The day Cathy Freeman won her race at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 I remember watching it in a pub and a guy took offence when I didn't stand up and sing along to Advance Australia Fair. I told him I loved Cathy, but I didn't like Advance Australia Fair enough to actually sing it. I know it the national anthem, but...

Australia Day Patriotism

While I am in my Australia Day mood (proud, bemused, drunk) and there are no longer helicopters and fighter jets screaming overhead in sydney, I draw readers' attention to an article by journalist and book commentator Marieke Hardy. It's a very strong attack on nationalistic jingoism and the Australian racist.

Here.

BTW, I have no image as yet to add to this post. Log in after the madness has passed.

A "flood" of Chinese tennis stars?

Source: China Daily via Google

I refer to a comment made by a local TV sports commentator John Alexander - who will be standing as a conservative party for John Howard's (ex-Aussie Prime Minister) seat in Sydney. I suppose, John, you think there are too many Chinese where you live?

As far as I remember no-one's ever referred to a "flood" of Latin American tennis stars, or a flood of Franco-Belgian stars.

Let's say there's been a flood of Russians in the last ten years, but Russia is associated with gulags and ice, rather than floods. Except a "flood" of vodka? Or perhaps a flood of money laundering.

Any Australian readers will be very familiar with our Australia Day celebrations, which include the age old debate about a "flood" of Asian refugees, and the now familiar lament about the demise of Australian tennis (after all there will never be a flood of Australian tennis stars; now, we seem to have a "drought" or "dearth" of them)!

There's a very informative video on how to write "flood", and drought in Chinese.

Go Johnny Alexander!!

Go here.

Lyrical poetry

One of my favourite lyrical poets, Denis Riley, wrote this poem, wonderful in its use of quotation, its self-awareness, rigour and modesty:

A MISREMEMBERED LYRIC
A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song
whirrs in my throat. ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart
tearing my’ soul and my conscience apart, long after
presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no
shadow. Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall.
I don’t want absence to be this beautiful.
It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t, while
‘everything that consoles is false’ is off the point –
you get no consolation anyway until your memory’s
dead; or something never had gotten hold of
your heart in the first place, and that’s the fear thought.
Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do.
There is no beauty out of loss; can’t do it –
and once the falling rain starts on the upturned
leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure
what I hear is bossy death telling me which way to
go, what I see is a pool with an eye in it. Still let
me know. Looking for a brand-new start. Oh and never
notice yourself ever. As in life you don’t.


Poet's Note: ‘A misremembered lyric’ uses a phrase from ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ written by Gummoe, sung by The Cascades, and from ‘Something’s Gotta Hold Of My Heart’ by R.Cook and R. Greenaway, recorded by Gene Pitney; the poem also quotes a line from Graham Greene’s version of a 1930s song.

At the heart of her poetry are both the recognition of the pull of the ecstatic and seductive (whether visual or aural), and also a precise responsiveness which is as fully self-aware as it can be. Her influential feminist text, Am I That Name?, which examines the verbal and social category of ‘women’ in history, helps establish this self-awareness as being a central component of a postmodernist intellectual and artistic project. It is out of the complex unstable surfaces of our lives and art that Denise Riley makes poetry.
PETER PHILPOTT

Read more of Denis Riley's poetry and more of Philpott's introduction at poetryinternational.

What is Populism in Asia?

My mother's brother-in-law, a true Yellowshirt Royalist, Bangkok 2008.

New Mandala has published a very interesting review of a book about populism in Asia, the rise and fall of charismatic leaders post 1997 financial crisis

here.

To strike a personal note, I don't know what will happen when the King of Thailand dies. Half my family in Bangkok are Taksin supporters, the other Royalists, and they live next door to each other. (Relations have been strained of late, and when I visited in 2007 and 2008, I literally had to cross a few fences to speak to each side of the family.)

As for my uncle (pictured above), a reasonably wealthy retired public servant, I find it hard to label him an elitist, or an anti-populist. He was born in a fishing village to poor parents. After studying engineering, he made his way through the ranks to become head of the highway department. He believes Taksin is a "khon jon", a gangster.

Other relatives believe Taksin is a true democrat, or at least a politician who can take Thailand into a more politically liberal and open future. Perhaps we'll see Taksin back sooner than later under the blessing of a new elite in Bangkok.

The academic approach to defining populism is complex. The reviewers for New Mandala suggest that a true populist leader is able to organise a

“trans-class” coalition wherein a leader possessing great personal charisma and high social standing, in confronting oligarchic rivals, appeals to dissociated mass publics with pledges of material redistribution, though with an intention of winning over clientelist loyalties rather than substantially leveling the socioeconomic order. In this way, as we survey the pantheon of challengers, we are able first to separate out the run-of-the-mill upstart, then distinguish meaningfully between the manipulative populist and the committed socialist. We are thus also better able to understand how even as redistributive programs are initiated, populist leaders today may seek furtively to shore up the capitalism by which their order is funded, thereby compromising popular preferences with the neo-liberalizing priorities that Susan Stokes has denounced as “mandate violations.” And finally, we may deepen our insight into how populist leaders are ousted. It is not, as Anderson (pp. 217-218) contends, when in vanquishing rival oligarchs a populist leader runs short of the foils that he or she needs in order to legitimate executive abuses and perpetuate mass solidarity. Rather, as Pasuk and Baker show in one of this volume’s best chapters, populist leaders like Thaksin are brought down by the oligarchies that they have provoked but failed to overcome.

My bolding.

Prahoc

Prahoc is Cambodia's national dish, a paste of fermented fish.

BBC video here.

Creative Writing and the Khmer Rouge

I have been fascinated and appalled at one aspect of Comrade Duc's methods at S-21: the ability of the interrogator to extract lies and fiction from the prisoner writing her confession. Such confessions were designed to implicate other suspected enemies of the State, and illustrates Milan Kundera's description of the Soviet gulag: "punishment seeking the crime".

One example is the story of John Dewhurst, a British teacher and amateur yachtsman whom the Khmer Rouge had captured in the Gulf of Thailand. He and his crew were imprisoned in S-21.

Dewhirst wrote a long confession that mixed true events in his life with wholly false accounts of his career as a CIA agent planning to subvert the Khmer Rouge regime. He claimed that his father (also an agent) had been paid a large bribe for inducting his son into the CIA and that his college course in Loughborough was interspersed with training as a spy.

(WIKI)

Lost in Cambodia

Tuol Sleng Prison, Phnom Penh (wiki)

For all dedicated to Cambodian history, There's a great article in the Guardian today, by Andrew Anthony, on Malcolm Caldwell, a near forgotten English academic and Marxist who supported Pol Pot and was one of a team of journalists who visited Phnom Penh in 1978. Caldwell was executed in the regime's final days, but by whom is a mystery. At the present trial of Comrade Duc, commandant of S-21, it has been revealed that there had been some sort of conspiracy to murder the British journalists, for at least one of them had discovered the awful truth about the Khmer Rouge genocide. Anthony reminds readers that in the murdering machine of S-21, prisoners were denied all human rights, and even forbidden to express pain while undergoing torture. As for the ethics of the genocide trial now taking place, Anthony hits the nail on the head:

The contrast between the care taken to observe Duch's legal and human rights and the indifference with which he dispatched his victims is lost on no one. But as Philippe Canonne, one of the lawyers representing the relatives of the victims, said of the urge to inflict on Duch what he had meted out to his prisoners: "We must give voice to this sentiment, but then have the strength to transcend it."

Anthony's article is detailed, scholarly, and highly readable.

Click Here.

Sydney was DEAD, until today!

ABC news headline:

SYDNEY TO COME ALIVE AT FESTIVAL OPENING

Headline act, US jazz notable Al Green and "Indigenous group The Black Arm Band and myriad musicians, DJs, dancers and trapeze artists".

And poets? I clicked on the Sydney Festival menu under poetry and was directed to something about Edgar Allen Poe resurrected as a TRUE GOTH in Baltimore USA: here.

No mention of any living Sydney poets. We truly are Zombies.

Gang of 4

Four seriously important people in the writing world.
From left: Pam Brown (Sydney poet and editor); Susan Schultz (American author and editor of experimental journal of writing Tinfish, based in Hawaii); Fiona Wright, editor for HEAT journal; Ivor Indyk (my publisher, and editor and head honcho for HEAT and Giramondo publishing).

Taken on the hottest day in Sydney for many years, at Hazel Smith's house in Cronulla.