Sappho Poetry reading tonight was a success as the guest reader highlighted a line of the sonnet I read. I won a DVD set.

The DVD packaging is very neat. The box contains six disks, mounted on the plastic interior. But the configuration is strange. One disk is mounted on the inside of both the front and back covers. Welded inside the box, however, is a pair of plastic, moulded leaves. Each side of each leaf holds a disk: on one side (recto) it is toward the top of the case and on the verso it is near the bottom.

The ingenuity displayed in this set-up is satisfying.

The poem I read is part of a sonnet sequence that begins on 13 December with 'How many years have passed in your absence'. This line, however, did not match the rest of the poem, said Martin Harrison.

A Canterbury graduate (oddly, he did not complete a BA prior to starting an MA), Harrison is English and teaches at UTS, which is located opposite Central Station, on Broadway. He runs the creative writing program.

The evening's schedule started with him reading some work. A poem about the landscape, which used an effective image of a wild beehive, was the opening item. Unfortunately, Harrison subscribes to the 'dun school' (my coinage) which is the dominant orthodoxy today.

Free verse has reached an end-point but nobody will admit it. Harrison is not free of irony but it is less visible in his work, than it is in the work of other poets writing today. Modernism has run its course but there is currently no viable alternative. And Modernism demands free verse.

The main element characteristic of the 'dun school' is a lack of striking imagery. These poets also borrow heavily from one another. In another item Harrison read, which included lines describing currawongs (a sort of native Australian crow), the same words you read elsewhere appeared. Things like 'skein' (to describe the bird's beautiful cry), and 'purling' (same), emerge, as they do, as part of the standard 'package' of tropes that are associated with the bird.

He described the sound of cicadas as a 'single breathing sound', which was quite nice. Overall I'd say that half of his lines contained viable imagery. The other half attempt to depress the tone to a level that is audible to the great unwashed.

In my poem, he said that the tone of the first (triumphant) line was not equalled in the remainder of the lines. This is probably correct, but I will not change a line.

I guess my system is to deploy the sonnet in a way that resembles the deployment of haiku by Japanese poets. The haiku is a single-image, high-impact unit that gratifies the desire of Japanese readers for a concrete, simple aesthetic moment. Such a moment is valued because it is quickly assimilated and does not tolerate development.

Development is not valued because it implies polemic, and this is not valued because it is antithetical to Oriental culture. A sonnet, comprising 14 lines of metrical verse, demands development.

More, the final couplet of a sonnet must contain a fresh angle, related to the themes within the preceding 12 lines, but that leads to a new place. Here is mine:

13 December 2007

How many years have passed in your absence?
Eternity obeys your pounding heart.
The sudden changes of your countenance
Ratify this moment, in which I start

Like the wild jerboa, lithe kangaroo
Of another desert, millennial
Denizen with an equal urge to woo
And win, and wean off desire. Finical,

Admiring yourself (seemly reticence!),
In me you find much to admire: curtains
Kept closed must strengthen desire; absence
A breeze that keeps kissing these rock-strewn plains.

You reached inside and broke off a corner
Of your heart, and placed it in my palm, girl.

The italicised segment is, thinks Harrison, not equal to the clarity inherent in the opening line. He's not the only one to criticise the segment. But it is necessary, given my artistic pose, to include something like this. It refers directly and explicitly to the object of my esteem.

The bold-text segment (the final couplet) is derived from popular culture. These two lines were praised by another friend. So we have some agreement and some disagreement. Which is as it should be, I suppose. Possibly I am being lazy. Should I rewrite?

There is a viable poetry scene in Sydney and I wonder if there is elsewhere in Australia. Possibly. But there seems to be something every week here. Which is nice.

Having problems with Windows Vista? I have a few and they are not trivial. It only takes a few days to resolve them, but they demonstrate that Microsoft takes its customers' goodwill for granted because they don't alert you to the dangers and inconveniences before you install.

Installation is not trivial. Mine took over two hours. During this time the computer reboots multiple times. This means that most people would want to wait until the weekend before installing. But caution is required: Microsoft's help line is not staffed on weekends.

The main problem is that Vista deletes your Internet provider's settings in the version of IE included on the operating system DVD. In my case, this meant a call to Optus in order to retrieve critical POP3 details: a twenty-minute delay prior to use.

The old email client is deleted, too. Microsoft has a new default email client called Windows Mail which, when activated inside Vista, knows where to find the old files, but it's not an expected feature. Microsoft should tell Vista buyers beforehand that this change will be made regardless of user preference.

Worse, especially for those, like me, whose computer may routinely be used by another individual, is the 'Welcome Center'. This cheerful little viewer is 'on' by default and appears when you start the computer after Vista finishes its installation sequence. Note the handy drop-down that shows all recently-visited websites:


Yikes!! Some of these new features are decidedly anti-marriage ...

Just imagine what would happen if your wife happened to fire up the PC one day while you were not present and was able to scroll, at leisure, through all the 'unsavoury' sites you'd visited over the past week!

The little red arrow pointing down in the picture shows where you can elect not to display the Welcome Center on start-up. This is OK, but ... it should not be an 'opt-out' feature. It should be something you elect to show, not the other way round. And it gets worse.

A little 'sidebar' feature that is switched 'on' by default is the 'Slide Show' gadget. The gadget controller sits in the top-right of the screen and, for my part, I'm yet to find the control that lets me hide it. Which I'm eager to do. That's because the Slide Show gadget displays a random sampling of stored pictures in an inch-wide viewer that sits on the desktop.

More opportunity for embarrassment. In fact, it's not just the Welcome Center that allows an unwary user to access all URLs stored during an earlier user's session online. Any panel in the new Control Panel will make this information public. It's too easy to see this stuff.

I guess the corollary to these gripes is to use a personal login. For me, living alone, this may not be necessary. A parent would want to be very sure that his or her personal settings were not visible to a child.

If the only benefit to the user from purchasing Vista is the sexy new skin, then I suggest not to buy. Rather, spend the hundreds of dollars it costs on more useful options, such as more RAM or some glossy photo paper for your inkjet printer.

Another negative, for me, was that installing Vista caused Norton Anti-Virus to be turned off. I'm not sure how I'll deal with this issue, but I do not think it should have become one.

Vista buyers: beware!!

To hang two Japanese paper fans on a wall has taken me all morning, including two trips to Bunnings in Ashfield. The fans are not in themselves particularly spectacular or valuable.

One was given to me by a friend of my wife's who was remarkable for having three children as well as for putting up with my wife's odd moods. The other one landed in my possession at some point during my decade in Tokyo.

To get this result, I started out in the car at around 9am. I completed the business about half an hour ago. It took this long despite the fact that the total concept was crystal clear in my mind from the get-go: I knew I wanted to use angle hooks and since the wall is double-brick, I knew a drill would be required.

Bunnings' tool shop on a Sunday morning is very busy and there's only one sales guy who knows all the details of the hundreds of models they sell. A queue quickly formed. I stood to one side until the cashier interrupted the expert.

He flashed me a quick look, as if to say 'greenhorn', and airily bid me buy a Bosch or a Makita unit.


I looked about me, saw endless rows of cordless and mains-powered electric drills and quickly deserted the post. I decided to do something useful, and made for the aisle displaying hooks and screws.

Here I felt in better company. I quickly selected the size and shape of hook I wanted. I also took some larger hooks for hanging a Japanese printer's block, which is a wooden slab about twenty centimetres long and half as much wide.

I then went to the place for masonry plugs and got the smallest type available: 5mm.

These critical items in my possession, I returned to the drills but asked a different sales person for help. Since he could not tell me precisely what type of drill I'd need, however, I started inspecting packaging and the marketing copy printed on it.

Since my maximum hole size would be 5mm, I gauged that a drill capable of punching a 10mm hole into metal would be good enough, if not over-spec. I took a box to the counter and asked the expert if this would be true. "Not necessarily," he answered.

"So what kind of drill do I need to put a 5mm hole into brick?" I asked. He was clearly not grasping my situation. So I asked him if a cordless would, perhaps, be inadequate.

"Yes," he said. "Get this." I looked at the box labelled 'ozito' and the $30 price and pressed, again: "Will this work?"

With a positive answer occupying a multitude of synapses in my frontal cortex, I took my selections off home and inserted the 5mm masonry bit into the drill's chuck, which is tightened manually.

I plugged the cord into a double-adapter underneath my window case and, having marked with a pencil the location on the wall for each hole, placed the tungsten tip against it and started drilling one of them.

After making two, I inserted a 5mm plug into one. Useless. It slipped in with no friction holding it at a place where a hook could screw in. Bugger.

I got back in the car and returned to Bunnings.

I wasn't happy. The guy who was lucky enough to serve me this time apologised profusely (this unlikely outcome is solely attributable to the fact that he is North American). He also took the time to help, thus averting future complaint.

He took me through the process from the beginning. This way, he reckoned, any other issues could be identified before I again drove off. He took on-board the fact that a 5mm plug is too small if a 5mm drill bit is used.

But he also (luckily) noted clearly that a plug larger than 5mm would be too big for the hooks I'd chosen. With a 7mm plug, for example, they would uselessly twist around endlessly.

The solution was to buy a packet of 'Fix-it' plaster-impregnated cloth patches. These are separated, soaked in water, moulded around the plug, left to dry for three minutes, and inserted with the plug into the hole.


This worked, although I had to snip off excess cloth with scissors (see bottom photo for a full catalogue of tools and consumables required).

I had learned a few lessons during the morning, so when preparing the second fan's mounting holes I chose a 4mm drill bit.

This worked perfectly. I knew this because I needed a hammer to sink the plugs into the holes. Note: when using a 4mm bit, you can twist the bit around in the hole as you finish it. This makes the diameter slightly larger than 4mm, and ideal for a 5mm plastic plug.

So while the morning's work demanded an unexpected amount of time as well as mental application by four individuals, the result is ideal. As you can see (above).

Here are the items required (from top left):

• 'Fix-it' plaster-impregnated cloth patches
  
• Angle hooks for mounting fans
  
• Mains-powered hand drill
  
• Scissors
  
• Philips-head screwdriver
  
• Hammer
  
• Pliers
  
• 4mm drill bit (also used 5mm bit, not shown)
  
• Screw (for removing the 5mm plug that uselessly disappeared into the first hole)
  
• 5mm masonry plugs
  

Selected Stories of Shen Congwen was first translated into English by Jeffrey K. Kinkley for University of Hawai'i Press in 1995.

The date is significant, he says in his introduction. He works in the Department of History at St John's University, New York. To say that Shen's "road was not easy" is to point at how significant, in fact, the date is.

The literary scene during his creative heyday, 1924-1948, was querulous and faction-ridden, but despite ideological rifts, most authors back then were fairly civil with each other, and friendships often crossed ideological divides.

But during the revolution Shen's reputation was 'eclipsed' and his works "virtually banned in China" for 40 years. The writer gave up trying to make a living from his craft and studied museology, first as "a mere docent". He catalogued items and did tours of the museum.

"During the Cultural Revolution, his house was raided by Red Guards, and he was sent down to the countryside, but his hardship was less than that of many other intellectuals." As a 'dead tiger', however, he posed no threat to the Party. Even in the early 1980s, many students had never heard his name.

Even in Taiwan his works were banned officially because he did not go to the island with the Nationalists in 1949. The situation changed, apparently, in the 1980s.

In both markets, his books began to be read again. Kinkley avers that a Nobel was in the offing but unfortunately the writer died in 1988. It is significant that the current publisher (The Chinese University Press) "was established in 1977 as the publishing house of The Chinese University of Hong Kong".

The press aims to add "five to six titles" to its list each year.

I won't quote from Kinkley's analysis of the stories in this fabulous book. He is, after all, an historian, not a literature scholar. His concepts are very stale and block-like. What we do have in common, however, is a deep admiration for this subtle writer. The writer who most closely resembles him, I guess, is Chekhov.

This is partly because of the bucolic themes. But also it is due to the very dry-eyed gaze. In both authors' work this clear vision is powerful because married to a soft heart.

A heart that remembers.

The historical period touched on in the stories is clear due to Western cognates used (tung oil is harvested by rich landowners and sold to Westerners who use it to make anti-fouling paint for warships; in another story there's talk of a magnificent fountain pen).

The ambience is distinctly Chinese, as is the cruelty (a woman a clan head dislikes is first raped by a mob then pushed over the side of a dinghy with a millstone around her neck).

The class situation is also medieval. A government official (hujia) virtually rules his town single-handledly, handing out favours to cronies and taking multiple girls into his house as concubines. The rich live in heaven while the poor rely on what is dropped off the edge of that favoured locus.

Basta! with the political and economic discourse, though. Here, the magic is in the way Shen carries the narration across time -- effortlessly -- and gathers his favoured sons and daughters to his bosom in the motion.

Of particular note is Sansan, about an ignorant (but rich) country girl who becomes the object of interest of a sick city-dweller come to the countryside to recover (probably from tuberculosis). At first she is dismissive, but the existence of his desiring gaze impacts on her psyche until, at the end, she is a partner in the dance of love.

Also extremely good is The Husband. His wife works as a prostitute and he lives off her earnings until, at some point, the burden of shame and regret overpowers him. As in the case of Sansan, the denouement is delayed. Everything resolves itself in the final paragraph, until which point the outcome of the story is quite invisible to the reader.

This effect -- of a car racing toward an immovable object and swerving to miss it at precisely the final possible moment -- is delightful. It's surely a rare gift that Shen commands here.

Finally, Qiaoxiu and Dingsheng offers a superb, postmodern approach to an old story (old in China, I suspect). The relationship between the two characters whose names appear in the title, is tenuous. The presence of the narrator in the story as a character gives the story a very contemporary feel, and his musings go a long way toward resolving the meanings of the two intertwined stories that centre on the young woman and the young man.

Without doubt, Shen is the best Chinese writer I've read. Even better than Gao Xingjian.

Superb. Superb. Hooray for Hunan!

Tom Heneghan, who teaches architecture at Sydney Uni, bemoans the difficulty confronting the foreigner who wants to live in North Asia: the wretched script. "After two years of study I knew just over 200, including numbers," he tells Elizabeth Farrelly, The Sydney Morning Herald's architecture critic-in-residence.

"As I learned new ones, the old ones I knew slipped out the back of my brain."

The newcomer is enchanted, as I was, with the spacial dynamics especially, as happened to me when I visited Japan in the winter of 1982, for a person with an inherent interest in the plastic arts. Here's me mimicking my host's wife's script (shodo):


This concern with form may be the reason for Asian reticence when faced with a confrontation. Farrelly writes that Oxford psychologist Michael Argyle finds Japanese faces "are still inscrutable, less legible - even to the Japanese - than English or Italian faces".

And the condition is common to Chinese people, too. The similarities are endless and hence are cause to regret the poor political link between the two countries which, it must honestly be said, know each other better than anyone else knows either.

Says Farrelly: "what really strikes you, on a first, fleeting Tokyo visit, is just how Japanese it still is". But the next bit is really beautiful:

Japaneseness infuses everything, from the way the buildings collude in their space-making to the extraordinary quietness of the streets, where the dominant sound is the soft, insistent rain of a trillion footsteps.

As even the train trip from Narita airport shows you something quite different is happening here. Tokyo's wan industrial suburbs are themselves oddly picturesque. Almost nothing is brick or concrete. All is light and timbery, textual and textural, settling to the ground in a loose, ordered chaos that makes a place of every street and a joke of the entire Western edifice of urban design.

It's true. There is truly a "loose, ordered chaos" in Tokyo and any other large city in Japan. What needs to be stressed, however, in "the soft, insistent rain" is the second qualifier.

The press of people in the world's largest city means that 'insistent' is a negative quantity. And this may also be a reason for Asian reticence: so many people living in such close quarters for such a long time. The Chinese influence, however, is really, yet to be adequately chronicled.

A friend tells me that Japanese traditional kimono (the garish, but lovely dress the women are most famous for) is highly reminiscent of T'ang Dynasty dress (circa 700 CE, when Buddhism and the script migrated across from Korea to the archipelago).

The little wave of the hand, in declining something, that is so characteristic of Japanese women (the men would never do this), is also common to the Chinese. My friend does it all the time.

And covering the mouth, when laughing is, it transpires, another point of commonality linking Japanese and Chinese women. It signifies good breeding.

My friend, however, laughs with her mouth open.

Farrelly ends her interesting article by pointing to "a palpable thoughtfulness" that inheres in what a Japanese person does. "Not just politeness, which suggests a kind of fraud. More a zennish mindfulness, a concentrated energy beneath the calm."

"[E]ven the young mother taking three smartly uniformed under-fives to the temple school by bike." Oh, what a feeling!

Nightwords Festival, Sydney, is to take place on 6, 7 and 8 March at the Sydney Opera House. Visit the site linked here and you'll encounter the face of Miles Merrill but the event promises a lot more.

Actually, this kind of grandstanding gets my goat, but competitiveness among poets is legendary, so this attitude should be taken with a grain of salt.

The event contains several elements, one of which ('Legends of the Word'), interestingly, is a retrospective of performance poetry in Sydney "from 60's beginnings to slamming present". Cool.

It may be a good idea to book early as I suspect space will be limited ("maximum seating capacity ranges from 220 to 350").




The flyer is bent. This is Peter's fault. Peter is a poet who reads regularly (the next event is on Wednesday 13 February at Sappho Books in Glebe).

Peter, Matt and I were talking outside The Friend In Hand tonight and Peter folded the flyer in two (you can see the creases if you click on an image). This is the kind of absent-minded act poets are prone to, especially when discussing weighty matters.

Peter and I disagree on many things but he read a wonderful poem tonight that originated in his youth. He started the poem 30 years ago and it chronicles an erotic moment, one of those plastic spaces that are available to all.

Apocalypse Now Redux, released in 2001, is the extended version of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 war movie and it is ideally summarised by Paul Byrnes, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday while reviewing a more recent film (There Will Be Blood starring Daniel Day-Lewis): it "has an overwhelming presumption of its own greatness".

Lewis is possibly the equivalent, today, of Marlon Brando, who made Apocalypse Now (the original, better version; Owen Gleiberman was correct to say the new version is a "meandering, indulgent art project that [Coppola] was still enough of a craftsman, in 1979, to avoid") a success. So a film with him in it that is about the sins of the American fathers, is bound to become Oscar material.

But this ray of sunshine is accorded by pure default. I'm not the only viewer to think the pace of Apocalypse Now Redux is slow. The Wikipedia page rightly points to the French plantation sequence among the chief offenders.

Another scene without merit shows the helicopter badged with the Playboy logo, adrift in the confusion and madness of war. Inside it, the bunnies give sexual favours to select soldiers. The only merit of this scene is to show that Lance, the surfer, has a kind heart. He puts makeup on one of the girls, a dreaming blonde who talks non-stop, oblivious, it seems, to the part she is expected to play. Her dream is to be (an actress? it's not clear) but certainly not simply to be the fuck-bucket of stir-crazy marines.

But we would anyway know Lance is kind. Later, he will snatch a puppy from the Chef's hands following the nasty slaughter of a boat-full of Vietnamese farmers. And when Clean is shot while listening to an audio cassette sent by his mother, it is the puppy Lance frets about, not the young, black 19-year old soldier. "Where's the puppy? We've gotta go back!" he screams as he flails around the plastic gunboat, hundreds of miles from civilisation.

The French heavies, in any case, are unconvincing from the start: more like a street gang than a group of farmers intent on retaining their land in the face of overwhelming social change. At the well-appointed table, the chief of them lists the losses in war suffered by the French, only to finish (striking the table so the glasses rattle): "We will never leave! Never!" Are the French always (at least since the memorable successes of the Napoleonic years) presuming as to their own greatness?

This thought brings me to ponder the fashions of youth, particularly the retro-chic valued today by 18- to 21-year-olds. Is this new conservatism a sign of incipient downfall? Is it not, perhaps, true that war is always (pace predictable pronouncements of such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright that it is "never justified - there is no just war") a catalyst?

Touring the Australian War Memorial on 28 January, it struck me that the changes made possible by war (Indian emancipation, the Roaring Twenties, American triumphalism since 1775; the list is endless) are not able to be achieved any other way. Somebody (not always the son of god, it would seem) must make the 'supreme sacrifice'.

On 26 January, I attended, with a Chinese friend (for whom I had to explain the meaning of 'supreme sacrifice'), a small ceremony at the corner of Sussex Street, near Darling Harbour. There, an ascending spiral of horizontal slats commemorates the war service of Chinese-Australians.

One woman, with red hair and the green suit of the Lions Club, by the name of Denise, told a little story of a sniper at Gallipoli named The Assassin. His real name was Tpr William Edward (Billy) Sing.

This also brings me to contemplate, especially now (the other day, shopping at Woolworths, I saw the shelf of check-out mags all showed Heath Ledger on their covers), how death enables a set of words, otherwise never heard, to emerge in the public sphere.

Words such as 'generous', 'kind', 'unforgettable', 'wonderful' seem always (and without exception) to attach themselves to individuals who, should they have been mentioned in the press while still alive, could not have had such words associated with their names.

As Camus endearingly wrote, when producing an introduction to the reprint of a youthful work: "everything must be done so that men can escape the double humiliation of poverty and ugliness" (Lyrical and Critical Essays, Vintage edition, 1970).

Poverty leads to war. But do we not nevertheless need to experience periodically the richness of language produced by war: to revitalise a culture exhausted by the demands of the pursuit of capital?

Is it possible to achieve such a revitalisation without death? I suggest this question should be posed to a devout Christian, the religion whose founding narrative (expulsion from heaven) was buttressed by a "superiority of belief, not superiority of people" (Michael Galak, Anti-Semitism, Its Origins and Prognosis, Quadrant, January-February 2008, p. 22).

Tours of the house of representatives and the senate in both the old and new parliament houses are free and frequent. But the capacity of the guides is not ideal. At least the rooms were cool, the mercury on the three days of our trip pushing 35 degrees Celcius.

Luckily the trip to Canberra is nowadays about 3 hours long -- the entire length of road is dual carriageway -- so with an air-conditioned cabin, not only does this mean that safety is assured and speed is guaranteed, it also means that you can travel in comfort and not for long.

The split road has meant that the speed limit is uniformly 110 kilometres per hour. Beware the return, however, as most people seem to do this right at the end of the alloted time: Monday evening.




When we arrived it was Saturday afternoon, Australia Day. Fireworks organised by authorites took place at Commonwealth Park, fronting Lake Burley Griffin, with the National Library and the High Court visible on the far shore.

The National Gallery, placed beside the latter building, was not visible from the dark water's verge. But the vertical water fountain, switched on for the final five minutes of the pyrotechnical display, added character and charm to the brilliant, bright lights.






I will go into my misgivings about the tours now, if you don't mind.

Both guides seemed overly proud of our heritage, crassly triumphant, even smug. "This is the only democracy to have been founded without bloodshed," crowed one. My own ideas about nationhood make this kind of statement impossible to stomach. What about the Commonwealth of the 1640s and 1650s? I thought.

Hardly half an hour later, the guide in the new building told us the reason why the Speaker is always accompanied down the stairs of the chamber by colleagues toward the high-backed chair situated at the rear of the green room. The tradition embodied in this charade -- once upon a time being Speaker was extremely perilous -- and in others (the Queen is only allowed into the Reps by invitation due to Charles I's ambush of five members in 1642), negates the primitive demarcation within the tonic date of 1788, which blinds us to everything that came before it.

The history of England is just as much ours as it is the Brits'. The guides pointed to tradition a dozen times each, yet questioned they will unhesitatingly disallow our debt to England.


A similarly blinkered view is held by the staff of the wonderful National Film and Sound Archive, housed in a lovely, stipped classical fabric near the ANU. One showed us footage of the signing of federation documents, in Centennial Park, on 9 May 1901. The gaudy costumes worn by the onlookers became a matter of fun.

But without such due process Australia would never have been allowed to become independent. It is within the traditions embodied in pomp and circumstance that we continue to see ourselves as masters of our own destiny.

The orthodoxies of the inner-urban elites are a hindrance to full comprehension of Australia's role in the world. It is time for the sorrowful protests of Modernist artists, poets, and writers to be cast aside and replaced with something wiser and more aspiring.

As I said during a book launch near the end of last year: "The standard post-colonial narrative is no longer useful. In fact, it is positively dangerous."

Apart from anything else, the woman taking us through the new parliament building said that Luke Hansard was the first parliamentary reporter!! I took her aside at the end of the tour and gave her the good oil. But it is a feather in a gale of mediocrity.

If the gatekeepers are semi ignorant, what hope do the vast bulk of Australians have, to keep informed and become enlightened?

Richard Flanagan, the fiery Tasmanian novelist, has penned a superb piece that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday ('Love of art will stop the advancing barbarians').

It contains strong opinions and ends, with a flourish, with poetry. But it also contains truths we are in danger of forgetting in our endless race for lucre.

[A]rtists and the art they make exist in opposition, speaking to those things that we need as individuals but which seemingly threaten us as societies: truth, freedom, non-conformity, desire...

"Art is, of course, a guarantee of nothing. Nor is love."

Flanagan is a leading intellectual in Australia. His most recent book is a roman engage in a long tradition practiced in Europe from earliest times.

Curiously, Flanagan quotes Napoleon in the piece. This suggests, to me, the idea that modernism was a European import, beginning in France. This further suggests that the Romantic project, which reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, may be reemerging as a cultural engine.

Certainly, Flanagan's suggestion that love and art provide easy avenues for (a) transgression and (b) innovation (the two are usually found together) is valid. But I went further, on the same day, in an email to a friend, and before I had read Flanagan's article:

Like culture itself, the erotic moment creates, by dint of the interplay of aspirational personas, loci of transgression. Many denigrate their high-wound tenor but we see daily that common alternatives are not acceptable in a free society.

And, further:

We also see that people always in every country and in every year, seek out their liberating miasma:

http://news.smh.com.au/lawyers-brace-for-postxmas-divorces/20080107-1kmw.html

We know that culture is the most plastic agent of human activity. The Tale of Genji, the first ‘novel’, was written in the 11th century by a Japanese noblewoman but that country would require another 800 years to even be able to supply clean drinking water and sufficient food to feed its large population.

Even in the most sophisticated polities, culture provides avenues that can lead to valid innovation. In the 19th century, in Britain, the aspirations of a religious minority contributed to a mini-reformation that happily reveals a remarkable tergiversation of tropes. Here, the classical narrative of freedom that had belonged to the Protestant faction for centuries was effortlessly appropriated by the Catholic faction, leading to practical refinement of manners.

Many of the early fans of Wordsworth were young Catholic priests busy establishing themselves following the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829. We see here, as in the case of Blake’s first groupies (young, fundamentalist Christians), that a repressed minority can contribute, through a valid aesthetic response to perceived injustices within the supposedly enlightened main-stream, to profound changes in society.

Flanagan's piece ends, in a sentence of such delicate rage, with a series of metaphors that link immediately to his recent book (The Unknown Terrorist, 2007). It is fantastic!

The empire's prefects and satraps take counsel only from the abacus, call on the flagellator to restore order, and cannot understand why the barbarians are advancing.

Eureka!!!!

Sidney Nolan Retrospective, Art Gallery of NSW

Curator Barry Pearce admits up-front in the video blurb on the dedicated website that most people will immediately recognise the 'First Kelly Series' as most representative of Nolan. He goes on to remark that these paintings represent only a small parcel of the artist's entire corpus of work.

In fact, the 'First Kelly Series' is, indeed, remarkable. This is immediately obvious when you walk a little further through the many rooms set aside for the exhibition, and come across the 'Second Kelly Series', painted maybe a decade later, when the artist was around 40 years old.

In this series, Nolan is trying to accomplish something far more difficult, and he draws on European modernism (particularly Francis Bacon). But the result is not as satisfying as the first series, painted when he was about 30 years old. This may be, however, merely an example of the truth that people only recognise what they already know.

The website contains an interesting little video by Edmund Capon in which he testifies to a firm belief that Nolan is the first truly Australian painter. This is a bold claim. But Capon possesses sufficient gravitas to make it stick. Which is a pity. The canonisation of Nolan, for the exhibition visitor, starts inside the small screening room, where a 12-minute video plays on a loop to a soundtrack of vanila 'classical' music.

The music is a screen, a layer of meaning that adds nothing to the visitor's understanding of why, for example, the young Nolan felt authorised to depart from established forms (one painting in the 'First Kelly Series' quotes fulsomely from the Australian Impressionists and is, in fact, a dud). A member of the Melbourne intelligentsia, Nolan was notably inspired, at an early age, by the French ninteenth-century poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Most people will not know Rimbaud from a lump of soap, but they will perceive the classical music as denoting 'quality', and the juxtaposition, made here, between the elegant kitsch of the eighteenth-century soundtrack and the vicious clarity of Rimbaud, cannot be a fillip for Pearce. He should know better.

Nolan painted a portrait of Rimbaud as a twentysomething and revisited the theme as a mature man. The words of the bard continued to hold value for him. But the curator ignores this fact, knowing that a tall poppy like Rimbaud would be unacceptable as an aesthetic mascot for a presumably down-to-earth painter we must (must!) herald as a uniquely Australian exponent of the great European traditon of oil painting.

He would have been better-off using some Snoop Dog or Frank Zappa for the video backing. The exhibition even contains original editions of the Ern Malley works!

But Nolan is bigger than Pearce even if some of his aspirations are decidedly colonial. If he felt so strongly about the Australian bush, for example, why did he set up his later-years studio on the banks of the Thames?

The pic included here is one of the later works, and demonstrates the huge energy of the older artist. Without doubt these later works are superior even to the 'First Kelly Series' and the pity is that nobody (myself included) has ever seen them before.

Like Donald Friend, whose wonderful domestic still-lifes of later years are completely unknown, Nolan achieved a clarity and richness of vision that eschewed the pat nationalism of the overrated 'First Kelley Series', in these fantastic late works. The shame is that they will never achieve the renown of the work of his first majority.

In addition, he painted some rather marvellous chinoiseries that Capon, as an admitted fan of Asian art, should do more to promote.

Review: After Dark, Haruki Murakami (2007)

A year ago, an interview with Murakami appeared in a major Japanese newspaper. In it the great writer spoke about his translation of The Great Gatsby. "[T]he Great Depression ... [was] a dark age in contrast to the flashy '20s. Fitzgerald matured as a writer as America did as a society. Both became introspective, and they had to mature in their own ways."

The new novel demonstrates that Murakami has matured. It is significant that he has started to look for new models, and even more significant that he should find one in Nabokov. In After Dark we frequently come across an authorial trope, a piece of meta-narrative architecture with which the writer dispenses, with a casual flick of the hand, with any requirement for a fictional character to be present in order for the reader to see an event unfold.

The metaphor is a camera, perhaps a hand-held one. With it, he pans in and out while letting us view scenes in this world and in the other, parallel world where the souls of the living resolve our dilemmas, much in the same way as, in the pre-Reformation age, Englishmen and -women bound to write a final will and testament, would request that songs be sung for their souls, trapped in the hereafter.

In Nabokov's underappreciated Laughter in the Dark the writer uses a flying eye to swiftly leave one scene up, up, up into the empyrean before descending down, down, down to let us view a car racing along a mountain road. An accident is about to occur and we, the readers, are privileged by our witnessing.

But Murakami has done more to make me think of his reference to Fitzgerald. The previous book (Kafka By the Shore) was too forceful, too didactic, too plain in conception (though complex in execution). Prior to that we had Sputnik Sweetheart, a novel not quite complete, with a denouement meant to be sad but which somehow failed to achieve that elusive emotion.

In the new novel the romance between Takahashi and Mari evolves as quietly as a foetus, ensconced in its mother's womb: all the cells twin in silence like the birth of an idea (Shakespeare: "The wish is the father of the idea").

This romance succeeds because it is truly about love (erotic love) whereas in Sputnik Sweetheart the affection between the girl who disappears on the Greek island and the young man, is more like friendship.

Of course, there is more to After Dark than this. Of tonic moment is the ambiguity possessed by Shirakawa, the computer technician who has beaten a Chinese prostitute not because of the money or out of sadistic delight, but because he "had to do it". Shirakawa is a truly modern hero and I don't think we have seen his like before.

I very much enjoyed the Cohen brothers' new movie No Country for Old Men, with its fabulously precise and relentless villain Anton Chigurh (played by the talented Javier Bardem), but in Shirakawa Murakami has devised an even more interesting villain: an everyman, a cypher, a hero for the post-industrial age.

After Dark opens with casual violence but closes with the twitch of a young woman's mouth as she lies asleep in something resembling a coma. This twitch is the sign that Murakami has survived the darkness.

"I'm just sketching what I saw in the darkness," said Murakami in a November 2006 interview with Nick Jones of The Prague Post. "Sometimes it's fun, [but] sometimes it's dangerous, so I have to protect myself. That's why I'm running every day. You have to be physically strong to survive that darkness."

In the previous two novels he barely survived. Now, older, tougher and wiser, he streaks out the far end of the tunnel that connects the world he routinely inhabits with the other one: the one inhabited by the rest of mankind.

Highly recommended.

In Memoriam A. H. H., Alfred Tennyson, winter 1833.

Tennyson's poem is quoted for a few lines that are memorable in their compact relevance. Especially the lines about it being better to have loved, and lost, than never to have loved at all. There's also the line about nature "red in tooth and claw" used to highlight the massive impact, on the popular psyche, of Darwinian theory.

Darwin's The Origin Of Species appeared in 1859 but poets such as George Crabbe were writing about the likelihood of evolution thirty years earlier. My edition of Crabbe is nasty (CUP Poets in Brief series, 1933) and doesn't come close to providing the detail he deserves.

But Tennyson's meandering poem resembles nothing so much as The Task by William Cowper, who set about writing it at the behest of a lady of his acquaintance who touched him.

Like the 1758 poem, In Memoriam is episodic. There is no central thread, as the author of the Wikipedia article suggests ("The death of Hallam, and Tennyson's attempts to cope with this, remain the strand that ties all these together."). Nothing could be further from the truth.

The poem is, however, animated by a feeling of intense love for the dead subject, who "helped Tennyson through the difficult period following publication of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830 and who worked over the new volume for 1832."

"He was friend, critic, and philosopher to a sometimes confused and lonely poet who desperately needed the guidance, warmth, and compassion Hallam freely offered," writes Robert W. Hill, Jr, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Tennyson's Poetry.

The potential stored in the relationship erupted in the poem but the tone is very uneven. It is all good stuff, or most of it at least. There are some rough patches where the poet marshalls his resources. But the more natural passages are delightful.

The verse is generally highly compact and satisfying, and provides the kind of idiom the Romantics preferred: intimate, observant of the world, high-wrought, and tentative in its logic.

I read the poem last week while waiting for a friend. The location was Bar Piccolo in Kings Cross. The place has been open for 50 years and they sell chinotto in addition to reasonable coffee. Unfortunately, the waiter spilled my second cup, largely destroying the book. Many pages are now stuck together.

I'll have to buy another edition.

Review: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright (2007; based on Ian McEwan's 2001 novel)

The film is at least half an hour too long and the second half is slow. The link between the war and what happened in the "enormous Victorian Gothic mansion" when Briony (the real star of the film, its hero and driving force) is 13 years old, is adeptly held until the stupid scene when Robbie Turner (James McEvoy) witnesses an atrocity.

The field under the fruit trees is covered with the corpses of dead schoolchildren. This sounds good and can be thought to link in nicely with the event that caused Robbie's trauma in the first place: Briony's dobbing him in to the police after the rape that followed the disappearance of the two little boys (Jackson and Pierrot Quincey).

But it doesn't work and just comes across as a pat canard launched at the German army, as if the exhortation not to forget were more important than the rhythm of McEwan's wonderful story. It should not be, as this horrid betrayal of the writer's artistic achievement shows. The heavy tear that swarms down Robbie's cheek on his discovery puts a dampener on the rest of the movie.

The real outstander for me was Benedict Camberbatch (who plays the dastardly Paul Marshall, the chocolate manufacturer), who appeared most recently in the wonderful Amazing Grace (where he memorably played William Pitt the Younger). His lascivious restraint is riveting; you can almost feel him undress the fey (but slightly vulgar) Lola Quincey (Juno Temple).

Romola Garai (who was also good in Amazing Grace and splendid in Angel) plays (very well) Briony at 18 years. She is in a hospital. But the scene where she comforts the dying Frenchman is nowhere near as good here, as it was in the book. There, you feel tremendous fear and revulsion as the man's bandage is wound off his shattered skull. Here, it looks like a side-show curiosity.

The contents of Robbie's lustful letter, too, are handled here differently. They are far more visible. This caused guffaws in the theatre (Bondi Junction Greater Union).

This theatre is in the splendid Westfield complex, newly rebuilt. As a boy, I went often to shop and socialise at the Junction. This new structure, however, reminds me more than anything of the opulent shopping centres found in swish Tokyo suburbs. I think there is nothing like it anywhere else in Australia.

Tickets can be purchased at the sort of video terminals found near airport check-in counters. But if you use a machine to buy tickets, they cost more; ours were $16 each.

Joe Wright also worked with Keira Knightley (who plays Cecilia Tallis, Briony's elder sister) on the very good Pride and Prjudice, In fact, she is more suited to this role, in a film set in Britain in 1935. As a slender beauty of the Regency period (1811 - 1820), she seems a bit glabrous.

Atonement can be considered a revenge fantasy. But it's not the revenge of Cecilia and Robbie that's important. These two hot bods reminded me of nothing else more than Van and Ada in Nabokov's 1969 blockbuster (actually his highest achievement, the kind of novel only a successful writer at the very top of his game can bring off), Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

In that book, the underdog sister (Lucette) commits suicide by jumping off a cruise ship's deck into the ocean because Van ignores her, and spurns her love. Here, it is the underdog sister who prevails (Vanessa Redgrave plays the older Briony, shown being interviewed for a TV show following the publication of her 22nd novel).

Art triumphs over physical passion. McEwan celebrates Nabokov's vision 32 years after the fact. It is fitting that Juno Temple has red hair. Lucette had it too.

Review: Mao's Last Dancer, Li Cunxin (2003)

Raised amid crushing poverty, Cunxin was, one day, tapped on the shoulder (as it were) when Teacher Song recommended him to a delegation of selectors seeking conscripts for a new dance school sponsored by the wife of Mao Zedong. It was 1973 and the Party was supreme, respected despite the aweful dearth of everything.

Cunxin travelled to Beijing to start training, which was tremendously painful. Diligent and conservative, he was recruited into the Party's youth league and, finally, chosen to participate in a troupe due to visit the United States.

Once there, he was struck by the freedoms available to those he met as well as the opulent lifestyle, which he did not believe was unexceptional. His yearning for fuller artistic expression is married to an aspiration to 'get out of the well'. This idiom is drawn from a story we read early in the book and that recurs over and over again.

In the story, a frog is trying to jump out of the well he is in, but cannot because the sides are too sheer and high.

Cunxin will marry an American, get divorced, defect, be ostracized by his country of birth, travel and dance, remarry (this time to an Australian; he lives in Melbourne), and be welcomed back to China.

It is an emotional story but the style is plain. It is so plain, in fact, that it appears artless. In places it is not very lively, but the tremendous release, when he finally gets what he wants, is invigorating.

One other theme is the link between creativity and freedom. The ease of access to the vice-president (George Bush snr) is effectively compared to the difficulty he had getting to talk to a local government functionary when his return to the United States for a second stint with the Houston Ballet, is threatened. We can feel Cunxin shaking with rage one moment, and shivering with gratitude the next.

Heartfelt and moving.

Delta Goodrem is 22 years old and this is her third album, and the first I've bought. The purchase was prompted by a friend's suggestion that I listen to Celine Dion. Goodrem is known to be similar. So in Armidale on my way up to Queensland, I bought both this and one of Dion's. Both are serious and talented singers who rely heavily on good diction (you can actually hear the lyrics) and rhyme (a sophisticated elegancy). But there the similarity ends.

Armidale is situated about half way between Sydney and the Sunshine Coast (my destination). I listened to Goodrem all the way up and all the way back. Non stop. I didn't get tired of it and I didn't start second-guessing the next track. I tried, in my head, to point out the positive songs (+) and the negative (-) ones, but the exercise was too much and I gave up. I would be able to do this in front of my screen, and that's a project for later.

In The Monthly there's an article on the album by "rock critic" Robert Foster, who helpfully points out that many different writers produced tunes and lyrics. He also says that the album "veers from the alarmingly banal to the inspired", which in my opinion is quite untrue. Sure, there are genres being exploited here but - who cares?

Goodrem's voice is superb in any register. She veers between soft, plaintive, erotic, sad, purposeful and kind. In any of these modes, she shines.

Each tune holds myriad complexities both in terms of words and music. None are false or tired. This may be due to the fact that each had a different composer (Goodrem herself pens several) and, as Foster points out, each competes to be the 'signature' tune that will sell as a single.

The single that hooked me is the extraordinary In This Life which has been featured on radio station Heart 103.2. But I think the new single, Believe Again, which opens the album, is superior.

Track 12 is a fascinating tune that uses an oriental flute and a plangent melody to suggest Goodrem is targeting the Japanese or Chinese market (or both).

Just stunning, the album (if listened to for an extended period of time) induces an extraordinary sense of well-being. The sonic effect seems to centre just in the middle of the forehead, behind the eyes.

My concentration during a seven-hour drive was always perfect and included a difficult final 120 kilometers on the Pacific Highway, where the speed limit goes up to 110km/hr. Even during this final phase, before the drudgery of Sydney suburban traffic, I felt totally aware and awake. My only stops were a toilet break and a sandwich. Apart from these brief pauses, the drive was continuous over the period (I left the hotel at 5.30am and arrived home at about 12.30pm).

Of course, driving the Aurion is not the same as driving the Echo, which has a capacity almost three times smaller. The new car behaved impeccably at all points, including the gruelling, three-lane final stint from Newcastle to Hornsby. Even up-hill at 105km/hr, you just squeeze the pedal and watch the tachometer lift by 5000 revs (from 2000 revs/min to 2500 revs/min), and you are already past the car you wish to overtake. The feeling is splendid.

Bee Perusco and Flower stood out tonight at the Tap Gallery Xmas party (6pm) reading (8pm) which ended on the pavement on the hoary slopes of Darlinghurst about half an hour ago.

And in addition SHE called close to 9pm to ask a question I'd already answered in an SMS some hours earlier.

Robert, whose satire is quite striking, is acquainted with physics and tells me that, as heat rises, the magnetic attraction between objects falls. If heat falls, magnetism rises likewise.

There was also something about the relationship between magnetism and electricity, but I'll need to resume the conversation on the next available occasion. They tell me there will be a reading in early February.

Why the break for the festive season? Who knows. It's a mystery.

Tap Gallery shows visual artists, too. I bought a tiny painting by Lilly Oen (half Chinese, half Dutch but born in Indonesia). It is a present and shows stylised flowers, ticked out in white. The size is about two inches square and it cost $125.

Tomorrow is the final work day of the year and I guess I'll have to contact mum to ask if she can book a room. I really think I'll go to Queensland via the New England Highway this time -- I've never seen Armidale.

They say it is quite nice.

'Sonnets, in Plain English' are now sent to Wet Ink for consideration. It's the same title I used to submit four different sonnets to the Sydney Uni Anthology editors last week.

A week! What unnumbered events have taken place in that seemingly short span of time!

Submitted on 9 December were 'The Castaway (14 November)', 'For those Who Wrote the Book: QT & WH (17 November)', 'Reading Ugresic (18 November)', and 'The Parkville Motel (9 December)'. All of them are what I call 'concept' sonnets. The last of these is extremely erotically-charged, in the wake of an event I attended at the Mitchell Library (but unfortunately didn't post on), 'Writing Sex'.

The event, which featured a panel of eminences, included Kate Holden. This author ties in with the poem furthermore as she was mentioned by a girl from whom I bought The Sex Mook (reviewed here) while in Melbourne for a conference.

It was during the conference, in the hotel room, that I had the experiences detailed in the poem. If it gets published you can read it then. If not, then when?

Maybe some day.

And submitted today are three more 'Sonnets, in Plain English': 'How many years have passed in your absence? (13 December)', 'Cracked polish on your fingernails gives me (16 December)', and 'In the lag twixt sighs wretched aforetime (16/17 December)'.

The dates of these, which are most definitely 'love' sonnets, are the only thing that differentiates one item from its neighbour.

For the Sydney Uni book, submission guidelines specify 12-point Courier (double-spaced). You must also include your name and the title of the work on each page. For Wet Ink you must use 12-point Times New Roman (double-spaced). But you must not include a name or title on pages containing the poems.

I always use 10-point Verdana to type a poem. It is certain that someone, somewhere, has written an elegant little piece on the joys of word processing. There may even be a poem about it for all I know. In my case, a WP is essential. Especially for a sonnet, where the ten-syllable line and the strict rhyme scheme demand the ability to rapidly alter words.

The process of writing a sonnet may involve a day. For example, the sonnet titled with 16/17 December was completed in a first draft on one day but, on the next, I radically altered it. In fact, I removed the entire first quatrain and added a new, third, quatrain.

It may also happen that the terminal word changes. This is not as common as a change to a word within a line, since establishing the terminus of a line allows you to make the one after the following line (a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g is the rhyme scheme). In a sense the fact of having written a quatrain reduces the alternatives significantly.

But I do think that rhyme possesses a value not otherwise present in poetry. Rap, for example, describes a state of mind characterised by aspiration. It exploits the elegancy commonly attributed to rhyme, in order to presuppose its author a member of an elite.

Ad-hoc rhyming is disturbingly common in otherwise free-verse poetry. Occasionally a poet known for his or her free style (which means every poet currently producing with the exception of me) will insert an ad-hoc rhyme, in his or her striving for the elegance rhyme bestows. Here's the few verses in a poem ('Diana' in 1994's The Monkey's Mask) by Dorothy Porter:

The door reads
Dr Diana Maitland

I knock twice

she's thirtysomething
maybe forty

her hair honey-blonde
streaks

falls in her eyes
she pushes it back

with a fidgety
nail-bitten hand

she's got eyes
that flirt or fight

she's gritty
she's bright

oh christ help me
she's a bit of alright!

The rhymed elements are in bold text. Note that this is a 'love' poem: where the hard-bitten, dyke private investigator meets the elite doctor and falls in love. They soon ("my hands and heart/aching/for blossom/for wild wild risk" in 'Spring', and "this time/will we just talk?" in 'Driving to her place') get around to turning it on ("her perfume/her eyes/he hot tip/of her tongue" in 'First move').

Other than that, there are no rhymes (I'm at page 72 at the mo). Which proves that, for Porter, rhyme means something different, something extra. This is, after all, the point in the story (there are two major plotlines: the love story and the search for a girl, then the killer of the girl, aged nineteen) where Lizzie first meets Diana.

Germaine Greer on Austen was too tempting, so when the notice appeared on the Sarsaparilla blog, I put my details into their system immediately. Professor Greer's lecture, 'Jane Austen and the Getting of Wisdom', drew me not only to Melbourne (by car) but down Swanston Street among the crowds of home-bound workers, to the RMIT Capitol Theatre.

It's an original structure, designed by Walter Burley Griffin. An ideal setting for an original mind. I did not expect her to focus on Mansfield Park, which has always been my favourite Austen novel. But her ideas were not so very divergent from mine, especially when she compared Fanny to Mary Wollstonecroft, pointing to the scene where Fanny and Edmund are outside the drawing room looking up at the stars.

Percy Shelley was a "totally liberated personality" and Greer even agreed with me (after I took the mic to ask a question) that the study of 18th-century English poetry is a sadly neglected arena for the docentary profession. "I agree completely," she said when I suggested that such writers as Richardson, Cowper and Crabbe could profitably be studied in schools. Cowper, I said as I stood amid the rows of (mostly) secondary-school teachers listening rapt, with me, to the eminent academic, was the only 18th-century English poet Nabokov praised when preparing the notes for his 'authentic' translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

The next two days were wonderful and I met some very interesting people. I listened to a number of other smart women (few men participate in Austen scholarship, it seems, though her first boosters, in the 1920s, were mainly men). Standouts for me were Jocelyn Harris, Sarah Ailwood, Mary Spongberg and Penny Gay.

Most interesting was Harish Trivedi, a professor at the University of New Delhi. A man of uncommon parts and an extraordinary grasp of the source material, Harish infuriated me to such an extent that I had to leave the lecture hall, my pulse racing at over 120 beats per minute. The lies, half-truths and baseless accusations he levelled at Western societies was not in agreement with the astute mind I had already encountered outside another lecture theatre.

We became sort of friends, however, as I drove Harish to the terminal dinner and back to his lodgings at Ormond College, Melbourne University. My final recommendation to him was to read Other Colours, the recent collection of non-fiction by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk manages to do what most subaltern scholars and writers do not: explain the significance of Western culture to an Easterner. My source at La Trobe (which sponsored the event) tells me Harish is reading the book.

The conference's tagline ('"I dearly love a laugh": Jane Austen and comedy') was not always the point of reference for speakers. More often than not these women tried to focus on the way that Austen surpassed any novelist prior to her era (and most since).

What I'd like to see, if I had my druthers, is a good, long peek at Samuel Johnson's prose. In my book, the good doctor was a major influence on the young Jane. In fact, by my reckoning, few before him and few since have equalled the sinuous, lithe and elegant movement of his short prose pieces.

Michael Specter started working for The Washington Post in 1985 and became a staff writer with The New Yorker (cover is of the 3 December 2007 issue) in 1998. In between he worked in Europe for The New York Times.

'Darwin's Surprise' in this issue is about endogenous retroviruses which, Specter tells us, "infect the DNA of a species [and] become part of that species". Unlike regular viruses, retroviruses reverse the 'flow' of genetic code from DNA to RNA:

A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell's DNA.

In this way, 'endogenous' retroviruses "alter our genetic structure" and it is a scientific fact that disabled retroviruses "make up eight per cent of the human genome".

Specter shows that the success of a species in one generation may cause it to be susceptible to a new retrovirus in a later age. In fact, the propeller-heads have shown this to be true. Our current problem with HIV is, they say, the result of our success in combatting another virus, called PtERV, four million years ago. Gorillas and chimps, who died in large numbers at that time due to this virus, are now immune to HIV.

But he goes further, noting, with gravitas conveyed by a researcher at the Institut Gustave Roussy, near Paris, Thierry Heidmann, that "without endogenous retroviruses mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature";

That led to live birth, one of the hallmarks of our evolutionary success over birds, reptiles, and fish. Eggs cannot eliminate waste or draw the maternal nutrients required to develop the large brains that have made ammals so versatile.

Heidmann says that retroviruses, being "two things at once: genes and viruses", "helped make us who we are today just as surely as other genes did." It is a fascinating story.

Also in this issue is a piece, also long (in traditional New Yorker style), by Geraldine Brooks. It chronicles the entwined destinies of two families of Serbs, one Muslim and one Jewish.

It is a story of redemption and really is worth reading, although the odd-sounding names make it hard to follow at times. In it, a kindness given by a man in one generation, is returned in the next by a woman, and finally rewarded by the entire state of Isreal in the next. It ends in the mid-nineties when the war in that part of Europe was sizzling across our TV screens.

It is a war, as this story shows, for which the statute of limitations, in terms of the stories it may produce, is nowhere near ended. For this reason, we should study such authors as Dubravka Ugresic, whose experiences in Croatia during and after the period of turmoil, make good reading.

Doris Lessing on the Internet: it has "created a world where people know nothing", writes Asher Moses in The Sydney Morning Herald. But Moses leaps to the defence of the Net:

• "Lessing ... barely acknowledges the internet's positive side"
  
• "She said little about the opportunity for internet users to freely browse reams of information they may otherwise not have the time or know-how to seek out"
  
• "She also ignored the fact that blogging has given a voice to millions who would otherwise be writing little or nothing at all"

Lessing says the Net has "seduced a whole generation into its inanities" and in a way she's right, but the real issue is not what we see on the Net. It is, rather, that the Net allows us to see what was previously obscure: most people are happily ignorant.

Moses also quotes Andrew Keen, a Net pundit whose ideas have appeared before in the newspaper. A book, The Cult of the Amateur, that purports to lament the poverty of most that is available online, actually points to a solution. Rather than fewer dilettantes, we need more.

In fact, a reason for the poverty of most blog posts and Web sites is not that they are produced by amateurs. The issue may be that those who actually possess the most knowledge are put off by the tribalism and savagery of much commentary. Especially in blog comments, these two aspects of online behaviour are to be regretted.

Putting forward an idea that diverges from the orthodox position of any blog (every blog has its own ideological banner, be it liberal, conservative, religious right, or anarchist), is sure to attract flames. And because people say online what they would hesitate to say face-to-face, the burden is on the dissenter to either expect flames or to go elsewhere.

Which may simply mean they refrain from commenting on blogs, which is a result that cannot be good for the quality of online content.

There is no evidence that, for example, book sales are suffering due to the advent of the Internet. The reverse is likely true.

But the fact remains that a strong online brand is essential if you want to attract numerous visitors to your site. This is why, despite early fears that the Net would decimate their readership, newspapers such as the one Moses writes for, are experiencing a significant rise in the number of hits per month.

In short, the communal experience most surfers treasure may end up being the downfall of many sites, as their readers realise that, in the end, the quality of the content is what matters. The challenge for established brands is to ensure that their content meets the expectations of their target demographic.

I expect fragmentation to continue. This will mean that blogs will become more specialised. This has certainly happened in the magazine world. Once upon a time, magazines were eclectic. They were also, at the same time, largely the province of a small elite. This is now no longer the case.

Whether there is room for generalist blogs is a matter of speculation. Some are already there, such as 3 Quarks Daily. This blog aggregates items from numerous sources, mainly online newspapers and magazines.

In the realm of lit blogs, a few maintain the frequency of posting required to sustain themselves. Most people have half-a-dozen or so favourite sites they visit daily.

Review: Hunting and Gathering, dir. Claude Berri

I fully prefer the French title (Ensemble C'est Tout) because it sums up the film more precisely. And, when it comes to French comedy, la precision c'est tout! Especially with the uber-gamine Audrey Tatou (pic), playing Camille, a girl who, the blurb tells us, "is doing her best to disappear".

The echoes of ancien regime France are apparent but not over-done. This is not Jane Austen, nor is it Dickens but, rather, the kind of comedy we are accustomed to from the French. It is also wonderfully charming, tender, funny (chuckle-friendly), and sexy. On this last point, however, I would like to register my protest over the type of kiss we're used to American films delivering. I'm tired of the romance being destroyed by these twisting, energetic, full-on smooches. I want something more real (this is not the way people kiss, conard!).

A resume of the plot is out of the question, although having something like this online might be of use. I just don't have the patience. But I want to testify here that I am completely in love with Phillibert (the aristocrat) because he is generous, kind, unprepossessing, chivalrous, intelligent, charming, and quite unimaginably perfect.

If only the ancien regime had behaved like him, there would never have been a revolution (conard!).

However, I will say that the treatment of Paulette is ravishingly beautiful. If this is the way the French think the world should be, then I want to live there, at least for a while (just to see if the image is lived up to by the reality; I suspect it is not). Paulette has a stroke and the blokey Franck, her grandson, takes Mondays off to look after her.

Franck lives in Phillibert's apartment and Phillibert rescues Camille from certain pneumonia when he carries her down the stairs from her freezing garret into his spacious apartment. Camille alters the boys' reality, not only because she is an artist, but because she is practical and honest.

They bring Paulette to the apartment to live while she recuperates, and Camille stays at home from her cleaning job to look after her. When she is better, they return her to her house and garden, her cats and dog, and her chickens.

Camille also falls for Franck and requests that he make love to her. But she is not prepared for a commitment. It is Franck who wants to be her boyfriend, not the other way round.

Being a comedy, everything turns out well in the end, but it is the journey and its delights that will ensure this film stays with its viewers for some time to come.

Review: Hitman, Xavier Gens (2007)

Starring Timothy Olyphant as a suitably robotic 'killing unit' (complete with barcode tattoo on the back of his head) and with model-cum-actor Olga Kurilenko who appears always dressed in little more than the idea of a dress, and with a screenplay by Skip Woods based on a video game, this is a real eye-opener.

The genre's primary point of reference is The Bourne Identity but the idea of a secretive organisation and a hitman trained to do one thing is as old as the James Bond franchise. The following blurb from the Web site does not appear in the film:

"Bred from the world's deadliest criminals, raised by an exiled brotherhood of the church. His purpose: to rid the world of the evil that infects it. Most believe his very existence is a sin, but others know he is a necessary evil."

We get a representative line-up of 'typical' Russian characters direct from the filmmaker's tour guide. From the fat police officer intent on obstructing Interpol to the glum secret-service agent, from the plausible sociopath who is the elected president to his brother, an arms dealer who surrounds himself with nubile women and opulence.

Interpol is represented by Dougray Scott and his sidekick Michael Offei. But their involvement in the hitman's rampage is not clear. In fact, the plot is as thin and skimpy as one of Olga's head-turning garments.

This criticism misses the point, however. The film is merely a sequence of highly-choreographed scenes where the following elements are of most importance:

• Virile brandishing of automatic handguns
• High-tech gadgets designed to kill
• Ferocious dominance of the woman in all cases by the active male
• Gritty street scenes in a decayed city (St Petersburg)
• Opulence of past eras compared to decadence and greed of the present
• Use of fists, feet, swords and guns to eliminate adversaries

The deployment of these elements is handled capably, however. All credit to the filmmakers. There are many original camera angles and the use of dark tones to create a Romantic gloom is satisfying, especially when it serves to underscore the protagonist's solitary nature. In fact, Number 47 is something of a Frankenstein's monster.

In contrast, Kurilenko is quite happy to appear without a top and it is true that she has nice breasts. Her physical availability and lissome grace are in stark contrast to her ready use of four-letter words as well as Olyphant's mechanistic personality. He seems totally uninterested in her as a sexual entity. It is clear that we see here elements imported from the massive, and growing, online porn industry.

One last criticism, though. The soundtrack on the Web site cannot be turned off. A control is located at the bottom of the screen, but when you click it to turn it off, it merely restarts the music from scratch.

Review: Journeys: Modern Australian Short Stories, Barry Oakley ed., 2007

I included notice of David Malouf's piece in the previous post, but it is not the best here. The title is furthermore confusing as at least two items in the book are non-fiction. One is Robert Adamson's 'On the trail of Ptilorus magnificus', which chronicles early transgressions in Neutral Bay and nearby suburbs, where the poet grew up.

The other is Helen Garner's 'At the Morgue', which gives a glimpse into the world of the mortuary, in this case the one in Melbourne, "half a mile from the leafiest stretch of St Kilda Road, in there behind the National Gallery and the Ballet School and the Arts centre with its silly spire and its theatres and orchestras and choirs".

Garner is always good value and in this case the rule is true. Unexpectedly good is Margo Lanagan's 'Rite of Spring', where a boy (or girl, it's not clear) is given a task that includes reciting names while sitting atop a windswept peak and wrapped in a heavy coat. In the story the dominant figure is the mother, who seems to scold frequently but whose good offices are eagerly sought by the child.

Lanagan seems to be a routinely-published author and after having read this little gem, I shall certainly seek out other work.

In the case of Steve J. Spears' 'What Do I 'Do' with Cancer' it is not clear whether we are in the realm of fiction or non-fiction. Likewise with Ken Haley's excellent 'September 11, 2001'.

In this piece, a wheelchair-bound traveller in the region bounded by the Black Sea and the Aral, meets various characters and forms impressions of very foreign cultures. Being there, at that particular point in time, causes a frisson of remembrance in the reader, but its effect is neither long-lasting nor deep. For Day 157 (4 October): Vanadzor to Dilijan, we get this:

The Saruhanyans may live a long way from the big smoke but they are as clued up as anyone in New York or Sydney. The TV is tuned into Moscow these nights and they glance at it sidelong from the dinner table, as if Frankenstein's monster had taken up residence in the living room. Once their thoughts are translated, I know they await the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan any day now. They are quiet Christians, and the invasion of their land by Muslim-Arabs and later Persians - is unforgettable in folk memory.

Review: The Sex Mook: What Is Our Sex?, edited by Julian Fleetwood (2007), Vignette Press, East Melbourne

Fleetwood's introduction contends that "this book is rough" and that it was done to produce "honesty and openness" but the most satisfying element is that this is a manifesto. It is a very polite one, but a manifesto nevertheless. It's been a while since I read such a thing.

Good are 'Do You Love Me?' by Louise Ellis Carter, which describes the satisfactions of role-play, 'Our Sex Is Not For Sale' by Emily Maguire, a run-down of the highly manufactured character of most sex in the media today, and 'Nympho' by Nithya Sambasivam, a poem about finding your legs in a Western society when you're told to want something else.

The good thing about the collection qua collection is the shortness of the pieces. Most do not go over three pages, including Leticia Supple's 'Private Time', which describes what a young woman gets up to when she locks her bedroom door. Not all of the collection is this good, and much is forgettable. But it's a start.

It's also welcome from the point of view of equity. There are pieces that are more forthrightly about the politics of sex, such as Peter van der Merwe's 'On Not Being Gay', and 'Herpes Male Seeks Herpes Female...' by Anna Krien.

I kept waiting for someone to allude to the father of sex writing (Henry Miller) but he seems to belong to a white, male orthodoxy that is no longer in style. A recent movie by some French people of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley reminds us that some things still need to be said.

One of which is that conflict can be liberating. In a piece in today's The Sydney Morning Herald, Cate Blanchett reminds us that "You don't want to be surrounded by yeah-sayers" and she's backed up by David Malouf.

His story in a nice collection I'm currently reading (Journeys: Modern Australian Short Stories, Five Mile Press, 2007) 'Elsewhere', includes a classic line about the inner-city elites among whom Andy Mayo (from Lismore) finds himself when his sister-in-law dies (probably from AIDS, though it's never specified).

After the funeral, Andy and Harry (Debbie's father) drive to a house somewhere in the suburbs for the wake. There are a lot of people who totally ignore Andy and the bereft father. Andy feels "He was in the middle of it" but:

No one paid any attention to him, though they weren't hostile. They just went on arguing.

Politics. Though it wasn't really an argument either, since they all agreed.

This is superb, although without doubt the best items in the book belong to Robert Adamson (actually a section from a memoir, Inside Out: An Autobiography) and the inimitable Cate Kennedy, whose 'Dark Roots' (about a woman of 39 with a lover aged 26) starts on page 79.

Also of note is a story by the erstwhile High Court judge Ian Callinan, 'The Romance of Steam', which chronicles a train journey from Sydney to Brisbane and hunger among the three hundred women in uniform on board, during WWII.

I picked up this collection in Wagga Wagga, a town of some 60 thousand souls where it was still 31 degrees Celcius at 4pm and 29 degrees at 5pm. The sex book was bought at Federation Square, central Melbourne. The two young women behind the table brought my attention to the nicely gift-wrapped books it held. I just picked up a naked copy from the pile and paid.

I had immediately beforehand bought two Russian modernist novels, The Silver Dove by Andre Bely and The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov. This table was run by Three Bears Books and I plan to contact them with the email address provided to get some Russian Symbolist poetry. The kind Nabokov always talks about.