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Critical
creativity
Geroge Papaellinas
(ed.)
Gang:
RePublica issue 4
Angus & Robertson
218pp
Reviewed Australian
Book View, April 1996, pp. 11-12.
Is it only reviewers
who read literary magazines through as if they were books while most
people dip into them? In the hope that a theme for each issue would hold
the attention of readers, RePublica
this time has centred on “gang”.
However, our gang of
editors and contributors have not interrogated themselves. Their wish
for an Australian New York Review of Books alongside RePublica as our own Granta
shows how inventive the cringe can remain. Since an issue of Meanjin
costs less than half the recommended retail price of RePublica
and offers the same minimalist fees to contributors, two distinct
questions arise: is RePublica
the answer to anything? Should its contents have been published
anywhere?
Although some of the
pieces might not have been written without editorial initiative, all of
the items could have found other homes and several deserved wider
circulation. For instance, Tony Birch’s account of how the defenders
of the Fitzroy baths contributed to a stereotyping of that suburb should
have been in the Sunday Age.
Henry Reynolds’s reminiscence of Eddie Mabo could have been taken in
by the Courier-Mail under its
new editor.
Janaczewska’s delight
in jam-making is the kind of writing that the Good
Weekend should encourage just as it might well have published
Kalantzis’s autobiographcial lecture, “The House of Brides”, which
wanders from frock shops to a chair in academe.
Barry Hill’s
nineteen-page sequence of poems reflecting on the Russian revolution
would have been the hardest to place elsewhere, but because of its
length, not from any arcaneness, though some acquaintance with the left
during this century is necessary to comprehend its allusions. The verse
is free but never merely cut-up prose. His patterning replicates the
thought as when
There are
nightingales
In expectant clauses, and line
Breaks that sketch the ghostly
Body of a the poem.
Styles vary to accord
with the angle of view. Hill’s fractured structure, leaning towards
Mayakovsky, should remind fiction writers such as Gemmell how
old-fashioned their experiments appear. The fictions of Silber and Kranz
are as predictable in their literary self-consciousness as any
sting-in-the-tail ending form O. Henry. McGirr’s “Champagne”
surprises because it almost tells its story.
When Tsiolkas writes
that News Corp. and Microsoft are “spending vast sums of capital on
the infrastructure of the telecommunication networks” he provides an
instance of the “Pulp Theory” that he claims to deplore. In fact,
Microsoft lays no cable and launches no satellite but makes operating
systems for computers which it does not manufacture, any more than it
produces telecommunications equipment. Rather than build infrastructure,
Microsoft is spending “vast sums” on marketing Windows to maintain
its oligopolistic command of the market.
Tsiolkas’s reference
to News Corp. is true although even with the recent injection of $US2bn
from telephone corporation MCI, Mass Murdoch remains a minor player
compared with the new Disney-ABC conglomerate. To comprehend
globalisation, Australian commentators need to get beyond our Murdoch
fixation. Moreover, all media theorizers need to become pre-Post-Modern
and learn how to read balance sheets as well as bodies.
One link between
Murdoch and Bill Gates came too late for Tsiolkas’s consideration. To
launch Windows on 24 August 1995, Microsoft sponsored that day’s issue
of The Times as if it were a
football match. For £335,000 Sterling, the corporation got a 24-page
supplement, several pages of advertisements and presumably some
expectation that their product would not be scrutinized too
scrupulously.
The only prose piece
too long for most alternative publications is Robert Dessaix’s
“Death to Art”, with its starting point in Sontag on illness as
metaphor. His complaint about the lack of AIDS “art of value”
suffers from an instamatic view of creativity. Perhaps the latency
period for “art of value” is longer than for HIV-AIDS? Tolstoy on
cancer and Turgenev on typhus were dealing with diseases which had
become part of folklore. The plea for AIDS “art of value” within the
first 15 years of the plague is as misguided as ACT-UP’s demand for a
magic bullet by yesterday, just as that “I-want-it-all-now” syndrome
contributes to a commodification of sex which spreads the virus. Dessaix
wants art that will outlast the present, but paradoxically expects it
immediately.
If we reconsider
Dessaix’s concern about the politicisation of AIDS against
Benjamin’s claim that the Nazis had aestheticised politics while the
Bolsheviks had politicised aesthetics, we can see that such distinctions
have been capsised by a commodification of both aesthetics and politics.
Despite Altman’s
pointing to the Americanisation (that is, commodification) of
homosexuality, Dessaix is rash to assume that AIDS posters will become
like Coke ads since the latter have not, as he claims, been “quickly
assigned to oblivion”. Rather, they are being recycled to provide a
tradition for that soda pop by filling up Coca-Cola Museums such as the
one that faces Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Indeed, they enter
that institution through Andy Warhol’s multiple prints. “Always
Coke” is a threat as much as a promise. For queer theory to be of
value, its practitioners need to get their comparisons straight.
The lightest touch
proves the sharpest. The first of Deborah Conway’s verses rings the
changes on blokes and their bed manners, the second is Mrs Gogol’s
wish to grow a penis, and the third charts “The Unhappy Hour” of
each drinking day against that of a life-sodden drunk. If you are
dipping into this issue of RePublica,
Conway is one place to start.
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