New Year's celebrations go back a long way, though they did not originally fall on December 31. The vernal equinox in mid-March once served this purpose, but the Romans made the change to January at some stage. It has bounced around a little, the Medieval Church disliking its pagan origins, preferring to mark the calendar with religiously based events. It seems that in the West, the celebration at December 31 is a rather recent development and its most modern iteration (countdowns, drunkenness, fireworks etc) is very recent. I can recall as a young boy there being a fireworks display on the harbour. I also remember the banging of pots and pans as the midnight hour struck.

But truthfully, I don't really get the whole thing. I am not sure if I fully understand the tedium of sitting on a rug for hours, surrounded by strangers, a tilting bottle of champagne growing more tepid by the minute. There is a buildup of sorts, a movement towards a moment in time, not unlike any other moment, much looking at watches and smartphones, a period of more waiting, then the hurried chant to midnight. Fireworks (yes, big and beautiful), then nothing. A drifting way, without meaning.

Then the resolutions, made so that they can be broken the instant the last syllable has passed from the lips. It's not intentional, just a consequence of the habit. There's nothing wrong, of course, with resolving to do better and be better and I encourage it, through goal setting, every day of the year. For those reading this, make this evening's resolutions doable. Make them specific and measurable and realistic. I hope that you achieve them and thereby break the hoodoo of the unfulfilled resolution.

Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay—
Stay till the good old year,
So long companion of our way,
Shakes hands, and leaves us here.
Oh stay, oh stay,
One little hour, and then away.

William Cullen Bryant

There is a lot of unearned inflated self-regard about and it appears to be getting worse. Pandering to this epidemic of me and me and me again is a cafe in England that is now offering a selfieccino (surely a horrible word in any dialect of English). An image of the customer is uploaded to the cafe where a clever machine prints said image onto the froth of a cappuccino.

It is not for me to offer a moral argument on this ghastly development but it is impossible not to look scornfully at the concept. After all, coffee at a cafe is a social activity. It is conducive to a lively conversation about all manner of things, from the mundane to the mystical, but now I fear that in addition to people staring at their hands for inspiration, they will also peer longingly at themselves, as rendered on the surface of their beverage. Sure, I understand that it can all be had in good fun and that the phenomena may pass like so many other fads. On the other hand, it might just be the beginning.

Caravaggio would have additional subject matter if he was painting today.

Today I cooked my first Thai meal, Larb Na. The dish is one of Ann's favourites and the recipe came out of Cooking With Poo, a book I bought recently. Poo has a cooking school in the slum district of Bangkok.

For more than 5 years the school has been running in Klong Toey for tourists as well as local residents. Poo represents a remarkable model of success and positivity in an often difficult and complex landscape of poverty and hardship and has trained up a team of fellow residents.

So this was a book well worth buying as it is now well worth using. Ann was so proud of me and kept saying "David, you can cook Thai food!" as if I had opened a magic cave filled with gold and silver. Truth is, if you get organized, it's not that hard.

People often make jokes about the title, but this is a great book and well recommended.

Good poetry captures the essence of human experience. Unlike prose, it distills it through an economy of language and a particular attention to word choice and structure, allowing the moment, or the experience, to resonate within the reader. Because our life experiences are often different, two separate readers might have divergent views on the impact of the same poem. Others will bring with them a knowledge of decoding the poem, skills that are taught at school and soon forgotten. I suspect that this is one reason why poets are no longer esteemed as once they were and that the general public is rarely bothered to read verse of any sort.

I confess that poets themselves must take some of the blame, for the shrinking of their profession and its confinement to academic circles has meant that a particularly abstruse form of poem has become common. I remember reading a few poems by an acclaimed young Australian poet and being bamboozled. The obscurity of the language made the poems dry and largely inaccessible to anyone except, presumably, a closed circle of fellow poets. Sure, poems should be challenging sometimes but they need to be readable. They need to communicate.

I have mentioned the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu before. An official in the Chinese bureaucracy at a time of considerable upheaval in the land, Tu Fu became a chronicler of the times. He reacted with genuine emotion to the threats of war and rebellion that he encountered. The following one, translated by Ken Rexroth, strikes a far more Daoist note. The hermitage may be real, or perhaps serves as a metaphor for the poet's desire to escape the folly of the world.

WRITTEN ON THE WALL AT CHANG’S HERMITAGE

It is spring in the Mountains.
I come along seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

When I first became familiar with existential thinking as an undergraduate, it was a revelation to me. Thinking about what life meant and how we made meaning in our lives was already something I thought a lot about. Studying the Romantic poets in senior high school opened me up to a broader conversation about existence and whether there was something beyond the material. I confess that part of me has been fascinated with religious thought since an early age, while another part of me scoffed at all this as I learned about science and the rational world. It is a dichotomy that has never been bridged.

The idea that we are born with no a priori purpose is strangely liberating. When I first dug into the pages of Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd, read the plays of Ionesco, Beckett and Albi, and attended the wonderful lectures of Dr. Jean Wilhelm in World Drama 1, some bright thing hove into view. It has stayed with me since, informing at least some of the work I did as a drama teacher and remaining a touchstone to this day. In terms of the arts, absurdism (which is one possible conclusion of existentialism) has the potential to unsettle a baked-in worldview and challenge long-held beliefs. There is nothing wrong with testing these waters, for stoking doubt surely gives us conditions for further growth if we are open to it.

Truth is, I keep running into stuff that harks back to my earlier epiphany. I haven't lost that first sense of wonder that there were real people thinking great things beyond my middle-class existence, things that went way beyond mundane concerns and the wretched mediocrity of television. What that says about me I don't know except that I feel compelled by a curiosity that I cannot explain.

Tom is almost finished 6th Grade and tomorrow will complete primary school. There have been a number of social events recently and I have often found myself sitting in the main quad waiting for something to start or end. Last night was his farewell and this afternoon is his graduation.

I don't always find someone to talk to on these occasions but yesterday, as I stared at a news site on my phone, a man I didn't know sat down next to me. Our brief encounter went thusly.

Him: You must have something interesting there.
Me: Yes, I'm looking at the returns from Alabama.

(Silence)

Me: Oh, er, the special Senate election results.

(Silence)

Him: That's in the US?
Me: Yes.

(Silence)

This probably reflects poorly on me, though I'm wondering just what sort of geek this gentleman thought he had sat down next to. I hasten to add that I rarely look at my phone in public but was drawn by the rolling coverage and the potential closeness of the contest. Politics is a funny thing, ne?

Tom's formal went really well and was unencumbered by obscure American electoral statistics.

local cemetery

summer-heated stone,
warily an old couple tread,
stoop to read a name

Back in August, I posted about being able to buy Dekavita C in one of the Daiso stores in George Street, Sydney. It was one of those things that conjured vivid memories of living in Japan, especially those steaming summer days when I chose to walk into the centre of Sanda with 100 yen jangling in my pocket. Not long after, Daiso ran out of the magical drink and it has not been seen since. By way of compensation perhaps, bottles of Oranamin C appeared in the refrigerator of the same Daiso store, producing a similar effect in me. I did not drink as much of this concoction at the time, but sometimes it was the only alternative to Dekavita in the vending machine, should that be unavailable.They have a similar taste.

Sure enough, upon visiting the same Daiso a week ago, the Oranamin C was gone, it's price tag removed! It seems that Daiso is subject to the whims of supply, whims that may have nothing to do with market forces, nor my entreaties to puzzled staff. Oh well!

I have been looking at some of the grimmer offerings that thoughtful FB friends have posted. I don't mean the bland pretending-to-be-meaningful memes that are the bread and butter of so many posts, but those with a strong social or political message. Sometimes they can be quite jolting, but it is always better to be shaken up than anesthetized. Uncomfortable to view they may be but the chance to address social ills or injustices is a noble pursuit, even where it is confined merely to words. Actions can follow if enough people feel the same way.

Many of these kinds of posts address the alleged skewed interface between technology and people. Some focus on the way we are seduced by the lure of gadgetry. Everyone reading this post will have noticed that the public space has been invaded by portable technology, and principally the smart phone. I have such a phone and it serves a utilitarian purpose - to communicate, to inform, to entertain. But I recognise that having a smart phone is in itself a threat to my autonomy unless I am aware of its distracting influence, its unshakeable omnipresence.

Theodor Adorno addressed some of these issues when he wrote about the "culture industry" seventy years ago. He noted that capitalism had co-opted culture (as with much else), creating a commodity out of it. Culture was thereafter for profit alone, with art being subsumed within the various modes of production. Perhaps worse was how this new product became the go-to escape for bored and alienated workers, who could seek some relief from stultification through the radio, the cinema, records, and later TV. Today the full panoply of mediated diversion is available and the list grows, with more promised. I don't agree with all of Adorno's positions, but think there is much to be gained from applying such an analysis.

We should never, however, underestimate the human capacity to think through the implications of phenomena. It is arrogant to think otherwise.