Two unrelated good news stories

1. India and Australia are playing cricket again, in Western Australia, instead of silly buggers…** (No, that is not offensive in Australia! )

2. I mentioned the excellent SBS series East West 101 (right) back in December. A comment on that post from Wayne Smith says:

It has been sold to Israel and other countries in the Middle East plus two more series have now been given the go ahead.

http://www.eastwest101.com

That’s good to hear!

Next day

Crazy world

Look, whatever else George Bush has been doing at this time in his dying presidency one thing seems horribly possible: passing on a really stupid war against Iran to whoever succeeds him. That and an economy approaching meltdown. So aside from making yet another effort in the Israel/Palestine thing, he seems to have been shoring up support for his Iran policy and begging for relief on oil prices.

Things in Iraq, though, are marginally better, or so we are told — so long as we don’t think too hard about how we have got there, and the general irrelevance of it all to what 9/11 represented.

Australian poem: 2008 series: #2 — Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) "Snowdrops"

Image from the excellent OzLit blog Matilda.

There is a good online collection of Slessor’s poems on Old Poetry, including “Snowdrops”. Reading Larry Writer’s Razor (Pan Macmillan 2001) as I have been lately I can now make sense of the poem, itself a document of the Darlinghurst and Surry Hills of Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh. “Snowdrops” = “cocaine”.

The Snowdrop Girl in fields of snowdrops walks,
Whiter than foam, deeper than waters flowing,
Flakes of wild milk gone blowing,
Snowing on cloudy stalks.
The Snowdrop Girl goes picking flowers of snow,
Blossoms of darkness bubbling into dreams,
In a strange country, by the shadowy streams
Where the cruel petals of the Coke-tree grow.

From the smoke and the fume of the backyard room,
Where poverty sits and gloats,
On runaway feet from a dirty street
To a field of snow she floats;
And tickets to Hell have a curious smell
And a dangerous crystal whiff,
Where men hawk Death in a snowdrops’s breath
At a couple of shillings a sniff.