Shut

Guv here.

On crying

I hate crying. Not only am I one of those people unable to cry prettily (red-eyed, blotchy etc) but it doesn't even help, as it is popularly supposed to do; on the contrary, it makes me feel exhausted, headachy and stupid. One of my favourite 19th century characters (he was a real person), one Reverend J. Haweis, is quoted somewhere as saying -- to me quite unforgettably, so I don't need to look it up -- 'A good play on the piano has not infrequently taken the place of a good cry upstairs.' Give me a good play on the piano any day.

Here in the second half of my fifties I'm horrified to find that if anything I cry more instead of less. I remind myself more and more of Waker, the emotional twin in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters -- 'Tell Waker it looks like rain and his eyes all fill up.'

It never takes much, and the minute it starts I feel split in two as neatly as an apple, with one half blubbing away and the other, cool and scornful, observing this intemperate creature and thinking Oh for God's sake, what is it this time? It's usually not about 'being upset', more something that seems both glancing and visceral, like being accidentally knifed by someone who wasn't even aiming for you. It reminds me, in fact, of that great line of Dorothy Dunnett's: 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

It is indeed most often something to do with either music or animals, which brings me to my real point, which is that one of the reasons I'll feel very pleased to have finished this book about Adelaide is that I might stop crying so much; not only is the writing of it an unexpectedly emotional exercise, I think probably closely akin to a form of auto-psychoanalysis, but in the reading for it (yes, I'm almost finished, but one keeps finding new things while checking the old things), I keep coming across stuff that gets me going, like the item about the War Horse Memorial in Simon Cameron's lovely little book about Adelaide's statues, Silent Witnesses.

It's a granite horse trough inscribed WAR HORSE MEMORIAL 1914-1918. Not an actual horse to be seen. On the contrary, what it evokes is the poignant absence of horses. It hasn't always; it was originally situated in Victoria Square and connected to the water mains for the use of the working horses of the Central Market. The memorial was moved to its present site on the south-east corner of North and East Terraces, next to the Light Horse Memorial obelisk, in 1964 when Victoria Square was redesigned. It's got an inscription on it from the Book of Job.

He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength. He goeth on to meet the armed men, he mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted, neither turneth his back from the sword.

Print media watch (online edition)

What, offhand, would you say was the subliminal message behind this conjunction of text, image and caption?

I want to know who chose that photo to illustrate that story. I want to know why he (or she) (hah) chose it, and from how many available images. And I want to know how many people it got past to make it online, and I want to know who they were, too.

And then I want to know how many of these people have wives, mothers, sisters, girlfriends or daughters, and I want to know how they'd feel if one of these women were sexually assaulted by a mob, and if there were a press story about it, and if that press story were accompanied by the most revealing photo of the victim that could possibly be found.

And if anyone says 'Oh they're just doing their job to sell their product,' I will remind that person of the phrase 'Nuremberg defence'.

UPDATE: The photograph originally used to illustrate the article to which I've linked has now been removed. It was a large photograph of the journalist from the waist up, looking particularly glamorous in a white evening dress that showed a great deal of tanned cleavage. I assume the Age got a lot of flak about it. If so, good.

South Australian Labor: same old same old

Memo to Premier Mike Rann and the Labor Party of South Australia:

1) If you want things to change, you have to change things.

2) Slightly more than half the voters of South Australia are women. Only slightly, but in the two-party preferred system, 'slightly' might as well be the whole enchilada.

In today's news that the SA Treasurer and Deputy Premier Kevin Foley has resigned after a series of unfortunate incidents, here in alphabetical order are the names of those affected by these changes: those who have been promoted, or reshuffled, or are struggling to hang on to their current portfolios and positions.

Bernie
Jack
Jay
John
Kevin
Michael
Mike
Paul
Tom

This situation didn't happen overnight. Much of it is the behind-the-scenes doing of a second Tom, whose attitude to women is well known. And while the recruiting of one token high-profile woman (as part of a wider strategy of nobbling charismatic Adelaide outliers so they'll be inside the tent) and then keeping her in cotton wool may not have worked out so well, that's no reason not to have another go.

I could understand it if, in the wake of the scandal last year over the Premier's long-ago fling with a pneumatic blonde waitress whose husband subsequently, at a public dinner, beat him about the head and shoulders with a rolled-up wine magazine (and oh my, that's a pure Adelaide detail I'll never get sick of), Rann had decided to simply cut his losses with women voters, knowing that's ground he will never make up. But hey, if ever there were an occasion for whipping up a bumper sticker saying I HAVE A VAGINA, AND I VOTE, now would be the time. Except that I'm sure it's been done.

Lots of luck in 2014, dudes.

At a what now?

A few posts back I got taken to task by a commenter for questioning the meaning of pronouncements by a Frenchwoman in full niqab. This commenter, like several others, mistook my questioning of her rationale and my feminist difficulties with the idea of 'protecting' women (from what? And whose responsibility is it that they should require protecting? Methinks it's not the women who need swaddling and muffling) for an attack on Islam. I can sort of see where this misreading is coming from, but it's fuzzy thinking at its worst and paranoia to boot.

So let me repeat: I am not anti-Islam as such; I am anti-sexist and anti-patriarchy. And that goes just as much for Christianity. So just to prove that one is an equal-opportunity organised-religion-basher, and heartened by the bracing opinions on the subject expressed by Billy Connolly, whom I saw last night and will post about, much more cheerfully, in a minute, here's something from this morning's news that I find utterly dismaying.

Following closely the faster-than-expected recovery of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords from the experience of being shot in the head by a lunatic (when was the last time you heard, BTW, of a woman shooting someone in the head, apart from those who shoot partners who have been assaulting, torturing and bashing them for decades?), I saw a headline this morning about her, or rather her husband, and clicked on it to read more.

Seems the astronaut husband has decided to go on his planned mission with the next space shuttle, having been reassured that his wife is progressing well and is in good medical hands. And fair do's, I get that part just fine. If I were an astronaut and I'd been at my injured husband's bedside for weeks and weeks and he was getting better every day and being well looked after then I would probably go back into space as well (and imagine, if you will, the opprobrious epithets that a wife would cop from the conservative press for that). No, here's the bit that had me reaching for the bucket:

"Every day, she gets a little bit better and the neurosurgeons and neurologists tell me that's a great sign, the slope of that curve is very important," Mr Kelly said at a national prayer breakfast in Washington.

A national prayer breakfast? In Washington?

It gets worse. Although the phrase is not capitalised in the article, it occurred to me that it might not be any old national prayer breakfast but some sort of particular one. So I googled it.

If you look at the dates you'll see that that's the one all right, and you'll also note that this cute little event began at the height of McCarthyist paranoia, the year the Rosenbergs were executed and the year before J. Robert Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance.

You'll also note that one of the purported purposes (sorry) of this event is for attendees to 'meet Jesus man to man'. Seems to me that leaves the ladiez free to point and mock.

Frankly I don't know why Islam bothers the Americans so much. They seem hell-bent on erasing the separation of church and state quite as thoroughly as even the most evangelical Islamic fundamentalist.

Let's hear it for Australia and the female atheist in charge.

Running away from the Beast

This is a brief, spontaneous and miscellaneous post written only because I have just noticed that the number of posts here is currently 666, or will be until I hit POST.

While I'm here, however, I'd just like to prove that the Beast is indeed present, for the moment, by saying that Mark Latham's venomous little spray about the Prime Minister not being a mother, to be found in the current Spectator, is pathetic; that Tony 'Dr No' Abbott's attempt to shift the blame for his frightfully timed gaffe about raising money for a campaign to destroy the flood levy is an added layer of disgracefulness; that the people slagging Ian Thorpe for doing what he does best and wanting to be paid for it are almost certainly men with modest incomes and no athletic ability who don't have the capacity to be happy with that and who are living in some big plastic bubble of pure envy; and that the next person who says to me cheerfully 'Oh, but you work well under pressure' or 'Don't worry, it'll all be wonderful' is going to get a smack upside the head.

And as TC Yasi approaches the North Queensland coast, the man who almost became our Prime Minister speaks

And this is what he has to say.

Observe the precision of his judgement, and the exquisite subtlety of his timing.

Four-fifths of the way there

Longtime readers might remember this post of four years ago, in which Papa Cat turned 80 and said, having blown out his candles, 'Right, now I'm striking out for 85.'

At 8 this morning, knowing him to be an habitual early riser, I decided it wasn't too early to ring him and sing Happy Birthday. He had already had breakfast, read the paper, showered and shaved, done two loads of washing and watered 'what's left of my little garden in the heat', and was now settled down to watch the news on breakfast TV with the cat.

It was sad, he said, about the beans and tomatoes that he'd lost when they fried in the 40 degree heat the day before yesterday before he'd thought to put some shade cloth over them. 'But then I thought about those poor bastards in Queensland, and that put it in perspective.'

Yes, that will help a lot

Julie Bishop was on the radio last night blithering about how the government, which has chartered a special Qantas flight out of Cairo for stranded Australians, wasn't doing enough and was 'too slow' to react. I would have found this marginally less irritating if I thought either she or her leader could organise themselves out of a paper bag, much less hundreds of countrymen out of Cairo.

Whenever anyone says anything like this there's always a chorus of 'Oh but the job of the Opposition is to oppose!' Is it? Is it really? Is that its only job? And if it is, what kind of idiotic half-arsed world are we living in, where all society-regulating structures are oppositional and adversarial (the justice system gives me the heebs in this respect as well) and that is deemed only good and right? Is it really the Opposition's job to obstruct and whinge and quibble about every single thing a government tries to do, even something at this level of detail and transience? If they're going to oppose, why don't they oppose, say, the choice of budget sacrifices to the levee levy (no argument from me on the levy as such), nearly all of which seem to be to do with climate ch-- Oh, wait.

Kevin Rudd's in the paper (I wonder when we'll stop saying 'the paper' about something we read online)  this morning defending the government's actions on Cairo. Talking to the media about this stuff in response to Bishop's self-righteous whingeing took up time he could have spent doing something actually useful, and I bet nobody's more aware of this than Rudd himself.

Working

Sometimes if you're lucky there's a moment, when you're working on a first draft, trying to turn it into a second draft, that comes when you're slogging away at micro-level and suddenly, without warning, you see clearly and exactly what needs to be done at macro ditto.

It's not quite as heady as the moment when you look at a paragraph you've just finished writing and think Holy schlamoly, where did that come from. But it's pretty good.

Shoot me now

From today's Crikey:

'Iran's cover up. Baroness Ashton, the EU Foreign Minister, has been given a more modest neckline in Iranian newspaper coverage of the talks in Turkey over Iran's nuclear program. Who said that what women politicians wear does not matter?'

Taking the veil

This is Crikey's Video of the Day today.



As one of the many feminists around the world bedevilled by the question of Islamic dress codes for women, I was hoping, really hoping, that this woman was going to explain the rationale of wearing the whole enchilada in a way that I could understand and sympathise with. Because I've read a number of pieces by Moslem women on this subject and frankly none of them have made a lot of sense to me.

Most of this woman's arguments about why the French ban is wrong do carry some weight. But all she says by way of actual explanation of the wearing of the garment is that she wears the niqab 'because of my spirituality towards God'. Which means nothing to me. 'Spirituality' yes, no argument from me. Even 'God', yes, I at least get the idea. But it's the word 'because' that defeats me. How is one's spirituality towards God expressed by hiding one's body, hair and face, which one presumes she believes God to have made? Does anyone know?

A little faffing around online reveals among other things that the face veil is a pre-Islamic garment worn in the desert to keep the flying sand out of one's eyes (on a literal if presumably not a metaphorical level). Which is the kind of explanation that does make sense. But you have to wonder how often there's call to keep the flying sand out of one's eyes in France -- again, on a literal if not a metaphorical level; France has quite a lot of metaphorical flying sand when it comes to putting pressure on women about their looks or pestering them sexually in public, and two reasons often given for wearing any level of hijab are to prevent unwanted attentions from men and to be able to stop fretting about how you'll be judged for the new wrinkle in your forehead or the fact that you've put on a few kilos.

Goddess knows both of those things make perfect sense to me.  What I want to know is why it should be held the woman's responsibility to prevent them. And why you can't express your spirituality, whether towards God or not, just as easily by singing a madrigal or growing a tomato or cooking a meal for people you love.

You can do a feminist reading of anything

I just followed a link someone had put up on Facebook to watch the original trailer of Antonioni's The Passenger, a movie I've always loved.

Here's a quotation from the voice-over: 'The brilliance of Jack Nicholson; the beauty of Maria Schneider; the vision of Antonioni.'

That movie came out in 1976.

Discuss.

(Trollitude will be ruthlessly excised.)

JAN 25: UPDATE

Bits

are all I'm good for at the moment.

* Am up sharp pointy end of Adelaide book, lurching from one paragraph to the next as deadline looms. One's student days come back to one at times like this: have vivid memory of sitting on my bedroom floor in 1971 crying over Philosophy 1 essay requiring all-nighter (FAIL) and of the four other long-essay all-nighters -- on Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, American Southern Gothic, medieval church music and psycholinguistics (not together, though it's an intriguing interdisciplinary proposition), and all the all-nighters writing lectures over the years, and wondering why the bod won't do that any more, just because it's in its late 50s and I don't feed it properly or give it enough sleep and exercise. Text yesterday from younger sister: 'Don't make yourself sick. Better the wrath of your publisher than the wrath of Mother Nature.'

* Wonderful piece by John Birmingham on what the Brisbane floods are telling us about human nature here.

Delicate, porcelain-skinned little vegan girls in bonnets with flowers muscled their way into the thickest, filthiest torrents of river mud next to bogan footballers, Army engineers, and tough-looking tattooed lesbians. This being West End there were travellers, too. Three French backpackers somehow managing to make their accumulated filth look stylish. A couple of Americans who'd come to Australia to surf and instead found themselves running wheelbarrows of grey, stinking ooze down to the water's edge from where it had come.

Gorgeous.

* New post at Read, Think, Write on second-guessing the publication process if you're interested.

* Garden spider that spins its gorgeous orb directly across path from front gate to verandah every non-wet and non-windy night is twice the size it was on Christmas Day when my friend R came to dinner and as she was leaving I had to take the torch out to show her why she needed to avoid the path and jump off the edge of the verandah in order to get to her car. Goddess knows I too have put on a kilo or so since Christmas but doubling in size in less than a month is awesome. I know for a fact that the insect pickings in that part of the garden are pretty good; the other night the web snared an entire moth. (No doubt the spider equivalent of a tub of Sara Lee Irish Cream and no I can't believe I bought it either. I'm as shocked as you are.) It's all a bit red in tooth and claw out there.

* Speaking of claws, the tortoiseshells are well, as is Papa Cat, who will be 84 on Feb 1. I'm told that for the birthday dinner we're having Chinese, which my adventurous ma taught him to like at the Silver Dragon Restaurant in Rundle St, Adelaide, circa 1955. Sadly she is now long gone, but his pleasure in Chinese food lives on.

Queensland: an ethics question

In a disaster situation involving both chaos and shortages, which is worse: looting, or charging ten bucks for a loaf of bread?

Why?

Why people have cats: an occasional series

I'm just starting to recover from a very nasty little episode a few hours ago that could have been any one of the following: (a) food poisoning, (b) caffeine poisoning, (c) codeine poisoning, (d) less than five hours' sleep, (e) a three-way dose of stress, or (f) (the most likely diagnosis) all of the above.

Anyway, as I lay there semi-conscious on my bed of pain, grateful that the room spins seemed to be getting slower, the neck knots looser and the head pain gradually less, I felt a thump and heard a 'Prrrrt?' as the bossy tortoiseshell hit the bed, and a few seconds later my head was enveloped in soft warm fur and my fevered brow was being rhythmically soothed by a rough and raspy tongue. Wash wash wash wash wash.

It really did help quite a lot.

Be Prepared

In the wake of assorted local, national and international natural disasters last summer, I was sufficiently freaked out to pack a small emergency kit. I think I was thinking mainly of unforeseen disruptions to infrastructure -- power, water, maybe roads somehow; what was mainly on my mind was fire.

Whatever it was, I assembled a zip-up carry-bag of the following: large plastic bottle of water, small first-aid kit, assorted energy bars and little packs of trail mix, tissues, wet wipes, small kit of travel-sized toiletries, candles, matches and a torch (and battery).

Somewhat to my surprise, family and friends were unanimous in their approval; obvs I'm not the only nervous Nellie in town. And after spending yesterday and today glued to the intertubes, I'm glad I've got that kit sitting there and will update it when I get a minute to spare. There are some things I plan to add: photocopies of essential documents (including prescriptions and cat vaccination certificates; nobody will board them without), two favourite novels, spare reading glasses and a large box of Nurofen Plus. A very large box.

In which Tony Abbott uses the bereaved, the unhoused and the traumatised for political gain

You've got to hand it to him though; he's 100% consistent. One relied upon him to make some response of this calilbre, and one has not been disappointed.

I have been giving some thought to Abbott's bizarre attitude to the NBN. I think it's to do with egocentricity and solipsism: with believing that if you personally don't understand something, then it can't possibly be important or true.

I am a woman, not a test mouse!

Don't listen to this at work unless it's all right for you to be LOLing at your desk.

Points will be deducted if your answer is based on neither faith nor prejudice

Today the national broadcaster makes its contribution to the ever-growing pile of human ignorance and stupidity by encouraging the populace in the belief that there is no difference between opinion and fact, and furthermore that everyone's opinion has the same value and anyone who says it doesn't is one of those horrid inner-city tertiary-educated latte-sipping leets. I give you the ABC's article on the mysterious mass bird deaths occurring around the world, complete with comments thread: 'What do you think killed the birds?'

It only took about two seconds for someone to turn up and say it was God's wrath, too, though this chap gets shot down in flames in short order and just as well. Fortunately quite a lot of the commenters aren't buying it, in fact, as you'll see. Suggestions as to the bird death cause include 'Stephen King' and 'Lord Voldemort'.

And look on the bright side: at least it wasn't structured as a quiz with opinion options A-D, or, worse, A-B, like those pernicious things all the MSM sites run from time to time that go 'Do you think [insert name of person involved in sub judice case here, totally inappropriately, destructively and quite possibly illegally] is guilty? YES/NO.'

Every time a mainstream media site asks one of these cunningly phrased yet inane questions the populace gets just that little bit more confused about the nature of truth and just that little bit dumber. What do you think blood is made of? What do you think NaCl means? Who, in your opinion, is the Prime Minister? What do you believe two and two adds up to? What colour do you think the sky is? Do you think it's turtles  all the way down?