New habits

Somewhat to my surprise, our Friday night film was Die Hard: With a Vengeance, number three in the quadrilogy. Mostly I find action movies preposterously silly, and this one was no exception. Trains, trucks, cars, and copters all competing for the nearest miss, the biggest explosion, the most uncreditable survival. A villain with a strong German accent and a Nazi strut, replete with blonde crewcutted henchmen, needed only a cat to stroke while plotting his wildly implausible bombs-and-bulldozers heist to make him indistinguishable from Dr Evil. Yet genius though he was, he was no match for John McClane's unique dumbass/badass/wiseass wit.

I confess to enjoying the performances of Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson very much. Their panicky, rancourous banter while trying to solve absurd puzzles before bombs explode was often hilarious, and Jackson especially had a lot of fun with his angry black man rhetoric. Both have an excellent comic sensibility and here it was not totally overwhelmed by the film's otherwise earnest delivery of seat-gripping tension.

I think what I didn't like about it, and probably why I don't like most action movies, is not so much the destruction or outrageous improbabilities but the story-telling. The way the story is told suggests no very complimentary estimate of the viewer's intellect. I guessed the internal monologue of this film's ideal viewer would sound something like this:

"Wow, look at that! I can't believe he's going to do that! He did it! Wow! That's unbelievable. He's crazy. Woah, look what he's doing now! No way! Now it looks like he's going to jump off that thing...Don't do it! It's really going to hurt! He did it! He jumped off that thing and landed really hard on that other thing! Ouch! That must have really hurt! I can't believe he's still alive. Hang on, who's this guy? He's not saying much, but we keep seeing him. Now he's saying something. Yep, he's really important. Thought he must be. What's happening now? Oh no, they're going to crash! They crashed! Ouch! That's amazing. I can't believe they're still alive."

By the end of the film that's pretty much exactly how my internal monologue sounded. Somewhat to my surprise.

Still the unresting castles thresh

I can't remember enjoying an essay on a poet by a novelist as much as I enjoyed Martin Amis on Philip Larkin in the Financial Times. Amis's essay is rich, pungent, razor sharp and unshakeably convinced of Larkin's greatness. It's lovely watching him dismantle the criticism that makes Larkin ‘minor’ because of its own misguided snobbery, and kick away some of the rubble of correctness that still litters writerly lore. It's refreshing to read someone interested primarily in literary effect, and mostly regardless of politics, reputation, or canon.

Amis cites the concluding lines of “The Trees” as an example of Larkin's “instantly unforgettable” quality, and his ability as a phrasemaker of many registers. It has a particular resonance this week as the last, yes the very last, week of winter. Cold, naked Canberra is coming into bud; blossoms are blossoming, green shoots are shooting. Amis calls the poem an “onomatopoeic prayer for renewal.” Like other Larkins, it has a demotic simplicity that's deceptive. Rhyme and heavy alliteration disguise the complexity of thought, the deep ambivalence of a primarily ironic cast of mind. He wants to but can't quite believe the promise: the trees almost say, seem to say, that life is renewable, but it's a trick, he knows the truth. But he's caught by beauty anyway, and the trees have the last tantalising word.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

With taxes we buy civilisation

I did my tax this week. My affairs aren't particularly complicated so using etax to do my return takes me about half an hour every year. And it's not a half hour I grudge. I think self-assessment is a great thing: an exercise of freedom, a guarantor of privacy, a symbol of trust between state and citizen. It's not every citizenry that can boast these. Nor is it every government that gives back overpaid tax to the tune, annually, of over $10 billion.

I also think, with Professor David Rosenbloom of NYU, that tax is important. In an entertaining lecture at Melbourne Uni Law School recently, he began

“by taking for granted that taxation is here to stay. (It is something of a statement in itself that we have to begin there, but we most definitely do.) Everyone wants government, even those who speak incessantly of shrinking it. Most of the folks who talk that talk are happy to enlarge government; they just operate on the assumption that the military is not government. We know today what a society truly without government looks like: it looks like Somalia, and really, who wants that? So we organize ourselves in units and expect those units to provide things we cannot efficiently provide on an individual basis.

This government thing costs money. We want public expenditures, and so we are going to need public revenue...There are only a limited number of ways of obtaining the necessary revenue. We can borrow it. We can run a national lottery. We can inflate the currency. These strategies are all problematic, for all sorts of reasons. Taxation is more rational, and certainly more subject to control. So there will be taxation.”

Nobody likes fiscal waste, but tea partiers who advocate slashing tax (and thus hamstringing government) cannot have adequately foreseen the social and economic wasteland they would thus create. The key is in Rosenbloom's succinct rationale: governments 'provide things we cannot efficiently provide on an individual basis.' Roads, schools, hospitals, parks, libraries, universities, care for the sick and the poor and the elderly. Yes, we could do all these better, but not by taking them from democratically elected governments and entrusting them to the richest guys in the room. Who, as we've seen, are not necessarily the smartest.

This approach, and indeed the flawed reasoning of the tea party, assumes that money is the basis for both individual happiness and collective wellbeing. It's good for both, but only when harnessed to values; individual in one case, shared in the other. My values, and those of my country, suggest to me that giving 30 per cent of my income to the government, who will use it to provide services for me and my countrymen that we could not provide ourselves, is no bad use of my money. Especially when every August they give some of it back.

Now we are 90

“Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred.”

Pooh thought for a little.

“How old shall I be then?”

“Ninety-nine.”

Pooh nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

I've known Pooh as long as I can remember. I don't know which way round it was, but I felt Pooh as kindred. I felt his humility and patience, his friendliness, his awe of the busy, bustling characters. His penchant for poetry, his passion for honey and condensed milk, his deep, unshakeable loyalty to his friends. His gratitude for simple things like birdsong and sunshine. His musy, mazy life. To me he was not a stuffed bear but a person, a person I recognised. No other childhood characters have endured in me the way he has.

So happy 90th birthday, Pooh. I haven't forgotten.

Split the lark

When she died at 55 in May of 1886, Emily Dickinson’s white dress (the only colour she would wear) was tiny. About the size of a twelve-year-old child’s. Also tiny were the cloth packets, sewn up with twine, that were found hidden in her bedroom afterwards. Tightly bound with red and white thread, they contained more than 800 poems on leaves stitched together, or in loose fragments. While she lived, seven of her poems appeared in print, most likely without her consent. She’s now known to have written more than 1700. Unlike her diminutive frame and reclusive life, her poetry is vast in scope as in scale. It is wild, prolific, kinetic, staccato, aposeopetic. It is full of awe and magnitude, though often condensed to a few broken lines.

Split the Lark – and you'll find the Music –
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old. 

Loose the Flood – you shall find it patent –
Gush after Gush, reserved for you –
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

This poem, quick and sharp, is a picture of largeness hidden in little. It’s also a lance, piercing scepticism that kills things to see inside them. For Emily, as for Christ the Bird, death loosed the flood, split the lark, and found the music.