Laziness or working to change the things you can?

My Beloved has been saddened today to learn that Channel 10 has copied the antics of Channel 9 and stopped showing Battlestar Galactica halfway through the current season. They won't put it on again until next year.

He found a website encouraging people to protest to the station. I told him not to bother because years ago I rang a commercial station to complain about them not showing a scheduled soccer match until THREE HOURS after the advertised time. A receptionist assured me the program manager would call me back. I'm still waiting.

At least SBS tells you they're not going to change their minds and why!

He has now bought the show on DVD.

I have a colleague who went down to Martin Place to stand up and be counted for poverty last week. Or she would have if the protest had been a bit better organised and had started when it was meant to so she didn't have to come back here before the they got their act together. She regularly circulates petitions and cuts interesting things out of the paper for me about global warming, religious intolerance, the war in Iraq and the crisis in water management. I smile and nod but I'm ashamed to admit to her that I think the only things I feel capable of changing through direct action are non-commercial television schedules.

Those rockets were, like, BIG

Beloved and I have been watching a documentary series on the ABC called Space Race. Over four Sunday nights it dramatised the US and Soviet rocket programs from WWII until the Moon landing. Unlike "The Right Stuff" it didn't just show the Americans astronauts being all Alpha type ultra competitives. It was mostly about the engineers who built the rockets - Wernher von Braun for the US and the long unknown Soviet Chief Designer, Korolev and their respective struggles with technical problems and politicians. With less good actors it would have been sentimental tosh or worse. As it was it was, it was great telly.

Now, I guess I've been a bit blase about space. All the exciting stuff happened before I was born. Actual space travel isn't a patch on the dodgiest sci-fi show. It wasn't until last year that I found out that that annoying beep Sputnik made didn't actually mean anything except "listen, I'm in SPACE!" and I was like "so who cares?" But this series showing how the rockets started as bomb delivery systems really made me think what an incredibly brave person you'd have to be to sit on top of one of them to go into space and not worry about being blown to kingdom come.

Last night they showed the Moon mission. We've all seen that footage of Apollo taking off so many times that it's part of our cultural wallpaper. So, yawn. Big rocket, Cape Canaveral full of ugly Americans with their shirts off looking up. I wasn't really paying attention until the narrator mentioned that the rocket was the height of a 36 storey building.

36 storeys.

That's big.

After the third week, which was about Gagarin going on the first manned space flight, Beloved remembered he had a biography of him called Starman and insisted I read. I was reluctant because I didn't want to spoil the series (after all, how could I be sure the Russians wouldn't get to the moon?) but in the end couldn't resist. It was really good. Published in 1998 when most of the participants were still alive but after the fall of the Soviet Union so all the secrets could come tumbling out, it showed how being the first cosmonaut was both a huge honour but a terrible prison for Comrade Gagarin. Well worth a read.

Gilgamesh

On Monday, I spent a frustrating day seeing a number of professional people to sort some things out for me. While waiting in a series of anterooms of various levels of noisiness, I tried to read In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje (whose name I'd never actually said out loud until last week when I tried to thank a colleague for putting it in the lending library. I could see the word in my head but couldn't get it out. What is it about non-Anglo double vowels and j's in odd places? I can't say JM Cootzee either).

I was about to give up on it until I got home and had a bit of peace and quiet. This is when I realised there was nothing wrong with me: I really DID need to read each paragraph a couple of times to work out what was going on. Each sentence is loaded with meaning and there are very few words to spare. I'm wondering if this is what reviewers mean when they say "muscular prose" which had always struck me as a stupid macho comment. Maybe "sinewy" would be better? It's not surprising that he writes poetry as well. It's certainly a huge contrast to the style of Mr Eugenides.

The dedication page reveals that the title comes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the world's oldest known epic poem (from Mesopotamia) and the one of the best things I came across in first year at uni. I mean, those Sumerians wrote on little clay tablets and most of these things seemed to be shopping lists or account books. Finding an epic poem there - even one which didn't have completely well-rounded characters? Most unexpected and a surprisingly good read. If you haven't come across it (and it's easy to find in a Penguin Classics edtion), Gilgamesh was a king who had this best friend called Enkidu who died and Gilgamesh was quite sad and wandered round for a long time in the skin of a lion singing songs about him and grieving. I guess we're meant to think that's what the central character in this book is doing too when important people leave his life. Grief certainly makes him do some extreme things (which are really inventive).

The other dedication says something like "no longer will we be able to say the greatest story ever told is the only one". This is another clue because the book is about the people who did the jobs that built Canada. There are some amazing images there. In the first section, immigrant timber workers chop trees in the depths of winter. When rivers have thawed in Spring, the logs are floated downstream and literal logjams are fixed with dynamite. I mean !!?!?! In the central part, workers are building a huge and recordbreaking viaduct over a vast gorge between different parts of Toronto. There's a lot of stuff about a daredevil fearlessly clambering above and below it on ropes. In the final part, they're working on an epic water treatment plant that seems to be the grandest thing in Canada even during the Depression. It requires digging a tunnel into the middle of the lake to get clean water for the inlet pipe. Hard work. Dirty, smelly, horrible, badly paid work.

So partly an expose of how the great engineering achievements of Canada exploited the working classes, partly unhappy love stories. I wasn't convinced by the lovey-dovey stuff in the English Patient (book and movie) and I don't think these parts of this book are entirely successful either. But reading it was a slightly magical experience. And I'm a sucker for anyone who mentions Gilgamesh.

Middlesex

I have to say that the dodgy facial hair sculpture and large-necked skivvy didn't really mean he wrote a bad book. It was extravagantly baroque in conception, covering three generations of a family's history, two wars, race riots, the Depression, urban decay, white flight, the sexual revolution and a very confused young person who finds out she isn't actully a girl. (Maybe the skivvy was a pointer to this complexity. I'm trying to remember if it was the same photo on the back of much more straightforward and subtle by comparison The Virgin Suicides but I can't find my copy.)

Not that Middlesex was a PERFECT book. It was probably 150 pages longer than it needed to be. (Do American publishers pay by the word?) I spent the final hundred pages wondering whether a character had died when I wasn't paying attention only to have a tacked-on explanation by the narrator saying he'd decided to concentrate on something else during those chapters. A lot of the symbolism was very obvious - eg the young androgene's family moves to a house called "Middlesex". (Get it?) There's a lot of stuff about silkworms metamporphosising and a character with several different identities. And a few too many coincidences. And this strange probably unecessary section in the middle about a particular teacher teaching advanced English and making the class stage a Greek drama so that a minor character can drop dead. Um, in retrospect it seemed really odd. But I kept on reading. Right to the end. In the middle of the night.

I realised that I'd read an extract in a New Yorker a few years ago. I'd actually thought it was a short story or a memoir rather than an extract until I came across it verbatim in the novel. The bits I'd vaguely remembered were about the exquisite agony of being 14 and confused. These were really well done and made me cringe inwardly with a bit of recognition both times. (After all, I think everyone has been 14 and not sure they fit in for whatever reason) ick!

So, um, I'm going to get past the quasi-goatee and hope he doesn't wear skivvies every day.

Tell me honestly...

Would you read a book by this man?

If he'd been in my Philosophy of Feminism class, I wouldn't have been surprised but I certainly wouldn't have agreed to have coffee with him.*

He's Jeffrey Eugenides who wrote the book I'm reading at the moment which is called Middlesex. It won the Pulitzer Prize. A dodgy Vietnamese edition was lent to me so I've only just found this photo.

I don't know if I can continue reading it now.

*Strangely, ALL THREE of the blokes in that class asked me out.** I suspect someone had told them it was a good way to prove their SNAG credentials.

** I don't know why they all chose me, separately, I mean, not on the same day or anythig. I had hairy armpits like all the other womyn.

Cossack silliness

Last night I couldn't go to sleep until I'd read EVERY SINGLE WORD of Boris Akunin's Death of Achilles. It was a such a ripping yarn I couldn't bear to stop until I found out what happened next and then the thing after that and after that until it was all gone. Now I've got to find another book. Sigh.

Apparently Boris Akunin is NOT HIS REAL NAME. I guess if I was called Grigory Chkhartishvillihas I might find a more euphonic non de plume too.

Death of Achilles is the fourth the series of novels about an unconventionally talented Erast somethingovich Fandorin who combines the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes with the martial arts ability of Jackie Chan in late nineteenth century Russia. In this adventure, he comes up against a similarly talented nemesis. The second half of the book is told from the baddie's perspective and makes him seem, if not attractive, then at least very charasmatic and more understandable. There is one badly dangling loose end that meant I DIDN'T sleep very well at all last night but apart from that it was great fun if you can keep track of all the triple barrelled Russian names.

And I've since found out that there are 11 of these books altogether but only four have been translated so far. The first book in another series about Sister Pelagia was also published recently.

If there's a serious subtext to these books I haven't found it yet. I'm sure If they'd been written before Glasnost rather than the mid 1990s, we'd be expected to find counter-revolutionary idealism of pre-soviet Russia. I guess in that case Mr Chkhartishvillihas would have been sent straight to a gulag rather than being Russia's bestselling and most beloved writer (I'm sure I read that somewhere but can't find the link).

What I did for love

On Saturday night my Beloved made me come with him to an awards night for commercial radio. I didn't recognise any of the radio stars unless they were also on television and I kept forgetting to clap when I was supposed to.

What was strange was that I kept asking people the names of the songs they were playing because they sounded VAGUELY familiar from my childhood and FM104 listening youth in Brisbane (before we got Triple J and the only alternative was the unaccessable to teenage girls uni community station Triple Z) but I couldn't QUITE place them. And some of them WEREN'T BAD at all. For instance, David Bowie's "Let's Dance" is a top song. I don't understand why Triple J doesn't play it occasionally. And um some of Bruce Springsteen's early work is quite exciting. And, after enough bubbly, Shania Twain CAN impress me. At the end of the awards, Marcia Hines came and belted out some songs that made her the Queen of Pop thirty years ago. And 500 people danced under the world's biggest mirrorball (not us - we went somewhere else to watch some important soccer match.)

It was all rather like being in a time warp. Instead of listening only to the supposedly cool new music as determined by the Alan Jones's "chattering classes" (or Richard Kinsmill) we were listening to, um, highlights of the musical canon that had survived the slings and arrows of temporary chart success.

Not that there's anything wrong with valuing the great songs from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and today... It's sort of what no-new-books-except-as-a-special-treat bookreading strategy is like, except I don't read the same Colleen McCullough bestseller or David Copperfield every month. And I like looking in the byways for the overlooked and forgotten. And I do have a sneaking respect for what book reviewing equivalent of Richard Kingsmill say. And quite often I borrow new books or I buy the ones I desperately wanted a year later when they're discounted.

But I WANT to believe

I've read three horoscopes today and they all say that my day should be FABULOUS. I should have lots of creative energy and inspiration and money should be falling into my path. Oh and, like a twelfth of the population, I'm particularly ALLURING to the opposite sex this week (must ask my Beloved if he's noticed). Well if that's not going to motivate me to get too much work done in too little time, nothing will!

In other news, I read Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster the other day. This is a charming history of oysters in New York and New York gastronomy. He talks a lot about urban development in the city. It's hard to believe but until the mid nineteenth century the metropolis had meadows and farms quite close by. The oysters in New York were amazing. For a time they practically cornered the world oyster market. It took three hundred years of overharvesting and pollution to wipe them out. Sadly, he concludes that 10 million people probably can't live next door to viable oyster beds.

Kurlansky does popular science and history so well (apart from in Salt which I couldn't finish) and he has the knack of showing that he knows what he's talking about without overburdening the reader with detail. He also has a good ear for the perfect anecdote. I'll be talking about the goings on at oyster cellars for months to come!

Separated at birth?

I've just wasted my lunchtime trying to find photographic evidence for the blinding insight my Beloved and I had at the Australia-Bahrain game last night that own-goal scoring Socceroo Michael Beauchamp* and veteran indie popstar Tim Freedman are either the same person or identical twins.

This is the best I could do. Thanks for your help, Internet!

It's may not be entirely clear but they both have rockstar haircuts, penetrating dark eyes, beetle brows and a face that means business.

Actually they both look rather a lot like Christopher Skase as a younger (living) man.

*That's BEECH-AM not BOWshom as I was merrily calling him all last season.

Now I'll have to think of something else to whinge about...

This arrived a mere day and a half after my shirty email to SBS:

Dear Mary

Thank you for writing to express your concerns about changes to program
breaks on SBS Television. Your comments will be shared with SBS
management.

SBS has taken this course of action following a great deal of
consideration and investigation. It was not an easy decision to make,
but the alternative is less palatable.

SBS could continue with its current format, but its ability to
commission quality Australian productions and to purchase the world's
best films, television programs and sporting fixtures would become more
and more constrained by lack of funds and rising competition from Pay TV
and the other networks.

SBS obtains about 80% of its funds from Government, and the remainder
comes from advertising revenue. Even though that amount is relatively
small, it is vitally important revenue that goes exclusively to the
purchase, commissioning and production of programs.

Under its Act, SBS is obligated to operate in an efficient and
cost-effective manner and, importantly, it is required to actively
pursue funding opportunities independent of Government funding.

The Act also stipulates that SBS is not permitted to show more than
five minutes of commercial advertisements in an hour, considerably less
than the 13-15 minutes typically shown by commercial networks. This will
not change.

Up to now, SBS has run five minute blocks of ads between programs and
the most immediate effect of this is more than 50% of our viewers switch
channels. Because of this reduced audience, our advertising rates have
to be pegged at levels far below the commercial networks.

By placing short ads within programs when we reach peak audiences, our
advertising rates (and revenue) can be increased. All of this additional
revenue, as mentioned previously, will go into the commissioning and
purchasing of programs.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to SBS, you are obviously
a committed, regular viewer; please be assured that your comments along
with others we have received will be given due consideration.

Yours sincerely,

David Lance
Manager, Public Relations

Poor little SBS, people leaving them when they have ads between programs! I'm sure most of those people change channels because the next show will be of absolutely NO interest to them. SBS simply isn't one of those channels you can watch all night. The shows are just too diverse. No-one is interested in both Russian and Vietnamese news and then willing to hang around for dodgy German cop shows and soccer or documentaries about war torn countries. And I don't think South Park fans are all in the Dateline target audience. At least, I never watch Dateline.

Outraged of the Internet

My Beloved thought this email to SBS commenting on their new STOOOOOPID advertising policy was a bit shirty:

I was very disappointed to see four advertising breaks within "Mythbusters" last night and at least two (possibly three) within "Brotown". Please stop this. It is incredibly annoying, especially as most of the ads were for the same three things. I've learnt to live with commercials between programs but if there are this many breaks within shows I might as well watch Channel 9.

Industry experts advise I should have said I'd only be watching the ABC from now on because SBS hates the ABC. But that would be lying because I need to watch SBS for certain things like soccer, The IRON CHEF and, ahem, Mythbusters.

Anyway, I just feel like the world became ever so slightly worse.

The Trouble with Henry

I've finished Henry Esmond last week. It was really funny. I can't explain why without spoiling the ending for anyone who wants to read it but NO-ONE reads Thackeray anymore so I guess it doesn't matter... that much...

All right. Sigh...

SPOILER ALERT:
Towards the end of Queen Anne's reign, there was all this manoeuvring between about who should inherit the throne: a distant relative from Germany called George or her brother who was Catholic who would have been crowned James III. The main characters in the book were hugely loyal to James and instigated a cunning plot to bring him over from France to be on the spot when Queen Anne was ill so she could name him her heir (sidestepping Parliament etc) but he was a MOST unpleasant young man and, having nothing better to go while lying low in a mansion, propositioned the young lady of the house. To protect her virtue, her rellies sent her to the country but he found out where she was and followed. He was still trying to get his wicked way the day several hundred armed followers assembled to march on Parliament or the Tower or somewhere important and declare him the King the minute Queen Anne died. Which she promptly did. Without James being there to stake his claim, the other guy's supporters declared him King George I. James's supporters disappeated, James felt like a right wally and the young woman (who probably encouraged him) preserved her vitue. And the Esmonds were much happier about the new King than they would have been if they hadn't started the whole treasonous enterprise.

END SPOILER

The trouble with the book was that I think he started off thinking he was going to get his hero to America about halfway through it and then got sidetracked by some plot developments. So we never quite work out how they get on carving a plantation out of Virginia or anything. Oh and he make an extremely improbable marriage! But it was funny in places and I enjoyed it enough to keep looking for books of his I haven't read.

Henry Esmond

I'm reading Henry Esmond by good old Thackeray this week. It's another tale of a young man's adventures at college, in love, in the army and eventually in America. The difference is that this one's set in time of William and Mary of Orange and Queen Anne, which was about a hundred and fifty years prior to when it was written. I don't know whether this is why all the lords and Dukes have proper names rather than the irritating dashes he uses in his modern books. And many of them are real too!

It's pretty well exactly what you'd expect from his other books. Thackeray skewers the rich,the pretentious, the drunk, the jealous and the formerly beautiful trying to preserve their looks. Our hero is the unwitting victim of plots for the first few hundred pages and his sense of honour stops him pursuing things to his own advantage. But there is also a lot about the Jacobeans and the politics of the era - most of which are explained quite well. One of young Henry's early mentors is a Jesuit priest who conspires to bring King James back to England. A relative dies at the Battle of the Boyne. When he grows up he goes and serves under the Duke of Marlborough.

Annoyingly, like Thackeray's other books, it's probably a bit too clever by half, with classical allusions and bits of foreign languages thrown in. One of the characters pretends to prefer to speak in French but she's never learnt to write it so her letters are a bit phonetically spelt which would be highly amusing I'm sure if I happened to speak nineteenth century French. And on the train yesterday morning I was reading along and he was talking about the folly of the Stuarts when he put in a footnote of three lines of Greek poetry. I recognised one word (meaning "fool") and if I'd been near a dictionary I might have tried to figure it out but I thought "he's only showing off. I'm sure it doesn't matter."*

This makes me wonder whether people would like Dickens as much if he'd gone to university. Maybe it's his very lack of erudition that makes him so popular still. That and having a few more plots than old WM...

* Of course, if I was reading a proper annotated modern edition I could have found out immediately what it meant but that's all a bit serious and academic. I can't help earnestly reading every note and come away informed but a bit bored. I prefer reading old editions of old books. This is an Illustrated Pocket Classic published by Collins and London and Glasgow in the 1920s. It weighs less than my diary and, even though I don't have a pocket big enough, it easily fits into my smallest handbag.

Earlier each year

Yesterday my first Christmas card arrived. Yes, on the third of October. This is about a month earlier than last year.

Admittedly, it was from someone who retired last month who probably wanted to steal a march on his replacement. I wonder whether the new guy knows or if, in a month or so, he'll innocently ask his PA to get a mailing list ready for Christmas cards and she'll have to say "actually we've already sent 350 out and we can't get any more printed." And he'll sigh sadly into his coffee and wonder why people are so unkind.

I'm DEFINITELY sending him one.

Too quiet

I haven't touched a computer since last Wednesday because my lovely doctor (who must be a bigger hypochondriac than I am), told me, when I showed up with what I thought was a comparatively minor ailment, to stay in bed for a few days. Hurrah! I don't need to be told twice. Time to wade through the last 200 pages of Power without Glory and then the next book on the pile and ... when I realised that all the books I wanted to read next were either at work or still in shops where I couldn't go. Darn and blast compulsory bedrest when there's nothing bearable to watch on television and it's far too complicated to get the computer to work in bed.

So, much to my anoyance, I found myself reading another Henning Menkell book called The Return of the Dancing Master. I actually really enjoyed this one. It didn't have any of the plot holes that bothered me about the last one of these I read. The characters made a bit more sense. It wasn't THAT violent. And it make Sweden sound like a really beautiful place to visit in summer. This had a lot to do with the central character being quite likeable. He did behave quite oddly but this was because he had just been diagnosed with cancer and was on sick leave waiting for treatment when he decided to help solve a murder at the other end of the country. So yes, cocmpletely credible.

Power without Glory became quite tedious. Um, apparently money can't buy happiness and money got the wrong way can't buy lasting political influence. Poor John West. I had to laugh at a bit of socialist romanticism where John West's daughter became a communist and fell in love with a handsome young worker and they were blissfully happy in their struggle for the revolution until he decided he had to go to Spain to fight the fascists and of course he died. It was the only purple bit. Frank Hardy seemed to know more about the sporting side of Wren's career than the politics. He'd explain various political shenanigans and then step back and talk about trotting or boxing instead. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting bit of social history but not that good that book.