In the early 1700s Bernard Picart and Jean Frederic Bernard produced a series of volumes entitled Religious Ceremonies of the World. The books were radical in a number of ways, not least in that they presented all religions as equal, being concerned to offer an insight into the ceremonies and practices of these religions rather than proposing any one as more important or correct than any other.The June New York Review of Books contains an insightful review of a new book about Picart and Bernard, (here) but it also, fascinatingly, gives a link to the UCLA website where all the engravings by Picart are presented. This is an extraordinary resource: every picture from the more than seven volumes can be searched and then enlarged on screen so that the smallest detail is beautifully revealed. Treat yourself here.

Returning to books you have loved is always fraught with tension. There is the possibility that the book was just of it’s time, or of that moment in your life, that it will have aged and a revisit will show it as being tired or sentimental or overwritten. Recently I reread For Whom the Bell Tolls after a gap of thirty-seven years, only to find it still as fresh and shocking as it was first time around. Franzen’s The Corrections, however, when I tried the same exercise, proved the thesis. The parts I had thought of as immensely clever and insightful in 2001 struck me as tedious and predictable. Was it the book or me? Had I simply not left it long enough? I’ll never know, but after picking it up in joyful anticipation I found the weight of it, the idea that I would have to work my way through all those different voices was just too much. I put it aside. Eventually it found it’s way back into the bookshelf.I say this because the experience had not disposed me well towards his new novel, Freedom, the first in ten years. Within barely a paragraph, though, all that was forgotten. Five hundred and sixty pages later I was still with him. Here is a wonderfully rich novel, a deeply-felt, multi-layered meander through thirty years of a marriage.The story opens as reportage, a variation of the omniscient author, criss-crossing the street where the Berglund’s live in Minneapolis-St Paul, the Twin Cities, dropping in and out of various households to get their opinion of the couple, Walter and Patty, who will prove to be the central characters. They are college graduates, Liberals, decent, ahead of their time in buying up an old home and doing it up. Walter is ‘greener than Greenpeace,’ remembered ‘for pedalling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow.’ Remembered because, as the first line attests things are already not so good with these two as once they were. This apparently objective opening perspective, while giving us a run-down of how things might have begun to fall apart, will not be returned to until the final pages.We quickly see that Franzen is playing with perspective. He swings from one side of the street to the other only so he can drop, abruptly, into Patty’s voice in the second chapter, giving us almost a book within the book, a version of her life entitled ‘Mistakes Were Made.’ Except Patty, who is writing this at her therapist’s injunction, doesn’t want to use the first person to tell her story. Instead she writes about herself in the third, she discusses with us, the reader, the decisions being made by the autobiographer. When she hands over to another character Franzen adopts a more traditional mode of narrative, pulling the reader forward through several other characters; Walter, his friend Katz, his son Joey, introducing, as he does so, a massive cast of contemporary Americans, but at the same time always bringing the story back to the Berglund’s marriage. Towards the end Patty gets another go, and then, to finish, as I said, he steps back out towards the role of the dispassionate observer.It’s a nice conceit, this moving in and pulling out, particularly the long tract in the first person told as third which allows the reader to sit alongside Patty as she tells her tale, a co-conspirator in her life. But, if there was a genuine complaint about The Corrections, it was that of the five voices which dominated the novel one of them was weaker than the rest and there was a moment, almost half way through Freedom (another big book) that I thought this was going to happen again. Franzen manages to carry it off this time, though, mainly because that character undergoes a change in himself, and with this change becomes more tolerable and interesting.Franzen’s concerns are not just literary, though. He’s interested in discussing the nature of love, both long and short term and how it changes over time. He’s very good on the male attitude to sex at different ages, but I suspect, too, that of the female. Patty feels right. The Freedom of the title is not directly spoken about and yet it inhabits the novel, all of the characters have the capacity to make choices and they do so, and if there is a moral to the story it is, perhaps, that those who make the harder choices, even though they have a difficult time of it, also win out in the end. It is a portrait of a difficult marriage – is there any other kind? But also of a certain American class, beset not just by their own emotional problems but also by their concerns for what it means to be a human being in the present age. Franzen’s characters brush against major political issues and it is testament to his skill that they are important without being central to the novel. The paradoxes of our time are everywhere evident.An excellent read.

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

This question came up in the context of writing a cultural plan. Most people probably don’t even know what a cultural plan is, or could care less, but suffice to say most levels of government have one. *For my sins I have recently read a few of these documents from various regions around the country. One thing I couldn’t help but notice was that, even though they were to do with culture, Art tended to be somewhat marginalised. Art, or ‘the Arts’ existed as an embellishment, the aesthetic coating over the more sober activities of general life.I brought this up with a friend who straight away said, ‘as soon as art becomes commodifed it loses its force, it becomes no more than another aspect of commerce.’A statement which led us, of course, to ask what art had been before it was commodified, which proved to be by no means simple to define. Clearly ritual was in there somewhere. But we also couldn’t avoid revisiting Neanderthal man sitting around the campfire after a day hunting the woolly mammoth. It has been a successful day. The beast has been felled, there is meat in the hands of the clan. Not satisfied, however, to simply fall asleep after the meal, one of the tribal members feels obliged to get up and replay the events of the day, to mime the hunt, to dance the events out, to retell. This replaying so engages the others that they demand the performance be repeated again and again.If indeed the beginning of Art happened like that (paintings on walls both after, and before the hunt, are another example) then we would have to posit that it is this process of retelling which makes us different from the other animals; not just an awareness of our own mortality but a need to talk about it. I’m not claiming it makes us better or that it gives meaning or even makes sense of anything, only that for some reason we, as human beings, seem to need to do it and this defines us as different. In the retelling we change ourselves and our experience of the world, and there has been a lot of retelling since the last woolly mammoth was killed.The point of all this was to say that when we marginalise art, when we make it just another aspect of our commerce we lose something essential. I, like most people in history, do not know what art is for, only that when we marginalise it we, in effect, take ourselves back to some sort of base line of existence in which all we do is reproduce, consume and excrete. We stop remaking the world.

* This business of cultural plans brings me to a curious aside: it seems that in this present age, in which we plan for every eventuality, local government both sets itself and then operates according to precise codes. These codes are presented in the form of a series of ‘plans.’ For example, an Environmental Plan, which, when it has been passed by a regional government, imposes on any future planning for that jurisdiction the regulations or even aspirations that are in the document.

Perhaps I need to make myself more clear here: these are not planning documents per se, in which a decision is made about the width of a path or the height of a ceiling, they are broader in their remit, intended to state, as it were, a ‘position’ on certain issues.

What I find worthy of note, even perhaps philosophically interesting, is that these documents are designed to ‘talk up or down to each other,’ by which I mean they exist in an hierarchical structure – a community plan might sit above a corporate plan (or the other way around) which in turn sits above a health and lifestyle plan or, in this case, a cultural plan, which, in turn sits above a whole raft of other ones.

In the field of law this has, of course, been operating for hundreds of years, under the principle of precedent. International treaties, too, operate in a similar way, whereby a country will agree to conditions which then have a bearing on their activities. But this is another level of documentation beyond that. In overarching local government plans the words themselves are often quite amorphous, leaning towards motherhood statements, and yet still have actual force, controlling the way our cities and towns shift and change.

Is this a good or a bad thing? I can't, at this point answer that; certainly it is better that government be giving thought to its process of governance and not operating in an ad hoc manner; it just seems a curious metaphor, these documents talking up and down to each other, staking out fences, presenting imperatives; particularly in a time where personal responsibility for decisions seems to have devolved, where everyone acts within prescribed frameworks.

Sometimes things on which we place little or no value have terrible effects downstream. Literally, in this case. The picture shows a dead platypus on the banks of the Obi Obi, near Maleny, with the object that killed it lying alongside. We can only assume that, while nosing around on the bottom of the creek the discarded hair-tie got caught around his bill. In frustration he will have raised a claw up to push it off and suddenly found himself entangled. The rather hideous wound on his neck and left shoulder would seem to suggest that, unfortunately, death did not come quickly.

There's a very warm (and insightful, but I would say that) review of 88 Lines About 44 Women here from ANZLitLovers Blog

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.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

Why do they sit in a library of empty, colour-coded books? I’ve never liked it, but even if they had insisted on starting out that way they could have, by now, have quite a collection of books they’ve discussed. Why can’t we at least see them?This might seem petulant but it is a serious complaint: a room full of books says something about the person sitting in it. That’s one of the reasons we collect them, so that visitors can see the kind of person we are. The resident readers on The Book Show are non people, the books they've read don’t stick to them. Last week several purple ones, behind Jennifer Byrne, were even damaged, like they’d fallen off the shelf and somebody had picked them up and thought, who cares.There’s too many of them anyway. The people, I mean. With five people, two of whom are celebrities who need their egos massaged, there’s not enough time or space for any sort of sensible debate. Get rid of the guests, give Mariecke and Jason a go.And while you’re at it get rid of those awful dramatised bits where the plot is revealed. They do nothing for the books and less for the show.If you do all these things you might actually be able to talk about more than two books a month. The show might become interesting. It might even become a force in the literary world.

Plan B talking about and singing the song 'She said.'here

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.