Liminal urinals revisited

Mort has produced an excellent work of social and cultural history, overflowing with anecdotes and illustrations, exhaustively researched and thoroughly insightful. The tragedy is that to get to all that, readers will have to wade through the humourless cultural studies waffle that surrounds it. Like some literary equivalent of the Eighties revival shows on our television screens this spring, Mort’s book often reads like a throwback to some terrifying textbook from 1984, in which space is always contested, identities are always in flux and chapters have titles like “Pathologies” and “Governance”.

So when a policeman tells the Wolfenden Committee about cottaging, taking them through the process of going into a public toilet for sex, he is “promoting a cognitive shift” and “encouraging them to see urinals as liminal spaces”. Later, discussing the Profumo affair, Mort announces that he will pay “attention to the scandal’s urban locatedness” and “complex negotiation of the themes of sexual and cultural modernity”, and claims that the affair “generated a dynamic and unresolved atmosphere of cultural and geographical disturbance”. This sort of stuff was bad enough twenty years ago. These days, it is not only ugly and frustrating but downright dated. Academics often complain that too much attention is paid to “popular” histories rather than their own works. But if they continue to write like this, can they really be surprised?

Dominic Sandbrook reviewing Frank Mort's Capital Affairs: London and the Permissive Society (Yale University Press) in the Literary Review July 2010; the review is not online but was noted in Art Words.

Worse than the book's blunders, though, are its barrels of banana oil. In a chapter on the Rillington Place murders, Mort describes how Beresford Brown (the Jamaican labourer and handyman who happened upon the body of one of John Christie's victims) "rehearsed his story across a sensory borderline between smell and vision and through a spatial narrative that dramatized his discoveries as a journey from the external world into a small claustrophobic space or lair". In other words, the poor guy described what he saw and smelt after knocking a hole in the kitchen wall. Still, at least Christie's victims didn't die for nothing. Rather, their murders "performed significant cultural work... questioning... ethical and sexual values as a result of the activities of the main characters and the unravelling of their complicated plots." So they can rest in peace after all, then.

Christopher Bray, reviewing the same book in The Independent on Sunday.


Questions:

• Why,oh why, do academics persist in writing like that?
  
• Who's that girl? It's Christine Keeler

.

And this is Alison Stratton:

Postcolonial Theory: meet Colonial Fact

This message came through on the Varsity wires:

A reminder of the High Commissioner's visit on Monday. The visiting party will include Brigadier-General Olivier Tramond, Commander of French Armed Forces in New Caledonia. This is a rare opportunity for students and staff to engage in discussion. Please disseminate widely.

New Caledonia: from the troubles of the 1980s to today

A lecture by His Excellency, Mr Yves Dassonville, French High Commissioner to New Caledonia

The High Commissioner is keen to engage with staff and students

· to explain the political situation in New Caledonia and its relationship with France to a wide New Zealand audience, and

· to discuss, and arrive at a deeper understanding of, issues around 'partnership with indigenous peoples' and 'self government in free association'

Monday 23 August 10am to 11.00am

At the Fale Pasifika

All welcome

A rare opportunity indeed; for once we can stop beating ourselves up about our own race issues, and witness old-fashioned colonialism in action.

What's more, it is being held at the Fale Pasifika, the most patronising building on campus, the one that says to the Polynesian students "look, we built you a fale, just like you have at home." Apparently, the building - by JASMAX of course - is a functional disaster. The envionmental controls simply do not work: it is too hot in summer, too cold in winter. The acoustics are awful as well, which is something of a shortcoming for a building designed for meetings. In any case, speakers cannot hear themselves speak because of the motorway nearby. The building has none of the usual environmental controls because its designers were determined to make it look like a building type which is quite unsuited to modern use and to a temperate environment. In short, it is an epic fale.

I do hope they have vin et fromage.

From Fulchester to Walmington-on-Sea

Apropos my previous post, I decided I should add to the small number (two) of Sci-Fi films with titles taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

My contribution, Evil Liver, was inspired by the Rubric on confession before Communion. But then (read, mark learn and inwardly digest) I remembered the time I wrote The Last Starfighter; well, not so much wrote the film, but wrote a synopsis for a screenplay which had an identical plot to The Last Starfighter - a film which I had not seen, although it had been made some twenty years earlier. So, I did the Google thing, and found that Evil Liver was an episode of Crown Court, one written by New Zealand's own Dame Ngaio Marsh (any gentle reader who does not know Crown Court clearly did not grow up in Britain in the 1970s, an admirable accomplishment in itself but one which might cause the reader to be a little confused).

Speaking of court, what a wonderful thing it would be to have a counsel like Guyon Foley, who represented Mr Roger McClay thus:

In his defence submissions, Mr Foley outlined McClay's record of "tireless" public service and said the fraud was baffling in comparison to that background.

If convicted, he would lose his ex-MP travel entitlements - 12 domestic flights and one international, worth up to $30,000 a year.

"That is not inconsequential for Mr McClay. That is in effect a fine of $30,000 every year for the rest of his life," said Mr Foley.

If any rhetoricians among the gentle readership should ever be looking to explain the word "specious," this example should suffice.

I am still waiting for the Sensible Sentencing Trust to be outraged at the community sentence given to Mr McClay. After all, he was already working for the community, and look what he did there.

On the other hand, I am pleased to discover that the Vodafone Warriors have a Captain Mannering.

Anglican Sci-Fi

My friend Tony told me I do not blog enough about religion. So here is a question. Is World Without End the only Science Fiction film to take its name from the Book of Common Prayer?

















Image from Wrong Side of the Art

House of want

"It will be bereft of the technology and comfort people expect to see."Mr Davies confirmed yesterday what peer reviewers reported in 2008, that aspects of the facility - kitchen fit-outs, turnstiles, scoreboards and replay screens - were "not in the base build", and he expected the final figure to pay for all he required would be a seven-figure sum.

Asked about the issue, Carisbrook Stadium Trust chairman Malcolm Farry said last night he accepted any funding from trusts or other providers would mean other organisations could miss out.

That included the Otago Youth Wellness Trust, of which he was chairman.

"That's the way life is, I suppose," Mr Farry said

Really? The costing for Dunedin's new stadium did not include provision for a few things - kitchens, turnstiles, scoreboards, replay screens; and so a trust which "supported 11- to 18-year-olds with case management using social workers, and provided mentoring, educational support and health services liaison and information" might lose out on funding . That's just the way it is?

How are they going to explain this to the kids? "Sorry son, we can't help you; but look on the bright side: at least they have toilets at the stadium." And how can Mr Davis be so blithe about the matter? The base build lacked several items which are pretty basic for a sports stadium, which looks like pretty dishonest costing from where I am sitting (in a building which includes toilets, incidentally). Yet Mr Davis is confident that he will receive funding for such items. And Mr Farry thinks the money will come from trusts.

If I were a sports commentator I would say something hyperbolic like "this is a felt-pen moko on the face of our national game" but instead I will move right along to the latest results.

Stadium: Millions
Dunedin: Nil

Tally Ho:

Bad Taste of the Town

Editorial cartoonists, by custom, are allowed a degree of freedom which other newspaper staff do not enjoy. That said, one has to wonder why nobody at the Herald told Rod Emmerson to go away and draw something else when they saw this cartoon. Or is the typical Auckland reaction to any crisis - "yes, but what about our house prices" - now editorial policy at the Herald?

Think how this one might play in Karam Pur, a village in the Sindh province. Not that well, given that the village no longer exists and I expect this family have more to worry about than property prices. Perhaps the Herald should talk to one of the 14 million people affected by the floods, such as mother of six Sabhagi Khatoon:

"We have nothing to eat, nothing to live in. We've been starving for days, so the start of Ramadan doesn't bring any joy.

"We used to celebrate Ramadan in a big way in our village, but my children and I are already starving. We need food, so we're already fasting in a way."

So what might someone Pakistan think of Aucklanders? Might it be something along the lines of "you selfish, whining pricks? [Wrong] And what might they think of our Government, which has donated nothing? [/Wrong: see Terence's comment]Might it be something like "obviously, we are only good for cricket?

I think we should be told.

Art historical note: my title comes from a much better satirist than Rod Emmerson: William Hogarth

Tomorrow belongs to topiary

And this I know: if I attempt to say something about some important thing, I shall probably offend somebody. So, instead, here is a photograph of Mr Al Stovall and some topiary animals at his Inn of Tommorrow in Anaheim, California. Who would have thought that ornamental shrubs would have a place in the sci-fi future? Of course, they did not, and neither did the future have a place in the future.

These pictures come from the Googie wonderland that is Synthetrix

An institutionalised racist

Professor Mutu said it was important that Mr Harawira's comments were taken in context. Her first husband was Pakeha and her mother is English and Scottish. But she defended the mindset of those Maori who continued to feel prejudice against Pakeha. "They know that when these [Pakeha] kids come in, they bring Pakeha attitudes. And not all Pakeha are bad - you'll always hear about a lovely Pakeha daughter-in-law. But when they first come in, [the Maori family] are suspicious - and those suspicions are grounded."

I don't mind so much about Hone Harawira. As the Mr Rudman observes, he is old and in the way, a relic of an unkinder past. As Mr George reveals, Mr Harawira and he have much in common.

No, it is Professor Mutu who bothers me. She has a real job, a position of responsibility at the University in which I have the honour of being a student. Had she been Pakeha, she would have been sacked for making similar comments about Maori. Professor Paul Buchanan was sacked (unfairly) for less.

Let's face it, Professor Mutu is a racist. Of course, many white folks will not face it. Instead they will contort themselves to avoid the fact, claiming (as some do) that it is only white folks who can be racist, or that we have to view such bile in some wider context that exonerates the Professor from responsibility. But no, she is a Racist. And something of a sexist as well - those lovely daughters-in-law. And what are the Pakeha attitudes to which she objects - the propensity to form relationships with people of other races, the unwillingness to preserve bloodlines? I think we should be told.

And she should be sacked. We don't want her kind around here.

Carpetbagging , redefined

Auckland District Court Judge Jan Doogue delivered her not guilty verdict at noon today, the directors, Tim Saunders, John Feeney, Peter David Hunter, John Hagen and Peter Thomas, were each charged with two breaches of the Financial Reporting Act.

Doogue said the directors were "all honest men" who had conducted
themselves with integrity.

The Crown alleged the directors failed to disclose the company was in breach of its A$100 million loan with ANZ, and that the company's debt with the bank was current, meaning it was on call.

The directors all concede now that those details were not disclosed in the accounts to December 31, 2005, but they claim at the time
they believed the statements met all the necessary requirements under the accounting standards.

It was only an 'undred million, guv; hardly worth mentioning, so we didn't mention it.

Or, to put it another way, believing that one's deceit meets all the necessary requirements of the accounting standards is now considered to be acting with integrity, the action of honest men. Although those men knew about the default on the $100 million debt and chose not to tell the shareholders of the company they were mismanaging, their apparent belief that the accounting standards allowed them to do so makes their deception a matter of integrity.

In effect, the phrase "they thought they could get away with it" is now synonymous with "they thought they were doing the right thing."

Short, controlling and abusive.

Weatherston stabbed and cut the stunning 22-year-old Dunedin student 216 times in January 2008 after a short, controlling and abusive relationship.

During his trial he revolted Kiwis by trying to claim she had provoked his murderous rage.

Sophie Elliott's Auckland-based cousin Linda Curtis said she had recently stopped sobbing "every other day" over losing her cousin in such horrific circumstances but the TV2 weeknight drama had made her "re-live" the nightmare.

Shortland Street student Sophie McKay, played by Kimberley Crossman, had recently entered into an on-screen relationship with lecturer Ash Fuller (Bryce Langston), which has been short, controlling and abusive.

Sub splutters: Shortland Street stalker storyline shocks fans, family. Just in case you did not get the message, that this story is really important because it is about Sophie Elliot and Shortland Street (tragedy + celebrity = significance), I have emboldened the key adjectives.