The God of Small Things

The title of this week's blog is apt to mislead. It is not about Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize winning novel - or indeed about anything so worthy and refined. Indeed, if you are a small child (or even a large one), I'd recommend you stop reading now and get together with your friends and do something useful - like give another English word an alternate meaning that will be sure to confuse adults. (I was told this week by my students that "hectic" now means "good." I still don't believe them.) So...go run along.

Enough delays - let us begin.

When I was younger, a girl (a "young woman"?) asked me to her year 10 formal. No girl had ever even asked for so much as a potato chip from me, so I said yes. The day arrived, I showered, dressed, stuck on my cummerbund, and applied generous amounts of Brut 33. Before we were to depart she said she needed to "use the bathroom." D. disappeared behind the bathroom door while I chatted awkwardly to her parents, most likely about the rain and school and where I was going to find a park. Then without warning, a noise came from behind the door reminiscent of the one that a tennis player makes while serving - an "effort noise" if you will. I'm not sure if I grimaced,  but her parents continued on as if everything was just the same as it had been only moments before. It wasn't. I'm ashamed to admit that I no longer wanted to go to the formal with her any more. I'm not proud of my reaction; I'm not even sure I quite understand it. My son can go to the toilet and carry on a full conversation about Batman through the whole process, with his voice wavering at various stages of the process. (OK - I warned you. There's still time to stop.) 

But things were different in 1986. D. even looked different coming out of that bathroom - and I don't just mean lighter. I didn't "fancy" her, and yet she was a different woman emerging from that bathroom to the one that entered it. Did I want something more radical perhaps? A friend's mother once managed to somehow sustain a fart all the while walking through a large-sized room: a textbook rasberry, the blast began before she entered the room and was still hissing and flapping wildly at us as she left; what's more, she even managed to chastise G. about his room on the way through, just for good measure. An original multitasker. If anything, G. and I were shocked and awed - and perhaps even had more respect for her after this display of virtuosity and chutzpah. But with respect to D. I wanted to go home.

What is it about certain small things in certain places that destroy everything for us? I recall once arguing with a school friend about religion while he had a piece of beetroot stuck to his cheek. The small piece of vegetable matter somehow managed to destroy his credibility for me in ways that, even now, I find difficult to account for. Part of this is surely just a matter of attention. I couldn't put the little purple sliver out of my mind; and yet it was more than simply a matter of being distracted. Something that reframed his whole personality - sort of like a negation at the end of a sentence that inverts the whole meaning of what preceded it - like "I think that of all the people I know you have to be the greatest [long pause] at stupidity." Beetroot isn't a phoneme and faces aren't, strictly speaking, syntactic - but the analogy at least reassures me that there's some meaning to my prejudice, even if I can't quite articulate it myself.

Is That the Truth, Or...

I am a sick man. I am a deranged man. There is something wrong with my newspaper.

Today, walking through campus, I was spruiked at virgorously by a bottle-blonde Englishgirl  - or someone putting on an accent for the express purpose of improving their spruiking (no one spruiks like the English). She offered me a free subscription to The Daily Telegraph. Free. Pay nothing. Ever. Really?

"But I am a staff member - not a student."

"It doesn't matter. It's for everyone." 

"But the form asks me when I graduate." 

"Write anything."

"1999?"

"Write anything."

"2087?"

"Anything. Fill out the form to the best of your ability."

I filled out my form (to the best of my ability) and was, for my efforts, given a small plastic card which I'm entitled to flash at the newsagent on campus who then responds by giving me my paper. It works - but it has created another dilemma. 

How do I actually get the paper from the newsagent back to my office? What if someone else in my department actually saw me with a copy of The Tele in my hand? It would be like being caught walking through campus with a copy of The New Testament or Dianetics. How could I explain it to them? 

"Dr Flemo, what are you doing with that? You read The Telegraph?"

"It was free."

"Free? I wouldn't read it if they paid me."

"Actually, they paid me."

"Even so..."

Perhaps the colleague would even be wearing one of those shirts that say "Is that the truth - or did you read it in The Telegraph?" Fortunately, however, it is Wednesday and I buy The Australian on the first Wednesday of every month to get a copy of The Australian Review of Books. I figured that I could fold up hide my copy of The Tele inside my copy of The Australian. Perhaps that was Murdoch's plan all along - targeting academics from the Humanities and Social Sciences with free subscriptions to The Tele in order that they then have to fork out the cash for his other publications to cover up their supposedly "free" paper. Cunning. But then how do I cover up my purchase of The Australian?

One solution I've contemplated is to bring a marker pen to the newsagent and - before leaving the shop - draw one big quotation mark on the first page of the paper and then another large quotation mark on the last page, to signal that I'm reading it ironically. Not reading, but "reading." 

That's it. I'll give that a go.

Me Everywhere

I work with someone who looks a bit like me, albeit older and perhaps - loathe as I am to admit it - a little better looking.

I console myself with the fact that he has only written around fourteen novels - and some of them haven't even won any awards.

Once, in a department meeting, I turned to the person next to me and asked whether he thought that the person in question looked like me. He confirmed my assessment. If we were actors, he could be cast as my uncle or older cousin; at a stretch, we could even be brothers. (He looks more like me than my actual brothers do, anyway.)

Once, in the late 1990s, I was stopped in a supermarket in Hillsdale NSW and asked whether I was Frank Woodley, the Australian comedian.

Stupidly, I denied it. With precise Freudian logic, further denials simply confirmed her suspicion. Encouraged by my evident humility, she congratulated me on my show with Colin Lane and said that, of the two of us, I was "much funnier." Eventually I demurred and thanked her - even if she did look a bit disappointed that I wasn't funnier in person.

I do, in fact, look a bit like Frank Woodley - although I tend to think that Woodley actually looks more like a cross between me and a friend of mine, Lucas Ihlein.

If one were to line the three of us up, with Woodley in the middle and Lucas and I on either side, then the effect would be something like a physiognomic colour-wheel, with a gradual morphing of the face. I'm sure - given the inclination and adequate resources - we could locate other points on the wheel. But it's not a bad start.

Please allow me to continue this narcissistic meditation...

Another Flemo lookalike is surely Colin Vearncombe, the lead-singer of the English band Black, who had a big hit in 1986 with the song "Wonderful Life."

In fact, I tend to think Vearncombe looks like a cross between me and the English singer/"pop sensation" Rick Astley. (Unfortunately, I think he is well-known enough for me to not put his picture here. Moreover, I don't want any pictures of Rick Astley on my blog - and if you know what's true, beautiful, and just, you won't either.)

When faced (literally) with these kinds of bodily similarities I have been tempted to wonder if the person in question and I are somehow related - or rather, given the "mitochondrial eve" hypothesis, just how related the person is. "Woodley," for instance, is an Anglo-Saxon name and my surname is Anglo-French, but perhaps the stronger genetic link here is on my mother's side. (Further proof of the Woodley connection: Like Woodley, I am also extraordinarily funny.)

I'm not sure why, but I find it frustrating the extent to which I can't really investigate these connections with any precision. I've long had a fantasy that I could make small lit signs appear above people's heads which would announce their familial link with me. The labelling could be switched from the technical "Fifth cousin twice removed on your mother's side"-type of a classification, to the simpler "Peter Smythe: Person most closely related to you within a five kilometre radius." The people themselves wouldn't be aware of the information - but I would.

These are not the only connections I've entertained. A few years ago my sister was seeing an elderly patient who began to cry shortly after the start of the consult. She asked why the woman was crying and the woman replied: "You remind me of my Ray." Without pause, and not knowing quite why, my sister shot back "Ray Crisford?" "Yes! My Ray! How did you know him?" My sister didn't - they'd never met. Ray was our uncle and his plane was shot down over Germany in 1945. He apparently survived the crash but later starved to death in a forest. The elderly woman in question was "with" Ray prior to him heading off to war. The woman married but she apparently never quite got over the loss. I know this story sounds apocryphal, but my sister has stayed in contact with the woman in question ever since, sharing pictures and getting stories. I'm not sure what the woman's husband thinks of it all, however. (Chances are that he has probably also been convinced by now that he should have married Ray as well.)

That was a connection - admittedly not genealogical - that might never have been discovered. It would be odd to suddenly be able to actually see all these threads wherever they might be. Imagine you are sitting next to an elderly gentleman on a bus. Perhaps he looks like this:

After ten minutes he leans over to you and says: "You know, young man, I had an affair with your grandmother. 1957. Paul Anka and a fine bottle of Petit Verdot. It was a magic year. You know, the way she used to..."

"I'm sorry - this is my stop."

Perhaps it's not such a good idea after all. I don't know why I made such a big deal out of it.

A Tale of Two Titties

All week I've been seeing an ad for the Australian series Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities where it is announced that, in this week's episode, actor Kate Ritchie will "come of age." I thought it was extraordinarily odd that it was the actor's name being spoken of in the commercial, and not the character's name. How, I wondered, does an actor "come of age" in a show? Then my actor friend, Chris Tomkinson, clarified matters: "coming of age" is a merely a euphemism for Ritchie showing her breasts for the first time on national television. Get the VCR ready. 

Given the nature of this particular show and its' capacity to integrate plot and the pendulum swing of the female breast, I was ashamed to have not realised this myself. Underbelly perhaps represents one aspect of Channel 9's general strategy to pilfer some of the loyal audience of SBS - a station that has been built on a reputation of combining high-brow with high-nudity. SBS has obviously anticipated 9's "booby trap." It's show, My Big Breasts and Me, airs this Friday at 10pm. Kate Ritchie - watch and learn.

Get a blog up you

I've finally cracked. First I caved in and watched Back to the Future. Then I got a mobile phone. Now I've got a blog. My parents will soon be worrying about the future popularity of people setting themselves on fire. I've always loved what other people do.

If you're wondering, I settled on the name "Seadog Blog" on the strict criterion that it was available. I'd investigated a variety of names, including "The Nervous System" and "Kermit the Blog." Both were taken, but neither have been active since soon after Y2K ended the world. (Remember that? Horrible.) I'm now wondering whether I should have perhaps chosen "Bjorn Blog." The only pleasure I get from the name of my blog (besides the fact that it's mine) is the possibility that it will - at some indeterminate point in the future - deny someone else the possibility of using it. I hope it crushes them. 

I didn't use to be this nasty. Blogging has done it to me.