tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47829363670787589262024-02-20T00:50:39.138+11:00lukewarm manifestoAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-33871442638829102462018-03-19T12:00:00.000+11:002018-03-19T12:00:53.088+11:00And hail they did: welcome to night vale’s ‘all hail’ review<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
10 February 2018*</div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>If you’ve never heard of <a href="http://www.welcometonightvale.com/"><i>Welcome
to Night Vale</i></a>, you could surmise a lot from the crowd outside
Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre last night. It
seemed the entirety of the fandom’s local contingent had descended on the
corner of Exhibition and Lonsdale in full devotee regalia—geeky,
affable youths in official merchandise, gothic corsets and steampunk goggles,
bafflingly obscure costume homages, and hair dyed in every hue. </b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But the
prevailing colour of the night, sported by almost every second attendee, was
undoubtedly the signature purple of the long-running US podcast’s logo: a
runic, crescent moon–pupilled eye hovering ominously above familiar water tower
and powerline emblems of rural America, part-<a href="https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/c/c1/Eye_of_Sauron.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20171214201353">Sauron</a>, part–<a href="https://eckleburgseyes.weebly.com/uploads/5/2/3/3/52331733/1269070.png?544">Dr TJ Eckleburg</a>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Each episode of the bi-monthly internet series represents a
broadcast by fictitious radio host Cecil Palmer, beloved commentator on the
weird, nonsequitur, Lovecraftian happenings of Night Vale, an imagined desert
community populated by mysterious forces and agencies competing to terrorise
quiescent townsfolk. Fans of the show are drawn to its potent combination of
creepy paranormal tropes, deeply ironic and self-aware humour, and Tumblr-style
progressive politics promoting a message of universal acceptance for self and
other alike.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In the currently touring live show ‘All Hail,’ the sudden
inexplicable appearance above the radio station of ‘the Glow Cloud’—according
to the <a href="http://nightvale.wikia.com/wiki/Welcome_to_Night_Vale_Wiki">Night
Vale Wiki</a> ‘an eternal deity predating reality and currently serving as the
president of the Night Vale School Board’—instigates abject worshipful
prostration and mindless recitations of fealty from the town’s populace,
sending Cecil on a mission to determine its motives and appease the malevolent
nebula. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The quest is punctuated by regular segments imported
from the podcast such as an infomercial from ‘sentient patch of haze’ Deb, a
collection of comically moribund horoscopes, a forecast of the delightfully bizarre
events scheduled on the Community Calendar and, of course ‘the Weather’—a performance
by the charming pint-sized musician <a href="http://www.erinmckeown.com/">Erin McKeown</a>, who over-estimated the melodic
and mnemonic aptitude of the average Melburnian theatregoer with admirable consistency and
patience. The show also features appearances from new and recurring characters
in the Night Vale universe—snobby local music store proprietor Michelle
Nguyen, shapeshifting sixteen-year-old Josh Crayton, bibliophile teen militia
captain Tamika Flynn, and time-travelling intern Jeffrey Cranor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p>Erin McKeown as 'the Weather.'</o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Perennial motifs from the podcast find expression once again in ‘All
Hail,’ among them a recurrent anxiety about the rapid consumption and disposal
of culture and the pace of contemporary life. After entrapping the audience
into laughing at how ‘2014’ vaping is, the charismatic show-opener Meg Bashwiner
quips, ‘It’s just like a millennial podcast audience to throw shade at something
that was four years ago.’ And in the show proper, Nguyen references in
stereotypical upward inflection ‘super-old retro music like The Killers and
Usher.’ The obnoxious hipster persona Nguyen’s character satirises is itself a
little stale in 2018, though her appearance yields such highlights as the
fourth wall–breaking real-time, part-improvised narration of sounds from the audience and a
description of her so-called business plan as ‘a crude sketch of Noel Gallagher
being consumed by a golem made of cocaine.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Likewise, the show seeks with some urgency to initiate the audience
into the experience of human connection so central to its ethics, reminding us
continually of the communality of viewership. ‘The sound of 950 people together
in a room sharing an experience’ is one of the sounds Nguyen identifies from
the audience, a sentiment echoed more pointedly in Cecil’s later ironic jibe,
‘Who wants to go out in public and share physical space with other people?’ Like
‘The Investigators,’ the last Night Vale live show to reach antipodean shores
in 2016, ‘All Hail’ exploits opportunities for audience participation to drive
this message home, enforcing hand-holding and protracted group recitations,
albeit with a little less success than its predecessor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Loyal listeners will recognise in ‘All Hail’ the formula of several arc-ending
episodes of the podcast, which often conclude with emotive diegetic exhortations
from Cecil that have clear real-world political parallels. The show ends on an
impassioned plea to convert our good intentions into positive action if evil is
to be thwarted. ‘Books,’ Tamika Flynn says, are ‘potential human action,’ and
‘filled with empathy, which is much more heart-shattering than any bullet.’ And
‘good,’ we are told, ‘is an action, not a description.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">While timely, timeless and true (Bashwiner includes in her opening
address the embarrassed Trump apology fast becoming a standard convention for
every international American performance), this message is not so elegantly
grounded in the preceding performance as it is in past podcast episodes or in
‘Investigators,’ and feels superimposed rather than earned—a coda by deus ex
machina. Without spoiling the final act completely, plot events might have lent
themselves much more naturally to a conclusive sermon on the importance of
communication and making space for understanding one another than a tenuously
(or, dare I say, non-existantly) linked monologue on activism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But the minds behind Night Vale know their audience and, judging by
the uproarious cheering, hyena-cackling, standing ovation and double encore this audience bestowed on the performers, it was not inclined to register the maladroit
delivery of a message it so firmly agreed with after an hour and a half of such
skillfully targeted entertainment. I’m not inclined to try to disabuse them,
but I would advise caution on behalf of those considering taking along friends
uninitiated in the Night Vale universe like I did, lest the audience’s Glow Cloud–like
adoration fail to take root in them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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LPL</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-25500297525138891372018-03-12T12:00:00.000+11:002018-03-17T22:59:03.479+11:00Where thoughtfulness lives: adelaide writers' week 2018 review<div style="text-align: justify;">
Monday 13 March 2018</div>
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<b>It may be Australia’s longest-running literary festival, but <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/adelaide-writers-week-2018">Adelaide Writers’ Week</a> shares little resemblance with the big-name east-coast counterparts that followed it a generation later. </b></div>
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The event’s idiosyncrasies reflect much about the city that gave it birth: august, commodious Adelaide, temperate and traversable, capital of the festival state, with its surrounding circlet of parklands in which the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden could be an understated crown jewel. Far from the air-conditioned concert halls and crowded café venues of the Sydney and Melbourne festivals, Adelaide Writers’ Week passes in the open air and sunshine of this glorious garden. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxS6iJzxL9a9ZtTUtwgjpeTzHY78oFoPYQAIazmuDxGRI4KtbTwb0hdQjuDrWyDaBu9IHULrzUQR2ratGM6Npi2njrFd_WOMknJdbJlSTgD-cJFvB5x5NpIDi9nsJhoAC_Ldy3rK9NgY0/s1600/IMG_0442.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1370" data-original-width="1125" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxS6iJzxL9a9ZtTUtwgjpeTzHY78oFoPYQAIazmuDxGRI4KtbTwb0hdQjuDrWyDaBu9IHULrzUQR2ratGM6Npi2njrFd_WOMknJdbJlSTgD-cJFvB5x5NpIDi9nsJhoAC_Ldy3rK9NgY0/s640/IMG_0442.jpg" width="524" /></a></div>
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And it feels like a gathering in a forest clearing, an enchanted grove. You sit, encircled by a dwarfbrick wall and screens of greenery sun-washed and backlit, presided over by each panel as they hold court beneath the beneficent maternal gaze of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ola_Cohn">Ola Cohn</a>’s 1941 Waikerie limestone statue, a goddess of the glade. Overhead, a lacing of cables, fairy lights, tree branches and blue tarpaulin spans the space between six sentinel lampposts straight out of Narnia. There’s the constant imposition of planes passing above, and sun and shade sweep over you in shifts as the clouds roll on, offering the discussion cheerful or ominous punctuation. ‘That’s global capital,’ jokes <a href="https://www.wheelercentre.com/">the Wheeler Centre</a>’s <a href="https://www.wheelercentre.com/people/michael-williams">Michael Williams</a> when a sudden darkness falls at <a href="https://laleh-khadivi.com/">Laleh Khavidi</a>’s mention of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/2/28/17058342/wall-street-gun-stocks-divestment">gun stock divestment</a>. ‘It doesn’t like what you’re doing.’ Beneath you are humble green plastic chairs like your nan has on the patio and, should they grow too hard on your backside, you’re free to plant yourself on the nearby grassy slope where locals snooze under hats and children periodically frolic a little too loudly. Kick your shoes off, lay back, close your eyes, and let the conversation wash over you. ‘It’s a pretty friendly festival,’ poet <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/author/pambrown">Pamela Brown</a> summarises in response to an audience question. ‘The air’s good.’</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Fg6QeAEaCBruhKjkgsOVUJLcbgluYwl1iJ2vc8pXTGxGPvsRHqmOldkm4UB7i4WfUf17cGt4uGpDoW-1SdCUzURDHBxl5cxOnSoLwYmhJT0W5ZQUrQpLJEHELAhEFWFxK2rLoAQhch0/s1600/IMG_0437.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Fg6QeAEaCBruhKjkgsOVUJLcbgluYwl1iJ2vc8pXTGxGPvsRHqmOldkm4UB7i4WfUf17cGt4uGpDoW-1SdCUzURDHBxl5cxOnSoLwYmhJT0W5ZQUrQpLJEHELAhEFWFxK2rLoAQhch0/s400/IMG_0437.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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Mem Fox reads from <i>I’m Australian Too</i>.</div>
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It’s simply different. Fanatical volunteers stand smiling guard over the bins, racing to intercede before any recyclable item is denied its rightful reincarnation by mistaken consignment to general waste. The dignified demountable bathrooms offer expensive soap and proper mirrors. For some reason, there’s a joey in the writers’ green room and, occasionally, in the audience.</div>
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And, indeed, everything about the event is free and easy. No pressure to attend pre-booked and paid-for sessions. You may come and go as you please between the twin stages that sit companionably close in the riverside park. Follow your fancy through a program as well-balanced and legible as Adelaide’s city grid—from the intimately personal to the sweepingly geopolitical, local to international, grand historical narratives to confessional poetry. Unbound by the confines of the indoors and its attendant fire codes, audiences expand and contract like a breathing organism according to the popularity of the speakers. Events at the more intimate west stage like <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/writersweek/thelifetocome">The Life to Come</a> with the radiant <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/author/michelledekretser">Michelle de Kretser</a> send the crowd fanning out into the wings of shade beyond the garden walls and curling up the slope, while drawcards at the east stage such as insightful international heavyweight <a href="http://www.kingsolver.com/">Barbara Kingsolver</a> and the delightfully peculiar festival-favourite <a href="https://www.robertdessaix.com.au/">Robert Dessaix</a> break the banks entirely to engulf the little island of the stage in all directions.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgid5_jkeY7nuuIBPhPPozF634Ow_FHORTfJ_zY6S1GwiHtHNFZB7ulml8eTiPPpb29io6K6Q9M-KG0mukacyRMFZ48i_4Dwr5yDci0TMDJgA6bfzysQ7HE6eHnzEtH2J_9FGlz08F0BWE/s1600/IMG_0441.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="823" data-original-width="1125" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgid5_jkeY7nuuIBPhPPozF634Ow_FHORTfJ_zY6S1GwiHtHNFZB7ulml8eTiPPpb29io6K6Q9M-KG0mukacyRMFZ48i_4Dwr5yDci0TMDJgA6bfzysQ7HE6eHnzEtH2J_9FGlz08F0BWE/s640/IMG_0441.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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In such a setting, the thirty-third iteration of the festival assembled almost a hundred writers, loosely united, as outgoing director <a href="https://www.adelaidereview.com.au/festivals/adelaide-festival/famous-last-words-laura-kroetsch-reflects-seven-years-adelaide-writers-week/">Laura Kroetsch</a> writes in <a href="https://issuu.com/adelaidefestivalofarts/docs/adelaide_writers_week_2018_guide">the event programme,</a> by the concept of ‘change.’ Unlike the parkland setting, this theme is a convention endemic to all literary festivals, to any gathering of those most sensitive vessels of social anxiety and conscience that are writers. Aside from helping stimulate the book sales that sustain our wordsmiths, this, it could be said, is <i>what writers’ festivals are for</i>. They are time that attendees collectively set aside to pay attention to the things in our world worth writing about: the troubles plaguing democracy chronicled in a genteel Monday-morning dialogue between British philosopher <a href="http://www.acgrayling.com/">AC Grayling</a> and local journalist and commentator <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/authors/george-megalogenis">George Megalogenis</a>. The fury and shame about Australia’s ‘extreme cruelty to refugees’ that inspired beloved and formidable festival dedicatee <a href="http://memfox.com/">Mem Fox</a>’s latest book <i>I’m Australian Too</i>. The capitalism-driven environmental destruction foreseen in the fiction of <a href="http://craphound.com/">Cory Doctorow</a>, <a href="http://www.majalunde.com/">Maja Lunde</a> and <a href="http://www.jenjen.com.au/about.htm">Jennifer Mills</a>. The institutional racism and radicalisation contemplated by <a href="https://laleh-khadivi.com/">Laleh Khavidi</a> and <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/author/kamilashamsie">Kamila Shamsie</a>. The introspection and commitment to the common good <a href="http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=jmbrett">Judith Brett</a> finds missing in contemporary Australian politics. The threat of climate change to Pacific nations such as the Marshall Islands that poet <a href="https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/">Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner</a> spoke of. And, most pervasively this year, the sense that somehow it is all going wrong. That meaning, the media, and politics have lost their way. That, in Kingsolver’s words, ‘the rules don’t apply any more.’ As literary critic <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/sean-hooks/">Sean Hooks</a> once <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577271/summary">wrote</a>, ‘it’s all going south tout de suite—awry and amuck and astray, combustible, doused in petrol, the fuse already lit.’ </div>
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Of course, attendees at such events tend to broadly agree on these topics, nodding and applauding so vigorously and universally that it is hard at times to understand why no one has done anything about them yet, to remember that this sample isn’t representative. We risk veering into self-congratulation, but we also remind ourselves we are not alone, steel our resolve, and reflect upon solutions. And, occasionally, answers arise. <i><a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/">Australian Book Review</a></i> editor <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/faqs/author/2659-peterrose">Peter Ros</a>e’s eloquent question elicited one such (even more eloquent) answer from Queensland poet <a href="https://www.sarahhollandbatt.com/">Sarah Holland-Batt</a>: ‘Where does poetry sit in a world consumed by material objects, materialism, pragmatism, careerism, professionalism, managerialism, all those –<i>ism</i>s?’ asked Rose. ‘How does poetry survive in a world so devoted to the object?’<br />
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‘Poetry,’ came Holland-Batt’s answer ‘really is the last […] vestige, the last bastion of a space where every word is consequential, where language is reduced to its most core purpose, to its most exacting, its most particular. A poem is a perfect machine where every word has its use, has its meaning […] Poems are the one place where sane and exacting language lives at the moment, in this morass of fake news and loose use of language.’</div>
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In other words, one of the ways we can save the world is: more <i>this</i>. More reading, more thinking, more discussion, more devotees to the compassion and rigour of literature and poetry, where standards of quality are cherished, not abandoned, where ethical engagement with the world persists, where meaning something still means something, where thoughtfulness lives, where we can learn the tools of discernment and critical thinking that allow us to dispatch the dissembling messages of governments and corporations and demand better. </div>
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One of the ways the writers’ week instantiates this impulse is particularly fitting for the state where (white) Australian women first won the right to vote, the birthplace of Australian suffrage. Without explicitly stating it, without excluding anyone, it is on so many levels a festival by and for women. Dedicated this year to a woman writer, set in a garden memorialising the contributions of women, on and around International Women’s Day, it is a worthy alternative to <a href="https://twitter.com/HelenRazer/status/971309810972020736">a corporate breakfast agitating for more gender-representative economic inequality</a>. This year the lost diary of Australia’s most influential woman writer Miles Franklin was even <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/miles-franklin-s-secret-diary-discovered-20180304-p4z2rk.html">found</a> during the proceedings. Among such auspices, it was impossible not to notice the makeup of the crowd—most abundantly middle-aged women, Australia’s largest reading demographic. A woman runs the festival, the discussions are most deftly facilitated by female <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2018/writersweek/chairs">chairs</a>, and women appear onstage over half the time, often speaking on topics relevant to the cause. </div>
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Next year’s Writers’ Week passes from Laura Kroetsch to <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/sydney-writers-festival-ceo-jo-dyer-to-replace-laura-kroetsch-as-adelaide-writers-week-director/news-story/a8fa244b154bc2480e3492c2a7504009">Sydney Writers’ Festival CEO Jo Dyer</a>. We can hope that, as an Adelaide native, Dyer will know how to preserve and enhance what makes Writers’ Week so unique and so very important as a home for careful thinking in a world of bombast and bluster.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-59968734633505369562018-02-28T19:30:00.000+11:002018-03-17T22:59:19.567+11:00Firebrands and double-edged flaming (s)words: the wheeler centre gala 2018 review<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Wednesday 28 February 2018</div>
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<b>Monday’s eighth annual <a href="https://www.wheelercentre.com/events/the-wheeler-centre-gala-2018-words-on-fire">Wheeler Centre Gala</a> saw eleven intellectual incendiaries light up Melbourne’s <a href="https://www.athenaeumtheatre.com.au/">Athenaeum theatre</a> with variations on the likely theme—for an institution dedicated to the holy trinity of books, writing and ideas—of ‘words on fire.’ The characteristically malleable topic incited diverse interpretations from an estimable ensemble of writers, performers and activists, ranging from personal parables to political polemic, performance and poetry.</b></div>
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And diversity truly was the word of the night. Excepting the transitory appearance of Centre director <a href="https://www.wheelercentre.com/people/michael-williams">Michael Williams</a>, who seized the stage long enough only to make his obligatory thanks, gracious self-deprecation and inevitable lefty in-jokes about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/03/peter-dutton-says-victorians-scared-to-go-out-because-of-african-gang-violence">African gangs</a> and <a href="http://www.theshovel.com.au/2018/02/13/turnbull-finally-provides-definition-of-partner/">the definition of ‘partner,’</a> the lineup was a veritable straight white male–free zone. Indeed, holding forth as the speakers did on such progressive subjects du jour as environmentalism, disability rights, Indigenous oppression, the trans experience, class politics and even a content warning or two, the roster could well have emerged wholesale from <a href="https://twitter.com/mirandadevine/status/944706927954501632">the very nightmares of Miranda Devine</a>.</div>
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Any outnumbered conservatives in the crowd might have snatched hungrily at <a href="http://www.boonwurrung.org/about-us/boon-wurrung-elder-carolyn-briggs/">Aunty Carolyn Briggs’</a> portents of overzealous offence-taking and language-policing as a slippery slope toward censorship, but the Boon Wurrung Elder’s discussion of privilege and disadvantage in language use revealed a position far removed from the typical PC-bashing proponents of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-24/brandis-defends-right-to-be-a-bigot/5341552">Brandis’ ‘right to be bigots.’</a> </div>
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Briggs’ extended Welcome to Country offered a sedate start to the evening, with reflections on the history of words as weapons used both by and against Indigenous Australians, pointing to the subversive meanings said to hide in Aboriginal names such as Coonabarabran (putatively <a href="http://www.aussietowns.com.au/town/coonabarabran-nsw">‘white man’s shit’</a>) and the <a href="https://moomba.melbourne.vic.gov.au/">Moomba festival</a> (folk-etymologised not as ‘let’s get together and have fun’ but rather <a href="https://blogs.crikey.com.au/fullysic/2011/03/14/does-moomba-really-mean-up-your-bum/">‘up your bum’</a>). </div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Briggs concluded by inviting the audience to use the language of the land—wominjika for ‘welcome’—and to fulfill the obligations traditionally attendant on that welcome: ‘not to harm the lands and waters and not to harm the children.’ It was an exhortation later taken up by Indigenous author </span><a href="http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/articulation/editions/2017-editions/june-2017/meet-professor-tony-birch-author,-activist,-academic" style="text-align: justify;">Tony Birch</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> in his address, an admiring paean to Wangan and Jagalingou spokesperson </span><a href="http://aiatsis.gov.au/bio/ext/murrawah-johnson" style="text-align: justify;">Murrawah Johnson</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> and her incendiary words to author–activist </span><a href="http://www.naomiklein.org/main" style="text-align: justify;">Naomi Klein</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> on </span><a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/indigenous-affairs/2017/06/03/murrawah-johnson-and-the-indigenous-fight-against-adani" style="text-align: justify;">Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine</a><span style="text-align: justify;">: </span><a href="https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-228/regular-tony-birch/" style="text-align: justify;">‘We have seen the end of the world and we refuse to accept it.’</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> Birch traced the violence enacted upon Johnson’s ‘personal and genealogical history’ through the language of Terra Nullius and the Acts of Parliament that have governed Indigenous lives to illustrate the heroism, the injustice, and the irony of her leadership in the fight against the mine.</span><br />
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My view of the stage through the perfectly curled wave of another spectator<span style="text-align: justify;">’</span>s hair.</div>
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Before thirteen asymmetrical bars of light flaring and fading between performances like the still-glowing trunks of bushfire-blackened trees, each speaker took to the stage in succession, without the intrusive inelegance of any master of ceremonies offering aggrandising introductions. This lent the night the dreamlike intimacy of yarns around a transfixing campfire, each one free to roll into the next and build upon it without any break in the spell.<br />
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Commencing the official program was writer, actor and director <a href="http://creativerep.com.au/artists/leah-purcell/">Leah Purcell</a>’s lively autobiographical narrative, a touching and comic recount of the words and phrases that marked her lifetime journey from poor rural daughter and young caretaker of an alcoholic single mother to the acting career she had always dreamed of. Replete with a reenactment of the dance she performed impromptu down the main street of Bergen after a compliment from a stranger, the tale at moments challenged even Purcell’s polished performance skills with tears. Malaysian-Australian poet and rapper <a href="http://omarbinmusa.blogspot.com.au/">Omar Musa</a> likewise gave a stirring personal account of his lived experience, counterbalancing the poetic drama of the oration to come with a casual ‘’S’goin’ on?’ as he arrived onstage. He spoke of his lifelong battles with a father fervently devoted to the Word of God, and the secret words of inspiration imparted by his mother in stolen eight-minute car rides on the way to school. And in the night’s penultimate speech, blogger and activist <a href="http://carlyfindlay.com.au/">Carly Findlay</a> drew on her (ever-political) personal experiences to question whether social justice movements actually live up to the buzzwords of inclusivity, diversity and intersectionality when it comes to disability.</div>
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A persistent motif, of course, was the power of words. The power of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMiqEUBux3o">a politician’s well-crafted speech</a> to inspire a lifetime of loyalty in the case of writer and anthropologist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMiqEUBux3o">Sally Warhaft</a>’s Republican niece, or Warhaft’s own affection for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCxpqtSuH2g">the rhetoric of Paul Keating</a>, which preceded a writer’s lament for the declining communicative power of today’s politicians <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv9_mELLA34">at home</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aFo_BV-UzI">abroad</a>. Or the power of writing to give a child control and escape from an unstable upbringing that a garlanded and needlessly bashful <a href="https://rosiewaterland.com/">Rosie Waterland</a>—she of the <a href="https://rosiewaterland.com/rosie-waterland-bachelor-recaps/">famed Bachelor recaps</a>—conveyed. Veteran of the <a href="http://www.beat.com.au/arts/melbourne-workers-theatre">Melbourne Workers Theatre</a> <a href="https://australianplays.org/playwright/ASC-242">Patricia Cornelius</a> too demonstrated the potency of words forcefully in the opening of her crowd-pleasing ode to profanity, with a rapidfire fuck-and-cunt-laden tract from her play <i><a href="https://australianplays.org/shit-by-patricia-cornelius">SHIT</a> </i>(a linguistic challenge to which the Auslan interpreter rose admirably). In the comedic highlight of the evening, Cornelius delivered an insightful interrogation of the class politics of snobbery about swearing, railing against the bourgeois insistence that the theatre remain a polite, expletive-free middle-class space and the notion that the underclasses should never express legitimate rage through swearing. </div>
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Other presenters built on Briggs’ earlier meditation on the nature of words as double-edged (flaming) swords – their ability, in Williams’ terms, to burn and to heal. From <i>honey</i>, <i>darling </i>and <i>sweetheart</i> to <i>dude</i>, <i>bro</i>, <i>mate</i> and <i>man</i>, queer nonbinary activist and writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevo_Zisin">Nevo Zisin</a> reflected on the usefulness and limitations of words and labels in defining and limiting their identity pre- and post-transition, while actor <a href="http://www.rgm.com.au/portfolios/rachael-maza">Rachael Maza</a> powerfully contrasted narratives of her grandfather from biased official records against family memory and empathetic deduction, lingering over the difference between the concept of history and the past itself.<br />
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The crescendo of the pyrotechnic spell which the speakers had been steadily constructing over the course of the night came in the final empyreal performance by <a href="http://finucaneandsmith.com/">Moira Finucane</a>, who fully earned her <a href="https://www.wheelercentre.com/people/moira-finucane">description</a> as a ‘writer, director, performer and creator of volcanic and magic realist worlds … and intimate theatrical spectacles, internationally renowned for her arresting mix of provocation and entertainment.’ Bedecked in a shimmering black gown and headdress somewhere between the <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxdrcmNewIu6BOVweqJmZNpTdBCPenGnI1-VOL-j9YkV7c_4s_UK0ok0uewkmmydbSqQJewKrhTuYr5ULdIoz3Yl9T5pj5XrzX6OOmbyDVZj8e2f2oEaClo6IL-QcZ4qtpHKOe_8WGCvQ/s1600/untitled.png">Statue of Liberty’s aureolic diadem</a> and Westeros’ <a href="https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/gameofthrones/images/c/c8/Iron_throne.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20131005175755">Iron Throne</a>, she emerged onstage swaying and arm-waving in time to cosmic strains. ‘Kingdom Animalia,’ she intoned in the commanding resonant boom of an elven queen. ‘Phylum Chordata, just like us. Not like us, Class Aves,’ she continued as if reciting words of power. ‘Family Alcidae, Genus Pinguinnis, Species Impennis.’ This scientific classification of the now-extinct great auk launched an abstracted traipse through humanity’s relationship with the planet as viewed through writings both dramatic and innocuous, from Proverbs 26:11, to <a href="http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-plan-on-resurrecting-the-extinct-great-auk/">the cruel 1794 words of sailor Aaron Thomas</a> on the ill-fated penguins, to Charles William Beebe <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/81654-the-beauty-and-genius-of-a-work-of-art-may">on extinction in 1906</a>, to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/336443-why-should-we-tolerate-a-diet-of-weak-poisons-a">Rachel Carson in 1962</a>, to 2018 personal correspondence from another Indigenous environmental firebrand, <a href="http://nt.seedmob.org.au/eleanor_dixon">Eleanor Dixon</a> (‘a genius with 60,000 years of understanding of her land’) to <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-24/stan-grants-racism-is-killing-the-australia-dream-speech-viral/7110506">Stan Grant in 2016</a> and Desmond Tutu in 1999.<br />
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Though her declamatory style courted the absurd and at times dipped into the ridiculous, Finucane performed with such ardor and conviction that a possibly skeptical audience stayed with her, tittering only, perhaps, as intended, when the monologue descended abruptly from the grand themes of environmental destruction to supplying the tangible details of how to contact the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s Office to express concern over the impact of fracking on the tourism industry, all while maintaining its grandiose delivery.<br />
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Paraphrasing Tutu as she slowly departed (perhaps significantly to stage left), she encouraged her viewers to keep ‘trending, trending, trending towards the good,’ and left the audience in the lingering strings and darkness to awaken with the lights as if from a dream.</div>
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‘We’ll go together into the darkness. Holding hands, calling out … and trending, trending, trending towards the good.’ <a href="https://twitter.com/moirafinucane?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@moirafinucane</a> closed the night with a curling, haunting mist of poetic and direct language. <a href="https://t.co/5Kjxq1EgOW">pic.twitter.com/5Kjxq1EgOW</a></div>
— The Wheeler Centre (@wheelercentre) <a href="https://twitter.com/wheelercentre/status/968078476560314368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 26, 2018</a></blockquote>
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If the gala is a sign of what we are to expect from the Wheeler Centre in 2018, it will be an impassioned, diverse, provocative, progressive year indeed.<br />
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Thanks for reading</div>
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LPL</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-1884545788410715182015-11-07T17:36:00.001+11:002015-11-07T17:36:18.498+11:00What's the creator of damo and darren up to now?Saturday 7 November 2015<div>
This article was originally published at bullshit-blog.com on Wednesday 11 June 2014</div>
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This article as it originally appeared.</div>
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Something wonderful happened on the internet last week. Michael Cusack, animator-extraordinaire behind recent YouTube sensations <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmL72sgVdAQ">Damo and Darren</a>, is once again showing his flair for painfully realistic Chris Lilley–level lampoonery in his latest project, ‘Lucas The Magnificent’. Taking more of a multimedia approach, Cusack has crafted a satirical online persona replete with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LucasTheMagnificent">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/LucasTheMagnif">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNQpFX8_KIqV8X0thfPvHXg">YouTube</a> accounts that serve as avenues for the videogame-centred ‘rantings, ramblings and witterings’ of Mr Magnificent, an archetypical fedora-sporting, neckbearded ‘Nice Guy =)’.</div>
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In the same way Train Station mocked with pinpoint accuracy the universally recognisable unemployed, addicted, irascible ‘bogans’ or ‘deroes’ who bicker with one another at bus stops and train stations Australia-wide, Lucas The Magnificent parodies the self-aggrandising, New Atheist–venerating snobs who populate the web’s science fiction forums and comment sections.</div>
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The breathtakingly immersive portrayal extends right down to the most infinitesimal of details – not only the affected, nasal voice, vaguely British accent, hyperbolic vocabulary and exhaustingly self-reflexive tone, but an almost Aspergic exaggerated sigh that punctuates every mention of his (fictional) Pokémon game ‘reviewwws’, removed from ‘YiewwwChewb’ for copyright infringement. His latest Facebook post, in which he poses with an old-school Gameboy and the Red and Blue versions of the original Pokémon games, declaring defiantly, ‘Yes, I still play these classics….problem?….’ [sic] was even edited solely to replace an all-too-sensible comma with yet more superfluous ellipses.</div>
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This verisimilitude has left Redditors and YouTube commenters alike scratching their heads over whether or not Lucas is for real. Having only reluctantly joined the ‘catacomb for filth and scum of this world’ that is Facebook, he also represents several other elitist internet stereotypes, such as the snooty Grammar Nazi, the fanatical retro-gamer and the obnoxious ’90s kid.</div>
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Is the spoof mean-spirited to an arguably already-persecuted internet subculture? Perhaps. But the timing of the appearance, along with a <a href="https://twitter.com/Gillsberry/status/470740793204822016">less-than-politically-correct tweet by Cusack late last month</a> hints that the character may be a response to the kind of pseudo-intellectual misogyny spouted by ‘Nice Guys’ all over the internet that informed Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger’s hateful worldview. Women have yet to figure in Lucas’ online ravings, but the inclusion of the ‘Nice Guy’ tag in his Facebook page description seems pointed at the least.</div>
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Either way, Cusack is taking internet satire to a whole new level. David Foster Wallace might have been right about <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/david_foster_wallace_was_right_irony_is_ruining_our_culture/">irony destroying our culture</a>, but damn, in the words of Bart Simpson, sometimes ‘the ironing is delicious’.</div>
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Words by L Phillip Lucas, who could be accused of indulging in his own share of self-aggrandising ‘rantings, ramblings and witterings’ on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">Twitter</a>. He once told a girl in his creative writing class that reading her story was like having to listen to someone talk about playing a videogame.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-39023332237082175332015-06-23T00:13:00.001+10:002016-10-01T12:50:20.691+10:00Kate liston-mills’ the waterfowl are drunk!<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Monday 22 June 2015</div>
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Pambula-based writer <a href="http://katelistonmills.com/">Kate Liston-Mills</a> is a friend of mine and a fellow graduate from the University of Wollongong’s creative writing program, where she was a few years older but a few year groups below me. Disarming, ebullient, and universally beloved, Kate is humble to a fault, with eyes so blue they must’ve soaked up all those South Coast seas and skies. As an editor for the annual UOW Creative Writing literary magazine <i>Tide</i>, I remember having the chance to publish some of Kate’s outstanding poetry back in 2010, but page limitations ultimately forced the committee to bump the lowly first-year from the volume, something that never quite felt right to me. Thankfully, if unsurprisingly, Kate’s words have since appeared in publications much loftier and more widely circulated than <i>Tide</i> (and even later editions). But it still felt like something coming full circle when the advance copy of <i><a href="http://spinelesswonders.tomely.com/the-waterfowl-are-drunk">The Waterfowl Are Drunk!</a></i> appeared in my inbox. A wrong has been righted, and in such spectacular fashion.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl481S1PRLYDwokOWClzNV7rvgMDVlZwDhVuLUQ06V2I04X5kgNoPrYtEW8AbEAJxeZnYo8DuoVsLV0EYs7egOHtKgRTm9ap0EDzHc2F7X_b99A3b_FI4bltCzhfMmBMvvd_IvSTylN8c/s1600/Kate+Liston-Mills.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl481S1PRLYDwokOWClzNV7rvgMDVlZwDhVuLUQ06V2I04X5kgNoPrYtEW8AbEAJxeZnYo8DuoVsLV0EYs7egOHtKgRTm9ap0EDzHc2F7X_b99A3b_FI4bltCzhfMmBMvvd_IvSTylN8c/s640/Kate+Liston-Mills.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>The gorgeous KLM.</i></div>
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Published electronically by <a href="http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/">Spineless Wonders</a> as a <a href="http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/submissions/esingles/">Slinkies Under 30s</a> collection, <i>The Waterfowl Are Drunk!</i> is Kate’s first major work. In seven interconnected short stories, she draws from deep wells of truth and fancy to bring to life this heartfelt tribute to town, home and family. Working in the best traditions of the tall tales and urban myths repeated and embellished in country pubs the nation over, <i>The Waterfowl Are Drunk! </i>is a richly rendered and skillful meditation on birth, death and disability in coastal, regional New South Wales.</div>
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Perhaps somewhat embarrassingly for a gen-y bibliophile like myself, this was actually my first experience with an ebook, so it was only after some significant fandangling and carnsarnitting with the zoom function on Apple’s iBooks that I was finally able to sink into the collection’s opening vignette, ‘Bound’, which immerses the reader in the teeming wilds of the Pambula wetlands, ‘on the fringes of what some would call a dated town’. </div>
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But this is no Eden, if you’ll excuse the pun. ‘Think red dirt, murky water and tired trees’, the first line enjoins us. The birds swelter in the heat, the ‘stench of rot and fetid water is inescapable’, and in the bushes lurks a dangerous interloper, a red fox. For a moment here I thought I was reading an example of that rarely realised mode of environmental fiction that children’s literature scholar John Stephens calls ‘deep ecology’ – fiction that attributes an intrinsic value to the lives of animals and the environment, often decentering or showing as contingent human perspectives, or excluding them altogether. But the instance of a pen anthropomorphically assigning her cygnets names, as well as the somewhat malapropos simile of a waterfowl slurping a worm ‘as if it were a slushy’, anchors the reader in a human perspective and a roughly contemporary moment, and it soon becomes obvious that what transpires in this wilderness is deliberately symbolic of the human lives we are to encounter in coming stories. </div>
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As with the collection on the whole, ‘Bound’ is not without its awkward lines and, at times, it struggles to maintain focus in its all-encompassing narration, moving abruptly from one group of animal subjects to another mid-paragraph. But in just two-and-a-half pages (depending, of course, on the size of your browser window), Kate achieves quite an affecting narrative in the story of the fox and his victims, cast in suitably raw, fictile language that showcases her poetic credentials and, at its best, recalls the evocative simplicity to be found in the rural poems of Seamus Heaney:</div>
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The cygnets’ eyes, not yet open, are glued with fluid. And through the flurry of<br />
feathers and calls, the cygnets plop out of the eggs and sog up the earth.</div>
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In the symbology of this natural tableau, it is worth interrogating the figure of the fox: is he, as an introduced species, merely representative of a troublemaking outsider, upsetting the rightful order and earning the fear and scorn of the locals? Is he death, an agent of doom against whom the members of the community are able to rally, though never fully prevail? Perhaps, by extension, he is the reader, come to gorge himself on the lives of the town’s inhabitants in the coming pages for his own satisfaction. Or could he be the writer herself – all writers: slinking double-agents moving stealthily amongst unwitting native prey, scavenging for stories and details? The answer, of course, is up for interpretation.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixK3FQmATL33z2aq2cvVj3xpoYOl4BvTJBRhUS0xk2w32sW1oKAAPWNIpPw9pztyk2-4TjONgsKvFPoNBkj0PVU8tBl4K0_xf2k3PuH8GKPbRzOp5ONIMVueH5qsHXyPnwLmM9fEnJ5rw/s1600/Kate+Liston-Mills%2527+The+Waterfowl+Are+Drunk%2521.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixK3FQmATL33z2aq2cvVj3xpoYOl4BvTJBRhUS0xk2w32sW1oKAAPWNIpPw9pztyk2-4TjONgsKvFPoNBkj0PVU8tBl4K0_xf2k3PuH8GKPbRzOp5ONIMVueH5qsHXyPnwLmM9fEnJ5rw/s640/Kate+Liston-Mills%2527+The+Waterfowl+Are+Drunk%2521.jpg" width="425" /></a></div>
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What is established early and unequivocally in this opening story is that Kate’s is a vision of the world where the invisible forces that so often move and shape us, guide and animate us, are made visible, where the abstract and intangible interplay with reality in concrete ways. On occasion here and throughout the collection, this device can veer towards the overly ‘telling’ or convoluted (such as, for example, when we are told that a wind blowing through the town’s streets carries ‘the aftershock of war and soiled youth’), but at others it results in breathtaking passages of Wintonian beauty and eloquence, as when, simply, ‘Ed feels the day approach’ or, later, when the news of Ed’s demise as it travels throughout the town, mobilising everyone into sympathetic action, is characterised as</div>
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tinkering like a mechanic, slowly tapping on each head. It’s tapping into the nuts and </div>
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cogs of the heart of the machine, tapping each greasy component, until the parts all </div>
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work together.</div>
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Aptly, the concept first treated in this fashion, the ‘sweet nostalgia’ that ‘blends with the croaks and sits on the tilted horizon’ in ‘Bound’, is also the one that most suffuses the work as a whole, which is always romantic and wistful, but never saccharine or overly sentimental. Indeed, what could be levelled as a criticism against another writer becomes in Kate’s hands one of the work’s greatest strengths. Kate shows herself to be an adept conjurer of those moments, sometimes mundane and others extraordinary, that characterise every family history, those universally relatable and yet thoroughly idiosyncratic memories and rituals that form the fabric of a family.</div>
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The organising force of the collection is family matriarch Hazel, modelled on Kate’s own grandmother. Prominently featured also is Hazel’s daughter Lottie, a beautiful soul who has Down syndrome, inspired by Kate’s real-life aunt Nettie (to whose memory the book is dedicated). ‘Hey Porter, Hey Porter’ takes the reader to the moment in time over Christmas of 1956 when Hazel is forced to confront her daughter’s disability for the first time. The opening passage, which I count among the strongest in the book, showcases Kate’s skill in tapping into our collective nostalgia in a scene that is both quintessentially of its time and specific filial setting, and yet immediately recognisable:<br />
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The radio is crackling and everything smells of tobacco. The news reporter’s<br />
carrying on, something about blood in the water at the Melbourne Olympics.<br />
Nobody’s listening. Hazel has it on so they don’t miss the Queen’s 3pm Christmas<br />
message. Everybody’s knackered from midnight mass and no one can be stuffed<br />
cleaning up. The aftermath of Ed’s pig trotter feast is now gelatinous on the sink.<br />
Flies chinwag in the corners of the trays and stick there. It’s a rotten mess for<br />
another day.</div>
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Later, we find this same skill in ‘I Don’t Even Like Scotch Fingers’, an everyday tragedy where we watch in knowing discomfort as narrator Georgie, distracted by the trivia of teenage existence, takes Hazel, her grandmother, entirely for granted. During one of those familiar interstices in senescent–adolescent conversation, Georgie’s mind wanders to the time they had to rush Aunt Lottie to the hospital because she was choking on a nut, but then they drove over a speed hump and the obstruction dislodged itself, sailing through the air right into her uncle’s hand: just the kind of unlikely, though all-too-real family legend all of us can lay claim to in one form or another.</div>
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Just as some stories consecrate the emotional landscape of the family, others do the same for the town of Pambula, most notably in the title story, ‘The Waterfowl are Drunk!’, in which the town reacts to the loss of Hazel’s husband Ed. ‘In Pambula,’ we are told when the death coincides with the arrival of an eccentric houseguest, ‘you have to be hospitable. You just have to.’ Littered throughout the story, attached to the ends of sentences here and there, we find the refrain, ‘as you do’: signposts in the thought processes of the grieving widow that perfectly evoke the double-edged comforting familiarity and stifling oppressiveness of small-town living. Hazel’s actions are governed by a subconscious list of preapproved Things You Do in Pambula, forcing her into the tiresome obligation of indulging the strange old bird who turns up on her doorstep (people are always birds in <i>The Waterfowl Are Drunk!</i>, and birds people). </div>
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But in times of crisis, there is also comfort to be taken from such rituals and ritualised behaviours, as we see with the ceremonies surrounding tea that so pervade the book – the word itself is used some twenty-one times in seven stories (I’m getting the hang of this ebook thing). In ‘The Waterfowl Are Drunk!’ it is this beverage, so treasured by Lottie, that occupies her while the rest of the family tries to shield her from the death of her father. But she is more attuned than her family might think. The sensitive and subtle exploration of the perceptions of different forms of disability that runs throughout the collection is another element for which Kate deserves laudation, executed as it is with the confidence and integrity of a much more experienced writer.</div>
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Just as Kate endows Hazel’s family with a canon of folktales and memories, the town too is replete with its own mythology of larger-than-life tales and escapades and, given the distribution of the stories over the course of a century, we are witness to many of them – the misadventures of Ed and Tom on the night Hazel goes into labour, as they rollick around town trying to get their mate’s body to the morgue in the back of a ute and, of course, the tale that gives the collection its title: the time the town drunk disappeared temporarily, only to turn up in a freshly dug grave covered in waterfowl inebriated by the bottle of sherry in his hand. In the telling of these fables we find the blending of comedy and tragedy, that certain mix of beauty, poignancy and irreverence, that marks the best Australian fiction. Which brings me back to the most remarkable element of the collection: the incredible lyricism of Kate’s voice. </div>
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If all literature can be plotted on a spectrum from the spare and sparse on one end to the expressive and ornate on the other, <i>The Waterfowl Are Drunk!</i> would have to be classified ‘hyper-lyrical’, on the far side of the latter. Fans of the Spartan, the reserved, the unadorned sentence, Hemingway devotees and Naipaul adherents alike, be warned. Each of us has our own preferences in this area, and the pendulum of taste seems to have swung back and forth since the inception of the novel, between one school of writers determined to prune back the overgrown grandiloquence and floridity of their forebears, and their own successors, who seek to rejuvenate with inventive, sensual, descriptive writing prose that has come to be seen as sterile and dull. There is a place for writing at every point on the spectrum, but I, for one, tend to prefer the latter kind: writing that gives me something. Writing that’s luscious, that astounds and inspires and tantalises me with new ways of seeing the world. Writing that pushes descriptive language to the limit, that shows me something of the author. Writing like Kate’s.</div>
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In <i>The Waterfowl Are Drunk!</i> Kate is a veritable Nigella Lawson of letters, unable to resist tiptoeing down to the fridge after midnight to indulge in one more simile, one more metaphor. And what delicacies she has crafted in this smorgasbord, what moments of descriptive brilliance, masterful details and turns of phrase slipped expertly into the narrative: Lottie picking up the phone ‘gently like a hot cup of tea’, Michael Swaney’s parents with their ‘vegetable-scraps-in-the-plughole-of-a-marriage’, a body ‘fancified’ by bruises and scratches, natal blood ‘soaking into the sugar’, all complemented by and contrasted against an enviable command of authentic, spirited dialogue: ‘‘That’s gotta be the best birth in ‘istory Haze –’ says Hazel’s neighbour, ‘rainwater on the skin, sugar-taste everywhere. Gotta be the most perfect girl I ever seen!’’ </div>
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Of course, with a young writer working on this end of ‘the spectrum’, where so much is risked because so much is ventured, there are bound to be some misfirings. Sentences brim so full with description and simile in the book that they sometimes spill over into mixed metaphor, or rush at you so quickly you can’t appreciate them.</div>
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But some imperfection is to be expected here on the literary frontier: young writers publishing their first works in a digital-only format. Minor errors, unintentional linebreaks, occasional patches of less refined prose – these become part of the reading experience. There is a sense, during the reading, of the haste in which some parts might have been written (perhaps in one long ‘<a href="http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/meet-the-slinkies-kate-liston-mills/">binge-writing</a>’ session), of the smallscale, independent organisation behind the book, working on a hope and a prayer, kept going by the passion of dedicated, but underpaid and overworked employees, interns, volunteer hours and a shoestring budget, struggling nobly on in spite of the current, arts-hostile political climate. Slinkies and programs like it have been devastated by the Abbott government’s funding cuts, and now more than ever its stated mission of providing ‘a platform for young and emerging Australian writers’ is invaluable. If a few impurities are the price of having access to this kind of writing, I am more than willing to pay it. I can’t put it better than Slinkies editor <a href="https://twitter.com/birtiledge">Bridget Lutherborrow</a> in <a href="http://www.wollongongwritersfestival.com/uncategorized/nywm-interviews-bridget-lutherborrow/">an interview for the Wollongong Writers' Festival</a>:</div>
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When people are developing and perhaps feeling that gap between their abilities and </div>
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where they want their writing to be – it can be tempting to stop. Getting beyond that </div>
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emerging stage requires a great deal of resilience. It’s important we support writers </div>
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through this process if we want to have exceptional writers in our future. Also, the </div>
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kinds of writing and subject matter young people want to write is often invalidated, </div>
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because it might be a bit raw or incomplete, but I think young/new writers can have<br />
an incredible energy and unique perspective on what it’s like to exist at this moment<br />
in history.</div>
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With some variation, the collection generally grows in skill as it goes on, culminating in the two most restrained and technically accomplished stories, ‘Without Floaties’, which gives us our first outsider’s perspective of the town, and ‘Shiny Lino and a Whistling Kettle’, where an older, repentant Georgie reflects on the lives of her aunt and grandmother. Especially if the whole collection is read, as I would advise, in one or two sittings, it is difficult to imagine not being moved by this frank and effortlessly fluid final story, which resounds with the authenticity of a lived experience and functions as an exceptionally tender obituary for its two major figures. What’s hard to believe is that Kate will only become more talented with time, and undoubtedly has the skills to surpass even her best work here.</div>
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<i>The Waterfowl are Drunk!</i> is a brilliant and powerful fiction debut, well worth the outrageously cheap $4.99 for which it is being sold. I mean, that’s FIVE DOLLARS. Five dollars would be worth it just to help support the arts and emerging writers in this country (because Lord knows the government won’t), let alone what you’ll be getting in this artful, beautiful book. <a href="http://spinelesswonders.tomely.com/the-waterfowl-are-drunk">Buy it</a>, sink into your favourite spot on the lounge, and prepare for a pleasurable few hours one afternoon. And when you do, why not pour yourself a big mug of tea, too? For Lottie.<br />
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Thanks for reading</div>
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LPL</div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas"><img class="CToWUd" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiMn2YAdEOGGHzX5JamoC3GM0fpEUa2ubEDbd1LIR24vWisKRcYUg7gXPRaCbOLJ8-1-9BsQUCIBCZTr-v47U2hfUmmCnljnsJWJSSBFF5USauCTegB1iNeFIyf6x_uW0OleVv6gYvGxTqQ7nffnPmRQUneGSLqbWbZ1MtTO3asN8l7n_oH7LyzPAh6fLzlJ_SzBSZ_1dWsFsEMu7Huf9dSup9t8ftI-K7ADM1F81WB197d6-xqwcqdqjZTIgfdXC-F4JPhR3o=s0-d-e1-ft&id=0B422AtIaYKKoNzNIQmhwMkp2eVE&revid=0B422AtIaYKKocEIzREVuTnl4Qk5vQjgwR0M5d0xrWnRBcnZRPQ" /></a><a href="https://twitter.com/lphilliplucas"><img class="CToWUd" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEh40yb8khtqkIZ1ulaU-tpLo899nHrd4v8w7WJ5lp-MwY2IhxiulP_qP-YGYFqVRAtiAGz84l3anf1Y82sYzeECj5ZCxbLm_ri1XZLco9iJl-o09Oxl86kWVBipB55YBzqdJ55vtQj_hgBewtJsGDjq_fR8f7ONuulqjOF7C40U4mqVE4xZjhWWEKfAtc9kTI0oLdYReqpvbtDnWo39nt7b7eVnTuM_vLHuprIirr2UtwbMFpDAaUnLtlQoIzl3kWv5kV_llwM=s0-d-e1-ft&id=0B422AtIaYKKoTU1FYm1WZm90Y1E&revid=0B422AtIaYKKoZzJDbTc3Y2xqcmNiZGZqZlZEL3FRNTBtUGljPQ" /></a><a href="https://au.linkedin.com/pub/l-phillip-lucas/26/494/362"><img class="CToWUd" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhEiS9Dr5_fkBv0inAuJjccdaIG6wjNDEBDvDACwFkwsm_KocGYeu0RxT1rexPLhj5H9RtAx8Q_CbqgO8C2aej9c7F1Apd0p63SLjVzLp34kO0f6DDRWmWQAotWwMG8ngkgcdwduHmqXt4gHU8a1HmqHwLXm7fA7ryLcFS9vZcq17grMfFpeNBTtf0Jy0x6o6wNmhtkg3TjRBYn6IFL89L-ojV8U5I_UUr-PekYkzR2A1m_yWQAJikmiroZnYwvjmKbqJ4VUP8=s0-d-e1-ft&id=0B422AtIaYKKocHRiWGtvQmhBem8&revid=0B422AtIaYKKoNTNuL3oxR3U2VkFjUEFEc2FqWWNlRFZVZHVJPQ" /></a><a href="https://instagram.com/lphilliplucas/"><img class="CToWUd" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEi3aa0urU5oG-UA6M1DPiO3QvXqVHLqmjObQHipuxFQoO_8HU3RsPhphq-_KXqbb4K8vOH6UUMlo0-eZvB9-SvxkcvvljCGA880sETzvmoLVuj58MVsDaeljzkXC8GKP5KQQoM33IUh_GYCekAZqljwAeH1bqI9cHeTUYCWg28XzmwIL75S4HArdUYQ3cIUr8GsJadsqkOUZBrimwG04jiftO84abwe70RzJzQ7uajsmCCit_Vzlkkf8YmR91nvmBaFKcdFCgA=s0-d-e1-ft&id=0B422AtIaYKKocTJWQkhUMUY1S2c&revid=0B422AtIaYKKoNTE4NG1ORUlxWTFQL0tVQ0ZrUko5QkNZSXJNPQ" /></a><a href="https://plus.google.com/+LPhillipLucas/posts"><img class="CToWUd" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgMAwQLnxJgtxjALtm15RoqiWxcZYng9Gp2bUW_3CRD1Gc7JCMcFDoT-1Yjz1N4Z7sJCO_N6FgPb-4jLXPE7ogyBDzrOdfhHV1Qc5vrxILTW9T502oYRgfWa0DecxPjvF40DJ9ViUXLKfcpqk_iPvVlnfZrRdkpH7QtXr2OMKeJo_DbNG-HmA9zgTYJ0e7b0sQxTKG6jLlPg5lOqTGcKPGlSQgT11q20_AkGDYDm_h0_EwwzVPFOS4oiMIcnCnpNXIuWrEawf4=s0-d-e1-ft&id=0B422AtIaYKKoZnJWZDVlc3hRRW8&revid=0B422AtIaYKKocFV1cys1WEt1Q052ZW81Q005eXZ5bnhzM1NBPQ" /></a></div>
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<b>References</b></div>
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Sarah Fallon's 2015 interview '<a href="http://www.wollongongwritersfestival.com/uncategorized/nywm-interviews-bridget-lutherborrow/">NYWM Interviews: Bridget Lutherborrow</a>' on the <a href="http://www.wollongongwritersfestival.com/">Wollongong Writers' Festival website</a>.<br />
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Kate Liston-Mills' 2015 ebook <i>The Waterfowl Are Drunk!</i>, published by Spineless Wonders.</div>
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Images from <a href="http://katelistonmills.com/">katelistonmills.com</a>.<br />
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John Stephens' 2006 journal article 'From Eden to Suburbia: Perspectives on the Natural World in Children's Literature' on pages 40 to 45, issue 2, volume 16 of literary journal <i>Papers: Explorations Into Children's Literature.</i></div>
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Spineless Wonders' 2015 interview '<a href="http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/meet-the-slinkies-kate-liston-mills/">Meet the Slinkies: Kate Liston-Mills</a>' on the <a href="http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/">Spineless Wonders website</a>.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-59304524611110730682015-06-19T13:40:00.000+10:002015-06-22T23:19:17.785+10:00Vegan options at summer hill hotel<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Friday 19 June 2015 </div>
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I had a pretty funny experience at the Summer Hill Hotel last night, but it didn’t have anything to do with their ‘comedy’ trivia. My girlfriend and I went along with her brother and two of his colleagues, and finished up at a respectable third place. Afterward, when it had emptied out a bit, we got talking to one of the bar staff who was coming around to clean the tables. While he was hanging around, Tilly noticed a sign saying they do veggie burgers on Mondays, and asked him why only on Mondays. We’ve been to the pub a couple of times and they only have two vegetarian options, neither of which can be veganised, so the only vegan option is a bowl of chips (almost certainly fried in the same oil as the chicken schnitzel). Keep in mind that this is in Sydney’s inner west, possibly the most vegan-friendly place in Australia outside of Melbourne, where just down the road I could ask for no fish sauce or oyster sauce in my stirfry at the Thai place or no cheese on my pizza at the Italian and get the response, ‘Oh, you mean vegan?’ </div>
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‘Good question,’ he answered. ‘I don’t know. I assume all the ingredients are there right now, but we only sell it on a Monday.’ </div>
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There was a bit of a back and forth where he bitched about his evangelistic vegan ex-girlfriend and her hypocrisy in drinking non-vegan wine and wearing leather shoes, and then Til volunteered that I was vegan and he started interrogating me about wine and shoes and honey, absurdly insisting that <a href="http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Why+do+bees+make+honey%3F">bees have no use for it</a> (!?!?). Then he said, ‘It’s funny, ’cause we actually got this loooong email a while back from some vegan who wanted more options on the menu. And for the first few paragraphs I was on board; I was like, yeah, mate, I agree, but then he got to the part where he started trying to preach and stuff and I was just like ‘Nup.’’ </div>
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Then he talked a bit about how he ‘gets’ people who do it for the health reasons, and that he’d do it for the health reasons but he loves chicken, but he doesn’t get people who say it’s for ethical reasons. </div>
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When he walked away, I turned to the rest of the group and said, ‘Yeah, so the guy who sent that email was me,’ and everybody lost their shit. No one could believe that had happened. I hadn’t said anything because I wanted to hear what he had to say honestly. It was like being able to eavesdrop but he was talking straight to my face – quite a rare opportunity, really. </div>
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Not that it particularly helped. After the encounter I dug up the email and read it back to myself to try and see where he was coming from. Obviously his reaction is not the desired one for my cause. I know that people often respond negatively to any discussion of veganism, so that was nothing new, but in this case I thought I’d tried to be particularly non-threatening and polite because I was trying to effect a concrete change. But see for yourself! I’ll copy and paste the contents below, with a little commentary. </div>
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Firstly, I guess the email <i>was </i>pretty long – four paragraphs in total, but I’m just a longwinded, thorough person and that probably won’t ever change. I didn’t want to just send a three-line email asking for vegan options, I wanted to make a case and give some suggestions, too. </div>
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My first paragraph was basically just sucking up to them and setting up the situation: </div>
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<i> To the management of the Summer Hill Hotel/AHL Group </i></div>
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<i> My girlfriend and I have just moved into the area, and we'd heard great things about </i></div>
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<i> your </i><i>establishment, so we decided to try out the hotel for our first lunch after a big </i></div>
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<i> morning moving</i><i> in. We loved the atmosphere and service at the hotel, but were a bit </i></div>
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<i> disappointed </i><i>that there were </i><i>no vegan meal options available at your bistro, and the </i></div>
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<i> two vegetarian options were unable to be </i><i>'veganised' because they were pre-prepared </i></div>
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<i> and contained fish sauce and dairy products</i><i> respectively. </i></div>
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Nothing to see here, right? Pretty tame? </div>
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Next I got to the point of the email: </div>
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<i> We're eager to make your establishment our new 'local' for drinks, trivia, and lunches</i></div>
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<i> and dinners with friends, but obviously we'll have a hard time if there's nothing we </i></div>
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<i> can eat there! So I'm just emailing to ask if there's anything you can do to </i></div>
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<i> accommodate vegans in your meal options – whether it's enabling one of the </i></div>
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<i> vegetarian options to be altered for vegans, or even adding a new menu item. </i></div>
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Again, pretty reasonable, I think. </div>
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My third paragraph was about establishing common ground in case they were thinking ‘Jesus, no meat, dairy or eggs – what the hell does he want, then?’ (a common reaction). I explained what veganism actually is, which, in retrospect could’ve sounded a bit patronising, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t actually know, so I had to explain it to be sure. Here I also gave some suggestions for actual meals, because it’s generally good practice not to just point out a problem, but also to arrive with a solution, and I think a lot of classically trained chefs and cooks have just never contemplated cooking something without meat, dairy or eggs, so I wanted to show that there were viable options:</div>
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<i>I come from a family of chefs, so I know veganism can sound prohibitively </i></div>
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<i> restrictive at first. We essentially don't eat (or use) any products that involve </i></div>
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<i> harming animals, so no meat, dairy, eggs, honey, etc. But there are actually so many </i></div>
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<i> inclusive, delicious vegan meals that anyone can enjoy, even staunch meat </i></div>
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<i> enthusiasts (if they give it a try)! At other pubs in the past I've had wonderful veggie </i></div>
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<i> burgers; simple mushroom, tomato and herb pastas; open pies of roast veggies in </i></div>
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<i> (dairy/egg-free) filo or shortcrust pastry; falafel and hummus pitas with salad; nachos </i></div>
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<i> with beans; and vegan pizzas. Often other pubs go to the extra length of making their </i></div>
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<i> vegan meal gluten-free as well, so they always have at least one option that anyone </i></div>
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<i> can enjoy, whether they're vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, lactose-intolerant, </i></div>
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<i> gluten-free or whatever else! </i></div>
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Okay, there, bud. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKn8RlD7Is">Calm down with the exclamation marks</a>. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOxq36WgfImEs7sUFXo0-fyTZCQXvCY5v2c0djdfQpN6myP1BDTTFlNLhhitnPHBnDNmMPIGSH7-oLzKjNsspEHLafxPnSZFIsJQhOqkznDBAa3DV7f5DVL9RbBTU0-eaf0aFxaV_xkj0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-06-19+at+12.53.38+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOxq36WgfImEs7sUFXo0-fyTZCQXvCY5v2c0djdfQpN6myP1BDTTFlNLhhitnPHBnDNmMPIGSH7-oLzKjNsspEHLafxPnSZFIsJQhOqkznDBAa3DV7f5DVL9RbBTU0-eaf0aFxaV_xkj0/s640/Screen+Shot+2015-06-19+at+12.53.38+pm.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">'Anyway, I was just reading your final edit, and um, there seems to be an inordinate number of exclamation points ... 'It was a damp and chilly afternoon, so I decided to put on my sweatshirt!' ... 'I pulled the lever on the machine but the Clark Bar didn't come out!''</span></div>
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But still, maybe just annoyingly nice, right? Not exactly raging preachy vegan yet? </div>
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But these were all still the paragraphs that he’d been ‘on board’ with. It was the last one he said he had an issue with. And I can definitely see why. The last paragraph was where I raised the issue of ethics. It wasn’t in my original draft of the email, but then I found <a href="http://downloads.venuescms.com/file/2335">this pamphlet on their website that was basically fifteen pages of them bragging in poorly written copy about their commitment to ethical food sourcing and sustainable environmental practices</a> and I thought, ‘Well, then I’ll bring up how maybe offering a SINGLE vegan option on your menu might fit in with your dedicated passion for ethical food and environmental sustainability’: </div>
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<i> I was interested to read the ALH 'Our Sustainable Kitchen' brochure available on </i></div>
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<i> your website and glad that all your meat seems to be procured as ethically as </i></div>
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<i> possible. </i></div>
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Okay, not really, but a bit of flattery couldn’t hurt … </div>
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<i> As a company 'committed to ethical food sourcing and supporting environmental </i></div>
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<i> resource management now and in the future', I hope you guys will look into </i></div>
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<i> accommodating what I and many other people are increasingly finding to be the </i></div>
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<i> most healthful, ethical and environmentally sustainable lifestyle choice available. As </i></div>
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<i> you may know, growing crops to feed livestock around the world is the biggest cause </i></div>
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<i> of habitat loss and deforestation, and raising animals for consumption contributes </i></div>
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<i> more to greenhouse gas emissions than all our transport needs combined. </i></div>
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<i style="text-align: justify;"> </i><i style="text-align: justify;">Thanks for your time and hope to hear back from you soon. </i></div>
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<i> Cheers </i></div>
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<i> Mr L Phillip Lucas, BA, BCA </i></div>
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<i> Freelance writer and editor </i></div>
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<i> <a href="mailto:LPhillipLucas@gmail.com">lphilliplucas@gmail.com</a></i></div>
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<i> <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/">lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au</a> </i></div>
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So, what? Is it that ONE sentence he took issue with, then? Merely making a claim about habitat loss, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions? Claims the UN itself has validated by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet">urging the world to move towards a vegan diet</a>? To me it seems that people are just so sensitive on this subject that you literally can't say <i>anything </i>without being written off as ramming your ideology down people's throats. I think this ties back to a realisation I had the other day that I posted on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas">my L Phillip Lucas Facebook page</a>: </div>
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<i> Shouldn't the real indicator of self-righteousness be the belief that all of our actions </i></div>
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<i> are </i><i>beyond reproach, that no one has the right to criticise our behaviour? As a </i></div>
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<i> society, our</i><i> fixation on 'judgement' is reaching phobic levels. In a world where most </i></div>
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<i> of us never really think critically about our lives, it becomes easier to dismiss any </i></div>
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<i> form of criticism as rude, judgemental, self-righteous, sanctimonious, holier-than</i></div>
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<i> -thou or preachy than to make sure our ideas and actions can stand up to criticism. </i></div>
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They never did write back to my email. Apparently they just passed it around to all the staff, had a laugh at my expense, and now they bitch about it (to other vegan patrons???). I'm not really sure what I should've done differently, except not mention the ethical side of things. Obviously, in a way, I did get ‘preachy’ at the end there, but only to hold them to their own professed commitments. I wouldn’t have brought it up if they hadn’t done so first, bragging about their obviously bullshit passion for sustainability. </div>
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Maybe you can write a more successful one than me. If you’d like to send them an email asking about adding a vegan option to the menu, that’d be amazing. If they hear it from enough different people, they might actually consider it. Their email is: SummerHill.Hotel@alhgroup.com.au </div>
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Thanks for reading </div>
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LPL</div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-80598792370559327502015-05-26T16:36:00.001+10:002015-05-26T16:47:01.661+10:00Sydney writers' festival 2015Tuesday 26 May 2015<br />
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I had an extremely limited, though, nevertheless, incredibly rewarding, experience at the Sydney Writers' Festival this year, mostly revolving around interactions with one of my favourite authors and the subject of my thesis, David Mitchell. Before the weekend was over, I would hear him speak at three events, meet him at two book-signings, and have my photo taken with him. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihnfihAR3fM01oXX6dHjJxzSFQ_WJ_ClKi2j4gd3HDwS0-rIqR1RELpQ2wNZ3HZRU7AbyoB46u0XwxE0hamJv9qNB8Go1B2rwEbrwJU8b_84tWsaqdJX66q6qCwvNkfQuN715xZmDsTmU/s1600/DSC_0403.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihnfihAR3fM01oXX6dHjJxzSFQ_WJ_ClKi2j4gd3HDwS0-rIqR1RELpQ2wNZ3HZRU7AbyoB46u0XwxE0hamJv9qNB8Go1B2rwEbrwJU8b_84tWsaqdJX66q6qCwvNkfQuN715xZmDsTmU/s640/DSC_0403.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Walking to see Mitchell a second time at the Theatre Bar at the End of the Wharf for Coffee and Papers with the <i>Sydney Morning Herald</i> and David Mitchell.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBHhxTzU1QM4bVSmBUHmeUpZZWX8MqTIL0l5xuaNo5xsjYb1-9F6RUmG0Uw_mgHRTai-0IxywsIsa2kqyEvipeAPFbe2fwKpTY-TefN3Rwh4Vs0gqJjj3EHeThLm50caQ_jK6aJR2YzWI/s1600/DSC_0405.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBHhxTzU1QM4bVSmBUHmeUpZZWX8MqTIL0l5xuaNo5xsjYb1-9F6RUmG0Uw_mgHRTai-0IxywsIsa2kqyEvipeAPFbe2fwKpTY-TefN3Rwh4Vs0gqJjj3EHeThLm50caQ_jK6aJR2YzWI/s640/DSC_0405.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Mitchell and I after his third appearance (and my second book-signing) at the Roslyn Packer Theatre for 'Imagined Futures'.</div>
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My favourite interaction, however, was the first: Friday night at the City Recital Hall Angel Place event 'David Mitchell: Bending Time', where he was interviewed onstage by Kate Evans. The night had a number of highlights, including when Mitchell claimed to be, in fact, a novella writer rather than a novelist, an assertion Evans rebutted with a single heft of his latest 595-page behemoth, <i>The Bone Clocks</i>; when he revealed that the tea he was drinking was made accidentally with sparkling water (it happens to the best of us); and when he suggested that the key to avoiding the dystopian though all-too-plausible near future he depicts in <i>The Bone Clocks</i> is to 'vote in more idealistic politicians who will need to pass things that cause us some financial pain' and not to 'listen to demagogues that says, 'Vote for me and I'll scrap the carbon tax', met, of course, by enthusiastic applause from the predictably assenting literary festival audience.</div>
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Kate Evans interviewing David Mitchell, sparkling water tea in hand.</div>
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Two questions before the end of the interview, Evans invited audience members to start making their way to the microphones positioned around the hall. As she asked her final question, I noticed they were all still vacant, so I plucked up my courage and seized the opportunity. When I got to the microphone, Mitchell was still making his way through his answer. I felt conspicuous standing there, ten or fifteen metres away from where they were seated onstage, blocking the view of the audience members behind me with my not inconsiderable height, so I decided I would crouch in the aisle, which also felt somewhat ridiculous, but the best choice under the circumstances. </div>
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Then came my moment. 'Now, is anybody going to make their way to—' began Evans, before I sprung up from my position like a Jack in the Box.</div>
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'Hello!' said Mitchell jovially, before assigning me seven years good luck for being his first questioner and offering me some of his (nearly entirely in tact) block of Cadbury's vegemite chocolate.</div>
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'That's actually kind of relevant to my question', I began. The whole event was recorded and broadcast by Radio National, and you can hear our full interaction from about 37:45 <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/arts-abc-radio-national/id306567956#">here</a> (look for number 7. 'David Mitchell – <i>The Bone Clocks</i>'), but here's a summary, starting with my question:</div>
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'So, I just wanted to say thank you first for coming and speaking to us and your wonderful work. <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/cloud-atlas-and-left.html"><i>Cloud Atlas</i></a> actually really changed my life ... mainly through kind of clarifying my personal ethics, just by thinking about it a lot and the ethics that I find embedded into it. One of the main things was that it kind of removed the last ethical blocks that I was putting up into vegetarianism and now veganism. So I couldn't take you up on your offer to eat the chocolate.' We laughed. 'You were talking before about how, you know, we make ourselves feel better by dehumanising those that we exploit. And I wondered if you have any feelings about the way that that would apply to eating animals and farming animals and killing animals.'</div>
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'Yeahhhhhhh ...' he said in a long, thoughtful sigh. 'Not a contentious question, then!' he added, eliciting a round of laughter from the audience. 'Uh, thank you. Yeah, you're right. Thin ice, because I'm not a strict vegetarian. I'm an occasional guilty lifeform-eater. I'm riddled with hypocrisies and this is one of them. I don't eat mammals any more, though, um, because—because they love their mums, and they don't wanna die.' </div>
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We all laughed at this. 'I'm glad to hear it!' I enthused.</div>
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'And their mums love them as well', he added. 'I'm sort of working towards where you are, I suppose.' For some reason this struck us all as hilarious as well. Perhaps the incongruity of it all – that I had hijacked the event to talk about animal rights and, unexpectedly, I suppose, for many omnivores in the audience, Mitchell was agreeing with me.</div>
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The best response I could offer, as an aspiring writer speaking to one of his literary idols was, 'I'm working towards where you are as well,' which the crowd loved – the round of applause that followed is clipped from the Radio National recording, but it was there!</div>
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From there he discussed his progress in slowly crossing birds off the list, and then fish, and how it's interesting to think of the shock that would ensue if it became part of the syllabus to send secondary school students to abattoirs to learn about the process. He concluded his answer by saying something that took me quite by surprise:</div>
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'You seem incredibly healthy. You sort of radiate health,' he said. 'You're a walking advertisement for veganism,' prompting another burst of laughter. Personally I'd attribute any glow to the fact that I was talking to a literary legend and he was speaking positively about veganism, but I'll take it. 'You just seem one of those healthy people. You know sometimes you see someone and they're looking a bit "uhhhhh"' – here he made a groaning zombie noise. 'You had an enormous slab of cow for lunch, didn't you?'</div>
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For the rest of my interactions at the festival this question gained me some sort of notoriety. Immediately afterwards several people congratulated me on asking it, and everywhere I went afterwards people would say, 'You're the one who asked that question!' It also meant I stuck out in Mitchell's mind, so that he had some personalised messages for me when I got my books signed. I couldn't be happier that the man who wrote the book that set me on my current path, and who continues to delight me with his fiction, is of a similar mind to me, and is on his way to fully embracing the ethics that he so talentfully depicts in his work.</div>
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Helen Razer and Bernard Keane at the only non-David Mitchell event I got to attend.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeKkAbNm1M7tPR6_sPaNM9H9Hfvfdn1XAraQzx5XC4HAUrHAwnB_YTMwB_zZ-302JtkJExoS-rcGQ7l8gPbA_BPeyQc5t4IXuKL6gXDf5oIq7KRuKwafNPT1z4nBiKzmC3QIaT5_ZluPw/s1600/DSC_0415.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeKkAbNm1M7tPR6_sPaNM9H9Hfvfdn1XAraQzx5XC4HAUrHAwnB_YTMwB_zZ-302JtkJExoS-rcGQ7l8gPbA_BPeyQc5t4IXuKL6gXDf5oIq7KRuKwafNPT1z4nBiKzmC3QIaT5_ZluPw/s640/DSC_0415.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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My haul from the festival – all signed!</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-61949007230606986722014-06-11T19:39:00.002+10:002015-11-07T17:40:54.110+11:00'What's the creator of damo and darren up to now?'<div style="text-align: justify;">
NOTE: Since Bullshit Blog is now defunct, I've taken the liberty of reposting the original article in full <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/whatsthecreatorofdamoanddarrenuptonow.html">here</a>.<br />
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The cool kids at <a href="http://bullshit-blog.com/">Bullshit Blog</a> were kind enough to publish my first web article! It's a short introduction to 'Lucas the Magnificent', a parody persona crafted by the genius behind <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmL72sgVdAQ">Damo and Darren</a>. <a href="http://bullshit-blog.com/2014/06/11/whats-the-creator-of-damo-and-darren-up-to-now/">Go check it out!</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1ZHiY_aToF0st7bS5j1xh0MnH_LcIAZGYzRq7s0l5DR7ApWXy11y6ZVg3Mx-XqGwGVC7eT0nVW_MZkv6PVPtjHajDsyF5SxE6YKadWvh5Bz5k8eE9MkcFqKpKO9Sp3mMso_I_k2HPq6E/s1600/Damo+and+Darren.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1ZHiY_aToF0st7bS5j1xh0MnH_LcIAZGYzRq7s0l5DR7ApWXy11y6ZVg3Mx-XqGwGVC7eT0nVW_MZkv6PVPtjHajDsyF5SxE6YKadWvh5Bz5k8eE9MkcFqKpKO9Sp3mMso_I_k2HPq6E/s1600/Damo+and+Darren.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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And just some background, in case you're interested: I usually do this thing where, instead of building my writing CV up by putting my time and effort into articles that can be published on actual websites, I just occasionally waste an entire day writing three thousand–word diatribes to languish here unread because this is an obscure blog and no one would ever want to read a random, unstructured, meandering three thousand–word diatribe that contains all the opinions I could possibly ever express on one topic. (And yes, that was all one sentence).</div>
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The last couple times I've started writing a blog post I've thought to myself, 'Wait a second. Is there anywhere else I could publish this? Should I be pitching somewhere instead?' But then I always talk myself out of it by thinking I don't want to restrain myself to the extent necessary for a published article, or no one would be interested in the topic I'm talking about enough to publish it, or whatever. </div>
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But this time, when I saw Lucas The Magnificent pop up in my feed and spent the next hour reading every tweet and post he'd ever made, I realised it would be the perfect subject for one of those little link repository articles you see on pop culture websites, so I scrambled down a couple hundred words, and here we are! Next objective: publish a serious article somewhere ...</div>
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Thanks for reading</div>
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LPL</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-45994727052319738902014-05-20T18:07:00.000+10:002014-05-27T11:36:40.181+10:00Rosie, queen of the streets<div style="text-align: justify;">
Tuesday 20 May 2014</div>
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In my post '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/worst-kind-of-emergency.html">The worst kind of emergency</a>' I wrote about the importance of giving. One of the ways I've been doing that for the last couple of years has been working with photographer <a href="http://ethanmann.co/">Ethan Mann</a> on a charity project for Sydney's homeless, 'The X Book'. It's a compilation of portraits featuring Sydney personalities accompanied by biographies and it's been a Herculean task, strung together on favours and distant connections during spare moments in the busy lives of some of our participants. Now we have an opportunity to gain some funding and exposure through Canon's 'Shine' initiative.</div>
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<a href="http://www.canon.com.au/en/Personal/imageSpectrum/SHINE/Gallery/?stackla=ct_53735789b5496e9e32000008#/"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSKLceP_osA2OrtnosFFr0zrn1p_ujlq36-YnlbM7hz4cmlUptlj1-v1BVWsr302ATU77ZhHKt1rHrpSAlO397j36BOY1nL-aKc6R6URf0CgDVDaPlelvWB37EaVlVVs_-hbmbNcse9mk/s1600/Rosie.jpg" height="640" width="424" /></a></div>
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Click the image to vote for us <span style="text-align: justify;">(if it doesn't take you directly to the picture just select 'Leaderboard' from the 'Sort by' dropdown menu on the top-left and look for Rosie at the top)</span>!</div>
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Meet Aunty Rose, 'queen of the streets', a familiar and friendly face to many in the heart of our city. So many people have connected with Rosie, but few like Ethan. On a stormy night in 2012 he took his mission to help the homeless to the next level when he set out to spend two weeks sleeping rough on the streets of Sydney to try and gain an understanding of this way of life. But we who live in the comfort and warmth of our homes have lost touch with the survival instincts it takes to navigate such a wild and difficult lifestyle. He would've been lost if it weren't for Rosie, the angel who took him under her wing when he brought his obsession into her world.<br />
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<span style="text-align: start;">Rosie is a beautiful and wise old soul who made the streets her home after the deaths of her family two decades ago. She's got equal parts book smarts and street smarts, and a hearty dose of kindness that makes her willing to impart her knowledge, her time, and even her money, to anyone in need. She taught Ethan where to eat, showed him the safe places to sleep, gave him a handful of change when he had nothing, and schooled him in the vital practice of 'cold-biting' (what the rest of us might call 'begging') so he could make it on his own. Without her hr wouldn't have even the beginnings of understanding that he has now, so when he heard about the <a href="http://www.canon.com.au/en-AU/Personal/imageSpectrum/SHINE#/">Canon Shine initiative</a>, it was an easy choice which photo he wanted to submit.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: start;">The competition is all about reminding us of the power of photographs to effect change in a world where selfies, food shots and Snapchats might seem to water it down, so of course The X Book had to get involved. We submitted a mugshot-style portrait of Rosie that depicts how the stories of the homeless are sentenced without trial to silence, how their complexities are flattened into tales of guilt so we can justify ignoring an outstretched hand.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: start;">The winner will have the benefit of all the considerable exposure Canon can offer when they make a documentary about the journey that led to the picture being taken. This is a story that needs to be told. If you believe in us and you believe in our cause, please get behind us now so we have the best chance of winning the competition, getting our story out, and making a difference to the lives of our city's most vulnerable.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.canon.com.au/en/Personal/imageSpectrum/SHINE/Gallery/?stackla=ct_53735789b5496e9e32000008#/">Vote for our image</a> by clicking on the photo above, and share this page far and wide. Alternatively you can send me your name and email and I wil register you. Once you verify the account by clicking on the link in the email they send you, you can vote from there, or just let me know and I will vote on your behalf! There's links on my Facebook and Twitter pages (see below) for you to like and share and retweet to your heart's content. </div>
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Thanks for reading</div>
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LPL</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-36931111015722940182014-04-22T01:06:00.000+10:002015-05-26T16:49:44.457+10:00Little garie and the hidden shack communities of sydney's royal national park<div style="text-align: justify;">
Tuesday 22 April 2014<br />
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For someone whose entire life can be characterised by migration back and forth between Wollongong and the Sutherland Shire, the obstacle that separates these two places, Sydney's vast Royal National Park, is a constant presence. In my nearly twenty-five years I've made the move on no less than five occasions, each time leaving behind friends and family who needed visiting, so I must've taken the hour-long journey around and through the park, by car or by train, thousands of times.<br />
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In the original sense of the word, then, the park has been geographically pivotal for me: the central point around which my whole life has swung. So in the spirit of 'writing what you know', this 16,000-hectare conservation area seemed the perfect space in which to hide the hermit protagonist of my inchoate novel 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe'. It wasn't until I was voicing this idea to my nan, though, that I was informed of the extraordinary fact that the world's second-oldest national park already secretes within its depths a handful of isolated shack communities.<br />
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But apparently I wasn't alone. Surprisingly few locals, whether Shirefolk or Wollongongers, seem to be aware of the four micro-communities of Little Garie, Era, Burning Palms and Bulgo, each accessible only by walking track, which have been established in the park now for over a century. It only took a little investigation to reach the conclusion that I needed to incorporate these idiosyncratic little colonies into my book in some way. I was sold.<br />
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And so it is that at 10am on an inclement Sunday, just over a year after that initial discovery, I find myself on the wind-blown grass of Garie Beach in the heart of the National Park, accompanied by a fittingly representative mix of friends and family from both its Sydney and Wollongong ends. My nan brings three other family members from the south, while high school friends and fellow Sydneysiders Charlene and Alexandra (who accompanied me on my first excursion to the communities a year earlier) drive in with me from the north. They have all kindly agreed to join me for the annual National Heritage Trust Festival walking tour of Little Garie (the most accessible of the four communities and therefore the only tour not to have been cancelled due to the weather), where I'm hoping to learn more about the lives and history of the shackdwellers.<br />
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The glorious view from Garie Beach on our previous (much more temperate) visit.</div>
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We huddle against the wind and I make my introductions as my filial and social worlds collide, milling about a picnic table while we wait for all the attendees to arrive. We are surprised by how many people show up, perhaps a couple dozen: active middle-aged couples in hiking gear, a young migrant family with an adorable baby, and the various other pleasant, solitary grey-haired oddballs you find at such events, enthusing politely and asking earnest questions like garrulous mature-age students at uni. My friends and I are conspicuously the youngest adults there, later earning us the moniker of 'the young ones' from the event coordinator Kerry, who soon makes herself known and leads us on a narrow path towards Little Garie nestled between the cliffs on one side and the beach on the other.<br />
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Family: Nan, Eddie, and great aunt and uncle Christine and Stewart bringing up the rear. The 'most accessible' though it is, all the materials that comprise and fill the shacks of Little Garie would have to have been carried along this narrow path, including the heavy old kerosene fridges and cast-iron fireplaces.</div>
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The view from the track, with the rocky plateau where the shackholders meet for elevensies in the foreground and some of the Little Garie shacks beyond.</div>
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Warm and quick to laugh, Kerry strikes me over the course of the day as the most socially conscious of the guides, trying visibly to keep speeches from her fellow guides on track, forewarning us of the more notoriously loquacious shackholders and hurrying along any groups that linger too long in any one dwelling. She guides us up a steep hill, which she assures us is the only one we will need to contend with, to the characterful Little Garie community hall and chapel, where we are to meet the rest of the guides and residents: Tim, Peter, James, Gary, Tony and more. I didn't take any photos on this occasion, but I did take some during the 2013 visit:<br />
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Kids playing with a kart outside the hall.</div>
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In the hall we learn that the first shacks in the area were holiday cabins built from 1910 onwards on land rented from the owners, forty years before its incorporation into the National Park. Later during the Depression, the communities swelled as unemployed miners from nearby Helensburgh moved into the area. Once the land was resumed in 1950 after lobbying from the shackowners to protect it from property developers, no new shacks were permitted to be built. The existing shacks could, however, still be bought and sold until the mid-1960s when the land came under the governance of the newly formed National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), whose policy was to remove the shacks once their owners died. This led many families to just continue paying rent under the pretense that their deceased relative was now a decagenarian. Nevertheless, the NPWS succeeded in demolishing around 50 shacks during this time. Apparently the removal of the shacks ranked in the top two things former NSW premier Bob Carr wanted to get rid of during his time in office, during the same time heritage authorities were clamouring to protect them.<br />
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Today the shackholders are council workers, medicos, PhDs, engineers, sugarcane farmers, coal miners and all manner of other professions. Indeed, one of the most distinctive shacks we would see, brimming full of fantasy novels and half built of stones that leak when it rains, is cared for by a kindly Woolooware High School science teacher/archaeologist/Egyptologist. Each shackholder pays circa $3,000 a year in rent, and they are entitled to have up to four names on their leases. Very few of them live in the shacks fulltime, but they visit frequently on weekends and stay for long periods over summer and during winter holidays. The custodians of such a prized coastal idyll might be expected to guard their closed community jealously against outsiders, but the open day shows their attitudes to be the opposite. In fact, it is due to their efforts to the contrary, largely exercised through the <a href="http://www.rnpshacks.info/">Royal National Park Coastal Cabins Protection League</a> (RNPCCPL), that the NPWS' policy of shack removal has latterly been overturned. The communities' demonstration and celebration of their unique cultural heritage has led to its recognition by several various heritage authorities, and the open day itself, we are told by bright, eloquent RNPCCPL president Helen Voysey, commemorates the listing of the communities on the State Heritage Register in 2012.<br />
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The promulgation of the shack communities' culture being one of the goals of the day, the shackholders are eager to impress upon us the importance of the shacks in their lives. 'We're very <i>heartfelt. </i>These aren't just some place we come and have fun, stresses Kerry. 'These are a part of our structure, our DNA.' She also emphasises the intimacy of the Little Garie community, noted among the four for its closeness, citing how quickly secrets spread among the shackholders, and their daily ritual of elevensies. Another community member adds that there are regularly five generations in a shack, and Helen concludes that 'Heritage is not just your big stone buildings and your government houses; it's your little shacks where people survived the Great Depression and where people carry on a kind of holiday recreation life.'<br />
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Another point to which the shackholders continually return is the effort involved in maintaining their seaside escapes. Possessed perhaps of an ingrained sensitivity from the parlous state in which the shacks existed for such a long time, they seem to want to prove that it's not all just the bucolic retreat and pleasant weekends surfing and fishing in the sun that visitors might think, that it's not only through the luck of birth or marriage that they come to enjoy their shacks, but that they have earned the privilege through their hard work preserving and maintaining them. Peter characterises the task as a fulltime job, battling the wind, storms, and vandalism. Their $3,000 a year is the price for the location alone; it doesn't buy them the amenities, roads, pathways, infrastructure the ordinary taxpayer expects, nor the community services ratepayers enjoy, nor the upkeep on which ordinary renters can depend. The shackholders seem to do most of this themselves. They constructed the stairway we trudged up to reach the hall, Kerry told us, when the NPWS wouldn't pay for it and visitors kept injuring themselves. My friends and I happened to be there that day on our previous trip as the men sweated, heaving rocks up from the river to sink into the earth as platforms to stand on. I even recognise some of the shackholders in the hall as the smiling faces of people who greeted us and wished us well as we passed through that day, giggling in their swimmers with champagne glasses in their hands.<br />
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One of the shackholders carries a stone up the hill to use in the construction of the stairs.</div>
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Throughout the day we would be regaled with such tales of the shackholders' diligent ingenuity and resilience, from the construction of the stone shack from boulders rolled down from the hills above to its more recent repair when the roof blew off in one piece. Fences have been erected to prevent rockfalls and protect and hold back plant species. Days have been spent clearing the brush of the decades worth of shattered glass from the beer bottles of the shackholders' antecedents. An agreement was made for the community to take over the upkeep of any shack whose owner grew too old to maintain it themselves. And then there is the shacks' most persistent enemy: whiteants.<br />
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Some of the shackowners of years past were more creative in their bottle disposal methods. Each of these show their brewing year on their base, some dating back to the forties and fifties.</div>
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We are informed the floor we are standing on in the hall has just been replaced for fear that it wouldn't hold up underneath us after whiteants (or termites) had been at it. The first shack we are led to in our smaller group, in fact, is a thoroughly comfortable and modern-looking, caravan-style dwelling which owes its contemporary feel to its previous degradation by the voracious little insects. The shack belongs to Tony, a friendly bloke jokingly referred to as a 'blow-in' for his measly two decades in the community who was invited in when the former owner of his shack was no longer able to care for it and had no willing heir to take up the responsibility. Tony restored the shack and, in the process, added a few mod-cons. The internal bathroom is tiled, the walls are smooth and a TV plays a DVD about shack life in the background.<br />
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Tony speaking to us in his 'beach shack'. Many of the shacks feature these little signs, which in another context might be considered tacky – cheap, mass-produced knick-knacks hawked by imitation-high end homeware stores to ironically adorn the holiday homes and beachside investment properties of affluent city-dwelling bourgeoisie. But somehow I think the shackholders are more entitled to make use of them than these usual purchasers.</div>
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The contemporary style of Tony's shack represents another theme that permeated the day. Kerry has encouraged us to ask questions of our guides, saying, 'They're passionate about their shacks and their ideas'. In the way of so many people who lead eccentric lifestyles, who harbour some desire to retreat from ordinary life, whether innate or bred into them by a lifetime of shack holidays, many of the shackholders seem to have eccentric or strongly held views. Of course, I only had a few hours contact with them, but even in that time I feel I was able to detect a few of these unguarded opinions, which seeped into the conversation at any opportunity, the way we vegetarians wait for any vague allusion to meat-consumption to pounce on. Kerry and the others hint laughingly a few times at the strife that arises between community members occasionally, as with any family, saying she thinks it's what makes them so close. One of the divisions I pick up on is between those who have updated their shacks and the purists who 'don't like the modernisation of the shacks' and prefer 'to keep them as humble as what they were when our parents had them', in Kerry's words.</div>
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Tony, I think, may be omitted from this mild resentment because his was a restoration of necessity, but when she takes us through her shack, passed down from her husband Gary's parents, Kerry remarks that some shacks even have Foxtel, adding, 'We ain't going down that path!' Later in the last shack we'll see we are astounded by the decorations. Books line every ledge and splay over every surface (I'm impressed by the presence of Winton and Dawkins). Entire walls are covered in patterns formed from wine corks, which seems a local fashion, while others are plastered with photos depicting festive evenings on the grog with not a few bared breasts and bottoms. Snake skins and cicada shells dangle from the rafters, dead sea animals hang in the windows, along with paraphernalia of every other kind scattered everywhere: a Navy sailor's hat that washed up on shore, artwork by the grandkids, ancient photo albums, a telescope. Awed as we enter, the owner says pointedly, 'Yeah. <i>This </i>is a shack. A real fisherman's shack', as if in distinction from the less authentic modern shacks that surround it.</div>
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This shack was the most exciting to me because my hermit protagonist's shack is similarly brimming with the objects he collects, and ideas were rich for the harvesting here.</div>
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All this conjures the image of a secret Little Garie cabin elite who behind closed doors thumb their noses at the unenlightened shackholders turning their abodes into the holiday-home equivalent of McMansions, and I tend to sympathise. Certainly the most unchanged old shacks are the most fascinating, both for my friends and me as a window into the past and as nostalgia for those of the older generation in attendance. Nan lights up when we enter one old shack with a hand-wound laundry wringer out front, still furnished in the old style within. Other people seem more interested in these older-style shacks as well <span style="text-align: center;">–</span> this shackholder proudly shows us the magazine article in which he featured, and Kerry tells me a Tropfest film was shot there last year.</div>
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Another strong and not-so-hidden view that pervades the community is a lingering contempt for the NPWS, understandable given the historical animosity between them. Helen describes the history as a pendulum swinging, and expresses a hope that one day it will eventually stop somewhere in the middle. At first the authorities liked the shacks, she says, because they wanted the revenue. Then the pendulum swung and the idea that national parks would be without people rose to prominence, before it swung back to recognise the value of human heritage. (It occurs to me that this is much more elegant and obvious metaphor for my '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Stratigraphy%20of%20argumentation">stratigraphy of argumentation</a>', which I <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/hegelian-dialectics.html">later learned</a> was an unconscious permutation of the Hegelian dialectic). Ever the PR liaison, Kerry speaks frankly about the rift but ends on a decidedly hopeful note, saying 'we're starting to get on an even footing now', only to be undercut by a more embittered community member who adds, 'Well, some of us are' in what is just one many veiled and unveiled digs at the (older) rangers and the NPWS throughout the day, and not without reason. In the hall after thanking us for our interest in the valley Kerry tells us it is 'important for us to get out our history, as in, the truth, let's say, not a skewed version.' We are told about one ranger who still works at the park who allegedly sunk an axe into a kerosene tank and, when asked why, reportedly answered 'So you bastards can't use it.' When bushfires swept through the region and the community evacuated, they came back to find the words 'Burn you bastards, burn' scrawled on their blackboard, supposedly by the same ranger.</div>
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The other strongly held beliefs of the community appear to be environmental. Kerry points out that the community has been forced to abandon their kerosene fridges for high-tech solar ones due to the unavailability of parts. We are introduced to at least one 'solar nut' and his solar-powered shack, as well as Peter, an affable 65-year veteran of the environmental movement, whose shack was one of the last legally bought Little Garie shacks . An engineering consultant by trade as well as a Landcare volunteer, Peter seems to be the resident historian of the community, claiming to have spent a lot of time researching to determine that the Royal National Park shacks are absolutely unique in Australia as non-road accessible coastal cabins built legally on freehold land. He distributes flyers about the communities entitled 'Living Heritage'. </div>
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Peter's experience of the environmental movement is fascinating. It must be bizarre to have been in a movement from its inception as a fringe concern and watch it ascend to mainstream acceptance. 'I can assure you it was not very popular,' he says in the hall. 'You were considered to be a Grade-A screaming nutter'. This is a pertinent example of our tendency to underestimate how much things can change in one lifetime, and a reminder not to measure the worth of ideas by their extremity in relation to the current norm, but on their own merits. In sixty-five years there will likely be an entirely new norm that may embrace what once seemed radical. </div>
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Peter's shack.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0SxwgFyC_s1QP4gW3p52A11QSXRBEgZGy3LjOR9aSwYWTl6rdXjPUXEXFpYzM9LnxfopWuBAy6OGGFvapCz1zosP7398axorM_tZyen6lnJNMwMwjwv9moK0YT9AgLNrRjaHHFckLj2o/s1600/P4136909.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0SxwgFyC_s1QP4gW3p52A11QSXRBEgZGy3LjOR9aSwYWTl6rdXjPUXEXFpYzM9LnxfopWuBAy6OGGFvapCz1zosP7398axorM_tZyen6lnJNMwMwjwv9moK0YT9AgLNrRjaHHFckLj2o/s640/P4136909.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Peter.</div>
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Before Peter speaks in the hall we are jokingly warned not to ask him about climate change. He goes on to say that the environmental movement has been 'hijacked by radical nutters who really don't understand the issues'. He may have a point and his example of the protests against hazard reduction burning is hard to argue with, but I found myself hoping this friendly and knowledgeable figure wasn't a denier of anthropogenic climate change, although the warning not to ask him about it could be interpreted either way.</div>
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The tour over, the various smaller groups reconverge on the hall for the sausage sizzle the shackholders are putting on. Alexandra and I duck back to the car to retrieve our Eski full of a vegetarian feast and sit in the grass a short distance away, attracting gratifying comments from various passersby that they're jealous of our lunch. A Little Garien hawking raffle tickets offers me the 'lucky ticket' 69 (appropriately the one from the shack featuring the lewd photographs) and I purchase some giftcards featuring paintings, photographs and drawings by a local artist to add to the nascent wall collage next to my desk to inspire me. Meanwhile, Charlene prompts my nan to buy me a 'Shacks Forever' shirt by pretending I told her I really wanted one.</div>
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I thought myself lucky to find the two paintings of the swamp wallaby, as one significant section of my novel revolves around one such wallaby who lives in the park.</div>
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After that the weather finally gives out and the rain drives everyone back inside the community hall. Fearing that the locals would take issue with an outsider coming in to tell their story for them, I was hesitant to mention the novel to anyone. My nan, however, fearlessly informed both Kerry and Helen, who thankfully responded with nothing but polite enthusiasm, obligatory though that may. But I'm glad, because it got me both some tantalising traces of stories to follow up on, some regarding the real hermits who inhabit the national park, as well as some great contacts, especially Helen, who welcomed me to contact her when I needed more information, something I will definitely be doing when the time comes. I'll also, I'm sure, be making many more journeys to the National Park to continue learning about the extraordinary communities to be found in this place which is so central to the geography of my life. And maybe when I do, at Charlene's suggestion, I'll be wearing the shirt Nan got me. </div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Shacks forever!</span></div>
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Thanks for reading</div>
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LPL</div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas?ref=hl">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">Twitter</a></div>
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Note: If anyone depicted visually or textually in this post wishes their name or image to be omitted, please <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/p/guestbook.html">contact me</a>. Feel free also to contact me with any questions, corrections or complaints.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-53503922927747190082014-04-16T23:19:00.000+10:002014-04-16T23:30:26.467+10:00Book review: terry goodkind's the omen machine<div style="text-align: justify;">
Wednesday 16 April 2014</div>
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(<a href="http://i.imgur.com/IwgAU.jpg">Source</a>)</div>
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The following review contains mild spoilers from the early parts of the book.<br />
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Having neatly tied up his myriad loose ends in the final instalment of the Chainfire trilogy, <i>Confessor</i>, Terry Goodkind embarks on a whole new mess in <i>The Omen Machine</i>, the first in another series of Richard and Kahlan novels. Seeking, it seems, to torture his characters almost as much as his readers by keeping the spaces between novels (and cataclysms) infinitesimal, a new existential threat emerges during the celebrations following the defeat of the previous one, launching us on what is sure to be yet another protracted, poorly (i.e. not at all?) edited, banal adventure full of impossibly, ridiculously evil villains for Kahlan to be kidnapped or poisoned or otherwise imperilled by and for Richard to lecture us about. </div>
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As an editor, reading Goodkind’s writing makes me want to prostrate myself before his publishers and beg them to allow me even a few hours alone with his manuscripts and a red pen, pro bono, before he is allowed to pollute the language with them. There’s none of the occasional moments of descriptive beauty sprinkled throughout Goodkind’s earlier works to be found here, no hint of his rarely exhibited though nonetheless surprising appreciation for detail. The prose is unwieldy and halting, repeated words clanking harshly up against one another and giving the book an overall careless, rushed feel <i>à la</i> the latter works of Raymond E Feist. It’s as though some of these B-grade epic fantasy authors work out that most readers don’t care how well-written their books are and they can just crank out sequel after sequel and make the same amount of money.</div>
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So, of course, it’s impossible to catalogue all the problems with a Terry Goodkind book in a single review, so I’m going to restrain myself to just one: his notorious monumental ego. Or rather, one way it manifests in his works. Possessed of a great number of opinions, ranging from morally reprehensible to innocuous, on any number of topics, Goodkind’s motivation in writing seems to be to embed as many of them in his books as often as possible, largely through the simplistic device of using his exaggeratedly perfect (in the world of the books, anyway) protagonist Richard directly to spout them for him. Plotting for Goodkind seems more an exercise in engineering various situations in which Richard can argue with and lecture other characters and the reader on one of these opinions than any conventional dedication to the integrity of the story or the gratification of the reader. Indeed, each novel is largely propelled not by action, but by argument. Revealing of their didactic impulse, the narratives largely turn on episodes in which different characters discuss events and ideas and try to convince one another of different positions in laborious exchanges that persist much longer than believability would allow.</div>
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The result is that the reader finds themself mired in perpetual, incessant exchanges between characters on subjects both mundane and esoteric, extended disputes over how best to organise and catalogue a library alongside lengthy treatises introducing abstract magical concepts that are never grounded in any previously established logic. These latter logomachies always reveal new concepts all at once, so the reader is never granted the chance to anticipate or share in the reasoning. It’s just Richard presenting some new element of the nature of magic that hasn’t come up before in any of the previous twelve overlong tomes, that completely explains what’s going on in this book, while everyone else disagrees that it’s possible until he is inevitably proven correct.</div>
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Goodkind facilitates this recurrent magical Deus ex machina at first by way of the charade of Richard’s ludicrous decision not to ‘depend on his gift’, even though he supposedly epitomises rationality and it is completely irrational for him to refuse to learn about an inescapable part of himself that could be so helpful to him, and later by making Richard a ‘war wizard’ whose magic is mysterious and able only to be activated by need and emotion, very conveniently giving it scope to work in any way the author chooses in future, failing to lock him in to any constraints. Such constraints are the very things that ordinarily make suspension of disbelief about magic possible in other series, the things that allow the reader to find any plots involving magic satisfying – that we know the way it works, that it has limits.</div>
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And I wasn’t kidding about the library debate, either. Just under an hour into the audiobook, an illustrative example of one of these monotonous, one-sided duologues occurs when we find ourselves in the royal library of D’Hara, the capital city of the eponymous empire ruled by Richard. After pacing for some time, Richard’s absurdly named grandfather, First Wizard Zeddicus ‘Zedd’ Z’ul Zorander, halts and proclaims that he’s ‘not convinced that it can work, Richard—or at least, work effectively.’ What follows is no less than six minutes of discussion over whether or not the classification of all the books in the library is a worthwhile pursuit.</div>
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What's more, this doesn’t even seem to be a point of any importance in the novel. I guess they came across a book that turned out to be important, but there’s nothing to say they had to do so while undertaking a reorganisation of the library. We can probably safely assume that it will come back in some way in future (I’m halfway through the sequel <i>The Third Kingdom</i> at the time of writing), but is there anything that could justify such a prolonged, mind-numbing argument over library classification?</div>
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It can only be Goodkind’s zeal to prove the veracity of one of his opinions that leads him to prolong these exchanges so unnaturally beyond the realms of credibility. He needs the discussion to go on much longer than it should so he has room to get out all of his profound thoughts. Would Zedd really try so hard to dissuade his grandson from such a harmless endeavour as trying to catalogue all the books in his library? And even if he would, is it really necessary for the reader to be subjected to it? So often does Goodkind deploy this device, it’s beginning to feel like Zedd never believes Richard about anything, no matter how many times he is proven right. All the characters, in fact, begin to appear obsessive and stubborn, overly concerned with debating minor details, unwilling to see the (diegetic) truth of their opponents’ assertions, their likeability in the eyes of the reader sacrificed at the altar of Goodkind’s ego. The debates depend on an endless stream of meaningless ‘But Richard …’ interjections from the protagonist’s interlocutors to interrupt the pages of explanation and prevent the diatribe from collapsing under its own weight. The characters are forever asking one another ‘What are you talking about?’ and ‘What do you mean?’ and regarding one another as though they are crazy because of all the <i>insane</i> propositions and <i>profound</i> misunderstandings flying back and forth.</div>
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Another illuminating instance of this propensity comes in another early scene in the novel. Shortly after a woman confesses to infanticide in order to spare her children the more gruesome death portended by a vision, and then attempts to murder Kahlan to spare her a similar fate, reformed Sister of the Dark Nicci shows up on the scene seeming to already know of the happenings despite her absence when they occurred. It becomes immediately apparent to the reader that there must be more than one instance of this going on throughout the city, but the characters on the other hand are not so fast on the uptake, positively baffled by the things they are telling one another, and we are forced to wade through 750 words of tortuous dramatic irony as the feeble-minded cast tries to determine what’s going on. It’s like the Abbott and Costello ‘Who’s on First’ skit (or the <i>Animaniacs</i> ‘Who’s on Stage?’ skit for you '90s kids) but without the witty paronomasia! See for yourself:</div>
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<i>“I didn’t see you at the reception,” Richard said. “Where did you hear about her killing her children?”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci frowned up at him. “Hear about it? I was there.”</i></div>
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<i>“There? What do you mean you were there?”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci folded her arms and stared at him as if he were the one who was crazy. “I was there. I was down in the market helping to get people organized and hurrying them along to move into the passages in the plateau and out of what is shaping up to be a monstrous storm. They need to move into shelter. Those tents aren’t going to protect them.”</i></div>
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<i>“That’s true enough.”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci sighed as she shook her head. “So, I was down there in the market when the first one hit.”</i></div>
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<i>The creases in Richard’s brow deepened. “What do you mean, when the first one hit? First what?”</i></div>
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<i>“Richard, aren’t you listening? I was there when the first child hit the ground.”</i></div>
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<i>Richard’s jaw dropped. “What?”</i></div>
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<i>“It was a girl, not ten years old. She came down on a log wagon, on one of the upright stake poles. That pole was bigger than my leg. She came down face-first, shrieking all the way. It went right through her chest. People were screaming and running around in confusion and panic.”</i></div>
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<i>Richard blinked, trying to makes sense of what he was hearing. “What girl are you talking about?”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci looked at all the faces watching her. “The girl that the woman threw off the palace wall, over the edge of the plateau, after she had her vision.”</i></div>
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<i>Richard turned to Benjamin. “I thought you said you found the children.”</i></div>
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<i>“I did. We found both of them.”</i></div>
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<i>“Both?” Nicci’s brow drew tight. “There were four of them. All four of her children hit within seconds of one another. The first, the girl, was the oldest. When the woman threw them off the top of the plateau they all landed right there near me. Like I said, I was there. It was a horrifying scene.”</i></div>
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<i>Kahlan seized a fistful of Nicci’s dress at her shoulder. “She killed four more?”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci didn’t try to remove Kahlan’s hand. “Four more? What are you talking about? She killed her four children.”</i></div>
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<i>Kahlan pulled Nicci closer. “She had two children.”</i></div>
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<i>“Kahlan, she had four.”</i></div>
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<i>Kahlan’s hand slipped from Nicci’s dress. “Are you sure?”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci shrugged. “Yes. She told me so herself when I questioned her. She even told me their names. If you don’t believe me you can ask her yourself. I have her locked up in a cell down in the dungeon.”</i></div>
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<i>Zedd leaned in closer. “Locked up . . . ?”</i></div>
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<i>“Wait a minute,” Richard said. “You’re telling me that this woman killed her four children by throwing them off the side of the plateau? And you locked her up?”</i></div>
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<i>“Of course. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?” Nicci frowned around at everyone. “I thought you said that you knew all about it. Her husband found out what had happened and was going to kill her. He was screaming for her blood. I was afraid that the guards who grabbed the woman were going to let him have her. I sympathize with his feelings, but I couldn’t allow it for now. I had her locked up, instead, because I thought you or Kahlan would want to question her.”</i></div>
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<i>Richard was incredulous. “Why did she do it? What did she say?”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci appraised them all as if they had collectively gone mad. “She said that she had a vision and couldn’t stand the thought of her children having to face the terror to come, so she killed them swiftly instead. You said that you knew about it.”</i></div>
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<i>“We knew about the other one,” Richard said.</i></div>
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<i>“Other one?” Nicci looked from face to face, finally settling on Richard. “What other one?”</i></div>
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<i>“The one who cut her two children’s throats and then came to the reception and tried to kill Kahlan.”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci’s concerned gaze darted to Kahlan. “Are you all right?”</i></div>
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<i>“I’m fine. I took her with my power and had her confess. She told us what she had done and what she intended to do.”</i></div>
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<i>Nicci pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Wait, you’re saying that there was a second woman who also had a vision and killed her children?”</i></div>
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<i>Kahlan and Richard both nodded.</i></div>
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<i>“That would help explain why people are so unnerved and want to know what prophecy has to say about it,” Richard said.</i></div>
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<i>“What’s going on?” Nicci asked.</i></div>
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JESUS CHRIST. YES. THERE WERE TWO INSTANCES. I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOD-DAMNED SEEKER OF TRUTH, ABLE TO MAKE GARGANTUAN LEAPS IN LOGIC IN A SINGLE BOUND. WHY DOES IT TAKE SEVEN HUNDRED WORDS FOR US TO ESTABLISH THIS? WHY GOD-DAMN YOU WHY? STOP THE MADNESS. WHY AM I READING THIS GARBAGE?<br />
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Thanks for reading<br />
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LPL</div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">Twitter</a></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-92002307821396673862014-04-11T17:32:00.003+10:002014-04-11T17:32:37.052+10:00Book review: terry goodkind's chainfire<div style="text-align: justify;">
Friday 11 April 2014</div>
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Following on from my discussion of audiobooks in my last post, '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/reading-habits-in-modern-age.html">Reading habits in the modern age</a>', and considering the interest this review generated on Facebook when it cross-posted from Goodreads, I thought it was worth throwing up here as well. Stay tuned for more scathing reviews as I continue needlessly to torture myself with Goodkind's works until I'm all caught up ...</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg4TxFYmcx1ASqK_61YnkPEqJfx_nl4PbmilwNVr6KlYuUPE-I6LS0uSY8LscxTJugk8hi-wOhAr3y7iM6zOJDJkn5YHQj6XzvnGmvKzODvxzzfWYPskeQn2868aZmyaL9UIVyEuHZF6o/s1600/Terry+Goodkind's+Chainfire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg4TxFYmcx1ASqK_61YnkPEqJfx_nl4PbmilwNVr6KlYuUPE-I6LS0uSY8LscxTJugk8hi-wOhAr3y7iM6zOJDJkn5YHQj6XzvnGmvKzODvxzzfWYPskeQn2868aZmyaL9UIVyEuHZF6o/s1600/Terry+Goodkind's+Chainfire.jpg" height="400" width="242" /></a></div>
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(<a href="http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9781455825752_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG">Source</a>)</div>
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Deplorable Ayn Rand fanatic Terry Goodkind's sole plot device of separating hyperbolically perfect lovers Richard and Kahlan recurs yet again in <i>Chainfire</i>, if in a slightly more interesting incarnation this time, with the erasure of Kahlan from everybody's memories but Richard's. This results in some characteristically tedious, repetitive, unrealistic, interminable, eyeroll-inducing exchanges between Richard and other characters as he tries to convince them of his inevitable correctness against their insistence that he is deluded. Oh and also something about an invincible beast that (of course) horifically mutilates people to get to Richard. </div>
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Goodkind has only my obsessive compulsion to finish what I start to thank for my continued consumption of his free market capitalist propaganda, and the fact that the books have been turned into audiobooks. I don't think I'd get through them if I had to will my eyes to continue relaying the derivative, uninspired words on the page to my brain instead of just tuning out and doing something else as the poor voice actor drones on and on, trying to intone the author's awkward phrases with any sense of realism. There are also, of course, the obligatory clumsy, transparent, desperate, deluded attempts from the author to trick the reader into endorsing morally untenable positions that glorify selfishness and pose helping others as the greatest kind of evil, as well as other philosophies that support a purely self-interested free market capitalist, minimal-government, nonexistent welfare dystopia. </div>
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The book ends on a cliffhanger to propel you into the next book in the triology, and I have to admit despite my innumerable objections that I'm usually interested in what happens at the end of each book as events (finally) reach their climax. Anyway, I'm one book closer to catching up to Goodkind and hopefully not reading another book from him for many years to come (or ever again).</div>
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Thanks for reading</div>
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LPL</div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">Twitter</a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-7609117094319144192014-04-01T12:20:00.000+11:002014-04-02T21:49:30.839+11:00Reading habits in the modern age<div style="text-align: justify;">
Tuesday 1 April 2014<br />
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I'm a big fan of lists. I have a list to keep track of what I'm doing and what I'm supposed to achieve every day of the week, partly because of OCD and partly because I'm too hopeless to remember everything I have to do (sometimes I even list the individual steps of 'hanging out the washing' and 'bringing in the washing' just to feel the sense of accomplishment when I cross them off). So for a few years now I've kept a list of books to read, and more or less pondered through it chronologically. This, I take it, is not abnormal. Most readers seem to resort to lists to realise their reading aspirations. Got a recommendation? Put it on the list. A friend or lecturer writes a novel? Put it on the list. An interesting-looking book wins a prestigious award? Put it on the list. An extreme but admirable instance of this practice would be <a href="http://goingdownswinging.org.au/site/category/blog/the-rory-gilmore-reading-challenge/">the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge</a>, which illustrious word-man <a href="http://spontaneityreview.com/about/">Patrick Lenton</a> is currently undertaking over at <a href="http://goingdownswinging.org.au/site/">Going Down Swinging</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpXTdmB_r6hyV4d3EO0vEAM5YrwULtt9zviBDRKPP4I3K9nBg2Dg6KMHRiLC0t8z-ClnQZntpiznmI_csUmM-6zeYVTksm6XWJYHGvLz1gFcO_s5a3F8zZVqdkUbZOgdy-kVyx2Pya_A/s1600/extreme+reading.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpXTdmB_r6hyV4d3EO0vEAM5YrwULtt9zviBDRKPP4I3K9nBg2Dg6KMHRiLC0t8z-ClnQZntpiznmI_csUmM-6zeYVTksm6XWJYHGvLz1gFcO_s5a3F8zZVqdkUbZOgdy-kVyx2Pya_A/s1600/extreme+reading.jpg" height="280" width="400" /></a></div>
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Reading ... TO THE EXTREME.</div>
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(<a href="http://www.addisonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/rsz_stephenmegison2.jpg">Credit</a>)</div>
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Despite my appreciation of this simple form of time management and goal achievement, however, I've recently had to abandon my list in favour of a <i>spreadsheet</i>.</div>
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I know, right? What a sign of the times. What a statement for the digital age. What a symptom of actual obsessive-compulsive disorder. But yes, I'm afraid it is so. In the fast-paced, time-poor world of a tech-savvy Gen Y bibliophile, a list simply will not suffice. There is so much to read, and every year stacks a heap more onto the pile. In the words of the 'grim narrator' in Markus Zusak's <i>The Book Thief</i>, 'There are many things to think of. There is much story' (2008, page 263).</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACl5NTLpC83PRUsH4mipju_LJ05JRAI6GpJIDBMU5AdISUeO68_-Cx0gzBCVvEsVLlpq6lVp_lMSgedXQyY9CXX2gOI3NJQ7JeLIVbsJp2B_sbvQ3aBf8x4tPMTiVT3CGHJppg947gh8/s1600/the-book-thief-doge.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACl5NTLpC83PRUsH4mipju_LJ05JRAI6GpJIDBMU5AdISUeO68_-Cx0gzBCVvEsVLlpq6lVp_lMSgedXQyY9CXX2gOI3NJQ7JeLIVbsJp2B_sbvQ3aBf8x4tPMTiVT3CGHJppg947gh8/s1600/the-book-thief-doge.png" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>The Book Thief </i>predates doge, I believe, so that turned out to be an unfortunate choice of phrase.</div>
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On top of the library's worth of literature to read, there's the smorgasbord of platforms on which to read it: the traditional printed book, audiobooks, ebooks, podcasts, even <a href="https://twitter.com/IAM_SHAKESPEARE">tweets</a> or, <a href="http://metro.co.uk/2014/03/18/gumtree-user-texts-entire-works-of-shakespeare-to-seller-after-ps3-fails-to-arrive-4639854/">if you piss off the right person</a>, text messages. And what are you supposed to do when someone decides to make a movie of a book on your list? You want to read it before it comes out, so you have to skip ahead. And don't your friends who get published deserve your immediate attention? What about when a friend loans you a book and you want to get it back to them? Or worse, when someone <i>buys </i>you a book and expects you to have read it by the next time you see them? And how do I make sure I'm getting the right nutritional balance of genre and literary fiction, classics and contemporary, fiction and non-fiction? Throw a few literary journal subscriptions and university readings in there and your literary lifestyle is a nightmare. The linear chronological hierarchy of the humble list simply cannot keep up with the postmodern pastiche, the multifarious mayhem of intersections between platform and genre and kind and motivation that is modern reading.<br />
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Lacking some kind of futuristic Deleuze and Guattarian reading rhizome, however (I'm not <i>that </i>tech savvy), the best I can do is a spreadsheet which, in its current, incipient form, looks like this:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTyUhJ8qeVucEWOGeilbLwdb4KgtMSC_qwbuCp6jlQyv9lEnOuzoja3Ky15IOD9xFD7i1a553Bs8Zv2oKQQ4j_xPuabnkdk0pnkRCDBavzhwEJxhCtCc3QQRE9SrRvV8rItbvcNtWc_k/s1600/Reading+chart.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTyUhJ8qeVucEWOGeilbLwdb4KgtMSC_qwbuCp6jlQyv9lEnOuzoja3Ky15IOD9xFD7i1a553Bs8Zv2oKQQ4j_xPuabnkdk0pnkRCDBavzhwEJxhCtCc3QQRE9SrRvV8rItbvcNtWc_k/s1600/Reading+chart.png" height="181" width="400" /></a></div>
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Blue is reading, green is read.</div>
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In case you can't see at that scale, it's currently divided into ten different columns: 'classics', 'contemporary', 'literary journals', 'non-fiction', 'recommendations', 'friends' (someone I know with a book), 'movie adaptations', 'audiobooks', 'masters' (books I'm reading for research), and 'favourites' (works whose authors I like so much I want to read their entire oeuvre). This kind of compartmentalisation captures all those types of books and the motivations for reading them I outlined above and systematises them, something I find way more satisfying than I should for some reason. So far (nascent though it is) it <i>has</i> proven a more democratic way to read, varying my literary diet in a very enjoyable way.</div>
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But as if all this wasn't enough, the spreadsheet comes with some attendant 'rules' I automatically seem to follow. I started this 'list 2.0' reading a recommendation from my nan, Stella Gibbons' <i>Cold Comfort Farm</i>, so that's where I started on the chart, moving laterally across the columns from there through my old lecturer Christine Howe's first novel <i><a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/beginningwiththetitle.html">Song in the Dark</a></i>, the launch for which I attended a shamefully long time ago and which I have only just read now thanks to this new system, and onto Tim Winton's short story cycle <i>The Turning</i>, which I wanted to read before I saw the new film adaptation(s), before coming to John Fowles' <i>The French Lieutenant's Woman</i>, a seminal metafictional text my supervisor advised I read for my masters. And around here is where it gets complicated, with audiobooks, classics and literary journals (favourites is a new column).</div>
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As part of my '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/p/glossary-of-terms.html">traipse through canon</a>', I want to read a great swathe of classic literature right from the beginning (hence <i>The Epic of Gilgamesh</i>). But I don't just want to read it: I want to read it <i>critically</i>, take notes, write down quotes, and do parallel research so I can write about it. All this takes time and space and energy that I don't always have when I've just got a few minutes to do some reading (as the interminably slow crawl of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6011911-l-phillip-lucas">my progress bar on Goodreads</a> currently attests). Furthermore, when I set out to tick a canonical book off my list, I usually buy a nice hardcover addition to add it to my collection, and these can be unwieldy to carry around. So I've decided to have a hardcover classic on my bedside table at all times, reading it whenever I get the chance to read at home.</div>
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More portable literary journals, conversely, I take out with me when I know I've got to wait in a doctor's surgery or at the bus stop, or for when I'm on the train. I like to think of this as doing my part to increase the visibility both of reading as an activity and of the journals as viable leisure-reading publications for those who cannot abide the inanity of <i>Zoo </i>or <i>Cleo </i>or <i>Woman's Day </i>or <i>The Daily Telegraph</i>, not that anyone's going to look at me in public and think, 'Woah, that guy's cool, I'm also going to read.' It's silly, because I'm often on my phone just like everyone else, but when I'm on the train and see everyone looking down at their iPads and iPhones instead of reading books I (somewhat irrationally) feel like literature is losing the war, which accounts for this little bit of perceived literary exhibitionist pageantry.</div>
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And finally, audiobooks. I love them. If you take nothing else from this otherwise largely pointless and meandering post, take this: <a href="http://www.audible.com/">buy audiobooks</a> (and no, this post is not sponsored by Audible.com, although, if you're reading this Audible execs, maybe it should be). They're a fantastic way to turn mindless tasks and unproductive spans of your day such as walking to the shop or driving to work or doing the dishes into time well-spent (although, of course, a certain amount of mind-wandering time is essential for reflection and spontaneous thought). Podcasts are good for this too, notably<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/podcast"> the New Yorker Fiction Podcast</a>. They're also <i>fast</i>, to some extent <i>because </i>of this capacity to be listened to any time, anywhere. They don't require dedicated time to sit and read. They don't busy your hands and eyes, just your ears and mind. It's for this reason, looking at my chart (and, for that manner, my <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/p/reading-catalogue.html">reading catalogue</a>), that I appear to get through them about four times faster than physical books.<br />
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In some ways, this aspect of the audiobook is all that gets me through my job. I'm an editor who works on billion-dollar submissions for tender. That's when the state government is like, 'We want a hospital designed and built and run and cleaned and maintained for thirty years', and a bunch of companies are like, 'We'll do that for teh monies!' and then the state is like, 'Well, tell us how you're going to do all this stuff better than your competitors by responding to hundreds of pages of questions and specifications'. These companies hire the company I work for to read the thousands of pages they generate in response to these questions and critique, edit, proofread and, in some cases, rewrite them, making sure they answer the question and flow nicely and such. Which is hard because this stuff is mostly written by non-writerly engineers and financial people and architects and lawyers and other people who don't do words that well (okay, it's mostly the engineers who are trouble). Given that it's usually just me and my boss working on all this for about six weeks and getting paid quite well, we are under a lot of pressure, which means ten to fourteen to eighteen-hour days and all-nighters as the deadline approaches, which means very little personal time, which means those precious spare moments I do have are extremely valuable. During these weeks, all that keeps me sane is living another life in the gaps between periods of work through audiobooks. Waking up, eating breakfast, catching a taxi, walking to the office, taking my lunch break, brief trips to the bathroom, showering, ironing my clothes: these become the only moments I have to myself, and it's wondrous being able to fill them with literature instead of only the banal mechanics of eating and washing and moving between spaces.</div>
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My good friend and fellow aspiring author Gilly put me onto audiobooks a couple of years ago when she advised that they were a good way to get on top of all the readings we had to do for our Theory for Practising Writers classes. I'll never forget the experience of my first audiobook, Charlotte Brontë's <i>Jane Eyre</i>, and how much more emotive it<i> </i>was when read passionately aloud, or Jeremy Irons reading Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece <i>Lolita</i> (and then having weird incongruous flashbacks <a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/three-wollongongers-do-london-longest.html">when we visited Westminster Abbey</a> and he narrated the audiotour).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwgfGQwpgDtxKyfbd622igRyHe2ReyBYufz7q5vaCd4kikIKPeTMXmJ-fR306EUHBjwLI9wzBsWBz-ngG7GZNoKN8CkKLRN3rZb5qJFip_EkPIjFDMbQlpR-hei5ZUI91_MYttIobdDVA/s1600/tumblr_m8085pDPmL1qzzd6io1_400.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwgfGQwpgDtxKyfbd622igRyHe2ReyBYufz7q5vaCd4kikIKPeTMXmJ-fR306EUHBjwLI9wzBsWBz-ngG7GZNoKN8CkKLRN3rZb5qJFip_EkPIjFDMbQlpR-hei5ZUI91_MYttIobdDVA/s1600/tumblr_m8085pDPmL1qzzd6io1_400.png" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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'Jeremy's ... iron?'</div>
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(<a href="http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8085pDPmL1qzzd6io1_400.png">Credit</a>)</div>
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Audiobooks can even facilitate the reading of bad books, so you can tune out for a while as the voice actor makes the effort for you. Perhaps if I'd read the works of Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan in physical form instead of as audiobooks, I would finally understand those people who purport to 'throw books across the room' when I came across the more politically questionable and gender essentialist passages therein.</div>
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But the speed of audiobooks does make them a good way to get through a lot of your reading list (or matrix, as the case may be) quickly. I started out using them for university readings as Gilly suggested, then commenced my 'traipse through canon' with them, downloading audiobook versions of the public domain classics for free through <a href="https://librivox.org/">Librivox</a> (although there is obviously a compromise in quality with these). But I actually found I was racing rather than traipsing through canon in such a way that I was forgetting what I'd read and, of course, I couldn't take down notes and quotes as easily.</div>
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This is the one drawback of audiobooks for me (apart from the fact that the audial equivalent of losing your page is much more frustrating!). You lose the ability to go at your own pace, unless you want to distort the sound laughably by using your device's 'slow down' or 'speed up' functions, and even then. With literary fiction, I love to take my time and luxuriate in the language, going back to read over certain passages a few times, relishing the look of the words on the page. That's why I've largely started listening only to pure entertainment-value books as audiobooks, mostly (very bad) fantasy like Feist, Jordan, Collins and Goodkind and some not-bad fantasy like Martin and Pullman.<br />
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So you can see how a matrix becomes necessary to track all of these literary endeavours. I'm reading hardcover classics in bed at night, laptop by my side to take notes; I'm reading literary journals on the train and in waiting rooms, flaunting the covers for all to see; I'm filling the banal gaps in my existence of shopping and putting the washing on (and hanging it out and bringing it in and folding it) with terribly written fantasy adventures, all the while proceeding through a rotation of award-winning contemporary fiction, non-fiction of interest, recommendations from friends, books for research, books by friends and books with impending film adaptations. I'm just not the type of person to spontaneously pick up the next thing that takes my interest. For whatever reason I have to feel like I'm reading it <i>all</i>, covering all bases, playing all angles. Let's just hope this level of obsession never escalates. If I ever start talking about book algorithms and reading dice-rolls, you have my permission to commit me.<br />
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Thanks for reading,<br />
<br />
LPL<br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/LPhillipLucas">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">Twitter</a><br />
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References</div>
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Markus Zusak's 2008 novel <i>The Book Thief</i>, published by Picador.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-84786767496939174632014-01-20T22:48:00.002+11:002014-01-23T11:04:53.869+11:00Sexism in tennis<div style="text-align: justify;">
Monday 20 January 2013<br />
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When it comes to sport, it seems that, rather than inheriting the athleticism of my father, a personal trainer, in <i>playing</i> it, I have acquired (along with bad skin and bad knees) his signature brand of cynicism and his propensity for abrupt moments of abstraction while <i>watching</i> it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjYX5FKRbKk1Z2gXWpVpZIJVv2JyJjFIgMVy3Udm8aqZQMx0BFVwthoWzCHx9qF1bhshivK36QZ_DX3kCV8Z_G1kEHm7TMAKo0IP4IG-foMH-TCHr1FpM81_ZtTorIvOCUrPGvXd7zpUw/s1600/Grampa_vs._Sexual_Inadequacy_122.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjYX5FKRbKk1Z2gXWpVpZIJVv2JyJjFIgMVy3Udm8aqZQMx0BFVwthoWzCHx9qF1bhshivK36QZ_DX3kCV8Z_G1kEHm7TMAKo0IP4IG-foMH-TCHr1FpM81_ZtTorIvOCUrPGvXd7zpUw/s1600/Grampa_vs._Sexual_Inadequacy_122.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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'Son, I was always proud … that you weren't a short man.'</div>
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Dad enjoys spectatorship as much as the next bloke, but he appears simultaneously to hold the whole enterprise in contempt: teams and clubs branding themselves with the names of cities while buying and selling players from all over the world who don't have any real connection to those communities. It's too much like supporting a corporation. I find this sentiment echoed in myself.<br />
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How does one pick a team, anyway? If it's not the team of the region where you live, and not a team you grew up supporting, what determines your choice? Is it who's winning the most? Who has the prettiest colours? The best mascot? Your favourite player? My girlfriend's dad supported the Cronulla Sharks for years until he converted to the North Queensland 'Toyota' (!) Cowboys, and then to the 'iSelect' (!) Gold Coast Titans, and now has no problem using the pronouns 'we' and 'us' to refer to 'his' team, despite residing in the Illawarra. Isn't it all rather arbitrary?</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBDDngWLmbxBlpHlLwFsDS-M59cq-qvS1gBIXW8PpU5MkhpozbQPECpo3asXhyphenhyphenMVegAH87nM_Mefo2zPC3yD_jZfh1Db1z5qXGn0ropvtdJ_SljfhAqGTOTKrjjflDRpCiSGGKcpxslow/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+1.08.04+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBDDngWLmbxBlpHlLwFsDS-M59cq-qvS1gBIXW8PpU5MkhpozbQPECpo3asXhyphenhyphenMVegAH87nM_Mefo2zPC3yD_jZfh1Db1z5qXGn0ropvtdJ_SljfhAqGTOTKrjjflDRpCiSGGKcpxslow/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+1.08.04+PM.png" height="262" width="400" /></a></div>
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'The Isotopes are winning? To the bandwagon!'</div>
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This is less applicable, I suppose, in international sports, where teams actually comprise nationals of the countries they represent, but even here Dad and I have a shared tendency to experience moments of almost Brechtian alienation, wherein the viewing experience is transcended by a sudden and profound awareness of the insignificance and absurdity of investing ourselves in such a pointless activity, a kind of 'opiate of the masses<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">–</span>style' reluctance to be diverted by an exercise in corporatised nationalism, the outcome of which will ultimately have no impact on our lives.</div>
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One such moment occurred for Dad last Friday night as we watched the match between Sam Stosur and Ana Ivanovic in Rod Laver Arena. 'What are we doing here?' he asked at one point, nudging me and laughing, a common effect of the incongruous jerk out of the immediacy of the experience and into comprehension of its ludicrousness. 'Why do we care? Does it pay <i>my </i>mortgage if Stosur wins tonight?'</div>
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Although I generally disapprove of any form of slavish utilitarianism ('I AM A CAPITALIST DRONE; EVERY ACTIVITY IN WHICH I ENGAGE MUST PROVIDE ME WITH SOME DIRECT, CONCRETE, PREFERABLY MONETARY BENEFIT'), and I harbour a vague inclination that sport fulfills some subtle but important purpose* in our society, I still find these to be compelling questions. Why <i>do </i>we care so much whether one entity beats another entity in an otherwise entirely useless endeavour?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdUBTYhhZDaN0tyf0JhiFMxP19x_jQTGueAh6mQZVxQ1NjJuM7QfRlvxi68f1fMfcGufwjghR5X0rzxevhmUgn84bANR_YHoLCTu3fxymaxTi6-J0Mc3Kd-2U-ziyL-E9TUUuou4A9lf0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+10.30.08+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdUBTYhhZDaN0tyf0JhiFMxP19x_jQTGueAh6mQZVxQ1NjJuM7QfRlvxi68f1fMfcGufwjghR5X0rzxevhmUgn84bANR_YHoLCTu3fxymaxTi6-J0Mc3Kd-2U-ziyL-E9TUUuou4A9lf0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+10.30.08+AM.png" height="276" width="400" /></a></div>
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'Oh my God, Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine! The winner will be showered with praise; the loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!'</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*I know, I know, it's about an outlet for primal aggression, social rituals and cohesion, blah blah.</span><br />
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In this instance, however, I couldn't fully share in Dad's characteristic momentary bewilderment. For reasons not entirely clear to me, tennis exempts itself from my usual spectatorial reticence, especially once a year for the term of the Australian Open when, time permitting, I become a rabid tennis fan. A were-fan, if you will. I look up rankings, download apps, text friends about matches, and follow every game I can.</div>
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I'm aware that, if anything, the 'pointlessness' of sport is exaggerated in tennis, where the match is confined to 260 square metres and the task can essentially be decocted to 'get the ball over the net and within the lines', but perhaps it's that there's something more honest about it as an individual pursuit that allows it to evade my cynicism. These aren't footballers professing some kind of loyalty to their team before scarpering off to the highest bidder the moment their contract is up, particular personalities subsumed into the larger team identity. They're individuals playing for themselves whose characters are on display to earn your support or opposition.</div>
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When I examine my list of favourite players and try to determine why I like them, however, it's still decidedly arbitrary, just slightly less so. With hundreds of individuals to choose from, you end up being quite superficial – one bad impression can be enough to turn you off someone. For me it seems to come down to a complex subconscious calibration of a player's skill, grace, manner, sense of humour, eloquence, nationality and, as I'm becoming increasingly aware when it comes to women (to my dismay), appearance. Which is my tortuous, <i>Simpsons</i>-like way of getting to the point that I've been thinking about how we pick which players to support in tennis, and who gets attention for what, and particularly how the criteria differ for men and women. </div>
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Even as perhaps one of the women's sports deemed most 'watchable' by men, the tennis court is a fraught field for gender issues, dominated for years by 'pin-ups' like Kournikova, Sharapova and Ivanovic and throwing up perennial debates over prize money, air time and the comparative quality and entertainment value of the men's and women's games. What brought the issue of player popularity to mind for me, however, was watching the match between Australian Casey Dellacqua and rising Canadian star Eugenie Bouchard last night. </div>
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Whether it's the men's or women's game, one truth universally acknowledged in tennis is the vapidity of the commentary. Tennis commentators seem to struggle to find anything much of value to add. One example from last night's match was Sam Smith's observation that Dellacqua had been eating a bread roll before the match, from which she extrapolated two things: one, that Casey hadn't had much dinner, and two, that she was nervous. Compelling stuff.<br />
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Is it any surprise then that we find traces of sexism in the inanities spouted by commentators in their furious verbal attempts to justify their relevance? Not conscious sexism, but the more insidious kind that infects the way even decent people think on a basic level. It's like what I was discussing in <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/whats-wrong-with-sex-appeal.html">my last post</a> (a thousand years ago) regarding Tony Abbott and his 'sex appeal' blunder: when the mind casts around for something to latch onto, something to say, the things it finds can be revealing, a window into a person's way of seeing the world and, therefore, the otherwise invisible ideology that shapes their worldview. It's problematic as it is that <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas/status/423385067000328192">female commentators are never assigned a men's match while at least one man is always present in the commentary box for a women's match</a>, but watching last night I became aware that the idle chatter of the commentators differs greatly depending on the gender of the players and the way they look.<br />
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As I type I'm watching Smith interview Dominika Cibulkova. Despite having just achieved the considerable feat of vanquishing world number three Maria Sharapova, the Slovak is being quizzed about her relationship status, how long she's been engaged, and her engagement ring. WHAT IS THIS?</div>
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It's astounding how much time is spent discussing looks in the women's game, even if it's obliquely, euphemistically. At one point, as I <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas/status/424830930641891328">pointed out</a> on Twitter, it was stated that Dellacqua was 'more girl-next-door than the girl next door', which can be translated to mean she is homely and unglamourous. This was underscored by Smith's statement only moments later that Dellacqua's opponent Bouchard is 'the heir to Sharapova in marketing terms', a euphemism for 'she's the hottest, blondest, whitest young player on the circuit.'<br />
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Bouchard (left) and Dellacqua (right).</div>
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Later Smith's obligatory male 'supervisor' (whose name I'm unsure of) joked that most of Bouchard's supporters, referred to by her as the 'Eugenie Army', seemed to be young men. After Bouchard had won, Renae Stubbs momentarily puzzled her in her post-match interview by saying she was sure her supporters were all about ready to propose to her.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/N4BbxV3iJg8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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And discussing the match Bouchard's win had set up for her with Ivanovic, the male commentator referred to Ivanovic as one of the 'all time great poster girls', as if she were a model rather than a tennis player, notable for her beauty rather than her skill. In response Smith asked 'How are you going to market it? The beauty of Belgrade versus the princess of Quebec?' and remarked that the pair were two very 'marketable' young girls.</div>
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Contrast this with the commentary on a comparable male player, Vasek Pospisil, who defeated Australia's Matt Ebden last Wednesday night. Pospisil and Bouchard are both attractive, white, blonde, young (23 and 19 respectively) Canadians with similar singles rankings (30 and 28) who triumphed over Australians. Yet not once did the appearance of Bouchard's countryman attract any commentary: no mention even of his adoring female fans, no talk of the impending match up between the 'Canadian catch' Pospisil and 'Swiss stud' Wawrinka.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiuTtbsRR6wkkAkqQq4v3U5317RGHyCyu6f-S9ru2XfPlDVzbV22bgKKBCi9FqYaVpYtpQdecpZnKRui58MMPcrmNJ-miCXv-k-JhzKNusAXjdAxHJtUFVBPEcT_-0eteBsZGsiA1gKoI/s1600/hqdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiuTtbsRR6wkkAkqQq4v3U5317RGHyCyu6f-S9ru2XfPlDVzbV22bgKKBCi9FqYaVpYtpQdecpZnKRui58MMPcrmNJ-miCXv-k-JhzKNusAXjdAxHJtUFVBPEcT_-0eteBsZGsiA1gKoI/s1600/hqdefault.jpg" height="226" width="400" /></a></div>
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Canadian heartthrob Vasek Pospisil.</div>
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Again, it's not that these commentators are bad people, it's that they've been conditioned by the prevailing ideology of the day to automatically view and assess women in terms of their appearance more than they do with men. The only way to wake people out of this ideology is to call it out when we see it, and we see it everywhere.</div>
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When the vacuous woman sitting next to me at the Stosur–Ivanovic match breezed into the arena four games into the first set, her first question to her companion was 'Who's that'?<br />
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'Ana Ivanovic', he answered.<br />
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'Ooh, she's really pretty', she cooed.<br />
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Moments later when Stosur appeared on the screen she laughed that the world number 17 looked 'like a man'. Former world number one <span style="text-align: justify;">Am</span><span style="text-align: justify;">é</span><span style="text-align: justify;">lie Mauresmo was the target of similar criticism. </span><span style="text-align: justify;">In a habit that I'm sure would chasten her if I brought it up now, my best friend in high school would periodically proclaim with some vehemence her 'hatred' for Mauresmo</span><span style="text-align: justify;">. The reason? 'She looks like a man!' </span></div>
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Stosur (left) and Mauresmo (right)</div>
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As well as being too muscular or masculine, female tennis players can be too fat. When Dellacqua made her return to the Australian Open in 2009, she <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/sport/tennis/coach-criticises-dellacqua-for-piling-on-pounds/2009/01/22/1232471451524.html">drew criticism</a> from, <a href="http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/re-casey-is-too-athletically-fat-to-pay-elite-tennis.668539/">among others</a>, Roger Rasheed for being out of shape, a claim she and her trainers <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/sport/tennis/dellacqua-returns-fire-over-weight-jibe/2009/01/22/1232471496408.html">strongly repudiated</a>. But that incident pales in comparison to the disgusting public reaction to Marion Bartoli's 2013 Wimbledon win, best summarised by the tweets collected in <a href="http://www.thegloss.com/2013/07/12/beauty/wimbledon-winner-marion-bartoli-fat-ugly-dyke/">an article by Amanda Chatel</a>.</div>
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Bartoli (left) and Dellacqua (right)</div>
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It's not enough, it seems, for a woman to be among the best tennis players in the world. She must also be born buxom and beautiful and maintain a slim, feminine figure.<br />
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It's not even safe in the sidelines. Lleyton Hewitt's wife Bec (nee Cartwright) was recently the target of <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2539032/Bec-Hewitt-supports-tennis-champ-husband-Lleyton-Australian-Open.html">an article</a> by the ever-atrocious <i>Daily Mail</i> and others asking whether she'd 'overdone it on the tan'.</div>
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I'd say she looks completely fine …<br />
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On the other hand, 'Aussie Ana' Ivanovic (a Serb) has been claimed for Australia by Todd Woodbridge, and every commentator to have taken up the moniker since 2008 when she won the Australian Open, due to her overwhelming popularity in Australia. In a poll yesterday asking who was expected to win the tournament after Williams' departure that Sam Smith joked could've been rephrased as 'Who is your favourite female player?', popular Chinese player Li Na, number three seed Sharapova and the defending champion Azarenka each received circa 20% of the vote, while Ivanovic was assigned double that at approximately 40%. But what can Ivanovic possibly have done to earn this popularity, other than being young and beautiful? Can anyone honestly contend she has twice the personality of Li Na, twice the skill of Azarenka?</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi54TV_NfmVPercz2jQ0Q1rznqpRnKabbFWmQDj-kPO6LhpRCZtx-_s77qpjzu_Wt0-r4C_17td2PK8uS_1qcLstMU9PjZ0DaPz96xiu8yII4dQmc68bpT6JF1UhdqD9dBo_IUMziSNcDs/s1600/ana-ivanovic-img5845_668.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi54TV_NfmVPercz2jQ0Q1rznqpRnKabbFWmQDj-kPO6LhpRCZtx-_s77qpjzu_Wt0-r4C_17td2PK8uS_1qcLstMU9PjZ0DaPz96xiu8yII4dQmc68bpT6JF1UhdqD9dBo_IUMziSNcDs/s1600/ana-ivanovic-img5845_668.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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I myself am not immune to Ivanovic's charms, nor to subtle sexism. There's no doubt she's attractive; she's actually pretty much exactly my type. But that's separate to her skill as a tennis player. It doesn't have to be her defining attribute. It shouldn't be mentioned by commentators every time she's on court. And players who don't have her looks shouldn't suffer in popularity, or worse, be lambasted for it. A cursory consideration of the list of my other favourite female players doesn't seem to reveal that I favoured them especially for their looks: Elena Dementieva, Justine Henin, Li Na, Ai Sugiyama. In fact, if anything, I hold a strange contempt for the bevy of attractive young interchangeable, quadrisyllabically named female players who've come to my attention over the last couple years: Caroline Wozniacki, Danielá Hantuchova, Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTa6qOHCboPuy-P2ObWKi29TKAiboiFPqZJW_E-eEIPdmZyhNuRTikX5JIPDMqS28RtyUQhdBrqHP5N0QqxKbpe_z3BwLz-9n0EOG5X0LMVC-OVVrOlshLASoW2x9JEqZ3CQHiDP43_68/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+9.00.51+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTa6qOHCboPuy-P2ObWKi29TKAiboiFPqZJW_E-eEIPdmZyhNuRTikX5JIPDMqS28RtyUQhdBrqHP5N0QqxKbpe_z3BwLz-9n0EOG5X0LMVC-OVVrOlshLASoW2x9JEqZ3CQHiDP43_68/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+9.00.51+PM.png" height="131" width="400" /></a></div>
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Female favourites (left to right): Dementieva, Henin, Li, Sugiyama.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxC8jGTJQA9TPMWHUKiVSrfb24ybVV5_vB5eYA8et5wGZIWHjPRFrxnS0heC8kIys-VALjINwMr1ZcIFxS491IBHIh87u_vtUIb_NtmwrhyphenhyphenobsN_S-YoZV3tWGKFMo1UL27jo8vyYBgN4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+9.00.57+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxC8jGTJQA9TPMWHUKiVSrfb24ybVV5_vB5eYA8et5wGZIWHjPRFrxnS0heC8kIys-VALjINwMr1ZcIFxS491IBHIh87u_vtUIb_NtmwrhyphenhyphenobsN_S-YoZV3tWGKFMo1UL27jo8vyYBgN4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-20+at+9.00.57+PM.png" height="132" width="400" /></a></div>
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Un-favourites (left to right): Wozniacki, Hantuchova, Zvonareva, Azarenka.</div>
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But then, on closer consideration, I think sexism might come into it at some level. Is my dismissal of this second group just another form of sexism? Do I think they're too pretty to be good players, to be memorable, to have personality? And even though my favourites aren't women I find <i>especially </i>attractive, they are all undoubtedly beautiful women, slender and graceful. There's no women among my favourites who are unattractive. Why is that?</div>
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And what about who's missing from my list? Notably absent is Serena Williams, though I can safely assign her exclusion to other factors than her looks. I do admire her skill in the game, but her ineloquence, her obnoxious, particularly American fervent Christianity, forever thanking God for her wins in her stumbling, graceless acceptance speeches, as though he has specifically chosen her, puts me off. But why not Clijsters? Why not Bartoli? If their slightly rounder features and thicker bodies were swapped for the slight frames of Dementieva and Henin, can I really pretend my preferences would be the same? </div>
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Lately I'm becoming increasingly alarmed about our society's attitudes towards physical appearances. We may try to hide it by using terms like 'marketable', but that only puts the problem at one further remove; what is marketable is determined by what people want, and what people want is to see attractive people and to judge ugly people, people they can safely designate 'uglier than me'. Ugliness now is treated like a fault, like something we have any power over. And deviating from the standard body form long ago became a crime worthy of opprobrium. </div>
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Recently I've had a number of windows into the world of acting and theatre, and have been disappointed to learn that even respectable institutions are primarily concerned with the 'marketability' of their auditionees, that it's 'unheard of' for people of certain looks and body shapes to be given places, regardless of acting talent. Meanwhile, inexperienced eighteen-year-olds who happen to have been born with 'the look' are raised up out of the masses clamouring for a place without any need to distinguish themselves theatrically.</div>
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And it's not just women. My sisters recently informed me that all their male friends are on steroids or growth hormones of some form or another. Normal, healthy-looking sixteen-year-olds dosing themselves with drugs to turn themselves into miniature 'Zyzz' effigies in under six months, the better to worship at the altar of the self in the temple of the gym.</div>
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I always knew we lived in a superficial world, but somehow I still believed that everyone knew that it was wrong. I thought everyone had learned in their childhood from fairy tales and cartoons that it was what was on the inside that counts, and not to judge a book by its cover and that, even if they still did so, they knew somewhere that it wasn't the right thing to do. But all I've seen lately is unabashed superficiality. It's why reality TV is still so popular – it's cheap hour after hour of unadulterated judgement, and we love to sit in judgement of one another. 'What is she wearing?' 'She's too ugly to be the next top model.' 'Why would he pick that song?' 'He looks gay in that.' 'How can they be so stupid?' 'I hope he gets voted out, he's annoying.'</div>
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If there's one cause for hope for me in the tennis world, it's Li Na. I was there for the 2013 women's final when Li faced Azarenka. From my friends who watched at home I've heard it was considered a boring match, but for those in the arena it was electric. Fresh from the controversy of the previous round where it was speculated Azarenka had taken a medical timeout purely to throw her winning opponent Sloane Stephens off rhythm, the crowd was entirely behind Li Na, to the point that Azarenka's winners were met with mere polite applause while her unforced errors, usually awkward to applaud, were met with impassioned cheers, and Li's two on-court collapses elicited immediate heart-wrenching sympathy. The fact that an Asian woman who speaks only broken English can through her charm, sense of humour and fighting spirit win over a public as racist as Australia's gives me hope where little else does.</div>
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Thanks for reading,</div>
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LPL</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-22931736748882128062013-08-14T23:46:00.002+10:002013-08-19T21:34:49.279+10:00What's wrong with 'sex appeal'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Wednesday 14 August 2013</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirXaNQeuolZbK2r3_jl6mX6e174B6tXYMwfKHY9QV_kcuZhvZupqzjFNV6_jYBKf2ryB1KckrrPTRwqsadNClcFSIehd637pXtszIoKCey0MvrFGDJXN3u8VngupVgQLmXzHJXGm56aMI/s1600/Tony+Abbott+Sex+Appeal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirXaNQeuolZbK2r3_jl6mX6e174B6tXYMwfKHY9QV_kcuZhvZupqzjFNV6_jYBKf2ryB1KckrrPTRwqsadNClcFSIehd637pXtszIoKCey0MvrFGDJXN3u8VngupVgQLmXzHJXGm56aMI/s400/Tony+Abbott+Sex+Appeal.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Opposition Leader Tony Abbott instigated a Twitterstorm yesterday when he listed 'sex appeal' as one of the assets shared by Fiona Scott and Jackie Kelly, the current and former Liberal candidates for the seat of Lindsay. Predictably, commenters and commentators of the Right, such as my own personal bête noir <a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/enough-already-of-the-constant-campaign-by-labor-about-tony-abbott8217s-attitude-to-women/story-fni0cwl5-1226696942728">Miranda Devine</a>, have since responded to the criticisms with lamentations about 'political correctness gone mad'* and 'confected outrage' and, of course, the usual deluge of abhorrent eructations from Andrew Bolt fans:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgedaJk2dcoWHR4Pl_6eyTsx9TQh_rb47BRgBwUEs_5ORdDeMkd6HU02BC_dduxfbuLPivo_aHFTXWKvAV9zuzV56VERHXQ7-IrAHk0fsSF1wgiCqzldbbC1n52Z8RjG4fcfYZCdrQ4GYE/s1600/Bolt+comments.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgedaJk2dcoWHR4Pl_6eyTsx9TQh_rb47BRgBwUEs_5ORdDeMkd6HU02BC_dduxfbuLPivo_aHFTXWKvAV9zuzV56VERHXQ7-IrAHk0fsSF1wgiCqzldbbC1n52Z8RjG4fcfYZCdrQ4GYE/s400/Bolt+comments.png" width="296" /></a></div>
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Comments from Bolt's readers, as tweeted by the good people at <a href="https://twitter.com/boltcomments">@BoltComments</a>.</div>
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*<span style="font-size: x-small;">I've previously discussed (and mounted a small defense of) political correctness <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/positions-on-political-correctness.html">here</a>.</span></div>
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The point of this post isn't to condemn Tony Abbott, as condemnable as I think he is. Aside from his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pJTX0iWYX9A">history</a> of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeGeooZOUdE">misogyny</a> and his <a href="http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/up-to-250-new-mobile-towers-under-abbott/story-e6frfku9-1226696249367">lack of expressed compunction</a> I actually don't believe what he said is <i>that</i> personally reprehensible, just inappropriate and symptomatic of a larger issue. What I want to try and do is explain to those people inclined to agree with Devine, Bolt and company, why the Left finds the comment so objectionable. </div>
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But first I want to address what's <i>not </i>wrong with the remark. Firstly, no one's claiming there was any malice in it. I think there's a common misconception that the lack of intention to offend excuses someone from having done so, as indicated by Opposition assistant treasury spokesman Mathias Corman's explanation that '[i]t was just a light-hearted comment, which I'm sure was not meant with any offence' (<a href="http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/up-to-250-new-mobile-towers-under-abbott/story-e6frfku9-1226696249367">news.com.au</a>). But this is an oversimplification. What this kind of thing reveals is not the speaker's unkindness or immorality, but rather their ignorance, often of how words, acts and omissions can reinforce cultural attitudes that privilege some and disadvantage others. </div>
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Think of that disgusting '<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/trayvoning-is-a-new-horrible-trend-where-teenagers-reenact-t">Trayvoning</a>' trend that's taken off recently, to much obloquy. Realistically, I'm sure most of the boys posing in those pictures are otherwise reasonably good people, who'd probably respond to criticism by saying it was all just a joke and they didn't mean any offence. Their wrongdoing is not a deliberate intent to mock a murder victim, but rather an unthinking insensitivity to a tragic and politicised issue and a grieving family, a selfish, immature transformation of a tragedy into a source of entertainment, posted thoughtlessly online.</div>
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To return to my personal holy text, David Mitchell's <i>Cloud Atlas</i> (or rather, the Twyker–Wachowski film adaptation), it puts me in mind of the casual, unintentional sexism spouted by smarmy would-be architect of a nuclear disaster Lloyd Hooks, as portrayed by Hugh Grant, to Halle Berry's Luisa Rey:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisRD9kSESlncutu270BNwvQsmEO_SxbwQzj-x1AUvdy0_RhmPX8K0zgfMKSptHe39rSx1gPKwnGsWl-KaRYl178wMd48wigIrgZxIqPn_k_5BnNcgflV8ZnMySCGeGW2wUpF1LKQwL6UA/s1600/Lloyd+Hooks+Tony+Abbott+Sex+Appeal.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisRD9kSESlncutu270BNwvQsmEO_SxbwQzj-x1AUvdy0_RhmPX8K0zgfMKSptHe39rSx1gPKwnGsWl-KaRYl178wMd48wigIrgZxIqPn_k_5BnNcgflV8ZnMySCGeGW2wUpF1LKQwL6UA/s400/Lloyd+Hooks+Tony+Abbott+Sex+Appeal.png" width="287" /></a></div>
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This kind of talk belongs in the '70s.</div>
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Secondly, I don't have an issue with the fact that Tony Abbott or anyone else has appraised Fiona Scott as possessing 'sex appeal', that anybody finds her attractive. Human beings are always going to find other human beings attractive, but there's a difference between thinking someone is attractive and saying it, and that distinction takes us to the heart of the issue.</div>
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As I said above, I find Abbott's comment inappropriate. Not deplorable, not opprobrious, not disgraceful, just inappropriate. Whatever Abbott thinks of Scott's and Kelly's physical appearances, it should not have been brought into the discussion of their merits as candidates. What business does anybody's attractiveness have in a list of their qualifications to represent an electorate? </div>
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Abbott's comment doesn't show us that he's a cruel person who consciously believes women are inferior to men. What it does give us is a direct window into his worldview, a worldview he may not necessarily have that much control over (how much do any of us really decide our worldview?), but one that he nevertheless holds and must be judged by if he wants to be the leader of the country. It shows, unsurprisingly for a conservative of his generation, that at a fundamental and unconscious level, Abbott cannot see women in the same way he sees men. This attitude I am able to overlook in people of a certain age who grew up in a different era, the way we forgive our 'racist grandparents', but not in the leader of our country.<br />
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If you still disagree, just think about what it means that, when called upon to list some of the similarities of his female colleagues, which he must necessarily accept as an opportunity to list their assets, the first things that come to mind are their youth, 'feistiness' and sexual appeal. He's struggling in that video. As we all know from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc5ljcri6Nk&feature=endscreen">his comments about scripted and unscripted commitments</a>, <a href="http://www.phonytonyabbott.com/blog/wheres-tony-abbott">his conspicuous absence from interviews and television programs like <i>Q&A</i> (despite an open invitation) over the past few months</a>, the '<a href="http://www.news.com.au/national-news/federal-election/tony-abbott-declares-8216no-one-can-be-a-suppository-of-all-wisdom8217/story-fnho52ip-1226695541167">suppository of wisdom</a>' contretemps, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY-xI6zgfk">that 'bizarre 28 seconds of silence</a>', Abbott isn't the best with impromptu speaking. You can tell he's grasping for positive adjectives in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaIvf9e51u4">that video</a>, buying time with a string of <i>um</i>s and <i>ah</i>s, and in the top three he comes out with is 'sex appeal', something that would never occur to him had he been speaking of men. Abbott himself knows this, as you can tell if you listen to him <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaIvf9e51u4">stressing the words 'smart' and 'hardworking'</a> (proper qualities) when he's asked about it later, after he's had some time to think.</div>
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'Sex appeal' is the descriptor getting all the attention, but I'd argue the others weren't that flattering, either. 'Young', I'm sure, is supposed to connote enthusiasm and energy, but it's a dubious distinction if that's the primary positive similarity you share with your predecessor.<br />
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Then there's 'feisty', the suspect implications of which Elizabeth Reid Boyd <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/who-are-you-calling-feisty-20130814-2rw0d.html">has already discussed</a> (I agree the word is condescending, with the suggestion that women <i>have </i>to be feisty in the big, rough boy's game of politics, but I completely reject the notion that its long-forgotten etymology has any impact on its meaning today).<br />
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Then comes 'sex appeal'. It's as though what Abbott wanted to say when the interviewer asked about the comparability of the two candidates was, 'Well, the similarity is obvious: they're both women ...' Would you ever say 'They're both men' in that situation? No, because maleness is the standard state of being, while muliebrity is a distinguishing condition to be remarked upon.<br />
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Even Abbott's final and most relevant compliment, that the two women are 'connected to the local area' reflects very little agency grammatically. They aren't active, agentive <b>leaders</b> in the community, prepared to <b>make the tough calls </b>and <b>fight</b> on behalf of the electorate. They're just passively 'connected' to the local area ...<br />
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I've seen Bolt commenters and others saying they've heard male politicians being referred to as sexy without any such backlash, but we rightfully hold our leaders to higher standards. Was it by a private citizen or media personality, or was it by someone holding high public office? Can you imagine Julia Gillard endorsing a local candidate in comparison to a predecessor by saying, 'They're both young, scrappy, and strappingly handsome'? I can't see it. What about Rebecca Shaw's example:</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">'It is unequivocally true that if Abbott had been asked a similar question about a male candidate, he would never say: “Well, um, well, Andrew Laming is young, feisty, has great hair and a very nice jawline”. If you are saying something about a female candidate that you would never say about a male candidate, you are treading on dangerous ground in the scary swamp of sexism.' (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/tony-abbott-sexygate-fiona-scott">Shaw 2013</a>)</span></div>
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We live in a society that <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-ugly-truth-is-rules-are-different-for-girls-in-sport-20130713-2pwhc.html">consistently judges women by different standards to men</a> (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsECK-gRCGc">speaking of Julia Gillard</a>), especially in terms of their appearance, a fact the Right fights against remedying at the worst of times and seems blind to at the best. The very fact that large segments of our society are held in the grip of an ideology that teaches them it is normal and natural to behave this way prevents their being able to see it. What the Left objects to about this incident is that it violates the principle that women in this day and age should be able to be enter the political sphere subject only to the same amount of attention to their physical appearance, whether positive or negative, as men are (i.e near none). The rules shouldn't suddenly change when it's a woman politician, so that it becomes a matter of public importance how she dresses, what she looks like, whether she's married or anything else. It's not so much what Abbott said, it's what his comment shows about him: that he is incapable of seeing the world in this way.</div>
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Thanks for reading<br />
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LPL<br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/L-Phillip-Lucas/156602084383026">L Phillip Lucas</a> (Facebook page)<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">@LPhillipLucas</a> (Twitter profile)<br />
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<b>References</b></div>
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<a href="http://l.yimg.com/ea/img/-/130813/4884346_4884348_16x9_700x394-190jt8q.jpg?x=292&sig=mlCyg_LevG3.pcgLgK4g3Q--">The Australian Brodcasting Corporation's image</a>.</div>
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Screenshot of Bolt Comments' (<a href="https://twitter.com/boltcomments">@BoltComments</a>) twitter feed.<br />
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Amalgalmation of Simon Chillingworth's <a href="http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2013/04/04/1226612/481705-tony-abbott-fiona-scott-penrith.jpg">image</a> and Warner Bros. Pictures' <a href="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3126766336/ch0357513">image</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://news.com.au/">News.com.au</a>'s 5:38pm AEST 14 August 2013 article '<a href="http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/up-to-250-new-mobile-towers-under-abbott/story-e6frfku9-1226696249367">Abbott cites exuberance in latest gaffe</a>'.<br />
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Rebecca Shaw's 9:49am AEST 14 August 2013 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/au">The Guardian</a> article '<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/tony-abbott-sexygate-fiona-scott">Sexygate: how Tony Abbott should have complimented Fiona Scott'</a>.<br />
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Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski's 2012 film <i>Cloud Atlas.</i><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-36983892652173224252013-08-10T19:30:00.000+10:002014-10-29T21:38:40.131+11:00Murdoch, the market and the myth of consumer choice<div style="text-align: justify;">
EDIT: I received an email threatening me with a $1,350 (+GST) out of licence fee for using several NewsCorp front pages in the original version of this post, so I've now removed them. I thought they might be covered under the 'criticism and review' fair dealing exceptions, but wasn't in a position to look into it any further at that point. Wishing the guys at News Corp well in their continuing endeavour to pander to the masses, disregard all journalistic principle, capitalise on people's fears and erode democracy.</div>
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Saturday 10 August 2013<br />
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In a move that unexpectedly became the talk of Twitter this week, Wallabadah General Store owners Glen and Kim Sheluchin announced on Monday they would no longer stock News Corp papers, citing the company's 'blatant' and 'long-standing' political bias (<a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/1693902/be-fair-or-youll-be-binned/?cs=159">Nickell 2013</a>). Owned by Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the corporation's front pages have been devoid of any pretension to objectivity since Sunday's election date announcement, giving credence to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's claim that editors have been instructed: '[G]o hard on Rudd, start from Sunday and don't back off' (<a href="http://theconversation.com/news-corp-chief-quits-as-pm-claims-editors-told-go-hard-on-rudd-16886">Grattan 2013</a>).<br />
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(Refer, for example to the <i>Daily Telegraph </i>frontpage from the 2013 election reading 'Finally, you now have the chance to ... KICK THIS MOB OUT' and the other featuring Photoshopped images of Craig Thomson, Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese as characters from <i>Hogan's Heroes</i>, accompanied by the caption 'THOMMO'S HEROES' and the headline 'Albo's explanation for German beers with Thomson: I KNOW NUTHINK!')</div>
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As I've <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/the-unvenerable-bede.html">mentioned in the past</a>, I believe along with many others that the two arms of a functioning democracy are a robust media and rigorous universal education, so watching the descent of Murdoch's tabloids, especially <i>The Daily Telegraph </i>and <i>The Courier-Mail</i>, from populist mouthpieces to full-blown propaganda over the past few years has been extremely disturbing. It was only in 2010 on my first trip to Britain when I encountered the shameless (and shamefully popular) likes of <i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU8VC4KUkfADNodd8MRREU7G9zDtQpcK0Its_08F-RROEJBYS4AaNNfePio7yyi8b79FLkA3DK92lUV5uZayfkP9f6Ue2_gpM0fyrEwjUjStSxy3yOb-przmHJMG0Ykl2rWnIFy4QlgLU/s320/2.jpg">The Sun</a> </i>(News Corp) and <i><a href="http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGvKqQrf6-osfiibhQs6kK6LcHbgid3lLl6JvG0epInR2Z0dDr">The Daily Mail</a></i> (DMGT) that I thanked heaven the media discourse in Australia was not so woeful,* that you'd never see such openly biased headlines here. It seems I was wrong to put it down to anything more than antipodean backwardness: we've finally caught up.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Of course, at this time, I'd never yet seen an edition of the <i>NT News </i>(News Corp), which is known for its outrageous headlines (see the edition featuring an image of a shirtless man drinking a beer with a snake coiled around it accompanied by the headline 'WHY I STUCK A CRACKER UP MY CLACKER').</span></div>
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I first became alarmed in early 2012 while on a business trip in Brisbane. There the political temperature allowed <i>The Courier-Mail </i>to trumpet anti-Gillard sentiment in a way I suspect no other state (excepting perhaps Western Australia) would have tolerated at the time, stirring up even more of the public vitriol demonstrated when local colleagues would whip around in their chairs at the mere mention of the PM, ready to criticise the way she spoke or dressed at any opportunity.</div>
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The Sheluchins may have already overturned their ban after a smarmy diplomatic mission by the Tele (discussed in all its quease-making detail <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/wallabadah_tele_ban_overturned/">here</a>), but hearteningly, not before they received a deluge of 'calls and messages of support' (<a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/1693902/be-fair-or-youll-be-binned/?cs=159">Nickell 2013</a>) and inspired other vendors to follow suit. The management of Brisbane's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/slightly.twisted.refreshment.lounge">Slightly Twisted Refreshment Lounge</a>, for example, which never sold the paper but had it available for customers to read, <a href="https://twitter.com/Sl1ghtlyTw1sted/status/365599085899706368">revealed on Twitter</a> yesterday that they're now displaying this sign in-store:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIP7mNjacuw3QPXnAbyS23aiGPpXvDHhcQgrWuNrKGk2sRxy7oGzUquTVvfuy4cWrkgqpOAEdMkBOYZmsyeUDtglNGrlAqvWuGwOtpw5vUelKG-TG7LiXlxD1u9sDyy_nU-MuhJUftnvU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-08-10+at+10.29.03+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIP7mNjacuw3QPXnAbyS23aiGPpXvDHhcQgrWuNrKGk2sRxy7oGzUquTVvfuy4cWrkgqpOAEdMkBOYZmsyeUDtglNGrlAqvWuGwOtpw5vUelKG-TG7LiXlxD1u9sDyy_nU-MuhJUftnvU/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-08-10+at+10.29.03+AM.png" height="400" width="300" /></a></div>
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But there have of course been negative responses to these small business boycotts, most of them bizarrely labelling them acts of 'censorship' (a term the Tele was more than happy to throw around in the gloating victory speech linked to above). For example:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh14GUC_9da_UK9UyeUPC43OzXl0A3zxQGbPS5aJV26mnJ8AuFZoUAHPIpvcXoOi3d3jZDyzTwQFF8hw3c-G8NEVTXa5DT_OJEItdAtOlQU_LRkYuV54r4fEaILwBfr0xlVPfI2G2Nh5YY/s1600/Daily+Telegraph+ban+comment.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh14GUC_9da_UK9UyeUPC43OzXl0A3zxQGbPS5aJV26mnJ8AuFZoUAHPIpvcXoOi3d3jZDyzTwQFF8hw3c-G8NEVTXa5DT_OJEItdAtOlQU_LRkYuV54r4fEaILwBfr0xlVPfI2G2Nh5YY/s400/Daily+Telegraph+ban+comment.png" height="60" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2e4DFeInEK1bF5UFqnnuFZh4TwAN1QZMD4esOyrrkkBHTcQDhvQHDgg8rzo8kjfisa7wnxcDvN5_AV6H7aiGBduq-vPboCrvQt4BjyAG0Dq2C0XeO5axfJp0foheO31SXvI0MJUAIwP8/s1600/Daily+Telegraph+ban+tweets.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2e4DFeInEK1bF5UFqnnuFZh4TwAN1QZMD4esOyrrkkBHTcQDhvQHDgg8rzo8kjfisa7wnxcDvN5_AV6H7aiGBduq-vPboCrvQt4BjyAG0Dq2C0XeO5axfJp0foheO31SXvI0MJUAIwP8/s400/Daily+Telegraph+ban+tweets.png" height="185" width="400" /></a></div>
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This, of course, is nonsense. As I <a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas/status/365629099936448512">pointed out</a> on Twitter, the argument is essentially that a newspaper's existence demands its supply or else it's censorship. The Sheluchins said themselves they don't stock Fairfax's <i>The Financial Review</i>. Presumably they don't sell <i>Green-Left Weekly </i>or Uganda's <i>Daily Monitor</i>, either. Censorship? Of course not. The difference, some might argue, is that there's an established demand for the Tele, but I'm afraid there's still that much-vaunted principle at the heart of capitalism to contend with: choice. There might also be a demand for child pornography or cocaine, or even cigarettes. That doesn't make it 'censorship' to refuse to sell them because of your 'own personal political views' that child pornography/cocaine/cigarettes are unethical.</div>
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Because unfortunately, that's what capitalism does to truth: commodifies it. The newspaper is a product like any other, and if the vendor of that product decides it is of substandard quality, they are free to cease selling it, and their customers are free to shop elsewhere if they don't like it.</div>
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It's curious the disproportionate amount of concern the objectors seem to have about this one supposed form of obfuscation of the truth through 'censorship' in comparison to the potential obfuscation of the truth Murdoch's papers might have through, say, <a href="http://www.policymic.com/articles/21682/fox-news-lies-and-gaffes-the-5-biggest-blunders-of-2012">shoddy journalism</a>, <a href="http://enpsychedelia.org/enpsychedelia/blog/murdoch-news-journos-lie-about-lsd/">lies</a>, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/19/murdoch-scandal-news-corp-s-code-of-conduct-was-ignored.html">dubious ethics</a>, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/450279/news_corp._admits_fox_%22news%22_is_biased">bias</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/news-corp-go-hard-rudd">editorial influence</a>, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-06/whats-behind-rupert-murdochs-interest-in-the/4869458">vested interests</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/19/observer-leader-bskyb-murdoch">market monopoly</a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;"> </span>(as the management of the Slightly Twisted Refreshment Lounge noted, 'there are <u>no</u> local publications not controlled by Mr Murdoch' in their area; what does that say about the influence of one man over an entire community?)</div>
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Here is one of the multifarious failings of capitalism: it's as though in its animalistic mimicry of the system of evolution (competition, survival of the fittest, etc.), it has also taken on Freud's <i>eros </i>drive, that biological urge 'to combine organic substances into ever greater unities' (1920, page 50), realised in the inescapable corporate gravitation towards monopoly, the ineluctable upward accumulation of wealth and power. 'He's earned his influence', free marketeers, Libertarians and minarchists will protest. 'He's powerful and wealthy because his papers are popular!' Truth by popularity. </div>
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Which is what's so strange about these objections: they controvert the basis of the Right's usual disagreement with 'regulations' and 'red tape' and 'big government', that one golden principle I referred to earlier which it mistakenly apotheosises as the way to determine all truth and quality and morality: consumer choice. As far as I can see, these News Corp boycotts are one of the few examples of consumer choice actually working as it is supposed to. Every time the quality or ethics of a product is questioned and the suggestion of more regulation is proposed, the Right turns to the touchstone of consumer choice: 'We don't need big government interference – the consumers are our regulators. If consumers don't believe what Rupert Murdoch's papers say, they won't read them ... If consumers don't like the way cage eggs are produced, they won't buy them ... If consumers think reality television is vacuous fluff, they won't watch it.' </div>
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Under capitalism, your dollar is your vote, and (in the fantasies of Randists) the market is supposed to adjust itself to align with consumer opinion as businesses consumers like succeed while businesses they don't fail. As though we are all moral philosophers, thoroughly conscious of the ethical ramifications of our every purchase. As though we have the time in our busy lives to research whether every product we buy is tested on animals or contributes to the deforestation of the Amazon or is made by third-world child sweatshop labourers working eighteen hour days for infinitesimal pay. As though in the moments before we put each item into our trolleys, bombarded by psychologically manipulative advertising and marketing and packaging designed to conceal anything untoward, dogged by a hundred other disparate velleities and cravings and distractions and concerns, we are our best rational and ethical decision-making selves. As though the majority of us are even concerned with right and wrong when we are shopping. As though we haven't been taught that the only value worth considering is monetary value. As though most of us even have the ethical fortitude to resist purchasing products we know involve unethical practices. This system is demonstrably flawed.</div>
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So here, in the form of a few small business owners rejecting the low-quality products of a powerful multinational corporation which will probably get its own chapter when historians write about the downfall of the United States (notoriously evil American television network Fox News, panderer to climate change deniers, Creationists, second-amendment nutjobs, Tea Partiers, Republicans and other fundamentalists, is also Murdoch's handiwork), we have one rare instance of an actual deployment of consumer choice for a reason other than price, one time where the consumer has looked at a substandard product and said, 'No, this isn't good enough; I refuse to sell this', and the internet commenters of the Right denounce it.</div>
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<a href="http://jeffsparrow.net/about/">Jeff Sparrow</a>, editor of left-wing literary journal <i><a href="http://overland.org.au/">Overland</a></i>, is optimistic about the recent slew of rubbish front pages from <i>The Daily Telegraph</i>, and claims the reaction to them online is a signal that 'Murdoch's spell is breaking' (2013). But it's easy to convince yourself you're in the majority when you're surrounded by sympathisers, when you're caught up in the outrage of the Twitter intelligentsia. Growing up in the safe Labor seat of Throsby I'd never met anyone who voted Liberal and couldn't even imagine anyone voting for Howard, and yet he'd won every election in my lifetime until '07. I'm sure Sparrow has the deductive powers to see past those in his immediate political surrounds; I just can't share his optimism in this.</div>
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Besides, it's not the engaged people I'm worried about. Not the ones who spend time reflecting on these issues, reading political articles, tweeting their outrage, and slowly constructing a worldview from a number of sources like world news from other countries, independent media, books, discussion, <i>Q&A</i> and <i>Lateline</i>. It's the ones who can't be bothered with politics most of the time, the reluctant voters, the uninformed but stubbornly opinionated who concern me. The ones who glean their political views incidentally from here and there: the mainstream news, the Sunday paper, what other people seem to be saying, a bit of Alan Jones here, a bit of <i>The Bolt Report</i> there. Because when you don't seize control of the discourse, when you just cruise through your intellectual life on autopilot receiving whatever comes your way, the vested interests take control for you, and you've got nothing against which to contextualise your information. The chances are that the vast majority of news these 'uninformed opinionated' come into contact with is produced by the Murdoch media and they don't even know.<br />
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So I think Sparrow might be giving people a little too much credit. People don't want facts and truth and expert opinions from people smarter or more specialised than them. They don't want hard questions about right and wrong that might require them to change their behaviour. They want entertainment. They want fluff. And 'consumer choice' on its own without any other barometers of quality or truth usually ensures they get it. Consumer choice alone results in pandering, like a divorced glory parent who only takes their child on weekends and spoils them with gifts and sweets and amusement parks instead of necessities and vegetables and homework, making the other parent seem boring. Given the choice, who might the child prefer to live with? What lifestyle would they choose to adopt? Do they want to watch <i>Big Brother</i> or <i>Lateline</i>? Do they want to read celebrity gossip or serious policy discussion?</div>
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This is why it would've been useful to have a real media inquiry in this country. But the howls of 'freedom of the press' that issued from the papers, accompanied dutifully by the Coalition, saw the death of that. You might disagree it was needed, but let's just imagine that it was. One wonders how we would ever get such an inquiry given the corrupt media would use its opinion-forming power to turn public sentiment in its favour with whichever party was in opposition to give it credibility.</div>
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No, my feeling is that we're stuck with tabloids that will become ever more like Britain's now, at least as long as the newspaper format survives. All we can do is try to avoid ending up with the Australian equivalent of Fox News that <a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/robert-manne/2012/02/08/1328693019/lord-monckton-and-future-australian-media">we already know</a> prominent conservatives and conservative organisations like 'Lord' Monckton and the IPA are gunning for. And, of course, to save the ABC from privatisation or, in other words, dumbing it down as much as the commercial networks. I only pray it doesn't come to that.</div>
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Thanks for reading<br />
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LPL<br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/L-Phillip-Lucas/156602084383026">L Phillip Lucas</a> (Facebook page)<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">@LPhillipLucas</a> (Twitter profile)<br />
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<b>References</b></div>
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<i>The Daily Telegraph</i>'s <a href="http://pedestriantv-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images%2Farticle%2F2013%2F08%2F05%2Fkick-mob-out.png">Monday 5</a> and <a href="http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2013/08/08/1226693/144237-thommos-heroes.jpg">Thusday 8</a> August 2013 front pages.</div>
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Harry Dellavega's (<a href="https://twitter.com/NastyHarry/status/365611194637230084">@NastyHarry</a>) 9:11am 9 August 2013 <a href="https://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/NastyHarry/status/365611194637230084">tweet</a>.</div>
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'Didie's' <a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/1693902/be-fair-or-youll-be-binned/?cs=159#comment-993680564">comment</a> on Ms Alena Nickell's 4am Friday 9 August 2013 <a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/">The Northern Daily</a> article '<a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/1693902/be-fair-or-youll-be-binned/?cs=159">'Be fair or you'll be binned'</a>'.</div>
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Sigmund Freud's 1920 book <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle </i>in Volume 18 of James Strachey's 1953 –1974 series <i>The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud</i>, published by Hogarth Press, London.</div>
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<a href="http://theconversation.com/profiles/michelle-grattan-20316/profile_bio">Michelle Grattan, AO</a>'s 1:48pm Friday 9 August 2013 <a href="http://theconversation.com/news-corp-chief-quits-as-pm-claims-editors-told-go-hard-on-rudd-16886">The Conversation</a> article '<a href="http://theconversation.com/news-corp-chief-quits-as-pm-claims-editors-told-go-hard-on-rudd-16886">News Corp chief quits as PM claims editors told "go hard on Rudd"</a>'.</div>
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<i>NT News</i>'s Tuesday 31 July 2012 <a href="http://panpa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/4..jpg">front page</a>.</div>
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Alena Nickell's 4am Friday 9 August 2013 <a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/">The Northern Daily</a> article '<a href="http://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/1693902/be-fair-or-youll-be-binned/?cs=159">'Be fair or you'll be binned'</a>'.</div>
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<a href="http://jeffsparrow.net/">Jeff Sparrow</a>'s Thursday 8 August 2013 <a href="http://overland.org.au/" style="font-style: italic;">Overland</a> article '<a href="http://overland.org.au/2013/08/the-good-news-behind-that-telegraph-cove/">The good news behind that <i>Telegraph</i> headline</a>'.</div>
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Slightly Twisted Refresment Lounge's (<a href="https://twitter.com/Sl1ghtlyTw1sted">@Sl1ghtlyTw1sted</a>) 8:23am Friday 9 August <a href="https://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Sl1ghtlyTw1sted/status/365599085899706368">tweet</a>.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-55326869500972759802013-08-07T17:59:00.001+10:002013-08-08T14:08:42.280+10:00I am a boat person<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Wednesday 7 August 2013</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7yr3lAzdc78ihP5CB_sUCr3WyK2KEHiUpEsMvLt3_6QXX_HY3YcNG6UMkl8_6FkUqEgQFGJsgZAO_s81m2BXI5mMOiYx4Lil29zK_AXlABMUkyFeryg9gGHAaGsG6J5GncE2Mo272XYQ/s1600/IMG_5893.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7yr3lAzdc78ihP5CB_sUCr3WyK2KEHiUpEsMvLt3_6QXX_HY3YcNG6UMkl8_6FkUqEgQFGJsgZAO_s81m2BXI5mMOiYx4Lil29zK_AXlABMUkyFeryg9gGHAaGsG6J5GncE2Mo272XYQ/s320/IMG_5893.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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My <a href="http://www.iamaboatperson.com/">I am a Boat Person</a> petition photo, showing me holding the campaign sign and my <a href="http://www.fellowshipfirstfleeters.org.au/">Fellowship of First Fleeters</a> certificate of membership.</div>
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My ancestors (great great great great great grandparents, I believe), Nathaniel Lucas and Olivia Gascoigne, arrived in this country as convicts in the First Fleet. There's speculation that Nathaniel, a master carpenter, was framed due to the demand for his skills in the nascent colony, while Olivia was a servant who robbed her master at gunpoint. She was to die by hanging until her sentence was commuted to transportation.</div>
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Nathaniel's entry (highlighted) in the convict register.</div>
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Like me, everyone else born in Australia has predecessors who arrived here from somewhere else, whether a generation ago by plane, or fifty-thousand years ago from South Asia. That's the idea behind the 'I am a Boat Person' campaign, which seeks to re-emphasise the humanity of so-called 'boat people' and demand a more humane response to those seeking asylum by boat.</div>
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I have sympathy for those politicians with a genuine desire to address this issue, who are faced not only with the ethically fraught situation itself, but also with an agitated, uninformed, bigoted public as well as unconscionable politicians seeking to capitalise on those sentiments. But even so, the policies of both major parties are thoroughly unacceptable. It's despicable and nonsensical to me that 'stopping the boats' has become such a politicised issue and such a major factor in the election. What's worst is that it's not about stopping the boats by, say, helping to alleviate the dire situations in asylum seekers' origin countries, or by opening overseas facilities run or funded by Australia to an Australian standard where those in danger can seek protection or lodge applications. Rather, it seems to be about stopping them by holding a race to the bottom to see who can be the least humane.</div>
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The thing about genuine refugees (which the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers are), is that their lives are in immediate danger. There's no time to sit around waiting to be accepted for immigration. They're real families in desperate situations, doing what they need to do for survival. If people in your community were being killed every day because of their ethnicity, and you felt you could be next, you'd do whatever you had to do to get to a safe place. And the Refugee Convention, to which the Commonwealth of Australia is a signatory, gives you the right to do so without persecution.</div>
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Hypothetically, on the other end of things, if a family, battered and bleeding, banged on your door in the middle of the night, begging to be let in because someone was chasing them down the street with a knife, you wouldn't say, 'No, kindly contact the authorities and seek protection via the appropriate channels' or 'No, you can't come in here, but there's another, brown family down the street without any locks on their doors; go and ask them.' You'd just let them in.</div>
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And that's the other troubling element of the issue: race. If the asylum seekers were white, there wouldn't be nearly so much public resistance. Don't believe me? Imagine the following scenario:</div>
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<i>A number of volcanoes begin to erupt in New Zealand, desolating several towns and cutting off land evacuation routes. Desperate, several hundred survivors turn to boats to escape the destruction and get to safety. At sea they are caught in a storm and lost for some time before reaching Australian shores. Eager to start new lives, they hope for resettlement in Australia, but are denied under Labor's new policy.</i></div>
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It'd be an outrage. No one would argue that (white) people in that situation should be turned away or resettled in Papua New Guinea merely because they arrived by boat. As long as this policy is in effect, how can we ever again intone the words of our national anthem with integrity?: 'For those who've come across the seas we've boundless plains to share.' It's an embarrassment.</div>
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Perhaps my position on this issue originates from my defined opinions about action and inaction. As with all things in this world, literature is valuable mirror for these issues. The book I often refer to as my Bible, David Mitchell's <i>Cloud Atlas </i>(and thankfully also its film adaptation), repeatedly demonstrates how turning our backs when others seek our help, remaining in comfortable self-interest, always constitutes an indulgence of the worst, most selfish sides of our nature, rather than the best, and how the right thing to do is always in accordance with saying yes, acting, speaking, taking a risk in the service of the needful Other. [The following discussion contains <i>Cloud Atlas </i>spoilers]</div>
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This dilemma is evident in the novel when escaped Moriori slave and stowaway Autua reveals himself to narrator Adam Ewing, asking the lawyer to speak on his behalf to the ship's captain, who is likely to kill Autua or throw him overboard without Ewing to argue his worth as an able seaman. At first Ewing protests, considering himself an 'innocent bystander' and stating, 'The Moriori’s adventure was his own & I desired no part in it' (Mitchell 27). Autua responds by closing Ewing's</div>
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fingers around the hilt of a dagger. Resolute & bleak was his<br />
demand.‘Then kill I.’ With a terrible calmness & certitude he<br />
pressed its tip against his throat. I told the Indian he was mad.<br />
‘I not mad, you no help I, you kill I, just same. It’s true, you<br />
know it.' (Mitchell 27)</div>
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Ewing reluctantly accedes to this argument, acknowledging its sense. Once involved in a situation, whether intentionally or not, inaction can be as much of an action as action. He is rewarded for intervening on Autua's behalf when the former slave saves his life later in the novel. </div>
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Autua (Dave Gyasi) cares for Ewing (Jim Sturgess) in the film adaptation of <i>Cloud Atlas.</i></div>
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In the book's final passage, which I have <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/cloud-atlas-and-left.html">quoted before</a>, Ewing argues for acting in the interests of others rather than purely for the self, in a conclusion that is apt in the context of the 'asylum seeker debate':</div>
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You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not<br />
fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of<br />
it if our consciences itch? Why underminde the dominance of<br />
our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight<br />
the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?</div>
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Why? Because of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world<br />
shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until<br />
the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness<br />
uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.<br />
(Mitchell 527–529)</div>
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The same exchange that occurs between Ewing and Autua is echoed again and again throughout the book, when Isaac Sachs must choose between his own safety and exposing a planned nuclear reactor explosion, when Timothy Cavendish appeals to his brother to help him escape some thugs, when Sonmi-451 must become the figurehead of a rebellion even though she is merely a 'server', not 'genomed' to be a revolutionary, and when Zachry must overcome his xenophobic mistrust of the Prescient Meronym in order to help her.</div>
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I'm someone who is typically suspicious of nationalism and patriotism, but even I can't help but be moved when I hear an immigrant expressing gratitude or appreciation of their new life in Australia. Nothing makes me more proud to be Australian, and we should be doing everything in our power to allow that to continue. Don't turn your back on the people seeking our help. Demand a more humane solution for asylum seekers.<br />
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Thanks for reading<br />
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LPL<br />
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/L-Phillip-Lucas/156602084383026">L Phillip Lucas</a> (Facebook page)<br />
<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/LPhillipLucas">@LPhillipLucas</a> (Twitter profile)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a></div>
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<b>References</b></div>
David Mitchell's 2003 novel<i> Cloud Atlas</i>, published by Hodder and Stoughton.</div>
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Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski's 2012 film <i>Cloud Atlas.</i></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01926780326300913796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-68492506117412303382013-04-16T09:30:00.000+10:002013-08-23T11:57:31.511+10:00Beginning with the title<div style="text-align: justify;">
Tuesday 16 April 2013<br />
Edited Friday 23 August 2013<br />
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'The title always comes first, to me and to the reader. I’ve written many stories and articles just by doggedly following the title' – Guillermo Cabrera Infante.</div>
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Infante strains to devise one of his characteristic, diabolically paronomastic titles.</div>
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If there were such things as patron writers like there are saints, Guillermo Cabrera Infante would be the patron of titles. In <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3079/the-art-of-fiction-no-75-guillermo-cabrera-infante">a single interview</a> in edition 75 of the fantastic 'Art of Fiction' series in <i><a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/">The Paris Review</a></i>, for example, the word comes up some 21 times. In fact, he seems to have been a little obsessed with them, making him a fitting epigraph for this post.</div>
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I can't say I'm as devoted as old Saint Guillermo to the art of the title, but I do of course appreciate its importance, and I do admire a good one. At some point I'll post the premise of 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe' here for those who don't know but, before I do, I'm interested in people's opinions of the title. </div>
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To be honest, it's not the kind I would usually go for; my favourites tend to be interesting sentence fragments. In my own work they're usually resurrected little darlings lifted from within the body of the text during the drafting process from a place where I've taken it one step too far, overstated something, as with 'These dying hours'. That, or a fragment from a relevant quote like 'All these, all our meagre losses' from Lina Sagaral Reyes' poem 'The Story I Would Have Told You Had I Met You Yesterday', or 'Some have entertained angels' from <a href="http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Hebrews-13-2/">Hebrews 13:2</a>, 'Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares'. (And then, of course, there are the times you happen to be writing <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/the-unvenerable-bede.html">an article defaming a public figure named Bede</a>, which also happens to be the name of a seventh/eighth-century monk whose title, 'the Venerable Bede' is just begging to be inverted.)<br />
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Infante might be the most enthusiastic titler but, when it comes to the fragment title, Hemingway is the undisputed champion. All his titles are amazing, but especially stellar exemplars include <i>The Sun Also Rises</i>, <i>A Farewell to Arms</i>, <i>For Whom the Bell Tolls</i>, <i>A Moveable Feast</i>, '<a href="http://www.asdk12.org/staff/grenier_tom/HOMEWORK/208194_Hills_Like_White_Elephants.pdf">Hills Like White Elephants</a>' and '<a href="http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html">A Clean, Well-Lighted Place</a>'. I love the way these titles suggest belonging to something larger, or contain within them a verb or the suggestion of a verb, or just use any other form than the standard, 'The XYZ'.<br />
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<a href="http://classicalcybelle.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/a_farewell_to_arms.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1J3QtFK-dB8u_qPPlkBPzaUPiCJS_99EMLVxoJGlV-OuPymkA7KPM9R4n5qxul8Km2rtn2z07h7Q8-Ei6CIzIh4hgelvXGqBxKJmqriIubSY87ijnHofvjc64JLaU1GyQQRKjEaSlKWNf/s200/a_farewell_to_arms.jpg" width="136" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><a href="http://myloc.gov/_assets/Exhibitions/books/1900-1950/Assets/ba0061_enlarge.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZRIzgmRkz0e4z8RWt4QIzhydIO-pBtY0hdl1NvqhrdDDdmZ8kRGDWxhv3L4tNyG0K3hqN0Lf3-hgu6W0_EyNQEv9oPrTSGBGkPO2UFsD5VSgRfnFsCaXiOeM_kk0eGcBQ1ANo7jhKyiBE/s200/ba0061_enlarge.jpg" width="140" /></a></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><a href="http://wolfharrison.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/A-Moveable-Feast.jpeg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKIRue2OiGvKf_vcSZClDkYEAauj7dMaG4pwvTdKU1sNbbQdjq3GHHY93G50W4GQ_oXRLdq7eetxolOROF8rkWtol1_cdZkadJSQ1Y3NE3ajUOU-3nW-eM0ynad30K2UKxNL20uvrMd2X5/s200/A-Moveable-Feast.jpg" width="135" /></a></span><br />
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When Hemingway's titles do follow the more conventional format, they're always redeemed by the interesting words contained therein, often poetic, curious combinations, slightly discordant in their adjacency, fabular in their construction: <i>The Old Man and the Sea</i>; 'The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio'; 'The Faithful Bull'<i> </i>– what do these words have to do with one another? How do they come together? Good titles, I think, provoke such questions, and chime euphonically in the ear and the mind. Other examples include Arundhati Roy's <i>The God of Small Things</i>, Merlinda Bobis's <i>The Solemn Lantern Maker</i>, Markus Zusak's <i>The Book Thief</i>, Jean-Dominique Bauby's <i>The Diving Bell and the Butterfly</i>, and David Mitchell's <i>Cloud Atlas.</i> There's something magical in all of them.<br />
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<a href="http://sandbox.oscar.tangentlabs.co.uk/media/images/products/2013/03/9780006550686.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgIW_Nfgy9Pz3c7iRGgv_WpROZJt2Yo0ZAqC3pymDuv7q5vQTHRpGELII6h2YSmJD1Wtcp2WXKwAJAHXRyO0jSM3LoFX2RIRxVIJ67IdlSmJ8mHHwZwihjmHawiMVykpAGhTIDGOw-SPV9/s200/gost.jpg" width="131" /></a> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><a href="https://ebooks-imgs.eb.sonynei.com/product/400/000/000/000/000/180/092/400000000000000180092_s4.jpeg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf3sQ3tRYM5NETU-I-cq-It9oVJ_1_QuJjU2n_PDpSibyBriiH7rmHdwgVS3PApnoOI5Ir6GvFNpyJhw3VG8sUINE-aZTbseoH8VUFUBDm-MZHXaGa0epQ4KK87Vxe1cPKsdZ9-EoV1dNy/s200/slm.jpg" width="127" /></a> <a href="http://theblurb.com.au/Issue74/BookThief.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsPpUsPMtbh8iZYyFnAH_cR-YGzOUlTdpXNcy64GqPWf2fAc4DvFpogw0nHEaGX_jjkCTn0zwppMl8zwNWWSpKPl5KgxwCAns91bO7Lb6jR48I9Np6uV39ragd4M27oWCqZaXfNPaYu5QK/s200/bf.jpg" width="129" /></a></span></div>
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Dull offenders of this kind include Orhan Pamuk's <i>The Museum of Innocence</i>,<i> </i>David Wroblewski's <i>The Story of Edgar Sawtelle</i>, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón's <i>The Shadow of the Wind</i> (though perhaps this last sounded less clichéd in the original Spanish).</div>
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And I don't think the curiosity-piquing 'magic' of these titles when they work can be replaced with references to made-up peoples and place names that nobody knows or cares about until they read your books. David Eddings' <i>Malloreon </i>springs to mind, featuring such obscure, repetitive, banal titles as <i>Demon Lord of Karanda</i>, <i>Sorceress of Darshiva,</i> <i>Seeress of Kell </i>or, rather, Magical Person of Bad Made-up City Name 1, 2 and 3.</div>
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<a href="http://covers.booktopia.com.au/big/9780552148047/demon-lord-of-karanda.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjkSCfkxNNyVJtzgm1nfBt7iz-oQ_ytsn_YSOizgWl0LqUnEl9nRZu4mOQp81eCOrrMpcdYiOtM5TUnCycu2IJj_sqYGjrWut1bQStus-YXMtBCg9eky4M4BXtaIPKKb31XqIfU_WTN-z0/s200/dlok.jpg" width="125" /></a> <a href="http://images.angusrobertson.com.au/images/ar/97805521/9780552148054/0/0/plain/sorceress-of-darshiva-malloreon-4.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB1GpNv5N-ymg5V_IepswxchexEEYPhyeOnppJUC3EnLn1zYhSiXQEXOgjtC_V9qo6LB-b5BbxEt7Q9NJcYoHgYwQctMcqOVHYe5rvcxU9sYR39s-Iefnw7a7RYb5J_r-Ezu-iUY_SSnXu/s200/sod.jpg" width="118" /></a> <a href="http://www.geofftaylor-artist.com/system/files/imagecache/normal/covers/eddings_d-seeress_of_kell.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaNWlgmE8N5EzF6wJAQ2rt8LPY89ywElwHiTYsjLc5rBvaHAXDHGHpQ_k7nercB0D_rnGPDYNK7ko4fIBUMlrncBmL-QYa7bTDz13ckS6IMH9JNNYmxP1oxE0w6-T7hBeTQCtfr7-UOs5R/s200/sok.jpg" width="118" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/">Goodreads</a> has <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/276.Best_Book_Titles?auto_login_attempted=true">a list of the 100 best book titles</a> as voted by users, and I think they largely get it right (with the notable exception of Khaled Hosseini's <i>A Thousand Splendid Suns</i>, which I cannot abide). The list is topped by Philip K Dick's <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i>, Seth Grahame-Smith's <i>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i> and Ray Bradbury's <i>Something Wicked This Way Comes</i>, also including such favourites as Jonathan Safran Foer's <i>Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close</i> at number 49 and Italo Calvino's <i>If on a Winter's Night A Traveler </i>at 84. I was surprised the omission of Lionel Shriver's <i>We Need to Talk About Kevin </i>and David Foster Wallace's <i>Infinite Jest</i>, though. And there are also very few or no one-word titles, which suits me. I'm generally not a fan, excepting perhaps JM Coetzee's <i>Disgrace </i>and AS Byatt's <i>Possession</i>. I'm really interested in this at the moment, so I'd love to hear some of your favourite book titles and the rationales behind them.<br />
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I recently had the chance to ask two authors about their titles when I attended a panel for the recently published novels <i>The Railwayman's Wife</i> by Ashley Hay and <i>Song in the Dark </i>by my old Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Wollongong, Dr Christine Howe. <i>The Railwayman's Wife </i>is very romantic, and <i>Song in the Dark </i>is equally evocative, so I asked about the significance behind them. I wondered especially why, in a book in which the author professed to have created a strong female character, she chose to situate that character's identity in her husband in the title, half suspecting the answer to be 'publishers'. And it was. Apparently it was originally to be titled after a line from a Triffids song, but the publishers objected and suggested <i>The Railwayman's Wife</i>. Luckily Hay didn't feel this was a betrayal of the heroine's character and accepted the suggestion. The origin of Chrissy's title was more organic. She said she actually woke up in the middle of the night and knew it was the one.<br />
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<a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/covers/catalog/9780143567448.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LWw0OqU3lT3WLvQc7vWneRSHIcySRqPgmclYdcw4Twd_UGF_FnEx3eBwOcJi765vxvKXVbzEqwPOCWWy2T3xKSIgPk7yOdyUz3L2gyzWu49NDhTILoEle5x-ZNhLA7bx0UYYZKtjt_1y/s200/sitd.jpg" width="130" /></a><a href="http://images.doubleday.com.au/Images/86303_2.GIF"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3qXM8lgEgFgIbL-p9urVbTyp2YyeQ2brgYncHBbC2w-hNyyzWt8euzRxUidec8nFJ9MshdwvxZy90rTXDgcUHwms0HbmyS8Ia6akVCtr1GAQ68__RN80epus10TbIRQQBZj0FP-RdcMvQ/s200/trw.gif" width="159" /></a></div>
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After much Facebook-friend consultation and confabulation with her publishers, another of my old lecturers, Dr Shady Cosgrove, has finally announced the title of her latest work: 'What the Ground Can't Hold', which I think sounds like an instant classic, very Hemingwayesque, and vastly superior to the other more pedestrian contenders, 'The Missing'<i> </i>or 'The Disappeared'.<br />
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But 'What the Ground Can't Hold' started out under a different name, if I remember correctly: 'The Necessary Tango'. In fact, Shady told us that title was the original kernel from which the rest of the novel grew. And yet I think it's skipped up a step from a great example of the enticing, provocative 'The XYZ' title, to an even better 'fragment' title.<br />
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Perhaps the same is in store for me. Like Shady's and Infante's, my novella began with the title, or the notion of a title. I was watching <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26FBhM_pjoc">a trailer</a><i> </i>one day in 2007, unaware of the film's title and trying to guess what it would be, when I came up with 'The [Adjective] Death of Harold Crick'. Its actual name was <i>Stranger than Fiction</i>, but the title I had invented stayed with me. Or rather, the format 'The [Adjective] [Noun] of [Proper Noun]'. This was around the time I was trying to decide on an idea for my English Extension 2 major work, so I spent a little time theorising it before ultimately abandoning it in favour of a (very poor) fictionalisation of the 1989 Tiananmen Square riots. I did so by trying to fill the gaps in the title, then imagining what such a story would be about. First I replaced 'Harold Crick' with a similarly quirky name, 'Norman Crabbe' ('Irving' didn't come until first year when I reimagined and wrote the story for my first Creative Writing assessment), but I always retained the word 'Death'. Then I played around with the adjective, which I found the most stimulating part of the exercise. I knew I wanted an 'in-' or 'un-' word, and tried 'inconsiderate', 'inoffensive', 'unintrusive', 'unconventional', 'unexpected', 'unfortunate' and 'indisputable' before coming to 'innocuous', dreaming up the different stories each adjective connoted.<br />
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So the title 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe' has been with me since at least the first half of 2008, with predecessors a year older. It has lived in a couple of radically different incarnations since then, first as a short story for Merlinda in first year, then as a novel outline and first chapter for Shady and Jill Jones in second year, but the name has stuck. Guillermo would be proud. Perhaps now that I am finally working on the novella in earnest, though, it will outgrow it. Maybe there's a better name, and I shouldn't 'doggedly follow the title', I don't know. Would you pick up a book called 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe'? What do you think of it? Good? Bad? Memorable? Forgettable? Devastatingly bromidic? Inexplicably erotic? What does it put you in mind of? What kind of story does it conjure? I'd really appreciate any feedback.<br />
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As an aside, when attempting to think of a title for <i>this</i> post, the utterly obvious 'what's in a name?' reference came to mind. Not that I ended up with something much better. But here's a selection of posts and articles that went down that road, heedless of those millions who had gone before them:<br />
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<li>'<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/03/book-titles">Book Titles: What's in a Name?</a>'</li>
<li>'<a href="http://www.greatvine.com/articles/whats-in-a-name">Constructing a Title for a Book: What's in a Name?</a>'</li>
<li>'<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1216999-what-s-in-a-name?auto_login_attempted=true">What's in a Name?</a>'</li>
<li>'<a href="http://tonykriz.com/?p=714">"What's in a Name": Did I Screw Up the Title of My Book?</a>'</li>
<li>and my favourite, another '<a href="http://olivertidy.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/whats-in-a-name/">What's in a Name?</a>', which is ironically concerned with not wanting to use 'a combination of words that has been used before for a book title'.</li>
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Thanks for reading.</div>
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LPL</div>
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<b>References*</b><br />
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Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Alfred Mac Adam's interview '<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3079/the-art-of-fiction-no-75-guillermo-cabrera-infante">Guillermo Cabrera Infante, The Art of Fiction No. 75</a>' in the Spring 1983 issue of <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/back-issues/87"><i>The Paris Review</i>, number 87</a>, reproduced on <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/"><i>The Paris Review </i>website</a>.</div>
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Verse 2, chapter 13 of the Epistle to the Hebrews of the New Testament of the King James 'Authorised Version', Pure Cambridge Edition of the Holy Bible, as reproduced by <i>The Official King James Bible Online </i><a href="http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/">website</a>.</div>
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*Click on images to be directed to original location.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-73226762597760898032013-04-06T11:56:00.000+11:002013-04-06T13:34:55.246+11:00The innocuous death of irving crabbeSaturday 6 April 2013<br />
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Greetings, dear reader.</div>
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This is a short post to formally announce that I, L Phillip Lucas, have officially commenced writing my first piece of long fiction, a novella titled 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe'.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-oUzDZZVU7OzqzHmzfZEA5-ZfYpjybUVGua5ymMWHYfp6L19ZSS24S1dKNFsrfQNCzKhhboqAkZ_bWJtTG-tMehzNa42EmNDBLDBdDQR8zYnMk9d4hlN3iKeCWk8miwnmJPA-M0tyw0WW/s1600/cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-oUzDZZVU7OzqzHmzfZEA5-ZfYpjybUVGua5ymMWHYfp6L19ZSS24S1dKNFsrfQNCzKhhboqAkZ_bWJtTG-tMehzNa42EmNDBLDBdDQR8zYnMk9d4hlN3iKeCWk8miwnmJPA-M0tyw0WW/s400/cover.png" width="282" /></a></div>
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The makeshift cover I have mocked up for myself, using some image stolen off the internet somewhere years ago.</div>
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With a grand total of 2,878 very raw words so far, it's not much, but it is a start. (At the risk of exposing my feeble mathematical skill to the scorn and ridicule it deserves, I believe this equates to 5.756% of the wordcount of the finished project, which actually sounds much more impressive). The plan is to get that number to six thousand by Monday.</div>
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It's not without a sense of guilt that I admit that, since studying abroad at the University of East Anglia for the first half of 2011, I have neglected fiction. First I was distracted by finishing my studies in literature and linguistics. Then work got in the way. But finally I applied for and have been accepted into a Master of Creative Arts by Research at the University of Wollongong under the supervision of the magnificent Dr Merlinda Bobis, and I can't convey how much I'm enjoying (after only one semester away from uni) escaping the hideous, lucrative corporate world of business English and offices and technical editing, and returning to the wonderful world of research, reading and writing. </div>
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And I actually believe the hiatus has done me good. I have a much clearer vision now of how to write than I did when I finished the Creative Writing portion of my degree. Those few extra years to think, work, mature, read, and write in other forms have left me a slightly different person, I believe, and a slightly better writer (though still, I constantly fear, not better <i>enough</i>).</div>
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I plan to blog often about the process along the way, but I don't want it to get in the way of actually writing, and I don't want to be blogging utter rubbish, so not <i>too </i>frequently. But please, stay tuned. Get involved. Tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you.</div>
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Thanks for reading.</div>
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LPL</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-11445090289827625912012-09-03T12:24:00.001+10:002017-05-11T15:12:15.358+10:00The unvenerable bede<div>
Thursday 11 May 2017<br />
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On Monday 23 July 2012, my article 'The Unvenerable Bede' about the perils of social media for politicians and local Wollongong Councillor Bede Crasnich in particular was published in <i><a href="http://tertangala.com/">Tertangala</a>: The Environment Issue.</i> Bede issued a response in the subsequent September <em>Gender and Sexuality Issue</em>, and for five years a slightly altered version of the article has been available here. After discussion with Bede in light of the <a href="http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/4626792/wollongong-councillor-to-quit-politics/">recent announcement of his retirement from politics</a>, I have agreed to remove the article from my blog. If you have any questions, or would like to request a copy of the article, my details are listed on <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/p/guestbook.html">my contact page</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfomSVbDe0GY0HFTGkACD3qIPpmTfBLZKU0-nUvSis8zms4tKByOj4b9-Dx-EBslelSdLTYe5d2JJLuzsuz-FMMVZQdj-TnEYmau0KPgy_8LVt5x5e3sh4FUVoHI9LnmxOqkWMQ8idBQQO/s1600/tert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfomSVbDe0GY0HFTGkACD3qIPpmTfBLZKU0-nUvSis8zms4tKByOj4b9-Dx-EBslelSdLTYe5d2JJLuzsuz-FMMVZQdj-TnEYmau0KPgy_8LVt5x5e3sh4FUVoHI9LnmxOqkWMQ8idBQQO/s320/tert.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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Cover photography by Wilfred Russel-Smith, design by Lisa Diebold.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-42511346942549149932012-08-05T11:24:00.001+10:002012-08-05T11:25:59.458+10:00A small addendum for the los angeles review of books<div style="text-align: justify;">
Sunday 5 August 2012<br />
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This morning in the course of my internet rounds I came across a fascinating <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=822&fulltext=1&media=">LA Review of Books article</a> by <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=540">Matthea Harvey</a> investigating the relationship between tennis and poetry. I was disappointed, however, at the omission of my favourite tennis-related passage in literature, and what I think is one of the most beautiful tracts of prose in all Western literary canon. Continuing in the lazy (busy) man's blogging tradition I started with '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/cloud-atlas-and-left.html"><i>Cloud atlas</i> and the left</a>', I've decided to post this passage as a small redress for the overlooked literary tennisphile, Vladimir Nabokov.</div>
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The passage comes from <i>Lolita</i>, when a tennis game as decidedly mundane as the titular character's is transmuted in the eyes of the narrator Humbert Humbert into 'the highest point to which [he] can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make believe':</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis -- without any utilitarian results [...] My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or stung to its long elegant hop. </span>(262<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px;">–</span>263)</div>
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Here we witness Lolita's deification, her ascension up the ranks of ancient mythology from nymphet to deity <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px;">– </span>the nymphs were, afterall, spawned of the gods <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px;">–</span> celestial and potent, beautiful and terrible, creator and destroyer of worlds, endowed with, instead of an ordinary tennis racquet, something altogether more divine, like Artemis' silver bow, a golden whip. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3TUio9Ienm5sD-kL4CXcXvTnHENWoHEQ8FnDLrUawfRbGa0XT9YH0T6tTjhobiPHGEwZknAVA9hYXUjKwKYeQbJmJeF5lrqJfkcxJxuWYsvlG56JUhs8g6NfJTDArKxN5ZCgPmXMqAl80/s1600/2009+Australian+Open+Day+3+1ToCUR8m6qel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3TUio9Ienm5sD-kL4CXcXvTnHENWoHEQ8FnDLrUawfRbGa0XT9YH0T6tTjhobiPHGEwZknAVA9hYXUjKwKYeQbJmJeF5lrqJfkcxJxuWYsvlG56JUhs8g6NfJTDArKxN5ZCgPmXMqAl80/s400/2009+Australian+Open+Day+3+1ToCUR8m6qel.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I must say, though, I prefer to imagine Humbert talking about Ana Ivanovic here than little Dolores Haze.</div>
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This is, of course, Nabokov, so there's more going on here than just a celebration of tennis, or even the surface-level attraction of the narrator to 'his' Lolita. This ode to the game is wrapped up into the novel and imbued with meaning, like everything else. I think there's something in the way Humbert apotheosises Lolita, the way he immerses her in abstract systems which she manipulates and controls ('white-lined time', 'the very geometry of basic reality', 'her aura of control', 'a vital web of balance', 'the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created', even 'the service cycle' and the almost illicit 'act of serving') that speaks of agency. It's as though by empowering his victim, significantly just before Humbert is called away from the court by a fake phone call, a scheme of Lolita's to aid in effecting her escape, he makes it appear she is more in control of her situation than the we otherwise might think and, therefore, by extension, Humbert becomes less a villain.</div>
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References</div>
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<a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=540">Matthea Harvey</a>'s 2012 article '<a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=822&fulltext=1&media=">We Can Be Heroes: Poetry at the Olympics (Part 3) - Can Braveheart (Andy Murray) Upset Twinkletoes' (Roger Federer) Apple Cart</a>', published by the <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/index.php">Los Angeles Review of Books</a>.</div>
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Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel <i>Lolita</i>, published by Penguin.</div>
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Lucas Dawson's 2009 <a href="http://www1.pictures.gi.zimbio.com/2009+Australian+Open+Day+3+1ToCUR8m6qel.jpg">photograph</a> of Ana Ivanovic.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-42666581477514407892012-07-03T13:02:00.000+10:002012-07-03T13:33:49.671+10:00The worst kind of emergencyTuesday 3 July 2012<br />
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Like most people who want to think of themselves as morally conscientious, I've been acutely aware of my obligation to contribute to charity for some time now. I wrote in March last year in the post '<a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/further-irish-adventures.html">Further Irish adventures</a>' on my travel blog, <a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/"><i>Ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted</i></a>: </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I can’t really explain it, I suspect because it doesn’t make sense, but I feel a kind of guilt being in someone else’s country and being better off than them. Here I am, a visitor, a traveller in London and there’s a homeless man whose country this is, and I’m better off than him.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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In retrospect, I now feel I can account for that 'inexplicable', 'irrational' guilt with another passage from the brilliant documentary that everyone should see, Stephanie Black's <a href="http://search.ovguide.com/?ci=101&q=Life+and+Debt"><i>Life and Debt</i></a>, and the book upon which it is based, Jamaica Kincaid's <i>A Small Place</i>: </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They
are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to
escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live
properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the
tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy
you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom,
they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a
source of pleasure for yourself.
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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The writer has, I think, natives of the third world in mind here, but I think it applies to the homeless of the first world, too. I think I was picking up on this dichotomy between the privileged tourist and the impoverished native, and it made me uncomfortable. I continued in that post to explain how I assuaged both this tourist's guilt and my obligation to give:</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <span style="font-size: small;">I just made a promise to myself that, while travelling, I
would give something to everyone who asked it of me – even if it’s just
always the smallest coin in my pocket (although I think giving single
pennies away is more insulting than anything else). I know it’s
irrational, but I don’t think giving can really be a bad thing, so I’m
happy to keep doing it. It’s either homeless people, charity workers, or
buskers, so the money’s never going somewhere it shouldn’t. </span></span></div>
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</div>
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I felt that satisfied my obligation while I was away, but I always intended to, upon my return, do some research and choose a charity or two that I could champion and support regularly. The task, however, proved too large and too difficult. Where do you start? How do you choose between one cause and another? I soon realised that the very dedication I had to the idea of charity (and of finding the right one) was only serving to delay my actual participation in it. So my ultimate solution ended up resembling my European policy more than anything else. Since then, I've been meting out smaller amounts of money more frequently to whichever charitable cause comes my way. $10, say, every time a friend does a charity run.<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
So far this has led me to make donations to causes as diverse as the <a href="http://sexytalescomedy.com/">Sexy Tales Comedy theatre collective</a>, <a href="http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/">Cancer Research UK</a>, <a href="http://www.leukaemia.org.au/web/index.php">the Leukaemia Foundation</a>, the lesser known Nepalese <a href="http://blinknow.org/">Blinknow Foundation</a> and even, controversially, <a href="http://invisiblechildren.com/">Invisible Children</a>'s Kony 2012 campaign. I have also recently begun to donate monthly to the activist group <a href="http://www.getup.org.au/">GetUp!</a>, although I would classify that as a third-tier act of charity. It's third-tier because, as strongly as I feel about the issue, its importance is higher-order, more abstract, contentious. I might be wrong about the need for the Australian political discourse to be dragged left, just as it might not be as important to donate to the <a href="http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/">Atheist Foundation of Australia</a>, or any particular political party, despite my personal feelings on the issue. These are disputable ideological causes whose need to be kept at the third tier is underlined when you consider that many people in the world would not donate to GetUp! or <a href="http://www.avaaz.org/en/index.php">Avaaz</a>, but to right-wing think tanks and the like. I would also place donations to arts organisations, libraries, museums, schools, local children's sports clubs, and other institutions of general good in this category. These are worthy causes, but they would serve only to improve lives, not to save them. The fact that there are two tiers of importance below them should not reflect poorly on their worth, but rather on how very dire the need of other causes is.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
We can all agree, for instance, about finding a cure for cancer, or multiple sclerosis, or AIDS, or leukaemia, whatever objections I may have to the shameless corporate exploitation of the breast cancer pink ribbon (most disgustingly in the name of 'breast cancer awareness', as though we could be any more aware of breast cancer), and misgivings I might have about the resulting disproportionate funding of breast cancer research to that of other cancers. These potentially life-saving causes I would name second-tier, once again because of the seriousness of other causes, not because of their own lack of worth.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Because, while the pursuit of cures for disease is undoubtedly a noble cause, no one can say it is morally wrong that diseases exist, that this is an injustice for which we are implicitly to blame and which we can act to stop. That is the nature of the first-tier causes, those which attempt to solve and alleviate poverty. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Now, <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/p/glossary-of-terms.html">semantic decay</a> has unfortunately seen to it that we hear talk about poverty mostly as meaningless platitudes. We're all inured to it. 'Starving children in Africa' has become a reproach for parents to get their children to finish their meals and avoid waste, the touchstone invoked rhetorically in every argument, a phrase to be bandied about by comedians in witty contrasts with petty Western concerns.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/ze3avOz1jf8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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<br />
But try to stop and think about it for a second, as I have recently. Try to undo the work of semantic decay, to resensitise yourself. It's like how we grow up with giraffes and elephants in our books and toyboxes, their long necks and noses pointed out to us as their distinguishing features from the very beginning, so we are robbed of the chance to ever really marvel at them, until one day you're half-watching a documentary when you realise how remarkable they really are.</div>
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Think about it. Try to look at it from an objective perspective, that of intelligent alien observers, or our descendents in the future. What would they think when they heard that three quarters of the world's population lived in poverty and the other quarter did nothing. How can we go on with our lives knowing that the rest of the world is suffering in this way? How can we buy an expensive new TV when we know that if we only donated that money to a charity instead, we would literally be saving hundreds of lives? How can we spend billions exploring space when we haven't even solved the problems here on Earth? How is this allowed to go on? If you accept that the boundaries between nations are arbitrary and we are all just human beings on this world, it's hard to believe. It's hard not to think that there should be some kind of limit on the wealth that a nation can possess while its neighbours are dying of easily curable diseases. That each rich country should have to take on a number of poor ones whose welfare it is their responsibility to ensure before they can continue to expand themselves. The poverty of the vast majority of the world is nothing short of an emergency, and it is the worst kind: the kind that we have gotten used to. The kind that can last centuries.</div>
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Think about the last time you heard about or saw someone rich, or some possession you wish you were rich enough to own. Now realise that nearly everyone in the rest of the world feels that way about <i>you</i>. The rest of the world would give anything to be in <i>your</i> financial position, however humble you may feel that to be. And not just now, but for all human history. It's mindblowing. This tweet comes to mind:</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1QylAO8kS7MeFxItuoLgGEUwjYnwyEaitxPFbztTkXSRMSd5XbMttr-mKMkIiTNohNMzjy2fYDqqgZObBqUoDNbPHOao7YHoFWWx6ZW8sFBXbQuM_Vnwt0wYGgcw9Xlb7ovzzWQqjZmcK/s1600/Lisa+Pryor+tweet.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1QylAO8kS7MeFxItuoLgGEUwjYnwyEaitxPFbztTkXSRMSd5XbMttr-mKMkIiTNohNMzjy2fYDqqgZObBqUoDNbPHOao7YHoFWWx6ZW8sFBXbQuM_Vnwt0wYGgcw9Xlb7ovzzWQqjZmcK/s400/Lisa+Pryor+tweet.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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In light of all this, I've decided to add <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/p/charity.html">a new page</a> to this blog, which will track my charitable efforts over this financial year. I'm not doing it to boast. I'm doing it because I want to be able to see the difference I've made, and judge whether I feel it's enough. I'm doing it mindful of what Peter Singer <a href="http://www.thelifeyoucansave.com/idea">has been urging</a> us to do: change the culture of giving. To make it something that you would expect any normal, decent person to do, something that you could envision bringing up in casual conversation: 'Oh, so who do you donate to?'</div>
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<br /></div>
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I'm urging you to do the same. Pick a charity, a first-tier one, and work out how much you can spare and start giving. Then, if you want, you can give to the second and third tiers too. Or do what I do and give out ten dollars here and there wherever the opportunity arises. As Singer says on the webpage linked to above:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">almost a billion people live very comfortable lives, with money to spare
for many things that are not at all necessary. (You are not sure if you
are in that category? When did you last spend money on something to
drink, when drinkable water was available for nothing? If the answer is
“within the past week” then you are spending money on luxuries while
children die from malnutrition or diseases that we know how to prevent
or cure.) </span><br />
<br />
Once you have any amount of expendable income there is no excuse for you not to give. If your savings are in the hundreds, just give ten dollars every now and then at the least. We live in the age of the internet. You can do it with your credit card without ever seeing your money leave your hand. You won't even notice the difference, I promise. </div>
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<br /></div>
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And don't just give, but record it, like I am. Publicly, if possible, but privately otherwise. So you know how much you're giving and can feel good or bad about it accordingly. And talk about it. <a href="http://www.thelifeyoucansave.com/pledge">Take the pledge</a> on Singer's website. Tell people you're looking for a charity to donate to and ask them who they recommend. Act surprised if they say they don't give. Shame them subtly if you must. And every time you give to charity, click the 'share on Facebook' or 'share on Twitter' buttons afterwards. Let everyone see, and let's change the culture of giving.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
References</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary <i><a href="http://search.ovguide.com/?ci=101&q=Life+and+Debt">Life and Debt</a></i>, produced by Tuff Gong Pictures<i>.</i></div>
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</div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
My 2011 blog post '<a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/further-irish-adventures.html">Further Irish adventures</a>' on my blog <i><a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/">Ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted</a>.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Lisa Pryor (@pryorlisa)'s 2012 <a href="https://twitter.com/pryorlisa/status/212150780168376322">tweet</a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/WhatNewsShouldBe">WhatNewsShouldBe</a>'s 2011 YouTube video, '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze3avOz1jf8&feature=player_embedded">african food joke comic strip</a>', of Dwayne Perkins's 'Not a Part of the Problem' comedy routine.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-91160346462317340452012-04-16T17:31:00.007+10:002012-04-16T20:42:59.706+10:00Cloud atlas and the left<div style="text-align: justify;">Monday 16 April 2012 <br />
<br />
I'm quite short of time at the moment (one assessment due tomorrow, one on Thursday, three books to read this week, editing work needed for Wednesday, going to Melbourne for the comedy festival from Thursday to Monday, with a presentation on a book I haven't started reading due two days after I get back), so in lieu of a real post, here's something I've been meaning to put up here for a while that won't eat too much into my time.<br />
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A while ago, while Til and I were travelling around <a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/camping-and-campania-or-travel-disaster.html">Italy</a> and <a href="http://ordinarythingssmashedandreconstituted.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/blog-boy.html">Greece</a>, I read a wonderful book by David Mitchell called <i>Cloud Atlas</i>, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 and which was recommended to me by one of my lecturers, the excellent Dr Joshua Lobb.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-p9Qow3fmxZt3BQsQ-wbv1rGmaTChoBW_x7pboUBKoyfEL8IhCOvw3nDh2774Mnm2n4SNiiBRN-8wZaQAxG3fS3t0mgheuyfYhb3CJvfF_s4wkaUYMIsihqfwwlJFTTxAtN-64AMHgD7/s1600/David+Mitchell%27s+Cloud+Atlas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-p9Qow3fmxZt3BQsQ-wbv1rGmaTChoBW_x7pboUBKoyfEL8IhCOvw3nDh2774Mnm2n4SNiiBRN-8wZaQAxG3fS3t0mgheuyfYhb3CJvfF_s4wkaUYMIsihqfwwlJFTTxAtN-64AMHgD7/s400/David+Mitchell%27s+Cloud+Atlas.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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I'm increasingly interested at the moment in tracing back the texts and ideas I encountered that led me to certain conclusions, because sometimes my conclusions (eg socialism, vegetarianism) seem so radical when just looked at bare. But if I could present people with a more manageable sequence of ideas that, once accepted, lead to that conclusion, it might be more understandable.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
The book is full of beauty and poignancy, but in particular the passage I want to quote below, the ending of the book, when read after undertaking the journey of the entire novel, was one of the first things I encountered that led me to start thinking about why a progressive, leftist, socialist (look it up if that sounds alarming; it might not mean what you think it means) approach to world governance is a better one than a conservative, capitalist, individualist one. I now see the divide between left and right as largely one of cooperative socialism and competitive individualism. It even had a part to play in the development of my ideas about vegetarianism (note the 'weaselly word' the narrator identifies, and possibly see my post '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/part-two-of-two.html">'Naturalness', semantic decay and veg(etari)anism (part two of three)</a>').<br />
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And don't worry, it doesn't have much in the way of spoilers, although being the final passage there are a few references you obviously won't understand if you haven't read the book:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.</span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">What precipitates acts? Belief.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & beastiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why underminde the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Why? <i>Because </i>of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world <i>shall</i> consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Is this the entropy written within our nature?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">If we <i>believe</i> that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we <i>believe</i> divers races & creeds can share this world as peacably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we <i>believe</i> leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">A life spent shaping a world I <i>want</i> Jackson to inherit, not one I <i>fear</i> Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, <i>Whiggish</i> sentiments, Adam. But don't tell <i>me</i> about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed Hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!'</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops? (527–529)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Incidentally, there's a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/">film adaptation</a> of <i>Cloud Atlas</i> coming out late this year with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess, so get your hands on a copy and read it beforehand!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LPL</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><b>References</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;">David Mitchell's novel <i>Cloud Atlas</i>, published in 2003.<br />
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<a href="http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/cloud-atlas-book-cover-390x600.jpg">Cover image</a>.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-80307420443377559652012-03-21T13:59:00.003+11:002012-04-16T08:55:19.652+10:00Anthropocentrism and the sentience hierarchy (part three of three)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="text-align: center;"><b></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Wednesday 21 March 2012<br />
<br />
This post originally formed part of my other post, '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/part-two-of-two.html">'Naturalness', semantic decay, anthropocentrism, hierarchy and veg(etari)anism (part two of two)</a>'. Upon rereading it shortly after I first posted it, I decided it was really a separate issue and could be excised to make that post more readable. I hadn't gotten around to reposting it yet, so this is it, part three in my series of posts about veg(etari)anism.<br />
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In '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/ideological-vegetarianism-or-why.html">Miranda devine: enemy of the heart, the mind and vegetarianism</a>' I argued that one of the central positions of Devine's piece – that we may as well eat meat because even if we only eat plants, we are still causing pain and death – was flawed because, among other things, it assumes that there is not a hierarchy in the capacity for suffering of different forms of life.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Positioning sentience as the sole criterion for valuing life is not without its problems. Viewed from the most objective, abstract perspective practically imaginable – say, that of an omniscient gaseous cloud which gained mass somehow from the dream of a fictional character imagined by a germ on the forehead of an alien* – it's arbitrary, biased, and it doesn't take into account forms of sentience we don't understand. But it's really all we have to go on. Like many things, it's an imperfect starting point, unstable ground upon which we have no choice but to build our more reasonable, moral theories. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">*Suggestions for further abstraction welcome. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Life is intrinsically valuable, but we can discriminate between the relative values of its different forms on the basis of sentience – the capacity of a lifeform to experience pleasure and pain, to have a 'preference', as Peter Singer explains in <i>Animal Liberation</i>, which David Foster Wallace calls 'more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement':</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Others have argued that all life is irreducibly and equally valuable. The system of reasoning I'm outlining, however, contends, perhaps less radically, that human beings come out on top. Our lives are the most valuable and the most important. But there's a crucial distinction between the reasoning that brought me to this conclusion and the reasoning used by others that privilege human life over animal. If you've read my blog post, '<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com/2011/10/positions-on-political-correctness.html">Positions on political correctness: towards a stratigraphical model of argumentation</a>', which you almost certainly haven't, this situation might sound familiar. We have the base Position containing all those traditional justifications humanity gave itself to do whatever it wanted to animals – man is greater than beast, God gave men mastery over animals – which has been countered by the Position asserting universal equality of life. My Position seeks to occupy a third stratum paradigmatically above the other two, but syntagmatically between them. The 'mastery over animals' Position condones any violence that humans wish to enact upon animals, and the 'irreducible and equal value of life' one allows none, but mine (and many others') justifies the taking of animal life only when there is a direct choice between animal and human life: when, for example, a human must eat an animal to survive, or when an animal attacks a human. </div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">The effective distinction between the three arguments, then, can be found in the points at which they locate the justification for the taking of animal life on a scale of necessity. Under Position 1, it can be almost anything – nourishment, pleasure, entertainment, convenience. Position 3 locates the distinction at a point beyond all of these, making them all violations of its rule, but some more extreme violations than others. </div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">It takes a lot for me to dismiss the death or pain of a fellow human being, considering the importance I place on empathy as a characteristic, and it's usually the kind of thing I cringe at when I hear someone else do. I've found one exception, however, to be when humans kill animals for reasons that constitute more extreme violations of Position 3 and are themselves killed or injured in the process, as, for example, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2038635/Hunter-mauled-death-wounded-bear-friend-shot-animal-dead-seconds-late.html">happened</a> earlier this year when a hunter accidentally shot a protected grizzly bear thinking it was a black bear, or as occasionally happens to Spanish bullfighters: </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtI1AB9p-BufCkjZzyzD3KeWeW82uPD97dgedpDeOCwJUHnlzrdW6k95dmMSZPQArrEEIti7XQMGNe2l5clmGtxuh0V5upi7FUWw5lmGXz3-Dlw_j1WMjw9uWfWf4J6FKIAvP1Rok4w6uJ/s400/Cuevas%2527s+Julio+Aparicio+photo.jpg" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: center;">Gustavo Cuevas's <a href="http://www.worldpressphoto.org/photo/2011gustavocuevassp-2?gallery=890#fullcontext">World Press Photo award</a>–winning shot of matador Julio Aparicio being gored in the throat. </div><br />
When a human is injured in this way, I can't help myself thinking good on the animal that did it. And no matter the sympathy I have for victims' families, my reaction is usually at least 'fair enough' when a person is killed in this way. If humans breed animals specifically for the purpose of killing them needlessly, or if they go into the animal's habitat with the same intention, and the animal is able to overcome the significant odds stacked against it, I simply can't help applauding it. It's not unlike the response evoked by the death of a mass murderer: certainly nothing like the mindless, morbid delight of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzThMAyFK6Q">the celebrations that ensued upon the death of Osama Bin Laden</a>, but nevertheless a calm sense that justice has been done (in this light, another justification for killing a sentient being might be added to the argument – punishment for undoubtable, confessed, wilful, unrepentant mass murder of humans or other equivalent beings on the sentience hierarchy, by a human or other equivalent being on the sentience hierarchy). </div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">The interesting and somewhat disturbing corollary of the sentience hierarchy as I have described it is that, if Earth was colonised by a race of aliens more intelligent than us, it would be morally acceptable for them to eat us if it came down to a choice between that or starving. The only defense would be an addition that asserts that the hierarchy plateaus at a certain level of intelligence, and all species beyond that point are equally as important as one another in spite of any differences in intelligence, and it is therefore universally wrong to kill any of them. But it would be fairly convenient to locate this plateau just below humans in the hierarchy. You'd at least have to include the great apes and the higher-order sea mammals, but humanity's actions hardly accord with this inclusion considering the damage we do to the habitats of both. </div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">Which is unsurprising considering humanity's overall hypocritical, anthropocentric attitude to predation. You only have to look at popular culture television shows and films to see that we regard anything that hunts us as evil, but anything we hunt as an acceptable source of food. In <i>Dragon Ball</i>, Goku hunts wolves and giant fish, but dinosaurs and even other humans who hunt other animals are characterised as villains and are consequently attacked by the morally incorrigible protagonist. The same hypocrisy can even be found in <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>. It's okay for Buffy to kill vampires and demons because, 'They're evil'. Why are they evil? Because they eat humans and they have no souls. But why discriminate against creatures just because they have no soul? They can't help it. They're just as intelligent as humans, and the show demonstrates they have the capacity to suffer, but killing them is acceptable because they need to prey on humans to survive. In this respect they're more moral than us; we eat animals even though we don't need to, but a vampire can subsist on nothing but blood (although pig's blood is a viable, more conscionable option for the program's re-ensouled undead). But stay your hands, Whedonites. I hasten to add that, to be fair, the show does engage with the Slayer/killer opposition.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU5t60BvofpMcupiZF41ZD0CqP3CKnt2o98ibB8lRbcdRaKmcF4CgP3vvGDGf03BwXazH4FHf18SMZznqtJ92oihnE6Km3YQrqDPuIsUB2G0_TqyI2eDz7Av3QLfMsUm8avAaPQ-6KlQHy/s400/Buffy+vs+Dracula.png" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: center;">'Yeah, I prefer the term 'slayer'. You know, 'killer' just sounds so ... Like I ... paint clowns or something. I'm the good guy, remember?'</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><b>References</b></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Gustavo Cuevas's <a href="http://www.worldpressphoto.org/photo/2011gustavocuevassp-2?gallery=890&photographer=411#fullcontext">photograph</a>, 21 May 2010.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Marti Noxon's television episode 'Buffy vs. Dracula', from Joss Whedon's television series <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>, Season 5, Episode 1.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Peter Singer's book, <i>Animal Liberation</i>, quoted in David Foster Wallace's essay, 'Consider the Lobster'.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">David Foster Wallace's essay, '<a href="http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster?currentPage=1">Consider the Lobster</a>', in <i>Gourmet Magazine</i> in August 2004.</div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4782936367078758926.post-55363056803083926352012-01-21T14:30:00.006+11:002012-01-21T15:22:45.895+11:00The hegelian dialectic<div style="text-align: justify;">Saturday 21 January 2012</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy7wXUdNZbHi8XKgEpU3ha3GggYlk_tn8vkszEXEJccL51ZGNUnrMPDRQq_T1YUF-JuU7-C6qIfNrbWZ7YkkF27GjVs9_lwqSTtb79mtFvlzb0wD_s7LvX0u0wv1zcOxNTDGVEqfZAVEGR/s400/Dialectic.png" width="400" /><span class="apple-style-span"> </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span"> </span><br />
<span class="apple-style-span"> Any feedback, suggestions, corrections, criticisms or referrals to </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span"> existing similar models will be useful in refining the technical </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span"> terminology, visual metaphor and general conceptualisation of </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span"> the model, and will be greatly appreciated. </span><br />
<span class="apple-style-span"> ('<a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com/2011/10/positions-on-political-correctness.html">Positions on political correctness: towards a stratigraphical </a></span><br />
<span class="apple-style-span"> <a href="http://lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com/2011/10/positions-on-political-correctness.html">model of argumentation</a>')</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span">So it turns out my 'stratigraphy of argumentation' model is merely the plain old Hegelian dialectic (although I gather it isn't as 'Hegelian' as that name implies). But yes, it's thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which we covered briefly in one of my Theory for Practising Writers classes, but I didn't remember enough to pick up on the similarities.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span">It's always a strange mix of pride, relieved excitement and embarrassment when this kind of thing happens. Pride that you came up with the same idea as a renowned philosopher on your own, relieved excitement over the fact that it's already been theorised and discussed and all you have to do is research it and apply it and possibly build upon it, and embarrassment that (in this case, anyway) I publicly and ignorantly put forth an idea that was already in existence as though it was original. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span">But as I said, I'm very excited to research the concept, and I'll then be able to see how much of what I came up with on my own is superfluous and how much could still be useful for expounding upon the notion. Once I've determined that I can do another post updating my ideas. The only thing is I'm not sure when I'll get the chance, now. I've landed a massive editing job that'll see me hard at work right until university starts up again. If it stays quiet around here, that's why.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0