Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Coldest Winter
(David Halberstam) (2007) Through the noise of Vietnam and Iraq, we fail to hear and heed the still reverberating conflict in Korea, under armistice since 1953 but technically open. David Halberstam, in his last book, brilliantly recounts the manoeuvres and ideologies at play, and beyond the recounting of the bloody and appalling battles, informed by a decade’s worth of interviews of the high and the low, and supplemented by excellent maps, shows the political shadows cast by the conflict on American policy, such as the stance vis-á-vis China, only corrected after a generation of isolationism, and the consignment to irrelevance, for almost a…
Continue Reading →We should be kind
Statue of Philip Larkin at Hull by Martin Jennings; photo by Paul Harrop
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) The cult of celebrity infects the quest for perfection: how can we expect the best from a human endeavour if we require general perfection of those that strive? You could play a parlour game and cite ceaseless examples of the highest art that would never been born had its creator been held to some prevailing standard of conduct (or thought). Take Philip Larkin, the best English poet of his time. We find from certain biographies* and the gleeful poring over of unguarded correspondence that he had thoughts, impulses and views. [*We except the very accomplished and mature book, Philip Larkin,…
Continue Reading →The Wagner Operas
"Should be bigger...?" (Unveiling the Wagner Memorial in Berlin by Anton von Werner, 1908)
(Ernest Newman) This ‘earnest new man’ was a precise and authoritative Wagner enthusiast, but he stowed away gush and did not indulge in panegyric. Newman certainly had the measure of Wagner the man (as his 12 cassette audiobook Wagner As Man and Artist shows). Yet his love and appreciation of Wagner’s work shines in this single-volume complete Opera companion, the kind of work to thoroughly research beforehand if you want to accentuate the payoff of seeing a Wagner, or to skim afterwards to clarify any nuance or symbol left opaque by a particular production. As Newman says in his introduction, whilst “…a…
Continue Reading →Pride of the Bay
The Story of the Glenelg Football Club (Peter Cornwall and John Wood) (1999) Why be a Glenelg supporter? Why indeed? Objectively, it seems less a badge of pride than a sentence, a millstone, a curse from the abyss of Hell. We started life with a vote down at the Glenelg Council Chambers, when Glenelg was a half days buggy ride from Adelaide, on March 10, 1920. It made a debut in the SAFL, then the second tier, beating South Adelaide by a single point (for the uninitiated, the narrowest winning margin) in its first game. Then it entered the Big League, the…
Continue Reading →Seveneves
Sir Richard in Space (Image by Arnfinn Christensen)
Neal Stephenson Now, before we start…..is there anyone here who has not read Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, “Snow Crash”, “The Baroque Cycle” and “The Diamond Age”? If so, please just take some time. Go out and beg, buy, borrow or download them…all of them…and read them while the rest of us wait….. Welcome back. As promised, the rest of us waited here because we wanted to be sure that everyone has read the best of Stephenson before we proceed. If the first Stephenson I met had been “Seveneves” (or “Anathem” for that matter), I just might never have read Stephenson again – and that would be…
Continue Reading →