What I want to show you is the fascinating mobility device and antique store just to the right of this corner. The mannequins are quite expensive. I’m not sure who buys them and why?

There are three rooms. This is the first room, taken up mostly with mobility devices.

In the second and third rooms, quaint oddities are arranged with painstaking, almost obsessive, attention. I started to feel a bit claustrophobic from the darkness, stuff, and constantly chiming cuckoo clocks.

This made me a bit uneasy. I think it’s because I am a kid of the 90s, and therefore incidentally exposed to older cousins watching Chuckie. They had the coping mechanisms to deal with it; I did not, therefore I was scarred for life.

On the window is a Herald Sun article by Terry McCrann about how Julia Gillard is going to turn light switches into tax collection points. On it, someone has scrawled ‘Read it and weep’. I think they are referring to the carbon tax rather than the quality of the article.

I spot people filming in the gardens so move in to watch.

The presenter is a Silver Fox who looks like a cross between an 80s game show host and a slimy car salesman. His eyes catch mine and he looks a bit uncomfortable under my gaze.*

I only catch the last few words. In his flashy newsreader on steroids voice, Silver Fox is talking about some Cassanova.** ‘Slippery Sal isn’t after their hearts, he’s after their money.’ His exaggerated cadences hint at parody.

At the end he has freeze looking earnestly at the cameras for a few moments, I can’t remember what the technical reason for it is but it’s a little bit awkward. Then he turns straight to me: ‘How was that?’

The whole crew turn around to look at me.

‘Oh, I didn’t get most of it,’ I say, with deliberate breeziness. ‘But it seems like you’re from Today Tonight or something?’

‘No, we’re from Current Affair,’ the man says indignantly, in a tone which on the face of it, implies a collegiate mutual joke, but is really thinly veiled disdain.

‘They’re pretty much the same though aren’t they?’ I say nonchalantly.

‘No, we’re much more highbrow than that love!’ the man says with ironic, patronising smarminess.

‘Really?’ I say in my innocent stupid little girl tone.

The whole crew laughs.

I found their story on the internet afterwards.

*I sometimes do watch if I stumble upon a press conference; it’s fascinating to watch their process. But they don’t like it. I don’t know, is it a bit off?

**I later realised they were actually calling him Cashanova, which is just brilliant.

Casual intimacy

My friend and I are on a lunch break and start watching an Asian couple sitting under that big gorgeous tree in the Fitzroy Gardens. I don’t know anything about tree names; but it’s one of those trees with branches that droop down like a fountain of leaves, apple green leaves that glow with the sunlight, making a haven of shade for its inhabitants.

I make the argument to my friend that the couple are structurally adorable, simply because they’re having a romantic moment under a beautiful tree. Maybe it helps that they’re Asian too.

But then we notice there is something about the way the couple are sitting together, smiling, heads close, looking at something on their iphones, his hand resting casually behind her back, her hand brushing his knee. They look perfectly happy in that moment. ‘Do you see that kind casual intimacy very often?’ my friend asks me.

Sleeping

When Guthrie talks about a ‘rift’, he is really talking about motorists being frustrated at cyclists’ supposedly bad behaviour. He recounts a litany of grievances that in his view demonstrate such bad behaviour. Some of them seem a little odd: A cyclist yells at him for cutting across their lane, or opening a car door, despite the fact that it doesn’t put them in any danger? Perhaps Guthrie’s idea of safe driving behaviour doesn’t look quite so safe when you are exposed to it from a bike.

No doubt a few cyclists do break the rules. Sometimes their behaviour may be dangerous, although the main danger will always be to themselves, rather than car drivers. Sometimes what is seen as lawbreaking is actually legal – for example, driving past stopped cars so you can position yourself out in front at an intersection, to be more easily seen. Other times, the laws are just bad, and cyclists need to break them to protect themselves.

For example, Guthrie complains about cyclists riding on the footpath, or even using pedestrian crossings. Guthrie notes of cyclists that ‘they have this annoying habit of changing their riding habits – one minute they’ll use the road, then the footpath, then a pedestrian crossing, if it suits them.’ Apart from the fact that it is perfectly legal for a cyclist to get off their bike and use a pedestrian crossing, Guthrie ignores the fact that one of the reasons cyclists use footpaths and pedestrian crossings is that they have no alternative – roads and intersections are often too unsafe for them.

Guthrie sees registration as a way of holding cyclists accountable for their supposedly irresponsible behaviour. The many incidents of law breaking and dangerous driving by registered motorists don’t make his list of grievances. I’d be surprised if he’s never experienced such behaviour – perhaps he just regards it as normal.

In fact, studies indicate that the majority of accidents are caused by drivers of motor vehicles, even though it is mostly cyclists, as vulnerable road users, who are seriously injured. Given this, you’d think that reducing cyclist and pedestrian casualties would involve changing driver behaviour. But road safety campaigns by government and police reflect Guthrie’s thinking, blaming cyclist and pedestrians.

The Victorian Government’s latest road safety action plan (p.15) doesn’t even recognise cyclists as a category of road user, and their strategy says almost nothing about cyclist safety. When I got stopped by police in a road block during the Safecycle campaign last year, my lights, reflectors, and bells got checked, and the policeman even questioned my choice of thongs. Is this really targeting the causes of road fatalities?

Operation Halo, a police action to take place throughout February, also appears skewed towards targeting vulnerable road users. It will be interesting to get the relative statistics as to how many cyclists, compared to drivers, are charged for law breaking as a result of this campaign. The frequent failure of police to charge drivers who injure – and sometimes kill – cyclists through their careless behaviour is inexplicable; the tragic death of James Cross is one such example.

Back to Guthrie, in whose view ‘the root of the problem’ is that cyclists ‘are not required to spend a penny, or be identified.’ Most cyclists do carry identification. But you don’t have to be a behaviour specialist to realise that having a piece or paper or a number on a bike is unlikely to change behaviour, either of drivers towards cyclists (which as discussed, is the main problem), or cyclists themselves. I certainly haven’t seen any evidence that car registration has done anything to prevent drivers breaking the law.

And cyclists already do pay for the roads, through their taxes and rates. Registration goes towards administration and third party insurance, not road construction and maintenance. Guthrie could have corrected this factual inaccuracy at the ‘root’ of his argument with just a bit of light research.

Despite cyclists taking up less room, reducing congestion, and generating less pollution, I wouldn’t mind betting they don’t get much for their taxes. In the CBD, cyclists get narrow bike lanes (if any), built alongside car doors and fast moving traffic, which often disappear leaving cyclists stranded and vulnerable. It’d be interesting to get a breakdown of proportion of cyclists vs drivers by locality, and commensurate expenditure of state and local government money in each area.

Guthrie, obviously struggling to find good cycling countries with registration, resorts to using Hawaii as an example of where it has been done. The bicycle mode share in Hawaii is about two percent, compared to 20-30 percent in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen (none of which have bike registration).

Guthrie argues that bike registration could be used to fund separated cycling infrastructure, as ‘cars and bicycles do not go together well’. I’m all in favour of safe bike lanes and other bike-friendly improvements. That, combined with driver education about sharing the road, is the thing most likely to reduce driver-cyclist conflict. But we can pay for it out of the taxes cyclists already pay.

Finally, Guthrie suggests, perhaps with the money cyclists could get for rego, they could get Shane Warne to ‘front’ for them. A ludicrous suggestion given Shane Warne’s aggressive actions toward that cyclist – but unsurprising given that Guthrie appears to share Warne’s attitudes, including complaining, in what may have been an unfunny joke, that cyclists crowd out all the good Sunday cafes.

In the course of his argument, Guthrie (perhaps light heartedly) describes cyclists as ‘lycra-clad pedal pushers’. This incessant focus on cyclists’ attire bothers me. It was even recently echoed by women’s cycling group Frocks on Bikes and Darebin Bicycle Users Group in their comments that ‘friends don’t let friends wear lycra.’ Such rhetoric seems counterproductive for bike advocates. I can appreciate that they are trying to ‘normalise’ the appearance of cyclists, but really, attacking people who wear lycra just fuels the stigma. Who cares, as long as they’re comfy?

Anyway, perhaps I shouldn’t really engage with the mainstream media’s opinion pieces, and fuel their fire. The predictably framed controversies the media engineer are really just a way of getting people to read and talk about their often unexciting content. Still, the media could take a more reflective, nuanced approach to reporting cycling issues, than simply giving a voice to people like Shane Warne and Bruce Guthrie who clearly have an axe to grind and know very little about the issue.

In the UK, The Times, following a bike accident suffered by one of its reporters, has actually launched a campaign to improve cycling safety, although it has recently been criticised for focusing on helmets and hi-vis – putting the emphasis back on cyclists to protect themselves.

*Today I spotted a well reasoned article by Alan Davies – goes into the specific arguments against in a bit more detail than this post, in particular, the administrative costs versus the limited road safety gain. Just a bit uncomfortable with his last point about TAbbott being some kind of cycling role model (even though I don’t want cycling to just be a left wing thing).*

The bodyguard was buff and hot. He shielded her with his body, like they do in movies. You have to be ready to die for the president, to take a bullet for her. Morning breakfast shows played Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ over the footage of Gillard being saved. She was so vulnerable that she lost her shoe, just like Cinderella. So visibly frightened.** Tony, of course, could take care of himself.

*Those who weren’t proper black are not, according to Andrew Bolt’s definition, Aboriginal – they are assumed to be ‘professional protesters’.

**Even though minutes beforehand she had seemed cool as anything about the protest, even playing the statesman in front of Channel 9 by getting them to save Tony Abbott. It couldn’t possibly have been the security guards’ over-the-top manhandling that disturbed her, or made her perceive the situation as more threatening than it was?

It was a party with a bunch of my old school friends and related folk. As well as being completely babe-a-licious, many of these girls are sharply sexy dressers. I started comparing myself to them. This cotton flower dress you’re wearing, the one that you thought was sweet…it’s actually dowdy. I wondered what they might be thinking about me. Why is she still wearing that daggy peasant shit? She could do more with* –

But I then had this vision of myself growing old: wrinkles, spots, a stoop. I imagined approaching the end of my life, looking back on this little moment, and realising how unnecessary it was. That those were pretty much my last days of being classed as a young person and supposedly in my physical prime, but I couldn’t just enjoy it – all I could think about was my small imperfections in comparison to others. That if I’d understood then how quickly beauty fades, and death comes round, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.

Not so perfect after all, are you?

We were at this excellent Laksa restaurant. This couple came in; they looked like architects or town planners. He looked like a cosmopolitan Tibetan guy with a classy shirt and suit pants and his hair in a pony tail. She looked cool and classy, with little ballet slippers on. They looked like the perfect urbane couple. You could imagine their apartment; minimalist, with really nice silverware and a few classy decorations. A very calm place.

They sat down. I was checking them out. Then I realised they weren’t really talking. They were just staring at each other. I don’t know whether they were just naturally subdued like that, or they were having relationship issues. But I was pretty certain they were unhappy. It looked like a very uncomfortable dinner. I then realised that I got some kind of satisfaction out of their dysfunction. I was thinking, ‘Not so perfect after all, are you?’

That’s ironic, isn’t it?

Today on Australia Day, my friend and I both injured ourselves on Metrotrains. We had our bikes and took them up the back to the reserved seats, as there weren’t many elderly and disabled people around. They were those flip seats, the ones you have to press down before you sit on them.

An older man came over, hobbling with a cane, wearing a classy hat, and carrying a Melbourne University diary. We realised that my bike was in the way, so moved it to the other side of the carriage with my friends’ bikes.

He looked a bit frail so I held the seat down for him while he sat down. It was a bit awkward, and I’m not sure whether it was a bit patronising, but the seats are a bit hard to get down. He said something to us like, ‘Worked it out now have you?’ I couldn’t discern his tone.

My friend got up to get some sunscreen from her bag, but I said she could have some of mine. Forgetting that the seats flip up when you get up, she tried to sit down again and landed arse-end on the floor. Not hurt at all, she started laughing.

Then the train moved the older man’s bag forward, and he reached to get it. I went to help him but he told me he was OK. I sat back down on my seat, rushing at my effort not to patronise him.

My seat had flipped up so of course I had exactly the same accident as my friend, except I actually banged my shoulder and hip really hard, so it took me a few minutes to see the funny side. Once I got over my pain, the older guy started chuckling too. ‘That’s ironic, isn’t it?’ he said.

Interesting that those seats are supposed to be for the elderly and disabled if we can’t even use them without hurting ourselves. Maybe we are just extraordinarily clumsy! The seats are actually a bit stiff to push down though, which can’t be easy if you’re frail.

This is an academic article by Andrew Abbott. His tone is a  bit pompous and like much academic stuff, the prose is slightly turgid, but there’s food for thought there. It came to hand from a friend who is an academic and talks about all the interesting things he’s read, so lately I’ve been pressing him to send me articles, which I nearly always have to make myself read because they’re so stiffly written, but so far it’s always been worth it.

Abbott’s field of study is the history of professions. His shtick is that the structure of professions is determined simply by their need for jurisdictional control, rather than by particular traits. In other words, ‘the problems handled by professions – health, disputes, monies*– do not have any symbolic shape.’ The professions culturally constitute the problems they claim to address, and they then create a structure that guarantees legitimacy before the public.

But Abbott’s field of study is only incidental to his real topic: ignorance.  In Abbott’s view there are three types of ignorance: amateur ignorance, professional ignorance, and expert ignorance.

AMATEUR IGNORANCE

Abbott starts by analysing Wikipedia’s article on professions, and the associated discussion page. Both, in his view, are ‘fundamentally ignorant…they are not only ignorant of the state of the art in the scholarly literature, they are also largely unaware of the scholarly literature altogether.’

His comments on the talk page are disdainful, if interested. It ‘resembles nothing so much as a dinner chat in a university dining hall. It is a melange of mixed agendas, unstated moral positions, sharp – even contemptuous – assertions of (usually erroneous) authority, and vastly different levels of actual knowledge, all sustained by a kind of youthful energy and a noble but naïve faith.’

You get the sense Abbott doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of undergraduates.

But what really gets me is when he says: ‘one has the sense that this group of people is more committed to having the debate than finding a conclusion – another hallmark of graduate thinking.’

But the sense that there’s always a conclusion to be found, or that you always have to be looking for one, seems a bit positivistic to me. And some of the best conversations I’ve had have been when we really are just throwing ideas around; not necessarily looking for a ‘conclusion.’ I believe enquiry in itself is of value. That said, I’m sure Abbott’s definition of a ‘conclusion’ is more nuanced than I’m giving him credit for.

Abbott labels the Wikipedians as possessing ‘amateur ignorance’: they know facts about professions, but they are ‘ignorant of modes for evaluating those facts and then on setting them and the literature into an order that will stand against the onslaughts of new facts and literature.’

I can appreciate where Abbott’s coming from. After all, he’s spent his life studying this, given it deep thought and analysis, and then he has to watch people argue round and round about it on the internet. Maybe it’s like a doctor watching people argue about whether sunburn causes skin cancer.

But amateur is really important. People shouldn’t be discouraged from seeking knowledge about stuff just because they don’t have the tools to use an online research database (and no Abbott, it is not that easy to find what you’re looking for). That just favours the privileged; those who have the time and money to study or discover the ‘literature.’ Plus, the truth is highly subjective; why should people not be encouraged to find it out for themselves? Experiential forms of learning are not given enough credit.

Maybe I’m just defensive because being amateur is kind of what I’m good at.

PROFESSIONAL IGNORANCE

Abbott talks about the substantial numbers of academics – and this is quite interesting – the amount of academics that have cited his book on professions unnecessarily or trivially (for example to justify some very general assertion), or wrongly. Some people cited his article for empirical analyses that were not central to it, but were easier to find in his book. I can remember doing that as an academic!

So some academics are citing articles without reading them properly, to give themselves legitimacy (and perhaps flatter academic colleagues)? I wonder what kind of pressures the internet has created for them to pump out work more quickly and rack up their publication tally – and how that’s impacting on the quality of their deep thinking. After all, if we care about anyone’s deep thinking, surely it’s academics.

EXPERT IGNORANCE

This is the one that Abbott dobs himself in for, and to me the most fascinating. It is when you earnestly dive deep into facts, patterns, theories. You emerge with a theory. From that point, it is difficult to think of the other facts, patterns and theories except in light of that conclusion. He also calls it ‘synthetic ignorance’, because it arises from a synthesis that can obscure complexities.

It occurs to me that the process that Abbott describes is even worse when the person’s not even on any genuine sort of truth seeking mission, ie they start with a theory and they look for the facts and patterns to prove it. In political life this is super common, probably quite so in personal life too.

In my view, expert ignorance – ie the creation of some kind of meta-truth which obscures the disorderly, and often inconsistent, texture and colour of situations – is why Abbott’s supposed amateur ignorance is so important. Debating around a subject, going round and round in circles, sometimes that actually helps you understand a situation, without coming to a conclusion.

Abbott acknowledges that ‘synthetic ignorance is in many ways the reverse of amateur ignorance’. So maybe he is talking about two extremes of a pole, and anticipates a happy medium.

He also acknowledge that expert ignorance is the most dangerous, ‘for it makes us unable to see the new…Always, we are only beginning to think.’

That last line is my favourite.

*err monies? See – turgid prose! That said, I’ve seen seen way worse, academia wise.

Just when your hatred of humanity threatens to overwhelm you, there’s a reassuringly hot blonde accompanying the ubiquitous tale of our ‘sizzling summer’. And at least one cute animal story (the miniature donkey last week was a highlight – if you think cute dogs are a good chick/man magnet, imagine taking that one down Lygon Street!) Interestingly, the Herald Sun does way more animal cruelty stories than The Age, with a preference for abuse inflicted on pets or native animals.

Readers can enjoy the violence, betrayal and lechery without ever getting their hands dirty, and at the same time, relish their righteous indignance. The Herald Sun quite obviously strives to reassure you that, as its reader, you are the good people, part of a community with shared values: honest, down-to-earth, hardworking, with a sort of varmint/mischievous sense of humour but also the ability to agree on when a joke has gone too far (cancer). Also: intolerant of disorder, impatient with complexity, and fed up with bullshit.

I’m not sure whether I’m a target reader. I rarely pay for the paper, but I do read it online. Stabbings, gang violence, tax slugs, bill slugs don’t concern me. But then, maybe they don’t concern the other readers as much either. Maybe they just read the paper for a bit of gossip and outrage. After all, surely one thing that every salt-of-the-earth Australian is supposed to know is that the media isn’t to be trusted?

With some exceptions (like banning makeup and cool hairdos for Victoria Police – do we want them to feel like psychos or normal people?), I’m not usually outraged at the stories themselves, but the way the paper has covered them. That said, I appreciate the Herald Sun as a cultural artefact in itself, find it fascinating. I probably also enjoy some kind of morbid voyeuristic satiation from their sordid stories. Lately though, some of them have left me with a bit of a sick feeling in my stomach. More to come…

Whaat… how dare you?! I’m actually quite fast you know. I’m just choosing to go slow. Well maybe I’ll just show you how fast I am!

Faint echo of self-chastising thoughts
why are you being so pathetic? just go at your own pace!  
quickly extinguished by a potent mix of adrenaline and something like testosterone

Then: speed up, but by all means do not show them your panting and sweating.

It must look effortless.

I often get that feeling when I have to ingest a lot of factual information about something, or even analyse a concept. Humans trying to understand and critique human systems of thought and behaviour, using brains that are so unavoidably shaped by the same systems of thought and behaviour. Err…it’s a bit bias. We think we’re a lot smarter than we actually are, or can be.

One of the most crude examples was in Year 10 science when we learned about the stupidity hierarchy of animals – small unexciting sea creatures, insects, dogs, apes, humans (in rough and almost certainly inaccurately remembered order). The intelligence level was determined by their similarity to humans. It doesn’t even pretend to be an objective measure.

I read this fantastic essay by Zadie Smith about David Foster Wallace. I like her non-fiction so much better than her fiction. She talks about ‘Forever Ahead’, one of his stories in Brief Interviews. A boy is at an old public pool resolving to try the diving tank for the first time. He is queuing for the ladder, and watching the woman in front of him dive in:

Smith: “The difference is awareness (this is always the difference in Wallace). The boy seems to see clearly what we, all those years ago, felt only faintly. He seems that ‘the pool is a system of movement’, in which experience is systematized (‘There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine’)…”

Smith, quoting an excerpt from DFW’s story: “Listen. It does not seem good, the way she disappears into a time that passes before she sounds. Like a stone down a well. But you think she did not think so. She was part of a rhythm that excludes thinking. And now you have made yourself part of it too. The rhythm seems blind. Like ants. Like a machine.”

There’s a lot more to Smith’s essay than fear of automatism. But I’ll leave you to read it, and the short story too.

Moments like finding that essay remind me how much I love reading. You think that there’s almost nothing that nobody else has thought about, but there’s almost always someone whose much further along in their thinking than you. It’s hit and miss finding them though.

I don’t know if there’s any intrinsic value to working these conundrums out yourself; it may be a bit overrated.