Gary at junk for code will be on a well earned holiday in Mallacoota on the eastern seaboard near the NSW and Victoria border from today until May 6th.
The break has been made. We are now out of the old electronic cottage and living in the new townhouse. I'm writing this from my study, which is upstairs and looks north to the Central Market and west to Whitmore Square. Its a commercial area and it means a new form of life.
I've just signed up to broadband--I'll have more time after the holidays. But I'm having cold feet already--its dam expensive. I postponed getting connected until after I returned from holidays in Mallacoota Inlet.
The city is very quiet tonight. The Asian guys who fought, yelled at each other, and chased one another around the street last night seem to have gone. The drunken street kids have moved on. The traffic has lessened. There are no terrorists to be seen unless you count the political agitators.
I had been hoping to duck into internet cafes along the way and do a quick blog whilst I was hanging out at Mallacoota havign fun. But I've been informed that such cafes do not exist on the alpine way to the east coast. And there are none in Mallacoota.
More painting around the electronic cottage tomorrow. Only this time its as the landlord. Painting is looking after my investment rather than affirming my identity.
This article by Virginia Haussegger makes a lot of good sense. I concur with a lot that is said here; as a result of my experiences of working and forming relationships, with women who have independent and successful careers and who have their roots in, and their identity formed by second wave feminism.
Virginia says that these women have found themselves in a situation where they find themselves "independent, successful, solid careers, nearing 40, childless, many partnerless and wondering what went wrong." And second wave feminism had a very strong anti-motherhood message: it said that being a mother was a major obstacle to any girl reaching her full potential in a man's world. Trying to be both mother and careerist was equivalent to being run ragged from trying to fit two jobs into one; run ragged because the men would not pull their weight in terms of household duties.
Liberal feminism was interpreted by those aspiring to be corporate woman as having to take on the men and doing this in a masculine way. It required becoming a worker who is independent, autonomous and free from domestic responsibilities. Femocrats in other words.
Virginia is quite right to ask: where is the feminism in this interpretation of liberal feminism? My experience is that corporate woman dumps the feminism for the highflying success and embraces inequality whilst doing so. She highlights similarity and downplays difference, thinks that the unemployed should get on their bicycles and get a job, and presumes that men are there to provide a service.
Its all pretty much a reversal of the traditional role rather than a equal sharing or partnership. This is a particular twist to liberal feminism; a much narrow class than the broader middle class perspective of Virginia Haussegger. But some of the corporate women were able to have a career and be a mother. They earned enough to be able to buy the motherhood services. I don't know what they did with the guilt though.
We are the middle of shifting, intransient between the electronic cottage and the new townhouse. We slept in the latter last night surrounded by chaos of furniture, clothes, boxes and piles of this and that. We are stilll cleaning up and painting the old cottage before the tenant moves in tomorrow. The place is filled with junk. It is overwhelming.
Our time has gone for shifting. We have to be out tonight.
The dogs hated the new townhouse in Sturt Street----they cannot handle the steep, highly polished Italian stairs. Their paws keep slipping. They have to be carried up and down evening and morning. We couldn't sleep at all---just too much urban noise. I thought it would be romantic---my memory of living in Fitzroy in Melbourne was that it was music. Who needed a stereo when the music was all around you. Well, it was not romantic last night.
Its all chaos that undermines your identity. But we took a moment out last night to have a light meal in a lovely Greek restaurant just down the road in Sturt Street. We sat outside in the warm night air and gathered ourselves. It was a way of ordering the chaos and creating some meaning to the turbulence that we were living.
I realized that everyday life is a patterning of chaos through habitual routines. The dogs deal with the chaos by sitting in the car---the car has become their secure place. They refuse to get out of it when we go from place to place. Without the ordering we would we live in anxiety and fear.
I can see that when people collect junk it is their way of dealing with the chaos of life. Collecting junk and leaving it lying around the place is their way of creating meaning or making sense of chaos.
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.
We travelled back to Adelaide from Victor Harbor this morning. Everybody was going the other way. It was glorious weather on the Southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast. Balmy autumn days, no wind, glorious sunshine. The place was jumping with Easter holiday makers. We were so reluctant to leave.
Adelaide was dead and empty. Shops were closed. So were the cafes. Everybody had gone south for fun, romance and family joy. We called into the new townhouse in Sturt Street. It was empty as the previous owners had gone. It was ready for us to move in. The Vogue grey walls were very noticeble. Ari hated it. He couldn't see the street and he refused to go upstairs to the bedrooms, study and balconies----the stairs were too step, the gaps between the stairs were too great and the steps were too polished. The great white hunter, killer of possums, galahs and magpies, had to be carried up and down the stairs.
It had a very urban feel---so different from the electronic cottage in the South east corner which has a friendly residential/community village atmosphere even though it is in the inner city of Adelaide. Sturt Street was more hard edged. Street kids hanging about; a drunk squatter reeking of metho staggering out of a derelict house; cars moving all the time; people walking down the street; no speaks to anyone. There is no eye contact. Agtet sat by the front security gate and lapped all the sounds up ---it promised to be a 24 hour day party.
Suzanne had cold feet. She is a suburban girl at heart. The electronic cottage was cute and sweet with its mornign sun in the back courtyard and afternoon sun in the front porch. Sturt Street was too raw. It was in area where people worked and business was conducted. We have gone deep into debt to do this and we keep our fingers crossed that house prices continue to rise, consumers go on a spending binge in the US, American businesses invest big time; unemployment keeps coming down in Australia; economic growth continues in SA and the Reserve Bank keeps saying no to interest rate rises and huge tax cuts are offered to those who reckon the meaning of life is spend, spend spend.
Yep it's a gamble. Australian house prices have got to hold. We trust no one. The market sucks. Its all blind faith and naked greed. The market says justice is a mirage.Its grab what you can when you can. The regulators only care about covering their back from the follies, indulgences and stupidities of others.
Then back to the electronic cottage to continue the renovations, pack and met the new tenant---a female computer programmer who works from home ---and her parents. 20 something professional women have yet to fully gain independence. The parents have to check the landlord out to see that he doesn't take advantage of their daughter. A century of emancipation and still the parents keep a watchful on their daughters. Urban life is seen to be threatening by those baby boomer adults whose horizons are formed by a suburbia that was a refuge from the harsh city.
Time is short. We have to be out by Thursday. And to make it worse we are going to shift ourselves.
At twilight time, after all the days work was done, we sat on the front porch, sipped a Coonawarra red and listened to a Kookaburra in the city celebrate life.
I've decided that a heap of junk for code is going to leave Blogger after the disasters I've experienced over the last two days--Saturday and Sunday. This weblog will move to Moveable Type. Like James Russell I've had enough. Blogger sucks big time. Even though I'm paying for Blogger Pro. the service is deplorable.
Blogger is now back online but Sqwarkbox is out. Great. Easter is time for everything to fall aprt.
Nothing much will change with the content of a junk for code. The mask will continue to be a melancholy cultural critic whose roots are in a pessmistic, western continental marxism concerned with a damaged life.; a cultural critic who affirms the particularity of individual experience in the face of a systematic neo-liberalism that speaks for American-style techocratic Enlightenment.
I see that Norman Mailer has a new book out called The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. You can find some reviews here and here, if interested.
I gave up reading Mailer years ago. I found his writing too macho, pugilistic, sexist and too much of a traditional conservative baroom brawler. I recall that I stopped reading his work about the time that I sort of decided that Anglo-American literary culture was in decline.
I do appreciate Mailer as the political being and his ability to decode those American flag conservatives (neo-cons) who desire an Empire as a way to prevent the country from going down the drain. Mailer reads the subtexts of that political scene very well; understands the flag conservatives (ie., the neo-cons) deep hate for Bill Clinton when he was US President; and he is able to clue right into an American political unconscious that is marked by a great guilt that it has meant the Americans have lost their compassion.
Mailer also has a sense of the tragic. He understands that Israel has now become one more powerhouse in the world; that they treat the Palestinians as if the Palestinians were ghetto Jews; and that Sharon is a brute, a powerhouse general, whose defense would be that “I am what fate has made me.”
To his credit Mailer understands that Anglo-American literary culture was in decline. He grasps that the new media of television, radio, and substandard cinema----the culture industry----has caused literature as art to wither into a literary journalism. And journalism has withered into entertainment ass they became cogs in the production machine of the culture industry. Something went badly wrong with an Anglo-American literary culture in the last quarter of the 20th century---writers are no longer taken seriously anymore----but Mailer is unsure what to do about it.
The server was down last night. I could not post a weblog in Victor Harbor after giving a talk on the Murray River to the local Marine Society. It was a good socratic question and answer session. I will post the talk on philosophy.com sometime next week.
We have two days of rest and recuperation on the coast before we go back to Adelaide to finish the painting. We need it as the stress of shifting household is starting to tell. Suzanne has had a migraine for three days straight and is completely out of action. Ari has not eaten for 4 days though he was chasing rabbits this morning.
And renting the electronic cottage has become a hassle.The person selected highly groomed 20's passive something who works in a bank, has a bright, confident, independent persona, and who gaily signed the lease contract last Monday with the flourish of a merchant banker. Lebanese, but definitely not wog glam. Nor a wog sterotype who did not make a radical distinction between wog heritage and Aussie nationality.
The aspiring mechant banker was a bundle of neuroses. We had two phones a day haggling then saying no then yes, then no then yes then no. Family troubles you see. Lebanese immigrant culture. The parents will not allow a mid-20s single woman to live on her own. Wog culture really is anti-urban and anti-liberal. No doubt the 20's something was full of shame because of her foreignness.
Once the shift to the urban townhouse has been made, then we are off for a holiday in Mallacoota; well, more specifically it's the Inlet in East Gippsland, Victoria via the Great Alphine Road A week there to get to know the place.
Will there be an internet cafe in Mallacoota? There is a community weblog but, if there is such a cafe, then I reckon that internet will be a problem. But I don't want no Victorian cultural tourism
Then back home to Adelaide through Melbourne, that great melting pot of wog culture----(Sydney says it is the
multicultural capital), then along the Great Ocean Road yet again.
Aaah, being a tourist in my own land seek a range of cultural experiences on the road by passing the signs that celebrate white settlement and refuse to offer any kind of critical account of Australian history. Driving through the country towns will be stepping into the pioneer idea of the past as a set of signs, or a set of icons that sit there for easy consumption.
If you to want to see support for the view that the war on Iraq has really been about the cultural wars in Australia, then this piece by Andrew Bolt makes it very plain. It's pay back time for the 1968ers and those who opposed Australia's involvement in Vietnam.
The political unconscious here is one which represents the left as supporting evil (terror, tyranny and genocide); the left driven by the dark passions of resentment and loathing and a left that sneers. Resisting the bad forces are the forces of goodness.
Bolt says it plainly:
"The war in Iraq has been won well. Let's move on to the next war -- a war for our culture. A war for truth, rationality, humanity, democracy and wisdom. Let the accountability begin."
In this war scenario the left is held to be against truth, rationality, humanity democracy and wisdom. The left is the Counter-Enlightenment. Its against the heritage of the West. It is opposed to liberty.
The tone of the conservative attack is harsh. Blood is required for atonement for the past attacks on the West. Sacrifices need to be made. Retribution is necessary. Its a culture war.