Ch-ch-ch-changes

Lately I've been researching a new (to me) subgenre from the self help section of the bookshops, all about babies and birth and stuff.

This has been quite a revelation. I mean Kaz Cooke's Up the Duff does have a week-by-week narrative about the oddly named Hermoine* and her experiences with six different health professionals as her girth expands and there is a baby at the end (I sneaked a look at the last chapter) but, by and large, these books they lack a lot in the areas of PLOT and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and include a lot of things to give potential parents of a nervous disposition NIGHTMARES.

Worst of these is The CHOICE Guide to Baby Products.


Look at the gorgeous little thing on the cover. How cute. What a happy sausage!

This is exceptionally misleading. This book should be subtitled "3000 ways in which you can cause your child's DEATH or DISABLING INJURY by shopping poorly."

Indira Naidoo has been the face of Choice for the past few years. As I was reading each section about HOW PRAMS CAN KILL and SAFE BATHING I heard her dulcet tones in my head, telling me that I need to be vigilant all the time and I can't do something as simple as letting my parents send me the cot used perfectly safely by my grandmother, her brother, my father and at various stages by me, my siblings and my niece and nephew. If a cot doesn't comply with the Australian and New Zealand standard of 1998, sleeping could be FATAL for your baby. Apparently.

It's all a bit hard really. Luckily, I've got this far without major misadventure and, in a week or two, if all goes well, touch wood and fingers crossed, I should get to test my compliant baby transportation, storage and washing equipment.

In the meantime, I'm going to catch up on some books with plots.

*The MOST IRRITATING NAME EVER because everyone who's read Parade's End or Harry Potter or Greek mythology is used to seeing "Hermione" and I was hoping it was a typo from the first edition but someone gave a me a more recent copy** that STILL called her "Hermoine" and it's spelt this way on her website.

** Yes I have two copies of the same guide to having a baby. If you'd like one, please let me. Strangely, my friends without children are reluctant to take the spare just in case they might need it some day

This man really IS Canadian

On Sunday we were watching Stargate Atlantis , one of those sci fi shows where all the alien planets are covered in temperate forests sort of like North America and all the aliens speak English. A bunch of earthlings has set itself up on the planet known as Atlantis in an abandoned ancient city that was underwater when they came along. Anyway, while the American military dominates the colony, there's an international flavour to the team and a lot of exaggerated accents.

One of the main characters is a dorky scientist Dr Rodney McCabe played by David Hewlatt. He's quite cowardly a bit like Zachariah Smith on Lost in Space, hopeless with women - actually with most people not just women, very sure of himself technically but kind of cuddly and a genuine genius.

He's meant to be Canadian. I can't actually pick a Canadian accent and over the years have caused a great deal of offence by accusing Canadians of being American so I was idly wondering whether he really was Canadian and what, if anything, making the token Canadian such a neurotic but clever character said about the state of US-Canadian relations.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that he is quite famous in Canada as a Canadian person.

I was less pleasantly surprised to find that the show is filmed around Vancouver which means that, not only can I not spot Canadians, I also can't spot Canada.

So now I'm wondering if including Canadian local content (not just actors) is a condition for filming dodgy telly shows in Canada. I wish we'd pushed for Australian characters in Farscape rather than condemning years of NIDA graduates to playing aliens.

See Colleen, THAT'S how it should be done

Yesterday I finished Count Belisarius by Robert Graves. I hadn't read any of his books since I was at school and I have extremely dim recollections of the BBC miniseries of I, Claudius - I suspect Mum and Dad wavered between trying to send us to bed because there was a lot of murder and mayhem and letting us stay us because it was "educational". I certainly had the odd nightmare about Caligula for several months after that.

Anyway, Count Belisarius is the story of Belisarius, a general in the late Roman Empire who was most active in the time of the Emperor Justinian (who's famous for codifying Roman law and freight prices). The book was a longwinded collection of battles over a forty year career that went on a bit much about the fighting styles of the various oppenents and marching from here to here and building siege engines to take towns that ten years later would fall again. But you get that when it's a biography of a general I guess.

The rest of it was mixed up with a wonderful love story with his powerful wife Antonina, lively descriptions of imperial politics and, most challenging of all, the theological disputes of the time.

Graves tells the story from the point of view of a pagan Greek-educated slave of British origins. And this authorial voice is quite charming. It catches a lot of the tone of Plutarch's biographies by telling anecdotes from various stages of Belisarius's life to illustrate particular virtues or moral failings.

I know that there are really good sources for Belisarius's life (at one point the slave has much to say about how the official biography was vetted by the general's political enemies) but I don't have time to work out what's "true" and what Graves made up.

I actually don't think I need to. I felt like I was reading a real history of the period as told by a charming author. And I don't know that I'd enjoy the original sources any more than that.

This was so different to how I felt after ploughing through Colleen McCullough's unreadably dull Roman sagas. These beat you over the head with the weight of her "largest private library of Roman history" (on Norfolk island at least). She retold all of Tacitus's scurrilous gossip as truth and randomly made up a wife for Sulla just to add a bit of sex and drama to a pretty dramatic story. For someone who can write bodice rippers, it was amazing that she could make late Republican history so very BORING. Or at least more boring than the guys who were around at the time.

So thanks Robert. This almost makes up for The White Goddess.

On death and working

On death: We've been out gallivanting for the past four nights and I haven't seen any news. So I was really surprised and saddened to read in today's paper that Kurt Vonnegut had died.

Poor old Kurt. At your best, you were magnificent.

I remember when I was 18, a friend handed me Salughterhouse Five saying "YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!!" And I was absolutely astounded that anyone could write a comedy about firebombing Dresden. At that stage I hated science fiction - even kinda sorta but not really science fiction - so I wouldn't have found his books on my own. And I still think about one of the (Cat's Cradle?) where some chemical (Ice-9??)can make all the water in the world freeze or something. And in one of his other books, there's an amazing room with a grand piano at the top of the Chrysler Building in New York. I really hope that was true.

On working: Lesson in life #502 - if you're at all unsure about whether or not to a dress shows too much cleavage for someone giving a serious and dull presentation to a roomful of people, and if you rely on your boyfriend's opinion that it's perfectly fine, don't be surprised if that roomful of people aren't looking at your face when you're talking. And next time, wear a camisole.

Easter and Parthenogenesis

I was thinking yesterday as I wandered in to work that Easter is the perfect length. It's like two magic week-ends at once so you get more than twice as much done as you would in two ordinary week-ends. I had time to socialise, sleep, play Trivial Pursuit, do ordinary chores AND a whole pile of things that had been postponed for months, read two books, see a band and shop. It was great! And there was chocolate too.

Why then did I feel so ripped off when my diary said that Tasmania has something called "Easter Tuesday"? How good would that be? Lucky Tasmanians.

One of the books I read before Easter was Glory Season by David Brin. He's a complicated American SF writer with strangely right ring politics. So far so dodgy. Trouble is he writes like a dream and creates these internally consistent worlds so you find yourself admiring his detailed description of the effects of a double sunset or moonrise on the alien plant life without noticing the utter repugnance of what he's on about. For a while anyway. I've been trying to work out exactly why this book makes me feel so very uneasy.

Glory Season is about a planet run by women. Society is dominated by clans of clones who've found entrepreneurial niches for themselves and their descendants. Men are needed to do things women can't such as sailing and "sparking" the production of clones at one time of the year (apparently parthenogenesis doesn't work and sperm is still needed to make women grow placentas. I know, I know. It's SCIENCE FICTION.) For the sake of diversity, some people are produced sexually at a different time of the year. Unique individual women produced this way are second class citizens and their only hope of reproducing clones of themselves is by developing a profitable talent. Men and women have been altered so they each want to breed at the times that have the best genetic outcomes for them. There's a lot of dwelling on the detail of breeding rituals and the women seem preoccupied with continuing their line, even at the age of 15 or so.

For some reason though Brin's world still assigns talents based on current (and increasingly discredited) assumptions about gender so that women still can't navigate and don't like playing computer games. Over thousands of years, this society has decided to turn its back on technology and adopt a low tech pastoral model which while not unique in the universe is still ascribed, at least in part, to the feminist preoccupations of the planet's founder.

His framework for describing this world is through the points of view of two marginalised people: a disadvantaged "unique" young woman with unusual mathematical abilities and a (normally functioning) male visior from another planet who arrives with news that other people are on their way. In the end we know society's going to change both techonologically and gender-wise and that this is a GOOD THING.

I guess I'm bothered by the fact that it's a bloke who's setting up this Amazonian world - and it is Amazonian - the women fight an awful lot and the male visitor comments several times how distractingly beautiful they all are. It's a bit of a teenage boy wet dream place. That's probably a sci-fi genre issue. I'm also bothered that the dramatic tension is about trying to redress the balance towards more gender equity. But then, you know, what else could it be about? And for all that, it was a really good read. Much better than some of his later "Uplift" books where humans joined intergalactic civilisation and made chimps and dolphins speak.

Now we can keep some real secrets

I used to work for the Commonwealth. On my very first day as a baby public servant, a man from security came to give my fresh-faced colleagues and me a lecture on the importance of maintaining security . We were told that it was our job to protect the information we'd be allowed to see. If we left secret or confidential files on our desk at night, someone would confiscate them and leave little pink slips telling us to collect them from the security office. I don't think there was an actual three slips and you'd become unemployed policy but I'm sure he thought there should be.

He then showed us photos of different types of cabinets to keep our secret documents in. They ranged from Class A which were lockable filing cabinets to safes with combinations we were instructed to guard with our lives. In the middle were metal cabinets with special "alligator" keys that had different serrations on either side of a gap. To this day, my worldly possessions have not been as well guarded as the most lowly confidential files were in that Department.

The final part of his chat was about destroying secret documents. He had little plastic bags containing the output of different sorts of shredder. He was very dismissive of the one cut shredder that simply turned your documents into ribbons because blind Freddy could put those pages back together. Two cuts, which led to squarish confetti was a bit better but best of all were the machines that made 1mm a side confetti. It would take REAL determination for someone to reassemble those secrets.

Sadly I rarely shredded anything although I did learn how to hide my secret files where security wouldn't find them.

Several years later I joined the New South Wales public service. I realised they were slightly less um paranoid about keeping secrets when I saw that our office shredder was the size of a lunchbox and only turned things to ribbons.

Not that I'm obsessed by shredding. I mean I wouldn't have shredded anything at all except that the cleaners would often take papers out of the recycling bins to line our rubbish bins (so the plastic bags lining them don't get dirty. Each day they throw away the dirty paper that would have been recycled... I don't understand either) and I kept finding personnel files and job applications and tenders from other floors in the building in my bin. Seriously...

Anyway, the point of all this is that yesterday we got a brand new confetti making shredder the size of a Great Dane that can shred a book in 10 seconds with a satisfying ripping noise. It has warning signs on it about not letting small childrn fall inside. I finally feel like someone is taking us a bit more seriously.

"Oscar winner" means "avoid at all costs"

I haven't seen a lot of the recent movies winning the best picture Oscar or even the movies with best actor (or "actress") winners. A lot of this is because I think I'll hate the subject matter. I don't like watching pretty ladies getting hit so I haven't seen Monster's Ball or Million Dollar Baby . I'm pretty sure I won't see Notes on a Scandal because our Cate seducing a schoolboy? I don't need to see that. And The Queen just continues the never-ending soap opera of the Windsors* in a way I don't need to give my $15.50 to help.

Also, I think there's so much hype about these movies that often I feel like I've seen them already and there'll be two or three thinkgs I don't know in advance which isn't good value for the price of a ticket when I can spend $11 on a secondhand book by Thackeray that will take three weeks to struggle through to the agonisingly protracted conclusion and still find a final plot twist to give our hero a happy ending.** Hooray! And other times, I think these movies are made just to attract prizes and I'd rather not see someone showing off to win a prize thank you very much when I want to be entertained by a well made but not self conscious movie.

So, I don't know why I feel ripped off that I thought The Departed winner of four academy awards was a completely overblown overacted self-indulgent pile of old codswallop. Jack Nicholson was chewing the scenery. Mark Wahlberg was off the planet with ridiculously foulmouthed rants at subordinates. Martin Sheen's Boston accent came and went as he kept slipping into President Bartlett mode. Even Leo di Caprio wasn't pretty enough to distract me from the silliness of the plots within plots of organised crime and corruption in the law enforcement agencies. The only bits I liked was trying to work out which parts of Boston they were using for locations. At one point, it looked like they used the same house for Leo that Matt Damon had in Good Will Hunting but that's another "Look at me I'm acting movie" so I really don't want to have to go and check.

Anyway, despite knowing what it was about and who was in it and that it had won all these prizes, I was STILL disappointed. So this is the very last "Best Picture" I'm going see, ever.

* There was a question in Trivial Pursuit last night asking what the surname of Princes Harry and William was (yes in that order) and the answer was Mountbatten-Windsor. Can't imagine why they need a surname but if they do, wouldn't "Windsor" do?

**It wasn't actually that good a twist. Philip was struggling in lower middle class wage slavery because everyone thought he'd been disinherited by an uncle who had a fight with him the day before he died but the most recent version of the will which gave Philip some cash was missing because the old man was thinking of changing it again so the estate was divided on the basis of an older will before the uncle decided Philip was all right. At the end there was a dramatic revelation of the newer (apparently valid) will but Thackeray didn't bother to explain how that affected the relatives who'd been merrily spending the money for the past few years. No need to go to Chancery for 25 years like in Bleak House. He'd probably filled up enough pages by then and just wanted a happy ending.