Parliament House steps back in time: Dr Cope, Buz Luhrmann etc

“We’re all forgotten sooner or later. But not the films.”
~ Burt Lancaster, quoted in Alain Silver and James Ursini, What Ever Happened to Robert Aldrich? (Courtesy of Buz Luhrmann who might one day translate political thriller Cold River II Script on Screen)

Nothing earth shattering I suppose, but to me seeing Alexaeyeva acknowledged this month made all the difference in the world. The  head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, 88, has been awarded the international Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize.  Russia’s oldest human rights activist is awarded Vaclav Havel Prize

Breaking News was so different 175 years ago

• ABC / Al Jazeera / AP / BBC / CBC / CBS /CNBC / CNN / Fox / Google / MarketWatch /MSNBC / NBC / NPR / Reuters / Yahoo 
•  
• "That this Virtual House of Bloggosphere acknowledges that this year, the NSW Parliamentary Library celebrates its 175th anniversary ..."

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are days where decades happen.

• Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat next to Geoff Whiteman and Rhonda Miller cataloguing daily clippings under Neville Wran, Nick Greiner, Brian Vaughan, Diedre Grusovin, Laurie Brereton, Franca Arena, James Samios, John Hatton, Micha Eagan, Bruce Baird, Andrew Tink, Paul Whelan, Paul Landa, John Newman aka Neumenko ... 
• I still remember their faces and stories clearly. We were trained to spot all articles no matter how smal, no matter how insignificant at the times as from little stories big stories tended to grow!
• If I do not measure up as a great Antipodean Bohemian clipping librarian  at least leave me to my delusions ;-)
• 
  
• Dr Russell Cope   is known as an innovative parliamentary librarian who helped to change the way research libraries function and provide proactive information services.

The New South Wales Parliamentary Library is the oldest of Australia's parliamentary libraries, and is also one of the oldest official libraries in the country. Established by the administrative action of the Legislative Council in 1840, it became a Joint Parliamentary Library with the introduction of responsible government in 1856. 

The collection has historical depths and riches in a number of areas, including a strong emphasis on official publications, as well as extensive legal resources. A growing emphasis on online resources increasingly frames the Library as a facilitator of end-user searching by clients from their desktops. Subsequently the Library plays an increasing role in user education and training, and in the delivery of information electronically to clients.

 [As Buz Luhrmann a former parliamentary attendant knows the X collection on level five (stack) is peppered with amazing treasures] History in a Nutshell ...

In early 1980s circa Orwell 1984 AD, Buzz studied this motto:

The Motto of the NSW Parliamentary Library “Knowledge is the Mother of Wisdom and Virtue"

Such is the magnitude of the collection that if lined up, the materials would stretch the distance from Parliament House to Bondi Iceberg ...
And here’s another little-known fact - Jozef Imrich and Baz Luhrman ;-) spent time in the Parliamentary Library ;-) That’s right – in the early 1980s the famous Aussie director worked as a Library Assistant. Wonder how much impact that had on his future career? Facebook links to 175

There were many friendly faces in the crowd that gathered on level six the Presiding Officers made thoughtful speeches. The Clerk of the Parliament, David Blunt (of PAC fame) and Clerk of Legislative Assembly, Rhonda Miller (of Library clipping section fame) were among the audience. Robert Stefanic, of Slavic background fame, head of the New South Wales Department of Parliamentary Services made also a short speech. The State Librarian, Alex Byrne graced the occasion with his presence. The event reflected on the amazing changes that took place in the last century ... Parliamentary library steps back in time

If you ever invade Macquarie Street in Sydney -  czech (sic) out the stainglass ceiling glass at the old parliamentary library ... Breathtaking stained glass windows

Even More Breathtaking are paintings by parliamentary librarian Conrad Martens - 

Fort Macquarie, Bennelong Point, from the North Shore 1836 (Czech out the Art Gallery of NSW)

Conrad Martens (1801-1878), artist, was born at Crutched Friars near the Tower of London, the son of J. C. H. Martens, a German merchant from Hamburg who had been appointed Austrian consul to London, where he married an Englishwoman...  Martens trained under prominent artist and teacher, Copley Fielding.  He became perhaps Australia's most famous famous colonial artist. As the rigours of a landscape painter's life began to tell on the ageing Martens, his friend Alexander Berry found a post for him in 1863 as a parliamentary librarian. Martens the Landscape Artist and Parliamentary Librarian; Note that Andrew Tink and Kevin Rozzoli peppered their books with interesting references relating to the wild men of Sydney, in particular scan monograph entitled Gavel To Gavel.

Walter O'Malley McEvilly (1820-1867), parliamentary librarian, was born in County Mayo, Ireland.  McEvilly was assistant librarian from 1 July 1850 at a salary of £109 and on 20 May 1856 was promoted librarian with a residence in the parliamentary premises. He was reported to have 'zealously and well discharged the duties of Librarian'... On 4 August 1863 a long-standing disagreement between McEvilly and his assistant, Francis Robinson, led to a fight in which both were hurt. A testimonial from 63 of the 72 members of the assembly attested to McEvilly's 'zeal, efficiency, uniform quiet and obliging and peaceful disposition'. Robinson was later dismissed. Good old days of 1800s: Richard Baker, Greig Tillotson or David Clune, Geoffrey White, Yosef Gusef  would only have a verbal disagreements with Jozef Imrich ;-)

If it was not for Dr Cope and Les Jeckeln not many of us would be aware that the first Legislative Council Librarian was a brilliant musician.  Richard O'Connor (1810-1876), parliamentary officer, was born in March 1810 in County Cork, Ireland. As town clerk from 7 September to 16 November 1842 he organized the elections for the first city council. With the establishment of the Legislative Council Library in 1843 he became librarian and published its first three catalogues. Most of all he played the flute, concertina and guitar: Richard O'Connor 

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

Dr Cope taught me how to observe the observers ;-) be it Taxing Tall Towers of this world or future Minns Dynasties in NSW …

5 Lessons Library Websites Can Learn from Buzzfeed – “Since its 2006 launch, Buzzfeed has become an Internet institution by recognizing and capitalizing on the insatiable life-cycle of viral media. The idea behind the website is relatively simple: bring together trending content (e.g., news, celebrity gossip, entertainment, quizzes) from around the web and organize it into a format that is short and eye-catching. 

The venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz estimates the net worth of Buzzfeed Inc. at around $850 million. And according to analytics website QuantCast, the site saw 146 million visits in May 2015 alone (accounting for both unique online and mobile visits). For contrast, the Library of Congress—the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States—drew in about 1.1 million visits in the same period.

NSW Parliamentary Library 1840-2015 The creative display XIV - X - MMXV AD

Ancient Romans, they're just like us: ill-fated military escapades, social-welfare policies, urban living, corruption. The similarities, however, are misleading... 1992 BC 

In 1992, MCMXCII, AD the politics in Europe, Italy, Old Czechoslovakia in 1992 appear to be rather similar to Antipodean corridors of power as in that year of 1992  NSW experienced the Charter of 92 (similar in spirit to Vaclav Havel's Charter 77)  - the extraordinary time when the independent exposed how bad apples in the police operated and how politicians were bought by the highest bidders ... The year Gabbie was born was filled with media scoops, exposes  and sunlight...

The world will be blessed with more universal political themes as creative writers, Ludovica Rampoldi, 36, Stefano Sardo, 43, andAlessandro Fabbri, 36, are changing the landscapes of the reality of our modern Machiavellis. The trio are behind the 1992 political series.

1992 examines Italy’s infamous political upheaval, which ended in the “clean hands” operation that brought the fall of the first republic. In its place came businessmen and media moguls to run the country. Starring Stefano Accorsi, Guido Caprino, Domenico Diele, Miriam Leone, Tea Falco and Alessandro Roja, 1992 follows six ordinary people’s lives to tell the complicated political history in a setup as engaging as antipodean legal and political thriller Charles Waterstreet's The Rake with a ruthlessness straight from Cold River...

Creative minds such cinematographer Michele Paradisi, and sets made with nostalgic precision by Francesca Di Mottola and costumes by Roberto Chiocchi. Editor Francesca Calvelli pulls the narratives together. 

Ludovica Rampoldi noted: So we say we are “show-walkers.” We know it’s the first step.
Alessandro Fabbri: We’re on the road to become runners.

So you’re writing now the next part of the trilogy? What can we expect in 1993 and 1994?

Fabbri: Those three years are the transition between the first and the second republic so it’s very particular period of time.

Sardo: And then the different arenas converge because Berlusconi and many politicos start to go up against each other.

Rampoldi: It’s like King’s Landing but they go to the parliament.

Sardo: Yeah exactly. Finally the dragons get to town.

This link will take you to the NSW Hansard.  Once there you will need to enter the word 'memorandum' in your Find facility and it will bring you to the section where Nick Greiner - who actually led a minority government in NSW in 1991 - tables a Memorandum of Understanding signed by three out of the four independents.

The four independents at the time were John Hatton, Clover Moore, Peter McDonald, and Tony Windsor. The first three were true independents and were never politically aligned.  Tony Windsor was formerly a member of the National Party.

John Hatton together with Moore, and McDonald signed the Memorandum of Understanding.  In interviews, Windsor is making much of the fact that he is experienced at operating within a hung Parliament.  Could some astute reporter please ask him why it was that he was not a signatory to the MoU with Greiner?  

Anyway, here is an extract from Hansard of what Nick Greiner said - in part - in Parliament at the time:

Mr GREINER: Today an agreement was signed which provides for stable government and fixed four-year terms of Parliament for the State of New South Wales. I table for incorporation in Hansard a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by me on behalf of the Government and by the member for Bligh, the member for Manly and the member for South Coast...

Grassroots Challenges: and a question: “Is this all there is?”

As Paul Keating famously remarked:

Never get between a premier and bucket of money.

Matraville chemist and Labor councillor Noel D’Souza has been elected as the new Randwick mayor. The Indian-born son of a printer who immigrated to Australia at the age of 10 becomes Randwick City’s 83rd and first Indian mayor. Cr D’Souza said the coming year would be very challenging and he would focus on maintaining high quality services, Indigenous issues and protecting staff ahead of the Government’s Fit for the Future amalgamation program.
In a controversial move, Cr D’Souza nominated himself as the mayoral candidate without the support of his Labor councillors who nominated Cr Kathy Neilson for mayor. Cr D’Souza didn’t win any votes from his fellow Labor councillors, but thanked senior members of the ALP for supporting his nomination saying “they know who they are”.
Labor’s Noel D’Souza elected Randwick mayor without support of fellow Labor councillors

This buffalo had a very intense stare but frankly she was bluffing 

with the oxpecker on her nose ...

Key cross-benchers Fred Nile and two Shooters and Fishers MPs have said they would not support such legislation. "We are opposed to any forced amalgamations," the Reverend Nile said on Tuesday. But the government has offered a $15 million carrot to any council that wanted to amalgamate, which it could use for parks, roads or other infrastructure Divide and Rule ...

The Premier has urged the state's councillors to get behind his government's push for fewer councils – even if it means some of them would be out of a job. Mike Baird was greeted by applause and repeatedly interrupted by hecklers as he used his address to the Local Government NSW annual conference to push the case for reforms viewed with hostility by many in his audience. "There's no doubt that ifu we have less councils we have hundreds of millions of dollars that we can put to work for our ratepayers." 

The Premier also used the speech to call out "all types of myths" he said were being circulated by campaigns opposing mergers, including that sporting fields would close, libraries would be lost and rates would rise.

"Not one part of that is true," Mr Baird said.

"Oh come on," a heckler shot back.

Permanently Smiling Premier Mike Baird heckled: Amalgamation of Councils

Writing a memoir is a lot of work. It takes time, elegant literation, meaningful accounts and, above all, a strong recollection for past events. Unfortunately, that’s something former Labor MP Peter Garrett seemed to have lacked when writing his autobiography, Big Blue Sky. The end result is a massive defamation lawsuit from Clubs NSW against the ABC “Kaching! Pokies Nation”
Former Labor minister Peter Garrett has revealed he was offered 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' by Clubs New South Wales, the peak licensed clubs body that has been heavily involved in lobbying against poker machine restrictions over more than a decade. Mr Garrett says he was handed an envelope filled with money at a function shortly after being elected in 2004. The revelation was to be included in his autobiography and a new documentary about gambling in Australia, but Peter Garrett no longer wants the allegation going to air.
Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett retracts claim he was offered cash

The TPP and metadata retention have been delivered by faceless public servants ...
The power of secret bureaucracies that can not abide democracy

Whether it's waterfront trophy homes or apartments off the plan, or even massive commercial developments, Chinese investment in our real estate has surged by more than 400 per cent in just five years, with as much as A$12 billion spent in the previous financial year alone. Property is now the number one Chinese investment in Australia.

So who are these investors and what do they see in Australia? The Great Wall of Money

CRA 'special adviser' joined industry lobby group amid probe of KPMG

Supply Chain Corruption: Procurement's Dirty Secret 

Police are no longer guarding the Ecuadorian Embassy where WikiLeaks' Julian Assange has been taking refuge, Scotland Yard says UK police drop guard at Assange's embassy refuge

A shock incident in which a police officer used her service-issue weapon to take her life yesterday has sparked Victoria Police to consider a review of ­suicide in the force.

Police confirmed the death of a female leading senior constable, believed to be a mother, at the Seaford Multi-Disciplinary Centre. It is understood she died about 3pm, reports The Herald Sun

Fairfax columnist Sam De Brito was a provocative yet poignant, passionate though polarising, figure of Australian journalism. Readers of his popular Fairfax column fell into two categories; they either loved him (mainly men) or hated him (mainly women) Sam de Brito a polarising writer who wore his vulnerability on the page

Style of predictions: We long for conversation

“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from,” Carl Sagan wrote in his meditation on science and spirituality, “we will have failed.”
~ “One cannot accumulate love.”

Prediction markets predict public events such as election outcomes better than do polls or other forecasting mechanisms. Internal corporate prediction markets in events such as sales forecasts, product launch times, and product feature demand have been less well studied. Internal corporate markets tend to have fewer participants than public markets and the participants often have strategic interests and biases. Thus, it has been an open question how well these markets operate.

Cowgill and Zitzewitz report on a number of different types of prediction markets run by Google, Ford and Firm X and although they find evidence for some biases they also find that corporate prediction markets also work better than alternative forecasting methods.

The Best Fashion

“Of all her contemporaries, Austen is the only one to have made it through with her best-seller status intact, and that’s not just because her girls meet her boys without any help from Tinder.” The Telegraph (UK)  “Two and a half years ago, the critic and editor John Freeman abruptly resigned his post as editor in chief of Granta, the tweedy British literary magazine that he’d spent several years remaking for a 21st-century readership. … Finally, last summer, Freeman announced the more long-term venture everyone was waiting for:Freeman’s, a Granta-like literary magazine-meets-anthology that he would publish regularly in partnership with Grove Atlantic.” The first issue arrives next week Vogue  In what is being referred to as “an unprecedented example of library-author-publisher collaboration,” a new philosophy book and accompanying digital archive of its material were recently launched. The book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, by Margaret Battin (Utah). Ethics of suicide Kate Manne (Cornell) has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times about professors’ use of “trigger warnings,” by which she means “notice in their syllabuses, or before certain reading assignments” that the course material may discuss or depict “common causes of trauma.” Such warnings have been criticized (here, for example) as a sign of the end times of higher education, but Manne makes some rather reasonable points about them Warning: This Post Is About Trigger Warnings This research investigates psychological differences between individuals of different political orientations on a social networking platform, Twitter. Based  Gupta, Sonam and Dhillon, Ishneet, Organizational Restructuring and Collaborative Creativity: The Case of Microsoft and Sony (2015). The IUP Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. XII, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 53-65. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2671723 “The need for innovation and cross-dependencies among the departments is forcing organizations to restructure from divisional to functional organizational structure. This paper presents one such case wherein Microsoft and Sony carried out restructuring efforts to move towards a functional organizational structure when they faced cutthroat competition from other technology majors such as Google and Apple.

A Story of Resilience: Ray Mullins

“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!”

~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (courtesy of Laila Lalami)

A great example of the incredible resilience of a Sydneysider commuter of Manly fame James Pittar

Riddles continued unabated in Column 8's David Astle competition. Today's entries include – Ian Cooper of Cabarita Beach: Where is Glenn Innes? (Next to Godliness); Patricia Slidziunas of Woonona: What did Brutus say to Caesar's threatening dog? (Et Tumut); Jennifer Coote, also of Woonona: What does the Governor-General give to Order of Australia recipients in winter? (A Wollongong); and Ray Mullins of Wagga Wagga: What did the visitor from Woy Woy ask for in the library at Wagga Wagga? (Book Book, which is a small place near Wagga Wagga). Column 8 Stories of note 

10-mile stretch of vehicles stuck on State Route 58 in Tehachapi KABC 

Families Outraged After Illinois Fails to Pay Out $288 Million in Lottery WinningsInside Edition

Orloj - Prague's astronomical clock makes Google's front page

Could A Mushroom Save The Honeybee? NPR 

Greening of business Economist

Please sir, I want some more! IFLS

Marlon Brando in The Godfather ... Don Corleone may have spoken in a whisper, but you hung on his every word...

Elise Andrew, the woman credited with making science sexy and interesting for millions around the world, says she was offered $40.1 million to sell her runaway success Facebook page and websites. But her achievement appears to have come at huge personal cost. Andrew launched the IFLS aka  I F----- Love Science website and Facebook page in 2012, posting news and Internet memes, jokes, pictures and factoids about popular science and nature:

 "Sharks are attracted to blood in the water because they mistake it for ketchup".
I F******* Love Science - the Silence of the Facebook

“Goethe … peered into the mysteries of human existence with a hope of solving the imponderables that hold the lives of men enmeshed.”
~ RLC PHD - The things that are most real to me are the illusions which I create with my painting. Everything else is quicksand

“It does feel incredibly strange to be right about something.”

$1.90 Per Day: What Does it Say? INET

 A new, more modern penalty rate system proposed by the Government this week would give those working in retail and hospitality the freedom they need to earn lower wages. theshovel.com

Air France Workers Rip Shirts From Top Managers in Jobs Protest Bloomberg  Much better than pies in faces. The French still remember the days of the barricades. And despite the claim that the workers were “violent,” the chant suggests that their intent was to strip the execs, not hurt them.

You can already rate restaurants, hotels, movies, college classes, government agencies and bowel movements online.

So the most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it.

When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad, inaccurate or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.

Imagine every interaction you’ve ever had suddenly open to the scrutiny of the Internet public.

The piece is by the excellent Caitlin Dewey.  Currently the company is valued at $7.6 million.

Laura Miller: “Much of a writer’s rep emerges informally, in the conversations that writers, readers, and critics have amongst themselves. Whether another writer is spoken of respectfully, whether you get the impression that ‘everyone’ is reading his or her new book enthusiastically, or how well people think he or she comes across in interviews – these and a dozen other imponderable factors constitute a reputation during a writer’s lifetime, particularly in the early part of a career. This stuff – let’s call it litchat – may be ephemeral, but it absolutely shapes the formal reception of a writer’s work.” The New Yorker 

Arras Doors so Intriguing ...

“Something nameless hums us into sleep,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his beautiful ode to dreams.
~ What your brain’s chemical lullaby has to do with how screens are making you perennially tired

About the Center for Audit Excellence – Given the demands and challenges of today’s world, government accountability is more important than ever.

“In all my life, I have never met a single person who could, or would, precisely tell me what he wanted. I am, however, constantly meeting people who tell me what other people want.”

Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings MarketWatch

Why the Post Office Matters Jacobin

Putting More Tax Information “Out There” for the Tax Database Thieves

Jim Maule, US Putting More Tax Information “Out There” for the Tax Database Thieves:

Until and unless the protection of online data is heightened to a point of 99 percent confidence, the IRS should not create yet another vulnerability, another door through which the robbers can force their way in. In the meantime, why not focus on the problem rather than the symptoms? The underlying cause of some noncompliance is the complexity of the tax laws. Treating the symptoms does not cure the illness.

Former health CIOs Paul Madden and Michael Walsh will join fellow electronic health experts on the 11- person steering committee charged with guiding the revised implementation of personal electronic health records in Australia Erecords

 Roberton Williams, US New Estimates Of How Many Households Pay No Federal Income Tax (TaxVox). “We now figure it is 45.3 percent, nearly 5 percentage points higher than our 2013 estimate of 40.4 percent.” 

“I’ve been particularly strong in this book about leadership and Rudd’s leadership and I think it needed to be said,” Mr Peter Garrett told the program. “Rudd wasn’t someone who was easy to work with in that way, and his vanity and his exercise of power as prime minister was contrary ultimately, to me, to what good leadership is.” “He was (a megalomaniac). I am not the only one to think it either.” Read more here 

The Gap of Time: Haberdasher

“Discovery, like surprise, favors the well-prepared mind.”

“Shakespeare”, as Jeanette Winterson succinctly puts it in the closing pages of her latest novel, The Gap of Time, “was not an enthusiast of family life.”
It’s a resonant understatement, and one that hardly begins to encompass the chaotic series of wilful or random tragic turns and bizarre coincidences that determine the plot of what has gone before — a “retelling” of Shakespeare’s strange late play The Winter’s Tale.
The Gap of Time

From a family-placed obituary in Maine that dealt openly with the deceased’s heroin addiction and the closure of the state clinic that was treating her (it was noticed nationwide), to the news obituaries (now less strait-laced) that run in big-city papers, the genre is getting multiple makeovers Pacific Standard 

If you are an American aged under 25, then much of your social life probably consists of sitting around with your friends sending messages to absent friends. You will sometimes even message people sitting next to you. You rarely do one thing uninterrupted for as long as three minutes. You never experience boredom, uninterrupted conversation or even solitude — because the moment you are alone, you turn to your phone. And young Americans are merely extreme cases. Most of us have these dysfunctions.
Sherry Turkle directs the “Initiative on Technology and Self” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her new book, Reclaiming Conversation*, based on many years of interviews with young Americans, arrives at a moment of tech fatigue. Most people are now ready for Turkle’s findings: how smartphones have damaged human interaction, and how we can recover.
Logging Out ...

 

Freedom and Hughes: Ted's Understatements: The Jackal Andrew Wylie

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has published the 2015 edition of its Journal of Academic Freedom. The volume covers a variety of events and issues. Several pieces are on Steven Salaita’s “unhiring.” There’s a piece on the personal ethics of academic freedom, one on the emergence of institutional review boards as threats to academic freedom, and one on the relation between Title IX compliance and academic freedom, among others.


 Henning Mankell obituary
“Henning Mankell, who has died aged 67, after being diagnosed with cancer last year, established almost single-handedly the global picture of Sweden as a crime writer’s ideal dystopia. He took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition, capturing in his melancholy, drunken, bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world…He campaigned against Aids and landmines; where drugs against Aids could not be afforded, he encouraged an oral history project, so that the lives and struggles of those who died might be remembered – he dreamed this would be read in a new library of Alexandria in centuries to come. “Africa has taught me that there is so much needless suffering in the world. We could stop it tomorrow: to teach every child in the world to read and write would cost no more than we in the west spend on dog food,” he said. Most of his working life was split between novel writing and theatre work. He was extraordinarily prolific, publishing as many as three novels a year, and his sales figures eventually topped 40m. The quality might have been uneven but there was no mistaking the passion and generosity behind them. He wrote, always, about subjects he thought really mattered…”

Jonathan Bate was given what he took to be a green light to write a “literary life” of Ted Hughes. He was never “authorised”; but the sole owner of the estate, the poet’s widow, Carol Hughes, gave Bate what he regarded as “a symbolic anointing”. She did not, alas, give him a signed contractual letter, and authorial unction — perceived or otherwise — has no standing in law. Faber & Faber, Hughes’s publisher, confidently commissioned Bate’s book.

Ted Hughes with Sylvia Plath in 1958

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, by Jonathan Bate, William Collins, RRP£30 / Harper, RRP$40, 662 pages
The fraught background to this important, flawed but ultimately triumphant biography has been a running news story.
The formative event for Hughes came when he met Plath, an American visiting student. At this point Bate’s narrative thickens. Like Ted, Sylvia was a poet of precocious promise; and, like him, passionate. They married — imprudently, as regards money and career prospects. Two children were born. The couple travelled and quarrelled and evolved distinctly separate styles of verse. There were “snarls and bitings”, broken crockery, slaps and black eyes. How necessary the turbulence of their relationship was to their evolving arts is carefully scrutinised by Bate. Possessed of insatiable sexual appetite and film-star looks, Hughes was flagrantly unfaithful. Plath was, his supporters allege, unstable. His most extended adultery was with the poet Assia Wevill — his dark lady. There was, she said, an “animal thing” between them. He was unfaithful to Assia, and others, eventually choosing to marry Carol Orchard, a young woman who had minded his children. In a ghastly echo of Plath’s death, the betrayed Wevill had killed herself by gas oven. She took her and Hughes’s child, Shura, with her. “All the women I have anything to do with seem to die”, said Hughes.
It is too easy to see Hughes as a villain. Bate avoids such judgment and mounts a subtly constructed explanation (it is not an apology). Hughes, Bate points out, “believed that all artistic creativity came from a wound”. The wound in his late work, from Crow (1970) onwards, was, of course, Plath’s death.
Bate draws, as closely as he is legally able, on Hughes’s dream journals to argue that he was haunted by her. The image that recurs — one that was played with by Ted and Sylvia in their early relationship — is Wuthering Heights. He is “Hughescliff”, she is Catherine, the ghost who will never let go. Bate also suggests, rather less credibly, that Hughes’s “infidelity in later relationships was partly a function of his fidelity to the memory of Sylvia”. Certainly in his years of fame, married to Carol, his infidelities went beyond flagrant into something resembling satyromania. It is not easy to see it as fidelity.
Ted Hughes

Stark Truths

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ..."

“Writing might be fishing through the ice

Where images elude the worried line

And words rise isolated into sight

Hooked upon a safety-pin of wit.”

 It’s not just words that reveal people’s truths “When he’s on a job, leaving fake signs and objects in his gym, at IKEA, in book stores, in chain stores, on the street or at a museum, he tries to be sneaky. Once the deed is done, ‘I run away as fast as possible,’ he says. Since January, Wysaski, a Los Angeles comedy writer who runs the website Pleated Jeans, has been planting jokes in the real world. “ Atlas Obscura

 “They called me The Book.”  The story of a super face recognizer.

St Augustine is supposed to have once prayed for chastity, but not yet. The great thing about social media is that it’s where the people are! Think about it where else can you find hard ironies of eccentric lives ...

In 1962, Tom Wolfe was a young, out-of-work journalist. Eighteen months later, he was famous. He knew what the public wanted: eccentricity »

Constable vs. Turner; Newton vs. Leibniz; Edison vs. Tesla. Does having anintellectual rival spur creativity? History suggests so ..

At 27, Charlotte Brontë, a poor, despairing student, walked into a church confessional for the first time. Within a year, she was writing her virgin novel ...

In my long experience men and women who go for cheap shots tend to be both bullies and economical with the truth amen! Yet the only place without a stress tends to be a cemetery so it is certain that it is only one thing in our wild life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about ...

If, as Oscar Wilde famously put it, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about then Media Drago could certainly have things worse. To be sure, people are talking.

However, of course, one never wishes to be merely criticised. To be criticised well—that is the tacit compliment one must hope for or with an attitude that is not exactly cordial ;-) Stark truth about Robert Stark

Best of all was the library room full of blank books. More my level. I sat down and flicked through the pages, before a dude with a badge gestured at me and with a loud whisper told me I must be some sort of uncultured ignoramus to be touching the art. moan--moan--mona

“Leslie Jamison and Charles McGrath discuss whether, 50 years after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’ was published, the confessional mode has been co-opted by the memoir.” New York Times Book Review