Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  Authors are no longer prophets, or barometers of the social climate. Many authors never liked being barometers anyhow.

  Books

  The source of all other art, the King of Arts, but not there to provide answers. Now called the text by some. You may hear some critics say, ‘There is only one book and we are all writing it.’ That is a put-down of authors.

  They will tell you that books are not written by ‘authors’ but are the intersection of social forces and other books (called intertextuality). While the author is no longer a barometer, he or she is more like a set of traffic lights which direct the social traffic of other books and ideas and the stew of the times. Some say this does not dethrone the author and nor is the author a traffic light or a barometer, that the author is more like a chief executive officer of the factory which produces an interplay of social forces, intertextuality, literary theory, and history, and deserves a much higher income.

  Imaginative Writing

  Now called the text. Exists to create theory.

  Feminism

  Now many types. Must be present but in a light, unthreatening way.

  If you are a man say nothing about feminism. If you are a woman say, ‘So-called “women’s writing” is too exclusive a label – I refuse to be ghettoed.’

  Marxism

  Is a quaint set of ideas that many artists once had (until last year) but will now distance themselves from and joke about as if it were an aberration of youth. Can be fondly remembered, as in, ‘We actors were required to go to lectures on Marxism but I was never really a serious Marxist – the nearest I ever got to the industrial proletariat was jumping into bed with a muscular truck driver who delivered the party paper.’

  Politics

  There are variants here.

  Variant a) Suitable only for satire.

  Variant b) There doesn’t have to be a stand-off between art and politics as long as the politics cannot be detected by the reader and the work doesn’t provide answers.

  Variant c) Who’s right-wing and who’s left-wing these days?

  Variant d) Some things are too urgent – the planet must be saved, art can come later.

  Sex

  A good thing in art and may be a good thing outside art too. Was not there before the sixties. Not to be confused with pornography. May have been too much of it in the sixties. There is something called ‘the obligatory sex scene’ which is to be avoided in art and is a hangover from the sixties.

  Pornography

  Once something to guiltily enjoy and defend the rights of even if it was not your cup of tea. Still a guilty enjoyment but more guilty now because of some feminist opposition. May or may not be ideologically unsound. Is itself a narrative. Is characterised by the use of sex in an ideologically disordered way. Confused because of the uncertainty of what is happening in the mind of the reader of pornography. Does it reduce threat and limitations of gender and sexuality? Is it only disordered play? May be gender confusion at its highest or lowest because the reader may be playing all the parts. Whether the erotica is commercial or not seems to change its value somehow.

  Reviewer

  Someone writing about ‘a book’. Usually suspected of having slept with the author, is sleeping with the author, would like to sleep with the author, which explains why the review is soft or hard in the case of the male reviewer, or enthusiastically embracing or coolly dismissive in the case of a female reviewer.

  Critic

  Someone who writes not about ‘one book’ but about the reading experience.

  Theorist

  Someone who writes about people writing about the reading experience. Does not sleep with the authors, enjoys instead the sensuality of the text.

  Metatheorist

  If theory is also narrative and maybe also fiction, we need theorists of theory to reveal the narrative of theory.

  Narrative

  Everything is narrative, everything tells a story, everything may, in the ultimate analysis, be ‘fiction’.

  Reader

  Is being urged to no longer worship the book (text). Is now urged to worship at the feet of theory. The act of reading is more important than the act of writing. There is no writing, only reading – the author does not ‘write’ the book. He or she, in ‘writing’ a book, becomes only ‘the first reader’ of the book. If you think you have no literary theory it means you are in the unconscious grip of some outdated theory. There is the possibility that we all are a mess of both earlier and advanced theory. There is also the possibility that we are unconsciously being taught our theory by reading advanced imaginative writing.

  Handling the Black Market

  At an arts festival you will find that many of the people present come from arts and crafts communities (mainly Tasmanians) who will pay highly for polyester clothing or factory-made cups and saucers. Likewise with greens, they will enjoy all manner of guilty pleasures if you offer them in the privacy of your hotel room – tobacco, a ride in a four-wheel drive, off-road recreational vehicle, a bloody steak, salt, sugar, alcohol, and coloured toilet paper.

  Handling the All-Ordinaries Index

  and Emotional Life.

  After being a clubbable Freudian for so long it came as an intellectual shock to discover that my emotional life was in some way tied to the all-ordinaries index. But then, looking back, I can see we had entered a time of economistic perception.

  Over recent years, as, in the club library, I idly studied those graphs which have become the accepted illustrations of our national health – almost the comic strips of our times – I kept sensing that I’d seen the all-ordinaries index line before. It seemed eerily familiar to me in a non-specific way – as if I were hearing someone else describing a dream that I’d had.

  The all-ordinaries index was, I realised, a chart of my emotional crises in the last ten years. But it was more than a chart, it was a drawing, using a graceful nervous line, and together with the dollar exchange rate line and the consumer price index, the interplay of these three lines was a portrait of my inner life.

  I have to say that my second reaction was that if I were to be tied to anything I really would prefer to be tied to the all-specials index, if there is such a thing – or maybe the fifty leaders index. I would have hoped that I had moved on from the all-ordinaries by now. But there you go, all is vanity.

  My life, like the all-ordinaries, was fairly flat in the late seventies, which I suppose could be described as my ‘flexible peg’ phase, a fairly fixed emotional life with some slight movement up and down. This sense of stability, or flatness if you prefer, correlated with the establishment of the National Companies and Securities Commission in late 1979: ‘company with security’ – the words leap out at me. It helped regulate mergers and takeovers and reinforced, in some ways, my effort to get myself in order. This was not to be easy. Although for a time then, I did have a fairly orderly merger going with Nola.

  Things went well enough until about the time of the removal of quantitive controls on bank lending in mid-1982. With the removal of these controls I was tempted by the easy money and the easy life and I went down for the rest of 1982, moving from one piano bar to another, a big spender, but not happy. The floating emotional world. The old days of the flexible peg looked good: I had then a peg at least, and could enjoy a little flexibility without the sensation of floating. I yearned to get back to company with security.

  This was not to be. Rocky times still lay ahead, further enflamed by the deregulation of the stock exchanges. But I decided that instead of slumping further I would try to make use of this deregulated freedom and go on leading a speculative, mature, risk-taking emotional life but I would try to enjoy it instead of yearning for the days of company with security.

  I should say that I don’t think that I was responding emotionally in a direct way to the economic movements. It was deeper than that. I am far from clear why this correlation should have shown up – but more on that later. I want to tell you about my life first. />
  Looking back on it, I can see that with deregulation I suffered some loss of nerve, some pessimism, but I began a great relationship with Fay, who lives in the UK, around the time that the ceiling on foreign ownership was lifted to fifty per cent in early 1985.

  When approval was given for fifteen new trading banks around the time that we also abandoned monetary targeting, I think that I became dazzled by my own confidence and the competing possibilities of my life: Fay in the UK, Diana in Hong Kong, Fifi in Paris. And my Former Mistress was back. This led me in late 1985 to the illusion that my emotional capital was easier to draw on, more readily available, than it really was.

  The illusion was further fostered by the collapse of OPEC in late 1985 and I banked on cheap, readily avail able energy.

  Really, it was the complete abandonment of emotional targeting which summed it up for me during 1985. They were breathless times.

  What I had tried to ignore, though, was the interest rates, which had been rising slowly but steadily for some time. Without being aware of it, I was paying more for my emotional life from about that time. Paying more and more as I became – let’s face it – ten years older.

  Then came fringe benefits tax and the tax on entertaining and my life was made transparent. FBT revealed me for what I was. My package of self seemed suddenly to be made up only of fringes and margins and expensive lunches – there was no centre to my life.

  What had appeared to be a maturing core was a loose cording together of marginal components. For this self, a self made of fringes, I now had to pay dearly, on top of rising emotional interest rates. The cheap energy also turned out to be an illusion.

  This is where the dollar exchange rate hit Diana in Hong Kong and Fifi in Paris and my other overseas affairs. The CPI and AOI entangled with the FBT, the mortgage on my life began to hurt, and we all came tumbling down.

  With more thought it is not so un-Freudian to have discovered this correlation.

  Our personal economy is tied to our emotional life, money with love, love with money, esteem with money, and the way we orchestrate our personal economy is, in a way, an index of our emotional life. There is a reverse impact too, so that an economy which gives incentives for long-term marriage will create a market for lawn mowers. If an economic policy encourages long boozy lunches at the club then certain things will follow in the afternoon. One will play the fool.

  The national economy, I realised, was a sum total of our personal economies – the sum total of the national emotional life.

  Which leads me to another hunch, that much of the economic turbulence in the 1980s is traceable to the permissive early 1970s generation trying to find its way back to a more conservative order and finding that this is not so easy. I personally do not seem to be making it even now.

  I have perhaps been too deeply deregulated. At least I am in step with the all-ordinaries index. I’ve got that far.

  The mood now is less inclined to modify reality and more interested in working with it than against it. If the seventies generation was the politically ‘demonstrating generation’ then the eighties generation could be called the ‘correlation generation’.

  I should have realised earlier in my life that, emotionally, there is an unresolvable tension between the ideas of secure company commissions, emotional targeting, flexible pegs and the wild seas of deregulation.

  But being tied to the all-ordinaries is sounder, I feel, than the nonsense I lived by in the seventies.

  For example, in the seventies I used to say I lived in an ‘economic shadow’. This explained why my light bulbs and transistor radio batteries didn’t last as long as other people’s, but it also led me to believe the fallacy that I was undetected and untouched by the economic forces. In those indulgent literary days I rarely had time to buy a croissant and argue whether to butter it or not, when it would be time for a tax-deductible lunch at the club.

  Now that I have the all-ordinaries index for good or for ill, it’s a sign of fiduciary awareness. I have an economically sensitive psyche now. I have joined the brave, robust world.

  I might even offer myself to the government as an additional economic indicator. Each morning I could fax a brief summary of how my night worked out and treasury could feed it into the computer. It might show up something.

  The Protocol of Food.

  One of the sub-committees of the world on which I sit is the dining room/catering sub-committee of the club.

  For reasons which I have not yet had explained to me, we have an ex-anti-Vietnam-war poet on the sub-committee. He is now very green. I have heard it said that he is also part of the muesli left. Not being a breakfast eater, I am not sure that I understand this expression. He seems to miss the Vietnam war badly.

  The poet is forever wanting opinions about his poetry and he campaigns nationally for more poetry readings. But he also worries a great deal about what other people eat.

  He wants life-affirming food served at the club. ‘Let’s get away from roast dinners, and those game birds.’

  Game birds are something of which I am very fond.

  ‘It would make a positive statement on behalf of the club and it would demonstrate its awareness of contemporary issues.’

  I like clubs because they are oblivious to contemporary issues.

  I realised that at some dinner parties in private homes I had been exposed to politically sensitive cuisine chosen to show the household’s affiliation with some country’s politics – I’ve found myself eating quite a lot of PLO bread. And hommus and pita bread. As well as being asked to sign petitions against all monorails worldwide.

  ‘Food is a statement,’ the ex-anti-Vietnam-war poet said with troubled seriousness. ‘And it goes on making that statement inside you. We vote the way we eat.’ I know some very charming people who eat very unhealthy food. I have never seen a connection between personality and diet satisfactorily established.

  So this was a novel idea to me. ‘Does it go on arguing inside you? The discourse of the digestive juices?’ I queried.

  ‘We need food which is good for us – in which yin and yang are balanced. That is biogenic. That is good for the environment.’

  I said that when I was young my mother had classes of food which were good for me and not good for me. I seem to recall that eating greens was considered good for me. I do not understand why the food that was good for me was also the food I didn’t care for as a child. ‘But it would not, I think, be thought good for us now. By some.’ And looking at the way things have turned out for me, not so good for me after all.

  ‘I think we know much more about food than our mothers did,’ the poet said.

  My mother and the race had survived quite some time. Too long perhaps. I realised that there were now many more things for food to do in the world. It could be good for you politically, good for you spiritually, good for you physically, good for the world, good for the environment. I remembered a time when there was simply disdained food and proper food. There was food which became ridiculed for its social style: the prawn cocktail, the Hawaiian steak, the sweet sparkling wines – even rosé – fried rice, Pimms. But I notice that mashed potato and sausages are, happily, appearing on menus. Now we were faced with ideologically sound and unsound food. I have been eating with people where I have sensed that bloody red steaks are considered dreadfully wrong. White Meat Families. It was all very hard. In one White Meat Family the six-year-old daughter had tried to eat me.

  ‘We don’t want food which screams out in pain – which says violence of one species against another. All those dead birds on plates. It is cruel food,’ said the poet.

  The poet said he also opposed elitist food. ‘How can we sit here eating caviar while Ethiopians die?’

  We were not, as it happens, sitting there eating caviar. It was some time since I had eaten caviar. I said that it was difficult to see the chain of responsibility or the chain of benefit which would flow to Ethiopia by the club not eating caviar. ‘We could cause sufferi
ng among Iranian fisherfolk if we stopped eating caviar,’ I said.

  Delly, the table attendant and also a member of the sub-committee (and all the sub-committees of the world) de facto, said that she was a part-time vegetarian.

  She said that club members were responding well to the word ‘wild’ on the menus, as in wild rice, wild berries and wild mushrooms.

  I said I believed in the doctrine of ferae naturae: ‘Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you’. I didn’t often quote the bible. But it summed up my attitude.

  ‘The alimentary canal is a long passage back to our forebears and their feasts,’ I continued. ‘To severely change one’s diet was to risk disrupting atavistic circuits. Could make us orphans in time.’

  ‘Red meat just has to go,’ said the poet, ‘and the mucoid-formers.’ He suggested that I was falling behind politically. ‘It is proven that it generates aggressive behaviour,’ he said angrily.

  I yearned to fall behind politically, the way I used to fall behind on school excursions and find myself doing not necessarily what I wanted to do but doing what no one wanted me to do, wandering off alone, away from the noise and skylarking, and the teacher’s instruction. On my own I would linger over details of inconsequential exhibits of no particular educational interest for no good reason.

  I said that to eat wild birds was to make a connection with the living universe and to remind us that we too became food when we die.

  I noticed that even Delly looked at me questioningly after this statement.

  The Chinese, I told them, had one vegetarian day a year when they remembered and honoured the animals they had eaten that year, and I rather liked that idea.

  I went on to say that vegetarianism had been justified by many religions and other theories but the justifications kept changing. ‘Vegetarianism is, after all, just a ritual of difference, of self-purity, a way of saying you are superior, for want of any other significant feature to set you apart from the rest of your culture.’