Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Although it’s been uni break over the last week, I’ve been a busy boy. I now have a date with destiny for my doctorate - I’m presenting to a final seminar on 30 October. This is the internal examination stage of phd completion according to the QUT rules - it’s a bit like a viva voce where you talk about what you’ve done and found and are questioned by a panel of senior academics (and the audience!) - in my case from QUT’s Humanities Program (once was a Faculty…) I more or less wrapped the thing up on Friday, did a little revision yesterday, and lazed around last night and watched Maggie Cheung movies on dvd, and today and tomorrow before the teaching and marking onslaught resumes, I’m giving the thesis a final spit and polish.
So I’m very chuffed!
Folks might also remember I’ve been doing a bit of travel writing - of the insider’s guide to where you live variety. I filed my copy for that and sent in the invoice on Tuesday arvo, and it was a really neat gig. On Monday, I went for a wander around Paddington and took some photos - not for the project itself - but as an aide memoire. It turned out to be a dodgy day to be walking - 35 degrees maximum. But it did also prompt me to decide that walking for about an hour a day was a good custom to be revived - so I’ve been doing that ever since - in the late afternoon on cooler days and at night on hotter days. Anyway, here’s the photographic record of my Paddo perambulations. It’s a really nice part of the world, and somewhere I wouldn’t mind living. But the real estate market would really have to collapse before I could contemplate buying there!
Jennifer Schuessler at the New York Times has been boosting the “turn the Veep debate into a poetry slam” movement. Two poems selected from her Paper Cuts blog post:
Haiku’s not the form
For Senator Joe Biden
Because the last line may come out slightly longer than is absolutely necessary due to the subject’s ability to analogize all topics to a seminal moment in the history of this great nation of ours, America, the UNITED states of America
-Henry Alford
So jobs, they … you know,
Health care’s really …. it’s — Katie,
That bridge? I said no.
Hot on the heels of lexicographer Erin McKean’s advice that if it feels wordish, use it, here comes some more legitimation for linguistic innovation. The well known author and linguist, David Crystal, has published a new book on sms-speak - Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.
In a fascinating piece in The Guardian, Crystal rebuts claims that texting is some sort of linguistic vandalism. Abbreviations and rebuses and other linguistic forms have a history as old as the written language, he argues. What’s distinctive about texting is the combination of linguistic features:
Some of its juxtapositions create forms which have little precedent, apart from in puzzles. All conceivable types of feature can be juxtaposed - sequences of shortened and full words (hldmecls “hold me close”), logograms and shortened words (2bctnd “to be continued”), logograms and nonstandard spellings (cu2nite) and so on. There are no less than four processes combined in iowan2bwu “I only want to be with you” - full word + an initialism + a shortened word + two logograms + an initialism + a logogram. And some messages contain unusual processes: in iohis4u “I only have eyes for you”, we see the addition of a plural ending to a logogram. One characteristic runs through all these examples: the letters, symbols and words are run together, without spaces. This is certainly unusual in the history of special writing systems. But few texts string together long sequences of puzzling graphic units.
Crystal also points out that only a minority of text messages are actually written in text speak. But most of all, in a similar spirit to McKean, he finds the linguistic challenges of text message composition, well, fun:
[Via Boing Boing] I must confess the idea of listening to some music tracks to get myself in the mood for reading a particular book has never occurred to me. But it has occurred to William Gibson. Here’s his playlist for Spook Country. I must say the dude’s got good taste. Excellent to see Lucinda Williams and Neko Case make an appearance.
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state - a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy - in quite different ways - want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship - while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
Well, as I noted on another thread about Germaine Greer, I’ve bought and now read On Rage. I’d like this post to stick to discussion of the merits of her arguments, which I continue to think has been something largely absent from most of the debate to date. I also think that very few people who’ve rushed into print have actually read her book, and instead taken the odd comment here or there that she’s made in the course of promoting it and projected all sorts of things onto her.
Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole - for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book - challenged to agree with Greer’s view that - on the basis of the evidence - the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources - is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says - accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on - unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.
What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are - and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well - in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.
There was an interesting discussion on this post on the whole “what is different about blogs and MSM “blogs” theme” with George Megalogenis recently. I generally agree with those who argued that whatever takes place on the bulletin boards of the News Limited and Fairfax online empires, it ain’t blogging. Even the reference to commenters as “bloggers” is jarring to anyone who was actually around the blogosphere before the media tried to appropriate it. It’s the lingo, dude! That’s just a small sign of something different going on, but a significant one. Another is evident from Megalogenis’ blog today.
My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.
My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.
Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.
Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.
Here’s another don’t waste your $34.95 book review, and for many of the same reasons as Mark identified as failures in an earlier 2007 federal election tome from Melbourne University Press - Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07.
If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.
The blurb claims:
In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.
Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.
If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.
One of the rather egregious questions on last week’s Q&A asked the panel to comment on why there was no contemporary political fiction of the stature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s. As with a lot of the queries posed on Q&A, it’s a bit of a silly one, but it did remind me that we discussed political fiction here at LP a while back, and to give folks the heads up that American speculative fiction writer and anthologist Jeff VanderMeer is blogging about political fiction at The Huffington Post.
[VanderMeer, along with regular guest bloggers, writes regularly at Ecstatic Days.]
As a bit of a follow up to the discussion of Germaine Greer’s latest book On Ragehere, I was interested to see Gary Sauer-Thompson observe that most of the reaction (and there’s been tons of it) to her writing and various speeches and appearances in the press has completely avoided the issues she actually raises, and concentrated on interweaving loud denunciations of her - and claims that she’s irrelevant - with already well established “media narratives”. If she’s in fact got nothing of relevance to say, as one of our commenters observed, you have to wonder why all the energy expended.
Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.
In the wake of discussion of Andrew Forrest’s proposal for the creation of 50 000 full time jobs for Indigenous Australians (discussed here at LP) and Germaine Greer’s remarks on the continuing force of history in shaping Indigenous responses to state initiatives (discussed here and see the video of last night’s Q&A), I thought it was worth linking to a paper prepared for the Australian Education Union by UTS Indigenous academics Larissa Behrendt and Ruth McCausland. The specific topic they examine is welfare quarantining and schooling outcomes. I’d recommend anyone interested read the whole thing, but the abstract has also been posted at Australian Policy Online.
As well as discussing the philosophy of mutual obligation (referred to as John Howard’s most significant legacy to social policy), the authors point to the lack of an evidence base for most policy initiatives in this area - something almost totally lacking in the research which justified Noel Pearson’s proposals for “family commissions” in Cape York, which is now being held up as a model for the rest of Australia. This appears inconsistent with Jenny Macklin’s disclaimers of ideological motivation and claims that evidence and “what works” would be the criterion for Indigenous policy. They also point to several studies which demonstrate that parental responsibility in sending kids to schools is at best only one factor in school attendance and outcomes, with the quality of schooling and child health also being very important variables.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that most policy initiatives in this area are at best blunt instruments. It also suggests that they are being driven by a new orthodoxy - arguments about “personal responsibility” and “social norms” being more assertion than evidence based. Most tellingly, perhaps, and here Greer’s comments are important too, is the suggestion that the obligation is almost entirely one sided and thus lacking in mutuality - and that the state is failing to put in place the preconditions for such experiments to have much chance of providing enduring outcomes. That doesn’t leave me feeling me feeling very hopeful about the prospects of closing the gap.
Germaine Greer will also be a guest. Greer has just released a new essay in book form - On Rage, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I was interested to see her obvious frustration last night in a Lateline interview with Leigh Sales at the difficulty of articulating any position that goes beyond tired dichotomies on Indigenous Policy and the NT intervention (including those which claim to transcend tired dichotomies). Or perhaps it would be better to say the inability to hear any heterodox position. I suspect a lot of the rage directed at Greer herself comes from an inability to comprehend or recognise any thought that doesn’t follow the predictable grooves of a “debate”, and indeed any call for reflection on issues and stories a lot of us would rather not face. So it’ll be interesting to watch her in this format too.
Much has been made over the last decade or more of the divide between “elite” opinion and popular opinion on a range of issues. George Megalogenis reports on the divide between popular opinion and that of an important category of elites - major party candidates - at the time of the 2007 Federal election, based on the 2007 Australian Candidate Study.
A key issue on which the candidates were out of alignment with the voters is our old friend, global warming. According to the 2007 Australian Election Study, 51.5% of voters considered this issue “Extremely Important” and a further 36.8% considered it “Quite Important”. This compares with 65.5% of Labor candidates who, according to the candidate study, considered the issue important, and contrasts strikingly with Liberal-National Coalition candidates, of whom only 32.4% considered it important.
This raises the further question of what the result would be of polling other right-of-centre elite constituencies on this issue, such as Quadrant contributors and subscribers, conservative media commentators, and staff and directors of right-of-centre think-tanks. One gets the impression it would be lower than 32.4%. Continue reading ‘Elites versus masses on climate change’
Some of the themes I wrote about in my recent contribution to the Pacific Journalism Review on that tired, tedious and irritating bloggers v. journos meme have been starkly illustrated in recent days - in particular the co-optation of the space of blogging and indeed the persona or role of the blogger by big media. As Kim noted, Andrew Bolt, in a “my hits are big, really” misadventure (demonstrating his capacity to ignore evidence that’s drawn to his attention about what statistics actually mean) suddenly became an outsider Insider, or an Insider outsider. Or something.
Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” - take that, lefty journos! - he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
We haven’t got around to posting the stats on our readership and advertising income (earned rather than paid still!) for June yet - to come shortly - but I did want to note Tim Watts’ post about Andrew Bolt’s stats post:
Thanks very much for all your support. The figures for the month aren’t all in, obviously, but we’ve already cracked the million: 1,077,334 hits for July.
Watts notes - rightly - that whatever you think of Bolt’s choice of subject matter and approach to it, he is one of the very few MSM “bloggers” who does get the form and do it well. But he doesn’t seem to get metrics. I’m not the first person on his thread to point out that “page impressions” doesn’t actually give you a direct take on the number of readers - if he were to disclose the number of unique visits, it’d be a much more worthwhile exercise. By way of comparison, LP got 1,442,702 “page impressions” (in Bolt’s terms) in July and topped one and a half million in May and June.
For those who are interested in these things, a recent check on how much of that traffic was to images suggests only about 1.4%. But page impressions or page views really just tells you how many of each and every page with a url of its own was viewed. In LP’s case, a not insignificant amount of this is the “long tail” phenomenon and consists of accessing old posts. It’s exclusive of bots doing indexing and spammers, and I imagine Bolt’s figure is as well, but he needs to put it in its proper context.
Update: Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” - take that, lefty journos! - he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Hot on the heels of lexicographer Erin McKean’s advice that 
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in 
Well, as I 
Here’s another don’t waste your $34.95 book review, and for many of the same reasons as 
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