I ran into Rod the corner shop reviver the other day and asked him if Revolver would be open for Ascension Day. ‘When’s that?’ he asked. When I told him it was forty days after Easter, he replied in the emphatic negative. Shortly after that conversation, this notice appeared in the window:
In case you can’t read it because of the lovely suburban sunset glare, it says:
I know, the last one was the “last” update …
But this one is YOUR fault … you guys keep telling me you like them .. so I now like writing them
So … THIS IS THE LAST UPDATE!!
The cafe is nearly finished (so am I!). Thanks again for everyone who gave words of encouragement … it really helped me. The reason it has taken so long is … LACK OF MONEY (not passion). Now we are just doing finishing touches … then finding staff, suppliers, etc … Hang in there it will be worth it … People ask me, ‘What style will it be?’ Well not to give too much away but it’s an eclectiv mix of antique beauty with a hiphop street beat … Food will be simple (I hate pretentious food) … awesum coffee and all local friendly staff … can’t say any more …even tho I want to.
Oh and as for when will al this finally happen? … SOON!!! Or else they will be reopening Callan Park just for me!!!
Much love again
Rod
Cute little lights have appeared at the front of the shop:
The balcony is built, complete with bullnose awning. Iron lace and railing are stacked on the veranda, not visible here:
Rod and Chie, the owners, have made their mark in the footpath outside the converted butcher shop next door:
And just because it’s there, here’s a tiny replica of Michelangelo’s Moses that passes for a garden gnome in this part of the world.
No action here just yet. I’ve signed up on WordPress because I’m planning to close down my existing blog, Family Life, and continue it here under a new name. The transition will happen on 25 May. See you here then!
Months ago, I mooched four books by Ursula K Le Guin from BookMooch , and have been reading them semi-assiduousy since. I’ve waited until I’d read them all to do a combined post.
A sufficient interval having passed since reading The Tombs of Atuan, I moved on to the third of the Earthsea books and was not disappointed. It reminded me at some moments of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, probably because both books feature a ride in a boat that goes on and on and on. There’s no character as irritating as Reepicheep, however, and though the final destination was fairly clearly signalled, I didn’t have the oppressive sense in this book that all was predetermined, as I did in the C S Lewis book. (If you haven’t read VDT, don’t let these remarks put you off. I believe many people found it utterly delightful, and Reepicheep among its finest elements.)
There are really only two characters in this book: Sparrowhawk, now the Archmage of Earthsea, and young Prince Arren who comes to ask Sparrowhawk’s advice on a problem in his home island, and stays to be his companion in seeking out the cause of the problem – much bigger than Arren knew – and in the end overcoming it. The relationship between the two men, old and young, is a thing of great joy. Arren is described early on as falling in love with the old, wise man, and I can’t help lamenting that the moral panic about paedophilia that has corrupted our culture in the last 30 years has made such a description feel risky. I didn’t care very much about the villain: though the final confrontation with him wasn’t written perfunctorily, I read it without any particular commitment. On the other hand, a splendid non-human character makes its first appearance less than ten pages from the end, completely convincing, completely memorable. How does she do that?
Incidentally, the author biog in this book answers the question about the author’s middle initial: the K stands for Kroeber, the name of her anthropologist father and writer mother.
Then I moved on to a couple of adult books, to both of which I brought preconceptions.
I knew The Left Hand of Darkness had a lot of gender-bending, and I had a subliminal assumption that it was a bit of a women’s liberation tract. It’s not that I expected to be out of sympathy with its sentiments. I just didn’t relish the idea of 300 pages of right-on propaganda from forty years ago.
I needn’t have worried. UKLG is a story teller with a great gift for aphorism (my mooched copy has quite a bit of pencilled underlining of sentences like ‘A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt’) and a miraculous capacity for world-building. On the planet Winter, the humans become sexual for only a couple of days each month unless they are pregnant, and there’s no telling whether a given individual will be male or female in any given month. This holds a distorting mirror up to our assumptions about the primacy of gender for human identity, but there’s no preaching, and the reader is not told what to think about it all. The visitor from a planet where sexes are differentiated much as ours are (perhaps he’s actually from Earth) develops a close bond with a member of the other species, and is alone with him (every individual is referred to as him, even when pregnant) for several months – we know that he will be in ‘kemmer’, kind of like oestrus, during their time together, and the sexual tension will be huge. Not only that, but it’s clear that the shape of the book requires that their relationship reach a new level of intimacy. In the hands of a lesser writer this could have led to erotico-bathetic disaster. Not so here. The author plays completely fair; the tension is resolved; intimacy is achieved; nothing is icky.
If I had subliminally prejudged The Left Hand of Darkness to be 60s feminist polemic, The Dispossessed was filed in my brain under Anarchist Agenda. I may have actually read an excerpt when it first came out, in which there was a lot of exposition about the workings of anarchism on the planet Anarres. As expected, the book was a joyous surprise. The society founded by the followers of the sage Odo is, if anything, more profoundly challenging to our assumptions about human possibilities than the ‘bisexual’ characters of The Left Hand. These are people who learn from babyhood that you can’t own anything, that ‘excess is excrement’. They speak not of ‘my mother’ but of ‘the mother’; they have trouble grasping the concept of class or understanding the function of a state; they refer to the society on their twin planet/moon Urras, from which they are in voluntary exile, as archist and propertarian; and they find institutionalised sexism puzzling:
He knew from Odo’s writings that two hundred years ago the main Urrasti sexual institutions had been ‘marriage’, a partnership authorised and enforced by legal and economic sanctions, and ‘prostitution’, which seemed merely to be a wider term, copulation in the economic mode.
So yes, I guess you could read the book as utopian anarchist propaganda, but it’s much more impressive and engaging than that. The word ‘magisterial’ comes to mind. In Odo, who died two centuries before the action of the book, Le Guin has created a great visionary anarchist. We are given snippets of her life and works; the characters are steeped in them, quote chapter and verse, argue their meaning in a changed context – all in ways that make her a completely believable presence in the society based on her thinking
But the Odonians haven’t got everything right. Shevek, a brilliant temporal physicist (that is, one who deals in the physics of time – Shevek’s general theory of Simultaneity will transform space travel possibilities) can’t get his theoretical work published because the Odonian opposition to ‘egoising’ has congealed into a bureaucratic stymying of creativity, and sometimes wells up into mob hatred of anyone who challenges received ideas. Facing down accusations of treachery – and dodging hurled bricks – he goes to Urras to further his work. Chapters telling of his life up to the point of departure alternate with those narrating his culture shock, seduction and eventual disillusion among the propertarians. The book is still powerful and inspiring after all these years, bodying forth the truism that how things are is not how they have to be forever. I suspect that fans of Ayn Rand would see it as ridiculous fantasy from beginning to end, but then …
What do you do after you’ve written something as profound as The Dispossessed? I hope Ursula Le Guin managed to rest on her laurels for at least a little moment. it may have been a mistake for me to move straight on to another book of hers, away from the ‘Hainish’ world of the last two, because The Beginning Place seemed very pale by comparison. It is fantasy love story rather than political science fiction, and if it wasn’t written in impeccable, musical prose, it would be too long by half for its simple, and predictable, story. But predictable is sometimes just another word for archetypal, and there’s plenty to surprise and delight. Having just intimated a couple of paragraphs back that I was relieved at the absence of a sex scene in The Left Hand of Darkness, I should say that the sex scene in this is handled with a degree of frankness that all the same manages to avoid disrupting the story. We do have this sentence, however, as a warning that sex is dangerous to write about (the characters are fully clothed at this very serious point in the narrative): ‘His desire for her stood up and throbbed against her belly, but his arms held her in a greater longing even than that, one for which life cannot give consummation.’
Some time in the middle of my Le Guin Readathon, a friend said she’d read everything by UKLG in her Anarchist youth. I rushed from the room and brought back the first two Catwings books – this book and Catwings Return – which she admitted she hadn’t heard of. When she brought them back a couple of days later she said she’d enjoyed them, but two were enough: no need for Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings and Jane on her Own (neither of which I’ve read, so it seems I agree with her). Before putting them back on the shelf where we keep books for visiting children, I re-read just this one, and found it just as magical as the first time. I believe the idea for this book came to Ms Le Guin while she was standing in a queue at a supermarket, and she drew a sketch of a cat with wings on the back of her shopping list. S D Schindler’s convincingly realistic illustrations are a large part of the book’s charm. This was probably my fifteenth reading, and the last line still brought tears to my eyes.
It’s Passion Sunday. The statues in the Catholic churches are swathed in purple (or used to be when I was a frequenter of churches). We’re in the countdown to Easter. If you’ve been following the saga of our corner shop, about to be a cafe, you’ll undoubtedly remember that Easter is the latest of a series of promised opening dates. There’s been definite movement. I don’t know if you can tell from these phone photos, but the balcony with its bullnose awning is coming along well. A stylish grey paint job is under way on the upper outside of the building. We’ve had some heavy rain – who can complain? – but the two or three guys who’ve been up on the scaffolding for weeks now seem to be cheerful about progress. I’m not banking on an Easter rising, but I’ll be surprised if Revolver (as the shop is to be named) fails to be there by the Ascension Thursday. A little while and we won’t see it, but again a little while …
Last October I wrote a little blog post about Nicolas José’s address at the NSW Premier’s History Awards, in which he spoke of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, due for publication in August this year. José talked about Taam Sze Pui’s bilingual memoir, My Life and Work, published in Innisfail in 1925, taking it as an exemplar of the process by which:
As a piece of writing becomes literature, it is read and re-read by different people, discussed, digested, dismembered, recovered, until it enters a continuum of creative experience and expression that joins with where we are now. It speaks and we listen; relationships with other texts are revealed; it is valued for itself and contributes to something larger.
On my recent visit to Cairns I laid hands on a photocopy of Taam Sze Pui’s book in the rooms of the Cairns Historical Society (the helpful woman at Cairns Library had tracked down a solitary copy on the Australian Libraries Network, at the Australian National Library, not much good to me), and read the English in less than half an hour. It’s a modest work, elegant and spare, a kind of combination of Bert Facey good fortune, exhortations to Confucian virtue and sound business sense. There are a number of pages towards the end that are not translated into English, each containing a delicate pen drawing, probably from the author’s own hand, and what I take to be a poem. I photocopied one of them, as well as another untranslated page from the front of the book. I wonder if anyone who comes across this might be able to translate.
Added 3 July 2020: Many thanks to Wang Shu-dong, friend of Jim Kable, regular commenter here, for the following translation of the script in that image. Shu-dong comments that something seems to be missing at the beginning of the final sentence, but offers this translation:
店伴姊妹兄弟， 倘有偶尔误会冲突， 忍之为上。 All people in the store are brothers and sisters. If occasionally misunderstandings and conflicts occur, the best response is tolerance
事后开解，使其意悟，和好如初，方为上策。 After the incident, we had better let them self-examine and then they will be able to reconcile to each other.
(九)戒凡事以和为贵，苟能此道焉， 生意之隆， 可立而待也 Abandon the perception that harmony is the most important thing. If such a principle is followed, blooming business can be expected.
This blog post is retrieved from my earlier blog, Family Life, first posted 31 March 2009. Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay Nº 78 is in part an update of Guy Pearse’s Nº 33.
This essay made me think of Marshal McLuhan’s famous piece about Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’. In the Poe story, when a mariner’s boat is wrecked in a giant whirlpool, he manages to survive because he stops to observe the way the vortex works. The water spirals slowly swallow all objects, but some of them return to the surface. The mariner clings to one of these recurring objects and survives. McLuhan offers this as a model for how to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing and potentially destructive environment. In Quarry Vision, Guy Pearce doesn’t single out any obvious floaters, but he certainly takes a clear-eyed look into a maelstrom and, to muddle my metaphor beyond salvage, cuts through a world of spin to argue that clinging to coal is not going to save anyone.
I approached the essay expecting that my virtue in reading such a worthy piece would have to be its own sole reward – but in fact it’s a completely engaging essay, full of pleasures, if it’s possible to speak of something as frivolous as pleasure in such a dire context. The essay argues that we have been lied to, or at least deliberately misled, assiduously and at great expense, by representatives of the big carbon emitters and particularly the coal-miners and exporters.
Not one credible piece of economic research suggests that making deep cuts in emissions by 2050 would cause even a temporary recession, let alone ‘crash’ the economy, or ‘cut GDP’, or send energy prices spiralling, or cause whole industries to shut down or flee our shores. Every serious study of the costs finds that deep cuts would delay the trebling of the economy and doubling of real wages by a few years at most later this century. The same analysis finds that acting sooner generates about a quarter of a million jobs more than would delaying, and many of the steps that reduce our exposure to carbon prices save rather than cost money.
However, you’d know none of this from the apocalyptic language that dominates the political debate.
‘Policy,’ he says, and presents evidence, ‘is contaminated by patronage at every turn.’ The Garnaut Report was full of potential loopholes, carve-outs and escape clauses. The Green paper didn’t stop them up and the White Paper, which is what we’re up to now, continued in the same vein:
It was a surrender to the same forces in whose interest John Howard had governed, but with one important difference. The question of whether emission cuts would occur was now gone, because, unlike Howard, Rudd was agreeing to take on obligations commensurate with a 60 per cent reduction by mid-century. The policy agenda had shifted markedly. How deeply and quickly Australia should cut emissions was still contentious, but quantity and timing were no longer the central issues. The big questions now were to do with the quality and morality of Australia’s emission cuts: where the emissions were cut, who made the cuts, how the cost of the cuts was apportioned, and whether the answers to these questions would be made with the short- or long-term interest of the nation in mind.
The answers that Pearse comes up with are dispiriting. He argues in the end for the ‘unthinkable’ proposition that Australia should phase out coal exports over the next couple of decades. If we were to do that, we would be playing an authentic leading role in the ‘Climate Change War’, on the side of humanity, rather than being a significant player on the other side as we now are and will continue to be under current policies.
It’s hard to believe that an essay that cuts through the bull and obfuscation as clearly as this will not have a powerful effect on the course of events. I’ve written to my local member and to the Prime Minister. I think we can expect a huge increase in the vote for the Greens at the next Federal election.
A footnote: Quarterly Essays are edited by Chris Feik, who does a brilliant job. Like many if not most good editors he renders himself almost invisible. I consider him (I’ve just gone Internet hunting and seen that he’s male, and was or still is ‘a young academic’) one of the unsung heroes of our time.
Here’s a clutch of books I have more than a casual interest in.
I’ve told you about Paula’s Seven Seasons more than once, and may well do so again. Now I’ve actually read it. While it’s missing some of the juicier and possibly libellous moments of the early draft I read, it still offers plenty to chew on, and is also – Richard Aedy was right – a bit of a girl’s own adventure. More than 30 years ago I spent six weeks in a remote Aboriginal community with the Fred Hollows Trachoma Prevention Program. Just those few weeks were enough to unsettle my sense of what it means to be Australian. One of the other Trachoma-ites put it well, if slightly hyperbolically: I used to think Australia was a European country, he said, but now I realise it’s an Aboriginal country with a huge number of Europeans living around the edges. Paula spent a lot more than six weeks in Aurukun, and engaged in a way that shows up my stay at Willowra for the tourism it was. What’s more, she took on the challenge of wrangling the experience into words. I hope the book provokes a productive conversation. I expect it will give pleasure to most readers. But don’t take my word for it.
Early in the month, the publication of these books by former editorial staff members on The School Magazine was celebrated – nothing so grand as a launch – by a small lunch in town. I had the best gnocchi ever, the authors paid, and we enjoyed each other and the occasion in a way that might have been described as riotous if there had been more than a handful of us. But the pleasures of the lunch were pallid compared to those of the books. I hadn’t seen The Terrible Plop before, but I hope to see much more of it as a result of giving it to very young acquaintances: it’s a rhyming story of ridiculous terror in the forest that begs to be read repeatedly until it’s known by heart. The Museum of Mary Child is another book I read in earlier incarnations, as a beta reader. As a rule I’m not drawn to horror as a genre, and this is at least marginally a horror book – marginal because there are no vampires, ghouls or zombies. But I just loved it. I haven’t read the published version yet, but it’s been highly praised in the Aust Child Lit Crit journal Magpies as a ‘disturbing and quite terrifying’ book that ‘demands a special reader’.
This book slipped quietly into my mail box with a friendly note from the author. It turned out he’d used a quote from this blog as a back cover blurb, and I wasn’t embarrassed to see myself quoted. Stephen evidently plans to produce two very slim vols a year to sell at his performances, and his brief introduction to this one implies that he produced a number of poems in 2008 that didn’t make the cut. He’s a member or ARVOs (Australian Rhyming Verse Orators), a group who meet of a Sunday to celebrate their shared passion for bush poetry. Poems of 2008 begins with ‘Triangular Cantaloupe’ a smooth parody of/tribute to C J Denis’s ‘Triantiwontigongolope‘ and proceeds on its cheerful way for 40 pages. There’s a touch of controversy in ‘A Puzzle’, which raises questions about euthanasia in a poem that an introductory note suggests might be for children. There’s political comment, in ‘Australia Spurns a Hero’, about Peter Norman, the white Australian athlete who stood on the podium with the two African Americans who gave the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics:
Norman is a hero, now, throughout the USA. October 9 has peen proclaimed as Peter Norman Day, And in Australia's hist'ry a most sorry day is burned, For Norman is the hero that his native country spurned.
You can get copies from the BookPod online bookstore or, while stocks last, wherever Stephen Whiteside is performing.
Freda is a self published book of a very different stripe, a biography of Freda Whitlam, launched this morning appropriately enough at the Whitlam Institute in the University of Western Sydney. Noelene Martin, the author, is a friend and neighbour of her subject, and I suspect she chose the self-publishing route to improve her chances of getting the book into print while Freda, now nearing 90, and her elder brother Gough are still around to enjoy it. Noelene is a veteran writer of non-fiction for children (much of it published in The School Magazine during my editorship, hence my interest in the project), and it shows here: while the meat of the story is in Freda’s career as Principal of the prestigious Croydon Presbyterian Ladies College in Sydney, Moderator of the Uniting Church, force behind the establishment of the University of the Third Age in Sydney, and so on, it’s the first hundred pages that really shine.
You can tell that, as well as sifting through piles of youthful correspondence, the author spent hours with her subject, listening to reminiscences. As she said today at the launch, the down side of seeing the book finally published is that all the secrets about Freda that she has held close to her heart are now general property. The little girl who knew the Greek alphabet, but not the English, before she started school; the teenager who walked seven miles from her tutor’s place back to school and couldn’t understand why the Principal made a fuss; the young woman at Yale on a Fulbright Scholarship who slept through a sermon by Eric Fromm; the beginning teacher on an excursion to Alice Springs who couldn’t stand to see a tourist haggling with Albert Namatjira and interrupted to buy a painting at exactly the price the artist was asking: the book recounts these and a myriad other minutely recorded incidents that are steps on a journey to a significant contribution to public life. (As a bonus, we get to see Gough as a shadowy but brilliant big brother.)
The launch was an imposing affair. A handful of distinguished Whitlams, including Gough in a wheelchair, and a hundred or so other people, mostly a good bit older than me, gathered in a spacious hall with modern stained glass windows and were addresses by the Vice Chancellor, Barry Jones (the launcher, who proclaimed with reasonable confidence that he and Freda were the only two people in the room who had corresponded with Ezra Pound, and conceded that she won the competition by having actually met him in the asylum in Washington DC), Noelene and finally Freda herself. Much had been said about Freda’s modesty (her entry in Who’s Who is apparently terse to an extreme and she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page at this moment). Her speech exemplified the trait: she hardly mentioned herself at all, but urged us to be glad at the publication of a book by someone from Western Sydney, about someone in western Sydney, when so many people think that ‘out here we don’t read’. Everyone has a story worth telling, she said, and it was good that one person’s story was being told in this book. In other words, she found any number of ways of praising the book while directing attention away from herself.
You would probably have trouble finding this book, but if you’re interested in Whitlamiana, in the history of the Uniting Church in New South Wales, the University of the Third Age, or the past as a fascinating other country, I recommend you contact the author-publisher at mrsmarty(at)aapt(dot)net(dot)au.
Plywood structures have appeared at the corner. For a little while we saw them, and then again a little while, as it turns out, and we’re not seeing them: a guy with a hammer was taking them down again today. The reason for this seems to be partly bureaucratic hostility on the part of Leichhardt Council (who originally refused to grant permission for a balcony unless the shop owners paid to have the appallingly broken footpath repaired, but lost their case at the Land and Environment Court). But the bureaucracy can claim to be responding to a local outcry: it seems that a mysterious neighbour, hellbent on placing obstacles in the way of the approaching cafe, complained to the Council about having unpainted plywood adorning our corner. So the ply will be painted and put up again, and will stay there for a week or so as the balcony/awning is built.
I can’t give you photos of the transforming interior, but there have been sneak previews, and I can tell you our new corner shop / cafe will have style. Revolver is to be its name.
This, plus the appearance of a tall besser brick wall out the back, behind which extensions to ‘the residence’ have arisen, is the only sign of an approaching opening. Christmas, like September, has come and gone. Easter is now proclaimed as a firm date. In case you can’t read the phone photo, the sign says:
LAST UPDATE
Firstly I really want to thank all the locals who have given me such amazing encouragement & support thru this (two year) ordeal … There were so many delays & problems to overcome I had to go and get a fulltime job to pay bills. THIS IS WHY IT HAS TAKEN US THIS LONG … But now I can happily say the shop is near finished & we will open some time around easter!!! We will be a 40 seat cafe with some general store items for all us locals. Good food, good coffee, good music & good vibes. I see this as more YOUR! place that I will be running. Just a cool local lounge to create a neighbourhood vibe, unpretentious & honest. Everyone asks about the mermaid!! Don’t worry … she stays … And again thanks & love to Annandale for such kind words thru this hard time… it really kept me going. I can’t wait to show & share with you the passion I have created here. I love it so much. Also the group of you that was talking about the ‘billycart race’ … don’t stop … It’s a great idea & we should make it an annual.
much love
Revolver
I don’t know anything about the billycart race, and I guess Revolver is a good nom de guerre for someone called Rod.
Me fail? I fly! 