[jeremy dean ballenger]

Fri 3 Oct 2008

Call for case studies / interview subjects

Posted by Jeremy under Medicine
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Aside from the work mentioned in the previous post I have another project I’m getting underway.

Several years ago I suffered some reasonably serious injuries in a workplace accident. My account of this particular time was published in the UK magazine Safety and Health Practitioner, something for which I am both grateful and surprised. The Editor of SHP, Tina Weadick, went out on a limb to publish the piece in full. This was first article of its type in the magazine and surprising given the graphic nature of some of the supplied photographs and the material itself. You can read a copy of the article here.

Despite a ruling by a legislated body here in Australia that I was 35% whole-of-person impaired as a result of my injuries I refuse to consider myself disabled. The “35%” was quite a number, and based on this assessment alone I was now less than two-thirds an able bodied person. The work will try to explore, among other things, what this number and situation means, if anything, to the people with whom the injured parties work, relate and socialize. What does it mean to them? Do they get to parking closer to the supermarket entrance? Can they tick the “Do you have a disability?” box on job applications, giving them immediate membership to a minority benefiting from positive discrimination? Or will employers now avoid them because they may cost more down the track? Personally it has meant no change aside from some minor physical adjustments, but that’s just my situation.

Why did it work out for me? Not driven by ‘survivor’s guilt,’ I nonetheless wonder why I refuse to consider my injuries an ongoing disability. Others, I am quite sure, are much less fortunate. From memory I received no specific counseling in hospital, and from the moment recovery began, even before the completion of surgical work, I was in no doubt my life would continue to be very similar to what it had always been.

Next to me on the ward, and please forgive any minor discrepancies in my memory, a young man had his dominant hand reattached after it had been liberated by samurai sword in a gang-related scuffle. Looking across he seemed defeated; he appeared to have already succumbed to depression and a difficult future dealing with disability. I remember quizzing my consultant quietly about my neighbour’s prognosis, and his response was in line with my quick observations. He would likely need assistance for the remainder of his life. Compared to my crushed appendage, the probability of a better outcome for my neighbour was higher – I’m told clean cuts make for better nerve and other connections during healing than crushed meat. Yet it would never happen for him unless he chose that path and wanted such an outcome. He had been advised of this, of course, but at that early stage it appeared beyond him.

Why? Is it simply a positive frame of mind? Are we predisposed one way or another? These are some of the questions I am trying to answer with this book. The work will explore the psychological concept of resilience, but in lay terms, and it will not be an academic piece.

If you know of anyone who may be interested in contributing please get in touch with me through this site. Names can be changed and the strictest confidentiality is assured due to the inherently personal nature of the subject matter.

Despite vigorous preventative campaigns industrial injuries continue to kill and maim many in the workforce. My own experience leads me to believe that telling the stories of others – what happened and how they struggle(d) to overcome it – will help some come to better terms with both their injuries and attempts to return to a normal life (whatever ‘normal’ is). It should also lead others to greater awareness and effort in preventing workplace accidents.

I hope some of you can help.

Thu 14 Aug 2008

Literary comeuppance

Posted by Jeremy under Miscellaneous
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As a confident, scholarship-winning teenager I found my English literature class reasonably easy going. The first three years of high school English were not difficult, and from memory even vaguely enjoyable as it appeared I could effectively do no wrong by my teacher, Morris Hood.

In my penultimate high school year I changed class, to be taught by an Englishman named Jack Roe. A County cricketer in his youth, Mr. Roe was every bit the dour, taciturn, even surly school master. The first work under review was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and turning in the first paper on the book I felt confident in maintaining my ‘A’ average.

Stunned is the best way to describe how I felt when my paper was returned with a ‘C’ on it. I took issue with Mr. Roe, suggesting with colourful turn of phrase that some error had been made and the mark was incorrect.

It still stings to remember his response. “Master Ballenger, in my class you need to pay attention. Look to the detail in the work, as there is more there than you can ever imagine. The superficial tripe you have become accustomed to turning in under Mr. Hood will not serve you well here.”

It took all year, but that December I left Mr. Roe’s tutelage with an A-, and an even greater understanding and humility. On returning to Mr. Hood’s class the next February, he positively gushed at how far my work had come, overtly proud of the groundwork he had supposedly laid several years prior.

There is a reason for this little story. For the last six months I have been working on a book. Having been published in a few forums and receiving good reviews my confidence levels were fairly high. Pages were written, chapters formed and the narrative was coming together nicely.

Reading the London Review of Books I happened across a review (or possibly and advertisement – I can’t remember) for How Fiction Works by James Wood and promptly ordered a copy. I had never heard of Mr. Wood - staff writer at the New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard - but the dust jacket reviews of his work certainly promised a great deal.

Within an hour of commencing to read his 123 paragraphs I found myself back in Year 11 standing in front of Mr. Roe. The prose is delicately forceful, with Wood’s opinions on literature and other critics elegantly precise. Wood begins with narration:

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these are rare indeed. And that is it.

Moving through detail, character, ‘thisness,’ and other critical topics, Wood gave me pause to reflect on everything I had written to date.

And he made me want to throw it all out, which I did without hesitation.

So I have begun again, with what lies ahead now appearing infinitely more difficult as I attempt to hold my own work to a much higher standard. The subject matter is difficult in and of itself, being an antipodean father, and with my new perspective I fear it will take me much longer to finish. But it will be better for the journey, and hopefully my progression will again be from a gentleman’s C to Mr. Roe’s A minus or better.

Tue 10 Jun 2008

Quote of the day

Posted by Jeremy under Miscellaneous
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From Mark Tredinnick:

I want to succeed like a mountain, like a day, like a river, like a phrase of music one can never forget and never wants to. I want to succeed like a child’s face, like love, like language itself.

That’s all.

Fri 6 Jun 2008

Reality check

Posted by Jeremy under Miscellaneous
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The ‘About’ page has just been updated following some reflection and a healthy dose of reality.

Nothing specific has driven the change, although continual comments like ‘Dad, you’re OLD’ from a ten year-old daughter eventually give you pause for reflection.

Mon 2 Jun 2008

Online Opinion

Posted by Jeremy under Politics, Behaviour, Economics
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Time for a little blatant self-promotion. My latest essay, ‘The trouble with diversity,’ is up at Online Opinion.

See here.

Tue 27 May 2008

Bookshelf

Posted by Jeremy under Miscellaneous
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As the library at home continues to grow, so does the virtual bookshelf on this site (when I get a chance to update it).

There’s a few new additions - check them out here. The page loads a random list from the bookshelf database table so if you would like to peruse more than what you first see, just refresh the page.

Tue 27 May 2008

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Posted by Jeremy under Politics, International, Behaviour, Conflict
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It’s Memorial Day in the United States, and the 5th since Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld foisted their country on Iraq in the name of freedom. In honour of this, the Reveres over at Effect Measure have just posted a moving tribute.

Listen carefully to the words. The pictures speak for themselves.

Mon 26 May 2008

Unsubscribe - waterboarding

Posted by Jeremy under Politics, Media, International, Behaviour, Conflict
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Amnesty International in the UK recently released the second of their short films on the subject of human rights abuse in the ‘war on terror.’

Like the last film, this is NOT for children.

What are they trying to achieve with this campaign?

… with your help, we can encourage others to take immediate action and invite their friends too. We say no to acts of terror and no to human rights abuses in the ‘war on terror’.

Thu 8 May 2008

Hacked…

Posted by Jeremy under Miscellaneous, International, Behaviour
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Binned by Google for violation of guidelines, I have just finished investigating some of the links they said came from my site and were a little dodgy.

Sure enough some bonehead had exploited a little php on my server and uploaded a cute little script or two that generated an enormous number of links to all manner of Canadian Pharmacy sites for online meds. Last thing I want to do is shill, even unwittingly, for that kind of crowd. So I deleted it all.

In doing so I came across a whole bunch of other stuff, part of a mirror set up to skim personal banking details from clients of NatWest and Lloyds TSB in the UK. Nasty, and what’s worse it was on my server. Not a good look.

What did I do to deserve this? No idea. Sure, I might have upset some Lithuanian mob types a couple of years back by outing their phishing scam, but I’ve kept to myself since then. Honestly. The DDOS attack they launched at the time was enough to get me to mind my own business.

The moral of this story - if you aren’t hosted by someone as big and bad as Google, check your server logs regularly. And have a decent look.

There are some clever (yes, you, Mr/Ms ‘Gadaffi On The STreeT‘) and possibly nasty people up to no good out there.

Oh, and if you came here looking for cheap xanax, viagra, lidocaine or other such pharmaceuticals - sorry - but you’ve been punk’d, and not by me either in case you are feeling grumpy about it.

Tue 11 Dec 2007

Deer Hunting with Jesus

Posted by Jeremy under Miscellaneous, Politics, International, Behaviour, Economics
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This book is in turns hilarious, disturbing, deeply concerning and insightful. Returning to his home town of Winchester, Virginia after a thirty year break Joe Bageant documents the human condition in America’s heartland, with a cry to his fellow liberals to pay attention.

With that in mind, I would like to take the reader someplace closer to the lives of America’s homegrown working folks than our media ventures, closer to those kids’ high school trip is to Iraq, who are two pay days away from homelessness yet in their pride cling to the notion that they are middle-class Americans.

[…]

This book is written from a changing town in Virginia, but this class of mine, these people - the ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting, and praise Jesus for a truck with no spare tire - exist in every state in our nation. Maybe next time we on the left encounter such seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God-obsessed folks, we can be open to their trials, even have enough solidarity to pop for a cheap retread tire out of our own pockets, simply because that would be a kind thing to do and surely would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mohandas Ghandi smile.

Deer Hunting with Jesus visits many topics oft-ignored, and some all too familiar:

What globalisation means when the only job your non-existent education can get you is working for a global giant without a living wage;
Buying a trailer that costs $79,000 under mortgage and other arrangements that actually make it cost $130,000 before interest;
Gun control and how misguided some of the media hype actually is when compared to the situation on the ground;
The rise and rise of fundamentalist Christianity as a political force, where the church is described by some as the last functioning institution in America;
The disproportionate representation of *heartland folks* in war casualty statistics (areas like Winchester,VA provide 20% of the troops and suffer 50% of the casualties); and
Healthcare - “when our sprawling medical system sees its purpose as seizing market share instead of curing people.”

In many ways Bageant has provided a voice for some of the people Walter Benn Michaels speaks of in The Trouble with Diversity - America’s working poor. Michaels casts a wider net in his work by including all races, thereby making it is easier to focus on ethnic minorities, while Bageant keeps his focus:

The hairy fundamentalist Christian hoardes, the redneck blue-collar legions … (where) You can make lightbulbs at the GE plant, you can make styrene mop buckets at Rubbermaid, or you can “bust cartons, ” “stack product,” and cashier at Wal-Mart and Home Depot. But whatever you do, you’re likely to do it as a “team assembler” at a plant or as a cashier standing on a rubber mat with a scanner in your paw. And you’re gonna do it for a working-man’s wage…

Ethnic minority or white-trash, groups discussed in both of these books are undeniably economically challenged. This is about class, pure and simple, and although Michaels’ focus is different, the undercurrent is strikingly similar. From The Trouble with Diversity:

The argument, in its simplest form, will be that we love race - we love identity - because we don’t love class … survey after survey has shown, Americans are very reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to the lower class and even more reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to the upper class. The class we like is the middle class.

Bageant devotes some time to this illusion, describing it as one of the factors in his “American hologram” driving the down-trodden working poor to keep voting conservative.

And Bageant’s pedigree for writing about this life? Simple…

I grew up here, my dad worked at a gas station here, and my mom worked at a since demolished textile mill whose rattling looms were the round-the-clock backdrop of our lives.

[ … ]

I know everyone’s last name, whose daddy was who, and who boinked whom when we were in high school. So when I moved back after thirty years out West, it was as if my heart was back where it belonged. Which lasted about three months.

A great book, with a message we should not ignore, even here in oh-so-comfortable, resource-booming Australia.

Why? When questioned during a TV interview here in Australia (link - great interview with intelligent questions) as to whether he thought Australia was headed down a similar path as the US, the refreshingly modest and quietly spoken Joe offered this:

I didn’t want to make judgments because I know culture is deep and politics deeper so I don’t imagine I know what’s going on … but I look around and I see that you are either at the beginning or a boom or in the middle of a boom and this is exactly the way it felt before everything went to Hell there (in the US). People were happy AND they were talking about protecting their prosperity.

I see a decline in interest in unions, I see the average guy being affected by media and so on …

I think all Western, developed countries are headed there if for no other reason resource depletion, global warming, ecocide … It’s kind of like you guys are on the back of the bus and we can see the wreck coming from the front.