Gentle readers, I beseech you to consider the following five seemingly unrelated phenomena:
- The Ishmael Beah alleged sort-of hoax (or is it?)
- The fourth estate’s duty to be skeptical and seek the truth
- Margaret Mead’s 1920s anthropological research in the South Pacific
- The ‘sexual revolution’ of the Baby Boomers
- The conservative moral imperative to bring pregnant women back to the kitchen, which is their rightful place in the natural order of the universe where they belong, which is true, and which everybody knows and secretly believes to be true if only they would search their hearts and admit it. We also secretly know that homosexuality is unnatural, that sex is dirty and shameful and wrong and should only be between a man and woman for the purpose of procreation and you know you’d all be much happier if you just did it with the lights off in the missionary position.
If you think these things have nothing to do with each other, well, you’d be right.
But that didn’t stop Simon Caterson from making an heroic effort to draw them all together in this marvellous piece of post-facto sophistry that has earnt him the first nomination in LP’s inaugural Agincourt Awards for the Longest Bow in Journalism.
Caterson’s article begins with a glib reference to the Ishamel Beah affair, and then leads the reader around a dazzling rogues’ gallery of recent literary hoaxes. All of this is fairly unexceptional in that it is the standard character-assassination format of which The Australian has lately made an art-form, tarring Ishmael Beah with the same brush as exposed, admitted frauds, even when Beah’s claims to have been a child-soldier are true and, barring some timeline discrepancies, admitted to be so by even his fiercest critics.
There is even some mewling reference to the higher purpose of the fourth estate in all this: to expose untruths and remain skeptical and impartial. Which is clearly why the highest priority of The Australian must be to deploy a cadre of journalists half way around the world to hound a former child-soldier about a few discrepancies with dates, instead of say, credulously swallowing some laughably dodgy Powerpoint slides from Colin Powell about Saddam’s WMD and then baying for an invasion.
But even this is not the ultimate aim of Caterson’s free-association writing. The real ideological payload comes in the final paragraphs, when we learn the following about how Margaret Mead apparently single-handedly started the sexual revolution (my emphases in bold):
A key question throughout the course of intellectual history is whether, or to what extent, humans are formed by nature or nurture. In the late 1920s Mead claimed to have found in traditional Samoan society a place where the normal rules of sexual conduct did not apply, thus proving that the otherwise universal taboos that restrict the ways males and females interact with one another physically were artificial and not an expression of our true biology.
In making what at the time was a very radical assertion, Mead relied on the evidence she gathered from conversations with adolescent Samoan girls who spoke to her of a paradise of unfettered, guilt-free sex. Mead’s claim had a huge impact in the postwar age of sexual liberation in the West, a legacy of permissiveness embraced by an entire generation of baby boomers and their children. However, [intrepid mythbuster Derek] Freeman travelled to Samoa and uncovered evidence suggesting Mead had been told only what her interviewees had thought she wanted to hear.
So, after 19 paragraphs of blumph, Caterson finally tells us what’s on his mind: sexual freedom is unnatural and wrong, and you should all stop it now, and it’s all Margaret Mead’s and Ishmael Beah’s fault. We must therefore pursue former child-soldiers or you never know where it will all lead. People will end up doing it in the road, and civilisation will crumble.
The article exhibits some sort of attention-deficit, as though the writer began in one place before being suddenly drawn back to more familiar obsessions. One can almost piece together the thought process… ‘hmm, this Ishmael Beah thing seems a bit interesting…and aren’t literary hoaxes entertaining…and isn’t the media supposed to have some sort of role in uncovering the truth…and OMG people are f***ing and enjoying it and must be stopped!’
A common trope for the conservative sophist is to claim that all the miseries of modern life were absent in the Edenic golden past, and therefore a return to living in the manner of our ancestors (eg. women barefoot and pregnant, poofs and dykes silent and invisible, lesser cultures kept down in their place) will bring instant happiness since, as we all know, our ancestors were always happy.
This blissful state of conservative ignorance can be maintained only by avoiding all the evidence we know about the immiserated conduct of most peoples’ lives throughout most of history, complete with routine substance abuse, wife-beating, incest, juvenile sex, foot-binding and the like. But on the calm untramelled canvas of the conservative word-painting, the past did not contain such unsavoury practices. Everybody behaved naturally by the ‘normal rules of sexual conduct’ that, in case you forgot, make everybody happy.
I wonder to which set of ‘normal rules’ does Caterson refer? Is it the normal rules of Roman times, which saw 12 year old girls married off to old noblemen? Or perhaps the socially-sanctioned man-boy paedophilia of the ancient Greeks, who, as conservatives are fond to remind us, are the glorious forebears of our superior Western values? Perhaps the ‘normal rules’ that Caterson reveres are more recent, say the ‘love, honour and obey’ vow of a blushing bride, or the ‘normal rules’ that forbid contraception and masturbation, or the ones that permit honour killing of teenage girls.
As for our ‘true biology’, is Caterson referring to the ‘true biology’ we share with the other primates, whose ‘normal rules’ of sexual behaviour include the dominant males keeping large harems of females, gang-rape used to enslave females, consensual group-sex as a tribal bonding agent, infanticide, public masturbation, sodomy, torture, and so on?
Conservatives would do well to avoid invoking notions of ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ in their ardent prescriptions to control our behaviour. For jungle rules are not pretty, and very few such rules fit with the sort of behaviour that most would be prepared to stomach.
It’s hard to avoid the niggling suspicion that the whole op-ed piece is just a smokescreen: an attempt to put some moral weight behind The Australian’s rather nasty go at Ishmael Beah, who has obviously suffered much in one of the world’s ugliest conflicts in Sierra Leone, and who now must bear the brunt of the conservatives’ fury about the sexual revolution. Or something. On any account, for drawing such a long bow, Simon Caterson richly deserves his nomination for the inaugural Larvartus Prodeo Agincourt Award.
PS – Nominations for the Agincourt Award now open…
A truly funny, clever and interesting piece of writing, the best I’ve seen on L.P. for quite sometime. AAA++++
Excellent. I nominate this post, for attempting to shoehorn some entirely contrived socially conservative anti-sex agenda into an article on the value of scepticism about sensationalised memoirs. The Mead controversy is cited because (1) the sceptic (as in all the other examples) was Australian; and (2) Mead’s flawed expose of Samoan teenage sexual mores was (as in at least some of the other examples cited) both widely influential and coloured by her own political agenda. The other examples, which you do not cite (I wonder why) sensationalise/fictionalise the phenomenon of so-called honour killings in Muslim societies.
Some facts: child soldiery, honour killings and sexual experimentation are all real. Some retailers of the details are full of shit.
You also express some scepticism of your own about the Ishmael Beah questions raised by the Australian. My bullshitometer tells me that a memoir informed by 2 months in a child-militia (and that at an age comparable to any number of naughty Australian volunteers in WW1) is a whole lot less marketable than 2 years starting at age 13.
No argument with your fine overall attack on this particularly silly piece.
Serious argument with your giving a casual pass to Beah, and, more pertinently, his oily publishing and marketing industry coterie.
If you want to blur your life story’s line between truth and make-believe for literary impact, fine, but do what the grown-ups do: write it as fiction. Exactly what this kid started out doing with his experiences…until the grubs of PublishProfitPissorf Inc. got hold of him.
Of course it’s much harder to publish, market and break even on fiction. Lousy reason to trash some pretty fundamental publishing (and journalism) epistemological bulwarks.
Gosh.
Just think what a monster of rectitude Caterson would be if he went after something current, relevant, and important. Like John Howard’s famous, though oddly non-existent, human shredder allegedly churning out flesh confetti at Abu Ghraib.
Simon … yes I’m talking to you. How about turning your clearly abundant forensic skills and your self-proclaimed zeal for moral clarity on to a study of how Howard lied his way into involving Australia in a disastrous war in Iraq?
That seems more relevant than a few misremembered dates in Sierra Leone, doesn’t it?
Gah what filthy pervs we were, with all that Marxism, Karma Sutra sex, “teh drugs” and foul Led Zeppelin albums, and the offspring are obviously mutated beyond redemption.
Kill ‘em all. Whisk ‘em away to be flogged by battalions of closet sadists dressed as monks…or closet monks dressed as sadists..
Simon Caterson’s political fellow traveller Miranda Devine tends to do as he does…. suck in the reader with an interesting or harrowing tale (generally featuring a child in distress), then a breathless segue into one of her pet hates – the permissive society, reproductive rights, Labor governments, multiculturalism, and her current fave – “let’s all make little girls adorable, modest and submissive (like I was?)”
Normally anyone showing such a consistent interest in little girls would need to be referred for treatment. But not in the brave world of the Cultural Warrior Queen.
Perhaps though we could give Randy an inaugural Small Slingshot Try-hard award, as her wee efforts are not a patch on Simon’s.
Especially in this country.
Obviously Caterson is not getting any.
Bismarck, I’m with you on the Beah angle, but I think Mercurius is closer to the money on the…mmmm…’strategic over-reach’ of this piece. Throwing in Margaret Mead really does skew the thing fatally, I think, given that ‘L’affaire Mead’ has long become a kind of catch-all sexual/moral bludgeon with which to whack the 60’s. It’s a bit of red-button Culture War shorthand. Any Op Editor who doesn’t recognise it as such by now, should. It’s not as if the writer was short of more recent, less morally loaded examples to weave into the piece.
Best of luck in your new job, btw, Bis. (Also, btw…you wouldn’t happen to be Tom Switzer by any chance, would you? If os, say hi to Brendan, tell him to get another earring…*Grins*)
Katz, your focus and perspective is as usual impeccable. I thought I was about the only person left whose bristling outrage over the lies, lies, lies printed by The Oz over Iraq hadn’t faded to a dull ache. Kudos to them on the Beah thing, IMHO, but still: Murdoch’s lot, of all our society’s potential epistemological guardians, have a hell of a nerve claiming the role as theirs.
So, after 19 paragraphs of blumph, Caterson finally tells us what’s on his mind: sexual freedom is unnatural and wrong, and you should all stop it now, and it’s all Margaret Mead’s and Ishmael Beah’s fault.
Except… he doesn’t. Certainly not in the excerpt cited, where no ultimate judgment is cast about sexual freedom, just the mild observation that in some cases, people may justify their sexual choices with reference to mythical events.
TimT, of course he doesn’t spell it out, but the implication is very clearly ‘… and look what that hoax led to!!!’ Mercurius, in this very funny and clever post, is merely mocking the chain of false logic in the article.
Apart from anything else, it’s a truism of recent(ish) social history that the so-called sexual revolution occurred as a result of the availability of The Pill. Margaret Mead had very little to do with it. If intrepid anthropological adventurers’ tales triggered sexual revolutions, how come the entire population of late Victorian England weren’t all at it like acrobatic weasels the minute Sir Richard Burton (the explorer not the actor) published his English translation of the Kama Sutra in 1883?
Having met commenter Nabakov once, there’s no other part I can imagine him in better onscreen than that one. Of course I might have to order it on “special” DVD from Germany or Denmark, but you know, that’s showbiz.
I see that to comment on this thread you’ve gotta have some kind of serious beef with Mercurius. I remember hacking viciously on one of his pieces earlier so I’ll be nice: Shouldn’t the Agincourt Award be for the equally metaphorical over-concentration of one’s attacking conceptual divisions and having them bogged down in already over-ploughed fields of argument?
Just asking.
What is it with the Right that it always comes back to sex? Is it simply that they are terrified (and mightily pissed)that someone, somewhere is not as crabbed, constipated and constrained as they are?
Even amerika thought, ‘no probs’ with Jerry Lee Lewis in the 60s, though he wasn’t allowed to bring his bride to Oz or Britain.
Not sure Liam, but I think we can agree that the winner should be announced upon St. Crispin’s day (Oct. 25) – yes?
What is this!I thought baby-boomers were the accrued outcome of everything that is conservative.Is that journalist telling me,that I learnt how to masturbate,by reading Margaret Mead as a teenager in the 60s!I read Margaret Mead stuff in passing in my twenties,and I Guess if I run into Dr.Peter Hollingsworth,before either of our days are ended,I will have to ask him what type of Liberal Conservative ends up on an Anglican programme for disadvantaged unemployed persons,in Fitzroy at the time 70s!?And last time I took notice of the MM,not mere male, was in a broadsheet,and before that something under the Brian Toohey Editorial in the National Times.So I cannot figure out how this journalist knows so much about me.Oh!Shit! He must of slept with me!? Didnt complain about snoring either!?I must of been drunk at the time,now when was that!?Early twenties say ,No!Late teens or being twenty,long before Fitzroy.Seeing I have always thought I was a hetero,,gee, he must be a attractive chap!I will have to google an image.Hello,sweetie!?Glad you remember me!?I couldnt react to the rest of it,because of the inverted Bell Curve that suggests people in their forties get depressed really easy.and there are bound to be some of those who could read this,and find the attack on them via,an attack on us sexed up boomers will mean they will never be considered that,because we hog all the publicity,and are so successful, the world is going backwards in morals!?And to hear from the Left in the U.S.A. go Go Left,to hear how baby-boomers to the last individual are the strutting reasons ,that kill.
Actually, the more I hear from older folk telling tales out of school now that there’s no penalty for being open and the more I read about sexual mores in Brisbane in the 40s and 50s, the less I’m convinced about that narrative!
But I do agree that Margaret Mead is unlikely to have been much of a factor.
It’s hard to know what’s being argued in the article, because “permissiveness” literally covers a multitude of sins. In terms of the nature/nurture debate, it’s now thought there are a few more anthropological universals than once was the received view on the basis of historical and anthropological research, but one of them sure as buggery isn’t “the prevailing official sexual norms of the 1950s”.
Top class post, Mercurius.
Very fine work, Mercurius. I dips me lid.
As it happens, I recall reading one of the Blessed Margaret’s books during the 1960’s, as a curious and s**ually-ignorant teenage boy; I think it was the one set in South Pacific island villages {”Coming of Age”??}. The volume beloged to my parents. My recollection of the times is that perhaps 1% of Australians may have heard of her in those years, no more than that I’d say.
I think St Margaret of Mead appeared on ABC TV (live) in the early 70’s: so raise the % to 4% by then…. I suspect she wasn’t as influential as (say) Benjamin Spock [6%] or James Bond [11%] or Elvis Presley [28%]. These are made-up figures, but I trust you get my drift.
What, James Bond was fictional, you say??? What of Pussy Galore then????????
Hmm, well there is an implied cause and effect argument in Caterson’s article, linking Mead’s study to a ‘legacy of permissiveness’. The term ‘permissiveness’ certainly is a weasel word, being designed to appeal to readers of a prurient mindset, while at the same time being quite ambiguous. But I don’t think Caterson does condemn ’sexual freedom’ outright, and it seems to me a useful exercise to identify social myths, their origins and their uses – as in the two primary cases cited, those of Ismael Beah and Margaret Mead.
At any rate, I’m not sure how conservative Caterson is, really. I know he writes for Quadrant, but I’ve never seen him feature prominently in the left-right culture wars. He usually writes commentary for the Review arts pages in the Oz.
You’re right TimT, the arts page is where Caterson usually appears. Where he tends to write a variation on the theme of “today’s artists in our fallen, dissipated age aren’t a patch on the old masters of the great and glorious past…”
viz
If it writes like a conservative, and quacks like a conservative…
If it writes like a conservative, and quacks like a conservative…….
Then it is probably a conservative. But what distinguishes conservative thought on these matters is not people having sex, even quite exotic sex as to both objects and practice, but the wholesale democratisation of its enjoyment, and the right to talk about it. That is what, above all, enrages conservatives. After all, the right to indulge in sexual practices of one’s own refined imagination has long been understood to be one of the prerogatives of power, but once any slapper has these rights, the currency is devalued somewhat.
This is instructive. The techniques of rhetoric and argument used here are very similar to the Beah/frauds/sexual revolution piece. (NB he has either just published or is about to publish a book called Hoax! so I assume this piece was cobbled together from different bits of that.)
Note the implication somewhere in the middle of that piece I’ve linked to, backed up by ’scientific’-sounding ‘evidence’, that if you’re not religious then you’re probably not creative. (As with the Beah etc piece, there’s no overt statement of causality, so that if called on it he could retort ‘But I didn’t say that’.) Note the breathtaking segue from Hitler to Islam within a single sentence. And note, in his attacks on anti-religion writers, the completely illogical free(ish) pass he gives to Christopher Hitchens.
I know a number of left-wingers who profess concern about sexual promiscuity, overuse of sexual images/ideas/stereotypes in modern culture (etc, etc). So I don’t know how much they’d agree that concern over ‘permissiveness’ is a conservative/right-wing thing.
As for conservatives themselves, how conservative are they really? P J O’Rourke recently wrote: “I’m so conservative, I support gay marriage.” And meant it, too.
Seems to me labels like ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’, ‘permissive’, and ‘right’ and ‘left’ wing are best seen as the beginning of a conversation, not as the closure of a conversation.
Re Beah. One of the first things a student historian learns is the unreliability of memory. Because some-one remembers something happening that is not necessarily the way it happened. And memory apparently gets more conflated the older one gets. This is obviously what happened in Beah’s case. As for Margaret Mead. I would have thought the dalliance ads in the Nation Review contributed more to the alleged sexual revolution than any anthropological study by Mead. As Mark has observed, long before the 60s there were the sexual shenanigans of the 40s and 50s. There were also the hip young things of the 1920s, the 1890s,the hidden Victorians (not you lot who come from Melbourne), much of the 18th century etc etc. Its probably a good idea to remember those of us who actually lived through the 60s didn’t actually discover sex in all it lithesome forms. Quite a lot of other people got there before us.Like the Ancient Romans?
Of course all sex should be banned! Immediately. It’s nasty and disgusting and animalistic too! It despoils the potential magnificence of man, the purity of his intellect, the potency of his intelligence…
Tea and polite conversation is much more desirable.
Paul Burns @ 21….”the hidden Victorians (not you lot who come from Melbourne)”…
ah, Paul, but we Melburnians ARE hidden, as we cower under our sunscreen and widebrimmed hats and shade cloth, loathe to leave our houses, peering out from politely parted lace curtains at the bewildering “modern” world, wondering which neck-to-knees bathing costume to choose for this afternoon’s picnic by the seaside, and waiting for our chaperones to arrive…
Yours very sincerely and chastely,
Miss [ ]
(initial deleted for reasons of modesty)
While at the Singapore Zoo in January i saw a mandrill masturbate and then eat the semen, another primate stick its finger up its arse and a babboon sitting there with an erection and a leer on its face. I don’t know what that says about Simon Caterson.
Sure, rumpy-pumpy has been going on for a long time, often even outside the bonds of wedlock.
Anyone who saw Catherine Freeman’s (the olympic athlete) episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” (an SBS program on genealogy) should have noted how many of her forebears were conceived on the wrong side of the blanket. This was be no means unusual.
However, it should be noted that these behaviours were not often spoken about before the 1960s, and certainly not spoken about in approving terms.
The cultural revolution of the 1960s was so much about behaviour as it was about perceptions of and attitudes to that behaviour.
My secondary school library had a well-thumbed copy of “Coming of Age in Samoa”. As I recall the revelations contained therein were spoken of in two broad ways:
1. Giggling prurience. (These folks tended to leave school early and get pregnant or father children out of wedlock.)
or
2. An expressed opinion that what young folks in Samoa got up to appeared to be more satisfactory than the prurient double standards prevailing at the time (in the md 1960s) in Australia. Margaret Mead supplied a vocabulary and a ready-made set of ideas that dovetailed quite satisfactorily with nascent and incoate opinions of adolescent baby-boomers of a thoughtful disposition.
And we began to talk about these things openly, even to adults.
“This is obviously what happened in Beah’s case.”
Paul Burns @ #21, I don’t know where this thread is meant to be headed, I suspect away from the relatively minor start-point that is Beah’s specific case. But while I don’t want to get in the way of an interesting, developing discussion, I have to dig my boots in: whether or not Beah’s memory ‘lapses’ were unintentional, wilful, or as I suspect, a little bit of both, with the subsequent egregious blurring-for-profitable effect driven by his publishing and editorial teams, what they produced was presented as – and he still maintains it as – the historical truth. An accurate telling of what happened to him, not one transparently presented as being subject to the kind of doubts you mention.
I have no problem with the blurring of fact and fiction, provided it is done transparently, and/or as part of the literary raison d’etre, the engine room, of a piece of writing. Helen Garner is probably the contemporary writer who has figured out how to navigate these treachorous shoals with the surest, most lucid and honest touch. Unfortunately writers of her calibre and generic ground-breaking dash have unintentionally opened the gate on a whole lot of opportunistic second-rate ‘truth of the imagination’ non-fiction works.
It’s not good enough for these ‘cake and eat it’ publishers to claim, as they now routinely do when sprung bad like this, that ‘of course’ they simply presumed that readers would make their own epistemological allowances for the genre. One of Garner’s primary lessons is that if you are going to walk this line, ruthless and sustained open-ness about your own epistemological liberties on the page is critical to maintaining writerly control overall.
Jack, I haven’t followed the Beah thing, but in general I agree with Paul. Most of us reinterpret – usually unintentionally – various episodes in our lives various times in our lives. As we age, our brain processes and registers memories differently, and often events which were particularly significant can loom larger – and thus, for instance, the sense of how long something took may be related more to the affect it carries than “accurate” chronological time. We often also conflate things and it’s quite difficult sometimes to remember exactly when something happened, when you met someone, when attitudes or views changed, etc. We have a tendency to draw things into a narrative that makes emotional sense rather than remember “facts”.
This is what was going on with the Rudd stories about his father’s death, I think. Note that the circumstances were very difficult to establish, because all that his childhood memories could be tested against was others’ (similarly distanced) memories.
It would be even more difficult for a publisher to “fact check” something that occurred in a wartorn African nation.
I’ve always thought that a good illustration of how complex memory, storytelling and truth can be is a relationship break up – I’d bet that you can never find two ex-partners who will agree on why it happened, and very often how it happened.
We – you and Paul, and me – have no argument as far as the psychology and metaphysics of memory goes, Mark. Yours is an excellent articulation of exactly the problems facing all non-fiction writers – historians, journalists, memoirists.
But at hand is the matter of the epistemology, not the psychology, of telling the truth about the past as far as we can know it. My argument is not particularly with Beah, nor even – at a pinch – with the publishing industry at the time of publishing, who may well, as you say, simply have lacked the resources to check the facts of Beah’s story thoroughly enough. (Although I find it hard to believe that it would have been as hard as you suggest not to check a few basic dates against widely-available historical and journalistic reportage.)
My real argument is with those who, after the fact of the discrepancies has become at least the subject of legitimate further enquiry, woould seek to dismiss such enquiry as somehow missing the point. There was no reason, as I pointed out by way of raising Garner’s approach, why Beah’s story could not have originally published, for example, within an explicit context of just the kind of writerly uncertainties your relevant points about memory – especially in kids – warn us about.
It wasn’t. It was published as a true story. They’ve been sprung. No amount of smokescreening about how the memory works – true or not – ought to blind us as to what’s really appropriate here: a mea culpa, and an amended version in future.
On the Beah case, no one disputes that he was for some time a child soldier.
Why is the time elapse important?
Beah’s claim is that his own brutal demeanour after rescue, over which there is no disagreement, was caused by a prolonged exposure to brutalisation as a child soldier.
If on the other hand Beah served as a child soldier for only a few months, the question arises as to whether this was a sufficient elapsed time to explain his post-rescue brutal behaviour, or whether he was already a brutal boy before being taken up as a child soldier.
For the record, I think that it is arrant want of empathy on the part of the Australian to suggest that Beah or any other child in his situation, should legitimately be expected to have been immune from brutalisation after “only” a few months.
Let’s be clear here. The Australian is exposing itself as being almost as callous as the soldier-leaders who required Beah to do unspeakable things in Sierra Leone, whether for some years or for “only” a few months.
Shame on you News Corp.
Jack, I know what you’re saying, but doesn’t this really go to the difficulty of distinguishing between a memoir and a “true story”? It’s a circle inherently hard to square.
Good discussion, folks.
What Jack Robertson, and even Bismarck, have put their finger on is the most interesting and pertinent aspect of the whole Beah affair: The commercial pressure to publish – something, anything – and then market it – somehow, anyhow – and the problems this causes for literature: THAT is the real story, and it’s a story as old as publishing.
Caterson could have chosen to write about the real issue, but studiously avoided it because he obviously had much more important things on his mind.
But the ‘gotcha’ factor with hoax-busters is interesting, because here Caterson, and recently others in his intellectual camp, like to use hoaxes as evidence that their intellectual opponents are insufficiently committed to truth and therefore bad, bad, people.
Now, we can all get het up about the absolute importance of truth as an abstract principle. But the mundane reality is that some truths are more important than others. As moral beings, we all make value-judgements about which truths matter more, even while capital-T Truth remains our guiding light.
It’s true that I had noodles for lunch, but this is not an important truth (except to my dietitian).
It’s also true that child soldiery happens, which is extremely important truth.
It’s also (probably) true that Beah’s memoir contains innacuracies about the length of time he was a child-solider. The importance of that truth falls somewhere in the middle of the first two.
So it *is* possible to make a nuanced judgement about the relative importance of some truths over others, without compromising or resiling from one’s overall commitment to the importance of truth-telling.
And as historical documents, even innacurate memoirs (which, let’s face it, is all they ever are) can still reveal important truths. After all, the fact that Manning Clark did not, as he claimed, walk through Bonn the morning after Kristallnacht does not mean that Kristallnacht never happened. The larger truth of Kristallnacht is more important than the smaller truth about whether Clark walked through Bonn the next day.
Whereas the untruths we recently endured about WMD, children in the water, coverups of AWB loans to Saddam – those untruths led to no larger truths – only more lies.
But the ‘gotcha’ crowd seem incapable of discerning such subtleties, since it’s too tempting for them to point to hoaxes as evidence of their opponents’ supposed moral vacuity. In their eagerness to do so, they lose sight of the larger, more important truths. As well as the real meat of this story.
The Swift Boat scandal during the 2004 US presidential election is another powerful case of this new right-wing approach to encasing a large lie inside a small fact.
Kerry’s “swift-boating” inocculated a craven Bush from the fact that his opponent was a genuine war hero.
Evil, genius.
Mark, yes, quite so, although I would suggest that you’ve perhaps got cause and effect back to front, in the sense that the difficulty in distinguishing between memoir and a true story is more the cumulative result of writers extending to the former exactly the epistemological dispensation I remain dubious about, at least in literary (and epistemological) profit-loss terms (see below).
Mercurius gives us a fine theoretical summary of the necessary range and flexibility in our ideas of truth without which non-fiction writers would be strait-jacketed into the most sterile kind of literality. And Katz (as usual) keeps her – his, its? – eyes on the main game, demonstrating in passing the danger inherent in getting bogged down on a high horse in these epistemological matters of principle. I’m not sure I can or even want to refute any of the points made, especially since I’ve already strayed too far into the classic fool’s forest of yarping on about a book I haven’t even read.
Hell, why not…suffice, I think, to suggest this much: common to those who tend towards giving Beah a (qualified) pass on this matter is the notion that these things are best regarded as a matter of prudently applied publishing judgement. I’m not entirely hostile to that idea, but do point out that when you start relinquishing basic matters of historical record – such as dates – to that (subjective) realm, you risk opening the door on, and effectively enabling, the application of exactly the same subjectivity to other matters of objectively assessable historical truth, such as whether or not George Bush or John Kerry has the more defensible Vietnam record, whether or not Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers published propaganda about Saddam they knew at the time to be wrong – lies, in other words – and whether or not John Howard likewise told lies about children overboard. Our capacity to call serious transgressions of the truth in these matters what it is epistemologically possible for us to discover and prove they were – lies (rather than ‘errors of judgement’, ‘different analyses’, alternative ‘takes’, all the other weasel words of the modern
agit-propspin industry – has been greatly diminished in my view by the insistence in trivial matters – like Beah – that such malleability can be legitimate. There is a direct link, in my view, between the ‘progressive’ literate community’s willingness to give the trivial ‘bespoke reality makers’ like Beah – Frey, JT Leroy, et al – an inch (usually for admirable reasons)…and the miles and miles taken by the Bush/Howard/Murdoch power-players, with disastrous effect.Inserting a few disclaimer-type qualifiers on dates, on the entire memoir, even, would have cost Beah’s story – and the memoir’s concomitent aim of publicising child-soldiery, the justness of which no-one is disputing – not a jot of force or narrativ e drive. And it would have helped maintain the creaking-but-least-worst bulwark between an outright lie and the absolute truth that is transparency of authorial status – even it that status, in topics involving such morally haphazard stories, is most likely to be one of helplessly conceded uncertainty.
Garner again. One thing no-one could ever accuse her of doing with her unyieldingly honest epistemology is giving the world’s truly dangerous liars and propagandists the slightest cause for thinking she is extending them a license to tell their filthy lies. The Beah book, or more properly the response to The Oz’s exposures, does, I think, even if only slightly. It’s a risk only worth taking when the literary pay-off on your own epistemological fluidity is major league.
When in doubt? Write fiction. That’s where the Big Swinging Pens hang out, anyway. Non-fiction wimps.
Katz, I think it is important to establish something approaching accuracy in regard to someone as high-profile as Beah, because there is still no firm consensus on how to treat war-traumatised children in general, or former child soldiers in particular. A high-profile success story like Beah will be used to gain understanding of approahes to rehabilitation (google and you’ll see him being discussed in those kinds of terms). His story is being sold as the very literal truth – lots of quotes from his publisher about how he told her that he has a photographic and exact memory derived from storytelling traditions in his village.
Human beings are not carbon copies, and react to trauma in different ways. However, in asking why Beah is more intact than others who have experienced war trauma (remembering that war trauma renders many children completely mute), his age and the length of time he was exposed to trauma are relevant issues (and 2-3 years extra education would also count for a lot).
I also think that the way many of Beah’s supporters talk about him as though he’s still a child patronising and a little creepy. It helps that he still looks so young – younger than 27. I’ve known other 27 year old former child soldiers and I doubt they’d attract so much sympathy, because they don’t look like kids anymore.
The talk of the veracity of memoirs reminds me of Spike Milligan’s memoir “Adol Hitler: My Part in his Downfall.’ The cover of the book had some quotes from famous historians assuring that their history was factually correct. Below was Milligan saying “I’ve jazzed mine up a little.”
Caterson’s blumphing over the years always seems to be about the same stuff, sex (perhaps he’s repressed or is just pretending to be) hoaxes (check out the internet for the yet to be published book he’s supposed to be writing about the subject), the Irish and from the style of the writing, it looks as though he may even have written his own entry on Wikipedia. Perhaps he needs to get out more.
Good call, Black Dog, I had exactly the same thought.
Shaun, you’re thinking of the first sequel, Rommel: Gunner Who?
I think you are right Liam. Point proven re unreliable memoirs.
Oh Spikey.
I’m a tad maudlin at the moment anyway, but the mention of his Foolishness just makes me happysad.
WTFAYSTSAT?
I hear you brother.
Andrew Norton responds here.
From James E Cote “The Implausibility of Freeman’s Hoaxing Theory: An Update.� Journal of Youth and Adolescence 29.5 (Oct 2000): p575.
…
“”Sir Richard Burton (the explorer not the actor)”
“Having met commenter Nabakov once, there’s no other part I can imagine him in better onscreen than that one.”"
Why thankee young Liam. I always thought I looked more like Oliver Reed the morning after the cathouse burnt down but if you insist. Dick Burton’s actually a personal hero of mine. Not only did he write the definitive manual of single stick play (insert smutty Arabian Nights innuendo here) but I also have a second edition of his book “A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome” which I feel is unsurpassed as a
Victorian adventurer’s account of a mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. And Dick did a lot of other cool shit too.
Mountains of The Moon is an excellent and sadly neglected film about some of his bigger adventures, and his relationship with his equally individual wife, Isabellam and with poor old Speke – a man of courage but never knowledge.
Now where were we. Oh that’s right, blaming Margaret Mead for Generation Porn.
Firstly as DelTim points out about Freeman himself is not a particulary relaible witness himself. Here’s a wikipedia quote it’s hard to argue with if you accept the grounds for Freeman’s critique of Mead.
“Freeman’s critics point out that by the time Freeman arrived on the scene Mead’s original informants were old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity. They further allege that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead’s original research, that after intense missionary activity many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead’s book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior (one of Freeman’s interviewees gave her born-again faith as the reason for admitting to what she now claimed was a past deception.) Further, they suggested that these women might not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man as they would have been speaking to a woman near their own age.”
Hands up anyone here who wants to confidently and accurately discuss their sex life with an older person of the opposite sex from another country that now owns yours? Remember from WW2 onwards until the 70s Samoa was basically a US protectorate (and not just American Samoa.)
Anyway, even the most cursory fossick through the last few hundred years of Western history alone will turn up many highly licentious eras that had root (snigger) causes completely unrelated to whatever’s twanging Caterson’s strings. Restoration and Regency England for starters. Plus the upper classes throughout history everywhere have been carrying on like minks on extascy like forever.
Basically, what is wrong with permissiveness anyway? Western society currently enjoying one of the most sexual permissive climates on record and we’ve never been richer or culturaly dominant worldwide. I guess people just like sex.
Anyone trying to control others sexual behaviour pretty much always has a bigger control agenda in mind. Harnessing, stifling, channeling and/or manipulating this primal urge is often the first line of attack for groups trying to get their world view to prevail – across the religious and political spectrum When you’ve literally got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
Fuck that.
My inner subbie is pissed. Please add all the missing conjunctions, prefixes and transitive verbs as you see fit. And try not to trip over the synecdoche crabgrass when responding.
So the Mead research really is a casualty of left/right hostilities? God that’s depressing. I don’t think I ever really believed it before. It seems even more lunatic than making the teaching of reading (phonics v so-called ‘whole language’) an ideological battleground.
Nabakov @ 44
“Anyone trying to control others sexual behaviour pretty much always has a bigger control agenda in mind. Harnessing, stifling, channeling and/or manipulating this primal urge is often the first line of attack for groups trying to get their world view to prevail – across the religious and political spectrum.”
So Eric Blair (George Orwell) was right on the money in portraying organised Anti-Sex sessions in his account of England under Ingsoc? (And also perceptive in having his protagonist Winston think that the Anti-Sex sash made a particular young lady look very inviting.)
“Animal spirits” – can’t live without ‘em, eh?
Amby #47: “So Eric Blair (George Orwell) was right on the money in portraying organised Anti-Sex sessions in his account of England under Ingsoc?”
Ah, I dunno about that…all that sour, dutiful, sexual freedom-as political emancipation as vaguely advanced by the plugged-up likes of Orwell tends to leave me as cold as the puritannical repressions of the shag-haters. Same horse, different rider, really: each is trying in their own prim-lipped way to render a human activity that’s inherently non-intellectual, intellectually utilitarian. Being urged to ‘fuck for the revolution’ sits in the same soft-on inducing camp as being urged to make babies for Costello, or being ordered by mum and dad and Cardinal Pell to zip it up until you’ve greased the priests, or for that matter feeling compelled by passing literary fad to wade through pages and pages of fast-dating tosh about New York neurotics who like to flog off at the drop of a quivering quim of liver. I bet Orwell, had he lived into the sixties, would have been firmly in the Whitehouse camp, anyway. He had Blimpy old reactionary-in-waiting written all over him. And I bet he never had a good hard fuck in his life, like more than a few grimly-liberated bedroom-lefties of his and later generations.
The fastest way to bugger up the nuke-league liberating power of sexual self-reconciliation (for us all, y’bastards) is to drag private sexual practise en masse, squealing and wriggling and fighting like hell to escape what it knows is a sensual death sentence, out into the harsh white light of cold clinical deconstruction. Sex liberates best when it’s an intensely private activity. You can sidle up most silkily of all on who you really are in the dark steamy cloisters of your own particular bathhouse.
Coetzee is scarifyingly (suicidally!) fearless on this in his latest. Fiction. Can’t beat it for getting at the truth in these tricky matters.
Jack
“And I bet he [Orwell]never had a good hard fuck in his life”
well, have you any evidence, sir? Or is this the (common) ascription of gettting-some / not-getting-any which so many posters trot out whenever someone opines sexward?
Frankly, my limited experience of life suggests that folk can have lots of other reasons to be grumpy (e.g. old age, disappointment, aches and pains, chronic pessimism, loneliness, for starters) quite apart from lack of sexual activity. I reckon Siggie Freud did us a bit of a disservice by pinning most of our neuroses on one main cause. A tad one-dimensional, a tad simplistic; possibly a tad wide of the truth. Though I’ll admit, when a Professor talks LUST he’s gonna grab our attention, no doubt about it! But it seems to give licence to everyone to voice suspicions about others’ sad dearth of sexual fulfilment, and in so doing appear somehow “well-educated” or something, while in fact (IMHO) they are merely GUESSING. Well, perhaps you’ve read enough Orwell biographies, to be fairly sure you’re not just making this up, in his case. Have you? Are you?
BTW, off Orwell; I admit being fairly silly, but I gained a good deal from browsing through Clive James’s “Cultural Amnesia”. On another thread I think you referred to it as “autohagiography”. Would you care to explain? Was it his ego – “I’m a very well-read chap!” that annoyed you, or something deeper?
cheerio
“(e.g. old age, disappointment, aches and pains, chronic pessimism, loneliness, for starters)”
Okay, but how many people with any two of these symptoms is getting any?
Cue sound for Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, Part 1. Thoughtfully replace “Eric Blair Was A Dud Root” on bedroom bookshelf where Gargantua and Pantagruel once romped. Nail shut trapdoor to Pan’s Labyrinth. Draw curtain, extinguish candle.
Negotiate piles of unpublished masterpieces on way to deeply significant other moaning expectantly from ensuite. Brace “silkily” for self-actualisation…….
JR: “Sex liberates best when it’s an intensely private activity. You can sidle up most silkily of all on who you really are in the dark steamy cloisters of your own particular bathhouse.”
Willie Reich: “You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night.”
How about “horses for (inter)courses”, Jack, would you buy that?
I was referring to a presumed causative factor, FDB, not associated variables. Or were you just pulling my leg? (No other limbs currently available to be tugged, BTW); just tellin’
How so, Jack R? I must have missed something.
Just joshin’ Ambigulous.
sorry, FDB, stupid and insufficiently perceptive. BTW, with random guesswork about the s*x lives of the famous, is prurience confined only to the conservative? I suppose not.
Certainly not.
More than a few “liberated” lefty baby-boomer parents of friends of mine suddenly took a different view about their own kiddes, too.
speculation abounds, as do speculums [speculi ??]
“…well, have you any evidence, sir?”
Of course not, Amby, why spoil the fun of petulant iconoclasm with that sort of nonsense? My intuition that Orwell was sex-bereft was based on the need in that series of sentences for a ratcheting up of the petulant certitudinal tone. It was a matter of pure aesthetics. I can think of no nobler reason for the character assassination of untouchable literary figures. Likewise my James-grumbling. Yes, yes, OK…I liked much of ‘Amnesia’, too. Although I think ‘autohagigraphy’ isn’t too bad. I sometimes get the sense, from his relentless pushing of his own barrow at the expense of other, lesser writers – witness his miserably drawn-out, grammar-fetishist deconstruction of some blameless sports hack in the current Monthly – that James is much more anxious about his long-term literary legacy than his current across-the-genres global status as a ‘great bunch of [literary] guys’ should merit. My amateur ear also thinks he’s a really lousy poet. I mean, really bad. To me he just goes ‘clunk, clunk, clunk…TA-DAH!!!!’.
I’m happy to admit I’m 50% bluster and 50% envy on these guys. I’m happy to own that I really don’t know what I’m talking about. Still…surely it’s more noble for a nobody like me to attack a big name than a fellow nobody? God, these guys have it all: talent, brilliance, fame, wealth, adoration, prizes, a secure legacy…I think they can probably survive a zipsqueak like me kicking at their ankles in thwarted frustration.
“How so, Jack R? I must have missed something.”
Oh, shit, not you too? I answer reluctantly, Dr Cat. I’ve got a large gob and a big chip on my shoulder. And you’re scary.
* Trembles like undergrad*
I thought that the way Coetzee had C articulate opinions in the essay strand, especially I suppose the one on pedophila, in conjunction with the way he developed Anya’s strand into a kind of emotional-intellectual redemption-fantasy, all in the meta-context of leaving us deeply ambivalent about how close Coetzee and ‘C’ really are…well, I thought it left him exposed to some pretty harsh attacks, in the the Amisian sense in Yellow Dog, say, and especially ala Nabokov in Lolita. You’re never really quite sure how much of a dirty old man C really is, if at all – one thing I do feel fairly sure about, though, is that it’s surely illogical and inconsistent to take at face value the manner in which Anya’s intervention softens (explicates, fleshes out) the ‘C’ opinions an voice; that’s the same pitfall Nabokov wants you to suffer in swallowing Humbert Humbert’s protestations of Lola’s precosity at face value. It’s easy to forget that the characters are all written by the same self-serving pen, even though Coetzee (and Nabakov) continually remind you of it with their structural games. You have ‘Anya’ in the end intending to clear out the old guy’s flat, take care of his reputation…well, should she? There’s another bit in which ‘JC/Coetzee/Senor C’ uses a friend as (yet) a further proxy by which to muse about the authorities ‘locking him up’ if they knew what sort of sexual fantasies he harboured. Well, who’s ‘he’? Who are we supposed to ascribe these dark sexual thoughts in a novel so epistemologically will-o-the-wisp, if not Coetzee? Then he essays on the Fictional Authority, about the key to veracity being to write not so much like a pro or a craftsman but as a fully-engaged prophet. I mean, everything about the book, from all the authorial double-clutching to Coetzee’s autobiographical cock-teasing adds up to an explcit declaration: I, Coetzee, want to write some essays to jolly well get some serious shit off my chest, but I’m worried about taking some hits (on the sex stuff in a minor passing sense), but on much broader front, too.
In many ways C’s ’strong opinions’ add up to a kind of fictional riposte to the nominally-’narrative’ essays in ‘Saturday’ – so beloved of the cultural war right. So to leave yourself exposed on the easy-peasy chopping block of appearing to downplay/excuse pedophilia – and it was just relatively smallish aspect that leaped out, by the way – while slagging off much of the cultural agenda of the recent neo-conservative ascendancy also seemed pretty fearless to me. I’d hazard that what really saved Coetzee from the kind of thrashing in the Op Ed pages someone like Flanagan got for The Unknown Terrorist was the sheer impenetrability, at times, of just who the hell was saying what; the authorial smokescreen a fiction writer gets to lay down, sometimes the only route to address scarifying questions, such as the sexual attraction some older men feel for very young women.
And if that was a trick question, PC…no. I don’t!
I won’t argue with a C-.
*Grins irresistibly*
*Plops big shiny apple on desk*
*Grins irresistibly again*
*Does….hopeful little…dance..?*
*Sighs*
*Wanders off, sobbing, to see if it’s too late to switch to Commerce…*
I second Bismark’s nomination of this column.
For the same reasons plus I think Caterson’s main objection is to claims about memoirs/ stories/ books being the absolute truth being used as a sales pitch.
The Mead example is used because it is an example of a scholar getting things wrong not as a tool to blather on about sexuality and permissiveness – that seems to be Mercurius’ problem actually.
Your extrapolating takes your argument into the entirely wrong areas- the writer of the article is more pissed off about liars rather than those who subscribe to a different set of sexual values.
No no no, Jack, the dance comes before the apple.
They never get it right.
Nice rant. I wish I’d been well-read enough to realise immediately just how much that novel alludes/refers/pays homage etc to Nabokov; maybe I would’ve made the connection with Lolita sooner if I’d read either Pale Fire (same layer cake structure) or Strong Opinions (Coetzee connection self-explanatory), but alas I had not. Does that make me less scary?
(NB: I am about as scary as a hamster.)
“Does that make me less scary?”
Oh no, I’ve known some savage hamsters in my time. ‘Fraid it just makes you scary and gracious, generous, light-of-touch with your book-learnin’…but we knew that already. Bless, ta.
Pale Fire’s a ripper, Doc. Structurally it makes even Bad Year scan like a cricketer’s Test tour diary. And it contains surely the saddest, truest, most exquisitely fragile love hymn, man to woman, on the topic at hand (more or less). That Nabokov buries it where, how he does…oh, shut up, Jack. But it sings, Pav, it sings, it sings, it sings. It’ll make you want to run around the back yard with your knickers on your head, shouting out over the ordinary Australian rooftops: I’m a writer, I’m a paid writer, I’m pitching in the goddamned big league here…
Shhh! Nobody tell Possum! He’s stroppy enough as it is.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/34388/
Jack, fascinating points on ‘Diary of a Bad Year’. Put in the context of the preceding novels, Coetzee’s clearly working through some pretty heavy thinking/feeling re: the ethics of authorship, and the author as ethicist/moralist (and we could add ‘Foe’ to this, as well as a number of his essays). I’m not sure what to make of it all yet, but I found ‘Elizabeth Costello’ was particularly though-provoking.
Looks like gleebooks has ‘Pale Fire’ in their catalogue. I just have to convince my partner that we should free up the money for me to buy it. I might check the second hand shops first, although it doesn’t sound like the sort of book I’d relinquish.
Yeah, and when you chuck in for example his review of GGM’s ‘Melancholy whore’, the plot thickens a bit more. What’s interesting to me – in the context of this thread, this discussion about truth/fiction, esp. wrt the attacks on Mead – is how differently one instinctively responds to similar material in different epistemological contexts: contrast the sharp intake of breath you can’t resist taking at the paragraph (about half-way down) that has Coetzee opining, as the explicit author in an explicitly non-fiction piece: ‘… Yet the goal of Memories is a brave one: to speak on behalf of the desire of older men for underage girls, that is, to speak on behalf of pedophilia, or at least show that pedophilia need not be a dead end for either lover or beloved…; with the nonchalant regard you apply to, say, the summary of Kawabata’s (fictional) ‘Sleeping beauties’ a few paras down. Clearly this…mmm…awkward subject has been on JC’s mind. Clearly, from the whacking list of high culture fictional riffs he brings into that review – safety in numbers, methinks! – it’s been on many a fine mind for centuries.
And ain’t that the depressingly ironic thing about Mead’s work being rent by ideological pillow-fighting beyond any academic use, as Pav noted just up a bit. Whether or not she was duped by her primary sources, she was in any case largely an empirical messenger carting back raw data whose substance in an anthropological sense was really only going to become clear in the context of subsequent Western reaction to it. In a profound way, articles like Caterson’s – what, sixty, seventy years later? – actually go on rendering her research more valuable and anthropologically illuminating, not less – but of our culture, not the Samoans’. Potentially, anyway. Still, it looks like we highly-strung aging white blokes are too wimpy – or too anxious – about this kind of stuff to gaze upon it without as a minimum the safety buffer of fiction. Like I say, I’m not entirely unhappy about that, for (possibly selfish, in a societal sense) matters of taste, personal preference for discretion in such matters. But to go on savaging Mead as a kind of displacement activity to ease our own sexual nervousnesses, when she seems to have been an able, earnest and focused researcher, seems shabby.
Pale Fire – whatever they’re asking, KK, it’s worth it.
I think you are right Jack about the negative illumination that anthropological work such as Mead’s (and Freeman’s) provides of our own culture, illumination that is sustained through the continued preoccupation with that work.
On Coetzee: I wonder where ‘Slow Man’ fits in here? Without trying to give away too much to anybody reading this who hasn’t read the novel, Paul Rayment’s experience is clearly closer to that of Don Quixote than to the character in Marquez, albeit a much gentler version of the former. (I might add that ‘youth’ in that novel is relative, and that something like ‘class’ – and I could add, ethnicity and migration as well – is tangled up in Rayment’s ‘inappropriate’ desires for his nurse). Coetzee may have been dwelling on the question of socially unacceptable desire, but his tentative answers to that question are quite at odds with Marquez, I think.
“how differently one instinctively responds to similar material in different epistemological contexts”
Excellent point, and as you suggest this is part of what Coetzee is exploring in ‘Diary’.
“sexual nervousnesses”
This concept is also quite evident in Coetzee’s ‘fictionalised autobiographical’ volume ‘Youth’, and it is clear that it is far from confined to just aging white blokes. The young ‘Coetzee’ is a case study in himself, and needless to say his feelings on virginity are substantially different to those depicted in Marquez.
“And I bet he never had a good hard fuck in his life,” said Jack waxing poetic about George.
How does one fit the messy reality of ‘a good hard fuck’ into this lofty literary discussion?
Not easily I suspect!
Well, I can only speak for myself, natch, but I’ve never had any trouble using big words even with someone’s great hairy ankles up around my ears, DavidG.
I can recommend a few texts if you need some help multitasking!
*Phwoar-hoars**
Ah, terrific work, Jack @ 58, 61 and 64; thanks Pavlova @ 60. I second Jack’s swooning over Nabakov’s fiction; his essays and memoirs are damn fine too. “Pnin” I love. Will take your tip and sample “Pale Fire” – cheers!
Jack, I’ve had to have a couple of shots of whiskey to help get my mind around the image of you engaged in furious rumpy-pumpy with someone with hairy ankles! Urk!
But to imagine you using big words simultaneously is beyond me. Do you have any videos you could post that would substantiate you claim?
The arguments about the accuracy of Mead’s work also serve to deflect attention from the absurdity of the actual longest bow in Caterson’s article:
That claim is utterly absurd, as several commentors above have noted: reliable contraception had much more to do with the sexual revolution, there have been many previous eras of sexual licentiousness, and what is wrong with sexual permissiveness anyway?
Do the culture warriors like Freeman and those who cite him really think that if they convince folks that Mead was wrong, then folks will just suddenly stop having sex?
Trackback
I’m a third of the way through ‘Pale Fire’ now and it’s quite funny. The poem is strangely brilliant in itself, but the ‘commentary’ seems to be moving rapidly away from being connected to it outside of Kinbote’s (Botkin’s?) own mind. The phrase ‘darkly comic’ is such a cliche, but I can’t think of a better way of describing it off the top of my head. There is so much here, it’s going to take some work I think.
Well, my planned John Banville binge is going to have to wait. ‘Doctor Copernicus’ is beautifully written, but Nabakov is the master.
“Well, my planned John Banville binge is going to have to wait. ‘Doctor Copernicus’ is beautifully written, but Nabakov is the master.”
Out of curiosity has anyone read any of Banville’s crime novels, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black?
Also if anyone is interested in a good novel about the child-soldiers in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Ivory Coast wrtier Ahmadou Kourouma’s “Allah Is Not Obliged,” narrated by a ten year old boy provides a startling description of the madness of the times of Charles Taylor and Fodah Sankoh.
Ah yes the “love” that dare not speak its name…
A Modern Guide to Nabokov
Humbert would screw a twelve-year-old
If he could get it up
She’d likely not have had it
So she might give him a tup
Bedazzled by his seeming charm
And hypnotising chatter
The fact he’d banged her dear old mum
Did not seem to matter
Lolita lived some time ago
Her secret was not found
No Facebook, text or message clients
And no mobiles around
Wrinkly farts have certain joys
They all have lots of money
That you can forget he’s just a perv
Whose penchant’s a bit funny
For partners of his own age
Were all bored with his shtick
Flab, blemished bod and sagging rod
They’ve given him the flick
When man a certain age does reach
He really needs to get
Personality, wit and charm
Maturity, you bet
Because all men wake up one day
To find the mojo gone
While real women on the other hand
Can keep going on and on
Old Humbert’s such a stupid git
A sleazy bore to boot
That even Lols got sick of him
When he came for a root
Meanwhile the women of his age
Would wisely have been seeking
A young stud with a nice buffed bod
Not one with joints a-creaking
Today the cops would come along
A good think, one would think
For Lolita, though a metaphor
It still gives quite a stink
Bravo!
In Defence of
HumpyVladJust imagine (for a tic),
Drop the purely Modern shtick,
Shift gears up to Po-mo crit,
Why’s HH such a clever shit?
More’s the point is ‘Who is Humpy?’
In this take on rumpy-pumpy?
Sure, the character’s alarming,
The narrator is deeply charming.
Feel the skidding tension rise,
Between these double-doubled guys,
The charmed who beds the kid with glee,
The cursed who brays: ‘What’s wrong with me?’
And fizzing in his lonely den,
The writer with a single pen,
Vlad v. Vlad, saint and sinner,
Musing who might be the winner.
What a splendid quest: to write,
Your dragon as a mounted knight,
For Life, greater love hath fair scriv none:
Than to flip it upside down – just for wordy kicks, and a bit of moral fun.
(Oh, OK, and to show your latest new country you’re No. 1…)
DuellingDoodling PoetsI do predate the Po-mo thang
By many years, be praised
By Leavis, Frye and Bradley
Was my critical conscious raised
We called it different names back then
But was the self-same thing
We did not deconstruct the words
But let the meaning ring
I must admit I like your take
Poor flawed perverted Vlad
To write of sleaze in peerless prose
And see some good in bad
But being of a feminist bent
And mother of a girl
I come to Vlad with some disquiet
As I watch his tale unfurl
For though it is a moral book
And says a lot that’s true
My gut reaction maybe is
To ring up SVU
As my almost 16 year old daughter might say:
“I love it when poets verse each other”
Jack, for our runner up this eveing Dolly has a lovely Bulova watch, wasn’t he a great player, customers?
sorcerer, hope you enjoy this link.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08039/855735-109.stm
Nice one EC. I’ll send it on to the daughter and her step-sisters.
Not so fast, EC. It ain’t over ’til it’s over…
Vlad, the
ImpalerUnfairly ImpaledO! Such exquisite purgatory,
Accused of just that felony,
Which, with his pre-teen ’siren’, he
Would honey-trap us; (see ‘irony’).
Read outside
Vlad’sHump’s ‘what she saids’;Her nightly ’sobbing’ in their beds,
The terror in
herHUMP’s ‘teenage whine’,Waddayawant? A neon sign?
With every Hump-twist of the ‘jailbait’ ratchet,
Vlad adds a counter-clue, if only we’d catch it,
Hump swoons: ‘The curve of her thigh, oooh, it’s heaven’,
Vlad screams: ‘Eleven, eleven, she’s ELEVEN!!!!’
Degree of diff? Surely ten-point-ten!
To write that faint dischord to your own singing pen,
Blipping a ‘moral hazard’ on each reader’s scope,
(Talk about extending us each enough rope!)
You’ve got a good point – down to this day,
Too many critics do still blithely say,
(In amoral and a-liter’y atrocities),
Yairs, t’is all about ‘barely legal precosities’.
(Don’t even get me started on the Hollywood travesties…)
And – touche, Sorc – they are ‘po-mo’ often,
Moral core and perspective now long-softened,
By decades of yapping far too frenetic,
‘Bout how words are mere craft, self-contained, hermetic.
But soaring, singing, Mod-poet Sorc,
(And I fly this with a grin – of course!)
Might I gently just suggest,
That you too
failedmerely A-minused Vlad’s naughty test?In Great Books High (ie fiction school),
We’re
toldshown agin & agin just one rule,To make your point hit deep and well,
Show show SHOW the reader – never tell.
So may I mildly, meekly expound,
How Vlad’s cautionary tale’s the best around,
When it comes to SVU intervention:
Call it a simulated ‘Literary Pre-emption’.
A step-by-step Creep’s Guide for Chicks,
See how easy it is to fall for our tricks?!
Not Lola, but you, the reader, swallowing Lothario’s oily diction,
In the safest learning ’safety zone’ of all, girls: utterly believable (and warm, funny, and so…chilling, too) Cocksman Fiction.
Awesome!
Arts and Letters Anchor Person: “And now, literary itinerants, feminist philologists, rhyming roués, sandstone scholars, dilettantes of tempo and metre appreciators…..
we cross live to Poetry Fight Club for the judge’s* verdict.
Ding…..ding…ding…ding….ding….�
Inside a ring that’s actually square
The ref raises two arms high in the air
The crowd erupts with a roar, frenzied and fecund
Not one of the punters demanded a refund
Humility Disclaimer: *self-appointed and completely unqualified
“Much fun singing about Nabokov’s Lolita in counter-point harmony with the majesterial, mystical, irresistible ‘Sorceror‘ over at LP…:”
We wuz both robbed, EC! It’s Fenech v. Nelson ‘91 all over again, I tells ya…
Bless as ever for the space, LeProdders. Great post & thread, Merc.
Posts 74 to 82 : bravo! This has to go into the LP Hall of Fame for Best Exchanges (on any topic). Does anyone need reminding why LP reigns supreme? Voila !!! Et merci.
Been to a tedious meeting today but hope to have another one of me pomes up tonight
lookin’ forward to yer pome
Yairs
Me too
Slight delay with partner’s birthday and wanting to watch the opening of Parliament and all. Will try and do it after the Apology tomorrow.
A Literary Walloper’s Lament
(One must be careful how one types
That tiresome term “po-mo”
For more than likely typing quick
You end up with “porno”)
Vlad’s purgatory and ensuing angst
By Jack has been explained
And though Jack’s efforts I have praised
My credulity’s still strained
For Lolita’s not exactly pure
No blushingh maiden fair
Budding trailer trash more like
And all too willing to share
She goes off with that Quilty bloke
A nasty piece of work
Enjoys his paedophilic charms
Knows full well he’s a jerk
Such an unlikeable, dreary lot
A relief when they all die
After wasted lives misspent
One cannot help but sigh
I’d spray the room with strong Lysol
If I ever arrest this crew
I’d not bother with a Miranda
They’d think ’twere someone to screw
I got…nuthin! Nuthin’, I tells ya…
*Quietly disappears from view, pops up several blog-years later on Tim Blair’s World Series Blogwrestling site as ‘Doggerel Death Beast’, gravatar’d in azure and gold lycra, crazy-eyed with the steroids.*
Man can drink deep from Ars and Vita
Without once wading through ‘Lolita’;
We’ve got on fine, since the Jurassic,
Without this strange splenetic classic.
One wades through prose both arch and frightening
For one great joke (viz., “picnic, lightning.”)
I find poor Humbert’s plaintive hum
(His eyebrows raised to Kingdom Come)
Leaves me uncomfortably numb.
If Amour-fou must be in house,
Give me K. Kat, and Ignatz Mouse.
Wow!
If there are awards for best Oz post of the year, perhaps there ought to be one for best (if somewhat tangential) thread of comments for a year (if one doesn’t exist already).
My vote for such an award goes to this set of comments… and I think it’ll remain one of the best of 2009.
Well done…. all of you!