Sterne

2009-01-07T21:02:00.000+11:00

Why not follow me on Twitter? (Rhetorical question, pls do not attempt to answer.)

2008-12-20T19:55:00.000+11:00

Sterne finishes here. What's that? you say. Is it March already? Obviously it's not (you clod) - I've cunningly preempted the post-festive season doldrums by bringing next year's retirement forward to this year. See: cunning.

The Ghost of Blogging Past is off sick today so you're spared the traditional maudlin nostalgia. Suffice to say that Sterne started off as a laugh, developed into something arguably more interesting, if wildly uneven, but hasn't been up to scratch for some time now. Time to move on, and this time I mean it. (*Tears cloud his eyes as he pets the faithful hound one last time before raising his shotgun...*)

Thanks for reading.

Man Celebrates Not Celebrating Christmas

2008-12-16T20:05:00.001+11:00

Christmas always comes early for Melbourne man Robert West, even though he doesn't actually celebrate the holiday.

"This is my favourite time of year," West told Sterne. "I get to show off how world-weary and cynical I am, all the while scoring points against soft targets like organised religion and mass consumerism. It's like, well, it's like all my Christmases come at once!"

West's pontificating doesn't stop at religion and shopping. The holiday season he vehemently opposes also affords West the opportunity to speak out on a range of subsidiary topics.

"I love going to Christmas lunch at my parents' place. I don't eat anything, or exchange any gifts - my constant haughty derision is gift enough. Last year I made my cousin cry by explaining in minute detail the battery-farming and slaughtering process that had resulted in the turkey she was eating. And then I sabotaged the bon-bons by replacing all the jokes with selections from Mao's Little Red Book. It was totally subversive, although for some reason everybody still laughed. But they won't be laughing after the revolution! Then there won't be any bon-bons for anybody!"

West said that while his anti-Christmas stance began as an undergraduate pose - "You know, making a point of writing 'xmas', vandalising nativity scenes, knifing shopping centre Santas, that sort of thing" - it has since become a true reflection of his character and beliefs.

"I really am this nauseatingly smug all year round," he said. "Christmas just gives me the chance to show it off."

_______________
This Xmas rerun was originally posted on Dec 21, 2005.

An anticlimactic tale

2008-12-09T16:31:00.000+11:00

I went into the kitchen this morning to put the kettle on. While I was there I looked out the kitchen window and noted that everything was normal: birds were singing, trees were producing sap/leaves, the clothesline was turning clockwise in a gentle, almost wistful, manner. Most importantly, none of the houses within my purview appeared to be on fire. I left the kettle to do its thing and went back to whatever it was I was doing. (Staring blankly at the loungeroom wall, if I recall correctly.)

I returned to the kitchen a few minutes later and made a cup of coffee. Glancing out the kitchen window I couldn't help noticing that there was an enormous column of thick brown smoke billowing from a house around the corner. "Shit!" says I, and various thoughts scurried through my (thus-far-uncaffienated) mind, eg. Shit! That house is on fire! Surely somebody else has noticed! I mean, shit! The house is on fire! Should I call 000? What if somebody else has already done that! But what if everybody else in the neighbourhood has a job and I'm the only pathetic person home at this hour to notice the fire and therefore the only person who can call 000? Or, what if I'm the only person at home except for the people in the house which is on fire? What then? What if they die? Should I call 000 or should I run around the corner and make certain that the house is on fire (although it clearly is), and if so whether there is anybody inside, whom I will then presumably have to rescue and maybe I'll have to appear on the news for having effected said rescue in which case I will really regret having put on this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt when I got up this morning, but anyway it's the right thing to do, I'm not a hero, I'm just doing what any Aussie would do...

While my brain was faffing around my body had taken control and I was off, dashing down the street and around the corner where I was confronted by an incredible amount of smoke. I had expected at least a few other people to be milling around in the street, mobiles to their ears, but it was deserted. The smoke continued to billow from the rear of the house, although I couldn't see any flames. I decided to get a closer look, so I ran down the driveway, through the side gate, and moved hesitantly into the backyard. The smoke was so thick that I expected the back half of the house to be engulfed in flame and I quickly calculated my course of action: first, call the fire brigade; second, try to find out if anybody is inside and if so attempt to rescue them; third, go home and change into that nice lilac shirt I bought for my brother's wedding, just in case the camera crews turn up.

Obviously I didn't actually want the house to be on fire, but I have to say I was a little disappointed when I got into the backyard proper and saw that the house was undamaged. Then I realised that there was a man standing in the centre of the yard with a garden hose in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his lip. At his feet was a heap of semi-wet leaves that he had evidently set on fire for some reason and was now trying to extinguish.

"Ya right?" he said, flicking cigarette ash into the leaf-pile, which was of course the source of all the smoke.

"Yeah," I said. "I live around the corner. I thought your house was on fire!"

"Nah. Just the leaves. I'm burnin' them."

He seemed disinclined to continue with this witty banter, so I slunk off home, muttering to myself. By the time I got back my coffee was cold so I called the local council and dobbed in the leaf man for burning off. I hope they put him away for life.

Santa-skeptic child "still fundamentally credulous"

2008-12-08T20:36:00.003+11:00

Local eight-year-old Marc Coleman's misgivings about the nature of his parents' relationship to Santa Claus have this year developed into full-blown skepticism.

"Marc began expressing doubts this time last year," Marc's mother, Judy Coleman, told Sterne. "It was just little things, things only a mother would notice, like when he drew a picture at school of Santa Claus with the words 'MOTHERFUCKING LIE!!!' scrawled underneath in red texta. That was the first clue that our little guy was growing out of the Santa stage."

The situation has worsened in recent weeks with the irrepressible lad now openly questioning his parents' honesty.

"I asked Marc what he would like Santa to bring him for Christmas. He looked at me and said, 'I don't know, what would you like to bring me for Christmas, Santa - oops, I mean, Mum.' I really don't know where he picked up that sarcastic tone. Bill [Marc's father] and I tend to be more spiteful and cruel than sarcastic."

Fortunately, Marc is "still fundamentally credulous" and prepared to swallow just about anything else his parents tell him.

"Bill and I had a fight the other night and afterwards Marc asked me if his Dad and I still loved one another. I looked deep into his innocent blue eyes and told him yes, we love one another very much and always will. Sucker bought it without flinching. Who's the know-it-all cynic now?"

Bill Coleman agrees with his wife's assessment.

"Yes, the Santa thing's become untenable but Marc still trusts us implicitly. He still believes in the Tooth Fairy, he still believes his dog has gone to live on a farm, and he still believes he can do whatever he wants with his life if he just puts his mind to it. We can probably string him along with that last one for at least another decade. Best of all, Marc still believes in his good old Dad. Just the other day I promised I'd play cricket with him after work. Of course I forgot and went to the pub instead, but when I got home there was Marc sitting on the front porch in the dark with his cricket bat waiting for me. Brought tears to my eyes it did - this kid really will believe almost anything!"

Writers, please stop using:

2008-12-08T19:59:00.000+11:00

quotidian

oneiric

cleaves (I used this once, but then I got help.)

limn

You don't have to be despondent to work here but it helps

2008-12-08T16:11:00.004+11:00

I had a phone interview this afternoon that was distinguished by the interviewer's strenuous efforts to convince me that the job she was interviewing me for isn't worth having.

"Now, the job is desk-bound and repetitive. The same task will be performed again and again for hours on end with only minor variations. How does that sound to you?"

"Um. Ok."

"The salary is $[unimpressive number]. That includes super loading. The before-tax salary is $[even less impressive number]. Employees also receive [paltry subsidiary benefits]. How does that sound to you?"

"Uh. Fine..."

"We're located [a long way from anywhere]. Public transport is limited. Do you have a car?"

"No."

"Then you'll struggle to get here. Even with a car it can be a struggle. [Laughs nervously]"

And on it went. I'm certain she must have finished the interview and started drafting her resignation.

It was fifteen years ago today

2008-12-04T13:17:00.002+11:00

New review

2008-11-30T19:11:00.003+11:00

My review of Murray Bail's The Pages is in Issue 14 of The Quarterly Conversation. I'm pleased to have contributed to an especially strong issue of this always-excellent online quarterly. Issue 14 features eleven book reviews (including TQC editor Scott Esposito on Roberto Bolano's 2666) plus essays on Gaddis, DFW, Carter Scholz, and more.

Ate tracks

2008-11-29T21:04:00.004+11:00

This mix is for Bel. Others may also listen, here or here:

He War, Cat Power
I Found Out, John Lennon
How Could I Be Wrong, The Auteurs
Shabby Doll, Elvis Costello & the Attractions
The Magnificent Seven, The Clash
Acid Tongue, Jenny Lewis
Seven Days Is Too Long, Dexys Midnight Runners
Sad Dark Eyes, Mick Harvey
Guilt, The Long Blondes
Editions of You, Roxy Music
Sacred Songs, Daryl Hall
Aviatrix, Jack Frost
White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane
I've Been Out Walking, Nina Nastasia & Jim White
Bigmouth Strikes Again, The Smiths

Picture of The Long Blondes' Kate Jackson used under CC courtesy of celticblade.

Job

2008-11-25T13:17:00.002+11:00

I don't have one (again). Actually I haven't had one for over a fortnight now, but I've been too ashamed/drunk to mention it here. It's the usual story ie. a long and boring one. I didn't especially like the job, but I expected that. What made it unbearable was a protracted campaign of arseholeness towards me on behalf of the manager and assistant manager. They just didn't like me - honestly, how is that possible?! - and after a while I stopped trying to get them to like me, preferring instead to ignore everybody and engage in subtle and inconsequential acts of sabotage. This was a new experience for me - normally I manage to strike up at least some kind of working relationship with even the most obnoxious people. Anyway, I was already considering quitting when it became apparent that I was being subjected to the classic method of getting rid of casual staff: leaving their names off the roster. I took the hint and told them where to stick it.

So now I'm unemployed yet again. Although the constant barrage of bad economic news doesn't fill me with confidence, I do feel that I am due for a change of fortune. (That's about as glass-half-full as I get, I'm afraid.)

I'm not here, this isn't happening

2008-11-11T20:26:00.004+11:00

Obviously I am here and this is happening. I was just testing if you were paying attention.

New 8tracks mix. Listen here or use the widget:

"Used Go-Go", Kazutoki Umezu (Ribot alert!)
"The Yesness", The Matthew Herbert Big Band
"Cuts and Lies", Acoustic Ladyland
"Moonshine", Dave Douglas
"The Movers and the Shakers", Herbert
"Montuno", Marc Ribot
"STHLM", The Vandermark 5
"When the Levee Breaks", Stanton Moore
"At Les", Innerzone Orchestra
"(Little) King Ink", Flat Earth Society (takes a while to get going, then it's epic)

Photo from here.

Come to my arms, my memish boy!

2008-11-01T08:19:00.003+11:00

A book meme, via Laura.

What was the last book you bought?

Make that books because I had a bit of a spree on Tuesday: Bornholm Night-Ferry by Aidan Higgins, Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge, two of James Sallis's Lew Griffin books, and Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter.

Name a book you have read MORE than once:

The books I have read most (ie. probably at least a half-dozen times each) are the ones I was especially enamored with as a teenager: Dune, Catch-22, Good Omens, Use of Weapons, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, various Wodehouses, Vonneguts, James Ellroys, Carl Hiaasens, Michael Moorcocks, Ballards, R.L. Stevensons, etc. As an "adult" the books I keep returning to include: A High Wind In Jamaica, Lolita/Pnin/Pale Fire, Titus Groan, Lucky Jim, Martin Amis up to and including The Information, Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Decline and Fall, But Beautiful, and probably a dozen more that I can't think of right now.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?

Certain non-fiction books have been eye-opening in various ways. I'm not sure fiction could ever change the way I see life - I'm not even sure what that means - but perhaps the steady accretion of reading experience has altered my thinking in ways I can't objectively analyse.

How do you choose a book? e.g. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews?

It's more serendipity than anything else. As for cover design, I generally won't choose a book because it has a good cover, but I do sometimes reject a book because of a bad cover.

Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction?

Fiction.

What's more important in a novel - beautiful writing or a gripping plot?

I like traffic lights.

Most loved/memorable character?

Bertie Wooster/Jeeves. You can't really have one without the other.

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?

Stone Junction by Jim Dodge.

What was the last book you read?

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. It was terrible.

Have you ever given up on a book halfway in?

Many times. I sometimes give up on books halfway through the first page.

Self-promotion

2008-10-31T16:07:00.003+11:00

My review of Louis Nowra's Ice is in the November Australian Book Review. The issue also includes my "In Brief" review of Wayne Grogan's Heavy Allies.

Arts degree

2008-10-30T20:31:00.000+11:00

For the last fricken time, no, it doesn't mean I can paint!

Bring the, or at least some, noise

2008-10-27T20:28:00.001+11:00

Following Amanda's lead I have signed up to 8tracks which is similar to the late lamented Muxtape but more reliable and user-friendly. My first mix is of recent jazz (save for the David Murray tune, which is from 1980, although to some that probably counts as "recent jazz"), including four tracks from the Clean Feed label which I'm big on right now. Listen here or make use of the widget:

"Spain Intro", Michel Camilo & Tomatito
"The Whimbler", Gerry Hemingway Quartet
"Gat Swamba", Garage a Trois
"Hard Sole Shoe", Jenny Scheinman
"Old Grooves for New Streets 2", Way Out West
"Correspondent", Mi3
"The Last of the Beboppers", Adam Lane
"Big Love (For Joe Giardullo)", Luis Lopes
"Dewey's Circle", David Murray

Red is the new black

2008-10-22T19:46:00.003+11:00

Karl Marx is back in fashion, which explains why I keep seeing young ladies heading off to the races with large bearded Germans draped over their shoulders.

Barrington Bayley

2008-10-18T08:58:00.002+11:00

He died the other day. If you like weird sf you need to track down some of his books.

The upside of the downslide

2008-10-17T14:07:00.002+11:00

Sportsbet chief executive officer Matt Tripp said in an economic crisis people drank and bet more.

"I'm sure the mindset of a punter broadly changes a little bit when his back's against the wall. I can assure you our turnover hasn't dropped at all, we're actually writing more bets than we ever have," he said.

What a wonderful, glass-half-full perspective Mr Tripp has. If only more people could be so positive - but I suppose then there would be less despair for Mr Tripp and his ilk to make money from.

Shiny and new

2008-10-17T08:47:00.000+11:00

I live in Melbourne's "leafy" eastern suburbs, about equidistant between two very different commercial centres. To the south is the Box Hill shopping centre/transport hub/mall/open sewer conglomeration, which, despite the vomit spatter and ever present threat of having a cigarette put out on your face, is nevertheless vibrant and honest and has a lot of shops with funny names (Nob Nobs, Hung Long Video, Hellboy e-gift).

Box Hill (artist's impression)

To the north is Doncaster Shoppingtown, a 1970s shopping centre clustered around a small office tower and buried under several square miles of car park. The centre has recently undergone significant renovations, allegedly doubling the number of shops in the complex - just in time for the recession!

Doncaster Shoppingtown (artist's impression)

The final stage of the renovation was unveiled yesterday morning and I happened to be there to see it. Unfortunately I couldn't get past the burly men in suits who were guarding the roped-off VIP section, but I'm told the Premier was there, cutting a ribbon or whatever Premiers do when opening new shopping centres. (Perhaps they go to Target and lay the first by?) The whole place is incredibly shiny - we saw a guy mopping a load-bearing pillar! - and there are plenty of posters telling you how classy the joint is. Also, because there's a Myer in the building, there are pictures of Jennifer Hawkins and her one facial expression everywhere you look.

The new Shoppingtown is even more pretentious than the old one. There's a David Jones, a Colonial Fresh supermarket,where the fruit and veg are kept crisp by a constant drizzle of vapourised water, a shop called Jones the Grocer, which is about as wanky as it sounds. There is even a "butler service", whatever that means in the context of a shopping centre.

Westfield is clearly trying to position Shoppingtown as the shopping centre for this part of the world. (Previous title holder: Blackburn Square. Just kidding.) It will be interesting to see how it fares, especially with the economy in the toilet, and with competition from outlet malls like Brand Smart and the Do Fuck Off empire. No doubt by Christmas the various luxury services will have tapered off, the pillar-mopper will have been turfed onto the streets, and there will be a Dimmeys where David Jones used to be. That'll bring in the crowds - from Box Hill.

Fuxtaposition

2008-10-17T08:10:00.001+11:00

The MS Paint arrow and exclamation marks say it all.

Thirty today

2008-10-12T00:01:00.001+11:00

I'll be thirty tomorrow, too, and for the 363 days after that, so it's probably not worth getting too worked up about. We did have a party though - I wrote and scheduled this post beforehand so I wouldn't be tempted to write any maudlin requiems for my lost youth when I came home drunk at some ungodly hour. That's the kind of forward planning we mature types specialise in.

Back to the

2008-10-10T10:10:00.003+11:00

Waiting for my train last night I noticed this on the platform:

It didn't seem to be working, hence I am writing this in the present.

The soul of man under retail

2008-10-09T21:30:00.001+11:00

I have discovered the cure for aging: get a job where they treat you like you're sixteen, even if you're not!

Basted

2008-10-02T11:29:00.002+10:00

My (brief) review of Michael Meehan's novel Deception is in the October Australian Book Review. Readers who recall this post might be amused by the contributor bio they've given me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my castle in the Loire.

The Sorrows of Young Liberal

2008-09-30T19:59:00.003+10:00

Dear Jacqueline,

There has been much speculation about the relationship reforms I proposed last week, that is to say, the fact that I asked you out. Much of this comes from persons with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - specifically Ken, who practically dribbles with lust every time you walk into the room, and who once described me as a "pompous wanker". Then there are those whose negative stance is influenced less by rational analysis than ideological prejudice. Scott, that daft Stalinist, falls into this category. In short, you are being given misleading advice by your so-called "friends", so I have decided to present you with the facts in the hope that you will come around.

MYTH: I'm only after sex.

FACT: I am not only after sex. In fact, if you examine the figures, you will see that sex constitutes only forty-nine percent of my expectations. Due consideration is also given to such key facets of our (potential) relationship as: holding hands in public, curling up in front of McLeod's Daughters, and talking about our feelings. Sex is a factor, but let me assure you that I am an advocate of mutual obligation in the bedroom. Put it this way: you serve up the pie, I'll eat it. You can't ask fairer than that.

MYTH: I am a sexist pig.

FACT: This is nothing but a vicious calumny put about by those who seek to discredit me. I have five sisters, three aunts, one mother and at least half a grandmother (her condition varies depending on the humidity), and I can honestly say I have never once subjugated them to my chauvinist will, not even accidentally. Yes, I do think that a woman's role, in addition to some light vacuuming, is to raise children, and if this marks me out as sexist then I suppose I am sexist. But I don't think I am, and neither do any of my mates down at the gentleman's club.

MYTH: I am a crypto-fascist imperialist.

FACT: Ideological hatred rears its ugly head. Scott (that cretinous collectivist) deployed the f-word in response to certain of my views put forth at a barbecue last year, and ever since I've had to put up with people who should know better calling out "Zeig Heil!" as I wander around campus. This is absurd. I merely suggested that we would be better off invading the entire Middle East and putting all insurgents to the sword - or the most efficient modern equivalent - before installing obedient puppet regimes. If that's crypto-fascist imperialism, I'll eat my new Patriotic Aryan Youth League of Australia hat!

MYTH: I am a dud root.

FACT: This chestnut is courtesy of Mandy who has been preoccupied with defaming my sexual prowess ever since I shagged her senseless during O-week and refused to buy her dinner afterwards. She claims I couldn't get it up and, as a result, was about as much fun as, I quote, "fucking a plate of lukewarm cannelloni". Clearly this is a lie, as my athleticism between the sheets has been well documented by such libidinous luminaries as Catherine, Jess, Claudia, and either May-Na or Wing-Nu - I'm not sure which one I shagged, all those Asian chicks look the same to me. The data supplied by these sources - which roughly breaks down to ninety percent moaning, five percent panting, three percent calling-my-name-in-ecstacy, and two percent squirting of vaginal fluids - indicates that, should you consent to my penis entering your vagina and/or other orifices (this last to be negotiated on an orifice-by-orifice basis), a good time is all but guaranteed.

I trust this letter has put to rest any reservations you might have entertained about my proposal. To conclude, let me say that I envision a lengthy, mutually-satisfying relationship between us, as long as you give up those silly gender studies classes. You don't need them: we can easily study gender in the back seat of my Cortina, and you won't even need to take notes. I sincerely hope this letter has convinced you of my rectitude and suitability. I remain, always and forever,

Jason P. Crisp
President, Young Liberal Pig Shooting Social Club (Victoria)

__________

This month's repost was originally spawned on September 13, 2005. I have a feeling it was sparked by a Federal Government ad campaign addressing various "myths" about Workchoices or something. Oh, and because I wanted to use that line about the pie.

It's been a long school holidays...

2008-09-30T17:56:00.001+10:00

Cheap, nasty, provincial

2008-09-27T20:58:00.002+10:00

Did you somehow miss that "50 greatest arts videos on Youtube" thing when it ran in The Observer a month ago and was linked to by almost every blog in the universe? Well, nevermind, because today's Age ~~wasted~~ devoted two-and-a-half pages to printing it.* You know, for the benefit of the five people who own a computer with an internet connection, and who would be interested in a list of the 50 greatest arts videos on Youtube, and yet who somehow managed to miss seeing it the first time around.

*They also put it on the A2 cover, which would be idiotic at the best of times but especially when the International Festival of Brass is on. Why not put some brass on the cover? What have they got against brass? Have they never stopped to consider what brass has done for them?

Work It

2008-09-23T19:34:00.004+10:00

Employed again. Obviously this is good from a need-to-eat perspective, and don't get me wrong I'd rather have the job than not, but the fact is it's another retail job and that does take the edge off my post-"You're hired!" euphoria. I suppose if nothing else it will provide an incentive to continue looking for something better.

I've been considering abandoning Sterne and setting up shop elsewhere, a la Pavlov's Cat. Long-term blogs generate a lot of psychic baggage and I wonder if I'd feel refreshed by a change of scenery. Also, I changed to a more accurate site stats provider a couple of weeks ago and have subsequently discovered that at least 70% of the roughly 90-120 daily visitors to Sterne are looking for this picture of Richie Valens, God knows for what reason. Another 20% are searching for things too disgusting to name in this family timeslot, while the remaining 10% consists of regular readers and a dedicated group of enthusiasts who apparently spend their free time googling "West African Fighting Rabbits" (Sterne being the number one, and probably only, considering I invented them, authority on these creatures). It's hard to explain why but I find these stats unsettling - more psychic baggage. If I shift I promise that you, and the Richie Valens/rabbit fanciers, will be the first to know.

How to cure writer's block

2008-09-16T14:08:00.001+10:00

Jump around the room singing along to "Lust for Life". Usually works for me.

All I can say is

2008-09-15T14:08:00.002+10:00

if you think David Foster Wallace committed suicide - in a particularly grisly manner no less, although I'm struggling to think of a non-grisly manner - because he was stressed about writing a book(!), or because James Wood criticised his prose(!!), or because John McCain had somehow "let him down" by not being as decent as DFW had portrayed him in "Up, Simba"(!!!), or because he needed more Christ and less thinkin' in his life(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), or any of the thousand other simplistic "reasons" I've seen people offer on comment threads in the past 24 hrs, then you clearly haven't got a fucking clue about depression or, I'd wager, much else. Then there are the seen-it-all types who shrug their weary shoulders and say, "It's sad, of course, but I'm not surprised - he was obviously troubled." Well, who isn't troubled? Then we get an excerpt from the fiction, like it explains anything and everything. There's only one work of DFW's that might go some way to explaining why he's dead, and it - if it exists - is presumably in his wife's possession, and I doubt she's taking much comfort from it at present. I suppose it's natural - and acceptable - to ask the big post-suicide question: "Why?". It doesn't follow that people who didn't know the guy are entitled to try to answer it.

DFW

2008-09-14T15:54:00.002+10:00

If you don't already know.

Terrible, shocking news.

Man Booger

2008-09-10T12:58:00.002+10:00

There is a "flavour", writes John Sutherland, to this year's Booker shortlist. Dead bird? Manure? (Not the latter - too fertile.) No, it's accessibility: "None (or at least, not too much) of that boring "literary" crap." So, mostly just crap crap then.

I like the look of Sea of Poppies (Stevenson-esque nautical yarns are all right by me) but the rest of the list is awful. I realise I used a fragment of The Lost Dog to make a point (yes, there was one, somewhere) about some irritating trends in contemporary literary fiction, but overall I was impressed with de Kretser's novel. (I've been dying to say that in public, because it's true and I felt bad about featuring de Kretser's work so prominently in my critique. If I could go back in time I would rewrite that post using an example from a different book; also I would remove the misleading and loaded word "unrealistically" from the first par. Because of course that's what I would do if I had a time machine, go back and edit blog posts.) That it didn't make the cut is testament to the (not entirely unexpected) conservatism of the judges and the (again hardly revelatory) bullshitness of the award itself. Also: no Netherland! Not that I liked the thing, but I'd bet on it to win in an informal sweep. Now I have no chance of winning back my four dollars.

"Babysitting"

2008-09-10T07:47:00.005+10:00

Catherine Deveny's column on fatherhood is spot on. Men need to be encouraged to be good parents, but they don't need to be coddled. I speak from experience: without going into specifics, at the age of twenty - a very immature twenty - I had to learn quickly how to look after a child, and although I had (and still have) supportive parents of my own, I soon became reasonably self-reliant and proficient in the arts of parenting. I don't know if I had any views on gender roles in parenting, but if I did they were swiftly overturned by the immediate reality of having a child to look after. I copped my share of condescending remarks ("Babysitting today?"), misguided praise ("So good to see a man brave enough to take his daughter out alone!"), and nasty looks (unfortunately to some people man + child = kidnapping) but I always felt it was axiomatic that you look after your kids, whatever your gender.

It is bizarre to me 1) that women let their men get away with acting like Ward Cleaver, and 2) that men want to act that way in the first place. It's a bit like cooking - my dad (who is, I hasten to add, otherwise an enlightened, generous and active participant in family life) rarely cooks anything more complicated than a slice of toast. I, on the other hand, cook most of my family's meals and tend to think that my dad has missed out on one of the great pleasures of life. The hands-off, Ward Cleaver-types miss out on even more. I can't imagine not being capable of taking my daughters out for the day on my own, or spending the weekend at home with my youngest while my partner is away with friends, or a thousand other day-to-day activities. I would feel incompetent, diminished. I still cop the occasional evil eye or condescending compliment when out pushing the pram, but frankly I don't give a shit. I'm not a novelty act and I'm certainly not doing anything exceptional. I'm just pushing my kid around in her pram, trying to keep her safe and happy, maybe singing her a song. If I had two X chromosomes most people wouldn't even notice.

*

Speaking of dads, last week my local library honoured Father's Day with a display entitled "Dads in Fiction". Nice gesture, except most of the dads in most of the fiction were from the arsehole end of the fatherhood spectrum. Moran from Amongst Women and Frank's father from The Wasp Factory certainly count as "dads in fiction", but they are somewhat less than the Father's Day ideal.

Notes

2008-09-09T08:43:00.002+10:00

I am trying to cut down my intake of alcohol, chocolate and Sopranos episodes before I turn into an overweight lush who uses the word "douchebag" as a term of endearment. Regular employment continues to elude me, maybe my resume smells? I'm still trying to figure out what (if anything) to do with Twitter - all the "hilarious" one-liners I come up with are over 140 characters and as for general observations about the world in which we live, well, I haven't had a decent one of those in years. There is a paperback copy of Anna Karenina (Oprah-approved Pevear/Volokhonsky translation) next to my bed, a bookmark lodged between pages 346 and 347, marking the exact point at which I got fed up with Levin banging on about farming techniques. Last Saturday I read And Then There Were None, which for some reason we read in Year 7 English, and which precipitated in me a minor Christie obsession. I was amazed at how well I remembered the book, right down to Christie's extensive use of zoomorphic simile, eg. "wolfish" Philip Lombard, "reptilian" Justice Wargrave, etc. Watched half of Spartacus t'other night; still not convinced of Kubrick's "genius" but did enjoy this line from a review by Anne Grayson, quoted in Halliwell's: "Everything is depicted with a lack of imagination that is truly Marxian." There is a lot of truth in this post about the despair (sometimes) engendered by blogging and other user-generated media, eg. "What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen." The Go-Betweens doco on Saturday night was a rare watchable example of the form: actually informative, unpretentious, celebratory but not uncritically so, and with a minimum of ex-hippies turning recording studio knobs with nicotine-stained hands. That'll do for now, despair setting in.

Here you go, girls

2008-09-06T15:56:00.001+10:00

There really is an Amazon guide for everything:

So you'd like to... have an ecstatic period experience

(l-r: John; Stuart; Mill)

2008-09-05T20:06:00.002+10:00

Plate Oh!

2008-09-05T20:05:00.002+10:00

B.S. Johnson

2008-09-05T20:02:00.004+10:00

Raymond Carver

2008-09-05T20:02:00.001+10:00

Mary Shelly

2008-09-05T20:01:00.002+10:00

Shakes Pier

2008-09-05T17:30:00.004+10:00

Shake Speer

2008-09-05T17:30:00.001+10:00

Shakes Peer

2008-09-05T17:29:00.001+10:00

Shake Spear

2008-09-05T17:25:00.001+10:00

Don DeLi-Lo

2008-09-04T20:00:00.002+10:00

Finland

2008-09-04T19:42:00.002+10:00

John Updyke

2008-09-03T21:24:00.000+10:00

Experimental Writing

2008-09-03T15:02:00.002+10:00

Homage to Cattle On Ya

2008-09-03T14:58:00.002+10:00

Stuff White Supremacists Like

2008-09-01T12:01:00.000+10:00

White power.

Carrot stick fasces.

Puppies, especially white ones.

Six Degrees of Nazification

2008-08-28T10:47:00.004+10:00

Scientists including Einstein* have long argued that any person can be connected to Nazism via a chain of no more than five intermediary acquaintances or beliefs. This so-called “Six Degrees of Nazification” is not a new concept: the term was first used in 1906 by Swiss spocktologist Pierre Swille, but it was not until the advent of the Nazi Party in 1920 that it made any sense. Since then, the concept has been used primarily as a parlour game, as well as forming the basis of a short-lived 1986 gameshow hosted by Maurie Fields.

“Six Degrees of Nazification” is in fact a misnomer. As Tagenflagenbelde notes in his 1957 book Schlechter Deutscher Für Schlechte Deutsche the “six” is redundant as by virtue of its Nazi status the last or “goal” degree would on principle have driven the other four degrees into the woods and machine gunned them prior to the connection being made. Thus a typical example of the six degrees takes the form of a simple syllogism of the kind beloved of people with glasses named Aubrey:

Paul McCartney is a vegetarian
Top Nazi Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian
Paul McCartney is a Nazi

John Travolta is a pilot
Top Nazi Hermann Goering was a pilot
John Travolta is a Nazi

This simplified version of the formula is highly popular amongst those wishing to smear their political opponents:

Senator Bob Brown wears suits
Top Nazi Josef Goebbels wore suits
Senator Bob Brown is a Nazi

Schmitt, in his 1975 paper “Aber beklecker nicht das Sofa, Sofa” refutes the validity of this stripped-back formula, although the Japanese translation is said to arrive at the opposite conclusion by way of several highly dubious recipes for home-made old people’s food. McRammstein takes issue with Schmitt in his 1981 paper “Ich bin Freddy Quecksilber”, but we all know McRammstein fiddles with pigeons so his views can be disregarded.

In short, Six Degrees of Nazification is something that exists and you should probably know about it. Apparently there is a film in the works starring Will Smith. Whether he will play the Six Degrees or the Nazification is unknown, but we can confirm that Donald Sutherland has signed to play Anne Frank.

Finally, we turn to Wikipedia to completely contradict everything said thus far:

Six Degrees of Nazification is a board game from Frown & Andrews. Players must move counter-clockwise while manipulating a special orb (Hitler's "ball") upon which images of Walt Disney films are projected, interspersed with random gore from Rob Zombie's remake of His Girl Friday. The first player to eat another player's big toe wins.

* Gerald Einstein, V.C.E., Warrnambool

_____

Yet another look back at Sterne's earlier, funnier/odder, years. This precious gem was originally cut and polished on August 29, 2006.

Saturday morning cartoon

2008-08-23T11:35:00.003+10:00

Not sure how accurate this here mangatar is - the hairdo and stubble look a bit too stylish and deliberate rather than the result of laziness/unemployment - but I do own a shirt that is exactly that colour.

And yes, if everybody else jumped off a cliff I'd probably do it too.

Meaning and condescension

2008-08-13T19:46:00.002+10:00

Scattered thoughts on certain aspects of contemporary literary fiction

He was thinking of his mother; of the dog; of Osman, in whom death was advancing cell by cell. He felt malevolence gathering force and drawing closer. The children crossed the street, hooded figures from a tale. Life would set them impossible tasks; straw and spinning wheels waited. Tom crossed his fingers and wished them luck: lives reckoned on the blank pages of history. And thought of a night in September when Nelly and he had sat contented in a pub, until people began to gather in front of the TV mounted on the wall at the other end of the bar.

It was their faces that had drawn him: uplifted and calm as churchgoers.

When they parted, Nelly said, 'Everything changes when Americans fall from the sky.'

The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser, pp. 140-41

Maybe I'm just tired of novels in which the mopey, passive protagonist wanders around having epiphanies about The World In Which We Live, but I found this passage, and others like it in The Lost Dog, fairly cringe-inducing. I'm going to advance the argument - dwelled upon at length, but admittedly not fully thought out - that a lot of contemporary fiction is diminished by the fact that its characters (protagonists in particular) are unrealistically self-aware of their roles as subjects of history. I don't mean that characters ought to remain blissfully unaware of geopolitics or ideology or local council noise regulations or whatever. I mean that it is contrived to have characters walk around acting, thinking and speaking beyond the ordinary limits of contextual awareness, ie. as self-conscious agents of or actors in historical events. This sense of contrivance includes characters responding to cataclysmic events by saying things like "Everything changes when Americans fall from the sky" - unless it's said in a Don DeLillo novel, in which case the contrivance is itself part of the novel's aesthetic apparatus. (However successful or unsuccessful that might be.)

I'm grasping here at something that has been bothering me about contemporary fiction for a while now. It's related to what I see as the reliance of many authors on a kind of forced profundity, an eagerness to explain great matters through necessarily reductive fictions, which tends to be inimical to the creation of fiction qua fiction, and in most cases has the paradoxical effect of weakening the explanation and undermining the profundity. There is a jigsaw quality to a lot of recent fiction: metaphor, character, setting, etc, all interlock to create an overall meaning or set of meanings that is itself the point of the novel. Of course I don't wish to suggest that meaning in fiction is a recent invention; it does seem to me, however, that the jigsaw method of composition, and the primacy of meaning, has recently become dominant, at least as far as "literary fiction" goes. Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl, nominated for the 2007 Booker, is an example of just such a "jigsaw" novel. My review of the book read in part:

Inevitably, Davies draws Karsten and Esther together for one of those unlikely collaborations that mutual longing – although not necessarily for one another – sometimes conjures. In fact, despite the incongruity of their union, the German soldier and the Welsh farm girl share a common status. Karsten may be literally inside but he is a natural outsider, while Esther is so far outside her native community she is practically neck-deep in the Irish Sea. The reader recalls Rotheram: isn’t he also, in many ways, an outsider? And isn’t the village riven with various permutations of the outsider/insider dichotomy? And isn’t Wales itself an outsider nation? And isn’t – well, you get the idea.

Reading The Welsh Girl I could almost see the flow chart tacked to Davies' wall, plotting out the thematic relationships between the elements of his fiction. I find this approach incredibly condescending; the dialogue between reader and writer (or reader and text) becomes an authorial monologue - this is the message of my book, this is what I want you to take away from it. There is no space for ambiguity, no space for the reader at all. Tolstoy at least had the courtesy to sequester his didactic asides away from the main business of the novel.

To a certain extent I blame 9/11. The preference for literary fiction that tells us things about the world in which we live was already long established when the towers collapsed; the impression I have is that post-9/11 some writers felt that this preference now conferred upon them an obligation. Who would make sense of our tragic times if not the poet-seers, the writer-intellectuals? You might recall how quickly writers like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis recovered from their vocation-denying shock (Amis: "after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation") and began turning out fiction in which 9/11 and its consequences were the abiding themes. The truth is that far from being a burden 9/11 was a gift to some writers. No longer was one required to turn to the past for grand themes of life and death, war and peace, love and hatred – now you just had to look out of your window at the sun glinting off the fuselage of a passing jet, describe what you saw, implant your feelings of fear and confusion and outrage into an appropriate fictional vessel (while you’re at it why not make him a neurosurgeon with a talent for squash?), and profundity is your reward.

9/11 didn’t explode the consciousness of our major writers, it imploded their egos and gave them a perpetually renewable “subject” and the license to explore it at the expense of whatever aesthetic they had hitherto developed. All of a sudden it was deemed important that literature – more specifically the "great minds" behind literature – be seen to be tackling the big issues of our time. The irony is that so many of the products of this attitude are a little too polite, a little too safe, a little too pre-9/11 to do justice to (fallacy alert) their authors’ intentions. A novel such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday, while in a limited sense successful as a political handgrenade, is about as safe as fiction gets, a comfortable stroll through the “issues of the day” written in professional prose and with a consolatory structure. The whole business of the impending war is distanced. Surely, however, one feature of post-9/11 life is the immediacy and pervasiveness of events. The attacks on New York were so shocking partly because we all saw it, as it happened – however silly it sounds in hindsight, at the time it felt like it was happening to all of us. In this sense, a trashy-but-entertaining movie like Cloverfield has more to "say" about the post-9/11 world than "serious fiction" like McEwan's. There is something contemptible about the way McEwan and others use their complacent fiction to present diagnoses of these events. It is arrogant art: here comes fiction with all the answers! Doesn’t it make you think? What it doesn’t do is confront and disturb because that would require moving beyond certain safe modes of thought and presentation.

I suppose it's unfair of me to begin this post with a quotation from The Lost Dog, a novel that for the most part avoids the kind of simplistic interplay and faux-profundity I have been describing here. Another Booker-nominated novel, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, is however the acme of the post-9/11, thematic-jigsaw novel, and it's got a mopey, passive protagonist to boot. Netherland is sober and "realistic" and terribly sincere - a real "missive to the future" concerning our interesting times. I doubt I've read a less engaging novel all year, and I only wish I had my copy here so I could quote some of the deep thoughts O'Neill has his standard-issue white Western male protagonist think.

This post is less a consolidated essay than a collection of (possibly intemperate) "thoughts" about contemporary fiction and I'm not sure how coherent it is. I think what underlies everything I've said is a wish to read fiction that is honest. Not honest in the sense of realistic, but honest as in truthful to the work rather than to some facile "message". I'm tired of didacticism and "research". If I want argument and editorialising I can read the newspaper. If I want to know what happened when and to whom I can read history or biography. I read fiction for other reasons - aesthetic pleasure; intellectual diversion; a sense of possibility coupled to an implicit acknowledgment of limitation - things that are either beyond the ability of writers like Davies and O'Neill to provide, or else do not interest them. I suppose they have bigger things to think about.

Edit (14/08/08): I have altered and expanded upon the second sentence of the fourth-to-last paragraph in order to clarify my meaning. The sentence originally read: "The demand that literary fiction tell us things about the world in which we live was already long established when the towers collapsed." It now reads: "The preference for literary fiction that tells us things about the world in which we live was already long established when the towers collapsed; the impression I have is that post-9/11 some writers felt that this preference now conferred upon them an obligation. Who would make sense of our tragic times if not the poet-seers, the writer-intellectuals?"

The incoherent Olympics-related rant I had to have

2008-08-13T09:06:00.007+10:00

I worked for a couple of months last year alongside an English guy - let's call him Clive - who had moved to Australia in early 2007 to get married. Clive was a bit of a lad and not entirely suited to the job but we got along all right, mainly due to a shared interest in quoting Sean Connery's lines from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (It's amazing the common ground you find or invent, and desperately latch onto, when you have to work with someone nine hours a day.) Clive was also a real know-all who, as is often the case, actually knew very little: nine out of every ten statements of "fact" consisted of hearsay, urban legend, or just plain bullshit. A little Clive went a long way, and while his claptrap was sometimes amusing at 9:30 a.m., it had usually ceased to be so by 5:30 p.m - especially when he started talking about Australia.

Now, according to Clive, before he moved to Australia he didn't even realise we had cities other than Sydney. He thought Australia was basically Sydney perched on the edge of an enormous empty continent with a few big rocks and some blackfellas outback for the tourists. Despite admitting to this breathtaking ignorance, Clive liked to think that his outsider status conferred upon him the ability to see Australia as it really is. This vision of Australia turned out to include more or less every negative stereotype and cliché about Australian life and character, all mixed up and regurgitated as "fact". I am a patriot of the least rabid stripe, but even I took umbrage at Clive's reductive misrepresentations: we're not all racist; we're not all drunks; we're not all lecherous Alvin Purples. (There was rich irony in the fact that Clive was a racist and a drunk, and would have given Alvin a run for his money in the lechery stakes.) The whole edifice of "national character" is childish and absurd, especially at a personal level. I have nothing in common with the bloke who lives across the road, but I've met Frenchmen and Egyptian women and Irish Setters with whom I have become firm friends. I also like and love various Australians - but their nationality isn't why I like or love them.

Anyway, Clive was a bit of a tool and I probably shouldn't have let him get to me. But the thing is, ignorant as Clive was, he hadn't come to his conclusions about Australia on his own. There had to be input from somewhere, and unfortunately that somewhere was Australia itself. Clive was simply responding to the face we show to the world. It's all beer and Warnie and "Where the bloody hell are ya?" Look at the behaviour of John Coates, IOC member and head of the AOC, who greeted the news of a British swimmer winning a gold medal with "It's not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap." Grow the fuck up, man. Not that this kind of thing is limited to "our" side: if the exchange of insults continues we can surely expect some jibes from a like-minded (no-minded) British official about "convicts" or whatever. It's not good-natured, it's juvenile; it's not gamesmanship, it's behaving like a dickhead; and it's certainly not patriotic, unless you're idea of patriotism is to represent your country to the world as a bunch of insecure, victory-obsessed oiks.

Aw well

2008-08-11T19:30:00.004+10:00

Orwell's diary is being published as a blog. Today's entry epitomises the intelligence, political and cultural insight, and humane decency of this great writer:

Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.

Timeless.

Update (12/8): Gosh, now Eric's blackberries are "beginning to redden". Reading this, it's almost like you're there.

Writer's lump

2008-08-10T20:12:00.005+10:00

There must be a name for this: the lump that develops on your finger(s) as a result of holding pens or paintbrushes over a period of years. My family didn't own a computer until I was about fifteen so until that time I wrote exclusively - and messily - by hand. As a result I developed quite a pronounced and incredibly hard lump on the side of my right middle finger. I used to gnaw at it during boring high school classes, ie. all of them. When I gave people "the finger", the lump added a unique, personal touch to the gesture that I'm sure didn't go unappreciated. When I shook hands with people, the lump would communicate to me their darkest secrets and deepest fears thus allowing me to bend the person to my will. Sadly, a decade-plus of computer use has caused the lump to disappear, leaving only a slight toughness of skin to indicate that it was ever there. Like sand through the hourglass, etc.

If anybody knows what these lumps are called - other than "gross" - do share.

Listening tour

2008-08-08T20:36:00.000+10:00

A year ago today I signed up to last.fm, an online music community that enables you to track the music you listen to and (in theory) connect with like-minded individuals. I haven't done much of the latter, nor have I paid a great deal of attention to the weekly charts, etc, that last.fm compiles of my listening but it's still interesting (kind of) to check in today and see that in the past twelve months I have listened to 10, 554 songs on my computer. (Obviously music listened to on my stereo isn't tracked.) No wonder my headphones are falling apart. The above chart (click to embiggen) shows my twenty most-listened-to artists for the year, while the full chart can be viewed here, although I'm not sure why anybody would want to do that.

Obviously this kind of thing is of extremely limited utility but to me it has the same kind of (admittedly fairly narcissistic) appeal as a reading log. I've been keeping one of those since 2005 and I find it quite interesting to see when I read what, especially when there is a cluster of similar books or books that obviously led from one to the other. I only wish I'd started keeping track years ago - I'm mildly envious of the likes of Art Garfunkel whose reading log extends back some thirty-eight years. Garfunkel's reading is also more consistently highbrow than mine, but then my stuff with Paul Simon is a lot better than his so it all balances out.

More pronounced

2008-08-07T19:53:00.003+10:00

I was watching Friends tonight and one of the characters said something about emus. Except the Friend in question didn't say "emus" they said "e-moos", like they were talking about some kind of new-fangled techno-bovine. I was expecting the laugh track to erupt with insincere hilarity - I mean, e-moos, really? - but the laughter remained canned until the next time Chandler said something sarcastic. Then: everybody whooped.

Is this for serious? Do Americans really say "e-moos"? W, as the kids say, tf?

Kids say creepiest things

2008-08-07T13:40:00.003+10:00

One night my friend Erin went out to the cinema, leaving her husband Michael in charge of their young son. Michael duly fed and watered the boy, read him a story and tucked him into bed. As was the family's routine, Michael then kissed his son goodnight and moved to the door where he dimmed the lights so that the room was almost, but not quite, completely dark.

"Goodnight, Daniel," he said.

"Goodnight, Dad," said Daniel. "Goodnight, Mum."

"I told you, Dan, Mummy's not here. She's gone to see a movie."

"But she is here!" the boy insisted.

"No, silly," said Michael, moving back into the doorway. "Mummy's out for the night. You'll see her in the morning."

"Oh." Daniel bit his lip thoughtfully. "Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"If Mummy's not here, whose hand is that on your shoulder?"

If you can't say anything nice, you must be reading the Booker longlist

2008-08-07T09:45:00.000+10:00

You'll chuckle knowingly when I tell you that less than a week into Booker '08 I've almost had enough. You knew, of course, that I wasn't going to read the longlist, not after my dramatic withdrawal from the 2006 longlist reading project. You knew that the only reason I read so much of the 2005 longlist was because of the novelty factor, and also because I was studying imagist poetry and American modernism and needed some low-impact reading to salve my brain of an evening. You knew I wouldn't have the determination, time, and masochistic tendencies required to wade neck-deep through the mire of the Booker Dozen, not when I could be reading, say, the Bible in Klingon, or the month-old Green Guide I found under my armchair. You knew all that, didn't you, you little know-it-all? I just have one question: why didn't you tell me?

The problem is that most of the books aren't worth reading, at least not cover to cover. I was discussing this with with Beth and she suggested that perhaps "observing the Booker longlist" was a better description of what we're doing than "reading the Booker longlist". So far I have observed four longlisted novels:

- The Clothes on Their Backs, Linda Grant. The blurb was enough to put me off this one: "...a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all." I didn't bother reading any further.

- The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga. Read about twenty pages of this. It seemed ok.

- A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz. By page 200 of this 700+ page novel I was exhausted and bored by the chatty, superficial style. This is the kind of book that attracts reviews containing words like "rollicking", "romp", "thumping", and "rip-roaring", but for all its vim and vigour it's actually quite dull and amateurish. I reckon it would make the perfect companion on a long-haul flight - long, not at all taxing yet not completely brainless, and marginally more interesting than clocking Super Mario 3 for the eighth time on the little back-of-the-seat entertainment unit.

- Netherland, Joseph O'Neill. The one longlistee I have read thoroughly. I've been working on an essay about this book and other post-9/11 fiction, however I am not sure I will complete it because frankly I find the whole sub-genre wearying. For now I'll simply say that Netherland is a good example of modern mainstream literary fiction, which is to say that it is well written, utterly conventional, and terribly "sincere" and "profound". It'll probably win.

Melbourne-baste

2008-08-06T21:19:00.003+10:00

When I was given the opportunity to write some book reviews for the SMH last year it crossed my mind for about six seconds that I ought to write under a pseudonym. This was not because I had anything to hide but because the average law-abiding person gets so few chances to act under an assumed name that it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity. I was also conscious that whatever name those reviews were published under would probably be the name I would use for anything else I might have published. (Of course I already have a pseudonym of sorts in "Tim Sterne", but that's really more of a nickname or nom de blog - I am Tim, from Sterne - than a name I have deliberately adopted.) In the end I decided to use my boring, everyday name, the surname of which I find I have to keep spelling for people despite it being the name of our recently-deposed PM of eleven years. How soon we (bash our skulls against walls in an effort to) forget.

The other thing I had to decide on was my contributor note. Again there was a strong temptation to lie, eg. "T. Kazutoki Sterne is the author of Drescher, Goebbels, Braque: An Eternal Golden Shower. He lives in a canoe under a chocolate waterfall with a sentient cabbage named Joyce." Sobriety and the desire not to appear insane prevailed once more and I settled on the more prosaic and honest, yet vastly less intriguing, "Tim Howard is a Melbourne writer". What I like about this formulation is that it makes a claim for authority - hey, this Tim Howard guy's a writer, not just some schmuck! Or at least he's a schmuck who is also a writer! - while also providing the authors of the books I reviewed with my full name and rough geographical location just in case they felt like tracking me down and pointing out my own deficiencies, literary or otherwise. "Tim Howard is a Melbourne writer" may be boring, but it is also fair.

I also like its concreteness. "Melbourne writer" rather than that common variation "Melbourne-based writer". The latter sounds as if the writer in question merely "keeps a house" in Melbourne, turning up occasionally to dust the Van Goghs and water the geraniums before jetting off to Paris, London, New York. I suppose in some cases this might be true; in my case it would be so far from the truth as to constitute a category five fib, punishable by the malicious flicking (with a ruler) of the perp's ear lobes.

All this talk of contributor's notes reminds me of Michael Martone's book Michael Martone: Fictions, which consists entirely of contributor notes for "Michael Martone". I haven't read it but I would like to. On an unrelated note: my birthday is coming up soon and I have no qualms about accepting gifts.

*

Incidentally, does anybody else find it odd and disappointing that this month's Australian Literary Review contains only one fiction review and that's of a short story collection largely consisting of previously published - if often brilliant - material?

Tim C. McSterne is the author of this post. He is based in a darkened room somewhere in Melbourne.

Schlock Tactics

2008-08-06T08:15:00.003+10:00

That'd be the head of Corey Worthington, "party boy", photoshopped onto the body of Jesus Christ, "saviour". The image is one of the entrants in this year's Blake Prize, which has a history of pissing off the usual people who get pissed off at such things with "provocative" and "controversial" (read: jejune and facile) works.

Dean Sewell, the creator of the Cory Christ piece, says: "Jesus was crucified to pay for the sins of man, and Corey was crucified by the media to pay for the sins of the MySpace generation." Yes, he really said that, apparently with a straight face. Reminds me of somebody I once knew...

For all your Hellboy needs

2008-08-04T09:52:00.005+10:00

This is a shop in Box Hill. They sell mobile phones as well as large, red, demon superheroes.

"Heroes"

2008-08-04T08:32:00.004+10:00

The Australian swimming team arrived in Beijing overnight, dressed as convicts. Which was appropriate, given the host nation's attitude towards freedom.

Mel and Koshie are hosting Sunrise from Beijing. This morning they presented a guest with a memento in the form of a Mao Zedong wristwatch, an act that pretty much sums up our media's reluctance to discuss China's recent history - let alone its present - in any but the most superficial of terms.

If You Were A Horse

2008-07-31T20:48:00.002+10:00

If you were a horse, my what a horse you would be! Hocks and fetlocks to take one's breath away, and cannon that just wouldn't quit. Your gaskin would be among the great wonders of the world, although I confess I am more of a pastern man myself. Out in the fields, I would stroke your flexor tendons, tickle your stifle, run my fingers lightly along your beautiful withers, slowly, one perfect vertebrae at a time. You would whinny and take some feed, and I would laugh merrily, my lips at your throat latch, my hand upon your poll. What a pair we would make, you and I, if you were a horse.

____

Almost forgot to do a repost this month. This was originally presented to an uncaring world on June 15, 2005.

Contenders

2008-07-30T10:11:00.004+10:00

The 2008 Booker longlist:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
John Berger, From A to X
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith, Child 44
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Not a bad list, although hardly thrilling. (But then this is the Booker...) I experienced a moment of shock when I saw the name Mohammed Hanif, until I remembered that the bloke our government locked up for no good reason was Mohammed Haneef. I know Damien Leith parlayed his Australian Idol win into a publishing deal, but terrorism suspect to Booker contender would be another thing altogether.

I happened to read Netherland last weekend so I should have a review up soon. It's been favourably compared to The Great Gatsby and Joseph O'Connor calls it "a great American novel" (although O'Neill is Irish, hence his Booker eligibility) but the reason I read it is because it was said to be that rare beast, a good novel about cricket. It turned out to be a reasonably good novel that had cricket in it. I wouldn't be surprised to see it win.

Other than that I'll be reading and reviewing what I can of the list. As is traditional with my Booker reading, the snark will be brought when warranted.

I now pronounce you incorrectly

2008-07-29T16:13:00.002+10:00

I bought a book by Andre Dubus on the weekend and spent the train trip home wondering how to pronounce his name. "Dub-us"? "Do-boos"? Turns out it's "Duh-byoose" (thanks, Google). Armed with this information I can now wade into any conversations about Andre Dubus that might crop up at dinner parties or on the bus, confident that I'll at least get his name right. Now all I have to do is find somebody who wants to have a conversation about Andre Dubus.

Whilst searching for Dubus-pronunciation assistance I came across a post at The Millions which features a fairly comprehensive list of hard-to-pronounce literary names. The only revelatory pronunciation listed is that of Donald (and, presumably, Frederick) Barthelme, which is apparently "BAR-tuhl-mee" rather than the more prosaic (and sensible) "BAR-thelm". Other than that I appear to be pronouncing most of the listed writers' names correctly, or close enough. (I'm still not sure if it's "kut-see" or "curt-see".) I was also pleased to see that mispronunciations I once employed are apparently common. For years I said "woad-house" rather than "wood-house", "thuh-row" when it's actually "thuh-roo", and "bore-jez" when it is, of course, "bore-has". I still don't know how to pronounce "Goethe", but neither does anybody else. "Goat" seems to get the point across.

Fw: Please pass this on...

2008-07-27T10:46:00.005+10:00

---- Original Message -----

From: ********

To: ***********

Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 9:48 AM

Subject: Fw: Please pass this on, it has been confirmed by the Australian Police and the Australian Carpenters & Joiners Union

I got a call last night from an individual who identified himself as a Doors Plus Front Door Technician. He said that he was standing on my front doorstep and asked me to open the door so that he could check that it was functioning correctly. I was a little suspicious – there have recently been a number of attempted regicides and chicken bonings in our area – but I eventually decided to do as I was asked rather than make a fuss.

Big mistake! After checking that my front door’s hinges were operating according to Commonwealth standards (or so he claimed!) the so-called Front Door Technician asked if he could check the rest of my doors. I hesitated, but he said that he was entitled by Australian law to access my doors. I felt I had no choice and allowed him to go around my house checking the doors. After this I thought he would leave but he then demanded to be allowed to check my drawers. I let him rummage around in my drawers but after a while I started to feel uncomfortable and asked him to leave as I had to go and pick up my children from World Youth Day.

The man then said that he wanted to check any cash I had on me to ensure that it was functioning correctly. I was suspicious but he told me that owing to departmental downsizing Doors Plus was now subcontracted to evaluate Australia’s circulating currency at street level. I gave the man all the cash I had – several thousand dollars in mixed denominations – and was informed that it was faulty and would have to be taken in for repairs. I felt uncomfortable and suggested the man come back later when my husband would be home. The man said that he was on a tight schedule so would have to take the money now. He assured me that the money would be returned in good working order and made out a receipt which I later noticed was actually just a piece of paper torn out of a Coles catalogue.

By this time I was getting very suspicious but the man showed me his ID. I probably should have twigged at this point – the ID was a video library card in the name of Esther Jones – but I am a trusting person (too trusting!) and I wanted to do the right thing.

The man finally left having convinced me to give him a spare set of keys, my credit card, bank account and tax file details, my daughter’s piggy bank, my husband’s anal intruder, the plasma tv, and my collection of rare 19th century Scottish shipbuilding erotica – all to be "taken in for repairs", or so the man claimed! I was suspicious but he seemed like an honest, decent man. Before he left he told me that amongst his people – he was from Bendigo – the handjob was a sign of trust and he would be greatly relieved if I would show my trust by giving him one. I was suspicious but didn’t want to seem rude, so I gave him a brief and explosive tug by the front door, after which he left.

A few days later I called Doors Plus to enquire about when I might expect my money and other goods to be returned. They told me they had never heard of me and that it sounded like I had been the victim of a scam! I was shocked and called my local police station. The sergeant I spoke to told me that he had heard of similar scams originating from many gaols and prisons and said that I ought to pass my story along to others using email so as to reach the maximum number of people using a trusted medium that can never be exploited or used to propagate rumours and urban legends. So that is what I have done and I thank you for reading. If you are approached by any suspicious men claiming to be Front Door technicians, call the police!

"Do you have a nose?"

2008-07-26T17:14:00.003+10:00

asks a classified ad in my local paper. If the answer is affirmative, you - yes, you, the one with the nose - can earn "$20 per hour as an 'Odour Sniffer'".

That they use the word "odour" rather than "scent" would seem to indicate that your $20 per hour will be hard-earned.

...and hold the placenta...

2008-07-26T14:57:00.002+10:00

Shame

2008-07-25T20:44:00.005+10:00

What is wrong with the English? Why are they so obsessed with not having finished certain books or not having started other books or not having taken books of appropriate cultural cachet to the beach? (Do they even have beaches?) There's one of these self-conscious whinges every second week in the Guardian, always couched in confessional tones - the shame of not starting/finishing Proust or whomever, the shame of taking the latest Ian Rankin to the beach instead of something translated from Norweigan with no paragraphs or proper nouns. Then, perversely, there's the shame of looking like a show-off if you opt for the allegedly pretentious tome over the bestseller. It's clearly impossible for the average Englisher to make a reading selection without being crippled by doubt.

Perhaps it's a consequence of growing up in egalitarian Australian - egalitarian to the extent that lack of interest in arts and literature knows no class boundaries - but I'm surprised anybody gives a frying frock what anybody else is or isn't reading. On the train the other day I sat between a businessman who was reading Robin Hobb and a Surrey Hills matron who was engrossed by The Bostonians, while opposite me a uni student was bending back the dusty spine of something horrible by Dennis Wheatley. (I had forgotten my book - Proust, obviously, in the original French - and was entertaining myself by trying to read bits of everybody else's.) These people weren't at all self-conscious, neither trying to display nor hide their reading matter. If a tyrannical cultural elite exists it failed to materialise on the 11:45 to Flinders St for a spot-check of commuters' books. ("High fantasy? 'Fraid that'll be a fifty dollar on-the-spot fine, sir. Madam, I'd like to see something from James's late period next time, if you don't mind. Sir, put the The Devil Rides Out down slowly and come with me. That's right, easy now. We'll get you all the help you need...")

The only person who regularly asks me what I'm reading is my dad, and he's never heard of any of the writers I like anyway and in any case is hardly seeking to make value judgments about my choice of literary diversion. I doubt if anybody else cares either. Or do they? Do I? Perhaps I'm just feigning nonchalance when really I'm a snob of the first water, peering down my nose at the philistines reading Wilbur Smith on the train, and then getting all worked up inside about my hypocritical snobbishness, remembering all those Dostoyevsky novels I haven't finished translating from the Russian, despite countless NYE resolutions to do so, so who am I to judge, but then, really, Wilbur Smith?

Dear Guardian. I have an idea for a blog post. I was on the train the other day when I was crippled by anxiety and shame...

Just so you know

2008-07-23T19:30:00.003+10:00

I'm bored with the internet right now. Too much blather. Also, it's so cold in my study I can barely hear my inane thoughts over the chattering of my teeth.

My study. Or my teeth.

It's interesting, the too much blather thing. Sometimes the web provides me with an escape precisely because it is so heavy with random information, lies, opinions, gossip, images, in-fights, outrages, lists, star ratings, and so on. Other times, like now, all that stuff makes me sleepy and annoyed, and I want to escape from it and go and read Richard Yates by the heater and drink Coopers Pale Ale and later watch the Tour de France. So, goodnight.

Ozzy

2008-07-22T13:17:00.002+10:00

One day in Year 12 a classmate brought to school a very small very furry kitten that she had found hanging around the back door of the bakery where she worked. My family's cat had been put down earlier in the year, so I volunteered to give the little guy a home. Twelve years later Ozzy (as I named him) is still a fixture at my parent's house, dividing his time between snoozing in front of the heater and shedding huge dusty chunks of fur on the soft furnishings. I was around there last night and he looked at me with his big yellow eyes, purred at the sight of his true owner and master, then coughed up a particularly revolting hairball.

About two seconds after I took this photo my dad trod on Ozzy's tail. This is an inevitable consequence of having a cat that is the same colour as the carpet.

Hammer Time

2008-07-21T11:29:00.000+10:00

Did you know that Peter Cushing played Darcy in a 1952 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice? Well now you do.

As a teenager I was a big fan of Peter Cushing, whom I had seen in various Hammer flicks and of course in Star Wars as Grand Moff Tarkin, who really was so much grander than all those other, regular, moffs. I was probably the only teenager in Australia who owned a copy of Cushing's charming, sad autobiography. I say sad because Cushing lived out the final decades of his life mourning his wife Helen, who died in 1971, and from what I can remember the autobiography is permeated by a strong sense of loss. I don't think Cushing mentions this in his book, but apparently on the night his wife died he tried to commit suicide using the somewhat unorthodox method of running up and down a flight of stairs in order to bring on a heart attack. It didn't work.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to direct your attention to Shadowplay's excellent series of posts on Hammer's Frankenstein movies, in which Cushing played the eponymous Baron.

1914

2008-07-19T21:13:00.002+10:00

2 August. Germany has declared war on Russia - Swimming in the afternoon.

Kafka, Diaries, p. 301

That mad game the world so loves to play

2008-07-19T14:39:00.007+10:00

In an attempt to ward off or at least mitigate depression I have been avoiding horror movies, sad songs, news reports of suffering and murder, and anything else that couldn't conceivably be turned into a cheerful Gene Kelly song-and-dance number. All was going reasonably well until today when I made the mistake of visiting the exhibition of Otto Dix's Der Krieg [War] etchings at the NGV.

Who's laughing now?

I'm actually glad I went because it is an enormously powerful exhibition. There is quite a lot of variety amongst the fifty-one prints, in style and focus, which is presumably the consequence not only of Dix's roving eye but also a conscious effort not to routinise the manifold nastiness of war. For the spectator this has the effect of precluding numbness - at every turn there is fresh horror to absorb. It's not all gory battle scenes either - one of the most shocking prints depicts a soldier raping a nun. It's horrific stuff, but that's the point. I found some of the prints difficult to look at, although Dix's skill - obvious even to your know-nothing correspondent - provides enough abstract fascination to counteract at least some of the physical revulsion one experiences.

Where no Russian has gone before

2008-07-18T19:03:00.006+10:00

Who is the greatest Russian of all time?

I think the answer is obvious:

"Is that a nuclear wessel in your pocket or are you
just happy to see me?"

Last train to tramcentral

2008-07-17T16:43:00.009+10:00

One drizzly winter evening in the mid-nineties, a friend and I were waiting for a tram at the Acland St. stop on Fitzroy Rd. As the old rattler pulled up, the driver poked his head out of the window and, in a voice apparently on loan from the late Vincent Price, announced: "Everybody must die!"

Being young, foolish and cold we decided not to interpret this as the ominous warning it so obviously was and boarded the tram. Inside, a musical trio (violin, acoustic guitar, bongo) had occupied the tram's aft and were energetically running the melody-free voodoo down. A small, clearly drunk/stoned audience of hippies danced around and applauded the band's more outrageous psychedelic noodling, while in the corner a dwarf in a top hat played Snap with a winged donkey on stilts. (That last detail might be a trick of memory: it may have been Old Maid rather than Snap and the donkey could have been on a unicycle.)

Presiding over this bacchanalia-on-wheels was an almost spherical middle-aged man sporting a cowboy hat, Harley Davidson belt buckle, leather pants, a handlebar moustache - and the badge and other accoutrements of an official Met tram conductor. He sold us our tickets, made some vaguely menacing remarks that involved referring to us as "boys", then wandered back to rejoin the frivolity. Twenty somewhat fraught minutes later - the conductor kept smiling at us - the tram arrived at Flinders St., we got out, and the merry band of psychopaths rattled off to strange, unknown realms, maybe even Brunswick.

This anecdote has no real ending - we just caught a train and were probably disappointed that it too wasn't overrun by crazies - but I was reminded of it by Catherine Deveny's column about the prospect of reinstating tram conductors not only as a practical solution to various public transport issues but also as a kind of spiritual panacea for our "tragic and disconnected" society. How romantic, how Leunigian!

I'm no fan of the present gumby gestapo, and I don't doubt there would be benefits to bringing conductors back, but surely in Deveny's haste to don her rose-coloured tram-riding goggles she is forgetting one thing: some conductors were insane. Or, if not insane, then rude, surly, and completely unhelpful. (Several commenters on this LP post make the same point.) Has Deveny caught a bus lately? Most of the drivers are fine, and I'd hate to see them replaced by bus-driving robots or a species of sentient heavy vehicle licence-carrying plants, but the public/driver interface is rarely spiritually uplifting. I've seen some appalling behaviour from drivers, ranging from impatience and unhelpfulness through to outright bigotry and threats of violence. (The behaviour of passengers is another issue altogether.)

Given this - that is, given the reality that any profession or social grouping will contain its share of pricks, psychos and nasty cowboy-hat-wearing pederast bikies - is there any reason to believe that conductors were, or would be, lovable saints to a (wo)man?

Use a cork, maybe?

2008-07-16T15:12:00.004+10:00

The whole "check out the weird Google searches that lead people to my blog" thing is so 2006, however it's probably worth mentioning that somebody landed on Sterne today after Googling "how not to get water up your bum waterskiing".

You throw me the idol, I throw you the whip

2008-07-15T19:42:00.004+10:00

Have you seen the new ad for Australian Idol? It is focking hilarious.

The best bit is when the red-haired kid sings "All the colours of the world..." and the line is finished by the guy who is apparently receiving an off-camera testicle squeeze from Kyle Sandilands. Also, the fist-pumping, totally right-on, totally premeditated ad-lib "Can you see what's going down?". And all the shoulder-dancing and soulful clapping. Aren't young people just great?

If they asked me, I could write a book

2008-07-15T14:14:00.003+10:00

I had an idea for a novel this morning. I was catching the bus when I felt "the first little throb" (to quote VN). By the time I reached my destination (library) I had a protagonist, various sidekicks/friends/nemeses, and at least half the storyline scrawled on the whiteboard in my brain. The return journey filled in the gaps and when I sat down in front of the computer to jot it all down in virtual ink I managed to improve on what I'd already come up with. (It has been my experience that ideas generated while walking/commuting/showering usually turn to mush when assembled on the page.) The way it all came together, almost without conscious thought, was thrilling. Now all I have to do is write the thing. Maybe I can do that without conscious thought too.

Of course, I'm not going to reveal here what my idea is. That would ruin everything. You'll just have to wait a couple of years and buy the book. Or wait for the movie adaptation.

Over the nights and through the fires

2008-07-13T19:38:00.003+10:00

Backyard, camera phone, 5:29 pm

Booker 2008: Sucking and Blowing

2008-07-12T21:27:00.004+10:00

Michael Portillo, Chair of this year's Booker Prize, has a blog. Make that "blog" - surely it doesn't count as a real blog if you've only posted to it twice in six months. Portillo's latest entry - posted on May 15 - documents the extraordinary diversity of this year's nominated titles:

At first it seemed that almost every book was going to be written from the point of view of a child.

And were those children disturbed and/or able to see things convention-bound adults can't and/or capable of revealing through their naivety the hypocrisies and cruelties of this crazy modern world in which we live? I'd wager real money that they were, if I had any.

Another big topic this year is Islam, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan feature quite a bit too. Novels set in the UK often have middle-class characters who reveal their disappointment with Tony Blair.

I expect next year there'll be a slew of novels "tackling" climate change.

Portillo also reports that auto-erotic asphyxiation is apparently the literary fetish du jour: "Three novels that I've read so far have featured it." There's a joke waiting to be made here but I'm too tired and anyway Rockwiz is about to start.

Nabokov Reanimated

2008-07-10T20:31:00.006+10:00

One of the half-arsed book ideas I have floating around in my head is for a half-arsed book on Nabokov. Needless to say, the book would not be an academic study - or even a study - but, like "the piano book" I am writing (and to which I have referred darkly on this blog) it would be a kind of exploratory, desultory, Geoff Dyer-esque book, angle(s) of approach yet to be determined. Whatever the book turns out to be, if it indeed turns out to be anything, I'm fairly certain that it will not involve a scene like the one in Nina Khrushcheva's Imagining Nabokov in which - I'm not making this up - "Khrushcheva converses with the statue of Nabokov in Montreux, Switzerland. He comes alive and responds, citing passages from his works."

Recent Reads: One Star Amazon Customer Reviews Edition

2008-07-08T09:44:00.005+10:00

Poor Things, Alasdair Gray:

Yuck!, 28 April 2000

By A Customer

Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn:

Dissapointing, 2 Jul 2008

By rocco1 "rocco1"

Having read so many good reviews I looked forward to reading this book. It started off well, but introduced characters I did not care about, and I actually could not finish the book, try as I might. I find it hard to understand what most of the other readers got so excited about. Perhaps it appeals to youngsters who spend their lives in shopping malls. I couldn't relate to the book at all.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov:

ugh.., June 16, 2005

By selffate "critical wunderkid"

[...]

Nabokov's novel 'Lolita' about an old man who lusts (that's right not loves LUSTS) after a pre-pubescent girl, is the most banal boring prose I've ever come across. Nabokov's narration while sometimes creative just goes on... and on... and on.. plus he gives no insight into his characters at all most simply because they have no dialogue what so ever. Perhaps the only dialogue I seem to remember from this book, was the words "you rapped me". So how can I feel for any of the characters in this book after that? huh? Would I want to identify with the main protoganist who just can't stop thinking of his sick ways? I don't think so.

I suppose many decades ago you could write a book like this and get noticed with the shock value, but if this book was released now, no-one would even pay attention to it, it would be passed off for what it is, toilet literature, and then be relegated to the garbage can.

The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald:

An European point of view..., August 20, 2002

By santiago

[...]

This way of writing, VERY fashionable these days here in Europe, gets me quite nervous. And the main reason is that I cannot sympathise with the people described in the book. Most of them are SO boring and have so little interesting things to say... at least, they take little time to do it, since the book is short and has many photos inside.

Ailing

2008-07-07T19:32:00.005+10:00

Classic British comedy – it’s not actually funny, is it? I don’t just mean the acknowledged pap like Carry On and Benny Hill; the alleged good stuff is often pretty shoddy too. I just watched the “classic” 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers and laughed approximately once and that was at something the cat did. Now I’m even more baffled than I was at the time by the invective directed towards the Coens' remake a few years ago. It was hardly the brothers’ best work, but it was amusing enough – I saw it at a preview screening and the audience were pishing themselves throughout. I guess it crossed a lot of critics because not only was it a remake but it was a remake of a forrin film and therefore hateful in a way that even the Coen factor couldn’t mitigate.

Compare The Ladykillers to an actual comedy classic of the era (one that is funny and well-made, Some Like It Hot, say) and it’s like comparing the episode of Neighbours in which Madge died to Hamlet. Of course one must allow for the proverbial subjective nature of humour, especially when viewing the comedy product of another era, but still there’s obviously something wrong with people who rave about The Ladykillers. Oh look, Obi Wan Kenobi with funny dentures! How sophisticated and quintessentially British! (Fortunately The Ladykillers isn't French because then critics would have to pretend it is funny and meaningful.)

In short, I'm right and everybody else is wrong. Amazing how often that happens.

RIP Thomas Disch

2008-07-07T09:28:00.004+10:00

Thomas M. Disch, New Worlds alumnus, author of two bona fide New Wave classics, Camp Concentration and 334, as well as dozens of other novels, stories, essays and poems, committed suicide on July 4.

Sunday Birthday Blogging

2008-07-06T16:49:00.001+10:00

Today is my eldest daughter Asala's tenth birthday. I still remember how significant it felt to tick over into double figures - you don't get another digit for ninety years! - and we have endeavored to make Asala's big day as enjoyable as possible on our limited budget. After presents and bacon and eggs for breakfast we went into the city, had a picnic lunch in the parkland near the Shrine, then wandered through the Botanic Gardens, something the kids always enjoy, especially when there are swans to chase. Then we paid a visit to the NGV where half of Melbourne was queuing for the Art Deco show. We headed straight for the modern galleries on the second floor which are generally colourful and weird enough to keep children interested. Charlotte tried to knock a Rothko off the wall, nudes were snickered at, Rodin's and Barye's lions were marveled at, and Anguish, as usual, provoked difficult questions. Tonight we're going out for dinner with the rest of the family and that should wrap up what has been a very pleasant day.

Happy Birthday, Asala!

Me, in the Botanic Gardens, with limpets.

Saturday Salmon

2008-07-05T14:28:00.001+10:00

An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like, as long as it's to do with salmon.

Austen Rethunk

2008-07-05T13:32:00.004+10:00

Laura posts news of an intriguing initiative:

This coming semester, in collaboration with a certain Land Baron around here, I will be trying out the use of group course blogs in teaching English. Not so novel perhaps, course blogs have been done before, but it's new for us and (we think) for our faculty, and we're planning to use the blogs in ways that have integrity - ie not using them as just another new-fangled place to park some text...This semester it is an experiment, and participation in it is voluntary and not assessed. I'm doing all I can think of to make sure it's taken up and is a worthwhile exercise. Next year I plan to make it mandatory.

The blog topic is non-academic appropriations of and responses to Jane Austen - Jane Austen in 'popular culture', the Austen industry, fandoms, mailing lists, LJ communities Austen spinoffs and sequels, fanfic, Austen coopted into marketing irrelevant products, Austen memes, Austen tourism - anything of that nature. I want students to find themselves things to write about and to write about them interestingly, knowledgeably, critically, and fairly.

The blog, Rethinking Jane Austen, is here.

Meet Market

2008-07-04T14:36:00.001+10:00

When Joyce met Proust they exchanged a mere few sentences. When Celan visited Heidegger they spoke about - well, nobody knows, but it probably wasn't the weather. What did Borges and Ballard discuss during their epochal encounter in the late 1960s? (Simon Sellars, that scurrilous paparazzo, has the shocking photo!) Best guesses on the back of an envelope to the usual address.

I'm a big fan of "when such-and-such met so-and-so" stories, especially when the details are vague, possibly apocryphal. What really happened is impossible to pin down, so you get speculation, or a Rashomon-esque kaleidescope of viewpoints. (eg. Did William Burroughs once tell Ian Curtis to "fuck off"? Mr Sellars once again has the story.) Literary gangs (Bloomsbury, the Lost Generation, etc.) are interesting in their way but it's the run-ins between incongruous (or even incompatible) individuals that are especially tantalising.

It's harder to get worked up about encounters between contemporary writers, most of whom are distinctly unmysterious and relatively accessible. I saw Ian McEwan, Peter Carey and Paul Auster yacking with Jennifer Burne a couple of months ago on ABC and it had all the intensity, conflict and significance of an informal Rotary Club meeting. Writers are too present these days, always shilling their wares or appearing at festivals or worrying away in public at the gnawed and marrowless femurs of their political obsessions. You can watch them chat to one another on tv, you can read their blogs and newspaper columns, you can see them live at book signings and literary festivals and dispensing advice in creative writing classes. Honestly, you get sick of the sight of them - and then they want you to care about their bloody books!

I prefer shadowy figures, your Pynchons and DeLillos who hide out in bunkers for decades at a time before emerging (in Pynchon's case in cartoon form) to hand over their latest work before disappearing once more from sight. I also prefer dead figures, who are by definition shadowy (no: shady) and unknowable and whose interactions took place in that dim, inadequately documented time known as "the past". Am I saying dead authors are more interesting than live ones? Possibly. All I know is that I'll take Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson letters over Dear Four-Eyes, Dear Plummy Git: The McEwan-Amis Emails any day.

You used to be all right - what happened?

2008-07-03T19:38:00.003+10:00

I sometimes feel bad about how Sterne has changed from being a mostly creative enterprise with the occasional personal rumination thrown in when times were tough/good to being more or less an intermittent personal status update with the odd slice of hilarity/oddness posted (or reposted) for old time's sake. In the dead of night I do sometimes pine for the blog's golden days (roughly: October 2005) but then I remind myself that life changes and if I was still in the same headspace as I was three fairly eventful years ago then I'd be either an idiot or a fraud. I also remind myself that it's my blog: I built it up and I can run it into the ground by posting naught but inconsequential crapola if I want to.

Anyway, Pav's going to post every day of July and I've decided to join her. That's right, a whole month of inconsequential crapola! Strap yourselves in/on...

Recent Acquisitions #3

2008-07-01T09:31:00.006+10:00

Now with floral doona cover background.

That's not my bed, btw.

I'm mostly a library man these days, what with the whole not having any money thing, but I did recently buy two books I've wanted for ages. Motherfuckers was a bargain at around $40 (incl. postage from the UK) from eBay. I have a post coming up looking at this novel, as well as Keith Seward's recent monograph on the whole Lord Horror/Savoy multimedia mind-fuck of which it is a part, so I won't say any more here. I also want to write something about B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, which is the famous "book-in-a-box" that's been OOP for yonks but is now BIP and looking very spiffy.

The other book is The Pages by Murray Bail which I got for nothing.

Ask A Hyperactive Fat Kid

2008-06-26T12:57:00.004+10:00

Dear Hyperactive Fat Kid,

On the weekend my partner and I went to the movies. I wanted to see Monster-In-Law but he insisted we see Land of the Dead or Kung Fu Hustle. It seems like we always see the films he likes, and whenever I suggest something he complains until I give in. I love my partner, but I'd love him even more if we didn't have to see these horror and action movies all the time.

Marjorie

Hyperactive Fat Kid says: What? Are you out of your mind? Like, what's wrong with horror and action? Hang on. Mum! Mum! Where's the fuckin' Mars Bar Pods? Ah fuck, Jamie's eaten them all. Mum! Jamie's gone and eaten all the fuckin' Mars Bar Pods! Hang on, Marjorie, I'm on level three of Big Mutha Truckers 2. Ya got Xbox? Ah, shit. Where'd I put those Cheezels? Mum! Jamie's gone and eaten all the fuckin' Cheezels! Marjorie, you've got to step back and shit, all right? You don't want to see chick shit like Monster-In-Law. Man, I heard Land of the Dead is the sickest shit. Like, one scene you see this zombie like eating some guy's leg, and it looks real as! That reminds me: Mum! Jamie's gone and eaten all the fuckin' KFC! Mum!

Dear Hyperactive Fat Kid,

Recently I discovered some porn on the computer I share with my husband. It was nothing extreme, just naked women, but all the same I am offended and distressed that he feels the need to view such material. I want to ask him about it, but I also don't want him to feel like I've been snooping. What should I do?

Carolyn

Hyperactive Fat Kid says: Hang on, I'm just about to kill some dude on Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance. Oh! Take that you fuck! Whoa, hold up a sec, Carolyn. Did you say porn? Have you seen this thing, right, where the chick has like a fake dick strapped on her and she puts it in the other chick? Matthew Kingston showed me on his computer last week, his brother downloaded it or something. Ah, shit. Mum! Mum! Jamie's taken my Fiddy CD! What? 50 Cent! Give it back you fuck! Carolyn, you need to step back and shit, all right? Porn is like a natural thing. Like, you should see the shit Jack Bristow brought to school on his fuckin' iRiver last week! With like one guy and ten chicks and shit. Fuck! Jamie, give me the fuckin' CD back! You don't even know his fuckin' songs, you cunt! Yeah, fuckin' "Candy Shop", but what else, you fuck? Mum!

Dear Hyperactive Fat Kid,

I'm sixteen and fairly good looking, but I'm really shy. There's a girl in my class called Sarah. I really like her, but I'm so nervous around girls, and I don't think she even knows I'm alive. I really want to ask her out, but I don't know how to go about it. What's your advice?

Jason

Hyperactive Fat Kid says: Did you fuckin' see that? Jamie - check this out. Watch me shoot this dude. Ha! See his fuckin' face explode! Sorry, Jason, just playing some Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2. Ya got Xbox? Je-sus! Mum! Mum! Jamie's taken the fuckin' instruction book. What? Well, how am I supposed to fuckin' figure out how to fire the stun grenade thing without the fuckin' instructions? Yeah, fuckin' genius, Mum. Jason, you need to step back and shit, and...hang on, Jason? Jason "Pigfuck" Jones? Is that you? Are you talking about Sarah Carter? "Poo-sags" Carter? Haha, you're a fuckin' dirty cunt! She's a scrag, man, a fuckin' scrag. Ah, shit, hang on a sec. Boom! Jamie, did ya see the dude's head? Like blown to fuckin' pieces. Where's the fruit 'n' nut block? Fuck it. Mum! Mum! Jamie's picking the fruit out of the fruit 'n' nut block and chuckin' it at me! Stop it ya fuckin' wanker! Mum!

*

This post is part of an occasional series in which old material is reposted in order to distract attention from the paucity of new material. It originally appeared on August 23, 2005, hence the dated film/video game references.

Page 123, sentence 5

2008-06-26T11:15:00.003+10:00

Mr Lawrence has tagged me for a meme. I'm meant to take the nearest book, turn to page 123, and blog the fifth sentence. Well, the nearest book is Fowler's and the second nearest book is a thesaurus (I like to pretend I'm a writer), so I'll have to go for the third nearest book, which is The Victim by Saul Bellow:

He thought at first that it came from below, out of the subway.

This, of course, is from the scene in which our hero, Asa Leventhal, is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an army of ninja zombies on the heat-drunk streets of NYC. Suddenly there comes a deafening roar, followed by a cacophony of shattering glass, torn tarmac and screaming. There is another roar, and Leventhal, with his fist submerged in the brain pulp of an undead warrior, ponders its source. "He thought at first that it came from below, out of the subway." But Leventhal is wrong - dead wrong. The roar sounds yet again, echoing through the deserted borough. Could it be? thinks Leventhal. After all this time, has my nemesis returned? Dispatching the remaining ninja zombies with a hand-grenade (Leventhal: "I gotta hand it to you guys..."), Leventhal feeds a fresh bullet belt into his waist-mounted machine gun and walks off into the night, towards the Empire State Building and his destiny.

Anyway, I don't want to spoil the book for you, but suffice it to say that The Victim is one of Bellow's best early works with a body count higher even than that of the hardcore splatter-fest that is The Adventures of Augie March.

Mob Bores

2008-06-24T20:05:00.003+10:00

I have been playing a game on Facebook called Mob Wars. In the game you are cast as a mobster (whom you are allowed to name - I am of course Mick Gateau) and the object is to commit crimes and buy weapons and property and basically move up the mob rankings. I started playing Mob Wars because a lot of people at my most recent work were into it and I thought it would be a good thing fitting-in-wise if I got into it too. (Imagined conversation: "Hey Tim! Nice going on Mob Wars last night!" "Thanks, [co-worker]. Nice going by you, too!" "Thanks!" "No worries!" "Man, even though you've only just started here, we're already getting along so well, and it's all thanks to Mob Wars!" "Let's be best friends!" "Ok!") Then I quit that job, but for some reason I didn't quit Mob Wars, which is strange because Mob Wars, deprived of its social lubrication role, is a waste of time.

Mob Wars takes the things that make the Grand Theft Auto games fun - shooting people, driving getaway cars, shooting more people - and replaces them with clicking on buttons. Let's say there's a mission in GTA that involves smuggling liquor. You will probably be required to drive around town to various locations, secure an appropriate vehicle, maybe shoot some people, drive to the pick-up location, collect the booze, drive it to its destination, and so on, all the while trying to avoid being arrested or killed. You might get involved in a high-speed car chase, or you might be ambushed by rival gangsters, or whatever. The point is that it requires time and effort to complete the mission, time and effort that is repaid by the sheer fun of playing the game and the satisfaction of completing the mission. Now let's say there's a similar mission in Mob Wars. You will be required to point your mouse cursor at the button labelled "Smuggle Liquor", click said button, and...that's it. Mission accomplished! Here's your reward, now wait an hour while your energy levels recover and you can click again!

The thing that kept me playing this futile and non-fun game was the cumulative nature of its "rewards". You start off scrounging together funds to buy basic weapons and properties but after a week or so you start raking in serious cash which you can use to buy better weapons and properties, and also to pay for hits on rival mobsters. Of course once I moved into these higher levels it became obvious that it was just as unsatisfying to click a button labelled "Place the hit" as it had been to click on a button labelled "Commit mugging". Who'd have thought? Well, not me, apparently.

Anyway, I have removed Mob Wars from my profile and I will now go back to ignoring Facebook. Somebody please let me know if there's ever anything worth doing on there.*

*Obviously there's Scrabulous, the crack-like Scrabble knock-off. I went cold turkey six months ago after a night spent dreaming about triple word scores and I ain't going back.

Old Guy From the Bill & Ted Movies Dies

2008-06-24T19:21:00.002+10:00

The old guy who played Rufus in the Bill & Ted movies died the other day. He was 71, which is pretty old.

The old guy from the Bill & Ted movies rose to prominence when he appeared alongside Keanu Reeves and a young guy who wasn’t Keanu Reeves in the 1989 comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The old guy from the Bill & Ted movies cemented his position as the preeminent old guy from the Bill & Ted movies with an appearance two years later as Rufus in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Eager to capitalise on his sudden fame, the old guy from the Bill & Ted movies took on a diverse range of roles, including the voice of Rufus in the animated series Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures.

Aside from his extensive Bill & Ted-related career, the old guy from the Bill & Ted movies is best known for his monologue “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television”. David Mamet later adapted the seven words for the stage under the title Glengarry Glenn Ross.

Unemployed

2008-06-15T14:41:00.002+10:00

Sterne seems to have turned into a tedious personal blog so I might as well report the tedious personal news that I have quit my job. It probably seems like I quit jobs every other week, but in fact I held my last permanent position for just short of eight years. Commitment is not, therefore, an issue, which is perhaps part of the problem – I don’t want to commit to something that I know in my guts isn’t right, or at least tolerable.

I had doubts about this latest job from day one. I held off judgment for the first week but by the start of my second week it was obvious that I’d made a big mistake in accepting the position. Fundamentally, the job wasn’t suited to my skills and temperament; if I’d stayed, I would have been miserable and unsatisfied and this would inevitably have shown through in my work. The shitty pay was another huge factor. Without going into specifics, the job was management level, which requires a certain sense of personal responsibility towards the organisation and a willingness to do extra, unpaid, work if necessary. All fine, but surely those expectations must be backed by a reasonable salary or else the incentive is simply not there. You’re not there for your health, as my dad would say.

Anyway, it was a shit decision to have to make – stay at job I don’t like or go back to being unemployed? Some choice! – but I’ve made it and I am once again unemployed. Here comes that gnawing sense of dread again…