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Text of the page (random words):
propos of which i decided early on that since this magical resource had been provided to me then the very least i could do was take an active part in the way it works crowdsourcing to correct the scanned text since obviously the resources don t exist for it to be done professionally i decided that i would correct every article i used there s no measuring this but my guess is that as with wikipedia the longer it goes on the more accurate it will be as more and more people use it and contribute anyway vaudeville oh yes indeed there s a thesis in this topic alone racism in the content and language of journalistic reportage of vaudeville in adelaide 1920 1940 here for example is a paragraph from the advertiser of september 30 1926 celebrity vaudeville special interest is attached to the southern revue company which will be appearing for the first time in adelaide at the theatre royal next saturday under the j c williamson management many of the members of joe sheftell s revue are even blacker than negroes are usually painted but this is not true about the chorus girls who are much fairer than their men folk one of the members of the company remarked while in sydney how mighty good every one has been to us this is the first impression gained of australia by one of the darkest of the members he also explained that in the land of liberty culled folk have to travel in their own special jim crow railway carriages and are segregated in special hotels and restaurants this company includes many talented performers who have been a great success in both melbourne and sydney minta cato the colored soprano joe sheftell the producer bob williams the comedian mcconn saunders and williams the nifty steppers and the chorus girls did you blanch over that word culled language is a wonderful thing when it come to the return of the repressed it took me a few seconds to work out that it was merely an attempt at phonetic approximation of the accent of the unnamed dark member oh dear it just gets worse and worse and his pronunciation of the word colored interesting that the advertiser was using american spelling in 1926 i also enjoyed the snide reference to the land of liberty implying that we in australia have no such unenlightened attitudes oh my wordy lordy no and as for the forces of history i couldn t help noticing the tour dates on this one from the advertiser of september 21 1929 vaudeville performance trixie wilson the well known ballet teacher announces that the annual concert to be given by her students will be held in the thebarton town hall on october 22 the programme will contain several spectacular ballets solo dances and vaudeville acts and for anyone looking for ideas for fiction there s a whole novel for you right there in the phrase trixie wilson the well known ballet teacher unbeknownst to either the journalist or miss trixie the 1929 wall street crash was imminent black thursday was october 24th two days after the concert vaudeville was a notoriously unstable and insecure profession even at the best of times as endicott s book makes clear with acts being sacked and theatres closing down and impresarios going broke left and right i wonder what happened to everyone in the wake of black thursday to miss trixie whose pupils parents must have hurriedly reassessed whether the budget could stand ballet lessons to those culled troupers from three years before to all vaudeville everywhere the performers the backers the managers the theatre owners and the audiences many of whom may have abruptly decided that going to the vaudeville was a luxury they could definitely do without what happened to the nifty steppers the men of mirth the chorus girls the acrobatic violinists and the gypsy dancers in the wake of october 24th 1929 whatever did they do wherever did they go posted by kerryn goldsworthy at 8 13 am 21 comments labels adelaide danger history journalism language learning something new every day life money newspapers pain performance racism research spectacle worrying wednesday january 4 2012 the everlasting strangeness of others overheard today in the shopping centre carpark a fragment of an exchange between the youngish parents of two little girls him but why do you have to bring everybody else down with you her why not if i m down why shouldn t everybody else be down too he had no answer to this he merely looked hang dog and got on with wheeling the trolley the power she had over him was not pretty girl power for she was not a pretty girl but you could see it was one of those relationships in which for some mad reason the bloke somehow courts and welcomes being emotionally controlled by some soi disant princess and her bitch from hell ways think brett in kath and kim there s a profound psychological truth to that marriage in the supermarket on a whim i had bought some trash mags entertained as i perennially am by the letters to psychics my mother died in 1976 is she all right one of this week s letters begins like this my eldest daughter is driving me crazy she will be 18 soon and we fight all the time about her career choice you do say what just exactly who is driving whom crazy in this scenario back off mama back off and mind your beeswax posted by kerryn goldsworthy at 9 13 pm 13 comments labels weirdness thursday december 29 2011 something you might not know about john clarke i was lucky enough to meet john clarke once maybe fifteen years ago clive james was launching a big poetry anthology at the melbourne writers festival clarke was at the launch and by sheer good luck i was talking after the speech not during it one of my resolutions for 2012 is to go up to anyone who s talking during a speech concert movie or any other public performance and give them a good hard smack upside the head no jury would ever convict me to a dude who knew a dude who knew him and finished up talking to him myself he is a lovely lovely man and he loves poetry and is extremely knowledgeable about it he s just posted a link on twitter to an appreciation of auden that he wrote in 2007 to mark the centenary of that great poet s birth the poem with which he finishes this post is one of the few poems i know by heart it s here photo from the abc tv blog posted by kerryn goldsworthy at 1 57 pm 11 comments labels legends poetry anxieties we has them what shall i worry about today there are a number of choices nb the state of the world is an ongoing given no surprises there will the new year s eve dessert cherry and roasted almond ice cream for 17 get safely shopped for made frozen transported and served intact in the 37 degrees being forecast for saturday will i get my column done this morning in time to get to the market before all the cherries are gone not if you sit here writing blog posts about fretting about it ed will my pathological untidiness and i get the house cleaned up by sunday when a dear friend is coming to lunch she has a get out clause about staying home in the cool as sunday will be even hotter than saturday if the definition of a heatwave is five consecutive days over 35 degrees as i believe it is then adelaide is cruising into one as we speak according to the bom so this one is flexible but i must clean up anyway as a new year thing just woke up out of a horrid dream about past crimes against tidiness i see domestic detritus in my case 95 paper products as a sort of rabid feral malignant hyperactive octopus that lives in the house and hates me will i get next week s column done on time will my father s 85th birthday be an easy happy day and what of my sister s hand surgery two days later will the full afternoon of running writing and editing workshops for cluey postgrads be a success or have i forgotten how to teach will i be able to get access to everything i want at the library to write my conference paper never gave a keynote speech before anxiety coming in waves is this a good argument do i have enough examples and are they interesting enough do i even have an argument and if so what is it all hons and postgrad students to whom i have ever sternly said but what is your actual thesis have my permission to snicker at this point will i be able to find my way to the aldinga library to give a talk about the adelaide book will i melt on the way if it s filthy hot and if it s filthy hot will anybody turn up and will i then be able to find my way home in the dark nb not worried about talk qua talk but give me time have i got time to read all the books i haven t read yet by all the people whose sessions i m chairing at adelaide writers week and will those sessions all work out well will i get my column done promptly every week in between all this stuff will the ice cream go well will the lunch go well will the birthday go well will the surgery go well will the teaching go well will the conference paper go well will the aldinga excursion go well will writers week go well look at that fretting fully booked till well into march posted by kerryn goldsworthy at 7 40 am 7 comments labels worrying saturday december 24 2011 carols by candlelight adelaide christmas eve 1944 67 years ago tonight thanks to persiflage for the correction to my always shocking arithmetic at adelaide s first ever carols by candlelight a population depleted and exhausted by the war and its effects went streaming down to the most beautiful place in the city which apparently the current government is about to wreck to spend the evening by the river and sing some carols not tacky christmas songs just proper traditional carols fifty thousand that s one twelfth of the 1941 population figure for the entire state from the adelaide advertiser december 26th 1944 fifty thousand at carol festival amazing christmas eve scene in elder park fifty thousand people celebreated christmas eve in adelaide by attending the carol festival held in elder park in aid of the adelaide children s hospital and the somerton sick and crippled children s home adelaide has never before see such a great gathering at night although it was to see a bigger one less than a year later when the war ended ed fifty thousand is the police estimate but the number may have been even larger long before the festival began all the 30 000 admission programmes 1 500 had been sold and thousands of people unable to obtain one gave a donation at the gates and sang carols from memory carols by candlelight was arranged by the commercial travellers association and radio station 5ad it gave the city a christmas scene of unique size and setting elder park on the banks of the torrens was solidly packed with people sitting from the city baths almost down to the water s edge and from king william road more than halfway to morphett street bridge the footpaths in king william road were dense with latecomers unable to find room on the lawns while down the road cars were parked in places two deep in unbroken lines stretching beyond st peter s cathedral in one direction and filling memorial and victoria drives and most of the adjoining streets at one time the cars were three deep opposite the rotunda until the police compelled the line to move on although the festival did not begin until 8 p m the crowd began to gather in the late afternoon many people brought tea ie dinner doesn t that take you back ed and picnicked on the lawns by 6 o clock they were beginning to arrive in thousands by nightfall the lawns had become black with people dotted red with the glowing ends of thousands of cigarettes they sat outside the light cast by the band rotunda and a platform that had been built in front of it for the orchestra and 100 voice choir the platform was lines with 7 ft candles and floodlit from below the orderliness of the crowd was remarkable there was no jostling or scrambling despite the great numbers a single rope barrier round the platform was so respected that the police did not once find it necessary to patrol it everyone on finding a place sat down and remained seated till the end st john ambulance officers had not a single case to attend to all night posted by kerryn goldsworthy at 8 52 pm 4 comments labels adelaide christmas history music friday december 16 2011 christopher hitchens 1949 2011 if one takes the normal american ambition to be the pursuit of happiness and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly thwarted sooner or later one strikes across the wound profiles of dallas texas on 22 november 1963 in those six point nine seconds of heat and light or those seven seconds that broke the back of the american century some little hinge gave way in the national psyche the post kennedy period is often written up as a loss of innocence a judgement which admittedly depends for its effect on how innocent you thought america had been until a quarter of a century ago but while presidents had been slain before they had generally been shot by political opponents of an indefinable if extreme sort like lincoln s resentful confederate or mckinley s inarticulate anarchist moreover the culprits were known apprehended and questioned with kennedy s murder the republic doomed itself to the repetitive contemplation of a tormenting mystery here is a country where informative technology operates at a historically unsurpassed level where anything knowable can in principle be known and publicized where the bias is always in favour of disclosure rather than concealment where the measure of attainment even in small change discourse is the moon shot and nobody is satisfied that they know for certain what happened in the banal streets of dealey plaza christopher hitchens where were you standing tls november 1988 i remember exactly where i was standing in the living room on the farm where i grew up the news had just come up on the teeve as a news flash remember them i was ten i also remember exactly where i was when i read this paragraph it was the winter of 1992 and i was sitting in the living room of my friend r s flat in balmain overlooking sydney harbour with the sun coming in through the window r was in the kitchen making coffee and i had idly picked up the copy of hitchens for the sake of argument that was lying on the table and opened it on the page where this paragraph appears i thought i had been struck by lightning i really did this it seemed was what writing could do if it tried posted by kerryn goldsworthy at 9 38 pm 15 comments labels genius goodbye writing saturday december 3 2011 conscience vote to use what might be considered an unfortunate expression i have no dog in this fight i m a straight woman in her late 50s with no interest in marriage been there done that threw up on the t shirt however i think the people who say the alp s national conference is being hijacked by the unimportant issue of gay marriage aren t thinking hard enough about what importance is or indeed about what politics is to my mind this goes to two absolutely fundamental issues in politics the quality of ordinary people s daily lives and the question...