Commonplace book: misc

“Every man for himself and God for us all”
as the elephant said when it danced among the chickens.

When the bankrupt Duke of Buckingham was told that his means no longer permitted him to keep an Italian confectioner, as well as a French chef and an English roasting-cook, he exclaimed, in natural horror, “Good Gad! Mayn’t a man have a biscuit with his glass of sherry?”

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet, when we want shoes.”
Jonathan Swift

It is the business of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to distribute a certain amount of human misery; and the man who distributes it most equally is the best Chancellor.
Robert Lowe

Commonplace book: Plantagenet law

I have laboured to make a covenant with my self, that affection may not press upon judgment; for I suppose there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble a name and house, and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it: and yet time hath his revolution, there must be a period and end of all temporal things, finis rerum, an end of names and dignities, and whatever is terrene, and why not of De Vere ?

For where is Bohun ? where's Mowbray ? where's Mortimer ? &c. Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet ? they are intombed in the urnes and sepulchres of mortality.

Crew CJ in Lord Willoughby of Eresby's Case (1625) W. Jones 96, 82 ER 50,

Commonplace Book: Kingsley Amis

To find his sexual drives had ceased
For Sophocles was no disaster;
He said he felt like one released
From service with a cruel master.

I envy him – I miss the lash
At which I used to snort and snivel;
Oh that its unremitted slash
Were still what makes me drone and drivel!

Christmas 1993

OUT WITH THE OLD, AND LET’S NOT BE IN ANY HURRY TO ADMIT THE NEW

Christmas, birthday, new year; anniversaries whose only value to the bitter and twisted
Is to enable the year’s disappointments to be listed
As an aid to prospective parents deciding this is no world to bring a child in to
However ineffective this propaganda has in the past been (and yes, Toz, Kath, Janet, and Prudence, we’re looking at you).
Rose has finished her book on facilitated communication training to be published in January by Columbia University (Teacher’s College Press)
Which she sees as inadequate compensation for DEAL being defunded by Kennett and having its approaches to Howe for alternatives meeting with no success;
Anne has been hounded into conformity with the pretentious and enervated shibboleths of academic self-congratulation
To the point of finishing her degree and facing graduation;
Chris kept on with occasional research and report work for VicHealth
Leading him to VicWisdom but unfortunately not VicWealth;
The cat was rushed trembling in a carrybag to the vet to be treated for a damaged paw,
And the house itself suffered severely from prolapse of the bathroom floor.
Still, I couldn’t say it was all bad (with my memory, there may have been wonderful things happen that I can’t remember)
And I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead year, and it is already December,
And so we hope you all finish 1993 in a manner appropriate alike to the optimistic and the bitter and twisted
By getting thoroughly pissted.

Chris Borthwick
December 8, 1993

Commonplace book: Larkin's letters

Faint heart never fucked the pig

Life is its own justification, of course: except in cases where it isn’t, of course.

I am a corpse eaten out with envy, impotence, failure, envy, boredom, sloth, snobbery, envy, incompetence, inefficiency, laziness, lechery, envy, fear, baldness, bad circulation, bitterness, bittiness, envy, sycophancy, deceit, nostalgia, et cetera…

I have my little depressions and fits of spleen, certainly, but nothing like the flu has touched me; boredom, yes, irritation, with all my heart, but nothing requiring tablets.

Looking back on my first 40 years, I think what strikes me most is that hardly any of the things that are supposed to happen or be so in fact happen or are so. What little happens or is so isn’t at all expected or agreeable. And I don’t feel that everything could have been different if only I’d acted differently – to have acted differently I should need to have felt differently, to have been different, which means going back years and years, out of my lifetime. In a way I feel I am still waiting for life to start – for all these things that are supposed to occur as a matter of course.

You can’t dip litmus into poems and say whether they are bad or good; you can say whether or not people like them but even if people don’t, this still doesn’t negate the pleasure one has take in writing them. Still, some poems are by common consent ‘good’, so are these? Well, I should say that they just don’t begin to be poems in the professional sense any more than your dancing or golf or piano playing would be professional unless you really worked at them. A poem is a highly professional artificial thing, a verbal device designed to reproduce a thought or emotion indefinitely; it should have no dead parts, and every word should be completely unchangeable and unmoveable. Your poems are hit or miss, rather verbose affairs, remarkably articulate and at times vivid but essentially conversation, not poems. Someone once defined poems as ‘heightened speech’; does that suggest my meaning? Features such as metre and rhyme help this heightening; they aren’t just put in to make it more difficult to do.

We judge a writer by the resonance of his despair.

Projection

Joshua Frydenberg quotes “Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, constantly on guard against those who seek to destabilise his regime” as saying “Shiites are mostly always loyal to Iran and not the countries where they live.” Am I the only one who sees echoes here of the slanders of disloyalty traditionally levelled at Jews (and, occasionally Catholics)? I can see why Mubarak would push this line – he is, after all, aware that “those who seek to destabilise his regime” include, among others, the bulk of the population of Egypt, and any scapegoat is better than none – but I’m still surprised to see Australians parroting it.

If you want to avoid destabilising the Middle East, don’t invade Iraq (or Lebanon). If you want to control nuclear proliferation, start with the one power in the region that already has nuclear weapons. If you want a serious debate, don’t begin by creating bogeymen about the Protocols of the Elders of Qom.

IPA

John Roskam and the IPA see a decline in the sense of community, and blame it on – who could have guessed? – government overregulation. People used to accept risk, he says, but “now it is something that must be eliminated”. And what’s the remedy? “Many of the issues council health inspectors try to solve could be fixed by simply declaring that anyone purchasing at a community event does so that their own risk.”

Well, that sounds good – but Roskam does seem to skip over who or what is to do the declaring. If the community group sticks up a sign at its sausage sizzle saying “Eat at your own risk” that has almost no legal effect, if anything goes wrong the group is still liable to be sued for millions, and even if nothing goes wrong the insurance against such suits is likely to be crippling. If the government gets around this by passing a law saying that you eat at your own risk, removing by statute the average citizen’s immemorial common law right to recover damages for negligence, that might create moral hazard – are there really no football clubs out there who would relax their kitchen standards if they were absolutely confident they were immune from suit? It certainly sounds like more government interference, which is what I thought Roskam was against.

Indeed, given the IPA’s previous attacks on not-for-profit groups as anti-business special interest lobbyists one might be forgiven for thinking that the IPA’s real interest was in a more general abolition of product liability suits, something that would be of immense benefit to the corporations that fund it.

Yes, there are real problems in regulating community groups, but they can’t be solved by the IPA’s kneejerk antigovernment rhetoric. It’s not the government that has made us Australians more ready to resort to the courts than we were in the fifties, it’s us Australians. It’s not the government that has left us too little connected to our neighbours, it’s modern consumerist culture’s drive to unfettered individualism. In dealing with these important issues the community sector needs more support, not less.