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Absolutely Revolting

March 2008, no. 299

Christina Hill reviews ‘The Con’ by Jesse Pentecost
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Contents Category: Fiction
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The title of Jesse Pentecost’s first novel refers not to a confidence trick but to a Conservatorium of Music. Primarily, Pentecost seems to want to talk about classical music, to offer considered criticism, to impart his knowledge of its history and practice, and to suggest the difficulties of a professional career in music. He is also keen to explore the post-Enlightenment idea of the ‘genius’.
Book 1 Title: The Con
Book Author: Jesse Pentecost
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books $24.95 pb, 400 pp, 9780733320002
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The title of Jesse Pentecost’s first novel refers not to a confidence trick but to a Conservatorium of Music. Primarily, Pentecost seems to want to talk about classical music, to offer considered criticism, to impart his knowledge of its history and practice, and to suggest the difficulties of a professional career in music. He is also keen to explore the post-Enlightenment idea of the ‘genius’.

Read more: Christina Hill reviews ‘The Con’ by Jesse Pentecost

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Brian Stoddart reviews Boycott: The story behind Australia’s controversial involvement in the 1980 Moscow Olympics by Lisa Forrest
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Contents Category: Sport
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Almost thirty years on, in a post-Samaranch age, when the wealthy Olympic movement mimics the United Nations in world affairs, the 1980 Moscow Games resemble prehistory, especially for Australian athletes, officials and spectators still revering 2000 Sydney successes. Yet as Lisa Forrest recounts, the Moscow boycott shredded the traditional views of Australian sports people, ensured national sport would become more politicised, and produced shameful behaviour all round.
Book 1 Title: Boycott
Book 1 Subtitle: The story behind Australia’s controversial involvement in the 1980 Moscow Olympics
Book Author: Lisa Forrest
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $35 pb, 272 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Almost thirty years on, in a post-Samaranch age, when the wealthy Olympic movement mimics the United Nations in world affairs, the 1980 Moscow Games resemble prehistory, especially for Australian athletes, officials and spectators still revering 2000 Sydney successes. Yet as Lisa Forrest recounts, the Moscow boycott shredded the traditional views of Australian sports people, ensured national sport would become more politicised, and produced shameful behaviour all round.

Read more: Brian Stoddart reviews 'Boycott: The story behind Australia’s controversial involvement in the...

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Contents Category: Commentary
Custom Article Title: Moonlight among stones
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‘Poetically we dwell …’ Heidegger wonderfully essayed, borrowing a phrase from Hölderlin. The phrase has been in me for a long time, feeding notions of how poetry might be inseparable from a form of life. When I was writing books connected with Aboriginal culture, the poetry seemed to come out of the ground, almost literally. There, in the performance of sacred song, with each step and syllable, a poetic existence was acted out, and all in the open air, a singing of the body in the public place. The ground and the body were painted, but there was no writing to speak of. The poem was voiced from the Dreaming, the poetic key to reality, as W.F. Stanner put it. Everything was vitally connected with everything else.

Lately, I have found myself taken up with a poetic dwelling that belongs indoors or, if not inside, then along a set of thresholds, and with such refinements and thorough literariness, that it presents a whole other illustration of Heidegger’s maxim. For it seems that a thorough-going model of poetic dwelling can be found not just on the ceremonial grounds of the archaic, but in the exquisite routines of the pre-medieval court in Japan, or more particularly, in the world of the shining prince of eleventh-century Kyoto, where, for a hundred years or so, women excelled in the most passionate brushwork, writing their Japanese freely in the tremulous air, you might say – air left to them by the men whose official duties and exclusive rights to formal education obliged them to inhabit the Chinese language.   
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‘Poetically we dwell …’ Heidegger wonderfully essayed, borrowing a phrase from Hölderlin. The phrase has been in me for a long time, feeding notions of how poetry might be inseparable from a form of life. When I was writing books connected with Aboriginal culture, the poetry seemed to come out of the ground, almost literally. There, in the performance of sacred song, with each step and syllable, a poetic existence was acted out, and all in the open air, a singing of the body in the public place. The ground and the body were painted, but there was no writing to speak of. The poem was voiced from the Dreaming, the poetic key to reality, as W.F. Stanner put it. Everything was vitally connected with everything else.

Lately, I have found myself taken up with a poetic dwelling that belongs indoors or, if not inside, then along a set of thresholds, and with such refinements and thorough literariness, that it presents a whole other illustration of Heidegger’s maxim. For it seems that a thorough-going model of poetic dwelling can be found not just on the ceremonial grounds of the archaic, but in the exquisite routines of the pre-medieval court in Japan, or more particularly, in the world of the shining prince of eleventh-century Kyoto, where, for a hundred years or so, women excelled in the most passionate brushwork, writing their Japanese freely in the tremulous air, you might say – air left to them by the men whose official duties and exclusive rights to formal education obliged them to inhabit the Chinese language.   

Read more: ‘Moonlight among stones’ by Barry Hill

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Custom Article Title: One more falling body
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In September 1985, when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.
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In September 1985, when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.

Read more: ‘One more falling body’ by Brenda Niall

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Custom Article Title: So long Bulletin
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For decades the Bulletin had lurched from one prediction to another of its decline or demise. ‘The Bulletin is a clever youth,’ its co-founder, J.F. Archibald, famously predicted. ‘It will become a dull old man.’ In 1946 a ‘Letter to Tom Collins: Demise of the Bulletin’, by the philologist Sidney J. Baker, appeared in Meanjin. In 1961 the Bulletin unknowingly published Gwen Harwood’s sonnets which contained an acrostic, ‘so long bulletin’.

The execution, when it finally came, was swift. On 24 January 2008, staff were told the magazine would cease publication immediately. A bloodless press release followed. There was no poetry, no clever literary hoax, not even the dignity of one more issue to farewell the readers.
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For decades the Bulletin had lurched from one prediction to another of its decline or demise. ‘The Bulletin is a clever youth,’ its co-founder, J.F. Archibald, famously predicted. ‘It will become a dull old man.’ In 1946 a ‘Letter to Tom Collins: Demise of the Bulletin’, by the philologist Sidney J. Baker, appeared in Meanjin. In 1961 the Bulletin unknowingly published Gwen Harwood’s sonnets which contained an acrostic, ‘so long bulletin’.

The execution, when it finally came, was swift. On 24 January 2008, staff were told the magazine would cease publication immediately. A bloodless press release followed. There was no poetry, no clever literary hoax, not even the dignity of one more issue to farewell the readers.

Read more: ‘So long Bulletin’ by Bridget Griffen-Foley

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