Three-dollar bill
As one of our finest young writers, Elliot Perlman knows how to spin a tale. Professor Bunyip has already fisked Elliot's heart-rending account of the young woman summarily dismissed from her administrative post at one of Manhattan's 'most prestigious' universities, as a warning of what we can all expect under Simon Howard Legree's new IR legislation. Which sent me back to another of Elliot's hard-times tales - his own. While publicizing his novel Three Dollars - about an imaginary parallel Australia, in which academics and public servants are retrenched one day and burrowing through restaurant dumpsters the next - Elliot frequently told the tale which served as his inspiration.
The gist is as follows: Elliot is standing in the checkout queue at his supermarket, when he notices a beautiful, affluent-looking woman who might or might not be a childhood acquaintance of his. As he gets to the checkout (buying, according to one account, Coco Pops and celery), his attempt to pay by Eftpos fails for want of sufficient funds. Casting aside his Coco Pops and celery, he flees the supermarket, under the withering gaze of the assembled shoppers, not least the well-heeled mystery woman. At the nearest automatic teller, he establishes that his bank account contains exactly...three dollars.
This has always seemed a puzzling story. Are we meant to assume that Perlman was unemployed at the time? All the interviews tell us that he was a barrister before turning to literature: they do not mention a period of unemployment, and one would expect Perlman to spotlight a spell on the dole, if he had ever had one. So are we to assume that he was a working barrister at the time of the supermarket incident? Further, he says nothing about any dependants: is he raising a family of six on celery and Coco Pops? One might also draw conclusions about the spending habits of people who pay for even the smallest purchases on Eftpos. A nasty suspicion dawns: is the notorious three dollars incident less to do with Howard's heartless Australia and more to do with poor cashflow management on the part of the individual?
As one of our finest young writers, Elliot Perlman knows how to spin a tale. Professor Bunyip has already fisked Elliot's heart-rending account of the young woman summarily dismissed from her administrative post at one of Manhattan's 'most prestigious' universities, as a warning of what we can all expect under Simon Howard Legree's new IR legislation. Which sent me back to another of Elliot's hard-times tales - his own. While publicizing his novel Three Dollars - about an imaginary parallel Australia, in which academics and public servants are retrenched one day and burrowing through restaurant dumpsters the next - Elliot frequently told the tale which served as his inspiration.
The gist is as follows: Elliot is standing in the checkout queue at his supermarket, when he notices a beautiful, affluent-looking woman who might or might not be a childhood acquaintance of his. As he gets to the checkout (buying, according to one account, Coco Pops and celery), his attempt to pay by Eftpos fails for want of sufficient funds. Casting aside his Coco Pops and celery, he flees the supermarket, under the withering gaze of the assembled shoppers, not least the well-heeled mystery woman. At the nearest automatic teller, he establishes that his bank account contains exactly...three dollars.
This has always seemed a puzzling story. Are we meant to assume that Perlman was unemployed at the time? All the interviews tell us that he was a barrister before turning to literature: they do not mention a period of unemployment, and one would expect Perlman to spotlight a spell on the dole, if he had ever had one. So are we to assume that he was a working barrister at the time of the supermarket incident? Further, he says nothing about any dependants: is he raising a family of six on celery and Coco Pops? One might also draw conclusions about the spending habits of people who pay for even the smallest purchases on Eftpos. A nasty suspicion dawns: is the notorious three dollars incident less to do with Howard's heartless Australia and more to do with poor cashflow management on the part of the individual?
posted by cuckoo at
2:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home