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

Posted on January 14, 2024 | 2 comments

The Rest is History The Fall of the Aztecs: War to the Death Part 7. It’s time that I finished this 8-parter off, before I forget how it started. This episode deals with the Siege of Tenochtitlan – the last stand of the Aztec warriors. As they point out, Meso America was so divided that it was easy to colonize. Conquest by the Spanish wasn’t inevitable- after all, the Chinese and Ottomans had empires too- but they were unlikely to colonize Meso-America, and given the competitiveness and entrepreneurship in Europe at the time, the Europeans were always going to come. The Spanish Conquest established a template for other conquests, transforming Meso-America into a Spanish place. They talk about Matthew Restall’s approach towards the conquest (I must seek him out) which depicts Cortez as a mediocrity, and which seeks to take out the glamour of the Conquistadors, leaving the horror and drama. Sandbrook and Holland (the presenters) don’t go that far: they claim that there was courage on both sides. 

The Fall of the Aztecs: The Last Emperor Part 8 As Tenochtitlan falls in August 1521, the story of sacking of a city repeats, as it has through Western stories (think Troy, think Jerusalem). Is the Spanish Conquest to be condemned? Certainly, Protestants dined out of its barbarity, and there is a strong progressive argument against it. Cortez was still desperate to find gold, and he was prepared to torture the Mexica to find it. Meanwhile, Charles V in Europe gave his approval of the expedition, and Cortez’s wife Catalina (a forced marriage) turned up in Tenochtitlan, only to die suddenly (how convenient). How much changed after the conquest? The Mexica were not slaves and they continued to work as peasant labourers, much as they had under the Aztecs. The Spanish were deferential towards rank and hierarchy amongst the people they conquered, as long as their opponents converted. The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared, speaking Nahuatl, at a place that was already a pilgrimate site to fertility goddesses. Cortez was not good at governing. He married Malinche and gave her her own estates, remarried and started another family, then sailed off to Spain to fight innumerable lawsuits- the fate of most of the Conquistadors- and he died there.

Return Ticket (ABC) I wanted something light to fill in about 20 minutes, and this travel series is certainly light. Hosted by Jonathan Green, of whom I am not particularly enamoured, these are short travel segments taking a somewhat quirky view of popular travel spots. I’m not particularly interested in hearing about places that I haven’t seen (and am unlikely to do so now), but I was attracted to the episodes where he talks about places that I have been to. Order and chaos in Mumbai juxtaposes the sheer crush of so many people against the unseen networks that somehow make this place work. He visits the dhobiwalas in the huge open air laundry near Maha Laxmi Railway Station ( I wrote about them in my travel blog here), then Churchgate Station, where the dabbawalas collect and distribute tiffin boxes throughout the city. He finishes off in a national park in Mumbai where he sees a leopard. 

The very first episode of this program (S1E1) is London Underground- Literally starts off in the Underground but then excavates deeper into the other services laid below the Tube like British Telecom, bolt-rooms for politicians and passageways for police. He then discusses the Iceberg Houses in Kensington, where a standard Regency exterior hides multiple basement levels with pools, gymasiums, theatres etc.- in effect, inconspicuous consumption in houses that are largely unlived-in, and merely an investment product. The juxtapositon between extreme wealth and poverty is jarring, with the Grenfell Towers nearby.

But this program is too flippant for me: too many ‘stingers’ breaking up the program, too much silliness.

Expanding Eyes. I haven’t enjoyed the last couple of episodes as much- there’s a bit too much re-telling of the Iliad, with not much more added. Episode 53 deals with the turning point of Book 16, where Patroclus dresses in Achille’s armour and goes and gets himself killed. In Episode 54 the Achaeans get Patroclus’s body back, minus the armour, and Achille’s mother Thetis goes to the workshop of Hephaestus on Mt. Olympus to get a replacement. Breisis speaks of her sorrow at the death of Patroclus, and finally Achilles goes into battle himself.

History Hit The WW2 Witch Trial of Hellish Nell features Kate Lister, who presents the Between the Sheets podcast about sex- her specialty. It’s a very noisy podcast and I find her accent rather grating. She interviews Jess Marlton, manager of Bodmin Jail, which markets itself as a site of paranormal activity. Hellish Nell was actually Helen Duncan (she gained the nickname from a brattish childhood) and she was the last woman to be tried under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, more than 200 years later, during WW2. The concept of ‘ghost’ changed over time, and after World War I, at a time when communication technologies were coming into their own, people wanted to communicate with the dead. Women in particular were seen to cross over between the real and the mystical, and being a medium was a way of women having spiritual authority that they otherwise did not have. Helen began her career in the 1920s. She specialized in manifesting the dead through ectoplasm, or spiritual energy, which ended up being exposed as a mixture of cheesecloth and egg white that she regurgitated- metres and metres of the stuff.. She was brought undone by a naval officer who attended one of her seances where she ‘spoke’ with a sailor who supposedly died in a sinking that the British Government had not publicized. Although she had been charged under the vagrancy act previously, the government wanted to make an example of her. She was sentenced to nine months jail. The 1735 Act focussed on fakery, rather than earlier Witchcraft Acts which tacitly recognized the reality of witches. The act was changed again in 1951 to the Fraudulent Medicine Act, and was later incorporated into Consumer legislation.

The Partial Historians I’ve been aware of this podcast, featuring Australian historians Dr Fiona Radford and Dr Peta Greenfield but I hadn’t listened to it. Ye Gods, one of them has the most annoying braying laugh (I think that it’s Dr Rad, but I may be wrong). I was particularly interested in this episode on Roman Naming Conventions, because I find Roman names really confusing. There are four naming conventions: the praenomen (the first name), the nomen (a reference to the clan or gens that the person came from), the cognomen (this name could have a variety of meanings!), and the agnomen (nickname). It’s comical that some of the names that we know Romans by were actually quite abusive: Galba meant ‘fat belly’; Crassus meant ‘fat’; Blazus meant ‘stutterer’. Adoption was taken very seriously by the Romans, and the suffix ‘-anus’ was added to their name to denote that they had been adopted. There was change over time in women’s status vis-a-vis their family, when instead of becoming part of their husband’s family, they remained part of their gens (i.e. birth family). Slaves were often given a cute name, and freedmen often had to keep their former owner’s name, although later generations dropped it.

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‘The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’ by Richard Flanagan

Posted on January 13, 2024 | 3 comments
2020, 304 p.

I’m old enough now to have sat beside two dying parents- and who knows if life holds further deathbed vigils for me- and one of the things that struck me even in the midst of it was what a strange time it was. Outside that room, life teemed on oblivious; inside that room, each breath was watched and counted. This strangeness pervades Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, starting right from the opening pages. It’s summer, and the city is shrouded in smoke, just as we remembered January 2020 to be (although I had forgotten that smoke when we were then catapaulted into COVID lockdowns by March that year). Anna looks down at her hand, and notices that her ring-finger is missing, blurred out, gone. Her mother is in hospital after a “bad turn” following the dreaded “fall”, having five years earlier been diagnosed and treated for hydrocephalus, and then diagnosed with low-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now she has had a cerebral hemorrhage, which will be followed by liver problems, and the family is asked what their mother’s wishes were.

Not that the siblings – Anna, Tommy and Terzo- are going to respect them, even when their mother Francie, painstakingly spells out ‘GOMELET’ on an alphabet board. “Let me go?” asks Anna, feigning astonishment, “But where are you going to go to?” Because, led by the forceful Terzo, the family has decided that their mother Francie must live, irrespective of cost, irrespective of doctors’ opinions. Strings are pulled, favours are called in, and Francie, becoming increasingly less human by the day, is kept alive by machines, because we can.

Meanwhile, those disappearances… first Anna’s finger, then her knee, then her breast, then parts of her face. No-one else seems to notice. Then her son, the unresponsive gamer locking himself in his bedroom and stealing from his mother, starts disappearing as well.

And at a broader level, there are disappearances too.

The ladybirds gone soldier beetles blue bottles gone earwigs you never saw now gone beautifully coloured Christmas beetles whose gaudy metallic shells they collected as kids gone flying ant swarms gone frog call in spring cicada drone in summer gone gone.

Gradually we learn the history of this family, and come to understand the dynamics between the adult children, starkly drawn in all its steely aggression and wilful blindness. This is a painfully honest book at the human level, and a grimly pessimistic book at the broader environmental level. It juxtaposes the desire to hold on at all costs to some lives and the blithe dispensing of others, power and powerlessness. It is a little heavy handed with the politics – I felt rather bashed over the head by it- but I was won over by his skill in interweaving his up-close personal story with a broader world-level story. Some readers will bridle against the magic realism, but for me it just highlighted the paradox of his argument. In many ways, this book touched on nearly all his previous books – the magic realism of Gould’s Book of Fish, the love for wilderness of Death of a River Guide and the horror of genocide and disappearance in Wanting. He is such an assured, deft writer.

Excellent.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: CAE bookgroups for my Ladies Who Say Oooh bookgroup. It was my choice.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 25- 31 December 2023

Posted on January 8, 2024 | 1 comment

Expanding Eyes Episode 51 The Embassy to Achilles deals with Books 9-11. The three men sent to encourage Achilles out of his man-cave all used different approaches: self-interest, guilt and just bewilderment. Achilles responded as if he had been holed up an reading existentialism: that nothing mattered anyway. The Achilles Heel story does not appear in the Iliad, although there is a prophesy of a double fate facing Achilles- either dying in glory or having a long and unremarkable life. Note that Agamennon’s list of gifts to encourage him back does not include an apology for running off with Achilles’ wife (probably the one thing Achilles wanted). Although it seems very to-and-fro, there is a pattern to the interminable fighting in Book 10. Book 11 reveals the aristeia (i.e. high point) of Agamennon’s role in the battle. By now the main people in the Achaean army had received injuries which take them out of the battle. It’s in fact Nestor who first suggests that Patroclus take Achilles’ place on the battlefield.

Episode 52 The Horrors of War and the Value of the Heroic Code There’s a speech about the Heroic Code in Book 12, but it’s hard for me to find anything to admire in it. Michael Dolzani suggests that perhaps one good thing that comes out of it is a sense of competition, but it also spurred countless thousands of British men into the meat grinder of the WWI trenches. William James once suggested that we need a moral equivalent to war. Zeus decides to “look away” and the gods intervene, helping out their favourites, but the battle is going the Trojans’ Way. Meanwhile, Hera, who favoured the Greeks, distracts Zeus with sex.

The Rest is History The Fall of the Aztecs: The Night of Tears (Part 6) This episode focuses on the night of 30th June 1520, La Noche Triste, when the Spanish tried to break out of Tenochtitlan. Montezuma had been killed and they were surrounded by angry Mexica. They made their escape at night and were successful, but it was a bloody event. The Tlaxcalans rejected the Mexica’s pleas to join forces with them to get rid of the Spanish, and instead they joined forces with the Spanish. But another enemy was stalking: smallpox which had already wiped out the Taino people in the Caribbean (necessitating the importation of Africans as a replacement labour force- but that’s another story). It was probably introduced by Narváez, rather than Cortez. The harvest collapsed because there were insufficient workers, so when more Spaniards arrived, the place was deserted. Cortez was determined to wage a European style War, but the Tlaxcalan’s sacrificed and cannibalized their Mexica captives- but Cortez was powerless to stop them. In late 1520 ships were arriving all the time. Meanwhile, in Europe, Charles V was showing off the gold that Cortez had sent to him. A shipbuilder, who had survived La Noche Triste arrived with 12 ships that he had built and had carried overland, and so Cortez was set….

Roger Kidd Georgian House, Lewes, East Sussex https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1111791

History Extra Georgian Grand Houses: the forgotten women who built them. Featuring Amy Boyington, the author of Hidden Patrons: Women and Architectural Patronage in Georgian Britain, this episode highlights the autonomy of heiresses, mistresses and widows in directing the design and construction of houses. Although the men in their families usually paid the accounts, a different picture of women’s involvement emerges from their correspondence (often with other women) where they display their practical concerns over, for example, where the sun would be shining in a dining room on a summer’s night, or how cold a room might be in winter etc. She gives many examples of women and houses, many of which were unfamiliar to me, but would probably be well known among British listeners.

The Philosopher’s Zone (ABC). Richard Rorty and America. I don’t often listen to this program, because it’s often too heavy for me, but I was attracted to the episode on Richard Rorty. I didn’t (don’t) know much about Richard Rorty, but I had heard of him because Inga Clendinnen responded to one of his books where he omitted history from his list of genres which could encourage the growth of our imaginative capabilities. (Inga’s essay Fellow Sufferers is available here). This episode features Chris Voparil who has co-edited a recent collection of the late Rorty’s essays (he died in 2007) called What Can we Hope For: Essays on Politics. In an essay that Rorty wrote in 1996 called ‘Looking Back from 2096’, he predicted the rise of a Trumpesque strongman. He was critical of identity politics, and especially compulsory college courses to raise awareness of Black, Women’s and LGBT identities, pointing out that ‘Trailer Trash’ was never seen as a marginalized group to be championed. Nonetheless, he argued that we get our moral stance from the group that we identify with- literally a form of ‘identity politics’.

Literature and History Episode 11 Who Was Homer? looks at Books 17-24 before then addressing the question of who Homer was and if he even existed. Aeneas pops up in the battle before being whisked away by Poseidon, which went down a treat with the Romans who were to later claim Aeneas as their own. We need to remember that Hector didn’t kill Patrocalus (instead the minor character Euphorbus did), but he did steal Achilles’ armour from him and disrespected his body. The funeral games, which seem to us to be completely incongruous and which take ages are part of a set piece to break up the narrative, and such a device appears in other similar epic poems. The ending is very inconclusive, but that’s because what we know as The Iliad is part of an 8-book poetic cycle, of which we have only Books 2 and 7. From flashbacks in these two books, we know that in Book 3 Achilles is killed, in Book 4 the Trojan Horse appears, in Book 6 Agamennon and Menelaus return, Book 7 is the Odyssey and Book 8 deals with Odysseus’ later adventures. He then moves on to the question of Homer’s identity, something you might have thought he would have done at the start. He suggests that Homer was probably not one man, but the works instead spring from a collective oral tradition. There are many narratives where a band of mates sack a wealthy trading city (Cortez and Tenochitlan spring to my mind) and it is in effect the story of the collapse of the Bronze Age in miniature. Troy was probably part of the Hittite empire. There have been many attempts to date The Iliad, using archeology of weapons mentioned in the narrative; linguistic patterns and the meter of poetry. Although there might not be one Homer the writer, it’s possible that there was one Homer to reciter. Milman Parry (the so-called Darwin of Homeric studies) basing his approach on Yugoslav oral folk songs, looked to the use of formulaic descriptions, rhythm and repetition as a mnemonic aids to remember such a long oral poem.

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Six Degrees of Separation from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to…

Posted on January 7, 2024 | 8 comments

Not only the first Saturday in the month, but the first Saturday of 2024 as well, and so I rather belatedly turn my attention to the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest. She chooses the starting book- in this case, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow– and participants bounce off six titles evoked from the starting book. 

As usual, I haven’t read Kate’s starting book, and indeed have never heard of it, so on the basis of one word in the title alone, off I go.

  1. Clearly the word is ‘tomorrow’ and the book that sprang to mind was Phillip Gourvitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. As you would guess from the title, this book deals with the 1994 Rwandan genocide which saw between 500,000 and 800,000 people die in a hundred days of violence between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.
  2. A similar book, with a similar title, which I read recently was Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father. Another genocide, but this time in Cambodia, where Pol Pot and his Kymer Rouge forces systematically murdered between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodian citizens (my review here)
  3. I’ve visited both Rwanda and Cambodia, and their memorial sites, and moving away from the genocide theme (slightly- though let’s not mention the Mau Mau) let’s go to Kenya instead which I have also visited. Although its name might seem to fit into the genocide theme, Richard Crompton’s Hells Gate is actually a detective novel set in Hell’s Gate National Park at Lake Naivasha, not far from Nairobi. (My review here).
  4. I’m not usually a great detective fiction aficionado, but I’ve really been enjoying big fat Robert Galbraith novels. Robert Galbraith is of course the nom-de-plume for J. R. Rowling, and I can actually follow these stories and can clearly tell you “who dun it” at the end of the book. The Cuckoo’s Calling was the first in the series about the murder of a high-end fashion model, and in it Galbraith establishes her detectives Comoran Strike and his secretary/sidekick Robyn. (My review here).
  5. And back to the original and one of the best of detective novels with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, published in book form in 1860. It’s long too, and rather convoluted with lots of convenient coincidences, but a thoroughly enjoyable read. (My review here)
  6. Wilkie Collins was good friends with Charles Dickens and although I could have chosen any number of Dickens’ novels, I’ve gone with a spin-off in Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip. Mr Watts, the last white man living in Bougainville after its descent into civil war in 1990 introduces his school children to Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’, which also happens to be one of my favourite books. (My review here)

None of which has anything to do with video games, which I gather is one of the themes in the original Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow starting book. But I guess that’s where Six Degrees of Separation can take you….

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‘First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers’ by Loung Ung

Posted on January 3, 2024 | 3 comments
2001, 336 p.

As you might know, some months ago I travelled to Cambodia and am likely to repeat the trip a few times more over the next few years. First They Killed My Father is one of the books that tops the ‘Books You Must Read Before Travelling to Cambodia’ lists, but I felt rather reluctant to read it. In my mind Cambodia was defined by two things: Pol Pot and Angkor Wat, but I want it to be more than that. And yet, having now been there, the influence of both is inescapable. They don’t necessarily define Cambodia, but they have shaped it.

Loung Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh. They were wealthy and of Chinese descent: her mother was ‘full Chinese’ and tall, with almond shaped eyes and a straight Western nose. Her father, part Chinese, part Cambodian, she describes as having “black curly hair, a wide nose, full lips and a round face” with “eyes shaped like a full moon.” Her father originally worked for the Cambodian Royal Secret Service under Prince Sihanouk, and then as a major in the military police under Lon Nol. We don’t actually learn what he did in either of these jobs, but it did afford them an upper-middle class lifestyle in Phnom Penh. She was raised to distance herself somewhat from Cambodia: in the mornings she studied French, in the afternoons Chinese and at night Khmer, and her parents spoke about Cambodian customs as being something “other”.

Not that any of this helped when the Khmer Rouge evacuated the city completely, under the pretense that the US was about to bomb the city, and that they could return in three days. Her mother soon realizes the reality, with her offering money notes to her daughter to use as toilet paper. The family is shifted from location to location, siblings are sent to jobs in different places, and her parents are acutely aware of hiding their middle class origins and pretend that they and their children are peasants. Her parents had reason to fear. I found that one of the most chilling sights in the Tuol Sleng Prison (Security Prison 21), which I visited, was the sight of children, arrested along with their parents, who were questioned and later killed. It was fear of being arrested as a family that led her parents to send their daughters away to fend for themselves. Yet somehow, miraculously, some (but not all) members of the family find their way back to each other when the madness comes to an end. With the family in tatters, she and her brother travel to Vietnam, then use a people smuggler to go to Thailand where they end up in the Lam Sing Refugee Camp, waiting to be taken in by another country. Did her brother’s conversion to Christianity help?- possibly, and she and her brother are granted residency in Vermont.

The book is written in the present tense, and it moves chronologically in a methodical way, with each chapter headed by a date. It purports to be a child’s-eye view, but of course it is being written by an adult. The book has been criticized in Cambodia for inaccuracies, her obliviousness to her privilege, implausibilities and the racism she displays against the ‘base people’ in emphasizing her Chinese origins. You can read several critiques at Kymer Institute – in fact, it’s well worth doing so. Certainly I noticed her disdain of peasants and Cambodians generally, but as for the rest of the criticism- I don’t know enough. I read it partially as a way of trying (unsuccessfully) to understand the Khmer Rouge and how and why they took power with so little apparent resistance. Exhaustion from war and exposure to unyielding and ideologically-driven violence have much to do with it, I suspect. Reading this book while in the country, I enjoyed the descriptions of Phnom Penh (albeit at fifty years remove) and gave context to my ambivalent visit to Tuol Sleng Prison. I’m still looking for books about Cambodia that, while not blithely ignoring the Khmer Rouge years, are not defined by them.

My rating: Hard to say – 7???

Read because: I was there. E-book.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 17-24 December 2023

Posted on December 31, 2023 | Leave a comment
A very ‘white’ Jesus https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/06/22/19/01/jesus-1473781_960_720.jpg

History in the Bible. Good grief- so much preparation for such a short service at my Unitarian fellowship In. Episode 2.25 The Quest for the Historical Jesus. I thought that this was going to be about the quest itself, but instead it was about three different waves of analysis of the historical Jesus. The First Wave was in the 18th century when Reimarus, a contemporary of Voltaire, anonymously published 10 years after his death, an analysis of the historical Jesus which depicted him as a fanatical revolutionary and highlighted the differences between different factions of disciples. F. C. Baur took up this interest in factions in the mid 1800s, distinguishing between the pro-Jewish faction of Peter and James, versus the pro-Gentile faction of Paul. After this first wave, there was a period when theologians like Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann decided that the Quest was useless anyway. In the Second Wave, after WWII, there began a systematic search for authenticity in the bible, which meant excluding everything that was Jewish and everything that was Christian. Walter Bauer argued that Jesus’ message had been corrupted by a warring Christian community from the start. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s, the diversity of belief among factions was demonstrated. The principle of Embarrassment arose- i.e. if what Jesus said was likely to be embarrassing to either Jews or Christians, then it was probably authentic. The Third Wave in the 1970s featured theologians like N. T. Wright, Ed Sanders and J.G.D. Dunne – and these were international scholars, not solely German ones as in the First and Second Waves. They looked at books outside the canon, and sought to place Jesus within the Jewish context. They rejected the Embarrassment Principle, arguing instead that whatever was authentic must be consisted with 1st century Judea (which is the way that I lean).

The Secret History of Western Esotericism. Good grief. How did I end up here? Looking for more on Apollonius of Tyana, that’s how. Episode 65: Graeme Miles on Apollonius of Tyana features Graeme Miles a lecturer in classics and researches Greek literature (especially of the Roman Era) and philosophy (especially the Platonic tradition). At the time of this podcast, he was at the University of Tasmania. He looks at the life of Apollonius and Philostratus’ biography of him written in the time of Julia Domna. This is a very learned podcast, with many references to other philosophical figures- and it was a bit beyond me, to be honest.

The Ancients Jesus of Nazareth. You know that point in preparing for writing an essay or thesis when suddenly you’re not reading anything new anymore- well I have finally reached that point. However, if you wanted a one-episode summary of the current state of play in looking at the historical Jesus, this episode featuring Dr Helen Bond, a Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, might be useful (except for her annoying giggle every time she is asked a question). Things I hadn’t thought of before: Matthew’s gospel looks at Kings, Wise Men etc., emphasizing the link with King David where as Luke looks at low status people. Jesus had 12 Disciples, even though he had many more adherents than just 12, but the number reflects the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

History Hit Napoleon Part 2: The Commander features military historian Dr Zack White who is rather conflicted about Napoleon as a Commander. Napoleon interpreted maps well; he physically touched (not in a sexual way) his men and yet he was cavalier with their lives in his quest for victory. He didn’t invent the corps system, but he used it well. His enemies soon learned that the best way to fight Napoleon was not to fight him. As not only military commander, but also ruler of France, he thought about what he wanted from a battle. He was a good commander, but poor negotiator. His skills remained the same, but he himself changed over time. Increasingly he began using his men as battering rams, losing huge numbers, and calling on his imperial guard to act as shock troops. He was a “come on” commander rather than a “go on” commander. Dr. White identified five traits that made Napoleon a great commander: 1. choosing good marshalls 2. use of the corps system 3. his opponents didn’t know how to deal with him 4. he had a Machiavellian mind 5. his ability to inspire (manipulate?) his men. [None of these traits were demonstrated in the Ridley Scott film, by the way]. His actions changed world history through prompting the fall of the Holy Roman Empire after Austerlitz, and changing the balance in the Americas through the Louisiana Purchase.

The Rest is History. Continuing on with Ep. 388 The Fall of the Aztecs: The Festival of Blood (Part 5) takes up with Cortez dividing his troops and heading off to confront Pánfilo de Narváez, who has been sent by the governor of Cuba, taking along Montezuma as a hostage. He confronted and defeated de Narváez, taking his troops (who were more a band of mercenaries than regular troops) and heading back with his vastly enlarged group to Tenochtitlan, increasingly aware of the sullenness of the people as he was moving through. On arrival, his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado told him of a massacre that had erupted after Cortez’ departure, and now Cortez and his additional men embarked on a new battle on the eve of one of the most hallowed Aztec festivals. Montezuma was brought out to address the Mexica, but by now he had lost all authority with the people, and now that he was of no use to Cortez, they killed him. It’s interesting to speculate why the Mexica even allowed them to come back- was it a trap?

Literature and History Podcast Episode 10 Homer’s Gods deals with books 9-16. He starts off with giving a summary of the books, which saves you the effort of reading it yourself (although I found this really useful after listening to summarize). He then goes on to discuss Homer’s gods. The gods of the Pantheon moved in and out of favour with readers at different times, but Zeus was always the most important. Zeus was the superintendent, but the other gods demonstrate the wicked, perverse sides that the gods could display. They had preferences, rather than being subject to laws. Much of books 9-16 involves the to-and-fro of battle, as if they were wearing a rut in to the earth. The presenter, Doug Metzger, backtracks to give us the origins of the war, even though this merits only a line or two in the Iliad itself. It was started by Eris, the goddess of discord who asked Paris to judge who was the most beautiful between Athena, Aphrodite and Hera, all for the prize of a golden apple. When Paris went for Aphrodite (who bribed him with the offer of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world), that instantly put Athena and Hera onto the Aegean’s side. Whatever we might think of Homer’s Gods now, other Greek philosophers weren’t too impressed with them back then either: Xenophanes was a critic, and Plato thought that the Iliad should be censored because of the bad values it promoted.

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‘The Wife and the Widow’ by Christian White

Posted on December 30, 2023 | Leave a comment
2020, 384 p.

Spoiler alert

This book won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction 2020 but given that crime fiction is not one of my preferred genres, it escaped my notice completely. Anticipating by the front cover a Shetland-esque novel, I was surprised to find that it was set in Australia, on a fictional island off the Victorian coast. The island is home to Abby, the “wife” of the title who lives there all year, as the population swells and dwindles with the holiday seasons. Her husband Ray is a handyman, and they live with their two children in an old house that Ray rarely uses his handyman skills to improve. She has a job in the small local supermarket which doesn’t provide enough income during the off-season, and she has embarked on the rather odd hobby of taxidermy in her garage, fed by the supply of roadkill.

The “widow” of the title is Kate, who is perplexed to find that her doctor husband has concocted an elaborate hoax to convince her that he has attended an international conference. Instead, his body is found at their holiday house on the island. Kate and her father-in-law, with whom she has a strained relationship- travel to the island to try to make sense of his death.

The narrative switches between the two women, both of whom find themselves having to re-evaluate what they thought was the truth about their husbands. I can’t say anymore- there is a really clever twist that had me stopping mid-paragraph, then flicking back to see if I had misread. I very rarely re-read books, but I am tempted to read this one to see how he did it. The writing of place is so evocative that you can easily picture the island in your mind, and his rendering of the emotions of the two women is deft and confident. But the twist is the absolute highlight and alone makes the book well worth reading.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: CAE bookgroups.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 9-16 December 2023

Posted on December 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

Emperors of Rome Podcast. This is their hundredth episode and to celebrate it was taped in front of a live audience here in Melbourne on 8th August 2-18 (It’s taken me a while to find these podcasts!). Episode C The Death of Caesar points out that it wasn’t just Brutus, Cassius and Decimus acting alone- instead there were about 60 co-conspirators. They chose this particular time because Caesar was just about to go off to the Parthian War. The involvement of Brutus may have been particularly poignant for JC “et tu, Brutus?” because Brutus was rumoured to be Caesar’s illegitimate son.

BBC Radio Being Roman with Mary Beard. I just love Mary Beard. I wondered at first whether I was hearing the soundtrack to a television program, but no, it seems that these have been produced for BBC Radio. Episode 1 Loving an Emperor looks at the letters between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius between 161-181 CE, when Marcus was still a young man. To our reading they are blatantly homoerotic, but who knows how they read at the time.

https://hellenicfaith.com/apollonius-of-tyana/

Let’s Talk Religion Yes, at the time I listened to this I was still preparing for my Christmas service at Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. I heard this as a podcast, but it’s also a YouTube video The Pagan Jesus? Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is often used to argue against Jesus, although they are both historical figures. Most of the information about Apollonius comes from a 3rd century biography written by Philostratus, and there are letters of doubtful authenticity. Difficult to say anything historical about him- it’s easier to talk about the mythical Apollonius, as depicted in Philostratus’ work. He was a wonder-working sage, a Neo-Pythagorean, following an itinerant lifestyle with a focus on numbers. It is said that his mother was visited by the god Proteus when she conceived, and his birth was surrounded by swans (like Apollo’s birth), accompanied by a thunderclap. He went to India and studied with the Brahmins, then returned to the West where he was known as a Sage. He travelled throughout Anatolia and Egypt, performing miracles and raising people from the dead. He rejected animal sacrifice, and may have seen God as a unitary, transcendant being. He was tried before the courts, but disappeared before he was sentenced. Philostratus’ biography of him was written in the 3rd century, possibly as a response to the gospels to show that Jesus wasn’t so special.

Pythagorus and his Weird Religious Cult looks at the ancient mathematician, and the emergence of a neo-Pythagorean lifestyle at the turn of BCE/CE when men would adopt vegetarianism and wear simple, ragged, smelly clothes. Pythagorus himself had an interest in numbers, music and the cosmology of the spheres.

The Rest is History Continuing on with Cortez: Episode 4: The Fall of the Aztecs: Prisoners of Montezuma. Aztec society was a Bronze Age society, similar in technology to the Sumerians, but their city was huge, with over one million inhabitants, well maintained and new (compared with European cities at the time). Who is exploiting who here? Why didn’t the Aztecs just kill them all. Matthew Restall, who wrote When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History suggests that Montezuma was planning to sacrifice them for display, but then the 18 other Spanish ships arrived to apprehend Cortez for disobeying his orders. Cortez decided to split his troops, with 80 to go off with Montezuma to confront Spain, and the rest of the troops to stay there.

Very Short Introductions This podcast has short interviews with the authors of books in the ‘Very Short Introduction to…’ series. I had just finished reading Marina Warner’s rather dense book From the Beast to the Blonde so I though I’d listen to this episode Fairy Tale- The Very Short Introductions Podcast Episode 20. She explains what a fairy tale is better here than she did in her lengthy book i.e. that anything can happen; it faces difficult themes like cannibalism, incest and jealousy, and it has a happy ending.

History Hit History Hit is responding to the interest in Napoleon prompted by Ridley Scott’s recent film with a short series on Napoleon. Episode 1: Napoleon The Early Years . The episode features biographer Andrew Roberts. He points out that Napolean was not of humble birth- he was from an aristocratic family which could prove its nobility for at least 250 years. His family was impoverished, but it was not nothing. Corsica had been purchased from Genoa in 1768 (the year of Napoleon’s birth) so its French identity was not well-established, and Napoleon himself was conflicted over his Frenchness as a young man. He received a free education from the French military academy, and was a great reader and good mathematician. He was 20 years old when the French Revolution began. He made a name for himself in the battle of Toulon, which is shown in the movie.

Theology in the Raw. Who would have thunk that I’d be listening to THIS? Hosted by Preston Sprinkle (is that even a real name?), it’s unapologetically Christian in its emphasis. The Scandal of Christmas is a four-part series leading up to Christmas and he starts Ep#927 The Scandal of Christmas Part I with Dr. Craig Keener talking about Luke 1-2, the politics and sociological scandal of Christ’s birth, his earthly vocation , the location of Christ’s birth, Matthew 1-2 (and the differences between Luke and Matthew), the problem of genealogies, and much, much more. The guest is rather discursive and sounds rather nervous. He starts by talking about other angelic visitations to announce births e.g. to Zechariah and Elizabeth. Caesar Augustus seems to be setting the agenda, but it was really God (hmmm). Most Galileans were immigrants to Judaea, some first generation others six generations on. It is said that Jesus was born in a cave where animals were kept, attached to a house. When Emperor Hadrian went through Judaea in 135CE deliberately placing pagan sites on Christian ones, he placed one on this cave, so it’s probably the authentic site according to legend. It could have been as much as two years before the Magi turned up, so Joseph, Mary and Jesus may have been in Bethlehem for some time. Nazareth only had a few hundred people, and it was more conservative, especially Upper Galilee. Aramaic was spoken but lower Galilee (where Jesus came from) was more multicultural. It is believed that Jesus spoke Aramaic, but he may have been able to speak Greek as well. Joseph was a ‘hand worker’ – probably he didn’t specialize, but did all sorts of construction. 70-90% of Galilee was agricultural, so as an artisan, Joseph may have had slightly higher status, but could not be said to be ‘high status’. If we only had Matthew’s gospel, we wouldn’t have realized that Jesus came from Nazareth. After Jesus’ birth they went to Jerusalem (about six miles) then returned to Bethlehem before going home to Nazareth. Herod acted like Pharoah did, killing babies to shore up his own power, and the wise men were pagans. There is no historical evidence of the Slaughter of the Innocents, but it’s consistent with his personality. Both Matthew and Luke go through Jesus’ genealogies, but Luke goes back to Adam, while Matthew lists Jesus’ ancestors and there is little overlap between the two genealogies after David.

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‘The Visitors’ by Jane Harrison

Posted on December 26, 2023 | 2 comments
2023, 290 p.

Sometimes it seems that a work written first as a play really struggles to transcend its stage origins. This is the case with Jane Harrison’s The Visitors which imagines the response of local tribes to the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788. The author, herself of Muruwari descent, ventures where non-Indigenous authors might hesitate to tread and Tony Birch’s blurb embraces it as “a remarkable achievement of First Nations storytelling”.

The book starts with seventeen-year old Lawrence who first notices the nowee on the horizon, its white sails billowing in the wind. His Uncles decide that Elder Gary should be notified, as it is his turn to host the next seasonal meeting of Elders. It is decided that the meeting should be held on the neighbouring Gordon’s land, which strategically overlooks the waters of Sydney Cove. The word goes out to seven mobs who send their Elders to discuss this second appearance of nowees, the first having arrived with Captain Cook eighteen years earlier. Cook departed: surely these ones will, too. Reminiscent of the interminable collection of adventurers in Lord of the Rings, the Elders are gathered in, chapter by chapter, with each given a back-story.

But these Elders, all with non-indigenous names (Lawrence, Gary, Gordon, Joseph, Nathaniel, Walter and Albert) arrive in business-suits, upending our time-frame as readers, and many of their back-stories are Oprah-esque in their relationship detail and more than a little imbued with 21st century values. The dialogue is presented in script form. The ships- eleven by now- show few signs of moving on, and the Elders joined by young Lawrence himself, need to decide how to respond. To fight or to welcome? In a Twelve Angry Men-esque scenario, Elder Walter, gradually convinces the other Elders that they cannot know why the visitors are here, and that they may bring things- like an axe that he found- that will improve their lives. We all know how this is going to end. Young Lawrence, who had disobeyed instructions to paddle out to investigate for himself, is sneezing and unwell and we know that these ‘visitors’ were here to stay.

I think that I would have preferred to see this on the stage, rather than on the page. Apparently the author did a lot of research in converting it to a novel, and the research feels very didactic at times and clags up the narrative. It’s an interesting concept of decentering the First Fleet story- and ‘what ifs’ are my guilty secret as a historian- and while playing with timespans through suits and names, it foregrounds the social complexity and agency of the watchers on the shore. I just wish that the author didn’t feel that she had to ‘educate’ me.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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‘Everything you need to know about The Voice’ by Megan Davis and George Williams

Posted on December 24, 2023 | 1 comment
2023, 224 p.

I started reading this before the referendum, and then after the referendum I was too discouraged and flat to finish it. By the time that I broached it again, it was already history – and a history that I believe we will come to regret.

I thought that I was relatively well-informed about the constitution, referendums and The Voice, but I certainly learned things that I didn’t know before. Chapter 1 ‘Making the Constitution’ starts back with the 1901 constitution and the constitutional process that produced it. It explains that Section 127 about counting aboriginal natives (repealed in 1967) was inserted to stop Western Australia and Queensland from using their large Aboriginal populations to gain extra seats in Parliament and higher funding from federal tax revenue. I was aware that the Constitution is silent about many things that we assume would be constitutional e.g. electoral systems, Prime Ministers, parties- in fact, the preamble doesn’t even mention Western Australia because they weren’t sure to join in Federation! But I hadn’t realized that women’s suffrage was not part of the Constitution but was instead legislated under The Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 (does that mean that it could be legislated away in a Handmaid’s Tale scenario, I wonder?) Although unable to vote on the Constitution except in South Australia and Western Australia, the womens suffrage movement at the time trusted the promises that female suffrage would be legislated after the Constitution had been passed. As has been pointed out since, had voters demanded the same level of detail in 1901 as they did in 2023, the federal constitution would not have been passed.

Chapter 2 ‘The 1967 Referendum’ looks more closely at the Referendum which white Australians have basked in ever since. It reminds the reader that there was a second referendum held on that day that proposed to break the numerical 2:1 nexus of members in the House of Representatives to the numbers of Senators. It was this second proposal that attracted the most debate. There was overwhelming support for the Aboriginal question, with the ‘for and against’ compulsory booklet containing only arguments for change. Federal law required the ‘against’ case to be written by the parliamentarians who had voted against the change- and not one parliamentarian did so. But the electoral question was soundly defeated; the aboriginal question passed strongly. When Prime Minister Holt left to travel overseas the following day (shades of Albanese heading off OS straight away too?), instead of celebrating the victory on the indigenous question, he labelled it a “victory for prejudice and misrepresentation”. The Sunday Herald recorded the Yes vote on Aboriginals in small type, with a huge headline ‘AUSTRALIA SAYS NO ON NEXUS’.

Chapter 3 ‘A New Era?’ is a rather depressing rundown of events after the high point of the 1967 referendum, and the string of bodies that have been created by governments to consider a treaty or legislation for national land rights. The ‘decade of reconciliation’ commenced in 1991 but after the Native Title Act of 1993, the Indigenous Land Corporation and a Social Justice package created by the Keating government in the wake of Mabo, things stalled. The Howard Government responded to the Wik Decision by the Native Title Amendment Act of 1998 that would pour ‘bucket-loads of extinguishment’ on native title while the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act 1997 ruled that the Heritage Protection Act applied everywhere except the Hindmarsh Island bridge area- the area in contention. The chapter reproduces the Howard/Les Murray preamble to the Constitution, then the second version written with Democrats Senator Aden Ridgeway that was eventually put a referendum in 1999. The preamble was prefaced by a clause that it had no legal effect, and both versions avoided the term ‘custodianship’ that Indigenous groups wanted. The referendum result was worse for the preamble than for the republic.

Chapter 4 ‘The Journey to Recognition’ looks at the apology, and new attempts to have a preamble – something that indigenous people did not want. Gillard established an Expert Panel to report on options for Indigenous constitutional recognition which made recommendations and wordings but which was put on the backburner because by early 2012 the political environment was not conducive to bipartisan support, and it was feared that a referendum might fail due to low levels of community awareness. At the 2013 federal election, each of the major parties expressed strong support for recognizing Aboriginal people in the Constitution, but when the Indigenous Affairs Strategy led to cuts and disestablishment of programs and activities, there was a backlash to the ‘Recognize’ campaign that specifically rejected a minimalist approach of preambular recognition alone. From the Kirribilli meeting with the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader in July 2015 it was made clear that any reform must involve substantive changes to the Australian constitution and that a preamble would not go far enough and would not be acceptable.

This was reinforced by the Referendum Council, established by Turnbull in late 2015 which asked the question “what is meaningful recognition to you?” The answer, from 12 Regional Dialogues was a constitutionally protected Voice to Parliament. Chapter 5 ‘The Referendum Council and Uluru process’ goes through in detail the consultation carried out, and the resulting Uluru statement. Turnbull’s rapid rejection on receiving the Uluru statement rehearsed the arguments that would later be used in the ‘No’ case (although he himself championed Yes by the time the Referendum came around).

Chapter 6 ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’ goes through the reasons for the sequence. I must say that I have wondered why Truth-telling came last (although I am less optimistic now that it would make any difference to many white Australians anyway). This chapter points out that there was concern that the energy for grasping the opportunity of constitutional power might be exhausted by a truth-telling process, and that there is no treaty process in the world that required a truth-telling process first. Many communities wanted truth-telling at their pace, at the local level, rather than being compelled to tell your stories without any guarantee of good faith from the listeners.

The chapter ‘The Voice’ brings us up to the election of Anthony Albanese, and his commitment to the Uluru Statement in full (something that I suspect is shakier now). It goes through the Referendum Working Group proposal, which already had the ‘detail’ that the No side called for. The chapter then goes through the myths and misconceptions promulgated by the No case.

The final chapter ‘The Voice Referendum’ has an optimistic tone that – as we now know- was misplaced. It includes a list of the 44 referendums brought before the Australian people and their results. With a final national Yes vote of 39.9% the Voice ended up being one of the least supported proposals ever put forward (although there were 8 that were even less successful). Interestingly, the rejection of the preamble which recognized Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as “the nation’s first people” in 1999 with 39.3% was very close to the Voice result of 39.9%. Does this reflect the hard-baked resistance of white Australia? To be honest, I can’t remember how I voted in that referendum: I suspect that because the preamble was a Howard proposal, I would have opposed it. Nor can I remember how I voted in relation to the Republic: I suspect ‘Yes’ (and today I would even more strongly support the Parliamentary-selected model that was proposed then).

My response to this book was strongly influenced by my sadness at the final result and the misplaced hope that it reflects. Co-written by constitutional experts Megan Davis and George Williams, both were active participants in the campaign, and it needs to be read with that in mind. It is a very clearly written, informative book that gives a clear narrative of the road to the Voice referendum. If only the final destination had been different.

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