Isobel Crombie's Body Culture (2004) takes its cue from the career of Australia's most famous modernist photographer, Max Dupain. The subtitle indicates the area of interest: 1919 to 1939.

In this twenty-year period ideas about race that had existed in Western culture since the Darwinian revolution, manifested themselves with increasing frequency.

Their ultimate expression would appear in Germany under the influence of democracy in the ideology of Germany's National Socialist Party headed by Adolph Hitler. It may be surprising for many Australians to recognise similarities in 1930s imagery published in, say, Berlin and Melbourne, but it's a fact.

Crombie, who now works as a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, developed the book from a doctoral thesis. Now is a good moment in Australia's history - a $20,000 compensation package is being debated this week in the Senate to redress wrongs perpetrated by dead generations on aborigines - to revisit her work.


The photos here are of my grandmother, Beatrice (nee Kewish) Dean, who is dead these past decades. In fact her daughter, my mother, is now in her late seventies. According to mum, the leftmost photo is of Bea in her late forties at a beach near Meblourne. The centre photo shows Bea with Dora, a friend, and Reba, Bea's sister, in the early twenties.

The rightmost photo shows Bea in the 1920s performing eurhythmics after moving from Leongatha in country Victoria, to Melbourne. Classes took place at the local Presbyterian church. She is about 21 years old.

In her book, Crombie provides plenty of guidance to a reading of any of these photos. The 'vitalist' tendency in Australian culture after WWI found expression in such activities as eurhythmics and beach culture. The epitome of this latter in the photographic record is photos of surf lifesaving, a movement born in Australia in the first decade of last century.

Tied to ideas about physical culture and its importance for personal wellbeing and happiness was the bizarre notion that doing things like weight lifting and farming would protect the health of the 'race'. In Crombie's book, the 'Australian race' is frequently (and quaintly) referred to.

Another bizarre (and, we now know, completely false) idea was the notion that miscegenation (marriage between ethnic groups) led to the weakening of the 'race'. Now we know that miscegenation strengthens the gene pool because it combines unlike elements: less opportunity for genetic diseases.

Dupain's father George was deeply involved in both body culture (he operated one of the country's first gyms in the Manning Building, near Central Station) and eugenics. In fact, most of the elite at that time believed in eugenics, including many scientists and doctors.

Norman Lindsay's ideas about physical culture would dovetail, here, for any reader wanting to look into it. Lionel, Norman's son, was a straight-out Nazi. Both father and son, and others, like Dupain pere, who took an interest in eugenics, looked to Nietsche for inspiration.

But the story is not so simple. Crombie also points to writers such as John Cowper Powys and D. H. Lawrence. These men had strong ideas about the spiritual side of life in the industrial age. Their ideas also work on such later writers as Henry Miller, who tried to reconcile ideas about the productive capacity of the West and its (apparent) spiritual decline.

Narratives of decline are age-old, however. Crombie does not point to earlier eras when changes in society due to increasing wages caused disturbances, especially among the elite, who had most to lose from changes in social structures and patterns of cultural production. The 18th century is replete with members 'of the better sort' moaning about a weakening social fabric.

Somehow we have, in the first half of last century, a concern with the baleful effects of city living. Eugenics, eurhythmics, vitalism and other such artefacts are due, I believe, to fear of the unknown. Especially, the loss of credibility of the monotheistic god of the Christians.

A similar thing is happening, now, in the Islamic world. The cult of the martyr seems, to me, to hold a similar appeal for Muslims as, during the period Crombie studies, the lifesaver held for Australians.

A final comment is due, I think, because of our lamentation at the so-called 'stolen generations'. The eugenic ideas of our forbears (who held that aborigines were closer to the same 'root' in humanity's developmental tree as Europeans; ie Europeans were 'more developed') remain in precisely the sector most vocal in support of Prime Minister Rudd: the Left intelligentsia.

How many non-Anglo-Celt names are there in politics, the arts, and journalism? It is in these areas (95 per cent Anglo, by any measure) that work still needs to be done. The Left's cries at Howard's declaration speech ring hollow, for me, because these people refuse - through culture bias and bullying in the form of silent agreements - equal opportunity for the 30 per cent of Australia's population that was not born here.

Photomontage requires a lot of free time if the files you use are large. Because a mistake can be costly, you need to be able to transform a finished draft at leisure. A bad decision can result in lost data, which may have taken hours, days or even months to collect and assemble.

It is necessary to wait for each processing delay to complete before moving away from the computer monitor. A single lapse in concentration - unless you write down what you've just done and what remains to do - can result in disaster.


The Burwood Road combo here is made of a street photo taken in Burwood (4 November 2007), and of traffic along New Canterbury Road (15 July 2007). There is also one of traffic signals on Victoria Road, Top Ryde (2 September 2007).

Other images include television news stories and one scan from a printed news story:

• Arrest of Kaihana Hussain on the Gold Coast, The Australian photo published 1 November 2006
• Today Tonight (Channel Seven) story on, and interview with, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (visiting for Sydney Writers' Festival), 30 May 2007
• Channel Seven News story on underwear-maker Bonds' spring fashions, 2 August 2007

Painting clips:

• The Torture of Prometheus (1819), Jean-Louis-Cesar Lair
• Three studies from the Temeraire (1998-99), Cy Twombly
• [sic] (1988), Juan Davila

There are also three Internet download photos:

• Samantha Harris, aboriginal model
• 'Anna' porn model (photo taken 5 August 2002)
• AFP photo of Carnival, Rio de Janeiro (in The Sunday Age, 22 May 2005)

The second montage constitutes photos taken at Westfield Burwood's carpark on 4 November 2007.


This picture is relatively straight-forward and will always seem, for me, slightly contrived. I attempted to create movement using arrows painted on the carpark floor and lines made from other vehicle guidance elements applied to the concrete pavement immediately after the building's construction.

For me, the contrast between the pristine shop access lobby and the various spilled drinks, chewing-gum blotches and assorted rubbish discarded by consumers rushing to leave the building after completing their purchases, is signal.


The last picture is made from snaps taken on the evening of 31 December 2007. The location, as is clear, is The Rocks. There is also one taken further south, down Sussex Street, on the edge of Sydney's CBD.

We spent hours mingling with fellow revellers - ourselves revelling in a rich confusion of faces in the crowd of 1.5 million.

There were 1500 police in attendance. The fireworks took a total of about twenty minutes to burn. The first bout started at 9pm and the second immediately before midnight.

In Canberra a month later, we saw Australia Day fireworks off Commonwealth Park, which sits beside Lake Burley Griffin with the National Library, the High Court and the National Gallery distinct on the far shore.

All photos by me were taken with a Canon PowerShot A530 and I assemble the files at the default resolution (with a height of 1944 pixels) that applies when a photo is loaded to the computer.

Each montage in the original Photoshop ('.psp') file format is about one metre square (303MB, 346MB and 228MB respectively). Files loaded here are JPEGs and are much, much smaller (121KB, 112KB and 58KB respectively).

Capote comatose taken from the Manhattan apartment he lived in is just part of the picture missing from the 2006 film, Capote, that chronicles but one of the mythical windows of time Gerald Clarke recounts (and interprets) in his engaging 1988 biography.


Just before the closing credits we read that Capote wrote no books following publication of In Cold Blood, his "non-fiction novel". The story is endlessly more complex than this brief and sentimental note implies, and Clarke's book is a good source for the curious.

One element contributing to the author's decline - the lengthy series of appeals and hearings in various courts culminating in the hangings - is not highlighted. And it should be. I think that part of the problem Capote had was that his creative act was severely interfered with by delays he didn't control.

In essence the book took over his life. Which makes his early prediction that it would change the way people wrote particularly poignant. Despite the knowledge that the book would change his life, he could not predict all the ways it would do so.

A quibble - the film is very nice, if overly enthusiastic about its subject - is that Capote did not invent literary journalism. John Hershey's Hiroshima (also written for The New Yorker, and published there) is just one in a viable English-language tradition that may be traced back to Daniel Defoe (Lay-Man's Sermon upon the Late Storm appeared in 1704).

A film can never more than approximate a book, even a work of non-fiction such as Clarke's biography. But here we have the opportunity to see how a writer can be perceived by his or her conationals.

Striking is the fact that Harper Lee and Capote grew up next door to each other in the same Alabama town. Lee, who is still alive, also never wrote another book. To Kill A Mockingbird, which deals with the inmates of an insane asylum, remains her only publication.

America's love-affair with Hoffman-Capote seems to have completed its honeymoon phase. The actor is onto other things and the writer is at peace with his personal deities. Yet at least we are encouraged to read the other books of a truly talented writer.

A personal note in favour of Capote is that he never relinquished his step-father's name despite earnest lobbying by his biological father. The Cuban may have been responsible for a point of future conspiracy for those desirous of rapprochement between the two countries.

Castro is out of the seat of power but Mr Capote will always find a seat at the table that is kept for American men and women of letters, with an offering of pride placed before each of their constructed images. In the film Capote shows Perry Smith a copy of Thoreau's Walden saying, in effect, that like Smith and like Capote himself, the nineteenth-century New Englander was always an outsider.

It is a pity that this vignette, with powerful links to an American dream of entitlement, cannot help many, especially the young (and especially those young men who routinely take revenge on an uncaring society by shooting dead random individuals placed in proximity to their moments of casual violence).

Capote's tears near the end of the film do not seem to fall fast enough to catch the attention of the American media.

Del Kathryn Barton's mother picture "beats Heath ledger picture" opines a mendacious sub at The Sydney Morning Herald.

And the journo at the gallery managed to corner a (clearly bored-stiff) Edmund Capon for the requisite sound-bite, during which the doyen of Asian art allowed it was likely that a decision in favour of the actor's portrait could have been seen as a stunt.

But did this sway the judges? I hope not.


Barton, an extraordinarily aticulate brusher, whose lively voice I caught while waiting for a friend to do some pressing business in Quay Street, is a decent choice.

The best, in my opinion, was by painter Hong Fu (one of eight with Chinese names among the finalists).

It is of Dr Joseph Brown, "who arrived in Melbourne as a 14-year-old Jewish refugee with his impoverished father and five siblings" (according to The Age, 11 May 2004), and who "ended up with doctorates from three universities and an art collection worth $60 million".


But Barton, one of whose drawings I enjoyed last year at another AGNSW exhibition, is something of a flavour-of-the-month. Her works sell for six figures. Despite the wealth, she sounded excited to have won the Archibald Prize.

Sebastian Smee, in The Australian (29 February 2008), wrote that Fu's painting "has real presence". I delightfully agree. "It uses an array of different descriptive modes to arrive at a portrait that looks traditional but is in fact beguilingly original."

Another stand-out for me is Ben Quilty's Self portrait after Madrid. It's a muscular take on a face otherwise remarkably regular, in a typical Anglo way, and it does not perish in memory.


What struck me in Fu's painting are the fresh 1970s modalities: a gaunt, umber cloud is thrown casually across the back of Dr Brown's head. It contains rich echoes of (for me) byegone days spent fumbling round the galleries in Paddington.

I also love the way Dr Brown's starched collar (remnant of East-European decorum) is mirrored by a polygonal hill (or pyramid) that crisply staples the sitter's rumpled garments to the paving of Fu's bright canvas. This last is a delicious compote of drab greens and burnt browns we recognise in memories of organic abstractions from a lost and benevolent age.

Barton's voice transcript follows.

------------------

This is a painting, ever since I became a mother a little over five years ago, that I've been trying to find time to make.

So entering this year's Archibal with a self-portrait as a mother was the perfect excuse to sort of give myself a deadline to make that painting.

-----------------

The reporter squeezes pathos into a track, segueing from the statement as to Barton's work being "not controversial" to noting that the Heath Ledger one was "painted shortly before he died". It's a clumsy movement from sunshine to the interior of a suburban pub on a Friday night: a locus of clammy cameraderie that I'm sure such as Ledger's family would prefer to overlook.

The implication is that celebrity can cast some of its shine onto visual arts that do not depend on short-term favouritism for an admiration future generations will be unlikely to transfer to cinema icons except with the salty chuckles that will thrive only within a naughties retro rave party.

Xia Tao hijacked a bus "for several hours" threatening to blow it up. He had a bomb strapped to his body. He freed nine of his original hostages but kept a NSW woman and an interpreter hostage before boarding a second bus.

As he approached a toll booth on the way to the airport, the police shot him dead.

Details of the incident are scanty. In today's Sydney Morning Herald, there is no official announcement as to a motive. A "diplomatic source in Beijing", according to the reporter, said that such random violence is commonplace in China.

Only Australian news outlets carried the story. More details emerged today after reporters talked with an Australian businessman who passed the bus and police in a taxi. Nick Hunt is general manager of Nufarm in China.

"The whole area between the toll gate and the bus was swarming with armed uniformed police and paramilitary types with dozen of vehicles," he said.

"The staff manning the toll gate were in a state of near panic and were just waving cars through.

"The actual hijacking was over by that stage and I saw no sign of the hijacker or hostages," the Shanghai-based Mr Hunt, said.

"Actually, the first thing that came to mind was they were making some type of movie, because every second person seemed to have a large video camera and microphone.

"They were doing interviews, filming marching troops in front of the bus and taking general footage of the scene.

"Quite surreal, actually. It wasn't until I got back to Shanghai and accessed foreign media that I found out what had transpired.

A friend who is Chinese says there is no story on the main Chinese-language websites.

Xi'an, a city in the centre of China, is described as in the "north-west" in extant stories. My friend says that anything north of the Yangtze River, for southerners, is northern China. Northerners tend to think of land located to the north of the Yellow River as 'northern China'.


The picture is of hostage Rhiannon Dunkley, of Corowa in NSW. Another picture, also in The Sydney Morning Herald, shows police "recounting the details". They are not "answering questions" is implied in this choice of words.

In the photo below, furthermore, there is nothing to indicate that it was taken in the Xi'an police offices. The sign at the back of the room says, simply, "press conference". "Chinese reporters are scared of these people," says my friend. "They have all the power."


According to the Herald, Xia "reportedly had a grievance with the Xian police (known as the Xian public service bureau or PSB)". In another story, we learn that Xia went to police headquarters "where the police chief exchanged himself for the hostages".

But Dunkley and "Eric" (the interpreter - more obscurity here) were kept by Xia for an unknown number of hours before Xia boarded the second bus. Dunkley was "on an educational tour with Australian travel agency China Bestours" when taken. She works at Corowa Travel Link.

The women were half-way through an "eight-day educational tour of Beijing, Shanghai and Xian". Jimmy Liu, from China Bestours in Sydney, says such tours are common.

Chinese authorities keen to downplay any security risks ahead of the August Olympic Games in Beijing have restricted reporting of the hostage drama and are believed to have seized footage and photographs of the siege in Xian's bustling Bell and Drum Tower square and at the airport.

Chinese officials and security officers also filmed the drama, but have refused to acknowledge or release any material.

None of the material Hunt saw being filmed has been released to the Australian media. On a quiet news day, the Herald gave it two columns at the bottom of the front page, with no photo. The photos here are from the Herald's website.

Coverage in China is scarce. Hua Shang Wang, a website associated with the Xi'an newspaper Hua Shang Bao, ran a story but it contains very little information. Hong Kong vehicle Da Gong Wang has more, but the Herald is more detailed.

The official website of the Xi'an newspaper has no story. Website www.chinareviewnews.com has almost exactly the same information as the Xi'an vehicles. Not indication of motivation is found.

Don't go looking on the BBC website for a story, either. They have headlined Sydney's mortgage stress, but this story - which is far more significant because it offers a window in the heavy wall of Chinese authoritarianism - gets no run.

Luckily, the Herald has thrown significant resources at the Xia Tao story. I've counted five reporters to date, including China-based (but Melbourne-raised Mary-Anne Toy.

The 2MBS book bazaar at Pymble served up a bunch of good things on Sunday. The trip, undertaken while in thrall to raging flu, led to me netting several choice items, including this. Henry M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (in one volume, 1879) can be bought for over a thousand dollars through AbeBooks.

My edition is slightly worse for the wear it survived over more than a century in the possession of at least one man, a student of Melbourne's Haileybury College. The headmaster awarded the book for proficiency in Latin and Greek (proving that the traditional disciplines endured as significant elements of secondary education well past the scientific revolution of the mid-1800s).


The book is richly illustrated and includes a map showing the trajectory of the explorers who travelled from the Atlantic coast up the Congo River and across to the Indian Ocean.

Another item is a first edition of Noel Coward's Play Parade (William Heinemann, London, 1934).

The contents page shows the plays included. Like the Stanley book, I intend to sell this. The cover is reasonably stained on spine and is hand-worn at top. The page edges are discoloured with age.

Despite these drawbacks, I think it will net a hundred. Other books in my hoard, which cost me $225, are more likely to remain on one of my many bookshelves. This, despite the fact that several are worth a good deal more than I would normally pay for the privilege of reading the author.

One such is William Styron's first novel, in a first edition, which was published in New York and Indianapolis by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, in 1951. Online listings show a value near US$2000 for a good exemplar. Which this volume most decidedly is, as the picture shows.


The dust jacket is slightly torn but it at least exists. The original owner, or someone who had the book in their collection subsequently, took care to add a plastic wrapper over the paper cover. As a result, the illustration is clear and clean. Which brings me to observe that an author's early books may be better-presented than those which are published in his or her maturity.

Thea Astley, who died in 2004, is a mature Australian author and is, moreover, one I've never read. This is surprising as she won four Miles Franklin awards, including one for The Acolyte (1972).


Another find in my library following Sunday's binge is her 1979 collection of short stories, Hunting the Wild Pineapple. I now have four Astleys in my library. If she's as good as the literati seem to think she is, there is plenty of enjoyment coming my way.


Another school prize book is this one by "the first Australian novelist to gain international recognition", Katherine Suzanna Pritchard, who is another unknown for me. The lovely cover is worth the insignificant purchase price all on its own. I'm sure the girl who received the book (Fiona Watson, 3rd in grade 4A) treasured it for this reason alone.


The final item's cover shows a painting of Barry Humphries by James Fardoulys and it's delightful. A more serious man is seen in Cecil Beaton's photo, which is on the back cover.


This little volume should help keep me away from the DVD counter, where recordings of The Chaser boys are sold. With Bazza in my hands, I have no need for the common man's Media Watch.

Speaking of which, the series started again tonight with Jonathan Holmes, the new host. Clearly Aunty has taken note of accusations of bias from the right-wing print media. Holmes give good face and is far less strident than Monica Attard, who he replaces in the new series.

I suspect the content is much the same, so any alterations are likely purely cosmetic. Possibly that's all the school bullies need to feel wanted. A less threatening opponent may be less likely to cause them to want to rip his head off and mount it on a stick in the public sphere.

Whatever that is.

LibraryThing's interface changes are gradual, like personal knowledge. But before you know it something amazing has occurred.

Or else, it's like waking up (as I did this morning) to find the sneezes and constant nasal evacuations of the previous evening have disappeared. LT regularly has downtime - usually to increase some part of its processing capacity - but the evidence (23 million books catalogued in around two-and-a-half years) shows people don't mind.

I look out the window today at the six-thirty skyline's remote pinpricks of light disappearing in the sub-cloudal grey and relish the vacuity of my sinuses. I am no longer sneezing every two minutes. I am ready for a new day.

LT's member profile page alone has several interesting developments. Some of these are layout changes, which may not be trivial. Changes in layout can potentially enrage a user not expecting them.

Here, the 'tag cloud' and 'author cloud' links have been shifted from the main block to the global navigation that sits just beneath the site nav tabs. And there's a new arrival here too.

The 'recommendations' link takes you to a page where you can use your keywords to generate a list of similar books (similarly tagged) belonging to other members. The accuracy, naturally, depends on the likness of your keywoards to others'.

For example, if I go to the Recommendations page, select 'history' (a keyword of mine) using the drop-down, and click 'non-fiction' next to the 'Similarly-tagged books' label, I get an interesting list of others' holdings:

1. The landmark Thucydides : a comprehensive guide to the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
387 copies. 7 reviews. Average rating 4.41. Why?
2. Fourteen Byzantine rulers : the Chronographia of Michael Psellus by Michael Psellus
104 copies. 3 reviews. Average rating 4.06. Why?
3. Byzantium : the decline and fall by John Julius Norwich
217 copies. Average rating 4.12. Why?
4. The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
392 copies. 3 reviews. Average rating 3.97. Why?
5. The Dutch Republic : its rise, greatness and fall, 1477-1806 by Jonathan Israel
97 copies. 1 reviews. Average rating 3.83. Why?

If I click on the word 'why?' next to a listing, LT gives me something like:

Because you own: The History, The History of the Peloponnesian War

I can also click on the link next to 'Special-sauce recommendations' and get:

1. History of Art - Ancient Art by Elie Faure
10 copies. Why?
2. History of Art - Medieval Art ( Trans. by Walter Pach ) by Elie Faure
12 copies. Why?
3. Love, death, and money in the Pays d'oc by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
21 copies. Why?
4. Capitalism in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century by Violet Barbour
9 copies. Average rating 4. Why?
5. The Barbarian West : The Early Middle Ages, A.D. 400-1000 by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill
76 copies. Average rating 3.5. Why?

Hey, this is a lot of fun! Elie Faure was a fave of mine as an undergrad.

My first question? Just how are the lists generated... I find odd, for instance, that there are so many books about ancient and pre-modern history instead of, say, books of twentieth-century history. I would have thought it more likely that LTers would own books about WWII than about the Peloponnesian War. I would have been incorrect.

We do get told why, of course.

Rather than using your own tags—and not everyone uses tags — "Similarly-tagged books" uses the most significant tags applied by the entire LibraryThing community.

As normally happens, a book's ranking is based on frequency: the book that has the most copies in LT matching your keyword, appears at the top. There are other new items, too.

If I then go back to my profile page and click on the 'stats' link in the global nav section, the regular page appears. But there's something new, here, too. A series of book lists below the bar graphs shows famous individuals who owned books of mine.

Alfred Deakin is here, as is Marie Antoinette. Thomas Jefferson sits just above Sylvia Plath. Being in such company adds a certain glamour, not only to my personal book selections, but to books themselves. They gild the lily (which was already a bright shade of pale).

The fleur-de-lis is a recent object of fascination for me. I'm daily tempted to purchase some object with this design as a dominant element, or a cast or carved exemplum.

Speaking in these terms makes me remember how easy it was, yesterday, to burn a CD using Vista. This is because Vista assumes (like the Mac OS before it) that if you copy a file and paste it to a volume loaded to the DVD R/W drive, it means you want to burn a CD.

For this reason today I salute Microsoft, whereas yesterday I damned the company.

The navigator, moreover, is very easy to use. It now has more axes of movement for navigation. Instead of going up and down a tree structure (as you used to do with XP), in Vista you can also shift horizontally between trees. So you can more readily copy a file from a deep location on your hard drive to a temporary drive such as a USB stick.

Speaking of convenience brings me back to the picture on this post. My LT 'work multiples' keep growing because my library has no storage method. If it were alphabetical, I'd see a shorter list. This calls for a complete makeover, but how to find the time!

The photo of Joan Didion was taken by Quintana Roo Dunne, the author's (deceased) daughter, and is unmistakably of Hawaii. Several elements of the narrative of the novel Democracy take place on the island.

In a similar way as we find in the preceding two Didion novels, characters in Democracy move through a privileged space together. It is within this space that we learn facts. But as usual in her work, it is almost impossible to track events. This is because she uses deft clips of conversation to tell most of the story. These are accompanied by recounts so dense we cannot see which stem leads to which flower.

The three novels of Didion's maturity are:

• Play It As It Lays (1970)
  
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
  
• Democracy (1984)

In my mind the second of these is the moment of greatest effect. Democracy, written 'about' a set of people Didion is well acquainted with, is more opaque, less defined. It is gossamer not velvet.

But this doesn't mean it's a failure. Indeed, it could be said that the accomplishment of an author might be his or her ability to demonstrate total control over the book's forward motion. By 'control' I mean whether it is manifest, despite the amount of information given to the reader, that the author knows what will happen in the future.

In Didion's novels, however, we are also always trying to see into the past. In other words, we are peering in two directions at once (or, possibly, at different moments we peer right or we peer left). The meaning of the future is discernible within the afterimages of past actions.

I think it is significant, for this reason, that Democracy was published in 1984. If we go to another cultural moment of the same period, we can find a similar anxiety. I think it is safe to assume that Didion mostly acts as a sentient being. In fact, she is probably more knowing than most, more aware of the ramifications of, what others see as, routine political events.

Didion is both a reporter and a novelist. Like Mailer, she is on top of the zeitgeist.

Jon Wozencroft, in his monograph The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (1988), says Brody "felt that there was no typeface at the time that suited the specific mood he sought for The Face. The gemoetric quality of the type was authoritarian, drawing a parallel between the social climate of the 1930s and the 1980s".

The Face, which closed in May 2004, was a leading pop culture vehicle, published out of London, of the eighties. Publisher EMAP, significantly, now sees healthy revenues from its weekly womens title Grazia. In last week's The (sydney) magazine (a monthly Fairfax vehicle), however, I start to see '80s elements, such as those pioneered by Brody, appearing in feature spreads.

In Democracy a few things definitely occur:

1. Two people, a man and a woman, die in suspicious circumstances
   
2. A woman (Inez) marries a wealthy man and has a long-term affair with a man whose occupation is 'shady'
   
3. The daughter of one of the lead women is a heroin user who travels to Vietnam during war
   
4. One of the men runs for president (of America, naturally)
   
5. A high-profile Hawaii businessman is also killed
   

Apart from these items, there is very little remaining in mind from reading. If the only achievement of the book, however, is to cement there (forever) the image of the daughter working in a Saigon cafe, then Didion has succeeded admirably.

Similarly, my only remaining memory of Play It As It Lays is of a woman, possibly on the brink of a nervous breakdown, driving at high speed on California freeways. A single image, well planted, may bring forth strong fruit.

I think that the daughter is the 'real' main character. The nature of other characters has meaning only in terms defined by our understanding of her.

Eva Orner's 2UE interview on Oscar triumph and how to make a prize-winning documentary reveals some basic truths not only about filmmaking but also about journalism. So much of the latter is poor in these days of ordinary violence.

A transcript of the interview follows.

---------

It's a very very harsh critique of the current administration's torture policies post-9/11.

And it's told - sort of metaphoically - through the story of a young Afghani taxi driver called Dilawar who was falsely picked up an tortured and ultimately killed at Baghram Prison in Afghanistan.

And we shot in Guantanamo and we shot in Afghanistan. You know, we do a lot of interviews around the country and throughout Europe. We use a lot of archival material which it's, you know, hard and complicated to get.

So it's a long process and our researchers had to do painstaking work. And, you know, people don't necessarily want to talk to you.

It's about being really brave and tenacious. Just being really dogged about trying to find information when you make these sort of films.

It's an important film and the point of the film is to make people angry, to make them enraged and to get dialogue happening about what's going on in this country.

And, you know, I think to some degree it's working. People are angry here.

------

I saw Orner walking on the red carpet in Hollywood on Monday night. And I saw her flushed and happy face as she stood to approach the stage, to receive her prize.

Note, furthermore, the graffito backdrop to the photo of Orner (at top). It puts me in mind of George Gittoes' film about Iraq.

Gittoes, too, is carrying a bright torch for liberal values and dialogue.

Stefan Klein looks remarkably like Martin Luther, the Renaissance spokesman for the oppressed who, drawing on the early mission statement of John Wycliff and the political implosion of Jan Huss and the utraquists, helped to rearrange the social fabric in Europe.

A science graduate who also studied philosophy Klein, profiled yesterday in the Review supplement to The Weekend Australian, is also a latter-day Coleridge.

Coleridge's own implosion -- into laudanum addiction -- was caused by his inability to escape from the dominant narrative of his era. While he was alive, most British subjects considered themselves Christians and the religion was woven tightly into the social fabric. Dissent was tolerated but atheism was not.

When Wordsworth and Coleridge argued, they both lost an important support. Reviewers' disdain for Lyrical Ballads and everything Coleridge produced in its wake, was a series of heavy blows to his frail psyche.

Contemporaries often noted Coleridge's ability to philosophise extempore. He was, said one, "inspired by heaven" (this could be wrong) and he "sang" rather than just talked. Continued repulse determined his fate, and he stopped writing poetry.

Klein would say that he stopped existing as a social being because of this. The silence imposed on him was the silence the ignorant themselves experienced when faced with the realities of life. It was the silence the intolerant demand of those who do not concur with their every utterance. It was the silence of totalitarianism.

The dominant narrative of the day was the sermon, which proscribes and threatens. Coleridge could not but subscribe to it and the anger of the reviewers was, to him, as a sign from god: stop.

Today, when the dominant narrative is built around the structure of the novel, the possibility for empathy is greater. In fact, often the mere fact of weakness will attract support, regardless of how correct or false the position the individual - the one who is being oppressed - is.

We may, in other words, have gone too far the other way. Perhaps the Nabokovian Apollonian stick is required. I suspect it is, though the struggle for dominance between, say, Nabokov and his Dionysian predecessor (Dostoyevski) is ongoing.

"Humans are creatures with brains built for processing stories rather than facts," says Klein, who appears this weekend at the Perth Writers Festival.

I feel like suing this Austrian interloper, who brings such wisdom to our dry expanses (I hesitate to call them plains; that word belongs to the American midwest).

Some time ago I was at a party and I introduced my quaternal maxim of 'progress' to a neighbour.

Here it is:

1. Language is an innate instinct in humans; we must talk and will regardless of the company, and
   
2. Humans are social animals, therefore
   
3. We live by narratives, furthermore
   
4. The history of progress is the history of the competition between strong narratives.

I wonder if Klein sometimes feels, like me, that he is surrounded by aliens. Possibly he feels that he has been selected by the gods for some higher purpose. In fact, going back to Luther, it seems as though the only kind of narrative that can prevail in society is one that satisfies a deeper urge: to fight.

The Sun-Herald's Sunday Life supplement today suggests this is true. In an article starting on page 20 Paige Kilponen cavasses experts to identify the benefit of a good stoush. Passive-aggressive behaviour is, she suggests, not good for the soul.

Barring resort to physical violence (I assume, though she doesn't actually touch on this terrible fact), she quotes Michael Burge, who says that

the absence of conflict can be an indication of a much more dysfunctional relationship. "If everything is stiff upper lip, there is suppression of identity. An absence of fighting suggests avoidance and can mean neither party cares about the relationship."

Australian Institute of Family Studies researcher Robyn Parker says

The benefits of a good fight ... include "fostering an open and honest communication, establishing boundaries and learning to choose our battles."

Burge again:

"It's unavoidable. If we don't fight, we become suppressed. We try to assert our ideas to maintain our identity."

Which suggests that those with strong identities and correct opinions are often shunned by the less capable, who fear they will drown in the ocean of another's will.

This could also answer the question of why alcohol is so popular. If the only way to honestly and forcefully express an opinion is under the influence we may have a biological cause for drunkenness. The by-products of this state of being are, however, often to be regretted.

The solution is resort to an alternative locus of transgression: culture. Even in third-world Asia, this is possible. See Orhan Pamuk's heroic attempt to reconcile Nabokov and Dostoyevski in his recent book of journalism and occasional pieces, Other Colours.

For many, however, this is difficult. Racism continues to be dominant. And long-held narratives (north v south, for example; or Protestant v Catholic) continue to hold sway. As we should know:

Culture is a locus of transgression,
And as the road is a crowded zone,
Control's the manifestation of joy.

Absent joy, energies are easily dissipated in the kind of deft and delicate qualifiers we prize in fiction, but which, in the world of non-fiction, are, as Calvino said, like "the flapping bat wings of the devil".

'Two major writers protect their distinctive brands.'

Brand Power is a marketing firm producing ads for Australian grocery retailers. The distinctive 'bee' logo and the apparently ad-hoc consumer vox pops it shows to buttress value claims, are well-known to Sydneysiders.

I hesitate to speak for Australians living in the other major conurbations.

Two recent stories show that writers, too, are very conscious of the value of their brands, and will always work strenuously to protect it.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Susan Wyndham has done something interesting today. In a week in which the news has been dominated by the Wollongong councillor corruption scandal (which threatens to unseat a state government minister), Wyndham has noticed a piece of corruption by our leading poet, Les Murray.


Murray is the fiction editor of monthly serious magazine Quadrant.

In the article Murray complains about how Australian poetry publishers routinely pester him for endorsements, for 'blurbs' as he terms them. These are the back-cover clips attributed to a notable figure.

This time, publisher Puncher & Wattmann asked for a blurb and Murray replied to the effect that one would be forthcoming if they published his wife's book, Flight From The Brothers Grimm.

Confronted, Murray told Wyndham that the offer was a joke. He said that "his intention was to say no to the publisher, "but I said it in a baroque way". Told it did not read like a joke, he replied, 'It reads like, 'Piss off', actually.'"

The disputed letter also contains a phrase to the effect that Murray is aware of the 'clout' his name carries in Australia.

A few days ago, The Australian carried a fascinating story about the notorious 'final novel', unfinished at the time of his death in 1977, by Vladimir Nabokov.

Nabokov is widely recognised as one of the premier literary talents of last century.

His son Dmitri, now 73 "and in poor health", has not decided what to do with the manuscript, which he praises (in his typically aggressive and proprietorial fashion). Academics caught in an epic battle for ownership (which will have consequences reaching into the coming millenium) note that significant quantities of work by Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson and Edward Elgar were published for the first time posthumously.

In fact, anyone who has read Stacy Schiff's excellent book on Nabokov's wife, Vera, will know that this dedicated woman prevented her husband from burning a manuscript of Lolita when they lived in Ithaca, New York. He was on his way to the steel drum in the back yard when she intercepted him, knowing of his indecision and uncertainty.

The novel catapaulted Nabokov into the highest levels of world publishing within a year of its publication.

Nabokov taught literature at Cornell University, which is located in the upstate town, for 20 years. Following the success of the novel, the couple relocated to Switzerland, where they both died.

The Original of Laura may be published, or it may not. John Banville's opinion is the same as mine.

John McDonald says that Sydney Harbour "is at once too complex a subject and too ubiquitous a presence in Sydney to be summed up in a collection of 42 items" regardless of "the ingenuity expended on selection and presentation" of the show he comments on.

The show is on at Macquarie University Art Museum and ends on 8 March. I will try to see it. The John Olsen etching below is included. I think it is lovely. Olsen, whose son I went to school with, and who lived at that time in a renovated fisherman's cottage in Watson's Bay, captures something of the frenzy of movement that characterises the start and end of each week day.


Sydney is a working city and the bridge is a major traffic conduit, linking the aesthetically-pleasing north side with the teeming eccentricites of the east and west. Olsen sees the chaos of cars and exhaust as a blot on the landscape, whereas in reality it is due to this frantic rushing of bodies and machines, that artists such as he is, live in comfort.

Slow drips of cash seep through the cracks of the carved bowl of capital, located atop its iron plinth. Small cascades run over the lips and into the mouths of the culturati, waiting patiently (like penitents in an earlier age - shamed by their rudeness and by the hideous implications of truth) below.


Whiteley fares not well at all. He is classed among those who provide a "more straight-forward appeal". This is required because (as McDonald correctly observes) "On the whole, we like nothing better than those things we already know."

Curiously, a Chinese friend, who didn't know Whiteley from a bag of cement, stood transfixed before the above canvas when we visited the Art Gallery of NSW recently. The Asian influence is obvious, she said, and we admired the dead man's clever use of negative space.

This kind of work is akin to the extraordinary and sensuous calligraphic elements North Asians use to communicate with, on a daily basis. We forget how close to real objects these 'characters' (called 'kanji' in Japan) are. They are still linked to the concrete object: the snail, the man, the mountain, the woman.

Or, indeed, the silicone chip ('semiconductor' translates neatly into three specific characters, in Japanese).

What strikes one when viewing the two images above are their different approaches to an identical object: the Harbour Bridge. Whiteley's classical elegance contrasts strongly with Olsen's left-brained squiggles and dense diagonals.

McDonald also gives the nod (in the 'straight' camp) to Lloyd Rees. Rees' etchings of Sydney Harbour remain some of my favourite images of this body of water, on whose lush and fickle shores I grew up.

eBay is addictive and because of other expenses I must not avoid, there's no excuse for my recent buying frenzy except that, finally, I've worked out the secret.

For almost a year I avoided eBay. The items bid for went elsewhere and, dispirited, I felt the risk was not worth the reward. In my case, this was a resounding 'zero' because I did not understand the psychology of online bidding. Now I know and I should be happy.

But the sheer volume of purchases means my credit card looks set to be maxed out for some time. Take this print, for example. Raoul, the seller, says it is an original, early-twentieth century photographic print. I've no way to know but the money's been paid ($32) and the package sent.

The description is delicious: "Vintage Antique Sepia Risque Lady Print 1800's 1900's". Even the redundant apostrophes contain a measure of charm and, in fact, function as a sort of guarantee of authenticity. I figure that it is good. It is also a lot of fun to own this sort of thing. I can easily imagine my grandmother (born 1906, died 1996) striking such a pose.

Then there's this.


I freely admit to being a map freak. It's sort of like being the guy who collects pre-WWII lunch boxes. Except, in this case, there's an intrinsic value that anyone can participate in enjoying.

A map, after all, is a political statement. As for this exemplum, the only query is whether the f**king thing was actually printed in the late 18th century. I sort of doubt it. It is more probably a 19th century copy of an 18th century engraving.

I retain doubts in this direction, though. I mean, would a self-respecting Victorian buy a (decadent) pre-Romantic print? It's counter-intuitive to think he (less likely she) would do so.

Further heartache is pending in the guise of additional expenditure for framing services. My preferred provider is ASA Anderson in Annandale. They're bloody good but never cheap and my innate bent (to collect images of unique appeal) means I'll be driving around that part of the inner west in the immediate future.

When buying on eBay it is critical to have some idea of the price an item should go for. This can take only a few hours spent looking in second-hand shops and antique dealers' showrooms. Given this information, it is relatively easy to aim, at about 10 minutes before the end of bidding, at the right target.

I generally (if I really want an item) immediately raise my first bid by some measure. I then usually raise it again. There's always a frenzy of activity in the last minute. If my third bid is accurate, I should be safe.

On occasion, it takes a further bid at about 30 seconds before the end, to secure the item. It's quite exciting and I will be back.

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).