Quipu (14 page)

Then you might pay some heed to your wonderfully witty gambit with this unfortunate woman. She is minding her business, reading what you describe as a substantial and demanding book. In you come with your grotesque insult. Of course (the frame of your merry little jab tells us all) women in general and she in particular cannot read properly. You have been watching her, and you’re here to let her know that if she were only lucky enough to be you, to be a man, she would be proceeding through the pages at a much faster rate. When she ignores this with the contempt it calls for, you actually have the vulgarity to go on and spell it out, repeat the sub-text in explicit form, rub her nose in it.

And all this in the context of a cheery voice, I have no doubt, a contextual assertion of friendly interest, an invitation to stop reading and have a conversation. One founded in her agreement that what she is reading is less important (and instantly perceived as such, the moment you arrive in all your glory) than your whim, your merest fancy to have a chat with an available woman, whoever she is, knowing nothing about her. And, as we’ve seen, requiring from her a blithe acceptance of her role as the butt of your joke, her agreement that she is a silly thing who, in any case, cannot read properly and is panting for your instruction in this matter.

Joseph, you fool. In a situation as blatant as this, you then have the stupefying audacity to feel hurt by her “indifference”!

Then we have Brian Wagner’s profoundly stupid advice.

Far from facing up to any of the discourtesies in your assault on the peace of these women, Wagner takes it for granted that you have every right to slam yourself down in their midst and harass them to your heart’s content.

What’s his remedy to their (entirely justified) rebuff? No prizes. Abuse and persiflage. Execration or moaning complaint. (“Aw come on, girls, give a bloke a break or I’ll vomit all over you.”) Wagner is a fuckup, Joseph. I don’t think he’s responsible, but that doesn’t mean I have to put up with it. If you let yourself get turned into a Wagner winebar protege, you can kiss your last chance at integrity and self-esteem goodbye.

It’s nice outside, right now. Warm and blowy. The rain this morning, and through the last couple of weeks, has spruced the grass up in the yard. Well, the weeds at least. And the cracks in the ground seem to closing up at last. (You can view this paragraph of virus-driven babble as pointed metaphor if you wish.) See you at the next convocation, if not before. I understand it’s being planned for the Pontes’ farm. We can get drunk together and I’ll explain in detail how much finer the world would be if all the men died quietly one night.

your cross Friend

Marjory Nourse

1970: sorry sorry sorry

Rozelle

13 March

My dear Joseph

I can’t sleep (it’s 4 a.m.), thinking about that foolish, self-indulgent letter. Can you accept my apology? It won’t happen again. It’s very bad to do things like that to people, I know. I’m truly sorry.

Watched television last night at a friend’s—
Baby Jane,
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. It was astounding. One sister causing the other to go mad with jealousy. Incredibly horrifying.

I started a job today. Driving a Kombi van, delivering clean diapers and carting off crappy nappies to the laundry. Some difficulty driving, a terminally crapped out can. I mean “clapped out van,” this must be your influence. The gear-stick knob flew off, the horn fell out, the gears stuck—Christ, U-turns on precarious dirt shoulders, backing blind, trying to avoid ditches. Nearly got bogged in French’s Forest. It’s very beautiful country, all the houses dispersed, like Eltham a few years ago.

7.30 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. for 2 weeks, perhaps longer. $50 a week. Came home after an English tutorial on top of that, flaked. Vague, indirect tutor, around 30, wouldn’t answer any of my questions about Romanticism. I’d been thinking about Ernst Fischer, wanted to see how he fitted in. (This was hardly arbitrary—Romanticism is the period we’re doing.) I tried to explain what I meant, the early expression of industrial alienation through identification of the image of “I” with nature & not man…

First, he said, he’d better explain what Romanticism was (having vaguely nodded his head at what I’d said), then just abandoned it. “No, no, it’d take too long, I can’t really.” Waffled off onto something else. I know he’s not meant to supply us with answers, but some preliminary discussion was surely in order, so we could place the novels and poetry in some context. I felt very strange afterwards, as if I’d been told I shouldn’t ask questions. But without probing, how else can one find out? Reading, yes, but aren’t tutorials the occasion for ideas to be brought together and rubbed on each other? I have to do a paper on Lear for the next tute, and feel very insecure—so what’s new!

Lanie and I shift in tomorrow, a great relief. Living at Alan’s is making me neurotic.

The nights are chilly and the breeze during the day is cool. Summer’s over, and I think I’m having a reaction to the change of season. Somehow I got it into my head that winter would never happen up here in Sydney, a thousand kilometers closer to the equator than Melbourne, that the air would always be warm and brilliant. I forgot…A letter would be nice—please.

My love to you,

Caroline

1970: censorship of the repressed

Mad Scientist’s Benchtop

Monday March 16 70

petalfrog

The brainstem continues to operate on a vegetable level, and gets me here to work only half an hour late on the average. You may make yourself free in admiration for the quality of paper, design and letterhead printing on this classy sheet of paper. One of the boss’s little coups, garnishing his empire as it sinks into the blood-red sea.

What of your house, have you moved in yet? Your affair with the American? Your drudgery? The slings and slurs of earning that brittle crust? For Christ’s sake write me a note, even if just a brief one, to say what your present phone number is. If you have one available to you.

In an amazing splurge I rushed into Myers the other day and blew fifty bucks on a Casa Pupa bedspread. And voila! The room is now livable, which it wasn’t during your stay I fear. I seized up a black cupboard from the kitchen (now replaced with an authentic crockery cabinet) and lugged this thing into my room and placed it beneath the window with a horrid red metal filing system on its ebon top and thought myself a clever little fellow indeed. My grandmother’s battered suitcase which once held my every worldly item is now redundant and hidden beneath the bed and my room is a prospect of luminosity and wonder. All it needs is a pair of sprawling Norman Lindsay nudes. AND WHERE ARE THEY, I CRY?

With my long-whetted interest in Roth’s “Civilization & Its Discontents,” you can imagine how eagerly I ripped out of the hands of Wagner the celebrated quipu publisher a copy of
Portnoy’s Complaint,
that wicked banned document, in (of course) a plain paper cover. Jeez, funny! I could of
cacked
meself!

I’m not altogether convinced that it lives up to its reputation as a dirty book. For improper porno proper, one might better turn, for example, to
Image of the Beast
by a guy called Farmer (also banned by the Australian censor and smuggled in by Wagner), which I’ve just read with many a shudder. The first chapter kicks off with an al dente account of a man who is (a) strapped to a Y-shaped table with leather thongs, and has his prick (b) sucked off, and then (c) gnawed off with (d) stainless steel dentures.

The women of this house are indeed interested in Wimmens Lib. Converted in part by Bakery reports. And perhaps your sense of excitement. But if any of you bites off anyone’s dong I’ll never speak to you again. Must do some of what I’m paid for.

love and licks

your frend J

1970: without tablets

Rozelle

Sunday 22 March

My Dear Horse

Lanie and I sitting at the dining room table, radio blasting, omelettes eaten, drowned in cups of tea. 9.15 p.m. Just finished writing up an experiment for Beh. Sci. on observation and recall. The wonders of a truly educated tertiary mind!

We scour secondhand furniture shops, bargaining wildly. Lanie thinks she’s still in Asia, where it’s de rigeur. Will we still be scouting around Op Shops when we’re 64? ‘Fraid so.

A beautiful, gentle camp guy answered our ad. He’ll move in soon.

Driving the Kombi on the North Shore means I travel alongside the coast and can stop for lunch by the sea, walk along the beach or just sit on the sand breathing salty wind—really beautiful. I’m beginning to sleep without tablets which makes me happy. Alan has returned to his wife, thank God. It was getting me down. I’m going to cut out some letters about Portnoy from the uni paper. They’ll give you some idea of what I’m dealing with. Without exception, they denounce the foul obscenity of it all. (Actually, I don’t think I could slog through the whole book. The bits on masturbation were hilarious.)

beautiful thoughts,

Caroline

A DOG’S WIFE

…five

Our bags were packed for Australia when the gentlemen from the government called by to announce that we might not emigrate after all. Their arguments were Byzantine and sturdily documented with sheafs of paper each of a different unusual size. Their case for refusing our exit bore every indication of hinging on Spot’s deficiencies as a human being, a bigoted and politically unpopular stance; carefully masked, therefore, by technicalities of a veterinarian nature.

It quickly came home to me that these manifestations in turn were intended to deflect attention from the true reason for our durance, namely, Spot’s peerless gifts as a nuclear theoretician. The government wanted my husband to make bombs for them.

“The di-quark hypothesis,” he told me. We had no secrets from each other. Although I am not certain that I followed him in every detail, it seemed that rather large bangs could be elicited from small amounts of fairly rare stuff using another variety of extremely unlikely fizzy material, which failed to add up to zero when you checked the niobium spheres.

1970: checks and balances

Melbourne Monday 30 March 70

McPossum

Easter Monday morning and I sit at my desk at work, city empty, boss on holiday, troll secretary on holiday, adman on holiday, hurray, clad in hairy pullover and lairy flares of huge green & white flowers, lighting up my nth Kent for my leathery morning throat, tired and shaky for no real reason having spent a dull afternoon yesterday—ah yes, I did, I did—at the Easter hike convocation—I can’t seem to stay away, but all they do is compete and show each other the size of their intellectual dongs…I sit here, as I say, and consider your various unanswered letters. Thank you for writing them (Another Person in Another Place is saying Hello).

Your hung-up letter was pretty sad, but I am not sorry you sent it anyway. And shit, don’t apologize—it was more real than anything I’ve ever written to you.

Your job sounds arduous and repulsive. Everyone at Chez Triangle of Death sends commiserations, while envying the lunches by the sea-cliff (I used to think St. Kilda was by the sea until I moved there).

My Big News is that I resigned on Friday and will only have to stay in this behavioral sink for another week, or until the boss can replace me. This is regarded as a remote prospect by some here (no professional would touch it, $100 a week or not). Hence, it was with a wild surmise that I suggested to Wagner that he might care to supplant me. He cackled and drooled, the poor blind fool, so I’ll put him up for the position when the boss gets back tomorrow.

In order to finance this extravagant madness, I may have to defer paying my university debts yet again. I’ve now got enough to live on at $25 a week (ample I hope) for 18 weeks, and I can scrape up some more here and there. In say 6 months perhaps you’ll be able to pay me back a bit of that loan and I can always look for a more congenial job. (But for Christ’s sake don’t worry about paying me back before then. Grinding the face of the poor into shitty nappies is more than my stomach could tolerate.)

Various souls from our house took themselves to the Launching Place “Miracle” (peace, love, joy and $30,000 profit to the organizers), fanging off with high hopes on Saturday at lunchtime with bags and tents and lamb chops and singers and instrumentalists, and returned muddy and bedraggled and saddened and hungry Saturday evening.

Mud and rain and drunken yahoos and portable lavatories blown over by the howling torrent and amps failing in the middle of songs. Wendy Saddington smiled sweetly, it seems, at the end of her bracket, and took the mike angelically, and said with all her might: “I’d like to send a big cheery get fucked to the organizers of this farce,” and there were cries of approval, and away everyone raced into the gloom for home and hot chops done on a gas stove like God meant and hot cross bums.

Our evil rooting cat is pregnant, having failed to avail herself of her Malthusian Belt the fuck-wit.

I got a call from Libby the other day, saw her for drinkies. Bumped into her in town a week later, window shopped, arranged lunch for last Thursday. By half past one I was hungry, frustrated and furious. I bought some sandwiches at two thirty. No call even yet. Wicked, wicked Libby. Or could there be something wrong in my approach to women?

Back to Portnoy and self-service.

I’m not really obsessed by the lower things, you know. I have an advanced political consciousness. As I stood bored and devastated at the convocation, several people rushed up saying, “Oh come see, a great marvel, a little-known luminary from America.”

“How sublime,” I cried. “By what wonder is it that we should be blessed to have an actual living American here amongst us, here in our unpretentious island continent.”

“Why,” they told me, their faces glowing at this stroke of luck, “it was made possible only because he happened to be in Melbourne on R & R.”