I was between blogs at the time…

In The Big Archive you will find an ex-Blogspot entry from 2005:

‘I don’t make moral judgments’ : Alan Hollinghurst, winner of the 2004 Booker prize

Published May 28, 2005 Australia and Australian , Fiction , Gay and Lesbian , Top read , book reviews , radio , writers

Link.

One of the cute but at times noisy young guys upstairs had a birthday yesterday, it seems, and part of their celebration involved arriving home at 3 am. Consequently I heard the repeat of Australia Talks Books on Radio National. This was good, as it turned out to be the Sydney Writers Festival session with Alan Hollinghurst, whose The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. Here is a related comment from the ABC Online book discussion page:

 

That hypothetical Year 10 lesson on "White Australia"

“Piebald Possibilities – a little Australian Christmas family party of the future”.
Cartoon: Livingstone Hopkins, The Bulletin,
13 December 1902.

I am not going to bore you rigid with a detailed unit plan, but I have to say teachers are well served these days. In my day — as all boring old farts say — I really had to bury myself in a library or break the bank at the book shop. The latter I quite often did when teaching history, my stint teaching Ancient History at Masada being a classic example, of great benefit at the time to Gleebooks and a second-hand bookshop in George Street.

 

Past seven days, top fives

According to Sitemeter 2,151 visits came to the Floating Life sites, 51 to Ninglun on Blogspot, and 1,240 to English/ESL. That’s visits excluding my own, and not page views.

TOP FIVE POSTS

Here:

Rampant: How a City Stopped a Plague 25
Education Week’s “Quality Counts 2008” survey 25
Great test match, but really bad smell on the field 21
Are Australians racist? 13
The Chatterley Affair 12
About 12

Oz Politics:

About 54
Racism No Way 44
The Great Surry Hills Book Clearance of 2005 44
Their 1968 and mine 33
John Howard’s Farewell Speech: for the record 22

English/ESL:

Studying the Gothic, or Emily Bronte? 142
About 73
Physical journeys and Peter Skrzynecki’s poems 70
Workshop 02 — NSW HSC: Area Study: Imaginative Journeys 60
How should I write up a Science experiment? 56

Old Floating Life:

The connection has timed out — Firefox 98
About 64
Bill Heffernan! 34
Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in Macbeth 31
About the Whitfields: convict days 30