Vale Val Street

At a certain point in your life mentors start to die off. I define mentors loosely here: those who took you in hand, told you to grow up and take responsibility, did you small and large favours, challenged you to do better, and many more things. When I worked in libraries I had the good fortune to get some of these things from Warren Horton, Lesley Payne, and Lynn Pollack, all now gone. All three had their shortcomings and strengths and I benefited greatly from knowing them. In becoming a historian  I had a great set of teachers and mentors. And then there was Val Street the principal of Women’s College at the University of Sydney from 1981-1989 who gave me a job as a Resident History Tutor and Librarian (I was one of a team of Resident Advisors/Tutors)  there from 1986-1987.

Val died last month. The obit in the Sydney Morning Herald described her as Fearless and Fun. Val was a bit of a rough diamond. The girls, and yes the women of the College called themselves girls, referred to her as the short round mound of sound. As Rosemary Annable’s obit states Val was no academic. I remember some of us arriving at the opinion that Val had no depth of knowledge or complexity of thought. Some of the girls found her a tad uncouth. She was certainly an outsider among the many big end of town types at Women’s. Some of this may seem a harsh judgment and arrogant. That Val was where she was simply amazed many folks and it was a tribute to her character that she arrived at the position and made things work. Val was wonderfully generous hosting a Friday evening drinks session on the Principal’s balcony just before dinner. Once when absent over the long weekend she gave some of us the run of her apartment in the College. She worked hard to improve the scholarships the College could offer and a good number of residents would otherwise not have found a place at College.

Male residents at Women’s College and the system of Resident Advisors was upsetting to many traditionalist at the College. The first Val justified on the grounds of trying to have some male presence in the College to thwart the bad behaviour of some boys who habitually wandered in from St Andrew’s and St Paul’s Colleges. Frankly in retrospect I doubt that it worked. The system of Resident Advisors Val borrowed from US Colleges. Traditionally the House Committee comprised of students had been the key body in shaping College life so the Advisors were seen as something of an imposition. Collegiality though reigned with only Val taking the heat for her innovations. I think Val regarded her innovations as necessary to shaping College life and her charges’ futures. She certainly tried to have the girls take responsibility for their own actions, but wanted safeguards in place for when they did not.

I have mixed feelings about Val and my time at Women’s College, but I certainly benefited from living and working there and I have Val to thank.

A Liberal Revival of Americanism?

On February 8, 2009 The Washington Post published an op-ed by the distinguished historian Michael Kazin entitled “A Liberal Revival of Americanism.” For the last four months it has sat in one of the piles on my desk and today as I cleared off things in preparation for summer working on a book I rediscovered his piece. Inevitably when I clean up the material on my desk I discover things that months ago seemed worthy of keeping, but now get assigned to the recycle bin of history. Just today for instance I put a review of The Flash Press in my paper bin after making sure that my library had the book. But Kazin’s piece continues to interest and worry me.

When I put it aside I had planned to look again at William Appleman Williams’s 1959 book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, a work that indites the conduct of American foreign policy for serving basically imperialist goals under the name of liberal good fellowship. I haven’t had the time to look at Williams’s book so my characterization of the it here is somewhat rushed and from memory, but that book, now 50 years old, did tell us something about the problems that occur in the world when American notions of their own essential goodness are projected on to the world.

Kazin’s piece does not directly engage with American foreign policy save to note that “since liberals turned against the war in Vietnam 40 years ago, they have struggled to prove that they love their country even while opposing most of the policies of its government.” For Kazin liberals have been able to reclaim the mantle of patriots because of the disaster of the debacle in Iraq. Kazin points to the “immensely attractive and remarkably supple creed” that is Americanism and notes that battles, are fought over just what this means and how America’s founders envisioned the nation.  To a certain point Kazin is simply restating truisms. Political change in America comes when enough people are convinced that American ideals are not being upheld by an existing arrangement of power.

When Kazin reminds liberals though that America must have a “privileged place in their hearts”  I worry somewhat. It seems a fine line between loving American ideals and demanding that the nation live up to its better self, and seeing, as did liberals in the 1950s and 1960s that the nations ideals would be best served by an intervention in Vietnam. Perhaps I read too much into the phrase “privileged place in their hearts,” but to my mind it was an ability to put aside such notions that let some liberals see the wrong of the war in Vietnam. I hope those who do determine they love America can still oppose wrong  policies.

For what it is worth I met Michael Kazin twenty years ago and between 1989 and 1993 had a couple of interactions with him. On those ocassions he was certainly more generous to me than he needed to be.

Jack Johnson

News came this week that John McCain plans to request that President Obama pardon Jack Johnson. Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champ of the world  (1908 to 1915) was hounded out of the USA on charges of committing immoral acts basically because he had sex with a white woman. He later served a year in jail on the charge.

Jack Johnson became the world heavyweight boxing champion on December 26, 1908 at the Stadium in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, Australia. In the mid 1990s I lived in Rushcutters Bay. The Stadium was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for a suburban rail line. In the 1964 The Beatles played there on their Australian tour. Occasionally I used to go for a beer at the Rushcutters Bay Hotel. The Hotel, also since demolished,  served the working class population of the nearby area, which had diminished greatly as more and more old properties that were rooming houses were demolished for new apartments. The front bar of the pub was somewhat ill-lit and I remember being staggered on my way to the gents to discover a small corner of the bar was devoted to Jack Johnson and his memorable fight. I wish I had photographed it. I never did find out why the tribute was there, Johnson was not exactly a household name in Australia. Perhaps the pub owner was a fight fan.

The first I knew of Jack Johnson was through a piece by the writer Jack London. London renown as a socialist writer, his most famous book is either The Iron Heel or The Call of the Wild, was a racist; or in his words a white man first and a socialist second. He was in Sydney for the fight and reported on it for the Australian Star and the article also appeared in the New York Herald. Tracing that report was one of the first pieces of original research I did. London’s views made me lose my appetite for his work.

Inspiration, Nostalgia and New Media

In a recent article in The Chronicle Review William Deresiewicz made a case for the necessities of solitude. The argument goes: Humans to be sure are social animals, but sometimes we need solitude because “no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude.” Last night I attended a talk by Adrian Cheok from the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore. One central theme of his talk was the increasing ways technology mediates our experience and he showed examples of his work that included applications that replicate human touch over the web.  When I asked him about our need for solitude he compared the human need and predisposition for interaction to food. We need it but sometimes we overindulge in things like cake. (He is a thin guy and I have had a slice or two too many of cake in my day).

I have been thinking about our use of technology and the need for interaction of late because of encounters on Facebook. Having joined Facebook because an ex student prompted me to do so I am now friends with 70 people. Some are folks I see regularly and some I haven’t seen for 20 years. The point though is not so much who is on Facebook and the exact nature of friendship, but the use to which we are putting Facebook.

Nostalgia seems to be one of the ways people (myself included) use Facebook. This use extends beyond merely reacquainting onself with old friends. Much of what goes one is sorting through memories for meaning and value. Nostalgia has had a bad press over the last 50 years or so oft being seen as self indulgent conservative backward looking behavior. In  her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym reminded us that  nostalgia has a reflective quality that can remind us of say  youthful aspitations that may in turn give us new inspiration. A good deal of what goes on in Facebook among the slightly older crowd I run with there is this later sort of nostalgia. What seems to drive this is the ability to share many aids to memory, some personal and some shared social memories, such as photos and videos.

New media is used for many things. So far so good with this use of nostalgia as inspiration. I fear that someone though will find yet another way to package our own nostalgia and sell it back to us. Or more correctly a more concise way of targeting us as consumers of such through traiting the communities we mix in on Facebook and the sort of things that are posted there. And of course Facebook is now moving to optimise profit from just that sort of information we have given them.

AC/DC and Memory

On Monday I listened to AC/DC’s “TNT“. The band is a great favourite of one of my softball buddies, an Irish American from New York. Their song “Long Way to the Top” has long been a favorite of mine; the lead bag-pipe break is absolutely inspired. I have heard TNT many times, but I added it to a playlist after hearing it again in Talladega Nights. What I heard on Monday was the drum opening of the song. I had never heard it so clearly or paid much attention. But on this listening having heard it I had a nagging feeling that the opening was similar to another song. Surprisingly it came to me later when I heard another familiar sound in the song. The lyrics “I’m dirty, mean and mighty unclean” are lifted directly from an advertisement for Mortein Fly Spray that has done the rounds in Australia from the late 1950s through to the present. Through many versions the ad features Louie the fly who tells us in the ad jingle that he is  “bad, mean and might unclean.” Somehow that connection triggered a memory. The drum opening is very similar to that of the Australian band Zoot’s opening to their cover of the Beatles’s Eleanor Rigby. Their version is somewhat akin to the way Vanilla Fudge reworked The Supremes’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” (Here and Here)

Zoot was yet another Australian band that came out of Adelaide moving their base to Melbourne for larger exposure. One of the founders Beeb Birtles went on to fame and fortune with the Little River Band. A later addition to the group Rick Springfield became a teen heart throb in America. The drummer Rick Brewer enjoyed one hit wonder success with a band The Ferrets. At one stage Zoot dressed all in pink and played bubblegum music. Eleanor Rigby was their attempt to be taken seriously. In many ways they tried to channel The Who; it is not in this clip but Sprigfield’s party trick at the time was to throw his guitar in the air catch it and hammer the last chord. The singer Daryl Cotton must have practiced his Roger Daletry moves in the mirror daily.

Bon Scott too played in a bubblegum band: The Valentines. He along with Vince Lovegrove, later manager of the Divinyls, was one of the two lead singers. If only there had been colour televison in Australia at the time you could see in the clip that the Valentines wore lilac. I still remember it because Bon’s tats showing through the lilac crepe balloon sleeves was so incongrous. Check the gonk doll thrown on stage in the clip. It was de rigueur in the mid to late 1960s for girls to throw these on stage at any pop concert in Australia.

Bon Scott died in 1980, but he has something of  a cult status in Australia even beyond his AC/DC work. In 2006 a Perth television station showed a documentary on him. (Part 1,  Part 2, and Part 3). In 2008 the Fremantle Arts Centre created a Bon Scott Project (Here and Here). While you’re at it take a look at Bon in Fraternity he looks like a hobbit.