Fun run and other oxymorons - Joe Bennett

Geen afstompender les dan de Engelse les, vroeger. Een handboek met lelijke illustraties, teksten zonder kraak of smaak, en woordenlijsten waar je zelf debiele dialoogjes moest mee brouwen. Hoewel ik nooit meer naar school hoef, vraag ik me soms af welke auteurs ik toen had willen lezen om de taal machtig te worden. De verhalen van Somerset Maugham, omdat hij zoveel bereikt met een beperkte woordenschat. De columns van Joe Bennett, omwille van het rijke Engels, de humor, de pit.

Joe Bennett (1957) werd geboren in Engeland en verhuisde naar Nieuw-Zeeland toen-ie negenentwintig was ("At the immigration desk I met the local passion for forms in triplicate"). Hij gaf les aan middelbare schoolkinderen in Christchurch en schrijft nu hoofdzakelijk columns, die op gezette tijden worden gebundeld. In zijn introductie bij Fun run and other oxymorons, schrijft hij terecht dat er over zijn stukjes weinig samenvattends valt te vertellen.

I anything holds these articles together it is that I like people but not in herds. I distrust all beliefs, most thought and anything ending in ism. Most opinion is emotion in fancy dress.

Bennett schrijft betrekkelijk lange columns, waarin hij één onderwerp grondig aangepakt, of jongleert met een aantal verwante voorvalletjes, wat soms resulteert in een driedubbele pointe. Bennett tapt uit hetzelfde vaatje als vele cabaretiers of stand-up comedians: persoonlijke aanvaringen met de moderniteit, zeg maar. Huiselijke reparaties, bodypiercings, obers met praatjes, een lopende neus, een everzwijn op de camping. Nodeloos ingewikkelde apparaten. Overbodige spullen.

Don’t acquire things. Things fill the house and shrivel the soul. Who amongst us has not got a cupboard of things that were thought once to bestow ease and wonder on our lives but became dump-fodder within days? Bread-makers, miniature vacuum cleaners, datadays, exercycles, solarpowered shoe trees, all of them now standing in mute testimony to our acquisitive folly, our possessive myopia, our desperate yearning for a better world.
Once upon a time we were kids at Christmas who couldn’t sleep for the excitement of being given things. But then we unwrapped the things and instantly discarded the things and started looking forward to Christmas again. And we remain kids at Christmas, but nobody loves us any more so we have to buy ourselves things and it still doesn’t do the trick.

In tegenstelling tot cabaretiers heeft Bennett de luxe om mooie volzinnen te mogen maken. Dat doet die dan ook, met zichtbaar plezier. "I’m full of angst and arrogance and out of sync with chlorophyll," staat er, wanneer Bennett gewoon een hekel aan tuinieren wil overbrengen. Hij is een heel lexicale schrijver, die zijn proza opdirkt met veel exclusieve woorden. De kunst daarbij is om licht op de hand te blijven. Dat lukt meestal, waarop de lezer glimlacht. Bennett over een spelletje Monopoly dat op zijn laatste benen loopt:

The game inevitably ends with two tycoons lumbering round the board like dinosaurs, fixing each other with a flat dead eye. For them the world has shrunk to a board awash with property. It’s Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, each with enough dollar bills to light cigars for the rest of their lives.
But neither cares for money now, because they have seen through money. They know that money is just a token for something seated even deeper in the soul. That something is power. The dinosaurs circle, eyeing the jugular, probing for the chance to kill and so to reign alone, to become lords of all survey: Mobutu, Marcos, Stalin, Ozymandias, master of the universe.
But the tycoons are blind. For when the deathblow comes and at last the victor stands alone he finds he stands atop a heap of rubble. The board has lost all meaning. Someone tips it over. The tokens of power jumble into nothingness. They are just plastic toys and bits of coloured paper. The master of the universe feels robbed. This is not what he wanted at all.
He stamps his feet. He wants another game. He rushes over to the window and shouts at the kids in the yard to come and play again. They are happy on their bicyles. They ignore him.
The bicycle game looks such fun. The master of the universe lusts to join it, but the others have glimpsed the malice in his soul. They will not let him play. He begs. He wheedles. He tries to bribe them. They laugh. The master of the universe bursts into tears.
Mum emerges to see what all the fuss is about. Mum is the Commerce Commission, the United Nations and God. She tells the children to be nice to each other. Sulkily they submit. For a while. Then someone suggests a game of Monopoly. Eyes lit up.

Daarom is het jammer dat, opnieuw net zoals bepaalde cabaretiers, Bennett zijn pijlen niet richt op iets groters, op structurele mistoestanden. De enige keer dat hij dat hij deed, kwam er meteen een kwaaie reactie van. Bennett had afgegeven op het dikdoenerige taaltje van consultants en reclamejongens.

The job description announced that ‘the appointee will facilitate the ongoing development of the school’s future positioning, strategic, quality management and planning processes’. (…) I object to language like this because it says little, bears little relation to reality, is needlessly complex and aims to impress by that complexity. It can be boiled down to very little. For example in the passage I have quoted, the word ‘ongoing’ means nothing. If development doesn’t go on, then it isn’t development. And instead of ‘facilitating development’ why can’t the appointee just ‘develop’ something? The reason, I suspect, is that it sounds less impressive.

[...]

We live in a world of things and deeds. Language names those things and deeds and enables us to consider them, to order them and to understand them. It is our best tool for thinking. In short, language civilizes us. If we use language badly we think less clearly and we become less civilized.

[...]

In rational matters like this, we think largely through words. It is not a question of the words catching up with the idea because, in the act of thinking, words and the idea become one. If the words are woollly it is because the thinking is shoddy.

Toch bestaan er betere schrijvers. Bennett moet het hebben van woorden, terwijl briljante schrijvers meestal beelden inzetten. Het juiste woord stelt de blik van de lezer scherp op een concreet gegeven; maar een goedgekozen beeld toont hem een verband dat hij nog niet eerder zag.

Op het einde merkte ik overigens een beetje gevoelloos te worden voor Bennetts uitsloverij. Mijn fout. Had ik dit boek met mate moeten lezen.

> lees een fragment uit dit boek op Prins van Denemarken

Joe Bennett, Fun run and other oxymorons
276 p.
Uitgeverij Scribner, 2000


Nog een greep citaten:

A brace of young Mormons visited me the other day, dark-suited, soft-spoken and both called Elder.

[...]

The first law of the shower states that no two shower controls in the universe are the same. The second states that the temperature markings on shower controls bear no relation to the temperature of the water. The third states that, however much a shower control may rotate, the degree of rotation required to change from ice-cold to scalding is never more than one millimeter.

[...]

If you want to learn good stuff about, say, scorpions, get stung by one. That’s exactly fifty per cent of everything you need to know about scorpions. The other fifty per cent is the best way of killing them. It’s napalm.

[...]

Every dog has its own dietary idiosyncrasies. My first dog ate wallets.

[...]

The first essential of boring a child is silence. Churches invented the idea. Libraries took it up. Museums perfected it.

[...]

Television news works on the theory that no one can understand a technical item without pictures of a scientist doing something with test-tubes. What you do with the test-tubes is immaterial; it just has to look sciency.

[...]

Nevertheless there are joys to having a cold. The first of these is that I cannot taste my own cooking.

[...]

I know quite a lot about cars. I know that red cars go faster than other cars and that men don’t drive automatics. I know that driving fast is safer than driving slowly because an accident is a random happening in a random place and so the less time one spends in any random place the less chance one has of meeting the accident lurking there.

[...]

Over the course of any year we accrete things which we consider important. We gain money, status and vanities. At the beach we take them off again.

[...]

As a child of the late twentieth century I suspect that I am typical. Not only do I not grow vegetables, I don’t eat them unless they are disguised by salt, grease or, ideally, meat.

[...]

So President Clinton ordered his navy to fire missiles on to the foreign territory of other countries. There used to be a word for this robust style of diplomacy. That word was war.

[...]

Life is a sentence punctuated by rituals.

[...]

The importance of death in art has been underrated, but the reasons for it are clear enough. It’s all to do with economics. Dead painters stop painting. Thus the art market, that bustling throng of bored billionaires, knows for certain how many canvases the corpse has done and can be sure of the value of their investments.

[...]

The Elders and I parted amiably. In the windy sunshine I watched them climb the neighbour’s steps. They had dog-hair all over the backs of their black suits.

____