Two Great Political Tomes

For the last two weeks I've been thoroughly immersed in these two huge, heavy but wonderful political books. I can wholeheartedly recommend both of them to anybody who loves to luxuriate in the rich details of our contemporary political history.

Ted Kennedy's Memoir is a reflective and beautifully written story of his life and career as a Kennedy and as a member of the US Senate for nearly forty years. The whole rich family saga is here, as well as fascinating behind-the-scenes narratives of all the great legislative battles Kennedy was associated with during the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Shrub administrations.

What a huge family! Ted was the last of nine children, and his brother Bobby and his wife Ethel had eleven for god's sake. Seemingly, hundreds (well...four) of the family were wiped out in small plane crashes, and disasters of one kind or another overtook many of the rest. You'd have thought they would have learnt not to go out! Still, there's so much love in this book, for family, friends, colleagues and even occasional foes, that makes it so warm and involving, and, frankly, absorbing.

Many of Kennedy's great speeches are liberally quoted, which gives the book a special, literary power as well. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Paul Kelly's The March of Patriots is also an enthralling read. If you want a superb, sympathetic and politically astute overview of Australian politics over the last thirty years you couldn't do any better than this book. And Kelly has a special gift for bringing even the most mundane and complex issues to vivid life. He brings a strong sense of story as well as a wealth of juicy detail to all the great policy initiatives and stoushes that have made the last few decades of our history so fascinating. Keating and Howard are the main protagonists, but there are many more.

He's a bit too fond of 'ism's', like nationalism, regionalism, exceptionalism, globalism, etc, which he uses to give his narrative a dramatic lift and nobler purpose, but nevertheless he remains pretty grounded throughout, and invests the story with plenty of energy and drive.

Huge structural shifts and policy reforms have (thankfully) been unleashed on Australia over the years encompassed by this book, and Keating and Howard have driven them with passion. Kelly's superb chronicling of these events is a must read.

Celebrate these new Australian films!

Blessed opened today around Australia and I rushed to see it because two members of its ensemble cast are simply my favorite female actors alive today: Frances O'Connor and Miranda Otto.

It's become quite fashionable in critical circles to denigrate Australian films of the last few years for being too dark and depressing and decidedly noncommercial. They've become too consciously indie and worthy, luxuriating in being labelled 'gritty'.

There's truth to that, but there's also untruth. See Balibo, Beautiful Kate and Blessed for fine recent examples of excellent local productions that are powerful and emotionally wrenching and worth all the investment that time, money and talent can make in them.

Blessed is simply amazingly good. See it for Frances O'Connor's performance alone. It's not a large role, but it's stunningly raw and harrowing. You don't so much see this film as subject yourself to it, but it's worth every bit of uncomfortableness you'll feel. I simply bawled at the end for at least five minutes. Thank god the credits kept the lights off!

It's directed and co-written by Ana Kokkinos, who wrote the superb Lantana. One of the other co-writers was Christos Tsiolkas, he of Slap fame, that extraordinary novel of modern Australian working class life, which I enthused over in this blog.

There've been plenty of wonderful Australian films released this year. Don't believe all you read.

The Genius of Paul Krugman

For years now I've been an enthusiastic reader of the Nobel Prize winning US economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

For so many reasons this guy is one of my all-time heroes! He's the scourge of the wingnut Republican conservatives in the US, particularly the neocons of recent times. He gives no quarter and lets them get away with nothing.

What makes him so powerful are two very formidable talents: the lucidity of his writing, and his exquisite intelligence.

Virtually singlehandedly he brought an end to Bush's crazy push to privatise social security in his second term, a proposal that would have savaged the entitlements and savings of tens of millions of Americans, but that was being sold as a way of rescuing funds from the dead hand of government bureaucracy so as to generate higher levels of returns on the market for individual citizens. Krugman's relentless and forensic critique of the proposal eventually sank it. Imagine the state those privatised funds would be in now after the financial crisis.

Krugman has written a number of books, but the latest and possibly best is The Conscience of a Liberal. There could be no better introduction to American politics and society than this magnificent and engrossing tome. The chapter on the rotten US health system and why it so desperately needs wholesale reform is one of the best things you could ever read on the subject.

But for a shorter intro to how good this guy is read his recent article in the New York Times called How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

Krugman got his Nobel Prize for his seminal work on trade theory. He challenged the long held belief that countries traded with one another because of the notion of 'comparative advantage'. Country A is good at making cheese and Country B isn't, so B imports the cheese it needs from A and sells stuff it's good at making to A in return. (Australia sells coal to China and buys cheap manufactured goods from China).

But, wait a minute...how about all those countries in Europe who make cars and import them as well? Italy, Germany, France and Sweden all export and import cars at the same time. So in fact does Australia, not to mention the US. Krugman blew the notion of comparative advantage right away. He looked at what was actually happening in the real world and then tried to construct a theory around it, rather than the reverse. Countries export as a way of reaching out to new markets, as a way of growing. And they import what they need and whatever takes their fancy.

This bias towards real world immersion is what has made Krugman such a compelling commentator on the current global financial crisis. He is a strong supporter of the stimulus packages implemented by so many governments around the world (in fact he considers they didn't go far enough) and a fierce denouncer of the 'debt is bad' mantra of wooden-headed conservatives.

Reading Krugman is a tonic, simply invigorating. His columns appear twice a week in the New York Times. I urge you to indulge!

Vale Ted Kennedy

For those of us who came of age in the sixties, and were of a liberal or radical persuasion politically, socially and theologically, Ted Kennedy was a hero.

His defining moment, the one that forever etched its profound mark in our consciousness, was his eulogy for his brother Robert in July, 1968. Simply and movingly he said this: 'My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'

With that familiar New England cadence, common to the Kennedy brothers, with its traces of Irish lilt and rhythm, the melodious upward inflexion in all the right places, Ted Kennedy powerfully defined the contours of much in our lives - the idealism, the reach and failure, the sins and the tragedies.

For over 40 years he engaged in the hard, wrenching and unforgiving task of achieving some sort of practical progress in the cause of a progressive, liberal agenda in the US Senate. He fought fiercely but constantly reached across the aisle when he judged it necessary to secure satisfactory legislative outcomes. He was the epitome of everything the conservatives hated, but in the end earned their respect and enduring friendship. Some of the most moving tributes to him today have come from conservative Republicans.

Ted Kennedy modelled the path of idealism for those of us in less exalted realms and places, and we continue to be inspired.

Thank you Ted.

M.J. Hyland and Colm Toibin - two new novels

Firstly a note to M.J.Hyland. The 'MJ' is a huge mistake - an awful marketing mistake and an unfortunate literary one as well.

Your name is Maria, one of the most beautiful first names in Christendom, and you should use it. You are not Mary-Jo from Louisiana. From your photographs you are also a beautiful woman physically. Why shrink away from that? Deliberately remaining nebulous and abstracted behind an indeterminate persona is no way to relate to your readers, much less attract new ones, and it is not a gesture of any significance. Authors are located in an historical place and time, a time swirling with the ideas and tensions of a particular social context, and for critical purposes key things about them should be disclosed. Being up front about your sexuality in today's world is a matter of integrity and honesty with your audience. The George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) days are gone. Even T. S. Eliot would present himself today as Thomas Stearns Eliot if he had any sense, which he had in spades. It's a weighty and resonant moniker, impactful. These things are important.

This Is How is Maria Hyland's third novel, and so far the only one of her's I've read. Frankly, I expected much more, given the pretty positive reviews. It's a prison narrative, even a prison procedural, and certainly not very original or insightful on that score. As a psychological portrait of a delusional young man with anger management problems who ends up murdering a recent acquaintance..well, it's just OK. All the usual cliches are there - unhappy childhood, distant father, smothering mother, university dropout, girlfriend leaves him, etc. The prison part makes up half the book and here again the cliches rule - vicious lags, sexual advances and threats, corrupt guards, bashings, rotten food, hopelessness, etc. The novel doesn't so much end as fade away, as it's got nowhere to go -much like the prisoner I guess. A disappointing read.

For a novel that really gets inside the mind and social context of a young person, and builds a narrative of incredible power and resonance, and one that simply won't let you go for days and nights after you've finished it, then read the Irish novelist Colm Toibin's latest, Brooklyn. Like his previous novel The Master, this is a magnificent achievement. The final, life-changing decision that the young female protagonist takes - praised by most reviewers for its rectitude and honor, but utterly wrong in my view for its cowardice and immaturity - is gut-wrenching.

Buy Brooklyn, read it and debate it and tell me I'm wrong.

The Slap: a Very Adult Book!

Reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas was an extremely refreshing experience for me. I pretend to know something about Australian literature - I majored in it years ago, and have read it extensively since - and think I know something about its broader themes and obsessions.

I subscribe to the fairly traditional school of thought that sees our literature reflecting the Australian experience of social fragility - our almost pathological need to seek shelter from the dark, menacing vastness of the land we inhabit; the deep, meaningless abyss that we're perpetually in danger of being sucked into. We congregate in cities and towns on the more welcoming edges of this continent. Our 'mateship' tradition expresses our deep sense that we survive as a group or not at all. Our fear is of isolation and madness.

While so much of our literature is rural in setting, it is never pastoral and rarely country town. In the 20th century it is dominantly inner city. It reflects the personal and social dynamics of the more educated, urban classes of Balmain and Carlton and the like. The protagonists are writers, broadcasters, teachers; rarely bizoids, middle managers, tradies. The stories and settings are all too familiar and 'literary'. The outer suburbs are non-existent.

It has usually been left to popular fiction, particularly crime fiction, to give us a sense of the broader social realities and how and where the majority of the population actually lives and what they do, think and worry about.

So when a book like The Slap comes along, it registers like a forgotten and surprising force of nature. This book is decidedly non-literary. It is a powerful, emotional, hard-hitting thump in the guts.

It has that rarest of features in Australian literature - muscularity. It is not effete; it is in no way a 'sensitive exploration of..'; it is intense in its earthiness; it has an invigorating physicality.

You will not entirely like most of the characters, male or female. They are not generally sympathetic, but they are frighteningly real and complex, and, in the end, unforgettable.

Much American literature tends to indulge in extremes: characters and situations on the very edge, frequently unrestrained, overripe. Think Mailer, Roth. Australians, like the English, are more genteel, with less of a taste for overt violence and aggression. It shows in our art.

Not The Slap! Here is a book that breaks the mould. It is confronting and bold and deserving of all the accolades and prizes it has received.

Buy it and read it! You won't regret it.

My Year Without Sex....(the movie!)

Having seen and enjoyed writer/director Sarah Watt's intriguing Look Both Ways, I was looking forward to her next, just released film My Year Without Sex. It's had rave reviews, and stars the brilliant Sascha Horler, whom I've always liked. She's an actress without a trace of method, straight up and down honest. What you see is what you get. Matt Day was also in it, he of the ill-cut, page-boy, hairdo.

What a disappointment. The film is easily the the most boring thing I've seen in years. What drama there was was totally contrived - 'what suburban episode can we shove in now to move the story along another month? - a car crash, a dead pet, a win on the pokies, a bit of anxiety at work, xmas presents (isn't there always some cheap drama in there), a dumb priest at the local church, a kid's birthday party, the easter bunny - god, the cliches keep coming.

Thus it never lifted off. The comedy bits were tiresomely unfunny, and the serious bits lacked anything remotely engaging.

I think Watts was trying to convey the stress entailed in being plain and ordinary in our pressured, consumer society, with its endlessly seductive, false god charms. But the parts never amounted to a whole conveying much meaning at all.

See the indigenous production Samson and Delilah instead. This simple movie is a classic. A film about Aboriginal desperation, written and directed by Michael Thornton, which utterly avoids blaming the white man. Powerful.