Experimental history won’t change the Battle of Hastings – Opinion – smh.com.au

This is pretty much what I was trying to say yesterday about history, except that Stephen Muecke, being smarter than I am, says it better.

THE smouldering embers of the culture wars have been stirred again, this time by the Prime Minister, John Howard, talking about the teaching of history in schools. He called for the learning of significant dates, like that of the Battle of Hastings, and decried the influence of postmodern relativism…

What of relativism? The way Howard is using the term is to imply there are people who think there is a different truth for everyone and anything. He means to assert that the date of the Battle of Hastings is 1066; that is reality and don’t mess with it.

While Albert Einstein, the physicist who messed with reality with the theory of relativity, cannot be held accountable for the rise of relativistic thought in philosophy and the arts, both relativity and relativism grew in the same atmosphere of 20th-century modernism. This was a great era of experimental thought.

 

History debate rages over loss of narrative – Top stories – Breaking News 24/7 – NEWS.com.au

Source.

Yes, I do agree narrative is the lifeblood of good history teaching, and has been ever since Herodotus and those Bible writers who may or may not have been earlier than Herodotus. But anyone who does not go beyond that to examine historiography, the actual nature and method of history and how the past is intellectually constructed, has not yet been educated. Why, they could even end up believing ripping yarns like The Da Vinci Code!

Any fool can find factoids, especially today with Google and so on.

And guess what! Kevin (do visit this) agrees with John Howard! Hardly surprising that, is it? Kevin is the author of what I described on reading it as the worst and silliest book I read on education in forty years of teaching. John loves him. My view of the book has not changed. Is Kevin the Paris Hilton of the educational world? Or am I just being grumpy?

 

HNN – HuntingtonNews.Net: The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

This is a very well-written memoir, only marginally a novel, by the hitherto mysterious Trevanian, author of thrillers such as The Eiger Sanction.

 

Marigold Citymark, Sydney, Sydney Restaurant Review – Eatability

We were disappointed, but not as much as this patron:

Food 2 Ambience 2 Service 2 Value 3

I went to the Marigold with some work colleagues for yum char. They had lost our reservation so they put us on a table next to the toilet. They place smelt awful, I think they must have just painted it or have a large smelly dog. The food itself I think was probably that frozen stuff that you get from the freezer and put straight into the fryer or steamer – yuck! The waiters were rude too. Never ever going there again!!

 

Lines from a Floating Life: wishes of a misguided void: from dust to man, and to dust we return

You may recall this sad news a couple of weeks ago. I called in at The Mine yesterday even though school does not go back until Monday. There were a few people there. I found that Mitchell Seow, the 18-year-old ex-student, had been in the city with friends the Saturday before last and simply collapsed and died. There has been no funeral yet because there has had to be an inquest, as with all sudden and unexplained deaths.

 

Trevanian – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005) is the next Surry Hills Library book on my agenda, clearly a more literary work than Island of Tears. I note the author recently died. There are some moving tributes on his website, a unique feature of which is an optional set of cybernotes on the book I am about to read.

 

Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (Harper San Francisco 2005)

Thanks to Surry Hills Library, I have this as my current reading. Jim Wallis is more of a fundamentalist than I could ever be, but that aside we are in agreement on so many things. Here is a person who rings true. Here is what Americans, and all people of faith, or even of little faith or none, need to hear in 2006.

The link above takes you to Jim Wallis’s open letter to wrestler/politician Jesse Ventura, which gives you a good idea of what to expect. It is in fact reproduced in God’s Politics.

 

The Book of Common Prayer HTML Edition, Psalter

Anyone following the Daily Office will have found the following Psalm set for last night.

49

Audite haec, omnes

Hear this, all you peoples;
hearken, all you who dwell in the world, *
you of high degree and low, rich and poor together.

My mouth shall speak of wisdom, *
and my heart shall meditate on understanding.
I will incline my ear to a proverb *
and set forth my riddle upon the harp.

Why should I be afraid in evil days, *
when the wickedness of those at my heels surrounds me,
The wickedness of those who put their trust in their goods, *
and boast of their great riches?

We can never ransom ourselves, *
or deliver to God the price of our life;
For the ransom of our life is so great, *
that we should never have enough to pay it,
In order to live for ever and ever, *
and never see the grave.

For we see that the wise die also;
like the dull and stupid they perish *
and leave their wealth to those who come after them.

Their graves shall be their homes for ever,
their dwelling places from generation to generation, *
though they call the lands after their own names.
Even though honored, they cannot live for ever; *
they are like the beasts that perish.

 

Mao: the never ending story

This, from the leftish site Open Democracy, is an interesting review.

Two of Mao’s contemporaries have summarized Mao in two sentences and the book illustrates the two points well. Mao’s long time Russian interpreter-cum-secretary, Shih Che once told me that Mao did not trust anyone. And young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang of Xi’an fame once aptly commented “Mao knew well how to use people (for his own ends)”. Mao trusted no one, not his women, his party colleagues or his family members. He used all of them for pleasure or power and then threw them away with equal unconcern when they ceased to be useful to him. That was the secret of Mao’s success – trust no one but use everyone. It is a truth well illustrated by this book.

 

The Finish Line: Sang Ye

A good book, this one. An extract appears in my From Yellow Earth to Eucalypt (1994). He has been here in Elizabeth Street, and while in Beijing did a signal service for me in obtaining copyright clearances for Chinese works in my book. He is also one of Chang and Halliday’s many informants.

 

Jung Chang: Information From Answers.com

Do look at Marcel Proust’s comment on the previous entry, and then review the information about Jung Chang here. Her account of the Red Guard period in Mao: the Unknown Story is all the more poignant given the fact that she was herself a Red Guard. I really believe that Mao: the Unknown Story is much better than 50% accurate and reliable, despite my “even if” in the previous entry. What she demonstrates very well in the course of this book is that the Cultural Revolution was no mere “mistake” but an emanation of Mao himself as he had been ever since the 1920s.

 

On China and Chinese History

Two years already
Two whole years
Seven hundred thirty days
Seven hundred thirty nights
Little by little
Have erased the memory
Like raindrops
One by one
Washed clean
The blood-stained Square

From “The Dead Do Not Forget: In commemoration of the second anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre” by Wu Ningkun. His A Single Tear, A Family’s Persecution, Suffering, Love and Endurance, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1993; Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1993, is not as well-known as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, but is in my opinion a better book really. Here is an interview.

 

Race – The Power of an Illusion – TV Reviews – TV & Radio – Entertainment

Definitely must-see TV on ABC tonight at 8:35 PM.

 

The Book of Common Prayer HTML Edition

That is, the American version, a copy of which I bought way back when I was working at Wessex College of English, around the time I met M. It was a cheapie at the remainder shop, and a nice looking volume it is too.

Lately I have been making use of the Daily Office section — it is 3 Epiphany at the moment by the way — as a frame for my own spiritual exercises. Lest that seems either saintly or pretentious, let me say that I am pragmatically finding this of benefit. I get food for thought, and, doing it as I do just before sleeping, I find my nights in general have been much more restful. No, I don’t mean to say the practice puts me to sleep, but it certainly helps compose the mind.