Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall. A wall, Salamanca Square, Hobart. February 2011.

Yet MORE books...

First is Letters from America is a compilation of essays drawn from Alistair Cooke’s weekly 15-minute radio series that ran for 2,869 shows from 24 March 1946, to 20 February 2004. Each ‘arrangement’ was presented by Alistair Cooke to a British audience, each week speaking of a topical issue in the USA, often tying together different strands of observation and anecdote. As such, this collection is a remarkable snapshot of ‘history in the present’.

Cooke was a master at this primarily because he had a magnificent grasp of history. Each essay is remarkable in his ability to contextualise what he sees, drawing upon both a great knowledge of history, and a seemingly endless amount of casual contact with top politicians, authors and artists throughout his life.

Moreover, despite the fact that each chapter was written for radio, they read wonderfully well. The art of constructing such a tightly composed set of thoughts so eloquently sometimes seems lost today, and for this alone the book is worth revisiting.

Secondly, Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon was originally published as a serial – fifteen instalments – in the New York Times Magazine through 2007. The author (in an enlightening afterward) tells us that the working title was Jews with Swords, which captures the swashbuckling tone.

Set (around) AD 950 in the kaganate of Khazaria – present day [deep breath] Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Northern Caucasus, Georgia, the Crimea, and Northeastern Turkey [exhale] – it follows two Jewish ‘gentlemen of the road’ slash bandits slash brigands (one Frankish, one African) who become embroiled in a rebellion and a plot to restore a displaced Khazar prince to the throne.

I won’t go any further than that, but it is a rollicking and breezy read and a nice venture into a genre I’ve not much experience in (nor did Chabon, until he started writing it). If you would like a change of pace, track it down.

Number 3: The Weekend is German author Bernhard Schlink’s latest novel and it tackles familiar themes of guilt, responsibility, contrition, remorse, justice and redemption. With the fulcrum of the plot a recent pardon of a former Red Army Faction terrorist, a group of former friends from the heady days of the 1960s and 70s gather to ‘ease’ his transition back into society.

Although at times the text seems a little ‘stagey’, it does manage to captivatingly explore the concept of what happens to revolutionaries well after the revolution (and the revolutionary spirit) is lost, and an extended meditation on the changing meaning of the nature of dissent, terrorism, of social activism, of idealism and violence in modern, democratic societies. In this sense, I think that Schlink achieves his goal.

Well worth the effort.

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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