What every child can learn about the Crusades

I'm reading Pilgermann by Russell Hoban . It's been at home for years and I must have orginally bought it for the cover which is significant to the plot and really similar in all the editions.*

For want of better words, it's a psychedelic or surreal journey. The narrator, Pilgerman, was a Jew in central Europe when the first crusade starts up but he tells the story from the point of view of someone moving at will through space and time. He regularly cites paintings by Hieronymous Bosch and Vemeer. He's visited by dead people, including Jesus (being Jewish, Pilgermann asks to speak to His Father and is told he'll be dealing with the Son from now on, boom boom). In places it's laugh out loud funny. In many spots it's really gruesome (maggot ridden corpses, rape, cannibalism) but these were and are gruesome times.

The book's about the violence caused by the different faiths. Christians kill Jews and Turks. Turks kill Jews and Christians. Jews try to survive (so far anyway). Implicit is the image of the Holocaust.

What is beautiful is the discussion of the different beliefs of the three religions and the creation of an infinite pattern that moves through the universe.

In places it's reminding me of this fantasy novel I read years and years called
The Wandering Unicorn** by Manuel Mujica Lainez. This is a strange and beautiful story about a fairy in love with a Frenchman who goes crusading and meets violence, treachery, disease and death on the way.

What these books both show is that logically, the Crusades were a completely bizarre waste of resources and effort. But then, logic wasn't the point.

*My cover is prettier than this but I can't work out how to get my camera to talk to my computer and make files that don't take ages to upload.

** THis links to the same edition I have. That never happens

Return to Usual Programming

Well that's a bit slack I must say: racing to the 100th post and then running out of puff. On Thursday I finshed a book by Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer) I don't think anyone should be interested in except other Huxley obsessives. It was almost as dull as The Island and the funny bits (about the excesses of Americans with far far too much money, no taste and a horror of death) were so similar to my dim recollections of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One that I suspect unconscious plagiarism.

Anyway Ampersand Duckhas been distracted by the LibraryThing, an online booksharing space. I can see why this might be fun because as one of the newspapers said:

"Some of us just can't help ourselves. At every book shelf, we cock our heads and scan the titles. Now, with LibraryThing.com, we can peek at thousands of libraries."
Jan Gardner, The Boston Globe
"Net gain for readers" (July 9 2006)

But, you know, how do we know anyone's going to tell the truth? I think I'd be a teensy weensy bit selective about what I said was on my shelf, all Nobel Prize winners and History of Times and far fewer pulp science fiction and dodgy thrillers than are really there. Or maybe it's self correcting: you're only hurting yourself with such snobbery because you'd never find books you'd like that are similar to the ones you really do like instead of pretending to like. Then again, I must say that Amazon's book recommendations haven't ever convinced me in the past.

Anyway, cute idea but I'm worried that there be dragons out there.

Gott and Murder and centenaries

This is my hundredth post. Hurrah! That shows commitment of some kind...to avoiding work at least. Unfortunately I can't raise the tone by talking about the erudite book* I'm reading at the moment because it keeps putting me to sleep. I know it's good though; it's just that when you know that the characters are only there to prove philosophical points it's a bit hard to pay attention to what they say.

This week, I keep finding where other people are talking about books I've read.
Doppelganger over at 50 Books was really enthusiastic about Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw (and far more descriptive than I bothered to be seeing I'd given my copy away).

The other day Laura at Sarsparilla was far less positive about the delightful Good Murder by Robert Gott. I admit bought this book last year because I liked the cover. Sometimes you've just got to do that. It's a bit too gory but it makes up for this by the joy of such an unreliable and completely unlikeable narrator whom you just want to SHAKE sometimes. It's set in Maryborough during WWII and I liked this because, when I was a kid, I asked my grandmother about what happened in the Queensland country town she lived in during the war and got the very lame response of "Oh the war didn't really affect us. We were trained to spot Japanese planes but." I mean?!!? All the men including her husband left town and she didn't seem bothered by it any more?

This book and the even more gory sequel A Thing of Blood have been completely round my reading circle with a great deal of enthusiasm. There's meant to be a sequel soon too, set in Darwin. Maybe they'll be there during the bombing. I can hardly wait.

* After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley in his dispapointing Californian meaning of life phase, not his funnier European aesthetic phase.

Q is for Quarry

Someone lent me Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton* so I read it. I think it's the first of the alphabetised adventures of private eye Kinsey Millhone I've come across although her addiction to jogging seemed vaguely familiar. Maybe it's something she shares with VI Warshawski or Patricia Cornwall's coroner.

Anyway, I liked it more or less. Really good descriptions of the Californian desert which sounded just like it looks on telly. We're told what every character looks like and is wearing in a bit too much detail but I let that slide because Kinsey's a PI and meant to pay attention to that sort of stuff.

The book's set in California in 1987. What really struck me was that there didn't seem to be a single African-American (I'm sure Kinsey would have mentioned it if someone was because she doesn't hold back if describing doggy hungarian accents) and no-one has a mobile phone. Kinsey spends a lot of time at payphones and writing down her hotel's phone number for people to leave messages. Thank God things have changed!

* This site makes me wish I could get rich writing potboilers. It includes many photos of Sue, her cats, her assistant and her NEW PERSONAL CHEF.

Y_ll_wpl_sh Papers

I read Thackeray's The Yellowplush Papers the other day. It's a bit of lighthearted frivolity that shows how very different those Victorians were.

Mr Yellowplush (named after the livery of his putative father) is a servant with literary pretensions. Thackeray has him writing perfectly grammatically but with almost phonetic spelling. This makes it a bit challenging to read late at night, especially during the sections where Yellowplush visit 'forin parts' as a 'vallay' and spells French how a nineteenth century cockney would pronounce it. This device was reminiscent of the 'Italian accent' used by Nino Culotto in They're a Weird Mob which every middle class suburban home I visited as a kid seemed to have on its shelves. Now, they're probably each as completely un-PC as the other.

Oh and all the Lords and Princes were S_r B__r D___ to 'protect' their privacy no doubt.

After that whinge, the book was pretty funny in places. Yellowplush is reading his masters' letters, listening at doors and standing behind chairs during the domestic travails of impoverished nobility trying to marry well and avoid debtors' prison. But, by golly, some of the class distinction stuff reminded me why they formed a socialist party.

A lot of the things that were meant to be funny are about how Yellowplush and other servants eat and drink as well as their masters. Their pay mightn't be much but they live off their 'perkisets'. At one point Yellowplush is offered an allowance three times his salary to go off and write full time but he refuses because he'd be worse off. Ho ho. Guess you had to be there on the right side of the green baize door to think it was funny.

Zen and coloured balls on string make me smile

Yesterday, I took a leaf out of Amspersand Duck's book and trundled off to the Art Gallery.. (I could only manage one gallery even though I didn't have to drive a bus to and from Canberra.) This picture is of an enormous room full of coloured ping pong sized balls suspended on wires. Large fans make them wobble. It's like being inside a pointillist painting. It's called Atomic: full of love, full of wonder by Nike Savvas 2005. It made me smile all day. Pointlessly, I took a photo about the size of this with my phone and showed my Beloved. It looks like a small pointillist painting.

From one extreme to the other, I went straight upstairs to the truly beautiful and well-presented exnibition of Zen painting in the Asian gallery. I read every single word and now feel like I could pass an exam on Zen Buddhism... which is completely missing the point. Gorgeous, apparently effortless paintings by three centuries of Zen masters. Beautiful.

Thumping good read?

I read Sight Unseen another bestselling thriller by Robert Goddard the other day. It wasn't bad. There were no loose ends this time but I'm getting a bit too used to his formula. It's not a bad formula - I can just see where twists might be popping up and what ho there they are.

According to his publishers, Goddard won a prize called "Thumping Good Read" for his first novel. I wish we had such pisstaking names for prizes here and that someone would give one to Di Morrisey. I don't think I've ever seen such an enormous inferiority complex as she showed in a really long Good Week-end story (which I can't find on-line) this week-end about how university-educated black wearing writers don't take her seriously enough to invite her to proper writers' festivals even though she does lots of research and writes books with proper plots and everything.

To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, who also had the misfortune of selling lots of books, she should tell everyone she's too busy counting her money in one of her many well-appointed homes to care about what the academics think.

Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw

I was a bit busy at work last week.* In the middle of this, I realised my Dad's birthday and Father's Day would happen when my parents were on the hugely exciting trip to Canada and Alaska they've been planning for months. I asked Dad whether he wanted a present to take with him or he could wait to ahve something to look forward to when he came back. Of COURSE he wanted to take one with him which meant I had to post something by Thursday if he was going to get it before leaving on Saturday. To be on the safe side with Australia Post, on Wednesday I skived off from hugely busy day to LEAVE the office for long enough to post two really well-written, educational and helpful books about Canada and Alaska. (I also sent one about exploring Newfoundland that was less useful because it turned out they were only going to the West Coast and I should have paid more attention to either their itinerary or the map.**)

One of them was Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson who seems to be a national treasure over there. It's a collection of articles from his travels to different provinces of Canada where he has adventures and intersperses them with his convoluted family history and ACTUAL history. I wish I'd read it before going there instead of six months later.

Anyway, on Thursday night, Dad was really chuffed to have three big books to read on the plane to the US. By Friday lunchtime he was much less thrilled to realise he'd only have a choice between watching telly or looking out the window for 14 hours instead.

* As in hugely monumentally sleepless night fraught with worry busy for three solid days for the first time in two months so exceedingly out of practice.
** I can't actually swear that I realised that Newfoundland was on the East coast until Dad told me. I just thought "Canada, cold therefore relevant".

Take your Tablets!

This thoughtful piece of medical advice from the Leader of the Opposition made me laugh. Nice Kim was just trying to help strange old Wilson Tuckey get through a challenging day.* And Wilson, it's the Opposition's JOB to oppose Government legislation. There's no need to attack him outside the House for it.

*In his position I probably would have used ten expletives and tried to throw a girly punch.**

**This is why I'm not in public life.

Lock all the doors, there's a madman around!

One of the books I found in Berrima last week-end was Suburbs of Hell by Randolph Stow.

It's set in a decaying fishing village in East Anglia in the early eighties. Half the houses were abandoned after the War and are derelict. People drink far too much and gossip in snug little pubs. Then there's an unexpected murder. Then another. And another. Fingers start pointing but the suspects keep turning up dead. So far so good but I finished it without being able to say exactly what happened.

My problem is that the preamble to the first murder is described in the first person from the point of view of a witness that you think is the murderer but, by golly, I still don't know who it was or if in fact it's meant to be Death itself as a witness, coming like a thief in the night and the murderer was actually one of the suspects.

Stow's dressed it up with quotes from seventeenth century revenge tragedies (the Duchess of Malfi, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, the Spanish Tragedy) and Beowolf . I found this annoying on the way through but in retrospect think he was trying to hint at the monster within arising (Beowulf) and then at the clunky motives of subsequent murders that don't solve anything in response to misplaced suspicions. Probably. This still doesn't really help me be sure about what happened first.

At the end he has an extract from the newspaper of the of day of the coroner's report into the last death which he puts next to headlines about all the accidents, wars and terrorist incidents going on around the world. So even though there was this terribly menacing series of events, it's really only a tiny part of the world. I guess.

The book's really good at describing scenery and uses dialect often enough to make you hear how the locals talked. This bit is where a character's coming back to the world with the early spring:

Unimportant things pleased him unreasonably: that ragwort was flowering yellow in the crevices of old walls, that fields across the estuary were bright green with new barley, that the sea was like a polished grey stone with a sheen on it, as if reflecting a blue-green sky. Oystercatchers waded and searched, gorse was brilliant in the weak sun. The crude bright colours of man, on fishermen’s dinghies and on a line of beach-huts, brought back a pleasure he had once taken in a new box of coloured pencils.

In a different place, in a bay of the estuary, a plain of sea-purslane and sea-aster carved with shining brown runnels, he watched mallard waddle and swim, and flocks of dunlin skitter away like blown white smoke over the sculpted, sky-mirroring mud. (p78)

Aw! pretty!

I loved the books of his set in Australia not that I remember the detailis. Tourmaline was in the outback after some sort of apocalypse and was a bit disturbing but really good. And The Merry-go-Round in the Sea was fabulous. This one is going to keep me wondering for a while.

Patrick woz robbed

On a lovely wet and wintry week-end in the Southern Highlands (with the ultimate aim of going to Wollongong to see Sydney FC play Perth Glory on Sunday night), we went to the the Berkelouw Book Barn near Berrima for the first time.

This was after we'd spent a day pottering in little antique shops where I'd swooped on anything that looked like a book or a magazine, even if they were just there to show that some piece of overpriced furniture was a bookshelf and not, um, something else. I thought seriously about whether I wanted each thing or if it could be kept for amusement value or if anyone I knew would be intersted in it. After a day I had three books and a beer coaster.

Now, when we drove up to the Book Barn, knowing that there were three hundred million exciting things inside, we agreed to leave in half an hour because we had a long list of things to do like get to Wollongong and have lunch.

But we left after only 20 minutes becuase it was so overwhelmingly organised, it was like a library. I didn't need to rummage, just think about what I would like to find and then go there. I found myself comparing six different copies of the same book and choosing the second most expensive because I liked the way it sat in my hand and the fact that the staff of the Commonwealth Bank had presented it to Miss Brown in May 1922. In other shops I'd have found one copy on one shelf, bought it then found the nicer one on my next visit and cursed their lack of organisation.

So I ended up with four books I really wanted but didn't really enjoy looking for them. Maybe next time I'll mail order.

Oh I finisehd Desmond Kale. Roger McDonald acknowledges about twenty people for telling him about wool classification, exploring and sheep breeding but there's nary a word for Patrick O'Brian or any other nautical authority. This makes me VERY suspicious.

Read this book!

I think Roger McDonald read Patrick O'Brian books as part of his research for Desmond Kale. There's lot more rum drinking, shanty singing and holystoning of decks than was really needed to get the characters from A to B (via C,D,E and F). And he uses a surprising number of nautical terms, in a manner completely consistent with Mr O'Brian. At least they're not talking about sheep in these bits. I only wish Captain Jack would arrive!

One of the many things bothering me about Desmond is the opposite sort of problem to the one I was complaining about the other day where Peter Ackroyd put real people in his novels. In this book, major figures based on real people have different names and (I assume) different characters but I'm ashamed that I don't know enough about Australian history to know who their real world proxies would be and how similar they are. I thought for a while that the governor was meant to be Lachlan Macquarie, who was rather nice to the convicts and built lots of public buildings which are still standing and established the only good town planning Sydney ever had even if it was reversed the minute he left. I remember that he wasn't treated that well when he returned to England but what happens to the character in the book is quite OTT.

And there's an explorer who I feel like I should recognise but grade four Social Studies was a long time ago.

So I guess it's all fiction and I shouldn't be overly suprised by an ending that doesn't accord with reality. Maybe the won't establish a great Australian wool industry.

On to more pleasant things: we went and saw Tristram Shandy the other day about the making of a movie of an apparently unfilmable book. It was great fun, not least because Gillian Anderson demonstrates she CAN move her face unlike in Bleak House. But NO-ONE I've spoken to about this has read the book. Most of the people in the movie hadn't either but that was the point.

Um, it's terrific. Easy to read - I've never finished Gullivers Travels so it's easier than that. Funny. Makes you really think that people living in the eighteenth century are just like us.

Admittedly the only reason I read it was because the terribly clever and beautiful girl George Johnstone was in love with in My Brother Jack carried a copy with her wherever she went. I can't remember if they read it either.

First Tuesday Book Club

So the first First Tuesday Book Club started at 10:00 last night.

At 9:30 I still had 300 pages to go on the interminable Desmond Kale. There was no way I was going to finish it in time and I didn't know whether I should watch it in case someone spoiled the ending. But I did. Must say, while I've always been a fan of Jennifer Byrne I thought she was particularly good enthusing about books. And Jackie Weaver was revealed to be a mad reader too. Good Heavens!!

Sadly, however, the show turned into my mum's book club with a lot of woolly thinking and "I liked this book" comments of the sort you also find in these archives. Reassuringly, the panel said the last 100 pages of Desmond were really easy to read.

They also talked about American Psycho which Jennifer Byrne argued was a classic. (I read it years ago and loved the bits I could read with my eyes open.)
This gave the show an excuse to show clips from the movie with beauteous Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. Delightfully, Jennifer Byrne even had a Patrick Bateman doll!

Unfortunately, the host of Gardening Australia took grave offence at having to read the book and someone else said "it would make an extremely good short story" without seeming to know or care that the sheer excess and repetition and baroque piling of detail on top of detail was the point.

Anyway, don't know if this show will work but good on you ABC for having an arts program aimed at my mum.