Author Liam Hogan

• Work and life

  AS IF IN REPLY to this blog's April Fools Day contribution to working-from-home advice and St Valentine's Day questions about clerical companionship, Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald has written in favour of offices and workplaces:

  I think we tend to undervalue the social experience of seeing our colleagues: the lift encounters, the desk-side chats, the coffee runs. I suppose if we happily discard those things now it will only go to show how little they really meant all along. But we'll miss them, I suspect. They're much better than staring at a screen.

  Posted 25 May 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Zombies

  IT IS NO WONDER that zombies are such a fixture of the horror genre. To be reanimated after one's own death, both with and without the key elements of your identity, treated as a less-than-human shambling artefact and played either for revulsion or comedy---what could be more terrifying? If there is one constant in zombie stories, it's the fundamental indignity of the afterlife: their shambling, angry peacelessness. The zombies naturally want to eat or kill the living, and it's never really a surprise that they should want to. In the first reel of the film, it's always the present that calls upon the dead; a spell, perhaps, or a toxic gas, but the present is always being haunted by the past, and unable to understand its own culpability, without context, or deal with the consequences. If you aren't scared of your own identity becoming reanimated after your death, and used by selfish characters to further a plot-line not of your choosing, maybe you don't have enough imagination.

  Posted 18 May 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• What kind of grubs

  ALAN JONES HAS ANNOUNCED his planned retirement and with his exit from our politics, both NSW and Australia will be a little bit better, a little bit cleaner, a little bit less self-satisfiedly hateful. You will read members of Parliament, celebrities, other members of the press, eulogising his career, paying tribute to a public man, or most predictably of all, describing him as complicated or ambiguous. It's all garbage. The man was uncomplicatedly, straightforwardly, the worst and most toxic public figure of Australia's last half-decade. Our political and cultural life will be better for his absence.

  Posted 12 May 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Folk Horror, Utopian Centrism, Art Deco Planes

  Morgan Jones, The Social Review: The Labour Campaign for Folk Horror

  The key beats of folk horror are the sense of time and the sense of the land- the relationship between place and past. It is perhaps a stretch to call the ways in which the genre thinks about these things “anti-capitalist” – but only slightly. For the protagonists who fall foul of the weird and the old and the powerful and the land itself, their demise is often as a result of an attempt to own, or to exploit, or to regulate, or even just to comprehend the things that have been there for a long, long time. In folk horror, to monetise is to antagonise…

  Hush-Kit, 12 ravishingly beautiful aircraft from the Art Deco era, and one from far later

  Louis Bechereau’s racing masterpiece: this is the most important aircraft barely anybody ever talks about today, designed by arguably the most important aircraft designer of the Great War (who hardly anybody talks about today). A flying machine to prove that heartbreaking bloodbaths are not necessarily a requirement for advancing our sense of style or our design and engineering skills.

  Chris Dillow, Technocrats and class

  At impressionable ages we are brought up to believe that success comes from knowledge and intellect. We thus believe this even in contexts where it is wrong. We’d be better prepared for politics if teachers gave top marks not to the brightest students but to the school bullies.

  Posted 7 May 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Private Plumb

  THE AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE (ADF) is now supporting the States in their response to coronavirus isolation. This includes things like transporting people, doing contact tracing, and packing Foodbank lunches, but also helping the NSW Police with self-isolation directions. The National Communicable Disease Incidence of National Significance Plan (CD Plan) provides for Defence to 'Assist the national response to a communicable disease emergency by filling capability shortfalls within other government departments'.

  This is not an accidental choice of words, and also refers to the application of new powers established by law in 2018, and trained with in exercises in 2019.

  Posted 7 April 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Champ

  EVERYONE CAN MAKE MASHED potatoes, but what do you do when you want to make the kind of mashed potatoes that deserve a blog post? You make champ, Ireland's answer to the question 'carbohydrates and fats, how can we make these even more delicious'.

  Posted 3 April 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Working from home

  IF THE TRANSITION TO mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits—new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively—how far is this related to changes in the inward notation of time?

  Asked E.P. Thompson in the extremely famous journal article Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, and his answer (to spoil a half-century old social history argument) was 'quite a bit, and also Methodism'.

  Posted 1 April 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Carry the love from town to town

  IT’S A UNIVERSAL HABIT in every era in every culture to express communal desire, keep solidarity, and drive individual courage, in music. Few of the songs I am used to humming and singing to myself are appropriate today: every one seems to call people to gather or come together. It isn’t physical courage we’re required in these times to show anyway, but social distancing demands moral, psychological, and even spiritual courage. We are each of us for the near future in our own prison of the self, but freedom is coming.

  Keep Your Eyes On The Prize was one of the key songs of the United States’ civil rights movement in the post-WWII. Like us, they knew things would get worse before they got better. Like us, they knew that patience is impossibly hard. Like us, they could see a different, better world at the end of the journey.

  Paul and Silas thought they was lost
  Dungeon shook and the chains come off
  Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

  Freedom’s name is mighty sweet
  And soon we’re gonna meet
  Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

  …The only chain that a man can stand
  Is that chain of hand on hand
  Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

  Posted 23 March 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Much Time And Little To Do

  WHEN I STARTED THIS blog in 2011 I had recently been made redundant, and was retraining completely to enter a new field. Little did I know then that the stretch of unemployment and underemployment I was about to go through would be a lot longer than I expected. Even less did I consider the mental health implications of being so far from the world of regular routine work. The time has come again, though perversely, for the moment I’m still in a full-time job; social distancing (which is experienced by every jobseeker) has a way of turning into social isolation, and from isolation to exclusion.

  Thankfully we have some literary practices left from the old world to guide us into the new. Get a blog.

  Posted 18 March 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Interior, Cocktail Lounge, Menzies Hotel

  ONE OF MY FAVOURITE Australian photographers is Wolfgang Sievers, who fled Nazi Germany to make a commercial career photographing Australian factories, mines, refineries, office buildings, and construction sites. He was a modernist, who liked to remove all the people from his photographs and capture the places as the gigantic machines for abstract production that they, in a sense, were. If like me you like extremely geometric pictures of other people’s workplaces, you’ll like Sievers.

  Sometimes though there’s a photograph that goes against the grain of the rest of the otherwise spare and formal collection, in a glorious way, and even though formally posed, just captures a moment. The interior of the Cocktail Lounge, Menzies Hotel, 509 Bourke Street Melbourne is just such a picture.

  Waiter, two whiskey sours and a pink gin! Thanks mate!

  

  Posted 28 February 2020 | Author Liam Hogan