Lord Malcolm

I just had a call from Artist Andy: Lord Malcolm discharged himself from hospital, where he had been since 7 April, but it isn’t working out and it seems he will have to return tomorrow. This does not sound good.

Sirdan, meanwhile, is in St Vincents: not too serious, and he should be OK to go home today or tomorrow he thinks. I am meeting him later and we may have a beer at the Green Park.

Dumbed down syllabuses?

Yes, I do accept “syllabuses” as an English plural these days, but you may have “syllabi” if you prefer… See Ask Oxford.

There is some good discussion on education happening on Mikey’s Blog at the moment, particularly on whether the Science courses in schools have been “dumbed down.” Do check the comments there as well. Great to see such thinking in a teacher-to-be.

And now Mikey has gone and written a follow-up entry. I note too he seems to have invented a rather good word in his other entry today: “My bestmate Sarge and I tottled down to uni for the Shute Shield Woods-Uni game yesterday…” I like it: kind of toddled mixed with tottered. Was that the idea?

Would you believe Mikey has just posted Teaching Science III? Go and read them all if you are at all interested in education. It’s great stuff.

Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

The first I heard of Mario Vargas Llosa was in the early 1980s when I met Netherlands-based Australian novelist Rowan Hewison, at that time in Sydney for a year; Vargas Llosa was something of a literary patron of Rowan. I read the hilarious Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) and loved it. Last year I read The Feast of the Goat, one of my best reads of 2005.

Last week (courtesy of Surry Hills Library) I read Death in the Andes (1996): that somewhat informal review gives you a good idea of what it is about, though the reviewer, an American student, is alarmingly ill-informed about Peruvian revolutionary politics. This issue of New Internationalist addresses that very well indeed.

The (Biblical) Book of Daniel

I have been reading Daniel lately, and a great story it is, even if self-evidently a work of fiction. Nothing wrong with that; fiction can be inspired. Daniel is about as reliable as “history” as Hamlet or Macbeth — slightly less so, perhaps.

Of course it is and has long been a happy hunting ground for millennialists and sectarians of all kinds. A pity, that. If ever there were a case for “context is all”, this is one.

Blood and Oil by Michael Klare (Hamish Hamilton 2004)

Now $14.95 at the remainder shops, and well worth buying. As this reader says:

Blood and Oil is a great book as an introductory piece to the energy and military troubles of United States foreign policy vis-à-vis the petroleum industry. It is a great source of information for individuals whose area of study is the energy sector, as well as individuals concentrating in the petroleum sector. The book is easy to read and the organization of information is appropriate for the book’s flow. One may find the last two chapters to be particularly thought provoking, thus craving more details than the book provides. Overall, the book is well written and is easy to follow by either experts or novices to the topic.

Such panoptic texts are essential. One can follow the day-to-day saga if one chooses by following many of the sites listed on the right here, but one can also, I fear, be driven a little mad by this incessant parade of dishonesty and incompetence. One needs a perspective. Books such as Klare’s give one that.

J S Mill 200 years on

Prospect has a very good article on John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty everyone should read: it is not all that hard to read.

…On Liberty also addresses freedom of thought and discussion in terms that remain instructive. His view is that progress depends on truth, that the truth is most likely to emerge from a constant collision of opinions, and that freedom of speech is necessary to generate such collisions. There are three essential components to his argument that free discussion is truth-generative. First, any opinion may be true, no matter how eccentric it seems at first, and so to suppress it is to slow the march of knowledge. Second, few opinions contain the whole truth, while many contain a “portion” of it—and only by bringing them into contact and conflict can any approximation of the whole truth be constructed. In an echo of Coleridge, he declares that usually “conflicting doctrines, instead being one true and the other false, share the truth between them.” Third, even if a received doctrine happens to be true, it becomes less vitally so unless subjected to open critique: “both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.” (He certainly would have opposed the jailing of David Irving.)

Mill insists that religion should be subject to the same criticism as any other system of thought, regardless of the offence caused. I think we can be confident that Mill would be disappointed by the progress made on this issue in the last century and a half, and by the regress of the last half decade. He certainly anticipated those who wanted to turn only “intemperate” expressions of religious criticism into crimes. Mill gave no ground, pointing out that serious offence is taken “whenever the attack is telling and powerful.” There is no doubt where he would stand on the current debates on religious hatred, or on publication of the cartoons of Muhammad.

There are weaknesses in Mill’s free speech arguments, of course. It is not clear, as Bernard Williams pointed out in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, that an absolutely free exchange of opinion is indeed the surest route to the production of truth, or its dissemination. But Mill’s case has considerable force in the contemporary debates about speech crimes. And it is all the stronger for its reliance on instrumental outcomes rather than on “human rights” grounds. I am not at all sure that I have a “right” to freedom of speech, but I am absolutely clear that it is to the detriment of us all if I am denied it…

Courtesy of The Arts & Letters Daily. “His unquenchable optimism is attractive to the hopeful young but often fails to survive mature scepticism,” notes Richard Reeves in that article, but better to err on the side of hope, don’t you think?

My past catches up

Got this email.

Hi Neil,

I was a former student of yours at Sydney Boys High. Perhaps you still remember my name. I certainly remember most of the stories you told us in English class, e.g. the fellow you met as a child named ‘Rear Admiral Sir Leighton Bracegirdle’. I also remember your recital of Caedmon’s hymn with proper old English pronunciation.

To cut a long story short, I am now working as a Computer Systems Engineer in the city and I am still in the office. I decided to do what I do whenever I am bored - an unclaimed money search.

Do you by any chance have ‘Thomas’ as a middle name? If so, the NSW Office of State Revenue has $76.80 of your money. Even if it’s not you, it should mean something that I thought of you when thinking of people to look up.

Indeed it does; but my middle name is not Thomas. Thanks, V.L. This sort of thing happens from time to time.

And look what intellectual stuff I taught in class, even if at that time — it was during John Howard’s first term — the reactionaries were bleating about dumbed-down syllabuses just as much as they do today! Pests.

Oh, and I didn’t meet the Rear Admiral: he spoke to us at a school assembly, possibly for Anzac Day.

In the city seeing my brother off

It was a bit complicated getting to King Street Wharf as the city was still sealed off pretty much for Anzac Day. The bus deposited me near St James Church, not exactly close, but I got there in time after negotiating Martin Place which was full of people in kilts and/or playing bagpipes. Some Scottish regiment having a remembrance ceremony.

After seeing my brother off, I walked back to Circular Quay via the historic Argyle Cut (see pic) where you may still make out the occasional broad arrow left by the convict roadbuilders.

There will be some family pics to show you soon, I believe.

Two Australian poems of World War II

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of my favourite poets. “The Company of Lovers” was written during World War II and I think captures the feel of the time as many lovers were separated by the war. It is not one of her better known poems.

We meet and part now over all the world;
we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night, forget
the night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all away
for this one thing, one only,
remembering that in the narrow grave
we shall be lonely.

Death marshals up his armies round us now.
Their footsteps crowd too near.
Lock your warm hand above the chilling heart
and for a time I live without my fear.
Grope in the night to find me and embrace,
for the dark preludes of the drums begin,
and round us round the company of lovers,
death draws his cordons in.

On the other hand, the following poem by Kenneth Slessor is — or used to be — very well known.

Anzac Day

I respect Anzac Day and still remember quite vivid flashes from the first Anzac March I ever saw, which must have been 1949, only four years after the end of World War II.

Last night, or early this morning, having been woken by neighbours, I heard a most interesting program on Radio National: The Music of Gallipoli presented by Jan Wositsky: songs from the Australian, Turkish, and Maori traditions. It began with that classic song by Eric Bogle, “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” (with delightful irony that link takes you to a German site.)

Wolves in sheep’s clothing on an extremist Islamic mission

Miranda Devine is not entirely inaccurate in her picture of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Sydney. Again The Mine gets a bit of unwelcome publicity: “Banned in Britain, Germany, Holland, Russia, and much of the Muslim world, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) has been invited to speak at Sydney Boys High at least twice, and often addresses students at Sydney University.”

Just last month I wrote about this on Blogspot. It seems appropriate to recycle that entry here today.

Happy Birthday to the Queen of Australia

While I don’t see her family holding that office for much longer, I still have a strong sentimental attachment to Elizabeth II. After all, I once won an award from this mob…

Reactionary myth-makers and education

The Prime Minister, John Howard, joined the national debate about the syllabus this week, saying it had been “dumbed down” and describing the literature taught in schools as “rubbish”.

Don Carter, English inspector for the Board of Studies, said Mr Howard’s comments did not relate to the NSW syllabus, which had a strong basis in the classics. He said the candidacy in the advanced English course was 37 per cent higher than it was in 2001.

That is at the bottom of an otherwise interesting story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, English teachers shy away from novel approaches. God I am sick of that reactionary mantra, utterly sick of it, because in the case of the NSW HSC English Syllabus it is patently false. John Howard and I both sat for the Leaving Certificate in the 1950s, and I am sure we both got an “A” at least in English doing a course far less demanding in both thought and content than the current top level English (”Advanced”) course, the only fair comparison, as the majority of the current HSC candidature would have been anywhere but in school in John’s day and mine. They would have been in apprenticeships, or working in all those clerical and manufacturing jobs which no longer exist in our brave new globalised world. Go to my “Education” tag for more, or visit my English and ESL Pages.

Classics: Books for Life

Classics: Books For Life by Jane Gleeson-White (Sydney, Knopf, 2005) is now on sale at the remainder shops for $14.95 instead of an outrageous $44.95. I picked up a copy yesterday. As Patrick Cullen writes in the linked review:

Italo Calvino’s 1981 essay ‘Why Read the Classics?’ offered 14 definitions for what constitutes ‘a classic’ and these definitions are wonderfully perceptive and varied. “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading…’.” Some of Calvino’s other definitions extend on earlier definitions: “A Classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading,” or when read for the first time “gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.”…

…As she introduces Classics: Books for Life, Jane Gleeson-White acknowledges the subjectivity of the pursuit: “We all have our own favourite classics, book about which we are passionate, that become ‘our’ books and help us to define who we are.” …Sufficient description is provided of each of the [62] books to enable a reader unfamiliar with the author’s work to feel as though they are at least a little closer to understanding why the book may be a classic. Gleeson-White’s choices are generally corroborated by lists submitted by Australian and internatinal authors including Luke Davies, Charlotte Wood and Tim Winton, American Don DeLillo, South African J.M Coetzee, and Englishwoman J.K Rowling.

It is all quite unpretentious when compared with Bloom’s The Western Canon, say — and to judge from this, Bloom seems to have become quite batty lately; I accept that some books are clearly better than others, but also accept that canon-making is a minefield. “The canon” has shifted radically over the centuries; three centuries back it was still argued that no work in English could compare with The Classics of Greece and Rome. See Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books.

What is in your personal canon? I’ve put my own eccentric list on a separate page (see link in the right hand column) and invite you to add your choices via the comments here. Should be fun.

Spare a thought for Fairy Meadow

I spent most of the 1970s in and around Wollongong and taught some of that time at a school whose postal address was Fairy Meadow. I spent perhaps too much time at the Cabbage Tree Hotel, generally known as the Cabbage Patch, on Princes Highway Fairy Meadow. And there were some very butch men in there, I can tell you. I suspect young Peter (see the pic on the link) was not even born then: a shame really.

All this silliness is because Today Tonight trotted out a cliched piece on “political correctness gone mad” tonight, always a good filler between dodgy builders, diets, and consumer rip-offs. Apparently “Sea World on the Gold Coast has decided the name fairy penguins could cause offence to the gay community so now it is now calling them little penguins.”