Quipu (27 page)

One was forced to admit, though, that the menacing glances of elderly Jewish folk walking their own Dobermans and Borzoi, pan or towel dutifully in hand, was ample deterrent to a more insouciant delinquency.

1970: the open classroom and its enemies

Shakespeare Pier

tues 28 July 70

dear woggie—professors, as I have cause to know, are almost always shits. but baby, the trouble is you’re one of the original innocents. nothing wrong with your neural sawdust, just your idealism lobe.

sickening and heartbreaking and vile as it is, kid, you’ve got to get it straight:

THE UNIVERSITY IS AN ARSE AND THOSE WHO PASS THROUGH AN ARSE ARE SHITS.

one corollary being:

THE WORST SHITS ARE THOSE CONSTIPATED TURDS WHO REFUSE TO BE EJECTED.

these are known as The Staff, of whom the ripest are The Professors.

another corollary is SPHINX OR SWIM. pardon me. that was rather sophomoric don’t you agree?

leave anything you value outside the gate, particularly your soul coz it’s gonna get maimed and molested if you allow anyone in there to cop a feel of it.

so maybe it’s not a bad idea to give English up—if you care deeply for it.

needless to say, you’ll find similar difficulties cropping up in Psych, but at least there you do have certain empirical studies that can be attacked on factual and procedural grounds, whereas in literature as far as I can see the whole thing is ingrown, incestuous and totally subjective.

moreover, it takes a moral hero of unearthly stature to buck the system and come out on top. who can measure up to such a demand? you’re showing incredible grit in just surviving, baby. hold high the candle and plod on.

love, houndstooth

firepower

MACHINE GUN

The history of modern warfare has been to a great extent the story of ever-increasing power to kill and maim applied to larger and larger numbers of victims with ever-
decreasing
personal involvement on the part of individual warriors.

During World War Two, entire cities were firebombed, or blasted by nuclear weapons dropped by remote aircraft. More recently, villages were incinerated by flaming napalm dropped from helicopters, and terrorists mutilate unseen victims with hidden explosives.

Perhaps the beginning of this horror (with world nuclear or bacteriological destruction as its possible end result) was the invention of the machine gun.

For the first time, killing power came from a weapon in a spray of savagery that required no accuracy of aim to rip bodies apart.

Attempts to design firearms capable of continuous operation were two centuries old when the American inventor Richard Gatling perfected a revolving battery gun in 1865. Gatling was an M.D. who never practiced as a doctor. In the American Civil War, though, his invention provided considerable scope for the skills of his fellow medical practitioners.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, the French
mitrailleuse
was introduced, firing 37 barrels at once. Later, an American, Hiram Maxim, devised an automatic gun after moving to Britain, and in 1901 was knighted for his contribution to civilization.

His brother Hudson, author of
The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language
, perfected the powerful explosive maximite in the same year.

During the First World War the machine gun came into its own, pleasing military planners with its capacity to pin down and slaughter hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers. Although cavalry charges into virtually defenseless infantry was thus made a thing of the past, warfare became a still more brutal contest of firepower and expendable soldiers.

Light machine guns were designed for portable use, delivering bursts of ammunition. Heavier types could be mounted on tripods and fed with endless streams of ammunition on belts. The heavy Browning was adopted in 1917 by the US Army, and by the Second World War the air-cooled .30-caliber and the water-cooled .50-caliber Brownings were standard American issue. In Britain, the favored light machine gun was the Bren.

Following the Korean War, American forces received the semi-automatic M16 gas-operated rifle, firing 750 rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition per minute, effective at half a kilometer, and weighing less than three kilograms. Four times as heavy was the M60, firing 550 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition and effective at more than a kilometer. This is turning my stomach. If you’re still enthusiastic to know more up-to-date details about this filth, I suggest you turn yourself in to the nearest psychiatric center for a good spring-clean.

1970: visions before midday

No-one else is home. Caroline wakes early (she’s set the alarm) for a day all her own. Bliss. She makes up a fine bowl of stewed apple with cinnamon.

Mary, in trendy Balmain, has been sick with a winter cold. Caroline walks slowly up Darling Street to visit.

Billy’s there already, hairy and boisterous, drinking tea and Southern Comfort. Mary sniffles into Kleenies but declines the bottle.

Brought your stash, Bill?

Sure. Hey, that’ll clear your head.

All the arcana; the selection out of seeds, the rolling, done without attention, in Zen oneness.

Whoop. Hey. Uh uh uh. Wanna hit, Caro?

She hasn’t thought about dope for a long time. But today she’s in fate’s hands.

It might improve my mood.

Here y’ go.

After a time she wanders outside and sits in the cool sun, relaxed, watching pretty fluorescent images.

Caroline opens her eyes to the clouds.

Heads. A beautiful lady of peace, quintessence of quiet calm. Men’s faces, then, strong at first, then horror & pleading and pain & terror. That passes. Noble beasts: lions, bears, a great elk, an incredible scorpion with a magnificent twisting tail (for the clouds move).

All goes.

Caroline closes her eyes in exhaustion. After a time she looks at the clouds again.

The beautiful lady gazes down upon her. The men, the grandeur, the pain, the heraldry. Caroline pities a crucifix, a poor cross stuck in the hill of the sky at 60 degrees, canted, fading, fading so gradually into a pale pale image, an image Caro must strain to see, of a fine man’s face.

The cloud has totally disappeared & there’s only blue.

Mary’s visitors have come to sit in the sun.

You sleeping? God, Caro, you look exhausted.

I’d better go now. Get well soon.

Mary waves, cloaked in a rug in the cooling sun, laughs at a joke from Billy. Caroline wanders down Darling Street, looks in the craft shop window. Bray’s bookshop is shut. Wanders on. Pleasant again.

She drops in on Antony’s house. Everyone has left. In an empty room she finds a sleeping man & two chairs.

They moved out, he tells her, rubbing eyes that have been watching lunchtime dreams.

Whose are these? She sits on one of the two small but fine chairs.

I dunno.

Could I have them?

Yeah. Come on, we’ll chuck ‘em in the back of my van.

1970: working girl

28th July

My dear Joseph

4 o’clock, the sun is shining in my window. Sitting on a new acquisition, a bright chair to match my bright desk. Strange circumstances.

Today is the first time my mind has been calm in a week. The university makes me unhappy. I guess I’ll get over that—it’s my projected emotion.

I started a waitressing job at a sleazy place at Circular Quay last night. Lots of Navy guys. Take-away chips, chicken rolls, hamburgers, greasy or dried out, & sit-down snacks and meals. The guy in charge is okay but the clientele are vile. After 10, the drunks from up the road. It won’t worry me for about 3 weeks, then I’ll throw it in. 5-12 p.m. four nights a week.

Have a courter at present I could do without. Quite nice but…he won’t be allowed to share my lecky blanket.

fondest love & hugs

Caroline

1970: problems of legitimation in late capitalism

Shags peer

aug 2 1970

The gay, wild pace just never lets up. A party here yesterday at which Melbourne’s leading draft dodger and fervorous Messiah put in an appearance, along with various marxists from Latrobe university, the new hotbed of academic revolution. It was meant to be a traditional Saturday bar-b-q but rain sent us all inside. One notable revolutionary kept niggling Wagner, who’d come at my specific request and was all too obviously chatting up this post-puritan fellow’s lady wife. At one point the merrymaker poured beer all over Brian’s hapless head. The wife was not to be found.

Finally, around 9 p.m. (drinking all the wet arvo, you’ll recall) it got too much for Brian, and he hurled a mucky plate of old spaghetti at his tormentor. The wicked communist leaped up in a murderous rage, Wagner ran into the hallway, into Martha’s bedroom. Instead of turning the knob his antagonist attempted to smash down the door, wooden panels crashing out, screams and abuse, his wife returning from the pub at the crucial moment, deflecting his rage. Incredible screaming vituperation in the hall, me quaking in my room where I’d fled for solitude before any of this had begun. Wonderful rhetoric overheard. Brian was characterized as “Zarathustra,” or more germanely if less germanly as “that fat, overweight, hermaphrodite stuffed with X chromosomes.” A highly cerebral approach, as befits a brawling intellectual. Also, I imagine, highly projective: he went on to berate his wife for fucking some tycoon socialist all last year in the back of a Bentley. Finally everyone went off in a huff, including most of the people who live here. I lurked and made notes in a cowardly fashion. When the coast was clear I went in and rescued Brian, who was taking his ease on Martha’s bed reading the Marquis de Sade in a banned American paperback edition.

Our mouser has had 4 pretty kits. I watched the last one being born and got all overcome with amazement and cluckiness.

your Friend

Joseph

1970: vicious rumors

sidders

2 August

Whatever happened to R. D. Laing? Someone on
Old Mole
told me his colleagues had committed him! Tell me true—I appoint you chief investigator.

your Mad Cobber

1970: the decline of charismatic rationality

seaside resorts, inc.

Read Mailer’s 2nd novel
Barbary Shore
. Pretty good, scary, crazy McCarthy-era anticommunist fascist FBI nasties monstering ex-stalinist turned true-revolutionary hero. Collapses at the end as a novel (too much political speechmaking) but a stirring work. Universally panned in 1952, always a good sign.

Had dinner with a couple of hikes the other night and kept pushing the notion that people (workers, students, whatever) should control their own places of work, reach decisions collectively. Of course I was scoffed at as an idealist—the workers are all too stupid, I was told, too tractable. Oddly enough, the night before I had been adopting that same skeptical attitude in a devil’s advocate role when Bob was forcefully arguing for worker’s control. Actually I’m inclined to think that it’s the only way we can get out of this shitheap. I recently read and recommend a book by Herbert Kohl on
The Open Classroom
that takes this line in education. It certainly vindicates your approach to literature studies.

in all foolish hope

Joseph

1970: eros and syphilization

King’s Cross

16 August

dear beast

Control by the workers indeed. A consummation to be craved but not on the agenda this year. After slaving for nine hours today as a true proletarian and meeting the workers face to face once more I can inform you—it’s a long way off.

As you see I’ve changed jobs, to the Cross. The first night here proved astonishing. Having time to kill before six I wandered into shops in the X. One was a men’s wear store (thought I’d buy you a decent tie) where I fell to talking with an elderly French gentleman. We struck up conversation easily as I inevitably do with random strangers and he invited me to coffee. He had been living the past 20 years in Noumea, traveling the world between times. He arranged to meet me after work.

So we dined and wined and I didn’t get home until after three in the morning. He was a lovely man, saddened when I would not share his bed. Through a quite fascinating evening he told me of his travels and of brothels and prostitutes in many lands. He compared and contrasted in detail the lives of the women, the houses, the rackets, the erotic films; the massages and prolonged fucking that follows them; the wonder and evil, beauty and ugliness of it all.

Keep in mind that this man has had thirty years of exotic experience. He provided me with a detailed description of how to “play,” to which I gave amused serious attention. His dildo collection. Bottles of pills, mainly from Germany, that stimulate desire. He is becoming an old man, he said ruefully, and when one sees these beautiful geisha girls, once is not enough! He gave me some of these pills and urged me to swallow them then and there, but I refused. I was exhausted from my first day of work at the hotel and wanted my chaste bed.

When his son was nearly 18, he took wife, son and daughter and a “paid lady” out to a lavish dinner. After the meal he left his son with the lady. He said it was worth the $50 he’d arranged to pay her, for she initiated his son fully, teaching him how a woman may prepare a man and a man ensure a woman’s pleasure.