The Iliad by Homer

It would be foolish of me to recommend this for everyone because it really isn't. I think if you have a passionate interest in Classical mythology or poetry in general - then this is certainly a poem which is worth the time and effort to read. I say that because it is not easy going - it requires effort to recognise who is who and why some things are focussed upon and others are not.
It is a foundational work of Western literature and a critical reader would see its influence in all the major works of poetry and narrative.

Epic

Kenneth Grahame (8 March 1859 – 6 July 1932) was a Scottish writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon; both books were later adapted into Disney films.

Moonlight

Wind in the Willows - pg 100

The line of the horizon was clear and hard against the sky, and in one particular quarter it showed black against silvery climbing phosphorescence that grew and grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more thy began to see surface-meadows wide-spread, and quiet gardens, and the river itself from bank to bank, all softly disclosed, all washed clean of mystery and terror, all radiant again as by day, but with a difference that was tremendous. Their old haunts greeted them again in other raiment as if they had slipped away and put on this pure new apparel and come quietly back, smiling as they shyly waited to see if they would be recognised again under it.
Fastening their boat to a willow, the friends landed in this silent, silver kingdom, and patiently explored the hedges, the hollow trees, the runnels and their little culverts, the ditches and dry waterways. Embarking again and crossing over, they worked their way up the stream in this manner, while the moon, serene and detached in a cloudless sky, did what she could, though so far off, to help them in their quest; till her hour came and she sank earthwards reluctantly, and left them, and mystery one more held field and river.

Homeric Hymn to Selene
"The air, unlit before, glows with the light of her golden crown, and her rays beam clear, whensoever bright Selene having bathed her lovely body in the waters of Ocean, and donned her far-gleaming raiment, and yoked her strong-necked, shining team, drives on her long-maned horses at full speed, at eventime in the mid-month: then her great orbit is full and then her beams shine brightest as she increases. So she is a sure token and a sign to mortal men."


Selene and Endymion by Nicholas Poussin (1630)

In Greek mythology, Selene (/sɨˈliːni/; Greek Σελήνη [selɛ̌ːnɛː] 'moon' is the goddess of the moon. She is the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, and sister of the sun-god Helios, and of Eos, goddess of the dawn. She drives her moon chariot across the heavens. Several lovers are attributed to her in various myths, including Zeus, Pan, and the mortal Endymion. In classical times, Selene was often identified with Artemis, much as her brother, Helios, was identified with Apollo.[1] Both Selene and Artemis were also associated with Hecate, and all three were regarded as lunar goddesses, although only Selene was regarded as the personification of the moon itself. Her Roman equivalent is Luna.


Claude Debussy : Clair de Lune, for Piano (Suite Bergamasque No. 3)

Clair De Lune (Moonlight) English Translation

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.

Paul Verlaine (1869)

Paul-Marie Verlaine (French pronunciation: ​[vɛʁˈlɛn]; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Fin de siècle (French pronunciation: ​[fɛ̃ də sjɛkl]) is French for end of the century. The term typically encompasses not only the meaning of the similar English idiom turn of the century, but also both the closing and onset of an era, as the end of the 19th century was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning.[1] The "spirit" of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including boredom, cynicism, pessimism, and a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence.[2]

The term "fin de siècle" is commonly applied to French art and artists as the traits of the culture first appeared there, but the movement affected many European countries.[3] The term becomes applicable to the sentiments and traits associated with the culture as opposed to focusing solely on the movement’s initial recognition in France. The ideas and concerns developed by fin de siècle artists provided the impetus for movements like symbolism and modernism

The Chapter 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' in The Wind in The Willows.

This chapter has deeply affected me. What a wondrous passage in this enchanting tale. It is a breathtaking description of night and dawn, such poetic prose that deserves alot more attention than, I assume, it does. At the risk of sounding patronising, this chapter is surely wasted if it is only ever read by 'children'.

Stunning.

I reread Silas Marner, in part inspired by your comments and notes in this thread. It amused me that you commented on Marner and the nature of memory, but your memory was flawed on who recommended it in the first place...it was me, as an interesting counterpoint to the miserliness in A Christmas Carol.

As for the book itself...beautifully written, and gets better page after page.

The details about the inner lives, thoughts and feelings of the peasants and other villagers was sublimely rich. The musings on memory, superstition, attitude, work, station in life and neighbourliness was similarly so. The language was simple, yet richly layered without becoming tiresome.

I think it may be the finest novel in the English language. Perhaps.

It certainly is in the uppermost tier.

Thanks for the recommendation DB and glad that I returned the favour somewhat.

For what its worth, Wind in The Willows is outstanding also.

I finished Wind in the Willows this morning. I am going to give myself some time to think about what I would like to say about this wonderful experience of rereading this book.
Now I am going to start upon




Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Enjoy Dalloway, Digger. But let me put in a plug for To the Lighthouse, one of my very favorite novels. Nothing happens in the book--people talk, think, paint, age--and yet it's amazing. Interested to see if you find Woolf's prose pleasurable or tedious.

April Reading summary

Novels
Part of Labyrinth
The Invisible Man H G Wells
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Washington Square by Henry James
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Iliad By Homer
Wind in the Willow by Kenneth Grahame

Shakespeare Play
Midsummer Night's Dream

Poems
Stars
It was Deep April, and the morn
Tithonus
Summons for a Gentleman Who Became a Recluse
Tyger
Sleep and Poetry
Very like a Whale
Excelsior
Homeric Hymn to Selene
Claire du Lune
+More Dante

Need to find
Pourtnoy's Complaint by Roth
Faulkner
Chekov
Rasselas
Voltaire? Candide

MB The Captain and The Enemy by Graham Greene
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Wallander
Some more classic poetry maybe a classic history or plays
The Inimitable Jeeves by P G Wodehouse Will go onto the to do list.

May list
Lolita by Nabokov
Three Men in a Boat Jerome K Jerome
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Hard Times Charles Dickens
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Essays from Labyrinth + review
Review of Wind in the Willows

Shakespeare Play
A Winter's Tale


Future reads
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Aeschylus plays

This will be my third look at Woolf and the second in this year.
A Room of One's own earlier this year and Orlando last year are the aforementioned.

I have yet to come across a 'tedious' read yet this year. Most have been pleasurable interestingly Dickens, Kipling and Grahame with
ostensibly 'children's' literarture are amongst the most so. I do not know what that says about me or the selection so far but thought provoking nevertheless.

With respect to your recommendation, I will throw it onto the list. I do want to have a respectable representation of women writers. So far, Eliot, Mantel and Woolf are it from memory but another Woolf and Walker this month will have it at 15% ( I might be overlooking one), in addition I will probably throw in an Austen that I have not read at some point.

But anymore female author recommendations would be welcome:
Have read
Wuthering Heights
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice amongst others
This year
Wolf Hall
Silas Marner
A Room of One's own

If you'll have read three by Woolf, Lighthouse will probably be more of the same--powerful and poetic renderings of interior lives. But it's her best imo.

Here are a few female authors I think you'd like.

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. A wonderful, sad book.
Willa Cather, The Professor's House.
Flannery O'Connor, short stories--esp. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People." One of the best short story writers.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening.

If I had to rank them I'd say read Roy, McCullers, O'Connor first.

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The ethos of this magnificent work of children's fiction has surely influenced thousands of children in the 20th century. One can link the peculiarly English sensibility to the natural and animal world of the likes of the RSPCA, Animal Rights movements and anti-GM movements in the moral universe of Wind in the Willows. Grahame, by animating these animals with anthromorphic relationships in such a thoughtful, poetic and warm manner merges the natural and moral world of fables in a delightful way.
This wonderful imaginary landscape is not just a romantic reimagining of a bygone era but also a palette upon which Grahame can showcase his deft metaphoric touch that infuses this world with both Classical and Christian symbology. This work is a wonderful introduction for young minds to the possibilities of literary fiction.

A Masterwork

Mrs Dalloway pg 25
(Mrs Dalloway [Clarrissa] on Sally)

The strange thing. on looking back, was the purity, the intergrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which would only exist between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's. For in those days she was completely reckless; did the most idiotic things out of bravado, bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars. Absurd, she was - very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, 'She is beneath the roof...She is beneath this roof!'

Hermaic pillar with a female portrait, so-called “Sappho”; inscription "Sappho Eresia" ie. Sappho from Eresos. Roman copy of a Greek Classical original.Palazzo dei Conservatori, Hall of the Geese

Sappho (/ˈsæfoʊ/; Attic Greek Σαπφώ [sapːʰɔ̌ː], Aeolic Greek Ψάπφω, Psappho [psápːʰɔː]) was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost; however, her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments.

Sappho by Gustav Klimt 1890

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body;[1] his works are marked by a frank eroticism.

Rest therapy, Shell Shock (Post traumatic stress disorder)

Viginia Woolf - was said to have been treated with 'rest cure' otherwise known as Neurasthenia. Septimus, one of her main characters, exhibits symptoms of 'shell shock' and the treatment proposed for his rehabilitation is described by Woolf in the following:

To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science which has to do with that, after all, we know nothing about - the nervous system, the human brain - a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (acommon delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months' rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve.

Neurasthenia is a term that was first used at least as early as 1829 to label a mechanical weakness of the actual nerves, rather than the more metaphorical "nerves" referred to by George Miller Beard later.

As a psychopathological term, neurasthenia was used by Beard in 1869[1] to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia and depressed mood.

Neurasthenia is currently a diagnosis in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (and the Chinese Society of Psychiatry's Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders). However, it is no longer included as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Americans were said to be particularly prone to neurasthenia, which resulted in the nickname "Americanitis"[2] (popularized by William James). Another, rarely used, term for neurasthenia is nervosism.




“The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still”

The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still
And I remember things I'd best forget.
For now we've marched to a green, trenchless
Twelve miles from battering guns: along the grass
Brown lines of tents are hives for snoring men;
Wide, radiant water sways the floating sky
Below dark, shivering trees. And living-clean
Comes back with thoughts of home and hours of sleep.
To-night I smell the battle; miles away
Gun-thunder leaps and thuds along the ridge;
The spouting shells dig pits in fields of death,
And wounded men, are moaning in the woods.
If any friend be there whom I have loved,
God speed him safe to England with a gash.
It's sundown in the camp; some youngster laughs,
Lifting his mug and drinking health to all
Who come unscathed from that unpitying waste:
(Terror and ruin lurk behind his gaze.)
Another sits with tranquil, musing face,
Puffing bis pipe and dreaming of the girl
Whose last scrawled letter lies upon his knee.
The sunlight falls, low-ruddy from the west,
Upon their heads. Last week they might have died
And now they stretch their limbs in tired content.
One says 'The bloody Bosche has got the knock;
'And soon they'll crumple up and chuck their games.
'We've got the beggars on the run at last!'
Then I remembered someone that I'd seen
Dead in a squalid, miserable ditch,
Heedless of toiling feet that trod him down.
He was a Prussian with a decent face,
Young, fresh, and pleasant, so 1 dare to say.
No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace,
And cursed our souls because we'd killed bis friends.
One night he yawned along a haIf-dug trench
Midnight; and then the British guns began
With heavy shrapnel bursting low, and 'hows'
Whistling to cut the wire with blinding din.
He didn't move; the digging still went on;
Men stooped and shovelled; someone gave a grunt,
And moaned and died with agony in the sludge.
Then the long hiss of shells lifted and stopped.
He stared into the gloom; a rocket curved,
And rifles rattled angrily on the left
Down by the wood, and there was noise of bombs.
Then the damned English loomed in scrambling haste
Out of the dark and struggled through the wire,
And there were shouts and eurses; someone screamed
And men began to blunder down the trench
Without their rifles. It was time to go:
He grabbed his coat; stood up, gulping some bread;
Then clutched his head and fell.
I found him there
In the gray morning when the place was held.
His face was in the mud; one arm flung out
As when he crumpled up; his sturdy legs
Were bent beneath bis trunk; heels to the skye.

Siegfried Sassoon


Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an eminent English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war.[1] He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy".

Shell shock has had a profound impact in British culture and the popular memory of World War I. At the time, war writers like the poet Siegfried Sassoon dealt with shell shock in their work. Sassoon spent time at Craiglockhart War Hospital, which treated shell shock casualties

Craiglockhart Hydropathic


Whilst we have a more sophisticated understanding of PTSD than ever before and with the previous two Middle Eastern wars, unfortunately, more 'patients' to study - it may suprise you, that remnants of the 'rest' therapy or isolation appears to still be maintained in Australian psychiatric facilities, and most likely your country's too. That, at the same time, a prison and a hospital could use the same technique of isolation - one as a punishment, the other as a therapeutic device - for very possibly opposite ends is absurd?? I think what it shows is that the treatment is not seen from the perspective of the 'patient' but from the surrounding context eg doctors, prison guards - wider society as the cure for our problems with 'deviancy.'

"Get that man away from me"

This sense of shame, need to get away from 'it' and need to 'cure' is insightfully described by Woolf in the reactions of Septimus' wife Rezia.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

Woolf employs a variety of narrators. She focusses upon decribing the inner thoughts of these narrators through one day in the life of Post WW1, upper-middle class London. Woolf does not structually separate transitions between these perspectives which has the impact of blurring the strength of any single voice within the narrative. It is as if Woolf would like to underline the fact that these are impressions and to reduce the facticity of these voices.
The interior landscapes of these narrators is temporally unstable. It is not always explicit when a recollection is being described or the present being viewed or a vision of the future is being narrated. The impact of this is that we get a very authentic picture of the impressions that memory and desire have upon our confrontation with reality.
The contrasts between each interior landscape is a space in which Woolf can explore with a critical eye the differing social and cultural expectations and realities around each 'voice'. The 'realism' of Woolf's writing lies not so much in describing with a precise detailed eye but with subtle, sympathetic hand the panorama of perspectives that compose the 'real' world.
Given the beauty of her lyrical flourishes, reader's will find themselves forgetting what it is we are actually reading and floating alongside the flights of the characters' inner life. Some of her passages are, perhaps, over-indulgent in their lush imagery. That, as a fault (if a fault it is at all), is easy to forgive.

The first 'queer' novel?

Parting memory of Mrs Dalloway.

pg133 (Clarissa ruminating on death being brought up at her party -Incidentally it is Septimus's)

She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living ( She would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (All day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corrupton, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mysticially, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture; one was alone. There was embrace in death.

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy



Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth.[1] Charles Dickens was another important influence.[2] Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin.[3]

Most of his fictional works – initially published as serials in magazines – were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.



Setting is Wessex:

Map at the front of my edition of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Housekeeping post: Year to date: Books

1.A Farewell to Arms by E. Hemingway
2.Gulliver's Travels by J. Swift
3.Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4.What Do You Care What Other People Think? Richard P. Feynman
5.Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut
6.Notes From the Underground Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7.Portrait of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
8.The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
9.A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens
10.A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
11.The Pearl by John Steinbeck
12.In the Winter's Dark by Tim Winton
13.One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
14.Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (non fiction)
15.Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
16.Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence
17.A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
18.Silar Marner by George Eliot
19.Cat's Cradle by K Vonnegut
20.Madame Bovary by G. Flaubert
21.Catch-22 Joseph Heller
22.Stalingrad by Antony Beevor
23.The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
24.Keep the Aphidistra FlyingGeorge Orwell
25.The Aeneid by Virgil
26.Labyrinth Jorge Luis Borges(unfinished)
27.The Invisible Man H G Wells
28.The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
29.The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
30.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey
31.Washington Square by Henry James
32.The Quiet American by Graham Greene
33.The Iliad By Homer
34.Wind in the Willow by Kenneth Grahame
35.Mrs Dalloway Virgina Woolf


36. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (start May 4th)

Personal Update

The phone went cold during first term which is not unusual (I think) for casual teaching work. However, I am starting to hit panic stations. I went out handing out updated resumes to schools last week. One of the problem with casual teaching is that the person who handles casual teacher call up can often change on a term by term basis. Which, I suspect, has the impact of unless you get the favour of the handler who passes on your name to the next person handling - a teacher can fall through the cracks.
Casual teachers (graduates) have to compete with retired teachers who had 1970s industrial relations for their employment and can recieve their pension at 60 and draw on their savings and then return as casual teachers with their previous schools. Additionally, there is a huge surplus of teachers in general with 1000s of graduates each year.

Which has me 2 and bit years post graduation reconsidering the whole enterprise. I will have to start pitching myself to Catholic schools which whilst not wholly personally objectionable is not ideal.
With the loss of my tutoring work - as small financial ballast, I think I have to either seek work with a tutoring company or find some other part-time work if I am to persist with waiting/seeking a full-time teaching position.

Another alternative I have been considering is possibly to enter a Ph.d pathway program which I was offered and accepted in about this time last year. It would be a Bologna format Masters of Research/MPhil 2 year course toward the Doctorate.
Positives
- I enjoy studying
- $4000 stipend per half year
- New enjoyable goal to focus on
Negatives
Have to be full time or no stipend + given my age I do not think I should be drawing it out to 4 years just for the master section
- would have to give up teaching for the government and being on-call, which entails leaving a very long queue for permanent positions ( I am prolly not that high up the queue - and I kinda doubt its actually existence)
- I would need to find alternative work with the $4000 = $20k ish - which would make the time available to put into masters alot less
- It is not really a employment enhancing job given I would be focussing either on English or Philosophy.


Have been cutting down on the amount of cigarettes I smoke. Mostly driven by a need to cost save. I did given up for about 18 months in my late 20 years by going cold turkey. It is not that I have a strong urge to quit, hmm I think, it is the fact that I am getting slightly offended by my own dependence on it. I do not know if that makes sense.
In any case I was about 25-30 a day about 6 weeks ago - with a concerted effort to monitor how many smokes I smoked a day it went from that number to a pack a day to 20 - in fortnightly reduction of 5 smokes a day.
I am now on a 15 a day
Which is ~ 5 per morning, 5 per afternoon, 5 per night break down.
The big breakdown was to stop buying by the carton which meant I always had a cigarette handy. Now I have to put some planning into it....at more than $20 a pack it was forced upon me by the 'nanny state' taxation increases.

Anyway - I am going to see how many mind/body handles 15 this week. Goal will be next week down to 4M/4A/4N.
The hardest times are:
Morning waking up
Whenever I have a coffeee sit at a coffee shop.
When I post on 2+2....haha

Public funding of Political Parties

I beg your indulgence for this rambling rant on Australian democratic politics. But it has been thoughts of this nature that have been agitating me and I need to get them out of me somewhere.

Both sides of my state's political landscape have been caught up in scandal and corruption. It is 'standard', mundane and, in some respects, offensively petty corruption. For one side, the corruption involves the nexus between political donations, influence peddling lobbyists and perceived or real political influence over ministerial conduct. Independent statutory legal bodies have been sweeping underneath the political carpets of our body politic and finding our major political parties circumventing electoral funding laws - with implied or explciit corrupt conduct being implied or established for a number of 'leading lights'.

Now, what offends me is not the corruption which I think is , if not a inevitable feature of human society then at least, not suprising in a culture that idolises the pursuit of power and money as a social good. But, instead, the very notion that a solution being proffered is to publically fund the political parties. To outline why I think that this is an absurd and very offensive suggestion let me bullet point it for clarity of expression:
1) Those proposing the public funding of political parties are the very political parties found to be engaged in illegal political funding. The comparison I would draw this with - is like listening to the advice of an unrepentant problem gambler proposing that his gambling should be tax-deductible. Wrong person proposing/ wrong solution being proffered.
2) There is a presumption that the political parties 'need' the funding , in the first place. No you do not have to have 10s of millions of dollars to propagandise the civic square by purchasing over-priced advertisments on mass-media.
3) It presumes that those poliitical parties are somehow permanent poltical features of our democracy. Nowhere in the Australian constitution does it mention the rights of political parties.
4) It would further entrench these morally compromised and legally found to be corrupt - institutions by the very nature of the public funding because the model being proffered is a proportional funding on a per vote basis. So, lets make the lunatics permanent board members of the asylum.

5) It presumes money = political speech. Despite, what the High Court of Australia or the Supreme Court of US would have you believe money is not speech.

I am a reasonable man - members of Parliament should have an annual publically funded stipend to communicate with their electorates. But publically funded political parties is not only beyond the pale. It stinks!

Update

So just as I complain about no work it appears that my expeditions to send out my resume last work apparently had some effect given I worked the last two days. I think I had a good impression at both schools- so I hope the phone keeps ringing at 7am!

I am currently about p80s into Far from the Madding Crowd. It is a pastoral work. Wiki:
Pastoral literature in general
Pastoral is a mode of literature in which the author employs various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one. Paul Alpers distinguishes pastoral as a mode rather than a genre, and he bases this distinction on the recurring attitude of power; that is to say that pastoral literature holds a humble perspective toward nature. Thus, pastoral as a mode occurs in many types of literature (poetry, drama, etc.) as well as genres (most notably the pastoral elegy).

A Pastoral Poem

The Shephard

How sweet is the Shepherd's sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day,
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.

For he hears the lamb's innocent call,
And he hears the ewe's tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their Shepherd is nigh.

William Blake

Pastoral Painting c 1900 Note just like Gabriel Oak (Shepherd -hero of Far from the Madding Crowd) - in the painting below the subject is playing the flute.


John Reinhard Weguelin – A Pastoral (1905). [Watercolour]

John Reinhard Weguelin (1849–1927) was an English painter and illustrator, active from 1877 to after 1910. He specialized in figurative paintings with lush backgrounds, typically landscapes or garden scenes. Weguelin emulated the neo-classical style of Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, painting subjects inspired by classical antiquity and mythology. He depicted scenes of everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as mythological subjects, with an emphasis on pastoral scenes. Weguelin also drew on folklore for inspiration, and painted numerous images of nymphs and mermaids. His subjects were similar to those of his contemporary, John William Waterhouse, who also specialized in painting the female figure against dramatic backgrounds, but unlike Waterhouse, many of Weguelin's subjects are nude or scantily-clad. Weguelin was particularly noted for his realistic use of light.

You left out a positive. When you finished you would be Dr. DiggertheDog.

Sergeant Troy


Chapter 25 (p130)
IDIOSYNCRASY AND VICISSITUDE had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.
He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a superfluity. Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday; the future, tommorrow; never, the day after.
One this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as one of the most fortunate of his order. For it may be argued with great plausability that reminiscence is less an endowment that a disease, and that expectation in its only comfortable form - that of absolute faith - is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.


Reading update
In bed last night and today I have managed to plough my way through to 200pages.
Hardy uses a very simple plot. He uses archetypal aspiring partners of Bathsheba to draw comparisons that enable him to pursue his moral concerns. He adpots an omniscient narrator for in-depth character disclosure (he tells and does not show by plot or discourse, principally) and uses long and powerful descirptions of landscape to mark the passage of time.
This is clearly a preeminent work of literature and would have been one of the works that 20th century minimalist styles reacted against.

According to the Hebrew Bible, Bathsheba (Hebrew: בת שבע‎, Bat Sheva, "daughter of the oath") (Arabic: بثشبع‎, "ابنة القسم") was the wife of Uriah the Hittite and later of David, king of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. She is most known for the Bible story in which King David took her to sleep with him.

The story of David's seduction of Bathsheba, told in 2 Samuel 11, is omitted in Chronicles. The story is told that David, while walking on the roof of his palace, saw Bathsheba, who was then the wife of Uriah, having a bath. He immediately desired her and later made her pregnant.

In an effort to conceal his sin, David summoned Uriah from the army (with whom he was on campaign) in the hope that Uriah would re-consummate his marriage and think that the child was his. Uriah was unwilling to violate the ancient kingdom rule applying to warriors in active service.[2] Rather than go home to his own bed, he preferred to remain with the palace troops.

After repeated efforts to convince Uriah to have sex with Bathsheba, the king gave the order to his general, Joab, that Uriah should be placed in the front lines of the battle, where it was the most dangerous, and left to the hands of the enemy (where he was more likely to die). David had Uriah himself carry the message that ordered his death. After Uriah was dead, David made the now widowed Bathsheba his wife.

David's action was displeasing to the Lord, who accordingly sent Nathan the prophet to reprove the king.

After relating the parable of the rich man who took away the one little ewe lamb of his poor neighbor (II Samuel 12:1-6), and exciting the king's anger against the unrighteous act, the prophet applied the case directly to David's action with regard to Bathsheba.

The king at once confessed his sin and expressed sincere repentance. Bathsheba's child by David was struck with a severe illness and died a few days after birth, which the king accepted as his punishment.



Bathsheba by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme (Vesoul, 11 May 1824 – Paris, 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period, and in addition to being a painter, he was also a teacher with a long list of students.


Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart. In this context it is often called "academism", "academicism", "L'art pompier", and "eclecticism", and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism".

There are no real suprises to be found in the plot of Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It is a magnificient advertisement of the English countryside with some sublime passages throughout the work. Hardy is also quite aninsightful observer of character although there are obviously dated social and cultural views throughout.

I will add some more thoughts on the book over the weekend.

My next book to read is The Plague By Albert Camus.



I chose this cover because alot of the purchases I have made in the last 12 months have been this plain orange penguin edition. I now have a bookcase shelf purely of these editions - albeit it a small one.

I know a little of Camus and that merely by reputation so I am excited about reading this work. I genuinely thought I had read The Stranger but it is not on my bookshelf and unless I leant it out - it is prolly a false memory. Which I can have I have noticed, not delibrately - I used to scroll through JSTOR reading article after article and I think I must have just read a few critical interpretations of Camus.
Anyway enough of my rambles


Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy] ( listen); 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay "The Rebel" that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual and sexual freedom.

Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as one (even during his own lifetime).[1] In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked...".[2]

Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family. He studied at the University of Algiers, where he was goalkeeper for the university association football team, until he contracted tuberculosis in 1930. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement after his split with Garry Davis's Citizens of the World movement.[3] The formation of this group, according to Camus, was intended to "denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA" regarding their idolatry of technology.[4]

Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".



#37The Plague By Albert Camus

The Setting of The Plague

Oran (Arabic: وهران‎ Arabic pronunciation: [wahraːn], Algerian Darja: Wehran, ⵡⴻⵀⵔⴰⵏ) is a major city on the northwestern Mediterranean coast of Algeria, and the second largest city of the country. It is closely associated with its neighboring city, Aïn Témouchent. Located near the north-western corner of Algeria, 432 kilometres (268 miles) from the capital Algiers, it is a major port and the commercial, industrial, and educational centre of western Algeria.

It is the capital of the Oran Province (wilaya). The city has a population of 759,645 (2008[1]), while the metropolitan area has a population of approximately 1,500,000,[2] making it the second largest city in Algeria


Contemporary view of Oran
Neo-lithic Art from Oran province

R'cheg Dirhem, hartebeest and human

Who were the artists?
Conjectures on the identities of the artists have been many. Lhote tells that some have believed them to belong to the black populations ancestral to the Mandinka and the Haoussas. But the Touareg, the Egyptians and the ancestors of the Berbers have also been invoked. They have also been thought to have been the Cro-Magnons, the husbandmen and farmers of Asiatic origin, the Harratines, the Proto-Libyans and the Bushmen. In the absence of discoveries in the region of neolithic human remains and of an adequate understanding of the ambiguity of the images, "one should avoid any absolute identification" or "definitive option".

Contemporary Algerian Art

Baya
Baya , whose real name is Fatma Haddad , wife Mahieddine born12 December 1931In Bordj el Kiffan (Fort-de-Water, around d ' Alger ) and died9 November 1998in Blida , is a painter Algerian , who never signed his works as his forename only.