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Dylan, the Devil and Judas

Bob DylanWhile many have searched for religious themes in Dylan’s lyrics, what has often been overlooked is the astonishing amount of times Dylan has scripturally referred to Satan. Furthermore, the unsavoury characters of Judas and Cain have also made regular appearances. Satan is usually portrayed as the great deceiver, the man of peace masquerading as an angel of light, while Judas and Cain are invariably metaphors for betrayal and guilt.

i) The Devil
Dy

Written by Damian Balassone on 29-10-2010, 5 user comments

Meanland: When does print matter?

NewspapersPicking up where I left off… though not with Nicholas Carr (at least, not immediately).

At the Wheeler Centre’s weekly lunchtime soapbox event Anna Krien addressed the question of whether newspapers still matter in the digital era. Krien’s central argument was that print newspapers needed to recognise and mobilise the features that make them unique and play to their strengths, rather than playing catch up with their online competition. Print newspapers can make a virtue of their relative slowness; can devote resources to research; can provide in-depth analysis and long-form reportage; can deliver a product that is worth the paper it is printed on (i.e. is worth its cover price and is worth whatever effort it takes to carry it from breakfast table to briefcase to beachside). In so doing, newspapers can leave the speedy work of ‘news coverage’ to the web. Printed papers, with their research, analysis and critique, can be the roughage in our media diet, giving us something to chew on: slow-to-digest information that complements the news snacks we get online. ... read more

Written by Caroline Hamilton on 29-10-2010, 2 user comments

Non-fiction review – Life on the Edge: The Autobiography of Ralph de Boissière

Life on the Edge: The Autobiography of Ralph de Boissière
Lexicon Trinidad Limited

Crown JewelRalph de Boissière lived for a hundred years and wrote five novels but this autobiography may be the story that de Boissière was always meant to tell. Born in Trinidad in 1907 he migrated to Melbourne in 1948 and lived the rest of his life there working in a variety of mundane day jobs while writing and rewriting his novels. De Boissière did not achieve success as a novelist in either the West Indies or Australia although his two major novels, Crown Jewel and Rum and Coca Cola, were published widely in Eastern Europe. He wanted to describe a society and its people in his novels and he was impressed by the example of Tolstoy and Turgenev but as de Boissière filters his experiences to create his autobiography he does a better job of describing people functioning within their societies in all their unpleasantness, glory and contradiction than most novels ever manage. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 28-10-2010, 2 user comments

NSW Labor – Degeneration versus resilience

Union manThe erosion of the ALP’s long grip on the working-class vote in NSW has been spectacular, reflecting the long-term processes that Left Flank has repeatedly drawn attention to. Yet it can still rely on a significant party organisation, and even more so the active endorsement (or at least passive acceptance) of trade union leaders, organisers and delegates to carry its base.

By focusing almost exclusively on the inner-party struggle in Power Crisis, Rodney Cavalier ends up acknowledging but downplaying the importance of how workers in unions helped deliver large ALP votes in NSW in the 2007 state and federal elections, but also how their alienation underpinned Iemma’s destruction and Labor’s electoral collapse in the years since. Iemma won in 2007 in large part because his campaign dovetailed with the powerful Your Rights At Work movement in its portrayal of the Liberal opposition as privileged, nasty, pro-Workchoices Tories. Power privatisation, on the other hand, like Rudd’s later abandonment of climate action, represented a deep betrayal of the hope vested in a party that had already been struggling to prove its relevance to traditional supporters. In both cases Labor ‘blew its last chance’. ... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 27-10-2010, 2 user comments

Post from Tanzania: A matter of choice

We almost made it to the Rwandan border by crossing Tanzania overland. We caught three ferries, five inter-town dalla dallas, eleven buses, a taxi and a pick-up. We tried to catch a fourth ferry and some trains but services were suspended. We travelled on the worst roads I have ever come across. I lost count of the number of times I feared we would crash. By the time our bus between Mpanda and Tabora broke down and the driver put us in the back of a cattle truck for the remaining five hours of the trip, we’d had enough. We chose to fly the last leg.

And we had that choice. Sure, it was expensive, and we felt a little like we’d cheated (there are travellers out there who do far more intrepid things than travel a few hours in the back of a bumpy truck), but after 13 hours on the road and 250 kms travelled that day, we did the maths. All those road trips – statistically speaking, we were due for something bad to happen. I pictured us careening off the side of a hill, barrelling through a crowd of school kids or tipping over on our side for swerving to quickly. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 27-10-2010, 1 user comment

Ode to ‘Nude Woman Reading’

When writing music reviews I often use the term ‘psychedelic’ as shorthand to describe those transformations to familiar sounds which are unexpected and unusual to the extent that the senses become favourably stimulated, and otherwise hidden dimensions of the world are revealed through a desirable glimpse of freedom. And there doesn’t have to be some big mind-blowing catalyst to set it off. Psychedelic enlightenment is there for the taking from something as simple as that tingling rush when lips are locked with a good kisser or possibly the distorted guitars and sexy vibes on Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’.

It is common knowledge that the onset of mind-expansion sometimes follows the ingestion of certain lysergic substances, but when it comes to musical adventures listened to in the right setting and mood, a profound and immediate impact can occur without chemical enhancement. I know that when I signed up for the inner journey that flows from such a majestic piece of music as Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, all I had to do was allow myself to focus on sounds that are in turn ethereal and strange, and it wasn’t long before I was taken somewhere outside myself, and somewhere so pleasant, it was almost a shame to come back to everyday experience sadly defined by habit and routine. ... read more

Written by Dan Bigna on 26-10-2010, 1 user comment

Last drinks for the NSW Labor Party?

Kristina KeneallyIt is now received wisdom that the NSW branch of the ALP is responsible for everything that is wrong with Labor politics in Australia. Even smug Victorian state ministers have felt comfortable parroting this line publicly. In particular, the argument goes, the NSW Right are a bunch of unaccountable thugs who singlehandedly destroyed what should have been a cakewalk federal election win and who are the last vestige of that familiar dinosaur, ‘union power’. They will also be responsible for the state party’s near-certain electoral routing next March because they humiliated Morris Iemma when he attempted to deliver power privatisation. ... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 26-10-2010, 2 user comments

Fiction and politics in the 21C: a reply to Emmett Stinson

Over at Kill Your Darlings, Emmett Stinson has written an essay about two Australian responses to Ted Genoways’ much discussed polemic ‘The Death of Fiction’: Davina Bell’s ‘To My Generation of Precious Snowflakes’ (harvest, Winter 2010) and Jacinda Woodhead’s ‘A response to harvest’ (Overland blog, July 2010). Among other things, Genoways argues that ‘most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues – as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 25-10-2010, 30 user comments

Frago 242

I used to think of the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars as somewhat Orwellian: the braying voices of politicians committing us to endless war against unseen enemies, the constant lies and the clumsy but barefaced covering up of those lies, the imprisonment of mildly dissenting citizens for crimes the state decides the nature of in secret and at their discretion and the presentation of the inciters of war as homely, steadfast and moral guardians of the social good.

Now, after the latest WikiLeaks release, it’s Dante that comes to mind. I need some metaphor to help with the visceral response to the revelation of Fragmentary Order 242. I’m not fond of using literary shibboleths to give me a way of coping with human suffering, but reaching for Orwell or the Inferno or both seems meaningful in this instance, as in others. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-10-2010, 12 user comments

In praise of angry feminists

One of my most cherished friends is an angry feminist. Of all the people I know personally, she has probably had more influence on the way I understand the world, and particularly issues relating to gender, than anyone else. She could well be surprised to learn of this. We’ve argued about these issues many, many times. Possibly more than I’ve argued with anyone else – and I argue with people a lot. Not only this – she has yelled at me many, many times for my views on issues relating to gender. Not necessarily because she thinks my views in particular are awful. Because she thinks the issues are of such importance, and because she is so passionate about them.

I have tried to listen carefully to what she has had to say, and consider it honestly. Sometimes I have maintained my disagreements with her. Other times, I have been persuaded. I have tried to educate myself further at times, and have read an assortment of feminist writings (Greer, de Beauvoir, Ehrenreich, etc). ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 22-10-2010, 38 user comments

The No-baby Bonus

If you believe the hysterics of Dick Smith and indeed the Prime Minister, there are just too many people in this country, or there will be too many people in this country. One of the points of difference between Gillard’s Prime Ministership and Rudd’s was their beliefs about the size of Australia’s population. In opposition to Kevin Rudd’s oft-quoted ‘big Australia’ Gillard chose to emphasise her belief in a ‘small’ Australia (I refuse to use the word ‘sustainable’ because it has now become an empty signifier, at least when wielded by a politician).

It is pertinent to acknowledge that many demographers and population experts are sceptical that any measures a government introduces can control population in any meaningful way. In truth, under all the rhetoric, what politicians are actually talking about when bringing up this issue is managing population growth. You can’t control it, because, at least at this present moment in this Western democracy, you can’t control the birth rate. We would never even contemplate sterilising people or instituting a ‘one child policy’. ... read more

Written by Matthew Sini on 21-10-2010, 12 user comments

Science cannot save us: the politics of climate action

Wind turbineIn March 2009 I was the lead NSW delegate to the Australian Greens’ National Council in Perth when I experienced a curious fact of climate politics. Our state party put a proposal that the Senators pull back from having emissions trading as the key plank of climate policy, a position Christine Milne had enshrined in Re-Energising Australia. We wanted to stress direct government intervention with a planned ‘just transition’ of jobs. We were met by hostility from the Senators, and incomprehension from many delegates. In essence, three arguments were put in favour of an ETS: a pragmatic view that it was ‘the only game in town’, a general commitment to markets, and a focus on cap & trade being able to deliver emission abatement targets based on scientific consensus. ... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 20-10-2010, 7 user comments

Post from Tanzania: Control over birth control

There are lots of reasons why people choose to have kids, but for many women in Tanzania, the word ‘choice’ may not be the most appropriate one.

No one is arguing that the birthrate here isn’t high. The Daily News, one of Tanzania’s newspapers, recently listed the country as having one of the 10 youngest populations (aged 15 and under) in the world. The fertility rate is currently 5.6. That doesn’t take into account infant mortality: the US State Department estimates that 68 out of every 1000 babies die in their infancy. And despite the enormous sums of money flooding in from international donors, and the relative peace and stability over the 50 years since Tanzania’s independence, maternal and infant mortality rates are still high. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 20-10-2010, 3 user comments

Non-fiction review: Here on Earth

'Here on Earth' Here on Earth
Tim Flannery
Text

Flannery’s new book Here On Earth reads like a cross between Bill Bryson and Jared Diamond, which is reassuring given it has the title of a Leelee Sobieski film. It also sort of makes sense; both of these authors have read and commented on the book, and Diamond is referenced throughout. Flannery has clearly read their work and is borrowing from their styles, which I enjoyed.

The book talks a lot about the Gaia Hypothesis and essentially argues for it throughout. For those unaware, the Gaia hypothesis states that the world as a whole tends to act as a singular organism and has many feedbacks and other mechanisms to maintain a given state. I personally am not a fan. I believe the world does a lot of things we don’t understand and certainly has all sorts of negative and positive feedback models going on, but I find both the name of the hypothesis and many of the people claiming to adhere to it irritating. It’s all a bit hippy-pie-in-the-sky from where I’m sitting, and I was surprised to find Flannery advocating it. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 19-10-2010, 6 user comments

Meanland: On the Twitters

Fail whaleI swore I’d never sign up to Twitter. ‘What’s the point?’ I’d ask. ‘It’s just status updates like Facebook.’

In June 2009 I found myself deciding what my Twitter username would be.

What bought about this change in attitude? Well, Grods, if you must know. Scott made the announcement that Bron had signed up. She had previously been as vocal as I had about the obvious pointless act of being part of the Twitter masses.

We were both wrong.

I hear time and again that it’s an exercise in vanity. That no-one wants to hear what you had for breakfast, updates are narcissistic, the tedious chatter isn’t worth your time. ... read more

Written by Michelle Baranga on 19-10-2010, 5 user comments