Starting All Over Again, Again

*

In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.

In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit-stands and cheap apartment houses and little cloudy candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work.

Raymond Chandler, The High Window.

He was shocked at the consequence. He turned 57 - today; birthday; and it was impossible not to reflect. On the dark times and the good. On the insane seas and the troubled dives and the fractured presence of other intelligences, of half formed souls, of malignant shadows, of an overwhelming good. Faces crowded in on an already crowded mind. So many things had gone wrong. So many things had gone right. He had made the deadline for self-improvement, but the gales of tears had been hard to deal with. Someone should have been able to bend down and say a kind word, mark the soldiers, be kind and apathetic all at the same time. For a great indifference had settled across the country. Disenchanted with the latest Labor incarnation, the Kevin Rudd propaganda machine, they switched off in their tens of thousands. They had been betrayed once too often.

So it was in the cold, pre-dawn dark he continued his writing rituals; continued to leave a tiny, humble little snail trail through the days, the weeks, the months. Just like in his day, it was a youth culture. The world belonged to the young. Technology dated and marginalised older people, just like that. Anyone here under 20 can show me how to do this? And of course, it was ever thus, from the day the Europeans brought weapons and the easy availability of welfare, destroying the traditional hierarchies. Their country, their place. Where they belonged. It was all favouritism. He had survived so many regime changes. She was quick and wicked and blew hot, stale air on his face as he sought shelter behind the old warehouse, rearranging the cardboard boxes. He walked out on a stage to massive applause. He bowed quietly and wished he could disappear.

For oblivion seeking had been his main raison d'etre for many years and he regretted the astonishing number of mistakes on the record. They flung private words he had said to a counsellor 20 years before in his face. They got simple things like dates wrong. The day of judgement was a flawed human event. There was no justice. There was no sanity higher up the food change. Indeed, the higher you rose, the more the obfuscation. Facts, the sights before him, jelled less and less with the truth of the occasion. To quote Feminist Jurisprudence: Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system. In our university days we had all been talk to overthrow the system, to deride the nuclear family, to hold in contempt the nations institutions, the common, peasant qualities of dignity, hard work, truth. For all was lies and these people had been lying for so long they could not tell the difference between truth and fantasy.

Their lives were so shallow nothing would ever be the same again, because if anything did pierce the fluctuating veils of myth and mismanagement, you would be able to bless me, reach down and touch. But that was not to be. The heartless faces of the rich people's houses, their arrogant stance as they flashed by in their black Mercedes four wheel drives, all of it led to an unsustainable social structure. You could not ignore the voices of the people forever. He thought he had been sent to tell their stories. But the government rhetoric had become so soaked in talk of the "country's most vulnerable", so soaked in apology for poor behaviour, that any kindness, any reaching down to the lower ranks, the disaffected and the dispossessed, immediately embarked the individual on a path crowded with social workers, lawyers, academics, bureaucrats, the ubiquitous clip boards.

So it was he came to long for a different truth. He wanted to start again. He wanted to step aside from the sobbing ebbs of suppressed emotions, from all the dangerous, bizarre images which populated his imagination. He wanted to gain a higher purpose without a higher power. Trust no one. Trust no thing. Adherence to the truth was no longer a value the culture held dear. Dignity in labour had long been abandoned. The churches lay empty. The factories were boarded up; all manufacturing had moved to China. Short steps or long, baby steps to the moon, the whistling cold, arid landscapes from which he had come, none of it made any sense in a society abandoned to spin, a government which functioned in exact sync with the 24-hour news cycle, with politicians who didn't believe a word of what they uttered. So it was he reached an advanced age he had never thought possible; wandered, staggered or lurched into an old age he had no desire to embrace. He would rather pay attention to the giant, impossible sign: GO BACK YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/21/iran-protest-mousavi-khamenei

The momentum of Iran's "green revolution" - triggered by allegations of electoral theft earlier this month - appeared to stall yesterday, as thousands of plain clothes and uniformed security officials swamped Tehran, using tear gas and water cannon on a hard core of about 3,000 demonstrators.

The latest clashes on Tehran's streets came as defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi released a letter he had sent to the Guardian Council - Iran's top legislative body - insisting that the results of the election be annulled and claiming that a plan to rig the 12 June poll in favour of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been planned months in advance.

Eyewitnesses said that protesters who had tried to gather for demonstrations were beaten by police, who also fired warning shots into the air. Video footage showed scattered knots of protesters fleeing as tear gas canisters were fired amidst shouts of "Allahu Akbar" - God is Great, one of the calls adopted by the protesters.

In other places, witnesses described demonstrators holding their ground against motorbike-mounted members of the feared Basij militia.

Helicopters hovered over Tehran and the sound of sirens echoed through the streets as up to 60 injured demonstrators were taken to the Imam Khomeini hospital. Tehran's university campus - another focal point for the protesters - was also blocked off yesterday by lines of police. Supporters of Mousavi were rumoured to have set fire to a building in southern Tehran used by Ahmadinejad supporters.

"This is like [the revolution in] 1979," said one older man on the streets yesterday. "But it's more dangerous. People had money in 1979 to escape and to get by for months. Now they don't."

After stern warnings from Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during Friday prayers and amid a climate of growing fear in Iran, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands who had earlier marched against what they claimed has been the rigging of elections to favour Ahmadinejad, appeared to have remained at home. Khamenei warned opposition leaders to end street protests or be held responsible for any "bloodshed and chaos" to come.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25666837-421,00.html

FEDERAL Treasurer Wayne Swan remains under pressure over "Utegate", having admitted buying a Toyota HiLux from the Queensland car dealer involved and personally discussing the businessman's finance problems.

As debate over a "fake" email implicating the Prime Minister in "Utegate" continued yesterday, the full force of the controversy was being felt by Mr Swan.

A series of emails released on Friday night showed the extent of the attempts by Mr Swan's office to assist Ipswich businessman John Grant, The Sunday Telegraph reports.

Mr Grant, a personal friend of Mr Rudd, gave him a utility to use in his electorate.

Mr Swan admitted yesterday he had also bought a car from Mr Grant for use in his electorate office, but said he had paid full commercial price.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25656383-2702,00.html

WHEN Tim Winton won his first literary award, The Australian/Vogel Award in 1981 for his first book, An Open Swimmer, he borrowed a pair of elastic-sided boots - Cuban heels, square toes and all - and boarded a plane for the first time in his life to travel from his West Australian home to Sydney to accept it.

Last night, he was announced the winner, for a record-breaking fourth time, of the Miles Franklin Award for his novel Breath, but was nowhere near the gala dinner at the NSW State Library in Sydney.

Winton has shunned award nights since his first Miles Franklin, in 1984, for Shallows.

"I was overawed that first time," he said yesterday, using a borrowed phone, talking from near his beloved Ningaloo Reef, off Western Australia's North West Cape.

"It was odd and strange and I think I was almost as surprised as everybody else, but I haven't been to an award night since then, once I realised you don't actually have to go.

"I don't go to many festivals either, I've just usually got other things to do and I'm not good in a crowd."

Winton also won the Miles Franklin Award in 1992, for Cloudstreet, and 2002, for Dirt Music.

Breath, his 12th book of fiction, is about a young man's initiation into the twin dangers of sex and surfing.

It begins with a traumatic scene of death by self-strangulation, setting the scene for Winton's exploration of what happens when personal morals are subjugated to the desire for physical sensation.

The Block, late afternoon.