tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/obituary-8016/articlesObituary – The Conversation2024-02-21T00:40:40Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2240122024-02-21T00:40:40Z2024-02-21T00:40:40ZMarion Halligan was a woman of great warmth and generosity, and a consummate novelist<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576910/original/file-20240220-18-9e7zxe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=428%2C10%2C1974%2C1257&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marion Halligan (1940-2024).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy8O58a1AQA">YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A13513">Marion Halligan</a>, who died on February 19 at the age of 83, was one of Australia’s finest authors. She has more than 20 books to her credit, including novels, short story collections and non-fiction. Her novels are compulsively readable and full of ideas. </p>
<p>Halligan was born and raised in Newcastle, but for most of her life she lived in and wrote about Canberra. She conveyed a strong sense of the place, with Lake Burley Griffin at the centre, “cool and severe and beautiful” as she described it in her 2003 novel <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Marion-Halligan-Point-9781741143720">The Point</a>. </p>
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<p>I <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41957332">interviewed</a> Halligan about The Point for Radio Adelaide and later published the interview in Antipodes. She was audibly taken aback when I likened her work to that of the great British novelist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Iris-Murdoch">Iris Murdoch</a>. Although she admitted being an admirer of Murdoch, she had not thought of her as an influence. </p>
<p>But for me the resemblance was striking. What I saw was not imitation, but a shared attitude to the capacity of novels to explore the big questions of life, without sacrificing their readability. In our interview, Halligan said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seems to me that novels are very much about this question of how shall we live, not answering it but asking it, and what novelists do is look at people who live different sorts of lives, and often people who live rather badly are a good way of asking the question. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another attribute Halligan shared with Murdoch was the richness of her web of allusions. In Halligan’s case, this was formed from the multitude of cultures and histories that make up Australian life in the 21st century. Her characters are embedded in their worlds. She said that she believed in giving her readers </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a whole lot of concrete things to hang on to. […] Lakes and trees and food and maybe buildings. […] Then when you’ve done that you can come in with the ideas and abstract things, the unconcrete things, the emotions, and people will trust you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Halligan never wrote the same novel twice. The Point is particularly Murdochian in its structure and tone. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovers%27_Knots">Lovers’ Knots</a> (1992) is a historical novel, covering a century of family stories. <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Marion-Halligan-Apricot-Colonel-9781741147667">The Apricot Colonel</a> (2006) and its sequel <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Marion-Halligan-Murder-on-the-Apricot-Coast-9781741753844">Murder on the Apricot Coast</a> (2008) are witty novels in the “whodunit” vein, playing with the familiar formula in clever ways. </p>
<p>Unlike many novelists, Halligan also wrote excellent short stories, publishing five collections. Intriguing and mordant, always intelligent, the stories in collections such as The Hanged Man in the Garden (1989) and Shooting the Fox (2011) are well worth revisiting.</p>
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<p>Halligan suffered much heartache in her personal life and wrote about it directly in fiction and memoir. Her novel <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Marion-Halligan-Fog-Garden-9781865087696">The Fog Garden</a> (2001) was written after the death of her first husband. It is a moving tribute to a beloved partner, and a searching and honest account of adjusting to life without him. </p>
<p>I recall her telling me that it was a novel she needed to write, so she put her other projects on hold until it was done.</p>
<p>Halligan’s last book, <a href="https://thamesandhudson.com.au/product/words-for-lucy-a-story-of-love-loss-and-the-celebration-of-life/">Words for Lucy</a>, published in 2022, was written for her daughter, who died in 2004. </p>
<h2>A unique contribution</h2>
<p>A consummate novelist and a brilliant wordsmith, Halligan was also a woman of great warmth and generosity. I met her several times. I visited her home in Canberra and partook of her hospitality. That she was an advocate for “slow food” – not necessarily complicated food, but “food with attention paid” – was obvious. </p>
<p>Her kitchen was large and welcoming, replete with wonderful aromas. Her non-fiction book <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/9781741154443">The Taste of Memory</a> (2004) celebrated food and its part in our lives and networks of love and memory.</p>
<p>Reviewing <a href="https://fac.flinders.edu.au/dspace/api/core/bitstreams/5bf9d07c-7700-4f0c-b7ed-85383a469107/content">The Apricot Colonel</a> in 2006, I wrote that “in Marion Halligan’s world, a male character who bottles apricots, chargrills vegetables, and speculates about the derivation of the word ‘idyll’ is never going to be a villain”. </p>
<p>There are not many generalisations that could be made about her, but I stand by this one.</p>
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<p>Marion Halligan was a unique contributor to Australian literature and culture.
She served as chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and received numerous awards for her writing, including the ACT Book of the Year, which she won three times. In 2022, the ACT Writers Centre was renamed <a href="https://marion.ink/">Marion</a> in recognition of her literary achievements and active support of local writers.</p>
<p>She was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2006 “for service to literature as an author, to the promotion of Australian writers and to support for literary events and professional organisations”, Halligan has nevertheless not yet been the subject of a book-length study, unlike many novelists of her generation. </p>
<p>I commented in our interview that readability seems somewhat disreputable among literary scholars, and we agreed that was strange – and regrettable. </p>
<p>Halligan wrote movingly about death and dying, about loving and losing. She suffered the loss that we now suffer, losing her. She will be missed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224012/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gillian Dooley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Marion Halligan wrote novels that are compulsively readable and full of ideas.Gillian Dooley, Adjunct Associate in English, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2237742024-02-16T18:21:08Z2024-02-16T18:21:08ZNavalny dies in prison − but his blueprint for anti-Putin activism will live on<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576225/original/file-20240216-26-sb3w3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5946%2C3574&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The legacy of Alexei Navalny lives on.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-alexei-navalny-candles-and-flowers-are-left-at-news-photo/2008366667?adppopup=true">Ian Langsdon/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Long <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/europe/russia-putin-election-boris-nadezhdin.html">lines of Russians endured subzero temperatures</a> in January 2024 to demand that <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-anti-war-candidate-nadezhdin-says-he-has-enough-signatures-run-president-2024-01-31/">anti-Ukraine war candidate Boris Nadezhdin</a> be allowed to run in the forthcoming presidential election. It was protest by petition – a tactic that reflects the legacy of Alexei Navalny, the longtime Russian pro-democracy campaigner. Authorities say Navalny, a persistent thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/world/europe/aleksei-navalny-dead-russia.html">died in prison</a> on Feb. 16, 2024.</p>
<p>For more than a decade, Navalny fought Russian authoritarianism at the ballot box and on the streets as the most recognizable face of anti-Putinism, filtering support to candidates brave enough to stand against the Kremlin’s wishes. </p>
<p>Often opposition does not translate into electoral success. Nadezhdin supporters did not expect that their man could actually defeat Putin in the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-putin-run-again-president-2024-2023-12-08/">vote scheduled for March 20, 2024</a>. Given how tightly the Kremlin controls politics in Russia, the result of the presidential election is a foregone conclusion.</p>
<p>But for many Russians, the opportunity to support Nadezhdin’s candidacy was the only legal means they had to communicate their opposition to Putin and the war. The fact that authorities ultimately <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/08/boris-nadezhdin-antiwar-candidate-putin/">barred</a> Nadezhdin from participating suggests that the Kremlin remains cautious about any candidate who punctures official narratives of a nation united behind Putin’s war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>That effort to protest the election seems all the more poignant following Navalny’s death. It reflected the heart of a strategy that Navalny developed over more than a decade and that <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4HseTkMAAAAJ&hl=en">I have written about</a> since 2011.</p>
<h2>The movement remains</h2>
<p>Navalny understood that opposition in Russia was about exposing the <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/united-russia-party-of-crooks-and-thieves-and-then-some/">corruption</a> in Putin’s party, United Russia; shining a light on <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/elections-protest-and-authoritarian-regime-stability/51A474C37A1671C885CC5F90091EDBC0">electoral manipulation</a>; and alerting the world to growing <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/russian-repression-of-dissidents-civil-society-reaches-unprecedented-levels/7279656.html">political violence</a>. </p>
<p>Navalny highlighted the very real opposition to Putin and authoritarian rule that exists in Russia despite attempts to hide it from the world.</p>
<p>To achieve these goals, team Navalny – and it is important to remember that while Navalny the man is dead, the <a href="https://acf.international">movement he sparked</a> remains – repeatedly used elections to make the opposition visible and spark political debate.</p>
<p>Navalny <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-blogger-alexei-navalny-in-spotlight-after-arrest/2011/12/06/gIQA5tZPZO_story.html">emerged as a political force</a> in 2011, when he kicked off a large national protest movement ahead of the 2012 parliamentary election by labeling Putin’s United Russia the “Party of Crooks and Thieves.” He held contests to create memes to illustrate the slogan and mobilized voters who did not support Putin’s party.</p>
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<span class="caption">Opposition activists in 2011 declare, ‘We did not vote for crooks and thieves!’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/opposition-activists-protest-in-the-siberian-city-of-news-photo/135444601?adppopup=true">Valery Titievsky/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Putin inevitably won the election, with the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer mission commenting that <a href="https://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/88661">due to irregularities and abuses</a> the winner “was never in doubt.”</p>
<p>But nonetheless, Navalny’s efforts meant that a new opposition was in place and ready to take to the streets to fight election fraud.</p>
<h2>Getting out of the electoral ‘ghetto’</h2>
<p>Despite his arrest and conviction on fraud charges in 2013, Navalny <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/russian-mayoral-election-white">ran for mayor</a> of Moscow that year. In the campaign, he innovated electoral politics, recruiting young volunteers who met voters on the streets and in their apartment blocks. </p>
<p>Navalny <a href="https://www.lai.lv/viedokli/navalnys-i-have-a-dream-moment-in-moscows-mayoral-election-313">won almost 30%</a> of the vote – double that expected – and claimed that the only reason Putin’s hand-picked candidate, Sergei Sobyanin, had got above the 50% needed to secure a first-round victory was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/moscows-mayoral-race-rattles-the-kremlin/2013/09/09/458edb8a-1986-11e3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html">due to a falsified vote</a>.</p>
<p>Navalny later <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43555051">articulated</a> the real success, as he saw it, in an interview with fellow opposition figure <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/russia-jails-putin-critic-vladimir-kara-murza-for-treason/a-65343380">Vladimir Kara-Murza</a>: “We have shown that ordinary people – with no administrative resources, no corporate sponsors, no public relations gurus – can unite and achieve results at the ballot box,” he said. “We have shown that we are no longer confined to a 3% electoral ‘ghetto.’”</p>
<p>Navalny concluded: “For me, the most important result of this campaign is the return of real politics to Russia.”</p>
<p>During that 2013 campaign, my research team <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/rupo/1/4/article-p347_2.xml">interviewed Navalny activists</a> and observed the work in campaign headquarters. </p>
<p>These interviews underscored Navalny’s relationship with the people. Many of the volunteers rejected the idea that they were working for him. Instead, they were volunteering because they admired Navalny’s tactics. They liked his political style. They wanted change in Russia.</p>
<p>Navalny brought Russians alienated by Russian politics together and empowered them. As one campaign volunteer <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/rupo/1/4/article-p347_2.xml">interviewed</a> in our study argued, “We all were frightened before the first protest and even left a will before we joined the movement. But it was not a mob. There were people like us. The feeling we had in Navalny’s office was the feeling of being with people like me.” </p>
<p>Through the next decade, Navalny and his team continued to return political competition to Russia’s politics. They built local organizations that attracted support and <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20200914-kremlin-set-for-victory-in-local-elections-navalny-s-allies-make-symbolic-gains-in-siberia">found some success</a> in Siberian cities Tomsk and Novosibirsk, despite the <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/10/25/how-kremlin-learned-to-defeat-its-opposition-pub-85620">endless obstacles</a> the Kremlin placed in their way.</p>
<h2>Return from exile</h2>
<p>The culmination of these efforts is a system Navalny developed in 2018 called <a href="https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-elections-media-voting-cec43110142e7ce362b2d4f9acd9b1f0">Smart Voting</a>. Through an <a href="https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-elections-media-voting-cec43110142e7ce362b2d4f9acd9b1f0">online tool</a>, the Navalny team encourages Russians to support any reform-minded candidates in elections and in particular directs voters to the candidate most likely to beat Putin’s United Russia party.</p>
<p>Research by Russian scholars Mikhail Turchenko and Grigorii Golosov <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2022.2147485">shows that the tool</a> has had a very significant effect on voters and increasing turnout, opposition votes and popular attention on elections.</p>
<p>Navalny’s efforts seemingly irked the Russian state and may have been the impetus of an assassination attempt against him by Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the FSB, in 2020.</p>
<p>Navalny survived <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/14/alexei-navalny-in-critical-situation-after-possible-poisoning-says-ally">Novichok poisoning</a> only because <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/06/navalny-poisoning-germany-raises-pressure-on-russia-with-sanctions-talk">international pressure</a> forced the regime to allow him to be <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53865811">airlifted to Germany</a> for treatment. During his recovery, Navalny used the attack on him to further his political activism and convey the regime’s growing brutality. He famously <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwvA49ZXnf8">interviewed his would-be assassin</a> to uncover the details of the operation.</p>
<p>Navalny’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-alexey-navalny-returned-to-russia">return to Russia</a> under threat of arrest in February 2021 kicked off the largest street protests – in support of the opposition leader – since the collapse of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>These protests inspired a new generation of activists. They also <a href="https://en.ovdinfo.org/suppression-rallies-support-alexei-navalny-january-17-and-18-2021">marked</a> new levels of police brutality against pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets and in the years since.</p>
<h2>Handing on the baton</h2>
<p>Since 2022, I have led a research team that has interviewed Russians who left the country in opposition to the war in Ukraine. Many participated in the anti-war protests of late February and early March 2022 and point to Navalny’s return to Russia as the origin of their own political engagement and activism.</p>
<p>As one respondent argued: “My civic position began to emerge. All this was close to Navalny, his movement, and his encouragement to notice something, to pay attention … I began to go to rallies, and became much more interested and aware of politics.”</p>
<p>While Navalny <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/25/europe/alexey-navalny-russian-opposition-found-prison-intl/index.html">languished in prison camps</a> following his arrest on charges of <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/02/russian-court-rules-jail-navalny">violating parole</a> during his recovery in Germany, many of these activists in exile <a href="https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/democracy/democracy-exile-political-action-anti-war-russian-migrants-facilitates-possible-democratization">continued</a> to operate outside of Russia, our <a href="https://outrush.io/eng">research partners</a> have found.</p>
<p>They <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/underground-networks-russians-helping-ukrainian-refugees-2022-05-11/">support Ukrainian refugees and war efforts</a> and participate in tracking down children who have been taken to Russia. They are active in anti-war demonstrations and <a href="https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/press/press-releases/russian-migrant-activists-try-to-mobilise-diasporas-in-georgia-and-germany">support</a> each other in exile.</p>
<p>This new generation of Russian activists – whether those in exile advocating for change or those risking their well-being in Russia to support anti-war candidates – is Navalny’s legacy, and I believe it is powerful. </p>
<p>Before his death, Navalny <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-alexei-navalny-had-a-message-for-russians-if-he-died-2024-2">spoke directly to the generation of activists he inspired</a>: “Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223774/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Regina Smyth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Alexei Navalny, a persistent thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died on Feb. 16, 2024, in prison, authorities said.Regina Smyth, Professor of Political Science, Indiana UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2227652024-02-06T12:29:17Z2024-02-06T12:29:17ZZuleikha Mayat: South African author and activist who led a life of courage, compassion and integrity<p>Few Indian South African women have achieved wider public recognition than author, human rights and cultural activist <a href="https://salaamedia.com/2021/05/08/championpeople-meet-zuleikha-mayat-social-activist-and-renowned-author-of-indian-delights-cookbook/">Zuleikha Mayat</a>, who passed away on 2 February 2024. An honorary doctorate from the University of KwaZulu-Natal was just one of many awards bestowed on her during a life that spanned almost 98 years. </p>
<p>Mayat was a remarkable pioneer, evocative writer, public speaker, civic worker, human rights champion and philanthropist. She was a staunch supporter of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/whither-palestine-ronnie-kasrils-19-may-2015-london">Palestinian freedom</a> and an end to Israeli apartheid and genocide. </p>
<p>I am a scholar of social justice issues in South Africa and have known Mayat for 49 years, through my friendship with her children. I assisted her with her last book, and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/dr-zuleikha-mayat-appreciation-saleem-badat">recently penned an e-book about her incredible life</a>. </p>
<p>She embodied principled, faith-based, socially committed, inspired leadership based on special talents and indomitable resilience, and upheld the dignity of all with whom she associated. In <a href="https://alqalam.co.za/zuleikha-mayat-93-a-true-indian-delight/">an interview in 2019</a> she said that she hoped to be remembered as “someone who interacted with everyone, no matter who they were, without prejudice”.</p>
<h2>Early life</h2>
<p>She was born on 3 August 1926 in Potchefstroom in South Africa’s North West province, the third-generation child of Indian-South African shopkeepers of Gujarati origins. In a country marked by racial divides even before the advent of apartheid in 1948, she learnt from her grandfather – <a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/893561">as she later wrote</a> – that intermingling across social divides and boundaries was important, as was “learning the languages and folkways” of other social groups.</p>
<p>Her father was generous to poor people and drummed into her, <a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/893561">she later reflected</a>, that “others have a share in our incomes”. For her “the Bounty of God is not just for a select few but must be shared” so that all “can benefit”. </p>
<p>The young Mayat read voraciously but racialism stifled her formal education. After grade 6 at the Potchefstroom Indian Government School there was no secondary school for Indians. Segregation (<a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/control-1910-1948">1910-1948</a>), the precursor to apartheid, which legally entrenched racial classification and enforced segregation in all walks of life, meant separate schools for different “races” and the schools for whites would not enrol her. </p>
<p>Patriarchy also played a role. She was one of seven siblings; boys, like her three brothers, continued secondary education in other towns or cities “<a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/893561">but sending daughters away was almost unheard of</a>”. And, so, her ambition to become a doctor was thwarted. </p>
<p>At age 14, as described in her 1996 book <a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/893561">A Treasure Trove of Memories</a>: A Reflection on the Experiences of the Peoples of Potchefstroom, she discovered that she “had a gift as a writer, an intellectual orientation, and a capacity for expressing strong views”. A correspondence course boosted the “English in which (she) would come to write” prolifically. Later, she achieved a certificate in journalism.</p>
<h2>A letter to the editor</h2>
<p>1944 was a turning point. An 18-year-old Mayat posted a letter signed “Miss Zuleikha Bismillah of Potchefstroom” to the newspaper <a href="https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/keywords/indian-views">Indian Views</a>, which was published in Gujarati and English. The editor was M.I. Meer, father of human rights activist and scholar <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/professor-fatima-meer">Fatima Meer</a>. He published the letter, in which <a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/893561">she</a> “argued for higher levels of education for girls” in a “style that revealed not only a principled passion concerning this matter but also her sharp wit”.</p>
<p>In 1954, aged 28, she invited friends to her small apartment in the coastal South African city of Durban. After supper, the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/gender-modernity-indian-delights-womens-cultural-group-durban-1954-2010-goolam-vahed-and">Women’s Cultural Group</a> was founded. It sought to mobilise women for social change.</p>
<p>Fatima and her husband <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ismail-chota-meer">Ismail Meer</a> roped Mayat and her husband Mohammed into their revolutionary activities. While hiding from the apartheid authorities, activist and future president Nelson Mandela slept at the Mayat home a few times.</p>
<p>In 1961, she edited the famous <a href="https://www.spiceemporium.co.za/product/indian-delights-orange/">Indian Delights</a>, a recipe book, which flew off the bookshelves “<a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/zuleikha-mayats-indian-delights-still-cooking-9845007">like hot samosas at a buffet</a>”. Several new editions have been published and it remains one of the best selling books in South Africa today.</p>
<p>Between 1956 and 1963 Mayat contributed a weekly column to Indian Views. Her column, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290929021_Fahmida%27s_worlds_Gender_home_and_the_Gujarati_Muslim_Diaspora_in_mid-20th_century_South_Africa">Fahmida’s World</a>, brought what academics Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen <a href="https://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/books/gender-modernity-indian-delights">have described</a> as her “signature liveliness and humour, as well as a sharp moral eye, to bear on various topics”. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/books/gender-modernity-indian-delights">In her columns</a>, she criticised social hierarchies, “ethnic and class prejudices” and racist and inhuman conduct, and commented on “the ethical triumphs and breaches of daily life”. </p>
<p>Mayat was involved in numerous institutions and organisations. These included the McCord Zulu Hospital, Shifa hospital, Black Women’s Convention, South African Institute of Race Relations, the Natal Indian Blind Society, and schools, old age homes and mosques.</p>
<p>And, throughout her life, she wrote.</p>
<h2>A life of writing</h2>
<p>In 1966 she compiled Quranic Lights, a book of prayers. <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-08-09-textiles-carry-a-living-history-in-nanimas-chest/">Nanima’s Chest</a> appeared in 1981 to promote the appreciation of traditional Indian textiles and clothing.</p>
<p><a href="https://iucat.iu.edu/iub/893561">A Treasure Trove of Memories</a>: A Reflection on the Experiences of the Peoples of Potchefstroom (1996) recounts growing up and life in her home town. South African scholar Betty Govinden <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Devarakshanam-Betty-Govinden/1751866409">called the book</a> “an important contribution to autobiographical fiction in this country”.</p>
<p>History: Muslims of Gujarat was published in 2008, the result of “inner urges” that compelled her to probe into her family’s distant past.</p>
<p>A year later came <a href="https://humanities.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/content_migration/humanities_uct_ac_za/1009/files/Devarakshanam_Govinden.pdf">Dear Ahmedbhai, Dear Zuleikhabehn: The Letters of Zuleikha Mayat and Ahmed Kathrada 1979-1989</a>, based on 75 letters exchanged between herself and anti-apartheid giant <a href="https://theconversation.com/ahmed-kathrada-a-simple-life-full-of-love-after-26-years-of-incarceration-75361">Ahmed Kathrada</a> that covered culture, politics and religion.</p>
<p>Then in 2015 she published <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/post-south-africa/20150520/281526519639492">Journeys of Binte Batuti</a>, a travel memoir. And at age 95 Mayat published <a href="https://muslimviews.co.za/2021/07/30/a-new-book-by-the-evergreen-zuleikha-mayat/">The Odyssey of Crossing Oceans</a>, an enthralling and expansive narrative by a consummate storyteller, which embodied some of her philosophy of life. </p>
<h2>Justice and peace for all</h2>
<p>Post-1994, when democratic elections were held for the first time in South Africa, Mayat continued her fight for equity and social justice. She <a href="https://alqalam.co.za/zuleikha-mayat-sadly-india-has-departed-from-indian-nation-to-hindutva-nation/">spoke out</a> and marched against local and global injustices. </p>
<p>She was acutely aware that for many the world was an inhospitable place. She sought, <a href="https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/read-nelson-mandelas-inauguration-speech-president-sa">like Nelson Mandela</a>, “justice for all”, “peace for all” and “work, bread, water and salt for all” – for people to be “freed to fulfil themselves”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222765/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Saleem Badat receives funding from the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. </span></em></p>Mayat embodied principled, faith-based, socially committed, inspired leadership.Saleem Badat, Research Professor, UFS History Department, University of the Free StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2208172024-01-17T13:36:23Z2024-01-17T13:36:23ZChef Bill Granger dies and leaves behind an inadvertent legacy – the avocado toast meme<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569130/original/file-20240112-25-mrzqwn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C25%2C4268%2C2818&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is it avocado toast or high interest rates that have prevented so many young people from buying homes?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/avocado-butter-royalty-free-image/185328444?phrase=avocado+toast+illustration&searchscope=image%2Cfilm&adppopup=true">Josef Mohyla/E+ via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Christmas Day 2023, world-renowned Australian chef and restaurateur <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/dec/27/bill-granger-renowned-australian-cook-dies-aged-54">Bill Granger died at 54</a>. </p>
<p>Granger owned and operated 19 restaurants across Australia, the U.K., Japan and South Korea. He authored 14 cookbooks, produced several TV shows and was awarded <a href="https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/food-and-wine/how-bill-granger-conquered-the-world-s-breakfast-tables-20230307-p5cq7g">the Medal of the Order of Australia</a>.</p>
<p>But his lasting legacy may be his role in making avocado toast <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/dining/bill-granger-dead.html">a Western culinary staple</a> – and, inadvertently, the viral meme that transformed the open sandwich into a symbol of generational tension.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Man uses a spatula to flip pancakes in a frying pan." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569577/original/file-20240116-17-asgem0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Granger was renowned for adding a bougie twist to breakfast.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/australian-chef-bill-granger-cooks-pancakes-for-tasting-of-news-photo/72864230?adppopup=true">Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The practice of spreading avocado on bread has existed for centuries, particularly in Central and South America. Some speculate it dates as far back as the 1500s, <a href="https://tastecooking.com/really-invented-avocado-toast/">when the Spanish settlers brought Western breads to Mexico</a>. But a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/06/how-the-internet-became-ridiculously-obsessed-with-avocado-toast/">2016 Washington Post article</a> pointed to Granger as the first person to put avocado toast on a menu, when he did so at his Sydney café, Bills, in 1993.</p>
<p>I love ordering the occasional avocado toast. But as a sociologist of the internet and social media, I’m most interested in the meme – its origins, how it became a point of contention and how it has ultimately muddied the waters of inequality. </p>
<h2>Avocado toast and the American dream</h2>
<p>On May 15, 2017, Australian real estate tycoon <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/09/13/australia-real-estate-ceo-tim-gurner-pain-in-economy-avocado-toast/">Tim Gurner</a> said <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/australian-millionaire-millennials-avocado-toast-house">in an interview</a>, “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.”</p>
<p>Gurner’s comments implied that young people were not buying homes at the same rate as older generations due to their poor money management skills – unlike Gurner and his cohort, who understood the value of a buck and the importance of an honest day’s work. </p>
<p>No matter that minimal research revealed that Gurner’s nearly billion-dollar empire <a href="https://thiswastv.com/tim-gurner-parents/">began with financial assistance from his wealthy family</a>. The backlash on the internet was swift and searing, as Gurner became a stand-in for an entire out-of-touch generation who didn’t know how easy they had it.</p>
<p>Memes emphasized the fact that baby boomers, in general, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2019.01.004">had an easier time becoming homeowners</a> compared to millennials, who largely came of age during the post-2008 economic downturn, which forced them to reckon with the crumbling remains of the American dream.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"910207147861983232"}"></div></p>
<h2>Generational tensions or class tensions?</h2>
<p>In their article “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205211025724">A Sociological Analysis of ‘OK Boomer</a>,’” sociologists Jason Mueller and John McCollum describe how we’re in a period rife with confusions exacerbated by the internet. </p>
<p>They conclude that meme trends like “<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ok-boomer">OK Boomer</a>” – a phrase that Gen Z popularized as an online retort to politicians and reporters who dismissed young people – reflect a world in which generational wars online coexist with class wars offline. The avocado toast meme works in a similar way.</p>
<p>In offline reality, <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27123/w27123.pdf">there is some correlation between generations and wealth</a>. But generations are not what ultimately explain class inequality. </p>
<p>Instead, economic sociologists largely agree that a political emphasis on market “freedoms” and the concurrent paring back of programs that distribute resources have led to soaring economic inequality. These include laws that deregulated markets and privatized public spaces, as well as those that scaled back funding for health care, welfare, education and other government services. The policies first emerged under the umbrella of “<a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-090220-025543">The Washington Consensus</a>” in the late 20th century. </p>
<p>For example, the <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/general/telecommunications-act-1996">Telecommunications Act of 1996</a>, rather than treating emerging internet technology as a public good, <a href="https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/14707">ensured the privatization of the internet</a>, paving the way for an online economy that profits off the attention and data of users.</p>
<p>Deregulation has created the conditions for today’s economic reality, in which many millennials and Gen Zers must work <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/REGE-08-2021-0153/full/html">precarious jobs in the gig economy</a>. They continue to struggle to buy homes and afford rent.</p>
<p>But importantly, many baby boomers face the same economic reality. Millions of them have been forced <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.22694">to delay retirement</a>, particularly <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.22694">if they’re from marginalized races and genders</a>. </p>
<p>In other words, the adverse impacts of class inequality leave no generation untouched.</p>
<h2>Illusions of separation</h2>
<p>So why does it feel like most baby boomers have it so easy?</p>
<p>Cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in his 2009 book “<a href="https://files.libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf">Capitalist Realism</a>,” describes this moment in history as one in which “hyperreality” prevails. </p>
<p>The term, coined by <a href="https://revistia.org/files/articles/ejis_v3_i3_17/Ryszard.pdf">French post-modernist Jean Baudrillard</a> in 1981, essentially describes a state in which simulations of reality appear more “real” than reality. </p>
<p>In his book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Simulacra-Simulation-Body-Theory-Materialism/dp/0472065211">Simulacra and Simulation</a>,” Baudrillard uses the example of Disneyland to describe hyperreality. Many people would rather pay to go to Disneyland – a park built to mimic imaginary places – <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/destination-science-the-natural-world-outside-disney-world">than travel to national parks</a>, where they can experience nature for free or on the cheap.</p>
<p>The virtual world of the internet – with its own sets of cultural norms, language and memes – is the epitome of hyperreality.</p>
<p>And in the hyperreal world of the internet, as Mueller and McCollum discuss in their article about the “OK Boomer” meme, generational tensions take form.</p>
<p>Memes like avocado toast construct a state of generational conflict in the online world that is real, quite simply, because it feels real.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1011175349055623169"}"></div></p>
<p>Algorithms have every incentive to stoke this conflict. </p>
<p>That’s because online generational conflicts, along with most social media battles, <a href="https://theconversation.com/hate-cancel-culture-blame-algorithms-129402">are immensely profitable</a>. In “<a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virality">Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks</a>,” sociologist Tony Sampson concludes that viral content usually elicits strong emotional reactions.</p>
<p>When users, old and young, are angry with one another, and express that anger in the language of memes, social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, get more engagement and make more money.</p>
<h2>Reframing avocado toast</h2>
<p>What Sampson finds, though, is that positive feelings also lead to virality.</p>
<p>So perhaps one way to honor Granger is to reclaim the avocado toast meme as an in-joke that nonmillionaires and nonbillionaires of all generations can relate to. </p>
<p>It’s about one billionaire’s absurd proposition that millennials eating a fleshy fruit on a piece of toast is preventing them from buying homes. It’s the billionaire divorced from the struggles of everyday people who’s out of touch – not an entire generation of boomers. </p>
<p>The avocado toast meme serves as a reminder that the hyperreal space of the internet distorts an offline reality in which generations share struggles, whether through housing insecurity or delayed retirements – a reality perpetuated by billionaires like Tim Gurner and the economic systems that serve their interests.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220817/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aarushi Bhandari does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Granger, who died in December 2023, is credited with making avocado toast fashionable. Little did he know that his lasting legacy would inspire a meme that symbolized generational tension.Aarushi Bhandari, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Davidson CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2210072024-01-12T21:43:06Z2024-01-12T21:43:06ZA ‘giant’ of Canadian politics: Ed Broadbent’s mixed legacy on social democracy and free trade<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/a-giant-of-canadian-politics-ed-broadbents-mixed-legacy-on-social-democracy-and-free-trade" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent was one of the good ones.</p>
<p>News of his death at age 87, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ed-broadbent-dies-1.7080936">announced on Jan. 11</a>, has <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/ottawa-playbook/2024/01/12/canada-loses-a-giant-remembering-ed-broadbent-00135268">inspired a wave of tributes</a>, including from former political opponents. <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ed-broadbent-passes-away-remembered-fondly-1.7081090">Brian Mulroney called Broadbent</a> a “giant in the Canadian political scene” and rightly said he would have been prime minister had he led any other party. </p>
<p>I still smile thinking about a photograph taken during the 1988 election when Broadbent gamely had the <a href="https://www.ledroit.com/2013/11/21/maurice-mad-dog-vachon-rend-lame-d60a79613ee313cbc0a5518ad434249a/">Vachon brothers</a>, beloved wrestlers from Québec who were NDP candidates, in a double headlock. It was silly, and great political theatre. </p>
<p>However, Broadbent’s political legacy was a mixed one. </p>
<h2>Turning point in history</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Party-positions-in-the-1988-polls_fig1_252539415">Riding high in the polls</a>, the NDP decided to play it safe in the 1988 election and play down the divisive free trade issue. It was a monumental mistake — for the NDP, certainly, which saw the John Turner Liberals capture the issue, but also for the country. </p>
<p><a href="https://canadianelectionsdatabase.ca/PHASE5/?p=0&type=election&ID=610">Brian Mulroney’s Tories won</a> in what was a de facto referendum on the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement and, as it turned out, a turning point in 20th century Canadian political history. </p>
<p>The free trade election rocked the federal NDP to its very foundations. <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/robert-white">Bob White</a>, president of the Canadian Auto Workers, and a vice president of the federal party, was livid. He drafted an angry seven-page letter to the NDP executive a few days later, as he “watched the disintegration of what should have been the New Democratic Party’s finest hour.” </p>
<p>For White, the election strategy and result were nothing short of disastrous and warranted a full debate within the party. The executive of the Canadian Labour Congress met two days after the election. In his letter he said, “their level of anger, frustration and concern about the campaign, was the most emotional I have ever seen.”</p>
<p>Somehow, the NDP — the party of labour — did not grasp the central importance of free trade for working class Canadians. </p>
<p>White reminded the party leadership that, for the past three years, the labour movement had mobilized on this issue across the country: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“While a lot of our concern was expressed about jobs, even more dealt with social programs, environment, regional assistance, energy, privatization, deregulation, etc. In other words, not a narrow self-interest approach.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>With business organizations lining up on the other side of the debate, why didn’t the party of working people understand what was at stake? </p>
<p>In answering this question, White declared that: “we didn’t fail by accident — but rather, we failed by design.” Indeed, “if ever there is an issue the social democratic movement in Canada should oppose with total emotion and strength, it is this deal.”</p>
<h2>The Free Trade Agreement’s legacy</h2>
<p>Broadbent <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-ed-broadbent-stepped-down-as-ndp-leader-1.5028383">resigned as NDP leader soon after the election</a> after 14 years of leading the party.</p>
<p>The timing of the <a href="https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-commerce/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/agr-acc/united_states-etats_unis/fta-ale/background-contexte.aspx?lang=eng">Free Trade Agreement</a> could not have been worse for Canada’s manufacturing sector, given the high Canadian dollar, which had risen from <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/66674/timeline-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-canadian-loonie/">70 cents to the U.S. dollar in 1986 to 89 cents in 1991</a>. </p>
<p>There were other factors at play, such as higher interest rates and the imposition of the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/no-regrets-as-gst-turns-20-mulroney-1.905501">goods and services tax (GST)</a> by the Mulroney government.</p>
<p>In short order, Canada’s branch plant economy was made largely redundant as multinational corporations restructured their operations in favour of global supply chains, rather than branch plants serving national markets. </p>
<p>Employment in Ontario’s manufacturing industries as a percentage of the workforce, dropped like a stone <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253986997_Community_Participation_and_Multilevel_Governance_in_Economic_Development_Policy">from 30.2 per cent in 1981 to just 18 per cent in 1991</a>. </p>
<p>In an interview with Bob Rae, NDP premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, in April 2023 for a book I’m writing about his government, he told me the “initial impact of free trade in Ontario in 1990 was terrible. It was a disaster. Because you had all of these companies that were closing down branch plants left and right.” </p>
<h2>Lessons from the past</h2>
<p>There is a lot of talk these days about “<a href="https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/green-jobs/WCMS_824102/lang--en/index.htm">just transitions</a>,” especially in the context of climate change. We can learn a lot from the profoundly unjust transition after free trade. </p>
<p>There were no special adjustment measures. Instead, the Mulroney government <a href="https://canadianlabour.ca/passage-of-the-unemployment-insurance-act/">restricted eligibility for unemployment insurance</a>, pushing many directly onto provincial welfare rolls. Even severance pay was clawed back.</p>
<p>The 1988 election was a watershed in Canadian politics, sweeping aside the economic nationalism that had been a bulwark against neoliberal globalization. Thereafter, protectionists were to the new global order what the <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/why-did-the-luddites-protest/">Luddites had been to the industrial revolution</a>: objects of ridicule and scorn. </p>
<p>The extreme <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/9809757/wealth-gap-canada-first-quarter-2023/">income disparity</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-function-in-an-increasingly-polarized-society-171081">political polarization</a> we see today, at least in part, is the direct result of the path we took in 1988. We will never know if Broadbent’s election would have made a difference, and this makes me sad with his passing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221007/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven High receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.</span></em></p>Former federal NDP leader and founder of the Broadbent Institute, Ed Broadbent, has died at the age of 87. His political legacy is a mixed one.Steven High, Professor of History, Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2207662024-01-09T19:17:04Z2024-01-09T19:17:04ZVale ‘sister suffragette’: how Glynis Johns became a pop-culture icon in the story of votes for women<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568340/original/file-20240108-23-ok22xb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C1%2C1173%2C658&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Disney</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Glynis Johns, most famous for her role as the suffragette mother Mrs Winifred Banks in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964), passed away last week at the age of 100. </p>
<p>A fourth-generation performer who made her <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-17-ca-126-story.html">stage debut</a> in London when she was only three weeks old, Johns inherited her Welsh father’s love of acting. She appeared with him in The Halfway House (1944) and The Sundowners (1960) and argued for the establishment of a Welsh National Theatre <a href="https://twitter.com/huwthomas/status/791367871242862592">as early as 1971</a>. </p>
<p>Johns’s career spanned eight decades in Hollywood, Broadway and the British stage and screen. As Palm Springs’s Desert Sun <a href="https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19630426.2.50">reported</a> in 1962, her “husky voice and big blue eyes” were her hallmarks. But it was her portrayal of Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins which would make her a pop culture icon.</p>
<h2>A childhood inspiration</h2>
<p>Feminist activists and scholars often describe the Mrs Banks character as a childhood inspiration. </p>
<p>As feminist communications scholar Amanda Firestone <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Resist_and_Persist/s5HiDwAAQBAJ">reflects</a> on the film: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I especially loved […] Mrs Banks (Glynis Johns), who marches around the family home, putting Votes for Women sashes onto the housekeeper, cook, and the (departing) nanny. Of course, as a kid, I had no idea that the people and events embedded in the song’s lyrics were actual parts of history, but I did find a kind of joy in a vague notion of women’s empowerment.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Set in 1910, the symbolism associated with Mrs Banks references the history of the British suffragettes. Johns’ musical showstopper, Sister Suffragette, directly refers to <a href="https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-pankhursts-politics-protest-and-passion/">Emmeline Pankhurst</a>, who founded the militant Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. In 1906 British newspapers <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859007003239">coined</a> the moniker “suffragette” to mock the union. </p>
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<p>This ambivalence continued into the 1960s. Historian Laura E. Nym Mayhall <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4316653">argues</a> that American concern over the impact of women’s public roles on their domestic responsibilities influenced the film’s depiction of Mrs Banks, especially her movement from a public suffragette back into an involved mother at the film’s end.</p>
<p>For Mayhall, the figure of the suffragette emerges in popular culture as “a symbol of modernity”: a harbinger of democracy and political progress whose characterisation would elide ongoing struggles such as the civil rights movement. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1193&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1193&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568335/original/file-20240108-23-tf6kwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1193&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This 1909 Dunston Weiler Lithograph Co. anti-suffrage postcard offers resonances of Mrs Banks and her household staff in Mary Poppins.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/items/show/44">Catherine H. Palczewski Postcard Archive/The Suffrage Postcard Project</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While some see the character of the suffragette mother as <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Mary_Poppins/BLujEAAAQBAJ">supporting</a> women’s votes during the 1910s and women’s liberation during the 1960s, other readings of the film suggest a more satirical representation of the suffrage movement. Some historians even find <a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-6923118">resonances</a> of anti-suffrage propaganda in Mrs Banks, including in her usage of her Votes for Women sash as the tail of a kite in the film’s final scene. </p>
<p>Looking back at film reviews offers insight into how audiences received this character – and, by extension, Johns as an actor. American studies scholar Lori Kenschaft <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Girls_Boys_Books_Toys.html?id=Or13vhnA_W4C">suggests</a> that film critics who saw Mrs Banks as a “nutty suffragette mother” reiterated popular stereotypes about suffragettes and feminists being “mentally unbalanced”.</p>
<p>Such stereotypes may have been reinforced by the film’s depiction of motherhood and the nuclear family. Involved parenting emerged as the bedrock of the 1960s nuclear family, an idea both supported and actively promoted by Walt Disney in both his films and his theme parks, as <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Children_Childhood_and_Musical_Theater/XHrRDwAAQBAJ">argued</a> by American musicologist William A. Everett.</p>
<p>As Mrs Banks, Johns embodied the transition from the distant, uninvolved parenting of the British middle-class in the earlier 20th century to the involved mother who facilitated the stable nuclear family. As women’s studies scholar Anne McLeer <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4316893">argues</a>, Mary Poppins, through Johns’ portrayal of Mrs Banks, demonstrated the liberated woman of the 1960s could be contained within the nuclear family: the bedrock for a Western capitalist economy. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-mary-poppins-film-acknowledge-the-suffragettes-success-106771">Will the new Mary Poppins film acknowledge the suffragettes' success?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A long career</h2>
<p>Beyond Mary Poppins, her most prominent role was in Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical A Little Night Music (1973).</p>
<p>Johns originated the character of ageing actress Desiree Armfeldt, becoming the first to sing Send in the Clowns. As she <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-17-ca-126-story.html">reflected</a> of the classic in 1991: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s still part of me. And when you’ve got a song like Send in the Clowns, it’s timeless.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sondheim composed this song with Johns’s famously husky voice in mind. Yet some were less enamoured with her performance. One 1973 theatre critic <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3850619">described</a> Johns as “a now somewhat overage tomboy, kittenish and raspy-voiced, precise and amusing in her delivery of lines but utterly, utterly unseductive.” </p>
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<p>A veteran of stage and screen, Johns appeared in more than 60 films and 30 plays. In 1998, she was honoured with a Disney Legends Award for her role as Mrs Banks. Johns also received critical acclaim throughout her career, including a Laurel Award for Mary Poppins and a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for A Little Night Music. </p>
<p>Regardless of how incongruous her status as a “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-05/glynis-johns-mary-poppins-send-in-the-clowns/103287036">Disney feminist icon</a>” may be, Johns’s extraordinary influence upon the 20th century’s cultural memory is a remarkable legacy. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/heres-to-the-ladies-who-lunch-one-of-sondheims-greatest-achievements-was-writing-complex-women-172765">Here's to the ladies who lunch: one of Sondheim's greatest achievements was writing complex women</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220766/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ana Stevenson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lindsay Helwig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Glynis Johns, most famous for her role as the suffragette mother Mrs Winifred Banks in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964), passed away last week at the age of 100.Ana Stevenson, Senior Lecturer, University of Southern QueenslandLindsay Helwig, Lecturer in Pathways, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2193752023-12-08T18:40:11Z2023-12-08T18:40:11ZNorman Lear’s ’70s TV comedies brought people together to confront issues in a way Gen Z would appreciate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564432/original/file-20231208-19-54ndew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C53%2C6917%2C3995&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"> Producer Norman Lear on the set of his hit TV series 'All In The Family,' standing between its stars, Jean Stapleton and Carroll O'Connor.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/left-to-right-is-actor-jean-stapleton-producer-norman-lear-news-photo/1835678866?adppopup=true"> Bettmann Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Even Americans who strongly disagree with each other may <a href="https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_to_use_stories_to_bring_us_and_them_togetherg-stories-brings-people-together">find common ground</a> when they watch the same TV shows and movies, especially <a href="https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/2015/04/29/Entertainment-Education%20Sheila%20Murphy.pdf">those that make us laugh or cry</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/norman-lear-died-87300f0e49b54c05803ab315dfdf9933">Norman Lear</a>, who died on Dec. 5, 2023, at 101, created television shows that did just that.</p>
<p>“All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son” and his other biggest hits began to air in the 1970s, a time when the U.S. desperately needed to bridge divides.</p>
<h2>‘All in the Family’</h2>
<p>In the late 1960s, the U.S. was in the throes of the Vietnam War and the country was divided on many issues. Many young people were beginning to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/2006/02/21/youth-and-war/">vehemently protest</a> – and not just against the war. They sought greater equity for people of color and an end to what they perceived as unjust military operations on the other side of the world.</p>
<p>Yet TV, the dominant media of the time, largely portrayed a <a href="https://stacker.com/tv/top-100-tv-shows-60s">sanitized version of society</a>, with visions of domestic bliss, a world where few were poor and racial tensions seemed nonexistent.</p>
<p>Lear changed the face of television when he teamed up with fellow producer <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005570/">Bud Yorkin</a> to create “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066626/">All in the Family</a>.”</p>
<p>The situation comedy, which aired from 1971-79, revolved around Archie Bunker, a working-class conservative unafraid to blurt out his bigotry. It emphasized interactions with his family, particularly Archie’s modern-minded, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jYDpAf4XLM&ab_channel=TheNormanLearEffect">liberal son-in-law Michael Stivic</a>, portrayed by future director <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001661/">Rob Reiner</a>. The show tackled issues such as racism, sexism and social change, often using humor to address these complex and sensitive topics.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.songlyrics.com/archie-and-edith-bunker/those-were-the-days-all-in-the-family-theme-lyrics/">show’s theme song</a>, sung at the beginning of each episode, was an earworm aptly titled “Those were the Days.” Its lyrics parodied Archie’s stuck-in-the-past mindset: “And you knew who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men.”</p>
<p>“All in the Family” unveiled the hidden conflicts simmering within numerous American families and throughout American society. More than just a sitcom, the show was a reflection of its time and a catalyst for hard conversations about everything from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0509824/">civil rights</a> <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0509864/">to menopause</a>.</p>
<p>CBS executives initially <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/norman-lear-obituary">worried that the audience wasn’t ready</a> for this kind of truth telling. But viewers enthusiastically embraced the show. </p>
<p>“All in the Family” topped the weekly charts of the <a href="https://www.retrowaste.com/1970s/tv-shows-from-the-1970s/">most-viewed TV programs for years</a>. Critics loved it too – <a href="https://www.emmys.com/shows/all-family">the show won 22 Emmys</a>, including four for Lear.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘All in the Family’ opened with an apt theme song and ended with an old-timey tune.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New storytelling venues</h2>
<p>Today, divisive <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4099983-the-republicans-culture-wars-are-dooming-the-party-to-failure/">culture wars are on the rise again</a>. Many Americans pine for a <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/culture-wars-identity-center-politics-america/story?id=100768380">return to supposedly more traditional times</a>.</p>
<p>But show business has changed since “All in the Family” was on the air and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/arts/television/norman-lear-rob-reiner.html.">some 40 million Americans</a> tuned in to watch.</p>
<p>No single TV show can help bring everyone together now. Instead, a <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/xe/en/insights/industry/technology/media-industry-trends-2023.html">fractured audience</a> chooses from hundreds of TV and streaming channels, gaming platforms and social media sites that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad033">often reinforce existing beliefs</a>.</p>
<p>When people consume entertainment and the media, it can isolate rather than unify.</p>
<p>But as a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0853945/">former movie executive</a> who now <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xTZ0V0YAAAAJ&hl=en">conducts research about the power of storytelling</a>, I firmly believe that storytelling still can play a unifying role.</p>
<p>My research team has <a href="https://www.scholarsandstorytellers.com/css-teens-and-screens-2023">found that members of Generation Z</a>, people <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/">born between 1997 and 2012</a>, yearn for storylines that address social issues, such as inequity and bias against marginalized communities, and that mirror their personal lives. These themes, which include their relationships with their parents, are reminiscent of Norman Lear’s work.</p>
<p>Archie Bunker, for example, was <a href="https://www.outsider.com/entertainment/all-in-the-family-creator-norman-lear-says-he-based-archie-bunker-his-father/">modeled on his own father</a>.</p>
<p>Norman Lear’s legacy offers storytellers a road map for meeting the needs of Americans coming of age today. I believe that we need more storytellers who, like Lear, hold up a mirror to our world, showcasing its complexity and imperfections – both the good and the bad.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219375/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yalda T. Uhls does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The TV producer showed how storytelling can bridge divides and serve as a beacon of truth in a complex world.Yalda T. Uhls, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and Assistant Adjunct Professor in Psychology, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/958532023-10-21T05:51:39Z2023-10-21T05:51:39ZBill Hayden’s remarkable contribution to public life<p>Who have been Australia’s most accomplished federal opposition leaders? The conventional answer to this question is Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam, both renowned for rejuvenating their respective sides of politics and galvanising new constituencies of support.</p>
<p>But what of the opposition leaders who never made it to prime minister: which among them boasts the most outstanding record? In modern times, Bill Hayden, who died this week aged 90, has powerful claim to that title.</p>
<p>Hayden’s public career began in December 1961, with his election to the House of Representatives as the Labor member for the Queensland electorate of Oxley. It came to a close in February 1996, at the end of a seven-year tenure as governor-general. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216968/original/file-20180501-135851-18p5y6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Hayden was Federal Labor Opposition leader from December 1977 to February 1983.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/images/cabinet/1977/hayden.aspx">National Archives of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During this time, Hayden established a significant legacy. </p>
<p>In the Whitlam government, he was the minister responsible for enacting the pioneering universal health insurance scheme, Medibank, which was revived and rebadged as Medicare in the 1980s and now enjoys sacred status among Australia’s public policy institutions. </p>
<p>He was Labor leader from December 1977 to February 1983, restoring the party as a credible electoral force following the trauma of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-gough-whitlams-dismissal-as-prime-minister-74148">1975 dismissal</a>.</p>
<p>Hayden assembled a formidably talented ministerial team that would later become the engine room of the Hawke Labor government.</p>
<p>Relinquishing the leadership to Hawke in wrenching circumstances on the eve of the 1983 election campaign, he was a long-serving minister for foreign affairs (and trade) from 1983 to 1988 before assuming his vice-regal appointment in 1989. </p>
<h2>‘Growing up, getting angry’</h2>
<p>Born in 1933, Hayden was a child of the Great Depression. In his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5939424-hayden">1996 autobiography</a>, the section on his early life is titled, “Growing Up, Getting Angry”. Hayden’s father, a piano tuner of radical political bent, struggled to provide for his family. He had a weakness for alcohol and a volatile temper. </p>
<p>Hayden described his parents as “busted by the Depression” and wrote that they: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>hated a system which had treated them, and legions more, so villainously. Their hate and disgust were my legacy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Educated at a series of schools in working-class Brisbane, Hayden became a junior clerk in the Queensland public service before entering the police force at age 20. Though initially diverted by the human drama of his police duties, he gradually grew frustrated both professionally and intellectually. </p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4534196-hayden?from_search=true">a biographer</a>, he also “increasingly believed there needed to be political rather than policing solutions” to the social problems he encountered on the beat. As way of compensation, he studied part-time for his matriculation and joined the Labor Party, which was convulsed by its 1957 split in Queensland. </p>
<h2>Reforming spirit</h2>
<p>When Hayden secured preselection for the seat of Oxley in 1961, local party wisdom was that the seat was unwinnable for Labor. Supported on the campaign trail by his wife, Dallas, who was pregnant with their second child, Hayden’s surprise victory was also aided by Whitlam, who “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5939424-hayden?from_search=true">dazzled</a>” Queenslanders with a platform of “northern development”. </p>
<p>Joining a caucus ranging from gnarled veterans like Arthur Calwell and Eddie Ward to the rising generation of leaders, Whitlam and Jim Cairns, Hayden gravitated towards the left. He fell under Cairns’ spell, an enchantment he <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5939424-hayden?from_search=true">later regretted</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was his feet. We should have looked at them from the start. Clay!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In an era when advancement through the party ranks was painstakingly slow, Hayden had to wait until 1969 to enter Labor’s shadow cabinet, now led by Whitlam. Having undertaken part-time university studies in economics, he hankered after a portfolio in that area. </p>
<p>Whitlam instead assigned him health and welfare, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5939424-hayden?from_search=true">promising</a>: “Comrade, we’re going to do great things in this field”. Once in government, Hayden did just that as minister for social security. He introduced a host of new measures, including the single mothers’ benefit.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216941/original/file-20180501-135837-1lu7k82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Hayden in 1990 (detail).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:57_Received_By_the_Governor-General_of_the_Commonwealth_of_Australia_H.E._Bill_Hayden_on_29.5.1990.jpg">Ali Kazak/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The battle for Medibank was ferocious. The Australian Medical Association, private hospitals, private health insurance funds, the non-Labor states and the Coalition-controlled Senate were all virulently opposed. Hayden bore the brunt of the fight – most cruelly, rumours were peddled that he was mentally unstable, a legacy of the tragic death of his eldest daughter in a road accident a decade earlier. </p>
<p>Though one of its reforming spirits, Hayden was also an internal critic of the Whitlam government. He was dismayed by the freewheeling spending of his colleagues. </p>
<p>When Cairns stumbled in mid-1975, a victim of Labor’s ill-fated loan-raising activities, Hayden replaced him as treasurer. He produced a budget that steered Labor towards a path of fiscal rectitude, foreshadowing his efforts as opposition leader. </p>
<p>Hayden was a Labor heretic too, at least in retrospect, about the circumstances of the dismissal of the Whitlam government in November 1975. After a meeting with Governor-General Sir John Kerr five days before the dismissal, Hayden <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5939424-hayden?from_search=true">warned Whitlam</a> that his “old copper’s instincts tell me he’s going to sack us”. Whitlam brushed off his advice. </p>
<p>Coloured by his own vice-regal experience, Hayden treated Kerr sympathetically in his memoir, writing that “[he] sought to do what he believed was right and proper” and was “not an arch villain but rather, at its worst, perhaps someone miscast by history”. </p>
<h2>Leading Labor’s recovery</h2>
<p>Hayden’s time as opposition leader was the pinnacle of his public career. Whitlam first offered him the role amid the carnage of Labor’s 1975 election defeat. When Hayden was eventually elected to the position two years later, there was still a huge recovery task to perform.</p>
<p>His chief priority was “to re-establish public trust in our ability to manage the economy soberly”. This was achieved through rigorous costings of expenditure proposals and the development of credible revenue measures. He also pursued party reform, with the 1981 special national conference adopting sweeping changes that included an historic affirmative action plan.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/as-treasurer-bill-hayden-set-labor-on-the-path-to-economic-rationalism-216150">As treasurer, Bill Hayden set Labor on the path to economic rationalism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As Paul Keating <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/paul-keatings-hayden-oration-in-full/news-story/15c6e53e9ebe59077939a754a835878d">remembered</a>, Hayden brought “order, focus and policy consistency” to shadow cabinet meetings and constructed a front bench “prepared to conduct themselves around the principles of rationality and accountability to which Bill was committed”. </p>
<p>The names of those in this camp read like a “Who’s Who” of the Hawke era: John Dawkins, Ralph Willis, Peter Walsh, Susan Ryan, Lionel Bowen, John Button, Neal Blewett, Don Grimes, Gareth Evans, John Kerin, Chris Hurford and, of course, Keating himself. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216955/original/file-20180501-135810-3nun9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Governor-General Bill Hayden (centre) with the newly sworn-in second Keating cabinet, outside Government House in March 1994.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/images/cabinet/1994-95/image05.aspx">National Archives of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Following gargantuan losses under Whitlam to Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal National Party Coalition in 1975 and 1977, Hayden led Labor to a dramatically improved result at the October 1980 election. The party’s primary vote increased by over 5% and fell only narrowly short of winning the two-party preferred vote. </p>
<p>But the election also presaged trouble for Hayden, with the arrival in caucus of the irresistible force of Bob Hawke. Virtually from that moment, Hayden’s leadership was stalked by Hawke and his supporters. Increasingly embattled, his weaknesses festered. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216944/original/file-20180501-135851-iqay16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Hayden as Foreign Minister, meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow, 1987.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:(10)_1988_Bill_Hayden,_Russian_FM_Shevardnadze,_Moscow.jpg">Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reserved and suspicious by nature and prone to self-doubt – in his autobiography, Hayden acknowledged he was subject to periodic bouts of depression – he became isolated and, according to some detractors, paranoid. Compared to the swaggering Hawke, Hayden was also a grudging media performer: his voice and dress sense were butts of criticism.</p>
<p>Hayden prevailed against Hawke in a leadership ballot in July 1982, but the narrow margin ensured that Hawke’s backers continued to circle, brandishing opinion polls as evidence of their champion’s electoral Midas touch. </p>
<h2>Standing aside</h2>
<p>In February 1983, Hayden bravely bowed to the inevitable following a decisive intervention by his confidant, John Button, who bluntly informed him that he did not think he could win the next election. Announcing his resignation (on the same day Fraser called a snap election), Hayden begged to differ. He uttered a phrase <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/116447838">immortalised in Australian political folklore</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am not convinced the Labor Party would not win under my leadership. I believe a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is and the way the opinion polls are.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of Hayden’s conditions for standing aside as leader was being made foreign affairs minister in a Hawke government. In office, he established a respectable record in the portfolio, including leading a politically charged review of the ANZUS treaty and promoting a Cambodian peace plan (concluded under his successor, Gareth Evans). </p>
<p>Yet there was a sense of anti-climax to those years. His chosen means of exit from parliament – the governor-general’s residence at Yarralumla – perplexed those who had regarded him as a republican. Subsequently, disavowing that position, when Hayden was chosen by the Howard government as a delegate to the 1998 Constitutional Convention, he went as a defender of the constitutional status quo. </p>
<p>He surprised at the Convention, however, by embracing the idea of a directly elected president, before campaigning against the republic at the referendum the next year. These twists were symptomatic of a capriciousness to his public interventions in later years, accompanied by occasional unbecoming acerbity towards former Labor colleagues. This led to suspicions that the wound of 1983 had never quite healed. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216947/original/file-20180501-135844-1lzcd77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Governor-General Bill Hayden shakes hands with newly sworn-in Minister for Finance Kim Beazley in 1993.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/images/cabinet/1994-95/image01.aspx">National Archives of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his memoir, Hayden insisted on the consistency of his belief system. His guiding stars had been the values of a “secular, liberal humanist”. However, in his final years the formerly avowed atheist caused further surprise by converting to Catholicism. </p>
<p>He perhaps had given hint to this direction in his memoir in his description of a philosophical self-awakening. Whereas he had once trusted in the transformative power of government for advancing “freedom, justice and security”, experience had taught him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>not to expect too much from the crooked timber of humanity and to be cautious about the natural tendencies of political government, which are to aggregate more power to itself … to become remote and often unresponsive to public expectations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hayden, of course, shared in the human lot of being carved from “crooked timber”. His flaws, though, paled against his substantial contribution to Australia’s national life.</p>
<p><em>Correction: this piece originally said Bill Hayden was 85. His correct age was 90.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95853/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Strangio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Former Labor Leader and Governor-General Bill Hayden has died aged 85. Hayden is remembered for his role in establishing Medibank (later Medicare) and for leading Labor’s recovery after 1975.Paul Strangio, Emeritus professor of politics, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2156592023-10-17T12:19:37Z2023-10-17T12:19:37ZLouise Glück honed her poetic voice across a lifetime to speak to us from beyond the grave<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554065/original/file-20231016-15-9jajn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1620%2C1079&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Louise Glück was photographed outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., after being named the 2020 Nobel laureate in literature.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/photo-gallery/">Daniel Ebersole/Nobel Prize Outreach</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When asked what her response was to being awarded the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html">Nobel Prize in literature in 2020</a>, Louise Glück replied that she was “completely flabbergasted.” She said she had thought it “extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life.”</p>
<p>Glück, who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/10/13/louise-gluck-dead/">died on Oct. 13, 2023</a>, at the age of 80, may have been taken aback that she was granted this exalted honor, the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/louise-gluck-prize-winning-poet-of-terse-and-candid-lyricism-dies-at-80">first American poet</a> to win since T.S. Eliot in 1948. But her win was far less surprising to those who know and love her work, and who now mourn her loss. </p>
<p>The Nobel Committee for Literature selected Glück for this literary achievement to <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/facts/">honor her</a> “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1062252">poet and professor of writing</a>, I have long been an admirer of Glück’s spare and striking work. Her lyric voice still reverberates after her death, in part because of how consistently she turned her attention to questions of mortality.</p>
<h2>A cruel clarity of vision</h2>
<p>Glück said, in the same interview about her Nobel win, “I’ve written about death since I could write.” Her work turns again and again to the human story, those elemental facets of life that unite people. She went on to say, “I look for archetypal experience, and I assume that my struggles and joys are not unique.” </p>
<p>What’s common to humanity characterizes her work: Her focus on lasting themes of family and heartache and loss has earned her a wide audience and lasting acclaim. Before being awarded the Nobel Prize, Glück won the <a href="https://www.nationalbook.org/people/louise-gluck/">National Book Award</a> for “Faithful and Virtuous Night” in 2014 and the <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/louise-gluck">Pulitzer Prize</a> for “Wild Iris” in 1992, among other accolades. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FWQUMaI3wPs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Louise Glück reads selected poems.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Though well received, Glück’s work is not always inviting. It can have an icy abruptness; she often writes speakers who have a cruel clarity of vision. In her poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49601/mock-orange">Mock Orange</a>” she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not the moon, I tell you.</p>
<p>It is these flowers</p>
<p>lighting the yard.</p>
<p>I hate them.</p>
<p>I hate them as I hate sex </p>
</blockquote>
<p>which she goes on to describe as “the low, humiliating / premise of union.” As the poem ends, her speaker asks, “How can I be content / when there is still / that odor in the world?” </p>
<p>The lyric “I,” the first-person speaker of Glück’s poems, is rarely content. Though Glück wrote in the voice of many characters and from many perspectives, woven throughout her work is a perspective that tends to find the world – and the self – wanting. </p>
<p>It may be surprising, then, how strongly readers have responded to her still, spare, often quietly devastating work. It attends to daily human struggles as if from a distance, what the critic Helen Vendler described as “almost through the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/159665/poetry-louise-gluck">wrong end of a telescope</a>.” As in the old adage about what poetry can do, Glück <a href="https://theworld.com/%7Eraparker/exploring/tseliot/works/essays/andrew_marvell.html">made the familiar strange</a>, which is perhaps what continues to draw readers to her work: It renders the close-up experiences of heartbreak and hope from a new perspective.</p>
<h2>Ancient voices speaking to the everyday</h2>
<p>Glück also made the strange familiar, especially the distant world of myth. She brought ancient figures down to a human level by exploring everyday dramas through their voices. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Poster with an image of a young Louise Glück leaning against a brick wall, promoting a reading at the Poetry Center of the Museum of Contemporary Art" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster promotes a Louise Glück reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago on Jan. 21, 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://archive.poetrycenter.org/2015/07/21/gluck-louise-1977-2004/">The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>She wrote often of families and the ways they fail each other, though slantingly, as when Glück explores strained dynamics between mothers and daughters via the Greek goddesses <a href="https://poets.org/poem/persephone-wanderer">Demeter and Persephone</a>. She makes vivid the challenges of marriage through the characters of Homer’s “Odyssey” in her 1996 book “Meadowlands.” A poem from that work, “<a href="https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/gluck/Telemachus.html">Telemachus’ Detachment</a>,” envisages the son of Odysseus and Penelope reflecting on his parents’ union as “heartbreaking, but also / insane. Also / very funny.” Her register was wide: Though Glück wrote with a kind of detachment about even the most intimate of emotions, it was often via characters who spoke wryly, abruptly, with gallows humor and a gimlet eye for human frailty.</p>
<p>Failure and loss frequently gave rise to her work: Her fifth book, “Ararat,” published in 1990, arose after her father’s death; her 1999 book, “<a href="https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/louise-glucks-nine-lives/docview/231943493/se-2">Vita Nova,</a>” emerged from the dissolution of her marriage. Even her titles exemplify the dense literary references that characterize her work:
“Ararat” echoes the story of Noah’s flood, and “Vita Nova” is named after Dante Alighieri’s poems on the death of his beloved. In “Vita Nova,” the way we fail those we love is explored via the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. </p>
<h2>Contact even at a distance</h2>
<p>“Wild Iris,” one of Glück’s <a href="https://poets.org/poet/louise-gluck">most honored works</a>, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, is exemplary of her style. A book of poems written after a <a href="https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/louise-gl%C3%BCck">paralyzing period of writer’s block</a>, it is the voice of flowers, of prayers, of the soul beyond death and of God speaking back through her poems. Even when talking to God, the speaker remains acerbic and questioning: The <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49758/vespers-once-i-believed-in-you">first line of one poem</a> to God begins “Once, I believed in you … .” </p>
<p>The title piece of the collection speaks in the voice of a flower emerging in spring and as a speaker from beyond the grave, “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice.” Another poem in the voice of “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49760/the-silver-lily">The Silver Lily</a>” says “We have come too far together toward the end now / to fear the end.” </p>
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<p>Louise Glück’s poems can feel like they come at the drama of life from a distance: The voice in her poems has been described as <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/poems-louise-gl-ck/1120357967">vatic</a>, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/159665/poetry-louise-gluck">divinatory</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html">Delphic</a> and <a href="https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3407600191/GVRL?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=9003490a">haunting</a>, evoking a ghost speaking across time, able to narrate its own story with a dispassionate disinterest. </p>
<p>In the end, it was this carefully crafted, piercing observation of what is core to our human struggle that continues to animate Glück’s work for so many. If ever a poetic voice was honed across a lifetime to speak to us from beyond the grave, it’s Glück’s.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated to clarify that Glück was the first American poet to win the Nobel Prize in literature since T.S. Eliot.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Cannon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A celebrated poet and Nobel laureate, Louise Glück wrote about mortality, broken families and human frailty with devastating wryness and quiet beauty.Amy Cannon, Associate Professor of Writing, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2130432023-09-08T12:24:07Z2023-09-08T12:24:07ZThe beautiful pessimism at the heart of Jimmy Buffett’s music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547034/original/file-20230907-11065-dq28ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=19%2C0%2C4397%2C2876&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Buffett's first hit, 'Come Monday,' was written when the artist was deeply depressed and suicidal.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/devore-ca-musician-jimmy-buffett-performs-at-the-1982-us-news-photo/515241080?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/arts/jimmy-buffett-dead.html">With the death of Jimmy Buffett</a>, the feathers of his loyal network of fans – affectionately <a href="https://www.fox19.com/story/22856369/the-term-parrot-head-coined-at-kings-island-in-1985/">known as Parrot Heads</a> – collectively drooped. </p>
<p>Over the course of his career, Buffett earned their love by transforming himself into a kind of musical shaman who offered transport from the banalities of everyday life to the bounty of a never-never land of eternal sun, endless sandy beaches and bottomless boat drinks: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/media/jimmy-buffetts-margaritaville-is-a-state-of-mind-and-an-empire.html">Margaritaville</a>.</p>
<p>As a young fan in the 1980s and 1990s, I marveled at the power of Buffett’s music to carry his audience to this fantastic utopia, seeing in it nothing more than a bit of harmless fun.</p>
<p>But as I matured <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZAe9GDcAAAAJ&hl=en">and eventually became a professor of philosophy</a>, I came to see Buffett’s music as less an expression of optimistic pleasure-seeking and more a reflection of a profoundly pessimistic assessment of the trials and tribulations of life. Now his work strikes me as a closer companion to the pessimistic conclusions of the 19th-century philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/">Arthur Schopenhauer</a> than to <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/hedonism/">the hedonism of leisure culture</a>. </p>
<p>I see this hidden pessimism – which underlies most of Buffett’s music – as the key to its enduring power and allure. </p>
<h2>An escape to Saint Somewhere</h2>
<p>Half troubadour and half travel agent, Buffett has long been in the business of selling escape. </p>
<p>Escapism was not only the driving force and centerpiece of his 30 studio albums and the main plotline of his three novels. It was also the heart and soul of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/media/jimmy-buffetts-margaritaville-is-a-state-of-mind-and-an-empire.html">his billion-dollar business empire</a>, which included two restaurant chains, <a href="https://www.margaritavillefoods.com/products.html?category=82">a line of frozen dinners</a> and a fleet of hotels and casinos. </p>
<p>These myriad products, as their varied taglines and marketing campaigns tout, promise to carry their consumer away from the monotony of suburbia to the galleys of some imaginary Caribbean Island – “Saint Somewhere,” as Buffett put it in his 1979 hit “<a href="https://genius.com/Jimmy-buffett-boat-drinks-lyrics">Boat Drinks</a>.” </p>
<p>Buffett readily admitted his commitment to supplying his fans with some relief from reality. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhYrDHUD34c">his 2004 appearance</a> on “60 Minutes,” he gleefully professed, “I sell escapism.” <a href="https://vault.si.com/vault/2007/02/16/the-ballad-of-the-worlds-luckiest-guitar">When interviewed by Sports Illustrated in 2007</a> he said, “I’m just doing my part to add a little more escapism to an otherwise crazy world.” </p>
<p>The question remains, however: Why are people so consistently drawn to Buffett’s special brand of escapism? Or to escapism in general? </p>
<p>Answering this question uncovers the pessimistic heart of Buffett’s work.</p>
<h2>Just a little relief</h2>
<p>Buffett himself ventured an answer to this question in the afterword of his 2004 novel, “<a href="https://www.jimmybuffett.com/books/a-salty-piece-of-land">A Salty Piece of Land</a>”: “… now, more than ever, we don’t just enjoy our escapism – we NEED it.” </p>
<p>For Buffett, escapism was not merely something fun, some fiddling flight of fancy that can be taken up or discarded at will. </p>
<p>It is something essential to our survival – something that, as he put it in his 1974 track “<a href="https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/885165/Trying+to+Reason+With+Hurricane+Season">Trying to Reason with the Hurricane Season</a>,” “cleans [us] out” so that it’s possible to move on with life. </p>
<p>To love the music of Jimmy Buffett, in other words, is not to love life. It is to pessimistically admit that life is difficult and that it needs to be escaped every once in a while just to be endured.</p>
<p>In Buffett’s music one catches a glimpse, however fleeting and even false, of the possibility that somewhere out there, somewhere beyond the persistent struggles and disappointment of life, there lies “somewhere warm,” as he puts it: some utopia where all our fears and anxieties might be wiped away and we can heal from whatever grieves us, whether the heartache of a breakup or the trauma <a href="https://genius.com/Jimmy-buffett-margaritaville-lyrics">of having</a> “[blown] out a flip-flop,” or “stepped on a pop top.”</p>
<p>“When I look out at my audience,” Buffett noted <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,988920-2,00.html">in a 1998 interview with Time magazine</a>, “I see people who are caring for aging parents and dealing with tough jobs, adolescent kids, and they look like they could use a little relief.” </p>
<p>And that’s what he endeavored to give them: a little relief from the woes and worries of their lives.</p>
<h2>The role of good art and good music</h2>
<p>Buffett’s first big hit, “<a href="https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/885400/Jimmy+Buffett/Come+Monday">Come Monday</a>,” originated from his own need to escape a particularly dark period of life. </p>
<p>“I was deathly depressed and living in Howard Johnson’s in Marin County,” <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/entertainment/jimmy-buffett-death/index.html">he confessed to David Letterman in 1983</a>, “and this song kept me from killing myself.” </p>
<p>Fortunately, he explained to Letterman, “it hit, and I was able to pay my rent and get my dog out of the pound.” It was his capacity to respond to the overwhelming difficulties of life in this spirit of comedic melancholia that made Buffett’s music so special. </p>
<p>His songs acknowledge what everyone already knows to be true: that life can be excruciatingly painful and is often too much to bear, but that one must nevertheless <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/114547-you-must-go-on-i-can-t-go-on-i-ll-go">find a way to move on</a>. It is this pessimistic subtext to Buffett’s escapism that made it so achingly irresistible.</p>
<p>In this sense, Buffett’s music exemplifies what the 19th-century pessimistic philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/">Arthur Schopenhauer thought of as the ultimate power of art</a>. </p>
<p>To Schopenhauer, good art grows from a recognition of the difficulties of life, and it endeavors to respond to them by offering a momentary respite from its otherwise relentless slings and arrows. </p>
<p>For these reasons, Schopenhauer saw in art – and in music, especially – a way of escaping reality, of being carried away into a fantasy land that everyone knows can never exist, but that is nonetheless comforting to contemplate. </p>
<p>The value of art, according to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic perspective, comes from how it creates an imaginary space where one can momentarily hide from reality to summon the courage to continue on – and perhaps to even learn from that hiatus how to laugh at the gallows that confront every living creature.</p>
<p>By this pessimistic measure, Buffett’s music was high art, for what it did so well was to help its listeners to escape the onslaught of modern life and teach them to laugh again – not in hedonistic ignorance of its difficulties, but in spite of them. What Buffett and all of his fans secretly know is that such escapist reveries are not merely an optional lark but a necessary tool for survival. </p>
<p>As Buffett himself put it in his 1977 hit “<a href="https://genius.com/Jimmy-buffett-changes-in-latitudes-changes-in-attitudes-lyrics">Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes</a>,” “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213043/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Drew M. Dalton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For Buffett, escapism was not merely some fiddling flight of fancy. It acknowledged the brutalities and indignities of everyday life.Drew M. Dalton, Professor of Philosophy, Dominican UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2118242023-08-18T03:04:13Z2023-08-18T03:04:13ZInterested, curious and empathetic, Michael Parkinson helped bridge the gap between Australia and England<p>Michael Parkinson, who has died at 88, demonstrated the art of the good interview night after night. He practised deep listening, giving his interviewee his full attention, but he was always aware of the audience. While he was asking questions on behalf of the audience and advocating for the audience, he always had the person he was interviewing as his focus. </p>
<p>As host of Parkinson (1971–82 and 1998–2007) and Parkinson in Australia (1979–83), he was a big presence on Australian TV. He was television the whole family could watch together, never unsuitable for children. </p>
<p>We may not have understood everything, and some references went over our head, but as children we could watch Parkinson with our parents. I remember as a young person regularly watching him and hoping the interview would be funny that week. </p>
<p>There were times you knew it was going to be hilarious. When Billy Connolly or “our” Dame Edna were going to appear it was a must-watch. </p>
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<p>Whoever the interviewee, Parkinson brought out their stories, their observations. He gave them space to share engaging stories and never stepped on a punchline. Although humour was a draw card for the audience, there was space for pathos, too.</p>
<h2>Finding the shape</h2>
<p>Parkinson was an interviewer of great skill. He could be a presence, but never pull focus from the interviewee. He was deeply empathetic, and always in control of the interview. </p>
<p>The form of the interview was always satisfying: he knew how to draw a narrative through the length of the program. When interviewing three people at once, he knew how to be fair and have a balance between everyone and their stories. He made this appear effortless.</p>
<p>From 1979 to 2014 he frequently worked in Australia across the ABC, Channel Ten and Channel Nine. </p>
<p>For a generation of ten pound passage immigrants, he represented the best of the old country: he was never patronising, never spoke down to people, and helped to bridge the gap between Australia and England. He was able to bring us the best of British and Australian interviewees alike, affirming Australia’s international standing in the arts and culture. </p>
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<p>When speaking to Australian politicians, sports stars and actors he was always deeply interested and deeply curious. He could reflect us back to ourselves without any of the cultural cringe so evident in the media of the time. The affection Australians felt for him is shown in the diminutive “Parky”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/interviews-with-journalists-can-seem-daunting-but-new-research-shows-80-of-subjects-report-a-positive-experience-200821">Interviews with journalists can seem daunting – but new research shows 80% of subjects report a positive experience</a>
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<h2>An authentic voice</h2>
<p>Born in Yorkshire in 1935, Parkinson didn’t attend university, starting his career working for newspapers straight out of school. It was perhaps this start which aided in his plain speaking common sense and ability to talk to ordinary people. You got the sense he could speak to anybody. There was no putting on a persona; he was always authentically him. </p>
<p>Today, this authentic self is seen in many of our best interviewers. We know how important it is curiosity and authenticity drive the interview – Parkinson was doing this decades before others recognised its importance. </p>
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<p>When I started in radio, I looked towards Parkinson as the gold standard. I admired how he was able to draw people out and reveal so much of themselves. He demonstrated how the media could go beyond the soundbite. </p>
<p>So much of the media of the time was about context-free news and current affairs journalism. Although his interviews were with celebrities, he showed people might share more of themselves and the world if they’re given time and space to speak. Parkinson gave us a fuller, richer sense of the people he spoke to. </p>
<p>His legacy in Australia can be seen in people like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enough_Rope">Andrew Denton</a>, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations">Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski</a> – long form interviews driven by curiosity. </p>
<p>Some people have been describing Parkinson’s death as the end of an era, but his legacy will live on. When we look at shows like ABC Conversations, and so many longform podcasts, we find curious interviewers who, like Parkinson, build a relationship and find a connection with an interviewee. A soundbite might show up on TikTok or YouTube – but you have to do the longform interview to get there. </p>
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<p>Perhaps one of the best demonstrations of this was Parkinson’s interview with Ian Thorpe. In the 2014 interview, Thorpe came out publicly for the first time, and spoke about his depression and use of drugs and alcohol. </p>
<p>Without the relationship Parkinson was able to build over the course of the interview, it is doubtful Thorpe would have felt comfortable to come out in the same way. Parkinson was always interested in giving people the opportunity to reveal themselves. </p>
<p>That Thorpe felt Parkinson’s show was a safe space to come out says something about the tenor of his relationship with his interviewees and his place in Australian culture.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ian-thorpe-came-out-but-not-in-australia-a-wise-decision-29158">Ian Thorpe came out, but not in Australia – a wise decision</a>
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<h2>There for the audience</h2>
<p>His few missteps seemed to be with women. As I grew older, I realised he was a man of his time, as was made obvious in his awkward interviews with Meg Ryan and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmlP_cFOoAM">Helen Mirren</a>. In these interviews, his occasional awkwardness around gender is writ large, and the interviews go off the rails. He fails to develop his famous rapport and adjust his approach in response to their discomfort. </p>
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<p>But given the length of his career, the rarity of these missteps is still impressive. His geniality and quiet generosity came across night after night, for decades. </p>
<p>What defined him more than anything was how he was inclusive of his audience. No matter how complex the ideas or how smart the person he was interviewing, the audience was brought along with them. He was there on our behalf, and able to ask the clarifying questions without worrying about his own ego.</p>
<p>He represents an age of Australian and British relationships in a way that is truly singular and his interviews are artefacts of that age. He was an interiewer who stood out for not having to stand out, and the delights and possibilities of the long-form interview are his legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211824/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lea Redfern does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Michael Parkinson, who has died at 88, demonstrated the art of the good interview night after night.Lea Redfern, Lecturer, Discipline of Media and Communications, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2111852023-08-08T04:19:10Z2023-08-08T04:19:10ZThe incredible creativity of William Friedkin: Oscars, box-office hits – and arthouse, experimental genre cinema<p>In 1972, American cinema was ablaze with the energy of what later came to be called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood">The New Hollywood</a>”. This was a group of film directors who were bringing a radical kind of cinema to the movie mainstream – movies with big budgets, edgy content and transgressive politics, all for a mass audience.</p>
<p>A few of them – Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin – even tried to start <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Directors_Company">their own</a> American arthouse studio in San Francisco in the early 70s, making their movies far away from the studio executives. </p>
<p>With the audacity of relative youth on their side, they wanted to bring down the old system and remake Hollywood.</p>
<p>Foremost among these directors was a young Friedkin, who burst onto the Hollywood scene with his searing police drama, The French Connection. Released in 1971, the film galvanised audiences, changed the landscape of Hollywood genre realism, and took home five Oscars – including Best Picture.</p>
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<p>I have a giant poster (a 1971 original) of The French Connection on my office wall. Apart from the gorgeous poster art, it’s a reminder to me of what that era of visionary cinema achieved in so short a period of time.</p>
<p>But Friedkin was also that something extra special, even among the Young Turks of the New Hollywood. He remained an unknown quantity, even while enjoying mainstream box office success. The prolific director has died at 87, just one month before his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/movies/william-friedkin-venice-film-festival-caine-mutiny-court-martial.html">now final film</a> is set to premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-moscow-stage-to-monroe-and-de-niro-how-the-method-defined-20th-century-acting-179088">From the Moscow stage to Monroe and De Niro: how the Method defined 20th-century acting</a>
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<h2>Enduring artistic fascination</h2>
<p>The stark realism of The French Connection shouldn’t have worked with the police procedural. Friedkin plays the thriller like something lifted from the French New Wave, say Jean-Pierre Melville’s glorious Le Cercle Rouge of 1970.</p>
<p>The French Connection was followed by perhaps the most notorious film of the Hollywood 1970s: The Exorcist (1973). The <a href="https://www.avclub.com/audiences-had-some-intense-reactions-to-the-exorcist-in-1798280003">stories told</a> about the film’s gargantuan run in Hollywood cinema chains are legendary: audiences running from theatres unable to stomach the content, screaming about the intensity of images of good and evil.</p>
<p>The Exorcist remains the apotheosis of the Christian horror, imitated a thousand times across the decades that followed. On its original release, the film took <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0070047/">more than US$190 million</a> on a US$11 million budget, cementing Friedkin’s place in the New Hollywood pantheon of visionary filmmakers.</p>
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<p>Whereas Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese found their niche in the mainstream Hollywood industry, Friedkin remained the <em>enfant terrible</em> and something of an outsider. </p>
<p>Alongside other directors such as Brian De Palma and his longtime friend Bogdanovich, Friedkin assured audiences Hollywood would not lose its tenuous grip on arthouse, experimental genre cinema.</p>
<p>Friedkin’s style was routinely unconventional. His material pushed the boundaries of the classical Hollywood system, traversing that line between mainstream and independence.</p>
<p>Like so many of the New Hollywood auteurs, Friedkin’s output after the 1980 masterpiece, Cruising, is patchy. </p>
<p>There were misses, such as The Guardian (1990) and Rules of Engagement (2000), and Friedkin shows his discomfort with Hollywood’s aesthetic and political constraint in the erotic thriller, Jade (1995). </p>
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<p>But there many works from the last 40 years of enduring artistic fascination: the synth-oozing To Live and Die in LA (1985), which sets the template for Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004); Jade, Friedkin’s 1995 attempt to outdo Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), a perverse pleasure precisely for its manic unevenness; and 2011’s stylised, hyper-violent domestic drama, Killer Joe. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/50-years-since-mike-oldfield-began-writing-tubular-bells-the-pioneering-album-that-changed-the-sound-of-music-162254">50 years since Mike Oldfield began writing Tubular Bells: the pioneering album that changed the sound of music</a>
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<h2>My personal top five</h2>
<p>I want to close this reflection with my William Friedkin top five, which I’ll be revisiting across the next week:</p>
<p><strong>5. To Live and Die in LA (1985)</strong></p>
<p>If The French Connection is the epitome of the New York Crime film, To Live and Die in LA is pure Los Angeles. It’s gritty, yes, and violent; but the film exudes cool, and in spite of its relative obscurity, was a major influence on a new generation of genre filmmakers.</p>
<p><strong>4. Sorcerer (1977)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/hope-lies-at-24-frames-per-second/the-critical-reappraisal-and-restoration-of-william-friedkins-sorcerer-8bd8349ef656">Many commentators</a> on Friedkin’s career regard The Sorcerer as Friedkin’s last great auteur film. Of course, that’s not my opinion (see below). But it is true to say that Sorcerer (a remake of sorts of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s wonderful Wages of Fear from 1953) remains a stunningly experimental film in Hollywood of the late 1970s. </p>
<p>It tanked at the box office (opening a month after Star Wars!) and <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/04/william-friedkin-sorcerer-star-wars">cast Friedkin</a> as an unreliable director.</p>
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<p><strong>3. Cruising (1980)</strong></p>
<p>Has Cruising – a film about a serial killer within New York’s homosexual subcultural community - been cancelled? I don’t know. I so desperately hope not. </p>
<p>What a stunning thriller in the tradition of the realist urban cinema, setting the scene for one of Al Pacino’s best and most unhinged performances. It first appeared with an X-rating and a mess of notoriety. It remains a brilliant film of this era.</p>
<p><strong>2. The Exorcist (1973)</strong></p>
<p>Simply put, the milestone that brought one of the most distinctive artistic visions to a classical possession genre story. </p>
<p>Adapted from William Peter Blatty’s novel (its own cultural phenomenon of the early 70s), Friedkin demonstrates the way in which audio-visual form can surpass its source material. Not for the squeamish!</p>
<p><strong>1. The French Connection (1971)</strong></p>
<p>Even if this film was one sequence – the car/subway chase through New York’s gritty underpasses – it would be a masterpiece. This is glorious action montage before the excesses of digital post-production hijinks. The film oozes a place and time unlike any other film shot in New York in the 1970s. </p>
<p>One of the best films ever made by a Hollywood studio.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211185/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bruce Isaacs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>New Hollywood filmmaker William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, has died at 87.Bruce Isaacs, Associate Professor, Film Studies, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2102442023-07-22T00:01:26Z2023-07-22T00:01:26ZTony Bennett: the timeless visionary who, with a nod to America’s musical heritage, embraced the future<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538796/original/file-20230721-6292-8kcivc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C13%2C2991%2C1980&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga in 2015. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitTonyBennett/d2da02e3d0754ead95520651844ef2a6/photo?Query=tony%20bennett&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=3377&currentItemNo=6">Charles Sykes/Invision/AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the history of American popular music, there have been few luminaries as enduring and innovative as Tony Bennett.</p>
<p>With a career that spanned almost 80 years, Bennett’s smooth tones, unique phrasing and visionary musical collaborations left an indelible mark on vocal jazz and the recording industry as a whole. </p>
<p>That his <a href="https://apnews.com/article/tony-bennett-dies-c3b3a7e2360449fb936a38794c7c3266">death at the age of 96</a> on July 21, 2023, was mourned by artists as varied as <a href="https://twitter.com/KeithUrban/status/1682395658395824133">Keith Urban</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/OzzyOsbourne/status/1682411338340126720">Ozzy Osbourne</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/HarryConnickJR?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1682411086656557056%7Ctwgr%5E04a78435a793b5246d7bc19e09529f2b2f0bcfab%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2023%2Fmusic%2Fnews%2Ftony-bennett-elton-john-reaction-tribute-1235676405%2F">Harry Connick Jr.</a> should come as no surprise. Yes, Bennett was a jazz crooner. But if his voice was always a constant – even late into his 80s, way past an age when most other singers have seen their vocal abilities diminish – then his embrace of the contemporary was every bit a facet of Bennett’s appeal.</p>
<h2>Vocal innovator</h2>
<p>Bennett’s journey is a testament to the power of daring innovation. </p>
<p>From the early days of his career in the 1950s to his final recordings in the early 2020s, he fearlessly explored new musical territories, revolutionizing vocal jazz and captivating audiences across generations.</p>
<p>His vocal style and phrasing were distinctive and set him apart from other artists of his time. He utilized a delayed or “laid-back” approach to falling on the note, a technique known as “<a href="https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/how-to-read-sheet-music/rubato/">rubato</a>.” This created a sense of anticipation in his phrasing, adding an element of surprise to his performances. Through Bennett’s skilled use of rubato, he was able to play with the tempo and rhythm of a song, bending and stretching musical phrases to evoke a range of emotions. This subtle manipulation of timing gave his songs a natural and conversational quality, making listeners feel as though he was intimately sharing his stories with them.</p>
<p>Armed with this silky, playful voice, Bennett found fame fairly early on in his career, delivering jazz standards alongside the likes of Mel Tormé and Nat King Cole. By the mid-1960s, he was being touted by Frank Sinatra as “the best singer in the business.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man in an open-necked shirt sings" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538797/original/file-20230721-40270-jsbx42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Tony Bennett in 1960.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/TonyBennett/f049da09ad994e1fab65b80524c35f7e/photo?Query=tony%20bennett&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=3377&currentItemNo=2">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>But his musical style fell out of fashion in the 1970s – a lean period during which Bennett <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/21/tony-bennett-son-life-career-drugs/">almost succumbed to a drug overdose</a>. Then, in the 1990s, Bennett found a new audience and set off a series of collaborations with contemporary musical stars that would become the standard for his later career.</p>
<p>No genre of artistry was deemed off-limits for Bennett. “<a href="https://www.tonybennett.com/music-detail.php?id=11">Duets: An American Classic</a>,” released to coincide with his 80th birthday in 2006, saw collaborations with country stars such as k.d. lang and the Dixie Chicks – now known as the Chicks – and soul legend Stevie Wonder, alongside kindred jazz spirits such as Diana Krall. “Duets II,” a 2011 follow-up, saw further explorations with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Amy Winehouse, in what would become the <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/amy-winehouse-final-recording-session/">British singer’s last recording</a>.</p>
<p>But his cross-generational, cross-genre and cross-cultural appeal is perhaps best exemplified by his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/arts/music/tony-bennett-lady-gaga.html">collaborations with Lady Gaga</a>, first on the 2014 Grammy-winning album “Cheek to Cheek.” The recording brought together two artists from different generations, genres and backgrounds, uniting them in a harmonious celebration of jazz classics. The collaboration not only showcased each one’s vocal prowess, but also sent a powerful message about the unifying nature of music.</p>
<p>Lady Gaga, a pop artist with avant-garde leanings, might have seemed an unlikely partner for Bennett, the quintessential jazz crooner. Yet their musical chemistry and mutual admiration resulted in an album that mesmerized audiences worldwide. “Cheek to Cheek” effortlessly transcended musical boundaries, while the duo’s magnetic stage presence and undeniable talent enchanted listeners.</p>
<p>The successful fusion of jazz and pop encouraged artists to experiment beyond traditional boundaries, leading to more cross-genre projects across the industry – proving that such projects could go beyond one-off novelties, and be profitable at that.</p>
<h2>Timeless artistry</h2>
<p>Bennett’s embrace of contemporary artists did not mean that he abandoned his own musical self. By blending traditional jazz with contemporary elements, he managed to captivate audiences across generations, appealing to both longtime fans and new listeners.</p>
<p>One key aspect of Bennett’s success was his ability to embody the sentiment of old America, reminiscent of artists like Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, while infusing contemporary nuances that resonated with the human condition of a more modern era. His approach to music captured both the essence and struggle of America, giving his songs a timeless and universal appeal. Moreover, his voice conveyed familiarity and comfort, akin to listening to a beloved uncle.</p>
<p>Bennett’s albums stood out not only for his soulful voice and impeccable delivery but also for the way he drew others from varied musical backgrounds into his world of jazz sensibilities. As a producer, he recognized the importance of nurturing creativity and bringing out the best in artists.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Bennett’s approach to evolving his own sound while preserving its essence sets him apart as an artist. Fearless in his pursuit of innovation, he delved into contemporary musical elements and collaborated with producers to infuse new sonic dimensions into his later albums. The result drew listeners into an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kNpdLZwetU">intimate and immersive, concert-like acoustic journey</a>.</p>
<h2>Depth of emotion</h2>
<p>The greats in music have an ability to speak to the human experience. And either in collaboration with others or on his own, Bennett was able to achieve this time and time again.</p>
<p>His albums were successful not only due to their technical brilliance and musicality but also because Bennett’s voice conveyed a depth of emotion that transcended barriers of time and culture, touching the hearts of listeners from various backgrounds. There was a universality in his music that made him a beloved and revered artist across the globe. </p>
<p>Bennett’s life spanned decades of societal upheavals in the United States. But in his music, listeners could always find beauty in challenging times. And as the 20th- and 21st-century American music industry went through its own revolutions, Bennett’s artistic evolution mirrored the changes, cementing his place as a music icon who defies the boundaries of time and trends.</p>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/2UxxnhUE5YLchYgutxKEbJ?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="380" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210244/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jose Valentino Ruiz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The jazz singer saw renewed success late in life on the back of collaborations with an eclectic array of artists.Jose Valentino Ruiz, Program Director of Music Business & Entrepreneurship, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2077092023-06-16T17:42:27Z2023-06-16T17:42:27ZCormac McCarthy’s fearless approach to writing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532288/original/file-20230615-27-es4rpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C17%2C1930%2C1298&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">McCarthy attends the 2009 premiere of the film adaptation of his novel 'The Road.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitCormacMcCarthy/e76e31de4fce44e5becba9a64b06a2f7/photo?Query=Cormac%20McCarthy&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=19&currentItemNo=0">Evan Agostini/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cormac McCarthy, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html">who died on June 13, 2023</a>, at the age of 89, is often characterized rather narrowly <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/texas/articles/cormac-mccarthy-reinventing-the-southern-gothic/">as a Southern writer</a>, or perhaps <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/want-read-southern-gothic-heres-start/">a Southern Gothic writer</a>.</p>
<p>McCarthy did lean heavily on <a href="https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2023/06/15/remembering-cormac-mccarthys-legacy-and-early-life-in-east-tennessee/70320788007/">his Tennessee upbringing</a> in his first four novels, and he set many others in the deserts of the Southwest U.S. However, as a writer, he saw himself as a part of an expansive literary community, one that stretched back to the classical and Elizabethan periods, and one that drew on a variety of genres, cultures and influences.</p>
<p>His unique and varying writing style has been compared with that of many of the greatest authors of American letters, with scholars highlighting connections to the writings of <a href="https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/1616140/8480163-episode-9-melville-and-mccarthy-with-steven-frye">Herman Melville</a>, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cormac-mccarthy-in-context/ernest-hemingway/D3D8FDEB9548A1D4786480EAA3B39714">Ernest Hemingway</a>, <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2023/06/the-three-punctuation-rules-of-cormac-mccarthy-rip.html">James Joyce</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Hypermasculinities_in_the_Contemporary_N.html?id=WmnBoAEACAAJ">Toni Morrison</a>, <a href="https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/">Thomas Pynchon</a>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/06/cormac-mccarthys-irrational-apocalypse/">Fyodor Dostoevsky</a>, <a href="https://themarginaliareview.com/how-flannery-oconnor-and-cormac-mccarthy-helped-to-invent-the-south/">Flannery O’Connor</a> and <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-orchard.html?scp=7&sq=The%2520Orchard&st=cse">William Faulkner</a>. </p>
<p>As such an unwieldy list of compatriots suggests, McCarthy is an author who experimented with language and literary technique. Each of his books typically departs radically in tone, structure and prose from the previous one.</p>
<p>I’m currently working on a book that’s tentatively titled “How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style.” In it, I trace McCarthy’s career-long commitment to playing with style, particularly his approach to narration and his techniques for conveying a mood.</p>
<h2>Two radically different reading experiences</h2>
<p>Depending on the book – and even passages within certain books – McCarthy’s writing can be characterized as minimalistic, meandering, esoteric, humorous, terrifying, pretentious, sentimental or folksy. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Title page of book reading 'Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West,' followed by author's name." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page for the first edition of McCarthy’s 1985 novel ‘Blood Meridian.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Blood_Meridian_%281985_1st_ed_half_title_page%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Some novels depend heavily on dense passages of narrative exposition and philosophizing, while others lean heavily on everyday dialogue. Some books celebrate regional voices and vernacular, and others adopt a neutral, removed and clinical tone.</p>
<p>It is possible to see McCarthy’s literary range and stylistic experimentation in two of his most famous novels, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110472/blood-meridian-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Blood Meridian</a>,” which came out in 1985, and “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110490/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Road</a>,” which was published over two decades later, in 2006, and was turned <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/">into a movie</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>In “Blood Meridian,” set in the desert of the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, McCarthy’s prose is dense, with details piling up one after another. </p>
<p>Take the famous scene in which a mercenary gang of American scalp hunters encounters a band of Comanche warriors:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador. … ”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The entire sentence is much too long to quote here. But you get the picture: There is very little punctuation and there are few places to even take a breath. </p>
<p>The narration in other moments of the novel catalogs the desert landscape of the U.S. West in similarly painstaking and tedious – if also beautiful – detail. The prose feels drawn out, slow and repetitive, like the subject of the novel: the United States’ western expansion in the 19th century, a campaign of escalating destruction that McCarthy characterizes in the novel as “some heliotropic plague.”</p>
<p>“The Road,” a later novel similarly committed to the idea of incessant movement, could not be more different in its style, pacing and rhythm. The prose in that novel, which won <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/cormac-mccarthy">the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction</a>, is concise and is marked by a linguistic restraint that’s entirely absent in “Blood Meridian.” </p>
<p>Rather than dense and overwhelming passages, this novel is constructed of short and distinct paragraphs that are separated by white space and often unrelated to what comes directly before or after:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was colder. Nothing moved in that night world. A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road. He pushed the cart on through the snow. … </p>
<p>In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. … </p>
<p>On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? </p>
<p>Dark of invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. … </p>
<p>People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Each paragraph in this passage is different in tone, subject matter, place, and time from what comes before and appears after. </p>
<h2>A lasting legacy</h2>
<p>It might be tempting to see such difference as an evolution, as McCarthy honing and taming his narrative voice from his earlier work. But his final long novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110481/the-passenger-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Passenger</a>,” which was published in 2022, returns again to the rambling prose reminiscent of McCarthy’s big novels in the middle of his career, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110485/suttree-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Suttree</a>” and “Blood Meridian.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of man with mustache folding his arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of McCarthy used for the first edition of his 1973 novel ‘Child of God.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Cormac_McCarthy_%28Child_of_God_author_portrait_-_high-res%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some readers find McCarthy’s stylistic flourishes and experimentation excessive – or, even worse, pretentious. But they always struck me as reflecting his love of words and the endless possibilities of language. </p>
<p>In a blurb that was originally written for McCarthy’s first novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110489/the-orchard-keeper-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Orchard Keeper</a>,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/17/obituaries/ralph-ellison-author-of-invisible-man-is-dead-at-80.html">Ralph Ellison</a> <a href="https://www.fedpo.com/images/TheOrchardKeeper/04TheOrchardKeeper.jpg">wrote</a>, “McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly – envied.” </p>
<p>As I learned of McCarthy’s death, I couldn’t help but think of this quote that marked the beginning of his career, and to think how right Ellison was to champion McCarthy’s craft – the careful use of language that sustained his work for six decades across 12 novels.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207709/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Hardwig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was always willing to experiment with his prose, pacing and narration, crafting an oeuvre that varied wildly in style and structure.Bill Hardwig, Associate Professor of English, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2076812023-06-15T12:33:23Z2023-06-15T12:33:23ZHow the Unabomber’s unique linguistic fingerprints led to his capture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532034/original/file-20230614-19-yvo44e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C6%2C2230%2C1518&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ted Kaczynski was arrested after the longest and most expensive investigation in the FBI's history.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/convicted-unabomber-theodore-kaczynski-is-escorted-by-us-news-photo/106884098?adppopup=true">Rich Pedroncelli/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Can the language someone uses be as unique as their fingerprints?</p>
<p>As I describe in my forthcoming book, “<a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781633888982/Linguistic-Fingerprints-How-Language-Creates-and-Reveals-Identity">Linguistic Fingerprints: How Language Creates and Reveals Identity</a>,” that was true in the case of Theodore Kaczynski.</p>
<p>Kaczynski, who was known as the <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/origin-ted-kaczynskis-infamous-nickname-145500991.html">Unabomber</a>, died in a North Carolina prison on June 10, 2023, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-1197f597364b36e56bdbcaca9837bdc4">reportedly by suicide</a>.</p>
<p>Kaczynski had been a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/05/us/suspect-s-trail-suspect-memories-his-brilliance-shyness-but-little-else.html">math prodigy and a professor</a> at the University of California, Berkeley, before he withdrew from society and declared war on the modern world. </p>
<p>From a <a href="https://helenair.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/photos-a-look-inside-the-unabombers-montana-cabin/collection_41103cf1-dc68-5950-babc-17861f0b8858.html">remote cabin in Montana</a>, he sent a number of explosive devices through the mail. In other cases, he planted them. Between 1978 and 1995, 16 of his bombs <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/06/10/ted-kaczynski-dead-unabomber/">killed three people</a> and seriously injured nearly two dozen more.</p>
<p>Kaczynski’s crimes triggered the longest and <a href="https://en.as.com/latest_news/ted-kaczynski-the-unabomber-has-died-what-are-some-of-the-most-expensive-fbi-investigations-n/">most expensive</a> criminal investigation in U.S. history. Law enforcement had little to go on other than a few letters that the terrorist had sent to the media, as well as fragments of notes that had survived his device’s detonations.</p>
<h2>Spellings and word choices offer clues</h2>
<p>In 1995, there was a breakthrough. That’s when the Unabomber offered to pause his attacks if a newspaper published his manifesto about the evils of modern society. Controversially, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/20/us/publication-of-unabomber-s-tract-draws-mixed-response.html">The Washington Post did so</a>. The FBI supported the paper’s decision, hoping that someone would recognize the terrorist based on the writing style of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm">35,000-word essay</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Copies of two newspapers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532004/original/file-20230614-22-d0iwj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Washington Post published the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto on Sept. 19, 1995.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-the-front-pages-of-the-new-york-times-and-the-news-photo/106884096?adppopup=true">Luke Frazza/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>FBI forensic linguist <a href="https://www.jamesrfitzgerald.com">James Fitzgerald</a> and sociolinguist <a href="http://www.rogershuy.com">Roger Shuy</a> were able to uncover several clues about the terrorist’s identity based on the manifesto and his other writings.</p>
<p>For example, the Unabomber used strange misspellings for some words, such as “wilfully” for “willfully,” and “clew” for “clue.” Shuy recognized these as <a href="http://www.rogershuy.com/pdf/Linguistic_Profiling.pdf">spelling reforms</a> that had been championed by <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-per-flash-simplespelling-0229-20120129-story.html">The Chicago Tribune</a> during the 1940s and 1950s, although they were never widely adopted.</p>
<p>Their use by the bomber suggested he might have spent his formative years in or near Chicago.</p>
<p>Fitzgerald noted the use of terms like “broad,” “chick” and “negro” in the manifesto was consistent with the vocabulary a middle-aged person from that era.</p>
<p>The Unabomber also referred to “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=1ib-AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA203&dq=20.+Roger+W.+Shuy,+The+Language+of+Murder+Cases:+Intentionality,+Predisposition,+and+Voluntariness+(Oxford:+Oxford+University+Press,+2014).&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwivhfXiqMH_AhVojYkEHbsSBVoQ6AF6BAgJEAI#v=snippet&q=raising%20children&f=false">rearing children</a>” as opposed to “raising children.” The former term is characteristic of the northern U.S. dialect and would be consistent with someone who grew up in or near the Windy City.</p>
<p>The manifesto also contains such fairly esoteric terms as “<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anomic">anomic</a>” and “<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chimerical">chimerical</a>,” suggesting that its author was highly educated.</p>
<h2>A brother’s suspicions</h2>
<p>But the move to publish the manifesto ended up being the decisive factor.</p>
<p>It was read in Schenectady, New York, by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/05/us/suspect-s-trail-family-brother-who-tipped-off-authorities-leads-quiet-simple.html">Linda Patrik</a>, who showed it to her husband, David Kaczynski. She asked if he thought it sounded like something his brother Ted could have written.</p>
<p>David was initially skeptical. Then he noticed that the essay contained unusual expressions, like “cool-headed logicians,” that he remembered his estranged sibling making use of. He <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/09/IHT-a-nagging-feeling-by-family-member-pointed-to-unabomber-suspect.html">approached the FBI</a> with his suspicions, and it was noted that David’s brother had been born in Chicago in 1942.</p>
<p>A search of Kaczynski’s cabin turned up explosive devices, as well as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/13/us/bomber-manifesto-amid-items-found-law-officials-say.html">original copy</a> of the manifesto. Kaczynski <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/23/us/unabomber-case-overview-kaczynski-avoids-death-sentence-with-guilty-plea.html">pleaded guilty</a> in 1998 and was incarcerated until his death at age 81.</p>
<h2>Fingerprinting authors</h2>
<p>The Unabomber investigation has been justifiably hailed as a triumph of forensic linguistics. But sleuths of prose and punctuation have had other notable victories. </p>
<p>Even something as seemingly trivial as unusual punctuation can provide clues to a suspect’s identity – which is what happened in 2018, when a forensic linguist was able to pin a murder on a British man <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6028507/Forensic-linguist-reveals-murderer-snared-sending-texts-commas.htm">because of his unusual use of commas and spacing</a> when sending text messages.</p>
<p>Similar techniques have been used by language experts to identify authors. In 1996, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/4166/primary-colors-by-anonymous/">Primary Colors</a>,” a novel based on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, was published by “anonymous.” English professor Donald Foster was able to finger Newsweek columnist Joe Klein as the author of the work, <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1996-02-16-1996047127-story.html">noting similarities</a> between the text of “Primary Colors” and Klein’s other published work, which included the use of unusual adverbs (“goofily”), states described as modes (“crisis mode”) and drawn-out interjections (“naww”).</p>
<p>And in 2013, “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a novel authored with the pen name <a href="https://robert-galbraith.com/stories/the-cuckoos-calling/">Robert Galbraith</a>, was exposed as having been written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-name-game-jk-rowling-and-a-history-of-pseudonyms-16150">J.K. Rowling</a>. <a href="https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5315">Patrick Juola</a>, a computer scientist, and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-23313074">Peter Millican</a>, a philosopher, independently identified the author of the Harry Potter series as the crime novel’s true author. Both men used computer programs to analyze such factors as the distribution of word lengths and common word usage in books written by several suspected authors. They then compared the results to “The Cuckoo’s Calling” and identified Rowling as the closest match.</p>
<h2>An infallible method?</h2>
<p>These techniques seem almost magical when they work. But <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/words-on-trial">they’re not foolproof</a>.</p>
<p>In 2018, The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html">published an op-ed</a> written by an anonymous “resister” inside the Trump administration. However, the editorial was too short for linguistic analysis.</p>
<p>Even after the resister published a full-length book, titled “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/books/review/a-warning-anonymous-book-review-trump.html">A Warning</a>,” it wasn’t possible to identify the author. He eventually outed himself as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/politics/miles-taylor-anonymous-trump.html">Miles Taylor</a>. He had served as the chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security. But because he had never published anything else, there was no text to which “A Warning” could be compared.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man in suit jacket poses with folded arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532021/original/file-20230614-31-4yi2ir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The public learned of Miles Taylor’s identity only after he revealed himself as the author of ‘A Warning.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/miles-taylor-who-has-recently-revealed-himself-as-the-news-photo/1229883086?adppopup=true">Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And scholars are still debating the identity of <a href="https://elenaferrante.com">Elena Ferrante</a>, the pseudonym used by a bestselling Italian novelist. Ferrante has published a dozen books, including “My Brilliant Friend,” <a href="https://lithub.com/have-italian-scholars-figured-out-the-identity-of-elena-ferrante/">but the author’s true identity remains controversial</a>. </p>
<p>Either way, technological advances have made it increasingly difficult for people who leave a paper trail to hide their identities – and the old adage to “not put anything in writing” is as true as it’s ever been.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207681/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger J. Kreuz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Similar techniques used to identify criminals have been employed to unmask anonymous authors. But they aren’t foolproof.Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of MemphisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2077152023-06-14T04:14:17Z2023-06-14T04:14:17ZMystique, minimalism and cataclysm: Cormac McCarthy’s fiction was a dark counter-narrative to American optimism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531824/original/file-20230613-29-wuuy96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C23%2C983%2C866&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Derek Shapton/Knopf, AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is testimony to Cormac McCarthy’s reputation as a writer of dark and violent fictions that his publishers should explicitly have stated in their press release on Tuesday that his death was due to “natural causes”. </p>
<p>Normally the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/13/cormac-mccarthy-dead-novelist">passing of a famous author</a> at the age of 89 might be regarded as part of the natural cycle of things, but McCarthy’s frequent depictions of gruesome murder plots, and the judicious discussion of suicide in his most recent novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60526802-stella-maris?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=LLlnAY3SyT&rank=1">Stella Maris</a>, perhaps induced Penguin Random House to emphasise how the author made his exit in a more conventional manner, garlanded by age and honours. </p>
<p>Given his own troubled personal history with alcohol, divorces and economic hardship during the early part of his career, such a consummation was never an entirely safe bet. Nevertheless, McCarthy eventually saw it through and he ended up a major American fiction writer, albeit a complex and often controversial figure whose works were typically unsettling.</p>
<h2>‘Overpowering use of language’</h2>
<p>Born Charles McCarthy into a comfortable Catholic family in Rhode Island in 1933, McCarthy subsequently took his pen-name “Cormac” as a memento of his Irish ancestry. He was brought up in Tennessee, with his early novels The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968) and Suttree (1979) immersed in the cracker-barrel humour of the American Deep South. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531859/original/file-20230614-15-znvs27.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>While these works were respectfully received, they did not sell well, although they did bring McCarthy to the attention of Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, who praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language”. </p>
<p>After being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, on the recommendation of Bellow, McCarthy travelled to Texas, New Mexico and other parts of the American Southwest. It was in this location that he found his most enduring and distinctive voice. </p>
<p>His most famous books, Blood Meridian (1985) and the Border Trilogy – All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998) –characteristically represent questions of life and death in terms of violent cultural relations between the United States and Mexico. By recasting American history in the long shadow of its southern neighbour, McCarthy projects a memorable counter-narrative to the more conventional rhetoric of millennial optimism that has long been associated with American models of freedom and individualism.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-macabre-metaphysic-and-fragmented-style-of-cormac-mccarthy-190739">Friday essay: the macabre metaphysic and fragmented style of Cormac McCarthy</a>
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<p>The Road (2006), a bleak work of apocalyptic devastation that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, also struck a public nerve because of the way it combined McCarthy’s customary scenarios of desolation with particular anxieties around the threat of climate change. </p>
<p>In McCarthy’s world, cataclysm is a normative state of affairs, with war and violence being primordial realities. Human behaviour through the ages is portrayed as being fundamentally insusceptible to change.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531836/original/file-20230614-21-sipiun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">McCarthy at the premiere of the film of The Road in 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Evan Agostini/AP</span></span>
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<p>Though generally uncompromising in his artistic beliefs, McCarthy did reveal throughout his career a willingness to accommodate this sinister aesthetic to more accessible genres and formats. His bloodthirsty crime caper No Country for Old Men (2005), about a drug deal gone wrong, was made into a fine film by the Coen Brothers. </p>
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<h2>Intellectual innovation</h2>
<p>More recently, McCarthy strove to integrate complex scientific material into narrative forms, with the ultimate result being a complementary pair of novels published last year: The Passenger, set primarily in New Orleans, and Stella Maris, which takes place at a psychiatric hospice in Wisconsin. McCarthy’s preoccupations in these final works turn upon the diminution of human agency and the fracturing of liberal consciousness through the coercive pressures of nuclear science, systems surveillance and big data.</p>
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<p>But they address these sombre concerns in an often light-hearted and comic idiom: even secret service executions and personal self-harm become the stuff of self-deprecating comedy. “Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne,” says one character in The Passenger. “But misery is a choice.” </p>
<p>McCarthy was never an easy writer, and his oblique, multi-dimensional novels have become less fashionable in a Facebook era that prefers the attractions of personal stories and the allure of authenticity.</p>
<p>McCarthy’s art, by contrast, was shaped by the minimalism and stylistic impersonality of classic modernist writers such as Ernest Hemingway, along with the more abstract forms of post-humanism that he discussed with his scientific friends at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe institute, where he spent many of his later working years. He gave few interviews and was averse to the kind of self-publicity that has now become the norm in the world of literary marketing.</p>
<p>He did however retain, albeit on a more modest level, some of the mystique surrounding the charismatic or reclusive male author that was a familiar trope in 20th-century American literature, from Hemingway through to J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/j-d-salinger-the-outsider-everybody-wants-to-get-to-know-29972">J.D. Salinger: the outsider everybody wants to get to know
</a>
</strong>
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<p>McCarthy was also sometimes critiqued for his more limited representations of female characters, and in this way, along with many others, he could be seen as a traditional American Western writer.</p>
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<p>It would, though, be wrong to categorise McCarthy’s achievement too narrowly. Though generally regarded as pessimistic, McCarthy’s texts also explore in intellectually innovative ways interconnections and tensions between white Protestant and Hispanic Catholic cultures in America. They also trace crossovers between humans and animals, social systems and the environment and, perhaps most significantly, rationality and its failures or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology">ontological</a> limitations.</p>
<p>The Crossing, the title of the second book in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, might in this sense stand as an epitome of his oeuvre as a whole, which probes points of conjunction and disjunction across the American cultural terrain.</p>
<p>His novels will last as long as American literature itself lasts, though in this era of digital technology, as McCarthy himself with his mordant sense of humour would no doubt have chucklingly acknowledged, the extent of that lifespan is itself an open question.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207715/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Giles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89, was a major American writer with a distinctive voice. In McCarthy’s world, war and violence are primordial realities.Paul Giles, Professor of English, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2036012023-06-12T10:59:05Z2023-06-12T10:59:05ZSilvio Berlusconi: the property developer who became a media tycoon – and Italy’s most flamboyant prime minister<p>Silvio Berlusconi, who has died at the age of 86, was born into a middle-class family in Milan, a city heavily affected by the second world war. He attended a private school belonging to a religious order, and eventually graduated with distinction in law in 1961, specialising in advertising contracts, an area that would of course prove extremely useful in his later careers.</p>
<p>As Berlusconi came of age, Italy was entering its postwar economic “miracle”. And immediately after his graduation, he started a series of successful entrepreneurial initiatives in a booming construction industry.</p>
<p>In his early 30s, Berlusconi conceived of a revolutionary and visionary project, the construction of a residential area in the northern outskirts of Milan called <a href="https://www.archilovers.com/projects/19955/milano-2.html">Milano 2</a>. The idea was to offer high standard, spacious homes in new areas on the outskirts of the city that contrasted with an increasingly crowded and polluted metropolis.</p>
<p>The project was ahead of its time in marketing “exclusive” property to a growing middle class looking to escape the inner city but remain close by. It proved a significant success, which quickly propelled Edilnord (Berlusconi’s construction company) into the big leagues and enabled it to diversify under the umbrella of a financial holding company, Fininvest.</p>
<p>By the 1980s, Berlusconi had received the Order of Merit of Labor and the informal nickname “Il Cavaliere” (the Knight) for his entrepreneurship.</p>
<h2>Building an empire</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, as video broadcasting was being commercialised for the first time in Italy in the mid-1970s (having previously been a state monopoly), Berlusconi started investing in TV.</p>
<p>He set up a media company that transmitted three channels across Italy (Canale 5, Italia 1 and Rete 4). All this was supported by the company’s aggressive advertising arm, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1081180x96001001007?casa_token=Vv9z3UMWpNkAAAAA:Rfax3PVP1iWs3VgbIPsYmXEP3W5oxs7tv8FsjcjH5Jndjeq8Wtkw-LMYNJjKCMn9yjDUe79Swfo">Publitalia</a>. </p>
<p>Berlusconi’s media empire (complemented by the acquisition in 1984 of Arnoldo Mondadori, the most important publishing house in the country) became the sole real competitor of RAI, the state-owned television company. Berlusconi’s personal ability to attract the most popular TV stars of the time certainly helped, as did personal connections in the government. </p>
<p>This made him a pervasive figure in Italian society, but his popularity skyrocketed in the mid-1980s when a highly valuable jewel was added to his crown: <a href="https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32459016/berlusconi_brand_cosentino_doyle-libre.pdf?1391104221=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DSilvio_Berlusconi_One_Man_Brand.pdf&Expires=1681304350&Signature=QO2mn516F4H7-6DztxorL-i4cFEXA5wkJ3K-HEsIdoZ0OwodR9xLVVrUTBdQrvYXmsLnQDYlGcKRif5Ub4knzpL3381pMT9i5KzCGK8zepxRl912dShRUdU5W2fAl2NtLdY4j%7EZcrMi4lkGOSNgLlMreKxS-BfMZx2LATxeFipd5HB74FOMA0ho2Ixi702Fi060IHGXO6Z%7ET8SFQBPyz8bMVw%7EFB1B1ddEqZRVTEEYI%7EhAK8vao0zSP%7ESBdZ9FGKFtSfx8qCaPOaP%7EoONT7s1fxcEAm4G08sGmIzwtXJ1GLwPsS7bDA9p7ced9wbE36synoeCMUxwffFdsuUz9hoSw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA">AC Milan football club</a>. This was already a highly strategic move given Italy’s national obsession with the game, but Berlusconi quickly set about turning Milan from a domestic team into an international brand. </p>
<p>In the 15 years that followed the successful project of Milano 2, Berlusconi had built a business empire that spanned construction, banking and insurance, TV and advertising, publishing, sport and even supermarkets. In just a couple of decades, Berlusconi had transformed Fininvest into Italy’s eighth largest company by turnover.</p>
<h2>From outsider to prime minister</h2>
<p>Despite this remarkable success – and his notorious business skill – Berlusconi was neither immediately nor eagerly welcomed into the drawing rooms of the country’s entrepreneurial elite, who tended to consider him at best a useful upstart. This is perhaps partially what drove an already individualistic character to seek a new level of primacy.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the 1990s, Berlusconi turned himself into a “political entrepreneur”. At the time, the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28117/chapter-abstract/212268180?redirectedFrom=fulltext">“Tangentopoli”</a> scandal had exposed deeply entrenched corruption among national and regional politicians. </p>
<p>Individual politicians and entire political parties were brought down by the revelations and the old party system was turned on its head, leaving an institutional vacuum. Berlusconi stepped in to fill that vacuum by creating a new political party practically overnight, leveraging his personal entrepreneurial prestige and the communication power of his media empire. </p>
<p>Having crafted a (sometimes precarious) <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402380500310600">alliance</a> with two different partners on the right and far right, Berlusconi was elected prime minister for the first time in 1994. It was the beginning of a lengthy spell in power as head of coalitions and alliances of the right. In the end, he was prime minister three times: from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006 and 2008 to 2011.</p>
<p>Berlusconi was recognised as a charismatic politician and the electoral campaigns that put him in government were inevitably centered on him personally. However, he was less convincing as a statesman. He lacked a long-term vision for Italy both in terms of statecraft and economic development. </p>
<p>In his two decades in power, Italy’s GDP remained in line with the rest of Europe but the country’s competitiveness, measured in terms of export, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43039816">declined consistently</a>. This was mirrored by a generous rise in public spending – despite the neoliberal leanings of Berlusconi’s governments.</p>
<p>Berlusconi’s politics always came down to personal relationships over institutions. This style as worsened by a persistent conflict of interest between his role as prime minister of the country and de facto monarch of a business empire largely built on commercial TV and advertising. </p>
<p>He acted no differently as a politician than he did in his entrepreneurial life, running his governments with incredible energy but with an extremely low propensity for delegation. </p>
<p>But while Berlusconi was able to slot his eldest sons Marina and Piersilvio into top jobs in his business empire, he hasn’t been able to find an equally charismatic successor for his political project.</p>
<h2>All is forgiven, again and again</h2>
<p>Italians gave the flamboyant Berlusconi a pass for many antics, particularly his sometimes <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64653128">unconventional behaviour</a> in his private life. He probably got more lenience from the public than he deserved, and certainly much more than the judicial system was willing to extend him, as was clear from his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/15/silvio-berlusconi-community-service-sentence-tax-fraud">conviction</a> for tax fraud. </p>
<p>While he fought off other legal cases over allegations of sex with a minor, others were convicted of <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/silvio-berlusconi/11994528/Italian-businessman-and-glamour-model-convicted-of-recruiting-prostitutes-for-Berlusconis-parties.html">recruiting prostitutes for Berlusconi’s parties</a>.</p>
<p>Even now, after his death, it is difficult to land on a definitive view of Berlusconi and his role in Italy’s recent history. His own life story is certainly emblematic of a country endowed with many gifts – a creative place capable of sudden and unexpected revival. </p>
<p>But he could equally be said to represent Italy in a negative way too, unfortunately too often incapable of producing a vision of the future based on anything other than individual egoistic interests.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203601/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Colli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite his serving three separate terms in office, it’s still difficult to decide on a definitive view of the late Italian prime minister.Andrea Colli, Full Professor, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2072712023-06-08T12:29:09Z2023-06-08T12:29:09ZAstrud Gilberto spread bossa nova to a welcoming world – but got little love back in Brazil<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530684/original/file-20230607-27-zy6mft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C12%2C4083%2C2920&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Astrud Gilberto backstage at New York City's Birdland Jazz Club in 1964.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jazz-singer-astrud-gilberto-pose-for-a-portrait-backstage-news-photo/158229367?adppopup=true">Popsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Astrud Gilberto didn’t set out to be <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/entertainment/astrud-gilberto-death/index.html">an ambassador of bossa nova</a>, the laid-back Brazilian musical genre with rhythms recognizable to music lovers around the world.</p>
<p>According to Gilberto, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/arts/music/astrud-gilberto-dead.html">who died on June 5, 2023</a>, at the age of 83, she wasn’t expecting to be on the 1964 recording of “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/olympics/2016/live-updates/rio-games/scores-and-latest-news/the-back-story-on-the-girl-from-ipanema/">The Girl from Ipanema</a>” – the song for which she is best remembered.</p>
<p>At the time of the recording, she wasn’t even a professional singer.</p>
<p>But Gilberto’s breathy singing voice – almost a whisper, with no hint of a vibrato – helped catapult the song, the singer and bossa nova to the forefront of international pop music. </p>
<p>But while she went on to achieve global fame, back home in Brazil, Gilberto was never given the respect that I believe her talent deserved. In 1966, in the only major performance she gave in her home country, she was booed.</p>
<h2>When bossa went big</h2>
<p>Astrud Gilberto and “The Girl from Ipanema” marked a turning point in bossa nova. </p>
<p>The genre had appeared in Rio de Janeiro in 1958, when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/arts/music/joao-gilberto-dead-bossa-nova.html">João Gilberto</a> invented a new beat on his guitar out of the traditional samba. Compared to samba, bossa nova featured a more relaxed rhythm, with an emphasis on harmonic melodies that João Gilberto and composer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/09/obituaries/antonio-carlos-jobim-composer-dies-at-67.html">Antônio Carlos Jobim</a> had drawn from American jazz.</p>
<p>In 1963, American jazz saxophonist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/07/obituaries/stan-getz-64-saxophonist-dies-a-melodist-with-his-own-sound.html">Stan Getz</a> invited João Gilberto and Jobim to record a jazz-bossa album with him in New York.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man seated, looking away from the camera, cradling a saxophone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530715/original/file-20230607-15-pwuyaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">American saxophonist Stan Getz, photographed in the mid-1960s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-jazz-musician-stan-getz-sits-outside-on-a-walkway-news-photo/3207831?adppopup=true">Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>At that time, jazz in the U.S. was waning in popularity, with other genres, such as rock ‘n’ roll, starting to attract more fans. Getz, in search of a new sound, had had huge success with his 1962 album, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_Samba">Jazz Samba</a>,” the only jazz album that had ever <a href="https://www.knkx.org/jazz/2022-03-24/celebrating-60-years-of-jazz-samba#:%7E:text=Jazz%20Samba%20is%20the%20only,Group%20(Instrumental)%20in%201963.">hit No. 1 on the Billboard pop charts</a>. The foray in bossa nova with two established stars of the genre was going to be his next move.</p>
<p>By then, many American music lovers were already somewhat familiar with bossa nova. Before Getz’s “Jazz Samba,” the 1959 hit Franco-Brazilian movie “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053146/">Black Orpheus</a>,” with its theme “<a href="https://www.kuvo.org/stories-of-standards-manha-de-carnaval/">Manhã de Carnaval</a>,” had introduced the genre to a global audience – the film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a best foreign language Oscar in the U.S. </p>
<p>Jazz singer Tony Bennett was also an <a href="https://bloggingtonybennett.com/tag/bossa-nova/">early champion of the genre</a>, arriving home from a 1961 trip to Rio de Janiero with an armful of bossa records, and he may have inspired Getz to collaborate with some stars of the genre.</p>
<p>João Gilberto arrived to meet Getz at a Manhattan recording studio accompanied by his then-22-year-old wife, Astrud. </p>
<p>What happened next is contested, with Getz claiming credit for suggesting that Astrud sing two tracks: “The Girl From Ipanema” by Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, and “Corcovado” or “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” by Jobim only. Astrud spoke English, along with a handful of other languages, in addition to her native Portuguese.</p>
<p>Astrud was, at that time, not a professional singer although she had sung in a couple of clubs in Rio de Janeiro. Nonetheless, she possessed a voice that suited the bossa style. Before bossa nova emerged, the Brazilian “cancioneiro” was dominated by an opera-like way of singing, where the singer imposed an image of grandiose figure to the audience. In the quiet and minimalist revolution of bossa nova, however, the singer’s personality is subdued; the music and the melody take center stage.</p>
<p>In that style, Astrud almost whispers her way through “The Girl From Ipanema” and “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.” Getz’s saxophone solos are similarly low-key. There is nothing flashy. It is all about the melody, the rhythm and the harmony.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman bathed in magenta light closes her eyes while singing." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530686/original/file-20230607-27-finyvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Astrud Gilberto’s voice was perfectly suited for bossa nova.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photo-of-astrud-gilberto-news-photo/86103973?adppopup=true">Simon Ritter/Redferns via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>And yet the restrained vocals and sax, together with the easy-flowing melody, proved a potent mix. When the track was released as a single in 1964 – with João Gilberto’s Portuguese verses cut out – it became a massive hit. Today, “The Girl from Ipanema” <a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/07/08/156430077/who-is-she-just-one-of-the-most-popular-songs-ever">is the second-most-recorded pop song of all time</a> – bested only by The Beatles’ “Yesterday.” </p>
<p>The album it appeared on, “Getz/Gilberto,” also became world famous, spawning a live follow-up, “Getz/Gilberto #2,” a year later. </p>
<h2>Brazil turns its back</h2>
<p>But the “Gilberto” in the album title was very much João, and not Astrud.</p>
<p>João Gilberto <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/astrud-gilberto-girl-from-ipanema-b2006879.html">was paid US$23,000</a> for the “Getz/Gilberto” session. Getz himself pocketed close to a million dollars from sales. Astrud reportedly received <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/06/1180416189/astrud-gilberto-the-girl-from-ipanema-singer-dies-at-83">just $120</a>. She also didn’t make it onto the credits of the original album.</p>
<p>Indeed, as the song grew in popularity, Getz reportedly called Creed Taylor, head of Verve Records, to make sure Astrud <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/singers-and-the-song-ii-9780195122084?cc=us&lang=en&">would not be included in the share of the royalties</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Album cover featuring abstract orange and black painting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530713/original/file-20230607-29-6w4o9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">On the album cover for ‘Getz/Gilberto,’ there’s no mention of Astrud.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cover-of-the-album-getz-gilberto-by-stan-getz-and-joao-news-photo/158624172?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Nonetheless, back in Brazil she was portrayed as a “lucky girl” who found overnight fame simply for being in the right place, with the right man, at the right time.</p>
<p>She divorced João in 1964, and the press in Brazil blamed her for the collapse of the marriage, amid rumors of an affair with Getz. No doubt, the misogyny of Brazilian culture at the time played a role. Her son, Marcelo, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65818566">later recalled in an interview</a> that “Brazil turned its back” on his mother, adding that “She achieved fame abroad at a time when this was considered treasonous by the press.”</p>
<p>Astrud Gilberto went on to have a successful career, releasing 17 original albums from 1964 to 2002 and collaborating with figures such as Quincy Jones, Chet Baker, Stanley Turrentine and George Michael.</p>
<p>Despite her success, she was never accepted as a star back in her native Brazil. In this, she was not alone: The country rarely embraces Brazilians who rise to stardom while living abroad, particularly in the U.S. Before Gilberto, singer <a href="https://www.si.edu/spotlight/latin-music-legends-stamps/carmen-miranda">Carmen Miranda</a> got the same cold shoulder. And Brazilians similarly shunned bossa nova legend <a href="https://www.sfjazz.org/tickets/productions/sergio-mendes-1920/">Sérgio Mendes</a>, who rose to fame in the late 1960s. </p>
<p>Astrud Gilberto ultimately only performed once in her native country after finding fame and emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s. Despite a career that spanned four decades, Astrud was viewed by many in Brazil as merely João Gilberto’s wife – the girl that got lucky with that one hit record.</p>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/2Ad42omFKALIj6R38Xk95w?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="380" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mario Higa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>During the only major performance she gave in her home country, Gilberto was booed.Mario Higa, Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, MiddleburyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2065112023-05-31T12:35:38Z2023-05-31T12:35:38ZRemembering South Africa’s “Grand Geek” Barry Dwolatzky - engineer and programming pioneer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528576/original/file-20230526-21-3xadfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Professor Barry Dwolatzky was passionate about innovation in all that he did.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>To some of his former students, Professor Barry Dwolatzky was the “Grand Geek” – a name of which he was very proud. But Barry, who passed away in Johannesburg, South Africa on 16 May 2023, was much more than a computer geek. He was also a leader and a visionary in the field of software engineering in South Africa.</p>
<p>At the time of his passing he was 71 years old. He was by then retired from academia and held the title of Emeritus Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where he spent much of his career. </p>
<p>But he didn’t really slow down: he remained the director of the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE), a role he’d held since 2007. During the COVID lockdown in 2020, he started a podcast called <a href="https://iono.fm/c/4965">Optimizing – Leading Africa’s Digital Future</a> and produced eight episodes. He also wrote an autobiography called <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/future/stories/looking-ahead-from-a-life-of-new-beginnings.html">Coded History – My Life of New Beginnings</a>, which was launched in November 2022.</p>
<h2>A pioneer in programming</h2>
<p>An alumnus of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Wits University, Barry graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1975. He then started a master’s degree, which he converted to a PhD.</p>
<p>After obtaining his PhD in 1979, he did post-doctoral research at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Science and Technology and at Imperial College in London. Thereafter, he worked as a senior research associate at the GEC-Marconi Centre in the UK.</p>
<p>I first met Barry in 1989 when he returned to South Africa as a senior lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering at Wits. I was an undergraduate in his class that year. When I returned to Wits in 1998, he was my MSc supervisor and, when I was appointed as a lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering, we were colleagues and friends.</p>
<p>When he joined the School, there was only one programming course, Engineering Applied Computing, taught to second-year electrical, civil and mechanical engineering students. Barry identified the growing importance of programming and information technology in engineering fields before anyone else in South Africa really had. Today, the School of Electrical & Information Engineering’s curriculum contains two second-year programming courses and a third-year course that is compulsory for all electrical and information engineering students. Barry was instrumental in introducing all these courses.</p>
<p>He was also the driving force behind the school’s name change: “Information Engineering” was added in the year 2000 with the introduction of a software stream that would be distinct from the electrical engineering stream.</p>
<p>The idea didn’t come from the blue. Talking to people in various companies, Barry realised that most of the school’s graduates went into the information and communications technology (ICT) sector rather than into the classical electrical engineering fields like electrical generation, transmission and distribution, high voltage engineering and control engineering. </p>
<p>That’s what prompted the development and introduction of the software stream. At that time, computers were becoming more common in many industries and the mobile phone sector was starting to take off.</p>
<h2>Software to drive development</h2>
<p>In the late 1980s, the then CEO of Eskom, South Africa’s national electricity utility, announced a mass roll-out of electrification called Electricity for All. Between 1990 and 2000, about 2.5 million houses were connected to the national grid. At that time, Barry started working on a software programme that would assist engineers in planning the electrification of townships, historically black urban residential areas. </p>
<p>A number of postgraduate students under his supervision worked on aspects of this software. He <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/624520">called the program CART</a> (Computer-Aided Reticulation of Townships). In 1997, he took a year-long sabbatical and worked full time on CART, developing it into a viable commercial product that was used to aid in the design of the electrification of many townships.</p>
<p>In 2005, Barry launched the <a href="https://jcse.org.za/">Joburg Centre for Software Engineering</a>. He became its director in 2007. It was the work he did through the centre that established him as an important thought leader in the software and IT space. Among other things, the centre hosted masterclasses with world renowned software experts.</p>
<h2>Innovation champion</h2>
<p>In 2012, Barry identified some old buildings owned by Wits University in Braamfontein, a high-rise downtown area of Johannesburg, as an ideal site for an innovation hub. Many people speak fondly of how Barry took them into a derelict disco with only the light from his mobile phone and enthusiastically explained how this was going to be a tech co-working space. He raised funding and transformed the rundown buildings into the innovation hub that is today one of the university’s flagship projects.</p>
<p>It is called the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct. <a href="https://tshimologong.joburg/">Tshimologong</a> (a seTswana word for “place of new beginnings”) provides a space for digital start-ups, as well as training in digital technologies, and is used as a co-working space. Barry was Tshimologong’s first director and was honoured for this visionary project with the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research and Teaching in 2016. </p>
<p>Even after retiring, Barry remained committed to and driven by the idea of innovation. He worked alongside Wits University’s deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Lynn Morris, to establish the <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/innovation/wits-innovation-centre/">Wits Innovation Centre</a>. It was launched on 17 April 2023. </p>
<p>He passed away in a Johannesburg hospital on 16 May with his wife Rina and his children Leslie and Jodie at his side.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206511/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Estelle Trengove does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many speak fondly of how Barry Dwolatzky took them into a derelict disco and enthusiastically explained the tech co-working space he envisioned there.Estelle Trengove, Associate professor in electrical engineering, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2063952023-05-25T07:18:39Z2023-05-25T07:18:39ZEmpowerment, individual strength and the many facets of love: why I fell for Tina Turner<p>For singers – amateur and professional alike – the name Tina Turner evokes instant reverence: Turner is a singer’s singer and perhaps the performer’s performer. </p>
<p>A highly successful songwriter, the consummate dancer and fittingly ranked as one of the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-greatest-artists-147446/">100 Greatest Artists of All Time</a> by Rolling Stone magazine, Turner was the ultimate entertainer. </p>
<p>Upon hearing of her death, I was deeply saddened. I immediately recalled the intoxicating power and timbre of her voice, her mesmerising energy and her commanding performances. </p>
<p>I started singing sections of songs such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2T5_seDNZE">Proud Mary</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Lehkou2Do">River Deep Mountain High</a> and of course iconic original songs, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I07249JX8w4">Nutbush City Limits</a>. This was an intimate, sentimental, nostalgic and danceable song celebrating Turner’s roots growing up in the small town of Nutbush, Tennessee. </p>
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<h2>Fierce hard work</h2>
<p>My first encounter with Turner’s brilliance and might was hearing her hits of the mid-1980s, with songs like Graham Lyle’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGpFcHTxjZs">What’s Love Got To Do With It</a>, Al Green’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFB4nj_GRc">Let’s Stay Together</a> and – love it or hate it – the powerful rock ballad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcm-tOGiva0">We Don’t Need Another Hero</a>, the theme song to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. </p>
<p>Once introduced, I immersed myself in her extensive back catalogue, soaking in her early 1960s soul, funk and emerging rock tracks. </p>
<p>Today, I flashed back to memories of the physical energy and technical focus and practice it took just attempting to sing any Turner songs in my 20s. </p>
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<p>The degree of difficulty required to perform as Turner did cannot be understated. </p>
<p>To sing with such consistency in such high registers, belting out song after song live with impeccable pitch, breath control, fitness, articulation and rhythmic precision is one thing. To do all of this while dancing with intense pace to highly choreographed routines throughout each show is on a whole other level. </p>
<p>Her performance practice exemplified fierce hard work – with an immense energy and vitality in live performance. </p>
<p>Try singing any of her songs at a Karaoke bar. Very quickly you gain some insight into the technical demands her songs require. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-some-of-the-best-known-tunes-like-happy-birthday-are-the-hardest-to-sing-130933">Why some of the best-known tunes, like 'Happy Birthday,' are the hardest to sing</a>
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<h2>Making songs her own</h2>
<p>For every singer, selecting a repertoire to cover is an ongoing quest. </p>
<p>In a sea of the world’s great songs, Turner selected songs she could make her own. She remodelled every song she sang - realigning them so much that we now think of them as hers first.</p>
<p>There are so many examples. My favourites are Turner’s formidable versions of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIPoC6JlP38">I Can’t Stand the Rain</a> (originally by Ann Peebles), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC5E8ie2pdM">The Best</a> (Bonnie Tyler) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4QnalIHlVc">Private Dancer</a> (Mark Knopfler). </p>
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<p>A great deal of the songs Turner was known for through the 1960s were covers. Turner’s forceful and expressive vocal delivery gave new life to these songs, realigning them with her uniquely identifiable sound and choice of vocal register, her phrasing choices and her punctuated rhythmic delivery. </p>
<p>Turner is perhaps less known as a songwriter, but her diverse songwriting demonstrated her skill and thoughtful, well-crafted lyrics. On her 1972 album Feel Good, nine of the ten songs were written by Turner. From 1973 to 1977, Turner composed all the songs on each album. </p>
<p>One of my favourites of her original songs is the power ballad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l__zi3OtrQ0">Be Tender With Me Baby</a>. It speaks of a request for understanding, of her loneliness and vulnerability, sung with Turner’s intensity. </p>
<p>Across her original songs and covers, Turner’s repertoire spoke of empowerment, individual strength and the many facets of love. Beyond performing, Turner represented inner strength, spiritual depth and resilience against adversity.</p>
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<p>In 1996, when Turner was 57, she recorded her ninth studio album, Wildest Dreams.</p>
<p>One track, Something Beautiful Remains, may not be as familiar as many of her other hits, but it is the song I have kept returning to today. In the chorus, Turner’s lyrics are sadly perfectly fitting:</p>
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<p>For every life that fades<br>
Something beautiful remains.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tina-turner-had-a-history-of-high-blood-pressure-and-kidney-disease-heres-how-one-leads-to-the-other-206392">Tina Turner had a history of high blood pressure and kidney disease. Here's how one leads to the other</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206395/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leigh Carriage does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The legendary singer has died at 83. Her performance practice exemplified fierce hard work.Leigh Carriage, Senior Lecturer in Music, Southern Cross UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2062822023-05-24T05:24:55Z2023-05-24T05:24:55ZEven after his death, Rolf Harris’ artwork will stand as reminders of his criminal acts<p>Australian entertainer and artist Rolf Harris has died at the age of 93. </p>
<p>After a prominent career as an artist, particularly in the UK, in 2014 <a href="https://theconversation.com/rolf-harris-guilty-but-what-has-operation-yewtree-really-taught-us-about-sexual-abuse-28282">Harris was convicted</a> of 12 counts of indecent assault.</p>
<p>For his victims, his death might help to close a painful chapter of their lives. </p>
<p>However, what will become of the prodigious output of the disgraced artist?</p>
<h2>Jack of all trades, master of none</h2>
<p>Harris developed an interest in art from a young age. At the age of 15, one of his portraits was <a href="https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/1946/">selected for showing</a> in the 1946 Archibald Prize. Three years later, he won the Claude Hotchin prize. </p>
<p>These would be among the few accolades he would collect in the art world. In truth, he was never really recognised by his peers. </p>
<p>The Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, from where he hailed, never added any of his artworks to its collection. </p>
<p>Harris rose to prominence primarily as a children’s entertainer and then later as an all-round television presenter. There is a generation of Australians and Britons who grew up transfixed to their TV sets as Harris transformed blank canvases into paintings and cartoons in the space of just 30 minutes. </p>
<p>His creativity also extended to music. He played the didgeridoo and his own musical creation, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobble_board">the wobble board</a>”. He topped the British charts in 1969 with the single Two Little Boys. However, he is probably more famous for the song Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.</p>
<p>Perhaps the ultimate recognition came in 2005, when he was invited to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Majesty_Queen_Elizabeth_II_%E2%80%93_An_80th_Birthday_Portrait">paint Queen Elizabeth II</a>. His audience with the queen was filmed for a BBC documentary starring Harris. His portrait of her majesty briefly adorned the walls of Buckingham Palace, before being displayed in prominent British and Australian galleries. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dealing-with-the-happy-memories-of-a-disgraced-rolf-harris-28722">Dealing with the happy memories of a disgraced Rolf Harris</a>
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<h2>Criminal conviction and the quick retreat from his art</h2>
<p>In 2014, Harris was found guilty of 12 counts of indecent assault against three complainants, aged 15, 16 and 19 years at the times of the crimes. These incidents occurred between 1978 and 1986. </p>
<p>Before sentencing Harris to five years and nine months imprisonment, the sentencing judge <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/the-full-statement-from-the-judge-who-sentenced-rolf-harris-to-jail-20140704-3bee0.html">commented</a>:</p>
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<p>You took advantage of the trust placed in you, because of your celebrity status, to commit the offences […] Your reputation now lies in ruins.</p>
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<p>What followed was a public retreat from his artwork. </p>
<p>It is worth asking why this was the public response, when the subject matter of his artwork was innocuous and unremarkable. Among his visual artworks were portraits and landscapes. None of them depicted anything particularly offensive or controversial. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, many of those who owned his works felt the need to dissociate themselves with Harris. His portrait of the queen <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28105318">seemed to vanish</a> into thin air. In the wake of his convictions, no one claimed to know of its whereabouts. </p>
<p>Harris had also painted a number of permanent murals in Australia. Many these were <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/rolf-harris-mural-in-caulfield-to-be-painted-over-20140706-zsy3n.html">removed</a> or <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-06/rolf-harris-mural-on-theatre-survives-vote-for-destruction/9518358">permanently obscured</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rolf-harris-guilty-but-what-has-operation-yewtree-really-taught-us-about-sexual-abuse-28282">Rolf Harris guilty: but what has Operation Yewtree really taught us about sexual abuse?</a>
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<h2>The roles of guilt and disgust</h2>
<p>Guilt seems to play a <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:d3f7264">prominent role</a> in explaining why owners remove such artworks from display. </p>
<p>Art is inherently subjective and so it necessarily forces the beholder to inquire into the artist’s meanings. When an artist is subsequently convicted of a crime, it is perhaps natural to wonder whether their art bore signs that there was something untoward about them. </p>
<p>Some artists even promote this way of thinking. In fact, Harris authored a book entitled <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2883465-looking-at-pictures-with-rolf-harris">Looking at Pictures with Rolf Harris: A Children’s Introduction to Famous Paintings</a>. </p>
<p>In it, he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can find out a lot about the way an artist sees things when you look at his paintings. In fact, he is telling us a lot about himself, whether he wants to or not. </p>
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<p>When facing the artwork of a convicted criminal, our subjective feelings of guilt persist because we have, in some tiny way, shared a role in their rise and stay as an artist. This makes it difficult to overcome the feeling that the artwork contains clues to the artist’s criminality. We can also feel guilty deriving pleasure from a piece of art whose maker caused others great pain. </p>
<p>Disgust also plays a central role in our retreat from the criminal’s artwork. </p>
<p>Disgust is a powerful emotion that demands we withdraw from an object whose mere presence threatens to infect or invade our bodily integrity. </p>
<p>Related to disgust is a anthropological theory known as the “<a href="https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-xpm-2014-feb-24-la-sci-sn-price-of-fame-celebrity-contact-boosts-value-of-objects-20140222-story.html">magical law of contagion</a>”. An offensive person leaves behind an offensive trace that continues to threaten us. It is not based on reason but instinct. </p>
<p>In essence, the criminal has left their “negative” traces on their artwork.</p>
<p>This explains why Harris’ paintings, although of innocuous images, suddenly became eyesores and their market value dropped. Owners of such artwork might also feel compelled to show their disgust openly, to publicly extricate themselves from the artist. </p>
<p>No one wants to be seen to condone the behaviour of a sexual offender. </p>
<p>Even after his death, Harris’ artwork will continue to stand as reminders of his criminal acts. </p>
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<p><em>If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call <a href="https://www.1800respect.org.au">1800RESPECT</a> on 1800 737 732. In an emergency call 000.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206282/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gregory Dale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Disgraced Australian entertainer and artist Rolf Harris has died at the age of 93.Gregory Dale, Lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2060692023-05-21T09:40:51Z2023-05-21T09:40:51ZThe pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation, Martin Amis’s pyrotechnic prose captured life’s destructive energies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527346/original/file-20230521-29-aeyvg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C33%2C5573%2C3690&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Martin Amis pictured at home in 2012.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bebeto Matthews/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Martin Amis, pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/martin-amis-era-defining-british-novelist-dies-aged-73">has died</a> at the age of 73. His dazzling, pyrotechnic prose dominated the world of English writing from the mid-1970s through the fin de siècle. </p>
<p>Amis captured the contemporary world’s sinister, destructive energies in a savage and glittering series of novels, essays and memoirs. </p>
<p>His books include the tour de force novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18825.Money?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=hbM32GrBNT&rank=1">Money</a> (1984), which summed up the 1980s before the decade of greed and narcissism was even halfway through and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18830.London_Fields?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=LygUkDaXx5&rank=1">London Fields</a> (1989), a strangely prescient vision of urban, moral, and environmental decline that turned the familiar, depressing, post-industrial cityscape into something oddly more terrifying. </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18827.Experience?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Rk1xeFthZS&rank=1">Experience</a> (2000), his unexpectedly tender memoir was written in response to the death of his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. And <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78432.The_War_against_Clich_?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=J3vlaAF9vP&rank=1">The War Against Cliché</a>, far and away the best of his essay collections, published in 2001, deserves a prominent place on any self-respecting literary critic’s bookshelf for its attack not only on “cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind”. </p>
<p>Amis was fearless, if not reckless. His female characters were admittedly thin, and occasionally insensitive. He pushed back accusations of sexism. And yet, he inspired radical feminist Germaine Greer to write (but not send) a <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-long-letter-to-a-short-love-or/">30,000-word love letter</a> that is now housed in the Greer archives at the University of Melbourne. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527365/original/file-20230521-125283-a54gyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Germaine Greer: wrote Amis an (unsent) 30,000 word love letter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
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<p>It is also true that late in life, he broke the bounds of the acceptable. His essay <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/10/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety">The Age of Horrorism</a>, written five years after the attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, prompted literary critic Terry Eagleton to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/13/highereducation.islam">compare Amis’s statements on Muslims</a> to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug”.</p>
<p>Amis wrote in The War Against Cliche that, “you hope to get more relaxed and confident over time: and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder”. </p>
<p>And yet he didn’t seem to learn. He once called Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee a writer <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7080509/Martin-Amis-criticises-Nobel-writer-JM-Coetzee-for-having-no-talent.html">with “no talent”</a>. He admits that “Angus Wilson and William Burrows nursed my animadversions … to the grave”. </p>
<p>Amis, who was married to the writer Isabel Fonseca, spent the later part of his life in the United States. He died at his home in Lake Worth in Florida. </p>
<h2>Middle-bohemian</h2>
<p>Amis came of age in what he once described as an “unrecognisably remote” era in which it seemed perfectly feasible to reorganise the world and socio-economic reality from an armchair, or by banging on a typewriter.</p>
<p>He once described himself in his twenties, at work at the Times Literary Supplement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… wearing shoulder length hair, a flower shirt, and knee-high tricolour boots (well concealed, it is true, by the twin tepees of my trousers). My private life was middle-bohemian – hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly debaunched: but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube: I always had about me my Edmund Wilson – or my William Empson. I took it seriously. We all did.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527348/original/file-20230521-126409-371l6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Amis pictured in 2004.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sergio Barrenechea/AP</span></span>
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<p>“We” included critic, writer and broadcaster Clive James, journalist Christopher Hitchens, and novelist Julian Barnes. Amis would later have a spectacular <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/05/martin-amis-is-dead-at-73#:%7E:text=Barnes%20was%20the%20one%20with,%2C%E2%80%9D%20Amis%20later%20said.">falling out</a> with the latter over a book contract. </p>
<p>This “we” also included much of the British literary establishment. Amis was born a literary celebrity – the son of Kingsley – but
quickly crawled out of his father’s shadow, publishing his first novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18828.The_Rachel_Papers?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=rFvGsP1wRX&rank=1">The Rachel Papers</a>, just out of university. This was swiftly followed by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18833.Dead_Babies?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=gIOkRQY2kT&rank=1">Dead Babies</a>, the title a clear signal that he was out to break a shibboleth or three.</p>
<p>According to Amis, OPEC put an end to the literary bohemia of his youth. The “oil hike, and inflation, and then stagflation” meant nobody could live on ten shillings a week. The whole idea of literature, which, for Amis, was intrinsically based on an idea of elitism, was doomed to be pulverised by money and necessity. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/christopher-hitchens-was-a-model-of-the-public-intellectual-as-celebrity-could-he-really-be-the-saviour-of-the-left-199497">Christopher Hitchens was a model of the public intellectual as celebrity. Could he really be the saviour of the Left?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A post-industrial Dickens</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527363/original/file-20230521-146626-n6lx7v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>He set himself to work, a post-industrial Dickens, to capture his times. And the language in which he did so contained endlessly inventive combinations of the extravagant and unexpected. </p>
<p>In the novel Money, for instance, the protagonist John Self, a boorish, wreck of a human being, addicted to fast food, fast cars and alcohol, takes the reader through the turbulent mental and emotional landscape of postmodern Los Angeles, replete with unforgettable descriptions combining deliberately smarmy schoolboy images shot through with Old Testament judgement.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run!“</p>
</blockquote>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1660018655122341888"}"></div></p>
<p>Amis’s writing style is instantly recognisable: inimitable, caustic and savagely funny. But there is also, underneath it all, tremendous pathos. London Fields, for example, Amis’s darkly comic novel featuring the small time crook, sex addict and aspiring darts champion Keith Talent, who watches rich people on television and dreams that he might yet become one, is also an extended meditation on death, anxiety and self-delusion. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Experience, Amis’s voice is similarly moving: angry, honest, wildly stylish, casting back and forth between youth and middle age. The book was notable for its magnificent footnotes, telling stories within stories, a little like life itself. </p>
<p>Amis was larger than life; a rock star writer. He moved freely between fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism. His death marks the end of an era.</p>
<p>It seems fitting to give him the last word. As he wrote in Experience:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Martin Amis’s writing style was instantly recognisable: caustic and savagely funny with a sense of pathos. His death at 73 marks the end of an era.Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2044282023-04-26T14:31:11Z2023-04-26T14:31:11ZLen Goodman: how the late Strictly Come Dancing star revived the nation’s love of ballroom<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522651/original/file-20230424-25-j2aklw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=515%2C81%2C2479%2C1985&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Len Goodman on the red carpet for Strictly Come Dancing in 2013. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/len-goodman-arriving-strictly-come-dancing-153582521">Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With the news of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65373373">Len Goodman’s death</a> at age 78, ballroom dancing has lost one of its greatest advocates. But Goodman has left a lasting legacy, spearheading an unlikely revival of the ballroom scene he loved.</p>
<p>As head judge on <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m8dq">Strictly Come Dancing</a> from 2004 to 2016, Goodman brought a no nonsense honesty to his role, as well as his wealth of expertise. The sparkle, camp and glam of the days of the BBC’s original dance show, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/september/come-dancing/">Come Dancing</a>, was rekindled in his cheeky quips and cheesy one liners – part of its familiar, broad appeal.</p>
<p>For children of the 1970s like me, early memories of ballroom dancing probably came from late night screenings of Come Dancing, the amateur dance contest that inspired Strictly. </p>
<p>In the days before 24-hour broadcasting, in the hazy excitement of staying up later than I should have, I can recall flicking through the channels (all three of them) and stumbling across the curious world of the ballroom.</p>
<p>Almost voyeur-like, I’d entered a world seemingly preserved in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/aspic">aspic</a> – another 1970s favourite. Sequins, frills, shiny hair, patent leather, an overabundance of makeup, tight trousers and a lot of “cha cha chaa”. All fronted by Angela Rippon, whose restrained received pronunciation seemed at odds with this brashness. </p>
<p>What I didn’t realise at the time, was that I was observing a cultural pursuit that was at a nadir in terms of both its popularity and public perception. Although Come Dancing was to stumble on for another decade or so, ballroom dancing looked like it was finished.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-strictly-is-challenging-the-way-people-think-about-dance-192357">How Strictly is challenging the way people think about dance</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Sure, it had thousands of devotees who competed regularly in town halls and the ever-shrinking number of ballrooms dotted around the country, but its golden age seemed to have gone forever. And boy had ballroom had a golden age!</p>
<h2>How ballroom shaped Britain</h2>
<p>Ballroom dancing was one of the most important <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/going-to-the-palais-9780199605194?cc=gb&lang=en&">social and cultural features of 20th century Britain</a>. While a distinction was to grow between “ballroom dancing” of the type featured on Come Dancing (competitive, semi-professional) and the “social dancing” enjoyed by millions in the dance halls of the country, they both drew from the same cultural roots.</p>
<p>First codified by dance teachers in Britain in the 1920s, the foxtrot, waltz, quickstep and others were later joined by the jive and the twist. In between, fashionable interlopers such as the Charleston, the Big Apple and the jitterbug briefly pushed their way onto the dance floor.</p>
<p>A vast industry grew up to cater for the demand of Britons to dance, as chains of dance halls sprang up in every town and city in the land. Led by groups such as Mecca (latterly of bingo fame), they were catering for the needs of a working- and lower middle-class population with more time and money than ever before and in need of letting their hair down.</p>
<p>In 1950, <a href="https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/going-to-the-palais(b53e9ddf-6d5c-44a0-9129-9b885c484724).html">the Daily Mirror estimated</a> that over 70% of people met their future husbands or wives while dancing – my own parents among them. Romantic music, close embraces and dim lighting made the ballroom the place to meet. </p>
<p><a href="https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/going-to-the-palais(b53e9ddf-6d5c-44a0-9129-9b885c484724).html">By 1959</a>, 5 million people went dancing every week, in over 3,000 venues. But it was more than just dancing they offered. They served a variety of important social functions.</p>
<p>For women, as my mother attested, dancing was particularly important. Offering a form of peer group independence, it was an important form of exercise, allowed interaction with boys from an early age and entry into the “public sphere”. All that in a venue that was safe and where they were usually better skilled than <a href="https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/we-do-not-want-fairies-in-the-ballroom(cc1dd687-05dd-436b-a294-5ce3fa9981d8).html">their male counterparts</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Goodman dancing in 1971.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Learning to dance was a key part of the younger generation’s transition to adulthood and the dance hall offered them a place to experiment with their appearance, identity and friendships. </p>
<p>As Britain grew more racially diverse – particularly from the 1950s onwards – the dance hall was one of the first and most important venues where people of different races came into close contact with one another, with their shared love of dancing. </p>
<p><a href="https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/worlds-of-social-dancing(35373051-9853-4ccf-8114-935515acb3d3).html">From the 1920s</a> to the mid 1960s, dancing was central to the nation’s social and cultural history – Britons were dancing mad.</p>
<h2>Len Goodman’s influence</h2>
<p>Len Goodman was one such dance-mad Brit. Born working class in Bethnal Green, London in 1944, he came to dancing relatively late at 19. He soon made up for this though and by his twenties he was winning dancing competitions up and down the country.</p>
<p>He went on to have <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2023/04/24/strictly-come-dancings-len-goodmans-unlikely-but-glittering-career-18662301/">a stellar competitive dancing career</a>. For most of us though, it took the arrival of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing in 2004 for Goodman to come to our attention. Adding a touch of irony to the highly codified world of ballroom, the programme has revitalised interest in this kind of dancing.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Len Goodman’s final episode of Strictly’s American counterpart, Dancing With the Stars.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With its combination of high camp, competitiveness, sexy professionals, hapless celebs, pantomime goodie and baddie judges and good old fashioned music and dance spun for the contemporary audience, it has been a remarkable hit. At its height it has attracted audiences of over <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59719398">11 million</a>. Moreover, it has driven a revival of interest in ballroom dancing that rescued it from oblivion.</p>
<p>Goodman made several television programmes on the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2601434/">history of dancing</a> and published several <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/220969/len-goodman">books on the topic</a> – all reflective of the newfound interest in ballroom. </p>
<p>Perhaps the best way to honour Goodman’s memory would be to reopen dance hall venues across the country, complete with live music, mirror balls and sprung dance floors. In an increasingly isolated society, the revival of such a rich social world would certainly get a “ten from Len” (and from me).</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204428/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Nott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The sparkle, camp and glam of ballroom days gone by was rekindled in Goodman’s cheeky quips and cheesy one-liners.James Nott, Lecturer, School of History, University of St AndrewsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2045002023-04-26T12:35:53Z2023-04-26T12:35:53ZHarry Belafonte leveraged stardom for social change, his powerful voice always singing a song for justice<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522980/original/file-20230426-18-t6jgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C47%2C3765%2C2616&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Harry Belafonte died at the age of 96.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/2011SundanceFilmFestivalPremiereofSingYourSong/32d0aee1f1544348892eac7fb4427f08/photo?Query=Belafonte&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=756&currentItemNo=565">AP Photo/Chris Pizzello</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In May 1963, as <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/birmingham-campaign">civil rights demonstrations rocked the city of Birmingham, Alabama</a>, Harry Belafonte was at a cocktail party in Manhattan, scolding the then-attorney general of the United States. </p>
<p>“You may think you’re doing enough,” he recalled telling <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy">Robert F. Kennedy</a>, “but you don’t live with us, you don’t even visit our pain.”</p>
<p>Belafonte had many frank and heated conversations with Kennedy. In fact, the singer, actor and activist was on intimate terms with many pivotal figures of the civil rights era.</p>
<p>He was a confidant and adviser to <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/biographical/">Martin Luther King Jr</a> and allied with <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/toure-ahmed-sekou-1922-1984/">Ahmed Sékou Touré</a>, the president of Guinea. He funded the grassroots activists of the <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/the-story-of-sncc/">Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee</a> (SNCC) as it battled Jim Crow, and he brought a delegation of Hollywood stars to the March on Washington. Along with his best friend and sometimes-rival, actor Sidney Poitier, Belafonte delivered funds to civil rights volunteers in Greenwood, Mississippi, <a href="https://blavity.com/how-sidney-poitier-and-harry-belafonte-escaped-the-kkk-to-help-save-freedom-summer?category1=news&category2=politics">while the Ku Klux Klan watched their every move</a>. </p>
<p>Belafonte, who <a href="https://apnews.com/article/harry-belafonte-dead-2d8cbdf0043e4383a6c4a85c862cdbe1">died on April 25, 2023, at the age of 96</a>, was a unique figure in the history of the Black freedom struggle in the U.S. No other entertainer immersed themselves so deeply in the Civil Rights Movement; no other activist occupied a niche at so many levels of American politics. If he was a powerful voice for justice, it was because he leveraged his celebrity.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A black man dressed in a military uniform stands next to a woman with her hand on her hip." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522840/original/file-20230425-22-urvbtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in the 1954 film ‘Carmen Jones.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/actors-dorothy-dandridge-and-harry-belafonte-in-a-publicity-news-photo/686940153?adppopup=true">Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>A remarkable career</h2>
<p>On stage, Belafonte was something to behold, a beacon of charisma. Clad in body-hugging shirts with his chest bare, drawing his audience’s eyes to the looping metal rings at the belt of his tight silk pants, he oozed with seduction. Women swooned. </p>
<p>And he was wildly successful. In 1957, Belafonte sold more records than Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. His repertoire resembled neither Sinatra’s classic pop nor Presley’s up-and-coming rock ‘n’ roll. </p>
<p>The son of West Indian/Carribean immigrants, Belafonte inspired a short-lived craze for calypso music thanks to hits such as “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5dpBWlRANE">Day O</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_mK1MyDntc">Jamaica Farewell</a>,” and he adapted ethnic folk music for popular consumption – his mainstays included “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE8rl5UwTP8">Hava Nagila</a>,” the Jewish celebration song. </p>
<p>He also starred in Hollywood films such as “<a href="https://prod-www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/639/bright-road#overview">Bright Road</a>” (1953) and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046828/">Carmen Jones</a>” (1954). “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050549/">Island in the Sun</a>,” released in 1957, caused a furor. Though Belafonte never kisses his white co-star, Joan Fontaine, on screen, the film explores the theme of interracial romance. The Southern censors banned it. </p>
<p>Belafonte danced around the taboos of race and sex. This exceptionally handsome Black man was charming primarily white audiences, though his light skin color and facial features softened that threat. As a performer, he nudged at racial boundaries without jabbing through them. </p>
<p>“Harry Belafonte stands at the peak of one of the remarkable careers in U.S, entertainment,” proclaimed <a href="https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19590302,00.html">Time magazine in a 1959 cover feature</a>. He had come a long way from a childhood split between Harlem and Jamaica, from stints in the Navy and as a struggling actor. By then, he was earning about US$750,000 a year, with a lucrative residency at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. </p>
<h2>Civil rights activism</h2>
<p>That stardom connected Belafonte to Martin Luther King, Jr. </p>
<p>The civil rights leader called him in 1956 during the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-boycott">Montgomery Bus Boycott</a>. Soon Belafonte was part of the movement itself. Following King, he embraced nonviolence. As their friendship strengthened, Belafonte realized the crosses that King bore: the burden of leadership, the fear of death.</p>
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<img alt="Two black men dressed in business suits are shaking hands and smiling." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522845/original/file-20230425-3274-8aml0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King Jr. shaking hands on Aug. 21, 1964, at JFK International Airport in New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/singer-harry-belafonte-shakes-hands-with-us-clergyman-and-news-photo/494798200?adppopup=true">AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Belafonte bought a 21-room apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan. “Martin would come to think of it as his home away from home, staying with us on many of his New York trips,” he recalled in his memoir, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/10860/my-song-by-harry-belafonte-with-michael-shnayerson/">My Song</a>.” </p>
<p>“On occasion, he brought with him two or three of his closest advisers, and by the mid-sixties, the apartment was one of the movement’s headquarters.” It was a place to both plan strategy and blow off steam, laughing at stories and sipping Harveys Bristol Cream.</p>
<p>Ironically, for such a public figure, much of Belafonte’s work was in private. </p>
<p>In the 1960s, he served as an essential link between King and the SNCC. He not only bankrolled the young militant activists, but he also listened to their concerns, respected their organizing efforts and communicated their perspectives to influential power brokers.</p>
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<img alt="A black man is smiling as he looks into the distance." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522842/original/file-20230425-2107-8ihhgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ‘King of Calypso’ shortly before his 50th birthday in 1976.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/theres-good-news-as-usual-from-the-okeefe-centre-box-office-news-photo/502267825?adppopup=true">Erin Combs/Toronto Star via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>That responsibility to speak for the movement led Belafonte to chide Bobby Kennedy in May 1963. Throughout the early 1960s, he expressed frustration with the attorney general’s detachment from the activists’ struggle. But over time, he came to appreciate Kennedy’s evolution, as he became a U.S. senator and emerged as a voice for the poor, for racial minorities, for “The Other America.”</p>
<p>Famously, in February 1968, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/09/08/910650652/the-sit-in-revisits-a-landmark-week-with-harry-belafonte-as-tonight-show-host">Belafonte hosted “The Tonight Show” for a week</a>, using his platform to illuminate Black perspectives and spotlight social injustice. His guests included King, who was about to launch his Poor People’s Campaign, and Kennedy, whom Belafonte urged to start a presidential campaign. </p>
<p>Within months, both men were assassinated.</p>
<p>For more than a half-century, Belafonte carried on the legacy of the 1960s, often taking <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-23-0210230046-story.html">provocative positions</a> from the far-left edge of the political spectrum. Like few others, he blended the worlds of culture and politics, singing a song of justice.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204500/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aram Goudsouzian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Singer, actor and activist died on April 25 at the age of 96. His legacy spans stage, screen and political activism.Aram Goudsouzian, Bizot Family Professor of History, University of MemphisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2043542023-04-26T03:40:38Z2023-04-26T03:40:38ZPoet, editor, publisher, anthologist: John Tranter’s influential life in literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522491/original/file-20230424-28-gp5xyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C2%2C1377%2C949&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Tranter (1943-2023). Photo: Susan Gordon-Brown.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Queensland Press.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Perhaps more than any Australian poet of the 20th Century, John Tranter, who died last Friday at the age of 79, was guided by a relentless desire to experiment. His earliest admiration was for the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and he soon discovered John Ashbery, who ultimately became his most important influence. </p>
<p>Tranter was dissatisfied with the Australian poetry scene he encountered in the mid-1960s. He rejected what he saw as a political and aesthetic conservatism, with its roots in an Anglo-Irish tradition and little sympathy for the French innovators of the 19th century or more recent developments in the United States. </p>
<p>The hoax poet <a href="https://www.ernmalley.net/">Ern Malley</a> was the only Australian influence Tranter credited. </p>
<h2>Early work</h2>
<p>The poems in Tranter’s first collection Parallax (1970) were short and often tentative in their disjunctions. His experiments were propelled further in Red Movie and Other Poems (1972), The Blast Area (1974), and The Alphabet Murders (1976). </p>
<p>These early collections show Tranter discarding conventional subject matter and a stable speaking voice for a purer realm of textual play:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when the new alphabet soup of the earth<br>
is raised into a flag, the inevitable wind appears<br>
with its own “sister to breath”.<br> </p>
<p>[…]<br></p>
<p>thoughts of silver oppress the lake<br>
:such light<br>
opening a way through.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In these poems, disjunctions are heightened and shifts in pronouns are intensified, as metaphors are bent and deranged. Tranter returns to the subjects of movies, drugs, fast cars and weaponry, but the nouns are employed for their textural grit and the atmosphere they generate more than for what they signify. </p>
<p>The work baffled those readers and critics attuned to more conventional models. It was claimed by some that the poems lacked emotional depth. But many reviewers, Martin Johnston among them, recognised something that was vital and new. </p>
<p>Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets (1977) was written concurrently with these collections. The sonnet form brought a greater sense of coherence, as it foregrounded the wit and an urbanity that was sometimes muted in Tranter’s earlier work. </p>
<p>Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Tranter quickly gained acceptance. Two of his early books were published by Angus & Robertson, a mainstream publisher that had a validating role in Australia akin to Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom. This venerable publisher produced his Selected Poems (1982), before the poet had turned 40. </p>
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<p>Tranter’s most celebrated work is Under Berlin (1988), which was published almost a decade after his previous single volume. Many of these poems exhibit a consistent tone and a stable voice. There are discernible themes, which likely contributed to its critical acclaim. The book was awarded both the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. </p>
<p>The poems show Tranter to have absorbed and refined the influence of Ashbery in the relaxed and confident tone of their lines. Their subjects are various. Bucolic settings that draw on Tranter’s rural upbringing sit alongside urban and domestic poems. </p>
<p>Backyard revolves around the Australian institution of the barbeque, subtly subverting the mythologising of those Australian poets who would raise the event to the status of a sacrament. The subject of North Light is the suburban man in a moment of contemplation. Debbie and Co., which begins – “The council pool’s chockablock / with Greek kids shouting in Italian” – is a snapshot of disaffected 20-somethings hanging out at the local pool. </p>
<p>Glow-boys considers the lives of workers who clear up nuclear waste. The poem is edged with the anxiety of its time, ending with an image of the workers progeny: “asleep, dreaming fitfully”.</p>
<h2>Late experimentation</h2>
<p>Some of the poems in At the Florida (1992) continue with this perfected style, but Tranter’s desire for formal experimentation remained. The book ends with a series of <a href="https://www.graceguts.com/haibun">haibun</a>: 20 lines of poetry, followed by a stanza break and a prose paragraph. Some signal a return to disjunction and difficulty. The collection was accompanied by a verse novel, The Floor of Heaven (1992), written in a rough iambic pentameter. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522483/original/file-20230424-28-7jbp8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Before the close of the 20th century, Tranter was experimenting with AI and generative technologies. Different Hands (1998) is presented as seven “computer-generated collaborations” based on pieces by different writers “shaken, stirred and transformed by the poet”. </p>
<p>Neuromancing Miss Stein, for example, blends and reconfigures text samples from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The results are interesting, but underwhelming in light of the strong work which precedes and follows it.</p>
<p>Tranter’s last two major publications, Starlight: 150 Poems (2010) and Heart Starter (2015), show a poet in late career drawing on the resources of language and technology, restlessly wrestling against any settled style. </p>
<p>These poems show Tranter experimenting with text-to-speech software and returning to the sonnet form. Also prominent among his late work is the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41957343">terminal</a>”, a form Tranter may have invented, in which the poet borrows the end-words of a previous poem to write a wholly new text. </p>
<p>Among these, the most memorable is <a href="https://soundcloud.com/jtwelsch/clepsydra-anaglyph">The Anaglyph</a>, a long discursive poem of cumulative power, which uses the opening and closing words of each line of John Ashbery’s Clepsydra. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/minimalist-poet-antigone-kefala-wins-the-patrick-white-award-for-her-contribution-to-australian-literature-195194">Minimalist poet Antigone Kefala wins the Patrick White Award for her contribution to Australian literature</a>
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<h2>Influence</h2>
<p>Tranter’s influence can be seen in the work of later Australian poets, but his role as an editor, anthologist and publisher, from the early 1970s until well into the 21st century had a more immediate effect on Australian poetry. </p>
<p>He was involved with a number of little magazines in the 1970s, including the one issue of Free Grass, which he wrote under a series of aliases in a single afternoon.</p>
<p>His journal, Transit, was as ephemeral as the title suggests, but he resurrected the name for his publishing venture, which produced a number of books by the likes of John Forbes, Gig Ryan and Susan Hampton. </p>
<p>For better or worse, the term “Generation of ’68” was defined by the publication of Tranter’s anthology The New Australian Poetry (1979). The book undoubtedly aided the careers of some poets, but came in for harsh criticism. The selection favoured writers from Sydney and Melbourne, and included a mere two women among its 24 contributors. Many of the names commonly associated with the group are missing. Ken Bolton and Pam Brown, in particular, are confounding omissions. </p>
<p>The Generation of ’68 label, which still persists, has revolutionary connotations, invoking as it does the student riots in Paris. But it also had the effect of freezing the movement in a particular moment. The “new” was already in the distant past by the time of the anthology’s publication. </p>
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<p>Tranter took the opportunity to amend for many of these faults when he co-edited, with Philip Mead, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penguin_Book_of_Modern_Australian_Poetry">Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry</a> (1991), which placed Ern Malley at the centre of the Australian canon, reproducing Malley’s oeuvre as it was originally published by Max Harris. </p>
<p>The anthology highlighted the achievements of many of Tranter’s close allies, but its representation of women was broader than any Australian anthology to date. It was also generous to poets Tranter found himself at odds with, such as James McAuley and Les Murray. </p>
<p>Tranter was employed as a broadcaster for the ABC on various arts programs and founded Books and Writing with Jan Garrett. He worked alongside Martin Johnston at SBS – and after his friend’s death – compiled Johnston’s Selected Poems and Prose (1993).</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Tranter was at the forefront of the digital revolution. He was the founder of the now defunct <a href="https://www.facebook.com/auspoetrylibrary">Australian Poetry Library</a>, which gave an international audience access to thousands of Australian poems, and he co-founded the Journal of Poetics Research. </p>
<p>In 1997, he established Jacket. This international online journal, which is still running as <a href="https://jacket2.org/">Jacket 2</a>, is now based at the University of Pennsylvania. It continues to be a premier journal for contemporary experimental poetry. </p>
<p>Energy and invention remained hallmarks of Tranter’s life and work until the end. </p>
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<p><em>Correction: This article has been updated to remove a reference to Martin Johnston, who was not published by Transit, and to correct a misspelling of Jan Garrett.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204354/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aidan Coleman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Tranter’s poetry was defined by his relentless desire to experiment.Aidan Coleman, Senior Lecturer, English and Creative Writing, Southern Cross UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.