I have had occasion to think, in recent times, on two songs of loss. I’ve cried to them before the loss, and I’ve thought of them ruefully after the loss, when I had no tears left. I will analyse them and discourse on them in The Other Place; and I’ll have fun doing it; and […]
Silence is golden. Gold peals where you walk, intuited and whole, in silent clamour. It slips beside its own: no need for talk, no weighing down with words. Mere joy and glamour. Not so with us. This river’s dammed with rock, and damned with talk, pleading aloud for grammar. The age of iron follows gold. […]
I have written on this blog ten years ago on my discovery of the changes in the traditions around Cretan folk music this past century. These changes have taken me by surprise: if you are immersed in an (albeit commercialised) folk music tradition, you assume it was ever thus. In fact, Cretan music used to […]
Those of my vintage will recall these two scenes from This Is Spinal Tap: There was something of a reenactment of that on The Project last night. The Project, as Australians know and others don’t, is a talk show hosted by Australian Muslim public intellectual Waleed Aly, along with some people who aren’t Muslim or […]
In days of yore, before computers, books were how knowledge was disseminated. And a knowledge economy had developed in the humanities, that went like this: A humanities scholar got tenure in a university by producing one or more published monographs. Because published monographs are still goods, there had to be suppliers and consumers of the […]
On the day of the High Court decision upholding the strict interpretation of Section 44i, I posted on the Facebooks: Why am I surrounded in this country by dolts? The High Court passed down the banhammer on the pollies. (Fun fact: turns out I’m as British as Xenophon is.) [False alarm.] The commentators get wheeled […]
So, we’ve had a little constitutional crisis here. The Australian Constitution disqualifies people from running for parliament if they have allegiance to another country, as part of its eligibility conditions. 44. Any person who – (i.) Is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a […]
Sarah Bond has published an article on Forbes, titled: Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu. Dear Sarah Bond: How about—No. Academia.edu arose as a response to the exclusive distribution of articles by journal publishers—whose money gouging is orders of magnitude more obtrusive, and more obstructive to disseminating scholarship, than academia.edu’s. (And the money gouging […]
Last week, my State Premier Dan Andrews approved the wholesale transfer of drivers licence photos to the Feds, because terrorism. And he also dismissed any concerns about civil liberties as a luxury (a luxury) that he cannot afford as a leader, because terrorism. Some people have the luxury of being able to have that notional […]
Following on from my defence of Tuvel: I’ve read Tuvel’s article, which a lot more than can be said of many who have criticised it. “My friends have been harassed by TERFs because of this specific essay,” for example. Then those TERFs didn’t read the article either: the article takes the right of trans people […]