Posts by Jolisa
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Oho. Next they'll be trumpeting pachyderm rights. It's political correctness gone mad!
-
This month's Metro magazine would have you believe that Auckland is a thriving cultural nirvana, though perhaps not quite on the scale of London or New York.
Incidentally, who is that on the cover, making free with Peter Jackson/King Kong in perhaps the weirdest mixed visual metaphor ever to stand for Auckland's alleged awesomeness?
-
It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
I think an elephant that behaves thusly has rather forfeited its right to privacy.
On the other hand, the poor elephant (if it indeed existed) was allegedly in a state of, shall we say, hormonal rage, and was thus not guilty by reason of being completely off its nut. Complicated situation. I'll wait till the Daily Mail gets the elephant's side of things.
-
Craig, that's a great example - because even if Orwell did shoot the elephant, he sexes up the essay anyway, by rather improbably claiming his anti-colonial epiphany occurred at the moment of lining up his shot.
Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
(text from here, italics mine)
The essay was written in 1936, about an event that happened in 1926 - ten years and half a world away. More likely is that he had an inkling of something a bit off at the time, and worked it out for himself much later. But we afford him wiggle-room because of the overall ring of truth (truthiness?) in the description of the event.
And it's something inherent in any act of writing - even an immediate transcription of events. Between the motion and the act falls the shadow, as our other mid-century buddy put it.
-
Perhaps you were thinking of Scoop-- where truth isn't a virtue, but a professional disability whether you're running a newspaper or a whorehouse.
True. I guess A Handful of Dust came to mind because it contains yet another Bad Mother whose child falls unheeded by the wayside while she's in pursuit of some kind of social glory (in this case, the hot young feller).
PS Jolisa, thanks for the recommendation (some time back) of The 10PM Question, which is just wonderful.
Isn't it lovely? <self-promotion> I rave about it at length in the upcoming edition of Landfall </self-promotion>.
-
Dubmugga brings it! Genuinely new material and a perfect conspiracy theory. Well done.
And Ethan, your analysis is very astute. Those Guardian columns are disturbing for all sorts of reasons, not least the fact that their content struck a chord with many readers.
A note: apparently "Jack" in the columns was not Jake (aka "Eddie"), but his younger brother. The one whose burgeoning pubic hair was (shudder) discussed in the newspaper and among his schoolmates without his knowledge.
-
Since you've read the damn thing (and I've absolutely no interest), I'd appreciate your opinion Ethan. If this was on the news pages, and Myerson was making allegations of "vicious -- semi-criminal even" conduct against a third party, do you think her "exaggerations" would have made it to print?
Ah, but it wasn't on the news pages and that was surely the point. The semi-anonymous anecdotal form occupies a different place in the world of the paper - the Mere Male/Over the Teacups/Bridget Jones's Diary/Letters to Penthouse section, where a degree of self-dramatisation and fictionalising is not just allowed, but expected. See also David Sedaris, whom I doubt is fact-checked on as rigorous a basis as other contributors to the New Yorker.
But I remain convinced that much of the vitriol being hurled at Myerson -- why her, why now? -- is gender-based and culture-specific and that it's to do with a sickening sensation about tabloid-reality-ickiness, exemplified by the public demise of Jade Goody. There hasn't been the same degree of outrage directed at, say, David Sheff, although Debra Gwartney is getting a fair amount of stick for her book right now.
Is there some notion about good mummies at the heart of this? That good mothers, like good wives (flashback to Emma's great thread) don't talk about what goes on behind closed doors? Is she being punished in part because she stopped joking about what was going on - can we only handle Domestic Confidential when it's funny? (See Shirley Jackson, whose dark personal and home life led to some of the funniest writing you'll read on the subject of life with small children, at great expense to her family - but perhaps they would have been miserable anyway. See also Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck, who kind of got away with it).
Of course Myerson was out of line - but that far out of line? Or just a convenient person to play the "pale" beyond-which-we-do-not-go?
Or both. I can hold both stories in my head - that she's done a foolish thing and compromised her child's right to privacy (excellent summary up there, Ethan), and that our disproportionate outrage says more about us than it does about her - because they both seem simultaneously true to me.
And because I'm fascinated by cultural pile-ons in general, especially in who winds up as the consensus-based Bad Guy in any given cultural fable. Once upon a time, Jake would have been the villain of the piece (Go Ask Alice, if you don't believe me, although I seem to remember a neglectful mother in that story too).
It's just there's so much flippin' archetype at play in this narrative: Bad Mother-Writer, Ineffectual Intellectual Husband, not to mention Romantic Broody Intoxicated Youth, all Chattertonesque and Keatsy. Waugh would have had a field day with this material. Oh wait - he did, A Handful of Dust comes close. I submit there are more complex reasons we're interested in this one, other than a simple question of parent-child power relations.
(Which is also incredibly interesting and important).
I do run on. Maybe I should get a blog.
-
The tradition of parent-child feuds in literary circles dates back to Chaucer, who dubbed his son Ian 'a nancie boye both faire and true, who taketh it up the ers for a groat or twoe'.
Genius. Plus everyone knows that Chaucer has been writing that anonymous blog about a call girl, you know, that one with Billie Piper in it... wife-of-bath.blogspot.com.
It did occur to me last night that if our big issue with this whole thing is that Myerson is seeking to turn a profit on her family's misery, then the solution lies in our own hands.
a) don't buy the book (and really how many people would have, without the attendant publicity?) and
b) don't click on any of the articles about it.Bugger.
-
That is so civilised. Is it a regular old high school?
And ditto on the comments thread. What happened? Guardian comments used to be reliably, genuinely witty; now they're bollocks. I just don't feel about that, as my 3 year old is given to sighing when something puzzles him.
(Oh crap, ruined his life again by writing about him - five dollars in the therapy jar).
-
In tangentially related news, this would have cheered me up at 17. Heck, it would cheer me up today.