Rego

Life in a box ... or two ...

Our bedroom, ready for the removalists (an anarchosyndicalist boy band from 1920s Soviet Russia). The lost Ark of the Covenant could be in there!!

Essentials of moving

Essentials for moving to Canberra on Sunday: 3 mysterious boxes of who knows what from the studio, 1 metre-long log, 1 metre-long pink plastic mould covered in white plaster (like something out of Alien), 3 half-metre branches, half a Bunnings toolkit and a square metre of steel. Joy.

SCA Open Day

Me and Norma Jean

Finished it.  At last!

Was it worth it?  Yes, truly amazing.  Did I get it all? Less than I think I did, much less.  I'll pay closer attention next time round.

Imagining America

My university study proper resumed today with the first classes of my literature unit (Imagining America, led by Dr David Kelly with whom I’ve studied previously – his Literature and Cinema course on book to film adaptations).  Typically (for me) I mossed the first class, a one hour lecture, thanks to a meeting running over at work.  I suppose I can’t complain too much.  NDS is allowing me the flexibility I need to study at all.  But I’ll try hard in the future not to miss classes.  I did make it to the first of our weekly two-hour seminars; this week an introduction to the course as a whole.  I volunteered to take the first week’s seminar topic (next Tuesday) on Walt Whitman with a particular focus on The Song of Myself.  I was the only person to put my hand up for Whitman, which I was rather pleased about.  I’m not keen on undergraduate group work.  To be honest, it’s because every time it’s foisted upon me my mark drops a notch or two. 

This afternoon we discussed the idea of America, considered within the context of American Exceptionalism and ‘the American experiment’ in nationhood and nation-building.  There were divergent views on the extent to which the exceptionalism notion still features in contemporary political philosophy (as distinct from current political discourse).  I tended towards that remains live within both philosophy and discourse (thinking of Bush and the Neo-Cons not so long ago or the Tea Party today).  A couple of my fellow students argued a similar perspective (with a sounder base in fact than I offered).  Dr Kelly saw it as less real in the current political philosophies at play in modern America although still a strong driver in the public discourse of candidates competing for office.  He argued (I think) that we’re in a different phase, beyond the triumphant and imperialist march of the great 20^th Century powerhouse, although the USA remains a great power but the hegemony of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that emerged from the ‘founding fathers’ is waning (Dr Kelly suggests) as the nation fragments, diversifies and re-considers internally its foundation myths while, economically and culturally, the idea of American hegemony in a globalised economy as reached its limits. 

Rip Van Winkle by John Howe

We started our literary examination of an imagined America with Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.  I read the story as a child.  The only part that stuck with me was the part about the man who falls asleep for 20 years.  I remember it as a modern fairy tale – Dr Kelly used the term ‘tall tale’ which has more meaning in the American context; that’s the tradition Faulkner was invoking with As I Lay Dying. Although I read the story before the class and was able to offer some analysis and interpretation of it – particularly around the portrayal of women, the soft spot it exhibits for the laconic, ne’er do well male hero, the reassurance of continuity and progress around or across the bifurcating disruption of the long sleep, among others - I was struck by the differences between Dr K’s much closer, more analytical reading of the text than I could manage.  I realise, of course, that he’s a full time academic at a major institution and that American literature is one of his areas of interest.  Nevertheless, I should have been able to see more than I did.  My reading must become more analytical.  I need to become more rigorous in asking myself what’s going on and seeing the answers present in the text.  So I didn’t adequately describe the contrast in women’s roles before and after the big sleep (Dame Van Winkle may be a shrew but she has agency; Rip Van Winkle’s daughter is domesticated and nurtures the next male generation).  I didn’t see the satire on the monarchy or on the transfer of power from King George to George Washington (asking the question, to what extent has circumstances truly changed / improved for ordinary people?).

The point is this: I must sharpen my powers of observation.  I need to see better what it is that’s going on inside a text, not simply what’s happening with or to the story or its characters.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester.  I may even learn something.

Depressing, isn't it?

An article by Aryn Baker, Middle East Bureau Chief for TIME:

Three shots ring out in close succession, and the woman’s shawl-shrouded body slumps to the ground. Whoops, cheers and praise to Allah follow another four shots into her inert form. The latest video footage to come out of Afghanistan purports to show the execution of an allegedly adulterous woman at the hands of the Taliban. The video, filmed last month on a mobile phone and obtained by Reuters, is shocking. But even more atrocious is the fact that such incidents are on the rise in Afghanistan, from Taliban executions to gruesome punishments like cutting off noses and ears, whippings and the forced amputations of hands for accusations of theft. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission notes that cases of extreme violence against women are on the rise — some are Taliban-inflicted, but many are simply eruptions of ancient forms of tribal justice unchecked by Afghan society and the government. The Taliban, after all, based their extreme edicts not just on a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law but also on tribal traditions that predate Islam. This latest video, as many have pointed out, supposedly presages the fate of Afghanistan’s women when foreign troops pull out over the next 2½ years. But the fact that such punishments continue to be meted out even with some 100,000 foreign troops still on the ground in Afghanistan is an indication that when it comes to women’s rights at least, the 11-year experiment in nation building has come to very little. And that has less to do with the commitment to women than with the weak support for education across the board.

Read the full article here

The Murders of the Rue Morgue

Charles Gemora plays the ape in the 1932 film

What a weird little tale, so entirely dependent upon the exotic, orientalism of an Orang Utan from Borneo; an animal that could not have been well-known in 1841 from a place that most readers would have known almost nothing about (if they knew anything at all).  I was about half way through reading the tale when I remembered that I read it once before, years and years ago, probably when I was a teenager.

It seems so quaintly old-fashioned despite its graphic, Gothic imagery of violence.  When it was published though, it must have been read as shockingly modern.  Did Poe invent the private detective with his character Dupin?  He pre-dates Sherlock Holmes by nearly fifty years and must surely have been part of Conan Doyle's thinking as he constructed the acutely perceptive, supremely analytical Holmes.

Reading Walt Whitman

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

(Song of Myself, the opening lines of Section 48)

Must be a Presbyterian cartoonist ...

New Yorker Magazine, July 2012

Eragon

Good CGI dragon, shame about the movie.  I should have known better and not wasted two hours of my life ... again!!

Speak softly and carry a big box of chocolates?

My thank you gift from the National Union of Students for speaking today at day three of its education conference.  I was asked to talk about the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  I covered everything from the bubonic plague and the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 through to my observation that most lesbians don't testify to their sexuality by putting spots on their foreheads.  My generous audience lapped it all up then gave prolonged and stormy applause (as the Communist Party reprints of Lenin's better-known speeches used to note).  Spike opened the chocolates when she returned from her night out.  I'll pay for those unnecessary calories with extra time on my Titanic 800!!!! Three days in a row now since Spike installed it.  Let's hope it's a trend emerging.

John Carter of Mars

Forbes Magazine liked it

We watched John Carter this evening.  What can one say?  It's not as terrible as some would have you believe; not terrible at all.  I quite enjoyed it (although there was quite a bit of Basil Exposition in the middle third).  Spike described it as a perfectly watchable early-period science fiction, which sounds about right.  It is true that there's a rather 1930's cheesiness about it but it does look gorgeous.










It's not wholly original as a film (which is an understatement).  Let me think.  There's ...

• Star Wars (various scenes stolen directly from several films)
• Dances With Wolves
• Gladiator
• Flash Gordon
• Any number of John Ford Westerns
• The dog out of Up
• Cleopatra (the Elizabeth Taylor version)
• Superman
• That ridiculous fourth Indian Jones film
• A bit of Hammer horror meets steam punk Sherlock Holmes
• Tarzan the Ape Man
• Several cheesy episodes of Star Trek

You get the point.  But you know, I've spent more than the $5.99 it cost us from iTunes to watch far worse.  If they made a sequel (and it clearly ended with a sequel in mind) I'd watch it.  Given the poor box office in America, though, I doubt that any of the other ten books will ever make it to the silver screen.

Titanic 800

Get Muscular, Stronger, Unbeaten

TITANIC 800

200 LBS. RESISTANCE

OVER 200 KILLER EXERCISES

Just 11 Minutes Every time ...

Well that's what it says on the box.  Spike picked up the exercise kit from the post office in the large box sent by the good people  at Zazz (one bargain-price item ... and only one item on sale ... each day).  It's a pulley system (with three differently weighted cords) that hangs on the back of a door.  After Spike set up the gizmo on the door to our spare bedroom I started my first session: 15 minutes of pulling weights (which probably took closer to 25 minutes by the time I stopped faffing about) trying 4 quite distinct exercises.  I had to work hard (for me) on two of them.  I think this new arrangement is going to work.  I'm very glad.

I am definitely weaker now than I've been for years.  I must get stronger and fitter if I am to regain and retain functional independece. So I now have no excuse. I need to put in at least fifteen minutes every day to start with and build up.  If I don't report real improvements within a couple of months I'm a fraud.

TED talks: Bryan Stevenson

TED Talks: one of the best you'll see

Another cheery tale from Poe

Opium this time, rather than alcohol.  A dying woman confined in a turret rather than entombed in a wall.  A guilt-stricken narrator.  And a Gothic sensibility that pre-dates the Hammer Horror films of the 1960s by more than 120 years.  How Gothic can an author be and yet get away with it?  Try this from Ligeia:

Ligeia at ebooks@adelaide

The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window — an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice — a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window, extended the trellice-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.

The odd thing (it seems odd to me) about these Gothic tales (and the doom-laden poetry) is that they were mostly written before Virginia's death, not after.  In 1838 when Ligeia was written or 1845 (The Black Cat and The Raven) the horror of a young wife's death had not been visited upon Poe.  If the chronology had been reversed, the wife's death (aged 25) then the Gothic writing, one might see a possible point of origin.  But that's not how Poe's story went, so where did the tales spring from, I wonder?

Call that art?

Andy Warhol, 1963

We had brunch with Jon Simpson and Rosie Birch at the teeming Deus cafe on Parramatta Road.  The food was decent enough; nothing remarkable but a good place to sit and chat.  So we enjoyed a good couple of hours catching up on their whistle-stop tour of the UK, their five days in New York, New York and Spike's adventures in the Australian art world.  Jon brought a gift from MoMA.  He said he saw the poster and immediately thought of me.  Am I that transparently obvious?  A philistine! 

As David Bowie chorused on Hunky Dory

Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all

Reading more Poe

"I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why ; - from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least - in the circumstances then surrounding me - there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli."

From Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1791

Henry Fuseli, Thor Bettering the Mitgard Sepent 1790

The Same Old Songs

In search of what it might still be
a man like me may yet believe
old songs fill the infinite spaces,
old men sing of inexhaustible fires
and unquenchable thirst; desires
they never understood or satisfied

and if we're lucky (maybe damned)
we sing along, not just because we know
the words to songs we started singing
forty years ago, when we still thought
we knew the purpose singing had
or what the songs were all about.

We sing because old music lives within.
We sing because old voices yearn to sing.

The things you say on Facebook ...

My friend Mike Donnelly posted this photo to Facebook, adding these words:

This is the man who taught me everything I know about throwing a spear ... a useful skill for a Glaswegian. He also led our sunrise tour of Uluru which did NOT include climbing it - lovely man, Wongha and his partner, Happy.

I added this comment:

I first leaned about throwing a spear next to my grannie's house in Rockbank Street just off the Gallowgate. I was seven. There were two groups of what might be called alienated youth these days, advancing towards one another. Me and my wee brother had somehow managed to get between the opposing sides. They advanced towards each other. Sharp implements were drawn. At least one spear was thrown. We scampered up a close. We did not tell my grannie who would have skelpt ma ear for endangering my brother's life. I kid you not. Bridgeton in the sixties. Spears.

 

True story.

Classic Poe

I read another Poe short story this evening, The Black Cat; a grizzly tale of horror, fate and the demon consequences of drink.  Three short stories read in a week and the catastrophic follies of alcohol are explored in two of them.  I'm guessing Poe was a remorseful, guilt-ridden drunk.    Although there are a couple (at least) of implausible narrative leaps in the story it still has some power, particularly of imagery.  The narrator's brutal attack on poor, ageing Pluto with his eyeless socket.  The cat's image seared on the bedroom wall's plaster.  The ghoulish, blood-soaked image of the penultimate sentence.  Written by Poe 170 years ago but still clear, still disturbing.  And for all that there's clumsiness in places there's a brilliantly positioned point of revelation when we learn, more than half way through the story, about location.  It immediately enriches the story, propelling it towards the doom-laden conclusion.  Great stuff.  Classic Victorian horror.  He may have invented the genre all by himself.

Intermezzo

So, we were taken out to lunch by one of consultants.  it was a well-intentioned thank you to a customer.  Nice people shame about the meal.  It wasn't bad.  That much was true.  Average.  Ordinary.  Those are words that come to mind.  We were taken to Intermezzo in the old GPO in Martin Place.  My crispy skin snapper lay before me on a bed of black caviar lentils.  The fish seemed dry, devoid of any character, lacking in anything snapperish.  The lentils were greeny black and that's about as much as one could say about them.  The accompanying roasted potatoes bordered on the mushy beneath the skin.  If I'd wanted mash, I'd have asked for mash.  God, I'm sounding churlish and ungrateful.  What can I tell you?  Never going back.

(Still) reading Joyce

I plough on slowly, usually reading snippets of Ulysses on my HTC smart phone while I sit in my van in the car park of Sydney College of the Arts waiting for Spike to clear up in the glass studio and / or mold room.  (Tonight it was the mold room and plaster-coated representations of short, thick sticks, one of which is ant-infested apparently).  Anyway, I on the second-last episode, Ithaca.  Stephen has just sloped off into the last vestiges of night and Leopold Bloom has unbuttoned most of his garments before heading to bed.  It was at this point I learned / read that Leopold:

... compressed between 2 fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting inflicted 2 weeks and 3 days previously (23 May 1904) by a bee.

Kilmardinny Loch

I do wonder why I'm still reading after 700, maybe 800 pages.  I know it's great literature and I'm mostly enjoying it (there's a racism that's difficult to forgive, even allowing for the 'different era' line of argument).  But the remembrance of things past?  A bee sting?  Maybe that's what makes it a great modernist work of hyper-real  fiction.  We sometimes remember the bee stings in life ... for example, I recall that Roger Brown was stung 4 times by bees that got inside his clothes one summer's day at Kilmardinny Loch.  We were eleven or twelve years old.  We must have been bee-bothering that day, more than forty years ago.

Midnight's Children

Not having been to bed overnight, I'm very tired.  But I managed a couple of (short) chapters from Book 2 of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.  It truly is a masterpiece of 20th Century literature; written beautifully, in places lyrical but still demonstrably modern; hugely imaginative, bursting with references to the modern age (not simply post-colonial Indian history) and overflowing with ideas.  All that and it's funny too. Everyone should read it. 

In the early evening I read some of Poe's verse (and criticism thereof).  There was The Raven (of course) and a couple of his earlier works, To The River (1829) and The Sleeper (1830).  I can't quite decide if I think The Raven is a bold, great poetic work or really not very good at all.  Yeats inclined to the latter view I believe and he's a hard man to ignore.

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Stumbling in the dark

It's 4:49 am.  I've not yet been to bed and I don't imagine I will until this evening.  Last night our computer problem reappeared and we lost sight of the E drive with all kinds of useful (some even necessary) data files.  I've been searching (almost) aimlessly for a solution all night; uninstalling a suspect AVG update, replacing AVG with an anti-virus programme called Kaspersky, running the new software, finally getting checkdisk to run on the E drive ... sitting here, in front of the screen, watching the programmes run.  I knew there were just over 118,000 files on the E drive.  Now I know there are 50,000,000 free clusters that get checked (I've no idea what a cluster might be ... 0 / 1 pairings?  Maybe).  And I know there are almost 1,000,000 files on the PC in three drives: C, E and F.

Twenty minutes ago I took the risk of re-starting the computer.  That's been problematic for days now.  It has seldom re-booted.  This morning though it worked first time and when I checked windows explorer all the drives could be seen.  If I fixed the problem I have no idea how I managed it.  Luck, ignorance and stubbornness.  At least it's working ... for now.

The Balloon Hoax

Poe's diagram of the model of the Victoria

What an odd little tale, printed in The New York Sun in 1844.  According to the Poe stories web site the short piece of speculative fiction appeared as if it was a news story rather than a tall tale.   I don't suppose that Poe or his readers could have known that the temperature at 25,000 feet is in the region of -50 degrees Celcius.  There's something of Jules Vernes in the gentleman characters but Around The World in Eighty Days wouldn't be published for almost 30 years (in 1873).  And the response of readers, turning up at the newspaper office brings to mind the reports of hysterical responses to Orson Welles's 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds.

Imagining America

One of my two units of study next semester is called Imagining America.  I'm looking forward to it for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Dr David Kelly will run the course.  I enjoyed his Literature and Cinema unit (although we could not agree on the merits of Hitchcock's Rope).

The reading list for Imagining America includes Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Chopin, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Ginsberg, Dylan, Eastwood and Scorsese.  I confess to being less than wildly enthusiastic about Whitman but I'll try.  The rest I've read / seen and know to varying degrees.  I know Poe least well I think (maybe Mark Twain and Chopin) but I'm looking forward to reading as much as possible of all the writers (even WW).

I want to get ahead of the unit.  I can be lazy and often struggle to keep up with the schedule of reading, only because I tend to leave works to the last minute.  So I've spoken sternly to my inner self, telling me to read, read and re-read as much as I can.  (There's a bit of me wonders how well I might do as a student, how much I might improve my marks, you know, if I had a more adult approach to the reading lists.  I kid myself on that I like to fly by the seat of my pants; brain the size of a planet, winging it at the last minute ... isn't that proven with those ninety-something scores?  Well no Douglas and besides, you said you were returning to university to learn, to understand better ... maybe even to write better ... so scores alone signify nothing.  They certainly don't indicate learning, merely an ability to write a decent essay, which is far from the same thing).

My attempt to get ahead of the reading (and stay ahead) began today with Edgar Allan Poe's quirky short story from 1844, The Angel of the Odd.  Here's part of it:

 ... in an incredibly brief period the entire building was wrapped in flames. All egress from my chamber, except through a window, was cut off. The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd, -- when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took it suddenly into his head that his left shoulder needed scratching, and could find no more convenient rubbing-post than that afforded by the foot of the ladder.

 Whimsical is a word that comes to mind.  But I did smile.

And today's number is ...

92 (minus two for being a day late).  Picked up my essay on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  Phew.  I couldn't hand it in on the due date because I had no idea what to write.  So I took another day and found something.  I don't quite recall how I stumbled on this but I did and my tutor liked it:

No words can prepare the self for oblivion; an observation Addie makes with reference to Anse by means of Faulkner’s almost poetic allusion to entropy within the Second Law of Thermodynamics: 

I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. (p.99)  

 Sometimes you get lucky. 

Five former prawns at Thai Number One (since 1992)

Dinner on my own because Spike was working late in the studio, polishing glass (or was it the wooden base?)  Polishing for sure.  I dined at a local cheap n cheerful Thai restaurant for the first time.  It's funny how events or circumstances lead you to new experiences - even if it's only a plate of chilli basil noodles with prawns prepared for my table in about two minutes.  My van's electrics are broken so I took the train home from work.  Spike's working late so I'm fending for myself (and had a quick curry in mind from the shop between the station and Liverpool Road).  But the lift to the Liverpool Road side, which was out of order yesterday but back in order this morning, was back out of order this evening so I descended to ground level on the opposite side of the tracks.  And there I saw Thai Number One restaurant ("since 1992" the legend boldly proclaims.  So Thai it was.  No complaints here.

Show of the year ... so far.

Kirra Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne

Happy re-cycler

ME OF PANDA

To Rozelle and the bicycle shop to fit a new inner tube for my wheelchair then the car park at SCA to drop off a library book then the car park at Bunnings, Ashfield, (which is always a joy) then the car park at JayCar, Parramatta road, Croydon then the car park at the Addison Road Community Centre, Marrickville.  At least I got out the van there to negotiate the narrow paths of Reverse Garbage in search of "..ME OF PANDA".  Who knew?  At least one shopper seems to have found a bargain.

As I Lay Dying

I finished my essay on Addie's monologue from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  It was only a short assignment (my piece comes in at 922 words, including the direct quotes ... so there's maybe 800 of my own words).  Nevertheless I couldn't find my way in for days and if I can't see the way in I have no chance of getting out again.  So it's a day late, which means two points lost before anyone starts to count.  I had no choice though.  Yesterday I had nothing but fragments.

Here's how I finished:

"My mother is a fish"

Addie’s passage is, therefore, pivotal to many ways of reading Faulkner’s novel: as an, at times, horrific re-working of Homer’s epic tale of the return home, suffused with absurd and darkly improbable humour; as an exploration of the tensions within and contradictions between public and private constructions of identity illustrated through variations of voice, tone, register and syntax among characters inhabiting the same, precisely delineated fictional world; as a cautionary fable concerned with the destructive and alienating effects of Modernity; as a recognition of ways in which the unmodern – in particular, death – persists (if not triumphs) in life; and as a writing experiment to demonstrate the author’s Modernist concern with the limits of language as a vehicle to express or explain meaning and truth.  

We'll see.






Illustration by Nate Olsen at NATEOMEDIA 

And today's number is ...

92.

Received my essay on Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) for my postmodernism course.  Happy camper.

Master of all he surveys

So I'm here.  I'm ready to start.  Master of the universe that I am I sit alone at the head of the table around which members of the Advisory Council of the NSW Lifetime Care and Support Authority will gather.  In two minutes?  May as well enjoy my tea and Tim Tam.  What else can the all-powerful Chair do?

In search of 750 words

William Faulkner and his typewriter in Hollywood

Working on my Faulkner essay, due on Friday.  Still not sure what I may write about Addie's monologue but I'll get there, with luck, by the submission deadline.

It's been observed in many places that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks without altering a word.  That may or may not be true but it's essentially beyond the point.  It's a brilliant work of what my tutor calls American Regional Modernism; a frontier tall tale of humour and horror; the point of meeting between myths of agrarian folk culture and cosmopolitan modernism; Homer meets Mark Twain meets Virginia Woolf.  It's hard not to be impressed; difficult not to feel daunted by such authorial power.

Time for Van Morrison

It's been that kind of day.  So, from Inarticulate Speech of the Heart ...

Rave on john donne, rave on thy holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down through the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on down through time and space down through the corridors
Rave on words on printed page

Rave on, you left us infinity
And well pressed pages torn to fade
Drive on with wild abandon
Uptempo, frenzied heels

Rave on, walt whitman, nose down in wet grass
Rave on fill the senses
On nature’s bright green shady path

Rave on omar khayyam, rave on kahlil gibran
Oh, what sweet wine we drinketh
The celebration will be held
We will partake the wine and break the holy bread

Rave on let a man come out of ireland
Rave on on mr. yeats,
Rave on down through the holy rosey cross
Rave on down through theosophy, and the golden dawn
Rave on through the writing of "a vision"
Rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on

Rave on john donne, rave on thy holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down though the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on words on printed page

Dog Debris in Dooralong

We're visiting Spike's parents at their self-built home in the Dooralong Valley.  When we arrived the soft toys of Fingle and Harry, the dogs, were scattered across the paddock like the collateral  damage of a bomb blast.  Spike gathered together the collection of sheep, cows and a rugby 'ball', ready for games of fetch after lunch.

The Hurt Locker

Guy Pierce in The Hurt Locker

Three years late I finally caught up with Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning movie, The Hurt Locker.  It's a good film but I wouldn't call it great (as some did).  There are moments of tension, of course, and it's highly dramatic in places (once or twice slipping into melodrama even ... the implausible expedition into the night after the tanker bomb, the drunken fight in the barracks) but (once Guy Pierce was finished) there was never really any risk that any of the principals would not make it out alive.  The final scenes were no surprise at all.

But it is a good movie.  The performances are excellent.  There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours of your life. 

I read something of John Pilger's criticism that the movie reduced the circumstances and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths during the American occupation of Iraq to an almost unseen backcloth.  He compared THL to The Deer Hunter in that respect.  I think, yes John and no.  It's broadly correct that there's an almost total lack of political context set in the movie but it's not wholly devoid of critique.  The American forces are clearly identified as an unwelcome, occupying force - even the way bystanders simply observe the troops' predicaments indicates that their presence is neither heroic nor justified.  There is too, I think, an attempt (not entirely successful) consider the alienating effects of the war on those who fight it.  Pilger's criticism depends (in part) on viewing The Hurt Locker as a film about the war in Iraq.  I'm not sure that's quite right.  It's more a film about the effect of war on men sent to fight that's set in Iraq.  That said, I'm not sure I buy entirely the conceit established with the aphorism that opens the film. 

The life of a student ...

So, it's student Friday for Dougie, here at the university of Sydney.  We're at the end of a brief Indian Summer (I have no idea what makes such late-season, balmy days Indian).  That may explain my lethargy.  So too may my bizarre decision to watch online all of Any Coulson's evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in London.  It was 2:00 a.m. by the time I reached bed.  I was back up at 6:30 a.m. (this being a Friday).

We looked at the two short films of Tracy Moffat in my ten o'clock tutorial: Nice Coloured Girls and Night Cries.  Both are intriguing takes on being an indigenous Australian woman at the turn of the Century.  NCG, the earlier film, is a more straightforward look at the relationships between European settlers (then and now) and the indigenous peoples of this land.  White racism (paternalistic then, more personally vindictive now) pervades the film.  Time and power relations are mixed up to make us adjust the way we read the text.  It succeeds.  The re-framing of testimonies from the past, turning written colonialist evidence into the spoken word while re-telling the testimony of the local population through written extracts (the privileged form) raises questions about reliable / unreliable narration (Among others).  Some of the film has not travelled well through time but those drawbacks are minor details about costume, character and mise en scene.  The ideas on the screen - to do with gener, race, colonialism, class, wealth and power - retain their power.  It's still a thought-provoking piece.  The movie NC is much more complex: it's closer to abstracted art and surrealism, inter-textual (as all postmodern texts must be); about and not about aboriginality; about family, women's business and domesticity; deals with mother / daughter bonds; takes apart and relocates Christianity's role in the 20th Century assimilation policies.  There's much more.  Good stuff.

At Noon I attended a tutorial on Virginia Woolf's Jacb's Room.  The discussion was tentative at first but after one woman reported that she's not realised that Jacob dies (until after reading the introductory essay when she'd finished the novel) our conversation picked up with talk of death, loss, fate and absence.  Good fun.  Excellent novel.

Now - halfway through the 3 to 5 Friday afternoon shift - I'm at a lecture on two Australian post-modern poets,John Tranter and Gig Ryan.  We populate the auditorium sparsely, like raindrops spread across a car windscreen just before the storm begins.  Dr Lilley, a poet herself, does her best.   

Silver threads and golden needles ...

  My side of the bed because ... the floor is not for filing.

once Upon A Time

Watching Episode 7 of Series 1 on the American television programme Once Upon A Time this evening I was surprised by the murder that occurred.  Given the gentle introduction of this series until this point (all the deaths so far have come about in the fairy universe).  The series, entertaining in its own way, is no less silly than it has been but tonight's episode took a surprising turn into darker territory than I'd thought the programme had been pitched at.  My surprise may tell us more, of course, about me but there you have it.  Silly but fun and, now, not as saccharine sweet as it has been until now. 

Roberta Joan Anderson

How long have I been listening to Joni Mitchell; singing along.  Forty years?  Forty five?  According to Wiki (so it must be true!!!) her first studio album was released in 1968 (I was eleven and have no recollection of any track from it).  But a year later cam Clouds and I do know Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now.  I'm pretty sure that BSN caught my attention as a twelve year old, probably as a result of my big brother's record collection.  He would have been 15 going on 16.  He was into contemporary folk - Pentangle, Donovan (but not Dylan, funnily enough), Joan Baez, CSN&Y, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell - as well as - let's think - John Mayall, Cream, Hendrix (of course) and way out there on the Californian edge of blues-based rock n roll, The Doors.  You can see where my tastes come from.  Did we all look west ... to America?  Anyway, I've been listening to Ms Roberta Joan Anderson sing for at least 43 years. Still am.

So I'm sitting here in Sydney, early in May, listening to Night Ride Home (1991).  As I type, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, based on Yeats's The Second Coming, is playing.  Sing on Joni.  Sing along Dougie.

I love the whole album; no track is better than another but this poem / lyric / song never ceases to grab me.  The unanswered question is audacious, irrefutable, unanswerable: Who you gonna get to do the dirty work / When all the slaves are free?



Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)

Magdalene is trembling
Like a washing on a line
Trembling and gleaming
Never before was a man so kind
Never so redeeming

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Ecstasy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

I am up a sycamore
Looking through the leaves
A sinner of some position
Who in the world can this heart healer be
This magical physician

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Misery
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, climb down, climb down he says to me
From the middle of unrest
They think is light is squandered
But he sees a stray in the wilderness
And i see how far i've wandered

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Apathy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, all around the marketplace
The buzzing of the flies
The buzzing and the stinging
Divinely barren
And wickedly wise
The killer nails are ringing

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Tragedy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Very few degrees of separation

Wallace Stevens

Spike asked me this evening if I knew of a poet named Wallace Stevens.  I said I did / I do but couldn't recollect any of the poems.  Spike mentioned Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which I vaguely recalled.  We looked at the poem on line and I remember being introduced to it years ago at Stirling University as one of the literary links between Poe's The Raven and William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow.

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called The Death of a Soldier, which I may have confused in my memory with a poem by Randall Jarrell.  I remember still the shock of reading the final line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jacob's Room

I finished Virgina Woolf's first experimental work today (it was VW's opinion that her first two novels are conventional).  She tried to build a fictional world with none of the structure of the novel up to that point.  So there's no beginning, middle or end (the penultimate sentence is an unanswered question).  Time is pervasive but never chronological.  Architecture informs character, mood, perception but we seldom linger anywhere, in any building, for long (the Reading Room of the British Museum maybe; the Parthenon and St Paul's Cathedral perhaps but always in an elliptical manner, coming back and forth, moving in and out).  It's a short, affecting read.  I made what may have been a mistake by playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata from the point in Chapter Three that Woolf writes "... the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz." (page 54 in my edition, Oxford World Classics).  What a powerful (depressingly so) sense of a doomed, lost generation of young men it evoked.  It's as effective ... not quite maybe ... as the middle section of To the Lighthouse which may be unsurpasable IMHO.

Jacob's Room is an impressive read; eye-opening about what can be done with fiction; moving.  It's not perfect though (what is?).  The butterfly metaphor was overdone (particularly in the chapters before we get to London) and that social strata upon which VW turns her perceptive gaze was irritatingly narrow but given who she was and how the First World War affected her own connections I suppose one can forgive her.  It's certainly a novel to read but not on any day you're a bit depressed by life's ability to subdue one's enthusiasm.

Every Australian Counts

After breakfast at Bondi

How hard can life be?

Some numbers drive me nuts

Take 84 as an example.  I picked up my short essay on Defoe's Roxana from a tray outside my tutor's office this afternoon.  84%.  I ask you, what's that all about?

My mark is one point below a High Distinction grade.  One point.  I'd much rather receive a lower mark - the high-seventies or low-eighties maybe - because the mark would be clear.  Dougie, it would say to me, middling sort of effort.  Must try significantly better.  84 though?  That one point is within a margin of error that has nothing to do with careful assessment.  It's a message - not quite good enough for a High Distinction but very close, almost there, treat this as sign of encouragement, missed it be a whisper.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Good.  Got that of my chest.

Opening Night

The artist and her parents at Hatched.

Little Willy's

Breakfast's nearly done - omelette and chai - in a neat little cafe on William Street, Northbridge - a student, cafe, culture neighbourhood on the northern side of the CBD.  There must be a million cafes like this one the world over; small, re-conditioned and re-painted wooden tables of a variety of shapes and sizes, some retro booths (as we might be in the American fifties maybe), benches made out of three milk crates and half an old plank of wood.  There's an Indie band playing n what I'm sure will be an ipod driven player.  i've no idea who the band is but the upbeat, slightly knowing observations of the songs imbue the cafe with a relaxed, friendly atmosphere.  A young woman with orange hair, a pink jacket and her de rigeur iphone sits in front of the window, next to the pavement from where one can see and may be seen. People come and go for takeaway coffees.  They're mostly regulars who smile, their vices singing with the days news or the latest instalment of a story commenced yesterday, last week or a year ago.  The guys behind the counter seem not to miss a beat; brew the coffee, put a slice of cake in brown paper bag, listen to the story, ask questions, comment on how difficult / fun / cool / much of a relief to hear that on had to let go a new member of staff who just didn't get what we're trying to do with retail or another spoke of the causes of this morning's hangover, a third talked about honeymooning in  Paris and the fourth's cat turned up.  I could linger all day.

Waiting for the AV guys

The show opens on Friday.  Spike's work is in boxes waiting for the AV guys to fix a problem with projection.  At least the plinth is unwrapped!!! But there's time.  So, it having been a very long day with an early 5-hour flight from Sydney we're going back to the hotel for a sleep before tonight's meal with Spike's mum and dad.  

Voice

Spike had an interesting seminar at the Art College today, considering 'voice' in writing.  Her tutor had referred the class to a questioning article / sceptical review from The New Yorker (2004) written by Louis Menand.  Spike and her class mates were asked to "bring to class an example (no more than two paragraphs) of some writing (any genre) where you think the writer's voice is strong."  Spike selected the first page of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.  Good choice.  If it had been me going to class, I'd have taken Prufrock.  No more constructed voice in literature. 

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

You mean ... out loud?

William Makepeace Thackery

Any person passing-by the silent room in which a score of bright but bored students of English literature sat today between four and five o'clock in the John Woolley Building of the University of Sydney might have wondered if the ghastly horror of an enormous, noisy fart had just ripped through the air inside, rendering all members of the class speechless, mortified lest their colleagues or the tutor might put the blame on them.  But no, the silence was not born of guilt or knowledge of the guilty farter in the midst of such unspeakable agony.  All that had occurred is that the pleasant, if inexperienced, tutor, sitting at the teacher's spot in front of the whiteboard, the sole occupant of the fourth wall of our makeshift group shelter, had asked that someone in the group read a short passage from Vanity Fair before we started to discuss what it might tell us of the author's interests, style, themes, purposes ... who knows what?  Eyes dropped to stare at the floor.  A few reluctant students shuffled in their seats, feigning purposeful activity such as turning the page of a notebook, losing one's place in the text, breaking the tip of a pencil.  Silence ruled while the great fart of engagement toured the desks in the forlorn hope that one of the assembled number might confess to an interest, a willingness, a liking even, for the act of reading from one of the greatest satirical novels ever penned in what was, when all's said and done, a university level course in English literature focusing on, of all unlikely things, the novel in English.

Interloper that I was, taking the class because I'll be in Perth on Friday when my usual tutorial is scheduled, I felt that one of the regulars might want to fill the gap.  But no, it appeared not.  Unfortunately I was unable to assist.  Pretending to myself that I'm a modern reader I'd equipped myself with a Kindle version of the text on my ASUS Transformer.  As the gods of anti-modernity would have it though my Tablet had died earlier in the day.  That's an overstatement because Spike resuscitated the computer when I got home. So, unable to bear the painful silence I apologised for being without text, recounted briefly the sad tale of my defunct tablet and was on the point of asking the bored young women next to me if I could borrow her pristine, possibly unread, copy.  Another young woman then interjected.  She would read.  I'm not quite sure if her threshold for pain at the awkwardness of our collective reluctance was close to mine or, perhaps, she felt sorry for the nice old man at the other side of the room who had suffered a not uncommon IT problem.  Either way, she read.  Between us ... her, the tutor and me ... we got a conversation going but it was hard.

I admit to puzzlement.  We're students of English, aren't we?  Who among us ... language barriers aside ... would not want to read out loud in the presence of such bright thinkers?  I'm NOT taking the piss.  It seems I'm a bit odd in this regard.  I'll try not to let that stop me.

There's Vanity Fair ...

... and there's the movie from 2004 starring Reece Witherspoon.  Each is enjoyable in its own way but the latter is a pretty distant cousin of the former.  But there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon when you're not going far from home; not going anywhere come to think of it.

Good student

From go to whoa: nine hours and 2,300 words later I have finished what looks like the virtually complete draft of an essay on chapter 26 of L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy for my university course on Postmodernism.  It'll do.  It has to cos we're leaving for Perth on Wednesday.  I can't remember the last time I had a student essay ready to submit six days before the deadline.  I'll put it in the box on Monday.

Here's the start:

Chapter twenty-six of LA Confidential is a microcosm of James Ellroy’s thematic interests as a writer of period fiction whose sometimes shocking autobiographical details[1] have driven the author to reject and re-construct the 20^th Century genre of ‘hard boiled’ detective thriller as part of a personal, literary and social pursuit of sometimes appalling underlying truths (as he perceives them).

[He] is one of the most significant historical novelists writing today.  His novels … describe 1950s Los Angeles and 1960s America through the eyes of ‘bad men doing bad things in the name of authority’.  If he departs significantly from what academic historians would consider acceptable practice, it is because he has a different, though equally rigorous and committed, approach to his material.[2]

Chapter twenty-six fuses the known social history of 1950s Los Angeles with Ellroy’s darker, imagined, conspiratorial and close to paranoid version to expose hidden truths about the corruption, exploitation and male violence that Ellroy sees at the heart of 20^th Century America. 

---

[1] Reinhard Jud (Director): James Ellroy Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction (Fischer Film GmBH, Vienna 1998) access at this location http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YPHNCDxQgk on 14/04/12.  (All subsequent references are to this edition.)

[2] Jonathan Walker: ‘James Ellroy as Historical Novelist’ in History Workshop Journal Issue 53, page 181  (All subsequent references are to this edition.)

... not necessarily wiser.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”