I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 February 2024

Posted on February 13, 2024 | Leave a comment

February already!

Expanding Eyes. Continuing on with A Midsummer Night’s Dream before going to see the play in the Botanic Gardens, Episode 99: Night Rule goes through the scene of Puck and the “love juice” which he manages to place on the eyes of the wrong people: on Titania, who instantly falls in love with Bottom wearing his ass’s head, and Lysander who is woken by the treacherous Helen, and instantly falls in love with her. Helen, who is infatuated with Demetrius, gives a rather pathetic speech where she begs him to treat her like his dog. He’s not worth it, Helen.

Episode 100 A Milestone, the Lovers and Fairies’ Conflicts Resolved. Michael Dolzani starts this episode by talking about imagination in Shakespeares’ work and the difficulties in trying to pin Shakespeare down to a specific theological approach. Duke Theseus’ oration about imagination here reflects Hamlet’s “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends” but it’s not as clearcut as that. There are many opposites in this play, and when Dolzani was teaching this play, he would get his students to identify them: reason/desire, order/chaos, masculine/feminine, reality/imagination. At the end of Act III, everyone is asleep and Puck and Theseus get the opportunity to undo the mischief they have caused. In Act IV, Oberon has ‘won’ and he has taken the child that Titania wanted to protect. Act V returns to Theseus, and it is here that he gives his speech about imagination.

Episode 101 A Midsummer’s Night Dream: What is the purpose of Act V? Good question, because this is where the lovers are all back with the people they are supposed to be with, and the rude mechanicals put on their play. Dolzani reminds us that this is a festive comedy, and the slapstick in their production of the play is a crowd-pleaser. However, at the end, Bottom asks whether the whole thing is a dream- a theme that Shakespeare addresses often. Is life real? Are we all just puppets, and who is the puppeteer? Dolzani reminds us that the play put on by the rude mechanicals has multiple audiences: the court, the fairies and us. Is someone watching US? (cue spooky music)

[By the time I’ve written this, I have seen the play and gained much by listening to these lectures – because that’s in effect what they are, complete with the rustle of paper as he turns the pages. He repeats himself a bit, so much so that I wondered if I was listening to an episode I’d heard before, but the repetition worked well for me in keeping the continuity when I was listening to episodes several days apart.]

History Hit I’ve finally finished the series on Napoleon. Episode 4 Napoleon: The Myth features Andrew Roberts (who appeared in the first episode) as he traces through Napoleon’s exile on St Helena, 2000 miles from any other land. He had 29 people in his entourage, and he spent his time writing The Memorial of Saint Helena where he himself crafted the ‘great man’ personae. He died after 6 years, and there are suggestions of arsenic poisoning, but tests have shown that all his family had high levels of arsenic as well, which could be ingested through many number of environmental sources. He was buried on St Helena, but in 1840 he was disinterred by Louis-Phillipe who was hoping for some reflected glory. Roberts thinks that Napoleon kept the best bits of the French Revolution, but there was such bloodshed. He thinks that Napoleon is unfairly stigmatized by the “Napoleonic Wars” because five of the seven such wars were started by the anti-Napoleon coalition. The coat, the medals, the bi-corn hat was all part of a carefully cultivated image on Napoleon’s part- and in promoting this visual image, you’d have to say that he succeeded brilliantly.

Prohibition. This episode comes from the American History Hit series. Under the Prohibition legislation passed in 1920, it was made illegal to manufacture, transport or sell alcohol, although not to actually drink it. Featuring Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. [Public Understanding?? Whatever happened to HISTORY?] she identifies prohibition as one of the three political movements that arose out of second wave Revivalism in America, the others being abolition and the suffrage. In 1920, 90-95% of the American population identified as being Christian, and so prohibition was framed as a moral campaign, led by women concerned about the link between alcohol, poverty and domestic violence, and the Anti-Saloon League, a powerful lobby group. It was spectacularly unsuccessful. New York ended up with 100,000 speakeasys, and organized crime moved into the trade. The government ended up adding poison to ‘rubbing alcohol’ to deter people from drinking it, which was not a good look, and with the coming of the Depression, the government became aware of the taxation revenue it was foregoing. So the Prohibition legislation was repealed in 1933, the first time a constitutional amendment was amended by a later amendment.

Sydney Writers Festival. Diary of an Invasion. I’m not really sure why this turned up in my podcast feed because events have largely overtaken it. Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov has been writing about daily life in Kyiv, and here he talks with Matt Bevan who, much though I like him, doesn’t do a particularly good job of posing questions to him (in fact, he sounds surprisingly nervous). Kurkov emphasizes that there are many Russian-speakers in Ukraine, but many of them have distanced themselves from their Russian identity as Putin insists that there is no such thing as ‘Ukrainian’ history or language. The head of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin was still alive at that time, and Kurkov discusses his role as an alternative political persona to Putin- but we all know how that ended. Badly.

Things Fell Apart (BBC) Episode 2: We’re Coming After You Honey. In 2006 a barmaid in a yachtclub was befriended by the Wittermore family, whose daughter was very sick with Chronic Fatigue. The barmaid (Judy) had worked as a medical researcher, and the family set her up in a research facility that they funded in order to search for a cure for CFS. She found traces of XMRV, a mouse virus, in the blood samples of CFS sufferers, and her research which she presented with 13 other authors, was published in ‘Science’ magazine. However, other researchers were not able to replicate her findings and the study was retracted. Judy angrily asserted that Big Pharma was attacking her research as an outsider to the medical establishment, and when she refused to hand over her cell lines on which the research was based, the Wittermore family sacked her. She stole the cell line and her notes from the laboratory, and ended up arrested and bankrupt. Eight years later, in May 2020, she appeared in the viral (haha) video ‘Plandemic’ accusing Big Pharma and Fauci of collusion in inflecting the population in order to sell vaccines. Interesting.

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‘The Silence of the Girls’ by Pat Barker

Posted on February 11, 2024 | 3 comments
2018, 324 p.

I have come late to The Iliad, only having just completed reading it (well, listening to it) for the first time. I had picked up bits and pieces of it over time, and read David Malouf’s Ransom some years ago, without having read the source material. I know that Pat Barker is not the first writer to approach The Iliad from a woman’s perspective, but after having been drenched auditorially in the gore and the testosterone of Homer’s work, I really enjoyed reading this book soon after reading the original, although I found the ending too neat, as if she was scratching around to end on a positive note.

It is mainly told from the viewpoint of Briseis, who had been captured when Achilles took Lyrnessus and slaughtered her whole family. She is his trophy, taken nonchalantly at first, until his commander Agamennon claimed her as his own after being forced to relinquish his own trophy sex-slave, Chryseis, when her father had called down plague on the troops encamped around Troy. Achilles bridles against this humiliation, not out of any great affection for Briseis, but because of the challenge to his own status as prized warrior by his commander. Briseis finds herself appropriated by Agamennon, who treats his women with violence, and then surrendered against back to Achilles who had previously treated her with nonchalance and disdain. As the war between the Trojans and Aecheans swings in the balance, so swings too her own future should she align herself with the Trojan women who are likely to meet the same fate as the women of Lyrnessus.

Perhaps it is because the reading of The Iliad is so fresh in my mind that Silence of the Girls seemed so powerful. The pathos and emotional depth of the final book 24 of The Iliad helps you to forget that you have sat through book after book of gore and vain-glory. Women are a by-product of that: either a disposable receptacle for lust, or valued mainly for their status as a trophy to be won or traded at the price that the enemy is willing to pay. I think, in a current-day context, of the Boko Haram “brides” kidnapped from Nigerian rural boarding schools (see a recent Amnesty International report here), and enslaved as a sexual convenience yes, but also as a challenge to the other side to fight or pay to ransom them. As in all hostage situations, the abductor is bringing into his – and yes, I will say “his”- ranks a resentful, frightened, angry enemy who, at first at least, must be terrorized into submission .

The women of Lyrnessus are slaves, outnumbered amongst violent men who, in this case, have the weight of military tradition and their kingdom, behind them. Women are the plaything of their Aechaen master, who can do what he will with them. ‘Unallocated’ women have an even more abject existence, available to any man in the camp. There is rape, violence and subjection, but I found myself particularly revolted by Agamennon’s act of deliberately spitting into Briseis’ mouth: there are, after all other fluids that a man can force into a woman. I don’t know why this disturbed me so much: perhaps it was the slow deliberation of the act. Resistance and agency, as a matter of survival, will be subtle, covert and “in the mind” despite what the body is forced to do.

Barker tells Briseis’ story in the first person, but with a twenty-first century viewpoint. The conversation and language, too, is twenty-first century. Often in historical fiction I am critical of such infelicities, but I have enough respect for Pat Barker as historical fiction writer to know that this would be a deliberate decision on her part, rather than ignorance or a lapse in concentration. I was disappointed in the ending though, because a writer of her status has no need to neaten things up, or end on an uplift.

At many times when listening to The Iliad I wondered why I was listening to so much boasting, repetition and gore. The final books made me forgive all that. And reading Barker’s The Silence of the Girls made me forgive all that boasting, repetition and gore too, because it provided a counterpoint to it, another reality more sobering and sordid and barely mentioned.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: I have a copy of Women of Troy (the next in the series) and I wanted to read the first book before embarking on it.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library Service (who I am horrified to see no longer hold any copies of the Regeneration trilogy. Surely a library service of this size could have one copy. This obsession with ‘chuck out the old and bring in the new’ is ridiculous.)

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‘The In-Between’ by Christos Tsiolkas

Posted on February 8, 2024 | 1 comment
2023, 400 p.

Whenever I read a Christos Tsiolkas novel, I come away wondering whether it’s him or me. Does everybody else think constantly of sex, appraising every random interaction as a possible liaison? Are everyone else’s eyes drawn immediately to groins or other sexual parts? Or is it me? Do I lack that whole sexual lens through which to view the world? Or am I too old? Have I forgotten? Was I ever like this? It’s as if the entrance price to a Tsiolkas novel is forced viewing of scenes that would certainly be designated for mature audiences only.

Yet, I think that there is a shift here as Tsiolkas himself, now in his late 50s, is ‘in between’ the shock value of his earlier novels, and something more mature (older) and reflective. The two main characters in The In-Between are middle-aged too, and embarking on a new relationship after both being burnt by previous relationships. Perry’s relationship in Europe with the urbane, educated Gerard ended when Gerard, largely because of his daughter, decided to commit himself exclusively to a heterosexual marriage with his wife, with whom he had a strained relationship. Back in Australia, Ivan’s relationship with Joe had more a suburban tenor, as the landscape gardener is ‘taken to the cleaners’ financially by Joe, much to his ex-wife’s fury. Both men are starting again, nervously and warily.

The book is told in five long chapters. Chapter 1 starts with Perry, 53 years old, catching a tram to their first date. Their restaurant meal leads to lovemaking at Parry’s inner-northern suburbs apartment. Chapter 2 focusses on Ivan, who is househunting in Frankston with his daughter Kat, who is planning her own daughter’s birthday. She wants Ivan to invite Perry, but her mother Dana, still furious about the financial shakedown by Joe, does not want Perry to attend. We follow Ivan to two of his landscaping jobs: one to an elderly Greek woman being bullied by her son, and the other to Clarissa and Simon in their Californian Bungalow, who make him feel dismissed and put down. Chapter 3 returns to Perry, and a dinner party held by lesbian friends Cora and Yasmin. This egg-shells dinner party, pure Tsiolkas in its incisiveness, sees Ivan being appraised by Perry’s friends, and the presence of straight couple Jed and Evelyn leads to too much drink, loose words and a confession. Chapter 4 has the most graphic and rather gratuitous sex in the book, I thought. Ivan breaks up with Troy, a long term male prostitute who he has been seeing for many years. Chapter 5 mirrors the previous chapter’s letting go of the past as Perry and Ivan travel to Europe to meet with Gerard’s daughter Lena. Lena has found a letter that Gerard wrote to Perry, but never sent but, receiving it years later, Perry decides not to read it.

When you’re in-between, things need to shift, and this book captures well the process of making space for a new person. It involves re-evaluating friendships, changing priorities and establishing new priorities. As Tsiolkas does so well, he captures Melbourne life crisply, with its suburbs and class distinctions played out through language, politics, interests and location. But there is also the element of age and maturity which, I think, is less often addressed in books with men (as distinct from women) as main characters – and often from an end-of-life backwards reflection rather than from this in-between stage. [ However, as I write this, a whole lot of other examples spring up: George Johnson’s books? Phillip Roth? ] In keeping with the title, this book looks both backwards and forwards; to letting go and building. It’s not just the sex: this is a book for grown-ups.

Rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 24-31 January 2024

Posted on February 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 411 The Man in the Iron Mask Have I ever read this? I don’t think I have, although I knew roughly what it was about. I always assumed that it was fiction, but there was in fact a real d’Artagnan and a real Saint-Mars and indeed a real man in the iron mask (although it may have been black velvet, rather than iron which rather changes the scenario somewhat). Tom and Dominic go through several scenarios. Several theories about the identity of the man in the iron mask were prompted by the fact that Louis XIV was rather a miracle baby, born after years of infertility. Was it Louis XIV’s older brother, fathered by a commoner? Or the commoner father himself? Or his identical twin brother born a few hours after Louis (which is often the case with twins), given that according to the beliefs of the time, the second twin born was actually the first conceived? Or was it a political prisoner, who knew too much? A valet for a famous man who knew things that he shouldn’t? Tom and Dominic seem to plump for the latter.

Unraveled (ABC) Firebomb I’ve been listening to this seven episode podcast for some time. It features actor Crispian Chan, who teamed up with investigative reporter Alex Manne to go back to investigate the fire-bombing of Crispian’s family’s Chinese restaurant in 1980s Perth. It was part of a neo-Nazi vigilante movement at the time, although it took the police some time to realize that. The two investigators catch up with men who were involved in neo-Nazi activities in the 1980s, then go in search of the ‘mastermind’ himself, before turning their attention to the rise of neo-Nazis in Australian politics today. This is all terribly drawn-out and could have been encapsulated in two or three episodes, and becomes rather too touchy-feely for me at the end.

The Daily (New York Times) The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia I have dementia in my family history, and I’m frightened by it. This is a fantastic podcast about two middle-aged daughters and their mother with dementia, and the court battle that ensued after their wealthy widowed mother embarked on a most-unexpected relationship with one of the daughter’s former father-in-law, a three-times divorced man with few financial resources. It raises lots of questions about whether loved ones have a responsibility to the pre-dementia person of the past, and the wishes they expressed then, or the happiness of the person who is sitting in front of them now, who may be quite a different person. Really interesting.

Expanding Eyes Episode 96: Shakespeare’s A Midsummers Nights Dream Act One We’re going to see this at the Botanic Gardens on Friday, so I thought I’d listen to Michael Dolzani’s series on A Midsummers Nights Dream. I have seen it before but to be honest, I thought it was a bit silly, so I thought it would be good to listen to a commentary on it first. So far Dolzani hasn’t disappointed. AMSD (my abbreviation) is one of a series of plays written by Shakespeare after the theatres re-opened after the Plague – resonances of COVID!- and it marks a change in Shakespeare’s use of rhyme and run-on in his narrative. Thematically, it is seen as a ‘festive play’ linked thematically with Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. It has four interlinked sub-plots, three of which represent social class distinctions: the ruling class (Theseus and Hippolyta), the well-born elite (the lovers), the working class (the “rude mechanicals”) and the fairies, and these story-lines play out contrapuntally. In this episode he deals with the first two. He points out that Shakespeare gives very rudimentary stage directions and little information about appearance, which is why Shakespeare’s plays can be reinterpreted so freely. The first grouping (Theseus and Hippolyta) is taken from Greek mythology which is a bit anachronistic. Hippolyta is an Amazon woman, taken by Theseus in victory (shades of the Iliad?) and they are about to marry in four days time. The second grouping, still upper class, sees the father Egius insist that his daughter Hermia, who is in love with Lysander, marry Demetrius, whom he has arranged for her to marry. Hermia and Lysander, star-crossed lovers- arrange to run away together (shades of Romeo and Juliet) but Hermia’s best friend Helena is going to spill the beans to Demetrius.

Episode 97 Acts 1 and 2 continued goes on with the other two plotlines. The mechanicals plan to put on a play for the wedding of the Duke and the Queen based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a fore-runner to Romeo and Juliet in that they both die needlessly, thinking the others dead. In Ovid’s story the metamorphosis occurs when their blood stains the white mulberry flower red. Shakespeare is not at all politically correct in his portrayal of the mechanics, making them out as dullards and fools. The name ‘Bottom’, which always amused me as a child, actually refers to weaving. Finally, there is the Fairy realm, where Shakespeare draws on Celtic mythology as well as Greco/Roman mythology, making much of the moon (modern readers/viewers are prompted by the other meaning of ‘moon’ with Bottom). Oberon, king of the fairies, is fighting with his wife Titania, and he decides to pay her back by arranging for her to be victim of a magic potion from a flower called ‘love-in-idleness’ which turns from white to purple when struck by Cupid’s arrow (shades of Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe). He finishes this episode by pointing out that AMND is often presented as a puff-piece- and I agree, this is how I have always seen it- but he’s certainly finding a lot of complexity in it.

Episode 98 The Green World AMND is one of Shakespeare’s “Green World” plays, which starts in a building, then goes outside into a forest, then returns inside with all the problems solved. This model was used in Two Gentlemen of Verona, in AMND, then in As you Like It and The Winters Tale. It continues to draw on Ovid’s Metamorpheses. Returning to the play itself, Oberon and Titania are fighting over a young boy. Oberon wants the boy to show his power, whereas Titania feels a sense of obligation to the boy’s mother, with whom she was friends. Puck – more strictly The Puck- is an English, rather than Irish character, and he plays the role of trickster.

History Hit What If Hitler Had Invaded Britain? As you know, I’m partial to a bit of counter-factual history, although this is more a discussion of Britain’s preparedness for a German invasion, featuring Andy Chatterton, author of Britain’s Secret Defences. Nine months after WWII started, Hitler was looking for an armistice, but Churchill was opposed to a truce so Hitler doubled down and planning started for Operation Sea Lion. This plan for a flotilla-based invasion was not put into place because of the power of the RAF. It was common knowledge that there were ‘auxiliary units’ on the coast, who were being trained to sabotage and resist any invasion, but they now know that they were throughout Britain, with their participants sworn to secrecy under the Secrets Act. Despite the fun made of “Dad’s Army”, these were actually trained saboteurs, with the details of their actions informed by the rapid fall of France and the Low Countries. They trained 16 year old suicide assassins, and respectable looking women as part of the resistance. I found myself thinking often of 16 year olds in Palestine….

History Extra Nicholas Winton: The ‘British Schindler’. I recently saw the film ‘One Life’, and this interview is with Edward Abel Smith, the author of The British Oskar Schindler: The Life and Work of Nicholas Winton (a title which the author admits Winston would have hated). He said that he was pleased to see that the film acknowledged Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick who worked alongside Winton. Smith points out that, unlike the Kindertransport (which this was not part of), Winton’s attention was on all children, not just Jewish children. He had a list of 5000 children, and managed to bring out 600, which he viewed as a failure. Once war began, he was a conscientious objector and worked as an ambulance driver. However, he later joined the RAF where he worked as a trainer because of his poor eyesight, and after the work worked on recouping reparations for the Jewish community from the extracted gold teeth- a pretty gruelling job. In the television show that features in the film (it was actually two separate episodes), many of the ‘children’ themselves did not know how or who had saved them.

Not Just the Tudors. As I’m going to see A Midsummer’s Night Dream this coming weekend, I was interested in Transgender Fairies in Early Modern Literature. Dr. Ezra Horbury, lecturer in Renaissance literature at the University of York, talks about the transformation at the end of the 16th century and early 17th century where fairies were transformed from the rather scary threatening folklore creatures into something small, sweet and delicate. This, she argues, was because of the ‘literariness’ of plays for the theatre, which drew on the child actors to play the parts. She discusses the appropriateness of using the term ‘transgender’, suggesting that many historical terms like ‘medieval’ are just as anachronistic. Children were viewed as being of no gender until they were about 7, right through to the early 20th century. She talks about the slipperiness of gender in fairies, and the misogyny and misanthropy in depictions of witches and old people. Much of this podcast went past me, because I was not familiar with the stories she was describing.

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‘The Iliad’ by Homer

Posted on February 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

I’ve never read The Iliad. I knew bits of it, most particularly the final scenes where the enraged Achilles is dragging the body of Hector around behind his chariot, but I’ve never read the whole thing. I’m not a big audio-book listener either, but in this case I decided to listen to it, knowing that it was originally an oral story. I had audios of the Fagles translation downloaded from who knows where, but they were many separate files and I kept getting lost. So in the end, I succumbed to the prose version by W.H.D. Rouse which felt a bit like cheating. However, I had first been drawn to finally tackle it after listening to a podcast on Achilles, where extracts from The Iliad were read out, and if that narrated version was not prose, then it certainly sounded that way. (The show notes don’t reference the translation). At the same time, I listened to an excellent series of lectures by Michael Dolzani at the Expanding Eyes podcast Episodes 44 to 56, which I have referenced in my I Hear With My Little Ear postings between 23 Oct 2023 and 16 January 2024.

It took me several weeks. Was it worth it? For much of the time, I would have said ‘no’. There are whole books devoted to call-outs to various warriors and their families: you can just imagine the listeners sitting, waiting for their family’s name to be called out, and their triumphant glances when it was. There are many chapters devoted to battles as men are run through the shoulder with swords, eyes plucked out etc etc etc. There are oddly placed chapters that describe ceremonial games held to celebrate a fallen warrior, with the results told in tedious detail.

Above all, there is the image of the hero: brave, fearless, unswervingly loyal. The obverse of the coin: proud, arrogant, stubborn. The image of hero has lured whole contingents of men to their death in its wake.

But there are also moments where we see the heroic ideal held up against other more human traits, most particularly the bond of father and son. This plays out most strongly in the last books of the epic, and these books alone make the rest of the testosterone-driven gore worthwhile.

And worth reading (listening to)? Yes.

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Six degrees of separation: from ‘The Great Fire’ to…

Posted on February 3, 2024 | 7 comments

This month the Six Degrees of Separation meme run by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest is a bit different. Instead of her choosing the starting book, she has invited us to start with a book that we have just finished, or read in the last month.

Well, the last book I read was Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and even though I know that some people love it and have read it multiple times, I wasn’t particularly impressed. But I haven’t posted my review yet, so you’ll just have to wait to find out why.

But, my disappointment in the book notwithstanding, where did it take me?

Despite the title, Hazzard’s book is not about the Great Fire of London at all- instead it’s set in Japan, Hong Kong and China in 1947 as the victorious Western powers occupy the territory. But Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self does deal the Great Fire of London because diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about it. In her biography, Tomalin gives us a rounded view of this 17th century Londoner and although many others have written about Pepys, I don’t think that anyone else could do it better than she has. My review is here.

John Lanchester’s Capital is set in Pepys Road South London in December 2007, just before the Global Financial Crisis. The book follows the little dramas of the inhabitants of Pepys Road in short chapters of just a couple of pages each. Somehow Lanchester filled over 500 pages largely about ordinary lives where nothing much happens and yet left me wanting more. I just loved it, and my review is here.

While we we’re in London, who else should we turn to but Peter Ackroyd, who has written several books about the city. London Under is atmospheric and erudite, steeped in literature and popular culture, especially that of the nineteenth century as he explores the river systems and infrastructure existing like a network under London Streets. The language flows seductively and smoothly in a very easy, beguiling read. My review is here.

Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness is set underground as well, but this time amongst the men tunneling under the Hudson River for the subway system in 1919. I read it before I start blogging, but I really enjoyed it.

And thinking about New York leads me to Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. I enjoyed the book enough the first time, but I absolutely loved the movie, and I went back and enjoyed the novel much more on a second reading. There is no back story; small events are told simply and in detail; every little act is described by a narrator who seems to be hovering up in the corner of the room, watching everything. It’s about a young girl who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn, and I felt that he described homesickness so well . My review is here.

The main character in Brooklyn left Ireland, while Claire Keegan’s books are firmly set there. They are only short- they’re novellas really- but they’re so beautifully crafted. She wrote the short-story, expanded into a novella that became The Quiet Girl movie which I howled the whole way through. Small Things Like These is set in 1985 as Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant with five children who has lived in his small village all his life, becomes aware of the convent and its power over the children in its ‘care’ and the complicity of the village in turning a blind eye. My review is here.

So, although I might have been less than enamoured with The Great Fire, it has certainly taken me all around the globe!

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‘Did Jesus Exist?’ by Bart D. Ehrman

Posted on January 31, 2024 | 1 comment
2012, 368 p.

It has never really occurred to me to question whether Jesus actually existed. There are many things that I doubt about him- miracles, resurrection, second coming for a start- but his actual existence, no. In fact, having spent a lot of the last three years or so catching up on the history of Rome that I missed out at school and university, it seems to me that the sparse references to Jesus himself and the response of Roman authorities to this small apocalyptic sect are just as you would imagine them to be.

However, as this book makes clear, there is a body of thought (albeit small) that asserts that Jesus never existed at all and was instead a myth that conflated Jesus with existing fertility gods and sun gods. According to this view, no textual evidence of Jesus emerged during the 1st century, having dispensed with the Jewish historian Josephus as a forgery. In his introduction Ehrman namechecks the major current proponents of these views: Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Frank Zindler, Thomas L. Thompson and George A Wells. While acknowledging that several of these authors have academic qualifications in classics and the Hebrew bible, according to Ehrman only one of these- Robert Price- has the intellectual chops in New Testament studies to be a serious contender. Ehrman then launches into his own rebuttal to the ‘mythicist’ position by looking at non-Christian sources for the life of Jesus, the Gospels themselves as historical sources, and other Christian writings that did not make it into the biblical canon. He presents what he considers two key arguments for Jesus’ existence: first, Paul of Tarsus’ personal association with Jesus’ followers and brothers especially Peter and James; and second, the common knowledge that Jesus had been crucified. The crucifixion was an affront to any perception of Jesus as a ‘messiah’, not unlike us finding out that David Koresh at Waco was really the Messiah. He then moves to dismantling the mythicists’ claims through either weak or irrelevant argument, and grappling with the ‘pagan myth’ hypothesis for Jesus’ non-existence. In the last two chapters of the book he spells out his own view of the historical Jesus as a 1st century apocalyptic Jewish preacher- a view that I largely subscribe to as well.

Looking at the list of ‘mythicists’ that he is taking on, one thing stands out to me: they are all men. I rarely mentally link the words ‘testosterone’ and ‘biblical studies’, but the first part of the book reminded me of chest-bumping, shirt-fronting, put-up-your-dukes academic skirmishing. The argument, carefully laid out with centred headings and subheadings felt to me like an extended exercise in man-splaining, complete with the repetition and put-downs. All rather unedifying, I thought.

However, I enjoyed the last two chapters of the book, where he stopped attacking and began presenting his own considered and backed-up views of the historical Jesus. Here is where he and I concur:

The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes…When we create him anew we no longer have the Jesus of history, but the Jesus of our own imagination, a monstrous invention created to serve our own purposes. But Jesus is not so easily moved and changed. He is powerfully resistant. He remains always in his own time. As Jesus fads come and go, as new Jesuses come to be invented and then pass away, as newer Jesuses come to take the place of the old, the real, historical Jesus continues to exist, back there in the past, the apocalyptic prophet who expected that a cataclysmic break would occur within his generation when God would destroy the forces of evil, bring in his kingdom, and install Jesus himself on the throne. This is the historical Jesus. And he is obviously too far historical for modern tastes.

Conclusion

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Read because: in preparation for my now completed talk at Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 January 2024

Posted on January 30, 2024 | Leave a comment

The Global Story (BBC)I had heard of the Houthis before the current attacks on ships in the Red Sea, but certainly they have more prominence in recent days as the Middle East becomes even more combustible. Why are the US and UK attacking the Houthis in Yemen?, featuring the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner explains that the Houthis come from the north of Yemen, although they only constitute 15% of Yemenis. They are a Shia sect that overthrew the President in 2014 and teamed up with the Republican guard to take power. The Saudis bombed them for years because Saudi Arabia didn’t want an Iranian ally on their doorstep. When the Houthis withstood this bombing, they developed a sense of invincibility. As devout Muslims, they see themselves part of the Axis of Resistance, comprising Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi. They are attacking at a chokepoint in the Red Sea, where 15% of global shipping passes. Australia has given logistical support to the US/UK bombings as part of a twenty-country coalition. I think we did the right thing in refusing to send a ship there.

The Daily (NYT) What the Houthis Really Want. Continuing on about the Houthis, this podcast is from 18 January, after several bouts of bombing. Vivian Nereim, the Gulf bureau chief for The New York Times points out that the Houthis have a larger Western presence than might otherwise have been the case because of their internet presence through videos, songs and TikTok. They go back to the 1990s, but came to prominence after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. After the 2010-2011 Arab Spring they toppled the US-back Yemeni strongman, and seized the capital in 2014 and installed themselves as the government. Saudi Arabia was concerned at having an Iran-aligned country on their border, so with US support, the Saudis began bombing Yemen, causing huge damage and famine- although this US support has frayed since 2018. The Houthis, at their core, are anti-US and anti-Zionist, and although their stated aim in the recent attacks on shipping is to support Palestine, it is also in their interests to distract attention from their difficulties in being the government and doing government-y things, rather than being rebels. October 7 was a gift to them, and they have nothing to lose from their pro-Israel support, and the US/UK bombings just feed into the anti-US rhetoric. They will not stop.

Laudatio Turiae, Turia’s funeral monument. Wikipedia

Being Roman. Episode 2: The Vengeance of Turia. This was a fantastic episode. The assassination of Caesar was followed by ten years of civil war. It’s easy to forget the perils of picking a side in a brutal, vicious civil war, where there is no stable government and when the sides keep shifting. Turia’s parents were both killed by thugs, the day before her wedding, and she had to fend off the legal claims of her relatives for her inheritance. Her husband chose the wrong side, and was exiled by the junta that took over after Caesar’s death. Eventually Augustus agreed to him returning, but Lepidus blocked it. She challenged him, and was bashed for her trouble. She and her husband were not able to have children, so she offered to give him a divorce and live in a menage a trois with a woman who could provide him with an heir. He rejected her offer (perhaps because he feared that he was the infertile one?) Anyway, we learn all this from a long inscription on her funeral monument, which just happened to reflect well on him too.

The Rest is History Episode 402 The Mystery of the Pregnant Pope was believed by the Catholic Church for about three hundred years, although in 1601 Pope Clement VIII declared the legend untrue. Later historians have christened the 9th century papacy “pornocracy”, and this is when the Englishwoman Joan was supposed to have lived, and ascended the ladder to become “John VIII”. Tom Holland (who wrote the book Dominion) goes on at length about the Gregorian Revolution which replaced the power of kings over the church with cardinals instead, with the church was conceptualized as the Bride of Christ. Even though most people acknowledge that the legend of Pope Joan is untrue, Saint (Abbess?) Guglielma had many echoes of the Pope Joan legend. When she died around 1280, her burial site became a shrine for the Guglielmites, who believed that she would be resurrected and lead a new church headed by women. The Inquisition charged 30 of her followers with heresy and dug up Guglielma herself, and burned her along with several of her followers. Fascinating.

Things Fell Apart (BBC) This is the second season of this podcast. Presented by Jon Ronson, it looks particularly at conspiracy theories that arose in May 2020, about six weeks into the COVID pandemic. In the first episode, Ep. 1 The Most Mysterious Deaths Ronson looks at the concept of “excited delirium” to explain the death of George Floyd which occurred on May 25, 2020 (I’d forgotten that it occurred during COVID). This spurious medical concept, developed and promulgated by a Dr Wetley, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Miami, arose in the 1980s when 32 black sex workers were found dead. Instead of going for the serial killer explanation, which seeme the most likely, Wetley said that it was the result of a mixture of cocaine and sex that led to “excited delirium” which manifested as sudden death in women, but psychosis and superhuman strength in men. The term was eventually debunked, but Wetley continued to publicize it up to 2020, sponsored by the manufacturers of Tasers who argued that deaths during Taser use were the result of “excited delirium”. It continued to be circulated amongst police officers, and indeed during George Floyd’s arrest, one of the arresting officer suggested putting him onto his side because he was suffering from “excited delirium”.

History in the Bible Although I have admitted to a secret enjoyment of ‘what-if’ history, I don’t know if my enthusiasm extends to the Bible. Speculations I looks at the years 35CE to 60CE and asks What If John the Baptist had been bigger than Jesus? His answer: John the Baptist was very popular and both were apocalyptic preachers but John the Baptist wouldn’t have spoken to Gentiles, and he would have been one among many sects in Judaism. Second question: What if Paul had split to form his own independent movement? His answer: perhaps the Jews who were left might have had more influence on Temple worship, and Jesus might have been seen as one of the great rabbis. If Paul had gone his own way, the Jewish part would have faded away, and what was left would probably have got on better with the Christians. Paul might have been able to downplay Jesus completely as the Marcions did later.

Expanding Eyes Episode 56 Book 24 The Meeting of Priam and Achilles is the final podcast about the Iliad. He concentrates mainly on Book 24, which is not a coda (even though it could have finished at Book 22) but instead one of the most important books in Western literature. Book 23, where Homer describes the games (rather boring) shows Achilles being re-integrated back into his society. The gods get involved again, and Achilles is ordered to give up Hector’s body and Priam is told to go and retrieve it. FINALLY we learn why it is called ‘The Iliad’: Priam and his manservant stop at the tomb of his ancestor Ilios, indicating that the whole thing has been about fathers and sons. When Achilles is transformed by the recognition of his grief for his own father, and extends this empathy to Priam, he shows his true greatness. In his speech about the 2 jars of life, that the Gods can dispense at will, Achilles emphasizes that fate is random. The play has a slow and dignified closure, with three speeches by women: Hector’s wife, mother, and rather surprisingly, Helen, whose actions had prompted the whole thing. Although there was a bit of a dip in the middle, I really enjoyed this series and found it really worthwhile. But do I want to launch into Milton’s Paradise Lost? Nah, I don’t think so.

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‘An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family’ by Alison Bashford

Posted on January 28, 2024 | 2 comments
2022, 419 P & 60 pages of notes

Sometimes you just have to shut a book when you reach the end and say “Wow!” That’s what I did when I finished reading Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution, a dual biography of Thomas Henry (T. H.) Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley that also drew in all the ‘little’ Huxleys as well. Not that there was anything ‘little’ about this family: it lay at the heart of 19th and 20th century British intellectual life, with links that extended to other illustrious families of science and letters like the Arnolds, Darwins, Galton and Wells.

While family biographies are nothing new, Bashford shapes her approach through two particular Huxley family members: T. H. Huxley (often known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) born 1825, and his grandson Julian, born 1887. This jump between generations, largely skipping the intervening generation, breaks up the linear progression of the narrative:

The younger man constantly fashioned himself after his Victorian grandfather, pursuing those signature Huxley knowledge-quests, some profound, others simply grandiose. They were both remarkable and both, on occasion, tortured. Writing these natural scientists together permits a kind of time-lapse over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely because they were so similar. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the space age; from colonial wars to world wars to the Cold War; from a time when the Earth was 6,000 years old according to Genesis, to a time when it was 4.5 billion years old, according to rock samples returned from the Apollo missions.

p. xxiii

T. H. Huxley was born into an “educated but struggling and socially declining” family (p.xxx) and had only two years of formal education before being thrown on his own resources as an autodidact. He was apprenticed to anatomists in the family, but did not complete his medical degree. He joined the navy and was made Assistant Surgeon on H.M.S. Rattlesnake, which embarked on a voyage of discovery and collection in Australia and New Zealand. (Actually, there are several references to Australia in this very English biography- perhaps reflecting Alison Bashford’s current position at UNSW). His work on jellyfish and other marine creatures gained him admission to the Royal Society but despite the acclaim he received for this work, he still had to fight for his position as professor of paleontology and natural history at the Royal School of Mines. His grandson, Julian, had a much easier path. His father, Leonard, had benefitted from the upward social and financial mobility of his father, and so Julian attended Eton and then Baillol College at Oxford from 1906. He, too, studied marine life, but he made his scientific name in his study of grebes (birds). He was invited to set up a Department of Biology at Rice University before World War I intervened, and he later moved to Kings College London as Professor of Zoology. He resigned this position to work with H.G. Wells and his son on a book The Science of Life before travelling to East Africa to continue his ornithological work . He returned to London to take up a position running the London Zoo in 1935, followed by a role in the creation of UNESCO and the WWF. He was a fore-runner to David Attenborough in popularizing the natural sciences and conservation through radio and television broadcasts and documentaries.

But both men’s work was broader than this. Their shared interest in evolution, albeit separated by the discoveries in the decades between their work, involved them in the intense debates of their times. Darwin’s theory of evolution (which T. H. Huxley was not initially convinced by, despite later becoming one of its major exponents) led to explorations and assertions about Homo Sapiens, anthropology, political biology and finally led to eugenics, of which Julian was a leading figure although distancing himself from its use in Nazism. Julian looked forward to transhumanism: a landscape that we have yet to traverse.

Both men were interested in the psychic and spiritual realm, particularly in later life. T. H. Huxley coined the religious term ‘agnostic’, meaning a humble ignorance and openness to further knowledge rather than its more hard-edged nature today. He approached the Bible as a historical document, and during his life wrote as much on Biblical themes (albeit critically) as he did on some of his natural science interests. He enjoyed jousting on religious matters with his sister-in-law, Mary Augusta Ward nee Arnold, who as well as writing rather dire ‘improving’ literature and being active in the anti-suffrage movement, was also a strong supporter of women’s education and settlement houses as part of the social reformist movement. His grandson Julian also developed an interest in neo-romanticism and was attracted to the ideas of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin with whom he shared a quest towards cosmic unification.

But both men shared the family inheritance of mental illness, in particular an immobilizing depression which saw Julian committed to psychiatric hospitals at various times during his life. This combination of family brilliance and family mental illness is perhaps what gives the title – An Intimate History of Evolution its unusual adjective. Here the theory of inheritance becomes personal.

The structure of the book reflects Bashford’s rejection of a single line of chronological narrative. The book is divided into four parts thematically: Genealogies; Animals; Humans and Spirits, and although dealing first with T.H. and then Julian in each of these themes, the timeline and focus does jump from one man to the other. Nor does the book focus on them alone: the women of the family, particularly T. H.’s wife Henrietta, Mary Augusta Ward, Julia Arnold are also referenced throughout. Other Huxleys especially Julian’s brother Aldous, and the religious writer Francis Huxley are also present. Bashford captures well the network of knowledge and intellectual influence which shaped, and in which the whole family moved.

Bashford’s own grasp of T. H. and Julian Huxley’s work is impressive. As a historian of science, she traces the contours of their scientific work, making it intelligible – and even, when you’re reading about jellyfish, interesting. She is just as comfortable teasing out their philosophical and religious work, which does become rather esoteric at its edges. It is not a particularly easy read, although I made it harder for myself by stopping for about a fortnight to read other things. But she is talking about big ideas – indeed, the biggest of ideas- and as a reader you have to work as well. She is writing about a family who were a tour de force in their intellectual milieu, and this book is Bashford’s own tour de force of biography, science, philosophy and history as well. Brilliant

My rating: 10/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I heard a podcast on it.

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‘From the Beast to the Blonde’ by Marina Warner

Posted on January 24, 2024 | Leave a comment

1994, 458 p.

I was rather startled to see that my CAE bookgroup had chosen Marina Warner’s book for our December 2023 read. We’re a rather cosy bookgroup, once condescendingly designated ‘middlebrow’ readers, more drawn to fiction than non-fiction, and I was familiar with Warner’s rather erudite contributions to the London and New York Review of Books magazines. From the Beast to the Blonde is a hefty tome, both physically, and intellectually. I raised an eyebrow at the notewriter’s opening paragraph in the CAE notes that accompanied the book:

Perhaps the book should be approached by reading the lucid and interesting introduction and conclusion, which summarize all the themes developed at length in the main text, then glancing through the text’s handsome and liberal illustrations, which will give a visual impression of the contents.

CAE notes p. 1

Once I felt that I had ‘permission’ to skip bits, I actually ended up reading most of the book, even though I only started reading it about four days before the meeting, as is my usual practice. It was very dense, with long sentences and a forbidding vocabulary (autochthonous? peripeteia?). It was very digressive, as if Warner couldn’t allow a possible association to go unremarked. Most of her material was focussed on European fairy stories. Some Islamic stories do get a look in, but few Asian or indigenous stories are mentioned. In fact, I’m not sure that she ever really defined what a fairy story is, and the distinction between a folk tale and a fairy story.

The book is divided into two parts: The Teller and the Tale. In the first part of the book, she highlights that most fairy stories originated in women’s talk, especially in women-only places like child-bed, washing, kitchens etc, even though they were generally published under men’s names (e.g. Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang). Wrested into the male realm, they often display a disparagement of the original women tellers, drawing on the imagery of the old crone, or a bird to declare them “Mother Goose’s” tales or a grandmother’s stories.

In the second part of the book she moves on to specific stories, particularly Cinderella and the rather disturbing Donkeyskin fairytale (where a young girl has to disguise herself in a donkey skin to avoid her father’s incestuous designs on her) among others. She discusses the Disneyfication of fairy stories, especially ‘The Little Mermaid’, and the cultural stereotypes of blondness and step-mothers that are conveyed through them. But this division between the two sections is not clear cut. For example, although name-checking Marie-Jeanne L’Heritier, Henrirette-Julie de Murat, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy as women writers of fairy stories prior to their absorption into the male-author canon in Part One, it is only in Part Two that she actually gives biographical details about the women and their part in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century French circles. She reveals her indebtedness to Angela Carter, whose adult fairy stories have extended and subverted the genre.

To her credit, she does give a good plot summary of the various stories and their variations, as few readers would be familiar with them, and she does the English reader the courtesy of translating French quotations from them. But it is still a very dense, difficult text. In the conclusion, she embarks on a discussion about a historical as distinct from psychoanalytic reading of fairy stories, arguing that they need to be read within their historical context in both their authorship and allusions, rather than as representatives of archetypes (at least, I think that’s what she was arguing).

The proliferation of anti-fairy stories, even more so in the decades after this was written, have picked up on the feminist emphasis on this book which no longer seems particularly radical or new. They certainly do not call on the same intellectual fortitude and commitment that this book requires of its reader. And it did remind me to one day introduce the original versions of the stories to my grandchildren (yes, it will probably only be my granddaughters) from my own mother’s ‘The Children’s Treasure House”, which will test their attention spans with its dark themes and its black and white art-deco line drawings. Just like my attention span was tested with this book. I recognize its contribution and I admire its breadth and erudition, but it was hard work.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: CAE for my CAE Book Group (AKA ‘The Ladies Who Say Ooooh’)

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