In which Sarah raves about: The Festival of Ideas

I was really keen to blog today: I had decided to close everything down because I hadn't been able to maintain it for so long... and then I read comments from my adoring public and saw the number of posts at the nicely round number of 50, and I couldn't. Sad really, isn't it? This weekend just passed I went to my first festival event in the city. Adelaide calls itself the "Festival City" - a strangely self-fulfilling prophecy as the name results in lots of festivals being held here. This particular festival was the "Festival of Ideas". So, imagine me if you will, terribly excited by all the talky-thinking that I was going to see. Lots of people ranting indefinately about postmodernism and the endless play of meaning inherent in (insert subject here). Unfortunately the majority of the lecture series were full of middle aged left wing intellectuals congratulating themselves on their left wing-ness. Don't get me wrong, I'm as much a raving leftie as the next post graduate, but these people were smugly preaching to the converted, anti-War and pro-Reconciliation. The theme of the Festival was "What is to be done?" and apparently the answer was "smugly sit around and recommend changes to society that will never impact on our way of life". My favourite part of the whole thing was when a "famous Australian" by the name of Bob Ellis stood on the stage during a panel discussion entitled "Making sense - representation and misrepresentation" and told us that there WERE facts, there WERE true and accurate representations - we just needed to find them. We needed to look in the right place (we needed to listen to him?) Que? There are NO accurate representations.... only endlessly different representations that play off one another, accurate for one reason or the other, but never whole and truthful in themselves. To think that this man was blindly preaching that we go out and find The Truth...? In defense of the Festival (or perhaps, in defense of middle aged left wing intellecuals?), I went to see Germain Greer speak and she was INCREDIBLE. Her topic was "Hunter-Gatherer values and the 21st Century State." The one and perhaps rather major thing that was negative about her concept was that in theory at least it had the danger of sliding into the kind of "noble savage" ideas that Rousseau amongst others ascribed to, and which helped to perpetuate the kind of oppression through representation that we still live with today. But I think that this is my inherent uneasiness rather than anything specific that she said. Essentially the argument was that Australia should stop fighting against it's environment and its extreme conditions and instead embrace the way of life that it necessitates. But it was much better, more elaborate, more entertaining than that sentence suggests. And: it appears that Andy has a job. No more house husband for me. And: I envisage my next post as a series of character sketches of the people that work around me. Oh, the banality! Oh, the irony!