on becoming a man

Well I picked up a book called On Becoming a Man today in a rather remarkable Hadfield op shop. It is in beautiful condition, to the degree that I suspect whoever was once given it did not actually read it, or if they did, they respected it immensely. Since the subhead is 'A book for teenage boys', the first five words in the title create the name OBAMA, an extraordinary piece of prediction (though it doesn't explain the rest of the acronym, which reads in full OBAMABFTB) The 20th century Nostradamus responsible is one Harold Shryock, whose name is an anagram for Hard Rocks Holy and Arch Lord Oh Sky.The book has no date (it might be from 1968* but it does not mention the Jefferson Airplane) and though it is American (Shryock was from the College of Medical Evangelists, Loma Linda, CA) it was published in Warburton, outside Melbourne, by a publishing house called Signs. I can picture it now.

By the way, some seem to regard the work as still relevant. This is not my other blog.

I haven't read it from cover to cover, of course I read the section on homosexuality as, being such a mad fag myself, I love to see how we are persecuted (actually it just fell open at that page). I notice that Shryock adheres to the interesting fallacies of the time (he sees gay men as frozen in an emotional state by, for instance, the death of a family member at a sensitive time) but considers a two-step scenario the most likely, wherein a boy is oriented to homosexuality by personal tragedy but only then activated - turned on, if you will - by an exploitative older man. Anyway, Shryock doesn't pull too many punches, except perhaps the punch that, while the book is plainly a Christian book, it doesn't say anywhere that it's a Christian book, until you start reading the fucker.

The pictures are possibly the best bit (since I'll never read it fully I'll never ever know). They are a mixture of oddly posed photographs and strangely but finely painted scenarios.


(By the way is it a syndrome that sparks off songs in your head when you're reminded of them? Because I keep thinking of a ditty 'bout Jack and Joanne. You can't really see the caption, not if you've got eyes like mine, but it's worth clicking on the pictures if that enlarges them. They look strangely more lovely pixilated anyway I think).

This one intrigues me, not just because I believe its central message to be true:



But also because I wonder what the hey this trusted pedagogue has drawn on his board. I mean, really:


It's so easy to laugh at this kind of stuff (I don't mean this picture specifically, but the whole book) that it's almost not funny. I suppose there is a generation or two of people whose knowledge, such as it is, of this sort of cheesy upright western civillisation certitude is derived entirely from retro greeting cards with funny talks balloons. This thing was probably published in my lifetime but I could never have ever looked at a picture like this without simultaneously finding it creepy, possibly funny, eminently defaceable, ridiculous, and standing in some ways for many things it is meant to be entirely the opposite of.

I mean, the world moved on; it doesn't matter particularly. But it does bear some consideration, that this kind of thing - I was almost about to say this kind of garbage, because that just seems so self-evident - represents a universe that is entirely gone now, with a huge amount of evidence left behind, but evidence which is for most of us entirely meaningless. I am not saying people don't still believe in families or America or god or whatever this stuff is supposed to represent, but that the certainty of its moral position and the coccoon-like right places for everyone has been entirely assailed and to my mind destroyed. When I see a picture like this, the endpapers of the book which for some reason I've made really teensy but you can still make it out kind of:

I can only see a phallic building over the back fence, a perverse set of relationships between the women in the picture and the young man in purple, and the whole thing so unutterably fraudulent and sterile, yet fraught with strong and corrupt meaning. None of these people can ever be happy until they cast off their crippling stereotypes. I mean maybe it's just me. Is it just me?

*Actually Father Dave says it is from 1951, which seems more plausible, I saw an edition on eBay dated 1968 however so maybe there was an update to mention Jefferson Airplane.

sex and society

First of all, I should warn you that some of this post might be a little tasteless, or at least, some of you might think it so. But I might have mentioned en blog a year or so ago how fascinated I was by L G De Garis' last years when he had bowel cancer and found his own body so interesting and the stages of the disease a rare fascination, including when he collapsed and vomited in church. I mean he was an eccentric to the end, I am (oops - I wrote 'was') just a person.

The illustration herein is interesting too in its irrelevance. I was thinking (as you will see, this is what this entry is about) about how people position themselves in structured/planned space, and I thought oh yeah the cover of that Vice Versa record where you see the bird's eye view of the people watching television. Now. looking at the cover in question, I see it is in fact a picture of the improbable idea of a man with a riot shield and baton, facing a television. To my credit, I was correct in remembering it is a bird's eye view. It's not immediately obvious that it's a person with a riot shield etc, until you see the other pictures on the sleeve, showing him from other directions.

Anyway, I went to all the trouble of scanning it, saving it in photoshop and erasing the name of the radio station that the person who sold it to the record shop I bought it from stole it from, which I feel fine about because said radio station (NOT a public radio station) wouldn't want it anyway, and then saving it for web, so here it is. Sorry it's still got a sticker on it. It's not a great record. Vice Versa added Martin Fry and became ABC.

So the slightly tasteless bit first, sorry, but it's kind of interesting. I was filling in time at a notable educational institution this morning (NOT my usual workplace) and I went to a cafe which had a large window at one end, and tables arranged in rows aligned with this window. When I entered I noticed that there was a conventionally quite attractive woman at the window end of the room, and a who cares man a few tables away from her also at the window end. I quite consciously thought, I must not sit anywhere in the room where I'll be facing this woman because it will look like I am there to perve on her. A few minutes later I realised I had quite unconsciously sat at a table facing the woman. As god is my witness (and that means a lot) I have to say I did not consciously do it and it is possible I sat there because it was a good place for maximum natural light, though of course not as good as if I'd sat facing with my back to the window! Oh, I'm a terrible person. If it makes us feel any better later I heard her talking to a staff member and I thought what a ghastly tootling voice she had.

Soon afterwards, I was in a meeting that involved seven people sitting round a table (or rather, four tables pushed together). It was 4 women and 3 men. The 4 women all sat consecutively (actually that's not strictly true, as there was a space between two women) and so of course did the 3 men. I have no idea how conscious this was on anyone's part. (In this instance I'm not thinking that the men sat to ogle the women or that anyone ogled anyone. By the way, my previous scenario did not involve me ogling either actually).

I guess this could have been coincidental (what are the odds?) During the meeting on the rare occasion my mind wandered (it was a 6 hour meeting) I thought about other ways you could categorise people - by institution, for instance (and with one exception, we were all sitting contiguously by institution) or by discipline or department (again, we were roughly sorted on discipline lines). Essentially the person who was the odd one out in these categorisations probably felt the odd one out themselves, as they (note how cleverly I am disguising their gender) were in a different, administrative role to everyone else and was about to leave the project under discussion. Additionally, they are much younger than the others, if that's a consideration.

Well, I thought it was interesting at the time. Now I look over it again the most interesting thing was the Vice Versa record cover.