… and the prize for most tortuous attempt to diss “the elites” while invoking Aristophanes and Socrates goes to… David Burchell!
Judges were impressed with his ability to entirely ignore the irony of indulging in a bit of elite bashing while simultaneously displaying his great erudition and comprehensive knowledge of the plays of Aristophanes.
Burchell also regularly interprets Western Sydney for his readers, who live in Murdoch-land, the “heart of the nation”, familiar as he is with the comforts of a decaying Holden in the front yard.
You can read the winning entry here.
Aristophanes named names.
David Burchell didn’t.
Aristophanes 1, Burchell 0.
A man farting through a vuvuzela forever
Check out this piece of unappreciated irony:
Indeed, Burchell, indeed.
Then he goes on to imply that JG is bringing in extra flotillas of leaky boats to increase the number of additional immigrants “for dark reasons.”
This stuff really is nasty isn’t it?
*nods*
Also, if I may purport to lift myself above the fray [no mean feat, I can tell you] and pass judgement from the eyrie for a minute, that excruciating so-called ‘singular themselves’ could have been avoided if he’d just reworked his gruesome sentence structure.
No, Burchill doesn’t blame Gillard for the flotillas.
In Burchill’s narrative Gillard is the good guy who has turned her back on outraged antipodean socratic wannabes.
‘… the government is engaging with climate-change confusion in a Hawke-like spirit.’
Sadly, this reflects the attitude of so many people who would consider themselves common sense moderates. Climate change is just another issue where there are lots of different interests and what we need to do is bring them together and thrash out an agreement that they can all endorse – probably because it’s so waffly it lets them all go back to their constituents and claim it means what they want it to mean.
The notion that this is an appropriate way to test scientific theory is of course preposterous but one suspects the Burchills of this world have only a passing acquaintance with scientific methods.
PC said:
That’s true, although it seems he is unaware that themself is an acceptable generic reflexive pronoun here.
Structurally, there’s too much modality in his prose here:
No demagogue, no matter how crass, ever made themselves nearly so ridiculous as do
… ugh … pretentiousness on stilts, or to borrow his reference, from a wicker basket.
He could have gone interrogative:
Was there ever a demagogue as ridiculous as [...]?
Still pretentious, but with less saturated fat …
My goodness, that stuff’s unreadable! Could you add some sort of literary health warning to it?
Off to find some Yeats/Shakespeare/etc to get the taste out of my head.
Love the way he mangles metaphors:
Tempests ‘wash’ do they?
Then, in an inchoate subconscious recognition of how bad this writing is, he tries to blame ‘the ancients’ for inventig “a tempest in a wine cup” instead of blaming the English education system for having exhausted his own imagination so much that he cannot find another metaphor other than “a storm in a teacup”. Even this, in a pretentious declasse double move, he then dresses up in Classical drag.
Fullovitt.
Quite right Anthony … and consider the use of tense in that extract.
This is not properly literate. Pretentious digression trips him up.
As to those “ancients” who allegedly spoke of tempests in wine cups, it seems that nobody before 2007 thought to utter the phrase.
Tempest in a teapot [AmE] is probably no older than 162 years … while Storm in a teacup was a movie title from 1937.
If you wanted a genuine ancient reference you will want Cicero’s Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo which has nothing to do with winecups or tempests at all.
What a charlatan!
He may have been thinking of Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’.
*runs away*
As much as I hate to read, let alone defend, anything in The Australian, I have come to the same conclusion as Burchell.
The extraordinary, emotional opposition to Gillard PM from left-wing commentators, and journalists may well be because she hasn’t paid them enough attention. She’s speaking past them to an audience she sees as more important in winning this election.
I’d add to Burchell’s observation that the immediate rejection of Gillard as PM looked to me like a fit of pique from the commentators because they were so wrong-footed by the move in the ALP to dump Rudd. Commentators who assumed they knew what was going on, suddenly found that they didn’t. Perhaps they’ve become accustomed to their role as news makers rather than observers.
Aristophanes at least was far more entertaining. The Chaser of his day. At least you occasionally get a good belly-laugh out of reading him, which is more that you can say for our modern politicians.
(and, unless things have changed since I went to school, most Westies would have been dragged along to see at least one production of the old bugger when they were schoolkids. Indeed, I think it was The Clouds we were taken to see.)
The most disturbing thing about Burchell’s piece is his implication that we Westies are totally deficient in our knowledge of Great western Lit. Patronising git!
Russell: the difference between you and Birchell is that you are comprehensible.
Geez Fran you’re a cuncher ancha?
He might have had that in his mind PC but again, The Iliad makes no reference to tempests washing across them. In the portion of The Iliad to which you allude, the tempests raised by Poseidon sweep. They don’t “wash”, and they certainly are not presented as innocuous and overhyped.
“He stirred up a flood in a ladle”
For ‘flood’ (fluctus) you could have wave, surge, flow. Fluctibus would be turbulence, disturbance. So I reckon that’s pretty close to “storm in a teacup”. It has the same elements: big wave, small container.
Lewis and Short’s entry for simpulus has quoted the Cicero passage (de Leg 3.36) as excitare fluctus in simpulo with a translation: ‘to make much ado about nothing, to raise a tempest in a teapot’. Perseus only seems to have the Latin (which is as you quote), no copy of the Loeb translation, so I can’t tell you what they think of that. But I’d reckon it will be very similar.
Storm in a teacup. Mountains out of molehills. Fuss over nothing.
Quite right Tyro, which is why I selected the phrase. The ancients knew the concept, — it’s just that they didn’t choose the words Burchell specifies — so his reference is faux intellectualism.
Sometimes I use the construction: as the old saying goes/as one recalls from the classics … with intentional irony. That’s clearly not what he was doing here however.
Actually I was talking only about the ‘wine cup’.
The wine-dark sea turns up four or five times in the Odyssey as well — in fact, it’s a sort of Homeric leitmotif. As with Wagner.
*runs away faster than last time*
LOL
what is wrong with the bloke, Evie, parts one to three, not good enough for him.
I’ve got the numbers in my pocket
I want the lodge keys in my hand
gunna butter up some journos
and you won’t see nought for sand.
PC: yes they reoccur because I think the most likely reason is that these epithets (“swift-footed Achilles”, “grey eyed Athena”, “rosy-fingered Dawn”, “great-hearted Odysseus”, “flame-haired Menelaus”) occur because it’s about the metre. You pick the right stock epithet for the character to get padding for the metre (i.e. the right syllables). Not that Greek poetry is my specialty, that’s just one theory I either read or was taught somewhere.
Fran, yes Burchell is a ass. Not a golden one either.
Oh I get that PC … but I was assuming the reference was where it shed light on tempests … In any even, Poseidon condemning Odysseus for his arrogance to sail for ever on his (wine dark) sea doesn’t sound like the storm in a teacup sense to me.
There’s a plebeian Australian term for what Burchell was doing, but I’ll refrain from uttering it here as I don’t want to trade in the taboo.
The article is really vicious but mainly gives me the impression of a self-loathing intellectual.
Never mind that Aristophanes was great mates with the elite – Plato gives Aristophanes the most philosophical speech on love in the symposium – (the greek equivalent of chattering over lattes) – and not a fart joke in sight. I wonder if the Murdoch press would use Aristophanes on war, peace, and the benefits of public ownership of everything, including your private parts (see congresswomen, and look for the first scene shamelessly pillaged by life of brian)
Dave Bath: “Never mind that Aristophanes was great mates with the elite”
Never mind that the plays of the Dionysia (it was a competition, folks!) were always sponsored by the incredibly wealthy aristocratic classes of Athens, either.
Gregh:
“a self-loathing intellectual”
Yes, it is difficult to block the ‘between the lines’ voice which mutters constantly ‘what’s the use of all this knowledge – hasn’t made the world a better place and not even made me happy either’. No body loves me everybody hates me goin’ down the garden an’ eat some worms.
Fran @ 17, I don’t think Birchill does irony.
“a leitmotif. As with Wagner.”
To further twist the metaphor then, just for fun, could we say “He was making an apocalypse in an opera-house”?
I recall as a kid one translation of the Cicero line which wasn’t too literal, but it was neat, funny English: “billows in a spoon.” Something about that long “u” sound in both versions that helps make it funny somehow.
As a self-loathing intellectual, Burchell exhibits impeccable taste.
The comments under this article at the OO:
Heh. Of course that bolded part is snark from a degenerate Leftwinger, but c’mon OO, you realise broadsheets are meant to be written to a level that can be understood by people who haven’t majored in bongwater philosophy, right?
I wonder if Rupert knows this man has been given primo space to audition for the editorship of Quadrant. 40+ times a year.
I love the fawning nature of the comments allowed on Burchell’s pompous drivel.Surely they’re some sort of parodying leg-pull,possibly by FoxNewsLtd minions aghast at just how far into the depths ‘The Australian’ is plunging.I mean,after Chris Mitchell’s assertion of suzerainty over the courts, closely following on his campaign to control state police policy,is there any limit to FoxNewsLtd hubris?
Yes, ” A Goddess whispered in my ear…”.
Hyperbole, syntax, grammar, silent “h”s, prolixivity; where will it all end?
Just read the comments on this piece at the Oz. Putrid except for “Devoted Reader of Perth”. Perhaps for sport we should emulate this canny commenter’s MO just to see how narcissistic Burchill’s editors are.
Pavlov’s Cat, (Schrodinger’s Cat sends feline felicitations,or doesn’t-take your pick) Burchell’s prose puts me more in mind of Joyce’s'snotgreen sea’, and,checking the punctuation, I noticed the epithet ‘jejune Jesuit’. How about that for a monicker for our favourite Murdochian poetaster of the moment. Casuistic to the point of unconscious self-parody.