Monday, August 18, 2025

Samuel Pepys: witness to history

From thearticle.com

Kate Loveman’s The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary (Cambridge UP, 2025, 237p, £22), a handsome book with small print, written in a clear and vivid style, displays on the spine a symbol of a golden lock to which she has the key.  Her work belongs to a fairly new genre, the biography of a book, including Michael Gorra on Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (2012) and Zachary Leader on Richard Ellmann’s Joyce (2025).

Loveman writes that for ten years “in the 1660s Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary whose contents, had they become known, would have destroyed his marriage, ended his career and quite possibly seen him arrested.  Today this is the most famous diary in the English language.”  Pepys was a “naval administrator, gossip, clotheshorse and routinely unfaithful husband. . . . In his diary, the diligent, honest, munificent gentleman and loyal servant of the king was revealed as a pleasure-loving, adulterous tailor’s son, involved in some distinctly shady dealings and with plenty to say about the monarch’s failings.”

An eyewitness to major historical events and court intrigues, Pepys (pronounced “Peeps”) vividly described momentous episodes, such as the London plague of 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666, when he famously dug a pit and buried “my parmezan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”  His Diary has been called “an incomparable masterpiece, an historical and literary work of outstanding character”, as well as an obscene book too gross to print.

Using Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy (“swift-writing,” 1691), Pepys wrote it in shorthand with a system of symbols that hid its sexual contents.  Breaking the code had the same mysterious fascination as Sherlock Holmes interpreting the figures of the puzzling dancing men, experts in Bletchley Park breaking the German codes and scholars deciphering the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls in modern times. The secret nature of Pepys’ diary has attracted millions of readers.

Robert Louis Stevenson called Pepys (1633-1703) “our little sensualist in a  periwig” and the diarist confessed that he “esteemed pleasure above all things.”  When he acquired a new pocket watch, he said “to see my childishness, I could not forebear carrying it in my hand and seeing what o’clock it was an hundred times.”  He also had a morbid fascination with public executions and decomposing corpses: “I rode under the man that hangs upon Shooter’s Hill, and a filthy sight it was to see how his flesh shrunk to his bones. . . . I went to see the body of a lusty fellow, a seaman, that was hanged for a robbery.  I did touch the dead body with my bare hand; it felt cold, but methought it was a very unpleasant sight.”  

The Diary—recording Pepys’ interest in food, fashion, finance and fornication—both preserves and disguises its content.  Driven by vanity and egoism, self-absorption and self-examination, his aide-mémoire is amusing, intimate and alive.  It expresses his curiosity about himself and his world, and captures immediate moments for all time.  Pepys’ emotion recollected in emotion imposes order on chaotic experience, relives the thrill of illicit pleasure by recording it and ponders an alternate reality about what could or should have happened.  Sometimes serious, always honest and frank, he wrote the Diary for his own satisfaction, and left the leather-bound volumes to Magdalene, his Cambridge College, to be deciphered and published in the future.


Pepys began the Diary on January 1, 1660 when he was 26.  He had witnessed and rejoiced at the execution of Charles I in January 1649.  Always on the scene, in May 1660, as a naval administrator, he sailed to collect the new king, Charles II, from The Hague in Holland. When Charles spoke about his harsh life and penury in exile, “it made me weep to hear the stories that he told me of his difficulties that he had passed through.”  Ironically, their ship the Naseby was named after a Parliamentarian victory over the Royalists in the Civil War.  In April 1661 Pepys sneaked into Westminster Abbey and saw the coronation of Charles II: “with a great deal of patience I sat from past 4 till 11 before the King came in.”  On this solemn occasion he comically combined high content and low diction: “I had so great a desire to pisse, that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies.”  No wonder, after a seven-hour wait, that he had to relieve himself.

In 1665 rats, attracted to the garbage that filled the streets of London, carried the fleas that brought the plague.  The victims of the Apocalyptic Pale Horse of Death suffered headache, fever, chills and painfully swollen lymph nodes.  While everyone who could afford it fled to the country, Pepys bravely remained at his post in the Naval Office. After two months of the plague, his heart hardened and “he barely registered a corpse being carried by him: ‘but Lord, to see what custom is, that I am come almost to think nothing of it.’ ”  The epidemic also halted the fashionable craze for periwigs: “nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection—that it had been cut off of the heads of people died of the plague.”

In 1666 the devastating fire in London began in a baker’s oven and quickly spread through the city, destroying 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and St.   Paul’s Cathedral .  Pepys watched the conflagration from across the Thames and “saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from here to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill, for an arch of above a mile long.  It made me weep to see it.”  It also became personally dangerous when the wind carried burning particles ahead of the main blaze: “With one’s face to the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops.”  He added images of sight and sound to his vivid descriptions: “the churches, houses, and all on fire, and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the crackling of the houses at their ruin.”  As useful as ever, he carried the news of the Great Fire to King Charles.

In Pepys’ lifetime the British and Dutch fought three wars over trade and colonial expansion, and some of the naval battles were painted by the marine-landscape artists Willem van de Velde and Jacob van Ruisdael.  A major naval crisis occurred in June 1667 when “the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and burnt the great ships anchored at Chatham.  After this national humiliation, peace was made.”

Famous for his brilliant and responsible work as Chief Secretary of the Admiralty and creator of the modern British navy, Pepys wrote of his official role, “Chance without merit brought me in, diligence only keeps me so.”  The historian John Hearsey explains that Pepys “was responsible for the sea-and-battle worthiness of the Fleet, for keeping the dockyards in efficient working order and seeing the sailors were properly looked after.”  His achievements included clamping down on corruption, overseeing naval construction and instituting an exam for seaborne lieutenants.  Pepys was considered “the ablest man in the English admiralty”. But he also took bribes of money, goods and sex.  When a woman and “her husband approached Pepys seeking his patronage, he subsequently approached her seeking sexual gratification as advance payment”.

Pepys observed conduct at sea that ranged from depraved and violent to sacrificial and idealistic.  A captain told him of a cunning scheme, like the one in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, about how to earn extra money by listing dead men as sailors and collecting their wages.  He must “have five or six servants on board as dead men, and I to give them what wages I pleased, and so their pay be mine.”  After impoverished sailors were discharged from service and given tickets for future payment instead of the cash they had earned, they rioted, robbed and even joined the Dutch navy.  

Yet seamen were also capable of great heroism.  When a brave captain died of his wounds in battle, 12 poor sailors who “have long known and loved, and served our dead commander”, offered to sacrifice themselves by ramming a Dutch ship and dying in a blaze of glory: “all we have is our lives; if you will please to get his Royal Highness to give us a fire-ship . . . we will, if possible, do that which shall show our memory of our dead commander, and our revenge.”

Pepys loved the stage, went to the theatre several times a week and described farcical scenes like those in Restoration comedies by Congreve or Wycherley: “Lady Castlemaine, the king’s chief mistress, staged a mock marriage with another mistress, culminating with the king’s taking Castlemaine’s place in the bridal bed.”  The king, who welcomed all women, approved the jest.  Another scene could have come from the Earl of Rochester’s obscene play SodomPepys recorded how Sir Charles Sedley had appeared naked on a tavern balcony in Covent Garden, “acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined.”

His English-born, half-French wife Elizabeth (1640-69), married Pepys when she was 14, and died of typhoid aged 29 soon after he stopped writing the DiaryHis sight was failing and he had to give it up for continuing would be “to undo my eyes”.  He was flattered when men paid attention to his pretty, well-dressed wife, but alarmed at her potential response.  He was so  jealous of Elizabeth that he even checked the bed sheets after her dancing master had visited for a lesson.

Pepys had sex with any available woman, with or without their consent or his payment, and took advantage of the fact that 17th-century ladies were innocent of underwear.  All attractive women were a source of potential pleasure, especially when he politely forgave their bad manners.  In a tavern “I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit backwards upon me by mistake not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.”  This contretemps emboldened his approach to her.

After a rare and fortunate encounter, he employed thinly disguised French, which his wife could read: “at the cabaret at the Cloche in the street du roy je l’ay foutée sous de la chaise deux times” (“at the tavern at the Bell in King Street I fucked her under the chair two times”).  While seated near a window in a wine-house he “so far forgot himself in an ecstasy of fondling that a passer-by threw a stone at the glass, and shouted at him to stop it.”  On another occasion, “I did kiss her and touch her thing, but she was against it and yet at last I did make her hold my thing in her hand.”  Hearsey notes that despite his promiscuity, his puritanical “inhibitions were so deep-rooted that his love-making often went no further than a little indelicate fumbling.”

The housemaids were live-in temptations and he was once discovered in flagrante: “My wife, coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl with my hand under her skirts; and endeed, I was with my hand in her cunny.  I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girl also.”  During a bitter quarrel with Elizabeth he tore up all his love letters to her while she pleaded to save them.  He once gave Elizabeth a black eye in a quarrel and, mightily vexed, she retaliated by biting and scratching.  The compromising situations became more dangerous in January 1669 when Elizabeth had a sudden fit of jealousy and appeared at his bedside with fire “tongs red hot at the ends, and made as if she did design to pinch me with them.”

The notorious Diary was first published in 1825.  Victorian editors had to “accommodate scholarly conventions, commercial requirements and popular enthusiasm for Pepys,” and the fascination with what had not been published.  It was shockingly enjoyable for the respectable editors to read about the depths to which Restoration society had sunk.  Defending Pepys, they agreed that he could claim only “comparative purity”, as against the very low standards of his time.  Readers were urged to unite the admirable and deplorable aspects of his character and “see the greatness of the man”.

Kate Loveman gives a lively account of how the two modern editors, Robert Latham in Cambridge, England and William Matthews at UCLA in California, worked distantly and together, then quarreled bitterly about payment for and recognition of their work.  Their monumental scholarly edition came out soon after the trailblazing appearance of Nabokov’s unexpurgated Lolita (1958) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959).  The complete transcription of the Diary was published in 11 volumes between 1970 and 1983, three centuries after it was written.

Loveman does not mention the illuminating similarities between Pepys, James Boswell and James Joyce.   Boswell’s best-selling London Journal, written in 1762-63 exactly a century after Pepys, was suppressed for almost 200 years until it was finally published in 1950.  Boswell also used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system to disguise the frank and detailed contents, which rose to exalted company and descended to sexual debauchery.  Both curious and precise observers were energetic and gregarious men who loved high-spirited and gossipy talk.  Like Pepys, Boswell was pleased with his achievements, and recorded how he just sat and hugged himself in his mind when well satisfied.  They liked to dress up in expensive clothes, and to attend public hangings. (Lawyer Boswell sometimes watched the swing of his own convicted clients.)  Both had salacious entries about frequent sexual encounters with many available women, but also included a strong element of guilty confession and repentance.

Pepys and Joyce both loved singing and music, and had serious eye problems.

The scandalous Ulysses (1922) was finally published in America after the landmark trial of 1933.  Joyce used Pepys’ stream of consciousness technique and cryptic content, and boasted, “‎I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”  

Pepys paved the way to the cloaca and licensed Joyce’s descriptions of excreta.  In the late Ithaca chapter Bloom and Stephen stand side by side and piss together: “their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition.”  In a numerical account Pepys records, “I begun to break six or seven small and great farts.”  At the end of the musical Sirens chapter Bloom uses the sound of a passing tram to disguise his sonorous fart: “Pprrpffrrppffff.”  Pepys notes that he “rose and shit in the chimney piece.”  In the early Calypso chapter Bloom, “Midway, his last resistance yielding, allowed his bowels to ease themselves.”

Joyce subtly imitated  and refined Pepys’ sentimental and sympathetic style in his description of Mina Purefoy’s protracted labour.  He writes of the maternity hospital in the Oxen of the Sun chapter: “Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put to it and can’t deliver.”

Pepys’ distinctive style inspired a wide range of parodic writing from children’s magazines to illicit reading.  Loveman defines it as, “drop the first-person pronoun, insert lots of periphrastic verbs (‘did sing,’ ‘do hate’), include some of his recognizable phrases (‘mightily,’ ‘with much delight,’ ‘But Lord!,’ ‘But strange’)—and end with ‘to bed.’ ”

Robert Louis Stevenson summed up Pepys’ talent: his “indefatigably lively, telling and picturesque style deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative.”

https://www.thearticle.com/samuel-pepys-witness-to-history 

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Diary Of A Songwriter: Matt O’Connor

From songwritingmagazine.co.uk

The Tuxis Giant frontperson navigates long summer walks, passing encounters, and the quiet doubts that accompany artistic integrity and ambition

Matt O’Connor has spent the past decade shaping Tuxis Giant into a project defined by steady evolution. Formed in 2015 with a self-titled debut recorded in a Vermont cabin, the band has grown to include a rotating cast from Boston’s DIY scene, with O’Connor’s songwriting at its core. Their new album, You Won’t Remember This, released via Worry Bead Records, finds the group balancing road-tested alt-country with moments of intimate reflection.

Across tracks like Last LaughSilver Cup, and Huey, O’Connor examines themes of identity, resilience, and the small moments that linger long after they’ve passed. While the record is grounded in personal experience, it resists nostalgia, favouring the ongoing process of creation over fixed definitions of success. Here, O’Connor offers a glimpse into the weeks surrounding its release, captured in their own words.

Their diary traces the days leading up to the album’s release, equal parts logistical grind, artistic experimentation, and the small scenes that colour life outside the studio.

18 JULY

Listening to the new Alex G record through laptop speakers. I work as a copywriter 9-5. It’s a solid job, and keeps my fingers moving throughout the day. I’m planted at my friend Bryan’s kitchen table, watching his cat while he’s out of town. She darts from room to room with eyes like marbles.

Our new record is out in a month. I fill the days’ margins with tour logistics, merch orders, and press emails. This is—without doubt—my least favourite part of the album cycle; a distinctly uncreative phase of the creative process.

One boon: I finished a new song I’ve been working on for a long time. Here’s hoping it sticks.

Matt O’Connor: “I started writing a new song when I got home, then threw it out in the morning. Can’t win ‘em all.” Photo: Omari Spears

21 JULY

The sun is setting and my brain is in knots.

Jenny [Ruenes – partner] and I saw Friendship play with 2nd Grade and 22° Halo on Friday. It was a sold-out show, so densely packed we could barely move. I’ve known these folks for a while – we all used to play at a Philly house venue called All Night Diner. Our first show there was in 2015, opening for Friendship.

I lived in Boston back then, where I ran my own DIY venue called Modesthaus. It was a regular tour stop for the bands I’d met at the Diner. After every Philly trip, I’d come home and tell my Boston friends how incredible the scene was, about Friendship and Ylayali and Crooked Spine. Philly felt like an oasis; a place where I could pursue the dream, blissfully away from everyday life. 25 forever.

Now, at 34, a certain doubt creeps in: will we ever “make it” like our friends have? Will we ever sell out a show like this? Envy like that misses the whole point of making art. If you’re not careful, you’ll start seeing this as a zero-sum game – one that has you on the wrong side of an invisible line.

At any rate, the show was incredible. We stood at the side of the stage while each band tore up the room. The night was full of old friends and good music. I left feeling warm n’ fuzzy.

I started writing a new song when I got home, then threw it out in the morning. Can’t win ‘em all.

23 JULY

Tank felt empty after work, so I went on a long walk. The sky was yellow, and the ice cream truck was louder than I’ve ever heard it. Two friends waved to me from their seats outside a bar, then another–on a bike–called my name. By the time I heard them, they were already speeding halfway down the block. I just saw the back of their bleached head.

That bar has pretty good beer, and free hot dogs if you ask. Jenny and I were there this week to watch a WNBA game. During commercials, I turned to the other TV, which played a 70’s sci-fi movie featuring bird people and an old guy with a monocle. If anyone knows the name of this movie, please email me immediately.

Jenny was tired from work, but I had a burst of energy. I tried telling her about the Tartarian Empire–a conspiracy theory claiming a pre-modern-yet-highly-advanced empire once ruled the world. It harnessed renewable energy and had apparently achieved world peace. All until a mudflood destroyed it and modern governments covered up its existence.

She wasn’t interested. I wasn’t either. Fallow times.

27 JULY

Quiet morning. A buzzsaw cuts through the hum of traffic and air conditioners. We’re going to the beach later, despite the chance of rain.

The week was hectic and squirrelly–my head was in a bunch of places. On top of work and album release stuff, Jenny and I are planning a wedding for the fall. Our to-do list is like one long, unravelling roll of parchment.

I’ve been working on a new batch of songs. Seven or eight so far, maybe the workings of a new record. After You Won’t Remember This comes out, I’ll find some time to demo these newer songs, then start the process all over again.

I’ve been at this for over a decade. While the “success” needle hasn’t moved much, I feel like I’m getting better at making songs, which might be the only worthwhile thing. I can’t measure my success by money or fans or album streams. But I can always rely on the work – that endless, mysterious process of creation. It eludes me constantly, but when I touch it, it’s like I’m touching the divine.

Clouds are gathering. Not a great beach day. We’re going anyway.

The new Tuxis Giant album You Won’t Remember This is out now and is available via tuxisgiant.bandcamp.com

 

Thursday, August 14, 2025

The secret diary of an Australian arts freelancer, aged 46¾

From artshub.com.au

Being an Australian arts freelancer can be lots of fun, right? Well, yes, kind of, but ... 

                                                                                                                 Image: Onischenko on Unsplash

7.30am

Wake in the dark before alarm goes off with an inexorable sense of dread that the wheel can’t be spun fast enough to avert disaster, AKA Just another day in the life of an Australian arts freelancer. LOLZ

7.35am

Bleary eyes backed up by reading glasses. Scan the news on my phone. Genocide, environmental disaster, flat-out fascism from unhinged world leaders and their milquetoast boosters, all present and incorrect. Timeline cleanse featuring fluffy kittens, film stars, fashion and hunks on Instagram to calm the apocalypse-borne despair. Nailed Wordle in three.

8am

Alarm buzzing, time to up and at ‘em. Existential crisis intensifies in shower, this time accompanied by an impromptu a cappella rendition of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’. The Voice will not trouble me, but I can do this! Is that my neighbour joining me through the floor, or the neighbourhood dogs whelping??

8.15am

Dress for the job you want, they say. Pull on the same ratty old hoodie and worn-out joggie bottoms I’ve worn for three days, as trawled from the bedroom floor. Ready to sic a pick on the cultural coalface, just as soon as I’ve had at least two strong coffees and a heart murmur.

8.30am

At my desk, 150 new emails. How many of these can I delete, sight unseen? One, two, skip a few … Whyyyyyy has that one about being flown to a dance salon in Singapore been lingering in junk mail until it’s too late? I swear gremlins are working against me.

                                                                                                    Image: John on Unsplash

Drink a gallon of water to combat the caffeine shivers. Or is that just my crumbling apartment walls, devoid of insulation like my soul? Must. Mainline. More. Fluffy. Kittens.

8.45am

Ooh, opening night ticket* offered for an eight-hour abstract show deconstructing Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure on a ‘minimalist’ set consisting of four chalked lines drawn on a shed floor. Starring that woman from Married at First Sight, who has been reduced to wearing a bin bag and is sporting a forlorn look of career contemplation I recognise all too well, thanks Tay-Tay.

*No plus-one. Politely respond requesting a guest. Debriefing with them is a legit part of the process, bouncing ideas and recalibrating my perspective.

That, and we’re paid peanuts (who am I kidding, I can’t afford peanuts in this economy), so we gotta lock in the perks, however meagre. Theatre tickets are exxy, after all, and industry-standard plus-ones plus a free bar help make the humiliation bearable. 

8.55am

Reluctantly RSVP to the 892nd entry in a never-ending, but fully flagging, superhero franchise. Maybe this one won’t be a mess of weightless CGI, mindless McGuffins and stakes so low, despite yet another Armageddon out of here plot fixed in a jiffy with a dash of Deus Ex Machina. At least Florence Pugh’s in it.

Check IMDb. Three-and-a-half-hour film. Curses. At 7.30pm, far across town on the Wednesday night before it releases. Publicist, no doubt harangued by distributor execs, wants us to share reviews by 7am the next morning. Briefly wish it were the 1950s, when we wore pork-pie hats and had to run to a wooden telephone booth in the foyer to dictate a review in black and white.

But I am 46 and 3⁄4, not 76, and have no memory of those days. I’ve virtually no memory at all these days. Although I do seem to recall my first magazine gig was in a fuggy office laden with overflowing ashtrays, misogyny and no open windows.

9am

Ignoring all emails now unless they are directly relevant to the three deadlines I am trying to meet consecutively, like I’m competing in the Iron Man competition. The triathlon, not the Marvel one.

But first, this alluring missive about frequent flyer offers is commanding my attention, and that one about exceedingly modest real estate I can’t come close to accruing a deposit for, and maybe that 5000-word New Yorker feature about post-industrial bees.

9.15am

Have forgotten what I was doing, which is a sure sign it’s time to make a cup of tea. Stare out the kitchen window at birds frolicking in the trees and the weird neighbour shouting at clouds while the kettle boils. Mindfulness is basically weaponised procrastination and necessary.

Remember to eat breakfast – a stale cookie and a slice of plastic cheese – setting a new record for fuelling the brain before it grumbles into slow death shutdown.

9.30am

Back at desk, composing an emotionally staunch response for whichever of us is struggling in the freelancer WhatsApp support group. A necessary lifeline for work-from-home connection and a timely reminder that we are all up against it. It’s not just me. Oh, wait, do I need the pep talk??

                                                                                                Image: Amanz on Unsplash

9.45am

Begin review of last night’s contemporary dance work – yes, if you want to make freelance arts writing work, you’d better be multidisciplinary. Think of it as a one-person band with half the instruments broken and/or out of tune, as the general public sneers at you while refusing to part with their hard-earned cash – including annual leave and Super, lol.

Show was staged on a sinking ship in the harbour. There might be a metaphor here if I can just locate it.

                                                                              Image: Jason Mavrommatis on Unsplash

Spend over an hour crafting the most beautifully knitted intro connecting the key themes to their cultural context via a personal insight into why this matters now. Realise I’m 500 words in and haven’t mentioned the show’s name yet. Delete beautifully crafted intro.

11am

Time for another cup of tea and a vacant stare. Is it too early for lunch??

11.15am

Restart review of last night’s contemporary dance work. Definitely getting the feeling this might be allegorical. Is that water lapping at my ankles metaphorical, or is my decaying apartment flooding again??

Spot breaking news that almost every boundary-pushing, non-mainstage creative company, forging exciting pathways for artists while delivering exhilarating work that upends the canon, has been defunded for the next four years. Business as usual. Insert appropriate meme:


12.30pm

Review now reads like it hasn’t been concocted by shrieking monkeys. Read, reread, and finesse. Ready to file. Send off to editor. Ten-minute disassociation break. Bites nails.

12.45pm

Receive a call from an old-school publicist who prefers a nice chat to emails, which is blooming lovely, but strikes me with the fear I’ll forget what we’ve agreed. Lots of gossip over the arts funding massacre, commiseration over bank accounts.

They’re offering a pretty darn ritzy international A-list celebrity interview that will set editors into a frenzy as they will get so many eyeballs on it once it’s published. OF COURSE this dream ticket is in a heinous time zone for Australia. Is the 4am wake-up call worth it? That used to come with one caveat: ‘Is it Madonna?’ But I agree.

Immediately synopsise deets and send through in a confirmation email so I know it’s real and pop straight into phone diary with reminder alerts. Have no actual memory.

1pm

Email from editor. Didn’t attach the review. Rookie (and alarmingly regular) error. Actually filed it this time. Remember to chase production pics.

1.15pm

May as well triage emails while I’m in here. OFC editors are looking for the other two features on the go. Can I smash one out before lunch, or will I faint?

1.30pm

Lunch it is. Sunday’s roast chook goes a long way. Time to not actually learn how to speak a language via dawdling on Duolingo.

2pm

Back at it, trying to translate the true meaning behind a dodgy transcription of an interview with a performance art clown who fashions balloon sculptures like it’s the Rosetta stone.

                                                                                 Image: Leonid Shaydulin on Unsplash

No matter, listening back and tweaking as needed gets me right back in the conversation, and there’s endless amusement at wonky words that always seem to lean towards inadvertent innuendo.

3.30pm

Chat’s flowing into shape on the page/Word doc, once I figured out what said clown actually said. Yes, I can corral this 10,000-word transcript into an 800-word count yarn while maintaining both of our artistic integrity.

Maybe the off-cuts will come in handy one day? When’s the anniversary of Stephen King’s It?

4.30pm

Miraculously managed to file second story for the day and even remembered to attach it this time. Fist pump. Quick check of emails. Review is already live, whoot.

Time to share that on multifarious nefarious social media platforms owned by technocrat oligarchs. Of course I should tailor the vibe to each site, but fark me, who has time?

                                                                                     Image: camilo jimenez on Unsplash

5pm

Another phone call, this time on an unrecognised number. Might be the ATO. Not answering. Quick scan for terrifying MyGov email. Escape unscathed another day. Should prob invoice for these two features while I remember.

Check bank account. Still terminal. Draft pass-mostly-aggro ‘sick of your shit’ emails. Pause. Disassociate. Redraft politely pleading ones begging for three-month-old invoices to be rushed through. My time, so very often, is not money.

5.30pm

Begin third story for the day, which should be a fun little listicle highlighting the most appealing events in an upcoming writers’ festival. Prioritising women, people of colour and queer folks, because natch. Sorry Tim Winton.

6.30pm

After deep diving through the festival’s website, I still only have a list of ten events with no accompanying text. Why, oh why do I pour so much into these things?? Oh crud, I forgot tonight’s screening of a long-lost Czech stop-animation about anthropomorphic rabbits who foment a social uprising. Who needs dinner?

7.30pm

Got to the cinema just in time to ask for the second wine pour down so as not to feel like a total lushOf course, the listicle is barely formed, ready to do it all again early tomorrow morn, but for now, socialism in surreal puppetry form.

9.15pm

Checking emails again on the tram home. Crud. Also forgot I’m on the radio tonight talking about how mushroom poisoning can offer a new perspective on arts funding.

Just need to get home first and hope the gods of internet connection will shine their favour on me while crossing to the ABC from my blackspot study.

10pm

On-air interview done. 14-hour day over. Invoiced $300 lol. Thank god I love this gig. Now, to pour a full epic wine and unwind. Maybe just one more look at those emails…

Ohhhhhhhh that celebrity chat is now TOMORROW at 4am??? Better get prepping…

If you have been affected by any of the themes in this article, please do reach out to other freelancers: it’s tough out there!

Review: The Benson Diary - musings of an Edwardian elitist

From theguardian.com/books

By Vernon Bogdanor

At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy milieu 

A C Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.

                                                                         Arthur Christopher Benson. Photograph: Alamy

Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.

But though he met plenty of writers and other figures of note, he has little of value to say about them. Indeed his literary judgments are crass when not philistine: Henry James’s “idea of art was to tell a tale that few could understand or to present figures so faint & vague as seldom to be more than hypothetical”; Arnold Bennett was “a cad”; of Housman: “I don’t think he is quite a gentleman”.

His musical opinions were even worse. In a concert that included works by Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, he declared the best work to be one by Waldemar Bargiel, a composer otherwise unknown to history; while, “fifty years hence people will probably talk of Wagner as claptrap and wonder how anyone could admire”.

Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys

His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?

Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam are, unlike Benson, distinguished academics. They have bestowed on these diaries all the apparatus of contemporary research, treating the commonplace utterances of obscure dons as if they came from great statesmen – but to what end? Anyone with misplaced nostalgia for a supposedly golden age of civilised living – an age that fortunately is long gone and which no one of sense would wish to see resurrected – may enjoy immersing themselves in Benson’s observations. But they would have to be almost as steeped in a certain crusted-over establishment atmosphere as he was. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys.

In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship. No doubt the question of whether the master’s children should be allowed to use the Fellows’ Garden was a matter of great moment to the dons in May 1914 but its historical import is unclear. The account of college squabbles lacks even the waspishness that we find, for example, in the letters of AJP Taylor or Hugh Trevor-Roper. They at least serve to confirm Henry Kissinger’s dictum that academic disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. What the diaries offer, as was once said – perhaps unfairly – of Trollope, is the sedative of gossip. They provide the illusion that one is in communion with great writers and powerful people, but it’s one we shouldn’t fall for.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/12/the-benson-diary-by-ac-benson-review-musings-of-an-edwardian-elitist

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

War diaries: Prison letters paint picture of resistance fighter’s final days

From vrt.be

VRT NWS journalist Tim Pauwels lives in the former home of Frans Verbelen, one of the 15,000 Belgian resistance fighters executed for their acts. He recently came into possession of the man’s letters from prison. Extracts are published here. 

There were 150,000 Belgian resistance fighters during the Second World War. 15,000 of them paid with their lives. One, Frans Verbelen, wrote about his experiences from the prison in Sint-Gillis, Brussels, as he awaited his death sentence.

Verbelen had just arrived at work when he was arrested by the Germans. It was 3 April 1941. The charge: espionage. 

As head guard at the Schaarbeek goods station, Verbelen kept lists of trains carrying military equipment. He thought the information could be important to the Allies. He passed the lists on to other members of the resistance, but one of his packages was intercepted.

Verbelen was jailed in the prison of Sint-Gillis. From his cell, 359, a room measuring 3m x 4.5m, he wrote to his wife and three children in Evere. It wasn’t just any letter. It resembled an essay, addressed to no one in particular, 21 pages long and called “In three days around my cell”.

In it, Verbelen takes the reader into his experiences as a prisoner. He writes about his situation with a thick layer of irony: “A prison cell, full of compassion, kindness and completely unselfish, has taken me in,” even though “I lacked any particular aptitude for the vocation of prisoner. Nevertheless, as such, I have been accorded this honour.”

He does not know how long he will remain imprisoned here. His “suite”, as he calls his cell, is bare and austere: a bed, a chair, a wall cabinet, a tap with a washbasin, white walls (though no longer so white due to “stains from dead flies or crushed ants”).

Millions of bricks were needed to build this prison. He comments: “Now you can imagine the happiness of the quarry managers who landed such an order.” And then, with that same irony: “One man’s death is another man’s bread.”

Even though his movements have been reduced to this tiny cell, “the mind knows no walls”. In his mind, he is not a prisoner awaiting his death sentence but a guest in a hotel. “Accommodated, fed and served at the expense of the state – you don’t even have to tip – isn’t that wonderful!”

In these times of war and deprivation, he writes that he is better off than the people outside the prison walls, because he is “free from all worries about high prices and rationing; shelter, heating, clothing and food are guaranteed”.

Only the food leaves something to be desired. “My third evening meal here is being served. No potatoes with rutabaga this time (hurray!), now it’s rutabaga with potatoes.”

He comments on the food served to him, like a critic reviewing a restaurant. “It will probably be unnecessary to wait for the next courses, to point out to the maître d’hôtel a fly floating around my soup or to draw his attention to the scarcity of meat.”

There is also room for improvement in terms of hygiene: “By the way, you can see everything on those walls! There’s even a spider web. When the valet comes to make my bed, I’ll point it out to him. They should know that I like cleanliness here!”

Foto

When evening falls, his thoughts turn to his home, wife and children. “It’s not pleasant to think about what a shock it must have been for my family to learn that I have been taken out of circulation for the time being.”

He is particularly concerned about his children: “They haven’t outgrown their childhood, it was ripped from their feet.” He writes home: an activity that gives him strength, but which he finds difficult.

“It always weighs heavily on my heart, but it is also really pleasant. I feel united with my loved ones; no distance or obstacle separates us. I cheer them on and they encourage me; we leave sad thoughts behind and make plans for the future.”

He describes loneliness as the hardest part of his imprisonment. That loneliness is accompanied by boredom. He sits alone in his cell for hours, watching the sun slowly move across the wall. After just three days, it feels like he has been there forever.

Nevertheless, his letter ends on a hopeful note: “I will let my mind wander, ‘chewing over’ all the pleasant things from the past and savouring what the future promises.” 

This letter came to our newsroom via the Kortenberg Heritage Centre. The editors tried to trace Frans Verbelen’s descendants without success. If they wish, relatives can contact us at nieuws@vrt.be.

'I am not afraid of death'

On 28 June 1942, Frans Verbelen was executed by firing squad. He was shot in Tegel, a district of Berlin. He is said to have gone to his death calmly. Half an hour before his death, he picked up his pen one last time.

He said goodbye to his children and asked his wife for forgiveness. By refusing to reveal the name of the person for whom his information was intended, he denied himself the chance of a lighter sentence.

“Dear wife, you are the victim of my attitude,” he wrote. “Forgive me, my beloved, for all I have done to you and caused you to suffer. Be brave, my dearest treasure. Show that you can forget your suffering, so that you may think of the children.”

Frans Verbelen was cremated. His ashes were scattered in Döberitz, not far from Berlin. 

Archive network Archiefpunt is collecting diaries and other personal writings from the Second World War for digitisation and publication. Anyone can submit diaries, scrapbooks, poetry albums or letters from the period 1939-1949 for digitisation and publication via the Archiefpunt website

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2025/08/11/war-diaries-prison-letters-paint-picture-of-resistance-fighter/