Germaine Greer trashed in The Monthly
March 3rd, 2010 by Kim | Published in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Media, Politics, Women | 245 Comments
I don’t know what qualifications you need to be a public intellectual. I think you get such a gig because readers of The Age have voted for you, or something. But apparently playwright Louis Nowra is one.
In 2007, he wrote a short book, Bad Dreaming, which to put it mildly, met with some legitimate criticism. Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself. Last month, he published what could reasonably be described as a laudatory piece on the life and character of one Tony Abbott in The Monthly.
He’s now followed that up with an amazing rant about Germaine Greer, to be published in the same mag on Friday. Allegedly, it’s to mark the fourtieth anniversary of the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
You can get a taste of it from this article in The Independent:
In the essay… Nowra not only attacks Greer’s work, but criticises her appearance, her character and even her sanity. “She will do anything to get noticed,” he says, adding that when Greer appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, she looked like “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”.
Yet Nowra has the gall to accuse Greer of misogyny. Nowra says that Greer doesn’t understand “what makes women tick” and that her work is too “middle class”. Presumably he is immune to such criticisms because:
Nowra… lives a studiedly bohemian life with his writer wife, Mandy Sayer, in Sydney’s red-light area, Kings Cross…
To allege that because women still wear make-up, Greer’s work had no value at the time it was written is risible.
This is not the first *controversial* editorial decision Monthly editor Ben Naparstek has made. What possessed him to commission such a piece of abusive raving? Were there not any women who might have written a fair and measured reflection on Greer’s influential book? To build sales? I won’t be giving him the satisfaction of buying a copy. I’ve already read more than enough of Nowra’s “intellectual” contribution.
Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
It surely can’t be worse than John Birmingham (I think) after her commentary on Steve Irwin’s death. That was a monumentally poisonous piece of penmanship.
I predict this thread will attract a lot of acrimony…
Oh fuck, not the annual “Germaine Greer: Still Relevant Intellectual or Crazy Old Witch?” thread.
Look she’s both. 400 years ago they would have burnt her at stake, now she gets a Professor Emeritus sinecure. That’s real progress.
While I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to her work lately, I’m damn glad she’s still around and stirring up trouble. Society would be rather less fair and far more boring without the likes of her around. I hope when I’m her age, I’m still be willing to do wild and weird things like appearing on Big Brother.
And speaking of Louie Nowra, what can you say about someone who named one of his chihuahuas after me – just because I slept with his wife.
I second Nabs (except the bit about the dog)
Yes, the Australia Day honours list should add a new category – Order of the Australian Ratbag (Motto “Stick your OAR in, why don’t you?).
I look forward to Hawkey, Germs, Warnie and Kylie as the first batch of inductees.
Hell yes, Kim, that is obviously a terrible, terrible rant Nowra has published in the (very near) future. Poor Germaine, how will she ever cope.
Naparstek has obviously proven himself a right little
cuntprick.Anyway, apropos of nothing, what do you make of Germ’s most recent forway into getting people to talk about herself:
That’s not just a slam against MtF transpeople, that was basically the lead paragraph for her article about Caster Semenya (who is most definitely not transgrendered).
That’s modern day Greer for you.
Yeah, I wonder why on earth a theater guy who lives in Kings Cross could possibly want to have a go at Saint Greer.
Y’know NickS, one day when yer older, possibly wiser and certainly scant of breath, yer gonna look back at @6 and wince.
Read Nowra’s piece in full last night. It was a rant, poorly written and lacking coherence. Not sure why I bother with the Monthly
There’s a decent takedown of this (and similar rubbish) here:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/03/brief-guide-to-reaction.html
1) Affect class resentment of “hopelessly middle class” leftist intellectuals (or if you prefer, “rich college fucks”, dixit Daniel Patrick Moynihan). This is a cardinal principle of reaction, particularly if you happen to be hopelessly middle class, or a rich college fuck.
2) Ventriloquise the intimate beliefs and impressions of others. If you’re bourgeois, remark that working class people are alienated and confused by the intellectualism of the left. If you’re male chauvinist, complain that feminists don’t understand how women tick. If you’re a racist, talk about how black people love you, agree with much that you say, and find you much preferable to your hopelessly middle class foils.
“Lives a studiedly Bohemian life”. WTF does that mean?
Is he slumming it with the sans culottes up in the cross like some sort of latter-day F. Scott Fitzgerald, hoping to get “discovered” or somesuch?
If he wants to get noticed perhaps he could cut-off something. Like an ear. Or a some other appropriate appendage.
It worked for Van Gough.
And I’m sure Ms Greer would appreciate the gesture.
Oh, my. This is going to be one of those threads. I’ll get the popcorn and deckchair ready.
We had some good fireworks in Adders on the weekend, but nothing to match the fireworks we’ll be seeing here in a few hours’ time.
I’ve met people (by now very old men if they’re still alive, who reckoned they’d never read Germaine Greer. I rather like her. I don’t always agree with her but I find her stimulating.
(Perhaps the question one should be asking is : Do younger women find 1970s feminism relevant. Now, I don’t know that many younger women, and I do live in the bush, but, my impression is – they don’t. (Beliewve it or not, some of them haven’t even heard of it. (Our education system today, eh?)
I have already decided not to buy this issue of the Monthly and I hope many other women, forewarned, will do the same.
Hope their sales take a dive.
And just for the record, apart from anything else, I think Germaine Greer is a gorgeous looking woman, for any age.
Memo to non-Sydneysiders: The only people living in the Cross these days are silvertails and junkies. The “studiedly” Bohemians are in Newtown. The real Bohemians are in St Peters, Enmore & Marrickville.
Now, if you look to your left, you’ll see we’re just passing by the…
Reducing everything to the dull compulsion of the economic (did you see what I did there?), I suspect The Monthly is doing this because, like all conspicuously high-brow but not ‘little’ magazines in Australia (think Max Suich’s The Independent Monthly), its circulation is tanking.
Oh good. Another Nowra slag fest. The score on the last one between Nowra and Ellis: Ellis 220 not out; Nowra exposed pissing on the umpires leg at tea.
I love the line about Nowra’s “studied bohemian life” up the Cross which presumably means breakfast at Piccolo while maintaining covert membership of those resident groups that want to shut down the Wayside Chappel.
Studied bohemian life my arse. Boehemians of any sort now live in Newcastle and the Gong because they can’t afford to rent or own a shoe box in Potts Point.
Historically and contextually “Female Eunuch” was more significant than anything Nowra will ever do which is probably what galls the runt.
From Nowra’s article:
What fraction of ASX200 companies have women as CEOs? Three-fifths of bugger-all (the only one that comes immediately to mind is Gail Kelly). Film directors? If Kathryn Bigelow wins best director at the Oscars she’ll be the first in history. And, while there were moves to change it, I believe women still aren’t allowed to even try for frontline infantry jobs in the Australian Army.
It’s a troll.
It seems the distinction between criticism and ridicule has been lost.
Even the distinction between self-promotion and self-ridicule seems lost with the ‘lives a studiedly bohemian life’ line.
This wouldn’t be the first time Germs has had a man hanging on her coat tails.
A studied bohemian life means that he is a poseur and a wanker. Wasn’t it Nowra who wrote a piece in the Herald claiming women who spent time visiting and helping asylum seekers were only doing it so they could meet men? His claim was that they couldn’t meet any outside the fence and so had decided to grab the ones who were so to speak a captive audience. Seems the only time you hear of Nowra is when he stands up and has a tantrum about some well known person. So who is the attention seeker? Germaine is at times as mad as a cut snake but I find that endearing. I think she has contributed more to the world than Nowra. In fact am sure of it.
How can we accurately discuss a text that is unavailable online ?
I’m not an unalloyed fan of Greer. I didn’t like the thesis of On Rage, for example. I have liked some of the other stuff she wrote (e.g. on cults of personality surrounding certain princesses).
You can disagree with someone’s ideas, but to my (rather old-fashioned?) mind you should do so with as much respect as you can muster. There’s no need to be rude. Particularly about Greer’s appearance (which has nothing to do with her ideas or their appeal and logic). That’s just plain BAD MANNERS on Nowra’s part (and yeah, I’m sure there’s an element of misogyny there). I don’t think they should be publishing stuff like that because it just doesn’t add much to intelligent debate.
And the injecting room. Those bloody junkies decrease one’s property values, you know.
SL @ 14 did I smell sulphur? ;-) I’m sure you’re right – it’s all down to the bottom line.
Nabakov @ 3
& Louie who? oh hiiimm..one of those “internationally famous australian artists” that nobody overseas has ever heard of..
Historically and contextually “Female Eunuch” was more significant than anything Nowra will ever do which is probably what galls the runt.
You have it, Anthony, Nowra’s article defined in one sentence.
And I love the irony of Nowra mansplaining the success or otherwise of Western feminism while criticising one of its exponents for her looks. FFS. Doesn’t Sayer proofread any of his stuff for basic coherence?
I decided not to renew my subscription when the author of one book about Julia Gillard was allowed to write a critique of another book about Julia Gillard. It is always good to get evidence of a correct decision.
Kim said:
I certainly trust Nowra more than any of his detractors on the subject of Aboriginal affairs.
In my experience, and in the experience of those I know much greater in the know, Nowra’s work on violence in remote indigenous communities if anything understates the matter. There is a very powerful code of silence operating up North.
The phrase “War Zone” came up regularly in discussion, at least until the Intervention.
I enjoyed Greer’s book THE MADWOMAN’S UNDERCLOTHES, a collection of clever and thoughtful essays that was a pleasure to read. That noted there’s a lot of other stuff she’s written that shits me enormously. Oh well.. I thought Nowra’s piece on Oz cinema from a few Monthlies back was okay, and I’ll give his Greer bash a look. They should bring out a special 21st Century edition of FEMALE EUNUCH and pass them out to young chicks in their 20′s, to see how many of decide that sexual interest from men, and glamming up to attract same, is really the shocker of shockers and not the source of fun and enjoyment they’d previously pegged it as being.
I have had a low opinion of Louis Nowra’s talents ever since the sight of a plaque on a footpath in Darlinghurst honouring a late member of the Communist Party of Australia prompted him to write a shitty little op-ed on TEH EVILS OF COMMUNISM and how awful Australian communists were for not being aware in the 1920s of the purges which Stalin carried out in the 1930s..
Whatever possessed The Monthly to commission a man to assess the impact of a groundbreaking feminist work anyway?
What about something from the generation of countless women who actually DID become motivated by `The Female Eunuch’? And I don’t mean your Anne Summerses or Eva Coxes – your average girls who were knocked out by the idea of holding on to your job rather than quitting the moment you got married, or objecting to getting felt up by your boss as a matter of course. There are plenty of them.
Some analysis of this impact at the distance of several decades would have been vastly more useful than a debate over whatever Greer is or isn’t today.
Yeah, there are criticisms to be made of Greer, if one wants to, but I would argue her status as a “public intellectual” is arguably the smallest contribution she’s made to the world (in comparison to Female Eunuch, and her genuinely excellent work on Shakespeare). But that’s public intellectualism in a nutshell isn’t it?
For Nowra to take a swing at her looks and attitude is piss weak, and comes off as nothing better than once again a man trying to tell a woman how to look and behave according to her ‘station’.
Not on the rents people charge in any of those suburbs these days, Mercurius. These days it’s all yuppie sardines* outbidding each other on renovated townhouses, preferencing the Libs after the Greens, making complaints about pub noise after 10pm and getting a vicarious thrill from the potsmoke next door. The kind of people who put band posters on their walls in the same way developed countries put the native animals they’ve made romantically extinct on their banknotes and stamps. Looking for fashionable ennui anywhere on the inner west line’s like going thylacine hunting, without the hope of shooting anything.
What Anthony Nolan said: if I wanted to find a bohemian in Sydney, I’d look to somewhere at the end of a long train line, like Richmond, or Mount Druitt or Minto where people can actually afford to do fuck all. Hell even Cabramatta and Liverpool are gentrifying these days. As to Nowra, how do you keep a claim to studied bohemianism when you’re permanently on the HSC 3 unit English reading list? A play by Louis Nowra is the kind of book kids use to disguise their smut.
Paging GregM, paging GregM.
*A line I stole with subtle daring, etc.
All too true Liam. I recall seeing share accommodation notices for rooms in Newtown the last time I was in Sydney and things have changed a lot since I was paying $16 a week for a room in a share house in Egan Street in 1984.
Is ‘studiedly’ even a word? Do they mean ‘studiously’? Anyway, any man complaining about a woman looking like a demented grandmother loses all credibility. Like, that’s serious criticism of her ideas.
Fine, I’m sure Nowra meant “studly”.
And let me just spoil my own joke by noticing that it was the Independent writer, not Nowra, using the term ‘studiedly’. Oh well.
Definitely ‘studly’.
Quite liked Richard Seymour’s response at http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/03/brief-guide-to-reaction.html
Talking points for the reaction against feminism, anti-racism, socialism, etc:
1) Affect class resentment of “hopelessly middle class” leftist intellectuals (or if you prefer, “rich college fucks”, dixit Daniel Patrick Moynihan). This is a cardinal principle of reaction, particularly if you happen to be hopelessly middle class, or a rich college fuck.
2) Ventriloquise the intimate beliefs and impressions of others. If you’re bourgeois, remark that working class people are alienated and confused by the intellectualism of the left. If you’re male chauvinist, complain that feminists don’t understand how women tick. If you’re a racist, talk about how black people love you, agree with much that you say, and find you much preferable to your hopelessly middle class foils.
3) Ground yourself relentlessly in reality. Real people just don’t live that way, and don’t want to. Real people don’t think like that, or talk like that. The real world doesn’t work that way.
4) Espouse victimology. Remark that positions exactly like your own are “brave” and “courageous”, because they are invariably “shouted down” by the left (cf, “chorus of execration”, “political correctness”, etc).
5) Talk dirty. Now that you have authenticated yourself as a hard-bitten realist and soul brother (or sister) of the oppressed, feel free to indulge in some old-fashioned baiting and stereotyping. Eg, if your opponent is a woman, you could imply that she is a mad, shrieking harpy. Remember, not only do you speak as a persecuted salt-of-the-earth, dyed-in-the-wool, working class hero, you actually speak on behalf of womankind itself.
I think you’ve just named the next Whitlams reunion album, Paul.
Having given it a bit of thought, I’m fairly certain that my new rented terrace two blocks from Parramatta Road has a higher concentration of licenced brothels around it than anywhere in Kings Cross. If you catch a 461 or 480 past Stanmore McDonalds you can hardly make out the guitar dealers and secondhand furniture warehouses for all the knock shops.
If sex work alone makes a suburb edgy and cool, Annandale and Stanmore ought to be up to the clacker with creatives and bohemians. Sadly, the inner west is full of people like me who wear ties to work, haven’t listened to any new music since Catriona Rowntree was on Triple J, and look forward to a middle age of grumpiness, whiskey and 702.
I live in one of those inner west suburbs but in a block which reminds me of the Johhny Cash song “Committed to Parkview” so I claim still a bit of boheme around here.
Geographically there is a wafer thin line between Kings Cross and Potts Point so when people assert living in the Cross for cred reasons, I’d like to see the domicile on an electoral commission approved map before I take the claim at face value.
“Some books are incitements to action, none of them good books, for the principal function of writing, even polemical writing, is to stimulate thought, to stimulate creative thought in particular.
That means producing confusion in place of certainty, melting concepts so that they may reform and coagulate in new relationships.
The way of doing this may be quite violent, for settled certainties resist corrosion and demand vitriol.
They are shrunken and crusty and need roasting or scalding to make them germinate into new forms.”
Not bad eh? The above is from the Introduction (called Warning) of Greer’s book ” Sex and Destiny: The politics of Female Fertility”.
It seems to me that this has been the consistent approach throughout all her works.
One ironic twist – pursuing its vendetta against the pseudo-Rightists at The Monthly, Quadrant has published a defence of Greer/attack on Nowra on its Website.
She’s the one who outed herself as a Marxist. So she trashed herself… and I used to really like her. A damn rotten shame. I hope she’s not senile.
I could be missing something Liam, but the last few households I had the pleasure of frequenting in said suburbs seemed to me replete with all the accoutrements of La Vie Boheme, viz:
Re-purposed milk crates, beer-bong paraphenalia, toddlers of ambiguous parentage, 20-somethings of ambiguous (and exuberant) sexuality, furnishings (and sometimes people) dragged in off the street, and tenants whose residence I’m certain was unknown to the landlord (and Centrelink!)
Say it ain’t so?
I met Greer a few years ago and she was a truly stunning and beautiful woman – no signs of dementia or grandmotherliness in sight. But I never knew my grandmothers, and I know little about them now because their men were in the spotlight. I don’t always agree with Greer, and some things she says, not all, do seem to me to be a bit out there, but for that we can only be thankful. I am grateful that she exists and that she continues to play a public role in the often dumbed down, mediocre debates of today. Just the fact that she has an untamed opinion seems to provoke acute discomfort, she doesn’t know how to toe the invisible line – and I say hallelujah! Maybe Louis’s bohemian lifestyle has turned a bit too predictably mainstream these days – sadly.
and just to add. I have also met Nowra and he was like a grumpy old man.
I’ve got a milk crate or two in my place, Mercurius, I have friends with toddlers, and I own a pair of birkenstocks and a Newtown Jets cap. Hell I’ve even been to a couple of matches and drunk KB watching the Bluebags lose. I was a twenty-something up until a month ago. If the accoutrements make a bohemian, I’m the stereotype.
But what Nowra and I have in common is that we’re about as marginal, creative, original and interesting as IKEA furniture.
[also: my last comment sits in the moderator's queue.]
[released!]
Jeez Mercurius, sounds good. What’s the address?
I think we call them “Czechs” these days, and there’s just not very many of them in Australia.
d
And they have a habit of throwing conservative Austrian Catholics out of windows into barrels of horse manure.
Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself
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Well he’s just honouring the tradition of being a
typical grant-slurping late sipping middle brow pretentious wankerbohemian. And he think Dr Greer is an attention seeker..
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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Well d’uh!
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This guy’s just another wannabe wanker who writes plays no-one watches. Go to any culture vulture function in this country swing a cat and you’ll hit a carload of ‘em. Swing that cat hard.
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how awful Australian communists were for not being aware in the 1920s of the purges which Stalin carried out in the 1930s..
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Well they were. And you’re to blame as well. What you weren’t born then? Excuses excuses.
Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.
I didn’t bother to renew my subscription to The Monthly a couple of years ago. It was the right decision.
Germaine Greer again, a grand old woman. So it’s now a bit less than 40 years when my (long-ago ex) husband said to me “you’ve never been the same since you read The Female Eunuch”…and a lot more than that along the same lines, e.g., “I allowed you to go to university and you haven’t thanked me in your thesis.”! I thanked Gough for that! The first comment, upsetting at the time because regeneration had barely begun, is now seen as the greatest compliment he gave to me.
And I thank Greer for the the generating of my real self, now a strong, feisty,
78 year old, fighting for the seriously mentally ill, against the governments which refuse to fund their care, with all the strength I have. And with an uber-plan (possibly unreachable) of tearing down the present Department of Human (?)Services brick by brick. Here’s to you, Germaine. You will continue to live your life as you want; how you want to do so is absolutely nobody else’s business
Presumably a studiedly bohemian life requires you to change your name.
So over Greer bashing in this country. Write about something else people – or is it because she is the only lit celeb the country has had?
Germaine Greer is one of the few ‘public intellectuals’ to have the guts to speak out and not give a stuff who she offends in the process – a quality that has earned her the ire of lesser lights, intellectual frauds and mediocre talents like Mr Nowra.
The pity is that there seem so few with her passion, intellect and courage in the younger generation.
The Monthly is the same old introspective masturbation produced by the same old myopic mutton dressed up as libertine lamb. The same old views from the same old hippies all under the misconception that their tired old schtick is somehow radical or counter-culture or even interesting.
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All it really is is the same old in-fighting and witless bitchiness amongst the same old 150 people who harbour a life long dellusion of being the Antipodean equivelant of [insert favourite intellectual/artistc movement here].
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Associate with any of these people and do/say something the least bit wild and they’ll cringe in fear or spew such self-righteous moralising hypocrisy as to make Lady Bracknell embarassed for them. The culture of this country would be imporved 3000% if you coukd give this lot a pleasure cruise and sink the boat with a cruise missile in shark-infested waters.
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Not that I have anything against them.
As an old hippy, Adrien, I think I take exception.
(apologies to Stephen Sondheim)
IKEA
I just filled my house with IKEA
And now my own domain
Looks eerily the same
As yours.
IKEA
I’ve traded Freedom for IKEA
I’ll never be replete
With trash from off the street
Again.
IKEA
I’ll never stop building IKEA
Who needs it ready made
When I could spend all day
Enthralled?
IKEA
Self-assembled from chipboard conjunctions
And named after bodily functions
IKEA
The sound catalogues
the allen key to my heart.
Heh.
Damn you, Liam. Now I have to wipe coffee off my monitor.
As an old hippy, Adrien, I think I take exception.
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Sorry old bean. Just talkin’ ’bout my lost generation. :)
pfft. so many critics.
there is no compulsion to follow the instructions, ya know.
If you are so uncreative that you lack the skill to customise, you could always just google: IKEA + hacks.
Amusing in the extreme to see someone writing for that effete bien-pensant bourgeouis toss-fest The Monthly describing someone else’s work as “hopelessly middle class”.
I’m also amused people seem to think there’s a meaningful distinction between gentrification and bohemianism. Bohemianism isn’t the last gasp before gentrificiation; it’s the first wave of gentrification – the invasion of “students-and-artists” shock troops that ready a nice working class suburb for takeover by the Yuppies.
Says the man who lives in *cough* Randwick.
Often, of course, those same students-and-artists shock troops have metamorphosed into yuppies after a decade or so has elapsed.
No YouTube at work, Adrien, but if it’s what I think it is (I’ll check this evening), I always hoped i’d die before I got old :(
Amusing in the extreme to see someone writing for that effete bien-pensant bourgeouis toss-fest The Monthly describing someone else’s work as “hopelessly middle class”.
Quite a few sticky-out nails being accurately hit on the head on this thread!
I’m also amused people seem to think there’s a meaningful distinction between gentrification and bohemianism. Bohemianism isn’t the last gasp before gentrificiation; it’s the first wave of gentrification
And hit again.
Susan @ 46 thanks for that. I’ve always been impressed by Greer on tele. Her appearance absolutely reflects her feminism, pride in her person without affectation. Mind you she was ever blessed in her looks and is as striking and attractive as an older woman as she was in her youth, wrinkles and thinning hair notwithstanding.
Yes, she speaks her mind. And what a mind! I’d give my eye teeth for half her intellect which seems undimmed by age. The disappointment in her published writing subsequent to The Female Eunuch is understandable perhaps if there was an expectation she should outperform herself.
If I were Nowra’s grandmother I’d disown him publicly. What a sexist ageist little
prick. Someone should do one of those computerised ageing tricks on him and his I’m sure his still lovely wife.
Bohemianism isn’t the last gasp before gentrificiation; it’s the first wave of gentrification
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That’s right. You’d think we’d get some credit.
So since I am a reely genuinre Bohemian from the days when Bohemians usta live in and around the Cross, where would I move to to find like minded people if I ever went back to Sydney? Not that I’m contemplating it.
You’d probably have to move out to Penrith, Paul …
I think the bohemians in Sydney have, um, moved out of SydneyYou’ll find them in Katoomba or some such.
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La Greer loves this stuff. She really enjoys pissing people off. Why I like her.
Good question, Paul. I’d say nowhere in Sydney town. Maybe tiny pockets in the Blue Mountains, but as you know Sydney’s full of wankers.
Patricia @ 69: “If I were Nowra’s grandmother I’d disown him publicly. What a sexist ageist little prick.”
And given he’s only 10 years younger than Greer…wtf?
Gentrification: Artists and Yuppies Working Together
I’ve enjoyed the cinematic adaption of Nowra’s, “Radiance”, and “Bran Nue Dae”.
I suspect Greer wouldn’t give a hoot what anyone thinks of her appearance. Reminds me of Patti Smith, who you know you can say whatever the heck you like to, and about, because she is a woman so comfortable in her own skin, and so aware of the lack of importance conventional notions of ‘femininity’ have played in her own success, it makes such bombastic criticisms redundant.
“If I were Nowra’s grandmother ….”
I never heard of Nowra ’till his memoir The Twelfth of Never came out. I thought it was a fantastic piece of writing, and perhaps gives us a clue to Nowra’s misogyny: his mother was, well, very hard to live with.
I forgot about Nowra ’till his next memoir came out, “Shooting the Moon”, and I’ll never believe the same person wrote the two books. Twelfth of Never is one of best Australian memoirs, and Shooting the Moon is probably the worst.
The Monthly never ceases to disappoint.
in and around the Cross
What, like Darlinghurst? Not a member of the Pointy Shoe Brigade, were you, Paul? I shared a Stanley Street terrace with a last practising member of the PSB; eventually he gave up the fight and moved to Melbourne with the rest of the maudlin winter poets.
No Bohemia in East Sydney now, of course. I think I caught the very end of it. The month I was there in ’87 I swear you could watch the gentrification move down Stanley Street like a Red Tide. Or that may just have been an illusion created by our other flatmate, the art atudent, moving out and being replaced by someone who could pick up after herself.
Er… so, yeah, try Melbourne.
Saint Furious, Nowra didn’t write Bran Nue Dae. It was a writer called Jimmi Chi.
How gentrification works:
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1. Take one nice working class suburbs with the spirit of ciommunity expressed in beer belly contests, fights to the death between youths aged 17-25 who live on different sides of the same street (might as well) and annual wife beating celebrations.
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2. In come disaffected middle-class malcontents determined to die in a flophouse, bloated with drink and riddled with diseases that ceased to exist in the 17th century, in order to piss their parents off.
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3. Take various persons who seek to make money from the resultant squandering of trust funds.
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4. Mix well and wait 20 years.
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5. Take a bunch of middle-class goody goodies whose imagination is stretched by the intensity of bank brochures, strapped with cash courtesy of their evil jobs and spiritually and emotionally void resulant of the final realisation that they’re the boring people who everyone makes jokes about.
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6. Add one wayward night in a dive somewhere featuring musicians whose life is dedicated to taking animal tranqualizers, add a prime specimen from #5 and an episode where s/he thinks some crazy beautiful freak might spend the night with ‘e,.
.
7. Presto. You get carloads of button down berks moving into the really interesting neighbourhood and after 5 years where it’s become the same Starbucks invested neon jailhouse everywhere else is, they say: Gee what happened! Why’s it so boring all of a sudden.
.
And the lesson that it doesn’t matter where you move to life is still a beige-carpeted series of Kenny G CDs because whereever you go, you’re there.
Oh, thanks Helen – my mistake. Sorry ’bout that.
Note to self: Must go to see the movie version with SWOON Dan Sultan SWOON Ahem before the cinema run is over – sorry – back on topic…
@60, @61 thanks Mercurius and Trotsky for making the thread bearable. Are we that bereft of intellectual fertility that we have to swing Germaine Greer’s public persona around like a bored cat on a flabby bungee cord?
So, has anybody actually read the whole thing, apart from the never-before-seen commenter ‘Endo Mondo’ @ 8? No?
Is the thing even out today? I don’t go into newsagents anymore to buy magazines, so I didn’t check out my local today. Guess this means all the chatterers here are relying on the ‘Independent’ article. Or maybe y’all are people with subscriptions and already have the magazine.
Jesus, people, I know the internet is rotting all our attention spans, and it’s not as if those spans weren’t already full of angry preconcieved notions, but FFS, would it have killed us all to wait a couple of days?
By now there’s no way I’m going to read the whole piece and/or discuss it here. That would look terribly uneducated of me.
No, my name-dropping friend, if you knew me you’d realise how much it takes to get me to make a bolshie non-sequitur argument like what I wrote about Greer’s reactionary attitude towards the icky female impersonators. I’m a distinctly non-half-cocked bloke. If Germ can get someone like me to turn against her, someone who respects the mighty power of the Female Eunuch, having studied it at uni not that long ago, then I shudder to think how many out there (& in here) are defending her all the while quietly wishing she would leave the stage permanently. In a box, if necessary.
Let’s face it, ‘Germaine is a bitch, details available next week in the new Meanjin’ by Brian Castro wouldn’t be provoking this kind of ragegasm pre-cum.
“There have been several occasions in recent years where we have felt that Germaine Greer has lost the social justice plot.” Indeed.
Nabs @3
Which raises the questions:
How many other chihauhaus does Louis Nowra have and what is his naming convention for the rest of them?
The world wants to know.
I returned and saw under the sun that folk despise the Sword ad hominem being uncouth, poor manners et cetera but the Learned Dr Greer is a vigorous Warrior deploying the same Sword; forsooth some who Decry the Weapon decry it only when it is Arrayed against their Friends.
In my time it was decried but also much beloved. The Wealthy had Nasty Salons to savour it within; everyone had Public Hangings to enjoy. Now I see that some folk love to belong with a Boo Hiss Brigade, an Ailment not easily cured by any Physick, and Treatment is rarely Sought by the Sufferer.
I think you can be fairly confident that his next chihuahua pup (female) will be called Germaine. Not that the naming will have anything to do with sleeping (or staying awake all night) with his wife.
@84 – Nickws, surely the whole point is the practice (and ethics) of commissioning a provocative article in order to get people to part with their 8 bucks to read it. Hence the pre-publicity essentially is the media event. After that, it’s just a commercial transaction.
And it’s pretty clear that a piece characterised by vicious personal slurs (and the irony of claiming to know “what makes a woman tick” and presuming some sort of feminist speaking position while dissing Greer in the most hackneyed misogynist terms) whose only intellectual content appears to be an illogical claim that Greer is discredited because what she hoped to see in 1970 hasn’t entirely happened in 2010 (she wasn’t writing futurology or science fiction) is not worth paying 8 bucks for. The better approach – if the best the mag can come up with is some sort of jejeune ‘then and now’ frame – would be to examine the co-optation of some of her themes by consumerist capitalism, and that’s not just a platitude, but something with a delineated and precise history. I can think of a number of women who could have written that sort of piece, or others which would be valuable and interesting.
Let’s wait for what Nabs has to say on the subject, which at least will be witty.
When I first saw the name Louis Nowra I imagined some Aboriginal guy steeped in hundreds of generations among the middens of NSW South Coast. A sort of mate of Bob Maza; a painter, an artist and actor. Instead he is not as he seems. According to wikipedia “He was born as Mark Doyle in Melbourne. He changed his name to Louis Nowra in the early 1970s. He studied at Melbourne’s La Trobe University without earning a degree.:
So this is another aspect of him being a poser. On the other hand Germaine Greer is very much her own woman and an grand example to all of us who followed in her wake.
Started with the “Female Eunuch” when it was first published and have been reading feminist thought and philosophy ever since. Greer is a self publicist and there’s a role for them in any movement especially one from the push with roots in anarchist thought. Read little else of Greer thinking that her book on indigenous “rage” was probably ill informed speculative anthropology by another wind bag expat know it all. However, enjoyed immensely her attack on liberal feminism in “The Whole Woman” which presents a reasoned critical argument. If Nowra’s personal attacks come within pissing distance of this considered piece from 2000 then it will be nothing short of a miracle. It is her stance against liberalism that is the problem for Nowra.
Louis Nowra isn’t Aboriginal? I had no idea.
As for Greer. I don’t agree with everything she says. But I owe her a hell of a lot. The patriarchy in Australia was being a grade A tosser and needed a massive kick in the balls.
Australia would be a hell of a lot poorer if it were not for her.
For those of you who are interested.
Darlinghurst Road, opposite (I think), the Pink Pussy Cat. Victoria street, next to the steps, in what is now a backpacker hostel;; Orwell street, next to the grocery shop that used to put metho in the fridge for homeless men; various parts of Darlinghurst adjacent to the Cross; various places in Surrey Hills and Wooloomooloo. And, not really the Cross, but an easy walk there, various places in Glebe and a short time in Redfern.. I spent nearly 15 years there.(Not counting the two years I spent there just after I was born, which I can’t remember. Loved the place, but when I left in 1975, it was starting to get a bit violent.
“$16 a week for a room in a share house in Egan Street
I think you’ve just named the next Whitlams reunion album, Paul.”
Necromancy and the loss of my eternal soul seems like a small price to pay to see Stevie Plunder and Andy strut their stuff again. tho if stevie launched into one of his marathon request gigs i’d die of exhaustion and be happy to be left in a puddle of my own sweat on the floor of the Sandy Hotel or uni bar of my imagining.
As to Germs, she rocks, i reckon that this stuff from LM will just flow just like water of a ducks back, I don’t know how she processes all the vitriol flung her way, but i wish her all the best and a steady supply of voodoo dolls.
Louis Nowra cannot distinguish a cry of rage from a book of prophesy.
Or perhaps Louis Nowra chooses not to perceive the difference between a cry of rage and a book of prophecy.
Louis Nowra is either deficient in critical skills or he is mendacious.
Nowra’s excellent plays suggest that (barring an early onset of dementia, a disorder he claims to detect in Germaine Greer) mendacity drove his seriously miscued attack on Greer.
Nowra’s mendacity is disappointing. His impotent attack on Greer’s reputation has succeeded only in undermining his own.
I am reminded that when I first read Lousy Nowra’s op-ed on TEH COMMUNISM (see #30) I was so gobsmacked by his characterisation of Frank Hardy’s But The Dead Are Many (Nowra coldn’t even get the title right) that I actually re-read the book to try to find anything in it which lent even a shadow of truth to Nowra’s judgment on it, and finished it convinced that Nowra could not possibly have come to such a conclusion in good faith if he had read the book at all carefully.
Is this weird and wonderful or what?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/05/2837455.htm?section=justin
Seems somehow appropriate on this thread in the absence of any other. Germaine as the Queen of Everything and Nowra as the snake emerging from behind the flowers, or something.
wow, this makes me think that the 50th anniversary is going to be a right nasty affair. I hope Greer is around and fully in command of her considerable mental faculties (I’m not sure how old she is), because it will be an absolute ball to see the small-minded wankers of the Australian arts elite writing their pieces, and having them torn apart by her. If she can be bothered spending her twilight years defending a legacy that is inassailable, that is.
Or maybe on the 50th anniversary the arts elite will quietly ignore it, knowing full well that they’ll never produce anything as worthwhile?
sg – In 2020 she’ll be 81 and I should think Germs will still be around. She’ll certainly be ‘mens sana’ and probably ‘in corpore sano’ if her 1999 nude portrait by Polly Borland is any indication of how well she was holding up at 60. She looked terrific. And having so much fun with it. If you don’t know it, go see at her Wiki bio site, you’ll get to it through the footnotes.
Did someone say that Louis Nowra was only ten years her junior, so already sixty? And his wife? I wonder how well they’d withstand nude photography.
PS to this and a comment I made above, is there a site (even a fun one) anywhere where one can get a forward view of someone’s aging. Retrospective views, I know, are possible for forensic research.
A bit of personal reminiscing here definitely off thread. An artist friend with a good reputation as a portraitist once did a charcoal drawing of me when I was fifty and a school principal. None of us, including him, thought it much of a likeness since since the hair he’d had me pull back and the somewhat thinner face he portrayed had a certain gravitas which just wasn’t me.
As a keepsake of him, since he died too soon after, I’ve kept it, but on the wall behind the door in a back bedroom. Recently visitors have commented on it. What a brilliant likeness etc. etc. The family and I had a second look. True! More than twenty years on, it’s me!
Perhaps I should change my blogging name to Doriana Gray.
And of course by picking up the Sword of <ad feminam Mr Nowra immediately enjoins his Detractors to use it against his own Person.
In my dotage I forgot that.
what a great read it would be if at 81 she is excoriating these johnny-come-latelies (or is that johnnies-come-lately?) and defending her legacy at the same time. That would surely sell more copies of the Monthly…
I’m finding this all very confusing, because Nowra’s plays are anything but stupid, and the description of the article makes it sound extremely stupid indeed. Maybe it got Monthlyised.
<blockquotePaging GregM, paging GregM.
Liam, long ago I had a go at Germaine Greer on the basis of her intellectual worthlessness and mendacity. LP indulged me in letting my condemnation run over into a Saturday Salon page.
But that was all that it was.
If Louis Nowra wants to stick the knife into her on other grounds that I don’t agree with and I don’t think are justified then I will defend her from that attack.
It seems to me that he is having a go at her on the basis of her beliefs and values rather than her scholarly worthlessness and mendacity.
She is entitled to those beliefs and values however much I might not share them.
Therefore I will write to defend her against what I think are unfair things said about her.
The biggest irony for me is that this long, rambling and splenetic essay on a groundbreaking feminist scholar and writer (who has not done anything in particular recently enough to warrant yet another lengthy look at her) from a hostile male playwright (as opposed to, say, a feminist of some sort or another who has been following Greer’s career in some kind of systematic way and has some sort of overview of her significance in Anglophone intellectual life) is the cover story, while the two other essays, both excellent, both by women, also ran.
One of these is a characteristically rational, carefully argued and well-researched piece on the so-called ‘Melbourne Model’ by the admirable Margaret Simons, and the other is a cracking piece of disquieting journalism about the child gangs in Tweed Heads, written by prizewinning fiction writer, anthologist and memoirist Mandy Sayer, who is Nowra’s wife.
Oh, where to begin.
Laura, alas, it’s all his own work, I think. If there was any Monthlyisation, I think it was in the bizarre act of commissioning in the first instance. Certain blokes just go hog-wild doolally at the very mention of Greer’s name and apparently Nowra is one of them.
I’m reminded by the appearance of Laura on this thread, since it was thanks to her that one of these occasions took place at all, that I have heard Greer speak, at length and in person, twice within the last two and a half years. On both occasions she was not only (just for the record) still a physically imposing and attractive figure in her late 60s, but, much more importantly, still a charismatic and electrifying speaker.
She also, on both occasions, had a complex yet clear and coherent case to make. Compare and contrast, etc.
PC, what research did you do in estabishing that Margaret Simons’article was well-researched?
I’ve seen these claims by you before about the “well researched” articles of other people whose opinions you agree with without you putting up any evidence to support your opinion, so this time please put up your evidence.
It is a simple matter of your integrity which I am sure you will have no problem in responding to.
If you have any difficulty in answering I will be glad to raise our previous correspondence on this issue from the netherworld of the internet.
I read Nowra’s article today, despite a reluctance to buy the Monthly – I can’t help but think that doing so only encourages Robert Manne.
I enjoyed it. He’s not totally convincing in the case he makes but he writes engagingly and made me laugh out loud on a couple of occasions. It is a biting critique but no more so than anything that Greer herself has produced on innumerable occasions over the decades. It also puts Kathy Marks’ review in the Independent into perspective. Marks appears to have confined her ‘review’ pretty much to Nowra’s first paragraph and devoted the rest of her piece to a free-wheeling character assessment of Nowra – the motivation for which remains unclear. But it would be interesting to know. What is clear is that Germaine Greer doesn’t need to rely on the Sydney-based stringer for a London daily to defend her honour. She’s more than capable of doing it herself – and no doubt will.
The only time he disparages her looks, by the way, is in the context of her appearance on Celebrity Big Brother where, incongruously, she voluntarily appeared in the garb of an undeniably elderly milkmaid prior to storming off on the premise that she’d discovered the show ‘humiliated’ the participants. As Clive James observed, she was possibly the last person alive to have failed to notice this previously.
But I think Nowra misses the point that it is the tensions in Greer that make her interesting and the things that disappoint him that are the very things that engage the rest of us. And that the Female Eunuch reads like a book written 40 years ago is surely ‘surprising’ only to Nowra and it certainly doesn’t devalue the impact it has had, then or now.
But I agree with him on the hokey, Daisy Bates-meets-Madonna pretension of ‘White Fella Jump Up’ and his critique of “Shakespeare’s Wife” is very funny. Greer will be incandescent of course – but she’s usually at her best in those circumstances.
Oh for crying out loud, GregM, you are being a pompous twerp, not to mention heavily reliant on whatever you learned about debating in high school. It’s a blog conversation, not an A rated refereed journal. Spare me your stern ‘Show Me Teh Proof’ admonitions, which I thought bloggers had grown out of in about 2004. I am quite familiar with what scholarship requires — and also what the difference is between a casual observation and proper research on which something important rests.
Oh, bullshit. As I say, blog conversation, pompous, etc. But I have to give you points for originality: despite my many other faults, I think this is the first time I have ever seen my ‘integrity’ called into question.
However, (1) since you insist, (2) with apologies to everyone else for the tedium and (3) in the order in which evidence appears in the article (with which, incidentally, you wouldn’t have a clue whether I ‘agree’ or not, particularly since Simons is, refreshingly, reporting in detail on a situation rather than stating opinions, so agreement is not even at issue):
Simons has interviewed VC Glyn Davis, has perused his academic publications and his CV. She has checked out the events pertaining to the University Council that led up to his appointment, and looked at the overseas precedents. She has sourced his discussion paper Growing Esteem (2005) and quotes from it. She has interviewed other MU academics about what they thought of that paper, from which she quotes. She has checked out the proceedings of the Curriculum Commission, and reports on them. She has consulted former Arts Deans Stuart Macintyre and Belinda Probert. She has consulted the Bradley review. She has looked at the university’s marketing documents. She has interviewd Chair of the Curriculum Commission and (former?) Provost Peter McPhee. She has interviewed union activist and university librarian Melanie Lazarow, and the current Dean of Law, and the univeristy’s manager of corporate affairs Christina Buckridge. She has checked out what the other universities think and which way they’re likely to jump.
This point is only halfway through picking out the refs from the article, but I really think that’s enough, and my time is precious to me. When I say ‘well-researched’ that is exactly what I mean. I have no intention of providing ‘evidence’ for every adjective in future discussions, and frankly I couldn’t give a rat’s arse whether you believe them or not.
Now perhaps we could get back to the topic of the post.
Much, much more than he deserves.
Indeed, PC. As one of my former lecturers used to say about students who criticised that lecturer in the student newspaper (not that I’m suggesting LP is a student newspaper) I wouldn’t dignify them with a reply.
Re Greer, while I mightn’t agree with her in everything, she’s still one of the great thinkers and critics of the 20th and now 21st century.
Can I please nominate this as the best comment anybody has ever made on the Interwebz?
Although it does shed a new and unsettling light upon the many pets I have met who share a person’s name…
Well said cMercurius @ 111.
Thanks Geoff Honnor @ 107; I too thought “White Fella Jump Up” was impassioned silliness, but a blot doesn’t destroy un oeuvre. Most writers are “uneven”, most readers find.
Mendacity (or taking liberties with self-promotion) was instanced in Christine Wallace’s Greer, untamed shrew 1997, McMillan; but that’s very old ground now.
….Yes Ambi. I would also like to know how many chihuahuas Louis has!
Hey, be kind to chihuhuas. They’re lovely little dogs. Faithful, brave, affectionate and funny.
pics of Loui with chihuahuas http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an21898670
http://www.boudist.com/archive/2009/11/15/griffin-theatre-30th-anniversary.php/louis-nowra-2
Actually, Paul, the part-chihuhua I owned was a fairly nasty-tempered little dog (altho’ much-loved) – perhaps it was the Maltese terrier bit of her.
I should also reminisce that The Female Eunuch burst over Australia like a thunderclap, and the reverberations echoed around the hills for at least 20 years.
It’s heartening that a strong book can have such an impact. Plaudits to Germaine Greer for seizing the moment and having her say.
DI (nr) @ 116,
Undoubtedly the Maltese terrier. With some surprise I saw on TV some time ago that the authorities were thinking of putting them on the dangerous dog list. But then again you can’t always trust everything you see on TV.
Mercurius – What’s all this joking about names? I tried using yours for some silly pome, and out popped this.
You should all be furious
About how we the wives
Feature in the lives
Of many Aussie pollies!
Aren’t any of you curious
To know if we have pined
While out sight and out of mind
As they enjoy their funded jollies.
Don’t you find it spurious
It’s only when they’re in a bind
PROs some way will find
To put us centre stage, like dollies!
Please understand it is injurious
And appallingly unkind
To ask us to forgive and put behind
The shame of all their latest follies.
We live by rules of St. Censurius
Who has us all still ironing shirts
Obliged to go to work in skirts
Not in pants, by all that’s Holy!
That’s it! How come we have forgot the holy writ which caused such wonder!
Oh, how it changed the rhymes that used to sing so loud inside our heads.
Time for revolution once again, women of the right or left, time to leave those fractious feds.
Please forgive us dear Ms Greer, you’re still germane and welcome here – downunder.
Fortunately, Paul, Malties are too small to be truly dangerous.
Patricia WA @ 119: Jiminy cricket and eight hands around, that was just The Awesome!
You’re really on quite a hot streak with the rhymes lately. It’s a blast!!
Having a nom de plume is fine by anyone, but Louis Nowra’s partner outed him a few months ago as having been ashamed of his born “bog Irish” name of Mark Doyle. He clearly feels he can’t stand up in “bohemian” (? surely he means plain old middle-class) society without an affected name. It was a bit rich of him, taking an Indigenous surname. Did he ask permission of the Shoalhaven locals?
Nowra changed his name in the 1970′s, Adam and he doesn’t owe you or anyone else an explanation for having done so. ‘Nowra’ isn’t ‘the’ Aboriginal place name, BTW. As with many other Australian place names, it’s a transliteration of what early Europeans heard Indigenous people saying, in this instance, “Nowa Nowa.” I’m sure that if the Shoalhaven City Council wanted to exert copyright on the use of ‘Nowra’ they would have raised it with him by now.
If you re-read the comments thread – which has possibly set an Australian blogosphere record for the number of vitriolic comments posted about the author of an article than none of the commenters had actually read – you’ll see that it was pointed out, a long way back up, that it was Kathy Marks – not Nowra – who claimed that Nowra affected a ‘studied bohemianism.’ I suspect that Nowra doesn’t agree.
Geoff Honnor, it’s disingenuous of you to bring Shoalhaven City Council into the argument – they have nothing to do with it, obviously. Nowra puts himself out there as a critic on Indigenous issues – and he can change his name back to a non-Indigenous term any time, if he was ignorant back in the 1970s. Appropriating an Indigenous word from the area is, as he well knows, would inevitably be very much bound up with Indigenous ownership of land and culture – they are inextricable. Nowra shouldn’t have taken an Indigenous word of any kind as his name, without a reason. Of course he is free to drop the working-class connations of “Doyle” out of shame – and his present partner would presumably know the background to the name change – she certainly claims to. It may have been a youthful, ignorant mistake – and if that is indeed the case, it would seem likely rather than not, that Nowra, sensitive to class and inclusion, would want to find acceptance among a cultural elite.
“Appropriating an Indigenous word from the area is, as he well knows….”
It’s not an Indigenous word, Adam. It’s the English transliteration of an originally Indigenous word and he needs no-one’s permission to use it.
The ref to Shoalhaven City Council was meant to be humorous. Guess I Should’ve used a smiley…..
I dunno about Doyle being ‘working class.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? I also don’t know whether Nowra is ‘sensitive to class and inclusion’ but more to the point, neither do you.
According to the ever-trusty Wikipedia, Nowra is an Aboriginal word that does not describe a place.
On the contrary, according to Wikipedia, Nowra means “black cockatoo”.
This being the case, it would appear to me that Louis Nowra is no more presumptuously appropriative of an area that may be claimed by Aborigines than were Kylie Minogue’s parents who named their not yet famous moppet after a boomerang.
If I were to say that this comment may “boomerang” on me, would I too be guilty of misappropriation of some vital aspect of Aboriginal identity, like Louis Nowra has been accused of doing in choosing his preferred new surname?
“On the contrary, according to Wikipedia, Nowra means “black cockatoo””
That meaning is correctly rendered as ‘Nowa Nowa’ in my version of Wikipedia, Katz.
But that aside, you’d wonder why the guy didn’t opt for something non-controversial like Bill Bondi, Terry Tamarama or Reg Mombasa.
Here, down the page, is Germaine on Nowra
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/matthew-bell-the-iiosi-diary-070310-1917420.html
Germaine, on Nowra:
Germaine Greer is preparing to take legal action over the spiteful attack on her from fellow Australian writer Louis Nowra, I can reveal. The Cambridge-based professor has refused invitations from several newspapers to respond to his remarks but, speaking exclusively to the diary, says she is consulting lawyers over Nowra’s article, in which he makes damning allegations about her sanity. Writing in the Australian mag The Monthly and in Friday’s Daily Mail, Nowra likened Greer, 71, to a “demented grandmother”, and described her as “a befuddled and exhausted old woman”.
“I’m talking to lawyers about his use of the word ‘demented’,” Greer tells me from her Essex home. “If he used it about me then it’s actionable.” Nowra’s article has been published ahead of the 40th anniversary of Greer’s influential book, The Female Eunuch, and says Greer fundamentally misunderstood how women tick, and that she has been disappointed by the behaviour of post-feminist women. Greer is almost speechless at the idea she could be so self-important: “Who do I think I am to say I’m disappointed in women?”
Now I got this from Matthew Bell: The IoS Diary (07/03/10) at the Independent but LP does not like my link and eats it.
Demented is such a terrible insult. Yeah.
The sole reference to ‘demented’ in the article is in the opening para which reads, in part:
‘The image has seared itself into my memory. Taken about five years ago, it is a newspaper photograph of Germaine Greer appearing on the UK’s “Celebrity Big Brother.” Snapped on the set, she looks like a befuddled and exhausted old woman. She reminded me of my demented grandmother who, towards the end of her life, was often in a similarly unruly state.’
I guess highly-paid QC’s will be only too happy to argue about whether that’s a ‘damning allegation about her sanity’ or just a decidedly ungallant, definitely biting but nonetheless, ‘fair criticism’ recounting, of how she appeared to Nowra during her memorable gig on ‘Celebrity Big Brother.’
The Independent’s stake in all of this becomes more interesting by the moment.
“I dunno about Doyle being ‘working class.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? I also don’t know whether Nowra is ’sensitive to class and inclusion’ but more to the point, neither do you.”
Honnor, It was his partner who said (publicly) that he had changed his name out of shame about it being a bog Irish name. I don’t think she realised his old name is on Wikipedia. I will try to locate the conversation!
Why do I have this mental tableau of Louis and the boys at The Monthly, sniggering together, pouring over his article, like so many 13 year olds smearing dog shit on the bonnet of a teacher’s car?
Greer was so right on Q&A when she said that the press reserves the disgraceful treatment that it used to mete out to Indigenous people, for older women.
Well, I very carefully didn’t comment till I’d read it.
Now here’s a little exercise for us all to do. Picture the most unflattering photograph of you that has ever been taken (that you know of), and then ask yourself how you’d feel about a cruelly mocking description of it being used as the opening image in a thousands-of-words-long essay about you in a national magazine, and then related to an unhappy memory of the writer’s grandma. Cue the phrase ‘old woman’ as, of course, an insult.
Would you call this honourable behaviour, good journalism, fair comment, honest, or logical?
Can’t imagine, Bernice. Yer dreamin.
Now here’s a little exercise for us all to do. Picture the most unflattering photograph of you that has ever been taken (that you know of), and then ask yourself how you’d feel about a cruelly mocking description of it being used as the opening image in a thousands-of-words-long essay about you in a national magazine, and then related to an unhappy memory of the writer’s grandma. Cue the phrase ‘old woman’ as, of course, an insult.
And picture, also, yourself as the grandmother, and imagine you have a kind of onmiscience which allows you to know that your grandson will, someday, write something like that about you in a national magazine.
Stay classy, Louis.
Happy International Womens day to all of you.
As Bernice and others have suggested, the blame doesn’t rest solely with Nowra. When as an editor you commission a piece from a particular person, a lot goes into thinking about what that person might say about that subject, before you even pick up the phone or sit down to email. And being an editor is like being a psychotherapist: you elicit from the subject some things that otherwise might never have been said, and might have been better left unsaid. I found myself caught up in a discussion of this on FB yesterday, and don’t usually recycle, but this is part of what I said:
I’ve had professional dealings with the two former editors and I think that both Christian Ryan and Sally Warhaft would have scorned to commission such a piece, much less run it.
The thing is also that Nowra’s article gives other peurile journalists an excuse to fill up blank pages with cheap shots and half-baked humour at Greer’s expense. Someone called Rick Fenenely concludes an article in the SMH with this observation:
“Perhaps Nowra’s cheapest shot is likening Greer, a ”befuddled and exhausted old woman”, to ”my demented grandmother”. If the dead could sue, his granny surely would.”
This might be a bit of a stretch, but as a thinker whose works challenged and changed society I think she’s up there with Marx and Adam Smith. Both of them have enraged people too. So I guess she hit some very sensitive buttons. (OMG, the pun was unintentional, really, but I’ll leave it.) It comes with the territory when you produce a book that not only challenges but changes the dominant paradigm. I guess some men still feel threatened by her ideas, and perhaps by Greer herself, but much of the world still feels threatened by Marxist ideas too,or is angered by the popular interpretation of Adam Smith as a proponent of classic capitalism. (I’m not sure he was such a proponent, but I’ve been struggling through Wealth of Nations for over two years now. (I go back to it when I’ve got nothing else to read. Might let youse know what I think when I eventually finish it.Have the same problem with Das Kapital, but I gave up on it. Greer’s Female Eunuch though, I got through in two sittings. When it comes to readability she beats the others hands down.)
Pavolov’s Cat: my teenage daughter recieved a sub to The Monthly at last chistmas. We’ve had several long discussions on Nowra’s article this week. There will be no resubscription. Cheap shot turns expensive for The Monthly is my guess.
Greer rises above it all at The National Times.
AN @ 140: ditto. I just got my resubscription notice.
Not planning to pay for any of Mark Doyle’s future articles.
Anthony Nolan, just to say you rawk. Not many dads I know would have long discussions with their teenage daughter on a controversial magazine piece on a prominent feminist, except maybe to join in the slagfest. (Not to say those dads are not out there, it’s prolly just the circles I move in…)
Good to see people picking up on Mark Doyle’s name change to Norwa. I don’t care if it is a mistaken version of the place Nowa Nowa or meaning black cockatoo. Or if the name Kylie means boomerang and has been appropriated by parents for their children. I mayself clung to my married Fijian surname Tulega long after I seperated from the man. Caroline Ifeka kept her Nigerian surname despite breaking with her husband.
But for Mark Doyle to change his surname to Nowra was off a different order to this. I was a poser trying to appropriate a different identity with out any justifiable reason.
Onya anthony nolan@140.
Raising a glass to you on International Womens Day 2010.
And farting in the general direction of Louis Nowra (whose one book from my library has now been ceremoniously deposited in the garbage bin), and The Monthly magazine (sales now tanking in my neighbourhood).
Thanks for the cheers Helen and Grace Pettigrew. There outta be a club for the ‘kids of ex-commos’ because most of them are steeped in non-conformism. They usually fall on each other with great relief when they locate a peer raised by rads.
Gumm: that link to Greer says it all.
tw: Helen Razer strikes the right note in reply also reproduced at Crikey.
She sure does! Good to see such accurately directed anger.
Mark Doyle should have image-googled himself before he pressed “send”.
Bit of a slap to Doyle’s Irish heritage, ain’t it. As an Aussie of part Irish heritage that offends me too. What’s he got to be ashamed of.
I agree. How dare Nowra slam germs!
The Femalle Eunuch was groundbreaking, but so were her appearances on Big Brother, her opinions on Steve Irwin, her “croning” and, well, another week, another big earth-shaking idea from Germs.
Sheesh. As an intellectual, she’s the equal of, well, I dunno … Clive Hamilton!
There, now that’s an achievement.
Hear, hear! Louis Nowra’s article is pathetic. But it is not the first time he has revealed himself as sexist in print. Read this article about his thoughts on the capabilities of women writers:
http://theember.com.au/?p=165
There are hints in Nowra’s story of a violent and conflictual relationship with his father.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that his shedding of Doyle entailed shedding these unhappy connections.
The township of Nowra is more or less equidistant between Melbourne, where he grew up and Sydney, where he now resides.
If he had in mind the Hume Highway instead of the Prince’s Highway, he might have called himself Louis Tarcutta instead.
Pru Goward on TFE:
I wondered aloud if she’d ever read it.
without comment about the content of the blog there is a photograph of Bunny Nowra availabe here. What a mug.
Liam @ 152,
Don’t think Prue has read Greer’s book on birth control. (I think it might have been called Sex and Destiny.) Apart from being brilliant it dealt with birth control, women and Hinduism specifically and at length. Can’t recall if she discussed China, but I’m pretty sure see wrote at length about some Communist countries as well. Its been a long while since I read it.
Kylies are clap sticks,not a boomerang and in Scotland are a breed of long haired cow…
I haven’t read an entire blog comment thread in a long time. That was hugely entertaining, everyone above.
I think my subscription expired last month. I’ll be *borrowing* a copy to read this thing.
Katz@ 151
“The township of Nowra is more or less equidistant between Melbourne, where he grew up and Sydney, where he now resides.”
Not quite equidistant. 161km by road from Sydney and 800 or so by road from Melbourne … so bang goes that excuse!
Snap on the location of Nowra, AT.
On that basis Nowra could have called himself Bowral.
Mungo, according to this, a kylie isn’t a clap stick but a non-returning (i.e., hunting) boomerang.
I believe that the first white Kylie in Australia was Kylie Tennant (born 1912) and that her name inspired a few directly and legions indirectly.
Helen Razer was great. So much swearing in one fucking article.
“Long-haired cow” was uncalled for too, Mungo. You shouldn’t talk about Our Kylie like that;)
Kaz, thats known as a stick ,according to F.T, Gumanjia from the Warlpiri mob (can’t mention his name, but he was around in the early 70,s)
I wonder whether Mark Doyle was inspired by Mudrooroo …
D.I (no relation), any similarity is purely coincidental.
AdamTucker: “…so bang goes that excuse!”
It would appear from the above that people who wish to change their names now require a valid ‘excuse’ — and that an excuse which is found to be invalid (by whom? by AdamTucker?) shall forthwith be held against them, should they ever happen to write something which other people don’t terribly like. All applicants for “legitimate” name-changes (looking at YOU, Brian O’Nolan!) should perhaps confer en avance with the author of # 159 to be sure their personal choices do not conflict with approved opinion.
Also: what, precisely, does “bog Irish” mean?
btw, “demented” can have the clinical (if abbreviated) meaning of “suffering from dementia”. In probabalistic terms, “my demented History teacher” is more likely to mean (metaphorically) “my extravagantly unreasonable History teacher,” whereas “my demented grandmother” is more likely to mean (clinically) “my grandmother, an elderly lady who suffered from dementia associated with aging”. Whether such a reading is actionable or not, I defer to any and all Amazing Masters of Libel Law.
Well I didn’t buy it. But I borrowed it. I’m with everyone else. Why keep the young fella there any longer than necessary? And what an embarrassing piece it is. Naperstek, all 24 years of him, may well look back and wince in the knowledge that he thought such a bitchy piece of jealousy and uncritical projection of one’s own unresolved past could pass as critique of a recognised seminal text at the moment of it’s 40th anniversary. What follows is far too long, and I apologise and ask those not interested to leave right here. But for those who did not read it, and do not want to, there are factual quotes lifted from the essay here and these should be considered in context of the dubious claim that this is in fact a critique of TFU. It’s not.
What is Nowra’s problem one might ask, when he starts off with that description of Greer which reminds him of his ‘demented grandmother’? His own troubled and troubling mother, I would posit and the monstrous feminine as projected onto Germaine Greer I would bet.
Here is a background on Louis Nowra. Looking at David McCooey’s review of Nowra’s memoir The 12th of Never at
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/April00/mcc.html
Here McCooey notes Nowra renders his mother as ” An intelligent, almost pathologically angry woman” and himself, as a subject that is utterly conventional.
What is also interesting is, by his own accounts, that two of his mother’s husbands ( his father one of them) were violent. His own father threatened to kill him. She was married three times.
Why a bio-criticism, given my particular hesitations in doing this? Because frankly, his piece on Greer, which depicts her as an unbalanced harpy is so relentless, that it deserves being read in light of these facts which he himself has provided and which other respected critics have commented upon and most compellingly, because, in The Monthly he raises up “his mother” as the main reason he read TFU in the first place.
In The Monthly, Nowra says that she was “An intelligent woman, she felt frustrated at living on a Housing Commission Estate and her dissatisfaction showed itself in her volatile emotional states…I knew she should never married and had children…I hoped that feminism would change the world enough to enable women to find satisfaction in careers rather than marriage and childbearing”.
From there he conflates feminism and Greer’s book as one the monumental failure which did not in fact change his mother’s choices. As we know, by his own accounts, she married three times, she killed her own father in rage over a racist comment he made about her still born twins from her first husband, an Indonesian. Then she proceeded to marry two other violent men. He was called to give testimony at the trial of the the third. How all this is feminism’s fault and Germaine Greer’s fault and TFU’s failure and how this has nothing to do with the patriarchy’s deformation of women is beyond me. Indeed through much of the essay Greer is raised up as the monstrous feminine beginning with the ‘demented grandmother’ image of the opening paragraph. I suppose it strange coincidence that Nowra’s own grandmothers both were institutionalized? Consider the many times the word ‘mother’ is raised in the essay and it is raised repeatedly. His mother her mother the image of the mother. Greer is particularly castigated for her criticisms of her own mother as “a narcissistic despot who used language as a weapon rather than a tool of communication” “her constant criticism and withering sarcasm towards her mother” and how “the demon figure of the mother in a sense encapsulates Greer’s view of womanhood”. Well, with this obsessive return to the mother, what projection of Nowra’s is at play here? And in this respect, I might ask, what does this have to do with TFU and it’s impact on the world 40 years after it’s advent? Consider the descriptives he uses through the piece to describe Greer: overbearing, propensity to make outrageous statements, braggart, bizarre, gibberish, hyperbolic, dull graceless prose, withering sarcasm, angry, unforgiving nature, fury, anger, shrill, silly, incoherent, will do anything to get noticed even if this means whingeing and moaning …, dreary, soporific, contradictory, coarse. I suppose eventually he had to run out of them and return to fury and rage, adding along the way – violent and impulsive tendencies even!!! Empty theatrical gestures, abrasive, irrelevant. Indeed, ‘as she has grown older’, he says, ‘her writing becomes increasingly daft ‘. And without ANY sense of irony, he chooses to finish his essay with a flourish and final swipe calling her ‘grotesque’. Well yes indeed. But of whom do we speak really, one might ask?
The essay itself is schizophrenic. First he says TFU and feminism (not sure which as he conflates) is a failure, it was naïve, it did not defeat capitalism. Then he says how well women have done in the western world. He gives us figures. Well that’s in fact not correct, as many have noted. Women are under-represented everywhere and still not paid in commensurate figures to men. But Nowra’s not particularly interested in being coherent himself. Either feminism worked or it didn’t right? Germaine galvanized a generation or she did not right???? As others have noted the figures he quotes are obscure. Are we looking at America? Or Australia? What figures are these? Why does he not admit what everyone knows? Feminism both succeeded and failed. The picture is a far more complex one that he allows here because he is too busy slamming it for being a product of it’s time and therefore irrelevent.
I also note that for an essay supposedly talking about TFU 40 years on, he spends half of it raving about the supposed failures of her other books and essays. For The Boy he notes she was a 64 year old writing about the allure of young men. Well one might ask, who BETTER to write about the allure of young men that Germaine Greer?? Not misogynist and ageist much. Oh and this: “In TFU” he says Greer’s view of womanhood is deeply pessimistic. .. “women are insecure; women suppress all aspects of their vigour; women feel rejected without male attention..blah frakkin blah” But take a look at his view of young women at the Cross “girls who go to nightclubs and bars flounce (??!!!) around in short skirts…at the end of the evening- like the boys, they swear, vomit, if in a foul drunken mood, they even fight. They are free to be as violent and laddish as the men” Well FFS someone might tell Nowra that equality isn’t perfect in his sexist moral universe Or they might even point out to him, if they can get him to stop jealously raving about the imperfections of TFU (oh and he doesn’t much wish HE could change the world by writing a text in 3 months like she did) that his view of womanhood is the most deeply pessimistic I have read in a while…
There is enough wrong with this essay, to write another essay. I didn’t even get onto the Aboriginal stuff. In that regard, Louis Nowra might do well to read this
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no2_2008/atkinsonwoods_turning.pdf
As for the rest, and there is a lot of it, everyone else has dealt with the other aspects of this disturbing rant.
And what is with finding the most unattractive photo of Greer they could find, which has the reader looking up into her nostrils and the following harshly lit lines of her face and plastering that on the front page?
Yes, well you need to read ‘demented’ in context of the 25 million other descriptors he uses in the essay. Is that you Japerz? Regarding Bog Irish, google is your blah blah blah. Now, could you read MY list and then provide alternate meanings for all of them too?
And in my own seminal essay above, TFU should read TFE, sorry.
Great stuff, Casey!
That’s to balance out the graphics on the inside, in which eight, count ‘em, eight different women, including the young Greer herself, appear (suggestively) semi-naked or (suggestively) dripping wet.
The only other images of women in the issue are of Cate Blanchett in the hideous nanna-blanket dress, an actor playing Elizabeth I, three women apart from Blanchett in an article allegedly about ‘Australian style’ (two of whom are Katharine Hepburn and Lady Diana Spencer as was; go figure), and … Dame Edna Everage.
Note by contrast the assorted pix of Very Important Men — politicians, academics and scientists — all fully clad and pictured in poses indicating that they are thinking deeply.
Hey Casey, don’t “tl;dr” yourself like that, I want the book version!
Sluggo @166 – you’ll have to ask Mark Doyle’s partner Mandy Sayer, rather than me, just what she meant by describing his origins as bog Irish – but I don’t seriously think you need to ask.
No, I’m not proposing that permission is needed to change one’s name. I think most Australians would concur that it is rude and insensitive to appropriate an Indigenous place name as one’s moniker without consulting with the traditional owners – regardless of whether the word is technically the official place name.
Thank you. But there is more.
Consider for a moment his depiction of his poor working class aunt and her working class working compatriots who sweated at tables with Oliver Twist in a spinning yarn factory or something and how, he says, TFE would be not be read by them. Would forever remain inaccessible to them because of it’s Nietzchean quotes. Failed them because Greer did not consider them,when all they wanted to do was wear lipstick as a relief, nor did she consider domestic violence (and Im not sure what this has to do with sweaty factories but there you go). So TFE was too middle class for the working class. An anecdote: My mother worked in a sweating factory too and she never read it either. But what she did was make sure her daughter got all educated and well, she read it. She’s ranting on a blog right now about it, in fact. Which was one of the points of the text – education for women – as even Nowra himself notes. And then, come on, the book drew attention to the inequality of women and the feminist movement it signposted. And that feminist movement wrought such momentous changes that every woman who lived in the West, whether they read TFE or not, was affected. They were. As Overington(???!!!) said: Watch Mad Men if you want to get a grip on how things have changed. And well really, and as Bolt said “I’m on Greer’s side this time”.???!!!
And I like how he ends the tale of his working class aunt by conflating her experience with his by saying “Greer’s’ overbearing personality and propensity to make outrageous statements made her even more remote from my world”. Sorry? His world? When was he a woman sweating in a factory wearing lipstick? He was a 20 year old MAN from the working class going to uni at that stage right? And IMO, it’s a bit rich accusing TFE of being middle class when he dropped Mark Doyle cause of its working class associations and became Louis Nowra and lived in the Cross watching girls flounce and he lived happily ever after off the proceeds of plays that only middle class audiences would ever see.
I’m in my late 30′s and my wife and I have watched a few episodes of Mad Men with our jaws hanging open. It’s true that the past is a foreign country, but to think of my grandmother living in that reality freaks me out!
Thank you for the dissection Casey. Spot on about Nowra’s projection of clearly unresolved issues about the women of his own family onto Greer. I was astonished at the way he identified his DV background as of any significance to the subject of Greer’s career and then didn’t develop the only relevant point which would have been that routine and severe DV was the common lot of many women (still is, of course) at the time that TFE was published. With apologies to LP readers who detest psychologising: in the light of your reading of his essay and the links you provided it now reads to me that Nowra’s mother was a classical borderline PD hence the rage, the amazing intelligence and frustration behind it, the multiple marriages and the choice of serial abusive partners. Nowra could have avoided this public embarrassment if he’d attempted therapy prior to hitting the keyboard. It really now reads like a public airing of his own soiled consciousness.
Let me just say that I have really enjoyed many of Nowra’s plays; I think The Golden Age and Cosi in particular are fabulous and rich.
I also think that sledging Nowra about his adopted name is an ad hom which is beneath LP’s dignity, and I really don’t see what it has to do with anything much. He has never pretended to be Indigenous, and those of you who think the name means he has are only showing your own ignorance.
I’m not defending him, and don’t get me started on what The Monthly has turned into under Naparstek. But I don’t like to see people on here playing the man – neither a good look nor a tactically sound decision.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Mad Men is a text very much of the present – don’t let its aura of reality fool you into thinking it’s an accurate picture of ‘the past’
Bog Irish: An English Protestant slur on Irish Catholics, who farmed pigs and used to let said pigs wallow in bogs, of which there are a lot in Ireland. :)
Ya see that? All I had to do was change the damn spelling a little, and then I didn’t have to spend my entire childhood getting my arse walloped by violent stupid knuckleheads — unlike my dopey cousin Sue.
Oh, fuck, I just realized — do ya think maybe now I owe a ton of royalties to the Lakota?
As a 57 Y/O carbon based biped, my take on TFU when it first came out was that both genders needed to look at themselves in a critical way and break away from the old thought, and in doing so, reboot (to usual a common phrase)the individual and group viewpoints of the role we all play in culture and society. It was valid then and is still valid for me today – if mr Cowra has a different viewpoint he is entitled to it, that’s his problem – but he shouldn’t shoot the messager.
Anthony Nolan, about that psychologizing, I tend the think the reverse – women full of incoherent fury and unspoken protest against a stultifying life hence the inevitable labling as psychologically unhinged(I don’t think it is a coincidence that the heyday of the lobotomy was in the immediate postwar period when women were forced back into domesticity). If you had the leisure time and a gift for passive protest you could take to your bed, turn your face to the wall, lapse into silence, but mostly it was rage. A ‘demented old woman’ multiplied by thousands, until there was Germaine.
Geoff Honor reminded me of my demented border-collie cross who, towards the end of his life, would often crap uncontrollably on the carpet before half-heartedly licking his own testicles.
Laura @175: the little I have seen of Mad Men seemed an accurate depiction of my past, but maybe the very small part I saw was not representative of the whole series.
Sum total I gained from reading these comments.
You guys are all warming the earth here, you realise?
@184, anthony, waaaaaay out of line. You get a conceded pass in view of the lateness of the hour, but only barely.
Geoff’s contribution to this thread has been well-informed, engaging and civil. He doesn’t deserve what you dished out. Let us charitably assume you were engaging in some arch ironic demonstration of reflectivity with pyke (degree of difficulty 3.0, and you didn’t pull it off), and leave it at that, OK?
Play nice.
Of course that’s what Nowra meant, j_p_z.
So what? When you’ve likened the appearance or behaviour of someone who doesn’t suffer from dementia, with that of someone who does, you’ve instantly and intentionally drawn in the disparaging non-clinical meaning.
I still find it odd (read juvenile, postively banal, intellectually regressive, unreconstructedly delusional, etc) that Nowra would attempt to compare critically a tabloid snapshot of a woman 10 years older than himself, with childhood/formative memories of a “demented grandmother”.
anthony, you mentioned “clearly unresolved issues”. I can’t help suspecting much of Nowra’s thought became all-too resolved years ago. It one thing to seek to dramatise and exercise your personal experiences of violence and madness in the form of plays, but quite another to transparently rehash and milk what have become your own well-rehearsed, oft-repeated autobiographical talking points in the guise of critiquing the life and writings of another author.
Nick @188: I’m not persuaded your point stands in the face of the thought of poetic figuration (to put a much-too-polite face on an otherwise somewhat sour thing), but it’d be pretty tedious for me to try and argue why. Meantime I can agree that the remark is, shall we say, a bit lacking in the chivalry department; worse though, it’s not particularly witty, telling, or memorable.
And therein may lie a crux. While I can understand and applaud Greer’s many fans here for rallying to her defense, still I confess I’ll be a trifle let down if the Grande Dame herself decides to just get all lawyer-y about the whole thing. Surely it would be more fun to fire back lustily with a withering fusillade of one’s own?
I’m no student of Greer’s work, but I get the impression that she’s clever and outspoken and quick-witted, and can, I presume, handle herself ably in a war of words. Surely in the pre-blogospheric mists of time, one of the great pleasures of being a public intellectual was the license to conduct weird, funny verbal duels in the pages of the TLS and the NYRB and the Voice and other such toney jernts. It used to be something of a hard-earned privilege to have a key to the literary gunpowder storeroom (nowadays blog-squawking makes it all so much less aristocratic). I’m hoping Greer will load up her own guns with some chain-shot and let fly. Much more entertaining, and much more belles-lettres-sans-merci, than the legal route.
What the divil do they think we’re paying for, anyway?
japers, Greer has already sent a shot across Nowra’s bows, as linked to by Gummo Trotsky way back at #141.
She has played the ball rather than the man by responding to the claims that feminism hasn’t changed women wanting to shop and that women today disappoint her by showing how that is patently untrue.
She doesn’t even mention the Kings X bohemian’s name, which I think is a wonderfully effective gesture of well-deserved contempt.
And you have to laugh at Planet Janet taking her turn at meanly sneering at Greer today in The Australian. She goes to some length describing how Greer cold-shouldered her and then dissed her crap newspaper in the Green Room before the ABC Q&A panel where they appeared together.
My recollection was that Greer completely ignored Planet, while Planet simpered and smiled her way through the entire Q&A session, agreeing with everyone, and without once engaging Greer for fear that she would get wiped off the stage with one clever backhand.
And now, from a safe distance in time, crouched inside the shelter of her newspaper, and peeping out from behind Nowra’s skirts, Planet now delivers her mean little diatribe. What a poor cowardly cat she is.
My new theory, Grace, after reading that predictable tosh this morning, is that the Oz has a Janetbot programmed to churn out whatever the real Janet would say on any given subject. Like solar heating, it would cost a lot initially but would pay for itself after a while.
One certain thing is that Albrechtsen took more notice of Greer in the green room than Greer took of Albrechtsen.
Thus:
Turning invisible, are we, Janet?
Katz and PC: giggle, and I also recall (since according to Nowra appearances count) how Planet was polished and groomed like a black leather-clad blonde-bouffant Barbie Doll, barely moving her face in case it cracked, while Greer was her usual wild and woolly self, in soft warm grey, throwing her arms around in big extravagant gestures and laughing her head off.
Who was the most beautiful? No contest.
Actually, I can’t clearly remember what Planet was wearing that night, but you get the picture…
It confirmed my opinion that the more these people see the light of day the better. When they can’t hide behind a carefully photoshopped newspaper image, their true character is revealed for all to see.
Speaking of which, the Devine Miranda is to appear on Q&A next week.
Grace, here you go: plunging-neckline black and a weird S&M-looking choker.
Haha thanks PC! I got the black leather look right, but the blonde hair was tightly slicked down, rather than puffed up. And I thought she had ditched the dog collar. Weird and sorry message she’s sending out, isnt it.
Na, its all about right wing dominance. :)
Or she might be hiding a goitre, poor thing.
I’ve only just read the Nowra article (seems The Monthly always holds its library subscription copies back – to increase sales? other magazines don’t do it) and the most offensive line to me was the last: “She has become a grotesque character called Germaine Greer”
I’ve never read a Greer book all the way through, just bits, and I doubt she ever thinks she’s written the book that changed the world. Her books and her public remarks go together – and she might be remembered mainly as a character. A ‘public intellectual’ who is always worth listening to, whether you agree or disagree with her. The public success of her books is partly because they say the right thing, at the right time, in the right way to be successful.
Apart from mentioning his mother there’s another thing in the article that gave me pause: “And as for gays, Greer constantly jars by calling them faggots and making her dislike of them obvious”. Has anyone else here read The Twelfth of Never?
I hope I haven’t mis-remembered this, but in that memoir Nowra portrays himself as a boy growing into a young man who loves other men. I’m just wondering if some homophobic remark of Greer’s, at the time, struck a particular chord with the young, unforgiving, Nowra.
Albrechtsen’s fixation on Greer’s physical appearance is particularly unpalatable.
She is an inveterate propagandist for the beauty myth, an ideology that necessarily marginalises a large percentage of women.
Albrechtsen also mischaracterises Greer’s attitude to sex. Greer is quoted as swearing of it at age 40.
This is twisted into:
Incorrect.
Greer has never demanded that others adopt her personal choice in these matters.
However, if Albrechtsen’s enjoyment of sex is diminished by Greer’s preference, perhaps she should seek professional help.
Frigidity by proxy sounds like a particularly tenacious condition likely to be alleviated only by lengthy and expensive psycho-analysis.
Grace and Pavlov’s Cat – Can I join the chorus of miaows here? I particularly remember that collar around her neck, the sort of thing she often affects, because I momentarily wondered about it. Was she hiding unsightly wrinkles? Or scars from some botched face lift? Anyway, that with her styled hair and upswept rimmed glasses made her look not intelligently chic, as I imagine she saw herself, but dolly-bird artificial and primped. Particularly in contrast with Germaine who looked her usual comfortable self with no need of war paint and body armour.
Who received the warmest welcome and applause from that Qanda audience as she spoke her mind with such forthright common sense? Time to purr now….
Interesting how Germaine has grown old, not at all disgracefully as one might have anticipated and forgiven, or some of us applauded. She has a certain inner serenity, I feel, which comes from living life on her own terms. That along with her willingness to speak out on issues in a way which is always life affirming and sane makes her a truly formidable woman.
‘Formidable’ in the French sense of course. Some synonyms for ‘formidable’ are ‘imposant stupéfiant, colossal, considérable, extraordinaire, étonnant, redoutable, épouvantable, redouté sensationnel, épatant’ No need to translate, is there?
And not a touch of the dreaded Botox to be seen.
PS – All I was trying to say was “La Greer? Formidable!”
My French dictionary is out and dusted down because it occurred to me that Abbott’s claim to the “leader’s call” had a sort of ‘droit de seigneur” ring to it.
“Sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,” Mr Abbott told colleagues. Doesn’t that tell us something about the way this man lives his personal life? Is that how he’d behave if he ever achieved government?
Various @ 197 – 199, to quote Iggy Pop, “Let me be your dawg!”
PatriciaWA and DI(NR): chuckle, snort.
Janet’s dog collar has got to be the fashion gaucherie of the decade. Did someone mention mutton and lamb?
How very sad for Germs – and what a victory for Mark Doyle – that a thread on The Female Eunuch trails off with confused and vulgar bitching about another woman’s sense of fashion style, and a comment about mutton dressed as lamb.
AdamTucker@208: “vulgar bitching” from LP and not from Nowra or Albrechtsen? Now that takes the cake, LOL.
It seems to me Adam has a fair point. It should surely be obvious that snark about Albrechtsen’s dress sense and appearance is both gendered and unnecessary.
Indeed Mark, but then many women upthread felt it necessary to defend GG’s physical attractiveness today. Way to miss the whole point.
Mark@210: if I had any idea about Nowra’s dress sense, then I would happily be less gendered in snark, mark, but he has not appeared on Qanda yet…The deep psychoanalysing about personal histories and motives I leave for others above.
I agree with Mark, and I’m glad he said it.
Yeah, you’re right Mark.
Thanks, Laura, and adrian.
In any case, it seems to me that this thread is in danger of straying off topic.
I agree with Mark too, but the thread was always in danger of veering off into ad hom directed at Messrs Nowra, Naparstek or Dr Manne. (Or indeed ad fem directed at Dr Greer).
Planet Janet’s take on the unwitnessed behind-the-scenes encounter at the ABC with Greer was interesting and may not have been wholly invented.
I’ve twice in the last year or so been on a plane travelling between Sydney and Coolangatta (Qld-NSW border) in which Ms Greer was also a passenger on the way to her “bit of rainforest” home abutting the Border Rangers National Park.
Despite a strong urge to approach her and offer homage, she encased herself within a cocoon understandable to me that went so far as pretending to be deaf and half daft so as to avoid eye contact or verbal interchange with anyone else before, during and exiting the flight. And yes I do think I saw her lips move more than once as she pondered whatever it was that she was mentally concentrating on sans book or e-gadget or the need for small talk.
Indeed Mark, but then many women upthread felt it necessary to defend GG’s physical attractiveness today. Way to miss the whole point.
No, you are missing the point. It’s not a matter of physical attractiveness but the fact that a depiction of a normal (not botoxed) 70 year old should not be seen as some kind of abomination or freak show. It’s feckin’ normality (Louis Nowra please note.) It’s also a matter of every prominent female figure being assessed on their fuckability or lack of, while prominent male figures are not so judged (Unless, like Tones, who wander around semi-nude for the camera and talk obsessively about sex, but the’re relatively rare…) And yes, it’s totally out of line to turn the same sexist bullshit onto Planet, Palin or any other woman you happen to dislike, however reasonably.
Grammar fail in the last comment. I blame sleep deprivation. Off to bed I go :-)
Helen, yes I agree with those points.
But still the perceived need to refer favourably or not to an important intellectual woman’s (or man’s for that’s matter) physical attributes, age, etc, in defense of their ideas, which are fundamental and primary in a way the former is not, seems to me a defeat in this case for feminism willingly if not wholeheartedly embraced and exemplified, like it or not by many of the comments by supportive women in the thread above.
Come off it, Mark, et tu Ambigulous! The so called snark about Albrechtson was minimal, mild and entirely deserved. Had she written a more researched and considered piece like that of her colleague Caroline Overington she would have escaped unscathed from the kitten claws of Grace, Pavlov’s Cat and myself, not to mention DUI (nr) – all generally renowned for our friendly, fair and objective comments.
Her article today, however, gave tacit tacit support to Nowra’s vicious piece, and was basically a self centred tirade against a woman to whom she owes more than she could ever know. I can imagine that encounter she describes in the Green Room with her self-important approach to GG who, JA’s style, m.o. and dress aside, would know of her column in the Australian. Vanessa is spot on with her depiction of GG as an international celebrity who has developed her grumpy old woman air as a defence against intrusion by friends and foes alike as she travels the world. My recollection of ABC pre-program hospitality suggests she might also have been hungry for something decent to eat and drink and probably jet lagged too.
Albrechtson’s dog collar would have invited some curious comment from me quite apart from her gratuitous insulting of Greer an eminent writer who deserves respect. Her attack seems driven simply by envy and Greer’s slighting of her amour-propre. After reading Casey’s brilliant take on Nowra I find his onslaught more understandable and in some weird way almost excusable. He too, it seems, is a damaged product of the patriarchy, as was his apparently appalling mother.
Forgive me if I can’t see the connection between Albrechtsen’s dress sense or appearance generally (“mutton”, “lamb”) and what she writes in the paper as being relevant. I’d reiterate the point I made before about the gendered nature of these slurs, and it hardly seems to me that reproducing Nowra’s practice is an effective rebuttal of his motives.
There seems to be an increasing tendency around here to prefer personal denigration to engaging with arguments. I’d suggest that careful note be taken of the comments policy.
Please note.
PatriciaWA@221: well said, and is it not interesting how a mildly snarky (but deliberately provocative a la Greer) after hours chat between two older women (and one older bloke) was rounded up, and dumped on by two younger blokes?
I must say I am surprised that the “mutton/lamb” line is considered so “vicious” and “bitchy” by younger men. My goodness, you guys ought to get out more.
I will make one final comment on the subject of appearances, which was where this thread began, at least for me.
Alongside Planet’s article in The Australian yesterday was a large cartoon by Eric Lobbecke, which online viewers might not have seen.
The cartoon is of an old woman’s twisted and screwed up face. It looks remotely like Germaine, perhaps around the mouth, with the age lines, but the hair is very definitely not Germaine’s.
It is long, wavy and blonde, just like Albrechtsen’s.
Well, I think Tony Abbott is mutton dressed as lamb. I don’t make gender discriminations there at all.
Grace and Patricia, although my contribution was minimal and although being called ‘confused’ by Adam Tucker is more entertaining than otherwise, I’m not super thrilled about being ticked off about ‘gendered’ badness either. But alas, as far as the whole ‘no conflating women’s appearance with their horrible journalism’ thing goes, I do think they-all have a point. Never mind what Nowra did or did not say; it’s stooping to Albrechtsen’s own level that we should try to avoid.
PC@24 All of our contributions were minimal in their snarkiness if compared with the vitriol dished out by Nowra and Albrechtson to which we were responding.
It was Nowra’s preference for ‘personal denigration to engaging with arguments’ as Mark so succinctly puts it, which initiated this thread. Inevitably his personal motivation for that was subject to scrutiny and response as happened with Albrechtson when she joined the fray.
Even so the tone of this thread has been more celebratory than combative. As it should be. Look how far we’ve come in forty years! Elsewhere on LP we read that “Feminism Has Conquered the Liberal Party!” Our conservative opposition is challenging our lefty government to double its proposed parenting leave and to tax big business to pay for it.
Eat your hearts out Janet, Louis and friends!
Still, there are better ways at getting at Albrechtsen.
Her petulant egotism which drives her to universalise her craftily edited emotionalism being chief among them.
Just to clarify, perhaps I didn’t express myself well last night. I don’t really care about snark so much (though I have noted that a lot of threads lately have turned into snark-fests rather than substantive discussions), but:
Surely the point made against Nowra was that his focus on Greer’s appearance was one of the reasons why his article was so noxious (and sexist). It strikes me that to focus on denigrating Albrechtsen’s appearance is hardly the way to answer him.
I don’t necessarily agree with how Adam Tucker made his point, and nor should it be assumed that I do.
I don’t think Nowra’s mother was horrible. I made no judgement of that at all. I wanted simply to show how the figure of the mother looms large in the writing. The first year of my thesis study was actually looking at the limits of the maternal in African American writing and though what I wrote up there (for the first time ever because I really dislike biocriticism) drew on biographical details of the writer, I did so only because he introduced the maternal as a key figure in the writing. I have no interest in labelling people with disorders, though I know and understand, Anthony Nolan, that is one of your interests and, like, I’m all at pace with that. And while you may be correct (or not!) it seems to me though, that to do that, either of Greer, or of Nowra’s mother – or any other woman, is to forget the discourses that form and/or deform women altogether. Like the patriarchy, for instance. It is to other the woman in isolation, not considering how existent power structures may work against her. Nowra did not consider that either. Nor how his own unreflective practice in the writing was informed by that very discourse which limited and entrapped his mother. How ironic for him, if he could see it.
Personally I blame the patriarchy for everything. Both for his mother’s limited life choices and for his own unreflective practice in this piece. The patriarchy is quite resilient and remains powerful in any class. But he was wrong on his central thesis. While the patriarchy has not been defeated, Feminism is an ongoing, living, vibrant discourse with an incredible resilence of its own. If he thinks it’s over he’s dreaming, like, badly. Again.
Casey, I agree with you about Nowra’s mother. I woke up this morning with the last words I wrote the night before hammering in my head – “appalling mother”. Even though I’d modified the phrase with “apparently” because I’d read her so descibed elsewhere I decided to do a PS to my comment and retract those two words. Both were superfluous anyway.
Then I got side-tracked by the lesser issue of ad hom retaliation barbs and forgot. I wandered even further away when I lapsed into flippancy in suggesting the struggle was over because Abbott was arguing our case.
If only.
[shuffles feet and stares at ground]
OK, the snark was a bit uncalled for, but Planet started it.
While we’re all practicing being positive …. although The Monthly, well, could be improved, I really do like this part of its website. It’s terrific for people who can’t get to events.
Great link Russell…..bookmarked!
The session from the Adelaide writer’s week featuring Germaine is there and is called “Germaine’s Legacy: After the Female Eunuch”. It isn’t on the front page of that link so it took a bit of finding, she speaks at the end of part two.
Gen Y in my experience – sweeping generalisation alert – haven’t heard of GG unless they’re students in relevant disciplines or have parents like Anthony Nolan or they’re friends/colleagues of lickspittle devotees like me. But then along come the attacks and media pile-ons, fuelled by GG’s regular usually spectacular to stunning gigs. GG’s good copy, obviously.
I guess we can draw comfort from the fact that people such as Nowra and Janet A will always be unable to resist a tasty morsel like Germaine and thus despite their intentions simply draw attention to her and her writing. Yes, sometimes all publicity is good publicity. Who the hell is this woman some will ask. And then go online to check her out. Not that she needs the publicity generally speaking since TFE is still in print so presumably the royalties are rolling in and new generations are reading her work.
But this helps too. In summary: it’s all good.
Grace @13: “And just for the record, apart from anything else, I think Germaine Greer is a gorgeous looking woman, for any age.”
Nah. She’s a dreadful, bad-tempered, old bat. :)
Vanessa, I was at that Writers’ Week session mentioned by su at #233 (2008, it was) and there were an awful lot of school uniforms in the (huge) audience. One of the young women thus clad got up at question time and asked Greer impassionedly why no one had written a Female Eunuch for her own generation. Greer clearly approved of this question, and of the questioner, and told her she should go home and write it herself. The question got a round of applause and so did the answer.
Anyone old timers read Mandy Sayer in the Oz today?
Louis Nowra’s good wife by name Mandy
Says with housework he really is handy.
Claims he loves doing dishes
And meets all of her wishes.
Of course she’d say that! Why wouldn’t she?
I’m touched – Mandy actually thinks her hubby has gotten her out of the big house, busied in a little two-beddie, for unselfish reasons, so she can get on with her work …
Obviously my paraphrasing of the infamous Mandy Rice Davies quote doesn’t ring bells at Larvatus Prodeo. I was so excited when the pome flashed into my head that I rushed my intro note. Any old timers from the early sixties who remember the Profumo scandal?
I guess that has nothing to do with Nowra. More to the point I thought Sayers’ piece a bit too arch to be a really good defence of her man.
Profumo? Wasn’t she mixed up in that Bogle Chandler thing? Or was that Mandy Rice Davies with Bill Sneddon in his last moments? I do get confused sometimes and have no recall of a pome. Do contextualise please.
Oh Mandy:
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman
Givin’ all your love to just one man
You’ll have bad times, and he’ll have good times
Doin’ things that you don’t understand
But if you love him, then you’ll forgive him
Even though he’s hard to understand
And if you love him, oh, be proud of him
‘Cause after all he’s just a man
Stand by your man
Give him two arms to cling to
And somethin’ warm to come to
When nights are cold and lonely
Stand by your man
And show the world you love him
Keep givin’ all the love you can
Stand by your man
Stand by your man
And show the world you love him
Keep givin’ all the love you can
Stand by your man
Mandy Rice Davies was one of the women involved in the Profumo Affair. She’s famous for observing when (I think) Profumo denied having sex with her, “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t ‘e?
Can’t say I remember the name of the working girl who gave Bille Mackie Snedden such a glorious death.
According to my mail Snedden’s terminal bonk was more curious than infamous. She appears to have been attempting to discover how far the apple falls from the tree.
A parliamentary secretary. One wonders which party she worked for.
The Going Away Party.