Painting Fakes

I've been re-watching Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. One of the aspects of the story that Jackson underlines so clearly is it's setting during the decline of Middle Earth. The films are littered with telling images - the elves in procession to the Grey Havens, the ruins of Moriah, the Fellowship looking in awe in the giant statues of the sons of Elendil. The first movie begins with the tale of the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, where Isildur cuts the ring finger from Sauron's hand and appropriates the ring for himself. Elves and men together face their foe in open battle and win. In the Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, such a battle is impossible. Men and elves are too weak for anything but a skirmish. Nor is Sauron what he used to be. Perhaps literally disembodied, he sits in Barad Dur directing his fractious minions from afar, unaware of the hobbits carrying the ring right through his own country. Our heroes may be victorious, the power of Sauron ov...

Being a huge cricket fan, I've been following the story of the England cricket team's response to the Mumbai terrorist attacks via http://www.cricinfo.com/ . Of course I'm fascinated by the batting and bowling stuff but it's also interesting to see how people react under pressure. As soon as the attacks happened, the England team flew home from India. This is fairly logical - Mumbai was their next stop and in fact their gear had already been sent on ahead of them to one of the hotels at the centre of the attacks. I believe it's still there. There followed a debate about whether the team would return for the test series, demands for a "presidential" level of security, talk of some players not touring no matter what, and so on.  It went without saying that the test scheduled for Mumbai would be moved to another city. As of now it seems a full strength team is heading back to a training base in Abu Dhabi, with the commencement of the Test series likel...

I’m sitting here watching a DVD of Deep Purple – “Live in Concert 1972/73”. They do those standards – “Highway Star”, “Strange Kind of Woman”, “Black Night”, “Smoke on the Water”. Deep Purple were one of the first bands I ever got excited by, back in the mid-70s when I was at high school. I remember the end of one year (probably 1975 or 76) when instead of sitting in class reading and playing cards a group of us were detailed to dig weeds out of the cricket pitch on the school oval. It was a great assignment – no classes, not timetable, a bit of work, a lot of goofing off. And all done to a Deep Purple soundtrack. It was my first exposure to “Strange Kind of Woman” as performed live with the singer exchanging licks with the guitarist, trying to match the guitar sound with his voice. We all had a go at imitating him imitating a guitar but our voices had only recently broken so most of us were hopeless. It was a few years before I listened to Neil Young and heard music that I wanted to p...

I’ve read a lot over the years about the death of poetry. People ament that no-one publishes poetry, that books of poetry sell such pathetic numbers that publishers won’t touch them, and that poets live on air, government grants and their day jobs. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s not as bad as it seems. It’s just that we’ve forgotten what poetry is, and so we’re looking in the wrong place. Poetry was originally an oral form, not a written one, and intended to be sung or chanted. For people who don’t read, poetry is a lot more interesting to listen to than prose – it has rhythm, it often rhymes, it uses repetition. If it’s accompanied by music it has an added emotional resonance. The limitation of oral forms of communication, however, is that they require physical presence. The singer or reciter has to travel to his or her audience, or bring them in. The printing press made a big change in this, allowing mass reproduction of the verbal content of poetry – although much m...

I really would like to write more often. Ideas pass through my brain and I think, “I should put that on my blog”, but I get busy and then I forget what I was going to say. However, part of it is my incompetence as a blogger, because I keep writing at such length. Most people’s blogs contain really short articles, just quick paragraphs. I guess having grown up in the age of the book, I’m used to going into detail so even the length I write at here seems over-compressed sometimes. One blog cum chat site I recently joined in my local church’s new mychurch.com site ( http://www.mychurch.org/churches/world/AU/Queensland/Brisbane/257600/St-Andrews-Anglican-Church ). It’s interesting because in the discussion you see a side of people that you don’t see on Sunday mornings. One of the guys started a men’s group off with a discussion about a book called “Why Men Hate Going to Church” by David Murrow. I haven’t read the book but I have visited his website www.churchformen.com . In a nutshe...

That’s enough of theology for a while. Not that I really know much about it but the joy of having a blog is you don’t have to be an expert. “Everything in this blog may be wrong”, to paraphrase Richard Bach. I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers create their worlds. I've just finished doing a red pen job on the draft of my cousin Allan Smith’s second book, Owleye’s Songs of the Night. He’s self-published the first in the series, Quid and Harmony, with all proceeds going to the Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia – you can find out more about it at http://www.smithysbook.com/ . It’s worth a read and if you don’t like the book, at least you're supporting a great cause. These are fantasy works but knowing Allan as I do, I can see various bits of the world that are drawn from his world – places and customs that are similar to his own, and ideas that fit Allan’s world view. All fiction writers create artificial worlds. For many, the resemblance between their world and the ...

This weekend I did one of my occasional preaching gigs at my church. The topic was “what is a good Christian?” and the passages Matthew 11:25-30 and Romans 8:1-17. It’s kind of an introduction to a huge subject which is at the heart of Christian teaching. The background to the passages is a religious environment in 1st century Judaism dominated by the Pharisees. In human terms, the Pharisees were not bad people – in fact, they could be seen as very good. They had a strict interpretation of the Jewish faith, believing it was essential to obey not only the entire laws of Moses, but various extrapolations, interpretations and additions to the law and prophets by Jewish rabbis. The result was 100s of different laws, dealing with issues from how to punish murderers to how men should cut their hair. Being faithful to God involved obeying all of these laws. There’s nothing unique about the Pharisees. There are plenty of Christian Pharisees around, whole churches of them in fact. A...