‘This week I had a pleasure of experiencing the best artistic event in Adelaide in many years. Shakespeare In Italy is intelligently written, superbly directed and fabulously played at Holden Street Theatres.’ — Leszek Pilch, Klemzig. (Letter to the Adelaide Advertiser)
‘Delightful trivia … performances enjoyable … some of the dialogue is irrelevant though undoubtledly clever. A nice feeling of the uncertainy of the times coupled with a strong sense of intrigue. Wayne Anthoney an excellent scheming cardinal, Bruce Venables a bluff merchant spy and, later, a boisterous pirate.’ — Myk Mykyta, Radio Adelaide.
‘Uncannily Shakespearian writing, and perfectly delivered by a great cast.’ — David Russell, poltical advisor. More to come
Name:
Bob are you going to bring the show to Murwillumbah! Tour it brother!
I,m still running Bob
What is that supposed to mean?
From the Liberal Party and excellence
Liberak Party excellent, is it? In what way?
Name one writer in it as good as Bob Carr. Or Barry Jones. Or Don Watson.
Or me.
Bob you are probably way ahead of the curve here, but have you sent a copy of your script to Jacobi, Rylance and Suzman, not to mention Branagh, Stanley Wellse etc etc. strike while the iron is red hot.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/9485729/Derek-Jacobi-and-Mark-Rylance-criticised-for-doubting-Shakespeare-wrote-plays.html
Suzman seems to think that it is “haughty” and class-related to say that the Bard’s plays were written by a nobleman.
I think I am a much a democrat and an egalitarian as any, and that the sonnets – universally admitted to be by the same hand as the vast majority of the plays – are, almost beyond reasonable doubt, written by a nobleman. A nobleman moreover who was in his middle forties or thereabouts in 1595. And a nobleman who was homosexually attracted to and involved with a much younger nobleman.
Suzman can say what she likes about the Oxfordians being elitist, but frankly I couldn’t give a damn whether the Bard was King James or the sanitary attendant at the Globe Theatre.
It is just rather more likely that the Bard was a nobleman, regarding education and life experience; it is easier to make a silk purse out of silk than out of a sow’s ear.
What I would like is that 400 years on the true author is given credit for his excellent works.
Neither here nor there Doug, the time is ripe for Bob’s and Denny’s play, while there is conflict and debate and dissent there is fame an riches to be had. Rylance is anti-Stratfordian, not pro De Vere, he lets his favoured voice fall on all nominees it seems except that of Will, he is a whore Sir, who thinks Neville is as good if not better fit than Oxford, so take it up with Rylance. I thought you might have had a point about the Sonnets, and after a recent reading, I think the Dark Lady Sonnets are more interesting and intimate than the other set, (no accounting for taste I suppose), nevertheless, far from the jury still being out, Oxfordians and the other 71 contenders are still trying to get enough evidence together to mount a case and get it before a jury, and by the way things look, it’s going to have to be a class action or nothing.
But for the meantime, we should add more fuel to the fire, and get SII launched on a world tour. And in that spirit; Oxford was a boy buggering pansy who owned a play group of child players and as a front feigned cultivation and the arts and didn’t know his Johnson from his Marlowe.
“…the sonnets….are, almost beyond reasonable doubt, written by a nobleman.”
Doug, with the greatest respect, this is simply not true. As you know.
It is a supposition, and one that rests on very dubious foundations – principally a rather ham-fisted attempt to apply features of modern literary practice to the very different milieu of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers.
After 80 years the Oxfordian’s have yet to produce one shred of actual evidence to support their theory.
The recent revival of the Oxfordian hypothesis is due to a not-particularly interesting film and some savvy web-marketing. It belongs to the history of Social Media rather than any kind of serious scholarship.
The pity of it is Doug, that in the last 30 years some really interesting work has been done on the way plays were actually written and produced in the period in question. Much of this work debunks the nationalist myth of Shakespeare that has grown over the culture like a parasitical vine. Unfortunately, none of this scholarship supports the Oxfordian case. Quite the reverse.
It’s so true, the more I read the more I feel that this was a tight community the comings and goings of which were so multifarious. If you watched the series The Tudors, the palace was a meeting place for all and sundry or such diverse interests and classes, and the need for politicking, begging, pleading, cajoling,sucking up had to be done face to face. It is almost like the court system in Bleak House, that constant requirement to be present, the continual nagging etc.
You think of Velazquez and Rubens, who were used by their respective courts and sovereigns on missions of diplomacy, and you realize how sophisticated these people must have been outside of their own spheres of expertise to be trusted with such duties.
It must have been a great time and place Polybius with the bonus of having to wear tights and a frilly collar.
Quite right, allthumbs. It’s a fascinating time. I’ve not yet read Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novel but I intend to.
It was an odd time – you could be all done up in your tights and frilly collar and smelling like a ripe cheese to boot.
Apparently, James I decided when he was six years old that he didn’t like bathing.
Apart from occasionally rinsing his hands and face, he never washed again.
The Mantel books are great, and if accurate, are a case in point. Cromwell’s background is one of very lowly origin, as well as containing the mysterious missing years,was he a soldier or did he work as a banker for a powerful Italian family etc, and yet his natural talents made him a confidante of Cardinals and Kings and one of the most powerful men in Britain. Cromwell also suffered the jibes because of his origins. And there is very little documentary evidence to put together a biography. The other thing that comes out was the propensity of families to put their children to work for other families at a relatively young age, children of all classes were sent to learn and work in houses and businesses all over the country.
Agreed, allthumbs.
It’s all too easy to project our own assumptions onto the past.
Resulting in some of the confusions that can be seen on this blog.
Just when how and in what way has human nature changed in the last 400 years? Or in the last 2500 years. Read the plays of Euripides and of Aristophanes and of Aeschylus.
“Very different milieu” ???
I can see we will need to agree to disagree, before I am accused of being a poor polemicist or of lacking a fine appreciation of semantic hair-splitting, or the misuse of emoticons.
PS No emoticons were harmed in the production of this reply.
(And my use of them is at all times tongue in cheek and because it annoys my sometime lover)
PPS I see no reason to publish such a disclaimer for the benefit and edification of every Johnny-Come-Lately who cares to blog here.)
Doug, it is not so much that “human nature” has changed since the Greeks but that the interpretation and expression of that nature changes with each successive epoch or age.
For example: Hamlet’s archetype can easily be located in the work of the Greeks, but Shakespeare’s rendering, his “Jacobean interpretation”, is remarkably original. It speaks to a whole new set of cultural and imaginative realities and, here is its genius, offers a new perspective towards understanding that human nature it itself is an expression of; it speaks of itself, to itself.
In this sense it is instructive to remember Ophelia’s “Lord, we know what we are, but we know not what we may be”.
Therefore I feel that Polybius’ assertion would be a correct one.
Jacobean? Hamlet was first performed at the latest in 1597, and probably some years before that. A minor quibble, but you do like such things.
As you may recall, it is my theory – original, I think – that nearly all the plays were written between 1570 and the mid 1590s, and performed privately at Court.
Then from the mid 1590s the Bard rewrote them for public performance. The theory would explain how so many excellent plays were written in so short a time from 1597 until 1604. It would also suggest a reason for Macbeth, written from scratch in honour of the new Scottish monarch, was apparently unfinished.
Discuss.
Doug, The fault is mine: I was attempting an ad-lib. I should have known better.
I used the term “Jacobean” so as to suggest, in light of the substance of my post, an era following on from that of the strict chronology of Shakespeare’s death date and/or Elizabeth’s.
This also hints at the period of “interpretation” that naturally follows on from a work’s publication date.
I was attempting to encompass too much within a single line.
It was clumsy.
However, my point is unchanged.
To your theory: I know it well. I’ve read the same 4 line argument retold 50 different times, in 50 different ways.
And yet,
I still wait for a single shred of evidence.
Discussed.
Doug, all of this has been dealt with before.
The notion that other playwrights finished off de Vere’s work – always improbable and obviously unsupported by any evidence whatsoever – has been further debunked by recent research.
James Shapiro in “Contested Will”:
“The Oxfordian claim that lesser playwrights touched up the works attributed to Shakespeare but written by de Vere by 1604 had until now proved quite difficult to refute. But editors of the collaborative plays have recently shown that some of these late plays could not have been started by one writer and later finished by another. A representative example appears in Lois Potter’s Arden edition of “The Two Noble Kinsmen”, where Potter shows that Fletcher wasn’t adequately aware of what Shakespeare was up to in the previous scene. In Act 2, scene 1, Shakespeare has a Jailor’s Daughter describe how Palamon and Arcite ‘ discourse of many things, but nothing of their own restraint and disasters’ (2.140-1).
The friends appear on the upper stage at the end of the scene but never exit – and that’s where Shakespeare leaves them. Fletcher, independently writing the scene that immediately follows, clearly had only a rough idea of what Shakespeare was busy writing in his assigned section, and has Palamon and Arcite appear on the main stage. And when they start to speak they contradict what the Jailor’s daughter has just told us in the scene that Shakespeare wrote, for the pair act as if they are meeting for the first time since the battle, with Palamon asking “How do you, noble cousin?” and Arcite replying ‘How do you, sir?’ Such discrepancies, while no doubt ironed out in production, are still visible in the surviving script – and render highly improbable the argument that Fletcher is completing an old unfinished playscript that fell into his hands. Things were a lot easier in the old days for those who doubted Shakespeare’s authorship, when it was still possible to imagine the ‘real’ author having his latest plays delivered to the stage door at the Globe”
Faber & Faber pps294-295.
The tide is running out on the de Vere Soap Opera, I’m afraid, despite it being recently plumped up by the ‘Anonymous’ farrago.
If it’s any comfort modern Scholarship is also dissolving many of the central features of the Sratfordian myth, and a much more interesting William Shakespeare is emerging. Not so much a semi-divine genius as a working man of the theatre.
Evidence, gents? After 400 years of the Stratfordians’ best efforts, the evidence they have can be set out in two short pages.
Add to that the obvious desire of De Vere to stay anonymous, the suppression of texts by the Jacobeans and the wilful misdirection of Ben Jonson and we have Buckleys chance of getting enough forensic evidence to ever satisfy the doubters.
No, the matter can never be resolved by “evidence”.
But the balance of probabilities is a different matter, and the Stratfordians are fighting a losing battle if they think the man from Stratford ever wrote a single line; he could hardly write his own name, and there is evidence of that.
There is no record that anybody at all from the Stratford area was educated during Shakespeare’s time. That’s because the school records were lost – as can be established by any cursory reading into the issue.
As to “…the obvious desire of De Vere to stay anonymous, the suppression of texts by the Jacobeans and the wilful misdirection of Ben Jonson…”, this is all fantasy and hokum.
The ‘balance of probabilities’? You’re an intelligent individual Doug, so I find your impulse to turn scholarship into a kind of glorified game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey puzzling.
In fact, I’ve persisted in this debate only because you’re not a tosser.
It just seems very unfortunate that someone with your flair would put themselves in thrall to a rickety 80 year old soap opera, when real scholarship is reshaping our view of the man and the period even as we speak.
Also, I can’t help wondering if you are aware of the ultra-conservative political views of J. Thomas Looney, the originator of the Oxford pseudo-theory? And which provided much of the fuel for that pseudo-theory?
I don’t think you’re a crank, but if you persist in pumping up the de Vere beach ball at every opportunity, you may end up being percieved as one.
cheers, R
I doubt that playing the man and not the ball will gain you much kudos, “R”
As for pumping up the ball, just what do I have to gain?
Pray tell?
The only evidence we can expect at this remove is on the balance of probabilities, and for mine De Vere is the very best fit.
And I did not raise the issue.
It’s all been thanlfully buried by the Olympic village
To DQ:
“I doubt that playing the man and not the ball will gain you much kudos”
Looney’s political beliefs were one of the main motive forces behind his formulation of the Oxfordian hypothesis, and are therefore relevant to the conversation.
As to what you gain?…I couldn’t possibly imagine.
The balance of probabilities does not constitute evidence, as you well know. The evidence that exists does not point to de Vere.
The issue has moved far beyond Looney as you well know. He did not found an ideology.
As to what the evidence points to, we must agree to differ.
Doug, those two pages you dismiss are still two pages more than De Vere has.
Let me try another approach: It must be a peculiar quirk of a profession to dismiss that which is intrinsic to its process – by that I mean, you have an interest in the Law, yet can offer no proof or evidence with which to advance or even assist your claim.
As if throwing away a primary tool were not strange enough, you then proceed to commit, what I can only describe as an intellectual/logical folly; you claim, actually you rationalise, as a defense of your eschewing of proof, that the matter can “never be resolved by evidence”!
I find such a declaration utterly fantastic.
On that basis Doug, I, in fact would sue the Oxfordians for attempting to steal the title of literary giant from the Stratford man.
What’s the code there Doug?
Let me see now,
Criminal Code Amendment (Theft, Fraud, Bribery & Related Offences) Act 2000
135.1 General dishonesty
(3) A person is guilty of an offence if: a) the person does anything with the intention of dishonestly causing a loss to another person..
Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years.
There we go!
Know any good lawyers?
I think we got ourselves a case!!
The difficulty is that the man from Stratford is long dead, Fed.
And you cannot get a good title to goods from a thief.
As for lawyers, I know hundreds of them; many of them are very good indeed.
Stick to your own field, Fed; probably dealing with aberrant undergraduates, from what I can gather.
Doug, with logic like this,
…the matter can “never be resolved by evidence”, and
“Either way”, and
“There is no evidence that the Stratford Man could write more than his own name, and that not very well”.
I find it bizarre that you, purportedly involved in the Law, could even put these forward with a straight face.
I think perhaps you should start looking around for another “field”.
Look Doug, it’s as simple as this:
The Stratford man known as “Shakespeare” is Shakespeare because….his name appears on many titles,
The Stratford man is Shakespeare because…Jonson says he is.
You refute that?
By all means!
And your evidence?
I thought so.
See? As simple as that.
A name on a title page – I nearly said a manuscript, but there is no such thing.
As Eric Blair was George Orwell, as Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain – names on a title page. Very convenient for the author seeking privacy and a private life, is it not?
A name on a title page. That is all.
Look at the substance, Fed; look at the writings of the Bard and tell me that a man with no proven education of any kind wrote them. And no contemporary account – no contemporary account – says “I knew Bill Shakespeare, he wrote all that stuff” – NOT A SINGLE FUCKING ONE.
Did you watch Qi, DQ?
You are sailing perilously close to the wind of the shameful politician who said: “Of course the children at the private grammar school are smarter than the children at the public school.”
Or, as said elsewhere: how could a poor rural lad from the back blocks of NSW write the works that have come out under the name “Bob Ellis”? It is obviously David marr et al who write these works under that pseud.
Fundamentally, your argument is based on an elitism that you perceive: an elitism that equates intelligence, creativity,drive, a love of story, love of language, love of theatre, with a level of social status.
In these days, we refer to that as “icsea”, and, on “My School” rate kids accordingly.
It is wrong. Unfortunately the edu mandarins think that income and caste describe people.
“Smart” is actually still widely spread. And, not confined to a particular class, as your arguments would suggest.
No proof of any sort of education, FI Kendall.
I have no objection to a grammar school education, or a modern government school for that matter. I went to one.
And I have Gough to thank for a university education. Bless him, as Bob might say.
But of course everyone has an education,DQ. To suggest, or undersatand this only in terms of “schooling” is rubbish. What resonance of language, what love of it, do you learn from turningup at church?
In any case, Qi seemed au fait with edu detailsthat you seem unawareof.
Why not watch it on iview?
“Must have” “had to have”
are the words used about the man from Stratford’s education. I saw QI. Listen carefully to Mr Fry.
How can it be resolved by evidence? There is only circumstantial evidence available 400 years on. Either way.
My point is that the fit for De Vere is far better than for any other candidate, including the apocryphal man from Stratford.
” There is only circumstantial evidence available 400 years on. Either way.”
There is certainly evidence that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, there is none for de Vere.
We’ve been over this in wearying detail – or at least, those arguing against your position have. You don’t really seem to do detail.
Ah well, Doug – you’re probably right – in saying that we must agree to differ, I mean.
After all, de Vere is a harmless enough hobby horse.
But I must say, I am looking forward to your future dissertations on Erwin Rommel’s invention of Cubism, and the strategic role played by Sir Winston Churchill in the beatles invasion of America.
If you want detail, do your own reading. Not my problem.
Try reading the Sonnets first.
There is no evidence that the Stratford Man could write more than his own name, and that not very well.
I already did it.
Write your own name?
Well, that was a bit limp.
Everyone’s a critic.
“don’t really seem to do detail.”
because there is no “detail” Polybius.
I am surrounded by the greatest critics and sleuths – there is no more formidable adventurer, no more passionate exponent of a conspiracy, than an undergraduate who spends 2 months in the library, a few quick internet searches and then BANG!! POW!! they’ve just cracked the “Big One”!!
It usually comes with a knock on my office door,
“Hi Ms. Fedallah. Ummm, could I talk to you for a minute”
It’s important”.
Simply priceless.
Keep trying, some undergrad will believe you.
Response top DQ, 9.34, and his comment: “I have no objection to a grammar school education”.
Nor do I.
But, my comment referred to a politician saying that a child at a private school is obviously smarter than a child at a private school.
Does anyone else find this as offensive a comment as I do?
I do; I find the comment very offensive, and manifestly untrue.
And yet the assumption is the core of the Oxford thesis!
Come on Doug!
101.
er…smarter than a child at a public.
Have a little more wine to clear your head, FI
To Doug, from above:
Doug, It was a mean thing to do, I know. I made you lean into the punch. I’m sorry about that.
But I was just trying to show you something; I was just trying to make a point about the argumentative style of the Oxfordians.
Look:
Put forward 2 easy questions, in this case the simple, documented fact of a name on a page, and the testimony of a peer (Jonson), and ask for evidence based direct refutation.
And your return?
The resort to speculation (De Vere’s alleged pseudonym),
The resort to the biographical fallacy (education, etc), and
The resort to questioning the lack of specific documentary materials from Jonson (!!!) when we know much about the extent of their relationship, both personal and professional.
Doug, If you are not able to refute these two reasonably simple questions with any evidence at all, what possible hope do you have of addressing the more complex questions?
Are you sure you have an interest in the Law?
Polybius is correct; we are going nowhere.
So I leave you with these final two:
*concerning the specific:how did De Vere know Kempe?
*concerning the general: where is De Vere’s will? Did he write one?
If you (your Oxford sites) can tell me the answer the the first of those, and offer me a smile of acknowledgement for the second, then we have a conversation that just might see you move into 2nd year.
But as it stands now, I’m going to have to ask you to repeat 1st year logic, before you can sit in my class.
I’ll repeat this in case you choose to misdirect:
How did De Vere know Kempe?
Depends what you mean by “know” , does it not? De Vere had been involved in the production of plays since he was old enough to talk – his father owned a troupe of “players” to put on performances, privately. Look at Hamlet and how the Prince directed the players in putting on the play within the play.
Autobiographical? I think it is at least based in De Vere’s own experience, as is Polonius – based upon De Vere’s own father-in-law Lord Burghley.
I’d love to debate all this stuff with you, but I fear a blog site is not a very good forum. It is very much one-way communication. It is subject to sidetracking. And we are so far off topic as to annoy many readers.
And if you accuse me of “misdirecting” one more time, I will not bother replying to you. It is that I have no intention of being cross-examined or required to provide “evidence”which you know and I know does not exist.
As for first year logic, stick it where the undergraduates want you to stick your other opinions. Sideways.
Doug, I’ll get rid of the absurdity first:
“I have no intention…. of provid[ing] “evidence” which you know and I know does not exist.”
How anyone allegedly working in the Law can issue such a statement as this is beyond me.
There is no greater concession to your impoverished arguments, and claim, than this.
Now to the heart:
If De Vere does not know Kempe, and there is no evidence that he did, none at all from either the Stratford side or the Oxfordians, or from any records or readings that I’m aware of, then De Vere could not be the author of the canon.
End of story.
Or find the link.
“Sideways” – I loved that movie!
You misquote me and/or take me out of context as you often seem to do. Somewhat of a failing in a pseudo academic, I wouuld have thought.
The answer is blindingly obvious : De Vere did not want to know Kemp or Jonson or any other such person officially. And if you quote me without using the critical word “officially” you are beyond the pale.
“Misquote”?!?!
You cannot be serious?
DQ: “It is that I have no intention of being cross-examined or required to provide “evidence” which you know and I know does not exist.
My quote: “I have no intention…of provid[ing] “evidence” which you know and I know does not exist.”
Misquote?
My peachy arse, it was a misquote!!
Now – if you see my asking about Kempe as being a question of “De Vere did not want to know Kemp or Jonson or any other such person officially” then I’m afraid it’s plain to see that you have no idea what I’m speaking of; no idea as to the importance of Kempe.
No doubt you will now scurry off to Wiki (good luck), read like a cramming 1st year and come back tomorrow, nonchalant, and admit you had known about Kempe all along. You were just “testing me” is what you’ll say.
And you thought it was about the “blindingly obvious”!!
Good Heavens Doug, you really are a bus bench legal secretary aren’t you?
Canguro, cancel that dinner! Doug’s got more reading to do!
No need to do any reading Fed. Kempe was a well known actor, big fucking deal.
You are starting to annoy me, pseudo academic.
“Kempe was a well known actor”!!!!!!!
That’s what we like about you Doug; your depth!
Doug’s correct, as is Fedallah, and Polybius also. This authorship question is still mired in disagreement, still being battled out with thousands of words written, and no end in sight.
I think the pragmatic thing to do, and a nod to DQ for the suggestion, would be to meet by arrangement at an appropriate watering hole and let the discussion proceed.
Mediation is optional, and here… toss the hat into the ring… I’m available for unbiased intervention.
What say ye?
[I know it's a long stretch from blogsville to realsville and so if y'all ain't that keen on the idea, ain't no mind.]
Hi Canguro, reluctant as I am to break cover I will surface for drinks or a communal dinner IF, and only IF, Doug comes bearing evidence.
Doug?
Polybius?
I’m happy to have Canguro mediate.
Canguro, bring Untitled66 and you’ve got yourself a deal!
Doug? Can I bring J.G.Cole?
Drinks or a communal dinner, with “evidence” ???
Pardon the pun, but it sounds more like a Kangaroo Court to me.
DQ, with so many pseudonyms here, the communal dinner is not going to have too many diners…maybe a dinner for two.
I’m sorry Helvi!
Did you want an invite?
Of course!
There’s an extra chair. Doug can’t make it. He has some reading to catch up on.
F, you are very kind, but I’m getting ready to have my own Friday night dinner out for four…hubby is showering….
Many thanks.
ah-h-h-h-h-h-hem!
it seems as though my invite got lost in the mail?!!
oh well it does happen………….
have no fear however as I will certainly be attending
i would not miss this one for the world
ps: i’ll be bringing along reader1.
You’ll recognise us rapidly.
she’ll be the one slurping the chimay and i’ll be the one supplying
instruction on its history and the exemplary characteristics of its creators
see you soon!
Dinner would certainly be interesting, drinks even more so – overproof rum and gasoline would be the order of the day, I should think.
However, most of you seem to be in Sydney, and I’m in Melbourne.
Plus, I”ve run out of hollow point ammunition after a more-than-usually fractious tram journey to Box Hill.
Never mind, perhaps we’ll all meet when Bob Ellis launches DQ’s Magnum Opus at Gleebooks: “The Sidestep in Theory and Practice”
Doug’s certainly a fine dancer Polybius!
Wait till he gets you on a slow number!
Whew!
What are you talking about?
These idiots have been trying to cross-examine me for months, apparently because I threaten their cute academic pretensions and their cherished academic certainties, so ingrained that to admit that anything other than their comfortable certainties is true would damage their dogma.
Doug, you “threaten” no-one.
Amuse? Yes.
Threaten? No.
On the contrary, your cherished certainties are threatened. Many academics have built a career based upon a paper written when they were in their twenties; to have someone challenge the very basis of their construct, when they are in their fifties, challenges their life’s work. Very, very threatening.
And to the young(er) intelligent idiots who would defend their mentors.
“Evidence” can threaten.
Your cerebral farting however, based on speculation, does not.
You would know all about cerebral farting. Your bathroom meetings with the mirror must positively reek when you all get together. LOL
Sigh…
My naiveté gets worse as I age. It’s not supposed to work that way, a balanced man would grow and mature into wisdom. I’d foolishly thought the way to reach amicability on the authorship issue would be best served by carousing with buxom wenches and quaffing tankards of roundhouse ale in some Tudorian bolthole.
And a very laudable ambition it was, Canguro…
Or turn
into a tavern brawl . . .
the legend goes that it did for Marlowe, though that may be apocryphal.
there are many of us in melbourne polybius, including myself…do not worry I will spot you your airfare
Why, thank you sorbet, that’s a delightfully kind offer.
I think it important that the dinner take place so that we can all club together to pour many barrells of oil on these unfortunately roiled waters.
I think I’ll make my piece with DQ by presenting him with an heirloom that’s been in the family for many years.
It’s a tobacco pouch made from the carefully tanned scrotum of the 17th Earl of Oxford.
The item is clearly identified by the de Vere coat-of-arms done in needlepoint.
Now, that’s evidence.
polybius- absolutely perfect
you bring along that scrotum
and i will bring…in the spirit of things…..absolutely nothing whatsoever
..except perhaps ample
assertion
….that increases commensurate with my bourbon intake
now to the venue……
does everyone know the de vere in surry hills?????
Hosts don’t receive invites sorbet, they extend them!
See you there!
Bring your own tobacco!
I look forward to seeing your “ample assertion” sorbet.
Can’t wait.
you got me U66.
there will be more than one
but all will derive from only one
until i am exhausted
and start deflecting…
and perhaps abusing..
or am called to revert to reader1
who needs me to clarify a few more things about her beer
Cheeky!
This guy in the link below was apparently part way through writing an episode of Murphy Brown when he was lost to authorities, highlighting some of the difficulties that stem from a lack of education in the culture of which one writes. Though seemingly intelligent, he simply did not know that Murphy Brown was cancelled back in the nineties. He didn’t even know how to spell Karl Stepanovic.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-503736/werewolf-boy–snarls-bites–run-police-escaping-moscow-clinic.html
” He didn’t even know how to spell Karl Stepanovic.”
“Stepanovic”?!?!
Oh no!
How awful!
Don’t be so snooty. It’s a fucking cultural reference. This is the point. It does not speak to intelligence, it speaks to familiarity.
“Snooty”?
Hardly “snooty”.
It’s more “Geeez it’s hilarious when preening hubris is pricked by its own sting and goes flying around the room like a child’s balloon making that wonderfully apt farting sound!”
It’s more like that.
I’m well aware of the point Reader.
What I’m saying is that you should perhaps spend less time on priggish grandstanding and more time on spelling.
I do believe you’ve been here, this EXACT spot, before.
Walk before you run Reader.
Walk.
Nice and easy.
Someone else on this blog, a Liberal, pulled me up on the spelling of Stepanovic a while back and it was that I as referencing. Why such fierce emotion in the community on the spelling of Stepanovic I don’t know. But snootiness is most certainly involved. There is no other reason.
Don’t mistake “snooty” for laughing at pretension exposed Reader.
Two quite different things.
Like Stepanovic and Stefanovic.
See?
Quite different.
Stefanovic is a very common Serbian surname, I did not know whom you were referring to with your ‘Stepanovic’…
I am not familiar with the Serbian language and was not aware Stepanovic was Serbian and still to this minute lack interest.
Sorry, I did not know that you were interested only in one language, English.
Who are Murphy Brown and Karl Stepanovic, are we supposed to know who they are…
I don’t care. Why would you make such a pointless comment? It’s a cultural reference. You need to be educated in or familiar with the cultural reference in order to be able to make the cultural reference. There is no objective authority operating outside this, no middle class saviour, white bread genius hero to transcend this basic constriction.
“Why would you make such a pointless comment?”
Malice, R1.
You are not fooling anyone, E.I.Kendall….
And possibly also a white centricism/Serbian connection, it does seem to provoke an inordinately strong reaction in certain types. This is the host of Seven’s Sunrise we’re talking about here, if I can spell Peter Andre then isn’t that sufficient? My main point at any rate was about the werewolf boy.
Actually he’s the host of Channel 9′s morning news show.
“This is the host of Seven’s Sunrise we’re talking about here”.
“Why would you make such a pointless comment? It’s a cultural reference. You need to be educated in or familiar with the cultural reference in order to be able to make the cultural reference.”
Yep, that about covers it.
Fortunately Helvi, you dear old thing, I have no desire to fool anyone: that is part of the pleasure I find in being, like you, a dear old thing, is it not? We have grown past artifice or pretence.
Perhaps I will see you tomorrow at the Moss Vale Flea market.
…as I said dearies, you are not fooling anyone, too much time wasted allready, have a good night…
I had to laugh, Helvi.
You poor little thing.
So pleased for you, did you have a nice night watching Balmain Tigers on some commercial station. Sorry I don’t watch sport or commercial stations, not even for cultural references.
Was this supposed to have some relevance to me, Helvi, or have you posted it in the wrong place?
I recently had a poem accepted by Quadrant. I don’t watch television or know anything about football clubs, although I see that you do.
A poem?
Really?
There are so many listed F.I.Kendall, how am I to recognise yours?
A clue!
Give me a clue!
hello f.i. kendall.
lovely to meet you!
you claim you “do not watch television”.
this is quite the admirable renunciation i must say
however as above above you certainly viewed
the television program Qi.
is one to assume you are taking the strict literal definition of “watching television”
??!?!?!?!
For those who are interested, a neutral short biography of De Vere :
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/deverebio.htm
De Vere most likely died of plague, and the result was that as usual in those times he was buried as quickly and safely as possible, with no funeral as such. He left no Will. A sad end to the man later acclaimed (in 1622, by Henry Peacham ‘The Complete Gentleman’) as first among the poets of the Elizabethan period.
That is, better than Spenser and Marlowe, Campion, Wyatt and Hoskins, to name a few.
Based upon the works known to be his own? Probably not, as certain well-known critics have pointed out their defects.
Perhaps Peacham knew something we did not, as did Webb and Puttenham, writing in the late 1580s : “best for comedy” – certainly not based upon the known acknowledged works. Based on early versions of ‘Measure for Measure’, or ‘As You Like It’ perhaps? Hmm?
Doug, sigh
,
“a neutral short biography”?
Hardly!
The author of this article is a known Oxfordian.
There is a general understanding that De Vere was neither a great poet nor a particularly original one. To rank him alongside Spencer is a patent absurdity, to declare that he was “better” situates Peacham in bedlam.
You’re getting too old for this sort of ambulance chasing!
Can’t wait to see you at the, where was it again sorbet, the De Vere in Surry Hills?
I’ll recognise you Doug. You’ll be the one without a scrotum!
Hi Polybius!
Rolling your own now?
Let’s do it.
All of us!
Let’s all gather for drinks and dinner!
I’m keen!
Name the city and the place.
Who could resist a meeting?
I don’t know whether to expect one Fernando Pessoa, or several.
being fully occupied with his windmill, Quixote may be too busy to attend.
Polybius, I must say your allusion to Pessoa was as perfect as it was unexpected and inspired!
Damn!
It will be my pleasure to buy the first, second and third round!
Ahh, what the hell!
Barkeep!
Bring us a bottle of Hart Brothers Bowmore 18!
Set em up right here my good man!
Good!
Salut!
I highly doubt that you have a scrotum Ms Fedallah.
she’s got a peachy arse and more front than myer, so i hear mr. quixote
that in itself will make for a splendid evening!!
A very fat arse has Fedallah, the very same one that Cole has. They should “both” fuck off.
The “general understanding” is based on the false premise that De Vere was not William Shakespeare.
And you and your fan club can gather in a telephone box; should be plenty of room.
Doug, “false premise”?
Really?
And your evidence for such as assertion?
Oh I’m sorry, I forgot, you don’t do “evidence” do you?
Or detail.
And from your statement above about ‘neutral’ it also appears you don’t do research.
Or acknowledgement.
Or rebuttal.
Or argument.
Not to worry Doug!
You still have your scrotum.
Oh no, you don’t have that either!
Smoko anyone?
Now where’s Polybius and that damn pouch????
Why should I bother ever replying to you?
I state my case as I see it, my opinion. You merely regurgitate the orthodox line. Why do you bother? You certainly don’t amuse me, or anyone else as far as I can tell, with your playground cheap shots.
Don’t bother hitting the “reply” button ever again; I won’t be reading it, and I recommend others to do the same.
Vale Fedallah.
Oh come on Doug, don’t be like that.
Here, look at this:
I’ll just stay on these latest ones – there are so many others we’ve all lost track.
You stated above that the article was “neutral”.
It is not; neither author nor article.
You were UNAWARE of that.
And so I made you aware of that.
What you need to do – to demonstrate to everyone here that your interest is sincere and that your insights worthy of consideration – is acknowledge that, with say,
“Oh goodness me Fedallah, you are quite correct! I didn’t know that the author was an Oxfordian and that his choice of referenced authorities is extremely selective and biased. Yes, yes, I can now see how that could be misleading. I’m sorry if I’ve steered you all on a dud link. I’ll be more rigourous in the future. Actually what I will do is try and search out any evidence of the kind necessary to construct a credible case – I’ll include as much material as possible – that way anyone interested will be able to navigate a more academically rigourous path through what I believe to be a highly contentious issue”.
Something like that Doug.
Give it a shot, You can do it.
Avoid this at all costs – “The “general understanding” is based on the false premise that De Vere was not William Shakespeare.” and do not rationalise it with this “I state my case as I see it, my opinion.”, it makes for an awful qualification that obliterates any sort of credibility your initial sentence may have had.
Someone, like me, will actually call upon you to articulate the substance of that which you call a “false premise”.
The reason you have thrown this tantrum now is because you cannot.
Your capacity for argument; logic, depth and knowledge, on this matter, is I’m afraid, limited.
Hence your frustration when challenged.
I am not conducting this conversation with you so as to ”amuse”:
I do it so as to instruct.
Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do – so as to soothe your furiously injured heart I’ll let you buy me a drink.
How’s that sound?
Good!
“I recommend others”
Oh Doug! You are such a baby!
I don’t know that there’s a lot of point pursuing this much further, Fedallah.
Mr Q is not interested in discussion or argument. He has made an assertion and simply wishes everyone to accept it. When that acceptance is not forthcoming, it sends him into a towering snit.
His personal investment in de Vere is curious, but apparently unshakeable.
To DQ: you’ve got yourself into a proper knot, pal. You seem to imagine that there is some kind of ‘Stratfordian Orthodoxy’ determined to cover-up Shakespeare’s true identity, and who are terribly threatened by you and your fellow Oxfordian insurgents.
Pure fantasy.
The most interesting work that has been done on Shakespeare in the last 30 years or so has dealt with the question of Shakespeare’s collaborations with other writers along with work practices in the theatre of the period. The ‘traditional’ view of Shakespeare is an untidy confection of 19th century Romanticism and Nationalism and the Oxfordian position sprouts from the same Victorian rubble heap. Modern scholarship has rendered them both irrelevant.
You’re like a man who claims to be able to explore the galaxy by means of astrology.
Surprisingly enough, I don’t agree with your assertions.
If you think that there is any reasonable evidence of collaborations, rather than a cobbled together attempt to make unfinished plays stageable, I would YOU to produce evidence.
For evidence of Shakespeare’s collaboration with Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsman, see Lois Potter: “Fletcher, John and Shakespeare, William “The Two Noble Kinsmen” The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series, Thomson Learning 1997. ” In point of fact, the quarto published in 1634 had Fletcher’s name om the title page.
For a discussion of Shakespeare’s collaboration with George Wilkins on Pericles Prince of Tyresee Jonathan Hope: The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge, 1994. Also Macdonald P Jackson: “The Authorship of Pericles: The Evidence of Infinitives”, Note & Queries 238 (2993): pp. 197-200; Jackson 2003.
See also Brian Vickers: Shakespeare, Co-author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays.
A small selection of the large volume of scholarship on this issue.
But it is neutral! The fact that it was written by a so-called Oxfordian is neither here nor there.
And it is all a matter of opinion : none of the main players is around to testify and the written record is so ambiguous as to allow almost any strange theory to gain some sort of credence.
As I have told you before, I had no interest in the authorship question despite having a deep and abiding interest in Shakespeare’s works, until last year.
I came to the authorship question with fresh eyes and a fresh mind, uncluttered by decades of “knowledge” about the issue.
My investigations were thorough given the time available (now sadly reduced) and all roads led to Rome : that De Vere was the perfect fit for the true identity of the Bard.
I have yet to see any satisfactory rebuttal of Sobran’s book, and certainly none of Rowe’s book.
Refer me if you will to the work making the stongest case for the Man from Stratford. I will read it whilst you refrain from your judgements.
I also will refrain, until it is read; there really is little more to say in any event, as we reach stalemate.
Why don’t we try not sniping at each other for a while?
Doug, I was sitting; drinking my morning coffee and composing my reply to your post.
J.G.Cole sitting right here, and armed with his 100 watt beaming broad smile, suggested I simply reply with a list of names.
He, as usual, is correct.
So to spare any further argument I leave you these names.
Read them.
If you care.
Greenblatt, Shapiro, Wells, Ackroyd, Bate, Nuttal, Schoenbaum, Latham, Vickers, Cox, Chambers, Nichol.
If you found Sobran “convincing”(?!?!?) then I’m certain you will/should appreciate the rigour of these chaps.
You and Cole, looking in the shithouse mirror as you take your morning crap?
Try Shapiro. He has his head screwed on, and you will find out some interesting facts about the unfortunately named J. Thomas Looney.
Yes Polybius, I liked Shapiro’s “1599″ book, and correct again Thomas is a dreadfully unfortunate name.
It certainly is. Makes any reasonable person think of impertinently fingered wounds.
Most unfortunate.
Who gives a flying fuck about Looney?
Shoot the messenger all you want, tar and feather Looney if you will.
Shapiro I have read, and he fails to convince, IMHO. The same “must have” and “had to have” shit the orthodoxy always has to serve up.
Do you think it is convincing? I don’t.
Nope, I can’t do it!! I’m simply not strong enough!!
Doug: please, this is important: we have addressed this question many times and your reluctance to acknowledge the fact, whether you believe it or not, that the entire Oxford claim is predicated on the notion of “must have”, hampers this discussion no end.
This has formed the foundation of every claim you have made for Oxford. Look back over your arguments, not one, not one Doug, can survive without the preface:
“must” be a nobleman, “must” be educated, “must” be well travelled, “must” be homosexual(?), works “must” be written in these years, “must” be a pseudonym….
“Must”, “must”, “must” – raison d’être of the biographical fallacy.
If we look at the term grammatically we can see further evidence of the logical disconnect that characterizes the Oxford claim – “must” suggests a certainty that is a clear logical deduction based on evidence: as in, “it must be raining” – I can see the rain water pooling in my backyard from my window.
The Oxford claim has no “certainties” because there is no evidence.
That you see fit to conclude your post to Polybius, and by association, myself, with the charge that the Stratfordians rely on “must” to carry their claim is a comically despicable, and wholly predictable, argumentative technique.
“And it is all a matter of opinion”
No, it is not. There is enough material to confidently claim the Stratford man as Shakespeare the author of the canon. Any counter claims, Oxford’s among many others, need to, are obligated to, bring more than speculation and coincidence to the table. Established facts OR myths will not be, cannot be, replaced by either subjective twaddle or interpretive naiveté.
Doug, if you have something to offer other than opinion, then I for one would love to hear them.
If it’s just opinion, or a regurgitation of the Oxford sites, then I ask you to please refrain.
We’ve heard them all before.
Fedallah, a question of no account perhaps, but is there anything else known about the man known as John Heminges, the actor and co-editor of the First Folio, apart from those two important pieces of historical fact?
His genes survive to this day, embedded in the flesh of my siblings and self, given that he was my great great many times removed grandfather.
Canguro – try this link, although it doesn’t seem enormously informative, there’s a bit of info there:
http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/editors/h-c.htm
Thanks for that, it added a little more to the story.
My brother has a coat of arms that had been in our grandparent’s keep, and handed down through the family line since the time of John Hemynge.
We were told it was a replica and that the original was destroyed in the Great Fire of London.
Awarded to him for his services to the yarts.
Perhaps the people at the Globe Theatre in London would be interested if you sent them a picture of that coat-of-arms, Canguro.
Actually, now I come to think about it, the Globe maybe just the people to approach for information about your ancestor. I understand they have a large and well-funded (well, pre-GFC) research unit.
Canguro,
I’m afraid I cannot.
There is precious little about these guys and any mention of them is in direct relation to Shakespeare’s Company and the Folio’s.
I think there are 1 or 2 books specifically concerning their work but I have not read them.
All I can say from my readings is that they both sound like good men.
Tell me about the connection; how did you come to know of it?
* You should have taken up Untitled’s invitation to tell a little of your story. I think a dose of real life would serve us all well.
To Polybius, I’m still smiling at your Pessoa reference.
Who did you have in mind?
Sorry, “both” as in John Heminge and Henry Condell.
Let me preface my remarks by saying I could be completely wrong about all this.
There are a group of posters on this blog – some current, some who appeared recently and who now only make intermittent appearances – who appear to be related. I’m thinking of yourself, untitled 1966, JG Cole and a long roll call of others.
Many of these posters have been accused of trolling, being some kind of ‘United States of Tara’ and so forth. And maybe I sort of thought that way myself for a while.
But I’ve been reading many of the posts with a great deal of enjoyment and now my thoughts are different.
My theory is that you are heteronyms – whether produced by one person or a group of people. And that these heteronyms are being deployed in much the same way that Pessoa deployed his.
It’s not a question of ‘pretending to be someone else’. Something else entirely is going on here.
If you started up a blog I would definitely like to read it. Not because I don’t want you to post here, I’d just be interested to see what you might get up to in your own domain.
Now, as I said, I could be completely wrong, and I will not be miffed if you point out my errors. I don’t really care whether you are one or many, because I’m enjoying what you write very much.
Polybius,
“Something else entirely”
We will need to discuss this.
You lead.
Otherwise I have my own question(s).
You have surprised me.
Thank you.
“We will need to discuss this.”
That would interest me very much.
“You lead.”
To be quite honest, I am slightly at a loss as to where to go next with this or which question to ask. There are so many possibilities.
But what was your question?
Hi Polybius,
There are many questions,
I think I’ll start here:
1. What were the prompts for this statement, “and now my thoughts are different”?
I count 2 possibilities, but I would certainly like to hear them from you.
Hi Fedallah – yes, that’s an interesting question.
The turning point for me was when I attacked Patrick Dignam in response for what he said to someone else. He objected to the attack and sort to engage, but I wouldn’t.
It made me think about who was the troll, really. It made me think that perhaps it was me, after all.
So I decided to pay more attention. To button my lip and not shoot from the hip.
So I began to read all the posts with judgement suspended.
Now, as I said, I probably have got the relationship between all these heteronyms wrong, and I have no idea whether they’re produced by one person or a group. But as i read further into the posts, particularly some of the long posts of untitled 1966, I began to think that I was seeing the playing out of some kind of writerly strategy – although I have no precise idea of what that is.
I also took not of your contributions to the endless de Vere wrangle. I saw that, while you can be extremely provocative at times, you also know what you’re talking about.
I hate these skinny columns – the next time I reply, it might be down at the bottom of the page.
To Doug, regarding Polybius’ post to you on August 28, 2012 at 9:50 am
This is the bit where you say,
Gee, thanks Polybius, you certainly have answered my question in a most considered and succinct fashion; I’m sorry that I put it to you in the form of a challenge. I know, the capitals were silly, I was trying to intimidate. I can see now that I was simply being foolish. I do now realise that there are people here who have obviously read more on the subject than myself and it would be prudent if from here on in I simply asked questions.
Anyway, well yeah, I can certainly see from your post that the collaboration issue has been addressed by some formidable scholars and it would certainly be worth referencing should I ever be possessed by doubts, or by ignorance.
Whichever comes first.
Thanks again Polybius. I’ve learnt something, and for that I’m grateful.
See? Do not avoid Polybius’ direct post; address it, acknowledge it.
Return the consideration given to you.
It’s not difficult.
Now, regarding my post – August 28, 2012 at 9:40 am
Thank you for refraining.
It spoke volumes.
Am I obliged to reply to your partly facetious replies to my sometimes not entirely serious posts? Tell me! If that is the way you want it, kindly refrain from replying to any of my posts, Fedallah.
Doug, this is a public space and as long as I see you, or anyone else for that matter, posting things of interest to me, I shall respond according to my conscience.
I hope that clears up any doubts you may have as to the motivation for my posts.
Now, regarding this new pique of yours – my point was simple: I feel it is essential to acknowledge the response of your direct interlocutor (in this case, Polybius) after he took the time and effort to respond to YOUR question.
It demonstrates an important thing; respect.
And it also means that the argument can advance; it can spin on the dialectical wheel. You ask a question, Polybius answers, and so we move on to a synthesis and thus a new question.
And off we go again.
It’s important Doug.
Acknowledgement, I mean.
All very well but I was asking you, not Polybius.
What are my responsibilities to an officious bystander, as you seem to know everything?
(Apologies to Polybius for catching him in the legalese)
Officious??!
Grow up !
Your responsibilities are but two:
to the question, and,
to the poster your question is addressing.
That”s all.
Now, if that’s more than you can handle, just let us know and we’ll lighten the load.
Now where were we?
Yes!
You spat out a challenge. There were capitals involved.
The man answered you with references.
You ignored it.
Now can you acknowledge the point: that the argument for collaboration is established by a variety of reputable scholars, and that should you choose to argue the point the onus is on you to now produce a similar case on behalf of the Oxfordian claim?
“yes” means that you understand, and that you have a genuine desire to see this conversation move forward.
“no” means you are a fool with little sense of comprehension fundamentals.
Take your time. Choose carefully.
It’s little wonder this conversation has not moved a syllable for months.
Your petulance is a disgrace.
But quite comical too!
That’s probably why I find it so hard to resist your posts!!
Oh well,
How many times do I have to tell you that I will not be cross-examined?
Think carefully about the answer.
LOL
Doug, did you find answering either “yes” or “no” too confusing?
I’m sorry, I simply cannot reduce the question to fewer syllables.
Oh Doug…:grin:
Absolutely full of shit, fat arse Fedallah.
“peachy”
my good sir
and………..dare i pass along a chinesewhisper………..luminous!!
Polybius, hello.
Fedallah is away until this afternoon and will be very excited about your post.
But before she has an opportunity to respond I’d like to say a few words.
My “role” in this thought, this discovery, of yours affords me that privilege.
It’s difficult to know where to begin, this question of yours pre-dates you by some 2 years! Does that surprise you?
So, let me offer this by way of answering your questions from my side:
Last week I attended the symposium at NGA on Abstract Expressionism. It was a wonderful few days; art, people, conversation. Perhaps none of that concerns you, but as I sit here, looking at your posts to Fedallah, thinking on my involvement and considering several of the themes under discussion at the symposium, it struck me that one way of responding would be to present you with some key terms and ask you to ponder them in light of your wonderful line “Something else entirely is going on here”:
Character as Composite –Univocal Forms/Spaces; Synthetical
Operative Codes and not Substantial ones
Writing/Construction as an Operative Landscape
Composition -> Position -> Disposition
Capacities for Relation
I don’t mean to sound cryptic or oblique; I’m just trying to show you something in a gentle, roundabout, way.
If you have questions please ask them.
You can’t know how important this is to Fedallah and W+S – there is a substantial wager in the works!
Cheers,
Polybius, hello.
Fedallah is away until this afternoon and will be very excited about your post.
But before she has an opportunity to respond I’d like to say a few words.
My “role” in this “discovery” of yours affords me that privilege.
It’s difficult to know where to begin, this question of yours pre-dates you by some 2 years! Does that surprise you?
So, let me offer this by way of answering your questions from my side:
Last week I attended the symposium at NGA on Abstract Expressionism. It was a wonderful few days; art, people, conversation. Perhaps none of that concerns you, but as I sit here, looking at your posts to Fedallah, thinking on my involvement and considering several of the themes under discussion at the symposium, it struck me that one way of responding would be to present you with some key terms and ask you to ponder them in light of your wonderful line “Something else entirely is going on here”:
Character as Composite –Univocal Forms/Spaces; Synthetical
Operative Codes and not Substantial ones
Writing/Construction as an Operative Landscape
Composition -> Position ->Disposition
Capacities for Relation
I don’t mean to sound cryptic or oblique; I’m just trying to show you something in a gentle, roundabout, way.
If you have questions please ask them.
You don’t know how important this is to Fedallah and W+S – there is a substantial wager in the works!
May I butt in here, JGC, just as an aside, there has often been references to “wagers” and bets and the like by your confederates before, and at one stage mention of an “experiment” that, if memory serves me right was being abandoned by W+S, as he had considered it had gone on too long with little show of results, I was hoping you may clarify what the experiment is or was and perhaps the terms of the wager, if I am not being indiscreet?
Secondly, the androgynous status of yourself and Fedellah, there seems to be a continual swapping of gender references, and until the unpleasantness of Rudd Redux (5) it was generally taken you yourself,are female.
I was hoping you might clarify that because I am never too sure who has the “peachy” ass, and it causes all sorts of problems and havoc with my penchant to build mind pictures of fellow bloggers, but sorbet of the small letters seems intent on providing physical descriptions, maybe he is just being mischievous.
And about time too!!
Good luck with getting answers from J.G. without answering some of your own.
And yes, the peachy bum is mine!
Rudd Redux was a critical thread.
There was no “unpleasantness”.
Only surprise and disappointment.
Fedellah, I think it was Untitled that asked the question, and the small lettered one, sorbet who saw fit to intervene of his own volition, uninvited so to speak. I’m still thinking about that and haven’t made up my mind one way or the other, as to whether I will provide a response. I’m not in JGC’s debt as far as I remember.
Your peachy bum is only half the story, for this to be right I still need to know your sex, that is sorbet’s fault, you can understand my dilemma me being a straight guy an’ all.It was ok before but as I said before sorbet messed the whole thing up.
What question do you mean?
The questions for Cole.
allthumbs,
if by “unpleasantness” you mean my reaction to your equivocation, I think I called it, then yes, it was unpleasant.
I thought you were not being entirely honest.
I think it still.
It is not a question of “debt” allthumbs – it is a question of give and take; you ask something of me, I shall ask something of you.
I expect only honesty and dignity. You should also expect, and receive, the same.
I’m surprised you would see such a transaction as a question of “debt”.
Sorbet is a mystery to me also.
I cannot fathom her purpose.
Ask Untitled66.
To your first point:
(i) the “experiment” concerns the (communicative) relations between people.
(ii) W+S is a woman
(iii) the terms of the wager?
(iv) No, of course you are not being indiscreet. Rather than simply “telling”, I would prefer if the answers to those questions came out of the conversation.
To your second point:
(i) there is no gender ambiguity – I am male, Fedallah is female.
(ii) Fedallah is correct; the Rudd Redux comments contained nearly all the thematic elements that concern me. From Polybius’ comments it seems clear that he can see outlines, shapes.
Now my turn,
You chose to use the word “confederates”.
Why that word?
Hello J.G., thank you for your interesting communication. I have saved it as a text file just in case you get electronically excised. It is indeed difficult to know where to begin. The net is a dark forest and the undergrowth rustles on every side.
I’ll cheat by beginning with an aside: when I say “Something else entirely is going on here”, it means I don’t know what is going on. That needs to be clear first of all.
Synthetical – Operative Codes and not Substantial ones
I’m not sure what you mean by these terms, you have a technical vocabulary that I do not possess – this may make me an occasionally obtuse correspondent. The sound you hear is my wooden head knocking experimentally on doors and walls, trying to find a hollow place to match itself.
Character as Composite – Univocal Forms/Spaces
There is no such thing as character, character is a construction enabling us to grasp and manage a grab-bag of constantly shifting characteristics – in much the same way as an economic model is used by economists to get a handle on a reality that seems random and chaotic. This is perhaps an unfortunate comparison, but then, that may be useful in itself.
Writing/Construction as an Operative Landscape
What I am describing as ‘the heteronyms’ – that is yourself, Fedallah, W+S and many others – are fully functioning characters with their own histories, desires and agendas and ought to be considered that way. There’s no point considering them as being one person or a group of people trying on different hats. Al that is beside the point. A winding garden path terminating at the outside dunny.
(Please don’t be insulted if I describe you as a heteronym – if it sounds insulting, that’s not how it’s meant. And as I have said, I have absolutely no idea of the process by which the heteronyms are produced).
Your other terms I will have to think about, although I must warn you that the result of my cogitations may simply be a pair of hands cupped and pushed in your general direction accompanied by the plaintive whine: “a little more, please”.
Also, I’m doing this on my lunch break.
Of course I have questions. There’s a part of me that wants to ask “who are you, and what are you doing?”, but the directness seems like an intrusion, and anyway, what business is it of mine? That kind of directness also seems entirely beside the point. A better question might be: “what are you intending to do next?”, or: “are there currently other places in which you do this or something like it?”.
Line of the day:
“Also, I’m doing this on my lunch break.”
Good stuff Polybius!
Polybius, forgive the jargon – again, my purpose is to describe and not to confuse or obfuscate.
Synthetical – Operative Codes and not Substantial ones.
By this I mean to suggest – the reign of “substance”; autonomous, singular, defined, centred, is over – or better yet, that it is so thoroughly destabilised as to have meaning only as a vestige, a trace, of what was.
Operative codes, fluid continuities; dynamic, hybrid, open, and receptive, now play themselves out – upon new intersecting matrices of all possible and variable fields.
I think it was Baudrillard who said it best: we are now “blank screens – switching centres for all networks of influence”.
We can all point to very individual histories, we can seek out these networks of influence, or meaning, wherever we care to look: – whether it be in Strindberg’s Preface to “Miss Julie”, or the art and collages of the Cubists, from Munch’s “The Scream” to Pollock’s “Totem Lesson II”; in the sheer unexpectedness of dissolving curtain walls, of splintering shards, of angst, and the wild ricochets of paint and Force, all are examples of the new articulations I’m referring to.
In this grouping I could include every human act or thought that signals a “new” meaning – perhaps even the red flannelette shirt that bound Untitled’s ankle to the steel bed.
Some others may plot the course from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche, others still the works of poets and physicists and architects. It matters little – all roads appear to lead here.
Perhaps to this very conversation Polybius!
Now wouldn’t that be a surprising thing?
Yes indeed Polybius, “Something else entirely is going on here”.
I am not offended at all. Whatever it takes Polybius, whatever it takes.
Speak freely.
Almost forgot,
I’m still very curious as to the meaning of your initial phrase “turning point”.
I’d be willing to wager that it has something to do with the participants of this Shakespeare authorship debate.
The Shakespeare debate could perhaps be described a turning point. It could also be described as a refit done in dry dock.
“By this I mean to suggest – the reign of “substance”; autonomous, singular, defined, centred, is over – or better yet, that it is so thoroughly destabilised as to have meaning only as a vestige, a trace, of what was.”
An interesting and fruitful suggestion. particularly as I sit here at work, not attending to my duties for the moment, with lines of code curling around my ankles, thin but elastic.
I will need to think much more about what you’ve said – which may be a matter of tracing the movement of leaves across the surface of the canal that lies somewhere between here and the gas-works. I’ll need to see what sinks and what floats.
“Now wouldn’t that be a surprising thing” – surprising, yes. Although the digital labyrinth seems particularly well-suited to these kinds of surprises.
This answer is radically incomplete – More to Come, as our host so often says.
How rude of me, I didn’t answer your direct question:
“…this question of yours pre-dates you by some 2 years! Does that surprise you?”
Yes, it does.
A reply to Fedallah’s August 28, 2012 at 4:00 pm post. I can’t say I’m writing this with any relish, but here goes.
It’s a long post, apologies, so please don’t complain if you choose to read it, or don’t read it, whatever.
re. the connection… it was an heirloom, through the hands of Hemnyges over the years until it came to my grandmother, who was born in England, nee Heming.
and re. the ‘dose of real life’. If Ken Loach made movies in Australia then I’d be up for characterisation. Real life for me is unemployment and little income apart from a govt stipend, unsustainable costs of living and almost exhausted savings.
I’m living on the edge of this society since I returned after years overseas. Or at least that’s how it feels. It’s not that I’m unknown; I’m registered on Big Brother’s computer, which pays a regular allowance, and the job service providers interview me every month or two and cheerfully tell me most of their clients find employment and so it goes. I’m not unknown. And yet I am.
To spend one’s days as I do is what unknown men do. I am unfamiliar in my neighbourhood, no-one knows me, and most of my waking hours are solitary, even though I’m married.
My wife joined me recently, my beloved Chinese wife, she who saved me, although she is unaware of it. How could I explain, when her English is not sufficiently broad enough for me to expatiate to the degree necessary? I leave my past alone, though when we were first together she was curious as to why the collapse of my first marriage, and the subsequent fallout. How can you explain madness? How can one tell a story about a person’s life that played out in such a way as to leave a trail of wreckage in its wake, broken relationships and heartaches and all the other consequences that incur when specific patterns of behaviour are displayed.
My wife’s been a university teacher for more than twenty years, her life in China was very comfortable, and I, also, had a good life, teaching at one of the main universities, and much free time. She’s at TAFE now, since her arrival, studying English so that she can get into a vocational course in order to qualify for employment that she’s already quite capable of doing. I think she’ll succeed; she’s always had a can-do attitude and has tasted success often as a former elite athlete prior to her teaching profession. But it has shocked her to realise the costs of living here, and it has stressed her to see how difficult it is for me to get work.
We rent an apartment close to one of the universities; small, one bedroom, $320 a week. My Newstart allowance pays $440 each fortnight. We get rent assistance too. I’m advertising in the Chinese newspapers as an English language teacher, coach, writing teacher whatever yada yada, but it’s a busy market and slow to develop. I ride the bicycle around the neighbourhood posting flyers on bus shelters and on the uni noticeboards, ‘proofreader’ will fix your writing so you can get better essay grades. I’m nearly sixty, and this is my life.
I could be more despondent, under different conditions, but I’m not. I’m lucky, or unlucky… it’s one of those debatable issues, but I’m lucky to be dissociated, and to live with that as a kind of ever-present condition. It’s been the norm for me from an early age, perhaps 5 or 6, and it’s real, I recognise the causality and the conditions under which the schism occurred and I knew at the time that I had broken in two and it’s been so ever since, with the exception of a few extraordinary drug-induced hours of completion and wholeness.
Be that as it may, but I live in my head and not in my heart and that’s a kind of psychic reality that I think, in my own case, has been a kind of a free ticket to hell in a way I could have never imagined in my younger days. There’s a ‘Many I’s” reality to the mental universe, and the best I can say after reflection is that one ought to try to develop the skills as early as possible that allow one to recognise, harness and corral and manage those “I’s” that have no interest in your better development so to speak, ’cause they’ll fuck you up, every time.
I could be more despondent about this solitary man thing, but feelings weigh heavily on my heart and when feeling bleeds through it’s more likely to be negative and the machine is good at repressing feeling. I’m kind of consonant with Camus’ Meursault on this issue. On the same page, perhaps.
Waiting to die. There’s your existential reality for you. A detached man who is also estranged and living in reduced circumstances can get to that point. But it’s not wanting to die, there’s a difference. It’s also watching and listening and thinking and pecking away at the details of a mundane existence and having mental sparky events about what might just work to catch a dollar or two, short of illegality or death of aged relatives. It’s not a lifestyle I’d recommend.
I know I’m unbalanced, and that in itself is a kind of ever-present sense of loss. It’s a bit like, I suppose, a person who’s lost a limb, say, when then is a constant awareness of what used to be, what was once the state of completion, of wholeness. You live with what you have, but that’s not to say you forget. A balanced man ought to simultaneously be able to think, to feel and to sense in his body, moment by moment. This is the challenge, and I’m afraid I’ve fallen rather short of it.
There’s always a past, obviously, we all have our pasts, and they matter, and they don’t, and whose matters more is a question that’s interesting and even vital, but ultimately of no consequence when measured against the sum of one’s own personal experience of this thing called ‘life’. Pasts’ matter because they shape events. I am what I am, to a large extent, as a function of the collage of experiences undergone from year 1 to, say, 8 or 9. The reality shaping years that taught that life was dangerous, that one’s closest carers could not be trusted or relied on to care appropriately, that one was unwanted but tolerated, that one was safest when alone, and so on. My parents had their own tragedies to cope with, post-POW trauma on my father’s side, my mother slowly dying with a condition which worsened year by year. All of us are shaped by our early conditions, but perhaps equally or more so by the choices we make as adults, and in my case I’m, what is the right word here… ‘ashamed’ seems to fit, though that may not be quite right, anyway, ashamed to admit that I’ve made many poor or ‘bad’ choices about behaviour throughout my adult life which ultimately brought me to this moment.
‘Such is life’ seems too cynical a statement, but it’s apt, more or less.
If I was to point in the direction of cinema to allude to the lifestyle that I lead, and which deservedly brought the consequences which followed, then it’d be somewhere in the realm of characters like Brandon in Shame, or Daniel in Amphetamine. It’s a pity.
Polybius, this is a response to your bicycle lane post. I don’t have time to address your longer one right now.
Tomorrow!
First,thank you for your first response.
These are some of the questions your post has suggested to me.
Tell me about this “writerly strategy” you mention.
Do you see it exclusively in stylistic terms,
Or is there an instructive, a pedagogical imperative, propelling the strategy?
Or is it a combination of both?
What was it about Patrick Dignam”s posts that caused such a re-evaluation of your own method and purpose?
What was it about Untitled’s posts that aroused your curiosity as to the “possibility of strategy” rather than just the telling of a “story”?
Did you find his 3 posts literal, or did you see them primarily as metaphors?
How do we reconcile the fluid metaphor, the unstable words used to construct meaning, with the desire for a direct, unambiguous telling?
Have you noticed, Polybius,the manner; the language and the style, by which these two posters debate their respective antagonists?
Can one discern a pattern?
I have my thoughts on these questions, though I’d very much like to hear
yours.
Fedallah, several hours ago I took the bait you threw at 4pm on the 28th, but it’s not been put up. The blogbot challenged the submit button and said moderation will ensue.
We’ll see. As far as I know I’m not banned, so perhaps excessive length is the issue.
Write it again Canguro.
earlier you had written,
“think about that for a moment…”
I just wanted to say that for the remainder of that day I thought of little else.
Write it.
Post it.
Oddly enough, that post was up, briefly, then disappeared, but not in the usual fashion of poster’s details plus white space. It simply vanished.
I’m assuming it didn’t meet quality standards; prose too turgid, inappropriate context or some other egregious errors.
Canguro, “quality standards”?!?!
Here?!?!
Write it Canguro. Write it long, write it short, serialise it, make it about something real.
Actually, write whatever you wish.
Just write it.
And then press the submit button.
More cross-examination?
They are all real events.
They unfurled as I have described; as the words have described them.
They are allegories.
Hello, Fedallah. Thank you for your post, and your questions. Whether I can reply in anything other than a halting and incomplete way…well, we’ll see.
As to “…an instructive, a pedagogical imperative”, that is certainly an element. Indeed, it is most noticeable in your own posts on de Vere. But then, of course, the pedagogical imperative may in fact be part of a wider stylistic strategy.
Now to the re-evaluation set off – detonated would be a better word – by Patrick Dignam. It was more my rather silly over-reaction to his irascibility that caused a rethink. And then I began to take note of the particular shape of Dignam’s silhouette as he came and went, and the literary threads trailing off him.
As an aside, I initially connected you with Naked Lunch – one of the (numerous) gaps in my reading is Moby Dick, I’m afraid.
I did not consider Untitled’s posts to be literal. Although, as I have said before, this sort of process only works if you allow for the possibility that you may be completely wrong. Something about the flexibility and agility of Untitled’s voice made me think… what precisely? It would be better to say that Untitled’s posts created a world that exists at an interesting tangent to the world of this blog – particularly in the the context of the threads on which those posts occurred.
“How do we reconcile the fluid metaphor, the unstable words used to construct meaning, with the desire for a direct, unambiguous telling?”
I’m not sure that we can. Perhaps the best we can do is exploit the tension between them.
“Can one discern a pattern”. The interesting thing about what is being done here is that one can discern in it patterns upon patterns generating more patterns of their own. Sometimes it seems like a brisk series of chess moves and sometimes like a bomb exploding very slowly.
In short, I got interested.
Hi Polybius,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Whether it be a vocational hazard or something that came long before, I think the instructive imperative is at the core of these posts/arguments. This leads me to what I suspect to be the reason for your “re-evaluation”.
Follow me here Polybius – I need to be very quick (lots to do this morning) and I need to see if we’ve got this right:
You had understandable difficulty in comprehending the depth of Dignam’s disdain for DQ during that argument you mentioned earlier. You saw him (Dignam) as possibly a loose cannon; rude, disdainful, obsessive with the details of the argument, etc. You saw him this way, I contend, for two prime reasons: one, you were unfamiliar with DQ’s style of argumentation, and two, you were unaware of the history between these two combatants.
Now let me jump forward: after you yourself were on the end of some of DQ’s “arguments” you came to appreciate both the source of Dignam’s frustration AND perhaps the underlying strategy of Dignam in attempting to tease out and reveal the communicative issues that arise from what he called, I believe, “faulty argumentation”; where evasion (deceit), fallacy and a certain level of subject ignorance, prevail.
Your response to such encounters was a mild, jovial, dismissal; and dry, factual responses. Dignam’s, of course, was different. But the object (of your frustrations) was identical; faulty argumentation.
And I’ve got to emphasis here so as to insure that the point is not lost, that the source, in this case DQ, is irrelevant to the issue. What is critical is the nature and expression of that suspect discursive habit.
Again, I believe your revelation to have occurred because you felt Dignam’s frustration, not as a bystander; abstract, indifferent, but as a participant with your intellect, imagination and self-respect on the table.
There’s much more to say on this subject, and if time and inclination permits, then we should explore further.
The reconciliation between those two states – fluid metaphor and unambiguous telling – has been my subject for too many years to mention Polybius.
That tension you speak of keeps changing its fucking shape on me!
Sorry this is a quick one,
Talk more soon.
I’ve already asked Canguro, and now I’m asking you – write something of yourself.
Write it so we can know something of eachother.
Loose cannon. Yes, that’s how I saw Dignam. Your analysis of the reasons why is correct. And correct again that the source is irrelevant to the issue.
What annoyed me about the argument was that it never went anywhere. It was like the public discussion we see all around us, everybody standing toe-to-toe and belabouring each other with their placards – and this blog is a place where you see that sort of thing in a pronounced, even caricatured form..
There is indeed more to say on the subject, and I’m very willing to explore it further.
I will post something I have written down at the bottom of the page. Will you know something of me when you have read it? Well, we shall see.
You are as Quixote says, full of shit.
Reply to Fedallah’s August 28, 2012 at 4:00 pm post.
Fedallah, you’d asked about the connection to the Hemynge coat of arms. It was an heirloom passed through the hands of Hemnyges over the years until it came to my grandmother, who was born in England, nee Heming, the niece of the Lord Mayor of Westminster. So Hemynge the actor begat a line of descendants that still continues and included the London-based jewellery business – a long-standing and influential family of goldsmiths that can be traced as far back as the early 1700′s when Thomas Heming was apprenticed to the Huguenot goldsmith Peter Archambo.
Then there’s the antipodean bunch, and what a different story that is…
Please speak english Fedallah
Unless I miss my guess, Fedallah will speak in whichever language she pleases.
Is that you and her ‘s juxtaposition
Polybius what are the essential differences between hetronyms and ventriloquism? Ever see “Dead of Night”? I was around nine years of age when I was alone watching TV and saw that film, scared the bejesus out of me. Never trusted Ron Blaskett after that much less that malevolent piece of oak in the bow tie that Ron would insert his hand into without a glove, imagine that without a glove!
Polybius, what are the essential differences between Heteronyms and Ventriloquism? Did you ever the film “Dead of Night”. I was around nine years of age when alone home from school saw it on TV, scared the bejesus out of me. Never trusted Ron Blaskett after that, much less that malevolent piece of hewn oak with the bow tie that Ron would have sitting on his knee with his ungloved hand inserted into the astonished eyed puppet, imagine without a glove! Keep an eye on the adams’ apple was a lesson I learned early in life.
The heteronym takes on a life of it’s own in the way that a ventriloquist’s dummy cannot – except for those in Dead of Night, of course.
If you think about what the dummy is doing once the act is over, you’ll probably imagine it stuffed into a suitcase. And it’s always an “it”.
Whereas the heteronym, wearing the dark jacket she bought in Florence when it was colder than she expected it would be, and which was expensive but has never fitted exactly quite right, will be sitting in the early evening at an outside table of a familiar cafe, watching the shop windows glow brighter as the sky darkens. And whatever she’s thinking can’t be guessed at.
I would be pretty sure that the ventriloquist carries the dummy, his vices and voice, his mannerisms, his humor and view on life inside of his head. There would be a never ending dialogue going on, question and answer sessions, the puppet may be stuffed into a suitcase, its soul would be free inside of the ventriloquist’s head and would get to enjoy the same view from the cafe in Florence as well.
Allthumbs,
I’m not sure if I understand you correctly.
So I’ll answer for both of my readings.
1. No difference – in this sense: creating character(s), and or a voice, is the stuff of every imagination, literary or otherwise. It’s been good enough for Homer and Dickens, Mallarme and Flaubert, Shakespeare and Bronte, Beckett and Tolstoy, every child and adult since inception…..
Hell! It’s even good enough for those here who, on occasion, enjoy taking their Modesty out on a good old run around the park. You know, to stretch the legs a little. Maybe even to do a little poop!
2. Re-read Polybius’ final paragraph, and please tell me, if you can, that you are unable to distinguish the difference, any “essential difference”, between a ventriloquist and a heteronym.
Please.
I’ve considered your response to Polybius and these are my thoughts – you respond well to the first of the two points but as an address to the second, it just doesn’t work for me.
I just don’t see it that (your) way at all; I see a fuller life that is, paradoxically, partial, contingent and evolves in a such a way that it surprises the “author”. This surprise is absent in the ventriloquists construction.
Or at least it is from my viewings.
Although the context is different, I am reminded of something Hemingway said. It seems appropriate to conclude with that, “[omission...as in a minimalist aesthetic] …makes the reader feel beyond what’s on the printed page”.
I like that.
And I think Polybius’ final paragraph expresses that idea of “feeling beyond” wonderfully, imaginatively, accurately.
Allthumbs, write something.
Tell us something we don’t know about you. Others here have placed an offering on this shared table.
What do you carry in that rucksack of yours?
Well the small letters are for sorbet, I didn’t want him to get up on a rickety ladder or to crane her neck, or get knocked over by a capital letter and whatnot, workplace safety and all of that. I would prefer to be addressed by J.G. Cole because, why talk to the help when you can… well you know how that goes.
Sure you may have others address me using your moniker, but as I have a tin ear and cannot distinguish the difference between the voices of U1966, Fedellah or Dignam (although he had a terrible Irish accent) it might as well be you J.G and therefore I would rather be addressed by yourself. If Cole is banned well that puts an end to the conversation with me as far as I am concerned. I’d feel stupid talking to Charlie McCarthy while Edgar Bergen sat next to me at table for instance, especially because I did once have a thing for Candice and I would be more intent on getting into Edgar’s good books then talking to a lump of two by four with wooden teeth and a top hat. If Hugo turned up at my door, he would be toothpicks in seventy seconds flat, the nice rounded ones, (that’s to Polybius).
What should I say about myself, I take a nine and a half in shoes, 43 in European measure
The “help”?!
You’re still mad at me about the Roger Vadouris thing, aren’t you?
I said I was sorry.
oops, sorry, I meant
Perhaps you are right, but I find it hard to think about that now.
I’m afraid I’m thinking much more of the little wooden gentlemen who terrified you so thoroughly when you were a child.
And I’m wondering, as you must be, what will happen when they finally ferret out your current address, in that wonderfully inventive way they have.
JGC, briefly, to the allegations of equivocation and hypocrisy I offer in my defense that I am not Superman, and therefore am under no moral obligation to offer my protection or exercise my sense of justice to all and sundry. I do confess to inconsistency, yep, inconsistency…. yep,inconsistency.
Somewhere along the track in a response to Doug when you admitted that you (Untitled) and Cole are the same person, and that somewhere else you have beat a guy bloody, then you seem able enough to defend yourself, you obviously have the language to articulate your own defense.
“Confederates” I just like the word, I thought it apt, I could have used colleagues, friends, gang, coterie, but I was trying to shorthand the impression of a concerted effort. And Fedellah was such an inspired name and he had “confederates”. I’m not the sharpest knife in the draw and hence feelings of confusion add to my sense of intellectual lack, cross dressing, trans-sexualism, transvestism, counter-tenors, eunuchs, androgyny, gender bending and the like have always left me scratching my head. So the continual changing references of he’s and she’s to you and others just confused me.
Sorbet of the lower case is not the refreshment to the palate he seems to think she is and their muddying of the waters, was the prompt for me to ask the question and thanks for the clarification.
There was the momentary Ben and Amanda reference, which I thought was a clever aside to Gillard staffers but gather that was just a mischievous distraction.
I find it difficult to detect stylistic differences or to hear the difference in the voice between Cole, Untitled and Fedellah, sorbet is easier, one because of the lower case usage, and he has that tonal obsequiousness reminiscent of the hackneyed Igor type servant portrayed in 1930’s Hollywood Dracula or Frankenstein movies.
I know my limitations and your current discussion with Polybius is way over my head, but he seems to get the gist of it, and I read it with some pleasure and less understanding, but as always I am open to learning new things.
good evening allthumbs!
why i’ve just arrived back in town…and what a right royal mess the place is in!!
…it certainly didn’t take long did it.
now.
i see i have soiled your water.
may i offer you another glass?
g’day sorbet welcome back, another glass? no thank you.
i will only correspond with cole from now on.
i wish you luck allthumbs
j.g. is a very busy man
and around here..as you know..he is on tenterhooks…
no luck required sorbet, i don’t have to communicate with cole, and he certainly has no avid requirement to talk to me, it’ll be like old friends you see once in a while, maybe not for years, but you just pick up where you left off. you are a loyal retainer though i’ll give you that.
do not talk yourself down allthumbs
one way or another you will receive your reply
gotta be cole from now on, cole and cole only.
I am?!?!?
Really?
Such a short post allthumbs – yet so chunky!
It appears that sorbet’s mannerism is contagious , and
who do think I am for it to be “cole and cole only”?
What idiots
You don’t think that for a second shad!
Who are you kidding???
shad – you write something as well. Tell us about what happened in your 24 yr or a journey, or whatever you wish!
I look forward to reading it.
Could not agree more, shad. Leading idiot is the first to reply to your post. Expect her fan club (alter egos) to join the fun.
what’s wrong dearie?
is it all a bit too complicated for you?
why not try looking away?
go on – give it a go!!!
The World is always departing into History.
We stand on the shore, waving to it as it slips it’s anchor and heads out into the open sea. All it’s flags are flying and streamers trail and snake in the wind and the band on the deck plays brave songs and tiny figures swarm up and down the rigging.
But we are silent. Only waving. Not quite with sadness. With…something that dances just out of reach before our fingers can find it. And somewhere inside, something is sounding but it’s pitched either just above , or just below, the limits of our hearing.
So the ship sails on. And the sounds fade and the colours dim as it’s swallowed up by distance and time. Until it’s gone from out of our lives altogether.
I remember the first time. Not the first time it happened to me. But the first time I could feel it happening.
1989. November 10.
I’m sitting in Nick and Ella’s bedroom watching the 6 o’clock news. Which is something we never did, but we were doing it on this particular evening. We were watching a crowd of people gathered at a wall chanting and singing and crying out God knows what. And some of them were on top of the wall, some were dancing on it and some were smashing into it with sledge hammers and some of the people down on the ground had sledge hammers too. And they went at it with fury and joy and then someone made a hole and arms were poked through and the people on one side of the wall grasped the hands of the people on the other side. And then they cut to a shot of a crane lifting out a whole slab of the wall and the people surged through singing and shouting and threw their arms around one another. Somebody kissed a soldier as if the AK-47 he carried wasn’t there.
Goodbye Berlin Wall, we thought you’d be there forever. But it turned out you were only a wall after all.
And we sat there and we watched and we didn’t say anything except fucking hell, then fucking hell again and we kept on saying it because there was nothing else to say as part of our life shimmered and danced, then turned to mist and blew away. And vanished.
We just assumed that things would always be that way, because that was the way things were. How else could they be?
We grew up in a world divided between East and West. And it seemed wherever we looked, things divided neatly into opposites.
But then things change.
And then they never stop.
With this latest financial crisis, there seems to be some kind of expectation in certain quarters, many quarters, that at some point things are going to ‘get back to normal’. No matter how hard a slog it might be, what troubles may attend, no matter how many bodies get tossed off the train. Somewhere ‘normal’ is waiting for us, and sooner or later there’ll be an announcement over the speakers that we’ve reached our destination at last and then we’ll pull into the old familiar station, haul our luggage down from the rack, make our way out onto the concourse, think about finding a taxi. Then home at last.
Only home isn’t there any more. Nor is the station. There’s only the train hurtling on through the night, and nobody knows where the tracks are leading and everybody’s trying to guess and the only thing we can know for sure is that none of us have it right. Some have it more wrong than others, but how helpful is that as the darkness rushes past?
There’s only ourselves and the night and the racing to god know’s where.
How else could it be?
Polybius, just caught sight of this post now. I’m sorry I got to it so late.
I wish Bob would put up a larger “recent posts” column.
You’ve written an curious meditation on Time here. It’s interesting how you have chosen both the Wall collapse and our immediate and urgent economic woes to express your feelings.
I had the strange sense, reading your final paragraphs, that your concerns echo those of allthumbs; so similar are they in imagery and anxious foreboding.
Thanks for writing.
Write something else.
Perhaps you saw my face on that Nov 10th night Polybius.
I swung a magnum of cheap tafelwein and had lit both cigar and cigarette.
My eyes blazed.
Just a young man of 23 bobbing in the flux of History,
but too drunk to know it.
My pieces of the Wall, 7 of them, each the size of a softball, proof that I had Lived it.
I look at those painted pieces of concrete sometimes and marvel at how they can confirm my existence.
How else could it be?
No other way.
For what other way is there?
The world is always departing into history, you say, and we are silent, only waving. Is that a poignant observation, Polybius? Was it ever different?
The few seconds it takes to type this have now been relegated to the past. And the few seconds it takes you to read also now belong to the past. We’re time-eaters, in an odd sort of way, our languaging is so critically dependent on time-related clauses and it’s difficult to conceive how we could operate as a species without this constant referencing of relative time.
Self-evidently, we’re the only creature on the planet that laments time’s passage or express fears about tomorrow.
I’m reminded of the words in Laurie Anderson’s piece ‘Same Time Tomorrow’, where she says ‘History is stories that we half remember, and most of them never even get written down’.
But the world is also always on the doorstep of its future? Do you ever wonder when you lay down to sleep whether it will be there for you when you wake up?
Turning and turning and living and dying, births and renewals and aging, senescence and death. It was never any different. 5,000 years or more of recorded human history, or 50,000 if you’re indigenous to this country, against billions of years of this planet’s existence.
We’re embedded, by virtue of how the organism is constructed, in the here and now. The five sensing systems (listening, seeing etc.) are not programmed to pay attention to yesterday, they’re here and now operatives. Data sensors, survival tools, call them what you like, but they’ve no interest in history apart from the survival aspect – don’t eat that, it’s bad for you, stay away from charging tigers and so on.
It’s only in the second reality, the language realm, that we can accord history its due position in the human universe.
“It’s only in the second reality, the language realm, that we can accord history its due position in the human universe.”
Start from the there Canguro. What are your thoughts?
My thoughts? Well, they’re not a priori, and not being a philosopher or trained thinker I’m not even sure if they’re a posteriori, but perhaps this is accurate. My sense of it is along the following lines: We’re born into the world, and genetically predisposed towards the acquisition of language. We’re fated, if you will, by virtue of having a cerebral cortex common to this species, to acquire these higher skills of logical or abstract communication. We naturally develop languaging, consonant with our environment and the degree of input. And consonant with that, after a certain time, is a kind of forgetting, where a mask or veneer is adopted, commonly called personality, which tends to, almost as an inevitable consequence of language acquisition, tends to blind us to essentiality.
Unless we’re primed to be cautious about this process, we’re more or less fucked. I’m sorry to be blunt about this, but on the basis of my experiences, earlier alluded to, and not the common run of the common man, I think this is the case.
There’s both primary and secondary realities. Which is which? A logician would aver that the primary is the original condition and should be afforded due consideration or attention.
But the scorpion’s sting is in the obverse. Identification with “I” is such a powerfully hypnotic influence that we’re blinded to the reality of our situation, or, as it’s sometimes stated, the ‘terror of our circumstances’.
Nonetheless, given that it’s a human condition, we’re all in the same boat, and fated to suffer the same ordeal contingent on our subjective level of understanding.
Thus, we can spend our lives fully immersed in this second, derivative reality and under the spell of language and some sort of subjective identity that says ‘I’m this’, ‘I’m that’, ‘this is important’, ‘that is important’, ‘history matters because I believe it does’, and so on.
There are options available to us as we prosecute our lives, but just as the New Testament analogies suggest, ‘many are called but few are chosen’, or ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’, and so on.
It’s important to realise that these points are not religious but psychological.
It does seem appropriate to be completely identified with who I am; my social and professional persona is a rolled gold identifier, and yet, and yet, strip away the mask, and what’s there?
History matters because we are second reality dwellers. Push through to original condition and it’s a different story, personally and at large.
I’ve always been interested in history – more particularly narrative history. But I began to get really seriously interested in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with all the talk in the United States about Empire and the sudden rush of books and articles exploring the parallels and points of difference between the USA and the Roman Empire.
And I began to think that while the Roman Empire may have left us, the idea of the Roman Empire has always exerted an extraordinary gravitational pull on what we might define as ‘the West’, and still does. In a certain sense the Romans are still with us, shaping our ideas and also our actions – the War against Terror – Delenda est Carthago/Carthage Must Be Destroyed.
And as the World begins to rebalance itself after 250 years of colonialism and China and India rise and the quaint idea that white men are best placed to run the world dissolves into comedy, what do we find? Edward Luttwak, the American Military Strategist and historian publishes ‘Grand Stategy of the Byzantine Empire’ in 2009. Because he’s trying to figure out what we should do next.
What I’m trying to say is that we are in a continual dialogue with history, and in some ways we can see this conversation in a particularly acute if distorted form right here in Australia in 2012.
I feel we have one foot in the here and now, and one stuck fast in the past, personally, nationally and globally.
Of course you’re right about the five sensing systems – and I do sense my argument is radically incomplete. I’m not sure how to take it further.
I may have to borrow a bobcat from someone.
The intelligent idiot or idiots that infest this blog seem to have some esoteric interest in the nature of argument. Substance is totally irrelevant. It is how the bullshit is cooked rather than whether it is bullshit or not.
Well, I beg to differ : well-cooked bullshit is still bullshit.
To Fedallah and all your ilk, JG Cole Patrick Dignam and all the rest of your pseudonyms (or heteronyms, perhaps) :
take your pathetic bet and your interest in the nature of argument and take a flying fuck!!
Well-cooked bullshit is still bullshit. And you are full of it.
Perhaps I’ve had too much red wine, but I think it is time you took your quibbles and fucked off. For good. Go and annoy some other blog – try Catallaxy.
Go for it Doug! Get the grrr between your teeth and run for it as hard as you can.
I reckon, with the greatest respect to yourself and the rest of us who declaim here on a regular basis, I reckon we’re all intelligent idiots. Hah!
Think about it. What are we doing at the keyboard apart from putting thought into word? Opinion or fact or something else, but it’s all just a transmission of the mental via keyboard onto the blog page in the context of whatever… the authorship question, the blogger identity question, the troll question, the idiot question or whatever else the question de jour may be. How important can that be?
When, how and in what way did you arrive at this opinion?
What has caused this analysis to arise, and what polemical attitudes have epistemiologically integrated this erudition?
In what way and at which time did you arrive at the conclusions?
It matters not what the conclusions are, by the way, so long as the argument itself is made in a way approved by us, the symbiotic organism known variously as Fedallah, Wood and Stone, JG Cole, Patrick Dignam, Stagger Lee, etcetera etcetera etcetera whose main stratagem is to pretend to intellectual superiority and alternative strategy is to flame, troll goad and generally attempt to incite a reaction from Ellis and from anyone else who gets in the way of our obstructionism and polemically obstreperous lunatical fecal repositioning.
In other words we the wankers throw our own shit and hope others are provoked into throwing some back. We really get off on that.
And you are, sir, who?
Forgive me for asking, for I’m long in the wilderness, but I’m unfamiliar with the general tenor of your position vis-a-vis this hub of exchange.
You are a riot Macabre. I almost fell off my chair
She physically shoves me off mine!
Macabre – you are too old to dye your hair that colour.
DQ, I’m writing this to you now in the full knowledge of the delicate detente that exists between us.
But it’s got to be said.
And I’m going to say it.
And you’ll take it how you see fit.
– I’ve seen warnings hissed with a knife drawing blood on the throat of a drunk woman who let her mouth go loose.
Just like yours has done here,
just like this.
If I were you I’d muzzle it, or shoot it.
But I’m not you.
To Macabre, look around!
Look around at what people are writing here!
Do you think anyone, anyone at all, gives a fuck about Cole’s pseudonyms???
Do you??
Muzzle up or I’ll come hunting you.
No, I really don’t care about Cole’s pseudonyms; the only issue is that certain writers like to agree with their own posts and thereby try to give the impression that someone actually agrees with them.
As for Macabre, have you ever heard of a loose cannon?
She drops in, shoots everything in sight and drops out again, leaving the collateral damage!
What is it with these feral females?
Do you see what I mean?
She even resets my computer with her emails; I freely admit to not being the most computer literate around. That last was my post, stuck in her URL or whatnot. Grrr…
Doug – “She even resets my computer with her emails”,
“stuck in her URL or what not”,
yeah, right Doug.
A bit like the pseudonyms who “try and give the impression that someone actually agrees with them”.
There’s plenty here who agree and disagree in equal measure. Just in these last series of open posts I can spot plenty here who agree with Cole’s posts and who don’t give a fuck as to the pseudonyms. I know I don’t.
You, of all people here, should see that, and recognise it for what it is. You of all people.
The pseudonym excuse is over.
Time to concentrate on the words.
Or we’ll ALL succumb to “reset computers”.
Believe what you will, but she does not like you whilst I think you have interesting things to say. Thank the stars she’s off again.
Gee, that was embarrassing Doug!
Caught with your pants down,
and nary a woman to be seen!
Now, which was it, a reset of your computer OR something stuck in her URL?
Reply to Fedallah’s August 28, 2012 at 4:00 pm post.
You’d asked about the connection to the Hemynge coat of arms. It was an heirloom passed through the hands of Hemnyges over the years until it came to my grandmother, who was born in England, nee Heming, the niece of the Lord Mayor of Westminster , and born into a family of goldsmiths that traced their lineage back to the 1700′s when Thomas Heming was apprenticed to the Huguenot goldsmith Peter Archambo, and beyond, given the possession of the coat of arms.
And as far as the ‘dose of real life’, well I think if Ken Loach made movies in Australia then maybe I’d be up for characterisation. At the moment, it’s no work and no real income apart from the govt stipend, unsustainable costs of living and almost exhausted savings. It’s living on the edge of this society after returning from years overseas. At least that’s how it feels.
I’m not unknown; I’m registered on a database, paid an allowance, interviewed by a job service provider each month and told most of the clients find employment and so it goes. I’m not unknown. And yet I am.
To spend one’s days as I do is what unknown men do. The waking hours mostly solitary, apart from a few students who come for coaching. Otherwise it’s Pat Malone’s company and long walks and photography and whatever it takes to get through the day.
My wife joined me recently, from China. She who saved me, although she is unaware of it. When we were first together she was curious in that natural female way as to why the collapse of my first marriage, and why the subsequent fallout? How could I explain, when her English is not sufficient for me to paint an accurate picture? I leave my past alone. How can you explain madness? How can one tell a story about a person’s life that played out in such a way as to leave a trail of wreckage in its wake, broken relationships and all the other consequences incurred as a function of certain patterns of behaviour? Why was one so persistently and predictably the locus of the dysfunctionality? Rationalise that into crème brûlée, if you will.
We rent close to one of the universities; small, one bedroom, $320 a week. The Newstart allowances pay $880 a fortnight, plus rent assistance. I’m advertising in a Chinese newspaper as an English teacher, writing, proofing, but it’s a busy market and slow to develop. I ride the bicycle around the neighbourhood posting flyers on bus shelters and on the uni noticeboards, ‘proofreader’ will fix your writing for better essay grades. At nearly sixty, this is the life.
I could be more despondent, under different conditions. Perhaps I’m lucky, … or unlucky. Dissociation is the norm for me, from an early age when in the midst of yet another fight with my brother something terrible happened. We had a history of fighting and squabbling and being younger than him I was always the loser of these petty squabbles and it just drove me crazy, the constancy of his willingness to use me as a foil for his need to be dominant. Like cubs in a litter. He loved to wind me up and I’d predictably go nuts, except that this time something broke, a sense of shattering, internally. I recognise the causality and the conditions under which the schism occurred and I knew at the time that I had broken in two and it’s been so ever since, with the exception of a few extraordinary drug-induced hours of completion and wholeness.
Be that as it may, but I live in my head and not in my heart and that’s a kind of psychic reality that I think, in my own case, was a free ticket to hell in a way I could have never imagined in my younger days. There’s a ‘Many I’s” reality to the mental universe, and the best I can say after reflection is that one ought to try to develop the skills as early as possible that allow one to recognise, harness and corral and manage those “I’s” that have no interest in your better development so to speak, ’cause they’ll fuck you up, every time.
‘You think too much’, my stepmother used to say to me, and sure, she was right but only partially, though she wouldn’t have known. I do think too much, but, and this is critical to the thesis, I think too much in the wrong way. We aren’t taught to think, and it’s a shame. Thinking, unchained, becomes a tower of Babel and that, my friends, is the ticket to hell. One persists with what’s on tap, so to speak, but it’s far from optimal. I could be more pissed off about this solitary man thing, but feelings and my awareness of them are like virgins and suicide bombers, they’re hardly likely to coalesce in reality. I’m consonant with Camus’ Meursault on this issue. On the same page, perhaps, waiting to die. There’s your existential reality for you. A detached man who is also estranged and living in reduced circumstances can get to that point. But it’s not wanting to die, there’s a difference. It’s also watching and listening and thinking and pecking away at the details of a mundane existence and having mental sparky events about what might just work to catch a dollar or two, short of illegality or death of aged relatives. It’s not a lifestyle I’d recommend.
Being unbalanced and aware of it is living with an ever-present sense of loss. It’s a bit like, I suppose, a person who’s lost a limb, say, and lives with a constant awareness of what used to be, what was once a state of, in this example, physical completion, of physical wholeness. Extrapolate from that to psychological wholeness and perhaps you see what I’m getting at. You live with what you have, but that’s not to say you forget. A balanced man ought to simultaneously be able to think, to feel and to sense in his body, moment by moment. This is the challenge, and I’m afraid I’ve fallen rather short of it.
There’s always pasts, whether distant or recent. They touched us then and they still do today. All of us emerge from the soil of our upbringing carrying our legacy of that time into this experience of adult life. Pasts matter. They shape events. I am what I am, to a large extent, as a function of the collage of experiences undergone in the first decade. Each of us has a unique perspective, a fingerprint viewpoint of reality, if you will. In my case, the teaching was that life is dangerous, one’s carers can not be trusted, one is unwanted but tolerated, one is safest when alone and so on. I could write a book about my childhood, given the intensity of it all.
My parents suffered their own tragedies. On my father’s side, the journey through Hades that was his experience as a POW on the Burma railroad, and on my mother’s, her encounter with Whooping Cough and its destructive consequences which killed her at the age of 44. How sad for them. How sad for millions more in similar or worse circumstances. We’re all shaped by our early conditions. Perhaps equally or more so we’re also shaped by adult choices…and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve made many poor choices about behaviour throughout my adult life which ultimately bring me to this moment.
Not that it’s necessary, but if I was to point in the direction of cinema to allude to the lifestyle that I formerly led, and which deservedly brought the consequences which followed, then it’d be somewhere in the realm of characters like Brandon in Shame, or Daniel in Amphetamine. Not entirely, but within that arena. And it’s a pity.
Trace the generations, 15 or so, from John Hemynge, fellow traveller with Will Shakespeare, and his progeny, the royal goldsmiths and guild members, the Jamaican plantation and London real estate owners, to political influence in the 1800’s and 1900’s, to the free settlers in South Australia 170 years ago, to the rump, now scrabbling for survival, fated within this century by war and disease, to the personal tragedies played out by this and the previous generation – for example within the present generation the three siblings have all married and divorced and tested multiple relationships. Why, one might ask? Why all of you? Look to the past, grasshopper, and all will be revealed.
So, to Fedallah again, and Untitled 1966; this is for you, a personal note from the Antipodes on how the newcomers have fared in their new world down under.
As far as your ‘dose of real life’, if Ken Loach made movies in Australia then maybe I’d be up for characterisation. At the moment, it’s no work and no real income apart from the govt stipend, unsustainable costs of living and almost exhausted savings. It’s living on the edge of this society after returning from years overseas. At least that’s how it feels.
I’m not unknown; I’m registered on a database, paid an allowance, interviewed by a job service provider each month and told most of the clients find employment and so it goes. I’m not unknown. And yet I am.
To spend one’s days as I do is what unknown men do. The waking hours mostly solitary, apart from a few students who come for coaching. Otherwise it’s Pat Malone’s company and long walks and photography and whatever it takes to get through the day.
My wife joined me recently, from China. She who saved me, although she is unaware of it. When we were first together she was curious in that natural female way as to why the collapse of my first marriage, and why the subsequent fallout? How could I explain, when her English is not sufficient for me to paint an accurate picture? I leave my past alone. How can you explain madness? How can one tell a story about a person’s life that played out in such a way as to leave a trail of wreckage in its wake, broken relationships and all the other consequences incurred as a function of certain patterns of behaviour? Why was one so persistently and predictably the locus of the dysfunctionality? Rationalise that into crème brûlée, if you will.
We rent close to one of the universities; small, one bedroom, $320 a week. The Newstart allowances pay $880 a fortnight, plus rent assistance. I’m advertising in a Chinese newspaper as an English teacher, writing, proofing, but it’s a busy market and slow to develop. I ride the bicycle around the neighbourhood posting flyers on bus shelters and on the uni noticeboards, ‘proofreader’ will fix your writing for better essay grades. At nearly sixty, this is the life.
I could be more despondent, under different conditions. Perhaps I’m lucky, … or unlucky. Dissociation is the norm for me, from an early age, when in the midst of yet another fight with my brother something terrible happened. We had a history of fighting and squabbling and being younger than him I was always the loser of these petty squabbles, and it just drove me crazy, the constancy of his willingness to use me as a foil for his need to be dominant. Like cubs in a litter. He loved to wind me up and I’d predictably go nuts, except that this time something broke, a sense of shattering, internally. I recognise the causality and the conditions under which the schism occurred and I knew at the time that I had broken in two and it’s been so ever since, with the exception of a few extraordinary drug-induced hours of completion and wholeness.
Be that as it may, but I live in my head and not in my heart and that’s a kind of psychic reality that I think, in my own case, was a free ticket to hell in a way I could have never imagined in my younger days. There’s a ‘Many I’s” reality to the mental universe, and the best I can say after reflection is that one ought to try to develop the skills as early as possible that allow one to recognise, harness and corral and manage those “I’s” that have no interest in your better development so to speak, ’cause they’ll fuck you up, every time.
‘You think too much’, my stepmother used to say to me, and sure, she was right but only partially, though she wouldn’t have known. I do think too much, but, and this is critical to the thesis, I think too much in the wrong way. We aren’t taught to think, and it’s a shame. Thinking, unchained, becomes a tower of Babel and that, my friends, is the ticket to hell. One persists with what’s on tap, so to speak, but it’s far from optimal. I could be more pissed off about this solitary man thing, but feelings and my awareness of them are like virgins and suicide bombers, they’re hardly likely to coalesce in reality. I’m consonant with Camus’ Meursault on this issue. On the same page, perhaps, waiting to die. There’s your existential reality for you. A detached man who is also estranged and living in reduced circumstances can get to that point. But it’s not wanting to die, there’s a difference. It’s also watching and listening and thinking and pecking away at the details of a mundane existence and having mental sparky events about what might just work to catch a dollar or two, short of illegality or death of aged relatives. It’s not a lifestyle I’d recommend.
Being unbalanced and aware of it is living with an ever-present sense of loss. It’s a bit like, I suppose, a person who’s lost a limb, say, and lives with a constant awareness of what used to be, what was once a state of, in this example, physical completion, of physical wholeness. Extrapolate from that to psychological wholeness and perhaps you see what I’m getting at. You live with what you have, but that’s not to say you forget. A balanced man ought to simultaneously be able to think, to feel and to sense in his body, moment by moment. This is the challenge, and I’m afraid I’ve fallen rather short of it.
There’s always pasts, whether distant or recent. They touched us then and they still do today. All of us emerge from the soil of our upbringing carrying our legacy of that time into this experience of adult life. Pasts matter. They shape events. I am what I am, to a large extent, as a function of the collage of experiences undergone in the first decade. Each of us has a unique perspective, a fingerprint viewpoint of reality, if you will. In my case, the teaching was that life is dangerous, one’s carers can not be trusted, one is unwanted but tolerated, one is safest when alone and so on. I could write a book about my childhood, given the intensity of it all.
My parents suffered their own tragedies. On my father’s side, the journey through Hades that was his experience as a POW on the Burma railroad, and on my mother’s, her encounter with Whooping Cough and its destructive consequences which killed her at the age of 44. How sad for them. How sad for millions more in similar or worse circumstances. We’re all shaped by our early conditions. Perhaps equally or more so we’re also shaped by adult choices…and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve made many poor choices about behaviour throughout my adult life which ultimately bring me to this moment.
Not that it’s necessary, but if I was to point in the direction of cinema to allude to the lifestyle that I formerly led, and which deservedly brought the consequences which followed, then it’d be somewhere in the realm of characters like Brandon in Shame, or Daniel in Amphetamine. Not entirely, but within that arena. And it’s a pity.
Trace the generations, 15 or so, from John Hemynge, fellow traveller with Will Shakespeare, and his progeny, the royal goldsmiths and guild members, the Jamaican plantation and London real estate owners, to political influence in the 1800’s and 1900’s, to the free settlers in South Australia 170 years ago, to the rump, now scrabbling for survival, fated within this century by war and disease, to the personal tragedies played out by this and the previous generation – for example within the present generation the three siblings have all married and divorced and tested multiple relationships. Why, one might ask? Why? Look to the past, grasshopper, and all will be revealed.
There’s always pasts, whether distant or recent. They touched us then and they still do today. All of us emerge from the soil of our upbringing carrying our legacy of that time into this experience of adult life. Pasts matter. They shape events. I am what I am, to a large extent, as a function of the collage of experiences undergone in the first decade. Each of us has a unique perspective, a fingerprint viewpoint of reality, if you will. In my case, the teaching was that life is dangerous, one’s carers can not be trusted, one is unwanted but tolerated, one is safest when alone and so on. I could write a book about my childhood, given the intensity of it all.
My parents suffered their own tragedies. On my father’s side, the journey through Hades that was his experience as a POW on the Burma railroad, and on my mother’s, her encounter with Whooping Cough and its destructive consequences which killed her at the age of 44. How sad for them. How sad for millions more in similar or worse circumstances. We’re all shaped by our early conditions. Perhaps equally or more so we’re also shaped by adult choices…and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve made many poor choices about behaviour throughout my adult life which ultimately bring me to this moment.
Not that it’s necessary, but if I was to point in the direction of cinema to allude to the lifestyle that I formerly led, and which deservedly brought the consequences which followed, then it’d be somewhere in the realm of characters like Brandon in Shame, or Daniel in Amphetamine. Not entirely, but within that arena. And it’s a pity.
Trace the generations, 15 or so, from John Hemynge, fellow traveller with Will Shakespeare, and his progeny, the royal goldsmiths and guild members, the Jamaican plantation and London real estate owners, to political influence in the 1800’s and 1900’s, to the free settlers in South Australia 170 years ago, to the rump, now scrabbling for survival, fated within this century by war and disease, to the personal tragedies played out by this and the previous generation – for example within the present generation the three siblings have all married and divorced and tested multiple relationships. Why, one might ask? Why? Look to the past, look to the past.
A powerful read Canguro.
Thanks.
Canguro, I took the children out for a bike ride this afternoon. A brilliant sunshine escorted us through a few back streets and into a cul-de-sac and there it was that I lay on the front lawn of a strangers house to watch my two children cycle the circumference.
The younger one, my son, cut a bold chord and looked for the attention and blessing of his older sister. She flicked her hair, smiled, and granted him his wish.
I looked up at the sky, a crisp blue, absent of cloud.
A few small miners chirped their displeasure and broke the afternoon suburban silence,
such a sublime thing it is.
My eyes fixed on a large clump of clover that bespoiled an otherwise immaculate lawn.
And there they remained, fixed, as I thought on your post.
The children cycled and laughed,
and I continued to dwell on your words – your allusions to Babel and Camus, your brother, the challenge, an unknown man.
I thought on these things,
as the children cycled.
Thank you, J G Cole, and also U66 and Polybius, for your responses.
JGC, your post kindled an association which had me dig through the entrails of the archives, and it was on the occasion of the memorial service for Allen Ginsberg, when Patti Smith read his poem ‘On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara’. Entirely resonant with your comments. Thanks again, to all three of you.
Reminds me of the words of a song Canguro.
“If it takes all the future, i’ll live through the past. If the phone doesn’t ring- it’s me.”
Simply wonderful Canguro,
thank you
Thank you Fedallah. Did you see the other post addressed to you, same thread, buried higher up the page?
Find it here.
To Canguro, thank you for taking the time to re-write.
I sit here this golden morn reading the words, reading the life, of another man.
It’s difficult to know where to start:
there are parallels Canguro; places where I understand, as much as can be understood, many things you talk about, most especially this: “Being unbalanced and aware of it is living with an ever-present sense of loss…..liv[ing] with a constant awareness of what used to be”.
It is a poignant thought that sits everpresent on my shoulder. At least it used to. Time seems to have dulled its sting.
But it’s never far away.
Canguro, I’ve looked to the past too often and for all the wrong reasons.
I try my best not to do that any more.
Now I try and recreate, anew, each day.
I am alive, I am healthy, I can read and drink a beer, I can laugh with loved ones and find a tree to sit under.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I miss the tobacco.
Other times I watch the children play in the backyard and a smile stretches my face, extending muscles I’d long forgotten about.
We are the living Canguro.
Bless you for your story.
U66
I’ll write more this afternoon.
Thank you, Canguro.
There is much in what you’ve written that I recognise in my own life – too much to make for comfortable reading, but then that wasn’t the intention.
“To spend one’s days as I do is what unknown men do.” I recognise this. Recently my fortunes have taken a turn for the better but I still feel very close to that time when I would walk along the well-heeled streets wondering whether I’d actually become transparent yet.
The market economy becomes a market society, and if you have nothing to sell you can’t buy anything, and then you find you’ve become a kind of ghost.
Good luck with everything. I like your writing a lot.
I’ve been where Canguro’s walked. Recognise much of the landscape, different volume in places, looking back over my shoulder, introspective. Deeply. Time heals some onslaughts and bad choices and no need to be confronted with failures. I remember them all.
I have a choice. Travel and live out of a car- no rent,very familiar with nature from the deserts to the rainforest. Gave up on finding a better half. I believe they happen. I don’t look, walk the other way ,nothing to offer,have no bright feathers or impressive strutting dances to offer and enjoying peace. I have a longing but walk the other way.I have hints but don’t know why.
I do pearl,opal and abalone work on guitars and ukuleles,and make them. Haven’t done it for years. Presently going to register a trademark if the funds are’nt directed to cost of living- surviving.
Will try and find some lost creatures after the good rain. Night parrot,i know where they are and have a couple of good cameras’s. Hoping to find a Grey Falcon , now thought to be extinct. Check on the finches,try and find the Star finches in their southern range. Thought to be extinct now too.
Choice 2 is rent a house,be paupered with the rent but maybe get my heart seen to. It’s a one way suicide trip for me, the downhill rat race. I can smell the cup of tea already. Made from a muddy outback river and taste the powdered milk and toast on coals. If you stay for a couple of months in the one spot, the locals get to know you. The birds sit on your table and visit through the day telling you what’s going on, wrens, flycatchers,bring their babies, the old snake ends up not fearing and happy to pay you no mind. Make submissive movements to the local macropods, they come and go as they please.
I’ve given up. There’s always stars, nature, botanics.
The dingo has many calls,contact, territorial,hunting. But sometimes they just sing. The loner is always the best performance. Very moving,amazing and though not really a native,it is a song of this land,amazing,from happy to sad and longing and everything between and I highly recommend it. The best was a twenty minute performance.I can never forget it.A highlight of my life.
The other rare treat is the song of the Mangrove warbler.In the 1920′s and 30′s the song was raved on about and known throughout the world. Common to Brisbane before population and sound pollution.
I have no words for that song. Only heard it three times,once was lying in bed with the bird outside my window for twenty minutes. I’ll say one word that doesn’t do it any justice. Incredible.Like from a greater force.
Been getting back in voice ,if I put a song upon the tube i’ll put a link up.
I have found great advice-
Keep calm and play the ukulele.
I enjoyed that, Jim. I hope you right some more, and that there’s no more talk of banning.
Bloody hell!!! “right”= “write” lol.
Maybe I should be banned.
Jim, good to see you back! I always enjoyed your comments, even if your unique writing and grammar style drives some to distraction. Btw, others ignore their condition of being banned and continue to post. Why not yourself, you’ve plenty to offer?
Intimacy and belonging within our landscape… have you ever wondered what this place must have been like before the white men came? We’re familiar with the post-settlement history and consequences on landscape, flora and fauna, but to have been here before the rot set in… that would have been something, yes?
Give me a call when you next set out on a Night Parrot hunt. I’d like to see that. I’ve been a bit of a birdwatcher slash bushie for most of my life also, with a few magic moments along the way, like seeing a Wedge-tailed Eagle stoop onto a mob of kangaroos and lift a half-grown joey 20 metres before letting it fall, or a peregrine falcon in a blindingly fast stoop onto a flock of ducks on one of the Murray’s lagoons.
Keeping close to nature won’t pay the bills, but there are many rewards if the interest is authentic. And yeh, play the ukulele. (I had an Aussie mate in China, a guy my age who’d played for years in pub bands up and down the east coast but most often and for the longest periods in Melbourne. A guitarist. His time in China was not that enjoyable, and he told me once that whenever he had the blues, he’d just pick up the guitar and play, didn’t matter what, just create the music. He was a skilled musician and his fingers could take the music anywhere. Things like that, activities that engage and reward will get you through the difficult times).
Good to mingle with you people though I hover past and have a read. I see Bob’s love of pen and word and social knots and twists resting on Shakespeare these days to leave the world. So much else to do and stories too. So much is left in our heads and never makes the pen or camera. I think we tell ourselves that no one cares or the matter is so simple we can’t comprehend the art and impact on others. That we take it for granted. The best songs are simplistic and hit like a train. A lot said in few words.
I’ve seen the other days Canguro. Born late 50′s and north of Brisbane was as left , in places, as the early 1900′s, some before. I’ve ridden the Great Divide on Thoroughbred and Welsh mountain pony from Mt Cootha, Samford, Dayboro to Landsborough in early seventies late 60′s. Sat on verandahs with tea and cake and walked paddocks with 96 year old pioneers children. Like you I yearn for much and see the devastating mistakes and the share of it lost to corruptions and the money god. The best time warps have been the old farmhouses and shops, left by the aged farmers as they were when the parents or brother to war was living. Cars and trucks, furniture, bottles, food, tins, old bakelight signage, drawers and cupboards full of nick nacks and loved things and necessities from old decades. If only one had foresight then. Treasure rooms like Tutankhamon and a guided monologue by those who were there in those times. Straight from the heart and right in the eye as those old people were but it hurt them to take you there but they must if they can relate to you. They hold the old like security and memorial. I could have this I should of that,I don’t know why I did this or that,my grandfather this, my great grand mother that.People said this or that of the event or times but listen and I’ll tell you the truth.
We’ve lost much as a people.
Reminiscing. I still have photo’s of that Welsh mountain pony. As the breed,game,cocky and very capable. I used to go into a lantana thicket on a wallaby trail that was blocking our way and stand up and bust the branches with my back for his passage. He’d crawl through behind me like a dog. He wasn’t as fast on a flat as a thoroughbred but he could gallop all day and nothing would catch him in the scrub. Anything 4 1/2 feet was safe to jump without thought from log to barb wire fence and if he couldn’t crawl under something he’d climb it. Including back steps to high set houses. A bread and cake thief ,loved ice blocks and would have a beer with Dad on occasion. Protector of children against biting farm and hunting dogs. He was the finest mate. The old pioneers planted mango and guava trees, lemons, along the roads and he found me a few guava stands no one else knew. In many areas and right season,you didn’t have to take any food on a ride along with the bush tucker, pasionfruit and gooseberries, mullet ,crayfish and catfish.
The days of finch flocks in their thousands and palehead rosella gatherings in their hundred after breeding.
I grew up on the Murray river in nth east SA, where the old timers would tell you that the flocks of native ducks in the earlier part of the century (but still less than 100 years ago) were so large that they’d take 30 minutes to pass as they flew along the river’s path.
And now? You’re lucky to spot a few Black Duck or Teal if you ferret around the lagoons and billabongs for long enough.
We’ve too many examples of degradation and destruction of our environs, with one of the worst records in the world for catalysing flora and fauna loss.
It’s a subject of shame imo, that we were so focused on the development of a successful market economy that we were prepared to accept this level of cost.
I just spent time at Balranald ? and Renmark. The lake was filling after some years,the ducks were flying the watercourse and 10 to 15 locals standing on the “old” new bridge that sunk in it’s foundations,daily excited at the coming duck shoots. the birds have had the hell knocked out of them with the big dry. After a seasons rain across NSW there was still no parrots in most places where there should have been flocks. Millions of Starlings and Asian minors though,swirling clouds of them through places like Moree. Part explains the lack of natives.
From Perth to Brisbane, plagues of rabbit, fox, mouse and cats. The Nullabor bitumen was grey in places for 100 yard to 1/4 mile stretches of squashed mice in January. Rabbits running through the centre of town everywhere through some SA towns.Port Augusta etc.
Hi Jim. Reading your accounts reminds me of school days spent listening (in 40 degree heat) to Douglas Stewart’s play The Fire on the Snow on the radio. The recent accounts of Scott’s ill-fated expedition briing it all back. I think watching the recent doco is about as close as I want to get to the South Pole!
Interesting to note that Scott’s ponies shared the fate of most animals we humans use for our convenience. I express no view either way, it is what it is.
Also interesting is the human’s eye view of God expressed by the expeditioners, as if such a deity if it existed could be bothered a fig for men struggling to the pole, or anywhere else for that matter.
Hi Doug, I’ve found “god” to be more concerned with the whole than individual or exploit. I don’t think anyone or anything has exemption from love, pain or turmoil in the plan but there are things that I feel can be avoided for what some may call being favorited. A learning process for some in a big scheme of things and balance.
Our pony- name Bob- was cut proud by original owners and died of testicle cancer in his home paddock surrounded by love and vet attention. The Scott story is well worth the browse though I remember nothing of ponies. I would have loved some of the lineage of his pack dogs though.
Pope Superbus I (formerly George Pell) picked at his rosary beads as he contemplated the man sitting opposite.
“Why could you not win the election of 2016?” He interrogated.
“Wwwell your Holiness, I was too busy seeing to your investiture here in Rome . .” he muttered hesitantly.
“But that took only a few weeks! Lord Rupert and I are very disappointed in you, Tony. We thought that you were very unlucky in 2013, with Julia staging a remarkable recovery. But this makes three elections straight where you have been unlucky. Perhaps we need to find a lucky candidate?”
“Arh, but I have a plan, your Holiness – this strategy is bound to work. Our Shadow Treasurer Barnaby Joyce has had discussions with the shadow Finance Minister Clive Palmer, and shadow Attorney-General Gina Rinehart has approved the plan!” He gushed.
“Well, what is it?”
We will give every voter a list of all our scare campaigns – oops I mean concerns we have raised – and show how every one of them has been {beaten up} justified! It can’t fail!”
“Does it mention how Julia eats babies?”
“Of course, though not so . . . baldly, your Holiness” he said uncertainly.
“Well then; but speaking of baldly, when do you restart the scalp transplants?”
“I was hoping to get it put into Medicare in 2013, and then this time around, as a gesture of confidence.”
Hmmm. Draw some petty cash and get it done straight away. And get the ears fixed whilst you’re at it.
“Of course Holiness and thank you so much. May I kiss your ring?”
“If you must.”
His Holiness picks up the phone and dials, he plays with the crucifix that lays on his growing paunch while the phone rings, click:
“Hello Tom, yes he was here, never mind about that, I want you to get hold of Luca Brazzi, yes Luca, good, thank you Tom”
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/newman-government-defends-200k-allocation-to-big-brother-production-after-slashing-cash-support-for-literary-awards/story-e