NSW premier has started dating leading Sydney lawyer Arthur Moses SC who last year represented her at an Icac hearing into her ex-lover
Arthur Moses - What makes you frightened?
Politicians who attack the judiciary for supposed political gain without understanding the impact it has on the rule of law in society. The recent attack on the Victorian Court of Appeal, which included personal comments about the judges, was disgraceful.
Police criticised for arresting and charging Kristo Langker with stalking deputy premier John Barilaro
The Complicated Benefits Of Reading Literature
“No one now can go on insisting on the usual beneficial effects of literature without taking serious and systematic account of Currie’s arguments. Not to do so in future will count as intellectual negligence.” – Notre Dame Philosophical Review
The Poem that Hurtles from Heights Unknown'
“The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article.”
Some of us wait expectantly for such flashes, thinking of them as the literary analog of what Wordsworth called “spots of time.” We know certain writers are reliable suppliers. It’s not the only reason we read them, and it will impress some as a dilettante’s pastime, but such passages are the attentive reader’s reward. They feed our commonplace book. On Monday, a friend in Washington, D.C. shared with me a list of his favorite short stories by Bernard Malamud, and I revolved to reread the seven titles he chose, beginning with “The Loan,” originally published in the July 1952 issue of Commentary and collected in The Magic Barrel (1958).
Lieb is a baker, a poor man. An old friend, Kobotsky, shows up at the bakery after fifteen years of estrangement. I won’t recount the plot, which is beautifully sad and simple, except to say that Kobotsky asks to borrow $200 for his sick wife. Here is one of several passages in Malamud’s story that “flash,” as described above:
“The honey odor of the new loaves distracted Kobotsky. He breathed the fragrance as if this were the first air he was tasting, and even beat his fist against his chest at the delicious smell.
“‘Oh, my God,’ he all but wept. ‘Wonderful.’
“‘With tears,’ Lieb said humbly, pointing to the large bowl of dough.
“Kobotsky nodded.
“For thirty years, the baker explained, he was never with a penny to his name. One day, out of misery, he had wept into his dough. Thereafter his bread was such it brought customers in from everywhere.
“‘My cakes they don’t like so much, but my bread and rolls they run miles to buy.’”
Malamud’s prose never gets in the way. Biblical allusiveness, echoes of Yiddish syntax and the Holocaust, and common human suffering are rendered delicately and without emotional fuss. A single misstep in tone, a heightened appeal to melodrama, would have wrecked the story and left it embarrassingly false and sentimental.
The passage at the top is from “Inspiration,” Nabokov’s essay in the Jan. 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. He is an unfashionable believer in artistic inspiration: “Conformists suspect that to speak of ‘inspiration’ is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks.”
Almost thirty years earlier, Nabokov published a poem about inspiration in the June 10, 1944, issue of The New Yorker. It is titled simply and significantly “The Poem”:
“Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud,
with its linden tree in India ink
and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;
“not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
shoulder still glimmering there;
not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme--
the tiny music that tells the time;
“and not the pennies and weights on those
evening papers piled up in the rain;
not the cacodemons of carnal pain,
not the things you can say so much better in plain prose --
“but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown
-- when you wait for the splash of the stone
deep below, and grope for your pen,
and then comes the shiver, and then --
“in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
the leaf-like insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense,
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.”
'Ignore Many of their Opinions'
“Part of the tribute that we pay great artists is to ignore many of their opinions.”
It’s a reckoning every thoughtful reader will face: what to do when an admired writer says something egregiously stupid or hateful, something unworthy of his gift? Consider the anti-Semitic sentiments strewn throughout Western literature. I refer not to rabid Jew-haters like Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose work long ago earned our disregard. (Perhaps the dumbest thing Philip Roth ever said was “Céline is my Proust!”) Rather, I mean the casual, presumptive distaste for Jews expressed by writers who otherwise appear to be reasonably decent human beings. For this reader, especially troublesome are Charles Lamb, George Santayana and H.L. Mencken.
Writers are an egotistical breed. Because their medium is words, they often are emboldened to use them for less than morally or aesthetically pleasing ends. I tend to assume that the least interesting things I can know about you are your opinions. The same applies even more so to writers. Please, don’t spout off like a cranky toddler. Use your words, as frustrated parents say. Articulate something interesting, amusing, consoling, beautiful or useful.
The sentence at the top is from an essay, “H. L. Mencken for Grown-ups,” published by Joseph Epstein in Encounter in 1980. He writes: “[A]rtists holding egregious opinions are an old story. The modern tendency is by and large to forgive artists their prejudices, to say, well, if these opinions do not spoil the artist’s work, then the devil take his opinions; and the modern tendency is, for the most part, correct.”
Things have changed. Many readers are no longer so forgiving. Of course, many readers are no longer readers but inquisitors with little love of literature. One linguistic misdemeanor and a career is “cancelled.” The situation is complicated by the fact that much of “cancel culture” is itself unambiguously anti-Semitic. What happens when you can’t be seen cancelling a writer for hating Jews? What’s an aspiring Torquemada (or Zhdanov) to do?
——
Nowhere in the story about staggering school hours was there mention of research into optimum learning times for students. There is a significant body of research into the times of day when children learn best, from early learners through to young adults. Yet all we hear is the usual blather from the Treasurer on productivity and what best suits parents. Let’s not revert to a 19th century model of factory-style schooling where children are reduced to mere economic units. Don Carter, Oyster Bay
The ramifications for changing school times can be far-reaching and far from simplistic (“School day overhaul to ’boost economy‴, June 18). Bus timetables, for example, will be affected in areas where timetables and pick-ups are shared between schools, and some children may be left unattended. After-school activities will also be affected as finish times change, with little continuity between schools. Teachers/parents, many of whom serve as “fall-back” coaches because other parents work later, may no longer be available. Schools will have to shoulder additional responsibilities to accommodate the changes, even as they are already stretched to the limit. Split-timetable schools pose problems of their own, with a lack of supervision for students and the splitting of families. Bettering school timetables for the greater benefit of teaching and learning is essential; changing it for the economy is just a tragedy. Janice Creenaune, Austinmer
Heaven forbid we consider overhauling the school day to improve educational outcomes. Elfriede Sangkuhl, Summer Hill
As educational outcomes are flatlining or slipping, the Berejiklian government wants to fiddle around with school times rather than provide more resources for quality teaching. Russ Couch, Woonona
School day overhaul? Good luck with that. More than 20 years ago the school where I was working intended to alter start and finish times. This was with staff and parent consultation and for the improvement of our educational program. It never happened. The bus company was unable to alter timetables or school bus rosters to fit the changes. Another challenge for Andrew Constance? Brian Collins, Cronulla
