Tag: History

Read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, lit. ’In the West, nothing new’) is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers’ extreme physical and mental trauma during the war as well as the detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home from the war.

The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and in book form in late January 1929. The book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany. All Quiet on the Western Front sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages in its first 18 months in print

All Quiet on the Western Front by Wikipedia

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque centers on Paul Bäumer and his experience of the Western Front during World War 1. Through the journey of the novel, Remarque manages to captures so many facets of war, whether it be training, food, lice, gas, hunger and recovery for a generation “destroyed by the war”.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades–words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

Our faces are encrusted, our thoughts are devastated, we are weary to death; when the attack comes we shall have to strike many of the men with our fists to waken them and make them come with us–our eyes are burnt, our hands are torn, our knees bleed, our elbows are raw.

I think that this all well represented in the 2022 film version, even if there are some adaptive changes.

In some respects the attempt to capture so many different facets feels similar to Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. However, where they differ is that by focusing on a single individual, I feel Remarque is able to take us further inside some of the thoughts and feelings of the soldier.

Terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;–but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

It is interesting to compare Paul’s return home on leave with the account of soldiers returning home after the war in The Road Back.

Continue reading “📚 All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)”

Listened Hardcore History 50 – Blueprint for Armageddon I from dancarlin.com

Publish Date:Tue, 29 Oct 2013
Duration: 03:07:20 minutes – 180.68mb
Buy from Apple Music

Blueprint for Armageddon is a 23 hour six-part podcast series by Dan Carlin exploring World War I.

Blueprint for Armageddon I

The planet hadn’t seen a major war between all the Great Powers since the downfall of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. But 99 years later the dam breaks and a Pandora’s Box of violence engulfs the planet.

In the first episode, Carlin begins with a reflection on Gavrilo Princip, the Serb national who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Carlin suggests that Princip is the most important no one in the last 100 years. The focus is then turned towards the place of Germany, Bismarck and European alliance system. Military power is about who is the “firstest with the mostest”. Associated with this, Carlin discusses the argument that war was inevitable, instead he suggests that there was poor leadership and statesmanship more than anything else. The worst much mistake was the “Rape of Belgium”

Blueprint for Armageddon II

The Great Powers all come out swinging in the first round of the worst war the planet has ever seen. Millions of men in dozens of armies vie in the most deadly and complex opening moves of any conflict in world history.

Carlin begins the second episode with the question, “When do we have the power to destroy the world?” This leads to a discussion of the Russians attempts to stop technological development through arms agreement. The Germans answer to the war was the Schlieffen Plan, where they would hit France like a sledgehammer, before then addressing Russia.

The Schlieffen Plan (German: Schlieffen-Plan, pronounced [ʃliːfən plaːn]) is a name given after the First World War to German war plans, due to the influence of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and his thinking on an invasion of France and Belgium, which began on 4 August 1914. Schlieffen was Chief of the General Staff of the German Army from 1891 to 1906. In 1905 and 1906, Schlieffen devised an army deployment plan for a decisive (war-winning) offensive against the French Third Republic. German forces were to invade France through the Netherlands and Belgium rather than across the common border.

Source: Wikipedia

The rest of the episode explores the Battle of the Frontier. Carlin contrasts the initial British army led by French vs the French infantry in Napoleonic colours led by Joffra. The world has gone from Napoleon’s quip of “30000 deaths a month” to 30000 deaths a day at Battle of Mons and the Battle of the Marne.

Blueprint for Armageddon III

The war of maneuver that was supposed to be over quickly instead turns into a lingering bloody stalemate. Trench warfare begins, and with it, all the murderous efforts on both sides to overcome the static defenses.

Episode III begins with a story about Ernest Shackleton and his shock that the war was still going when he returned from Antarctica. Carlin uses this to highlight the length and complexity of the war. With the same amount of people killed in first month than were killed in the whole American Civil War.

Moving into 1915, Carlin discusses the blending of two eras, as captured through the Battle of Ainse and the Battle of Ypres. A particular change was with the development in technology, whether it be barbed wire, flamethrowers, zeppelins, submarines, gas and multilayer trench network. With these changes, Carlin argues that shellshock impacts everyone at some point.

Although it is easy to get bogged down on the Western Front, Carlin explains that there were also battlefronts in the East, Turkey and Pacific. Turkey and the Dardanelles was seen as a weak point in Central Powers, which turned out to be a mistake. Carlin then touches on the atrocities in war with the Turkish massacre of the Armenians.

Throughout, Carlin always tries to capture the human side, such as tropes stopping at 1914 Christmas.

Blueprint for Armageddon IV

Machine guns, barbed wire and millions upon millions of artillery shells create industrialized meat grinders at Verdun and the Somme. There’s never been a human experience like it…and it changes a generation.

As the war grinds on and more and more soldiers are killed, Carlin asks how you market hell as a travel destination, as that is what the war has become. Rather than touching on each and every battle, Carlin dives into a few examples, including the Battle of Verdun, where a battle is intentially designed to be a meatgrinder, the Battle of Jutland, where the English and Germans faced off at sea, the Brusilov Offensive, where Russians defeated Austrians but lost one million soldiers in the process, and the Battle of Somme.

On a side note, Carlin explained the way in which ‘gas’ was actually more of a solid that lay on top of everything and left everything dead.

The focus of the war progressively moved to home front and the civilian economy. The intent was the collapse and disintegration of a nation.

Blueprint for Armageddon V

Politics, diplomacy, revolution and mutiny take center stage at the start of this episode, but mud, blood, shells and tragedy drown all by the end.

Episode Five focuses on the changes to politics and the impact this had on the war. It begins with an exploration of US and Woodrow Wilson’s decision to go to war. This position of power is contrasted with Germany and the turnip winter of 1916/1917, as well as the struggles faced by Italy, Austria and Russia. Outside of this, there were changes in the governments of Britain and France.

With the Russian Revolution and Germany decision, under the leadership of Erich Ludendorff, to enter into total war, Carlin explains how things could have been different and that chance had so much to play. Total war for the Germans meant the development of the Hindenburg Line and dead zone behind the old front line to imped the spring offensive.

The Hindenburg Line, built behind the Noyon Salient “Salient (territory)”), was to replace the old front line as a precaution against a resumption of the Battle of the Somme in 1917. By devastating the intervening ground, the Germans could delay a spring offensive in 1917. A shortened front could be held with fewer troops and with tactical dispersal, reverse-slope positions, defence in depth and camouflage, German infantry could be conserved. Unrestricted submarine warfare and strategic bombing would weaken the Anglo-French as the German armies in the west (Westheer) recuperated. On 25 January 1917, the Germans had 133 divisions on the Western Front but this was insufficient to contemplate an offensive.

Source: Hindenburg%20Line%20-%20Wikipedia by

What ‘total war’ meant was captured in Carlin’s discussion of the creeping barrage associated with the Battle of Arras and the 3rd Battle of Ypres, where rain inundated Flanders’ fields.

Blueprint for Armageddon VI

The Americans are coming, but will the war be over by the time they get there? Germany throws everything into a last series of stupendous attacks in the West while hoping to avoid getting burned by a fire in the East they helped fan.

Episode Six is largely about the ramifications of World War One. It begins with the discussion of a ‘dangerous idea’ being worse than say a dangerous gas. Carlin explains how Vladmir Lenin, with the help of Germany, released the idea of Communism on the world.

With the collapse of Russia, the various treaties were made public. A particular part of this was the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, this included the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.

With all this happening, Carlin explains how Germany had window of opportunity, as there was an increase in troops from Eastern front and such developments as the Paris Gun. The problem was that there was also a lower morale on the home front and eventually low morale on the war front, especially as troops went days without eating.

Allied Commander-in-Chief, Ferdinand Foch, held back troops to survive the battle of morale. This with aided by the addition of fast moving tanks and American support.

Overall, Carlin never promises to tell the story of World War I, instead he carves out a particular story that encapsulates many of the highs and lows. As he often states, he is not a ‘historian’, but a storyteller, what some describe as “the Michael Bay of history.” He captures the past from the high road, from the perspective of a reader, rather than a thorough researcher. This often sacrifices nuance to instead carve a clear path. With this in mind, he often builds situations up with suspense. It is interesting challenge given that we often know the end, but we do not always know how it unfolds. Therefore, he often addresses our desire to know.

Associated with this, he often goes off on tangents, jumps around making comparisons with previous historical events, whether it be Genghis Khan, The Civil War, The Battle of Hastings, Napoleonic War and World War II.

Replied to How Britain’s taste for tea may have been a life saver by Veronique Greenwood (BBC)

Tea became one of the British Empire’s most prized resources in the 18th Century. But it may have also had an unintended effect on the British population – reducing mortality rates.

In a recent paper in the Review of Statistics and Economics, economist Francisca Antman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, makes a convincing case that the explosion of tea as an everyman’s drink in late 1700s England saved many lives. This would not have been because of any antioxidants or other substances inherent to the lauded leaf.

Instead, the simple practice of boiling water for tea, in an era before people understood that illness could be caused by water-borne pathogens, may have been enough to keep many from an early grave.

Source: How Britain’s taste for tea may have been a life saver
 by Veronique Greenwood

I was expecting the benefit of tea might be less drinking of beer, I guess boiling water does make a lot of sense.

Read A Shorter History of Australia by Geoffrey Blainey

A broad, concise and inclusive vision of Australia and Australians by one our most renowned historians

I stumbled upon Geoffrey Blainey’s A Shorter History of Australia via BorrowBox. It does what it says, provides a short history of Australia. One of the things that intrigued me was Blainey’s ability to tie so many desperate stories together into a coherent narrative.

I think it would be an interesting exercise to do something of a meta analysis, reading different histories, such as Manning Clark and Stuart McIntyre, and doing a comparison.

Read 1835 by James Boyce

With the founding of Melbourne in 1835, a flood of settlers began spreading out across the Australian continent. In three years more land – and more people – was conquered than in the preceding fifty.

With 1835, James Boyce takes us into the early years of Melbourne, before the gold boom in the 1850s when there was spectacular growth, when the initial timber buildings were rebuilt in solid stone and brick.

The book begins by setting the scene for the settlement, discussing the geography of the region, the impact of other settlements in Van Diemen’s Land and Sydney, as well as the political conditions in London. It then moves onto the initial settlement, led by the Port Phillip Association, the treaty with the local indigenous people and the initial settlement. Building on from the initial settlement, Boyce explores the first year and the interactions with the indigenous people, including early conflict. After initially rejecting the idea of a new settlement, the Melbourne experiment is accepted, leading to explosive growth.

What was interesting about this book was how the settlement in Melbourne differed to that in Van Diemen’s Land. Whether it be the attempt to reject or deny any influence of convicts in Melbourne or the change in relations with the local indigenous people. The other thing that I had never really considered was the speed of impact that settlement had on local populations. I was always aware of the spread of disease, but it had never really occurred to me the impact on hunting and gathering of taking away the best land from grazing purposes. Made me think about all the supermarket’s were destroyed overnight and replaced with a field of vegetables. I imagine our lives would change pretty dramatically too. Although not necessarily questioning the settlement, as it was something that was always going to happen, Boyce asks the question of how things might have been done differently?

Part of the reason that the founding fables have endured is that there is truth and legitimate sentiment to be found in them. The speed with which Melbourne grew and Victoria was settled is, when seen from the victor’s perspective, ‘one of the romances of modern colonisation.’43 If anything, perhaps in part out of sensitivity to Aboriginal people, historians now tend to downplay what an extraordinary settlement story the founding of Melbourne represents.

Source: 1835 by James Boyce

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truce

The Truce (Italian: La tregua), titled The Reawakening in the US,[1] is a book by the Italian author Primo Levi. It is the sequel to If This Is a Man and describes the author’s experiences from the liberation of Auschwitz (Monowitz), which was a concentration camp, until he reaches home in Turin, Italy, after a long journey. He describes the situation in different displaced persons camps after the Second World War.

The Truce recounts Primo Levi’s journey after being liberated from Auschwitz. It follows on from If This Is a Man. I have read and watched a lot about World War II, but I had never really thought about what happens afterwards, especially with the divide between the Russians and the Americans. I wonder if one of the differences with something like Erich Maria Remarque’s The Road Back is that there was possibly more movement in World War II? It also made me wonder if Waiting for Godot and Rainbow’s Gravity are not as absurd as they seem?

Marginalia

 So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled, and filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them; and also with anguish, because we felt that this should never happen, that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it occurred and in the stories that we should tell of it. Because, and this is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. It is an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body and the spirit of the submerged, it stifles them and renders them abject; it returns as ignominy upon the oppressors, it perpetuates itself as hatred among the survivors, and swarms around in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as renunciation.

The market of Cracow had blossomed out spontaneously, as soon as the front had passed by, and in a few days it had invaded an entire suburb. Everything was bought and sold there, and the whole city centred on it; townsfolk were selling furniture, books, paintings, clothes and silver; peasant women, padded

He explained to me that to be without shoes is a very serious fault. When war is waging, one has to think of two things before all others : in the first place of one’s shoes, in the second place of food to eat; and not vice versa, as the common herd believes, because he who has shoes can search for food, but the inverse is not true. ‘But the war is over,’ I objected : and I thought it was over, as did many in those months of truce, in a much more universal sense than one dares to think today. ‘There is always war,’ replied Mordo Nahum memorably.

I felt my sense of freedom, my sense of being a man among men, of being alive, like a warm tide ebb from me. I found myself suddenly old, lifeless, tired beyond human measure; the war was not over, there was always war. My listeners began to steal away; they must have understood. I had dreamed, we had always dreamed, of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz: of speaking and not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone.

They were months of idleness and relative comfort, and full, therefore, of penetrating nostalgia. Nostalgia is a fragile and tender anguish, basically different, more intimate, more human than the other pains we had endured till then – beatings, cold, hunger, terror, destitution, disease. Nostalgia is a limpid and lean pain, but demanding; it permeates every minute of the day, permits no other thoughts and induces a need for escape. 

Read https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/reading-the-holocaust

Inga Clendinnan’s Reading the Holocaust is what the name suggests, a reading of the various texts produced about the Holocaust. This reading is divided into sections, including a discussion of impediments, accounts from witnesses, what it meant to resist, the grey zone of those Jewish people who helped, the leaders, the police and the SS. It involves explorations of various texts, including memoirs, photographs, documentaries, poems, novels and historical accounts. This is something akin to a literature review.

Throughout, Clendinnan addresses the dangers of treating the Holocaust as unique just because it stands so near in time.

Our sense of Holocaust uniqueness (and we do have that sense) resides in the fact that these ferocious, largely secret killings were perpetrated within ‘twentieth-century Western society’, and that both our sense of portent and of the peculiar intransigence of these actions before puny human interpretation find their ground in the knowledge that they were conceived, executed and endured by people very like ourselves.
It is not that this material stands too far from us. It stands too near.

The limits to compelling the silence to speak and giving voice to the voiceless.

While we can never be sure what lies behind silence, I will begin to map the silences behind the words we have by exploring the circumstances under which people might feel the compulsion to speak, but find themselves unable to do so: situations, that is, when words fail.

Writing to find peace, to mend, to resist.

Levi was to find both personal peace and a way back to society not through the social activity of talking but the private one of writing: ‘By writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither debased nor a saint: one of those people who form a family and look to the future rather than the past.’

The difficulty with making sense of motives of leaders.

Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving. The notion that one must simply reject the actions of the perpetrators and not try to understand them would make impossible not only my history but any perpetrator history that tried to go beyond one-dimensional caricature … I must recognise that in such a situation I could have been either a killer or an evader – both were human – if I want to understand and explain the behaviour of both the best I can.

The theatre of the camps, like Auschwitz.

The theatrical perspective helps expose understandings otherwise left implicit, and flush into light some of the sadistic impulses which lurk along the boundaries of consciousness. It can expose the determined ‘othering’ by the SS of their ‘enemies behind the wire’. It can take us a certain distance into even this action sequence – into what Olga Lengyel, who saw it, diagnosed as one of the ‘fits of destructive insanity’ she thought occasionally possessed the SS. But I do not believe it can take us to the heart of the scene described, or into the hearts of similar scenes scattered through the record.

The problems with trying to provide thick description of thin material.

Despite the most diligent research, the material remains too thin to allow a sufficiently detailed retrieval of actions to achieve ‘thick description’, save in one singular instance: the Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion’s first day of mass murder at the little Polish town of Jozefow. More damagingly, Goldhagen tends to confuse detailed external descriptions of actions (‘They did this, they did that’) with the ‘thick description’ which Geertz would have us aspire to, where the actors’ meanings are the quarry (‘She’d gone too far, so I hit her’).

The challenges in attempting to represent the Holocaust.

The most effective imagined evocations of the Holocaust seem to proceed either by invocation, the glancing reference to an existing bank of ideas, images and sentiments (‘Auschwitz’), or, perhaps more effectively, by indirection.

In the end, she ends with the claim as to why history writing, with its balance between telling and interpreting, provides the best means of telling the past.

Historians are the foot soldiers in the slow business of understanding our species better, and thereby extending the role of reason and humanity in human af¬ fairs. Humankind saw the face of the Gorgon in the concentration camps, petrifying the human by its denial of the human both in itself and in its prey. The shadow of the Holocaust has lengthened with the years. In that shadow, none of us is at home in the world, because now we know the fragility of our content. If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassur¬ ing myths. We must do more than register guilt, or grief, or anger, or disgust, because neither reverence for those who suffer nor revulsion from those who inflict the suffering will help us overcome its power to paralyse, and to see it clearly.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Is_a_Man

If This Is a Man (Italian: Se questo è un uomo [se kˈkwesto ˌɛ un ˈwɔːmo]; United States title: Survival in Auschwitz) is a memoir by Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi, first published in 1947. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Monowitz) from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.

If This Is a Man is Primo Levi’s memoir of how he survived the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. A trained chemist, Levi approaches the recount in a very factual manner. This methodical nature reads something like an absurd Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Whether it be only being transported later in the war, having the right skills required for work in the laboratory or falling sick at the right time, as Primo states at the beginning, chance played a significant part in Levi’s survival.

One of the strange things about the text is the trick of language that makes you feel that you could actually imagine what it was actually like. It has me wanting to go back to Inga Clendinnen’s Reading the Holocaust.

Marginalia

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist.

Bookmarked Book Summary: The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences / Michel Foucault by Huzeyfe Kıran (Thinking Prismatically)

“One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area — European culture since the sixteenth century — one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledges prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities differences, characters, equivalences, words — in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same — only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility — without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises — were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (The Order of Things p.386-387).

I remember reading Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge during university, but never got around to The Order of Things. Wondering about the crux of the book I stumbled upon this lengthy summary from Huzeyfe Kıran. I was left thinking about archeology in relation to my Honours thesis on psychoanalysis and the way in which what we talk about when we talk about psychoanalysis.
Read The Road Back

The Road Back, also translated as The Way Back,[1] (German: Der Weg zurück) is a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque, commonly regarded as a sequel to his 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front.[1][2] It was first serialized in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung between December 1930 and January 1931, and published in book form in April 1931.

Erich Maria Remarque’s The Road Back details the experience of a group of young German men, including Ernst Birkholz, returning from the trenches at the end of World War I. It unpacks the many challenges they face in integrating back into everyday life and the way in which so many are left both physically and mentally broken.

Beginning with the hope of peace, the novel begins with death even as things seem to be coming to an end. It then details the journey of the soldiers back to their towns. This includes a meeting with some Americans who are willing to barter for any relic that they can barter for.

Eventually, once home, Remarque unpacks various facets of life, including seeing families again, reconnecting with past relationships, trying to concentrate enough to read a book, continuing the habit of foraging for food, going back to school, attending dances, and getting a job.

There are always challenges with fitting in with other people’s reality of the experience of the front:

“Green grasses!—green grasses!” he stutters, “long sleep? In the mud of shell-holes they are lying, knocked rotten, ripped in pieces, gone down into the bog Green grasses! This is not a singing lesson!” His arms are whirling like a windmill in a gale. “Hero’s death! And what sort of a thing do you suppose that was, I wonder?——Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? All day long he lay out in the wire screaming, and his guts hanging out of his belly like macaroni. Then a bit of shell took off his fingers and a couple of hours later another chunk off his leg; and still he lived; and with his other hand he would keep trying to pack back his intestines, and when night fell at last he was done. And when it was dark we went out to get him and he was full of holes as a nutmeg grater—Now, yoti go and tell his mother how he died—if you have so much courage.”

Or everyday life:

Here I stand and must now be your teacher and guide. What should I teach you? Should I tell you that in twenty years you will be dried-up and crippled, maimed in your freest impulses, all pressed mercilessly into the selfsame mould? Should I tell you that all learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery, so long as mankind makes war in the name of God and humanity with gas, iron, explosive and fire? What should I teach you then, you little creatures who alone have remained unspotted by the terrible years?

What am I able to teach you then? Should I tell you how to pull the string of a hand-grenade, how best to throw it at a human being? Should I show you how to stab a man with a bayonet, how to fell him with a club, how to slaughter him with a spade? Should I demonstrate how best to aim a rifle at such an incomprehensible miracle as a breathing breast, a living heart? Should I explain to you what tetanus is, what a broken spine is, and what a shattered skull? Should I describe to you how brains look when they spatter about, what crushed bones are like, and intestines when they pour out? Should I mimic how a man with a stomach-wound will groan, how one with a lung-wound gurgles and one with a head-wound whistles? More I do not know. More I have not learned.

Should I take you to the green-and-grey map there, move my finger across it and tell you that here love was murdered? Should I explain to you that the books you hold in your hands are but nets with which men design to snare your simple souls, to entangle you in the undergrowth of fine phrases, and in the barbed wire of falsified ideas?

I stand here before you, a polluted, a guilty man and can only implore you ever to remain as you are, never to suffer the bright light of your childhood to be misused as a blow-flame of hate. About your brows still blows the breath of innocence. How then should I presume to teach you? Behind me, still pursuing, are the bloody years. How then can I venture among you? Must I not first become a man again myself?

I feel a cramp begin to spread through me, as if I were turning to stone, as if I were crumbling away. I lower myself slowly into the chair, and realise that I cannot stay here any longer. I try to take hold of something but cannot. Then after a time that has seemed to me endless, the catalepsy relaxes. I stand up. “Children,” I say with difficulty, “you may go now. There will be no school today.”

Thoughts of war are always rising to the surface.

We are like those abandoned fields full of shell-holes in France, no less peaceful than the other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives—and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to plougher and ploughed.

It is interesting to consider Remarque’s approach alongside other novels, such as Mrs Dalloway and Wise Blood, which touch on the difficulties of life after fighting in war.

Read Moby Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael’s narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship’s previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author’s death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author’s birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself,[1] and D. H. Lawrence called it “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” and “the greatest book of the sea ever written”.[2] Its opening sentence, “Call me Ishmael”, is among world literature’s most famous.[3]

I remember reading Michael Gerard Bauer’s Don’t Call Me Ishmael when I was still in the classroom. I therefore thought it might be interesting to dive into the novel where the title came from, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Other than being about a whale, Moby Dick, and including a same-sex marriage, I did not really have much of an idea of what the book was about.

One of the things that was really interesting was the way in which Melville ties together so many differing styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and asides. I can imagine some readers may skip some of the dalliances into all things whaling to instead focus on the chase for the white whale. However, these lengthy descriptions both add context and also add a real fever to the text. I would be intrigued to see Melville’s notebooks collecting together all this research.

Captain Ahab and his manic obsession had me thinking of both The Judge in Blood Meridian and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. I watched a video where Harold Bloom argued that he liked Captain Ahab, because without him, we would never have had Moby Dick. This is an interesting way of looking at it.

The reference to different countries (Australia, Peru) and the way in which whaling traverses everything had me thinking about how the novel exists outside of society. Interestingly, it predicts its own interpretations throughout. I was left thinking about Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desire without bodies.

Moby Dick is definitely a writerly text that I can imagine easily rereading.

Read The Australian Dream by Stan Grant

In a landmark essay, Stan Grant writes Indigenous people back into the economic and multicultural history of Australia. This is the fascinating story of how fringe dwellers fought not just to survive, but to prosper. Their legacy is the extraordinary flowering of Indigenous success – cultural, sporting, intellectual and social – that we see today.

Yet this flourishing co-exists with the boys of Don Dale, and the many others like them who live in the shadows of the nation. Grant examines how such Australians have been denied the possibilities of life, and argues eloquently that history is not destiny; that culture is not static. In doing so, he makes the case for a more capacious Australian Dream.

‘The idea that I am Australian hits me with a thud. It is a blinding self-realisation that collides with the comfortable notion of who I am. To be honest, for an Indigenous person, it can feel like a betrayal somehow – at the very least, a capitulation. We are so used to telling ourselves that Australia is a white country: am I now white? The reality is more ambiguous … To borrow from Franz Kafka, identity is a cage in search of a bird.’ —Stan Grant, The Australian Dream

Stan Grant’s Quartarly Essay extends on his speech on racism in Australia at the IQ2 stage in 2015.

Now, you will hear things tonight. You will hear people say, “But you’ve done well.” Yes, I have and I’m proud of it and why have I done well? I’ve done well because of who has come before me. My father who lost the tips of three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table because he was denied an education. My grandfather who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.

My great grandfather, who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson (my father). Jailed for it! My grandfather on my mother’s side who married a white woman who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy and ran over the graves of the three children he buried there.

That’s the Australian Dream. I have succeeded in spite of the Australian Dream, not because of it, and I’ve succeeded because of those people.

Grant elaborates on the challenges associated with his personal history, the idea of indigenous people as ‘migrants’, and the layered nature of identity. I found it a fascinating book to read, especially in light of discussion around the referendum for a voice in parliament. For me, it highlights that there are no quick answers, instead it is always complicated.

Bookmarked Why Learn to Read? (daily.jstor.org)

The value placed on literacy has changed over time, shifting from a nineteenth-century moral imperative to a twentieth-century production necessity.

Deborah Brandt explains that learning to read has meant many things over time.

“Literacy was irrevocably transformed from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative,” Brandt concludes, “Transformed from an attribute of a ‘good’ individual into an individual ‘good.’”

This reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s work on digital literacies and how what this means can vary.

Bookmarked Victoria’s ghost railway stations, culled for low patronage, a drawcard for explorers by Gavin McGrath (ABC News)

Victoria was once dotted with train stations that are now, like this one, derelict and abandoned. Some have found new lives, but what’s happened to the rest of the state’s “ghost stations”?

Jasmine Jones explores the railway stations that have either been left to the past or reclaimed for other purposes. It is interesting to think about this alongside  Les Everett’s epic quest to uncover Australia’s ‘lost’ cricket pitches.
Bookmarked Florence Nightingale Was Born 197 Years Ago, and Her Infographics Were Better Than Most of the Internet's (Atlas Obscura)

With such a massive tome on offer, though, Nightingale feared that this most vital conclusion might be overlooked. So she developed a series of charts meant to make it even clearer to the reader. Her most famous graph, displayed at the top of this article, shows the number of soldier deaths per month from various causes. Each pie slice represents a different month, from April 1854 through March 1856, and each color stands for a different cause of death. It takes just a quick glance to achieve the two main takeaways: that disease, colored blue, killed far more soldiers than either “wounds” (red) or “other” (black), and that it was reduced greatly in 1855.

Celebrating the birth of Florence Nightingale, Cara Giaimo discusses her impact in regards to the spread of ideas, not just as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. After returning from Crimea, Nightingale spent two years putting together her notes and data. Fearing that the conclusions might be lost in the length of the report, she developed a series of infographics, some of which she even leaked to the press.

It is interesting considering this in light of the modern world where all information is presented to the press using such visuals and then the scientific community. I wonder if it would have still been lost in the noise?

Liked The death of Mikhail Gorbachev has returned us to a time that haunts us by Stan Grant (ABC News)

Of the books to emerge in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jacques Derrida best captured the paradox of the time, in Specters of Marx.

At the end of the Cold War, Derrida saw the shadow of Hamlet. There could be no good ending. “To be out of joint”, he wrote, “…is the very possibility of evil.”

Derrida coined the word “hauntology”, to describe how the traces of our past — our ghosts — throw shadows on our world.

As Derrida wrote: “What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted by the very chase we are leading?”

To Derrida, “the future, comes back in advance: from the past….”

Derrida looked at the liberal triumphalists and saw those “who puff out their chests with the good conscience of capitalism, liberalism, and the virtues of parliamentary democracy.”

The certainty and triumph he wrote was “obscene in its euphoria.”

In their moment of victory they did not sense the ghosts returning. The past was lying in wait.

Indeed, Derrida wrote, “never, never in history has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated…been as dark, threatening and threatened.”

The end of the Cold War would unleash the forces of neoliberalism that would in time eat at the heart of democracy itself.

Liked Why “Microhistories” Rock – Clive Thompson – Medium (Medium)

The big problem with this sort of writing is, of course, that by trying to cover so much ground, they often cover it shallowly. One skips like a stone across the lake of history. (I should point out that while I’m poking fun at the pretensions of this type of book, I arguably tried to write one myself, so consider this also as self-mockery.)

Replied to The Mysteries of Mondrian by Peter Schjeldahl (The New Yorker)

Peter Schjeldahl reviews “Piet Mondrian: A Life,” by Hans Janssen, a new biography that excavates the genius of the Dutch modernist painter.

I enjoyed Peter Schjeldahl’s overview of the life and works of Piet Mondrian. The quote I liked the most was the importance of religion when it comes to atheism:

Mondrian was caught up for much of his life in Theosophy, the anti-materialist mythos that was initiated in 1875, in New York, by the much travelled Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Its pantheistic mysticism seemed to resonate with everything he craved in both art and life. Theosophy’s tenet of an ascent from the natural by way of the spiritual toward a union with the divine was right up Mondrian’s temperamental alley. He was most immersed from about 1908 to 1912, when he painted metaphysically supercharged flowers and frankly weird totemic figures. In the years that followed, he shrugged off the aspects of the movement that seemed pedantic and nebulous rather than liberating and practical, not to mention its mediumistic hocus-pocus, but he never regretted the influence. He remarked later, “One cannot call oneself an atheist without really having experienced some form of religion.” He kept painting flowers, however, with unfailing virtuosity but waning enthusiasm, as a stock-in-trade to support his experimentation with frontal, vibrant geometric patterning.

Bookmarked We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business (eyeondesign.aiga.org)

I would say that floppy disks have a future, but it won’t see a revival like Vinyl. People like the idea of the record player and it will be around for a long time as a very niche or cool kind of thing. Floppy disks are going to be a little bit more like buggy whips or typewriters. They’re going to be a collectible marvel of their time. Imagine how hard it would be to manufacture a new typewriter today. There are a number of American authors who talk about the fact that they can only write on a typewriter. It’s something very important to them that is tied into their artistic genius. I think that floppy disks are going to be a little bit like that.

In an extract from Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar interview Tom Persky about the dying art of maintaining floppy disks. Persky discusses how he came to be in the busy and where he gets his stock from. He also explains how there are still various industries that are dependent upon the technology, such as medical equipment, that was developed 20+ years ago.

The customers that are the easiest to provide for are the hobbyists – people who want to buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks. However, my biggest customers — and the place where most of the money comes from — are the industrial users. These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That’s a huge consumer. There’s also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices. The biggest customer of all is probably the embroidery business though. Thousands and thousands of machines that use floppy disks were made for this, and they still use these. There are even some industrial companies that still use Sony Mavica cameras to take photographs. The vast majority of what I sell is for these industrial uses, but there is a significant hobbyist element to it as well.