Elena Ferrante: Storytelling Has Been Wrested From Men, And Its Power Now Rests In Women’s Hands

“Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as indeed in many ways they are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us, and beaten by the muddle; but rather let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against to-morrow’s day-light—that to-morrow, when the civilised world, no longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall have a new art, a glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.”

William Morris, The Art of the People

Huskisson seawater is filled with WobbeGongs this morning 

My life with George: How Luke Davies went from broke to Clooney's Catch-22

 "Review: 'Fleabag,' Biting, Bitter and Pushing Boundaries". The New York Times

Elena Ferrante: Storytelling Has Been Wrested From Men, And Its Power Now Rests In Women’s Hands

Ferrante: “I chose to write out of a fear of handling more concrete and dangerous forms of power. And also perhaps out of a strong feeling of alienation from the techniques of domination, so that at times writing seemed to be the most congenial way for me to react to abuses of power.” – The New York Times 

Reagan Ray has collected a bunch of classic logos from American airlines, from the big ones (Delta, United) to small regional airlines (Pennsylvania Central, Cardiff and Peacock) to those no longer with us (Pan Am, TWA, Northwest). I sent him the logo for my dad’s old airline, Blue Line Air Express…I hope it makes it in!

Imagine writing a masterpiece and never getting to see it in print. Such was the fate of Vasily Grossman 

See also Reagan’s collections of record label logos, 80s action figure logos,American car logos, VHS distributor logos, and railway logos. Careful, you might spend all day on these… (via @mrgan)

The New York Times – “A letter written by Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary War has resurfaced more than seven decades after the document was stolen from the Massachusetts Archives, federal authorities said. The 1780 letter, addressed to Hamilton’s good friend the Marquis de Lafayette, came to light last November when an auction house in Virginia notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a South Carolina family tried to consign it for auction, according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Federal District Court in Massachusetts by the United States District Attorney’s Office. An auction house researcher had discovered that the letter matched a copy of the correspondence on Founders Online, a National Archives and Records Administration website. It had been listed as missing…”

SEmily Satterthwaite (Toronto), Rewarding Honest Taxpayers: An Experimental Assessment, 22 Fla. Tax Rev. 200 (2019):

Shrinking budgetary allocations for tax enforcement at the U.S. federal level have placed an unprecedented premium on low-cost policies that promote voluntary tax compliance. In other jurisdictions, tax administrators have experimented with rewarding taxpayers for voluntarily complying with tax laws, but there has been an absence of reward-focused policy experimentation in the United States. To explore the efficacy of rewards among U.S. taxpayer populations, a multi-period online tax reporting experiment was conducted featuring a simple reward intervention: a token monetary amount pre-announced and provided to participants who were audited and found to have fully complied. The reward failed to increase average post-audit compliance levels as compared to the no-reward control condition, regardless of whether random audits or non-random (i.e., conditional on past detected evasion) audits were used. However, the reward treatment condition in combination with random audits was strikingly effective with respect to an alternative measure of tax compliance: “consistent compliance,” or the outcome in which a participant voluntarily reports all of her income in each and every period of the experiment.

Thorny Frogmouth

Paul Kelly Music 

14th song included the only poem by aliving  Australian artist Robert Adamson:

Roadkill of the Week: Robert Adamson's reflections on the death of two Tawny Frogmouths - The Northern Myth - Crikey

This is a guest post by the poet Robert Adamson, who has previously provided his thoughts on death ... A recent event bought to mind a very upsetting episode I had with a pair of Tawny Frogmouths the ...

Paul Kelly Exclusive Full Text of All Poems Program: Paul Kelly in Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds 

Film director Alfred Hitchcock and bird perched on his cigar

World Happiness Report 2019 (PDF) John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey D. Sachs

Via deep European blogger MS ... Paul Keating, former Australian Prime Minister, on classical music.

An old beer bottle in Monks Wood NNR, used as an anvil to smash open countless snails by countless Song Thrushes. The bottle may have been used by the birds for more than half a century, it's embossed 'Huntingdon Breweries Ltd', who ceased production in 1954.

@NE_WestAnglia

The Historical Precedents for the Excessive Violence in Game of Thrones

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: German government warns Jews not to wear skullcaps for their own safety

Kabbalah of spells

The Historical Precedents for the Excessive Violence in Game of Thrones

Perhaps Game of Thrones doesn’t seem so fantastical after all…

Game of Thrones made its return to HBO last night and, surprise, someone died! According to this compilation video, over 174,000 people have died on the show in seven seasons. The sheer numbers and the fact that some of the deaths have been, shall we say, a little creative (even for a fantasy show) sometimes interfered with my ability to fully suspend my disbelief when watching. Take Khal Drogo killing Viserys Targaryen by pouring molten gold on his head in the first season:

That’s a pretty outlandish death, an over-the-top display of sadism for the benefit of a TV audience. Right? Well, I’ve been reading Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and I’ve discovered that Game of Thrones hews close to historical precedent when it comes to inventive murder.

According to some sources, after the Roman Emperor Valerian was captured in battle in the 3rd century, he was subjected to something much worse than a simple death at the hands of the Persian Emperor, Shapur I:

The Emperor Valerian was humiliated after being taken prisoner and held in “the abject form of slavery”: used as a human footstool for the Persian ruler “by bending his back to raise the king as he was about to mount his horse,” his body was eventually flayed “and his skin, stripped from the flesh, was dyed with vermilion, and placed in the temple of the gods of the barbarians, that the remembrance of a victory so signal might be perpetuated and that this spectacle might always be exhibited for our ambassadors.” He was stuffed so all could see the folly and shame of Rome.

Around the end of the 10th century, a leader of the Rus’ was ritually executed by Pecheneg steppe nomads:

The capture of the prince was gleefully celebrated, and his skull was lined with gold and kept as a victory trophy, to be used to celebrate ceremonial toasts.

In 1182, rising tension between the Byzantine Empire and the rising Italian city-states like Venice resulted in attacks against citizens of the city-states who were living in Constantinople:

Many were killed, including the representative of the Latin church, whose head was dragged through the city’s streets behind a dog.

The Mongols, under Genghis Khan and subsequent rulers, used brutality as a tool to shock and awe local populations into peaceful submission, making examples of those who resisted their advances:

Nīshāpūr was one of the locations that suffered total devastation. Every living being — from women, children and the elderly to livestock and domestic animals — was butchered as the order was given that not even dogs or cats should be left alive. All the corpses were piled up in a series of enormous pyramids as gruesome warnings of the consequences of standing up to the Mongols.

It was a very effective technique:

In 1241, the Mongols struck into the heart of Europe, splitting their forces into two, with one spur attacking Poland and the other heading for the plains of Hungary. Panic spread through the entire continent, especially after a large army led by the King of Poland and the Duke of Silesia was destroyed, and the head of the latter paraded on the end of a lance, together with nine sacks filled with “the ears of the dead.”

When the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, they moved through the city “like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves, or like raging wolves attacking sheep,”

The city’s inhabitants were dragged through the streets and alleys, like toys, “each of them becoming a plaything.” The Caliph al-Mustaʿṣim was captured, rolled up in fabric and trampled to death by horses. It was a highly symbolic moment that showed who held real power in the world.

And finally, if there was any remaining doubt that George R.R. Martin modelledthe Dothraki on the Mongols and Khal Drogo on Genghis Khan, consider the death of Inalchuq, a 13th-century Persian governor:

Stories such as that of a high-ranking official who was ordered into the presence of a newly arrived Mongol warlord and had molten gold poured into his eyes and ears became widely known — as was the fact that this murder was accompanied by the announcement that this was fitting punishment for a man “whose disgraceful behaviour, barbarous acts and previous cruelties deserved the condemnation of all.”The Historical Precedents for the Excessive Violence in Game of Thrones

Yes, Antonio Banderas Is Totally Playing Pedro Almodóvar In Their New Movie — And Yes, Says Banderas, It Was Weird

“I don't care what you think unless it is about me.”
― Kurt Cobain 

Part art music, part poetry reading and part folk-rock oratorio, it was by turns profoundly moving, playful and darkly atmospheric

Paul Kelly rules tonight at 7:30 seven dirty ...

Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Alice Keath and the Seraphim Trio pulled off a coup with Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds, a musical response to verse about birds from poets including Emily Dickinson, A.D. Hope, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Judith Wright. Part art music, part poetry reading and part folk-rock oratorio, it was by turns profoundly moving, playful and darkly atmospheric – and something the rest of Australia will hotly anticipate.

Kelly, his co-composer Ledger, multi-instrumentalist and backing singer Keath and the Seraphim Trio took to the stage of the Adelaide Town Hall Auditorium and launched into spoken-word recitals of Judith Wright’s Black Cockatoos and Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, without explaining exactly what we were about to see (the programme was a big help at first). Then there were quiet introductions, apologies for the use of one word, a little Ocker humour and some fond personal sentiments from Kelly as we continued through renditions of WB Yeats’ Leda And The Swan, Gwen Harwood’s Barn Owl and the first of several instrumentals, Mudlarking.

Occasionally haunting and always restrained, highlights from hereon included: Richard Wilbur’s beautifully repetitive A Barred Owl; John Keats’ epic Ode To A Nightingale; Miroslav Holub’s grimly comic The Fly (which seemed to not feature birds at all until the punchline); and Kiwi Denis Glover’s most lovely The Magpies. Sometimes the music became almost (dare it be said) ambient, but the often gorgeous orchestrations kept pulling it back from the brink, with Kelly’s soft, Aussie-as tones perfectly suited to the almost tranquil mood.

 Paul (likealike Phil) sung with his arms outstretched like a bird in flight and the music, words and voices combined effortlessly

Paul Kelly Exclusive Full Text of All Poems Program: Paul Kelly in Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds

Story of Irish Antipodean Paul Kelly not related to Ned Kelly Gang Bushrangers 

Lucky 🍀 *13 Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds

The suggestion that MEdia Dragons twisted Paul's arms to include a reference to Chekov gun and add Czech poet is exaggerated ;-)

THE FLY
Miroslav Holub - Holub means the bird  Dove - Translated by George Theiner
She sat on a willow-trunk watching
part of the battle of Crecy, the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.
During the fourteenth charge of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly from Vadincourt.
She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse meditating
on the immortality of flies.
With relief she alighted on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.
When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay softly circled the bodies
and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,
she began to lay her eggs on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.
And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift fleeing
from the fires of Estrees. 

You need this new Paul Kelly and Dan Sultan duet in your life right .


Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins among 70 musicians fighting against coal

Backyard astronomer snaps Jupiter storm using home-made telescope

An amateur astronomer has stunned experts with his photos of the Great Red Spot — a centuries-old storm raging above Jupiter.

THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Slimy fish mucus can help chemists develop new antibiotics — here’s how.


NEWS YOU CAN USE: Good blood pressure, blood sugar levels can prevent ‘heart block.’

Yes, Antonio Banderas Is Totally Playing Pedro Almodóvar In Their New Movie — And Yes, Says Banderas, It Was Weird

“It’s weird to play a character who lived, more weird if he’s still alive — because he’s producing more information every day — and extraordinarily rare that he is behind the camera saying, ‘Action!’ to you. To deal with all of these things was not easy.” –The New York Times


The incestuous world of Sydney rich kids - The Bondi Iceberg Observations

Before The Kremlin Could Stop It, Rap Spread All Over Russia

I thought about calling my mother, but she was in heaven. I called her anyway. “Mom, how are you doing?” I said. “I’m bored. Don’t come here. There’s nothing to do,” she said. “Aren’t there angels?” I said. “Yes, but they’re boring,” she said. “But I was going to come see you,” I said. “Go to hell, it’s more exciting,” she said. I had fallen asleep with my teacup in my hand. When I awoke I realized I thought it was a phone. My mother would never be so sarcastic about heaven.

Winter tales: Australian writers reflect on the cold months

From woolly socks, chicken soup and cranky wombats to bonfires, purple shadows and frozen windscreens .

'Would I let my family go through this?': Why psychiatrist left public system

When Mark Cross was asked to give a speech about why he left the public mental health system, he said "Thank you", hung up, and "promptly went into anxiety mode".

Before The Kremlin Could Stop It, Rap Spread All Over Russia

It was the Web, and especially V Kontakte (Russia’s Facebook), that made it possible, and, as always in such cases, the old fogeys in charge didn’t catch on until it was too late to stop or co-opt it. So now the Kremlin is nervous. – The New York Times

In the Soviet Union, I once spoke with a monk and asked him how, as a composer, one can improve oneself. He answered me by saying that he knew of no solution. I told him that I also wrote prayers, and set prayers and the text of psalms to music, and that perhaps this would be of help to me as a composer. To this he said, 'No, you are wrong. All the prayers have already been written. You don't need to write any more. Everything has been prepared. Now you have to prepare yourself'. I believe that there's a truth in that.

Arvo Pärt, from various interviews

It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them. Death, for example, is nothing frightening, otherwise it would have frightened Socrates. But the judgement that death is frightening - now, that is something to be afraid of. So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves - that is, our judgements - accountable. An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.

Keep the prospect of death, exile and all such apparent tragedies before you every day - especially death - and you will never have an abject thought, or desire anything to excess.

[...] Try to influence your friends to speak appropriately by your example. If you find yourself in unfamiliar company, however, keep quiet. Keep laughter to a minimum; do not laugh too often or too loud[...] Avoid fraternising with non-philosophers. If you must, though, be bareful not to sink to their level; beacuse, you know, if a companion is dirty, his friends cannot help but get a little dirty too, no matter how clean they started out.

Never identify yourself as a philosopher or speak much to non-philosophers about your principles; act in line with those principles. At a dinner party, for instance, don't tell people the right way to eat, just eat the right way. Remember how Socrates so effaced himself that people used to approach him seeking an introduction to philosophers, and he would graciously escort them; that's how careless he was of the slight.

[...] Sheep don't bring their owners grass to prove them how much they've eaten, they digest it inwardly and outwardly bring forth milk and wool. So don't make a show of your philosophical learning to the unitiated, show them by your actions what you have absorbed. [...]

When faced with anything painful or pleasurable, anything bringing glory or disrepute, realize that the crisis is now, that the Olympics have started, and waiting is no longer an option; that the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day.

Lead me, Zeus, lead me Destiny, / To the goal I was long ago assigned . And I will follow without hesitation. Even should I resist, / In a spirit of perversity, I will have to follow nonetheless. / Whoever yields to necessity graciously, we account wise in God's ways.

~ Epictetus, Enchiridon