It gives me no pleasure at all to see a government in turmoil (“Scandal widens as Ayres resigns”, August 3).
To the suggested list of songs for the Ayres musical (Letters, August 4), you need to add that old-fashioned statement of principle, I Did it My Way, although it’s probably a cabinet chorus, not a solo number. The production would be perfect for that other old-fashioned medium of political commentary: a puppet show. Eat your hearts out, Punch and Judy; life is truly stranger than fiction. Jenifer Nicholls,Armadale (Vic)
Ayres feels that “if a trade minister can’t represent NSW for trade, who can?” If Ayres needed heart surgery, would he ask the minister for health to do it? Ian Rewell,Longueville
On Sunday night he wrote a rambling Facebook post that pinned the blame for his woes on the Labor party, which he claimed was really using the Barilaro affair to target his seat of Penrith.
Yesterday he finally made admissions of sorts that he made misjudgments on Barilaro. Maybe he should have discouraged his old Coalition colleague from applying for the plum $500,000 New York trade job so soon after Barilaro had left Parliament. Oh yes, and particularly because Barilaro had actually created the job. And, oh yes, I did text Barilaro the job advertisement.
Ayres out: a sunken minister in what now appears to be a sinking government
According to Mr Ayres the former Bardwell Park girl is a ‘tragic’ St George/Illawarra Dragons fan while he is passionate about his beloved Penrith Panthers.
“She loves the Dragons,” Mr Ayres told News Corp this week.
Defence minister Marise Payne is the woman leading our biggest boy’s club
In his former role as NSW Sports Minister, Stuart Ayres almost singlehandedly brought down Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s Coalition by building football stadiums at huge public expense and tearing down others for no good reason.
The public’s rage was incendiary. The then Labor Party leader Luke Foley unfurled the election-winning slogan that an ALP government would build schools and hospitals instead of football stadiums. When Foley crashed out of the Labor leadership, the anti-stadiums policy went with him.
The Payne & Ayres show
Ms Payne, 55, and Mr Ayres, 38, i.e. 16 years younger, operate as a tag team. They described themselves as long-term “domestic partners”. When the word “cougar” was once mentioned within earshot of Senator Payne she rolled her eyes and said: “It’s just us. It’s not an issue. It’s who we are.” Quite right too. Their relationship is nobody’s business but theirs.
Stuart Ayres resigns as NSW minister after questions raised by John Barilaro trade role review
Jen heads west
Western Sydney University has a new chancellor, with veteran Business Council of Australia boss Jennifer Westacottappointed yesterday.
The former KPMG partner, senior public servant and member of more boards than we care to name succeeds Peter Shergold, who moves on after 11 years as chancellor of the institution formerly known as the University of Western Sydney.
Westacott said she was drawn to the role by WSU’s “enduring connections with the diverse and vibrant communities of western Sydney”.
Back to Sleep ... And That, As They Say, Is That
Toward Harnessing Language in Support of Intersectionality and Cross-sector Power Building Language is a key ingredient in a winning theory of change. Language can build bridges and change minds. By acknowledging the ability of language to shape and reflect reality, progressive campaigns can become more powerful vehicles for social change, inclusion, and justice.
And That, As They Say, Is That After almost a decde, I've decided to put The Dual Loyalty on indefinite hiatus.
In 2002 there were very few blogs and very few literary sites, however, now there is a kaleidoscope of brilliant writers, librarians, publishers with so many authentic voices. I read their words and I wonder where they come from ... Time's Flow Stemmed "A title is always a promise." Derrida (1986)
CODA Sorces of Literary Wisdom and Lessons Learned Links to Literary Weblogs @ the complete review
SEC charges 11 people in alleged $300 million crypto Ponzi scheme NBC. “Crypto Ponzi Scheme” is redundant, no?
Crypto Crash Leaves NWSL Players Empty Handed as League Mulls Cash Payout Sportico. NWSL = National Women’s Soccer League.
Basically, web3 developers gave user “root” (password “password”) admin privileges. Hilarity ensued:
Is Australian rhyming slang in a bit of froth and bubble? Let’s take a Captain Cook (spoiler: the billy lids may hold the key) The Conversation. Useful to communicate en claire. Eh?
“It is ridiculous that the poems of Charlotte Mew and Martyn Skinner should still be quite unknown, the novels of William Gerhardie out of print for thirty years, the best works of John Stewart Collis unread, almost unobtainable.”
Caliban in Act III, Scene 2 of The Tempest says to Stephano and Trinculo: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” Beerbohm reviewed a production of The Tempest in November 1903.
“Here, one might say is the least Shakespearean of all Shakespeare plays. For what is the salient thing about Shakespeare? Surely, the careless exuberance, the headlong impatience, of his art. Like the age in which he wrote, he was essentially young. In heat of his creative power, he cared not at all—could not pause to bother—how he expressed himself. Everything came out anyhow, short by blind and irresistible impulse.”
A previously uncollected poem, “Biographer,” by the wonderful Samuel Menashe (1925-2011):
“Authorized, booked
By my steadfast prose
The dead I ghost write
Shed shadows that shine
With hindsight, hearsay—
The last word is mine”
Robert Conquest’s “Budapest in 1945”:
“Looking through dusk and a very light mist
Over the luminous grey Danube and the lamps beginning,
From that hill of broken palaces the ruins
Assumed an ageless beauty, hiding the terribly
Slashed city, one of the very rawest
“Zones in which Europe’s hatred went
Absolutely to the bloody whirlpool’s centre,
Struck a cold thunder over
Every usual noise and thought, and carved
Granite to a formless monument.
“Gold light shivered warmly from the water through the vague
Evening. For even there, among all that
Debris of brick, flesh and steel, the eye selected
Blindly its focus. And so no verse can ever
Express the essence of the deadly plague.”
“Like meter, rhyme seems to appeal to a basic human capacity for play and fun. Just as people enjoy and respond to rhythmical patterns, so they delight in verbal correspondences . . .”
As evidence to bolster Timothy Steele’s observation, I cite not Yeats, Cunningham or Larkin but these lines, memorized through repetition fifty-seven years ago:
“Well, she don’t make me nervous
She don’t talk too much
She walks like Bo Diddley
And she don’t need no crutch”
And these, from a decade later, including the Longfellow allusion that had already been committed to memory:
“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy”
Cunningham wrote “With a Copy of Swift’s Works” in 1944. It was originally published in The Judge is Fury (1947) and is included in the newly published volume:
“Underneath this pretty cover
Lies Vanessa’s, Stella’s lover.
You that undertake this story
For his life nor death be sorry
Who the Absolute so loved
Motion to its zero moved,
Till, immobile in that chill,
Fury hardened in the will,
And the trivial, bestial flesh
In its jacket ceased to thresh,
And the soul none dare forgive
Quiet lay, and ceased to live.”
