’ve committed many parts of In Memoriam to memory, made easier by the poem’s exceptionally memorable language (immortal, melodious phrases like “I loved the weight I had to bear/because it needed help of love”). </p>
<p>The poem’s form, entirely in quatrains of iambic tetrameter <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/In-Memoriam-stanza">rhyming <em>abba</em></a>, composed in a long, ledger-like diary now <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epXwX0MxZcg">kept at the British Museum</a>, aids in memorisation. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-poetic-metre-53364">Explainer: poetic metre</a>
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<p>I recite a selection of cantos <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-285653421/alfred-tennyson-from-in-memoriam-ahh-selected-cantos">here</a>, and the famous <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-285653421/alfred-tennyson-ring-out-wild-bells-from-in-memoriam">“Ring Out Wild Bells” sequence</a>, which charts a move from devastation to rebirth.</p>
<p>In Memoriam has an almost relentlessly regular meter, meant to recall biological processes such as the beat of the heart and breathing, organic processes that sustain life even as the poet’s being cries that life has ended. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PI0j4kf5Hh4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<h2>All creation mourns</h2>
<p>After Tennyson received a letter telling him Hallam’s remains were coming back by sea to Hallam’s family in England, he wrote the very first part of In Memoriam, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/9.html">calling the ship home</a>: “Sphere all your lights around, above/Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow/ Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now.”</p>
<p>A hypnotic enchantment is created with the ship phosphorescent as it sails at night.</p>
<p>The poem connects something cosmic and transcendent with Tennyson’s own very private, enclosed grief. Terrence Malick’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBawefQO6I0">Tree of Life</a>, a film where the death of a young son is juxtaposed with grand existential and metaphysical questions that interrogate God, also aimed for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6w_znQYEF4">such territory</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351150/original/file-20200804-24-146hoho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tennyson with his wife Emily and sons, circa 1862. He named one of his sons Hallam.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public Domain</span></span>
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<h2>Soulful ambiguity</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/129.html">“Dear friend, far off, my lost desire”</a>, cries Tennyson. Today if a man speaks such excessive language of love to another man, we are likely to apply a defined identity or classification. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-walt-whitmans-leaves-of-grass-and-the-complex-life-of-the-poet-of-america-116055">Guide to the classics: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the complex life of the 'poet of America'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Although modern readers may read Tennyson’s excessive professions of love for Hallam as homosexual, the nature of their relationship was unclear to Tennyson himself, and its expressions in keeping with Victorian sentimentality. He would have baulked at our collapsing of an entire world of feelings so complex.</p>
<p>In Memoriam testifies to the ineffability of human experience. <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/52.html">Language is inadequate</a> to capture its density and intensity.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=653&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=653&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351148/original/file-20200804-22-129fi82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=653&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Canto 5.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>Tennyson was protective of the intensity of his feelings: hence the time he took to publish. He avoided the imperative to <em>immediately display</em>. Today we feel immense pressure to respond at once, in public, with clear stances, to make things transparent. Such transparency destroys soulfulness.</p>
<p>What makes our times so hard to bear are not just external circumstances themselves but the common ejection of mystery and suffering from art, and transcendence from consciousness.</p>
<p>In Memoriam dwells with the mysteries of being and death, mounts an impassioned <a href="https://aeon.co/videos/defend-love-as-a-real-risky-adventure-philosopher-alain-badiou-on-modern-romance">defence of love</a> and friendship, and — perhaps rarest of all — reminds us of something noble in the capacity to <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984004">suffer for an ideal</a>. </p>
<p>Tennyson’s lavish, excessive passion, his “tarrying with the negative” as Hegel put it, shows us how soulful art stirs us to life and staves off banality — but the cost must be paid. </p>
<p>Tennyson had a deep <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2911135?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">interest in Persian poetry</a> through his friend <a href="https://iranicaonline.org/articles/fitzgerald-">Edward Fitzgerald</a> (translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).</p>
<p>He surely found something in Persian poetry’s insistence that <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soul-search/rumi-hafez-sufi-poetry-broken-hill-samia-khatun/12070568">grief and joy are inseparable</a> and that death is not total loss, because nothing we feel passionately and soulfully is truly lost to us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143614/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Darius Sepehri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Alfred Tennyson’s passionate book-length elegy was once among the most popular poems in English. Today, it shows us how soulful art can stir us to life and stave off banality.Darius Sepehri, Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature, Religion and History of Philosophy, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1443642020-09-01T04:02:58Z2020-09-01T04:02:58ZHollywood: a glitzy, queer recasting of Tinseltown that is perfect escapist TV<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355516/original/file-20200831-20-1m0h17w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=89%2C12%2C1219%2C743&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Murphy Productions</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In days of COVID-19, I’m seeking escape and the screen is a glowing cornucopia of distraction. As a former worker in the Hollywood studio system I’m intrigued by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9827854/">Hollywood</a>, a seven-part Netflix miniseries that’s equally adored and abhorred by critics.</p>
<p>Some have criticised Hollywood for being <a href="https://variety.com/2020/tv/reviews/ryan-murphy-hollywood-review-1203551971/">smug and unrealistic</a>. But the series is clearly not realism. It’s camp, it’s glitz and it’s quietly hilarious, with producer credits including big names from Glee, Big Bang Theory, American Horror Story and Scream Queens.</p>
<p>I see where critics get confused. The real Hollywood is often mythologised as a dog-eat-dog environment, which suits the need of storytelling focused on dramatic conflict. But having lived “the dream” in the ‘90s as a <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/writing-language/Writing-Your-Screenplay-Lisa-Dethridge-9781741140835">script and story editor</a> for Fox, Working Title, CBS, MTV and others, I can refute the stereotype.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-the-funniest-filthiest-comfort-tv-around-143171">It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the funniest, filthiest comfort TV around</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Professionals I worked with around town, especially in the old school 20th Century Fox studio (pre-Murdoch), went out of their way to help each other and improve conditions for all players. My experience of the ‘90s Hollywood studio system was of highly organised, cooperative artist teams, collaborating, working and playing hard; a central theme of the Hollywood series.</p>
<p>This camaraderie of the studio “family” is evident in the opening titles of Hollywood, a group of young actors clamber up the scaffold of the famous Hollywood sign, giving each other a leg-up to catch a view from the top.</p>
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<p>In seven snappy instalments, Hollywood follows this ensemble of young hopefuls into the post war 1950s. The action centres on Ace Studios, where Jack (David Corenswet), aspiring actor from out of town, waits at the gates to be picked as an extra so he can pay the rent.</p>
<h2>‘Dreamland’</h2>
<p>Jack ends up in uniform at a special gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. Surprisingly this is the front of a male prostitution racket run by a loveable rogue who provides day jobs to his band of wanna-be-star hopefuls. For drive-in clients of both sexes, the codeword for service is “take me to dreamland.” </p>
<p>Jack becomes a gigolo in the gas station (bright and sparkly, like an ice cream parlour.) He wears a neat, white, military-looking uniform and caters to an array of attractive female clientele while waiting for his big break.</p>
<p>Like his wife, we forgive Jack his indiscretions, which finally pay off in a studio audition thanks to some help from one of his clients Avis, played by veteran Patti LuPone. Avis is a grand dame of the old school, the neglected wife of Ace Studio head “Ace” (Rob Reiner). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355512/original/file-20200831-18-ztdgxr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Patti LuPone and David Corenswet in Hollywood (2020).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Murphy Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This Hollywood power couple are reminiscent of the old studio heads — Fox, Laemmle, Mayer, Warner, Zukor — that <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573">film historian Neal Gabler</a> calls “the Jews who invented Hollywood.” They are smart, resourceful immigrant workers who transform their knowledge of rabbinic storytelling and of fashion, marketing and manufacturing into a large-scale film industry.</p>
<p>Finally inside the studio with a contract as bit player, Jack teams up with a screenwriter, a director and thespians of varied racial and sexual background. Their passion project is “Meg”, a script written by and starring young African American talents. </p>
<p>The plot picks up steam when Jack and his team of young artists encourage Avis to confront bigotry in the studio system by accepting the radical script, “Meg”, written by a black man. Further, they persuade her to forget threats from the Ku Klux Klan and cast a black actress in the lead of “Meg”. Despite death threats, our crew bravely confront the religious and white supremacist groups who picket Ace Studios to protest the promotion of gay and coloured talent. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355518/original/file-20200831-22-or93zr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Darren Criss, Laura Harrier, and Jeremy Pope in Hollywood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Murphy Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With the help of the screwy talent agent Henry (played with delicious malice by Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory) they beat the Klan and make it as far as the Oscars. Our young African American screenwriter arrives at the red carpet holding hands with his boyfriend, Rock Hudson (Jake Picking). They bravely confront a mixed reception from waiting press.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/with-moonlights-oscar-win-hollywood-begins-to-right-old-wrongs-73843">With Moonlight's Oscar win, Hollywood begins to right old wrongs</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Alternative history</h2>
<p>Like so many of his contemporaries, the real Rock Hudson was forced to hide the truth of his life within a fake, short-lived marriage. </p>
<p>In this alternate history, we are invited to view the world through a new lens as Rock transforms from a shy, closeted country boy into a determined young advocate for homosexual rights, which is what he eventually became in the 1980s. In this way, the series truncates history and gives voice to characters across time.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355519/original/file-20200831-24-86chlt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jake Picking as Rock Hudson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Murphy Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In re-imagining this already pre- and re-packaged history of media production, Hollywood offers a queer blend of nostalgic whimsy and sharp meta-commentary. The series invites us to speculate on a world that could have once and still can challenge the stereotypical onscreen representation of black and gay lives. In one scene, an Asian actress complains that she is <em>already, actually Asian</em> and does not need to wear makeup that accentuates her slanted eyes.</p>
<p>In another, the regally cool Queen Latifah plays popular actress Hattie McDaniel who complains that despite her talents, as the descendant of slaves, she is only ever <a href="https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/forgotten-black-women-of-early-hollywood-take-center-stage-at-caam">cast as a mammie or a maid</a>. </p>
<p>Whether they are fighting the KKK, the studio system or their own demons, each main character has a major sexual and/or racial issue to confront and conquer. This universal theme is updated and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2018.1530882">laced with LGBTQI irony</a>, offering very NOW, queer angles on the courage of those who take risks in times of change. </p>
<p>While often critiqued for being elitist and white, queer theory and art disturbs the stale conventions, the “truths” and limited perceptions of our social world in a way that is <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532708611401329">fluid and “becoming”</a>. </p>
<h2>The ‘heart’ of Hollywood</h2>
<p>In this series, we get to know a range of characters at the intersection of racial and gender stereotypes. To get their movie made, our characters confront violent religious groups and the KKK. Like all Hollywood heroes, their courage goes beyond what most of us can muster in our daily struggles. </p>
<p>The series pays respect to characters who offer us insight into what it’s like to feel closeted, persecuted or “invisible” within mainstream culture. At the same time, the producers dress these serious themes with sequins and lighthearted, campy fun to ensure we enjoy the ride. Backstage or on-set, we observe the construction of character, of film “reality”, of “truth” in all its colourful fakery. </p>
<p>The series has what the studio story department traditionally calls “heart,” the empathic ability to reach out and touch audiences at their core. It is not to be read as “true” to the facts but “true” to the poetry of the Hollywood ethos; the world may be in tatters but we all deserve our dreams. When viewed with a sense of humour, the result is a sophisticated, juicy and eye-opening entertainment. </p>
<p>In times of COVID-19, we perhaps can’t bear too much reality. This series both challenges and reassures us that despite our woes outside the theatre, there’s a warm place for everyone inside.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144364/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Dethridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This Netflix TV series following an ensemble of young hopefuls in the 1950s is sophisticated, juicy and eye-opening entertainment.Lisa Dethridge, Research and Senior Lecturer, Media and Communication, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1435422020-08-20T03:52:24Z2020-08-20T03:52:24ZWinter Winds by hippy cowboy Mickey Newbury: the perfect soundtrack to wintry times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353113/original/file-20200817-24-y6p42a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A winter dawn in Brisbane.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>This road down to Nashville is like crystal and stone,</p>
<p>it’s a place where a man sells his soul for a song</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The house is creaking, buffeted by westerly winds, Brisbane’s annual curse. The sleep owed me by the long day is held to ransom by the racket rising through the floorboards, the windows edging open, sending doors slamming. Cardboard boxes tumble and slide on the cold concrete below, and the patio roofing lifts at the edges, beating a random rhythm, tempered by the pretty pentatonic windchimes hitched up to a beam somewhere down in the dark. We don’t hear them often, those lullaby chimes.</p>
<p>The westerlies slide in and out through the Brisbane winter, settling around August with the usual winter ills. But this year, there’s no flu and few colds. The world is trembling under the looming Virus. And in the quieter, slower life that is now the norm, we have more time to listen and read and scan the channels. </p>
<p>I don’t know, can’t remember, what brought this album into my sight. I had seen his name, associated with Nashville songwriters — Kristoffersen, Cash, van Zandt — and with the arrangement of “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAlnYJXmO2Y">An American Trilogy</a>”, Elvis’ big closing number in his 72/73 shows. Dylan made sure he <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/fb115a92-7a90-11e0-8762-00144feabdc0">touched base</a> with Newbury when he was recording Nashville Skyline in 1969.</p>
<p>Mickey Newbury was born in Texas in 1940 and died in Oregon in 2002. He moved to Nashville in 1965, and by 1969 had racked up a string of hits … for other singers. Sweet Memories, Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings — in 1968 he had hits across four different charts.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/simplicity-and-quiet-my-isolation-playlist-from-ecm-records-143595">Simplicity and quiet: my isolation playlist from ECM Records</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The album I’ve been falling into, relying on in this quiet time, is called Winter Winds. Released in 2002, it is an extended version of the 1994 live album Nights When I Am Sane. An odd thing to do, re-release a live album, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70l7nfWxg5E">Winter</a> is markedly different from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwt3LaToL_Q">Sane</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/70l7nfWxg5E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The picked guitar fades up, the voice, wordless, floats around a cello and settles into the verse. And when the chorus comes: “It’s the 33rd of August and I’m finally touching down”, we get this guy. He’s the guy whose “demons dance and sing their songs within [his] fevered brain” and we know him well. </p>
<p>We’ve all had those days, those mornings when brutal reality slouches in, slides onto the sofa and lights a cigarette. Looks at you sideways.</p>
<h2>A storyteller’s voice</h2>
<p>But it’s the second song, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_vDtpsWJck">Ramblin’ Blues</a>, that sends my neck hairs crazy. Newbury has a storyteller’s voice. You can smell the phone box, the fear, hear the kids yelling in the distance at the other end of the line — and in the chorus the voice soars, untethered, on a landscape of strings. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/listening-to-songs-of-leonard-cohen-singing-sadness-to-sadness-in-these-anxious-times-142661">Listening to Songs of Leonard Cohen: singing sadness to sadness in these anxious times</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>These strings set the album apart from its older twin. The strings, the sound effects — the wintry winds — the bass and mandolin, were all added later to Newbury and Jack Williams’ delicate guitars. Some purists hate them, but these embellishments helped me love this record. That, and the whistling!</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a_vDtpsWJck?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Yes, the strings drew me in. They’re not cinematic, or showy. They just wrap the words and melodies in harmony and warmth. They’re structural and sometimes a bit dramatic, but carefully considered. </p>
<p>A few tracks in and we arrive at I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In); the cello swooping up to meet Newbury in his delirium —</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I woke up this morning, the sundown was shining in / I found my broken mind in a brown paper bag but then / I tripped on a cloud and fell eight miles high / Tore my mind on a jagged sky</p>
<p>I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This song has crept into the zeitgeist, thanks to the Coen Brothers, who used the very groovy First Edition <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AULOC--qUOI">version</a> in The Big Lebowski dream sequence, and on it travelled – True Detective, Fargo, on and on. You can smell the trip gone wrong, the metallic fear, the suffocating.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AULOC--qUOI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Dark moments</h2>
<p>There are lots of dark moments on this album. As there are love songs, full of heartache. The lost love of San Francisco Mabel Joy, of Genevieve, of Angeline. Aching, relentless loss in this soaring voice, the voice of a troubled mind.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, what will I do / Till the need in me subsides? / Simply close my eyes / And try to sleep / And try to sleep.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then, just the sound of the chill wind, and finally the distant train whistle, reaching into the fitful slumber. And then it’s gone.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/reP8JNB0pQE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>So that’s been my accompaniment since the beginning of the year. I listened to Winter Winds when we were at airports and on planes. And then the planes went away, so I listened to it in the car, combing the empty streets just to get out of the house in the early lockdown. I have it on in the background when I write, keeping my words company. </p>
<p>But mainly I just relax into Newbury’s wonderful voice, and my spirit rises with those notes, and skips with the whistling, and settles into his sad and beautiful stories.</p>
<p>Some parting advice from Mickey: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve been dying all my life … You should do the things today that need to be done. Tomorrow is too late.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143542/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Willsteed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With his wonderful voice, fondness for strings and whistling and sad, beautiful stories, this American singer-songwriter lifts the spirits.John Willsteed, Senior lecturer, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1434512020-08-19T03:25:44Z2020-08-19T03:25:44ZSecret Feminist Agenda — a treasured item in my ‘feminist killjoy survival kit’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352146/original/file-20200811-14-12ln6xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In her 2017 book <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/living-a-feminist-life">Living a Feminist Life</a>, <a href="https://www.saranahmed.com/">Sara Ahmed</a> advocates the necessity of a “feminist killjoy survival kit”, her name for the assemblage of books, things, tools, creatures and joys that enable feminists — and feminism — to survive.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352148/original/file-20200811-20-19uc16c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When the world is exhausting, when life grinds you down, the Survival Kit is the place feminists turn for nourishment and solace. More than just an exercise in <a href="https://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/laurie-penny-self-care">neoliberal selfcare</a>, Survival Kits are about sustaining a community and a political project.</p>
<p>Needless to say, my Survival Kit has been getting a heavy workout in 2020. Coronavirus, climate collapse, economic downturn, the implosion of higher education, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-fascist-performance">resurgent fascism</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@pennyred/terf-wars-why-transphobia-has-no-place-in-feminism-60d3156ad06e">celebrity transphobia</a>— not mention my own <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/824-calibre-essay-prize/6504-reading-the-mess-backwards-by-yves-rees">gender transition</a>: it’s a lot.</p>
<p>What I’ve craved, to survive these times, is communion with like-minded souls, fellow queer bookworms who’ll share my horrified fascination with a world in flames. But in this age of social distancing and repeated lockdowns, communion is hard to find — especially for us more than <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0%7E2016%7EMain%20Features%7ESnapshot%20of%20Australia,%202016%7E2">two million Australians</a> who live alone.</p>
<p>This is why a treasured item in my Killjoy Survival Kit is a podcast that beams whip-smart feminist conversation into my home, allowing me to eavesdrop on the latest musings of a fellow traveller each week.</p>
<p><a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/">Secret Feminist Agenda</a> is the creation of Canadian academic <a href="https://hannahmcgregor.com/">Hannah McGregor</a>, a literature scholar at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. As McGregor describes, it is a “podcast about the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives”. </p>
<p>Now in its fourth season, the podcast alternates between interview episodes and shorter “minisodes”, in which the dauntingly articulate McGregor monologues on a topic front of mind.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352156/original/file-20200811-22-kxuf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">With a city under lockdown, communion with like-minded souls can be hard to find.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">James Ross/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Soundtrack to the Sisyphean</h2>
<p>Every Saturday morning for the past two years, the latest episode has provided the soundtrack to the Sisyphean drudgery of laundry and housework. In the process, McGregor’s voice has become as familiar as my own. As podcasting critics have <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/how-podcasts-became-a-seductive-and-sometimes-slippery-mode-of-storytelling">noted</a>, you develop a special kind of intimacy with someone who whispers into your ear as you scrub the toilet each week.</p>
<p>What makes this podcast stand out in an increasingly rich podcasting landscape is its unique blend of brain and heart. McGregor is an intellectual greyhound, and she brings a fierce scholarly rigour to each episode. </p>
<p>But she has an equally fierce commitment to a <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjBha69wuXqAhUOzzgGHYPKAF8QFjACegQIAhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Facme-journal.org%2Findex.php%2Facme%2Farticle%2Fview%2F1058%2F1141&usg=AOvVaw2t33gQPeQD-Rlu-tqFTQIc">“feminist politics of care”</a>, showing that <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2018/07/06/episode-2-25-soft-bois-aka-tender-masculinity/">softness</a>, humour, <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2018/02/16/episode-2-5-fun/">pleasure</a> and even <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2018/12/14/episode-3-11-make-baby-cozy/">cosiness</a> are values that must be central to a truly emancipatory feminist politics.</p>
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<p>More than anyone, McGregor has made me realise the truth of Audre Lorde’s vision of <a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/">selfcare as warfare</a>. For oppressed groups like women, people of colour, and queer and trans people, using selfcare to ensure one’s own survival can itself constitute political resistance. As Lorde <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/A_Burst_of_Light.html?id=0yZhQgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">wrote</a>, and both Ahmed and McGregor cite, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”</p>
<p>By exploding the <a href="https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/29/descartes-and-mind-body-dualism">Cartesian mind-body divide</a>, McGregor gives us an embodied, feminised model of intellectual excellence — one that provides a much needed alternative to the still ubiquitous vision of “the scholar” as a white male automaton with a wife looking after things at home.</p>
<p>In the process, McGregor helps us imagine a world where academia could discard its masculinist culture of hyper-competitiveness, punitive benchmarks and elitist gatekeeping. As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/04/australian-universities-to-close-campuses-and-shed-thousands-of-jobs-as-revenue-plummets-due-to-covid-19-crisis">embattled Australian universities</a> discard their armies of casuals and push surviving staff towards ever greater “efficiency”, we need more than ever to envision and fight for a better university.</p>
<p>Secret Feminist Agenda also expands the boundaries of academic knowledge production. By having the project <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2020/04/23/bonus-episode-secret-feminist-agenda-and-peer-reviewing-podcasts-at-mount-royal-university/">peer-reviewed</a> via a university press, McGregor makes a case for the podcast as a legitimate form of scholarship. </p>
<p>In doing so, she shows that “scholarship” can be pleasurable, collaborative and —most importantly — accessible to a broader public. This example has been crucial to development of my own podcast <a href="https://www.archivefeverpod.com/">Archive Fever</a>, co-hosted with historian and author Clare Wright.</p>
<p>On a more personal level, Secret Feminist Agenda has given me specific tools to think with as I — like McGregor — navigate life as a queer, single, white, vegan, millennial feminist academic living on stolen Indigenous land.</p>
<p><a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2018/02/02/episode-2-3-on-being-seen/">Episode 2.3</a> helped me discover my inclinations towards <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health/what-is-asexual#sexuality-is-a-spectrum">asexuality</a> and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/what-does-it-mean-to-be-aromantic_n_5bb501cee4b01470d04de20d">aromanticism</a> (little or no romantic attraction towards others). <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2019/02/08/episode-3-17-on-veganism/">Episode 3.17</a> spoke to my growing qualms about veganism, dissecting its <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/evb4zw/why-so-many-white-supremacists-are-into-veganism">links to white supremacy</a> and disordered eating. Other <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2018/08/03/episode-2-27-slow-down/">episodes</a> pushed me to confront how my workaholism reproduces the productivity fetish of late capitalism. </p>
<p>And many episodes have illuminated instructive parallels between Canada and Australia, twin settler colonial nations struggling to come to terms with entrenched racism and genocidal histories.</p>
<h2>‘It’s okay not to be okay’</h2>
<p>Finally, the podcast has been a treasure trove of reading recommendations. Both the interviewed guests, and each episode’s show notes, have led me to books that have transformed my world.</p>
<p>Best of all, McGregor is as delightful in real life as she appears on the podcast. We met once, back in 2018, when I visited Vancouver for a conference. We feasted on vegan ice cream and she introduced me to her <a href="https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/11/15/Metro-Vancouver-Inequality-Division/">beautiful and troubled city</a>. Just like her podcast, it was the perfect blend of pleasure and politics, radical sweetness infused with a dash of bracing vinegar. </p>
<p>As I approach my five-month anniversary of lockdown, this memory has itself become part of my Survival Kit — a reminder life once contained sociability and travel, and will one day do so again. In the meantime, I have McGregor in my ear to remind me that <a href="https://secretfeministagenda.com/2020/04/03/episode-4-17-its-okay-not-to-be-okay/">“it’s okay not to be okay”</a> when a pandemic upends life as we know it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143451/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yves Rees does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In this age of social distancing and lockdowns, communion is hard to find especially for more than two million Australians who live alone. A whipsmart feminist podcast can help.Yves Rees, Lecturer in History, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1435952020-08-05T03:37:08Z2020-08-05T03:37:08ZSimplicity and quiet: my isolation playlist from ECM Records<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351192/original/file-20200804-41393-1b0elpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>One day in 1984, a friend and I went to have lunch with my friend’s aunt. She was keen to play us an LP. She put the record on the turntable, and an unfamiliar sound filled the room. Despite her solemn appreciation of the music, my teenage friend and I laughed until our irritated host turned the record off. </p>
<p>Secretly I liked the unusual music, and I loved the album cover. Next to the name of the artist and album title were (in the same sized font) the letters “ECM”. Clearly, the record company was as important as the music it was selling. </p>
<p>Since then, Munich-based <a href="https://www.ecmrecords.com/home">ECM Records</a> has introduced me to countless new sonic worlds. And thanks to COVID-19, I am turning to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/ECMRecords/featured">ECM Records</a> — without mockery or reverence — on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Since 1969, Manfred Eicher’s ECM has been the “boutique” label par excellence, specialising in jazz and — through the ECM New Series sister label —Western classical music from the Middle Ages to today. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-essential-is-invisible-to-the-eye-the-wisdom-of-the-little-prince-in-lockdown-143095">'The essential is invisible to the eye': the wisdom of The Little Prince in lockdown</a>
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<p>But such a summary ignores the label’s commitment to transgressing generic boundaries. Its catalogue of over 1500 titles includes folk, electronic music, “world music”, and beyond. Within this variety, ECM maintains an impressively consistent aesthetic, due to the pristine sound of the recordings, and the label’s recognisable visual identity.</p>
<p>Given its serious-minded, prestige-driven character, ECM long resisted music streaming, finally making its catalogue available for streaming in 2017 (while loftily noting that CDs and LPs remained its “preferred mediums”). But one of the beauties of music streaming is the ability it gives the music consumer to configure and reconfigure a label’s entire catalogue. </p>
<p>The hour-long playlist supplied here is not meant to be a representative snapshot of the label. It mostly ignores, for instance, the label’s many straight-ahead jazz titles. Instead, my playlist (initially made without thought of sharing) emphasises simplicity and quiet — two features iso living invites us to appreciate.</p>
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<p>“Piano”, as both musical direction (meaning “soft”) and instrument, dominates here, as seen in the opening selection. The playlist begins with Keith Jarrett (whose groundbreaking 1975 album, The Köln Concert, is a high-water mark for ECM) in classical mode. The exquisite opening Adagio from Händel’s second Suite for Keyboard shows Jarrett at his most lyrical.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/turning-to-the-code-46-soundtrack-bearing-solitude-in-a-time-of-sickness-142711">Turning to the Code 46 soundtrack: bearing solitude in a time of sickness</a>
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<p>One of the shortcomings of ECM is the relative lack of women in its catalogue, but two women with a considerable presence are the Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou and the American composer and pianist, Carla Bley. </p>
<p>Karaindrou’s piece, from one of her film scores, is the essence of simplicity: a drone supplied by strings, and two almost childlike figures repeated on piano.</p>
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<p>The first movement of Bley’s “Beautiful Telephones” (the title taken from Donald Trump) is not as simple as Karaindrou’s piece, but the interplay between Bley’s piano and Steve Swallow’s bass is a delicate balance of melancholy and humour.</p>
<p>A similar interplay between mood and instrumentation (this time piano and oud) is also heard on Anouar Brahem’s Déjà La Nuit (Already Night).</p>
<p>On Stream by the Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær. also mixes light and dark, with the song-like trumpet part supported by a darker electronic rhythm bed. Khmer (1997), from which this piece is lifted, was a signal moment for the ECM catalogue, powerfully bringing electronica into the label’s purview. </p>
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<p>On the other hand, Where Breathing Starts by the Tord Gustavsen Trio (from Norway), with its immaculate sound and tasteful musicianship, could be the archetypal ECM track.</p>
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<p>Für Alina:1, by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (for whom Eicher launched the ECM New Series in 1984), shows how porous the label’s musical borders are. </p>
<p>Occupying a space between classical, jazz, and ambient, this minimalist piece (performed by Alexander Malter) creates the perfect contemplative space.</p>
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<h2>Neither morals nor escapism</h2>
<p>Similarly, Breathe, from Different Rivers (2000) by the Norwegian saxophonist and composer Trygve Seim, produces an intensely reflective mood through simplicity and repetition. </p>
<p>Spoken-word content in most music other than hip hop is generally looked down upon, though ECM has a small but rich seam of spoken-word material. Here, the text (spoken by Sidsel Endresen) could be a facile New Age evocation: “Breathe, and you know that you are alive.”</p>
<p>But the interplay between human voice and wind instruments (and the airy spaciousness implied by the beautiful, multi-second reverb) is sublime, not to mention timely. In its quiet way, it could be an anthem of the COVID era.</p>
<p>In true ECM fashion, one of the musicians on Different Rivers, Arve Henriksen (another Norwegian!) leads his own ensembles elsewhere in the ECM catalogue. Sorrow and Its Opposite (from 2008’s Cartography) is almost unbearably sad, thanks to Henriksen’s flute-like trumpet playing, and the presence of grainy, melancholy samples. </p>
<p>The final piece in my playlist takes us back to simplicity and piano. The last movement of Hans Otte’s Das Büch Der Klangë (1999) (The Book of Sounds), performed by Herbert Henck, is another intensely contemplative space, dissolving melody and accompaniment, exercise and performance piece. It could be a beginning; it could be an end.</p>
<p>The ECM catalogue doesn’t offer morals for our time; nor is it simply escapism. Rather, the artistry that can be found there allows a degree of abstraction that can be energising. </p>
<p>To concentrate on such music could be mindfulness or a kind of culturally sanctioned dissociation, but for me it is an essential response to living through the real difficulties of this pandemic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143595/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Munich-based record label ECM specialises in jazz and Western classical music. The artistry found in its catalogue allows a degree of abstraction that can be energising while enduring a pandemic.David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1430952020-08-04T00:15:29Z2020-08-04T00:15:29Z‘The essential is invisible to the eye’: the wisdom of The Little Prince in lockdown<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350973/original/file-20200804-16-1osw9wl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=50%2C64%2C4720%2C3233&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Chris Pietsch/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>During the lockdown in Sydney, I turned to my shelf of well-loved books and found Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Little-Prince-Antoine-Saint-Exupery/dp/1405288191">The Little Prince</a>. Browsing through it again, I realised that the situation in which the book’s narrator finds himself uncannily resembled my own: crash-landed in the middle of a desert, his plane’s motor broken, he had nowhere to go.</p>
<p>He was stuck – stuck in a place that seemingly provided little hope of surprise or wonder. </p>
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<p>The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean.</p>
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<p>But little did he know! The next morning, a boy appears seemingly out of nowhere who claims to be a prince from a faraway planet. </p>
<p>His account of intergalactic travels takes the desert castaway to a number of places as strange as they are familiar: one planet inhabited by a king and nobody else, another by a conceited man, a third by a lamplighter, a fourth by a businessman, a fifth by a tippler and so on. </p>
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<p>In Saint-Exupéry’s book, first published in French in 1941, the point is that all these individuals live in their own little worlds. </p>
<p>The king believes everybody arriving on his planet to be a subject. The conceited man considers each comer a potential admirer. The lamplighter turns the single streetlight on his little planet on and off, on and off, multiple times a day. The businessman counts all the stars he can see in the belief this will make them his own. The tippler drinks to forget that he feels guilty for drinking. </p>
<p>Even though they pursue different ends, there is a certain uniformity to these characters: in the uncompromising resoluteness with which they apply themselves to their tasks, they reduce and diminish their lives and worlds. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/p-g-wodehouse-in-a-pandemic-wit-and-perfect-prose-to-restore-the-soul-143533">P.G. Wodehouse in a pandemic: wit and perfect prose to restore the soul</a>
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<p>The lockdown cuts back the radius of our actions. Even though some of the frantic activity that defines our days continues online, it deprives us of many of our usual interactions. No more twice-daily commutes, no more school runs, no more rushing to social engagements, no more travel. </p>
<p>Rather than looking for adventure outside, in public and faraway places, lockdown involves taking a fresh look at things close to home. And this long hard look in the mirror can bring the realisation that our pre-pandemic lives resembled those of the king, the conceited man, the lamplighter, the businessman, and perhaps even the tippler in more ways than we are prepared to admit.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘People where you live,’ the little prince said, ‘grow five thousand roses in one garden, … yet they don’t find what they are looking for.’ </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In some sense, and in addition to other central themes such as love, friendship and loss, The Little Prince is a story about looking: about how we see only what we are prepared to see; about the narrowness that can come with our perspectives, professional and otherwise; about the way grownups and children look at the world differently.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-the-funniest-filthiest-comfort-tv-around-143171">It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the funniest, filthiest comfort TV around</a>
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<h2>Reassessing in moments of rupture</h2>
<p>Moments of rupture, of crisis, and distress, when everything we took for granted suddenly seems up in the air, always also harbour an opportunity to take stock and to reassess. To look at our life and the lives of those around us from the point of view of an intergalactic traveller, or, indeed, a child. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Men,’ said the little prince, ‘set out on their way in express trains, but they do not know what they are looking for. Then they rush about, and get excited, and turn round and round…’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Back home in lockdown with my little daughter (aged seven), I was fortunate to have my own guide who took me to once familiar but long-forgotten places: listening to the sounds of the sea in an empty seashell; throwing paper planes down a cliff; blowing dandelion seeds; gazing at the stars at night. Our radius had shrunk considerably. And yet the world seemed rich and marvellous and full of wonder.</p>
<p>At one point in the book, the little prince explains to the castaway that real seeing is not even a physical activity but a matter of the heart. </p>
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<p>And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350114/original/file-20200729-17-1ay8qyo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Richard Kiley and Steven Warner in a 1974 film version of The Little Prince.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paramount Pictures</span></span>
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<p>What changes our world and our being in the world is that there are things, activities, and people we care for deeply; and we make them as special (for us) as they are. In Saint-Exupéry’s book it is a flower with four thorns back on his home planet, that the little prince misses and holds dear. But it could be anything, really …</p>
<p>Saint-Exupéry’s book ends with the little prince returning home and the narrator repairing his plane and returning to civilisation. And yet, he never looks at the world again with the same eyes. </p>
<p>The knowledge that somewhere up there among the myriad little planets there was one with a prince and his beloved flower, a sheep, and three volcanoes (one extinct) made all the difference. </p>
<p>And what about us? Will we too look at the world differently once this has passed? Or will we return to the routines and habits that defined our worlds before? </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes …</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143095/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Kindt receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).</span></em></p>Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic book, first published in 1941, is a story of isolation, and seeing things anew.Julia Kindt, Professor, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1435332020-08-02T19:54:03Z2020-08-02T19:54:03ZP.G. Wodehouse in a pandemic: wit and perfect prose to restore the soul<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349799/original/file-20200728-25-46gwq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C705%2C425&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in the 1990 TV series Jeeves and Wooster.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carnival Film & Television, Granada Television</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>There is a genre of novel that I have relied upon for many years. Some people call it “airport fiction”, or “beach reading”. The name implies a reassuring effort-to-pleasure ratio. It includes young adult novels about teenage girls kicking arse in post-apocalyptic dystopias, low-stakes relationship dramas and action-thrillers full of weapon specifications.</p>
<p>These are the books I turn to when my emotional capacity is near nil. When I am exhausted by life, by working and parenting and waiting on hold and all the other activities that make me feel as wilted as a wet sock.</p>
<p>It’s a pleasure to curl up with a cup of tea and a novel of escapist silliness. For a few hours I’m distracted and entertained. But lately I have been worse than wilted. Fear and uncertainty have become a constant background sensation. Grief and despair flow in and out of my consciousness like a grim tide.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349802/original/file-20200728-13-8adx4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>I don’t need mere distraction. I need real, potent pleasure to offset the horrible news of the day. I lack the resilience to cope with the minor irritants of poor prose style and shoddy plot holes that so often come with the “light read” genre.</p>
<p>What I need is something that will demand nothing of me, but which is, in every other respect, absolutely <em>perfect</em>. And so I pick up P.G. Wodehouse.</p>
<p>Contrived plots, two-dimensional characters, ridiculous resolutions: check. Yet the master of comic novels takes all of those elements and spins them into shining gold. Wodehouse is what to read when anything less than the utterly sublime is too much to bear.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349798/original/file-20200728-29-17xlb1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">P.G. Wodehouse in 1930.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wodehouse wrote 71 novels. For those new to him, I recommend you start with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9850375-right-ho-jeeves">Right Ho, Jeeves</a>. It is a delight.</p>
<p>His contrived plots are contrived so artfully that they seem as natural as birdsong. Misplaced antiques and mistaken betrothals weave around one another like Bach’s counterpoints, complex yet perfectly balanced, resolving harmoniously into a neat final chord that makes you sigh with satisfaction.</p>
<p>Characters that in lesser hands would be caricatures become some of the sharpest and funniest fictional persons ever created. Aunt Dahlia, Bobbie Wickham, Psmith (“the P is silent”), Jeeves and Wooster, and Lord Emsworth are my favourites.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/listening-to-songs-of-leonard-cohen-singing-sadness-to-sadness-in-these-anxious-times-142661">Listening to Songs of Leonard Cohen: singing sadness to sadness in these anxious times</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A way with words</h2>
<p>It is customary, when <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2000/10/the-genius-of-wodehouse">praising Wodehouse</a>, to <a href="https://entertainment.time.com/2011/11/23/in-praise-of-p-g-wodehouse/">include some quotes</a> that illustrate his unparalleled deftness with the English language. </p>
<p>Anyone who <a href="http://www.pgwodehousebooks.com/fry.htm">loves Wodehouse</a> knows the impossibility of choosing, but this one seems appropriate for those finding solace in small things today:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn’t played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wodehouse’s words are as pristine as poetry. His similes delight me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She looked like an aunt who had just bitten into a bad oyster.</p>
<p>He sprung round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk.</p>
<p>He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349800/original/file-20200728-21-178ntwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Illustration from Jeeves in the Springtime.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wodehouse and Jane Austen are my go-to writers when I need the balm of perfect prose style. But while few have accused Austen’s novels of being too grim, the stakes are often real: enough money to live on, a happy marriage. Even the trials of Marianne Dashwood are enough to send me into a slump these days. By contrast, the stakes in Wodehouse couldn’t even make my four-year-old cry, and she cries when Sean the Sheep loses his farmer.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sense-and-sensibility-in-a-time-of-coronavirus-vicarious-escape-with-jane-austen-142817">Sense and Sensibility in a time of coronavirus: vicarious escape with Jane Austen</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Bertie’s millionare Uncle has lost his favourite milk jug. A houseguest at Blandings Castle has been throwing eggs at the gardener. These are high dramas I can invest in, safe in the knowledge that the milk jug will be found, the errant houseguest thwarted—and none of it really matters anyway.</p>
<h2>‘A musical comedy without music’</h2>
<p>This was quite intentional on Wodehouse’s part, as he famously said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I believe there are only two ways of writing a novel… one is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right down deep into life, and not caring a damn.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wodehouse wrote at a time when his contemporaries —James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley — were forging Great Works of Literature. I love those books, and the ways they go “right down deep into life”.</p>
<p>I suspect Wodehouse could have written such novels with the best of them. But I’m so grateful he knew that the human soul also needs simple joy. His books lead me beside quiet waters, and restore my soul.</p>
<p>And I will never not giggle when Bertie Wooster, offended to the core, takes his leave of his cousin Angela:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Very good,’ I said coldly. ‘In that case, tinkerty tonk.’</p>
<p>And I meant it to sting.“</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143533/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carly Osborn previously received funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.</span></em></p>Contrived plots, two-dimensional characters, ridiculous resolutions: the master of comic novels takes these elements and spins them into gold, bringing consolation during these grim times.Carly Osborn, Visiting Research Fellow, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1426612020-07-28T01:50:43Z2020-07-28T01:50:43ZListening to Songs of Leonard Cohen: singing sadness to sadness in these anxious times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349064/original/file-20200723-37-1dmym53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C6%2C2245%2C1454&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://photos-cdn.aap.com.au/Image/20090220000157016214?path=/aap_dev3/device/imagearc/2009/02-20/4c/5e/0d/aapimage-5o18xxyusbr6asu223r_layout.jpg">AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>If anyone can express the particularities of distress, it is surely the artists; and they are surely needed at times like the present – times when uncertainty, anxiety and, for too many people, bitter loss are the order of the day. </p>
<p>My first such experience was in my mid-teens, when I had to confront uncertainty, loss and grief without script or rehearsal. Initially at least, I longed <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale">like Keats</a> “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”. But cometh the hour, cometh the art, and I found my sister’s copy of <a href="https://www.leonardcohen.com/music/songs-of-leonard-cohen">Songs of Leonard Cohen</a>.</p>
<p>In the months that followed, I played the Canadian singer-songwriter’s 1967 debut album obsessively, stretched out on the floor, listening to that lion-rumble baritone as it soothed and smoothed my wounded heart and head and self.</p>
<p>This may seem counter-intuitive. Cohen <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Im-Your-Man-Leonard-Cohen/dp/0061995002">told his biographer</a>, Sylvie Simmons: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>People were saying I was ‘depressing a generation’ and ‘they should give away razor blades with Leonard Cohen albums because it’s music to slit your wrists by’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But for me it worked like homeopathy; a small dose of sadness to counter my sadness. Or maybe it worked like <a href="https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/kintsugi/">kintsugi</a>, the Japanese art of repair that transforms brokenness into beauty. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/as-a-writer-musician-leonard-cohen-was-a-one-off-68676">As a writer-musician, Leonard Cohen was a one-off</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Among the garbage and the flowers</h2>
<p>What Cohen’s album persuaded me was that there are always reasons to keep going – that there is beauty even in a broken world. </p>
<p>I think of the dignity in the character of the “half-crazy” <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/suzanne.html">Suzanne</a>, she of the first song on the album. </p>
<p>I think of the pointless charm of Jesus waiting until “only drowning men could see him” before offering his truth. Of the heroes who can be seen only “among the garbage and the flowers”; or Suzanne’s own “rags and feathers”. </p>
<p>In this and other songs on the album, the world is revealed in its strange enchantment, despite the melancholy that permeates the music. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/svitEEpI07E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘She lets the river answer, that you’ve always been her lover.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/winterlady.html">Winter Lady</a>, the third track on the album, consoles too in its focus on what is not finished, not whole. The singer’s first love, that “child of snow” who has left him a gift: the image of her weaving her hair “on a loom / of smoke and gold and breathing”. The <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/heythatsnowaytosaygoodbye.html">“trav’ling lady”</a> for whom he is “just a station on the road”, whose transience reflects the consolation of contingency, of not having to “talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/marianne-and-leonard-a-new-film-tells-us-little-about-the-woman-fixed-in-the-role-of-musicians-muse-128112">Marianne & Leonard: a new film tells us little about the woman fixed in the role of musician's muse</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This sort of letting go can be such a solace. In the 2005 biopic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt00478197/">Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man</a>, Cohen says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes; but still I’d claim that Songs of Leonard Cohen is “the real masterpiece”. A <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-the-10-best-leonard-cohen-songs-143602/">2014 Rolling Stone readers’ poll</a> to rank his five-decade strong back catalogue placed <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/solongmarianne.html">So Long, Marianne</a> at #6 of all his songs, and Suzanne at #2. A year later, Guardian critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/may/06/leonard-cohen-10-of-the-best">Ben Hewitt’s list</a> had So Long, Marianne at #2, and Suzanne topping the charts. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgEiDc1aXr0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘It’s time that we began to laugh. And cry and cry and laugh about it all again.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Spanning decades</h2>
<p>No doubt their enduring appeal is associated with the saturation of these songs across the decades, but for me it’s because of the exquisite crafting of the poems; the spare melodies against which they operate; and the wit that shimmers through the songs. </p>
<p>Like, <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/oneofuscannotbewrong.html">for instance</a>: “I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me. / But the room just filled up with mosquitos, they heard that my body was free”. Maybe it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is delightfully wry.</p>
<p>An album is more than the songs; covers really matter too. Songs of Leonard Cohen looks like the album that 1960s parents would approve of – the so-not-a-rockstar portrait: the sepia, the solemn face, solemn border. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-bJPmasXKs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Your eyes are soft with sorrow. Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I spent a lot of time looking at that cover while drifting along with the music, and suspect that’s because it resembles a poetry book. Cohen’s image represented what back then I would have characterised as “mature”; and his sharp intelligence and attentive gaze spoke of “artist”, of “poet”. </p>
<p>He was, of course, always a poet, and though I did, and still do, love the musicality of his albums, it is always the words, the phrasing, their conjuring of mood and image, that work on me. </p>
<p>Which is why I still turn to this album for solace during trying times. Over the decades I have become more accomplished – more practised – at dealing with disaster, but haven’t forgotten that broken girl I was, who in the wash of this album’s music and magic and mood found a way to survive, and to thrive. </p>
<p>If I really am “locked into [my] suffering”, I know now that my “<a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/storiesofthestreet.html">pleasures are the seal</a>”.</p>
<p>And the seal does not keep me from immersing myself in the world and all it contains – all its wit and tenderness and beauty, all the very good reasons to carry on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142661/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>It may seem counter-intuitive to turn to Leonard Cohen’s ‘depressing’ songs during times of grief and uncertainty. But he shows there is always a reason to keep on keeping on.Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1428172020-07-27T04:11:50Z2020-07-27T04:11:50ZSense and Sensibility in a time of coronavirus: vicarious escape with Jane Austen<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348808/original/file-20200722-31-iladjx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C10%2C1037%2C675&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, and Emilie François in Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility (1995).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Columbia Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a> series, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>That we are all spending more time at home these days goes without saying; for those of us in Melbourne, our four walls feel restraining when most ways of leaving them are proscribed. So let me persuade you of a marvellously legitimate alternative to breaking the law, sorting your messy passwords, or rearranging your higgledy-piggledy books into some kind of order. It’s called vicarious escape.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, if my bookshelves had been in proper order I might have missed out on this experience. During the first lockdown I was looking for inspiration among the over-familiar titles when I discovered a book I had bought but not read, and then forgotten I owned. In triumph I carried it as far as the couch, stretched out (the sun was streaming through the windows), and turned to page one. </p>
<p>This was not a cop-out, you understand, for the book was Literary Criticism. It would be instructive, even demanding; it could almost count as work. It was a book born of impressive knowledge but written in a lively, deceptively simple style; it offered new and clever perceptions about a writer of whom you might think everything had long been said. It plunged me back into the beloved novels of Jane Austen, and I read it with delight.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-revolutionary-vision-of-jane-austen-71000">Friday essay: the revolutionary vision of Jane Austen</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>By the time I had reluctantly reached the last page, the next lockdown was imminent, and I rejoiced that one effect of my excellent discovery was to know exactly what I must do next. I would reread one, two, or all of Jane Austen’s major works, beginning with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibility">Sense and Sensibility</a>, the first of the six to enthral an unsuspecting 19th century English audience.</p>
<p>Published anonymously in 1811, its first run had sold out. What I did not anticipate was the light this book could throw on life under COVID-19. </p>
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<p>The novel concerns two sisters, Elinor and Marianne. The contrasting natures of the two girls provides Austen’s title, but there is also a younger daughter, Margaret, and an older stepbrother by the mother’s first marriage whose new wife forces the mother and daughters out of the large family house into a cottage in a small village in another county. </p>
<p>It is this move that puts the sisters in a situation that has parallels with ours. The tiny village of Barton could offer no social life. A little like people obliged to work from home, the girls found themselves with no external stimuli, other than Nature, with which to fuel their inner thoughts and mutual exchanges.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/turning-to-the-code-46-soundtrack-bearing-solitude-in-a-time-of-sickness-142711">Turning to the Code 46 soundtrack: bearing solitude in a time of sickness</a>
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<p>Thrown back on their own resources then, the two older sisters work on their existing accomplishments. Elinor sketches and paints, Marianne practises her piano-playing; they walk daily, sew and read. Their every activity seems to the modern reader almost weirdly extended: a short stroll will occupy two hours; Marianne, at least in intention, will read for six.</p>
<p>Now that lack of time is no longer an excuse, we might even think of emulating them, but there is one great difference (at least for me). Each sister has in the other, on tap, a daily companion who provides companionship and stimulation. There is no mention of boredom or restlessness; depression results only from romantic mishaps. How? Their neighbour Sir John turns up, some social life takes off, and Marianne falls in love. Well, this <em>is</em> a novel.</p>
<h2>Literary isolates</h2>
<p>I briefly put aside the Dashwood sisters to consider darker examples of literary isolates. Dostoevsky’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/436982.Notes_from_the_Underground?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=lE6aewdJ4Z&rank=2">Underground Man</a> leapt to mind. He lives utterly alone in a basement; his first words announce that he is “a sick man… a spiteful man … an unattractive man” whose liver is diseased. As a solitary he qualifies, but he’s hardly an example to follow. </p>
<p>Back to Jane. But could even she help someone without a sister? Someone whose props, given the age we live in, are texts and emails, both of which seem determined to shorten our exchanges. “U?” is all we need say to seek an opinion by SMS.</p>
<p>The phone seems currently the only resource by which we Melburnians could copy the sisters’ ability to introduce, develop, and thoroughly draw out a conversation. But even that we can’t count on. Usually our life-saving story isn’t nearly finished before the friend we’ve rung rudely interrupts with what <em>she</em> wants to say. </p>
<p>No. The only escape must be vicarious, and preferably delivered by the divine Jane, with her potential Mr Rights completely taken in by her unscrupulous Miss Wrongs; where Incomes (salaries are for the middle classes, wages for the servants) can suddenly become desperately insufficient or dangerously excessive; where heart-stopping vicissitudes abound. All related in elegant prose that flashes with pointy wit and lashes with quiet disdain. </p>
<p>The lockdown does permit you to lose yourself in a beguiling other world – if you have a Jane Austen on hand.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142817/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Judith Armstrong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Published anonymously in 1811, the first of Jane Austen’s novels throws light on life under COVID-19. It is the perfect lockdown read.Judith Armstrong, Honorary Fellow of the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1431712020-07-26T20:02:48Z2020-07-26T20:02:48ZIt’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the funniest, filthiest comfort TV around<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348773/original/file-20200722-21-16izgb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C6%2C1422%2C737&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472954/mediaviewer/rm398244864">FX</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>In times of stress, it is only natural to seek out comforting art that reaffirms our faith in humanity. Why, then, am I back to binge-watching the utterly irredeemable <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472954/?ref_=ttmi_tt">It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia</a>? </p>
<p>Sunny is a cult sitcom about five friends who own Paddy’s Pub, a South Philadelphia dive bar in which customers arrive about as frequently as Godot. A lack of clientele means “the Gang” is free to drink, scheme and bicker their lives away.</p>
<p>The US show’s home video aesthetic and overlapping, semi-improvised dialogue recalls the <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/fast-track-fandom-which-mumblecore-films-watch-first">“mumblecore” film subgenre</a>, although “shoutcore” would really be more appropriate here. Each episode, <a href="https://www.finder.com.au/where-to-watch-its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-online">available to stream in Australia</a>, is essentially a 20-minute squabble in which everyone is under informed and over opinionated.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">“Charlie, you’re the most misinformed person I’ve ever met. You don’t even know what’s going on in Israel.”</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Inside Out for adults</h2>
<p>Although the show began during the George W. Bush era, I’ve come to see each character as a partial reflection of current US president Donald Trump. Frank (Danny DeVito) is a wealthy bigot; Charlie (Charlie Day) is an illiterate savage; Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is a needy narcissist; Dennis (Glenn Howerton) is a psychotic womanizer; and Mac (Rob McElhenney) is a love-deprived zealot.</p>
<p>Through the prism of these assorted neuroses, the show filters every contemporary issue imaginable: gun control, racism, #MeToo, climate change, and so on. Occasionally, the gang stumbles upon some crude solution to a topical problem. </p>
<p>In one episode, the question of how to gender bathrooms is solved by taping an all-inclusive Animal Shithouse sign to each door. More frequently, though, episode titles such as The Gang Solves the North Korea Situation or <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6362510/">The Gang Solves Global Warming</a> are just wishful thinking.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Gang tackles big issues – but rarely solves them.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The global warming episode – from season 14, which aired late last year – provides the perfect example of Sunny’s satirise-everyone approach. Conservative Mac shrugs off the crisis with “if God wants to roast us like turkeys, there’s got to be a good reason for it”. While progressive Dee buys recyclable shoes just to shame others on Instagram.</p>
<p>The show is less disgusted by any particular partisan viewpoint than it is by the bad faith discussions that occur between corrupt parties. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/happy-birthday-mr-bean-celebrating-30-years-of-a-major-comedy-character-124593">Happy birthday, Mr Bean! Celebrating 30 years of a major comedy character</a>
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<p>It offers, hands down, the best replication of that clanking feeling one gets when encountering immovable ignorance online. “I’m an American”, Mac proudly <a href="https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=104&t=15566">declares</a>, “I won’t change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">“I’m not gonna stand here, present some egghead scientific argument based on fact.”</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Anything for a laugh</h2>
<p>Admittedly, this doesn’t sound like much of a tonic for our leaking garbage bag of a year. The idiots are everywhere; why should we be wasting our screen time with them? Because Sunny, as long as you can stomach its distinctive brand of filth, is the funniest thing around. </p>
<p>Over its 14 (and counting) seasons, it has evolved from a grimy Seinfeld xerox into a Monty Pythonesque carnival of the surreal and grotesque. The actors here are willing to do, or expel, anything for a laugh. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aczPDGC3f8U">If you loved Terry Jones vomiting in a high-class restaurant</a>, might I suggest <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VufV5-I94bI">Charlie Day vomiting blood all over his posh date</a>?</p>
<p>Obviously, sensitive gaggers need not apply. Nor those who are repelled by dumpster babies, glue-huffing, rat-bashing, sewer-diving, bed-pooping, or (and this is a crucial Sunny litmus test) a naked and sweaty Danny DeVito bursting forth from a leather couch.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">“I believe there is a man in that couch.”</span></figcaption>
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<p>If nothing else, I cherish Sunny for the way it has unleashed <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000362/?ref_=tt_cl_t5">DeVito</a>. The former Taxi star is an incredible comedic performer, but he was in danger of forever being defined as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtlB7q96NMs">Arnold Schwarzenegger’s improbable twin</a>. As Frank, he snorts and grunts through scenes like a rabid truffle pig with a bloodlust for depravity. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/was-that-joke-funny-or-offensive-whos-telling-it-matters-126167">Was that joke funny or offensive? Who's telling it matters</a>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">“Good God, you are disgusting. A disgusting animal.”</span></figcaption>
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<p>While Frank is the show’s rotten core, Charlie is its heart. Intellectually stunted, possibly molested, and living in abject poverty, Charlie nonetheless radiates twisted <em>joie de vivre</em>. His helium voice and vacant gaze always kill me, whether he is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOY0pwuush8">torturing leprechauns</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZfCyTpAlg8">boiling milk steaks</a>, or getting rich off “kitten mittens”. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">“Finally, there’s an elegant comfortable mitten … for cats!”</span></figcaption>
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<h2>All together now</h2>
<p>Charlie is also responsible for The Nightman Cometh, a bizarre musical in season four that has since become a <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/the-nightman-cometh-oral-history">live singalong show</a>.</p>
<p>The casts’ theatre backgrounds have provided a number of surprisingly catchy songs over the years. This is no <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1327801/?ref_=vp_back">Glee</a> though. Only a Sunny musical would make hay out of the slipperiness between “boy’s soul” and “boy’s hole”.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Rehearsals go somewhat awry.</span></figcaption>
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<p>So why am I back in Paddy’s Pub once again? We are spoilt for choice when it comes to intelligent sitcoms filled with witty, warm-hearted characters who learn and grow. </p>
<p>If it’s escapism you’re seeking right now, shows like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3526078/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Schitt’s Creek</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5339440/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">One Day at a Time</a>, and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4955642/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Good Place</a> are ready to shelter you from the storm. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia provides a different, yet equally important, service. </p>
<p>By the time I emerge blinking from yet another session in its dank and derelict hidey hole, I find that the real world almost looks bearable in comparison.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143171/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Cothren does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If it’s escapism you’re looking for, watch Schitt’s Creek or The Good Place. But if you want a dirty dive that makes the real world look good by comparison, try It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.Alex Cothren, PhD Candidate, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1427112020-07-22T04:55:29Z2020-07-22T04:55:29ZTurning to the Code 46 soundtrack: bearing solitude in a time of sickness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347813/original/file-20200716-15-4kdee2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Samantha Morton in Code 46.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Films, BBC, Kailash Picture Company</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a> series, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>My ten-year marriage came to an end on the cusp of lockdown. It was amicable – we were “saving the friendship”, we were “taking care of each other” – but it was gut wrenching all the same. We have a beautiful 8-year-old daughter, and little did I know back in early March, but we were about to spend 12 long weeks apart. You see, the in-laws have a property in Portland on the far-flung south west coast of Victoria. Perfect refuge from the plague.</p>
<p>And so, after much discussion, it was decided. They bundled up and got outta Dodge and I moved into one of those concrete cubes in the sky on the outer rim of the city. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitch Goodwin</span></span>
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<p>I’m also one of your “vulnerable community members”. Not just because I’m an <a href="https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/756098-mitch-goodwin">arts academic</a>, but because I have a co-morbidity.</p>
<p>Back in 2006, I was doing a lecturing stint in the UK when I was struck down by an acute case of pneumonia. I spent 13 days in ICU in a Birmingham hospice with an abscess the size of a tennis ball in the burrows of my left lung. They killed off the infection and atomised the Slazenger with a fierce dose of drip-fed antibiotics. All I remember was the endless coughing of men – they were all men – many decades my senior, and the horrid stench of ammonia and piss. </p>
<p>I fully recovered and got on with it. But complications occurred in 2012 when the scar tissue from the abscess ruptured and became septic. I was on research in New York, coughing up rancid blood with a stench akin to yesterday’s meat. Two weeks later I had a chunk of lung removed at the Royal Melbourne. Doctors assured me I would have a full and unencumbered life but to this day I require an annual cocktail of jabs to ward off the nastiest of flu variants.</p>
<p>Enter COVID-19.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/art-for-trying-times-reading-richard-ford-on-a-world-undone-by-calamity-142816">Art for trying times: reading Richard Ford on a world undone by calamity</a>
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<h2>Dylan, wicked jester</h2>
<p>If we are going to tip our hat to cultural markers for 2020, this article should be about Bob Dylan. Plague, pestilence, the idiocy of men, playing the minutia of life against some ancient stereoscopic vista. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/27/bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-review-jfk-assassination-john-f-kennedy">That’s his bag</a>. Dylan, the wicked jester of mortality and love. </p>
<p>His 17-minute song <a href="https://youtu.be/3NbQkyvbw18">Murder Most Foul</a>, which appeared as if by magic during the depths of Lockdown 1.0, is a genius work of reflexive historical authorship. It spoke perfectly to the perverse conspiracies of our times but also proffered a way out through art and muse. While any Dylan scholar might well cite the lilting dread of <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1qbn6QrHG8XfnqVFKgNzKP?si=KrXRJ-shQuSSUM1lStW7GA">Not Dark Yet</a> as perhaps COVID-19’s most ominous theme songs. </p>
<p>But Dylan sets heavy in the bones, catches you second guessing things; as with all good art, he makes you gulp hard. Like a mad uncle he weasels into your thoughts, skipping about in his pointy leather boots; that joker’s grin. I just can’t do that now. I’m too close to the edge.</p>
<p>What I need now is space. Sometimes you just need some room to fill in your own maudlin lyric. For me, right now, it feels necessary to tap out my own eulogy to the “time before”. </p>
<p>Enter Belfast boy, David Holmes. <a href="https://youtu.be/TMDXTRwAZQ0?t=125">DJ</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/dQdTem-tz9E">band leader</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/0T2MHyyXoVM?t=32">producer</a>.</p>
<h2>Soundtrack to an alternative present</h2>
<p>The setting is a somewhat obscure science fiction film from 2003 by the prolific <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Winterbottom">Michael Winterbottom</a>. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345061/">Code 46</a> is one of those uncanny dystopias – a familiar not-too-distant future – a dream perhaps of an alternative present. Its design consists of a mash-up of locations, from Shanghai to Dubai to Rajasthan, slithers of silver reaching into the sky, interiors framed by neon and chrome, dusty cars sprinting across the savanna. </p>
<p>I won’t go into the plot machinations: themes of surveillance, statelessness and bio-ethics abound. Suffice to say that Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton are <a href="https://youtu.be/9B5_9Hv1-K4">perfectly cast</a> in a story that could be the <a href="https://youtu.be/XPKO7C543ls">Lost in Translation</a> of genetic engineering.</p>
<p>My key takeaway however is the <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/3WS2ZC2lD3g4e8pXgu68qT?si=hMk7Jqd7Q82v0VVWwm90Mw">soundtrack</a>.</p>
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<p>On the eighth floor, in my concrete cube, I have been listening to plenty of electronica and lo-fi lately – <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/5oOhM2DFWab8XhSdQiITry?si=CKcY-PNeQjeWadDNvRGN4g">Tycho</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/2VAvhf61GgLYmC6C8anyX1?si=2gMUw61pSzq9dQ6rqx9Mlw">Boards of Canada</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/47e7SP8MtzYKK8Lm3gEK2i?si=22uL2ntCS9KHRwQybTE4dg">Eno</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/17vHPMmoxN5B8cdhCDeMTe?si=CMDQNjn2QB2JZ0q7AVHxog">Aphex Twin</a> – they’re all in my COVID well-being playlist, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DGpmCMXO0XuZ3QNKY6yUC?si=k11YzXh-TfWczpq44kOaGg">Calm the f..k down</a>.</p>
<p>It is Holmes’ work on Code 46 (under the moniker the Free Association) that resonates the most. It pings off the blank, bleach-white walls and adds a certain shimmer to the quiet brooding of the city beyond. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347663/original/file-20200715-15-4250o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitch Goodwin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the opening moments it is both mournful and redemptive. The rhythmic elements are compulsive, evoking escapist thoughts, while mercifully pushing others away. Like the looping hours of quarantine, memories appear, fade and repeat. At once you are riding the sustained echo of a synth progression and then rescued by a melodic chime or a spiky guitar line. </p>
<p>Oh, how I need that room to breathe. To go there and just be, without tracing the progression or measuring the gaps.</p>
<p>David Holmes <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/0yuMGKMei19rQtngxPK4lg?si=9mfBIuhyRTSBJ7tJYtJL1A">has form</a>. His sophomore album from 1997, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/5CVZGhLQA0ndG1tV1G3se1?si=LWN5VFl8S_mWI_Qp_R-XRw">Let’s Get Killed</a>, with its in-your-face <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3tS0GwJmDoPgQaidNPMnLq?si=Vxoik1bETTe6oSqyAobXIQ">field recordings</a> from the streets and clubs of New York city, mixed with crack instrumentation and frenetic break beats is an absolute classic of the genre.</p>
<p>His bold, brash, instrumental remix of U2’s <a href="https://youtu.be/Hu91B_yY2Go">Beautiful Day</a> and his reworking of Rodriguez’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3KzjVgb0rHw9LTwBKaPShi?si=gaP29v-fQoWxomqEYYnd8Q">Sugarman</a> are indicative of his fearless alchemy at the mixing desk.</p>
<p>But Code 46 is that rare compositional work of ambient luminosity. Perhaps I am sentimental, knowing that it tracks the seductive themes of state conspiracy and forbidden love. </p>
<p>And it might be playing to my weaknesses during a time when there is no time. Days seeping into nights like the slow fade of celluloid. A car cuts a course across the desert, the door flings open, a stranger awaits. Sometimes you just have to get in.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142711/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mitch Goodwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A somewhat obscure 2003 science-fiction film has a luminous soundtrack, which brings surprising solace to a locked down world.Mitch Goodwin, Faculty of Arts, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1429832020-07-21T19:51:32Z2020-07-21T19:51:32ZArt for trying times: how a philosopher found solace playing Red Dead Redemption 2<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348316/original/file-20200720-31-1ptu11n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=50%2C29%2C919%2C514&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rockstar Games</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this time of pandemic, our authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Just before the first COVID-19 lockdown started in Melbourne, I ran out and bought an Xbox – “for the kids,” you understand. </p>
<p>I’d never had a games console, and I am certainly not the target demographic for <a href="https://www.rockstargames.com">Rockstar Games</a>’ work: massive open-world behemoths like the infamous <a href="https://www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto/">Grand Theft Auto</a> series and 2010’s <a href="https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption">Red Dead Redemption</a>. So while I knew of the hype around the prequel <a href="https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/">Red Dead Redemption 2</a>, I was utterly unprepared for the emotional impact it would have on me – and what curious solace I’d find in its evocation of time and loss. </p>
<h2>A big canvas</h2>
<p>Red Dead Redemption 2, released in October 2018, spent <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games-red-dead-redemption-2.html">more than seven years in development</a> (sometimes in <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/27/18029154/red-dead-redemption-2-working-conditions-rockstar-games-overtime-labor">controversial working conditions</a>). The sheer scale of the thing is overawing. Depending how you play there’s 80 plus hours of game-play, held together by a 2,000 page script for the main story alone. Every kind of terrain, from snowy mountains to swamps to city streets, is lovingly detailed and populated by around <a href="https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/features/wildlife">200 species of animal</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/art-for-trying-times-titians-the-death-of-actaeon-and-the-capriciousness-of-fate-142815">Art for trying times: Titian’s The Death of Actaeon and the capriciousness of fate</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>You never quite stop being astonished at the technical achievement, the strength of the acting (done over 2,200 days in a motion capture studio by 1,200 actors, 700 with dialogue), the hyperreal beauty of the landscapes and the granular details, like how your footfalls squelch in the mud. Even the weather is spectacular.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348331/original/file-20200720-27-1seubpy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A still from Red Dead Redemption 2.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rockstar Games</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There’s also any number of moral decisions and uncomfortable compromises to be made. </p>
<p>As Arthur Morgan, a grizzled outlaw who is starting to rethink his loyalty to charismatic gang leader and surrogate father Dutch Van der Linde, you’ll be murdering a lot of people. You also have opportunities to spare and to help many others. You’ll confront issues of race (slavery and its ongoing effects are a recurring theme), gender, Indigenous sovereignty, and loyalty. </p>
<p>The moral quality of the decisions you make determines how other characters treat you and what happens at key moments. You will also ride, eat, hunt, get drunk, dance, and be asked by an eccentric, foul-mouthed European scientist to operate a remote control boat.</p>
<h2>Electronic elegy</h2>
<p>But what really got under my skin was the sweet melancholy that pervades every moment. The game is an elegiac <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubi_sunt">ubi sunt</a></em> to a world that is already disappearing under the feet of the characters, and which for us is long gone.</p>
<p>Set in 1899, a recurring theme is the vanishing of the Old West, and with it the way of life of the Van der Linde gang. Modernity and “civilisation” are taking over all the wild spaces. (Warning: spoilers ahead). We know from <a href="https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption">the first game</a>, to which this is a prequel, that the gang is going to break up, and we’ve already seen how some of the characters we interact with will die. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348333/original/file-20200720-17-121trxg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A recurring theme is that the Old West is vanishing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rockstar Games</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then, about two thirds of the way through the game, Arthur receives some distressing news. The shootouts continue, but your open ended narrative romp through a Western twilight draws to an inevitable, yet remarkably moving, end. </p>
<h2>The persistent past</h2>
<p>Yet if this all sounds bleak, there is also something strangely consoling in it too. </p>
<p>In his book <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading">Camera Lucida</a>, Roland Barthes makes the startling claim that every photograph is both a presentiment of death and a “certificate of presence”. A photo is not a record of the past so much as an emanation from it, according to Barthes; the dead reaching out to confront you face to face. </p>
<p>Barthes discusses a haunting photograph of <a href="https://theconversation.com/drafts/142983/edit">Lewis Powell</a>, one of the conspirators in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, awaiting execution. Part of the force of the photo is knowing that Powell both <em>is going</em> to die and <em>has already</em> died – precisely what we know of every character in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348285/original/file-20200720-29-htq65h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Lewis Powell (also known as Payne) in custody aboard the U.S.S Saugus, 1865.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">United States Library of Congress</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Photographs are everywhere in the game, from the mocked up, sepia shots of cabins and landscapes it shows you while loading (labelled with dates and places), to bedside pictures of absent family and old sweethearts, through to missions where you must photograph retired gunslingers, or visit a portrait studio.</p>
<p>The past remains stubbornly material, appearing in old watches, rings and letters as well as portraits. The dead are just as present in the game’s world as its notionally long-dead characters are in ours. Its past is nested in its present, just as ours is.</p>
<p>And in that, despite the sad pall that lingers over the game, there’s a corresponding sense that nothing is really lost. The past is every bit as real as the present, even if our access to it is always mediated. </p>
<h2>Loss of life</h2>
<p>The Roman poet-philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/">Lucretius</a> said that as we do not fear the time when we did not exist before our birth, we should not fear nonexistence after our death either. <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/">Charles Hartshorne</a>, an American philosopher of the last century, argued in reply that once we have lived, we take on a reality that not even death can erase.</p>
<p>That’s a powerful thought at a time when COVID-19 confronts us not only with loss of life, but with the loss of our lives in the broader sense: being suddenly cut off from ways of living and assumptions about the world that felt so secure we barely even noticed them. </p>
<p>We increasingly find ourselves dividing time into “before COVID” and the uncertain present. Like the Van der Linde gang, on the run from both the law and the new century, we’re tormented by the nagging fear that the world in which we’re meant to live is slipping out of our grasp. </p>
<p>Perhaps Red Dead Redemption 2’s most fundamental message is not about redemption at all, but something even more universal: the past is always there. All must die, but nothing can take away the fact of having lived.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142983/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Stokes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Playing Red Dead Redemption 2 during a pandemic is a surprisingly moving experience. The game is a haunting meditation on time, death, and the persistence of the past.Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1428162020-07-21T04:44:56Z2020-07-21T04:44:56ZArt for trying times: reading Richard Ford on a world undone by calamity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348275/original/file-20200720-29-18zairb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=58%2C14%2C3167%2C2087&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A rollercoaster washed up on a Jersey beach after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tom Mihalek/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this time of pandemic, our authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective.</em></p>
<p>I’m one of those fortunate people for whom the direct experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has thus far been felt only through isolation from close friends and family and away from the pleasant routines of campus. Indirectly, however, it has been felt as a deep ultimatum from the earth about the interactions of its inhabitants. </p>
<p>Books are both solace and provocation at such a time. Reading Rachel Cusk’s latest collection, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41940257-coventry?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=AkP8MMF2S5&rank=2">Coventry</a>, prompted me to read her entire oeuvre in sequence, as I also did as I reread Richard Ford, and as I will now pursue with Patrick Modiano. </p>
<p>Why this urge to read a writer’s corpus in strict order? Was this my subconscious desire to restore order to a disordered world? Or just the depressing signs of a tidy mind? A linear imagination? Whatever the case, it has been satisfying. </p>
<p>Ford’s prize-winning trilogy of Frank Bascombe novels – The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006) – are a landmark in recent American literature, but it is his follow-up <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20828358-let-me-be-frank-with-you?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=MJWD3b1Ezi&rank=1">Let Me Be Frank With You</a> (2014) that I have most relished returning to. The four interwoven “long stories” (Ford’s term) are his poignant, often hilarious, reckoning with environmental catastrophe and mortality.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348269/original/file-20200720-27-g6rex4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Frank is now 68 and retired eight years from the real estate business he had run along the New Jersey Shore. He has moved inland to comfortable, white, “asininely Tea Party” Haddam with second wife Sally Caldwell. He travels to Newark weekly to greet “weary, puzzled” troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and reads to the blind on his local radio station. His current choice for them is V.S. Naipaul’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5857.The_Enigma_of_Arrival?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=LBJQ69Upi0&rank=4">The Enigma of Arrival</a>: “they’re pissed off about the same things he’s pissed off about”.</p>
<p>Frank is dealing with his ageing body: he is recovering from prostate cancer and Sally keeps telling him to lift up his feet when he walks to avoid “the gramps shuffle”. Frank now listens to Aaron Copland and is trying to read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.</p>
<p>Frank deals routinely, if mostly affectionately, in ethnic and racist labels. He still calls black Americans “Negroes” but plainly prefers them to others of his compatriots: “It’s no wonder they hate us, I’d hate us, too”. Frank is a Democrat; he’s gratified that Obama likes Copland’s Fanfare. </p>
<p>The four interwoven stories unfold across the fortnight before Christmas 2012 in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which had hit the Jersey Shore on 29 October, shattering coastal buildings and killing scores of locals. </p>
<p>The presidential election has just been held: an Obama-Biden sign has been repurposed to read “WE’RE BACK. SO FUCK YOU, SANDY”. Other signs along the Shore warn “LOOTERS BEWARE!”. One, notes Frank, “merely says NOTHING BESIDES REMAINS (for victims with a liberal arts degree)”. His own former house on the shore has disintegrated.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348273/original/file-20200720-33-f3xphc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A home destroyed in Mantoloking, New Jersey, by Hurricane Sandy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lucas Jackson/Reuters</span></span>
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<p>Frank is awe-struck: “There’s something to be said for a good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective” but admits his fear that “something bad is closing in – like the advance of a shadow across a square of playground grass where I happen to be standing”.</p>
<p>The people of the Jersey Shore have various explanations for the hurricane: his ex-wife believes it was a “bedrock agent”, others think it was somehow Obama’s doing to prevent people voting for Mitt Romney. No-one refers to climate change.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348278/original/file-20200720-63094-1k0iuok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Richard Ford pictured in 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Laura Wilson/AAP</span></span>
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<p>Richard Ford interprets and survives a world undone by calamity and death through the encounters Frank has with four individuals: a former client to whom Frank had sold his own house eight years earlier; a reserved, sad and gracious black woman who visits Frank’s new house where 40 years earlier her father had killed her mother, brother and himself; his ex-wife Ann, who has Parkinson’s and has moved to an aged-care facility “determined to rebrand ageing as a to-be-looked forward-to phenomenon”; and an old friend Eddie.</p>
<p>This novel is Ford at his finest. Sharp satire is captured in barbed turns of phrase. Unforgettable, somehow rootless, characters stud the stories. Ford combines the meticulous attention to domestic detail of contemporaries Philip Roth and John Updike with the “dirty realism” of Raymond Carver. His precise, gritty tone is perfect – and strangely consoling.</p>
<p>Ford’s ultimate consolation offered to us is expressed through a brief final encounter, an epiphany of decency through environmental calamity and personal despair. After all, “love isn’t a thing”, he notes, “but an endless series of single acts”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142816/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter McPhee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Books are both solace and provocation during a pandemic. This novel set during Hurricane Sandy is a poignant, often hilarious, reckoning with catastrophe and mortality.Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1428152020-07-20T19:51:56Z2020-07-20T19:51:56ZArt for trying times: Titian’s The Death of Actaeon and the capriciousness of fate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C8%2C1095%2C990&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Titian,The Death of Actaeon (1562).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this time of pandemic, our authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective.</em></p>
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<p>Why do bad things happen to good people? It is a question that seems particularly pertinent during times of pandemic. Disease is no respecter of virtue. It is just as likely to strike down saint as sinner. Yet even in more normal times, this is a problem we confront with depressing regularity. All too easily one thinks of lives cut too short, of acts of kindness and generosity that go unrewarded. The world can be a cold and bleak place. Why does this happen?</p>
<p>Every culture develops its own answer to this question. For the Greeks and Romans, their solution was that tragedy occurred because the gods were at best indifferent to mankind, at worst downright cruel.</p>
<p>When I’m feeling my most pessimistic, I often think of this world view and, in particular, one story that the Greeks told. It is a story perfectly captured in one of treasures of the <a href="https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-the-death-of-actaeon">National Gallery in London, Titian’s The Death of Actaeon</a>.</p>
<p>The story of Actaeon was one of the most popular of Greco-Roman myths. Its most famous retelling was undertaken by the Roman poet Ovid in his epic Metamorphoses. Titian had little Latin, so he almost certainly read about the myth in one of the many translations and abridged versions of Ovid that circulated in the 16th century.</p>
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<p>It is a myth that shows well the sadism of the gods. Actaeon committed no crime. It was only an unfortunate coincidence that, one day while hunting, he happened to stumble across the goddess Diana (Greek: Artemis) as she and her retinue of nymphs were bathing in a forest pool.</p>
<p>Diana, who prized her virginity above all else, did not take kindly to being caught naked by this stranger and so she organised a terrible punishment. With a wave of her hand, she transformed Actaeon into a stag. The hunter now became the prey. To magnify the cruelty, Actaeon was still fully conscious, a man trapped in the body of a beast. Tears trickled down his now furry cheeks.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316">Guide to the classics: Ovid's Metamorphoses and reading rape</a>
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<p>Instantly, Actaeon realised his danger. He had arrived with his pack of hunting dogs and they wasted no time turning upon their former master. The hounds seized his legs and dragged him to the ground. Their jaws bit deep into the shoulder, back, and throat. Actaeon died in agony torn apart by animals he had raised with such devotion.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C8%2C1095%2C990&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C8%2C1095%2C990&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347809/original/file-20200716-33-kklqr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Death of Actaeon depicts a world of unfair savagery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Titian’s version of this tale shows the final moments of Actaeon’s life. It is an extraordinary painting from the end of Titian’s career. Most paintings of this story prefer to focus on the moment when Actaeon encounters the bathing Diana. Unable to resist the voyeuristic potential of the scene, they indulge in a riot of naked female flesh. </p>
<p>There is an earlier Titian of precisely this moment which he painted for Philip II of Spain. Yet in The Death of Actaeon the voyeurism is limited to one exposed nipple, a visual allusion to Actaeon’s crime. Diana dominates the foreground, but the line of her arm draws the viewer’s eye to the figures on the right of the painting. Here we see Actaeon caught in mid-transformation. He still retains his human form, but his head is now that of a stag. </p>
<p>This is enough for the hounds, who have overwhelmed Actaeon. Man, deer, and dogs merge into one muddy, muddled heap, a confusion of forms so jumbled that many have wondered if the painting is actually finished - but in its commotion it perfectly captures the vicious vitality of the act. Against this chaos, Diana stands off to the side ready to administer the coup de grâce, the only form of kindness she is prepared to give.</p>
<p>How could the Greeks and Romans bear to live in a world in which such unfair savagery received divine approval? </p>
<h2>Unpredictable forces</h2>
<p>The death of Actaeon is emblematic of so much injustice. The ancient Greeks and Romans may not have really had to worry about the correct etiquette for dealing with naked divinities, but they did need to worry about equally unpredictable forces. Theirs was a world stalked by famine, disease, war, and natural disaster. </p>
<p>Yet, it was in facing up to the capriciousness of fate that the ancients found meaning in the world. When Ovid introduces the story of Actaeon, he reminds his readers that no man should be regarded happy until he is dead. The treasures that we possess today can all too quickly and easily be taken away tomorrow. In this we see the true value of Actaeon’s story.</p>
<p>The lesson is not that the world is cruel, but rather that the gifts that we possess need to be cherished for the hard-won, against-the-odds, bounties that they are. It is the absences and deprivations that give value to our lives. </p>
<p>Only the person who has been hungry can truly know what it is to be full. The child born into wealth will never appreciate the riches that they enjoy.</p>
<p>Disasters are inevitable. They should not make us give up on life, but rather we should celebrate the preciousness of that life all the more. To do otherwise is to let the gods and Fate win, to let them turn us into beasts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142815/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alastair Blanshard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Disasters are inevitable. They should not make us give up on life, rather we should celebrate the preciousness of that life all the more.Alastair Blanshard, Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History Deputy Head of School, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.