National Party promotes crime, prostitution

Here's another bit for the 'law and order' ticket: make it harder for people with problems to get benefits, specifically people with drug addictions and who are in trouble with the law.  I assume this is intended to be a big club that will magically make everyone who lives on the margin suddenly law abiding, fragrant smelling, and all round wonderful citizens, but I don't think that's how it's actually going to work.  I think people who fit in these categories are mostly going to slide away into the other ways to get money if you've got problems - and those are going to have worse societal effects.

But I'm going to give people who disagree with me a G. K. Chesterton quote, because G. K. Chesterton is cool:

"It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice.  It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them."
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Rockville, Maryland: Serenity Publishers, 2009.

And a happy election to you, too.

Christmas Bling

I don't often wear jewellery, but on some occasions it's almost mandatory, such as on Christmas Day having been presented with rose quartz earrings by one's sister:

They make me oddly nostalgic, actually. When we were very young our grandmother, who lived in South Africa, would most often send us presents of semi-precious stones set into bracelets that she'd made herself.

Regarding bling of a very different kind, my sister has also been producing her own limited edition Christmas Book. (Literally producing, as in selecting the material, editing it, and binding it herself.) It comprises a selection of roughly five years of both of our writing output, and she says that I can have a few author's copies to give away on my own account. Would anyone like a copy, of the 'would really be interested' variety, rather than the 'nod politely because they're friends but stash away somewhere and not look at' variety. We appreciate the latter sort, because they're polite, but more interested in providing Xmas goodies to the former. It has a range of material: short stories, poetry, fairy-tals, one short-film script and some essays. Much of it is very good indeed, and the rest of it is by me. :-)

Finally, a complimentary picture of Macca doing Macca type things:

Commonplace Book

There is an obvious danger in the business of examining a labyrinthine world such as that of the Confessions from the kind of perspective I have assumed. Any optic one chooses risks setting certain features into a prominence that may turn out to have been exaggerated; it may at the same time minimize the importance of features which, examined through a wider lens, turn out to be far more prominent than the narrower vision could allow. Every scholar fears the moment when he may have become prisoner to a point of view he has cultivated far too long than was good for his objectivity. And yet, his only therapy is to present the findings that his point of view enabled him to uncover, even at the risk of being premature. Others, then, may succeed in widening his vision before it is too late. In presenting his findings, he must (for sweet clarity's sake if for nothing else) suppress the ever-nagging temptation to resort to the subjunctive: "If my view of the matter be correct, then it would follow that Augustine means this." But the indicative mood, habitual in English exposition, tends to convey an air of greater confidence than the writer himself often enjoys: give me a scholar and he will know what I mean. My hopes are that whatever features of the Confessions' landscape I may have left in the shade were not deliberately ignored, or half-consciously excluded, because their message positively militated against the thesis propounded here, and that the Augustinian scholar will be sensitive to the number of hesitant subjuntives that still tremble behind my regular use of the indicative mood.

O'Connell, Robert J. St Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969, pp viii-xi.

Well it made me laugh. I know the feeling.

I've been tagged by a Commonplace Book meme...

As per Mark's instructions, , quoting from the book that's nearest to hand right now, p123, sentences 5, 6 and 7.
She looked then to Ukiah, curled in the rental car's backseat. "How do you feel?"
"I'm fine, Sam. I just want to go to sleep."

which isn't very interesting. Personally, I liked this bit better:

Sam picked up her coffee. "What I would love is a picture of Ukiah's father, so I know all the players."
   Max looked at Ukiah, puzzled.
   "Rennie," Ukiah said. "Indigo says he flew into Portland yesterday."
   "Oh, shit! That's the last thing we needed!" Max pulled out his PDA and played with it for a few moments. "Here. This is him."
   Sam viewed the picture a moment, sipping her coffee, and then suddenly spit it all back out. "This is the FBI Most Wanted list!"
   "Yes, it is." Max reached for his PDA. "I don't have any other picture of Shaw."
   Sam leaned out of reach, scrolling down through the entry. "Wanted for arson, assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, burglary ...kidnapping...manslaughter...murder - oh my god, you weren't kidding! He is a homicidal lunatic! And he's coming here?"
   "See, I'm not the only one he has that effect on," Max said to Ukiah.
   "He's not that bad," Ukiah said meekly. "Once you get to know him"
pp142-3.

Wen Spencer, Tainted Trail, New York: New American Library, 2002.

And I tag Starfire and Repton Infinity, because I think there'll be some interesting stuff coming out of their libraries.

That's a quote from your physically nearest book, p123, sentences 4, 5 and 6, and because that isn't necessarily the most interesting bit, I'm adding "plus the extract of your choice" to the list. :-)

Yet more poetry...

Because if people are going to have interesting conversations in comments to your posts, you might as well memorialise it. :-)

Psyche to Eros

Do you think of me then, waiting on the rock?
It was cold – the wind bellied my red mantle, embroidered
with suns and wheels and dandelions. Their
warmth was only pictures; my bare feet bled
on the ragged stones. From the dark hills cold glints
of trumpets bid farewell: they were leaving me, though
my mother had clung like lichen clings, had wept
like water gushing from blank granite.
A beautiful sacrifice, I.

In this dark place – all softness, as a scrap
of thistle-down, as the fluff
of a wild-cat nursing kits – my eyes
are shut with your kisses, your murmuring
willow-voice all I hear. I drink you,
as night drinks blindness from a bowl.

Ah, love,
I dreamed that I married a falcon,
and slept in his feather-soft nest in the cliff
but I looked in his eyes,
sun-yellow,
and knowing me, he fled.

I might travel the hills to find that bird,
and cut my feet on the rocks,
and wear the wind for a mantle.
Until I see you,
you will never know.
--Cat Pegg

Commonplace Book

liberal
Consider this:
      A man who feels for the people.
      A friend to the ill-favoured.
      Never a word against the bar-
barians assuming Roman dress.

Reconcile this:
      A believer in man's potential.
      A voice raised against the games
      where human flesh is sport.
A man whose eyes fill at music.

You might at least concede:
      No man went hungry from my door.
      No woman was molested.
      No child was imposed on.
Humanitas inevitable as breath.

I who might have, have
      never raped, pillaged, extorted;
      abused office or position;
      concealed; interfered with art;
stood between any man and sunset.

And yet as you say,
      I have killed a god. I have made
      of impartiality, a farce.
      I have dabbled in chaos. I,
Pilate. Who vote as you do.
-- Vincent O'Sullivan

Vincent O'Sullivan, in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, (eds. Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory Brian, Mark Williams), (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997), p228.

Because I Was Asked To Inflict Poetry...

Gilgamesh
There was a young king from Uruk
Whom Enkidu thought was a pillock
They fought a great war
And broke down a door
Then made mighty love on a hillock.
-- Cat Pegg

(Er, I think Catherine wrote it. She's certainly the person who told it to me...)

My Eyes Are Covered With A Double Night...

Catullus #51

That man is equal to God,
or so it seems,
to me.

He even, may I say it,
exceeds divinity, for he sits
near you, again and again,
he sees you and he hears
you laughing sweetly.

All my senses have escaped,
they flee my misery, for
as soon as I have seen you, my Lesbia,
no voice is left to me.

Words numb my mouth,
creeping flames seize my weak limbs,
my ears ring with their own sound.

Oh Lesbia. My eyes are covered with a double night.

(Procrastinate? Who, me?)

The Parrot Poem

Because it's after midnight and I can't sleep. And it's funny.

"Alas, the Parrot"
The Parrot, imitator bird from the Indies of the East, has died.
     Go in throngs to his funeral, birds, go in throngs;
Go, pious winged ones, beat your breasts with feathered limb,
     go, and tear your tender cheeks with rigid claw.

All you who balance your course in the liquid air,
     but you before others, friend turtledove, mourn.
He was full of the harmony of life to you
     and lasted to the long end, tenacious and faithful.

What use that faith of yours, what use that form of scattered colour,
     what use that ingenious voice of shifting sounds,
What use that you are given to please my girl?
     Unhappy glory of the birds, you surely now lie dead.

He died, that burbling ghost of the human voice,
     the Parrot, a gift given from the far edge of the world.
The seventh day came, with no hope of another and
     he shouted out his dying words: "Corinna, be well."

Ovid, Amores 2.6, abridged.

Commonplace Book

Of Truth
"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, through there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth; nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.

Bacon, Francis, "Of Truth" in ENGL308 Renaissance Literature Coursebook, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2006, p37.

On Studying...

Study continues apace. I've now finished rereading Love's Labours Lost, and I'm starting on the "Song of Songs" from the Authorized Version of the Bible, which has steamy bits. For instance, from Chapter II:

9 My beloued is like a Roe, or a yong Hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh foorth at the window, shewing himself through the lattesse.
10 My beloued spake, and said vnto me, Rise vp, my Loue, my faire one, and come away.
11 For loe, the winter is past, the raine is ouer, and gone.
12 The flowers appeare on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree putteth foorth her greene figs, and the vines with the tender grape giue a good smell. Arise, my loue, my faire one, and come away.
14 O my doue! that art in the clefts of the rocke, in the secret places of the staires: let me see thy countenance, let me heare thy voice, for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
15 Take vs the foxes, the litle foxes, that spoile the vines: for our vines haue tender grapes.
16 My beloued is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lillies.
17 Vntill the day breake, and the shadowes flee away: turne my beloued and be thou like a Roe, or a yong Hart, vpon the mountaines of Bether.

Reynolds (ed.), "Song of Songs", Authorized Version in ENGL224 Texts 2, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2006, p124.

Commonplace Book

The myth of colonial isolation and inferiority seems to be connected broadly to the theological concept of the Fall of Man - the immigration of our ancestors was, as it were, a second Fall, a departure from a Garden of Eden situated somewhere in Victorian England. Like other myths of inferiority (as in the reaction of a Jew to anti-Semitism, for example) the loss of self-confidence is insidious: no labour of intellect or will can ever really bridge the predetermined gap. Many New Zealanders who go to Britain (to go 'back Home' is the code word for it) may be unconsciously making a trip to a land that does not exist: the land of their great-grandmother's exiled fantasy, with the Old Lady sill drinking tea and whisky at Windsor, the village cricket team still playing in the twilight, and Oscar Wilde riding off to jail in a hansom cab. But not all of us are bound by the myth. Personally I prefer the dark country I was born in, with its man-eating pigs and politicians imported from Australia, where, if you break wind at the Bluff, you can be heard in Auckland.
- James K. Baxter, Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand, (The Caxton Press: Christchurch), 1967. (Originally presented as a lecture at Victoria University of Wellington.)

Yet Another Infliction Of Poetry...

Catullus No.13
O, come with old Catullus, that we may dine:
a loaf of bread, a flask of wine, you, a girl,
it will be Paradise!
So long as you bring some wine,
  and maybe a bit of bread,
  and definitely a girl,
  and you.
For your well-salted wit
you shall have all my love,
(though my pockets are home for spiders)
and a little something more elegant,
  or smelly, I should say -
for my latest girlfriend left a bottle of the
most stinkiferous, redolent, exotic attar
of roses that you ever did smell.
(You will beg the gods of love to make you
  All Nose.)

Heaven.
-- Stephanie Pegg, May 2006.

(Our class assignment for today was to rewrite one of Catullus' poems in the style of a poet that we liked. I started off with whatsisname Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat and then got a tad distracted.)

((Today I've had a signing test worth 20% and handed in a 2000 word essay worth 33% and a language assignment worth 20%. So I'm feeling tired but accomplished. Yay!))

Commonplace Book

"We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, -- I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then till now.

Pray, remember, that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data, for your adding as is meet;
And remember, men will scorn it, 'tis original and true,
And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.

But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learnt the worth of scorn;
You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn;
What, for us, are all distractions of men's fellowship and smiles?
What, for us, the goddess Pleasure, with her meretricious wiles?

You may tell that German college that their honour comes too late.
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate;
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight;
You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night.
I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known.
You "have none but me," you murmur, and I "leave you quite alone"?

Well then, kiss me, -- since my mother left her blessing on my brow,
There has been a something wanting in my nature until now;
I can dimly comprehend it, -- that I might have been more kind,
Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind.

I "have never failed in kindness"? No, we lived too high for strife, --
Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life;
But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still
To the service of our science: you will further it? you will!

There are certain calculations I should like to make with you,
To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true;
And remember, "Patience, Patience," is the watchword of a sage,
Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age.

I have sworn, like Tycho Brahe, that a greater man may reap;
But if none should do my reaping, 'twill disturb me in my sleep.
So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name;
See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame.

I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak;
Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak:
It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars, --
God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.
-- Sarah Williams

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1773.html

Commonplace Book

I haven't posted anything lately, so here goes another random poem (selected for no particular reason other than I happen to like it.)

Raferty
I am Raferty the Poet
Full of hope and love
With eyes that have no light
With gentleness that has no misery

Going west upon my pilgramage
By the light of my heart
Feeble and tired
To the end of the world

Behold me now
And my face to the wall
A-playing music
Unto empty pockets
--Raferty (trans. Douglas Hyde)

http://www.bartleby.com/250/142.html

Commonplace Book

Big whorls have little whorls
   That feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
   And so on to viscosity.
-- Lewis F. Richardson

This was Richardson's summary of his 1920 paper "The supply of energy from and to Atmospheric Eddies" and can be found here, along with the two poems it's parodying. Gotta love physicists with a sense of humour.

In other news, our frisbee game last night was a draw. Go us!
(It's one of the more endearing traits of Ultimate Frisbee that there are no referees, but it does mean that sometimes people's idea of the score at the end of the game can be a little bit hazy. This time round, it turned out that both teams had thought that the other team was winning, so we compromised on a 12-12 split.) Also, one of the opposing team members said something nice to me about my playing at the end of the game, which still has me smiling. After the game our team decamped to my house for an evening of sausages, chips and conversation. It was a pretty good night.

Because I Haven't Inflicted Poetry On Anyone For Ages...

Or at least a week. :-)

"Ode to the Lemon"

From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its planetarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid stained glass,
drops
oozed topaz,
altars,
cool architecture.

So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles,
a fragrant nipple
of the earth's breast,
a ray of light that was made fruit,
the minute fire of a planet.

-- Pablo Neruda

(Courtesy of the Wondering Minstrels again: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1702.html)

Gaudy Night

I've lately been rereading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is a lovely book for many reasons, including interesting characters, beautiful prose, a detailed description of Oxford life in 1935, and being a detective story that can be taking seriously by literature professors who happen to like detective stories. It also has little gems like these:

"Hard-boiled or soft-boiled?"
"Hard, I think."
This question had no reference to Dr. Threep's politics or economics, but only to his shirt-front. Harriet and the Dean had begun to collect shirt-fronts. Miss Chilperic's "young man" had started the collection. He was extremely tall and thin and rather hollow-chested; by way of emphasising this latter defect, he always wore a soft pleated dress-shirt, which made him look (according to the Dean) like the scooped-out rind of a melon. By way of contrast, there had been an eminent and ample professor of chemisty - a visitor from another university - who had turned up in a front of intense rigidity, which stood out before him like the chest of a pouter pidgeon, bulging out of all control and displaying a large area of the parent shirt at either side. A third variety of shirt fairly common among the learned was that which escaped from the centre stud and gaped in the middle; and one never-to-be-forgotten happy day a popular poet had arrived to give a lecture on his methods of composition and the future of poetry, whereby, at every gesticulation (and he had used a great many) his waistcoat had leapt in the air, allowing a line of shirt, adorned with a little tab, to peep out, rabbit-like, over the waistline of the confining trouser. On this occasion, Harriet and the Dean had disgraced themselves badly.

Sayers, Dorothy L, Gaudy Night, (London: Hodder and Stoughton), 1970, p256.

Commonplace Book

In honour of Neil Gaiman's very entertaining blog, most recently entitled The Return of The Devil's Foot, an oldie but a goodie:

Song
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
    And find
    What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
    And swear
    No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
    Yet she
    Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.
    -- John Donne

Used to good effect in Howl's Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones, although it was, alas, left out of the recent movie.
(Courtesy of Wondering Minstrels: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/384.html)

Commonplace Book...

I just read a poem that Dorothy Sayers wrote about being thankful which I rather liked. (This was written early on in WWII when a lot of material goods were becoming scarce.)

I need not shiver in silk stockings; -
I had a hunch about wool before it was rationed;
Now I have knitted myself woollen stockings
That come a long way up.
They are warm and admirable,
They do not ladder or go into holes suddenly.
I can boast quietly about them
And smirk while others admire my industry;
As it happens, I like knitting
And nothing gratifies one more
Than to be admired for doing what one likes.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

(Hannay, Margaret P. (ed.), As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Kent: The Kent State University Press, pp211-2)