1. Waiting for results of something, but either way, writing a book. 1000 words a day.
2. Once got through my current pile (which is small), no more book reviewing.
3. Saying no to things that, in my heart of hearts, I know I do not want to do.
4. Keeping a notebook or two.
5. Reading more, internetting less. Which means reading 104 books this year (ha!).
6. Keep in touch, write more letters, send more cards.
7. Care for the garden more regularly.
That's a start!
There are wisps of dead wattle tree leaves on the floor. A pile of clean but unironed laundry in a basket. Crumbs on the kitchen bench. The glass-topped table is covered with papers, paper clips, receipts that I go to throw out and then think I'd better keep for a while longer, keys, mobile phones, bananas. Books on shelves are dusty, silverfish wait in the folds. Venetian blinds turn darker with the dust of time. I don't turn my head to look at the garden because I know I will see weeds blooming with unrelenting force, creeping into vegetable beds to throttle the struggling bean and the valiant tomato. I close my eyes to banish it all, only, of course, to see the real chaos booming within.
On reaching a scene near the end of Teju Cole’s novel I had to reassess what I thought I knew about the narrator Julius, a young psychiatrist of Nigerian and German background. He has an encounter with a friend who tells him something startling and disturbing, to both him and the reader. It was on the second reading of this absorbing and satisfying novel, with this scene in mind, that I began to see his central character a little better, and to understand the multiple layers of meaning and the myriad interplays between identity, literature, culture, race, suffering, and death. It is one of those books that contains worlds.
I kept digging. Apart from the photographs, tiny vases came up with the shovel, of all different colours. One had 'Portugal' painted on it, with flowers and squiggles. There was something that looked like a collection of four leaf clovers in a plastic wallet, and I stopped to remember how my father used to spend an hour every Sunday looking for those himself. Never did find any but had a good life anyway. I wonder if the person who belonged to these had been lucky? Ah, here's a bone, a grey yellow little thing, like out of a leg. Now that looks like a booklet coming up this time. What's it got on the cover ... Diary ... 1947 ...
Olin Dodson received a telephone call from a stranger in August, 1990, to tell him that a woman, Gloria Maria, with whom he had had a brief relationship in 1978 in Costa Rica, had a message for him. It turned out the message was that he had a twelve year old daughter and she wanted to meet him; she was the ‘Melissa’ of the title. This momentous news arrived at the same time he was thinking of relationships and yearning for a child of his own. The caller, Laura, who became a good friend, mentioned something about a pancreatic disorder; he learned it was cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease that causes lung and digestive problems, in particular, and a truncated life expectancy.
Continued at The Compulsive Reader.
Alex Mitchell is a journalist with an extraordinary career investigating the political landscape, largely from a Trotskyist perspective. He begins his memoir with an ending: he and his partner Judith White leaving England and their many years of work for the Workers Revolutionary Party, he as reporter and editor of the party’s newspaper, and she as head of their book publishing program. It is July 1986 and they are going to Australia.
This is a big story, for Mitchell has led, so far, a big life. He was born in 1942 in Queensland to progressive-minded parents; his mother was a founding member of the One People of Australia League (OPAL), and encouraged activists like Roberta Sykes and Bonita and Eddie Mabo. His first job was as a cadet journalist on the Townsville Daily Bulletin in 1960:
My chief surprise was that at the end of each week I collected an envelope containing £6 (equivalent to about $120 today). They were actually giving me money for something I loved doing. I was still in disbelief when I gave up full-time reporting 47 years later. (13)
Continued at M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media.
Robin Hemley has written an excellent book on immersion writing, which he defines as ‘any kind of memoir, travel narrative, or journalistic piece in which the narrative is as much forward-looking as backward, and in which the writer is a part of the story being told’ (8). He writes with humour and passion and injects himself into the prose, thus making for a great example of what he is describing.
Tuesday was a strange day. For the first time in weeks I felt as if my whole life was a mistake. A wreck. I was a wreck upon a vast and lonely beach that saw no other life. I moved around the house dragging the seaweed behind me, plucking barnacles from my side. The wood from the old boat of my skeleton was still strong, though, despite its weathered, darkened looks, its splintered touch. And then I turned the page in my diary and saw the remembrance. You had died before seeing me again, just like with your own parents. You were old, yes, but no amount of time and years would have improved our understanding of each other.
The man on the bike thought we were laughing at him. He rode on ahead, looking back at us every now and then, talking. We walked on, not sure whether he was talking to himself, or to us, or to his bike, or to an imaginary friend. I am not being facetious, some of us have imaginary friends and have good conversations with them. It's just that some of us also restrict those conversations to private places rather than public ones. Turns out he was talking to himself, but about us. We had simply looked at him before crossing the road, because we didn't know if he was going to turn into that road or not. He took it as an insult. He waited for us at the traffic lights.
were no longer waiting. But the dead ones had disappeared as well; even the blood and intestines were gone. He turned to look at the man beside him, whose stupefied expression was directed towards his knife. It was clean and shining as if it had never been used. One came in from outside, shouting, but saw the emptiness and his voice drained away. 'My dogs just disappeared', he said. 'On the back of the ute a second ago.'
I cannot recommend Scared Sick highly enough because of its approachable style, clear explanation of complex medical science for the general reader, passionate advocacy for babies and small children, and its importance in encouraging everyone to pay attention to what we are doing to the youngest members of our societies. I was shocked to learn that it was only from the late 1980s that newborns, whether premature or full term, were given anesthesia when operated on for conditions such as heart defects. It was thought the infantile central nervous system was not developed enough for neonates to feel pain, and so they were simply paralyzed for surgery with no pain relief. It seems to take us a long time before we notice the suffering of others, and the effects it has on them. No wonder we are still in the early days of noticing psychological stress and instigating preventative programs and therapies for it.
Siri Hustvedt is fascinated by the brain and mind, and what can go wrong with them. She is also fascinated by fiction, reading, writing, art; she writes with verve, intelligence, and understanding about all these things, and others as well. In her latest collection of essays, she notes the link is her 'abiding curiosity about what it means to be human' (ix), and the reader cannot argue with that conclusion.
When I went to the fridge to get the milk, the bottle was empty. Okay, I yelled, who's drunk all the milk? No answer, of course, because they're all asleep. Or pretending to be asleep so they don't have to be the first to get the tea ready. Then I noticed there was no butter in the butter dish, and the sausages that were leftovers from yesterday were gone too. Right, who's swiping food from the fridge? I yelled again. I opened the freezer door, and the chicken was gone, along with the chops. The polysterene tray was there, as was the plastic from the chook, but otherwise, gone. Jesus, someone would have to be bloody hungry to eat all that.
The butcher bird flew on to the fence, and watched us as we pulled out weeds. The roses didn't seem to care much about the riff-raff that surrounded them, the cobbler's pegs and sticky milk plants and thistley things. A moth appeared, fluttering on the surface of some newly exposed soil, and the butcher bird swooped for the morsel. Our friend Cameron also watched us, commenting regularly on how he must get down into the garden sometime, but not right now. His memory is unravelling, leaving sentences all over the earth in front of us, released again and again because Cameron can no longer remember what he's just said. We all sigh. The butcher bird cocks his head.
The dream involved someone wrapping their arms around me from behind. I did not know who the person was, or why they were hugging me, or if their intent was good or evil. Usually this sort of dream would involve me never finding out the identity of the person. But then usually the dream, which I refer to as an anxiety dream, features a wall and I would be walking along beside the wall until I reached the corner. Around the corner was something foreboding, something bad, but I never knew exactly what, and I could never see it. No matter how far around the corner I looked, the fearful thing remained just out of sight. This time, I looked around and saw the person who had grabbed my torso, and it was a female, with her eyes closed, but she was no one I knew. What was different was the fact that I could see her face, and she was unthreatening. There was no fear.
The cello was 274 years old. I had never held anything that had lived that long. The sound that came when its guardian played was robust, but I couldn't help thinking how easily the object could be damaged. If it was damaged, though, the music itself would not be, for it could be played, and made to live again, from another instrument. Maybe it would not be so venerable, but the music would still come. It's not the same for humans. When the body is done and gone, the music of that person is gone also; children and work may be left behind as memories, but no new tunes are created ever again.
He gave me a hot pink eraser, a giant one, with the words 'for really big mistakes' printed on it. Good, I thought, this is appropriate. Now I can go back and rub out all of those ridiculous things I said to various people over the last four decades, and say what I should have said. All those embarrassing goofs in public, all the insensitive comments, and even the bad fashion days, bad hair days, and bad days. The whole lot, gone! One big pink eraser applied; badness gone! Could I do it with bigger things? Parents? Lovers? Friends? Lend me your past, I shall erase it!
When he read a book, the words swam. He'd read and re-read a paragraph, but the meaning would elude him. He'd read each word, examining it and not moving to the next one before he'd thought yes, I understand what that word means. But by the end of the sentence, the combination of word-meanings had slid away, and there was no sentence-meaning in its place. It was a blur, a blank, a smear of text without hope of comprehension. He went on, saying to himself that the meaning would come, he just had to swim through the words to find it.
The photographs I dug up that time were old, black and white, small size, eaten at the edges some of them, blurred or faded, and had writing on the back. But not all of them had writing on the back, and that was frustrating. There were no names, but some people were identified as 'mother', 'father', 'uncle', and so forth. Places were always identified, which was helpful, except for the fact that I had no idea where these places were. St Michael's Mount? I made a note to look it up, as well as all the other names.
Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing is not your average book about writing, which may be suggested by its title. Lance Olsen is interested in creative writing as a ‘series of choices’, whereby to ‘write one way rather than another is to convey, not simply an aesthetics, but a course of thinking, a course of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another’ (13). He’s not interested in the ‘Balzacian mode’ of writing, a term introduced by Alain Robbe-Grillet to refer to the works of nineteenth century authors like Honoré de Balzac who preferenced realism, here defined as a ‘genre of averages’ (11). Rather it is writing ‘as a possibility space where everything can and should be considered, attempted, and troubled’ (13).
Review continued at M/C Reviews.
These imaginary conversations she has. They don't make it better. If anything they make her more angry. What's the point of reconstructing arguments? The time has gone. She was a different person back then, and talking to him was different. Now, she limits what she says, and avoids him. He could write if he wanted, or learn how to use a computer. The extreme fatigue she feels when she puts the phone down after talking with him permeates all the way through to her marrow, to the centre of her brain, to the centre of her chest, into her heart.
Something woke him, and for a moment he didn't know where he was. But there was someone outside, a male from the voice, and he was shouting something. He threw off the bedclothes and tottered to the window. The light from the neighbour across the road shone over an old ute, filled with newspapers, and a man in overalls on his driveway wrestling with a dog. The dog, more precisely, had a newspaper in her mouth, and was resolutely hanging onto it with her teeth, while the man, swearing all the colours of the schema, was hanging onto the other end.
Lines for Birds by Barry Hill and John Wolseley is one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen. It is poetry and paintings: the poetry is rich with metaphor and imagery, the paintings extraordinary evocations of birds in their landscapes. The high standard of production by UWA Publishing does justice to the fine quality of the content.
In the introduction the creators explain that the idea for the book came about in 2001, when Barry Hill first saw John Wolseley’s painting, Olive-backed Oriole and Papaya Fruit (2000), in an exhibition of his called Tracing the Wallace Line.This painting and the poem, ‘Olive-backed Oriole Eating Pawpaw’, are included in the book. Hill’s poem begins:
It’s no wound
it is flame
of fruit, Capricornia sap.
Eat me, it says
to its ravenous arrival
Dig in, I’m yours. (94)
The painting shows a bright orange and red fruit and the hungry, enticed bird, exquisitely rendered in green, leaning in to its meal. The poem is described as celebrating ‘with Darwin in mind, the ünion of beauty and savagery’ (1), with a touch of humour that is suffused throughout the work.
Review continued at The Compulsive Reader.
This hole is different. The soil is moist and rich, the worms are coming out to play, and the birds are gathering around. As I dig deeper in, there are colours coming through. Like the way carrots can be purple, there is purple soil down here, and now a dark red, a pinky type of thing, now an orange. Problem is, the hole is now much too big for the little fennel plant. I’ll have to fill it in again, or dig a shallower hole somewhere else. What is this? I’ve hit something hard again with the shovel. Oh my…
The day before, she had talked to her father on the phone. Why don't you come and visit me, he asked. You could come down on the weekend. She let the sound of her breathing fill the handset. Are you still there, he said. No, I went away a long time ago. What? he said. I said, I went away a long time ago. Now he let the sound of his (laboured) breathing fill the distance. You didn’t have to leave home. You could have stayed with us. The phone remained against her face a moment, then slid away.
His heart beats irregularly sometimes. He feels it at night, when he's lying in bed, listening to the silence, or to the crying dance of the curlews. It sounds like dozens of them out there, tip-toeing up and down the street, calling their screaming, wailing, keening cry, but it's only two. Once a curlew came up to his front door. He saw it by chance and approached, but it backed away into the night. Then the cry came, and something moved in his bones. What were they calling, if not something beyond this life, beyond what he could see?
The last time I dug a hole in the garden, the water welled up and ran over my feet. The time before that, when I dug a hole to put in a grevillea, I struck something hard, and it turned out to be a cylinder filled with photographs. I’ll tell you about them in a minute. The time before the photographs, I dug up a skeleton. Not a human, thank God, but a small animal skeleton, a dog probably, not that I’m an expert on boneology or anything, but that’s what it looked like. I carefully put the soil back.
'The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.' – Donald Barthelme.
(found in Lance Olsen's Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing)
There was something moving by the back fence. The sound came into her sleepingness until she was no longer sleeping but wide awake and listening intently. She felt damp, and chilled, and swathed in night. The sound stopped. The sugar cane mulch was making her skin itch. She could feel weeds tickling her feet. The sound began again, but it was further away, heading towards the house. Had she left the door open? She slowly raised herself up and turned to peer in the direction of the kitchen. Screen door closed, light gleaming, geckos gathered on the window. Silence again.
Tin House began as a literary magazine in the United States in 1999, venturing into publishing books three years later, and now also hosts annual writers’ workshops in Portland, Oregon. According to the brief introduction by Lee Montgomery, it is from these workshops that this book originated, and it is a stimulating and provocative collection.
Not all of the contributing writers were familiar to me, but all of the seventeen essays are worth reading, with several being exceptionally useful, both to writers and teachers of writing, who will garner ideas aplenty. The topics discussed are place, sex, simplicity, editing (using The Great Gatsby’s evolution as an example), character motivation, fairy tales, material, time, imaginary worlds, scene-making, Shakespeare, revision, poetry, telling versus showing, and empathy. And two essays that are difficult to describe in one word: ‘Let Mot Incorrect’ by Jim Crusoe, which is about getting to the ‘right word’ through many wrong ones, and ‘Lost in the Woods’ by Antonya Nelson, a rather beautiful dissertation on lostness in story, the characters’ search for each other, loneliness and aloneness.
Review continued at TEXT.
The long blue day often visits him. This year seems to have encouraged them again. He loves the colour blue, but the blue of bitter moods is a punch, an ache. It seems so hard to get anything worthwhile done, to start anything beautiful; the focus is scattered, wayward, lazy. Instead, he doodles with a mouse, clicking from one pretty trinket to the next. When he looks out of the window, there is his neighbour standing over their last living azalea, the only one to have survived the drought. It hasn’t rained for a long time, except in his heart.
This is an exceptionally clear and well organised text, making it easy to read for just about anyone interested in matters of free speech, particularly with regard to political speech, which is her interest of concern. Katharine Gelber researches, writes, and teaches in the field of politics and human rights, being an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Queensland. Speech Matters: Getting Free Speech Right is her fourth book.
On first glance, I was unsure about the author’s attitude to her subject: the cover of the book shows a rather evil-looking Jessica Mitford stubbing out a cigarette in an ashtray. Is Leslie Brody critical of Mitford’s life as a muckraker, Communist, civil rights activist, aristocrat, sister to the fascist Diana and Unity, and writer? It turns out that she is definitely not; in fact, quite the opposite. Her strong principles and fun-loving attitude to life are celebrated here.
Emma Forrest's memoir about having a mental illness—in her case, a type of bipolar disorder with rapid cycling between depression and mania—is engrossing and involving. She knows how to write poetically and viscerally, conveying the pain and despair of her illness in vivid terms. At times she comes across as self-absorbed and irritating in her self-abuse, but that is the often the nature of mental illness. When something goes wrong with your mind, it is difficult to control your thoughts and behavior; Forrest shows this well.
The Memory Palace is one of the most beautiful, tragic and hopeful memoirs that you will ever read. Mira Bartók's artistry, imagination, compassion, and skill with words have created a book about family and mental illness that will be read for many years to come by a wide range of people: the mentally ill, their families and friends, mental health professionals, social service workers, and—I would hope—politicians and the wider community.
The history of Evergreen Review is an important part of the experience of reading the journal, but could be easily missed if you happened upon the website without knowing anything about it. Click on the ‘History’ link at the top of any page, and what is revealed is impressive and significant, to say the least. It was founded by the legendary Barney Rosset in 1957, and the first issue contained work by Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. The second issue was the first collection of work by the Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. Rosset had also bought Grove Press in 1951 when he was twenty-eight, and went on to publish the work of numerous writers such as Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Duras and Borges, as well as William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for which he fought, and won, legal challenges against obscenity.