Priceless

Yesterday is the birth place of today

Marvin Gaye, 1983. Not wrong.

And he wasn't wrong here either ...

Sam Dastyari exposes the vile absurdity of Pauline Hanson

Racism is having a worrying (but minor) resurgence in Australia. Pauline Hanson is its best known flag-waver although in recent days journalist Andrew Bolt, television 'celebrity' Sonia Kruger and Norther Territory politician Adam Giles have added fuel to the flames (or been sucked into the vortex ... if you're inclined to feel over-generous when reflecting on their public pronouncements). All four have spoken up or written in favour of banning or keeping out Muslim migrants to Australia.

Sam Dastaryi, an Australian Labor Party Senator with whose right-leaning tendencies I have often disagreed, has been remarkably effective and truly outstanding in challenging attempts to make anti-Muslim sentiment the new normal of Australian political discourse. His performance - sitting next to Pauline Hanson on last night's ABC programme Q & A - is a masterclass in challenging political opponents directly, forcefully and effectively without losing either the plot or - even more importantly - the argument or the audience. You can see it here.

Today he posted a photo and comment via Twitter to highlight the absurdity, the irrationality, the mendacity of Pauline Hanson's racism. You simply cannot fault his analysis or doubt his real courage in these ghastly times. We need more people like Senator Dastyari to be willing to stick their heads above the parapet to say ... Enough, No more! And the rest of us (you know, when is a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant like me ever going to encounter such a challenge to my legitimacy and background?) ... we need to give whatever support we can to brave, decent, progressive voices.

Sam Dstyari at five years old. Pic: Sam Dastyari
Me @ 5. Never been religious (born Muslim).
Under the Hanson ban I would never have been able to come to Australia.

Some days a man could weep

From today's Guardian ...

The TV presenter Sonia Kruger has called for an end to Muslim immigration to Australia, saying she agrees with the US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stance on immigration.

Read the whole article here.

Thankfully good folk like those at Gosford Anglican Church know something about common, human decency.

Another Country

Passage III: Project Another Country. Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan (2009)
Singapore Art Museum, June 2016

A beautiful gift by Trevor Gill

Trevor Gill as Bottom. Pic: Topher McGrillis

The initial reason for travelling to the UK in June was to visit Belfast, meet old friends of almost forty years standing and catch my friend Trevor Gill play the role of Bottom in the Royal Shakespeare Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Trevor and his fellow amateur players were, quite simply, brilliant. It would have been impossible for anyone who didn't know the cast personally to tell which people on stage were the professionals, which the amateurs (accents aside).

Over this weekend the Belvoir Theatre mechanicals helped to bring the RSC Dream 2016 to a close at Stratford-upon-Avon. What a buzz. How richly deserved.

Trevor wrote of his feelings and impressions about being involved in this remarkable project for the last year. The RSC published his thoughts on the production's blog. Trevor started his short essay this way:

This Friday night, five of my good friends from The Belvoir Players and I will stand at the very heart of world drama. We will step out onto the stage at the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), Stratford on Avon in the 400th anniversary year of William Shakespeare’s death. We follow in the footsteps of the great and the good of UK and international theatre. 

Sometimes I still find it hard to believe that it’s happening.

Read Trevor's whole piece here.

Lucy Ellinson (Puck), Spike, Trevor Gill (Bottom) and me at the Belfast show after-party.

If ever there could be a good reason to fly 10,000 miles around the globe it would be to cheer on Trevor and his team. We had fun. I can't imagine what it must have felt like for TG and the Belvoir Theatre players.

An idea is forming

Death on a Pale Horse. Benjamin West (1796)

Preparing for a course on Spanish film

Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (1928)

The course outline for my second semester film studies course (Spanish language film) arrived in my university account inbox this morning. I've been waiting for it (not entirely patiently) so I can try to get ahead of the viewing schedule. I've seen only three of the thirteen movies on the screening list previously so that's good for me in that I'll be watching films I've not seen before. On the other hand I'll be viewing most of the works for the first time so I shall need to ensure I see each at least twice if I'm going to get into them adequately. There are, I accept, more onerous tasks in life.

I was not surprised that our screenings begin with Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. That's one of my three. I watched it again this afternoon (It's under twenty minutes in running time). The opening scene with the eye remains as confronting now as it was when I first watched - I don't know how long ago. Once again, I closed my eyes because it's too difficult to look at. Modern day gore and guts and comic book violence have little effect on me. The willing suspense of disbelief seldom kicks in when shock-horror violence of absurd unreality and computer-generated fakery fills the screen. But I can't follow that open razor across the character's eye, even though I know the scene was filmed using the eye of a dead calf. I've no doubt the impulse to turn away, to not look is exactly what the film-makers were after. Nevertheless it's impressive that almost ninety years later, knowing what's coming, and knowing how the shot was constructed it still retains its power to shock; I still can't look.

The film is, of course, surrealist bonkers. One would expect nothing less of a project in which Salvador Dali participated. (I did not know he plays one of the priests being hauled across the bedroom floor. I think I did know, however, that it's Bunuel himself who wields the open razor). I laughed when I read that Dali thought the film had failed his co-author intentions at its first showing. No fight broke out among the audience, which reads like a who's who of the Parisian avant garde. Freud and psychoanalysis must have seemed so revolutionary in the mid-twenties. The film-makers must have felt they were pushing the boundaries of the still-new medium of film and the barely developed idea of spectatorship. Maybe they were.

I wonder what they would make of today's voyeuristic, reality-show culture? Dali might have loved its frivolous excess of attention-seeking performance (although he may also have despaired at the dearth of technical skill, irony and intellect to underpin it). Bunuel might have thought his worst nightmares were being realised. I shall see if the course sheds any light on those, not entirely idle speculations.

It's a long way from a white Christmas

We woke to snow falling on our Canberra garden this morning. Snow - in Australia! It's not what you expect. It's certainly not what I emigrated from Scotland in search of. I ought not to be too surprised though. We live about ninety-minutes' drive from the Snowy Mountains and, I suppose, the clue is in the their title. 

Spike, of course, was happier than a penguin at the south pole. Not only was it cold (minus two last night and minus four expected tonight), not only was the ground frosted hard, it was actually snowing as we looked out of our window. Wrapped only in her dressing gown Spike went to investigate, to willingly experience the cold (I guess) and take the photograph of our garage roof (which could pass for a ploughed field on a crisp northern morning from my childhood). 

While our intrepid photographer was out capturing her shot I was switching on the fire in our study because ... you know ... it was snowing outside. I ask you, does that seem odd to you?

This does for today

Holding Back The Years by Simply Red

This song went to Number 1 in the USA on this day in 1985, apparently. I was living in my Grassmarket flat when the single came out in the UK; barely three months out of hospital after ten months rehab following my accident. Even at that stage I knew the world needed changing. Thirty-something years later there is still work needs doing.

I bought the CD, of course. I still have it somewhere. 

This'll do for today. It fits, not that one knows why.

And today's word is ...

asseverate

It's a word I never knew existed until I read it in a short story, Monday or Tuesday, by Virginia Woolf. I had to look it up. Dictionary.com tells me it means,

1. to declare earnestly or solemnly; affirm positively; aver.

from the Latin assevērātus spoken in earnest (past participle of assevērāre)

Who knew?

Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips, 1813

Mrs. Woolf, obviously. And Thomas Moore, who used it in Volume 6 of his six-volume Life of Lord Byron (1854). My guess is Lord Byron also probably knew what the word meant. I doubt that I shall ever use asseverate in any other context but, as ever, I am indebted to Virginia Woolf. 

I could be being a smarty pants here: Perhaps a year before this portrait was completed Lady Caroline Lamb asseverated that her lover, Lord Byron, was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." 

Allegedly.

A society for asking questions

Virginia Woolf. Source: AP/Getty Images

Ninety-five years ago Virginia Woolf published a collection of short stories entitled Monday or Tuesday. I read the opening two stories earlier today. The first - a short, short story - is called 'A Haunted House'. It clearly draws directly on Mrs. Woolf's life and the deaths of her parents. One can see in it the core elements concerned with families and loss as well as time and place (especially the house in 'Time Passes') presented with such accomplishment and power in the novel To The Lighthouse, published six years later.

The second piece in the 1921 short-story collection goes by the title, 'A Society'. It's a comic tale, a satire I suppose, extolling feminist Utopian ideas which, almost one hundred years after publication, remains insightful and compelling. Like everything of Virginia Woolf's I have read it also shows her powerful intellect and perceptive skill. It is witty, self-deprecating at times and sharp throughout. It's impossible not to think that a Century later we still haven't reached the point Mrs. Woolf looked forward to in her short story.

by Aubrey Beardsley, 1895

I subsequently stumbled over (yet again and not for the last time) just how much I do not know and have yet to learn when I found an academic paper on Mrs. Woolf's short story online: 'A Society': An Aristophanic Comedy by Virginia Woolf' by Lucía P. Romero-Mariscal. I vaguely recall studying one of Aristophanes' plays forty years ago at Stirling University. It may have been Lysistrata but might have been The Birds. I still possess the book of the great dead Greek's plays I bought in 1975 or 1976; one of several paperbacks to see me through the semester on drama. 

Now ... I'm not entirely thick. With character names such as Cassandra and Castalia, and references to Sappho in her story I understood Virginia Woolf was making Classical allusions as well as many other observations. But I had no idea at all of the direct reference to and influence of Aristophanes' Lysistrata in 'A Society' until I read Ms. Romero-Mariscal's short, insightful and persuasively argued paper. So I came away from this evening's set of readings with clear impressions and observations, which include:

• Every new encounter with Virginia Woolf's writing leaves me in awe of her talent and accomplishments;
• I truly do know much less than I think I know;
• I have a lot to learn;
• Writing has as much to do with reading as it does with writing.

When I was reading Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon I was struck by a suggestion of his that one should "climb your own family tree". He described that idea in these terms,

"... chew on one thinker - writer, artist, activist, role model - you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can."

I surprised myself at the time by sticking an IKEA-equivalent of a post-it note to the page in Mr. Kleon's book (page 15, as it happens). I scribbled on my note, "who would that be?" I was stumped not because I don't have heroes and role models. I have many. Instead, I struggled with selecting my number one, my person of choice with whom to begin. Since reading Steal Like an Artist, however, the question has been answering itself because time after time after time I'm drawn back to Virginia Woolf. Who would have thought so? Well, me actually; now that I think about her place in the panoply of influences and talents from which I might choose. 

It seems, then, I've found the first of my next three 'thinkers' to explore (as I continue to mine the works of Virginia Woolf). So ... Aristophanes, here I come. I shall start by digging out the creased and worn paperback volume of Greek plays I've carried with me across two continents for more than forty years. Back to the future indeed.

E Annie Proulx keeps moving

The writer's desk. Pic: John Freeman

Annie Proulx no longer lives in Wyoming (I may be one of the last people on the planet to know this fact but it's news to me). And she has a new novel out; Barkskins, which I shall add to the list of future-reads (university reading lists loom large in my current thinking; term starts in a week so I have other priorities).

I read those snippets of 'news' in an article, 'How The Writer Researches: Annie Proulx', in the online journal, The Literary Hub. The article is worth reading. It begins:

Annie Proulx is 80 years old and still not sure where she belongs. Standing in the atrium of her home in the Snoqualmie Valley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist eyes a photograph of the cottage she once occupied in Newfoundland, the setting of her 1993 novel, The Shipping News. “I fell in love with that landscape,” Proulx says, speaking in the tone of a woman describing an ex-lover.

“But ultimately, I did not belong there.”

After 20 years in Wyoming—several spent building a dream home she later sold—Proulx had a similar epiphany about that state. As she did about Vermont, and Texas, and New Mexico, and any number of places where she has lived. In an age of itinerary writer-teachers, Proulx’s boomerangs back and forth across North America are exceptional.

Now she’s made a similar discovery of the wooded idyll east of Seattle.

 If it's true that Ms. Proulx remains unsure about where she belongs there may yet be hope for a 'young man' like me, teetering on the brink of sixty-something. Write on Douglas. Write on.

Batman v Superman

If ever a movie could be improved by losing the first hour of its preposterous, pompous three hours, it's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Man, oh man what a crushingly boring sixty minutes that first hour is. After that it's a passable visual effects piece - completely bonkers - but no more than passable. Shame really.

High Tech / Low Starting Point

Spike handles one of the art works on display at Imaginarium, last Thursday at the Singapore Art Museum. It was a fun exhibition. The fact that I've been able to upload the file from my OneDrive folders suggests I may finally be following the instructions.

#OldManAlmostJoinsThe21stCentury

Poetry - a living, breathing art

Poet Jackie Kay recites her first commission as Scots Makar at the Opening Ceremony of Scotland's Parliament. (I was at university with Jackie and worked alongside her father, John, in the 1980s. Lucky me.)