Thursday, December 28, 2006

The Sunday Philosophy Club - Alexander McCall Smith

Oh light holdiday reading. This was a nice quick read, not bad, loosely a mystery, with a little of intrigue towards the end and lots of cups of tea and musings of the 40-something main character who like Phryne Fisher (see review below) lives without a partner, is independantly wealthy and is concerned with living according to her view of how 'one should' in such circumstances. While Phryne muses more on the cut of her swinging 20's frocks and the quality of silk in her shortie nighties, drinks rather a lot and has wild elegant indulgent sex with talk dark quiet types, Isabel Dalhousie is a well-behaved, respectful (if a little nosie, but hey aren't we all), woman concerned with morality. I dig that not once did the book describe the cut of her hair or the jaunty swing of her ankle in a green ankle-straped heel - she is formless in the way that a male protaganist might reasonably expect to be in a novel: she is her life, her actions, her relationships, looking out of and acting from her body. She is not coquetish and flirty, but she does harbour a sneaky little crush on a younger man, which much to my diapointment was never consumated. I thought themusings on philosophy and little trite, just a little, but maybe a nice 'taster', and certainly not alienating to anybody. Her role as an acandemic (even a part time one) I found a little hard to swallow, as despite editing a journal she seemed little more than vagueley intrigued by the subject matter, but in a restrained, affable, hoby-like way - as if she was eighty and reading about hydrangeas for the local fair (sorry to be ageist). I guess what I noticed was the distinct lack of passion, the whiff of enquiry and personal scholarship that i would expect such a character to actually have. But whatever. I'm sure Alexanders' readers prefer her mild mannered and musing than driven and incandescent. She is someone you could pop around and expect an omlette from, with a well-ordered, comfortable existence and a mild curiosity that pulls her into intrigue. The mystery element was quite nicely crafted as something that was almost secondary to her life and partly constructed by her own inquiry. I hope she shags the boy in the next one. I hope she shakes things up a bit and has a wild jaunt to Italy and writes a book or two. Or maybe I'm projecting...

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Sula - Toni Morrison

OK so this book says on the cover 'Oprah's Book Club' and you would be forgiven for thinking that this must mean that the book is sweet and comforting, that it involves baking and quilt making and sisterly love - right?
I've read a few of Morrison's books now and find that they are all a strange brutal mix of love, life, death, madness, poverty and the ache of everything. 'Jazz' was uncomfortable, 'Beloved' was down right wacky... they both kind of took the notions of 'good' and 'bad' and mixed them around a bit, fed them back to you in a strange combo whose flavours were unfamiliar. This one is about a town of people living up the mountains, tricked out of prime farming land in the valley by the white slave owners who gave it to them on their freedom, it's about two childhood friends, about sex and falling in love, about households of women, about black folk and white folk and seeing each other through their lenses of culture, about being a woman and how being in love affects you, about the love of children, about poverty and hope and hopelesness. And I suppose, if I really think about it, it's probably about the whole tricky notion of morality - of good and evil.

Sula is one of the childhood friends, she goes away, comes back. But it's not really about that - or not about just that - it's about everything little and big that happens in and around and before and after that.

The description of Sula's careless love for men, contrasted with the moment when she becomes hooked on one person, who then leaves her, is spine tingling. You feel her begining to see him in objects around the house, like her you want to inhale him, gobble him up; but at the same time you smell the whiff of her clinging desperation the moment he does, and like him you also want to flee. In the same vein, the account of a sexual betrayal of another character is also so real feeling you almost melt into the corner of the bathroom with her, watching dust motes twirl as your life unravels.

I also loved the description of Sula's mother who lost her husband and proceeds to sleep with al the towns men both single and married, but in a gentle, natural, almost unthinking way, as she pulls them into the pantry for fleeting, passionate, unnatached sex, without shame and without spite and without remorse. This is contrasted with Sulas sexuality and the sexuality of monogamy and the sexuality of sex workers in a very interesting way. Like this:

Everything had changed. Even the whores were better then: tough, fat, laughing women with burns on their cheeks and wit married to their meanness: or widows couched in small houses in the woods with eight children to feed and no man. These modern-day whores were pale and dull before those women. These little clothes-crazy things were always embarassed. Nasty but shamed. They didn't know what shameless was. They should have known those silvery widows in the woods who would get up from the dinner table and walk into the trees with a customer with as much embarassment as a calving mare.

Anyway, there's lots of great prose, lots of 'hmmmm, that's interesting' moments, and lots of unertainty in this book.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Away with the fairies - Kerry Greenwood

So, the day of my housemove I found myself at central station yearning for some comfort reading. Something silly and quick to read, something to whisk me away to another time and place and make me feel all warm inside. So I bought this and proceeded to read it in two days (aah, long train journeys were good for something!). Mermaidgrrl bought me my first one in this series when I flew back to Sydney from Brisbane in September. She picked it out at the airport, after declaring that I needed a trashy romance (which I thouroughly agreed with - she is after all a nurse, I trust her diagnosis - and sunk into with relief on the plane). In brief, this series features a woman called Phryne Fisher who is an heiress in 1920's Melbourne, Australia, and although fabulously wealthy and happily whiling away her days with cocktails, lovers, philanthropy, being arch and witty and keeping an eye of her adopted daughters, does a little bit of crime solving in her spare time.

What busy working Aussie woman wouldn't entertain the fantasy of being swathed in silk, sporting a fetching classy bob, having servants (who are gartefuly emplyed as such, and ever so loyal and warm), being adored by men and women alike and getting to nut out juicy crimmes over a cool mint juleppe? No wonder she's gone ahead and written squilions of books.

So - any good? yeah kind of. Some firm feminist stances scattered through this one - which I thoroughly approved of - the requisite insight into some random piece of histo-geography (in this case, silk trading and pirates in the south seas), lots of outfits described in meticulous detail, bitchy suspects who are all either shagging or blackmailing each other, and some rompety pompety bedroom action for the leading lady (oh tasteful mind, ever so tasteful). Not sure that I need any encouragement to conjure up my inner style-queen-bossy-hyperpampered-girl around town though, so may read them sparingly lest I begin clisking my fingers for Astin Martins that don't exist and wearing drapey silk things to match my clouche hats and silk underwear.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Reading Russian Dollies

Does anybody else read several books at once? Like 6? If so, how do you do it? I tend to start one, pick up another, stop the first, read the second, until I pick up a third. It becomes this nested affair, like Russian Dollies, like Calvino’s notoriously wandering If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. I sometimes dance back up the chain, read another chapter, keep them ticking over, but at the same time pick up more down the line. The line of nested reading that gets longer and longer. I finish one, it’s so exciting! I write out quotes from it and sometime write about it here. Meanwhile, there are brief breakout books – a book bought at an airport which I read in a day, a mystery novel or a light and easy book which is immediate satisfaction, and keeps me feeling ok about the others that decorate my rooms and refuse to be read quickly in an offhand manner. They are all quite patient. They don’t clamour to be finished. They’ve all been read many times before, by people far more exciting than me, they don’t need the reassurance and flattery of another reader, they can be taken or left. They are self-contained and require commitment and perserverence, require decent chunks of quiet time. They can not be gulped down in ad breaks or in a weary half hour before bed, or with half a mind still on work matters or relationship queries – they need a whole mind, a mind up to the task, nimble, well-rested, in top form, and keen.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Blogs only window on the world

I stayed awake later than intended some nights ago, and finished Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedarkis. He's very funny. I sniggered even lying in bed reading on my own and listening to wind howl. I picked a new copy up at a discount bookstore fafter browsing the very cheap table. The reason I know about the author? Read about it on a blog. A chick who went to a signing and desperately wanted not to say something bland. She's funny too.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

'The Subterraneans' by Jack Kerouac (1958)

Preceded by On the Road (1957)
Followed by The Dharma Bums (1958)


"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."
— Jack Kerouac

I just read this book in its 1962 Panther Book 2nd reprint edition, picked up by Aunty B for $4 at Bondi markets recently. I love reading things in their tiny print, thin editioned, tacky artworked glory from the 60’s. It makes it more fun to read knowing that not only have countless others read the story, but that unknown numbers of people have owned and touched and read this particular actual book in all its three dimensional glory. Was it bought shiny and new and stuck inside a floral shoulder bag and taken on campus as a sign of cool, pissing off someone’s parents when they saw it on a bedside table? Who bought it since then from musty second hand shops and have read it over coffee in Sydney cafes?

Anyway, away from discussions of the book, and back to the book (if you know what I mean). Subterraneans is quite autobiographical, well it at least feels like it is and Wikipedia tells me so:
‘The Subterraneans is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-fictional account of his short romance with an African American woman named Alene Lee in New York in 1953. In the novel she is renamed Mardou Fox and described as a carefree spirit who frequents the jazz clubs and bars of the budding Beat scene of San Francisco’ (Wikipedia).

The main character Leo seems very much Jack. The story is basically ‘boy meets girl, boy treats girl badly through despite occasional bursts of intense passion mostly ignoring her by going on groovy beat benders listening to bop shagging beautiful young men and then skulking home to mums to get fed and try to write second book, boy looses girl.’ It is very stream of consciousness, so if long rambling sentences and wild asides shit you to tears, this book may not be your glass of cheap red wine.

I liked the texture of the excitement of the time and place, the musings on life as a so-far-so-good young writer, the raw and exposed outpourings of a flawed person, the swirls of madness, the ennui, the wistfulness, the slow dawning of love. The language is not tight and clean and structured, but like big dynamic brushstrokes that build up a composite image, it is language that tells you a lot despite not telling you much. You need faith that meaning will seep out from between the flurry of sentences, and from between the constant activity of characters: the characters meeting, being inspired, gearing up for nights out with a ripening sense of potential, getting blotto and then falling into despair and regret. But really, it’s less bleak than all that.

This is the ‘spontaneous prose’ style that he was famous for, and adored for, and criticised for. Like this:
also the sudden gut joy of beer when the visions of great words in rhythmic order all in one giant archangel book go roaring thru my brain, so I lie in the dark also seeing also hearing the jargon the future worlds – (insert made up words here) – poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future and attesting to the madness, hollowness, ring and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where the trees sing – in a funny wind – well-being believes he’ll go to heaven – a word to the wise is enough – ‘Smart went Crazy’ wrote Allen Ginsberg.) Reason why I didn’t go home at 3am – and example.


The novel has been criticized for its portrayal of American minority groups, especially African Americans, in a superficial light, often dramatizing their humble and primitive energy without showing insight into their culture or social position at the time' (says Wikipedia). I can understand that people now criticize the book for dodgy race politics, but at the time, as I understand it, he was pressure by his publishers about the including material about minority groups that it was too sympathetic. Tellingly, the film that was made of the book had a young French girl cast in the role of his girlfriend, rather than a black woman. Safer? More saleable at the time? And sure, Leo is clearly aware of the race issue, aware and sometimes distracted by it – but also aware of his awareness of it, and conscious of trying to rethink attitudes. In the book Mardou tells him not to hold hands with her as they walk down the street in the city in case people think she’s a hooker. He worries about whether if he marries her he wont be able to take her to the family home down south. This was the backdrop to their lives, it seems unlikely that these issues and attitudes wouldn’t have also formed part of the context for their relationship. Leo does indulge in some ‘black woman as primal earth mother, source of all life, vital and alive’ type stereotypes, and I guess that’s 2 dimensional, but also tied up with his views of women in general – which are interesting, not to mention his (not explicitly stated in the book but haphazardly demonstrated) bisexuality* and his highly claustrophobic and needy relationship with his mother and together these are possibly all worthy several PhD theses, but not neccessarily something that should deter you from reading the book.

Ultimately I’m torn between Leo’s offhand self-serving treatment of his lover and his wide-eyed and reeling notion of women as saviour, women as ‘good’. There is something both endearingly matriarchal, life-affirming and goddess-worshipping about such romantasising of ‘woman’:
‘knowing as I do from past experience and also interior sense, you’ve got to fall down on your knees and beg the woman’s permission, beg the woman’s forgiveness of all your sins, protect her, support her, doing everything for her, die for her but for God’s sake love her all the way in and every way you can..’ but also something on the nose about his guilt-informed idealization which seems to be the other end of the pendulum on his self-absorbed drunked adventures where she is forgotten and left at home. I suspect Mardou would have settled for some good manners and friendly treatment over being idolised and ignored in turn, but that’s just conjecture. Mind you it seems like his behaviour wasn’t deliberately hurtful but more a function of his immense capacity for awe and attention – when the focus is on her he is in awe and deeply in love, when the focus is on the magical connection between like minds and trying to get to the kernel of truth in conversation at a bar with jazz in the background, his attention is wholly there, and she is forgotten.

The character is no hero, he is confused and flawed and contradictory and stuck, and the book is honest about the tensions between his feelings of responsibility to the people in his life and to his own aspirations. He knows when he’s been crap (the benefit of hindsight? Autobiography lets us paint the appropriate feelings in at the right moments to act as counterweight to our bad behaviour?). Nonetheless it’s interesting reading that kind of gritty self-appraisal and flashes of insight. He says, I guess referring to on the Road: ‘Mardou…who’d never read my first novel, which has guts, but has a dreary prose when all’s said and done.’

*Although as highlighted in discussions with mermaidgrrl a while back the word bisexuality might be replaced to good effect with ‘pansexuality’, which seems rather less ‘bipolar’ than groovily global and all encompassing in range.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

"Oh the Places You'll Go" Dr Seuss*

OK so my 3-month-old is too young to understand this, let alone think this is his favourite book... And I know that at this age I could be reading him the phone book and it would be just as interesting because it's all about the tone of our voices and the attention we're giving him.

HOWEVER... I can safely say this is his parent's favourite kids book for the time being.

I was given this book as a birthday present from BSharp a few years back (thanks, mate!). It was written by Dr Seuss a year or so before he died, and it's like he's trying to pass on a message: Life has it's ups and downs; sometimes you won't know which way to go, sometimes you will; sometimes you'll just have to sit and wait for things to happen. But you have your brain and your feet and you'll be just fine. All done in Dr Seuss's wonderful wacky rhyme, with accompanying primary-coloured pictures of 4 limbed creatures and Escher-like buildings.

*I seriously don't have an attention span for anything longer at present

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Oh hello this is your book club moderator

Too lazy to email these questions so i will just blog it and hope you all see it.
#1 Does anyone want to fix up the sidebar on this blog nicely so that it lists contributors? Add any new links? (More with the too lazy, yadda yadda.)
#2 Do any ardent book club readers (are there any?) want to be contributors? It's not hard, even I can do it and I'm a dead set luddite who can't program a video player. Maybe current members can email interested friends invites...
3# Low brow is the new high brow - seriously, any posts on magazines, radio plays, back of cereal packets, anything that involves words or stories is highly welcome

Ergh, this post is so boring and adminy I am even boring myself.

A poetry blog

yes that's right, a poetry blog (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/) which isn't just oodles of tense teen poetry on black background with lime green text that makes your eyes weep for all the wrong reasons.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Book Crossing

Hey bookfolk, have you come across this? Idea is you mark books with an ID number that you get off this website, put the book somewhere public and wait for someone else to read it and enter their thoughts into the website too - you track where your book has gone and who has read it and where it ends up.

The fascination with an individual objects story is a bit like that film 'the red violin',I suppose it's a tangible link between us and other people, us and time? So maybe this is a fascinating aspect worth tracking via this site.

The notion of sharing strikes me as a nice one, encouraging people to read second hand books and to pass on things when they're done. Whether this is the most effective way to do this (as compared, for example, to simply handing over your old books to Vinnies or the local second hand book vendour)is maybe not so clear. There is a sense of thrill though in finding something for free, something that someone else has left for you - is huge, a a bit like a treasure discovered. I love places that have a 'book swap' bookshelf set up - like some backpackers, or a cafe in Springwood near my dentist, or the train station at Blaxland.It seems very trusting - that people will give and not just take books, that a self-serve system works, and for that reason, the gesture of trust in people's good nature, I like it even more.

So, if anyone gets into the Book Crossing thing, let me know, and maybe I'll give it a burl too.

Ursula le Guin rocks

Totem
Mole my totem
mound builder
maze maker
tooth at the root
shaper of darkness
into ways and hollows
in grave alive
heavy handed
light blinded

(Ursula le Guin, 1979 from 'Buffalo gals and other animal presences' 1987)
I really liked this brief book of poems and stories, with an animal theme - the characteristics in us which are akin to those in animals, our relationship with non-human animals, the imaginary lives of animals. I'm digging stories with wolves as main characters. It's funny, because in our culture it is seen as infantile and only feminine to be interested in animals in a mythological / symbolic sense (ie in any way which is not entirely materially self serving and dominating), but in so many cultures a healthy respect for and interest in animals helped provide a story about how the world worked and what is mysterious and magical about being alive. Joseph Campbell writes lots about this in his book 'Myths to Live by' (and no doubt in his other books too but its the only one of his that I've read) and muses on the functional role that these and other myths play for people,in giving a sense of meaningful story to our lives. When I was little I loved animal books - Wind in the Willows, Cuddlepot and Snugglepie (with lots of lizards and other folk), even Waterbabies I think had fishie people in it. It seemed to make sense atthat age to be aware of the characters of animals, to talk with them, to see them as other, different, people populating the world along side us. Of course as an adult in an industrial consumer capatilst society that is seen as ludicrous, indulgant and pretty much bonkers.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

on poetry..

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
John Keats (1795 - 1821)

A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words." - Robert Frost

Friday, June 09, 2006

Book Orgy

Due to my currently unemployed status I am really eating up books at the moment. I don't know if others go through this phase but its one that involves library-borrowing, ferreting through the family/sharehouse bookshelf, and even committing the cardinal sin of getting stuck into a book that someone else is partway through. The shame. So here's a condensed run-down for you nerdygrrls (and boys), if you want some pointers in the direction of diversionary reading. Oh by the way, this run-down is from the start of April, so not as bad as it looks.

Animal Instincts - Barbara Kingsolver
About a young woman returning to her tiny childhood town near the USA- Mexico border, with lots of latino culture surviving. The stories from her young life unfold into her experience there as an adult, and teaching biology at the high school. Liked this. She's tall, a bit awkward, a bit of a stewer, and it has some family stories, love, a glimpse into indigenous life, and a sprinkling of ecology.

The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
Love the Margie A. She creates lovely women characters who are flawed but funny, and strong, and believable. She basically re-tells sections of this story as experienced by 3 different women. They have a common link of their experience with a psycho, life wrecking monster. For a while I couldn't work out the point of painting this one-woman car crash, but at the very least its entertaining.

Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Hilarous. Lots of compulsive sex, including a treatise on the various airline toilet capacities on cross-continental flights. Made all the more richer by the discovery last night that a compatriot has had a real experience of this nature. I also think that there's a couple writers like Chuck (Irving Welsh comes to mind) who are creating shocking/dirty/reprehensible scenes to make a point or draw a metaphor on the rampant use-and-abuse nature of society. They just exaggerate it so far out there into the world of toilet sex so us readers don't recognise ourselves (at first).

The Wind-up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murikama
I really didn't get along with this book. Feel a bit of a cheat as I gave a copy to Miss J. Whoops. I persevered through several full days on the couch reading it, only to feel very empty and flat, as that was precisely what the main character was doing. When he wasn't navigating a pyscho-drama that involved endless walking down passages (real or imagined) fights with a baseball bat, intense stories from the war, and a long, seemingly pointless episode with a duo of pyschic sisters. I feel bad being mean about it, and maybe I just couldn't piece the puzzle together, needing more pedestrian and linear plots. I really hope others can get into it, and enjoy the intense mystery and interior life that he opens up in incredible detail.

Fairy-tale anthology - Compiled by Angela Carter
My lovely birthday pressie by the very perceptive and thoughtful miss J, and also resting at her hillside abode, as it was too heavy to add to my bursting backpack. A great one to dip into, and savour and laugh over ancient tales of tricky women. Will have a nice long shelf life I'm sure. Would be grand to read aloud sections to munchkins.

Star Dust - Neil Gaiman
In the modern Fairy-tale genre. Great fun. Takes only an afternoon. Set in a Victorian-era village that contains the frontier into "Fairy" - the land beyond the wall. Currently being turned into a movie with Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfieffer and Clare Danes.

Strange Pilgrims - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Short stories all about Latin Americans in Europe. Some a bit fanstastical, many with a spoonfull of sadness or grief. Rewarding to read references to places and respond with a slightly smug mental "I've been there, I know what seaside boulevard he's talking about".

Tremble - Toshiba Learner
Australia's no. 1 mainstream erotic writer, with a speciality in creating a historic setting. Short stories, with a bit of rumpy pumpy in all of them. Some grotesque. I haven't finished them all, but a couple of stand-outs that made me laugh out loud. In particular the Brisbane white-shoe property developer being "haunted" by the jungle that his concrete monstrosities gobble up. All his sexual fantasies feature synthetic materials, and a kind of weird plastic film. He is repulsed by the organic, the dirty, the natural, but then he meets a grand, feral ecologist with no bra and hairy-armpits. You can imagine where it goes, the whole thing a serious piss-take.

The Red Tent - Anita Daimant
Tale of the tribe of "Jacobites" - Jacob from the (first) Bible - his four wives, 11 sons, and one daughter, told from the daughter's perspective. Lots of pregnancies, old rituals, births, deaths, eygptians, and old-testament-style violence. Quite famous as far as I can tell.

Affluenza - Clive Hamilton
Read it. Its scary. Aussie stats and tales about the national obession with possesion, coupled with a uniquely Australian malaise where the collective subconsiousness is kidding itself we are all still "doing it tough".

Mr Nice - Howard Marks
Life story of a hippy traveller who became an international dealer exclusively in marijuana. Somewhat a celebrity in the UK. Full of hundreds of names, funny-clever international deals, unpleasant consequences and horror of the US "justice" system.

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Book shows and readings on the radio and Teev (and relative links):


Book Readings
(Mon-Fri 2pm, repeated 11pm, on ABC Radio National)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookreading/default.htm

The Book Show
(Weekdays 10am, Sun 7.10pm on ABC Radio National)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/

Book Lust
(ABC TV, 10pm Tuesday)
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200605/programs/AC0518V002D30052006T220000.htm
(This seems to be a one-off special. I read somewhere that there is an new TV show on soon on the ABC about books, but not sure when it starts or what it will be called).

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Um, hi. This is my first post. Nice to be here.

I kind of wagged work the other afternoon and did a bit of second-hand-bookshop-browsing and came away with quite an armful. One of which was Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of those books I've vaguely heard of but were never really sure what it was about. Hint: there is no sea in it. It's an imagined pre-history of the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, aka the mad woman in the attic. In Jane Eyre, she is a gothic beast, unfeminine, mad, tropical, sensual, a perfect foil to Jane's purity and rationality.

Jean Rhys imagines her rather differently. Antoinette's a bit lost, a bit unloved, and very scared, living in Jamaica when the recent emancipation of the slaves has made white people unwelcome. The first part of the book covers part of her childhood, which is quite tragic and results in her mother going mad. The second part is written from the view of Mr Rochester, and if about his marriage, which he kind of falls into because he's greedy for money and Antoinette has plenty. During their honeymoon, things begin to go wrong. Rochester finds out he is a figure of fun for having married a woman with a family history of mental problems (probably from inbreeding), who also has black blood. Antoinette is desperate to make him love her, and resorts to voodoo, which doesn't work and leaves her angry, impotent and trapped.

The third part is set in England, and this is where the story crosses Jane Eyre. It's a strange book, because you already know the ending - mad woman, burning house - she can't escape her fate. But she knows she can't, and this makes her real, instead of the animal other that Charlotte Bronte imagined.

The writing creates a sense of dread and doom all the way through to the end. Reading it late at night gave me a bad case of the creeps. It's only 150 pages long, but packs a lot in.

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Miss J has pleaded with Booklub members other than herself to post on their reading.... here goes, but I suspect my reading will be of limited interest to others at present:

"Baby Love" by Robin Barker
"Kidwrangling" by Kaz Cooke
"The Essential Guide for First-time Parents" by Dr Miriam Stoppard

You get the idea. Falling asleep on the couch by 9pm really puts a damper on your reading schedule. However, now that I am on maternity leave (whoohoo!), perhaps I'll have the time to read the following which I have lined up:

Virtual Light, by William Gibson
Mr Golightly's Holiday by Sally Vickers

and a few others that I started over the past few months...

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Haruki Murukami - The Wind up Bird

So I've got a100 pages into this, right. And I know that Mr Murukami has a bit of a fan base out there in Booklub, but just to put the cat among the wind-up birds... I wonder if I find him cold, aloof, and just trying a little bit too, er, hard. Maybe. I'm enoying it because its all mysterious and has some very casual humour with the prophesy angle.. but is he overtly trying to create a spooky (but meaningless) atmosphere just for the sake of it? I read another one of his, completely forget the title because I'm a fairly crap book reviewer, but it was about a man with a long lost love, who owns a jazz club and feels a kind of duty to his wife not to track down his myterious lost love. This one seems to be about a jobless man who listens to jazz all day and is starting to worry he doesn't really know his wife that well at. Interesting, but cold. I sense perhaps he a is a little subversive with the attitude of his protagaonist, if we are to believe the stereotype of Japan, and the highly dutiful salaryman. So the way his men characters kind of glide through life might be a bit of a shock over there. Just guessing here. Maybe I've known one too many dissolute men for real, and don't get much of a kick out of fiction ones. Who knows. In the last two weeks I stayed up till the wee hours reading first Animal Moves by Barbara Kingsolver and then The Robber Brides -totally cliched chick books, and loved them both. Even shed a little tear at the first one. Will give you more run down next time.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Zadie Smith - On Beauty



Just finished reading this one. Thanks Mikey for perfect airoplane reading.
Liked it. Anyone else read it?

Sunday, March 12, 2006

"Nine Hours North" - Tim Sinclair


Nine hours north of everything I knew, of all my life that's made sense so far . . . Things stopped making sense from the moment Adam arrived in Japan - the conservative job, the shoebox apartment and the growing weight of his relationship with Sarah.
By the time Marianne arrives, he's been battery-caged for so long it all seems normal - but then she changes everything . . .

A bittersweet novel about finding the strength to move forward.

Nine hours north has just been released this February, published by Penguin and I must confess to be very excited about this book, not only because I know the author (albeit tangentially) as he is the son of my 1st year Biology lecturer *and* the husband of a dear friend of mine who I went to HS with, but also because it's the debut novel by a young Australian - Adelaidean no less!, AND because it's a verse novel. Remember Vickram Seth's 'The Golden Gate' or Matt Rubenstein's 'Solstice' or Dorothy Porter's wonderful 'The Monkey's Mask' and 'What a piece of work'?? Great verse novels, in a genre which is slimly populated but satisfying to read.

I think it's incredibly brave to be a writer, and even more brave to be a poet. Poetry! Who does that these days, when everything is meant to be useful and contribute to production of bright and shiny things that you can eat or wear or drive or renovate? For that reason alone I am committed to buying the work of contemporary poets / poetic fiction (I just made that genre up) writers - good to support the dreamers, so we remember how to dream.

Anyway, this book is set in Japan, characters are early twenties Australians teaching English as part of a youthful adventure away from home post-uni. They are in a relationship but things are getting weary. Captures those few years (longer??) when the acting out of a working life feels like playing dress ups, it can be done with irony, it is still so new, and uni life still feels so close. When you just know that you will never wear a suit and be old and be boring. The interesting thing about their relationship is that they seem to be developing quite different attitudes to their life, about what is important and how to live it.

I must confess that parts were uncomfortable reading for me in terms of candid insight into the mind of a male partner who is increasingly dissatisfied a few years into a relationship - I think I was a bit defensive about his judgement about Sarah. I did also wonder if it was going to be a 2-D 'my girlfriend's so boring I need a wild adventure' story - but it wasn't, it didn't end up being this, the characters fleshed out with much more realistic too-ings and fro-ings of feeling. It effectively built up tension as you wonder what will happen to topple the domestic order. It rolls along, with cycling becoming a theme of the book - Adam and Sarah united in their use of bikes for commuting to work and also as the mode of travel they choose for their long-planned touring holiday around Japan.

Definitely worth a read, and may especially apppeal to those who are into bikes, who have had a 'coming of age' relationship, have visited Japan, who have been confused about their feelings for someone, and who like wry, simply stated poetry. Proof that poetry doesn't have to be abstract and fey and hard to access. Buy a copy! Give a copy to a friend! :)

Authors website

"Olivo Oliva" - Phillipe Poloni

Turns out my local library service runs this you beaut service called 'Book Express' for city commuter types. A stall at the train station complete with network accessed laptop, a friendly and informative person on the other side of the stall, and a bunch of books and audio books to borrow. All this between 5.30ish and 7ish am. And me lugging a laptop and some reading for work but glad of any excuse not to do that and be immersed in fiction instead. Sipping coffee, reading, it’s almost like being on a moving café rather than a mode of transport. Almost.

I borrowed a couple, one was “Olio Oliva” by Phillipe Poloni (1997 Stoddart publishing). Read it that day, was one of those sparsely type fonted slim books that you just whip through (especially when you are on your derrière for 4 hours with no distractions).

It starts with the relationship between an olive tree and its olives. Describes the anguish of an olive wanting to be free of the tree, the trees contempt for its ‘droppings’, the tree as patriarch. The gist of the story then is boy meets girl, boy beds girl, olive tree drops olive from great heights into the steamy sea of lovemaking below, girl has olivish baby. Sounds a bit like ‘Leolo’ that Italian movie where conception takes place in the back of a tomato truck? Yes, I thought that too. It’s all about the olive in Sicily, the role of landowners versus the landless poor, resentment, fear of losing hold of power, and ultimately revenge. The writing was lovely, sparse and poetic, translated from the Italian by David Homel. It did remind me of Calvino in some of its language but perhaps that is just due to the meandering, observational, dreamy nature of the writing, and the playing with words - or maybe it’s just that these are probably the only Italian authors I’ve read (that’s a bit tragic – so anglocentric in what I read…). It captured a very languid feeling of a slow, hot, worn out Sicily rather well, and gave an interesting picture of the successive waves of invaders that have moved through that part of the world, and the layering of culture and religion that takes place as a result.

Characters? The sicario in the new country. Some quirky ancient craftsmen accompanied by a donkey, who has his own bank account and gets paid the lions share of their fee. Hunchbacked moralists who guard over unwed mothers in crumbling ruins. The patriarch who is superstitious and ruthless in protecting his empire. Some of these characters reminded me of people from Loius de Berniers novels – they are irrational and contradictory and flawed and colourful.

This is a bit like a gentle, lazy, loping fairy tale, which doesn’t deliver much in the way of ‘action’, and everything that happens has already been foretold at the start. Even the end is a kind of poetic anticlimax. However, this is entirely in keeping with the setting of the tale, and what it says are the characteristics of that place – so this kind of works.

It made me want to go lie under an olive tree and eat pasta and drink wine.

The young olive tree had a soul. It was possessed of a memory. A kind of heredity. Awkwardly, it paraded the military pride of its ancestors. Poor little tree! It was but a simple domesticated olive producer among the million of other domesticated Mediterranean copies, all planted in rigorously straight rows. No more petalism! Doric temples a thing of the past! Polytheist ceremonies accompanied by chanting and pungent Levantine incense – all obsolete. Its leaf would no longer serve as a model for those early Christian mosaicists who decorated their catacombs, late at night, illuminated by the oil of its fruit. All that had happened, long ago… All that belonged to another time. The scion was a heraldic tree no more, but the object of intensive rationalised agriculture. And the haughty olive tree knew nothing of that!’ (p.4)

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me; leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy, and my plain dealing; 'tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.
--Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) English author

Sunday, February 26, 2006

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad
to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones
who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in
the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Jack Kerouac - "On The Road"

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Good Books on Cat and Girl.
Love this comic. And look, soon appearing in a book! This is now on my ever growing 'when I get paid' wishlist.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Art & Lies
Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson



I read these two books recently, in that order. Art and Lies is fiction, Art Objects is a book of short essays, and whilst they cover some similar territory, ideas on what art is and how it fits within life, and in particular within our culture of corporate consumer capitalism, I think that Art & Lies is probably the more beautiful read. That said, all of Winterson's prose is essentially poetry, and I find it a joy to read even when I think she has been opinionated, bombastic or arch - maybe especially then!



Art and Lies had great passages of beautiful prose which I would memorise if I had the dedication to do so. Kind of like the type of literary tattoo I would get it you could print words into the ether around you rather than images into flesh. There is one passage about the sea, in Art and Lies, which is particularly wonderful. the story looks at what it is to be a woman artist (painter, writer) - to grapple with expactations and sexual politics and double standards. One of the characters is the female Picasso in modern day England grappling with family expectations and the presumption of madness, one is Sappho the poet who exists both as the historical figure and modern day lover, one is Handel, a surgeon who loves opera and God and is deemed quaint and archaic by his colleagues.

"There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only Art and Lies"

Handel struggles to feel, to allow expression of his passions, to be authentic to himself in the midst of corporate culture - which has art merely as accessory, gross consumption but no tasting of what is consumed, lack of appreciation, of wonder. He is afforded staus and position, but leaves it to nurture his soul. The women are awash with passion and talent, but constrained by the self-serving interests of father/brother (in Picasso's story) or Church and misrepresentation (in Sapppho's story).

The story weaves around in a way that plays with time and place - gently a story emerges. It is not a linear, pointed, fast and obvious plot by any means, but more like a beautiful symphony which takes you along and connects directly with your subconscious. If you've read other worksby Winterson you wil be familiar with the style. If you haven't, I suggest Sexing the Cherry, or The Passion as great starting points. For the sake of categorisation, some people apply labels such as 'Magic Realism' to her work (see the absolute shocker of an entry on Wikipedia - boy did someone not like this writer when they wrote that!), but this is a descriptor the author rejects.

I think essentially this is a piece on authenticity - of spirit, of being authentic to ones true nature, and of the repurcussions that may transpire as a result of expressing authenticity in an world more comfortable with thoughtless reproduction. It is a pretty damming reflection on how society deals with creative women, and on how muted and rationed feeling and expression is in a culture dictated by the market.

From Art & Lies:

"It is so easy to be a brute and yet it has become rather fashionable.."

"It's comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find that I have none"

"...Such habits and a contemplative nature, have not fitted me for a world that knows neither restraint nor passion. the fatal combination of indulgence without feeling disgusts me. Strange to be both greedy and dead"

"I confess that I am frightened of the sea.There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sub-lunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself. A list of all the things that the sea does is not what the sea is...."




"Some people find this book very difficult. What do you say to that?

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort. Certainly Art and Lies is my most closed piece of work. Perhaps it is hermeneutic, though no more so than plenty of books by plenty of guys .It was written at a time when I was looking inwards not outwards. It is thickly layered, concentrated and often dark. But it's a book not a crime. If you don't like it, don't read it."
(From the authors website)


Winterson on Art Objects:

"it's a verb not a noun. Art objects to the lie against life that it is pointless and mean. The message coloured through time is not lack but abundance, Not silence but many voices. Art, all art is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die." (From the authors website)

Quotes from the book:
"To suggest that the writer, painter, the musician, is the one out of touch with the real world is a doubtful proposition. It is the artist who muct apprehend things fully, in their own right, communicating them not as symbols but as living realisties with the power to move."

"For the artist,any artist, poet, painter, musician, time in plenty and an abundance of ideas are the neccassary basics of creativity. By dreaming and idleness and then by intense self-discipline does the artist live. The artist cannot perform between 9 and 6, five days a week, or if she sometimes does, she cannot gaurantee to do so. Money culture hates that. It must know what it is getting, when it is getting it, and how much it willcost. The most tyrannical of patrons never demanded from their protegees what the market now demands of artists; if you can't sell your work regularly and quickly, you can ither starve or do something else. The time that art needs, which may not be a long time, but which has to be its own time, is anathema to a money culture. money confuses time with itself. That is part of its unreality." (pp138-9).

Sunday, February 05, 2006

"Kafka on the Shore" - Haruki Murakami

This is the story of a teenage boy, who runs away from home in an attempt to escape his father's prophesies (curses). The boy also wonders about the fate of his mother and sister, who left when he was four never to be seen again. There is an interlocking story of an old man who has not been "quite right" since an incident when he was a boy during WW2, but gained the ability to talk to cats. A series of events interlock the stories of these two as they both travel from Tokyo to one of Japan's Western islands, introducing new characters along the way who help out the characters in their times of need.

There are interesting twists and contrasts - the simple, illiterate man blindly leading a truck driver who ends up being enlightened by his journey; the man who can only live in the present and the lady who can only live in her memories; Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker appearing to the book's characters to ensure the carrying out of fated events; night time dreams that run into reenactments of events from many years before; and fish raining from the sky.

I enjoy Murakami books, and this is the third I have read. They all have some common elements - trips into the metaphysical, misfit characters of the Japanese kind, use of simile and metaphor, bold truisms buried in the text, references to whiskey drinking, eating and cooking, music, and graphic descriptions about the male sexual function (wanking, sex, nocternal emissions or fantasizing). [I could do with less on the latter, but then, he's a male author so I expect that he writes with some authority on the topic. It's written in a factual way, as a normal part of the life of the male characters, rather than being in anyway pornographic].

This novel has all the above elements. This had some lovely truisms in it... I marked the pages so I could quote them:
"Like someone excitedly relating a story only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."

" 'From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I'm generalising, of course.' "

" 'Are the Japanese God and the foreign God relatives, or maybe enemies?'
'How should I know?'
'Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the devine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God any more. That's what Japanese gods are like - they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American chomping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o - God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. And if that's what God's like, I wouldn't worry about it.'
'OK...' "