Inspired by a few readers, true gentlemen all, I was thinking what a fine role model Vivien Leigh made in Gone with the Wind.
Petulant, sulky, irascible, a tease and a flirt, yet feisty and willing and ready to stand up to anyone with a saucy defiant air.
True, Vivien Leigh herself in the real world was on occasion as mad as a march hare, and gave poor Larry an extremely hard time, but what's wrong with a little manic depression.
Truth to tell, I was also inspired a little by Elizabeth Gumport's Laughing a Lot, and Often Over Nothing Much, my current bathroom reading (oh we never say toilet here at the pond, no never, as a concession to our much loved American cousins), which celebrates novelist Elaine Dundy and her love of screwball comedies, but which sad to say is behind The Believer paywall and so you will have to fork over your hard earned readies if you want a full read.
I feel I can filch a couple of Gumport's observations - I happen to love American screwball comedies of the 1940s, any that feature Katharine Hepburn more so - without harming her intellectual property rights, and in particular her recall of Dundy's marriage to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and his response to Dundy's first book The Dud Avocado and its best seller status:
After a night out with with his friends, he returned home to find Dundy reading a copy of her manuscript; in a fury, he flung it out the window. "The awful truth was not so much that his tormentors had pressed upon him the idea that his wife had 'competed with him and 'won', Dundy wrote, 'but that he was buying into it. Except for the screwball comedies, where women were allowed some equality in regard to jobs, professions and careers, we females were taught by endless example never to seem to have even the appearance of competing in any way with our husbands." Tynan told Dundy he would divorce her if she ever wrote another book. The next morning she began work on what would become her second novel.
So it goes, and what does this have to do with anything, apart from the incessant desire to actually avoid dealing with the scribbling of the commentariat commentators?
Nothing much, but we must now move on from the wonderful world of people who create things from nothing - artists, doers, movers and shakers who create the culture within which we can live and breathe and reference and so understand each other - and move on to the doomsayers, the negatives, the omegas to the alphas ...
And who better to represent that world than Miranda the Devine?
Sometimes I wonder, does she think of herself as a kind of modern day southern belle, Scarlett O'Hara style, fighting the forces of evil and oppression? Or is she just as mad as a march hare?
Well if you read Fraught obstacle course on Moore's 200km vision of city bike paths, you'll learn only one thing: Miranda the Devine needs bicycles and bicycle paths like a fish needs mercury poisoning, and so it seems does Sydney.
Of course the Devine has form in this area: who can forget her epic tirade against Tony Abbott in Roads are for cars, not Lycra louts? Well it was actually against cyclists, who were crazed, and rampant, and attacked bush drivers, and were classically angry, and believed in forcible education and fear like jackbooted Soviets, unlike happy, tranquil eastern and northern suburbs drivers of Toorak tractors (though perhaps they should be called Paddington or Woollahra tractors here). By the time she'd finished that rant, there was a war between drivers and cyclists, and almost five hundred comments.
Yes, the shit stirrer had done her job, and stirred the poo, and presumably all were happy, except those who actually had read the rant.
This latest offering is rich in Freudian insights and epic detailing, perhaps best left to the Devine connoisseur to discover. But we particularly like the opener, as she rants about how much she hates the idea of cycleways:
Even the cyclists don't like it? Hmm, has she trotted off to Sydney Cyclist, and got the buzz, got the vibe from the brave band of bicyclists who actually venture on to Sydney roads, and face crazed challenges from rampant ideologues like the Devine in charge of tonnes of vehikkul? Has she got on board with the Western Sydney Cycling Network? Does she indulge in outings with the Sydney Cycling Club to get her informed opinion of what cyclists, those lycra clad louts, think?
No, no, no silly, the cyclists who don't like cycleways are an army of one, that is one Miranda the Devine, who bravely dons the pedals to discover the hard-hitting truth:
I rode from Milsons Point to Pyrmont at the weekend with a commuter cyclist friend to test the most trumpeted bit of the network, passing only two or three other cyclists, on a sunny winter's day - perfect for cycling.
You see, brave Devine took to the road, and found only a couple of other cyclists, in a random example of scientific study, proving there's no cyclists on the road and no need for cycle ways and at the same time bringing back this kind of remarkable insight:
Well I never. And does the Devine then bemoan the presence of stupidly large vehicles in the inner city and demand a congestion tax on them, since off roaders that never see dirt should be shoved up the fundaments of the owners (or as Jon Stewart mournfully said, vehicles designed to tow the boat he doesn't own up the mountain he doesn't live anywhere near). Of course not. She's stuck impatiently at the lights, unlike any Sydney cyclist I know:
With the interminable wait at two sets of traffic lights, at Clarence and Sussex streets, you get time to admire the handiwork, the 15-centimetre handsome polished granite curbing, the row of little trees, and the cute set of traffic lights with illuminated images of bikes.
What a law abiding observant possum.
I guess the point in all this is that in the interminable list of problems that the Devine lists involving Sydney cycleways, you can reach an ultimate point. Should there be cycleways, and should the city build a network, and should they attempt to make the network better?
But it is fatally compromised by the reality of a hilly, busy, higgledypiggledy city with narrow little lanes and too many people who actually have to get places to make a living.
Yep, over the Devine's dead body will they wrench the 4WDs from the hands of Sydney motorists, whose right it is to use its narrow little lanes, as they go about the business of making a living, and making life hard for lycra-clad louts.
Well it'll be interesting to see the result of the Devine's latest interest in the fate of cyclists, since it purports to care (If the city is serious about replacing cars with bicycles, it needs to have the Lycra-jockeys on board) but drips, in the usual Devine way, with disdain and distaste.
Thus far it's been a quiet opening, unlike the box office for Toy Story 3, with only 18 comments at the time of this scribbling, and only a few comments in the thread offered up in the Sydney Cyclist forum here.
Which leads us to the dismaying conclusion that the Devine might have gone to the usually reliable well of lycra-clad louts for a response, and found the well relatively dry. And if there's one thing a member of the commentariat hates, it's being ignored. Being right is an optional extra, a bit like a bicycle bell, rarely used and never needed.
Still I did enjoy one comment which outlined the Devine's vision for Sydney, which had apparently been truncated by the subbies:
From memory it goes something like this:
- Ban bicycles from the city - also buses and pedestrians
- Widen the lanes so Hummers can pass each other at cruising speed.
- Don't enforce any road rules or parking restrictions - that's the evil councils and corrupt state government engaging in unfair revenue raising.
And then you finished on a lighter note, a time saving tip: How to quickly extricate a mangled bicycle from your bullbar
- Ban bicycles from the city - also buses and pedestrians
- Widen the lanes so Hummers can pass each other at cruising speed.
- Don't enforce any road rules or parking restrictions - that's the evil councils and corrupt state government engaging in unfair revenue raising.
And then you finished on a lighter note, a time saving tip: How to quickly extricate a mangled bicycle from your bullbar
Now that's what I like, mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Much more useful than this poor possum, who attempts to find some rational coherent ground for a sensible debate ...
Miranda's arguments here are inconsistent. On the one hand she's arguing the cycle paths are a waste of money, then argues they are insufficient and so more should be built. Which one Miranda? And she rides down York St dodging buses, yet only a few months ago argued bikes shouldn't be on the road at all. But credit to Miranda for at least investigating what confronts cyclists after being so against them previously.
Oh dear, the poor possum. It's Miranda the Devine and they want consistency? The Devine needs consistency like Rhett Butler needs Scarlett, or a bicycle needs a fish, or the Devine needs to ride a bike more than once to show how dangerous and foolish the notion of riding a bike is ...
Talk about a storm in a teacup, or a goldfish in a bowl, or the Devine being tedious yet again about lycra-clad louts.
Someone give me a day pass. Which leaves me plenty of time to get back to reading about Dundy and perhaps watching a good old screwball comedy, perhaps His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story. So much more fun than reading screwballs with their very predictable lycra-clad themes ...
(Below: a cartoonist evokes Miranda the Devine's epic bike ride).
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