Intersecting Lines

The End

2006-07-12T10:24:00.000+10:00

As of today, Intersecting Lines is no more. Unlike last time there will be no dramatic resurrection.

Thanks to TimT, James, and Beth - without your efforts the blog would have folded all those months ago. As it was, we revamped it, had a bit of fun, upset a couple of people, and hopefully entertained a few more. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end - and so too must Intersecting Lines.

All contributors may be stalked by following the links to the right of this post.

Cheers.

The Adventures of Snidy - with Colourful Pictures!

2006-07-01T22:19:00.000+10:00

I've been on a bit of a spending splurge over the last two days. I got two DVD's (The Producers, Blazing Saddles), a book of How To Write Television Comedy, Dream Comics, Tintin in the Congo, Ha! Magazine, The Australian, and the Herald Sun.

I also got A Sindy Adventure Story!

Not this one: Sindy Adventures, it seems, are so rare that they haven't even made it onto the internets. However, the Adventure I have - The Curious Clock - shares certain characteristics with the others. Note the blue, white, and red sweater: Sindy wears the same on the cover of my book, along with the red hair-band and denim trousers. (And she's certainly a well-developed girl, isn't she? Excuse me ...) Note, also, the sidekicks - most importantly, her ten-year-old sister Patch (pictured to the right of Sindy). And note, finally, that an anagram of 'Sindy' is Snidy. Not that that's important or anything, I just felt you should know that.

As it turned out, I was missing the first two pages, but I bet I can guess the beginning:

'I am so sorry, but I cannot come to the auction, my dears! I hope you have a WON-derful time!'
Blonde, blue-eyed Sindy ____s, who was sixteen and tall for her age, flicked a strand of hair out of her eyes and looked in exasperation at her sister...

You know how it goes.

Anyway, it made for a pleasant Saturday afternoon read. You learn some interesting things about, for instance, people who live at places with name's like Rat Wharf:

'Mike Roake, Rat Wharf'. Fancy living in a place with a name like that!'

Or:

'But I thought we'd decided that the burglar was Count Fersson?'

'That was what we thought last night - because of the clock, but we may have been wrong, Paul. The sergeant may have been right. It might have been a professional burglar, the sort of man who might live in a place called Rat Wharf.'

Now, you or I might doubt that criminals actually do live at Rat Wharf. You might think, in fact, that people living at a place called Rat Wharf are just ordinary folks. Sindy, thankfully, is in no doubt of their felonious propensities, and she and her 'boy friend Paul' take her theory to the police station and inform the sergeant.
At this point, Sindy's sister Patch actually gets into the action. And about time, too ...

'Excuse me, but could you tell me the way to Rat Wharf?'
'Rat Wharf!' He looked at her with something approaching horror.
'Why do you want Rat Wharf? A nice little girl like you has no business going to a place like Rat Wharf!'

When she gets there:

... 'The only thing she noted in that first, horrified glance was that he had a cloth tied around the lower part of his face.
She dropped to the ground ...'

Nice little moment of pulpy writing there: action and reaction are all tied up in one 'first horrified glance'.
It's all quite enjoyable. I had lots of fun spotting the moments of pulpy writing: the 'beaming smile' from the detective, and the melodramatic Count Fersson who has this beautiful line written about him:

He was handsome in a dark, flashing-toothed manner, but for some reason Sindy did not like him. She did not trust him because he smiled only with his mouth.

Smiling only with his mouth; I like that...

(Cross-posted here.)

A Biased View of Media Bias

2006-06-20T18:12:00.000+10:00

There's been a bit of discussion lately about media bias, following the new appointments to the Literature Board and the ABC. I can't say I'm too phased by it, since bias is not necessarily a bad thing; strange as it may seem, you can be both objective and biased. But it's an interesting subject, if only because of the frequency with which it crops up in political disputes. So I thought I might put my two cents in, about media bias in general, and about bias in Australian publications in particular.

***

Firstly, it has to be said that broadcast media, in Australia at least, is much less biased than published media. Right-wingers are fond of attacking the ABC for having a left-wing bias, and left-wingers are fond of complaining about right-wing bias in the commercial networks. That's not really true; as Rachy pointed out in a conversation with me, the commercial networks are populist. You can't really slot this populism into a political category; they'll go for whatever rates. For instance, Sixty Minutes did a story this weekend about the chemical pollution caused by a large company operating in Botany Bay: as a political issue, this is closer to something the Australian Greens might be focusing on, rather than the two major parties, but it's hardly an example of overwhelming pro-Green bias.

The ABC is not biased, either. It's probably different from the other stations in that it's self-consciously intellectual; it targets what are called the big ideas and the big issues, which is partly why it has so many programs focusing on religion and science and art and economics, even though none of them rate very well. I do agree that the ABC's board is biased, simply because I've been told by a person who worked for the ABC - a left-winger - that they were, overwhelmingly, old socialists. I just don't think that this has much of an effect on the content of the ABC shows. And why should I begrudge old socialists a job?
So, as I said, the ABC is self-consciously intellectual. Overall, I think this has a negative effect on their shows, since it means they will accept most ideas that come to them with very little criticism. About two weeks ago, on the 7.30 Report, Kerry O'Brien interviewed John Howard about nuclear energy. O'Brien challenged Howard that he had not looked fairly at the alternatives, such as wind and solar power. There is some truth to this, because these proposed alternative energies are demonstrably inefficient, and more energy may in fact be expended in setting them up and taking them down than they produce themselves. In other words, the 'sustainable energy' alternatives most commonly put forward in the media are silly alternatives. Why should we consider the silly alternatives 'fairly'? By continuing to use the ABC as a platform to push these alternatives, O'Brien contributes less to the energy debate than to the general confusion in Australia which surrounds this topic.
So, enough said about the ABC and the commercial networks.

***

Secondly, moving on to the published media, there are more extreme examples of bias. The most obvious reason for this is probably because of the predominance of opinion columnists; another example is the influence of Australian artists and creative writers on parts of this media.
Quadrant, for instance, is a right-wing publication - it's John Howard's favourite journal, for starters. It's also an excellent read. The first editor was Australian poet James McCauley; the current poetry editor is Les Murray; several poems and stories are featured in each issue. The articles are often excellent, written with wit and insight, covering topics from the serious and academic to the light-hearted and trivial. Here's the intelligent response of one Quadrant reader:

Well, I vote for The Greens at both state and federal levels and I buy Quadrant.

As he points out in comments to that post, 'I don't think it's good policy to ignore what the other side is doing and thinking.'

If anything, I lean to the right, but I agree with Dean; it's stupid to ignore people that disagree with you. At worst, they might persuade you that they are right about some political points. This is why I sometimes read Overland, which describes itself as a 'leftish literary journal'. It's not just leftish, it's far to the left of the Labor Party. (Yeah, I know, that's a biased claim; but that was the overwhelming impression that I got when I read it a while ago, and since I can't remember the articles that gave me the impression, I'm going to have to leave it at that.*)
Personally, I find that both the content and the arguments fall short of Quadrant's standards, but again, it covers a wide range of subjects, the writing is skilfull, and literature features heavily.

The mainstream media is also biased. Generally speaking, the Fairfax papers, most prominent of them being The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, are left-wing. The Murdoch papers - most prominent being the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph, and The Australian - are right-wing. Mr Lefty implies, in comments to this post, that The Age is 'fair and balanced'. He's half-right; The Age is balanced, but unfair. In the names of balance, for instance, it might feature columns by an extremist like John Pilger. (In Australia, Pilger is most well-known amongst fringe organisations, such as readers of the Green Left Weekly, where he is regularly published). Given that Pilger's routine method is to employ inflammatory propaganda terms and to ignore the crimes of terrorist organisations like Hamas, the question has to be asked - why is he printed in major Australian publications at all?

This being said, the Murdoch papers are biased too. They offer some support to the conservative Governments in Australia and America (but, interestingly, they also support the Labour Government in Britain.) Broadly speaking, the perspective they offer is patriotic and nationalist; they supported the Iraq war; and they are pro-privatisation. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is another question entirely. Personally, I enjoy their columnists and reviewers (even in the Herald Sun, with the exception of Andrew Bolt). The standard of debate in the Murdoch papers is just as high - if not higher - than in the Fairfax papers, and they are frequently better formatted and wittier. The Herald Sun regularly tells us more in a single headline than a Fairfax writer might tell us in a paragraph.

***

So there you go: a biased view of media bias. As I said, I don't think that bias is necessarily a bad thing, and it's possible to be both biased and objective. But it's also worth being aware of the kinds of bias in the news media, both on screen, and in print.

UPDATE! - Turns out the ABC board are now all Howard Government appointees. I think my ex-ABC employee acquaintaince may have been referring to the middle management. What, you wanted me to do research for a blog post? Oh, bugger off!

*I'd like to see you guys do that in an academic essay, heh!

Absolutely Everything You Never Needed To Know About Modernism, Part 3

2006-06-19T20:40:00.000+10:00

Auden was a great poet but a bad modernist. He kept on attempting obscurity and slipping into lucidity. He made rhymes accidentally, and poetry incidentally. He really couldn't help himself. His earlier poems seem to be deliberately difficult: it's as if he has to force himself to write like Eliot. His words keep on threatening to make sense. I like Auden; he's definitely not the most modern of the modernists (which to some of them may have been the most important thing), but he was certainly the most talented.
His themes are always interesting: he writes about the epic nature of teacups, and the heroic qualities of accountants. Maybe that was the difference between Auden and his contemporaries. Other modernists took the hero out of the man; Auden put the man back in the hero. He wrote about minor characters and their potential for greatness. Think about his miniature satirical masterpiece, The Unknown Citizen:

... had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

In between writing the occasional masterpiece, Auden casually penned opera librettos, offhandedly put together verse dramas, and wrote the occasional bitchy sonnet about fellow poets:

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

I'm as befuddled as anyone about Auden's earlier poems; at Uni I wrote a dissertation including analysis of his work with Benjamin Britten, Our Hunting Fathers: I still have no bloody idea what it's about. But his obscurity - and he could be very obscure - is often a teasing obscurity. And often, this obscurity itself has to be limited, for instance, by putting it in the mouth of a character:

Waking in her arms he cried,
Utterly content:
"I have heard the high good noises,
Promoted for an instant,
Stood upon the shining outskirts
Of that Joy I thank
For you, my dog and every goody."
There on the grass bank
She laughed, he laughjed, they laughed together,
Then they ate and drank:
Did he know what he meant? said the willow-wren;
God only knows, said the stare.

Which is all quite interesting, so far as it goes; the double meaning in the last line is particularly effective.
All in all, he was a smart cookie; sometimes, too smart. Nobody could understand what he was on about. But anybody who could write an entertaining, witty, and musical ten stanza poem about shit certainly had something going for him.

Next: how to become a modernist, in ten easy steps!

Read Your Need to Feed, or, Would You Like Pickles with Your Pixels?

2006-06-14T20:50:00.000+10:00

Ella asks:

How about you, Concerned Reader? Do you prefer your litblogs with or without sandwiches?

The sandwiches here are a metaphor, of course, for something else; but hey - this is a litblog, and I'm a litblogger, what would I know about metaphors? Sandwiches, on the other hand, I do know about, and I know I definitely want to see some more of them on this blog.

So without further ado, dear readers - help yourselves!

Don't worry, there's plenty more pixels where that came from!

Be careful not to bump into the computer monitor when taking a sandwich:

If someone walks in and sees you gnawing at the monitor, you have my permission to shoot them!

Sandwiches! Sandwiches for all!

Wanted! Author Known To Be Engaging In Occult Activities ...

2006-06-13T18:07:00.000+10:00

I received some reader feedback recently regarding a comment I made in this post regarding children's author P. L. Travers. I had read quite some time ago - possibly in the edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at my parents house - that P. L. Travers was a member of a well-known occult organisation, which from memory I thought to be The Golden Dawn.

It turns out that there are a number of links on the web implicating P. L. Travers in The Golden Dawn, but nothing that proves she was involved.

So I thought I'd throw the question open to readers, who may be familiar with a good biography of Travers; readers who may be aware of secret occult messages hidden in her children's books; or readers who can fill us in on the history of The Golden Dawn.

WANTED

	WANTED: Information regarding a notorious children's author's involvement in early-twentieth century occult organisation The Golden Dawn
KNOWN FACTS ABOUT AUTHOR: - Name: Helen Goff - AKA P. L. Travers - Author of Mary Poppins books - Author of a biography of occultist G.I. Gurdjieff - Was known to have met poet and Golden Dawn member W B Yeats.
	THE QUESTION: What proof do we have that P. L. Travers was actively involved in The Golden Dawn organisation?
THE IMPLICATIONS: Who knows how many spiritualist messages could be hiding in the outwardly simple, naive 'Mary Poppins' stories?

Anyone Remember This?

2006-06-11T22:04:00.000+10:00

I grew up in Balranald. It's a country town near the NSW/Victorian border that nobody has ever heard of. When I tell people that I come from Balranald, I usually end up telling them it's near Swan Hill (a country city smaller than most city suburbs) and Hay. Hay is a tiny country town which everybody seems to have heard of, probably because it's on the Hay plains. And yes, they are certainly plain.*

Balranald - the town - consisted of a couple of houses, a hundred-year-old boat ramp on the Murrumbidgee that had decayed into a few planks of wood that nobody had ever bothered fixing or junking, and near our house, a woolshed that no-one had cared to tear up, or do much with. Every month or so a guy named Bob Heddle would pull up in a truck, go into the shed, raise a bit of dust, and leave.
My brothers and I got friendly with Bob. For some reason, we gave him the name 'Wooly Williams', and would run out around his truck shouting that name out. Bob was something of an artist as well as a truck driver; he entered paintings into the local art competitions, and drew cartoons. Once he gave several of these cartoons to us, which we thought was pretty neat.

It might have been when Wooly Williams came around once that we were first introduced to the joys of Joliffe's Outback. It's hard to find much information about these comics - they're that obscure - but I seem to remember that, after having been introduced to Joliffe's Outback, we saw them everywhere. Eric Joliffe, the artist, must have been either senile or dead by the time we were introduced to the comics; the stories seemed to mostly be about the type of Australia that Henry Lawson or Banjo Patterson idealised in their bush ballads. They featured a stock set of characters, including Saltbush Bill, his wife, and various other farm hands and animals. The comics also contained pencil portraits done by Joliffe of various characters he'd met in the countryside; you could tell he was a good artist and draughtsman. Here's a Joliffe's Outback item on eBay at the moment - I sure as hell can't find a date, but you can tell it's pretty old.

So - anyone else remember this?

*If you ever want to get to Hay, just drive down the Hume Highway until you see nothing in particular, and keep on driving. You'll pass Hay at some point, but that's no reason to stop.

(Cross-posted here.)

Review of a Second-Hand Book

2006-06-03T19:42:00.000+10:00

... I found it in the dry corner of a shabby store in an abandoned suburb run by a dusty old Marxist, on a shelf clothed in spectacles and a beard. Isn't that how all stories start? Well, this one doesn't either.

***

In fact, I found it on the back wall of a large second-hand bookshop in Moonee Ponds, somewhere between the top shelf and bottom shelf. It was sandwiched between two or three Marcovaldos and one If, On a Winter's Night, a Traveller ... I hadn't read Invisible Cities for years, so I bought it.

Invisible Cities - as you may or may not know - is an ingenious book by Italo Calvino. The concept is simple: Kublai Kahn questions Marco Polo about his travels, and Marco Polo replies, in a series of small, sharp vignettes, telling the Khan fantastic stories about the cities he has visited. The stories are loosely grouped together by a series of themes: 'Trading Cities', 'Cities and Signs', 'Cities and Eyes'.

As the stories and the ideas develop, it becomes clear that, not only are the stories fanciful and fantastic, the loose theme around which the book is based - Marco telling stories to Kublai - bears little relation to some of the stories, which are often about twentieth-century cities, or even science-fiction cities (concepts alien to the world which Marco and Kublai inhabit.)

***

I sometimes wonder why more people buy new books at all. The only difference between second-hand books and new books is a few years. Why should something be better just because it's been published in the last two or three years?
People have been writing for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. Old books aren't necessarily better than new books, either - but they are more likely to be better ...

***

The book was covered in Contact: obviously it had been through a library.
A black-and-white price sticker on the back was dated 10/05/2006, for $15.37. It peeled off easily, revealing a yellow price sticker (used by a Melbourne University bookshop) underneath the Contact, dated 17/06/96, for $11.95.
Details on the back revealed the book was a New York imprint that had originally costed $7.95 (American) - the difference in prices, incidentally, says something about Australia's ridiculous restrictions against the parallel importation of books.

***

Here's how the book opens. Even in translation, it is beautiful:

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.

As it turned out, my copy of Invisible Cities had been previously owned by a student probably studying for his or her exams; they had gone through the book, underlying certain phrases - and more often than not, whole pages. They had made a number of extremely pedantic, very literal 'interpretations' above certain words. The word "Braziers", they helpfully inform me, are "metal receptacles"; and a planisphere, I am officiously told, is "a map of half the celestial sphere".
Some explanations are - I admit it - genuinely useful; others are bizarre and misleading: "Nubile girls", apparently, are "marriageable". And it's just plain irritating to be told - halfway through the book - that "hempen strands" are "made of hemp". Noooo!!!

***

But then, I guess that is the problem with second-hand books; more often than not, they come with a second-hand reader ...

Sarsaparilla

2006-05-29T15:07:00.000+10:00

Sarsaparilla is a new group blog, "conceived as a kind of small-scaled and laid-back literary-arts-media forum, liberally infused with the most appealing attributes of the weblog form." In other words, it's about books, films and stuff like that. (You can see why I wasn't asked to write the general introduction.) The blog's line-up is very impressive, even if it does include the occasional shady character such as yours truly. (Yes, I am now involved in three blogs that I don't have time to write for.) So go, now! Read!

Books That Are Impossible To Illustrate

2006-05-24T08:59:00.000+10:00

Some books must be impossible to illustrate. Imagine, for instance, being responsible for the illustrations in a book titled 'An Illustrated History of Nearly EVERYTHING.' You wouldn't know where to start.
Often, however, it is not the general nature of a title that would defeat you; it is the exact opposite. Imagine being asked to provide graphics for a book with so stiflingly dull a title as, say, 'The Income Tax Returns of 1989'. It would be like slow suicide. Elsewhere, MrLefty has noted the difficulties associated with illustrating the 'Law Institute Journal'.

The LIJ editor rings you with your assignment for this month. Joey Jo Jo, here's your assignment: I need a snappy illustration for the exciting May 2006 lead story. That story? "Targeting civil remedies - effect of consent judgments on third party contribution claims."

"Targeting civil re--"?! How the hell do you draw that? (There's a reason "effect of consent judgments on third party contribution claims" is not on a card in Pictionary.)

But it would be interesting to see other works of literature illustrated. A classic like Apuleius's The Golden Ass would be one thing, while the Greek fable Pandora's Box would be another thing altogether. The medieval carol I Have a Gentil Cock will probably never be published on its own, but there must have been several books published with the title Gay Paris. And how about being the cover artist charged with the task of illustrating Philip Roth's Kafka parody, The Breast:
Professor of comparative literature David Kepesh wakes up one day to discover himself in the hospital, having been transformed into a 155-pound female breast. The ensuing 89 pages depict his rationalization for such a sudden and drastic change, his trying to convince himself and others - his girlfriend, his father, his doctor, and a university mentor - that he has only gone insane, and his quest to satiate an ever-present, raging libido.
On the one hand, obscenity lies; on the other, obscurity: how to navigate your way between this artistic Scylla and Charybydis?
Still, consider what it would like to be asked to illustrate 'Lose Weight Through Great Sex with Celebrities the Elvis Way.' Any illustration of that would offend puritans, celebrities, and bulimics - a kind of unholy trinity. As a task, it would be marginally less easy than being asked to be the cover artist for 'The Best Fake Book Ever'. How do you illustrate a paradox? Either way, you'd end up looking like a liar.

Cover Me Badd*

2006-05-23T14:00:00.000+10:00

Browsing in Reader's Feast the other day, I noticed that Penguin seem to have expanded their range of silver-spined modern classics. That, or Reader's Feast has broadened their ordering policy to include a handful of obscure titles, i.e. books not written by a member of the Amis family. Whatever the case, I grabbed a copy of Aharon Appelfeld's Baddenheim 1939 (been on my to-read list since forever) and noted the titles of a few others for future purchasing.

I also noted the arrival of Penguin's latest series of repackaged classics, Penguin Reds. The titles in the series are fairly predictable, although it's good to see the work of authors like Stefan Zweig and Eduard Morike getting a run (he says, pretending to have read them). At around $10, the books are cheap, compact, and I expect to pick up a few over the next few months.

The only down side is Penguin's choice of cover art. Not that I particularly like the sombre, drawing-room tone of Penguin's main classics range (all those black spines!), but the attempt to modernise the look, and presumably appeal to younger book buyers, has one fatal flaw: modern book art is mostly shit.

Take a look at what Penguin Reds deems suitable for Nabokov's sublime masterpiece:

Ugh. And possibly: snore. Certainly it is nothing compared to this:

Not exactly the kind of thing you'd want to be seen reading on the train, but it is certainly striking, and conveys something of the story's themes, as well as paying cheeky homage to the novel's lurid reputation. It is appropriate without being fusty, modern without being self-consciously flashy or pretentious.

Of course it all comes down to marketing. Check out this awful chick-lit edition of Sense and Sensibility:

Not sure which publisher has dressed this prime lamb up as spam, but whoever is responsible deserves, as Book World suggests, to "have two Bic Biros held with the pointy ends against their eyes and be forced to head-butt their own desk." And even that might be letting them off lightly.

*Other titles considered included: Cover Version; Got It Covered; Under The Covers; and The Aesthetics of Repackaged Classics, Or: Wow, That Cover is Shit!

A Non-Review

2006-05-17T10:31:00.000+10:00

I've just finished reading The Shape of Further Things, by Brian Aldiss. I was halfway through it before I realised I had no idea what he was talking about. It starts off as a discussion about the future before slipping into several chapters about dreams, which merge into a personal history of science fiction, concluding in a chat about the relevance of the moon landings. The book has themes, but I don't know whether it has a Theme. Its chapters all lead, one into the other, but I'm not sure whether they go anywhere; the book itself could be said to have the same structure as the conversation Aldiss records in Chapter 11, where he attends his first science-fiction convention:

I feel in with an English fan who was an old hand at these occasions, and we headed for the hotel together.
'You've got some pep pills?'
'No," I said.
'You'll need pep pills. Got to keep awake somehow. You'll get no sleep at a con, believe you me Kettering.'
'You surprise me.'
'at Kettering last year, nobody in the whole hotel got any sleep for the entire weekend beer.'
'What's that?'
'Beer. I never saw so much beer consumed in all my life. You like beer?'
'I can take it.'
'You'd better! Stick by me, you'll be all right!'
I lost him in the foyer of the hotel, but he caught me again as I was tiptoeing down from my room.
'There you are! It's going to be hell. Don't be3 nervous. are you feeling hungry talk?'
'What?'
'Talk! We'll be talking all night! Ken Slater's got his stall up, Ron Bennett's checked in, and the fans are kneeling round Walt Willis already Ghod.'
'Walt Willis is Ghod?'
'You believe it too? That's what the fans say ...'

It's well-written and entertaining, but does it have a point? The book does have a conclusion, of sorts, but the only problem is that it bears very little relationship to what has gone before.

It's this sort of thing that alternately confounds and delights me about Aldiss. As an author, he can be both clumsy and sublime; unfortunately, his clumsiness and his sublimities seem to be intimately tied up with one another!

Absolutely Everything You Never Needed To Know About Modernism Part Two

2006-05-12T21:04:00.000+10:00

W. B. Yeats
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death:
Horseman, pass by!

Yeat's poetry was an allegory of a metaphor of a symbol representing something that represented something else. I have no idea what he really wrote about, but I love the way he wrote about it:

I went out to the hazel-wood
Because a fire was in my head

Now, when you first read this, you think: a fire? In his head? Is this what happens when you put too many jalapeno peppers in with your baked beans? Ouch!
It's a bizarre metaphor, whatever it means, but the poem that follows has such a light turn of phrase, that you almost don't care.

Amongst other things, Yeats was an initiate into a occult society known then as 'The Golden Dawn', and known nowadays as 'weirdos'. They believed in reincarnation and possession and tarot cards and speaking in tongues and just about everything other thing possible to believe in. He got involved in some pretty strange activities; once he hypnotised his wife and got her to take 'dictation' from the spirits. He was so interested in the results that he made her write a whole book this way.

I'm not even sure if he was a modernist, since he prefeferred writing about the past to writing about the present. Though I guess his poem Easter, 1916 qualifies him as a modernist:

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Just imagine him calling his wife a 'terrible beauty'. "Terrible beauty? Really, William! I don't know about you! Were you hit on the head by a tundish as a wee sprat? Terrible beauty! Hmmmph!"

Still, he was a great poet precisely because of his ability to write lines that were simultaneously incomprehensible and able to catch your breath:

Nor law nor duty made me fight;
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds;
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
I balanced all, brought all to mind:
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Whatever the fuck it means, it's beautiful.

Yeats also has had the distinction of meeting James Joyce. Joyce said, "You are too old for me to have any effect on you." Yeats later said of Joyce something like the following:

"That is the most arrogant and most talented young man I have ever met."

James Joyce
Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor bar none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle.

Joyce wrote a lot of words and not so many sentences. His earlier books (Dubliners, Exiles, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) have both in a more or less pleasant arrangement. In his later books (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) the word-to-sentence-ratio dips wildly in favour of the words. Certainly there are enough sentences in the first chapter of Ulysses to make it readable. In the third chapter, Joyce starts writing in his stream-of-consciousness style - meaning that he puts down any random thought that comes into his head down, in a disordered manner, on the page; and passes it off as the random thoughts that come into his characters heads. Full stops and colons start scattering in wild profusion about the page, but they don't seem to divide any noticeable sentences. They're just there to provide a little variety. It gets to the point where you start wondering who thinks what, when, and how; and you realise you've started getting the characters all mixed up.

Then, just to mess you up a bit more, Joyce throws in a ridiculous amount of classical references which nobody - certainly not he himself - could understand.
By the last chapter, Joyce even does away with punctuation, and you get the thoughts of a character jumbled together in one great thing. I think about twenty pages into this he throws a full-stop down, I don't know.

Most of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are unreadable. I think I spent more tim reading the footnotes to Ulysses than the book itself; as a matter of fact, I'm sure of it. Because of the amount of references and allusions Joyce threw into these two books, the amount of footnotes that could be written are more or less infinite. (It's the theory of writing by reference - just like writing by weords, except it doesn't involve having to be as creative.)

Still, both books have their uses. Ulysses you can carry around and impress bookish, glass-wearing women with by saying you've read it. Finnegans Wake you can use as a pass into the highest echelons of academia; most academics haven't read it, and so they will always be impressed if you say you have.

(Next: W. H. Auden!)

Connivin' Miss Jaivin

2006-05-10T10:05:00.000+10:00

I wish I hadn't borrowed a copy of The Age from my flatmate. Then, I wouldn't have seen this article by Leunig. The piece ends, "The audience explodes, the directly hurls me through a hole into the blazing light and there is St Peter, played by Andrew Denton, beaming and waiting to unmask me - a record of my life and a large coil of rope in his arms and the two pretty little chairs facing each other one-on-one: a picture of dignity and balance." It is chillingly captioned: "This is the first of an occasional coumn by Michael Leunig that will appear in A2".

I also wouldn't have seen an article by Linda Jaivin, portenously entitled, Inspiration from behind the wire.
"Why did comic writer Linda Jaivin turn her attention to asylum seekers?" asks the introduction. "Because of a simple desire to change the world."
My reaction to this: Linda Jaivin is a comic writer? Previously, I'd only heard of Jaivin as an erotic writer who for years had been doing minor book reviews on the pages of the Fairfax papers, and appearing occasionally on boring ABC Arts shows. Her ridiculous hair-dye and large glasses may have inspired a generation of women in older-middle-age who frequented libraries and bookshops, but that's all.
But, as it turns out, Jaivin not only 'sees' herself as a comic writer, she places herself amongst the best:

There is a long tradition of comic writers making big, important political statements. Remember Aristophanes? ... In Aristophanes hilarious Lysistrata, the woman of Athens go on a sex strike in order to force their men to stop the fighting. The men grow visibly - very visibly - frustrated and the women win.

Aside from the arrogance of this claim, Jaivin's interpretation of the play is stupidly simplistic. In Lysistrata the women become just as sexually frustrated as the men; and nobody desires to end the war because of any high minded Platonic ideals about a perfect society: one of Aristophanes main complaints about war is that it pushes the price of eels up. Jaivin therefore ignores some important context - that context being the rest of the play.
As far as I can see, Jaivin makes this interpretation of Aristophanes either because she is genuinely mistaken, or because she simply wants to align herself with a political ideology. (During the Iraq war, anti-war activists arranged for the play Lysistrata to be acted around the world as a 'protest' against the war; the plot of the play coincided nicely with the anti-war stereotype that 'men' cause war, and 'women' are the peacemakers. Just for once, I'd like to see anti-war activists admit that this stereotype was first popularised by an active member of the patriarchy, at the time when the word 'patriarchy' may have had meaning).

Apparently, Jaivin wants to 'change the world'. What her aims are, it's not certain. Possibly she wants to see an end to detention centres, though I'm not sure whether she wants to replace them with anything.
The same ambiguities emerge in The Age's review of Jaivin's book:

... it is the architects and tradesmen behind a policy that doesn't give a rats about the human beings confined by it - those who callously disregard the human rights of refugees - who appear un-Australian.

It's easy to make sniping judgments like this. But of course, if you favour a system of orderly immigration - and I'm sure most Age readers would - where people's claims to refugree status are assessed, then you will probably have to have some sort of detention system. It's either that, or letting people freely into Australia, and then keeping an eye on them through police/federal surveillance, regular check ups ... neither choice is pretty.
And inevitably, when refugee claims will have to be processed by a bureaucratic system. This always takes time; no government has ever been able to make a bureaucracy work quicker. So either way, 'orderly' immigration will sometimes be a long process.

Both Labor and Liberal support detention camps, which is why the Liberal Government are simply upholding the system of detention camps that Labor put in place. Personally, I couldn't care less if immigration is orderly or unorderley, and would be quite happy for us to be overwhelmed by Asians, overflowing with Arabs, overpopulated by British, or whoever else cares to come over here.
But when I see articles like this published in national newspapers, I have to hold my nose. There's a reason why the paper is pushing this line about Jaivin's book, and that reason is not journalistic integrity: it's simply trying to appeal to the 'Let's talk about how evil detention centres are in order to feel good about ourselves' crowd. Jaivin and her publisher help to set the tone by making the claim that Jaivin is a 'comic' writer and that she 'wants to change the world'. This series of reviews published in The Age are more about Jaivin's reputation than about the claims of asylum seekers and immigrants to Australian citizenship.
It stinks.

Book Blurbs

2006-05-09T17:44:00.000+10:00

It’s pretty much a given that, these days, anybody who finds themselves purchasing a book on the poetic strength or authorship of its dustcover blurbs is not the sort of person you would trust to, say, drive a train, or babysit your children (unless your children are McCain pizza pockets, and you want them warmed up in the microwave and ready to eat when you stagger home drunk from the opera), or fall asleep at night without drowning in their own sputum.

Andre Mayer agrees, and has written a fine little article on the reckless art of book blurbing (Dave Eggers is in there, the little cunt). Book blurbs by other authors are nothing but literary back-scratching (Who knows when the upstart writer you condescendingly call “the next big thing” will actually become the next big thing, rendering his blurb on your new book more valuable than your blurb on their old book?), and even professional reviews (if such a thing existed) can be manipulated as easily as a little crippled girl with Down syndrome and pipe cleaners for limbs. Not that it matters, because these days you’ll have a hard time finding a negative review of a book in a newspaper – the literary cognoscenti, desperate to maintain (or indeed establish) relevance, prefer to hedge their bets by spoofing equally over every new release, because eventually something that they pretend to believe to be brilliant will achieve mass appeal, or, even rarer, will actually be brilliant.

Dustcover blurbs by other authors are a strange beast for another reason: they tacitly suggest that the blurber is a wiser authority, and a greater writer, than the blurbee. A big-name author giving the thumbs up to a small-time novice is something guaranteed to shift a few units, whereas a nobody telling you how fantastic something is is hardly going to inspire you to drop what you’re doing and make haste to the nearest A&R. Problem is, big-name authors become big-name authors because they have mass appeal, which, more often than not (the masses being what they are), means that they either already suck, or are going to start sucking with their next release. People who suck telling you to buy shit you don’t care about is a recipe for widespread stupefaction.

Anyway, the only reason I started in on this piece is because I wanted to try my hand at some book blurbs. Exactly like Thus Quote The Maven, More Fake Reviews, and More More Fake Reviews, except with sufficient distance between posts with identical conceits that hopefully you'll have forgotten about the others and think this clever and original.

Submit your own for fabulous prizes!

“A book so good that, were it a woman, you would have to observe her from a distance, perhaps hidden by some shrubbery, carefully memorising the usual route she takes home from work, plus other particulars, such as the code to her building, and then, one evening just as she is fresh and pink and scrubbed, emerging warm from the shower and preparing for bed, you leap from the cupboard, bind her hands and feet, and repeatedly rape her. And you can't keep something this wonderful to yourself, so you've told some buddies, and they're there too."

“An hallucinatory experience, with sentences so dazzling and unique, and a style so very fresh and warm and beautiful that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably shit your pants and not even notice it until hours later when your wife gets home and she screams at you OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SMELL HAVE YOU SHIT YOURSELF AGAIN, YOU HORRID LITTLE PRICK?”

“Reading this book, I came so often, and so hard, that I paralysed myself, and my body was not discovered for weeks, having died from a combination of starvation and testicular infection, but with a blissful smile on my face, and a song in my heart.”

“This is the book that would have stopped Hitler.”

“A heady read, and lovely, and exciting, like the first time you broke into your father’s ‘secret chest’, and found his booze and kiddie porn.”

Content

2006-04-30T23:22:00.000+10:00

Disclaimer: This isn’t going to be very good, but I thought somebody should make an effort.

Having just finished watching Mirrormask with the wife, I have to say that I’m glad it had only a limited budget, else it might have been even longer and more interminable than it was. There are some halfway cool and moderately creepy parts in it, but mostly it’s fucking stupid and senseless.

To people who actually know who Neil Gaiman is, he’s generally recognised as the writer behind the Sandman series of comic books, which DC Comics published between 1988 and 1996, and continues to republish regularly, launching a new edition of the collected trade paperbacks (ten books collecting 75 issues), or TPBs, approximately every week. I was into these books for a while a few years back, and I think I got up to about the sixth seventh trade before giving up on them. Firstly, because they are pretty expensive (nearly $30 per volume), and secondly because the art is uniformly shocking across the entire series (despite a roster of pencillers, inkers, and colourists, which one would think would overcome any problems with artistic burnout or exhaustion). Thirdly, I gave up on them because it was all a bit wank, really.

It’s hard to really explain why I think this. Comic book series, like television series, generally consist of a series of “arcs” built into a series of stories. So you have the 75 issues, the “Sandman tale”, and inside those 75 issues you have a couple of dozen different stories, and each of those stories straddles maybe six or seven “arcs”, which are usually character arcs. It takes a lot of planning, I would imagine, to develop this sort of multithreaded storytelling, especially over such a period of time, and to Gaiman’s credit he pulls it off pretty well. Each of the multi-issue or one-shot stories are excellent, and what arcs I was able to detect were also reasonably well executed. As standalone books they would all be pretty good, but the problem is the central character of the Sandman, some sort of god, who looms over the entire series, and Gaiman’s problem was that, for the sake of cohesiveness, he had to link all of the stories, somehow, to the Sandman character. This is where the series fails, because the vast majority of those links are pretty tenuous. Should we be concerning ourselves with the actions and motivations of Sandman, or with the characters in the stories, or what? When I actually stopped to think about it, I realised that despite Gaiman’s writerly chops, my interest was waning – I no longer cared about Sandman because I had been given no reason to, and for a book called Sandman, that’s a bit of a problem. It pulls you in too many directions at once.

Supporters of the series will tell me that I am an idiot or a philistine with a short attention span, but the fact of the matter is I just don’t care to spend $300 on shitty drawings and a cobwebbed plot that has no real reason to exist. Perhaps one problem was that I was taking the books in one big dose over a period of weeks, when the story itself was told over close to a decade, but I don’t think that’s it – Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher series, which was 66 issues long, can easily be read in one sitting (though you wouldn’t). The art is excellent, the violence cheering, and the stories and arcs reasonably compelling. The central character, Jesse Custer, turns out to be a bit of a knob near the end, and if you think about it too hard a lot of the conceits of the series turn out to be fairly embarrasing, and some of the dialogue will make you cringe if you’re not speed-reading your way through the thing, but Preacher is vastly superior to Sandman, because it has a direction that it’s obviously going in, and regardless of what bumps you encounter along the way, you want to know what happens in the end. It’s a good read, and worth a look.

I’ve recently started on a couple of other comic book series, as well as knocking over a few standalones. There’s the Frank Miller Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and Daredevil: Born Again, which are all great, and can be read independently of your knowledge of superheroes, though some background will enchance the experience.

The Filth, a 13-parter collected in one volume, by Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, and Gary Erskine, is…okay. I think it probably needs to be read closely, and more than once, because it seems to be a bit all over the place and a little too drugged-out for its own good.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a comic book masterpiece, as most people know, and can be read again and again without any decrease in pleasure. Every self-respecting individual ought to own a copy of it. V for Vendetta and From Hell are fairly decent as well, and so are both League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, but none of them come close to the sheer brilliance that is Watchmen. You really ought to try it.

The other multi-book series’ that I’ve started reading recently are Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, and Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. Two books in, I’ve decided that Transmet is a little immature and hasn’t aged very well (even though it’s only a few years old), but it’s a good read and I’ll probably persevere because the world Ellis has created is an interesting and vivid one. I’m not a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson, in fact I hate him and am glad he’s dead, but I appreciate what he did and I appreciate that Ellis would want to pay tribute to him with the character of Spider Jerusalem.

Y: The Last Man has a pretty good premise: Yorick Brown and his little monkey Ampersand are the only two male animals on the planet after a mysterious virus wipes out every other male, and they embark on adventures. It sounds pretty stupid written down like that, but it’s compelling and the first volume can be got for cheap, so you can taste it and see how you like it. The series is still going but the first six or so collected editions are available, so if you drill through those quickly enough you could probably start grabbing the monthly releases along with everybody else.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing. I think I’ll start grabbing Strangers In Paradise for my wife (superficially – really they’ll be for me) and after I’m done with all these kiddie books I’ll probably get back to reading some proper stuff. Like, uh, Vernor Vinge.

Tell me of your comic book experiences.

Lazy Long Weekend

2006-04-16T15:41:00.000+10:00

We're into the third day of the Easter long weekend in Melbourne, and the weather's wonderful. Slight showers are followed by the sun coming out from behind the clouds. The night air is sharp and cool, and the whole city is calm. It's my kind of weather, alright. It might seem a bit odd to non-Australian readers, but if you ever experience the Australian summer - good for inducing sweats and rashes and attracting flies and mosquitoes; not good for comfort or relaxation - you might see why winter is my favourite time of year, and Melbourne is my favourite city.
We've still got a day and a half of the long weekend to go, and I plan to spend most of it reading. Suitably enough for this time of year, the two books I'm reading have a rather pious theme.

Phantastes is the first book written by George Macdonald, a Christian and mystic from Scotland who fell under the influence of the German romantics. It's a nineteenth century fantasy novel, with a free-flowing, dreamlike plot; a little like the Alice in Wonderland books, but written with a slightly more allegorical intent.
I first came across Phantastes on the seventh floor of Fisher library, an unlikely, gigantic, nine-and-a-half-storey bookshelf in the middle of Sydney University campus. I'm not sure how, exactly, I came across it; I think I'd read of Macdonald's name in connection with C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton and went exploring for other books written by him. I have to say Phantastes was well worth finding.

The other book I'm reading might seem to go a little against the spirit of this weekend:

The Devil's Dictionary is, to my knowledge, the only book Ambrose Bierce ever wrote. I could be very, very wrong about that, though.
I've always been fond of fictional lexicons, and made up dictionaries (see as an example my latest Poet's Dictionary post), although I have to confess that comic writers today have overused the idea. Bierce's work may or may not have been the first 'satirical' dictionary; so if you like, you can blame him for starting it all. If only The Devil's Dictionary wasn't so damned good!
Bierce uses what appears to be a narrow idea - a book of definitions - to ridicule all the established piueties and opinions of his time. The book is compiled, like C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, by an imaginary diabolic figure: probably Satan himself. And - again like The Screwtape Letters - it's best read with this in mind. It's full of cheery advice to the pious Christian on how best to land themselves in hell. Definitions are occasionally illustrated by short, satirical poems, mostly of Bierce's own invention.
The definitions are sharp and precise, but occasionally - very occasionally - they become fanciful. 'Chimpanzees' are defined as a 'species of pansy grown in Africa'; Abelians as a 'religious denomination' who unfortunately flourished at the same time as 'Canians, and are now extinct'. I guess Bierce's idea was to lighten the harsher satire with more fanciful passages; and it works well.

Perhaps the last word should be left with Bierce - or is it Satan?

Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

(Cross posted here.)

Revolutions

2006-04-14T14:21:00.000+10:00

Oh boy - if there's one thing I hope to find in my Easter Stocking this year, it's The Dolls’ Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination by Rachel Fensham, Denise Varney, Maryrose Casey and Laura Ginters. Set aside the fact that a book about Australian theatre written solely by men would be immediately labelled irrelevant, nothing more than further evidence of male hegemony in the Australian cultural landscape, and you’re left with a book that I still can’t imagine anybody ever reading. Theatre is of course the poor man’s BitTorrent, but according to Glenn D’Cruz, who writes the review for this particular book, it turns out that certain theatre artists have “played a crucial role in articulating a new Australian identity, which defined itself against the Anglophile ethos that dominated Australian theatre until the late ‘50s.”

That sounds pretty self-aggrandizing to me. Have you ever met a person who reads mainly comic books and graphic novels, and is eager to announce at every opportunity that they are art of the highest order? I dig comic books, sure, and just knocked over Daredevil: Born Again and V for Vendetta, written by Frank Miller and Alan Moore respectively, who are two of the best writers in the business, and I would probably even go so far as to recommend stuff like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns to people completely unfamiliar with the medium of graphic storytelling, but would I ever claim that Alan Moore and Frank Miller “played a crucial role in articulating a new British/American idendity”? Not even if I was padding out a review of a book about them.

I also used to play stuff like Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun, and would possibly consider getting into D&D again if they weren’t constantly revising the rules and forcing you to purchase ten new “core” rulebooks at $60 apiece every three months. It’s good fun, a great way to spend a few hours with some buddies. It gets the creative juices flowing, fires up the imagination (for better or for worse, probably the latter, I would have never “become a writer” if I hadn’t played D&D and read comic books at boarding school), and the old 2nd Edition with its THAC0s even used to help you with your maths. In fact, playing D&D is of more intellectual value than watching any number of plays, and it’s certainly more enjoyable.

But would I say that Ernest Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, creators of Dungeons & Dragons, played crucial roles in articulating national identities? I most certainly would not, but I would certainly say that they played crucial roles in articulating generational identities. The “information age” that we currently wallow in was founded on the back of role-playing nerds from the 70s and 80s. Nobody would give a shit about computers if it hadn’t been for the computer game Doom, released in 1993 (I actually knew that date without having to look it up) and developed by the biggest bunch of outsider RPG-playing geeks that you’re ever likely to meet. I can’t find any evidence of it but I’ll bet you good money that Bill Gates used to be a level 12 elf ranger, awake at nights worrying about getting the 6000XP he needed to go dual-class. And I’ll even go further by saying that if Bill Gates and John Romero hadn’t been picked on when they were kids, we sure as shit wouldn’t be living in the world we live in today.

So what does this have to do with The Dolls’ Revolution? Absolutely nothing. But if you’re going to be a self-important wanker like absolutely every person currently inhabiting absolutely any facet of modern Australian theatre – a thing that absolutely no Australian outside that particular clique has any interest in whatsoever – then you need to go and fuck yourself, because you’re an even bigger loser, riding a train of even less cultural and societal impact, than me and my fat, nerdy, comic-book reading, RPG-playing, graphics card-upgrading mates.

Absolutely Everything You Never Needed to Know About Modernism Part One

2006-04-08T21:30:00.000+10:00

Eliot, Schmeliot
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative. - T S Eliot.

Nobody says something like T.S. Eliot. He is the master of the overstated understatement and the unstated overstatement. He generally conveys meaning by quoting from dead poets who write in dead languages; and when he writes in English, it sounds like he's translating one dead language into another. He makes rhyming into an abstract art form.

A woman once asked him about a line in his poetry: "Mr Eliot, what did you mean by 'three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree'?" Eliot replied: "I meant, 'three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree'".
He wasn't always so straightforward. But then, he didn't seem to like women much, anyway (his satirical line, 'In the room, the women come and go/speaking of Michelangelo' comes to mind).
His dislike of women and his pessimism comes together in The Wasteland, where the following dialogue occurs:

"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
"I never know what you are thinking. Think."
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

Bloody cheerful husband he must have been. But I like that last line. Think of how many places it could be used in:

At a party:
"Jeremy's got the hots for Amy. What do you think?"
"I think we are in a rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones."

After the Movies:
"Gosh, that was a fabulous movie. What do you think?"
"I think we are in a rats' alley where dead men lost their bones."

In Maths Class:
"What is the binomial equation for x2 + 2x +1?"
"I think we are in a rats' alley where dead men lost their bones."
After Sex:
"That was REALLY good!"
"I think we are in a rats' alley where dead men lost their bones."

The possibilities are endless.
So, there's T. S. Eliot for you. A man who had a huge influence on the course of modern literature. If only we knew what it was.

Next: W. B. Yeats!

Goodbye Blue Monday

2006-04-04T22:56:00.000+10:00

It only took me an hour to read Kurt Vonnegut's most recent book, A Man Without a Country. It is not a substantial book in any sense. Variously promoted as memoir, as polemic, as a summing up, it actually resembles the kind of structureless, extempore lecture a curmudgeonly relative might launch into on Christmas Day. Vonnegut trumps my relatives, at least, by being personable and witty, and capable of expressing anger and dismay without embarassment or hysteria - he's the great benevolent uncle I never had. So even though this book is slight, it is a pleasure to once again hear his voice.

There are bits of memoir in A Man Without a Country, bits of polemic and bits of whatever else Vonnegut happened to be brooding on at the time these pieces - originally published in a newspaper called In These Times - were written. That is, pretty much what he's been brooding on forever: cruelty and kindness, laughter and sadness. He is the great American sentimentalist, but with a cold streak of disdain for liars and tyrants. Vonnegut's argument is not sophisticated or profound, but it warms my aorta to see him denounce in print the "guessers" who control all our fates.

Vonnegut is as wishy-washy and folksy and bleeding-of-heart as ever here. He is also as hard-headed and realistic as ever. That subtle mockery of "grown-up" pieties that is so attractive in the novels is present also, e.g. "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different". Not exactly a clarion call to revolution, but nonetheless an affecting little irritant for a shallowly idealistic culture. There are plenty of similar lines scattered through the book. Many are rehashed versions of previous witticisms, which I guess could be considered lazy. But whatever, the guy is eighty-four years old. Allowances should probably be made.

Anyway, as I said it only took me an hour to read A Man Without a Country. It's not the greatest thing ever written, but it is amusing enough. Nice to know Vonnegut is still out there, ticking over. There's a photo on the back of the dust jacket that shows Vonnegut standing on a beach, his back turned to the camera, hands in pockets and looking out over the ocean. At first glance it struck me as a cliche: elderly man contemplates the infinite/mortality/his cataracts. But having read the book, the photo takes on extra meaning. Vonnegut comes across as tired, and like the aging Twain seems to have given up on the world. The end is now in sight. In the photo, Vonnegut is not contemplating anything. He is watching the waves creep closer to his feet: he is waiting to be taken.

Which Is The Greater Crime?

2006-04-01T12:51:00.000+11:00

Way back in 1993, a thick-ankled young lass from Brisbane, Helen Dale (nee Darville), won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, one of Australia’s highest literary accolades (just as a pile of rabbit droppings would be the highest point on a perfectly flat expanse of desert), for a little book called The Hand That Signed The Paper. As though two surnames wasn’t already enough, the book was released under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko, and in 1995 her efforts were rewarded with a Miles Franklin Award (picture horse manure).

I never read it, but the rest of Australia was going nutty for The Hand That Signed The Paper, a story of Ukrainianism, Stalinism, and Nazism, and finally Australianism. Naturally, when you’re dealing with Nazis, it is considered criminal to not go on and on about the Jewish experience (even if the whole conceit of your project is to examine the Holocaust from a different perspective), so the book was also accused of anti-Semitism, and in the wake of the Franklin, plagiarism. The isms were coming thick and fast and eventually it came to light that Demidenko was a hoax, her real name was Dale/Darville, the book was total fiction, the Mile Franklin judges were frauds, and the Australian literary landscape was, as already alluded to, a perfectly flat and featureless expanse of mediocrity.

But nevertheless, Australia had been betrayed! Who did this woman think she was, writing a book and then getting it published and then getting positive reviews and then receiving awards for it? False pretenses or not, the very fact that the awards were granted on the basis of the plot and alleged inspiration of the book, rather than on the quality of the writing, then the awards themselves may safely be considered farcical and useless.

And it seems that Australia’s literary elite is still not quite done with Miss D. In The Age today, a piece with the heading UNMASKED NOVELIST SNAPS has appeared, wherein a recent column by Helen Dale that appeared in Australian Skeptic has fomented the input of one Simon Caterson, journalist (and probably poet in his spare time). We learn that, recently, Dale has been studying in London to be a ninja, and has also become a lawyer, or judge’s associate, whatever that is (further counterfeit?). She has also been cultivating the look of a Byron Bay fish ‘n’ chip shop worker. But according to Caterson’s headline she has “snapped”, because she wrote this thing in Australian Skeptic, lambasting the Australian literary community (hell hath no fury; she should be careful), the media, and various and sundry for their involvement in what she claims was never anything more than a work of fiction based on a few stories related to her by some old Ukrainians. I don’t really care about the particulars of the case, so you are welcome to research them for yourself.

Caterson does not spare Australian Skeptic, either, and ends his article with a snippy “the magazine did not verify the article’s content”, after taking pains to tell us that the mag is all about the careful investigation of “charlatans, hoaxes, Holocaust denial and racism and racial theories”.

Aussie literati certainly enjoy their controversy, and after the James Frey thing in the US, probably felt left out, and since nothing fresh was going on, decided to unbury Demidenko.

But what is the point of my poorly-structured rant? Simply this: in the very same edition of The Age, much approval is heaped upon Theft: A Love Story, by needledicked “Australian” author Peter Carey (who has lived exclusively in New York since 1990, and sadly has not yet been shot).

The headline reads: “Art and deceit meet in Carey’s new novel”. And indeed they do. At 288 pages, it retails for $45.

Which is the greater crime?

The Beginning of Modernism - The Rather Silly Version

2006-03-30T20:27:00.000+11:00

1. Surrealism, New Realism, and Fruitsaladism

Modernism began in the evening hours of October 3, 1908, in a medium-sized garret in Paris, France. The owner had previously bought a small, closet-sized garret, but due to a recent demand for artistic garrets, he had upgraded to to a medium-sized garret in order to live his life of artistic penury and starvation in a little more comfort.
The people present in this garret were Utge Mitke, a painter from Poland; Mahra Uhle, a preminist* from Germany; Oswald de L'Empriere, a novelist who lived by the Seine (although he had not yet actually written a word); and T.S. Eliot, depressed, from America.
Up until that point, artists had been living in the past. But eventually, the past must pass into the present, and that is what it did that morning, with an audible thud.
All of the artists were standing around, wondering what to do now that the present had finally arrived. Mitke was listlessly painting a still-life of apples and oranges, Uhle was expounding to the room her radical preminist theories, L'Empriere was thinking about the novel he hadn't written, and Eliot was depressed.

Suddenly, L'Empriere strode across the room, took an apple out of the still life that Mitke was painting, and bit into it. The rest of the room was astonished, but, as Eliot later explained, it was as if the Real World had finally caught up with the artistic world.
Announcing this as the first act of surrealism, L'Empriere flung the apple onto the floor and left the garret.
The next day, L'Empriere and Mitke invented the second great artistic movement of modernism: Fruitsaladism. L'Empriere took all of the fruit out of a still life painted by Mitke, and diced them up into a delicious fruit salad, which he then fed to the crowd of onlookers. They continued in this way for one month, until the Parisian Chefs Union ran them out of town. To this day in France, putting things made out of oil and turpentine in your mouth have been a strictly culinary act.

L'Empriere and Mitke went on to perform many other great artistic acts: instead of painting an apple, Mitke and L'Empriere would allow the apple to paint them (they called this 'New Realism'**). In a final, great artistic act, L'Empriere allowed himself to be eaten by the apple. He never survived his death, and so, to this day, we don't know what to call this artistic movement.
Many people considered this great concluding performance a comment on the war. Unfortunately, it was 1938 at the time, so people weren't quite sure what war he was referring to.

* A preminist is a proto-feminist.
**This may or may not have been the inspiration for F.D. Roosevelt's political plan, which he was originally to call 'The New Dealism'

2. Eliot and Smudger

Modernism had soon become a worldwide artistic movement, with many adherents and practitioners. One highlight of this movement was the publication of T. S. Eliot's poem 'The Wasteland'. Another highlight was the publication of T. B. Smudger's poem 'The Scrapheap'. Eliot's work is too long to be quoted in part, and Smudger's masterpiece is too short to be quoted in full without leaving a lot of extra space, but part of it goes:

God, my life is crap.
Wei la la la la
Jug jug
Those are the pearls that were his eyes! *

As you can see, Smudger was a master of the metreless quatrain, as well as the quatrainless metre.

*The rest of the poem is a lot of artfully-placed blank space.

3. The Second Ever Performance Of ...

Another modernist of distinction was Elge Gonthe, a native Bulgarian who had returned to live and work in his native homeland for the first time. He was a classically-trained pianist, and one evening, he strode into a music hall where, for no reason at all, a large audience of random people had gathered. He then sat down at a piano and proceeded to play nothing for five minutes.
When somebody asked him what he was doing, Gonthe replied that this was the Second Ever Performance of John Cage's 4'23'' (a piano piece consisting of four minutes and twenty three seconds of silence).
"But that piece has not been written yet!" persisted Gonthe's zealous inquirer. "And, if it is 4'23'', then isn't this the first performance?"
Gonthe replied simply that he was not bound by conventional chronological structures.
The audience, moved by Gonthe's artistic and rhetorical brilliance, rose as one and gave him an ovation. During the following months, Gonthe presented the Second Ever Performance Of Cage's most famous musical composition to audiences all over Europe. It was a true tour de force of the avant garde.
Thirty years later, John Cage shut himself up in a studio with his cat and two strawberry meringues and spent the next week writing 4'23''. The meringues escaped unscathed, but the effort took so much out of Cage and the cat that they could not afterwards pass by a meringue shop without shivering.

4. Larry, husband of ...

One of the most interesting stories to come out of the modernist movement concerns a simple American mechanic by the name of Larry. (He didn't have a last name. Sometimes, he wasn't even sure that he had a first name. He did have a middle name, but no-one knew what that was.)
He didn't know anything about art, but one day, he was visiting the Guggenheim gallery with his fiancee, Carrie. They happened to pass by Piccaso's famous painting, Woman Crying:

In what was to prove to be a fateful act, Larry mistook the painting for his fiancee and left the gallery with his arms wrapped around it, speaking comforting words.
One month later, Larry and the painting were married in a small and simple wedding ceremony. All of the family were present, and they were all very moved by it.
Larry and the painting went on to have three children, which they named 'Pastelle', 'Charcoal'*, and 'Landscape'. It was only after thirty years of happily married life that Larry and the painting discovered their tragic mistake. Larry immediately rushed back to the Guggenheim, but he could not find his wife anywhere. However, he did see a saucy minx of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and he immediately threw it to the floor and ravished it before being removed by gallery staff.
So, although the story ended tragically, it is well to recall that Larry and an item of abstract art had lived in harmony for three decades.

*Larry had wanted to call them Chantelle and Parkle, but his wife had disagreed.

(Cross-posted here.)

Things Inside Books

2006-03-29T20:56:00.000+11:00

When I first became truly interested in reading as a pleasurable pursuit, rather than as a way to avoid beatings from my schoolteachers, I had to rely mainly on the books of others for my consumption, for, being a child, I was earning very little money, and despite my newfound passion, what little money I came across or stole from my mother’s purse went immediately towards video games or little white paper bags filled with jellies, purchased at the corner shop. So most of the time it was visits to the library (even back then I hated the fucking things, and still do, and will continue to do so forever), or I would scratch through my parent’s bookshelf in the front lounge.

It was a fine bookshelf, the one in the front lounge. Cast iron and redwood, around three meters long, three shelves high (the bottom shelf easily dismissed, packed as it was with my mother’s gardening and cooking portfolios), with, at a guess, a hundred and two score and a bit books in it. I worked my way from left to right. There was a lot of shit, of course, but a decent proportion of good stuff: Conan Doyle, Evelyn Waugh, Morris Lurie, Lennie Lower (which reminds me: I have to track down some of his books and see if they were as piss-funny as I remember them being), Spike Milligan (his war biographies), Roald Dahl, Dorothy Parker, Rider Haggard. I read them all and when the supply was exhausted I kept going back, but this time, it was to discover all the stuff inside the books.

My parents, it turned out, were inveterate placers-of-things-in-books. Newspaper clippings, postcards, pamphlets, patches, vegetables, letters, envelopes, bookmarks (of course), photographs, you name it. At the time I thought it was odd to keep things inside books (I still think this, and don’t do it myself), and one day I went through every single book in the house, leafed through every single page, and removed every single thing. I put them all in a manila folder and presented the folder to my mother, who immediately instructed me to return the items to their rightful places before dad got home. Not wanting to go back and put every single thing back where I found it, I just through the objects into random volumes. Thus many thin books swelled visibly and could not be reshelved before severe modification.

The point I’m trying to make is that I enjoyed finding things in books back then, as I enjoy it now. I always flick through likely-looking books at secondhand stores, to see what people have put in them. I found an old twenty dollar note a few years ago in a book at a store in Brisbane. Being penniless I naturally kept it and furthermore never again returned to that bookstore, because if the guy’s pricing his product (quite outrageously, if I recall) without even examining it, then fuck him and I hope he goes broke. Apart from the money, a photocopy of somebody’s birth certificate and a black-and-white picture of a vagina I don’t believe I’ve ever found anything really good, but a lot of the stuff is pretty interesting, especially those newspaper clippings that don’t seem to have isolated any particular article. You know the ones – you find an upside-down ‘L’ newspaper clipping, yellow with age, but it seems to be entirely random, and hasn’t followed the margins of any particular story. It’s like somebody just wanted to be fancy with a pair of scissors. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m a little drunk, but I was wondering: what goodies have youse found inside books?

Fin Du Cycle

2006-03-29T20:39:00.000+11:00

Alright already! Enough out of me!

Peas De Resistance

2006-03-29T18:31:00.000+11:00

I know that absolutely nobody is annoyed by this, but honestly, this is properly my last one.

Esprit De Corks

2006-03-29T18:29:00.000+11:00

Coupe De Grass

2006-03-29T18:26:00.000+11:00

Au Grating

2006-03-29T18:19:00.000+11:00

Fin De Sickle

2006-03-29T18:18:00.000+11:00

Tour De Forts

2006-03-29T18:14:00.000+11:00

Protestantism

2006-03-29T18:07:00.000+11:00

Alternative titles:
Getting antsy.
Ants in your pants.
Angry Antserson
Anty-Americans.

Cyclopaedia

2006-03-29T17:49:00.000+11:00

Fin Du Siecle

2006-03-29T17:41:00.000+11:00

Dictionary

2006-03-29T17:31:00.000+11:00

Postmodernism

2006-03-29T14:59:00.000+11:00

Okay, definitely the last one. From me.

Objectivism

2006-03-29T14:50:00.000+11:00

...also known as Randianism.

Stopping now.

Monotheism

2006-03-29T14:42:00.000+11:00

Gnocchisticism

2006-03-29T14:35:00.000+11:00

Altruism

2006-03-29T14:27:00.000+11:00

Modernism

2006-03-29T13:13:00.000+11:00

Rationalism

2006-03-29T13:11:00.000+11:00

Dialectics

2006-03-29T12:50:00.000+11:00

Reductionism

2006-03-29T12:35:00.000+11:00

Dualism

2006-03-29T11:52:00.000+11:00

Stuff Like This Always Happens To Me

2006-03-28T16:49:00.000+11:00

Just as I was beginning to hunt down and enjoy his work, namely The Invincible and The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem has up and died at the frankly decent age of 84. Having read only two of his books, I am already of the mind that he is (well, was) one of the finest science fiction authors the world will ever see. Certainly such populist luminaries as Philip K. Dick and, I don't know, Harlan Ellison, while fine speculative authors in their own right, have a difficult time maintaining their excellence when compared directly with The Mighty Lem, but I mostly admire Lem for being probably the first antihumanist sci-fi author.

Science fiction by definition mostly concerns itself with the accomplishments of humankind, be they unique achievements with no real purpose, or spectacular victories in the face of extrasolar adversity. Lem's genius is that he was one of the few writers ever to realise that, in the scheme of an infinite cosmos, human ingenuity and human preconception are matters of enormous irrelevance. Lem’s human space adventurers don’t simply struggle for a few weeks or months or years to understand an alien artifact, or mysterious BDO, or communicate with a species from another corner of the universe, before finally there’s a breakthrough and some great realization is realized – Lem’s adventurers forever labour in darkness because the aliens they encounter are just so fucking alien, so completely beyond even a fraction of our understanding. The scientists of Lem’s stories are as petty and self-absorbed as the scientists of today, his politicians are just as useless, his civilians just as stupid. His imagination (not just his capacity for manufacturing novelty, or taking modern technology and upgrading/miniaturizing/implanting it) far surpasses that of most any other writer of speculative fiction, and his prose is of the highest order. At least, it seems to be, as I am reading English translations of Polish/German books. His humour is cynical and warm (yes, it is possible), and though his pages can be dense and a little tough to chew at times, the mental protein acquired from them is enough to nourish the spirit indefinitely, with equal nourishment acquired at every rereading.

Anyway, I’m not about to write a dissertation on the themes I have been able to detect in only two of Lem’s works, likely poorly-translated ones at that. His stuff is extremely difficult to find secondhand and the new editions are ridiculously expensive. And now what’s going to happen is, just as I had found a new author from whom I could glean genuine enjoyment, the public is going to start murmuring. Death always means that your name is going to appear somewhere, and suddenly whole armies of fuckwits who never read a sci-fi book outside of Hitchhiker’s Guide or whatever piece-of-shit William Gibson deposit is winning awards this year are going to hear about Lem, are going to demand Lem, and all his books will be released in fresh translations for the mass consumption of the great unwashed. The thrill I get from chasing down his books will be gone, and my status as an elite connoisseur of fine speculative literature – stuff you just wouldn’t get – will suffer severe damage.

Some good Lem quotes here.

From the Metafilter post (my first notification of the event).

UPDATE: It isn't all bad news though - apparently Robert Jordan is dying. Prick that he is, he insists on living longer than the predicted four years, because he has more books to write. His revolting Wheel Of Time series - wholly and solely responsible for the widespread depreciation in quality and snobbish denigration of fantasy writing - is already 9743 pages in length, which, spread over twelve books (including the recently-released "prequel", New Spring), is eight books and thirteen forests longer than it needs or deserves to be. But he wants to live another thirty years. At an average rate of one book every three years, that's ten more books, and probably 10,000 more pages. No matter when he dies, Robert Jordan will have killed more rainforest than McDonald's. What. An. Asshole.

Great Books That Have Never Been Written

2006-03-26T16:59:00.000+11:00

Bridget Moans Diary

The History of Tom S. Boners, a Foundling

Oliver's Pissed (From the Charles Dickens section in the Alcoholic's Anonymous library)

The Chronicles of Tania. Vol 1: The Whining Bitch in the Wardrobe

The Q'uran - a Pop-up Book and Colour-in Book for Children

The Choose Your Own Adventure Version of The Bible

Not-so Great Expectations (From the Charles Dickens section in the Socialist-realism library)

Cross-posted here.

Insults - Poetical and Otherwise

2006-03-23T08:08:00.000+11:00

One of the greatest insults of all time is Byron's seventeen stanza introduction to his verse novel Don Juan. He does a piss take of all the Romantic poets. He called them the 'Lake poets', mocking their fondness for writing about natural scenes:

... all the Lakers, in and out of place,
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye,
Like "four and twenty Blackbirds in a pie".

He lays into philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor-Coleridge:

... Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
Explaining Metaphysics to the --
I wish he would explain his Explanation.

William Wordsworth is next:

'Tis poetry - at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the dog-star rages --
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

Byron goes on to make a complicated reference to Mount Parnassus: in classical mythology, it was the 'seat of the Muses'. He mixes it up with the scenery preferred by the Lake poets:

You're shabby fellows -- true -- but poets still,
And duly seated on the Immortal Hill.

He's not above mocking their appearance, either:

Your bays may hide the baldness of your brows ...

This was true, at least for Wordsworth.
There's also a lot of topical commentary in there, too. I like particularly his line about 'The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh', a 'Cold-blooded, smooth-faced placid miscreant' but I'm not sure what this is referring to. It's great stuff, nonetheless.

But I think we can all agree with Byron when he says:

I say -- the future is a serious matter,
And so -- for God's sake -- hock and soda water!

You're All Invited!

2006-03-22T19:24:00.000+11:00

You're all invited! Of course, it helps if you're living in and around Melbourne ...

Lists

2006-03-22T15:31:00.000+11:00

Over at the Random House Modern Library website, there are two lists of one hundred books. Random House calls them the "100 Best Novels". I understand the lists are quite old but I'm going to write about them anyway because there's an awesome picture I want to post.

The first list contains 100 novels selected by "the board"; the second list is 100 novels selected by "readers". "Readers", in this case, seems to be a particularly generous term. Obviously Random House doesn't want to alienate their target market - i.e. semi-literates - but a quick glance at the Top 5 suggests to me that something has gone terribly wrong in Literary Land. It's like American McGee's Alice accidentally got out and infected the whole library.

Fucking awesome.

First up on the list is Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's inescapable quasi-philosophical novel. I haven't read it and don't want to, even if the Wikipedia entry does make it sound relatively palatable. I just can't quite get my head around the fact that out of over 200,000 people, the majority of them consider Atlas Shrugged the greatest novel of all time. Of course, the sinister "board" naturally voted Joyce's Ulysses - a book, I do not fear confidently stating, that nobody, least of all any sort of editor, has ever read to completion - Number 1, so probably we can ignore both lists altogether.

But what did the readers vote for Number 2? Surprise surprise, another Rand book: The Fountainhead. I haven't read this one either and Wikipedia gives the impression of it being fairly annoying. I get most of my information about books I haven't read from Wikipedia - try it!

Bored already with this post, Number 3, as voted by 217,520 readers (probably from New York, but certainly from America), is L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth. Holy shit. Battlefield Earth, according to 217,520 people, is the third greatest novel ever in the history of the world.

The Reader's Top 10, incidentally, features a further two books by Rand, and a further two books by Hubbard. 1984 slips in at Number 6 but I reckon that was a problem with the ballot machines. Orwell would have murdered himself before he was seen in such company.

Oddly enough, the list gets a little better the deeper you go. Robert Heinlen comes in at 15 and 16 (and 62), The Worm Ouroboros at 32, Lovecraft at 45. Still, Nevil Shute appears three times, for some reason, and Stephen King appears twice, and then some other shit happens. The "board" says that The Magnificent Ambersons by somebody called Booth Tarkington is the 100th best novel of all time. I've never heard of this book and my guess is the only reason it's in there is because the "board" had only read 101 novels between them, and near the end, it was a toss-up between The Magnificent Ambersons and the adapted screenplay for Anus Magillicutty.

Conclusion: Everybody but me is a god-damned moron.

Fomented by this Metafilter post.

Bonus feature: More Metafilter goodness - Smoking the bath. Probably one of the best things ever. When the wife isn't about, I pour a good bath, and throw myself in there with a beer, some smokes, and whatever I'm reading at the time. It's fantastic. I also smoke in the shower, which is doubly awesome and not as hard as people like to think it is. Drinking beer in the shower isn't something I've ever tried but maybe I'll give it a whirl tonight. I'll let you know how I go, since you're probably keen to find out.

Lust In Translation

2006-03-22T09:09:00.000+11:00

You've heard of English being translated into other languages, and other languages being translated into English, but how about English into English? I found one example of this in a Sydney bookstore. It was a modern translation of Shakespeare's plays. It took ordinary Shakespearean phrases, like:

Methought I had been pierced with Cupid's bow

And translated them:

I fell in love.

The Ovid translation I'm reading at the moment isn't quite as bad, but it's getting there. In Erotic Poems, translated by Peter Green, insipid words are weakly arranged in limp, rhymeless verse by a simpering, pedantic Profesor of Latin. The force and fire of Ovid's original words are almost completely extinguished. Phrases are translated faithfully; the only things missing are sound, rhyme, metre, interest, joy, and meaning:

Like a fabulous Eastern queen, en route to her bridal
chamber,
Or a top-line city call girl ...

Why not the phrase 'Like a fucking classy hooker'? This is a poem about rooting, you can't afford to hold back.
Good puns are badly translated and become bad ones:

... poor virgin Europa whisked off overseas clutching
That so-called bull by the - horn.

Anybody from outside university could have told him that 'horn' actually is a well-known phallic symbol; there's no need for that hyphen.
You wonder why he bothers with the verse part at all. My translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is in prose and, while it isn't brilliant, it's far better than this. This is not free verse (if it was, the lines would vary a great deal more); and it's not metrical. It kind of hovers in between, like an amorphomous entity of words that are arbitrarily grouped together. It's as if Green put them together in between bouts of brandy and scrabble with his fellow professors.
He resorts far too often to italics to provide a kind of 'fake' stress to words. Good poets - or good writers of any sort - would never do this. These are just from the first four pages:

Take that!
Though he was drawn
Caesar - this conquest's
Listen, Venus:
What have I got
Immortalise you
Just to look at my darling, while he

Not one imaginative phrase amongst that lot. It's almost as if Green wasn't hired to translate Ovid, but to kill the English language. He should go back to reading his lexicons.

Sawed-Off Stupidity

2006-03-20T14:04:00.000+11:00

It’s an old joke that the shortest science fiction/horror story in the world goes like this:

“The last man alive in the entire world sat all alone in his house. Suddenly, the doorbell rang.”

I thought I would play around with similar ideas, as it’s quite an entertaining premise. Readers are encouraged to do the same. Best submission wins prizes!

“In sole possession of all the money in the world, yet on the brink of starvation, Terry Thermidor recognised his quandary: hold on to the dough and thus retain his unique standing, or order out for a pizza?”

“Sober all his life, Terry Thermidor swallowed the last of the flagon of scotch, as he had done every day prior to this one.”

“Born without arms or a lower jaw, Terry Thermidor reached up and scratched his chin.”

“Possessing all knowable knowledge, with both an encyclopaedic and photographic memory, and able to calculate pi to its final decimal, Terry Thermidor wondered where this would get him.”

“At the top of the tallest structure in the universe, Terry Thermidor looked down. ‘Hmm,’ he said, and stepped up onto a box that was there.”

“A staunch Scientologist, Terry Thermidor was not afraid to laugh at himself.”

Anonymous submits:
"The last fertile man on Earth, Terry Thermidor could not remember where he left his little blue pills."

Ella submits:
"Every time she babysat her nineteen noisy grandkids, she felt better about her decision to never have children."

Darby M. Dixon III submits:
"Terry Thermidor couldn't stop checking his Technorati score the day he invented blogging."

Plod!

2006-03-20T08:55:00.000+11:00

Terry Pratchett is still capable of knocking out better books than most of his peers, but he has been coasting for the past few years. It's not that he's been writing bad books as such, but when you look at his ever-expanding list of titles, the really good stuff is starting to feel like ancient history. I suspect he is devoting more attention to the Young Adult Discworld series, which I don't particularly like, but then I'm hardly in the target demographic. Who can blame him: at least the YA books receive awards and critical recognition; the regular series only rakes in yet more cash, and he's probably got enough of that by now.

The latest Discworld book, Thud!, at first seems like another solid, unspectacular series entry: funny, morally serious, briskly plotted. And it pretty much is a solid, unspectacular series entry, but there is something about it (several things about it) that got on my nerves.

The first problem is: it's a Watch novel. Perhaps I am in a minority amongst the Pratchett fan-base, but I am sick to death of Watch novels. Commander Sam Vimes, who along with Granny Weatherwax is/was Pratchett's most interesting protagonist, is now little more than a mouthpiece for Pratchett's increasingly grumpy moralising. The rest of the Watch are trapped in a kind of Groundhog Day-esque routine, and since there's so damn many of them now the routine sometimes threatens to overtake the entire novel. I'd be happy if Pratchett would give the Watch, and perhaps Ankh-Morpork itself, a break.

The other main problem with Thud! is the story. It is typical of Pratchett's present malaise that the tale spun in Thud! is largely non-fantastic. The incidental fantasy trappings remain in place, and there is a vague plot thread involving a malfeasant supernatural entity, but mostly Thud! reads more like an airport thriller in fancy dress thanks to Pratchett's insistence on pontificating about the real world. Now, Discworld has always been partly a satire and critique of our own world, but the tendency of recent books towards a kind of "realism" - of theme and style - has been worrying. Recent Discworld novels tend to be structured around one or more Big Themes, and these are not handled lightly. Thud!'s big theme is sectarian conflict, and you don't have to look too hard to spot the real world parallels. It's all rather obvious and bland, and, as more than one reviewer has noted, pointing out that hatred and bigotry are stupid is hardly a bold insight. There's rather too much editorialising going on in Thud!, bogging the story down. If the cliche is true, and satire fails when the satirist takes him or herself too seriously, then Thud! is a poor satire indeed.

The Watch novels used to be fantasy novels dressed up as crime thrillers or whodunits; with Thud! the reverse is true, and sadly Pratchett is no crime novelist. One of Pratchett's strengths has always been his underlying realism - people really get hurt or killed in his books; there are always consequences to actions; emotions are ever present - but by allowing this element to take over he has reduced the effectiveness of his writing. If I want gritty, introspective police procedurals, I can get them by the bucketload at any bookstore. Discworld was, and perhaps still is, an amazing place to read (and presumably write) about because within it anything was possible. Like few other popular writers Pratchetts can combine fantasy and humour and satire and emotional realism - think Lords and Ladies, think Reaper Man. In comparison, Thud! feels limited, lacking exuberance and daring.

Doubtless Pratchett will have another book out before Christmas, so we will see if Thud! is merely an aberration, or the beginning of a genuine slump. Not that it will matter to most Discworld fans, who will lap it up, whatever the quality. I may or may not be among them.

My Saturday

2006-03-19T10:18:00.000+11:00

So, I finally took my great big pile of culled books (I guess about 50 volumes, including all the Barthelme that Tim once wanted, as well as the Vandermeer book that I said I would send to somebody but they never emailed me their address) to Book Affair in Carlton yesterday. I wanted to be economical about the whole affair, since I don’t have a car and don’t ever intend to own one, so I decided that I would forfeit the thirty dollar taxi ride from Malvern to Carlton, and use public transport to get there. We are right by the train station, after all, and Book Affair is only a brisk stroll from the Melbourne University tram superstop.

My shoulders today will attest to the fact that this course of action was, largely, a mistake. While a pile of 50 books isn’t really all that heavy, I guess maybe 20 kilos at a stretch (there were a great many hardcovers and folio books in the stack as well, so it was probably a little more), and since I am from Queensland and therefore more genetically predisposed towards muscle-dependant labours than weakling Victorians, the real difficulty with bipedal transportation of books is not that the books are heavy, but rather that their unique shape makes them supremely awkward to carry.

I had two baggage modules with me yesterday. The first was a tasteful black canvas duffel bag with leather trim and solid base, a very sturdy and capacious piece of luggage I don’t mind telling you now. The second was one of those revolting piss-stinking red white and blue-striped laundry bags that you buy at The Reject Shop for like two bucks. Affording one of these latter bags only a cursory glance, and you could be forgiven for thinking it less than structurally sound. Happily, they are tough little sons of bitches, and so I spent the morning carefully rationing out my piles of books into these two receptacles, trying to keep the weight and mass even across both units. Nevertheless, the duffel bag filled before the stripy bag did, so the stripy bag ended up holding the greater portion.

I set off from my place of residence at around 10:30am. The first thing I had to do was descend three flights of stairs. This was accomplished without injury, and so I commenced my laborious constitutional towards the station, only a few blocks away. The problem with the stripy bag is that it is very tall, and so unless the arm is bent, the bottom scrapes along the ground, and so it wasn’t enough for me to simply hold the handles in a deathgrip – I also had to give my biceps a workout. Anyway, I made it to the station, staggering like a man born with each leg shorter than the other, and made my way onto a train packed to the gills with Commonwealth Games revelers (I assumed). Upon arrival at Melbourne Central I disembarked, and was distraught to discover that, despite my cumbersome burden, I was still capable of walking faster than every other meandering cunt that was there, yet had no choice but to shuffle along behind them as they strolled nine abreast and filtered themselves onto the escalators.

At the top of the second escalator, within spitting distance of Borders, I considered abandoning my project and just going inside to look at one of those dodgy half-porno foreign photography magazines. Sadly, despite a profound weakness of both body and spirit, I did not do this, and instead stepped, or rather hobbled, out into the late morning sunshine of Swanston Street. There I determined to refresh myself with a cigarette, which I commenced to roll, and was immediately accosted by a man who asked for one of them, mentioning that he would not be paid until Monday. As we rolled our respective smokes we got to talking, as you do, and it turned out that he was a rather pleasant character indeed, a fan of speculative fiction and computer games (he was profoundly impressed when I mentioned that my favourite computer games of all time were System Shock 1 & 2) and, as it turns out, a writer, which is another thing that I claim to be, sometimes. To validate this claim, the man, named Julian and around 40 years of age, at a guess, presented me with the first few pages of an assignment that he was working on. I do not remember the precise details of the assignment, a sci-fi story, but it was reasonable enough for something thrust upon me by an absolute stranger in the middle of the street. Anyway, we chatted for a while longer and I gave him a couple more cigarettes, and we exchanged email addresses (I have no problem with giving my Hotmail address to a total stranger, but I draw the line at Gmail addresses). I boarded the next tram.

The tram trundled along Swanston Street towards Melbourne Uni. In my six years in Melbourne, every other tram I have been on, heading in that direction, has terminated at the superstop, instead of going around the corner along Elgin Street (and therefore putting me that much closer to the bookshop), and so naturally I assumed this one would as well. I took up my bags and deracinated myself, as it were, from the rich loam of the tram’s floor, and hopped onto the platform, still struggling with those ridiculous fucking bags. Naturally I was first surprised and then infuriated to see the tram merrily trundle its way around the corner, rather than going back in the direction we had just come from. Ah well, I said to myself, and chuckled at the curious ironies of life. I hefted up the bags, and headed those last couple of blocks along Swanston, towards Elgin, at the corner of which I stopped to compose myself. My shoulders were beginning to hurt, and the circulation to my fingers had been all but terminated, thanks to the biting handles of that stripy fucking bag. I shook my hands in order to restore life and, while I would not presume to bore you with recollections of the last phase of my journey along Elgin Street, let me tell you now that it was supremely unpleasant.

I made it to Book Affair, happily, and threw my bags up onto the counter. “Guess what’s in these?” I bellowed, and the man was kindly enough to humour my pathetic attempt at ingratiating myself towards him, in order that I might get a better price. For purposes of etiquette, I told him that while he was reviewing my submissions, I would take a look about the store. I vaguely recalled there being a Stanislaw Lem book lurking somewhere in the Sci Fi/Fantasy section. So I trotted off, failed to locate the Lem (or, indeed, anything else of interest, which was something of a surprise as usually I can find something good at this particular store). A few minutes later he actually put an announcement over the PA: “To the gentleman who brought the books in, we’re ready for you.” I returned to the counter and stroked the spectacularly fat cat that was there while the man told me that I could get $150 credit or $75 cash.

Had the purpose of my book cull been any other than to simply reduce the number of books in my collection to make our move to Brisbane fractionally more convenient, I would have taken the credit. Sadly, this was not the case, so like the pathetic junky that I am, I requested the money. There were a few books left, ones that he knew he would never be able to sell, so I took them back. We concluded our transaction and I went away. I had planned to meet a friend at a nearby pub, but it would still be several hours before he arrived. I left the books on a park bench up the road, and went back down Swanston Street to another secondhand bookstore that was there. I don’t know the exact name of it, but if the signage was any indicator, the store was simply called BOOKS. I went into BOOKS and picked up Hyperion and The Fall Of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, as well as John Crowley’s Little, Big for the missus (I had intended to resecure for her my old copy of The House Of Leaves from Book Affair, but somebody else had already bought it). I then walked to Alice’s Bookshop in Rathdowne Village, near enough to two clicks away, and I’m sorry, I know the guy’s written two relatively enjoyable books about the book trade (I gave them to my mum, however, after he made some disparaging comments about the television show Black Books, and also because I had determined that he was, to put it mildly, a bit of a wanker), but the place fucking stinks and the beardy guy behind the counter was an unfriendly cunt. Plus the stock is obscenely overpriced. Plus there was nothing there that I wanted. It would be a great bookstore if it a) got rid of its staff and b) marked everything down by 50% and c) got some proper books in, but as it stands, Alice’s is probably the dullest, most unpleasant bookstore in Melbourne, if not Victoria.

So I went back to Lygon Street, mooched around Borders reading Batman comics for an hour or so, and then went to meet my friend and we proceeded to get shellacked, which drew my attention away from my bodily injuries, at least until just now. As it is, I am typing this essay using my eyelids, for my torsal region is paralysed with pain.

How You Doin'?

2006-03-18T21:40:00.000+11:00

2006 Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony – An Intersecting Lines Eyewitness Report

2006-03-16T12:21:00.000+11:00

The crowd sits in the stadium in darkness and in silence. The song of bongo drums, played repetitively and unskilfully, begins to swell, and we hear the dim report of five cent pieces being tossed into a wadded-up towel. Then, fireworks!

Suddenly, the orchestra pounces on us! The lights go up slightly, and we see something moving about above our heads. The classically-trained musicians playfully poke and prod us with their instrumental meanderings, and we see a new D1 Class Articulated Vehicle descending from the heavens in a shower of twenties and fifties.

The tram touches down softly and begins to trundle about the stadium for a while, incessantly dinging its annoying bell at pedestrians, who leap out of the way, screaming in terror. Only a few are struck. The tram eventually shudders to a halt, and seventy-three Yarra Trams ticket inspectors emerge, resplendent in their cheap blue uniforms.

They quickly surround a young Japanese woman, the tram’s only actual passenger. She has a little more English than the inspectors themselves, and protests her innocence over and over: “The machine wasn’t working! The machine wasn’t working! The machine wasn’t working!” Heedless to her cries, inspectors mercilessly rain blows down on her with their truncheons, and then write her a ticket. The orchestra makes a farting noise.

The crowd applauds. Raucous laughter is heard throughout the stadium, as every Melburnian identifies personally with the scene that has just transpired before them. Ray Martin’s head nods gravely, affording this initial gambit his seal of approval. Fireworks!

But what’s this? A boy on a skateboard, suspended by invisible wires, skateboarding in the sky! He spits on everything he sees and knocks over an old lady, similarly suspended, shattering her hip. He laughs and transforms into a pigeon, which settles on the ground and begins to peck at a McDonald’s french fry. A taxi, driven by a mad Arab, careens around the corner, splattering the boy-pigeon against the tarmac. Fireworks!

Fat men in dark suits and Akubra hats enter the arena. Will they dance for us? Perhaps sing some opera? Ray Martin’s head will not tell! One man steps forward from the group of fat men in dark suits and Akubra hats. He kneels down on the ground. What will happen?

The other men all take pistols from inside their jackets, and fire into the man. With each gunshot, cymbals clash! Again! Again! Again! Aha, it is a traditional Melbourne gangland execution! The other men drag the slaughtered stoolie out of the arena, leaving a trail of shining love hearts, like those ones that people sometimes put in an envelope as a pleasant surprise.

A barefooted Michael Leunig, dressed as a priest, now descends – sigh – from the heavens, clutching a duck. He lifts his hand, as though he is about to begin preaching to us. The stadium moans. The fat men in dark suits and Akubra hats enter the arena again. The cymbals clash once more! Bang! Bang! Bang! Leunig slumps over, twitching. The crowd bellows its approval. Ray Martin smiles, his teeth casting light on the entire arena, while his solid-state hairpiece absorbs it. Equilibrium is achieved.

Fireworks!

Then, some other stuff happens! Nobody really pays it any attention. More things float around above us, while ballerinas and tapdancers scurry to and fro below. The orchestra plays the Qantas theme song. A giant papier-mache John Howard appears, but it falls over and catches alight on one of the seven million constantly exploding fireworks, before the giant papier-mache George W. Bush can approach it from behind and anally violate it.

The house goes silent and dark once more. A single shaft of light illuminates the unmistakable figure of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, dressed in a glittering dress. Accompanied by an entourage of “rapping grannies”, she launches into a heartbreaking rendition of ‘My Humps’, Melbourne’s favourite song for 2005-2006. Some fireworks, and a bunch of flags appear! Cameras cut to the Queen, who has been replaced by a mannequin. Some university students begin a slow circuit of the stadium, protesting something. Nobody pays any attention! Soon the arena is cleared. Even the fireworks stop.

A booming voice, possibly God, or Ray Martin, comes over the PA system.

“What’s brown and runny?” the voice asks the crowd. The crowd does not respond. A fine question! Mud? Poop? What is brown and runny?

“Cathy Freeman!” the voice announces. Cathy Freeman appears, the torch held aloft. Somebody remarks that she’s even more inescapable than Eddie McGuire. Cathy Freeman does something with the torch, and something else catches on fire. Fireworks go off!

All eyes turn to the Yarra River, that great intestinal expanse of mud and pollution. A spotlight is switched on, and we watch as it is trained on a solitary bobbing turd, with a party sparkler stuck in it, as it makes its lonely fecal way down the river, out of sight, and forever into our collective spirit.

Hooray Melbourne!

Crossposted here.

In The Halls of Higer [sic] Ed ...

2006-03-15T17:58:00.000+11:00

Maybe it was a vain attempt to relive my university days, or maybe it was a vain attempt to relive my university days. Either way, I recently found myself with the student publications Catalyst, from RMIT and Farrago, from Melbourne University.
As everyone knows, university student publications are well known for their astounding creative capacity to use the word 'fuck' in many and varied contexts; for their amazing ability to offend groups in Australia that you'd never heard of, much less suspected had existed; and for their unerring instinct for missing deadlines.

How did Farrago and Catalyst live up to the standards of previous publications? I decided to score them on a number of criteria.

Miseditings
If there's one thing that student publications are known for, it's their ability to mispell words, misplace apostrophes, and generally miscommunicate.

Neither publication failed to disappoint. Page 61 of Farrago has a column on the 'blogsphere' (members of the actual blogosphere would be surprised at this) which gives a faulty blog address for popular blog http://bitchphd.blogspot.com (they give the address as bitchphd.com), and mispell 'Pseudonymous kid', the name which the bitchphd blogger gives her child (their spelling is Psydenoymous Kid).
In page 50, the author of an article dealing with the Cronulla riots tries to use a swear word, but simply makes a fool of herself: 'bullocks'!
There is an even more blatant example of misediting on page 6, where an article on logging protests ends thusly:

The Central Highlands, particularly the Marysville area, is one of the last havens of the Leadbeaters possum: just 2,000 remain.elesent augiamcor ing elessis augait do dipisim in ut irillam acidunt ad min essed magna feugait laorem zzrit.

[sic]!

It's as if their printing press had been possessed by the spirit of Julius Caesar: either that, or they just put that in there to help with formatting, and forgot to take it out.

There are also numerous miseditings in Catalyst, including blatant misuse of the enter key on page 3, three times again on page 6, and a similar misuse of the 'justify' function on page 7. (I've noticed this happen time and time again in student publications: when you combine thin columns with text which has been spaced far apart, the results can be devastating.)
Misuse of the enter key again occurs on page 28 (the recipes page) where it's not entirely clear, on first reading, how many tablespoons of cheddar cheese we're supposed to use in the casserole recipe. (We'll get back to the recipes later, by the way.)
Catalyst scores double points for the hilarious mispelling in a title on page 19:

CITY HIGER ED.
ACTIVITIES CHAIR

Farrago:
7 points (added points for the pile up of errors in the blogging article, and their little 'latin' moment on page 6)

Catalyst:
7 points (added points for the pile up of errors on page 6, and the blatant mispelling in the title on page 19).

Academicisms
No student publication would be the same without the use of jargon which would be indistinguishable outside university.

Several academicisms appear in Farrago, including the rather attractive term 'Vice-Chancellorial', and (on page 13) the almost meaningless sentence, "Sedition used to be a relatively latent concept in Australian law."
Double points for the use of the term 'Bourgeoius construct of romantic love' on page 8. All I can say is, when it comes to architecture, I prefer bourgeoius constructs to socialist constructs anyday; but when it comes to the use of outdated communist jargon, I'm yours, baby!
Catalyst is disappointingly lucid. The term 'bourgeoius construct' doesn't appear once! However, the term 'bicylism' - appearing on page 15 - is verging on the academic.

Farrago:
4 points (added points for the term 'bourgeoius construct)

Catalyst:
1 point. They must improve on this performance in future editions.

Propaganda
One of the main purposes of student publications is to publish whatever propaganda is submitted to them by the fanatics on campus. This propaganda can range from Young Liberal articles on the Howard Government to Communist Party of Australia articles advocating revolution.

Several examples in Farrago are worthy of note:

Page 18:
"2005 was an eventful year. We saw the biggest student demonstrations in about a decade against Howard's attacks on student unions. We saw millions of workers and students on the streets against the Liberals attempts to degrade workplace rights. Opposition to the war on Iraq remained steady, about 66% of people think we should never have gone to the war in the first place, and that troops should immediately be withdrawn.
So in 2006 we will have to work pretty hard to top the inspirational successes of 2005."

Some success. The troops remain in Iraq, and Howard's industrial relations and VSU legislation have both been passed through the senate.

Page 20:

"Heya Women! Jan and Khandis here , your 2006 Wome*ns Department Officers... The Wom*ns Department exists to celebrate women's diversity, to challenge sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist, ableist assumptions and stereotypes about women, and to have some feministy fun."

I wasn't sure at first whether this 'Wom*ns Department' missive should be classed under mispellings and miseditings or under propaganda. Either way, it's terrible writing.

Page 50.

"The Cronulla riots were racist in the extreme - they were for more oppression of the already oppressed - whilst the Lebanese riots were an outcry against oppression."

Translation: 'All violence is inexcusable except for the violence that I excuse.'

Catalyst has some fine examples as well, including VSU and You, on page 6; About your Student Union, on page 8; and RMIT Queer Department, on page 17. These articles combined only scored two points, because two of them were written by the same guy, and used many of the same phrases.
A fine example of double-speak occurs in the 'VSU and You' article, where the author writes:

Dr Nelson, you are wrong. VSU is about choice. It is not about freedom.'

Freedom is not about choice? Has this guy been studying under Stalin?

On page 18:

Planetshakers City Church states that their objective is to make music and deliver training to "empower a generation ...

It's not everyday you see Christian propaganda in a student magazine. Double points for originality.

Farrago:
3 points.

Catalyst:
5 points.

Slacronyms
In Farrago, mention is made of the WAC - the 'Women's Action Committee' - which may or may not prove that all feminists are WACkos.
Catalyst gives us the even more entertaining Student Union Committee, or the SUC. It comes complete with a SUC president, a SUC representative and even a SUC Womyn's Officer.
Does she really SUC? I guess you'll just have to go along to meetings to find out ...

Farrago:
1 point.

Catalyst:
1 point.

Closing Comments:
5 points have been deducted from Farrago's final score for several readable articles, and an amusing format (parodying an official 'administrative' document).
Catalyst receive a bonus point for the recipes on page 28 ( 'Cheesy Beans on toast'? Reminds me of my own student days.) However, 7 points have been deducted from their total for amusing editorials, a well-written article about the Melbourne fashion festival, and for the hilarious 'pointers' on page 27 for students moving in to a sharehouse for the first time:

- Misconception: You can live off beer and/or two minute noodles.
- Fact: Heard of scurvy? It's a disease that you get from not eating enough food that is rich in vitamins and I've heard it can be pretty nasty. If you notice yourself/housemates loking kind of yellow, maybe it's time for some vegies.

Final Verdict
Farrago:
10 points

Catalyst:
7 points

Both show dangerous moments of lucidity, however, I'm sure with a few missed deadlines, more propaganda, the addition of badly designed pages (courtesy of a resident fine arts student) and bad student poetry, these publications have the potential to be as horrible as the best of them.

(Cross posted here.)

Experimental Writing

2006-03-15T17:50:00.000+11:00

So Help Me God: A Review of "The Kite Runner"

2006-03-14T12:59:00.000+11:00

One hand on the Bible and one hand on my heart, I swear this solemn vow.

If I ever write a novel in which a first-person narrator has life experiences similar to my own, including marrying someone with a name similar to my spouse, I WILL NOT make that first-person narrator an enormously gifted writer. Particularly if my own writing is not that great.

Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" commits this cardinal sin over and over. The narrator's father tells him to "go and read one of those books of yours." (Even as a child, he is such a reader!) His mentor gives him a leather notebook for his stories and urges him to use his godgiven gift (and whispers "Bravo"). His wife-to-be is discovered reading one of his stories: she looks up and says "you never told me you could write like this". Hushed awe from the crowd, please.

It's just so crap. I've never rolled my eyes so often in a novel - Hosseini has a compelling story about Afghanistan to relate, but he tells it mind-numbingly badly. While telling us how brilliant he is. I have to discuss this book in a social book club next month - and it was enthusiastically recommended by a friend of mine. In other words, I'm going to have to play nice. Thank god for the ranting spaces of the internet.

E. Annie Proulx Can't Stop The Emotion

2006-03-14T12:39:00.000+11:00

E. Annie Proulx has a cry in The Guardian over Blokedick Mountain not winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

I read an interview with this minger a while ago and she gave the impression of being the most obnoxious, irritating, intellectually bankrupt and self-absorbed woman in the world, without also being Germaine Greer. In her post-Oscars whinge, Proulx defeats her own logic by first complaining that they didn't win the statue, and then by saying "If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards". So the Academy judges wouldn't know a good picture if it hit them in the face, but you're nevertheless irked that they didn't award yours? Nice going, Lady McBrainington.

Of course, Crash is probably the worst movie ever made (I say this with total confidence, having not even seen it), and certainly not deserving of the accolade it received, but still, shut up, E. Annie Proulx.

Recent Reads Reviewed

2006-03-10T22:24:00.000+11:00

I'm tired! Very tired! But not of using exclaimation marks! Let's talk about some books I've read recently!

The Land of Laughs, Jonathan Carroll

In a brief yet much-discussed post, I suggested that this book was "a crock". I forgot to add: "of shit". Allow me to elaborate. The story concerns one Thomas Abbey, the cynical, dilettantish son of an old Hollywood star, and his "spirited" girlfriend (she's always drunk), who are drawn together by a shared love of reclusive children's author Marshall France. For various uninteresting reasons they head off to his home town of Galen, Missouri, to research and write his biography. But what's this? The town is actually a product of France's imagination - he dreamed the fucker, from the pitbulls to the bullshit. And France's oddball daughter is using Abbey and Saxony (his pissed tart) to bring her old man back - back from the grave!

Carroll handles the set-up nicely, but when Tom and Sax get to Galen it all melts into a big greasy puddle of cliche. The fiction-merging-with-reality schtick has been done so many times that yet another go at it seems, at best, superfluous. Granted Land of Laughs was published in 1980, so predates the many subsequent variations on the theme, but even so Carroll's handling of it is disappointing. You never really get the sense that France's surreal-sounding books are coming to life. There is no dread, creeping or otherwise. Instead, dogs start talking and people start speaking in a conveniently expository manner, and before you know it you've hit the end and that's about that.

One interesting thing about Land of Laughs is that Carroll pauses to name check Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" even as he is delivering a half-arsed variation of its central theme. Readers are advised that ten minutes spent with the Borges is worth four hours with Carroll, if not more.

The Walkaway, Scott Phillips

By far the best book I've read in ages, The Walkaway is a prequel/sequel to Phillips's The Ice Harvest, which I haven't read but have subsequently bought. If I tell you The Walkaway is a noirish crime thriller you'll get certain ideas, and you're probably right to have them because it does embrace the genre in setting, story, and (most importantly) sleaze. But Phillips paints a big canvas (I love cross-media metaphors: I was originally going to say that "Phillips crochets a big quilt" but I decided to go all traditional). There are two intertwined stories, set thirty years apart, populated by a large, well-drawn bunch of characters, and Phillips keeps everything loose, circling a point that is perhaps not entirely satisfactory when reached, but in this novel it's not A and Z that are important, it's B through Y. (I can't believe I not only wrote, but am actually going to publish that sentence.)

In short, it's dark, witty noir, and better than anything you could write. Unless you're Scott Phillips. Of course.

Double Indemnity, James M. Cain

The Walkaway got me started on a bit of a (wait for it) crime spree, in particular Orion's excellent Crime Masterworks series. Double Indemnity is probably more famous in Billy Wilder's 1944 film incarnation, but the novel remains good fun, if by "good fun" you mean murder most foul, which you probably do, you fucking sicko. The story is seminal noir: gullible insurance agent falls for attractive woman (or femme fatale, to employ the terminology) and offs her husband, only to be double crossed, triple crossed, and so forth. We're inured to this stuff now, but Cain's plotting is so tight, and the crime and its aftermath so well described that this brief thriller was a perfectly satisfying evening read.

Capsule Review: Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer

2006-03-07T23:58:00.000+11:00

Our regular reader may recall that I spoke of picking up Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground for cheaps the other day. It seemed like the sort of thing I’d dig and I’d been hearing plenty about it. Somebody even compared it (favourably, along with City Of Saints And Madmen) to The Gormenghast Trilogy, one of my favourite fantastical works.

It’s probably (no, definitely) bad form to do this, especially considering that I’m [GRATUITOUS CROSSLINKAGE CENSORED] myself, but the trick with me is that I’m just having a bit of fun, whereas Vandermeer seems to take himself very seriously indeed. The other trick with me is that I’m a cunt and things I say don’t matter.

The consensus from the Wall household (two humans and two felines) is that Veniss Undergound fucking sucks. I started the thing on a brief train trip from Malvern to Melbourne Central Station on Sunday, and had given up by the time we groaned into Richmond. The book begins (on page five, no less):

“Let me tell you why I wished to buy a meerkat at Quin’s Shanghai Circus.”

A decent enough opener, no doubt entirely compatible with the dictates of some creative writing teacher (strong contender for the most useless job on earth) in whatever suburb of Seattle it is that most closely resembles Footscray. But a chapter and a bit later we still haven’t learned why the protagonist wished to buy a meerkat. Or maybe we did, and my eyes had glazed over by that particular paragraph. We get several rambling passages about holo-art, and several more rambling, though ostensibly evocative, passages about the Canal District of the city of Ambergris. There’s some guy named Shadrach, who gives the protagonist directions. Apparently there are people called “geosurfers”. The narratory (!) timelines jump all over the place. I begin yawning and don’t stop until my head has folded back on itself.

It’s entirely possible that the book gets better. It might even get great. But in just over a chapter, or barely a dozen pages, Vandermeer has lost me. He’s created this steampunk-gothic city in the future that is less interesting than a drunken stroll along Collins Street at midnight, looking for somewhere discrete enough to throw up but public enough to hail a taxi. I got off the train at Melbourne Central, went up the mechano-stairs, walked right into Borders, and, with Veniss Underground in my pocket, effectively virgin, picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s A Maze Of Death, which I am enjoying somewhat. I met my wife so we could head off to a friend’s gig together, and I handed the Vandermeer to her, thinking she might like it.

She started it this afternoon on the train ride to work. Just now, walking through the door, she threw it on top of a pile of books that I still haven’t gotten around to taking to the op shop. “An annoying wanker,” she declared (I paraphrase). “I powerwalked home just to get it out of my bag.” Now, my wife can stomach crap writing a lot easier than I can. She loves Clive Barker and wants to keep that big Susan Faludi book that I keep telling her to get rid of. She can read pretty much anything, even if she doesn’t really like it. For her not to tolerate Veniss Underground casts a very dim light on it indeed.

I read my fair share of rubbish too. I just finished In Death Ground by David Weber and some other guy, and it’s just six-hundred pages of spaceship battles. A child could have written it. Hell, I could have written it. But it was fucking great and I kept reading it until it stopped. I won’t pick it up ever again and I won’t ever recommend it to anybody and, six months from now, I will deny ever having heard of it. But it’s a pulp science fiction story that doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and the authors go with the flow. Vandermeer writes like he is wading through flashbacks of every Twilight Zone episode he ever saw, and every Nine Inch Nails song he ever heard, and every game of Shadowrun that he ever played, and every essay on Blade Runner set design that he ever read, trying to assemble it into something coherent. But his scattered imagination outstrips his ability, and in the end, Veniss Underground is just a great big confused mess of fucking boring. I have City Of Saints And Madmen sitting here too. I shan’t be opening it. It’s yours for a kiss.

Things I Have Learned After Reading H. Rider Haggard

2006-03-05T10:03:00.000+11:00

In an effort to make myself into a man, I have been prescribing myself a stern diet of literary classics, subjecting myself to such masterworks as 'Versus: Ogden Nash' and 'King Solomon's Mines', by H. Rider Haggard. Oh, you may scoff and turn your nose up at the mention of Haggard, but he's very good. I've learned a lot from him.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED AFTER READING H. RIDER HAGGARD

When First Being Told The Tale of a Long-lost Mine Created by King Solomon, It Is Desirable To Exclaim For Dramatic Effect

"What was it you heard about my brother's journey at Bamangwato?" said Sir Henry, as I paused to fill my pipe before answering Captain Good.
"I heard this," I answered, "and I have never mentioned it to a soul till to-day. I heard that he was starting for Solomon's Mines."
"Solomon's Mines!" ejaculated both my hearers at once ...

Meteorological Phenomenon Have a Way of Occuring at Convenient Moments For The Plot

As soon as they were gone, Good went to the little box in which his medicines were, unlocked it, and took out a note-book in the front of which was an almanack. "Now, look here, you fellows, isn't to-morrow the fourth of June?"
We had kept a careful note of the days, so we were able to answer that it was.
"Very good; then here we have it - '4 June, total eclipse of the sun commences at 11.15 Greenwich time, visible in these Islands - Africa, &c.' There's a sign for you. Tell them that you will darken the sun tomorrow."
The idea was a splendid one ...

King Solomon Was a Pretty Awesome Road Builder

As for the road itself, I never saw such an engineering work, though Sir Henry said that the great road over the St. Gothard in Switzerland was very like it. No difficulty had been too great for the Old World engineer who designed it. At one place we came to a great ravine three hundred feet broad and at least a hundred deep. This vast gulf was actually filled in, apparently with huge blocks of dressed stone, over which the road went ...

It Is Not Advisable to Follow Withered Old Crones Into Dark Caves

On she led us, straight to the top of the vast and silent cave, where we found another doorway, not arched as the first was, but square at the top, something like the doorways of Egyptian temples.
"Are ye prepared to enter the Place of Death?" asked Gagool, evidently with a view to making us feel uncomfortable.
"Lead on, Macduff," said Good, solemnly ...

The Assassination Methods of Elephants

With a scream of pain the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing his huge foot on to his body about the middle, twined his trunk round his upper part and tore him in two ...

When Encountering a Mysterious Race of People Who Speak in A Dialect Related to Modern Zulu, One Should Foment Revolution If One Does Not Like Their Leader

... "Well, I feel uncommonly inclined to be sick."
"If I had anhy doubts about helping Umbopa to rebel against that infernal blackguard," put in Good, "they are gone now. It was as much as I could do to sit still while that slaughter was going on. I tried to keep my eyes shut, but they would open just at the wrong time. I wonder where Infadoos is. Umbopa, my friend, you ought to be grateful to us; your skin came near to having an air-hole made in it."

Englishmen Are Never Immoral

"It is strange," he answered, "and had ye not been Englishmen I would not have believed it; but English 'gentlemen' tell no lies. If we live through the matter, be sure I will repay ye!"

Englishmen Hardly Ever Remove Their Monocles

He was so very neat and so very clean shaved, and he always wore an eye-glass in his right eye. It seemed to grow there, for it had no string, and he never took it out except to wipe it. At first I thought he used to sleep in it ...

Englishmen Are Not Concerned By Wealth

... I can assure you that if you had passed some twenty-eight hours with next to nothing to eat and drink in that place, you would not have cared to cumber yourself with diamonds whilst plunging down into the unknown bowels of the earth, in the wild hope of escape from an agonising death.

But They Don't Turn Their Noses Up At It Either

... If it had not, from the habits of a lifetime, become a sort of second nature with me never to leave anything worth havin behind, if there was the slightest chance of my being able to carry it away, I am sure I should not have bothered to fill my pockets.

Englishmen Do Not Swear, They:

Curse
Damn
Ejaculate (!)
Use invective
Use salty language
Good responded nobly to the tax upon his inventive faculties. Never before had I the faintest conception of the breadth and depth and height of a naval officer's objurgatory powers.

In other news relating to the African continent: South Africans are stoners!

The Age Reviews: More Bullshit

2006-03-05T00:39:00.000+11:00

If the concepts of quality writing, useful insight, good literary judgement and cultural awareness could be somehow be placed in a vacuum and then painfully turned inside out, the resultant mess would look a lot like The Age’s book review pages. They served us up some more this weekend, and I was there to send it right back to the fucking kitchen with instructions for the waiter to relay my quivering disgust.

The Incredible Adam Spark by Alan Bissett

Something has gone terribly wrong with this review. The tagline tells us that “You can’t put a barcode on a character like Adam Spark.” But you can apparently put a price tag on this 240 page book. A $53.40 price tag, to be exact. We are also told from the outset that the book is about a spastic, and from what I can tell, consists of nothing but the spastic looking at things and describing them to himself. A little investigation also turns up the suggestion that the language is “very Irvine Welsh”. In other words, indecipherable blasphemy. In other other words: shite.

Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs by Jeremy Mercer

I have it on very good authority that the entirety of Paris smells like feces. Despite this, I am still intrigued and tantalized by notions of one day visiting the infamous Shakespeare & Company bookstore, mainly because I have been hearing about it for the last twenty-eight years of my life. It sounds to be quite the hive of literary activity, with many famous writers staying there (it seems that they have rooms above the store proper), and also something to do with Ulysses. And I love a good book about a bookstore. But I won’t be reading this one, namely because it focuses too much on the people, and not enough on the structure. And the people, as it so happens, are “artists”. And if there’s anyone I hate, it’s an artist. And if there’s anything worse than an artist on his own, it’s an artist cohabiting with other artists, sharing their art, talking about their art. And a bunch of artists living together in the most famous bookstore in the world, with another artist (in this case, Mercer) moving amongst those artists, and writing about them, the shop, and himself, is a perfect recipe for a great big wank.

Consider The Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Fucking David Foster Wallace. Look at that picture of him wearing a bandana. What a cunt. The reviewer actually has the tenacity to compare Wallace to, respectively, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, and Thomas Pynchon. I have no opinion of Laurence Sterne as I have not read him, but if there’s anything Joyce and Pynchon have in common, it’s that they write big, and they write hard, and people pretend to have read them when they haven’t. People go around with notions of Pynchon and Joyce in their heads, but no understanding of them. Wallace certainly writes big (take a look at Infinite Jest if you don’t believe me), but the difference between Wallace and the rest of them is that people can read Wallace, if they are so inclined. Put the effort in, and eventually you’ll finish the book. Only problem is, you get to the end of a book like Infinite Jest, and you come away with nothing. It’s a thousand pages of empty words and tedious footnotes and disinteresting, sometimes even despicable characters, and you’ll never meet anybody who claims to be reading a Wallace book for the second time around in order to complete or at least augment their understanding of it. That’s because Wallace is read – and read only once – for cachet, or he is not read at all.

The reviewer of Lobster gives the game away halfway through: “If [Wallace] thinks of any new fact - and he thinks of 10,000 - that might illuminate or fructively impede the progress of his argument, he throws it in. He throws it into the footnotes. There they are, at the bottom of the page, going on forever, to what purpose we do not know.”

But he doesn’t mean this in a disparaging way. He is, in fact, delighted by all this uselessness. That’s because he has an impression of Wallace as a grand master, and can’t not approve of anything the man does, even when he admits to frequent and protracted bursts of irritation. He concludes by telling us that this, a book of essays, is “thrilling”. Methinks his synapses are all askew, for essays are not designed to thrill – they are designed to enlighten. I am a big fan of essays and essayists – Hazlitt, Orwell, and Nicholson Baker being amongst my favourites – and many essays I can read again and again without any distillation of delight. But I have never once experienced the sensation of being “thrilled” by an essay. If this were to happen, I should immediately recognise the essay as either one of two things: a piece of journalism, or the lyrics to a fucking rock and roll song.

Dream Boogie: The Triumph Of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick

A $75 biography of a man that most of us have never heard of. Not because we have no appreciation for African-American soul/gospel music and civil rights activism, and not because those things were not important to America during a certain phase of its downward spiral, but simply because it is totally fucking irrelevant to me as an Australian reader.

NEGADON!

2006-03-04T13:02:00.000+11:00

The Japanese prove once again that if there’s one thing that will never, ever go out of fashion, it’s giant fuck-ass robots slugging it out with equally enormous space devil-monsters in the middle of Tokyo.

Nostalgia

2006-03-01T23:32:00.000+11:00

Tip-off number two ...

In another world, I wrote:

I used to think we lived in a democracy, but we don't. We live in a bureacracy; and it's all about making resolutions about making regulations for setting plans for writing reports.

That was in an article I wrote just after attending a Newcastle City Council public meeting. They had the idea of making a 'City Cultural Precinct' in the middle of Newcastle as a way of attracting artists to the city. It was and is a crazy idea. They could never agree on the borders of this precinct, they didn't have a clear idea about which artists would be working in this precinct (and which artists wouldn't), and they had no clue what date the precinct would be ready by.
The council was always planning to move organisations into different buildings; restructure the Library; and rebuild the art gallery, but it never seemed to happen. The motto of Newcastle City Council always seemed to be: "never put off for next year what you can put off for a decade."
In the meantime, organisations closed down; buildings grew derelict; businesses shut up; and people sat in the Newcastle Community Arts Centre on Parry Street and held interminable meetings in which they discussed future meetings they were going to have.

But there was another Newcastle. Over the three-years plus that I lived there, I can remember helping Liz to set up her store on Hunter Street, sitting in at the first meeting for a new zine committee at the Octapod building on King Street, seeing a Steve Martin play at the Repertoire theatre in Lambton, arguing with dreadlocked socialists selling Green party propaganda at the zine fair in the Honeysuckle markets, drinking too much with Fiona at the Sydney Junction Hotel on Beaumont Street, chatting to Sue Leask (and her Linda Jaivin-style hair) at the Pepperina bookshop on Bolton Street just two weeks before she shut up shop for good, and reading (or rather shouting) poetry at Dean Winter's Cabaret, opposite the now-closed Pepperina bookshop.

Good times? Sure, there were those. And then there was the time I first walked into Graphic Action. They were just next to The Rock Shop at the time, on Hunter Street; and I had just moved to the area. You know how occasionally you get weird author fetishes and for months on end, you comb the bookstores looking obsessively for books by that author, and often only that author? Well, at the time, I had a Michael Moorcock fetish. I wasn't expecting to find anything in particular, but I went in nevertheless. I had a vague idea that they might have stocked Elric of Melnibone comics, so after flicking through some of the collection at the back of the store, I asked the fast-talking guy at the counter if he had any Michael Moorcock books. He went to the collection and showed me several copies of Michael Moorcock's Multiverse.

That fast talking guy was James; he was a member of a local church, and a local theatre group; his father had been a state politician or a federal politician or something like that, and he was part of a local rap band. He was great company: smart, knew what you liked, funny, full of ideas, and usually ready to talk. But the business was his, and he knew business alright; he started working at another local comic store, and then started up in Graphic Action.
There were other guys working at GA as well; Liam, always good to talk to, and easygoing Callan, who was in a band called The Pints.
Later, GA moved to the opposite side of Hunter Street, near the Salvation Army employment offices. This second location for the store differed from the first principally in that you could actually move between the shelves and not get jammed between other customers.

Truth be told, I wasn't the biggest customer of GA. I've never been very interested in comics. But key finds there include the aforementioned Multiverse comics; Joss Whedon's Fray comics; and almost all the Howard the Duck books (which still remain tantalisingly almost-but-not-quite complete).

Ah, Graphic Action. If Newcastle had more places like you then ... it would be a city with two comic bookstores.

Crossposted here.

Another Day...

2006-03-01T17:09:00.000+11:00

...another book with a promising beginning that doesn't pay off. This time it was Jonathan Carroll's "classic modern fantasy" The Land of Laughs. What a crock, although at least I managed to finish it.

The Internet Is Wasted

2006-02-28T23:13:00.000+11:00

“And then a baby starts crying so hard that it chokes.”

I was going to crosspost this entire entry here as well, but figured I’d spare you the agony. I don’t know why my writing has been so cranky lately, because psychologically I’m feeling quite cheerful.

Give It A Name

2006-02-28T20:10:00.000+11:00

It is a fact of life that some people have silly names, and normally the polite thing to do is not draw attention to it. If somebody's name is, say, Carrington B. Felch, then they are doubtless all too aware of how ridiculous it sounds, and probably the only thing holding them back from suicide is that people are yet to discover that the "B" stands for "Buboe". To make fun of poor Carrington would be cruel and unnecessary. Unless, that is, Carrington is a published author, in which case it is your right to judge his appelation as harshly as you wish.

Authors are in the priveleged position of being able to rechristen themselves at will, whether because they dislike their actual name (e.g. Stephen King's real name is said to be Gulliver Wankstrom III), or because they are already famous for writing under their actual name and wish to fly under the radar with a pseudonymous work. So it makes you wonder what some writers are thinking when they, and indeed their publishers, allow books to go on sale bearing disastrously unappealing or inappropriate names. Note the following examples:

Joan Jonker - According to her website, Joan writes "hilarious and touching stories". She also has a hilarious and touching (well, hilarious, anyway) name. While I have never heard of her, apparently the Swedes are mad for Yoan Yonker.

Rosamunde Pilcher - Half love-interest-in-a-shite-fantasy-novel, half tinned cat food flavour, Ms Pilcher allegedly "delivers heartwarming stories set against the beautiful landscape of rural England".

Dean R. Koontz - Winner of the 2006 Author Surname That Sounds Most Like a Phonetic Profanity in an Irvine Welsh Novel Award (narrowly beating thriller writer Stephen Coonts), Koontz is apparently one of the big names in horror fiction, and something of a reactionary bigot as well. I'm adding him to my fantasy dinner party guest list as we speak.

Karin Slaughter - Not sure if she's related to the old action thriller man Frank G. Slaughter, but in any event Karin has made a (rather off-putting) name for herself writing Patricia Cornwell-esque forensic thrillers. Appropriately enough, her books are renowned for their graphic depictions of, well, slaughter, so I suppose this is one case where the author's name actually reflects their work.

Jonathan Gash - Another well-named crime author, Jonathan could probably have turned his hand to erotica with equal success.

Louise Bagshawe - Not such a bad name, perhaps, but easily misread as "bagshave", a compound that summons at least three unpleasant mental images.

For more unfortunately named authors, see this excellent Amazon list which features such authors as I. Metin Kunt, Leon Homo, and (my favourite) Mu-Chou Poo. Martin Wank is pretty good, too.

Anagram Fun

2006-02-28T15:10:00.000+11:00

Intersecting Lines:

Silencing Interest - perhaps a new motto?

Testicles reign inn - ditch the last 'n' and this is also known as "spontaneous feminization".

Nieces renting slit - a Footscray uncle's fondest dream.

Elect tigers in inns - because where else do you elect a tiger? Go on, tell me.

Linens entice gits - an important lesson for those of you with loose morals and Egyptian cotton sheets.

Enticing lesser tin - otherwise known as "fool's tin".

Generic tinsel nits - a common Christmastime pest.

Genetic lint sirens - Ever wondered how you just knew there was some fluff in your bellybutton?

Incense lingers tit - Think you'll be up for another round come morning? Stop your one-night stand from taking a taxi home but lighting up a few sticks of Sunflower Daydream.

Sir Glint Sentience - the android kiddy-fiddler.

Remainders: "erect gents", "Leninist gin".

Tipoff Time with Intersecting Lines!

2006-02-26T22:59:00.000+11:00

Since Tim, TimT and myself are effectively raking ourselves over smouldering literary coals so that you don’t have to, I thought it would be a nice idea if we were to provide intelligence on good book resources in and around the fine city of Melbourne (and, once my wife and I have relocated, Brisbane). I don’t have many friends because frankly they’re too much hassle, but if I did, one thing I’d hate to hear from them is “Oh James, I found this great little bookshop in [insert location here] and picked up [a bunch of awesome books] for only [minuscule amount of currency]…pity it was the last week of their going-out-of-business sale!” Man, that kind of thing would really piss me off.

With this in mind, I (and possibly the others) will, whenever I (we?) am (are!) able, provide you with the delightful results of my (our!) frequent bibliophilic reconnoiters, wherein amazing bargains may be had. And so today, as I limped along Chapel Street in Windsor-Prahran, looking for the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, I came across one of those mushroom bookshops, usually Angus & Robertson remainder stores, that pop up from time to time in vacated premises, offer a startlingly uninspiring (can something be simultaneously startling and uninspiring?) selection of product, and then vanish before you can take your stuff back for a refund.

But I sensed, today, that this one was a little different. The clue was in the pile of Iron Council’s by China Mieville sitting in the front window, new editions at only five bucks a pop. Now, Mieville is a cock, but he’s a relatively popular, culty sort of author, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt for me to have a poke around. The front of the store was jammed with the usual array of gardening, feng shui, aromatherapy and Donna Hay cooking hardcovers, but, as the ancients used to say, stand on the side of a hill with your mouth open for long enough and eventually a roast duck will fly in, and I had no urgent bowel movements to attend to, so I ventured a little further, sifting through a varied assortment of rubbish in the hopes that I might eventually uncover something that, when the inevitable bowel movement came, I would have to read while attending to it.

I must say, I have never been quite so impressed by a pile of slightly dusty, remaindered books with a full accumulated inch of repricing stickers on them. Within minutes I had secured: City of Saints and Madmen and Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer; What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart; Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang; and, I am somewhat sheepish to admit, Funnelweb by Richard Ryan. With the exception of the final volume, which was too mindlessly entertaining to pass up, these were all books that I had seriously considered paying full price for on prior occasions, in other establishments, but just never got around to. The princely sum for this selection of delicacies? Twenty bucks.

Naturally there was a great deal of crap to be found as well, mostly a plethora of crime books and cheap-looking biographies of Hitler, plus the ubiquitous housebrick-thick World’s Blankiest Blanks, but whatever, this is some pretty good stuff and you’re certain to find a surprise (naturally, I accept no responsibility if you don’t).

How To Get There: This no-name place was directly across the road from the Prahran Town Hall on Chapel Street, if you’re on the right-hand side of the drag and heading towards Windsor Station, but before you get to the Chapel Street Bazaar. Standard-sized paperbacks are three for ten dollars and everything else seemed to be five bucks. Minimum EFTPOS transaction $15, but there’s an ANZ ATM just across the road. While you’re in the area, there’s a secondhand bookshop further along towards Dandenong Road which is also pretty decent – Syber’s Books.

Public Masturbation

2006-02-26T22:24:00.000+11:00

This was originally to be a comment in response to Tim’s previous post, but I got carried away, as is sometimes my habit.

I abhor lists of that nature, and there are certainly many of them. Where do those cunts get off on telling us what they think we should read? Who are they that I should care for their opinions? 1001 books? Unless you wholly commit yourself to the pursuit, I think I'm not going too far by suggesting that that is more reading than can be profitably accomplished in an average lifetime. Three days to read the book from cover to cover, three more days of reflection and rereading (for, if the book is truly so great, then surely it is worth more than a single run?), and a day of rest.

Okay, so, not exactly a lifetime. Only 20 years, in fact. But, unless we rigidly abide by their curriculum, we are still going to be reading other books, for one of the great pleasures and benefits of books is that they inevitably lead you to other books, because a fine book always stirs the imagination and warms the spirit, sets you seeking further adventure and enlightenment. The mark of a truly great reader, in my humble opinion, is not that he has dulled his senses by drawing red lines chronologically through a prepared list of books, studiously absorbing every line, every paragraph until the final page. Rather, it is that he sometimes leaves books half-finished, desirous to move on to others, carried by his fancy, certainly returning to those uncompleted volumes but never so set on a single path that he has no room for the deviations of his imagination. In fact, such a person would seemed to be marked by a singular deficit of intellect, for he feels that it is his duty to complete a course of reading, and anything seen as a duty soon becomes a chore, and anything that is a chore soon grows to become something that is despised and resented. With a tired heart, he picks up Pens�es or The Symposium or even, god forbid, Beowulf, and silently mouths his way through it, the material seeping through his eyes only to be refracted by his mind.

I am not a great reader by any measure, but I am a satisfied one, an enthusiastic one, and dare I say it a confident one. Though I am not so vain as to never reach for a dictionary, and am certainly not ashamed to admit that sometimes I must read a page more than once in order to understand it, I am not troubled by or fearful of any book. Some simply evoke no passion in me, and others cause me to withdraw violently, because I know that they either have nothing to offer, or will serve to actively stupify me. Why pain myself so when there are piles of unread books in my own modest collection, further piles yet to be discovered, or old friends to be revisited?

One Blog Post You Must Read Before You Die

2006-02-26T18:05:00.000+11:00

We at Intersecting Lines are not stand-offish elites, pontificating from atop our ivory towers or wherever it is stand-offish elites pontificate from now that you're not allowed to shoot elephants without a permit. No, we like to engage with our readers, to make them a part of the blog, as befits the democratic age in which we live. Enough of our waffle, we like to say: what do you think? Interacting with our audience not only stimulates debate, but provides a really easy way to conclude posts. Don't you think?

Anyway, one of the "buzz" books in the "blogosphere" at the moment is 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It sounds like meretricious crap to me, but it's got me thinking about my 1001 favourite books. I'd list them now if I had time, but sadly I have other things to do with my life than provide proper conclusions to blog posts. So, dear reader, the task once again falls to you. What are your top 1001 "must reads"? Annotated lists in the comments, please.

Sunday Night Cross-Promotion

2006-02-26T18:04:00.000+11:00

Read my review of Stephen King's Cell here.

Now, at sentence level, King is not a very good writer. He improves at paragraph level, gets a bit shaky at chapter level, but at part-and/or-other-subdivision level he is not too shabby at all. By which nonsense I mean that for all the sloppiness of his prose (which admittedly is less distractingly energetic than it used to be; somebody has obviously had a word to him about all those ITALIC CAPS), King is very good at keeping you turning the pages. So although the story and characters are straight out of the manual, the dialogue terrible and the constant attempts at humour disastrous, Cell starts out exactly as I had hoped - fast, violent and engaging.

The Age Reviews: Bullshit

2006-02-25T22:40:00.000+11:00

Glancing back over the undulating seas of time, I can’t think of a single The Age book review that has ever given me the impetus to go out and buy whatever it is they happen to recommend. This being my thesis, I decided to take a little look at what The Age had on offer today, in order to categorically establish whether or not they know what the fuck they are doing..

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis

Approximately ninety-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven books have been written about the Cold War, and a great many are priced below the $50 that publishers are asking for this effort. The interesting thing about the Cold War is that it was history that never happened: all of it was conjecture and doublethink, but we’ve been jawing about it ever since. Baby boomers too young to have lived through WWII, and too old to have given Vietnam any critical analysis outside of “let’s get those gook bastards!”, like to dredge up the Cold War from time to time to remind all subsequent generations that, really, we’ve got it pretty easy, because we have no idea what it’s like to live in real fear. Perhaps if the Cold War had escalated into anything more than the diplomatic equivalent of two clowns smacking their erect cocks together in a circus tent I might feasibly be interested, but as it stands, the whole thing was rubbish. Rating: D-

Hatchet Jobs by Dale Peck

This book came out in the middle of 2004. I didn’t care about it then, and I don’t care about it now. The authors it allegedly attacks – David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, James Joyce, etc. – were irrelevant when people were reading them, and are well past irrelevance now, resembling no more than hunks of cheap cheese that have been grated to a point that, should you wish to grate them further, you will be shredding your fingers in the process. The review concludes: “While it would be deliciously satisfying to accuse Peck of being naked himself, his clothes look remarkably well cut, if somewhat showy.” I was writing shit like that in Year 9. Rating: D

The Murrimbidgee Kid by Peter Yeldham

Apparently a “pot-boiler set in NSW during the Great Depression of the 1930s”. I’m sure the Depression was rough, but using it as the cornerstone for your literary excreta is no longer original, and the fawning praise by Bryce Courtenay only seals the deal: three months from now, after nobody has borrowed it from the local library, you’ll find a pristine copy of The Murrimbidgee Kid on the shelf at the Salvation Army reject shop, tucked between a handful of Clive Cussler softbacks and a stack of those editions of Michael Chrichton’s Prey that they were giving away for free with the newspaper a while ago. Rating: D-

Lies I Told About A Girl by Anson Cameron

I’d never heard of Anson Cameron before right now but, judging from his picture, he probably wanted to be a jockey until Jockey School told him he was too tall. His fourth book sounds pretty boring: something about a kid at boarding school in rural Victoria. I know it’s a load of shit because in the review there’s a “rich student who misses urban life and so carries around a jar of Manhattan air that he opens every now and again to revisit civilization”, but the book is set in 1975, when flights between Australia and America had to be booked six years in advance, and only took off every eight weeks at an approximate cost of $78,000, adjusted to present-day dollars. The chances of some kid winding up in a boarding school in the middle of Victoria, and just happening to have a jar of Manhattan air with him, are very slim indeed, and point to one inescapable conclusion: Anson Cameron is a wanker. Rating: D

The Good Life by Jay McInerney

Jay McInerney is like the half-aborted lovechild of Bret Eaton Ellis and Martin Amis, with two important differences: the first is that nobody reads Jay McInerney, and the second is they don’t read him because he sucks. New Yorkers attending parties and coming to grips with the tragedy of September 11, replete with “references to brand names and celebrities” (echoes of DeLillo)? Put me on the “Do Not Call” list, thanks, Bloomsbury. Rating: D

The History Of The Times: The Murdoch Years by Graham Stewart

Possibly this is a fascinating book, as I’ve always had an interest in the biographies of prestigious, globally-renowned newspapers, but at $60, which is nearly two slabs of beer, I guess we’ll never know. Rating: C

Henri Cartier-Bresson by Pierre Assouline

Another $60 stocking-stuffer. Henri Cartier-Bresson is a photojournalist, now dead, who used to take pictures of people like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Matisse, William Faulkner, and, uh, Coco Chanel. Great. Props to the reviewer for using the word “belletrist” (“a writer of belles lettres”), however. The teaser to the review reads: “Cartier-Bresson's name is indisputably associated with photojournalism.” In other words, nobody gives a shit about this book and the editor didn’t bother to read my copy. Rating: C-

Collected Poems For Children by Ted Hughes

I’m sorry to keep going on about cover prices, I really am, but I can think of better ways for a child to spend $39.95 than on a book of poetry by Ted Hughes. Pokemon cards and Passion Pop, for example. Rating: C

From Under A Leaky Roof by Phil Sparrow

A book about Afghan refugees in Australia. Sounds halfway decent but I’ll never read it, and I’ll wager that neither will you. Actually, it doesn’t sound so much like a book that somebody would “read”, exactly. Rather, it sounds like a book that somebody would list as a secondary source in their university essay. Rating: B-

There are some other books reviewed on the The Age website but already I’m bored with the whole exercise, and so are you. Ave atque vale!

Borising Around Henley-on-Thames (Or, the Greatest Tory Ever Told)

2006-02-24T21:34:00.000+11:00

My flatmate, who also happens to be my landlord, is something of a lefty. We've got into arguments about Whitlam, Howard, and the comparative merits of the Herald Sun and The Age. Plus, his sister once invited me to a Labor Party fundraiser in Brunswick. I figure, though, since I can't do much about it, I can at least try and take advantage of the situation. Next time he asks for the rent, maybe I can assert, 'Hey comrade! Property is theft!' or something. Then again, he's not from the extreme left, and would probably laugh at me. And I'm hardly Josef Stalin myself: he's got me there, the swine.
Still, in the meantime, I've been redistributing some of his wealth - ie, borrowing a book from him. It just so happens to be,

FRIENDS, VOTERS, COUNTRYMEN: JOTTINGS ON THE STUMP

Boris Johnson.

And it's fucking good.

In case you were wondering, here's a quick Borisography. Child of upper-middle-class parents, he gained a scholarship to Eton and became middle-upper-class. Sometime after graduating, he became an apprentice journalist for the right-wing-leaning national paper, The Daily Telegraph, before going on to work for the even-more-right-leaning international magazine, The Spectator. During 1997, he stood as the Tory candidate for the Welsh electorate, Clwyd South (lost), and in 2001, for Henley-on-Thames (won). At the same time, he was also a columnist for The Telegraph, and writer and then editor of The Spectator.
As a politician, he was once labelled as 'The Worst Candidate In The World' by the Sunday Times. Despite this recommendation, he failed to lose a safe Tory seat in the following elections. As an editor, he is said to have had an affair with Petronella Wyatt, one of his columnists.
And as a writer, he is exceptional:

"That's it. The gun is fired. We're off. With a glint in his eye Stuart Reid, deputy editor, seizes the reins at the Spectator. My Telegraph column is prorogued. Chris Scott has drawn up a compendious battle plan, beginning with a walkabout in Henley high street."

The comic deflation in the last part of the last sentence is wonderful. But 'compendious'? Who the fuck uses the word 'compendious' nowadays? 'Big', 'Large', 'Jolly Huge', 'Gigantic', or even 'Comprehensive' all seem to be simpler options.
(Then again, I suspect that Boris sometimes doesn't like to be understood. He once described rumours of an affair between him and Spectator writer Petronella Wyatt as being an 'inverted pyramid of piffle'. Right, Boris. So, did you root or did you root?)

Apparently, the book 'makes no pretensions to being a work of political economy'. Perhaps not, but at one point he writes:

"... if I may be permitted a political side-swipe."

That's just plain weird. If you are trying to become a member of parliament, then aren't political side-swipes are expected of you? Anyway, it's obvious to anyone with the most basic knowledge that The Spectator, which Boris edits, is a Tory magazine. It is written mostly by Tories, published mostly by Tories, and read mostly by Tories and Labour Party hacks looking for something to laugh at. Once Boris meets a voter who tells him -

"... with a glassy stare that he is going to vote Lib Dem, because they are the only ones who are absolutely sure to keep the pound.
No they're not, you say. Yes they are, he says, robotically. Has he, perhaps, been hypnotised?"

I'm no expert in Australian politics, let alone British politics, but I don't think the Liberal Democrats ever endorsed hypnotism as an election strategy. At another point, Johnson confesses to a 'morbid fear' that the Liberal Democrats will beat him in the elections. At various times he says the Labour party are 'liars', and that their leader, Tony Blair, longs for popularity and public approval. He agonises over the polls for his own party: 'Unbelievably awful. The hostility to William is very depressing.' And he seems particularly depressed over his own nasty right-winger reputation:

"I once went on Question Time and said that if gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog. Was that the remark that cheesed them off? Or was it the time when I said that among the factors responsible for the Paddington railway disaster - the fat cats, the Tories, Railtrack, etc. - you could not altogether ignore the role of the driver, who had gone through several red lights and ignored two warning buzzers in his cab? Was that what did it?
What had I done, I whimpered to myself, as I was overtaken on the running circuit by the sprightly grannies of Islington, to earn this obloquy?"

But he is often disarmingly honest. He often comes across arguments that he can't counter; and he admits to the failings of the Tory party - and his own failings - repeatedly. And sometimes, his arguments hit home. He is good on Britain's socialised National Health System - the notorious NHS - showing how it has consistently lower success rates with cancer and heart-attacks than the French and German health systems.
At several points, he offers sharp insights into the political and journalistic professions. He is visited by journalist, Jeremy Paxman, who is at that time writing a book:

"The thesis of the book, as it turns out, is that politics and politicians don't really matter that much these days. Politicians, Paxo will argue in his new book, are not worth a pitcher of warm spit, especially not compared with multinational tycoons and the Olympian journalist figures who nightly mould the mind of the country ... why am I doing it, Jeremy? I tell him: it's 30 per cent a desire to be of public service or use, or however you want to express that with minimal piety. It is 40 per cent sheer egomania; and it is 30 per cent attributable to the belief that the world ought not to be run by swankpot journalists, showing off and kicking politicians around, when they haven't tried to do any better themselves, hmmm, what, hmmmm?"

Towards the last quarter of the book, there is disappointment as the realisation sets in that public opinion is not turning in the Tories favour. One person Boris meets tells him that he is going to be the 'Socrates' of the Conservative Party. 'Needless to say, he is wearing a VOTE LABOUR sticker'.
But as engaging as Boris is, what really makes this book live are the people he meets. The pages overflow with thousands of people: spritely grannies; tired, middle aged mechanics wiping grease from their hands; embittered journalists spitting out insults veiled as questions, questions veiled as insults, or just plain insults; the workers and customers at a Viagra clinic; clannish university students enraged at something (they're never sure what); citizens, constituents, voters. And Boris faithfully records it all.

What other book is there like this, really? Nothing in Australia, certainly: Mark Latham wrote a diary while in politics, but only published afterwards; Lindsay Tanner publishes the occasional column in The Daily Telegraph. I suspect that if an aspiring politician wanted to publish a work similar to this here in Australia, the party would overrule him. Politicians over here are obsessed with things like 'conflict of interest' - maybe because they don't think politics should be conflicted with interest. Or maybe politicians are just interested in conflict. A pity, really. There's something fascinating about this book. Never has the transition from person to politician been made to seem - well, almost natural ...

James and the Giant Preach

2006-02-22T16:47:00.000+11:00

Over at Sterne, Jon reviews Clive James's recent essay collection, The Meaning of Recognition:

There are two Clive Jameses, and no, this isn’t leading into a fat joke. Reading through this latest selection of essays, speeches and general musings one is confronted by two authors: the first a man whose hand I would like to tremblingly shake, a critic of style and wit with a breadth of knowledge and depth of insight that can only instil admiration; the other a complacent, self-centred git at whom one can’t help yelling, “Shut up Clive James. Shut up!”

Quote, Punquote - The Lost Years

2006-02-21T17:58:00.000+11:00

"Call me Fishmail."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Bobbit."

"I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my fiver."

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the arm bandages that you've had."

Brought to you by Intersecting Loins.

N.B. A Google image search for "loins" brings up only loins of the meat kind, or loins of the misspelled lions kinds. Hardly any genitals at all.

P.S. Yes I know this post wasn't very good.

Your Voice Sucks

2006-02-21T15:36:00.000+11:00

I’m certain I am not the only person ever to have felt this way, but in case I am, I thought I would explain my condition. Sometimes, when I am listening to the beginning of a good rock ‘n’ roll song, or a little bit of Scandinavian death metal, or perhaps even something with synthesizers and a theremin, I think to myself (as opposed to thinking to somebody else, using my awesome powers of telepathy, or thinking out loud, which is known as shooting your mouth off): “Yeah, this is pretty cool. I’m totally into it.” I might even start nodding my head in approval, and, if it’s really good, I fancy myself as having orchestrated it, which leads me into imaginings of playing it before a crowd of the thousands of people who used to pick on me in school, and those who thought me useless, and they are in thrall as I violently manipulate their emotions using chord progressions and maybe some creative tuning.

And then, just at the precipice of sheer enjoyment, some asshole starts in with the singing. Their stupid, whiny, toneless, vacant gibberings completely obliterate my appreciation of the song, no matter how excellent the actual music may remain, and I feel a little part of me die as another fuckwit and his invented problems are introduced to the world via the medium of not being able to sing. I’m thinking this right now as I listen to bootleg MP3s of Tool, just as I think the same thing whenever I am listening to sturdy rock of any description. Pixies. Quite a bit of heavy metal would be great if only it wasn’t ruined by some disabled guy shouting through a throat full of curdled milk. There are probably other, better examples I could think of, but my heart’s not really in it.

Anyway, I hope I’m not alone. What are some songs (or albums, or bands) you think could be vastly improved by the simple excision of the singing?

N.B. I know this isn't technically about literature, but it's all just words, innit?

Peter Craven on Peter Craven

2006-02-18T21:35:00.000+11:00

Hi. I'm Peter Craven, intellectual.

You might remember me from such articles as 'Peter Craven on Proust', 'Peter Craven explains what the dickens Dickens is about', 'Peter Craven gives the absolute, ultimate, and definitive explanation of Shakespeare', and 'Some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of book reviews that you'll never read, and Peter Craven.'
But enough about all those other people. This time, I'm here to review a much more interesting subject. Myself.

Now the first thing about Peter Craven (that's me) that you (the reader) are going to have to remember is that I'm really smart. Like, phenomenally smart. I'm so smart that whole cities have to be evacuated when I have a thought, because of the movement of my stupendously large brain-cells. This means that from time to time, I throw in a few big words into my review. It's obvious, really: big words for big thoughts. So here's how my review starts.

"Taken as a whole, Peter Craven's work is truly, astonishingly, omnipotently pure."

See? How do you like that? Not bad for a beginning, is it? I'm not surprised if you're impressed by that. I'm an impressive guy who writes impressive things.
But that's not all there is to me. I'm also an astonishingly funny person. I'm a wit, you see? I'm here to say quirky or funny things about literature, in order to make you look at it in a different way. Which leads me to my next paragraph:

"The ouevre of Craven's genre is exemplary. His progressively avant garde criticism is a cri de couer from the heart of all belles lettres, a 'barbaric yawp' across the ages. And his bon mots are extremely tasty, too."

I hope you notice not only the ingenious way in which I win you (the reader) over to my (Peter Craven, the reviewer) position with my natural charm, but also the professional way in which I display my credentials. The perfectly-honed prose seems to say: "Here I Am, Peter Craven, Intellectual: At Your Service." Or at least it would say that if it didn't say something else (I'm still not sure what that something else is.) Anyway, the point is by now well and truly established. I'm a clever guy.

"The orotund complexities of his prose - the baroque magniloquence of his orotund complexities. The rolling grandeur of his apostrophes - and scintillating brilliance of his strophes: he is never more truly himself than in his obfuscations."

Isn't that a clever paragraph? I thought it was, too. You see the trick? I use big words which make myself sound important. And that's because I am important! See?
But there's another good bit here too. And the good bit is this: although I'm a world-class reviewer, I never actually MENTION the books I review in my articles. Not once! That might seem a bit deceptive of me, but I'll let you into a secret. A good reviewer never DOES mention the books he is reviewing. Oh, it might seem like he does; he says 'this' and 'that' and 'what have you' about the authors. But does he ever actually quote the book? Does he ever actually engage with the writing? Does he ever? Does he, FUCK!
No, the trick is to just make it look like he's engaging with the book. Because reading books is actually pretty boring. It's much more interesting to re-write the book EXACTLY THE WAY YOU (or me, in this case) would write it (if you were writing it in first place (and you shouldn't be (unless you're me (and I am)))).

Actually - I'll let you in on another secret. I'm thinking of writing reviews of all the classics as a way of rewriting the classics. Then I'll get myself published in Penguin books. I've got a whole series all planned out.

Great Expectations (fails to live up to the title)

Romeo and Juliet (Thank God the fuckers killed themselves)

Phallus in Chunderland (The significance of Lewis Carroll to Modern Australian Literature)

The Bible - Where God Went Wrong: Craven explains.

Craven's Epistle to the Philistines

'James Joyce's 'Ulysses'' - by Craven

The New New Testament

Once I've written all these incredibly insightful and complicated reviews, you'll never need to read 'literature' again. And once my reviews become the new 'literature', you'll never want to read it either! Isn't that nice of me?

Anyway, here's the concluding section of my review.

"Yes, truly, Peter Craven is most sagacious."

And it's true, isn't it? Go on. Don't hold back!

Quote, Punquote

2006-02-17T19:43:00.000+11:00

"It was the best of tines, it was the worst of tines..."

"Take up the white man's bourbon... "

"Alas, poor Berwick!"

"I have always depended on the kindness of strainers. "

The preceding puns were proudly brought to you by Intersecting Lions.

Elmore Leonard School Of Authoring

2006-02-15T20:23:00.000+11:00

For all you wannabe asshole “writers” out there, some lessons from a master:

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing.

All are perfect common sense (something in short supply in modern literature), but I particularly like Number 8: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters”. There’s nothing I hate more – except for smashing my balls caught in a car door, which has only happened once and anyway was something I did on purpose to impress a girl – than reading a nice little story and then having to suddenly usurp my own imagination by having some fuckwit author go on for seven paragraphs about how some bird has “golden hair” and “a voice like honey”, and some bloke has “deep blue eyes” and “a square jaw”.

Anyways.

A Load of B.S.

2006-02-11T22:28:00.000+11:00

What makes a man with a perfectly all right name like Bryan Stanley Johnson go and abbreviate it to B.S. Johnson? I suppose I will never know having failed to finish (indeed barely start) Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant. The answer is probably stuffed away in the back somewhere, but I can't be bothered searching it out. Coe's book is dull, dull, dull, which is a shame given a) how interesting a writer Johnson was, and b) how excellent the title Like a Fiery Elephant is.

Johnson, in case you don't know (oh, how I'm looking down my nose at you!) was British literature's "one-man avant-garde", to use one of Coe's few memorable lines, during the 60s and early 70s. Johnson started out by questioning the basic assumptions of the realist tradition, and ended up undermining just about all of them in a series of innovative novels that utilised every device from a constantly interupting omniscient author to holes cut in the pages so the reader could see ahead. Johnson himself was a fascinating figure: passionate, single-minded, and, well, fiery and elephantine. Good bio material, you might think. So what went wrong?

Coe's problem is that he thinks he is cleverer than his subject. His initial method is to provide a fragment of Johnson's writing (from a published work, or otherwise a letter, note, etc) then do the bio thing, then another fragment, then more bio. It's too much Coe, not enough Johnson. A couple of hundred pages in and I'd had enough. As much as I'd like to know more about Johnson's life and (more importantly) his thought and work, I just couldn't face any more of Coe's nonsense. I also started resenting the $30 I'd spent on Like a Fiery Elephant. It could have been put to better use buying a B.S. Johnson Omnibus from Abebooks. Or indeed a couple of six packs.

My question is, are there any good literary biographies? (Fair warning: if somebody says the words Life of Johnson I will have an attack of the beserkers.) Actually, I can answer my own question, as Richard Ellman's Yeats: The Man and the Masks is about as good a mix of biography and criticism as anybody could ask for, particularly with a poet as complex as Yeats. The same author's books on Joyce and Wilde are reported to be excellent, but surely there must be others. Any suggestions?

(And yes, I know this started out being a kind of review of Like a Fiery Elephant before trailing off into ask-the-reader rubbish, but in my defence I am really, really tired, and like whatever I don't care man.)

There Once Was This Photographer From New York ...

2006-02-11T16:50:00.000+11:00

Nice piece published in The Australian today on Philip Roth. It heads the cover page of their 'Review' section with a wonderful title - 'The Gripes of Roth'.

Roth on: Smiling
"Why don't you smile?" I ask.
"There once was this photographer from New York. 'Smile,' she always said. 'Smile!' I couldn't stand her or the whole phenomenon. Why smile into a camera? It makes no human sense. So I got rid of both her and the smile."
"Do you ever smile at all?"
He looks at me. "Yes, when I'm hiding in a corner and no one sees it."

Roth on: Death
"The classic is called Everyman; it's from 1485, by an anonymous author. It was right in between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare. The moral was always 'Work hard and get into heaven', 'Be a good Christian or go to hell'.
"Everyman is the main character and he gets a visit from Death. He thinks its some sort of messenger; but Death says, 'I am Death' and Everyman's answer is the first great line in English drama: 'Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in miond.'
"When I thought of you least. My new book is about death and about dying. Well, what do you think?"

Roth on: Sex
"You know, passion doesn't change with age, but you change, you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant.
And there is a power in the pathos of sex that it didn't have before. The pathos of the female body becomes more insistent."

And finally:

Roth on: Literature
"I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk. If you shut down all the literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics.
The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. "

He has such an optimistic, life-affirming philosophy, doesn't he?

Finds

2006-02-08T18:05:00.000+11:00

If you’re anything like me, you carry around with you a list of books that you’re interested in acquiring, whether to read or merely to possess. They may be books found via your comfortable, almost hypnotically meditative browsings of Amazon, or they may be books mentioned by other books (surely one of the great joys of the art of reading, wherein a fine book recommends other books of equal quality, sending you on an inexhaustible journey), or they may be books in which your interest has been piqued by friends or reviews.

In any event, the list. I carry mine around in the back of my Moleskine notebook – a chic accoutrement, I know, but eminently practical and generally delightful – and whenever I come across an unfamiliar bookstore, or a familiar bookstore I have not visited in a while, I enter and turn to the back of my Moleskine, browsing the shelves on the off chance that I will find something. About 70% of the time I will find the book and, having taken the opportunity to read a little, will find that it wasn’t worth all the fuss and bother, and thus it is angrily stricken from the list, never to be mentioned nor thought of again.

29% (these aren’t quantifiable figures, just a rough estimate) of the time I find the book and, after browsing it, decide that it is exactly as good as I predicted it would be, and it is snapped up in an instant, to be savoured at leisure. I have a great pile of just these sorts of books on my desk at home, covering a variety of subjects and styles and, when time and mood permits, I make my way through them gradually.

But that final percent? Those are magical times. Many of the books in which I am interested seem, inevitably, to be either out of print or just generally quite rare. They are difficult to find, and their titles and authors lurk in the back of my Moleskines for months, sometimes years at a time. You hardly find mention of them on the internet, you scour the depths of Amazon and eBay and every other site, to no avail. Scratching through every two-bit bookstore you find, in fact planning entire days of journeying to every corner of the city, into every secondhand bookstore the Yellow Pages makes mention of. Your desperation grows wilder, your enthusiasm morphs into infuriation, and inch by inch you begin to resent every book that is not the one you are seeking, throwing them aside in vile disgust, as though they were all written by Jonathan Franzen. Shopkeepers are harassed and verbally bludgeoned for their stupidity when they raise their eyes heavenwards, scratch at their stupid ears, and mumble that “Yes, that title does sound familiar…I’m sure I’ve seen it about!” Then they lead you to the shelf in question, muttering uselessly and pottering through the volumes before announcing that they were mistaken or, worse: “Ah, yes, now I remember. A young lady came in and bought it last week.” Oh, really? Cunt!

Until, one day, when aforementioned enthusiasm is barely at a smoulder, and, resigned, you grouse your way through those same tired shelves for the thousandth time, there it is. Your eyes, scanning the spines, pass it on the first run, but then a little shot goes off in the back of your head and your eyes snap back like a typewriter’s carriage return. I dare say you even emit a merry “Ding!” as it happens, as I do, constantly. And there stands the title in all its splendour, the pages orange-brown and filled with fossilized food matter decades old, the cover tattered and torn, and you snatch it down, flick through it to be sure it is real – yes, yes, yes! – and shove it furtively under your arm, glancing from side to side lest other searchers emerge wailing from the dark recesses of the store, raking their nails across your face and sinking their teeth into your poor balls.

These discoveries have been made by me precisely three times that I can remember. The first, some time ago, was the termination to my years-long search for The Maze Maker by a certain Michael Ayrton. And not just a ratty, gangrenous softcover, which I would have been more than happy with, but a pristine, hard cover first edition for a criminally low price. I took it home and, fearful, placed it on the shelf. It has not been read since and probably never will be, as I suffered a momentary loss of interest in the subject matter (classical mythology, specifically the Cretan myth of Asterion the minotaur, Daedalus, Icarus, etc.), but the find was just as joyous, and the excitement tangible.

The second was more recently. I had worked myself quickly into a froth over online reviews of The Purple Cloud by one M. P. Shiel. A reconnaissance of the more modern establishments informed me that it was “not on the system”, and so the hunt was on! I searched high, I searched low, having already decided that a certain bookshop opposite Flinders Street Station was “rubbish” and “they’ll never have it”, eventually, almost out of spite, entered said establishment and found the volume instantly, even shelved alphabetically and in the correct section. I about shat myself right there and paid only five dollars for the book, consuming it in a day and finding it better than I had imagined.

The third, today, in Carlton. I had been looking for The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner for a good while. Enter any secondhand bookstore and you’ll find loads of Brunner (The Dramaturges of Yan most commonly), but never this one. So I stepped today into the shop, moseyed up to the science fiction section, planted my hands firmly on my hips, thrust my crotch outwards tilted my torso backwards so as to more properly survey the top shelf where the “BR”s began, and there it was, the first, and, bizarrely, only John Brunner in the shop. I have it now safely ensconced in my bag, to be more properly appreciated at a later date.

Rest assured that my bibliorgasms are under no threat of eradication just yet, for already I am on the prowl for my next acquisition: Mockingbird by Walter Tevis.

But to you, dear readers of this wee 'umble blog, I submit the question: what are your greatest finds? Not necessarily great books, or beautiful editions, or even something that you will ever read, but the finds that put piss and vinegar into your step and plaster groin-tinglings of happiness across your face. Spill, or be forever damned to do all your book shopping at the local St. Vinnie's.

Writing A Book Review For The Age

2006-02-06T10:39:00.000+11:00

I never read a book before previewing it. It prejudices a man so. - Sydney Smith

The best way to write your review is by not writing your review. Start off with a quote from someone else (preferably dead and/or famous), continue by fleshing out your review with several quotes from the book you are reviewing, and add one or two paragraphs of generic argument (use lots of big and impressive words such as 'sesquipadalia', 'quaquaversal', and 'stentorian', as a way of saying "This is a big and important book and I am using big and important words because I have read it. If you want to be a big and important person, you should read it to.") Finally, conclude your book review by quoting somebody else entirely. For instance, you could quote me: "This is a vital and necessary work for the bourgeoisse classes." Not a bad quote, isn't it? It'll certainly impress the editors.

Of course, you shouldn't just quote from other people. Use the dictionary, as well. The editor will be unlikely to publish your review unless it is fleshed out with several very exciting nouns and adjectives. These words will mark the key emotional points of your review. It doesn't matter what they mean, so much: they just have to have a lot of consonants and syllables in them.
Start your review 'rambunctiously'. Mention the 'vigour' and 'high-spiritedness' of the author's prose. Continue your review by 'stepping back through the looking glass' into the world of the author's childhood, to discover the 'subconscious' and 'cthonic forces' which compel the author. Relate the 'infernal torments' of their childhood (it won't be necessary to read a biography of the author to do this, just read a gossip column in Woman's Weekly, and substitute the author's name for the name of someone else who figures heavily in the column.)
Remember, it's hardly necessary to do 'research' about the author before writing the review, just as it isn't necessary to read the book. If you spent all your time reading books, how do you think you'd get any work done?
Continue in an 'eager' manner, looking 'wryly' back on the author's past achievements. (In other words, make them up).

At this point, your readers may be getting just a little bored. Stun them with a sudden series of references to academic writers who have written essays referring to other academic writers who have written essays referring to other academic writers who have written essays which may or may not have a bearing upon the book you are reviewing. Anyway, it makes you sound clever. If you like, do this at several other points during your review. If it made you look clever once, it will make you look twice as clever the second time. And looking clever is what writing book reviews is all about.

Conclude in a 'sublime manner', noting the author's 'newly-found religiosity', and their 'finely-honed, coruscating prose' . Perhaps throw in an impressive metaphor or two, about how 'reading so-and-so is like having the mindless corpse of Mata Hari rise from his grave and gorge on your brain', or some such nonsense. After all, writing reviews isn't about making sense.

Once you have done all this, run the spell check through it, and send it off to the editor. He's sure to publish you.

Cross posted on Will Type For Food.

Eldritch, Cyclopean Horrors

2006-02-06T09:02:00.000+11:00

I make no apologies whatsoever for the following gratuitous link to one of the most creative and inventive Lego dioramas I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing. I present to you: Cthulego Rising!

People like to poke fun at Lovecraft for overplaying the dramatic tension surrounding his stories, but so far as I am concerned, none have so far surpassed him for the development of atmosphere and, yes, “nameless, lurking dread”. Not only the greatest horror writer we have ever seen, but the most influential (Can you imagine Alien without Lovecraft’s obvious influence? It would probably look a lot like Alien: Resurrection or, y’know, Alien vs Predator, which is horror as interpreted by a cheerleading squad.), and one of the finest writers I have ever read.

The best editions of Lovecraft, for those unfamiliar with this sublime genius, may be found, unsurprisingly, in Penguin, who, having lost the plot around 1970, at least have the decency to keep quality classics in print: The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories and The Thing On The Doorstep & Other Weird Stories. Each furnished with wonderfully elaborate footnotes and annotations, and truly a delight for the senses, provided the scotch and cigarettes are to hand and something suitable is spinning on the old jukebox. I recommend Morals & Dogma by Deathprod, or Saurian Meditations by Karl Sanders.

Speaking of Penguin, their boxed edition of the first series of Great Ideas mini-books is available now in all good bookstores. I recommend you do as I did, and go buy it.

Big Gooey Blobs

2006-02-06T07:50:00.000+11:00

I owe a big gooey blob of thanks to Chris Knutsen, who fearlessly and humourously edited these pieces.

... writes Steve Martin in the introduction to Pure Drivel, a collection of short pieces published in 1999. Good point. I'd like to offer Tim Sterne large steaming piles of gratitude for allowing me to post this, and John Howard long, pendulous oozings of indifference for being my Prime Minister. Rapid, globular wheezings of jocularity go to Martin for writing this book; a gaseous emission of apathy to Phoenix books for publishing him; and irregular emulsions of boredom to Michael Leunig for being Michael Leunig.

Thank you.

Quangle Wangle Quee to You Too

2006-02-05T15:21:00.000+11:00

There's been a blog-fight recently over which is funnier, left-wing or right-wing humour. And it's unbelievably stupid - being based on the notion that humour is 'political'. Actually, only some humour is political, and most of the humour that is political isn't very humorous. Although I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're mutually contradictory, they're very nearly so.

So in light of this blog-fight, it's salutary to go back to one of the best humour writers and see the real stuff. Not that he thought of himself as a 'writer'; actually, he was first and foremost a painter. The man I'm thinking of is Edward Lear. He gave to the world the genre of 'nonsense', at least in its modern form; and also invented the terms 'bong-tree', 'Great Gromboolian Plain', 'Pobble', and 'Yonghy-Bonghy Bo', amongst other things.

It's striking how simple Lear's writing is. It's true that there were a lot of light-verse writers and comic writers at the time, but poems were full of classical allusions. Compare Lear's poetry to that of his more serious contemporary, Tennyson. Tennyson gave the world the long and complicated Idylls of the King. (These poems now moulder on the shelves of university libraries the world over; hell, my brains beginning to moulder over just thinking of them.) Lear, on the other hand, popularised the Limerick.

There was an Old Man in a boat
Who said, "I'm afloat! I'm afloat!"
When they said, "No, you ain't!"
He was ready to faint,
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.

That make seem to make no sense to you, and you're right. It's nonsense. Australian comedian John Clarke once wrote a whole book of poems satirising Lear and his Limericks:

There was an old person from Bong
And he hailed in the first place from Bong;
From Bong did he come,
With Bongolian rum:
That humorous old fellow from Bong.

But in fact parodies of Lear began much earlier than that. W.S. Gilbert - of Gilbert and Sullivan fame - once wrote this:

There was an Old Man in a Tree,
Who was stung in his arm by a Wasp:
When asked, 'Does it buzz?'
He replied, 'No it doesn't!
I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet!'

Isn't that wonderful? Well, I thought so.
Lear wrote simple lyrics very well; think of 'The Owl and the Pussycat' or 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat':

On the top o the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle-Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side,
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody ever could see the face
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

This is the first stanza of 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat'. Lear sticks to this stanza form, quite strictly, for the rest of the poem (it's six stanzas long). Do you notice how the first four-lines of the poem are fairly short (containing only three stresses); and the second four lines are longer (containing four stresses to every line)? Doesn't that add a lovely, musical variety to the whole stanza? Hmmmn? You, up there, at the back of the class - sit up and pay attention!
Anyway, it's interesting that in some places, Lear's verse is in danger of slacking off, he is able to throw in a word like 'bibbons':

With ribbons and bibbons on every side ...

Now, Lear could just as easily have written 'with ribbons on every side', but this would not have fitted in with his metrical scheme. And at first, it might seem a bit pointless to you to through in a silly word like 'bibbons', but really! Lear couldn't help it if the Quangle Wangle wore bibbons on his hat, could he? And the poem is called 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat'. Do you think that Lear could write about what the Quangle Wangle wears on his head without mentioning the bibbons? Shame on you!
Even better, of course, is the way with which Lear terminates this first stanza (and every subsequent stanza) - 'Quangle Wangle Quee'! 'Quangle Wangle', of course is a given. But that 'Quee!' Does that not express the utmost in exuberance and high-spirits to you?
Ah, Quangle Wangle Quee to you to.

One striking aspect of Lear's nonsense poetry is how places and creatures appear again and again in different poems. Non-existent places and creatures they may be, but they are persistently non-existent. 'The Bong Tree' which the owl and the pussycat meet, for instance, is also seen by the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. The Great Gromboolian Plain - over which roams the Dong with the Luminous Nose - is also visited by 'Mr Daddy Long-legs and Mr Floppy Fly'.

The final poems in my Edward Lear book are three nonsense alphabets. Poetic alphabets are always amusing to read; you never know what surprises the alphabet has in store for you. What is the author going to do with the letter L? Or Q, for instance - that always makes for some interesting responses. And 'X' is the true test of any writers ingenuity.
Which makes Lear's attempts a little dissapointing: 'U' twice becomes an 'Urn', and 'X' twice becomes 'King Xerxes'. 'E', however, becomes a little Eel:

Eely
Weely
Peely
Eely
Twirly, tweely,
Little eel.

Now I can hardly think of a better description of an eel than 'twirly tweely', can you? The syllables seem to mimic the action of the eel in water.
'N' is a 'needly/tweedly/threedly/needly/wisky-wheedly/Little Needle!', as well as a 'Nice little nut'. And Z becomes 'a piece of zinc', a 'pretty striped zebra', and again, 'a box of zinc.'

On the whole, I think Mr Lear's poetic ouevre is postively grobullacious.

Insert Apposite Line From Voltaire

2006-02-03T08:11:00.000+11:00

France Soir, which, along with other European newspapers has this week published satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, asserts:

...no religious dogma can impose itself on a democratic and secular society.

But it can try:

Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's radical Shiite movement Hezbollah said that if Muslims had killed British writer Salman Rushdie in accordance with the 1989 religious edict from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then "this rabble who insult our prophet Mohammed ... would not have dared to do so."

Ghost Writer

2006-02-02T19:39:00.000+11:00

The Guardian occasionally runs online poetry "workshops", in which guest poets provide lessons for readers who fancy themselves of a bardic persuasion. It's quite silly in the way writing workshops tend to be - a lot of "imagine you are a seagull" or "imagine you have something better to do than writing poetry" - but whatever, live and let live and all that. Today's workshop is by Esther Morgan. Quoth Esther: "Imagine you are a ghost". Well, why not:

I am a ghost

Ok, so I am a ghost
The ghost from Ghostbusters
Who in one particularly raucous scene
"Slimes" Bill Murray before eating a lot of hotdogs
Or at least I think it was hotdogs, maybe it was cigars
You'd think I'd know having seen the film a thousand times
Anyway, so that's the ghost I am
In the later cartoon series, The Real Ghostbusters
(As distinct from the little-known Filmation's Ghostbusters series
Which had nothing to do with the movie,
And featured a talking ape named Tracy,
But which apparently predates the film by a decade,
And so is technically the original "real" Ghostbusters)
The ghost that I am was known as Slimer
And was a kind of mascot or pet for the "real" Ghostbusters
One of whom (Peter Venkman, whom Bill Murray played in the film)
Was voiced by Dave Coulier
Also know as "Uncle Joey"
From tv's Full House
On which no ghosts were evident
Although there was something uncanny about John Stamos's hair
Anyway, so that's the ghost I am
And by now you've probably noticed something about ghosts
And that is that they are really crap at poetry
Or at least this one is
And oh, I'm fading away
My sins (eating cigars, possibly) having been atoned
I am now dissipating in the air
Like Dan Ackroyd's post-Ghostbusters career
Although Grosse Point Blank was pretty good
Anyway, gooood-byeeeee cruel world!

Doing It For The Kids

2006-02-01T15:20:00.000+11:00

The Royal Society of Literature asked a bunch of luminaries (I think that means hacks, Philip Pullman excepted) to come up with a recommended reading list for school children. The definition of "school children" seems to include everybody from kindergarten kids through to doctoral students, and when they are not completely unrealistic (Ulysses? Don Quixote?) the selections tend to be rather quaint and predictable, which I suppose is what you get when you ask a bunch of middle-aged white people anything.

The other problem is that, in this country at least, studying literature at any level is about as much fun as watching an eight-day chess tournament between a Commodore 64 and a dead sheep. I hated every book I was forced to read at school, and I continue to hate every book I am forced to read for university, despite spending most of my non-studying life thinking about books (when I am not thinking about music, sport, or sex of course). You can't just throw "classics" at kids and hope they'll stick. You have to show them how interesting and amusing and (damn it) entertaining literature can be, and if that means they'd rather read The Hobbit than Ulysses, then so be it. Allow a sense of possibility, that nothing is beyond their possible scope, and they may well get to Ulysses one day. Or they may find they prefer the Upfield/Broadmeadows timetable.

Anyway, if we must go around recommending books, I don't see why Andrew "Bowel" Motion and J.K. Whatever should have all the fun. What books do you recommend for the young 'uns? When selecting books for my own daughter I favour formulaic Saddleclub adventures and the early works of Irvine Welsh, but I am open to suggestions. As for myself, I grew up on a steady diet of Asterix, Biggles and James Bond, and I won't hear a word against these books because, to quote poet laureate Andrew "Newton's Three Laws Of" Motion, "that way cultural vandalism lies".

More More Fake Reviews

2006-01-31T23:47:00.000+11:00

“Zadie Smith writes like a woman who, having accidentally ingested a dictionary, takes five doses of Metamucil, crouches down and peers between her legs, and snatches out half-digested scraps of paper totally at random.”

“Cory Doctorow, having deen denied sexual interference by creepy relatives as a young boy, nevertheless has escapist regressions into a wonderful fairy-tale universe where the grizzled male members that were never slapped roughly against his cheek in the woodshed are turned into smiling marshmallow turtles who playfully squirt water in his face.”

“Reading Germaine Greer is like peering up your senile grandmother's dress at Christmas dinner and finding that she isn't wearing any knickers, and then she winks at you and you start to wonder if she's really senile after all.”

“Enjoying David Foster Wallace is like having an orgasm in a nightmare. You know you should probably call somebody but you're not sure how to explain yourself.”

“Irvine Welsh is like being a kid in school and telling the other kids that your dad's in the army, and getting bashed up anyway.”

An Exercise in Comparative Literature

2006-01-31T21:08:00.000+11:00

For decades, the debate has been raging amongst literary scholars: "Which is better? James Joyce, or a train timetable?"

On the one hand, there are the scholars who argue that we live in an everchanging, metatextual world, and that we should be prepared to let in all types of literature to the canon. On the other hand, there are the classical scholars who think we should just stick with the train timetable.

So what's so good about James Joyce, anyway? Can it do something useful, like tell us when and where to catch a train?

In this essay, I propose to help settle this crucial philosophical debate once and for all by performing a comparative study.

ULYSSES vs THE BROADMEADOWS AND UPFIELD TRAIN TIMETABLE
A Study In Literary Quality

***

Let us consider the table. I have listed a number of criteria by which we may judge our two texts:

Criteria	*Train Timetable*	Ulysses
What does it do?	Helps you get from A to B	Helps get you from A to L by way of Z, and making a slight detour through G and U before considering the Freudian and Jungian qualities of the letter S
What does it describe?	Trains departing from and arriving at various train stations	A day in the life of various Dubliners.
Best Line	"Challenges lie ahead, but we believe we have the experience, knowledge and vision to consolidate the network."	"Thou has done a doughty deed! Thou art the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding farraginous chronicle. Astounding!"
Worst Line	"Challenges lie ahead, but we believe we have the experience, knowledge and vision to consolidate the network."	"Poor Dignam!"
Difficulty level	Easy to read, and you don't have to read all of it to get the general idea. It is a bit boring.	Diufficult to read, and once you get through it all, you realise you have no idea what the fuck it was all about. It is a bit boring, even if you do read it.

Clearly, our two texts are very closely matched.

***

Let us next consider some of the pros and cons of each text ...

Timetable

Ulysses

Pro: Can tell you when trains arrive

Con: Trains are often late.

Pro: The letters and numbers are printed in a variety of pretty colours and shapes, making for a pleasing aesthetic experience.

Con: The literary quality is execrable.

Pro: Can be used as a bookmark, thus making it even more useful.

Con: Can be used as a bookmark in Ulysses.

Pro: Can tell you everything you need to know about the 8.27pm train from Kensington.

Con: You don't want to know. No, really, you don't.

Pro: Can't tell you when the trains arrive, but they'll be late anyway.

Con: A late train is better than no train at all.

Pro: Learned literary scholars tell us that it is quite well written.

Con: But alas, it is nothing without the pretty colours. :(

Con: Huge book. Can not be used as a bookmark, ever.

Pro: Can not be used as a bookmark in another copy of Ulysses.

Con: Cannot tell you all about the 8.27pm train from Kensington.

Pro: What if you want to catch that train?

***

In this final section, I will consider the opinions of various literary scholars, and attempt to draw a conclusion.

According to Fotheroy, Joyce was a "luminous beacon of twentieth century literature, an inspiration to all humanity. In these troubled times, we should all read some more James Joyce." But in the considered opinion of Jervinski, Fotheroy was a dirty old man who liked to invite young men to his office and fondle their lily-white bottoms. Arthurs-Ramfellough is on record as saying, "I do like to sit down with a nice cup of tea and a copy of the latest train timetable." On the other hand, we must give equal weight to the arguments of Jeeves, Blubinski, and Wuggles, who have stated that Ramfellough enjoyed writhing around naked in a bathtub of hot spam, singing all of Elton John's lesser-known hits.

In Conclusion:
I think I need a drink. Thank you for your time.

Tim Train

In next week's Exercise in Comparitive Literature, Tim asks the question: "Is it appropriate to read the Bible naked? If so, in what circumstances?"

Cross posted on Will Type For Food.

Sub Mission

2006-01-31T10:24:00.000+11:00

Fabien Cousteau, grandson of ocean explorer Jacques, is tracking sharks using a submarine based on Professor Calculus's Shark Submarine in the 1944 Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure.

Later in the year, Cousteau intends to swim with the sharks, fortified by a magic potion brewed by his personal druid, Getafix.

To the Manner Born

2006-01-31T08:47:00.000+11:00

NSW judge Jim Spigelman reckons Australian society is too rude. His "scathing attack" checks all the boxes of your classic geriatric whinge: popular culture, parents, mobile phones. Speaking of mobile phones, check out the picture ninemsn has used to illustrate the judge's argument:

Wow, she looks really rude. Either that or she's about to throw up.

Clearly Spigelman has been reading too much Lynne Truss. (Indeed, reading any Lynne Truss is arguably too much.) Spigelman's thesis is the same as Truss's (decline of politeness leads to decline in morals leads to the end of civilisation as we know it!) and he offers the same supporting evidence: none. It's simply a matter of waving a hand at the ills of "society" and complaining about how much better everything used to be.

But were things better in the past, and if so when, where and how was it so? I don't know, and I'll bet the likes of Spigelman and Truss don't either. Is politeness a relative or constant value? It's sometimes hard to know whether the pro-politeness brigade is calling for common courtesy, or a return to lower class servility. Having worked in retail for over a decade, I agree that politeness is to be preferred, but I can't help but feel that the likes of Spigelman and Truss are simply peddling a combination of prejudice and nostalgia in order to get their names in print.

Anyway, this post has been pretty meaningless. I don't actually care about manners or "society", I just wanted to post that picture. It looks like she's struggling to expel an enormous turd. And in a public place, too. Now that is rude!

More Fake Reviews

2006-01-30T16:47:00.000+11:00

"Peter Carey writes in a manner that, were his books children, you would beat them mercilessly, for you can tell just by looking at their little faces that they've shat on something important and hope you never find out."

"Reading China Mieville is much akin to being brutally gang-raped at knifepoint, yet being so detached from the experience that you still feel a nagging sensation that somewhere, at some point in your life, you've left the oven on."

"Being caught reading Houellebecq is like getting drunk, being forcibly given a coffee enema, and then filmed as you walk stark naked through Bourke Street Mall, stopping only long enough to vomit onto your feet: you wish none of it had ever happened, but now that it has, you can at least experience some satisfaction in knowing that a Japanese businessman will later be masturbating to the shaky, pixelated video footage."

An Old Codger Speaks...

2006-01-30T14:37:00.000+11:00

Contrary to the author of this piece, I would love to watch Sepultura perform their entire back catalogue a capella, especially the first three songs from Chaos A.D., which would sound great with a few barber-shop harmonies. In every other respect, however, I am in complete agreement. The Big Day Out is indeed a load of cobblers, and I'm glad that I once again managed not to talk myself into going.

In my day (it was a Tuesday), I went to my share of festivals. Well, three of them. I have only been to one BDO, and it was so shit I can't even remember who was playing, or even which year it was, although it might have been 1997. (Yes, I am that old.) I spent the whole day in front of the Triple R stage, starving and thirsty after smoking a rather sorry excuse for a joint upon arrival, watching bands I could have seen any time at the Corner Hotel or the Espy for about ten bucks a throw. I ventured over to the main stages a couple of times, but was so freaked out by the pulsating mass of sweaty teenagers and drunken wankers, not to mention the crap sound quality, that I quickly retreated to the laid-back banality of the minor stages. I left early, missing the headlining act. I think it was Soundgarden. Remember them?

Since then, every year I say to myself - yeah, BDO, I should go to that, I like music and drinking and sunshine and stuff. And every year I end up giving it a miss because in the nick of time I remember how crap it was when I actually went, and how crap subsequent years have apparently been according to the the reports of friends and various other people who don't know me but whose phones I have tapped. The BDO is hot, smelly, and full of tossers, young and old. The sound quality is terrible, and many bands don't play full sets. Then there's the problem of schedule clashes. But leaving all that aside, the BDO sucks because although it may have once been a humble rock festival, bringing big-name bands together for the convenience of the masses, it is now just another element of the "alternative culture" machine that has pretty much ruined music in this country. It's basically the Triple J live show, and frankly Triple J these days has nothing to contribute that is not as safe and unthreatening as a Seeker's best-of. Check out the top ten of this year's Hottest 100 - you'll find more attitude and innovation on an episode of Video Hits. Or Australian Idol.

Kids these days (and don't all the best sentences begin with those words?) seem as happy/morose/ugly as kids in my day, indeed probably kids in any day. I don't blame them for the BDO or Triple J or Ben Lee, because teenagers are natural, not to mention willing, victims of herd-thinking and marketing. It just seems that all popular music these days, not just actual pop music, has largely been tamed and brought into the fold of the marketing men and the promoters. Why bother sticking your middle finger up when the only way to get anywhere is by going with the flow? There are plenty of interesting, even great, bands around, but music in general kind of sucks right now. But then, maybe it always has.

(I know: this has absolutely nothing to do with books. Sorry.)

Thus Quoth The Maven

2006-01-30T14:17:00.000+11:00

Quotations on book covers tend to be stale strings of adjectives: "powerful", or "thrilling", or my favourite, "unputdownable". Sometimes, however, a reviewer will go that extra yard and come up with a sentence that puts the other quotations to shame. Ladies and gentlemen, from the fly leaf of the paperback edition of Tim Willock's Bad City Blues, I give you the following recommendation:

"Willocks writes like the Archangel Gabriel using a pen that's been dipped in the devil's semen." - Loaded

Brilliant. I not only want to read the book, but I'd like to see all reviewers adopt this mode.

"John Banville writes like a savage who, having learned a rudimentary alphabet from tinned spaghetti labels, runs a missionary through with his spear and uses the blood to scrawl his darkest imaginings on the body of a fallen zebra." - Lord Melvyn Bragg, The Times

Or:

"Tim Winton writes with such extraordinary flair and passion that he simply must be one of the undead, risen from the grave, pen dripping with gore, desperate to show us how to understand ourselves, or at least how to cook a decent brain stew." - Peter Craven, The Age

Bin Laden Recommends

2006-01-30T07:44:00.000+11:00

In his latest recorded address to the infidel, Osama Bin Laden told Americans about a book they should read. Result? Rogue State by William Blum got to #32 in Amazon’s ‘Top Sellers’ list and, as expected, whackos from both ends of the much-vaunted “political spectrum” came out to leave their reviews. For example the one by Alan Rockman:

“So Neo-Fats, do go out in droves and buy it. After all, you do hate America so - even those of you who live here and have the freedoms you'd never have under Binnie.

William Blum is a coward who has written a work of sheer propaganda, endorsed by who else? The Holocaust denier and self-loather Noam Chomsky.”

This reviewer’s problem is that he believes people who live in America should also love it. This sort of mindset (“Ask not what your country can do for you…” etc.) is precisely what allows fascist-lite governments like the Bush Administration to flourish: the good of the country above the good of the people (translation: the good of the thousand or so people in government above the good of those tens of millions of people who elected the government). Imagine buying a bullet-proof vest only to be told that you shouldn’t wear it or it might get damaged.

As for the second part, a little research seems to erase the assertion that the book is “propaganda”. Instead, it appears to be exhaustively referenced, attributed and footnoted, and those with a little self-acquired history will be familiar with many of the reported scenarios. I haven’t read it, of course, so am only going on the measured perspectives of others.

Finally, the argument that Chomsky is a “Holocaust denier” was long ago refuted. The so-called “Faurisson affair” came about when Chomsky was approached by Serge Thion, an alleged “French scholar”, to sign a petition defending Faurisson’s right to freedom of speech/freedom of expression. Chomsky then penned an essay, which he says was “banal”, called ‘Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression’, gave it to Thion, and told him he could do whatever he wanted with it. Thion used it as an introduction – in fact, he called it a “warning” – to French academic Robert Faurisson’s book Memoire En Defense. Academic circles being what they are (ie. cesspools of hysteria), the whole thing blew up from there, and Chomsky’s defense of freedom of speech became “Holocaust denial”.

As for Rogue State itself? As I say, I’ve not read it, but frankly I’m sufficiently intrigued to want to go out and pick it up later today. I have no real problem with America – all my favourite TV shows are from there, after all – but what I do have a problem with are rabid hegemonies, which is what America has become. And if Bin Laden’s hatred of the west in general and America in particular has been formed in part by the work of one American researcher, is it not then prudent for all right-minded democratic individuals to a least examine the source material and evolve hypothesis of their own?

Story from here.

Crossposted here.

Booze On Books

2006-01-30T06:56:00.000+11:00

The book bar.

(Via somebody, I forget who.)