Friday 31 March 2006

Why I Blog

I was walking to the post office today, with a package about to be mailed under my arm, when I heard a strange, horrifying rustling coming from the bushes and dead leaves. I stopped and the rustling stopped too. I walked a few steps and the rustling followed. A nasty, yet small and cowardly being appeared to be stalking me.

I held my breath, heart beating, and peered through the neighbor's garden. And I saw it - I saw by what I was being hunted. Even now my pulse races as I recollect that moment. Hands shaking, I raised the digital camera.





Gathering my wits, I shouted some curses and imprecations at it, hoping it might fade quietly back to the netherworld from whence it came. All in vain! No matter how much I picked up my pace, dashing headlong from house to house along the eerily deserted footpath, still my silent pursuer determinedly pursued me.








Have you ever been followed by a creature whose whole being is devoted to following you, to seeing where it is you wish to go? It is a most unnerving experience. Every time you catch sight of your hunter it instantly drops to the ground, lolling about, nonchalantly pretending to ignore your proximity. But just look away and it leaps to its feet and recommences the pursuit.







At last, reaching the blessed haven of the local shops - people, commerce, civilisation - I breathed a little easier. Surely my hunter would not attempt to follow me here. But I made the mistake of casting one last glance over my shoulder as I crossed the threshold of the post office. And there, in the distance, it stood: eyes fixed balefully, unblinkingly, upon me. Waiting.



Somehow, I know not how, my business in the post office was accomplished. (I fear the condition of the parcel - wrapped and addressed on the premises - may betray the confusion and dread overwhelming my thoughts.) Then, taking a deep breath, I ran from the building, headlong down the hill, and trembling around the corner, every step of the way haunted and shadowed by my small silent evil tormentor.









Lungs bursting, temples throbbing, at last I gained the sanctuary of home. And now it is all over. I sit here solitary, sad, afraid, nerdish, sipping a mug of tea and typing into a box, with only the dim glow of the computer screen for illumination. I believe I am safe.

But hist! something is at the door, scratching, scratching, trying to get in.....

Red Blob Friday

Wayne from Toolybird nominated the red blob-thing protruding from Melbourne Central for a bit of statue-post investigative journalism.



Well, I'm pretty sure it's not a statue, but what is it? A pomo magic mushroom? An artist's impression of your liver after dining in the food court at the top of the escalator? One of the sticky beanbags we had to sit upon in the "kids" cinema, also reached via this escalator, when we saw Hustle & Flow last Sunday?





Come on then, if you know what it is / is for / is all about, enlighten us.

Wednesday 29 March 2006

spine-blindness

I know I have three copies of Pride and Prejudice. (I know it because LibraryThing tells me so.) Why, then, can't I lay hands on a single one of them? I've looked several times, and most times have managed not to instantly forget what book I was looking for, but to no avail.

Now I have to go down to the bookshop and buy another copy.

Saturday 25 March 2006

Statuary Friday #23 (Empire Games edition)

Blog project: documenting Melbourne's open-air public sculpture in words and pictures. Suggestions for future episodes are more than welcome.

Today's installment brought to you by the jolly old Empire Games!

#23 Queen Victoria Memorial



Queen Victoria Gardens, Linlithgow Avenue, Melbourne



The Queen Victoria Memorial sits on a kind of roundabout amongst promenades on top of a small hill in the Queen Victoria Gardens, a pretty flower garden tucked between the rambling King's Domain to the southeast and the low-lying Alexandra Gardens to the north. The area is chock-a-block with sculpture and statuary of various kinds; this elaborate memorial is one of the oldest, and I think one of the best.

At first glance the memorial, made by James White, looks alarmingly like some kind of trophy (perhaps one you'd win for being the century's champion World Dominator & popping out nine kids to boot.) On top of a circular granite platform with three rings of steps is a four-sided neoclassically modelled plinth decorated with female figures on each side and a column at each corner, and on top of that stands Victoria herself, stately and stern, mourning-veiled and miniature-crowned and robed and sashed, holding orb and sceptre, and gazing across the Yarra & Birrarung Marr to central Melbourne.



The memorial is placed on a grassy mound at the top of a hill, and the effect of these cumulative elevations is to make the thing look much bigger than it really is. This is particularly true of the Queen as you have to really struggle to get a good look at her: you may respectfully observe the Empress's entire person from a suitable distance, or cringe insignificantly at her feet. The figures are about one and one-quarter lifesize, which is about the same as the Redmond Barry statue outside the State Library and only a little bit smaller than the figures on the Burke and Wills monument. But the dramatic perspective makes Victoria look very much larger than life.

When you do find a vantage point that renders her visible to the commoners' eye, she looks like this:



The sun was setting on Melbourne when I took these pictures and its last rays set the white Carrara marble blazing. It's rare for a large public memorial statue in this city to be constructed of marble: bronze is the usual material. The whiteness of this monument is unlikely to be any kind of unintentional effect.

Supporting the globe on which Victoria stands is a cornice inscribed on each side with letters of gold spelling out the Queen's honorifics in Latin: VICTORIA DEI GRATIA etc. The cornice is held up by four polished Harcourt granite columns topped with darkened bronze capitals, sort of Ionic, but with a typically Victorian bit of overdecoration in the form of a tiny cherub's head poking out between the volutes. It's not fair to laugh at them for that sort of thing, they honestly couldn't help themselves.

On the flat between each column is a shallow arched niche with a bronze shell or fan form occupying the top hemisphere and a curved block pushing out from the bottom third. Under that is another deep panel with a bronze plaque in the centre. The plaques reminded me very much of the inscriptions at the Springthorpe Memorial which predates this monument (completed in 1907) by only a few years. A nice detail is the carving on each one of a thistle, a rose, and a shamrock.

Each arch frames a different allegorical female, garbed in loose (but not too loose) draperies, each one labelled with a different abstract concept and a different phase of Victoria's life, and accessoried accordingly.




This is 'Progress', and 'Born 1819':



She's shading her eyes and looking into the distance, and holding up a torch to light the way. Eager sort of girl. Nice puppies

Next is 'History', aka 'Married 1840'. What a remarkably interesting combination of ideas. This is the facet Victoria has her back to, by the way. It's tempting to look at this as some kind of proto-feminist statement about the irrelevance of Victoria's gender to her abilities, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that she was a prolonged and conspicuous mourner. The figure doesn't look like an enthusiastic bride. But she exudes a certain luxurious langorousness that might subtly suggest sexual maturity.





The third side belongs to 'Justice' and 'Died 1901'.



Justice carries her traditional attributes, the scales and the sword (the sword is broken, but you can see still holds the hilt.) She isn't blindfolded, though, which is interesting.

The fourth side, facing the same way as the Queen, is 'Wisdom' and 'Reign 1837-1901'.



I fell for Ms Wisdom in rather a big way, despite her facial expression which seems to communicate having inadvertently sat upon the Kohinoor Diamond. She's got a winged helmet, a stack of impressive books, an owl, and the sense to do up the front of her dress. Indeed it might be argued that she's taken things a touch too far in the 'camouflaging the bosom' department.



Dorian thought her chest looked like a still from Alien, and I agree with him. But still, the owl makes up for quite a lot:



It's hard to say whether Owl had its nose broken off by the same vandals who took away the sword and all the womens' toes, or whether it just forgot to put its dentures in. Never mind, it's still lovely.








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Thursday 23 March 2006

Dirty Cat

Can you see how dirty it is? This is what comes of rolling in the dirt, like a fool.





I think it might be Bath Night tonight.....

Wednesday 22 March 2006

Sorrow at Sorrow at Sills Bend

My submission of "lipsniger" for inclusion at Urban Dictionary failed to make the grade. No explanations, just the thumbs down.

Sadness.

the glittering breadcrumb trail

Since I read Zadie Smith's On Beauty last December I've thought about it more than I'd have expected to given that it struck me at the time as being kind of overstuffed - or kind of a "fragmented stew", perhaps. (If you've read it too, you might enjoy Amardeep Singh's recent Valve post, about the novel & what it suggests about how poststructuralist art theory copes - or fails to cope - with aesthetic pleasures of various kinds.)

One of the elements among the stuffing that I did think was perfectly judged, as in it had the exact density of a chunk of real lived experience, was the strand of commentary on Googling, specifically on students Googling their professors, but with an obvious parallel in any authority figure with a visible public record being Googled by many less conspicuous people under his or her jurisdiction. (See p 142 for instance.) The Googling is done in the interests of coldly assessing the Googled One's social cachet and status and influence and general utility to the Googler, and all the Googled One's efforts to be charming and worthwhile and interesting in person are defeated in advance by the poor impression left by his involuntary internet presence. (I'm afraid I read this as deriving somehow from the novelist's own experience of celebrity, but since it carries on from ideas started in The Autograph Man that's probably not right.) "Googling" - which I associate with ogling and goggling and other sleazy voyeurisms - is a fitting name for this activity.

I suppose this sort of problem has been around exactly as long as celebrity culture, but the self-published internet rolls it out to a vastly greater number of people and makes it all a great deal more personal and intimate. And the live, comment-enabled, realtime self-published blogosphere makes it more personal and intimate still.

(A small digression: there are some times when a blogger is justified in wishing to say something about some public figure without running the risk of having that person show up themselves; for these occasions, a very clever Duck had the idea of using an acrostic to spell out the name & whatever is to be said about it. This has the extra benefit of quarantining the post from every species of Googler, confining its readership to those who were there already, so to speak.)

Searching for information on the net about an ordinary living person is not a psychologically simple event. To begin with, in order to search for a person you do need to know something about them in the first place - in many cases you already have the option of asking for information from the person directly, so the connotation of stealthiness is inbuilt from the start. Along with the weird passive-aggressive projections inherent in the scenario outlined above, there is also the stigma attached, in some quarters, to searching for yourself - autogoogling or the tellingly named vanity googling - though I think the widespread likening of this practice to "checking for lumps" is nearer to the mark. At the bottom of both points of view is the assumption that representations of the self on the internet are outside personal control in an ominous and negative way. (I like to think that this is basically not true and unless you independently make a major arsehole of yourself you're unlikely to be seriously impugned.)


Which is why it gives me a small shock and an irrational nasty feeling when my blog is visited by a public figure who I've mentioned by name, as happened yesterday - Sandy McCutcheon commented on a recent post (rant really) triggered by some nonsense from the pen of Gerard Henderson. I hadn't said anything nasty about Sandy (whose comment was perfectly chipper) so why the discomfort? Partly, I think, because I had offhandedly alluded to him as a sort of mediascape thing or object in the same modality as a newspaper or a magazine, then he unexpectedly showed up in real person mode, and it can't be altogether nice to read about yourself represented so flatly. I also imagine, perhaps wrongly, that most autogoogling is done defensively and with the expectation that some of the material turned up will be childish or malicious. (Edit: deleted a few lines, see comments re: why)

The main reason this kind of unforeseen visitor is startling, though, is that it's most uncanny, like a magic summons in a story: intone the Name and the genie will appear! M.R. James has several stories about unsuspecting antiquarians who call up ghosts and vampires by repeating incantations they don't know the meaning of; Rumpelstiltskin and other Name of the Helper folktales get at the same material. No matter how much you know about the workings of Technorati and so forth, it still feels like strong magic when the Call is Answered.

I intended to finish off this post with a small experiment in blog occultism: into a chunk of some nineteenth-century novel I meant to insert various people's names and wait to see how many of them would follow the trail of breadcrumbs. But having written all that about ghosts and spirits and so forth I'm actually a bit scared to mess with forces beyond my control!

Friday 17 March 2006

If you've been paying attention

If you've been dutifully paying this blog the sort of lavish, minutely detailed attention it really deserves - nay, demands - you will already know that my nose is slightly crooked (definite drift to the left) and I am correspondingly slightly hung up about things like having my picture taken.

Unless the picture is taken from the side, of course. Always happy to exhibit myself in profile, so when the distinguished Norm Geras invited me to strike some attitudes for inclusion in his portrait gallery, I eagerly complied. Thanks, Norm, that was a lot of fun.

Now, run along and read all about me. Some of this stuff will be on the test.

Wednesday 15 March 2006

Wednesday night procrastination

Dateline 9.34pm

I can't stay. Just dropped in to write that I'm very sorry for being such a bad blogger, I don't like it....but it could be worse, I could be liveblogging the Commonwealth Games, which are being opened right now, or foisting something similarly appalling upon you.

Meanwhile:



update: Defector to the Mother Country Ben H. supplies all yr liveblogging Stolenwealth Games (as heard about on the BBC) needs.

Update #2: and after I wrote that silly remark, naturally there is all kinds of very pleasurable Empire Games Live Blogging to be had round the traps, thoughtfully provided by expert fashioners of silk purses from sows' ears.

I'm still waiting, though, for a satisfactory explanation of the reasoning behind the colossal insensitivity of a flying tram disgorging literally millions of whimsical tram conductors, since all Melbourne's tram conductors were most unwhimsically sacked ten years ago....errr, shouldn't they have been ticket inspectors? & shouldn't a squad of them have bellyflopped en masse onto the Skateboarding Kiddy and banged his head against asphalt?

Saturday 11 March 2006

Saturday night procrastination

DATELINE 11:37pm

I'm writing a lecture about Emma for Tuesday morning. I have given this lecture before but I don't want to use the script again, because it's got a curse on it. So I'm re-doing the whole ten thousand words. This is the kind of behaviour that permits a person to take six years to write a phd, you just keep swapping words till one day you can't stand it any more and then you just print it out and hand it in. And then the next day you take out a subscription to World of Warcraft and set about raising an army of ruthless, savage, hairy slaughterers.

After the lecture I've got to finish the intro section of Adaptation: The Very Last Word On The Subject so as to give it to my supervisor on Friday. Our most recent conversation was upbeat and positive re: the overall vibe, but kind of weird too, because he suggested I eliminate all those sly little sentences beginning with things like "this dissertation argues" and "as I will show in chapter x", and just stop trying to argue or show anything in advance.

I'll let you know how that goes.

A few minutes ago I decided to clean up my work table in order to jumpstart a fresh wave of scholarlylearnedness. At one end of the table I stacked up all the books that I am not using just now but can't reshelve because I might need them any moment. (Aren't you glad I'm telling you this? I often think this blog is infinitely more boring than it was a year ago. How can you stand to read it.)



And then I took a photograph of the pile. This means it's Inane Behaviour Time & I won't be doing any more constructive work this session.

Today I squoze out about four & a half thousand words & I am feeling very Lucky Jim on Merrie England in consequence. But not as drunk. To make matters worse it seems there is something wrong with all the atom feeds in my bloglines subscriptions and I can't discover what's happening in the wide world of Blog.

Friday 10 March 2006

My cup runneth over, Miaow!

Zoe!

Thank you!!!!!!!

As a recovering ebay addict I've ripped open some mighty fine parcels in my day...but none to compare with what I found in the mailbox this evening. Oh, oh, oh, oh my. I didn't see it until 7 o'clock, and the postie comes around at about 11am, so the precious was poking out of the letterbox for eight whole hours in full vulnerable view of whoever happened to wander by...god I hate to think what might have happened to it.

This is what was inside the envelope:


YES! YES! yesyesyesyesyes. YES. "Cat Tales: A Family Album" *hyperventilates* featuring photographs by the legendary, world famous Harry Whittier Frees, unsung genius and grandfather of early bizarro costumed kitty photography.

Just look.








It's a kitten tug-of-war, yes, it really is. *dances*



I am a fluffball and I vote.



Hey, I recognise these two from somewhere...

hang on... can't place them..... oh. No. I was thinking of something else. Something entirely different.




Basil says thanks too.







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Pretty Girls in Killer Shoes

To plagiarise Lawrence: Do you read novelisations? If not why not, if you read other kinds of novel and other kinds of film paratext, e.g. screenplays? If you do read them, why? What does a novelisation supply that a movie lacks?

Are novelisations even readable?

Some time back I had a novelisation-fuelled lost weekend. I was trying to find out whether there might be some useful generic lesson therein about how writers deal, in practice, with translating a largely presentational narrative mode (showing) to a largely assertive narrative mode (telling). Reversing the standard novel-to-film flow of material might throw some light on the boring theoretical chestnut about plastic mental imagery versus rigid poured-concrete imagery, I hoped.


What I actually discovered was this: most novelisations really, really suck. More about that anon. First, here is a scene-setting slab of Seymour Chatman's classic law-laying-down statement on cross media compatibilities. Chatman is discussing a segment of Maupassant's "Une Partie de campagne" and its adaptation by Jean Renoir (the bit in question is about a teenager on a swing.)
The first narrative unit, "Mademoiselle Dufour was trying to swing herself" and so on, refers to an event. The second, "She was a pretty girl of about eighteen," seems on the face of it a straightforward description; but look at it from the point of view of a filmmaker. For one thing, "pretty" is not only descriptive but evaluative: one person's "pretty" may be another person's "beautiful" and still a third person's "plain." There will be interesting variations in the faces selected by directors across cultures and even across time periods: Mary Pickford might be just the face for the teens and twenties, while Tuesday Weld may best represent the sixties. Renoir chose the face of Sylvie Bataille. The interesting theoretical point to be made about evaluative descriptions in verbal narrative is that they can invoke visual elaboration in the reader's mind. If he or she requires one, each reader will provide just the mental image to suit his or her own notions of prettiness. But the best a film (or theater) director can hope for is some degree of consensus with the spectator's ideal of prettiness. Even with the luckiest choice, some patrons will mutter, "I didn't think she was pretty at all." A similar point could be made about age; Sylvie Bataille's Henriette seems closer to thirty than eighteen, but that may be because of the costume she's wearing. The more serious point is that visual appearance is only a rough sign of age. Again the author's task is easier: correct attribution can be insured simply by naming the attribute. The filmmaker, on the other hand, has to depend on the audience's agreement to the justice of the visual clues. (ftn1)



So when novelisers extrapolate prose narratives from film and tv texts, how do they insure the attributes they name are the "correct" ones - or at least the ones that the movie's audience might be expected to agree about?

In most of the examples I read, the short answer is that they don't. I looked at fourteen production line tie-ins, mainly attached to SF movies, action movies, and thrillers, and at seven other oddities, many written by a key creator of the relevant film (e.g., Jane Campion's own clunky novelisation of The Piano.) The overwhelming majority of writers seemed to have enough difficulty comprehending basic storylines without attending to those degrees of finessery. The novelisers had two aggravating habits: they filled in narrative blanks that worked better left blank, and the filler they used was inconsistent with the tone and texture of surrounding material. At least one contained interpolations that were obviously logically incompatible with plot material inherited from the movie. Not a good look for a thriller.

It is possible to novelise well, however. Arthur C. Clarke's postnatal expansion of 2001: A Space Odyssey seems to me to fit the bill - not overly explanatory, but not slavish or parasitic either. I expect many of you know this book and I'd like to have your opinions about it - along with your views on any other subject you care to expand upon. Besides the Clarke, though, there's one other novelisation I'm kind of besotted with.

The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards is Whit Stillman's own novelisation of the movie he wrote and directed. The conceit of the book is excellently complicated. It's supposed to be written by the "real" Jimmy Steinway, the original of the dimwitted, lecherous, cowardly Dancing Adman depicted in the film; Jimmy is working from the finished movie but filling in the "gaps" - characters' private thoughts, mostly - from his own patchy & prejudiced memory of events, twenty years previous, which the movie is supposed to be based upon. Castle Rock Entertainment hired Jimmy to write the tie-in when they couldn't get anyone else, we gather.

So, inasmuch as it's "written" by a dope who has a poor grasp of (a) what's really going on with the finer implications of the plot and (b) the concept of artistic economy, Stillman's book reproduces the key markers of the novelisation genre. Conclusion: rubbish novelisations exist to give form and meaning to parodies?? That and wedging the bottom of the bookcase. Anyhow, Stillman's book also contains the funniest smackdown of Chatman-style theorising I've ever come across.


Once, at a dinner during a return trip to New York I heard the novelist Tom Wolfe talk fascinatingly about what film could and could not do well in terms of narrative storytelling. I forget what he said film could do well, but as to what it could not do well, he cited as an example "shoes." In a novel, he said, if you wanted to discuss a character's shoes, you could describe not just the shoes' external appearance -- the film or TV ad spot equivalent might be a tight close-up -- but everything about them. Perhaps the shoes had been handmade at enormous expense at Lobb in London; maybe the character under study would not have known (or cared) about Lobb when he first came to New York from the South in the late 1950s, but over time and with increasing prosperity in a certain social milieu, perhaps he'd come to care about just that kind of thing. Was it to show off and keep up with his peers, or simply an enthusiasm for beautiful objects of craftsmanship, along with the resources to buy them?
....
I remembered this "shoes" story at the screening of the first rough cut of The Last Days of Disco when, after the opening title cards set the scene as "Manhattan -- The very early 1980s," the first striking pictorial image flashed onto the screen and was, again footwear: in this case, a tight shot of a woman's shoe-clad feet (Alice's) striding along the sidewalk, keeping pace with another woman wearing a pair of modish low black boots (of course, Charlotte's). Then the camera tilts up and we see the cool actresses attached to these shoes and boots. In the movie it's the music (Carol Douglas's early disco hit "Doctor's Orders"), the sound of the actresses' voices, and their stylish body language that strike one so strongly -- the shoes hardly register at all. It was another example of the enormous difference between a story told on film and one told in writing. (ftn2)




(ftn1): "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa.)" On Narrative ed. WJT Mitchell, Chicago 1981, p.127. Chatman was immediately (as in, before publication) challenged on the failure of his critique to engage with the passage's thorough-going scopophilia, as he acknowledges in a footnote to the essay. He seems not to have reconsidered his argument any further than to say we can't have these types of discussions unless we're capable of considering "pure aesthetics" separately from "ethics." I leave it to you to determine which he is considering here.

(ftn2): The Last Days of Disco (With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards) Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000, p.7-8.

x-posted to The Valve - comments are open there.

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Thursday 9 March 2006

It's got to dry up soon

The run of great movies in local cinemas, I mean. Can't remember the last time, outside of festival season, such a diverse bunch of mainstream movies of similarly solid quality were released so close together instead of spaced out at miserly intervals.

I spent the earlier part of the evening braving the local Legionnaire's Disease-infested multiplex in order to see A History of Violence, which is terrific - even better than I expected. What is it, though, with parents who bring two children under six to a film with a name like that, rated MA, featuring thirteen extremely violent deaths? Disturbing.

A History of Violence reminded me of Cache: they both involve a glibly successful bourgeois family which is torn to bits by the delayed backblast from a piece of past brutality, one that was not so much repressed as swallowed whole by willed amnesia. And in both movies I felt myself suddenly disoriented, more than once, by the feeling that I'd been imperceptibly drawn into reading events in a completely wrong register: am I watching a global-political allegory, or a claustrophobic family drama? Both movies are impossible to pin down to either mode; A History of Violence uses that instability to establish a continuum between domestic and national terror, suspicion, and revenge (something also attempted by Munich but with far less success.)

This is a David Cronenberg movie and thus the force that pummels the amnesiac nuclear family into full schizoid consciousness is not plain vanilla violence, ie men shooting and garrotting and knifing each other in the ordinary way, but sex/violence : the pair of random, terroristic murderers who initiate the torrent of killings have an obscurely sexual intimacy with each other, and whatever it is they are about to demand from the protagonist, it's clearly not money. Think Deliverance, think Death Wish. The high school bully employs the body language of a rapist. Brothers embrace and kiss and lean their foreheads tenderly together, five minutes later one shoots the other in the left temple. At the core of the movie is a mercilessly brutal coupling between the protagonist & his wife, who's just realised her husband is an impostor & their lives together have been founded on exactly nothing: it seemed to be an event that abruptly levelled the smoking ruins; it replaced the memory of an earlier sexual encounter, tenderly and genuinely erotic, but in retrospect so psychologically disconnected as to be unreal, masturbatory. It's not the dramatic high point of the film (feels wrong to say 'climax') but it seemed like the most important moment, to me. After it, the protagonist goes away, and ties up some loose ends pertaining to his murky past. When he returns to the family home, it feels like they should now be able to go on with their lives, only better, because they're free now of the illusions they laboured under before. That feeling fades really quickly. Without those illusions there's nothing, just four people sitting frozen around a dinner table.


It feels strange to say you had a good time at a film where people are always getting shot in the face, but enjoy it I did. Aside from the interest of the story, there is the consummate skill of the performances, camera work, and the score. There's also a very nice subliminal hum of byplay going on back & forth between this film and Psycho, which I have some embryonic ideas about, I don't fully grasp its purpose yet, but it certainly contributed to my pleasure in this movie.

Let's make this a rule, OK?

If you happen to see a person passed out in the street, call an ambulance.

Tuesday 7 March 2006

Hasty Jottings from Hater Central

Today's Crikey squatters newsletter alerted me to a charming screed by noted omniscient Gerard Henderson in today's SMH; Mr Henderson takes us through how "Howard haters" seal themselves inside a bubble of class-based leisured privilege & thus remain completely out of touch with what the Man In The Street really thinks. I'm afraid I take this kind of thing personally - though he does mention the university humanities department, so I don't have much choice - and it makes me absolutely fricking furious.

According to Mr Henderson (who has access to the Illuminati's extensive network of hidden surveillance cameras) this is how those of us who aren't celebrating a decade under Howard fritter away our days:

Arise and read the editorial and letters and opinion pages of The Age, Australia's most politically imbalanced broadsheet, judged on its coverage of the national security and industrial relations debates. Admire the cartoons of Michael Leunig, who has drawn Howard as a masked, kneecapping IRA terrorist. Look forward to next Saturday's Herald in the hope that, again, Alan Ramsey will describe the PM as a "duplicitous toad" and refer to him as "Little Johnny". Check The Australian to see if cartoonist Bill Leak still maintains "we are all little Johnnies now; smaller, meaner and less attractive".

Go to work in a university humanities department and talk to your Howard-hating colleagues. It's morning tea time. Go online and check out the most recent criticism of Howardism in John Menadue's New Matilda journal of (almost identical) opinion. Agree with editor Jose Borghino's view that Howard is the "hamster version" of Robert Menzies.

Break for lunch. Drop into an inner-city bookshop to check out the latest Howard-hating thesis on the Morry Schwartz-owned Black Inc's publishing list, including such titles as The Barren Years: John Howard and Australian Political Culture. Admire past copies of Black Inc's Quarterly Essay, featuring the likes of Mungo MacCallum and Guy Rundle. Buy the most recent issue of Schwartz's quaintly named journal The Monthly, featuring yet another (very long) article by Robert Manne bagging Howard.

Spend the afternoon on research. Order a DVD of Richard Connolly's taxpayer-subsidised film Three Dollars. Re-read Rayson's taxpayer-subsidised play Two Brothers. Prepare a workshop on how to establish socialism in at least one country.

Drive home listening to the ABC Radio National's Perspective program, followed by Sandy McCutcheon's Australia Talks Back. Tune into ABC TV's 7.30 Report to see which cabinet minister Kerry O'Brien is interrupting. Check out how alienated George Negus is on SBS TV. Go to sleep listening to Phillip Adams' Late Night Live program. Dream of Gough Whitlam, Howard Dean, George Galloway. Wake up - read The Age.


I just want to say three things about this pile of garbage.

One: the working day I narrated last Thursday is by no means out of the ordinary. It's the norm. I work those hours every day, and so does everyone else I know, and the demands of keeping up with marking, preparation, admin and teaching, and research, leaves no time for reading the newspaper, browsing bookshops, discussing anything but work with colleagues, or, dare I say it, frigging around with material like Three Dollars or Two Brothers, neither of which I would ever, ever, ever consider teaching: I may be a Howard h8tr, but I still know the difference between good and bad art.

Two: I'm not paid enough to afford to buy three daily newspapers, a subscription to New Matilda, The Monthly, a couple of Quarterly Essay titles, DVD-buying etc etc. My discretionary budget runs to one sandwich and one cup of coffee per day. It's a trivial point perhaps but the portrait of the (brulee-chomping?) soy-latte-swilling lefty painted here is also the slyly constructed portrait of someone who's an addicted, indulgent consumer of media that does nothing but reinforce his or her own point of view, all lavishly funded by the taxpayer. A complete fantasy, and a complete fiction.

Three: One partial benefit from being seriously run off my feet is that I haven't actually suffered too much from having to partake of the current round of ten year anniversary paroxysms of delight. (I did enjoy the new and bitter twisted smirk sported by Peter Costello on the few occasions I've caught sight of him on the telly though.) The one bit of national political news that really penetrated my humanities department fog of late was the story about the settlement the Department of Immigration made last week with the child Shayan Badraie after he developed post-traumatic stress disorder while detained at Villawood. Australia, which I continue to hope can really be an honest, decent, kindly nation, utterly failed this child, and how many other vulnerable people besides? And it happened, and perhaps continues to happen, under Howard's leadership. Sorry, what is it we're meant to be celebrating again?

Radio National is nice and all, but I don't need no Sandy McCutcheon to provoke me into a frenzy of despair. I wish it were otherwise.

cross posted to Larvatus Prodeo

Saturday 4 March 2006

A version of Pastoral

Here's a sketch by S.T. Gill - from the 1850s or thereabouts - which instantly reminded me of Brokeback Mountain.

Merry merry king of the bush is he

I have all the windows open while the morning is still cool, and a few minutes ago I heard kookaburras chuckling to each other out in the trees outside. The usual avian crowd consists of mynahs and sparrows, magpies, butcher birds, cockies, galahs, tits and lorikeets, plus an occasional tawny frogmouth, but I've never seen or heard a kookaburra here before. I hurried outside and well, there they were. The butcher birds here are highly territorial and moved them on before I could take a picture. But it was great to see them looking so insouciant and perky right in the middle of suburbia.

These are the trees the birds come for:



All the birds really seem to like this one, which is quite dead and will have to come down sooner or later before it falls on somebody.



I'm in a good mood this morning, partly because I just read a really cranky review of a set of stupid books about adaptation studies. But also because I managed to make it through week one without falling over.

Thursday 2 March 2006

My Day! Starring Cat! + Many Foods!

6.03am: Arise from my jasmine-strewn fairy couch, rub eyes, dimly recollect awful dream about contracting Legionnaire's disease.

6.10am: Take shower under strict feline supervision. Well somebody has to make absolutely certain all the water goes down the plug hole.



6.28am: Brekky. I can only manage 1/3 of a cup of coffee at this hour of the day. At least the sun's up now.
After breakfast I unpack my packed-up laptop and briefly connect to the internet in order to download three or four more pictures to be patched into a slideshow for later on. Oh all right and to quickly log into bloglines & see what happened in the Northern Hemisphere while I was snoring.



7am: Get in the taxi I booked the night before.

7.14am: Western Ring Road, gateway to all the excitement and cosmopolitanism of the world's most liveable city.



7.25am: Tullamarine. The morning light always looks extra full of promise and hopefulness in the vicinity of airports.



7.40am: Gate 25.



I am early anyway because I try to get here before the morning rush on the roads; but a voice on the tannoy says I'm going to have to wait an extra twenty minutes because "the engineers aren't quite sure just yet exactly what the problem is." So I get out my laptop. Am unable to resist the pop-up invitation to connect to the airport wireless network, so pay $5 for the privilege of fifteen minutes email-checking and teeth-grindingly slow blogsurfing. Next time I'll Just Say No, and look out the windows at the pretty, elusive-problem-ridden airplanes instead.


8.35am: Plane takes off twenty minutes late. Never mind. I look out the window at the earth and the sky.



8.50am: Qantas person brings me my second breakfast. It is like a sugar-embalmed version of breakfast #1, but I don't immediately notice this as I'm trying to explain that I don't require extensive plastic cutlery or a table mat or a napkin in order to eat a muesli bar.



But after protracted negotiations it seems that I won't be given coffee unless I put the napkin-thing on my little table. So I leave it there but don't touch it. All the same when they come back later to clear up the untouched napkin contraption goes into the rubbish.

Is it actually possible to travel on this airline without getting drawn into some kind of silent but deadly tactical battle with the cabin staff. Note absence of question mark at end of previous sentence.

9.35am: Welcome to Mildura, hurray!



I get in another taxi.

9.55am: Arrive at the Grove of Academe, hurray!



I try to avoid making identifiable photographs of people who are minding their own business, so many of these pictures are underpopulated - but this is really how the Mildura campus of my university looks much of the time when I'm around. It's too hot outside to stand about, I guess is part of the reason.


10.10am: I have coffee with the charming campus Librarian and a quick look at some of the library's local history resources, which are modest but not catastrophically limited. Phew.

11am: Meet my first year tutorial group. There are thirty-four people in this class. I knew that before but I hadn't pictured quite how many people that actually is. In midst of minor freakout I completely forget all previously formed resolutions about doing lots of small group & pyramid activities and doing them from the very beginning. Consequently I very soon find myself actually standing at the front of the room writing on the board. Not cool! Very, very far from cool. Must have more backbone next time.

(Now seems like a good moment to say that any student who is kind enough to wonder about my life outside our classes, & who ends up googling their way to this blog, is very welcome here, and I hope you will come back & visit again whenever you feel like it.)

1pm: All-important midday meal was partaken of in the salubrious surroundings of the Sunraysia Institute of TAFE's cafeteria which styles itself "Cafe Delice". I had too many handouts and things to carry this time, but normally I would bring lunch from home, since there's nowhere within walking distance that sells food but this place, and the offerings seem mainly designed to appeal to the palates of teenage apprentices like the ones in the corner of this picture. Doesn't matter how early in the day you go in they will be there in their overalls eating deep fried yellow material and drinking Big Ms.



I think you want to see a closeup of my own very special lunch.



Out of consideration for the tender feelings of the afternoon class I fished the onion chunks out of my salad.

1.45pm: sure is hot outside. Palm trees look good but they don't give too much shade.



2pm: Do my best to teach about The Bush to a dozen 2nd & 3rd year people who live either in, or near, it. I can't lose the irony of this. One thing we agree on: what qualifies as bush has everything to do with where you're standing. I think they see it as a more derogatory description than I do. This was the fun part of my day and I felt kind of deflated when they all went off to their next class.



Empty seminar room, you tear at my heart! A bit.

4pm: I'm a bit sick of airconditioning and being socially ept so I go sit under a tree outside and read Tracks by Robyn Davidson.



4.45pm: Another cab back to the airport. It is driven by the Mildura taxi driver who knows everything there is to know about grapes and the cultivation, growing, harvesting, and selling of grapes. I, too, am rapidly increasing the store of my knowledge about these noble fruits.

4.57pm: Another delayed plane so I wait at the airport for a long time.



5.40pm: Plane finally leaves. There are only six passengers.





I love those round things, but what the hell are they? It is a dumb citified question which I am too afraid to ask of any person who might know the answer.

6.50pm: Plane lands, kinda bumpily, at Tullamarine.


7.03pm: Back here again. Sigh. By now I am rather a wilted little blossom.



Fortunately taxi driver #4 is comfortable with silence.


7.49pm: Cat acts pleased to see me.




8.20pm: Veggie pizza at snobby pizza place. Snobby for Lower Plenty anyhow.



9.40pm: The ad always used to claim that it's hard to have a Gaytime on your own. What drugs were they on? It's not something I've ever had the slightest bit of difficulty with.



There is nothing left to do so now I'm going to sleep.