Quadrant must be the only “little mag” that gets to run its job ads for free via laudatory columns in the press – witness Frank Devine in The Australian a while back:
THE worst paid – next to nothing as an informed guess – full-time job in Australian journalism has become vacant. It is editorship of Quadrant, a post also noted for attracting bitter enemies and for its insecurity, the monthly magazine of ideas still tottering financially after more than 50 tottering years.
But they needn’t have bothered. The editor’s gig has gone to… Keith Windschuttle. And the first target of the culture warriors will be… “decadence in the arts”!
Keith Windschuttle, scourge of leftist historians, will campaign against decadence in the arts when he takes over as editor of Quadrant magazine next year.
Consider Wagner’s Tannhauser, that myth of the sacred and profane now on show at the Sydney Opera House. “There’s a guy painted in gold (who) stands there with a giant erection – symbolises lust or something,” Windschuttle said yesterday. “That kind of gratuitous offensiveness is almost everywhere.”
As Andrew Norton observes:
That perhaps doesn’t bode well for the ’sceptical and non-ideological’ spirit Paddy says he has tried to revive during his editorship.
What’s the bet Quadrant won’t outlive Howard for too long?
Enjoy a bit of scourging, that mob, though I thought it was Windschuttle on the receiving end last time around.
How long do his and Albrechtsen’s directorships on the ABC last for?
Frankly, this cannot come a moment too soon.
How many of us are sick to death of the likes of Beethoven and his high-handed ‘romanticism’. There’s nothing ‘classical’ about that music. To say nothing of Wagner, whose ‘music’ consists of little more than a bassoon section coming down with epilepsy.
While Keefy’s at it, he can address that most degenerate of literary forms, the so-called ‘novel’. Every person of sound mind knows that Hamlet is art. Tristram Shandy is not.
Should Keef’s interventions be successful, perhaps we as a society can finally get around to halting that scourge of the arts, namely, women smoking unaccompanied at the opera…
At least he’s focusing on the big (unless it’s cold) issues.
They might have to re-name the masthead “Wowsers ‘R Us”, or “Tongue-Clickers Monthly”.
If Windschuttle is offended by a man with an erection, I wonder how offended he would be to learn that thousands of Aboriginal babies were forcibly removed from their parents solely because of their race? Or that a Minister for the Commonwealth recently blamed the Sudanese for being bashed to death by skinhead thugs? Or that $300 million of Australian money was funnelled in bribes to Saddam Hussein?
But we’ve got much more important things to worry about, like “decadence in the arts”.
My god, do you realise that with current medical technology, Windschuttle and Howard and Akerman et.al. will most likely live ’til they’re 120, and be active for most of those years? Arrrrgh!
I hope that giant golden erection wasn’t “cut”. Otherwise, what’s the issue – Wagner was a bloody mountebank anyway.
PS – Beethoven wasn’t a romantic. Just the guy who exhausted the classicist tradition, opening the way for romanticism.
PS – Beethoven wasn’t a romantic.
I’m afraid that the urgency of the our task, necessitated by the crisis of decadence in modern ‘art’, makes such hair-splitting distinctions superfluous.
We shall decide who sings arias in this country, and the circumstances under which they sing them.
Considering what happened to Robert Manne during his stay in the editor’s chair at Quadrant, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Windschuttle metamorphose back to his leftist roots. Manne would probably acknowledge that the job and the editorial board does strange things to one’s leanings. He would admit that the Howard Government had a bit to do with his going. A Rudd Government however should keep young Keith in focus and the mag on message.
Might be a good time for someone to launch a more progressive mag along similar lines. Any takers out there?
No more Lied von der Erde, GurreLieder or Woyzeck then?
Bring it on!
“Consider Wagner’s Tannhauser, that myth of the sacred and profane now on show at the Sydney Opera House. “There’s a guy painted in gold (who) stands there with a giant erection – symbolises lust or something,â€? Windschuttle said yesterday. “That kind of gratuitous offensiveness is almost everywhere.â€?”
“Symbolises lust or something”. Tee hee. Good grief. Or something.
Gosh knows what Keith will think when David and his doodle tours shortly.
Some art is nonsense, but without it the world would be a shrivelled up old “something”.
Windshuttle is such an ass. As in donkey. It’s hilariously bad. Obviously the old fool completely failed his Classics education or else he’d know the gigantic phallus has a good, long and hard history in Western art all the way from the Greek satyr comedies all the way thru to the modern period. Maybe he’s just trying for satire.
Come on this is aimed directly at Keating The Musical. Wagner is just an innocent bystander.
Actually he has a point in as much as most of Tannhauser is crap after the first 20 minutes.
Don’t show Keith a video of The Valkyrie unless it doesn’t have subtitles though – he’d hav a fit if he found out the lovers were siblings. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
It’s a flagrant conflict of interest for Windschuttle. How can he set himself up as critic in chief of arts decadence whilst sitting on the ABC Board which promotes and funds the very same acts of decadence?
So after the first twenty minutes it’s a crap “myth of the sacred and profane”? I’d say that weakens his point, rather than strengthens it – if the opera is crap anyway, why not add a giant golden cock here and there to keep the audience amused during the draggy hour and forty (or more).
If the opera’s that bad, maybe what it needs is a money shot in the last act, to give the audience something worth hanging around for. Maybe the AO should commission Bob Guccione to produce their next performance of Der Ring Des Nibelungen.
“No more… ‘Woyzeck’ then?”
That’s Wozzeck to you, bub. Woyzeck is with my buddy Herr Buechner (SFX: horses whinnying outside!) down the street. Sheesh, the kids these days.
Es wird mir ganz Angst um die Welt…
Oops. My bad.
But then I’m not much for opera – I prefer soppy instrumental pieces with naff titles like Lyric Suite.
Keating The Musical was a hoot and I enjoyed every minute of it, but accurate it wasn’t.
I wonder if the said penis on said stage is painted in mineral or elemental gold.Seems the latter has some good health effects,and might be baby boomers revenge on the younger fellas with a little finger problem! Windschuttle who was extremely radical once for unemployed and pro Solar Panels, surely must know the penis power shows up everywhere in ancient history.Eh!? No wonder I am myself modern history!? Been frolicking around at http://www.jordanmaxwell.com which is kind of coincidental,and full of much to think about. Including penis realities,but, dont get too cross with me.
Unfortunately “The Monthly”, “Eureka Street” etc, have never been rivals to “Quadrant”: too much tinsel and flimflam in the glossies.
“The Monthly” is to “Quadrant”, as those turkeys at GetUp are, to LP.
I mean in seriousness and the tendency to argue a case in detail….
cheerio
Is this real? Is Keith Windschuttle actually saying Venus and Tannhauser is too risque? Christ, even Max Nordau took a central stance on Wagner.
Lol to pretty much this whole thread.
Tyro Rex, you do asses a disservice with that suggestion.
My guess is that, after prolonged archival research (‘doing a Windschuttle’), he’ll find that nearly all works of art and literature turn out not to have been fabricated…
I always thought that Quadrant and Eureka St shared a quality that made them the big players in the little (political) magazine business. Both got financial backing from huge multinational business concerns: Rio Tinto in one case, the Jesuits in the other
You’ve missed your calling! Opera Australia wants to talk to you about their next Handel production.
Never mind being able to hold a note, doing that night after night is quite some gig.
Wait till he finds out that the later works of Beethoven were written by a deaf, homeless, mentally ill man. Apoplexy I tell you. Sydney University c. 1960 was the apex of civilisation in this country, all downhill from there.
I stand by my comments on Andrew N’s blog, too.
I was going to say that the gold-erection thing was all the fault of that young modern whippersnapper Aristophanes, but Tyro Rex beat me to it.
Lawdy, Keef’s not so much a fish in the proverbial barrel on this as one strapping himself across the fucking end of it, shouting ‘Pull it, PULL THE TRIGGER, you pisspoor arty-farty wankers!’. The current Quadders Loonocracy must be bursting with cosmopolitan pride to have him on – nay, heading up – their mighty CW army. Ambigulous, I think you’re kind of right: Quadrant used to be a fantastic conservative magazine, for the reasons you briefly cite and much more. Growing up in Shitsville, it was for me like a little window on the mighty universe that is a life of ideas and the intellect. But Martin Krygiers (I think/hope it was him; there’s no link, I’m going on memory) got it about right in The Monthly a while back: the current wierdo crop of intensely agit-propaganding ex/anti-’Left’ies, Jackboot Libertarians and general past-glory freeloaders with petty personal fingernail-axes to grind down to the fucking quicks…has buggered it up good.
I still buy it, in perpetual hope that the subtle mix of Viennese cafe cosmopolitanism, US can-do-ery and Oxbridge dry wit hasn’t been throughly pissed away in the bilious stream of self-hating anti-’Left’ projection and (oxymoronic) Groupthink Iconoclasm that’s emanated from betwixt its Summer of Lerve (redux) tinged pages since Paddy shifted it north and turned it into his (and Frank Devine’s) vanity-publishing shit-sheet. At taxpayer expense, of course. Windschuttle, the monumental dope, inherits not so much a poisoned chalice as a piece of fine silk, lately used by a very bitter handful of aging white men as toilet paper. Wipe, wipe, out damned youthful spots…they’ve been using Quadrant to try to exorcise their own ideological failings, make up for the fact that they weren’t Robert Conquest back when it was (still only one day going to turn out to be) fashionable to have been Robert Conquest. Hitchens, Amis, Clive James, Salman Rushdie…the world is awash with eloquent aging artistic failures (but critical successes) who made their way in that world of letters by being vaguely-leftish when that was how one did it, but who now fervently wish they hadn’t, since the opposite avenue’s lately the one more likely to open doors for the ambitious wordsmith and thinker.
Sadly, Orwellian scepticism about ideology just doesn’t work retrospectively. You have to have been sceptical – about Whitlam, say (to take Paddy’s personal source of embitterment) – back in the day. Resentful self-knowledge of that unalterable fact is what’s driving most of the more toxic and destructive (and inane, peurile, adolescent, etc) ‘Culture War’ shit now. In a way, most of ‘Howardism’ is a series of exercises in self-hating projection: all the usual targets, from ‘post-modern gobbledegook’, to slipping standards in education, to shithouse art, to ‘PC’ molly-coddling…are far more the result of Howardian failures than their usual scapegoats. It wasn’t some prissy university academic or Fairfax hack who dumped Pauline Hanson as a Lib candidate for being ‘politically incorrect’. John Winston Howard, the classic gutless watcher-in-the-playground until the winner becomes obvious, only started kissing her arse once she proved popular by getting elected, anyway. It’s not ’scepticism’ to wander down onto the ideological battleground and bayonet the wounded once all the real fighting has been done. It’s scaredy-cat groupthink of the same-old, same-old stamp. Quadrant’s about as intellectually singular now as a column by Mark Steyn. And since 9/11 he’s had more fucking professional impersonators than Elvis.
It’s the wrong move to give the seat to Windschuttle, I think, but he has made good contrarian contributions to Quadrant. But I’m confident that Quadrant will continue on in one form or another – it’s just got too large a talent base not to.
A thoroughly entertaining rant, Jack.
You know, Quadrant could reclaim a lot of its credibility if Windschuttle has the guts to use Jack Robertson’s post above as his first op-ed piece!
Well they’re big men but talented might be pushing it.
I’ve recently bought (and attempted to read) a couple of issues of “Quadrant” – know your enemey, and so on. One thing it isn’t, is non-ideological, and its scepticism is all in one direction. The damn thing’s close to unreadable (probably partly due to my own biases), and the only article I read that didn’t result in it being flung across the room in rage was a rather saccharine piece by Frank Devine on Don Bradman. That’s $16 and about 4 hours I’ll never get back. It can’t die too soon for me.
Who are you thinking of, TimT? (Apart from the great Les Murray, I mean. If he’s still there, which he may not be.)
Yes, do tell TimT. Just who is Quadrant’s Dirk Diggler?
Jack Robertson, I salute you with my gold painted tool. Getting some funny looks in the office right now, but it’s worth it.
Jack,
I pity all those who had such hopes for any lively intellectual project, only to be disappointed. But you say “I still buy it”: good on you. I didn’t have the courage to admit that, foolishly thinking it would bait some of the LP wolves, red in tooth and claw…. “Quadrant” still has qualities we might wish for in other magazines, despite its many failings.
I admire the range of your targets, Jack. And I tend to agree that Orwell is still the touchstone for unwavering scepticism. BTW, on Robert Conquest: I liked his reported reaction to a publisher when they wanted to re-issue one of his exposes of Stalin’s crimes (“The Great Terror”, 1968) during the Gorbachev era. A new title? “How about, ‘I Told You So, You F***ing Fools!’ “, quoth Robert C.
come to think of it, he gave good scorn, the old Robert C
See, I might expect to see ‘Tannhauser’ with a giant gold phallus (or any other peculiar thing) at, say, the Lab Annex of an ambitious regional state theater, for instance, or a university performance, or BAM, or some scrappy company with a wild reputation to uphold, where it was understood that such things go on as part of serious ongoing exploration, or even just as an interesting type of fucking around. And it might even work there, ya never know.
But to do it on the mainstage of the Sydney Opera House (if that is indeed what happened) is involving oneself in many extra spinning Ptolemaic circles of cultural and social import, other than the immediate claims of art. And shouldn’t the artists be aware of that basic fact of the society they’re living in, and respect as much of it as they can? Does everybody really have to be made to feel like Margaret Dumont, all the time? Maybe you’d still get to do this if you were Peter Brook or Arianne Mnouchekine or some such; but really, you’re supposed to earn your wings. There’s such a thing as being a grown-up, after all.
That being said, just wait til you folks get a load of my honky-tonk Lohengrin. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
Tim, of course being a humble chap, wasn’t referring to himself but he has been published in Quadrant. Not sure if his payment was to receive a big hug from Paddy or not.
As for other talent, well, ummm, Clive James did a good turn as Paddy in that “Bazza McKenzie”.
That Bazza McKenzie film, that is.
Oh, Windy!
Giant gilt todgers are just the sort of thing that might be spied about the Grotto of Venus.
Aubrey Beardsley was doing a book of Tannhauser illustrations which remained incomplete when he took ill and died.
Prominent in this manuscript were some infeasibly proportioned dongers. (Maybe NSFW).
Mind you, Aubrey Beardsley made something of a virtue of decadence.
But I defy any decadent to tumesce in the manner depicted by him.
So, because some building on Sydney harbour is internationally well-known, the art thereinperformed is to be judged on different criteria Jape-easy?
Which ones? Just so’s we know – wouldn’t want to upset potential tourist $ to our little province.
What the DEVIL are you on about now? Of course they fucking shouldn’t.
Jack Robertson — as others have said above, Quite a lovely little rant. You could sing that if you had an air to it. Plus Sun Ra’s Arkestra backin’ you up. Well done!
Katz: “Giant gilt todgers… some infeasibly proportioned dongers.” Wow, that’s utterly classical. Cool. Score a milk-through-the-nose moment for you!
Hey, I’m sort of starting to like this new gig of being a pleasant fellow…
FDB: Yah, fair enough, in a way. But see, I don’t really reckon there’s any actual rule book about all this stuff anyway, aren’t we all just swatting the ball around in the living room, until one of those little fake-porcelain knick-knacks on top of the TV set gets broken by accident? Then we do a bad job of glueing it back together, and when that doesn’t work either, we’ll just tell mom and dad and Old Man Windschuttle that Greg did it. But in some fairness, don’t you find that there are ever different norms of behavior depending on where you are and who you’re talking to? I don’t act the same way at Sunday dinner that I do down at the pub. Not that that’s the final word on anything, but does it seem totally unreasonable to you?
(Apart from the great Les Murray, I mean. If he’s still there, which he may not be.)
The bastard still hasn’t published a story I sent into him, so who knows?!!
Just who is Quadrant’s Dirk Diggler?
I’m tempted to ask in return, ‘Just who is… Dirk Diggler?’ Wikipedia gives some idea, though.
I enjoy the occasional read through Quadrant, though I’ve long since ceased been a regular reader. They still have a good line up of regular columnists (Frank Devine, Peter Ryan) – as well as semi-regular contributors in the reviews page (Andrew Norton), poets (Les Murray, John Whitworth), and a mixture of academically inclined essays with more eccentric/idiosyncratic pieces by writers like B J Coman. I suppose it could be argued that I value these writers because they reflect my own biases (whatever they are), but I’m not so sure about that. I generally enjoy them for their inquiring and sometimes critical tone, mixed with the wit of writers like Ryan and Devine.
“Under The Hill” (very NSFW) – which he also wrote with much posthumous assistance form John Glassco. A fine addition to any respectable library of erotica. I recommend the Olympia Press edition.
Back OT. So where’s “Quadrant: The Opera.”? Sure Les could do the libretto, Windschuttle the wind section, Paddy pound the percussion and Manne man the podium but there’s heaps of other parts and roles to be cast.
JPZ – yeah, fair enough. “No rule book” is my point really. But if you’re aiming for something a little avant garde, you know you’ve failed when nobody is (I resist here the urge to say “shocked”) surprised by it.
One tired old Cunture Worrier carping about a big schlong doesn’t make the production a steaming pile of wank though – I’d imagine the singing would be where it stands or falls.
You know your arts community needs a good kick up the arse when even left-wing Australians are so desperate for money that they are willing to acknowledge as inherently shit a poet as Les Murray as “good”. He is fat, stupid, talentless and useless, and he has sucked up an enormous amount of arts grant money that could have been given to more deserving people (or burnt to keep the homeless warm, if there are no more deserving people), whilst whinging about how he isn’t getting more because of leftist conspiracies.
Windshuttle, however, is clearly not the man to kick any community up the arse. Unless someone else has already broken it, in which case he’s the first into the breech. A brave and steadfast representative of the modern right, if ever there was one.
I beg to differ: Les Murray is talented. His weight is neither here nor there. He’s not stupid, IMHO. Have you fallen for the infamous “Quadrant Phallusy”? {which equates stupidity with being a contributor to Quadrant}
By the way, I love it when all you High Culture afficionados talk dirty, in that very cultured manner you’re so practised at.
What did Goering say? “When I hear the word ‘kultur’, I reach for my ph***us!” Gold-plated indeed. What an expensive cock-up.
cheerio
No Ambigulous, Les Murray is so fat that his weight is pretty much everywhere.
“He is fat”.
Speaking as a non-cultured type who could be described as cuddly, I wonder why someone felt the need to refer to Paddy’s weight in such an explicit fashion.
We cuddlies are sick of having our weight always placed next to words like “stupid”. I’m not the brightest lampshade on the mantel piece, but many people with a few extra kilos are very smart.
On a progressive website, this sort of thing is unacceptable.
Tim, you were supposed to get cranky that I mentioned your past liaison with Quadrant.
Oh well.
Didn’t we see that same production of Tannhauser in Melbourne a few years back? With a ‘nude’ Venus or two, as well?
Ho hum.
My apologies Darlene. I did, however, manage to become huffily offended over the non-publication of a story I submitted to Les for Quadrant (above)
Actually, fuck that and boo fucking hoo. How about getting off their arses like the rest of us and getting some adverting instead of sucking on the teat of government agencies and corporate sugar daddies and start making the mag look a bit less like they’re fucking samizdat and all they’ve got are large stocks of dunny paper, two fonts, and some leftover wrapping paper. With a permanent staff of three, we manage to crank out a shit hot, good looking, 86 page colour food and wine mag, with principles, that pays for itself. And we lived on instant coffee for 18 months.
A lot of Les Murray’s poetry is world-class.
C’mon Ant.
Fire up and say what you really mean.
Drifting off topic now: the quality of Les Murray’s work is generally very high, although I haven’t gotten as far as the most recent stuff. It is a shame that his politics leads him into keeping the company that he does.
As to the question of deserving government money: well, I’m inclined to the view that, while I don’t think a poet of his stature is undeserving, I do think there are broader questions about who receives what and how often, and the extent to which younger talent is being fostered under current arrangements. Poets are very cheap – maybe we could afford to bankroll a few more of them?
BTW well put, anthony re: the appearance of the magazine.
Saw Tannhäuser last night. The strap-on was indeed eye-popping.
This version was directed by Elke Neidhardt – nevertheless, Venus kept her clothes on.
As for “gratuitous offensiveness,” I was pretty offended by poor old Tannhäuser being driven off to Rome because he sang a song in praise of bawdiness.
“Poets are very cheap…”
Well, Shakespeare was. But Marlowe spent like a drunken sailor.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I would’ve subscribed to Quadrant if they’d picked Andrew Norton (even though he didn’t want the job).
And I do subscribe to Anthony’s magazine, which is great and y’all should subscribe to it, too. It comes with a free set of knives. Well, it comes with an entry into a raffle for a set of knives, but close enough, right?
Quadrant is good enough to pick up in the newsagent and flick through, and then maybe read an article in the library, but no more. Then again, if it wasn’t for Quadrant I wouldn’t have known such a thing exists as the Melbourne Beefsteak Club, where men apparently eat beefsteak and hear tedious speeches about the pleasures of lung cancer.
I tells ya FBD…
A strap-on you say woulfe? A phony dick for phony outrage. How very perfect.
Hope it wasn’t literally eye-popping, it’d be a bugger explaining the eye patch.
btw, woulfe, that link you provided is hilarious.
You know one thing I’ve been tempted to do is to try get my copy of Unemployment (written by Windschuttle when he was still a Marxist) and see if he’d autograph it. I think I’d an interesting reaction. Maybe it’ll inspire some raving rant in Quadrant.
Yeah, great link woulfe. Reminds me all too well of a certain AO production of ‘Peter Grimes’ – which to be fair was a pretty charmless piece of work to begin with.
Bravo! Encore! My sentiments exactly.
By the way Ants, my offer to guest edit an erotica Black Label edition of Spice still holds. Already conceptualising a few ideas.
I was a trifle surprised by this as contained within the OZ story referred in the post.
As long we’re clear then about the standard of scholarship Keith will bring…& a guide to Brough’s future policies in the area.
“Jack Robertson — as others have said above, Quite a lovely little rant. You could sing that if you had an air to it. Plus Sun Ra’s Arkestra backin’ you up. Well done!”
Got duped in the sixties too, did we JPZ? Aw, that’s just too bad. Don’t you just wishy-wishy-wish you could go back in time and undupe yourself?
Well, you can’t, mate. Suck it up. Or not, for all I give a shit. Just don’t take your lamented personal history out on me and my generation by morphing into Enoch fucking Powell in your boo-hoo-reality-mugged-me dotage to over-compensate. Or Lord fucking Marchmain, for that matter, since (like me) you’re a Believer.
Nyah, nyah, I can see your knickers, the Japezty one. When you’re straining clunkily after disdainful condescension they tend to match your posts perfectly: obviously and embarrassingly full of shit, with all the usually eye-catching prints and patterns beneath duly obliterated.
I never thought I would think anything to do with a publication as trivial as Quadrant would symbolise a descent into barbarism.
But Windschuttle wanders around like a vampire with no teeth. He is self-deluded, small minded and stupid.
I guess he has found his shelter after he gets turfed out of the ABC. If he has any grace, he will resign. But I bet the whole foul nest of Murdoch opinion flunkies will have to be dragged out spitting and widdling in some cultural equivalent of a possum trap.
Unlike the average bandy legged hack politician on the right side of Desolation Row, there won’t be any comfy possy for them when the government teat they suck on and despise at the same time is ripped from their greedy gummy mouths. Who would have them on a real board, with real money and market position at stake?
And that question, of course, reveals how worthless those appointments were.
As an aside – how will Maurice Newman take to the return of the staff representative on the ABC Board? He spat the dummy over that very issue last time, and he is reputed to be a good chair.
I fancy them all on the Meat Marketing Board, in a sort of inverse version of that time when Jorge Luis Borges lost his job at the Argentina National Library and was re-employed, blind as he was, as a chicken sexer.
According to Greg Sheriden the government has “comprehensively lost the culture wars”
“It has governed against the relentless opposition of the big institutions in our society: the media, particularly the ABC, the public service and the universities. It has at times out-manoeuvred these institutions; it has not reformed them. The Howard Government has comprehensively lost the culture wars. It has on occasion been clever at arousing a popular backlash against elite opinion on this or that subject. But it has not changed elite opinion. And in the end it appears that it is impossible to govern permanently against elite opinion. Elite opinion shapes popular opinion. Far from ferociously waging the culture wars, the Howard Government has been mostly missing in action.”
Shorter Greg Sheridan: WAAAAAAAHHH!
Honestly, this guy wants a war so bad, he doesn’t even mind if it’s a namby-pampy la-di-da kulturwar, just so long as he can loaf in his armchair, sozzled on brandies and mumbling anecdotes about the fine fellows he’s met.
Tosser.
Jack Robertson: ?? If by getting “duped in the sixties” you mean my being caught wearing an unfashionable brand of diapers, or foolishly trading my Tom Seaver rookie card for a 3-D Banana Splits sticker, then, keenly observed.
“morphing into Enoch fucking Powell”
Well, I guess one has to try everything, don’t one. But if you check your lunchbox, I think you’ll discover that you now have only three meatballs left, so I suggest you aim more carefully. After all, if I duck and you miss me, you might accidentally hit Franklin, the token black kid sitting in the desk behind me. Which would then automatically make YOU into… ENOCH POWELL! (lightning flashes, sinister organ sting. several peasants die of fright on the spot, and are buried in segregated graveyards. Miniature nooses become fashionable to wear as earrings. Godzilla appointed editor of Quadrant.)
Thanks jpz – just what I needed this morning. Another mental image I haven’t really got time to turn into a graphic!
(I’m thinking a little 12″ high Godzilla with a Keith Windshuttle head trying to tear down the Sydney Opera House or something similar. Because let’s face it, Utzon’s creation has none of the formal austerity you’d expect from Oz’s greatest home grown architect, Harry Seidler – in fact it’s a pretty decadent design all up. Perfect setting for a decadent production of Tannhauser).
Politics aside, there’re three master wordsmith-ranters who comment at LP: j_p_z, nasking and Jack Robertson. Love them all.
oops, & Nabakov, of course.
LOL! This is turning into an opera in itself. All we need now is Elke and a spare black leather coat from Operatunity.
I’ve already co-written and performed a rock opera based on Windschuttle and the culture wars, so don’t start getting any ideas.
Sheridan’s a weird dude.
Discounting the gallons of pule cascading down Sheridan’s manifold chins, his thesis about the failure of the Right in the kulturkampf is precisely my own.
I hardly need adding that, unlike Sheridan, I’m extraordinarily chuffed about how the broad, cultural Left has faced up to its sternest test and seen off rodentine populism.
Well done chaps and chappettes!
Now normal transmission can return and we lefties can resume our traditional task of internecine fratricide.
Take that, you dirigiste, statist, soggy, creeping Jesus nannies!
Now that he’s (K.W.)relegated to Quadrunt perhaps the burning intellectual question is going to be “Who is this guy?’ His foray into history was so bad no publisher would publish it. It had to be self-published.
Which should’ve been enough to warn the discerning reader off.
I predict yet a further decline of Quadrunt.
To be fair, if I had my own publishing house, I’d be very tempted to self-publish. Especially if the book was going to turn into a nice little earner as Mr Windschuttle’s seems to have. As an author you might have some humility, but as a businessperson it may have looked like a winner. I mean, every library in Australia has a copy of it now, surely? It was very effectively marketed as an important book, quality be damned, and with plenty of help from the voluminous opinion and criticism it prompted from friends and enemies alike.
Jack,
I didn’t read j_p_z’s assessment as condescension. Do you two have “a past”?
I hope Quadrant continues on. I don’t mind its cheapish look. I still savour those old Pelican paperbacks circa 1940-3 which have a note in the front explaining that war-time restrictions on paper supplies have necessitated the use of poorer paper… 60+ years later they’re still readable.
If cheaper printing helps Q continue, then hoorah say I. “The Monthly” by contrast is glossy and has much lower-quality pieces IMHO. People like Judith Brett and Robert Manne who seem to think that being self-elected ‘public intellectuals’ entitles them to respect, really give me the irrits. But I like that cricketing, financial writer – Gideon Haig?
Darlene: cuddly is fine, fat is insulting; but you know what? I think a few % of voters thought Kim Beasley was fat and THEREFORE lazy (not stupid). So he lost their votes. I thought he was lazy too, but it was from observing him in Question Time (chuckling with ill-concealed feelings of superiority, unearned by achievement as Opposition Leader) and giving speeches, and hardly ever visible in newspapers or radio….
cheerio
Guy Rundle predicts the death of Quadrant.
Me, I see it more as a fall of Valhalla moment. Must get cracking on the production notes for my Ring Cycle.
Jack Robertson: ?? If by getting “duped in the sixties� you mean my being caught wearing an unfashionable brand of diapers, or foolishly trading my Tom Seaver rookie card for a 3-D Banana Splits sticker, then, keenly observed.
Yeah, yeah, and I’m Alan Funt and my chopper’s fourteen inches long on the slack, blah blah, gotcha.
Japes, like every other unanchored tag in here you’re no more and no less than an oscillating bundle of 1’s and 0’s in the collective hallucination of cyberspace. The way you Blimp on about TEH EVILS OF MULTICULTURALISM/TERRORISM/etc at the drop of a hat you’ll do just fine n’ dandy as an excuse-cum-stage prop for a monologue on culture war ex-lefties-turned-hard-righties, thanks. Write under a Googleable full name – I do, much to my cost, sigh – and your real life might just come into play. But don’t snipe tactical flesh-and-blood factoids my way from behind a one-way electronic mask, cowboy. I don’t give a ferret’s fester who or what the person who blogs under the (lame) tag ‘JPZ’ actually is in real life. Nor do I extend a jot of credence to those cute little JPZ-as-kiddie vignettes, anyway. Tell you what, I think you’re lying. I put you at about 55-60 years old. Nyah nyah fucking nyah.
What now, Einstein?
Slap your birth certificate online and then maybe I’ll cede you a few wayward meatballs. Oh, and by the way, JPZ: you actually can’t throw meatballs at someone via a computer. Hang on a sec…golly, you can’t throw anything at someone via a computer, except maybe stale metaphors and blog-stoush cliches. I’m sure you’ve seen them all by now. I know I have.
“I didn’t read j_p_z’s assessment as condescension. Do you two have “a pastâ€??”
Not that I know of, Ambigulous, unless inviting him to suck my donger once, and etc, could be considered a ‘past’. Ah yes, I do so love a good old cruise, eh JPZ? The one and only legitimate occasion, I earnestly feel, for rigid anonymity during intimate human intercourses. Oh, alright, and, I suppose, the Confessional. (Whatever the billy-o does your lot do in there, I’ve often mused…a little covetously, I’ll own…O my, Sebastian…)
Actually, don’t tell him, Amby, but I am a bit of coy fan to be honest. Simpering no-namer or not, any long-termer with the gonads to out themselves unexpectedly as a Christian in these dreary God-starved parts and times is automatically a bit interesting.
Jeez Jack, as entertaining, provocative and technically accomplished as usual but y’know sometimes, while anger is an energy to be surfed, you can mistake the wave for the ocean.
Fully agree with your point though about those evil sly pricks who refuse to lend their real and googleable names to their online opinions. Bastards! All of ‘em!
So, Vladimir Nabakov, it really is you? You bastard – you cashed in on poor little Lolita’s wayward impulses, you grotesque kiddie lover. We say “Nyet Nyet Nyet!” to you. And how the hell did you get that slimy memoir published at all???
Jack
Oh dearie me: “do you two have a “past”?
I meant a past of slagging each other off in Blog world, not s***king each other off in Bog world.
nabakov ≠nabokov
On the basis of this, I’d have to say Jack R has generously provided us psychoanalysts with far more interesting material to work on than jpz’s relatively wholesome efforts. Tell us more, Jack. Why did you invite jdz to suck on ya donger?
And Jack, Sebastian Flyte and Lord Marchmain’s Catholicism wasn’t all that interesting, was it?
“Jeez Jack, as entertaining, provocative and technically accomplished as usual but y’know sometimes, while anger is an energy to be surfed, you can mistake the wave for the ocean.”
Anger, Nabs? Looxury. Ha, I dream of posting in anger.
My rant-fuelling waves are the usual ones, old bean: desperation and fear and bewilderment. A general all-round state of lip-quivering, flailing outrage at God’s extremely dubious sense of humour.
Still…ta. Your apt point applies to that lot anyway, I s’pose.
“Tell us more, Jack.” Pop that in LP’s ‘Unlikeliest Post Eva’ file, won’t someone? jinmaro, you can follow those earlier links (to the end of the interwebs, by criminy!) if uncracking nuts is really your idea of time well spent.
“And Jack, Sebastian Flyte and Lord Marchmain’s Catholicism wasn’t all that interesting, was it?”
No ‘ism’ as such is all that interesting, but that’s just BR’s costumery. It’s really about humility and grace generally, and the struggle to find it and keep it in a world where both are rapidly devaluing currencies, about decline and fall and fear there-of, about homesickness for wherever it was we humans came from, and so on. All the great gulping beautiful sadnesses. It’s about my dad slowly forgetting how to walk due to Parkinson’s and my little boy slowly learning how to walk, and how I’m situated somewhere between those two falling fellow humans, wishing I could do more to make the world safe and calm and painless for both, forever, while knowing I can’t, godfuckingdammittohell. We’re all of us born dying, aren’t we, and we none of us fucking want to die, do we. We don’t want to die. And that’s not just very interesting….that’s the marrow of life. So any artist who manages, miraculously, to produce a coherent and accessible articulation of that, of the various emotional arcs that this bony existential predicament ram upon us all, has IMHO earned the right to have us treat his mere chosen costumery with respect and tenderness and deadly seriousness, rather than make it the focus of cheap tittering and pointing (or – ick! – psychoanalysis, jinmy!). A reader’s views on God generally and Catholicism specifically, on the Brit aristocracy, on adultery, on epic masculine love affairs, on hypocrisy and misogyny, on the rich…none of this narrative marginalia ought be allowed to intrude on the line-of-sight between your thumping, pining heart and Waugh’s. Not when he’s offering us all universal melancholy beauty, with enormous writerly generosity ie at great risk of being edged snickeringly to one side by the ‘hot’ writers of the post-war moment, as a reactionary old wannabe-aristo, Convertolic social climbing windbag anachronista in a coming age of ironic Angry Young Gunslingers. As happened.
It’s aesthetically fucking criminal when an artist’s trembling tenderness of heart is misconstrued, even partially. Quite aside from not giving an inclusive and ambitious writer his due respect, focussing on the Catholicism (say) of BR, whether in proprietorial smugness or smirking disdain (or, may I say, vague indifference, jinmaro?), risks denying ourselves the rare enough human pleasure that is (universal) self-recognition without (specific) self-hatred. Great fiction allows us to see ourselves clearly without diverting emotional energy towards the calculus of blame and blamelessness that even great non-fiction can’t avoid (especially the post-Gonzo brand which explicitly claims to do exactly that, usually with tortured results). If you start to focus on the ‘facts’ of a work of fiction – Seb’s religion, rather than his struggle with/for grace and death/bottle – you get swept up in all the non-fiction contemporary baggage that goes with it, and before you know it, you’re seeing a pedophile-priest backstory lurking in every snifter of brandy he scallops. It’s not so much ‘wrong’ to unpack the Canon in all sorts of new ways; more, to me, anyway, simply distracting, and usually cauterising, too. A Catholic aristocrat who pisses his life away and ends up in a monastery because he was rogered by a Priest when he was ten – aha! I knew it! – is far less interesting than one who ends up like that simply because…well, the prospect of the Void scares the shit out of us all in different ways, don’t it.
Shorter Jack: Yes. I agree, jinmaro. Having now meatballed this thread to death…JPZ, I really overcooked my earlier ones. Sorry for being a jerk. Nabakov’s point is salient.
Cheers, Jack, no harm done. Besides, I’m really only a Turing test anyway.
“the rare enough human pleasure that is (universal) self-recognition without (specific) self-hatred…”
Well put. Good to see that this thread is coasting back into the region of (relative) sanity in its golden years.
VIOLA: What country, friends, is this?
SAILORS: This is Illyria, lady.
Ah a happy ending.
Me too, Japez, & I’m floundering around a C- grade average so far (must try harder, Jack). Ta.
su, it could have used a big gild willy, but apart from that…oh, my. What a heartswelling way to exeunt, all.
Nice one su. Better than my original choice for this thread’s finale.
Jack, I think the psychoanalytic investigation and explanation of religion is one of the most important and fascinating bodies of knowledge that humanity has contructed.
Ludwig Feuerbach was the first (European at least) to develop the insight that “God” is a projection into the heavens of our unfulfilled and fearful existence on earth. Marx and Freud both followed in the path of Feuerbach and developed this insight. The Austrian psychoanalyst and Freud collaborator, Otto Rank, developed the thesis that all creative human endeavour is fundamentally religious and he believed that the need for a religious ideology is inherent in human nature.
I would agree with that though I adhere to know religion and in many ways despise Catholicism, though I was raised and educated Catholic and my family history is full of nuns and priests and the whole palaver. There isn’t much I don’t know about Catholicism and I am very interested in all religions in as much as they are precious universal wisdom narratives and traditions which teach us much that is beautifu and good, as well as just plain useful.
Funny, it never occurred to me that Waugh was defending religion or Catholicism in BR. I thought the religious confusion, guilt, self-loathing, and fear of the Marchmain family, a deliberate telling of the grotesque futility and destructiveness of the notion of Original Sin, upon which the theological notion of Divine Grace is based.
That was my reading of it anyway. Perhaps not the accurate, or orthodox one.
Lord Marchmain’s death-bed conversion, so fabulously portrayed on film by Laurence Olivier, was to me, the first time I saw it, perhaps less so now, one of the most shocking, and upsetting, things I’d seen in a film narrative.
adhere to no religion…
It’s been ages since I read BR, jinmaro, but redemptive grace was certainly a theme as I recall, and also for Ryder.
Wikipedia has quite a decent discussion of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brideshead_Revisited
Apparently there’s a remake of the film due out next year.
True but I reckon another motor driving the telling of the story is that Waugh also wanted to write an elegy to the kind of aristo life he supped at just above the salt and that could tell then was going to snuffed out in the aftermath of WW2.
It certainly has some of his finest writing. The scene where Julia agrees to marry Rex Mottram is a masterpiece of Waughian ellipsis after a slow burning build up.
Super. Now all we need is an opera based on “Brideshead Revisited,” directed by a nutty German stage director who decides it’s “really” all about the Bride’s giving head, and thus parades onstage a, you guessed it, giant stiff golden wee-wee.
Oh, we’re the girls from the chorus,
We hope you like the show.
We know you’re rootin’ for us,
But now there’s this giant gold-painted wang that the crazy German guy is telling us to bloooow.
Hmm, not sure but I think Jack Robertson may have coined a new phrase. Whenever Windschuttle chooses to invest some random artistic detail with spurious culture war significance we should say that he is “gilding the willy”.
Jack, on the basis of the two, bar one, posts above, I’d say jpz is 55 going on 16. Or vice-versa. Like the characters in Mozart’s operas, he appears to be driven by forces that he seems, ever-so-sweetly, to not fully comprehend, but very much enjoys.
Which also, if I may be so bold, is why my question to you, which you refused to answer, remains so apposite.
You both have a lot more in common than you can admit to yourselves.
Been done. ibid: Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte.
Well who isn’t misplacing their age on the internets?
Nabakov
aged almost 17.
jinmaro — Well, as Jethro Tull once said to me while we were sharing a “doobie” in the VIP Room at Max’s Kansas City, “Hey, man. We stopped a war, man.” Then Wavy Gravy fell by, and invited us both to Woodstock in his Love Bug. I’d tell you more about it, but my arthuritis is killing me.
Oh stop it jinmaro. You wanna fight, pick on someone your own size.
Well pull it out, JPZ, pull it out.
The body may be painted gold but Amor’s wanger is actually black, so far as I recall. I was in row C, but it was only brought out in the more dimly-lit scenes: could it have been the backlighting?
The Black Wanger?
Somebody’s been watching The Bullshitters, eh?
Well after all, “wanger” and “Wagner” are anagrams of one another, so maybe we’re finally getting to the bottom of this…