- Almanac: Virgil Thomson on journalists
“Journalists are plentiful everywhere and entertaining too, full of jokes and stories. Only their jokes are not very funny and their stories not quite true. Their information is always incomplete, because nobody tells them the truth about anything.” Virgil Thomson, The State of Music Continue reading Almanac: Virgil Thomson on journalists... Read more
AN EVENING WITH CHARLES BUKOWSKI: “Writers are very despicable people.”
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?
Historic houses in NSW up for sale
NSW has a priceless collection of historic houses. They go largely unnoticed, unappreciated and unfunded. Conservative politicians and their wealthy supporters stole the timeless landscape of indigenous Australia and gave it to white settlers. Now they want to profit from colonial history as well
The first blow was delivered by NSW Treasurer “Electric” Eric Roozendaal when he introduced a Bill to amend the Act and give the NSW Government the power to dispose of its assets. Roozendaal told MLCs in the Upper House that the purpose of his Historic Houses Amendment Bill was to “streamline the Trust’s procedures”. Its real purpose became clearer when he said: “The current Act requires that the Governor must approve of the disposal of any property originally acquired by the Trust as a gift or a bequest. Proposed amendments will require the Trust to obtain approval of the Minister, rather than the Governor.”
In other words, the sale of historic homes and sites was being transferred to a Labor minister in a Cabinet heavily influenced by Eddie Obeid, Joe Tripodi and other factional warlords.
Roozendaal excelled in chutzpah. ..
Eric the Viking” left politics before any serious damage could be done to historic homes but the attack was renewed when Liberal Premier Barry O’Farrell swept to power in 2011. His successors, Mike Baird and Gladys Berejiklian, have carried forward the emasculation of heritage and cultural history. First of all, in 2013 consultants, “influencers” and Liberal hacks morphed Historic Houses into a new entity called Sydney Living Museums, responsible for just 12 of the houses and aiming to make them into money-spinning tourist and event venues.
NSW has a priceless collection of historic houses. They go largely unnoticed, unappreciated and unfunded. Conservative politicians and their wealthy supporters stole the timeless landscape of indigenous Australia and gave it to white settlers. Now they want to profit from colonial history as well
The first blow was delivered by NSW Treasurer “Electric” Eric Roozendaal when he introduced a Bill to amend the Act and give the NSW Government the power to dispose of its assets. Roozendaal told MLCs in the Upper House that the purpose of his Historic Houses Amendment Bill was to “streamline the Trust’s procedures”. Its real purpose became clearer when he said: “The current Act requires that the Governor must approve of the disposal of any property originally acquired by the Trust as a gift or a bequest. Proposed amendments will require the Trust to obtain approval of the Minister, rather than the Governor.”
In other words, the sale of historic homes and sites was being transferred to a Labor minister in a Cabinet heavily influenced by Eddie Obeid, Joe Tripodi and other factional warlords.
Roozendaal excelled in chutzpah. ..
Eric the Viking” left politics before any serious damage could be done to historic homes but the attack was renewed when Liberal Premier Barry O’Farrell swept to power in 2011. His successors, Mike Baird and Gladys Berejiklian, have carried forward the emasculation of heritage and cultural history. First of all, in 2013 consultants, “influencers” and Liberal hacks morphed Historic Houses into a new entity called Sydney Living Museums, responsible for just 12 of the houses and aiming to make them into money-spinning tourist and event venues.
The secret lives of us
They’re as natural as breathing – and usually, far more destructive. Start looking into confidences and you realise they rule our lives – both the making and the breaking of them.
Ninety-seven per cent of us will have at least one big secret at any given time, Slepian discovered, and the average person has 13 secrets. Five will have never been divulged to anyone. “Women confide their secrets more than men,” Slepian says, “and I think what that reflects is essentially just men’s discomfort with opening up ... It’s not considered masculine.”
Secrets are often self-protective. We’ve done something that doesn’t match our standards for ourselves and/or those set by our society or community. We keep it secret so we don’t lose the regard of others. One interviewee confesses to Slepian, “A secret is basically something you don’t want to admit to other people, and sometimes not to yourself.” As for what we keep secret, it’s the entire range of human behaviour. Use your imagination.
The most often shared secret is that we’ve told a lie; the least shared is that we’ve had thoughts about having a relationship with someone other than our partner. Slepian has built a website (keepingsecrets.org) where people can take a test on their own secrets and see how they compare with others. The results will help Slepian’s own research into secrecy.
Secret Daughters And Ghost Fathers
The Margot Affair — a teen’s tale of lost identity Sanaë Lemoine’s debut novel echoes the life of the ‘secret’ daughter of François Mitterrand © Alamy Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Share on Whatsapp (opens new window) Save Lauren Elkin JULY 28 2020 2 “I was told to keep my mouth shut, not to exist in public, not to have a name, not to have a father, not even an imaginary one, because he was all too real.” So wrote Mazarine Pingeot, the “secret” daughter of the former French president François Mitterrand, in her 2005 memoir Not a Word. The premise of Sanaë Lemoine’s absorbing debut novel The Margot Affair echoes Pingeot’s story. Seventeen-year-old Margot, the daughter of a famous actress and a married politician, is tired of keeping her mouth shut, and does something rash: she tips off a journalist at a party that her father is the minister of culture. Where in certain quarters Mitterrand’s double life with his art-historian mistress Anne Pingeot was well-known, in Lemoine’s setting Margot is secret. The damage is permanent: Margot’s father abandons her and her mother, and soon after, dies of a heart attack. Margot is left to wonder if she is to blame. It is a sign of Margot’s increasing maturity that she comes to understand that attention lavished does not necessarily equal love The emotional mapping of the novel is intricate and precise, especially when it comes to Margot’s plaintive longing for her father. He is a workaholic, ascended from the lower middle class to the highest echelons of French society, and, her mother tells her, “he’s always wanted to please everyone”. When his secret is exposed, he feels he has “failed in the most public way”. Margot is sensitive to his fragilities; it’s his white ankles she remembers, or how, returning from a father-daughter weekend in Normandy, he pulls over to the side of the road to take a quick nap. ...
Audiobooks were already doing well before things came to a stop, and seem to have done very well in lockdown, too.
It's great that more people are enjoying books in whatever form -- especially since the increased popularity of the format does not appear to have come at the cost of print-books (i.e. people aren't simply substituting listening for reading), but I have to admit I don't really get it; I can't imagine having the patience to listen to a book being read out loud to me. (Of course, I haven't even had the patience to watch an entire movie over the past few months -- if there's text in reach, that's what I'll turn to (and there's a lot of text piled all around me right now).)
In Metropolis Eric Margolis finds that, with works such as Life for Sale and Star (and The Frolic of the Beasts), 'Fifty years after his death, Yukio Mishima is reemerging in translation', in The Resurgence of a Japanese Literary Master.
As he notes, for a long time, Mishima has been seen -- because presented -- in a very specific form abroad, as:
a writer of capital-L literary fiction, with dense works and elaborate language, in dense conversation with early 20th century European literature and theories of modernizationIn fact, however, there's a lot more to his work -- because there are a lot more works, most of which we haven't seen in translation: Mishima remains one of the most under-translated modern masters, with only a fraction of his prodigious output available in English.
(The reason so little has been translated, especially after that first wave of the big, serious works through the early 1970s ? Obviously, publishers long seemed only interested in works that fit the Western image of Mishima (which he himself -- ridiculously image-conscious as he was -- also carefully fostered) -- which much of his very varied output might undermine. But I also note that the Mishima estate is represented by a literary agency, which seems to have a ... not necessarily reader-friendly approach to 'handling' their clients, i.e. seems to have other priorities than actually getting the work out there so it can be read.)
At Russia Beyond Alexandra Guzeva explains What makes the Silver Age of Russian poetry so important. Symbolism ! Acmeism ! Futurism ! New Peasant Poetry ! Imaginism !
Well, this is a hell of a book reviewby NY Times critic Dwight Garner about Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste(which I am starting the second it comes out tomorrow).
A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off.
I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.
I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.
I mean, how can you not want to read a book that stirs a seasoned critic like that, particularly when the author also wrote the fantastic The Warmth of Other Suns? You can buy Caste at Bookshop, get the Kindle version, or read a lengthy piece adapted from the book.
AFRIKAANS – dankie
ALBANIAN – faleminderit
ARABIC – shukran
ARMENIAN – Շնորհակալություն / chnorakaloutioun
BOSNIAN – hvala (HVAH-lah)
BULGARIAN – благодаря / blagodaria
CATALAN – gràcies (GRAH-syuhs)
CANTONESE – M̀h’gōi
CROATIAN – hvala (HVAH-lah)
CZECH – děkuji (Dyekooyih)
DANISH – tak (tahg)
DUTCH – dank u
ESTONIAN – tänan (TA-nahn)
FINNISH – kiitos (KEE-tohss)
FRENCH – merci
GERMAN – danke
GREEK – ευχαριστώ (ef-hah-rees-TOH)
HAWAIIAN – mahalo (ma-HA-lo)
HEBREW – .תודה / todah (toh-DAH)
HINDI – dhanyavād / shukriya
HUNGARIAN – köszönöm (KØ-sø-nøm)
ICELANDIC – takk (tahk)
INDONESIAN – terima kasih. (tuh-REE-mah KAH-see)
ITALIAN – grazie (GRAHT-tsyeh)
JAPANESE – arigatô (ah-ree-GAH-toh)
KOREAN – 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida)
LATVIAN – paldies (PUHL-dyehs)
LEBANESE – choukrane
LITHUANIAN – ačiū (AH-choo)
MACEDONIAN – Благодарам / blagodaram (blah-GOH-dah-rahm)
MALAY – terima kasih (TREE-muh KAH-seh)
MALTESE – grazzi (GRUTS-ee)
MANDARIN – Xièxiè
MONGOLIAN – Баярлалаа (bayarlalaa)
NORWEGIAN – takk
POLISH – dziękuję (Jenkoo-yen)
PORTUGUESE – obrigado [masculine] / obrigada [feminine] (oh-bree-GAH-doo / oh-bree-GAH-dah)
ROMANIAN – mulţumesc (mool-tzoo-MESK)
RUSSIAN – спасибо (spuh-SEE-buh)
SERBIAN – xвала / hvala (HVAH-lah)
SLOVAK – Ďakujem (JAH-koo-yehm)
SLOVENIAN – hvala (HVAA-lah)
SPANISH – gracias (GRAH-syahs)
SWEDISH – tack
TAMIL – nandri
THAI – kop khun
TURKISH – teşekkür ederim (teh shek uer eh der eem)
UKRAINIAN – Дякую (DYAH-koo-yoo)
WELSH – diolch (DEE-ol’ch)
YIDDISH – a dank
ZULU – ngiyabonga