Media Dragon

Monday, November 02, 2026

Senate Estimates wrecking balls, silver tongues … The APS pay deal is big beer, so why are we fed bureaucratic waffle?

Has the ATO gone too far? 87% of surveyed accountants say the Tax Office has become more aggressive. Now, the profession is speaking out.

The APS pay deal is big beer, so why are we fed bureaucratic waffle?

By Paddy Gourley

October 30 2026

Negotiations are now well under way for a new pay and conditions deal for staff in the Australian Public Service (APS).

It's a big deal too that will provide the backbone of personnel management for some 200,000 staff for the next three years.

The relatively new Public Service Commissioner, Jacqui Curtis, has brought in one of her former colleagues, Alison Stott, from the Tax Office to run the negotiations. That's not a great vote of confidence in the condition of the organisation which Curtis now heads. She must have been disappointed to find that the Public Service Commission, the central personnel authority in the public service, was left without the capability to undertake one of its main responsibilities off its own bat.

Public Service Commissioner Jacqui Curtis has brought in one of her former colleagues from the Tax Office to run the negotiations. Pictures by Sitthixay Ditthavong, Jeffrey Chan and Shutterstock

Anyway, in recent weeks Stott has been running negotiations for a new public service-wide agreement on pay and conditions under the burden of a government remuneration policy that makes no sense. That policy is a mish-mash about "model employer", "unified and capable", "attraction and retention", "fairness and equity" and, of course, that reliable old standby "sustainability", which as ever is expected to carry immense burdens when comprehensible explanations are not available.

In short, the policy does not provide a satisfactory basis upon which judgements about adjustments to pay and conditions can be made, still less justified to staff and taxpayers.

Rational, model employers who want to be able to recruit, retain and motivate staff try to set staff remuneration at competitive levels in relation to outside labour markets for comparable work. That consideration is absent from pay policy for Commonwealth public servants. It's a significant burden for Stott to carry into her negotiations.

Yet while she's been battling away against the tide, some progress may have been made in removing differences in conditions of employment that have been damaging personnel management. But unless the evening up is to the more generous standard this can be difficult, as was discovered when proposals for a common working week raised the ire of some who would have to put in a few minutes more a week. That is, in evening up pay and conditions, pressures to take the highest common denominator are inevitable.

On October 13, Stott tabled the government offer on pay. Essentially, it was for a 9 per cent increase over three years. Surprise, it's the same as has been reportedly offered to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Yet while the details of the offer on pay have been explained, no justification has been provided for it.

In faint hope, the Public Service Commission was asked about the reasons and rationale for the 9 per cent and whether it was based on any comparisons with levels of remuneration in outside labour markets including state public services.

The commission said that the offer was "informed by a range of factors including but not limited to claims put forward by the bargaining parties, discussions and feedback from the bargaining room, feedback from the 2026 employment conditions survey, input from APS agencies, workforce needs across the public service, broader economic conditions and indicators, and affordability and the need for sustainable outcomes".

That is to say, the 9 per cent is a figure plucked from the air without any consideration about how that will place public service remuneration in relation to the labour market. So there can be no assurance that levels of remuneration are too little and so imperil recruitment and retention, or are too much and so require staff with other employers to subsidise better remuneration than they have.

Mind you, it's not as if this sort of nonsense is new. It's consistent with habits that have gone on for far too long and any number of governments have been unwilling to snap out of it. Curtis and Stott are, to an extent, caught in a tradition that is not of their making and which is now likely to be sealed up for another three years. It's to be hoped they will be able to use that time to reflect upon the bind they're in and convince whatever government they're serving in 2029 to do the right, proper and fair thing by departments, their staff, other employers and taxpayers, because the present policy and its expression lacks all integrity.

When it comes to the crudity of mere cash, the new public service pay and conditions deal is big beer. At this point it's not easy to calculate the cost precisely, although there probably won't be much change left out of $4 billion in the public service alone, not to mention the ADF and other government agencies like the ABC, CSIRO and others.

Sure, public service remuneration needs to be adjusted, but when billions are being spent, taxpayers should be favoured with an explanation of the reasons for doing so that gets above generalised waffle about affordability, sustainability and feedback from the bargaining room, none of which provide the faintest assurance that their money is being well spent.

Model employer? When it comes to industrial relations bargaining and the adjustment of pay and conditions, the Commonwealth is more like a muddle-headed one.

Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant.
This article first appeared on John Menadue's public policy site, Pearls and Irritations

The Senate estimates power list: wrecking balls, silver tongues and more

We learnt plenty about government spending at Senate estimates this October, and there was no shortage of drama.

So who asked the hard questions? And who rose to the challenge?

Find out here:

The human wrecking balls

Liberal senator Jane Hume has found her feet as the deputy leader of the opposition, and it's no surprise after 10 years in Parliament. Senator Hume was across her brief, persistent in questioning, and picked her moment for political attacks. This involved pressing Treasury officials over growing inflation, and putting figures on public sector growth to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher.

Education secretary Tony Cook, Health secretary Blair Comely, Senator Jane Hume, and Senator Malcolm Roberts. Pictures: Gary Ramage, Karleen Minney, AAP.

ACT senator David Pocock used his famous death-stare to good effect, going in to bat for Canberrans and plenty of others. Under questioning from Senator Pocock, National Emergency Management Agency bosses revealed their staff were still waiting for $1.8 million in backpay. He slammed health officials for the botched rollout of an aged care assessment tool. And that was just the beginning.

Greens senator David Shoebridge was everywhere, with questions on migration, the corruption watchdog, offshoring legal transcripts and a host of Defence matters. Senator Shoebridge was incisive, but his scattergun approach left something to be desired for others. In the words of Labor senator Murray Watt: "I always forget you are always the smartest person in the room."

Masters of the brief

Meghan Quinn has led the Department of Defence for all of six months, but it didn't show at estimates. Ms Quinn was across the detail, gave a polished performance, and had choice quips to defend her agency. When grilled over a $1.8 billion investment in tanks that have since sat on the shelf, Ms Quinn said "we do not buy equipment in the hope of using it."

Spare a thought for health secretary Blair Comley, who had to defend his agency's role in two recent bungles at estimates. Alongside the botched rollout of the integrated assessment tool, it emerged that health officials' decisions contributed to a $700 million underspend in funding for aged care packages. Others would have cracked under pressure; Mr Comley stepped in to save his deputies.

Honourable mention to ACT senator and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who came within 10 minutes of escaping the hearings unscathed. Ms Gallagher defended the government's use of contractors, reminding the public that there are still circumstances where using external providers makes sense. She urged "respect to all individuals" in comments on gender-neutral language. But questions about inflation near the end of day three caused Ms Gallagher to stumble.

Most improved

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts is known for asking rhetorical questions at estimates. He came to this round with more facts, intent and policy nous. Senator Roberts asked climate change officials why they didn't change course on Snowy Hydro 2.0 after delays and blowouts. And he forced Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett to commit to no job cuts in the short term.

Special mentions

Education secretary Tony Cook used the most deft of touches to remind senators to behave. In his opening statement, Mr Cook welcomed APS graduates who were observing from the back of the room. Committee chair Marielle Smith quipped: "Hopefully we don't scare them off a lifetime of public service."

Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions Raelene Sharp faced a barrage of questions from Liberal senator Michaelia Cash at 9pm. Ms Sharp acquitted herself from claims there was a conflict of interest to manage in a high-profile case, with detailed evidence. Not easy after a day of waiting around.

And many thanks to Industry Minister Tim Ayres for keeping estimates interesting. Mr Ayres called opposition leader Angus Taylor the "worst energy Minister ever", said "don't interrupt me" multiple times, and got fed up with Senator Roberts. In Senator Ayres' words, "I don't know how to persuade you, Senator Roberts, because I know you're not listening."

Ray Athwal

Data Journalist

Ray Athwal is a data journalist interested in data-driven stories. Got a tip or an idea to share? Email him at ray.athwal@austcommunitymedia.com.au or on Signal @rayathwal.10

Zac Braxton-Smith

Writer covering the public sector after a decade in government, consulting and media. Call 0467 674 451 or email zac.braxton-smith@austcommunitymedia.com.au.

Dave Allen

Reporter

Dave Allen is a public service and federal politics reporter with an interest in AI, govtech, government integrity and transparency, and the changing day-to-day lives of public servants. He operates out of the federal press gallery and Canberra Times' Civic bureau. Contact him on Signal at daveallen.85 or at dave.allen@canberratimes.com.

‘Who’s going to dob me in?’ Michael Kirby’s literary secret, his great love and a stark national warning

The High Court’s first “celebrity judge” reflects on love, poverty, Howard-era battles, and chilling out about a musical on his life.

Cara Waters

OCTOBER 28, 2026

He was the High Court’s first “celebrity judge” and still has students and legal practitioners coming up to him to tell him his judgments are their favourites.

Former High Court justice Michael Kirby retired from the bench in 2009 but continues to be in demand as an arbitrator and speaker around the country.

The 87-year-old lives in Sydney but is in Melbourne ahead of delivering the Brotherhood of St. Laurence’s annual Sambell Oration.

Kirby arrives straight from the airport to meet me for lunch at Streat cafe in Collingwood.

In a quiet backstreet, the cafe has a rare luxury in the inner-city suburb – a sun-filled grassy courtyard with tables and chairs where we can sit and talk.

I tell Kirby he was my favourite High Court judge when I studied law because his judgments were always interesting and easy to read.

It’s not the first time Kirby has heard this.

“Everywhere I go, they want to go up and tell me they learned their law through my opinions,” he says.

It’s a nice legacy to have, I say.

“It is, but I don’t get carried away with it,” Kirby says.

Such is his popularity that a production of a musical based on his life is currently under way.

“I sort of vetoed it and said I wouldn’t co-operate,” Kirby says. “But then I wrote back and said if they really want to, they should go ahead.”

He says he’ll go along when it is staged, as long as the musical numbers are decent.

“You’ve got to have some good tunes,” he says.

Kirby’s popularity is partly due to his judgments written in plain legal English rather than the convoluted and more confusing style favoured by some of his contemporaries.

Lunch with Michael Kirby, comprising a spinach and ricotta roll and an Anzac biscuit at Streat cafe.JASON SOUTH

“You can make things easier to understand if you write in short sentences,” he says. “So that’s what I did.”

Kirby served on the High Court from 1996 to 2009, and during this time he was known for his incisive judgments and for dissenting from the judgment of his colleagues, particularly on matters of civil liberties and human rights.

I ask him if it was lonely dissenting so much, but Kirby says he only really broke ranks when he joined the High Court in response to pressure from parliament “to rein these judges in”, to just apply the law rather than try to address fundamental values.

His rulings, including finding that WorkChoices legislation distorted the constitution, that prisoners deserved the right to vote and that indefinite detention of a stateless migrant was unlawful, attracted the ire of then-prime minister John Howard.

Receipt from lunch at Streat with Michael Kirby.

Howard was often critical of “judicial activism”, and Kirby returned serve by giving speeches defending the right of judges to interpret laws in light of changing social values.

Even when he was in the majority, Kirby often wrote his own separate judgment – a record he’s proud of.

“Chief Justice Mason once gave a big compliment to me,” Kirby says. “He said ‘If you want to know what the case is really about, start with the Kirby judgment’.”

A talent for writing runs in Kirby’s family – he tells me his grandfather, William Spotswood Knowles, was a journalist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Sadly, Knowles was a little before my time, so we turn to the menu and Kirby confesses he has already eaten on the plane, so isn’t particularly hungry.

A committed pescetarian, he says Qantas’ catering now finally embraces his dietary preferences.

Instead, Kirby orders a mocha and biscuit, which he carefully nibbles on during the course of our discussion, while I order the spinach and ricotta roll with a carafe of sparkling water.

The pastry is buttery and flaky and the creamy ricotta has a salty tang to it.

It’s good, but Kirby chose Streat more for the cafe’s social impact than the quality of its food.

It’s a social enterprise which provides vocational training and support programs for disadvantaged and homeless youth.

He’s been concerned with social justice since he was given a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by his teacher as a student at Fort Street Boys’ High School, in Petersham, in Sydney’s inner west.

Kirby studied law at the University of Sydney and practised as a solicitor and a barrister before his appointment in 1974 as the deputy president of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. In 1983, he was appointed to the Federal Court, and then the High Court in 1996.

During his time at the bar and as a judge, Kirby was known for his formidable work ethic, often beginning his day at 5am.

“The Melbourne bar is a late bar, and the Sydney bar is an early bar,” Kirby explains.

“In the old days, before the internet and emails, you could get a few good hours of total silence. You could focus on the problems of your day, clear your head, get across the issues, and how you will express the issues in your head.”

It’s a habit Kirby continues to this day.

Ralph Heiman’s Radical Restraint, featuring former High Court judge Michael Kirby, is one of the most popular pieces at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery.HEATH MISSEN

He still walks into chambers each day, proudly showing me his watch that shows he has already clocked up more than 6000 steps for the day.

He asks to compare with my watch and is put out that I have eclipsed him with 9000 steps thanks to an early morning run with friends.

“Don’t worry, you’d have me on a normal day,” I tell him.

Since retiring from the High Court, Kirby has not eased up, working with the United Nations and is still in demand as a speaker at universities and for events like the Sambell Oration where he called for a new national approach recognising poverty as a human rights issue.

“The reason I took this topic was because every day when I walk to work, I see people who are seriously poor, sitting on the pavement,” Kirby says. “Sometimes asleep in borrowed bedding, or sometimes with bedding which is handed out to them.”

Kirby says it seems like homelessness is becoming more prevalent and in a wealthy country like Australia, 14.2 per cent of the population shouldn’t live below the poverty line.

“Remember when Bob Hawke promised that no child will live in poverty?” Kirby asks. “The words came back to bite him. But most people would think 14 per cent is quite high for a country like us.”

Kirby warns about the impact of worsening inequality on society pointing to the recent protests and looting in France.

“And having regard to what we’re seeing in the world at the moment, deep unrest of violence, destruction of public property, it’s a warning to us in this way to keep on top of this” he says.

Still sharp as a tack, Kirby is comfortable discussing jurisprudence from 40 years ago as well as the latest decisions from the High Court where he says, “I keep an eye on areas I’m interested in.”

As well as his public speaking duties, Kirby is presiding over a billion-dollar arbitration in India, which involves occasional travel there.

He has agreed with his spouse, Johan van Vloten, that once the arbitration concludes in about three years he will finally actually retire – at the age of 90.

“I’ve done a deal, it’s a Trumpian deal that I will retire when I finish it,” Kirby says. “He says he will believe it when he sees it.”

Van Vloten and Kirby have been together for 57 years and were vocal advocates for the marriage equality vote.

I ask Kirby what it was like coming out as gay in such a high-profile role, and he says for much of his career he was not open about his sexuality.

“The deal was: if you don’t make us think about diversity, we’ll leave you alone,” Kirby says. “And so that’s what I did, and I continued doing that for quite a while.”

Michael Kirby married his partner Johan van Vloten on the 50th anniversary of when they first met in 1969. HADDEN MOTION PICTURES

It was van Vloten who convinced him to help blaze a trail for the next generation as he is from the Netherlands where “they call a spade a shovel” and so told Kirby it was time to stand up for himself.

“What can they do to you?” van Vloten told Kirby. “You are on the highest court on the land.”

Kirby says in the end, van Vloten proved to be correct.

His secret to a long and successful relationship is compromise and mutual interests.

“You’ve got to have one partner who will always give in,” Kirby says. “That’s me. You’ve also got to have mutual interests. Ours is history basically.”

Kirby says he sometimes wonders if he should have been a history professor rather than a lawyer.

When he retires he plans to spend time talking to van Vloten about the history books van Vloten is reading, while Kirby will spend his time reading the London Review of Books.

“That is a wonderful journal, all about a lot of books I will never read,” he says.

I ask whether it is cheating to read the London Review of Books rather than the books themselves. Kirby laughs.

“Who’s going to dob me in?” he says.

Our lunch is over and Kirby carefully places the remainder of his biscuit in a paper napkin to take away for later.

He has some parting advice for me as I attempt to digest our expansive lunch conversation into this article.

“Short sentences. Full stops.”

Noted.

Links

May we never forget freedom is not free.…

You were about to die … And you are here living despite it all.

‘Between life and death there is a library,' she said.
'And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?'

Seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, hold the truth and defend the truth until death.

— Jan Hus as all the time we have is borrowed

The truth doesn't drown in water and doesn't burn in fire

A story forged by history as their silent graves speak louder than any words ever could.

Reviewer of Cold River told me my life was the kind that's told with blues music …

Dear Readers: “If you like my book, please tell your friends. If you don't, tell your enemies. I am not picky about sales …

“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”
~ Lois McMaster Bujold

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
~ Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

As usual, Maslow was wrong. People create art when they're dying, starving, freezing, not only when they are comfortable and have all their needs met.
Because creating art is a fundamental human function. it's a way to say "I was here" and "I saw, thought, and felt something".

Words left behind, carried forward by others

"Books are many things: lullabies for the weary, ointment for the wounded, armour for the fearful and nests for those in need of a home."
~ Glenda Millard.

“There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
– Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers

“Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.”
~ Proverbs 4:27, KJV

“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.”

"Free Speech Absolutist" As they used to say in the Soviet era: "The Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but it does not guarantee freedom after the speech."

Guernica was painted by Picasso in 1937 in response to the Nazi's blitzkrieg on that town that killed or wounded 1/3 of the city's citizens. It's said during WWII, a Nazi officer, saw a photo of Guernica in Picasso's Paris apartment, and asked "Did you do that?" Picasso replied, "No. You did."

"I am not poor. Poor are those who desire many things."
~ Leonardo da Vinci

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
~ Elie Wiesel

For better or for worse: ‘I am their voice'. The folkloric night owl in me collects all kinds of escape stories and insightful links … As Rachel Maddow put it: “Watch what they do, not what they say."

In reviews and discussions of the book, Mafia: A Global History, Gingeras is noted for observing that "Mafias will be with us until men turn into angels," suggesting that organised crime is an enduring byproduct of human society and state power…

“Between 1934 and 1952, an estimated 18 million Soviet citizens were interned in the country’s massive gulag system.”

Write what should not be forgotten.
~Isabel Allende

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
~ Anaïs Nin

Freedom is not free. We have to work at it. Nurture it. Protect it. Even sacrifice for it.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed ~ Martin Luther

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

"The best way out, is always through."
~ Robert Frost

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

~ Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

Not everything can be said in a few words, but nothing can always be said in many words.

"[Just like democracy,] Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new."
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We May Finish A Book, That Book Is Never Quite Finished With Us

“Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
~ Tom Stoppard - Satirical Emeritus

You may be the only person who wants to read this. ”All is lost! Please find me…”

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, to rethink it, to deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.”
~ Salman Rushdie

If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit…

If “judge me by my enemies” is a thing, there is pretty good evidence at bear pit and taxing platforms that you are pissing off the right people

”Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.”
~ George S. Patton Blue Sky Platform

No art is possible without a dance with death.
~ George Carlin

“If we must die, we die defending our rights.”
~ Sitting Bull

Honour their memories. Keep fighting for democracy …

“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.” - Jean Cocteau

One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground. I rarely post anything that reflects my political sentiments, mostly because others can articulate my feelings better than I: The fight against fascism is never-ending

“A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears.”
~ Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
~ John F. Kennedy

"What's past is prologue.”
~ Shakespeare, The Tempest

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

“Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s as if they say everything you have tried to say, or tried to do, or everything you are. As a rule, what you are is one simmering, endless longing …”

"Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties?
Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity."
~ Vaclav Havel - The Fate of The Day

My whole political stance pretty much boils down to "I care about other people and the planet" and wow does that make some people mad.

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”
~ Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union

The public servants' guide to effective writing: How to write effective briefings, speeches, emails and media dragon 🐉 blog posts

A book is brand new every time someone reads it for the first time. There's no such thing as coming late to any story.

To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.
~Napoleon Bonaparte

BOOKS ... the cheapest vacation money can buy

The best accessories will always be books 📚 … So looking forward to slipping between your covers… although I am currently enjoying my coupling with Dostoyevsky…
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
~Twain quoting Dostoyevsky (Archive)

“The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.”
~ Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

"There is nothing I can write to derail this catastrophe that I haven't written already. I am worn from warning. What is a warning, anyway, but a declaration of what you love and want to protect? It's not that my heart's not in it. It's that my heart is in everything."
~ Sarah Kendzior

If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.

“No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.”
—Benjamin Disraeli

“In any conflict the boundaries of behaviour are defined by the party that cares the least about morality”
― Randy Wayne White

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
~ Charlie Chaplin

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms.
~Franz Kafka

“With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone”
~ Bob Dylan

The entire point
of life is to take chances
on dreams that seem
crazy to most but feel like
destiny to you…

"There comes a time when you realise that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."
~ James Salter - All That Is

Strange thing about getting older: your eyesight starts getting weaker, but your ability to see through people's bullshit gets much better.

A poet Heinrich Heine was once asked why men no longer build great cathedrals.
He replied: "People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."

I am convinced that ” being a survivor is hard bloody work, harder than it looks, and I think I might be running low on survivor juice. Given the choice, I’d far rather a pampered life of indulgence where nothing bad ever happens.”
~ Marian Keyes

‘In quoting others, we cite ourselves.’

“Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.”
~ Garner’s Spirit

I made it out of the Iron Curtain river alive …
“If a tiny baby is submerged beneath the water, it can breathe. Through hard training and psychological determination, it is possible to breathe there again. That is what his father told him long ago.” Obsession

“I think I became a writer to stay sane. Or maybe because you don’t have to be sane when you’re a writer.”
~ Sara Stridsberg

~ ‘Deciding to write a book is like knowingly entering a bad marriage’

"I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions."
~ Charles Bukowski

A life without challenge, a life without hardship, a life without passion, is no life at all.

Feel guilt, it builds character. Feel weakness, it builds strength. Feel fear, it builds courage. However, if you allow yourself to only feel without building or perseverance to build further, you'll fester in the rot of apathy or compliance. The world may fail but you shouldn't fail yourself.

I choose to challenge because nothing is perfect and luck favours those who act - I choose to challenge myself to be my best imperfect self
~ Clare Gunning

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
~ William James The Art of Making A Difference By Losing

A century after Van Gogh exulted in risk as the crucible of the creative life and a decade after David Bowie, a swimmer at the Andrew Boy Charlton pool, urged young artists to “always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in ...”

Van Gough knew how to make God laugh … Tell Him your nostalgic plans

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise”
~ Voltaire 1694-1778

“Tell your story.
Shout it. Write it.
Whisper it if you have to.
But tell it.
Some won't understand it.
Some will outright reject it.
But many will
thank you for it.
And then the most
magical thing will happen.
One by one, voices will start
whispering, 'Me, too.'
And your tribe will gather.
And you will never
feel alone again.”
― L.R. Knost : Like life, ‘Cold River’ is complicated and messy …

Every book that finds you is a minor miracle.

Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be.

Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.
~ Neil Gaimen remembering G.K. Chesterton

Dream big and dare to fail … We alone cannot change the world, but we can cast a stone across the Cold River to create many taxing ripples… sometimes stakes are higher than our simple existence.

“In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the ‘beingness’ of life.”
- Jim Harrison

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
~ James Baldwin

The most valuable things in a life are a man's memories. And they are priceless.
~Andre Kertesz

MEdia Dragon 🐉 is an absolute nobody who did something once upon a time …
By being curious and by reading this dragon 🐉 blog, you have made a valuable addition to the number of people who have read this bronze winning blog since 2002…

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor.

~ Back in 1980s the role in the media clippings was a labour of love ❤️

“The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic, and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.”
~ Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy

Willa Cather wrote: "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years."

If you haven’t heard I wrote a book about those three or so stories peppered with my favourite mistakes 📝 …

“What is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? Why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? We are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs and if human beings were cars, we would return them for being faulty.”
~ Marian Keyes

We ourselves are events in history. Things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us.

Remember: blogs and things are not what they seem. May we never forget that freedom is never free …
~ (Malchkeon) Rupi Kaur

“The wound is the place where the light enters you …”
~ Rumi

"And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we came from, and what might be possible.”
~ Alan Rickman, inspired by Cold River

‘There’s nothing special about me-dia dragon ... but with a number of other people we’ve built something different.’

“When you feel small and invisible or stretched-too-thin-and-all-used up, when life feels too hard to live and pain feels too much to bear, when guilt and shame and self-condemnation feel too heavy to carry, go outside and stand barefoot in the stardust-speckled dirt with your face tilted up to the universe and whisper to your wounded heart,
'This is not how my story ends. There is so much more to life than this moment, these hours, this day, this season of my life.
It's my story. I get to choose. It doesn't end here;'
And then take your pen in hand and write the rest of your gorgeous, shredded, pasted-back-together story however you choose to write it.
And remember, you're not alone.
We're all writing our own jacked up stories our own way, too.
Welcome to our tribe of misfits and outcasts and rebels and dreamers. We are the story-weavers.
And we're all on this ride through the galaxy together.”
― L.R. Knost

Social media allows the previously voiceless to walk right up to the powerful and put stuff right in front of their faces, at any time of day

“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

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
— Joseph Brodsky

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
~ Janis Joplin

As Nietzsche says, the true path is the one which is currently darkened, where you don’t know what’s around the bend. So remember if you care about your rights, you should care when other people are stripped of theirs.

“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. Like Tom, by that metric I am too a great success...

THE FINE ART OF COLD RIVER FAILURE: Rejection, not acceptance, defines writing life.

“You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going.”
~ Jackie Robinson

In the immortal words of Popeye the Sailor Man: “I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam.”

'The truth shall set you free.'
Truth is true even if no-one believes it.
A lie is false even if everyone believes it.
Seek truth, reject lies.

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority.
~ Booker T. Washington

Memories can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car … If we can't make memories, we can't heal
~Leonard Shelby, Memento

When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.

“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

I Am The River, The River Is Me “You’re only here because of everything your people survived.”

I don’t live by the day. I live by the second

“I’d rather die trying to take them down than die giving them what they want.”
~ Andor Recap: Sink or Swim

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
—Haruki Murakami

People who are afraid to die, die many times !!!

But books, like people, die too. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a great book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
~ Anthony Doerr

“Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.”
—Ilka Chase

If a story is in you, it has to come out.
— William Faulkner, born in 1897

While tourists follow a trail, a High Tatra mountaineers find one…

History repeats itself, Marta Chamilová reminds us in the book coined ‘Cold River’ — our present will soon become a past that informs the future. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are days where decades happen. Well, where do we start? Sometimes the most unlikely things can change the course of our lives. Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.
~ Richard Kadrey

If with all your effort and might you do not reach the mountain top that is not failure; failure is that you did not even try.

The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi dissident, who died on 9 April 1945 few weeks before the end of WWII

Edward Teller once wrote: “I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.”

Don't mistake the gentle strides of a lion as weakness.

John Quincy Adams once observed, “I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.”

“Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people.”
~ Warren Buffett

". . . [E]very book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."
~George Orwell, "1984"

In his samizdat existential stories Vaclav Havel used to quote Absurdist Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who suggested that every problem (or truth) passes through three stages on the way to acceptance: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Stephen King is completely different than celebrity. King has a magic all its own:
“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.”

~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Mark Twain knew all about forbidden fruits and freedom: “Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent”

I taught myself how to do research, how to dig out the pieces... I discovered in the process that, contrary to the notion that the past is a dead thing, that in fact wherever you scratch the surface, you find life. And it was the life, the people and what happened to them, that was the pull for me.
~David McCullough

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
— Harold Pinter, born in 1930

Sometimes events happen just “for some reason,” a favorite phrase of Leo Tolstoy's indicating that no theory could ever predict them. Tolstoy had the unerring ability to see what we see and predict that Cold War and Rivers of Peace stories would take ages to write: “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

“[E]very true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex, and important. The blogs or books we read are no different from the people we meet or the cities we visit. Some books, people, or places hardly matter, others change our lives, and still others plant some idea or sentiment that influences our futures. No one else will ever read, reread, or misread the same books in the same way or in the same order.
Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others. Perhaps that is why books matter so much.”
Lonely Bohemian Impulse of Delight

“Literature has nothing to say to those people who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as it is. Literature offers sustenance to rebellious and non-conformist spirits and a refuge to those who have too much or too little in life; it wards off unhappiness and any feelings of lack or want.”
Literature it wards off unhappiness

It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.
— Karel Čapek, born in 1890

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
– Jozef Stalin

In a repressive society, dark political jokes allow regular people to describe what they see with their own eyes.

I love the notion that the whole course of the war was changed by this small group, hunkered down in a smoky basement room
~ Michelle Ashford

You never appreciate what a compost your memory is until you start trying to smooth past events into a logical and rational sequence. What happened to my memories was what happens to most people’s stories when they are confronted by mistakes or disasters too big to be borne; they let in the reality of it inch by inch, as it were, a little bit at a time, avoiding at all costs the full, total shock of it. The shocking events in our lives are always the result of a sequence of tiny details.

As I reflect back on my life, I am full of regrets, yet the choices we make are part of who we are. Our words carry power to quote Etta James: “If I did it any other way, It wouldn’t be me.” (Life, Love and the Blues.) So If I don’t write this book my way about Morava River, no one else will. No one will know what hasn’t been written... How We sort of drifted into the business of escape. A peculiar aspect of surreal escapes across the symbolic Iron Curtain is that a significant portion of them reads like fiction. They have the metaphorical Kafkaesque-Roth power of sublime fiction. Everything I wrote was struggle against the impossibility of writing, attempts to preserve something of the escape or perhaps to rediscover the wall of the cosmos and our small place within it.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
~ Leo Tolstoy

Writers Are the Middlemen Between the Human Race and Immortality

Stories of escape are infectious like the bastard child of William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, and Jane Austen all mixed together. ~ Book of Faces

We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength, but I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.” John Green offers the unsugar-coated advice that, no matter where we go after school, we’ll be back at the bottom of the totem pole and that, if we can muster the humility and patience to handle it gracefully, we’ll be better off for it. “In learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk.”
~ John Green

Whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political realities, the thirst for freedom is very simple: It means believing that if regimes built 10ft wall you will create a 12ft ladder.
~ Wade In From the Cold!

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In the middle of the journey of our life, when we begin to start to feel the weight of the crimes we are hauling behind us, we might turn to literature for wisdom. It is not readily available, but I have always found it in Leo Tolstoy and his War & Peace. Both Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession demand that readers reflect on what the inevitability of death means to us, and on how we shall face our own end.

… Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
~ Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

I also won’t pretend to understand why in the middle of the night some of the deep and stirring quotes and manifestos came to me. Why do I oppose communism and fascism? Because they will eventually come for you. That’s why. The loser like me is strong because he has nothing left to lose. People who are life’s winners, apparently, are weak because they have so much they want to hang on to. The upwardly mobile are particularly afraid. We are afraid of losing what we have attained, because it is not secure. neither morally nor financially. There are events in seemingly far away places that have significance way beyond their immediate implications. Every story starts with water ... and the Morava River keeps our Cold War past alive. Lives are like rivers. Eventually they go where they must, not where we want them to. It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. . . But there is no other way. The river can not go back.

“Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.”
― Richard P. Denney

I have tried in my way to be free

This world. This human race. It isn’t divided into sexes. Everybody thinks it’s divided into sexes but it isn’t. It’s the givers and the takers. The kind and the cruel.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag

“So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”
~ Neil Gaiman also tried in his artistic ways to be free

Stephen King compares writing to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub, because in both, "there's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt." Not only will you doubt yourself, but other people will doubt you, too. "If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all"

… at times it is only the angry who are in a position to apprehend the magnitude of some injustice. For they are the ones willing to sacrifice all their other concerns and interests so as to attend, with an almost divine focus, to some tear in the moral fabric. When I am really angry, it is not even clear to me that I can calm down—the eyes of the heart do not have eyelids—and the person making that request strikes me, to adapt a locution of Socrates’, as trying to banish me from my property, the truth. They are calling me “irrational,” but they seem not to see that there are reasons to be angry.
Why I Am Angry .”

“If I live till I am 80 years old,” Charles Darwin wrote to a friend in November 1837, “I shall not cease to marvel at finding myself an author.”

Tim Harford: James Baldwin, once said: “History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to normal people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else. — John Locke, born in 1632

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
— Rudyard Kipling, born in 1865 - You thought I/we’d lay down and die?

I read my verse to dragons, waterfalls and clouds:
I will not die in a bed
before a notary and a doctor,
but in some wild gorge
drowned in thick ivy.
~ Nikolai Gumilyov - 35 years old (1886-1921)

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
~ Johnny Cash

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
— Henrik Ibsen, who died in May 1996

It is a little embarrassing that after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
— Aldous Huxley born on 26 July 1894

I once asked my friends if they'd ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

I have survived far too much to go quietly; let a meteor take me, call the thunder for backup, my death will be grand. The land will crack, the sun will eat itself.
~Rupi Kaur

“Sooner or later… one has to take sides. If one is to remain human”
– Graham Greene – The Quiet American

Tyranny is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various. The well and truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they will say and think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt and violent or covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population in which the power of the word is dulled and, thus, the power of thought occluded and the power of deed brought low.
Underground Grammarian

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
— Doris Lessing, born in 1919

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.
— Simone Weil, born in 1909

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“...they turned to the bloggers, who might be unfiltered and full of shit, but they were fast, prolific, and allowed you to triangulate the truth. Get your news from six or nine sources and you can usually it tell the bullshit from reality.”
“Everything is ‘just a story.’ Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, whatever, it’s just a story. What matters is making sure it’s heard.”
― Mira Grant, Feed that eery and alien torch to the truth

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
— William Faulkner, born on this date in 1897

This book. . . springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, . . . to give voice to the silenced and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced. Hence this volume is as much about seeking as finding, as much about losing as gaining. . . [The] difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.”
~ Judith Schalansky

“Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.”
- Francesca Lia Block, author

Alessandro Pertini makes a deep and meaningful point which is often lost on people who define success as winning at all cost or whatever it takes: “Sometimes in life we must fight not only without fear, but also without hope.”

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness... Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

— Jaccob Burckhardt, who died in 1897

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” ... "The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1965, in words that echo 21st century.

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose and Cold River

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
~ Malcom X

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
— Hannah Arendt, born in 1906

There are lots of things I don’t know. I don’t know if there is life elsewhere in the universe, though I find it hard to believe we are alone. But I do know this: Right this minute, we are all here together on this beautiful planet. It is the only one we have, so we should take care of it.

“If you are a creative person and you’re honest, you realise how little you know. The depth of your ignorance is something you are constantly aware of – knowledge is a bottomless pit and you keep finding new things. I’m forever coming up against a question I can’t answer. And that’s what keeps me going.
- Desmond Morris

Some people come into your life as blessings. Some come into your life as lessons.
- Slavic Mother Teresa

Traditional Media Dragons continue the exploration of pioneering lessons learned. It is useful to trigger mittleuropean collective memory by channeling Faulkner’s famous aphorism— The Past Is Never Dead–Is It? We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. Freedom is like that. It’s like air. When you have it, you don’t notice it.

So continue to do what scares you ...

Books are like Aladdin’s lamp,” Wasserman, the miteuropean ghost, enthuses. “You don’t rub the lamp, the geni doesn’t come out. And a book that lies on the shelf is in something of a coma.”
Writers need readers to complete the work.”

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
~Elie Wiesel

I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
- Michael Jordan

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”
~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?...We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more that ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
~ We repeat we did not start the fire! We blame Kafka

As that inspirational leader Alyssa Milano has said: ‘First, accept sadness. Realize that without losing, winning isn't so great.”

Brene Brown nailed it when she pointed out that "courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen."

“There must always be two kinds of art, escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”
~ W.H. Auden, “Psychology and Art To-day”

I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things. Life is a series of things that seem to be your fault when it's that damn butterfly flapping its wings in the High Tatra Mountains.
–Surreal Kafkaesque

“What is life but an ongoing war ... So read like a butterfly, write like a dragon. History tends to be written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs."
Douglas Coupland asks us: “Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don’t (…) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That’s me and my memories.”

'The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.'
~ William James, like Jozef Imrich, shares first names as surnames

“Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urge to not just be “creative,” it’s a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.”
- Shawn Coyne, The Story Grid

Some words are more than letters on a page, don’t you think? […] ‘They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath, you can feel its sharp edge against your lip. It can be quite cathartic in the right context

Not everyone gets the chance to write their escape story. First-generation migrants and exiled are worst generation migrants. They do not feel at home anywhere. Neither in Czechoslovakia where my roots are, nor in Australia where my branches are. Strange mixed feelings about belonging never die ...

You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all."

Books are the anchors
Left by the ships that rot away. The mud
The anchors lie in is one’s recollection
Of what life was, and never, late or soon,
Will be again ...
~ ‘The River in The Sky’ by Antipodean Clive James

“But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they
could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

“I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed”
~ Marco Polo

Uncovering the powerful stories from your life and learning how to share them in ways that resonate with audiences. . .

Good books do not invite unanimity. They invite discord, mayhem, knife fights, blood feuds. . .

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am
bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and
stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
~ Abraham Lincoln

“The dragon is brave to walk alone.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

"We all need secrets, just to keep sane, to feel that the world doesn't own us."
~ Deepest MEdia Dragons

'Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can't hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. Like 19 years old Media Dragon, Beeple is worth $1 billion

As William Golding observed 'if man did not produce evil as a bee produces honey' we would not need to move the world ... or toil over surreal stories which expose brutal isms and adversities ...

Juraj Jánošík saw royal police pull fish out of the water just to watch them not breathe.

Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum
Let him who wants peace prepare for war
If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Homo sapiens have a substance abuse problem, and the substance is corruption

Hans Hansen, his real name, had the finger on the pulse of the society in all kinds of isms when he observed that ... "It takes nothing to join the crowd. It takes everything to stand alone."

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner on the unrestrained freedom of life - Why The Unbearable Lightness of Being Matters

Life has more meaning in the face of Death

One of the smartest things one can do in life … is to play stupid.

“Don’t bend; don’t - water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
— Franz Kafka who perfected the bohemian art that must be exact about the uncertain

As blogging trailblazer, Hunter S. Thompson, mercilessly suggested: “So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time." Like MEdia Dragon, Svetlana Alexievich is on a mission to dare greatly in order to collect memories before they disappear, to correct for the rewriting of history by propaganda...
"It takes two flints to make a fire."
-Louisa May Alcott Curiosity is Dangerous Sensation

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life,” Carl Jung observed as he contemplated human personality

Putting into words what is beyond words … If you’re not scared a lot you are not doing very much... A Society Is Only As Free As Its Most Troublesome Political Dissident

"Within a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And, to boot, every person who lives from now until the Sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the taxing and legislative atomic level, we are in a sense eternal."
Eternal Bohemian Bill

Being an (Eternal) Oscar blogger isn’t about being a creep. It’s about doing your thing without apology, no matter how strange it looks to “normal people.” It’s about weird passions and showing the side most people are scared to reveal such as shameless self promotion:

It’s better to cross the line and suffer the consequences than to just stare at the line for the rest of your life ... Freedom has a story: Memories of Moving Cold War River deliver tears and smiles in ways that many stories try, but few achieve so soulfully ... the flawed storyteller from Cold War era you have never heard of . . .
Sole survivors' voices tend to come from places which had never had a voice, never been granted real existence, before ...

“If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.”
— Wally Lamb

“Failure is never quite as frightening as regret.”
Contributed by Sages at DB

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
~ Thomas Wolfe, born in 1900

“The beautiful thing about fear is that when you run to it, it runs away.”
~ Robin Sharma

The taxing and legislative world of isms is peppered with all kinds of characters, however Being kind to the unkind is a higher art of kindness ...

“There are a million Bohemian and Antipodean Jozef Imrich stories, and they’re all true, even the ones that never happened.” The old bohemian maxim still holds: ‘Stories happen only to people who can tell them.’

“According to history, quite a few times simple man turned out to be the significant man.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”
- Adlai Stevenson

“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.”
– Malala Yousafzai, activist

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
~Jessica Mitford, Deep Blogger who penned The Hons and Rebels

My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight there will still be left a member [of our school group] to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve [the group]. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.
~ Just prior to his death, G.B. Smith wrote a letter to J.R.R. Tolkien

Books like waterbirds
flying over bookshelf pond
Splash! Some land, most gone

“High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
– George Orwell, trailblazing author and journalist-(blogger) more insightful now than then

Orwell was a good MEdia Dragon example that ignited in generations of reformers the passion for justice and human rights - a bittersweet reminder that, in Zadie Smith’s beautiful words, “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”
Speaking of Orwell who wrote is seminal 1984 in 1948, my gradparents' land was conficated in 1948 and my parents and especially godmother Sidka never managed to get the land back again as the land was given by the communists to the fishing association - yet the great news is that it is part now of the common wealth as there is a hot spring and these hot waters work miracles with sick bodies ;-)

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

Haters of doorstopper fame love to pick on MEdia Dragons and Vegemite Lovers

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline paraphrased writer G. K. Chesterton

Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long-disowned love.
~ Thubron, In Siberia

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
—“Milan Kundera Warned Us About Historical Amnesia. Now It’s Happening Again,” Ewan Morrison, Quillette

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.” ~Rod Serling “The Twilight Zone"

Whom the gods would destroy they first make him to write his memoirs. As the luckless protagonist of Detour, one of those film noirs Media Dragons love to digest, dourly reflects "Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you." I used up way more than my nine lives. . .

Even in 2019 AD, Russia investigation courtesy of the Mueller report shows that bad guys who play dirty, like Trump, always win ...

“Because of the goodness of God, I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”
~ John Lukacs

I have another quote that I’ve kept on my bedside table for years. “There's nothing to be afraid of. . . Everything changes — don’t be afraid.” It’s a motto I’ve tried to live my life by, and it is, of course, from Deadwood.

We are all potentially characters in a novel — with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full ...
— Georges Simenon who was born in 1903

"If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity"
~ Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam who heard my loud whistling sounds and voices coming out of Cold War River...

To paraphrase Nadezha ... No agent or publisher ever knows for certain what will work. Their doors, and minds, must stay open out of self-interest? However, even if you made it into print, your book might well sink without trace

MEdia Dragon is guided by George Orwell’s statement: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

“Each person who may chance to pass you by,
even just once — only to disappear (kottke) —
has her own story, her own mystery,
her luckiest and her most bitter year.”
“Everybody hurts” (At Mittleuropean Dinner Tables, Everybody Wants to Own the End of the World and Lifelong Bondi Iceberg Swimming Membership )

In most Cold War stories, you are dealing with events, and I’m really dealing with trauma and wounds ...
'Our Chief Means of Breaking Bread with the Dead'
Words fall short, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable...

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy.
~A River Runs Through It (Naration)

For Hugo, Stonehenge, the Parthenon and indeed Notre Dame are “books of stone” pregnant with meaning.

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."
— Winston Churchill whose Crown Employees and admirers nicknamed MEdia Dragon the “Bouncing Czech”

Robert Frost wrote the sequel memoirs of my other exiled adventures, marriage, fatherhood, divorce ... “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.”

"Words are what matter,” Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “the sharing of words.”

Every (good) thought vibrates through the universe.
— Dorothy Richardson “Excelsior!”

"May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve."
- Sappho ( c. 630 – c. 570 BC) Expresso for the Mind

“I wear my mistakes like badges of honor, and I celebrate them.”
― Amy Schumer, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

I saw the worst of politics. I had a ringside seat ... As Maya Angelou once soulfully observed “there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you”...

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a look at how he treats his inferiors not his equals.”
— Sirius Black, character in the Harry Potter series ;-) Happiness is like water…We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers.

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
~ Hermann Hesse

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
~ George Steiner

'Cold River' illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory', which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

Compacted into this very, very small amount of writing was almost everything that explains the totalitarianism in the world … Concepts like international law, for instance, concepts of human rights, all these kind of things—ultimately, they don’t go back to Kafka, Orwell, Havel ...

Be wise and only trust someone who can see these three things in you: the sorrow behind your smile, the love behind your anger, and the reason behind your silence...

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
– Winston Churchill

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete

“They will call you immoral if you dare to describe their immorality”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana

The friends we have lost do not repose under the ground ... they are buried deep in our hearts. It has been thus ordained that they may always accompany us.
— Alexandre Dumas - They Shall Not Grow Old

“Tears are a river that take you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“We've seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.”
~ Jimmy Wales

“ ‘Blogging’ will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.”
— Horace Greeley

Song: “Right Hand Man”
Lyric: “Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.”

“Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.”
~ J.K. Rowling(ova)

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. In life, if we don’t risk anything, we risk everything.
~ Helen Keller

Life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.
— Dylan Thomas

Something in me
despite everything
can’t believe my luck

“Every experience, good or bad, is a priceless collector’s item.”
~ Isaac Marion

Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me,” the Scottish poet and mountaineer Nan Shepherd wrote in contemplating the might and mystery of water. “Mysterious, Cold and Hot, Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads ...."

As Jack Handey once observed "It's funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and they never realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating. . ."

I don't want poetry books to be bestsellers. For, if you sell more, that means you are resonating with the mainstream. Poetry is the voice from the outside. Its survival depends on resisting the mainstream.
According Mother Theresa, we alone cannot change the world, but we can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples ...

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

There is no time to be voiceless, lonely, scared or intimidated.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
~Franz Kafka

Man is in fact nailed down — like Christ on the Cross — to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.
As quoted in "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy" by Richard L. Stanger in Christian Century (11 April 1990).

“The meaning of (blogging and) life is that it ends”
― Franz Kafka

“I’m the kind of writer that doesn’t know jack shit about anything,” says Stephen King.

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. — George Orwell

Like the character Mopsa in The Winter’s Tale, who crooned: “I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.” Mopsa today would implicitly trust the big-ticket newspaper and TV networks. Fate loves hard core irony as Bill Shakesbeer mocks the uneducated person's reverence for the printed word inside Winter's as well as Cold River's Tales ...

MD IS PREFERRED SUPPLIER OF INSIGHTFUL INFORMATION TO BOHEMIAN ANTIPODEAN MOVERS AND SHAKERS

You can learn a line
from a win
and a book
from a defeat.
~ Paul Brown who shared with deep bloggers the old saying "no good deed goes unpunished."

Of all the virtual gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you walked into my MEdia Dragon

Punch back twice as hard, the wise exiled bohemian man once said

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards.
Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Czechoslovak Gulag, Bear Pit and Latitude

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.

"Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.”

“There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.”
~Beirne Lay Jr. and Frank D. Gilroy, screenplay for The Gallant Hours

Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most.

Nothing is only one thing. Nothing. An egg is both a womb and a prison ...

There is a delicious old Soviet observation about nothing is only one thing on Radio Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.” (Old Soviet Jokes Are MEdia Dragon's gift from beyond the grave)

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.
~Democritus

Nothing is new here. The tragedy is so old, but even within it there are actors — some who’ve chosen resistance, and some, like X, who, however blithely, have chosen collaboration.

Each breaking egg of a wave, each rush of the sea on the slope of sand, reminds me why these places of pilgrimage matter. They matter to me because in the long view, I do not. I am driftwood. I am rockweed. I am osprey and the mackerel in the clutch of her feet. I am a soul standing on the edge of the continent looking out.

"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done."
~ Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice - Written Words Never Die

It's impossible that the improbable will never happen.
~ Emil Julius Gumbe An impossible escape even by a cow can be an inspiration to us all

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw

Paths are made by walking.
— Franz Kafka, born in July 1883

Like most haters, fake communists failed to understand human nature - "The more you try to bully people into NOT reading something the more they will do so. Freedom matters."

It is commonly suspected that the writings of Jozef Imrich are not actually mistakenly written by JI, but by another medium of the same terrifying name or initials.

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."
~ Charles Evans Hughes, Supreme Court Justice

“I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way – what happens to somebody – but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens.”
–– Alice Munro

“You must be doing something right if you’re pissing people off. I just wish it was easier to piss people off.”
Big Historical Charter 77

You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, wrote: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"

If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954

What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control:
Who lives
Who dies
Who tells your story?
~ Our Place In The World ("Never Trust Anyone Who Doesn't Have Skin in the Game.")

We have been granted 2 billion seconds on this planet, give or take:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
—William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

“I will not be another flower, picked for my beauty and left to die. I will be wild, difficult to find, and impossible to forget.”
― Erin Van Vuren

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion memorably wrote

“The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”
― C. JoyBell C.

We made love stories up so we could believe the night sky was not so vast, so unbearably vast, that we barely mattered ...

“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
– Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier (1967 – 2015), publisher, Charlie Hebdo.

Do yourself a favor: Put away the self-help guides and just read "Cold River" ... What might have been written off as a futile gesture became a defining symbol for a generation

"My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world''.
~George Bernard Shaw

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
— Vrbov proverb shared at Iconic Bondi Icebergs

A tale of Cold River, manages to trap a tiny speck of theatre of absurd of the kommunist Czechoslovakia in amber and then put time in a bottle, forever uniting them in our collective memory and imagination ... History has failed us, but no matter

We live and breathe words... via Who Will Buy Your Book? - 'Skin in the Game'

“You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort,
but you cannot choose both.”
– BRENÉ BROWN

This poetic sentence will reverberate in all cultures and language forever:
"Tis not the first time that, dreaming of freedom, we build a new prison."
-- poet Maximilian Voloshin

The taking of offence is what rests in the bosom of the stupid ones.
— Ecclesiastes 7:9

Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella.
That is faith ...

Speaking of faith, Cold River is a story that is meant to survive, just as its sole survivor has. This is a memoir that crosses all borders and speaks directly the human heart as it reminds us of the preciousness, the miracle! of freedom.

"... The most important expression which the present age has found… a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
~ T.S. Eliot lauding 'Cold River' in our dreams ;-)

Joseph Epstein penned a story entitled “First Person Singular,” an essay published in The Hudson Review in 1992. It begins: “The best time to write one’s autobiography, surely, is on one’s deathbed.” He identifies “only a handful of splendid autobiographies,” and goes on to identify them:
Odd, but very few of these really splendid autobiographies have been written by novelists, poets, and playwrights. Saint Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Gibbon, Franklin, Mill, Alexander Herzen, Henry Adams, the men--and there have thus far been almost no women--who wrote the monumental autobiographical works were none of them primarily imaginative literary artists...

A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.
~An Untouchable Fire: Remembering Aharon Appelfeld

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”
W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” And, “Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”
"I am not a survivor, I am a crumbling remnant” of the end of the 500-year-long Age of Books

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
cc ~ Uncle George in his Cold River Nightmares

Within a few generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else’s story: a plot device, a golem.

You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through

Without the story — in which everyone living, unborn and dead, participates — men are no more than bits of paper blown on the cold wind
George Mackay Brown born in 1921 - hat tip to that great Irish clan of O'Neill

“Some of the best things that have ever happened to us wouldn’t have happened to us, if it weren’t for some of the worst things that have ever happened to us.”

Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad
~ James Baldwinc

Defying every expectation of what communism used to be, imagine a system where the key to success wasn’t hard work or merit, but conniving and politics. If you sold your soul to the devil, you were rewarded Hey Millennials: Communism Sucks, I Lived It

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
— George MacDonald, born in 1824

"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink." f
-- T.S. Eliot's words were wrapped in razor blades

Jasmine, the talented grand-daughter of John Hatton AO, one of the Australian Living Treasures, turned blood into a wonderful painting of freedom...

“People have had enough of well-constructed intrigue, clever plot hooks, and denouements… Take it from me, readers expect something different from literature and they’re right: they expect the Real, the authentic. They want to be told about life, don’t you see? Literature mustn’t mistake its territory.” ~ 'Based on a True Story’ by Delphine de Vigan – The Mysterious Lady L.

Wisdom listens ... As the wise Vrbov Cemetery mortalist, David BenATAR, once noted even turning blood into ink is bad as "our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane." Our human 'iron curtain like' predicament also means that it is impossible to realise genuine escape: "We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us ...We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death ..."

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising ...

Being motivated by a deep sense of injustice can be a costly thing. How do you begin to write about one of the most terrifying and momentous event in our lives? A lot is needed to create a book worth reading. You require a strong voice yearning to tell a story with passion. It helps to have spent years mastering a craft, bringing it to the level of art. In many cases, piles of research are also needed.
And either a big stack of paper and pens or a laptop that won’t talk back [ Continue to learn the value of being an effective troublemaker]

“Human life begins on the far side of despair.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mouches ...

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full. ~ Marcel Proust

The virtues of reading books we don’t understand.

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

And we lived by her fierce folklorik dictum: “Fitting in is death. Remember that. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always. As dead men tell no tales... "

The Cold (War) River is finished, I am sensible how imperfectly, but certainly to the best of my limited abilities ... WE HAVE NO VOICE, AND SOMETIMES IN THIS SHORT LIFE ON EARTH WE MUST SCREAM!

"We Became River"
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
— G. K. Chesterton via AFL Legend and a Briliant Aboriginal Mittleuropean Mark Heiss

According to a quote sometimes attributed to not so great Jozef Imrich and the great Albert Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay in trouble and with problems longer."

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is nothing original about me except a little original bohemian sin. I hope you will be treated unfairly ...

Don't ever be embarrassed by your stories of failure, butt (sic) at the same time, don't ever be embarrassed by your successes! Embrace YOUR life as is ...

"The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others."
~Shusaku Endo who loves sharing parables

"My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up ... share what’s unspeakable ... offer unsolicited criticism ... defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse — that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public."
~ Krzysztof Wodiczko

Like a recurring nightmare, in MEdia Dragon bohemian saga entitled 'My (Not So) Perfect Life', about a tall towerish crown (clown) employee with strange latitude to oddballs and outsiders, and where "tyranny is always better organized than freedom"
— Charles Péguy

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

"Cold River's" history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. [Cold as ice, but in the soulful hands the story melts ... a literary treat you, insomniacs, can enjoy for years (because that's how long it will take you to get through it ...)]
~ John le Carre

"Read Shakespeare. There's more in Shakespeare about power, decision-making, ambition, and how people are blinded by their own needs that's so incredibly applicable [even today]. To see it in that context is something that makes it real."
Brad McMillan

“There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.” Unbelievable River...

Thomas Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
~Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

Regardless of what you may think about social media, it remains a global microphone for voices of survivors like Jozef Imrich to tell their stories - as according to Tom Wolfe: "Nonfiction is never going to die"

"I am the youngest by far of six children and I am rich because I come from a blessed family"

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
- JFK

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
~ Walter Bagehot

They tried to bury Media Dragons. They did not know we were seeds ... Cold River proves that truth is always stranger than fiction.
~Noro Cervenak - … an absurd living testament to the incredibly improbable trip that we’re on

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
— Harold Bloom, born in 1930

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.”

Just like blogging, 'Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better..."
— André Gide

Blogging is a dirty and crazy job , but someone has to do it ...

François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire tends to share the most profound observation: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”

However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something. So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader".
Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life? To live at all is miracle enough ...

Q. How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
A. Failure
— a soulmate, Simon Critchley

If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right.
Woody Allen

We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison

What a strange world this is … Before I’ve even had time to blink they’re already calling me old, when inside I’m like an unripe fruit...

“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” ~ Bohemian-born Tom Stoppard, Arcadia in 2006 Sydney

MEdia Dragons are keen observers of leadership and politics in all its drama and absurdity.

“My theory has always been to write a real small story against a big background.”
~ Burt Kennedy

As Dr Cope once observed about knowledge and wisdom "...all the data in the world is in the ocean, however the value is in the fish"

There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about Iron Curtain escapes, but when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over...There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.

“We are born with some things in our veins... When I compared in Cold River humanity to a flower growing in the shadow of a chemical munitions factory, it may be that I was being unfair to flowers ...”

Dylan Thomas pointed out that the best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
— Henry Green

Cold River is like a secret image, a photograph is a secret about a secret. It is about surviving and playing the cards that are dealt you, even if it looks like a losing hand. The more it tells you the less you know... The anthropological folkloric tale is about the strange relationship between a secret and knowledge. A secret is, necessarily, relational—like difference, it needs another just to exist, whether to be shared in confidence or because it cannot be shared. It is a perfect book for COVID paranoid times ... Great riches in remarkably few pages

'This story is more than a history of escapes. It’s not easy to say where, exactly, you would shelve it. It could be under memoir. Or is it more like anthropology? . . . The other option would be farce just like the life under communism ... The aim of Cold River is to prepare a person for death...

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. (According to Robert and Shel,) You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart

"We all know that funny feeling of filthiness, of contagious ickiness. It's a feeling we call the prick of conscience when we make a compromise that we have doubts about. So we think about it again and again, and... we even worry about it somewhat, even though the compromise may have made life easier, compared to what would have happened had we not made it. But for myself...I see that my bravery comes out of cowardice, because I am afraid of feeling that ickiness of feeling that I've done something wrong, that I've made an undesirable compromise, that I've side-stepped; and conversely when I do something that I know is right, I can even have a feeling of euphoria."
~ Vaclav Havel

If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito

"We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and elders past and present."

Frequently, one of the best ways to get insight into a culture is through its humour ...
So under communism when we wanted to hear God laugh, we made meticulously planned escapes from the totalitarian regimes. Our young fragile ironic stories under totalitarianism were not crying out to be told. And yet ....

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs. ~ German Shepard Bessie The Act of Reading All Kinds of Books

Like the ForeReads or Outline, Media Dragon are not for everyone.... Outline

Good blogging like journalism is sharing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations... It is our business to know something about every subject – or to know where to get the knowledge (Dr Cope, J Hatton, MO'N etc ) One of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places ...

MEdia Dragons are known for their 6-foot-2 stature and are often expected by totalitarian characters to play villains... There’s a deeper poetry and music that runs through and beneath the River...

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." ~Matthew 7:7 (Ask, Seek, Knock )

Consider why you should not go through life without seeking Simon Sinek: “I write about my father and mother, their generation, and my own limited experience, our struggle for individual freedom and self-expression in the Mitteleuropean Orwelean society. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. We need to remember that all rivers are fearless and free. They come and go as they please, and borders or governments do not bind them. All rivers are filled with liquid histories and stories. Shame, failure, despair, utter horror, these are all stations on the journey, even after completing a ‘draft of a draft.'
Certain stories that get virtually no traction nevertheless involve phenomena that are quite important in understanding the way the world operates. Stories of freedom everywhere as it is the history of the entire world ...
Many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all... “One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824 ..." Our story emerges from our bones! And why we are not satisfied with simply making an impression; why do we want to mark our readers and listeners for life?"

Great writing is like diving: anybody can get from the platform to the pool—or the pavement—but some, with grace and sweat and just a bit of swag, can make that brief passage through the air angelic in its beauty and terror. “We started talking about dying long before the first one of us jumped ...

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see your whole city running as well. You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land." ~ 'Home' by Warsan Shire

If you are in the business of finding out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye. It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas from disparate places than other people usually do. Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to telling the truth.
~ Tom Rosenstiel

I even ignored advice to change my name ... If I wasn't Jozef Imrich, I'd probably think that Jozef Imrich has a lot of answers myself.

We can be heroes
We can be heroes
We can be heroes
Just for one day
We can be heroes (Flashback Bowie: Heroes by Berlin Wall)

Most writers waste people’s time with too many words. I’m trying to reduce everything
down to the minimum. My last work will be a blank piece of paper.
— Beckett

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
— Frenet, Journal

Most of us do not like risk and uncertainty. That's too bad, because there's no shortage of either. Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
Industry Leader and Risk Taker Steve Monaghan

“Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connection than people who are most content.”
~ Nobel Bob Dylan

The hard core irony will undoubtedly be lost on some except gals and guys at the Google news, but by failing to reach NY Times reviews, Cold River, a book of a lifetime, succeeds brilliantly. Without any doubt the story of the human race is war

... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr
“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!” ~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Freedom or Death: Ondrej a Milan
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy

There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which extreme communists or rotten capitalists won’t sink if they think they can grab power or make money out of it...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.

“You don’t find the books that change your life by accident; nor by design. One finds them the way a ragpicker finds something useful in the garbage, or the way a hunter accidentally encounters his prey. The enterprise demands vigilance, says the philosopher Walter Benjamin: it takes practice to lose one’s way in a city in order to discover something important about it.” Some books show us a new world, others vindicate our own experience...

2015 MEdia DragON

Breaking News

We live in a world of radical ignorance

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Support Us by Supporting Our Trendsetter
Double Daring Publisher: DDP
• The Double Dragon Publishing •

• Belgium

There is no truth. There is only action. – Blaise Cendrars

There is no word only a way of living as the hunter, collector or gatherer. It is rather eclectic to collect antipodean and bohemian talking pieces and artifacts...

Past Is A Strange Country: Girls of the Velvet Revolution
*Chi Chi Bella
*Sasha
*Lea: French Family Connection

Agape: Unconditional Love

Bohemian Gabbie: Casting Artistic River

Sa(r)sha of “Oh Boy Blind ” Fame

“Do you worry about your worth? The tiny river that creates a great canyon does so by existing. You make a deep impression by being alive.”
~ John Patrick Shanley

Media Dragon has been live since June 2002 ...
(“In Internet years, the blog is about a thousand years old")

The new brave virtual world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love!

Why I Love Blogging?
Bloggers are like the little first amendment engine that could: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win If you like taking the path less travelled: Dive into Deep Books

“If you know how to read, you do not need many books […] Learn to meditate on a few lines, even from a mediocre author; nothing bears fruit unless it is rooted in meditation.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), the French priest who reestablished the Dominican Order after it was neutralized following the French Revolution

We are not the wordly boys we used to be on the interrete. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

What Lies Beneath: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
Indeed, the power of a story comes from what's not in it
jozefimrich@authorsden.com

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

“Media Dragon Loves Us”
-Evangelists Robert Scoble & Shel Israel
“I like Media Dragon”
’A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine’
-Priceless Jay Rosen
“Jozef Imrich is a prolific researcher”
-Antipodean Hugh Martin
"Never settle" he wrote to MEdia Dragon and We (royal we) never did ;-) -Steve Jobs thinking differently

God will never give you anything you can't handle ... Guardian Angel: Andrej Imrich

Tragedy, like irony, is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. You don't cross the Iron Curtain and come out without scars or appreciation of the words of wisdom by Rudyard Kipling. They are as true and applicable today as when Kipling wrote them!

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice... Elena Ferrante

Stay Hungry. Stay Googlish

*Digital immigrant's testimony to the power of the powerless. I have been dead all over the world:
#Daily Beast
#Cold War Digger
#Daily Political Dust

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

You're not going to read a book, You're going to cross the Iron Curtain!

“A good, blogger, intel analyst, writer always works at the impossible.”

*Meeting with Disaster & Triumph; Treating Them Just The Same
*River of Coversations: The Kindness of Strangers
*When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it
There is an old saying attributed to Prince Bismarck that “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”
“Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.
(God will pardon me. That is His business.)”

Media Dragon blog is worth $16,936,200 ;-).
How much is your blog worth?

Nota, Nota, Bene
Blog Father: Classified Links
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There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

Explore the World of Spectators:
Protect What Matters

Live Love Bondi: Troika - Terry Burke,
Maurizio Terzini and Mario Venneri

If you encounter a registration screen, try this:
Bug MEdia Dragon Not
or
A Trick to Avoid Registration

Bloggers Down Under

Directory:

Eatonweb directory (Australia)
List of Ausie Blogs (via Anthony Hicks)

Election Coverage:

John Hatton: Fair Man

A Bunch of Sheilas and Blokes who blog:

Altreuter, Gregory
Anderson, Alan (The Razor)
Andrew Welder
Appleyard, Baden
Aussie Obsever
Barista
Bartlett, Andrew
Bahnisch, Mark
Batey, Paul - Daily Flute
Being A Dad
Bitchin' Monaro Guide
Blair, Tim
Boud, Daniel
Boynton
Carr, Bob
Chrenkoff
City State (Sep 2004)
Connors, Brett, - Being A Dad
Cook, Trevor
Corr, Robert
Coulthart, Ross a.k.a. NINE
Crazy Brave (Zoe)
Cumes, James a.k.a. LAKATOI
Daily Addict
Dawson, Ross
Dog Fight At Bankstown
Dunlop, Tim
Dunlop, Tim II
Electron Soup
Fifth Estate
From a LAN Down Under
From the Trenches
Gomes, Philip (June 04)
Hack Watch
Hardy, Marieke
Hatton, John
Heidelberg, Harry
Hornsby, Roy
Jericho, Greg: Grog's Gamut
KINGSTON, Margo
Lambert, Tim
Living Room
Loewenstein, Antony
Loewenstein, Antony *
Martin, Hugh
Mayne, Stephen a.k.a. CRIKEY
Mike Stuchbery
Morgan, David
Mornington
Morrow, James
New Matilda
News With Nipples
Observant Little
Parish, Ken (Dewey Classification of Political Siberia)
Polywise
Quiggin, John
Rank & Vile
Ray, John
Reasons You Will Hate Me
Robson, Alex (via Libertarian Society)
Sam and the City
Schaap, Rob
She Sells Sanctuary
Silent Running (successor to War Now)
Slattery, Bernard
Soon, Jason (Catallaxy)
Southerly Buster
Spin Starts Here
Starkoff, David (Inchoate)
Suki has an Opinion
There Aint no Sanity Clause (GG)
Tiley, David: Barista Extraordinaire
Tash
Washington, Stuart - TuMuT
Weatherall, Kim
Wickstein, Scott
Will Type For Food
You Cried for Night

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist,
wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON

We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

ANTIPODEAN
If you find savvier writers/bloggers anywhere, drop me a line...
APO
Art Links
Apolitical blogs
Philip Adams
Australian Regulatory Review
Julian Burnside
Drawing Board
Margo Kingston (NHJ)
Antony Loewenstein
Chris Masters ::
Media Watch
Newcopia
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Alan Ramsey
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*Archives - Election 2004
*SMH - Antony Loewenstein: Counterspin
*ABC - Matt Liddy: Poll Vault

AMERIKAN
A Hippercritical
A Media Savvy
Eric Alterman
Paul Colford
Richard Connelly
Cynthia Cotts
Ian Donnis
Dan Fost
Peter Johnson
Steve Johnson
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Staci Kramer
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"Media Person"
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William Powers
Steve Rhodes
Michael Roberts
Tim Rutten
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Jack Shafer
David Shaw
Russ Smith
Norman Solomon
Erik Wemple
James Wolcott
Michael Wolff

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EUROPEAN
An Eastern European Literature ;-) Havel, Kafka, Imrich
Daily Czech
Douglas Arellanes
European Dragons
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Fistful of Euros
Guardian Weblog
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McMillan
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NicMoc
Prague Blog
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Spyblog: UK
The Budapest Mafia:
Rick Bruner
Nick Denton
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The Prague Rebellion:
Cinema Minima
Henry Copeland
Amy Langfield
Matt Welch
ZNet Czech & Slovak

Can one person make a difference?
It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind

LOCAL

1stHeadlines.com
A Local Google News
ABCTales
Aussie Scan - Jeff Venture
Belinda Williams - Outback Painter
Bronte Capital
Bayosphere Gillmor: MD
Blogometer
Bookmarklets Every Blogger Should Have
Car Brokers: John Drayton
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Deep Blog
Dojo Cuts: Music for All Seasons and Reasons
Google.com
iTalk news: MD
Malleys Lawyers: Iceberg
Point of Impact: Lance Schafer
Prime Factor: John
Radical Reference
Sutton Place: Colm
Slow Lane: by William
Tactical Insulation: Peter
Wentworth Courier
Woollahra
World of Ribbons
Z - Topix Blog News

GLOBAL

101 Best Sites (Writing)
Battelle Media
Beautiful Atrocities
Best of the Rest
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Mas Media (Military)
Master New Media
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Memigo
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Minate, Jim
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Peek: The Blog Of Blogs
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Rittenhouse Review: James Capozzola
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Slashdot Politics
Smart Mobs
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Struth: CNNN
Tech Dirt
Tom Paine
TPM Cafe
Your Right To Know
ZNet

Virtual Mausoleum
Blair, Tim (hiatus Dec 04)
Russell, James (rip Apr 05)
Sheil, Christopher (hiatus Nov 04)

Google in Society
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Monday, November 02, 2026

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