The DailyNYT‘The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done. Powerful Conservatives are Listening Well, as far as I am concerned, anyone who is a friend of J.D. Vance is an enemy of mine, and Vance talks very approvingly about Curtis Yarvin. He is a computer engineer who has “done his own research” to come up with an argument that, to quote The New York Times “the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he’s called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator.” His way of arguing is repellent: he machine-guns out a scattershot of historical facts, any one of which could be unpicked if he gave you time. A repellent, slipshod, bombastic man.
In the Shadows of UtopiaSeason 2, Episode 2 Maoism and the Great Leap Forward 1949-1962 In this very long episode (2 hours 43 minutes) Lachlan takes us over to China where, after the Korean and Indo-China wars finished, the Chinese Communist Party could concentrate on local matters and the need to delineate ‘the people’ from ‘the enemy’. In 1953 a five year plan was initiated on the Stalinist model, where small farmers took over the land that had previously belonged to their landlords. In May 1958 Mao looked at the countryside, and after declaring the four pests (rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows) embarked upon the Great Leap Forward, later described as a ‘bubble of unreality’ which pushed the country towards starvation. The small farms, only recently given, were taken back into huge communal farms, with an emphasis on agricultural targets and communal eating. There was a push towards industrialization, with backyard furnaces slowly pillaging families’ household goods in the production of poor-quality steel. By 1959, famine had taken hold, prompting cannibalism and necrophagy and culminating in the death of perhaps 30-45 million people (no-one really knows). After Mao’s Minister of Defence criticized the Great Leap Forward, Mao rachetted it up even more to prove him wrong. It was not until 1962 that conditions improved. Meanwhile, the Sino/Soviet relationship had always been testy but initially Russia showed a readiness to co-operate militarily with the new Communist regime in China. However, Krushev’s denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ after Stalin’s death was not taken well by Mao, who was curating a cult of personality of his own. Mao can be seen as either the 3rd or 4th Great Prophet of Communism after Marx (who identified the stages of communism and the importance of class), Lenin ( who introduced the concept of the ‘vanguard’ of the revolution), and maybe or maybe not Stalin (who created the centralized command economy). Mao wanted to use the nationalist cause combined with Confucian concepts of ‘right thinking’ and built on struggle and volunteerism. He had a fraught relationship with Krushev, who he believed had betrayed communism, and as the rift between the two countries increased, Soviet advisors returned to Russia and the promise of an atom bomb was withdrawn.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 228 Portugal: The Golden Age of Discovery Part 2 The first episode finished with the reconquest of the Muslim ‘invaders’ of the Iberian Peninsula. This led a militant edge to Christian exploration outside the known world. The Portguese had ports all around the Cape of Good Hope, so they didn’t need Columbus. During the negotiations for the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese tricked the Spaniards by getting them to shift the line 1000 km that meant that Portugal got Brazil. Vasco da Gama was chosen to lead his expedition in search of India because he was a hard man. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned right at Kenya and sailed for 23 days to get to Kerula. He reached Indian, Malaysia and Japan, and was very violent towards the Muslims. The Portuguese ’empire’ was more a series of nodes, and they were not very good at administration. By now the Portuguese throne had been inherited by a Spanish king, but Portugal retained its own identity.
When I first heard about Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, I thought “But that’s just a rehash of everything he’s already written”. It’s true that there are flashes of his earlier work, almost as if he’s tipping his hat to it in passing. The Tasmanian section evokes The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Wanting and Gould’s Book of Fish, his mentions of his father’s wartime experience sparks memories of Narrow Road to the Deep North and his mother’s death was explored in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and the final chapter brings to life Death of a River Guide. But this makes the book sound like a glorified ‘greatest hits’ and it’s much, much more than that. It’s brilliant.
The title is taken from a Chekhov story, where a question is posed in the form of those schoolroom maths questions that still give me a sinking feeling in my stomach:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”
Who, indeed. The real question is love, not the train or the timetable, and it’s a question that is unanswerable. So too, is the question of causality that brings each of us where we are.
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Slizard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project, and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima, and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them. (p.237-8)
We meet all these contingencies and people in this book, written as a series of small shards within ten chapters: the Enola Gay pilot Thomas Ferebee, physicist Leo Slizard, the writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, his parents, his childhood in Roseberry, Tasmania, the Burma Railway and indigenous dispossession. Themes arise, drop and rise again, and parts of the book are an extended reflection on death and memory, encountered over and over. It’s hard to fit in into any one genre: it’s history, non-fiction, memoir and philosophy all rolled into one. The most compelling writing in the book comes at the end, when he tells his experience of nearly dying – indeed, did he die and is all this just a dream?- that he fictionalized in Death of a River Guide. My dinner was ready, and I was being summoned with increasing impatience, but I had to keep reading, even though I knew that clearly, he did, survive – and if it was a dream, then we’re all enmeshed in it too.
I have always loved Richard Flanagan’s right from Gould’s Book of Fish, which was the first of his books that I read. I’ve read interviews as part of the publicity for this book, where Flanagan said that he didn’t know if he’d write another book and I must admit that I closed it, feeling that he had written himself completely into the book, wondering how he could ever write anything else after this.
The best book that I have read in ages.
My rating: 11/10
Sourced from: borrowed for a friend (for far too long!)
The Rest is Politics USTrump’s Insurrection: A Riot or a Coup? Episode 4 Can you remember where you were on January 6th 2021? Even now, all these years later, you can still detect the absolute disbelief at the things that unfolded on January 6th. They talk about the response of Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Republican politicians like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pense, and the failure to convict Trump afterwards.
The Shadows of Utopia. Season 2: Episode 1 Les Khmers Rouges: Double Lives in Sihanouk’s Golden Era This episode covers 1955 to 1960, often described as Sihanouk’s Golden Era. Cambodia was a newly independent country under Norodim Sihanouk, who was very popular, owing to the introduction of ‘Buddhist Socialism’ and his canny playing of the US and Communist Cold War sides, both politically and financially. With their numbers dwindling, the ‘revolutionary organization’ or ‘Anka’ went to ground and shifted its attention to the schools, where teachers could mentor enthusiastic, progressive young recruits. Saloth Sar, who was only just now starting to be called ‘Pol’ worked as a teacher in this way. By this time he was married, not to Soeung Son Maly, a society belle with whom he was infatuated, but to fellow communist Khieu Ponnary in 1956. Despite his communist ideology, he was very traditional in relation to his marriage. By 1958 Sihanouk needed another election. This time the Democrats, who Sihanouk detested, didn’t even contest it after Sihanouk humiliated them in a 3 hour public debate which sounds very Trumpian. In the end the election was only contested by the official Communist Party which, compromised by a traitor among their ranks, won just 1% of the vote, with the other 99% to Sihanouk. By this time the US were getting a bit concerned about Cambodia’s association with the Non-Aligned movement, and so plots were instituted by the CIA against him. Meanwhile Saloth Sar, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary found themselves in high-ranking positions in the newly formed Communist Party of Kampuchea which Sihanouk dubbed the ‘Khmer Rouge’
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 227 Portugal: On the Edge of the World I don’t think that I’ll ever get to see Portugal, sadly, so I’ll just have to listen to Tom and Dominic telling me about its history. The alliance between England and Portugal goes back 650 years, the oldest surviving alliance in Britain’s history. Invaders came from the Mediterranean, but they very much saw it as being on the edge of the world. Portugal was annexed by Rome after the defeat of Carthage, and the whole Iberian peninsular was known as Lusitania (it was not divided into Portugal and Span until much later). In Lusitania, as in Britain with Boudicca and Gaul with Vercingetorix, there was a bloody response to Rome. After Rome, the invasions kept coming. There were the militantly Christian Visigoths, then the Muslims, but the north held out against them (as occurred in the north of Spain). After the Reconquista, the area that would later be Portugal became a vassal of Leon. Afonzo I became the first King of Portugal between 1139 and1185. During the Siege of Lisbon, he called on Britain, with whom there was a trading alliance, to come to their aid. In 1386 the Treaty of Windsor saw the English Phillipa of Lancaster married to King John I of Portugal, and their son Henry the Navigator invaded North Africa. He was fascinated by the legend of Prester John (a mysterious King who was supposed to be surrounded by infidels and in need of rescue), and awed by all the riches coming from the East. The Portuguese weren’t really interested in Columbus’ proposals because they were already sailing the coast of Western Africa. Slavery was common within the Mediterranean, and Africa provided a good source of enslaved workers for Lisbon and the plantations.
The Coming StormEpisode 7: Wonderland At one stage, Gabriel Gatehouse asks if he is becoming a conspiracy theorist himself, and I think that he is. Although given the madness of the United States since Trump’s inauguration, perhaps there really is a conspiracy after all. In this episode he talks with futurist thinkers who emerged in the 1990s who call themselves Extropians (the opposite of Entropy). They imagine a world of augmented human bodies, nanotechnology, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. He focuses on the spectrum that stretches from Max More and his wife Natasha Vida More, who are transhumanists, and see themselves as ‘accelerationists’, through to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky who champions ‘friendly’ artificial intelligence and has been dubbed a ‘doomer’. Gatehouse refers to the sacking of Sam Altman from Open AI, and then his re-instatement. He picks up on ‘The Singleton’, which Wikipedia defines as “a hypothetical world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level, capable of exerting effective control over its domain, and permanently preventing both internal and external threats to its supremacy” – exactly what conspiracy theorists have been talking about all along. It could be democracy, a tyranny, or a single dominant Artificial Intelligence. All of a sudden, seeing all those Tech Bros at Trump’s inauguration seems even more frightening.
The Human Subject (BBC) This rather gory podcast looks at the origins of modern medicine, which often lay in trauma and exploitation of its ‘patients’. Episode 1 The Man with a Hole in his Stomach tells the story of 18 year old Alexis St Martin who was accidentally shot in the stomach outside an American Fur Company store in 1822. He was not expected to live, but his stomach formed a gastric fistula which led straight into his stomach. His life was saved by ‘Dr’ William Beaumont, who had seen similar injuries as an army surgeon. Previously the stomach had been seen as merely mechanical, munching up the food, but the fistula gave Beaumont an opportunity to experiment on the stomach through this direct access, without triggering the gap reflex. He gave St Martin a job as a servant, and wrote a sort of contract for the experimentation, although it was a complex master/servant relationship. St Martin, who was illiterate, tried to run away several times and nonetheless managed to father 17 children who lived with his wife ‘elsewhere’. As it turned out, St Martin outlived Beaumont by 17 years, even with a gaping hole in his stomach.
I’ve had this book reserved at the library for some time, and when I finally received it I was disappointed that it seemed to be a rehash of the excellent podcast series that I mentioned back in November 2024, before this whole Trump 2.0 nightmare began. But it isn’t. Her podcast was called ‘Autocracy in America’, and in the podcast she applies the principles that she spells out in this book Autocracy Inc to the American context, with much prescience, I’m afraid.
She notes that the old cartoon image of the ‘bad man’ autocrat is outdated.
Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services- military, paramilitary, police- and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy, but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources- the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s- as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America. (p.2)
In this book, she sweeps her searchlight onto the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria (possibly outdated), Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan in particular- although she mentions some three dozen others. What a depressingly large list! Autocracy Inc, as she calls them, collaborate to keep their members in power by ignoring multiple international agencies, buoyed by a conviction that the outside world cannot touch them.
Her opening chapter ‘The Greed That Binds’ looks particularly at Putin, and the schemes he established to enrich oligarchs in the breakup of the Soviet Union. These oligarchs have invested in America and Britain.
Her second chapter ‘Kleptocracy Metastasizes’ turns to Chavez’s Venezuela, where Autocracy Inc. stepped in after Chavez’s death in 2013, where Russian and Chinese money poured into the country to enable Chavez and then Maduro to postpone any kind of financial reckoning as they destroyed the economy. Cuba joined with Venezuela in an anti-American agenda, and Maduro and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan share a dislike of democracy and anti corruption movements in their own countries. Improbably, Venezuela and Iran, despite their many differences, relate on the basis of shared grievance, with Iranians buying Venezuelan gold, and sending food and gasoline in return and assisting with the repair of Venezuelan oil refineries. She looks at Uebert Angel, an evangelical pastor and British-Zimbabwean businessman who is involved in gold-smuggling schemes, some associated with Zimbabwe’s ruling party and its president Emmerson Mnangagwa. The ruling party has a long standing relationship with the Chinese Community Party and Putin’s Russia.
Chapter 3, ‘Controlling the Narrative’ looks at cybersecurity and firewalls as a way of rewriting history, as for example, in China with Tiananmen Square. Spyware and surveillance is a way of autocracies justifying their abuse of electronic technologies. Domestic propaganda in Russian state television devotes huge slabs of time to America’s culture wars. China has made an enormous investment in international media, which makes possible the spread of misinformation internationally, and RT (Russia Today) has sites which writes material, is translated into other languages, and published on ‘native’ sites to make them seem local. Yala News, run by a Syrian businessman for example, has taken material from Russian state media and spread it through Arabic news sites. As we know, websites and videos can be fake.
Chapter 4 ‘Changing the Operating System’ looks at the ‘rules-based order’ (something that powerful countries feel themselves exempt from) and the removal of language that constrains Autocracy Inc from the international arena altogether. Instead of ‘human rights’, China wants to prioritize the ‘right to development’. The term ‘sovereignty’ is used in different ways. ‘Multipolarity’, a word preferred by the Russian information networks, is meant to be fair and equitable, but is now the basis of a whole campaign systematically spread on Russia Today in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, and repeated by information-laundering sites such as Yala News. Alternative institutions in a ‘multipolar’ world agree to recognize each other’s ‘sovereignty’, not to criticize each others’ autocratic behaviour and not to intervene in each other’s internal politics. Not every member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an autocrat, but she asserts that
…if the old system was designed to inculcate the “rule of law”, these new institutions are meant to promote “rule by law”- the belief that “law” is whatever the current autocrat or ruling party leader says it is, whether inside Iran, Cuba, or anywhere else in the world. (p. 107)
She looks particularly at the Syrian Civil War and the Russian-led campaign against the White Helmets, and the involvement of the Wagner Group.
Chapter 5 ‘Smearing the Democrats’ looks at ways that the people have fought back in Poland, Venezuela, Burma and Hong Kong- although this is a very discouraging list (except for Poland). The response of autocratic government to challenge is to mount smear campaigns and make accusations of foreign interference. More sophisticated autocracies have moved beyond just killing their opponents, and now prepare legal and propaganda campaigns in advance, designed to catch democracy activists before they gain credibility or popularity.
Applebaum’s book is dedicated “for the optimists” but it’s hard to find much cause for optimism here. Her epilogue ‘Democrats United’ brings the book even more up to date by looking at Ukraine and Israel. She emphasizes that in no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of the 20th century cold war. Many countries do not fit neatly into the category of either democracy or autocracy and divisions run inside countries as well. She urges a reconceptualization of the struggle for freedom as not against specific states or countries, but against autocratic behaviours, where-ever they are found- in Russia, China, Europe and the United States. She spells out a number of steps
Put an end to transnational kleptocracy through ending the whole financial system that makes it possible e.g. in real estate transactions and money-laundering and through an international anti-kleptocracy network.
Don’t Fight the Information War- Undermine it by challenging the information systems at a government level (fat chance, with Musk in power) and joining forces to make Reuters, the Associated Press and other reliable outlets the standard source of global news instead of Zinhua (China) and R.T. (Russia)
Decouple, De-risk and Rebuild – ensure that countries do not remain dependent on other autocracies
She finishes by noting that:
There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect. Those that exist have deep flaws, profound divisions, and terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them….They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside,too, by division and demagogues. Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them (p. 176)
I feel as if much of this book has been superseded by recent events in America, which is really demonstrating where these links between autocracies are operating. There is one serious omission. Until the afterword, she is largely silent on Israel (I think that she herself is of reform Jewish heritage) and its provision of surveillance and military technologies to autocracies, that was described in Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (which I see is now a documentary). There are other chapters earlier in the book when she could have looked at Israel earlier.
However, particularly since Trump’s inauguration, her articles in The Atlantic, bring her analysis to current events at both the American and international level, and she is an active and articulate participant in current political commentary. This book ranges over a huge number of countries and their leaders, and she told us quite clearly how Trump fits into the Autocracy Inc. model in her recent podcast. Americans can’t say that they weren’t warned, and the whole word is bearing the consequences.
These cinema productions of stage shows tend to spoil you for live performances: you become accustomed to seeing closeups and hearing every little whisper. It’s a bit like when you go to the MCG and realize that the players you’ve been seeing up close on television actually look like little ants on the field when you’re there, live.
The audience in the cinema version are all wearing headphones, and I assumed that it was because it was being filmed and that perhaps they were being short-changed by the filming process. But no- according to this video, the sound design is an integral part of the production, and theatre-goers at the Harold Pinter Theatre were all provided with headphones for a surround-sound experience, where whispers could be heard, and the sound could shift from one ear to the other, behind you. As a cinema audience, we didn’t have headphones, but the sound was so clear that at one stage, with the witches, I thought that someone was laughing very rudely and inappropriately in the cinema. It must have been part of the soundscape.
The set design is minimal: just a white square, a bit like a boxing ring, with glass cubes behind it, where you could glimpse the musicians at times, or action occurring ‘off-stage’ so to speak. The costumes, too, were rather drab in grey, except for the Macbeth’s, whose clothing changed.
It’s not a large cast, and I found myself getting a bit confused when a character would be killed off (there’s lots of killing in Macbeth) only to be resurrected as another character. This was particularly the case with King Duncan, who was offed fairly early on, only to reappear looking exactly the same, and with the same voice and delivery, in the guise of the doctor as Lady Macbeth fell apart.
Cush Jumbo did not seem particularly regal as such. Instead, she seemed like one part of a power-couple (which of course she was). And David Tennant – ah, David Tennant (sigh)- he was absolutely brilliant, on stage nearly the whole time, and just as intense and tortured as you would expect him to be.
The Rest is History Episode 298: The Nazis: Total Power (Part 4) Hitler was by now the head of the coalition government, but only he and two other Nazi members had cabinet positions. However, they had the police, the street gangs and the tacit support of conservatives behind them. Their immediate need was to square the army and to neutralize the left. In yet another election, Hitler needed to get a 2/3 majority to change the constitution and so they framed their election as a fight against Communism and Hitler unleashed his own stormtroopers. The Democrats did nothing and the Communists were paralyzed, but the Nazis didn’t know or believe that. Marius Van der Lubbe lit the Reichstag Fire, and although Tom and Dominic follow Richard Evans in believing that he was a lone actor, certainly the Nazis took advantage of the opportunity and arrested 400 people within hours. The next day Hindenberg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended all civil liberties. The election went ahead and the Nazis and their partners obtained 52% of the vote but this was still not sufficient to get the Enabling Act to change the constitution. So they overtook the local government structures, declared the Communist Party illegal and mounted a campaign of intimidation. With the Communist Party out of the way, they needed fewer than a 2/3 vote, and were able to obtain 444 votes in favour of the Enabling Act from liberals, Conservatives, and the Catholic centre, with only 94 against, mainly from the Social Democrats. This meant that Hitler could rule by decree. In April 1933 there was the first boycott of Jewish shops. The episode closed with a discussion between Tom and Dominic over the extent to which the Nazi rise to power forms an exemplar for other dictatorship. They rather optimistically assure themselves that lines would be drawn in future (huh! and how’s that working for us today with Trump?) and Tom thinks that any takeover in the future would be more subtle.
The Rest is Politics (US) Now that I’m tuning in to American politics again, watching this car crash in real time, I’m listening to Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci again. In their episode Trump’s Mafia World Order they spoke about a poster of the 14 Signs of Fascism that they said was at the American Holocaust Museum. It appears that it was not, but was instead taken from an op-ed called ‘Fascism Anyone’ by Lawrence W. Britt published in Free Inquiry,Vol 23 No. 2, the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Briefly, here are the 14 common threads that link Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia.
Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
Disdain for the importance of human rights.
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
Rampant sexism.
A controlled mass media.
Obsession with national security.
Religion and ruling elite tied together.
Power of corporations protected
Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
Obsession with crime and punishment.
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Fraudulent elections
They mentioned an interesting new book that I might follow up on: Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind
The Coming StormSeries 2 Episode 6 Kompromat In this episode Gabriel Gatehouse returns to the purported paedophile ring that lay at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He looks at Jeffrey Epstein (and I must admit that I’ve always been uneasy about his ‘suicide’ in jail) and the way that his case has tentacles all over the political elite. It links to the wider conspiracy theory held by many Americans that democracy is a facade, and that the institutions of America, from politics to finance, from Hollywood to the secret intelligence agencies, are controlled by hidden hands. And whose might those hands be?
History HitHow World War I inspired Lord of the Rings. This episode features John Garth, an award-winning Tolkien biographer and author of Tolkien and the Great War. I always think of Tolkien as the quintessential Oxford don, but he was actually born in South Africa (then known as Orange Free State). He had returned to England with his mother when his father died in South Africa, and then when his mother died when he was 12, he was brought up by a Catholic priest. He went to a prestigious school in Birmingham, where he formed a close friendship with four other boys. When war was declared, two of them joined up immediately, but Tolkien finished his degree at Oxford before enlisting. As a university graduate, he was immediately made an officer. Even though the battalion he led was successful, he himself was not a good officer. Many features of WWI show up in his work- the trenches are evoked in Mordor, the flying creatures reflect the change that air power brought to WWI, and he based Sam Gamgee on his batmen (servants to officers) during the War. Underpinning the Lord of the Rings is the experience of Tolkien, as with other soldiers, of going into fearful situations.
I’m a Baby Boomer. Of course I’ve seen ‘A Complete Unknown’ and like nearly everyone else I know, I loved it. I didn’t realize how much the background soundtrack of my life is made up of Bob Dylan songs- songs that other people had covered that I didn’t realize had been written by Dylan. I’m astounded that Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, sang all the songs himself. The movie covers the early 1960s from Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and ends with the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival where Dylan ‘went electric’, which seems a particularly mild crime looking back sixty years later. (My God. Sixty years. How did that happen?)
That said, I could barely understand a word the Bob Dylan character said, and his mumbling seemed to become worse as the movie went on. I was a bit disappointed in the Joan Baez character too, who seemed too ’rounded’ instead of the rather pointy person I’ve always thought of her as being, and Monica Barbaro, who also did all her own singing, didn’t capture that crystalline, soaring voice- although few probably could.
I haven’t particularly been a Dylan fan, but I have a new appreciation for him now. However, doesn’t stretch as far as thinking that he was a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Well, Scheherazade may have been able to spin out her story over One Thousand and One Nights, but Mary-Mathilda, the mistress of plantation owner Mr Bellfeels, and the mother of his only sons, takes only one very long night to tell her story. But it’s a very long night, and the story takes over 513 pages. Alone in the Great House on the plantation, she has called the police station on a Sunday night to confess to a crime. The Constable is dispatched to house to “pacify Miss Bellfeels” until the Sergeant, whom she has known since childhood, can arrive to take her statement. This is the story of that night, and the conversation that flows back and forth between Miss Bellfeels and first the Constable and then the Sergeant, before they take her statement about a crime that she has committed.
The story is set post-WW2 in Barbados, called Bimshire by the locals. The world, and Britain in particular, was happy enough to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 2007 but the reality is that even after the expanded Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, plantations continued in British colonies, with former slaves designed ‘apprentices’ until 1838, and then subjected to a form of indentured labour after that.
Mary Gertrude Matilda was born ‘free’ on the plantation, presumably in the early 20th century. Her mother, who also lived on the plantation was probably born ‘free’ too, but the power relations of the plantation still held sway. Mr Bellfeels, the plantation owner, had taken Mary’s mother as one of his -what do you call it? Not a lover, not a mistress, nor a concubine- perhaps sex-slave (?) and Mary is only a very young girl when Mr Bellfeels corners mother and daughter in a church-yard. Still mounted on his horse, runs his whip up and down Mary’s body, claiming ownership when she is a bit older. By the time she is an adolescent, he has raped her, just as he did her mother, and he continues to abuse her, albeit more as mistress than slave, setting her up in a house on the plantation where she bears his only son. With the malicious irony of the oppressor, the boy is baptized Wilberforce (who had campaigned for the abolition of slavery) and Mary Matilda occupies an ambiguous place in Bimshire society: shunned by white planter society, and treated with a mixture of deference and scorn by black society.
Mary has a hoe, that she used in the fields as a field-worker before she was sequestered away in the Great House. She has kept this hoe carefully sharpened, and it doesn’t take much imagination to know what she has used it for. The Sergeant, who has secretly been infatuated with Mary Matilda since they were children together knows too, and he is reluctant, but obligated, to take her statement. And so the story weaves around, backward and forwards, over Bellfeels’ abuse of both Mary and her mother over decades, the control of workers on the plantation, the birth of Wilberforce which places her in a different category to the other field-workers, leading eventually to Mary Matilda’s crime. It is a very slow telling.
Much of the book is dialogue, in a Barbadian patois, with Mary Matilda’s meandering narrative, interspersed with conversation with first the Constable, then the Sergeant. The book is told in three very long parts, with nary a chapter heading anywhere. This felt rather oppressive, especially reading as part of a compendium of Clarke’s writing on an e-reader, with no way of knowing how much longer the chapter or the book was going to continue for. For me, it made it feel even longer.
This book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Giller Prize and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. It is a striking book but too long and too slow for most readers -including myself- I would say.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: hard copy from my own bookshelves, supplemented by an e-reader version while I was on holidays.
Rear Vision (ABC) For about a fortnight after Trump’s victory, I couldn’t bear to listen to any news about America at all. I’m glad that I didn’t realize the inauguration was even happening so I missed that completely. But now, even though I’m horrified, I can bear to listen, watch and read again. Rear Vision replayed an episode from 2015, before Trump won his first term. It’s called A Tsunami of Trumpness, and the little wave then is nothing to what we have seen now. Trump’s grandfather arrived in 1885 – an immigrant, eh? – and made his money from North West mining. His father Fred built the family wealth further by taking advantage of the New Deal to become a builder and mortgage guarantor. Donald made his money from real estate and casinos, starting by refurbishing a hotel with his trademark glitz, using the political connections and credit from his father. He wasn’t particularly successful, but he knows the power of his own celebrity to gain free publicity because he is too big to fail.
The Rest is HistoryThe Nazis: Hitler’s Triumph (Part 3) This episode starts off with Horst Wessel. I’d heard of the song, but nothing about who Horst Wessel was. He was a streetfighter and member of the the SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. He was shot by 2 communists in 1930 and virtually deified by Goebels. The German economy was crippled by the withdrawal of US banking from Europe, something that happened gradually but inexorably. It was estimated that 1/4 of the population was living in a house with unemployment (actually, I think that the figure in Australia was even worse at 1/3 unemployment). Both the Communist and Nazi parties were increasing their members. The Weimar Republic virtually committed suicide as the governing coalition collapsed and, spurred by their fear of communism, Hindenburg and the army decided to rule by decree. Chancellor Heinrich Bruning cut spending and worked on evoking deflation and the first of a string of elections was held. This was the Nazi’s big moment, going from 12 seats to 107. They weren’t fringe any more. The violence of the streets and language was brought into mainstream politics. Electors had to hold their nose to vote for Hindenburg, who was the mainstream candidate. He won 53% of the vote, while Hitler won 37%. The very conservative Von Papen became Chancellor, and he called another election. This time the Storm Troopers were not banned, and the Nazis won 230 seats, against the 89 held by the Communists. Hindenburg refused to make Hitler Chancellor because of his violence. Von Papen wanted to dissolve Parliament and rule by decree but Von Papen lost a vote of no-confidence and so they had yet another election. This time both the Communist and Social Democrat parties improved their share of the vote, but they refused to work together. On 30 January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor to head a coalition government with Von Papen as Vice-Chancellor.
The Rest is Politics (US edition).Trump’s Insurrection: The Fall of the Capitol I listened transfixed on the radio while driving down to the beach, unable to believe what I was hearing. I saw the photographs in this most widely-photographed event. Anthony Scaramucci and Katty Kay go through the day, hour by hour, discussing what Trump was doing, what the politicians in Congress were doing, what the crowds outside were doing. For me, the most telling phrase was Trump saying “Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.” (see transcript of Jan 6 speech) For me, the WE is fundamental. Anthony and Katty speculate about what the rioters thought they were doing, and what I think they were doing is they were supporting Trump, who was going to march down there with them. It’s really important that we don’t forget the shock of this day, no matter how much Trump wants to rebrand it a “day of love”. We saw it, we heard it.
The Daily (NYT) The episode today is a long read from the NYT magazine: Opioids Ravaged a Kentucky Town. Then Rehab Became Its Business. The former coal-mining town of Louisa, Kentucky was at the heart of the opioid crisis, but then a Christian-based rehabilitation service Addiction Recovery Care moved into town. It was able to access Medicaid for rehabilitation services, and it formed a whole network of services and enterprises for recovering addicts including coffee shops, schools, panel beaters, aged care. This, of course, attracted more addicts which has changed the profile of the town. Many of the recovering addicts are ambivalent about Tim Robinson, the CEO and himself a recovering alcoholic, and his power, while at the same time acknowledging that he has changed their life. The story traces through two women working as aged care nurses who share a trailerhome, and it highlights the precariousness of addiction recovery.
My friend Fiona and I went to ‘The Round’ in Whitehorse Road to see Joe Camilleri and the Black Sorrows last night. Quite a weird experience. Looking around, the audience was predominantly over-60 and in our faces you could still see the 20 and 30 year olds that we once were, but it was as if a computer-program had aged us all.
The video above is from last year, but the lineup was the same last night. Why lookee- there’s James Black from Rockwiz on keyboards and for a 76-year-old, Joe Camilleri sounded good (better than in the videoclip, I think), supported by a great drummer and guitarists.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 