Les Liens du ... Jeudi?

[highlyeccentric]

Supplement to monday links, occurs irregularly. (There will be no Monday links next week, fyi, due to travel)

We can now retire the Special George Pell section, but be broadly warned he will turn up at various points in either Current Affairs or Essays, I expect Australia has not finished saying things about him yet. Or about institutional abuse generally.

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Latvia vows to end money laundering, wants to know if the rest of Europe will hold up its end of the bargain.
  
• Calais port backed up as french customs agents work to rule ahead of Brexit (they feel understaffed and underprepared for the changes ahead)
  
• Phyllis Bennis (The Nation), Democratic attacks on Ilhan Omar are a travesty - has good chunks of the Omar speech that caused the most recent round of Discourse, in which Omar pointed out that a neat trick of spending so much public time debating is she or is she not anti-semitic is no one actually has to talk about Palestine.
  
• I supplemented that, however, with this tweet thread by wonko_the sane_ in which he argues that the back-and-forth over whether Ilhan is being subject to islamophobic backlash is effectively 'gaslighting' jewish commentators who point out her use of anti-semitic tropes. (And then this one by Erin Biba, which strikes what seems to me to be a sensible point - she feels jewish people are being used as scapegoats or tools to chastise Omar, by people who do not actually care all that much about anti-semitism)
  
• Scott Gendel on Twitter: we should pursue excellence, not 'the best'
  

  THREAD re: “the best”
  
  Rant: Our culture is far too obsessed with “the best” instead of “the excellent.”
  
  I see orchestras fighting over the same 10 guest violinists when there are 1000s more truly excellent violinists who’d play the same rep beautifully. /1

  — Scott Gendel (@ScottGendel) February 22, 2019

  
  
  
• Theodora Sarah Abigail (hellohoneybi) has a good thread on Indonesian literature in translation, and Bad White Takes thereon.
  
• Birmingham school stops LGBT lessons after parents protest (Guardian UK report)
  
• Australian Catholic University staff want Greg Craven disciplined over pell support. What I find most interesting about this is not just that while Craven ordered staff not to discuss the case he was writing his character reference - it's that the ban on discussing the case clearly doesn't apply to Frank Brennan, who is also employed by ACU.
  

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Maggie Levantovskaya, Shedding books to survive the uncertainty of academic life.
  

  When you are an adjunct, turning space into place can be impractical and emotionally risky. And yet, it is often expected. In his first one-year position, my partner made a conscious decision to bring books into his office when one of his colleagues questioned his commitment to the job. He saw that his office mate filled his shelves with books and followed suit. Miraculously, my partner became a tenure-track professor but his was not the typical story. Today he has his own office. It’s crammed with books, gifts from his students and toys that signify his nerd-dom.

  
  
• Eddie Synot (The Conversation AU), The Uluru Statement showed how to give first nations people a real voice, now it's time for action.
  
• Barry Corr (Meanjin), Pondering the Abyss. I said on Monday I was a bit skeptical of the Guardian piece on the frontier wars for not citing any indigenous historians? Corr is one such.
  

  This essay is not just about the spectres, the Aboriginal and settler ghosts still bound to land and water by settler forgetfulness; it also contrasts the constant shedding, modification and transformation of settler memory and the immanence of the overlapping tides of past, present and future that make up the Dreaming and come through revelation. This is not a contrapuntal story.
  Because of the cataclysmic nature of settlement I don’t embrace the Hegelian concept of history as progress. My work has more sympathy with Walter Benjamin’s concept of a horror-struck angel of history driven into the future by a storm blowing from Paradise, looking back at an ever-increasing pile of rubble called progress. Perforce it is constructed with the master’s tools. From a Western perspective it probably sits as structural antagonism within Jameson’s third horizon. From an Enlightenment perspective the settlement of New South Wales was a pioneering example of state intervention in social reform. Lenin would probably have seen the settlement as an early ‘monopolist possession’.

  
  
• Evelyn Araluen (Sydney Review of Books), Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum, on her relationship as an indigenous person to white Australian children's lit.
  

  Here’s the entanglement: none of this is innocent and while I seek to write rupture I usually just rearrange. I can name the colonial complexes and impulses which structure these texts but it doesn’t change the fact that I was raised on these books too. They tell me they never chose them to hurt us, and I never thought they did. They both grew up surrounded by the bush in country New South Wales towns. None of my grandparents finished school and had very low levels of literacy. Books were one of the many things my mum never had growing up but made sure to give her children. She chose them for us around what we could afford, but always looked for stories of the bush she knows and loves with intimate detail. She read them to us with care and patience, even in all the years she was working two jobs to put those books in our hands.

  
  
• Sommer Moore (Archer Magazine blog), When shame comes from the inner sanctum: biphobia within the queer community.
  
• Ellena Savage (Meanjin blog), What I'm Reading:
  

  Reading in capitalism makes no sense. It produces nothing. It prepares you for nothing. If you have access to a public library, it costs nothing—except time, which everyone is encouraged to believe is in short supply (which is, for some people, in short supply). Reading costs the economy money, I think, I argue, I contend, because if you’re reading you’re not spending money on crap or earning money to spend on crap or paying tax, nor are you promoting a lifestyle that anyone, really, can profit from. Except those who stake it to their identity—that increasingly capitalist thing—, an Instagram bookshelf kind of identity.

  Reading is a non-activity: outside time; immaterial; passive and active; politically potent and also just banal.

  It’s possible, I guess, to professionalise reading. Become an academic or critic. Solve the mysteries of the text. It’s possible, too, to read with a spirit of competition—set targets, keep fastidious records of ‘achievements’, consume in ways that alleviate the ordinary senselessness of reading. But if things are supposed to have a ‘point’ (and they are), reading is pointless. Reading requires time and attention that could be spent on other people’s needs and profits; on preparing your body for another day of work. Reading, then, is an exercise in freedom. No one hands anyone freedom, or time, on a platter. It’s a thing that has to be taken by force, and taken again tomorrow.

  
  
• Caspar Salmon (New Statesman), By opposing equality in sex education, Shabana Mahmood is underestimating children
  
• Patrick Strudwick (Buzzfeed UK), 30 years ago, teachers were banned from mentioning homosexuality: here's what I wish they'd taught me. There's so much courage and stubborn pride in this piece, but what really stuck out for me was the opening paragraph:
  

  That is not sex, he said. The teacher had just shown a series of sex education videos and asked us what we thought. I’d raised my hand and said they were good but did not mention gay sex. I was 11.

  That is not sex, he said. It was 1988, the year a new law was enacted that forbade local authorities and teachers from “promoting homosexuality”. Today is exactly 30 years since that law (which was not repealed until 2003) came into effect. It was so vague as to muzzle everyone working in schools from mentioning gay people. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic.

  
  
• Frankie Huang (Foreign Policy magazine) Get ready for China's baby quotas
  
• Georgie Burg, The priest who raped me changed my life; my daughter inspired me to jail him. A tough but moving piece, on how Burg's relationship with her queer teenage daughter gave her courage to report many years after the fact.
  
• Dan Nosowitz (Atlas Obscura), Decoding the shape of the Nepali flag (h/t Silveradept) - great piece of nerdy history.
  

Items of practical interest:

• Mary Bateman offers Good Latin Mnemonics (at least, good if you use genitive-second declension tables):
  

  FIRST DECLENSION (note the endings):
  singular: Mari*a*, queen of regg*ae*, gave some j*am* to Fanny m*ae* for her banan*a*
  plural: Fanny m*ae*, fond of *a rum*, gave the Israel*is* some banan*as* from the del*is* /3

  — Mary Bateman (@xfairymaryx) March 4, 2019

  
  
  

  SECOND DECLENSION (note 2 poss endings for the nominative):
  sin: g*us* and pet*er*, friends of luig*i*, gave mari*o* some g*um* for his burrit*o*
  pl: he and *I*, kings of the qu*orum*, gave the israel*is* some burrit*os* from the del*is* /4

  — Mary Bateman (@xfairymaryx) March 4, 2019

  
  
  

  THIRD DECLENSION ('black hole gang' here means no ending)
  Singular: The *black hole gang*, friends of Beav*is*, gave Bamb*i* a g*em* from chil*e*
  Plural: The Apach*es*, masters of the dr*um*, gave the min*ibus* some tamal*es* from the omnib*us* /5

  — Mary Bateman (@xfairymaryx) March 4, 2019

  
  

Comments

[muccamukk]

I thought this was a good post: http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-to-avoid-trap-of-house-antisemitism.html