(Above: lordy, we feel so bold risking Gail Dines' wrath, though that's as far as it goes, since joining the alleged 557,000 readership for the rag is simply beyond the pale. Get your Cosmopolitan media kit here and see how they shamelessly target the core target of women 18-34).
Beware zealotry and monomania in all its guises, that's the advice I took from a brief and tragic mistake which saw me switch on the ABC too early, looking for Lateline, and then ended up catching some of the ritualised arguing, preening and shouting that marks Q&A, all heat and no light.
Until you see a managing director chosen outside Europe you will know the IMF still has a long way to go to reflect the world of the 21st century.
Happy days, the smirk goes to run the IMF, and the Fairfax rags no longer have him hanging around like Banquo's ghost writing wretched nostalgic columns about the way things were.
It always reminds me of nothing so much as the family at the dinner table, everybody in the trenches with fixed bayonets and positions, and everybody knowing which buttons to push to make sure an Irish barney ensues. A bit like the intertubes really.
HOWARD JACOBSON: Any writer who took on Schwarzenegger, the challenge would be to make him sympathetic.
LESLIE CANNOLD: Yes, I would agree with that.
GAIL DINES: Why?
HOWARD JACOBSON: Because he's a - because he's a human being.
LESLIE CANNOLD: Because it's a novel.
HOWARD JACOBSON: He's another person and we shouldn't...
GAIL DINES: He's an adulterer who goes around screwing women. He uses his power. I don't think we should be sympathetic towards him at all.
HOWARD JACOBSON: But how on earth do you read literature in that case? Every play of Shakespeare, he's an adulterer. Othello's a wife murderer. What's wonderful about Shakespeare is Shakespeare said here's a man who murders his wife. This is what it's like to be him. Isn't it terrible to be him and you're imagination is expanded. That doesn't mean you forgive him. That doesn't mean you left him off but your imagination is expanded in the acts of understanding what it's like to be somebody else.
These may seem mischievous questions, but they're pertinent with regard to Snowtown, a horror filed in the Australian psyche as a serial killing when in fact it was a hate crime, an episode of anarchistic butchery driven by a banal malevolence that is enjoying some purchase in the more depressed quarters of this nation and civilised world.
He then jumps the shark and links the whole thing to a kind of capitalist Armageddon, but still it's an engaging set of insights that almost makes me think I should set aside my fear of bodies in barrels. Or maybe wait for the DVD ...
So we came to this little exchange:
LESLIE CANNOLD: Yes, I would agree with that.
GAIL DINES: Why?
HOWARD JACOBSON: Because he's a - because he's a human being.
LESLIE CANNOLD: Because it's a novel.
HOWARD JACOBSON: He's another person and we shouldn't...
GAIL DINES: He's an adulterer who goes around screwing women. He uses his power. I don't think we should be sympathetic towards him at all.
This exchange helps explain Dines' obsessive monomania, in which pornography is the ruination of everything. It took a patient, bemused Jacobson to push her a little further:
HOWARD JACOBSON: But how on earth do you read literature in that case? Every play of Shakespeare, he's an adulterer. Othello's a wife murderer. What's wonderful about Shakespeare is Shakespeare said here's a man who murders his wife. This is what it's like to be him. Isn't it terrible to be him and you're imagination is expanded. That doesn't mean you forgive him. That doesn't mean you left him off but your imagination is expanded in the acts of understanding what it's like to be somebody else.
GAIL DINES: I'd agree with that. (here, the spelling in the transcript is the property of the ABC).
She'd agree! Having entirely missed the point before.
At that point, to avoid hurling a shoe at the screen, I switched over to another station. It seemed the safer, wiser thing to do ...
But it reminded me of poor old Bob Gould, long a fixture at Gould's Bookstore in King Street Newtown and now dead. He'd been looking fragile these last few years, but in his feistier radical socialist days, when he was running the Third World Bookshop on Goulburn street in the city, he got done over by the cops for stocking Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, posters by Aubrey Beardsley, and pictures of Michelangelo's David, which lacked the Vatican-approved fig leaf. (lordy fig leaves even have their own wiki, here).
Which I suppose is better than the genital mutilation that affected many Roman statues, especially as the Roman ruling elite saw nothing wrong with posing in the nude, and the Christians sought to demonise sex by chopping off their threatening marble thingies (End of cultural chapter as beloved bookseller dies at 74).
The revolution never happened for Gould, but strangely sex and the obsession with it is still hanging around. Will it ever go away? Not if Dines has anything to do with it ...
Gould's bookstore is a lovely mess - always has been, though he'd been taking steps to get things in shape before his fatal fall - and let's hope it stays a mess, an Aladdin's cave of impossible to find delights.
What a pity that there's no chance of a Gould v. Dines match-up, but what the hell, since Dines clearly doesn't have the first clue about literature or art, let's call it a win for Gould in absentia. And someone keep her away from any pictures of Michelangelo's David, for fear her sensibilities are inflamed like a sixties Sydney cop.
Speaking of impossible match-ups, that reminds me of Jack Marx's intriguing insight into Snowtown, the film about the John Bunting murders, under the header From battler to psychotic killer. According to the Dines creed, if Arnie's under the hammer, then this is definitively the sort of film that shouldn't be made, and it's certainly a film I've flinched from seeing.
But Marx's reading is intriguing:
There's a telling moment in the new Justin Kurzel film, Snowtown, when Bunting, addressing his friends around the dinner table, compares his homicidal hatred for pedophiles with the heroism of the Anzacs. The desire to rid the world of evil is what the Anzac spirit was all about, wasn't it? "Where's my medal?" he asks. "Where's my parade?"
Whether Bunting actually said this or not, there can be no doubt that he thought it, nor any doubt that, for many, it's a fair question. Is it really more noble to take a life on direction than to kill at the behest of one's own conscience? If terrorism is, as Arundhati Roy declared it, "only the privatisation of war", might not murder be merely the privatisation of terrorism, the skirmishes of Gallipoli, Bali and Snowtown separated only by degrees of political interference? Was Bunting's army, coerced and corralled into a war that would traumatise them later, any less deserving of our sympathies (let alone our applause) than the veterans of Vietnam?
Whether Bunting actually said this or not, there can be no doubt that he thought it, nor any doubt that, for many, it's a fair question. Is it really more noble to take a life on direction than to kill at the behest of one's own conscience? If terrorism is, as Arundhati Roy declared it, "only the privatisation of war", might not murder be merely the privatisation of terrorism, the skirmishes of Gallipoli, Bali and Snowtown separated only by degrees of political interference? Was Bunting's army, coerced and corralled into a war that would traumatise them later, any less deserving of our sympathies (let alone our applause) than the veterans of Vietnam?
Marx then manages to tweak this into being a part of the culture and economic wars:
These may seem mischievous questions, but they're pertinent with regard to Snowtown, a horror filed in the Australian psyche as a serial killing when in fact it was a hate crime, an episode of anarchistic butchery driven by a banal malevolence that is enjoying some purchase in the more depressed quarters of this nation and civilised world.
He then jumps the shark and links the whole thing to a kind of capitalist Armageddon, but still it's an engaging set of insights that almost makes me think I should set aside my fear of bodies in barrels. Or maybe wait for the DVD ...
Hang on, here I am quoting a writer for The Australian with some pleasure, a bit like my regular 'guilty pleasure' walks through the insights of Jack the Insider, who, when not celebrating the truth-telling ways of Malcolm Turnbull on Liberal party climate change policy, is berating the theocratic ways of the Dalai Lama.
Well I'll have to stop this before I go blind, or before I start brooding about all the sex talk in Cleo (I Had Sex Every Day For A Month) and Cosmopolitan (How to Master His Member) and Dolly (Is He Your Next BF? Find out on page 94) - that's just a few from the ACP stable - as Dines assures us that women's magazines condition women to enjoy sex, when as everybody knows, women should find sex unendurable and horrid, and it should never last more than five minutes, and thankfully most Australian men oblige ...
Bring back the Victorian era I say ... but wait a second, didn't good old Queen Vic have quite a thing for Bertie until he shuffled off - you don't have nine kids without a little work - and didn't she then find Billy Connolly to her taste?
Must have been the influence of all that Victorian pornography, what with her using all her regal power to screw her manservant. What an unsympathetic character, worse than Emily Bronte salivating over that rough trade Heathcliff, and lordy have all those BBC period dramas got it all wrong.
Hang on, this is supposed to be a site about the commentariat, and so I suppose we must turn to the scandal de jour, in which case Julie Bishop will do just fine. There she was only the other day, scribbling away earnestly Let Peter Costello work his magic at IMF. Oh it was so heartfelt and concerned, as Ms. Bishop explained how the smirk, aka Petey boy, could save the world, or Europe and the euro zone, or at least the Asia Pacific region.
Sadly The Economist, in its list of 14 candidates, completely overlooked the smirk's claims (The IMF's next leader: The betting begins), preferring to list such goers as Agustin Carstens, the governor of the Bank of Mexico (25-1) and Trevor Manuel, former finance minister of South Africa (20-1).
Well blow me down if the smirk doesn't join in today with Why the IMF must look beyond Europe, wherein the smirk gravely explains the huge workload, the need for change, and how he knows the place intimately because he was a part-time governor of the IMF for nearly twelve years.
Now the Asians are restless and the G20 has shown the IMF how to do it, and the IMF needs, sotto voce, to get its act together. By golly, it reads like a job application:
Happy days, the smirk goes to run the IMF, and the Fairfax rags no longer have him hanging around like Banquo's ghost writing wretched nostalgic columns about the way things were.
It's a win win for the world, for Europe, for Asia, and for Australia, and for the smirk's sense of self-esteem as he righteously reduces his hotel tariff to well under 2K the night ... and proves to Gail Dines that dullness is its own reward and sex has no place in the world economy.
Make it so, IMF, make it so.
(Below: watch out world and the IMF, the smirk is coming to give you a good tickle, yes he is, oh yes he is).
I was slightly surprised anyone considered Costello as a possiblity to run the IMF. After all, he was the laziest Treasurer Australia's ever had.
ReplyDeletePeter Hartcher is also keen, but doesn't dare utter the "C" word:
ReplyDelete... yesterday the emerging powers asserted themselves, for the first time calling for an end to the joke. It is a defining moment where a rising Asia is eclipsing the West. This presents a prime opportunity for Australia.
As Paul Keating was the driving force in forming APEC, as Peter Costello and Kevin Rudd were instrumental in establishing the G20, Australia can play a vital part in reshaping global economic governance in its own interest.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/labor-missing-a-chance-to-help-change-the-world-20110525-1f4hs.html#ixzz1NQif72Qm
Hartcher accuses Wayne Swan sitting on the fence, and squibbing the chance to get behind a "good candidate", but squibs it by refusing to nominate a "good candidate". Well except for the dog whistle of Keating, Rudd and Costello. Take your pick and water your delusion well ...