give yourself a pat on the back

...you can if you want but actually that's just me talking to myself. A 31 July deadline for four academic papers (three conference papers, two of which were co-authored and which admittedly are constructed only to a 'this will get past the referees even if they will have objections' standard) and a book chapter. All that stuff in parentheses actually makes it all seem a little like, well, it's not as good as all that but really, perhaps counterintuitively I don't know as I have no intuition on this any longer, it takes a lot out of you to do these things. 

It was a humbling experience earlier this year when we received referee reports on an ARC application wherein one referee suggested I didn't have a high publication rate for someone at my level. Fuck's sake! I have a hundred journal article-conference paper-book chapter publications and there are ten books with my name on them, give or take, sometimes as editor and sometimes as author or co-author. It's not something I dwell on (except when someone says something like that) and I suppose ultimately it just leaves me completely baffled as to what they meant, the only explanations I can think are either that they're in one of those STEM fields where papers all have seventy authors often added without their knowledge (either that, or half the effort of writing the paper is contacting all the authors and saying 'you OK to be on this? We'll let you know when it comes out') so twenty years into your career you have ten thousand publications, or they weren't paying attention to my publications, or they were trolling me. I don't really know.

An academic I encountered early in my career, to whom I took an unreasonable dislike very early because he was clearly predatory of the young girls in a way that surely has had the powers that be at his university periodically tut-tutting and hoping that no-one complains or that if they do it'll somehow be manageable (for all I know it's been 'managed' many times) published one book, that's it, one book. That was the basis for a career. It still gets mentioned periodically, and it leaps out at me from time to time in other contexts, so I know he has yet to be cancelled. I mean I also liked the book when I read it, and I suppose the author has to be detached from the text eg Lewis Carroll. But my point is not (I had to remind myself what my point was) that he was a predator but that some people, admittedly people who made their mark in the twentieth century when things were different, can sustain a career off one freakin' book. I guess I have yet to write the career-defining book! Probably never will and in fact would prefer not to, not that I haven't tried in the past. 

Anyway, all I really wanted to say was that finalising (let's say) 20 000 words of text on three different topics in a week isn't easy. I am pleased with myself, even if at the same time I am very cognisant that the two sole-authored ones in particular are very flawed, in a way that only their author would really know, there's no mystery to them, and that's what a good piece of writing needs I think, a bit of artifice, I can't enjoy that when I know what happened on this side of the curtain. 

Here's a goat I met yesterday. Actually, one and two thirds of two goats. 

tall poppies '93

Helping Bezos spend ten minutes in space has its upside eg I get to choose some audiobooks from the curious pile at Audible. I have no idea why this one came into my mind when I was trying to decide what was the best mental chewing gum for the week. I had heard of the book dimly but I can't imagine why I thought it would be interesting except that I had somehow been put in mind of it by starting to watch, again, American Splendour (Harvey Pekar had been an occasional guest on Letterman's NBC show but was thrown off because he wouldn't stop critiquing the station's parent company General Electric). 

So this is a book about Johnny Carson's retirement from The Late Show, the machinations behind NBC's decision to replace him not with David Letterman who had been hosting the show after The Late Show for a decade but with Jay Leno, who had been a frequent guest host on The Late Show, then Letterman's decision to leave NBC and set up a competing show to Leno's Late Show on CBS. Even I, who has a certain affection for showbiz arcana, am wondering why anyone would care about these things, even when they are grounded in important ideas like big-advertising-dollars etc. I just can't see this as important, and obviously, I'm not American so why would it be. I tried to think about how in this country, Channel 9 used to mean something (um - family-friendly, glossy, best-practice television but not really that engaging to me most of the time) Channel 7 I suppose meant something to some people though I'm not sure what (it wasn't Channel 10 though) and Channel 10 was trashy and bratty. Channel 2 was a whole different ballgame and so of course was SBS, they're not important for the purposes of the comparison. Still, I don't know what NBC / CBS meant in the 80s-90s in the US and it's a completely different system anyway - the networks - they're much more like networks of distinct broadcasting companies than we had in this country. 

So what's the interest value? Basically that these people, particularly Letterman, but also just the knobs in management, and the CEOs and producers etc, are the most unbelievably neurotic fools you can imagine, all somehow stoked up by the preposterously shallow and fickle enthusiasms of millions of people who are as likely to reject them tomorrow as continue to do the most passive thing you can do and be a 'fan' (that is, not turn off a tv). Carter subtly suggests Jay Leno is a childish automaton whereas Letterman is presented as gifted but, as mentioned, an ego so fragile as to be most susceptible to the criticisms of the voices in his own freakin' head. Also, I guess, that this shit mattered so much to so many; I suppose it was like the zeitgeist news, checking in to see-how-the-culture's-going-kind-of-thing and now thirty years later you're kind of like 'well, the zeitgeist looked after itself, that world is over now, vale'. But seriously - to report with such seriousness (and I have to say, skill in reportage) about the trivial behaviour of big adult babies - at some point, surely, Carter said to himself (or someone) who are these creepy soft-shelled millionaire idiots. I'm close to the end and he hasn't actually asked any question like that really (beyond one moment of reported self-analysis from Letterman along the lines of, 'it's just a TV show'). So. It's interesting but it's mental. 

I would love to read an Australian equivalent, and I have enjoyed things like Gerard Henderson's 60 Minutes book, etc. I'd like to read about Daryl Somers, Ernie Carroll and Gavan Disney etc. But there's no real big set-up war dynamic for them as there is in this book. 

By the way, I gather Leno's manager/producer Helen Kushnick sued Carter for $30M for the way she was portrayed in this book and I don't see how she couldn't have. She comes out so badly it's almost embarrassing to read, and once again, you end up thinking: no-one could have been this bad or, if she was this bad, what kind of milieu was she in that allows the creation/fostering of people who behave this badly? There was a settlement, and Kushnick died not long after (from cancer).  

Oh and also they made it into an HBO film as well. For what that's worth.