I DO have a heart

I've been a bit concerned about my lack of reaction to the deaths of that Crikey bloke and Brocky (who I vaguely recognised from some car ads and thought was rather handsome) and feeling a bit outside the Zeitgeist at the outpouring of public grief, especially when level-headed cultural commentators like Elsewhere reveal a shamefaced fascination with the televised memorial serivce.

One of my workmates said not to worry; there's bound to be some OTHER celebrity who I feel closer to than Steve Irwin, someone I have more in common with and actually identify with (and I was about to launch into my story about how upset I was at school when the news came that Andy Warhol had died but realised in time I was being pretentious). We both agreed to not caring that much about Princess Di but being fascinated by the funeral.

Anyway, last week, I was surprised by how horrified I was that Richard Hammond, one of the presenters of Top Gear was injured in a test of jet powered car when trying to break the British Land Speed record. (As you do)

Not quite upset enough to join the 4,000 plus people who've left a get well soon message at SBS's website but disproportionately glad that the accident wasn't as bad as initial reports and that he's talking and stuff.

What does it mean that I care more about a guy on a year old show about English people test driving cars I couldn't buy here even if I could afford them than "iconic" Australians? Must be a latte drinking chardonnay swilling member of the chattering inner-city elite or something with a slice of hitherto undetected revhead.

I still hope he gets well soon.

Wino Forever

One of the many ways I didn't mispend my youth was in neglecting to get a tattoo. It's not that it never occurred to me: I just never wanted anything in particular badly enough for long enough to go through with it. More importantly, I never got drunk enough close enough to a tattoo parlour in persuasive enough company to end up with dolphins gambolling round my waist or a bluebird anklet or even a big arrow pointing towards my nether regions. (Thank goodness I don't drink near tattoo parlours.)

Occasionally, when I see a particularly beautiful piece of body art with lovely colours on some trendy firm-fleshed urbanite, this is a source of regret. But then, I've seen enough faded tats on saggy arms and tummies and legs to realise that even though they're there forever, they might look like crap in ten years when the infrastructure wears out. And not all of them can be as imaginatively edited as Johnny Depp's "Winona Forever" tattoo (to Wino Forever) after the break up.

Anyway, I'm just wondering what Jake Kovko's widow's new tat is going to look like in ten years and what'll it do to her love life. Will new boyfriends only think they're being taken seriously when their face is on her other shoulder? It's a dangerous precedent.

Boxer Hats

Still ploughing through tales of sin in Melbourne in the early 20th Century. John West is now a millionaire running a Tattersal's club and a tote and owning several race courses. He's also got about half of the State Parliament on his pay roll. Wow, I say, if this is indeed based on a true story as advertised.

Something that's bugging is that John West's henchmen are described as wearing "boxer-hats". I've never heard of this before and nor has anyone I've asked. Google brings up sites happy to sell me caps with pugilist or boxer dogs on them or strange German sentences where Mr or Ms Boxer are doing something because "hat" is a verb. Does anyone have any ideas?

Power without Glory

Don't know what got into me yesterday. Uncharacteristicly ranty. Today I'm reading Power without Glory by Frank Hardy which is a surprisingly light read. I vaguely remember not watching an ABC miniseries of the book when I was a kid because it was dull and had the impression that it was a HARD book and an AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC. But it's quite easy to read - could almost be a Women's Weekly Good Read.

Before starting it I read the introduction about poor Mr Hardy's travails in researching the book and hiding the fact he was publishing it from the crime lord John Wren on whom the book's main character is based. So I was expecting weight and seriousness. So far (160 pages in) it's reminding me of mafia exposes say by James Ellroy. Sure John West is a nasty man running an illegal tote, buying cops and politicians and exploiting the Holy Roman Catholic church for his own ends but it doesn't seem at all shocking in this post-Sopranoes era.

Maybe it'll get more serious later on.

Harrumph!

I've been quiet for a while because I haven't had much nice to say about the books I've been reading lately (and everyone's mum told them it was better to say nothing at all in such circumstances).

One of these was Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner, a memoir of a Catholic girlhood in upstate New York. It had its moments. I learnt that in the fifties, shoe shops had x-ray machines so you could see your bones and a local doctor suggested that using them every time you bought shoes maybe wasn't such a good idea but his opinions were dismissed by the good townfolk because he was known to have socialist tendencies. But it just came across as a bit formulaic: "in this chapter I'll deal with religion", "in this chapter I'll deal with race." A few stories ended up without punchlines when they drifted outside the chapter's theme. It's a Women's Weekly Good Read so it is actually a good read but I wanted more from it. Maybe this was an editing problem??

The other thing I read last week was Before the Frost by Henning Mankell which is about Inspector Wallender of Ystadt in Sweden who is apparently rather good at his job but not much good at life. His 30 year old daughter has just graduated from the police academy and has been posted to his district. She gets to help with an investigation before she starts work (How Famous Five!). It was pretty good as a police procedural in that there was lots and lots about meetings and talking through things. But a lot of it seemed odd and I couldn't work out if this was bad writing, deliberate, a translating problem or a deeper cultural misunderstanding on my part. I never really felt like I got Ingmar Bergman so it could be the last of these.

And I read the Week-end SMH from cover to cover (as usual actually). The essay in the Spectrum part was by some guy who was forced to deal with "Theory" in order to teach creative writing and thought he'd discovered reasons to demolish it as a monolithic whole because it used lots of jargon he didn't understand so it must be meaningless and OF COURSE there's authorial intention so take that, Barthes! Now, I fled the English Department at Uni because, at the time, I couldn't come to terms with Derrida et al (and I still don't like reading postmodernist critiques for fun which is why this blog is pretty well a theory free zone) but this sort of Howardist intellectual revisionism really sticks in my craw because if you roll everything from Leavis on up and chuck it out, you end up with nineteeth-century aesthetics and we'd all be whittering on pointlessly about Shakespearean heroes' tragic flaws. And creating canons of dead white males and not valuing other voices and so on. Harrumph, I say.

It reminded me of David Williamson plonking on a decade ago about how he suddenly understood Literary Criticism in order to write yet another of his plays I haven't seen because it sounded dull (It might even have been called Dead White Males). And the whole "Death Sentence" and "Weasel Words" movement (which I also haven't read so I am extrapolating from book reviews and conversations) complaining about language changing and people not speaking plainly. Academics use language in a technical way to be understood by other practitioners. People don't expect engineers to write deathless prose when designing bridges and they certainly don't assume they're able to tell whether or not bridges will fall down. Just because everyone feels like they have competence in reading novels doesn't mean they're qualified to dismiss the academic practice of criticism. (Not that I want to join in either.)

Harrumph I say again!

Over the Top with a Fortunate Hobby

The other day I read A Man's Got To Have a Hobby by William McInnes* which was about growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Redcliffe (which is technically a separate town but I was raised to think of it as a beachside suburb of Brisbane). It was charming, in a sun-kissed self-deprecating rosy-hued way. Every anecdote was a doozy. I laughed out loud many times and found myself explaining why to my Beloved. Unusually (for me anyway), this was remarkably easy to do - I just read out a paragraph. Generally it takes me ten minutes to say what I thought was funny in a book. He also told you enough about his family for you to feel real sadness when age and infirmity caught up with some of its members.

So, it's up there in that blokey jokey life writing genre like Over the Top with Jim and A Fortunate Life. Disappointingly though, it wasn't that well organised. He'd used the continous past a lot ("we used to do this") and you'd get a sense of repeated events but suddenly realise he was talking about one actual occasion. This was confusing.

Also, he'd loosely structured the main part of it around a night to celebrate the history of Redcliffe where a series of speeches sparked heaps of memories of different things and separate anecdotes. Every time he came back to the present he had another drink because he didn't like what someone was saying about changing the town he'd loved. He was meant to be the final speaker as the guest of honour. I was expecting a huge climax of him drunkenly abusing everyone but it didn't happen. Sigh.

Anyway, apart from that, it was sweet.

* Who the book blurb writer thinks is "one of Australia's best loved actors". I thought he was fantastic in Look Both Ways but I really didn't like him in Sea Change. (This doesn't mean he's a bad actor - I just didn't love him But then I was probably too young to embrace the Sigrid Thornton's whole wish fulfilment thing in that show. I mean, when it was on. Probably not now that I live in the big city.)

The Theatuh, Darling

On Saturday night, we went and saw a play at the SBW Stables Theatre, a tiny space in the Cross where, if you don't sit three rows back, you're just as likely to be spat on by the actors. We saw lots and lots of spittle heading towards the people in the first two rows and thought ourselves very sensible.

My Beloved was disappointed in the sparseness of the set because he likes to know that the backstage people have gone to a bit of effort. But I don't think he realised how hard it would have been to make an architect's model of a huge development that took centre stage for most of the play. The thing LIT UP with the flick of a switch. There were little bushes and trees and the fake grass that you can buy from model railway shops. It was lovely!

What was even sweeter was Alex Dimitriades's bio in the program. Now, there's a secret language to theatre bios. This particular theatre's programs generally have professional black and white photos of all participants in the production: playwright, director, lighting design, actors etc. They're listed in alahabetical order. So far so, I don't know, Pram Factory or People's Republic of Brunswick. Each actor's bio, as a rule, lists their participation in every single amatueur or professional production since primary school and, this is important, without any dates eg "Chatswood Drama Society The King and I , The Lane Cove Players Annie, Sydney Theatre Company The White Deveil. Only the true fan would be able to tell whether they haven't trod the boards for ten years or are major stars.

Then there'll be the occasional film listed. Again without dates. You're left to ponder whether you haven't heard of a film because you weren't born at the time or if it was one of those 10B disasters that no-one saw. Then, and only then, will dreadful plebeian television be mentioned. (Incidentally, it's amazing how many people in Sydney plays claim to have worked on Farscape. Not that I could tell under all that blue bodypaint.) You can read 150 words wondering why someone looks vaguely familiar to find they did three seasons of Neighbours, Water Rats or, more rarely, Home and Away.

In contrast, Alex Dimitriades's bio begins:

Alex is an award winning actor who has worked extensively in film and television. His film roles include Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo...

On ya, Alex.

The Walker

Last night I finished The Walker by Jane R Goodall. (It was only when searching for her home page that I realised WHY she needed to follow the American middle initial tradition. If I was her, I'd probably just talk about chimps to make people happy).

A few months ago I read her first book called The Walker and I really really liked it.

This one didn't grip me as much, but then I've been really busy. The friend who lent it to me raved about it and said it was better than the first one. It's set three years on (in 1974) with the same core cast of police. The central character of young female detective, Briony Williams, is still singlehandedely trying to convince the blokes she can do the job. In this book though it comes across that she's pretty well won this battle without quite realising it and there's only one bloke who's a bit of a twit about her abilities but that's because he's a bit of a twit (and I wouldn't be surprised if he confesses his undying love for her in the next book).

The story is spooky and unsettling. Goodall's gone to a lot of effort to establish how people revived the Druidic cults in the 70s. For a while there you feel like you have to believe in spirits. But realy, it's a police investigation dealing with a nasty series of murders.

There is a lot of period detail but it doesn't intrude as much as in the last book. You're conscious of it (not wondering why people just don't use mobiles or something) but there's no disseration on the different clothes women are wearing. This is probably about Goodall's confidence. The local detail of architecture in Oxford and crucial spooky topographical details are really well done. Anyway, hope she keeps going but doesn't do something as spooky next time because that might get a bit old on a third outing.

Sorry Jennifer

I realised this morning that I had completely forgotten to watch Jennifer Byrne in The First Tuesday Book Club on Tuesday. Completely and utterly forgotten. And she was going to talk about Longitude by Dava Sobel, the book that turned me onto books about the history of science so I finally learnt that good books don't need to be in the fiction section. Bother, darn and blast!

I blame television programmers for not putting anything on I want to watch during prime time so we always go out on Tuesday nights.

And I blame cinema owners for cheap nights on Tuesdays which probably causes the television programmers to assume their target demographics are out.

And I blame the ABC for not having enough promos for the show this month because I don't think I saw them. (I could probably blame the ABC for not having much on that I wanted to watch so I couldn't see the few promos I did see but I know I watched ALL of the exceptionally tedious Bleak House and the delightful Dr Who and their three good shows of the week on Wednesday nights and even The Chaser one week.)

Anyway next month, they're doing the first book by Martin Amis called The Rachel Papers. It's probably one of about three books of his I haven't read. I think his earlier stuff like Strawberry Fields was pretty nasty but the Rachel book might be from before he met Will Self and was just a nice well brought up young man. Maybe? Maybe I'll find out.

Lucy Sussex

Stupidly busy day today where I was in trouble for things not my fault and couldn't fix but congratulated for things I didn't really do. I also felt compelled to apologise abjectly for things that went wrong that I didn't know about till much later and possibly could have helped if I'd been told at the time. At least I get paid, I guess.

Anyway, I was delight to read this article in Sarsparilla by Lucy Sussex. Years and years ago I read a collection of short stories by her with an amazing cover, like lace on top of a medieval painting. They were very haunting. Some were ghost stories, others were unconventionally sci-fi. Ten years later, every so often I start to remember the plot of one of them in particular where this woman finds a portal to another world. They were beautifully written. And I've been looking out for more books by her ever since. From her website, it looks lack that book was called The Peace Garden. I won't put a picture in because the website's edition has a really ugly cover. I also read Black Ice a couple of years ago. This is for young adults and is about a teenager dealing with a haunted house and family problems (and using the internet in a not very convincing way but maybe that's just technology dating between writing the book and publication.) It was ok I guess but I'm SOOOOOOO excited to see she's written all these other things and I can get them. Hurrah!

Of course I'm far too shy to put such fanlike babblings in an email to an actual author!