2010 recycle: The juvenile conservative

Jul29

Tom Switzer may be forgiven for not knowing much about the arrival of Vietnamese boat people in Australia as he was hardly out of nappies at the time. But yes, Tom, there were boats, and Malcolm Fraser really did welcome them, just as Bob Ellis told you on ABC News 24 tonight. So, Tom, “Not by boat!”, as you so confidently stated, is really not quite the way it was.

True, Fraser went even further and organised flights for a whole lot more of them, and the far Left were totally unimpressed at the arrival of all these anti-Communist fascist “slopes” being treated so well. It was another time, you see.

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Vietnamese boat people in Darwin Harbour in 1977

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Temps perdu–Whitfield’s, not Proust’s–1 — 20th century

Jul27

The first thing to come my way was a special edition of Aero Magazine.

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Now I need to refer you to Closely watched planes 1 and About the Whitfields: loss in my “Specials” archive.

14390 Cpl. Whitfield J. N.
Group 833
RAAF
Pacific
16-2-45

My Darling Wife

I came to work this morning thinking it was just another day, another hot steaming day, after a terrific thunderstorm last night. About nine o’clock a chap came in with some demands that had to be attended to and on dating them the realisation struck me, this was no ordinary day to me, but a very special one, the anniversary of the day when I made my very bestest pal in all the world mine for keeps, for worse or better…

Thus begins a letter from Port Moresby reproduced on the second of those two pages.

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One of my father’s wartime photos

Sadly many more have been lost over the years

Now I am not absolutely sure which squadron my father was in, or if as a “carpenter-rigger” – so described in his discharge papers – who appears to have been involved in salvaging bent aircraft – I have seen a file of correspondence with the higher-ups in the RAAF my father was engaged in, including some recommendations of his that seem to have been adopted – he was attached to several. His discharge papers don’t say. One thing I do know is that he rather specialised in Kittyhawks. 82 Squadron seems a possibility.

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So I was drawn to a photo in that copy of Aero.

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Now the more I look at the guy in the cockpit the more convinced I am that it is my father!

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I guess I will never be sure.

The same issue has this photo of someone I once met and talked with for an hour or more: Richard Cresswell. As I mentioned in “Closely Watched Planes”:

I met Wing Commander Cresswell — as he became — purely by chance one night at the Sydney Intercontinental Hotel in 1988 and had quite a long conversation with him; but that’s another story.

78S

ace

Australia’s Amateur Hour/Got Talent 2012

Jul26

There is no doubt that AGT didn’t attract the following it did last year, but even so last night’s Big Decider – the spectacular during which the winner is announced – was a very good show.

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And the winner:

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After illness forced him to leave chart-topping 90’s R&B group CDB in the 90’s, AGT was singer/songwriter Andrew’s last chance to try and resurrect his music dreams and the opportunity to share his catalogue of original songs with the nation. Tonight he proved victorious with a symbolic welcome back to the industry, topping the public vote and triumphing over Tasmanian country band, The Wolfe Brothers.

Andrew was overwhelmed by the result “It was just an amazing moment. This is all a dream… I feel amazing. It’s just such a beautiful way for it to come to an end and in a way it’s actually a new beginning.”

Andrew paid tribute to runners up The Wolfe Brothers saying, “I was so happy to be up there with those guys, I have much so respect for them. It’s real music as well, so for both of us to be up there together is incredible and such a positive achievement for original Australian music.”

UPDATE: On Andrew De Silva.

As a song writer, live performer and a session musician, Andrew De Silva is constantly busy. In the hard to penetrate local music industry De Silva’s vocal diversity is an in-demand asset that has seen him work with some of the biggest names of the Aus music landscape, across various genres and projects. This, along with his command of the guitar and bass guitar has served to cement De Silva’s reputation as an all-round musician. Whether it’s playing bass on stage for Guy Sebastian or providing vocals as part of the in-house band on Australia’s Got Talent, De Silva’s resume includes performance work across most areas of the entertainment industry. – 2011

See also his own website.

We have become bored with the talent shows, opines today’s Sydney Morning Herald. The Australian version of The Voice, having garnered almost constant publicity during its run, seems to have been the exception. Poor old AGT12 had hardly any publicity at all this year.

The talent show is in fact a venerable genre.

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That’s Terry Dear in 1956 on Channel 9 in the TV version of a long-running radio show, Australia’s Amateur Hour. Click on the image and you will see some remarkable footage of Channel 9 1956-7, with The Amateur Hour snippet at 4:35.

We liked our announcers posh and British-sounding in those days, even on commercial radio – though as the Channel Nine footage shows the late 50s represent a transition perhaps. What follows is a 1952 radio Amateur Hour featuring a guy who went on to become a legend in country music circles.

The program was very popular during the war years. During this time radio became an important form of communication and entertainment as people largely stayed at home and there were blackouts. Over time the show had three comperes: the last of these, George Alexander Dear (known as Terry) described the impact the show had during the war years:

When Sammy Dobbs, the great power-that-was at Lever Bros, started up Amateur Hour, he first got Harry Dearth to do it, and he was very good indeed. Then when he joined up, Dick Fair took over and carried it through the war years. That’s when the show got its tremendous popularity. People couldn’t go out; there were blackouts and no street lights and since everybody stayed at home, the radio was the best means of communication. Amateur Hour wasn’t just made in Sydney. It was broadcast from all over Australia. So if a listener heard Dick saying, ‘Good evening, this is Amateur Hour from Cairns in Queensland’, this was real glamour. It was also comforting: the show was still there and still going on, even when the Japs came into the war and people were afraid Australia might be invaded. Dick left he show in 1950, and that’s when I took over. When I did, we were at show number 423 or something like that, and when I finished ten years later we had done something like 930 shows. I was there the longest of the three of us.

The Amateur Hour audience was invited to ring in and vote on the best act. There was a switch board of 10-15 ‘girls’ supplied by Lever Brothers taking down votes. People could also write in. Sometimes people would phone in 50 or 60 votes from a pub for one act. The phone ‘girls’ judged by the background noise whether to accept the votes. Amateur Hour compere Terry Dear describes the tabulation system:

We had a switchboard of ten to fifteen girls supplied by Lever Brothers, taking down votes, or people could write in. There were many ways they could vote, and we sometimes had colossal totals. Sometimes people would ring with a huge number of votes for one act. We wouldn’t know how many people were putting them in, but if there was a lot of background noise, we could assume that they were in a pub. If they put in, say fifty-seven votes, we accepted them. The Amateur Hour organisation was very good, believe me.

The show kept a register as a theatre agent, and would provide performers from the show. Performers such as Bobby Limb, Donald Smith and Rolf Harris appeared on the show, and got work that way.

And Johnny O’Keefe, it appears.

Proust: visiting a demented relative?

Jul25

I refer to the opinion of Germaine Greer:

If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.

In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, as Proust’s "novel" is variously titled in English, is widely touted as one of the favourite books of the 20th century, second only to The Lord of the Rings. Fans of Tolkien can certainly handle a marathon read, as can Harry Potter addicts; but whether they have stayed the distance with Proust seems to me highly doubtful.

But I have to confess getting into my seventieth year now while remaining to this point a Proust Virgin! Thanks to eBooks (Adelaide University) I now have the whole thing – free — on computer and Kobo. Yesterday I took the plunge.

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Sample:

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

I think I am hooked. And one virtue, for me, of the eReader is that the Himalayas I am now ascending seem less daunting somehow screen by screen. Why, I am 20% through Swann’s Way already!

And even if the interviewer seems to be stoned:

There is a very handy cheat page in Wikipedia.

Critical reception

In Search of Lost Time is considered the definitive modern novel by many scholars. It has had a profound effect on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group. "Oh if I could write like that!" marveled Virginia Woolf in 1922…

Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century."  Vladimir Nabokov, in a 1965 interview, named the greatest prose works of the 20th century as, in order, "Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Biely‘s Petersburg, and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time." J. Peder Zane’s book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, collates 125 "top 10 greatest books of all time" lists by prominent living writers; In Search of Lost Time places eighth. In the 1960s, Swedish literary critic Bengt Holmqvist dubbed the novel "at once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the ‘nouveau roman’", indicating the sixties vogue of new, experimental French prose but also, by extension, other post-war attempts to fuse different planes of location, temporality and fragmented consciousness within the same novel. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has called it his favorite book.

Proust’s influence (in parody) is seen in Evelyn Waugh‘s A Handful of Dust (1934), in which Chapter 1 is entitled "Du Côté de Chez Beaver" and Chapter 6 "Du Côté de Chez Tod." Waugh did not like Proust: in letters to Nancy Mitford in 1948, he wrote, "I am reading Proust for the first time …and am surprised to find him a mental defective" and later, "I still think [Proust] insane…the structure must be sane & that is raving.")

Since the publication in 1992 of a revised English translation by The Modern Library, based on a new definitive French edition (1987–89), interest in Proust’s novel in the English-speaking world has increased. Two substantial new biographies have appeared in English, by Edmund White and William C. Carter, and at least two books about the experience of reading Proust have appeared by Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose…

E-books and editing–opportunity and hazard

Jul23

Way back in the last century when word processing was hot new technology I knew nothing about I became a footnote in Australian literature – but I did learn a thing or two about publishing and editing. As I wrote back then:

AFTERWORD TO NEOS 1

If you have enjoyed this first issue of Neos as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you, then our aims are achieved. We have had to select from material at hand; we hope you, our readers, will become contributors, widening the range on which we can draw. Yet we have been able to give you, in this initial sample, work in whose quality we believe…

We do not have rigid preconceptions concerning what and how you should write. But if we were to offer advice, it might be that of Ezra Pound*:

Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Go in fear of abstractions… Use either no ornament or good ornament… If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush… the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, … if a man use “symbols” he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.

Advice we aim at; we do not always succeed.

Second, expect to discover things as you write: that is the joy of writing, as Australian poet Robert Gray observed in Island Magazine (June 7 1981):

All those details [in the poem "Telling the Beads"] which sound as if they’re the record of an experience I’ve had of walking into a garden in the morning are things that actually I never knew I’d observed, and when I sat down with a white sheet of paper those things came into my mind like a new experience. They’d obviously been things I’d encountered somewhere, in some form, but then I really saw them for the first time on the white page as I wrote, which is one of the reasons one enjoys writing so much.

Third, revise what you’ve written. Of this Robert Gray said:

I keep the drafts, and I just trust to my response to know if and where I’ve overworked it, but usually I haven’t. To me, to write well is to have the exact word. It’s absolutely essential to choose only the words that are appropriate and nothing else… I just try to always work for the feeling of clarity… I think if you’re going to say something, if you’re going to open your mouth at all, you have to be prepared to really examine and define and refine what you’re talking about until you get it right.

If then we decide to use your work, you may get from us some suggestions for further revision. This is not meant to discourage you. Rather, see us not as “experts” (which we’re not) but as your writing partners, dedicated to bringing out as well as possible what you want to say.

* Charles Norman (ed), Poets on Poetry, NY, Collier 1962, pp 320-333. John Hawke reminded me of Pound’s important statement. Robert Gray became a regular reader, I might add, and a keen supporter.

And later on I found myself editing – at his request, mind – Frank Moorhouse and then Rob and I found ourselves editing – virtually rewriting a sentence or two – Les Murray. Why? Because even truly accomplished writers — if in a hurry as were both, I suspect, doing guest pieces for us – can nod off. “Les Murray is Australia’s leading poet and one of the greatest contemporary poets writing in English. His work has been published in ten languages.”

So what happens with eBooks?  One prompt for this post was The Diary in today’s Sydney Morning Herald.

WITH THE E-BOOK PHENOMENON

MAINSTREAM publishing houses are colonising new territory in the next stage of an e-book revolution that is changing not only how we read, but what we read, forever, The Guardian reports. After the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, which started out as an e-book series posted on a fan site by its author E L James, and which has become the world’s fastest-selling book, publishers are circling the thriving online platforms serving unpublished writers. Last week Pearson, the owner of Penguin Books, bought one of the biggest grassroots publishers, the American company Author Solutions, for £74 million ($111 million). The idea is that Pearson will no longer have to rely on spotting e-book successes early on; instead, they will own a new author’s work from the first moment it appears online. Last week the Glaswegian crime writer Denise Mina said she believed e-books would soon radically alter the publishing industry. After receiving a British crime novel of the year award for The End of the Wasp Season, she said: ”Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market’s changing so fundamentally because of Kindle and electronic publishing … It’s going to change the sorts of stories that we hear, which is amazing.”

So we all know the potential even if we really have no idea yet where this will all end up. And of course the opportunities for young – and not-so-young—writers are just mind-blowing. What would Neos look like today? Well, go to Smashwords and you will find out: there are quite a few journals, some of them excellent, available there free! And some of them are edited – by which I mean the copy has passed before human eyes and informed brains before you get to see it. Sadly, however, there are plenty of cases where this doesn’t happen.

Writing isn’t easy and no writer, bloggers excepted perhaps, inflicts first drafts on his or her readers. Most writers would rather no-one except themselves and their editors ever saw their first drafts, let alone publish them. And yes, this is a first draft though it will get edited if I spot something really wrong with it. But then this is a blog, not a properly published piece of writing.

Sometimes the lack of editing leads to absurdities like these, from a book I am now reading.

“This belonged to my granddad” said George, “your great-grandfather. He was fighting the Japanese over in the Pacific during the war. When he died he passed the medal over to his son, my Father passed it down to me on my eightieth birthday. I was saving it for your eightieth. But being that you’re already on the way to become a man, I’ve decided to give it to you now. I hope you like it. This became a lucky charm for me. It helped me through many hard times, I can tell you. I hope that it will help you in the same way it helped me”

Context makes clear that should be “eighteenth” and a good editor and/or proof reader would have spotted this in a trice. And one more:

Ross’ room was jam-packed with cupboard boxes.

Oh the curse of the spell-checker! I will let you work that out.

If such things were infrequent I wouldn’t really complain, as I am not all that much of a pedant. Trouble is some published eBooks are so littered with such solecisms and worse – mangled sentences are worse—that one really does start to choke on what one is reading.

Now my two examples are from a good young writer from England – potentially a very good writer indeed. So apologies, really, to Nathan Davey (b. 1993).

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Nathan Davey

He has two books out there: Dust in the Wind and Aaron Connor.   Of these Aaron Connor is far and away the better. On Dust in the Wind I agree with a very thoughtful review on Amazon:

Ok… the good, the bad, the confusing…

The good: Ross and his friend Beth are truly nice kids. Their dialogue and interaction in the beginning of the book is very realistic and rather heartwarming… you can actually relive the nervousness of your first date and your first kiss.

Ross’s feelings for his family – especially his little sister. The emotional trauma and feelings that Ross goes through while trying to rescue his family, his reactions to what he sees "above" and his memories of better times before the nuclear bomb hit LA.

The secondary characters: General Gardner, Nick Beat, and how they meet Ross and Beth and the ties that are formed.

The bad: Maybe "bad" is a harsh word – instead, let’s call it "breaking out our inner child and suspending all belief" that the government could actually build an entire underground city and more importantly, would have enough moving vans and "helpers" to load everyone’s entire household on the same day and then convoy it down to their identical houses (and streets) below…

In my opinion, the author is truly talented – I just think he needs to pick a target age group and write consistently for that age. And, based on what I read, he would be successful at whatever that targeted age group would be.

I would still recommend this book and look forward to reading more from the author as I feel he is truly talented!

I think he is truly talented too, and Aaron Connor shows this, though even there I just don’t buy the ending… The nearer Davey writes to his experience and his genuine concerns, the better he is.

I have a little secret to tell you about Teachers. They don’t care about you. The only reason they want your grades to be high is to make the school look good. They don’t give a toss about your well being or about your future. To them it’s just a job, which is a bugger as their job should be helping you get a job. Of course, like everything these days, money always comes first doesn’t it? When will we all learn that it’s just paper? Life’s too short to be worrying about little pieces of green paper!

I mean, Teachers are dicks aren’t they? I can’t imagine why these people, who are meant to determine our future, could be such horrible people. Every Teacher I’ve ever come across has been a patronising, horrid, vile, smoke stinking, whiskey swilling, pompous, stuck up and arrogant old psychopath! They find joy in making you feel insignificant.

If you’re bullied, they don’t do anything useful to stop it. All they do is “have a word with them” which makes the bullies beat you up even harder for snitching. I bet there are good Teachers out there somewhere, it’s just a shame that I had all the nutters.

I and Teachers have never gotten along. Do you really want to know why? Because they blamed me for everything! If anything anti-social happened at the school, it always seemed that the finger was pointed at me, whether I was involved in the event or not. I never did stuff like that, but that didn’t stop the Teachers from assuming that I was the guilty one.

Just because of how you look or act they make assumptions about you. It’s so contradictory, as they spend entire assemblies going on and on about treating everyone as equals, when they themselves are the most judgemental sods I’ve ever known! If they smell cigarette smoke on the playground, they search for the first bloke in a hoodie they can find and punish them accordingly. No evidence, no jury, no plead for innocence just straight forward punishment. It was like being stuck in a George Orwell book!

Mr Bertgill was the worst of those judgemental horrors. I wasn’t particularly smart. That’s all there was to it. It wasn’t that I didn’t pay attention in class because I bloody well did. I took notes and asked questions and everything. The information just didn’t go into my little brain box. It went into one ear and then buggered off out the other.

That didn’t matter though. Mr Bertgill uses my dress code and background to create his own story in his head. In his head I’m a delinquent who disturbs classes, talks back to Teachers and plays games on his phone during lessons. He believes that I’m not even bothering to learn but that’s not true! I want a future as much as anybody!

There are some great chapters set in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival. Given that the Youth Theatre Group Davey has been associated with was there in a production not a million miles from the one described – well, one hopes there is a strong dash of poetic licence happening…

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From an actual Youth Theatre production in Edinburgh in 2009

based on this

The children were dressed in striped uniforms. Their hair was completely shaven, the hair they had before must have been wigs of some sort. They were marching in a lined procession up the street, led by several boys dressed as Nazis. The boys dressed as Nazis were goose-stepping and had their hands rose in a Hitler salute. At the back of the procession were two people, who were holding up large banners brandishing the swastika. Joe was at the back as well, holding an amplifier which was plugged into his MP3 player. From the MP3 player, Joe was playing Adolf Hitler’s Rally Speeches at full blast. The man with the monk haircut was whipping the young actors with a fake rubber whip, while singing the German national anthem.

The one thing that Joe hadn’t counted on, was a large group of German students and tourists being on the Royal Mile that day. If they had done this on a day in which the street was occupied by British people alone, all they would have got was a fair amount of tutting. Instead they got a massive backlash of hatred from the crowd.

One German man with a grey beard came out of the crowd, grabbed the amplifier from Joe’s hands and smashed it over his head. Joe went tumbling to the ground, as bits of broken plastic fell all over the cobblestone street. There was a massive cheer from the crowd.

Even though I shouldn’t have done, I smiled at the sight of it. Serves you right I thought, you insensitive bastard!

Interesting to see what Davey has been reading. (Amazing thing, this Internet!) There is something there I may follow up on myself.  Russell Brand.

So what of eBooks then?  I am rather glad to have had the opportunity to read a very promising writer fifty years younger than myself who lives on the other side of the planet. Not before eBooks would this have happened so readily. Still, I do wonder where editors, proof-readers and publishers will end up – and whether there may be a considerable loss there in the world of writing, or quality writing.