Finally the move has been made to Moveable Type thanks to the noble spirited Scott Wickstein. Many thanks to Scott for giving up his valuable time this afternoon to help a fellow blogger out.

A few wines, some food, a bit of Four Corners on ABC on Queensland property sharks and I'm begining to feel a human.

I have been glancing at Clive James', Even as We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001. James is another expat Aussie who has gone conservative. Well, that's was my reading of him from the few television shows of his that I'd seen a few years back.

The book is marked by lots of attacks on lefty academics by a cultural conservative who takes his bearings from Hitler from what I can see from a quick glance.

This passage caught my eye as it referred to who I once was in the academy. James is talking about posing new questions about totalitarianism that open up to interpretation a vast array of phenomena that I had previously found baffling:

"The most immediately alarming of these was constituted by the successive wave of pseudo-scientific dogma that had taken over humane studies in the universities, most damagely in the English faculty. Most of this busy but essentially vacuous theorizing could be traced back to the obscurantism of the French left, whose origin could be traced back to the period of Occupation, when there had been shamefully good reasons for intellectuals to hatch an impersonal language by which history would take responsibility for what they said."

Is James referring to Marxism, poststructuralism or postmodernism? It is unclear. It could be all of them. It doesn't really matter as we can see from this attack on the academic left:

"What was startling, however, was the way that these Laputan doctrines, all dedicated to the dismantling of humane culture rather than its protection, continued to flourish as belief in the prospect of an egalitarian utopia declined. Indeed they burgeoned, with contantly self-renewing supplies of energy.Capped by its master piece, political correctness, the irrationality in the universities clearly had its province in the classic Left."

You would not call this cartoon intellectual history, with its echoes from another century, illuminating cultural criticism. French poststructuralism (Derrida Foucault etc) clearly targeted scientific Marxism (what James calls "pseudo-scientific dogma"). And conservative cultural criticism was not irrational? In what way was the old humane studies (does he mean Leavisite?) rational?

Its not much of an argument. What Clive James is flagging is that he stands for humanity, individuality and democracy against the totalitarianism of the left and the right.

Reading James wil provide a bit of light relief from all the painting and shifting over the next few days. I'll start with the Australian stuff first.