... from my phallocentric perspective just about every bad thing in history was caused by men who could not work out the right relationship between themselves and their penises...more from Lee Seigel at the New York Observer here

So I’ve got my iPad. This remarkable piece of equipment which I’m not really terribly sure what to do with - I mean it is unquestionably beautiful, mysteriously functional, with an exquisite resizing screen and thousands of apps - but in all honesty I can’t see what I might do on the thing that I don’t already do on my laptop.Except, of course, read books.The problem being that in Australia you can’t get any. You log into iBooks and there are no books for sale. Apple is yet to sign an agreement with Australian publishers which will allow you to access them. Apparently no framework has been developed which protects the rights of authors and publishers. It’s not just Australia; Apple is concentrating on the American market and has yet to finalise agreements with the EU or the UK; we’re a long way down the list. Well, that’s the story according to the Australian Publishers’ Association.You can buy electronic format books online, of course. There are several different stores, Kindle, Stanza, Borders, for example, all of which work on the iPad. But not iBooks, the Apple Application for which most people buy the thing in the first place.The strange thing about this is how – I’m struggling for a word here, trying to avoid the one that springs to mind, but no, here it is – how unbelievably stupid this is.We’ve already seen the problems the music industry had with this issue. We’ve watched the issue re-hashed for television and film (the purblind refusal by our television stations to acknowledge that we have instant access to American television shows here through bittorrent. The belief we should politely wait until our betters give them to us, sometimes years later). We’ve had at least ten years warning that we needed to sort this out. I myself sat in workshops and panel sessions at booksellers’ conferences seven years ago discussing the imminent arrival of the e-book. Now it’s here and we still don’t have the mechanism to provide instant cheap copies of electronic books to readers who want to buy them. Except we know exactly what happens when that capacity is absent, don’t we?Customers will not wait around for corporations to get their act together. They will access the content for themselves in other ways, most often for free, and with no concession to international borders. And once they have started thinking that they can get content for free it will be hard to get them back to the idea of paying.A good friend also has an iPad. He showed me his library, all stacked neatly on iBooks’s virtual shelves. It already contains literally thousands of books, only some of which he paid for.‘I would gladly have bought them,’ he said. ‘I love books.’ (He does, he has shelves and shelves of them at home, I’ve seen them.) ‘But if I’m not allowed to buy them I’m going to get them elsewhere.’He’s not alone. Apple hopes to sell 100 million devices across the world by Christmas. Some of those customers might even want to read my books. Some of them might even be prepared to pay for them. Why can’t they get them?I don’t mean to be facetious. I can see that there are huge problems associated with this. Not just for writers, booksellers and publishers – there’s an interesting take on the debate as it relates to newspapers and paywalls here from David Mitchell at the Guardian (which winningly begins by opining that Rupert Murdoch is ‘a monstrous arsehole who wants to ruin everything for everyone’ and goes on to consider the pros of what he's attempting with the Times) – but the longer those who hold the rights to content delay delivering it at a reasonable price, the more customers we’re all going to lose. The real and present problem is that the technology is already freely available. If we don’t use it, others will, and they won’t pay us for it.

‘… it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.’Thus begins chapter 8 of Susan Sontag’s work Regarding the Pain of Others, a polemic on viewing the suffering of others via art or photographs.I’ve been struggling with its argument ever since reading it. I mentioned it in conversation with my friend Michael Berry when he said that he was reading a history of the Rape of Nanking and he suggested that perhaps such a belief came about in people who had visited or lived in war zones in the way Sontag had. ‘I think it changes people irrevocably,’ he said.I am always surprised by human wickedness. As a student of history, as a reader, I cannot help but be aware of what has happened in both the distant and the immediate past. Yet to encounter descriptions of it never ceases to shock me to the core. Does this mean I have yet to reach moral or psychological adulthood? Do I have to witness it myself, in the flesh, for it no longer to affect me thus?Susie Lindfield writes in the magazine Guernica of the problems associated with the present international belief in the power of Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals. She mentions Jean Améry:‘writer, résistant, Jew—who was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and survived (or, as he insisted, did not really survive) Auschwitz and other camps. Améry’s relative anonymity is a shame, for he wrote some of the most original, incisive, and discomfiting essays on torture and genocide ever penned—essays that are, sad to say, still strikingly relevant, and that challenge current ideas about what reconstruction after genocide might look like. Despite the restrained irony of Améry’s voice, his writings accumulate into an accusatory howl.’Lindfield goes on to talk about Rwanda and what is being asked of the people who survived the genocide there. I invite you to read her essay here. I challenge you not to be deeply wounded by what you read.I think Sontag is wrong. It is our capacity to be surprised and disillusioned (again and again) which might, just, save us.Lindfield refers to a series of photographs which are on display here under the title Intended Consequences. It might be that the photographs would be interesting without reading the article first. I would recommend looking at them afterwards.

The June 10 issue of the NYRB has an article by William Pfaff reviewing Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to the War in Vietnam by Gordon M. Goldstein. Bundy was a National Security Adviser for both J F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson. In his old age, and particularly after McNamara publicly announced he had been wrong, Bundy came to reconsider his role in guiding America to war in South East Asia.Pfaff, in this article gives a potted history of America's involvement prior to and after Dien Bien Phu (after which the French withdrew) and leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. What I found particularly fascinating was an account of Douglas McArthur's opinion given to Kennedy:

'With respect to Vietnam, the new President sought the advice of another eminent American soldier. He invited Douglas MacArthur to Washington. According to Robert Kennedy’s account, MacArthur said that it would “be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent,” and that “the future…should be determined at the diplomatic table.” Kennedy’s aide Kenneth O’Donnell has added that MacArthur said to Kennedy that “there was no end to Asia and even if we poured a million American infantry soldiers into that continent, we would still find ourselves outnumbered on every side.”'

Kennedy was persuaded, and it seems that had he not been assassinated America would have drawn down its troops and advisers in Vietnam.The article is interesting, too, in its description and analysis of America trying on the role of the disinterested policeman of the world after the Second World War, and where that has led us all. Find it here

I’ve been reading Robert Hughes’s Goya. In the introduction he canvasses Goya’s occasional heroism in taking on the Catholic Church in the late 1700s in Spain. (‘artists are rarely moral heroes, and should not be expected to be, any more than plumbers or dog breeders ... Goya, being neither madman nor masochist, had no taste for martyrdom’). Yet, Hughes goes on to say,

‘His work asserted that men and women should be free from tyranny and superstition; that torture, rape, despoliation, and massacre, those perennial props of power in both the civil and the religious arena, were intolerable; and that those who condoned or employed them were not to be trusted, no matter how seductive the bugle calls and the swearing of allegiance might seem.’

How neatly put. Although he might, also, have added, in that list of crimes, the incarceration of innocent men and women to make a point. Which brings me, of course, to our present government, that rag-tag bag of misanthropes I voted for a couple of years back who seem to believe that it doesn’t matter what they do I’ll continue to vote for them because the opposition – in the shape of Tony Abbott – is too awful to contemplate.They’re right about the latter part, of course. Abbott is the worst sort of zealot, the kind of man who, if he came to power, might well see fit to resort to tyranny to stay there, for the good of the country. But Rudd is proving, unfortunately, to be little better. Every day it feels more like he is prepared to sell his, and the country’s, soul in order to stay in power, so that he can do some mystical good. And what’s the good of that, tell me?Right now he is prepared to indefinitely lock up those who are almost certainly genuine refugees, without the due process of a trial, or even the promise of one, simply to thwart Abbott on immigration.At some point each one of us has to cry enough.Refugees from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan are just that, refugees. If it’s safe for them to go home to Afghanistan then why are our troops over there, engaged in a fierce battle with a devastating insurgency? (And the northern summer just beginning) Howard’s policies on immigration brought shame upon this nation. In the name of political expediency - locking innocent people away without charge and with no indication of a time for release - the Rudd Government is behaving just as badly.

A long and fascinating article on the battle for how to price e-books, on what publishers do for authors and whether Amazon can do it instead, and how difficult it is, generally, to force art into tight spaces, here

In contrast to how the proposed Cultural Plan for the Sunshine Coast Region defines culture it is interesting to note how Arts Queensland defines it in their new Sector Plan 2010-2013:'Arts and culture can be defined as all forms of creative practice and artistic and cultural expression and activity. This includes but is not limited to visual art, music, dance, writing, craft, theatre, media art, multi-arts, design, public art, events, festivals, exhibitions, community cultural development and preservation of knowledge, stories, heritage and collections.' (p8)This, while being very broad, is still much narrower than the definition which SCRC Cultural Plan is adopting. Arts Queensland focuses on ‘culture’ as Arts and Culture rather than the 'culture' of a society which is, clearly, a much less specific thing, including, as it does, business (and the many ways business is transacted, all forms of work, parenting, sport, in fact the whole kit and caboodle.)The problem arises because the word ‘culture’ has two distinct meanings which often get mixed up, in particular because, when we think of defining it, a confusion arises between the sub-categories within the meanings rather than the definitions themselves; the issues associated with high and low culture impose themselves on our ability to think about it rationally.If we can dispense with those problematic issues for a moment we see that ‘culture’ is either the thing that differentiates one society from another in the way, for example, that Sydney people are different from those who live in Guangzhou, or, for that matter, Melbourne; or, alternatively it refers to that part of society which might be summed up as the historic amassing of our artistic and philosophical achievements. We could take as examples the (possibly contentious) statement: ‘European culture up until the Twentieth century was rooted in the Christian Church, both as a director of thought and as the agency thinkers opposed over the last millenium; music, art, writing have been manifestations of our relationship to God as defined by the Church in all its different sects.’ Or, less contentiously (because it is easier to make statements about other cultures than our own) we could take the Chinese example: ‘Chinese culture arises out of a schism between three distinct world views, those of Confucius, Lao Tzu and Buddha; generally speaking art, music and writing in that country have come as a response to those beliefs, either in favour or against them.’The latter definition, it is clear, which in the dictionaries often includes the word intellectual, is about the aspirations of people, the way they define themselves both within and against the world views of society.If we’re going to develop a ‘cultural plan’ for the region and base it on the first definition then we are entering a self-defeating process; all we’re doing is producing a map of what we already think. We define ourselves as what we are and then leave it at that.By doing so we leave no room for aspiration. We abandon all those people in the society who are working to provide some sort of self-reflection and their goal of encouraging us to see ourselves more clearly. We walk away from the idea that we can become ‘more cultured.’We also run into some serious problems with the scope of development proposed for the region. The indicative surveys that have already been done (on the basis that we’re making a plan for the generic culture of the Sunshine Coast) put ‘environment’ as the most important quality. At the same time we are planning several new towns or ‘communities’ of significant size with very little recognition of that very aspect.The example which springs to mind is the development of the greenfield site for South Caloundra, a planned city of 50 000 people. A city the size of Dubbo, (39 000) or Gladstone, (49 000). The very concept is problematic in itself, and I will be returning to this issue later, but it is made more so because we intend to simply place it into the landscape as if nothing already lives there.We’re still engaging in the terra nullius syndrome: we need to expand, there’s a bit of land with nothing on it, lets use it. Only this piece of land does happen to have several things living on it; a single example: One of the few known major colonies in Queensland of the Vulnerable Water Mouse (Xeromys myoides) is found in the area. This small endemic rodent is listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red Data Book, the Federal Government’s Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) and the Queensland Nature Conservation Act. This is only one endangered species identified on the site. It is not even known if a proper study has been done to indicate if there are endangered species, either plant or animal, but it seems highly likely more are present. Moreover the development of a town the size of Dubbo in that area will undoubtedly impact on Pumicestone Passage, already recognised as a site of environmental significance. It cannot help but do so.If we’re developing a Cultural Plan based on the present society’s wish to put environmental protection as the number one priority then we’re clearly in trouble.

With thanks to The Onion (and Caitlin for the link) for this gem.

How depressing it is to watch Julia Gillard defend the Rudd Government’s recent position on refugees from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.Gillard is normally erudite, unflappable, even reasonably honest, but there she was this morning, live from Brisbane, peddling outright lies about the UNHCR position on refugees from these two countries. Apparently, Gillard tells us, the situation is improving and that’s why we’re not going to process their refugees for the next six months.I don’t know about Sri Lanka, but you’d have to be living in a sensory deprivation room not to know that Afghanistan is a disaster right now. Very little is improving. Gillard has the gall to mention the Hazara people in particular and how things are getting better for them. Last I heard the Taliban were using Hazara men to walk through minefields in front of their vehicles. They used to use sheep or goats but Hazara are worth less.Labor’s position is disgraceful policy, introduced to head off the back-lash against asylum seekers whipped up by Tony Abbott over the last few weeks for no other reason than political expediency.Arrivals by boat people represents only one percent (1%) of the legitimate migration each year. (That’s 180 000 people per anum, not the 300 000 that’s been touted recently. The latter figure includes people on student visas, temporary work permits etc.) Now, you can argue 180k is too many for sustainable population and I’ll listen sympathetically, but you can’t say that Australia has a problem with asylum seekers. Something like 90% of all boat people prove to be genuine refugees. A fact that makes sense when you think about it. These people are desperate.We need to demand more ethical behaviour from our government. This is why many of us voted them in. If we don’t do it, who will?

David Cox at the Guardian is concerned about the use of the word cunt in the film ‘Kickass’ – as in, an eleven-year-old girl in pigtails, armed to the teeth, enters a room full of adults, and says: ‘Lets waste the cunts.’David is not worried about the eleven-year-old, or violence, or any, really, of the things you might expect him to be worried about. He’s concerned that the word cunt is being devalued. If eleven-year-olds can say it in films, he asks, what force does it have left?I’ve not seen the film (and could care less about seeing any film with a caped crusader in it, ironic or otherwise, ever again) but the film is not the point. The issue is the word and its status as a swear-word of power. The one word you still cannot say, or write in decent society. Or, supposedly, in film. (although, down the pub, one suspects, there are, even as you read, men finishing a glass who address the assembled company by saying: ‘Right, which one of youse cunts is buying?’)The question has to be: Does the word’s power reside in its reference to a woman’s sexual parts? I mean we can call someone a dick or a prick, we can ask if they have any balls at all, the phallus is all around us as insult and example, but whatever we do we daren’t say the word c--t.In fact, if we even want to talk about women’s parts we’re still confined to the extraordinary Latin word vagina. A word which has always seemed to lack appeal. Or fanny. Pussy. It gets worse. Twat.The story I’ve heard, and I’ll wait to be corrected by linguists on this, is that cunt is the Old English, the Anglo-Saxon word. That during the early years of development of English as a language, when it was considered inferior to French and Latin, the term became pejorative because it was the Anglo-Saxon word.This is hearsay, I have no practical basis for belief in the story but I like it if only because I like the word cunt. I think it goes to the root of things. It is an earthy word, it’s the word most suited for that wonderful part of a woman, a word that celebrates the delta, the alpha and the omega (as Leonard Cohen might have it) the cradle of the river and the sea.Unlike David Cox (there’s that phallus again, we’re so proud of our proud cocks) I’m happy for the word to be out there in public use. Let's take the insult out of it and give it back to the place it belongs.(It has been recommended to me to include more pictures in my blog but in this case I’ll refrain.) Cox’s article can be found here.