New Year Blog Resolutions

1. Write less.

2. Write about what I know. It is a commonplace of writing teaching that one should write about one’s own backyard. An example of that advice:

I have a muse and essentially her name is Oregon. My stories take place there. Fiction grows out of place. Always keep your eyes open, understand where you grew up. Write about your own backyard, the place you know best.

On the other hand, Elizabeth George wrote:

Next movie in mind…

After yesterday’s good experience with Happy Feet, we plan to see The Queen, which The Empress, something of a royal buff, has seen and praises highly. Dorothy McRae-McMahon, who isn’t a royalist, also praises it highly. We thought of going to the wheelchair-friendly Fox Studios on Tuesday but reflecting on the fact the Fifth Test will be on at the SCG next door we decided to postpone. Looking forward to it though.

Next Sunday is Keating the Musical at the Belvoir.

Next Day and Next Year!

We may see The Queen on Tuesday at another theatre not far from the hospice. Lord Malcolm went out again with Sirdan on Sunday and is mastering wheelchair navigation. That man is just so amazing!

Outcome

Do see Happy Feet

Lord Malcolm wanted to see it and we managed to do it. 🙂

For us this New Year is especially poignant; after all Lord Malcolm knows it will be his last. That is not big on the world scene, but not everything important is.

Amazing technology

I must say The word from on high: we’re drying up fast impressed me when I read about it this morning.

SATELLITES have been used to map all of Australia’s fresh water for the first time, and the picture is bleak. In just three years, the continent has suffered a net loss of 46 cubic kilometres of fresh water – enough to fill Sydney Harbour more than 90 times.

Initial results of an extraordinary international satellite project provide yet another indication that Australia is drying out.

Don’t talk about the (um) “occupation”

Just had a look at the God’s Politics (Jim Wallis) blog.

Sharing a poem

Let me share a favourite of mine: Robert Graves, “The Cool Web”. If one is to accept Richard Tarnas’s admittedly schematic account of Romanticism versus Enlightenment in Chapter VI of The Passion of the Western Mind, I tend towards the Romantics, aware of the danger, as the end of this poem suggests. I suspect my (heretical) religious views are of a piece with this. Some day I may write a post on “Why 21st Century People of Faith Must Be Heretics or Die”… This may be sooner than you think. “The Cool Web” resonates with postmodernism too, which would obviously not have occurred to Robert Graves.