Category Quick Posts

• The Importance of Being Earnest

  I HAVE LATELY BECOME slightly fixated on music and other cultural artefacts that have a specific quality to them: that they are straightforward, uncomplicated, unashamedly enthusiastic, and completely lack sardonic detachment. There is almost a dialectic here, between works that have the quality, and works on the other end of the scale, which must be appreciated only as context. Bluey, the children’s show about talking dogs, is earnest, straightforward, lovely. Muppets films like Muppets Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island have the quality too. Seinfeld, on the other hand, can only work as comedy at multiple levels of awareness of humour, that the nothingness of the show’s jokes are key. It’s impossible to enjoy TISM, for example, without enjoying the double- and triple-entendres, and being aware of the many levels of irony going on, and appreciating that the jokes come mainly at the expense of the band themselves (if only because the rhymes don’t often scan, and the music isn’t very good). Movies by Tarantino are just violence and slurs on the surface, on top of a context of layered, appreciative irony and meta-context, that is, if you can stomach the blood.

  Let’s call it earnest vs. ironic. Neither is inherently better than the other, this is simply a model I’m proposing. Salt ‘n’ Pepa were earnest, the Wu-Tang Clan ironic. The best of punk music is earnest, but the moment any kind of punk music requires a ‘scene’ to be enjoyed it shifts to the other end entirely. Folk music is earnest, shoe gaze ironic. Sometimes it’s counterintuitive: WWE wrestling is earnest, despite none of it the ‘kayfabe’ being technically true, because it’s the single-level appreciation of fans that matters, while all ‘mixed martial arts’, Ultimate Fighting, combat sports, and the like are essentially ironic riffs on their fans’ weird ideas, on multiple levels, about violence. Prince, despite the many layers of his pop performances, was essentially an upfront, simple, earnest soul singer at heart. Madonna was infinitely ironic from the beginning, and challenges everyone to find the next onion layer of meaning there. Some cultural products have shifted in time between the poles, like Star Wars, which started out as deadpan-earnest Western Ninja Space Opera pastiche, and has gained an accretion of context-driven catchphrase fan-service.

  The apotheosis of earnest, I think, of this is Neil Diamond’s 1972 double album Hot August Night. How can anyone resist lyrics like:

  I got a song been on my mind
  And the tune can be sung, and the words all rhyme…

  Posted 20 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Log off

  HAVING FACEBOOK ARGUMENTS WITH people is generally unpleasant, frustrating, and pointless. You won’t win them, and they only increase the engagement figures of the kind of people who engage marketing consultants, or use the word ‘yarns’ without irony. Arguing on facebook and twitter is why everyone’s racist uncle is in charge of our political parties and civil institutions, jumping into your conversation to say, well, ‘you might not like Trump but he reflects how real people think’, or other infinitely facile opinions that simply cannot be engaged with because there is no ‘there’ there, and people with critical self-reflection skills get off social media, retreat further and further from any sphere that can be called public, and work on their hobbies and addictions.

  The key image of the early 21st century is major corporations shitting in the gemeinschaft.

  Posted 17 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Trove

  I HAVE BEEN INFORMED that this blog is now officially archived by the National Library of Australia and is accessible in trove.

  I am both honoured, and ashamed of this, my own personal crime against the national heritage.

  Posted 9 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Assessment

  THE FOLLOWING ARE INDIVIDUAL assessment instrument steps in the assessment plan, produced to the requirements of the unit of competency, and mapped against its elements and their performance criteria, contextualised for the learner and properly validated for effect according to the rules of evidence established by the Australian Skills Quality Authority (AQSA) as part of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system. Workplace risks have been identified and controlled, and communication with appropriate stakeholders has been established at the outset of the assessment process.

  The brief to participants is as follows:

  1. bourbon
  1. scotch
  1. beer

  All participants, please have your third party reports filled out for recognition of competency by recognition of prior learning (RPL).

  Posted 23 November 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Achewood smell jokes

  RUNNING FROM 2001 TO 2016, more or less, Chris Onstad’s webcomic Achewood was one of the more remarkable cultural artefacts of the 2000s web. While a lot of it hasn’t aged well, there are other elements to it that remain incredibly powerful (the Michael Jackson strip from 2009 manages to sit in both columns). Roast Beef’s depression and anxiety, which are played on as subjects for jokes, are also treated far more seriously and humanely than in far ‘better’ works of literature. It’s completely internally inconsistent, surreal, some of it’s over-written, and ought to sit with the greats of Americana.

  At a fundamental level I am an immature person and have always appreciated an under-recognised part of Achewood’s running humour—jokes based on the sense of smell.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  The fart joke is one of the standards of comic writing, and should be treated as fundamental to literature as a 12-bar blues riff is to music.

  Posted 3 September 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading

  A City Plans For War (Emma Shaw Crane, Public Books):

  Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only the usual modernist improvements—development, growth—but also peace. Yet in postconflict Beirut, planners, developers, and architects, instead of designing for a peaceful city, plan for the war yet to come.

  It's time to let Canberra picturesquely decay (Ian Warden, Canberra Times):

  When Australians, in their endearingly muddleheaded and inarticulate way, complain that there is something “artificial” about their nation’s capital, one of the things they mean (without being able to put a muddleheaded finger on it) is that Canberra has no ruins.

  Conspiracy Theories (David Runciman, TLS):

  ...for the conspiracy theorist the absence of truth can only be explained by some sinister forces having decided to conceal it. And of course that is a conspiracy theory that many liberals find hard to resist. Why did people vote for Brexit? Because the ignorant voters were misled by nefarious forces. The same with the election of Trump. What are those forces? Take your pick...

  Posted 8 January 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Total House

  On Twitter, Trav (@Br_Tr) posted an art print of the Total House car park in Melbourne. It’s a really good looking piece of architectural art, and like all good art, it creates an emotional and intellectual response. Mine, of course, was fury.

  Posted 5 April 2018 | Author Liam Hogan

• Loneliness

  THIS MORNING, A MATCHED pair of posts about loneliness, by Amba Azaad in The New Inquiry and Chris Dillow.

  Azaad:

  Because straight white men refuse to recognize their own unpalatability, they come up with solutions to loneliness that appropriate the rhetoric of justice- and freedom-based ideologies without actually engaging in any rigorous structural analyses of their culpability in oppression. They don’t want revolutionary change but merely a polite tolerance that would make them more bearable. And this selfishness renders them incompetent to address the structures of loneliness as a social ill.

  Dillow:

  And this has been my experience too. My grammar school was on the other side of town and it played rugby, the function of which was not so much to produce rugby players as to signal to people like me that we didn’t belong. And then I went to Oxford which was chocka with charmless dullards from “nice” middle-class backgrounds*. All along there were cues that I didn’t fit in.
  Of course, the ruling class rarely gave overt outright messages of class hatred, just as Ms Hirsch rarely encountered crude racism. It likes to think of itself as open and tolerant. But this is self-regarding bullshit which rests upon a denial of the real lived experience of the tens of thousands of black, mixed-race or working-class people: Michael Henderson’s “review” in the Times is a wonderful example of this.

  Posted 30 January 2018 | Author Liam Hogan

• There are more important issues

  ONE OF THE RHETORICAL tricks I’ve noticed becoming increasingly common (though I may just have been sensitized to it) is opposition to some proposal, based on the claim that “there are more important issues to discuss”.

  John Quiggin on the ‘why won’t the x talk about y’ phenomenon.

  Posted 29 January 2018 | Author Liam Hogan

• The Para-Academic Handbook

  Specialists in all manner of things, from the humanities to the social and biological sciences, the para-academic works alongside the traditional university, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, usually a mixture of both. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don’t seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we’ve always done: write, research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others.

  That sounds pretty familiar to me. Read the Para-Academic Handbook immediately.

  Posted 6 November 2014 | Author Liam Hogan