What’s the matter with you people? You are all mad. This is why Nabakov was so boring. He never had anything worthwhile to say.

But pissing in the punch is pretty much what Jerks like Fyodor, Nabakov or Trotsky do.

A confession.

I agree with most of what you have to say about the interaction between MSM and blogging.

Fair enough, Helen, on Peter Woodforde, whatever abuse you copped from him probably would have been the result of my moderating indulgence. You’re not alone in your underwhelmed impression. Many Webdiarists I think despaired of my blind spot when it came to Peter. It wasn’t because he was ‘on my side’, though. He’s on no-one’s side but his own, I suspect. I just happened to take to his very Antipodean sense of the absurd. And he can blog in a really good pirate voice, which as you know is very important in the blogopshere.

Flippancy aside, I’ll cop your point. PW can fling abuse with the best of them, and clearly I let him rant away way too much at times. But even granting this, I’m not sure I accept your extrapolation re: the business model comments.

Tim Blair (say) and Margo Kingston both started out in the cyberworld using exactly the same ‘business model’ for a popular, sustainable punditry website. It’s called ‘a paying real world job - preferrably one with a toehold in the MSM already’. My hunch is that anyone who thinks that an Op Ed type blogsite can make them a stand-alone living is being wildly optimistic. Tim’s site was for ages the most popular such one in the local ’sphere and may still be, but unless his recent elective plank-walk from The Bully reflects a major boost in monthly revenue from his online writing - and it could, I dunno - even his is never really going to be a family feeder, I would have thought. I think that apart from a few large collectives, the only political blogs that will ever pay a living wage to any sort of staff (even of one) will be those associated with established MSM outlets, parties, think-tanks and/or foundations, say.

In other words, Op Ed business-as-usual, effectively.

Tim Dunlop has gone the full circle from the Webdiary ‘business model’ back to the Webdiary ‘business model’, with his drafting into the News realm today. For years The Oz railed at the arrogance of Margo and the SMH presuming to ‘moralise’ about politics and ‘interfere’ in the democratic process via an electorally-unaccountable do-gooding blogsite, blah blah…I hear tell Tim’s version of Webdiary is to be called ‘Blogocracy’.

You have to smile.

Maybe someone with Blairelzeebub’s profile can now scoop in enough to pay himself adequately…but I’d be surprised. Even the biggest such big hitters like Instapundit tend to keep their day jobs. Andrew Sullivan’s site has gone scurrying onto the Time payroll. Eric Alterman’s is only still blogging on after MSNBC arsed him because an established public interest media website picked him up. Andhe’s got a day job (or several hundred). Huffington Post - the creme de la creme of Larvatus Prodeo/Webdiary/Troppo style sites needed AH’s millions (and MSM celeb contacts and allies) to kick off at all.

As for LP, well, there’s some quality writers - that genius kkkkkkk is especially awesome - and an unusually cohesive group dynamic over there, yet they’re all volunteers and the site relies on donations just to stay alive.

To be honest I never really bought into the ‘blogosphere journalism revolution’ crap.
I haven’t blogged for four years so I guess I know jack shit, really, but what always seemed intuitively apparent to me was that, just as no-one is ever going to pay to have a conversation with someone they meet in a public square where talk is free, so too no-one was likely to pay for the privelege of consuming blog-pearls of wisdom they could get probably for free next door. Just because everyone’s now a publishing mogul doesn’t mean that writing talent and originality isn’t as rare as ever. And as usual, what there is is always going to gravitate to the high-paying MSM (read MSM-blog) sooner or later. Symbiotically and in turn - as usual - the MSM(-blog) imprimatur will continue to be a defacto ‘quality assurance’, its own point-of-difference and advertising shill for the blog there-in.

Starting to sound familiar?

Queering the ‘blog-revolution’ further is the fact that not onoly are those established MSM outlets racing to hire the best established bloggers, but established MSM Bylines are increasingly blogging as an adjunct to their own hard copy work. (BTW, pardon my ego, H, but…p. 400-401 of NHJ…ahem…bloody Mayne never gave me my free year’s m’ship for the mega-plug either, the cheap buggers…)

But as far as ‘paradigmatic media revolution’ goes, it’s a non-starter. As the boundaries blur between blogging and MSM it’s the MSM alone which will profit from any revolutionary change, enhancing its epistemological dominance, using its existing market power and career-cachet to lure the new talent and corner whatever new revenue avenues really are going to fall out of the new technology. You watch Tim D trawl in oodles of commenters out of the wider blog-sea…as did Kevin Drum, the first of the genuine amateurs to get picked up by The Man. Blogging and commenting is a time zero sum game - what Rupert gains, Surfdom loses.

Despite all the frantically casual energy and ironic wit expended by bloggers and commenters on maintaining a lackadaisaical, take-it-or-leave-it, MSM-sceptical air about the business of debate and discussion and ideas…in fact we all of us want our deathless prose and pearls of wisdom to appear in the most credible, widely-read and far-reaching forum we can. That’s always going to be the commercial and public broadcast MSM. It may well be a much more ‘online’ looking MSM, technically…but the ‘business model’ principle of product differentiation doesn’t change. The very alignment of a blogger with an MSM imprimatur is what will value-add to certain pieces of information, in an information-saturating marketplace.

Media/forum incumbency, reach, volume, slickness, aesthetics…these ‘package & delivery’ aspects of information, as opposed to content, are going to become paramount in the information wars, as we all forget how to think and feel for ourselves about subjective abstracts. We’ve all grown up saturated with constant information, H - it’s much harder than we realise for our generation to decide with confidence what we think is good and bad information without recourse to quality aide memoires: ‘experts’, ‘analysts’, ‘critics’ (spit!), ‘public commentators’.

Public opinion or media peer pressure plays an enormous role in determining our own ideas.

So there’s never been a more important time for the deliberative manifestation of libertarian impulses. Manifestation, not just theory…that’s why I liked MK’s journalism so much (and occasionally get snarky with tub-thumping libertarians who can talk the talk forever, but get all coy when they’ve got to risk making a dickhead of themselves to be truly libertarian…). For all MK’s - or because of - her public rough edges and occasional outright nuttiness, she was always chafing and scratching and kicking at the passive information complacency that seems to define so much public discourse now. Whether she was yelling at Bob Carr or harrassing Tony Abbott or please-explaining Hanson, Margo turned over the chairs in the living room. Sometimes it was just a self-pitying tanty and all she made was a mess of the place and a fool of herself.

But usually the public places she trashed looked a whole lot better for being a bit less tidy.

It’s going to get harder, not easier, to make that kind of impact from the blogosphere from now. The MSM has finally ‘got it’ about blogging, which is that it’s…just writing. It’s just a word processor, a typewriter, ballpoint, a quill…as usual, they’ll want to bring the best writers inside their tent, where they can housestyle-train them; and as ever, the best writers will, rightly, want to say ‘yes’ to that marker of their talent and originality…and rush inside.

As ‘Nabakov’ pointed out on TD’s site, we all want the chance to piss in the punch. Not necessarily to spoil the punch, I would say for most (in the end), but rather because into the punch, inside the tent…is simply where all the biggest dicks and hottest twats line up to take a piss, and everyone who fancies their pen wants to see if it’s good enough to join the queue.

The blogosphere was never about bloggers creating alternative ‘business models’ for bringing down the elitist Boomer media. It was simply about taking their place, the same thing every generation of new writers wants to do to their elders.

What stuffed MK was simply Margo’s decision to walk from the Herald at all. She had little real choice, after the SMH made what she saw as ‘offers she couldn’t accept’. It was the net result of a lot of pressures from various quarters, but the bottom line was that the Herald had had enough of her consistently uncomfortable style and mode of reportage - as I said, sure, abrasive and ill-judged, often. After NHJ became a bestseller in latte city and some regional quarters even as JH’s popularity held and held nation-wide, she turned into a bit of a lefty-lightning rod in the culture war, even though she’d tried via Webdairy and when writing NHJ! to avoid stark us-and-them stuff. When JH bolted the eleccy MK was on borrowed time at the SMH. Yesterday’s news, and so on. Had she not been quite so tired and isolated from her MSM peers - and as I said increasingly shattered by the nastier stuff from some internet voices…she might have slugged it out for another round at the Herald. And been in better more upbeat shape when she finally did move.

Possibly hangers-on like me could and should have been more forceful in telling her she was nuts to walk away from that MSM imprimatur. And, of course, the salary - which, as I wrote earlier, JC, she had preferred to cut (to less than half what you asserted), in order to keep Webdiary as it was originally intended, editorially uncompromised.

I know I’m going on a bit here, Helen. It is cybersapce, though. Plenty of space. So I wonder if you’d mind me getting a bit presumptuous - as a matter of reciprocal appreciation for your kind words. Take it or leave it. It’s meant in good faith.

You talk about ‘hating’ the left, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbolic shorthand and a glass of wine or two, I don’t understand why any Miles Franklin-winning novelist would let herself fall for those sorts of meaningless generations. Especially a libertarian skeptic lawyer brand. Especially one who once had the guts to have a go at what might well be, even for a Jewish writer with impeccable Holocaust credentials, a bit of a literary suicide mission: trying to climb inside the head of a Nazi mass murderer, and articulate why he did what he did in a humanly convincing way. It’s a big theme for a twenty-one year to tackle, and good on you for trying.

I don’t want to presume to get into a tit-for-tat about how successfully you did it, nor about all the other ancient authorial controversies. I’m not qualified to do so anyway; enough people at the time who were qualified were impressed.

The success or otherwise of your creative vision isn’t what makes me presume to speak my mind; it’s the fact that you once had the ambition to apply…(ahem)…’the verbal skills that won [you] all those gongs at 21…’ (ahem) to entertain such literary ambitions, but now, here you are, buying into the meaningless rhetorical tit-for-tatting of the Keating-Howard-etc ‘culture wars’, like some one-time big city contender reduced to belting provincial local toughs in Paddy Mac’s travelling boxing tent.

Helen, it’s no more possible to hate (or love) an abstract political label than it is to fight a ‘war’ on terror. Who it is that you really ‘hate’? (Or disdain - I doubt you hate many people).

Peter Woodforde, maybe. OK.

So what of…Robert Manne, or David Marr, or Anne Summers, or John Pilger, or Kerry O’Brien, or Phillip Adams, or the younger cultural studies new lefties like Catherine Lumby and the new literati over at Sarasparilla, or the ‘No War! Opera House Two, or Antony Loewenstein, or Albanese for that matter, or the Dixie Chicks, or Al Gore, or Bob Brown, or Marieke Hardy, or….or what?

They are or were or could be on ‘the left’. Or not. To suit. Right?

Labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ and libertarianism simply don’t fit together, H, just as those kinds of blanket labels and creative writing don’t fit, either. Specifics, specifics, specifics, isn’t that how it goes? In the Information Age especially, when everyone can wrap their fat lips around a self-justifying blog-megaphone at will, a term like ‘The Left’ becomes the supreme Humpty Dumpty pap-filler. Far from engaging with each other, we all end up locked petulantly in our own rooms creating imaginary strawman enemies which we then slew fearlessly. That’s pretty much where we’re all fucking stalled at, in this fucktarded Culture War thing that your and my best creative fucking years have been lumped the shit with, no? Every Op Ed or blog column you read nowadays spends the first 400 precious words setting up some idiotic strawman…to knock down. It’s the Current Affairisation of conversation - case in point is CL’s reduction of my previous posts to this, FFS: “… Jack’s story of a group of innocents done over by a nasty mob of digital brownshirts and ingrates strikes me as, at best, exaggerated - at worst, adolescent…”

That’s simply not a story I recognise, CL. Or ever told. What do you possibly gain from hanging it off my tongue, and then cutting it down, too?

Helen, you hate ‘the Left’? You hate it as much as Tim Blair? It must be fucking nasty, this ‘Left’. So I think I’d better hate ‘the left’, too, sure. Mine looks like Stalin and Pol Pot and, on genetic technology issues, just maybe that loony Moonbat Natasha Stott-Despoya, too, and those scary doctors in London who’ve just announced they want to legalise smothering retard infants. Your ‘left’, perhaps, looks like Peter Woodforde and GLW. Good-o. CL’s looks like me and Margo, I’d say. (I wouldn’t like to start on Joe’s…we’d still be here till Friday.)

Robert Manne’s ‘left’ looks like Helen Demidenko. Andrew Bolt’s looks like Robert Manne. George Pell’s ‘the left’ looks like Andrew Bolt, at least when it comes to Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson’s ‘the left’ looks like Vatican II and Frank Rich. Poor apologetic Mel Gibson looks waaaaay ‘left’ to his old man these days, I bet. Frank Rich’s ‘the left’ looks like Christopher Hitchens, but only on 10 September 2001. Back then Hitch’s ‘the left’ was probably still some loony Spart fire-bombing animal labs in Manchester; two days later, it was Henry fucking Kissinger, whose ‘left’ is now Walt Meersheimer, Meersheimer’s is Finklestein, Finklestein’s might be Galloway, Galloway’s used to Saddam, except when he was shaking hands with Rummy, who’s is to the ‘right’ of them all, while Saddam’s ‘the left’ was the Ayatollah…I mean it can go on forever, this Alice-in-Wonderland stuff, and it has been for your, and my, adult life, hasn’t it.

So here’s my definition of who you really mean, Helen, when you say you ‘hate [or disdain, or are sceptical of]…the left’.

You ‘disdain and are sceptical of…all those whose politics you…disdain and are sceptical of.’ So there, Alice!

Using blanket labels - as we all still persist in doing - is no more use than a circular motherhood statement like that.

Fuzzy labels are for those who can’t use language properly, or won’t, for fear of offending specific people. Specific people are problematic in things like Culture Wars and political debates, because while ‘the left’ (or ‘the right’, et al) just has to sit there and cop shit, individual people can argue back and make their defensive case; and generally, apart from a few kooks and extremists, the vast majority of individual human beings are very likeable, or at least un-hateable, once you give them that chance to put their PoV for themselves.

That’s what Margo was always trying to do with Webdiary. Provide a place to dissipate and defuse the heat and hurt of the culture wars by getting people to argue with each other, not over and around and through each other, not fighting to a bitter standstill with….nothing more than their own conveniently misdrawn straw versions of each other.

Some people had and have no interest in that sort of conversation, of course. Because nobody gets to ‘win’ that sort of encounter.

As for the ’scepticlawyer’ tosh, what the hell’s wrong with blogging as ‘Helen Dale’? Jesus, to wade through the blogosphere these days is like getting lost in a car-park full of red sports cars: vanity plates everywhere you turn. ‘IMSEXY’…’HRNY4U’…’Nabakov’…’Pavlov’s Cat’…’Currency Lad’…’BIGBOY69′…
…’Gummo Trosky’…’Witty Ironic Decent Self-Effacing But Very Very Very Clever Intellectual Pretending Not To Be An Intellectual Just An Ordinary Australian’….(sorry, I made that one up)…’scepticlawyer’…that’s not the whiff of self-reassuring bravado I get there, is it?

Me, I like what Winston Churchill apparently had to say about self-applied labels, Helen: ‘If you need to tell me you’re a gentlemen, you’re probably not one at all, but the precise opposite’.

‘Yobbo’, eh - what’s that all about, I wonder.

If it’s securing your personal liberty and identity and being ‘allowed to be me’ that you want, don’t think libertarianism or any other ‘ismic’ label is the panacea. You won’t reclaim yourself properly until you stop disowning - or worse, rewriting - your own past. Retrofitting THTSTP as some cunning Ern Malley ‘hoax’ intended all along to flip the bird to some mythical ‘Left Literati’ that fucked you up a bit in the Press is a cruel, undeserved, gratutious insult to the brimming 21 year old girl who worked her tits off to produce an award-winning, shit-stirring novel. It’s a lousy betrayal by your older self of your own early talent and achievements, no matter how much you strap on the libertarian, ju-jitzu, gun-toting, anti-literati Lara Croft crap in compensating mourning for that girl. And in a wider sense, all it’s going to do is achieve the dubious dual aims of vindicating whatever miserable Lit Twit nobodies did take vicarious pleasure in aiding and abetting the public execution of that keen young girl, while betraying once and for all those decent Lit Twit nobodies who did try and have tried to stick by you, for as long as you’d let them.

Worst of all, for what my uninvited two bob is worth: it’s just wrong - it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s a personal and cretive and intellectual mistake, Helen - to allow your experiences, however shitty, to take you to this dismal place, when you’re still young and full of ambition and drive:

“I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt while they’re nice to me, but if they’re not, then I don’t. I used to, but I learnt the hard way that Australian public discourse doesn’t reward that sort of behaviour.”

What a load of self-pitying bullshit. Unless you see a token run in Paddy’s Quadders from time to time - ‘cos you’ve agreed to jump on the modish Culture War bandwagon of the hour and have a cheap swipe at ‘the Left’ too, hurrah! - as the sort of Australian public discourse ‘reward’ you do wish to get from your chosen behaviour.

Take all your most virulent critics and pettiest sniggerers, including me in this angry compliment if you like, and line us up; then stand your 21 year old self in front of us, like a sergeant major, and invite us to step forward towards her if we’ve completed a novel. Then ask those of us who do to step forward again if we’ve had it published. Then, again, if they’ve won any awards for theirs.

Then, again, if they’ve won the MF.

By this stage there might be one or two standing next to Helen Demidenko, I suppose. And it might even prove useful to have them still at hand at this stage - but only to measure your older self, back-to-back, against that younger self. In order to let you know - with a fellow MF winner’s honesty - whether you have in fact grown bigger or smaller since then.

By the way, Helen, I could do a lot worse than an epitaph like this: ‘Here lies Jack: he was good, if verbose, and he did have real potential… ‘

Thank you for your kind words of encouragement, Helen. You may remember yourself how these things can make a big difference in demoralising times. I hope I haven’t hit a bum note with my clumsy attempt to reciprocate, as best I can from my current position of great…erm…potential. You don’t need another nebbish either kissing or kicking your arse. Perhaps a hopeful sharp slap in the face will do.

Write another novel in between winning cases, or whatever it is you ’scepticlawyers’ do. Come on, I dare you. Imagine the shit they’d have to gobble if you won again.

PS: Jason - I’ll gratefully add ‘well-intentioned’ to that headstone, too. Every little helps, as they say. By the way, I see you blow some harp. Do you know weenie juke radio? Essential listening. Do you blow with a band?

That may sound like a lot of money to some people but she did earn round $100 G a year when she was working for Fairfax.

She was loopy and that’s why she was criticized. I’ll never forget that she went with a story about the US/ Boeing working on a secret anti-gravity machine that was supposed to take over the world.

She was a nutball. What she’s like as a person is irrelevant. She also promoted hatred of rightwingers and the stuff that ended up being published was beyond normal decency. In fact Margo is partially responsible for people taking hard edged views these days.

I disliked the way Margo was attacked personally. Always did.

That said, Margo herself (& company) caricatured the ‘other side’ as people with an inherently evil worldview and people didn’t take kindly to that. Of course, Webdiary lefties didn’t think this was vicious because, you know, right-wingers are fair game in moral warfare, right?

Wrong.

As far as I can see, SL is still copping snark from some quarters, from people who seem to resent that a gifted woman of letters isn’t on the lefty reservation. She has responded with a great deal of patience.

Nobody wants Margo to be going through hard times but Jack’s story of a group of innocents done over by a nasty mob of digital brownshirts and ingrates strikes me as, at best, exaggerated - at worst, adolescent.

I hope Margo gets on her feet again soon.

Everyone carries baggage.

Who is this Soothsayer?

He appears to be carrying a great deal of baggage.

Just because someone is on your side doesn’t mean you let them run off at the mouth. I ’soon’ GMB more than any other poster, despite the fact that I broadly agree with most of what he says. Margo and her friends never learnt that lesson, so rather than cop the crap, I left (I was also half way through a law degree and had a good law firm job lined up, which made it easier).

And yeah, I probably hate the left as much as Tim Blair, but know I’m too eccentric to ever fit into the right’s ‘grouping’. I want to be allowed to be me, and right now there’s only one political grouping that allows me that luxury.