It has been a barren year. My writing projects have not developed as I would like. I have made progress with Ivan's Singer, but I have not been finishing the sections according to schedule. I think it is still viable for me to finish next year this Sebald-like novel about Ivan the Terrible and my… Continue reading Reflections on 2019: walking through the desert
The year's reading has been among my least studious. The troubles of the year have robbed me of time and concentration to read deeply and widely, and there has been less discovery of new topics or rediscovery of old masters than in recent years. Yet still if I document my reading I may discover curiosities… Continue reading Reflections on 2019: notes on my reading
Democracy is a mesmerising word. The power of the idea overwhelms definition and precise thinking. The mandarin political theorist, Emeritus Professor John Dunn of Cambridge University, posed these questions in Breaking Democracy's Spell: "Why does this word democracy now hold such singular political authority? Where is the power that lurks so strangely within it? What… Continue reading Reflections on 2019 – the democratic rebuff to progressivism
It has been a difficult and personally challenging year. Much of the year has been consumed by profound stressors. I have been stalked by the threat of redundancy. I have endured the daily reality of ostracism and being an outcast at work. I have stared into the frightening prospect of unemployment in my later 50s… Continue reading Reflections on 2019: walking through the circles of hell
Over the last week or so amidst some illness, which led me to convalesce in bed for four days, listening to podcasts and watching youtube, and some insomnia, which led me to wake anywhere between two and six am, I have tuned into many hours of the impeachment hearings being conducted in Washington. There appears… Continue reading The impeachment of the republic
"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are.… Continue reading Where is virtue in dark times?
In 1986 Andrei Tarkovky released his final film, The Sacrifice. It has long been one of my most treasured films, and for reasons that are mysterious it is calling to me this morning. Perhaps it is the pervasive sense of doom, the collpase of meaning, and the threat of cultural catastrophe, and the need to… Continue reading The Sacrifice
The American literary critic, or rather lover of literature, is dead at 89. There are the usual range of bad obituaries, collected over at aldaily.com, prepared by scornful woke journalists ("staff writers") on the make or embittered post-modern pedants envious of his gifts of memory, language and understanding. But these fashionable madmen cannot mar the… Continue reading Bloom’s last lilac: the death of Harold Bloom (1930-2019)
Douglas Murray places this remark from G.K. Chesterton in epigram of his The madness of crowds: gender, race, identity: "The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it." His book is a restrained testing of the absurdities of identity politics, social justice and… Continue reading Forgiveness and the madness of crowds
In 2016 following the vote on Brexit, an American political journalist wrote: "But what if progressivism isn't inevitable at all? What if people will always be inclined by nature to love their own — themselves, their families, their neighbors, members of their churches, their fellow citizens, their country — more than they love the placeless… Continue reading To govern does not equal to change
In 1815 Mount Tambora, on the northern coast of the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted in the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history. The vast amount of ash and gas thrown into the atmosphere led to strange weather being recorded across the world - in China, in India, in America and Europe. In central Europe,… Continue reading Frankenstein’s children
As described in the previous post, Free speech for public servants and Osip Mandelstam, I am reposting here an extended set of posts that I originally posted in three parts on the Happy Pessimist blog (no longer online) in 2013. The Crisis in Australian Politics 2010-2013 07 Apr 2013 (originally posted on The Happy Pessimist… Continue reading The Crisis in Australian Politics 2010-2013 (reposted)
During the week the High Court of Australia passed judgement on a case in which a public servant was sacked for an anonymous tweet, critical of government but made in her private life, that was said to breach a code of conduct for government employees. The lower courts had found that this action was an… Continue reading Free speech for public servants and Osip Mandelstam
I am returning today to my notes on my travels, and piecing together the literary and cultural associations prompted by my travels through Stockholm and Uppsala in June. I began to say that I knew little Swedish or Scandinavian writing or culture as I entered the country, but that was not really true. As we… Continue reading My descriptions of the Northern Peoples – travel in Stockholm and Uppsala
https://wp.me/p1YJAa-2xN This interview with Seamus Heaney (vale Seamus) is wonderful. I particularly like the line that poetry is stratification of the need for transcendence.
Today I am posting the last (for now) of my reposts from earlier, retired blogs. This post comes from 2010 and is a reflection on Vaclav Havel's thought, then still alive, and comment on the defeat of the masters of the universe in the global financial crisis. As it happens I read Havel's famous long… Continue reading On the virtue of not knowing (WordPress anniversary repost)
I am continuing my blogging retrospective today by reposting a small think-piece from The Happy Pessimist blog. If I have done my digital erasure correctly, you will not find any record of this blog online. I wrote it using the avatar pseudonym of Antonio Possevino, a Jesuit priest, diplomat and missionary of the 16th century.… Continue reading My wordpress 11th anniversary retrospective: 3 dilemmas of government
Earlier this week I got a message from WordPress that I had passed my 11th anniversary as a blogger on the platform. I began with an anonymous blog, The Happy Pessimist, which I began amidst a bout of doubts about my public service career, which led me to embrace the political essay in its new… Continue reading 11 years with WordPress – from the archive: Good Government Starts Today
Once ten years ago I gave answers to one of those personal profile questionnaires that aimed to help people know more about their colleagues at work. It asked questions like "how would you describe your childhood?" "what film changed your life?" "what are your favourite books?" and so on. I put some effort into it… Continue reading On human frailty in governing
Here is a poem I have written this morning that is, I suppose, a kind of reflection on the task that lies before all of us, so much harder than making a poem, of making a life out of the events, circumstances and culture we inherit and encounter. How to make a life I Not… Continue reading Poem: how to make a life
