Green thought, in a green shade, Green views The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy) |
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
The Goodies
good television
good movies
good books
good poetry
more good books
good songs
good children
good boys
good people
good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

Strange
Bedfellows
John Howard
Kevin Rudd
Al Gore
George Bush
Malcolm Turnbull
Leon Trotsky
Thomas Huxley
Oliver Goldsmith
Kurt Vonnegut
Tony Blair
Samuel Pepys
Winston Churchill
Peter Costello
Joan of Arc
Fidel Castro
Sarah Williams
Peter Beattie
Ned Ludd
De-Anne Kelly
Barack Obama
Kylie Minogue
Tony Abbott
Alexander Downer
Barbaro
Sam Kekovich
Alan Bennett
Osama bin Laden
Rupert Murdoch
George Lakoff
Bjorn Lomborg
Adolf Hitler
Ayn Rand
George Orwell
Julia Butterfly Hill
Saddam Hussein
James Carville
Charles Darwin
Philip Cooney
Jacky Kelly
Irshad Manji
James Lovelock
Bob Hawke
Brendon Nelson
Barnaby Joyce
Robert Menzies
Robert Tressell
Slim Dusty
Noel Coward
Samuel Johnson
Walt Whitman
Edmund Hillary
Robert Byrd
Phillip Adams
Alisa Camplin
Arnold Schwarzeneger
Blogger's Cut
Best slices from the watermelon
Future to the back
Ox power
Whacko Texas
Ticked off
Inhaling the Sixties
God unwilling
Bakers Oven 5
Game over
All change for
Dog bites man
Whale tears
Flowers for bosses
Curtin spinning
Gotta love it
Dodgy intelligence
A glass darkly
Truth and consequences
Media-ocrity
Cant get me Im part of the society
Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state
|
An extract from my new book 'Forgotten, as a Dream'
I remember little of my grandfather, and this has been one of my great regrets. He was one of the family who encouraged me to read, and used to lie on the couch with me, home from work and perhaps sweaty, his working clothes still on, my head on his shoulder, reading to me and I guess teaching me words. I don't remember this, but can remember remembering for a long time, trying to hold on to the memory of him but slowly losing it. I called him Dad, which was what my mother called him, and I, having no one else to call Dad, followed her lead. I guess that he probably saw me as a son, or perhaps as a kind of return of his own fair haired second son Kenneth who had died as a baby.
.........
So what was Charles reading to his grandson while lying on the couch? The earliest book was probably 'Curly Kitten' who was 'never still; here and there he skips and plays'. Curly has many adventures, including climbing a monkey-puzzle tree and having to be rescued. The monkey-puzzle tree has fascinated me ever since, in my mind I think a tree like a vertical maze, where you could get lost or stuck, rather than one you could climb easily.
Possibly the next, for Christmas 1948, was 'The Runaway', the story of a pet rabbit who escapes and joins the wild rabbits in the woodland - 'Down the hill and through the woodland scampered Sandy free at last, thought no more of Little Michael, and his rabbit-hutchy past!' The same Christmas brought, extraordinarily, 'Black Beauty' a present from Mrs Ness. It had originally been a present to Edna Ness in 1931, and Edna having outgrown it, the book was passed on to me. Edna was the first person (then about 8 years old) my 8 year old mother met at Margaret River, the Nesses living nearby. They were friends until Edna died at a very young age.
A favourite in 1948 or 1949 was 'The Rupert Book' and my grandmother could remember my grandfather reading this one to me. The Rupert books were strange in having a picture, a couplet of poetry underneath, and underneath that two paragraphs of prose which gave the story in more detail. 'The little bear gets quite a fright, when cheeky Jack Frost pops in sight'. 'As Rupert rounds the tree he pulls up with a start, "Good Gracious, who are you?" gasps the little bear. "Wait a minute, I've seen you before! Aren't you Jack Frost?"' And so on.
The alternating picture, prose and poetry was designed to let the reader choose what level was most appropriate for the child being read to. But when I read it myself, the prose and poetry gave a strange feeling of being able to jump from one to another, both telling the same story but in different ways, and the mind make a jump as well. I couldn't choose which one I liked the best, both were equally valid tellings of the story, and I would be forced endlessly backwards and forwards between them. At some point about here, early, I learnt to read for myself, and one day when my grandfather came to read to me he was told I could read for myself. 'Cans't boy read?' he said, astonished, and perhaps dismayed. But I enjoyed him reading to me anyway, and would have enjoyed it even more, made more of it, could I have seen the future.
Dozens of other books followed. 'The Stories of King Arthur' came from a friend of my grandparents in England for Christmas 1951 for example, 'In the long, long ago, there were many small kings reigning over different parts of Britain. The greatest was named Uther Pendragon'.
A favourite in February 1952 was 'The Old Oak Paddock' a wonderful idyll of English farm life 'Jinny stood there perfectly still, remembering things, whilst cocks crowed, and dogs barked, and the moon moved slowly towards Mr Wigg's chimneys'. It deserves to be a classic work of children's literature, if it isn't, but for me it was just a much loved work to be read many times. It gained, perhaps even more than it might have done, a place in my mental furniture, coming, as it did, the year my grandfather died.
{ Post a Comment }
{ Last Page } { Page 406 of 945 } { Next Page }
|
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
People listen!
Browse recent entries (below), or select a
Category
Climate change Crop Marks (my novel) Dream Economics Education Environment Evolution Fire Health History Conquerors Infrastructure Iraq Media Nuclear power Politics federal Politics general Religion Rural life Shepherds Calendar The Arts Values Water
"We do not choose our convictions, but they choose us and force us to fight for them to the death." (Wedgewood Benn)
Recent Entries
Mr Warren, are you with me? Olympian depths Soul brother? Blocking arteries Summer Love I find the defendant I see dead people Train whistle blowing Bring on the secular advisers Eyes Right This is the schoolroom I see dead people Sailing down the river Just Imagine More Jam tomorrow Just imagine Dr Yes He is baaa-ack Say Aaaaah Mirror mirror on the wall Louis et moi Eternal truths Quiddities and quillets I see your $10 billion and raise ... No going back
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)

Links
Huffington Post The Greens Common Dreams Australia Institute The Nation Independent Guardian Truth Dig Edge New Matilda Global warming Kitchen gardeners Conservation International Diggers Club Community Suported Agriculture Voiceless Toronto Globe International fund for animal welfare Humane Society Concerned Farmers Network Worldwatch Institute George Monbiot Sierra Club Aust Inst Health & Welfare Parks Association NSW Gun control Aust Council of Social Service Aust Council for Educational Research Education Network Australia Rural Australians for Refugees Greenpeace Bush Heritage Geoff Davies Naomi Klein BBC Mother Jones Tom Paine John Quiggin Human Rights Watch Amnesty International Doctor's Reform Society Dissent magazine David McKnight Aust Film Institute True Food Network Get up United Nations Assn Arms trade protest Michael Osborne Lee Rhiannon Intnl Peasant Movement World Conservation Union Biological Farmers of Australia Natural Sequence Farming Union of Concerned Scientists Rockridge Institute Climate action now Climate Ark Sustainable Population Australia Global warming blog Zero Footprint Charles Darwin Mars Climate Institute Jeremy Rifkin Gene ethics (GM) Slow Food movement Darwin Awards Stern Review Bob Brown Baghdad blogger Web Diary (Margot Kingston) Real Climate (science of climate change) Spatial literacy Oil and energy Stop global warming Wilderness Society Columbia Journalism Review NSW Rural Fire Service Google Book Search World Public Opinion Reporters without borders Doctors without borders Which? UK Choice Australia Energy Science Womankind Worldwide Work Foundation Rocky Mountain Institute Sustainable Development Commission International Forum on Globalisation Democratic Audit Australia Stem Cells Emily's List Electoral Commission Turning the pages Domesday Book W.I.R.E.S. Women's Electoral Lobby Leakey Foundation Richard Dawkins Intnl Agricultural Research Alpine ecology SETI at home Rare breeds Friends of the Earth Revolutionary women Afghanistan Nature & Society forum Sceptic's Society Republican Movement Tom Dispatch City of Joy aid Mumble (Peter Brent) NASA - Mars Murray-Darling Commission Marine Conservation Well Being Live science Women's Health Children & Youth World weather The Progressive Lester Brown Australian Archives Jay Rosen (Press think) World Policy Health & Global Environment Surtees Genealogy (IGI) Free census (UK) Genealogy mailing lists Farmer John Steve Waugh Jane McGrath Meteorology Global Fund for Women One World network Red Cross RSPCA Camp Quest Humanists Pierre Tristam Landscape design Creative non-violence human extinction movt Witness Save our rivers Terry Jones No sweatshops IPCC Forest Stewardship Global Security Bad science Green building Energy [r]evolution Free the bears Pamela Poole Press Emblem Inst. for Public Accuracy Progress Iraq oil Atheists of Florida Museum of Woman International Women's Day Rodale Institute David Michael Green Good LIfe Center Food First Robert Dreyfuss Oxfam Jubilee Debt campaign Astronomy photos Rock Ethics Institute Linda O'Brien Foreign policy in focus Global giving Rare species ringtones Biofuel dangers Commercial free childhood Tom Tomorrow Environment & Development Robert Kennedy Memorial Sustainability Institute Idealists Book Mooch Irish Radio Show Step it up David Korten Intnl Forum Globalization WIMN's Voices Blog Crooked Timber blog Earth Rights Intnl Women's Media FireDogLake blog Anti War Christopher Brauchli Robert Koehler Science Blog Green alliance Wildlife Coalition charity donations Idealists Aid Watch Solartopia Women blogging Envt Management Systems Fund for Peace Away with Words Peace Direct De Smog Blog UN climate change Water treaty Francophiles Peter Martin Question everything Story of stuff
Contact me directly -
greenviews at optusnet.com.au
Or subscribe to RSS feed
Subscribe
Site feed at http://www.blognow.com.au/ rss.php?w=mrpickwick

|