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poetry... and poetic justice...
But petite Linda is a formidable lady who wears super-high heeled red shoes, stiletto style, with a very sharp brain to match. Actually she should be the Premier of this NSW State — replacing that tree-chopping idiot called Baird... and the absent Labor leader... whatisname?
Most people would see this doco-in-the-making as a stupid idea and it is. But it's not such a miss-match, though I dare say no-one can make Andrew Bolt change his mind about the whatever crap he thinks about constantly. He is a CONservative through and through with what appears to be an understanding bypass — possibly white supremacist, possibly sexist, certainly anti-feminism and a scientificus ignoramus to boot. But he is clever in his craft of entrapping people.
The idea of opposite views appearing in public in whatever format is not new. The Greeks and the Romans had their fair share of philosophers throwing mad mud at each other. Some people call this a "debate" — like Q&A or like the US president hopeful, trying to woo a frenzied public, make sillier and sillier promises of kicking butts and making the country richer by, of course they do not say, making the poor poorer and increasing public funding for more private prisons to house more inmates — especially illegal immigrants who are prepared to clean your dunnies for a survival song — and beat the overall world record of prisoners per capita. Phew...
History is also full of nasty wordsmith duellists, of murderous political feuds, but also full of scientific opposites who are often a bit more civilised in their disagreements. Think of Einstein and Bohr, for example. They agreed to disagree — Bohr won the quantum mechanics debate...
Meanwhile many writers were not that nice to each others. This is not an exclusive English tradition. These days we tend to enforce respect of differences with stronger laws of libel, but many clever people are bypassing these with crotchety satire.
One must know that while more and more people could read and write, interestingly it was not until 1895 that English literature was first studied at Oxford university. English language and literature was nonetheless only first taught at the City of London School in 1866.
So what did kids (mostly privileged brats) learned about before this? Say dead lingos like Latin and Greek, philosophy, religion, arithmetic, brawling, buggery, other languages — such as French — fencing, swimming, while some parents warned their kids about reading English "literature".
Luis de Gongora was possibly the most famous Spanish poet in his time (16th-17th century). Sill is. He is very hard to translate as his syntax is extremely convoluted, all designed, I guess, to hide the real meaning of his thoughts (unless he was a precursor to the surrealists) — and he uses many more words than necessary, bordering on flamboyant totology. Here is a poem by Gongora:
Estas que me dictó, rimas sonoras,
Culta sí aunque bucólica Talía,
Oh excelso Conde, en las purpúreas horas
Que es rosas la alba y rosicler el día,
Ahora que de luz tu niebla doras,
Escucha, al son de la zampoña mía,
Si ya los muros no te ven de Huelva
Peinar el viento, fatigar la selva."
—Luis de Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 1612
Some words do not have equivalent in English and some words are derivatives of ideas, twice or thrice removed. I thus chose to translate these in a freer format than scholars would (I must say I have not seen any translations of this anyway).
These rhyming sounds dictated to me,
By Thalia still oozing with the bucolic spirit,
Of exquisite glory of the purple hours
that is the pink and rosy dawn of the day,
Now from the nebulous light of god's gift
Listen to the sound of my panpipes,
As the walls of Huelva do not see you
Combing the wind and exhausting Nature.
Luis de Gongora, Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea, 1612
I bring you this obscure poem and the following ones for several reasons. First as mentioned the "other" language is often not translatable in this poetic format where the important alliterations and the sonorities are Rap-like. Second I believe Gongora's poems hide his existential angst. And third, he had ferocious "opponents"... Gongora was a priest, possibly with some not so hidden major vices, and a man who wrote in a wordy style of poetry which he invented, called Culturanismo. It's very close to a Romantic style, a bit like Wordsworth's if I may say so, in my general ignorance.
The major other Spanish poet of his times — and still of today — was Gongora lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo who — as Gongora was as witty and esoteric windy a writer — was a satirist and a writer of the shorter Spanish "direct" poetry called Conceptismo. A bit like modern minimalist poetry.
Quevedo wrote nastily about Gongora, especially about his big nose:
No altar, garito sí; poco cristiano,
mucho tahúr, no clérigo, sí arpía.
Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado,
érase una nariz superlativa,
érase una nariz sayón y escriba,
érase un peje espada muy barbado
No saint, gaming for sure; unchristian,
A big gambler, not a cleric, but a bitch,
Once upon a man a nose was stuck,
Once a superlative nose,
Once an ugly nose upon a scribe,
Once upon a third-rate bureaucrat with a sword like a beard...
(All translations by Gus. The word peje was a curly one and there were very few references to make sense of, except the third-rate bureaucrat)
This would hurt... It was written to hurt...
---------------
Now for a bit of Wordsworth:
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
A bit lame and wordy. The vicious attacks on Wordsworth by other writers were quite remarkable since it appears he was not a remarkable rhymer. But he became the Poet Laureate nonetheless — and evolved into a very pompous haughty member of the establishment. Wordsworth strongly approved of the English government's repression and prosecution of any form of expressed radical thinking — not unlike our own shock-jock, Andrew Bolt, at the present, in his own way.
Wordsworth good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had far more genius to offer. Samuel, having been influenced by Kant and by William Godwin — one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism, — would have been horrified by Wordsworth later political stance.
Here is the genial conclusion of Kubla Khan by Coleridge:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Since Coleridge was often smoking opium and indulged in other substances (honey-dew, milk of paradise) because of chronic arthritic pains or such, he may not have cared much about or noted Wordsworth's rabid reactionary conservative views...
Meanwhile contemporary and latter writers had their two bob worth to say about Wordsworth's unworth:
What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth... I can compare him with no one but Simonides, the flatterer [shock-jock] of the Sycilian Tyrants [the extreme despotic gangsters with ultra right views... i.e. the Mafia].
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he never was a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already written there.
Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying...
Dank, limber verses, stuff with lakeside sedges, And propt with rotten stakes from rotten hedges.
Walter Savage Landor
In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period he was a "bad" man.
Then he became "good", abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
Wordsworth had a big nose, like Gongora, but with no sense of smell, and he had an awfully limp handshake. The "correct principles" of course are Russell's cynical words that defined the condoning of the use of the aristocratic whips to make the plebs work harder and harder for less — often with religious fervour. We know.
Andrew Bolt is here on the bridge like a modern captain of the same reactionary boat, side by side with Wordsworth. Flog 'em! Discreetly...
So, dear Linda, beware, Andrew is very skilled at making people contradict themselves by placing words in their mouth like placing a muzzle on them with his boca grande perro.
Gus Leonisky
Your local non-laureate poet.
- By Gus Leonisky at 22 Jan 2016 - 6:27am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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baird, the tree-chopper...
We all pay when Liberal-National Coalitions at a state and federal level directly contradict each other on environment policy, writes Dr Oisín Sweeney of the National Parks Association of NSW.
The background to the current chaosNew South Wales is currently undertaking the most dramatic reforms of its environmental legislation in decades. The Office of Environment and Heritage is frantically (environment groups say much too frantically) drafting the new Biodiversity Conservation Act which "streamlines" current legislation by repealing the Native Vegetation Act 2003, the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995 and parts of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 to create new and improved environmental legislation.
Well new at least. Contrary to its name it looks set to weaken protection of the environment across the board. It will broaden the application of the ‘Major Offsets Policy’ which was the subject of a damning independent review by a top scientist and is much weaker than the recommendations made by a Federal Senate Committee.
It looks set to increase the incidences where self-assessable clearing can take place by landholders — justified by a requirement to recreate nature in set-asides and offsets which, we know is dodgy at best, and an increase in funding for private land conservation that hasn’t yet been agreed to by Treasury. And of course it repeals the Native Vegetation Act which, although not perfect,dramatically reduced land clearing.
read more https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/coalitions-in-conflict-behold-the-great-environment-policy-jumble,8597
another poem...
Another famous poem by Gongora:MIENTRAS POR COMPETIR CON TU CABELLO
Mientras por competir con tu cabello
oro bruñido el sol relumbra en vano,
mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
mira tu blanca frente al lilio bello,
mientras a cada labio, por cogello,
siguen más ojos que a clavel temprano,
y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
del luciente cristal tu blanco cuello,
goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,
no sólo en plata o vïola truncada
se vuelva, mas tú y ello juntamente
en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada.
Luis de Góngora
Translation below by Gus:
WHILE COMPETING WITH YOUR HAIR
While competing with your hair
Burnished gold, the sun shines in vain,
In defiance against the evident presence
of the beauty of your white lily face,
As each lip catches
more following eyes than early carnations,
And as the lushness covers with disdain
The gleaming white crystal of your neck,
Enjoying this neck, hair, lip and forehead,
Before it was in your golden age
Gold, lily, carnation, gleaming crystal,
Not only in silver and as a cut violet
The more you and your hair together
Becomes earth, smoke, dust, shadow, nothing.
Luis de Gongora
The poem could be simplified as " your hair shines more than the sun but you will die anyway..." Poetry is about the sounds and the unwritten music which becomes memory of an elusive image made of words.
a powerful oration against racism...
A powerful speech by Indigenous journalist Stan Grant in which he says the "Australian dream is rooted in racism" has gone viral.
Grant addressed an audience in Sydney on the impact of colonisation and discrimination as part of the IQ2 debate series held by The Ethics Centre.
The speech was made last year but was published online just a week before Australia Day. It has resonated with Australians, having been viewed more than 736,000 times on Facebook and 15,000 times on YouTube.
In his address Grant was asked to argue for or against the topic "Racism is destroying the Australian Dream", and said racism was at its heart.
Grant opened his speech acknowledging when AFL player Adam Goodes was "hounded" and booed, and told "he was not Australian".
"When we heard those boos, we heard a sound that was very familiar to us ... we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of disposition, injustice, suffering and survival," Grant said.
"We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you're not welcome."
He said we sung of the Australian dream, "Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free".
"My people die young in this country," Grant said.
External Link: Mike Cartlon tweet"We die 10 years younger than the average Australian, and we are far from free. We are fewer than 3 per cent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 per cent — a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons.
"And if you're a juvenile it is worse, it is 50 per cent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school."
He referenced a famous poem from Dorothea Mackellar, saying his people's rights "were extinguished because we were not here according to British law".
"I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges," Grant quoted from the poem My Country.
"It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, diseases ravaged us on those plains."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-24/stan-grant's-racism-is-killing-the-australia-dream-speech-viral/7110506
Please note that:
A successful Aboriginal bureaucrat and activist, Linda Burney became the first Aboriginal person elected to the New South Wales (NSW) Parliament in 2003, and only the fourth Aboriginal woman elected anywhere in Australia.
Linda Jean Burney, of Wiradjuri descent, grew up in Whitton, a small farming community near Leeton. One of the 'Stolen Generation' of Aboriginal children, she first met her father when she was 28 years old.
Burney obtained her Diploma of Teaching from the then Mitchell College of Advanced Education. In 1979 she began teaching at Lethbridge Park public school in western Sydney. In the mid-1980s she became involved in the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG) and helped set up the national body, the Australian federation of AECGs, in 1990-91. She was also instrumental in the development and implementation of the first Aboriginal education policy in Australia for the state's education department.
In the early 1990s Burney was, concurrently, president of the national body of AECGs, and chair of the New South Wales National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy Coordinating Committee. Her priorities have been early childhood education, mandatory Aboriginal studies in all schools, and the eradication of racism in education.
read more: http://trove.nla.gov.au/people/723086?c=people
See article from top where I deliberately omitted to say that Linda is an Aboriginal woman...
running up the flag-pole day...
John Pilger writes about the significance of 26 January for Indigenous Australians — a history of theft, mass murder and dispossession.
ON 26 JANUARY, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be "a day for families", say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.
For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-Indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call "New Australians" often choose 26 January, "Australia Day", to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.
It was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain's First Fleet dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788
This was the moment the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was "settled". It was, wrote Henry Reynolds – one of few honest Australian historians – one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as ‘a whispering in our hearts’.
The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained.
https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/australias-day-for-secrets-flags-and-cowards,8609
Read from top.
a few words from governor macquarie...
aussie anthem isn't good news for some...
Former NRL star Joe Williams has rejected calls for him to hand back a Citizen of the Year award, after a local Wagga Wagga councillor criticised his decision to remain seated during the national anthem on Australia Day.
Key points:The Wiradjuri man was named Citizen of the Year in the New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga for his work in mental health and suicide prevention.
But his decision not to stand for the anthem angered local councillor Paul Funnell, who told the Daily Advertiser the move was disrespectful and divisive and called for the award to be handed back.
Williams said he felt conflicted about attending the ceremony on Australia Day, which he said was a day of great heartache for Aboriginal people.
"It took a lot to go. I won't lie about that," he said.
"January 26 isn't, you know, a day of celebration and showing your face all happy like, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
"You know it's widely, widely mentioned that it's a day of mourning and definitely a day of sorrow for our mob right across the country."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-29/joe-williams-won't-return-award-amid-national-anthem-controversy/7123316
Meanwhile while no-one was looking:
“I’ll be creating a nation, though the nation already existed,” says Murrumu Walubara.
He’s not talking about a revolution, rebel or separatist movement in Australia – but an Indigenous nation that has always been here. Australia just failed to notice.
Late last year, I made a film with Murrumu Walubara – an Aboriginal man helping to create an independent government in Australia’s north – which debuted around the world this week for the Witness program on Al Jazeera English.
The sovereign Yidindji government was created by the tribal council of the Yidindji nation, a grouping of a dozen or so clans who speak the Yidin language and who hail from the areas in and around Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef in far northeast Queensland.
read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/29/theres-another-government-in-australia-and-murrumu-is-taking-it-to-the-world
moving on...
New South Wales deputy Labor leader Linda Burney is switching to Federal Politics.
Sources have told the ABC Linda Burney will seek pre-selection for the seat of Barton in Sydney's south.
The seat is currently held by the Liberal Party, but an electoral boundary redistribution in NSW is expected to favour the ALP, due to a move to the west.
Both Labor and the Liberals spoke out against the changes when they were proposed, with the Liberals arguing they would lose three seats as a result, including Barton.
Ms Burney's switch will force a by-election in the state seat of Canterbury, which the MP has held since 2003.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-29/linda-burney-to-move-to-federal-politics/7209108
See story at top...