Larry Buttrose

ROOMATISM

2012-01-01T15:52:00.000-08:00

When all the plummy plump

Is bruised to lumpy pith

Amid a local and general sag,

And all the grand and fervid passions

Are cold ashes in the grate,

And there it is, the lone fucking chop

The twenty fucking peas,

And the chunks of fucking carrot

On the clunky fucking plate,

And all the books swim

In a dark swash of print,

And the songs fade to a whisper

On the drums of well thatched ears,

The lips may yet move

With an odd line here or there

Of that reserved anarcho-jester,

The poem, whose rhythms,

Neurisms and truisms

Suggest all of the allusive all

That lies just beyond touch,

Beyond the fog and cloud and shadow,

Beyond the room and rheumatism.

The Last Day Of The Year

2011-12-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

in memoriam Carol Novack and Kerry Leves

“he told me that writing poetry was the most beautiful thing anyone could do on this godforsaken earth”

-Roberto Bolano

The writing of a poem

Is problematical

As life itself:

Where did it come from?

Why is it here?

What does it mean?

Then it settles itself

Into ink, infused

Into the fibres of a page,

Signifying much, little

Or nothing much at all,

Or otherwise shimmering

Pixels on a screen,

In the e-tombstones

Of two dead poets,

Our friends, who wrote

Beautifully for reasons

Beautifully unclear,

Now departed to compose

In places we the living

Know not where.

Larry Buttrose

31 December 2011

CARRINGTONIANS' FIFTH ANNIVERSARY DRINKS AND POETRY READING

2011-12-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

NON SECATEURS

2011-12-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

PEG ENTWISTLE HOLLYWOOD TRAGIC

2011-11-28T16:16:00.000-08:00

The death of aspiring starlet Peg Entwistle has come to be regarded as Hollywood folklore at its finest. Much of it is composed of fact, but much also of hearsay and urban legend, nourished by a sentiment to which almost anyone who has ever struggled with their art can relate.

Following the death of her mother, Entwistle migrated to the United States with her father and brothers in the 1920s after growing up in Wales and London. When her father was run over by a truck on New York’s Park Avenue, her brothers headed west, seeking their fortunes like so many others in California. Peg remained in New York, bitten by the stage bug and starting to get roles in the theatre. She enjoyed some success, acting opposite rising stars such as Humphrey Bogart.

She was only 19 when she married an older actor, Robert Keith, but after the marriage fell apart she decided to follow her brothers’ example and in 1932 travelled west to join them in Los Angeles.

There the blue-eyed platinum blonde had almost immediate success, scoring a movie role in Thirteen Women, a melodrama starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne about a group of former school-friends getting horoscopes from a fortune-teller who is working under an evil influence. Unfortunately for Entwistle, most of her part ended up on the cutting room floor. She found herself out of work, friendless and depressed, without even enough money to take the train back east to New York and put Hollywood behind her. Instead, she used Hollywood itself to take her own life.

Hollywood began as a developer’s subdivision in 1923 called Hollywoodland, in Beachwood Canyon above the plain of Los Angeles. The “Hollywoodland” sign was lit up by thousands of light bulbs, but when the development failed, all that remained of the scheme was the sign, up on the craggy slopes of Mount Lee. It fell into disrepair, and the final syllable “land” was removed, rendering the word the familiar “Hollywood”. The entertainment business came to recognise its importance, and in 1978 it was restored through a subscription campaign in which companies and individuals paid for a letter. Among those said to have taken part were Playboy millionaire Hugh Hefner, who paid for the Y, and rock star Alice Cooper, who paid for one of the O’s, in memory of Groucho Marx.

On 16 September 1932, having told her family she was meeting friends at the local drugstore, Peg Entwistle put on a borrowed dress, wrote her suicide note, and began scrabbling up through the brush and stony slopes of Mount Lee. There she left the note along with her purse and coat, and used a workmen’s ladder to climb the 50 feet to the top of the H letter. She jumped head first, tumbling down the rocks and ravines below.

Her body was sighted the following day by a woman hiking in Griffith Park, who reported the matter to the police. Her body was recovered and a post-mortem done, which concluded that she died of multiple fractures to the pelvis, and may have survived the fall for some time with agonising internal injuries. Her body was cremated, and later interred in Cincinnati, Ohio beside the remains of her father.

Tragically, a letter which had been posted on the day before her death arrived the day after she was found, offering her a part in a forthcoming stage production at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. She was to have played the part of a young woman who commits suicide in the final act.

In the decades since her death there have been numerous reports of hikers spotting a sad-looking blonde in a 1930s era dress, some of them saying she literally shimmered and vanished before their eyes. Others have reported the strong smell of gardenia while walking in the area: it was Peg Entwistle’s favourite scent. In recent decades special hi-tech sensors have been placed at the sign to help deter would-be copycat suicides.

The film Thirteen Women opened to generally poor reviews, although Peg Entwistle received good notices for what was left of her part. The suicide note she left read: “I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.”

From my book Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths.

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Famous-Deaths-Famus/dp/1741105641/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277516386&sr=8-15

“I’m afraid I’m being an awful nuisance.”

- last words of poet Edith Sitwell, died 1964

PAJEROO7

2011-11-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

CARGO

2011-10-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

The synthe-parfum-inked catalogue is chastening:

So much to buy for so little money,

And you have none.

How must you reek of failure

How must you pong of angst

When workers in Mumbai and Shanghai

Infuse every plasma screen

With the blood of their very Faust,

While all you may hope for

Is a kiss, a caress,

And ergo may sigh authentically

As you file the catalogue

In the state-sanctioned bin,

Knowing love is a ship

That never comes in.

FREIGHT MOVEMENT

2011-10-23T17:49:00.001-07:00

Not long past dawn

I sit in the lavatory

At the far end of the platform,

Aspiring to perform

Before my train arrives.

This precious duty demands

Contemplative stillness,

And is thus unsuited

To the convenience

Aboard a car in motion.

A sudden freight train

Belts through the station,

A long linked sausage

Of heterogeneous containers,

Mere metres from where I perch,

Shaking the earth

To its bowels.

Then it is gone,

The silence resumes,

But the moment has passed:

In the old gum tree

A kookaburra cackles

From afar:

But no cigar.

ABC ANNOUNCES GRITTY NEW DRAMA SERIES: "BABES", SET IN HARDCORE INNERCITY CHILDCARE CENTRE

2011-10-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

1. INT. CHILDCARE CENTRE. DAY.

KYLIE, 16, work experience childcare centre worker, runs in from bathroom. She is in a short black cocktail dress, high heels, and showing plenty of cleavage.

KYLIE

Mavis, Jezebel has done a poo!

MAVIS, 73, in a short black cocktail dress, high heels, and showing plenty of cleavage, slaps her.

MAVIS

Wash yo mouth out, ho!

KYLIE weeps hysterically.

KYLIE

But I didn't mean to slap her!

MAVIS punches KYLIE in the stomach.

MAVIS

WHADYOFUCKENMEAN DIDN’TMEAN!

KYLIE

I....

MAVIS

YOU RACIST, AGEIST, HYSTERICAL BITCH!

KYLIE

But....

MAVIS king-hits KYLIE, who collapses unconscious on the floor, her hem riding up to reveal a hint of her sexy knickers.

KYLIE

(Huskily) Ooooh....

JEZEBEL, 2, emerges from the bathroom, crying.

JEZEBEL

Poo-poo, poo-poo!

MAVIS sighs world-wearily to her.

MAVIS

Yeah, like, who fucken cares?

JEZEBEL

Random. Totally.

MAVIS

(Sighs again) I'll get Kylie in to clean it up.

Shot through the open bathroom door of a large anarchist A and "DOWN WITH FASCISM" smeared in baby poo on the wall.

JEZEBEL

Eat shit, bitch!

Enraged, MAVIS chases a giggling JEZEBEL around the centre.

Suddenly MAVIS gasps, clutches her ample chest, and falls to the ground.

FADE OUT on MAVIS’S wide-open dead eyes, with JEZEBEL standing over her.

JEZEBEL

Where’s my teddy gone?

MUSIC OVER OF DRAMATIC PHILLIP GLASS-CLONED ARPEGGIOS.

FADE TO YVES KLEIN BLUE, THEN BLACK, THEN VERY DARK BLACK.

IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC KISSING

2011-10-09T16:52:00.000-07:00

Barely clothed beneath their clothes

They pash, his baseball cap nudging

Her pinned purple black fringe;

The bus lurches, and with a slack grin

His face falls into her lap

Below the Plimsoll Line of skirt

And stays there till every neck

Aches from arching: She giggles,

At what, when there are so many choices,

And he resurfaces all out of breath

Gasps and suckers to her mouth and

They don’t take breath for a full stop.

When the cosmos is nothing

But a drifting black hulk,

A celestial Marie Celeste,

Those mouths will still be kissing

Blithely ignoring the departed god

Allegedly behind it all,

In whose name priests forbade

The eating of meat of a Friday and

The meeting of lips in a pubic place.

SLEEP

2011-09-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

A little bottle of sleep

White tablets of sleep

Made by careful hands

In white latex gloves

And full hair nets

To keep anything foreign

Out of all the sleep

Poured into every bottle

A bitter foretaste

Of a blank destiny

A measured little dose of death

A sleep that is black and cold

Sleep that is dreamless

And would be worthless

Were it not sleep at least

And so worth every silver grain

Of the ten dollars it cost

To procure these priceless two

Weeks of sleep

THE KETTLE

2011-09-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

This is a tale of two cities, and an electric kettle. One might perhaps say with more accuracy that it is about two countries, or two cultures, rather than cities, but it is definitely about a kettle.

I preface the tale with mention of a satirical piece written by British comedian John Cleese, which like many people around the world I recently received, forwarded in an email from a friend. Britain is Repossessing the U.S.A. stated that the Queen was revoking American independence because of the abject failure of the United States to find itself half-decent presidents. Political institutions would be dissolved, and the British Prime Minister would appoint a Governor for America.

There would be other effects too, more keenly felt by average Americans. They would henceforth refrain from shooting each other to settle spats, jettison baseball and American football for cricket and soccer, drink tea (in proper cups and saucers), return the letter “u” to words such as colour, and learn how to pronounce aluminium.

It was very funny, as one would expect from John Cleese. But the notion underpinning it - perfectly serious as with much good humour - is the ongoing sideshow of a United States haplessly flailing, falling into ever deeper political and economic mush, while abnegating the very human rights and values it once purported to cherish.

Cleese’s genteel rant underlined something further too, however, which is how different two leading nations of the English-speaking world - one a colony of the other only a little over two centuries back - truly are. That called to mind a tale of mine from a number of years ago, which I now offer to readers in a refreshed, refurbished, revitalised, retitled and somewhat shorter form.

The night before I left London, my friend Tom telephoned from Los Angeles with a special request: could I bring them back an electric kettle? He explained that Americans tend to boil water on a stove, or use a coffee-making or home cappuccino machine, and so electric kettles can be very expensive, if you can find one in the first place.

I departed into a liver-spotted grey morning, and stopped off at one of those London shops with windows displaying everything from shopsoiled chamber pots to vibrators made in Taiwan. A stooped old man emanated from the shadowy recesses, and I explained I was flying to the United States that afternoon and wanted to buy a kettle. After first marvelling with respectful terror upon the miracle of powered flight, this latter-day Steptoe recommended a particular kettle, ‘retailing at 20 pahn’.

I noted it lacked a wall plug. For reasons known only to the English - could this, like the long-persisted-with afternoon closing of pubs, be some hangover from the Blitz? - British electrical appliances are sold with cables bared to the copper wiring. To my mind, this national characteristic was as odd as the American eschewal of the kettle. Of course, for a ‘small extra fee, guv’, the salesperson will wire on the plug for you, on the spot, and he did.

On the flight I sat beside a sixtysomething English couple on their way to San Diego, and retirement in a motorised home. They enthused at length upon the medicinal digestive properties of papaya seeds. Seven, the man assured me, and precisely that number only, would cure any stomach ailment. I noted it, and have since attempted to eat seven papaya seeds each day, even if my digestion remains stubbornly intermittent.

Tom and Alison picked me up at LAX and whisked me back to their West Hollywood condo, eager to try out the new kettle. But then, disappointment. It took twenty minutes for the water to boil. Their patented US adaptor did not work properly with the British plug. We all looked at each other and sighed. There was nothing for it: we would have to seek expert help.

Americans have enormous problems understanding English spoken by non-Americans. The differences go much deeper than mere accent, vocabulary and idiom, into stress, intonation, rhythm. Americans often sing-song in time-worn patterns, typically "Hello, how are you.. I'm fine, how are you?" Outsiders who do not have the hang of this sing-song may be misunderstood, even if they are speaking the very same words as the locals. Then there is the plain ignorance many Americans have of anything which lies beyond the Valley, the Hudson, the lower forty, the end of the block. This was highlighted by a telephone conversation which Tom recounted he had with a journalist working for a prestigious national magazine in New York.
'You're from... now where'd you say you're from?' she asked.
'England,' Tom replied.
'Enga-land?'
'Yes. England.'
'Cool. Say, do they speak English there?'

Seeking a new adaptor for the English kettle, we encountered predictable linguistic hurdles. It is axiomatic that an entire generation of Americans cannot speak a sentence without a liberal sprinkling of the word "like". The same generation has also managed to reduce English's wide palate of approbrious adjectives to "cool". A representative of this generation sat behind a counter before us now, in blue jeans, t-shirt, blond pony tail and reversed baseball cap. His tag said his name was Caleb, and that he was an Electrical Appliances Services Consultant, a role usually referred to outside the United States as a shop assistant.
'An adaptor for my English kettle,' Tom repeated, very slowly, but too English altogether.
'Keddle?' Caleb tried.
'Kettle,' Tom articulated. 'For boiling water.'
'You mean a, like, pot?'
'Yes. Only it's electric. You don't put it on the stove.'
'Stove?'
'Hob.'
'Oh, I geddit. You mean, for, like, coffee or somethin'?'
'For tea.'
'Oh. Tea.'
His eyes emitted a blue, knowing gleam. He finally had a fix on us and our weird English ways. Tea. It was all about tea. 'So, wassa problem?' he asked, finger on his place in the newspaper.

'England has a different voltage to America,' Tom explained carefully. 'I need an adaptor for the kettle's wall-plug.' He produced the British plug, that solid, sizeable lump of government-regulated, welfare society plastic and brass, its three prongs staunchly protruding.

Caleb’s eyes widened. 'That's a plug from, like, Enga-land?' We nodded. 'Cool,’ he enthused. ‘But I ain't seen nothin' like that before. So sorry, cain't help you.' He was already back in his LA Weekly.

'Can you suggest another shop where I might be able to find such an adaptor?' Tom attempted. Caleb gave a little shrug and a "well-lemme-see-now-you-might-just-try", and dispatched us to the first of what became a succession of electrical goods places. We did find adaptors in some, but only for Americans travelling overseas, so that they could run their hair-dryers and shavers in Finland, Thailand, and, like, Enga-land. We ended the paper chase at a massive warehouse in West LA stacked floor-to-ceiling with fuses, wires, switches, circuits, gadgets and gismos. The ultimate home handyman hang. This had to be the place.

After the inevitable wait of fifteen or so minutes as the counter assistant loudly sorted out his marriage on the phone, we were granted an audience at last when another assistant rose lugubriously from his seat by the Cafe Bar, and sauntered over. This man is perhaps most easily described as a flesh and blood Homer Simpson, complete with doughnut, although his name-tag revealed his name as Bob. When we outlined our inquiry, his response was direct:
'No problem, just swap over the plug. Swap it for an American one.'
The readiness of this solution took Tom so much by surprise that he couldn’t manage to reply at all at first, while Bob wandered off to a stand displaying hundreds of different wall plugs in dusty cellophane boxes.
'Any of these will do just fine,' he said, passing one to Tom. 'Just pay on your way out and have a nice day.'
Still speechless, Tom could only stare down at the plug.
'But...' I asked quickly before Bob could get away, 'isn't it a problem that England is on a different voltage?'
'Wha?' His eyes narrowed as he sensed a hitch in getting us out of his hair and back to his seat by the Cafe Bar.
'Different voltage,' I repeated, madly over- articulating. 'America is on 110 volts. England is on 220, or 240.'
'Tha' so?' Bob said, genuinely surprised.
'Mightn't the kettle blow up with too much voltage?' I persisted.
He pushed back an imaginary baseball cap, and gave his front bald patch a scratch. 'Well now,' he sighed, 'that may just be so.'
It was a hot day, and, like his English kettle, Tom was on a slow boil. 'Just a minute, you work here - can we or can't we just change over the plug?'
Bob's eyes searched the stained white polystyrene ceiling panels. 'Guess better not,' he muttered, voice falling on the last word. He had realised that he would have to fix us. It would take time. His big round eyes flicked back yearningly to his seat by the Cafe Bar, the National Enquirer spread out before it, the coffee ready and just waiting to be poured and sipped, and another whole doughnut. Would he never get back there?

Twenty minutes later we were at the check-out with, not just an adaptor, but a full-scale transformer the size of a shoebox. It was heavy as a pair of dumb-bells, cost 25 dollars, and was made in the People's Republic of China.
'Can I return it if it's not right?' Tom asked.
'Sure,' Bob said breezily, sensing escape at last. 'You got five days bring it back.’

We stepped out into the smoggy late afternoon sun lugging the transformer, and loaded it into Tom's vintage silver Corolla, running sweetly after being serviced by a pair of overalled mechanics name-tagged Jesus at the local Chevron gas station on Sunset Boulevard.

We dropped the kettle off at an electrical goods repair place recommended by Bob, where the English plug wired on by Mr Steptoe in grimy Kentish Town for one pahn was to be re-wired with an American plug to fit the transformer, by a guy name-tagged Dwight (baseball cap front on, blond pony table pulled down through the back of it) for five dollars.

Ten minutes later we pulled up outside the condo’s basement electric security gate, with a real sense of achievement. We were on our first beer when Alison got home from work. She had spent the past eleven hours dressing a 'medium tech kinda funky' (the director's brief to her) dentist's surgery set for a TV toothpaste commercial. Tom proudly showed her the electric transformer from the People's Republic, but she cast a chilly eye over the big orange lump of metal resting in its recycled cardboard box.
'Tom, really...'
'What?' he said defensively.
'I just wanted a kettle. A kettle we could use here, and take away on holiday, and I could take on assignment. I can't take that. It's too big and cumbersome. And is it safe to use?'
Tom cleared his throat. 'It should be, yes.'
'But is it?'
'I... don't know yet.'
'Well have you tried it?'
'Not yet. We were waiting for you.'
'Then I suggest we don't. Who knows what will happen? I think you should just take it back.'
‘But...’
‘It’s useless Tom. It’s too heavy. And it’s very ugly. And probably dangerous.’
Tom looked at the orange thing a moment longer, opened his mouth again, but said nothing.
'We should really have just paid the hundred or so dollars for a kettle after all,' Alison sighed.
'They won't take it back,' Tom said gloomily.
'Why do you say that?' she replied.
'I know them. They won't. I know they won't.'
'But Tom, the guy said...' I began.
'I know what the guy said. But they won't. They never do. They say they will but they never do.'
'Of course they will,' Alison soothed. 'If they don't honour their customers, they’ll go bankrupt. This is America.'
'This is America alright,' Tom retorted. 'And it's already bankrupt. By the trillions.'

The following day we were back at the service counter with the transformer. The only person serving was a neat little Hispanic man who conscientiously ignored us while peering down at a circuit board. We looked around for Bob, but his place by the Cafe Bar was empty, the scene somehow dismal. The Hispanic man, whose name was Xavier, continued to ignore us until Tom spoke up loudly. 'Excuse me, may I have some service please.'
He did not look up. 'What is it?'
'I'd like a refund on the transformer I bought here yesterday.' Tom took out the receipt and deposited it on the counter.
Xavier glanced up. 'No refund on that item.'
I was surprised by this, coming so quickly and so cut and dried, but Tom, who had been expecting it all along, psyching himself with muttered obscenities at the wheel on the way, did not miss a beat. 'Why not?' he snapped.
'It's the law.'
'What law? Federal law? State law?'
'Just the law,' he said, with a renewed frown of interest in his circuit board.
A sardonic smile crept across Tom's face. He stood well away from the counter now, and started moving about, loping. In that moment he reminded me of a beast I had once seen in a wretched little resort in Mexico, on the polluted Baja coast just south of Ensenada - a lion, an old gold, lop-eared, shaggy lion, somehow brought to that blighted place and kept in a barred box for the idle amusement of tourists, pacing.
'What law?' Tom repeated, hard.
'The law that says we can't take back transformers once they've been sold. No electrical goods store can. We all have to post the regulation in the store.'
He made a vague gesture behind him, to a bare wall which completely lacked such a posted regulation - indeed, in its very American way, any regulation at all.
Tom stared at the wall in bewilderment. 'But there's nothing there!' he cried out.
'Well there should be,' Xavier said, turning some tiny screw. 'It's the law.'
Too stunned to go on for the time being, Tom lapsed into an exasperated silence. At the same moment, my nose irritated by the LA smog, I happened to sneeze mightily. The man looked up over his spectacles. 'God bless you sir,' he said, in a totally unexpected instance of human compassion.
'Thank you,' I said, wiping my reddened nose with a handkerchief. 'But when we bought this thing here yesterday the man who served us said we had five days to return it.'
'No-one would have said that,' he said calmly.
'Well, this man did.'
'Who did?' His eyes did not budge from the board.
'The guy who was sitting by the Cafe Bar,' Tom said, recovering his momentum now, loping about again.
At this the Xavier shot a mischevious glance across to another counter assistant, a young white flour-sack of a man tagged Jed, who was doing his own fair share of ignoring a queue of complainants. 'The guy by the Cafe Bar, he says...' Xavier chuckled, and Jed grinned back.
'He does work here, doesn't he?' Tom pressed on, but sensing difficulty from some unexpected quarter.
'Works here, yeah, sure does,' Xavier said. 'Only all he does is sit. At that Cafe Bar.'
'What?'
'All he does,' Jed agreed. 'All he can do. Don't know shit.'
'You're telling me,' Tom said slowly, 'that all this guy, Bob, that was his name, Bob... that all he does is sit over there by the Cafe Bar?'
'That's right,' said Xavier. 'Drinking coffee, reading the papers. Only today he's not.'
'Why?' Tom asked suspiciously.
'He's absent,' Xavier said, and Jed down the counter let out a little hoot of laughter.
'Always absent if you ask me,' Jed said.
'But he works here - in this store!' Tom almost shouted.
'Yeah, he does. But he's not, you know, quite right in the head. I don't know why they keep him on, but they do. It's not my business, I just work here. But he just sits over there, doesn't do nothing,' Xavier said.
'Just comes in here, drinks his coffee, dunks his doughnuts, reads his paper right there by the Cafe Bar,' Jed agreed. 'Lord, how he loves that Cafe Bar. Lives for that damn thing, he does.'
'So you can't believe anything he told you,' Xavier said. 'If you did, you'd probably end up with an electric shock. So you can't listen to him, he doesn't know anything, and if he gave you the wrong idea, that’s too bad. That's just how it is.'
'I want to see the manager,' Tom snapped, with an furious tremble.
'He ain't in today.'
'When will he then?'
'Tomorrow, maybe,' Xavier said.
'This is utterly preposterous and you know it. I'll have to report you to the consumer affairs people.'
Who? I couldn’t help but think. If such people existed. But Tom’s threat, however emptily made, did appear to have some effect. Xavier’s eyes came up for a moment from the circuit board and engaged with Tom's, the drama of the moment punctuated with another staggering sneeze from me.
'God bless you sir,' Xavier said again.
I idly wondered if he was born here, or how he'd come into America - whether he’d ever been one of those people a Texas State Trooper once searched my car boot for: 'Sorry sir, we're jes' lookin' fer wetbacks.'
Xavier stared a moment at Tom, returned his attention to the circuit. I could tell though he was weighing up the aggravation he was getting from us against the aggravation he would get from his boss if he was found to be getting soft on all the bums queuing up to get good money back for all the useless bits of junk they'd bought here. But he sensed he had to do something in our case. We were strange. Foreign. We could not be stalled any longer. The so-called "moment of shit" had come.
'Okay,' Xavier said. 'This is what we do. I'll give you a 25 dollar credit on the transformer. You can take your pick from the store.'
Tom replied with another of his sardonic smiles. 'And what about the law? That law you were talking about. The government regulation that's meant to be posted on the wall but isn't? What about that?'
He didn't even look up. 'What about it?'
Tom got 25 dollars in light bulbs and we left. Driving home we passed the repair shop where the kettle was having its plug re-wired on by Dwight - the one with the blond pony tail pushed back through his (not reversed) baseball cap. And there, on a dusty shelf out back, Tom’s English kettle no doubt ended its days, a stranger in a strange land.

The black woman behind the check-in counter for my Sydney flight seemed distracted. As she took my passport and ticket she kept glancing around as if looking out for a friend, or snooping supervisor perhaps. Her fingers leafed automatically to some old US airport tax stamps in my ticket.
'Paid your airport tax yet sir?' she said tersely, still not looking at me. Her name-tag said Loretta.
'Not yet.'
'What are all these then?'
'They're old ones,' I said, feeling somehow guilty.
'You'll have to pay some tax then.'
'Okay. How much is it?' I felt for my wallet.
Her serious eyes finally came to rest on mine. 'Well, where you bin?'
'Er... I flew from LA to London. That's when these stamps are from. And then I came back here, went down to Mexico... and now...'
'Mexico...' Loretta's purpled eyelids gave a tiny flutter, her fingers no longer dog-earing my passport. 'You like it down there?'
'Yes, a lot. I’ve visited a couple of times.'
'Mexico,' she repeated to herself, as if recalling some sultry, long lost weekend. As she looked up at me again she noticed a newly purchased cinema magazine in the crook of my elbow, with Spike Lee on the cover. 'Do you like him?'
'Some of his films,' I said. 'How about you?'
'He's okay.'
'I liked Do The Right Thing.'
'Oh yeah, now that was real good,' she agreed. 'But some of his other stuff is like, you know, just too sexist. Like that one She's Gotta Have It. Now that was sexist shit.' She paused. 'But, then Malcolm X was good. Long, but good.' She smiled, a flash of white teeth. 'I'm Loretta by the way.'
'Nice to meet you, Loretta.'
We shook hands.
'There's no tax payable sir.'
'Really? Why, thank you.'
'I like your hat,' she said, handing me my boarding pass. 'And you have a nice flight, won't you?'

(re-posted for those who might not have seen it originally)

From my book, The Blue Man (Lonely Planet Journeys)

http://www.abebooks.com/9781864500004/Lonely-Planet-Journeys-Blue-Man-186450000X/plp

A GOOD WAR: TURN BACK THE PLANES!

2011-09-05T03:14:00.000-07:00

There can be no doubt that Julia Gillard and her government are in deep excreta. She has taken hard hits on refugee policy and carbon tax, to name just a couple. In terms of popularity, she and her government rate just above rancid butter.

The refugee and carbon tax issues are both knotty and complex, and demand far greater scrutiny, insight, intelligence and education than Australians habitually own up to, for which Tony Abbott is only too pleased to give them a pat on the back and shout another round, ably assisted by the Liberal Party's Coalition partners, News Corporation and Alan Jones.

Of course in their more sanguine moments, a space of perhaps a few minutes after a nice lunch and before a Bex and a snooze, most Australians do know that refugees are arriving here because of wars in other parts of Asia, some of which we helped start, and that it is our duty to help out our fellows in distress. And they know that considered in terms of overall migration numbers, and against illegal visa overstayers, they constitute a trickle to our shores.

And they know that something real will have to be done about global warming, which almost every boffin on earth is telling them is real and true and caused by us and must be addressed pretty well now, and they know the Coaltion's policy is a non-starter, a people pays the polluter scheme, with absolutely no idea of what to do after a 5% reduction by 2020 - which would never happen anyway. And they may have given some tiny thought to rich shareholders ripping 22 billion dollars in profits out of land that nominally at least belongs to us all, and carting off the booty to the four quarters, and that maybe a bit more of that plunder might help us keep making things and employing people in industry.

They know all that but they still don't care. They want the boats stopped, no carbon tax and no super profits tax, and that's that.

So what to do?

If Ms Gillard were a conservative leader, the path would be obvious. When Mrs Thatcher was in trouble in the early 1980s, and when John Howard was likewise in the early 2000s, what did they do? They did what conservative leaders always do: start a war.

Given that Australia is by no means any superpower, she would have to select a pretty soft target. The Americans are very good at this, well, if you don't count Vietnam.

One obvious selection criterion for a foe would be a nation that threatens our borders with an endless flow of its most criminal, diseased and useless who will do nothing but bludge off the fat of our wide brown land.

This makes the choice crystal clear. Ms Gillard has to turn back the trans-Tasman planes and secure our borders against New Zealand. The RAAF could be scrambled - our armed forces appear to be that much of the time anyway - to repel any attempt to land more New Zealanders invaders here, and then a Gulf of Tonkin style incident could be engineered to provide the spark for Total War against New Zealand.

Given that our easygoing national racism extends even to New Zealanders, it would be a popular war, a good war, and all over by Christmas too. And by extending our national territories, it would give Ms Gillard and Mr Bowen an obvious dumping ground for refugees - the state of New New Zealand.

Simple, really. With all the advice John Howard has been giving Ms Gillard lately, it's surprising he hasn't let it slip.

WALKING THE DOGON COUNTRY pt 2

2011-08-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

Moussa announced: 'Telli!', and there, in a long, deep cleft high up the Falaise, was our first "classic" Dogon village. All we could do was gape at that mud town perched up so high in the side of a cliff. It was like seeing the Sagrada Familia, or Venice for the first time. The profile was oddly Manhattan-like, a range of smooth, beautiful earthen towers running the length of the cleft in the sandstone escarpment. The fragile mud structures were sheltered from the rain and wind by the massive overhang of rock, just as for hundreds of years the cliffs were said to have sheltered the Dogon villagers from the evangelising Christians and Muslims on the sandy plain below.

Moussa pointed out other houses honeycombed into the sandstone, higher and ever higher, places one could never imagine human beings able to climb. These were the houses of the Tellem people, pygmies, he said, extraordinary climbers who lived along this escarpment long before the arrival of the Dogon several hundred years ago, and who had been pushed out by them, migrating south to a new homeland down in Cameroun.

We lunched in the chief's enclosure at the foot of the cliff-face, then began the sharp ascent over mighty boulders. As we came up into the shade of the overhang and reached the lowest of the mud buildings, about five hundred feet up into the cliff-face, I realised this part of Telli was now deserted. The walls were cracked and scabrous, the ceilings tumbled in, the mud floors crumbled away to the rows of tree branches underpinning them. There was a maudlin neglect about it all, and I wondered how much longer even this remnant would remain.

'People stop living here years ago now,' Moussa said. 'They moved down below.' This had been when they had decided to stop resisting Islam. Now a considerable proportion were Muslim. 'Now the Falaise is like this,' he said, pointing high up the mountainside. 'Christians up top of the cliffs, animists in the cliffs, Musselmans down on the plain.'

We walked along further, and came to the end of "town", where the gash in the cliff face ended. Down below stretched an eccentric forest of conical buildings jutting up out of stone, and beyond that the current settlement on the khaki plain. We sat down to rest on a log bench, and noticed a strange bowl-shape cut into the mud at our feet.

'This circumcision place,' Moussa said.

We grimaced. 'For boys, girls?'

'Many girls brought here.'

We moved uncomfortably at the realisation of what been perpetrated in this place. Female circumcision involves the removal of the clitoris, and sometimes the labia too. In the most extreme of cases, infibulation, the vagina is sewn closed. One couldn't help but wonder what bizarre human impulse - male jealousy, desire for control of female sexuality, sexual-political hegemony - had caused this practice to come into being and flourish for so long. And so integral to the culture was it that women carried out the mutilation themselves, upon the young of their own sex, without surgical instruments or anaesthetic.

'They've been lobotomised, so that they're beasts of burden, servile workers. So they'll pound the millet and bring up the children and not rebel,' Kathryn said. 'Their souls have been cut out of them.'

Now Moussa pointed to the bowl shape carved in the hard clay at our feet. 'Blood go here,' he stated.

'What do you think of it,' Kathryn asked him carefully, 'female circumcision?'

'I think it is a good thing. It is part of our tradition.' He looked at us both, thought a moment, then added: 'Boys have it, why not the girls? It is only fifteen days to get better.'

We might have suggested that there is an inestimable difference between removing the penile foreskin and the clitoris, but, uncomfortable at this exchange, Moussa got up and walked off a few paces, and in the end nothing more was said.

We followed him down a dank and narrow, debris-strewn path between the tumbledown rows of houses, up notched climbing poles, and precariously along crumbling walls until we reached a house in relatively good repair, with a padlocked hatch-door. This had belonged to last witch doctor of the upper town, Moussa said. When he died, he locked all his magical tools inside, where they had remained undisturbed for years. A pair of buffalo horns guarded the front wall, and beside it, set into the cliff-face, was a fetish point, the blanched skulls of sheep, goats, monkeys and dogs fixed on to the rock with dried blood, milk and mud, breaking away now and falling back into the red African dust.

As we began our climb back down to the plain, Moussa mentioned there had been a French plan to build a five-star hotel near the village so that tourists could come in numbers to see this world historic site. The villagers had vetoed the plan however, saying they did not want the intrusion of electricity, piped water, cars and chaos, into their ordered lives. If tourists wanted to come and see their world, the villagers had said, they would have to walk in here just as we had, and sleep on the earth as the Dogon did.

'I bet they offered a lot of money,' I said, but Moussa said they didn't want it anyway.

'Not even the young people?' Kathryn said. 'Don't they want hamburgers and pop music and all that rubbish?'

'Not yet,' Moussa said.

We stayed the night at Ende, where the village girls performed a vibrant impromtpu dance in the moonlight. They formed a circle and chanted exuberantly while each girl took her turn in the middle, whirling around in her wild signature dance. The words were translated for us as:

"If you go to Cote D'Ivoire/ If you go to Abidjan/ Don't forget your people/ Don't forget your home."

The next day we reached Begnimato, a predominately Christian village perched on a rocky shelf high above the Gondo Plain, surrounded by sandstone peaks weathered into fantastic, Arizona mesa-like formations. The night was chilly up here, and we slept inside a house, but were awakened before dawn by another millet drinking party.

We departed in the early morning, the air still heavy and cool, marching up through the wind fissures in the sandstone and ironstone ranges, past villagers tending terraces of tomatoes and green onions, carrying water in calabashes from a nearby well. We climbed through gorges tangled with morning glory and fragrant with jasmine, past a spring-fed lake in a rock fissure that bloomed with water lilies. As we traversed the top of the escarpment we looked down onto a line of swells out in the Sahel, rolling pinky-gold dunes spiked with spinifex. The day remained overcast, perfect for walking, and we made the next village, Dourou, in a couple of hours.

We rested there, then leaving our bags behind began a hard, precipitous descent of a staircase of boulders and rocks, passing through more mesa-like formations, to the sandy Gondo Plain once more, where, under escort from a throng of "ca va, centfranc?, ca va bonbon?" chanting children, we ended our hike resting in a wicker enclosure out of the sweltering midday heat. A chicken pecking at our feet was grabbed and hustled off, there was a rustle of feathers and a sharp cry. Lunch was on its way.

A calabash of millet beer was handed to me by one of the village men, and even though for some reason this time I wasn't quite sure about it, I was thirsty enough to drink it all down. Later, as we climbed through the upper cliff part of Nombori - another extraordinary site, another Telli, more crazy avenues of conical mud houses - I began to feel that I had seen enough. But perhaps there was something else at play - I experienced a mild queasiness. I thought it might just be the lack of variation in the diet - it felt like we had eaten enough millet and chicken here for several lifetimes. I hoped it was nothing more than that, but from then on I could not help but see the grime encrusting my fingers and nails, noticed the dirt on the children's hands ever extended to shake, noticed every goat, dog, human turd on the path we traversed.

We returned to Dourou in the late afternoon and found a pair of other visitors there. These young men, Quebecois, had just spent three months over the border in Burkina Faso working on the construction of a remote hospital. We conversed as best we could - they had limited English and we found their heavily-accented French difficult. Feeling a little better, later on I played frisbee with them and Moussa.

We played beneath tall, spreading trees on a dusty field in an arid valley below the village. The air was still and golden, swifts darted and circled. The Quebecois were skilled frisbee players, and the four of us formed a big square and threw hard - great, long throws that swooped, curved and dipped in the twilight air. Word spread quickly through the village, and soon all the children, about a hundred of them, had assembled on either side of the valley and atop towering boulders, to watch this strange rite. Some gathered behind each of us, running shouting after each stray throw, tackling one other hard for the disc and the chance to try their own hand. Others stayed up where they were, applauding good catches, falling about laughing when one of us tripped over a dried mud millet-mound and sprawled in the dust.

We played for about an hour, and with each darkening gradation in the pink sky, each fresh nuance of cool in the air and the ever deepening still of the coming night, the game attained a new perfection. None of us wanted it to end, and we continued until all that could be seen in the gathering darkness was the glint of the yellow disc and the white teeth of the children laughing all about.

Despite the hard walking and climbing of the day, and the long game of frisbee, I had little appetite at dinner. We retired early, up to a roof to sleep out under another purple-black, star-filled sky. But later on a wind sprang up, the Hamrattan out of the Sahara, hard and cold and bristling with stinging dust, and we half-froze, tossing sleeplessly all night up on the hard clay roof.

The next morning I had no appetite at all. A feeling of nausea came and went in waves. We were to be picked up that day, and after washing we shouldered our bags and walked out of the village, pursued by most of the children from the night before. The Quebecois asked for a lift back to Mopti, and the five of us stopped and sat on our packs where something of a broken road began, waiting for the car to arrive. I was just beginning to wonder what would happen if it failed to turn up - after all, there was no way of telephoning and requesting another - when we saw a red dust cloud coming up through the stony ranges.

From my book, The Blue Man (Lonely Planet Journeys)

http://www.abebooks.com/9781864500004/Lonely-Planet-Journeys-Blue-Man-186450000X/plp

WALKING THE DOGON COUNTRY

2011-08-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

Our bush taxi crawled along a rocky track beyond the frontier town of Bandiagara. We were journeying into the Sahel at the start of a five-day walking trip through the Pays Dogon, the Dogon Country.

The Dogon People live in a string of villages nestled along the hundred or so kilometres of the Falaise de Bandiagara, a tall sandstone escarpment that drops off into a vast, orange sandy semi-desert called the Gondo Plain. They have no centralised form of government or administration, and some of villages do not even speak the same language, although there is a Dogon lingua franca that can be spoken by all.

The Dogon have spiritual leadership as a people in the form of the hogon, who lives alone high up in the cliffs. They have a complex religious and metaphysical system - as well as a keen interest in astronomy. All these coincide in a rite called the sigui, held every sixty years when the dog star Sirius in Canis Major - the brightest star in the terrestrial sky - appears between two mountain peaks. The ceremony is based on a Dogon belief that three thousand years ago beings from Sirius visited them - cherchez Erik von Daniken.

Fieldwork by French anthopologists in the 1950s and some astronomical diagrams drawn in the sand by the Dogon, led to the theory that somehow the Dogon knew of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, before Western astronomy. The existence of Sirius B was deduced by Western astronomers in the 19th Century because of the irregular behavior of Sirius, but it was not actually photographed until 1970. How the Dogon could have known of the existence of a tiny star light years from earth without the use of telescopes has mystified Western thinkers for a generation. The Dogon themselves say they learnt of Sirius B from the Nommos, a race of reptilian-amphibious aliens who visited them, and whom they call The Teachers. The Dogon also believe there is actually a third star in the Sirius group: this has yet to be confirmed by western astronomy.

The origin of the Dogon as a people is equally intriguing. One Dogon man told me they came from what is now Saudi Arabia, chased all the way across the Sahara by Muslims to their current home in the cliffs where they made their stand, and found a new life. Another theory was that they are the lost crew of the Argo, who intermarried with Africans - or perhaps they are just a lost tribe of Israel. Whatever, they are a singular people, with a quiet determination to hold on to their culture, their values and their way of life. Their villages have no running water, no elecricity, telephone, two-way radio, certainly no television. Here one quits the world wide web.

We went in with Moussa, a guide from Mopti. We had by now come to know him quite well as a courteous, trustworthy and resourceful person. His smile was ever-ready, although his laugh sounded a little stage-managed at times, a practiced, tourist-pleasing "haw-haw-haw". But at just 21 he was one of the most respected guides in Mopti. Everyone we spoke to said, "ah, oui, Moussa - tres bon, tres honet." His two greatest enjoyments seemed to be illuminating the fine points of Dogon culture, and playing frisbee at dusk.

The bush taxi stopped abruptly, and I thought for a moment we had a flat tyre, but Moussa said 'We are here'. I scanned an arid, unprepossessing landscape, and wondered precisely what he meant by "here". We got out and shouldered our packs, and started walking up a steep, boulder strewn path. Gradually a human habitation revealed itself on the crest of the hill, the village of Djijuibombo ("Ji-ji-bombo"). Although Moussa's father was a Bambara living in Bamako, his mother was Dogon, and he had relatives and friends scattered all through the Dogon Country. He was greeted affectionately as we went down meandering alleys of flat-rooved banco houses, and squat mud-brick granaries with thatchrooves of grey millet stalks. We were directed to a courtyard between buildings, and a shelter where we put down our bags. This turned out to be the chief's enclosure. The chief himself was there to greet us, a circumspect man of about forty, dressed in an old brown pinstripe suit jacket and baggy pants. Straw mats were pulled out for us, and we rested out of the sun while children gathered around, watching us curiously.

We were offered warm soft drinks and Flag beer carried in from Bandiagara, and a calabash of the local millet beer, still fermenting. I drank, and found it very bitter but quite palatable, if strangely active. Next lunch was brought out - all food and sleeping arrangements were included in our handwritten, signed contract with Moussa - of braised, freshly-killed chicken and a plastic bucket full of steaming sweet potato, deliciously herbed. This was followed by slabs of watermelon, which we ate as best we could before Moussa nodded to the young children hanging around, and they descended upon the remnants with glee.

After lunch the chief discreetly directed us to a mud-floored room off his enclosure, where we were treated to a Dogon art show - elaborate masks, bronze pendants and ancestral figurines, intricately carved slingshots, and a Dogon "pop-gun" fashioned from a single dried millet stalk and wooden trigger. There was no pressure to buy, but we did purchase one or two bronze figurines.

Moussa next asked if we would like an overview of the village from the roof of the chief's house. The ladder turned out to be a notched pole, extremely challenging for novices such as ourselves - myself in particular, having washed down lunch with a warm Flag beer as well as the calabash of (albeit quite weak) millet beer. From the vantage point Moussa pointed out the various parts of the village - the Muslim quarter, with its tiny banco mosque, the Christian quarter with its equally tiny church, and the Animist quarter, still the biggest despite the incursions of the two exotic religions over recent years. The geographical divisions notwishstanding, everyone got on well in the village, Moussa assured us. If there were problems they were worked out in the togu na, or talking house.

The togu na was where we visited next - a shelter of thick, low roof of millet stalks supported by eight poles carved to represent the eight ancestral figures, four female, four male, of Dogon lore. Here the men spend the day chatting, chewing over problems, and consulting the witch doctor. Although women are excluded, this did not extend to visitors, so we went in together to meet the village's one hundred year old witch doctor. He lounged in the hollow of a boulder, his lean face faceted like a Cubist bronze. Dust adhered to his scrawny legs, arms and leathery feet. He smiled and chatted with us in French as bad as our own, but would not shake our hands. Moussa had warned us about this. He never shook hands with anybody because he did not allow outside influences to enter his body. As we left, Moussa pointed out "fetish points", mounds of dried spilt blood and milk, built up over Dogon generations into sacred "power points" in the earth.

We left the village around mid afternoon, hiking first down a track through arid country past grazing goats and donkeys, until we started to descend into a hard landscape of red rock hills - again reminiscent of Australia - with a horizon-wide vista of the Gondo below, the sandy, tree-scattered plain that extended all the way into Burkina Faso, and beyond.

A group of four teenage boys with big, hand-carved slingshots joined us and scampered on ahead down the warm, rounded plain of stone. We descended a steep staircase of boulders, clambering down into a delightful green gorge, past a cold spring sprouting with ferns. The climb was hard, exacting with a heavy backpack in the sun, and soon I perspired freely. I realised that coming down out of the thousand metre tall Falaise, we had well and truly left the modern world behind. There were no rescue helicopters, certainly not back in Bandiagara or Mopti, perhaps not even in Bamako for all I knew, to come and pick up any injured hikers.

'Do people find the going hard?' I called forward to Moussa.

'Some, yes.'

'Do they ever slip and fall?'

'Sometimes.'

'What happens?'

'I wait. They feel better. We walk again.'

'But what happens if they take a really bad fall, and can't go on?'

'It has never happened.'

'But if it did?'

'It has never happened,' he said. 'I choose my tourists too wisely,' he said, with a grin.

We arrived in the village of Kani-Koboli, where we were to spend our first night. Here we did encounter the influence of the outside world, in that several of the village elders wandered around with 1960s transistor radios strapped around their necks, blasting out music from the single station that could be picked up out here, one in nearby Bankass that played wall-to-wall Dogon music. The radios played on through much of the night, a wild, impassioned talking blues, very loud, while we tried to sleep on straw mats on the hard ground, wrapped against the chill in a pair of Fulani blankets. Around three o'clock we heard drumming from a nearby village and the screams of laughter of children who ran by our walled enclosure, playing almost until dawn. It being just after millet harvest time, we encountered similar revelries all the way through the Dogon Country. Visitors would turn up in a village at three or four in the morning, play music, sit around talking loudly and laughing. If they were animist or Christian, they would drink millet beer, litres of it, and leave after dawn, rollicking homewards.

I got up and wandered out of the enclosure, and watched the first light play in filmy reds and golds high in the sandstone bluffs of the Falaise. The air was soft, the dust beneath my feet powdery fine. All the way to the horizon I saw fields dotted with dry humps like ant nests: these were the mounds from which the millet had been harvested. Women met on the pathway to the well, massive water gourds balanced on their heads, exchanging the highly formal Dogon greetings, chanting back and forth as they wandered off in either direction. The sun's rays probed down, gently warming my face. I basked a few moments, then returned and awoke Kathryn with a cup of boiled water and squeezed fresh lime.

We left the village after breakfast, and hiked in file down a sandy path along the shaded base of the Falaise. Before too long we encountered a tall German, fifty-ish, grey ponytailed, patrician - the first other visitor we had met in the Dogon. Stopping to unscrew his canteen, he noted our guide and mentioned disdainfully that he himself had dispensed with guides many visits ago. He much preferred to travel alone now - it was so much less of a mere tourist experience that way. With that he turned his back and marched on in his Birkenstocks.

When we continued, I mentioned to Moussa that I had thought visits to the region were forbidden without guides. He said this was true, but that this man was a professional, a buyer for ethnic-antique shops back in Germany. He and others like him, Moussa said, had stripped the Dogon granaries of nearly all their precious carved wooden doors, Creation images of the eight Dogon ancestors. The dealers had paid the locals next to nothing for their doors, and sold them back in Europe at vastly inflated prices - cocktail party talking points in Frankfurt, study accessories in Berlin. Now the Dogon granaries had reproduction doors, Moussa said. And thus threatened are all the tribal peoples of the world, threatened with being left with a mere reproduction of their own culture after the ponytail vultures from the ethnic chic boutiques have picked their way through.

End of Part 1. Part 2 next week.

From my book, The Blue Man (Lonely Planet Journeys)

http://www.abebooks.com/9781864500004/Lonely-Planet-Journeys-Blue-Man-186450000X/plp

ROTTEN REVIEWS: A Literary Companion

2011-08-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

assume that every writer has read every word of every review, and will never forgive you

This is my selection of "favourites" from Rotten Reviews: A Literary Companion, ed: Bill Henderson (1987), Robert Hale Ltd, London.

On Euripides

A cliche anthologist... and maker of ragamuffin manikins. (Aristophanes, 411 BCE)

On Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant. (Charlotte Bronte, 1848)

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched workings of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer... is marriageableness... Suicide is more respectable. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1861)

On Ralph Waldo Emerson

A hoary-headed and toothless baboon. (Thomas Carlyle, 1871)

Belongs to that class of gentleman with whom we have no patience whatever - the mystics for mysticism's sake. (Edgar Allen Poe, 1842)

On Edgar Allen Poe

After reading some of Poe's stories one feels a kind of shock to one's modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images. (Leslie Stephen, 1874)

On Ulysses, James Joyce

...a misfire... the book is diffuse. It is brackish, It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky. (Virginia Woolf in her diary)

On To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Her work is poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it. (New York Evening Post)

On Lives of the English Poets, Samuel Johnson

Johnson wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

On Chaucer:

Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible; he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity... (Lord Byron)

On Edward Gibbon

Gibbon's style is detestable; but (it) is not the worst thing about him. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

On Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We cannot name one considerable poem of his that is likely to remain upon the thresh-floor of fame... We fear we shall seem to our children to have been pigmies, indeed, in intellect, since a man as Coleridge would appear great to us! (London Weekly Review, 1828)

On Moby Dick, Herman Melville

This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilised life, and rhapsody run mad... (The Spectator)

On Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire

In a hundred years the histories of French literature will only mention (this work) as a curio. (Emile Zola)

On Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert.

Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer. (Le Figaro)

On Paradise Lost, John Milton

I could never read ten lines together without stumbling at some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the schoolroom, worse than either. (Edward Fitzgerald, 1876)

On Henry James

These people cleared for artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker. (H.G. Wells, 1915)

An idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world. (H.L. Mencken, The American Scene, 1915)

On Youth and Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

It would be useless to pretend that they can be very widely read. (The Guardian, 1902)

On The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

...leaves one with the feeling that the people it describes really do not matter; one is left at the end with nothing to digest. (New York Times)

On Hemingway

It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man. (Max Eastman, New Republic, 1933)

On Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, Of Mice and Men will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists... Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans (Christian) Anderson. (Time)

On The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot

Mr Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior. (New Statesman, 1922)

On Ezra Pound

A village explainer, excellent if you were in a village, but if you were not, not. (Gertrude Stein)

On Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

My dear fellow, I may perhaps be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep. (Marc Humblot, French editor, rejection letter to Proust, 1912)

On Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud

...poorly written, full of repititions, replete with borrowings from unbelievers, and spoiled by the author's atheistic bias and his flimsy psycho-analytic fancies. (Catholic World)

On A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen

It was as though someone had dramatised the cooking of a Sunday dinner. (Clement Scott, Sporting and Dramatic News, 1889)

On The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter

What all this means only Mr Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts or feelings. (The Guardian)

On Hamlet, William Shakespeare

It is a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy... one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. (Voltaire, 1768)

On A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare

The most insipid, ridiculous play I ever saw in my life. (Samuel Pepys, Diary)

On Othello, William Shakespeare

Pure melodrama. There is not a touch of characterisation that goes below the skin. (George Bernard Shaw, 1897)

On Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw

I think Shaw, on the whole, is more bounder than genius... I couldn't get on with Man and Superman: it disgusted me. (Bertrand Russell)

TIMBUKTU

2011-07-31T19:04:00.000-07:00

The taxi sped down a narrow tarred road, its edges lacy with white drifting sand. Ahead was the first line of houses, straw-grey in the sun. We entered a wide sandy boulevard, and continued on until it narrowed and snaked about in the old part of town. Carrying on between shuttered alleys of mud and stone houses, we came to a low, tree-studded hill on the far side and a modern hotel built in the Sudanese style. The grounds were leafy, and there was a central courtyard bordered with flowers and crowned with a towering ghost gum tree.

Timbuktu began humbly around 1,000 years ago as a Tuareg seasonal camp - its name taken from the slave woman the tribes left in charge whenever they went back into the desert. At its zenith in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was a thriving city of 100,000 people, its universities, libraries, judges and doctors famed across the Islamic world. All this came to an abrupt end in 1591 with the arrival of a Moroccan expeditionary force and the establishment of the sea trade routes down the west African coast. Many of the European explorers who attempted to reach it paid with their lives but, by then, the mystique of Timbuktu had gripped the European imagination.

We wandered down the empty, dun-coloured streets in the sun, past cracked old mosques and clustered houses that looked like sets from a cowboy movie but for their carved, Moroccan-style, studded wooden doors. I had half-expected a harsh and unwelcoming atmosphere in this frontier town, but there was no paranoia, no sense of tight security or of watching eyes. The pan-Malian harmony abided and there was a welcome absence of street hustlers and the eternal "ca va cent francs?" begging children. The town felt organic, cellular: it was like strolling inside a spiral seashell. But there was a palpable presence here too, an uncompromising one. Timbuktu retained its power and its secrets, its desert Torah, but this was not revealed, certainly not to the casual visitor anyway. We sleepwalked through the sandy maze while Timbuktu brooded within a hard shell of mud.

We were obliged to register at the police station, where our passports were impressed with the prized "Tombouctou" stamp. Returning to the hotel in the late afternoon, a blue-robed and turbaned Tuareg stood at the bar soliciting camel rides out into the sunset. He was a lean, sun-dried man, and he bargained very hard.

We went with him to the line of sandhills outside the hotel, climbed on the camels, and set off with his two sons leading. Along the way, Mr Ibrahim mentioned how poor the Tuareg people were now, how bad the seasons had been and low the goat numbers, and suggested that for an extra payment the women of the village would sing for us. We negotiated as the camels plodded over the rosy-white Saharan sands, hanging on gamely, our feet cross-braced on the camels' necks.

After a half-hour or so we saw the first signs of a camp up ahead. Boys ranged through the dunes while slender women in blue-black robes carried firewood towards a scattering of tents. Dismounting from the camels - mine bellowing profanities, resolutely refusing to release me - Mr Ibrahim directed us past a dark tent where a woman of 20 or so breastfed a baby, to a semi-enclosure of desert thorns, and invited us to sit on a pair of worn mats in the sand.

While one of his sons prepared us mint tea in a tin pot, the women drifted up - three ancient withered ones, the indigo drained from their robes by age to a flat grey, the younger ones supple, bright-eyed, lashes long, noses aquiline, teeth perfect. Lastly came the young woman who had been breastfeeding, and I realised she was Mr Ibrahim's wife. He himself must have been at least 50.

As the last rays of the sun slanted across the dunes and the moonlight was affirmed, the women silently arranged themselves in a semi-circle. I sipped my tea. The evening was sublimely serene, and the desert felt a wondrous place to be, clean and hospitable.

While Mr Ibrahim refilled our cups, his wife took out a single-stringed instrument and began playing it with a tiny bow, and the Tuareg women clapped in time - but bored, very bored. Subdued, almost embarrassed chanting followed, killing time rather than keeping it. Soon the chanting wavered and started to die away, voice by voice. After all, the rice was on the cooking coals back at their tents, they had children to feed and men to deal with, and they wondered how much longer it would be until they were released from this nightly tourist chore. Even here, in the sands outside Timbuktu, one felt the dead hand of tourism, of culture as fleeting display, heritage as floorshow.

After we went back to the hotel, I wondered how long the Tuareg would be able to go on like this, living in camps on the edge of town, scraping together what they could. I could not work out what was more disturbing - a people whose home is the wide Sahara considering they are "poor" in comparison to the junk-fed worker bees of the industrial world, or the warrior founders of Timbuktu reduced to beggary at its verge.

From my book, The Blue Man (Lonely Planet Journeys)

http://www.abebooks.com/9781864500004/Lonely-Planet-Journeys-Blue-Man-186450000X/plp

THE RED TRICYCLE

2011-07-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

I was robbed two days after we arrived in Senegal. We were in Dakar, crossing the Place d'Independence, a wide and desolate square of battered colonnades, when we were approached by two young men hawking the kind of brass and copper bracelets sold in public spaces the world over. When we responded with "non merci", they pursued us between a pair of parked cars, jostling us as we walked. It was only when we sat down for lunch and I felt for the prescription spectacles in my day-pack that I realised the rear zippered compartment was open, and my glasses were gone. As acts of theft go, it was very petty, and utterly futile. Fitted with lenses crucial to me but useless to anyone else, the only thing the thieves could do was smash out the glass and sell the frames for whatever small amount they might fetch. But it left me with only my sunglasses with my day prescription, and my reading glasses, which were useless beyond two or three metres. Worse, I realised that to claim on my travel insurance I would have to report the incident to the police, and theirs is a rock beneath which one does not readily place one's hand.

Police headquarters was a morose yellow colonial building in a street near the Place. Entering, we were challenged by a tall man in a Chicago Bulls t-shirt, a baseball cap informing us that he loved New York, tight blue jeans and white Reebox. It turned out that he was a senior detective. I explained my problem, and he directed us towards an office upstairs. 'After that you will come back to my office,' he said, 'and give me telephone numbers for girls in Australia.'

The main detective office was crowded and chaotic. Ten teenage boys stood handcuffed together in front of a table covered with official papers, with a heavy black baton as a paperweight. An ample, surly man sat behind the desk, barking orders into a black bakelite telephone. The boys were plainly afraid of him, and cowered in a corner while other detectives in jeans, baseball caps and gym shoes, swaggered about joking and laughing. A dozen car tyres were piled incongruously a corner: I deduced the teenagers were accused of stealing them.

We were told to sit down while the senior officer conducted a fast, angry interrogation of the boys. Their only response was to hang their heads and not dare look up. When his cold eyes jerked my way, I tried to outline the theft as briefly I could, but found myself in difficulty as his questions came rapid-fire in heavily-accented French that stretched my own scratchy French to the limit. All the while the boys shifted about uncomfortably in a clanking of chains. This only heightened the bristling irritation in the big man. After barely a minute listening to me, he wiped his brow, picked up his telephone and started shouting angrily down it. To complicate matters further, three young blond dreadlocked Germans walked in declaring they had been robbed of everything - money, passports, travellers cheques - at machete-point by a gang down on the seafront. The policeman sighed testily, looked at me and the boys in chains, sighed again and said something to one of his junior detectives, who conducted us out into another office.

Here a young man in a short-sleeved business shirt worked with enormous concentration on an old Facit typewriter. He was typing an account being dictated by a woman in a matronly dress and headscarf of the theft of her handbag. It too had been snatched out in the Place, the equivalent of $100 US taken - avery large sum for the average Senegalese. The clerk laboured on conscientiously, stopping every now and with a pained mutter to white out a typographical error. All the while the woman struggled to maintain her composure, the occasional tear escaping nonetheless.

'Excusez-moi,' I said. The clerk looked up and nodded curtly towards a spare seat. I suggested to my girlfriend that she go back to the hotel on the off chance the glasses had been handed in there, while I waited here to give my details. One of the denim detectives watched her go, all the way down the corridor. Then he twirled his baton in the air, and thwacked it hard into his palm before opening a door and disappearing into a side-room. It appeared he was about to interrogate the ten boys further.

The reading glasses I now wore gave proximate things a bizarre, microscopically detailed quality, while all else faded into a background blur. While the woman continued with her account, I peered through bug eyes around the room, at a pair of desks where older men sat. One of them was reading the Koran, mouthing the words. When he finished, he opened a desk drawer, put the book away and promptly took out a disposable razor which he dragged across his face in short, rapid strokes. This completed, he picked up the big office blotter from his desk, flexed it into a funnel, and deposited his shavings in a fine soot-like deposit beneath his desk. Then he lowered his head to his desktop and instantly fell asleep, snoring gently.

The man at the other desk sat engrossed in a French romance novel, oblivious to the angry shouts which now could be clearly heard coming from the adjoining interrogation room. Heavy fist-slapping sounds and pained cries followed.

A trim, neat man in an olive green safari suit and black suede Hush Puppies wandered in and glanced bored around the office. He had one hand behind his back: the other held a cigarette in a studied pose. Seeing the sleeping man, he complained to the one reading the French novel, who appeared to ignore him. The Hush Puppy man drifted on then, trailing a white curl of cigarette smoke.

The moment he had gone, the reader urgently woke the sleeper, and the pair of them quit the room and returned with a pair of beaten-up Facit typewriters. It was then I realised that they, like the young man still labouring over the woman's account in his typewriter carriage, were clerks - only they, perhaps because of seniority, had not until this moment needed to work. Now they rummaged in a rusted filing cabinet for paper and carbons and sat down at their machines, ready to re-type piles of handwritten reports. But they had not got in a single keystroke before two officers in uniform khaki marched in and commandeered both machines and left without a word. The response of the two clerks to this turn of events was for the sleepy one to go back to sleep, and the reader to his French novel.

I was well aware that I was privileged to be witnessing bureaucracy at its finest, and so engrossed had I become in it, that it came as a surprise that I had lost contact with my left leg. As I stamped around to restore circulation, the young clerk peered up apologetically from his page and promised he would be onto my case "within minutes". I decided on a stretch my legs with a stroll.

Out in the corridor, straining my eyes, I could just make out a watchhouse of dark cells below. The barred windows were tiny, and I imagined what it must be like for the men huddled in there, with the rats and roaches. Then my eye was drawn to something on the prison roof, a soft blur of red. Removing my reading glasses and squinting, I could just make out a red child's tricycle, broken and on its side, wheels gone. How had it got up there, I wondered? To whom had it belonged? Had someone tossed it up there in a fit of anger? But my thoughts were interrupted by more shouts, frightened cries, thumps and groans, and realised I was standing right outside the room where the interrogation was going on. The door opened and one of the young cops strode importantly away down the corridor. Not long after, the ten teenage boys emerged, heads down, shackled together two-by-two, a uniformed cop prodding them on with his nightstick. The boys went downstairs, and disappeared into the cells beneath the broken red tricycle. Only a few years before, they might have been riding one like them themselves.

Then, astoundingly, the young clerk was standing before me, announcing that it was time for me to come and detail the account of the crime to which I had been victim. Such a tiny thing, in the scheme of things, that had left me unable to see properly, yet witness so much.

From my book, The Blue Man (Lonely Planet Journeys)

http://www.abebooks.com/9781864500004/Lonely-Planet-Journeys-Blue-Man-186450000X/plp

THE AFRICAN QUEEN

2011-07-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

'The African women, yes, the African women are good. They are very good. Make no bones about it. In screwing they have no peer. Queens of all Creation!'

Eddie the septuagenarian Indian, native of Goa, a functionary of some sort in this commercial travellers rest hotel in East Africa, the gaunt, bespectacled man with the rapid, loping gait that made him resemble no-one more closely than Groucho Marx - Eddie allowed his rheumy brown eyes to wander from our chessboard to his bed, and move slowly over the body of the teenage African girl in the pale blue cotton shift who lay there.

A uniformed waiter appeared in the open doorway and asked something in Swahili. Eddie uttered a sharp response, and the young man was gone.

'The African women,' he continued, 'they know what a man wants. They know it. In their bloody bones they know it. They are trained to it. They learn it in the jungle. The lips, so big, the breasts, behinds, the powerful legs, and the way they can move their hips, the way they can screw, I tell you it is very heaven.'

He was often tempted to play an early queen, especially when he was behind the white pieces, and this night was no exception. My response was almost automatic. I brought out my queen's knight. He looked at it with dismay. 'Oh, oh, oh, oh,' he muttered, 'always, always, always.'

In the background, a taped voice droned on, its high churchy tone both hollowed and hallowed by the inner expanse of the cathedral in which it had been recorded. 'Oh, now this is the very best part,' Eddie smiled gleefully. 'When she gets the words wrong. It's... perfect.'

He breathed the last word out, in a soft, satisfied hush. The girl on the bed, whom I had not seen before, and whose name I did not know, shifted slightly but otherwise seemed happy to lie there while Eddie played chess and listened to the tape he played at this time every evening, of the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in Saint Paul's Cathedral. A small female voice was heard on the tape again, and Eddie threw his head back and laughed as Diana stumbled through Charles's name. 'It's wonderful ! Wonderful!' he exclaimed, eyes glistening.

The waiter reappeared with tea on a tray, and we took a cup each. There was a chilled Sprite for the girl. Eddie withdrew his impulsive queen a square. I pushed a pawn, renewing the threat. 'You always do that! Why do I never learn! You just move out the knight, then the pawn, then the other pawn!' With a flick of his craggy hand he dropped the queen back into the white ranks. 'There, now do your worst.'

We were entering the mid-game. With the queen gambit almost inevitably gone awry, White was undeveloped. I had a good opportunity to take control of the centre with my bishops, but first I brought out the other knight.

'Ah yes, caution, caution, always caution, safety first,' he mocked. He sipped his tea. 'Will you be wanting to accompany me to the temple again tomorrow?'

I paused, recalling our first visit there together a few days previously. The Hindu temple was on the far side of town, and for some reason we went there in the heat of the afternoon, rushing down crowded streets, Eddie agitated, intense, impulsively sweeping stray strands of his yet thick and dark hair back from his damp brow as he strode and Mandy and I battled to keep up.

At the temple other devotees sweltered under a corrugated iron roof, but Eddie dashed around, putting what looked like fast-talking propositions to his favourite deities, and stuffing banknotes in the multi-coloured shrines. It was as if he had half a day in LA to close a movie deal. We stayed perhaps five minutes, then scurried through the afternoon sun back to the hotel. Over chess that night I had asked him what he had asked for at the temple, but his eyes merely sparkled, and a smile suggested itself on his lips.

'So, will you be coming tomorrow?' he repeated now, as my eyes stayed fixed on the board.

'Perhaps I'll see how I feel tomorrow, if you don't mind.'

'Of course. Now where was I? Oh yes, the African women. But let me tell you about the Indian women. The Indian women are the most beautiful women in the world. More beautiful than any women from France or Italy, or America.'

'More beautiful than English women?' I enquired.

'They as well,' he said emphatically, with a small Indian wobble of his head.

'Even more than Princess Diana?' I asked.

His reply came without a beat. 'Oh, well, now, she is the exception. She is the exception because she is the most beautiful woman on earth. She is all softness, all loveliness, perfection, utter perfection. But she is only one woman. There are so many ugly women in England that they pull down the average. If all women were like her, all the men in the world would flock to be in England. So it is just as well that they are not. That would be a disaster, I tell you. Because the only thing the British ever did was invent the one way road system. And ruin India. They are parasites.'

'Then how can you lavish so much adoration on a member of their royal family, the biggest parasites of all?'

'Ssshh,' he hissed. 'She is not a parasite. She is not even a Briton. She is a queen!' He touched the white queen, then looked up into my eyes with a child's mischief in his eyes, seized the piece and triumphantly planted it back in the centre of the board. 'There!'

'Eddie, I'll just have to chase you back with pawns again, or pin you with a bishop, or fork you with a knight.'

He shrugged. 'I know, I know. But I cannot resist it. It is my... what do you call it... fatal flaw.'

The tape ended and the machine clicked itself off as the girl on the bed noisily sucked up the last of the Sprite through her straw.

'Eddie...' she said yawned.

'Go to sleep a little while,' he said. 'I won't be too long now.' He looked up at me and grinned. 'After all, I'm about to lose my queen.' The girl obediently closed her eyes.

'Where did you meet her ?' I asked.

'Up country. Her father asked me to bring her to the city and find her a job, as a favour.'

'Does he know she's living with you in your room?'

'Of course, where else would she be living ? But let me tell you about Indian women.'

I pushed another pawn. He stared down at it, but his mind was elsewhere now. He sat back in his seat, stared up at the ceiling and opened his arms wide, as if surrendering to the Muses.

'Indian women are beautiful. So beautiful. Delicate, like flowers. Their eyes are gentle, the loveliest things in the all the world. Their voices are like music, and they know how to speak to a man, to say all the soft things a man wants to hear. And their kisses! Oh, their kisses! Sweet! Their bodies are elegant, and they dress like queens of all creation. I tell you, each and every one is a princess. If you ever get the chance to marry an Indian girl, an Indian girl from a good family, do it! And cook ! What concoctions they can make out in the kitchen! But there is one thing you must remember one thing about Indian women. They are not cock-suckers. An Indian woman will not suck a man's cock.'

'But, what about the Karma Sutra?' I asked.

'There is no cock-sucking in the Karma Sutra,' he declared.

'But I'm sure there is. And what about Indian erotic art, doesn't that depict fellatio?'

'That is all Chinese! And Japanese! No, an Indian woman will never suck a man's cock! Believe me, I know.'

'So you've been with all the women in India,' I said.

Then Eddie grinned again. 'Only the beautiful ones.'

He retreated his queen. She was down to two squares now, with no chance of being screened by pawns or a bishop. Surveying the board, we both realised the truth. Then his voice was sombre, no longer mocking or provoking, drained of its exuberance. 'Go on now, trap me again. Trap an old man,' he said. 'Do it.'

I advanced a pawn. Again he retreated the white queen, to the last safe square.

'You're just so impulsive Eddie,' I said softly.

'And you're so old,' he said. 'I'm forty years older than you, and you're old. Older than me.' He turned and took in the black girl on the bed, sleeping now. 'Look at her,' he said. 'Their hips, the way they move their bodies, I cannot tell you of the ecstasies I have felt, the visions I have seen, in the embrace of such women.'

'I take it that means she's willing to suck your cock Eddie.'

'Perfectly! Oh, she does it so perfectly! You know, the way some women know what you are feeling and just what to do! She brings me such pleasure, I cannot tell you! And it is a two way thing. That is why she loves me. I bring her ecstasy too. '

'And because you feed her.'

'Goan cuisine. The best in the world. I cook for her, yes. The very best. She is lucky.'

He watched as I placed my fingers on my black squares bishop.

The African girl stirred. Eddie?' she murmured.

My bishop slid up to the white queen, and I picked it up from the board. The wooden piece seemed heavy in my hand. Eddie gazed mournfully upon it.

'Coming my queen', he said.

From my book, The King Neptune Day & Night Club

http://books.google.com/books/about/King_Neptune.html?id=WVX_GwAACAAJ

http://www.biblioz.com/search.php?a=79&i=62954435

THOU DUST

2011-07-13T04:03:00.000-07:00

   THOU DUST


   In the gastropodic grip
   Of an aged hand to a cane,
    And the gargantuan gnaw
      Of an infant gum on rusk,
In the hangdog homes
Humdrumming in the rain,
   Tempus fugit: attic to attic
   Dusk to dusk.

- Larry Buttrose

MUSHROOMS by Sylvia Plath

2011-07-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

View on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J97jDua-TAE

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE: JOHN WILKES BOOTH

2011-06-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

It is a sad irony of history that the man revered as probably the greatest president of the United States was destined to die in circumstances oddly akin to a popular Victorian theatre production. John Wilkes Booth, an actor, shocked America when he murdered Abraham Lincoln in a planned execution-style hit.

Fresh from the triumph of the Civil War in 1865 - the Confederate surrender had come less than a week before - Lincoln was in a private box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington with his wife Mary, watching the hit show Our American Cousin, when Booth entered. Despite the depth of feeling among Southerners against Lincoln, and the obvious danger to him, the presidential box was temporarily unguarded, and Booth placed a derringer pistol to the back of Lincoln’s head and fired a shot.

Amid uproar in the crowded theatre, the assailant mounted the railing and leapt down onto the stage, ran through scenery backstage and out onto the street, and escaped at a gallop on horseback. At the same time, in another act of the conspiracy, the ailing Secretary of State, William Seward, was stabbed in his sickbed by another would-be assassin, although he survived. Lincoln himself lived through the night, but died the following morning, much to the anguish of his people. Less than two weeks later Booth was cornered in a barn in Virginia and shot dead. The other conspirators were executed.

Born in 1809, and raised in a Kentucky log cabin, Lincoln became a self-educated lawyer, reforming politician and president. Lincoln popularly typified emergent America. A stirring orator, he first spoke out against slavery in the 1850s, and his resolve against it became ever firmer and more passionate. He found himself on a collision course with the slave-owning states of the South, which ignited into Civil War soon after his inauguration in 1861. Despite some Confederate successes, the North’s superior wealth, technology and infrastructure made victory virtually inevitable, and by the time of Lincoln’s re-election in 1864, the end loomed for the Confederates. It had hardly formally surrendered when, early on the evening of Good Friday 14 April 1865, Lincoln and his wife set off for Ford’s Theatre.

Although generally viewed as conspiratorial act of revenge by beaten and embittered elements of the South, there are numerous other theories about the assassination, ranging from the possibly plausible to the bizarre.

These include that Vice President (and later President) Andrew Jackson was behind it (Lincoln’s widow believed as much, describing Jackson as a “miserable inebriate”) that it was a conspiracy of bankers opposed to Lincoln’s economic policies, and that it was the Vatican.

These and more have all been raised and investigated in a welter of new books in recent decades, as Lincoln and his death once again became the subject of national fascination for Americans. Inevitably, even more fervid accounts exist online. The most likely explanation remains that while he sat in his seat watching a play on stage, Lincoln was shot in cold blood by an embittered rebel without a cause.

From my book Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths.

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Famous-Deaths-Famus/dp/1741105641/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277516386&sr=8-15

“I believe we must adjourn the meeting to some other place.”

- last words of Scottish economist Adam Smith, died 1790

EXISTENTIALISM

2011-06-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

click on image

view the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wIGDh1-Te8

THE SACK OF ROME

2011-06-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

The world is all a carcass and vanity,

The shadow of a shadow, a play

- Montaigne

While the Eternal City has been sacked by numerous invaders, it is perhaps hard to believe that the last sacking of Rome occurred less than 500 years ago, and at the hands of Christian forces, of the Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1523, two years after the death of Pope Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici) , another Medici would ascend the papal throne. But first there was the brief interregnum of the Dutchman, Adrian of Utrecht. Adrian had been tutor to Charles V during the emperor’s tender years, and the grown-up Charles now used his sizeable leverage in the Conclave of Cardinals to have his old mentor elected pope.

Adrian knew little of the ways of Rome, was found to be rather less than a Renaissance Man, and early in his papacy was judged entirely unsuitable by a number of his peers, ‘...a barbarian who had been horrified at the pagan splendours of the Vatican when he at length arrived there. Barely able to speak Latin, Adrian seemed to believe that the prime duty of the supreme pontiff was to give spiritual guidance and set a Christian example to Christians.’1

This would not do, not for the bon-vivants of Rome. Like Leo before him, Adrian too misread the growing crisis in Germany with the followers of Luther, and suffered setbacks in the ongoing struggle with the Turks, the most serious being the loss of the strategic island of Rhodes in 1522. But more than anything else it was Adrian’s style which rankled with the Roman elite, and following his timely death in 1523, many among the ruling clans of Rome looked forward to a resumption of business as usual. After all, another Medici candidate was present before the cardinals in the person of Giulio de’ Medici, cousin of Leo X, son of Giuliano, and nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Giulio’s accession was not to be in any way as simple as that, however. Allied with the Emperor, he faced the pro-French faction in the conclave, and there were others with old family axes to grind against the Medici. The election dragged on for weeks, and the cardinals were bricked in and put on meagre rations to force a decision. Giulio’s ultimate victory in mid November was seen as a win for the Emperor and Spain over the French, and laid the groundwork for new intrigues which would bedevil Giulio for much of his pontificate.

He took the name Clement VII, and although as a cardinal he had served with some distinction as secretary of state under Leo, virtually from the beginning he was regarded as a well-intentioned but wavering and indecisive pope. The Venetian ambassador at the Vatican at the time, Marco Foscari, sketched him in these terms:

‘The Pope is forty-eight years old and is a sensible man but slow in decision, which explains his irresolution in action. He talks well, he sees everything, but is very timid... He withdraws no benefices and does not give them in simony. He gives away nothing, nor does he bestow the property of others. But he is considered avaricious... people grumble in Rome. He gives largely in alms, but is nevertheless not liked. He is very abstemious, and is a stranger to all luxury. He will not listen to jesters or musicians and never indulges in the chase or any other amusement... His entire pleasure consists in talking to engineers about waterworks.’2

Perhaps it was a hangover from the glory days of Leo, or that simply too much was expected of another Medici. ‘With all his good qualities, Clement was weak, hesitant, and always a little late; and he tried to play the old Italian political game in circumstances which no longer permitted it.’ In the process, Clement ‘made certain of the Protestant schism, and lost England to Rome’.3

This latter observation concerns his refusal to annul the marriage of England’s Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, a matter over which, struggling with the advice of conflicting advisors, he dithered at length. But there was another catastrophe to befall the Church in the time of Clement: the sack of Rome. It may be hard for some to comprehend it now, but less than five centuries ago, Rome and the Vatican, which had survived the depredations of a thousand years of Huns, Vandals, Goths, Visigoths and Saracens, was once again overrun by hostile forces, its people butchered, raped and tortured and its treasures carted off as booty. The difference was this time the invaders could not be characterised as pagan hordes, but were themselves Christians. How that disaster came to pass is the second instalment of the tragic epic of the Emperor, the King, and the Pope.

In late 1524 the French army of Francois I was on the march once more in Italy, intent again upon taking Milan and moving on south to Naples, both with titles to which he considered he had a legal right. Milan fell readily enough, the forces of Emperor Charles V ejected and the French in control. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Clement threw the support of Rome behind Francois, on the undertaking that the French would leave the Papal States alone on their march south to Naples.

But Clement had backed the wrong horse. Rather than resting and re-supplying his forces, emboldened with a first taste of victory Francois pressed his men on, and laid siege to the imperial stronghold of Pavia, some thirty or so kilometres south of Milan. A few weeks after the French took Milan, early on the morning of 24 February 1525, the mightiest armies of Christendom clashed head-on outside the city walls of Pavia, Christian cutting down Christian. In an unremittingly brutal clash of cannon and arquebus, sword and pike, entire French units were outmanoeuvred, surrounded and hacked down to a man by the combined Spanish-German army of the Habsburg Emperor. In spite of their numerical superiority, the forces of Francois were routed, with a number of French nobles falling at the head of their troops. The king himself, his horse shot from beneath him, kept fighting on foot until he was surrounded and taken prisoner on the field sodden with the blood of his men. Francois was conveyed back to Madrid and kept prisoner at Charles’s pleasure. From there he wrote to his mother Louise, “all is lost to me save honour and life, which is safe”.

The other loser on that morning in Pavia was a man safely far to the south of the clashing swords, Clement. For the time being, however, Charles resisted any urge to move south upon Rome and his former ally, but opted to reach terms with Clement in a new treaty. After a year of captivity, Francois secured his release bypledging his solemn word to Charles that he would desist from his territorial ambitions.4

He never had the slightest intention of doing so. Upon his return to Paris, Francois and Clement entered into yet another treaty, the French king blessed with the Pope’s absolution for breaking the vow he had given to Charles. Thus the so-called Holy League of Cognac was formed, with the Pope, France, Venice, Milan and Florence all lined up against the Habsburg emperor: a formidable alliance against a formidable foe.

But Charles faced other, even potentially bigger problems. That same year, 1526, he had to respond to a threat from the east, the Turkish forces of Sulaiman the Magnificent, and for a time it appeared the squabbling between Christian elements would be a serendipitous sideshow to aid the overthrow of Christendom by the Ottoman Muslims. The Christian world received a reprieve, however, when Sulaiman found the supply lines of his advancing troops were overstretched, and was forced to postpone the next critical phase of his western campaign. In doing so, he freed Charles to deal afresh with the French and their allies in Italy.

Pope Clement had continued to dither over which side to take, leading on Francois against Charles and then vice versa, in a bizarre menage a trois which finally cracked the patience of the Emperor. During the winter of 1526 a powerful German force crossed the Alps under the command of seasoned campaigner George Frundsberg, and efforts by Francois failed to halt their advance into Italy. In February 1527, just two years after the Battle of Pavia, another strong Imperial force was assembled in northern Italy, when Frundsberg’s army linked up with a Spanish force under the command of the French turncoat, the Duke of Bourbon. They marched on Rome.

Francois promised Clement more troops: they never came. Clement attempted to muster what Italian forces he could against the approaching horde, but gathered scant support. In a last desperate act he tried to bribe the approaching Spanish-German army, but with its soldiers now straining at the leash at the prospect of the legendary riches awaiting them in Rome, Clement’s offer was met with contempt. At the last, Clement prayed that the ineffable power of his office, as the representative of God on earth and spiritual head of all Christendom, might still deliver him and Rome from their fate, but his prayers too went unheard.

On the spring morning of 6 May 1527, the Eternal City came under assault from its attackers. Unfortunately for the Romans sheltering in their homes from the cannon fire, Frundsberg had recently died from a stroke, and to make matters worse, the Duke of Bourbon lay mortally wounded by a Roman sniper. By the time the pitiable defence was thrust aside, a horde of thousands of underpaid Germans and Spaniards was on the loose within the walls of Rome, and there was no-one of any real authority remaining at their head to prevent the orgy of death and pillage that followed.

The Pope was still on his knees praying as the imperial forces ‘stormed the city and sacked it amid such scenes of violence, murder, rape, looting and destruction that the Sacco di Roma has remained in the European memory even after many still more frightful events. The pope fled to the castle of San Angelo and later to Orvieto... As for the city, the sack was rightly seen at the time as the end of a great age. The Rome of the Renaissance was no more.’5

Drunken soldiers menaced the streets, nuns were raped and priests murdered, palaces and churches pillaged and burned by the hundreds, nobles tortured for ransom and hacked to death if they could not pay. Smoke curled from burnt out buildings and scavenging dogs gnawed at the rotting limbs of the unburied dead. As the days and terrible nights passed, the city was given over to a ghastly carnival of sexual violation and unremitting brutality, anarchy befitting depiction by Bruehgel or Bosch.

‘A mob of soldiers dressed an ass in bishop’s vestments and demanded that a priest should offer it the Host. The man, in last defence of his office, swallowed the wafer himself and was murdered - slowly. Those nuns who were killed after being raped were fortunate, for their sisters were dragged around like animals, to be auctioned off to man after man before finding the relief of death. Luther was proclaimed pope in a mock ceremony. The venerable relics of Rome, the tombs of the popes, were despoiled.’6

It was a hammer blow to the Church of Rome delivered by Spanish and German Christians who considered themselves facing a papal anti-Christ, and who used the unfinished Saint Peter’s basilica as their stables. Although Charles was said to have been horrified at news of the acts perpetrated by his own men, they would nonetheless occupy Rome for the remainder of that terrible year, and after they finally departed it would take Rome decades to begin to recover. The very spirit of Rome had been shattered: ‘After 1527 there was a failure of confidence; and no wonder.’7

1. Chamberlin, R., The Bad Popes, p255: Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, 2003

2. Alberi, E., Le Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato durante il secolo decimosesto, p126, quoted in Chamberlin, R., op cit, p260

3. Elton, G.R., Reformation Europe, p80: Collins, London, 1967

4. Seward, D., Prince of the Renaissance: The Life of Francois I, p151. Francois bartered the freedom of his own sons as hostages in exchange for his release, and they would remain in captivity for four years, until the Treaty of Cambrai in 1529, when their freedom was bought with four and a half tons of gold. Francois threw fistfuls more of it into the streets after signing the treaty and securing the release of his sons, much to the delight of the citizens of Cambrai. Sphere Books, London, 1974

5. ibid, p83

6. Chamberlin, R., op cit, p278

7. Clark. K. Civilisation, p125: Penguin Books, London, 1987

from my book Tales of the Popes: From Eden to El Dorado.
http://www.newholland.com.au/product.php?isbn=9781741106664

Blue Velvet and other (mainly) classics reviewed

2011-06-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

My teenage son Jack is a major film and video afficionado, and so going away on holiday with him usually involves a fair bit of viewing. But this time, with no TV, rainy weather, and a holiday place that turned out to be stacked to the gills with videos, he got through a lot of viewing, much of which I got involved with too, to some degree or other.

Thus I caught a lot of films I had missed over the years, and re-viewed others that I’d liked. Most of them were chosen by my son, so I didn’t get to re-view La Reine Margot, Delicatessen, Cinema Paradiso and a number of other old favourites of mine he simply couldn’t be persuaded to insert into the machine. And there were some, such as Blue Velvet, that I viewed without him.

Blue Velvet ****

In David Lynch’s smalltown masterpiece, Kyle MacLachlan plays Geoffrey, a teenager who finds a severed human ear amid rubbish scattered on a vacant lot near his home. Soon he is drawn into a world of horrifying cruelty and brutality that lies just a scratch beneath the surface of his whitebread American town, in which a club singer (Isabella Rossellini) is being sexually tortured at will by a psychotic hoodlum Frank (Dennis Hopper), who has her son and husband kept hostage. Hopper is as superbly chilling as Rossellini is vulnerable. Lynch’s storytelling is well paced and seamless, all the threads drawn together for a terrific climax and a suitably cheesy denouement. Memorable moments include Geoffrey’s anguished question “Why are there people like Frank?”, Laura Dern’s figure 8 cry of anguish, and Dean Stockwell's campy frill-shirted weirdo, miming Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” on a microphone with a little light inside it, illuminating his every powdered facial crease.

American Beauty ****

One I had missed until now. Initially it appears a la Lolita, but the story detangles into strands that are luminous, compelling and affecting. Kevin Spacey puts in a beautifully layered performance as Lester Burnham, an everyman painted into a corner by life, without love, without sex, without any real joy. His newly ignited desire for the sexy young friend of his teenage daughter unsettles the world around him, including his uptight wife (Annette Bening, in an equally memorable performance), and, tragically for him, his virulently homophobic closet gay neighbour, who mistakes his sense of liberation for something else entirely.

Star Wars ***

The disciples of Joseph Campbell have a lot to answer for in modern cinema. While Campbell's work on the "hero's journey" may be useful as an interpretative tool applied to myth and legend, when it falls into the hands of amateurs (and even worse, auteurs) it can smack of the storytelling equivalent of Arthurian painting by numbers. I remember seeing Star Wars at release in the 1970s - roped in, yes, by all the hoopla - and the feeling that I was perhaps almost the only person in the crowded cinema who found it as tedious and predictable as Disney. Both Lucas and Disney endlessly trumpet the triumph of the individual and the pursuit of dreams, and, in framing the individual at the centre of all things, sprinkle just that much more bullshit fertiliser onto that ever-cosseted parasitic vine, the American Dream. Luke Skywalker’s “hero’s journey”is from callow youth, through his “mentor” to the moment of personal shit when all seems lost, to the ultimate triumph through“The Force” (see: Religious Faith). It’s a fast-paced action adventure shoot-em-down, with stock standard antagonist-attraction love interest (Princess Leia/Carrie Fisher with Han Solo/Harrison Ford) and legendary overtones of good (Obi-Wan in white) and evil (Veder in black), with some good visuals, Wagnerian soundtrack and great sound: it's Prince Valiant as space opera, Flash Gordon with a budget. But those who claim this is some kind of modern myth-making might reflect that real myths grow over millennia, from telling to telling, and are not created by film companies for profit. Myths are the repositories of the experience and wisdom of human communities through history, rather than the brainchild of some superman cine-individual. Viewing this film again, provides evidence that society is indeed “dumbing down”: people loved this stuff 35 years ago .

Battlefield Earth **

Pilloried as borrowing heavily from Star Wars, John Travolta’s Battlefield is a standard sci-fi pic that is nowhere near as bad as the crits it got. It’s not one of the worst films ever made - there is a long list of candidates far more deserving of that title. Those concerned that this big budget rendering of a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is propaganda for his religion (unparenthesised as it is no more or less absurd in its liturgy and beliefs than any other) need not bother themselves. It gets knotted and tangled up in all its own hairy threads and is too complicated and ultimately nonsensical for anyone to extract any “message” from it, though the final image of the caged villain in a vault of the gold bars he murdered so many to get, is nice. Largely innofensive matinee fare, with Travolta as the villain with double cheese.

Starship Troopers **

Another sci-fi pic, this one from a novel by Robert Heinlein, about Earth battling distant worlds inhabited by big nasty insects. There are lots of the de rigueur plastic model spaceships with all the little lights in them, and big blasting sound. There is some attempted characterisation by the cast, but any try at real story is thwarted by the unanswered question of why didn’t Earth just use napalm amd nuclear weapons against the bugs? Or, failing that, bug powder?

Trainspotting ****

This open-throttle assault on the sensibilities of the dormitory class retains its power to confront. A smack-happy holiday in a Scottish hell, it doesn’t relax its grip from the police chase at the top to the doublecross at the end. Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) is a deadshit charmer who beds the schoolgirl, practical jokes the best friend to death, and betrays all those who trust him most, junkie to the end.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest **** 1/2

I missed this screen version of the Kean Keasey novel at the cinema, and somehow had not seen it until now. Jack Nicholson plays a misfit who cons his way off a prison work detail and into a psychiatric unit, where he expects the going to be easier. While it is at first, his growing affection for and loyalty to his fellow patients precipitates a slow motion act of self betrayal and self destruction by a sane man in a world that cannot recognise its own madness, and treats him with unspeakable, callous brutality in the guise of medical treatment. Nicholson is riveting, the film unfolds with a measured pace that allows the truth to dawn (outlawed now in screenwriting) and it never preaches. I was reminded of another cinema classic, Cool Hand Luke.

Pulp Fiction **** 1/2

Holds up (sic) with time. Quentin Tarantino's cut-up, multi-perspective narrative is as cleverly engaging as ever, and the cast members, headed by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, put in almost uniformly fine performances. A homage to Hitchcock and the French New Wave, and criticised at release on the grounds of racist stereotyping and consciously contriving ultra-violence as cool, it has nonetheless attained the deserved status of a bone fide classic. The musical choices are of course impeccable.

Jackie Brown ****

Tarantino’s follow-up again explores the seedy lives of the LA criminal underclass, who seem to spend much of their time in vicious activities such as watching daytime television and smoking bongs. It has fewer (and less graphic) shooting murders than Pulp Fiction - only four this time, by my body count. Tarantino centres this tale of small mean lives on the eponymous Jackie, an airline stewardess in a major pickle. Though disappointing some critics with its more conventional storytelling than Pulp Fiction, it has a satisfyingly complex story and a well drawn central character. Pam Grier as Jackie coolly plays off all sides, pulling all the strings for the film’s shoot-out climax. This, alas, is a tad unbelievable, as Samuel L. Jackson’s gang war seasoned Ordell Robbie, holding a human shield at gunpoint, chooses to walk first into a darkened room where an armed woman he doesn’t trust - Jackie - awaits him... and is duly gunned down by the cops.

Pleasantville *** 1/2

An enchanting minor classic, about what happens when a teenage brother and sister are magically transported from the here and now into a vintage black and white TV show Pleasantville that the brother (Tobey Maguire) loves. The presence of the real world teenagers in Pleasantville starts a chain reaction that gradually eats away at the traditional 50s American values of the bland TV series and its unidimensional characters, introducing such perils as sex, art and literature. The film is distinguished by the radiant presence of Joan Allen, who plays the teenagers’ mother in Pleasantville. In a touching and ironic scene, she learns the facts of life from her own children, leading to her exploration of her erotic self, at the climax of which she flushes into full colour, and a tree bursts into flame in the picture perfect, white picket fenced garden. As the 50s facade crumbles, and more of the black and white characters come to experience genuine emotion and take on colour, the town fathers organise as vigilantes, and violence erupts. There are ironic overtones to fascism in the book burnings and the banning of art and music deemed “decadent”, and to segregation, with shops putting “No Coloureds”signs in their windows. A high concept that works, by writer/producer/director Gary Ross.

The Stepford Wives **

A mad scientist (Glenn Close) turned estate agent (well, we always knew that, didn’t we) creates a closed community in Connecticut where wives are medically “made over” to idealised visions of 50s American women, as brainlessly pretty, sexually compliant, obedient Betty Drapers without the shotgun. Each husband has his wife’s own personal remote control, with her name written on it in copperplate script. Close, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken all try their darndest with this high concept that does not work. Credibility disappears down its tractor-sized story holes, leaving little but a vapid commentary on the battle of the sexes.

South Park movie **

Poo-bum meets fart joke in this piss-take of “moral” America. A satire in incomprehensible voices to nasty show tunes for the goldfish generation.

Austen Powers **

Mike Meyers’ spoof on James Bond grew from this wobbly beginning into that terminal Hollywood condition, the franchise. There’s no doubt about Meyers’ talent - he wrote the script as well as starred - but the joke is thoroughly milked from early on in this very first one. The films that followed were better and enjoyed more success, but in the end it was all just more of same.

The Party **** 1/2

This classic comedy is hilarious from the opening sequence, a slice of 60s America glimpsed through the eyes of a hapless yet essentially decent and nice Indian actor (Peter Sellers). Blake Edwards oversaw a film which retains its comedic power no matter how many times it’s seen, and hasn’t dated. Along with Doctor Strangelove, it is perhaps Sellers’ finest work for the screen.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being *** 1/2

Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche feature in this 80s adaptation of Kundera's novel, set against the Czech "Prague Spring" of 1968, a peaceful uprising against Soviet rule brutally smashed by tanks and troops. Lewis plays a young doctor highly attractive to women, and equipped with the signature line "take off your clothes". Nowadays he would be labelled a "sex addict", that ugly notion that seeks to create a medical problem out of human sexual attraction, and the latest upwelling of American Puritan sentiment. He gets involved in a love triangle with his innocent and vulnerable wife (Binoche) and a freethinking liberatarian artist, and the film finely balances the struggle for liberty against tconstraints of authority on the individual and mass level, in a young man's pursuit of happily married monogamous love amid a smorgasbord of earthly delights.

OCCASIONALLY

2011-06-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

OCCASIONALLY

I never knew the reason why

The evening and the dew

Never saw a dragon fly

Until I’d seen a few

It’s a wonder that I ever have

The smarts to lace my shoe

When suddenly I’m thinking

Of always calling you

Occasionally I do

Mulligatawny stew

Occasionally I do

How about you?

Sometimes you find you’re whistling

A tune that you abhor

Sometimes it’s like the midnight knock

Fondling at your door

Sometimes it’s like the key of life

Is jingling on your ring

Sometimes it’s all just sweet sweet peas

Germinating

Occasionally I view
A sky that’s tending blue
Occasionally I view
The view

And there’s the thought

That strikes me hard

I lost the game

But won the card

‘Twas on a whim

‘Twas to a wit

I don’t know why

I got bit

Occasionally I do
Autumnal hues accrue
Occasionally I do
Winter too

Occasionally I do

Mulligatawny stew

Occasionally I do

Rhubarb too

- Larry Buttrose

SPIRITUAL VALUES

2011-05-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

RABBIT REDUX

2011-05-15T19:46:00.000-07:00

If it has not already done so, the Gillard Labor Government is reaching that point of no-return in the polls, which, barring a Bligh-esque miracle, inevitably leads to terminal decline.

As it is, Ms Gillard’s government is only surviving due to the possibly surprising good physical health of the Labor side, and the grace of two rural independents whom it would seem harbour a deeper fear and loathing for the National Party than for their own probable political oblivion.

That grab-bag of agrarian socialists - led in waiting by a bar-room brawler straight from the pages of that other Joyce - are ever happy to bellyache about the difficulties of the life their voters have chosen, are the first with the bowl out for public money when it suits them and yet of course are also the first to howl for cuts to welfare for the poorest and most vulnerable in our community, the urban poor, who do not even have the teensiest little farm to hock if things get too hard.

The Liberal leader, and Prime Minister in waiting, is a man whose single and sole purpose - like every Liberal leader - is the wresting and exercise of the power of our highest office. He has no interest in issues such as human-caused global warming, the science about which he, Cardinal Pell, Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt and other climate experts, profess the deepest scepticism, against the views of the 97% of published climate scientists.

Nor does he believe that Australians should get any more in mining royalties from the once-off gouging of our soils by multinational corporations: no, far better, he feels, to send the profits where they rightly belong, to other corporations, and rich stockholders around the world.

But in all probability, he will become our next prime minister. Why? Is he an especially effective leader? Is he doing something astounding in the job, wrong-footing the government at all times?

No, he has simply isolated a few issues on which he thinks he can win, and bangs on relentlessly about them: asylum seekers, carbon tax and mining tax. Does he have any passionate personal views on these issues? No. None at all. But he is beating the government because he understands the Australian people better than Labor. When did he last mention health, education, in any meaningful way? They are not issues he can win on, and so he has no interest in them. And the people, it seems, have forgotten them too, despite what they will tell pollsters.

While beaten politicians religiously praise the wisdom of the Australian people in ousting them - and Julia Gillard may well be next in mouthing the cliché - Tony Abbott understands that the Australian people are not at all wise, but rather are more herd creatures, easily driven by fear, confusion, suspicion of scientists and intellectuals, and motivated by exactly the same thing he is, which is naked self interest rather than any silly woolly-headed notions like national or global good.

He gets that about the Australian people. And they like it. He also understands that while they are not racists of some KKK-like definition, they don’t like change and different faces, especially the grey electorate, and so can be exploited in a cruel, vicious and cynical campaign against the tiny fraction of people who attempt to reach our shores by boat - war refugees often from wars of invasion we ourselves had a hand in starting.

He knows too that Australians would prefer to keep giving welfare to millionaires than look at any sane dividing line about who is eligible. He knows what is most precious them is their McMansions, private schools and SUVs. He knows they told pollsters some time ago they were deeply worried about the climate change than will impact so terribly on future generations and would pay more to alleviate it, but he knew that was really a lot of bullshit, and that when it came to paying anything at all for it, they’d squeal like stuck pigs and reneg on the whole thing.

He knows the essential self-centredness of contemporary Australians far better than Labor. Which is why, barring a miracle, he will defeat Julia Gillard, and possibly sooner rather than later.

THE SHARK ARM MAN

2011-05-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

The mystery of Australia’s so-called “Shark Arm Man” began with high drama on Anzac Day, 25 April 1935, when a monster 3.5 metre tiger shark which had been caught a few days before off Sydney and was being displayed to the public at the seaside Coogee Aquarium Baths, disgorged a human arm. The macabre discovery would lead police and detectives on a bizarre ride through Sydney’s underworld, in a tale many have commented would sit more easily in the pages of fiction than of fact.

The arm which the horrified spectators saw leave the shark’s mouth bore a distinctive tattoo, of two boxers shaping up to fight, and banner newspaper headlines followed. When the limb was examined by doctors, it was found not to have been bitten off by any shark, but crudely hacked off with a blade. With public interest in the case mounting unabated, it wasn’t long before a number came forward with information leading police to the conclusion that the tattooed arm belonged to a man called James Smith.

Smith was a known small-time figure in Sydney’s flourishing underworld of the 1930s. A former boxer and illegal SP bookmaker, he had been a familiar sight in the bars of Sydney pubs. He was also known to be a police informer. It’s believed he had been involved in a large-scale attempted maritime insurance scam, but when he unwisely attempted to blackmail his criminal associates over it he signed his own death warrant.

Suspicion settled upon two men: Smith’s employer Reginald Holmes, and a criminal associate of Smith’s, John Patrick Brady. On the basis of circumstantial evidence - such as Brady’s landlord saying that at the time of Smith’s disappearance Brady had scrubbed the walls and floors of his cottage clean, and that a metal trunk and certain heavy objects had gone missing then - Brady was taken into custody, but police were well short of conclusive evidence against him.

The spotlight shifted to Holmes in a sequence of extraordinary events. Holmes ran a successful boat building business in Lavender Bay, and was known as a speedboat enthusiast, but he is now also thought to have used his small fast boats for more nefarious ends, such as smuggling in cigarettes and other contraband, as well as cocaine, from ships standing offshore.

A month after the arm was discovered, water police pursued a speedboat manoeuvring erratically on Sydney Harbour. Holmes was found at the wheel, his head bleeding from a seemingly self-inflicted bullet wound in a failed suicide attempt. Under questioning from police, Holmes revealed that soon after Smith’s disappearance Brady had arrived at his home carrying a bag from which he had produced Smith’s tattooed arm, saying if he didn’t do what he was told he’d end up the same way. Holmes’s wife Inie Parker-Holmes also spoke to police, telling them her husband had told her Brady had said he had murdered Smith, chopped up the body and placed it into a trunk which he had dumped out at sea.

On the night of 11 June 1935, only hours before he was due to appear as the star witness at Smith’s inquest, Holmes was found slumped over dead at the wheel of his car in Sydney’s Dawes Point docklands. The three bullets found in the back of his head had been fired at close range, in an execution-style killing. With Holmes dead and the absence of Smith’s body to help provide conclusive evidence even that a murder had taken place, the Crown case against Brady failed, and he walked away from his subsequent trial a free man. Two well known identities from Sydney’s waterfront were later charged with Smith’s murder, and also acquitted.

While for many years the question remained as to who murdered Holmes, with Brady held in police custody at the time he was shot, prominent law expert Professor Alex Castles later provided the extraordinary opinion that Holmes had arranged the killing himself. “In the afternoon before his death, Holmes went to his bank, took out 500 pounds and arranged for the 500 pounds to be paid to the hitman who was then told he had to kill Holmes that night to make sure that Holmes wouldn’t have to make an appearance at the Coroner’s Court in the morning.” Professor Castles also expressed the view that Smith’s most likely killer was a Sydney criminal called Eddie Weyman, whom Smith in his role as an informer had “dobbed in” to police.

One can only speculate about what Holmes could possibly have feared more than three bullets in the back of the head. As a coda, the last link with the main players in the mystery, Homles’s wife Inie, died in a fire at her home in November 1952, which while not closing the case entirely did effectively end a chapter of Australian criminal history.

From my book Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths.

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Famous-Deaths-Famus/dp/1741105641/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277516386&sr=8-15

THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF BOGLE AND CHANDLER

2011-05-03T16:54:00.000-07:00

Doctor Gilbert Bogle and Mrs Margaret Chandler died in circumstances which have remained the topic of speculation and public fascination in Australia for more than four decades. The pair died in an apparent lovers’ tryst on a river bank in Sydney early on New Year’s Day 1963.

The New Zealand-born Bogle was a scientist of international repute, a physicist working on lasers for the government research body, the CSIRO. He was a popular figure in scientific and intellectual circles in Sydney at the time. Not only was he highly successful in his work - he was about to take his wife and family to the United States, where he would be working at the prestigious Bell Telephone Laboratories - he exuded charisma, played the jazz clarinet, and had a reputation as a ladies man.

Margaret Chandler was the young wife of a CSIRO technician, Geoffrey Chandler. She met Bogle at a Christmas party in late December, and he ensured she and her husband were invited to a friends’ home for New Year’s Eve. Bogle offered Mrs Chandler a lift home, and they left the party together as dawn approached. They stopped off at a lovers haunt a few kilometres away, on the bank of the Lane Cove River, but little is known about what happened next.

Their bodies were discovered a few hours later by two boys looking for lost golf balls from the adjoining course, and police rushed to the scene. Almost immediately the police and press realised they were dealing with something major, and very out of the ordinary. Not only was Bogle a well known figure in the more rarified echelons of Sydney society, but he had been found with a married woman, both of them in a state of partial undress suggesting sexual activity. Moreover, no obvious cause of the deaths could be found. They was no sign of any gunshot or stabbing: the bodies were virtually unmarked. Sydney and the entire nation were scandalised by the revelations. The inquest created enormous attention (and newspaper sales), yet at its conclusion the coroner was forced to bring in an open finding. A cast-iron alibi for Mrs Chandler’s husband - the prime suspect - removed him from suspicion, and exhaustive testing failed to detect any toxic substances in either body. There the case rested, over time attaining the status of a mystery.

What did come out during the decades after was that Bogle was doing work which might well have brought him to the attention of various spying agencies such as the CIA or the KGB. The laser he was working on developmentally in 1962 was in use in smart bombs in Vietnam by the end of the decade. There is also the possibility that Bogle was conducting his own inquiries into the death of his friend Cliff Dalton, head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, whose wife Catherine maintained he had been killed “without hardware”.

There were suggestions too that Bogle might have been involved in the development of laser anti-satellite weaponry, although a veteran reporter, perhaps tellingly for the yellow press of the era, recently claimed that was concocted by newshounds keen to keep the story going. Whatever the case, there remains the suspicion in many quarters that there is more to the story than Sixties free love gone wrong, and that Doctor Bogle and Mrs Chandler may have been victims of Cold War intrigue. There is also an explanation, aired in a 2006 TV documentary, that the pair died from noxious hydrogen sulphide gas exuded by the river, but for some this raised as many questions as it answered. After all, if such lethal gas leaks were occurring from the river bed, why were Bogle and Chandler the only two ever known to be affected, in an area known as a lovers' lane? The case would seem yet to be closed.

From my book Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths.

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Famous-Deaths-Famus/dp/1741105641/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277516386&sr=8-15

THE WISDOM OF THE AGES

2011-04-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

THE MEDICI AND THE MURDER IN THE DUOMO

2011-04-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

How passing fair is youth,

Forever fleeting away.

- Lorenzo de’ Medici

On Easter Sunday in 1478, the good burghers of Florence gathered in the Duomo, the splendid cathedral which sits at the heart of their equally splendid city, to celebrate the traditional High Mass marking the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ from his tomb. Amid the hundreds crowding the pews that day were the young Medici brothers, Lorenzo, not yet thirty years of age and ruler of Florence, and his brother Giuliano. Among the other worshippers in the Duomo was a priest named Francesco de’ Pazzi, who intended to lead the assassinations of the brothers in a coup d’etat to end Medici rule of the Florentine Republic. Before the sun set that day, the River Arno ran red with the blood of the dead.

Francesco’s family the Pazzi had grievances against the Medici going back generations, to when Giovanni de’ Medici, the great grandfather of Lorenzo and Giuliano and founder of the banking dynasty, had imposed taxes on the rich to the benefit of the poor. The move had predictably made Giovanni de’ Medici popular on the street but detested in the halls of the aristocracy. Since then the Pazzi had watched the seemingly irrevocable rise of the House of Medici, through Cosimo (“The Wise”) and his son Piero, to Lorenzo. The young Lorenzo was a popular ruler, gifted and outgoing, able to handle himself in a joust, but also composed lyrical poetry and songs. In other words, he was just the man to make Pazzi blood boil.

Although the Pazzi had long nursed the ambition of bringing down the Medici, it was via the scheming of a pope, Sixtus IV, that they almost achieved their aim, although in truth the Pope played the Pazzi for a patsy. Sixtus IV was born Francesco della Rovere, into humble circumstances near Savona, in Liguria. He joined the Franciscan Order and ascended the ranks to become its head in 1464, and a cardinal three years later. He was elected pope in 1471, and promptly addressed himself to temporal problems by dispatching a fleet against the Turks at Smyrna, an assault which failed dismally. In addition to his public works - he is remembered as an energetic engineer of roads, bridges and aqueducts - Sixtus IV joined a long line of papal nepotists. He installed his relatives into key Church positions while scheming with them to expand the Papal States, but the now infamous Pazzi Conspiracy became his most notorious scheme.

The plot was hatched between the Pope’s nephew Girolamo Riario, and Francesco de’ Pazzi, then in self-imposed exile from Florence, after the two young men met in Rome. The plan approved by Sixtus was to overthrow the Medici and turn the prized Florentine republic into a papal fiefdom under Girolamo, effectively annexing it to the Papal States. The scheme was agreed to by Jacopo, head of the House of Pazzi. It appealed to the Pazzis on many counts, especially in humiliating the insufferable Medici, but for Sixtus it promised a massive boost to his coffers. Florence was a commercial dynamo, grown rich on the fabric trade, and banking. After decades under the Medici, among the most powerful banking families in Europe, Florence was literally stuffed with riches in gold and jewels, fabrics and furnishings, artworks and rare and treasured books.

To Sixtus, it was a fat plum ripe on the branch, but it was well fortified and defended. Through the Pazzi, with their long-standing grievances and aristocratic pretensions, he glimpsed a means to take the city-state from within, in a coup: the Pazzi were just the men to pluck the plum for him.

The plotters saw their first opportunity to strike at a banquet given by Lorenzo on 25 April 1478, at his villa in the hills of Fiesole just outside Florence, but because Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano was ill and unable to attend, the plan was postponed until the next day, Easter Sunday. Even then it was uncertain whether Giuliano would be able to attend, but being a red letter day in the Christian calendar, special arrangements were made to get him there.

Francesco de’ Pazzi took his place in the pew behind the two Medici brothers, and gripped the dagger concealed in his priestly garb. He had chosen the dramatic high-point in the Mass as his moment to strike, and when the officiating cardinal raised the Sacred Host high, the bells rang and the congregation all bowed their heads, he leaping forward and thrust his dagger into the unsuspecting Giuliano, following up the first strike with a furious assault until the young man lay mortally wounded on the marble floor of the cathedral, bleeding from twenty stab-wounds. Lorenzo had been also been attacked by Francesco’s accomplices, but here the murderous coup went awry. Although injured and bleeding from a serious stab-wound to the neck, Lorenzo managed to fend off his would-be assassins and escape with his supporters to safety.

By this time the Duomo was in uproar and confusion, with Giuliano lying dead, others including Francesco bleeding from wounds, and the gentlewomen of Florence weeping over their fallen menfolk while the fight raged on around them. The chaos soon spread to the streets and piazzas as the extent of the conspiracy became apparent.

As planned, an ally of the Pope and the Pazzi, Archbishop Salviati of Pisa, had tried to take control of the government, believing the two Medici brothers successfully murdered. But as word got out that Lorenzo had survived, the people turned upon Salviati and hanged him from a window of the Palace. The Pazzi clan then attempted to take control of the streets by force of arms, trying to rally the people to their cause with a cry of “Liberty!”, but they received scant support, and confronted by a throng of citizens loyal to the Medici and the republic, took flight.

In the bloodbath that followed, more than two hundred members of the Pazzi, Papal allies and others even conceivably connected with the plot, were killed, including Jacopo, head of the House of Pazzi, whose mutilated corpse was dragged through the streets. Francesco Pazzi, killer of Giuliano Medici, finished up at the end of a rope beside Archbishop Salviati. Other members of the Pazzi clan were beheaded. The man who stood to gain most from the coup, Sixtus IV, was the only conspirator to escape its collapse virtually unscathed. But instead of any penitence for the plot and the loss of life, and in spite of irrefutable evidence linking him with it, the pontiff went on the attack.

‘Infuriated by the failure of the plot, the Pope demanded that Lorenzo surrender and that the Florentine government answer before an ecclesiastical court... The sovereigns of Europe sided with the Medici; the Pope excommunicated the Florentine state; the Florentine clergy outlawed him in turn; the Pope declared war.’1

Hostilities failed to amount to much after the declaration, however, largely because the Pope had a much more pressing threat to deal with a Turkish incursion in southern Italy.

The Pazzi conspiracy did have an abiding effect on Rome in one respect however, through the murdered Giuliano de’ Medici. As was the custom with young nobles, he had been liberally sewing his wild oats, and a pretty young Florentine girl had borne him a son named Giulio. Grief-stricken over the death of his brother, Lorenzo was determined to locate the infant, illegitimate or not.

‘It was not a difficult task in a city of a hundred thousand people; nor had the girl been at pains to conceal the illustrious parentage of her child. She made no difficulties about passing her son over to the lord of Florence and Lorenzo brought up the child as his own.’2

Chastened and more vigilant after the failed plot, Lorenzo lived another decade and half, becoming a statesman and patron of the arts. ‘The lover of art and letters more than maintained the fame of his family - he increased it by his boundless liberality. Under his enlightened lead Florence became the mother of arts and the cultural capital of Italy, imitated but unsurpassed by other states. He set the pace, the other princes were compelled to compete; but he was the highest bidder for the services of scholars and artists and carried off the all the prizes for the glory of Florence and the greater glory of the Medici.’3

He became known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, his time followed by two Medici popes, Lorenzo’s own son Giovanni, who would become Leo X, and Giulio, the illegitimate son of Giuliano, who would become Pope Clement VII.

As for Sixtus IV, he lasted six years after the failed plot, built the Sistine Chapel which bears his name, became a patron of artists such as Botticelli - who among others painted frescoes for the Sistine walls - condemned the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, and even established a refuge for orphans. But it is for his attempted bloody coup against the Medici, and his Chapel, that he is most remembered.

1. Roeder, R. in Plumb, J.H. (ed), Renaissance Profiles, p63, Harper Torchbook, New York City, 1965

2. Chamberlin, R., The Bad Popes, p254, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, 2003

3. Roeder, R. op cit, p65

How Bad Were the Borgias Really?

http://larrybuttrose.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-bad-were-borgias-really.html

from my book, Tales of the Popes: From Eden to El Dorado.

http://www.newholland.com.au/product.php?isbn=9781741106664

DISCURSIVE

2011-04-10T22:01:00.000-07:00