More Fun Than Joining Probis

BUSY nights around the kitchen table at the Anne Summers household? You bet! There is Young Chip of The Drum in his high chair, brow furrowed and attempting to write a diplomatic rejection note to the resurgent Margo Kingston, whose return to journalism has not been going well.  She has a scoop to share, a desperation to make voters aware that all this talk about Julia Gillard’s AWU slush fund ignores the bigger issue of Tony Abbott’s long-ago efforts to torpedo Pauline Hanson’s political career.

This view obviously presents a problem. It was only this week in Parliament that Julia Gillard heaped guilt by association on Abbott and Julie Bishop, whose attempts to wring some straight answers were rebuffed with accusations that they are in bed with at least one former Hansonite, whom the prime Minister insisted has been responsible for blackening her good name. Shagging other women’s husbands, being unable to say if stolen money paid for her home renovations and having been fired by a major law firm are, apparently, insufficient shadows to darken the character of a strong Labor woman.

So Margo’s contribution had to go. How could Abbott be both a sworn enemy of Hanson and her minion’s eager tool? Certain manifestations of cognitive dissonance the Left can assimilate – Julia Gillard, honest lawyer, aids and abets a grand fraud but remains entirely blameless and pure --  but other thoughts simply confuse the narrative. Safer, much safer, for Young Chip to stick with the party line and have ex-Drum supremo Jonathan Green channel his old friend Alene Composta, which he does with ardent aplomb. No wonder the pair got on so well. As for Margo, she can go tweet.

And at the table’s head there is Anne Summers, beavering away at her latest journalistic, and modestly christened, tour de force, Anne Summers Reports: Sane, Factual, Relevant.  Summers has been down this road before. Stalwart of the National Times, hood ornament at Fairfax Media, publisher and proprietor of Ms magazine – all went bust or are about to, so it can be said with absolute certainty that spectacular failure is a destination whose path she knows by heart. Her latest project, revealed to the world today, testifies that Summers’ ambitions are more modest this time, which should make the latest road to ruin less taxing.

She is certainly off to a characteristic start. Glance through the offerings – The Stolen Generation Was Sexually Abused Too! Fashionable Architects Confounded by Big Apple Climate Doom! – and eventually you get to a review of what sounds a very annoying post-modernist novel about noted Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. Here is its opening paragraph:

ON A HOT DAY outside Prague in 1942, a Mercedes convert­ible slows to halt before a solitary figure in the middle of the road, a man with a raincoat slung over one arm. Inside the idling car is Obergruppen­führer Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Czechoslovakia (the Reich’s wartime industrial powerhouse) and one of the ris­ing stars of Nazi Germany. The figure in the road aims a Sten machinegun at the man who declared all of Europe’s Jews ‘condemned to death’ two years earlier at Wannsee, and …nothing. The trigger sticks. Chaos ensues.

Nothing happened, really? This may come as news to Summers, but a fellow resistance member then tossed a satchel charge at Heydrich’s Mercedes, peppering him with shrapnel and prompting a raging infection that carried him off several days later.

In her statement of goals and principles, Summers has this to say:

This is our pledge. We will be sane. We will be factual. And we will be relevant.

Sanity is, of course, a subjective state, and anything that whines is “relevant” in the circles in which Summers and Young Chip circulate. But the “factual” bit, that must be coming into  effect with the next edition, due in late January. By then, one assumes, the grant application will be in place with Summer's pal, Sophie Cunningham, who oversees the Australia Council's Literature Board.

For those more interested than Summers in Heydrich’s end, this is decent primer:

UPDATE: Scrotum Face is also taking dictation from Alene's ghost.

  

Bottom of the Deck/Learning on the Job

The Parkville Asylum's Bronwyn Hinz has been girl-talking a storm on Twitter with the venerable Anne Summers, who gives the game away in her excitement:

Alas, the man of the Summers household was not having anywhere near so nice a day. Landing the job as The Drum's new editor was the easy part, but mastering the small details of an editor's brief -- things like reading, understanding and writing a few small words by way of an accurate headline -- those skills remain to be acquired. Let Jonathan Holmes' rebuke and young Chip's eagerness to please serve as a lesson to all youngsters hoping to make their way in the world of quality journalists on taxpayer-funded six-figure salaries.

After such a day, the hearth's consolations must have been sweet indeed.

Chip Of The Old Bloc

MR Anne Summers, sometimes known as former Sydney Writers Festival honcho Chip Rolley, will not take up his duties as editor of The Drum for another month or so, which must demonstrate even more than the pleasure of waking up every morning next to his former boss at Ms magazine just how much luck one young man can jam into such a short and blessed life. There he was, hardly more than a teenage Texas tumbleweed trying to make it in the Big Apple in the Eighties, when he lucked into a job at the proto-feminist monthly. Eyes met across an editorial floor, hearts beat faster and, while Summers' magazine sank into a sea of red ink, love took wing and soared.

Chip

It is a beautiful story. Having failed in the US, Summers and business partner Sandra Yates returned to Australia, where some people can be very easily impressed, especially at Fairfax. Summers wrote those wonderful pieces for which she is so well respected, sharing with the Silly's audience all the special perspectives of her fascinating view of the world. When Bill Clinton came to town, for example, she told of choking back tears. He might have been a rapist, almost certainly is a rapist, but he's a rapist of the left so that makes him OK, even to a professional feminist.

 Anne

Yates, too, was kicking on, landing board gigs and scoring the chairman's job at the SWF. She did it with aplomb, presiding over the festival that makes sure  99.9% of guests are ideologically sound and fully fit to be revered by the sort of people who believe that visiting literary leftists lecturing rooms full of the local variety represent the exchange of ideas in its most pure and noble form.

It was certainly a coincidence that Yates' former business partner's beau just happened to be installed on her watch as the SWF artistic director -- just one of those strange outbreaks of happenstance. We can only imagine Summers' pride, however, at seeing young Chip make something of himself. If you have ever watched a nanna delighting in her grandson's first steps, that must be some small tremor of the joy she felt.

Now Chip is about to move on once again -- and, as ever, the pieces just seem to fall into place for him. Not only did he jump straight from the SWF to a nice, secure ABC salary as Drum supremo -- a job that was briefly advertised and must have drawn hundreds of less-qualified applicants -- he will have the satisfaction of supervising towering talents like the all-hearing Tim Dunlop, the forever couth Marieke Hardy and many other deep thinkers like, well, this one.

And Chip's luck -- he is the Gladstone Gander of the literary set, for sure -- knows no bounds, as anyone who peruses the reader comments beneath this article will quickly realise. There is nothing wrong with the article itself, mind you, which quite correctly observes that newspapers taking their cues from the likes of Summers are too busy circling the biscuits to notice normal, average, sane readers turning away in disgust. The Drum commenters, though, they might be Summers' great grandchildren, banging on at great length about everything that is wrong and morally deficient about Andrew Bolt. According to those commenters, Bolt endorses "the worst aspects of Australian society", profits from "the politics of envy" and manufactures "appalling smears" which are said to be "typical" of him. Also, the ABC site announces, it is "proven" that he "makes things up". Then there is this: "People like Andrew Bolt ... usually want any person with a contrary view to their own put in gaol with the key thrown away."

Throw in accusations of telling deliberate lies and, if Andrew has the stomach for it, it would seem he has grounds to proceed against the ABC for libel.

But that won't be young Chip's problem, as the slanderous comments have not been published on his  watch.

Some guys have all the luck -- and Anne Summers for breakfast as well.

A NOTE: For more on the perspectives and views young Chip will be bringing to The Drum, see Gerard Henderson's little backgrounder. 

A Woman's Right To Choose....Sometimes

A PHAGE reader is outraged:

What about baby?
LAST WEEK my wife saw a pregnant woman smoking outside the Royal Women's Hospital. If it is illegal to inflict cigarette smoke on people in bars and restaurants, then surely it should be illegal for a pregnant woman to inflict cigarette smoke on her unborn baby
David Wood, North Melbourne

No doubt Mr Wood's heart is in the right place, but one cannot help wondering if he was similarly peeved by the venerable Anne Summers' column on Sunday, the one in which she insisted no woman could be considered a feminist if she opposed abortion on demand.

According to a reader, the unborn need to be protected from irresponsible mothers. According to the columnist, the unborn are worth less than a mother's inconvenience.

The liberal mind really is a thing of wonder.

Old Gal Loses Reading Glasses

ANNE Summers must have thought she had found something as telling and scandalous as the fact that Andrew Bolt once had a girlfriend who did not become his wife, excitedly tweeting that her fellow Q&A guest, the Australian’s opinion editrix Rebecca Weisser, should have disclosed that she once worked as a PR operative for Qantas.

Some gotcha, sweetheart! The info is in Weisser’s Q&A biography, and Summers, having had her senior moment corrected by several respondents, has now flushed the original allegation down the memory hole.

Poor old Summers, what is to be done with her? There will not be any cushy appointments for her under the Abbott government, and with Fairfax in its parlous state, outlets prepared to publish whatever crap dribbles down her leg are apt to be rather limited. Julian Disney had better get his speech police off the ground ASAP! Slack and partisan but well-connected, the feminist battleaxe is the perfect choice to administer Disney’s fines and lectures about the need for accuracy.