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Do you have any favourite books?" they ask. - "Yes", I say, "1984." - "Wow, so many!" they say. Which just about sums up how much we have forgotten George Orwell's last and most defining and most prescient book.
Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by the success of his earlier highly acclaimed and more popular book "Animal Farm", so much so that they thought that "1984" was just another anti-Russian, anti-Communist condemnation of Stalinist atrocities. Which it isn't! "1984" is about us, about our world, about today's "newspeak" and "doublethink".
Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed 'spin', as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time, a state in which those in power want us to remain.
"1984" ought to be everyone's favourite book, especially around election time. Come on, I dare you to read it (again): "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen ..." [continue]
P.S. Any comments on this blog will be deleted by the Thought Police.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," Auggie muttered under his breath, "time creeps on its petty pace." (click here)
A tobacconist quoting from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" - albeit slightly imprecisely - and who photographs his corner of the world at precisely 8 a.m. each morning, isn't such a bad example to follow, so here we go:
Click on image to enlarge
Is there an element of tedium in this process? Of course there is. Tedium is an inescapable fact of the human condition. It's the plain black cloth against which the precious jewel can be displayed. 3,994 photos to go!
The Australian Government recognises the financial hardship seniors have faced during the Covid-19 crisis,
and are finding it challenging to cope in the current difficult financial situation we are now experiencing.
Seniors are to be commended for their diligence in conforming to strict restrictions to maintain safety for all Australians.
The Australian Government has decided to provide financial assistance to Seniors, which will continue until the end of 2020.
Qualifying Seniors will be entitled to maximum $200 per week, which will be back-dated to 13th of July 2020.
The Government Grant Assistance Package, or GGAP, is accessible to all Seniors holding any State, or Territory Seniors Card.
You can read the full article below, along with the eligibility criteria, on how to register and how to apply for the GGAP,
by following the link below:
The tourist boat going upriver means time for lunch of some "Bratkartoffeln mit Spiegelei" washed down with a glass of rough red; the tourist boat going downriver means time to sleep off the effect of both on the old sofa on the verandah.
It's now half past three and I'm back inside in front of my computer, with a cup of tea and an extra-soft iced finger bun by my side (I just thought you might like to know). My newfound ex-German ex-plumber friend at Long Beach sent me another email. I know he'd rather phone but thinks he'd disturb me (which he doesn't), but I let him persevere with his laboured typing for a little longer. Who knows, he might get good at it and have a crack at a retirement job; I never did any good at mine.
Anyway, what's all this about talkative retired plumbers? Every year around this time the Council sends out a retired plumber to inspect our septic tank. The first few years it was a retired plumber who cracked scatological jokes from the moment he walked through the gate, and who stopped only briefly to push a stick down the hole to pronounce the tank as "working" which was more than he was doing, because he would stay on for another fifteen minutes and for at least as many more jokes.
He must've choked on one of his jokes, because in more recent years he was replaced by a "Sanitation Officer" who, once he'd found out that I used to live and work on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, regaled me with stories of that part of the world which he knew from past travels or employment (I've forgotten which). What a great retirement job!
As soon as I've finished my extra-soft iced finger bun, I'll give the ex-German ex-plumber a call before he breaks his finger on the keyboard. Then it's back to my supine position on the old sofa on the verandah.
The meaning of life? Just like the river, go with the flow!
"I don’t think there’s a human being alive who doesn’t reflect on what could have been."
As an Ausie movie aficionado, I was excited to discover "Pawno" on "Aussie Movie Favourites". I simply loved it and, after reading a review which compared it in style to the American film "Smoke", watched that one as well and thought it even better than "Pawno".
Reading that it was based on a screenplay by someone called Paul Auster, I wanted to know about him, which led me to a string of books. I'm now well into "The Invention of Solitude" and can't put it down.
Just came back from the Bay where we checked the mailbox, did some shopping at Woolies, and dropped in at a German neighbour at Long Beach with whom I'd been having long telephone conversations for the past month or so, but had never met.
They say, "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind, und Deutschen die im Ausland sind", but I'm happy to make an exception when it comes to Franz, and not just because he gave me a packet of original German potato pancake dough mix to try out.
Franz came to Australia ten years before me which means ten
more years of good ol' Mixed Grill and lamb chops, and it shows!
If you read this, Frank and Robyn, thanks for your hospitality, and catch up with you by phone and in person in a couple of weeks' time. I like anything Pfanni, so I'm rushing to try out the German potato pancakes!
In the movie "Smoke", Auggie takes his snapshot in the same spot at the same time, at 8 a.m., every morning.
With Daylight Savings coming, an astute reader posed the question, "Hi Peter, daylight savings starts next weekend will you compensate in the time of your photo for going from AEST to DST?"
Ray, you almost got me there, but a quick read of "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" revealed that Auggie actually took his picture "at precisely seven o'clock" which aligns it neatly with the upcoming Daylight Savings Time which makes eight o'clock the real seven o'clock.
From "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" by Paul Auster
Problem solved! And my life's work can continue unchanged.
Iheard this story from Auggie Wren. Since Auggie doesn't come off too well in it, at least not as well as he'd like to, he's asked me not to use his real name. Other than that, the whole business about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner is just as as he told it to me.
Auggie and I have know each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it's the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go there fairly often. For a long time, I didn't give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather or the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.
But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person. Most people couldn't care less about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie considered himself an artist. Now that he had cracked the secret of who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I found it rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment came when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs. Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there didn't seem to be any way I could turn him down.
God knows what I was expecting. At the very least, it wasn't what Auggie showed me the next day. In a small, windowless room at the back of the store, he opened a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical black photo albums. This was his life's work, he said, and it didn't take him more than five minutes a day to do it. Every morning for the past twelve years, he had stood at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at precisely seven o'clock and had taken a single color photograph of precisely the same view. The project now ran to more than four thousand photographs. Each album represented a different year, and all the pictures were laid out in sequence, from January 1 to December 31, with the dates carefully recorded under each one.
As I flipped through the albums and began to study Auggie's work, I didn't know what to think. My first impression was that it was the oddest, most bewildering thing I had ever seen. All the pictures were the same. The whole project was a numbing onslaught of repetition, the same street and the same buildings over and over again, an unrelenting delirium of redundant images. I couldn't think of anything to say to Auggie, so I continued turning pages, nodding my head in feigned appreciation. Auggie himself seemed unperturbed, watching me with a broad smile on his face, but after I'd been at it for several minutes, he suddenly interrupted me and said, "You're going too fast. You'll never get it if you don't slow down."
He was right, of course. If you don't take the time to look, you'll never manage to see anything. I picked up another album and forced myself to go more deliberately. I paid closer attention to details, took note of shifts in the weather, watching for the changing angles of light as the seasons advanced. Eventually, I was able to detect subtle differences in the traffic flow, to anticipate the rythm of the different days (the commotion of workday mornings, the relative stillness of weekends, the contrast between Saturdays and Sundays). And then, little by little, I began to recognize the faces of the people in the background, the passersby on their way to work, the same people in the same spot every morning, living an instant of their lives in the field of Auggie's camera.
Once I got to know them, I began to study their postures, the way they carried themselves, from one morning to the next, trying to discover their moods from these surface indications, as if I could imagine stories for them, as if I could penetrate the invisible dramas locked inside their bodies. I picked up another album. I was no longer bored, no longer puzzled as I had been at first. Auggie was photographing time, I realized, both natural time and human time, and he was doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosing for himself. As he watched me pore over his work, Auggie continued to smile with pleasure. Then, almost as if he had been reading my thoughts, he began to recite a line from Shakespeare. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he muttered under his breath, "time creeps on its petty pace." I understood then that he knew exactly what he was doing.
That was more than two thousand pictures ago. Since that day, Auggie and I have discussed his work many times, but it was only last week that I learned how he acquired his camera and started taking pictures in the first place. That was the subject of the story he told me, and I'm still struggling to make sense of it."
This is how Paul Auster's book "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" begins. Of course, it's far too early for Christmas stories, even one as unique and charming as this one, which is the reason why I stop right here - the other reason is that I don't want to break copyright laws - , but if you want to jump ahead, you can SIGN UP and LOG IN at www.archive.org.
The reason I've copied here what is the introduction to a Christmas story is that the introduction is a story in itself. Auggie's "life's work" of standing every morning in the same spot at the same time and taking a photogaph of his "tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosing for himself" is the story of a man's attempt to make sense out of an otherwise mundane life.
P.S. While the spoken word had existed long before writing developed, in this case Paul Auster's book existed long before it was made into the utterly charming movie "Smoke". Look it up on Youtube or buy the DVD.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
Notice to North American readers:
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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