Phantom Pregnancy

I take a pretty dim view of gynecology, and whatever I think of modern gynecology (and that's unprintable enough) it's nothing to what I think of archaic gynecology. Even still, I have assumed, like archaic gynecologists, that phantom pregnancies are the product of a certain hysteria (though I have assumed that the hysteria was caused, not by being female, but rather by a corset-induced lack of oxygen to the brain and resulting weakening of the cardiovascular system).

But the goat who is 16 (the equivalent of 90 for a human) has just had a phantom pregnancy and there's nothing hysterical about her. She has no mobid fancies and she is not trying desperately to produce an heir to the English throne*.

I don't believe I have ever had a conversation on the topic of phantom pregnancies so no one has ever had to suffer from my ignorance. Nevertheless, I would like to apologise for my misconception which is damaging, oppressive and hurtful.



*I know Mary Tudor had a tumour, now conjectured to be cancerous, and is not strictly an example of a phantom pregnancy. But her case demonstrates the historical attitude to phantom pregnancy, and anyway, as Richie says in Filthy, Rich and Catflap after a line which equals mine in hilarity, 'It was just a joke[sic] we were doing'. BlueJ thinks I'm funny (sometimes), so there.

Foucaultean Hollywood

I have become interested in Lindsey Lohan. Well, I say "interested", by which I mean I don't know who she is or what she does or how to spell her name. I only know of her through the constant bagging she received on Get This. The point is, I've become interested enough to read the headlines about her in the women's mags while waiting at the checkout in the supermarket. This week's headlines include that she has a girlfriend, that she's pregnant and that she claims she's not gay or bisexual. So I'd like to stress first off that I acknowledge the possibility that this may not match the highwater mark of journalism and that there is an outside chance that at least some of it is not true. But I'm intrigued. She has apparently posed for the cameras with her girlfriend and yet denied that she is gay and when asked if she was bi said 'maybe', but has confirmed that she is attracted to women.

So the question is, does she not understand what the words mean? Or is this some kind of radical challenging of the hegemonic discourse of sexuality?

I was having an ideological debate with my boyfriend the other day and in response to me illustrating what I regard as a flaw in his argument he told me that I'd really hurt his feelings. I bring it up because I get that a lot from boys, both friends and boyfriends. Yet not one of my female friends has ever said that to me. The irony is that I'm much more forthright with my female friends. Many of my female friends have strongly disagreed with me over the course of our friendships, many have been cross with me for adopting a view which in their opinion is problematic. But none of them has ever felt that their egos were in any way involved in an ideological discussion. (Personally, I suspect that any girl whose ego was liable to get hurt so easily would get it knocked out of them pretty quickly.) Certainly, none have thought that I either should, or was likely to, change my ideological position based on their feeling personally slighted.

Carolina Liar

It struck me as an odd name for a band, especially one which comes mainly from Scandinavia, but it has begun to make sense, because over the weekend I heard an interview with the American guy from the band who claims that he often gets asked what the song "I'm Not Over" is about.

Here's the chorus:

I'm not over,
I'm not over you just yet.
Can I hide it?
You're not that easy to forget.
I'm not over.

If, as is presumably the case, he made up the thing about being asked that question to make himself sound cool, then I think he should ask for a refund from his writers and PR people. Or better yet, he should change the band name to something he's a little bit less talentless at.

Very Rural Victoria

The Old Ballarat Road (or the Old Melbourne Road, depending which way you're heading) runs due west (or east, depending which way you're heading), which would be grand for stage coaches which don't have rear view mirrors and which aren't travelling at 110kms/h. For me, it proved to be a lesson in the dark side of riding off into the sunset (and hoping there would be no cars coming out of it, after having discovered that the sunset wasn't all it might be.) I'd never driven that freeway before so I spent the whole time in a state of anxiety about where I needed to turn off. Under those conditions and in the glaring sun, it seemed to go for ever. When I finally pulled over in somewhere that could well have been Ballan, I was a zombie. I walked into the nearest building, I'm still not totally sure what it was because my eyes wouldn't' adjust to the light difference. Even once I worked out that I was still wearing sunnies.

Insufficiently rested, I was back on the road like Jack Kerouac except less gay, or like Ned Kelly without the beard and radical political agenda. The last FM radio station to give out as I drove into the sunset was MMM. They were having an 80s weekend playing the countdown charts from each year of the decade. We were up to #4 of 1987 when it too finally dissolved into static and I was forced to turn over to Radio National, who were airing a program made in the 1950s about Billy Hughes, one of those ones where people tell stories like this in old fashioned Australian accents:

"Rosie had only been with us I suppose about a fortnight when she got it into her head than Billy wasn't eating enough. So she determined to set it right, you see. Next morning she took him his breakfast tray as usual with tea and toast, and two boiled eggs as well you see, and gave it to him. And he said 'I don't eat eggs' and Rosie said 'you'll eat these' and she sat down next to him on the bed. So he drank his tea and ate his toast and then ate the eggs as well. And ever after anything that Rosie said he did without a murmur. He used to say to me, 'that Rosie, she's a wonderful woman.' When she got married he said 'Just like women, never give a thought to anyone else's convenience' but he was still best man, I believe. He always did well by Rosie."

It was a truely surreal experience.

Grand Final

I'd really rather not talk about it. But I do feel obliged to clear up a misconceptions.

After the game, I stopped at a petrol station and when I went in to pay the bloke said:

TB: 'So? Are you happy or sad?'
Me: 'Sad' (obviously)
TB: 'Ah well, the Cats did pretty well last year, didn't they?'

Now, as you all know, I am not a Cats supporter, but 'the Cats did pretty well last year' is of no use to me because I wanted revenge.

One of the indelibly traumatic experiences of my childhood is sitting with my then six-year-old Cats barracker younger brother in our uncle's front room and watching the Cats get done by Hawthorn in 1989. For me there are few scenes to equal the pathos of a little kid whose team is getting shellacked. The look of total concentration, the heart on the sleeve.

The 1989 Grand Final left its mark on all of us; Mum, for example, has it in for Malcolm Blight because she holds him responsible for upsetting her little boy. Hawthorn played with the inevitability of the Roman Army and the best Mum could do for my brother was tell him that after centuries of subjugation the Germanic Tribes had finally destroyed the Roman Empire. As far as I was concerned, this weekend was supposed to be Odoacer at Ravenna.

Very Small Government

Today, Mr Turnbull positioned the Liberal Party as the party of small government. Unlike the Labor Party, he told us, the Libs are, apparently, not vain enough to think they can make decisions for everyone else.

This came as a surprise to me; I thought that making decisions is what Government is.

As you can imagine, I was even more surprised to hear that his major criticism of the Rudd Government was that they hadn't been doing enough governing.

When are the poor old Libs going to find themselves a leader who is clear on whether or not he is in favour of governing?

Do Me A Favour; It's a Flaming Book Shop, Of Course We've Got Jane Austen

I have been staying up with my birthday present; a complete set of The Sweeney and an espresso machine - not really, but you know what I mean - and I have to say that the misogyny and racism (when they actually have non-anglo characters) is starting to get to me.

I love The Sweeney. I do. Men in high heels, paisley ties, skin tight three piece pin-stripe suits and very approximate hair cuts. Denis Waterman, I've loved since I was a kid. I even like On The Up. And it's not like there's some particular incident, its just the relentlessly of the sexism.

A little girl interviewed in 1975 said in response to a question about female characters on Doctor Who 'it's a bit better, but its still mainly the girls falling over and ruining everything'. When I first heard the interview I failed to appreciate her ability to find the nub. I was hoping for subtlety, complexity, deconstruction. I was young and foolish and didn't realise that the problem was a lot more basic than I imagined.

People talk about how no one writes 'good female characters'. When they elaborate, it turns out they mean morally good or psychologically complex or kooky, and most often, just more like themselves. Honestly, I'd just like one female character on The Sweeney who wasn't a drag.

Perspective in Australian Comedy

Frontline, The Games and now The Hollowmen are all topical to the extent that we recognise some or all of their characters as fictionalisations of public figures. In each case, they are profoundly unpopular figures. Like their fictional counter parts they are involved in immoral projects and like them their benefit is always at the expense of the public, who is, of course, also the audience of the program. These programs use comedy for social critique and yet, the protagonists are not anti-heroes as such because these shows co-opts the perspective of the audience so that we adopt their perspective so completely that we lose sight of the implications of their actions. This puts the audience in a constantly oscillating position in relation to the characters, whom we develop a fondness for despite everything. We see their ordinariness and that their intention is not born of malice. And yet, the programs constantly remind us of how worrying the outcomes of their actions are. I think it acts against the apathy that is such an inherent part of Australian culture.

And Speaking of Pathological...

My favourite event of this Olympics was unquestionably the Men's Javelin. So many extraordinary looking people and all with such visceral energy coming off them, energy which doesn't relate to my everyday experience of humans in any respect. Even Bannister had spooky husky's eyes. The Finns were uniformly terrifying, of course. And as for an act of God like Thorkildsen - so odd in such a calm way.

All of them conformed to the Ancient sense of profound excellence taking humans out of the human realm and making them something really uncanny and slightly worrying.

Freaks of Nature

It used to be that Australian Olympians were proper freaks. People like Ian Thorpe; prodigious, superhuman. Thorpe's proportions have more in common with a dolphin than a human and he swam like it. They were fantastically disciplined, of course, but they also were physically set up in a way that made capable of more than normal people.

This time it's different. One of our marathon cyclists competed with a collapsed lung, our Olympic silver medalist short track cyclist broke her neck, several limbs and took the skin off one side of her body a couple of months out from Beijing, and our Olympic Gold medalist 10 metre platform diver suffers from vertigo.

The extent to which each of these incapacities is taylored specifically to disadvantage the athelete in their chosen event strikes me as highly suspicious. I mean, it's a bit pathological, isn't it?

The thing that seems to make these people champions is the extremely relaxed nature of their grip on reality. The cyclist didn't, for example, think 'a broken neck probably takes me out of contention.' Surely, theoretically at least anyone who hadn't broken their necks just before the Olympics would be in an better position to win a medal than our girl. And is it really the case that there's no one on the planet that can dive better than a man with no head for heights?

But more importantly, is "pathological" really the best direction for sport to be going in?

Cultural History

My sense of the British post-WWII attitude to Neville Chamberlain is almost entirely based on a Monty Python sketch, "Joke Warfare". Despite Hitler's early failures in joke warfare, the Nazis eventually develop a joke even funny than Britain's great pre-War joke. Cut to a shot of Chamberlain with the piece of paper - peace in our time.

It's in that context that I think Genesis of the Daleks is really quite amazing. There is a clear line being drawn between the Kaleds and the Nazis and the Doctor has the opportunity to blow up the lot and instead, Chamberlainesque, he allows himself to be convinced that Davros' eugenics program can be halted via democratic means. He is utterly and naively wrong, of course, but the program totally endorses his decision as the only viable one, in spite of being wrong.

That must have been quite something, if 30 years after WWII even Monty Python was bitter about a figure who wouldn't accept that war was the only way.

Metaphors

In the beginning, all metaphors were God's metaphors, or natural metaphors, if you prefer. And as material culture developed that was incorporated into the vocabulary of metaphors as well but all that is still the way of things.

But computers were made in an extremely primitive form of our own image, a basic and appallingly binary analogy with our own brains. Because they were new, a new vocabulary was made to fit them. Now we use this vocabulary and computer metaphors to describe our own consciousness.

Which means that it is also conditioning our own understanding of our own consciousness because, as Wittgenstein or possibly Peter Greenaway said, 'to imagine a language is to imagine a way of life.'

Without joining the "Replicants Are Coming to Get Us" section of the population, I would like to say that there's really is no bit of that which I think is a good idea.

Ad BlueJunillam

I would never have thought of you as 'Calvinist'. Low Church, certainly, but Predestination? Are you? Ex-Calvinist, I mean. And does this explain where I've been getting confused all these years? When you talk about optimism without faith - or perhaps optimism and 'faith' without the One True God - are you talking about the Schroeder's Cat (which is a much less stupid idea in Theology than it is in Science) element of Predestination in Calvinism? That that particular impasse is what allows for optimism?

I find the Gospels and especially what Christ talks about in the Gospels very heartening, though I don't believe in his Divinity, nor Monotheism in general. Doctrine I always find endlessly disheartening. The idea that abandoning Doctrine eats at optimism is rather strange for me, because Jesus says what he does and that's the end of it. Doctrine is the scaffolding we build around it because we don't trust it to stand up - so much for our faith! - and I think, because we're rather frightened some bit of masonry might fall an crush something we hold dear, like, as JayBee points out, Usury.

The nature of faith

For many years I fell into that category that might be roughly described as Christian, typically few others describing themselves in the same way would have agreed with me but nevertheless, I was a believer. Now I occupy a demographic group, more numerous than one might be inclined to think, that could with reasonable accuracy be referred as ‘recovering Calvinist’. As far as it is possible to ever ascertain what might precipitate such an amorphous and infinitely complex thing as the loss of faith, it was all the usual suspects. A growing horror of the escapades of both churches and individual religious, loss of patience with the endless and pointless scholastic paradoxes of a faith tied too rigidly to a testament and that disillusionment with the world and its compromises that is the true nature of the loss of innocence.

These days what strikes me most forcibly about the issue is, as I see it now, the utter absurdity of using exclusionary belief in a particular deity with a particular nature as a measure of virtue and scaling ever loftier heights of the ridiculous, as a measure of spiritual evolution and enlightenment. To emphasise my position, I see nothing wrong in it, and often it provides people with the strength to be better people than they could be without it and that of course has infinite value. But as the keystone of doctrine I can see no good in it as an end in itself. As is almost certainly obvious at this stage, my own brand of thought and background places exceptional emphasis on this aspect but it is a principle present in all denominations.

But I was thinking recently that perhaps there is some use in retaining the idea of pure faith - optimism, hope, what you will, as an achievement worth striving for and valuing highly. It seems a very obvious idea but I do believe we underestimate the challenge of maintaining a genuinely optimistic outlook and that maybe our standards for the definition of hopeful are a little low. Or possibly I am just deeply enamoured of the notion of Saint Peter (or your chosen conceptual equivalent) meeting people at the gates and asking, ‘Why are you looking so worried?’

Cyber Gender

I notice with cyber space communities that they tend to polarize into those in which the absence of visual contact (and therefore accountability, oddly) has led to the total break down of all forms of regulation of behaviour and those which have, for exactly the same reason, developed highly pronounced etiquette, ethics and ethos. Ebay being one of the latter and indeed just yesterday I was 'reviewed' by one seller as "a first-class Ebayer and a credit to Ebay". No one has ever thought I was a credit to anything, so it's taking a little time for me to adjust my self-perception.

I suppose the development of these communities represents a fascinating social experiment, but the thing is, I hate fascinating social experiments. Any experiments of any real interest everyone ignores anyway, like "Australia" - Q: what happens if you settle an island with criminals? A: you get one of the highest voter participation levels in the world and one of the lower levels of violent crime - or "America" - Q: What happens if you settle a land mass with puritans? A: you get an isolationist interventionist culture.

I recently joined an Envro Community site, using what I now realise was a gender neutral username. Because cyberspace freaks me out, I fall back on a highly diffident, and what I would consider, extremely feminine manner of constantly apologising for my presence, checking I haven't inadvertently offended anyone or indeed, put anyone out by existing. Yesterday, two other member of the site said that initially they thought I was male and only realised I wasn't when I made some oblique reference to my gender.

So, hmmm.

Long Tan

I want to know about the Battle of Long Tan pretty much exclusively because no one will tell me. This is reverse psychology at its best.

Clearly Long Tan is a battle of tremendous propaganda value. As one writer says, immediately before he moves on to riduicule propagandist Viet Cong accounts of the battle:

"as a result of Viet Cong stupidity in the face of Australian courage and mateship, 108 Diggers were able to defeat 2500 Viet Cong."

Even War isn't as ironic as War Historians.

But moving swiftly on. The Australian platoon was decorated by the US. Several soldiers were awarded individual Commenwealth honours and a recommendation was made that the Australian Government honour the platoon. But it didn't happen.

Now, the Rudd Government (and by the way, does anyone else wonder if the Government is entirely made up of androids - I mean would it really be possible to get so much done if you were sleeping occasionally as well?) has reviewed the case and is awarding the honours after all this time.

Given that every News or Current Affairs program last night ran the story, why didn't anyone report on why the honours were not awarded in the first place?

And more importantly, why weren't the honours awarded in the first place?

For BlueJ - remember the lilies, and that other bit about birds and anyway, I'm sure they'll work out about the birdfeeder, but in the meantime, this:

We Fight in the Shade

When I first saw the trailer for 300 I wrote this up and then lost it, you know the drill. Belatedly, here is it.

The original quote is from Heroditus and Cicero retells it in Latin. It is quite appropriate to be adapted to an action film because it is the Classical equivolent of 'you talking to me?'

Simonides promises to send the Spartans to Hell/ the underworld and further that their arrows would be so thick they would blot out the sun. Leonidas says 'then we will fight in the shade.' The pun is on 'umbra', 'shade' which is also the word for 'hell/underworld.'

I don't know if the Persians were worried about a Hell-based resurgence from the Spartans, but if they were, its a great line. If they weren't, I don't know that the pun works on all its levels.

As far as I can tell the point of the story in Heroditus is nothing to do with bragging or chest-beating. The Greek is simply and quietly making the point that the Persian threat is a lousy one since its more fun to fight in the shade than in the heat.

According to Wiki, 'we fight in the shade' is now the slogan of the Hellenic Army XX Armoured Division. I can't tell if this is because they are actually inside tanks when they do their fighting, or if they require opponants to provide a clean, clear battlefield with towels, drinks, refreshments and a predetermined amount of shadey terrain so as to prevent unnecessary stress and strain.

"THEY LIED" - like the Herald-Sun can talk...

No one can blame Shaw for not grassing on a mate, and Collingwood was not founded on the ideals of honesty and integrity.

Obviously, no one could blame anyone for lying to Eddie Maguire.

What is interesting is the absence of a good behaviour clause in Didak's newly-signed contract. Given Collingwood's position on the ladder at this point in the season, I wonder who gains most from that...

Narratology

So, this week David Murphy, a fictional character from The Hollowmen, added me as a friend on his Facebook page. I didn't go looking for him, you understand - how could I, he's fictional - he came looking for me - how could he, he's fictional, I heard you say. Putting aside ontology, just for a moment, how did he find me? I mean, I have a quote from the show, but not the name, on the page, did he really search Facebook with a complete copy of the show's scripts?

When TV spins offs started to become overlapping shows, acting in complete alternative universes in which any number of other groups of fictional characters independently participated, I also started to realise how many people would rather live in those alternatives - just look at the rise of fanfic.

People have always needed stories, but I don't think any group of people have ever wanted stories the way we do. There are probably positive aspects to this, but the whole thing makes me uneasy, though, not really as uneasy as being friends with fictional people makes me.

Vandalism

There are a lot of new Doctor Who/ David Tennant fans amongst the Ladies, but I am no longer one of them. I have had enough of the babbling. And the melodrama; every week everything explodes, everyone sacrifices themselves (though not really as it always turns out) and everyone cries at how totally rad everyone is. All of this held together by the idea of the Doctor as a 'man' whose awesomeness justifies anything. When it was more true, they said it less.

Let's do a microcosmic side by side.

In The Girl in the Fireplace, the Tenth Doctor makes a flippant reference to meeting Cleopatra or 'Cleo', as he insists on calling her.

In The Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Sarah Jane remarks that the phonebox has probably been vandalised, to which the Third Doctor replies, "That's a very unfair word, you know. The Vandals were mainly very decent chaps."

The first is like the most embarrassing kind of groupie name-dropping. From an historical point of view, it refers to an idea of Cleopatra which is very old fashioned. (Despite the view created in Roman propaganda, Cleopatra was in fact not especially beautiful, which was fine because she was a brilliant astronomer and mathematician, astute strategist and totally ruthless, calculating political operative.)

The second, on the other hand, makes a series of implications about etymology and the agency of a history written by the victors as it is expressed in popular culture. It also assumes a revisionist reading of the 'Dark Ages' which is pretty progressive for the early 1970s.
And better yet, no one cried or spelt it out at tedious length while other people stood around cheering (which is what happened in last week's episode).

There is film, shot by Tennant's girlfriend, of him standing, holding the action figurine of himself, so I suppose the decline and fall of Doctor Who is no one's fault, as such, (not even the Romans).

Newman

So Sam Newman has made an idiot of himself again. AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said "If everything Sam says is going to be … analysed, I think we're going to start to become terribly unfair," he said. "Analysed"? Like "listen" you mean? That is unfair. Funny the way no one else manages to "accidentally" say anything horribly offensive.

Grrr

I was at lunch the other day. The conversation was on the nature of contradiction. My interlocutor found his way onto the topic of whether the world's wealthiest are in fact a race of reptilian-human crossbreeds, or perhaps it was about people thought that that was the genetic makeup of the wealthy.

It is difficult to engineer a conversational segue from there but I did my best; I thought I'd done rather well. But my companion looked at me quizzically and said "What's that got to do with contradiction?"

Oh yes. Absolutely. Why don't we bring in relevance as a requirement at this stage?

Synthesia

There is an inevitability to the fact that my best friend at school was the only 16-year-old in the world with a detailed knowledge of Synthesia, even though he isn't a synthete. He diagnosed me; it fascinated him. I've never really been terribly interested because I don't really believe that other people don't have it. Of course, if the existence of non-synthetes is a fiction then it requires a conspiracy of pointless proportions to support, so I am obliged to believe in it. Even still, it just doesn't seem very plausible to me.

I've just been looking through the Synthesia Battery and I don't know what the inside of other synthetes' heads is like, but it does strike me as being very much a non-synthete's conception. The Battery seems to assume that we use a colour-based substitution code. One of the tests boils down to being a test of perfect pitch rather than Synthesia.

So I went looking for descriptions of other people's synthesia. I've always assumed that colour would be important to anyone who had it and that their heads would be full of beautiful, beautiful colours. Even white and black (which aren't colours as Tintaretto, another childhood friend and as you probably guessed son of hippies, told me when we were seven) aren't included in my synthesia (except for zero which is obviously white). What I found is that lots of people's synthesia seems to be focused in a range of dull and drab colours.

I was horrified. It had never occurred to me that I would need to be open-minded about the manifestations of Synthesia but there it is.
Being judgemental about other people's synthesia, that's time to have a good hard look at yourself.

Matt 18:6

The Pope says he 'shares the pain' of child abuse victims and Bishop Fisher is complaining about people who 'crankily' insist on talking about child abuse rather than embracing the intoxicating joy of World Youth Day.

Perhaps they are just genuinely stupid and vacuous, perhaps they genuinely don't understand, but certainly they give a lively impression of immorality and religious hypocrisy.

I Hope There's A God, I Hope He's A Vengeful God

From the Church that brought us unsafe sex in disease-ravaged countries, we now have an exhortation to populate in this ecologically devastated, massively overpopulated world.

Is this possibly even more irresponsible than the Baby Bonus? Yes, it's all about the kids.

Pell says "we've got to keep our numbers up". We humans have our numbers up, so who's 'we'? Catholics? Christians? Whites? And this on the eve of a visit from an ex-member of the Hitler Youth. Straight from protecting paedophiles to eugenics for Pell; if only someone could get him to stop thinking about sex just for a bit.

Girl Talk

On the way to the Ladies last night I walked passed two of the boys from our group talking about their fiancees and their fast-approaching weddings. So this is what boys talk about when girls aren't around.

Back at our table the boys had started the spin-the-bottle-esque 'who would you go home with?' conversation, beloved pickup conversation of boys in pubs everywhere in my experience, though with an Australian twist: the boys very quickly lost all interest in the girls and their answers to this persistently-put question and became instead entirely consumed with razzing each other.

Milling around outside the pub, waiting for the boys to stop fighting with the bouncers and then waiting for them to make up, which despite the patting each other on the back and commiserating at the hard lot of a bouncer's life, is if anything an even more aggressive and belligerent interaction, always threatening to develop into a full-scale pitched battle melee, I heard one of the girls say disapprovingly 'Fuck's sake! Never met a girl who couldn't get along with a bouncer!'

It was a fairly gossip-generating night and our group hadn't seen each other in ten years but as the four girls waved their final goodbyes and turned away one of them said to me 'Did you see the game?' That's what we talked about, all the way home. That's what Australian girls talk about when boys aren't around.

The Adventures of Bingley

Bingley has taken to crying or princkling things in the middle of a the night in an attempt to get me to wake up and let him out, which I am not allowed to do because of the curfew and which he can't do himself because he still can't work the cat door.

There do seem to be some conceptual problems. Yesterday, I woke (at 5am) to find him behind the curtains, so I got up and opened the window to let him out. As the window went up he looked at me, double took, then turned, sprang, sped across the room loosing traction on the cornering due to the fluffiness of his paws, up the stairs and so to the back door.

In other words, although there are some times of day at which he can conceptually accept exiting via the window, apparently an opened window in the morning only indicates to him my willingness to enter into negotiations the outcome of which would of course ultimately be achieved via the back door.

Whatever the conceptual issues, there is no question that round went to Bingley, but last night's round went to me.

Last night he was showing all the signs of embarking on a sleep deprivation campaign against me, so I took the precaution of leaving one of those spray bottles for watering plants beside the bed. In the dead of night came the princkling, and I, like a gun-fighter of the old west, quick on the draw, grabbed the bottle and shot, my eyes still half closed. Next time I shall sleep with one eye open.

But for now, Bingley has conceded that I am the better man and has adopted a conciliatory stance.

Garnaut Review

A gentleman from the Herald Sun's corner of the Fourth Estate asked Prof. Garnaut whether signing the report would be signing a suicide note for Rudd. Prof. Garnaut answered in such a way that the gentleman regretted the question, but the fact remains that saving the planet and so ourselves, is not going to be popular.

Even self-interest seems to be too difficult for us these days.

As Garnaut pointed out, the time to implement these changes was when he put a submission to the Howard Government six years ago. I hope that is not lost in this debate, that Howard mortgaged our future by artificially inflating the Australian economy and so his popularity by allowing Australian industries to continue running in old fashioned, high polluting ways for very, very short term profits.

When environmentalists say 'non-sustainable', they don't just mean the environment, they mean non-sustainable profits too.

Eastlink

I am a little shocked at how shamelessly the news on the commercial networks has been spruiking for this tollway, but not as shocked as I am that it worked. Obviously, even in a world running out of petrol to the extent that in the not-too-distant future it will be unaffordable, you could bank on commuters being excited about saving time. What I didn't expect was that the ploy of opening the road as a fun day out for the kids would work.
It's exactly as ugly as every other big road and yet there they were in their droves from 2am on when the road opened with balloons, clowns and sausage sizzles. There is nothing about this that isn't bizarre.

My incredulous scorn fixed itself upon one man who, when interviewed for the news, said 'Oh, it's great; worth the hype'. But as Dad pointed out...

...Dad: That's what they all said, isn't it?
H: Some of them talked about how much time it would save them.
Dad: Ah, yes, the practical, utilitarian angle; doesn't explain why they were out there sightseeing at 2am though, does it? No, they just drew a veil over that with this 'practical' facade.

It's a very good point. What a rich vein for psychological inquiry.

Some archaeologists think that the people of Rapa Nui knew they were killing themselves through deforestation, but they cut down the last tree anyway. Some scholars argue it was celebrated and turned into a statue to appease the god who brought this complete ecological annihilation upon them.

Someday, some Martian archaeo-psychologist, sifting through whatever remains of our records, is going to write such a fascinating paper.

I Don't Think I'm Going To Be Able To Avoid Entitling This Post "Bunking"

So obviously, where I come from, Julian Barnes is a big deal. If you wanted confirmation, then there he is with Rushdie as one of the literati cameos in Bridget Jones's Diary. Is there a higher literary accolade? Much to my undergraduate embarrassment, I found Flaubert's Parrot so tedious I really couldn't tell you whether it's a book with intellectual merit (which is totally different to interest).
So now I'm reading A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and I'm enjoying it as far as it goes. Tony Martin says he couldn't get passed the first word in The Da Vinci Code - TM: "'Renowned curator somebody somebody'... why do we have to know he's 'renowned'?" EK: "Makes it sound classy, Tone" TM: "Isn't that called 'bad writing'? Isn't that crowbarring information in too early?" EK: "Very early." - Anyway, I couldn't get passed (without comment) the first page in A History where it described the women on Noah's Ark as 'too delicate' to muck out the animals. Barnes does realise this is the Ancient Levant these people come from, right? Not Victorian England?
But more bizarrely, Barnes, in his attempt to deconstruct one of our (many) genesis myths and to do it from a non-human perspective, seems to have got hooked on committing character assassination on Noah, as though we were all deeply invested in Noah as a really top bloke in the first place. The Bible isn't especially positive about Noah, and that's nothing to what the English Miracle Play tradition does to him. Why is Barnes spending quite so much effort debunking something we really never bunked?

Geneses

Stupidly, I've never noticed that there are two Creation myths, side by side in Genesis, and distinguished, so I'm told, by different words for 'god'. (There is certainly no distinction in the Greek text but maybe there is in the Hebrew Bible, which I will struggle through to make sure, but not today, eh? It's gloomy and I have enough trouble with the languages I actually know.)

The first myth is the one in which God makes the world in six days and rests on the seventh. This one is particularly concerned with the fruitfulness of the earth and here God creates humans male and female, in his own image. I suspect (and will check on a less gloomy day) that personal pronouns are against us, but even still, in this version women are made in God's image too. Think about the implications of that. And now think about it back to front.

The second one starts at Gen 2:4 with the words "This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when they were made in the day". It does sound like the beginning of a new Creation myth, which is why I feel so exceptionally daft to have missed it. In this version a fountain rises out of the earth and waters the land and then god makes man out of dust and makes Eden for Adam to live in. Then, not wanting Adam to be alone, He creates birds (made on the fifth day in the first myth) and land animals (made before men and women on the sixth day in the other story) and brings them to Adam to name. It is only then that He makes Eve out of Adam's rib.

So, I gather the consensus is that this represents two competing myths that the writer(s) of Genesis (or Geneses as I am now in no way going to have the restraint or good taste to refrain from calling it) tried to amalgamate. The first probably suggests a more peaceful and agrarian society, in which the abundance of the natural world is evident. The second suggests a society under various kinds of pressure, probable econmic hardship and resulting social change, hence the desire to explain their excusion from plenty in the face of being God's Children through the Expulsion from Eden story and to justify the antagonistic relationship between the natural world and Mankind, not to say towards women.

Adam's rib is a truly strange story. There's a relief sculpture of it in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo (right). BlueJ and I watched a group of Koreans looking at this and, through their body language, I got a fleeting glimpse (I can't speak for BlueJ) of what an unnatural myth this is and how inexplicable the story's idea seemed to them. This sculpture, of course, stresses the already fairly pronounced womb-envy aspect of the myth, but even without that, what strange creatures we are and how strange our ideas and our religion.

But to go back to the Book; what I can't help noticing is that, although, the first myth is the more commonly known, we have opted for the story of the creation of humans from the second. Since it seems to me the more cynical and mean-spirited of the two and since we have used it as the basis of so much of our theology, I am wondering if we couldn't do a bit of a rethink on some of these issues?

So Get This...

I was listening to old podcasts and I came across the one where Tony Martin is talking about the French Revolution 'way back in the 15th century or whatever.' And it struck me that he has a fairly good grasp of the manners, customs and events of the French Revolution, so it's not that he doesn't know when the Revolution was, he doesn't know when the 15th century was.

Shocking Cock Up, The Mice Were Furious.

I have been attempting to teach my cats, Bingley and Lucrezia, to use the cat flap. For months now. Unsuccessfully.

Millions of years of human evolution and decades of personal education combine in me so that in approaching a problem like this I try to make out the pattern behind every failure. I try to work out how cats learn, how they think, why they don't seem able to grasp this concept when they are able to grasp others, but of course I missed the most obvious thing about the way cats think.

In Bingley, it became clear pretty early on, I had simply taken on a lost cause. Bingley really is loving and warn and heart on sleeve and very stupid.

But Lucrezia, Lucrezia knows how to get out through the cat flap and given her love of independence I was sure I could teach her to come in by it too. But no, she would sit by the back door waiting for me to notice her and let her in. Ever the diadact, I would take these opportunities to demonstrate the utility of the cat flap and she would look at me with her mesmeric eyes behind her most innocent sorry-Hannah-I-no-speak-English expression until I let her in by the door.

But last night she got caught out in the storm. There was the creak of the cat flap and then the drenched Lucrezia was by the fire.

I don't speak English indeed.

I suspect she has been able all along but was caught up investigating my capacity to learn and think and also that she has not been overly impressed with the results.

Toclifane

First there was the Eurovision Song Contest. Well, no, I suppose first there was 1066 and all that. But the Hundred Year's War didn't help and neither did Mary Stuart or Napoleon or the Rugby. And now (well, now for me, I'm only just finishing series 3) Russell T. Davies implicitly compares William of Normandy to the Toclifane. If the French watched Doctor Who or cared what English people think anyway I'm sure they'd be outraged.

Fountain

A couple of weeks ago one of the most innovative shows on radio, Hamish and Andy, broadcast a pissing contest they held between themselves and which Hamish Blake won to his obvious delight.

I know.

I know, too, which Rudyard Kipling quote you are not thinking of: 'It's very clever, but is it art?'

But, I've been asked by grown ups to take Surrealism, Dada and Duchamp seriously. I have been told that Fountain interrogates and challenges my prejudices about what is and is not art. (In fact, contrary to the experts, I have always thought that Fountain is a work which powerfully advocates conservative attitudes towards art, but then, I always was a bit of a death-of-the-author girl.)

So anyway, if it ever comes to a choice of one or the other, I really hope the Tate take Hamish and Andy.

Get Smart

I never thought Get Smart was subversive so I'm a bit freaked that the makers of the Get Smart film remake do.

In the TV series, Agent 86 was an incompetent though highly regarded top operative constantly being made to look good (after a period of looking bad) by outrageous fortune and 99. In the film (according to the trailer, I don't think I could face the film itself), Agent 86 is a depressed junior desk spook, disliked and ridiculed by his masters, who is, of necessity, thrown into field work as a clean skin when Kaos discovers the identities of every Control field agent.

Can it be that the premise for an American TV show filmed at the height of Cold War paranoia is too subversive for America now? Or is it that the secret services have, after Iraq and Afghanistan, been shown to be so incompetent, that they feel the original premise would amount to letting out trade secrets?

Thoughts on the Cultural Implications of 'Guess Which Supermarket Aisle'

On today's Hamish and Andy Show, the boys played the gnomically titled 'Guess Which Supermarket Aisle'. Hamish described it as a game, but essentially it came down to the question 'do you think the olive oil is shelved in the aisle with the pasta or the aisle with the vinegar?'

Hamish answered 'vinegar', Andy 'pasta'.

Much to my mother's disgust, Andy was right.

My interest is anthropological. In Ong's famous Orality and Literacy he describes a question which demonstrates one of the cognitive differences between people from oral societies and those from literate societies. The question is 'axe, spade, block of wood, saw: which is the odd one out?' Literacy tends to produce the answer 'block of wood because all the others are tools of one kind or another', while orality tends to conclude 'spade because all the others are to do with wood.'

Hamish and Andy's answers reflect the same divide: oil is like vinegar, it has a related place in cooking and eating, while oil and pasta are associated because both are used in the cooking of Italian dishes.

After all the trouble the Greeks went to to straighten these things out in the first place and millennia, we are quietly shifting our mental processes backwards, but without the culture to support it. Such a big shift at such a small level implies a massive shift on higher levels.

I'm pretty sure it's computers. Computers developed so amateurishly that early models show the odd thinking of their creators which then becomes the template upon which later models are built. Now, no one even notices how odd it all is, unless they have to try to teach a pensioner to navigate around email. The logic needed to find things online or to do things on computers is closer to Andy's answer than Hamish's.

This is bad news for me because a quick look round Silicon Valley, then and now, gives me a remarkably full list of people I don't want to think like.

I'm not saying they're not brilliant people and I'm not saying that computers haven't made the most amazing things possible, I'm just saying I don't want them wearing away at the organizational structures of my thought. My thoughts are unstructured enough without any more help.

Serendipity Update

BlueJ tells me that the 14th of May is also the date that the wiki entry for de Pizan was most recently updated. Someone tell me what's going on with de Pizan!!!

Serendipity

According to our sitemetre, on the 14th of May, around twenty people, all from the American Midwest, and particularly from Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, all searched for the same quotation and were directed to our site. The Midwest has a population of over 66 Million, so twenty people aren't a lot in the grand scheme of things. It's just that the quote they were searching for is an unusual and unusually long one:

...we have not come to do you any harm, but rather, out of pity on your distress, we are here to comfort you. Our aim is to help you get rid of those misconceptions which have clouded your mind...

No one has ever been directed to our site before through that quote, which comes, of course, from de Pizan. If any of you find your way back here, what were you looking for? And what happened to prompt you to look in the first place?

Spam

My email has randomly started putting important emails in my spam folder. This means I have been forced to undertake the totally icky job to going through my spam mail to check nothing has been misdirected. This is a generally depressing and thoroughly unrewarding experience, so I was grateful for this comic relief this morning; I found an email entitled 'Bomb her womb with your enormous cannon'.

If anyone is actually getting off on this stuff and is wondering whether they are normal or likely to be happy at all, ever in their lives; I'm so, so sorry. No Dice.

Bees

I was at the exhibition of Light at Trinity last year with BlueJ and it was completely great, except that one of the exhibits was a collection of 3D rendered bee-maps, showing the exact path that the bee had flown. The paths were being mapped because some snotty post grads had made a grid of different coloured dots with sugar water behind one of the colours and wanted to see if the bee would come to associate the colour with sugar water and fly more directly to it. I don't know whether it was an experiment meant to demonstrate that bees, like every other living thing, learn from experience or to demonstrate that they can see colours. I thought everyone knew both those things... unless it was designed to demonstrate the bees learn a lot quicker than Science post grads?

Haints and Saints

So I am completely not going to write about the article in the paper today on how women deserve to be paid less because they don't work as hard as people.
Partly, I'm not going to write about it because it will only annoy me, partly because biological determinism is so last century but one and even then it was only really the National Socialists who really got off on it, partly because it's silly (we all know that what we're talking about is women being financially punished for having children - academics and social scientists, out of the pool!) but mainly I'm not going to write about it because the guy who conducted the study is called 'Prof. Wooden'.

'"It's a well known fact that women are indolent," quipped Prof. Wooden, woodenly, "This is no laughing matter."'

You see? I'm not going to be able to be grown up about this, not even close. So instead I'm going to write about how I find Bluegrass music confusing.

I really like every sound in Bluegrass music, every instrument, I just don't like it when they all play together at the same time. (Yes, I know, for all of you humming "Mama Don't" in their heads at the moment.) When Torvill and Dean were awarded their honorary doctorates, the speaker joked that the definition of an intellectual ought to be anyone who can hear Ravel's Bolero without thinking of them and I have the version of a same problem with Bluegrass; it's very difficult not to think how twee redneckism really is.* Finally, it does have the unfortunate characteristic of making every song sound the same. I think that's mainly to do with not being able to vary the rhythm so much if you're getting strings to do the job of drums and because at the heart of it, it's playing not listening music. So, virtuosity is more important than not homogenizing everything.

Partly, of course, this is all Bill Monroe's fault. Anything earlier than the Bluegrass Boys has more variety or sound and rhythm and fewer instruments which lets the music come out from amongst all that talent a bit more. Clarence Astley is a great example of that haunting high and lonesome sound in the banjo music before Bluegrass. The Newgrass movement made some progress on that front and I think people like Gillian Welch who are on the edge of it have been even more successful because they're going back to pre-Monroe music. Rick Danko is my favourite male singer (all his early influences were Bluegrass but he did something with them) but Tim O'Brien is my next favourite and I never listen to him because there really is only so many times you can listen to the tiddle-ti-tees.


*Anyone who is going to write in to tell me that a) the term 'Redneck' originated in the South, not Appalachia and b) 'Redneckism' isn't actually a word, and please God, never will be, don't because know and I'm very sorry, really. (Actually, I always thought "Redneck" came from Mississippi, but according to the OED doesn't.)

Post-Feminist Australia

First Troy Buswell's bizarre chair-sniffing incident and now Sam Newman fondling a lingerie clad mannequin with a picture of Football journalist, Caroline Wilson's face attached to its head. In some quarters there has been a suggestion that, despite how tough it is being a female journalist in the football world that she should 'just get over it'. Troy Buswell doesn't seem able to 'just get over it' although he won't stand down as Liberal Party leader and although it wasn't actually him who was victimized. He seems to have been traumatized by victimizing someone else. According the The Age:

Tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell said he needed a short break, turned his

back and then asked his press secretary to bring him a glass of water.
Mr Buswell said his wife was aware of the allegations before they were published

on Sunday. He said it had been a difficult time for him "on a personal level".
"These are difficult issues for me to deal with and they are very difficult issues

for my family to deal with," he said. "It's hard dealing with these matters and

having to face up to your responsibilities behaviourally, publicly, and it's

harder to do it privately."

Is it hard? Really? All we're asking of him is that he not snap female MPs bra straps as he did a couple of years ago and that he not publicly sniff chairs in which female members of his own party have been sitting.

I am genuinely perplexed by his comments - perhaps he also does these things when he has people round to dinner? Perhaps he does such things to his mother? Or this mates? If he doesn't, then why would he do it in this circumstance?

In the cases of both Buswell and Newman, there has been an attempt to down play it as a joke. But the point is that in both cases these men tried to embarrass women in their profession, tried to make them feel awkward and excluded. In both cases, aside from the sexual harassment aspect, it was a very nasty insult.

One letter to the Editor attempted to cast this as a civil liberties issue, but given that we have defamation laws and no one thinks that that's the kind of censorship which, as the letter-writer put it 'has no place in a liberal democracy', I think we can put his letter down to his weak grasp of what constitutes censorship in the first place.

What is really lovely about the public response to both these incidents is that the vast majority of people have been outraged. Men, in particular, have been vocal about how embarrassed they feel that there are still men out there that behave like this and how offended they are about this kind of behaviour generally.

That's what this comes down to; it's not a women's issue, it's a human issue. It happened to women because in both cases the women work in professions in which they are in the minority, but it is nothing more than the bullying, excluding and victimizing of people who were already at a disadvantage. Gender clouds the issue, if not for that, there would be unanimous support for the women; all Australians step in if they see that someone isn't getting a fair go.

Pod Death; a modern tragedy.

There's an album come out a couple of months ago called 'No Man's Woman'. It is 'an Australian male compilation, saluting the female perspective in rock & pop'. The idea came about because You Am I did a cover of a Patti Smith song and the idea of men covering a woman's song was thought remarkable enough to raise comment. (In fact, "House of the Rising Sun", a song covered by every British male group and quite a few American ones as well, is a woman's song. Most early Anglo-American music is 'women's songs', but that's a story for another day.) On the cd, Tex Perkins, inevitably, wonderfully, sings Helen Reddy's 'I Am Woman' accompanied by his comment that he's always felt he was a 'woman in the body of an ape', which, as K-Rudd would said, is too cute by half. And yet, I find it endearing. One of us is seriously special and I'm not game to call it.

Either way, it was reading the liner notes for the album that I realized that I was not alone in an everyday tragedy I suffered recently. In fact, it must be on the scale of zeitgeist by now. So, my everyday tragedy is this: I accidentally wiped my pod. So did one of the guys from The Vines. When they asked him why he choose the song he did for 'No Man's Woman' he said that he'd accidentally wiped his ipod and it meant that he had to go round borrowing and finding and buying albums so that he could build up his music library on another computer. In the process, he ended up hearing a whole load of new music, one song of which he'd liked so much that the band covered it on the album.

As with all death, my pod death (and his ipod death) lead to new life. Like The Vines, I ended up listening to a pod full of music that was new to me while I dug through my cupboards looking for my favourite cds that I bought and put on computer so many years ago I don't remember what the cover art looks like.

Gillian Welch's Soul Journey, Bernard Fanning's Tea and Sympathy, The Cat Empire's So Many Nights (which I took against the first time I heard it, but love now), solo John Lennon, Hijack Oscar and Dave Graney, At Speed's Ashtown Sessions, and particularly, Tex Perkins and Tim Rodgers' My Better Half, which, if I had no other reason, I would love just for the cover art. The album has been rightly criticised for its poor production values, but I don't mind that. I haven't heard an album as direct as this since I was 15 and heard Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan for the first time; an equally poorly produced album. My pod death was worth it for the song You Should See Her Now alone.

Well I Don't Know If I'd Go So Far As "Fascist", I Mean You're Not Actually Proposing a State-Enforced Ban On All Reduced-Fat Products...

...oh, you meant that rhetorically, didn't you?

BlueJ is one of the best cooks I have ever met. I used to do her ironing in exchange for her cooking dinner and, much as I hate ironing, I absolutely got the sweet end of the deal. In fairness, she has also cooked me dinner because I was poor, hungry, ill, sad, helped her move, because she needed someone to experiment on or just because. So, she's paid her dues and has every right to be a fascist, although she isn't. It is true that when she comes to power she genuinely will ban all reduced-fat products, but at the moment what she is talking about isn't fascism, it's the pursuit of a way of life that's all about people who 'sing songs, spin stories, love, laugh and drink wine'. It's about the understanding that sheer pleasure in life is a virtue as well as a profoundly practical thing. It's about generosity to others and ourselves, the staff of life metaphorically and literally. For her, not surprisingly, reduced-fat food stands metonimically for the opposite.

And I utterly agree, except that, without being in the least 'Skinny Jean' about it, I just like reduced fat milk and cheese better than the full fat version.

Food fascist?

This issue of Observer Food Monthly contains fifty of Nigel Slater's most popular recipes. In his introduction he says that while recipes were mostly chosen because they are either his favourites or those most requested by readers, one or two are included because they were unclear when originally published. One of the clarifications is a recipe for cheesecake which failed to specify full-fat mascarpone, and results in cake soup if low fat cheese is used. Personally, I'd think that anyone attempting to make cheesecake with low-fat cheese deserves everything they get.

Lest We Forget

... and yet every year ANZAC Day is an exercise in forgetting. We remember it as the newly federated Australia's first military campaign and we remember how proud young Australian boys were to serve. We remember that they lied about their age in order to sign up. And we remember that over 10,000 ANZACs died at Gallipoli, not to mention the casualties of other nationalities. It is only human to remember and honour their sacrifice and above all to say that they did not die in vain.

But, historically, they did die in vain. What we don't remember about Gallipoli is that it was a futile campaign, orchestrated by Winston Churchill; it is no wonder that after this, in WWII, he felt he could commandeer Australian troops against the express orders of the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin. Although we talk about this as our nation's first war, Australia had in fact sent troops to the Boer War as well. We don't regard this as such an important event because Australia was unfederated and its troops were very much Britain's troops.
So there is a terrible irony in our valourization of ANZAC Day; by sending troops to a war which had nothing to do with us we weren't breaking past patterns and asserting our Nationhood, we were confirming that we were still at Britain's beck and call, still willing to put Britain's interests ahead of the lives of young Australians.

The First World War, a war of disasters and unimaginable casualties, achieved nothing except the creation of the resentment which allowed Hitler to come to power in Germany and the onset of the Second World War. Worse, perhaps, it was fought for nothing. It was begun by the assassination of an aristocrat for reasons to do with the regional history of Eastern Europe, and the rest of the world was dragged in by virtue of treaties. Each new country obliged to join by their treaties, forced their allies to commit to war too and then theirs, until the World was at war.

So, historically, the ANZACs died in vain. We have a duty now to change that. The Australian Government under Billy Hughes allowed Australian boys, too young to know better and fired with the kind of misplaced patriotism the WWI soldier and poet Wilfred Owen called 'the old lie' to die, not to protect our way of life, but to ensure their standing with the British. Later Sir Robert Menzies put Australian troops entirely at Churchill's disposal in hopes of being given a seat in Churchill's war cabinet. The Australian Parliament at the time was horrified enough to throw him out on that basis, and his successor, Curtin, realizing the recklessness of the British attitude towards Australian troops, threw our lot in with the Americans. During Vietnam, Menzies, once again PM, again introduced conscription in order to be able to provide troops to support America in such an unpopular war. His successor, Harold Holt, whose slogan was "All the way with LBJ", once again put our troops utterly in the hands of American President Lyndon B. Johnson. And most recently, John Howard, in the image of his hero Menzies, committed Australian troops to American causes which have made the world less safe and have greatly increased the threat of terrorism to Australia, apparently for the glory of being termed a 'man of steel' by George W. Bush.

The lesson of ANZAC day, the thing the ANZAC deaths should teach us never to forget, is that the lives of young Australians should never be spent by their government except in direst need, and solely in our own national interest, not to impress our allies as though we were their poor cousins. It's a day which, of all days, should remind us of how terrible war is and how cautious we should be in committed ourselves to it.
This is the only patriotic way to honour the ANZACs and their sacrifice.

An extraordinarily good way with chicory

This is a story that illustrates two great truths about cooking, firstly, that often it will go wrong and more importantly, that fabulous alchemy that a really great recipe displays - of simple ingredients simply prepared that produce something ridiculously tasty.

So, I was feeling vaguely fishy this week but a combination of sheer laziness and circumstance meant that Aldi was going to be the extent of my market place. Which left me with two rather sad looking trout to do something with. To be frank the trout was not a success, I decided to bake it with lemon and dill and to serve with an old stand-by of mine, a variation of the creme fraiche-citrus-herb theme. Take it from me, don't serve even really crappy trout with creme fraiche. Were I to do it again I'ld keep the dill and capers and incorporate them into a dressing based either on vinegar or lemon but the fish needs something sharp and clean rather than anything in any way luscious. So the star of my meal bombed but salvation occurred in the form of the side I was eating with it, the chicory (which I'm in possession of because it was it was the last packet left in Superquinn and was reduced to Eur1.40, oh sweet serendipitous chance).

To make really amazing chicory:

Chicory
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil (decent if you have it)
Unsuccessful fish sauce:
Creme fraiche
Lemon Juice
Capers
Salt and pepper

1)Loosen the creme fraiche with the lemon juice to a thick pouring consistency and then add more salt and pepper than you think you're likely to need.
2)Add 1 tsp of capers for every two (heaped) of creme fraiche, you could chop them if you fancy but I can't say I was bothered.
3)Remove a half inch at the root of each chicory and cut length-ways in half.
4)Drizzle each half with the oil, season enthusiastically and pour a couple of teaspoons of the creme fraiche mixture on top.
5)Put under a very hot grill for about five minutes until the creme fraiche has browned and the edges of the chicory are blackening very slightly.

And you come out the other end with pure magic.

Through one of those vaguely ominous but almost certainly meaningless motifs, strawberries and fish frequently occur in my life together. In this case the strawberries arrived on the scene through the agency of a two for one honey-trap offer in Superquinn. So I finished my decadent, dilettante little repast with a deeply drinkable sparkling rose (Aldi Eur8.99 - worth every red cent) while polishing off half a pound of surprisingly good strawberries (which will almost certainly give me hives, mais c'est la vie). The presence of the bottle of wine will quite probably mean that I will wake up tomorrow to the presence of rather a lot of fishy dishes. If there is any sense no mind justice in the world, some day someone, who considers that washing dishes in return for being well fed to be a good deal, will marry me. But only those who consider chickpeas 'real food' and don't sermonise people for consuming perfectly reasonable quantities of bloody good single malt need apply.

Iraq

We've just had the five year anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq and a curse on the houses of all the journalists who are using the word 'invasion' now that it's gone so horribly wrong and that public opinion is so much against it, but didn't use it five years ago.

Five years ago a group of boys on a train pinned me up against the wall because they could see from my black arm band that I had been at a demonstration protesting the War. One of them said 'How are you going to feel if that fucker Hussein does have weapons? You're going to be responsible for all the babies that die.' Everyone from undergraduate history students up knew that the War would make the world more dangerous, not less dangerous, especially if Iraq really did have nuclear weapons.

At the time I was teaching poetry to first year undergraduates and I made them read Wilfred Owen; a class full of kids who thought we should be at war berated me for my ghoulishness in turning their stomachs with Owen's descriptions of the war dead.

Just recently, an American friend of mine looked confused when I said that the upcoming election was in the context of America being at war. Then he said '...Oh! you mean Iraq? Most Americans don't think of us as being at war.' I told him, in my insufferably self-righteous way, that most Iraqis do think of America as being at war.

Our attitude to war is only maintained by the absence of wars at home, which is what Owen, who died in the Battle of Sambre a week before the war ended, meant when he said that anyone who had seen or heard what he had would not urge war. My great uncles, who signed up underage like so many Australia boys, were POWs in Changi and the Burma Railway and it broke them. But believe me, it made pacifists of them.

The best reason not to vote for McCain is that he is a man who fought in Vietnam, was captured and tortured, and still believes that the war in Iraq will achieve any worthwhile purpose. I cannot imaging the depths of the kind of pathology that would drive a man to such a delusion.

You be the Kremlin and I'll be the saint

I'm starting to feel that feminism is a bit conditional in its attitude to women. I am angry about Prof. Greer's comments on Clinton-actually livid is probably closer the mark-, but I have to concede that it is a malaise which Feminists have always suffered from.

Feminism immediately understood that the Patriarchal definition of the Good Woman was a hiding to nothing for us, but made the awful mistake of trying to oppose it with an alternative definition and then crucifying those women who don't 'live up' to it.

As early as the Renaissance, De Pizan invites all good women to live with her in the City of Ladies. Her definition of a 'good woman' was -is! - groundbreaking, but her invitation is still conditional*.

Centuries later another Frenchwoman, De Beauvoir, argued that if women want to have the same rights as men then they have to behave like men, without any sense that perhaps not all women regard male behaviour as a dizzying height definitional of civilized humanity.

Even De Gouges, in many ways the most free from this conception, campaigned for women to be subject to the Death Penalty, then suffrage, so that no one could say that women do not deserve the vote. Of course, De Gouges was executed in 1793 during the Terror and women didn't get the vote in France until 1944.

Women seem always to have felt a pressure to demonstrate that they, that we, deserve equality, in contradistinction to most disadvantaged groups. I suppose that this is why women, generally, seem so paranoid about appearing to be self-serving. There is no question that African Americans will vote for Obama while American women are often reluctant to vote for Clinton, not least in order to make the point that they wouldn't vote for someone just because she's 'one of their own'.

Certainly, conditional equality is totally absent from the masculine equivalents. The Rights of Man and of the Citizen begins "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." It continues "Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law." It doesn't say "your rights are conditional on you being a really top bloke", the only requirement is one made in the interests of order; that men obey the law. Equally The Declaration of Independence claims that "all men are created equal", and though this truth turned out to be a little less self-evident than everyone had hoped, in its language and conception it imagines that the essence of equality is that we are born with it and that it is not dependant upon our actions.

And now Prof. Greer has joined the list of Feminists who believe in women's equality subject to their virtue by joined the endless succession of people who want to criticize Clinton on personal rather than professional grounds. Greer is quoted saying "She's so bossy and cold and manipulative." (Can anyone remember when such things were said of a male politician? Must be because male politicians do not have these qualities. No. Wait. What about John Howard's entire front bench?)
Not that Greer is against female leaders, but she seems to feel that it only furthers the cause if they are women who's lifestyle meets with her approval. Now not only do when have to succeed, we have to be saints too, her kind of saints.


Greer, who was in Melbourne promoting her book Shakespeare's Wife, was quoted in The Australian 11/3/2008 as saying, without any apparent consciousness of the irony, "I can't see that Hillary would appeal to feminists because, why is she there? She is there because she is Bill's wife."


Surely, people as feminists are delighted to see any indication that the idea of women in every aspect of society is becoming more acceptable, and surely as individuals they vote their consciences across a range of issues.


*Boccaccio's On Famous Women, one of the inspirations for De Pizan, by contrast gives the biographies of great women who have performed great deeds, regardless of whether they were 'good' or 'wicked'.

The Drover's Dog

A friend of mine is hoping that Obama gets the nod, not least because, as she said this morning, he unites the centre and the centre right around a democratic candidate. A minute later she went to town on Clinton for 'courting the republican vote.' This girl's a highly educated feminist. grrrr. ahh. buah boor bahno grrrrr, etc.

As Hayden said, I think a drover's dog could lead the democrats to victory in this election, so I'm not that pushed either way, but then, I don't really understand Americans, despite dating them, living there and watching The West Wing.

Errata (Dialects)

BlueJ just pointed out that there is a pocket of the Newfoundland population which retain a pronounced Waterford twang, albeit with other influences. And, of course, I spent last Easter with a group of Australian nuns living in the Chianti whose accents were certainly closer to the Australian accent of the period (1960) when they left Australia than to anything else.

Sorry

When Rudd won I told my American boyfriend that the new Government would apologise to Indigenous Australians. Said boyfriend isn't especially racist, but he couldn't see the value: you either compensate people or you shut up, there's no point saying sorry.

I was standing in the changing rooms in my gym in Dublin today when it was reported on the radio that Rudd's first act in the new parliament would be the apology. I can't speak about what it means to the first Australians, but the sense of relief that I feel is beyond words. I was alone, which is just as well because I burst into tears.

For all that Howard was PM for 11 years, the thing, maybe the only thing that will be remembered about him is that he is the man who wouldn't say sorry. We actually do need the word. There was an annual Sorry Day instituted while Howard was in power and the organizers would have skywriters write the word. People would sign petitions saying that they wanted to apologise personally, if the nation wouldn't do it. Clarke and Dawe's The Games made an episode around the apology, the text of which they offered to 'any other John Howard' who might want to use it: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/thegames/howard.htm

The opposition to the apology has always argued that no living Australian is personally responsible for the Stolen Generation. This is utterly untrue because people were still being taken as late as the middle 20th century. It actually doesn't matter whether it's true. Howard said that it wasn't the role of Government to apologise. But that's just it, it is the role of Government. When a Government apologises, the collective, not the individual acts.

Howard always said it played into 'the Black Arm Band' view of history - something that never bothered the ex-PM when he was mourning soldiers fallen in WWI. Paul Keating said in the famous Redfern speech 'However intractable the problems seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragged down.' He went on to say, in a Don Watson phrase (one of many) which won him my undying love, and pissed off nearly everyone else 'That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.'

Everything about the Western World's self-narrative at the moment is to do with bottom-lines and what Australians call 'Economic Rationalism'. But actually, everyone is most profoundly concerned with culture politics and ideology. Howard was an ideological politician. Kennett was about balancing books, but Howard wanted the hearts and minds. Bush is the same. Which si why there has been such a kick in the opposite direction. When Australia voted for Rudd, people started to adopt Whitlam's election motto and talk about the First Hundred Days, just as people are trying to make a Bobby Kennedy out of Obama. The War in Iraq is about ideology as much as the Crusades were. (I am the historical consultant for a production of Macbeth at the moment and when I mentioned the Crusades continuing on into the 17th century, one of the actors said 'They're not over yet.')

Dr Nelson stills thinks we shouldn't apologise - he got the leadership of the conservatives at least in part because Turnbull said he would support an apology. But seriously! Even Ted Bailleu thinks we should 'do the decent thing.'

So, we are finally going to get the word itself. This is a section from Keating's Redfern speech:
We non- Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us.
Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia?
Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the fist Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We fail to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

Rudd wants to 'get it right'. I really hope he asks Watson to write it.

PR

In the last couple of weeks, I've found myself arguing against Obama a lot. Not because I think it would be a disaster if he won, but because I am profoundly suspicious of the reasons that people like him. I am dismayed by the fact that the whole world seems to want to vote for Change, when no one I've meet knows what that would be. Very few people seem to know much about him at all except that he is in favour of Change and Hope. As am I, by the way. But it all sounds suspiciously like the War on Terror. I'm against Terror, but I am not at all in favour of the War on Terror, a war which has caused so much Terror. Words, words, they're all we have to go on, and they're leading us astray.

Now the Kennedys have endorsed Obama. Caroline Kennedy wrote an article published in The Age today which actually stated this position frankly. Kennedy writes:

'We have that kind of opportunity with Obama. It isn't that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960. Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates' goals are similar.'

The article presents Obama as a special politician and - without missing a beat - says that, actually, on issues of policy, he isn't especially distinguished.

Also, what could she possible mean by 'a change of leadership'? Bush's term expires; America is getting a change of leadership no matter what.

No, I know what she means, of course I do.

But I'm really concerned that language is being used in such a sloppy way. When democracies are as big as America, everything is PR, everything is words. So if people use them imprecisely they are devalued to the point where no one can be held to account. Also, it effects people's ability to think clearly. When every word has an entirely amorphous value, its much easier to make mental slips - and if you're a good spin doctor, then it's easier to make people make mental slips.

I have a healthy terror of what politicians as charismatic as Obama can do, what, historically, they have done. But I'm more worried that no one - until now - seemed to have noticed that no one is focusing on policies. I don't know whether I'm more or less worried now that someone has but just doesn't care. A democracy really depends on people being more thoughtful and more insightful than this.

Picture from Cuthbie's Girl

Love this! Thank you Cuthbie's Girl.

South Carolina

I've noticed that I refer to female politicians either by their first name, or their full name if I subconsciously think of them as being feminine (Hilary or Hilary Clinton, Maxine or Maxine McKew) and by their surnames only if I don't (Thatcher, Gillard).

A friend said to me yesterday 'There's no doubt that Hilary's the better candidate, its just a really unfortunate thing that she's so personally unlikeable. I feel it too, even though I've seen how hard she worked for us in New York.'
I couldn't count the number of times I've heard that particular 'special case' argument in relation to female politicians.
My friend also said 'America is so ready for a female president and because Obama's black, its not even an issue; no one's even talking about the fact she's a woman.'

I'm hearing that a lot too.

And I don't think its true. I don't think the fact that it's not being talked about means that people are any more comfortable with women in politics. My friend says last time there was a female presidential candidate, all the debate was about whether foreign governments would take her seriously. (I didn't have the heart to tell him that gender is the least of the prejudices the world holds against American leaders.) There is also a slip there; he was talking about America 'being ready' but said the debate (the sign that America wasn't ready) had been around whether the rest of the world would take a female president seriously. That slip demonstrates how good we've got at justifying, rationalizing and hiding prejudices. The unintentional implication of what he said was that foreign perception was being used as a way of disguising American sexism and that subconsciously, at least, he knew it.

What we want from a politician is so utterly at odds with what we want women to be that I think it is entirely possible not to be sexist, to be a person who is in favour of women succeeding in any number of previously male-dominated areas and still find it difficult to like a female leader. Clinton is unlikeable because she's a potential presidential politician. Gradually, we are coming to a view of minor female politicians which is positive. In those roles, women are able to be either more maternal or more ball-breaking, and there isn't such a problem. But for a president, for a leader, we want her to be tough enough to do the job and comforting because women who aren't are bitches. Simultaneously, we want her to be maternal, but also not, because you've got to be tough to fight wars and protect us all from the big bad world. And because we are happy (enough) with women in other public offices, it always feels like we don't like whoever it is personally, rather than because of her gender.

Maxine McKew, the woman who took John Howard's seat (and therefore, although not vying for a leadership role nevertheless occupies that space because she defeated the Prime Minister) was almost entirely able to escape these contradictions. Her public profile was developed over years as a journalist and people still relate to her that way although she is now a politician. Having said that, it was shocking to hear her speak on election day (and no one was barracking for her more than me) because she wasn't tough like politicians are, she wasn't aggressive, and it was only the remembrance of her intellect and dedication as a journalist that stopped me from wondering if she was up to this. And all because she speaks softly.

In the presidential debates, when all the candidates walked onto the stage together, Clinton's height (a foot shorter than everyone else) and her hips made her a completely recognizable silhouette. Obama didn't stand out for being black; Clinton was the odd man out.

Australia Day, pt 2

I got absolutely shellaqued by a friend of mine for saying that the cultural cringe still exists. But today's edition of The Age has an article on the Australian accent. I don't think other people worry about this the way Australians do: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/bcultureb-strine-feels-strain-as-austrayan-twang-on-the-wane/2008/01/26/1201157739206.html?page=2
The article isn't stridently anti-immigration, but it does say that our broad accent is under threat from 'wogspeak'. No, seriously. Just try to imagine what the article would have been like if it had been anti-immigration and used the 'word' 'wogspeak'? Also interesting is that fact that parodying second generation versions of the Australian accent - as long as they are European - isn't really seen as being problematic, where as if it were Chinese or Taiwanese it would be (to steal another Get This term) a bit me-no-rikie.

The whole article surprised me because TV has played a much bigger role in altering the accent than immigration has. In Australia, it did what the railways did to accent in America. Accents always change, they change everywhere and all the time, so I don't even really know what we're talking about anymore. Even the good people in Lost, without any outside contact, would change their accent over time. (I'm just guessing that last sentence makes some sense; I've never actually seen Lost and I don't know anything about the plot. For all I know they might be stuck on an island with a major international airport.) Actually, contact stabilizes and neutralizes accent rather than the other way about.

While I think we should be more concerned about the loss of Indigenous languages (the only people studying Aboriginal languages at my alma mater were visiting Americans) I don't know how much of a good idea I think it is to put it in an article about accents. Indigenous languages aren't an accented variation of English.

Just easing up on the moral indignation for a moment, I was interested to note that pronouncing 'eh' as 'ah' (as in Malbourne for Melbourne) is a Victorian thing. I thought it was a me thing and something that had only started to happened after I moved to America. Also, why isn't the article asking why Australians famously pronounce more diphthongs than any other group aside from Texans, and yet, equally famously, tend to elide actual diphthongs? So many unanswered questions.... Speaking of which, I see that 'strayan' is now being pronounced as 'strine'. I thought we had cut down 'australian' to its shortest possible length while still saying the word, but I was wrong. This is what happens when I leave the country.

The article includes a list of expressions not found in other Englishes, some of which caught me out badly. 'Light globe', 'icy pole', 'silver beet', 'bora' and 'doona' spring to mind, but it was 'short black' and 'flat white' that nearly got me killed in America. Actually, that wasn't the worst of it. One of the most common snakes in Victoria is the Yellow-Bellied Black snake, a charming creature which, according to the guy who came to get one out of our house, is most commonly grey with a red belly. Australians always drop the end off words and expressions, so we tend to call it the Yellow-Bellied Black. That was the expression which caused the greatest tension in a room full of middle-class, educated white Americans, even ahead of 'spit the dummy' which many people, with better imaginations than me, thought sounded like a lot of fun. I swear, it had never occured to me that it could mean anything else.

Also is enterprise bargaining and scruntchie (pronounced 'Crunchie' by my German skating coach) really just us?

Australia Day

This is such a difficult day for Australians, though it's been pointed out to me that I find really quite a lot of things difficult.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/blarissa-dubeckib-why-its-australian-to-be-unaustralian/2008/01/25/1201157665918.html

Heathcliff

This is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't happen in Ireland.

http://media.theage.com.au/?category=BreakingNews&rid=34892