07 Saturday Jul 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
I found a good site for free blog headers:
http://www.freewebpageheaders.com/gallery/
You need to register, but so far I haven’t been spammed. Seems legit to me.
One of the problems with WordPress is the difficulty in customising it. I guess it’s made for professionals, rather than amateurs like me. But even an amateur can use a WordPress template with a customisable header and then use a header from the freesite above.
06 Friday Jul 2007
Posted in reading, Western Australia
Tags
It’s so cliched to like Tim Winton. He’s the only Australian novelist most people have heard of. As soon as I tell people I’m a novelist, they ask if I’m going to be the next Tim Winton. I’m never sure quite how to answer that.
Well, I used to answer it by being anti-trendy – disliking Tim Winton’s work and anything else that was trendy, anything that was read comfortably in suburban bookclubs, anything that the general population liked. I enjoyed being the only person in the world who didn’t like Tim Winton’s work.
But this was based on reading The Riders when I was fourteen and Lockie Leonard when I was eighteen.
Then in 2002 I begrudgingly read Cloudstreet, and had to admit it was excellent. (I read it again two years later.) I then went on and read Dirt Music and The Turning. When I read the Turning, I had to repent completely and admit to admiring Winton immensely. It is a brilliant book, with a clean lyricism that his other work doesn’t have. (The thing I like least about Winton is what most people like most – the vernacular, slangy writing.)
I also had to change my mind a lot when I discovered that he was deeply influenced by my favourite theologian – John Howard Yoder, the Anabaptist. I’ve written two simplified versions of Yoder’s work and was amazed that another Western Australian writer admired him.
So, I’d actually really like to have a conversation with Tim. And my opportunity came when a couple swapped tickets with Nicole and I at the Australian String Quartet because the wife had a cough and wanted to be at the back. I was promoted to the second row. A couple came in just before it started and were confused by the numbering. I said to the man, ‘You’ve got the right seat.’ He said, ‘Thanks, mate.’
And then I realised it was Tim Winton.
I spent the performance rehearsing what to say to him. I didn’t want to sound like one more wanna be writer who wants to talk to Tim Winton (ie “I’m a writer too”). But neither did I want to sound conceited (ie “I’m a prize winning novelist too – not the Booker, mind.”). And I didn’t want to talk to him because he was famous – I wanted to talk to him because he was interested in Yoder and wrote good books.
I thought of how he was such a private person and seemed to hate all the publicity. I thought of all the idiots that try to introduce themselves to him. And with my heart thumping away at the end of the performance, I kept silent and watched him walk away.
06 Friday Jul 2007
Posted in lists, reading, Western Australia
Tags
1. Patrick White – Voss
2. Gillian Mears – The mint lawn
3. Patrick White – The tree of man
4. Tim Winton – The turning
5. Morgan Yasbincek – liv
6. Tim Winton – Cloudstreet
7. Greg Egan – Axiomatic
8. Peter Carey – Illywhacker
9. Simone Lazaroo – The world waiting to be made
10. Peter Goldsworthy – Maestro
06 Friday Jul 2007
Posted in book review, reading
Tags
This is a strange book and helps me understand why earlier in his career Coetzee was compared to Kafka.
The novel is, in one sense, a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was itself based loosely on the story of the real life Alexander Selkirk. Susan Barton is marooned on an island where she meets a white man named Cruso and a black man named Friday who has had his tongue cut out. When she is rescued, she lives in England with Friday trying to survive and have her story written by Daniel Foe.
To read it simply as a rewriting is not enough, though. In another way, it feels like a parable about race relations and gender relations constructed around the myth of the desert island castaway.
The first part is told by Susan as her version of events. She is addressing Foe and all of it is set in speech marks, like Conrad’s Lord Jim. In the second part Susan writes letters to Foe – letters which are never read or received, adding a sense of futility. The third part is a more conventional first person narration.
A strange book; I don’t know what to make of it yet.
I will be adding quotes from the book here:
03 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in book review
Published in 1961, this is McCullers’ final novel. She died aged 50 in 1967, leaving an unfinished autobiography.
Clock without hands is a novel about death. It starts with Malone the chemist being told he is dying. Malone goes to visit his friend the Judge, a comic, corpulent Republican former senator in his eighties who drinks and pontificates on his own greatness, while fearing death and mourning his son, dead of suicide in his twenties. Most of the novel is concerned with the Judge, his grandson Jester and his amanuensis, Sherman the African-American with blue eyes.
This quote sums up the Judge and McCuller’s humour:
When the odour in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his faeces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him. So he sat there, relaxed and meditative, pleased with himself. (81)
McCullers is brilliant in being both humorous and profound. The Judge is a glorious character, so hilarious in his arrogance, in his grand scheme to revalidate Confederate currency (he has millions stored in the attic).
For more quotes, visit my quotes blog – http://othervoices.wordpress.com/tag/mccullers-carson/
27 Wednesday Jun 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
http://www.oneimaginaryblog.com/
It’s blogs like these that make me feel like a very inadequate Cure fan. John knows The Cure backwards and offers intelligent commentary and analysis of just about everything Cure.
27 Wednesday Jun 2007
Posted in music
My favourite band, the Cure, are coming to Perth. But one day after the tickets went on sale, the only place to buy tickets was on e-bay. Sellers in Melbourne were advertising twenty tickets for sale at $159. (The original price – $119 – already seemed excessive.)
I can’t believe how unethical I’ve become, because I even contemplated buying a ticket from one of these scum. But then I realised that I was perpetuating an injustice. As soon as everyone refuses to buy tickets from scalpers, they’ll stop doing it.
So I reconciled myself to not seeing the Cure. I decided to stop listening to them, because it was a painful reminder.
But then yesterday at lunch time I decided to go to the Ticketmaster outlet in the city. I don’t know how these things work, and neither did the girl at the counter, but she had restricted viewing tickets. So for $238 me and Nicole will be seeing the back of Robert Smith’s head – but at least the scalpers aren’t getting any money off us.
26 Tuesday Jun 2007
Posted in life
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People talk so much about life being a journey that it’s a standard way to talk and think about our lives.
But is life like a journey?
Journeys have a destination. Journeys are about getting from one place to another. Sure, they’re more than that; we should enjoy the scenery as we go. But in the end, if there isn’t somewhere we are headed, then we don’t set out on a journey.
Life doesn’t have a simple destination like that – unless it’s death. And death isn’t a culmination, a completion of life so far.
Unless you’re Elizabeth Kubler Ross.
Or maybe even in the Christian story – if death in Christian thought is not a destination as such, then it is at least the transition point to the Christian destination. Maybe it is the expectation of eternal reward or punishment at the end of life that has pushed this metaphor of life as a journey.
And that’s a very individualistic Christianity – it doesn’t factor in Christian hope for the renewal of the Earth, for the establishment of God’s reign on Earth.
23 Saturday Jun 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
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I feel, in the delightful words of my wife, ‘ensmallified’. I’m at work, sitting on the reference desk and the security guard I’ve been walking past every day for six months came up to me and asked me if I worked here. The desk had been closed till I got back, and he thought I was a member of the public.
21 Thursday Jun 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
I was born in 1981.
I’d like to think it was a good vintage, that year. My wife was born in 1981, too, and I think she’s good.
But the three most famous people in Australia I can think of who were born in 1981 are three of my least favourite people in the world –
Natalie Portman, nearly as famous, is a better ambassador for 1981 – slightly.
Who are the most famous people born in your year?
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 