Type Zerstreutheit into Google and whaddya get at no. 1 – this ol’ site. Try it, go on, I need the stats.
Another term that gets you here pretty fast: iordachescu cristina – and I don’t even know the girl.
Coming soon: sprezzatura.
Oct 152011
Mar 162009
People who live in bushfire areas do well to collect their photos, birth certificates and anything else portable and precious and remove the lot to a safe place over summer. One of the items in my own stash is a suitcase full of letters, theatre programs, bits and bobs from childhood and youth, and some from my daughters’ childhood, lugged around over many years from house to house and country to country, taken for granted, never – until last night – never re-read.
Listening to the way people talked about their losses in February’s fires – that and our own narrow escape – led me to open the suitcase. Carpe diem, I suppose.
The first envelope I pulled out contained a series of letters from my first love. I spent hours in a reverie, musing over people and events from the better part of fifty years ago. Anyone my age can fill in the emotions, and some are very painful. All the same, this is a case of treasure.
All the rhetoric about Kinglake and Marysville turns on hope and the promise of a future and so it should. But it is terrible to think of the suitcases burning, the photographs and letters and the postcards and the childrens’ drawings.
Feb 132009
Chap called Sheahan up in Reedy Creek got into bother a few years ago when he bulldozed 247 eucalypts around his house, thus creating a 100 metre moat against fire. Nillumbik Shire fined him $50,000 and his costs added as much again. After the fire last Saturday, his is the only house left standing for several kilometres around. The Sheahans lost some vehicles, their TV antenna melted, it took four of them, all CFA trained, to save the house, but save it they did.
The Shire of Nillumbik will not permit ratepayers to cut down a tree further away from the house than six metres. That’s the trunk we’re talking about, so plenty of houses in the shire are overhung with branches. And a fire-wind can snap large trees at the base.
Since Wordability HQ is at the southern edge of Nillumbik we take a close and particular interest in this policy. We understand that in our area, which belongs to something called the Green Wedge, the shire is intent on preserving an uninterrupted canopy. That’s an uninterrupted canopy of volatile eucalyptus leaves.
We, too, have incurred the wrath of the shire when we felled half-a-dozen trees just outside the three-metre limit, partly for fire safety, partly because their roots had gummed up the septic system. Not good enough, said the man in the cardigan, and before leaving he took a lot of photographs. My partner got us off. She wrote a magnificent letter of placation, pointing out how many trees we had in fact planted, how many environmental weeds removed. Nothing further was heard, and as you can see, there are rather a lot of trees still around, if not quite the uninterrupted canopy of councillors’ dreams.
I wonder if this catastrophe (over 300 dead, 1800 homes destroyed, 7000 people homeless) will mark the beginning of a new phase in Australians’ attitude to the bush? Phase 1, as we know, was to find it ugly and alien and impossible to draw with any verisimilitude. In phase 2 we learnt to love the gumtree, people hung Hans Heysens on their walls but continued to plant camellias.
A 1950s ideal. But notice the gumtree lurking in the background . . .
The 1960s ushered in Phase 3, in which urbanites began to apologise for our existence, native gardens became fashionable and the green movement was in full swing. This is the period in which places like ours became sought-after and protected.
Not that we’re all that authentically natural. Our district was settled in the 1840s by loggers and goldminers. (Yes, before Ballarat.) Between them they pretty much took out the over-story. Most of the bush around here is regrowth, some only thirty or forty years old. People who have bought houses here since that time – most of us – chose a home among the gumtrees. In so far as they understood them, they thought the risks were worth it.
Saturday will begin a new period of strife over these issues – that’s abundantly clear from the press. And in these places on the edge of the cities, I predict we will see the beginnings of Phase 4, a return to the view that the bush is all very well, but it needs to be tamed and caged if people are to live alongside it. As for those who live in the middle of it, the people in those small places like Reedy Creek (which the press has taken to calling hamlets) their situation is desperately grim. To construct a genuinely safe set of dwellings will involve not only new building standards, but the destruction of the bush around them. Will Mr Sheahan prove a prophet in his own country?
Dec 242008
. . . to my readers, ‘fit audience, tho’ few’. Keep warm, or cool, according to taste, and enjoy the holiday.
Sep 282008
Last week, the most farsighted market players were flabbergasted, even as they comprehended that they were witnessing a capitulation to some kind of greater truth?that Wall Street had got caught up in a pyramid scheme of its own devising.
That’s Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker . He puts it more succinctly than anyone I’ve read so far. But I’ve yet to read an informed commentator who doesn’t say pretty much that. Here, luckily, the market is too small and the players too few for a comparable efflorescence of bullshit. But we’re taking our share of the damage, both directly, in the collapse of slick imitators like Babcock and Brown, and in what matters much more, the collapse of confidence in market values. So we have perfectly sound companies with actual products and no significant debt trading at price-earnings ratios that translate to no future earnings, ever.
In Australia we ought to be furious, both with the initiators of all this and with their local avatars. But we’re not. For most people, it seems, the operations of the market are like weather, uncontrollable, or nuclear physics, unintelligible.The professional commentators are too cool – or too frightened – to get angry.
A good deal of this represents generalised apathy about the workings of the world, but some of it surely is down to an education system for which the operations of the market are either sacred or shameful. Our economics departments teach the theology, our commerce departments (much more popular nowadays) teach the rituals. Over in humanities the market economy is what kinky sex used to be, a shameful practice that we don’t talk about. (Kinky sex, of course, is now a burgeoning area of study.)
It was good to be reminded this week of a more generous vision.
For more than half a century [John Kenneth] Galbraith argued that the truly important economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, that the work of economics is far messier than the blackboard mathematical models that claim hegemony, and that economic analysis and prescription must always keep front and center both the factors of power and the narratives societies use to tell their economic stories.
_ Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 2005, p. 653
OK so that’s one busy lens in the metaphor, but it’s times like these that remind us that the market is not the forbidden turf on which only specialists may walk: it’s a common.
Aug 282008
My newest grandson, not yet three months, is in hospital with bronchiolitis. It’s a viral illness, common enough in infants, and not usually serious. In his case, however, although he’s now mending well, there were some complications. He’s hooked up to an oxygen supply and an antibiotic drip. His foot connects him to a device which monitors his blood oxygen level. When he cries, or otherwise struggles for breath the readout turns red and an alarm begins to sound, quietly at first, like a discreet cough.
Before I set out for the hospital today, I was reading Johnson’s notes on his 1775 journey to France.
Sunday, Oct. 29. We saw the boarding-school,-The Enfants trouv