Ramona Koval interviews Nicholas Jose: Sunday 23/10/2005

I am now reading Original Face, thanks to “Marcel Proust” who dropped in last Saturday and lent me his copy. I didn’t go the launching, by the way. I am enjoying it. Marcel emailed me earlier this month with some well-observed reservations about a few points. I may come back to these later. Marcel enjoyed the book too, despite those reservations. There are one or two hints and fragments of Chinese I have known through M, here and there, and of course I have known Nick for fifteen years now.

I began the novel in the waiting room at the gastroenterologist’s today.

 

Endoscopy

I recovered from an anaesthetic just over two hours ago, so I trust today’s posts make sense. I do feel OK, and Lord Malcolm delivered me from Bondi to the Juice and Java Lounge in Surry Hills where I ate my first meal since last night’s excellent steak.

By the way, yesterday’s yum cha again: Sirdan did turn up, but not where we did! So some time in the near future we will make use of Ben’s gift.

 

Is it Education Week in the papers this morning?

FIVE-YEAR-OLD children will be tested for basic reading skills twice a year under a national plan to help struggling students.

Describing the current state of early childhood and kindergarten education as “a mess”, Education Minister Brendan Nelson said the literacy tests would provide parents with results while their children were still identifying words and developing reading skills.

Pre-empting a national literacy report to be released soon, Dr Nelson backed the investigation’s recommendation of a national testing regime for under-8s.

“When a child comes into the system, you have got to have some idea of what their reading skills may be,” he told The Weekend Australian. “How is a teacher to know who to concentrate on? You worry about them all but you’ve surely got to identify the ones you have got to start from scratch on.”

This is insane stuff, really, and could only come out of the mouth of an anally retentive bureaucrat/politician with a mechanistic industrial model of education like Brendan Nelson. Mister Gradgrind, eat your heart out! It is also insulting to every early education teacher in Australia, who are trained and experienced to recognise what is happening with their charges and what their potential/problems might be in ways far more accurate and sensitive than any test Brendan-babe might think appropriate.

 

Does the Bible Justify Violence? (Facets 2004)

Got this little number from Surry Hills Library: well worth a look, and only 32 pages. Can’t quarrel with his last sentences: “The Bible has contributed to violence in the world precisely because it has been taken to confer a degree of certitude that transcends human discussion and argumentation. Perhaps the most constructive thing a biblical critic can do toward lessening the contribution of the Bible to violence in the world is to show that such certitude is an illusion.”

 

Kirby urges lawyers to stay true to the principle of justice

Source.

MICHAEL KIRBY: We have until now, cherished the belief that democratic governance is a temperate and moderate form of government with many checks and balances that save it from extremes.

A belief in the majoritarian parliamentary votes, sustained by nothing more than triennial visits of citizens to the ballot box, with uncontrolled power thereafter, is an infantile conception of a modern democracy.

KAREN BARLOW: Justice Kirby says lawyers have an intimate knowledge of the legal process and considerable sensitivity to injustice.

MICHAEL KIRBY: Lawyers have a special duty to raise their voices and act as they can whenever they believe that the fundamentals of the constitution are endangered by extreme laws or by governmental actions out of harmony with our liberty respecting traditions.

KAREN BARLOW: And so he says lawyers must speak up for civil liberties, even when other voices fall silent.

Justice Kirby has just been named NSW Australian of the Year 2006.

 

Yesterday

Yesterday I was meant to meet early in the morning with The Poet to talk him through how to use the site I set up for him (above) but the probably final illness of his mother-in-law prevented this happening. He is off to the USA shortly to visit his son as well, then moving to Victoria.

Later we were to have coffee with Phil Day;

 

Real Authors of Iraq Dossier Blast Blair (2003)

Yesterday I wrote: “From a very different viewpoint, that thriller I have been reading — which is not bad but woefully proofread if at all — has one marvellous but of course unlikely trope, that the (unnamed) British Prime Minister depended on his teenage son’s web surfing to garner evidence on Saddam and WMD for his dossier on Iraq pre-invasion.”

I had forgotten the true story.

 

Military pin-up turns critic of war – World – smh.com.au

Link.

Tim Collins, who commanded the Royal Irish Regiment during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said “the war as it was prosecuted was a mistake, and history will judge that”.

He said the 20th century had been “blighted by a war which began in 1914 and arguably didn’t end until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It now falls on Australia and the United Kingdom to persuade the Americans not to blight the 21st century with a war which involves future generations.”

While he believed removing Saddam Hussein had been necessary, the US-led coalition had been “incompetent’ in not forging a broader coalition and in not having a five-year plan for after the invasion…

Colonel Collins, who has retired from the military, achieved overnight fame in 2003 when British journalists recorded a stirring address he made to his troops just before they crossed over into Iraqi territory. For a time he was a pin-up among coalition military commanders. But in his recently published book, Rules of Engagement, he criticises US military culture for its failure to engage with the local population. He told the Herald: “The Americans really only understand subjugation”…

It appears the book is hardly a seditious document though: see “REVIEW ESSAY: British Armed Forces in Iraq” (Royal United Services Institute site).

 

Ekklesia – Ekklesia is a UK think tank and news service on theology and public life

This site is well worth visiting. See for example Rethinking hate speech, blasphemy and free expression. Vlad mentioned Sojourners today, and it does look good. See for example “Who would Jesus torture?” “Sojourners, http://www.sojo.net, is a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice…”

 

So what happened near this day?

While looking for evidence on my old diaries about scintillating scotoma (see previous entry) I decided to review what was happening in my life around this day since 1999! That’s a lot of diary, not all of it online. Below you can read what I found, the last two years being linked as they are still archived online.

 

Delia Malchert – Migraine Aura – Scintillating Scotoma

These are actually rather pretty as you may see on that site. I have had such attacks from time to time for at least thirty years, having one today soon after I got home from church. It lasted about twenty minutes. I note on my diary (offline now) that I had one on May 12, 2003, and I don’t think I have had one since. It goes like that. Sometimes I have a few, once an episode starts; we shall see. It’s OK now.

Update November 2007

Corrected the link. Also, look at this animation. Just the way it is.

 

English Teacher moments

English Teacher moments

The link above takes you back to August, when I mentioned Scott Poynting, an ex-student from Wollongong who is now at the University of Western Sydney. Imagine how pleased I was to receive this email the other day.

 

RUMFITT Jeremy, First Strike, Cambridge, Vanguard Press 2004

Link.

Talk about romans-a-clef!

In the aftermath of 9th September and the run up to the Iraq war, US President Mike Santos rides high in the polls. But to stay there he needs Saddam Hussein’s scrotum, hanging from his gun belt. When Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service uncovers a terrorist plot to detonate a dirty Bomb in Washington DC, Alex Bowman is dispatched to the States to help the US authorities deal with the problem. The leading hawk in the US cabinet, Secretary of Defence, Karl Herzfeld, pressures the CIA to conjure up the missing evidence of WMDs he needs to justify the war. When the CIA fails to produce the necessary data Herzfeld resolves to facilitate the detonation of the Dirty Bomb, pin the blame on Saddam Hussein and justify the war…

 

Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, Allen and Unwin, 2005

I shouldn’t buy books, should I? After all, I have devoted much effort this year to ridding myself of so many, but the above title just reached out to me. Skimming it so far I am glad I bought it.

Geraldine Doogue: Why do Australians seem to find such difficulty discussing history – that it becomes so angry so fast?

Bain Attwood: Because I think history is very much bound up with the sense of who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going to. History is increasingly bound up with human being’s sense of who they are, their identity. And so human beings have a lot invested in history, they have a lot invested in what they believe is a true story and I think in these times of very rapid change a lot of people think that the past, or the story about the past is the most stable thing that they can hold onto.

And so what we have is a situation where there’s been a democratisation of history, where we have whole series of competing historical truths and many people find this very difficult to come to terms with, particularly settler peoples. We’re used to saying our story is true, you accept that.

Since the age of de-colonisation, colonised peoples have not accepted that, and they say, we have our story too. How do you determine what is historical truth, how do you determine who is right? How do you determine whose identity is going to prevail. These are very very difficult questions for any nation state to address. We shouldn’t say that this is easy, we shouldn’t assume that where people’s histories are challenged that that is an easy process for them, and the evidence in Australia, as it is in many other places is that this can be very painful, and that should be recognised, we shouldn’t just brush that aside…