dieter

Cassandra here: the bottom line is that nobody knows much about this virus FOR SURE. It's all conjecture and I have tried to post that we should not be led astray by snake oil salesmen and spin doctors who assure us that because we have a high vaccination rate that we will have no further lockdowns etc and we are now open and free. None of these 'bright and rosy' future salesmen and women know anything about what Ignatius Pop calls 'Dealing with the real.'

In 1986 I managed a Sydney-based wine company in Melbourne. One of my clients was the Marquis of Lorne. I was attracted to a woman who worked there. I asked her out, the venue, The Melbourne Concert Hall, the occasion, a Leeuwin Estate sponsored visit by the Staatskapelle Berlin. She agreed, specified she would pay for her own ticket, then she suggested we have dinner afterwards. We went to a Bistro in Bourke Street. I ordered Clos De Tart, 1980. It was $125 on the list. Halfway through the dinner a waitress who had been a friend who she hadn't seen in years walked past. She asked the waitress to sit with us and because it was her last shift there she said why not? She then ordered another glass - one of those huge balloony things which held half a bottle - and she poured the rest of the Clos De Tart for her friend, yes, half the bottle. After I had paid the bill - this was after she had insisted she would pay half - she asked me if I could drop her off at her boyfriend's house. I mention this in light of this great article about our Capitano Max who at the end of festivities after the GF sat with our Angus on the roof of their hotel and drank a decanted bottle of Clos De Tart. Apparently it costs $1500 these days. It's a Monopole, you see, and that ain't a Polish thing...

Just for the record, I found the reference to Italians in war in poor taste: as I've said, my post has nothing to do with war, it was an attempt at celebrating Melbourne Football club players of German descent. None of them had anything to do with WW2. Also, if you wanna take it further, tell me how you'd behave if you were sent from a village in Puglia or Sicily or Sardinia to fight for the Nazis at Stalingrad.

I'm in Cape Patterson, baby, where are you?

Yep. However, In Vilnius, as the great Polish saga commences...

I said to the woman serving at the Polish Cake Shop in Carnegie, My wife is Polish. Polish girls, she said, they keep you on your toes. I grimaced: But, I'm not a ballerina.

You find reading Poland depressing. Try living with Poland! 😂🤣😍🤩🥰 By the way, you can buy her novel if you're on a Polish escapade: Archeology of a Dream City. It's available online, published by Balestier, the launch was at La Mama last Saturday. Here is a review: Monica Raszewski The Archaeology of a Dream City Balestier Press, London 2021 ISBN 9781913891060 Pb 220pp AUD26.06 Compelled to return again and again to Nadwodom, Raszewski’s protagonist Martha seeks, to graft a phrase from Marx, ‘to awaken the [city]from its dream of itself’ (n.p). The Archaeology of a Dream City is exquisitely attentive to the tears in the fabric of appearances – it’s here that the spectres of a traumatic past move; that shadowy matter speaks its enigma to the eye and to the camera. An aspiring biographer and photographer, Raszewski’s protagonist Martha travels by losing her way, engaging in a mode of dream archaeology via her cousin Klara, whereby fragments suggest what cannot be articulated – the language of ruin and decrepitude – and whereby recurrent apparitions become uncannily alive. From every rift of this fabled city of a fictionalised Poland come emanations of the Holocaust, but Raszewski’s remarkable skill is in oblique evocation, in accruing suggestion upon suggestion, so that one feels the brush of ghostly trajectories down disintegrating stairways of the cousins’ overlapping dreams and through the enigmatic windows of the actual city. This novel fascinates with allegories, not of fixation, but of elusiveness; the reader finds radiant insight when lost in the tenebrous labyrinth of the forest – for instance, it’s only through being lost that Martha and her grandmother can find their way to the kindergarten where learning might begin. But on arrival, they find that school is over. Belatedness, also a key motif of Benjamin’s, seeds its ironies throughout the narrative. This is how, out of step, out of time, one finds the ‘cool spot’ (Benjamin’s die kühle Stelle) from which one falls into a radically different sense of temporality, where one recognises the ultimate equivalence of all beings – whether ‘animal’ or ‘object’ (Benjamin, p. 110-11). Glimpses of others’ stories, of layered histories within this one, induce space-time warps – things and beings miniaturise or grow according to psychic relativism. This is where one encounters the self as a stranger and the recognition of the other’s pain materialises in shards of traumatic memory. Here, the subtle exploration of haunting becomes a meditation on artmaking–both photo-graphy, literally light-writing of course, and writing itself, host the traces of others’ lives, allowing the shades of the dead to play again on the walls of the living. Razsewski shows us the past as unresolved and unresolvable visitation – riddling apparitions in the rifts of the fortress of representation. Here the Beatrice leading Martha is the late photographer Marion Porter, of whom she hopes to write a biography, and whose family name, Porter, suggests how Martha is paradoxically carried by the burden of artistic inheritance. Perhaps this also suggests the corollary: that only in assuming the burden and the challenge of the history inherited can one make images respectful of the spectral ever-present dead. The fabulist spirit of this remarkable work seems to me descended from Kafka, who appears here in the narrative as donor to a distressed Jewish boy artist and scholar; its cultural sensitivity and intelligence recall those of Kafka’s great commentator, Benjamin; and its ethics resonate with those of the great Jewish philosopher of alterity, Levinas. This novella performs with extraordinary skill a fugal approach to the fragmentary narrative, without ever subordinating – in the name of integration and closure – the unknown, and perhaps unknowable, to the known. The work is thus driven by a poetics of the rift and the trace: saturnine, sleepwalking Martha provides the psychic aperture through which the dead return. And how radiant these glimpses grow through all the layers and rips… In fact, the archaeological trope of layering is figured early in in the image of an old dressing gown, almost a magical dreaming gown, which haunts Martha, especially once it is discarded by her mother. Its unravelling quilting is cherished in its very disintegration, in its decrepitude,and makes of it a dream-catalyst, its unstitched layers foreshadowing the delicate archaeological excavation practised by Klara. Together, the cousins offer a healing kind of love, walking finally as ‘one person split’ through Nowadan as archivists of the wounded place, marking the traces of lives painfully rescued and shockingly betrayed (p. 154). But in case this gives the impression that the work is slow and melancholic, I hasten to say that, at every turn, it is graced by delightfully absurdist humour, again in the spirit of Kafka. Beguiling and compelling, The Archaeology of a Dream City is all the more moving for the subtlety and tact of its beautifully decanted writing, rare qualities that are sure, in turn, to haunt its readers. What is more, this haunting power is amplified in dialogue with Jane E. Brown’s beautiful and subtly surreal gelatin silver black and white photographs. This fascinating photo-essay performs light-writing as the material trace of time in the pocked facades, forbidding doorways, bolted roller-shutters and uncannily stranded objects of a deserted European town: the hush these studies convey is ghostly and most eloquent, as if taken by a melancholic but exceptionally sensitive sleepwalker, just like Raszewski’s Martha. Works cited Benjamin, W. (2016). Convolut 9a 7 of The Arcades Project. In G. Richter (Ed.) Inheriting Benjamin. Bloomsbury. Marx, K. (1943, September). Letter to Arnold Ruge Kreuenach. Marx Engels Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm Marion May Campbell’s most recent works include the memoir The Man on the Mantelpiece (UWAP 2018), the poetry collection third body (Whitmore Press 2018), the critical monograph Poetic Revolutionaries: Intertextuality and Subversion (Brill 2014), and the novella konkretion (UWAP 2013). Formerly Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, she now lives in Drouin in GunaiKurnai country with her two border collie companions.

We don'want no short people or ring ins round here...

Thanks. Beats Daisy Cutter anytime. My wife, as I write, is talking to her cousin, Mrs. Cupper, as it heppens...as they say in Greece.

No, Dumkhoff

My surname ends on Hoff! 100% German...

1: Dillon: 85 injury-interrupted games in a very ordinary side in which he won regular Victorian selection. 2: Robertson: 228 games, great player but one dimensional, mark but no chase... 3: Jarrah: the complete freakish footballer, but only 36 games... Trent Rivers will be number one by the time he's finished.

I Lombardi - Germans. Lombard, Latin Langobardus, plural Langobardi, member of a Germanic people who from 568 to 774 ruled a kingdom in Italy. The Lombards were one of the Germanic tribes that formed the Suebi, and during the 1st century ad their home was in northwestern Germany.

Thanks for the advice; I certainly know how to enjoy what I have, just for the record. I have neither regrets, nor resentments. In fact, I learned a lot about living in the moment from my mother. She told me that for her the Ukraine wasn't about the Soviet guards of their camp, rather, it was about the sunflowers which came out in spring every year, about the wonderful family who took her in and fed her on that one day a month when she was free. She also used to say she loved the sound of the Russian and Ukrainian languages. She lived until she was 91. She was a happy, integrated Australian who attended Adult Ed English classes until she was 90. I've also understood - and this is not to be a smarty bum or contradictory - but life isn't, in fact, about compartments, rather, it's about understanding the interconnectedness of all things. I've become interested in Aboriginal concepts, what they call their culture, and I understand that they, in essence, are talking about the same thing - the interconnectedness of life, of the universe.

Good advice; thanks. Because of my background and a keen interest in 'real history, I am inclined, unfortunately, to err on the side of reality. Others call that pessimism... That genetic predisposition is often manifest in the first born who have parents who were war-ravaged, or who suffered from persecution. My mother, for example, survived two and a half years in a Labor Camp in the Ukraine. She and the other inmates worked a bauxite mine in alternating twelve hour shifts, seven days a week with one day off a month. Most of her fellow inmates - ethnic German women aged under forty from Northern Yugoslavia died from malnutrition and typhoid and suchlike. She weighed 45 kilos when she was released in April 1947. I guess it's one of the reasons I have so little sympathy for those privileged mental midgets who protest about losing what they call 'freedom'.

They are not full of (censored0) at all. In fact, they are exhausted and overworked and have to wear the full protective regalia all day long, and, just for the record, Frydenburg and Scomo have regularly referred to 'getting the economy' kick started again.

That's precisely what I'm referring to...

Mister Faulty, I agree entirely that people losing their homes and businesses is sad and debilitating and drastic. It's just that I know too many people in the medical and auxiliary professions, who are very tired of politicians talking about this pandemic just in terms of 'The Economy.'

I take your point: Singapore, though, is proving to be a fly in the 'Vacc' ointment. It's warm there, no sign of Winter Covid and my understanding is they have an extremely high Vacc rate, yet the numbers are suddenly very high again... Once again, I don't want to do the Cassandra gig, it's just that the history of how to deal with pandemics has proven to be much more complicated than the bland optimism of many snake oil Statesmen.

Um, don't take anything for granted. Most of the optimistic annunciations have come from Politicians and in Europe those same Politicians are talking about renewed pre-Christmas lockdowns. I ain't Cassandra, by the way, I'm reporting what is. The real problem the world faces is that Pandemics are not about THE ECONOMY.

Great point. I've argued with a gent on a history site - a Sassenach, I believe - who wrote that Germany's offer to accept refugees was done 'without the consent of its neighboring European countries'. How shameful!!!! ( Ironically, the term 'Sassenach' is the Gaelic word for the Poms, i.e.Saxons...)

Lou Reed: Those Italians, they need a lesson to be taught.

The new side is: Terlich Prymke Rohde Seecamp Neitz Wagner C. Wagner H.Mann Burgmann Wittman Schwartz Fritsch Weidemann Mueller Vanthoff Ditterich Obst Heintz( Haines). INT: L.Mann, Milner, Funcke, Strauss

Leonard was in my original team but with Ditterich and Preuss...: on second thoughts, Len Mann would be a better pick than Mister Preuss. I simply went through Demonwicki Players, looking for German names. Anyway, Mister Heintz takes Nick Pesch's place as first rover. I also wonder how many Demon players had German mothers. The sad thing about it is that for reasons to do with the Nazis, it is tricky to nominate German Demon players of Jewish descent for fear that they might feel wrongly classified.

My dad's father was from Essen - hence he followed Essendon.