Painting Fakes

 Among the backlog of unread books on my shelf was a copy of Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.   It consists of a course of 28 lectures delivered by Freud at the University of Vienna in 1915 and 1916, designed to introduce students to the main ideas involved in psychoanalysis.  I gave this book to my father many years ago, I forget why, and eventually it made its way back to me and sat on my shelves until this year, when I finally read it.  Perhaps there is some kind of subconscious significance to the fact that the volume fell apart as I was reading it, so I had to bin it when I got to the end. My first introduction to Freud's ideas was not encouraging.  When I did introductory psychology subjects at the University of Queensland in 1979 and 1980 as part of my social work degree, the psychology faculty there was very much dominated by the idea of psychology as an experimental science, driven by scientific methodology and randomised co...

Continuing my trawl through some of the books that have been waiting to be read for way too long....  Quite some time ago I bought a second-hand copy of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes,  probably at a Lifeline book sale.  I remember starting to read it, finding it dense to the point of incomprehensibility, and putting it on the shelf for later.  I'm not the only person who felt this - the book's previous owner covered the pages with underlining and illegible marginal comments for about the first third of the book, after which its pages are completely untouched. If this memory is accurate then I must have got smarter in the intervening years. His writing is not nearly as impenetrable as I remember it.  Not that it is exactly an easy read - he's a French intellectual, after all - but I found it clear, highly logical, and completely disconcerting.   Ellul was a prominent Christian intellectual in the second half of the 2...

One of the things I've been doing over the past few months is reading some of the books that have been sitting untouched on my shelves for a long time. A while ago, a friend passed on a copy of a book called Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views on Economics,  published by the evangelical publishing house Inter-Varsity Press back in 1984.  It had been sitting on her shelf for a long time, and has been sitting on mine for the past year or two.   Back on the 1980s IVP published a number of 'four views' titles, designed to present readers with some alternative Christian views on contentious subjects.  This one is edited by Robert G. Clouse, with contributions by Gary North, William E Deihl, Art Gish and John Gladwin.  Each contributor contributes a lead essay outlining their viewpoint on the topic - these are around 30 pages each - and then provides a brief response to the other three.  North is touted as representing 'Free Market Capitalism' , Deihl's...

A little after 8.00pm on Monday, 15 June, Noel Henry was riding his bicycle to his home in the Adelaide suburb of Kilburn when he was pulled over by the police.  They told him they suspected him of being in possession of drugs, and ordered him to put his hands on his head so they could search him.  According to the police statement released the next day, he 'originally was compliant and after a short time he began to refuse. Police attempted to arrest the man who resisted and a struggle ensued.'   The noise of this struggle alerted his friends who came out of the house.  Some of them filmed parts of the incident and subsequently posted their films on social media.  They show three police officers holding Henry on the ground, one of them hitting him, and his head being forcibly pushed down onto the concrete footing of the fence they have pinned him against.  All this while his friends yell at the police to 'get off his head' and 'let his head up'...

Here's some more social isolation reading for you.  As you may know, I've spent a lot of my career working on housing and homelessness.  I could write endlessly about policy and service responses (indeed, I have in other forums) but this is not the place for that.  Instead, here are two books that tell great homelessness stories. ***  A few years ago I read John Healy's The Grass Arena , his account of life as a homeless alcoholic in London. This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers.  It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read. Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants.  As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life.  He was an angry man.  As a teenager he took up boxing, feelin...