The everything genius of Friedrich Nietzsche
“The judgement ‘good’ did not originate with those to whom ‘goodness’ was shown!”
- On the Genealogy of Morals p.23
9/24/2006
9/16/2006
9/10/2006
The post-colonial genius of Samuel Beckett
When she had finished her grave she handed me the spade and began to muse, or brood. I thought she was going to cry, it was the thing to do, but on the contrary she laughed. It was perhaps her way of crying. Or perhaps I was mistaken and she was really crying, with the noise of laughter. Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
Molloy (1959), p.35
9/8/2006
Karol: the touching story of a man who would be king
Well that clinches it. The new computer will have to wait.
9/7/2006
Getta loada *this* cultural cringe! Crikey!
If there’s one thing that irks me in Australian public debate, it’s the use of the term politically correct, inevitably in aid of putting someone down, such as Kevin Rudd on Germaine Greer about Steve Irwin yesterday. Despite the rights or wrongs of Greer’s behaviour, labelling someone as ‘politically correct’ is such a strategy in the Australian media: aimed at reducing someone’s heartfelt - usually counter-cultural - lived values into a mealy-mouthed, anally-retentive pernickety-ness, and to thereby re-confirm mainstream values. In Australia, said values are seemingly embodied in Steve Irwin: the man who called John Howard the greatest leader the country’s ever had and thought Bob Brown ought to be ‘taken out the back and given a belting’ for interjecting during George Bush’s address to Parliament. Now there’s some values. Are they all like that in Queensland? Maybe I should move there.
9/1/2006
PhDs Dumb You Down: Evidence
1. Recent conversation at the Botanic Gardens:
Me: So I’m thinking of making a pay-per-view website called MangyRandyPigeons.com.
Dr. Beloved: Really? What about SkankyAnimals.com? Then you could include that ibis over there (points to ibis with broken wing and bald patch on its neck who has clearly just eaten 12 cold chips, a kid’s sandwich stolen directly out of said kid’s hand, and the dregs of a Fruit Box, including the Box).
Me: Yeah! And that seagull (points to seagull that is squawking threateningly at all the other seagulls who are gathered around the 13th cold chip). I bet that’s the bastard seagull.
Dr. Beloved: Yeah totes. The one that everyone hates but secretly relies on to secure food.
Me: Yeah totes.
2. Habit of breaking into an Afrikaner accent at any given moment, e.g. at the greengrocer last night: “Ahll hev twoh ohv those bleck begs for the tomawhthoes thenkhyouh. When I mek a pawhsta sauwhce I don’t do it by hawhlves”. This habit arose after reading a recent article by John Safran, where he notes that the current popularity of a Zionist in certain quarters rates somewhere below a combination of an 80’s Afrikaner and a 90’s Serb.
More to come.