Saturday, April 25, 2020

ANZAC Epiphany — No more triumph of hope over experience

Captain Tom Moore becomes oldest person to top Britain's music chart

A World War II veteran who raised millions for charity has now become the oldest person to top Britain's main music chart.

Musicians join forces on an Anzac Day unlike any other

The Rubens would normally be playing two-up together on Anzac Day – but this isn't a normal Anzac Day.

To those lost in and after wars: thank you for your sacrifice

THE ANZACS HAVE PASSED THE TORCH TO (NEXT) T'IS GENERATION - DETERRENCE: Australia joins U.S. ships in South China Sea amid rising tension.


 Pleasure comes in many forms, from fleshy to mathematically abstract, but every great writer and even some of the merely good ones are pleasure-givers. Let’s limit the exemplars to prose and think of Rudyard Kipling and Isaac Bashevis Singer and the pleasures of sheer story telling. Or the musicality of Sir Thomas Browne and John Ruskin. Or the historical gravitas of Edward Gibbon and Raul Hilberg. Or the philosophical grace of Spinoza and Santayana. Or the comedy of Max Beerbohm and P.G. Wodehouse. When a writer combines elements of even a few of these virtues, one can only celebrate the gift of literacy. Such a writer is Vladimir Nabokov, for whom pleasure – creating it, appreciating it – is a moral obligation. In “Good Readers and Good Writers,” his introduction to Lectures on Literature (1980), he writes:


“It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure that is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass








“I am not leaving because I don’t love you guys and these places but because I want to know more, do more, experience more. I want to see what’s out there.”

Our Time Drowning in Poetry 

For the first time in living memory, the Last Post will not sound at Australian war memorials in Europe on Anzac Day.

 Here's how to hold an Anzac Day 'Light up the Dawn' service in your driveway this year

Lest we forget the woes of another time


This weekend marks the 105th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli.This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the final year of the Spanish flu pandemic.



Aussies at home and abroad mull Anzac Day restrictions unseen since Spanish flu

ABC Technology and Games

NOEL TURNBULL. The origins of Anzackery

Posted on 25 April 2020 by John Menadue
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Anzac Day was in decline – a malaise exemplified by Alan Seymour’s play “The One Day of the Year”, the origins of Anzackery.Continue reading →















No rousing cheers and Aussie flags
to support our ANZAC ranks.
We'll still show our gratitude
to our treasured personnel.
It's time to offer up our thoughts
to those who fought and fell.
We will observe our silence
for the minute and recall.
All the freedoms they have willed us,
we are thankful to them all.
There were so many Aussies,
And Kiwi cousins too,
who left their homes and families
to fight for me and you.
They fought with pride and valour
never looking back.
And the chevron they wore proudly
was the single word ANZAC.
Lest we forget.


Czech out the secret theory of everything above the Cold River 

The Value of Being Uncomfortable: Herman Melville on Privation as a Portal to Appreciation and Aliveness

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”


Books are paper ships, to all the worlds, to ancient Egypt, outer space, eternity, into the childhood of your favorite musician, and — the most precious stunning journey of all — into your own heart, your own family, your own history and future and body.

Spring in a Pandemic: Mary Shelley on What Makes Life Worth Living and Nature’s Beauty as a Lifeline to Regaining Sanity

“There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.”


From that fathomless pit of sorrow, on the pages of a novel about a pandemic that begins erasing the human species one by one until a sole survivor — Shelley’s autobiographical protagonist — remains, she raised the vital question: Why live? By her answer, she raised herself from the pit to go on living, becoming the endling of her own artistic species — Mary Shelley outlived all the Romantics, composing prose of staggering poetic beauty and singlehandedly turning her then-obscure husband into the icon he now is by her tireless lifelong devotion to the posthumous editing, publishing, and glorifying of his poetry.
Shelley had set her far-seeing Frankenstein, written a decade earlier, a century into her past; she sets The Last Man a quarter millennium into her future, in the final decade of the twenty-first century, culminating in the year 2092 — the tricentennial of her beloved’s birth.

EINSTEIN’S MOTHER
by Tracy K. Smith
Was he mute a while,
or all tears. Did he raise
his hands to his ears so
he could scream scream
scream. Did he eat only
with his fists. Did he eat
as if something inside of him
would never be fed. Did he
arch his back and hammer
his heels into the floor
the minute there was
something he sought.
And did you feel yourself
caught there, wanting
to let go, to run, to
be called back to wherever
your two tangled souls
had sprung from. Did you ever
feel as though something
were rising up inside you.
A fire-white ghost. Did you
feel pity. And for whom.
Join us for the 2020 Universe in Verse, livestreaming around the world on April 25, for more poems celebrating the science of the universe, the people who make it, and the questions we live with, read by a glorious human constellation, including Neil Gaiman, Patti Smith, Elizabeth Gilbert, Rosanne Cash, astronauts, artists, astrophysicists, and other rare makers of meaning and seekers of truth.

~ Amanda Palmer Reads “Einstein’s Mother” by Tracy K. Smith



Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel. A subtle Irish story of a woman telling the tale of her now-departed famous, charismatic mother and her career in the theater.  Unpeels like an onion as you read it, and reveals successively deeper layers of the story, it would make my “favorite fiction of the year” list pretty much any year.  But please note it has not have the “upfront attention-grabbing style” that many of us have been trained to enjoy.


Epiphany — No more triumph of hope over experience 

Article excerpt: 

“I don't think fiction is harder to read than nonfiction -- if anything, good fiction (make that the right fiction) is easier. But, as every reader can attest, opening a novel is a crap shoot. Depending on how new and untried the books you read are, the washouts are likely to outnumber the successes. For some older readers, summoning the optimistic energy required to give it yet another go despite these discouraging odds just doesn't seem worth it. As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages, such efforts represent the triumph of hope over experience.”



This posting contradicts much of what I’ve written in past postings because it represents my kinship with Roth and others: I’m also tired of reading fiction. I no longer expect triumph of hope over experience. 

So, I will in the future read only nonfiction. As an old man who is infamous for my fickle, feckless follies, I wholeheartedly embrace my Declaration of Independence from fiction. 

And so it goes



Your writing often touches on memory—suppressed or forbidden memory, the gaps in memory, and trauma. You seem to be inspired by writers of Jewish origin (like Osip Mandelstam or Elie Wiesel) and writers whose lives were defined by their resistance to communist regimes (Anna Akhmatova, but also the Czech writers Václav Havel and Milan Kundera). How do these experiences dovetail with the experiences of Tibetans in the twentieth century
Posted by at