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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 9-16 August 2020

Posted on August 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson Her History and Politics Chat on 29 July was a commentary on the events in Portland and the Republican Jim Jordan’s showing of a manipulated video showing the violence there. She was asked how to respond to REAL fake news like this, and she talked about the importance of changing the narrative back to reality. As far as moving the Feds in, she reminded her listeners of other events, e.g. Waco Branch Davidian siege, and the preceding Ruby Ridge siege, that act as a warning that the optics of a Federal intervention are always bad. She then moved on to whether the Russian bounty scandal is real. She notes that Trump isn’t really engaging with it, and wonders why. Finally, she addresses the question of Trump refusing to leave office. She is not overly concerned about that at the moment, noting that lots of things can happen between now and the election  e.g. Trump’s finances, Portland. etc.

Her History Chat of 23 July continues her History of the Republican Party into the 1930s and 1940s. Now that the Republican Party had allied itself with big business, it was happy to bask in this alliance during the 1920s when things were good (for some). But it backfired in the 1930s, when everything fell apart. There was a philosophical determination to overlay unemployment with moral overtones, and so the Republican Party couldn’t compete with FDR’s New Deal, which was very electorally popular. The Republican Party split between the Taft Conservatives (who wanted to return to the big business led affluence of the 1920s) and the Dewey Republicans (who embraced a lot of the New Deal ideas). The Democrats split too, with the Dixie Democrats from the south objecting to policies that black people were able to benefit from.

The Thread Continuing on with the thread of ‘non violent resistance’, we’ve gone back from Martin Luther King to Bayard Rustin, and now with Turning Enemies into Friends we go back further to Ghandi, who was a direct influence on Rustin.  Ghandi himself corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, who is explored in The Transformation of Leo Tolstoy. What a fundamental spiritual/political shift he made! Then finally we end up with I Will Be Heard, which looks at the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, printer of The Liberator newspaper in the 1830s, decades before the American Civil War.

The Latin American History Podcast How curious- a Latin American history podcast from Australia, presented by Malcolm Sargent. I have no idea who he is. But anyway, I enjoyed The First Circumnavigation of the Globe Parts I and Part II about Magellan’s three year circumnavigation journey in  1519. Actually, he didn’t actually make it, because he was killed in a battle with the locals in the Philippines when he became embroiled in political/religious affairs.

Lectures in History C-span. This lecture from 2013 is called Culture and Society in the 1920s. Professor Michael Kazin from Georgetown University (and co-editor of Dissent magazine) discusses Prohibition, the reactivation in the 1920s of the Ku Klux Klan as an anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant movement, the growth of  Hollywood and the Production Codes that led to sanitized bedroom scenes in American movies, and Al Capone.  Interesting.

Latin America in Focus. This podcast in English is produced through the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. Do you remember seeing a few months back those photos of thousands of semi-naked prisoners chained together, crammed together on the floor in rows? That was ordered by the El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele, Latin America’s youngest president (39) who styles himself as being an ‘outsider’. In The Strange Case of El Salvador’s Plummeting Homicide Rate, the Central American analyst with the International Crisis Group, Tiziano Breda, argues that gangs can choose to dial up or down intra-gang violence for political ends, and that perhaps Bukele’s current very high popularity gives him political capital to institute dialogue with the gangs. I’m not sure that these photos, which Bukele tweeted himself, will help. Breda suggests that he did that to shore up his over-90% popularity, because he is not in a strong legislative position. Mmm. I’m not so sure.

 

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‘Commonwealth’ by Ann Patchett

Posted on August 11, 2020 | Leave a comment

patchett_commonwealth

2016, 336 p

This book was next cab off the rank after reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. A damned hard act to follow, and so I was pleased to read something contemporary and not too pretentious. And even though the name suggests something Cromwellesque, it is instead a domestic/family novel set in America spanning the 60s to the present day.

It starts in 1964 at a christening party. Bert Cousins turns up alone, without his wife, to the party held by a barely-known work colleague, ‘Fix’ Keating. There he notices Fix’s beautiful wife Beverly. None of them know it, but soon the Keating’s marriage will be ended, and Bert and Beverly will become a couple. There are children from both first marriages, and despite their anger at their respective parents, the children themselves form a group, at time united, at times jealous and resentful. The book traces the blended families over time, as further relationships fail and the now-grown children move into adult life. Their life story is not their own, and instead becomes publicized through a book called “Commonwealth”- the name of this novel. I don’t really know that the book needed this little metafictional twist: it’s only a minor part of the novel, and the title really doesn’t fit with the book as a whole. Unless, perhaps, you thought of the family as a Common-Wealth, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

As in books by Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout, this is a book with complex, contradictory, fully-rounded characters. They are not always likeable, but their actions always make sense, at some level, just as we know that our own actions do, however baffling they may seem from the outside.

This is a very domestic, relationship-heavy novel that captures the intricacies and frictions of blended families. It is noticeably American, bathed in a television hue. If perhaps the cohesion of the children seems too good to be true, it does illustrate the way that ties can continue, though sometimes strained, across the various permutations of family as we know it today.

My rating: 7.5

Sourced from: The Little Free Library at Macleod Station.

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Six degrees of separation: from How to Do Nothing to…..

Posted on August 2, 2020 | 1 comment

odell_nothingSo, another month- another Six Degrees of Separation – see the ‘rules of the game’ here.

I haven’t read the starting book, Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing (2019). I think my son read it, but it has really passed me by. I think that the title must offend my Protestant Work Ethic background.

Johnson_cleanstrawBut the title put me in mind of George Johnston’s Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), the second of his David Meredith trilogy, and the sequel to My Brother Jack. Unfortunately, I read it before I started my blog, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that I absolutely loved all three books of the trilogy.

wheatley_cliftSo caught up was I by the trilogy that I became fascinated by Charmian Clift, writer and journalist and, as it happens, George Johnston’s wife. Nadia Wheatley wrote a brilliant biography of her called The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2002) which, again, I read before starting this blog.

 

australian-women-war-reportersClift was a journalist, although more of the domestic kind, with long-running columns in the ‘women’s pages’ of the newspaper. Jeannine Baker explores the world of Australian woman war journalists in her Australian Women Reporters (2015). She traces through the various wars that Australia has been involved in, identifying women reporters who had to forge their own roles in a journalistic genre that lionized male war reporters.

Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill.jpg

And one of the biggest male reporters of them all is Ernest Hemingway, who is just one of the journalists that Amanda Vaill deals with in Hotel Florida (2014). During the Spanish Civil War, international journalists were based at the Hotel Florida in Madrid, and she traces through the interleaved lives of press journalists Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and press officers/censors/propagandists Arturo Barea and Isla Kulscar.

mccamishMentioned in passing is the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead, who was also in Spain during the Civil War. Thornton McCamish wrote a fine biography of Moorehead in his Our Man Elsewhere (2016). This book dealt with Moorhead’s experiences as a war correspondent, then his plunge into popular history with, for example, his book Coopers Creek about Burke and Wills.

murgatroyd_digMoorhead wasn’t the only historian to write about Burke and Wills. English writer Sarah Murgatroyd wrote an eminently readable history in her book The Dig Tree (2002), which again, I read before I started this blog. It was quite tragic to learn that she died of cancer just a few weeks after it was published. It has been republished as one of the Text Classics, which is impressive for a book published so recently.

My, I’ve been non-fiction-ny this month.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 July 2020

Posted on July 31, 2020 | Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson. In her History and Politics Q&A of July 7, she spends quite a bit of time on the electoral college, and reasons that the system is broken. She comments on the letter about cancelling culture published in Harper’s magazine, which rather amazing triggers a cascade of trolling in her comments feed while she’s talking! She also discusses whether Trump will accept defeat, and reminds us that Biden is only the presumptive candidate, and that other Democrat candidates are still in the race in order to influence policy.

In the History of the Republican party broadcast Episode 5, she takes us from the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century.  The Republican party has cemented itself as the party of big business, it ‘steals’ two elections where the candidate has lost the popular vote but won the electoral college (each time this has happened, it has been a Republican who comes out on top), and it all sounds pretty corrupt. She attributes (rather questionably, I reckon) the 1890s depression to Republican panic-mongering when the Democrats win both the Presidency and Congress (surely this was a worldwide depression- can American politics have that much influence?) – using the trope that the Democrats (read here in Australia- ALP) can’t handle money. This was all pretty detailed stuff.

The Jungle Prince (New York Times)My son recommended this three-part podcast. What an intriguing story- a family squatting on a Lucknow railway station platform for ten years, claiming to be the Royal Family of Oudh; a crumbling 14th century palace in the jungles surrounding New Delhi; a Miss Haversham-like existence inside the palace and a house in Bradford England with a garden full of garden gnomes. Really worth listening to. I listened to The Jungle Prince via Stitcher.

Rear Vision (ABC)  The U.S. election is drawing closer- coronavirus, Black Lives Matter, ‘law and order’ – it’s like watching a movie. The Religious Right- politics and God in the USA argues that Reagan and Trump both won their victories through a disguised racism (less so in Trump’s case) that dressed itself in concern about abortion.

 

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‘Beyond the Ladies Lounge’ by Clare Wright

Posted on July 26, 2020 | 9 comments

wright_ladies_lounge

2014, 256 p.

My parents were teetotalers, and even though I’m not  a teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination (cue laughter from my husband), I was certainly influenced by my parents’ distaste for the dull roar and acrid smell of beer that emanated from the corner pubs of my childhood. Growing up in the time of the ‘six o’clock swill’, and with the quaintly lettered ‘Ladies Lounge’ etched into the stained glass of pub windows, the pub seemed a threateningly male place. But as Clare Wright reminds us in this book, this was not always the case. Female publicans have a long history, right back to the earliest days of white settlement, and at the end of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, over half of Melbourne’s hotels had a female licensee.

This book, republished by Text Publishing in 2014 has had a longer life than you might think. The original 2003 book was originally drawn from Clare Wright’s PhD thesis from 2002, which itself grew out of her honours thesis which utilized oral histories with female publicans and their descendants. These academic antecedents are still here in this 2014 version of the book, but Wright’s lively writing style, even more pronounced in her later books The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka  and You Daughters of Freedom, ensures that the academic analysis enhances, rather than suffocates, the text.

She starts her book with an evocative pub crawl around Melbourne in 1889, from one hotel to another, where the publican is a woman. Right from the earliest days of convict settlement, the authorities were prepared to condone hotel-keeping by young single women.  During the gold rush, when liquor was ostensibly banned from the diggings, the sly-grog tents that flourished were often owned by women. Some women made sufficient money from sly-grogging to build hotels on the roads to the diggings where they became legitimate, respectable traders.

The legal framework regulating the liquor trade in Victoria was distinctly favourable to women because they were seen to ‘keep orderly houses’, reflected in the language that spoke of the licensee as ‘he or she’.  Most importantly, the requirement for pubs to offer accommodation (something that was not the case in Britain) meant that women were involved in creating a domestic, as well as drinking establishment. Nonetheless, with time, this came under threat.  The 1876 legislation, which aimed at cleaning up the trade after the gold rush, changed the language to ‘he’ and favoured male licensees, and in 1884 there was a courtcase that ruled that married women were prohibited from holding a publican’s licence.  This verdict threw the hotel industry into turmoil, but an Amending Act the next year preserved married women’s rights to renew their licences. Support for married women as licencees came from two unexpected quarters: the Licensed Victuallers Association who were ambivalent at first,  but were swayed by wanting to demonstrate the ‘respectability’ of their profession; and more importantly, the brewing companies who owned a number of hotels outright under the ‘tied house’ system, often using female licensees. In the midst of the temperance campaign around WWI, even the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which campaigned vociferously against barmaids, was largely silent about female publicans with whom they probably had more in common than they wanted to admit.

‘Respectability’ was used by women publicans as both an attribute to make themselves valuable as licensees, and as a way of embedding themselves and their hotel as integral parts of the community. It was used as a way of controlling behaviour, too, by insisting that men not swear in front of them, and by not drinking with the men (as male publicans were wont to do) in order to maintain a respectable distance.

Because of the requirement for the publican to live on the premises, the pub was a home as well as a business. In the chapter ‘Mapping Elizabeth Wright’, she looks to the inquest records of the aforenamed Elizabeth Wright, who was murdered in her own hotel’s dining room by her business partner. Through these records, Wright (the author, not the victim!) is able to map out the Frankston Hotel spatially, and the dual and ambiguous family/business uses of many of the spaces. Female publicans, bringing up their families within this shared zone, did not have a separate work life but instead their children saw how they operated with authority and efficiency, as oral history testimonies demonstrate. In the final chapters of the book, she brings the female publican into the 21st century, with examples of female publicans in inner-city hotels (e.g. the Curry Family Inn in Collingwood) and  gastropubs (e.g. the Grace Darling, also in Collingwood).

I enjoyed this book. It is written with the same warmth and wit of Wright’s later work on Eureka and suffrage, which tie far more into the bigger historical themes of Australian history. It is not just a paean of praise to female publicans, because it has academic ‘grunt’ as well, although some readers may find this off-putting. There are enough personal vignettes for you to remember that you are reading about real people as well, and the sheer number of examples of female publicans drawn from right across Victoria reinforces that she is writing about a widespread, if overlooked, phenomenon.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library e-book

 

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 July 2020

Posted on July 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

History Chicks  I’m on a bit of a Helen Keller binge at the moment, so I downloaded the History Chicks episode on Helen Adams Keller– one of their earliest from 2011. I suspect that they have read Dorothy Hermann’s biography because it’s staying fairly close to that. But I like that they spend considerable time on her radical activities, although they don’t mention her spirituality.

Historical Figures also had a podcast on Helen Keller, but it focussed more on her childhood. They do mention her political activities, but most of the podcast repeats the water-pump story.

Heather Cox Richard’s History of the Republican Party Episode 4 looks at the rivalry between Ulysses Grant (ex-military rather than a career politician ) and Charles Sumner (the guy who got bashed up on the Senate floor in 1854) who felt as if he should have been President.   Heather Cox Richardson pushes back against the idea of Grant being corrupt. We see the rise of ‘liberal’ Republicans, as well as the rise of the KKK and the creation of the Dept of Justice. The party splits, and turns to big business, who switch their loyalty to the Republicans. We also get the fear of ‘communism’ and wealth distribution through coloured voters (something we still have today)

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‘The Radical Lives of Helen Keller’ by Kim E. Nielsen

Posted on July 19, 2020 | 1 comment

Nielsen_Keller

2004, 194 p.

I’m plunging into some reading about Helen Keller, in preparation for a talk that I’m giving this week at my UU Fellowship. I remember reading the story of Helen Keller standing by the water pump in one of my school readers in primary school, and of course, I saw Patty Duke in ‘The Miracle Worker’. But I hadn’t realized that Helen Keller had such a rich intellectual, political and spiritual life after water flowed over her hands prompting her ‘aha!’ moment and once she became an adult woman- and that’s what I’m exploring at the moment.

I hadn’t realized just how much had been written about Helen Keller. Children’s books, in particular, abound. The Radical Lives of Helen Keller is a relatively recent book, published in 2004, and I’m a little sorry that I hadn’t read Dorothy Herrman’s more conventional biography Helen Keller: A Life prior to reading Nielsen’s book, which is more overtly rooted in a theoretical stance than a ‘straight’ narrative biography.

Nielsen’s book comes from a Disability Studies perspective, which challenges the idea of disability as something to be ‘overcome’ and instead focuses on the social, political, economic and cultural factors that define ‘disability’. As she says, this perspective

”  reveals to historians, such as myself, the depth to which those definitions of disability and normality are ever-changing, are historically bound, and have immense consequence. Using disability as a tool of analysis necessitates a profound rethinking of power and the dynamics which create social power.” (p.13)

While not at all discounting the effects of blindness and deafness on Helen Keller, Nielsen argues that:

As the world’s most famous person with an acknowledged disability in the twentieth century, whatever Keller wrote, spoke or did mattered. The policies and attitudes she espoused regarding people with disabilities had political, legal, medical, financial, cultural and educational consequences.  Her public persona was held up as a standard for other people with disabilities and shaped their personal and political options, whether or not she or they desired it. She understood the political implications of class She also actively involved herself in advocating for people with disabilities. But she rarely explored the political implications of disability. For most of the her life, the disability politics she adopted were frequently conservative, consistently patronizing, and occasionally repugnant.” (p. 9)

It is because of this reframing of Keller’s life through a Disability Studies lens that I wish I had been more familiar with the entirety of her story, before critiquing it through this very late 20th-early21st century lens. Taking a contemporary intellectual stance and revisiting a well-trodden story is valuable and enlightening, but I am a little uncomfortable with the suggestion of blame that sometimes attaches to the project –  “why didn’t she act in a certain way?”

In particular, Nielsen is critical of Keller’s deliberate distancing from other people with disabilities throughout most of her life, most particularly the Deaf community. Keller’s education was recommended by Alexander Graham Bell, an oralist who was fiercely opposed to the use of American Sign Language. Possibly without being aware of it, she was aligned with one side of the cultural and political debates about signing and orality that still run through the Deaf community today. Moreover, she appears to have had little contact with other networks of blind professionals, intellectuals or activists of her own generation. She became a mythologized individual rather than part of an oppressed minority.

Nonetheless, Nielsen admits:

Given the limited practical or theoretical options perceptible to her, her isolation from other people with disabilities, and her inability to politicize disability, her career can be explained as a pragmatic choice. Few viable alternative choices existed. (p.12)

Nielsen explains why she titled her book in the plural:

This political biography is not simply entitled The Radical Lives of Helen Keller because of Keller’s interest in radical politics. She also lived radically different lives at different points in her life. Internal and hard wrought personal decisions effected these changes. External factors…also prompted these changes. The Radical Lives of Helen Keller seeks to recognize the various political lives Keller lived and the reasons for those political and personal revolutions. (p.14)

The book is divided into four chronological chapters, and a concluding chapter. The first chapter ‘I Do Not Like This World As It Is’ covers 1900-1924, thus starting with Keller’s entry to Radcliffe College, rather than the more common opening scene of the pump in the garden. It describes her spiritual conversion to Swedenborgianism and her involvement in socialist politics, something that was encouraged by John Macy, who was originally engaged as an editor/secretary, and ended up marrying Annie Sullivan

Chapter 2 ‘The Call of the Sightless’ covers the years 1924-1937 when she and Annie (now separated from her husband John Macy) focussed on the fundraising activities of the American Foundation for the Blind, a position which required Keller to suppress her socialist activities so as not to spoil ‘the brand’. At the end of this period, Annie Sullivan died, leaving Keller bereft.

Chapter 3 ‘Manna in my Desert Places’ 1937-1948 covers her first visit to Japan, a deathbed promise to Annie Sullivan, and her increasing concern over the rise of Hitler in Germany. She increasingly came under the purview of the FBI, especially for her support of the American Rescue Ship Mission, which planned to take European refugees to Latin America, but the project was scuppered because it attracted communist support. She became friends with the sculptor Jo Davidson who introduced her to many progressive, engaged people.  She returned to Japan in 1948 as part of a tour that planned to visit Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Middle East, but it was cut short because of the illness of her travelling companion Polly Thomson. She did, however, visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and was appalled by the dropping of the bomb.

Chapter 4 ‘I will not allow Polly to Climb a Pyramid’ takes the last 20 years of her life (1948-1968) and her work as a goodwill ambassador for the United States, representing the United States “as a courageous, interesting, vibrant but quirky country that could accomplish virtually anything.”

The political  implications of her actions were implicit, her political opinions left private. Her message was inherently political but her image was of a living miracle. This seemingly placed her above the squalor of international and partisan politics” (p. 106)

The final chapter ‘One of the Least Free People on Earth: The Making and Remaking of Helen Keller’ examines the project to curate the Helen Keller image, both at the time, and since. It was a project that depended on her exceptionality, and it demanded the suppression of political solidarity with both disability activists, and with the progressive politics that might offend donors to the American Foundation  for the Blind.

I enjoyed this book, even though I recognize that I should have read it later, rather than sooner. I am now reading Hermman’s biography, and find myself reading the two books against each other. And I find myself astounded by Keller’s preternatural intelligence, her political involvement and deep spirituality.  Nielsen is right-

Keller is a complicated icon, just as she was a complicated individual, who lived a complicated life. She thrived, however, on complication, on debate, on excitement and on constant movement. She liked Scotch, not tea (p. 131)

Sourced from:  ebook through State Library of Victoria

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 July 2020

Posted on July 16, 2020 | Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson continues with Episode 3 of her History of the Republican Party. In this episode, she deals with Reconstruction. No wonder Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives- after Lincoln was assassinated he took over, and in a few months stitched up arrangements so that the South (which had lost the war) was largely excused, and he passed the Black Codes to limit the rights of afro-Americans.  As H.C.R. says, in these years you can see the origin of many of the issues tearing America apart today.

Her Politics and History talk of 30 June was a bit more present-focussed than usual. She starts off with the history of treason, pointing out that until John Brown was executed (as in the John Brown’s Body song) in 1859, no-one really knew what actually constituted ‘treason’ and how it should be punished. The 1949 definition, passed in the Cold War, assumed that the enemy country had declared war- so how does that work with terrorism? Another question was: What happens if Trump retires? She wouldn’t be surprised if he did, on the basis of his prior behaviour where he breaks things then leaves. Next question: Why didn’t Obama do something about Russian interference? Her suggestion: it would have given the Republicans real ammunition to say that the Russians thought America so weak that they could interfere with impunity. And finally: why do so many sports teams reference Native Americans? Her answer: because in the 1890s and early 20th century, when most of this naming occurred, there was anxiety about white men becoming effeminate, and so the names referenced a physically strong imagery.

Earshot (ABC) Life After Hate is a two-part series that follows a young British-Canadian Tony McAleer who was a white supremacist. He was imprisoned for crimes committed while he was involved with the far right, and on his release he decided to leave it all behind. He became involved with a charismatic life-coach and public speaker, and is now on the public-speaking circuit, building his shtick from his far-right past. Is this just another form of self-aggrandisement?

99% Invisible A few months back, I mentioned a 99% Invisible program about a statue of the Spanish conquisador Juan de Oñate. Activists had hacked the foot off the statue, replicating Oñate’s own action when he cut the foot from indigenous men to punish them. Well, with all the statues toppling all over the world, Oñate’s statues (the old fashioned man on a horse and a more recent one) came in for attention. Return of Oñate’s Foot reprises the original one, and catches up with recent events.

Talking Politics: History of Ideas – Mary Wollstonecraft David Runicman is obviously trying to draw connections between Episode 1 (Hobbes’ Leviathan) and Wollstonecraft’s work but it’s a strained connection at times. Writing during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft wrote two books in response to Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution: first Vindication of the Rights of Man and then Vindication of the Rights of Woman. He points out that although it’s rather cold in tone, it is surprisingly graphic when describing sexual practices. He finishes talking about Jane Austen, who probably read Wollstonecraft’s book, and her novelistic expression of Wollstonecraft’s arguments in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 25-30 June

Posted on July 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson.  I really am enjoying her ‘chats’ (which are an hour long- she has a lot to say!) In her History of the Republican Party Part II  she talks about the relationship between Lincoln’s view of equality and the economics of the Civil War. In order to provide what the people wanted (as distinct from what the oligarchs deemed to give them), income tax was introduced to provide a source of income when many of the eastern seaboard ports were confederate controlled. In a way, this was a bit of a repetition of her history of income tax in last week’s History and Politics Chat.

In the History and Politics Chat of June 23rd she talks about the history of policing. She points out that in the north, policing had its roots in maintaining public order while in the south it was based on slave patrols.  Police forces became corrupted by their ownership by the city municipal bodies; eventually they broke through to become professionalized, then went to the other extreme by taking on ‘scientific techniques’ which saw a lot of people jailed incorrectly.  Then she went on to talk about newspapers. At first newspapers, in their four pages, provided ‘what an educated man needed to know’;  but from the 1840s onwards became increasingly partisan. The Fairness Doctrine of the 1920s, which insisted on the presentation of both sides of an argument, was repealed under Reagan in the 1980s, leading us to our current phenomenon of Fox ‘news’ (which is entertainment, not news). She finishes with a question about women in the political sphere, pointing out that under 2nd wave feminism in the 1970s there were women in politics and as journalists. Her most recent book How the South won the Civil War ends with the hope that women, by voting differently to men, will rescue America from Trump.

The Music Show. Does the world really need a three volume opus on the Beatles? Mark Lewisohn’s ‘The Beatles: All These Years – Volume 1 – Tune In’ is a 1000 page book, with two others yet to go. I think that this program The Beatles- the early years was recorded a few years back, but it’s well worth a listen. Lewisohn is a historian as well as a fan, and so he has written a fascinating social history of 1950s Liverpool, which includes a consideration of the 1944 Education Act (which made a grammar school education available to bright children) and the abolition of national service (which freed the Beatles to go to Germany as 18 year olds) as influences on the Beatles. They play some really unusual tracks during the program too.

 

 

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Six Degrees of Separation: from What I Loved to….

Posted on July 4, 2020 | 1 comment

It’s the first Saturday of the month, and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. To find out more about this meme, check out Books are My Favourite and Best where all will be explained.

what-i-lovedSo, the starting book is Siri Husdvedt’s What I Loved. I could have sworn that I have read this book, but I have no record of it at all, and when I read the synopsis it doesn’t sound familiar either. But I gather that it starts off with an art historian and a painting, so that leads me to….

 

sittersAlex Miller’s The Sitters which is about an aging portrait painter and his young portrait subject, a visiting academic. It’s only a small book, and like much of Miller’s work, it has layers under its apparent simplicity. Talking about sitting for a portrait leads me to…..

 

thelongingCandace Bruce’s The Longing, which has a dual narrative: one set in the mid 19th century where a young indigenous woman working as a domestic servant in one of those large Western Districts homesteads, observes her mistress’ infatuation with a visiting portrait painter, and a second narrative where 150 years later an art historian visits the same homestead to make a significance assessment of a portrait kept by the family in their now-decayed mansion.  That Western Districts of Victoria setting takes me to….

kiddle_menofyesterdayMargaret Kiddle’s Men of Yesterday: A social history of the Western District 1834-1890. This book, written in 1961, is written by a daughter of the Western District herself, celebrating the white settlement of western Victoria. Its reverence for ‘settlement’  and ancestral pride, without considering the theft of indigenous lands, does not sit well today but it is beautifully written by a young historian who died before it was published. Another historian who discovered Margaret Kiddle’s work was Maggie Mackellar, who used it in writing her own work on Western Districts squatter Niel Black. I haven’t read that work, but I did read Maggie Mackellar’s memoir which led me to….

Whenitrains

When it Rains, Maggie’s memoir of packing up after a family tragedy to return to her grandparent’s property in outback New South Wales. She steps into small town life, while continuing to write through her grief, which she expresses as a series of short chapters, acting as a voyeur in her own life, circling around the pain. The isolation of pain and grief leads me to….

bereftChris Womersley’s Bereft, set during the influenza epidemic of 1919, when Quinn Walker returns from the Western Front of WWI to his childhood home. There is no grand home-coming for him because he had fled his hometown ten  years earlier, when he was accused of a rape, and had been reported dead on the front.. Realizing that his mother is very sick with influenza, he approaches the house when his father is absent, and speakers with his mother, who thinks she is hallucinating. The setting of the book during Australia’s influenza epidemic leads me to….

Spinney_paleriderLaura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world  is  a global account of the influenza pandemic that reached Australia in 1919. It is well researched and fascinating. She focuses on the disease, its manifestations and the scientific response, but she also interweaves this with a consciousness of how the experience of suffering and recovering from the flu leached out into music and literature in the succeeding decade.

How odd. I seem to have spent quite a bit of time in Australian literature this time, with only my book-end books set internationally.

 

 

 

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