'Education: what is it?' -- Part Two

In his current Weekend Australian column, Christopher Pearson is bemoaning a decline in standards, which is something that all good right-wing pundits need to do on a regular basis if they want to keep their edge. This week it's the decline in standards of education (or is it literacy?) in Australia (or is it the US?), which he blames on changes in reading-education techniques ... or is it the opening-up of the universities?

For which in turn he blames Dawkins (or is it (gasp) Menzies?), and which has resulted in the dumbing-down of curricula in, of course, wait for it, the humanities. Ah, a clean well-lighted RWDB position at last, and Pearson nestles into it, rhetorically speaking, with an almost audible sigh of relief.

All of which is to say that the column is oddly scrambled and self-contradictory, as though Pearson had set himself the challenge to cover every possible right-wing pundit party line and cliche on the subject in the course of a relatively short piece of writing, even if it meant directly contradicting himself in almost every paragraph.

But the out-of-left-field (so to speak) criticism of Menzies gives a glimpse of the Pearson of twenty years ago, who was an independent thinker with a razor-sharp brain. Conservatism seems to have blunted it (twenty years ago he would never have committed to paper such an egregiously mixed metaphor as 'a burgeoning vicious circle', for a start. Circles don't burgeon, they expand. Sheesh) but every so often one gets a quick glimpse of what he used to be like. Criticising Menzies?

Ah, but no, wait, what was he criticising Menzies for?

Wait for it: the trouble with Menzies was that he was not conservative enough.

Two things about this piece:

1) It's another example of the very nasty drift on the right towards the notion that facts and opinions have equal status and validity. Pearson's opinions are presented rhetorically as facts. This kind of thing at its worst results in wild rants from the right about non-existent global warming on the one hand and demonstrable 'intelligent design' on the other, where failure to acknowledge that some people 'believe in' ID and/or not in global warming is decried as a lack of 'balance'.

2) It's all about the party line. There's no way that anyone could even begin to get to the truth of the enormously complex and endlessly changing state of education in a thousand punter-friendly words. But my sad suspicion is that the truth about the situation isn't what chiefly interests Pearson, or any other pundit anywhere on the political spectrum with a barrow to push or a flag to wave. Public signalling of one's allegiances is becoming the journalistic substitute for finding out and reporting on what has actually happened.

Pearson's characteristic tutting in this piece is -- uncharacteristically -- half-hearted and unfocused. As so often with his op eds, he's torn between the intellectual attractions of truth and complexity on the one hand and the comforting clarity of the party line on the other. (My guess is that being a highly intelligent right-winger is bloody hard work; think of all the internal contradictions that need to be resolved.)

This piece could easily have been an interesting and thought-provoking sweep across the broad range of reasons why literacy in particular and education in general, in Australia and elsewhere, might have changed the way they have over the last few decades. It could have examined what I think is the single central issue, which is the rapidly-increasing commodification of education and the distortions and dumbing-down effects of that -- but no right-winger's going to touch that one; Pearson merely mentions in a neutral tone the current cost of education as though there were a direct and self-evident correlation between the amount of cash you fork out and the 'quality' of the education your kid gets. (One of the most dismaying effects of this kind of thinking is that it constructs education as a one-way street, something that you passively 'get'. But that's a whole other discussion.)

It could easily have been a really good piece of op ed writing. But in the end it simply rumbles away from behind its cigar in its comfy leather chair at its gentleman's club, getting no further than 'Things were better in my day' and using the crucial, massive problems and issues in contemporary education as just another stage on which to do the 'I told you so' dance.

The Meme of Four

Florence, January 1983. Note authenticity-indicating rips, stains, faded non-permanent Italian Kodak colours and such.


Here's a 'Four Things' meme I nicked from The Rest is Noise and felt compelled to have a go at.

Four jobs you've had in your life:
Dishwasher in a Greek restaurant
Magazine editor
Research assistant for an economist
Singer with a band

Four movies you could watch over and over:
Some Like it Hot
Strictly Ballroom
Billy Elliot
West Side Story

Not quite the same thing as 'movies you thought were brill' or Dead Man, Fargo, Trainspotting, Broadcast News and The Piano would all be in here. Note predominance of performance/spectacle in listed 4, something which has only just occurred to me.

Four places you've lived:
Toorak
Curramulka
Port Adelaide
Klagenfurt in Austria (very briefly, but I was working -- counts as 'lived in').

Four TV shows you love to watch:
Taggart
Will & Grace
Boston Legal
Nightline

But nothing on the teeve these days can touch Cracker, Prime Suspect, Northern Exposure or Hamish Macbeth. (NB -- new 2-hour reprise ep of Cracker, made 2005, coming up shortly!)

Four places you've been on vacation:
Bangkok
Coffin Bay
Kings Cross
Tuscany

Four websites you visit daily:
ABC News
Larvatus Prodeo (I assume blogs count)
Google
Doonesbury

Four of your favorite foods:
Only four, huh?

Sushi
My homemade fresh-cherry-and-toasted-almond ice cream
Fresh pineapple
Haigh's dark chocolate truffles.

Four places you'd rather be:
Florence
The Scottish Highlands
Younger (see tastes in TV, above) and fitter (see Haigh's truffles, above)
Singing in opera

Four tagged (heh):
Elsewhere
Laura
whitebait
Zoe

That weird time of year

Given what pleasure there is in putting the Christmas tree and decorations up, I suppose it's only fair that taking them down again should make a person sad. I took them down on the correct day (Twelfth Night, Jan 6th) but it's taken me nearly a week to get round to packing them up properly and putting them away.

During the twenty years I lived in a different city from my family I used to come home every year for Christmas, and some years I'd bring home some new decoration for the family tree that I'd found while travelling, to replace things that had become shabby or been smashed.

After my mother died, my sisters and I each took back whatever we'd originally bought. So when I was packing up the decorations this afternoon in their tissue paper, my mother's handwriting leaped out at me unexpectedly again -- see December 12 post -- in a note featuring my own family nickname (hereafter 'X'), which was the only thing she ever called me except when she was white-knuckle angry with me. My ma was the kind of person who not only wrapped all the decorations in tissue but wrote on each parcel a note saying what was inside. The note said 'Pearly white bells and icicles, X, Christmas 1987.'

This year I had a tree for the first time in five years, since the cats moved in. I decided to chance it, and it was a good call; to my astonishment, they completely ignored it. I'd anticipated something along the lines of the Get Fuzzy Christmas classic, with Bucky Katt swinging wildly from a string of exploding lights in the topmost branches of the about-to-come-crashing-down tree, Satchel Pooch looking horrified in the foreground, and the caption 'Bright Lights, Bad Kitty'.

In the event, the tortoiseshells couldn't have been less interested, and left it aloofly alone. It's a great little tree, a completely non-realistic looking arrangement of stylised gold-coloured 'branches' that look like something out of Michael Leunig's Mr Curly cartoons. It was decorated with red, white, silver, gold and crystal ornaments that mostly take the form of critters and musical instruments. I hated taking it down.

But my consolation, as I look around the blogosphere and see the spectrum of reactions from stoicism to real despair that people are describing about going back to work, is that I don't have to. Sure, the workload itself is piling up, the phone is starting to ring, the deadlines are starting to loom. The income is wildly irregular and overwhelmingly modest; I sure as hell don't get leave loading; and if I get sick then that's just too bad. But my workplace is my desk and my boss is the woman in the mirror, and there's no feeling in the world quite like it. If anybody out there is contemplating the jump -- just do it. Life is short, and you only get one.

Graeco-Roman wedgies and the biggest game of blackjack in the world

Patrick Cook's obituary of Kerry Packer is less sycophantic and possibly more accurate than most.

"I began with the desire to speak with the dead."

Pavlov's Cat cannot quite provide medium services, so there'll be no actual speaking with the dead. But I can do the second best thing and invite you to listen to the dead, which I promise you is quite spooky and sobering enough to be going on with, not least because of the innocence and promise in those 19th-century words.

If you can't quite make out what he's saying, here it is:

“America, centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike, endeared, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the earth, with Freedom, Law, and Love.”

Now go here.


Whitman, Walt. "America" (audio file). The Walt Whitman Archive. Ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. 11 September 2003 .

Imagine being loved like that

I don't surf the net so much as lurch it, like someone staggering drunk through the snow whose attention keeps getting distracted, so it's no real surprise that, having started out checking the blog of a Scottish Highlander called Pat the Chooks, who runs poultry of all sorts and spends a lot of time walking through and taking stunning photos of the Highland landscapes, I've somehow ended up in the great John Huston's final film. I assume this kind of thing happens to everyone.

A commenter was asking the Scottish blogger whether there were any 'snipes' in the region he lives in, and the word tripped a memory of one of the most astonishing poems I've ever come across, an anonymous Gaelic poem called 'The Grief of a Girl's Heart' that one of the dinner guests recites a bit of in Huston's 1987 film The Dead. When he finishes reciting, one of the guests says wonderingly: 'Imagine being loved like that.'

The poem, for which back then I searched for days in libraries but which is of course now online, was translated from the Gaelic by Augusta, Lady Gregory (above, image from here -- Yeats's Lady Gregory, whom I discovered, while I was looking for a pic of her (see 'lurch', above), that Colm Tóibín has written a biography of, called Lady Gregory's Toothbrush, which I'll now have to chase up as well. But here's the poem.

The Grief of a Girl's Heart

O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and do not forget it; and you will have a sweetheart for fair days and market days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at night.

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird through the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be there before me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under a silver mast; twelve towns with a market in all of them, and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible, that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

O Donall og, it is I would be better to you than a high, proud, spendthrift lady: I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you; and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.

O, ochone, and it's not with hunger or with wanting food, or drink, or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened; but it is the love of a young man that has withered me away.

It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the road on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing of me; and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.

When I go by myself to the well of loneliness, I sit down and go through my trouble; when I see the world and do not see my boy, he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you; the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday. And myself on my knees reading the Passion; and my two eyes giving love to you forever.

O, aya! My mother, give myself to him; and give him all that you have in the world; get out yourself to ask for alms, and do not come back and forward looking for me.

My mother said to me not to be talking with you to-day, or to-morrow, or on the Sunday; it was a bad time she took for telling me that; it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls; it was you put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me; you have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me; and my fear is great that you have taken God from me.

Let's not get carried away

I love my home town dearly. I made cataclysmic life changes in order to return home to it, after 20 years away, and I have never regretted the move for a nanosecond.

But this doesn't mean I look at it through rose-coloured glasses (why would I need to? It's almost always either blue and gold, moss-green and mother-of-pearl, or rose-coloured off its own bat: see above, courtesy SA Tourism Commission), so I had to have a little cackle at the deadpan summary I just read over at crikey.com.au of an article about drugs in today's Advertiser: 'Adelaide cracks down on ecstasy.'

Ain't it the truth. Comfort, yes. Contentment, absolutely. But ecstasy? Isn't that just a little bit, well, excessive? In, perhaps, doubtful taste? I'm reminded of the Alex Ross link a couple of posts back; if you read his long article on the John Adams/Peter Sellars opera Doctor Atomic you'll see that it contains a detailed and admiring profile of Sellars as a major heavy hitter in the world of the western stage. But here in Adders the dangerously edgy and radical Sellars was dismissed and undermined right and left from the outset by staid Adelaideans who thought he was a peculiar-looking little sausage and/or didn't want their arts festival hijacked by a feral director.

It's true that the Sellars festival turned into a disaster, though bravely salvaged at the eleventh hour by a tactful, professional, conscientious ring-in from Victoria. But Sellars' real and fatal mistake was to misjudge the essential nature of Adelaide and of the ways in which the Festival heavies, still largely soi-disant socialites and Establishment pillars, were likely to react to the radicalism of his politics and his general vision of what art is and what it's for.

He probably made another basic error to do with economies of scale. And he may have wrongly deduced that local arts legends Robyn Archer and Greg Mackie were typical of the joint. Whatever it was, it was a major mis-fit with the realities of this our small-but-perfectly-formed city-state. Ecstasy? Not in my back yard.

Hours of harmless fun ...

... as Dubya's speechwriter, here!

(Pinched with thanks from Health ... and other rants.)

What's trash to you is treasure to me and vice versa

This morning there's live blogging going on from the Sills Bend garage sale, with some excellent illustrations that make you really think about the things we accumulate in life and how and why we keep them, or get rid of them as the case may be. I am still wondering how the Sills Bend household acquired the photo of the young Her Maj a-horseback and the wooden doll with the giant penis (not together) in the first place.

But what this post has reminded me of is my own experience last year with the local council's hard rubbish collection round, something I'd never actually made use of before. I put out a dead microwave oven, a wheelbarrow made of rust, a pair of small wrought-iron gates ditto, a big ancient lawnmower (also mostly rust) from which bits of metal had begun to fly off when in action and to which I had Blu-Tac'd a sign saying NO PETROL IN THIS MOWER, the frame of a folding tatami screen which got destroyed by the cats when kittens, an ancient suitcase that had travelled the world and was now full (after several years in the garage) of teeming insect life, and a lot of anonymous bits of wood of unknown origin.

And by the time the council truck arrived mid-morning, EVERY SINGLE THING HAD GONE.

Is this what usually happens?

What's Your Sign?

"Wrong Way, Go Back."

Ahem. Here from Scrivener in Atlanta, Georgia, via Sills Bend, a quiz called 'Here's Your Sign', and my own tragically inevitable result:



There's No Such Thing As Too Many Books


Here's Your Sign {pictures included}
brought to you by Quizilla


Funny, I always thought I was a Taurus. I like this one much better.

On housework

An only partly light-hearted item about gender and housework, posted at Club Troppo and then cross-posted to Larvatus Prodeo by Nicholas Gruen, has generated a number of comments on both blogs and spun discussion off into others. So here's my two cents.

1) Ideology is the enemy of housework. As a feminist all my adult life I have always resisted the idea that making a mess and not cleaning it up is somehow worse if you're a woman, or that the many activities traditionally lumped under the heading 'housework' are in any way gender-specific. On the other hand, I also have political objections (weakening as I age, but still strong enough to prevent it) to the idea of employing a cleaner, particularly since almost all cleaners are women. I can't quite shake the idea that there is something simultaneously undignifed and anti-democratic about not cleaning up one's own mess.

2) I therefore live in a much bigger mess (speaking of undignification) than I would like. Nothing chez moi actually smells or festers, and the bathroom does not look as if I am developing a new species of penicillin in it, but the untidiness is chronic and in one room in particular the chaos would be regarded by some as a mental health issue. There's a proliferation of displaced or homeless items in this room that it would take three or four weeks to sort, deal with, throw out or find a home for, even if I could get the carpenter in to build the cupboards I can't afford in the space I don't have.

3) The bringing-up of children and the cooking of meals are both arts. Housework is a chore. Under no circumstances should they all be considered as part of the same deal.

4) If you're a woman, it's all about your mother. You have either internalised her standards and followed her example, or wildly over-reacted against them. This applies at both ends of the spectrum, whether she was an unutterable slob or Mrs Sparkle incarnate.

5) Ironing is less unbearable than cleaning the bathroom.

6) The piano looks better without the paw prints.

And this is why he got the job

The sheer intellectual exuberance of this wonderful post from New Yorker music critic Alex Ross takes my breath away and fills me with wicked envy. One of the most enviable gifts of people with this kind of quicksilver brain is the combination of a rich horde of varied, detailed knowledge with an ability to make instant connections across those bodies of knowledge: music to poetry to history, all with no apparent effort. Do check out both of Ross's links even just briefly because neither that post nor this one makes much sense without them.

A 'chaconne' is a particular kind of musical form in slow waltz time. I know this because I have just looked it up.

And just to prove (since I have been sounding more than usually snarky lately about Christians when actually it's not Christians as such that I mind at all, it's morons) that I am actually not particularly anti-God, here for the hell of it is the poem to which Ross is referring, which has been one of my favourites since I first struggled through it at school. If there's one thing that I love it that John Donne loves, it's labyrinthine grammar, and if there's another, it's the inescapable erotic dimension of religious ecstasy, which he had the brains neither to repress nor to deny.

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You
as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
that I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
labour to admit You, but O, to no end;
reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,
but am betrothed unto Your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
take me to You, imprison me, for I,
except You enthrall me, never shall be free,
nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

Sharon gravely ill, nutters in overdrive

Spokespersons for Hamas plus other radical Palestinians and the President of Iran have all unwittingly joined the barking US God-botherer Pat Robertson in claiming that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cerebral haemorrhage was a punitive act of God.

So there you go. You can be an overweight 77-year-old taking blood-thinning drugs and living under the unbearable stress of running one of the most controversial countries on earth, but if God loves ya, ya safe -- and if He don't, ya doomed.

Dubya, meanwhile, is in sparkling form. Just saw him on the news, where he announced at a press conference about Sharon's condition that he was "prayin' for him" -- and then, in the next sentence, began talking about him in the past tense.

And on a considerably lighter note

Still in holiday-mucking-about mode, I tried that thing where you Google your name plus the word 'needs' and write down the first ten things that come up. My name isn't one that Google recognises much, so I tried my family nickname instead and got thousands of results. Here are the first ten: taken as a whole, this list makes me sound as though I am running a brothel.

1) Pavlov's Cat needs an Avatar
2) Pavlov's Cat needs your input
3) Pavlov's Cat needs to have a new one
4) Pavlov's Cat needs volunteers
5) Pavlov's Cat needs a home with adults who have time to continue her training
6) Pavlov's Cat needs to match the needs of the individual with the specialist room and products provided
7) Pavlov's Cat needs to be evenly matched with the ignition source
8) Pavlov's Cat needs a boob job
9) Pavlov's Cat needs medication
10) Pavlov's Cat needs money

I swear this really is how it came up (substituting blogname for nickname, of course) and most of these things are, alas, all too true, especially #9 and #10. Those who know me well will know just how funny #8 is. #3 and #7 are intriguing, but #5 is just sad.

Too good to last

It was a textbook New Year this year: dinner in the Adelaide Hills with three of my oldest friends. A yummy fresh-Adelaide-food dinner it was too, a triumph for the cook and hostess, who has been a close friend since school and I am not saying how long ago that actually was but we're talking decades here. She and I saw the New Year in while Glad-Wrapping the remains of the summer pudding and clearing up the snapper scraps. The cool change swept in overnight and in the morning we sat around in the dressing-gown stage, exchanging views, memories and philosophies as is our wont. It was an excellent way to see in the New Year.

But on the rainy drive home, less than a kilometre from my house, I caught sight of something in the gutter that resolved itself, as I drove past, into the terrified face -- big eyes, big ears -- of a grey and white kitten. While clearly still alive, it would not have been in the gutter in the rain unless it couldn't walk.

Long story short: irretrievably and desperately damaged kitten (broken leg/hip, obvious internal injuries, possibly dog-mauled for good measure) retrieved, brought home where I then could not bring myself to kill it, so given a pile of clean bedding in the corner of the garden shed where it could die in relative peace, dry and unmolested, overnight. Came the dawn and the little bugger was STILL alive -- just -- so I hauled him off to the Animal Welfare League, who were extremely nice, and who relieved me of my tiny, filthy, mangled, unbearable burden.

Morals:

1) If you have a cat, (1) have it spayed, (2) have it microchipped, (3) make sure you know where it is at all times.

2) If you run over a cat, or a dog, don't just keep driving. At least have the decency to stop and make sure it's dead or do something if it isn't.

3) Read J. M. Coetzee's *Disgrace*. If you've already read it, read it again.

4) If you have any spare cash, pet food, bowls or bedding lying around, take them to the Animal Welfare League or the RSPCA. Today. Now.