Sunday, October 05, 2008

Judging a book by




This cafe was in Port Douglas, near Cairns* and had one half bookshop (new - lots of coffee table books, as well as fiction), and one half cafe (nice coffee, good open frontage to let breeze in). I quite liked the coffee and the timber and slightly down at heel but colourful furnishings.

What I also liked about it was that it had a display of 'book cover art' - little handmade posters with text and images stuck on it, telling the story of famous books, and who designed and created their covers. I think this is a really interesting element of books, that we often don't know about. I can barely name one single book cover illustrator, and yet we are drawn to the art of books, when remember a book we sometimes remember the image of the cover. Very interesting.

* (in Qld, Australia)

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Back with nose in book...

Seems it has been ages since I've had the time or energy (?) to get into a book, but recently I was sick, spent a large part of a day in bed, and I have had a nose in a book of some kind ever since! Yihar! Doesn't leave me with the same feeling of wasted time that I get when I sit in front of the telly.

1) Spook Country - William Gibson
While I always find William Gibson writes well and about interesting, different subjects, this novel lost me a bit. The art scene in this novel involves geo-hacking - where people hack into coordinates on GPS's and put in things that aren't there, but if you are wearing a helmet (virtual reality style?), you can see their artwork - eg an image of River Phoenix's body lying on the spot where he actually died. This was written in his frequently used style with 3-4 converging storylines, written in turns in different chapters. There were bits where the writing just got bogged down, I felt, where the author described in detail things that I just couldn't picture, so I ended up skimming through paragraphs.
But still, Gibson's writing was noticably superior and easier to read than the book I had been reading prior to this. If you are thinking of reading a Gibson novel, I'd try "Pattern Recognition" (his last novel) instead.
3 out of 5 stars

2) Raising Boys - Steve Biddulph
While I never take these books too literally, and this has slighly dumbed-down case studies just like many self-help/pop psychology books, this book provides food for thought. Discusses stages of boyhood, importance of role models (parents or other, female or male), testosterone levels and how they fluctuate throughout childhood and its effect amongst other things. Good for helping me to think from my son's perspective, and it may just be a book I drag out again when he approaches teenagerhood...

3) Also read "T is for Trespass". Easy to read, and good to get through on a single rainy day - nuff said.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Like books? Wants to help kids help kids read?

Become a student2student Mentor Supervisor

The Smith Family's student2student program is aimed at increasing students reading skills. It matches students from Years 3 to 8 who are behind in their reading skills with older student mentors from a different school who have high literacy skills and have been trained to support the reading development of others. Since student mentors do not have the skills of a teacher, we are aiming to create a network of (adult) mentor supervisors who can support and encourage these student mentors. Each mentor supervisor is assigned to approximately 10 student mentors and supports them through fortnightly phone calls for the 18 week program duration between May and September. From October/November 2008 we will be starting our recruitment for Mentor Supervisor volunteers for the 2009 programs, so if you are interested please contact Warunee Nuij on Tel. 02 9895 1205 or warunee.nuij@thesmithfamily.com.au during this time.

NSW, Australia

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Reading this and loving it

I don't know about you but I just love a well written reference book! This one is a great intro to arts therapies for someone who wants an overview of the different philosophical/psychological foundations, and practical applications of arts therapies, in each of the areas of art (visual art) therapy, music therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy etc (I think that's it actually, from memory but I haven't finished it so I might be missing something). It is written in an accessible style, each chapter writen about one of the types of arts therapy (music, etc) by an author who works in the field. Each chapter acts as an overview, introducing the historical origins of the artforms use in western psychological/therapeutic practice, the various schools or approaches, the various applications, and typically drawns on some case studies or examples to ilustrate the potential effects of the theraputic approach at hand. So I like the book because it is clear and well structured (ooh I do like some god structure) but also because the stories are so heartwarming. To me, it makes a compelling case of the value of arts therapies, especially in the many situations where people aren't able to access 'talking cures', and where connection and expression are paramount to a person's healing / restoring wellbeing. For example in the chapter on music therapy they talk about a case study where a man went into neonatal wards to play classial/improvised music to accomodate and work with the (high levels of) background noise on the ward, and how he concentrated on extending calm and support and love for the staff and for the babies the staff were caring for. The staff were interviewed before and after about noise and stress and the intervention was found to successfully reduce stress levels on the ward. Other examples of music intervientions for premature babies suggest that the rhythmic quality of some music encourages very premature babies to suckle, when they have trouble doing this. Also in the chapter on music therapy was an example where a therapist worked with an elderly lady with dimentia and schizophrenia who had for a long time been living homeless and very isolated from contact with people. At the time of the music therapy she was in care but did not speak and was very non-responsive. Through a series of music therapy sessions the therapist used old songs and snippets of songs with her native language in it, as well as mirrorring the woman's tapping motions, encouraging her to sing along. The woman smiled, and sometimes sang along and even made comments, as the therapy progressed. I got all teary reading this book at several of these types of stories, which seemed to be about therapists offering such a lovely gesture of care. The tone also appeals to me, as the styles described are generally less dogmatic and rigorously 'scientific' than some of the more cognitive approaches to therapy (noting of course that these therapies are used within many different paradigms of care, for example visual arts therapies can be used in combination with CBT to help identify responses and alternative responses), and is very open about the central role of the therapist and their emotional connection with the patient.

I like the approach because it seems to work on many levels - physical, cognitive, emotional, and can offer many pathways for the 'patient' (and therapist) to transform. there also seem to be lots of examples of efective arts therapies working with traumatised children/adults, developmentally delayed children/adults etc. Anyway, that's just my top of head recollection, without the book here to quote to you from, but if you're interested in this general topic, it would probably be a useful reference book or an introductory read which will point you to other texts that might be useful for the specific areas you're interested in.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

My new books



So what did I buy at the book shop?

‘Nature and Art’ by Elizabeth Inchbald, edited by Shawn Lisa Maurer (based on the second edition published in 1797). Another female writer I’d never heard of! Am really starting to get the shits with the vast array of amazing voices that I’ve never had the chance to read because their work and gender didn’t fit the pattern of what society deemed to be appropriate and their names and works haven’t been added to the commonly bandied about list of ‘Great Authors who had something important to say and who you really must read’. More on that later – I feel a rant coming on, but for now, just to say that the story of this women’s life really interested me and this book – looking at the prejudices of education, the artifice (‘art’) of contemporary western society, class and gender constructions through a story of two cousins brought up in different ways. Apparently the work is quite utopian in it’s vision of a potential classless future, where people value people more than status, and is in keeping with some of the other philosophical and social movements of its time. I think it’s even more interesting to read a work about outsider perspectives on culture written by someone who has lived that experience – which I think a single woman supporting her family through writing, in the late 1700’s can be said to have had. The author wrote many dramatic pieces, and several novels, and supported herself through her writing and acting before and after her brief marriage, as well as supporting her sisters. Aah all this I get just from the introduction to the novel. I’ll write some more when I read the actual book!

“Scotttsboro Alabama – a story in linoleum cuts” by Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez Edited by Andrew Lee. New York University Press.

[Please note that this review refers to violent death, racism and other yucky stuff]

This book is a reproduction of some very striking original artworks that were made as narrative and political statement in the 1930’s in response to the arrest of nine African American boys and young men (aged 13 to 19) accused of raping 2 white women on a freight train, the subsequent court case and the different responses by the public. It’s mostly pictures. Each page is an image and a small amount of text, also created through lino-cut. Narrated in the present tense, each page charts a moment in history or key element of the story (“the boss uses every means to keep the negro separate from the white”), and has very strong images, caricatures, symbols, and are almost cartoon-like in their directness and emotion – lots of. It has with it a new foreword, a new introduction, and the original foreword that came out when the prints were produced as a (self published) volume prior to 1935.



I bought this book for a few reasons. Firstly because I’m interested in text-image interplay in story telling, and am gradually collecting an interesting collection of books that use words and pictures together to tell stories. This is one of the earliest examples I’ve seen of the graphic novel format used to make a strong political statement – I found that really exciting (noting that I’m by no means an expert and maybe there are heaps of examples, and I’ve just not come across them in my wanderings yet).

Secondly because I’m interested in lino-cuts and relief printmaking in general. Partly because they are so primal and direct, and have been an accessible/affordable form of mark making compared to things like oil painting, and so have been used to express political views and experiences of the less privileged. Partly just coz I like them – because I think they’re tricky and back to fronty and can use a simple technique to make complex or simple images. I like to get books that have examples of different ways of using the medium, because I think I’d like to teach again one day, and find that using books with examples of work are a lovely, low key way to demonstrate different techniques, styles and applications.

But I was also interested in the story – I’d never heard of the trial, and as I flicked through the introduction it seemed like quite a significant event and quite an interesting moment in history. It seems like the trade union (ILD – International Labour Defence) was really involved in responding and defending the accused, and that many saw the event as being a way to divide the black and white workers, to dissolve solidarity amongst workers. In this way the case also became symbolic of the uprising of workers against unfair bosses and the powers systems of the wealthy.

“The Scottsboro case became one of the key episodes in the history of race and civil rights in America. It wasn’t the legal manoeuvrings of the defence counsel or the actions of the defendants that invested this particular case with such historical importance. Rather the ILD and their supporters brought this injustice before the world. Maintaining that a fair and impartial trial was impossible under white supremacy, the ILD publicized the case widely in order to expose Southern “justice” and pressure the Alabama legal system to free the nine defendants. Protests erupted throughout the country and as far away as Paris, Moscow, and South Africa, and the governor of Alabama was bombarded with telegrams, postcards, and letters demanding the immediate release of the Scottsboro Boys…And although the “Scottsboro Boys” themselves never identified with the Party’s goals, they became cultural symbols on the left – the subject of poems, songs, plays, and short stories that were published, circulated and performed around the world.

It took place in that period after the Civil War and slavery had been abolished but before segregation had been abolished – the story charts the realities of African Americans trying to find work and still being victimised, discriminated against and lynched around the time of this trial. It’s hard to imagine that this was all happening at the time my Grandparents were kids. That it’s within living memory.* And for some reason this particular time and place in history really resonates with me – maybe it’s that I’ve read other things that explore these experiences (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sojourner Truth) and that some of the music I love most comes from the mouths of Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith.

Many of the images refer to lynchings and deliberately draw no distinction between mob lynching and the court case and sentencing of death to all but the youngest of the 9 boys. The foreword talks about this, explaining that at that time, there seemed to be very little difference:

(Notes from the editor on use of the word lynching):
“the usage at that time, at least among African American and leftist activists, consistently did not distinguish between a court-sanctioned execution and a mob execution. In my youth I was told about one such lynching that occurred just before the Democratic National Convention in 1928, when the man who would become the sheriff of Harris County, Texas, led a mob in lynching a black man accused of raping a white woman. The prevalence of such stories, especially those involving the overt and active participation of law enforcement officers, make a moot point of such fine distinctions between legal and vigilante justice.”

Also this

“Stories like this one were not uncommon in the South during the late nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth. Black men were frequently accused of raping white women and most never even made it to trial. “Judge Lynch” usually presided over these affairs; a local white mob would take custody of the accused (with the complicity of local police), and save the state the costs of trial by hanging the defendant from a sturdy tree branch or street light or a bridge. Lynchings were more than hangings. They were public spectacles intended to punish and terrorize the entire black community. For white’s who needed to prove their white supremacy even as they struggled to make ends meet, a lynching was like a picnic, a celebration of their power and an affirmation of black inhumanity. Whole families often showed up – wives, children, grandparents – to watch black bodies tortured, burned, riddled with bullets, and to partake in the severing and selling of body parts. For the black people who had to clean up after this carnival of violence, a charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree served as a visible and potent reminder of the price of stepping out of line. But these “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees were not the only reminders of racial hierarchy. the fields, mines, and roads were dotted with black men on chain gangs whose main crime was insubordination.” (from the foreword by Robin D.G.Kelly).

This stuff makes me so sad, and as I read I kind of wince, at the thought of that really tangible, physical violence that represents the pervading sense of hostility that must have been borne out in so many other ways at the time. And I wonder if there is a need to be reminded of things like that sometimes, to do a little bit of grieving, to process some of the, perhaps collectively not yet fully processed, grief that must arise from such violence in our recent shared history. Don’t you think?

Anyway, the story seems like such an interesting mix of class, gender and race politics – all made evident through the focal point of one court case.

As an aside: I guess there’s a part of me that wonders about the gender politics of the case too, mostly because the narrative of the book and its recent commentary doesn’t really touch on that – it’s assumed the women made false accusations to prevent them for being arrested (they, like the men, were “riding the rails”, trying to get a ride to the city for work – but unlike the men were likely to have been arrested for prostitution, by virtue of being alone amongst other male hoboes). I wonder about the experience of being single and out of work as a women at that time, and how safe it would have been to travel, about the male instigated violence (or threat of that violence) that takes place against women in such a wide-spread way as to be almost invisible. I wonder how safe I would feel as a poor woman without power or connections travelling with a freight train full of angry, hopeless, desperate men (white and black). I wonder at the ongoing injustice of wealthy men who can visit prostitutes without fear of recrimination, but who in their working lives would arrest and prosecute women for having sex in exchange for moeny. I note that sexual violence has been used, and continues to be used to ‘keep women in their place’ and to threaten women into socially acceptable gender roles. I also feel angry at the way that accusations of rape has been used by men to target other men (a crime with less tangible ‘evidence’ than say murder) – white men ‘defending the honour of their women’, but at the same time goes most frequently unreported and unpunished as a crime when there is no ulterior race-driven motive for punishment. In fact, it often seems that rape is considered a regrettable, but kind of unavoidable crime- you know, boys will be boys, women can be so darned hard to figure out, men have needs.. etc. I’m not saying (fervently not saying) that this is what I think, but just that in my reading of popular commentary, I get the feeling that violence against women at the hands of men isn’t yet something we collectively take very seriously. It selectively being used falsely as a vehicle to funnel racial hatred, historically or in the present, is an injustice to all women (who have experienced sexual violence and whose attempts to have it be taken seriously are undermined by stories of false accusations like this) as well as the specific men affected.



Oooh. That was all very serious wasn’t it? Anyway, a good book if you can track down a copy.

*Noting of course everything awful and race related that’s happened in my own country, in the past and now, and not thinking that for one minute that this story isn’t also replicated right now in lots of other countries with battles between ethnic and religious groups.

And on a lighter note
Blab! – Fantagraphics Books, 2006
Stories, artwork and illustration. Comic /graphic novel/ folk painterly outsider art illustration style. I like this! Bunch of different artists. Great variety of contemporary styles. Varied and exciting, like a comic of random bits and pieces. No grand moral message or story, just bits and pieces that make you smile or frown – like being a kid reading comics all over again.

To market to market

Gleebooks is having a sale- on for the rest of the week I think. This book shop is a must-visit if you’re Sydney, not only is it big, and has a great ‘literary fiction’, crime, graphic novel, art book and non-fiction philosophy/social science/psychology sections, but it has an unpretentious, lived-in feel, with wooden bookshelves going up to a very high ceiling. It stacks books in piles on tables and on the floor, you have to walk through sideways sometimes if you have a big shoulder bag and don’t want to take out some fellow browser. The atmosphere is all the nice stuff about a crammed full second hand book shop, but less crammed and not dusty, all the nice stuff about a new bookshop, without all the dross you never want to buy anyway or the giant cheesy advertising material invading your view around the store, staff who actually read, and are cool but not quite as young, trying hard and shiny as those in some of the ‘I’m a cool bookstore’ stores around town. It feels comfortable, well-read, expansive and welcoming. Aaah.

Anyway, book sale. Upstairs, neatly arranged in tightly clustered rows, spine up, trestle tables, lovely, higgledy piggledy lack of order (think ‘blogging for your church’ sitting next to ‘sex and development’, ‘Jung as a writer’, sitting next to ‘imagination games for people working with children’ sitting next to ‘the complete gluten and dairy free cookbook’). The sale has been on for a while so I may be seeing the less popular remains, but there still seems to be some great stuff – especially in the sociology/ psychology/ theology/art book domains. There are novels on sale too, but I think the sale range is no better than a second hand bookstore for that, the best savings seem to be on the non-fiction stuff, where you can get current and interesting reference materials for half to a third of their RRP. Oh and some cards and postcards too, but I browsed very slowly and the store closed before I had a chance to look!

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Reading writing about writing

Read an interesting journal article today about the process and experience of writing. Maybe it's my love of blogging, but I really enjoy the emerging auto-ethnographic approach to social research. There seems something honest to me about hearing the voice of the researcher, and I think when it comes to the human condition, self reflection is an interesting 'data source' - as much as grand scale surveys and quant studies. As a form of identifying one of all the possible experiences, and exploring that in some depth. Enough chatter - here is a beautiful passage from that paper:

"Today, in the garden, I killed a snail. As soon as I did it, I vowed in my life never intentionally to kill another creature. But I have just woken up in the middle of the night, thinking about the snail. I only broke its shell, but breaking that shell ended its life.

What is the significance of that snail and its shell? For the snail, its shell was not simply its protection from being killed, or simply its home: It was the snail: Breaking the shell equaled killing the snail. What has that got to do with writing? In my sleepy reverie, I have connected writing with the shell. This is not meant to be a simple figure of speech, which allows me to think that cracking the shell of (my) writing will somehow crack some hidden code and lead me to a profound understanding of self. But there are some parallels. Writing is not simply a shell or a code which protects us or allows us to be identified in certain superficial ways; our writing is us, or to paraphrase Richardson (1997), writing becomes us, we inquire after ourselves through our writing. So finding out about our writing is also finding out about ourselves.

Every snail shell is idiosyncratically unique, allowing us to identify every snail. The snail’s shell is becoming, it grows with, the snail; there is no separation.
So my writing is not there simply to identify me, nor to protect me, nor to give me my home—it is me, its fluid, energetic, emerging shades, it is me becoming. It is identifying me, it is protecting me, it is my home but can only be characterized in these ways through the constant fluid movement of becoming. So between the two, me and my writing, exists a multiplicity of connections, a state of fluidity, an ever-changing nexus of identifications, infinitesimally small but hugely significant moments that give something to my sense, my feeling of knowing, of self."


Source: Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt (2006) Inquiring Into Writing: An Interactive Interview Qualitative Inquiry 2006; 12; 1117
Downloaded from http://qix.sagepub.com by on July 15, 2008

Reference cited above:
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play (constructing an academic life). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Reading, read, red

Just this week finished reading and it made my week more interesting and made me laugh out loud in the bath and at the breakfast table as I carried it dog eared with me around the house reading, and now I want to recomend it to everyone:
Fear of Flying - Erica Jong

Read all in a flurry on my week in Adelaide when I needed 'reading in bed' material and 'reading in the hotel bath' material and leant to me by my mum:
T is for something arother - a Kinsey Millhone mystery by Sue Grafton

Finished a while ago but don't want to really give back to the library because I really like some of pictures:
Put the Book back on the Shelf - a belle and Sebastian Anthology (graphic novel), and
A book of textile art from the early 1900's which designs that make me sigh and gasp with wonder

Kind of read one chapter of this good classic sustainability text and took it all the way to Adelaide and back in my suitcase and really think I would like to read it if only it wasn't competing with rollicking stories and good picture books:
Believing Cassandra - being an optimist in a pessimists world - Alan AtKisson

They are sitting on my desk unread from yet another library and making a little paper fortress which is stoping another pile of paper from avalanching across and spilling dramatically on the floor:
Assortment of social research text books and teribly earnest sciencey-engineering books about cleaning up soil

They have been lent to me and are waiting if I should need them for light relief but so far not started:
A Phryne Fisher Mystery and a Evanovich mystery

They have been redistribuited this week to other people who cook and eat meat:
Some old recipe books that have lovely recipes that I will never make

They are sitting on a large trestle table and being fossicked through by kids and people with small dogs:
A kazillion second hand books at the book fair outside my local library

Thursday, May 15, 2008

how to not have a regular job...

Watched "Jennifer Byrne Presents" recently, and she interviewed Peter Carey, Paul Auster, and Ian McEwan. Transcript is via this link.

What struck me is that, on top of feeling compelled to write and being good at it, they became writers to avoid being employed by someone else, and so they could control when they work and not have to work 9 to 5!

They talk about how long it took to get their first novels published, and how they view other authors.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Groovy book club in Melbourne

Books @ Fed Square - Cult Book Group
Interested in reading and discussing books that have caused a stir or attracted a cult following? Fed Square’s free new book group is a chance to talk about controversial and challenging literature in a relaxed informal environment. The group meets once a month at Café Beer Deluxe in the Atrium at Fed Square. For more information email books@fedsquare.com

Sessions will be held at 10am on the first Saturday of every month, commencing 1 December 2007.

Reading list:

January: The Complete Maus, Art Spiegalman
February: A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
March: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
April: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
May: Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
June: 1984, George Orwell
July: Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

To see every bird on earth - Dan Koeppel

I guess this book is a memoir, as much as it is a novel, but it felt like reading a novel. It's subtitled 'A Father, a Son, and lifelong Obsession', where bird watching - and specifically bird listing is the obsession. At the time of writing, his father had seen over 7,000 birds. That's 7,000 species, not just 7,000 flappy squawky individuals. Seen and identified them, using all manner of field guides. Seen and identified them in all manner of hard to get to places. And then recorded them, meticulously, with cross referencing and reference to the official tally of species for a region. Changing the list as species are deemed to have been split or 'lumped' (as taxonimists decide that one species is actually two different ones that look pretty similar, or decide that two are really the one). To get this list his father dedicated huge chunks of time and attention to his pursuit, becoming more and more single minded about it as he grew older.

The story jumps from the past to the present, linking stories of Dan's grandparents' lives as they left Europe in war, and adapted to life in America, memories from his own childhood and his parent's marriage in it's early days, goes off on tangents about the history of bird watching, or of other famous listers, includes tales of adventure in far flung places as people hunt down birds to spot. And it does this all rather effortlessly, not a dry tedious detail book, but seeming rich with interesting stories that ebb and flow around each other. What I found most interesting was the author's own story of coming to terms with his father's reality, and the generous and philosophical way he looks at his dad's own childhood, and the pressures on him, and the joy and escape he got from watching birds (as well as the relentless family pressure to enter a career in medicine in give up any notion of being an ornithologist), and his conjecture that the repression ended up with the love of bird watching becoming an obsession. But he says it all so much more kindly and interestingly than I do. It was interesting to trace the author's own story of himself as a child and young man, and how his father and he interrelated, and to see that although there were periods of estrangement and hurt (when he wished his dad was different and more available to him) in the end he got to a point of trying to share their lives however they best could - which ends up with him with binaculors in the Amazon with his dad sharing the moment of him spotting his 7,000th bird.

It's quite interesting to look at the kind of behaviour in the book that is easy to say falls squarely outside the 'norm', and consider how these boundaries might gently blur - all the different kinds of tallies and lists that people make, all the different kinds of 'spotters' out there, as well as the garden variety tally-er (to-do, countries I've been to, books I've read, bands I've seen.. etc). Makes you wonder about (and the book explores this too) some general desire in humans to feel more in control through recording and counting, and maybe, in terms of bird watching, to feel connected to the wonderous abundance of nature. But maybe a little more the former than the latter.

If you like stories about people and what might or might not make them tick, tales of 'the life less travelled', how other people navigate their family dynamics, or you just want to appreciate birds just that little bit more, this one gets a double thumbs up.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Plan B 3.0

A review of the new book by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute on Global warming and eco-collapse. Interview too.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Real stories about women's leadersip for peace

Also from my trusty e-newsletter:

"Read the stories from an extraordinary group of women who are mediating conflict, caring for refugees, restoring communities and building more responsive governments. These 15 leaders came together for CEDPA’s (Centre for Development and Population Activities) Women lead in promoting peace and stability workshop, held Oct. 23–Nov. 17, 2006 in Washington, D.C. Each has a powerful story to tell about the conflict in her country, and how women are building lasting peace by rewriting constitutions, negotiating human rights protections, securing access to land and water, and changing mindsets that limit women’s roles in their communities."

To read the publication, please visit CEDPA.

New book on Aung San Suu Kyi out soon

(This info from a women's peace e-network I'm on)

Perfect hostage: a life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s prisoner of conscience

Justin Wintle (Skyhorse Publishing), has written a timely and important new book. The book’s subject, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest since 1990, when Burma’s brutal military junta deemed her political ambitions a threat to their power. Despite imprisonment, failing health, and vilification at the hands of the Burmese media, Suu Kyi has persevered in an ongoing campaign of nonviolent protest and become an international icon for the peaceful pursuit of justice. Wintle’s beautifully crafted narrative offers the most thorough biography of Suu Kyi to date, as well as a complete, up-to-date account of the violent suppression of 50,000 peaceful demonstrators in September 2007.

The book will be available from March 2008 in bookstores everywhere.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Melbourne Library




A friend took me to the Reading Room of the Melbourne Library when I was there last year for work. What a room! Lovely. Very high vaulted ceiling as you can see from teh pics, and lovely old wooden desks with green reading lamps. Quotes from authors on the walls above bookshelves. I recomend a visit if you haven't been.

A real life Book Club for those in Sydney

Sunday Book Club at gleebooks

February book is The Memory Room by Christopher Koch:
(they say) "The events in this absorbing novel take place in the final phase of the Cold War, but they are highly relevant to today, and Christopher Koch’s widely admired prose style gives them a contemporary freshness. The aims of The Memory Room go far beyond those of a thriller. A psychological portrait of a brilliant but eccentric spy, it is also an exploration of the mystical nature of secrecy."

Published by: Vintage Australia
With Morgan Smith

Venue: gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
When: Last Sunday of the month
Cost: Free ($5 donation for wine)
RSVP: gleebooks - 9660 2333 or email events@gleebooks.com.au

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Why read 'why read the classics?'

‘The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvellous than we had thought from hearing about them.’

The start of a new year and so it seems appropriate to begin as I wish to continue – that is by writing something on this new, first day of January. I say this because writing more regularly is one of the things I aim to do this year. As is reading more of the books on my ‘I’ve been meaning to read’ list.

Yesterday I cleaned out a bookshelf, putting some books in a bag to give away, maybe take to the backpackers for travellers to read over morning coffee or help amuse while buses are late, that kind of thing, and the others rearranging. I spent a while thinking about how to organise the books in some kind of order – not that there are so many that I wont be able to find them otherwise, but as a tool to help me plan and prioritise my reading for this year. I get excited in book shops and buy new books to add to my pile, then sometimes I despair at how many I have yet to read, how many authors who I already know I love that I haven’t managed to read the whole of their works. The list of authors I’d like to read but haven’t tried yet, or maybe have got half way through and then abandoned. The non-fiction in little clusters of topics that I think I will read and patch together an interesting picture of the state of play in a field, or finally figure out the range of arguments for and against and where I stand on the matter. My bookshelf has things I’ve read and loved (with gaps where I loved them and lent them out and haven’t had them returned), things I didn’t love that much and are now going to the backpackers around the corner, things I’ve bought and hope to read, a couple of guilty long term lends that need to be read and sent home, and the ghostly figures of books not there but dreamt of, the ones I sometimes think ‘oooh, wouldn’t it be good to read…’ (ancient philosophers and beat poets and mystics and recent releases by old favourites, that kind of thing).

Funnily enough one of the books I took off the neatly organised and newly inspiring bookshelf this morning was ‘The Literature Machine’ by Italo Calvino – a series of essays through the 1960’s to the early 80’s about writing and reading, as well as about specific authors and pieces of work, science and literature, philosophy and literature etc. He is one of my favourite writers, whose books are classics to me.

Generally I like his work because I find it clever and funny and awe-inspiring. His language (as I read it, once removed from the source, translated from the Italian) is clean and precise and lovingly used, not stale, not staid, it has depth and detail and contradiction and a lot of wry humour. He writes the reader into the work, often, and he writes in a matter of fact way about the foibles of people and the planets and the workings of nature. He tells silly little stories that have grace and meaning but aren’t overblown. Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m missing something, that he’s saying something that I haven’t quite grasped the meaning of, but I kind of like it, it’s like being a child around smart and capable grown ups who you know you will be like one day too.

Anyway, one of the essays, ‘why read the classics’ is brief but very engaging – he ranges through some definitions or key characteristics of what might make up a classic, and addresses the challenges in engaging in these works in a busy life, but talks about how they are valuable to a reader. The whole thing is great, and only about 10 pages long, so you may as well just read it yourself. I wont summarise but I’ll just talk about a couple of things that interested me.

Firstly, I liked the tone. I had a public school education and don’t speak French, Latin, Greek or Italian, so any opinionated writing about ‘the classics’ that sounds like dust and elbow pads and large country houses tends to annoy me. I don’t want someone to tell me that that unless I’ve read Dante and Montaigne and Plato that I really couldn’t possibly understand the human spirit, or that I’m seriously missing out on something wonderful and it’s probably too late to start now anyway. I am having to build my own relationship with the classics which is selfguided and tentative, any brow beating would be counterproductive. This essay is modern and light hearted (yet serious) and doesn’t tell you what you ‘should’ read, instead it supports the idea of being selective, and of there needing to be a very personal relationship with the books and the reader: ‘if the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, only out of love. Except at school.’

‘There is nothing for it but to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count – leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries’.

This paragraph made me happy because it reminded me of yesterday and felt very synchronous to be reading about what I’ve just done and only be in a position to read it because I’d done the thing.

Also, this talk of books yet to be read made me think about how reading, unlike many other ‘interests’ of ways of interacting with the world through others (compared, say, to listening to music, or watching films) has a different time scale about it. If I decide to get to know a film director who has interested me, it is plausible that I can find an all day Saturday screening of their most famous works; I could watch a DVD a night for a week and see all their back catalogue if I put my mind to it. On music, I could digest a few new albums a week and ‘really listen’ to them, plus relisten to favourites – I can do this while doing the dishes, while walking down the street to the shops, while typing reports at work, while enjoying dinner with friends.

With reading, there is more time involved, and it is something you do alone. Getting to know an author (outside a university English course, or community college creative writing course or similar) might take place over a period of several years (even if you are quite interested in them you might only read one of their books a year, in amongst other things you read, or ). It takes a certain peaceful setting, other people to not need your attention, over the hours it takes to read it. You may be lucky enough to dedicate a day / week/ afternoon to reading, or you may find yourself picking up a chapter here and there, revisiting and asking yourself ‘now where was I? And where were they?’.

(And I’m not suggesting it’s a special and noble pursuit because of this difference, just that it has some different challenges).

The unread books on the bookshelf can be distressing because you have chosen them knowing that you want to go there, you have it on good faith that you will enjoy them, you are intrigued to know what this author will say, how they will speak, what their tone of voice is like, whether they smile as they talk, or frown, how they speak of people and places and ideas you already know and who and what new they will introduce you to. You want to have this conversation, to listen in to the story and find your own responses to it, but you must wait, can only be reading one at a time (even if reading several at once). It requires patience, delaying gratification, and faith that you’ll get to the other ones later, in the face of that niggling (perhaps technology age aided) sense of anxiety about all there is to know and read and experience, in such a short span as a life.

That’s why I liked his description of the book shelf, because it validates the ‘yet to be read’ and also the unknown that might find its way into your hands and heart.

I also like the way that he recognises, in the essay, the particular challenges that a modern reader faces in ‘reading the classics’. Not in terms of time available (that is more my concern) but he talks about how to balance the intake of inputs eg the classics and daily news and whether one would ideally abstain from popular culture altogether or whether connection with the daily grind is an important part of placing the reader and the work in historical context.

‘Maybe the ideal thing to do would be hearken to current events as we do to the din outside our window that informs us about traffic jams and sudden changes in the weather, while we listen to the voice of the classics sounding clear and articulate inside the room. But it is already a lot for most people if the presence of the classics is perceived as a distant rumble far outside a room that is swamped by the trivia of the moment, as by a television at full blast.’