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.