A reckoning in the eastern suburbs for the Liberals

In the morning I was travelling to Newtown to buy coffee but at Central Station my right ankle packed it in and so I came home without making the purchase. Then I cancelled the movie I had organised to see that evening and sat down to watch the Wentworth by-election take place. I’ve filled out this account with some details that will make it easier for people outside Australia to understand. For various reasons this election was particularly important, although it was not part of a general election. General elections for federal Parliament are held every three years. As an extra, in this account there is a storm.

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, had lost his job in August in a party-room coup and had been replaced by Scott Morrison. Wentworth was Turnbull’s seat. He then decided to resign from Parliament, making it necessary to hold an election for the seat outside the normal general election cycle, with the next scheduled to be held in May 2019. The by-election was critical for the government because the Liberal-National coalition held power in the lower house by only one seat. If the Liberal Party lost the by-election, the Parliament would be hung and getting legislation through it would be hampered by the necessity of making agreements with cross-benchers (members of the lower house who belong to neither of the two major parties, but who sit between them in the chamber).

Soon there was news that sausages on sale at polling places were being sold for $5 each. Normally, sausage sizzles like these charge a gold coin ($1 or $2) for a piece of bread with a sausage wrapped in it. This point was funny because Wentworth is home to some of the wealthiest parts of the city of Sydney. “Democracy is finished,” added Guardian journalist Greg Jericho to the retweet that contained the news. Later, he added, “Although to be fair it looks like they’re using hotdog rolls rather than a slice of [Woolies’] bread. And the snags do look rather big.” The reference was to the retailer Woolworths, which is a dominant player in the domestic grocery market. The original tweet, from Channel Ten reporter Jonathan Lea, had contained a photo that showed a man standing at a BBQ wearing a black T-shirt that had “I see a little silhouetto of a man” printed on it in white.

At 10.39am Health Nerd (who calls himself an epidemiologist and says he writes for the Guardian and the Observer) tweeted, “The fires have been started. The sausages are burning. Anthony Green has been called from the deep. THE VOTING HAS BEGUN.” The reference to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) psephologist would have reminded people that the usual post-election telecast covering the vote was scheduled to start at 6pm. Green always features heavily in these productions, sometimes bringing in accurate predictions ahead of official announcements as the counting by Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) volunteers and staff progresses once the polling places close at 6pm.

After getting back from my aborted outing I had ironed my shirts and changed the sheets on the bed, putting the used set into the washing machine to clean. Now, the machine told me its cycle had finished and so I put the top sheet in the dryer with the pillow case, set the dial, and turned the machine on.

At 10.51am Sean Bradbery tweeted, “So far Scott Morrison's only achievement has been to turn the 8th safest seat in the country into a marginal.” He was referring of course to the fact that Turnbull had held the seat of Wentworth by a margin of around 18 percent. The previous day as I had been driving in my car, the ABC had told listeners that opinion polls had an independent candidate, Kerryn Phelps, a local GP for many years as well as a former president of the Australian Medical Association, and a City of Sydney councillor, neck-and-neck on a two-party-preferred basis with the Liberal Party’s candidate Dave Sharma.

The acronym “2PP” is used in discussing opinion polls to indicate that the number under discussion is the two-party-preferred number. Another acronym that is used is "2CP", which means two-candidate-preferred, and this acronym was used for this election because Kerryn Phelps, the front-runner in the opinion polls, was an independent, and had no party affiliation. The acronyms rely on the tendency for voters to give their preferences in a predictable way. So, for example, people who vote for the Australian Greens tend to give their second preferences to the Labor Party. So, in most contests the votes given to Greens candidates will be apportioned to the candidates of the Australian Labor Party when the second preferences of those voters are counted by the AEC.

How-to-vote cards that are handed out by the competing parties at polling places are printed 4-colour leaflets that show how the party in question wants people to mark their votes on the ballot paper, which is filled out using pencil in the booth. The resident has to get their name crossed off a master list by a volunteer, then they are given a ballot paper and go to an empty booth. (In general elections, residents get two ballot papers: one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. In the Wentworth by-election, there was naturally no Senate contest.) The booths are made of folded cardboard. Once in the booth, the resident marks the ballot paper with numbers in the order they want to preference candidates. The voter can follow the how-to-vote card of their party or they can mark the names of the listed candidates in any other order they choose. All of the boxes on the ballot paper have to be marked with a number otherwise the ballot is counted as informal and if that is the case the marked votes are not given to any of the candidates whose names appear on it.

At 10.54am Greens candidate for the seat of Wentworth, Dominick Wy Kanak, the deputy mayor of Waverly Municipal Council, a local-government authority in the area, tweeted using the @IndigenousX account, “Busy Bondi with enthusiastic Greens at the gate.” The tweet came with a photo showing a group of people, some with the party’s green T-shirts on, standing in a street with how-to-vote flyers in their hands. Kanak was in the centre of the photo wearing a T-shirt with a design made to look like the Aboriginal flag, in red, yellow and black.

At 11.13am Jieh-Yung Lo, a commentator, tweeted, “I am not a resident of Wentworth but as an Australian who believes in a fair go, I'll be cheering for Dr Kerryn Phelps because the well-being & survival of children, refugees & asylum seekers are more important than the survival of the Morrison Government.”

At 11.16am comedian Dan Ilic tweeted, “Bellevue Hill Public School #democracysausage review: Full bodied, tasty, good caramelisation of the onions, just a hint of forest floor, subtle flavours harking back to '07. Cheery fellas on the tongs. Good banter. $5.” The ironic tweet came with a photo showing a sausage held in a bread roll and a paper napkin held in the same hand.

At 11.19am Jack’s Project SafeCom tweeted a photo showing a cardboard sign that had been made for the by-election. It was branded with the name of the prominent independent candidate and had other words on it as well: “Where’s Malcolm? Vote 1 Kerryn Phelps. Send the Liberals a message.” The sign also featured a photo, in a cut-out, of the former prime minister.

At 11.26am Melbourne resident Lesley Howard retweeted a tweet from commentator Dee Madigan that had gone up at around 10am, and which had said, “No matter what happens today in Wentworth, climate change and the treatment of kids on Nauru are back on the political agenda. Massive kudos to @drkerrynphelps for that.”

At 10.28am Sydney resident Jodie Salmon tweeted a photo of her hand on her ballot paper in the booth. Her hand was holding a pencil. The tweet that came with the photo said, “The pen is mightier than the bonesaw.” The comment was a reference to the alleged Saudi killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, and was especially apposite as he had been killed for wanting to encourage more transparency in government in the Middle East. The tweet also had the hashtag #Journalismisnotacrime in it. The ballot paper in the photo was not numbered so it did not show how she had marked her preferences. The green slip of paper said at the top, “Number the boxes from 1 to 16 in the order of your choice.”

At 11.34am a professional photographer from Queanbeyan named Hilary tweeted a photo showing men and women wearing white T-shirts that had “Freedom for refugees” printed in black letters on the back and on the front. Some of them were holding their hands above their heads with their wrists crossed. The tweet also said, “Paddington.” The signage behind the volunteers was blue in colour and it was not immediately clear which party they were representing as they stood there on the pavement.

At 11.38am Blue Mountains resident Preston Towers retweeted a tweet that had gone up at around 11am from News-dot-com political reporter Sam Clench that had said, “I've located the best polling place in Wentworth - Paddington Public School. It has a market AND, even more importantly, cakes.” The tweet came with a photo showing a table covered with a white cloth on which a variety of cakes and other baked goods had been laid out. Towers had said, “THIS is more like it, though it’s not #DemocracySausage.”

I noticed at about the time I took the top sheet and the pillowcase out of the dryer, and put the bottom sheet in, that #wenthworthvotes had also been used by some people as well as the correct hashtag #wentworthvotes. The extra “h” was puzzling and I wondered how it had got in there.

At 11.46am Brisbane resident Fran Ross tweeted a tweet the progressive activist group GetUp! had put up about an hour before that retweeted one from Liberal Party MP Craig Laundy which had been posted at 9.29am, and which had said, “Bloke pulls up at a polling booth in a black BMW X5, gets out & and puts up a @GetUp sign .....”

At 12.06pm Towers put up another sausage tweet, this one retweeting one from ABC News’ Sydney digital editor, Riley Stuart, which said, “$5 for a sausage sizzle???! I’ll vote for anyone who brings these prices down ...” The tweet had a photo showing a hand holding a white bun with a sausage in it that had tomato sauce and mustard on it.

At 12.15pm LaLegale retweeted a tweet from a Geelong resident (“Grumpy, conservative old gay man”) named Eileen Twomey-Wright that had gone up about 30 minutes before, and which had said, “In the category of: Never Underestimate the Stupidity of the Electorate - #WenthworthVotes is trending number one on my list. Try: #WentworthVotes, people. Gawd.” The wrong hashtag was tending on Twitter.

At 12.20pm Central Coast man Troy Grant tweeted a tweet that Antony Green had put up about two hours before and that contained a photo showing the ABC’s psephologist standing on the pavement outside a voting booth dressed in Lycra. The tweet said, “The set-up at the Watson’s Bay polling place on my Tour de Wentworth ride this morning.”

At 12.23pm Milan resident Philippa Nicole Barr tweeted a photo showing a piece of A4 paper that had been stuck to the side of a garbage bin on a street. The paper had a picture of a polar bear on it and the caption, “Think of your children and your grandchildren. Vote Out Climate Deniers. Vote Out LNP.” Barr had commented, “Omg I love this. So DIY.”

At 12.40pm Jess ‘McGiggles’ Epps, who lives in Sydney, tweeted, “Would you like a damocrisy sossige with your misspelt hashtag?” The tweet came with a screenshot of the Twitter interface showing how many tweets the wrong hashtag had received. The people who had used it included ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas and the MEAA, the journalist’s union. Three minutes later Jodie M, a Melbourne resident, noted that the hashtags #voteWentworth and #WentworthByElection were also being used for the event.

At 12.47pm comedian Joel Creasey retweeted a tweet from theatre director Richard Carroll that had gone up at around 11.30am, that said, “Just voted for @kerrynwentworth @drkerrynphelps.” His tweet showed his face, with a fashionable, dark, three-day growth, as he stood in a suburban street outside a polling place.

At 12.53pm Maria, who only identified herself as living in Darug country, tweeted, “Sky news [sic] saying Dave Sharma is going to lose, but thinking it may be a scare tactic.  Depends on preferences which are impossible to predict, my guess is as good as @AntonyGreenABC.”

At 1pm Melbourne resident Max Alexander retweeted a tweet from Jonathan Lea, who we have met before in this account, that had gone up an hour earlier and that said, “Government now telling me Wentworth is no longer conservative or their heartland but progressive. Say heartland is more Qld. Clearly repositioning to soften the blow for what’s coming...”

At 1.24pm shareholder rights activist Stephen Mayne retweeted a tweet from Sam Clench, who we have met before in this account, that had gone up a few minutes before, and that said, “Bit of juxtaposition going on here in Bondi.” The tweet came with a photo showing a poster of Scott Morrison putting his hand on the shoulder of Malcolm Turnbull. The poster also had the word “Remember” printed on it, and “Disunity. Dysfunction. Chaos.” In the background behind the poster was Bondi Beach, with its lifesavers’ tent and its blue and green waves and with people sitting on the sand in the sun. Bondi is in Wentworth.

At 3.23pm Fiona Caldarevic from the NSW town of Narrandera tweeted a photo that had gone up about five minutes before from ALPHRW founder Nart (there was no more information about him, but the ALPHRW might mean “ALP human rights watch”; it seemed to be an activist group) that showed a photo of the tourist advisory sign in the Blue Mountains that is set on a road indicating toward Wentworth Falls, a town that is situated there. The man after whom the federal division of Wentworth and the town are both named was William Charles Wentworth, a famous colonial-era statesman who was also an explorer in his youth. “Brilliant,” commented Caldarevic in her tweet.

At 3.24pm Jonathan Green, the editor of the literary magazine Meanjin, retweeted a tweet from Sky News Australia that had gone up on 17 October at around 10pm, that quoted a columnist for the News Corp vehicle The Australian, Chris Kenny, saying, ”The reason they're having the by-election is that @TurnbullMalcolm spat the dummy and ran away. He shouldn't be putting the Party through this. He's shown no loyalty to the Party that gave him the Prime Ministership.” Green added the comment, “They. Assassinated. Him.”

At 3.40pm Paul Colgan, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Business Insider Australia, tweeted, “All these people who like their martinis stirred rather than shaken coming out of the woodwork now. Fitting, given it's #WentworthVotes today.” The comment was a reference to the positions on some issues that had been voiced by the independent candidate Kerryn Phelps. In most elections, the ALP is the primary candidate against the Liberals, but in this election, because of the high net wealth of the average voter in the division, the ALP candidate was not considered a likely contender. But of course, the stakes in the contest were much more significant than Colgan had stated them, because it wasn’t just the personal philosophy of the two major contenders that was germane in the case, but rather what was in the balance on the day was the Coalition’s majority in Parliament. On top of that, Phelps has different views on such major issues as climate change and on the status of refugees detained in offshore camps operated by Australia. It was true however that on economic issues Phelps has a campaign platform that is not so different from that of the Liberals, including lower company taxes and policies that encourage entrepreneurship.

Phelps had said that if elected she would guarantee supply to the government (the ability to raise money for government business) but had not ruled out launching no-confidence motions in the lower house. The government’s ability to ensure supply and to avoid no-confidence motions in the lower house is critical to its survival. If it cannot ensure supply or if a no-confidence motion is successfully moved against it in the lower house, the outcome is likely to be a general election.

At 3.46pm Sam Clench tweeted, “One voter sums up the problem with the Liberals' stability argument: ‘That's a joke, isn't it? After what they did to Malcolm?’” The tweet contained a photo of the Kerryn Phelps cardboard sign mentioned earlier that featured a picture of the former prime minister.

Rain had been predicted for Sydney in the evening. At 3.49pm @giddeygirl tweeted, “Really raining now in Canberra. Thunder. Lightning. Wind. Heavy drops. Hooray.” The reference to the Queen song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was topical considering the T-shirt that the BBQ chef had been wearing in an earlier tweet. By 5.25pm the dark clouds had started to cover Sydney and thunder could be heard rumbling in the distance.

At 5.29pm @Roger192964382, a resident of Victoria, tweeted the odds that had been given that afternoon for the Wentworth 2PP contest by a betting agency. It wasn’t clear from the enclosed image which betting agency had given the odds, but the numbers were definitive. Phelps was on 1.32 (the lowest odds, meaning that she was the most likely to win based on the bets that had been received), Dave Sharma was on 3.20 and the ALP’s Tim Murray was on 16.

At 5.36pm I received a text message from my auto insurer notifying me that there was an increased chance of hail in my suburb. They send out these messages when storms come over the city. The last time I had received a similar message was in September. At 5.43pm Therese Taylor, a lecturer in history at Charles Sturt University in the Riverina, which is located in the southwest of NSW, tweeted, “Sydney settles down at the end of the day and waits to know the results of #WentworthVotes. A storm is rolling in, on the twilight sky. Atmospheric.” At 5.46pm the TV signal was lost for a few seconds due to the atmospheric disturbance the storm had created.

At 5.50pm @suthernx tweeted, “My prediction is Sharma will poll 30-35% of votes. Phelps will get up on the back of Greens preferences.” The TV signal was lost again momentarily. Outside, the sky was almost black with clouds, and thunder was sounding continuously with lightning flashing in the gloom. It was still 10 minutes before the polling places were scheduled to close and the storm was smothering the city in moisture and electricity. Rain was falling steadily and the sound of thunder was almost continuous. Flashes of lightning broke through the dark sky and from my apartment the city skyline was almost invisible. By about 5.07pm the centre of the storm had moved over my location just west of the central business district and the thunder had by then died down to a distant rumble that disturbed the evening from time to time. By then I was watching the ABC’s election coverage and the thunder could be heard in the background in the telecast as the storm moved east.

At 6.43pm Antony Green tweeted, “0.3% counted - LIB Projected [first preferences]=35.2%[,] down 27.1% [from the previous election, which was held in 2016].” The tweet contained a link to a story on the ABC’s website.

At 6.51pm Central Coast resident Bill Quinn tweeted, “My late mum always said that fair weather on polling day meant no change, and wild and/or wet weather meant a change. Just sayin'...”

At 6.52pm Antony Green tweeted:

2 of 41 counting centres reported.
PartyCode, First pref %, (matched PP [(polling places)] change in %)
LIB 57.1 (-23.4)
IND 23.9 (+23.9)
ALP 7.0 (-0.4)
OTH 6.2 (+1.9)
GRN 5.8 (-1.9)

At 6.58pm Guardian journalist Katharine Murphy tweeted, “One [Darlinghurst] booth in now (Phelps territory), swing against the Liberals up to 30%.” “Terrible figures” for the Liberal Party, said Green on the TV just after 7pm adding that he wanted to wait a few minutes before making a prediction about the result.

At 7.04pm Edo Voloder, a resident of Dandenong in Victoria, tweeted, “By-election Primary Votes (1.6% counted): LIB 40.9 (-30.3) Phelps IND 33.1 (+33.1) ALP 9.9 (-2.1) GRN 8.8 (-3.6).”

At 7.13pm Antony Green tweeted:

6 of 41 counting centres reported
PartyCode, First pref %, (matched PP change in %)
IND 36.5 (+36.5)
LIB 33.9 (-24.6)
ALP 10.9 (-8.3)
GRN 10.4 (-6.9)
OTH 8.2 (+3.4)

It took more than a few minutes but at 7.17pm, less than 80 minutes after the polling places closed, Green called the election for Kerryn Phelps. At 7.20pm Katharine Murphy tweeted, “The Morrison government has lost its majority in the lower house.” At 7.21pm Green tweeted:

9 of 41 counting centres reported
PartyCode, First pref %, (matched PP change in %)
LIB 35.8 (-25.0)
IND 35.5 (+35.5)
ALP 10.9 (-7.2)
GRN 9.6 (-6.7)
OTH 8.2 (+3.4)

At 7.23pm federal editor and Canberra bureau chief for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Bevan Shields, tweeted, “At the Paddington Central booth, the Liberal Party vote has collapsed from 60.43% under Malcolm Turnbull to just 33.7% now.” Just before 8pm on TV Green announced that, with 29.4 percent of the ballots counted, on a 2PP basis Phelps had won 54.7 percent of the votes. The TV coverage about 10 minutes later showed what was happening in North Bondi at the Phelps post-election event, where Macklemore’s 2017 song ‘Glorious’ was playing for the crowd. Phelps thanked her wife Kathy, her children, and her grandson.

At 8.10pm Canberra journalist Samantha Maiden tweeted, “The whole comedy of the Liberals trying to look into banning gay teachers from schools or gay teenagers from private schools or whatever and then Double Bay saying SCREW YOU WE ARE SENDING IN THE LESBIANS! Is also ...delicious.”

At just before 8.30pm I logged into the coffee company’s website and ordered a kilo of my usual blend to be shipped to my home.

UPDATE 21 October 10.32am: Margin in the contest narrowing with postal votes still being counted. Last I saw, Phelps' lead was down to 905 votes, with thousands of votes still to be appraised.

UPDATE 21 October 11.06am: Antony Green on ABC News says the result of the contest will not be known for several days.

UPDATE 21 October 1.14pm: In a tweet from Sydney artist Jeffrey Wood that was retweeted at this time, there was a screenshot showing a page from the AEC website which had Phelps 889 votes ahead of Sharma with the time-stamp in the comment of 12.51pm.

UPDATE 21 October 4.13pm: In a tweet, Antony Green said, "Check count corrects increase Phelps lead from 884 votes to 1186 votes. Two-candidate preferred percentages Phelps (IND) 50.8%, Sharma (LIB) 49.2%."

UPDATE 21 October 5.39pm: A tweet from Miranda Devine, the right wing commentator: "Dr Kerryn Phelps has increased her lead by another 679 votes, to more than 1700, after a check count at Bondi Beach public school booth." The tweet carried a link to a story in the Australian newspaper.

UPDATE 23 October 3.40pm: Phelps is ahead by 1540 votes in the continuing count and Antony Green says on ABC News that it is unlikely that Sharma can overtake her going by the trends in the postal votes that are being received by the AEC.

UPDATE 24 October 6.08pm: The Phelps lead at this time was 1643 votes.

UPDATE 27 October 9.34am: ABC News announces that Phelps has won the by-election.

UPDATE 29 October 7.01am: Checked the AEC website again this morning and the most recent results are dated 25 October at 6.03pm. They showed Phelps ahead by 1783 votes.

UPDATE 2 November 9.38am: This morning a person on Twitter asked if the Wentworth by-election result would be announced today and at 9.22am the AEC's Twitter account answered, "No. Today is the final day for late arriving postal votes.  The AEC will issue a media release and tweet in advance of the day when a declaration will be scheduled."

UPDATE 4 November 3.56pm: A Sydney Morning Herald story published today said that the announcement of the victory of Kerryn Phelps would take place on Monday and that she would be found to have won the contest by a total of 1851 votes.

UPDATE 5 November 10.39am: Business Insider Australia tweeted that Phelps had officially won the election, with a link to the story which quoted the AEC. The final margin between the two leading candidates was 1851 votes.

The conformity of the news media

In an 18 October podcast he did this year with Ezra Klein of Vox, Jay Rosen criticised the news media for conformity, identifying the tendency of different news rooms to report on the same stories and poking fun at their desire to get the scoop first rather than to cover something original and unique.

When I wrote for magazines I had this experience so I know it is true. The editor at a small outlet would email me asking if I could do 500 words for a story about something that had just been broken by one of the major outlets.

This kind of piggybacking however seems to me to be more normal now, in the era of social media. Since the emergence of the internet, news editors have always been able to see which stories got the most traction in the community. But now, with Twitter especially, they can see exactly what people are sharing and how they are sharing it: either with approval, criticism, irony or some other attitude layered over the original story. Editors know exactly what people want to read because they can see several different metrics measuring what links get clicked on.

Social media has not only changed the way that journalists see themselves, it has changed the way people use news, making them more likely to share and engage with stories that they are already familiar with because it is these stories that satisfy a deep human need for connection with others. I wrote a number of blogposts earlier this year about how stories are used on places such as Twitter. The first of these posts came on 2 July and it was titled ‘The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress’. In it, I provided a theory of narratives, describing the way that people in the community use stories in order to create community: to bring them closer to allies and to distance themselves even more completely from enemies. I said that the way they do this is similar to the way that people barrack for sports teams in national leagues: the contest is a zero-sum game, where the prize is a scare resource and there can only be one winner.

But in fact there can be many winners, and on 21 July I continued the discussion with a post titled ‘The left-right tango is a dead end’ in which I talked about the need to find the best policies regardless of which side of politics introduces it. We need, if we want to move toward a sustainable future, to take the best policies from wherever they come, and use them to expand the pie for all members of the community.

Journalist Katharine Murphy talks about the dynamics of social media in her new book, ‘On Disruption’, which I reviewed on 9 July on the blog. In it, she identifies the election to the office of US president of Donald Trump as an artefact of the social media era. Others have pointed to the fact that no Australian prime minister has been able to serve out a full term at the head of a government since the invention of Twitter. Social media has changed the ways that we use the media, as it has changed the very nature of democracy. Our thinking about the media has to take that into account. Murphy herself works for the Guardian, a left-leaning outlet that operates on three continents and that has used its ideological position, as have other outlets, to build a community. Many people in it pay for the news they receive.

So the “view from nowhere” is gradually disappearing as people form communities around different news outlets that validate the positions they themselves hold about issues. In this new environment, of course, there will also be a place for a news organisation that takes a more objective view of the world, and which deals with issues in a dispassionate manner, such as the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. But objectivity will gradually become the exception rather than the rule because of the economics of the news: people like to back their own team in the contest.

Movie review: Star, dir Johann Lurf (2018)

This collage, or mash-up, or sampling of movie segments showing stars, with the original soundtracks, is an evocative and experimental work of cinema that takes a little patience. The director and the team of people (who found all the segments of film from the earliest days of filmmaking to the present day, with the segments displayed in roughly chronological order) ask you to take a little time to reflect and think about what all of these attempts to understand the immensity of the universe mean in aggregate rather than in their particular instances.

The sampling is done so that the original sense or meaning of the sampled scene is absent. You get rough cuts, half phrases blurted out, music out of phase and cut up in a crazy asymmetrical array. The words used in the segments are in a wide range of languages, from English to Japanese and from Russian to French. Seen together in this way the scenes let you start to understand that we have always used the night sky as a place on which to project our deepest fears and our most soaring ambitions. The blackness with its myriad of small white dots is the perfect canvas, replete with abstract space, on which to depict all of our hopes and dreams and anxieties.

Stars have been used as carriers of signification by every community on the planet at one point or another; the use of stars for cultural communication is a universal trait of the species.

I had to convince myself at times to watch the whole thing. The temptation to get up and leave was sometimes powerful, but in the end I was glad I stayed. The significance of the project creeps up on you slowly as you try and then fail again and again to construct a meaningful story out of the fragments that you are shown. The meaning comes later, once you have been sitting in front of the screen for long enough that you have been able to relinquish control over your imagination.

The scenes wash over you and gradually patterns emerge to fill your busy mind with new understanding. When you see a film you are usually given a conventional story to follow with an opening followed by development, a crisis, and a resolution. The mind is ever seeking to form narratives out of lived experience and with Lurf’s film it is often at a loss as to what to make of the material offered to it. Letting go allows you to see new things.

The name of the film is correctly only rendered with the symbol of the star, as the musician David Bowie used it in his last album. Lurf is from Austria.

The screening I saw was the Australian premier of the film, which was shown as part of the Sci Fi Film Festival, on at Event Cinema on George Street in Sydney until 21 October. The festival website is here. 

Book review: Traumata, Meera Atkinson (2018)

This memoir seems to have been pre-packaged for the victim industry. It suffers moreover from major problems in the area of pacing, but the problems go deeper than that. They are not merely mechanical, but indeed are structural in nature.

There was a rape when the author was aged 18 and then you are given a potted version of the idea of the patriarchy, as though that answered all of the questions you might have about the issues that are raised. There is a stab at the science behind memory but the author enters very strange territory when she talks about her uncle’s wife, of the Macarthur-Onslow clan. Atkinson recounts a bit of the family’s history and then, completely po-faced, avers that trauma had been ferried across the generations from the Battle of Culloden, which took place in 1746. Now I went to school with a scion of the Macarthur-Onslow family and he was a boy, named Rupert, who was well-adjusted enough despite a slightly odd physiognomy, and who probably ended up in the legal profession, as an alarming number of my schoolmates did. I found myself vocalising aloud at this point and deciding against continuing with the book.

But this kind of literature, which frames reality in terms that only a minority can possibly tolerate, let alone comprehend, seems to be more and more commonplace. Recently I tried reading a book titled ‘Citizen: An American Lyric’ which was published in 2014 and was written by an African-American author named Claudia Rankine. The boosterish title of the book conceals an ironic (possibly) reference to a homeland that had neglected the author and oppressed people looking like her.

But the overall tenor of the project was suffocatingly narrow, because the author’s world is delimited by blatant discrimination on the part of the white majority, on the one hand, and by a blinkered viewpoint on the other that is informed by reading from a collection of black-liberationist source texts. If you don’t accept the underlying premises of the argument, then the story just becomes nonsense. I personally cannot comment with great authority on the American experience, having only visited that country a double-handful of times over the years, but I do know Australia and Atkinson’s restricted version of reality is not reflective of the country I live in.

I have worked for most of my life in various office jobs starting from when I left a sales position with Pan Books to join the public service. I had women managers in 1988 for a year when I worked with the police, and from 1992 until 1997 when I worked at a Japanese manufacturing company in a PR role, then I worked as a technical writer under a woman in 2008 at Sydney University. The women I worked under were no worse and no better than any man I have worked under, except the last, who was a downright bully. Working in her office I practically had a nervous breakdown, her conduct was so deplorable. So I don’t accept that a society run by women would be any better or any worse than one run by men.

But the left is irrational and won’t see reality if you hold it up in front of their faces. You think that a humiliating defeat on a battlefield remote in time and space still lives today in the hearts of the majority, when it is merely a preoccupation for the looney fringe? How’s this: I was out having a few beers at the Crown Hotel on Elizabeth Street one night and in the smoking area was a man who had rings on his fingers celebrating the name of James Edward Stuart, the son of King Charles II, known as the Old Pretender to the throne of the United Kingdom. He got into an argument with a friend of mine. They were stalemated for a period of time until the hostilities ended and amity was reinstated in that corner of the pub.

I have met Meera Atkinson on one occasion, at meeting a mutual friend organised in Newtown. I mentioned to her, in an attempt to break the ice because it was the first time we had met, that books by Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson were regularly stolen from the bookshop that I used to go to when I lived in Queensland and that the managers of the business had had to place their copies of the authors’ books behind the counter to prevent theft. Atkinson dryly noted that both of the authors I had named had abused alcohol, and left it to me to decide whether it had been wise to bring up their names. 

The day Sydney saw its soul: horserace ads on the Opera House sails

On Friday 5 October, radio shock jock Alan Jones publicly berated Opera House executive Louise Herron for rejecting an approach by Racing NSW to use the building’s structure – specifically the famous “sails” that make up the roof of the structure – to advertise a new horse race, The Everest. I had seen the race being advertised in Martin Place not long before. There had been portable kiosks branded with the name of a betting agency, and five-foot-high letters placed on the pavement outside the MLC Centre (another architectural feature of the city, built in the 1970s and designed by Harry Seidler). Herron said:

What we won't do is put text or videos of horses running or horses’ numbers or names or the Everest logo on the Opera House sails.

The prime minister, a member of the conservative Liberal Party, made his views public: the Opera House was Australia’s largest billboard and should run the ads. And the Liberal NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian (also a Liberal), stepped in to announce a compromise. On Sunday she said, "There'll be no logos or names -- the only words on there [will be] the words of the trophy itself." But still Sydney simmered with resentment. Or large parts of it. Over 300,000 virtual signatures protesting against the move were collected on a website. Parts of the community were ropeable, voicing their complaints on Twitter to anyone who would listen. Some people in Melbourne were enjoying the spectacle: the hated rival to the north was being humbled by Capital. Well, good, they thought.

By the following Monday, Jones had magnanimously apologised to Herron. And the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s comedy team, The Chaser, got out during the night and projected a sign onto the Opera house’s sails that read “Advertise here”, along with Alan Jones’ mobile phone number. The rant had turned into a debacle which had turned into a meme.

On Tuesday night the drama continued when light displays were scheduled to be projected onto the building’s sails. As each barrier draw was announced the number of the barrier was projected on the middle sail and the colours of the relevant horse were projected on two smaller sails beside it. But protesters – over 1000 according to the ABC but probably closer to 5000 going by a video taken on the night – who had gathered in front of the building flashed torches onto the illuminated sails, distracting viewers who had tuned into the telecast and disrupting the smooth performance of the show.

Despite the sound and fury the episode threw up, it seemed clear to me that there was something both profoundly fitting about the premier’s decision and something disappointing about the views of the political left. Not exactly that Berejiklian was toning down the visuals, but that she had insisted that the ad go ahead. The building had been funded, originally, using a lottery, for a start. But there’s more to support her case than that fact alone.

The Opera House began in the 1960s as an idea and an international competition was run by the state Labor government to find an architect. The winner, a Dane, turned out to be an inspired choice, although he almost wasn’t chosen. But the idea itself was the interesting thing about his pitch to the judges: to build a special monument to an authentically Australian culture at the edge of the gorgeous harbour on the site of a tram marshalling yard. What characterised that moment in history was optimism, and people forget just how new that might have felt to Sydneysiders at the time. But think about it: with the New York stockmarket crash of 1929 and then the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s, followed by a global war that only ended in 1945 that led to massive changes in governance around the planet, the world had had enough drama and now wanted to settle down and get on with the business of living.

Over 15 years of hardship and conflict were ended by halcyon days when the wages of ordinary people were rising in the post-war economic boom. People’s lives were being changed not only by better-paying jobs, many of which required university degrees to gain entry to, but by bigger houses with open plans instead of poky rooms, higher buildings in the city built to accommodate the businesses that were emerging to fill the void left by the Depression and WWII, a growing economy fuelled by higher immigration rates and inflows of foreign capital looking for a safe haven and high returns. Things were, finally, looking up.

The design that was finally chosen was itself not implemented exactly the way the architect had initially envisioned, in his early drawings, due to engineering constraints. Even so, the problem of how to assemble the vaulting structure using concrete and steel proved difficult to solve. In the end, modular pieces were strung together like beads on a cord using steel cables that were anchored to the earth. The building also has other innovative elements, including a cooling system that uses harbour water to regulate temperatures inside the buildings.

But what about those big, white sails? In a way they are emblematic of the era as well, and the idea that you can project any meaning onto them seems to me to fit the ambition of the designers, the builders, and the governments who led the project from start to finish.

They were nothing if not modern. Like the big, almost empty walls in contemporary art galleries, which featured isolated paintings hung one next to the other in a uniform series (so unlike the traditional “salon hang” where paintings are all squeezed into the available space higgledy-piggledy). Like the wide streets and front gardens of salubrious Sydney suburbs, settled in the years after the turn of the century. Like the spreading government-funded train system that reached out into areas that were still covered in grass and trees, with scattered settlements in wide expanses yet to be filled with houses. Like the Reserve Bank of Australia building in Martin Place, designed in the International style to suit the times and imbued by its founder, Nugget Coombs, when it was finished in 1965, with the same ideals that had led to the foundation of the big, global organisations that emerged to prevent another military conflict: the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1944), the United Nations (1945) and the International Court of Justice (1946). Things, the country seemed to be saying, echoing the global community, were going to be different now.

And different the Opera House is. Almost as well-known globally as Mickey Mouse, the building contains within it an abstract, formal purity that makes it able to withstand any application of light or shadow by whatever government of whatever colour happens to be in power at any particular time in history. It has at its core this simplicity, like money itself, so that it can accommodate any message and still retain its essential character. Apart from time and youth, money can be traded for practically anything, and the world after WWII was finally over was about nothing if not the accumulation of wealth. For all. For the broader community and not just for the economic elites. Our big challenge now is not the preservation of some notional purity for the Opera House that is rooted in narrow political interests, but rather the challenge today is to recapture the egalitarian spirit of the post-war years, and to make sure that the wealth that we are creating is shared as widely as it was then and not squirrelled away in offshore bank accounts operated by members of a rent-seeking managerial class.

While in theory I disagree with using the Opera House to promote gambling, because it is bad for people and causes harm to parts of the community, for the reasons listed I feel that the campaign of protest against the ads by the political left was misplaced. The bigger threat to their interests is a growing inequality that characterises the economies of the west, with Australia being no exception. Given the right conditions, totalitarianism can easily appear again; indeed, it exists already in many countries including China and Russia. The forms it takes now are different from the ones that applied in the past, but the end result is the same: the control of the majority by a murderous and self-interested elite. This should be the focus of the left in Australia. Change-dot-org petitions are merely the opium of the chattering classes.

Book review: Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (2011)

The only problem with this otherwise stunning novel is its narrow scope, although the political realities of Spain, where the novel is set, are alive within the narrative through the beliefs of certain characters that Lerner creates. The book describes a year in the life of an American poet living in Madrid on a literary fellowship. (Lerner himself writes poetry and spent a year living on Madrid on a Fullbright fellowship.)

The title refers to the 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid that killed hundreds of people. Adam Gordon, the novel’s poet-protagonist, had travelled to Granada on a train that he and a woman named Isabel had caught at the same station. The trip was cut short by Adam’s strange temperament – he gets angry for unspecified reasons at unpredictable moments and takes his anger out on the people around him. He also smokes a lot of hashish in the book but never seems to consider how this habit might adversely affect his mental health. As well as being mostly romantically inept he’s actually a bit of a mess and, later in Barcelona, gets lost for a whole day after just going out for a coffee from the hotel he and another woman, Theresa, are staying in.

But apart from the psychotic elements, which are really just flaws in an otherwise fully-formed but rather banal modern character, the real poetry of the novel resides in its study of the texture of time, as Nabokov formulated the problem in the 1960s. The way that people move from tonic moment to tonic moment, smoothing over the emotional cracks that open up between signal events in their lives, is explored. To accompany this theme there is a running debate in the book about Adam giving up smoking, something that he likes to do because it helps him, he thinks, to navigate these interstices between things.

These “gaps” in lived existence become irrelevant only at moments of increased social drama, such as during the protests that take place after the bombings. In such an arena, Adam glides purposefully from encounter to encounter, though still intent on his current romance, and the way that people come alive in his life at this time mirrors the sense, that he generates throughout the novel, that he is special. There is always a sense of him looking in at himself speaking and interacting with people, and this kind of artifice (sometimes pure fakery, in Adam’s case) is somehow absolved by the real drama of the attacks and their aftermath.

They turn out to be for Adam a benediction of sorts. The novel shows that it’s only moments of heightened drama that live up to the register that regulates our emotional lives. Getting through the downtime is everyone’s challenge, and Adam’s drug-taking is emblematic of this truth.

But Adam also has a strange need at different times to lie to other people in order to dramatize his life so as to make himself more interesting in their eyes. He almost sabotages his relationship with Isabel in this way, and does a similar thing with Theresa, who turns out however to be a sophisticated person as well as a translator of literature. Adam is projecting himself in society. Near the end of the book Theresa appears at a poetry reading that Adam is involved in and he wonders how he didn’t know that she had been invited to be on the same panel as he was.

Adam plays with his own persona, as an American living in Spain, but while everyone in their everyday lives does what he does, and amplify in their minds certain parts of their personalities in order to achieve certain effects in their relations with others, not everyone goes as far as to lie to their friends to get the desired result. The barrier of language that Adam faces gets lower with time and by the end of the story his speech is for most purposes indistinguishable from that of a Spaniard.

What this novel reminded me most strongly of were the brilliant novels of Edmund White published in the 1980s, although Adam (and, presumably, Lerner) is not gay but rather determinedly heterosexual. The politics of sex are sumptuously on offer in this brilliant novel, as they are in White’s novels, along with the ways that people create narratives to accompany the flow of their own thoughts and perceptions of the world, winding stories around the things that they see, think, and feel in an effort to make sense of life and also to negotiate the thickets of the relationships that they forge with other people in the communities they live in.

While this novel offers a coherent vision for its chief characters you sometimes feel like slapping Adam in the face and telling him not to be so selfish, although you have to keep in mind that he is living with a mental illness and that this circumstance is always a barrier he has to overcome in his diurnal rounds.

For the main part, the machinery the author uses to get ideas and feelings across the barrier to other people’s minds is adequate to the task at hand but on occasion the fabric of the narrative starts to fray and tear, threatening to fail. Such passages might have been written longer. It is always a goal of a competent author to seek the most efficient expression in order to carry things over to the reader, but in Lerner’s case there are times when this dictum wears thin, and in some places in the narrative you wish that he had spent a few more paragraphs or a few more sentences on the task of making meaning.

But overall the fictional vistas that open up after you have read this book seem more expansive, freer and more inviting. Just as Nabokov planted the seed that Lerner would later nurture so that it could grow into a flourishing thing, other writers in the future will want to come along and use the innovations that Lerner has put into print in order to enrich society and make it more suitable for its inhabitants.

Toxic masculinity and “having fun”

As more stories emerge about what goes on in university residential colleges, we are faced with facts about toxic masculinity that have been known personally by many people but rarely spoken about aloud in public. Another aspect of the same malaise that infects the culture is the kind of violence that led to the lockout laws that so many young people still complain about, which have turned Kings Cross into a haven for baby boomers where once it was a popular resort for young people intent on “having fun”.

In a story in Domain on the weekend, we learn that the southern end of the shopping centre in the Cross, which had been full of strip clubs and drinking establishments, both of which were designed for use by young men, has changed in the four years that the lockout laws have been in place. There are more eateries now, and less of the types of places people go to when they want to "have fun".

These stories sum up feelings I have when, a rare occasion, I happen to go out late at night on a weekend. I was down in the casino's food court and it was about eleven o'clock at night on the Sunday before the Labour Day public holiday. I was buying something to eat and needed to use the lavatory. But most of the stalls were filthy. In one the seat had been saturated with urine. One was full of toilet paper that wouldn't flush away. One was covered in dark-red vomit. I eventually found one that was clean and used it. When I exited the stall I saw a cleaner with a mop coming into the room. He had evidently been called on to do something to clean up the mess made by people "having fun".

But earlier in the day I had been exposed to another aspect of toxic Australian masculinity. At Central Station in the middle of the afternoon as I was going up the escalators with a friend, a casually-dressed young man stopped the flow of people walking up on the right-hand side of the machine. He was standing near us and then from further down in the queue of people could be heard a big, male voice calling out loudly, “Go the chooks!” Everyone was suddenly on alert at this display of raw physicality, and most of the people around us there were unhappy as a result. You could have cut the air with a knife. My friend, who is a woman, got fed up with the display and edged past the young man standing on the escalator, heading up to the street level. I followed her. From below as we went up the same man who had called out earlier shouted “Dropkicks!” in an effort to shame us for our lack of appreciation for the brilliance of the Eastern Suburbs Rugby League team. At the next set of escalators, near the grand Concourse, two more fans were walking with their mates. They were dressed in a shirt with the team’s familiar red, white and blue: the colours of the nation’s flag.

We know that domestic violence complaints are more frequent at grand final time because of the toxic mixture of alcohol and the kinds of emotions that are inspired in men by spectator sports. But this kind of behaviour is everywhere encouraged. On bus stops at the moment there is an ad for a brand of rum, that takes its name from a town in Queensland, which displays a famous photo of two rugby league players, a short man and a very tall man, who are covered in mud after playing a game in wet weather. The word that is associated with both the photo and the beverage is “mateship”, as though both of the things being shown in the poster – the drink and the football players – are emblematic of something central to the culture. This kind of license to behave badly is all around us and we need to crack down on it if we want to change the toxic male culture that we inhabit.

Book review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo (2012)

This work of literary journalism examines the lives of slum dwellers in Mumbai and despite the evident talent of the author and the competent execution of her artistic vision it’s a tawdry affair that attempts to give an operatic strength to its pitiful subject. The endemic corruption of slumlord Asha and the politicians and police that look after the slum are toxic. Existence for people living in the community of Annawadi, a slum that has been built up against the perimeter of an airport, are miserable and brutish, distinguished only by different degrees of oppression or abuse.

The book functions as a searing indictment of the government of India and shows what a society looks like without such basics as the existence of land titles and street addresses, a sewage system, indoor toilets, home water supply, roads, public transport, public education, and a functioning public sphere with its own disciplined and unbiased media.

I read about half of it before getting bored with the relentless misery on offer from Boo, who is an American with a background in investigative journalism. I similarly didn’t get to the end of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, the 2008 film by director Danny Boyle, having left the cinema before the film ended (I reviewed it here on 21 January 2009). If you want to know exactly what is wrong with the postcolonial project, these are the places to go to find out. While Indian academics complain loudly about such things as the East India Company, the reality on the ground in Mumbai lies in a realm entirely outside the periphery of a rational mind.

Life as it is portrayed here is horrific and depressing and the fact that it took a foreigner to recount stories that people back at home in New Delhi are too busy taking bribes to address, must surely be a matter of great shame for the Indian people.

Heart palpitations: the diagnosis

On 9 August I wrote about a trip I made to the hospital because of concerns I had about palpitations I had felt in my chest. During that visit, the doctor who treated me gave me a letter to give to my general practitioner, who after I had seen him for a consultation organised for me to have a Holter monitor put on for 24 hours. The people who do this work out of his clinic. You go in in the morning and they put a data logger around your neck and place contacts at different points on your upper torso which feed information to the unit. You can’t shower obviously when you’re wearing the thing and you keep it on during your time asleep.

They took it off the next morning and sent it away for analysis but the doctor’s receptionist called me a couple of weeks later to tell me the pathology company had mislaid the data logger and that the data it had contained had been lost. She apologised and told me she would organise for someone to call me back when another monitor was available to put on. In the meantime, I met my GP one day in the square where the cafes are and we had a chat about this occurrence. He apologised for the inconvenience.

The receptionist called me back not long after this and I went in one morning at 9am as usual to get a new device put on. The contacts that go on your torso are kept there by a kind of adhesive patch that has a backing surface that is removed and thrown away. The technician who did the work this time told me that the previous time the reading had not been successful, and wasn’t aware that they had told me that the data logger had been mislaid. I went away with the monitor attached and went about my business as usual, then the next morning early I went in to have it removed.

Later in the week, the GP phoned me to tell me that the results had shown that I have an ectopic beat and that it was not something to be concerned about. He said that if it got a lot worse I should go to see a cardiologist, but in general it was not serious and I should not worry about it. He was surprised when I told him that the staffer of pathology company staff had not realised that her company had mislaid the data logger the previous time. He said they work out of his clinic but that they are supervised independently so there was not much he could do about it apart from registering a complaint. I had a look online to research ectopic beats and it seems that it’s not uncommon for people to have this condition.

Book review: All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews (2014)

This impressive novel has a gem-like purity of vision, something so brilliant and innate, deriving from that which is contained within it, that you can use it to get through those tough days when things seem just too much to bear. It tells the story of two sisters, the insatiably curious Yolandi, who writes novels for young adults, and her older sibling, the talented musician Elfrieda.

The girls grow up in a family within the Mennonite community in rural Canada. The Mennonites were Anabaptists who had migrated to the Ukraine in the years after the Renaissance started, when people began moving away from the Catholic Church. Mennonites were always careful to make sure they were not obliged to serve militarily in the administrations that governed their communities. They also worked hard to conserve their language, which they thought was essential to preserving their unique culture. Some Russian Mennonites emigrated to Canada in the last decades of the 19th century but after the October Revolution, all remaining Russian Mennonites were sent to Siberia and then were expelled from the Soviet Union, moving to North America.

The town that the two Von Riesen girls grow up in in Manitoba is called East Village but their father Jacob, a bookish man with drive and a lot of progressive ideas, is often at odds with the town’s leaders, dour Christians with circumscribed views and long lists of things that you are not allowed to do. He commits suicide when the girls are still living with their parents, and the girls eventually move away from the community. Elfrieda follows her passion for the piano and becomes a professional pianist.

The bulk of the narrative concerns the problem that Yolandi has when her sister tries to kill herself for a second time. By this time Yolandi has had two children by two different fathers and she is in the process, when the narrative starts, of getting divorced from one of these men, Dan, who is often out of the country on business. Their daughter Nora, who is aged about 15, and Yolandi’s other child, Will, who is aged about 18 and who lives in New York, are included in the main part story through text messages. Much of the time is spent in the hospital in Winnipeg where Elfrieda has been taken to recover from her attacks on herself, and part of the drama is produced when she asks Yolandi to help her get to Switzerland where she would be able, legally, to kill herself with the help of competent doctors.

It is spring and the Assiniboine River is in flood, with ice breaking up in the stream. Nic, Elfrieda’s husband, who lives in Winnipeg, is making a canoe. There is a wonderful little vignette at one point when Nic and Yolandi are walking outside one day and they see a canoe being carried upside down by what appear to be two teenage boys. Nic asks them if they are planning to use it in the river and they say they are. He tells them it is still too dangerous and convinces them to let him take the canoe, which he promises to look after. They can come and get it later. Nic gives them money so they can catch a bus to their home, which is located downriver.

This small detail elegantly and in a novelistic way serves to underscore how natural it is to care for other people around us, how we are all connected, and how, consequently, it is torturous for Elfrieda’s family to see her intent on destroying herself. It also says something important about the recklessness of youth and how the young always try to find their own solutions to problems, despite what their elders might say.

The girls’ mother, Lottie, is also a central figure in the drama and serves by the end of the book to propel the narrative forward in surprising ways. You can see how the two girls had been raised by their parents to be independent-minded and wilful. In Yolandi’s case, there is a savage oppositional force within her that rejects accepted norms and strives to exist as an independent thing in the world. And Elfrieda’s passion for music locates her close to the divine, as art is a way of making the ineffable sensible for mortals.

The way that Yolandi interacts with the nursing staff and the doctors who are assigned to caring for her sister tells you a lot about Yolandi. She gets close to one nurse, Janice, but finds the others to be unsatisfactory. She also fights with Elfrieda’s doctor. This negative animus will resurface in a surprising way later on in the novel but it would be poor form to reveal too much. There is a real dramatic arc at work in this book, with moments of great crisis around which the rest of the structure pivots.

Although there is a lot of dialogue it is rendered without conventional punctuation. The thoughts of Yolandi as she goes about her business are also conveyed in the narrative, and so you get a kind of collage of different points of view that emerge, each of which adds to the story in its own unique way. The characterisation is also extremely fine, with each of the people who are involved in the book assuming a unique personality.

This is a very fine book indeed. It also shows something about how Canada sees itself. At one point, Jacob has an idea to supply restaurants and roadhouses in the province with placemats to eat off that contain messages about the history of the nation, but this scheme does not get off the ground. In the book, the big neighbour to the south seems to be far less important in people’s minds than is Europe, which emerges as the main point of reference when Canadians was to compare themselves to something outside their own borders. The book’s title is taken from a poem titled ‘To A Friend’ of 1794 by Samuel Coleridge, a poet whose work Elfrieda had admired when she was a teenager. In the poem the narrator talks about his sister, with whom he had had conversations that he had not had with anyone else.

In a real way, this novel allows the author to confide in the reader in the same way that Coleridge confided in Charles Lamb (the “friend” of the poem). The way that the affections and other things tie people together can be described using the word “empathy”, although in Coleridge’s day the word did not exist. The poem named here is really about this force that ties people together, and it is something that is central to the human animal, which is essentially social in nature.

I was reminded of this force the other day when I was walking back home over the Pyrmont Bridge after having been to the dermatologists’ clinic. Near its western end I saw an elderly couple stop walking and turn to look at a small boy, aged about five years, who was standing next to the bridge’s boundary and playing with the barrier that has been installed there to stop people falling into the water. As I came closer, I asked aloud, “Is he lost?” and the woman sort of raised her hands, then walked over to the boy and bent down to talk to him. Just then, from the west, a middle-aged woman approached and the elderly woman spoke to her. I saw the middle-aged woman nodding her head and pointing to herself, evidently explaining to the other woman that she was, in fact, the boy’s mother. The mother and the boy then walked west, in the direction I was going in, and as they stopped at a bench where a younger woman was sitting I heard the middle-aged woman speaking in French.

Toews’ book is furthermore partly autobiographical. The author’s own roots lie in the Mennonite community in Canada and her sister suicided in 2010.

At Cronulla in spring

It was the last day of September. We sat at a table in the Contento Café on parkside Gerrale Street eating a fish basket (deep-fried crumbed prawns, pieces of deep-fried battered fish, hot chips, deep-fried calamari rings, and “crab claws” which are balls of crab meat that are deep-fried and attached to pieces of exoskeleton taken from crab legs) along with a rocket-and-pear salad that had pieces of cooked duck and macadamia nuts mixed with it. The staff who served us this halfway-sophisticated meal were both from the Middle East. A folky cover version of Bon Jovi’s 1986 hit ‘Livin’ on A Prayer’ was playing on the stereo and the young couple at the table near ours sounded as though they were having an argument but in fact they were just talking.

There are a lot of choices for dining out on the main drag which is, not surprisingly, named Cronulla Street and is open to vehicular traffic for part of its length, but closed to it for the remainder. We had walked its length surveying the prospects. I had spied Tako, a Japanese place, and pork banh mi from Golden Hot Bread (a Vietnamese shop) was also an option. There is also Casa Pollo for takeaway, a Thai place, and an Italian place inside a white Art-Deco building on the corner of Surf Road that does oven-baked pizza as well as pasta.

I’m not sure how we ended up where we did, in an unremarkable place on a different street, but it did the trick, and after lunch we headed toward the beach (where else?) and the seafront promenade, which was full of people walking their dogs. There are parking bays for cars behind the grass next to the beach, and palm trees and pine trees standing in rows. People were enjoying the beginning of the outdoor season lying in the sun and the wind on the grass. And there were dogs everywhere and dogs of all sizes. Many of the dogs were busy sniffing other dogs. It was all very companionable until we got to the halfway point between Cronulla Beach and Shelly Beach past where the waves break over the bombora that sits in the ocean off the rocks of the foreshore.

There I heard a young woman calling out “help!” I saw a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter standing on the cliff edge looking down at the surf breaking on the rocks lying below. The woman bustled back to the path with a worried look on her face as we stopped to wait and see if help was, in fact, needed. “She’s calling out help,” the woman said to an elderly couple who were standing on the path, and who I assumed were her parents. “They’re all sitting there together,” the woman went on. I had seen several young women in bikinis lying on towels on the narrow strip of sand at the bottom of the cliff. “Maybe she’s just mucking around,” offered the wise father. My friend and I walked on regardless.

We reached Shelly Beach and I took a photo of a sizeable Australian flag that was attached to a flagpole set prominently in the front garden of a two-storey house facing the ocean. The wind was playing with the flag and people walked and jogged past us as we stood admiring the sea view. A bass voice could be heard behind us as we walked back the way we had come. “You’re doing a great job champion, keep up the good work,” it said. It had been addressed to the jogger who just then passed us, heading south. The man who had made the remark was wearing an electric-blue T-shirt and shorts and he was walking fast in a northerly direction, speaking at random to people as he went along.

There was a pair of young couples walking in the same direction. One couple was Asian and the other was Anglo. The young Asian woman wore a black leather jacket and black cotton pants that were wide at the ankles. She had white trainers on her feet. The young Asian man wore an olive-green T-shirt and blue trousers. He carried a rucksack over his right shoulder and wore black sneakers on his feet. The young Anglo woman wore a summery, colourful cotton skirt and a white cotton top that was tied at the back. She wore brown leather sandals on her feet. The young Anglo man wore a white T-shirt with a black stripe around the middle, and dark shorts and thongs. All four were talking animatedly as they walked along the path, engrossed in the company they created there in the spring sunshine.

“Oh my God, the fridge is right next to the couch,” said a well-dressed youngish woman carrying a branded handbag who was looking at a real estate sign that had been set up in the front yard of an apartment block visible from the path. She was talking to her partner, who was with her.

There was a flowering jasmine bush in the front yard of one block of flats, a flowering red banksia tree in the front yard of another one, and huge banksia trees full of yellow flowers growing on the verge near the cliff that faced the ocean. As we headed back toward the station I saw a young Chinese couple; the man had a Sydney University athletic top with a crest on the left-hand side where the heart is. There were also Pakistani, Pacific islander, and African people visiting the beach on the day we were there.

There is a Berkelouw bookshop in the shopping centre, confirming an impression, on my first-ever visit to the area, that it resembles the Sunshine Coast in southeast Queensland. Certainly most of the people I saw there were white and middle class. Including the three fourteen-year-old girls, halfway between childhood and adulthood, who hurried in their bikinis down the pavement and around the corner of Cronulla Street and Surf Road where the estate agent is located. This is another thing about Cronulla: the number of apartments here, although they are often older than the ones that have been built on the Sunshine Coast, some dating from the 1970s or even earlier. In the estate agent's shop window there was another Australian flag, this time standing in the corner. There was also an advertisement for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, two-carspace unit in a small block of flats located one street back from the water. The asking price was $1.4 million.

On the train back to the city I saw construction site cranes at Kirrawee, Hurstville, and Kogarah heralding the imminent arrival of new blocks of flats. At one point in the journey an elderly man got on. He was wearing a plaid shirt made with the colours pink and pale blue and olive green. I don’t know where he was born but he was carrying a number of grey plastic strips that are used as conduits for electrical flexes in apartments when you want to hide them from the world as they travel from one point in the place to another. He also carried a white plastic bag with ‘Gi-gi’s’ printed on it in pink lettering, and it contained a number of items, one of which was a DVD titled ‘Transformers’. While he sat in the train he took out of the bag a couple of folded pages that had been taken from a magazine and that contained advertisements printed in four colours. He was sitting there on the bench seat with his ankles crossed and keeping to himself.

At Central Station as we were going up the escalators a casually-dressed young man stopped the flow of people walking up on the right-hand side of the machine. He was standing near us and then from further down in the queue of people could be heard a big, male voice calling out loudly, “Go the chooks!” Everyone was suddenly on alert at this display of raw physicality, and most of the people around us there were unhappy as a result. You could have cut the air with a knife. At the next set of escalators, near the grand Concourse, two more fans were walking with their mates. They were dressed in the familiar red-white-and-blue uniform of the Eastern Suburbs Rugby League team.

Above: Cronulla Beach.

Above: The flagpole and flag in the front garden of a block of flats near Shelly Beach.

Above: A deserted pavilion at Shelly Beach.

Above: A large banksia next to the oceanfront walk.

Book review: Road Series, Hugo Race (2016)

This is a memoir by a musician of the post-punk era and you can feel him reaching out with his instincts and his mind for models that might guide him on his way. There are references to certain types of writing from time to time but the book lacks a centre where the man himself existed in time.

I didn’t finish this book, it didn’t warrant the time required for that. It contains descriptions of concerts, meetings with people in share houses, and conversations in the backs of taxis, but what is missing is any sense of coherence that might have tied the disparate elements together into a whole.

Race has an impressionistic sensibility that serves to render in a sort of jerky, stroboscopic technicolour the frantic pace of a drug-inspired lifestyle full of stage appearances and girlfriends, but there’s no solid thread to hang onto, or anything like a plot to tie it all together. This was a disappointing book that reminded me of the risks inherent in the kind of blasé nihilism that young people adopt as a pose when confronting the world. Often, what lies behind the mask they put on to deal with things is nothing but an emptiness. Hating everything they see, they might yet have nothing useful to offer in its place.

Ever been mansplained? How about femmesplained?

This post involves two separate stories. One happened not so long ago and involved a woman who uses the name of a famous postmodernist theorist in her Twitter handle. She had made a comparison between Germany in the 1930s and the US today and I had said that I didn’t think that the two cases were identical. I gave my reasons but she dismissed them, telling me that she was a sociologist who teaches on German politics and that I was mansplaining to her.

I still don’t agree with her but note for the record because of her attitude she made it impossible to have a conversation but I retired gracefully, maintaining my pride intact. In the end, she had not convinced me, she had merely insulted me.

The second story involves another conversation that took place on social media, this time on Facebook where a well-known Australian author had announced that she was going to be involved in the judging of a literary prize. I made some comments about novels and the fact that women had historically been the main readers of novels in the early days. Another person, who is American, said that female conduct had been controlled through novels by the dominant culture in England in the 19th century and that other countries had done novels differently.

I had mentioned Jane Austen, and I noted in the ensuing conversation that Austen had been publishing well before the Victorian era. I also noted that women had been the main readers of novels even as far back as the early 18th century, and for that reason mentioned the readers of the novels of Samuel Richardson. It turned out that we were in furious agreement, although the emphasis was not always placed in the same way by both parties. She ended up saying that we had no disagreement but then took the conversation offline onto Messenger. Here, she backed herself into the conversation sideways, mentioning that some of her friends had verbally raised their eyebrows at our exchange. I let her go on and it came out that she had a doctorate specialising in the early modern novel and had felt that I was trying to win the argument while she felt that she was merely trying to get acknowledgement for her learning.

I thought back onto the conversation we had held and said that I thought that I had been fair. In the end, she firmly insisted on her scholarship as the basis for the truth and I wound up conceding that Laurence Sterne had been a singular genius. She said she would try to find the biopic ‘Mary Shelley’ that I had recommended and I left the conversation as it was.

What the whole shemozzle made clear for me was that for this woman the fact of her doctorate was of more importance to her for the purposes of the argument than any point that she might make in the moment to back up her claims. I tend to fall in the other camp, and demand that people who claim to profess expertise must substantiate their arguments with real evidence. As an American, she possibly felt that my democratic Australian spirit was at odds with her keenly-felt identity politics. For my part, I don’t care what letters you put before or after your name, I have to hear your arguments first before I will concede defeat.

The whole thing reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov’s quarrel with people he characterised as “lady-novelists”. His way of explaining the difference between himself and this breed of personage that he felt was common in his day was that they buttoned up their shirts with the opposite hand. In my mind, the method used by today’s femmesplainers is to adopt the scholasticist’s pose, claiming knowledge by dint of a-priori academic attainment, rather than through an empirical process of conversation and argument. It reminds me of the quarrel Petrarch had with stubborn Aristotelians in the 14th century: he critiqued men who assigned truth merely on the basis of who had said what rather than on the objective merit of the assertion itself.

Book review: How Should A Person Be?, Sheila Heti (2013)

This odd novel starts well but can’t maintain the pace necessary to construct a reliable central character. It’s got a Knausgaardian reliance on actual reportage from life but it’s not as sustained as that exemplar in any of its moments. Heti fails to keep the engine going for long enough so that a plausible first-person narrator can emerge in the fragments she assembles for the reader. Which is a shame because the fey tone you find at the beginning is full of potential. It’s just that it doesn’t last.

Knausgaard keeps up the patter as he relays the minutiae of existence as he goes about his business during the day. The even tone he uses in his novels is the thing that keeps you reading but even though Heti at one stage buys a cassette recorder in order to capture conversations for future use, she doesn’t manage to create the persistent type of form that the Norwegian writer achieves in his autobiographical novels.

Oktoberfest 2018, Sydney

On the second-last day of the month I waited at the light rail stop at about 11.30am. Once on the tram, a young man in the carriage wearing a purple sloppy joe took off a pair of heavy boots as he sat in his seat. From a Coles branded polka-dot shopping bag that was in his rucksack on the floor he took out a pair of fashionable grey sneakers. He put the shoes, which had three parallel black stripes on the outside of the uppers, on his feet. Then he put the boots into the same bag and put it in his rucksack.

At Central Station three young men coming up on the escalator from platform 25 were wearing long sleeved shirts, waistcoats and plaid caps like 19th century apprentices. On the train a man was talking on his mobile phone behind me in the carriage. “Oh hi, can I make an appointment for Monday? Are you open?” Monday was Labour Day. “You’re closed on Monday?” said the man, who sounded like he had migrated from Vietnam.

I arrived at Tempe at around 12.30pm and followed some men wearing lederhosen and check shirts and braces who were also leaving the train station. We queued up outside the Concordia Club and I paid the $15 door charge to gain entrance. A blue paper band was attached to my right wrist. In the compound there were white marquees set up with long tables and chairs, in addition to the usual restaurant seating on the verandah and inside the building. Before looking for a table, I bought some drinks tickets at the cashier that had been set up for that purpose at the back of the clubhouse. The bar didn’t accept money and the only way to purchase beer was using tickets.

After the transaction had been completed I found a table in a marquee that had some empty seats and asked the young men sitting there if it was ok to sit down but they said that other people were expected. At the next table I asked the young mother sitting there if it was ok to take a couple of the empty seats. She took pity on me and said it was fine. I sat down to wait for a friend.

At 1.06pm there was an explosion of amplified guitar coming from the club’s interior. Then there was silence punctuated by the hubbub of hundreds of adults getting tipsy on good German beer. What sounded like an electric ukelele began strumming shortly afterward, prompting vocal expressions of approval from the people at the table next to mine. One of the men sitting there had a T-shirt that said “Oktoberfest” printed on the back along with a colourful heraldic crest. His head was shaved and he had tattoos all along his left arm from the wrist to where his arm disappeared into his sleeve. I saw a man standing at one point who had tattoos on his calves, it might have been the same tall muscular man, but I’m not sure of it.

Other young men were sitting at the same table. Some young men wearing richly-embroidered lederhosen and check shirts and suspenders were standing around the table talking and drinking. One of them wore a T-shirt that was printed with a tromp-l’oeil design that looked like a traditional check shirt with suspenders. The design included the top of the lederhosen that the wearer should have had on. At the same table several women were seated who wore grey felt conical hats on their heads. Other people had the colours of the German flag featured on their clothing: red and yellow.

Everyone was drinking beer. My Spaten was in a glass stein with a handle and dimpled sides. Next to me the young mother and father I had spoken with earlier were talking. Their children were with them. One of the children, a toddler aged about two years, was crawling on the table top. Her brother, who was aged about five, hung around the table. From time to time his father would take him to where the jumping castle had been set up on one of the croquet greens.

After a while the friend I had been waiting for arrived and we took turns to order food at the kitchen, where there was another queue. I ate pork schnitzel, sauerkraut and mashed potato. The meat was served with gravy. I also had a white roll with the meal. Another friend turned up a bit later and ordered some food as well, choosing to eat fried battered fish and red cabbage.

After eating food we moved to stand on the grass. There we listened to the music and talked. From time to time we would visit the bar to get refills. Two of us wore jackets against the cold wind even though the sun was warm. There were some Asian women sitting at tables in the main hall and on the verandah but for the most part the people there had a European background. Some security staff wearing black suits who had lanyards around their necks walked around the compound keeping an eye on things. Club staff dressed in traditional German costumes came by the tables on occasion taking away empty plastic cups and used plates where people had been consuming food.

A band played throughout the afternoon but from time to time they would take a break, and during these periods the PA system continued to be used, feeding recorded songs to the crowd. The music included a version of Joe Cocker’s 1990 ‘Unchain My Heart’,  Mary Hopkins singing her 1968 hit ‘Those Were the Days’, the 1959 song ‘Che Sera’ that was made famous by Doris Day in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, a version of John Paul Young’s 1977 ‘Love Is in the Air’, one of Van Morrison’s lyrical 1967 ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, one of Ike and Tina Turner’s stomping 1973 hit ‘Nutbush City Limits’, and one of the Proclaimers’ bracing 1988 song ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles’.

The music was on all afternoon, so this is a very partial list of the songs that were played. It was hard to find an authentic German flavour in this sort of playlist but the club runs the event each year so presumably they were giving people what they had asked for. For us, sometimes the music was cause for conversation and in any case this sort of fusion is inevitable where the source cultures share so much in common. The overall effect was festive, and men, women and children danced happily on the wooden dancefloor that has been installed in the main hall near the front door.

After my friends and I moved inside the main room and we had found seats at one of the long tables that had been set up there for visitors to use, we talked among ourselves while the people around us enjoyed the afternoon. There were elderly women sitting at our table who spoke German, as had done the woman who sold me my drinks tickets. At the next table a group of young men, and women who were dressed in dirndls, were seated. One of the women handed a small child across the table she was sitting at, to one of the men. He held the child in his arms and moved its small body to the rhythm of the music as it played over the PA system.

On the way back to Central Station I sat on a bench seat opposite two young men who were speaking in Korean. Once I was back on the tram and we were moving along the tracks through Chinatown I saw a long line of young people standing in a queue leading to Yomie’s Rice x Yoghurt on the corner of Hay and Thomas streets, proving that cultural fusion is popular everywhere.

Universities should issue ‘journeyman’ certificates

When I worked in the education sector I was in the IT department of a major Australian university, one of the Group of Eight. One day near the middle of my tenure a senior manager, who was also an academic, visited my workplace to meet people. She was shorter than me and had dark hair and a polite mien. She shook hands and heard what my name was then she moved dutifully onto the next employee. I eventually signed a workplace agreement to govern my role with the institution and she was the respondent in that process, signing the document on behalf of the university. After that time that I met her the agreement was the only time I had anything to do with her.

But she was on the record promoting the university in the community as a place where learning could be pursued throughout an individual’s life, and not just at the beginning of their time in the workforce. The message was that people could benefit from continuous learning opportunities that institutions like hers could offer them, giving them a way to upskill so that they would be more able to compete for higher-paying jobs, for example, or to change career and move into an area of the economy that offered more employment opportunities.

The problem with this scenario is that the barrier to entry to university is still quite high. A diploma that you pursue part-time still takes a full year, depending on the one you undertake. And often the coursework you are given to complete is stuff you already know because you have been working for a long time in a role that uses that knowledge. You might even know more about your field than the teachers who are employed by the university.

To accommodate this kind of person, universities should establish a “journeyman” program, allowing people in the community to they get guidance from an academic in a chosen field of study for a limited duration, say three or six months, during which time the consumer researches a topic and writes an essay that can then be published on a website like The Conversation.

To qualify for the program the consumer would have to show evidence to the university of prior knowledge. It could be a personal hobby or it could be something related to their career, about which they are evidently much better-informed than the average person in the street. The university could charge a fee for the service and, if the product of the program were of sufficiently high quality, the consumer could then go on to enrol in a doctoral program with a view to completing a longer essay of thesis length.

UPDATE 16 December 2018: I was in a cab coming back home from the city when I heard an ad on the driver's radio about "bespoke" courses being offered by the University of New England. I looked it up when I got home. They are courses where students can pick units of study to undertake from undergraduate and postgraduate lists. You can choose two, three or four units (presumably to study part-time over a period of a year or more):

One option is to design a Bespoke Course using only ‘Fundamental’ units from a degree. A second option is to select only ‘Advanced’ units. In a third option, you can choose a combination of fundamental and advanced units from a degree to create a ‘Critical Content’ Bespoke Course. The last option allows you to combine units from entirely different degrees and disciplines—you can do this as part of a ‘Mix and Match’ Bespoke Course.

Book review: Li Shangyin, Poems (2018), and The Complete Cold Mountain (2018)

These two recent bilingual editions of Tang poetry are welcome additions to books of Chinese literature but it’s difficult to see how I can substantially add to the comments I have already made about the period (16 September on this blog) apart from refining some of the ideas that I explored in that post. This blogpost attempts to do that.

The Li Shangyin collection, edited and translated from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts, is a New York Review of Books edition and it is more highly mediated than the collection of Tang poetry I reviewed earlier. But to my taste it’s not adequately annotated. A lot more could have been done to explain esoteric referents that the poet uses in many of the poems.

The significance of things that were common in Li’s day is, naturally enough, remote today. Doubly so because this is not just a collection of classical poetry, it’s a collection of classical Chinese poetry. So, frankly more work is needed to clarify things. The poet lived from 813 to 858 and was, as the poets in the earlier reviewed collection were, a state functionary.

Li’s subject matter is singled out for comment by the translator in this edition but the poetry seems to be fairly typical of the Tang period from what I could see. The privileging of the natural world is again evident here, as it had been in the other collection I read. What is also clear in these poems is the fact of the present moment. In the absence of any form of narrative (which I had also remarked on with respect to the earlier collection) the predominant feeling in these poems is a kind of melancholy linked to the transitory nature of life.

You are caught in a matrix of sensations and you register impressions as you observe the natural world, but nothing very much takes place apart from your ephemeral impressions.

Today a pine
On the ravine floor,
Tomorrow a cork tree
On a mountain peak.

The immediate sensation of the physical world circumscribes your horizons, limiting the scope of your imagination and rendering your feelings as mere sensations that fly past the periphery of your consciousness. The lack of even superlunary beings leaves the poet bereft of a certain potential for the creation of meaning. There is also no significant other in the mundane universe to bounce off. And there is no certain consequence for any perception, just the passing of the moment into a kind of oblivion that is fortuitously avoided through writing.

This kind of writing can be inspiring because it offers a distinctive outlook on life (and this point will be explored more in the review, below, of the second book being considered in this blogpost) but humans crave narratives and we produce them, apparently without even thinking, all the time in the course of our daily lives.

Just today, for example, it being a Friday when I wrote these words, there was a tweet in my feed by an Australian academic living in America about the Kavanaugh inquest. There had been so much news already this week, she said, that the news team in the studio could just go home without putting out more. This kind of memeification of personal moments, tying the individual’s perceptions of reality to larger debates going on in the public sphere, is frequent and unceasing on social media as people come to terms with things that they hear and see throughout the day. It is the narrative instinct at work that we see in theses artefacts of consciousness on Twitter and Facebook, and that we react to with surprise, anger, or approval. In poetry like Li’s, and like that of the hermit(s) whose work is described below, the moment is cut off from that larger narrative, even though we strive as readers to fix it in place in relation to something bigger and more meaningful. Being constantly deprived of that narrative focus is tiring and eventually frustrating.

In my mind, these poems are best not read all at once, but rather they should be sampled selectively one at a time, and preferably talked about with a friend. Left alone, the mind cries out for some sort of development, something on which the emotions can hang.

In the second collection under consideration, which is a collection by the hermit Hanshan (which is translated as “Cold Mountain”) you are again faced with the point of view of a single mind. There are no other points of view on offer, and while there is a certain credible aphoristic quality present, there is no dialogue. The tone is often ironic and tired in the face of the conventionality of the world, or concerned more with eternal things than the mundane subjects that animate the vignettes on offer. But there is again little argument although you are aware of the point of view of the narrator, who is a Buddhist, and his distinctive system of values, one which eschews material wealth in favour of other things.

Here, the development is very sparse indeed.

Fulfilling means fulfilling the spirit,
this is called being fulfilled.
Transforming means transforming the form,
this is called being transformed.
If we fulfil the spirit and transform the form,
we can reach the stage of an immortal.
Not fulfilling the spirit means no transformation,
no escaping death and suffering in the end.

The Chinese original is also given in this edition, and you can see the way the five-character blocks are set up in a rectangle, the totality of the poem forming a single piece of text that can be understood as a standalone unit of signification. I’m not sure how the poetics operate in this kind of scheme but it looks like each poem has a physicality that makes it seem to be inevitable, with the prescribed number of characters lining up to form the whole.

Not all of the poems are as reductive as the one included above here, but that poem seemed, to me, to state something central to the kind of poetics on offer in this collection, animated as they are by the distinctly Chinese form of Buddhism known as “Zen” (or “Chan”). The circularity and aridity of the movement from beginning to end has something emblematic that goes to the core, in my mind, of the vision being proposed here. Here’s another one that goes along similar lines:

A good-looking man
who had mastered all six arts
went to see the south, but was driven back to the north.
He went to see the west, and was chased toward the east,
so he wandered a long time, drifting like water weed,
and flying about like mugwort without taking a rest.
I ask what kind of thing he is –
his family name is poverty; suffering is his given name.

The essential lesson of the piece is clear, and it goes to something that is central to the Buddhist ethos on offer in these poems, but the sterile nature of the composition is not evocative of anything that transports the individual out of a world of care. It is a dry and austere mode of living that is presented to the reader. There is little hope of improving your life, and there are few consolations for the solitary traveller apart from a certainty of the essential nobility of material poverty, and certainly no hope of transcendence.

This edition is a strange book as it is published by a religious imprint, so presumably you are supposed to glean meaning from the poems without much context placing the verses in the historical moment. The approval of the editors is unironic and patent, like shiny leather. The poetry in the book was recovered from obscurity via Japanese scholars of Zen Buddhism starting in the Edo period (1603-1868). Zen Buddhism was strongly influenced by Taoism.

A cashless world and the senseless utopianism of the technorati

Recently, ads in the light rail that I catch have been promoting the ability to use your credit card to pay for your trips. It was only a few years ago that the government in New South Wales had finally got their act together to be able to offer a transaction card to travellers called the Opal card for all rail and bus services. You can top up the wallet it represents from the internet at home using your credit card. But now, they want you instead to use your credit card to pay for trips on the train.

The problem is that transaction cards of all types are riddled with problems. You'd think that paying for lunch would be easy, but it's often more difficult than it looks. For instance, I've been having problems recently with Commonwealth Bank of Australia point-of-sale terminals. My National Australia Bank transaction card (which is linked to my cheque account) is rejected most of the time with this brand of terminal, the one with a flat screen and a touch panel instead of buttons. So I have to pay with cash sometimes.

I always keep enough cash with me in my wallet to deal with this sort of problem but not long ago on one weekend at the restaurant I ate lunch in, where the total for two meals was $43, I saw that the POS terminal was one of the hated CBA models, so I opted for cash instead of EFTPOS. Then the cashier asked me if I had three dollars when I gave her a $50 note. I looked in my wallet and gave her $45 in banknotes, but you'd think that a popular suburban cafe would have the ability to give seven dollars in change. It seems that regardless of how you choose to pay for your meal you will end up having problems!

This discrete failure should alert us to the dangers of going all-electronic when it comes to making payments for things in the real world. Things will inevitably fuck-up if we go cashless and it will be at the most inopportune time that it happens. The trouble with the cashless crowd is that transactions often do not complete. I’ve already mentioned the problems I’ve personally had with CBA POS terminals. But at any time your cheque account might be refused by the POS terminal at a supermarket or your credit card transaction might lead to a message to the restaurant staff to get your to sign a chit to prove that the transaction was legitimate. These kinds of things happen all the time.
And yet the technorati with all their utopian visions of a completely cashless society are out there with their grand schemes and flawless plans for an improved economy that rides on the back of electricity above all else.

I had a long conversation with a couple of these evangelists earlier this year and they were full of ideas for making things better. When I remonstrated with them and noted that sometimes electronic transactions do not go through they were all, like, “They’re just teething problems. If the world were completely cashless then you bet your bottom dollar the system would work.”

But I don’t share their optimism. For me, the likelihood of someone not being able to catch a cab to get home late one night, or not being able to buy food when you are sick on a weekend, seems inevitable in a world where buskers would have to get you to log into a website to make donations and homeless people would be completely at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats in government departments. Cash is a material guarantee of service in a world where networks are always under threat all the time from nameless actors with questionable motives.

Book review: The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt (2000)

This experimental novel is written in a way that shows that the author cares little about the reader. You get narratives truncated and interrupted by other pieces of text that have absolutely no relation to what you had just been reading.

The beginning of the book is a standard enough story but it is replaced later by the story of a mother and her young son, who she is teaching to read and much else besides, but every now and then bits get stuck in the flow that stick out like sore thumbs. It’s immensely frustrating especially since the story that forms the bulk of the book is so poorly executed anyway. I didn’t see the need for all the interruptions and felt that they were just evidence of a partially-realised plan.

It doesn’t need to be like this. In his brilliant 1995 novel ‘The Unconsoled’, Kazuo Ishiguro constructs a strange narrative around the story of a man who is to give a performance of classical music in a regional European town. But events always seem to get in the way of him realising his purpose, sidetracking him and taking him in new directions, where he meets more people, and the turnstile of dead-ends and broken stories continues right to the end of the book. This very unusual novel has a deliberately experimental structure but the way that the transitions are handled shows you that the writer has a distinct purpose in mind, and the effect is magical, as though you were watching a performance by a particularly skilled conjurer. DeWitt has something similar in mind but utterly lacks the talent or vision needed to make it come about.

The characterisation in DeWitt’s novel is also very weak. The mother is only incompletely rendered. She is an American living in London with her child and she has precarious financial arrangements and a burning appetite for learning. But she doesn’t have enough variety or depth in her conception within the story to keep you turning the pages. I just lost interest after a while (about 11 percent of the book finished).

The beginning of the novel is also weak. You are meant to understand that in the old days (the early part of the 20th century) in America people were either gamblers or preachers. The lack of real insight about the culture as it existed then was another failing in the book, in my eyes.

Political correctness and the overreach of the radical left

Some battles get put aside in the face of a defeat, like the plans the Liberal Party has to privatise the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Too hard right now? Let’s try again down the track.

On the left, one battle has just been lost but will undoubtedly be revisited again in the future at a more opportune time. The crisis happened when The Saturday Paper decided to disqualify writers submitting essays for the Horne Prize, for which it organises the judging, where they were writing about issues important to minorities but where the writer was not a part of the minority in question. The conditions the outlet had put on the prize had made Anna Funder, an Australian author who had been asked to judge entries for the prize, retire from the judging panel. Then journalist David Marr, who was also a judge, retired as well. The paper then backflipped.

But the issue is not going away. The episode underscores an ugly tendency on the left to reward political correctness at the expense of true enquiry or scholarship. But it’s completely nonsensical. If it’s fine for people living, say, on the subcontinent to enjoy the benefits of science and democracy – both of which were innovations that emerged in Europe at specific moments in history for specific reasons at specific points in time – then it should be fine for an Anglo to celebrate the birth of Krishna in the southern spring alongside any other person who chooses this form of religion. What’s wrong with practicing yoga if you are from a Greek background? Who’s to say what you should or should not do if it hurts no-one and is good for you?

But the PC brigade are immune to reason, and only see what already agrees with their views. You cannot argue with them, especially not on social media, where the extreme views get all the attention, hollowing out the middle and making it impossible for reasonable ideas to flourish. And the overreach of the left is hurting its chances of convincing those with opposing views. The more solidly they back their jaded nags in the stale races they run online the more likely others, with different views, will be to take polar-opposite positions. A stalemate ensues.

The judging episode however points to a disturbing contemporary trend in the public sphere, where different groups of people try to quarantine issues against criticism, and only acknowledge the validity of opinions from people who they judge to be qualified to comment on them. In this kind of environment, competition between ideas is jettisoned as too confronting as people insist on a limited version of reality that belongs to them in a personal way. They resent any attempt by people outside the tent to make comments about select issues, and ignore what they say if it goes against cherished notions.

But this is the new normal, which is why it’s more important than ever to keep the ABC free for the user, and ad-free. The ABC at least functions as some sort of clearing house for the truth.