I too value statistics, and only meant to point out that they can be used to prove almost anything depending on the criteria by which they are gathered.

Indeed that’s up there with Hitler’s speeches. I’m surprised P Cat hasn’t been charged with a hate crime. .
.
Hatred does blow in from the Left and out from the Right and around and around. Hate! We;; at least now it’s regular shouting matches instead of the good old days when it was pikes up yer gullet. Still I think it might be useful to consider the source.

I’m not quite sure what the pegging of currencies to the market price of the yellow metal has to do with hoaxes. On the assumption you’re using ‘gold standard’ as a synonym for ‘acme’, I have to disagree. Piltdown Man has no peer in the realm of mischievous fabrication.

Jack’s sincerity is not at issue for me. It is the appropriateness of taking on an explicit position of humility when everything about his critique of Dr Cat was the opposite of humble. I’m asking him to reflect on this ambivalence with respect to her in particular.

BTW I think your analysis of Murray has a great deal of merit Casey, but I’m sticking with appreciating Murray ‘in spite of’ it.

In terms of my only major work so far, on the Brisbane line Controversy, I was criticised by a colleague on the Left in print and on-line as being an empiricist – a philosophical approach to history which I cheerfully admit to.

Left Establishment. Jesus!

What is it about Quadrunt that they so readily appear to resort to ad hominem {sp?] arguments. Its one of the first things you learn is a no-no when you go to uni. One debates ideas, not the personality of the person who makes them.

I think Murray’s politics make his poetry crap, no matter how good it is, but hey, thats me. I think the Buladelah Holiday Song Cycle is one fine example. He slaps a Christian white dreaming over the cycle – song cycles are used for dreaming narratives of Aboriginal peoples. There are many versions of the same cycle, some so secretive, very few know them. Murray adopts the cycle, using the cadence and rhythym of an ancient sacred Aboriginal form of storytelling – but he takes out Aboriginals and puts whites in there instead. I could go throught he whole poem but that would be boring. But one thing stands out – The dreamtime creation snake for example becomes queues of cars on a highway heading home for Xmas. Its clever indeed. But for me, its an erasure of stupendous proportions – a recolonisation in writing as it were. As for his Athenian and Boaetian divide, well you know, he should go to Greece and be done with it!

Jack I never said you were sexist. I said the stereotype you used was. And I stand by it. I feel you write out of a masculinist discourse which has a long tradition Australia’s (war) literature. Given your background, thats not surprising. (How’s that for biocriticism Jack!) For instance, you describe the stoush as ‘dirt pissing’. Half your readers cant dirt piss, not easily Jack. And the ones that can, well some would choose not to do so. So when all the man dust settles, have a think about it.

When I read your stuff I am reminded of all the war lit i did as an undergrad, – My Bro Jack, and the Odd Angry Shot, etc. You remind me of those writers and their elegiac lament for the lost Australian male (Im thinking of the Anzac Day piece you wrote a while back here). But you know, I found those texts (not your writng thought) to be mysoginistic in impulse, even as there was beauty in the elegy for the lost mythical Australian. Dominic La Capra suggests that there is a difference between absence and loss. Absence being that which never was – often a story of origin – like the Fall. Loss is grounded in history – like the loss of the Stolen Gens. I might suggest to you that the mythical Australian (and the mythical white Australia) never was, and Les Murray and John Howard’s and Quadrant’s insistence on his and its return Jack, was always going to fail and result in a national stasis, where (white) mourning, which rightfully should be about its own violent history, is now displaced onto spaces where we have created a loss – like Anzac Day (as I heard Brian Castro say recently).

But if this situation created your own blog site, rest assured, I will be visiting!!!

Cheers
L.

And… now Ive lost interest. Sorry Pedrant, only dropped by to make WIndy look a goose – not actually interested in your cruddy mag, which Ive never read before – or since.

He never left the soft cocoon of perfect bourgeoisdom.

That’s from Peter Ryan’s 567483th article about Manning Clark.

Now could we all forget about Manning Clark? Anything more “yesterday” can hardly be imagined.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/1-2/hollow-man-of-yesterday

Then there’s the “series of articles” which will be a “critical appraisal” of the Howard government:

In the first article in that series, “Our Greatest Prime Minister”, it would have been easy to bolster the case for that title by dwelling upon the Howard government’s economic record. I chose not to do so because, with the Editor’s agreement, I had already resolved to write a further article devoted entirely to that topic. This article, deliberately delayed so that the statistical record could become more fully available, now discharges that resolve.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/1-2/growth-jobs-and-prosperity