I'll talk about a book again one day soon

I eventually found out what happened in the last ten minutes of The West Wing by ploughing through a 15 page recap at Television without Pity. Major anticlimax really. [Alan Alda gave the briefcase back to Jimmy Smits who claimed he wasn't maintaining a second family but was making payments to support his niece because his brother was a deadbeat and it wasn't a scandal at all and his wife knew all about it. To which I say "yeah right, why didn't Josh make a big deal about this last season when he was insisting on knowing all the background stuff?" Lousy continuity and lazy scriptwriting.]

Speaking of lousy continuity, I've almost finished Thackeray's Adventures of Philip. Our impoverished and disinherited hero is scrabbling away as a jobbing journalist and an insubordinate sub-editor. I kept wondering why he wasn't trying to get briefs because he'd been admitted to the bar three hundred pages earlier (although this was when he was rich and he'd had no intention of practising). I think old WM remembered this at the same time because lo and behold Philip's problems with his boss are solved by him getting first one brief, then another and so on.

I know these serialised novels are the Home and Aways or The Bills of their time but, even so, it wouldn't have killed him to do some rewriting before publishing the whole thing.

Absolutely, positively the last thing I'll say about the most boring election ever

So last night my Beloved and I sat down to watch The West Wing episodes that had been broadcast on Saturday night. We'd planned ahead enough to realise that the ABC was making the unusual choice of showing three hours of election coverage and THEN two thirds of its usual Saturday night programming. The Bill wasn't on but they did show part 112 of this strange documentary where a man is travelling round the world complaining about the locals making it hard for him to see their national treasures and when he does see them he gushes in an unwatchably embarrassing fashion.

I don't know if this means that New South Wales will be behind the rest of the country in the Sun Hill soap opera but worse things may have happened in the world.

According to the program guide, The West Wing was meant to start at 11:15. We set the recorder with half an hour of padding at the end just in case something went wrong.

And last night we discovered that we'd missed the last ten minutes - just when Alan Alda had a choice between giving Jimmy Smits back the briefcase containing possibly incendiary information or using it to blackmail his way into the White House. Thanks ABC. Almost as bad as something Channel Nine would do.

I simply cannot believe that there was THAT much to say about the election that they had to go forty minutes over time when it seemed to be all over by 7:01. Or the previous week.

Dyslexia

I realised after my last post that Carmel Tebbutt only has one kid - or at least that she actually said she wanted to spend more time with her six-year-old son.

She may in fact have other kids she doesn't like so much.

I blame the mistake on eyestrain from spending all day squinting at the election laws.

Most boring election ever

Well that was just as dull as I expected it to be. The only thing that surprised me was that to vote for the Legislative Council below the line I only had to fill in 15 boxes to fill 21 vacancies.

Now, I know 95 per cent of people vote above the line and the below the line votes are supposed to go from regional centres to the State Electoral Commission headquarters to be counted but only asking for 15 preferences to fill 21 spots makes me think it's all a terrible trick and my vote really went into a giant shredder.

Just to be on the safe side, I kept filling in squares until I didn't care any more - somewhere around the 35 mark.

Oh yeah, there were probably closer to 200 candidates than 50. I um have better thing to do than to count that high.

In other news, Carmel Tebbutt is leaving the ministry so she can see her kids occasionally. This makes me a bit sad because it's not as if there are that many sensible-sounding ministers here, much less that many women in Cabinet.

Yawn

There's going to be an election in New South Wales on Saturday. I live in a safe seat so it doesn't matter whether I vote for the incumbent member or not. This meant that the only thing I could be interested in about the election is the vote for the upper house.

Last time (the first time I've voted here) I earnestly took the option to number all the boxes below the line rather than just each group. I did my research. I knew who about three quarters of the 60 candidates were and I knew how I felt about them.

This time, strangely enough, I can't even bring myself to care about that even though there are fewer candidates. As well as the major and minor parties, there are five groups without a name as well as one "ungrouped" group. I know one of the nameless groups is fighting against climate change. They probably would get a reasonably low number and a chance of my vote under normal circumstances but they were too slack to get registered as a party in time. This doesn't augur well for their professionalism. I mean, there are fixed parliamentary terms here. They've had four years to get organised - and ads in today's paper claiming they never wanted to be a party anyway just irritate me because they're not true. Twits.

I know people always choose nice sounding names so the cuddly horseriding party are just as likely to be religious fundamentalists as gun nuts and it'll take me too much effort to research this so I'm not voting for them. Besides, the only horses I get close enough to touch these days have teenage police officers sitting on them as they try to control the way I cross roads after leaving sporting events.

And our Dawn Fraser is running. How sweet. I wonder how many votes she'll get because people know her name.

We have to be somewhere at 9 on Saturday so I'm going to get to a polling booth at 8:50. I mightn't even have time to number the boxes from 1 to some number over 50 I can't be bothered remembering. In fact, it's delightful to read that I only have to go up to 15 (but for 21 seats??? I don't understand.)

But for the first time since I started to vote, I can't be persuaded that it'll make any difference whatsoever to anything important.

Che's Boys?

Last night, we went to see Sydney FC play against the Urawa Red Diamonds in the Asian Clubs Champions League - a strange offseason competition that they got into by winning the 2005-06 season even though they didn't do so well last season. In the first stage, they have to play teams from China, Indonesia and Japan.

This team is from Japan, probably from a place called Urawa. I know almost nothing about them (and can't really get much info from their website because of tragic monolinguism) except that they're the richest club in Japan, have a wages bill for players of $15 million and Sydney was expected to lose this game. (They didn't!! It was a draw!! hurrah!! But that's not the point of the post.)

One of the good things about the game was that about 1000 Japanese fans seemed to have flown in to be there at one end of the ground in their red shirts (the local Japanese fans were scattered throughout the stadium).

They were great to watch because, like every other group of Japanese fans I've ever seen, they take it all terribly seriously and are very um committed to helping their team's performance any way they can. They all seemed to wear ALL the team regalia - shirts, scarves, badges. They had three times as many banners as the Sydney fans in the Cove (even though our fans had two very fetching banners with half of the Harbour Bridge on each side that they passed over their heads until they joined in the middle. Excellent work!). They sang a dozen different songs in at least two languages IN UNISON for several minutes at a time. They had coordinated arm gestures. They had drums. In the second half, the front three rows took their red shirts off and waved them above their heads. If fans can really help a team, the Red Diamonds should have won 6-0. (Which makes me think my footy watching strategy of sitting down most of the time, paying attention to the game and occasionally shouting out useful suggestions like "pass it that way, twit" is likely to be just as effective in motivating the teams I support)

Anyway, one of the Urawa Reds banners just didn't seem quite right. It was an enormous picture Che_Guevara (like on all those tshirts from the Korda photo) with "BOYS" underneath. It could have meant Che's Boys or Red Boys.

Either way it seems strange to think of the richest club in Japan endorsing the Cuban revolution. Wonder what would happen if they took that banner to games in the US.

The Coast of Bohemia

I'm reading another collection of Thackeray potboilers that include "A Shabby Genteel Story" and "The Adventures of Philip." The first story more or less retells Cinderella but with a nasty twist at the end. This made me quite despondent and I hid the book under the bed for a while after that.

Then I started the next part (which has a subplot revealing a slightly less horrible result to the first story - hurrah).

Anyway, in the middle of one of his usual hackneyed plots about morals and manners, there's a delightful passage where a young man is seduced by the pleasures of the demimonde and has become a bit of a slacker:

Ah, think where he might be, and where he is!' [laments his father]

Where he was? Do not be alarmed. Philip was only idling. Philip might have been much more industriously, more profitably, and a great deal more wickedly employed. What is now called Bohemia had no name in Philip's young days, though many of us knew the country very well. A pleasant land, not fenced with drab stucco, like Tyburnia or Belgravia; not guarded by a large standing army of footmen; not echoing with noble chariots; not replete with polite chintz drawing-rooms and neat tea-tables; a land over which hangs an endless fog, occasioned by much tobacco; a land of chambers, billiard-rooms, supper-rooms, oysters; a land of song; a land where soda-water flows freely in the morning; a land of tin-dish covers from taverns, and frothing porter; a land of lotos-eating (with lots of cayenne pepper), of pulls on the river, of delicious reading of novels, magazines, and saunterings in many studios; a land where men call each other by their Christian names; where most are poor, where almost all are young, and where if a few oldsters do enter, it is because they have preserved more tenderly and carefully than other folks their youthful spirits, and the delightful capacity to be idle. I have lost my way to Bohemia now, but it is certain that Prague is the most picturesque city in the world.*

I love the way he plays with the metaphorical and real country. And provides a recommended condiment for imaginary fruit. (Assuming lotuses are imaginary. They're in Homer so I thought they weren't real but it's been a long time since I worked in the produce section of the supermarket.)

Nice work, WM!

* WM Thackeray The Adventures of Philip Etc, McMillan 1904, pp150-151

Newsflash: Commuters not angry!

As a result of an unprecedented demonstration of planning and forethought, a quarter of a million people crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge on foot yesterday and got home without being trapped on major transport routes for hours and hours.*

Of course, they could just as easily walk across any other day but they wouldn't get fluorescent green hats from the taxpayers for their trouble.

* Actually I read somewhere else that there were delays but people were in such high festive spirits (because of the poisonous dye in the hats??) that they didn't mind very much.

Lucky escape

I thought I'd had a memorable enough journey home last night when the young stranger wedged next to me in the train carriage told me he'd just got back from overseas where he'd seen the stage musical of the book I was reading (Wicked by Gregory Maguire). He sounded so very thrilled but I couldn't tell whether this was because he loved musicals in a Friend of Dorothy way or if he was excited about being OVERSEAS. Seeing the book tells the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West in a very grown up way, I was tending towards the first assumption.

Luckily I didn't ask him to compare Judy Garland to whatever happened in this new musical I'd never heard of but talked randomly about how much better this book was than the Frank Baum Oz books I hated as a kid because then he spent the next 15 minutes on the phone to a female friend from his church who'd just become a pastor and talked about his first time travelling on his own at extraordinary length (Not that I'm making any assumptions about the mutual exclusiveness of Young Christians and campness - it just would have been awkward to have assumed the wrong way when we were sitting so very close together).

I'd almost decided not to catch that train because it was a bit full but my Beloved was home sick in bed and waiting for me to cook him dinner. If I'd waited another five minutes, it would have taken me three hours to get home because of another tiny problem with the transport system.

I simply can't imagine how I would have coped with being stuck on a train for two hours with that many people. At least I could have kept reading my book until it got too dark.

Reading for Fun

Pavlov's Cat has re-started her semi-dormant blog about books and writing called A Fugitive Phenomenon. The first new entry is about her job reading four novels a week for the "In Short" reviews in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald (and probably The Age as well- I wouldn't know). This seems like a serious waste of her time and talent. I mean, I read those reviews every week. They're really short - she says abotu 180 words. They contain just enough information for me to go "yes" or "no" or "maybe Mum would like that for Christmas" but aren't "proper" book reviews as such. Some weeks, if it's quite clear from the title or author that I'm not likely to be interested, I don't even read anything except the first sentence. But, with the other (longer) book reviews, I feel obliged to read every word. I guess that I assume that because someone's put the effort in to write so much I might learn something even if it's a book I wouldn't read unless it and I were all alone together on a desert island.

And I hadn't actually noticed that someone had to read FOUR books every week to write about a THIRD of a page of one part of the paper. Talk about labour intensive!

Although part of me would love to hang around at home reading all day, another part would really prefer to be writing 1,000 words about one book a week - ideally one that I wanted to read in the first place. Maybe Pav could try that approach - with each column continuing the review of the first book and the final sentence of the fourth column saying "oh and don't bother about the other three books pictured. I hated them." Kind of like I do here...

Anyway, too clever by at least a quarter Gilbert Adair has written a spoof whodunnit called The Act of Roger Murgatroyd. He plays with the genre of the polite murder in an English country house in the 1930s where all the genteel guests are suspects and cannot escape until a blizzard abates. There's even a lady novelist specialising in detective stories on the scene who talks at length about her own work and how she wouldn't try anything as cliched as a "locked room mystery".

Everyone has a motive for killing a thoroughly unpleasant young man but as clues gather, it becomes harder and harder to tell red herrings from kippers. There's a map at the front that I spent several minutes puzzling over when the book describes the house's layout but it made no sense. One of the characters talks about how dumb it is for readers to rely on diagrams for clues so I felt suitably chastened (this feeling was only alleviated by smugness when I guessed the murderer well before the ending).

In short, the book was a delight. The period details seemed spot on and it had a reallt satisfying conclusion.

Staying out late to watch telly

Some days I feel very idealistic. I dream about reducing my footprint on the earth even further below the Australian average than it already is because I can go weeks without using a car, I live in a flat, I buy Safe toilet paper and I'm too indecisive to buy new clothes very often. (Please bear with me. I realise this assessment is delusional and can't be fixed unless I install a worm farm on my balcony to compost household waste, persuade the cat to live off local insect life, work out how to isolate the air conditioning from my office and convert to green power even though it will double the power bills).

Other days, high faluting principles seem a bit too hard.

One of the principles I've been persuaded to adopt is not to get Pay TV (evil mind numbing commercialism, think how many books you can buy for $50 a month, we watch quite enough dross on free to air etc etc.) This means that the only ways we can see Sydney FC play when they're not at their home ground is to travel long distances to away grounds or find a pub with Foxtel. And I haven't actually kept a running tally of how much we spend on beer in the interests of saving money on pay TV.

Usually finding a pub is ok unless they don't want to swap their tellies over from the cricket or rugby or fashion TV. Usually SOMEONE will agree to show it and, if it's an important game, we can go to proper offical club screenings at the casino. At least they turn the sound up.

But last night it was all a bit hard when the team was playing in China. From 10:00pm. On a school night. When I was tired. I couldn't help but wonder why I was hanging on a bar stool when there was a perfectly good telly all on its own at home that could show me the game if we weren't so very PRINCIPLED. And it wouldn't notice if I wore pyjamas.

To change the subject entirely, last week I read a gently wonderful book called The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg. It was about the way people love poetry for different reaons and whether poets' intentions matter and how myths about poets can arise. It's also about finding love in odd places and being brave enough to change the direction of your life. I quite liked the cover (which is this picture above) because all the things on it are important to the plot (and goldfish are cute) but the colleague who lent it to me thought that it had made the book not sell very well. You also learn an awful lot about Emily Dickinson and her work.

Two days in bed with Patrick White

I've been quiet for a while firstly because of unexpected busy-ness, then being a bit ill and then YESTERDAY

Oh my, YESTERDAY!!

I was so stressed by the effort of getting on a train after the line that had been closed (because someone had been killed*) along with everyone else who had obviously been waiting for an extremely long time so were incredibly pushy, smelly and shirty that I had to turn around and go home again.

Absurb. I'm wondering if Cityrail will pay the resulting medical bill or if it's my fault for not realising in advance that it would have been quicker to walk. Or more sensible not to go at all.

Anyway, last night I managed to see the second part of the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. They were talking about Patrick White's The Solid Mandala which I read a long time ago and remember liking very much - unlike every other book of his I've read. Half the panel loathed the book with the sort of passion I can only respect. In fact, word for word, it's how I feel about DH Lawrence (who was probably one of White's models) "all these words and 50 pages about a walk but we can't work out what happened!" - I read Women in Love at uni and found it so obscure I didn't notice two characters got it on until the tutor raised the subject.

But Jackie Weaver (!!) was such a fan, it was truly delightful. She'd read the book three times (and was still a bit unclear about the plot but loved the ambiguity). She confessed to having had a standup fight with Frank Hardy about the virtues of White - I would have loved to have been there.

Then she talked regretfully about how people don't read White any more because gone is the era when you could take a book to bed for a couple of days. Everyone else claimed this was outside of their experience. No it's not Jackie! I'd do it all the time if I didn't have to go to work five days a week.

* By a train. A mere station away. What a horrible way to die.