Christmas Shopping

Alas, Santa Kev hasn't visited me with a bonus.

However I decided to keep on keeping on with another year of Christmas shopping.

I can't give away the exact detail of my purchases (who knows, the children might be listening in), but I can reveal the secret structure to my modest investments into the economy.

This year I've decided to invest in these industries: 1. Books (surprise, surprise!!) 2. Wine (ditto) 3. Yoga 4.Theatre and music. 5. Tea.

All Aussie and homegrown (except the tea).

Email me for tips.

Booklist 2008

This year I've managed to keep a list of the books I've read. Here it is with some annotations about the books and where I obtained them. I've set them out in the order in which I read them.

William Dalyrymple, The Age of Kali. Indian travel/history. Borrowed from a friend. My second reading.
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky. Novel set in North Africa. Borrowed from a friend. Second reading.
Sarah Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Essays about writing in America post-9/11. Borrowed from a library.
Murray Bail, Notebooks 1970-2003. Australian writer's notebook. Library copy.
Sarah Hobson, Family Web- A Story of India. Anthropological study of village life in South India. Library copy.
Arthur Miller, Timebends. Autobiography by the great American playwright. Purchased at secondhand book sale.
Hannie Rayson, Inheritance. Play set in rural Australia. Secondhand copy.
Sophie Cunningham, Geography. Novel. From my own collection. Second reading.
Helen Garner, The Spare Room. New Australian novel which I bought this year.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Towers. History of the background to the 9/11 attacks. Library copy.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Classic philosophical memoir. Secondhand.
Sophie Cunningham, Bird. New Australian novel. Free review copy.
TimeLife books, Russia Beseiged. History of Russia in world war two. Library copy.
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog. New Australian novel. Library copy.
Maryanne Robinson, Gilead. Novel. Friend's copy.
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Bookclub. Novel. Library copy.
Fiona Capp, Musk and Byrne. New Australian historical novel, set in Daylesford. Library copy.
Murray Bail, The Pages. New Australian novel. Bought new.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Nights. Detective novel. Library copy.
Amitav Ghosh, Field of Poppies. New Indian novel. Birthday gift.
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosone. Novel. Secondhand copy.
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons. Play. Own collection. Re-reading.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Novel/history/philosophical essay. New translation. Friend's copy. Second reading.
Heather Vicenti, Too Many Tears - An Autobiographical Account of Stolen Generations (Meme Media), new copy.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles. Autobiography, Secondhand copy. Second reading.
Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With. Autobiography. Secondhand.
William Shakespeare, King Lear. My collection. Re-reading.
Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps. Travel in Africa. Library copy.
Richard Greene (ed.), Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. Writer's letters. Library copy.
Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri. Memoir. Library copy.
Henning Mankell, Firewall. Detective novel. Secondhand.

They are the books I have on my list so far this year.

And now - drum roll please Maestro!
I am pleased to announce the inaugural Gold Camel Award for the best book read by me in 2008.
The award goes to -
Count Leo Tolstoy for War and Peace.
Congratulations Count Leo!
Round of applause.

In making this award I would like to thank the sponsors: friends, op shops, garage sales. bookfairs, public libraries, schools etc

What have others been reading in 2008?

Recession poetry

I've been wondering about the poets who sing the songs of the hard times.

The Australian poet, Bruce Dawe, comes to mind. He writes about ordinary people in the context of historical events and the society they live in.

'Sometimes Gladness', the collection of Dawe's poems written between 1954 and 1992, has been studied by thousands of high school students in their senior years at school and it's one of my favourite books of poetry.

The poem, 'Drifters' was written in 1968 when Australia was supposedly in an era of full employment. The people in this poem have very little but there is also a certain richness in their lives in the sense of close family connections and connection with the natural world. How recognisable are Dawe's drifters in Australian society today?

Drifters

One day soon he'll tell her it's time to start packing,
and the kids will yell 'Truly?' and get wildly excited for no reason,
and the brown kelpie pup will start dashing about, tripping everyone up,
and she'll go out to the vegetable-patch and pick all the green tomatoes from the vines,
and notice how the oldest girl is close to tears because she was happy here,
and how the youngest girl is beaming because she wasn't.
And the first thing she'll put on the trailer will be the bottling-set she never unpacked from Grovedale,
and when the loaded ute bumps down the drive past the blackberry-canes with their last shrivelled fruit,
she won't even ask why they're leaving this time, or where they're heading for
- she'll only remember how, when they came here,
she held out her hands bright with berries,
the first of the season, and said,
'Make a wish, Tom, make a wish.'

What's Out There

Going up the Newell Highway towards Queensland one passes through an array of anonymous towns, big and small: Dubbo, Forbes, Parkes, West Wyalong, all highway towns and 'anonymous', or should I say 'homogenous'? That is, they tend to be more or less the same, at least on the surface. It's the chain stores that give them that sameness: the Newspower chain of newsagents, the Targets, the Subways, the MacDonalds. Once past Dubbo the character of old country towns begins to assert itself and the homogeneity starts to fade. Swing back closer to the Blue Mountains, closer to Sydney, and the country town character is retained in places like Mudgee.

There are plenty of stories out there. Country music, Ned Kelly, the surprising string of observatories that start at the huge Parkes radio telescope and stretches into a cottage industry of homebuilt observatories up and around Coonabarabram where the Siding Spring Anglo-Australian Observatory is located inside the Warrumbungle National Park. The skies are wide up there, the nights are dark and there's a sweet quality in the air.

The area around Mudgee is Henry Lawson territory. There's a Lawson Museum in Gulgong, just north of Mudgee and the town has an annual Lawson Festival.

In Mudgee I sat for a while on the Lawson Seat, an old stone seat set into the wall that surrounds St. John's Church of England. A plaque records the date of Lawson's birth, 17 June, 1867, and his death, 2nd September, 1922. It also records a lovely fragment from one of his poems:
'I come with the strength of the living day
And with half the world behind me.'
Further up the road the beautiful Lawson Park is surrounded by a huge stone wall built in 1933, possibly as a Depression-era project. The plaque there reads that the wall was 'built by virtue of a government grant and voluntary labour gangs. The stone was brought from the Mt. Frome quarries by local farmers using their Clydesdales and wagons.'

As we drove along from town to town listening to the sound of falling stock markets on the car radio I wondered who are the poets of this Depression-era? Will we also build walls round parks dedicated to poets?

About War and Peace

War and Peace is like a vast inland sea. It's huge; there's so much room to swim around in; you can't see the other side; you can't even see the middle from the shore.

One of the great characters of the book is General Kutuzov, the real-life general who was commander-in chief of the Russian army against Napoleon in 1812. Kutuzov retreated and allowed Napoleon to occupy Moscow, much to the disgust of other ambitious generals, and to the Russian emperor's court who were holed up in Petersburg. Tolstoy admired Kutuzov and spends many pages defending his actions which saved Russia and caused the French to lose their whole army in the long run. Tolstoy contrasts Kutuzov with Napoleon in his discussion about the 'great man' which is a major idea in the book - an idea he 'essays' upon rather than 'novelises' about, hence the debate on whether W & P is really a novel.

Be that as it may, now that I'm out of the sea of W & P, I've been splashing around with my usual magazine reading (fifteen minute swots while I'm waiting for the spuds to cook) and found in the latest Vanity Fair an article about Vladimir Putin. It's all about what a mysterious and possibly sinister figure he is, but I was struck by the prosaic fact of how he gets to work. He drives, actually he's driven in impressive style, along the Kutuzovsky Prospect. Hey, I know what that street's about! I've read War and Peace!

Yes, this is highly digressive, but the point I want to make is how often a really good book can illuminate landscapes for the reader. Writing inscribes all sorts of meanings onto the landscape and, for me, it's one of the chief joys of reading.

I'm about to take off for a short trip into the backblocks of NSW. No particular destination in mind, but I'm wondering what kind of writing I'll find attached to NSW country towns? Bush ballads, tales of wandering poets, grim stories of massacres, heroic stories of settlement? What's out there?

Reading

How do you like to read? I'd love to hear how different people go about their reading lives.

For the last ten days or so my main activity and preoccupation has been reading War and Peace, the great Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy. It became the centrepiece of my days; it dominated my thoughts, dreams and moods. I first read it many years ago in an old Penguin edition but recently a friend loaned me a new translation of the work which came out in 2007. Published by Viking, this edition is translated, introduced and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book is long, more than 1200 big pages. Except for the last section of the Epilogue, I found it a thrilling and profound page-turner.

I feel its effect is still filtering down into my mind. I want to think about it more before I say too much about it. One thing's for sure though: it's put me off all other novels for the time being at least. (That's not counting the odd bit of crime fiction which I put into another category.)

Tolstoy has blown away the cute little plan I had going for reading books on the Man Booker Prize list. I'd managed to reserve the Booker Prize books from my local libraries but when I went to collect them I just couldn't face them any more. I'll read a thousand pages of Tolstoy with glee but please, don't ask me to read a big modern door stopper - not now, not any more.

Novels were once considered dangerous, immoral, a device of the devil and there's still a touch of that around in the sense that reading a novel all day, day in and day out, week in and week out, is regarded as being idle, being lazy, doing nothing. When, as we all know, wisdom and moral strength is found in being busy (but not busy reading novels). Yet for me the best way to read is to go about it seriously, get right into the book and make it the centre of daily life. This also goes for non-fiction reading.

Spring

May I say, right at the start, I'm having trouble with blogging. Can't find the full 'compose' view. The only help I have available to me are the spellchecker and the image icon. No linkmaker, no block quotes function, no html. One of these days a red-legged goddess will pop in and all my technical problems will be solved; until then I intend to continue on with words and hope readers will bear with me. I can only give you link addresses. (I suspect all this may have to do with the way Safari is operating on my machine) - but then, maybe not.

Ahem. As I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted by all this techno whatnot, it's spring!

Two days ago it was the Spring Equinox which means from now on in south-eastern Australia our hours of sunlight will be increasing until we come to the Summer Solstice which falls on December 21 this year. The meaning of this is clearly explained and illustrated in a one page document at the Victoria Museum's website at www.museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/infosheets/Planets/The-Sun-and-the-Seasons - just Google it.

On the day of the equinox I stuck a small stake in the ground out the back of my house to mark the point of shadow from the back veranda at noon. The sun is getting closer to the house and I know this for a fact because the equinox stake is much closer than the one we (me and my scientific adviser) put in at the time of the Winter Solstice - around about 7 feet closer (what's that in metres?). I'm not sure what we can do with this 'knowledge' - or should I say 'data'?- but it all looks good alongside the rain gauge where we also do some measuring.

Meanwhile in the animal kingdom the possums are showing themselves in the evening and junior is on her mother's back as they spring from the roof onto the walnut tree, then woodshed and a leisurely stroll to the compost heap to snack on juicy leftovers.

Over at the lake the Wood Ducks (aka Maned Goose or Chenonetta jubata), are bringing out their babies. Mum and dad stand guard as the little ones feed on the grasses round the lake. The parents hiss at passing cars and the whole family group heads back into the water at any sign of danger. Smart animals.

In the garden blossoms abound and the camellia tree is showing its brilliant red flowers. They were always out for mum's birthday. During winter I wrote about them in this poem for my mother. I called it 'Spring'.

Spring will come
and mother's tree will glow
dark red
again.

She liked a bit of colour:
polka dots on crisp cotton,
simple dresses
pressed into service with a hot iron
spitting onto a damp cloth.
Primped and pleated and hung.

She loved to see the sun.
Let the sun shine through
to make her day:
a cup of tea, a splash of colour
and the sun peeping through.

Now mother's tree
is dressed in serious green
flashed with clusters of crimson flowers,
petals falling to make for her
a thick red carpet
on the earth.

Just Macbeth!

I'm crazy about Shakespeare and I'm also crazy about Bell Shakespeare, Australia's own Shakespeare acting company. I love watching them act in the big theatre, the Playhouse, in Melbourne's Arts Centre. I usually go there twice a year to see the two new plays in the subscription season.

This year I made an extra trip to the theatre to see them do Andy Griffith's Just Macbeth! in the school holidays.


Andy Griffiths is also the author of a number of very funny books for kids including The Bum Series.

Bums and all their noisy and smelly manifestations feature quite prominently in Just Macbeth! Just the thing for a people of refined tastes such as myself and Badger, my seven-year-old companion.

Bum jokes, wee wee, snot, stuff poked up your nose and into your mouth (and out the other end), wizz fizz potions that send you and your mates reeling from a boring classroom lesson into the mayhem of Macbeth's world. Onto the dark side with daggers and dripping blood, ghosts, witches and madness. And poetry.

The juxtaposition of evil and brutal action alongside sublime poetry is one of Shakespeare's greatest achievements in Macbeth. As Macbeth slashes his way to absolute power he horrifies the audience, but also entrances us with the beauty of his words:

I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Nightmares of guilt send Lady Macbeth right over the top into madness and have Macbeth lilting on the balm of sleep now lost to him:

Macbeth does murder sleep - the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

In silly Just Macbeth!, the brilliant poetry of many of Shakespeare's best lines emerge through the veil of Macbeth's dark deeds and the riotous comedy on the stage. In this context their beauty is even more stark and amazing.

Poetry

This week my writing group met to share their thoughts about travel.

I wrote a poem:


Stasis and movement
ebb and flow
mountain and sea.
I move from the centre
to the periphery.

At rest I draw my
outlines of the world.
In movement I fill spaces
of crazy colours mixing.
My lines are reconfigured
or erased.

Thought and action
concept and experience.

India filled in worlds
my mind imagined-
but I did not think
the world might be
so crumpled-
I saw Jane Austen's hedgerows
from the highroad near the paddy
and Dickens' close-by houses
nodding in streets
of working beasts-
Dostoyevsky also
made flesh
around the books upon my shelf.

Grand Final

A couple of weeks ago I was awarded my first sporting trophy - for table tennis. The inscription reads: '2008 B Grade Premiers'.

The final series ran over three weeks at the local club. Each week I sighed with relief that this would be the last night I'd be required to turn up at the hall to negotiate my way through a few rubbers of table tennis while trying not to look like a complete idiot. Vain hope! I won few games in the finals, few in the season proper for that matter, but still my team prospered.

I joined the table tennis club three years ago when I had a bit more freedom from marking essays at night as a part of my job as a high school English teacher. I'd enjoyed table tennis games at friends' places before that and wanted to learn more about the game. Naively,I had not even contemplated the possibility that the club would be competitive. Competitive sport was anathema to me except from the vantage point of a couch potato viewer of aussie rules football. Now here I was in a thicket of gradings, a truly hierarchical order of abilities with me at the bottom with a massive handicap.

Hierarchy was one thing but the saving grace was -I was not alone, I was part of a team. I found that I liked playing doubles best; I felt more confident and able to contribute more as one half of a doubles pair. Added to that was the extra strength gained as part of the team when our top players raised the overall team score and dragged the rest of us along to victory.

Now I'm part of a winning team and I have a trophy to prove it.

Australia Felix

Driving the camel loaded with books, southwest from Ballarat to the coast.

Nice country down that way. Green, loaded with crops at the start of spring. Fat merino sheep, contented herds of cows on their haunches dreaming the day away. Prosperous farmhouses and long driveways leading to mansions in the bush.

When Major Thomas Mitchell travelled through that part of the country in 1836 he called it 'Australia Felix', a term that's still in currency and which might be translated as 'Fortunate Australia', 'Favoured Australia' or even 'The Lucky Country' as Stephen Murray-Smith explained in his wonderful book about the Australian language, Right Words.

Murray-Smith included this passage from Mitchell, where he describes the western district of Victoria:

We traversed it in two directions with heavy carts, meeting no other obstruction than the softness of the rich soil; and, in returning, over flowery plains and green hills, fanned by the breezes of early spring. I named this region Australia Felix, the better to distinguish it from the parched deserts of the interior country, where we had wandered so unprofitably and so long.

The quote is from Mitchell's account of his journeys in Australia, Three Expeditions... , London 1839.

Book Fair

I've loaded the camel with more than twenty boxes of books. I'm headed to Port Fairy on the coast where they're holding a book fair this coming weekend.

I'll be selling books in the Reardon Theatre on Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 6 & 7). There will be writers talking about their books around the town.

Can't wait to get on the road and see that great country rolling down south from up here near Mt. Macedon. Wanna see Koroit again.

Booker Prize

I was caught on the hop when my sister-in-law offered to buy me a book for my birthday a few weeks back. What did I want? I really didn't know but said, 'Something off the Booker Prize list would be good.' She sent two books from the 2008 list: 'Sea of Poppies' by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh and 'The Secret Scripture' by the Irish writer, Sebastian Barry.

Both books are on the longlist for the 2008 Man Booker prize. In all there are thirteen books on the longlist. The shortlist of five books will be announced in London on September 9.

I'd already read one of the books on the list for this year's prize. That's 'The Lost Dog' by Michelle de Kretser, the only Australian writer on the list. (Michelle is Sri Lankan born but she lives and works in Melbourne.) I loved her book; it contains some wonderful passages of writing and subtle insights about human behaviour; it's witty and also profound and I loved the descriptions of landscape especially urban landscapes around Melbourne. It's great to see 'The Lost Dog' receiving favourable attention with Booker readers and I hope it makes it onto the shortlist.

'Sea of Poppies' really turned me on. It revived my dreams of visiting Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India. The novel is the first part of a trilogy that Amitav Ghosh has planned. The Ibis Trilogy will tell the stories of a bunch of characters associated with a ship, a schooner called the Ibis, that sails to and from India in the years around 1840, at the time of the Opium Wars between England and China. The Ibis is tied up in these wars, in opium shipments and in the transport of indentured labourers and convicts.

One of the pleasures of reading this great rollicking and hair-raising historical novel is the language used. New words spring from the page, like this:'one ungainly gordower even had a choola going with a halwai frying up fresh jalebis'. Ghosh is describing a small vessel that has pulled up next to the Ibis as it takes on fresh provisions before it sails from India down the Bay of Bengal and on towards the the island of Mauitius off the east coast of the African continent. Ghosh has written elsewhere about the origins of some of the fabulous words he uses from Indian, Lascar and other languages.

'Sea of Poppies' fulfils one of my criteria for a good novel; it creates a whole other world full of characters I can believe in and places I can almost feel and smell and taste. Its language excites me; the history it portrays appalls me and educates me; its wit entertains me. I'm on the Ibis journey and I look forward to the next port of call.

Blog class

There were five female students, one female teacher, and a dog (gender unknown) in my blogging class this evening.