The Best Australian Humorous Writing (12 page)

 

Criticising a sick culture, even if the criticism accomplished nothing, had always felt like useful work. But if the supposed sickness wasn't a sickness at all—if the great Materialist Order of technology and consumer appetite and medical science really was improving the lives of the formerly oppressed … then there was no longer even the most abstract utility to his criticism. It was all, in Melissa's word, bullshit.

The “evil” in corporate mergers with cultural spaces, therefore, has to be re-argued continually to an audience who suspects, like the gen-Y Melissa, that “what's so radically wrong with society that we need a radical critique, nobody can say”.

After I return from Japan, the air is thick with talk about “Australian values”. Everybody wants to talk about what they are, but nobody argues that values, whether national or familial or personal, are less nouns than verbs. Values aren't what we know, but how we do things. And our values are expressed in how we process what comes to us from the outside. It shows up in the discussion about how we treat asylum seekers and other immigrants, but it's also part of how we process those imports that don't need to apply for a visa.

To generalise, there are two ways an object can migrate across borders, and it's much the same whether we're talking about an idea, an art movement or a widget. One is because it's needed. The small, cheap, fuel-economic car was needed; the Pachinko machine was not. The microchip was needed; the Washlet was not.

The other way is when nobody sees any reason to resist the import. The question moves from “Why?” to “Why not?” This accounts for the bulk of our cultural imports. Nobody needed the Walkman or sushi, but once they were on offer, there seemed no good reason not to adopt them. This is how the meshing of corporate and cultural will happen, is happening. Some bright spark will visit the Toyota Megaweb, a light bulb will flash, and next year we will have dodgem-car rides, Daytona simulators and an electric-car exhibit at the most profitable car showroom in Perth. We will ask “Why not?” and come up with no answer that doesn't make us sound like a stick-in-the-mud. It's an Australian value to welcome ideas when they pay their way, when they sound like fun, when they do no harm. We've never closed our borders to the economically productive person, product or idea. We've never stood on our dignity, culturally, which is why we have been such a fertile market for consumables.

Just how ripe we are strikes me a week after I come back to Australia. I go away for the quintessential summer holiday: two weeks in a sleepy, one-shop coastal village. The shopkeeper is building a new tiled patio in front of the fish-and-chips counter. One
day, I walk past and he's standing there, admiring the tiles. I say, “You can't let anyone walk on that. Just admire it.” He says, “That's right—just like the ad!” Then I remember that his stance did indeed remind me of a TV ad. I thought I was being witty, but instead I was parroting an advertiser's witticism. The shopkeeper mentions another, similar, ad. We have a whole conversation about ads.

Many of us are always having conversations about advertisements, whether we know it or not. Ads link us by way of shared jokes, lessons, myths, ways of seeing, much as our ancestors were linked by their holy books or folklore. Advertising has taken over from religion in providing that invisible web inside ordinary conversations. So does it matter if our culture—an outcrop of our conversations and our thoughts—sells itself to the advertiser?

The other thing happening in this seaside village is that everyone is up in arms against a new development. The council has agreed to sell off public land to a real-estate developer, and the locals' reaction is to put up posters accusing councillors of taking bribes and “destroying the way we live”. Not just a few hectares, but an entire way of life is deemed to be at stake. Everywhere on our coast, from Sydney Harbour to Broome, we have huge tracts of land that belong to and are used by the public. It seems particularly Australian to hang onto so much prime land for the public good. Although we're a soft touch when it comes to the privatisation of our minds, we are deeply hostile to the privatisation of what we can see and touch: our land. We are a materialistic people. We worship the material world. You can buy up our art, but you leave our beaches alone. So where does our history fit, on this spectrum between the two-dollar shop of ideas and the Fort Knox of bushland and beach? How tightly held is our history? Do we care enough about it not to sell it to the highest bidder?

It's here—in the ownership of history—that I find why I'm so uneasy about the corporate showroom as cultural exhibit.

In Ginza, Shiseido has two buildings. The Shiseido Gallery is housed in the flagship store, glossily red in the colour of the brand.
Among the perfumes is one floor devoted to rotating exhibitions of the visual arts. The exhibitions have nothing to do with Shiseido, but provide a pleasant accompaniment to shopping. The other building, a few blocks away, is the House of Shiseido corporate headquarters, built in 2004. Inside the headquarters is a museum dedicated to Shiseido history. It's open to the public and is well patronised—as are the Shiseido Corporate Museum and Shiseido Art House, entirely separate edifices situated outside Tokyo. This is one proud company. Its “Corporate Culture Department” was set up in 1990 with this charter: “valuable managerial resources that reflect the intellectual and spiritual outcomes of our corporate activities”.

The corporate headquarters' museum, foremost among these intellectual and spiritual outcomes, is both beautiful and informative, with interactive displays and a temporary exhibition, “Women in the Ginza”, about professional women working in the area in the past century and a half. I learn that Shiseido was founded in 1872 as a pharmaceutical retailer, turning to cosmetics in 1897. The historical display includes other scenes from Japanese history, such as the country's first beauty contest, held in 1892. So comprehensive is the museum's embrace of Japanese history—Shiseido, it implies,
is
Japan—that I'm curious as to what it says about World War II. I can find three references:

 

1942: The enforcement of container standards makes production of cosmetics difficult.

1943: Beauty department closed.

1943: Tokyo factory bombed. Young women wear more subdued hairdo.

That is the sum total of the war, through Shiseido's eyes. No Pearl Harbor, no Nanking, no Coral Sea, no Hiroshima. And in recalling this, later, when I'm back in Australia tossed between the sell-off of our minds and the territoriality over our beachside bushland, the penny drops for me.

Of course it's not a company's responsibility to tell the full story. The company only owes responsibilities to itself, its shareholders and its customers. It owes nothing to the national past; if you want to find out about Japan's history, you will have to go elsewhere. But when the private corporations own not only the means of production but also the cultural spaces themselves, where will there be to go? If culture is privatised, aren't we only going to hear the private owners' version? After all, they'll have paid for it. Who will hold the past in common trust? Who will protect our stories as jealously, and guard them as protectively for the common good, as our voters and ratepayers protect our public land? From Tokyo, I can't help but think that the greatest threat to our understanding of the past won't come from leftist teachers in black armbands or Windschuttles in rose-coloured glasses, but from a corporation who will remember the violence of early settlement as a time when land-clearing became more difficult, sales of firearms rose and young women wore more subdued hairdos.

CLIVE JAMES

In writing, to reach the depths of badness, it isn't enough to be banal. One must strive for lower things. Almost five years have gone by since I cut out from a British newspaper the article containing the following passage, and I think I am finally ready to examine the subtleties of its perfection. But first, let the reader judge its initial impact: “Now, the onus is on Henman to come out firing at Ivanisevic, the wild card who has torn through this event on a wave of emotion …” (Neil Harman,
Sunday Telegraph
sports section, front page, 8 July 2001).

Time has elapsed, Tim Henman has dropped out of the top 50 after never sticking long in the top five, the original clipping has gone a mellow colour at the edges, and the featured sentence is at last ready to be analysed, as a fine wine slowly makes itself ready to be tasted. Ivanisevic aside, there are two men involved here: Henman and Harman. One is a tennis player, and one writes about tennis. It is Mr Harman, I think, who is better equipped for his career. Tim Henman was always a bit too lightly built in the chest and shoulders. Mr Harman has what it takes to go on serving his clichés and solecisms with undiminished strength forever. But let's take a look at how he does it—or how he did it, on the day that no spectator of
bad writing will ever forget. At this point the reader should scan the sentence once again, slowly, as with an action replay.

An “onus” is a weight, but the word has been so long in the language that its derivation can safely be left for dead: Shakespeare himself would have no quarrel there. For Henman “to come out firing”, however, is borderline at best. We can leave it neutral, but would prefer to know why the metaphor is military. Baudelaire, in
Mon coeur mis à nu
, warned us that journalists with a fondness for military metaphors were proving their unwarlike nature. For all we know, Baudelaire's stricture fails to fit Mr Harman, who might have been in the SAS before he turned journalist. We can't help suspecting, though, that Mr Harman has no accurate picture in his mind of what sort of weapons Tim Henman might be firing at Ivanisevic. The writer simply means that the British tennis player is behaving aggressively. But then we find that the British tennis player is behaving aggressively towards a wild card. The wild card, again, is a metaphor that can be left for dead: it was brought in from gambling, but we court pedantry if we ask for it to be brought alive. All we can ask for is that it be not too grotesquely transfigured in its death: the corpse should not be mutilated. If a wild card tears through something, it should not be on a wave of emotion. Suddenly the British tennis player, weighed down with his unnamed weapons, is attacking a wild card that has become a surfer. And the sentence isn't even over.

But neither is its impact, which has only just begun. Speaking as one whose flabber is hard to gast, I'm bound to say I was floored. Not bound in the sense of being tied up with ropes by a burglar, or floored in the sense of having tipped my chair over while trying to reach the telephone with my teeth: I mean floored in the sense of having my wings clipped. One of my convictions about the art of composing a prose sentence in English is that for some of its potential metaphorical content to be realised, the rest must be left dormant. You can't cash in on the possibilities of every word. In poetry you
do more of that than in prose, but even in poetry,
pace
Baudelaire, you must concentrate your forces to fight your battles, and there is no concentrating your forces in one place without weakening them in another—a fact that Field Marshal von Manstein vainly tried to point out to Hitler.

To achieve conscious strength in one area, we must will a degree of inattention in other areas: such has been my conclusion from long experience. But here, from out of the blue, is a sentence that demonstrates how the whole construction can be inattentive, and achieve an explosive integrity through its having not been pondered at all. Imagine the power of being that free! Imagine being able to use a well-worn epithet like “out of the blue” without checking up on whether its implied clear sky comes into conflict with a storm later in the sentence, or whether it chimes too well, but in the wrong way, with a revelation in the previous sentence that the person being talked about once rowed for Oxford or Cambridge! Imagine not having to worry about “explosive integrity”! Imagine, just imagine, what it would be like to get on with the writing and leave all the reading to the reader!

Too late. I missed the wave, perhaps because I was carrying too many weapons. A kind of wild card myself, I might have ridden my potato-chip surfboard more easily if I had not been burdened with all my onerous ordnance. The mine detector, especially, was the straw that broke the camel's back—or, as Mr Harman (and Australia's prime minister) might have put it, was the bridge too far. At high school in Sydney I was taught not just to parse a sentence but to make sure that any pictures it evoked matched up. Our teacher, Mr Aked, was not a professional philologist, but like all people with an ear for language he was a philologist at heart. He taught us enough Latin roots to make us realise that etymology was a force in the language, and the more likely to be a confusing force the less it was recognised. He didn't make it all fun. Some of it was hard work. But he made the hard work satisfactory, which is the
beginning of good teaching, and I suppose that period was my one and only beginning of good learning: I began to become the student I would be in later years, long after I had proved that formal study was not my gift.