Gerard Henderson, the cawing of crows, inner city intellectuals, Peter Carey, and a general gloom settles on the pond like a sullen fog ...

(Above: Peter Carey in New York in 2007, and in Australia in 1976. Notice all the give away signs of a burgeoning inner city intellectual. Read the New York mag interview here and confirm it for yourself).

Tuesday is the dourest day of the week on the pond.

Hits go down, crows caw as they circle in the greying sky, a stray vulture skips away from the corpse of joy, students flinch at the thought of another value-laden history lesson, and a general gloom settles like a sullen fog.

Yes, it's time for Gerard Henderson, he of the prattling Polonius fame, and here is the start of his latest posting from a suburb beyond the fringes in Disdain from a lofty height, but funded by the masses:

From New York to Sydney and on to Melbourne, many an inner-city intellectual is full of contempt for their fellow men and women. It's just that not many 'fess up to what they really think.

Oh you fiendish inner-city intellectuals. It's no good pretending that you're from Tamworth or Wagga, or perhaps right now reside in Broken Hill. We can smell you by your latte attitudes - come on down Elizabeth Farrelly with More sex and death, please: the art form of arrogance:

My partner likes his coffee small, black and sweet (I wish I could say, ''like me'' but sadly not, on any of these counts). A longish short-black is the thing, rather than shortish long; the demitasse full rather than the tasse half-full.

Oh dear. Enough said.

It's no good for example for Peter Carey to protest that he was born in Bacchus Marsh, and went to Geelong Grammar, or studied at Monash University, or lived in an alternative community in Yandina, north of Brisbane, or did a stint in Bellingen in northern New South Wales. You see, he shifted to New York and set up shop with his wife in a west village townhouse. West! With three flights of stairs and a decktop! (here).

Don't go telling me he's shifted into a new pad with his new agent wife. Once you've lived in the west for a nano second, that's it, you're finished.

Carey's an inner westie through and through. Because you see, being an inner westie (code for inner city intellectual) is actually a state of mind, and has nothing to do with an actual physical place.

How can you tell an inner westie? Why they love Shakespeare and Dickens and they diss cookbooks and Dan Brown, because these latter wretched publications head up Australia's best seller lists.

Why it's got Gerard Henderson as mad as hell, this kind of perverse inverted snobbery - how dare they diss Dan Brown and cookbooks - and he's simply not standing for this kind of inner city intellectual contempt any more:

Carey's complaint is, in Australia, cookbooks and Dan Brown novels top most best-seller lists. And he expressed the wish, by as early as next year, every 14-year-old would understand and adore William Shakespeare and learn to love Charles Dickens's work. If young teenagers go for Shakespeare and Dickens, well and good. But if they will settle for Brown, this should be good enough. What matters is that the young learn to love reading - and virtually any reading will do for starters.

Good enough is good enough, because life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to read. In a pinch, I've found Sydney timetables an infallible source of amusement as while as a profound philosophical guide to life.

Yep, young 'uns, even reading Gerard Henderson as he froths and foams and fumes will do for starters. Then you can work your way up to Enid Blyton.

You see, this wretched Carey is full of unseemly, offensive arrogance, and it's Gerard's job - not content with the work of literary reviewers - to bring him down a notch or two, to rub his nose in pure Penrith mud:

As a novelist, Carey is worried about the status of the novel itself. In April, The Wall Street Journal reported how, at a function in the New York Public Library, Carey responded to a question about the kind of novels he writes with a version of the conversation he claims to usually have on planes. It went as follows. The person says: ''What do you do?'' ''I write novels.'' Person: ''Should I know your name?'' Carey: ''Only if you're literate.''

Enough said.

Oh cruel jest, oh unkind thrust, oh wretched parry, oh demitasse joke. Enough said indeed.

You tell him Gerard:

The fact is people read more than ever before. This reflects increasing literacy rates in the less developed world, along with the growth in online reading in the developed world. Carey's claim "we have forgotten how to read" is hyperbole - whether spoken to American or Australian audiences. Yet it is more than this. The novelist's disdain for the reading tastes of his fellow citizens reflects a deeper disenchantment with societies which do not assess intellectuals to be as important as intellectuals regard themselves.

Huh? So cookbooks and Dan Brown reflects increasing literacy rates? Might Carey have been talking about the gentrified, rarefied world of parlour novelists, rather than worrying about how many people can read the spiel on the back of packet of cornflakes?

And how many leaps of logic can a pretzel make, from a preference in literary tastes to a sudden disdain for reading tastes to a deeper disenchantment with society at large. As if Carey would say he naturally prefers the works of Dan Brown to his own ...

Sheesh, is there a word for wanker out there in the outer west, past Penrith way?

Because you see there's nothing like the disdain of a wanker for the inner city types when his head office - in fact the one and only office for the Sydney Institute - is in Phillip Street Sydney in the heart of the city. And no, just because it has the headquarters of the Australian and NSW Rugby League doesn't get us out of jail. Don't pretend that the boofheads in rugby league are these days are anything but highly paid professional gladiators.

Phillip street also has the NSW Supreme Court and Sydney Law school, and as its very own wiki obligingly informs us:

A variety of cafés and restaurants located along the street service these institutions.

Cafés! Which no doubt serve coffees - lattes - with an impudent, insolent air, as Henderson scurries to work, fearful of being infected by the latte sippers. Like someone fresh from Zombieland, who understands the key thirty two rules of survival. Rule 1: bash latte sippers with umbrella, then give them the double tap!

Oh you can see, you can feel the Henderson suffering:

In an interview on Radio National's Breakfast in 2006, Carey declared if he still lived in Australia he "would spend so much time in a total blinding rage". He is on record as having described Australia as a "flea circus".

Oh dear. A flea circus, and with Henderson the most irritating flea, tick or gnat, every day berating inner city intellectuals and holding up Dan Brown as a good solid worthy read.

Why on earth would Carey fly into a total blinding rage when confronted by such signs of civilisation?

Carey's Sydney Writers' Festival whinge is but the most recent complaint of the inner-city leftist writer or commentator who decries the (alleged) lack of culture among those who live in the suburbs and regional centres. A similar critique is commonly heard in Australia.

Ah you see, it's not just because they love Shakespeare or Dickens. Suddenly you see they have become contemptuous leftists. Yep, that word "leftist" snuck in and caught you by surprise, but it shouldn't. Perhaps they're atheists. Certainly secularists. And we know what that means. Can Catherine Deveny be far away?

Earlier this month, The Age dismissed its Brunswick-based columnist Catherine Deveny. The immediate cause turned on her Logie night attempt at humour - to the effect it would be a you-beaut idea if 11-year-old Bindi Irwin got laid. This controversy diverted attention away from Deveny's contempt for those who live in the suburbs, some of whom read The Age. She mocked shoppers at the suburban shopping malls, ridiculed families with signed and framed football jumpers on their walls and dismissed believers as mere idiots.

Astonishing! Some people who live in the suburbs read The Age. Has anyone told the editors? Lucky it's only some. Thank the lord for the HUN.

Are they aware, these editors, that they have dolts and mere idiots, all sound and fury, signifying nothing, as their readers? Is this why they publish Gerard Henderson?

No one quite matches Deveny's contempt for the less educated and lower socio-economic groups. However, in 2004 La Trobe University academic Judith Brett warned readers of the edited collection The Howard Years that, in contemporary Australia, "the opinions of the ignorant or uninvolved are given equal weight to those of the passionate and the knowledgeable". How shocking is that?

Actually not so shocking as that the Sydney Morning Herald routinely publishes the musings of Gerard Henderson, with their regular indictments of beastly inner city intellectuals and the socialists at their Ultimo bunker.

I mean there's tedium, and then there's mind numbing boring tedious offerings of the most insipid kind, a kind of Nescafe of prose. With triple sugar and lashings of milk, admittedly whole cream rather than soy.

Surely it's time for our obligatory history lesson:

Writing in the Herald Sun last February, columnist Jill Singer opined: "There is nothing wrong with being an accountant, farmer or fisherman - but these are insufficient credentials to, say, run a nation's finances." According to this logic, one-time train driver Ben Chifley was not qualified to be treasurer in John Curtin's successful wartime government but Jim Cairns was just the man to hold the position in Gough Whitlam's erratic government in the early 1970s. Yet Chifley was competent at his job while the former academic Cairns was a disaster.

Yes! And that's why Joe Hockey, who self-confessedly knows nothing about economics, is the right person to run this nation's finances right now, the loyal deputy of an Abbott who thinks golden handouts are the way forward!

In 2005, journalist and academic Margaret Simons wrote in the Griffith Review about her experiences in visiting the Fountain Gate shopping centre in suburban Melbourne. It was an "us" and "them" experience. One minute Simons was in Carlton with its devotion to "conspicuous refinement and good taste". Just an hour later, dressed in hemp, she was in suburban Narre Warren asking shoppers whether they had heard of the culture wars and wondering why they ignored her questions. All this in search of an answer to Simons's query as to what is "the difference between the people who chose to live here and ourselves". The question is as embarrassing as the account of her research for an answer.

Oh indeed. In much the same way as Henderson's epistles to the Penrithians and the Parramattans from Phillip street in the heart of the city are astonishing for their lack of hemp. Or any other fibre known to humanity. Not when you can offer up high fructose corn syrup.

It seems that some parts of the inner-city are more, in Simons's terminology, sophisticated than others. On ABC radio in Melbourne last February, John Faine dismissed Altona as so "industrial" it "gets the fumes from the industrial zones wafting across it". Not attractive, was Faine's judgment. Not enough coffee shops and insufficient hemp worn, apparently.

Sheesh, poor old Altona. Well at least they now recognise that Sunshine and Deer Park are cutting edge inner city suburbs. But wait a second, that means they're now tainted, ruined. By golly, this inner city intellectual bracket creep is a real worry. Is that how Sunshine produced Leigh Bowery?

What to do? Well surely we must don some rayon and move forthwith to Auburn, hopefully in a house right next to Gerard Henderson's new abode, where we can get real, mock the hemp, and enjoy the daily drive along Parramatta road, as we commute into the heart of the city to pen our missives to the Penrithians. While searching of course in a very T. S. Eliot way for irony:

The irony is that much of this inner-city snobbery is funded by taxpayers who live in industrial areas or near suburban shopping malls.

There is of course no irony in those people who fund the inner-city snobbery of Gerard Henderson, who purports to be of the people, but who rarely actually seems to mingle with said people. Salt of the earth, provided you rub your salt somewhere else. You see, the Sydney Institute is "privately funded" and is very fond of black tie dinners, though I suppose choosing the grand habour ballroom, Star City as a setting, shows an appealing suburban banality.

Still if you'd like to attend a Sydney Institute function, and mingle amongst the common folk and attend a common or garden event, why this very night at 41 Phillip Street, you can hear Desmond O'Grady giving a talk on the topic My life in Italy: Tales about Shirley Hazard, Peter Robb, Morris West, Doris Lessing and others. I hope there's a discount for anyone who can prove they live more than fifteen kilometres from the heart of Sydney.

The following week you can hear Andrew Robb at the Clayton Utz seminar room, and the week after that Alan Reid going on about the 36 faceless men (some of whom lived in the suburbs), and then Judith Keen on treason on the radio, and then in August Kate Jennings and Shelley Gare, and then David Gonski andn Elizabeth Broderick talking about balancing the gender mix in board rooms. This will be tremendously useful for those wishing to balance the gender mix in primary school tuck shops.

What's that? You'd rather go shopping in Roselands? No, no, no, please no hostility towards the preening pretensions and delusional double standards of Gerard Henderson. He has a joke to finish off with:

Carey's alienation found expression at the Sydney Writers' Festival while Simons's analysis appeared in the taxpayer-subsidised Griffith Review. Brett is an academic and Faine works for the public broadcaster. It's enough to make you reach for the nearest cookbook.

And Gerard Henderson is a prize git, who works for the Sydney Institute, and it's enough for me to reach for the nearest Enid Blyton and hope that I'm transported up the magic tree to a faraway land. Wherein I might hope to see a flea circus.

And the best joke of all? The Sydney Morning Herald publishes these musings as a kind of sociological insight ... but are they an insight into inner city intellectuals, or into the delusional meanderings of a man who pretends he has some affinity and affection for common humanity while preening around town as a conservative intellectual?

Who knows, and in the end who cares?

Tuesday is the dourest day of the week on the pond.

Hits go down, crows caw as they circle in the greying sky, a stray vulture skips away from the corpse of joy, students flinch at the thought of another value-laden history lesson, and a general gloom settles like a sullen fog.

(Below: Gerard Henderson, scrubbed up after a hard day's work down at the Altona steel yards, and ready now for a hearty yeoman discussion of philosophy, literature, Dan Brown and cook books at the Penrith Mechanics' Institute. Warning: if you bring along Shakespeare or Dickens, please anticipate being evicted).