November verse 10: Wiggle and Jiggle at the Library
For Scott Morrison
We're here to sing and dance and jiggle,
mums, a dad and sundry grands,
toddlers primed with twinkle-twinkle,
row-row, incy-wincy hands.
'Welcome all, here's bells and shakers.
Let's go where the songs will take us.
We'll have great fun this afternoon
though sadly I can't hold a tune.'
That was no lie. She sang with gusto,
high and low but always wrong,
We tried and failed to sing along
fell silent on that all-day bus. To
sing together lifts the heart
but badly led, song falls apart.
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Reading & watching- SBS On Demand: The Witnesses / 8 Zeugen (Jörg Lühdorff & Christian Rohde 2021?) 22 September 2021Alexandra Maria Lara is an academic psychologist who specialises in memory research. often called on as an expert witness to challenge eyewitness's memories, she is called on to directly interview the witnesses of an abduction. It's very good, appropriately suspenseful, with a satisfying final twist.
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- SBS: Strong Female Lead (Tosca Looby & Rachel Grierson-Johns 2021) 13 September 2021A documentary about Julia Gillard's time as Prime Minister of Australia, in the context of other women who have been in top leadership positions, beginning with Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka in 1960 and ending with Kamala Harris. The doco focuses on the extraordinary sexism directed at Gillard. None of it is news, but it's extraordinary seein […]
- SBS On Demand: The Witnesses / 8 Zeugen (Jörg Lühdorff & Christian Rohde 2021?) 22 September 2021
Aah! That thing about singing and not being truly able – rings bells for me. I remember this very season almost upon us back in my Japan teaching days – with middle schoolers and seniors and university students – singing (maybe holding the tune if not tunefully so – Xmas songs and Christmas carols (all let loose in shopping centres across Japan in any event) after explaining their general intent – snowy season: Frosty The Snowman, Rudolf, I’m dreaming… – and the decidedly unbiblical Santa story (but not in Australia – for which we’d sing the Aussie Christmas Carol “The north wind is tossing the leaves….the red dust is over the town…etc.) – or the Jesus nativity tales! (Adeste fidelis… We Three Kings, Away in a manger… and And even within that reference of mine – the red dust bit – acknowledged;edgement that for umpteen decades the invader kinds of land-use has been the antithesis to the careful millennia-long land management practices of the First Nations peoples! And just before departing Tbilisi in Georgia on Monday last – our Georgian guide telling us of forest wild-fires in the country’s mountainous north-west – country mostly above 2000 metres above sea level – peaks over 5,000 metres – and despite recent falls of snow among which we had tramped and slid and fallen – no bones broken thank goodness – and where such fires had never before occurred – amid retreating glaciers – climate change had well-and-truly arrived!
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Thank for that truly Proustian comment, Jim – from a children’s event in suburban Sydney to the mountains of Georgia by way of Latin sacred song, Japanese supermarkets and the havoc wrought by colonialism in Australia, all miraculously cohering in virtually a single sentence.
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You’ve enumerated perfectly all my faults of passion and connection and long-windedness! Merci beaucoup, mon ami!
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But being Proustian is not a fault. Quite the opposite
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