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.

Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution.

Ever since I was a very young and innocent man I've read Terry Eagleton. He came to my notice in the late 60's during the Vietnam war. He was a young academic from Cambridge who described himself as a Marxist and co-founded a UK magazine called Slant, which became a fierce, articulate and passionate voice of criticism of Western political and cultural 'decadence'. These were the days of student uprisings and incipient revolutions across the spectrum - political, social, sexual, cultural. It was the counter-culture in full swing. It was a heady and exciting time to be a young student, to say the least.

Over the years Eagleton went on to become an important voice in literary and cultural criticism in Britain, but never lost his taste for radicalism. He also never lost his extraordinary talent for writing. He has written numerous, well-regarded books, and is currently Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland in Galway (where he lives).

All this by way of introducing his latest work Reason, Faith and Revolution, which I've been unable to put down for the last three days. I've barely eaten or slept. It's just utterly absorbing. The subtitle is 'Reflections on the God Debate', which is exactly what it is. He takes aim at the anti-God brigade: Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular, authors of The God Delusion and God is Not Great respectively.

It is witty, polemical and wise, full of marvellous literary and philosophical allusions, and wonderfully provocative, with full-frontal attacks on all sorts of juicy targets. And it's such a joy to read. The prose is lively, at times poetic. He is a master of the telling and accurate simile.

If you have a penchant for theology, philosophy, literature and politics - and what civilised person doesn't? - then you will love this book.

Here is a taste:

Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another. It was Christianity, not the French intelligentsia, which invented the concept of everyday life....There is nothing heroic about the New Testament at all. Jesus is a sick joke of a saviour. Messiahs are not born in stables.

It ever there was a pious myth and piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.

Science has its high priests, sacred cows, revered scriptures, ideological exclusions, and rituals for suppressing dissent. To this extent, it is ridiculous to see it as the polar opposite of religion.

The sky's the limit, never say never, you can crack it if you try, you can be anything you want: such are the delusions of the American dream. For some in the USA, the C-word is 'can't'. Negativity is often looked upon there as a thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.

Neoconservatism is a species of fideism, untroubled in its ideological ardour by anything as trifling as reality.

Buy and read this book. As for me, I'm about to read it again!

The Debate Over??...

Here is a climate alarmist story from today's Sunday Age:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/debate-over-droughts-and-floods-on-the-rise-20090523-bizp.html

Here is the credible science:

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/200705-03AusIMMcorrected.pdf

Professor Bob Carter (pictured) is an Australian research scientist at the University of Adelaide, and was formerly head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Queensland. His article is a superb summary of the more rational view.

Debate over, my arse!

A Global Warming update...

I ordered these two books from Amazon having become fascinated with the scientific side of the climate change debate after reading Ian Plimer's wonderfully invigorating Heaven+Earth.

Amazon is so good because of its readers' reviews which guide selections from the hundreds of competing tomes on a particular subject. These two books universally got five stars, and I can see why.

The Solomon book is simply outstanding, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who, like me, is getting quite fed up with the repetitive, apocalyptic, 'we'll all be rooned' visions of doomsayers who simply accept the orthodox, consensus, scientific view absolutely uncritically. (Here's what I want on my gravestone: 'He never accepted the party line'!)

There are far more rational perspectives from far more credible scientists around the world, and they are refreshing, optimistic and sane. Solomon reviews the writings and opinions of thirty of them.

For instance, the world renowned Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov says this: 'If the temperature of the ocean rises even a little [due to increased solar activity], gigantic amounts of CO2 are released into the atmosphere through the evaporation of water. It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations'.

'Furthermore....this recent global warming will be short-lived and we are actually on the brink of a global cooling, likely a severe one....The Earth has hit its temperature ceiling, demonstrated by cooling that is occurring on the upper levels of the world's oceans. Solar irradiance has begun to fall, ushering in a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012-2015. The depth of the decline...will occur around 2041...and will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-60, lasting some 50 years, after which temperatures will go up again. We continue to bask in the remains of heat that the planet accumulated over the 20th century'.

Great stuff eh?

Antonio Zichichi is Italy's most renowned scientist and an outspoken critic of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He argues 'that models used by the IPCC are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view....On the basis of actual scientific fact it is not possible to exclude the idea that climate changes can be due to natural causes, and that it is plausible that man is not to blame'.

The problem is that scientists with these sorts of views get very quickly ostracised from the mainstream scientific community whose members universally believe the 'science is settled'. Here's how Al Gore described the sceptics: 'they get together on a Saturday night and party with people who believe the earth is flat and that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot'!

Funny, but sadly, tragically,wrong.

The big question for me is why is there this divide? What psychological and group dynamics are at play? Are we seeing just another example of groupthink, the well documented process of individuals identifying with a group being captured by its leadership and authority and seemingly losing any ability to think independently and critically?

Fascinating.