Apparently it's National Cat Day

Spider love

It's been nearly eleven years since I moved into this house and over those years I have found redback spiders in a number of places: tucked into grooves in door frames, peeping coyly out from drainpipes, neatly hidden in the inside-underside moulding of plastic garden chairs. (!)

So you'd think, given what a haven my place seems to be for them and given the way that their amazing beauty and elegance lures me close enough often enough to make it very likely that one day I will get bitten on the nose and die a horrible death, that I would know a bit more about their habits, personalities and tastes. But no. None of the following, which I have just found at a perfectly respectable news site, has ever been visible from where I was standing:

It's long been known that the female redback who is roughly twice the size of her male counterpart, regularly eats a number of her male courtiers, although exactly what determines who gets eaten has been unclear.

New Canadian research suggests that it depends on whether the female has been satisfied by the duration of the stimulatory courtship, which entails the male vibrating the female's web for approximately 100 minutes.

I'm not sayin' nothin'.

The Kiss

Last night I went to the premiere screening of a new short film by young local filmmakers Sonya Humphrey (producer) and Ashlee Page (writer-director). Adelaide's Mercury Cinema was filled to capacity, no mean feat at 6.30 on a warm Tuesday evening, by a crowd that included some well-known faces.

The film is an adaptation of Peter Goldsworthy's short story of the same name, 'The Kiss', a story I know very well because I chose it to include in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aust Lit and have therefore read it about eleven times, if you count repeated proofreadings. Not to be giving away the whole plot, but it's a chilling tale in which two teenage boys, the worse for drink, decide to go for a swim in an isolated underground tank and realise only after they have jumped in that the water level is too low for them to be able to reach the ladder.

Considering that in Page's screenplay the characters are girls instead of boys, which you'd think was a pretty substantial change and a most disconcerting one at first, the film is actually one of the closest and cleverest adaptations of a piece of fiction that I think I've ever seen. Page gets a couple of extraordinary performances out of her two young actors, and a lot of mileage out of the look of rural Australia at night, simultaneously sinister and glorious.

What I've always admired most about Peter Goldsworthy's work (NB if you're wondering, he may or may not be a distant cousin, so this is nepotism five times removed if it is nepotism at all), in any genre, is his ruthlessness in following the logic of the body to its often bitter end; to me at least, all of his best work is firmly grounded in his experience as a GP over several decades, pitting the detailed abstractions of moral dilemmas against the stark, simple, unrelenting clarity of the body and its processes and frailties. The film is very faithful to this particular take on the mind-body problem. One of the most interesting things about watching it was that although I was all too familiar with the story's events and therefore knew what was coming, I still felt chilled and wired by it -- tense muscles, racing heart -- which makes you wonder about the nature of suspense. Another kind of mind-body problem.

Two things I've learned already today and it's not even lunchtime yet

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about 'literary merit', a 180-word book review being written to deadline is not the place to do it, and anyway you're far better off waiting for your dear friend L, co-author of Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, to arrive tomorrow to give her seminar at Adelaide U so that you can pick her brains about the current state, if any, of academic debates around this question and her own ideas about it.

(2) Work really does expand to fill the time available.

Faine daining: to tip or not to tip

Ploughing sadly through the various horrors of the Adelaide news this morning, I came across an altogether more frivolous item about SA people being the meanest tippers in the country.

What do people think about tipping in restaurants? Do you do it? How much? Why?

Typo schmypo

It's been a long and painful process and even now I occasionally succumb to temptation, but I've learned over four years of blogging that there are certain fora in which you can be as rude, abusive and profane as you like, but the moment that -- having finally snapped at some online wanker's rudeness, aggression or abuse -- you mock someone's grammar, spelling, transcription, typing skills, or any other manifestation of ignorance or carelessness with language, you will be roundly abused for pointing out a 'typo'.

In the book of netiquette, mockery of a so-called 'typo' is somewhere well beyond defamation in the catalogue of sins and even further beyond plagiarism, which isn't considered a sin at all. The word 'typo' is short for 'typographical error' which (while technically a misnomer since it harks back to the days of lead type) is, or used to be, used in media and publishing to refer to any alphabetical or other character misplaced by mechanical accident, formerly as when one misplaced the little metal letters and now as when one tingles up one's fangers in the typing process. But the netizens to whom I refer here, who clearly don't know this and don't care, use 'typo' to mean all manner of error committed through ignorance and carelessness.

They are welcome, of course, but it is sad for them that, since they are not alert to these things, they miss so much unintended online humour. Like this most wonderful comment, comment #3, at this excellent piece on Julie & Julia: 'Stop trying to analize everything.'

That, folks, is not a 'typo'. That is a truly magnificent spelling error and an even more magnificent, if entirely unintentional, pun. It's the sort of thing that makes you hope there's an afterlife, just so that Freud can have a giggle.

Hey hey, who dunnit?

Here's what I want to know: who was it who watched the Jackson Jive act on old Hey Hey footage from decades ago, when the participants were all young medical students, and decided that it would be a good, funny and appropriate thing to do to invite them back? Who thought that was a good idea? Surely this can be tracked down to a single name. But I bet we never hear it.

Unless it was Daryl Somers himself, of course. He certainly appears to be living in the past in every other way.

For the record I think (a) that when it comes to humour, context is everything, especially with parody and satire, but (b) that blackface, whose origins lie in open mockery (and badly-concealed fear and loathing) of African-Americans, is not appropriate, at all, in any context, ever. (And I did enjoy Germaine Greer's comments on Q&A last night comparing the Hey Hey fallout with women's tolerance of men in drag. I've always taken it for granted, especially after seeing Priscilla, that theatrical drag -- as distinct from private or non-performative cross-dressing, which is about something else -- is grounded in ferocious hatred of and contempt for women, but that is true of so many other things, like The Footy Show, that one has to acknowledge it as a norm.)

Part of the context for the Jackson Jive fiasco, of course, was that one of the judges was a guest from the American South. So whoever set the whole thing up either was too ignorant and dim to realise, or did it deliberately. I'm not sure which is worse.

Brothers, sisters and anthologies : oh the irony

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.


Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

NUMB3RS

So, will my Visitor stats hit 60,000 today? And if they do, will I get a special cookie?

UPDATE, 6.30 pm: Yes! All ur numberz are belong to us!

Good news for aspiring writers!

Because these days, apparently, you can get any old crap published. Any old offensive, outrageous, barking, evil crap at all.

A taste, if you can stomach it. My emphasis. Note the interesting elision from 'polygamy' in the headline to 'polygyny' in the article, and ponder on whether it was a nodding sub or a deliberate way to make this bilge look more palatable, or what. NOW READ ON ...

Yes, polygyny may lead to jealousy. We are all human. But ... the ultimate in giving is for a woman to give a fraction of her husband's time and affection to another woman who is willing to share with her. It is a spiritually rewarding experience that allows women to grow while the husband toils to provide for more than one partner.

... Many men in Western society complain about their mother-in-law or a “nagging” wife. If his wife and in-laws were difficult, would he seek more of the same? The willingness of a man to take on another wife is in fact a form of praise to his first wife.

While Islam sanctions polygyny, it does not condone threesomes. Islam also does not permit polyandry, a form of relationship in which a wife takes more than one husband. There are many reasons for this. Some are medical, some relate to paternity. Others pertain to the sexual proclivities of the different genders.

Yeah, see, you need to know who the father is. Because that's the most important question in the world. And everyone knows women don't like sex. And 'medical' -- hey, enough said. (It must be enough; he doesn't elaborate.)

Now re-read this article swapping the roles. Try to think of any man you have ever met or heard of who would accept that being one of several men in any woman's life would be a spiritual experience that would allow him to grow, or that he should look on it as a song of praise for him.

I know the blogosphere is particularly scone-hot on free speech so I take my life in my hands here. But this kind of stuff ought not to be allowed to poison our reading air. Speech is action, and some actions are not to be condoned.

Blogiversary post: in praise of blokes

It's four years ago today since I tentatively followed the 2005 Blogger step-by-step instructions and eventually, to my own astonishment, set up my first blog Pavlov's Cat. (I have recently attempted with Blogger's much more sophisticated 2009 machinery to incorporate t'old blog in t'new blog, but I nearly broke my internets and have not been game to try again.)

By the time you get to your fourth blogiversary you need to think a bit in order not to start repeating yourself, so, looking back over the year's posts, I decided on a bit of linkage in celebration of the dudely side of life. As a woman, a blogger and a feminist, if not quite a 'feminist blogger' within the meaning of the act, not only am I often quite rude about blokes (though only when they deserve it) but I tend to write about women's work and women's lives, my own and other people's, public and private, on a weekly and sometimes even a daily basis, with the default focus on the female, as you might expect.

But this year some exceptional men have provided me with some exceptional moments (I'm sorry, I would have liked to have put that another way) and some hi-qual blog fodder. They include:

Leonard
Cohen

Barack Obama

Jon Stewart (I hope you can see this; I know some people can't)

Daniel Craig

Grandfather Goldsworthy

Roger Woodward and Johann Sebastian Bach

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Trip trap, trip trap

Sorry folks, I have a new troll -- some free-market worshipper behaving the way such types usually behave online, with the emphasis on anonymous, gratuitous, aggressive pig-rudeness to total strangers -- and therefore comment moderation has been enabled until she or he gets bored and goes away. I know it's annoying, but it won't be for long.

For some reason, every blogiversary I've ever had (4th tomorrow) seems to be marked by some unpleasantness of this nature. Perhaps it is merely the blog gods reminding one that blogging is not all Veuve Clicquot and free kittens.

Some random

Random blog posts I would write if only [insert excuse here]

• One about the common motivation behind nearly all of the negative reactions I've seen so far to The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, which have included 'I'm not in it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'I wasn't invited to edit it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'My husband / wife / SO /BFF / offspring isn't in it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'My own genre isn't adequately represented! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'It hasn't got enough of the things that I think are really good in it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' Etc. Spot the common element here.

• One about natural disasters and the reporting of natural disasters, with specific reference to headlines like '2 Australians Missing After Volcano Eruption' when in fact 5,000 Sicilians have also been engulfed by molten lava, a fact that appears somewhere in the fourth paragraph if you're lucky.

Random reasons to be cheerful

• I've just had a nice drive up to the Adelaide Hills to hang out with my best mate.

• The book I'm reading for work is quite adequately gripping.

• There are prawns dipped in leftover guacamole for dinner.

Random whining

• I'm still not at all sure about this haircut.

• My back hurts.

• The deplorably illiterate "sneak peak", which I'm seeing more and more frequently, has just turned up on the website of one of the country's major newspapers. Don't people think about the meaning of the words they write and misspell at all any more? It's a peek, people. (And no, 'sneek' is not acceptable either, in fact that's worse, because it isn't any kind of word at all.) A peak is the pointy bit at the high end of a mountain or a soft-serve cone. A peek is a little baby look.

In which two specialist vocabularies collide

Forms of tiredness

Between 7 pm on Friday night and 7 pm last night I had four separate conversations with four different people whom I've known for thirty years or more. Every one of those conversations was long (one hour, two, two-and-a-half and four-and-a-half, respectively), intense, wide-ranging and tête-à-tête, if you count the phone one which was more properly a case of oreille-à-bouche.

All of these people are very dear friends. One was a little bit tired and emotional; one was visiting from another city and up for the marathon professional and personal catching-up that we get the chance to do maybe once a year, if that. And one had had some truly dreadful news.

By 3 am this morning I was in that horrible state known only, I think, to people over about 35: of feeling at once exhilarated (in an overwhelmed sort of way) by the complexity of life, with specific reference to lifelong friends and all that we know about each other, and completely flattened by life's unexpected weights, by the pianos it drops on you while you're thinking about something else. I was exhausted to the marrow and far too wired to sleep. You know you're really at some extremity of feeling when you're reading Val McDermid in a desperate attempt to calm down and fall asleep, and it works. But not a lot of work is going to get done today.

'Dejected but not hopeless', or, Are you absolutely sure you want to be a writer??

Over the last week I've had two emails marking literary anniversaries and quoting bright stars in the literary firmament. September 18 was the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, September 23 the 120th anniversary of Wilkie Collins' death.

A member of VICTORIA, a longstanding Victorian Studies email discussion list I've belonged to for many years, posted this on September 23:

On this day 120 years ago 23 September 1889 Wilkie Collins died. He wrote his last letter just two days earlier to his doctor. "I am dying old friend. WC." and on the other side of the paper "They are driving me mad forbidding the [hypodermic]. Come for God's sake. I am too wretched to write."

Five days earlier on September 18, an old friend, an academic and regular reader of this blog, sent me this, and has very kindly given me permission to quote the email he circulated round his department on that day:

Subject: Happy birthday Dr J

Today is Dr Johnson’s 300th birthday. I feel a bit sad that a Department which once boasted a very impressive 18th-century research output, including John Wiltshire’s wonderful work on Johnson, now doesn’t teach him any more. Just thought you would like to know. Don’t break out into congratulatory whoops, though, as Dr J spent most birthdays regretting his sins and vowing to do better the next year. For example, I rather like this one, given that I’ll turn 56 this year:

Sept. 18, 1764, about 6 evening.
This is my fifty-sixth birth-day, the day on which I have concluded fifty five years.

I have outlived many friends. I have felt many sorrows. I have made few improvements. Since my resolution formed last Easter I have made no advancement in knowledge or in goodness; nor do I recollect that I have endeavoured it. I am dejected but not hopeless.

O God for Jesus Christ's Christ's sake have mercy upon me.

Action, acting, and re-enactments

This morning there's been some serendipity; I began reading a novel by a young writer whose exploration of a sexual harassment incident and its aftermath at a girls' school veers back and forth between the formality of an actual stage play and the notion that everyone in life spends a lot of time acting a part, especially adolescents trying out adult personae. At least I think that's what she's doing, I'm only on page nine. It's very good so far, blackly funny and very original, with at least one character (a saxophone teacher) whose dialogue comes express from her id, and very startling it is too.

So it was odd to get my email newsletter just then from Médecins sans frontières, a fixture in my charity budget (though I think the aggressive campaign to get people who are already regularly giving them money to give them more money may prove counterproductive and I wish they'd stop), with the announcement that their 'Refugee Camp in Your City' exhibition? experience? re-enactment? show? was on in Adelaide this week and coming to Melbourne in October.

On the one hand it's good that they're publicising their activities, and yes I think schools in particular should take kids on the tour, and yes its aims are admirable, and yes I like the upbeat approach that focuses on the sorts of help that aid workers in the field can provide.

I can see, as I say, that their reasons are uniformly excellent, and you couldn't call it exploitative, but there's something about this idea of cheerfully replicating sites of human misery that just doesn't ring quite right. And yet it never bothers me when people do it in literature, or onstage (and yes yes, of course drama is literature, don't get me started), or even in movies (except for the Holocaust, which I don't think people should make movies about, but at least I have a worked-out line of thought on that).

This reaction to the MSF project is defective thinking, I know, but somehow it's not about thought, more an instinctive shrinking away. Does anyone else feel a bit squeamish about this whole idea?

In case you missed it

It's all true. Especially #8.

Spooked

Longtime readers of this blog might remember my astonishment on discovering, in the course of an enthusiastic rummage through the online NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages records, a pair of five-greats grandparents who were both First Fleeters -- one convict, one Marine -- and who married on Norfolk Island in 1790, had a bunch of sprogs, were given some land and lived to a ripe old age. I'd always thought that my dad's family were the serious pioneers and I was a bit sad that my mum didn't live long enough to discover that her family, via her own father, was several generations more Australian even than my dad's.

Googling around to find out as much about them as I could, I came upon the Jane Langley Descendants Association -- apparently there are something like twelve thousand such descendants -- and immediately joined, and have been getting their newsletter plus information provided by other genealogy enthusiasts ever since. Today I fished a full envelope of this stuff out of the mailbox. Usually when there are photos in it, they are baby photos of tenth-generation members, taken less than a year ago, but today I was leafing through the various family trees and came upon a Depression-era photo of four women: my second? third? cousin Eileen, my great-aunt Florence, my great-grandmother Ellen aka Granny McGuinness, and my great-great-grandmother Caroline.

I'd never seen photos of any of them before. Florence, even in a bad reproduction of an old photo, is unmistakably my Grandad's sister: same tall stature, long face, swarthy complexion and thick, curly, wild, dark hair. (My mum inherited this hair, except in her own mother's flaming red.) The transcript of Jane Langley's trial for theft at the Old Bailey in September 1785 says



(The transcript suggests that Jane wuz framed by this drunken "gentleman" trying to explain how he'd lost his money, but I would say that, wouldn't I.)

The girth of Granny McGuinness explains a lot.

Oh well.

A process of continuing negotiation

Life for most thinking people is a daily battle of the various principles, large or small, that for one reason or another are mutually exclusive. You need to negotiate, constantly, the place where they collide. Feminists who are continually chided (I think I mean chidden, actually -- comp hide/hidden -- but let's not get sidetracked, as I say to my father in conversation more and more these days) ... Ahem. Feminists who are continually bashed criticised for their so-called "silence" on the subjugation and worse of women in various Islamic countries, and who are in fact simply trying to resist joining a chorus of mindless, racist hatred and aggression by continuing to express their longstanding resistance to said subjugation in more general and less targeted dog-whistling ways, will be particularly familiar with this one.

But it manifests in tiny daily domestic ways as well. I like to support as many charities as I can, and I like to support the local independent fruit and veg shop in their struggle against Woolies and Coles. But I noticed the other day that said fruit and veg shop was selling little transparent containers of nasturtium flowers, displayed with similar boxes of mesclun and herbs. There would have been about half a dozen flowers in each container. And they were charging $2.99 for them, which is to say, 50c per flower. They're charging that much for flowers currently growing wild everywhere, simply because there are people stupid enough to pay it. Ah, the free market. I've got a self-seeding, self-tending nasturtium patch growing up the fence outside my study window, two metres high and three wide, with at least a hundred flowers on it as we speak and twice as many buds. I could retire.

As for the charities, here's an announcement. To all cold callers ringing up in the middle of the day because the thinking is that women at home are just sitting round doing nothing with no structure in their day: the moment you address me as "Mrs Goldsworthy", you have done your dash. No money for you.