Dialogue line of the day

'Waiter, can we have another bottle of Pinot Grigio? Things have taken a turn for the worse here.'

-- Maeve Binchy

Hard to believe now

And as if the subject of the previous post were not enough gobsmackery from the headlines for one day, here's another: Rolf Harris telling Aboriginal people they need to get over themselves. The context: his attempts, decent in themselves if largely failed, to erase from recordings the verse of 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' that goes 'Let me Abos go loose, Bruce, let me Abos go loose / They're of no further use, Bruce, so let me Abos go loose.'

I am old enough to remember when this was universally regarded as funny. By 'universally' I mean, of course, 'by white Australians'. (Compare and contrast with Barry Humphries' brilliant and savage line about the word 'Moomba': 'It's an Aboriginal word for "Let's get together and have fun". They didn't need it any more.') The real point of even mentioning this unpleasant little lyrics-based episode in Australia's cultural history is to express my admiration for the headline on this item, the best headline I've seen for quite a while, courtesy of some inspired sub at the Sydney Morning Herald: Cut the Bigoted Verse, Perce.

Even so, it was quite a contrast to the event I was at last night: a brilliant lecture on 'The Many Futures of Our Digital Lives' by Adelaide's newest Thinker in Residence, anthropologist Genevieve Bell. The event began with a Welcome to Country by Kaurna elder Auntie Josie Agius, who after demonstrating her expertise in bending the mics down to her diminutive level, lifted her head and ringingly addressed the audience in Language. We were smack in the middle of Kaurna land and you could practically see the shimmering electric line connecting the words to the ground.

Throw out those nanna pants or take the consequences, bitch

Check it out.

As they sometimes say over at Hoyden About Town: I have no words.

Actually I do have a few words. The hilarious line being taken by this man's lawyer is a defence based on the concept of diminished responsibility. That's the one that goes 'Well of course I raped, strangled and dismembered her, I'd had 19 Tequila Slammers, so it wasn't my fault.' It's the kind of thing that makes you think they haven't yet quite ironed out all the bugs in the judicial system.

I see from the last paragraph under the heading 'Discussion' in this handy Wikipedia entry that there's an urban legend regarding the alleged precedent for the line of defence being used in the nanna pants case: it's a kind of reverse version of the 'Twinkie Defense'.

I don't understand it, therefore it must be rubbish

Here's a little something for the foam-flecked anti-post-modernist brigade.

Post post

There's a lively discussion going on at Larvatus Prodeo about the term 'postmodernism', which in spite of its derailment in various directions by a handful of usual suspects is galloping along vigorously and providing some thought-provoking ideas and information.

For example: for someone like me whose (fairly limited) exposure to the work of French feminist cultural critic Luce Irigaray has been strictly within the context of feminist psychoanalytic theory, it's been an eye-opener to discover her being denounced under the banner of postmodernism -- not least because both feminism and psychoanalysis are even more irresistible targets for Loud Denunciation from the anti-intellectual brigade than postmodernism itself.

It all began when The Australian, fearlessly pursuing an agenda it has had for some time, published yet another rant about postmodernism by someone who clearly hadn't bothered to do his own research about what it actually is. (This surprised me, actually, as I know the culprit a bit from way back and he is no fool -- although, thinking about it, his form has always been to spray first and negotiate later, which is how I first encountered him, in an intemperate letter to the editor of Australian Book Review, who was, at the time, moi.)

What I wish people would do (apart from the reading. Do the reading) in these debates is remember what, in these sorts of constructions, the prefix 'post' actually means. It doesn't mean 'after the end of'. It means 'in the wake of', as in Post-Impressionism: a development that could not possibly have taken place without being based on the thing it names. The concept of post-feminism, for example, makes no sense at all unless you see it as a consequence and development of feminism. 'Post-' implicitly attempts to answer the question 'What now?'

All of which is to say that I think people ought to pass a test and get a licence before they're allowed to talk about postmodernism at all. And one of the things you'd have to do to pass the test would be to demonstrate some knowledge and understanding of modernism. Without which, etc.

An important anniversary

When I was seventeen it seemed that most Australian adults were smokers, or at least most of the ones I knew. Both of my parents smoked and had since they were teenagers in uniform. And like my friend J, I took it up myself in the November of 1970 when we were studying for our matric oh all right Year 12 exams, in my case because it was a preferable alternative to the absent-minded stress-induced scarfing up of biscuits while I tried without much success to get cell division, irregular French verbs, the battle of Thermopylae and the European revolutions of 1848 straight in my head.

I became a seriously dedicated smoker and remained that way for nearly two decades, except for one interlude in 1983-4 when I gave up in order to spare the person I was living with at the time.

What with all the excitement and fanfare and brouhaha of the federal election this time last year, I clean forgot to notice the anniversary of a day that changed, and very likely saved, my life. And this year it's even more significant than it was last year. Because as of approximately 3.30 am tomorrow morning (I was sitting up at the kitchen table drinking and fighting with someone about the SA election of November 25 1989, which Labor controversially won by a shred of a whisker), which was the last time I smoked a cigarette, I will have been a non-smoker for longer than I was a smoker.

Actually I'm not a non-smoker. I am a recovering smoker.

Hard-rubbish Wombles please note

You are welcome to anything in the pile. If I wanted it, it would still be in the house or shed, not out on the nature strip.

HOWEVER.

If I chuck stuff out, it is because the stuff is no longer viable. Anything I don't want that is still usable goes to the Red Cross or the Salvos. So:

-- That office chair is broken. If you sit on it, it will immediately tip you out sideways on your backside, if not somewhere less well padded.

-- All those plastic garden pots are brittle and cracked.

-- After three globally warmed summers in the otherwise uncooled living room, that portable evaporative air conditioner/fan whatnot now emits a foul stench when in use. Something to do with Adelaide water. Intensive inner cleaning and a replacement straw insulation thingy will not help.

As I say, take whatever you like. But please, please, re-stack what's left neatly and don't leave rubbish scattered all over the nature strip.

And finally: most of this stuff has been in the shed, which harbours a fascinating array of insect life. Sometimes, some of said life is black and pointy with a big red stripe. Just so you know.

With apologies to Oscar Wilde

To lose one pair of prescription sunglasses, Ms Cat, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

On being overwhelmed

They say if the task in front of you looks too big to tackle then you should break it down into smaller components and then do them in an orderly fashion one by one. The weakness of this method is that if you break it down into manageably small units then you will almost certainly look at the number of small units and then get overwhelmed by that.

Using this method I now have a list (in order of urgency) that says I have to finish all these things by the time I go to bed tonight:

Pages to read (in 3 different books/theses): 360

Reports and/or reviews (anything from 180 to 400 words) to write: 8

Cats to feed and clean up after: 2

Urgent financial issues to chase up: 3

Machinefuls of laundry to wash and dry: 3

Sinkfuls of dishes to wash, dry and put away: 1

Book covers to scan, crop and convert to emails: 4

Stacks of hard rubbish to gather from various places around the house and yard and organise neatly out on the nature strip for the non-negotiable early morning collection date, after having made sure nothing is longer than 2 metres and having put all small objects in boxes and removed all visible rusty nails and anything else with which recyclers official and unofficial could hurt themselves: 1

Clinton (H.) set for Secretary of State

Read all about it (and check out the fantastic photo) here.

That should keep the right-wing bloggers and the Oz's op edders happily Loudly Denouncing for weeks.

Tragicomic, bittersweet and other internal contradictions

When British then-schoolboy Adrian Mole first saw the light of day he was fourteen thirteen and three-quarters. Over the years his creator Sue Townsend has updated us on his tragicomic condition and for a while there it was more tragi than comic. But the current offering, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001, is making me laugh a lot. Adrian is 33 (the age Jesus was when he died, something Adrian is happy to point out) and is living as a single father with his two sons: Glenn Bott-Mole, son of Sharon Bott, and William Mole, son of Adrian's Nigerian ex-wife JoJo.

In spite of Adrian's lifelong literary ambitions it's clear to everyone (except Adrian) that his son Glenn at fourteen is considerably more gifted than he, being able among other things to write verse that scans and rhymes. Witness the personal message in his Mother's Day card to Sharon, who now suffers from depression (as you would):

Best wishes on your special day
I love you more than words can say
You're always miserable and sad
And that is why I live with Dad.

LOLcat of the week

Is this family working?

During the lead story on tonight's 7.30 Report about the extensive recent storm damage in south-east Queensland and the high likelihood of more, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer both took advantage of the mics under their noses to say the word 'families' as often as possible, as in 'providing help for families'.

Any visitor to these shores idly watching the teeve in his or her hotel room could be excused for thinking that the single and the childless were expected to sod off and fix their own roofs, re-wire their own houses and clean up all the tree branches and sinister floating typhoid-harbouring garbage themselves. The homeless, of course, are not burdened with roofs and therefore require no attention either.

Memory

Caught by surprise tonight, when without warning the opening chords of 'Shelter From the Storm' came on the teeve as part of the drama of the drama.

I don't know what it is about the violence with which music retrieves memory, but I suppose we did play Blood on the Tracks all through the summer of 1975-76, till it wore out (we're talking vinyl here) and I could probably still sing every song for you all the way through. But just those first few bars were enough to bring down a flood of remembrance: white silk dress too much whisky lying on the seagrass matting reading Crime and Punishment in Adelaide heat crazy lover too much whisky singing in the folk club concerts sitting round the kitchen table too much whisky.

Those were the days.

Decoding

Life as a word nerd has some remarkable moments, as when, emerging from the fog of anaesthetic some years back after the same operation from which Ampersand Duck is currently in the throes of recovery, I had a kind of dream in which the actual word PAIN, in sharp, spiky capitals, was inhabiting my innards, the points on the A and the N in particular sticking very nastily into the tender flesh of my surgically ravaged interior.

It was a very vivid sensation, halfway between a dream and a hallucination, and I remembered it the other night when I had a dream in which people were talking about me (always a horrid sensation) and one of them -- someone I'd thought liked me -- said 'Oh no, not her -- she's turned into a nightmare.'

This was so intensely distressing that it actually woke me up, and I only figured out the next morning that my dreaming subconscious was telling me this was a nightmare and I should wake up out of it sharpish.

I have great faith in my subconscious. So now that I'm sitting here working up the other end of the house from the kitchen late at night and could swear I can smell coffee, I'd very much like to know what metaphorical coffee it is that my subconscious wants me to wake up and smell.

Boundless plains to share -- not

Whatever your plans for this evening may be, see if you can fit them around watching this program on SBS.

As Philip Adams remarked last night on Late Night Live, of course it ought to be on the ABC, but we all know what's happened to them. Brian at LP has a good post on this doco here.

"If I'd been released maybe I'd be a good person, in Australia."

Happy birthday!

Many happies to the friend, regular reader of this blog and fellow Chinese Water Snake whose birthday it is. You know who you are.

If it happens to be anyone else's birthday, many happies to you too!

Word Nerd Corner (now with bonus nostalgia and film critique)

And today we have two:

1) "Fraudster"

Where did this bit of nonsense excess come from? It looks like tongue-in-cheek vaudeville Yiddish, or possibly Lolkitteh, whose construction is based partly on the addification of superfluitude. Whatever happened to the perfectly good, indeed lovely, word "fraud"? By this logic I could write you a list of some of my favourite blogs: The Viewster from Elsewhere, Hoydenster About Town, Pea Soupster, Baristaster, Humanities Researcherster ...

2) Socialite

In yet another cautionary tale about over-trustful reliance on the spell-checker, this week's TV guide, courtesy of News Ltd via the Adelaide Advertiser, contains a plot précis of tonight's ABC movie A Room With a View: 'Much to the disapproval of her chaperone, a young woman is drawn to the son of a socialite while visiting Florence in search of adventure.'

Now I wrote an Honours thesis on Forster back in the mists of time and to this day remember whole chunks of A Room With a View by heart ('Most excellent Honeychurches, but you know what I mean') and this does not sound to me like Forster's plot. For a start, the heroine is already engaged to the son of a socialite (a strange way to put it, I thought) and her arrival in Florence precipitates the new romantic direction away from him, not towards. And secondly, her chaperone, far from disapproving, is in fact excited and inspired by her new romantic adventure.

[UPDATE: well, I've watched it now and I take some of this back. What I was remembering was the chaperone Charlotte's own repressions and projections; chaperone is indeed outwardly over-horrified about Lucy's attraction to George but later proves to have been excited and stimulated by the romance, and a friend to it in the end. That was what I was remembering, not helped by conflating the character of the chaperone with her friend the novelist Miss Lavish, who finds it all terribly romantic and colourful. My bad. NB although I could sort of see what Davies was doing turning so many of the subtexts into super-texts (one of which in particular Forster would have been relieved to see end its long sojourn in the closet, so props to Davies for that) and obliterating others altogether, I thought this new version pedestrian, heavy-handed and literal-minded, though some of the casting was good, the music was nice, and Florence was Florence even though the cinematographer tried very hard to make it look ordinary with a palette of bleached Dickensian greys.]

I thought I'd solved the first mystery after two minutes' thought when I recalled that the new love interest is the son of a socialist (something Forster barely mentions in passing), and either some twelve-year-old sub had never seen the word 'socialist' but was intimately acquainted with the life and works of Paris Hilton, or (slightly more likely) they simply hadn't bothered to check. After all, it's not so long ago that I used the word 'interiority' in a book review and was subsequently horrified to see it rendered in both the online and the dead-tree edition of the paper in question as 'inferiority', which still made a kind of sense but, as you might expect, grotesquely changed the meaning of the sentence. (Both 'socialite' and 'inferiority' in these instances are variations on the theme of the eggcorn.) However, I remained bewildered by the chaperone part.

The TV guide gives the date of this production as 2007 so it is clearly not, I thought, alas, I thought, the substantial, sumptuous and multiply-Oscar-nominated Merchant Ivory adaptation of 1985 with Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Rupert Graves and Denholm Elliot.

No, a quick Google revealed that it is this adaptation by the ubiquitous Andrew Davies, who for reasons best known to himself has decided to change the ending in a way that would have Forster turning (or, more probably, knowing Forster, smiling gently) in his grave. And for all I know, not only has he made the chaperone disapproving but he's turned the love interest's father from a socialist into a socialite. Heck, why not.

Just as well I Googled it, or I would be spending an hour and a half tonight intermittently tearing my hair out and screaming at the TV. But Forster, as I say, is beyond caring. And as though to underline the point about spell-checking, up there in that last paragraph I originally typed 'smiling gently in his grace'.

Knowing Forster, that too.

Still Life With Cat #eleventy squillion

And in my nightmares ...

Never mind all this insert Tab F in Slot G and glue at Point H and where are the batteries and have you got the sticky tape, this is what Christmas chez la famille Pav is going to be like if somebody* doesn't get a wriggle on.

*Looking at you, sisters