Those of us who live in the "real" world and who have long ago given up on the arts as being of no use whatsoever, still occasionally read reviews of shows and performances we have not seen, in order to confirm that we are (indeed) missing nothing, writes Brendan Glacken.
This is not to denigrate performers or authors, many of whom appear to be pleasant people who have probably ended up in the arts world through no fault of their own, and who deserve sympathy, though certainly not encouragement or support.
People who approve of the arts often claim they "find" themselves there, or recognise some truths of human life. In our experience most of these truths are unpleasant and better left unspoken.
Say, for example, you went to Tom Murphy's 1985 play, Conversations on a Homecoming, a production of which has just concluded at the Lyric in Belfast. You have had no dinner, because all plays start at 8 p.m., which is dinner-time for self-respecting people. (And you have no wish to partake of one of those rushed "pre-theatre" dinners).
You take your seat, and the curtain rises on what our Fintan described the other day as "the wreckage of the 1960s boom washed up on the bleak shores of an east Galway town in the early 1970s". Further, the setting is "a decrepit pub" where "the once-golden youth is dwindling into a sour middle age of lost hopes and corrosive cynicism".
Understandably, you stare at this in horror. But it is clear that among the regular theatre-goers, no one feels the same way: there they are, the usual well-heeled, articulate, book-reading, arty crowd, many of them well known to be in dubious sexual relationships, delighted to find themselves plunged into this repulsive physical and moral misery, and the thing barely started. The word degeneracy comes to mind.
If it was only about what our critic calls the "enactment of the mating rituals of the Irish male with the Irish pub" you could maybe relax a bit and have a laugh, feeling reasonably confident that it will all be over before closing time. Inevitably, however, the thing has a psychic dimension, in this case a whole and healthy personality split between two lads, a bitter realist and an ineffectual romantic.
To think that all this passes for entertainment.
Right. I am disappointed at the critical response to Andrew Robinson's book, entitled The Man Who Discovered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris (Thames and Hudson, £12.95 in UK).
Linear B is the ancient script discovered and named by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated the Minoan city of Knossos at the beginning of the last century. For years, scholars struggled unsuccessfully to decipher it. And then along came Michael Ventris, a gifted linguist: at the age of 18 he published a paper on Linear B, and a few years later figured out that it was actually made up of symbols for syllables of archaic Greek. This was the key to unlocking the whole symbolic system.
The reviewers of Robinson's book, while keen on the biography itself, seem universally uncomfortable with Ventris, basically writing him off as a man who did one remarkable thing in his life and was otherwise uninteresting.
It does seem that Ventris did not have any conversation, and had no emotional attachments (despite being married to a rich society beauty). Once he had made his brilliant discovery, he lost all interest in Linear B and went back to his first love (if love is the word), modern architecture. Then, disappointed with his own work, he lost interest in that. He gave up his job. And he died in a mundane accident at the age of 34, crashing his car into a stationary lorry. The reviewers naturally relate Ventris's story to that of the brilliant mathematician John Nash but they seem doubtful that a film based on Ventris's life could be as appealing as A Beautiful Mind, the film version of Nash's life.
They are probably right. It is regrettable, however, that disinterest and detachment are not properly appreciated, and that a man (or even a woman) can not be deemed interesting because of so-called emotional detachment.
We must give up our unhealthy and distressing obsession with people who, in attempting to resolve difficulties, find themselves "redeemed" by love (whatever that is), as if emotional connection were everything. We must learn to celebrate those who stand back, those who have the courage to walk away, the wilful outsider, the entirely disinterested and the fully detached.