Author Archives: Nathan Hobby

From Lincoln to Little Dizzle: My favourite films in 2013

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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American Hustle

 New Films

1. American Hustle – a film of surprises, lit up by Amy Adams’ performance, with a script which knows how to use the conventions of drama while also being fresh and strange. The playful evocation of the seventies fascinated me.

2. Lincoln – the sort of serious drama I appreciate more and more as I get older. Review here.

3. The Great Gatsby – I thought at first the drama would be lost in the glitz, but in the second half, the film hits hard. Particularly devastating for me is the realisation that Daisy is not a good person.

4. The Turning – the adaptation of Tim Winton’s short story collection (my favourite work of his) misses the connections between the stories because each story is individually adapted by different creative teams, with different actors for the same characters. But this is also the film’s strength, a kaleidoscope of Australian talent around the theme of remembering the town you grew up in from middle age.

5. Mystery Road – this film noir set in the Australian outback makes my list on the proviso that I understand the ending next time I see it, because I was just confused. But it is an atmospheric clash of genre and setting as an Aboriginal detective returns to the town he grew up in to solve a murder mystery.

On DVD

1. Safety Not Guaranteed – a quirky drama-comedy about a reporter and his two sidekicks who go to answer a classified ad looking for people to accompany a time-traveller. It’s not about time travel at all; it’s about outsiders finding meaning in life. It stars one of my favourite TV actors (Aubrey Plaza) and is a surprise delight.

2. Seeking a Friend For the End of the World – a film which shares some of the same tone of Safety Not Guaranteed. It brings together two wonderful actors – Keira Knightley and Steve Carell (US Office) – wondering what to do when there’s only a couple of weeks left to live. It’s dark but funny and made me cry. A lot of critics didn’t like it; I respectfully disagree.

3. The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle – this is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and makes it on the list for being so bewilderingly interesting. My wife saw it on the videostore shelf and thought it worth trying; I’m glad of her serendipitous find. It’s like Fight Club meets David Cronenberg. After becoming addicted to experimental cookies discarded in a lab, an anarchist cleaner obsessed with the meaning of life gives birth to a blue fish creature. Obviously not a film for everyone. Unfortunately, it ends suddenly and unconvincingly, but even that’s part of the charm – like a dream which you suddenly wake up from.

My favourite books of 2013

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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brightabyss

1. My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer / Christian Wiman

A beautiful memoir of faith, doubt, death and poetry. I feel he gets to the heart of our existential dilemma as well as anyone I’ve ever read. I noticed in The Australian that Tim Winton had this as one of his favourites of the year too. I wrote on it here.

2. The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist / Martin Thomas

The amateur anthropologist R.H. Mathews lacked all reflexivity; he would not yield any of his secrets to his biographer, Martin Thomas. So, like great biographical questers before him, Thomas makes a narrative of the quest itself. This being the theme of my thesis, I found it riveting and beautiful.

3. Unapologetic / Francis Spufford

Much like Wiman, Spufford writes beautifully about faith, which is all too rare. Review here.

4. Dear Life / Alice Munro

Reviewers were falling over themselves to pin new superlatives to Munro’s work even before she won the Nobel Prize this year. I completely agree with them: her short stories seem perfect to me. I read this collection on a bus through Italy, giving both the landscape the flavour of Munro and Munro the flavour of Italy. I can’t hold in my head all the marvels of this collection; I just went back to my copy and, flicking through, I was shocked at how much I had forgotten. One which sticks is “Amundsen”, a story about a young woman’s doomed affair with an asylum doctor; it has the scope and profundity of a novel—as do many of the others.

 5. The Aspern Papers / Henry James

If I was reading more fiction, I would spend a lot of time with Henry James, because my failed attempts to read his longer novels have still given me some hint of his brilliance, if only I had the perseverance. I read his novella, The Aspern Papers, on the plane between Melbourne and Perth, and it absorbed me. Set in Venice, it is the elegiac story of a biographer desperately trying to win over the aging lover of a late poet to gain access to his papers. I got to see Venice later in the year, and I kept thinking of Henry James and the biographer walking the same strange streets I was walking. ‘Just here—this is where it could have happened.’

A note to Mrs Brown found in a box of books

21 Saturday Dec 2013

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The other week I found this typed fragment in a box of books. I don’t know if it had fallen out of one of the books (which had belonged to an academic interested in the philosophy of science) or from the box which was borrowed from the library which had donated the books to my library.

Mrs-Brown-typed-fragment-in-bottom-of-donations-Dec2013-cropped

I can’t even work out the genre of this found object. It reads like a letter, but it is not presented like one. Maybe the writer was practicing for a card or letter they were to write by hand? But what was on the rest of the sheet of paper? Why cut it out?

In layout it looks almost like a stageplay. I searched in case it was the piece of a script, but Google doesn’t think so.

And then there’s the content. I would like to know what an ‘HL’ is. I wondered if the Captain was linked to the Salvation Army, given the conversion and holy living testimony (is that what HL stands for?). Most mysterious of all – the rose!

It feels precious to me, this ephemeral glimpse, as mysterious as it is, into someone else’s life.

Quote

It is a rar…

07 Saturday Dec 2013

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It is a rare gift to make the intrinsically dull interesting, to tell you things you thought you didn’t want to know in a compelling manner – imagine a biography of Charles Lamb, say, that dealt exclusively with his nine-to-five at the East India Office and you have the literary equivalent – and Knight has that gift in spades.
– David Crane, reviewing Roger Knight, Britain Against Napoleon in The Australian, sec: Review, 7/12/13, p.18.

The best book reviews give important insights into what makes writing work, and this is one of those moments. The book’s subject matter is the ‘government contracts and procurement’ and the ‘mechanics of trade and finance’ powering Britain’s war against Napoleon. I almost want to read it, just to see how these things are made interesting.

Can you think of other examples of what the reviewer is talking about, the dull made interesting?

The Lion, the Dalek, and the Book Depository: the Juxtapositions of Coincidence

22 Friday Nov 2013

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The way we work, we wait for anniversaries to commemorate anything. It seems arbitrary; why not remember the things worth remembering spontaneously? That would never work. We need a roster of commemorations, something like the calendar of saints the church has. Since 9/11, the terrorist attacks has received a big annual commemoration, but already it has become smaller, except for the decade anniversaries. The last time anyone made a concerted commemoration of JFK’s assassination and the beginning of Doctor Who was ten years ago, and now their time has come again.

I like to make something of coincidences; it’s what drives the work of my favourite novelist, Paul Auster. The 22nd November 1963 was a day thick with coincidences. An hour before JFK was mortally wounded so publicly, C.S. Lewis had died quietly in his bedroom with only his brother around; twelve minutes before this, Aldous Huxley had also slipped quietly away. Lewis’s stepson tells of that day.   He learned of his stepfather’s death after news had broken of JFK’s death. Alister McGrath’s biography tells how Lewis was to be buried with few in attendance at the funeral. Christian apologist Peter Kreeft has written an expanded edition of Between Heaven and Hell, an imaginary posthumous conversation between Lewis, Huxley and Kennedy, three representative figures of the twentieth century.

But the anniversary the daily Google search page chooses to commemorate is that of Doctor Who – which doesn’t turn fifty until tomorrow, 23 November. The Doctor is a counterpoint to all those deaths, a messiah who can regenerate, who is not limited by space and time. Perhaps Kreeft should have added him to the conversation, but maybe that would just get silly.

The Monday after JFK was shot, Perth’s most infamous murderer, Eric Edgar Cooke went on trial. I remember the author of Broken Lives, the account of his murders, remarking that Cooke would have been sorely disappointed that his infamy was overshadowed by the death of JFK and then the death of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As much as that is true, Cooke’s years of terror shaped Perth far more than Kennedy”s death. Everyone who remembers that time in Perth has a story about Cooke, has a distinct memory of hot summer nights when they were suddenly too scared to leave the door open or sleep on the verandah.

I’ve read snide remarks by people sick of hearing about JFK’s assassination in these couple of weeks. Yet for me, it is endlessly fascinating, the quintessential American event. It brings together so many great American themes – presidential celebrity, criminal celebrity, the Cold War, the South vs the North, gun culture, and conspiracy theories. It has produced two novels I like immensely – Don DeLillo’s Libra and Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

The Doctor, JFK, C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Eric Edgar Cooke – such a bizarre and fascinating juxtaposition as only coincidence and history can serve up to us.

The “Self-Invented Man”: Debunking a Victorian Hero

04 Monday Nov 2013

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Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley John Bierman (Sceptre, 1990)

Abandonment, rejection, betrayal. These were the themes that haunted the inner life of the swaggering, assertive little man known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley… For Stanley, a mere mask was insufficient protection; he fabricated for himself a suit of armour, which it has taken almost a century to penetrate. (Opening paragraph)

Henry Morton Stanley was famously the journalist who “found” the missionary explorer David Livingstone. He is a classic subject for the debunking-a-Victorian-hero genre, because – if Bierman is to be believed – Morton was a compulsive liar, a storyteller who invented versions of his life to suit his purposes.
I’m only part-way through the book, but want to offer some initial reactions to its first part, “Self-Invented Man”. The book was a serendipitous find in a booksale; I was only vaguely aware of Stanley as a historical figure, but I am fascinated by the possibilities of Victorian biography. It exists outside the lifespan of anyone alive today (bar the handful of people born before 1900), so it is an archival genre of biography, yet it almost feels in touching distance: the world of the Victorians was a world my grandparents were familiar with, even if they didn’t directly live in it.

Bierman writes well, with requisite wit. He has just the right tone to write Stanley’s story. He has also chosen a fascinating subject.

The gift Stanley left his biographer was an autobiography and other writings which are demonstrably false. Early sections of Bierman’s biography read as an extended commentary on Stanley’s autobiography. A key passage of Stanley’s account is presented and then debunked. As one example, Stanley presents himself as a youthful hero in the children’s workhouse, standing up to the tyrannical master, a rebel campaigning for justice. Bierman finds a contradiction in Stanley’s own account – why, then, was Stanley left in charge of the other children when the master was away? – and deploys corroborating evidence (interviews with other inmates, the workhouse records themselves) to argue the reality was that Stanley was actually the teacher’s pet.

Unlike a biography I recently finished (that of South Australian author, Matilda Evans) Bierman has a wealth of material to work with, and I find the debunking process gripping. The contradictions and fabrications in Stanley’s account reveal so much about the subject’s character and the age in which he lived.

The choice of subject is surely paramount for the biographer. There are so many historical figures who cry out for attention, and yet before embarking on a biography of them, the question probably has to be: what traces have they left behind? What raw materials are there to work with? (Unless, perhaps, the greatest biographer can coax blood from a stone and produce a great biography of a subject who has left little behind. It would have to be a convincingly and fascinatingly speculative account.)

Australia’s greatest temperance novelist: Matilda Jane Evans, aka Maud Jeanne Franc

27 Sunday Oct 2013

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Matilda Evans caught my attention when I was reading a history of Baptists in Australia. A brief profile talked of her significance as the first woman to have a novel published in South Australia (1859). In all, she published fourteen novels. She was a deaconness and married to a Baptist minister. I discovered a full-length biography of her had been published in 1994 – Our Own Matilda by Barbara Wall (Wakefield Press).

Alas, Matilda is a difficult biographical subject. Despite extensive research, Wall was only able to uncover a few letters written by her, and just one photograph. If she kept a diary, we do not have it. But even if she had kept one, I doubt Matilda could ever become a compelling biographical subject: Wall does her best to redeem her and the conventionality by which she lived and wrote, but can only do so much. A number of Matilda’s novels were temperance novels; all of them were favourites for Sunday School prizes, safe novels which inspired piety and respectable living. Of course, I’m missing Wall’s main point here: she takes to task the generations of male critics who have ignored or trivialised Matilda’s writing for these reasons. Wall insists – rightly – that the novels are fascinating social documents, providing insight into South Australian colonial life and the attitudes of her time. Yet from her own argument, Matilda’s writing will be of more interest to the historian than the literary critic.

The book is of interest to me for its insights into biographical method. What is the biographer to do when the subject does not reveal themselves? Wall attempts to fill the gaps by speculating on the basis of Matilda’s novels, drawing parallels to places and incidents to reconstruct Matilda’s likely experiences, fleshing out the bare facts provided by education records, obituaries and newspaper ads. It is a dangerous method, likely to be dismissed as invalid by some critics, but it seems fruitful and her suggestions reasonable.

Yet somehow, the analysis never quite brings Matilda and her world alive. As an example – and I probably place too much weight on death scenes – but for me they should usually be one of the stronger moments of the biography; there should be a way to convey some of the significance of a person’s life in their death, or at least to show how their death fitted their life. The death in this biography only shows the ordinariness of Matilda’s life and the lack of information about her:

She died on Friday, 22 October 1886, of peritonitis, and was buried on the following Sunday…

I’m sure the historical record can yield no more than this, so what more can I ask of the biographer? I’m not sure. But perhaps it could be juxtaposed with an analysis of how Matilda saw death in her novels. Perhaps something of the place of death in Victorian-era Australia. Perhaps some background on death by peritonitis at that time. Perhaps even some more speculation about the circumstances of her death, drawing on social histories of death. Perhaps none of this would work; I’m only trying to anticipate method when I come to write a biography of my own.

Matilda Evans is perhaps not so neglected as Wall fears – there is another book looking at her literature; a thesis written on her and two other S.A. women writers, and an entry for her in Australian Dictionary of Biography. Abebooks reveals that her books (which remained in print right up until the 1930s) are worth hundreds of dollars. Our Matilda itself is an excellent piece of research, and a good analysis of her life and literature, aware of the shortcomings of Matilda’s writings while open to their significance.

Forgetting to bcc, time travel to a different season

11 Friday Oct 2013

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Recently I got a mass-email from this guy who went overseas years ago. He forgot to do a blind carbon copy, and all the email addresses were visible – a snapshot of his address book from 2004 or so. It was time-travel, the sight of all these email addresses next to each other. A window to a season of my life. Everyone’s scattered now, all these young christian leftists brought together by the Iraq War protests. Do they even use these same addresses any more? You won’t ever catch them all in the same room again. Too many schisms, divorces, deconversions, metamorphoses. That’s what your twenties do to you.

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You can tell things about people from their email addresses. Older people (Baby Boomers +) usually have ISP addresses – iinet, bigpond – and it’s usually in the name of the husband, even if the wife uses the account. (How many people sixty plus have you met with a gmail address?) People with a ‘hotmail’ address have had their address an awful long time. Attention-seekers have an attention-seeking email address. The great transition in my life, the change in epochs, was when I changed from ‘savageparade’ (it’s a quote from Rimbaud) to my name. I am pretty certain I changed personality at that moment.

The Tourist #6: The Soundtrack To My Holiday

07 Monday Oct 2013

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My music collection is on my laptop; I took with me my tablet, with just 150 of my 3778 songs. Who knew 150 songs would come to feel like so few, repeated again and again over the headphones and through the slivers of speakers? It feels like so few when I keep skipping half of them, and going back to the same few. Lisa Mitchell, “Land Beyond the Front Door”. Mazzy Star’s droning shoe gazing rock each time the coach guides put on their music. The comfort of Nick Cave’s title track “Push the Sky Away” without the rest of the album.

Then there were the buskers. Both times we walked to the basilica in Florence, the electric violinist was waiting for us in the square. She was trying to be Andre Rieu; my wife, a violist, hates Andre Rieu. In the busker’s own version of soulfully (sentimentally) she would play those overfamiliar classical pieces, and then throw in renditions of pop songs like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It was a kind of interesting torture standing in the queue.

I wanted to reward the buskers I thought were good. Above the ruins of the Roman Forum, a handful of Italians were playing catchy songs in their own language. I went up to put a Euro in their plate; the lead singer put his arm around me, wanting to know where I was from, and dragged me back, insisting my wife take a photo of me with them. He put his hat on me. She took the photo; I went to put a couple of Euros in his plate and escape, but his voice changed – it was 10 Euros for a photo! He was insistent, angry. We started walking away quickly; it was an unpleasant encounter, left me cautious of the buskers.

A musical highlight. In Cinque Terra, walking one morning between Vernazza and Monterosso along the cliffs, glorious saxophone music floated toward us. We came around the corner and the player, a man of seventy, was standing on a rock above the narrow, isolated path. I should have given him so much more than I did.

The other musical highlight. Arriving in Rome after a long day’s bus ride, late at night we venture out for a walk to the Pantheon, right near where we were staying. As we come to the massive ancient edifice, the Cure’s “Charlotte Sometimes” is playing so loudly, so freshly, the moment is so enchanted, that I tell my wife, “They’re playing a concert, right now, outside the Pantheon – we’ve stumbled on a free Cure concert!”. It seemed the sort of thing Robert Smith might do, but it does sound a little far-fetched, writing it down. It wasn’t the Cure, it was a taxi driver on his break, with an excellent sound system and the door of his taxi open. It was still magical, beholding the ancient pillars against the night sky to the sound of my favourite band, an unlikely but befitting soundtrack.

Sometimes I’m dreaming
Where all the other people dance
Sometimes I’m dreaming
Charlotte sometimes

The Tourist #5: Souvenirs

22 Sunday Sep 2013

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A week ago, we were on the island of Murano, the island of Venice famous for its glass-making. A thousand shops on the tiny place sold glass ornaments; many of the cheaper ones were selling Chinese-made ones. Trinkets were made in factories in a different world and shipped to this island to sell to tourists to have their piece of Venetian memorabilia. It seemed a strange thing to do. The authentic shops, or the ones trying to seem so, had up signs declaring that there was no Chinese glass to be found in their shop. Overwhelmed yet underwhelmed, we left Murano without having purchased anything but a hot chocolate.
Souvenirs must have meant so much more in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the possibility of travel opened up to so many more people, and each traveller was delighted to bring home a piece of the place they visited to remember it forever. But what do souvenirs mean in a globalised world when anything can be bought over the internet? And in our cluttered houses, with too much stuff, where no object can truly be treasured, only drowned out in the noise of our possessions.
We packed with no spare room in our bags at all. Our expectation was that we would bring home nothing but photographs, given our dislike of shopping and ideological disdain for souvenirs. Then, on the bus between cities, I was talking to an Australian couple who were collecting shot glasses from each city they visited; they showed me their latest from Lucerne. I said, “That’s going straight to the pool room!”; they laughed, but I’m not sure they got the reference. I was kind of jealous, imagining their cabinet full of slightly kitschy shot glasses to remember forever their great Europe trip. What was I going to have to show for my holiday? Did I really think my memories and photographs were enough?
I’d missed four cities already, but next city, I bought a fridge magnet. It would hold up documents on our fridge, and remind me of the exotic places I had been with an iconic image of the place in question. Never mind where it was made. Never mind how tenuous the link between the image and my experience of the city. I decided I would join the souvenir game.
I have done this knowing there’s something despicable about souvenir stands. (There’s one every twenty metres in the Vatican, it’s the worst for them.) They remind us we are tourists. They remind us we are a herd. They remind us we trying to capture our moment, capture the place in a trinket, and that, really, we have failed.  And still, today, before I left Florence, I made sure I’d got another magnet.