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

Too many steps in that theatre, and Malcolm was not quite so well today. Sirdan and I took him to Woolworths again: his request. I write about him, let me repeat, in admiration of his spirit. I am sure I would not do as well as he does in his circumstances. In the past year I have got to know him better than ever before, and it has been a privilege. He is a rare human being.

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.

Based on current consumption patterns of about 1.5 billion litres a day, the water lost could have quenched Sydney’s thirst for more than 80 years.

The discovery has been made using two US and German satellites designed to map all the world’s water stocks - a task never before possible.

Launched by a Russian rocket in 2002, GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, involves two identical craft circling 220 kilometres apart, 485 kilometres up. By repeatedly plotting variations in the tug of earth’s gravity, GRACE can estimate changes in the mass of the water below. “Even water in aquifers,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine. It also measures water in river basins and reservoirs.

That is alarming news, too, though there is insufficient long-term data from this source for any confident extrapolations to be made from it, and it is obvious that causes are not addressed either. But what a neat application of science!

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

Just had a look at the God’s Politics (Jim Wallis) blog. Jeff Halper: The Occupation is the Issue is particularly interesting. “Jeff Halper is the coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), based in Jerusalem.”

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.

For those who do care

Sirdan took Lord Malcolm back to the hospice yesterday. I’m going there today; so is Sirdan. Things are not looking good.

Broader related issue

Just received this from Planet Out:

President Bush’s ambitious AIDS-fighting program in poor countries has pushed so hard for fast results that basic record keeping and accountability often went by the wayside, making it hard to judge the true success, according to government audits and officials. Investigators found the 3-year-old, $15-billion program has overcounted and undercounted thousands of patients it helped or was unable to verify claims of success by local groups that took U.S. money to prevent the spread of disease or care for AIDS victims and their children…

Later

A display of humanity and warmth…

Updates 28/29 December and an expanded final comment.

…not to mention generosity of spirit, humility, and all that marks this fine example to the rest of the human race. Yes, you read it first on the blog that will reform the universe!

And here was I thinking his blog was back on track. I honestly don’t know why he bothered to expose his meanness of spirit quite so nakedly. After all, I haven’t mentioned him lately, not until now. You need not expect further mentions.

Anyone who will mock an actual dying man who has served this country in several capacities is beneath contempt in my book, and I suspect I would not be alone in making that call, not to mention the gracelessness of trivialising other people dear to me whom he has never met. That dying man is an actual example of “the aids victims, etc, all things I thought were worthy of highlighting” — but some people prefer their compassion to be displayed towards groups and abstractions, the further away the better, don’t they, rather than confront the pain in three dimensions in a hospital ward or a hospice? God forbid if a real person with Stage 4 AIDS ever crossed his path.

Another Surry Hills Library DVD: Dating the Enemy (1996)

Australian company Animal Logic is famous at the moment for the movie Happy Feet, which I have not yet seen. A project they were associated with ten years ago was Dating the Enemy, directed by Megan Simpson Huberman, starring Guy Pearce and Claudia Karvan. I have to confess I knew nothing of this film when I borrowed the DVD from the library, and it is fair to say it doesn’t have an enormous internet presence.

There is a good page (even if most of the links have died) on ComedyDownUnder.com, a site “run and updated by a single person. My name is Dominica Malcolm (formerly Corless). I started this web site in 1999 when I was fifteen and in year eleven at high school.” Pretty good site too.

The synopsis I found on the WebSPIRS database reads, “A romantic comedy about a couple that wake up one morning to find themselves in each other’s bodies. The message of the film is quite simple - wouldn’t it be great if men could understand women’s lives from a woman’s point of view, and women could understand men’s lives from a man’s point of view. Guy Pearce from Priscilla is featured.”

I found the second half of the movie better than the first, but it was rather enjoyable. Guy Pearce is brilliant in it, especially when he “becomes” a woman. There are some very funny situations and a better than average level of social satire. I found it much more appealing than the run-of-the-mill American situation comedy.

Very Sydney.

He did make it through Christmas…

Some of you will recall how I doubted he would.

I saw Lord Malcolm today. Sirdan saw him yesterday, and The Empress, he tells me, saw him last Friday. Lord Malcolm did not remember that last one today, saying he hadn’t seen The Empress for two weeks: part of the condition as the virus is working in the brain. His recent revival was the effect of transfusions, among other things. He is too far gone for any but palliative measures, as the drug cocktails, all of them, stopped working some time ago.

So it really is a matter of time. The hospital are talking of sending him back to the hospice. Lord Malcolm is not too keen on that, as people die over there. He talked today for the first time of not going home. I told him that just a week or two ago I had thought he wouldn’t make Christmas. “Neither did I,” he said.

Sunset over Sydney: photo by Brian de Alwis (Canada). Click on the image to see it in all its glory on his site.

So we set our eyes on a short-term goal. Will we get to Keating the Musical (taxi and wheelchair) on 7th January? We’re working on it. I think I need to talk to Dorothy.

A multicultural Surry Hills morning

It’s Boxing Day here in Surry Hills. “Boxing Day is a holiday of peculiarly British origin, but in most years it falls on the same day as the Feast of St. Stephen (St. Stephen’s Day - 26th December).” Well, it always is the day after Christmas, even if the actual public holiday might move a little. For example, if the 26th falls on a Saturday or Sunday, then a long weekend would happen. What Boxing Day means to most Australians is the fourth Test Match in Melbourne and the start of the epic Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race.

So I slept in this morning, in this flat where I would not be if it were not for my Shanghainese friend M. I go down to the Indian newsagent and buy the Sydney Morning Herald, then go to the coffee shop on the corner of Belvoir Street and Elizabeth where the Vietnamese owner and the very gay Tamil sidekick ask me if I want the usual. The Lebanese man is already at his table reading his paper. Two other customers of indeterminate Eastern European origin join us. An American says in response to the Vietnamese owner’s “How are you this morning?” “I’m well, by the grace of God.” He and his Anglo-Aussie friend avoid the smokers. I buy cigarettes from the Shanghainese on the corner of Goodlet and Elizabeth.

Congratulations, Roy and Kay!

On Boxing Day 1956 my Uncle Roy Christison and my Aunt Kay were married. I was there at the time! Fifty years — I just don’t believe it. I remember well it was a stinking hot day, unlike today.

They met in hospital, actually. Roy, my mother’s youngest brother, was in for a heart problem resulting from childhood rheumatic fever, if I remember correctly. Kay was a nursing aide. They fell in love, and the rest is history. For all of that fifty years they have lived in my grandfather Roy’s house in Sutherland, which my father built.

Les Murray and The Widower (2005)

Widower in the country

I’ll get up soon, and leave my bed unmade.
I’ll go outside and split off kindling wood,
From the yellow-box log that lies beside the gate,
And the sun will be high, for I get up late now.
I’ll drive my axe in the log and come back in
With my armful of wood, and pause to look across
The Christmas paddocks aching in the heat,
The windless trees, the nettles in the yard…
And then I’ll go in, boil water and make tea.

This afternoon, I’ll stand out on the hill
And watch my house away below, and how
The roof reflects the sun and makes my eyes
Water and close on bright webbed visions smeared
On the dark of my thoughts to dance and fade away,
Then the sun will move on, and I will simply watch,
Or work, or sleep. And evening will draw in.

Coming on dark, I’ll go home, light the lamp
And eat my corned-beef supper, sitting there
At the head of the table. Then I’ll go to bed.
Last night I thought I dreamt - but when I woke
The screaming was only a possum skiing down
The iron roof on little moonlit claws.

Met Vlad’s replacement

At this morning’s carol service at South Sydney Uniting Church I met Vlad Korotkov’s stand-in for the next twelve months. He is quite young, but seems good. His name is Andrew Collis, and when he took part in that very interesting episode of Radio National’s Religion Report he was a Chaplain at the University of New South Wales. I must tell him I actually know Prof David Flint (through the Mufti of Watsons Bay). Here is some of what Andrew had to say back then.

Reverend Andrew Collis is the Co-ordinator of the University of New South Wales Religious Centre, and he’s also the campus chaplain for the Uniting Church. Andrew Collis has a certain degree of sympathy for religious activism on campus but he’s also surprised at the intensely dogmatic form that this activism sometimes takes.

Andrew Collis: It does surprise me that in a place like a university where people are encouraged to think historically and to compare the literature of one culture with another, one time and place with another, that more conservative approaches to religion that encourages simplistic universal and eternal propositions are so popular. I can appreciate somewhat why that occurs, that as a response to all this relativism, here’s a simple answer over here, something to cling to. Often a person has moved out of home for the first time, is much more solely responsible for getting to lectures, getting assignments done, meeting new people, making new friends, and so a religious group on campus can offer security and stability at a time when there’s lots of change. I see a strong idealism and enthusiasm among young people who are attracted to religious groups on campus. They’re thinking, Well if I’m going to be a Christian, I’m going to be a real Christian. And there’s a place for that, there’s a place for immersing oneself into that tradition.

You can now download a PDF of our church’s paper The South Sydney Herald. Do so. I think you will be very surprised. Anything less like a Murdoch publication, or even a church paper, is hard to imagine. Consider it my Christmas present to you. That link is courtesy of REDWatch-Redfern Eveleigh Darlington Waterloo Watch: such a shame the name is similar to a notorious ultra-right outfit. No relation, I assure you. Far from it!

Something to read after Christmas Dinner

How Ahmad Shuja survived NATO in Afghanistan

Surry Hills is very quiet compared with this. Go to An Adventure With Death: How I Survived NATO Firing.

…Moments later, I begin to think: Escaping Al-Qaeda, Taliban and other threats lurking around, we come under threat by the very force which claims to be “protecting” us. Although I acknowledge there’s an idiocy factor involved from our driver, I can’t help but wonder how many people have lost their lives in such incidents that have been labeled “encounters with terrorists.”

From my observations it appears as if such incidents are quite common. In the three trips that I have made to Afghanistan in the last two years, I have had two encounters of this nature with international troops, the first one being a lot less dramatic…

Click the picture below for a Christmas poem.