Here and there – The Third Man and Shakespeare

24/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, on a desultory whim, I watched The Third Man for the nth time. I realised I had never read the book, so I ordered a copy. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay too, but there are some differences in the two versions. The cuckoo clock didn’t get a look-in in the book, but the book’s account of the lecture given to the British reading group in Vienna is different and hilarious – and loaded.

You will recall that Rollo Martins (Joseph Cotton) is a bashed up American writer of cheap westerns. He is in Vienna to check up on his mate Harry Lime (Orson Welles). A member of the British Council named Crabbin thinks that Martins is the distinguished novelist named B Dexter. Crabbin invites Martins to address a meeting of the local British literati. When Martins is more under the weather than usual, he gets picked up and delivered to the meeting. He is very sore and terse. But after a while, he realises that he is making ‘an enormous impression’, least of all when he said that he had never heard of James Joyce. Graham Greene was having a lot of fun, and settling some old scores.

A kind-faced woman in a hand-knitted jumper said wistfully, ‘Don’t you agree, Mr Dexter, that no one, no one has written about feelings so poetically as Virginia Woolf? In prose, I mean.’

Crabbin whispered, ‘You might say something about the stream of consciousness.’

‘Stream of what?’

\A note of despair came into Crabbin’s voice……

Martins ends up signing books by Dexter ‘From B Dexter, author of The Lone Rider of Santa Fe.’ He is trying to make his escape via the dunny when Sergeant Paine patiently collects him to have a word with Colonel Calloway (Trevor Howard).

As condescension goes, Mr Crabbin is a direct descendant of Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. For many, the highlight of the night, which was not in the film, had come as follows.

‘Mr Dexter, could you tell us what author has chiefly influenced you?’

Martins, without thinking, said, ‘Grey.’ He meant of course the author of ‘Riders of the Purple Sage’, and he was pleased to find his reply gave general satisfaction – to all save an elderly Austrian who asked ‘Grey. What Grey? I do not know the name.’

Martins felt he was safe now and said, ‘Zane Grey – I don’t know any other,’ and was mystified at the low subservient laughter from the English colony.

Crabbin interposed quickly for the sake of the Austrians, ‘That is a little joke of Mr Dexter’s. He meant the poet Gray – a gentle, mild, subtle genius – one can see the affinity.’

‘And is he called Zane Grey?’

‘That was Mr Dexter’s joke. Zane Grey wrote what we call Westerns – cheap popular novelettes about bandits and cowboys.’

‘He is not a great writer?’

‘No, no. Far from it,’ Mr Crabbin said. ‘In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all.’ Martins told me that he felt the first stirrings of revolt at that statement. He had never regarded himself before as a writer, but Crabbin’s self-confidence irritated him – even the way the light flashed back from Crabbin’s spectacles was another cause of vexation. Crabbin said, ‘He was just a popular entertainer.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Martins said fiercely.

‘Oh, well, I merely meant – ’

‘What was Shakespeare?’

Somebody said with great daring ‘A poet.’

Now, all this is hilarious and beyond price. It is a Falstaffian swipe at the snobs of the literary establishment who want to turn the popular entertainer called Shakespeare into a god, who helped to propel poor John Keats into the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and who still so meanly and sadly turns up their noses at the wonderful writing of Graham Greene. Off the top of your head, what writer wrote novels that people enjoy reading more than those of Graham Greene?

It’s as if Greene foresaw his doom. The establishment wouldn’t give him a Nobel Prize – but they would give one to Bob Dylan. Well, at least there’s no bloody doubt about his being a popular entertainer.

It’s idle to compare artists, and it is arrogant to purport to rank them, but this extract from The Third Man suggests to me that Greene may have had one thing in common with Shakespeare – just, say, in the wistful remark of the kind-faced woman in the hand-knitted jumper. You get the impression that it’s just a matter of waiting for some bastard to pull the plug out – and down it all comes. It’s as if, somehow, God gets in on the act. Either way, we have been blessed.

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 5

06/11/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This is a short version of a book ‘Terror and the Police State; Punishment as a Measure of Despair’, published in 2015. The book focussed on France after 1789, Russia after 1917, and Germany after 1933. The instalments will follow the 21 chapter headings that are as follows: 1 Terms of Engagement; 2 Enduring emergency; 3 Righteousness; 4 Good bye to the law; 5 Instruments of terror; 6 Civil war; 7 Waves of terror; 8 Degradation; 9 Secret police; 10 Surveillance; 11 Denunciation; 12 Fear; 13 Popular courts and show trials; 14 Scapegoats, suspicion and proof; 15 Gulags; 16 Propaganda, religion, and cults; 17 Surrealism and banality; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Justification. The short version is about one quarter the length of the original. Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

The Instruments of Terror

When it comes to the application of terror in France, Russia, and Germany, the abandonment of the rule of law consists in large part of creating no-fly zones for the law at each end of the process – you deny all rights to the targets and the victims, and you create not just privileges but absolute immunities for the government agents of the terror. They are all outside the general law at either end. It’s like Anglo-Saxon outlawry or apartheid.

The guillotine was invented by a French doctor as a humane replacement for death by hanging, firing squad, or the axe. Death was the main instrument of the French Terror, and the guillotine became the prime symbol of its inhumanity. Unlike Russia or Germany, the French had no substantial police force, or at least nothing like the Gestapo or NKVD, and no concentration camps, Siberia, or gulag. For an infringement of laws made during the Terror, the penalty was usually death. For the most part at its start, the Convention kept some right of control over the Revolutionary Tribunal, but there was nothing like a judiciary that was either independent, or professional, and the prosecutor was not easily distinguished from the executioner. The Terror lasted less than two years in France; about twelve years in Germany; and about forty years off and on in Russia. If around 16,000 passed under the blade in the nine months from the death of Marie-Antoinette to the death of Robespierre, the toll in both Germany and Russia is beyond our understanding.

But the horrors of the twentieth century cannot obscure the horror of the French Terror. The Tricoteuses (knitting-women) of the sisterhood sat beneath the the sharp female called La Guillotine and calmly counted off the number as each head fell into the sack, or into a bucket that on a big day overflowed. Imagine the impact of terrorists killing 16,000 people in France in two years in our time.

Lenin had a Rousseau-like schizophrenia in his affection for humanity. Maxim Gorky said: ‘Lenin is a leader and a Russian nobleman, not without certain psychological traits of this extinct class, and therefore he can consider himself justified with performing for the Russian people a cruel experiment which is doomed to failure.’

Through a series of accidents and coups, the Bolsheviks found themselves in charge. At the head of affairs, they put all power in the hands of the party, and then used terror to wipe out all political opposition. Fourteen years before this, Trotsky had warned that when the party got control, the Central Committee would take over, and a single dictator would then take over from the Committee. How else would a country that had so little experience in self-government be governed? You can see a similar descent in France with the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre. It is a natural descent in times of disorder and violence.

The Bolsheviks went through a form of election, but they only got about half of what the Nazis would get – and the Nazis never got 50%. The Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) therefore arrested the electoral commissioners. The Bolshevik leaders set about a kind of civil war on a whole social class. A cult of violence arose. Trotsky said that ‘There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right.’ Gorky said: ‘I am especially distrustful of a Russian when he gets power into his hands. Not long ago a slave, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he has the chance to become his neighbour’s master.’ The Communists clothed mob trials with a garb of government. The People’s Courts had twelve judges. They had no training. They were to be guided by their ‘revolutionary conscience.’ When you extend the law by saying that anyone outside the true sentiment of the people is outside the protection of their laws, you are getting close to the heart of the police state.

When the Germans invaded Russia, Lenin issued the decree of ‘The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!’ The Revolutionary Tribunals were ordered to shoot suspects on the spot. The Cheka did not look for proof. ‘First you must ask what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.’

Revolutionaries develop a halo, a feeling of purity. They think that things will turn out for the best, but they are just as selfish as the rest of us. They look forward to their own Utopia, but it is a simple fact of history that a state that acquires these powers does not want to give them up.

Hitler knew that he had engineered a revolution. He told the faithful that the Nazi revolution had succeeded, and that power was theirs alone. He said: ‘Revolution is not a permanent condition. It must not develop into a permanent condition. The stream of revolution… must be channelled into the secure bed of evolution … A second revolution can only direct itself against the first one.’ This political insight was sure. Hitler instigated the murderous purge called the Night of the Long Knives to avoid a German second revolution like that of 10 August 1792 in France.

Hitler got his emergency powers. He signed the army up to personal loyalty. His word was law – The Law for the Guarantees of the Unity of Party and State. He set up the Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police, or Gestapo. . When Himmler was put in charge of all German police, he put Reinhard Heydrich in charge of the Gestapo and SS Security Service. Heydrich was therefore in charge of the instruments of terror in a police state run on terror. He may well have been the most feared man alive, a title he would have dreamed of. In February 1936, the German people made a law that took the Gestapo out of the jurisdiction of the courts. This was part of the pact that the German people were entering into with the Devil, but they were too far gone to pull out.

The Schutzstaffel or SS, the ‘Protection Squad’, began as the private bodyguard of Hitler, and ended as the prime agent of the Final Solution, and with its leaders sticking their Lugers into their mouths and blowing their brains out in final fealty to their oath to the Fuhrer. They were like Spartans – fanatically, self-annihilatingly disciplined, puritanical, racially pure, and exquisitely Teutonic – and bereft of conscience or humanity.

A People’s Court was set up in April 1934 – the Germans were in every way so much swifter and more focussed than the French had been 140 years ago. This court was to deal with treason cases – that meant any kind of political case. The objective was to ensure that no one person could stand in the way of the State – and that meant, as night follows day, that everyone was subordinate to the State. The police state puts people in boxes and characterise them – to brand them. Then it visits every person in that box with the same legal consequences – the state refuses to see each case being treated on its own merits, to treat you or me as individuals each having our own worth or dignity. The individual simply ceases to exist. In March 1933, Goebbels uttered a frightful truth that could have been written by Orwell or Koestler: ‘On 30 January, the era of individualism died … The individual will be replaced by the community of the people.’

Passing Bull 124 – Bull about respect

13/10/201713/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If, having fetched a pale of water, Jack said to Jill ‘I respect you’, what might he mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has for the verb ‘to treat or regard with deference, esteem or honour; to feel or show respect for; to esteem, prize or value a thing’, or person. Jack is saying that he has a good opinion of Jill, or that he thinks well of her.

What if Jack says that he respects the flag? Well, he is not talking about the cloth that is the symbol. He is talking about the people, nation, or political entity for which the flag is a symbol. And all those entities, involving tens of millions of people, all of whom are entitled to their own respect, are far more abstract than the little girl called Jill. And there may be a lot more room to discuss just what are the aspects of, say, the nation that causes Jack to respect it. Jack may not be of the ‘my nation right or wrong’ faction. To use the distinctions of the OED, the question may also arise whether Jack regards the nation with deference, or whether he merely treats it that way; whether Jack feels respect for the nation, or whether he just shows it.

We are talking about a ritual performed before a symbol – like a lawyer bowing in court, or a believer genuflecting in church. There may be many shades of meaning behind the ritual or the belief of the person making it to the ideas of those for whom the symbol represents.

Some American footballers chose a different form of that ritual to protest about one aspect of the governance of the nation. That was their right. Their president claimed the right to abuse them. He wanted them punished by being fired. He did not specify what law or contract had been broken. He would be equally ignorant of both. But he showed his lack of respect for his fellow citizens when he offended and insulted them by the vulgar locker room banter that is his stock in verbal trade. Well, we are used to that with Trump. He is a bad stupid man who thrives on conflict.

But his unctuous vice-president – who, unlike the president, has God, and has Him written all over his face –feigned a tantrum, and staged a walk-out, at God knows what expense to the American taxpayer. Mr Pence said:

I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our flag, or our national anthem.

What would Jack and Jill know about the concluding trinity? It’s hard to say something good about a nation that seeks to cast out anyone who does not think well of it. It’s just as hard to think of anything good to say of a leader of such a nation who turns his back on someone who does not think well of it. They are marks of regimes that we least respect.

We are having this discussion while looking at a massive lack of respect in the best known industry of the U S – Hollywood. Mr Weinstein sounds evil to the core. He reminds me of Mr Strauss-Kahn. Their vice is identical. They are predatory bullies who abuse their power to exploit those beneath them in pursuit of their own self-gratification.

So does Donald Trump. He shows no respect for those beneath him. He shows no respect for what the flag or anthem stand for – the Constitution, Congress, the judiciary, or the office of President. The President has no idea about the Bill of Rights, except for the current fallacies about guns. He is a true abuser of power, and not just because of his celebrated curbside opinion about pussy-grabbing. The difference between Trump and people like Strauss-Kahn and Weinstein is one of degree.

These thoughts came up as I read an article in the Financial Times. It referred to an article entitled Why the assholes are winning. Its author, a Stanford professor, said that leaders who create ‘toxic and hellish work environments’ are often admired nonetheless: ‘It seemingly doesn’t matter what an individual or a company does … as long as they are sufficiently rich and successful.’

The Financial Times went on:

In ‘Down and Dirty Pictures’, his book about Miramax, Peter Biskind described the Weinstein brothers’ reputation ‘for brilliance but also for malice and brutality’.

Another study of the traits of dominant people noted that greater power triggers ‘disinhibited behaviour’. In other words, leaders who are allowed to do whatever they want can end up behaving very badly. The powerful ‘more frequently act on their desires in a socially inappropriate way’, the authors concluded.

Over-eating, over-aggression and predatory sexual behaviour were among syndromes they described for ‘high status, powerful individuals’ whose moods swing from irritability into mania. When personal patronage is the surest route from obscurity to glamour, danger lurks.

The references to ‘disinhibited behaviour’ and ‘personal patronage’ may or may not reflect what happens in the Murdoch empire, but the whole piece looks to describe the current white House – word for word. Leaders who get away with doing what they want end up behaving badly – very badly.

Poet of the Month

Andy’s gone with cattle

Our Andy’s gone to battle now

‘Gainst Drought, the red marauder;

Our Andy’s gone with cattle now

Across the Queensland border.

He’s left us in dejection now;

Our hearts with him are roving.

It’s dull on this selection now,

Since Andy went a-droving.

Who now shall wear the cheerful face

In times when things are slackest?

And who shall whistle round the place

When Fortune frowns her blackest?

Oh, who shall cheek the squatter now

When he comes round us snarling?

His tongue is growing hotter now

Since Andy cross’d the Darling. T

he gates are out of order now,

In storms the `riders’ rattle;

For far across the border now Our Andy’s gone with cattle.

Poor Aunty’s looking thin and white;

And Uncle’s cross with worry;

And poor old Blucher howls all night

Since Andy left Macquarie.

Oh, may the showers in torrents fall,

And all the tanks run over;

And may the grass grow green and tall

In pathways of the drover;

And may good angels send the rain

On desert stretches sandy;

And when the summer comes again

God grant ’twill bring us Andy.

Why history? Civilisation- Are we there yet?

01/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Sir Lewis Namier was a great historian. In one of his books, he said that ‘England knows not democracy as a doctrine, but has always practised it as a fine art.’ Later, he said ‘Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time…’

Now, those observations are rather large, but as I look about me here in Australia, what I miss is ‘plain human kindness’ and ‘restraint’. These of course can’t be measured, much less prescribed. Nor would they appear in many definitions of ‘civilisation’. But might we not hope that civilisation is favourable to kindness and restraint?

Earlier I said why I think that neither ancient nor medieval Europe was civilised. Rather, I see the germ of Western civilisation in the respect for the dignity of life in both parts of the bible and then in the fumbling efforts of medieval lawyers in England to grope toward the notion of the rule of law. That may be the bias of a lawyer; Kenneth Clark had a natural bias as an art critic. Then I see the loosening of the shackles of the priesthood across Europe; the English parliament’s victory over its kings; the espousal of human dignity by Kant and others in the Enlightenment; the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France (at a frightful cost to it and Europe); and finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the abolition of slavery in England, and the victory of the North in the American Civil War. If I had to nominate landmarks in the arts, and I’m not sure why I should, I would start with Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. But if you take the view that a nation cannot be said to be civilised if it tolerates the ultimate Caste of slavery, then civilisation has only become possible in the last two hundred years.

In my view, in order to qualify as civilised, a people or nation should satisfy the following criteria.

It has a moral code that respects the dignity and the right to property of each person in the group.
It has a mature and stable form of government that is able to enforce those rights, and to preserve its own structure.
It observes the rule of law – the government is under the law and all people are equal before it.
Its working is not clogged or threatened by corruption.
It seeks to provide for the subsistence of its members and allow them to have sufficient leisure to pursue happiness or improvement in such ways as they may choose, provided that they do not harm others.

Put differently, a group of people may be said to be ‘civilised’ to the extent that people are ‘civil’ to each other. Some would want to say something about people who have got on giving back to the community that nourished them, and looking after the aged, the sick, and the unemployed, and refugees, but I fear that these aspirations are too plastic here.

It is hard to see many nations outside Western Europe and the U K and its former colonies qualifying as ‘civilised’. Japan for example has big trouble with corruption, and Indonesia has nothing like an independent judiciary; each is at best marginal on the status of women. Depending on your views on the death penalty, the U S may be disqualified. China fails on the rule of law and India fails on caste. Russia in my view has never come even close to being civilised – even if it has produced some of the finest artists in the world. Public opinion in the West has moved on since Auschwitz and Hiroshima. We now attach more weight to the protection of human rights and dignity, and from our own annihilation, than some impossibly enlightened and refined works of art whose real secrets are not revealed to the unwashed.

And the fact that you have reached civilisation does not preclude your falling out of it. France and Germany were and are among the most civilised nations on earth, but each has descended into the bowels of humanity, the first after 1789, and the second after 1933 – with frightful results for their neighbours in each case. All these thoughts put big holes in any idea that mankind is always on the assent – especially as we see democracy, capitalism and Christianity appearing to collapse under their own weight. And no one has got close to finding an alternative for any of them. As for art, we look in vain for the staying power of Dante, El Greco or Beethoven.

This brings me back to ‘restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness.’ Yes, we probably can’t use these as criteria for ‘civilisation’, but we may surely notice that their absence suggests a problem with the one that we claim. Just look at us here and our rejection of refugees.

The one thing I’m clear on is that I don’t see either restraint or kindness in the David of Michelangelo. What I see there is Adolf Hitler in drag. And it’s not just in the eyes.

Here and there – Reflections on poetry on a bleak day outside Melbourne

15/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

On a lousy day at Malmsbury at the beginning of what was supposed to be spring, I wrote to friends along the lines set out below.

I read the Oxford edition of King Lear yesterday. The editor quoted Keats:

Once again the fierce dispute

Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay

Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.

Keats was in truth a fan. I wonder how often in his short life Keats read this play – in company, and aloud. I wonder if he saw it performed. I forget.

My favourite lines – perhaps I should say quotes – were:

so out went the candle and we were left darkling

and

Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.

Both lines were uttered by fools, actual or pretended, and each is so apt for the foolish darkness all around us now in Australia, England, and America – where the fools are in triumph. Trump in particular does a fair take on Nero, and he loves nothing more than angling in darkness. And, Boy, can he put out the candles!

Another phrase that caught my eye was in the press. ‘Intrinsically disordered’ is apparently a line employed by one church to describe homosexuality. It’s one of those lines that goes clear out of the back of your head as soon as you have heard it – probably in response to a very healthy defence mechanism. Himmler may have used that line about the Jews. We could say a lot about it – including that it is utterly impossible to imagine the holy man whose life and teaching gave rise to this church saying anything like it.

What’s wrong with these people? A friend of mine is a true and decent follower of the man Einstein called ‘the luminous Nazarene’. (Kant, too, would never use the name.) My friend compared the response of the institutional church to marriage equality to the behaviour of the Commonwealth Bank generally. That’s shockingly sad.

There may not be all that much of a gap between foolish darkness and terminal illness.

You will see, then, that with things as they stand, this Shakespearian fruit is much more bitter for me than sweet.

The reference to Keats, and the weather, sent me back to read for the nth time the letters of Keats from his Scottish tour. It’s a glorious edition from The Grolier Club, with rough edged handmade paper from the Czech Republic, and a tipped facsimile of a letter (over-written vertically to save on postage) and a portrait and a map. The portrait is different to that which looks down from my fireplace, but both show the doomed poet with his chin on a hand (although with different hands). I expect that the portrait shown in the book was done from life; mine was not.

But for two things, the reader may not have thought that the letters came from a poet. One is that when Keats first saw a waterfall, he spoke ‘if I may say so, [of] the intellect, the countenance of such places.’

The space, the magnitude of mountains, and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance. I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write, more than ever for the abstract endeavour of being able to add a mite to that abstract of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials, and put into ethereal existence for the benefit of one’s fellows. I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little. I never forgot my stature so completely; I live in the eye, and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest.

These thoughts and his well-known piece about ‘negative capability’ suggest to me that Keats had an intellect of singular analytical firepower. Medical science being what it was then, Keats should have chosen law. He looks to me to have been a born advocate.

The other thing that alerts us to poetry is that Keats keeps breaking into it. He says ‘I am sorry I am so indolent as to write such stuff as this – it can’t be helped.’ He climbed the highest mountain. It nearly killed him. ‘On that account I will never ascend another in this empire.’ Well, he could still write a sonnet ‘on the top of Ben Nevis.’ In it he jotted down or threw off these lines in his windswept exhausted state:

I look into the chasms, and a shroud

Vaprous doth hide them; just so much I wist

Mankind do know of hell: I look o’erhead,

And there is sullen mist: even so much

Mankind can tell of heaven: mist is spread

Before the earth beneath me; even such,

Even so vague is man’s sight of himself.

It’s just not fair! The poor little bugger just couldn’t help himself. And to make good the comparison – if I had attempted that climb up Ben Nevis, an emergency call to the Intensive Care Unit at Fort William or Inverness would have gone out within, say, ten minutes of the start – if Scots wielding straightjackets hadn’t got to my ‘impassioned clay’ first.

Why opera? 7 Puccini

03/07/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Puccini

Now we come back to the problem of snobbery. In the case of Puccini, I have felt it at Oxford, but the worst culprits tend to come from the acolytes of the Master whom we have just been looking at. It is, frankly, hard to see why people should feel so superior for worshipping at the same shrine as Adolf Hitler, but some of that Wagner crowd do stick their noses in the air and then hold them when the subject of Puccini comes up. Well, there is one crowd that is hardly well placed to claim the high moral ground over the other on private life. Perhaps the problem is that Puccini is and always has been popular.

Now, populism is right on the nose just now for obvious reasons. But why was Puccini so popular? He had an eye for drama, a natural sense of theatre, the knack of creating good songs, and the skill in manipulating the emotions of his audience. Isn’t that essentially the case with Wagner – or any successful composer of opera? Ah, yes, old boy, but think of the difference in the audiences – the Master did not patronise the gutter. It is hard to think of a better case of pure snobbery.

In truth I think too many purists get needled by Puccini because he was like The Magnificent Seven – he just knew when to unleash his big guns, and the crowd – the unwashed crowd – specifically including ME – just bloody well loves it and calls out for more. And, of course, Puccini was Italian, and opera is their invention.

Giacomo Puccini (1858 to 1924) was born into a fine musical family. He began studies with his father who had studied with Donizetti, and then his uncle. He then went to the Milan Conservatory and studied with Ponchielli. His first works flopped, as did Verdi’s, but he had a success with Manon Lescaut in 1893 and a big hit with La Bohème in 1896. Bernard Shaw then said that he was heir to Verdi. Tosca and Madam Butterfly were also huge hits and came out at regular intervals. Then came some hiccups around the time of the premiere of La Fanciulla del West in New York in 1910. Puccini was working on Turandot when he died. It premiered in Milan in 1926.

Puccini had become very wealthy and he could indulge himself in fishing and shooting. His marriage was unhappy, as was his extra-marital life. Many affairs became public, and one servant was driven to suicide. Puccini won no friends by calling her ‘a silly girl’.

He did not have the sure conviction of his predecessors, but it might be said that he fused bel canto with verismo. The Rough Guide’s summary is fair.

It can’t be denied that Puccini has his weaknesses: he often lapses into glutinous sentimentality; there’s more than a hint of misogyny in his preference for helpless heroines dominated by despotic men; and his plots are sometimes feeble or trivial. But for most audiences, these weaknesses are beside the point, for his operas contain some of the most enjoyable music ever written, carrying into the twentieth century the legacy of Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.

Now for the operas. There is for some, including me, a structural problem with La Bohème and Tosca – some feel that the climax comes too soon, or, put differently, that each opera reaches a peak that it never gets back to – or that the end is a bit of a fizzer. For some that problem is worse in the first opera than the second because the perceived climax comes at the end of the first act – in Tosca, you wait for the end of the second act – and, boy, there you do have a climax. Some people feel the same about Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica.

Poor garret residents in the Latin Quarter are doing it hard – and cold. Rodolfo falls for a consumptive seamstress, Mimi. Some past attachments lead to rift which Rodolfo tries to heal too late. The songs of the lovers in Act I are among the most popular in all opera – ‘Che gelida manina’ and ‘O soave fanciulla’. The 1952 recording with Bjorling, Victoria de Los Angeles and Robert Merrill was long seen as pre-eminent. But now we are again spoiled for choice. For the whole opera, you can go straight to Netrebko with Villazon, or listen to versions conducted by Karajan or Carlos Kleiber, who some good judges thought was one of the best, conducting at La Scala. The Karajan version was directed by Zeffirelli, but it is fascinating to compare the two orchestral sounds. At the least, you should listen to the two great songs I referred to. They are best sellers for good reasons. Try the 1964 concert version in Russia of Pavarotti – he really had the bullets to fire when the composer unleashed the guns. That’s what the fans have come for. Or try the Peruvian Juan Diego Florez, who is hot in bel canto and here. He reminds me of Di Stefano.

When I was looking at Thomas Allen in the last act of Don Giovanni, and I said that it may have its dramatic equal, I had in mind the second act of Tosca, and one famous version of it in particular. A painter, Cavaradossi, the lover of Tosca, a jealous opera singer, shields a political prisoner. The evil head of police, Scarpia, forms a scheme to seduce Tosca while destroying the painter. Scarpia has him tortured in her presence. She reveals where the escaped prisoner is and agrees to sleep with Scarpia if he lets Cavaradossi go. They do a deal which backfires even after Tosca kills Scarpia at the end of Act II.

It is relatively unusual to find a piece for the stage where a central figure is a study in pure evil. That is very much the case in Billy Budd with John Claggart. It is so here with Scarpia. The tenor has two wonderful arias ‘Recondita armonia’ and ‘E lucevan le stella’ and the soprano has ‘Vissi d’arte’. But the whole show centres on the life and death struggle between Tosca and Scarpia in Act II. The 1953 recording of Callas with Gobbi was one of the most successful records ever made.

But now you can watch them on screen. Try the 1964 Covent Garden version directed by Zeffirelli. The voice of Callas may not have been what it was, although this was not her biggest test vocally. But just look at the stage presence of each of Callas and Gobbi in a struggle between ineluctable evil and overwhelming innocence by two superstars of the stage in one of the great set pieces of theatre, so well-known that it has its own liturgy. Just look at their eyes and feel the timing. I doubt whether many saw intensity like that since the soprano’s ancestors were putting on Orestes and Medea. The sense of elemental force is physically unsettling. At Covent Garden, they take curtain calls at the end of the act. You will see here that the audience does not applaud ‘Vissi d’arte’, and properly so because of the point in the drama, but they can let go at the curtain. Even from here you can feel the tension – it reminded me in part of the tension on Broadway when Richard Burton loaded up on Hamlet. And just look at the serene way these two pros take their bows.

Now, we have some wonderful singers now who can act, but I doubt whether the two we have just been looking at will ever matched for raw horse-power on the stage. If you get nothing else but this act from these notes, you will not have done your money.

Madame Butterfly is another tear jerker. It is all so inevitable – and for that reason, like Othello (on stage), it is not among my favourites. You just find yourself bracing for the fall. An American naval officer marries a young Japanese girl, impregnates her, and dumps her. When he comes back with a white wife, Madame Butterfly kills herself. I can’t help thinking that plot might be better placed in a ballet. It crashed on its first night in the face of concerted attacks on the composer before an audience not as entranced with the orient as the French, but one used to the hard action of verismo. Then Puccini cleaned it up a bit and it became a hit. It has always played well for the AO. I prefer the Tebaldi and Bergonzi version. You may wish to see Alana Gheorghiu sing ‘Un bel di’ at the Lincoln Centre in New York. (I saw Carmen there. At the first break in the action, a guy about four rows back said, with a perfect Brooklyn accent that carried: ‘She’s got great legs, but she can’t (pronounced ‘Kant’) sing!’)

That brings us to another show set in the east. Turandot is about an evil princess who tempts young blades to their death when they fail to answer her riddles. She finally succumbs to the hero after the unfolding of a story involving his servant Liu. It is a show that can stand a big production, and it got it from the AO when it was choreographed by Graeme Murphy, the ballet choreographer. It now gets featured on Sydney Harbour. It is a big role for the soprano. Some think that ‘In questa reggia’ was what broke Callas. I have a Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson doing it with Bjorling. You might listen to her doing the opera with Franco Corelli – and then you can listen to two belters. Another big voice for this aria was the great Leontyne Price. You can get the famous Sutherland and Pavarotti version. You should look out for the big aria for the soprano, and a lovely song for the tenor, ‘Non piangere, Liu’.

And yes, you are allowed to take ‘Nessun Dorma’. It comes near the end of the show. Try Jonas Kaufman who is thought by some to the best tenor now going. You can get him on Last Night at the Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by a woman. Again we see that assurance. It’s like being passed by a Bentley – you know he’s got a fair bit left in the tank. Just watch him at the end before an enraptured English audience. He knows he’s nailed it. And he bursts out in laughter. I mean this – really – when I say that it reminded me of the 2007 NRL Grand Final. Greg Inglis ran more than half the field, and then while balanced just inside the line, he put on a fend to see him over the try line – he was a freak, and as he touched down, he burst out laughing. At that level, you are entitled to enjoy your own great talent. God bless all of them!

I might mention two well-known pieces from other Puccini operas that are popular in the concert hall – ‘Ch’ella mi creda’ from La Fanciulla del West and ‘Donna non vidi mai’ from Manon Lescaut. Both are on the disk Allegro al dente that we began with.

For completeness we might mention here also the French composer Georges Bizet (1838 to 1875). You will see that he died too soon. He of course wrote Carmen and The Pearl Fishers that has the great duet we looked at when we started. Bizet said: ‘I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, and the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.’ He was not alone. For even more completeness, I may say that Tchaikovsky (1840 to 1893) who is famous for his ballets, wrote two operas. Eugene Onegin is well supported when put on by the AO.

Well, there you have Puccini – a wonderful source of entertainment at the opera and of solace before the fire. Don’t let any snob tell you anything different. And remember, he was an Italian – and second in opera only to one other Italian and Mozart.

Passing Bull 113 – Bleating from the banks

27/06/201727/06/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

New taxes on banks, both federal and state, have caused outrage. My paper, the AFR, got itself into a right tizz, and went into a leaden, clichéd overdrive.

First Canberra held up the banks because the politicians couldn’t control their spending, and the banks were both profitable and unpopular. Now that the Feds have broken into the banks’ vaults, other levels of government are joining in the looting of private stakeholders’ money. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the debauchery of the political system.

In yesterday’s budget, South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis announced that his state was going to follow Scott Morrison’s lead and whack the big four banks plus Macquarie with a 0.015 per cent tax on the South Australian share of their liabilities. Whereas Morrison said the banks could afford to ‘‘pony up’’ because ‘‘no one likes you anyway’’ and it was just a ‘‘fair additional contribution’’, Mr Koutsantonis said ’’we know they are making super profits’’ and that ‘‘even if every other state follows, they’d still be under-taxed’’. Sound familiar? Oh, and it will raise $370 million for the mendicant state whose disastrous renewable energy policy means they can barely keep the lights on, just as Morrison’s version is expected to raise $6.2 billion federally.

As we editorialised after the May budget, this is the Willie Sutton school of budget management: robbing the banks because that’s where the money is. Strapped governments simply reach around for cash wherever it can be found. Morrison’s Liberal Party, ostensibly the party of fiscal discipline, thought this was a great idea. Why shouldn’t the states follow suit? Yet this is serious, and may be the thin end of the wedge if other cash-strapped states choose to follow South Australia’s lead.

Dear, dear, dear – looting! ‘Of private stakeholders’ money’ – in a public company? Should we be looking for reds under the bed?

Then they published what lawyers call a plea from Ian Narev of the CBA (in which I hold shares).

The providers of the capital that fuels our economy are international pension funds, just like the Australian super funds looking after our retirement savings. These funds place high importance on strong banks. But they also place high importance on strong, predictable government policy. Providers of capital hate surprises. Surprises undermine their confidence to invest. They wonder where surprises will end. And in a world where they have abundant choices for investment, surprises ultimately lead them to take their capital – the capital we need to build businesses and create jobs – elsewhere.

Unpredictability of government policy has a clear label: sovereign risk. Ask global investors about their view of Australia, and most will point to significantly elevated levels of sovereign risk.

It is in this context that we should view the South Australian government’s unprincipled and reckless tax grab as it walked through the gate the federal government left open. Despite the fact that almost every Australian has an economic stake in the banks, and that banks directly and indirectly create jobs and wage growth, the Federal and South Australian Governments revel in saying how easy it will be to gain support even for populist policies that have no basis in sound economics.

They may be right. But they miss the big point. Under their watch, sovereign risk in Australia is rising exponentially. That won’t show up in short term opinion polls. It will show up over the longer term in reduced investment and higher costs of capital. And the community may take a different view when, in time, the consequences of these ill-considered policies become obvious, and can’t be explained away by slogans.

What that means, I think, is that Mr Narev fears that he may now have to pay more for his money. Poor fellow – quel domage! The business of banking is simple. You take money in through the left window at X% and let it out through the right window at X+Y% and you pocket the difference. Mr Narev is here worrying about the left widow – X may grow a bit. But what got the silly buggers into trouble was the right window – they found that in their greed they could not get their money back. You should watch The Big Short at the cinema and listen to the audience sigh and groan at the galahs that nearly sent us down.

The banks may have a ground of objection in economics. I wouldn’t know – but I do know that I am suspicious about economists. Where were these gurus when we needed them in the lead up to the GFC? Why could some whizz kids working in a U S garage see what was coming when no practising economist could? I’m even more suspicious when an appeal is made to the knowledge of business insiders. ‘Trust me, I’m a banker’ does not wash – to the certain knowledge of ‘I the banker.’

What about the politics then? A home run against the banks. How many people are in favour of cutting taxes paid by large profitable companies and reducing support for the young, the sick, the unemployed, and the aged? (Disclaimer – I may qualify under three of those headings.)

The federal government was crude – as is its wont – in saying that they could be cavalier with the banks because banks are unloved. But we do have a kind of democracy, and that is a form of government that should reflect the thinking and feelings of the people at large. It’s just tripe to dismiss that fact of life as ‘populism.’ If the people as a whole are angry with the banks – and they are – then it is natural that the government reflects this anger in their laws. That’s just what we have here.

For my part, I see no substance in the Commonwealth’s criticism of the state of South Australia. The people of that state have a government of a different political colour to that of the Commonwealth. For reasons I understand, people there are angry with both the Commonwealth and the banks, and that anger too will be reflected in their laws.

Of course there is a risk that these taxes will expand. That’s a risk with any tax and with just about any law. Income tax started as an emergency wartime measure to stop Napoleon. The government just got hooked on it, just as our governments got hooked on gambling revenues.

The banks were on the nose before the GFC. Someone like Mr Narev gets paid about one hundred times what Peggy Sue the bank teller gets. One of his main functions – one of his ‘drivers’ – is to sack as many Peggy Sues as he can and to leave me dangling on the line to the bowels of Bengal.

In their defence of their obscene pay levels, the banks refer to market forces. But their embrace of these forces dissolves into the ether when those forces don’t suit them. When market forces threatened the very existence of the banks, they came running to Daddy and Mummy for their dummy. They want me to stand behind them, whether I like it or not. They need us to guarantee them. So much for market forces, and those reactionaries who fulminate against government funded bodies like the ABC. At least the ABC acknowledges that it’s there to serve us – and don’t even think of asking which people trust more, Aunty or the banks.

With our help, the banks rode out the GFC. That crisis had been brought on by criminal greed and profit-driven ineptitude. We picked up the tab. The bankers trousered their bonuses. Almost no one went to jail. But people kept losing their jobs. Those left in work saw their wages stall, while their bosses were rolling in it. The banks sat pretty on our backs.

And they didn’t bother to support the government or even decently liaise with it. Instead they gave it the bird by appointing someone from the other team to lead their defence.

The banks behave with this lordly insouciance in an industry that doesn’t just need what politicians call a ‘social licence’ – they must have a legal licence to open their doors, just as I need a licence to drive a car. Well, they have got used to being callous with their staff, and rude to me – but can’t they see the sense of getting on with their government, or, if you prefer, their sovereign?

And in cataloguing some of the reasons why people don’t like or trust banks, I have not mentioned that the top pay levels are often set by criteria that encourage bank officers to cut corners with the law and decency. The word for that is ‘corrupt’.

What about sovereign risk? This is a protean term. I would think that people dealing with a bank may have to account for the chance that the government behind it may default on its debts or other obligations or that it might legislate against the banks. The greatest risk, as it looks to me, is that the government might repudiate its guarantee of the banks or fail to honour it. It’s not in Mr Narev’s interest to mention that risk in this context.

My little super fund holds a significant part of its shares in banks. I did that on advice from a mate who is a broker. He said that the conduct of the banks that made them jerks to their staff or me may make them more profitable and enable them to maintain their flow of dividends. He also advised that I look for markets that are tightly controlled and looked after by governments. (I can’t recall if he used the word ‘cosseted’.)

These new taxes may lead to a reduction in my dividends. I doubt that – I certainly don’t fear my being ‘looted’. But it will all be worthwhile if this little démarche leads to an improvement in the banks’ manners. I am sick of their arrogance, posturing, and bleating. Frankly, I’m even sicker of looking at people making twenty times what I made at my top with little of the learning and none of the risk.

Poet of the month: Homer, Iliad, Book 1.

The Greeks in shouts their joint assent declare,

The priest to reverence, and release the fair.

Not so Atrides; he, with kingly pride,

Repulsed the sacred sire, and thus replied:

‘Hence on thy life, and fly these hostile plains,

Nor ask, presumptuous, what the king detains

Hence, with thy laurel crown, and golden rod,

Nor trust too far those ensigns of thy god.

Mine is thy daughter, priest, and shall remain;

And prayers, and tears, and bribes, shall plead in vain;

Till time shall rifle every youthful grace,

And age dismiss her from my cold embrace,

In daily labours of the loom employ’d,

Or doom’d to deck the bed she once enjoy’d

Hence then; to Argos shall the maid retire,

Far from her native soil and weeping sire.’

Passing Bull 81 – A Portrait of an Idiot

11/12/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

In a book soon to be published called Language, Meaning, and Truth, you will find something like what follows.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks and those who make a career out of working TV chat shows. While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler are two bad cases – some people in the press engage in conflict for a living. These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict. To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible. It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live of the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments. So, for example if someone, were to query the rigour of the policies of the government toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC? How would you like these people to move in next door?’ There is no argument – just vulgar abuse.

The CIA reported that Russia had intervened in the US presidential election. That report did not please Donald Trump. In trashing his own intelligence community, the president elect gave a text- book example of the response referred to above – a personal attack followed by some labels – no argument – just vulgar abuse.

These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’

This is what we must expect as we go from a president of intellect and integrity to a buffoon and bully who has neither. This is the reaction of an uneducated spoiled child – which is what Trump is.

Poet of the Month: Vergil (Eclogues)

Need I mention him who, having sown the seed,

follows closely, and flattens the heaps of barren sand,

then diverts the stream and its accompanying brooks to his crops,

and see, when the scorched land burns, the grasses withering,

he draws water, in channels, from the brow of the hill.

Or him who grazes his luxuriant crop in the tender shoot,

as soon as the new corn’s level with the furrow,

lest the stalks bend down with over-heavy ears.

Or him who soaks out a marsh’s gathered water with thirsty sand,

especially in changeable seasons when rivers overflow

and cover everything far and wide with a coat of mud,

so the hollow ditches exude steamy vapours?

Passing Bull 75 – Two words to avoid

18/11/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In the last four or five months, some people called ‘the elite’ have been held to be responsible for quite a lot, including political earthquakes in England and America. Apparently, they have not cared enough about those who are on the wrong end of the inequality stakes. The people who make this claim are often in the media, which is a principal target of those who have missed out. The elite are those who are chosen. It should mean the cream. It is hard to see the press in general, or the Murdoch press in particular, as the cream. But it is harder to see just who the elite are here. In truth, it is just a distracting label for an indeterminate body of people, and a gateway to bullshit.

Another problem word for us now is ‘conservative’. A conservative political party is one that seeks to keep things as they are and to minimise government action. The Tories in England claim to be such a party. Until recently, the Republicans did also in America. For many reasons, we have never had a real conservative party in Australia. We are just too reliant on government to allow that to happen. And we don’t like ideologues.

But now the word ‘conservative’ is claimed by some politicians, such as Abbott or Bernardi, and commentators, such as Bolt. As best I can see, the ingredients of their beliefs are as follows. They are concerned about ‘border protection’ – they think it is in order to hold indefinitely people who sought to enter this country by boat in order to deter people they call ‘people smugglers.’ They think that what we call ‘climate change’ is either bullshit or over-rated; they get very worked up over ‘renewables’. They also get worked up over laws about insulting and offensive words. They say that a law against insulting or offending people on the ground of race limits their freedom of speech. Of course it does – the question is why they want to be free to insult and offend people on the ground of race, and how that freedom might benefit them or us. They are mostly monarchists; Abbott’s mania about this was instrumental in his losing office. And most of them claim to be close to God – obnoxiously so to those who prefer to see religion kept out of politics – no matter what the faith may be.

I hold the opposite view on each, but it is hard to see how these views qualify for the label conservative. This is especially so with the views on hate speech and climate change. I don’t see how the rejection of science or laws needed to maintain public order makes someone a ‘conservative.’ And, if it matters, both look to be pure bullshit – and to be the subject of quite manic pogroms in the Murdoch press.

I saw four exemplars of this weird faction on Sky the other night. Going from left to right around a bemused and sensible chair they were – Bronwyn Bishop, Mark Latham, Ross Cameron, and Rowan Dean. I don’t know how much alcohol was involved, but they were like pigs in a trough. They were bucketing Obama and chortling about Trump. It was like Animal Farm crossed with Lord of the Flies. It was seriously scary and nauseating. Dean may be the most revolting person in public life here, but that night he had three challengers.

This faction is in my view in large part responsible for Shorten being tipped to win the next election by the length of the straight.

That’s all now – I’m being worked over by Telstra again. I know what it feels like to be rejected – but here the ‘elite’ are certainly not involved.

Poet of the month: Rosemary Dobson

On Christina Stead

I sit beside the bed where she lies dreaming
Of pyrrhic victories and sharp words said,
She will annihilate the hospital …
Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame,
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind
That built these towers the world applauds …
I have dreamt her nightmare for her. She wakes up
And turns to smile with quick complicity.
”I wasn’t asleep. I watched you sitting there.”

Passing Bull 69 – Secrecy and Camps

23/10/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

In The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005), Richard Evans says of concentration camps in the Reich that officers and guards were banned from talking about their work:

Communication between inmates and their relatives or friends was restricted; officers and guards were banned from talking about their work to outsiders. What happened in the camps was meant to be shrouded in mystery. Attempts by the regular police and prosecution authorities to investigate murders that took place there in the early years were generally rebuffed. By 1936, the concentration camps had become institutions beyond the law. On the other hand, however, the regime made no secret at all of the basic fact of their existence. The opening of Dachau in 1933 was widely reported in the press, and further stories told how Communist, and Reichsbanner and ‘Marxist’ functionaries who endangered state security were being sent there; how numbers of inmates grew rapidly into the hundreds; how they were being set to work; and how lurid atrocity stories of what went on inside were incorrect. The fact that people were publicly warned in the press not to try and peer into the camp, and would be shot if they tried to climb the walls, only served to increase the general fear and apprehension that these stories must have spread. What happened in the camps was a nameless horror that was all the more potent because its reality could only be guessed at from the broken bodies and spirits of inmates when they were released. There could be few more frightening indications of what would happen to people who engaged in political opposition or expressed political dissent, or, by 1938 – 9, deviated from the norms of behaviour to which the citizen of the Third Reich was supposed to adhere.

Well, that kind of evil madness could only happen in a totalitarian state like Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR, could it not? No. It is happening here. The Australian Border Force Act 2015 is presumably part of what Tony Abbott calls his legacy. S 42 provides for secrecy in terms that Stalin and Hitler would have gazed on in wonder.

Secrecy

(1) A person commits an offence if:

(a) the person is, or has been, an entrusted person; and

(b) the person makes a record of, or discloses, information; and

(c) the information is protected information.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 2 years.

Exception

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if:

(a) the making of the record or disclosure is authorised by section 43, 44, 45, 47, 48 or 49; or

(b) the making of the record or disclosure is in the course of the person’s employment or service as an entrusted person; or

(c) the making of the record or disclosure is required or authorised by or under a law of the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory; or

(d) the making of the record or disclosure is required by an order or direction of a court or tribunal.

Note: A defendant bears an evidential burden in relation to a matter in subsection (2) (see subsection 13.3(3) of the Criminal Code).

The relevant terms are of course defined in cascading rainbows or snow jobs, but doing the best I can to apply this law – which like most contemporary legislation is just about indecipherable – a person employed in one of our offshore camps would breach this law if she told her husband that a colleague at work had broken wind after biting into a bad mandarin.

This law is a confession of our shame at the highest and most formal level. No wonder people look on us so darkly in Europe. We should all be ashamed. Instead, we just shoot the messenger.

Poet of the Month: Verlaine

Through Interminable Land…

Through interminable land

Ennui of the plain,

Vague snow once again

Gleams like sand.

The sky is copper

Devoid of any light,

You might almost gather

The moon had lived and died.

Floating clouds

Grey oak-trees lift

In near-by woods

Among the mists.