Something you might not know about John Clarke

I was lucky enough to meet John Clarke once, maybe fifteen years ago. Clive James was launching a big poetry anthology at the Melbourne Writers' Festival; Clarke was at the launch, and by sheer good luck I was talking (after the speech, not during it: one of my resolutions for 2012 is to go up to anyone who's talking during a speech, concert, movie or any other public performance and give them a good hard smack upside the head. No jury would ever convict me) to a dude who knew a dude who knew him, and finished up talking to him myself. He is a lovely, lovely man, and he loves poetry and is extremely knowledgeable about it.

He's just posted a link on Twitter to an 'appreciation' of Auden that he wrote in 2007 to mark the centenary of that great poet's birth. The poem with which he finishes this post is one of the few poems I know by heart. It's here.

 Photo from the ABC TV Blog

Anxieties. We has them.

What shall I worry about today? There are a number of choices. [NB: the state of the world is an ongoing given, no surprises there.]

Will the New Year's Eve dessert -- cherry and roasted almond ice cream for 17 -- get safely shopped for, made, frozen, transported and served intact, in the 37 degrees being forecast for Saturday?

Will I get my column done this morning in time to get to the market before all the cherries are gone? [Not if you sit here writing blog posts about fretting about it -- Ed.]

Will my pathological untidiness and I get the house cleaned up by Sunday when a dear friend is coming to lunch? She has a get-out clause about staying home in the cool, as Sunday will be even hotter than Saturday -- if the definition of a heatwave is five consecutive days over 35 degrees, as I believe it is, then Adelaide is cruising into one as we speak, according to the BOM -- so this one is flexible, but I must clean up anyway as a New Year thing. Just woke up out of a horrid dream about past crimes against tidiness. I see domestic detritus, in my case 95% paper products, as a sort of rabid, feral, malignant, hyperactive octopus that lives in the house and hates me.

Will I get next week's column done on time?

Will my father's 85th birthday be an easy, happy day, and what of my sister's hand surgery two days later?

Will the full afternoon of running writing and editing workshops for cluey postgrads be a success, or have I forgotten how to teach?

Will I be able to get access to everything I want at the library to write my conference paper? Never gave a keynote speech before. Anxiety coming in waves. Is this a good argument? Do I have enough examples and are they interesting enough? Do I even have an argument, and if so, what is it? (All Hons and postgrad students to whom I have ever sternly said 'But what is your actual thesis?' have my permission to snicker at this point.)

Will I be able to find my way to the Aldinga Library to give a talk about the Adelaide book, will I melt on the way if it's filthy hot, and if it's filthy hot will anybody turn up, and will I then be able to find my way home in the dark? (NB not worried about talk qua talk, but give me time.)

Have I got time to read all the books I haven't read yet by all the people whose sessions I'm chairing at Adelaide Writers' Week, and will those sessions all work out well?

Will I get my column done promptly every week in between all this stuff?

Will the ice cream go well? Will the lunch go well? Will the birthday go well? Will the surgery go well? Will the teaching go well? Will the conference paper go well? Will the Aldinga excursion go well? Will Writers' Week go well?

Look at that. Fretting fully booked till well into March.

Carols by Candlelight, Adelaide, Christmas Eve 1944

67 years ago tonight (thanks to Persiflage for the correction to my always-shocking arithmetic), at Adelaide's first-ever Carols by Candlelight, a population depleted and exhausted by the war and its effects went streaming down to the most beautiful place in the city, which apparently the current government is about to wreck, to spend the evening by the river and sing some carols. Not tacky 'Christmas songs', just proper traditional carols.

Fifty thousand. That's one-twelfth of the 1941 population figure for the entire state.

From the Adelaide Advertiser, December 26th 1944:


FIFTY THOUSAND AT CAROL FESTIVAL
Amazing Christmas Eve Scene In Elder Park

Fifty thousand people celebreated Christmas Eve in Adelaide by attending the carol festival held in Elder Park in aid of the Adelaide Children's Hospital and the Somerton Sick and Crippled Children's Home.

Adelaide has never before see such a great gathering at night [although it was to see a bigger one less than a year later when the war ended -- Ed.]. Fifty thousand is the police estimate, but the number may have been even larger. Long before the festival began all the 30,000 admission programmes (£1,500) had been sold, and thousands of people unable to obtain one gave a donation at the gates, and sang carols from memory.

"Carols by Candlelight" was arranged by the Commercial Travellers' Association and [radio] station 5AD. It gave the city a Christmas scene of unique size and setting. Elder Park on the banks of the Torrens was solidly packed with people sitting from the City Baths almost down to the water's edge, and from King William Road more than halfway to Morphett Street bridge. The footpaths in King William Road were dense with latecomers unable to find room on the lawns, while down the road cars were parked in places two deep, in unbroken lines stretching beyond St Peter's Cathedral in one direction, and filling Memorial and Victoria Drives, and most of the adjoining streets. At one time the cars were three deep opposite the rotunda until the police compelled the line to move on.

Although the festival did not begin until 8 p.m. the crowd began to gather in the late afternoon. Many people brought tea [ie dinner; doesn't that take you back? -- Ed.] and picnicked on the lawns. By 6 o'clock they were beginning to arrive in thousands.

By nightfall the lawns had become black with people dotted red with the glowing ends of thousands of cigarettes. They sat outside the light cast by the band rotunda and a platform that had been built in front of it for the orchestra and 100-voice choir. The platform was lines with 7 ft. candles and floodlit from below.

The orderliness of the crowd was remarkable. There was no jostling or scrambling despite the great numbers. A single rope barrier round the platform was so respected that the police did not once find it necessary to patrol it. Everyone on finding a place sat down and remained seated till the end. St. John Ambulance officers had not a single case to attend to all night.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

"If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly thwarted, sooner or later one strikes across the wound profiles of Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963. In those 'six point nine seconds of heat and light' or those 'seven seconds that broke the back of the American century', some little hinge gave way in the national psyche. The post-Kennedy period is often written up as a 'loss of innocence', a judgement which admittedly depends for its effect on how innocent you thought America had been until a quarter of a century ago. But, while Presidents had been slain before, they had generally been shot by political opponents of an indefinable if extreme sort, like Lincoln's resentful Confederate or McKinley's inarticulate anarchist. Moreover, the culprits were known, apprehended and questioned. With Kennedy's murder, the Republic doomed itself to the repetitive contemplation of a tormenting mystery. Here is a country where informative technology operates at a historically unsurpassed level; where anything knowable can in principle be known and publicized; where the bias is always in favour of disclosure rather than concealment; where the measure of attainment even in small-change discourse is the moon-shot. And nobody is satisfied that they know for certain what happened in the banal streets of Dealey Plaza."

-- Christopher Hitchens, 'Where Were You Standing?' TLS, November 1988.


I remember exactly where I was standing: in the living room on the farm where I grew up. The news had just come up on the teeve as a 'News Flash' (remember them?). I was ten. I also remember exactly where I was when I read this paragraph. It was the winter of 1992 and I was sitting in the living-room of my friend R's flat in Balmain, overlooking Sydney Harbour, with the sun coming in through the window. R was in the kitchen making coffee, and I had idly picked up the copy of Hitchens' For the Sake of Argument that was lying on the table and opened it on the page where this paragraph appears.

I thought I had been struck by lightning. I really did. This, it seemed, was what writing could do if it tried.

'Conscience vote'

To use what might be considered an unfortunate expression, I have no dog in this fight. I'm a straight woman in her late 50s with no interest in marriage. (Been there, done that, threw up on the t-shirt.)

However.

I think the people who say the ALP's national conference is being hijacked by the 'unimportant' issue of gay marriage aren't thinking hard enough about what importance is, or indeed about what politics is. To my mind this goes to two absolutely fundamental issues in politics: the quality of ordinary people's daily lives, and the question of who has power over whom, and to what end.

So the idea that it has anything whatever to do with Person A's 'conscience' when Person B and Person C decide that they would like to formally and legally celebrate their commitment to each other in the manner in which such commitment is most usually celebrated in our society is really just a case of a power struggle being dressed up to look like something nicer.

For whatever sense does it make, really, that Person A should wrestle with his or her own better angels about something that Persons B and C might want to do? No sense, that's what. Person A, if she or he genuinely believes this to be a matter of his or her own conscience, needs a bit of a lesson in how to recognise his or her own beeswax. And everyone knows that the Prime Minister's taking of the 'conscience vote' road is a totally cynical move in any case. And I can't be alone in finding something particularly rank and icky about dressing up a bit of pragmatic and strategic political gamesmanship as an issue of individual conscience.

Journalists I Have Known

I originally wrote this as part of the comment conversation on the last post, but I'd quite like to say something positive about journalists in a more accessible spot so here it is again. RIP Hume. (The other one's still alive.)

Such a strange profession.

I owe most of what I know about the art and craft of writing to one journalist, a man called Hume Dow, who was older than my parents, and who had worked on the Age, which I think was back then still the Argus, with George Johnston and Charmian Clift during WW2. Whenever he talked about the gorgeous and brilliant Clift, he was unable to finish any given sentence. He would just waver off in mid-syntactical construction and gaze off into the middle distance. Hume taught me how to proofread properly and what good 18th century prose looked like and why Hemingway in A Movable Feast, but not in his fiction so much, was a miracle of writing.

Another of my major mentors, whom I knew intimately and won't name (grounds, incriminate, etc) was also an exceptional journalist before he moved on to other pursuits. I have great respect for a number of contemporary Australian journalists (Megalogenis, Tingle, Marr, Grattan, Colvin et al), not to mention the legendary international ones, and I have just finished reading a novel about two heroic journalist-photographers, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, who both died in the service of their vocation. And I think all these things may be why I hold the bad ones in such contempt.

Gotcha

In which the very savvy Mr Benjamin Law takes a screen shot of SA Liberal MP Michael Pengilly's Tweet this morning in response to one from journalist David Penberthy (Twitter is a bottom-up read) on the subject of the Government's response to the resignation of Harry Jenkins as Speaker.

Because, of course, any minute now someone's going to let Pengilly know that he wasn't having a private conversation, and that his opinion of the Prime Minister is there for all the world to see, and then he's gonna take it down. Much too late. Hah.

UPDATE, 2.07 PM: Yep, he's taken it down. Hee Hee.

Normal service will be resumed shortly ...

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not grateful to have work. Au contraire, for how else would I ever hope to pay the dentist?)

I heard the most wonderful interview with Paul Kelly on the car radio yesterday and wrote a long post about music in my head but of course it's all gone now. Well, nearly all; hands up anyone else who remembers Peter, Paul and Mary singing 'I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog'. Sigh.

Exams aren't what they used to be

This kind of stuff -- students buying pre-written essays to memorise and then regurgitate (and I use the verb advisedly) in their HSC exams -- has made me reflect on the olden days of last century, when I wor a lass, and my cohort had to sit a total of five, count 'em, five lots of public exams within three years.

In Intermediate (the year we all turned fifteen, the equivalent of Year Ten) we sat the exams for Commonwealth Scholarships for the last two years of school -- these were essentially IQ and general-knowledge tests, not things you could prepare for in any way apart from staying healthy and getting enough sleep -- and only a few months later we sat three-hour exams in each of eight subjects. The following year, Leaving (Year 11), we sat another set of three-hour exams in six subjects. And the year after that, we sat for another round of Commonwealth Scholarships, this time to university, plus more three-hour exams in five Matric (Year 12 / HSC) subjects, except for the exceptionally clever kids who did six because they could.

That's 60 hours of competitive public examinations over three years, in an era when there was no continuous assessment: your result for the year depended entirely on how you scored in the exams. And if you didn't pass a sufficient number of them, then that was it: you repeated the year or you left school.

Nobody cheated, perhaps partly because they were not the sorts of exams for which cheating of this kind would have been possible.

Then, of course, there were the university exams, by which time you could score at least part of your result through essays handed in during the year. Not much, though.  And if in later years as an academic I ever got sick of my Honours students complaining about how hard they had to work, all I had to do to make them stop was tell them about the assessment for my own Honours year: two 12,000 word theses, plus four three-hour exams in a total of six different subjects, two of them (Practical Criticism and Shakespeare) compulsory. Like many of my mates in that year, I was by then living away from home and worked all the way through the exams, in my case washing dishes in a Greek restaurant. I was, however, alone in the charming experience of going to court about my no-contest divorce about halfway through the exams.

What's more, I walked five miles to school and university barefoot in the snow. And I think you should all get off my lawn.

Love, music, sex and death

Never having heard of this delightful young woman, though I sure as hell have now, I was mesmerised by this song on the car radio this afternoon, on Adelaide's local ABC.

I used to listen to, and perform, a lot of folk music when I was in my teens and twenties. But I didn't have the analytical skills I have since acquired, in 35 years of reading and thinking about literature and society, to think about these kinds of songs in a way that any educated young woman would automatically think about them now. If someone held a gun to my head and said 'Write a 3,000 word feminist analysis of this song and its narrative structure in the next three hours or you will be shot,' there is no doubt that I would get out of it alive.

But never mind that for the moment -- and you will get the gist at a visceral level anyway. Just have a listen to Sarah Calderwood's filigree musicianship and this haunting tale of commerce and nemesis, impossible to tell convincingly in any but a minor key.

Dear Dorothy Dix

Okay so this is totally a First World problem and a very minor one at that. If that offends you, stop reading now.

Ahem. There's this woman I know only very slightly and only from work-related meetings that we occasionally both attend. I don't know her outside this context at all. We have never had a conversation or indeed exchanged more than a couple of sentences at a time, if that. But every time we are in the same room, she greets me by patting or stroking my hand, arm or shoulder. She will occasionally do this again during the meeting if I am within striking distance. I haven't observed closely but I don't think she does this to any of the other people present.

Now I am not a cold person as a rule. I am on enthusiastic hugging and cheek-kissing (not mouth, not air) terms with family and with friends of both sexes. But I am so repelled by this woman's touching me that I can't control my distaste. I don't actually brush her off but I move away and am quite sure that my reaction is showing on my face. I hate doing this as it seems rude and hurtful, but it really is out of my control, like sneezing.

While it's a very long way from the hardcore sexual harrassment I occasionally experienced from men in my (much) younger days, and while it's hardly the sort of 'inappropriate touching' that we warn children about, I think any touching from such a slight and wholly professional acquaintance, much less stroking and patting which frankly I find a bit creepy, is inappropriate. I feel like the brat Hugo in The Slap saying 'Nobody is allowed to touch my body without my permission', and that can't possibly be a good thing.

Of course one can never know these things for sure, but I'm pretty certain that if I were attracted to women at all, this woman would not be among those to whom I was attracted. If I were a hot young thing myself then I would probably say philosophically with a flick of my blonde locks that inappropriate touching from people of all sexes was the price one paid for hotness. But, you know, seriously not the case.

If she has so far not been put off by my obvious distaste for being pawed, then it doesn't seem likely that discreetly murmuring to her 'Hello, boundaries' is likely to work either. In the meantime, I have to work with her, if only occasionally, and it's making me much more thoughtful and reserved about when and how I touch other people, which may be a good thing, but also may not.

Xenophobia exploined: 'The stranger had remained strange.'

From his first novel Open City by Teju Cole, who is a Nigerian New Yorker and professional historian of early Netherlandish art:

The classic anti-immigrant view, which saw them as enemies competing for scarce resources, was converging with a renewed fear of Islam. When Jan van Eyck depicted himself in a large red turban in the 1430s, he had testified to the multiculturalism of fifteenth-century Ghent, that the stranger was nothing unusual. Turks, Arabs, Russians: all had been part of the visual vocabulary of the time. But the stranger had remained strange, and had become a foil for new discontents. ... My presentation – the dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger – made me a target for inchoate rage ... But the bearers of the rage could never know how cheap it was. They were insensitive to how common, and how futile, was their violence in the name of a monolithic identity. This ignorance was a trait angry young men, as well as their old, politically powerful rhetorical champions, shared the world over. And so, after that conversation, as a precaution, I cut down on the length of my late-night walks.

So what DOES he think it is?

Latika Bourke on Twitter: "Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says the #Qantas dispute 'isn't a Workplace relations problem...this is not a policy problem.'"

There you go folks, the aspiring PM in waiting doesn't know what a workplace dispute is.

As Stephen Fry would say, Lordy potatotes.

In which politicians talk about Qantas and their metaphors give them away

Quoted in a report tonight:

Bob Brown: 'This lockout is also a sellout of the spirit of Australia.'

Tony Abbott: 'It is the responsibility of government to ensure ... that brand Australia is not damaged.'

Got that? Lapsed Presbyterian Bob Brown thinks Australia has a spirit. That devout Catholic, Tony Abbott, thinks it's a commodity.

Well would you look at that

'There's only one thing worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about.'

-- Oscar Wilde

(From Bookseller & Publisher Online today.)

One degree of separation

I had to be dragged, not exactly kicking and screaming but certainly emitting weak staticky signals of protest, onto Twitter. But now that I'm there, I find there's at least one daily joy. If it's not Stephen Fry, currently in Australia and announcing yesterday that he's off to a barbie in North Perth and it's not really the weather for it but it's all about the sausages really, then it's a reminder like this that the world is really very small indeed. If you don't know who Ronan Farrow is, here's a hint: he used to be called Satchel.

We report, you decide

How have I managed never to see this before? Thanks to Lucy Sussex for the link.

But one likes, as they say, to be asked

UPDATE, 27/10/11: I am reliably informed that the AGNSW did indeed have copies of the other books and had either sold them all or not unpacked them yet. I take it all back. This post was written with a small bit of my tongue in my cheek, in a knee-jerk reaction (if you will forgive the involvement of all these body parts) of a non-eastern-stater to Syd/Melb hegemonic etc etc. Mea culpa.



Cruising around the gallery shop yesterday at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I was glad for the sake of their respective authors, Delia Falconer and Sophie Cunningham, to see on display for sale a little stack of copies of Sydney

and another little stack of copies of Melbourne.

But alas, that was all.

Having put a great deal of time and effort into writing a book that could be read for pleasure and instruction not only by Adelaideans but also by interstaters and overseasers, I couldn't help thinking that surely visitors to the gallery shop might be largely from elsewhere, and therefore perhaps interested in Australia as a whole. And that even the Sydneysiders might interested in broadening their horizons by also reading Adelaide,

Brisbane,

 

and In Search of Hobart.

Or is it really true that Melbourne and Sydney people think that the Hume Highway and everything to the east and at each end of it = Australia?

Things I would rather do than pose for photographs

I have done all of these things so I know whereof I speak. In ascending order of reluctance:

1) Give blood
2) Give a speech to a crowd, unprepared
3) Vacuum the whole house
4) Eat mushrooms I don't recognise
5) Have a general anaesthetic
6) Clean up cat vomit
7) Vomit (see #4) (also #5, and possibly #2) (and indeed #6 and #8)
8) Watch someone else vomit
9) Have the crowns on my two front teeth forcibly removed and replaced, while conscious
10) Wrangle Poppet into the cat carrier and take her to the vet

Maybe not roll and wreck another car. Not quite. But close.

Abbott promises to spill bodily fluids, Wong says 'Ew'

What on earth does the Leader of Her Maj's Opposition think he means by 'blood pledge'? Doesn't he know that Talk Like A Pirate Day was last month?