Right wing parties sweep EU polls

Far-right and anti-European Union parties have made sweeping gains in the European Parliament elections [Aljazeera]; Marine Le Pen's The National Front in France, Nigel Farage's UKIP in Britain, the Danish People's Party, Austria's Freedom Party, all made significant gains. The exception is the Netherlands Freedom Party. These parties are united in their opposition to immigration. Nigel Farage said that he wouldn't want to live next to a Romanian family. We don't really have a right wing party in New Zealand. Yet the parties on the left, Labour, Green, Mana-Internet, and New Zealand First who for the time being threw their hat in with Labour, all agree on limiting immigration. They blame immigrants for the great increase in house prices, even though it is clear that immigrants had virtually no influence on property values. True that Auckland house prices are some of the most expensive in the world, but this is not the result of immigration, but of generations of bad planning, inadequate infrastructure, and unreasonably high building costs, due almost certainly to inefficiency  While politicians blame immigrants, there is a critical skills shortage in New Zealand. There are 10,000 IT jobs that cannot be filled. The hospitals are staffed by highly skilled Philippine nurses, Polynesian cleaning staff who are prepared to work for the ridiculously low minimal wage, and doctors from all corners of the world. The whole health system, but probably much else, would come to a complete stand still without immigrants, but xenophobia is good politics. Politicians, who in other areas show a good deal of common sense, are prepared to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to immigration policy. Shame on them.

Antisemitism

I had the privilege today of talking to a class of Year 13 students about antisemitism, a topic that they are studying at school. I prepared a paper for them on the history, various forms and sources of antisemitism, and talked about the way antisemitism is and was used to confront problems societies face that had nothing to do with Jews. I challenged the students to discuss problems facing Germany in the 1920s and 1930s that the Nazis tried to resolve through the hatred of Jews, even though there were comparatively few Jews in Germany. As they were not familiar with the Merchant of Venice, I explained how the play was not about Jews, there were no Jews in England in Shakespeare's time, they had been expelled three hundred years before; that the play was about usury, lending money at interest, Shakespeare himself was a money lender, and about the validity of contracts, both of these new and contentious issues in Shakespeare's time. Perhaps all this was too academic even for senior students. The teacher asked me to talk about my own personal story. This was what impressed the class that visited last year. I told them a little about myself, something I am always reluctant to do, why should anyone be interested in me, and told them my parents' story and the story of the Hungarian Holocaust. What I did not talk about, and perhaps I should have, was present day antisemitism. I don't know what to say about that. For many years after the Holocaust open antisemitism was frowned upon. It was unfashionable. It has now resurfaced, partly due to the emergency of right wing politics, partly through Moslem influence in Europe, but I believe that antisemitism was always there, nothing changed, it was just given new political voice. There is, however, a huge difference between the antisemitism of the new 'Right' and that of the immigrants from the Middle East and the state backed antisemitism of the 1930s. There will always be people, unfortunately lots of people with an irrational hatred of Jews, but murdering Jews is something else. 

Pope Francis and the walls

Everything Pope Francis does is carefully planned and has a symbolic value. He visited the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, with two friends from Argentina, Rabbi Storka and Omar Abboud, leader of Argentina's Muslim population.. Then he visited the wall separating Arabs and Jews on the way to Bethlehem. A wall is a wall, whether it represents the destroyed Temple of ancient Israel or a symbol of Arab grievances. He met politicians and religious leaders on both side, invited Shimon Peres and Abbu Abbas to the Vatican.  He showed by example, that as the head of the Catholic Church he can relate to the contemporary secular world and has a role to play at bringing people together. If  Jewish and Moslem religious leaders like him would get together and talk about peace they might achieve more than politicians do with all their peace negotiating. But these would have to have the attitude of Pope Francis with a faith in peace and religious tolerance, not the kind who foment hatred. Such are all too prevalent both in the Jewish and the Moslem world.

Brahms and Debussy

Last night I went to what might have been the best, certainly one of the best concerts of the Hutt Valley Chamber Music Society, now renamed Chamber Music Hutt Valley. ever put on. Pianist Deirdre Irons, violinist Vesa-Matti Leppänen, concert master and Andrew Joyce, principal cellist of of the NZ Symphony played Beethoven's Trio Op 70/2, Debussy's Violin and Cello Sonatas and Brahms's Trio No.2. The Debussy works, and particularly the Cello Sonata were strikingly original pieces, perhaps the most 'modern' innovative 20th century sonata for cello. The Brahms Trio, for all its transcendental passionate beauty, was a homage to the traditional, the comfortable settled times of Europe of the 1880s, a peaceful prosperous time between wars; the Debussy work written during the first year of the First World War, reflected the breakdown of tradition, the questioning of what the old masters, and by implication traditional culture and society stood for. It was exactly the kind of concert the small team of us who set up the Hutt Valley Chamber Music Society now almost 30 years ago planned to offer. The New Zealand Chamber Music Society, the Music Federation, closed down the Hutt series of concerts. We believed that we could organize series of concerts better without them. They offered us expensive overseas groups but not the top ensembles, so ours would have been a second tier series of concerts at first tier prices. This would not have worked. We thought that there is a wealth of New Zealand talent we could use, and the costs would be much more affordable. We could offer opportunities to local musicians and get music that our audiences wanted. It is very gratifying that what we set up so many years ago is still going strong. Now there is a younger generation taking over the committee, with great innovative ideas. May Hutt Chamber Music go from strength to strength.

Solving problems with a gun

Three people were shot at a Jewish museum in Brussels, six near Santa Barbara, California. We know almost nothing of the two assassins in Brussels, but we know a good deal about the young man who committed the murders in California. He was rejected by girls, he was unhappy, so he bought a gun, in fact he had a number of guns, and thought that by killing people he would solve his problems. We can surmise that the gunmen in Brussels thought that by killing three tourists and seriously wounding a fourth they would contribute to the solution of the problems of the Middle East. It is impossible to fathom the thinking of people. The assumption that people act rationally certainly doesn't hold. Yet dismissing these killers as crazy is an easy way out. In both instances the killers were guns. Guns have no business being in the hands of  unauthorized people in the community. Americans have a love of guns that people outside the United States can't understand, but where did the gunmen in Brussels obtain their weapons? Did some armed organization put them up to it, making use of two gullible individuals to commit senseless murder? The Californian young man is dead, killed in the exchange of fire, so his problems are solved even if not in a satisfactory manner, one of the killers in Brussels has been apprehended, the other is still on the run, but the problems of the Middle East are no nearer to solution. Their action just confirmed that the hatred of Jews is widespread, something that needed no confirmation. 

Future of bookselling

Publishers have abandoned New Zealand. Penguin merged with Random House and moved to Australia, Macmillan, Harper Collins, Hachette (Hodder and Stoughton in my time) have all closed their operations in New Zealand, moved to Australia and distribute books to New Zealand booksellers from there. This makes books in New Zealand unnecessarily expensive because it introduces an other layer of distribution costs, and greatly limits the books that are readily available to bookshops in New Zealand. The sky is falling, bookshops are dying, Amazon is taking over the world. But I, being long in the tooth, have seen it all before. In the 1970s the Booksellers Assn of NZ, lead by Roy Parsons, fought two great battles: the end of the net book agreement, the trade agreement that ensured that all books were sold at the same price wherever they were sold, and so made sure that the playing fields were level for all booksellers no matter how small or distant, and closed markets, which gave the right to publishers to supply books exclusively from their New Zealand distribution centres. The end of the net book agreement put large booksellers and chains at a great advantage, because they could negotiate special terms and get competitive advantage over their small rivals. Some of the small bookshops that were so disadvantaged were among the best bookshops in New Zealand if not in the world. Overseas visitors were amazed to find excellent bookshops in places like Marton, Fielding, Levin, Blenheim and many other small towns. Closing the markets, distributing books from New Zealand distribution centres greatly limited the range of books available. If you wanted a book outside the range of highly promoted best sellers you had to wait for a long time and pay an exorbitant price. Now that publishers virtually walked away from their closed markets, booksellers are presented with new opportunities and challenges. Instead of choosing from a limited range of books on offer, they can buy any book from any part of the world and get it within a few days. But selecting books will require booksellers to be well informed. They will have to keep up with whatever is published here and overseas, subscribe to The Bookseller, The Publishers' Weekly and read it every week, as I used to, read the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, get to know their customers and their interests, so that bookshops become market places for ideas, places where you would meet friends and talk about books, places where you could have interesting conversations with well informed booksellers. Bookshops that want to survive will have to focus on books and chuck out peripheral merchandise and remainders, stacks of failed books that no one wanted at full price, and will not be obsessed with prices, getting the cheapest on the market. No one would want to buy a book because it is cheap. They would want it because they are interested in it, or would want to it to give it to someone for whom it would be meaningful. The new challenges booksellers face also provide wonderful new opportunities. Book selling is still an interesting business, with all its challenges and rewards.

The Grand Budapest Hotel and Stefan Zweig

Although I enjoyed the Grand Hotel Budapest (nothing to do with the city of Budapest) and was amused by it, I found it somewhat weird. It was inspired by Stefan Zweig, it said in the credits at the end. I knew that because I cheated and read some of the reviews, but I failed to see any connection with Stefan Zweig. I had read Stefanz Zweig many years ago. He was the great popular writer of Europe for my parents' generation. I recognized Zweig at the beginning of the film as the 'author', but more in particular, Zweig's way of telling a story. The film quotes Zweig I believe, when the author says that he doesn't make up stories, stories come to him. The author talks about his book, which is about a story he had heard in an old hotel in a remote corner of the world, and then we meet the author as a much younger man having dinner with the narrator of the story. So we are two steps removed from the actual story. This is genuine Zweig. Wes Anderson says that he lifted bits of the film from stories by Zweig, but the stories are not really recognizable. What he took from Zweig is a sense of nostalgia for a vanished world of the past. What Anderson adds to this is that the vanished world was itself a fantasy and unreal.  The hotel itself is a monument to the past, but it is empty and was perhaps never quite what was remembered about it. Truly the past was a borderless world, it was the break up of empires that created artificial borders, but the life in the hotel and the life in the schloss, the castle, and the surrounding countryside, depicted as rugged mountains, were worlds apart. The elderly dowager, the owner of the castle, soft on the debonair concierge, M. Gustave, is the representative of the past, her son, unscrupulous, ruthless, with his tough, threatening bodyguard is the present, in 1932. But the story of the relationship between the concierge, M. Gustave, with his charming and impeccable manners, and Zero, the lobby boy he befriended and took under his wing is more like a Stefan Zweig,  remains largely unexplored. Both of them are rootless. We don't find out anything about M. Gustave's origins. We know that Zero Moustafa is a refugee from some Middle Eastern war and massacre. Zero, who is M. Gustave's acolyte, ends up being his saviour. Finally Zero inherits the hotel, by then largely empty and decayed, and assumes the role of the keepr of the memory of the past. This is a film that requires reflection. It has much more depth once you think about it than is evident when you first see it.

Questions about the Holocaust

Please excuse me if for once I blow my own trumpet. When we planned our new Holocaust room I ended up, by default, being responsible for the content of the display. I borrowed and stole material from the Internet for quotes, from Ann Beaglehole and from Jessica Caldwell for the Timeline, I incorporated the panels about Hanka Pressburg and Clare Galambos ifrom the previous display, and worked with Lisa Silestian on the Deckston panels. All credit should go to  Az James and her team at Workshop e for bringing all this material together into a coherent exhibition, But the material proved to be an excellent teaching tool. It tells the story of the Holocaust in a logical and comprehensible manner that students have no trouble following. To make sense of all this a guide was needed which addressed, and asked relevant questions about each panel. I could ad lib about these panels, but the guide was needed for other educators, less steeped in Holocaust lore, and for visitors. I have been working on this guide for some time, recording teaching points that I used in my lessons. Now I finally completed this Guide, in time for the Open Day next Sunday. Louisa turned it into attractively designed sheets, and now I hope that people will find it useful. I ask questions about the Buttons, and quote Himmler, who said that the children had to be killed to make sure that there will be no one left to avenge the murder of their parents. I ask about other victims of Nazi persecution, and the unique place of Jews; about the Map of European Jewish life, the different fate of Jews from various parts of Europe, and it was my suggestions that the map should focus not only on the number of Jews killed, but more importantly, on the number of Jews who had lived in each country before the Holocaust and the destruction of an entire Yiddish speaking culture. I raised questions about the book burning in 1933, which some misunderstood as a bonfire of Jewish books. It was not that. Goebbels justified it by saying that 'the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end'. This opens up a discussion about what he meant by Jewish intellectualism. I wrote a unit on propaganda and the way the children's book Trust no fox was used to teach hatred of Jews. I also wrote a unit on anti-Semitism and its various roots: religious political, warped scientific, nationalist and sheer envy. I put Hanka's and Clare's story in the context of Theresienstadt as a camp established to mislead, and the Hungarian Holocaust, and how the murder of Jews was given greater priority than fighting the war. Finally I showed through the story of the Deckston children New Zealand's role as a haven for those who managed to get here. Creating the contents of the Holocaust Centre, with the Guide to it, is probably the most important piece of writing I have done.

Transfer of culture

Martin, who came to the NZ Symphony Orchestra concert with me commented that Savannah, Georgia, where he lives, a city about the size of Wellington could not sustain a symphony orchestra, yet here we had an almost full house, and audience of over 2000. He also remarked on the fact that neither his son, not mine would ever go to a symphony concert. Young people don't care about classical music, he said. Yet though the audience still had quite a few elderly people, the old European brigade, there were also enough young people. The audience didn't look like a bunch of geriatrics. My brother, Janos also remarked on the fact that classical music still thrives in Wellington. Are we witnessing a gradual shift of European culture to such a remote place as Wellington? In the early days of the orchestra the audience was dominated by European immigrants, for whom going to classical music concerts was a mark of belonging to an educated, cultured, middle class. Over the years this changed. Going to concerts no longer denotes a class status, perhaps not even a cultural status. People go to concerts because they like the music and like the occasion. I don't say that classical music is any way equivalent to popular music. It presumes a greater depth, both intellectually and emotionally, it requires a greater commitment, listening, concentration. But if it is not your poison you are not excluded from the club of thinking people. With all that, it is great to know that the old European tradition of classical music is alive and well here, something you could not have predicted a generation ago.

Marjorie Baker R.I.P.

My Horizon Bookshop was just a few years old. I needed help, someone to replace Noeline, my first assistant and employee. I had numerous applicants for the job, and the person least prepared to sell herself, the most diffident, was Marjorie, a few years older than I, but someone who seemed a good deal older. To her surprise I gave her the job. I saw in her a personality that was warm modest yet one with an enquiring mind and the ability to reach out to people. It was  the best employment decisions I ever made. I am not a good judge of character, and over the years I had employed a number of people I should never have had anything to do with, but with Marjorie I got it right. I believe that she had little formal education, but to make up for it, she had read widely. She had the remarkable ability to open a book, any book, at random and establish a personal connection with it. She found a place she knew, people she had connections with, no matter how distant, stories that had special meaning for her. And as with books, she established immediate personal connections with people. She never had to sell a book, people came to seek her advice, came to chat with her, share their lives with her, and always walked out with a book if not with a whole bundle of books. She was a natural bookseller. And she was so successful at selling books because people saw in her a compassionate wise human being who could understand others, total strangers who became friends. People remembered Marjorie many years after she had left my shop and moved to Nelson when Bernie, her husband was transferred there. We all missed her, I did, my customers did. And Marjorie missed my shop, the books, the people. As a bookseller she found self-fulfilment, and respect. She hadn't had an easy life, brought up four children, and like many women of her generation, she was a mother, a housewife, perhaps a hostess, but getting a job in her early fifties, a job that offered a lot of job satisfaction, was something that she always valued. With her wide reading, she sought a spiritual anchor and found it in Buddhism. Last week her daughter, Mary, rang us from Eltham, Taranaki, to tell us that Marjorie passed away.She was 88 years old and frail in the last few years. She had a full Buddhist funeral.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15

Some thoughts on hearing Shostakovich's 15^th Symphony at an outstanding NZ Symphony Orchestra concert last night: It is 45 minute work (47 minutes under Gergiev). To me it sounded very Russian, very un-German. No grand gestures as in Mahler. It is playful, full of humour, think of Gogol. It is a very approachable, colourful work, think of socialist realism. Yet the wealth of quotations, references, make me think of the vast diversity of Russia. It also has grandeur, great brass chorales, broad, sweeping melodies and individual solos, flute, violin, cello. It has sadness, resignation, perhaps reflecting the state of mind of the 67 year old composer dying. It is an uncompromising work with broad appeal. The Russian community was well represented in the audience. I think that Russians probably have a different attitude to culture from the American dominated West. A new symphony first performed in 1971, by Shostakovich is a cultural event unlike any such event by a Western composer, no matter how celebrated. And this is where the greatness of Russia lies, unappreciated by the Western media. For Russians, education and culture matters, and they were over generations prepared to die for it.

Socialism in the New Zealand DNA

The current neo-liberal National government just passed a Budget that socialist governments in other parts of the world would be proud of: free medical services for children, extended parental leave, tax cuts for the hard up. There is little for the Labour opposition to take exception to. What is lacking, as critics pointed out, is vision. This budget says that if we stick to the same path things will only get better, certainly not worse. This assumes that people are happy with their lot and don't want changes. Yet there are big problems that New Zealand faces that this budget does not address. Unequal income distribution is one of them, but at the root of it is that New Zealand has a low wage economy. economic survival depends on lots of cows giving lots of milk that lots of Chinese are prepared to buy. It does not address the question of how to diversify the economy, how to make the most of talent that is now wasted because there are no opportunities to make use of them. It does not address the imbalance of capital investment, whereby you can invest in property, not in productive enterprise, write off costs against tax, but enjoy the profits from capital gains tax free. The hard-working New Zealand Mum and Dad, who builds up a nest egg for retirement sits at home, gets student to put a coat of paint on some ramshackle property they bought to on-sell, make a handsome profit when they sell and gloat about how smart they are. You probably see them on the cruise ships sailing from one place you don't want to visit to another.

The Butler and Freedom Riders

Last night I watched DVD of The Butler, who served all Presidents from Eisenhower to Regan. It is the story of an African America, a Nigger, a Negro, all these in the course of his life, who having witnessed as a child his mother being raped and his father being shot point blank with impunity by the owner of the cotton plantation he worked on, became part of the White House staff and at time confidant of Presidents. He saw the changes of African Americans in his lifetime from virtually slaves to the election of a black President. And this was largely due to the efforts of the Freedom Riders who were arrested and beaten protesting against segregation and discrimination, and the Black Panthers, who resorted to violence to achieve their aims to gain equal rights and opportunities for blacks. It is also the story of a middle class family, and a father and son story, the father believed that the right course of action is to keep your head down and not rock the boat, while the son, with educational opportunities denied to his father, joined the Freedom Riders and the Black Panther. Superlative acting by Forest Whittaker, and great film making.

John Pilger and the war on democracy

I share many of John Pilger's prejudices, so I watched his 2007 documentary The War on Democracy last night on Maori Television. Maori TV shows somewhat out of date documentaries every Tuesday.  Current or out of date, we must be grateful for any serious program on our small screen. Anyway, though I accept that the CIA are bad guys, that the American policy of self interest, in the 'national interest' according to an awful CIA operative that Pilger held up for ridicule, is bad, there was something unsatisfactory about Pilger's account. Chavez was his great hero, and Chavez certainly came across as a likeable man,;the universal health care and almost universal literacy in Venezuela is admiral, if in fact it is true, but there are problems, and we know about these problems, not only in Venezuela, but also in Bolivia, Guatamala, Nicaragua, and the other countries Pilger covered, these problems however were left unexplored. Why are these countries so poor? Why did they not make the progress that the countries of South East Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, made? Is there something patronizing in accepting that these are countries of poor peasants, seeking dignity, freedom from oppression and exploitation, but not fussed about significant economic progress. Pilger criticizes Chile for its economic success, driven by neo-liberal economics, while the poor are still poor. He doesn't consider that China's economic miracle started with low wage workers making by hand things the market wanted, before these low wage workers or their children acquired new skills, built cars, aeroplanes and sophisticated gadget, and a whole generation moved from great poverty to reasonable affluence. Pilger admits that American policy has changed. They no longer murder democratically elected politicians they don't like because their policies adversely affect American business interests,  but they have other ways of putting pressure on countries. These pressures are evident in New Zealand. The government flogged off some of the large state owned companies, and the Labour government of the 1980s like the government of Chile, flogged off everything that that had any value. Now there are big issues with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would give  rights to American companies, like pharmaceutical and tobacco companies to sue the government if they see their commercial interests threatened. A question in the back of my mind is: had we followed the "Think Big' economic policies of the Muldoon government, hung on to our assets and reinvested them, fostered local economic initiatives, would we be better off now, would New Zealand be a more self-sufficient economically dynamic country? These are questions no one, except Hugh Templeton, a minister in the Muldoon cabinet and I dare to ask, because they run counter to the neo-liberal orthodox faith that has swept the world. 

Abducted school girls, Boko Haram and Kony

It was some time ago, when I wrote up the story of Apolonia, my Sudanese friend, that I first came across the name Kony and the Lord's Liberation Army. 'We saw that the Lord’s Resistance army (LRA rebels) came running towards us.' Apolonia told me. 'The LRA was a sectarian religious and military group operating in Northern Uganda from bases in Southern Sudan. The LRA was renowned for killing, torturing, maiming, raping its victims, abducting large numbers of civilians, and virtually enslaving numerous children.' Kony has a price on his head. For many years there were attempts to capture him, but he escaped capture to this day. He may be in the Republic of Congo or anywhere else in the vast lands in the neighbourhood of Uganda.  Now Boko Haram abducted 270 girls in Northern Nigeria, half a continent away from Uganda and Southern Sudan, where Kony operated. Boko Haram practice a form of fundamental Islam, the LRA practised a weird cocktail of Christianity and Achioli tribal beliefs, but the end results are the same, children get abducted, children are used in a conflict they are not part of. Perhaps we need to look at our media and our political and military priorities. Do we dismiss these incidents as 'This is Africa, what do you expect?' 'These are simple primitive people, such abductions are part of the way they live?' Such an attitude must be unacceptable. We, and the media in particular, need to understand Africa, an African mentality, empathize with their plight and care. Above all, we must care with all our might.

Mosquitoes and charity

Mosquitoes outnumber every other species on earth except termites and ants. (NZ Listener May 17, 2014, p.11) They cause 725,000 deaths annually. Bill Gates decided to do something about it and is funding research to instil Wolbachia bacteria in mosquitoes and block the transmission of dengue fever. This is ever so kind of Bill. He can afford it, he still has enough to live on. Other billionaires, millionaires, support other charities, opera houses, art galleries, churches and synagogues, hospitals, programmes to alleviate poverty. But should all these programmes depend on the private charity of the extremely rich? Are these not issues for the whole of society? If I were rich how would I decide what good cause to support? Should a cause get priority just because I happen to think that it is close to my heart?  Charity is something that is incumbent on every individual; not for some feel good factor, but because everyone should care for the welfare of others. But with the proliferation of extreme wealth there is a danger that charities that should be addressed by society will have to depend on the good will of wealthy donors, and should these donors not be in tune with a particular charitable cause such a cause would be ignored and neglected. When Prince Eszterhazy hired Haydn as the servant responsible for providing music in his palatial home he didn't do this as an act of charity. He didn't build opera houses or concert halls where people could enjoy Haydn's music. The fact that we can still enjoy Haydn's music, and get the benefit of Prince Eszterhazy's support for Haydn is incidental. Did Prince Eszterhazy use his extreme wealth to benefir anyone else but himself?

Democracy

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965), Hansard, November 11, 1947

My 13 year old grandson wants to be a politician. He is a smart kid, widely read, but politics is not a profession I would recommend to him. He believes that he might be able to do good as a politician. Good luck to him. But he does not believe in democracy. Like Winston Churchill, he thinks that democracy is an imperfect system, but unlike Churchill, he does not agree that it is better than the alternatives. His political heroes over time as he read more widely ranged from Stalin to Robespierre. To me they don't seem to be good role models. Yet my grandson believes that people need to accept authority. We are yet to discuss the source of this authority, and in particular, its moral accountability. There are, and indeed were in fairly recent history, times when democracy failed. Failed because people abused of the system and the liberties it provided. At times like this an autocratic system, perhaps not as ruthless as Stalin or Robespierre, may be preferable to the rule of chaos. In the period between the 1920s and 1945 much of Europe was ruled by dictators of various shades of brutality: Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Horthy in Hungary, Antonescu in Romania, Metaxas in Greece, and of course, Hitler in Germany. My apologies to any dictator I omitted. Now the situation in Ukraine brings toi mind the threat of failure of a democratic system. The last two heads of the government in Ukraine were indicted or accused of large scale corruption or outright theft. It is not surprising that people lost faith in such a government and soldiers were not prepared to fight to defend it. Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly an autocrat, not on the scale of Stalin, but still someone who exerts his authority without bowing to democratic scruples. But if I were a citizen of East Ukraine, I am not sure whether I would prefer the corrupt and unpredictable rule of Kiev to the no-nonsense but predictable rule of Moscow. If I lived in Western Ukraine it would be different. I would want to live under Hapsburg rule and have nothing to do with Kiev.

My violin

My violin, was made 150 but possibly 200 years ago by an anonymous violin maker in Mittenwald, a small town on the route towards the Brenner Pass from Germany to Lombardy. The town was noted for its violin manufacture, an industry started by Matthias Klotz in the 17th century and developed by his sons, and grandsons. The other day I was talking about selling it and insulted it. I said that its scroll is crudely made, which is true; if you want to make as many violins in a short time as you can you don't spend time tuning the scroll into a work of art of carving. It doesn't affect the tone of the violin, but it has a lovely dark red varnish, and a pleasing shape. I also said that it is a hard instrument to play on, it does not have an instant sweet tone, you have to work to get a good sound, but the sound is powerful and capable of a range of colours. I should have shown more respect. This violin has been a companion right through my adult life.. It travelled with me when I travelled the length of the country, it kept me company on long solitary evenings. I played on it in just about every amateur orchestra in Wellington and the Hutt Valley, the Hutt Valley High School evening orchestra under Graham Lillie, the Wellington Chamber Orchestra under Bill Walden-Mills, the Orphans Orchestra, Victor Latyshev's Chamber Orchestra in Petone, not to mention Sam Gezentsvey's Jewish orchestra playing Sam's arrangements. I was never much good, but they tolerated me at the back of the second violins. I was a late started. After trying my hand at piano, piano accordion and recorder, I decided that I wanted to learn the violin. My ambitions were limited, I wanted to be good enough to play second violin in a Haydn String Quartet, and in my hay days I could have coped with this. In the event I seldom played chamber music. I never had the right friends who played at my level and whose companionship I enjoyed. Music making is a competitive business. Even professional string quartets who tour the world together avoid each other's company when not working together. The image of four good friends getting together to play exquisite music is a myth. And of late I thought that my old companion, my violin, was letting me down. It didn't sing as I would have liked it to sing. The music didn't speak to me. Yet yesterday I gave it another chance. I tuned it, and started revisiting some of the easy music that I had played previously. And the fiddle sounded all right. So I will go back to it, play a little every day, get back into playing, nothing too hard, nothing ambitious, but pieces I feel comfortable with. A recent article I read said among other things, that that music may hold off the onset of dementia.

The Signature of All Things

I finished it at last, 500 pages of closely argued novel, The Signature of All Things By Elizabeth Gilbert, an intricate book with unexpected twists and turns, yet a simple story of a woman who devoted her life to the study of mosses. It starts with Joseph Banks, the wealthy eighteenth century botanist and polymath, who sailed around the worlds with Captain Cook collecting specimens, intrigued by the vast diversity of life, and ends with Darwin, Wallace and the Theory of Evolutions. Yea, riveting you might say, but the story is so well constructed that you get hooked. Gilbert says that her narrative style is based on Dickens, the technique of telling a story about the past through the eyes of a contemporary narrator. So you get the story of an ambitious simple Englishman, driven by the will of becoming very wealthy, a match for the wealthy aristocrats who looked down on him,  and her daughter, whose life is circumscribed initially by her father's vast estate, an excess of education, but a lack of social contact with people of her own age. She finds fulfilment in the study of botany, and in particular, the strange growth and development of mosses. She is the ultimate practical, empirical, rational human being, yet she falls in love with an artistic soul, who wants to be an angel and live in the world of the spirit. The story is about the conflicting, or perhaps complimentary worlds, the spiritual and the rational. Contemporaneously with Darwin, based on her research of mosses, the subject of the novel arrives at a theory of competitive adaptation, the survival of the strongest and the fittest. Yet she doesn't publish her findings, because she is concerned about a hole in her thesis, a conclusion that does not explain altruism, doing good, even if it does not further the competition for survival. She finds the same difficulty in Darwin's theory of evolution, and finds a kindred spirit in Wallace,who arrived at conclusions similar to Darwin's at the same time, but turned to spiritualism to find the answer to the conundrum of altruism.

The Signature of All Things is a challenging, stimulating book that I really got caught up in. It is seldom that I am gripped like this by a work of fiction.