[The] notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce. In the list of sixties social heroes, there are musicians and poets and civil-rights activists and sports figures. Herzog’s implication is that such a high-minded list is incomplete. What, say, of Vidal Sassoon? In the same period … Sassoon made individualization the hallmark of the haircut, liberating women’s hair from the hair styles of the times-from, as McCracken puts it, those “preposterous bits of rococo shrubbery that took their substance from permanents, their form from rollers, and their rigidity from hair spray.” In the Herzogian world view, the reasons we might give to dismiss Sassoon’s revolution-that all he was dispensing was a haircut, that it took just half an hour, that it affects only the way you look, that you will need another like it in a month-are the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.
— Malcolm Gladwell, “True Colors: Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America,” The New Yorker, 1999.The Novel as Manuscript, by Norman Dubie
—an ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
like immense museum masterpieces
patchwork
wrapped in linen, tea stained,
with hemp for strapping…
these colored stamps designed for foreign places
were even printed during famine—
so when they vanished, so did the whole
Soviet system:
the Berlin Wall, tanks from Afghanistan
and Ceausescu’s bride before a firing squad.
It had begun with the character of Yuri Zhivago
in a frozen wilderness, the summer house
of his dead in-laws, his
pregnant mistress asleep
before the fireplace
with flames dancing around a broken chair, piano keys
and the gardener’s long black underwear.
Lara lying there. A vulgar fat businessman
coming by sleigh to collect her for the dangers
of a near arctic escape…
But for Yuri, not that long ago, he was
with celebrity,
a young doctor publishing a thin volume
of poems in France, he was writing
now at a cold desk
poems against all experience
and for love of a woman buried
in moth-eaten furs on the floor—
while he wrote
wolves out along the green treeline
howled at him. The author of this novel,
Boris Pasternak arranged it all. Stalin would
have liked to have killed him. But superstition kept him from it.
So, the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress eventually
is walking with a candle
through a prison basement—
she is stepping over acres of twisted corpses
hoping to locate her vanished mother…
she thinks this reminds her of edging slowly
over the crust on a very deep snow, just a child who believes
she is about to be swallowed by the purity of it all,
like this write your new poems.
(Source: poets.org)
Wall of words: the Berlin Wall fifty years on | OxfordWords blog
“Like the concrete wall, the word walldivides Europe linguistically. Some European languages, like German and French, form their words for wall from the Latin murus. So the German for Berlin Wall is die Berliner Mauer. English, Irish, and other languages use another Latin word, vallum, a more military word which means a rampart. In Irish it became fál, and its possessive form has found its way into the name of the political party, Fianna Fáil.
During the Cold War era language often emphasized our differences. In 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built, Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard flew into space for the first time. They did the same thing, but we found different words to describe them: Gagarin was a cosmonaut and Shepard an astronaut.
But if we look a little more widely we find how much the European languages share. English language newspapers reported that the East Berliners had beenimmured, and, later, they carried pictures of the murals that spread across the Wall on its western side. Both words, immure and mural, come from the Latin root murus that the Germans use. In the East the Wall was known as theAntifaschistischer Schutzwall—the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart: German has retained its own traces of ‘our’ Latin word for wall.
In 1989 the division between the Berliners became so unabsolute and absurd that the people tore it down and so the Berlin Wall is not here for its fiftieth birthday. What remains are the vestiges of murus and vallum with which we can all trace our common heritage.”
Charles Simic on "The Lost Art of Postcard Writing" (via NYRblog | The New York Review of Books)
Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities. If there was such a book, I’m sure it would contain hundreds of anonymous masterpieces of this minimalist art, since unlike letters, cards require a verbal concision that can rise to high level of eloquence: brief and heart-breaking glimpses into someone’s existence, in addition to countless amusing and well-told anecdotes. Now and then one encounters in antique shops and used book stores boxes full of old postcards valued for their antiquity, their images and their stamps. The writing found on them most often tends to be in faded ink and hard to read. To anyone with plenty of time on their hands, I recommend reading a bunch of them. Postcards continued to be used by people of modest means to convey important family news long after telephones ceased to be a novelty. I once came across one that said:
Francis Brown died last night, funeral on Tuesday.
That was all there was. The image on the other side of the card was of a famous race horse from 1920s, so I immediately pictured Mr. Brown with a straw hat, a cane in his gloved hand and carnation in his lapel, stopping for a beer in a saloon before catching the streetcar to go to the track in Boston or San Francisco.
It was true that local characters and scenes slotted effortlessly into a global script. Muscled teenagers in big shorts crowded the nation’s shopping malls. On neat estates where every house replicated its neighbour, young women pushed strollers containing babies of such plush perfection it was difficult to believe they would grow up to eat McDonald’s and pay to have their flesh tanned orange. There was comfort to be derived from this sense that the nation was keeping up with the great elsewhere. What claim does a new world have on our imagination if it falls out of date?
But a stand of eucalypts in a park or the graffiti on an overpass might call up a vision of what malls and rotary mowers had displaced. Australia was LA, it was London; and then it was not. Here there was the sense that everything modern might be provisional: that teenagers, news crews, French fries might vanish overnight like a soap opera with poor ratings. The country shimmered with this unsettling magic, which raised and erased it in a single motion.
The past was not always past enough here. It was like living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances; and discovering a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard.
— From The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser“Lecture 1: The Island”
Stephen Fry demolishes the Catholic Church at the the Intelligence² Debate, October 2009.
Eviscerating.
[W]hat does it tell us about race relations within this country or our international relations with our neighbours if, instead of seeing ourselves as a society of victims, we see our arrival as an invasion of opportunists? Among many vices one could characterize as universal there is a particularly nasty one - the lust to be seen as a victim. I was astonished and repelled a few years ago in Germany to read a lead article in a major publication claiming: “We Germans were the first victims of Nazism”.
We have our own version of this, complications and mitigating circumstances notwithstanding: by the story we habitually tell, we have made the tragedy of Australia a convict tragedy. Whereas the overriding tragedy always was, and still is, an Aboriginal tragedy.
— Australian writer Rodney Hall, “Being Shaped by the Stories We Choose from our History,” Alfred Deakin Lectures, Capitol Theatre, 2001.
