Metamorphoses nocturnes

Went last night to a bona fide soirée (some of you may know that I would love to be able to revive the custom of the soirée, but I'd never actually been to one) and it was magical. Every month a woman (a friend of a friend) invites people to the room above Dante's Bar on Gertrude Street, a room with brass chandeliers, wood paneling, red curtains and a bar with cool blue light - and some musicians or comedians. Last night the young Melbourne-based Flinders Quartet (left) played Gyorgi Ligeti's first string quartet, "Metamorphoses nocturnes," and a retired opera singer sang some new songs by a youngish Australian composer.

The highlight was the Ligeti, whose music I've not really enjoyed before, perhaps because I've never heard it live. The first string quartet was inspired, we were told, by a study of Bartok's 3rd and 4th string quartets (which, apparently, were not being performed in Hungary in the early 1950s). It conveys some of the solemn magic and exuberant dancing of those pieces, as well as abundant good humor. It took me back to one of my great music memories, a marathon performance of all six Bartok quartets by the Takacs String Quartet in January 2000 in Alice Tully Hall. I arrived at that concert a Bartok sceptic and left a true believer.

The Flinders Quartet played the Ligeti with vigor, precision and beauty - and hearing it in the warmth of an intimate space took me back to another place and time: Vienna, thirty years ago. We were living there at the time, and my parents often took us (my sister too? I don't remember) to chamber music recitals in the building on the Ring where my father was working. Chamber music up close and - as part of a series of convivial evenings - personal is a wonderful thing. How lucky I was to get to know it already as a child. (I don't remember if I thought I was lucky at the time!)

The Ligeti took me back to Vienna 1977 for another reason: my best friend at school then was Gyorgi Ligeti's son, Lukas. I wonder what happened to him? Aha, just googled: he's a composer and percussionist, and lives - where else - in New York! Think I'll drop him a line. Why should not Gert's soirée in Melbourne reunite two New Yorkers who met as children in Vienna?

Fact and fiction meet on Lygon Street!

I’ve been slowly reading J. Wallace Knight’s The Ritualist, a novel published in 1900 about St. Peter’s, Eastern Hill, and it's just passed by my house! The State Library (of course!) has the only copy around. It’s a dusey. It tells the dramatic story of the arrival in Melbourne of two heroic Anglo-Catholic priests from England. One, Wulfred Langton, winds up dead a few weeks after introducing candles, vestments and incense, and it looks like foul play. Wolsey Roland Ken, his young assistant finds on Langton’s desk a letter describing having been abducted and threatened by three men dressed as Inquisitors a short while before. They point out that while they have donned the attire of Inquisitors they could be Catholic, or Puritans, or atheists. He’ll never know, nor need he, but if he doesn’t recant his ritualistic ways something worse might happen to him.

Dashe, the Anglican bishop of Melbourn but a Puritan, refuses to do the funeral, so it falls to the recently arrived Wolsey Ken, who says the city’s first requiem mass, confounding the crowd of gawkers. Turns out that Langton’s innovations have made him well-known, and a large crowd has gathered to follow the funeral procession up Lygon Street (!) and past the University to the cemetery. But along the way the sky turns a livid black and a terrific thunderstorm breaks out, and the Puritans declare it the anger of God. By the time Langton is laid in his grave the crowd has turned into a mob, cursing the dead man and flinging dirt into his grave as the rain-sodden choir runs in confusion, tripping over their vestments.
Fearing for the ornaments of the church, Wolsey rushes back. His cab arrives, the horse nearly dead, just in time to meet a mob which proceeds to trash the place, tearing pictures from the walls and throwing prayerbooks and hassocks around while someone plays saucy songs on the organ. Ken valiantly defends the sanctuary with a broken broom and an acerbic wit, but while he knocks one thug down is held back when a big man comes in with a sledgehammer and proceeds to pulverize the marble altar. At the end of part II, Wolsey Ken collapses, perhaps hit on the head by one of the rowdies, in the middle of his looted and pillaged church.

It’s clear to the novel’s narrator that Anglo-Catholicism is the way of the future. The mad fervor of its opponents is a sure sign that they - Papists, Puritans and modernists alike - know that they will lose out when the Church is triumphantly reunited by Anglo-Catholicism, brought back to where it was before the great schism of Eastern and Western Chrsitianity and the Reformation. I expect the rest of the novel to show the arrival of the Kingdom in Melbourne.

Three things about The Ritualist are particularly interesting. For one, it’s a ripping good yarn! For another, it is full of poetry. Langton and Ken and the various people they meet – even people in the mob! – are endlessly quoting snatches of poetry to each other: they live in a world humming with the language and imagery of English poetry (including the King James Bible) – a nice image of late nineteenth century Anglican theology of culture. And – but - third, none of this ever happened! Protestant clergy fulminated and the bishops of Melbourne raised arched eyebrows at the ritualistic innovations of the Anglo-Catholic churches in Melbourne, and a cross went missing once, but that was about it. The first Anglo-Catholics in England half a century years before encountered some trouble like that described in the novel (but no murders), but nothing of the sort happened in Australia.

Did J. Wallace Knight create this foundation myth to articulate the countercultural excitement of the Anglo-Catholic movement in Melbourne? Or was it because Melbourne in fact didn’t provide enough resistance (or interest!) for the English narratives, carefully crafted to align the Anglo-Catholics with the heroes and martyrs of the church, to ring true and catalyze world-historic change?

A more pertinent question: Can I say that the funeral procession of Wulfred Langton must have passed right in front of our house on Lygon Street? Part of me thinks: why not? Would it feel any more real if it had actually happened? I'm used to sharing streets with characters from fiction and film. Paris was crawling with them!

I remember a few years ago I was in Echigo Yuzawa, the hot-spring heart of the Niigata Snow Country (in Japan) about which Yasunari Kawabata wrote the great novel of that name. There they had a walking-trail where you could see spots important in the novel. At least one hot spring promised that you could soak in the very same water where the novel’s pretty courtesan had soaked. Why not?

The postcard, from 1908, and the amazingly early photo of St. Peter's
from a few decades earlier (Lygon St. and the cemetery would be
off in the distance to the left) are from the SLV collection.

State Library, 1922

Say, here's a picture from the SLV collection of what's now called the La Trobe Reading Room in c. 1922. Much darker than in the contemporary picture below, because leather-bound books are of darker color than books are nowadays, and also because the bookcases went higher.

Mondo bizarro

One of the pleasures of working in the La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria (here's a picture from an article in The Age) is that it's the home of the Australiana collection, and people leave the most fascinating books lying around. Yesterday's discovery was James Cockinston's Mondo Bizarro: Australia in the Seventies (Port Melbourne, VIC: Mandarin, 1994). I suppose most of the western world was pretty bizarro in the 70s; Australia was no exception.

Thought I'd share with you the "One Recipe From the Seventies" the author thought worth listing. (A friend of mine assures me it's really an adaptation of Welsh rarebit.)

The Beer Fondue serves 3-4
1 cup beer • 2 cups (8 oz.) cheddar cheese, grated • 1 clove garlic, crushed
1 oz. butter • 1/2 tsp dry mustard • 2 Tbsp cornflour • a little extra beer • French bread
Place beer, cheese and garlic in fondue pot. Cook over a low heat,
stirring constantly, until cheese has melted. Stir in butter.
Blend mustard, cornflour with a little extra beer.
Add to fondue, and stir until thickened.
Serve with French bread cut into one-inch cubes.

But that wasn't actually the most bizarre holdover from the 1970s I saw yesterday. I went to a talk at the Philosophy Department at Melbourne Uni. A veteran philosopher of religion tried to demonstrate that William Rowe's "evidential argument" for atheism from the existence of evils (first stated in 1979) is less conclusive than it might seem. Rowe only considers two incidents of evil, but our philosopher showed that even if you added in all the evils in the world you would not be able to get someone who started out thinking the odds of God's existing to be 0.2 down to something approximating 0.

Through a complicated set of propositions, all abbreviated as letters and pronounced à l'australienne as djooey (for G: God exists), kye (for K: all background knowledge of evils), pooey (for P: no good we know of could justify a God in permitting a given evil), pooey-staa (an elaboration of P, P*), and culminating in eeaye:

Let Ea list all known instances of evil, and providing just enough
empirical information about each instance to enable the instances
to be roughly ordered via the axiological relation worse than;
and let Ea say that it lists all known instances of evil.

and pooey-wahn:

No combination of goods, each of which we know of,
justifies God in allowing Ea to be true.

he arrived at this formula, which you'll have to sound out for yourselves. [Pr(x/y) means the probability of x given y]

Pr(G/P1&Ea&K) = Pr(G/Ea&K) X Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) / Pr(P1/Ea&K)

He then factored in what he thought were values Rowe would accept (he thinks they're arguable but these were "freebies" to Rowe), and came to a result of 0.2 X 0.8 / 0.99 = 0.162. While there's a false specificity about this number, he admitted smiling, the point is that it's not as far from the posited 0.2 as Rowe's argument would seem to require.

And he beamed like a child who'd just made "fondue" in his toy kitchen with root beer and velveeta.

I am soooo over analytic philosophy of religion!

Lorikeet

Can you spot a green lorikeet in this blooming gum tree? (You can't see much more than its head.) It was one of the few not adding to the deafening din of bird chatter as the sun rose over one of the man-made lakes near my sister's place in Shepparton on Monday.

(I post this picture in part as an antidote to the pictures the gun-toting Virginia Tech killer took of himself which are all over the internet news sites. Do we need to see them? Apart from surely adding to the trauma of survivors and the family and friends of victims, it only makes it more likely that some other disturbed person will someday follow in his footsteps.)

Moral desertification

The first half hour of the radio news this morning was again on the shootings at Virginia Tech. From down here part of what we're trying to understand is how America accepts this level of gun violence in its national life. The extinguishing of thirty-two lives is an unspeakable tragedy. But thirty-two thousand people are killed by guns in America each year, and the number of guns just grows and grows. Something just doesn't make sense. Do we care about the victims or don't we? Is it a tragedy or just a fact of life?

Three things on the radio disturbed me. One was President Bush's remark, "Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time." The second was the observation of the killer's parents' postman who said "no parent deserves this." It's hardly fair to put the postman's off-the-cuff remark in the same category as the president speech (doubtless written by someone else), but it seemed to me that both say something that shouldn't need saying. Of course the students and professors at Virginia Tech didn't deserve to die; there's no right place or time to be murdered. And of course the parents didn't deserve for their son to shatter so many lives, including theirs.

I understand that mentioning "desert" in this way is a way of insisting on the innocence of the victims. But nobody has questioned their innocence! Nobody would. (Actually many will blame the killer's parents.) Even to suggest that one could deserve such a fate shows you think there are cases in which such fates are deserved.

The third upsetting thing on the radio was an interview with a Virginia pro-gun lobbyist, who argued that if students had been allowed to carry concealed guns on campus the tragedy wouldn't have happened. (Actually he never said even this, just that "one of those kids would have refused to let himself be murdered" - don't think about what's implied here about the rest.) When the interviewer mentioned the 32,000 the gun-runner said that was mostly "bad people killing bad people." Clearly many tens of thousands of people deserve to die every year. (And that's just in the US.)

So which is it: thoughtlessness (I can't believe this has happened, this never happens)? fatalism (sometimes people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, American culture's just violent for some reason)? or (perhaps also) blaming the victims (some people deserve it)? One of the achievements of a civilized society (if I may use such barbarous terms) is the presumption that people who suffer tragedies of various kinds don't deserve them - that's what makes them tragedies, and what gives us all a reason to respond and to do what we can to prevent them. American civilization (to take something Gandhi said when asked about "western civilization") would be a good idea.

Nobody deserves to live in a land of such thoughtlessness, fatalism and victim-blaming.

Bildung verbindet

On a day when higher education was, alas, in the world news (I had to turn off the radio when they started to play a Virginia Tech student's mobile phone recording of gunfire) as well as the local (the Melbourne Model was officially launched today), I went to a talk by Ján Figel, the EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and somethingelse. The talk was sponsored by four Australian universities' EU studies programs for the EU's 50th anniversary, and his perspective as a Slovak grateful to be part of a reunited Europe after the cold war was interesting... but it was not the world's most exciting talk.

But then the EU is not the world' most exciting topic. And yet, and yet. Figel claimed that the EU was a political and cultural model of world-historic significance and novelty... Part of me wants very much to believe that - a part that's been down in the dumps since the French and Dutch no votes on the European constitution last year, since it thought the EU the only hope of a counterweight to the terribly bad vibes George Bush was sending throughout the international system. And as Figel trotted out the numbers of people who have studied abroad with Erasmus and plans to triple that number in the next seven years, another part of me suddenly found itself thinking: it's the trouble with good again!

Good news is no news, to turn a phrase. You only hear about the EU when something goes wrong, like mountains of butter, or the failure in the Balkans, or anti-Turkish rhetoric, or the politics of defining "mayonnaise," or the capricious behavior of the Polish delegates. What you don't hear is a kind of historical and cultural and political miracle, an enormous series of banal and quietly revolutionary improvements and exchanges and openings and relaxations and dialogues. It's so successful that it's hard to remember the bad old Europe it somehow managed to transform. (Easier to remember if you're from the erstwhile Soviet bloc.) Instead of seeing European expansion as the problem, Figel said in response to a question about the difficulties awaiting the newest member states and more mobile laborers, he'd rather see it as the solution. But, smart man that he is, he also quoted Jean Monnet: "I am neither pessimist nor optimist, I am merely determined."

(Not sure when this photo was taken; it's from an article on "Bildung Verbindet," Germany's theme for its current EU leadership.)

Bunyip moves!

Just found out that I can embed a video directly in the blog! So you can share our delight on finding an active koala in a tree high above our heads. We - my sister, her husband and two boys and I - were in a park along the Murray River on Sunday and found lots of koala bears napping in the nooks of trees. This one alone was awake and moving around!



Bunyip Bluegum is one of the protagonists of The Magic Pudding; you've seen him before (the post of September 29th).

Made us laugh

Had a ball last night with my nephews - sister and brother in law were out to a rare dinner with friends. I'd noticed a copy of "Singin' in the Rain" on sale at the local Big W, and - since no household should be without it - picked it up for them. The story's a bit hard to explain to a four-year old ("what's a star?" "what's a movie?" "what's in love?" "why is she wearing that thing?" "why are they dancing?") but not Donald O'Connor's immortal "Make 'em laugh," which had him screeching and hooting. His younger brother was chuckling and tittering (mainly at his brother's mirth, I think!). I guess I was making some noise, too. We watched the scene three times, then tried our hand at some of O'Connor's stunts. Well, mainly his unparalleled repertoire of falls and the bit involving a sofa and a rag doll and falling over the back. I'd say don't try these at home except we did and we're still standing, though precariously! If you don't know the scene, and even if you do and just saw it again last week, check it out: youtube's got it, of course.

I'm not sure just why "Singin' in the rain" is such a great movie, or, I suppose I mean, why I love it so. The "Broadway Melody" scene with Cyd Charisse is trying (especially compared with the comparable scene in "The Band Wagon") and "Beautiful Girl" is tedious, but the rest... The title song is perfection itself, and "Good morning" something like my Platonic ideal of good friends. Part of what makes the film so timelessly winning is how surely it shows that the noblest human emotions and the most delightful thoughts are better expressed - and perhaps not fully expressed unless - danced! Another part is the way it uses one film innovation (technicolor) to replicate the effects of an earlier one (talkies), which allows a kind of recursive synaesthesia (or do I mean synesthetic recursiveness) into the future. But I'd be lying if I didn't also admit that Donald O'Connor's character Cosmo really speaks to me.

Now I can stop suffering and write that symphony!

Unseasonal green

It's that time of year again. No, I don't mean Fall (though the maple above is lighting up one of the houses in our block), and I don't mean Spring (though right now the Chrysler Building's probably surrounded by something like the cherry nimbus at left, snapped two years ago this week). I mean Tax time, the time of the greenback. Let me tell you: there's nothing like trying to file as a New York Nonresident to make you think you never left, that you couldn't leave if you tried, and that you might as well admit you're still a New Yorker even though you run to the ends of the earth!

From the other side

I don't think I've ever shown you what our humble abode looks like from the north. It stretches from the no parking sign to the street. The red fence is the length of our little yard, and just above it you can see the window of the sun-filled little room off the kitchen where I have my breakfast. I quite like the graffiti - or may I call it a mural? The two somewhat shamefaced figures framing a light blue signature on the right guard the other side of the wall of my room, and the figure showing a hand gesture he learned from the US seems to mean no harm by it.

Mystery statue

After that last rather mongo entry, I'll keep this one brief. I was in St. Kilda yesterday and was able finally to get a picture of this sculpture in front of the St. Kilda Town Hall, which I'd seen many times on the tram during my first month here. The snakes, the plane, the expression on the man's face, the temple: what could it possibly be about?

Women at the tomb

After having barely taken note of Lent, I did a sort of penance by binging on Holy Week, at St. Peter's and a number of other houses of worship besides. Appropriately for news first released to women (the painting's by Fra Angelico, from the Convento di San Marco, Florence), my Easter began and ended with women-run services, though of very different kinds.

I started Maundy Thursday at St. Mary's, North Melbourne, in whose choir a new friend of mine sings. St. Mary's is Anglo-Catholic like St. Peter's, but has a different feel, less established, edgier but also more down to earth. The vicar is a woman; I hadn't realized how much I miss hearing a woman's voice saying the mass. The sermon was unpretentious but serious. The choir did valiantly with some Duruflé, Bach and plainchant, but the hymnal we used is a snazzy ecumenical thing called Together in Song with melodies from a hundred countries. Besides something to a traditional Ghanaian melody we got to sing this anthem to the church's belated discovery of women's ministry (I think it's originally Presbyterian: my source):

A prophet-woman broke a jar
by Love's divine appointing.
With rare perfume she filled the room,
presiding and anointing.
A prophet-woman broke a jar,
the sneers of scorn defying.
With rare perfume she filled the room,
preparing Christ for dying.

A faithful woman left a tomb
by Love's divine commission.
She saw, she heard, she preached the word,
arising from submission.
A faithful woman left a tomb
with resurrection gospel.
She saw, she heard, she preached the word,
apostle to apostles.

Though woman-wisdom, woman-truth
for centuries were hidden,
unsung, unwritten, and unheard,
derided and forbidden,
the Spirit's breath, the Spirit's fire,
on free and slave, descending,
can tumble our diving walls,
our shame and sadness mending.

The Spirit knows, the Spirit calls,
by Love's divine ordaining,
the friends we need, to serve and lead,
their powers and gifts unchaining.
The Spirit knows, the Spirit calls
from women, men, and children
the friends we need, to serve and lead.
Rejoice and make them welcome!

In the Anglican Church of Australia, where the ordination of women is still a far-off dream for many, this was prophetic indeed. Not to get into the causes of the latest self-flaggelation of the Anglican Communion, but I don't imagine this sort of thing gets sung much in Ghana.

The morning of Good Friday I went to St. Peter's for a lovely service, the austere but perfectly choreographed medieval liturgy seeming entirely appropriate to so somber an occasion. Particularly moving was the long silence as the three priests prostrated themselves before the stripped altar, and the liquid gold of the choir's singing of the Reproaches (the setting by Vittoria, I think), by turns loud and very soft.

As we finished we could hear a crowd gathering outside the church, the Melbourne City Churches in Action's seventh annual Stations of the Cross Walk. It had begun at the city's oldest Catholic church, and ended at St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral, picking up people along the way from a Welsh church, a Church of Christ, a Wesley Church, St. Peter's, St. Patrick's Catholic cathedral, the German Lutheran church, a Uniting Church, the Scots Church and a Baptist Centre; the Salvation Army sent a banner. At each stop part of the passion narrative from John is read and a prayer or meditation or reflection furnished by that church (each quite different from the others even in style!), followed by a verse of the passion anthem from Bach's Matthäuspassion. It's a nice idea, my first real experience of ecumenism, though I was by the end of it very sick of the dirgelike Taisé chant we sang in all manner of keys as we moved from one church to another, "Jeeeeeeesus, remember meeee, when you come into your kiiiiingdom..." But it was a nice way to spend a sunny noontime on a public holiday, and fun, as we spilled down Collins Street, to see people's reactions. A panicked young body-pierced couple in black who hadn't noticed us coming round the corner looked like campers caught in a flash flood.

In the evening I came back to the Scots Church for a performance of Bach's Johannespassion, which I hadn't intended as a Lenten austerity but became so, starting with an evangelist who sounded like a squeaky attic door. (The choir, orchestra and one of the base soloists were fine.) But even so, it was impressive to have a big church full of people devoted to such music sung in German in the Antipodes.

Saturday night I went back to St. Peter's for the Easter Vigil, which started at 10:30 and lasted until well past everyone's bedtimes. It was very slow, needlessly so. Some visitors from a local Islamic society had come, and I imagine they went home reassured that Anglo-Catholicism is a harmless wraith. This is a pity, since the change from the darkened church to the bright first eucharist of Easter should (one might have thought) be the perfect occasion for appreciating the spirituality behind its theatricality.

This morning, being Anglo-Catholicked out, I decided to go across the street to St. Jude's, the Anglican church my friends talk about like al Qaeda. (In America we'd call it evangelical.) It was a combined service for adults and children, and kids were running up and down the aisles when not asked to participate, making noise to the band which accompanied us through bland modern anthems (the text in powerpoint) or lining up with balloons with the words of the Bible quote we were to memorize on them, the youth minister popping them one by one to jog our memories. The sermon was delivered by a youngish male priest, a recently returned missionary by the sound of it, but the rest of the service was run by women. This wasn't what I was expecting at all, since the Sydney Anglicanism I've been told St. Jude's represents is dead against the ordination of women, and so committed to male "headship" that it argues for a hierarchical Trinity.
Then came the biggest surprise. A bare-bones communion - "symbols Jesus gave us to remember his sacrifice by" - was said by a woman, a layperson, in ordinary dress! It felt like a Tupperware party. Shocking! The priest came out to help share the bread and wine, but was nowhere to be seen during the consecration of the sacrament. Of course it probably wasn't meant as a "consecration" but as a "commemoration," and they probably think of it as a "symbol" rather than a "sacrament." (Someone has suggested the Sydney Anglicans are best described as Neopuritans.) I remembered another thing I'd heard about Sydney Anglicanism - that they're going full-tilt for what they call "lay presidency." Who needs priests anyway? It hadn't occurred to me when I read about this that it might prove a back-door way to a form of women's ministry.

What a broad tent is the Anglican Church, unbelievably broad, really. How sad it would be if its various factions were to break apart; its great gift to the larger Christian community is precisely the variety it manages somehow to sanction, if not always to celebrate.

Crossed

Easter joins the list of things in Australia that seem like America stood on its head. Most Australians are not religious, but schools and universities get a week or two off and everyone gets a holiday for Easter, indeed a 4 day weekend! (Not sure why Easter Monday needs to be a holiday for anyone.) With ads for Easter chocolates all over, it's strangely like Christmas in America - a once religious holiday now become a secular and commercial one. Perhaps one of the comedians at The Melbourne Comedy Festival (which uses this weekend to take flight) could explain how you secularize this literally excruciating event when it isn't even Spring - not to mention in a land where the importation of rabbits has proved disastrous! (In the Shepparton paper I even found an analog to the "put Christ back in Christmas" campaign, a picture of a foil-wrapped chocolate bunny with the caption "He didn't die for your sins.")

Care for a hot cross bun? This is just the normal one from the Bakers Delight down the street. (Actually it's from their website.) But their special chocolate chip hot cross buns each have at least 100 chocolate chips in them. Maybe they were inspired by - or inspired! - that Americanized Aussie Mel Gibson in his gorey reimagining of the passion story. More wounds, sweet wounds, mmmmmn!

Macedon it is!

Almost forgot to mention that the offer my sister and her husband made for the cosy house they saw in Mount Macedon has been accepted! I fell in love with the house too, the day not even a fortnight ago when I picked up this pine cone, still closed...

Rain

Can you see the rain between me and St. Jude's, the church across the street? I can see the church much better than I used to, thanks to my ever provident friend K, who noticed a queen sized bed in search of a new home outside one of the neighboring houses after dinner one day last week. Like good New Yorkers we dragged the thing in, and my days of living like a kidnapping victim on a bare worn out mattress on the floor are over! Unlike the St. Jude's rain, which stopped a few minutes after it started, the largesse of K - who put me up my first few weeks here, introduced me to the SLV and to various people who have access to free tickets to things, and taught me where people go and don't go in the laneways of the CBD - just keeps pouring down!

Kangaroo café

Oh, how I love teaching! I'm not getting many chances this year, but I had one on Monday. As I mentioned way back when, a group of us are learning Pitjantjatjara, an Aboriginal language from the center of Australia. Or at least we meet occasionally to compare notes - two or three times a month. Alas only one person's been able to come every time. (I missed many weeks because of my travels.) Worse, this is without a proper textbook and without a teacher who speaks the language, so we don't even know how to pronounce things! In short, we were going nowhere, and are not much farther along than when I first went in October or November.

Until this week! We'd decided a few sessions ago to take turns designing some kind of learning game, so someone brought in a big drawing of a person with the names of various body parts, someone else offered a tree of family names (which became impossibly complicated, kinship structures being very involved), and another devised hand-signals for practicing the nine pronouns for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular, dual and plural. This week was my turn, and I tried to recreate the drills I found most useful when teaching English in Japan.

So I drew four sets of pictures, which we had to ask each other questions about, forming and using sentences and changing them one word at a time: Rosemary, do you see a man eating food? - No I don't see a man eating food. I see a woman eating food. Karina, you see a woman eating food? - No, I don't see a woman eating food, I see two women eating food. Anthony, do you see two women eating food? - No, I don't see two women eating food... It was the first time we'd put sentences together, the first time anyone spoke more than once every ten minutes, and the first time we really had fun! The hour was over before you knew it, and people stayed on!

Now I certainly can't take credit for inventing drills. But I suppose I can take credit for one thing. You learn more if you're having fun, and you have fun if you get to say silly things. (You also can test if people really understand the way a language works better if you give them nonsense sentences to translate.) It sounded like we were having party by the time my drawing led to these exchanges: Susan, do you see Bruce (someone added this name, not me) drinking coffee? - No, I don't see Bruce drinking coffee. I see two women drinking coffee. Debbie, do you see two women drinking coffee? - No, I don't see two women drinking coffee. I see two kangaroos drinking coffee! (Indeed, they were clearly enjoying flat whites under a sign saying KANG- KOFF-, doubtless on Lygon Street.)

And then I pointed at the joey in the pouch of one of the kangaroos and all hell broke loose!

Best "cities" in the world?

Shock, horror: the cities of New Zealand are more livable than those in Australia! According to the just released 2007 Worldwide Quality of Living Survey, Sydney ranks 9 but Auckland is in the top 5! (Melbourne limps in at 17.) Something's clearly wonky in their formula, since the top ranking cities (I know people who live and have lived in the middle three) were:

1 Zurich • 2 Geneva • 3 Vancouver • 4 Vienna • 5 Auckland

And New York City? How could they let it be the index (100.0 points) and then give higher scores to forty-seven other cities?! Aren't cities supposed to be gritty and stressful and noisy anymore - not to mention, big?

What ought not to be

I'm tweaking a section in my first chapter where I criticize a recent and widely praised book, Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (2002), for building its whole account on the "fact (sic!) that the world contains neither justice nor meaning." Is that a fact? Is it the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

I agree with many things Neiman says. Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil. Note that it is as little a moral problem, strictly speaking, as it is a theological one. One can call it the point at which ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics meet, collide, and throw up their hands. At issue are questions about what the structure of the world must be like for us to think and act within it. But (you know what I'm going to say) is the world composed only of indifferent events interrupted by evils? I trace Neiman's question back to Schopenhauer, who thought that all the deepest religious and philosophical traditions determined that the whole world "ought not to be."

Most people think Schopenhauer was a crank - why have readers accepted Neiman's pessimistic assumptions, indeed praised them for their moral seriousness?

What I want to say - tell me if this just sounds wrong - is that we sometimes also think something very like this ought not to have happened at goods: the child pulled safe from a well, the parents who adopt the killer of their child, the story told in "Amazing Grace," etc. Perhaps we throw up our hands here, too, along with ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics, but to wave our clap our hands in delighted disbelief and gratitude. Certainly: "ought" means something different here. (It would be interesting to pursue how different - it may in some cases be less different than you'd suppose.) But isn't it in fact (sic!) the case that our expectations - including our expectations of what by all rights should have happened - can be upset by good things as well as evil?

See this film

Just saw the young German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's amazing film "Das Leben der Anderen," somewhat flat-footedly translated as "The lives of other." It should probably be "The lives of the others" or even "The life of the others," since the film gives us the lives on both sides of Stasi surveillance in East Germany. Also misleadingly translated is "Sonate vom guten Menschen," the name of a piece of music which plays a central part in the plot and reappears as the name of the novel the writer publishes at the end; it could also have been the name of the film. It should be "Sonata of the good person," not, as I recall its being rendered, "Sonata for a good person."

Don't let these mistranslations put you off seeing it, though if you've seen it already perhaps this can be an excuse for you to go see it again! See it as a sonata, see it as disclosing two worlds by showing the ways they subvert and inspire each other. The film is fantastic, and worth seeing for the acting, for the script, for the cinematography, for the music. And (if you're into that sort of thing) because it's about goodness.

The "Sonate vom guten Menschen" was, I've learned, composed by multi-multi award winner Gabriel Yared. Sebastian Koch, the actor who plays the good writer, says he only found his way into his character through playing this piece on the piano - a piece of which his character says: how could anyone hear this music and not become a good man?

Catch 22, anno 2007

So David Hicks will soon be free! Or so it seems. Latest news is that his guilty plea and plea bargain won an unbelievably lenient commutation: from the expected 20 years to life to the seven years he was actually sentenced to the nine months he will have to serve, most of those in an Australian prison. (The six years and three months taken off are not, we are assured, a nod at the five years he spent at Guantanamo.) It seems to be a sop to John Howard, the last leader of the "coalition of the willing" standing; Howard's facing a tough reelection later this year, and his unwillingness to insist on due process for Australian citizen Hicks (Tony Blair got the Tipton Three out of Guantanamo ages ago) has in recent months become a major embarrassment for him. At this rate Hicks will be freed shortly after the election - but conveniently can't make any statements of any kind before that.

Don't expect Hicks' non-Australian Guantanamo fellows to get off with such light sentences - if they ever even come to trial.

But then the Hicks saga may not be over. Hicks' father claimed that his son had pleaded guilty only to get out of Guantanamo any way he could (it would be insane not to, one wants to say), and in response some US military judge has said that David would be in trouble if his guilty plea was not serious: he could face new charges of perjury. Sounds like Catch-22. If Hicks is innocent, he may be in bigger trouble than if he was in fact guilty.

But what did we expect? Guantanamo's been a legal and moral black hole from the word go - by design, of course: the people imprisoned there can't be proven innocent since they've not been charged of a crime! By now it would be nearly impossible to do right by them even if the administration were serious about it - something the surreal Hicks trial surely doesn't suggest. If only there were even a small chance that the monsters who thought this place up might some day have to experience some of the moral horrors they have unleashed.

Roving

Here are two paintings by Rover Thomas, an aboriginal painter whose works I find incredibly moving. (I first saw some in the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth in December.) The top one is called Dreamtime Story of the Willy-Willy and the bottom Yari Country. Both were painted in 1989. Both are on display in the National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square.

These two are big, big enough that you get lost in the loping shapes of their dotted lines, and find something like the truth of space.

International man of mystery

Once upon a time I was teaching English conversation at a girls school near Tokyo. The lesson was on family relations and I had the students draw a family tree they could explain. (Sachiko is my aunt. Taro is her husband. Their daughter Hanako is my cousin. Etc.) Meanwhile I drew one on the board for me, then announced: "I'm half German, one fourth American of French ancestry, and one fourth ... mystery!" Everyone was very excited. And it's true: my paternal grandfather was an orphan.

Well, thanks to the mapping of the human genome the mystery is a little closer to being solved. My father sent off a tissue sample (from his cheek, I think) to the Genographic Project, and the results came back a few weeks ago. His Y-chromosome (and mine) belongs to Haplogroup J2 (M172). Our distant ancestors made their way from Africa to the Mediterranean via the Middle East by the paths shown on this map; the haplogroup emerged about 10,000 years ago. How they got to Columbus, Ohio is anyone's guess, but it probably didn't involve significant stays in central Asia or northern or central Europe. Indeed Europe may not have been part of the story at all, since M172's more common in north Africa than southern Italy or Spain.

It's very exciting! Unexpected, too - our surname seems to have Scottish roots. But what does one do with this knowledge - is it even a candidate for "self-knowledge"? All this tells is that the line going back from sons to fathers leads back to M172, but this line of purest patriliny includes only a tiny percentage of my actual ancestors: think of all those sons' mothers and their mothers and fathers. On the other hand, these fathers almost certainly didn't marry people from far away. The kind of almost frantic itineracy which has characterized my father's family since his mysterious grandfather's generation is something entirely new in human history.

After Italy and California and Austria and New Mexico and England and Japan and New Jersey and France and New York and now Australia maybe it's time for me to change my name to Rick, move to Casablanca and open an American Bar.

Frog and toad aren't friends

Serious topics aside, as an American in Australia how could I not show you this monster cane toad found on a "rampage" in the Northern Territories? He even upstaged David Hicks on the Age webpage. (Don't let him upstage the historic pics of marvellous Melbourne below.) Not that cane toads aren't a serious topic!

Simply marvellous

Can't remember if I mentioned that I'm sitting in on a lecture course at Melbourne Uni called "Marvellous Melbourne: A Cultural History." So far I've attended two lectures, neither particularly exciting (perhaps I've got American expectations that lectures be exciting or at least entertaining), but it is certainly nice to be learning more about the city! The main thing so far is how recently it all happened, this history: Melbourne went through three buildings and rebuildings in the 19th century: the founding, 1830s-40s; establishment of civic institutions and grand building with gold money, 1850s-60s; then, after an economic downturn, the "marvellous Melbourne" of the 1880s, when the city put on not just one but two international exhibitions. These two pictures show Melbourne in 1901, when Federation gave Australia something like independence. The first looks like the Kremlin but is in fact Flinders Street Station. The second is the Queen's Gate, one of nine gates put up throughout the city (including a Chinese gate draped in silk, and a German gate). A statue of Victoria presides over the intersection of Collins and Russell St. The actual Victoria, alas, died at the same time as Federation, so celebrations were muted.

Macedon opens up

Haven't posted any pictures of my own in a while. Here's one, taken just this morning. It's a pinecone I picked up in Gisborne, near Mount Macedon, on Friday. I'd not seen one like this before, and two things struck me about it. First, parts of it are blue, not bluish-green but truly blue! And second, it is like a ball of paper-thin sheaves, folded inside each other. As it dries out it opens up, and seeds float out on almost transparent wing. On the tree (a kind of fir or spruce, I think), cones unfurl themselves from the tip. As the wind takes the seeds and the sheaves holding them, each pinecone is pared down to a narrow conical core. This pinecone, which someone had prised from the tree (not me), was still a tight little ball with deep blue streaks when I brought it home Friday. It's opening from the other end in the warmth of my room - as it would, also, in the cosy house in Macedon my sister and her family are inclining towards making their new home!

Time twists

What a sight, this morning at 9:55 in front of the State Library - scores of people waiting for the doors to open, and this on a Sunday! As I think I've said before I love coming here not only because it's a lovely place to work (and free internet!) but because so many different kinds of people are here - university students, history buffs, amateur genealogists, journalists, writers, high school students, lovers of literature, people just stopping in to look at magazines. It's a vision of books and learning as rightfully integrated into the heart of life, not sequestered (or shunted) off into some quasi-monastic periphery. (Picture source.)

Of course, some of the people waiting this morning might not have intended to arrive for the library's opening. We turned our clocks back last night, so some might have been aiming for 11. Others might - who knows - have been standing there for an hour!

Daylight savings is one of those times when you realize that the two hemispheres of this planet have a more twisted relationship to each other than you might think. As we fall back much of the northern hemisphere leaps forward, and so California, which was 5 hours ahead (minus a day) is now 7; New York, which was 8 hours ahead (minus a day) is now 10. (I suppose I could have said - should have said? - that California is now 17 hours behind us and New York 14.) In half a year we'll snap back again: into and out of synch, or, perhaps, ever overshooting.

That the relationship is literally a twisted one is something I learned the other day from one of my fellow honorary fellows at Uni, a historian of science. One consequence of there being far more land mass in the northern hemisphere than in the largely oceanic southern hemisphere is that the northern hemisphere is bigger. This means that it rotates ever so slightly more slowly than the southern hemisphere - the way, my fellow fellow explained, a ballet dancer spins more slowly with arms extended. In consequence the two hemispheres are torquing. Hooda thunkit!

What's your book about, Mark?

Working on the good sounds bland and sanctimonious (or, on the other hand, precious) - people seem either perplexed or embarrassed for me when I tell them. Or perhaps I come across as embarrassed already. I need a better approach! So I imagined bringing a PR consultant in. Perhaps my attempts to answer his questions can help explain what my book is about for you, too. If not, do let me know!!

What are you working on? I’m writing a book on the good and why nobody dares to talk about it anymore. Lots of people write about evil, which is important, but you get a lopsided view of the world if you have an elaborate account of evil and none of good. I’ve done a lot of work on evil myself—edited the only historical reader on the subject—and in this book I’m trying to tease out the understanding of the good implicit in some of the things we say about evil. You won't come to a full understanding of the good through evil, but some of the things people assert about evil suggest that a shared conception of good still exists (or is striven for), if indirectly. In a way I’m arguing that good is the “secret” of evil.

Why not just write about the good? I’m approaching good through discussions of evil for a number of reasons. Evil already matters to us, is a “problem.” I would like to get book published and even—such ambition—read! Further, I try to show that we find ourselves at a loss for words about the good for historical reasons—the worldviews, religious and metaphysical, in which the old theories of good are at home have been weakened if not destroyed by changes in knowledge and society in the last few centuries; in some ways the language of evil is all that’s left of these worldviews, at least on the surface. Finally, the picture of good which emerges from a study of what we say about evil is different from those which many past theorist of good came up with (in a word, ‘the problem of evil reveals the vulnerability of the good’) and provides new and sometimes critical perspectives on these earlier accounts. Many of them, I argue, take offense at the vulnerability of the good and imagine more perfect or truer goods which are not vulnerable. There may be invulnerable goods, but I argue that vulnerability—or openness to interaction—is an essential quality of the goods that matter to us.

Do you offer a definition of the good, then? Not really. (I'm not a philosopher or theologian, let alone a prophet, and I'm aware of too many different views across time and cultures. But exploring these differences and commonalities can still be useful.) The good, I argue, is by nature hard to talk about. Unlike evil, it doesn’t demand thought and indeed in some ways eludes it. Evil is at home in thought but we are at home in the good. Evil is something we (think we can adequately) understand and analyse in terms of causality and stories, but good needs other less linear genres, like music and poetry and ritual.

Why ‘the good’ instead of, say, ‘good things’ or ‘things people value as good’? Good question. First, good is not a thing—one of the reasons we have trouble talking intelligently about good is the consumer commodity economy in which we live and what happens to the concept of ‘goods’ in it. Commonplaces about its being better to give than to receive and stories like that of King Midas clue us in to the fact that good is not some thing you possess. Likewise talk of virtues is truer when we don’t think of these virtues as something people somehow possess. The language of participation is better than that of possession, if harder to understand; the language of response and relation are good words too, and the language of the feminist ethics of care.
The question of ‘good’ vs. ‘goods’ is a very interesting one. I’m arguing, against some classic theories of good, that good is plural and dynamic, but still want to hold on to the concept of a single ‘good’ because it seems to me that particular goods evoke a larger connectedness, point beyond themselves. Not to a single highest ineffable good (or not only to that) but to each other, to new combinations and harmonies.

That's still pretty vague... What’s it all got to do with religion, by the way? You are in religious studies, aren’t you? Indeed I am. I think my approach is very much shaped by the field of religious studies—I see religious ideas as part of complicated traditions of practice, ritual, narrative, and always as shaped by and shaping social and political orders. The idea of goods isn’t a religious idea, though on some definitions of religion it might be. If calling it religious makes it easier to take seriously, be my guest. My approach is shaped by a movement called ‘religious naturalism,’ roughly the idea that religious practices and ideas emerge naturally out of the life of human beings in community, history and nature—you don’t need to posit supernatural forces to account for them or their value. Faith in supernatural beings is compatible with religious naturalism, though not every kind of faith, but this is not part of my argument. I’m hoping that what I argue will make sense to secular readers as well as religious ones; it’s couched in the undogmatically secular lingua franca of the humanities.

And evil in all this? I certainly don’t mean to be saying ‘evils are terrible, yes, but look on the bright side, there’s all this good…’ If nothing else I hope to persuade people that they’ll understand and respond better to evil if they think about the good tool, whether they accept my proposals about good or not. But of course I hope they find something useful in my suggestions, and start to think in new ways about evil and good. And not just think, since the good need our care.

Mount Macedon?

Came up to Shepparton again to take care of my nephews while my sister and her husband did some more househunting. They seem to have taken a liking to a place less than an hour northwestish from Melbourne called Macedon, at the foot of one of the biggest mountains in these parts. (No mountain in Australia is very high, Mount Macedon's peak is apparently sometimes capped with snow!) I suppose Mount Macedon is Melbourne's Hausberg. You can see it in the distance, for instance, in this watercolor from 1847 from the State Library of Victoria, depicting one of the candidate events for the founding of Melbourne in 1835, Batman's agreement with the Aborigines.

Gridlocked

Went this morning to a lecture in a course on the cultural history of Melbourne being taught in the history department at Melbourne Uni. (I met the lecturer by chance last week and he told me about it.) I didn't learn much I hadn't at least guessed along the way - it is a survey course - but it was such fun to be back in a classroom! Even hearing the announce- ments and the description of methods for research projects made me happy. I miss teaching!

Among Australian cities, Melbourne is famous for its grid, laid out by a man named Hoddle in 1837. The above is one of the surveyor's chains he used in marking out the blocks. Originally there were to be twenty four big square blocks, 3 by 8, barely bisected by narrow lanes allowing the backdoor provisioning of the houses and businesses fronting the main streets.
It's nothing like as big as New York's grid in 1821, but still striking for its ambition. (You could, I suppose, see the gridding of the whole island of Manhattan as an act not of ambition but of laziness - just keep the lines going until you reach water!) Both imagined cities far grander than what was already there or could be extrapolated from it.

The thing about grids is you don't know how they'll fill out, or even if. By laying out a grid rather than a system with centers or letting the lay of the land carve out your spaces you leave it to the future to shape your city, maximizing in advance the possibilities of communication and movement between sections. (Hoddle had no way of knowing that the city would basically grow along the north-south grid - diagonal in his picture -, leaving the now CBD stranded on a permanent tilt.) The uncertainty is intoxicating and terrifying... and the only thing certain is the uncertainty, for the communication and movement doesn't stop when the grid fills up but just gets more energetic.

Rather like if you planned to write a book with seven chapters, each divided into four subsections, and hoped that each of the twenty-eight resulting blocks would be equally interesting - or at least equally easy to fill - long before you knew who would be moving in...!

A bridge too far?

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is seventy-five years old today! This picture shows the two sides inching toward each other in 1930, something apparently watched with bated breath by everyone on both sides until the unbelievable moment of union. (Source of the pic.)

The Melbourne Age barely mentioned it in today's paper. There is an article, of course, but it's entitled "As Melbourne celebrates the big events, Sydney crosses a bridge." In the weekend review of arts and culture, the Age included an article by an ex-Melburnian living in Sydney who reported that the bridge is avoided by drivers and still marks divisions between parts of the city rather than uniting them. No complexes here!

Although nothing in Melbourne would ever make you think this, I'm starting to wonder if Sydney may not be worth a visit after all, just for the fun of it. While I'm assured there's nothing behind the surface, nobody doubts that its surface is very pretty. I would go prepared to see Sydneysiders prove their patent inferiority to Melburnians by spending no time at all comparing the two cities, if they even think about Melbourne at all!

Perhaps Sydney's calling to me because I just finished another marvelous book by our old friend Kate Grenville which takes place there, Lilian's Story. It is loosely based on a well-known Sydney eccentric, a bright and enormous woman who falls or is pushed out of "respectable" Sydney society into semi-lunacy and ends up homeless. "Lil" knows and doesn't know that she's not like other people. She knows that she's famous and half-knows that people think she's mad. She thinks she understands people and while they would disagree she's usually right. It's a heart-breaking tale of great beauty and humanity.

Here's a little taste. Lil's on a tram and refuses to pay the ticket, the conductor kicks up a fuss and stops the tram; a stranger offers to pay the fare since she needs to catch her ferry.

You are familiar with me, I told the woman as she waited for the cool air of her ferry, but who are you? I seized her wrist above the raffia bag, to make her sit down beside me, because I wanted to participate in the story she would tell about the two of us. Now that she was beside me, and we were nothing more alarming than two middle-aged ladies on a tram seat, she became calmer. I am Agnes Armstrong, she told me, and smiled, because close up she could see that I would not bite her, or embarrass her any more. And what else? I asked, and she peeked in to consult the spinach, then said, Well, I am a wife, and a mother of two. But I was still not satisfied. What else are you? I asked, but she was standing up now, the Quay in sight, smiling and glad that this was nearly over. That gave her courage, and she laughed recklessly and lifted her chin like a young beauty, and cried, Oh, what else I am would take a year to tell! And I had made her beautiful for that moment. She was off the tram then, springing away for her ferry, but I could see that her face still had the echo of that smile and would see her home, and be with her while she told her remarkable story.

A remarkable story, no? Sad and beautiful. And it rings true, an urban truth.

Yo MaMa

Had a nice theatrical evening yesterday. Melbourne's La MaMa theater - one of several so-named theaters around the world which provide a place for new and international work(there's one in the East Village in NYC) - turns out to be just around the corner from where I live, and one of their new plays sounded interesting, so I went. The play's called "Sinners," and was written by husband-wife team Ramiz Tabit and Johann McIntyre. (Husband Ramit is originally from Lebanon; how his Melburnian wife ended up named Johann I don't know.)

The play tells the story of a farmer from the Middle East who ends up fleeing to Australia and a Pentecostal minister (wife of another Pentecostal minister) who meet up, work through various religious questions, and, well, have an affair. It's not a perfect play; you can tell that it's been through many stages. It started as a project called "The Muslim sinner" and was to be a light-hearted look at Islam and modern life, but then 9/11 happened and the moment didn't seem right; this version started out trying to balance that out with a parallel story of a fundamentalist Christian, but their relationship and the challenges of being an immigrant and a Muslim in Australia and a woman set free from a misogynist religious tradition all make it into something more. Less clear in retrospect but more engaging while you're watching it! But it was well written, acted, directed. And the story of how Australian freedoms and love overcame the false certainties of religious fundamentalism went over well with the audience, not all of whom were typical Aussie religious sceptics.

The evening was fun also because this was a small show in a small space, and started to feel like family! The director started chatting with me as we waited for the show to start and when it started I recognized one of the two actors - Gemma Cavoli was the other lead in the "Happy End" I saw at VCA last December! - Remember, I found her co-lead working at the De Graves Cafe. (The other actor is originally from Iran.) And then the extended family of the authors (two Muslim women in head scarves, some pale-looking Ango-Celts, a Turk and her Croat husband Darko) invited me to join them for coffee after the show: "middle eastern hospitality," they said. Annnnnd I won the raffle with which each La MaMa performance begins, and have tickets for another show they have on at the moment, a prize-winning play called "Asylum"! Feel the love. And feel the vibrant immigrant Melbourne I've told you I'd tell you about but have not until now really seen!

Prix fix

As I walked to Uni just now I heard a distant buzzing and whirring sound, somewhere between chainsaws and cicadas - it's the F1 Grand Prix of Australia, for which many Melburnians leave town. I understand why. It's at Albert Park, on the other side of the CBD from here, more than 5 kilometers away - and yet you can hear it all the way up here. If not, at this distance, VROOM VROOOOOM it's still vroom vroooooom.

I'm sure I mentioned long ago, when we were just getting acquainted, that Melbourne is one endless parade of festivals. Right now, as we wind down from a fashion festival and look forward to a comedy festival, we're host to the F1 Grand Prix and to the FINA world swimming championships; I'm sure I've overlooked others.

Being the "events capital of Australia" is all a bit much, really. But at least I don't need to pay for it. Taxpayers do. An article in The Age a few days ago pointed out that FINA and the F1 will cost the city - that is, its taxpayers - $80 million this year, about $20 per citizen. Is it really worth it? Sure, the author conceded, such events contribute to the economy and add to Melbourne's international status and visibility. But wouldn't the same be accomplished and with longer-lasting results if the $80 were put into improving education? Indeed, the author noted, even having all the rocks at the bottom of the Yarra River painted red would: painters would be employed, and the world press would be sure to pick up the story!

I won't be watching race cars or swimmers today: it's wrestling with blasted chapter three for me - Theodicy and Democracy (what was I thinking? if I only I could remember!). The last few days it's just snarled at me, but I think I've turned a corner. If it's not going VROOM VROOOOOM at least it's going vroom vrooooom.

Small world (too small)

At a Philosophy Department welcome party for the new academic year last night I saw a bit more of the small world which is academe than one perhaps should. A visitor from Beersheba University (originally a Melburnian who left in 1967 and is back for the 100th birthday of an uncle) told me he'd recently written a review of a book by one of my Princeton advisors. Where, I asked? In a bilingual Canadian journal whose name he couldn't recall. How did this happen? On the bus between Jerusalem and Beersheba he met a Canadian whose daughter was spending some time in a kibbutz who happened also to be the book review editor for this journal. He had a bunch of books in his bag looking for reviewers, and so the deed was done. I didn't ask if he'd liked the book.

A young German historian of science I'd just met and I wondered later how the history of scholarship might be shaped by book review editors trawling along other bus routes, perhaps between Berlin and Leipzig or Melbourne and Canberra ... or the Trans-Siberian railroad?

Salaam dunk

Went to the National Gallery of Victoria/International today to see a 2-year-old Bollywood film called "Salaam Namaste," shot here in Melbourne. It's a silly story about headstrong singles finally swallowing their pride and getting married, only the more strange for taking place in familiar settings. A bit in this respect like "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna," one of last year's big films, which took place all over New York City, though a New York City from one end of which you could move to another as swiftly as through a hypertexted website (and change costume, too!)! Of course Bollywood - especially but not only in its dance numbers - is not about continuity, and to notice bloopers seems simply to miss the point.

But it's not insignificant that "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna" took place among NRI (Non-Resident Indians) in New York and that "Salaam Namaste" takes place among NRIs in Melbourne. Big budget Bollywood films take place in all sorts of strange and wonderful places; what's important is simply that these take place abroad. The foreign locales allow the films to take on forbidden topics, allow their NRI protagonists to let it all hang out. In India, I learned, "Kabhi" isn't the New York movie, it's the divorce movie - the first movie to present divorce sympathetically... (it seemed extravagantly cruel to me when I saw it...)

And "Salaam" isn't the Melbourne movie; it's the living-together-when- you're-not-married movie. I'm sure it's not the first film in which proud young people who've rejected marriage shack up and get pregnant but it's the first to give them a happy-ever-after ending anyway, although they do have to suffer a little bit on the way. (When she can't go through with an abortion and he won't marry her because he doesn't want kids or marriage, she says it must be her karma to have fallen in love with him and gotten pregnant - despite using birth control! - and now have her life ruined, a punishment for turning down the ten matches her parents found for her which only he could have meted out to her.)

Divorce and living together without marriage are explosive topics to an Indian, but to a jaded western viewer the films are striking for other reasons. Like the delirious dance numbers in "Kabhi" and the strangely disconnected love duets in "Salaam" and the crazed camera work in both! Lucky for you people have posted some parts of "Salaam Namaste" on youtube. So you can see many places I see every day as the protagonists fall in love ("My heart goes hmmm"). You can also see something I've never seen before - go on, I dare you - the title number where Australian girls in bathing suits do Bollywood dance numbers (not all that well). And here's something really bizarre, the only NRI whose English sucks is a Crocodile Dundee wannabe, with a Leitmotif from Ennio Morricone - is this how Aussies are seen in Hindustan?

Lorima

The other day I picked up a book I'd ordered at a local bookstore and although I'd spelled out my name when reserving it and we even corrected the a the man in the shop had written down when I said i, it was nevertheless filed under Lorima. Australian accents are an amazing thing. Sometimes, as when I overheard some people in the tram planning to swing by Chonnatan for dinner, it makes me woozy. At other times, it thrills me - I think I'm in love with ABC radio's Damien Carrick, or at least with the way he talks.

Something else on ABC made me think about accents yesterday. They were interviewing some prominent Australian expats in the US, including the new director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Tony Haymet. (Scripps is just down the coast from Del Mar, and houses a fabulous aquarium where I encountered the weedy sea dragons - most improbable-looking of Gould's fish - in real life just last year!) None of these people quite sounded like Australians any more, though they didn't sound like Americans either. More a sort of slick melodyless drawl with just the faintest occasional echo of singing vowels, but muffled. How must it sound to Aussies back home? The phenomenon is surely not new; I suppose a few decades ago the expats interviewed would be in Britain and sounding more English than the queen. And yet it seems to me there's something tragic in giving up an Australian accent for an American one, especially, as in these cases, where it doesn't seem deliberate.

See? Yanks can do the cultural cringe, too!

In other news, I had my last antimalarial pill yesterday - you're supposed to take them for two weeks past your return from your trip, since it takes a while for mosquito eggs to hatch. Has it just been two weeks since India? It feels like it was last year - all of last year!