Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Uses of Enchantment
By Hans Thoma
(Bruno Bettelheim) (1976) Bruno’s book meticulously deconstructs the beauty and the terror of the fairy tale, with its bullying utility (a boon for childish education) and wonderful rogues’ gallery of archetypes. It’s a great book on the power of myth that goes beyond J.G.Frazer to focus on the utter magic of childish understanding and imagination. Bruno, a Professor of Psychology, and holocaust survivor (for awhile – he, sadly, stifled himself in 1990), understood both the power of fable and its tendency towards brutal indoctrination. He knew from life and in his finely-chiselled mind that we are all bullies – we are all bullied, and that…
Continue Reading →Life of Herod
Massacre of the Innocents (1565/7 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)
(By Josephus) (c. 79-93AD) A Jewish scholar who fell in with the Romans was well-placed to write an account of the fairly wicked and opportunistic King of Judea (37-4BC). Herod was a survivor in every sense, swinging between supplicant and psycho, and he knew how to pick a winner. Most of the losers, meanwhile, comprised members of his extended family, leading to the saying that it was ‘better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son’. This intriguing work has the nuance and factual matrix absent from the biblical references, suggesting that the Massacre of the Innocents was really an inspired…
Continue Reading →Attlee
(By Kenneth Harris) (1982) A big comprehensive tome on the bland, modest and decent Labour leader who as a rather supine Prime Minister from 1945-1951, gave the Brits post-war austerity and de-colonization. He seems to have oozed integrity, to the point where he was as clean and dull as an Eagle Scout Master (remember the quip “An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street and Mr Attlee got out”) but he was an invaluable brake on the zealous excesses of Churchill, within that curious and brilliant creature, the wartime coalition. This is reflected in the golden vignette of January 1945, when Attlee wrote…
Continue Reading →Gilead
(by Marilynne Robinson). I had read rave reviews of this book and was so pleased to find a decent second-hand copy. I started it, but couldn’t “get into it”. I thought that was just “me”. I then found a copy of the second book in the trilogy, “Home”. Yay! When I heard that the final book was available for pre-order I skipped to my computer and ordered it. I then waited, thinking it a good idea and motivational to put off reading the first book until I had all three. That would make it all the more fascinating the second time round. So, when…
Continue Reading →Big Blue Sky
"oh the temper of the time..." (photo Gympie Times)
(by Peter Garrett) (2015) A famous singer in a leading Australian rock band, environmental activist and all-round bien pensant, it was Peter Garrett’s stint as Federal Arts Minister that impelled The Varnished Culture’s perusal of his book. A lot of the time it is a happy memoir – from middle-class childhood in suburban Sydney, with warm milk and bush cricket, trains into the city and boarding school, discovering girls and rock and roll. Garrett’s early account is written with flair and humour. When as a kid he signed up to Australian Record Club, receiving a record in the mail every few months, it “was the only…
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