READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  Re-reading In my craft or sullen art the personal declaration doesn’t sound like a revolution, or even just a reason for writing words, perhaps because of sullen, a word meaning resentment, moody, bad-tempered, morose, uncommunicative, a word that sets the tone. And though uncommunicative, the art or craft is not still or too moody but Exercised in the still night, a time When only the moon rages , giving credence to the claim that he is exercised though everything else, bar the moon, is still. Except, either in his mind or to acknowledge their certain presence And the lovers lie abed , as night will have it, though unexpectedly not with ardour or passion or mutuality but With all their griefs in their arms . The words, having set out their condition, then turn to a series of opposing purposes for writing words: I labour by singing light. Does he even sing for his supper? Apparently Not for ambition or bread , even if he’s doing a good job of keeping our attention while staying ...

  Anton Chekhov: 16 June 1904 Gregorian Calendar 29 June I just cannot get used to German silence and calm. One day is like any other day in Badenweiler.   There’s not a sign of good taste or talent anywhere. At 7 in the morning a band plays in the garden: they’re awful. But there’s loads of order and formality and honesty. Names: Doktor Formula, Frau und Fraulein Bassoon, Herr Lipp. My health has improved, not so much out of breath. Never submit a manuscript to two publishers at once. They might both publish at once, ignoring your protests. Out walking I don’t notice I’m ill, no aches and pains. My legs are thinner than ever they’ve been. Anyway, my play would seem to have been received well. At 7.30 a German visits, a kind of masseur. Herr Spa rubs me over with water, then I rest a while. Idea for a novella: all one man’s thoughts over course of one day. His thoughts about their thoughts and so on and so forth. At 8 I drink some acorn cocoa....

  An anti-ode entitled ‘Fire’ opens with a line from a letter of Anton Chekhov written to Dmitri Grigorovich, March 28, 1886, Moscow, and published in the Picador edition of selected letters in 1984. The whole poem is about Chekhov, reading him in Melbourne during the January bushfires.   FIRE   “I have composed my stories as reporters write their accounts of fires – mechanically, half-consciously,   “with no concern either for the reader or myself,” fire being the given, the sudden cause of all decisions   the story tells as people run one way snatching belongings or would stay put and fight heat they cannot beat.   Leave now, it is too late to leave, abandon your plans is the language of fire coming over the hill towards us.   Staying doesn’t make you a hero. Fire came from nowhere. We’ve lost everything. The whole place has just gone.   Fire quietens the township’s dreams of a world trip. Fire has leapt the r...

  The author’s gift for memorable openings is recalled in ‘The Museum of Innocence”, where the two lovers of the story are first introduced in the middle of the act of lovemaking, an extended erotic description that infuses the reader’s thoughts for the rest of the novel, in the expectation of when will this happen again.   ‘My Name is Red’ employs an equally remarkable device to take hold of the reader’s attention and keep it there: the reader listens to a story told by a dead person. And not just any dead person, but a fresh corpse, the murdered man at the centre of the story, speaking now from where his body has been thrown at the bottom of a well.   The whole novel is spoken in the voices of different characters, living and dead, as well as unexpected voices like a dog, or a tree in a picture-book. Such variety of voices keeps the reader alert to what might happen next, while enabling a decameron of perspectives about the late 16 th century world of Constantinopl...

    Kerry Greenwood’s knowledge of church ways and the Anglican Province of Victoria a century ago are marvellously, if quirkily at times, on show in her posthumously published Phryne Fisher mystery, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. The stylish socialite detective has been invited by her old friend Lionel Watkins to attend his installation as Bishop of Bendigo. For this reason, we learn from Miss Fisher that “I’m not much of a believer myself, but I was brought up in the Church of England. It is the religion of the Great Compromise. It is above all a creed founded on the principle that murdering each other on points of doctrine is something that only foreigners do.” This confession of faith, if you will, is basis for her opinion, shared with the investigating constabulary, that “every church has its awkward moments, but clergymen and organists don’t go around killing each other because they have guilty secrets.” She works by her own process of elimination, nearly always leaving offi...

  Article written by Philip Harvey for the Newsletter of the Community of the Holy Name   Irish historian Eamon Duffy, in ‘A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation’ (Bloomsbury, 2021, page 83) writes that “There are more than 350 different translations of the Bible into English, more than into any other language. And if we count English versions of the New Testament, or of individual books or clusters of books such as the Psalms or the Gospels, the number of different English Bible translations runs into thousands.” Note the quiet sub-clause “more than into any other language”, which only hints at the scale of translations into those “other” languages. Wikipedia, quoting Wycliffe Bible Translators, summons the numbers: “The full Bible has been translated into 704 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,551 languages and Bible portions or stories into 1,160 other languages. Thus at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,41...