Toward Eternity at Howell: MeDia Dragon Bohemian Heroes Orwell & Havel

Plainly Anzac Day is more important to us all than Australia Day, if attendances at Dawn services are anything to go by What does it mean to be 'Australian'?

After Orwell - on the wait for a truly political modern British writer After Howell is Settled ... ~ So it is a boon to Anglophone literature that New York's Theater 61 Press has published The Havel rock n roll:-) Collection, allowing non-Czech speakers to read a significant selection of Havel's plays for the first time. These five volumes, featuring eight plays, are the most comprehensive collection of Havel's plays published in English to date After Havel a Collection of Memories

Spies like us Spooks, oligarchs and spin in Le Carré’s modern-day London. John Gapper reviews ‘A Delicate Truth’ Spies like us

James Bond of Eternal Drinking ~ Another Jack travelling through Yugoslavia

How to Tell a Joke on the Internet ~ A serious non compliance writer uses his Amazon success as somewhat of a personal ad for a “research assistant”. Best-Selling Author Seeks Female Participant for Erotic Novel Research

Domino Effect

Interconnectedness and Systemic Risk: Lessons from the Financial Crisis and Policy Implications Complex links among financial market participants and institutions are a hallmark of the modern global financial system. Across geographic and market boundaries, agents within the financial system engage in a diverse array of transactions and relationships that connect them to other participants. Indeed, much of the financial innovation that preceded the most recent financial crisis increased both the number and types of connections that linked borrowers and lenders in the economy Two Degrees of Syststic Separation

Abstract Taxpayer compliance research has tended to focus on why people evade their taxes rather than on why the vast majority of people do willingly comply with their tax obligations. Whilst tax administrations globally seek to improve the efficiency of their revenue collections, there is growing recognition of the need to have a deeper understanding of why taxpayers comply voluntarily. A person’s internal motivations to comply are commonly characterised as his/her ‘tax morale’, the ‘key’ to the puzzle of understanding taxpayer compliance behavior. Behaviour

Seminal dispute resolution theorists Ury, Brett and Goldberg said that: ‘[D]isputes are inevitable when people with different interests deal with each other regularly.’1 Echoing this, the current Australian Commissioner of Taxation (the Commissioner), has recently said: ‘[I]n relation to the application of tax law to complex facts, some level of disputation is inevitable.’ Tax Disputes System Design

All that I have written now seems so much straw

“How I love the dying words of St.Thomas Aquinas: “All that I have written now seems so much straw!” Finally he saw. At the very last minute. He knew—and he was wordless.
If it takes ninety-nine years to attain such a moment, fine! We are all bound up with the creator in the process. The ninety-eight years are so much sticks of wood to kindle the fire. Its the fire that counts.”
 —  Henry Miller, “My Aims and Intentions”

“Where readers used to see, perhaps, a paragraph thanking the writer’s editor and agent, a few key researchers, and maybe a family member or two, now we are confronted with a chapter-long laundry list of name after name. [Sheryl] Sandberg’s seven-and-a-half page section, for instance, thanks more than 140 people for contributing to her 172 page book.”
Rulers of my childhood in the good old straw peppered Czechoslovakia ~ –The New Republic

Story-telling has evolved from ancient rock markings to the current age, where brands are able to effectively tell their stories via blog posts and social media dragons platform. No matter how fast we leap from first childhood to second childhood of grand fatherhood our brains still respond to content by looking for the story to make sense out of the experience. No matter what the technology, the meaning starts in the brain Seven great escapes in children’s literature

Trends Beyond Bitcoins, New York New York ...

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
― Tom Waits

It might seem that Bitcoin is just like a fiat currency issued by governments. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jack Hough says precisely that it's a purely online currency with no intrinsic value; its worth is based solely on the willingness of holders and merchants to accept it in trade. In that respect, it's not so different from fiat currencies like the dollar or Euro, but whereas governments back such money, Bitcoins lack central control.
Historically, money arose from, and in conjunction with, this power. (This point has been made repeatedly over the years, most recently in David Graeber’s controversial Debt: The First 5000 Years , a surprise publishing hit for an anthropologist Bitcoins Anthropology of Trust

The art and culture site Animal inserted a letter purporting to be from New York Post Editor Col Allan into some copies of the paper Friday Pranksters insert ‘apology’

According to a report in the Courier-Mail, Queensland Treasurer Tim Nicholls has just announced the sale of seven government buildings in the Brisbane CBD. This transaction has all the dodgy features we’ve come to expect from Queensland asset sales
* The buyers are “assorted funds managed by the [state-owned] Queensland Investment Corporation”. So, as often seems to be the case, we are selling assets to ourselves Nicholls says “the sale proceeds will be used to reduce state debt. The government will also save about $130 million in interest payments.” Of course, this is double counting – the whole point of reducing debt is to save interest payments. But what does the $130 million Double Counting

Shakespeare, Proust, Holly Grail

"I do think that if a book is really well written, it's terribly difficult to see how it's done. I think it's part of the mystery of writing that the real great hands always conceal how they do it. And an awful lot of bad writing is due to people trying to write like great writers and not really seeing that the outer covering has nothing to do with it at all."
Anthony Powell, interviewed by Michael Barber (Paris Review, Spring-Summer 1978)

This selfish desire - let’s not pretend it is an altruistic or philanthropic urge - is nowadays catered for under the aegis of “creative writing”. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe, this is a fairly new state of affairs. But in the US, where “creative writing” has been on the scene for longer, many universities operate a policy of basic segregation: there is an “English” (or “literature”) department and a “creative writing” department, and the two lead separate existences, in a strange sort of academic isolation. However, things are changing. The relationship between “English” and “creative writing”, especially in the UK, is shifting. Composition

Hoarder, moneylender, tax dodger — it's not how we usually think of William Shakespeare

THE EARTH, AS I can feel it, is pressed together at points and ruptured in parts. And so events seem to fold into each other, like burial and birth. It’s not like the smooth and undulating beauty of a ribbon streaming out. No. The earth buckles with the stories it holds of all those who have cried and all those who have croaked

A rare psalm book from 1640 could fetch between $15 million to $30 million at a Sotheby's auction on Nov. 26 in New York. Holy Grail of Rare Cold River Hymnal Stories Could Fetch $30M "Spraying cold water on a witch hunt is one of the duties that a critic should be ready to perform." By the Book

Proust famously preferred to write in bed, and, between chronic illness and predisposition, ended up spending much of his life there. “It is pleasant, when one is distraught, to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one’s head under the blankets, surrender completely to howling, like branches in the autumn wind,” he wrote in “Pleasures and Regrets,” his first book, a collection of prose poems, philosophical reflections, and sketches, published in 1896, when he was twenty-five THE THRILL OF PROUST’S HANDWRITING

Australians often forget just how odd our flora and fauna seem to Europeans.  That Wallace Line which defines the boundary between our fauna and what’s in the rest of the world was only recognised in 1859, but long before that travellers’ tales were full of strange rats, greyhounds that hopped (i.e. kangaroos), swans that were black in defiance of Aristotle*, and double-ended reptiles.  Curious Minds is the story of the naturalists who came to our shores and began to identify and classify our strange world. * Aristotle used the example of white swans as an irrefutable fact, i.e. because all swans were white, etc. Black Swan Event

Fanatical Terrorists Creating the New Normal

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
Umberto Eco

US authorities are investigating if the Boston Marathon bombing Russian American suspect killed in a shootout was a follower of controversial Australian Muslim cleric Sheik Feiz Mohammed The family of the brothers are ethnic muslim Chechens

As I try to grasp the significance of the fact that a Chechen named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a member of the ethnic group I have been studying for years at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and writing on for years in scholarly journals (that I have hosted on my website at under Publications), reached out to me to learn about his people, then committed an unspeakable act of terrorism in Boston, I wanted to mention the one thing that is notably missing in this story. The Chechen people. Most Americans know very little about this small Muslim ethnic group. While nothing can legitimize the despicable act of terrorism perpetrated by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I believe ethnic and historical background might provide some much needed context.
First of all, the Chechens I have met, including the members of the small tight knit community here in Boston, tend to be a rather Sovietized, secularized, moderate Muslims. The ones I know tend to emulate George Washington for freeing the 13 colonies from British oppression. The Chechens dream of the same thing for themselves from their historic nemesis, imperial Russia/Soviet Union/the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Marked Souls ~ Tsarnaev Brothers

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
R. D. Laing

Death, Drinks & Taxes

A new drug is out. Everyone is talking about it. Death. Take it, and you have one amazing week to live. It's the ultimate high. At the ultimate price ~ Drinks From Behind The Iron Curtain

For young Soviets, the Beatles were a first, mutinous rip in the iron curtain ~ The band inspired dissidents and musicians. Vasin was a diehard Beatles fan. The Beatles' music had given him, he said "all the adventures of my life", for which "I was arrested many times, accused of 'breaching social order'. They said anyone who listened to the Beatles was spreading western propaganda." More than that, in the USSR, the Fab Four "were like an integrity test. When anyone said anything against them, we knew just what that person was worth. The authorities, our teachers, even our parents, became idiots to us." Beatles drowning in cold river

On Friday President and Mrs. Obama released their most recent tax return for the entire world to see.  They continued a longstanding tradition of sitting presidents releasing their returns, even though no law requires that they do so. The tradition began under the late President Richard Nixon The IRS Should Report on Tax Returns Filed by Members of Congress Forget about the Bahamas, Panama, Cayman Islands, or Fiji. If you want to avoid paying taxes and have no problem with dicey business practices, Europe has a lot to offer.
Europe is far from innocent in the international offshore tax evasion industry, as the Tax Justice Network (TJN) recently demonstrated. Many European countries, with their stable infrastructure and professional personnel, provide fertile ground for businesses or individuals to evade taxes The 'who's who' of European tax havens

Avoinding taxes odd strategies Tax competition – in which countries fight to lower taxes – not only hits the poor, it doesn't even help the economy grow Heard that countries should 'compete' on tax ~ THE GREAT DIVIDE: Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent 99%

With growing availability of the Internet around the world, double-digit growth rate, and stronger-than-ever financial reports of the major players in this market jurisdiction free (Google, Facebook and the like), online advertising is expected to be a key player in the twenty first century global economy Digital Reality Bitcoins Bitdragons

Congress could control the IRS’s abuse of the tax law. Using insights from the literature of administrative oversight, this Article proposes that Congress provide standing on third parties to challenge IRS actions. If properly designed and implemented, such “fire-alarm oversight” would permit oversight at a significantly lower cost than creating another oversight board. At the same time, it would be more effective at finding and responding to IRS abuse of the tax system and would generally preserve the IRS’s administrative discretion in deciding how to enforce the tax law. Monopoly on Truth

Memory is like a Chest

“I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.”
― Haruki Murakami

The notion of fate lies at the heart of the book. Ursula's seemingly insignificant choices transform the course of her life.

 In Salon (Slovakia), in To hesitate is fine, Ilma Rakusa discusses the national labeling of writers “Europa has the shape of my brain ~ Forgotten authors ripe for rediscovery The curse of the forgotten authors ~ Agent Query Letters That Actually Worked for Nonfiction

       The Festival spisovatelů Praha ran 17 through 19 April; yes, I'm a bit late with that news, but nevertheless Siegfried Mortkowitz's Preview: Prague Writers' Festival in The Prague Post is worth a look for information about the risky literary trends ~ a lifetime of unpacking the tragic ironies of Communism in gorgeously intricate prose miniatures Makine has been compared to Stendhal, Tolstoy and Proust ~ DOING THEIR BEST WORK AT NIGHT: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and other artists. If I had my way, I’d still keep my student schedule of staying up until 3:30, and arising at noon.

Liesl Schillinger on Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings: “This theme of self-invention is the subject of most of the great American novels, from “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to “The House of Mirth” to “The Great Gatsby.” Enveloping and thoughtful, Wolitzer’s novel describes this process in a fresh and forgiving way.” That misanthropic wag H. L. Mencken once wrote that his definition of happiness included "a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men" - something he suggested was more easily achieved in this country than elsewhere Happiness

Hector Tobar on Laleh Khadivi’s The Walking: “…a book that manages to convey painful truths with a rare combination of grit and tenderness. That makes it not just an important addition to the literature of California’s immigrants, but also a universal story of suffering and resilience told with elegance and compassion.”

Kent Shaw on Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine: “… sophisticated, wry, faithful, divine, contradictory, tragic and allusive. Deeply allusive. Which is the nature of faith, the Human History of faith.” Everyone has angels, but who has an angel’s child

 Good and evil are the twin opposites of our ethical compass, and the struggle between good and evil is a conceit that powers the narratives of a huge variety of literature. Stories, from religious texts to fantasy novels, depict good protagonists fighting against evil antagonists for the salvation or protection of the world. The problem of the portrayal of evil in such narratives, though, is that although it evil meant to be an inscrutable monolith, it is nonetheless fascinating. A look at evil in literature
Counter and Strange: Contemporary Catholic Literature Catholicism is made of “all things counter, original, spare, strange

Sydney bookseller offers a sweet deal if you’ll dump your Kindle at his door. (The Bookseller) Pages & Pages, run by the Australian Booksellers Association president Jon Page, said it will give customers a $50 gift voucher when they buy an e-reader from his shop and at the same time as dumping their Kindle e-readers into a bin in his shop. said he is taking the action as part of a movement to raise awareness of Amazon¹s business practices, including its locked-in Kindle system and low corporation tax payments

Coffee! It is the great uniting force of my Daily Rituals book. It’s what brings together Beethoven and Proust, Glenn Gould and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gustav Mahler. This should hardly be surprising. Caffeine is the rare drug that has a powerful salutary effect—it aids focus and attention, wards off sleepiness, and speeds the refresh rate on new ideas—with only minimal drawbacks. And the ritual of preparing coffee serves for many as a gateway to the creative mood Kofi

Mixed Feelings

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
– W.H. Auden

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
― Stephen King

Damien Ober on Chris DeRose’s Congressman Lincoln: “(D)elivers a thrilling account of the dramatic events, bizarre characters, weighty issues and nuts and bolts procedures of the tumultuous 30th Congress.” lincoln

Impartial writer, Carrie Tiffany, wins the inaugural Stella Prize, then shares her prize money with other Media Dragons

Mighty Mare Black Caviar: White & Salmon Streamers

"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."
Rudyard Kipling, "Fiction"

She truly was the people's horse, so what better way to honour Black Caviar upon her retirement than with an Elton John-esque ditty.

Randwick was awash with traditional black and white for Australian Derby day on Saturday, but hundreds of racegoers broke the strict dress code to salute the champion mare by donning hints of her signature salmon pink...So it was not just Black Caviar's jockey Luke Nolen donning salmon and black ... Salmon and white streamers burst across the public lawn moments after Black Caviar crossed the line four lengths clear; a tickertape finale to a night of celebration never before seen on a Randwick Doncaster racetrack. Malchshkeon could not believe how stunning her eyes, her face, her manners were as she walked past her.  "It was all very emotional.  The light was tricky, the build up impossible.  As ever, the juggernaut that IS Black Caviar gains speed with every turn she makes." Black Caviar, the world’s top- ranked thoroughbred sprinter, was retired four days after extending her perfect career record to 25 victories Queen of Turf: Black Caviar in Sydney

Fashionistas seeking to take out the Vogue Australia & GQ Australia Style Stakes may need to be careful with their colour Choices at the races ... White Sydney & The unbeaten Black Caviar

Let's make a dent in the universe ~ Steve Jobs

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap."
--Cynthia Heimel

The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all. You must lose a fly to catch a trout

"Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?"
I still read to escape, and because I slip into books to get away from the things that are making me mad/sad/angry/frustrated, I know I am not as well-read as many of my contemporaries.  Heh.  Yeah, I read a lot but I’m not well read --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"If you're not making mistakes, you're not taking risks, and that means you're not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more changes to learn and win."
--John W. Holt, Jr.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."
--William Shakespeare

Luck is unreliable ~ Risk is our Business: Predictive Where the puck will be

   “Risk is just an expensive substitute for information.” 
-Adrian Slywotzky and Karl Weber

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
 ~Anais Nin quotes (French born American Author of novels and short stories.

“A RISK is a potential for a LOSS.  The LOSS is the realization of that negative potential.  A RISK is running across a busy street blindfolded.  A LOSS is getting hit by a car while doing that.. “Thoughtfully assessing and addressing enterprise risk and placing a high value on corporate transparency can protect the one thing we cannot afford to lose: trust. A review of the use of complex systems applied to risk appetite and emerging risks in ERM practice

Like a well-prepared meal at a fine restaurant, ERM is best taken one course at a time, not mixed up on a single, giant plate. “Enterprise risk management is no panacea, and I know some people who question whether it really exists. But anything that gets people and the institutions they’ve built to look at risk from multiple angles, with an eye to building value, is a most welcome thing Summit on Fraud
“The concept of ‘inherent risk’ is impossible to measure or even define. The idea of looking at risk absent all hard controls, soft controls, or mitigations, provides little or no useful information in most cases.” Organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to manage and control risks. Armoghan Mohammed looks at why the dynamics of risk are changing Predicting Risk
ERM is really about managing residual risk – that is, things that could happen. That’s what senior management needs to know ... Risk taking is an integral part of business for every financial institution. Traditional thinking is the higher the risk the greater the reward. But, the most rewarded firms are  those that have consistently balance risk and reward and understand the level of risk that the firm can profitably absorb Absorb

“Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for if there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field.
- Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods

Science Versus Art in Risk Management: Lessons from Merrill Lynch

“One of the greatest contributions of risk manager – arguably the single greatest – is just carrying a torch around and providing transparency.”   
~Enterprise Risk Management, (Chapter 5 “Becoming the Lamp Bearer” by Anette Mikes)

“Enterprise risk management is a contact sport. Success comes from making contact with people.”

- John Fraser, Enterprise Risk Management, (Chapter 5 “Becoming the Lamp Bearer”)

January in April: An Almost Physical Need to Tell It

And all was as it should be. I was young (and bohemian;-)
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Isaac and Archibald" (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

“That’s it.That's it...7/7 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

“Jozef Imrich has written the War and Peace of escapes. Havel tackled free will, Tolstoy the meaning of life, Imrich practiced what they preached... " “When I was growing up, Czechoslovakia was still a country where people darned their socks.” Memories of the Iron Curtain: Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." A sole survivor's life can be a fate worse than death: The names of some writers float through the air like those anonymous insects – midges? gnats? flies? – that swarm in the summer. We ignore them until accidentally ingesting one. Such was my understanding of Robert Fulford. I knew he was a journalist and vaguely associated him with Toronto. In preparation for our visit to that city I read his Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto (1995) and a very different sort of book – The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture, which he published in 2000 An Almost Physical Need to Tell It

Casanova opens his memoirs with: "I begin by declaring to my reader that in all that I have done throughout my life, good or bad, I am sure that I have earned merit or blame, and as a consequence I believe myself free.

“Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when the person looks back-she will hear her heart”
~ Paulo Coelho quotes (Mystical author, one of Brazil's most successful novelist)

You couldn’t invent a character like Alfred Jarry, the absinthe-drinking, excrement-smearing playwright and star of Parisian literary life...Merrrrdrrrre

There is no such thing as an artist

“There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”
- Annie Dillard

As the River Runs is a terrific read, with convincing characters, luminous settings, and authentic Aussie dialogue.   Above all, it has a compelling plot, highly relevant to contemporary Australia.
Ours is the driest continent on Earth and prudent governments around the nation are setting up infrastructure to get us through the next period of extreme dry weather.  Stephen Scourfield’s story is based around the perennial fantasy of damming the Kimberley in the monsoonal north and piping it thousands of kilometres south to Perth.  The tale involves an ambitious politician called Michael Mooney who hatches his plans in secret as part of his private campaign to be the next Premier.  To suss out the likely opposition up north, he despatches his Chief of Staff Kate Kennedy and a sleazy political fixer called Jack Cole, both of whom are ‘in the know’ though their levels of cynicism and self-interest are different. Their guide is Dylan Ward, a former Greenie who acts as a go-between for mining interests, Aborigines, and environmental causes.  Dylan knows nothing about the proposal for a dam; he thinks he’s escorting these two around to spruik a solar energy proposal As the River Runs

Anyone who’s ever been to Tasmania can’t help but contrast the exquisite beauty of the island with the sense of menace that derives from its convict past, the dispossession of the Aborigines, a shocking massacre in recent times and its often hostile weather and environment.  Koch’s story portrays the bushrangers’ hideout as a kind of Eden masquerading as a Utopia.  Martin is beguiled by the peace and solitude of the Nowhere Valley, where he is required to work as a farm labourer until taken up by Lucas Wilson and groomed as a disciple.  Lost Voices

Poor Franz. The irony and complexity of his work have been reduced to one hopelessly inept adjectival cliché: Kafkaesque

A female war photographer writes a memoir, Shutterbabe. She hates the title. It's a best seller. Welcome to a so-called post-feminist literary career Shutterbabe Tash

Rich and poor, rectitude and laxity, sacred and profane: Moscow has always abounded in contrasts. Flowing through the city’s dichotomous terrain: vodka... Water of Mos Cow

"A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience."
O. Henry, "The Gold that Glittered"