Author Archives: Nathan Hobby

The Worst Piece of Casting in Literary Adaptation History

10 Thursday Feb 2011

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I hate it when people go on about how film adaptations spoil their favourite book. Don’t watch it and shut up. No-one likes a pedant. But first let me go on about this one point. It’s okay, it’s acceptable going-on, because it’s the worst piece of casting in literary adaptation history.

A.S. Byatt’s Possession describes literary scholar Roland Mitchell as shy and awkward. His nickname is Mole. Let me repeat that he is a literary scholar. And he is shy and mole-like. Now no-one likes typecasting or stereotypes. No-one would insist that literary scholars all look shy and awkward, but it is crucial to this story that he is.

Whatever the case, has anyone ever pictured a literary scholar to look like this? Like a big chinned Hollywood star?

Obviously some movie producer did. He read the script which described a shy, awkward literary scholar with a nickname of ‘Mole’ and the first name which came into his mind was Steven Segal. But Steven being unavailable, the next name that came into his head was Aaron Eckhart (whom I have nothing personal against). And so Eckhart became Roland Mitchell, with predictable results.

(On the other hand, Gwenyth Paltrow is perfectly cast as Maude, might I add.)

The Long Sunset

10 Thursday Feb 2011

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His early success, and now his long sunset. His brief peak in 1971 and now everyone wants him to play That Song. He talks a lot on stage. Like a sad old man in a pub, except the audience has paid to listen to him. He tells us stories, drops some names. He has had to become a performer. Once he was going to change the world. When you are a performer, you have to get the baby boomers to sing along, and you have to ‘play it like you mean it’ – when you don’t really mean it, because this is, in his estimation, the 15th-20th tour of Australia.  He told the audience they had a paid a lot of money, so he and the band would play it like they meant it.

He is polite, but the audience can hear the bitterness. At MP3s, at music these days, at the youth these days. And he keeps talking about That Song. Everything is dated by it, and if he’s not mentioning it directly, he’s hinting at it obliquely. He’s 65 now, and he said he imagines he’ll do this for another five years. His stories, they were trying to explain to the audience why he had done what he had done. An account of how he had spent his life. But it wasn’t to the audience, it was part of the inner struggle to keep his chin up, pull out that guitar, night after night, in the long sunset.

T-shirts: a memoir

19 Wednesday Jan 2011

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The other day, I saw a teenager in the supermarket with a t-shirt that said, ‘When I’m God, Everyone Dies.’ I wondered what made him pick it out at the shop and decide that he wanted to buy it, that he wanted this slogan to represent him in public.  Does he hate the world and wish we would die? Was he just being ironic? (There’s nothing indicating irony in the design.) Or did he not particularly think about it? Later, a google search revealed it’s a line from the Marilyn Manson song, “The Reflecting God”. Which doesn’t really answer the questions.

What does it mean to wear a t-shirt with a message?

For a time in my early twenties, I would nearly only wear t-shirts with messages. I was a billboard of anti-war and anti-capitalism messages as well as bands I liked. It showed the world what kind of person I was, I suppose. Maybe I thought it would also convert some people.

I don’t have too many t-shirts-with-messages. I have a Clash t-shirt, but that’s an accident, because I didn’t pack enough clothes for my honeymoon and when we got to Christchurch on a Sunday, it was the best option from the markets. I feel dishonest, as these days I don’t listen to the Clash, as the very low play count of their songs on my itunes will prove.

I didn’t consciously turn away from t-shirts-with-messages. But these days I’d rather be more anonymous. Maybe it’s a part of being old.

I should be understanding of people who do wear t-shirts-with-messages. But many of them are disturbing. Not usually in the way of the ‘When I’m God…’ example. More often in their banality. What does it mean to wear a t-shirt saying, ‘I can only please one person per day. Today isn’t your day…and tomorrow don’t look good either’?  There’s quite a few of these kind of t-shirts with a standing joke, often postured slightly against the world or against women, or against men. I can understand a t-shirt promoting a cause, or a band, but what do these do? Is this as close to an ideology as a certain kind of person goes? Perhaps people are actually wearing their philosophy of life and they just wanted to share it with us. I don’t know.

My Favourite Novels In 2010

14 Friday Jan 2011

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What a year of novels! I found at least five I loved.

This list does not include the big pile of novels I discarded. So all of these had some merit, or I wouldn’t have finished them.

1. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004), USA
It got even better this second time I read it, a novel which embodies grace and what it means to be alive. 10/10

2.  Freedom – Jonathan Franzen (2010), USA
It is a deeply perceptive novel. Franzen is smart and cynical, but he knows how to break my heart and then patch it up again with hope. He knows our inner worlds, and he also knows the outer political worlds. He seems to know everything. 10/10

3.  Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) , Brit
A devastating tale of a dystopian childhood and youth. I’m still waiting for the film to be released in Australia. 9/10

4.  Home, Marilynne Robinson (2008) USA
The companion to Gilead; some will find it ‘slow-burning’, others ‘boring’, but I came to love it. 9/10

5.  Journey Through Space – Toby Litt (2009) USA
A ship travelling to the nearest habitable planet at 1/10th light speed, taking generations to get there – what an amazing concept. Litt covers the span well and the civilisation of the ship comes to symbolize the behaviour of humanity broadly. It is bleak and sad, but also fascinating and compelling. 9/10

6. Cold Mountain [audiobook] – Charles Frazer, Charles (1997) USA
A cruel ending sours an incredibly rich and beautiful account of the dark days of the Civil War.  8/10

7.  On Beauty – Zadie Smith, (2005), Brit
An engrossing drama-comedy set around a university. She perceives the young and old well, it seems to me. 8/10

8.  Rabbit at rest – John Updike (1990) USA,
It was a perfect book last time I read it; what changed? 8/10

9.  Howards End – E.M. Forster (1910) Brit, 8/10

10. The Final Solution [audiobook] – Michael Chabon (2002)
Delightful, wise descriptions of life are what this novella are about, rather than the detective story. Missed crucial aspects listening on tape – like the fact the ‘old man’ is, of course, Sherlock Holmes! 8/10

11.    The Bell Jar [audiobook] – Sylvia Plath (1962) USA, 8/10

12.    Solar – Ian McEwan (2010) Brit, 7.5/10

13.    Unless – Carol Shields (2003) Canada, 7/10

14.    Oranges are not the only fruit – Jeannette Winterston (1985), Brit, 7/10

15.    The Reincarnation of Peter Proud – Max Ehrlich  USA (1974)
There is a satisfying narrative symmetry to The Reincarnation. It begins with Peter Proud’s recurring dream from his previous life of being drowned in a lake at night by a woman named Marcia, and it ends with this same woman drowning Peter in his current life.  The plot is well structured. Peter Proud has disturbing, recurring dreams of his past life. He seeks answers from a sleep researcher, a clairvoyant and a ‘psi-researcher’ in order to recover his past. But the break-through comes when he sees footage on television from the town where used to live, and eventually tracks it down. Once he’s discovered who he was, he has two tasks to juggle: he finds his daughter and wife (Marcia) from his previous life and learns as much information he can from them; and he re-enacts each of the recurring dreams, as the re-enactment has some sort of psychological healing effect on him – it stops coming back. 7/10

16.    The American – Henry James (1877) USA, 7/10

17.    In A Dry Season – Peter Robinson (1999) Brit, 6.5/10

18.    The Lovely Bones [audiobook] – Alice Sebold (2002) USA, 6.5/10

19.    Sunset Park – Paul Auster (2010) USA, 6/10

20.    A Personal Matter – Kenzaburo Oe (1964) Japan, 6/10

21.    That eye, the sky – Tim Winton (1986) Aust, 6/10

22.    The Three Evangelists – Fred Vargas (2006) France, 6/10

23.    So Much For That – Lionel Shriver (2010) USA, 5/10

Murdering Stepmothers – Anna Haebich (2010) Australia (Unrated)

When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro, Brit (Unrated)

Book Review – Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

18 Saturday Dec 2010

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Alas, Paul Auster has fallen short this time.
If it’s an experiment, it’s an experiment which doesn’t work. We start off with Miles Heller, a man in his twenties running away from his past, and earning money by clearing away stuff people have left in repossessed houses. He likes to take photos of the things he’s left behind. I thought that was going somewhere, but I think Auster forgot about it.
Miles is forced to return to New York, and we end up reading chapters from the perspective of each of the housemates he is squatting with, as well as his estranged father.
It’s a novel chockful of Austeresque concerns, and yet it spreads way too thin without adequately developing any of them. To tell all the stories he begins in this novel, he would need to write a 900 page tome.
I wish Auster would finish what he starts. In many of the books he’s published in this flurry of the last ten years, he disrupts the narrative unnecessarily. If he achieved something by doing this, then by all means he should. But I feel that generally he has achieved very little.
I can’t generalise too much here; certain kinds of disruptions are part of Auster’s magic, but now they’re stopping him telling the story which seemed to be burning bright in his mind at first. (And yet in his previous novel, Invisible, I felt the frame narrative actually worked well.)
Side note: in almost every Auster novel, he features a protagonist who was born in 1947, his own year of birth. In this novel, it is Miles’s father who was born in that year. He’s moved onto the next generation; most of the characters are his children’s age.
Concluding note: it was enjoyable enough to read, especially when each chapter is taken on its own. Auster gets a chance to write at length about baseball, luck, loneliness and reconciliation. It just all adds up to less than it should.

[Book review] Cold Mountain

18 Saturday Dec 2010

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Thirteen years after Charles Frazier’s American civil war novel was at the top of the bestseller list, I’ve finally read it. Or listened to it, actually. Frazier himself has been reading it to me in the car for several weeks now, and he has a beautiful voice, well suited to the story he has to tell.

In one strand of the story, I journeyed with Inman as he faced obstacle after obstacle on his way home to his fiancee, Ada. It had an episodic feel to it; no particular progression to the various encounters – they just happened, as he comes across friend and foe and in between. In the other strand of the story, Ada is helped to look after the farm she has inherited by the plucky Ruby. I loved Ada for her deep intelligence, impracticality and compassion.

[spoiler alert]

It’s a novel with the same kind of meditative beauty and innate violence as Cormac McCarthy’s work, but I thought Frazier’s world was a less cold one, that he had to give Ada and Inman the happy ending they deserved – that the reader deserves.

But he doesn’t. Inman returns to Ada only to be shot down, almost randomly, a few pages from the end. I don’t think Frazier should have done that, not even if the source history he was vaguely working from demanded it. It undercuts the long journey toward reunion that forms the rest of his novel. We know McCarthy’s world is cruel; we expect it. But your world, it seemed a little kinder.

Yet there are antecedents. So many moments of chance, and of good luck falling Inman’s way; maybe Frazier was only trying to balance things out. At one point Frazier is shot and even shallowly buried. Later, another character is also shot and left for dead. Both of them survive. Despite all the driving power of chance in the narrative, moments like these stretch credibility.

Yet it is a beautiful book, rightly canonised, which has much to say about life, as well as telling a familiar yet beautiful story.

He liked to listen to the babble of voices

09 Thursday Dec 2010

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The radio is one of my comforts in this life.

My first radio was red and ran on batteries. I won it as a prize in a fundraising activity in Year 1. I don’t remember what we had to do, but I do remember the fear of asking people if they would give money to sponsor me balanced against the hope of winning the Brownes Dairy Pack or, if I cracked $50, the red radio. I do remember that Tammy raised several hundred dollars and got to meet Daryl Somers from Hey Hey It’s Saturday. We were all so jealous.

I used to love to listen to my red radio just for its novelty. Perhaps that’s how I got into football and cricket as a child. Listening to the broadcasts on my red radio, being just like Dad.

When I was about eight, Dad came home with a new tape player, and I inherited the old stereo, the one with the broken tape player but a working radio. It had short wave, which I thought was the most wonderful thing in the world.

I spent a long time roaming the short wave band, amazed to pick up signals from America and England. I found an American religious program once, which made me proud, because people I knew would always complain about how the radio and the tv were so anti-Christian. I told Mum excitedly, but she didn’t want to listen to the American religious program. She said there were a lot of strange Christians in America, which confused me, because the things they said sounded a lot like church.

The short wave signals were always fleeting. If I moved the radio in the wrong way, they would disappear. Even if I didn’t move the radio, the Earth would move, I suppose, and the signal would go.

I liked to go to sleep with the radio on, a friend in the dark, murmuring.
Growing up near Collie in the 80s and 90s, we had two stations on AM – ABC Local Radio and Radiowest – and one on FM, Classical FM. Perth was a wonderful place full of more radio stations than you could even think of. It wasn’t till after we moved to Bunbury that Triple J came.

For me and my brother, our teen years were a desperate struggle with Mum and Dad about music. We wanted our alternative rock music – The Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Radiohead, Metallica for a while – on the radio and the tape player, in the car and in the kitchen. Mum liked quiet; Dad hated swearing. The war was long and unresolved. Triple J came close to a complete ban a number of times. I didn’t listen to the voices so much then, and the old radio had broken completely. But I did listen obsessively to Triple J. I remember listening to the entire Hottest 100 from start to finish when I was 17, and knowing every song. Oh, I was lonely, and horrified with myself by the end.

When did my addiction to Radio National begin? It’s come upon me slowly, but now I know every program on Radio National and I listen to it at all hours of the day and night. When I stopped going to uni – well, I never really stopped going to uni, but when my undergrad days ended – Radio National took up my education.

Milan Kundera knows what it is to love and need the radio, not the music but the talking:

Out of despair, out of nervousness, she turned on a little radio beside her pillow. To get back to sleep she wants to hear a human voice, some talk that will seize her thoughts, carry her off to another place, calm her down and put her to sleep; she switches from station to station but only music pours out from everywhere, sewage water music, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, and it’s world were she can’t talk to anybody because everybody’s singing and yelling, a world where nobody talks to her because everybody’s prancing around and dancing.
-Identity, p.124

A surveyor rang the other day, wanting to know about radio listening. My instinct was to hang up, but instead I did his survey, because I am addicted to radio. I could not do his survey very well, though. He almost grew exasperated with me, because every answer was ‘Radio National’ or ‘Newsradio’ or, reluctantly, because it is so middlebrow, ‘720 ABC Local Radio’. ‘But don’t you listen to any music on the radio?’ he asked. No, I should have told him, there is no station which plays Morphine, the Cure and Regina Specktor with no ads and no competitions. But he wanted to know who had the best competitions. I told him I hated those competitions SO MUCH. This is one thing I could still be passionate about. How DESPICABLE commercial radio is. How much I HATE commercial radio competitions. Never mind the music. It sounds so terrible too. Always holding a single emotional note of manufactured states of love or disappointment.

No, I live in Radio National, where everyone is serious, and everyone is thinking, all of the time. They talk to me about the state of the world. About politics, religion, identity, books and history. They do it all night and day. I weary of it sometimes, but I’m addicted, so I keep listening.

Sylvia Plath on tape

01 Monday Nov 2010

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This year we bought a car with a working tape player, and having played my Best of Leonard Cohen tape to death, I’ve started listening to books on tapes. The limited selection at the public library forces me to listen to things I might not have read in print, which is good. It also makes me realise how much driving I do, when I get through a nine hour audiobook in a bit over a week.

I finished Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar a couple of days ago, and I liked it a lot. Esther, the narrator, is far more spunky and interesting than I thought she would be. It’s a classic tale of adolescence; a comparison to Catcher in the Rye is inevitable but helpful. Bell Jar is set in 1953; Catcher in 1949; both are set in New York.  Esther (born 1934) and Holden (born 1933) must have nearly have crossed paths a few times in their lives. They might have really liked each other. They both end up in mental hospitals too.

It was strange to think Sylvia Plath was born the same year as my Granny: they are from different worlds, it wasn’t the same milieu, growing up in Eastern US and Perth. No hopes of college or poetry for my Granny. It’s as much about personalities, I guess.

The voice of the woman reading the tape was all wrong; she was old, and I hated it when she did men’s voices or foreign accents in this screwed up kind of voice.

How different is it, listening to a book versus reading it? You can’t control the speed – that’s significant; it keeps rolling on, regardless. My mind drifts and I miss things. I get through more, because I’m less likely to stop, fatigued by the page. But what about cognition?

An eerie thing, Esther surviving her suicide attempt to tell the story, and I feel there’s a kind of optimism to her life, but this feeling is tempered by the knowledge that Plath killed herself soon after the book was published.

Weeding and the meaning of life

04 Monday Oct 2010

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I was thinking on the weekend, it’s definitely easier to believe in a benevolent world on a sunny spring day. But just a few clouds, an overcast day – well, the world looks different. I get prone to a certain kind of ennui.

I pulled out some weeds on the weekend. This is becoming a more common occurence. I was once very resistant to pulling out weeds. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a 3 acre property, with probably nearly an acre devoted to well-tended gardens that seemed to consume my parents’ entire weekends. I didn’t want to become like that. But now I see houses with no garden and I think they’re ugly, depressing. I have begun to see why people spend time in gardens.

One of the problems was that there seemed to be nothing to do in gardens except gardening. As much as we put out chairs and tables in gardens, very few people just enjoy their garden. I certainly have trouble doing so.  If only I could sit still outside and read a book! But I’m very bad at this; never comfortable.

Another problem was my tendency – starting in childhood – to divide the world and its tasks into ‘meaningful’ and ‘unmeaningful’. Anything which was repetitive, like pulling out weeds which would grow back, tended to be put into the ‘unmeaningful’ basket. Never mind that everything in life really fits that basket. No wonder I had such unrealistic expectations of life I have spent my twenties disabusing myself of.

Kathleen Norris writes incisively of making one’s bed as an act of hospitality to yourself in Acedia and Me.  I now believe this in theory, though I still have trouble doing it. I’ve always had troubles with routines. I think one thing I’m learning to accept in life is routines. I’m learning to see them as usually necessary and sometimes good. Yet they lull me into my my boring self, that’s what I fear.

Because too often in recent years, people see the wrong side of me, or they see something that’s really only a part of me. Me in safe mode, a librarian not wanting to stand out for the wrong reasons. The struggle between standing out and not standing out. (This has something to do with the stalemate between 1 and 4 in my personality on the Enneagram, not that I’ve really looked into it.) I have come to detest in myself and others acts designed to stand out for their own sake, without substance, attempts to get attention. It’s easy to offend, especially if you dull your empathy with the roar of righteous indignation or ambition.  These days, I’ve resolved to only offend or stand out when I really have to.

Fear of offending has made me so careful what I write on my blogs. Oh, the things I used to write on those blogs which a failed server in the USA obliterated! Perhaps they have grown in my memory. But I was fearless, reckless, ready to tell everything to everyone. Perhaps this post marks the return of getting personal, as inoffensively as a gentle truthfulness allows.

[Book Review] Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

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Jonathan Franzen / Freedom (Fourth Estate 2010)

Let me fall over myself to be the next one to breathlessly call for the premature canonisation of this book. Franzen has written what might well be a masterpiece to sit neatly next to his previous masterpiece, 2001’s The Corrections. It is similar enough to satisfy all of us who wanted more of the same, and different enough to stand on its own as a major work.

It’s about a lot of things, but more than anything it is the novel of the marriage between Patty and Walter Berglund, and their attempt to live in the world of the noughties, more particularly the America of the noughties. At one crucial point Patty is reading War and Peace, and it’s a breaktakingly arrogant comparison for Franzen to invite, and yet one that is possibly justified. It doesn’t have the sweep of Tolstoy’s novel, but it spans the years and branches out to involve us deeply in the lives of secondary characters and make us care so much about them. And it has taken the pulse of a milieu so precisely, evoking what it’s meant to live in this crazy past decade, the Bush years, the Iraq War, the shadow of 9/11.

Patty has always lusted after Walter’s bad boy best-friend, Richard the alt-rocker. She has also set up her life in opposition to the ‘arty-farty’ New York bohemian lives of her family, and this is what drives her to excel at basketball and then marry Walter the Minnesotan environmental lawyer, disciplined, earnest and good. Walter’s problem is that he has always tried so hard to be good and despite succeeding splendidly at it, his life is not working out quite right. Patty is depressed and resentful, partly because he is so good, partly because their son Joey has abandoned her suffocating love and shacked up with the ‘white-trash’ girl next door. Adding to the pressure on Walter is the fact that he has taken up the cause of protecting an endangered species of bird and in doing so has ended up on the payroll of the very forces of greedy conservatives he set out to spend his life opposing.

The novel has a disorientating time structure and several shifts in narrative point of view. It starts out with a somewhat distant omniscient narrator relating the story of Walter and Patty through the 1990s, partly through the eyes of their neighbours, giving hints of much of the plot to be developed later on. Then we shift to Patty’s confession, written at the behest of her therapist in the early 2000s. She writes in the third person to distance herself a little, telling the story of her life as a kind of apology to Walter, calling it ‘Mistakes Were Made’. After this we have the actual core of the novel (just when we thought Patty’s confession might be that), a third person narration stretching from p.191-p.503 and telling the events of 2004, when everything comes to a head, through sections seen through both Walter’s eyes and those of his rebelling son Joey. There are two short epilogues, Patty’s conclusion to her confession written six years later, and then, giving the novel a symmetry, a third person narration rounding off Walter and Patty again told through the eyes of the neighbourhood.

It is a deeply perceptive novel. Franzen is smart and cynical, but he knows how to break my heart and then patch it up again with hope. He knows our inner worlds, and he also knows the outer political worlds. He seems to know everything.

10/10