Kicks and kisses

Dear Editor,

In recent years, conservative commentators have taken to spraying insults at those with whom they disagree. Personal attacks now pose as rational discussion, particularly in the news media. Even so, I did not expect to see in ABR a personal assault disguised as a review of my book Allied and Addicted (July-August 2007).

What a great ad feminam title Michael Wesley chose: ‘Screeching to the converted’. Would he have used it about Clive Hamilton or Robert Manne or Julian Burnside? If not, he proves the truth of an argument in my book: that habits of mind have revived in Australia which we tried to abandon forty years ago. I had not expected one of Australia’s rising younger academics to exhibit them. But now, it seems, academics too resort to sexism and condescension, kissing up to the powerful and kicking down the powerless, just like our government.

Nicolette Stasko’s poetry is as far from the postmodern baroque as it is possible to be. This is not to say that her work lacks awareness of contemporary theories of art, but rather that her style eschews self-consciously clotted imagery, radical syntactical dislocation, and the production of high-sounding obscurities. There is nothing rebarbative here. At their best, the limpid surfaces of these poems invite the reader into aesthetic experiences where the pictorial is rendered with such clarity that the images resonate deeply. As we might expect from a poet who writes one of her best sequences in response to Cezanne and another following Van Gogh, the most satisfying of these poems recreate that moving stillness characteristic of figurative painting.

Glass Cathedrals begins with thirty pages of new poems followed by generous selections from Stasko’s previous volumes, Abundance (1992), Black Night with Windows (1994) and The Weight of Irises (2003). For readers unfamiliar with Stasko’s work, it is a pity that the latest work disrupts the chronology of the book and that the poet has chosen to open the volume with one of her lighter poems.

By contrast, the first two poems from Abundance, ‘Dislocation’ and ‘Femme assise pres de la fenetre’, provide a prescient introduction to all of the work that follows. Here the characteristic tone of meditation is established by way of short, unpunctuated lines predominantly organised into recognisable syntactic units, but occasionally disrupted or complicated by a line or clause that squints both backwards and forwards to add intriguing possibilities of meaning. Here, too, the dominant themes of Stasko’s work are sounded: ‘Dislocation’ deals with the emigrant’s distress (Stasko was born in the United States, of Polish and Hungarian ancestry), while ‘Femme assise pres de la fenetre’ has the poet in characteristic attitude observing a landscape through a window. The order imposed upon the landscape by the frame suggests the poet’s own transformation of the scene which in turn leads to the following disturbing question: ‘am I a Picasso / woman pieced / geometric shapes / making sense / only / on canvas?’ There are many solitary domestic interiors in Stasko’s work from which the poet peers out on landscapes and other public spaces, struggling to find a sufficient place and identity through epiphanies in nature or, more often, through the illuminations of art.

Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.

Some of the imagery in this scene is later echoed and reversed in one of Jones’s free-ranging academic essays, where she recounts a possibly unreliable childhood memory of walking across the ocean floor at low tide to view the wreckage of a Japanese warplane. Upon arrival, she tells us, she was disappointed, having hoped to find a skeleton resting in the cockpit; later, she imagined gathering and reassembling the bones of the lost pilot.

The aquatic museum of found objects, the sea temporarily made into land: both these vignettes conjure up a landscape founded on paradoxes and viewed from an outsider’s incomplete perspective (that of a child, or a foreigner in an occupied city). Either scene could easily have come from a film by Jane Campion, a director consistently fascinated with skewed or naive perceptions, with the conjunction of separate realities, and with mysterious kinds of ‘immersion’ that mark a passage from one state to another.

This is a book about words that are on their way to the dictionary cemetery where they will be stamped with the labels ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’. Of course, unlike us, these dying words will achieve a kind of eternity through being permanently displayed in dictionaries, but the time will come when no living person possesses them as part of their actual speech. Ruth Wajnryb proposes that a hospice should be set up to provide sanctuary and comfort for these weary and largely forgotten lexical bits and pieces, a ‘hospice of fading words’.

Lexicographers, too, have tried to develop a way of dealing with words in this category. One short-lived idea was to label such words as ‘obsolescent’, in the sense ‘becoming obsolete’, but this was a bit of a mouthful, and in abbreviated forms the terms ‘obsolete’ and ‘obsolescent’ were likely to be indistinguishable. More recently, the label ‘dated’ has been introduced (for example, in the second edition of The Australian Oxford Dictionary [2004]) to ‘indicate a word no longer used by the majority of speakers, but still encountered occasionally, especially among the older generation’. Thus dictionaries have also begun to respond to this special category of words that have become outdated, old hat, anachronous, and demode, or, to go back to eighteenth-century nomenclature, ‘fogram’ and ‘trunk-hose’ (both used as adjectives as well as nouns).

The term ‘old hat’ is mentioned in chapter ten, ‘Hats’. Apart from baseball caps, akubras, and sun hats, we now live in a largely hatless world, and this change of fashion places pressure on the numerous phrases, such as ‘old hat’, that grew out of a world in which hats had everyday meaning. In the days when a woman would never dare take the tram or bus to go into the city to do the weekly shopping without wearing hat and gloves, the wearing of an old hat would certainly have been judged declasse. As hats go out of fashion, many of the literal and figurative phrases involving hats, such as ‘old hat’, are threatened with obsolescence and thence obsoleteness: ‘to buy a straw hat in winter’, ‘at the drop of a hat’, ‘Oh my hat!’, ‘throw one’s hat in the door’, ‘keep your hat on’.