...if the infinite technological reproduction of the penis in the utilitarian plastic form of straws jeopardizes the aura and authority of the original object? Whether this reproduction does not, in fact, liquidate the value of the cultural heritage of the phallus?
Your hen's night paraphernalia doesn't seem so innocent now, DOES IT? How does it feel, eh, knowing you're contributing, via the endless copying of the original object, to its inevitable devaluation as a unique artifact? Did you notice this ENTIRE post is composed of rhetorical questions? Except that one, which wasn't really rhetorical, because you may or may not have noticed, and I'm genuinely interested?
4.3.10
2.3.10
How To Get Your Novel Scoffed At
Friday was my last day of work at the publishing company where I answered phones for the last two years. I did an extremely good job of pretending I really didn't like it. In reality, I LIVED for the crazy wannabes who ring up and pitch their retarded ideas for books. A large percentage of them were old men from 'God's country' (north Queensland, FYI) or teacher librarians. My dad's a teacher librarian, and he's not an aspiring children's author (THAT I KNOW OF), but he is the exception which proves that the rule is, while not infallible, definitely justified. The catchcry among those in children's publishing is, essentially, 'FUCKING teacher librarian authors! Why don't they just ACCEPT that their book is a FLOP and GET OVER IT AND STOP CALLING ME?' The general consensus is that the whole process of publishing would be much smoother without the hassle of involving authors, who really only make trouble.
There was one author who would ring with great regularity, although I know for a fact her last and only book was published five years ago and there is no likelihood of her ever publishing another, and as soon as I picked up the phone she would just... sigh. It would go thus: me: 'Publisher Australia, this is Jennifer.' Author: 'UUUUUURRRGHHHH.... heh-lloooohhh Je-heh-nifer.' Me: 'Oh hello I'll put you through.' *gets off the phone as quickly as possible* If the person she was looking for wasn't there (like, maybe they were having a wee, or eating a sandwich, or away from their desk for three and a half seconds) she would call back and sigh, 'Uuuuughh, is the-hehh-re EVE-heh-n any POINT?' to which I would WANT to respond, 'No, no there's not, you're a big fat failure and nobody wants to talk to you. You may as well go DIE.' Instead I would say, 'I'll send her an email and make sure she knows you called', because, in spite of all appearances and protestations, I was actually quite good at my job. Then I would send this email: 'That author rang. I told her I 'd tell you she called so you could call her so she could SIGH at you.'
I had one call from a guy who introduced himself, then paused, and when I said, 'Yes?' he cried, 'You mean you HAVEN'T HEARD OF blah blah blah something about the self made millionaires from Queensland who were brought down by the big corporations or some such Aussie battler style nonsense?' I was Googling him AS he spoke, and he wasn't anywhere on the internet, so I could honestly say, 'No.' And thus his book pitch was a failure, on account of him claiming to be famous when he wasn't even on Google.
Many was the time I offered to Google something for a caller, and they totally failed to catch the intense sarcasm in my tone as I sneered, 'Just let me GOOGLE THAT FOR YOU, HMMM?' I think many callers thought I had a special publishers' Google with which I could access sites hidden from their civilian browsers.
I had old men pitching books about their lives which were essentially books about them spending their entire life trying to write the book of their life, on account of they couldn't read or write.
I had a man from a record company call and ask if we would publish a book with a CD attached. No, I said, we only look at submissions which come through literary agents, CDs or lack thereof notwithstanding. 'Oh,' he says, 'I'm calling from a record company.'
'That's nice. You want to publish a novel?'
'Yes, that's right. With a CD.'
'You'll need a literary agent.'
'But we're a record company, so wouldn't we, technically, BE a literary agent?'
'No. Agent. Literary. As in, actually has to do with actual books.'
And then, of course, there were the letters, which were unspeakable. UNSPEAKABLY AWESOME, THAT IS.
I think I'm going to miss my job. Oh, also there were people who were quite nice, and fairly cool, and also extremely daggy, and always very chatty. And when you're used to having three dozen conversations before 11am it's a bit weird to suddenly be talking to no one at all for most of the day.
There was one author who would ring with great regularity, although I know for a fact her last and only book was published five years ago and there is no likelihood of her ever publishing another, and as soon as I picked up the phone she would just... sigh. It would go thus: me: 'Publisher Australia, this is Jennifer.' Author: 'UUUUUURRRGHHHH.... heh-lloooohhh Je-heh-nifer.' Me: 'Oh hello I'll put you through.' *gets off the phone as quickly as possible* If the person she was looking for wasn't there (like, maybe they were having a wee, or eating a sandwich, or away from their desk for three and a half seconds) she would call back and sigh, 'Uuuuughh, is the-hehh-re EVE-heh-n any POINT?' to which I would WANT to respond, 'No, no there's not, you're a big fat failure and nobody wants to talk to you. You may as well go DIE.' Instead I would say, 'I'll send her an email and make sure she knows you called', because, in spite of all appearances and protestations, I was actually quite good at my job. Then I would send this email: 'That author rang. I told her I 'd tell you she called so you could call her so she could SIGH at you.'
I had one call from a guy who introduced himself, then paused, and when I said, 'Yes?' he cried, 'You mean you HAVEN'T HEARD OF blah blah blah something about the self made millionaires from Queensland who were brought down by the big corporations or some such Aussie battler style nonsense?' I was Googling him AS he spoke, and he wasn't anywhere on the internet, so I could honestly say, 'No.' And thus his book pitch was a failure, on account of him claiming to be famous when he wasn't even on Google.
Many was the time I offered to Google something for a caller, and they totally failed to catch the intense sarcasm in my tone as I sneered, 'Just let me GOOGLE THAT FOR YOU, HMMM?' I think many callers thought I had a special publishers' Google with which I could access sites hidden from their civilian browsers.
I had old men pitching books about their lives which were essentially books about them spending their entire life trying to write the book of their life, on account of they couldn't read or write.
I had a man from a record company call and ask if we would publish a book with a CD attached. No, I said, we only look at submissions which come through literary agents, CDs or lack thereof notwithstanding. 'Oh,' he says, 'I'm calling from a record company.'
'That's nice. You want to publish a novel?'
'Yes, that's right. With a CD.'
'You'll need a literary agent.'
'But we're a record company, so wouldn't we, technically, BE a literary agent?'
'No. Agent. Literary. As in, actually has to do with actual books.'
And then, of course, there were the letters, which were unspeakable. UNSPEAKABLY AWESOME, THAT IS.
I think I'm going to miss my job. Oh, also there were people who were quite nice, and fairly cool, and also extremely daggy, and always very chatty. And when you're used to having three dozen conversations before 11am it's a bit weird to suddenly be talking to no one at all for most of the day.
23.2.10
HUMBUG
This quote pretty much sums up my feelings about hen's nights, weddings, 21st birthdays, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and church:
"The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that's the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That's the tradition, they explain." - Nicolas Chamfort, 1741 - 1794.
And this is how I feel about the opinions of people I might offend by being against said absurd customs:
"Other people's heads are too wretched a place for happiness to have its seat." - Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860
Yes, I'm reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton, and I'm enjoying the 'Intelligent Misanthropy' section VERY MUCH INDEED.
"The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that's the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That's the tradition, they explain." - Nicolas Chamfort, 1741 - 1794.
And this is how I feel about the opinions of people I might offend by being against said absurd customs:
"Other people's heads are too wretched a place for happiness to have its seat." - Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860
Yes, I'm reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton, and I'm enjoying the 'Intelligent Misanthropy' section VERY MUCH INDEED.
21.2.10
The Outdoorsman
I posted this blog a few months ago on my Wordpress which... yeah I forgot I had it. Since then there have been developments which I will maybe elaborate on later.
Since we bought our apartment, The Library, only a couple of months ago we haven’t been to a strata meeting yet or any of those other fun events where home owners get to celebrate with their fellow flat moguls. I imagine a strata meeting is just a bunch of landlords swimming in the sinking fund, which is a hole in the ground full of money. I have a sound knowledge of the ways of the asset-rich.
So the only neighbour whose name I know is The Outdoorsman. The Outdoorsman is obviously a clever pseudonym for the guy who lives downstairs from us, an aging rockabilly with nipple length dyed black hair who spends all his time, the time he isn’t playing Hendrix-ian guitar solos, that is, standing in his doorway having loud conversations with other members of his band, or young acolytes. Quote: “Hey man, you can do whatever you want with your life, you know? I mean, look at me, I’m forty and I’m… ” *trails off since he can’t say “and I’m doing great” because he’s clearly living alone in an apartment with as many square metres as he has years, playing 70’s style guitar and drinking. Alone*
The Outdoorsman rushes upstairs whenever I hammer something (which is surprisingly often) and shouts at me, “ARE YOU BANGIN COZ YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THE MUSIC? COZ YOU CAN COME DOWN AND SAY SOMETHIN, YOU KNOW?”
Uh, yeah, I know, I was hammering something…
“YEAH COZ YOU KNOW IF THE MUSIC EVER MAKES IT SO YOU CAN’T RELAX, YOU KNOW, OR YOUR DUDE, IF YOUR DUDE HAS A PROBLEM, YOU KNOW, YOU CAN JUST COME AND SAY SOMETHING, THAT’S TOTALLY FINE.”
Yep, umm, ok, I’ll let my… uhh… dude know, thanks, I’m going back to my hammering now…
He continued to assure me, aggressively assure me, that any time I or my dude wanted to relax, we could just knock on his doorframe, and tell him so. Yeah, yeah sure, I’ll totally do that, next time I want to be pushed off a third floor balcony by a small statured rockabilly vampire.
Since we bought our apartment, The Library, only a couple of months ago we haven’t been to a strata meeting yet or any of those other fun events where home owners get to celebrate with their fellow flat moguls. I imagine a strata meeting is just a bunch of landlords swimming in the sinking fund, which is a hole in the ground full of money. I have a sound knowledge of the ways of the asset-rich.
So the only neighbour whose name I know is The Outdoorsman. The Outdoorsman is obviously a clever pseudonym for the guy who lives downstairs from us, an aging rockabilly with nipple length dyed black hair who spends all his time, the time he isn’t playing Hendrix-ian guitar solos, that is, standing in his doorway having loud conversations with other members of his band, or young acolytes. Quote: “Hey man, you can do whatever you want with your life, you know? I mean, look at me, I’m forty and I’m… ” *trails off since he can’t say “and I’m doing great” because he’s clearly living alone in an apartment with as many square metres as he has years, playing 70’s style guitar and drinking. Alone*
The Outdoorsman rushes upstairs whenever I hammer something (which is surprisingly often) and shouts at me, “ARE YOU BANGIN COZ YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THE MUSIC? COZ YOU CAN COME DOWN AND SAY SOMETHIN, YOU KNOW?”
Uh, yeah, I know, I was hammering something…
“YEAH COZ YOU KNOW IF THE MUSIC EVER MAKES IT SO YOU CAN’T RELAX, YOU KNOW, OR YOUR DUDE, IF YOUR DUDE HAS A PROBLEM, YOU KNOW, YOU CAN JUST COME AND SAY SOMETHING, THAT’S TOTALLY FINE.”
Yep, umm, ok, I’ll let my… uhh… dude know, thanks, I’m going back to my hammering now…
He continued to assure me, aggressively assure me, that any time I or my dude wanted to relax, we could just knock on his doorframe, and tell him so. Yeah, yeah sure, I’ll totally do that, next time I want to be pushed off a third floor balcony by a small statured rockabilly vampire.
17.2.10
...and then you die.
'Why don't you wash behind your ears?'
'When you wash there, you just encourage things to live there. They go, "Oh, we'll move in here, it's nice and clean back here. Then let's kill him."'
'When you wash there, you just encourage things to live there. They go, "Oh, we'll move in here, it's nice and clean back here. Then let's kill him."'
16.2.10
Here comes the battery hen...
Narrow and I have to go to a buck's and a hen's night, respectively. We are TERRIFIED.
I don't understand the purpose of buck's and hen's nights. The etymology even offends me. The connotation being that while the man is a free roaming wild creature, virile, powerful and independent, the woman is a clucking, broody, fat little thing stupidly running around in circles, scratching in the dirt and building up her nest to lay her many eggs.
A hen's night is a celebration of the things a hen represents: fertility, dependence, the catching of a man with your tiny malicious talons. A stag night is the mourning of the loss of all the things a man is supposed to want: wildness, freedom, ceaseless rutting of any and all things with tails.
Aside from the names, then there's the actual activities these nights entail. The female party celebrates the impending marriage with rituals of sympathetic magic: the construction of wedding dresses from toilet paper by the bridesmaids (to bring about weddings for the unmarried girls), the sculpting of plastic phalluses (beseeching the gods to endow the groom with rigidity and largesse), and the pinning while blindfolded of the penis onto the poster of the naked man, a ritual to bless the bride with seductive arts in the bedroom. And all the while, huge quantities of strawberry daquiri must be imbibed, to sustain the illusion that what they're doing is sexy and fearless, rather than sad and unimaginative.
In the meantime, the groom's friends must try their utmost to steer him from the path of self destruction he has taken. The method is quite simple - parade in front of him the many wonders he will no longer know once he is married: never-ending geysers of beer and Jagermeister, bars full of roaring drunk men, and of course a naked woman.
Under no circumstances should the two groups meet, regardless of the many other nights which they may have enjoyed as a co-ed group. If they did, the mutual disgust each group would feel for the behaviour of the other would result in an instant break of the union, and those of any other couples therein, a kink in the space-time continuum which would change the pattern of history.
That the happy couple must be divided in order to enjoy the evening, and that there is an air of mourning around the male celebration, and one of self-conscious raunch around the female one, is really just sad. To me, the upshot of feminism should have been that men and women would view each other not as adversaries but as friends, as essentially the same and equal. Instead, after nominal equality was gained, it all went right back to where it started.
Only now, instead of being fetishised by men, we fetishise ourselves. By participating in these outmoded rituals we only entrench the idea that women are worthless if they aren't sexy, and that men are deeply different and apart (although not necessarily superior). Why the hell would you want a stripper at your buck's night? You are going to be LIVING with a woman, who will be naked at least twice a day, for the rest of your life! It's particularly pointless these days, where most likely you've already been living with that woman for years.
The same goes for the hens - dicking around with plastic penises as if you've never seen one in your LIFE and it's so HILARIOUS because it's so NAUGHTY to play with genitalia! Go find me a pack of pink straws shaped like vaginas and I'll tell you that we're on an equal footing. Although I'll grant you they're less conveniently designed for ease of drinking.
Not to mention that if you're a couple with an engaged pair as friends, you BOTH have to go to these nights, or even whole weekends, and it costs a FORTUNE. We're going to end up in the poorhouse, and we're not even going to enjoy ourselves on the way.
I don't understand the purpose of buck's and hen's nights. The etymology even offends me. The connotation being that while the man is a free roaming wild creature, virile, powerful and independent, the woman is a clucking, broody, fat little thing stupidly running around in circles, scratching in the dirt and building up her nest to lay her many eggs.
A hen's night is a celebration of the things a hen represents: fertility, dependence, the catching of a man with your tiny malicious talons. A stag night is the mourning of the loss of all the things a man is supposed to want: wildness, freedom, ceaseless rutting of any and all things with tails.
Aside from the names, then there's the actual activities these nights entail. The female party celebrates the impending marriage with rituals of sympathetic magic: the construction of wedding dresses from toilet paper by the bridesmaids (to bring about weddings for the unmarried girls), the sculpting of plastic phalluses (beseeching the gods to endow the groom with rigidity and largesse), and the pinning while blindfolded of the penis onto the poster of the naked man, a ritual to bless the bride with seductive arts in the bedroom. And all the while, huge quantities of strawberry daquiri must be imbibed, to sustain the illusion that what they're doing is sexy and fearless, rather than sad and unimaginative.
In the meantime, the groom's friends must try their utmost to steer him from the path of self destruction he has taken. The method is quite simple - parade in front of him the many wonders he will no longer know once he is married: never-ending geysers of beer and Jagermeister, bars full of roaring drunk men, and of course a naked woman.
Under no circumstances should the two groups meet, regardless of the many other nights which they may have enjoyed as a co-ed group. If they did, the mutual disgust each group would feel for the behaviour of the other would result in an instant break of the union, and those of any other couples therein, a kink in the space-time continuum which would change the pattern of history.
That the happy couple must be divided in order to enjoy the evening, and that there is an air of mourning around the male celebration, and one of self-conscious raunch around the female one, is really just sad. To me, the upshot of feminism should have been that men and women would view each other not as adversaries but as friends, as essentially the same and equal. Instead, after nominal equality was gained, it all went right back to where it started.
Only now, instead of being fetishised by men, we fetishise ourselves. By participating in these outmoded rituals we only entrench the idea that women are worthless if they aren't sexy, and that men are deeply different and apart (although not necessarily superior). Why the hell would you want a stripper at your buck's night? You are going to be LIVING with a woman, who will be naked at least twice a day, for the rest of your life! It's particularly pointless these days, where most likely you've already been living with that woman for years.
The same goes for the hens - dicking around with plastic penises as if you've never seen one in your LIFE and it's so HILARIOUS because it's so NAUGHTY to play with genitalia! Go find me a pack of pink straws shaped like vaginas and I'll tell you that we're on an equal footing. Although I'll grant you they're less conveniently designed for ease of drinking.
Not to mention that if you're a couple with an engaged pair as friends, you BOTH have to go to these nights, or even whole weekends, and it costs a FORTUNE. We're going to end up in the poorhouse, and we're not even going to enjoy ourselves on the way.
7.2.10
Speed kills
Narrow's been working way out in the middle of nowhere this weekend, like, north of Hornsby, which I'm pretty sure is the arctic circle, or at least the equator. He rang me yesterday to ask if there were any speed cameras between Hornsby and Greenland because he'd probably been going over the freeway speed limit, but it WAS RAINING SO HARD HE WOULDN'T HAVE SEEN THE 'HERE COMES A SPEED CAMERA' SIGNS. Again: he was going faster than one hundred and ten kilometres an hour, in rain so pelting he couldn't see off the side of the road. And when I say, 'You'll have an accident', his response is, 'No I won't, I don't feel like I'm out of control.'
Because every person who's ever had a high speed accident in the rain on the freeway knew that they were not in control of the vehicle well before they lost it completely and rolled towards their fiery doom. The only reason people have accidents is they suffer a crisis of confidence.
Because every person who's ever had a high speed accident in the rain on the freeway knew that they were not in control of the vehicle well before they lost it completely and rolled towards their fiery doom. The only reason people have accidents is they suffer a crisis of confidence.
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