Talk:Ern Malley
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[edit] Chutzpah?
I doubt Ern would have known what "chutzpah" means! And come to that, he wasn't even under graduate...ah well, campcase, imagine if we were all seinfeld watching highschool teachers with no sense of humour..speak strine please.
Stop coming the raw prawn, acting the dog etc. And sign ya name, piker. Campcase 19:16, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Ah, that's better, I was getting worried. This is no chat room, so I end with saying this. Anyone who is interested in Ern Malley needs a sense of humour...and a decent chip on their shoulder! My name is Christopher Chubb, sometimes I go by the name of Peter.
[edit] Peers
It would be of interset to elaborate upon Malley's position and friendships amoung his contemporaries, such as Christopher Chubb. mangonorth
[edit] Style
This is not a very encyclopedical artical, not in style, form... It's well-written, but perhaps not in a style appropriate for WP. I think at the very least the lede should say who Malley really was, even if the "story" style of the article is kept. This has been done twice, and then reverted twice by the original author, to whom I ask - Why should the reality of Ern Malley be saved for the middle of the article (other than so we aren't "boring pedants")? Zafiroblue05 03:46, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
I was just about to come on here and say the same thing. Most of the article is commentary--which is inappropriate and contrary to wikipedia standards. I deleted the entirety of the section The Last Laugh as it was nothing BUT commentary. But really the whol article needs a rewrite. Whoever wrote it needs to read the tutorials before doing any more editing. --Brentt 02:55, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
Brentt: I came to this page to read up on Ern Malley because of a passing reference to him in a newspaper article. Wikipedia was temporarily down so I read the Google cached version, which still included 'The Last Laugh'. Now, while I agree that that's an inappropriate section title, nevertheless I think there was quite a lot of interesting and relevant stuff there that didn't warrant deletion. Editing, yes, but I wonder if your reading of the section (and consequent wholesale deletion of it) wasn't coloured somewhat by the ridiculous, NPOV section heading? Quite a lot of that section was, it seems to me (and despite the section heading), fairly neutral (and interesting) biographical stuff - about how the Ern Malley incident subsequently affected the lives of those involved.
Zafiroblue05: I agree - as it stands, the leader is misleading. That this article concerns a hoax should definitely be flagged up right from the start. Whoever originally structured this article was trying to tell a good story rather than write a good encyclopedia entry, I think. --Tremolo 04:45, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] "Philistine Australia"
the philistine Australia of 1943. How is this NPOV? RickK 05:36, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
It is the commonly held view of Australia at that time. Anyway, I am not a slave to NPOV, and no serious historian should be. History is about interpretation, not just lists of facts. To quote Australis's most famous historian: "Look at the title page, young man. It's Manning Clark's History of Australia. If you don't like it, write your own." Adam 05:42, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- Hmmm. I think in the context of this piece "philistine Australia of 1943" is acceptable shorthand. It's certainly a very widely-held view that Australia was very much a cultural desert at the time. I used the phrase "dreary conservatism" to describe 1950's Melbourne. However, I should add that a (moderately) right-wing friend of mine thought that some of the Australian-oriented topics on Wikipedia showed a bit of lefty bias. It's something we should keep in mind, IMO. --Robert Merkel 10:27, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I agree that is a problem with many WP contributions. But I don't think there's anything lefty about describing 1940s Australia as philistine - it's a rather elistist-conservative view in some ways. Adam 11:39, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
[edit] Harris publishing "indecent matter"
Can anyone help me? I read that Max Harris did jail time on a charge on "publishing indecent matter" as editor of the poems. This article doesn't mention it. Is it real? Auric The Rad 19:23, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
It's a while since I read up on this story, but my recollection is that he was fined, not jailed. I will check when I get home to my references (I am currently in Thailand). Adam 05:39, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Harris was convicted, after a three-day trial, and fined five pounds. The poem in question (one of the Malley poems) was about a young couple in a park after dark. A policeman gave evidence that in his considerable experience young couples only go to a park after dark for one reason, and that this made the poem indecent, immoral, and obscene. Wocky 07:49, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Alternative Prospective
Has anyone considered the possibility that the fake authors were actually lying when they said they wrote the poem in one day? Perhaps they wanted to humiliate the critics, and were willing to attempt quality poetry to do so. Superm401 | Talk 03:59, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
Michael Heyward, in "The Ern Malley Affair" goes to some lengths to counter the claim that the poems could not possibly have been written in one day - which did come up at the time. McAuley had already written most of the opening poem Durer:Innsbruck (quoted in the article) and the two poets claimed they tinkered with it a little but left it largely unchanged. This, they said, got the creative ball rolling, and the rest of Ern's output came quickly. Ethel's letters, they claimed, were much harder to get right.
Heyward establishes that McAuley in particular had a flair for satiric improvisation and that Stewart was highly regarded in poetic circles for his knowledge of other poets' works and styles. Moreoever, there was a tradition of off-the-cuff parody and (frequently ribald) versification within the Sydney poetry scene, where both McAuley and Stewart got their start.
Campcase 22:56, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Hoax
The fact that this is a hoax, and an historical controversy, should be stated in the first paragraph. As it currently stands, the article is somewhat confusing and misleading - those who do not allready have knowledge of the incident would not fully understand this artilce - Matthew238 00:25, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Original author's comment
What a lot of boring farts you all are. However I agree that I would not now write the article in this way. I will make some edits. Adam 10:28, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Malley a "fraud"?
There is nothing wrong with article at all which tells the whole story of a quintessential piece of Australian ratbaggery and pompous pricking very well. Looking at the poems now (and I have not glanced at them in 20 years) I can see that whatever McCauley and Stewart said, these could NOT have been composed by the selection of random pieces of text. Analogies and conceits are pursued stanza after stanza, poem after poem. For example:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all-existence
Traces the inevitable graph
Here, Malley looks with stoicism at his own impending death, and the unfinished canon of his poems. There is even the pun on “foot”. If anything, far from being abstruse and incomprehensible, the material here might appear rather commonplace today. Certainly, there are any number of “deconstructionist” texts far more obscurantist than anything in these 16 poems. It could well be that the two hoaxers exaggerated the randomness of their poetry writing to achieve the maximum with their humiliating prank. Or, as is suggested here, they were irresistibly guided by their own poetic concerns as they pieced Malley’s truncated world together. Either way, a theory of mine would be bolstered. To create poetry of this kind requires education, and a poetic sensibility, but not a great deal of technical skill. The same can be said of much abstract art. The result is that, yes, I believe that many of us could indeed write poems “as good at these”, but that does not mean the poems are a fraud. The poems are real and interesting and “poetic”. The reality of how they were constructed might reveal that poetry is nearer to our own lives than we might suppose, but that it is not the singular piece of bravura excellence that Harris had talked it up to be. Myles325a 03:51, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
