Justin > Recent Status Updates

Never enough time with this fascinating examination of German history-making - fruit on every second page for an inquiring Australian

Historiography in this German setting awash with local-nationalism .... Rich picking for an open mind apropos Australian colonisation - This isn't the book, however, to treat with the national pastime of not forgetting the wars and Holocaust and German culpability - a remarkable trait of modern Germany that a 'settler society' such as ours here should take heed of, obsessed as we are with forgetting the frontier

I tell you, I'll need to get Count Leo out of my system after this ... Chekhov and old friends Brothers Karamasov await - in return to the Russians

Need a break from Manning Clark - Lord knows how McKenna did this for eight (or was it seven) years!! I call it up close with the desert of another's mind - we're all somewhat desolate to each other when our diaries are opened up!

Great teller of European dukkha - although without, yet at least, the heights of Fyodor - such that Anna et al seem awfully vain and the good philosophy somewhat lost in the Count's weird Russo return love of peasant 'purity' (their sound is forever merry, although they're somewhat untrustworthy too). Good, however, to be transported so far from present day humbug!

Need to get my mind of Manning Clark for a while!

I'll persist in this book cos Clark has played such an integral role in Australian cultural history and, of course, I am an Australian experiment after all.

Oh biography! Unfair intimacy but courted by vain Clark. Reading of the pretentious, hung-up, vain, needy and emotionally exploitative (at least when it came to Dymphna his fiance) Clark in Oxford is especially tricky - not only because he's harder and harder to like but because it reminds me of times when I was possibly as self-obsessed and arguably as awful as that.