The Trad Pad

A great modern writer is dead. John Fowles has died. The writer of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus is one of twentieth century’s greats. Time magazine chose TFLW among the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present. We loved it when it became a movie with Meryl Streep.

There is a phrase about to get wider currency. It is “cultural exception”. What is cultural exception? Free trade agreements are in increasing use. Australia, in the last year or two, has negotiated a free trade agreement with the USA and is involved in trying to establish one with China. Despite free trade being the name of the game in the contemporary international economy, many members of the World Trade Organization assert a right to limit cross-border trade in the interest of national cultural sovereignty. Unfortunately, there is virtually no evidence of interest by Australia in asserting its national cultural sovereignty. It would rather put lamb chops on the table of American citizens than go into bat for its own culture or intellectual property. On the basis of cultural exception, Canada has tried to regulate the sale of American periodicals. France has tried to limit the dominance of American films and protect its French film industry. Reflecting contending interpretations of intellectual property rights, some developing states have opposed as cultural appropriation the commercialization of local botanical knowledge by foreign pharmaceutical firms (”bioprospecting”). Some nations - well, let’s be blunt, it’s mainly the USA - view cultural exception as a thinly disguised form of protectionism.

France has struggled to get cultural exception recognised and accepted on the international trade agenda. It got a boost when joined in the struggle by Canada. Is it only a co-incidence that Canada has a significant Francophone population? As of the last week, France and Canada have just got a heap of friends and they have got them together with the assistance of UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). See here for UNESCO’s definition of the application of cultural exception.

Last weekend, the nations of the world voted on cultural exception. More than 150 of the 191 member states of UNESCO voted to approve The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions to protect cultural diversity. The USA and Israel - who have only recently rejoined UNESCO after lengthy absences - voted against the convention. Gutless Australia who won’t stand up for itself and certainly won’t go against the USA in the form of the Bush Administration abstained along with poor Kiribati - whose main interest is to seek a place for itself in the world as increasing sea-levels (caused by the global warming which Bush and Howard & Co. deny/ignore) threaten to swamp their island nation.

The US is feeling quite frustrated about this. No links here but search the net and you will find the outpouring there by the bucketload. How dare someone not want open slather for US movies! The hypocrisy of the United States is endless. It protects its own and wants open slather for themselves. But Aussies remember. They remember well how Rupert Murdoch had to take out US citizenship in 1985 to comply with that country’s media ownership laws.!

The Endeavour Journal - picture from the National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia is sending national treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries on walkabout from 3 December 2005 . The exhibition celebrates our history, our nation, our libraries and our treasures. It offers a unique opportunity to view, in one place, more than 170 rare and valuable objects—many never before displayed—that are housed in Australia ’s national, state and territory libraries.

There are all sorts of things including Henry Lawson’s pen. Have a look at them here.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.nla.pic-an2256760
I have a special interest in Captain James Cook’s Endeavour Journal. I am a descendent of John Gore, one of three Americans on the Endeavour. He came from the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia. It is believed that the Gore family/descendents may be the only family descended from a crew member of the Endeavour living in Australia.

The family are definitely of the venturing kind. Captain John Gore’s son, Rear-Admiral John Gore (whose guardian, should anything happen to his father, was Sir Joseph Banks), came to Australia to a grant of land at Lake Bathurst, near Goulburn in New South Wales. Various Gores are buried at the back of the graveyard of the beautiful tiny little Anglican Church at Lake Bathurst.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2288558-v
The Rear-Admiral’s son, Graham Gore, travelled on The Beagle when it sailed in Australian waters. There was no artist on board The Beagle but Graham Gore was a talented man and he became the unofficial artist on board. A painting of his, with a date of ca. 1841, Burial Reach, Flinders River, is in the National Library of Australia. The Flinders River is the longest river in Queensland, Australia and flows into the Gulf of Carpentaria. Graham Gore perished in the Arctic on Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The date of his death is given as 1847. For many, many years little was known of the fate of the Franklin expedition except for a note in the beautiful copperplate handwriting of Graham Gore found under a cairn of stones. The story is told in a most intersting book by Beattie and Geiger called Frozen in Time.

A lucky few are getting their names into books by some very famous and best selling authors. See the details here. Funds raised in the auction for named places in the books go to the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting freedom of information, expression and petition.

This is a bit of a reversal of The Bulgari Connection by Fay Weldon in which Bulgari sponsored the book and Weldon’s contract required her to specificially mention a dozen or so Bulgari items.

Readers of this blog will have noticed that I like to mark the changes of the seasons whether natural or spiritual or both together. To-day is Holy Cross Day, an ancient feast day or memorial day in the Christian Calendar. The excerpt below which I consider is a meditation on the Cross by one of the world’s greatest writers in English, is from Paradise by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Alfred A Knopf, NY, 1998, pp 145-147

…Misner walked away from the pulpit, to the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the podium and held it before him for all to see – if only they would. See what was certainly the first sign any human anywhere had made: the vertical line; the horizontal one. Even as children, they drew it with their fingers in snow, sand or mud; they laid it down as sticks in dirt; arranged it from bones on frozen tundra and broad savannas; as pebbles on riverbanks; scratched it on cave walls and outcroppings from Nome to South Africa. Algonquin and Laplanders, Zulu and Druids – all had a finger memory of this original mark. The circle was not first, nor was the parallel or the triangle. It was this mark, this, that lay underneath every other. This mark, rendered in the placement of facial features. This mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace. Remove it, as Pulliam had done, and Christianity was like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging everyday evil; the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness; the sighted ripped of light and thrown into the perpetual dark of choicelessness. Without this sign, the believer’s life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit, the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid. Or, as Pulliam put it, no one knew when he had “graduated”. But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well life was a whole other matter.

See?….See how this official murder out of hundreds marked the difference; moved the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one? The cross he held was abstract; the absent body was real, but both combined to pull humans from backstage to the spotlight, from muttering in the wings to the principal role in the story of their lives. This execution made it possible to respect – freely, not in fear – one’s self and one another. Which was what love was: unmotivated respect. All of which testified not to a peevish Lord who was His own love but to one who enabled human love. Not for His own glory – never. God loved the way humans loved one another; loved the way humans loved themselves; loved the genius on the cross who managed to do both and die knowing it.

But Richard Misner could not speak calmly of these things. So he stood there and let the minutes tick by as he held the crossed oak in his hands, urging it to say what he could not: that not only is God interested in you: He is you.

Would they see? Would they?

Paris has installed five book vending machines. Yeah - that’s right book vending machines. The books are cheap. They cover the widest range of genres. And they are finding a book buying public.

At a time in Australia when we wonder out loud about the future of the book and bookshops are going out of business, this may mean that we can’t write the book off just yet. (Oops, I didn’t really mean such a woeful pun!)

It is with a great sense of relief and encouragement that I have come across a review of the book, THE SURPRISING POWER OF FAMILY MEALS: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier, by Miriam Weinstein.

I recently heard or read that Kathy Letts, that well-known expatriate Australian, has rid her London house of the dining room table so that the room could become a home theatre. I was horrified. She said that, if the family wanted to eat together, they went out to eat. More horror! What about privacy - what if something unforeseen invaded mealtime: argument and debate, outrageous laughter and hysteria, practical jokes. All of these I have known to arise at family meal time and a good thing too. But what happens in a restaurant or some public eating place: a child’s terror of having to behave?

I loved the outcome that eating together correlates with kindergarteners being better prepared to learn to read. Food, family, and reading. A wonderful combination.

How many times do we mean to read a particular book or seek out books by a particular author and fail to do so? I have made lists to keep me up to the mark without success. Best-selling author, Barbara Kingsolver, falls into this category for me.

Eventually I got to read The Poisonwood Bible after hearing so much about it. It is a tour-de-force novel told in the female voices of a mother and her daughter. It is a contrast of cultures as an American family goes as missionaries to Central Africa and it traverses the modern history of African self-determination and independence. I can’t remember reading a novel before which had a serious and extensive bibliography including US State Department documents. Kingsolver had included these because she knew how disbelieving her compatriots might be regarding US activity in Africa.

So - with no decent excuse at all - I have not read a Kingsolver novel since. Then this week, I went past an Opp Shop at the Burnt Bridge Shopping Centre on the Maroondah Highway and there was a Kingsolver novel sitting atop a stack of books outside the store. Open the cover to see the price - 50cents. Mmm…. and so The Bean Trees came home with me.

I am enjoying it. You will see a description of the book and some reviews here.

I loved and identified with this snippet on page 88. Taylor says:

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.

I feel this in so many ways - no one person, no one church, no one political party and so on can use all of my parts. I am not so simple. I am complex, complicated, and multi-faceted. Traditional and conservative on one side: postmodern and radical on another. What do we do?

I love reading. I have always been a bookworm. I have been a librarian too. I love children’s books and - with some of them - wonder if they are really written for children and not for adults. (Drop by my Ebay store, Buy the Buy, and see some old fashioned charmers.)I married a bookworm and I have three well read children.

My daughter decorates houses. She says she sees quite a number of houses where people want things to look beautiful - but they are homes with not a book in sight! In many cases, she introduces books - if only as a decorating accent.

A house without books! For us, it might as well be a house without food. Books open up worlds of experience, ideas, values, emotions. They take us outside ourselves. Long live the book - even if it comes in digital fashion. But that will spoil things a bit.

I love a smaller book: one that is more or less the length of your hand (I have a large hand) and that feels a good weight as it lies open there. I love clear san serif font with lots of white (or creamy buff) space surrounding the text. And if I have all that and the pages are deckle edged - well, I am near to swooning with ecstasy and delight.

And bookshops! Well they are smack for literate addicts. In one delightful bookshop in Adelaide, I have never been more than ten feet inside the door, never to the back wall because I have usually exceeded the budget and I have to get out of there quickly. Ebay is a delight for buying books on my esoteric reading list - things like Rufus Jones and other old Quaker writers.

So transmitting this joy to new generations is something I regard of great importance and that’s why I want to post this item which tells pre-school centres to promote reading aloud to children as surely as promoting immunisation.

I second the motion!

For those who live outside Australia, I would like to tell you that Mem Fox is a national treasure in her own country.

We fell in love with her when she published her first book, Possum Magic, and it has continued ever since. Mem burst into the news with the rise of Mark Latham to the leadership of the Federal ALP and his adoption of her views on reading and by his reading to children in schools. Recently, Andrew Denton interviewed her on Enough Rope and the transcript of that is here. Literacy is a controversial issue in this country - and I would be surprised if it was not in other countries around the globe. At the core of this is how reading is taught. This debate tos and fros and in the middle of it pops up the topic of phonics.

Mem had a recent opinion article in The Sydney Morning Herald which, to me, seems to put phonics in its place. She points out in a convincing manner that phonics has nothing to do with reading - but everything to do with writing.

So make up your own mind - and, if you want to join in the Great Debate on literacy and phonics, don’t be shy. Have your say here. After all, it’s all about reading and books and magic - even Possum Magic!