Praise be! It's Wednesday!

So annoying to have High Definition telly and NOTHING to watch for the past two nights if you're not interested in ballroom dancing and have already seen all the Oscar frocks online and found out who won what on the news.

I did TRY to watch the red carpet special but Richard Wilkins's hair was so irritating I had to leave the room. My Beloved persisted for another ten minutes but couldn't believe that rich and famous people had to stand there and answer Mr Wilkins's asinine questions of "How long did it take you to get ready? Who made the gown? Do you know anyone here?" I told him that Richard was one of about 50 people they had to be nice to before going in where there wasn't even going to be food.

We're both rather glad we'll never have to bother with all that although the free clothes look nice.

At least there's a reasonable hour or so on the ABC tonight. Exciting inventions and nostalgic music! After that I may be scrubbing the kitchen cupboards because I've been far far too embarrassed to watch more than half of every previous episode of "Extras" and "The Worst Week of My Life".

While ignoring these shows last week, I did read part of an excellent book. It was Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. This was his first novel and published in 1999. He's been nominated for the Booker prize since then and if this pyrotechnic display is a sign of how he would develop I'm not surprised. It's terribly clever but has enough heart to make you not mind the show-offiness of nine sepearate but vaguely related narratives in different genres. Each chapter is in a different voice and place, including Japan, China, Russia, the UK, Ireland and the US. There are echoes of Mishima, that guy who wrote Sputnik Baby, Borges and various SF and thriller writers.

Mitchell seems to have entered alien Eastern cultures particularly well but then I wouldn't really know. Unfortunately the only Australian character is a young woman prone to saying "Oath" so I'm not entirely sure whether to trust him on anything else. Nevertheless, it distracted me from the glowing box for a while.

Making me look bad in front of my Mum

My Mum's never worked in an office and, no matter how hard I try to explain, simply doesn't understand what I do.

Not that I do anything particularly special or important and it can be quite boring to talk about...

But I have felt a bit miffed the last half dozen times I've gone through the exhaustive public service recruitment process (even if the last three times it was to keep a job I was already doing) when Mum hasn't seemed that impressed when they chose ME over ALL THOSE OTHERS.

I say "Look Mum, I'm called a Manager and I have an office with a door that shuts and a window with a view and they've paid for me to go to uni and they're letting me do this special thing because they like me, they really like me."

And she only asks "When are you going to be important enough for work to give you a mobile phone?"

This makes me sad because they just DON'T DO THAT HERE - unless you're the IT manager who gets paid to come and fix the network when it breaks at 4:00 am and even he might use his own phone.

Today I caught up with a mate who was so worried about our restructure that she went and got a job somewhere else doing similar stuff for roughly the same money. They gave her a Blackberry on the very first day.

I really hope my Mum doesn't find out. I'll never hear the end of it.

More about National Literary Treasures

I had a distressingly busy week last week and a fit of extreme resentment that I was late for a meeting on Friday because I waited to cross a road for ten minutes but the lights didn't change. It took me (and the other inconvenienced people) a while to realise that this was the RTA mucking about in case Dick Cheney's motorcade came by soon. (The hovering black helicopters were a bit of a clue.) Strangely, when I'd had quite enough and jaywalked, none of the policemen loitering inconspicuously nearby in their fluorescent vests stopped me. And no, I didn't get hit by a speeding limo with diplomatic plates. I wonder if that would have been reported as "disgruntled public servant interrupts motorcade."

Pavlov's Cat and Meredith have written some lovely tributes to Elizabeth Jolley over at Sarsparilla. They sound glad to have known her and I feel less thoughtless for not thinking about her in so long because she had been ill for several years. I mean, it wasn't that I wasn't paying attention and ignored three masterpieces she'd produced. No, that still doesn't sound right... It's hard to know what you're meant to say when public figures you admire die.

In other news, my mother was less than enthusiastic about David Malouf's Every Move You Make which I'd given her for Christmas. It's a collection of short stories. He was reading excerpts from it at a public reading I attended the other week. She did tell me the ending of the one he'd read most of (which was what I'd expected it to be) but she was frustrated by how many of the stories set up complex characters and situations and then just trailed off...

It's a shame she didn't like it that much as Malouf is one of Brisbane's three literary lions (if you count Nick Earls and Andrew McGahan because I don't think people talk about Gwen Harwood and Xavier Herbert so much now) and they're fiercely protective of their own up there. But I expect it's partly her reaction to not being used to reading short stories any more and partly that novelists don't always take the form of the short story seriously enough. This is certainly why I've been struggling to to think of something constructive
to say about China Mieville's collection Looking for Jake for a while now. Some of the stories are extraordinarily good, taut and well plotted. Others just feel like offcuts from his novels. He's one of the most exciting newish fantasy SF writers around but if you're going to start reading his wonderfully energetic and original work, don't start here. Try Perdido Street Station instead.

Hello and Good-bye

I woke up to the news that Elizabeth Jolley had died and, because the radio was on Triple J, I wondered for half a second if there was another Elizabeth Jolley who was 25 and sang alt-country with Ryan Adams and I hadn't heard of her because I'm so out of the loop. Then they said "writer" and "age of 83" and I realised the radio and I were thinking about the same person.

Well that's quite sad. I liked her books even though they made me feel extremely uncomfortable in a squidgy "oh my God I can't beleive you're allowed to DO that" way. I haven't read any of them for years. The Sugar Mother was particularly, um, awkward-making.

In other news, I read Julia Darling's delightfully mad Crocodile Soup last week. She's a poet and a a playwright and this was her first novel written in the late 1990s. You can't read this story literally (a bit like Elizabeth Jolley really) because the plot's overblown and you're never entirely sure what's happening and what's imagined but it's quite delightful. She enters the mind of a little girl incredibly well - like Donna Tartt did in The Little Friend. But that juvenile sense of unreality continues when the main character grows up (physically at least) and doesn't really cope with the world.

Someone told me she'd written other books but when I went looking I found out there was only one other one because she died in 2005. The other book is about a woman dealing with cancer.

This is like Bruce Chatwin all over again! I mean, in the sense that I find a modern writer I like but they're not going to keep writing for another 20 years like I want them to.

This picture shows the cover of the edition I read. Other editions have a boring picture of a cherubic little girl but this is far better. EVERYTHING that's pictured is relevant to the book, from the red shoes to the Society for Cutting Up Men badge. Looking at it after turning the last page was truly delightful! Good work, publishers, even if it is a bit literal.

Two Lessons of the week

Apart from the unprecendented fickleness of telly programmers*, this week I've learnt:

1. If you're going to avoid the opportunism of restaurants' "Valentine's Day Specials" (where all the tables for four, six or eight are split up and separated by 10 cm and you can't help hearing other people's domestics and the menu is limited to "romantic" food involving champagne and heart-shaped desserts) by staying home and sharing the cooking of a gourmet extravangza, don't be surprised if there's an awful lot of washing up.

2. If you've laughed out loud when a colleague said they're moving house on an odd day, say Wednesday, because they reckon the stars are in a particularly favourable alignment (even though it turned out to rain and rain that day for the first time in months), expect to lose some credibility when you later blame the Mercury retrograde for the computers not working.

*Why suck us into another bad day in the life of Jack Bauer with four hours one week only to continue the story at 10:30 the following week? Why fill prime time with rubbish (I mean "Bones"???) and then put "Stargate Atlantis" on at 11:30 at night? Why waste the last series of "The West Wing" by putting episodes back to back over 11 weeks rather than one each for 22 weeks? Aargh, even with HD I'm going to be reading a lot!

The Poe Shadow

Worn out by another night of staring at the new shiny box, I stayed home today and finished The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. He wrote The Dante Club which was a rollicking murder mystery with real bearded men of letters trying to stop fictional murders. This was about a fictional young lawyer trying to find out what happened when the (real life) Edgar Allen Poe died mysteriously. He tries to find the model of Poe's fictional detectives to help solve the puzzle and he risks his considerable fortune and his position in society in this quest.

I didn't like it as much as the first book, at least partly because Pearl embraces the gothic horror of Poe's stories which I don't know that well and didn't like that much. But there's some good fun in trying to work out who's telling the truth and whether it matters in the end. There's also a lot of research into the real mystery behind the novel which the historical sources note at the end explains quite well.

But I like it a lot less after visiting Pearl's official website. I know these are vanity exercises designed to sell books (why else would the cover have an endorsement by Dan Brown?) but this is just a dumb thing to say:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution groups Pearl with Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers as adding to "the growing genre of novel being written nowadays -- the learned, challenging kind that does not condescend."

If there's anythhing these three writers have in common it'd be that they're American and their books are long. That's not necessarily a bad thing: I love Jonathon Franzen's complicated skewerings of society but the the one Powers book I've read was at least three times as long as it needed to be and incredibly pretentious.

All right, that's a massive overreaction to a tiny thing. But some days I'm surprised Greenpeace hasn't started campaigning for a UN declaration for saving trees by shortening books. The French would of course be the first to ratify but the Americans would probably see it as a threat to their way of life.

Just call me Kath Day-Knight

I haven't read a book for three days.

This is because my Beloved decided he needed to upgrade our perfectly good reasonably-sized much-used telly with something marginally bigger (NOT wall sized) but with a better picture and High Definition (for the two shows a week that have this). In the evenings it now glows in the darkened livingroom with a backlight changing automatically to reflect the level of light and colours on the screen.

It's extremely hard to look away. Even when there's nothing on.

We were trying to watch the cricket last night between rain interruptions. I couldn't stop staring at the added clarity of Glenn McGrath's wrinkles. And the rain looked so good. I could see every drop!

All the ads seemed shiny and new too. I wanted to rush out and buy cars, insurance, fast food, cleaning products. I resolved to make time this week to watch A Current Affair's special reports on what THEY'RE NOT TELLING YOU about something that's probably in newspapers.

There's an episode of Kath and Kim where Kath is hypnotised by the her big screen telly. I laughed then as a watched it on my standard definition 56 cm screen. I'm not laughing now.

Last of the Christmas books

I really don't understand publishers sometimes. Why would you give a book the cover in picture one (an Old Masters painting of a voluptuous seminaked woman) when you could have the much more dynamic exciting, accurate, attractive and relevant cover in picture 2?

Cover one is the UK edition of The Ruby in her Navel by Barry Unsworth.I was given the Australian paperback with cover two for Christmas. Because it looked so pretty, I've been saving it up to read for five weeks. I don't think I would have looked forward to reading it if it had been in cover one. I might even have wrapped it in brown paper before taking it on the train.

The book is set in twelfth century Sicily shortly after the second Crusade where the Christians apparently did quite badly and looked like they were going to lose hold of the kingdoms established in the first Crusade. Many of them went to lick their wounds in Sicily where a Frankish king had been ruling over a racially mixed society for decades, carefully balancing the skills and interests of the Saracen (Arabic Moslem), Byzantine Greek, Italian, French and German populations. The book is about palace conspiracies to reduce the power and influence of the Saracens.

The main character is a fairly naive young Frank who wants to be a knight but works within a Saracen-dominated administrative office. People keep EXPLAINING the political situation to him in a way that's a bit didactic and is probably my major problem with the book. This is an amazingly alien world that does need some explaining (and Unsworth does a fabulous job of describing the physical environment), but the approach is heavy-handed at times.

There's also an extremely exotic Turkish dancer who introduces what sounds like bellydancing to the western world. Phwoar!!!

Cover 2 shows the elements of the plot with its pictures of a jousting knight and a dancing girl (with a tiny red dot in her navel. You probably can’t see that). It also looks like it’s designed to imitate a manuscript that might have been illuminated by someone living in a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic place like Sicily. Maybe it’s meant to be by a monk who grew up looking at Frankish knights but also understanding Arabic decoration. This just makes far far more sense as a cover than a pretty oil painting of a passive naked lady.

And at least cover 2 gives the woman a face.

Stalking David Malouf

I realised yesterday that I've been more or less stalking David Malouf my whole life - although usually at a gap of 30 or 40 years. I went to the girls' highschool across the road from where he says he went to school in Johnno . When I went to uni (the same one he went to and the same department but NOT the same building), I often drove past the site of what he described as his childhood home in 12 Edmonstone St (a weatherboard Queenslander in his day but a nondescript medium rise office building in mine). At highschool, I spent days and days in the old State Library perched on the edge of the city next to the river where he talked about struggling with his Latin translations in at least one of his memoirs. (A new library was built shortly afterwards). I've even followed him on some of his travels he's written about through Belgium, Greece and Italy.

But I've only knowingly shared the same place as him simultaneously yesterday and a few times a decade ago, when I went out with someone who lived in the same inner-city Sydney street as he did. Occasionally, I'd see a dapper gentleman in his middle years crossing the road in the distance. I'd be quietly glad that he was still around and hoped that when he went inside his terrace he'd write something I could read in a year or so.*

Because I think he's quite delightful. Three or four of his books have stayed in the back of my mind ever since reading them. These memories are of gentle, beautifully written books with powerful images even though they don't have the pyrotechnic displays of say Patrick White. (This in itself is odd because Malouf's plots aren't that gentle. Johnno is about coming of age in the 1950s, the cultural cringe and existential angst leading to suicide - even though what I remember about it is the nostalgic visions of Brisbane before I was born. An Imaginary Life is about Ovid dying in the wilderness. Fly Away Peter (I think vaguely) is about a guy coming back from the Great War dealing with demons by birdwatching(??) and The Great World is about a successful businessman who wasn't much good at life.)

Malouf's really good at describing the edges of things and people on the boundaries between one state and another. For instance An Imaginary Life describes the ultracivilised Roman poet coping with exile in the back of beyond and then befriending a feral child who was apparently raised by wolves. Even though that all sounds a bit postcolonial and academic, he was doing it before it was trendy and in a completely accessible way. And readers love him if the crowd of people at the library yesterday is any indication.

Curiously, Random House seems to think he wrote Jane Eyre in 2000. Can't wait to read this. I mean, he is good at historical fiction but he probably would have made it a bit shorter than Charlotte Bronte's version.

*I thought actually going up and saying "love your work" might be too distracting.

Spectator sports

Been a bit despondent since having a bird's eye view of this "brawl" on Friday night. One of the Sydney players was sent off for a shove of less force than I get from strangers on train platforms every couple of weeks* while the ref didn't seem to notice half a dozen punches and headbutts from Newcastle players.

And then the extremely parochial crowd started to yell "go home Sydney" (all right, two people near us) and I suddenly really really wanted to drive straight back down the F3. It was so unfair! We didn't say that the previous week when they visited us! So now, even though I thought they deserved to win and have had a brilliant comeback this season and have the best designed team colours and supporters' stuff in the A-League, I really hope they lose really horribly next week.

Can't imagine what it would be like to be in the sort of football crowd where they use teargas and people die.

The good news is that now we don't have to worry about trying to get tickets to the final.

My mood lifted a bit today when I went to a reading by David Malouf at the newish library in Customs House. Very civilised people go to book readings. Even though there weren't enough chairs, there were no fisticuffs at all. Everyone smiles and listens quietly then claps at the end. Maybe football games should start with a bit of poetry reading.

*inadvertantly, I'm sure, at least some of the time, maybe. But they're usually from young men with headphones in their ears pretending they can't hear the pushees' protests. When I'm a whitehaired purple-wearing octengenarian I plan to pull headphones off these young men and tell them they should have better manners. At this age I'm worried that they might punch me.

Smiling for no reason

Oh and I forgot to mention that Misfortune is beautifully illustrated with several lithographs and the initial letter of each chapter is a wonderful little picture that reflects the story and you can buy one of these from Mr Stace's website. Joy!

Of course, after this, I couldn't just stop reading. Forever. This would have been more satisfying I think.

Instead I went and read another thriller by Swedish national treasure Henning Mankell. This was The Man Who Smiled.

It has quite a nice cover, sadly disfigured with a big lie or at least odd opinion on it where The Times inexpicably claims this is "one of his best". I found it really odd, beyond cultural differences and the translator not being a native English speaker. It was just clumsy with some really dumb leaps of logic in the plot.

It focuses on Kurt Wallander's recovery from post traumatic stress from shooting someone (in a previous book) by investigating the death of a couple of lawyers. Weirdly on his first day back at the office he finds he's very very sweaty so he shuts the door to his office, strips down and dries himself on the curtains. Ewww! Maybe I should have stopped reading at that point