The Ancient Marinara

Mar 17, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Freedom of Speech, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

The Ancient Marinara

 

He’s a Legend, and our friend

 

We wish he wouldn’t describe himself as “ancient”. That tends to put us at the edge of a category we fiercely resist.

Richard Neville, one of the founders of homepagedaily.com, was the infamous, notorious publisher and editor of Oz Magazine.and author of Hippie Hippie Shake; Play Power, amongst many others. Unrehabilitated 60s icon, iconoclast and futurist. And our friend, or at least our supporter and adviser, in the earlier and more threatened days of the Ministry of Mateship and Fair Dinkum Values, aka ‘ValuesAustralia’.

Here he is with chilling news on the grim future for the globally-heated rich:

A Man’s a Man

Jan 6, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Freedom of Speech, OzPol Values, Values

A Man’s a Man

Robert Burns statue in Writers Museum Edinburgh

Within the first five seconds we were hooked

 

We were on the way to work, tuned in to Radio National’s Book Show, a replay of the opening address by Andrew O’Hagan from last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival .

Sudden fauvist swathes and splashes of bright primary colours, seduced by the promise of intrigue and adventure and of amazing stories.

Andrew O’Hagan: Sydney Writers’ Festival Opening (Excerpt):

Andrew O'Hagan

“ In our house we didn’t have many books, but there was a large yellow kitchen table where my mother sat at the centre of all her evidence.

 

I grant you she wasn’t the Norton Anthology of Literature, but she knew every song that was ever sung in Glasgow. And my father, when he was there, would appear from his adventures with a crimson face and stories you wouldn’t believe. Except of course I would believe all of them, being sick in the head and the youngest of four.

 

Between them my parents barely read a book in their lives, but I’ve come to feel there was literature in everything they said. “I had a book once,” my father once told me in a moment of pride. “It was green. Do you remember that book, Nancy? It was up on top of the fridge. Green it was. Stood there for ages. Greeny-coloured.”

 

“Away ye go ya daft pig,” my mother said. “That was the telephone book, that manky battered old thing.”

 

She turned to me.

 

“He only uses it to get the numbers of people he can go and buy dogs off. Bringing them in here: as if I don’t have enough to clean.”

 

“The book was definitely green,” said my da. “Green as a pound note. And don’t listen to her: it wasn’t a phone book or anything like it. It had a story in it and everybody died, I remember that sure enough.”

 

…a large yellow kitchen table where his mother sat at the centre of all her evidence…

We were intrigued. What evidence? Evidence of what? What an opening line!

So we knew this was a writer worth listening to. And then he said the other things. The inspiring things; the dark things.

He talked of the old world and of new worlds – new worlds known only in imagination and exotic stories, in dreams. Dreams that can come true through the power of literature to pave new paths to possibility. 

“ But who were we? For me, it was the less legendary granda, the one who sailed to Sydney and came back, I heard, with packets of dates and chocolates and large foreign dolls for my mother. The memory of him was the one that described us better, for the journey to Australia was an excursion into the blue heaven of our imagination.

 

I have to tell you, I grew up to believe there is no other nation but the one you can build and honour in your head, and for kids growing up that way, in a Scotland filled with faded songs about the grandness of our destiny, the thought of new beginnings in virgin lands became a beautiful dream.

 

To travel over the sea to a place free from the torpor of national attributes – not one without its own historical controversies, and one with its own deep traditions – but nevertheless a country that seemed built to be filled with high hopes.

 

In the cold winter nights outside Glasgow, I often lay and imagined my grandfather Charlie having a hot Christmas somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef, eating strange fruits, surrounded by coloured fish, and hearing talk we’d never known. Australia was the dream state of our working class childhoods, the Xanadu of the wee small hours, and that dead old sailor was to my unquiet mind a great engineer of imagined worlds, a crown prince of enchantment, the ultimate wizard of Oz.

 

It didn’t matter what reality had to say on the matter. Australia was the place to start again. I remember families going off from Scotland never to return. They were … emigrating. And to my mind those small friends of mine are kind of legendary because of their early engagement with open possibility. It never occurred to me that they Australia would stop them from growing, but I see now that they were infantilized in the minds of those they left behind. They grew Down Under, but not for us, who would always remember those emigrating heroes as boys we waved off in the knowledge we would probably never see them again. They were the high-flying flamingoes, those boys and girls who had followed my grandfather past the Cape of Good Hope, to a place that appeared, despite its own dark shadows, to make a virtue of BECOMING rather than a prison of BELONGING.

 

I remember watching a programme with my father in the 1970s about people in Adelaide who were trying to build a community of whitewashed houses. They were drinking pink wine and smiling. I’ll never forget it. The pink wine. The smiles on them. “In this part of the world,” said the presenter, “the idea is to be all you can be.”

 

The line seemed to me at the time like a thing out of Shakespeare. I’d never heard such a concept before &mdash Be All You Can Be. The white houses. The pink wine. The smiles on them. It was like Keats, I tell you. Like Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitgerald — all those people in their beautiful clothes at Jay Gatsby’s party, drinking this stuff — what was it called? — WINE.

 

Be All you Can Be. It was like an ancient Chinese proverb. A kind of haiku. A word from the lips of the great and bottomless pool of belief across the world.

 

“What did he say?” asked my father.

 

“Be All You Can Be,” I said.

 

He crushed a can of McEwan’s Export and threw it down by our two-bar fire.

 

“What?”

 

“Be All You Can Be.”

 

“What a load of shite,” he said.

 

Of course, it wasn’t really Australia. It was the thought of it. It was the imagining of it. And the great vehicle of such powerful imagining, says O’Hagan, is literature.

“ If we are truly alive, we have a duty to connect with the planet we inherited and that others will inherit in their turn. If we are truly alive, we have a role to play — every one of us — in the realization of peace and tolerance in our time.

 

If we are truly alive, and if we know what the imagination can do, it will not be in us to sit dormant whilst the planet is ruined by unfettered commerce or whilst thousands are killed by the pre-emptive and ruinous urges of Christian or Islamic fundamentalisms.

 

If we are civilized, we imagine our way past political coercion or selfish pride.

 

We speak truth to power.

We question our media.

We spring to the defense of liberty.

We take care of the world’s resources.

We interrogate corporations and we upbraid ourselves and our hungers and our needs.

We listen to the past.

We question our feelings of superiority.

We teach our children the truth of our culture and what it has done and what it has failed to do.

We keep a close watch on this heart of mine – yours and yours and yours.

And we never forget that we are moral beings and not machines.

This is what we do if we are truly alive. This is what we do if we live close to our imaginations.

[ … ]

I believe it is a failure of the imagination that allows famine or terror to reign in the world.

A man who throws half the contents of his fridge into the trash on a Monday morning fails to imagine, next time he visits the supermarket, that whole villages in Eritrea have children gasping for a droplet of milk. The politician or the general who orders a soldier to release cruise missiles from 5000 feet does not imagine the innocent men playing cards in the teashop below. He does not imagine their loss or the grief of their loved ones. The terrorist[/tag] at the controls of a plane cannot imagine the dreams of the secretary on the 102nd floor, planning her wedding and making a bid for life.

 

Failures of the imagination are behind the conduct of our woes — and so we as we gather here to salute literature and the imagination we also come to denounce those failures of the imagination that harm and betray and destroy life.

O’Hagan finished his speech by quoting his countryman, Robbie Burns.

“ Burns was a poor man who came at last to enrich the world — and I finish with these words I seem to have known since birth, his “Marsellaise” to the human spirit. 

A Man's a Man - Robert Burns

A Man’s A Man For A’ That

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that;
The coward slave – we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that.
Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that. 

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities an’ a’ that;
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that. 

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a’ that,)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

 

So Burns was part of the struggle for equality and rights and democracy, the Scottish Enlightenment. “A piece of defiant uppityness such as ‘A Man’s A Man’ could get a man hanged, or transported to a life of hard labour in Australia. Burns had seen this happen to free thinkers like Thomas Muir,” says the BBC.

A-hah! Had “A Man’s A Man” (or more correctly, “Is there for honest Poverty”) not been as overwhelmingly successful as it was, Burns himself could have been transported to Botany Bay, as fellow Scots Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer and William Skirving were in 1794. Muir escaped in 1796 on an American ship which had been sent to rescue him. He fled to France, still in the midst of its Revolution.

America had only recently won its own independence from Britain. In France Muir worked with the famous Thomas Paine who agitated for American Independence. Paine famously wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man – a guide to the ideas of the Enlightenment. (Muir had been a student of John Millar, Scottish philosopher and historian and author of The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society [1771]).

It is extraordinary to realise with what sacrifice, and courage, and how recently, people fought – and often died – for ideals which now seem so obvious and which we take for granted, and the ferocity with which the establishment opposed those ideals.

It is also salutary to note the patience with which corporations, religious zealots and governments are winding back these obvious rights and freedoms.

And it is important to understand the central role that writers played in gaining those rights and will continue to play in protecting them.

PS: If you would like to see what Andrew O’Hagan’s writing space looks like, you can visit the amazing Writers’ Rooms section at the Guardian. Other authors include Raymond Briggs (The Elephant and the Bad Baby), Caryl Phillips, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Margaret Drabble, John Mortimer, Will Self, Antonia Fraser, David Hare, Michael Frayn, and on and on — the list is much longer than this.

Happy Saturnalia

Dec 24, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Humour, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Happy Saturnalia

 

Absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment 

 

 This time of year is a traditional celebration of the birth of an extraordinary man – a long-haired mystic who revealed the secrets of the universe and forever changed the way we see the world. He is one of the most universally revered historical figures of all time.

Yes, 25 December (in the “Old Style“) is the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton.

His birthday was retrospectively celebrated in antiquity by the Romans in the festival of Saturnus, or the Saturnalia

Or perhaps the birthday of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. Other cultures also celebrated the winter solstice as Yule, or the birthdays of various gods.

The Romans attributed to the god Saturnus the introduction of agriculture and the arts of civilized life. Falling towards the end of December, at the season when the agricultural labours of the year were fully completed, it was celebrated in ancient times by the rustic population as a sort of joyous harvest-home, and in every age was viewed by all classes of the community as a period of absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment.

 

During its continuance no public business could be transacted, the law courts were closed, the schools kept holiday, to commence a war was impious, to punish a malefactor involved pollution. Special indulgences were granted to the slaves of each domestic establishment; they were relieved from all ordinary toils, were permitted to wear the pileus, the badge of freedom, were granted full freedom of speech, partook of a banquet attired in the clothes of their masters, and were waited upon by them at table.

 

All ranks devoted themselves to feasting and mirth, presents were exchanged among friends, cerei or wax tapers being the common offering of the more humble to their superiors, and crowds thronged the streets.

Seems oddly familiar…

It was Newton who formalised the importance of gravity in the motion of the planets and his laws remain largely the basis on which today we are able to compute the trajectories and forces to send spacecraft to explore our solar system. (with a little help from Einstein)

One of these craft, Cassini, has been exploring Saturn and its moons and sending back amazing images. Last year it sent back this extraordinary [mosaic] image:

You will be able to notice this:

Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from over a billion kilometers (and close to a billion miles) away in the icy depths of the outer solar system.

 

This image of Saturn is eerily reminiscent of a monument to Newton that was never built.

 

Étienne-Louis Boullée was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose work greatly influenced contemporary architects and is still influential today… His style was most notably exemplified in his proposal for a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton, which would have taken the form of a sphere 150 m (500 ft) high embedded in a circular base topped with cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles.

So Happy Saturnalia to one and all!

And as our special seasonal gift to you, here are two videos to put a smile on the face of you, your friends and family:

 

Germany vs Greece: The Millennial Match

 

 

Women: Know Your Limits

  

 

Such Is Life

Nov 18, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

Such Is Life

“Unemployed at last!”

 

 We think this is the best Australian novel ever written. Yes, we know there are many contenders and perhaps The Tree of Man comes a close second.

But to us, at least, Such Is Life by “Tom Collins” (Joseph Furphy), published in 1903, is the best literary expression of enduring Australian values and character.

The colour and variety of the characters; Furphy’s obvious affection for the people who sparsely, but so vibrantly, populate the bush; the good-humoured, fatalistic, attitude to the daily struggle; the disrespect for authority (now on the brink of extinction); the sense of the Australian bush which is not so much read as absorbed from the pages; the hilariously laconic humour; and the story-telling genius of the author; all of this would be enough.

But most of all we like Furphy’s own description of the book:

‘temper, democratic;
bias, offensively Australian’.

In fact this is so perfect that we want it for our own motto. Indeed, why not for Australia’s motto?

 

 

The 1956 dustjacket says:

” Such Is Life cannot be described: it has to be read. And when it has been read it will be read again for the pleasure that its human greatness and its subtle craftsmanship give.

 

“First published in 1903, this book is an Australian classic whose stature has grown with the years, whose intricacies and strength have been the subject of endless discussions and literary essays. ‘Tom Collins’ (who was Joseph Furphy) is widely held to be the greatest and most individual of Australian writers – partly, perhaps, because his ideals are those which all true democrats most resolutely cherish.

 

… in stressing its Australian core we must not forget that it is also unique in English literature. The author’s genius soars above accepted rules and forms, creating in rare and beautiful language a work that is all of life as he knew it.

 

“No less great as a man than as a writer, Tom Collins wrote with the complete sincerity of one whose independence of mind and essential honesty made him discard all forms of sham. Wit, shrewd observation and delicious humour are blended in this richly entertaining book to give an illuminating picture of humanity and of Australia.”

What makes this novel so relevant today? In the light of Tony Abbott’s “excellent” advice about WorkChoices’ protections, it’s the first line of Such Is Life:

Unemployed at last!

A-Wishin’ an’ a-Hopin’

Sep 9, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Global Warming, OzPol Values, Values

A-Wishin’ an’ a-Hopin’

Crowning Achievement

 

Climate change negotiations at the APEC conference in Sydney have been an enormous diplomatic breakthrough, acting as a catalyst for future action, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer says.

Enormous! And completely original! Un Tour de Force Diplomatique!

Good work, Bunter! Well done, that boy!

The Sydney Declaration on climate change was signed by the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders on Saturday.

Predictably enough, John Howard referred to these people as the “leaders of 21 economies” – in clear contrast to leaders of “people” – human beings, you know?

Economies — as we have learnt from John over the last, long, 12 years of grey, Calvinistic drudgery — are much more important than people. If the economy is doing well, how people feel is irrelevant – except that they ought to feel pathetically grateful.

This breakthrough “in-principle” agreement which has sent the pulses of world economies racing with its audacity and originality commits the countries to working towards a long-term “aspirational” goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

In principle.

The agreement which has been signed is an agreement – nonbinding – to consider taking some steps towards imagining what a – nonbinding – aspirational goal might be for a particular “economy”.

This is a cardboard box full of empty air.

Without the box.

What is this agreement on an “aspirational” goal? It is a commitment (in principle) to consider hoping that something good will happen.

What is a commitment to working towards hoping – at some unspecified time in the reasonably distant future – that some dream or other will come true?

It is nothing.

And what does it require?

Nothing. No action is called for or called forth.

So in a time when every month of the next ten years is said to be critical in terms of planning and action taken (in fact), Messrs Downer and Howard are pleased with themselves that they have come up with a plan, which everyone could agree on to, in principle, do nothing.

No wonder the Chinese and Americans were happy to sign such an agreement. A vacuum has more substance.

Or to unquote Dusty Springfield:

Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreaming each night of his charms?
That won’t get you into his arms…

But doesn’t “aspirational goals” sound ever so positive? Why, it’s almost pretty enough to fool a nation full of stupid people. Unfortunately John has still to discover that Australians aren’t stupid.

As George Bush once carefully explained, “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Please may we now get on with replacing these people with people who have committed to actually setting targets inside an actual timeframe?

Oh, and by the way, “aspirational goals” for climate change measures was a Bush vision, as the amazing Steven Poole of Unspeak¹ discussed in June:

At the end of May, George W. Bush attempted to pre-empt the G8 on global warming with an alternative vision for reducing carbon emissions. Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on ‘Environmental Quality’, was challenged by a sceptical reporter:

 

Q Now I’m confused. Does that mean there will be targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions and that everybody will be making binding commitments to each other about greenhouse gas reductions – or, at the end of the day, are those just voluntary commitments?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: The commitment at the international level will be to a long-term aspirational goal –

Q Voluntary.

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Well, I want to be careful about the word “voluntary,” because we do these kinds of goals all the time, international agreements. It’s the implementing mechanisms that become binding.

 

One should always be careful about the word ‘voluntary’, in case it gives the right impression. Still, aspirational goal is a lovely coinage. ‘Aspirational’ is a glossy-magazine lifestyle fantasy of fast cars, large houses and single-malt whiskies. And aspirations are always virtuous, even if they are – almost by definition – not actually going to be accomplished. As the poet said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

¹ Unspeak.net is well worth a visit and adding to your list of favourites, not only for Steven’s clear, clever and entertaining writing but also for both his depth of analysis and his sense of fun. And the book is also very well worth reading – even purchasing. Or you can check out this helpful video: 

Clive of Kogarah

Aug 27, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values

Clive of Kogarah

Clive James with Bill Moyers

 

Bill Moyers recently hosted Clive James on his show to talk about his new book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts (not the 80s punk band).

Publishers Weekly  says:

“  From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, Tacitus to Margaret Thatcher, this scintillating compendium of 110 new biographical essays plumbs the responsibilities of artists, intellectuals and political leaders. British [sic] critic James…structures each entry as a brief life sketch followed by quotations that spark an appreciation, a condemnation or a tangent (a piece on filmmaker Terry Gilliam veers into a discussion of torturers’ pleasure in their work). Sometimes, as in his salute to Tony Curtis’s acting or his savage assault on bebop legend John Coltrane’s penchant for “subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder,” James’s purpose is just bravura opinionating. But most articles are linked by a defense of liberal humanism against totalitarianisms of the left and right “and ideologues who champion them.”

Salon calls James “The greatest living critic”.

Clive’s approach in his book seems to be to help us to share his understanding of the value of culture and of humanity in all its variety, in all its forms and at all its levels. His is a passionately humanist, while healthily sceptical, world view (which is probably why we like him so much). And we like that while we don’t agree with him all the time we love that he gives us ideas to think about.

He talks about the way in which the understanding of cultures can come when they are torn apart,

”  Everybody concerned with the whole business of culture is scattered to the winds and…you see how the society fits together. It’s extremely complex and impossible to reproduce through one person’s will.

To us it brings to mind the stump of a severed limb. Sure, you can see the bits of flapping muscle, blood vessels and bone, the shiny sinews and nerves, and you can see how they were all put together. But they don’t work any more.

There are interesting parallels with the blogging culture in the interview.

” The Jewish intellectuals in the Vienna cafes, they learned to write “the article”, what they called the feuilleton, the little leaf, the entertaining thousand-word piece which is the basis of the whole of modern culture that I find fascinating.

And one of the maniacs in the Vienna cafes was Adolf Hitler…

But he is particularly passionate about the culture of liberal democracy.

” There’s something about the creative force of liberal democracy which gives you hope that it can overcome any challenge, including terrorism. I’m sure terrorism can punch very large holes in western civilisation, and probably will.

You’re inheriting civilisation. What you try to do is protect it and improve it, but get rid of the idea that it can all start again because a few men think it can.

And he doesn’t believe in an elitist view of culture (unlike some Australian journalists who hate bloggers)…

” My only originality when I started off as a journalist was I didn’t believe in these elites. I thought that intelligence was enough and if people were intelligent they’d hear what you had to say. I don’t believe that knowledge and understanding and wisdom are the property of a class at all. I believe they’re generally democratic things. That doesn’t mean that everyone will understand what anyone can, you know?

On the other hand, Clive comes to Australia so rarely, and is so busy, that he seems a little out of touch at times. He ascribes to the Leader of the National Party (and therefore Deputy Prime Minister) a statement made by Costello (Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party but not Deputy Prime Minister) and while he believes in the fair go, he is a little behind the times with one of its expressions (emphasis on the “ex”):

” In Australia we have a concept called the “fair go” which is built into the system. It’s built into the Basic Wage and so on.

In any case it is an interview very much worth watching  (if you don’t mind using Flash).

 

Which brings us to disclose that …

ValuesAustralia interviewed Clive James in London 32 years ago in the heat of the Whitlam debacle. We interviewed Clive in 1975 over a slab of Fosters about his “new” book, Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media, which is so out of print that it receives only the most fleeting of references, even on his own website.

Clive, to his great credit, has never lost or varied his Australian accent. We, on the other hand, are of the kind who tend to ‘merge’ into, or ‘immerse’ ourselves in, a new culture, to our somewhat amusement years later. We insist, however, that we have repatriated our accent.