I’ve hardly had time to stop since returning from Sydney on Sunday night – spent yesterday teaching three classes at ACU, and today working at my current gig getting as many edited articles in the publishing queue over at Online Opinion as I could to allow me to be able to edit it from Melbourne. Which is where I’m off to – at the ungodly hour of 7.50am tomorrow morning (that’s not so bad, but the getting up at 6am isn’t fun). My trip to Melbourne is more work centred than my trip to NSW, but I hope to fit some pleasure in. It’s the first time I’ve been down since 2000, when I was there about this time of year – while the Sydney Olympics were on. I’ve had so little time since returning from Sydney that I haven’t had time to think about organising a formal grogbloggy thing, but if you do want to catch up, email me – mbahnisch (at) gmail (dot) com. I’m taking my laptop along.
Btw, I’m hoping to put up a post about my TINA! experience when I’m back in Brisbane, and no more a wanderin’ as the song says. My co-panelist Zoe has a bit of a review in her comments thread though.
I was at Tina the year Newcastle won the premiership (2001). The walk down to the pub for one of the musical events was pretty scary.
Not a bad day for it, Mark. ‘T-shirt weather’ as they say here.
When I arrived in 2001, I was disturbed to find this was rare enough to warrant special mention.
That is all really fascinating Mark.
I look occasionally at this site with a a sort of morbid curiosity at the vacuousness of the bloggers posts and the banal, trite, try-hard repartee of the site’s respondents. Sad, very sad, and certainly not left.
Was good to meet you Mark, the panel did generate some good discussion, despite the turnout.
Will be posting a lengthy review/commentary on our panel and the festival once all my exams are over!
Ah, well, T Rex, I didn’t dare mention the Broncos from 11am this morning when I touched down in Melbourne…
Lefty E – yep – feels like home – hot, windy, dry, October day! Last time I was down here at this time of year I remember the weather as 12 degrees, rainy and windy!
Phospherence – keep that positive attitude up! That’s such a sign of someone with some valuable input. Perhaps if you don’t find this site sufficiently left for your liking, you could go and hang out at many of the “indy” media outlets that Trotskyites helpfully provide for those still waiting for the workers to understand their historic mission.
James – likewise – I’d like to recreate the panel somewhere else with a bit more of an audience – not at all casting aspersions on the TINA! organisers (10am being a big ask when there was so much ginger beer to be drunk the night before…) – because I also felt that the discussion was valuable.
“Keep that positive attitude up.” Ugh. What ugly English. You are sub-literate as well as having nothing remotely of interest to say.
Plenty of good left sites for lefties. You should get out more.
I think you’ll find Phosphorescence has a second o.
It’s phosphorescence, if you’re going to be a pedant.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Good lord what a poisonous twat your are, Phosphorescence. Fancy having the gall to critique a grammatically correct sentence for its inelegance when your own name is misspelt.
I laugh merrily in your sneering face.
Sorry, trumped.
Twice.
Should really read down before I fly off the handle, eh?
Not only does ‘Phospheresence’ spell this word incorrectly in two places, but s/he left an apostrophe off the end of the possessive “bloggers” (bloggers’) in his/her original post.
My guess, Mark, is that this is one of your students. Either s/he is a disgruntled conservative who thinks you are propagandising in class, or s/he has had a bad grade from you, which is quite likely, considering the standards of his/her literacy and capacity for rational thought.
Or possibly both, and s/he thinks there is some kind of causal thing happening. If I’m right, then you can probably even guess who it is.
Thank Cat I deserted academe before blogging was invented.
Pardon, these four syllable scientific words may roll off the tongue, but can be tricky when written on a white screen. And the missing (redundant in my opinion, even in a publication) apostrophe. Dear me. No apologies for that.
Thanks everyone for proving my original points, so beautifully.
Mark B writes a blog of staggering banality (like every one of his I have skimmed) this time about his itinerary, his busyness, (really, for the life of me I can’t readily recall a single word without going back and re-reading it, not a happy task) and the responses are firstly, his bizarre rave about Trots and Indymedia (?!), followed by this site’s courtiers or camp-followers or cultists or some combination of all three, jumping in to defend their guru head teacher by dah dah – pointing out a word misspelt in my post! May I add humourless, vicious in the case of Ms Thatcher, and without a doubt (bet you have never misspelt a word in your life, in any media) hypocritical.
Why are you reading his drivel in the first place? Silly question I guess. As I said, banal, trite, vacuous, ugly, try-hard.
Nature abhors a vacuum. I guess I just filled it. And my namesake in itself, word though it merely is, is beautiful.
Glad to bring some beauty into your lives.
Pointing out your hypocrisy is in no way a claim to infallibility on my part.
Remember (or re-read) that it was you who waded in here roughshod to spout your pronouncements that LP isn’t weighty or left-wing enough (hence Mark’s recommendations of suitably ideologically pure alternatives – why are you still here BTW?), then presumed to get all huffy about Mark’s ‘ugly English’. Log in your own eye and all that.
This post (and numerous others on this site from time to time) is for the benefit of Mark’s friends* from various parts eastern-Australian who may want to try to catch up with him on his travels, and who may (irony of ironies) be wondering about his lack of weighty posts of late.
Really dude, get yourself a life.
*I can explain if you like.
This may come as a surprise to you, ducks, but punctuation is not a matter of opinion. Your various errors were pointed out only because you were being a pain in the arse about literacy yourself — glass houses, stones etc.
I notice you don’t deny being a student of Mark’s.
PC – we’ve not only cross-posted, but mixed each other’s metaphors! Get that log out of my glass house, lest I throw a stone in God’s eye!!
Pumpkins, for me and many others of creative bent, punctuation is an optional component of written language.
Styles of punctuation vary wildly depending on context. Poets, eg, e e cummings, Allen Ginsburg to name the most flagrant and a personal favourite, have made use of subversive punctuation as an effective form of art.
Punctuation’s primary (traditional) function is to provide meaning not supplied by bare words themselves. If the meaning is clear it is often redundant, or if indeed unclear that may not be the primary aim. Clear?
Of course as everyone knows but the school marms and pedants among you, punctuation is often neglected or completely ignored by Internet users.
I don’t think it even really matters if quotes are not exactly word perfect, even in a print publication. As long as the meaning is not changed.
Teachers, public servants, conformists, most wage slaves would beg to differ, certainly.
And, catty, to answer your inquisitorial statement – why should I deny baseless, prying speculation?
That’s e.e. cummings and Allen Ginsberg, dearie.
Bugger off, phosphorescence. I’m the resident grumpy old muppet in the stalls whose self-appointed job it is to keep the bastards honest. You are are simply making a fool of yourself.
“I don’t think it even really matters if quotes are not exactly word perfect, even in a print publication. As long as the meaning is not changed.”
Irrespective of the importance of punctuation, you’re right. Meaning is important. Which is of course the main point I at least would make – your meanings and intentions have been uniformly snarky, pointless and ridiculous.
If you hate LP that much, you could try to improve it (which you’ve manifestly failed to do) or… well… fucking off is pretty easy too.
Do you think you could manage that, or do you want to keep crapping on about how tops you are to a bunch of people who think you’re a tosser?
Plus you used ‘even’ twice in a sentence – inelegant.
“Poets, eg, e e cummings, Allen Ginsburg to name the most flagrant and a personal favourite”
So which one of the two’s “a personal favourite”? Correct punctuation and grammar might make your meaning clear here.
Punctuation is vital. Even on the Internet. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go out. Out for a walk. In the rain.
“…to a bunch of people who think you’re a tosser?”
I don’t. I think phosphy’s an arseflange.
(I believe beret boy coined that term.)
Yet again, confused with Lefty E. I prefer the much meatier epithet ‘arse-clown’.
I believe it was Dennis Pagan, though, who came up with the best put-down I’ve heard lately: ‘so-and-so must be drinking his own bathwater’.
Arseflange was not ‘invented’ by either. Look it up.
Well, sausage, as far as creativity is concerned I think you’ve still got a bit of a way to go. Which of your fave teachers are you quoting?
Indeed. And those are the ones that the literate and/or the grown-up among us usually don’t read.
No reason at all. Especially since I think you’ve already answered the question.
PS — that’s ‘pussy’ to you, possum.
An absolutely thrilling pc discussion about punctuation from a mob-like “literati” who exhibit a scary group-mind. How funny that you all scrutinise each others prose. But it is the lack of any meaningful, inspiring, informative content that floors me, porcupines.
I wasn’t quoting any “teachers” (I haven’t had any worth mentioning, or, indeed, in actuality). I am an autodidact and my teachers have been other writers, nature and life.
Personal favourite? I meant Ginsberg at the time, but at this very moment? Definitely the tender, joyful, ee cummings.
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
what ever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them
men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right
they are not young
and may my self do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been
quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
Got anything to match it?
You sparkle briefly, phosphorescence,
tide-lapped and ancient,
the starr’d nightsweepings
of mine foot.
Lefty E
Poet Laureate de la Tour Keating.
Not bad Lefty E. Thanks. A bit anthropocentric perhaps. As if the phosphoresence exists for your examination, touch and personal enjoyment. It isn’t like that, you know.
I like this.
“At night the water slides over your body warm and silky, a mysterious element, unresistant, flowing, yet incredibly buoyant. In the dark you slip through it, unquestionably accepting the night’s mood of grace and silence, a little drugged with wine, a little spellbound with the night, your body mysterious and pale and silent in the mysterious water, and at your slowly moving feet and hands streaming trails of phosphorescence, like streaming trails of stars. Still streaming stars you climb the dark ladder to the dark rock, shaking showers of stars from your very fingertips, most marvellously and mysteriously renewed and whole again.”
I think you should let the nice people know where you found that and who wrote it, Phosphy — one of the most disgracefully undervalued writers in the history of Aust Lit, dead by her own hand at 45.
In the meantime, I have a poem for you:
may my mind always be open to little
commas who are the secrets of sentences
whatever they make pause is better than to run on ambiguously
and if trolls should not hear them
trolls are not fully literate
may my mind stroll about paying close attention
and awake and focused and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i give sunday a capital letter and one to i too though i see i have already given it’s an apostrophe and in the right place too fancy that
for whenever trolls are unpunctuated
they are wrong
and may my mind do nothing uselessly
and love language in all its precision and diversity and finesse so more than truly
there’s never been
quite such a fool who could fail
to stop the heart with a comma in exactly the right place
It was written by Charmian Clift of course. I agree she was a sublime writer, I have read everything she has written and the biography by Nadia Wheatley is a masterpiece.
Your poem Pussy, is clever, but empty. It does not move me, mainly because its message is about rules and I don’t nor did the exquisite Cressida, give a fuck about them.
That’s ‘poem, comma, Pussy’.
I dunno about the exquisite Cressida, but the sublimely gifted Clift never put a punctuation mark out of place, because she knew exactly what she was doing and would have laughed herself stupid at the notion that a writer doesn’t need to know how to punctuate. (I know this because I was taught how to proof-read properly by an old journo who knew her. He’d worked with her on the Argus in 1946 and used to talk wistfully about how beautiful she was.)
Hey Mark, caught up with any of the Melbourne mob yet? I’m sure all but one of us would be interested to hear how the trip’s going …
Well… best not get into authorial intent, Phos; the night unmoods me, and I hear it’s passe in any case.
So, still slumming it here?
Really, the evidence above suggests you do. Why change the spelling?
And you look for meaning? May I suggest that meaning is given rather than received. Think about that if you choose to make a reply.
Good great cluster-fucking Jesus Christ waterboarding Pilate. Tied up in orange with cable-ties somewhere south of Florida.
We’re really getting deep and poetical, right? Is this your collective clued-in definition of what a weblog should be about, or how a [comments:] field should be used?
You’re trying to out-snob the snobs, fphosfphy, and Pavlov’s Cat, you’re responding like the proverbial animal to the feeding-bell, or a left-winger to the confessional. C’mon, you call this banter?
Pass the santorum-bowl, and cue J_P_Z for the put-down to end put-downs.
Oh bugger off, you tottering sot. I did try to change the subject.
phossy strikes me as a troll.
It’s boring.
I’m putting it in the spam bin where it can toss off (sonnets) with viagra ads.
Ps – hope you’re having fun in Melbourne, Mark.
Yo, phossy, you’ve put clearly put a lot of time and effort into attracting the attention of people here who you claim are not worth the candle.
Why not do something um…creative with this attention. Instead of misspelling the names of poets, fucking up by the standards you were trying to impose on others and not attributing quoted poems in the hope we’d think you’d written ‘em. Bad phossy.
At least when I pulled Erica’s ponytail back in Form 2 to get her to pay attention to me, I had a follow up line that made her laugh.
Go on Kim, let it out of moderation. I’m feeling very feral and feline at the moment. And phossy strikes me as a good chew toy for a couple of comments or so. Unless of course I’m making a faulty inference here.
C’mon Kim, let it out. I wanna spread some guts around in the purple shag pile.
I second the motion.
Arseflange!
Good E, Lefty One.
Kitty Kat you have obviously found your proper niche and good on you I say. There is a need for punctuation protectionists and heaven knows we could do with some more stringent editing and sub-editing in Oz publishing for Australian writers.
wpd intones: “May I suggest that meaning is given rather than received. Think about that if you choose to make a reply.”
I usually think about things before I make a reply, on anything. Why would you say otherwise, to another adult?
I tend to suppport the view that there is a reciprocal dialectical relationship involved in the construction of meaning. Jorge Luis Borges wrote very well on this. Go see.
Here is Carlos Fuentes on Borges’ thoughts on the relationship between writing and reading:
“A book does not merely transmit information to the reader; the reader must engage the book, create a space between the text and the reader’s own
imagination, a space where the book is in fact rewritten. It is here, and not in the text itself, that Borges locates the “book;” a dramatic shift of focus from a closed system to a perpetually open one where the book is recreated by each reader.
“Books have a double life. First, there is the book as generally agreed upon; it is so and so pages, has such and such characters, and has this and that as a basic plot. But each book also revolves through a universe of readers, past, present and future, generating a multiplicity of worlds that collect, like ghosts, like secrets, into the pages of the work itself. Each single book has a myriad of secret books folded up
inside of it, a house with an endless series of hauntings, spirits blind to each other and yet sharing a basic vocabulary of unconscious symbols and
archetypes.”
Inspiring stuff, eh Lilliputians?
As for authorial intent being passe. In the academy, that may well be. Yawn. But there would be little literary criticism, and no biography, without its consideration and use as a divining tool as to possible meanings.
As for time and effort. Well, we all make our choices, don’t we?
Good grief, just because you’re an autodidact doesn’t mean the rest of us are uneducated gits.
Thanks for a lovely morning read, all.
“Inspiring stuff, eh Lilliputians?”
Back in year 12, yeah it was for a month or two.
Phossie, are you Julie Bishop?
No Laura
I didn’t realise this site was full of – yikes – teachers. Explains a lot. A helluva lot!
No Laura. I would have far more in common with..um…let me see. Thinking.
Oh, I know, those whose âfecund loins give forth electric flashesâ?.
Bet you have to Google it, teach.
Yeah, there’s nothing worse than a teacher. All that helping in the communication of ideas and understanding. All that capacity-building and encouragement to engaged minds. What a bunch of dicks!
I’d much rather talk to a jumped-up idiot who can’t bring themselves to just fuck off from a place they profess to detest.
Like a dog returning to its vomit, so are the days of our lives.
I wonder why you care so much about what people here do and say and think…
Phosphy, you are being a phuckwit. Give it a rest.
RE: arseflange.
I can claim that I introduced the term ‘arseflange’ to L.P. at least.
I got it from a descriptive term used on the The Depot club’s forum for ‘emo’ (a sort of morose modern punk rock or Goth-lite). The forum software automatically turned any reference to ‘emo’ into ‘arseflange’.
Googling for the term produces top hits; depot forum, depot forum, two posts of mine on LP, a post on the brisbane gothic forum … and so on.
There is an urban dictionary useage document on August 15 2006 for ‘ass flange’. Incorrect spelling for a Brit, too.
There once was an old man from Natchez
Whose loins gave forth electric flashes.
When he earthed his cock
The static-charge shock
Reduced all his trousers to ashes.
Hey Phosdike it’s working.My you do have a good needle.
speaking of arseflange I bet phosphor-bomb’s one. it’s the whiny emo brat behaviour that gives it away.
Teachers, like nurses, and many other workers, are salt-of-the-earthers, I know that. Hell, many of my friends, and relatives, are teachers. And I worked once for a teachers’ trade union. It was not a happy experience. The hypocrisy and bullying were stupendous.
It is probably an occupational hazard, but many of us non-teachers do find you a lil arrogant, dismissive, incurious, and have a very unattractive propensity to infantalise other adults and label people who challenge or disagree with you “whiny”. The abuse and bullying is often par for the course too. This has been a pretty good case study of all that.
I guess, being a materialist, I would see the problem with many teachers as being a product of the nature of the teacher-student relationship, an inherently unequal and hierarchical one.
Phossie, you better look away now, cos I’m going to just mention that the Melbourne grogblog was a lot of fun – Mark showed up, as did Boynton, Helen Balcony, Mark Lawrence, Tony T., TimT, Nabakov, FXH, Gummo, WBB, and Rex Ringschott. Hope you had a nice time fulminatin on yer own, phoss. But don’t worry, Nabakov kindly spared a thought and some kind words for you….
Thanks for the update Laura. I am honoured that Nabakov saw fit to toast er roast me. His was, by far, the wittiest riposte. Bad Nobby. Nothing like a stoush to get one’s creative juices flowing, eh wot?
Though why he would deliberately, one assumes, misspell his moniker beats me. Did anyone ever ask?
I’m just back from an early-morning kayak on Botany Bay, which was a crystalline vista of crushed diamonds. The stately sacred ibises in silver-toned
V-formation flew parallel to me and then onwards to feast in the precious, fragile, remnant mangroves and long grasses.
This evening I will wallow in Gregorian chant.
Bored now.
Crushed diamonds, huh.
Could it be the Kurnell refinery fumes?
Wait for the bats—you’ll be seeing them soon.
My carriage awaits, fainthearts and cultural cringers.
But here is some homework for you.
From one of the “significant minority”.
Ah well, who wants to be an insider, or a wishy-washy liberal.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/irwi-o07.shtml
Wot? That’s it phossy?
After all your sanctimonious little sermonettes about beauty, creativity and originality, you’re just gonna paddle off leaving behind some rather desperate namedropping, a para of strained purple prose (I mean really – “the precious, fragile, remnant mangroves and long grasses.” Not so much tin-eared as leaden tongued there.) and a link to a windy polemic stating the bleedin’ obvious in far too many words.
Still, as your comments settled by volume not weight, I guess you filled a much needed gap in the blogosphere.
Since we’re on Baudelaire,