James Tringham

An obvious couple, if I'm being honest. I can really see them together. But then, I'm on strong hallucinogens.

I've seen them both this week. Sean was fitfully funny, but not a patch on his former self. He just seems to be getting swallowed in bitterness and a sense of his own morbidity. Not genial, borderline racist, obsessed with shagging young girls and porn. Sad, really.

Plus he had a go at my wife for her daring to suggest that a joke he'd made was to do with Of Mice And Men: he'd found this piece of paper outside his house dropped by a schoolkid with something like "I went into my room and rubbed linament on my back. The Lenny came in." written on it. Now it's clearly something to do with Crooks, and Emma (Mrs T) has to teach the blasted book every year to some of Sheffield's more gormless teenagers, and so knows it far too well, but he wasn't having it. So he just went down the path of humourless belittlement. I didn't really see the point. If you can make a joke out of a heckle or a contribution, fair enough, but just saying "that's wrong, you're crap and you know you are" doesn't really seem to be a comedian doing his job.

And then we saw Germaine last night, talking on her new book on Anne Hathaway (still not the actress, sadly). She, by way of a contrast, was brilliant. Lucid, thoughtful, fearsomely intelligent. She spoke for nearly two hours without notes, and it was all linked, and she wasn't repeating herself. I'm really glad to have seen her.

She was talking about the role of women in Tudor society, and mortality rates, and illegal enclosures, in talking around her topic, and all of it was interesting. One of the best speakers I've ever seen.

The only snag was that most of what she was saying was total rollocks. There's little enough concrete evidence about Shakespeare, let alone his wife, and so to come up with a coherent whole she has, as she quite cheerfully admitted, invented large chunks of it e.g. Shakespeare died of syphilis. Now he may have done, but I haven't a clue how Germaine would know about it.

I'd have loved to have to talked to her afterwards, to see if she had answers to any of the various holes that were in her arguments, but I didn't get a chance. Strange that.

Quite what you're supposed to say about that, I don't know, but I thought I'd type it.

Coming up soon: reports on Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle, who are both playing the Sheffield comedy festival. Hold you breath, lads...

kidkovacevic

Greer's scholarship is almost all terrible terrible stuff. Female Eunuch's pretty good ebcause it's just a rant, it's not actually required to do proper analysis of sociology/literature. It's thought-provoking fun in the same way that Valerie Solanos is.

But her other stuff is not much good, not much constructive use and driven less by any attempt to understand or explain than by a need to be polemic.

Even her second-most famous effort - being the first literary feminist to admit that female writers were basically terrible until the 19th century - doesn't hold up and isn't that brave, because while Aphra Benn and the like ARE awful, there are some fantastic female visionary writers in the medeival period, like Julian of Norwich, who operated completely outside the Greer-envisioned court/social patriarchy that she blames for the rest of the early women's rubbishness. She never lets complete ignorance get in the way of her generalising.

And I like how her entire dismissal of Diane Arbus' work comes down to 'she took a picture of me in which I look like a twat.'

As for what you said about her new book: this seems to be the general opinion; actually i've seen some incredibly sniffy and dismissive reviews, which is interesting since the literary reviewing system in britain at the moment is generally bland and toothless, so if the Times are willing to sneer at something it must be bad.

My guess is that no-one will know who she was in 50 years.

Don Baker

For all Greer's faults when it comes to the truth, she can be fantastic when she is in full flow - she has a way of speaking that captivates people, and that means you are prepared to give her the time to make her point, before picking holes in it. Very similar to George Galloway, imo.

Sean Hughes sold out when he started doing ITV1 dramas.

James Tringham

I don't know Aphra Benn's work, but a previous girlfriend used to reckon she was pretty good. Is that wrong then?

I think you may well be right about Greer in terms of her scholarship. She's best at opinions, and holding forth. Which she did very well yesterday. And she's witty, and smart enough to be able to browbeat most opposition.

But there are huge gaps in what she was saying. For instance, she was adamant that Hathway was a puritan, as was Shakespeare, as they were common in that area. She may have been, but I'd always thought that there were links between them and the Catholica recusants. They too were common in the area - Anne Vaux lived close by, for instance.

Other sample hypotheses:

Hamnet (Shakespeare's son) had cerebral palsy.
Anne ran her own successful haberdashery business.
Anne's cousin was a successful playwright in London.
She arranged the production of the First Folio (though why she'd have missed out at least two of his plays if she'd done so, heaven only knows).
Some of the sonnets are dedicated to her.
Shakespeare fought in an army overseas. I've heard that one before, tbf, but quite when or where he is supposed to have done it, I don't know.
Anne's mother was Welsh. No shred of evidence for that one.

It goes on.

I'd still say she's up there with David Jenkins (the old, controversial Bishop of Durham) as a superlative speaker. And Stephen Hawking held sway, though that was more being in awe of the man than anything else.

Kill Rock Stars

i heart valerie solanas :*)

SarfLondonSpur

Saw Jimmy Carr in June. Pretty fantastic imo.

James Tringham

I wouldn't have put Galloway in the same league as anything other than a large turd, tbh.

trundle

Does Greer still lecture at Warwick university?

James Tringham

No, she's recently retired from there.

When she was talking about the actual literature, rather than historical hokum, she was spot on, I thought.

Retro

Writing a whole book on Hathaway must have been pretty difficult. Talking about her for two hours non-stop can't have been easy either.

Although you imply that it's pretty much Greer filling in the massive gaps in historical evidence with theories.