A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Vin Rouge rides again. I met up with my mercurial friend Vin Rouge again tonight. I haven't drunk anything since last Tuesday's farewell drinks at work, so perhaps Vin had more of an effect on me than usual. Two glasses, and I have that warm, voluptuous feeling. The sort that makes you want to lie on your bed, in the dark, and think about ... things.

Vin makes me restless and impatient. He makes me want to call people and say ... things. Speaking of which, I had a drunken phone call last night at 11pm. It was Saige wanting me to do karaoke with her. I might have, except I had half-promised to do karaoke with Shane on Thursday. Why, that's tomorrow! I was going to finish that fucking mannequin article tonight, except that Vin has knocked me for six and I should just call it a night. And think about ... things.

Holy meme, Batman! Given that I am a complete sucka for memes, it is to my chagrin that I only just get around to responding to this one, from The Love Pump.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

The I Dream of Jeannie-style ability to teleport myself somewhere else, instantly. This would be really handy for when I'm running late, as I invariably am. Or for when you really want a pie, but you can't be fucked getting off your arse and walking to the shops. Cos today, after craving a pie all day, and saying "I'll go later... I'll go later..." I finally walked down to the shops, and when I got to the bakery the pies were gone. And when I asked them when the pies were coming back, they said they didn't know! And then I had to trudge back up the hill. But on the upside, I saw a guy who looked exactly like a Viking. I wished I had a camera. He had the beard and everything.

Which, if any, ‘existing’ superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?

I sense a batlash against Christian Bale, but I maintain that he is Batalicious. It's the mouth (conveniently exposed by the mask). Here I would like to do a comparative study of Batmen and their mouths. I feel as though Ben would be totally into this worthy intellectual project.









Look at the shifting semiotics of the Batsuit as well. I am particularly interested in the length of the ears and the design of the chest emblem. But of all the recent Batmen, Bale has the least amount of face exposed by the mask. Clooney possibly has the most. Keaton sneers. Clooney smirks. Kilmer pouts. Bale has thin lips, tightly held. When he speaks, they don't move very much, except at the corners. He does some great mouth-twitching that manifests in smiles as dry as martinis.

But to the complete unsurprise of all my friends, I would have to say the most fanciable superhero is Spiderman, because he is publicly nerdy but secretly buff. It is his gift; it is his curse.

Which, if any, ‘existing’ superhero(es) do you hate?

That fucken vampire slayer, with all my heart; but then she is not really a superhero. She is more of a super hero.

OK, here’s the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you’d be proud to mask under.)

It is no secret that I am The Incredible Melk. Don't make me angry. You won't like me when I'm angry. And also I am Sweet Cheeks, the bootydancing superhero whose bass-infused arse-cheeks emit an incapacitating sonic boom when slapped.

For extra credit: Is there an ‘existing’ superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

I always wanted to be He-Man. It would be so cool to hold up some talismanic object and feel power flowing transformatively through your body. No wonder he looks almost orgasmic as he says in a voice of thunder, "I have the powerrrrr!" I like the way his powers are a kind of club that only a few people are privy to. Also, I have always wondered how comfortable those furry undies would be. That whole outfit is kind of kinky. As for She-Ra, she was just a crappy merchandising push once they realised that chicks wanted to be He-Man.

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they’re the wind beneath your wings.

No! This superhero meme has gone far enough! MELK SMASH!

Try and understand it ... whoaaaah whoaaah whoaaahhh. I have recently been thinking about the importance of voice. Last week I was on the tram and I heard a woman talking on her mobile phone. She had the most incredibly annoying voice. I can't really explain what was so annoying about it. It wasn't excessively high-pitched, which can be annoying; nor did it have a whiny tone, which can also be annoying. Maybe it was something about her cadences.

In any case, I found myself thinking snootily, "I could never be friends with someone with an annoying voice." Almost immediately, I realised that was a silly thing to think. Perhaps it's subjective, and an otherwise annoying voice becomes dear to you if you like the person. Still, I do love the way my friends speak. I wonder whether I sought them out as friends because of it. I certainly cherish certain of their vocal mannerisms. Gemma and I have a joke about the way she pronounces the word "delicious". I love the way Jeremy says "Jesus!" I love Stuart's filthy, delighted laugh.

I have been reading Eucalyptus by Murray Bail, mostly "to see what all the fuss was about" and because I am obsessed with books that have been (or in this case, were almost) made into films. All I will say on this front is that Nicole Kidman was completely wrong for this film. She was twenty years too old to play the character and I can't easily see how the script could have been re-jigged satisfactorily to account for her age. Russell Crowe, however, would have been very well cast.

But there was one passage I was reading earlier this afternoon which struck me:

Came his voice, "When the breeder of canaries knocked on Miss Kirschner's door he had dandruff on his shoulders. She had a squint in one eye - something like that. And she had the excruciating taste in furnishings usually found with musicians. It's a mystery how an attraction can spring up in one person for another. Who can say why? It would be amazing, except it happens all the time. A person's voice, say a man's voice, heard in the dark or behind a door is sometimes enough. But it must be a combination of things. What do you think?"
"Just voice isn't enough, I don't believe."
"There must be cases where the attraction is not deliberate. It just sort of happens," he proposed. "It can't be explained - a real mystery. There's no logic to it," he added. It was enough for him to shake his head.

I like the way Bail begins this section, "Came his voice." He suggests that, despite what the protagonist, Ellen, believes at the time, voice may well be enough. The entire premise of the book is that a man woos a woman through storytelling. (Insert obligatory gag about 'oral sex' here.) I don't even think I need to write about the seductive power of the voice, although there's a definite pleasure in it. Perhaps that's a subject you and I can talk about together in an alcohol venue. It would be all the more piquant then. We would no doubt have a lot to say.

Last night I was watching The Wedding Singer on TV. I love Drew Barrymore's voice and her way of speaking, almost sideways from delectable lips. I was particularly taken by the scene in which her character Julia speaks to her reflection in the mirror and has the horrible realisation that she will soon become Julia Guglia. Adam Sandler's Robbie has already anticipated this situation (Glenn (terse): "Why is that funny?" Robbie (deadpan): "I don't know.") but somehow it becomes more awful when said in Drew Barrymore's lovely voice.

By contrast, the name of Julia's true love sounds all the more wonderful in Drew Barrymore's voice. Maybe the audience has this subconscious realisation, and that's why they sympathise with Julia's slow, growing happiness and with Robbie's disappointment as he sees Julia in the window, animatedly chatting to her reflection. Robbie assumes her happiness is about her impending marriage to the odious Glenn. After all, he can't hear her voice.

Are actors chosen for their voices? Think about Jack Nicholson and his voice-a-like, Christian Slater. Think about Winona Ryder's distinctive whistled consonants. Think about Janeane Garofalo's mellifluous sarcasm.

But back to Eucalyptus. What I found intriguing is the way the book attempts to capture the beguiling quality of the human voice using the literary metaphor of authorial voice. I felt it was mostly successful, but it has implications for other forms of communication.

Like, duh, blogs. You imagine a voice for the blogger's endless first-person narrative. I remember being quite shocked when I heard the manslave's voice for the first time - it was completely unlike the voice I'd given him in my imagination. But Will's voice is exactly as you would expect. And when you read letters, emails, text messages or blog posts from people whose voices you already know, you imagine them reading it in their own idiosyncratic voices. You know the most curious thing - I gave Glen the wrong voice. Based on his writing style, I imagined him a kind of playful, comedian's voice, when his real voice is quite gruff. I realised with horror that I'd actually grafted Chris' ex-housemate Tim's voice onto Glen's writing.

Then there are the voices we put on for particular occasions. I used to have a "market research voice", which I put on nowadays for radio interviews and conference presentations. I was taken aback a couple of years ago when I was at a conference in Adelaide, and a chick I met told me that my speaking style had reminded her of a PhD student in her own department, a chick called Saige. Anyone who knows the way Saige speaks might find this diverting.

I realised afresh at the superheroes conference the vital role of the voice. For me, the very clever papers situated themselves as entire performances of an argument, rather than verbal presentations of written arguments. Oh, I wish I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned what Shane has hilariously dubbed "the fantasmatic 'longer version' of their paper." I wish some academics would realise that people pay attention when you can weave your paper into a story, not when you pause annoyingly because you can't get the DVD player to work.

Christian's paper took this idea furthest in the most original way, in that the performance of his paper was itself the argument, and any written version would have to be a literary re-interpretation of the oral original. I remember noting, through a hangover so massive I felt as though my head were drifting clean off my shoulders to bump aimlessly against the ceiling like an errant helium balloon, at the evenness and neutrality of his voice. It was as though he'd hammered smooth his conversational voice, which seesaws between breathy, almost nervous phrases and loud, emphatic rhetorical flourishes, into an assured, fluent Lecturing Voice.

I mean to write more, but I gotta go to a magazine meeting now. Perhaps I'd add to this later.

History has been made. This morning I awoke to sunlight streaming across my bed. I wished you were there with your ridiculous hair. More precisely, I wished to roll over, encounter a rapidly cooling patch where you'd recently been, and just as I was working myself up to feeling disappointed that you'd nicked off without waking me, you'd come in bearing two steaming cups of tea and the weekend papers.

Thankfully, the steam rising from the tea would hide the smirk you couldn't suppress when you saw me half-sitting-up, my face all pillow-creased and perplexed. We'd drink our tea and read the paper in bed, which I never normally do, and I would point out little interesting stories, like at UWA they've actually done research to prove the theory that Eurasian people are really really ridiculously good looking.

But I read the papers by myself at Penny's work instead. Penny has spent years trying to make me work there, and I have spent years replying that this was a very bad idea. I gave the following reasons:

1. I am very, very lazy and tire easily.
2. I have an intense dislike for cleaning.
3. I have shaky hands and weak wrists, and am very bad at carrying drinks and plates.
4. I find it hard to hide my feelings and thus am not very good at kissing customers' arses.
5. I am bad at remembering orders.
6. Other of her friends have worked there in the past, and set standards of incompetence which I am highly likely to surpass.

However, today I found myself working at Penny's work for almost two hours. This is the historic occasion to which I refer. There were definitely shades of The Nanny to it - I had style, I had flair, I was there.

It will never happen again.

People-watching. This evening I was in Vis observing a wonderful little play unfolding at the window bench. I shall call it The Competition. Three twentysomething office types in suits were having after-work drinks: a handsome olive-skinned guy with an English accent; a pretty long-haired blonde; and a pretty long-haired brunette with equally pretty high-heeled shoes. The chicks were both wearing pants that were deliberately too long for them because they knew they would only ever wear them with high heels.

They were lined up along the bench, slightly in a circle. From my perspective, the brunette was sitting on the far left, the blonde in the middle and the guy on the right. Funny thing was, the two chicks were both angled to face the guy, almost as if they were interviewing him. Their chairs were quite close together, with a space between them and the guy's chair. Almost as if they were afraid to sit too close to him. But my interpretation was that they were each afraid to give the other the impression that they wanted to sit close to him, and as a result, neither of them were sitting close to him.

At one point, all three of them raised their voices and I couldn't tell whether they were actually fighting about something or just getting chardonnaically boisterous. Penny felt that the guy was serious, but I could have sworn that the brunette had a jokey expression on her face.

The funniest part was when the two chicks went to the toilet. The blonde went first, and while she was gone, the brunette pushed the blonde's chair out of the way under the bench and moved her own up close to the guy's chair. She was leaning in towards him and laughing. The blonde came back from the toilet and physically dragged the brunette's chair, with the brunette still in it, back to its original position, got her own chair back out in the middle, and sat down. Order restored.

Then the brunette went to the toilet and the blonde was behaving in exactly the same flirtatious way as the brunette had been earlier. It was as though they'd both watched a Flirting 101 instructional DVD:

1. Lean towards man.
2. Laugh.
3. Toss hair.
4. Caress man on forearm or thigh occasionally. (Cries of "Oh, you!" optional)

The guy was sitting in that splayed-knee fashion that men often adopt, and the blonde had her own knee right between his legs. This tactic seemed to be working - the guy was caressing her thigh, too. But their idyll was spoiled when the guy's mobile rang. It must have been another work colleague of theirs (or at least a mutual friend), because the blonde soon figured out who it was, demanded the phone, and started yelling into it that the caller "should come down here!"

While she was distracted on the phone, turning away from the guy, the brunette came back from the toilet and started chatting to him again, standing next to his chair with her arm resting on the back of it.

I could have watched this all night, but Penny and I were heading to Yoyogi with C7 on our minds. After we'd ordered, Penny opined that there were two possible reasons for such clumsy flirting: both girls were inexpert flirts; or they didn't deem the guy worthy of more sophisticated flirting. But the part that interested me was the naked competition between the chicks for the guy.

Perhaps I'm just sensitive to this because I always feel myself at a disadvantage in competition with other women for the men I want. I know people who say, "It's not a competition", "I don't buy into that competitive bullshit", etc etc. But they're able to say this because they're winners - the competition is only visible to the losers.

Like on Sunday, Leanne was saying earnestly, "There's no such thing as 'hot' and 'not'."
Bo started laughing and said, "You only think that because you're hot."
I started laughing too, but was soon coughing my guts up.

The art of the epigraph. If I ever end up writing that academic book about hip hop culture in Australia, I would like to use the following as the epigraph:

The best of Punlovers. In a sentimental mood yesterday, Jane and Sophie let my final appalling pun headline go through. It was about the recent Lebanese elections, in which voters overwhelmingly endorsed the anti-Syria opposition. My headline was "Lebanon Says: Syria Later!" Now I am getting all nostalgic for the shonky headlines I attempted (and usually failed) to get through at work. A while ago, I used to send my friends a weekly email bulletin of that week's pun headlines. It ended up running to 19 editions before I got bored of it. Oh, the rich irony that The Reader will now be a weekly email bulletin.

I thought that I might reproduce a few of them here as an occasional series, arranged thematically. Some themes I can already think of are "Those Crazy Russians", "Sexual Punning", "Political Puns" and "Kriminal Kapers". But first in Punlovers Redux, the cream of my dubious crop, the Puns of the Week.

(3 February 2004)
A man has sex with his relative's sleeping wife...
Mel's Headline: "Sleeping Booty"

(19 February)
Our lives are increasingly mediated by screen technologies...
Mel's Headline: "Makes You Want to Screen" (and I think that one does!!!)

(26 February)
Shoddy Russian buildings fall down...
Mel's Headline: "The Big Collapski" (I can't believe that got through!)

(4 March)
South Australian parliamentarians have passed a bill banning the eating of cats and dogs after the Attorney-General alleged that a cat had been put on a public BBQ in his electorate...
Mel's 1st Headline: "Cat on a Hot Tin Grill"
Mel's Final Headline: "Gourmiaow"

(11 March)

(13 May)

Unemployment: Day One. Last night, I told Virginia that I was beginning to feel maudlin. She replied that I ought to feel angry instead. Right now, I can't really summon the required anger. I am mainly thinking how life at work is going to proceed without me much as it did before. Perhaps they'll even be relieved that I'm gone - me and my stupid puns and constant enquiries about whether you would call your child this or that, and whether this or that situation is ironic.

I have mentioned before that I resented being the office buffoon; but it's a role I always slip into when I'm comfortable in a particular environment. I feel torn between two conflicting impulses - my desire to be taken seriously as an intellectual, and my desire to share with others the absurd things that delight me.

I ate some two-day-old pizza and swigged Solo from a 1.25L bottle. I did some laundry. My sheets are the same blue as the sky.

Feel ... strength ... returning ...

Fully sick. Two or three weeks ago we were having a magazine meeting at Vis and I had that horrible foreboding feeling that I was coming down with a cold. Paging through my haphazard mental flip-book of folk wisdom about how to prevent and cure colds, I had a lemongrass and ginger tea. I followed this up with a severe regime of hot lemon drinks, freshly squeezed juices, rugging up in bed (I had heard somewhere that raising the body's temperature kills off germs), gargling with antibacterial mouthwash and wearing scarves round my neck all the time.

Now I have a fucking full-blown cold. The sort where your throat is raw from incessant coughing, your joints ache, your nose runs, your ears are blocked and you feel both boiling and freezing. Of course, I could blame it on last Saturday's superhero ball drinking binge, Thursday's Irish karaoke session, and last night's mega-cleavage. But I choose to blame it on the inefficacy of all my various folk remedies, and am now drinking coffee and sleeping naked again like normal.

I really hope I am okay again by Tuesday, because it is my last day of work and there will be a company-sponsored piss-up that night. I feel quite aggrieved that my birthday is in August so I will miss out on the traditional dodgy birthday cake at work. Oh yeah, and also that I will have no income apart from freelancing.

Oh, and one more thing? Christian Bale = Batalicious. Today Tash was pointing to a picture of Batman in the paper and saying "Hot", like a toddler pleased at having learned a new word. I pointed out that you couldn't really see the hotness because it was a silhouetted picture, but Tash said she was just pleased to know it was there underneath. Tash also asked me who was hotter, Christian Bale or Cillian Murphy. It was like Sophie's Choice; but I eventually opted for Bale.

And as for Katie Holmes, she was out-acted by her own breasts in a satin shirt on a cold day.

Things to do with food courts. Yesterday, Gemma and I had a food court lunch. She had potato wedges with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce. I had a small combination butter chicken and rogan josh with saffron rice. We had been wondering if there's been any academic work done on food courts. I bet Meaghan Morris had a stab at it. I did a bit of a web search but I couldn't find anything specific, although I found this list of general mall-related resources.

I researched shopping centres for my thesis because I was discussing consumerism and femininity in Kath & Kim. What a fucking disgrace that chapter was; but let's not dwell on that. Basically, I'm aware of the standard arguments about privatisation of public space and gendered consumption patterns. And we all know from the movie Mallrats and the recent business about hoodies that the mall is also a site for surveillance of young people and moral panic surrounding their public congregation (panic which centres around people using consumer space without spending money).

The food court is made for hanging out; and its component structure seems to complicate the mall's panoptic regime. Each food outlet is independent, adjacent to the rest but not associated with them. And the people sitting and eating in the common space can buy as much or as little food as they want, and take as much time over it as they want, because unlike other restaurants, the food court outlets have no control over the consumption of their product. "If you were bulimic, you could easily binge without drawing attention to yourself," said Gemma.

I'm also interested in the faux-cosmopolitanism of the food court. I remember the first food court I ever went to, at Box Hill Central in the late 1980s. It had a sandwich place that also served roast meats, a fish and chippery, a hot dog/baked potato place, an icecream place, and another place called "Asian Gourmet Affair". Nowadays we're accustomed to being able to choose from a basic selection of "ethnic" foods - an Italian place, a Mexican place, a Middle Eastern kebab place, an Indian place.

Then there are places like Ong's Food Court, an all-Asian basement which had Vietnamese, Chinese, Malay/Indian and Thai. Apparently it's modelled on the "hawker food courts" that you find in Singapore and Malaysia. And there are the hybrid food courts at fresh food markets, where stalls that sell ready-prepared meals - especially delis, juice bars and bakeries - sit side by side with stalls selling food you can take away and cook yourself.

At last year's CSAA conference, I heard a fascinating paper that focused on laksa as a diasporic dish. It talked about the dish's origins as a Straits speciality, and thus already hybridised, and drew on depth interviews with migrants from Asia to Australia: how they learned to cook laksa; how they built food-related businesses in Australia and how the locals took to them. I was thinking about this because one interviewee actually started the first "Asian" food stall at the Adelaide market back in the 1970s.

I think this kind of research is vital to understanding the food court as an imagined space of cosmopolitanism; as an encounter with the Other through bland, bain-marie fodder. In Kath & Kim, this is a source of comedy - Kath fancies herself sophisticated by consuming "cinos" and "ham and cheese pinatas". I am loath to buy into the recent inner/outer suburb divide (inner suburb=thoughtful, self-reflexive consumer/outer suburb=thoughtless, voracious consumer), and the very thought of my thesis topic now fills me with a curious mixture of rage and ennui. But I still don't want to dismiss the food court as a banal, Orientalised space where dumb suburban bogans thoughtlessly swill crappy westernised versions of exotic foreign cuisine.

I would like to view the food court as a revolutionary space where cultures sit together like curries in a combination Indian meal, or like businessmen eating their lunch on bench seats next to teenagers wagging school and mums with prams. And its very quotidian banality is what makes it revolutionary - there is no patronising search for an essentialist culinary "authenticity". You can have a Flake Shake with your falafel, and put the Vietnamese shop's chilli jam on your McDonalds fries.

(Watch this space for Mel's deconstruction of the all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant.)

The manslave stalks me with his whizz-bang new digital camera. This was on Saturday night while I was getting ready for the Superheroes Ball. He kept imploring me to turn around and I kept seeing the results and imploring him to delete them. After a while I just went back to doing my makeup.

Eventually I relented, but you can see I was not particularly happy about it. Or perhaps I was using Marsha Queen of Diamonds' powers on him...

Nobody got that I was Marsha Queen of Diamonds because I just looked like a normal person. There was a real preponderance of Sailor Moons and Spidermen at the ball. Amusingly, this guy that we were laughing looked like the Comic Book Store Guy from The Simpsons actually came as the Comic Book Store Guy. He was wearing a t-shirt that said "Worst Costume Ever".

Most of my friends left really early and I felt quite depressed and abandoned. And I was jealous because Jeremy had been on a highly successful Hot Date that afternoon. Jeremy attempted to console me by saying that "if you lost some weight, you would be really hot!" I felt quite outraged at this, especially given that last year I had a brief crush on Jeremy when he was much fatter than he is today.

In the end, I turned to my cool friend Beer. Oh, Beer and I have had some great times. Saturday was one of those nights. I brought him repeatedly to my lips, running my fingers over the condensation on his glass, and let him slip deliciously down my throat.

After a while, Beer ran out, and I felt depressed and abandoned, but soon moved on to his sophisticated buddy Vin Rouge. Vin packs a punch and I had to take it pretty slow - I couldn't just knock him back. But Vin imbued me with superheroic powers including Killer Dancing, Witty Conversation and Jumping Fences in High Heels. After a disagreement over whether we would adjourn to Ding Dong or Alia (I came down strongly on the side of Alia), I caught a taxi with a bunch of strangers, including an American who looked disconcertingly like Rowan Atkinson.

At Alia I discovered my friend Beer again. He said to me, "Where the fuck have you been? Who cares if the music's shit? Let's fucking dance, baby!"

At times like this I realise I love Beer dearly. We danced. Princess Leia was being hit on every five minutes. She was pretending to be all humiliated at wearing the outfit in public, but she was loving it. She-Ra was making out with a guy in an armchair. Wolverine's white wifebeater bore the marks of a violent altercation with Vin Rouge earlier in the evening, and he was also inexplicably wearing a black bra over the singlet, which I found disconcertingly erotic.

Beer spun me til I was dizzy and Marty had to take my elbow and pilot me to the couch. We talked about the forum the following afternoon. Marty joked that someone should ask whether superheroes were "really gay." Drunkenly, I promised to ask that question. And I did. Stuart put his head in his hands when I put my hand up. This is roughly what I said:

It's interesting that you bring up this issue of camp, and you mentioned Kavalier and Clay. I wanted to tie this into something Angela said in her presentation this morning, about homosexuality carrying a stigma in the 1950s. I was thinking about how in the novel Sam has to go before the tribunal because of the homosexual subtext to his sidekick characters. And I was also thinking about the camp superheroes of the 1950s and 1960s - the 'men in tights' that the conference title refers to. So I put it to you - are superheroes just really gay?"

Big laugh from the audience. Marty said, "Yes, yes, they are," hoping to leave it there. But the other speakers on the panel actually got into the question and provided some answers that interested me - stuff about border crossing and the associations of camp with masculinity.

Mel's comic strip tease. Stuart designed the program for the Holy Men in Tights! superheroes conference at Melbourne University, which I attended this weekend. The program looks like a comic book, complete with panels and onomatopoeic "Krakkk!"s and "Aieieieie!"s. There were some blank pages in the back for notes, and I drew this comic strip on Friday during a mind-numbingly boring session. (Click to enlarge.)

It was so bad that Christian said to me, "I can't take any more of this!' and left during the second paper. I am not one of those ruthless/busy/carefree people who goes to conferences and only ends up attending half the sessions. I have this compulsion to get my money's worth - particularly spastic in this case as I got to go to the conference for free - that leads to me doggedly going to every session and drinking my weight in free booze. Oh my god, I drank so much last night.

When Christian came back in time for the fourth paper (by the always sardonically excellent Martyn Pedler), I had drawn three frames already. Later that night, Mark paid me a supreme compliment by refusing to believe I'd drawn it myself. (Okay, he was drunk at the time.)

Academia and journalism - can the twain meet? I know that sounds like a shoddy essay question from a first-year media studies subject, but it's a very real and omnipresent frustration for me in my professional life, which as I've miserably blogged about before, takes place in a dreary no-man's land in which I get no respect from either field.

The thing that inspired me to write this latest post is an article I wrote this week for the Sydney Morning Herald, which posits the idea of a compliment economy. It's not a particularly novel idea - it clearly ties in with Mauss's gift economy. And my thesis argument about mutual obligation was inspired by a wonderful Ghassan Hage article that spoke of gifts as ethical exchanges. But anyway, I wanted to explain how compliments worked in a very distinctive way as social transactions.

It was a really hard article to write, because I was stripped of the academic discursive mode, which allows digressions, rhetorical gestures towards alternative possibilities, and detailed and contextualised citations of relevant work. By contrast, the journalistic mode - particularly the "opinion column mode" I was adopting, provides encapsulated summaries of other research as self-contained evidence for an unequivocal argument. That "other research" must be a published account of research findings, or a book. There's very little room for going, "Well, then there's this way of looking at it," or "but X counters that idea". And in the newspaper context, it looks dodgy to cite one article someone's written - you want something that suggests authority in this particular field.

Anyway, I used two sources: a recent social pyschology study at the University of Kansas which found compliments improve female self-esteem (I know: hold the front page!), and University of Michigan law professor William Ian Miller's philosophy book Faking It. (I have been a fan of Miller's smart, wry style since reading Humiliation, a book of essays on honour, shame, humiliation and violence.) Then I got the following email from B.Ro, my editor:

Do we have any local input to validate what all these American's [sic] are saying?
A locally sourced quote speaking to the main theme would be useful.

So despite slight ethical twingeings (thinking of how New York Times wundercolumnist Jennifer 8 Lee was bagged for using her Harvard alumni listserv as a journalistic resource), I promptly got on the CSAA list:

Hello all,

I'm currently writing an article for the SMH that imagines the practice of complimenting people as a kind of economy of goodwill. It's a two-way exchange in which people recognise and trade desires and expectations; and how people respond to compliments reveals their perception of the relative social positions of the complimenter and recipient.

I am wondering whether any Australian academics have written on this or similar topics, and/or if anyone is interested in being quoted for this article.

# posted by Mel @ 2:19 PM 0 comments