Sort of About Human Stupidity

I’ve been developing this big rant about how stupid the Robert Bly book ‘Iron John’ is, which connected to some of the research I’ve been doing on masculinity. The basic theory I keep coming across is that a lot of men have issues which are specifically gendered: things like poor work/life balance, an over emphasised link between work and identity and all the usual emotionally stunted stuff that goes with the dominant versions of masculinity. The research I’ve been doing is about Hindley Street, its high crime levels, the fact that the majority of perpetrators and victims are young men and relate to alcohol abuse.  The theories I’ve read suggest that Hindley Street is one of those areas certain men go to act out a hyper-masculinity that counteracts their otherwise humdrum lives, but unfortunately also results in them getting in drunken punch ups. Which is sort of obvious I guess. Similarly, I was reminiscing about a story a certain small, cranky friend of mine once told me about this ‘Barbie Doll’ friend of hers. Apparently the Barbie Doll’s boyfriend had a bit of a self confidence issue and decided she needed to be “more feminine” so he could feel “more masculine”. Which begs the question, “Why does her being more feminine make him more of a man?” and, from there, “Does being more manly actually make you happier?” Personally I struggle to see that it does.

 

 Which led me back to Iron John – a book which took the complexities of masculinity and gender and reduced them down to one basic issue “Men need to feel more manly to be happy! They should dress up in loin cloths, gather in the woods with sharp sticks and pretend they’re cave men!”  I read Iron John when I was nineteen. It obviously didn’t help me, seeing I’m still a ponce, but it remains one of the key examples that I look at and think, “Why do people believe this stuff? I don’t get it. It seems so insanely stupid.”

 

Anyway. So I had another big rant about human stupidity. Then yesterday I entered a phase of intense optimism. We heard back from the Adelaide City Council who have approved a grant for us to run stuff as part of the Fringe. It’s a pretty small sum of money, but its enough to do more than we did last year.  So now we’re running the annual Zine and DIY Fair, a whole day of workshops and panels and, hopefully, a sort of prototype Bike Film event. I talked to the absolutely lovely people from the Sydney Bike Film Festival yesterday morning, who put me in touch with some film makers and so far I’ve had about four film makers offer to send me their bike related films. The Fringe still seems keen to see everything grow into a bigger mini-festival, so everything is coming up roses on that front.

 

Then I went to band practice and we’re playing some ‘Laneway Festival’ or something in January and at the Exeter on New Year’s Eve. I’m not really sure what this ‘Laneway’ thing is, but everyone seemed pretty happy about it, and the Exeter should be hilarious. Plus we’re going to the spacious Broadcast studios to “demo” our new album. I’m not entirely sure what doing a “demo” entails, but so far it would appear to entail lengthy philosophical discussions on the nuances of click tracks, and lengthy philosophical discussions on spurious topics are, of course, one of my great passions.

 

I’ve also spent the past two days doing some boring work for an interesting grant, looking for other federally funded grants on urban renewal in both Australia (funded by the Australian Research Council, which funds research projects that are supposed to be in the national interest) and the ESRC (which does the same in the UK).  It’s actually left me quite optimistic.  By and large the research I’m dealing with will supposedly go on to have an impact on policy and decisions made at a higher level. The English stuff in particular had a really strong focus on trying to develop cities and suburbs that are socially and environmentally sustainable, looking at the kind of cultural change you’d need to produce better urban environments and how you could begin getting it off the ground. Of course, I’ve had it pointed out to me that good research is easily transferred into bad policy, but its still nice to see.

On Human Stupidity Part Two

I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in before making another foray into my paper on fear, masculinity and public space (aka "Why there's so many morons on Hindley Street").

 

Just after the election I went to my mother's house and she was telling me I should be less pessimistic and stop referring to our "Glorious New Centre Right Government" in such a sarcastic tone. She said the ALP was back in power, multiculturalism and reconciliation were back on the agenda and, generally speaking, Rudd can't be worse than Howard. So I thought maybe she was right. Then I stupidly read the letters to the editors page of the Advertiser. Particularly I was struck by a comment from Clive Wallace of Seacliff, written a couple of days after the election:

 

"The power of marketing spin over substance was clearly demonstrated last weekend. The good voters of Australia and, in particular, Bennelong, have replaced a Prime Minister, arguably Australia's greatest, with a commentator.

 

John Howard and the Liberal/Nationals, in troubled and difficult world conditions, led the country to a stronger position of prosperity and the lowest level of unemployment in more than three decades.

 

Many of the young, through their Green-vote preferences going directly to Labor, have swept aside this historic achievement without a second thought.

 

Voters under 30 have never been out job-hunting in a recession and we hope they never need to. They will judge the new government harshly if it forgets the social cost of mantra without substance and fail to deliver strong government for all Australians. We all hope this is not the case."

 

This letter is about me and a reasonable proportion of my friends. I voted Green, I'm under thirty and I was out looking for jobs this time last year.  Mr Wallace is right. Thanks to changes in the definition of 'employed' I've been gainfully employed since I was 21 or so, making, for the most part, a whopping $11 an hour after tax. And I do owe Howard a great debt, which I'm reminded of every time HECS is taken out of my pay. The thing about this letter isn't that it's just stupid, it's that it operates on a strain of logic which, for me at least, makes absolutely no sense. It reminds me of an argument I got into when I was about 19 with a hard right wing Catholic. Every time I raised a point they couldn't defend, they'd just cite the bible as the final stop point. It was impossible to argue with them because their version of logic was so totally detached from my own.

 

I remember when the liberals got in again after the children overboard scandal and the decision to go to war in Iraq, I was particularly struck by the knowledge that I lived in a country where I simply could not comprehend half the population. It was utterly unfeasible that anyone would vote for such an overt liar. It was like when I was a kid and first read about Joe McCarthy (who had 50% public support at his peak) and thought "How could you not see he was a jerk?"

 

It was nice to see Howard get kicked out, but the whole "Kevin 07" thing is having roughly the same effect. People seem overjoyed to have a new Centre Right Government. Why? You don't remember that there was a Gulf War when Labor was last in power? I see Rudd on the front page of the paper and, yeah, he's less obviously evil, but sans mind altering drugs or a severe blow to the head he still looks like a right wing Christian touting economically conservative policies. What's everyone so happy about? I still don't get it. Am I missing something?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Human Stupidity Part One

I'm waiting for last night's insomnia to wear off, and today's coffee to kick in before I launch into the final stages of my article. So I thought I'd take a leaf out of Henry Jenkin's blog and instigate a series of entries on a theme. This is the first one:

 

Anyway. I finally finished reading Sherman Young's 'The Book is Dead' (www.thebookisdead.com) which is a sort of counterpoint to Andrew Keen's hilariously cranky 'The Cult of the Amateur'. Both of them are dealing with a question that I keep encountering post-election.

 

That question is: "Are people really that stupid, or is it just me being old and bitter?" I have lengthy conversations on this topic two or three times a week.

 

Keen argues that people are that stupid. His book is about two things:

(1) Blogs are making Disney go broke.

(2) People need 'cultural gatekeepers' because they're too fundamentally stupid to sort things out for themselves.

 

I don't buy it. Disney is going broke because they've got a stupid business model revolving around blockbusters.  And 'cultural gatekeepers' is a polite way of saying editors, journalists and producers appointed by such notably moral media barons as Rupert Murdock and Conrad Black (who just got sentenced to six years for fraud. Ha!).

 

Sherman Young's book is also about two things:

(1) 'Book culture' is the highest form of human endeavor. Or it would be if people still read books. Apparently the 'average' Australian spends 103 minutes a day watching television and 7 minutes reading a book. Those figures are based on a general average. Most Australians don't spend 7 minutes a day reading a book, it's just that some of us spent an hour or more reading, and thus drag the average up. Case in point: I spent about two hours reading books yesterday, which isn't particularly abnormal.

(2) Kindle will save the book. Kindle is yet another in the long line of digital readers - sort of like an i-pod for books.

 

Young seems like a nice guy, and his argument hinges on a belief that people, or at least some people, aren't stupid and would prefer to read and write something of greater quality than another report on Britney Spears and her failed attempts to negotiate the virgin/whore dichotomy. He says the thing holding them back is price and accessibility. That said, he also seems to admit that the book has never really been a 'mass' media form, it's always been aimed at a pretty small market, it's just that that market has included all the best people.  

 

It sort of boils down to forms of literacy. Keen focuses on mass media. When you're consuming mass media all the work is done for you and you can just sit there. Hence the high volume of people who will sit around watching shitty TV, complain about it but never actually bother to get off their butts, turn it off and go do something else with their lives. The less of it I consume the more I hate it: mass media breeds a sense of learned passivity - reinforcing the idea that someone else is meant to entertain you. If you focus on mass media its inevitable that you'll think people are stupid. I turned on the television for five minutes last night and saw some sitcom with Charlie Sheen in it. Horrible.

 

Young, on the other hand, focuses on a medium which requires a great deal of effort to consume and attracts only the people whose idea of a good time involves identifying a book to read, tracking it down and then sitting down and laboriously reading it. It's a high effort past time but the sustained engagement with a single piece of text produces a much stronger affiliation. There's some pretty big value judgments in here, but personally I find it hard to deny that, whatever the content, books demand more of their readers and breed less of a sense of passivity. Unfortunately Young finds that very few people are actually devoting that much time to either reading or writing books. A pretty significant whack of the population is apparently content with Britney Spears and her failed virgin/whore gender performance. They might bitch about it being a bad role model or an example of a fundamentally sexist culture or whatever, but they won't actually turn the television off. Which is depressing.

 

 

 

 

 

The toilets at BBQ City

Hmm. I just tried sending out an invite for our post-post grad picnic, whereby I became completely, completely confused initially by setting up a mailing list through my email program thing, and then by using Facebook. If you didn't receive an invite and you know me, you probably should have. If you received one and we don't know each other, or you live in another country or something, sorry for clogging your in-box.

 

Anyway. Last night I went to BBQ City with someone or other. We were talking about how the service is always bad and how you always ask the waiters for water and they never bring you any. Amazingly on this particular night the waiter was both relatively polite and remembered the water. Then I went to the toilet. I was in the cubical, going about my business, when someone else came in to use the urinal. As they left they turned out the light. The toilets at BBQ City are totally light sealed. For a moment I thought I'd gone totally blind. It was as if I was in the depths of outer space, lost in a lightless void, except it was an extremely unhygienic lightless void in which one didn't wish to stumble around relying on one's sense of touch to gain some sort of orientation.

 

Right now I'm trying to work up the energy to write the second half of my paper for work. So far I've spent about an hour looking at the computer and dosing myself with caffeine. I expect the caffeine to kick in sometime in the next half hour. Post-PhD I've started taking my study tips from Black Flag: "Drink black coffee, drink black coffee, drink black coffee and stare at the wall!" or however that song goes.

Celia Lury

I spent most of last week as a volunteer at the Sustaining Cultures conference. I saw Celia Lury talk, which was exciting for me because (a) apparently I’m an even bigger nerd than I thought I was and (b) she provided one of the most important quotes I used in my thesis. I forget what it actually said, but I remember the occasion very well. I was sitting on the couch in my old house back in Mile End, sometime in 2005, totally stuck and trying to forward one of those points that you’re not allowed to just say, you need to back it up with a citation from someone better qualified then you. I hate those points. So I took a break and went to the Oxfam bookshop on Hutt Street and picked up this old copy of a book on feminist autobiography. I was browsing through it and came across an article by Lury in which she said exactly what I wanted to say, except she’s a famous tenured academic and I’m a lowly post grad.  

 

Damn, that was a great day.

 

Anyway, so I saw Celia Lury talk, which made a nice metaphoric ending point because I finally handed in my PhD thesis on Friday afternoon.  People keep asking me if I feel relieved, and I keep telling them that I feel like one of those old guys that retires and then goes crazy. I went out and purchased a copy of Tom Hodgkinson’s book ‘How to be Idle’ in the hope that it’ll provide me with some ground rules for not being a PhD student anymore. I’m only about fifty pages in and so far he seems to be talking about the importance of taking a long time to wake up in the morning.

 

 

Also, Aliese, Evan and I, having all finished our time as post grad students, are having a picnic next Sunday. The details are:

 

Post-Post Grad Picnic

Sunday 16^th of December

Botanic Park

(Opposite the big metal glasshouse thing/rose gardens)

Bring food, bring drinks, bring stories about how hard it was to finish your three year under grad degree which we will cruelly dismiss.

Me Playing Solo

Before I forget, I’m playing a rare solo show at the Rocket Bar this Thursday night. I’ll be supporting Pikelet (who is amazing) and Ned Colette (who I’ve never heard of).  So all the people who keep bugging me to play solo should come along. I have no idea when I’ll play again but it probably won’t be any time soon.

 

The Charioteer

I had a wildly eventful weekend.

Most notably I finished reading this book:

First published in 1953, it's a classic example of gay fiction, focusing on the romantic antics of a Quaker, a naval captain and a soldier in the wake of the evacuation of Dunkirk. Contrary to the opinion you might garner from the cover there's nothing you could refer to as 'overt ramming'. Indeed, if you weren't looking for the allusions to homosexuality, this book would make no sense. After about 325 pages the two main characters have their first liaison, which reads:

'Laurie stood silent. He didn't want to think, there was too much pain in it; only for a moment, resisting foreknowledge, to stand here waiting, his mind's eyes closed.
"Come here, then", said Ralph with gentle arrogance. "Come and say good bye to me."

Afterwards he said, "Are you going to be angry with me, Spuddy, as soon as you're alone?"'

The focus is very, very heavily on suppressed emotion and loaded, complex dialogue. That said, it's still an amazing book, albeit largely because it's a good example of how to write a book about a socially taboo topic, which is quite obviously about that topic, but doesn't actually make many overt references to it.


Also over the weekend, I got my thesis printed and soft bound and threw up.