Reading Underwater

Head of the Corner

2008-10-23T14:41:00.005+11:00

The other week I read a charming little book called Head of the Corner (Google won't find me a picture)by award-winning journalist, novelist and poet Grace Ingoldby.

At least I think it was charming, in a way that reminded me a bit of Virginia Woolf's trick of getting completely inside people's heads.

It was about a collection of mismatched variously flawed and self deluding characters who'd all found refuge as guests or workers in a convent on an small island off Ireland. They all thought about their lives while the convent set about closing down and moving to Europe. Half the dialogue was with people who weren't literally there - not including conversations with God and the saints.

But the points of view shifted and there was so much interior monolguing going on that I'm not entirely sure what happened at the end SPOILER ALERT Someone might have claimed to have seen a miracle. Press may or may not have descended. This may have been a foolhardy ploy to fake a miracle to keep the convent on the island. My real problem was that at the end "a familiar looking body" was found floating in the harbour without any more identifying clues. I could think of at least three characters it might have been including one who'd died and been buried in the island's cemetery that was meant to be falling into the sea chunk by chunk, someone who'd been said to have fled the island but may have killed himself instead of going home and the resident no-hoper who might have tripped over a sheep. But I simply couldn't work it out for sure END OF SPOILER.

And it was driving me crazy.

Over the next fortnight I had a couple of odd dreams about these Irish nuns.

In fact, I was so bothered by not understanding this basic plot point, I tried to find a review of the book. I mean on-line of course.

But I couldn't because it's from the late 1980s.

And then I found out that the author, sweet, clever and wise Ms Ingoldby passed away almost three years ago.

So I can't even ask her what she meant.

Maybe I should just set up a book club.

Must be here somewhere

2007-12-12T18:41:00.000+11:00

It's been two and a half weeks since we moved but I still feel more dislocated than relocated. I keep turning the wrong way in the kitchen, opening the wrong drawer in the bathroom and fumbling for light switches which aren't where they used to be. For two weeks I didn't have the internet which meant that I had to do about three hundred administrivial things like paying bills and finding out about bin night by talking to actual people using what my mum calls the steam powered telephone. It felt really odd to ask questions out loud rather than looking for a written answer on a website. And the boxes I've unpacked! Who knew that thousands of books would need scores of boxes to move a mile. And none of them feel like they're in the right places yet.

The fact that the government changed while I was off-line gave me a real sense of precariousness about the state of the world. The telly kept talking about "Prime Minister-elect Rudd" but I didn't really believe it because I couldn't read political bloggers. I kept expecting to wake up one morning and find out the election result was all a house-moving delusion.

This sense of unease and confusion wasn't helped by reading the deeply unsettling A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Benton/. This is about the physicist Shroedinger (of the cat fame) who left Austria for political reasons after Hitler invaded. He sought refuge in Dublin during the Second World War when the infant Irish nation was in a state of tenuous neutrality, being bombed "accidentally" by the Germans and half expecting to be invaded by either side.

Schroedinger didn't really fit in. He lived with his wife, mistress and unacknowledged child in a deeply Catholic society. His home life suffered because of food and heat shortages and because he had a disastrous affair. His work wasn't going well. The weather was foul. He had enemies, both real and imagined, everywhere.

Benton created a great sense of menace and danger throughout this book that kept me perpetually off balance as I waited for some momentous disaster or another. I also felt quite out of my depth during long discussion about Irish poltics and physics. So, not really an easy read for a beach holiday.

Regrets, I have a few

2007-11-19T08:50:00.000+11:00

We're moving house next week-end so Beloved and I voted this Saturday.

Curiously, this isn't one of the 30 grounds for eligibility for a pre-poll vote. Having to work, travelling interstate and being more than 8 kilometres from a polling place for the whole day all are but being a gibbering wreck because your worldly possessions are hiding in boxes so you can't make a cup of tea without dismantling a cardboard tower all confusingly labelled "kitchen" that has somehow been wedeged between the bedroom door and the disassembled bed frame is no excuse.

I know from past experience that there's no way I couild cast a valid House of Reps vote in such a mental state, much less vote below the line for the Senate (and I have to vote below the line. No way those big party party preference deals are going to detract from me exercising my democratic right to put Pauline last).

So off we went to the local community centre, fictitious story about planning to drive to Brisbane on Friday prepared in case anyone asked.

But they didn't. Phew, wouldn't want to be caught LYING to an Commonwealth Official, would I? There might even be a $50 fine for that.

It was pretty painless actually. There was hardly anyone waiting which was just as well because Winnie was grizzling and it took ages for me to get up to number 79 on the Senate ballot. And we met the mother of one of the candidates who seemed quite nice. They even had long enough string on the pencils in the cardboard booths for me to write with my left hand without contorting and looking like I was trying to cheat from the person on the right.

But it's hard to believe we now have to wait a whole WEEK for the result. A whole week to wonder if I did the right thing...

And now GetUp has this quiz to help you make up your mind by matching your opinions with candidates' policies. Of course, based on this, I should have chosen someone else. Do you think they'd let me go again?

Poor semicolons

2007-11-13T22:25:00.001+11:00

Between the Christmas catalogues from every shop in the city, real estate ads and the electioneering guff, the letterbox has been pretty full lately. Luckily, junk mail is of tremendous interest to small babies. The pictures are bright. The pages make a delightful crackling sound when scrunched and one of Winnie's great joys in life is tearing pages into bits small enough to fit into her mouth.

I don't like her actually EATING this stuff though. I mean should I bother sterilising her bottles if I let her eat chemically treated wood fibre covered with glossy inks?

I'm also fairly sure I don't like the idea of her ingesting some of the political messages either, especially the poorly phrased and designed brochure that arrived today containing the following crimes against punctuation:

"IF LABOR WINS

....

The Liberals won't be there to stop unions going into small business and dictating economic policy; costing jobs.

....

With no checks and balances, in a cosy and risky relationshop between the Labor States and Labor Federally; small bausinesses, our strong $1.1 trillion economy , and the families dependent on its stability, WILL suffer."

It's the semicolons I feel sorry for. It's not their fault but they reakly do look dumb up there.

Swimming with Sharks

2007-10-22T09:35:00.000+10:00

Oops, looks like I fell off the internet again.

I read >Sea Change by Robert Goddard the other week. This was a great read about dastardly political skulduggery and derring-do in eighteenth century England and parts of Europe.

Goddard tells a really complicated story about what happened to the secret account books of the South Sea Company, which collapsed disastrously embroiling most the great and good of the time in a bribery scandal. Many different people are on the trail of the book with murder in their hearts. Through it all, a hapless impecunious mapmaker struggles to keep his head and get the girl.

This was an utter delight: the sort of book I wish Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle had been. There's a dizzying cast of lords, earls and other titled bods but a helpful glossary at the back helps the reader keep track. Goddard clearly knows his stuff but doesn't beat you about the head with everything he's found out.

One of the more dangerous people chasing the book hither and yon worked for a parliamentary committee of inquiry. He was sent overseas armed (with arms and with powers of arrest) and able to demand full assistance from the diplomatic service. Let's hope Mrs Bishop desn't get ideas for using powers like that in her next committee inquiry.

Assuming she gets another inquiry after the election...

Speaking of which, both local candidates for the major parties were at our local fair in baby-kissing moods yesterday. Beloved and I looked at each other in horror and hurried Winnie home.

Blog Entry 220: in which Mary tries vainly to say something new about motherhood

2007-10-02T10:54:00.000+10:00

Winnie is five months old today.

So I've had five months of casual clothes, not wearing a watch and and struggling to do the most basic administrative tasks between baby sleep times.

If anything, my gorgeous girl looks more like this picture of Winston Churchill than when she was born - except for the bow tie. She's one of those babies whose impossibly round cheeks complete strangers feel compelled to pinch. Most of the time she finds this hilarious. The rest of the time, she's a screaming horror.

When's she's awake, her two settings are delight and despair. The tiniest thing (or nothing visible to the adult eye) makes her swap between the two. I spend half the day singing, shaking jingling things and waving toys at her to keep her smiling.

I'm still a bit surprised by how interested I am in her. It's like my genetic programming kicked in when she arrived and a switch in my brain turned me clucky. I lie awake and worry about the world she'll live in. I want to buy her endless toys and clothes but haven't bought anything for myself for six months. I devour news stories about babies and children and utter silent prayers of thanks to unknown powers that we've avoided major problems so far.

This means that I'm not reading very much at the moment. Even stranger, I feel no burning urge to be snarky about books I haven't enjoyed that much (Irvine Welsh, I'm talking about Glue here. What a waste of ink!) or to tell people that I agree with the Booker judges about The Inheritance of Loss and other judges about Mr Pip (Yes, very good. More please). I just sort of want to let things flow for a bit.

It's a beautiful day. I'm going to take Winnie for a walk and if there's time to read a book, I'll enojy it if I can.

Drugs are bad, mm'kay

2007-09-14T13:42:00.000+10:00

I knew having a baby would cost me money, take all my time and mean I wouldn't be going to the movies for a while, much less going out dancing every week-end.

I even half-expected far worse things to happen than did (eg stretchmarks, not finding childcare, losing touch with childless friends)

But I didn't know it would cost me my will to blog.*

Weird eh? Actually, not really. Half the time I'm too busy playing happily with my gorgeous girl to blog and the rest of the time I'm in far too high dudgeon about the idiocy of all levels of government to type anything I won't regret later.

But I can't let Mrs Bishop's latest outrage against years of expert opinion for the sake of political pointscoring pass without comment.

She's Chairman (sic) of a parliamentary committee that has just recommended a new emphasis on zero tolerance for drug use as opposed to harm minimisation strategies that actually treat addicts as human beings and addiction as a health not a moral issue. To give her credit, at least the non-government committee members were allowed to read the report this time. Her last major inquiry (into childcare) was discussed at a meeting arranged for when it was common knowledge that the ALP members were busy electing Kevin Rudd as their new leader. They complained. They got nowhere.

Yesterday Mrs Bishop was on
Triple J's the Hack program using her Margaret Thatcher perfumed steamroller approach of repeating ad nauseam that drugs are bad and policies that allow drug use to continue in any form are bad.

My carefully thought out comment is:

Harrumph.

Bring on the real election campaign.

*Years ago, when I was an impressionable teenager, there were anti-drug ads on telly that said something like "I knew heroin would cost me mony. I didn't realise it would cost me my friends, my job, my looks, my boyfriend and my health." Probably just as ineffective as the scary ones showy ice addicts gouging their arms but they made the point that there were consequences of addiction.

New football fan?

2007-08-27T09:34:00.000+10:00

This isn't a photo of us watching Sydney FC play on Friday night.

One excellent example of optimism is taking a three-month-old baby to a second soccer match after missing 80 per cent of the first game she went to because, at various stages, she was cold or hungry or had a wet nappy or didn't like the noise and needed to be walked around.

It was almost worth it though: at her second game, Winnie only needed two new nappies, one feed and confined her screaming to 20 minutes. She did spew on my nearest neighbour who asked to hold her for a while* but, on the upside, she fell asleep for the final 15 minutes and had to be woken up to go home. I reckon I saw 30 minutes of the game.

*probably also a season tickedtholder. I wonder if she'll be back...

Only picky because I care

2007-08-21T13:12:00.000+10:00

I finished The Laments by George Hagen yesterday. I'd rescued it from a discount bin in a notoriously mercenary book chain because I loved the cover. And it is both very pretty and an extremely accurate reflection of the book's insides. (Good work, book designers!)

Curiously, even though I'd read the blurb, the title subconsciously reminded me of The Commitments and I half expected it to be about a Celtic musical group rather than a family with Lament as a surname.

According to Howard Lament, Laments have always travelled. That's his reasoning for uprooting the family at the first sign of problems where they're living at various times in South Africa, Rhodesia, Bahrain, England and the US. And they do have problems: from baby swapping and family tragedies to unpleasant neighbours and disappearing bosses.

But, despite their misfortunes, there's a lot of joy in the Laments' lives and Hagen has a charmingly light touch that never strays into mawkishness. I was very teary at the ending but glad at the same time. I also reaaly loved the way Hagen described the ups and downs of a marriage over a couple of decades as the partners grew and changed.

I did have two quibbles: a newborn is described as smiling delightedly at people which is high;y unlikely if not impossible (Winnie didn't do this for four weeks) and a boat is found abandoned "in the Coral Sea twentyt miles east of Brisbane" which I think would probably be a bayside subrban backyard. But these are tiny things realy.

The other day, before reading the Laments, I almost bought Hagen's next book Tom Bedlam which is all about long lost sublings and trying to create a family in the nineteenth and early twentieth century England and South Africa but I wasn't sure how the touchy-feely stuff would be overwhelmed by the grand historical themes. Now I think it'll be great.

Pink's just a colour like any other

2007-08-17T17:28:00.000+10:00

If you've never bought your baby girl pink clothes and most days avoid dressing her in the pink things well-meaning rellies have sent because they don't really go with anything, you shouldnb't really mind if strangers say "oh what a gorgeous little boy! How old is he?" After all, they're not to know, unless they're actually watching a nappy change.

Still, I don't understand why boys get ALL the other other colours.

Not quite right

2007-08-15T14:35:00.000+10:00

I probably haven't said so in so many words before but I often to like to think that there's a parallel universe where I grew up next door to Jasper Fforde. At seven we would have promised solemnly to marry each other when we grew up. In primary school I would have instructed him carefully in the right way to play "Mothers and Fathers" and he would have let me help stage motor cross rallies with his matchbox cars. We would have listened to The Goon Show on ABC AM on Saturday afternoons, giggled at The Two Ronnies on Friday nights and hidden under the couch during Dr Who. We would have discovered PG Wodeghouse and Jerome K Jerome together but probably one of us would have introduced the other to Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut.

Of course, in high school we wouldn't have been seen dead together and would have ostentatiously ignored each other on the bus home but in second semester of first year of uni he would have run into me in the queue at the undergraduate library. He would be wearring the most deplorable acid wash jeans and a chambray shirt that his mum had bought but we would have realised we both adored Red Dwarf and we'd have picked up where we'd left off six years earlier. For the next decade, I would try to set him up with any single women I knew: "He's really funny. You've just got to get past the bad clothes and hair." Eventually, of course, he would have found someone utterly perfect and completely unlike me and got married and on the day of the ceremony my heart would have quivered ever so slightly because things would never be the same between us again.* I mean, where else was I going to another male friend who read the Brontes voluntarily? And who else would have come up with something as delightfully absurd as Jurisfiction? And why can't we all have home gene-splicing kits so people can have pet dodos?

This background explains my shock when I got to page 60 of Thursday Next's latest adventure First Among Sequels where she says:

"Since I'm an Outlander I have powers of abstract and long-term thought that most fictioneers can only dream about. The thing is I don't generally tow the line, and Jobsworth doesn't like that."

Oh Jasper!

Luckily, this is about the only thing I can complain about. The book's an utter delight otherwise, a comic tour de force of sci-fi and literary in-jokes coated in whimsy, puns and metaphors streched to the point of absurdity.

I like the Thursday Next series better than Fforde's two Jack Spratt books, not least because she's such an attractive heroine. In this adventure, she's something of a rarity in popular fiction - at least as written by a bloke: a 52-year-old female action hero with an active sex life. Good on you, Jasper.

*Any resemblance between this fantasy and the plot of My Best Friend's Wedding are acknowledged but purely coincidental.

Karl Marx and H.G.Wells

2007-08-10T09:39:00.000+10:00

Lately, when I should have been reading tips on baby-wrangling or cleaning the oven, I've been struggling with The World of William Clissold by H.G. Wells.

This was a infuriatingly uneven treatise on how H.G. would like to redesign the world dressed up as a novel with a curmudgeonly protagonist perfectly balanced by the chips on both his shoulders. (Incidentally, I've never understood that expression. My parents used it a lot, confusingly, often when we were having chips for tea. I remember at least once them telling my big brother to "get the chip off his shoulder" in response to some ordinarily petulant statement like "Mary's got more than me" or "why do I have to turn the telly off to have tea?" and we'd both look for the chip we thought had somehow leapt off his plate.)

I'm not just guessing that these are H.G.'s views: he has a overly defensive foreword where he protests far too much that this is FICTION and just because most of his views are consistent with Mr Clissold's doesn't make the book any less of a NOVEL. And Wikipedia says so too, so there.

Basically, William Clissold is a rich scientifically-trained industrialist who doesn't like the way the world is run and wants to rearrange everything so that men like him are put in charge of a world government because they'd manage everything far better than the current crop of politicians. This was set in 1925 so he was upset by the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution and the failure of the League of Nations to achieve anything like a meaningful World Governmnent.

So far so dull. But there were some cute whimsical things in between the megalomania. Mr Clissold was very keen on socalism which he thought had been dreadfully distorted by Karl Marx's idea of history as class struggle (although he spends about 200 pages crticising the landed gentry for mistrusting not just the working classes but clever men like himself).

He thought Marx should have smoked less and taken more exercise, preferably cricket although he acknowledged that this would have been difficult given the length of the Marxian beard, even in an age of great beards.

This made me wonder what the Cricket World Cup would look like now if Marx had started a trend of cricket-playing amongst Communists. After all, Iron Curtain countries would have had a very long time to develop professional state-based training regimes. There's no reason why they would have stopped playing once the walls came down. In any case, I don't think Australia would be doing that well if they had to face China, Russia or Cuba in the Baggy Green. And what would that do to our national identity?

The Trouble with Harry

2007-08-01T14:33:00.000+10:00

This is some sort of record for me:

Time elapsed from aquiring (borrowed) copy of Harry Potter #7 to starting to read: 18 hours

Previous performance (for HP #6) (approximate only): 30 minutes

Time elapsed from starting to read to finishing HP#7: 43 hours 36 minutes
HP#6: less than 24

What I was doing instead while trying to read Harry Potter #7 in order of relative frequency:
1. Feeding the baby
2. Changing the baby's nappies and clothes
3. Playing with the baby
4. Persuading the baby she'd like to go to sleep
4. Washing the baby
5. Sleeping
6. Talking to grownups
7. Watching telly
8. Cooking
9. Washing clothes
10. Washing myself
11. Shopping (for food!)
12. Exercising

Number of these I didn't have to do while reading HP #6:
1-5 (well obviously), probably 9, maybe 8 and, in all probability, 12. I may have skimped a bit on 5 and 7 last time round too.

And I was pretending that motherhood hadn't changed my priorities!

Oh almost forgot: time spent treating the internet with extreme caution to avoid spoilers: 8 days.

Conversations ended with hands on ears and loud humming to avoid hearing spoilers: 3

Number of spoilers encountered (in a newspaper! with no warning!!): 1

And another thing

2007-07-23T16:30:00.000+10:00

This is a dodgy photo of page 4 of today's Sydney Morning Herald. It's a full page ad about how great APEC is going to be.

That would have cost a lot.

The fine print says "With your assistance, we [the "Australian Government"?] can successfully showcase Sydney to the world."

Which is a bit of an Irish way of telling us to stay home, out of everyone's way.

NOT sulking

2007-07-23T16:22:00.000+10:00

In case you're wondering, I'm NOT upset that the Socceroos were beaten by Japan in the Asian Cup quarter final.

I'm NOT cross at Vince Grella for getting sent off, leaving his team mates to struggle on with ten men for a really really long time.

Really I'm not.

Let's just look at Winnie's favourite toy instead of talking about it anymore.

Scary, isn't it?

She looks up at that for ages and shakes it by its crinkly skirt.

She'd eat it if she could.

Twelve weeks old and already I don't understand her!

Four Bloody Nil*

2007-07-17T17:47:00.000+10:00

Looks like I was WRONG yesterday about the Socceroos crashing out of the Asian Cup.

But I really really really don't mind.

Lucas Neill is still a twit though. Wish I'd got the mini-Viduka instead now.

* With apoogies to Michael Palin's Gordon Ottershaw.

No hope

2007-07-16T16:30:00.000+10:00

Wish I'd waited till AFTER last Friday to order Beloved a Socceroo figurine for his bithday.

Then I wouldn't have caused us to have a miniature Lucas Neill at home who'll constantly remind us of his pointless RED CARD against Iraq and how Australia won't actually have any defenders when they take on Thailand tonight* and we'll crash out of the Asian Cup and soccer will go back to being slightly behind LAWN BOWLS in levels of spectator interest** and I won't need to fret about taking Winnie to the next WORLD CUP in South Africa because we're not going to qualify for anything ever again.

At least I didn't decide to order a mini Mark Schwarzer.

*I mean GOOD defenders. We'll have people there but they won't stop many of the other ones from running along wherever they want to be.

**Beloved keeps saying that the Socceroos weren't fired up because there were only about three fans at each of the games they've played. We'd talked vaguely about going over but soon realised we had absolutely no idea how to take a newborn to a stadium much less how to get her to Thailand without a truckload of things babies need. It was all too hard. But that doesn't excuse the other 10,000 people who went all the way to Germany last year. They can't all have had kids.

Mogblogging

2007-07-12T13:46:00.000+10:00

Ok, I never thought I'd ever exploit my cat, GAFIC, for blogging purposes seeing he's not really able to give permission for the use of his image but, um, this is quite cute and I've been stuck on the same book for a couple of weeks now and that's far too boring to talk about just yet.

These two shots show GAFIC in his new favourite spot - under baby Winnie's crib. When I get up in the middle of the night to feed her, the cat gets up too to keep us entertained. First he rubs against my legs for a while. Then he runs up and the hall a few times. Then he jumps underneath the crib and plays peekaboo. Very cute.

This one shows his second favourite spot - in the middle of the baby's playmat, preferably when she's on it.

I keep telling him I'd be more impressed if he could only play with the toys the right way but he's far too dignified for that...

Um-ah

2007-07-09T08:24:00.000+10:00

Daniel Johns just told the Triple J breakfast show that he thanked Bono on his latest record because he said he liked the demo tapes for it. Jay and the Doctor asked whether Daniel was there when Bono listened to them so he felt constrained to say the tapes were good and Daniel said that yeah, he was. On a really "bizarre day", he said he visited Bono at the house he was staying at in Sydney and he, his wife Natalie Imbruglia, Bono and PETER GARRETT all lay round on a bed smoking joints listening to these tapes.

Daniel is so sweet and frank sometimes...

But it's just as well Parliament isn't sitting or poor old Peter Garrett would be hassled mercilessly about whether or no he inhaled.

Anarchy rules

2007-07-05T13:41:00.000+10:00

According to today's SMH from next year prams must be sold with tethers so if people forget they're pushing their precious bundles of joy around and answer their phones, their prams won't roll off into rivers.

This makes me so cross. It's NOT HARD to use a pram's brakes or hold onto it with one hand. It takes far far less concentration than driving. The first time I took Winnie out I was surprised how quickly the pram built up momentum downhill but two minutes of practice later and I worked out what to do.

The article says that parents are only going to be "encouraged" to tie themselves to the prams but I can just see the disapproving looks on people's faces if you dare to go out unrestrained. And heaven help you if you shop like me by leaving the pram at one end of the aisle in the supermarket while trying to find something quickly. You'd soon be pulled up short by your harness. Gives new meaning to the idea of kids tying you down!

I wonder if failure to tether will be grounds for Mal Brough to take away whatever tax concessions parents get.

Don't quite know why I'm so upset but such a small thing when incompetent terrorists have paralysed international travel for days. Maybe I really am
an anarchist after all.

IM IN UR CRIB WATCHING UR BABY

2007-07-03T16:05:00.000+10:00

Be good if I could get a camera in my hand when my Geriatric and Fat Indoor Cat (GAFIC) jumps into the storage basket under Winnie's crib. So cute! So kittenish! Such an attention-seeking beast now there's a new member of the family who has all this STUFF in spaces where he used to laze about. Poor cat.

Over the past few days, in between laughing at GAFIC and feeding, cleaning and playing with the baby, I read In the Woods by Tana French. I bought it because I loved the cover and the way the edges of the pages are black. The photo doesn't show this or the lovely dual textures of the cover. It looks so SPOOKY and interesting that I didn't even mind paying full price (or not much anyway). It's a beautifully designed book.

For once, the inside didn't disappoint. This is really well executed police procedural set in contemporary Dublin. The thirty-something Detective Ryan is investigating the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in the same suburban remnant wood where two of his friends disappeared at the same age more than two decades earlier. He was with them but was left behind for some reason and he has no memory of what happened. He's convinced the crimes are connected and turns his world upside down trying to recover his memory and prove this.

What makes this book so good is the way French evokes the thoughtless animal joy of childhood and the atmosphere of suburban Dublin. The contemporary scenes are scattered with enough pop cultural references (Scissor Sisters, South Park etc) to make it seem part of the real world too - unlike many in this genre. I can only assume the stuff about how the police operate is true too. Ryan's central relationship is with his partner and this is really beautifully realised as the emotional and professional core of his life.

This is the sort of book where I have to put it down and do something else to avoid rushing through to the end pell mell and I was sad to reach the last page.

Hmm

2007-07-02T17:44:00.000+10:00

According to a terribly scientific quiz at the political compass (thanks, Pav), I'm further to the left on economic issues than Marx and than Ghandi on social issues .

Gotta stop reading that pinko-bleeding heart-black armband Sydney Morning Herald if I want to hold my head up on the Lower North Shore.

Mind you, if I did stop reading it, I wouldn't have come across this oddity from a bestelling Russian-American author Gary Shteyngart on being told that his publishers had rushed to print an additional 200,000 copies of his book Absurdistan after a favourable review in the New York Times Book Review:

"Who are these people? They must be incredibly rich to have time to just sit around and read."

Maybe they'd need to be incredibly rich to pay full price for hardcovers...

Week-end paper silliness #2

2007-06-26T13:51:00.000+10:00

According to Tim Elliot's review of an exhibition of Latin American art at the Museum of Contempory Art, parts of the catalogue are printed in invisible ink. Words will only appear after exposure to light.

I hope this idea doesn't catch on for other books. It'd be pretty clear I'd never got past page 50 of Ulyesses.

Week-end paper silliness #1

2007-06-26T13:20:00.000+10:00

I don't often read the "Open Gallery" column in the Sydney Morning Herald but I'm glad I did last week-end. This sounds like a doozy:

"Another series of photos Incinerator Holiday emerged from negatives found at the Waverley garbage incinerator. When developed they were covered in red blemishes with a texture like rice paper, the blurred landscapes glazed and weathered but compelling."

I don't know whether the artist cropped out the grinning tourists from the foreground or if the original photgrapher was like my dad who only occasionally and grudgingly allowed us kids to sully his perfectly framed piictures of whatever beauty spot we'd driven all day to visit.

It'd be pretty odd to walk into a gallery and find your old holiday snaps up on the wall and called art. But the way these look, you probably would haved thrown them away for a pretty good reason...

Speaking of my Mum

2007-06-22T17:12:00.000+10:00

One of the nicest things about having a baby is the outpouring of home-made gifts. A mate made her this hat:

Friends of my mother made this blanket:

and decorated this piggy bank:
My Mum loves to knit and could probably win prizes at country (or even city) shows if she was so minded. Winnie has three beautifully matching hat, jumper and bootie sets, a crocheted shawl, 12 little shirts with individual embroidered things on them including frogs, clowns and soccer balls and a wonderful embroidered cot blanket. It's a joy to look at all these lovely tiny things.

But she has set the bar pretty high. Even though Winnie's other grandmother isn't so craft-y, she made this bear:

Beloved and his family reckon it looks like Homer Simpson with ears. They teased her about it non-stop for days.

I really hope it becomes one of WInnie's favourite toys.

No, it's not me, it's the book

2007-06-22T16:55:00.000+10:00

I've spent the past couple of weeks showing Winnie off to her extended family, coping with the worst weather in years and trying to enjoy reading John Birmingham's Final Impact: World War 2.3, the third in the Axis of Time Trilogy where all these twenty-first century military personnel and their ships have gone back to World War II and change the outcome in confusing ways that go bang rather loudly.

The first two of these I manage quite well. The book-enjoying didn't work partly because I started at volume three but mostly because it was all about diferent sorts of weapons being deployed anachronistically described in intricate detail. There were some cute things: the future became fairly common knowledge in this alternate past so for instance people were calling John F Kennedy "Mr President" in 1944 and Prince Harry, a daring SAS officer, called the teenage Princess Elizabeth "Grandma" but mostly I found it a bit of a struggle. I thought my brain was rotting because I could never keep track of the different characters and their weapons and it took me five minutes to find my place every time I picked it up. But then I read antoher book in a day and realised that maybe unapologetic action adventures really aren't for me.

And it's not Mr Birmingham. I mean I quite like his journalism and I did laugh a lot at He died with a Felafel in his Hand although I wish there was some law preventing anyone over the age of 50 from reading it because my mother got some exceptionally odd ideas about what went on in my share houses from him.

Competitive? Moi?

2007-06-07T14:53:00.000+10:00

Winnie and I battled a deluge to get to the first meeting of our mother's group this morning.

Until today I thought those people who covered their expensive prams in clear plastic covers were being silly and over-protectve and possibly suffocating their young. But after walking a kilometre in the heaviest rain we've had for two years while trying to hold an umbrella over the open front of the pram so Winnie didn't drown and getting completely soaked myself, I kinda get it.

I also see why there is a baby shop right next to the Early Childhood Centre. Canny move that.

And I'm extremely grateful that they could sell me one of those stupid covers so that next time it rains I can struggle to push the pram while holding the umbrella over my own head. Of course it probably won't rain like that until Winnie's in school now...

Anyway, it felt strange to walk into a room full of sleep-deprived anxious new mothers and realise I was the most obviously bedraggled.

These groups are meant to make you realise you're not alone. That's great but I walked away worried that I wasn't doing about ten things right. Apparently we're meant to spend every waking moment staring into our babies' eyes and show them toys they're too young to see and talk to them all the time, even reading to them if possible. One woman said she read New Idea to her baby and the nurese said that was all right. I was too shy to admit that this week Winnie and I have been reading Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins. Or at least I've been reading the few bits to her that don't involve horny older men trying to get into bed with adolescent girls. Or taking psychotropic drugs. Or just plain silliness.

It's slow going (because I'm reading five pages at a sitting) but I'm enjoying it for it's show-offy pyrotechnic language and flights of fancy connecting odd things like Peruvian indians to the prophecies of Fatima and gun running to post-impressionist art. Robbins uses similar conspiracy theories and covoluted plots as Pynchon and Phillip K Dick in this book but it seems more lighthearted and less ponderous than their work. Could just be me though.

But then

2007-06-01T15:58:00.000+10:00

On Monday, with the baby bonus burning a hole in my bank account*, I paid almost full price for Engleby by Sebastian Faulks because I read this review.

It was marvellous - in an icky discomforting way that gets in your head and stays there. The narrator has such a powerful authorative voice (and such good grammar)that it takes ages for you to go "but, hang on."

A couple of days later odd bits of it keep coming to mind just like with Ian McKewan's Atonement. Both of these books bring the world of a vanished genertation of English people back to life really convincingly and both depend on the memories and misunderstandings of fallible people. And with both of them you just go "Oh why did it have to be that way?" Yes, highly technical assessment there I know.

Actually a bit cross with the review for saying Engleby was an expert on classical music because most of his references were to seventies pop and folk band. And his name reminded me more than anything of Burgess's deeply unattractive poet Enderby
who is similarly self-centred and opinionated - and drunk too for that matter.

I haven't read anything by Faulks before. Not sure why but at least partly because I was a bit put off by the "Sebastian" - but now I'm intrigued. I might even BUY them.

* I HATE it when the government I despise gives me stuff I don't really need for doing something I was going to do anyway. Really should send it to orphans in Africa rather than fritter it away on books. Stupid government pandering to my greed. Just becauase I take your money don't expect me to vote for you!

Nice cover, shame about the insides

2007-05-30T08:57:00.000+10:00

I've been reading a lot lately in bursts of 20 minutes or so between doing baby stuff. Annoyingly, I haven't found any of these books THAT good and while I'd rather not bag novels people have put a lot of effort into unnecessarily, I can't keep quiet about Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt. It COULD have been really good but it just struck me as lazy and derivative.

Plotwise it echoed His Dark Materials by Philip Pullmanand China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and it borrowed a lot of pseudo-Victorian technologies from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. More obscurely I thought the overly long climactic battle owed a lot to the ending of the Japanese horror movie Tetsuo II The Body Hammer.

It's even marketed as being similar to His Dark Materials. (The blurb also refer to Sussannah Clarke but any comparison is just silly.)

The man is clearly an SF fan - apparently he set up one of the first SF websites in 1994. But this book read like a pastiche of the best bits of recent successful fantasy novels: enagaging young heroine, check, interesting technology check, airships check, different species of people including some with exoskeletons check, artificial intelligence check and MAGIC check.

There's also a laziness of adopting details from the real world that bothers me a lot. For no apparent reason people who live in mountains have prayer flags and meditate just like Tibetans. Folk froim the "Uplands" speak brogue and play things like bagpipes. Heart-eating dark gods have names ending in "tl" just in like pre-columbian central America.

And I know I was tired but the last hundred or so pages really dragged for me.

None of this would be so bad of course if I hadn't paid full price for this book.

Mother's little helper

2007-05-25T14:49:00.000+10:00

It's probably fair to say that before Winnie came along I was ridicuolously paranoid about the prospect of going a bit post-natal. I've been working full time for 13 years and I'm used to talking to adult people all day. I wasn't sure I'd cope with months and months of relentless nappy-changing and baby-feeding.

A few weeks ago we were watching The Collectors and this woman had sent in her collection of blue plastic objects she'd found in the street while pushing her son's pram around. While these things were quite a lovely blue colour (she couldn't bring herself to keep anything red or green even though she picked them up occasionally) no amount of calling it the art of the "found object" could disguise the fact that she was picking up crap from the street like a bag lady.* I looked at my Beloved and asked him to shoot me if I started doing stuff like that.

So far, I haven't time to feel sorry for myself even if there was anything to feel sorry about. Friends, family and community support people are ringing me every day to ask me how I am. This is lovely and heartwarming* and quite a bit different to my poor old mum's day when she was stuck in the burbs without a car and people apparently scowled when you tried to take prams on public transport.

But I thought I might have been crossing a line yesterday morning when I wheeled the pram into the bottle shop at 10:30. I was there to buy wine to go with the dinner I was going to cook and I had two enormous shopping bags full of food as supporting evidence... but so worried was I that the man behind the counter might think I was about to go home and drown my baby blues that I bought UNREFRIGERATED white wine.

* I have tried to call crap art myself. When I was 17 I went through a phase of picking up black shoes I found in the street. I thought it could be a sculpture project for school art but after I had a dozen or so shoes I realised I couldn't stand the smell of other people's foot odour anymore and threw them out.

**except when they ring when I'm trying to sleep (which is at least once a day.)

Positively Loopy

2007-05-23T14:20:00.001+10:00

I shouldn't really complain too mcuh about not liking The Loop by Koji Suzuki because I bought it for its pretty psychedelic cover.

It's meant to a be sequel to the two Ring books which were made into movies both here and in Japan. For those who missed them, these eminently credible horror movies involved a curse transmitted by watching a videotape imprinted by the mindpower of a troubled young woman who may have been dead at least some of the time. Perfectly normal and believable.

The sequel however just pushed the boundaries of believability a a bit too far - even for me reading this in the middle of the night while trying to feed a tiny baby.

I've never really "got" Japanese fiction. Not that I've read much besides Mishima and something by Haruki Murakami that may of may not have been Sputnik Sweetheart*. I don't know how much is cultural differences or bad translations.

SPOILER But putting all that aside, this book was seriously odd. It argued that the first two books had occurred within a computer simulation of the world that had started with just machine code for the physical world and evolution had happened in exactly the same way as in the "real" world down to people being exactly the same. And the curse of the Ring jumped from the computer simulation to the corporeal world. Spooky! END SPOILER

Yeah so um, not one to read in a hurry.

*There was lots of stuff about the Russian dog Laika orbiting the world but the only bit I really remember because it was so dumb was a two page explanation by this character of why she hadn't dyed her hair to meet someone for the first time who would have been expecting her to have black hair and now it was grey which depended on dye lasting about two days. Odd.

Another bad book for an anxious new parent

2007-05-22T17:30:00.000+10:00

The night before I went into hospital, I started reading The Slapping Man by Andrew Lindsay.

I didn't get far that night. On page one a woman gives birth to a child with a monstrously deformed jaw. On page 2 she's worried he'll bite her boob off while breastfeeding.

Luckily that turned out all right in the end. The baby grew up up to be Ernie, a man with a powerful jaw that could withstand any amount of violence.

This book took me two weeks to read because I kept losing my place.* But this is exactly the sort of self-consciously odd book I find a bit irritating at the best of times. It's set in an isolated coastal community of indeterminate siuze full of "quirky characters". There's Ernie who makes his money from being slapped and his quirky parents and the quirky town butcher who wants to slaughter every different animal and the town publican who's scared of his brother the butcher and quirky Jean who sleeps with everyone but hasn't kissed anyone since her first boyfriend died and finally there's Vronsky the fake town shrink, the quirkiest of them all because he hears all the town's secrets.

It's structured around really short chapters focussed on one character that may not relate to anything else that happens. Some of these are quite poetic but it's impossible to work out how much time passes during the action - it could be weeks or a couple of decades. Yes, I realise this is probably the point.

Anyway I was surprised that even though there was heaps I didn't like, it wasn't that bad. Some of it was even pretty funny. Oh and I liked the cover.

*Admittedly, for most of that time, I WAS heavily medicated, sleep deprived and a bit excited about having a tiny baby of my own to cuddle and wrap up and try to tickle.

Fire and Brimstone and all that

2007-05-21T10:23:00.000+10:00

The week before Winnie arrived, I was desperate to finshThe Volcano by Venero Armanno. This was mostly because the book weighed almost two kilos in hardcover and I didn't think I could hold both it and the baby. It wasn't really because of the plot because you knew pretty well what was going to happen from the beginning.

The book tells the story of Emilio Aquila, a Sicilian post-War immigrant to Brisbane who got caught up with a crime lord and with union-busting railway management. Along the way he could never really shake the nickname "Devil of Sicily" he got as a youngster for living as a brigand on Mt Etna and kidnapping a girl who then had to marry him.

This was published about five or six years ago and I used to see a lot of people reading it in public. It has a lovely cover and sounds like a terribly PC postcolonial immigrant tale. But I was put off from reading it then. This was partly because the reviews talked about the use of ancient mythology (Pluto kidnapped Proserpine on the slopes of Mt Etna and took her to the Underwold to be his queen except she wasn't happy which is kinda sorta what happened to the protagonist and his wife) and I'm dubious about modern novels using myths because it's hard to do it well. But in this book, it wasn't that heavy handed and it did work.

And there were a lot of good things going on that I enjoyed a great deal such as descriptions of migrant life in Brisbane in the 1950s where the locals were as casually and unapologetically racist as you'd expect. Life in Sicily during the war sounded very grim too. Where the book did lose me though was in the present where Emilio befriends an annoying young woman who's trying to study creative writing and is depressed after the death of a boyfriend. Some of this - such as her discussions with her incompetent supervisor - is meant to be funny but it doesn't really work for me and I got annoyed that she had not one but two artist boyfriends.

So, a lot of pages, a lot of story, a lot of great background research but ultimately unsatisfying.

Good but not for the squeamishly expectant

2007-05-18T10:47:00.000+10:00

A couple of weeks ago I read The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser. Until just now I didn't realise it's technically Australian because the author has lived here since she was 14. This is a reasonably excusable oversight because the novel is set almost completely in Sri Lanka with a couple of excursions to England.

The action takes place from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s amongst the privileged Sinhalese class who were wealthy and socially powerful but never accepted by the Europeans as equals even though they sent their children to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge and bought their suits on Saville Row.

The central figure, Sam, is a very unhappy barrister who spends his whole life being rejected by both his mother and the society which unaccountably defies his expectations, rewarding people he sees as useless and denying him his just desserts. He can't bear Sri Lankan independence: at one point he laments that he has to put up with pineapple jelly when he'd been raised to appreciate marmalade. This unhappiness makes him very cruel.

I thought it was remarkably good. It starts off with Sam's account of his life and the case he thought would make his career. Mercifully, this is quite short because he has an overly fussy, ironical voice. Most of the rest of the book is narratged in the third person, some from other viewpoints so you can qury the reliability of Sam's version of events.

The blurb on the front of the book says that it is reminiscent of Remains of the Day. This is a fair enough comment about Sam's capacity for self-deception but there is a lot more going on in the story. The jungle is described magnificently. One character changes from a hunter to a proto-ecologist over time. There are ghosts of dead children and magical visions. It's a very fine read.

But I really could have done without reading about a stillborn baby when I was eight and a half months pregnant. I poked Winnie until she did somersaults after reading that bit.

The Rich are Different

2007-05-17T09:25:00.000+10:00

I also read the May edition of Vanity Fair when I was in hospital.

I admit I only bought it because the cover had two of the cutest things in the world on it: Leo di Caprio and a teensy weensy cuddly fluffy white polar bear cub. What's not to like?

Inside, I learned that Bobby Kennedy Jr - son of Bobby that got shot in 1968 and apparently an environmental lawyer - chose his prep school in upstate New York himself. He was attracted to his choice because it had a zoo.

A zoo.

At my school we thought ourselves lucky to have grass.

How I almost burst my stitches

2007-05-16T10:18:00.000+10:00

When I was in hospital with Baby Winnie, I couldn't hold both her and a book. Well I could HOLD a book; I just couldn't keep it open and actually READ.

So I spent a lot of time reading magazines. Very slowly because my concentration was shot.

This profile of of superstar artist Jeff Koons made me giggle far too hard. It alleges that when Jeff was wooing Ciccolina, an Italian parliamentarian and porn star, she didn't speak any English and his Italian extended to ordering dinner.

Instead of LEARNING Italian, he spoke English to her with an Italian accent.

Eventually, when that didn't really work, he got a translator to help but she had to be dismissed when she fell in love with Jeff.

And he reckons he was surprised when the marriage didn't last...

Life without the interwebs

2007-05-15T09:54:00.000+10:00

Back again. Strangely enough hospitals frown on new mothers using computers in bed. In fact, some of the midwives were a bit dubious about books too. One went so far as to say I wouldn't have time to finish the trashy novel I was trying to read between feeds until 2010.

My how I scoffed!

But 13 days later when I got to the last page and couldn't remember the beginning, I realised she had a point.

Anyway, the baby is delightful. We think she's the most beautiful thing in the world - far cuter than Princess Mary's newborn for instance. But I know that to the rest of the world she probably looks like Winston Churchill - except with a more boring hat.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2007-04-24T17:07:00.000+10:00

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

2007-04-17T11:07:00.000+10:00

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

2007-04-16T09:39:00.000+10:00

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

2007-04-13T13:45:00.000+10:00

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

2007-04-11T10:34:00.000+10:00

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

2007-04-05T15:48:00.000+10:00

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"

2007-04-03T12:01:00.000+10:00

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.

I'll talk about a book again one day soon

2007-03-30T16:44:00.000+10:00

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

2007-03-28T10:01:00.000+10:00

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

2007-03-27T09:20:00.000+10:00

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

2007-03-26T16:34:00.000+10:00

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

2007-03-22T17:05:00.000+11:00

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?

2007-03-22T11:34:00.000+11:00

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

2007-03-20T15:29:00.000+11:00

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!

2007-03-19T09:45:00.000+11:00

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

2007-03-15T14:04:00.000+11:00

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

2007-03-13T11:32:00.000+11:00

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

2007-03-08T15:44:00.000+11:00

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

2007-03-07T12:18:00.000+11:00

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.

Praise be! It's Wednesday!

2007-02-28T16:45:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-27T14:56:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-26T11:58:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-20T09:28:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-16T09:39:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-13T16:48:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-12T12:53:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-09T13:23:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-07T11:46:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-06T13:59:00.000+11:00

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

2007-02-01T15:39:00.000+11:00

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

Sorry, there was a point to that last post

2007-01-31T11:29:00.000+11:00

Anyway, the "noisy/quiet" distinction was sort of relevant last week when I was reading Misfortune by Wesley Stace (confusingly, the nom de plume but REAL name of a comparatively well-known musician John Wesley Harding* which is in fact his stage name (nom de scene??))

This is an excellent book. I bought it because I fell in love with the cover but I don't understand how I missed hearing about it in because it got very positive reviews in the US at least.

It is a "noisy" book with lots of quirky characters who talk funny like in a Dickens novel and with the aristocracy behaving atrociously in a way reminiscent of Thackeray. As commonly happens in books by both of these guys, the plot relies on a large number of coincidences to resolve itself.

As a pastiche, it's really good but it does far more than that. Stace plays games with the expectations of the form to shift back and forth from omniscient to first person narration (and talks about this too). One of the characters is a balladeer and there's a lot about song writing. One chapter has someone in a fever speaking only in traditional songs. Another character is obsessed by a very peculiar poet.

It's the story of a foundling raised by an eccentric lord who decides, despite all physical evidence, that he has adopted a daughter. Because he's the richest man in England and quite peculiar, the servants, his wife and eventually the child collude to keep the illusion alive because the truth would too much for him to bear. This causes much confusion and consternation eventually.

Themes of hermaphroditism, cross dressing, and sexual awakening are handled really imaginatively. Stace talks a lot about Ovid's Metamorphoses which retell the Greek myths of changes (girls turning into trees, boys into flowers, gods into swans). There are also implicit parallels to Virninia Woolf's Orlando such as living the life of Reilly in an old English country house, a change of gender identity and a journey to Turkey where odd things happen.

It's also really funny in places.

Stace has also written something about Laurence Sterne I've resolved to track down. And another book is coming soon, hurrah!

*By which I mean that, while I hadn't actually heard of him or his music, when I got to the last page of the book and read out loud that John Wesley Harding had released 14 albums, my Beloved said "oh yeah, he's a really good folksinger" and that's saying something because B hates most folk music.

And another thing

2007-01-30T14:44:00.000+11:00

The other day elsewhere contrasted her idea of the "noisy" plot-driven novel with heaps of characters like Shantaram* it to the "quiet" novel which depends on beautiful writing and thoughtful character development where nothing much may actually happen. She was trying to establish whether there was a trend in Australian lit towards preferring "noisy" to "quiet" and I don't know the answer but I realised that after a decade of tending towards the "quiet" books (Marion Halligan, Drusilla Modjeska, even the quite marvellous Shirley Hazzard) I've been reading an awful lot of these "noisy" books lately. I mean, in between the dodgy sci-fi and thrillers, there was The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Vernon God Little, both pretty "noisy" books.

So, even if there isn't such a trend in publishing, I suspect I've moved on from navel-gazing emotional delicacy to wanting THINGS TO HAPPEN to LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE meanwhile complaining loudly about the clunkiness of plot devices and ridiculousness of some of the cardboard cutout characters.

*which I haven't read but a guy on the train was carrying it round for weeks so it will probably take a really long time

More books

2007-01-30T10:58:00.000+11:00

Still reading away the summer. Last week it was The Raphael Affair by Iain Pears which is the first in a series of seven books about art forgery and theft in Italy. This one was quite sweet if slight. Jonathon Argyll, a fish out of water English student in Rome, tries to prove that someone stole a painting by Raphael in the eighteenth century for the sake of his academic reputation only to be foiled by dastardly forgers who are trying to profit from his discoveries in the twentieth century.

We're introduced to the dedicated and specialist (fictionalised) Art Theft Squad of the Italian police who trace stolen national treasures. Flavia da Stephano, one of its researchers, is quite strong on keeping Italian art in Italy despite four hundred years of legal and illegal exports. These poor public servants struggle against public apathy, incredibly lax museum security and the fabulous wealth of the international art market.

The book has lots of detail about living in Rome: the suicidal traffic, the food (a day without ice-cream is a day wasted!), the coffee, the good sense of living within walking distance of work and the joy of the times of the year when the tourists aren't about. It also visits Siena where the characters get incredibly lost driving round looking for a hotel and end up reversing up a one way street. This reminded me of one of the most difficult hours of my life where I valiantly tried to advise an extremely stubborn male driver how to navigate through Siena in rapidly falling dusk while reading a tiny Lonely Planet map. We did something like half a dozen illegal u-turns - twice in front of the Cathedral - and ended up abandoning the car to ask directions as I'd suggested doing in the first place.

So, a good fun potboiler but not anywhere near the same level as The Instance of the Fingerpost.

"Mary should pay more attention to detail"

2007-01-25T11:53:00.000+11:00

Last week, I was wondering why it always seemed to be snowing, raining or sleeting in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla books. Mystery's solved: I read another one on the week-end called The Malcontenta and actually bothered to read the author bio which said he'd been a lecturer at the University of Newcastle since 1984. Further "research" shows that now he lives in the Hunter Valley. Of course England would seem cold, dark and miserable to an emigrant sitting amongst the ripening grapes on a typical 40 degree day in January there.

The Malcontenta wasn't my favourite of his books. The plot was a bit experimental and felt awkward. An unexplained death in a large Palladian-style English mansion now used as a health farm leads to Brock going undercover to find more clues. This reminded me of one of the early Sean Connery James Bond movies where he's been sent to the fat farm but dastardly evil geniuses track our hero down! It's very unlike the normally solid procedural approach Brock takes. There's also a trip to Italy which just seemed to be an excuse to see La Malcontenta, the original model of the English house and to talk about some nice weather. It was written in the early 1990s and seems a bit odd and dated now because the police characters don't have mobile phones and hacking into computers is described in very plodding and unconvincing terms.

That aside, Brock and Kolla are exciting, complex characters and it's good to fill in another gap in their stories because later books refer to earlier events without explaining them.

Just as well I'm not in the Liberal Party then

2007-01-23T14:55:00.000+11:00

From the SMH website just now:

The decision to dump Senator Vanstone leaves only two female cabinet ministers - Julie Bishop and Helen Coonan.

But Mr Howard denied he was overlooking women.

"I don't think talented women in the Liberal Party do these sums every time there's an adjustment made and I think that is a rather patronising, old-fashioned view to take," he said.

No, it's clearly just the time-serving talentless whingers who mention these things.

Deep sigh.

Charmed, I'm sure

2007-01-23T12:15:00.000+11:00

Last week I succumbed to the first of the Isabel Dalhousie novels by the too charming for his own good Alexander McCall Smith.

I've resisted for a long time because I found his Precious Ramotswe series (beginning with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) addictive, expensive and sadly, ultimately unsatisfying. Precious is convincing heroine (a "traditionally built lady") in an exotic African city trying to make her way in a man's world as a detective. The sleuthing is incidental to stories about tales of life in Botswana told with what seems to be real affection. But I found the tales themselves got slighter and slighter with each adventure and I was spending what seemed like a lot of money on books I was reading in a couple of hours. (I know, I know, that's what libraries are for. But these were such PRETTY books that I wanted to own them. One (Tears of a Giraffe?) even had a picture of my favourite animal on the cover.) So I stopped reading them, probably at about the same time as two other McCall Smith series turned up in Australia. (The man is a publishing phenomenon and deservedly so. Apparently he doesn't get writer's block. He just sits down and writes and then stops when he thinks it's done and his editor puts a cover on and releases another best seller to the world.)

Anyway, The Sunday Philosophy Club is also very charming. It's a love letter to Edinburgh (where I've never been). Its heroine, Isabel Dalhousie is an independently wealthy editor of a philosopy journal. This means there are plenty of opportunities for her to bring profound philosophical thoughts to events as well as heaps of time for her to take us on a tour of the city. (Unlike real academics who are too overworked and real people of inherited wealth who would be more likely to hang around with the jetset.)

Once again, the sleuthing isn't that important and I was a bit disappointed in the resolution of the mystery. But now I really really want to go to Edinburgh, in summer anyway.

So many books, so little time

2007-01-18T15:44:00.000+11:00

Lately I've been reading far faster than I can bring myself to blog. It's not really that I'm reading more books; I just can't always think of something constructive to say about them. For instance, last week I finished An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. It's amazingly good and an international bestseller and I liked it heaps more than I liked his more recent Dream of Scipio. But I can't think of much to add to the dozens of reviews already out there. Read it if you want an exciting historical murder mystery that keeps you turning pages to the very end.

Sigh, Of course I can't stop there though. The books is about a death in Oxford in 1663. There are four separate accounts from four people with very different philosophies and motives: an Italian doctor attempting to use the scientific method, a deeply superstitious young nobleman, a cryptographer and an historian. Each of these is completely convincing at the time but each separate account highlights contradictions in earlier ones. Pears has just put so much knowledge in there from such a wide range of fields, from architecture, religion, philosophy and political history, that I'm in awe that someone's head can hold that much stuff and he can still write a good book. I'm looking at you, Neal Stephenson with your overblown Baroque trilogy. Grr.

I'd even go as far as to say that this is the best book I've read so far this year.

Dratted Internet

2007-01-15T15:43:00.000+11:00

For a week or so, I've been meaning to talk about another "Christmas Book", Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, a collection of his "short fictions and wonders". I haven't done this yet because I haven't been able to find a picture of the Australian edition online (just when I've come to rely on the internet for all my needs) and have my usual hamfisted excuse about not being able to get my camera to talk to my computer because I'm anachronistic so there.

It's an issue because the Australian edition is far far prettier than the design hodgepodge of the UK hardcover pictured. The cover of my book is almost totally white with a green leaf skeleton on it on the top half. Each section reproduces the leaf in black and white. This made reading the book really delightful visually.

The colliection is a bit of a miscellany and probably one for the fans. My favourite story revisited the hero from American Gods , Gaiman's major novel of a few years ago. This was masterly but some of the stories are misses or jokey pastiches. I found myself not minding this uneveness so much because Gaiman is refreshingly honest about his process and provides an explanation for why he wrote each piece (to paraphrase:"someone asked me to put a story in a collection", "we thought we'd try something together" and, my favourite,"my daughter asked for a unique present for her 18th birthday but, knowing me very well, said that it didn't need to be finished on the day and I'm only 18 months late"). There's plenty to enjoy in this book and I especially enjoyed the fact that it was a gift. Thank you!

Dear Diary Maker, or letter from someone without Outlook

2007-01-11T09:35:00.000+11:00

I still use a paper diary to organise my life. I'm so oldfashioned I find it far easier to write things down in a book than on a calendar attached to an email program. This is partly because our work computers use a fairly odd program that doesn't communicate with people using Outlook very well so I find myself agreeing to meetings at the wrong times (Consequently, I have conniptions when people try to check my availability by looking at my blank online calendar.)

The good side of this is that my diary isn't hooked up to my phone so that when a phone beeps at three in the morning to remind us that someone has to remember to be somewhere that day, it's my Beloved or one of his colleagues and NOT MY FAULT AT ALL.

The bad side is choosing a diary that works. Every October I'm asked to choose a diary from a fairly short list. I always get a smallish week to a page one that costs my boss about $2.50. Every January I wrestle with how I'm going to use it (is there room for appointments, contacts, reminders to pay bills?) and how the stuff the diary makers put it is ever so slightly inconvenient (No, I emphatically do not care how to convert hogsheads to litres. International paper sizes are pointless. Why is there no space for email addresses, in 2007!!??)

Last year my Beloved gave me a very expensive English diary that was absolutely perfect - for me anyway. It was featherlight so lots of lots of pages weighing not very much. Each page had space for daily appointments and a facing page for notes. Dozens and dozens of pages at the back for notetaking in meetings. It also told me the best vintages for wine around the world (2002 was the best for South Australia but not so good for NSW wine, apparently), British mileage, English University terms, London sunrise and sunsets and principal London clubs (Annabel's but not Bouji's!). I found this funny rather than irritating and it also had a good accurate selection of international public holidays.

Sadly, this spoiled me for going back to the $2.50 diary from the stationery cupboard. For a week, I've struggled and struggled. Finally, yesterday, I gave in and bought a refillable week to a view "diary system" in a zip up case with room for a pen, 300 business cards and probably a nail file, comb and lipstick. It has a big address book at the back, separate yearly, monthly and financial planners and a To Do list section. All good, until you get to the stupid "important details" page at the front which has space for you to put your name, address, phone number, passport number, medicare number, blood group. (What? No tax file number down here. The manufacturers clearly have more faith in my ability not to lose the diary and my identity than I do) and then "important phone numbers" of doctor, dentist, bank manager (WHO has a "Bank Manager" and who would put them THIRD on a list of most important people?), accountant and solicitor (actually ditto for those too).

There's no space on this page for me to put my Beloved, my hairdresser, the vet or helpful things like all the bloody passwords I can't remember if I don't use them every day. Just as well I have a phone to keep these in - and where did I leave that then?

Oh Martin, what can I say?

2007-01-10T14:36:00.000+11:00

Of course, the trouble with Christmas books is that sometimes you get expensive hardcovers that you don't like all that much.

I read Martin Amis's House of Meetings last week. It has a very attractive cover. But the insides look more like this photo of Mr Amis.

(I love this photo.)

As I've said before, I'm rather fond of Martin Amis, even though it's not a very rewarding relationship. In this book, he's tries to be as clever as usual but the protagonist is a shambling, sentimental Russian giant whose better impulses make him repent his former misdeeds and the cleverness comes off as a sort of defensiveness, as if he's hiding behind the careful prose.

The book is narrated by an octogenarian former gulag inhabitant made good in the US. He's writing a valediction to a much (if problematically) loved American stepdaughter from a cruise to the sites of the former gulag. This gives Amis the chance to explain everything that happened in Russia since the War and talk about the gulags and how life in the US is very different. In short, the gulags were terrible and brutal. He kept his wimpish half brother alive through the horrors even though the brother was a pacifist and had married the one woman he himself really wanted. Oh, and it's very cold in the Artic circle and Russians drink far far too much and have a bad history of persecuting Jews and using secret informers to denounce people. And former prisoners found it difficult in Soviet Russia if they didn't bribe anyone for a rehabilitation certificate. And crimes change people, even if people do them solely to save their own lives. And you can't make people love you. And invading Afghanistan was a mistake. Um, oh and America is a different country.

Amis's books provoke lots of strong criticism - I vaguely remember his Yellow Dog making it onto several "worst book" lists. While trying to sort out my own reactions to the book, I ploughed through Daniel Soar's "Bile, Blood, Bilge and Mulch" in the London Review of Books.* Soar's excellently-titled article compares Amis's novel with his recent non-fiction book called Korba the Dread and shows how the same sources are used in different ways. Soar doesn't think the book works because Amis tries to give characters hearts and he doesn't have one himself (awww!). I don't actually agree but it's an easy enough conclusion to draw.

I was also surprised to realise that Amis is 59. FIFTY-NINE! And he was only a Wunderkind a decade or so ago!

Anyway, the next entry will be back in the land of Faerie.

*There are heaps of other reviews here.

Call me shallow...

2007-01-08T14:28:00.000+11:00

but this is pretty.

I love Christmas, because this is when I give people and occasionally receive CHRISTMAS BOOKS. It's the one time of year when I put aesthetics above value for money and buy books with HARD COVERS. Sometimes people give me hardcovers too.

My best present this year, because it was a surprise (apart from the Daniel Jackson action figure complete with removable glasses, magnifying glasses, scroll, walkie talkie, bush hat and strange Gouald* weapon which was even more of a surprise) was Susanna Clarke's new book The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of short stories about people's encounters with the world of Faerie. The special edition came in a box and had a pale pink cover embossed with the same floral decoration picked out in pink on the first picture. I was worried about dirtying it so I had to read it incredibly quickly. At least that was my excuse for gulping it down in two sittings on Christmas and Boxing Day.

Clarke's books are delightful because she plays games with assumptions about historical fiction and class and with people's expectations of fairies being all innocent and fey and delightful. Her fairies are quite different, not bad exactly, just different...

She (or her publisher) also pays particular attention to the appearance of her books. This one has delightful line drawings of most of the stories. As I was reading, I regressed to primary school age and just sat and looked at these pictures until I'd absorbed every detail. And now I'm wondering if it would be too selfish not to lend this book to anyone because it's just too pretty to damage. Usually I just don't care what happens to my books because they weren't that nice to start with. They get read until the covers come off. This sounds like a short step to having a locked bookshelf full of first editions I wouldn't dream of reading...

In Australia her first book, Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, was printed in paperback with either a black or a cream cover. I bought the black one because I thought it would show the dirt less. It's been read by four people and is still holding up quite well. (This UK multiple volume set has a volume in each of the colours I mean.)

Later on, when I wanted to give a copy to my sister, I could only find copies with the incredibly disappointing colour cover (in this picture).

Now, I don't usually care about the way books look but I couldn't bring myself to buy this for her because the monochrome cover with the raven image was so important to how I enjoyed reading the book. Around then, my Beloved went to England for a meeting and I made him go to bookshop after bookshop until he found a copy with a better cover. I think he found the red one which (of course) is now in all the shops here.

The point of all this is to say that sometimes publishers games work and I can be distracted by pretty things. And I'm not sure that's a good thing.

* I'm enough of a nerd to admit to watching Stargate but not to bother learning how to spell the alien words

Dante in America

2007-01-05T10:47:00.000+11:00

Before he left home this morning, my Beloved made sure my shoes matched. I got through all of yesterday with only one odd look from a stranger in the street and that mightn't have been shoe-related.

In other news, over the break I read The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. This was a rollicking murder mystery set in Boston in the 1860s. A team of scholars, led by the poet Longfellow (the only one I'd actually heard of), is translating Dante's Divine Comedy into English for the first time in America (although quite why this is such a big deal when there were already an awful lot of British English translations never really convinces me). Someone is using the Dante's punishments of the wicked in the circles of Hell as the models for murders! Can the translators stop him or her before it's all too late?

What's good fun about this is that the novel uses real literary men (with lovingly described facial hair arrangements) as the detectives. Some of them find it extremely difficult to get out of their fireside armchairs and traipse around the dangerous back streets of Boston. What's not so good is that I thought it was one of those mysteries where you can pick the murderer out but it's more of a Sherlock Holmes revelation at the last minute mystery so there was no need to think much at all.

There is a lot of cool period detail. I've been to Boston in the depths of winter and could visualise walking through the same locations. It was really interesting to read about the social pressures caused by the soldiers returning from the civil war and how the underground railway worked. One of the main characters is the first black policeman appointed to the Boston Police force because of his conspicuous bravery during the war but he wasn't allowed to wear a uniform, carry a gun or arrest a white man. It was disappointing to find out this character was fictitious. But some of this detail was a bit on the "I read this fascinating detail so I have to put it in" side - do we really need to know there was an outbreak of distemper among Boston horses in 1865?

One of the major plotlines is about the lack of academic freedom at Harvard. The college corporation was very resistant to studying modern languages, especially "decadent" Catholic literature. This seemed very odd, but then very little should surprise me about Amercians any more.

Anyway, it was a good, fun read but I'd take the hype on Mr Pearl's website with a bit of salt.

Time for some colourful shoes

2007-01-04T13:56:00.000+11:00

My right foot has been a bit sore all morning but the other one is fine. I've just realised that it's not some new one-sided malaise, from sleeping strangely or crossing my legs more one way than the other. I don't even have gout.

When I looked down, I realised that my left foot is wearing the brand new flatsoled Wittner moccasin-y type thing I bought to replace the hideously uncomfortable because oddly stitched flatsoled Jane Debster moccasin-y type things I've been meaning to throw away because one of then has started to fall apart already and they'll never feel right as demonstrated by how sore my right foot is today after four hours encased in one.

When you have a cupboard full of black shoes, occasionally you get it wrong. The odds increase when you follow almost autistic shopping patterns developed from years of learing what shoes are likely to be comfortable eventually. I have black flat shoes. I have black shoes with heels of two inches and three inches. And some boots. Generally, when I get muddled, it's only between shoes of the same height but to avoid confusion in the future, my next pair of shoes will be purple and I'll just have to get a new wardrobe to match them. After all, I've got the job now.

In other news, the day before Christmas, I finished reading The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears because someone lent it to me. This isn't the cover of the edition I read but I like it better.

The book is set in Provence with three narratives, in the sixth, fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Three men of philosophical turns of mind are confronted with moral dilemmas about how to deal with the persecution of the Jews.

The twentieth century strand deals with the Nazi occupation of France. It was probably a bit soon after reading the much superior Suite Francaise to be reading this because the same basic material is handled here in a much more sentimental, almost mawkish, way. The book also relies on picking up echoes of similar emotions and thoughts in each story and the parallels seem a bit too neat. But it's more a novel of ideas than of character and narrative. And those ideas are very much philosophy lite or Neoplatonism for beginners, which isn't a bad thing at all. And it was so sad that I would have been very upset if Santa hadn't been coming in the morning.

Fun with Captain Kirk

2007-01-02T17:18:00.000+11:00

Back in town after a week in Brisbane which did its best to make me regret leaving it in the first place. They've finally built a bridge between my old uni and Dutton Park so impoverished students of the future don't have to worry about whether they've got enough cash for the ferry fare home after lectures. (And a lovely bridge it is too, although quite why it needed to be walked across remains a mystery known only to my mother.) It stayed pleasantly cool and my hair didn't turn into a frizzy mess. They've built a very beautiful new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) that seems ten times more convenient than Sydney's strangely poky MCA. The suburbs teemed with birds and geckos and moths and it wasn't until the last night that we saw dozens of cane toads worshipping the streetlights. (My Bleoved insisted on picking one up because he'd never seen one before. I made hime scrub his hands before doing anything else). We caught up with friends living in beautiful airy wooden houses. And, as I packed my bag to head back to my (perfectly adequate for Sydney) inner city flat, I tried hard not to think about the fact that a man who used to work for me now owns a vast house in a very nice part of Brisbane.

One of the things that helped distract me was Kill Tek by William Shatner.

Yes, THAT William Shatner, old Captain James Tiberius Kirk himself. He's written a whole series of detective stories set in the twenty-third century where people fly around the Greater Los Angeles territory in sky cars and eat food substitutes washed down with nearcaf, shooting each other the stunguns and try to avoid the drug cartels pushing "Tek", a completely addictive electronic virtual reality drug sort of like the total immersion game used in Red Dwarf.

Strangely enough, the book wasn't THAT bad. Fast paced, heaps of action. Several characters were well enough drawn for you to care about their fates. Jokes that provoked a smile, if not a laugh. The only irritating thing was a cheesy Mexican character with an inability to utter the English words "yes" and "buddy" and a propensity to say "Chihuahua" at the slightest provocation. All in all, not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a holiday and outstanding value at the cost of 27 cents from the discount bin at Crazy Clarke's.

Don't take this the wrong way...

2006-12-22T16:08:00.000+11:00

Have just discovered there won't be a fresh Sydney Morning Herald tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. Guess they deserve bonus points for not bothering to pretend they're bothering to report the news this Christmas and I've saved my $2.20.

But I can't help wondering whether I'll manage to find out if something important happens.

Anyway, I'll be away from the internet until next year.

Post Trauma oblivion

2006-12-22T11:27:00.000+11:00

Despite several opportunities for catastrophic failure, everything went SWIMMINGLY yesterday. Hurrah!!!

One of the many things I had to do was be the gender balance on a job interview panel. (Wouldn't you just love to do a job interview at 5:00pm on the second last working day before Christmas?) I found myself trying to calm the interviewees with my reassuring smile. For THREE HOURS. I wandered home with aching cheeks, wanting nothing more than to sit on the couch and watch telly. Is this why I never entered beauty pageants? Maybe there are exercises I can do to strengthen my facial muscles... Seriously, this HURT.

Sadly, telly didn't make me happy for long last night. I ended up watching The Midsomer Murders and once again wondering WHY OH WHY do they MAKE THIS SHOW?? It just makes no sense in this day and age. They could use the millions of pounds in so very many better ways.

For those of you who haven't seen it, The Midsomer Murders could have been written by Agatha Christie in 1925 except they were made for several years from 1997 onwards. There's an incredibly grating disjunction between the traditional form of the village detective mystery and the early 21st Century. People have mobile phones and new model cars (even if all the women wear floral frocks and cardigans) as they enact the archaic rituals of an idealised English country life. There's much cricket played, many rustic pubs and a new local festival each week. The crimes are always terribly complicated murders for motives of inheriting mansions or protecting secret societies or winning choir competitions. No mundanities like drugs or domestic violence! And strangely, not a single black or Asian person is in these villages with disturbingly high murder rates. Maybe changing the racial mix would lower the crime rate? Even the police are affected by this nostalgia for traditional English murder mysteries. Despite using the latest in high tech forensic techniques, there isn't a single WPC in the Midsomer constabulary.

I mean, I understand the attraction of detective dramas as a way of working out a slightly gruesome puzzle but without the nasty blood or other signs of real world crimes (like Cluedo - the butler did it in the drawing room with the poker). Over the years I've watched Inspector Morse, Taggart and Jack Frost with varying levels of enjoyment. I also understand nostalgia for a quieter, gentler time - I mean Heartbeat was quite fun in a cheesy way - but when you combine the two without acknowledging that the world is a very different place to bucolic Miss Marple wonderland, it just doesn't work.

Also, I would love to talk about Beachmasters but it was so masterly, there's nothing I can add. Where a lesser writer would have included a map and a glossary, Thea Astley describes the many places on this island well enough for you to know where you are and uses Pidgin English that makes me think I could get by on a Pacific island. She's especially good on the many ways Europeans end up in such places. If only I'd had the good fortune to be in her Australian Lit classes instead of suffering through the third rate lecturers who made it quite clear teaching first years was beneath their dignity.

Breathing Easy

2006-12-19T12:08:00.000+11:00

Tipsy people who SHOULD KNOW BETTER and and KNOW THE RESULT have quietly told me at Christmas functions not to worry about keeping my job. Hurrah!

Of course, I STILL can't sleep. Things that are keeping me awake at night:
I have a plane to catch on Sunday but am convinced I won't survive because I spent an hour at the MCA watching a film about the history of hijacking. Will Hamas, Hezbollah or the Black Panthers stop me from getting to my parents for Christmas?
What if Qantas goes on strike on Christmas Eve?
What if my Beloved misses one of his several flights to Brisbane from Darwin and I have to spend Christmas at my parents ON MY OWN??
Will my mother will be disappointed that her present is much smaller than my father's?
My father's present is too big to fit in my suitcase if I want to bring any clothes. Sholud I try to post it up knowing that this will take a long time, cost a lot and may not get there in time?
What should I give my niece for managing to finish high school despite an unsupportive home and truly ghastly school environment?
Why has Channel 10 stopped showing "Charmed" after one episode?
Why do we need to win all five tests? Won't people not to play with us any more?
Does anybody buy any of that cricket merchandise?
Why do I never write down addresses of family and friends and then wonder why I can't send Christmas cards? Why have I only got three Christmas cards so far this year? Is it because I only sent three last year? Do email greetings count?
Will I make it to all of meetings I have on Thursday?

But at least I'm a bit more relaxed as I read into the night.

I'm currently reading Beachmasters by Thea Astley. It has a very nice cover.

It's about a coup in a South Pacific colony not unlike Noumea or the Solomons. I'm only half way through it despite it not being very long. It's very, um, dense. Most of it needs very SLOW reading. And it's startlingly good.

Suite Francaise

2006-12-15T10:15:00.000+11:00

* This week I've felt a bit melancholy, partly because a lot of people are leaving my workplace because we're being "restructured" and partly because I finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. (I know there are plenty of French curly whatsits and accents in both of those those things but it would have taken me too long to do to them right so I gave up.

When it was published here, the story of how the book came to be written received a lot of press attention. Russian-Jewish novelist living in France for 20 years dies in Auschwitz. Sixty years later her daughter realises the notebook she's carted round as a keepsake of her mother contains an unfinished novel that was written in incredibly tiny handwriting to save paper while she lived in exile in a tiny village during the Nazi occupation of France. Sadly, her other daughter dies a few years before the notebook is transcribed. Oh the humanity! Why didn't anyone read it sooner? Just the sheer waste of talent and life seemed horrifying.

Which also made me dubious about whether the book would be any good. It wasn't until my mum lent me her copy that I bothered to read it. And it is good. Unfinished - possibly 40 per cent finished - it tells the story of how several different groups of people respond to the German invasion. Part one is about an incredbily chaotic evacuation of Paris in 1940. Part two covers dealing with the enemy occupying a village and a farm. It ends with the Germans leaving to go to the Russian front. What would happen next is only roughly sketched out because she was writing in approximately real time.

The niceties of civilised behaviour are strained by the circumstances of exodus while pursued by bombers. Nemirovsky has a very deft way of skewering the vanities and pomposities of her characters and meting out appropriate treatment. The rich woman who prides herself on her Christian charity merrily shares her stores of biscuits with other refugees until she realises the shops are empty. TThen only HER children matter. The man who values his porcelain more than people meets an appopriate end. The banker who reneges on an offer of a lift to his staff because his mistress insists on taking their place is punished for his selfishness. Others rise to the crisis and help children find their parents.

The second part is less urgent and more bucolic. The Germans are living amongst us. Who will talk to them? Who will sleep with them? There are some wonderful descriptions of the natural world as well as of the intense claustrophobia of village life. Behind the closed shutters eyes are watching! There is tremendous humanity in this section as Nemirovsky makes the German soldiers individuals who are kind to animals and really truly can fall in love. There are also no real surprises about which characters become collaborators.

The appendices include her plans for the rest of the book (a complex construction based on musical structure without much musical knowledge which sounds pretty dodgy to me - but then it's only a plan) and correspondence about her life. The contrast between her circumstances and her book could hardly be more stark. As a foreign Jew (despite her baptism as an adult), she was banned from publication and from receiving roylaites for earlier works. She couldn't travel. Eventually she was arrested and for months and months her husband tried to find her until he too was taken to a concentration camp. Her children were only spared with the help of friends who kept them hidden until the end of the war.

Nowhere at all does the book mention the persecution of the Jews. I don't know whether this was because she thought such things shouldn't be talked about. Or if she thought her book would be more popular this way (there is a comment in her plan to include many descriptions of the lives of the rich because people loved this) or if she really didn't see this as part of the French experience of the War. In this era of identity politics this omission seems very peculiar and doubly sad.

Without knowing the circumstances of Nemirovsky's life, you'd think this was a clever, insightful and wise book. Knowing them, it seems tragic that she was able to recognise the humanity of the Germans even though they didn't pay her the same courtesy.

*This was originally posted LAST week but I couldn't remove dodgy comments offering me untold riches without pulling it down/

Weight of the World

2006-12-14T17:18:00.000+11:00

It rarely happens that the books I pick up to read chime so well with how I'm feeling. Yesterday, I was interviewed along with a great many other people to see if I deserved to keep the job I've done for almost three years. Today, five people from our smallish office finished up and we said good-bye, wondering what would happen next. Next week, I've triple booked myself for meetings to sort things out before everyone else disappears to far-flung places. I'm fretting about the usual family burdens of meeting everyone's impossible expectations for Christmas and I can't sleep.

Last night, I picked up Weight by Jeanette Winterson a wonderful poetic retelling of the story of Atlas, the Titan bearing the weight of the cosmos on his shoulders. This is part of a series of various authors retalling classical mythology for Text publishing. A.S.Byatt, Margaret Atwood and Donna Tartt are amongst the many people who've contributed to the series but I haven't seen their books yet.

I've said in other places that Winterson's work can be quite baroque and inpenetrable. This, on the other hand, is deceptively simple prose that works on at least two levels - sometimes metaphysical, sometimes literally. (You're really entirely sure where Atlas is standing when he's holding up the universe.) The book opens with the start of the world, geological time and talks about the layers of sedimentary rock as pages of a story, where things get trapped.

Atlas is the child of the earth and the sea who produced him from an extended coupling when the sea covered an island for 36 hours. For a while, he tills the earth and raises a family. But then he's punished for taking part in the war between gods and titans by being forced to carry the cosmos. A long time later, Heracles needs his help. He borrows the load for a while and then tricks Atlas into taking it back. Atlas knows he's made choices to accept his punishment but wonders why he obeys the gods. In between these bits, the gods and heroes behave badly and the real world moves on.

Winterson interweaves this bits with sections in her (pseudo)autobiographical voice to show how she's been carrying far too much around with her for too long and she wants to put it down. Writing this story is meant to help. I hope it did. This is a wonderful meditation on life and love and the choices we make that set our paths. It's a lovely way of using the myth.

I've always loved retellings of classical mythology eg Alan Garner's series of at least three books (The God beneath the Sea? Heracles?) were some of my favourite books as a kid. I was really disappointed at uni to find out how badly written or inaccessible the original versions of the myths are. (And it's such a relief to read something GOOD after a week of dodgy SF even I'm too embarrassed to blog about.)

Now for something existential

2006-12-05T17:18:00.000+11:00

What a sadly neglected blog this has been lately. Each time I try to log on (unsuccessfully a few times lately for IT reasons), I've been distracted by invitations to upgrade, update, go beta. It's all too hard at the moment. I'm completely absorbed in trying to work out what to buy family and friends for Christmas.

But, if I do upgrade and I get tags, I wouldn't feel so, I don't know, random compared to the Superfast Reader who claims "Reading is my superpower" (And the frequency with which she updates make me agree me her.)

Not sure I need a separate classification for "Norwegian Literature" as she does. In fact, I'm not sure that I pass snap judgements on books so much as dither about why I didn't like them. I don't think I could divide them into "Love!!" or "Boring". This is yet another reason why I haven't been appointed to the High Court - that and not having a law degree or anything.

I would very much like to have a super power. But it wouldn't be reading. It would something more uncanny X-Men-ish, like flying or teleportation or stopping time for a bit while I got on with something important like finishing a chapter. Hmm, maybe reading is a good super power to have after all.

That explains it!

2006-11-30T12:31:00.000+11:00

Have just learnt Sturgeon's Revelation that states, more or less, that it's not surprising there's so much bad SF out there because "Ninety percent of everything is crud."*

Not that I'd be shallow enough to dismiss a whole genre on the basis of one dodgy book with a naked blue girl on the cover!**

But I wish I'd thought of that first.

*Thanks to Laura for posting it at sarsparilla.

**No, really. In fact, I jumped back on the horse and read a 1960s Russian SF book I didn't understand either (of which, more another day.)

Gossip from the Forest

2006-11-29T12:06:00.000+11:00

Last week I read and was extremely puzzled by
Tom Keneally's Gossip from the Forest.

Now I haven't read many of his books. At least part of the reason for this is that I saw the movie version of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith when I was really little and had nightmares for weeks about the evil treatment poor Jimmie received (because he was an Aborignine trying to fit into the white world) which made him go and kill lots of white people with an axe. To be accurate and not very PC, I was far more upset by the axe-murdering than the cheating of him out of his wages for however many yards of fencing it was. Poor Jimmie. This was probably the first time I'd ever come across a story about "the Olden Days" that showed our pioneering forefathers in a bad light. And it was a really scary movie!

Another reason for not seeking out Keneally is because his twinkle-eyed face has been all over the telly and newspapers for the entirety of my life as "famous Australian author Tom Keneally". (And it is a nice uncle-ish face.) His every publication is extracted in the press and reviewed at length so that I feel like I've read it even though I probably haven't. I'm not even sure if I've read Schindler's Ark but I really really disliked the sentimentality of Spielberg's movie. So even though he's part of the national cultural furniture and he writes accessible books on really unusual topics for an Australian writer, I haven't had much to do with him. The only exceptions I can think of are Flying Hero Class about being in a plane when's it's highjacked and Towards Asmara about the interminable Eritrean war for independence. Both of these was thoughtful, well-researched and well written.

Which brings me to Gosip in the Forest: a phantasmagoric, absurdist bit of historical fiction about the men negotiating the armistice at the end of World War I. This is something we dealt with at school in five minutes: the Allies destroyed Germany with excessive reparations whcih led to economic troubles for a decade and created the ground for the rise of Hitler. This ignorance makes ask, do I believe it's all strictly true because Uncle Tom wouldn't lie to me? Or is it all made up?

The book is about a meeting between the French and English on one side and the Germans in a train in a French forest. At the beginning, the chief negotiator, the French Marshal Foch, desperately wants to make his name as a latter day Napoleon (except successful) by using the American armies, newly arrived in Europe, to invade Russia to put down Bolshevism. He doesn't want to compromise the onerous terms and is not at all interested in what happens to the German navy. The English want the navy destroyed.

The German envoys start off in Berlin where the soldiers have joined a socialist revolution. There is utter chaos and they have a Pynchon-esque journey where they're more worried about being shot by their own side than the enemy.

Basically, they're desperate for peace. The Allies refuse to believe in the level of chaos in Germany and won't compromise very much.

One of the weird things was some of the background to the lives of the negotiators. For instance, a German count who spends most of the novel drunk and raving claims at one point that his aristocratic mother only saw him for 10 minutes a day and, because his odd brother murdered his sister in the nursery and no-one believed this, he himself had to eat with a spoon till he went to boarding school (and faced various atrocities there). He then claimed that the German Kaiser had a similarly unloving childhood which made him not listen to commonsense.

Now I don't know what to make of this. Apart from not believing for a second that such a man even in extremis would make such a confession to an acquaintance, it sounds a bit like the way Upstairs Downstairs explained the class system to viewers who hadn't lived through it. The book was written in the 1970s, a time remote from the events depicted with a great deal of cultural distance between the German aristocrats, so this sort of clunky explanation for German militarism could be needed to help the reader. But it seems discordant with so much of the book which was thoughtful and subtle and psychologically insightful. (There are some wonderful passages about how long it took to realise cavalry didn't work any more and about the tragedy of the millions of new widows and bridegroomless young women.)

What a longwinded way of saying "this book was kinda ok". If you don't believe me, please note that it has the mixed distinction of being shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Weird Science

2006-11-27T16:48:00.000+11:00

One of the many joys I find in secondhand book shops is discovering cheap old science fiction, especially by people I've never heard of and especially, for some reason, Gollanz yellow hardcovers. Sometimes I even buy the trashy paperbacks with the naked girls on their covers if there's likely to be an interesting story inside (and then I imagine I'm getting funny looks on the train when I'm reading them and feel awkward.)

I'm sure many people have said so before but science fiction is a great barometer of the preoccupations of its era. The Corgi SF-27 collection of new science fiction from 1977 is no exception to this. Instead of the optimism of earlier decades with people merrily populating the universe, many of the stories have a sense of impending doom and the futility of effort. Problems are both environmental and political. New technology is dangerous. Bureaucracy impedes action. Politicians lie and walls that are meant to be keeping people out may instead be keeping people in. Pollution kills thousands each day. Governments hate students and turn colleges into public housing.

It's also fun when guessing makes them seem a bit prescient. In one story, people in 2010 (not so far away!) are driving through the Chunnel in an old 1998 car (I had one of those!) to a London with areas where private vehicles are banned to reduce pollution.

I almost didn't buy this book because it had a story by Brian Aldiss but he was the only one I'd heard of so I got it anyway. And the cover! A lion is holding a naked blue girl with a very abundant bust - about size 8 double F if you can imagine. (And I'm going to make you imagine because I'm too squeamish to go looking for it online and I still haven't sorted out the whole camera-computer interface)

Most of the stories were ok - some good images that have nagged at my subconscious in recent dreams. But the gender politics of two of stories was the dodgiest thing about the collection. I don't know if it's how the genre developed as a bloke thing - I didn't read much SF when I was a kid because I thought of them as "boy books" - or if it's just what crappy popular fiction was like then - and we are talking about the era of Sydney Sheldon - but in both cases the punchline was about disempowering older women. As a good thing to be doing, I mean. One story was about the slightly unethical but worth it in the end plot by a father to ruin a relationship between his adult son and an older woman (it's not clear how much older she is but she's a retired filmstar who's had plastic surgery, therefore must be a hag. She's certainly depicted as exceedingly unpleasant because she has money and uses it to influence others). At least there's a sense of moral ambiguity in this story.

The other had a complicated and really quite interesting plot about entering the mind of a man in a coma in order to find some secret he'd supposedly discovered. But it turned out to be a convoluted way of getting rid of the woman in charge of a secret service organisation who no-one liked but everyone was scared of. Once again, we aren't told how old she is but she's got a surprisingly young face and completely grey hair. And she's a complete cow. In this case, I diagnose an acute case of the author not liking his boss - who's probably a bit hard on him because he spends all his time at work making up science fiction and chatting up the younger and prettier of the women in the typing pool.

Lesson of the day: Most of the time there's a good reason why you've never heard of most of the people in science fiction anthologies from the 70s.

Time for something different

2006-11-21T14:50:00.000+11:00

I've been quiet for a while because I took far far longer than I should have to limp through to the ponderous conclusion of Richard Powers'annoying book. (That's a "don't waste your time on this one" from me. No more to be said.)

Then I spent over a week trapped in one of those deadline induced states where I felt like all I was doing was working, eating, working, sleeping, working and more working. Mercifully, this is all SOMEONE ELSE'S problem now.

But then, on the week-end, I read the utterly delighful Pelagia and the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin. Who is a joy and a tonic should be bottled or at least sold in capsule form in the medication aisle of the supermarket. Thank you, USSR for collapsing and creating the conditions for a writer of pre-revolutionary nostalgia who won't be sent to
Siberia. (Can you tell I liked the book?)

This is the first of the "Sister Pelagia" mysteries and, tantalisingly, starts with the principal characters of the good nun and her Bishop (whose name I can't type) having a sterling reputation for detection. This leaves much scope for prequels as well as sequels! As a nun, Sister Pelagia is pretty inconspicuous and has various devious means of hunting clues in all levels of society. She also has some forward thinking ideas about the need for female education - they live in a poor province so she argues her pupils won't have dowries and should learn physical sport to make them more physically attractive.

Akunin loves the society he's created in a remote province on a certain "River" in the east of Europe. This province is a feudal never-never land with tolerance of religious minorities, bribery reduced to practically nothing and the church helping the spiritual welfare of the inhabitants. Into this sleepy world, intrudes a big city procurator, keen to stir up trouble and make a name for himself. Dananana!

And the cover art was lovely too.

Two more wrong things

2006-11-10T14:34:00.000+11:00

I'm STILL reading this irritating book. The good bits are intriguing enough to keep me going through the extremely DULL and UNBELIEVABLE bits.

It's been two weeks now and I have ten other things to read but I still feel compelled to see how it ends. I wish flipping to the last page worked. It's taking so long because I can only read 20 pages at a time before needing to put it down to get rid of the sugary taste.

Oh and I had a meeting yesterday and missed out on a piece of cake that a colleague brought in to celebrate Donald Rumsfeld's departure.

Wrong

2006-11-10T10:18:00.000+11:00

I just feel WRONG today. I'm wearing white socks with black shoes. I haven't done this, except in jest, since highschool.

Keep expecting someone to leap out and yell "Fashion crime, take those socks off at once."

In my defence I can only say I have new shoes that need thin socks to stop me getting blisters and I also wore them earlier in the week so by Friday white frilly ankle socks are all that's left.

I'm going to hide behind my desk all day.

Three good things and one practical tip

2006-11-07T16:16:00.000+11:00

1. On the week-end I found out that Susanna Clarke, author of the fabulous Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrel, has written a new book. It's called The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Hurrah! Something to put on my Christmas list!

2. I just won $11.50 and a bottle of wine in the office Melbourne Cup Sweepstakes (thank-you Pop Rock) and novelty hat competition where a popcorn-covered hat blitzed the admittedly-limited competition.

3. Accidentally dropping an earring down the sink doesn't necessarily mean it's gone forever if you can be bothered dismantling the S-bend.

1. When reassembling an S-bend, it's important not to throw away those strange bits of rubber that fall out of the joins. If you do this, water comes out later when turn on the tap.

The Time of Our Singing

2006-11-03T17:56:00.000+11:00

This week I've been reading The Time of Our Singing, another overblown intergenerational tale of a family's particular problems in embracing the American Dream. (It's clearly far too soon to be reading this after Middlesex .)

The book's about what happens when a German Jewish physicist marries an African-American classical singer and produce three mixed-raced musical prodigies in the 1950s.

It's full of descriptions of listening and performing classical music and these parts are really really good. I haven't read a book about music this convincing since Vikram Seth's tale of lovelorn violinist An Equal Music.

But I'm having trouble with the other main theme which is how bloody difficult it was to be neither black nor white in 1950s America, even if you weren't in the South. Lynchings are described. These kids are neither fish nor fowl and cause consternation wherever they go. When the family travels together, the mother sits in the back of the car to avoid trouble. Synagogues are getting vandalised and their European cousins haven't been heard of since before the War.

I'm at the point where the civil rights movement has just started but i think this is going to take over because they've foreshadowed that one of the kids grows up to join the Black Panthers.

Anyway, I'm not really believing in this stuff. I mean in the context of the book - not that it happened. After all I've read Soledad Brother and Alice Walker. And I think most of my problems are because yesterday I found out this photo of Richard Powers.

And I wonder why I'd believe he could imagine himself back in that time and position any better if his parents were Jewish and African Amercan. Because that's clearly what my subconscious would prefer. I mean, it's fiction. Silly brain.

Time for whining is done

2006-11-02T14:56:00.000+11:00

Today I signed two petitions. One was Amnesty International's about bringing David Hicks home.

The other one was to save The Glass House.

While I'm in the mood for gestures, I might lodge a protest against Amanda Keller being voted off Dancing with the Stars. Not that I watch the show; I just think she's nice and it's a shame she had to go.

More television moaning

2006-11-01T15:32:00.000+11:00

They've axed The Glasshouse. Those bastards! And the Prime Minister says he didn't do it!!

Now I'm starting to wonder if an international cartel of librarians is conspiring to destroy all sources of televisual pleasure so we'll read more books.

Laziness or working to change the things you can?

2006-10-31T13:54:00.000+11:00

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

2006-10-30T17:00:00.000+11:00

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.

Reading Underwater

Head of the Corner

Must be here somewhere

Regrets, I have a few

Poor semicolons

Swimming with Sharks

Blog Entry 220: in which Mary tries vainly to say something new about motherhood

Drugs are bad, mm'kay

New football fan?

Only picky because I care

Pink's just a colour like any other

Not quite right

Karl Marx and H.G.Wells

The Trouble with Harry

And another thing

NOT sulking

Four Bloody Nil*

No hope

Mogblogging

Um-ah

Anarchy rules

IM IN UR CRIB WATCHING UR BABY

Hmm

Week-end paper silliness #2

Week-end paper silliness #1

Speaking of my Mum

No, it's not me, it's the book

Competitive? Moi?

But then

Nice cover, shame about the insides

Mother's little helper

Positively Loopy

Another bad book for an anxious new parent

Fire and Brimstone and all that

Good but not for the squeamishly expectant

The Rich are Different

How I almost burst my stitches

Life without the interwebs

Ch-ch-ch-changes

This man really IS Canadian

See Colleen, THAT'S how it should be done

On death and working

Easter and Parthenogenesis

Now we can keep some real secrets

"Oscar winner" means "avoid at all costs"

I'll talk about a book again one day soon

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

Dyslexia

Most boring election ever

Yawn

Che's Boys?

The Coast of Bohemia

Newsflash: Commuters not angry!

Lucky escape

Reading for Fun

Staying out late to watch telly

Two days in bed with Patrick White

Praise be! It's Wednesday!

Making me look bad in front of my Mum

More about National Literary Treasures

Hello and Good-bye

Two Lessons of the week

The Poe Shadow

Just call me Kath Day-Knight

Last of the Christmas books

Stalking David Malouf

Spectator sports

Smiling for no reason

Sorry, there was a point to that last post

And another thing

More books

"Mary should pay more attention to detail"

Just as well I'm not in the Liberal Party then

Charmed, I'm sure

More summer reading

So many books, so little time

Dratted Internet

Dear Diary Maker, or letter from someone without Outlook

Oh Martin, what can I say?

Call me shallow...