Pseuds Corner Holiday Edition

"Grandeur is a mixing together, a moral aspect of what do we value, and with an economic aspect - which is, where are the resources going . . . It's saying that in life you must try to fuse your ethical ambitions and your economic ambitions. . .
The image that was very much in my mind, thinking about grandeur, was a story of boys behaving badly at school. It was a school trip on which two boys had picked on a third. And the ones who'd done the bullying were from the most affluent families.
For me that caused a sort of sacred rage. . ." (John Armstrong, in interview with The Zone, "Grand designs", The Age, 01/11/10)
 

When I realised so many years ago that Jesus's sisters had been cruelly written out of history, and that no matter how much I cared, I could not reinstate them, I felt useless. None of the tools I had spent so many years acquiring as an academic scholar and general audience non-fiction writer were in any way equal to the task. I was surplus to what these women required. - I tried to forget the sisters. To abandon them to the dust of the unmarked past where I'd found them, but failed. To do so made me feel complicit in perpetuating what they'd already suffered - the terrible pain of being forgotten. - There was only one thing left to do. Slowly, I learned the craft of fiction writing so I could tell these stories the only way they could be told. (Leslie Cannold, "The Da Vinci Sisters", The Age 26/12/10)

I'm sitting in my local cafe, near the window. My jacket is on. I can see the Manchurian pear trees nearby, and the sky through their silouette fingers: clouds of white, light grey and charcoal, moving quickly from the shop facades to the awning of the cafe. On my table is a double short black and my laptop. The coffee has one sugar in it. Plugged into my laptop is a pair of large black headphones. They fit over my ears, and sit against my skull with soft rubber pads. Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor is playing - Jascha Heifetz is the virtuoso. . . Even here in the cafe, the headphones need to cover my ears, otherwise the piercing voice of the proprietress will intrude. This is a relationship between me (the author), you (the reader) and the page. The proprietress in not helping by interrupting. (Damon Young on the moral quintessence of distraction, The Reader Vol.2)

The story of the Christ child makes the spirit soar, as it has for countless generations. What is it that defines Christmas for us? The strain of the obligatory socialising with family (including the ones you might naturally run a mile from)? The obligation huge numbers of people have to make those they love, especially children, feel that love because of the effort to delight them with the right gift? The general mayhem of spending and socialising and simulating good cheer in the midst of the strain and the squalor of another year gone? - Well, Christmas can be all of that. It's easy to forget that when Dickens created his ''Bah! Humbug'' man Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, he wasn't simply adding new refinements of sentimentalism to the long-established myth. He was also delineating, with great power, the travails of the long-distance loner. (If you re-read the bits of the story everyone forgets, before Scrooge comes good, you'll find that Dickens accommodates a sweeping blackness as disturbing as Kafka's.) - But on top of everything else, there's the story of the Christ child that surfaces in us like a race memory. . .
It was pleasing the other week when that easygoing lady of the left, Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Human Services and Social Inclusion, took to task whatever blighted public servant it was who ordered that there should be nothing Christian in any of the displays in post offices, as if a nativity scene was the insignia of the Spanish Inquisition and nothing but the stench of infamy in the nostrils of all those fundamentalist atheists who march under the banner of Richard Dawkins. - Plibersek said, quite rightly, that the Christmas story was a thing to be treasured, and people should also be free to honour Hanukkah and Hindu and Muslim festivals. - Of course that's true. Christmas is the one, though, that underlies the Jewish and Greek influences that structure our world. - If you doubt the Jewish influence in Christianity, think of the stupendous, densely Hebraic accents of Mary's great prayer which is known to the church as the Magnificat. (Peter Craven, "Tale of Innocence and Joy", The Age, 24/12/10)

If the independent arts remain invisible to government policy and support, a diminished view of the arts will guide community participation, venue programming, education programs and media responses - and the arts will suffer across the state.
In the words of one prominent voice: "It's important that we don't allow the arts to become just a platform of observers; it's about participation; it's about artists. And in my view, an active arts community is a community where there's diversity, where the community is engaged with artists, where they're welcoming of artists, where the artists and the art forms are not institutionalised for their own sake, but they are ever-evolving - they're thoughtful, they're powerful, perpetually fresh, perpetually edgy". . .
An effective arts policy, collaborating with the independent arts, will create partnerships with those smaller organisations already immersed in artist development. A devolved funding approach overcomes the stop-start nature of project funding, securing the committment of expert organisations for programs such as mentorships, audience development, public space creation.
In 2011, Victoria's arts policy must take the creativity, diversity and sheer scale of the independent arts as its starting point. With a strong peer-review culture, and unencumbered by the art-form boards of the Australia Council, Arts Victoria is well placed to collaborate on new models. . . (Esther Anatolitis, wind assisted by T. Baillieu (aka "The Voice") - The Age, 17/01/11)