Colonial Culture and Cambridge (redux)

It's difficult to tell how people respond to things you publish on the internet, as the only audience reactions you see are tainted by the very fact that you are seeing them. People feel obliged to laugh/cry/spew, and are very conscious of you hovering over their shoulder, waiting for them to get to what you have deemed "the good bits". Thus it's not clear whether people are "getting" the things you are writing (how arrogant of you, by the way, to suppose that the things you write are any more layered than a car manual or a Bill Granger cookbook). To make it easier for readers of It's alright, I know you're from Circumstances, here is a previously published piece with suggested reader responses highlighted in bold.

The Setting: 1966- A Cambridge flat, drab with minimal furnishings. Piles of books are stacked against the wall and old newspapers cover a small table in the middle of the kitchen/dining area.Germaine Greer is busily cleaning the kitchen while Robert Hughes sits at the paper-strewn table drinking a bottle of beer. The door opens and in staggers Clive James, drunk. Ah, a quick Wikipedia search reveals that these three are considered leading lights of Australian Baby Boomer intellectualism. The conceit of this vignette appears to be that they all lived together in shared accommodation, which actually never happened. I am intrigued, and will thus read on.

Clive: Whooo! Clive is on the piss again. (Sings) Clive is on the piss again! This seems unusual behaviour for a bookish man like James, but perhaps the piece is building towards something.

Hughes: What's happening mate? Where you been?

Clive: Just down at the rub-a-dub with Barry Humphries. Spew. (giggles to himself) Ha! An excellent reference to another cultural icon of this era. It appears James looks down on Humphries.

Greer: (Not looking up from her cleaning) What were you doing with that dickhead? Although not central to the developing storyline, I am highly amused to see Greer doing the cleaning. The mundanity of her domesticity clashes harshly with her independent feminine views.

Clive: Reckons he's hit on a new idea. Spends three months in London, and now he's gonna start wearing a dress and acting like a housewife. Sounds like poofter activity, if you ask me. How delightful! Here the author presents Humphries' seminal creation at its genesis point, and imagines it receiving an cold reception from his peers.

Hughes: A dress? Bloody hell. What else did he say?

Clive: Not much, we just shot the shit, chatted up the waitresses. Nice birds.

Hughes: Any love?

Clive: Nah, I was doing alright with one, but... you won't believe this... I farted just as she dropped off our second bottle of Beaujolais. Man, it stank. After that it was all over. I think she spewed. A nice contrast between the sophistication engendered by the wine order and the lowbrow toilet humour.

Hughes: That's awesome. I dropped a ripper today at the Tate, right in the middle of the Degas exhibition. The women next to me looked like they were crying. Hmm, a bit disappointing. If the author had researched properly, he would have realised that the Tate is a gallery for British art, and would thus not have been exhibiting Degas (1834-1917), a Frenchman.

Clive: Did they spew? I would have spewed. Your farts are rank. A good fart should always get some spew going. The toilet humour continues here. Probably laying it on a bit thick by now...

Greer: Sorry to interrupt you Rhodes scholars, but what are we going to do about the energy bill this month? Clive, you still owe us for last month. Excellent. If you'll pardon the pun, the story was getting "bogged down" in all the toilet jokes. Now we reach the 'complication'.

Clive: Shit. I just pissed it all away.

Greer: Clive! Didn't Bazza owe you money? What happened to that? It is very clever of the author to present these highly-respected cultural commentators in such a mundane setting, arguing over the payment of a utilities bill. Very clever.

Clive: I... um... I lost it on a dog. You got any more of those beers, Hughsey? I'm gonna spew if I get any more soberererer (giggles).

Greer: Hold on, a dog? Bloody hell Clive. You're useless. What are we gonna do? It's going to be winter in a month, and I don't have any bras to spare for fuel. Riotous! Simply riotous! Such a witty backhanded reference to Greer's militant feminism. Not only does she burn bras for political effect, she also just burns them to keep warm. This writer is as clever as he is tall and good at finding novel uses for potato wedges in pasta bake.

Hughes: (coming back from the fridge with a beer for Clive. Strikes a Shakespearean pose). Now is the winter of our discontent... A wonderful use of irony. Hughes quotes Shakespeare, but reverts to one of the most well known and overused lines from Richard III. An extra dimension has been added to the already rich juxtaposition of intellectualism with the everyday setting of beer, drunkenness, and electricity bills.

Greer: Don't start Robert, this is serious.

Clive: (holding the beer bottle up to his eye like a telescope) Bloody oath it is, I can't get this beer open. He appears to use James as comic relief when the storyline runs out of steam. An effective technique, but a tad overdone. I hope we're not going to get more farting jokes.

Hughes: They're not twisties mate, where's my key ring? I'm not sure twist tops were in common usage in 1966. Damn, I've already closed the window that had Wikipedia open. Oh well, I'll look it up later.

Clive: It's alright, mate (starts opening the bottle with his teeth). It'll be okay Germaine Sausage. I'll tell you what I'll do... (lifts his leg and farts, followed by raucous laughter from him and Hughes). More farting. There are motifs, and then there is bland repetition, and unfortunately this is straying to the latter. I wonder if there's anything good on TMZ.com?

Hughes: That's disgusting you sicko. Oh man, the place is gonna stink for a week!

Greer: Oh well, it's still better than...

Together: Living in Australia! Yes, very nice. Very nice. I worried the scene would descend into farce, but the author has redeemed himself. All three players in this scene left Australia, finding the narrow mindedness of their countrymen too great a restriction on their self-proclaimed genius. A slight whiff of Tall Poppy Syndrome, but all in all a tightly written swipe at the pretensions of the intellectual elite, reminding them that they are, after all, human, just like the rest of us. I can't wait for the next post to this wonderful blog. I hope it's not just some old content slightly dressed up and passed off as someting new. That would be disappointing.

So there you have it, a quick guide outlining the best way to approach Circumstances. Hopefully you're able to identify with the Ideal Reader of this piece. Most blog readers think to themselves in the voice of a mustachioed colonial memsahib circa 1865, don't they?

Cockroaches and nightcaps...

Chantelle realised she should probably break up with her boyfriend. They'd been living together for three months, and in that time she'd developed a healthy disgust for him. As she walked towards the small, dark kitchen of their one bedroom terrace apartment she couldn't help shake the feeling that he'd scuttle under the fridge the moment she flicked the light on. She turned the light on anyway, and found him standing in the middle of the kitchen, wearing a discoloured white singlet, socks and nothing else. He was drinking a beer. She lived with a man whose daily routine involved a half-naked midnight Carlton Cold. His back was to her. Despite the sudden flash of light, he didn't flinch or turn around. She looked at his broad, muscular shoulders, his right shoulder muscles rippling as he hurriedly tipped the beer bottle to his lips. His buttocks seemed to be taunting her through their fine screen of jet black hair.
"I am living with a man who drinks beer naked in the kitchen with so much intensity he apparently doesn't notice that where once there was complete darkness, there is now light," she thought. Her mother hadn't said exactly that, but her vociferous objections to her moving in with him began ringing in Chantelle's ears. Her thinking voice adopted her mother's whining tone: "You've only known him for four months." I know that Mum. "How do you know he's not a woman basher?" Excellent question, Mum. Can't you be happy for me? He wasn't a woman basher, thankfully. Just a naked midnight beer drinker who, although not literally a cockroach, had the air of someone who at any moment could touch your hand in a way that would make your skin crawl.
Chantelle flicked the light off again. Still he didn't turn around, or even make that annoying grunting sound he'd make in the morning when she said hello. They had the kind of relationship where polite greetings seemed more appropriate than affectionate pet names. She wandered back down the corridor and climbed into bed, wincing briefly as her hand became entangled in the briefs he had obviously discarded before heading to the kitchen.

The meaning of life...

Tony despised the people he saw on shows like Australian Idol, and even worse, Big Brother. People who wanted to "be famous" disgusted him. "Notoriety and fame is something you have to earn," he would say. "Being famous for nothing is fleeting, illusory, and shallow." Despite this vehement dislike of people he referred to as "Fifteen-Minute F---wits", Tony's life's ambition was to be famous. Staggeringly famous. Neil Armstrong famous. Tony secretly hoped than in 40 years he would be so famous that even though the paparazzi no longer followed him around, and magazines no longer printed his photograph, people who met him by chance would forever remember the experience as the defining moment of their lives. But Tony was not impatient. He had already been working for two years to fulfil his dream, and was content to wait another two before people started noticing what he was doing.

- "I hope this new job will take me where I want to go, I think it's a good opportunity to get a foothold in a big firm. It'll also give me a good idea if I'm doing the right course at uni. I'm pretty sure I want to be an accountant." Tony's best friend Josh said.

"How can you be an accountant?", Tony answered, slurring a little from the 13 beers he had consumed that evening. It was 3am.

"What do you mean?" Josh asked.

"It seems to me that people who plan their lives around being something are planning to make themselves extraordinarily unhappy," he said. "Wouldn't it be much better to plan your future around doing something? If you say 'I want to be an accountant', and then become an accountant, what happens if you don't like it? At the end of the day, work is boring. That's why you get paid to do it. Even if it's work you like, when it comes down to it you'll still have to sit at a desk 40 hours a week for 50 years. It doesn't matter what you do, that is going to be boring. So if you've planned your life around being an accountant, at some stage you're going to wake up and hate yourself because you are one."

"It's an interesting idea," Josh said, wrapping his fuzzy, drunken head around Tony's philosophy. Both Josh and Tony were private school boys, the sons of successful people, who had been groomed for successful careers since they were old enough to earn pen licences and leave their blazers on the train. Thus Josh had always believed that "career success" and "happiness" shared the same entry in Roget's Thesaurus.

"You know what I think when I look at the future?" Tony continued. "I see myself happy. Not in a job, not necessarily with a family, but rather as a person I can be happy with and proud of."

"But how are you gonna do that," Josh asked, sensing he'd discovered the crucial hole in Tony's thinking.

"I guess we'll just have to wait and see..."

-That had been three years ago. Josh scarcely remembered the conversation at all, rather he remembered the unfortunate incident at a high-class strip joint that had resulted in the two of them drinking alone in a deserted bar at 3am. He had repeatedly mentioned the incident in his speech at Tony's 21st. For Tony however, it had been an epiphany. He had spent the year following that night dreaming up his strategy to become the person in his visions of the future. The first stages of his plan were complete, and now it was more a matter of waiting...

-Suddenly I realised that to finish the story would require the answer to the question "what is the secret to happiness?". I sat back, stunned at my own stupidity for beginning a story that I had no idea how to end. It was all too deep, too heavy, too pretentious to tag on a joke ending like "soon everyone would receive his anthrax-laced letters, and he would be a celebrity", or "he had been standing behind Tim Bailey now for two years, waving in the background of the weather reports. Soon everyone would know his face. He just had to keep on top of Bailey's schedule." Pissed off with my own arrogance, I went to dinner, had a few beers, and did this instead. I like "Fifteen-Minute F---wits" though...

Aborted attempts, skeletons, and failures...

The stories appearing on I Know You're From Circumstances usually begin as a single idea, a sentence, or an observation. The final stories are usually built up around these central ideas or sentences. Colonial Culture and Cambridge developed from a discussion with a friend about Robert Hughes and how pretentious he is, Nothing matters in our private universe was the spawn of a badly mistimed comment at a dinner party, and A bear by any other name was originally an extension of the question "what would happen if someone corrected everything they saw misprinted with a texta?". It's kind of hard to see that last one in the finished story. The character evolved into a wanker in joggers and jeans, roughly based on my girlfriend's father (in appearance only. He is not a wanker, and even if he was I'd be too scared to say anything, lest he develop a property on me or my loved ones. The dude develops property).

"So what?" I hear you, the gentle yet powerful reader, asking. "Is this the blog equivalent of a DVD's extra features section, because I never watch them because they're usually rubbish and self congratulatory."

No, it isn't. What I was trying to get to before you, the impatient yet understanding reader, interrupted me, is the frustration this method can cause. Too often an interesting sentence or idea pops up that cannot be developed into a story. Considering it has been three weeks since the last Circumstances post, I decided it was time to stop forcing them into being stories and just write them down (including the original idea for A bear by any other name). Extra points for anyone who can email me a story using any of these ideas.

1- The army of skeletons that had spent the course of the evening massing behind the closet door took Uncle Arthur's comment as their cue to burst out into the living room and form a faceless, unholy, but unmistakably jovial conga line.

2- Robert was not a Conservative, he was barely even a lower-case conservative. If anything he tended towards muddle-headed liberalism. His primary concern was being lower-case right (ie, correct). He had no particularly strong political views, aside from a nagging suspicion that immigrants were okay as long as they wanted to work. However, when one's favourite pastime is correcting spelling and factual errors on posters around university campuses, one will inevitably come into conflict with members of the Liberal Left and beyond. Robert was in the middle of crossing out misplaced apostrophes on a "Principle's of non-violent resistance" forum poster erected by The Socialist Alliance when he was placed in a headlock by a long-haired youth in a Che Guevara t-shirt and Thai fisherman's pants, front pockets bulging with juggling balls, coloured ribbon, and a bottle of "Firebreather's Delight" ingestible butane. As the two wrestled for posession of Robert's texta, the youth's woven hemp satchel spilled open, scattering a dog-eared copy of Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx across the concrete footpath, coming to rest next to an ancient copy of Harpo Marx's Barefoot Circus Tricks and Juggling.

3- It wasn't that Justine thought Max was lying, she just knew Max's stories represented the truth in the same way hardcore pornography represented lovemaking. It was easy to believe Max provided you were 14 and weren't there when it happened.

So there are three things that were going to be stories but weren't. I couldn't think what Uncle Arthur had said in number one, the ill-kempt youth in number two just became a vehicle for stereotype exposition, and three just had no obvious way of making it into anything, and I hate having to try too hard at anything. This post is proof of that.