Nihilistic, misanthropic Melbourne punk band Primitive Calculators aren’t strangers to antagonism – indeed, it sometimes seems like they court it. Their new album – their debut, despite having formed at the tail-end of the 70s – is entitled The World is Fucked. It contains nine vicious, bowel-cleansing slabs of noise, all with one-word titles (No, Why, Kill, Love, God, Cunt). But even their singer, Monash University academic Stuart Grant, must have been taken by surprise by the latest controversy.

It all started earlier in the week, when the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair ran a short blog entitled The face of Melbourne above a Sunday Age clipping of Grant looking hangdog soulful in big, chunky glasses. In it, Grant revealed a fondness for pu-erh tea, reading philosophy and cooking Chinese meals.

Cue scores of outraged readers. It seems like there’s nothing that will wind up your average Telegraph reader more than an academic drinking pu-erh tea.

“My God, what self-pitying, gratuitous dross. And what’s with the photo?”

“I cannot tell you how angry I am about this absolute dribble. Dead set, this fool needs to go and work at a real job for just one day.”

Like a sheep to the slaughter (or should that be the other way round?), “don’t call me right-wing” Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt followed with A modern academic. Bolt’s researchers had done a little – uh – research, and discovered that Grant (being an academic) had published several academic papers.

Cue scores of more outraged readers. It seems like there’s nothing that will wind your average Herald-Sun reader up more than an academic publishing academic papers.

“A prime example of the degradation of university academic life,” wrote Stephen of Brunswick. “Mr Grant, who looks completely miserable and shows abysmal dress sense, no doubt punishes his students by making them study not musical theory but cultural theory, an invention of discredited French wannabe ‘philosophers’. You have got to pity those students who have to persevere with that garbage in order to get a degree of questionable merit.”

“Turn off the taxpayer-funded money,” writes mja of Sydney. “If what this clown’s doing is so important, so valuable, then I’m sure someone other than me and other taxpayers, will pay him directly for it.”

Bolt later removed some of the comments for being “mean”.

“I don’t take it seriously,” Grant says on the line from a South Yarra tea shop. “It’s so ferociously irrational.” Until readers from the alt. music website Mess+Noise started commenting on the Bolt blog, none of the increasingly shrill responses picked up on the fact that not only are Primitive Calculators an Australian cultural institution (the sort of which gets invited by Nick Cave to play festivals, and who featured in the 1986 cult movie classic Dogs in Space), but that Grant works in comedy, theatre and performance at Monash – and that this sort of "controversy" feels precisely like something he’d like to engineer.

“I loved the comment about my glasses,” laughs Grant. (One commentator called them "Telescreens", like John Howard used to wear.) “My wife bought them for me.”

Mostly, Grant is amused by the whole process. He says, “What’s interesting is the way the contemporary public sphere manifests itself in comments on YouTube clips, letters to the editor and, in particular, answers to blogs like this. There’s a really interesting blend of emotion and information.

“In this case, it demonstrated what happens where a small number of people egg each other on to say things they normally wouldn’t say in polite and decent company. Apart from that, it’s fun. I do what I do, they do what they do – and they’re welcome to do that.”

“So let me get this straight,” reads one comment on the Bolt blog. “A guy spends his Sunday doing some work, drinking tea, going for a walk and then cooking some food. Then he may or may not be doing a bit of reading. That’s it? All this bitterness over that? Wow.”