“Creativity is like washing a pig. It’s messy. It has no rules. No clear beginning, middle or end. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, and when you’re done, you’re not sure if the pig is really clean or even why you were washing a pig in the first place.”
~ Luke Sullivan of magpie fame
Those rare moment when sun sets and storytelling starts …
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Reading in ... Russia
At Foreign Policy Andrei Kolesnikov suggests that For Russians, Reading Is the New Resistance, as:
One crucial resemblance to Soviet times is the newly political role of reading. Unable to protest openly, people are expressing a different kind of resistance by reading literature that is banned, discouraged, or casts an unfavorable light on the regime -- if only by comparison.
How can a $4.75 bottle of wine win three medals?
Shows are a great leveller: when cheap bottles are rated higher than expensive ones, eyebrows are raised.
We’re enjoying a wine that’s won three bronze medals and costs only $4.75. How is this possible? Are cheap wines judged against more expensive wines, or in price categories?
M.F., Southport, Qld
A: As you’ve discovered, it is possible to find very good and inexpensive everyday wines that have won medals at competitions. You mention the De Bortoli Sacred Hill Semillon Sauvignon Blanc 2022. There are several varieties under the Sacred Hill label and they often punch well above their weight.
Even a bronze-medal wine (scoring between 86 and 89 points out of 100) can be a very good drink and represents, at the price you paid, great value. In most competitions, wines are judged in varietal classes, irrespective of price. So a $4.75 wine will be judged against wines that are almost all dearer, often substantially so.
That said, most semillon sauvignon blancs are no dearer than about $25-$30. Chardonnay prices can go much higher.
A glance at the De Bortoli website reveals that many of the Sacred Hill wines have won not only a bag of bronzes but occasional silver medals. To win a silver, a wine has to score between 90 and 94 points out of 100 (gold is 95-plus). For example, the 2021 Sacred Hill Shiraz Cabernet won silvers at four shows in 2022: Cairns, Cowra, Riverina and Rutherglen. Most Australian wine competitions judge wines “blind”, meaning the judges are told only the vintage and grape variety. In other words, they can’t be influenced by knowing the price. This gives great credibility to the quality of wines that win multiple medals. Shows are a great leveller: when cheap bottles are rated higher than expensive ones, eyebrows are raised.
If you want to be really naughty, decant your Sacred Hill into a bottle that once contained a dearer wine, and see what people would pay for it. You might be surprised.
I’m very fond of your father’s son’s bridge
Tour the Bridges of All of Star Trek's Starships Enterprise
Being a great father is like shaving. No matter how good you shaved today, you have to do it again tomorrow.
Students must learn how to get things wrong. Only one subject does that Sophie Gee
Literature is all about learning to work well with uncertainty and discomfort. Lolita seduces us into a place of sympathy with a malevolent madman; the Marabar Caves are the centre of A Passage to India – something bad happened, but we never know what; or those disappearances in Picnic at Hanging Rock, which are never explained. Novels matter most when they immerse us in ambiguous stories where we can’t get comfortable. Heart of Darkness is about the vast, unspeakable “horror” of Africa after European colonisation (but we’re not explicitly told that), and the mysterious Kurtz dominates the novel but is barely seen or explained. Novels often rewrite other novels, poking fingers into the most uncomfortable parts of the original, like the South African novelist JM Coetzee’s Foe, a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe. There are books where we barely grasp what’s happening, like Finnegan’s Wake, or Tristram Shandy.
