We went on a guided tour of Castlecrag over two and a half hours. Recommended to those with an interest in social history.
The walk was informative and interesting. It focussed on Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, and also those whom they influenced in the continued development of Castle Crag, as it was spelt in those days. We walked there once on a rainy day and saw some of the streetscapes and houses, thanks to the web site of the Walter Burley Griffith Society. http://www.griffinsociety.org/index.html
That gave us a familiarity, but this walk was more detailed. It filled in many details and emphasized the community-building parts of the plan. We had the choice of an arduous clamor down to the water and back or a more gentile walk, which we choose. It was the right choice for my knees though I did (barely) mange to ascend and descend Edinburgh Rock. It was a fine and crisp autumnal day and the guide was knowledgeable and informative.
The common areas reminded me a little of the playgrounds and common areas in the Daceyville. Though Daceyville was earlier and a creation of official state planning which began in 1912 and was converted into a project for returned soldiers after The Great War. It was the product of the scourge of creative types who peopled Castle Crag, it seems from the repeated and caustic way they are mentioned, bureaucrats. It did not subordinate buildings to the salt bush plain.
In contrast to Castle Crag, Daceyville was working class. The houses are conventional both within and without. But rather than rows of terrace houses they were spaced around rings with inner play grounds and parks. It was for dinky-die Australians who still felt themselves to be British. Indeed the overall look of Daceyville is English.
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In contrast, we we were reminded on our walk, Castle Crag, planned and partly built by two ex-patriot Americans attracted Chinese and European investors and residents. The Chinese came from Melbourne, while the Europeans fled Naziism. Its early residents, which were too few to make the project financially viable, were often self-styled Bohemians: artists, poets, and other dreamers, who also could never pay top pound for the Griffin-Mahony creations.
I heard it said that aboriginals were leaving on the point at Castle Crag when Griffin and Mahony came but there is nothing about that in the material.
Both Daceyville and Castle Crag seem to follow a line from the Garden City movement in England which was in turn was informed by William Morris’s News from Nowhere. For Griffith and Mahoney that line ran through Frank Lloyd Wright. For Daceyville it was directly inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Letchworth, the first of the Garden Cities in England just outside London. When Howard failed to make a living in Lincoln Nebraska, Howard returned to England and in time he turned to town planning.
Aside, we have seen many references to the fact that in latter in life, after Walter had died, Mahony went back over some of the drawings done in his name and blacked it out. She never explained, so the slather (what is a slather?) is open. The feminists declare that she was reclaiming her own work that the dastardly Griffin had appropriated. The grey Marxists claim she was reclaiming her own work that the evils of capitalism had forced her to disown, and so on. The ideologues always find what they want to find. As predictable as a late bus.
How about this: she was mad at him for dying and leaving her alone. Everything we know, everything the above interpreters reluctantly admit, is that the two were nearly one in everything they did, though not given to spouting off about it. Then he went and died and left her alone, half. No wonder she was angry, which psychology bores will tell us is part of grief. No ideological mileage in that but maybe some truth, something that seldom interests either ideologues or journalists.
Author: Michael W Jackson
A Year of Junk Mail
I groused about the junk mail filling up the letter box at Ack-comedy so much that I decided to do something about it. I put one sticker on the mail box banning junk mail and when that seemed to do no good, I added a second larger one that appealed to the Green conscience.
The second sticker did not seem to have any effect either, though there is one honourable exception mentioned at the end.
In the absence of riding shot gun on the letter box, I decided to compile a year’s worth of junk mail from ANZAC day 2012 to ANZAC day 2013. Bear in mind that the building alone has 42 letter boxes so everything I received is a fraction of the total in this building let alone the surrounding streets. Since we live around the corner I dealt with a repeat of the same items at home where they went directly from the letter box to the council recycling bin, usually without going in the front door.
But to return to the description, here is what I found. The pile measures 10 centimeters in height.
It contained 241 separate pieces and weighed 1.935 kilograms. A propos of the context, multiply that number of 241 by 42 and conclude that 10,122 items of junk mail were delivered to 1 Linthorpe Street or 84 kilograms of dead weight.
The items fell into a few categories. Real estate; restaurants, food, and drink; government and politics; and miscellaneous. To review each in turn, real estate contributed 52 pieces of which I could reuse 3 in my personal recycling effort, that is, print on the blank back side. They varied from handsome cards to 256-colour brochures and flyers. I responded to none of them. The effort and cost of design, printing, and distribution was wasted in its entirety as is the effort of recipients in disposing of it, the council in paying for it to be collected and trucked to a recycling centre….
The restaurants ran to 70 items. Many were from pizza places usually emphasizing delivery. None came from the restaurants we frequent on King Street, I am happy to say. I am unhappy to say that 24 pieces, more than a third of restaurant items and a tenth of the total of all items came from a single noodle bar on King Street. With dogged persistence these 24 items were each very plain and all identical. No colour, no flair, but repetition and more repetition. I have sworn never to eat there and to tell others not to do so either. It seems to be my only form of reciprocity. Yes, I thought about going it and asking to be excluded but apart from cementing my reputation as a nutter, I could not imagine that accomplishing anything.
I thought about inserting some photographs of offending items but decided against it as that would only give them more exposure.
Another stack was a newsprint item call the Inner City Weekender. Never having opened one, I have no idea of its contents, but I suspect much advertising for real estate and restaurants.
Then there is the government and politics pile, numbering 33. This pile included many notices about works on the roads and nearby rail line. Others were notices from the City Sydney Council about waste removal and recycling. Then there were others that were, let us say, community building notices, inevitably featuring local councilors or the Mayor. I will accept these as necessary. I was able to recycle 6 of the items for printing.
During this period there was one local election for the City of Sydney. A dozen or so items were letter drops by office-seekers, known as rent-seekers in economics.
Finally, we come to miscellaneous of 85 items. Most of these came from small businesses offering services from carpentry, to foot reflexology, house cleaning, dog walking, and the like. These are all very small businesses.
There was also a drop from a retirement home in distant Lane Cove, and however distant Lane Cove is in kilometers, in ambience it is an alien world compared to Newtown. There was also a drop from one giant corporation, Telecom. Yes, I know that in order to distance itself from its own incompetent past it changed its name to Telstra, to usher in a new era of incompetence. But under the make-up it is Telecom unalloyed.
A quick look at Google is depressing. There are online ads, several, to recruit junk mail walkers all over Sydney. And an even more depressing is a news item that claimed junk mail did work. I suppose one hit in a thousand pays for it.
Technical matter for nerds.
The Ack-comedy is the private office I use in a nearby apartment building.
Junk mail is material in the letter box that is not addressed by name. See the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_mail
I excluded post addressed to previous occupants, which I dutifully mark Unknown at this Address and Return to Sender and drop in the slot at the Newtown Post Office. [I have printed Avery labels to affix to such returned mail.] I also excluded mail addressed to me, though there is little of that these days.
I have excluded from this account the largest single item. The Inner West Courier which is dropped on the mail boxes porch, a pile of 30 or so wrapped in plastic. It remains there four or five days until the building attendant dumps them in the trash. Maybe I should borrow one such pile for a weigh in and count. Since it is never in my letter box I left it out for the moment.
Nor did I emphasize the mess these unwanted items lead to on the porch. Though there is a disposal basket left there for such detritus some dwellers cannot seem to hit it, so many items are on the floor, left there for others to pick up. Maybe I should photograph that, too.
One honourable exception: The Mitre 10 drops are occasionally to be seen hanging out of other boxes but not from mine after the second sticker. Clearly the dropper takes note of the signs and excludes some. Thank you Mitre 10. There may be others who also exercised a like discretion but I did not detect them. The Mitre 10 examples shows that the others could do so, as well. Thus they act knowingly and culpably.
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (2009)
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (2009)
Recommended for adults.
A delightful fairy tale for grown-ups from a master of the short story. This, however, is a novel in length and conception, but it is also a book of short stories. That distinctive combination is part of its charm, and charming it most certainly is. The princess is in the tower amid a forest of eucalypts and her suitors must prove themselves worthy of her. Sound familiar?
Mr. Holland’s wife died in childbirth and he the baby girl with an insurance payout retired to the hinterland where he planted every known and some unknown eucalypts without end. There was no grand plan and yet a pattern emerged. See above. Then along came, first, the professor, and, then, the sign maker and – in time – there came a revelation.
Wonderful. It deserves the superlatives applied to it.
I have been asked the meaning of ‘adults’ in my recommendation. That is a question on notice.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).
Recommended for adults.
Eleven years after this child prodigy published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) at the tender age of twenty-one, she produced this novella. It is a meditation on love, not on what it is, but on what it does to people, even the most unlikely ones.
In a tiny mill town deep in the pines of northern Georgia Miss Amelia comes to love the drifter Lymon, but he in turn falls under the spell of the no-good Marvin Macy. These loves are not of the flesh, I add. But slowly, Amelia discovers that she likes doing things for Lymon, and the more she does, the more he takes it as his due with nary a word of thanks. This she does not mind.
Then Marvin reappears and slowly Lymon comes to admire and imitate Marvin. Along the way McCullers offers a glimpse of the people and practices of that isolated community. Lymon cannot bear to be parted from Marvin, and so the despicable Marvin moves in with Lymon and Miss Amelia. In time she is displaced from her own home to allow Lymon to serve Marvin.
I read a lot of Carson McCullers’s novels in high school and college, and having re-read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe I am reminded why. The judgements are sharp, Marvin is a creep, but even so McCullers extends a compassionate gaze on him, too: He is the way God made him, part of this world. Neither more nor less than anyone else.
That Lymon is a dwarf, Miss Amelia acts more like a man than many men, that Marvin’s brother is ineffectual, adds color to the account but these are only the surfaces beneath which McCullers peers, perceptive, unflinching, calm, and determined. No these oddities are what attracted a Hollywood film maker to mangle it.
My mission is clear. It is time to read anew The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and see how Sam and Mickey have aged since last I had their company.
On Kingdom Mountain
Quite a trip once again. Set in northern Vermont in 1930, On Kingdom Mountain is the story of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. Recommended for adults.
A bookwoman, bird carver, and the last remaining resident Kingdom Mountain on the Vermont-Quebec border, which mountain is now threatened by a new highway. Miss Jane encounters a mysterious stunt pilot and weather-maker when his biplane crashes on a frozen lake. He brings with him a riddle containing clues to the whereabouts of stolen gold that may have been hidden on Kingdom Mountain. As she and the courteous aviator search for the treasure, Miss Jane is confronted by the most important decisions of her life. Lost gold, rainmaking, a combine harvester on the loose, much bird carving, char not trout, many French-Canadians about, a fly-in and out, wing walking, not to forget the sex, and more. Did I mention buried treasure? Miss Jane approves of firearms, and how.
Kon Tiki
On a fine Sunday afternoon with blue sky and green grass aplenty we sat in a dark room and watched “Kon Tiki (2012). Recommended for adults.
Thor Heyedal’s greatest contribution is that he believed those primitive people had the wit and willingness for such a colossal undertaking. I said ‘primitive people’ to mimic that great scourge of reason, Erich von Däniken who always says in response to his own rhetorical question: “How could these primitive people do it?” by saying the aliens did it. Heyedal is a wonderful antidote to that drivel. Moreover, they did not just go with the flow but also charted their travels with the stars.
The film has something for everyone. Some intellectual weight, a cast of handsome Aryans, some light relief, and plenty of adventure and action. Though some viewers may conclude that it all came down to Heyerdal’s will power and conviction and not to the evidence he had before he started and that would be a shame. He did have evidence, and faith does not move ocean currents.
No doubt the moronic fault-finders will find that which they seek and miss the point.
Northern Borders
Howard Frank Mosher, Northern Borders (1995). Recommended for adults.
A coming of age story set in the remote Kingdom County Vermont in the 1940s and 1950s. When his mother dies six-year old Austin Kittredge is sent to live with his grandparents in township of Lost Nation.
There he works on the farm, which produces just about enough food to sustain life, and helps with apple jam and the one-man saw mill to earn cash money. The work starts before dawn most days and involves strenuous physical labor in shifting planks, milking cows, haying the stock, fighting off the predators (some animal, others human). As Austin grows he deals with a school teacher in the one-room school house who is in equal parts a thug and an ignoramus. He develops a reputation as a ‘famous reader’ which is a term of derision most of the time. The repeated beauties of nature are detailed but so is the cruelty and indifference of nature detailed.
More importantly, he survives the Forty Year War between his grandparents, and they each individually slowly reveal to him their inner most secrets. Hers is Egypt and his is Labrador. Along the way there are sled rides, a fight at a traveling carnival, the assault of a snow owl, the fall of much snow to be waded through hip deep, a Solomon-like judgement, and a memorable performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Then the Grandmother dies and Austin and his grandfather go to Labrador, where the latter, has always been. It is an arduous trip but the arrival is well worth it.
Over ten years Austin passes almost imperceptibly from boy to adolescent and seems well set to be adult.
Because the central character is a young boy at the start, no doubt many libraries will shelve it as Young Adult. It can be that, but it is also much more. Although Whiskey Jack’s reading matter might belie that conclusion. (Read the book to get the point.)
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
William Styron (1925-2006) published the novel Lie Down in Darkness (1951) when he was twenty-six, a boy. Recommended for adults.
How could a boy have had all those voices in his mind: Milton, the alcoholic lawyer; Helen, the angry, self-martyred wife; the Elektra-like daughter, Peyton; Carey, the childish churchman; and all the others. It was hailed as a masterpiece when it appeared but it has not weathered so well in the eyes of some reviewers. On that more later.
First for the uninitiated it is a southern novel, what has been called, Southern Gothic (for a definition see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic).
Styron did not write another novel of this ilk, though he wrote others that are better known: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979). I have already commented on his The Long March (1952). By the way, a reader would never connect the spare prose of that book with the languid and at times moving descriptions of people, places, and gestures in Lie Down in Darkness. The two books seem to come from two different hands.
Recent retrospective reviews that I have read seem to be driven by the need of the reviewer to demonstrate superiority, moral, technical, literary, to Styron and his novel. Thus they comment on the condescending references to blacks, the drumbeat of negation that runs through the story, the unbelievable medical interludes, the inconsistent references to psychoanalysis, the stream of consciousness chapter is labeled imitative of William Faulkner (who thought highly of this book), the Sunday school theology, and even the geography of the story. To read such reviews one might wonder why bother.
Here’s why.
When the needs of the reviewer takes priority over the book reviewed much is taken out of context and rendered disproportionate. The book is no dirge. There are arresting passages of great beauty, as when Helen describes her love of Maudie, the oldest daughter with brain damage and polio; as when the juggler appears in the rain; as when the train rocks through the woodlands of northern Virginia; as when Milton swears off drink (again, and again, and again); and most of all in that stream of consciousness chapter inside Peyton’s broken soul. It is certainly not imitative, transcendent rather.
There are novels of that time and place that do more justice to blacks, agreed, here I think of many examples in Faulkner, but they are few, too few and too singular to be a standard against which to judge this book. Nor does one read a novel to learn of medicine, psychoanalysis, theology, or geography. Let the poet have license.
Of course, there is no explanation of why Peyton was so fated. She just was. That is the premise of the story. The parents, Milton and Helen, blame each other, as mature adults do. But given that she is what she is, then the rest unfolds.
I first read this novel when I was about twenty, not much younger than Styron was when he started writing it, nd that makes it all the more remarkable that he had all those voices in his mind, though he could not always control them each, nor orchestrate them just so. For all of that, it remains a masterpiece.
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How to read half a book.
Some books are too complicated for a reader’s good. Here’s what I do about it.
Many of the krimmies I read have two parallel story lines: the police procedural and the villains getting up to villainy, often in every-other chapter. Toward the end these parallel lines meet. The technique is common but it takes an uncommon writer to do it well. To make both the plodding police and the risk-taking villains believable and interesting.
For the most part, the technique is connect-the-dots because it spins our the story, makes the book bigger (so the punter feels like it is more for the money, etc). A successful writer’s second book is never shorter than the first one, that must be a rule in publishing, and so on to the third in a mindless progression. But the results is unbalanced, not in page count, but in interest.
I am reading one such example now: Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Absent One (2012).
The police procedural part is well done, the characters interesting, the office politics credible, the dogged persistence refreshing in a world of 30-second attention spans, the speculative leaps satisfying if sometimes ill-judged, the varying interpretations that evidence supports intriguing, and so on. That is the half I am reading.
But every second chapter concerns the villains, and they are such cardboard characters that as they enter the pages a hiss rises from book. The author’s distant contempt for anyone with money and they are always the villains in these books is blinding. Everyone who drives a BMW or owns a house is presented as an unindicted war criminal who grew up pulling the arms off the children of the toiling working class. So I express right through those chapters by turning the pages. These villain-chapters fatten up the book but they only parade the author’s prejudices, no doubt in the effort to tap into the like prejudices of readers. Oh hum.
Ergo I can recommend half of The Absent One, but not the whole.
Best and Brightest 2013
The Best and Brightest Showcase of IVth Honours Research in the Department of Government and International Relations will be on 22 May from 6 p.m. at Parliament House on Macquarie Street in the theatrette.