Nathan Hobby’s blog

At the library where I work, I’ve been following up on requests for information placed in newspapers by amateur historians writing local or family histories. I’m constantly irritated by the way the notice will say ‘a history is being compiled on the area/family’. The passive construction is bad enough, but what’s worse is this idea that history is merely ‘compiled’.

I think in the popular mind histories are simply a collection of known facts. If you put together all the known facts about a subject, you have a ‘history’. According to this concept, there is no interpretation involved, no construction of narrative, no presence of the historian.

It reminds me of something similar. The library collects every single book published in our state. The biggest self published book I have ever seen is a massive two thousand A4 page volume chronicling some twenty years in the life of a local resident. Two thousand pages! Not even Gandhi or Churchill deserve that much attention! At least not for twenty years. (What’s more, it has this horrible cursive font running down the spine. I’m tempted to tell you the title so you will come and see for yourself, but then he might google me and I’ll get in trouble. Breaking the mask of objective librarianship and all.) He probably thought the best way to write an autobiography was to write every single thing he could remember.

Which makes me think of the idea of the library as a collection of every single thing ever written, a mass of undifferentiated, unsorted data. Which would make it like the Library of Babel in Borges’ story, where every single possible book has been written, so the truth is buried by endless contradictions and variations of it.

Selection and deselection is everything.

Rising cost of living hits low paid - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

In WA, average wages have gone up 5%; rental by 17% and food by 11%. This is why the mining boom is bad! It’s created two classes of people in Western Australia - those that win and those that lose. I hope all the minerals run out soon.

(Yes, I realise that would be disastrous for the economy.)

It’s been a bad day so far because:

1. When I went to get the bus I got stranded on the traffic island on Stirling Highway while a million cars, including my bus went past. I hate heavy traffic.
2. When I got to work, I started in a new section where I don’t have a desk. (Or a locker for the moment. Let alone a computer and a phone.)
3. Somehow my bag got wet, and my precious Yoder book which cost a fortune, The Jewish-Christian Schism got wet. I wanted to cry when this happened. I couldn’t bear to read it with its damp pages. 
4. In my new job distributing materials through the library, a woman I’ve never seen before in a back section of the library I’ve never been before called after me to stop and show her my badge. I felt humilated. ‘I am a librarian,’ I wanted to yell at her in a snooty voice. (Comebacks came to me about ten minutes later.) ‘You have to show it in a more prominent place!’ she said. I’ve been working here eight months, if you don’t recognise me that’s your fault, I thought.

There’s some of the reasons I’m having a bad day today.

It seems every time I turn on my favourite radio station - Radio National - I hear Phillip Adams’ patronising voice. I must get home at the wrong time, cook dinner at the wrong time.  

For the last seven years, I’ve tried hard to like him. I like some of his politics. I like some of his guests. But he sounds patronising and egotistical to me. It’s something about his voice. It’s like he’s always having an in-joke about himself. And as much as he’s meant to be this spokesman of the left, he doesn’t seem to have much to say.

And for some reason so much of his show is boring. It puts me off international affairs, really. I don’t know why.

And the weird thing is, despite being left-leaning, I usually enjoy the right-leaning Counterpoint. It’s unpredictable, it has a broader range of topics, and I feel like Michael Duffy has opinions in a way that isn’t full of himself. (I’ve barely heard the show for the last year, though, and I think it’s got a new co-presenter.)

My favourite band, the Cure, are coming to Perth. But one day after the tickets went on sale, the only place to buy tickets was on e-bay. Sellers in Melbourne were advertising twenty tickets for sale at $159. (The original price - $119 - already seemed excessive.)

I can’t believe how unethical I’ve become, because I even contemplated buying a ticket from one of these scum. But then I realised that I was perpetuating an injustice. As soon as everyone refuses to buy tickets from scalpers, they’ll stop doing it.

 So I reconciled myself to not seeing the Cure. I decided to stop listening to them, because it was a painful reminder.

But then yesterday at lunch time I decided to go to the Ticketmaster outlet in the city. I don’t know how these things work, and neither did the girl at the counter, but she had restricted viewing tickets. So for $238 me and Nicole will be seeing the back of Robert Smith’s head - but at least the scalpers aren’t getting any money off us.

I hate the mining boom in Western Australia.  

It’s made life much worse for me and my wife. So many mining workers flooding in from the east, driving up house prices and cost of living, while public servants like me haven’t got anything extra. (The government hasn’t even spent money on the public service in this time of prosperity!)

I can’t wait for the mining boom to end. Then maybe rent and house prices in Perth might be affordable again.

It’s union boss Joe Mcdonald that’s getting kicked out of the ALP, not Kevin Mcdonald. But both of them sum up what’s wrong with the union movement. I read an article in the Sunday Times magazine a few weeks ago photographing Reynolds at his multi-million dollar apartment. I can’t stand such hypocrisy. He adopts the language and look of the working class, and yet his life has no affinity with them. They aren’t concerned with social justice; they’re concerned with furthering their own wealth no matter if it creates injustice on the way.