Mark,
I spent only two weeks in Australia, but shared your
experience of the country and the gender aspect. I
also ran into some hostility (because I'm an American,
I suppose), but that was rare and I enjoyed the slower
pace. I also envied the poets there, who are known and
respected. Frankly, I wanted to live there!
Candice
"I'm holding out for that teenage feeling"
(Neko Case)
--- Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Agreed--good piece.
>
> McCauley's rhetoric, in his verse and in his reply
> to Jen, reminded
> me of local bullies like Rush Limbaugh, with I
> assume similar
> motivations. On the one hand, there's bigotry as a
> career-builder. I
> bet this guy gets speaking gigs and publication on
> the strength of
> it, and he may not even believe all of it in his
> heart-of-hearts. I'm
> suggesting that there's a degree of cold-blooded
> calculation. It's
> quite possible, for instance, that Benny Hill of
> sainted memory had
> excellent table manners when he wasn't on stage. On
> the other hand,
> there's what appears to be the real thing--the
> globalization of one's
> personal situation and personal resentments, a
> substitute for thought
> that we're all capable of but that we're supposed to
> be in dialogue with.
>
> The US and Australia share a mythology of the
> frontier. In its US
> version white men came to a place so close to empty
> that the
> aboriginals count as a nuisance except when they're
> teachers, and
> anyway they never developed the place and needed to
> be displaced.
> This required strong men, whose job it was to
> civilize the land, and
> strong women, whose job it was to civilize the men.
> In the US, at any
> rate, this was always a myth. The men who first
> entered the various
> wildernesses tended to be incapable of social life.
> Few of them
> became civilized. They were simply displaced by
> families. Fennimore
> Cooper, who was a lot closer in time and place to
> the event,
> understood this: Natty Bumpo is as threatened by
> extinction as his
> Indian friends.
>
> The perpetuation of the myth has meant that large
> numbers of men in
> the US continue to spend a part of their emotional
> lives feeling
> deprived of a freedom that mostly existed among the
> marginal and in
> the penny-dreadfuls and the movies. Hence the
> western. Remarkably,
> the engines of entertainment have managed to impart
> this to recent
> immigrant groups. For myself as a child, I
> internalized two myths,
> the one that ran from slavery in Egypt to
> deprivation in Eastern
> Europe to the perilous ocean crossing and security
> in the US, and the
> one in which I rode alone into the unknown. I
> suspect that the latter
> has fueled my love of large empty spaces.
>
> I assume that the situation in Australia is similar.
> Crocodile Dundee
> is as good an escape fantasy as most westerns.
>
> Behind the fantasy is the mass of lives of quiet
> desperation, where
> the majority spend their working lives staring at
> Bartleby's blank
> wall and men, at any rate, often think that if not
> for the wife and
> children they could live lives of instinctual
> freedom. But that's I
> think changing, in the middle class at least.
> Increasingly men and
> women stare equally at the same wall, and the dream
> increasingly
> seems to be to escape together. Periodically there's
> a rash of
> articles about couples who chuck it all and start
> vinyards, or B&B's,
> or something that allows them a degree of
> flexibility. And the
> airwaves are filled with ads for young-looking
> couples in happy
> retirement. And in fact these days when I go into
> the big empty
> spaces I find couples or small groups of women
> carrying backpacks as
> often as I find groups of men or individual walkers.
>
> I divided my month in Australia between cities and
> outback. In Sydney
> I bunked with an ex-student and her apartment mate,
> two heterosexual
> women in their early 30s who were adventurous to a
> fault. I spent
> time with them and their friends of all genders, and
> I never saw my
> friends become passive in the face of male argument.
> And I got to
> hang out, there and in Melbourne, with women like
> Alison and Jill
> Jones, nobody's patsies. In most places I stayed in
> hostels or camped
> out, and I met lots of rugged young couples. I was
> struck by the
> independence of the women and the sweetness of the
> men. I saw no
> macho posturing. Very different from what I'd been
> given to expect.
> But of course it was only a month, and I can't claim
> a very deep
> knowledge. But I carry with me the memory of young
> couples on
> enormous cattle stations in the middle of the
> desert, the children of
> unpleasant men who probably came close to fitting
> thetraditional
> image, but who appeared nonetheless to treat each
> other as equals.
>
> I think I've wandered way off-point. I'm suggesting
> that there are a
> lot of McCauleys out there, in both countries, but
> that vulnerability
> to their appeal is fueled by old myths, and by
> current frustrations
> that have little to do with gender but get expressed
> through the
> available rhetoric of gender. That those who have a
> pretty tenuous
> hold on their impulses, and there are a lot of them,
> are sometimes
> motivated to violence by that rhetoric. And that for
> the majority of
> men, and probably women, there's a disconnect
> between the lives they
> actually,and willingly, lead, and the aspirations
> they have for those
> lives, and the kernel of the myth that they hold
> onto, because it's
> what's available to them, as an escape fantasy.
>
> It would be nice if the myth we carried within us
> were more communal
> and less solitary. Though that, too, has its
> dangers.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
>
> At 07:02 AM 1/29/2007, you wrote:
> >very nice piece alison - well said - and it is
> perfectly all right
> >to use me - typical impetuosity eh???
> >cheers - jen
> >
> >----Original Message Follows----
> >From: andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>
> >Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue
> relating to poetry and
> > poetics <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: Re: Bad poetry, etc
> >Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:10:49 +0800
> >
> >Thanks, Alison. Well said.
> >
> >Andrew
> >http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
> >
> >On 29/01/07, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>Thanks, Kaspar. Andrew, in the end, finding this
> whole thing was
> >>bothering me deeply, I posted a fairly extended
> response on
> >>Sarsaparilla, including some of the disucssion
> here -
> >>http://sarsaparillablog.net/?p=483 - no way am I
> entering the enemy's
> >>territory on this one.
> >>
> >>All the best
> >>
> >>Alison
> >>
>
=== message truncated ===
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