Crossing These Tides ... Myth and Reality of East Berlin and Beijing in Sydney 2016 AD

… Sydney Swimming Boy - Kogarah - Clive James on Proust: Making Up For Lost Time | Standpoint

” … heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.”
~ Herman Melville

One of News Corp's best-known sports reporters has received payments from Eddie Hayson, the controversial gambler alleged to be at the centre of some of the most sensational betting scandals in rugby league and racing. The multiple cash deposits into the TAB account of Phil "Buzz" Rothfield, the sports editor-at-large at the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, are just some of Mr Hayson's unusual financial transactions that are being scrutinised by authorities. News Corp journalist Phil 'Buzz' Rothfield received payments from controversial gambler Eddie Hayson

"This is an ideal time to double check questionable statistics, suspicious misquotes and inflammatory rhetoric. But first you have to be honest with yourself. Do you want the truth or do you want to believe mistruths?" — Columnist Jerry Davich in the Chicago Tribune 

You’ve Never Read Anything Like Dark Matter.

There. I said it.

The new novel by Blake Crouch, is a terrifying, enthralling, lightning  -fast, brilliant book. You have no idea how much I want to write about it. I want to tell you everything about it, but that would spoil everything, and that would be very, very bad. Because Dark Matter is the kind of book you want to know absolutely nothing about. Further, to get the full, mind-blowing effect, you really need to know nothing about it.

Here’s what I knew about the book before I started reading it:

1. A guy is knocked unconscious (in Austria?).
2. He wakes up and is welcomed “back” (in Australia?)
3. Where he wakes up looks like his life, but it’s not his life. Everything is different. Some things in obvious ways, others in subtle ones.
4. Now what?

That’s it...

Dark Matter is about the choices we make, the countless pick-and-choose moments we encounter every moment of every day. It’s about the choices we make without even thinking about them. We eat this. We turn right. We get up early. We cook. (We swim at different swimming pools...) Dark Matters from the Past

Tackling and identifying your values Myth of Value Addings ... Why organisation's values should be off its website

Henri Cole on swimming with Oliver Sacks (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

That is a new paper entitled Gender Differences in Risk-Taking: Evidence from Professional Basketball by René Böheim, Christoph Freudenthaler, and Mario Lackner, the abstract is to the point:

We analyze gender differences in risk-taking in high-pressure situations. Using novel data from professional athletes (NBA and WNBA), we find that male teams increase their risk-taking towards the end of matches when a successful risky strategy could secure winning the match. Female teams, in contrast, reduce their risk-taking in these situations. The less time left in a match, the larger is the gap. When the costs of an unsuccessful risky strategy are very large (losing the tournament), we find no increase in risk-taking for male teams.

The strange prestige of exhaustion. From popes to poets, having an exhausted mind has long been both a weakness and a badge of honor. Why?...  Question of Smartness  

Washington Post: “A bacterium was found to produce an antibiotic capable of killing one of the most hard-to-treat pathogens, which causes deadly skin and wound infections, bloodstream infections and pneumonia.” Lena H. Sun

via NASA -“Two key climate change indicators — global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent — have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016, according to NASA analyses of ground-based observations and satellite data. Each of the first six months   of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880... 

"[S]tate supreme courts have become, at least for the time being, the last safeguard of the United States Constitution in the vast majority of criminal cases": So writes Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, concurring in a decision that the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued today in a post-AEDPA case.

A separate concurring opinion that Circuit Judge Jay S. Bybee issued in the same case is also worth a look.

 Larissa MacFarquhar's Strangers Drowning (and here's a good interview with Larissa at the Guardian)  

  

“The pool and what it represents is woven into Australian identity and culture,” explains the five-time Olympic gold medalist Ian Thorpe, who also contributed a story to the project. Visiting the pavilion in Venice, Thorpe was particularly struck by the scent design (created by the Sydney-based parfumier Elise Pioch with the artist duo Lyn & Tony), which he found powerfully evocative of outdoor Australian pools. “There are two smells,” he explains. “One that you’d associate with fresh rain: the slight smell of eucalyptus and decaying plant matter that you’d find in a wet natural environment. The other is the smell of smoke that you’d get after a bush fire, a smell we commonly associate in 

Australia with summer. The pool I swam in when I was training and where I put in most of my hours was right across the road from the national park — the smell of cut grass and rain and smoke took me right back."

     “Aqua Profonda.” A social history of Australia through its swimming  pools

The man to save Fairfax the unstoppable rise of Garry Linnell:

Welcome aboard everyone, and thanks for joining us on today's Big Bus Tour of Sydney's Most Over-Hyped and Over-Rated. Please, take your seats and settle in with your complimentary glass half empty of overpriced tap water. To ease the journey, we'll be playing a collection of Beatles and Rolling Stones songs. 
Another question. Who designed Bondi Beach and the rest of Bondi, with its jumble of maddeningly small streets, cramped poo brown houses and East Berlin-inspired blocks of flats? Sir, we're still searching for the vandal concerned. At last report he was in hiding in  Newtown, disguised with a heavy hipster beard and perpetrating the same crimes against good taste.
...Here we are in Macquarie Street and to your right you will find – no, sorry lady, that's not a horse stable, that's the seat of power in NSW, the State Parliament. 
Welcome to Sydney's most overrated destinations ( Sydney was the most soulful amd  amazing bohemian corner of this world in 1980s and 1990s ... )

Sydney Morning Herald Lettes on Disappearing of Quality of Bohemian Living:
...What next? Will the Opera House be sold off to stockbrokers? The Art Gallery of NSW to a merchant bank? ("State refuses to give guarantee over the future of art school", July 21).

...The NSW state government has called on the public to suggest names for the six new ferries it is building. ("Ferry McFerryface, smh.com.au) July 22) Here are six that immediately sprang to mind: WestConnex, Forced Council Mergers, TAFE Cuts, Rising Motorway Tolls, Stamp Duty Bonanza, Speed Cameras Windfall.

..Mike Baird is a smart politician and he's riding the zeitgeist of support for neo-liberal economic policies that his actions represent. The question of applause for his actions, however ("Baird's popularity might be his undoing", July 22), is moot.

Baird's actions in committing the money from the sale of public assets such as our electricity system to building WestConnex and Sydney Metro Rail is not simply a matter of privatising public infrastructure. Much of the economic rationale for these ventures is based on massive property development associated with these roads and railways facilitated by the Urbangrowth, the government's property arm.

Much of Premier Baird's policies are now wrapped up in enormous property speculation in which the government is banking on increased property prices underpinned by government funding keeping ahead of an overheated property market. If it all works out, massive profits will be reaped by the usual suspects

And if it doesn't?

Baird's legacy is on a knife edge, and it's not Parliament that he has to worry about, but the vagaries of economics, something that many merchant bankers have tripped up on to disastrous effect. Perhaps we should hope Baird remains lucky, for if he isn't it is the people of Sydney and NSW who will pay a heavy price for his "bravery".

Colin Hesse Marrickville

Fuerteventura Inter: Scots firm at centre of organised crime probe into weapons deal Herald Scotland. Richard Smith: “Scottish Limited Partnerships are front page news in Scotland today.”

Why Does Crime Feel Exponentially Higher, When It’s Materially Lower? EconomPic Who thinks that? Crime was way worse in the 1970s and 1980s

Jonathon Green's dictionary of slang is going online. Also: what's a chuggypig?

 ‘His decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president’.

~Professor Jean Edward Smith, eminent US presidential biographer, on George W. Bush

One privilege of being retired that one can watch ABC News24 daytime television while others are hard at work. On Wednesday 13 July around midday, I was treated to a dramatic spectacle: a Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister in an hour-long international media conference in Beijing fiercely denouncing, as a ‘scrap of waste-paper fit only for the rubbish bin’, a Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) Award (ruling) made by the South China Sea Arbitration Tribunal the day before, 12 July.[1] I watched fascinated as the Minister criticised the ruling with great force, even challenging the legitimacy of the Tribunal’s selection and membership. A Chinese White Paper was issued on the same day detailing why China rejected the ruling.[2]   Continue reading →

Mello, Steven, Police and Crime: Evidence from Cops 2.0 (July 6, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2812701
“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act increased funding for the Department of Justice’s local police hiring (COPS) grant program from $20 million in 2008 to $1 billion in 2009 and over $150 million annually in 2010-2012.

First things first: Michelle Obama is simply wonderful, a person of rare intelligence and elegance who could power a small Siberian city on her dignity alone. It is hard, even for those of us who feel gassy at the mere suggestion that the American government exists, not to notice this.

I cross these tides to you – my beautiful
hearse that carries the corpse of desire
on your spine. We plow this sea together,
as the wake’s ribbon trails behind us.
Your harpoon-rope uncoils like a vine.

Below in the secret green, another tale
begins – not yours, nor mine either,
but the wild carol of a sleepless god
in his kelp nest, now risen to ask who
dares break faith with him.

I cannot separate myself from your pale
back, your bone burden. I ride you
groaning through the wet darkness.
Whatever lies we gave each other
in our youth, the salt has eaten them.

There is only a crazy boatman now,
sworn to own us both – captain of souls
who carries no one without consent.
Refuse him, love. Dive deep and take
me under too. Accept no sunless

river or frail death-vessel. We will claim
the whole ocean, circle this waterborn ball
a hundred thousand years.

This poem utilizes a haunting and effective metaphor that energizes the poem seamlessly to an evocative conclusion. Lines like “the wild carol of a sleeping god/in his kelp nest” are both visual and pertinent. --Joan Colby

 Welcome to the strange world of modern-day fame, when it helps to be a nobody if you want to be a somebody! In some ways, we are returning to the rules of the medieval world, when major works of art and technology were created by anonymous innovators. But there’s a difference nowadays: Today’s mystery artists cultivate their aura of secrecy. They prefer obscurity over the perks of celebrity status Banksy daft punk Elena Ferrantethe new cult of the anonymous artists


Jewish women were some of the first actresses in India’s cinema

POPULAR: On-Demand Healthcare Helps Patients Get A Doctor To Their Door

The app promises quick and convenient consultation from a healthcare professional without having to leave your house

 

Literary Landscapes: Letters on Fire

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
~ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan

“I say ‘the great literature’ not because of its aura of cultural strenuousness, but simply because, in the past, there is only great literature. Only the great stands the racket of time and survives from generation to generation; the rest dies for lack of staying power.”
~ V.S. Pritchett, My Good Books (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

Literary Trojka:
 We are supposed to be the Cold War soldiers who had never blown their composure ...

Exclusive:  Michael Orthofer answers MR reader bonus questions

Libertarians like genre fiction but tend to ignore romance novels. Want to understand the importance of work and free markets? Crack open a bodice-ripper... Hot War Rivers 

"I’ve been thinking about my grandparents ever since I started reading Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by J.D. Vance, who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, joined the Marines, attended Yale Law School, and now works in Silicon Valley. It tells the story of how the members of his family, who moved to Ohio from Breathitt County, Kentucky, in the hope of escaping the grinding Appalachian poverty into which they were born, were permanently scarred by the world they left behind, the same world that Gracie and Albert had left behind them three-quarters of a century earlier."
Before the Fall - Terry Teachout Going Dark Memoirs 

“When editors and publishers feel they need to fight for every moment of planned reading, and readers are experiencing a shrinking cultural attention span, it’s surprising that large books inherently make the most market sense. With this pattern of investment behavior, major presses are inadvertently helping foster an environment where American indie presses can thrive by doing the very thing they’re best at: being small and, by extension, focusing on creativity and originality over sales.” The Atlantic inside Cold River ...

Whether his strange blend of fact and fiction elicits delight, astonishment, or boredom -- or all three -- give Geoff Dyer his due: He's an original... True to himself

Tim Parks disdain the conventions of book talk and the posturings of the literary establishment. He ridicules everyone but himself...   Dyceish Observations 

Rousseau was a hypocrite for our times. He preached family values but exposed himself to women and was given to compulsive masturbation, though he warned against it in his writings...  via Joneses 

Books burn at 451 degrees F. The human body burns at 1,500 degrees. “Where they have burned books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will end in burning human beings”...  Literary History Repeating Itself 

"A story is like a human face," says Svetlana Alexievich. "We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different"... Memoirs of Different Iron Curtains 

"The Clerk, The Thief, His Life as a Baker: Ashton Embry and the Supreme Court Leak Scandal." In 2002, John B. Owens published an article bearing that title in theJournal of Supreme Court History, a publication of the Supreme Court Historical Society

Literature is full of impostors, but few have pulled off a hoax as brazen or bizarre as JT Leroy, the novelist who wasn't who he seemed ...  Proofing Door Stoppers - Cold River ;-) 

Geoff Dyer on Kerouac

O'Keeffe and America

VCR, R.I.P.

*Exquisite masochism Review of note ...

“I don’t know of any thing in my book to be criticised on by honourable men. Is it on my spelling?—that’s not my trade. Is it on my grammar?—I hadn’t time to learn it, and make no pretensions to it. Is it on the order and arrangement of my book?—I never wrote one before, and never read very many; and, of course, know mighty little about that. Will it be on the authorship of the book?—this I claim, and I hang on to it, like a wax plaster. The whole book is my own, and every sentiment and sentence in it. I would not be such a fool, or knave either, as to deny that I have had it hastily run over by a friend or so, and that some little 
alterations have been made in the spelling and grammar; and I am not so sure that it is not the worse of even that, for I despise this way of spelling contrary to nature. And as for 
grammar, it’s pretty much a thing of nothing at last, after all the fuss that’s made about it. In some places, I wouldn’t suffer either the spelling, or grammar, or any thing else to be touch’d; and therefore it will be found in my own way. But if any body complains that I have had it looked over, I can only say to him, her, or them—as the case may be—that while critics were learning grammar, and learning to spell, I, and ‘Doctor Jackson, L.L.D.’ were fighting in the wars; and if our hooks, and messages, and proclamations, and cabinet writings, and so forth, and so on, should need a little looking over, and a little correcting of the spelling and the grammar to make them fit for use, its just nobody’s business. Big men have more important matters to attend to than crossing their ts—, and dotting their I’s—, and such like small things.” 
~The Autobiography of Davy Crockett

       I'm looking forward to my to-be-podcast conversation with Tyler Cowen, and at his Marginal Revolution weblog he invites readers to tell him What should I ask Michael Orthofer ? So if you have questions ..... 
       (35 responses so far, last I checked -- though I haven't read them, yet. Should I ? Don't want to be over-prepped. (Oh, who am I kidding, of course I am going to peek ....))
Tyler's conversation with Michael published on 28 July 2016 AD

Ink-stained wretches learn
At fires on ice-cold nights that
Pencils never freeze
(Shaperners Sold Out)

Hands tapdance on keys
Clacks halt. You forgot to get
The name of the dog.
(Bessie aka Bestia and Saint)

* There’s going to be a new season of Making a Murderer. [Slate]

What for a smoker is non-fiction, for a non-smoker is fiction. That majestic story by Julio Ramón Ribeiro, for example, about the smoker who desperately jumps out the window to rescue a pack of cigarettes, and who, years later, very ill, his wife keeping a vigilant watch over him, escapes to the beach every day to unearth, with the skill of an anxious puppy, the pack of cigarettes he has hidden in the sand. Non-smokers don’t understand these stories. They think they’re exaggerated; they read them cavalierly. A smoker, on the other hand, treasures them.

We love our friends. But any explanation tends to feel inconclusive, vague, banal. Friendship defies language ... 

How to focus on the friendly people in every story ...

Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon

Henri Cole on swimming with Oliver Sacks. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

The power is in the story... 

Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free.

Sung often, seldom do we pause to consider its meaning.
The paradox is that what is most important to us we tend to take for granted, including the political, economic and religious freedoms given us as Australians. Streets of MatraVille: Pozieres anf Fromelles in Australia They will be Proud of this ...

*Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel lecture:

Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think – how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. We haven't been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don't appreciate it, we aren't surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk ... I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion. 

*Svetlana Alexievich received the Nobel Prize for Literature. PS  Selected thoughts from  Voices from Chernobyl ...

An interview with Tom Stoppard

“With an odd, unjust circularity, being a published writer was the very thing that enabled me to continue to be one.”  LitHub 

Publishing history is full of strange tales, and that recounted by Lucy Sussex in “Blockbuster! Fergus Hume & the Mystery of a Hansom Cab” is certainly among the strangest and most poignant. In late 1880s Australia a would-be dramatist decided that he might gain more attention from theater impresarios if he were a published author. So Fergus Hume sat down to produce what ultimately became the best-selling crime novel of the 19th century. ‘Blockbuster!’: The strange tale of the best-selling crime novel of the 19th century

Art asks for an emotional investment, with the promise of some insight into the human experience. But what if the artist is an algorithm? 

I think literature exists to bridge the gap between how things are supposed to work, and that feeling we all have that they're not fucking working that way at all. In life, a lot of our time—especially a lot of our unconscious time—is spent glossing over and making up for some serious fucking gaps between what we have been told should happen and what actually does happen. That and the gap between what people think they are like and what they are actually like is the stuff of life. Books are specifically about filling and explaining these gaps.

...As soon as you get a few pages in, the thing inside of you that needs to be said will start coming to the surface. The characters that appear, the situations that happen, the dynamics that are created, will already be there, whether you've realized it or not. I get this feeling that our own stories aren't always tellable, but they catch a ride, they hitchhike. If we have something to say, it will come out.

DBC Pierre: Man Booker Winner writes a book on How to Write a Novel...

Nonfiction for Fiction Writers

I'm just back from Readercon 27, the annual convention that I've been to more 
than any other, and for which (a while back) I served on the program committee 
for a few years. At this point, Readercon feels like a family reunion for me, and it's a delight.

(CC) Jurek D. via Flickr Once a year, NAS gathers 24 creative changemakers from all over the
nation for a week-long residential program called Creative Community House. We spend this week living and learning alongside ... read more AJBlog: Field Notes

Forbes magazine has published their list of top earning celebrities for 2016. Novelist James Patterson is in the number three spot, outearning Adele, Dr. Phil and even the material girl. Forbes says Patterson made $95 million last year, making him…Continue Reading →

Jozo Imrich Starsi

Survival is in everything we do. We are hunter-gatherers, whether in the literal sense or the modern, figurative equivalent. No matter how far we evolve from our spear-carrying, mammoth-hunting ancestors, the innate instinct is still there. But most of us have forgotten the basics. Ask your average person on the street how to start a fire without matches or a lighter, or how to set a rabbit snare, and you’ll get a blank look followed by, "I’m a vegetarian. You should be ashamed!" And yet the survivor narrative, whether in books, TV shows, or movies, is consistently popular. This tells me a lot of people wish they could peel away the trappings of modern life and live simpler, in a way more connected to nature... Read More

“You can’t just exist as a bookshop nowadays; you have to make it a place where people want to hang out.”
The Observer (UK)

Forbes magazine has published their list of top earning celebrities for 2016. Novelist James Patterson is in the number three spot, outearning Imrich, Adele, Dr. Phil and even the material girl. Forbes says Patterson made $95 million last year, making him…Continue Reading →

“We turn to literature not only for respite, relaxation or escape from the boredom of reality and the gnaw of suffering, but to get away from uncertainty. And certainty is in the past. There, so it seems to us, things have been settled. There we can see a whole picture. For to see something whole becomes a necessity to people like ourselves whose world has fallen to pieces. Perhaps, we think, the certainty of the past will help our minds to substantiate a faith in the kind of certainty we hope for in the future.”

V.S. Pritchett, My Good Books (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

Adults have become shorter in many countries (NYT), and which nations have the tallest men and women?  Here is the paper

Sally Beauman “said she turned to fiction to spend more time with her son. Writing romances for Harlequin, she said, was a useful way to learn pacing, dialogue and how to make the plot move.”

The New York Times

Vlado Imrich

“With the rollout of the new work, publishers, retailers and fans are preparing for an explosion of all things Harry Potter reminiscent of the series’ heyday more than decade ago.”
The Wall Street Journal

“Not until bones have found a last resting place will shades be let across these gurgling currents, their doom instead to wander and haunt about the banks for a hundred years.” 

~Bathroom quote

“In high-poverty neighborhoods, books—the very things that could supply so many of those 30 million-plus words—are hard to come by. In many poor homes, they’re nonexistent.”
The Atlantic

“In Rome, around the year 400, a scribe and three painters created an illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, illustrating the the ancient hero Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy. 1,600 years later, the Vatican has digitized the surviving fragments of this manuscript. Known as the Vergilius Vaticanus, it’s one of the world’s oldest versions of the Latin epic poem, and you can browse it for free online.” Hyperallergic

Brushing up on the plain English essentials

“What suspicion as an interpretive approach implies is that literary texts are always hiding something. The meaning of a work is buried, a brilliant jewel whose rays can only be glimpsed once the layers of obfuscating sediment have been flensed from the text. So, like a patient in analysis, whatever it seems on the surface to say, it must really mean something else. Under this cool, post-Freudian gaze the motives of authors, narrators and readers themselves are revealed as equally obscure and unreliable.” ArtsATL

This week: A penetrating portrait of artist Chuck Close, a reality check on meritocracy as a concept, a look at anger and our access to visceral emotion in a media-saturated world, the enduring meritocracy ... read more AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2

The exodus, and the troubles, continue at 1000 Fifth Avenue: announcement of the departure of Carrie Rebora Barratt (below), a deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum and longtime close associate of director Tom Campbell, is imminent, ... read more

AJBlog: Real Clear Arts

How do you know if you’re lesbian? 

Following up on my previous post, Elsevier Acquires SSRN:  Authors Alliance, Is It Time for Authors to Leave SSRN?:

As feared, it now appears that SSRN is taking up restrictive and hostile positions against authors’ ability to decide when and how to share their work. Reports are surfacing that, without notice, SSRN is removing author-posted documents following SSRN’s own, opaque determination that the author must have transferred copyright, the publisher had not consented to the posting, or where the author has opted to use a non-commercial Creative Commons license. One author, Andrew Selbst, reported that SSRN refused his post even though the article’s credits reflected his retained copyright.http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2016/07/before-the-fall.html