Floriade

The rock and roll theme at Canberra's flower-filled fiesta was a fizz. (note: if I get too alliterative it means I am suffering medieval withdrawal symptoms)

The only theme that was really, really obvious was "Spicks and Specks" and if anyone can tell me what daffodils and "Blue Suede Shoes" have in common (apart from both being a tad on the daffy side) I will be most impressed.

My top favourite flower was, as ever, that tulip so dark it is black until sunlight shines purple through the petals ("Qeeen of Sheba"?). It is the ultimate goth-flower. Normally my second favourite is a beautiful cream tulip, but this year it got beaten to the finish line by a really lurid striped tulip with far too many frills: it struck me that this was the perfect flower to be worn on "Talk like a Pirate Day."

(no subject)

An article called "History, the Past, and the Inner Life" by Anthony Harrigan, published in Humanitas in 2004, is at http://www.nhinet.org/harrigan17-1&2.pdf
The quote to watch out for (my favourite bit of the article, in fact - the History Carnival spotted it) is: 'Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity.'

I don't know if anyone reading this was at the Magic Casements in Sydney a year or so back, when I was on a panel. I was embarrassed by the illustrious company into talking wildly and theoretically because discussing my single book would have been so up myself given the prominence of the rest of the panel. Anyhow, my thought then was that we have places in our society where we retain things that don't quite fit current world-view or cultural norms but that we think should not be entirely lost. My example was belief in magic as held and explained and thought about in speculative fiction. Harrigan's article reminded me of that, and also why I love studying history so much. The discipline provides a vast array of tools for analysing ideas such as this, as well as providing a vast capacity for cultural growth and development and self-analysis. A very powerful discipline, in fact.

Most of Harrigan's article rests on a bunch of worn ideas and is a bit dated: how can any historian lack an ideology, for instance - a modern historian identifies bias rather than assuming that some scholars are innocent of it. We all live in our cultures, not separated from them. It is rather nice, nevertheless, to see it out there and being read.