Don't all ring at once

Today, the five people I needed to hear from all contacted me - when I was at a meeting. Typical. But it's all sorted now. Feel much better about the world. Competent even.

This morning I finished a really charming book called The Thief Taker by Janet Gleeson. It's set in London in 1750. The central character is a cook in a household of wealthy tradesmen. It's a nicely plotted detective story with lots of period detail and well written enough to make it impossible to put down last night. And I see she's written two other books. Hurrah!! I must go and look for them.

The Wait Goes On

Day 2 of the great wait. I am now convinced that my calls to a certain person who's meant to tell me what to do are being avoided. I've tidied my desk, cleaned out my email and filed for the first time in a year. Maybe I should just go home.

I did read another Barry Maitland book on the week-end. It was called "No Trace" and was about the abduction of the small daughter of a conceptual artist who immediately exploits her absence in his work. There's a lot about art in it and a lot of beautfully observed humour about the 'Art World' of Turner Prizes and Tate Moderns.

These books alwys have an amazingly convincing sense of place. Maitland includes a map of the location in the front of this this one. I'm not sure if he's done that with the others but usually I tend to skim over spatial details in novels and he doesn't let you get away with that. You know exactly where each scene is set and if you're on the 10th floor you know what you can see through the window.

His main characters, Detectives Brock and Kolla, are more or less married to their jobs which as a potential victim of crime I find extremely reassuring in crime fighters. That is probably the point. If crime fiction is to make us feel safe by describing and then defusing our nightmares, then we want our police heroes not to be distracted by private lives.

Waiting

I'm having one of those lulls where I can't really do much until others respond to lumps of work and important issues I've left with them to resolve. True to form, rather than using this time constructively, I'm wasting it worrying about world events I can't alter (East Timor, Iran, Indonesia, Wadeye).

Something a bit closer to home that's bothering me is a bill the New South Wales government introduced last week to prevent prisoners imprisoned on serious charges storing their 'genetic material'. This came about because the media realised some time ago that a 'bad man' who was in prison had stored sperm while undergoing cancer treatment and the government was paying for it. Instead of responding by simply refusing to pay for these services in future, the government chose to ban the collection of genetic material at all. The Opposition supports the bill.

So, unless the bill doesn't pass the upper house next week, my advice to you, if you live in New South Wales, is to make sure you've had all the kids you want before ending up with a cancer diagnosis in prison because anyone helping you store your genetic material while you're having radiation treatment coud go to prison for six months.

I don't know much about human rights, but I'm pretty sure a sentence of medically caused sterility is probably cruel and unusual punishment. There may be some sort of um treaties about it. It sounds like prisoners could be denied normal medical services for punitive reasons without any reference to a judge. I don't like it but I don't know what to do about it.

Women's Weekly

I bought a copy of the latest Women's Weekly today.

This is the first time I've ever paid money for this magazine. My grandma used to subscribe to it in my childhood and I've always associated it with recipes for avocado dip and directions for ugly macreame projects. Not that I'm a magazine snob: I read Who magazine for about a decade but this just never seemed like the magazine for me.

I succumbed to buying in I was sucked in by the fllowing teaser:

'PATTI'S AMNESIA SHOCK 'I didn't recognise Bert!'"

To which I can only say: Well Patti, after his recent facelift, we don't really recognise him either!

But seriously, she had something called Transient Global Amnesia where she just lost her memory one night and acted vague and wasn't herself. It looked like a stroke except a CAT scan ruled this out and in a few days she was heaps better. This happened to my Mum three years ago. She just had a funny turn at the swimming pool and swam twice as far as she ever had. When she got out, she didn't recognise her best friend and then was uncharactistically rude to strangers. Luckily her friend took her to hospital. It was hugely distressing at the time - especially for my Dad. No-one could explain why it had happened. But the good news was that it hardly every recurs. And she's fine.

Unfortunately, now I have a 266 page magazine full of beauty tips I won't follow and articles illustrated with models who'll make me feel inadequate. One thing about the mag hasn't changed though: this month you have the opportunity to KNIT HARRY KEWELL'S JUMPER, which has to be the ugliest thing I've seen a man wear since um 1923.

Eco is still Eco

I've been putting off posting about The Island of the Day Before because there's something about its similarity to Eco's other books that makes me feel so at home that I'm uncomfortable.

In this (reassuringly) big heavy book Eco plays the same games with language and authorial intrusiveness as in all his novels. There's arcane scientific knowledge, as in Foucault's Pendulum, except this is about the search for longitude rather than the strangeness of whatever the Knights Templar were looking for (it's been a while and I always mix Foucault's Pendulum up with William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night which I read immediately afterwards. There were Templars in both and at least one had a homunculus.) There are elements of the quest with impaired and deluded protagonists who may or may not be doing what they say they're doing as in Baudolino. And there's philosophising about religion and the clash between philosophy and Chrstianity as inThe Name of the Rose. There's even the theme of the inacessible beloved, which is at the beating heart of the recent The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, although not as extensively as in that strange and moving meditation on ageing, memory and the intense power of nostalgia. (I decided to tackle Proust after reading Queen Loana but I haven't had a spare month yet.)

Because of these similarities, I wonder if I like reading Eco because he makes me feel smart. I can follow him up his arcane paths and jumps between Latin and German and English. Subconciously I might be saying 'Look, I have this big fat book and I understand it! Give me a gold star!' To be a bit less self-referential, I think his process of taking the history of science and putting it into a novel can educate the reader and make them feel like they're doing something a bit clever in choosing to read these books. So they'll buy the next one. Sort of like the Reader's Digest theory of selling the Great Books of the Western World series to suburbanites in the seventies. Can you still buy them?

And it's all too easy to do Eco's schtick badly. Essentially, this is the same turf that Neal Stephenson covered in such a pedestrian fashion in the Baroque Cycle. I ploughed through all three million pages of those books, feeling patronised and not very entertained. At least Eco is funny.

High horse day

I'm having one of those days where I jump on my high horse at the slightest provocation. Our computers are being rebuilt and merrily plinking at each other every 30 seconds and I've used this as an excuse to put off some work and whinge loudly about IT interrupting our day. VERY mature, I know. People in shops have suffered from my glaring at them for having the nerve to be in my way. I muttered darkly at an enormous private schoolboy this morning who had spread his adolescent lankiness across two train seats (without realising that he really really can't help being six foot four and forced to wear a boater).

This is indirectly caused by the weather. There's finally a semblance of winter in the air so I'm wearing wool. This means that I'm really comfortable on the walk to and from the train station and when I go outside at lunchtime but I'm really far too warm when sitting in air conditioning. I know, I know, the answer is layers. But layers don't work. You always get to a point where you've committed to a bottom layer of some warmth such as opaque tights so your legs don't freeze under a skirt and you can't take them off in the office. Same with woolen trousers. Same, I've discovered today, with a woolen long sleeved tshirt.

The other problem is my boots. They look good, or at least, adequate in the great scheme of fashion boots. I had a lot of trouble finding boots that cost less than my mortgage that fitted my erm muscular calves and that I could walk in. The issue is that my legs get hot when I'm indoors and that makes me cranky. I look back at the days over the past two winters where I've said things I may have regretted and realised that on all those days I was wearing these boots.

Which brings me back to the high horse hopping of today. Of course I'm wearing my boots. I should know by now to exercise extreme caution.

New canons

A mate of mine is desperately seeking a copy of Don de Lillo's Underworld in shops because it was shortlisted as runner up in the New York Times list of best american work of fiction of the last 25 years.

I told him he was shallow for wanting to read something just because a newspaper said it was good. But then everyone else where he lives must be trying to do the same thing because he can't find it ANYWHERE.

I guess in these dark postmodern days of cultural relativism where the canon of dead white males is replaced by a hotchpotch of cultural theory, paid endorsements, advertising, instore promotions and 'I liked this book' style recommendations by colleagues who may have nothing in common with you, it's hard to find a good read.

Also I read his Great Jones Street years ago and thought it was fantastic if deeply peculiar.

I'm reading Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before at the moment. It seems um like all his other books as in too clever by half and very difficult to read on the train. This one is set on a boat for at least part of the time.

Schade

'Schade' is a lovely word I learnt in German last night meaning 'shame'. I guess that's where we get 'Schadenfreude' by tying it to 'Freude' which means 'pleasure'.

'Schade' is my state of mind today as I've realised I've been giving the poor people who work for me bad grammatical advice based on a poorly remembered article I read in my communications course last year. I mean, the advice presented my preference as a rule when, in fact, it was only optional.

I remember ten years ago when, as a freshly minted graduate, I had a boss who crossed out all the definite articles in my work because he thought it made it sound more authoritative. I thought it made me sound like we were from Yorkshire, and was highly offended. But I still left them out the next time I wrote something.

Mother's Day

When I made the obligatory call to my mother yesterday she said she was glad I hadn't bought her Peter Carey's latest book because she had a signed version and had met him and was so excited by the whole thing.

I told her that I didn't get it for her because I felt sorry for the ex-wife and there was a story in Saturday's SMH where she explained how he took her life and her friends and I wasn't going to make him richer by buying the book. And my mother told me that the ex-wife was mentally disturbed by September 11 as if that made it all right.

I CANNOT believe we were arguing about someone else's divorce. On Mother's Day. Maybe I should tell my Dad that Mum's in love with a famous writer...

Hold the Front Page: Fiction is useful

This story in the the Australian Financial Review's annoyingly glossy Boss magazine should get some sort of prize for stating the bleeing obvious, if only for the opening:

Novels can teach you more about leadership than the latest business books can. That’s because fiction has more shades of grey, says one management academic.

I guess if this catches on, there might be a publishing revolution so that bookshops are less cluttered with "Who moved my Cheese?" etc and filled with new well-crafted subtle works of fiction. I can dream anyway.

Rocket Boys and Las Vegas

I've been reading Rocket Boys by the marvellously named Homer H Hickam Jr. It's a memoir of a boy growing up in a coalmining town in West Virginia in the 1950s. (I think I chose it as a reaction to the Beaconsfield accident and rescue.) Homer, known as Sonny, is inspired by the missile launches at Cape Canaveral to get his mates together to make and launch their own rockets. They're all coal miners' sons when the mine is facing an uncertain future and, apart from the sheer joy of making things go bang, they see making rockets as a way to get them to college and away from coal mining where their daddies and grandaddies worked until roofs caved in or they died of black lung.

At that age, I might have had a fleeting idea that it might be fun to blow things up but I'd never have shifted myself to do anything about it, much less lobby the school to get a calculus class started so they could do the sums to work out rocket design. In fact, if they'd told me you could do fun stuff with calculus, I might have enjoyed it more.

Sonny's a pretty engaging character and the book is a good read so far.

When I started this blog, I just wanted it to be about books but I realise now that I've been ignoring the other great influence on my life: television. My Beloved and I were watching Las Vegas last night (where he's been recently). It's a terrible show but tremendous fun because it doesn't take itself seriously. All the hotel rooms are more glamorous than any room I've ever seen. Every time main characters walk past a row of poker machines, extras celebrate a jackpot. All of the women are beautiful unless their lack of glamour is a major plot point. No one gets drunk (unless ditto). Watching this show could give young women the impression that there is a rewarding career in wearing evening clothes all day encouraging extremely rich men to lose their money. In the event that casino security (who, in this show, are far far more powerful than the local, state and federal law enforcement - yes, even than those CSI folks) make a terrible mistake and infringe people's civil liberties, everyone is made happy again with a free suite at the mythical Montecito.

My Beloved said that the Vegas casinos are just like the ones here and full of really old and fat people playing poker machines. I guess most things look better on telly.

Alice and March

Elsewhere has much much much better photos of Alice Springs than the dozen or so I took so I won't waste anyone's time trying to upload mine. (Yes, this is mostly technophobia. I don't talk about it much anymore but I handwrote all my uni work - including my Honours thesis - I paid a typist back in the days when they were still around - and the first time I touched a computer keyboard was when I started my first office job where I was APPALLING. Not quite liquid papering the screen but close.)

Also, I read March on Sunday. It is actually rather good, really charming. Well done, Ms Brooks! I especially liked this acknolwedgement at the end where she unreservedly retracts her previous characterisation of her husband as a Civil War bore because somewhere along a sunken road near a battlefield she caught the bug too.

I guess the fact that someone can come along 140 years after Little Women and imagine the history of what the absent father is another example of what I was talking about with Austen a few months ago: women's fiction dealing with the domestic; money and business only being relevant if they relate to someone's marital prospects and wars can be happening very much off stage.

More about Melbourne

Lord Melbourne, that is. I don't like reading biographies so much because they usually end on a downer with people dying at the end. Lord Melbourne's biography was no exception and worse, included a sentence saying it would have been better if he'd died years earlier than he did after a stroke because he was in a sad decline ever after.

I guess I shouldn't expect a biographer called Lord David Cecil writing in the 1930s to have particularly radical predilcitions but he tended to apologise for Lord Melbourne's inaction or opposition to many of the major reform issues of the day, considering that Lord Melbourne preferred the status quo in almost all cases. The only time he really stood up for change was when he was governing Ireland where the prevailing bias against Catholics was very blatant and he was muttered about darkly for entertaining them and appointing them to positions for which they were qualified. The nerve!

Throughout his career, Lord Melbourne opposed extending the franchise. As Home Secretary he organised the militia to put down the riots associated with the Reform Bill in 1830. He opposed educating the poor because it would give them ideas above his station. He refused to entertain appeals about the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs because he thought they should be an example. He didn't support repealing the Corn Laws which kept the price of grain high. And, most curiously of all, he opposed the penny post.

These actions or inactions appear in the biography as odd incidents in the life of a lively intelligent man with generally good motives who loved his friends well and was terribly handsome. I can't help being exceedingly grateful that the world has changed so much since then.

and another thing

My silent mate showed up. He hadn't mailed lately because he'd been on leave and then he was busy at work. And he'd given up on his blog because he kept getting spammed because he is um an argumentative type.

Am very relieved as, last time I hadn't heard from someone for about that long, I hadn't worried, just felt vaguely resentful at being ignored, and then found out that he was at death's door. And then I felt bad for being resentful. Oh and sad he was dying and all that.

Of COURSE I was sad; it's just that I'm trying to make a point about how easy it is to misconstrue the meaning of not returning emails. People, please, if you're away for a while, put an out of town autoreply on your mail. If you're ill, say so. I'm not a mind reader. Although I've been guilty of this too. I rarely reply to my dad's emails which are usually just jokes someone else has sent him. But then, if I don't reply he rings me to see if I'm all right and that's kind of nice.

The Music, the Passion!

My Beloved has finally returned, bearing souvenirs of extreme cheesiness from Las Vegas. I am now the extremely proud possessor of a Barry Manilow wallet.

I've almost got to the end of Lord Melbourne's biography. All his friends are named after places in the colonies (eg Palmerston and Glenelg) but they haven't mentioned Australia once or even the founding of Melbourne!

Actually, the debonair tone of the book that assume the reader is across the detail of nineteenth century political history is becoming quite tiring because I must have been home sick the day we did the Corn Laws. Apparently they kept the price of grain high to keep the landed gentry rich. Looks like there's a long tradition of agrarian socialism.

The best part of the book is the description of the years when Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister was the mentor to the young Queen Victoria. She wrote everything down in her diary and she adored him. Very sweet. Until of course she found Prince Albert.

Barry Maitland and the Shrove

I was extremely disconcerted yesterday to find that a mate who hasn't emailed for a while has deleted his blog. Not quite worried enough to ring him long distance. After all, he did say something about going to New Zealand in his last message. And his blog was only VERY rarely updated. And at the end of yesterday I found out that my external email had been broken all day. It wasn't that no-one was talking to me.

On ANZAC Day I spent the day obsessively reading Barry Maitland's Babel a Brock and Kola mystery. I think these are called 'police procedurals' which has always struck me as a singularly unattractive name for a genre when in fact it's pretty exciting to read about an investigation. It's funny that outside of detective fiction, there's very little about the mundanity of the world of work on fiction. And yet many of us have fascinating jobs. Why are there no great 'public service procedurals'? Maybe I should write one.