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Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
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Frist!
smh
Looks like the parties in the icecream contamination saga have reached a settlement of kinds.
Thanks to those with kind words last week. Daughters’ procedure has helped and she may be able to go home next week.
And 19 mm rain has settled the dust with more forecast next week.
I heard yesterday, so this is unconfirmed hearsay, that with the shutdown of the sugar producing plant in the Ord River area (a plant which was based on membrane technology which apparently did not work very well) there is no sugar cane grown in the Ord River valley at all. And very large chunks of the farmable land there have been taken up by Sandalwood farmers.
So what? You say.
The information came from a farmers group in another area. This is a group who are current attempting to implement a 150 million dollar, farmer owned, 95 million litre per year ethanol plant, in their area. This is a plant that will provide a stable supply of ethanol for the automotive fuel sector along with a massive chunk of green (bagasse biomas) electricity to the state electricity grid.
There are those who have gone to great lengths to push to false idea that cane ethanol is bad for the world because in their mind it displaces “essential” food production.
And so here is the outcome. Land that should be put to use growing a huge carbon absorber like sugar cane which produces ethanol to displace our consumption of oil based petrol, is now producing near zero carbon absorbing plant for essential oils production for the cosmetic industry.
Cosmetics defeats environment!! Great outcome Australia. It seems that this country has succeeded in replacing one bunch of idiot politicians with another.
What have I missed as I’ve become old?
I have become concerned at the disappearance of Charles Dickens from the English reading lists in schools curricula. When I went to school in the 50s a Dickens novel was as much part of the reading list as a Shakespeare play. And like Shakespeare, it could by any one and was frequently varied.
By the time I eventually did a degree (post-Gough) in the late 70s, Dickens was still one of the three pillars of English (with Shakespeare and Chaucer), although study was pretty well confined to his great period from the 1850s.
Nowadays even at a good bookstore Dickens is harder to find. The odd publisher cashing in on the lack of copyright is just about it. I once went to a very large 2nd-hand bookshop in Melbourne with no better luck. Isn’t he read or in demand any more?
So much great literature has been published since Dickens’s day, especially in America, which has dominated from the 20th century, that perhaps there is a crowding out effect. But I think it is a pity if he is fading from our view.
Even in his heyday, Dickens was challenged. Thackeray, the Brontes and George Eliot, Trollope, too, for that matter, seemed to deal more fully with the complexities of human behaviour and character development. Dickens did respond, however, and produced his greatest works.
Leavis did not seem to rate him. His work is excessively wordy. He editorialises far too much, and even his greatest works pour it on very thick in melodrama. One tutor I had suggested that Dickens had been able to make melodrama into an art form. And there is too much sentimentality. If we regard the novel as a continuing development, it could be argued that Dickens contributed very little.
And yet his humanity stands out to me. He shows a lot of faith in human goodness in the most trying circumstances. And he can see through villainy and cynicism. It is my belief that if more people were familiar with “Hard Times”, we’d have hardly allowed this neo-liberal, or economic rationalism type of thinking, to dominate our political landscape as it has over the last 25 years or so. If nothing else, he provides a compelling picture of the forces at work in the 18th and 19th century. Dickens and George Eliot arguably should be on the reading lists for economic historians studying the industrial revolution.
His humor, of course, dominates everything. Little wonder that actors love to portray Dickens characters. In some ways he seems to portray people as we see them on the stage, or as we mostly know them superficially. Yet his narrative does not suffer through these idiosyncracies.
Technology and communications have changed so much that this might have been against Dickens. Perhaps people today are less patient with their reading.
I still think he is a major landmark in our literature. But I fear I am now very much a minority.
Good news about the rain.
Well, (apparently) one of the major issues of the week was Michelle’s dress:
Dress article
Errr, yep.
Obviously the guilt or innocence of the accused will be decided by a jury in the case of the Victorian doctor accused of raping a patient:
http://news.theage.com.au/national/vic-doctor-raped-suicidal-patient-court-20081106-5j9z.html
The alleged victim has apparently been seen many many times at a particular Victorian hospital, so it makes one wonder whether during any of those many many visits she has ever been told about the appropriate treatment for the mental illness she has been diagnosed with (the case also raises a ton of other issues).
In an alternative universe, if Hillary Clinton had managed to get herself elected, there’s no way that Bill’s clothing would get as many news articles as Michelle Obama’s dress is getting, that’s for sure.
TimT, exactly. A similar point arose when some schmuck started comparing Quentin Bryce’s clothes unfavourably with those of former GG Michael Jeffery’s (spelling?) wife, and needed to have it spelled out to him that if one were going to compare the garb of Mrs Jeffery with anyone else’s, it would more properly be that of Quentin Bryce’s husband Michael.
I though Michelle Obama looked fabulous, BTW (it’s not about the dress qua dress, it’s about how the person looks, as any student of Style 101 could tell you in Week 1) and that the family had chosen its collective clothes with style and care.
Yes, I loved the red and black dress too. Also the gorgeous turquoise dress with dolman sleeves that she wore at the democratic convention. She dresses very well indeed, much better than any presidential spouse I can think of (the obvious excepted). I don’t mind the coverage for that reason. It’s not exactly ‘news’ but then neither is 87% of what makes the online home page of The Age.
This is funny Tele scandal generator
Don Wigan, re: Dickens, Bleak House is on the VCE Literature list at the moment. It was added this year. I imagine largely because of the rapturous reception accorded to the BBC adaptation of a few years ago. I’ve had a lot of undergrads tell me how much they liked that show.
In general, I don’t think Dickens is specially neglected – there are other writers who are equally worthy of study although they have different virtues. It is certainly becoming harder to get people to read long / complex novels though. (But on the other hand among long novels, Dickens’s are probably better constructed for maintaining the reader’s attention.)
I agree with you that the range of books on offer in most bookshops is truly pathetic.
Don re:
Shorter Obama: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
I know I would be in trouble as I didn’t even notice the Michelle Obama dress on election night. Now that it has been drawn to my attention I must say it is quite fetching. It always amazes me, though, that it is much more likely that other women seem to focus on these matters than the men.
Further, I wonder if she had a chance before, the big occasion, to ask her hubby if her bum, “looks all right in this dress, dear”?
Thanks for that, Laura. I’m glad that Bleak House has made a comeback. As you say probably helped by the fabulous TV production. That has been my favourite Dickens, albeit Hard Times runs it close.
You may well be right, too. His entertainment and theatrical value may well save him from vanishing.
LOL, David. Sums up things nicely. Actually Tale of Two Cities is also very good.
Hi, Don.
Great Expectations is on School Certificate (I think) syllabus this year. A friend of mine is having a devil of a time getting her boy to read it. He prefers fantasy novels. (Tolkien has a lot to be blamed for.)
Before A&R burent down a year or so ago in Armidale, they used to have all of Dickens’ novels in Wordswarth classics. I haven’t been the the new A&R so I don’t know if they are continuing the practice. There’s only a small collection of classics per se in Dymocks here, and in the independent bookshop, the classics are interweeaved with other literature. (You can’t get a printed Penguin catalogue any more btw.)
I don’t knbow if the absence of Dickens in the bookshops actually means much, given the enormous amount of purchasing being done on-line these days.
In any case, some of Dickens is best come to late. I never really appreciated Pickwick Papers till my 40s, (though I first read it about 12 years old). I just didn’t get it until I was a mature man. And that’s perhaps a notable point. There was no lowest common denominator for these great writers, no belief their readers coundn’t cope with content demanding thought and attention. (And, if I read the evidence rightly, I think literacy was becoming widespread in Dickens’ time and before.)
Anyway, that’s my rave.
Actually think Darlenes comments re Michelle dress astute. Real Hannah Arendt-ish explosion of colour.
RE: Dickens … he’s a master of local English dialects (like Chaucer) … maybe it’s seen as an anachronism nowadays. Is Austen on the reading list?
However, as an intellectual exercise, just why is it that the Canon so frozen in the past? There are plenty of 20th century authors that could (should) be included and only so many books you can teach in a few years. Something’s got to give. I would have to say only Shakespeare could be declared immune to the winds of change.
Yes and modern bookshops are rubbish. Even the small ones … they are often full of self-help crapola and girly novels with purple floral covers. God, even Borders in the city, which was the last big chainstore to stock a decent history section (once you got past the brightly jacketed glare of ‘Hitlers War Machine’ and the like) still thought that ‘Plato’ and ‘Dante’ were *history* writers (!!!). Nowadays all my books except for casual light reading come off Amazon. It’s not like it’s easy to find a Blackwell’s Companion in bricks-and-mortar store!
Sense & Sensibility is a VCE staple in Victoria, and I understand the Emma / Clueless pairing is fairly widely studied as well.
I wouldn’t agree that ‘the Canon is frozen in the past’, if by canon you mean the books on school curricula. But part of the essence of a canon, any canon, is that what it includes has passed some sort of test of time.
I thought of a reason why Don didn’t find much Dickens in a second-hand bookshop: the books are pretty easy & cheap to buy new, so there’s probably not much point investing shelf space in them.
When A&R roll out their instore print on demand service lots of these issues will be solved, and we’ll also find out what books people want to buy when they’re not being prompted by shop displays.
Thanks for those comments. Laura’s probably right. Cheap new prints probably squeeze out 2nd hand demand.
Paul and Laura both have points. Quality will stand the test of time, and some understanding will only come from maturity or life experience.
Maybe we should also use Dickens as we used to use Shakespeare: for quotable quotes.
David had a good one for Barack Obama. In the same novel I was thinking maybe Dubya could be imagined saying on 20th January:
“It is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done before.”
I never read Dickens in school, and never felt particularly inclined to give him a go. But the tv series of Bleak House changed all that! So I’m part of that category.
Firstly, “passed some test of time” inherently freezes it in the past. And the canon != books on the curricula. The curriculum can only contain so much of the canon. And that’s my point. By *definition* the canon changes over time – as time passes, we can see that certain books should be made part of the canon, and others fall off it because they cease to be widely read.
Would you argue that, just to pick an example, Heller’s Catch-22 is not part of the Canon of English Literature? If not why not? It is a powerful exploration of the “logic” of 20th century warfare and capitalist exploitation of it, written in an interesting ‘non-linear’ form that presages ideas from later in the 20th century. The main premise has entered everyday idiom – people use the term nowadays without even knowing where it comes from! From every perspective, despite it being written in my lifetime and maybe yours, it is now part of canon of English literature.
But if the canon is to grow and expand, and be taught in a limited sphere, new titles have to push old titles off the school list every now and then. Once upon a time the canon – a priori – didn’t even contain novels at all!
You know, circle of life and all that, in order for things to live, things have to die.
In case anyone’s interested, Obama’s first press conference as President-elect:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GxGPPK3e4bc
H/T Phil.
I would have said Cath-22 was part of the American canon.
I loved Dickens when Iwas a kid. In particular, I remember reading ‘Pickwick Papers’ when I was 12 or 13. I just loved its eccentricity and humour. Maybe I was just weird kid, but he was one of my favourite writers. Sometimes I wonder about the point of novels that are directed specifically toward ‘young people’. I know there’s some great writers in that category, particularly Sonya Hartnett. But, I think a good book is a good book and a literate kid should be able to read a very wide range of material.
Chaucer with a slight modification was somewhat prophetic on the subject of corporate gluttony:
#17 You mean authors like Robert G Barrett?
Langmack … ahh, no.
Laura, you’ve blown me away!
I was made to read Great Expectations in high school literature in the mid 70s, and it seemed so stale and staid compared to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which was also on the curriculum. Ten years later I tried GE again and loved it, and have read most of his novels now. They’re mostly still available in the Wordsworth Classics. It’s the richness and fluency of Dickens’ language and the diversity of his characters that I still love. Several posters mentioned TV adaptations, which maybe explains why they’re perhaps not so widely read; enjoyed nonetheless. What about Thomas Hardy? Basically ignored now, even by TV. I guess there are just so many books a person can read in a lifetime.
In over two decades of English teaching, the books I “lost” most frequently were “Slaughterhouse Five” & the Neville Coghill’s translation of “The Canterbury Tales” – in both cases, at least one a year. Kafka (Eng & German) and Camus rarely lasted a year. Good SciFi copped a hiding, especially Philip Dick and Thomas Disch (Camp Concentration), Azimov, of course & “Dune” (but I still have my original copies of bloody awful sequels ….and few of my SciFi zines – Analog, Fantasy & SciFi etc) …. I have only a box of 70s ones left (but they’re “classics”).
The in-demand book of plays was “Elizabethan & Jacobean Drama”, starring such gems as “The Duchess of Malfi” and “Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (very popular with footie playing blokes-in-the-making, as was Chaucer).
Suetonius “The Twelve Cæsars” topped the non-literary list (I was going to write “Non-fiction”, but it really belongs in the Salacious Gossip genre – of which it is undoubtedly the Daddy) Yeah and they watched “I Claudius” & “Gladiator”, too!
On a lighter note – I couldn’t keep up with Travis McGee an the 87th Precinct series … “First get em hooked on reading … anything” was my motto. Violence, sex and bodily functions … nothing like them for hooking the toughs, hence Chaucer’s popularity. None of them cost more than a few cents at markets & OpShops.
PS Re Dickens etc: Whatever happened to Lorna Doone, Scott (esp Ivanhoe), Thackeray, Anthony Trollope ..?
I read through Dickens during QLD’s interminable pre-TV “SuperWet” Christmas Holidays of the 1950s, along with Dumas, Scott & everything else I could get my hands on (the bitumen hardly reached city limits; after that, every creek flooded; no one travelled by road in the Wet); but “The Last Days of Pompeii” (the B— grade movie was infinitely better) and “Hereward the Wake” beat me.
The serialisation of Dickens’ (& other Eng authors’) novels, often over 1-2 years means they are, of necessity, overly repetitive for more recent “curl up with a good book” readers, and really do need good editing for eras when we no longer gather in the parlour to hear Mama’s nightly chapter.
Great post DeeCee.
Yes, love Hardy. Was brought up on Dickens, Shakespeare, Scott, Dumas and those 18 classics for chgildren the bowdlerisede Gulliver’s travels and Robinson Crusoe. Also Captain Marryat’s books, Swiss Family Robinson, J. M. Ballyntine, R. L. Stevenson’s treasure Island and Kidnapped. I think in my protected Catholic childhood, the first remotely non-canonical book I read was the Jeeves Omnibus. I enjoyed it so much, busting myself laughing, that my evil stepmother decreed reading to be a vice and actively discouraged books in the house. (She was an illiterate cretin.)
I wonder if someone somewhere back taught people to get their children to read Kidnapped and Gulliver’s Travels. I remember those books basically being given to me as chores, like mowing the lawn.
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Of course the were way more enjoyable than mowing the lawn.
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Not as good as reading The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde tho’. Hilarious.
The American Canon: The Great Gatsby, Libra. Top of my list. And Emily Dickinson.
“The American Canon: The Great Gatsby, Libra.”
???
Hmm, I see the problem, you’re still only in the candy store in the lobby, A. If you go out the door and make a left, you’ll see the bank of elevators. Take one up about a hundred floors, to the Observation Deck.
There’s quite a view, actually.
DeeCee
Thackeray, “The Book of Snobs” is very good too
Way before his time, and timeless.
Adrien, if i recall rightly, a couple of weeks back you said you wqere interested in the career of Black Caesar. I mentioned a book about Washington and his slaves. Have found the referenc.
Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God. George Washington, his Slaves and the Creation of America.
Its on Amazon, various prices.
JPZ – Thanks for that I always love being patronized. Delillo and Scott Fitzgerald are class. Deal with it.
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Paul – Thanks. I’ve got it.
Will this “George Bush did/didn’t know what the G-20 was” and Rudd is somehow guilty/not guity of spilling the beans, ever end?
The press and opposition just cannot get enough of it for reasons I cannot understand. It has to be the lamest story about a lame duck, that just will not go away I have heard this year.
joe2,
I don’t want to prolong your pain, BUT how can the claim that George Bush said “What’s the G20?” be simultaneously “a leak” and “untrue”? Just wondering.