Saturday, February 01, 2020

Hot and Humid: Williamson's rallying cry to the privileged in funny, poignant new play

'The big heat day': NSW residents urged to stay indoors, reduce load on electricity grid

Rising temperatures, winds and muggy conditions will make for an uncomfortable weekend of weather.

Williamson's rallying cry to the privileged in funny, poignant new play

David Williamson's words are allowed to speak for themselves in this powerful, funny and poignant call to action.

DAVID WILLIAMSON. The Trump Card of the Right.

The political parties of the Left often still hold to the Enlightenment belief that we are rational creatures – that the person who has the best evidence based argument will win the debate. Sadly, as long as they do they’ll keep losing. Continue reading


A tale of two summers for beach loved to death, then deserted

This time last year, up to 5000 cars a day were trying to park at Hyams Beach, in Jervis Bay. Then the Currowan bushfire came roaring up the coast.

Khmer Rouge, Ground Zero, melting ice caps: Tragedy began as a form of art, writes Terry Eagleton. It is now a way of life 

How Can Australia Come To Terms With Its Past?



Australia’s Aboriginal poets had some ideas as Australia Day – or #InvasionDay, as it’s known by many on social media – fever hit the country over the weekend. Problem: “Australia is the only Commonwealth country without a treaty between its government and Indigenous people. Yet, in the resulting vacuum, long after the gong’s last clang, the work of First Nations artists maps some directions reconciliation, treaty and atonement might take.” – The Irish Times

Bach and the Cosmos of Belonging: Michael Pollan on How the Transcendent Power of Music Allays the Loneliness of Being and the Ache of Regret


“Opened to the music, I became first the strings… and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe.”


10 US Cities You Need To Visit If You Love Books: 

BuzzFeedNews: “After sifting through cities with a population above 50,000 and “at least one retail bookstore, used or rare bookseller, public library or institutional library,”Apartment Guide released a list of the best cities in America for book lovers based on “the ratio of book-related establishments per 100,000 residents in each.” Here’s what they found


“Light Is the New Black:”
“The world is filled with people who, no matter what you do, will point blank not like you. But it is also filled with those who will love you fiercely. They are your people. You are not for everyone and that is OK. Talk to the people who can hear you.” Carry the Light With You!

 

For those who love the sea but fear it too, ocean pools are a revelation


Ocean pools can be a bridge between Australia’s beach-going mythology and the dangerous reality of the surf

A Russian Typewriter Longs for Her Master

My father has lived a very full life, compared to which my own life looks boringly ordered and bourgeois. He got to do things I will never experience—from training on a Baltic Fleet submarine in 1958 to working in the midst of the 1970 cholera outbreak in Crimea. As a Leningrad teen he played chess with Boris Spassky; as a young poet he recited his poems before Anna Akhmatova and discussed with Dmitry Shostakovich the prospects of a Jewish-themed opera. Life brought him in contact with Nikita Khrushchev who was visiting a Soviet submarine with the then Czech leader Antonín Novotný; my father would later describe Khrushchev as a “jellyfish on the deck.”