Tarragon Tales

I have been nurturing tarragon for over a year since I bought my first small plant in spring. Last summer I could pick only very small amounts, but the plant I nursed then is getting much bigger this year in its earthenware pot. I've also planted three new seedlings directly into the garden bed and they are doing well. Hopefully I will have a bed of tarragon one summer soon.

The plant dies completely away in winter. As autumn comes in and the cold weather begins to accumulate the plant is reduced to sparse sticks with fewer and fewer of shiny green leaves. Then it disappears. This tendency to disappear caused Mark Crick to portray the herb as an 'aristocrat' in his very amusing book The Household Tips of the Great Writers (Granta Books, 2012).

In that book tarragon appears in his parody of Pride and Prejudice. The herb is likened to the aristocrats from Netherfield who disappear to more pleasant climes, Bath perhaps, in the winter months, leaving the poor Barrett girls and their mother bereft in their hopes of finding suitable marriage partners. When it does show up,the herb is praised for its sublime flavours, much loved by cooks, and Crick suggests poached eggs with fresh tarragon as a nice dish. I agree. Eggs poached or boiled and scattered with tarragon are lovely.

I took the recipe one step further  to produce Eggs with tomatoes and tarragon.

Thus: cook up a thick tomato sauce with onions, garlic and tomatoes. You could save a small quantity from any tomato sauce you make for pasta and so on.
Put three or four tablespoons of your thick tomato sauce into a wide pan (I use a frying pan) and heat it through without drying it out.
Create a space in the middle of the sauce and break an egg into it. Continue heating slowly until the egg is cooked to your liking. When almost cooked sprinkle the egg with finely chopped tarragon leaves.

Serve on hot buttered toast.

Flaubert Reading Spree

Keen readers know the joy of mining a deep seam of interest in a topic as we move from one lead to another, books leading on from one to another. I had this experience recently with the French master, Gustave Flaubert. I started by re-reading Madame Bovary, Flaubert's most famous novel. I read it in a new translation by Lydia Davis and it was a revelation. I had read the book many years ago and was swept up then by the strength of the marvellous story, but my new reading brought me to a much greater appreciation of Flaubert's brilliant writing style and I wanted to know more about the author.

Flaubert (1821 - 1880), lived and died more or less on the same piece of ground in and around the French city of Rouen. He spent most of his adult life living quietly with his mother, niece and their various housekeepers in their large house beside the River Seine at Croisset, just outside Rouen. He needed quietness and solitude to compose his great works of literature, but he also, from time to time, bit sharply into the big apple of friendship, love, cosmopolitanism and travel.

While he had a great capacity for friendship and was loved by women, Flaubert hated the idea of marriage or of anything, the career in law that he was expected to enter for instance, that would fix him into the cement of a bourgeois existence . He loathed bourgeois values and views which he contrasted with his own beliefs in the value of art and the life of the artist. 

Those beliefs come out in all his novels where he lampoons human stupidity with great delight while he lingers over the exact description he wants to create. As he wrote of his slow, painstaking way of composing:

'May I die like a dog rather than hurry by a single second a sentence that isn't ripe.' 

Flaubert's letters are an absolute joy to read though not very easy to obtain. Luckily my local regional library still has Volume 1 of the Letters, edited by Francis Steegmuller, a great Flaubert scholar. I am yet to find a copy of Volume 2 and may have to read it in the State Library. However, the letters are full of the most tantalising ideas about art and life with Flaubert's dark, but amused, view of humanity's follies being very apparent.

He was not at all impressed by the idea of 'progress' and indeed his rejection of any such idea is a big theme in his books, including Madame Bovary. He hated the railways that set up during his lifetime, believing that they would only enable people to move around more,meet, and be stupid together.  One can only imagine his disgust at our modern, frantic, moving around. No doubt the advent of tweeting, messaging, and blogging, would have appalled him deeply.

On the bedside table

I have a big stack of books on the bedside table, some read some unread. I'm sorting them out today. This is the list:

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte. This book has been on the table since mid last year when I finished reading it, inspired by seeing the new film. What a wonderful novel it is.

The Conformist, a novel by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia. First published in 1951, the copy I'm reading is an American paperback published by Steerforth Italia, Vermont, U.S. in 1999. I'm reading this to prepare for viewing the film later this term (The Conformist directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970). I've started on the novel and find it fairly slow-going so far; not a difficult read but rather flat and schematic.

State of Wonder (2011) by the American, Ann Patchett. Boy can she spin a yarn! Great female characters and a terrific story. Can't wait to read more of her books. This book has to be returned to the library.

Also borrowed from the library:

Reading Madame Bovary (2010), a collection of short fiction by Amanda Lohrey. Strong stories with interesting themes. I'm still dipping into this one.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. This famous novel was first published in 1856. I first read it decades ago and I'm looking forward to reading the new translation by Lydia Davis (2010).

Other books I can now return to the shelves are The Acolyte (1972), a novel by Thea Astley and Minitudes (2000) a book of diary entries for the period 1974 - 1997 by Barry Oakley.

Meanwhile I continue to dip into Cold Mountain Poems, the poems of Han Shan in a lovely edition by Shambala Publications.

There, I have cleared up the bedside table muddle. Now there's room for a few more books.

Books into films

Last term I joined a film club in my home town. The club is run by a retired professor of film history who wanted to share her knowledge and promote discussion about films. We meet at the local Neighbourhood Centre and make a small donation to the Centre. Our leader provides us with copies of the films so that we can watch them at home before we meet to discuss them. The films come from a man with a very large film library who copies the film for us onto CDs, purely for purposes of study. It's like a book club but with films, led by a person with special knowledge. It's a wonderful example of sharing and free access to knowledge.

So far we have looked at three films that have their origins in novels or stories. The Servant, a 1963 film directed by Joseph Losey, and starring Dirk Bogarde, was based on a story of the same name by the British writer, Robin Maugham. Babette's Feast (1987) came from a story by the Danish-born Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), and the Hitchcock film, Rebecca, is based on the novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.

I read Rebecca prior to watching the film and that reading shaped my response to the film. I disliked the book intensely, was appalled especially by the treatment of female characters - clueless, nameless, female narrator; evil nymphomanic dead Rebecca; vampirish evil Mrs. Danvers etc. I could not see how such a lineup of hideous female characters and their vacuous male counterparts could possibly translate into a good film. While the film redeemed the book in many ways because of its sumptuous mise-en-scene in some sections, such as the encounters between Mrs. Danvers and the young Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca's hallowed bedroom, (with lesbian undertones), or Hitchcock's beautiful framing in many instances, it could not enhance or negate the reactionary sexual politics which tainted the whole conception of both film and book for me.

Each of the participants in the group reacted to the film, and some also to the book, in very different ways from enthralling to cliched, melodramatic, entertaining and disappointing. All these various reactions led to an interesting discussion, especially about whether one can judge the sexual politics of a previous era (Rebecca was made in Hollywood in 1941), and whether the film ought to be seen as a well-made melodrama. No conclusions were reached, but the threads of this discussion and others are bound to be taken up again as the group looks at other films and develops enough common language and experience to be able to cross-reference ideas.

Winter Reading

This is the list of books I read over winter:

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin.

Nine Gates - Entering the Mind of Poetry - essays by Jane Hirshfield.

Guantanamo, My Journey, by David Hicks.

In the Company of Rilke, by Stephanie Dowrick.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.

What I read this summer

Summer has come and gone, such as it was. Most people seem to agree that we've been cheated of a long, hot summer here in Victoria and the chill days of autumn, with winter to follow, have come too soon upon us. Books though, never fail, come heat or cold, and what follows is the list of books I've read this summer. With thirteen books on my list that makes it approximately four books each month for December, January and February, or one a week, if you like.

There are many ways one might organise a list like this: perhaps by the order in which they are read which is quite relevant and telling because my choice of books is often dictated by what I've been reading and would like to know more about, or by an author I've enjoyed and want to follow up on. This time I'm going to organise the list by categories, rather as they might go together on a library shelf, but even as I start to do this I see that there are not necessarily strict boundaries between the categories or genres of writing.

LIFE STORIES/AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIRS/BIOGRAPHY

Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood. (Melbourne University Press, 2010, paperback. pp. 260.) Borrowed from Bendigo Library.

A very interesting and moving account of growing up as the daughter of the Melbourne writer Brian Fitzpatrick. Sheila Fitzpatrick went on to become a historian. She is honest and courageous describing both her parents who were complicated people with plenty of human flaws. She's also honest about her own very independent character. The book provides plenty of fascinating social context in Melbourne from the 1950s til the late 1970s including many insights into the politics and career structures in academia.

Christine Wallace, Greer, Untamed Shrew.

I mentioned this book in my last blog entry. It's definitely worth reading for insights into one of Australia's most famous women who still makes people sit up and take notice. It's also interesting for the context of the times when Greer grew up (50s and 60s) and for the approaches to her life that Wallace takes. I purchased the book second-hand.

Jacqueline Kent, An Exacting Heart -The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin. (Viking, 2008. Borrowed from the Bendigo Library.)

Hephzibah Menuhin was an accomplished concert pianist who played all over the world with her famous brother, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Hephzibah left the world stage to marry the Australian heir to the 'Aspro' fortune and went to live in the backblocks of western Victoria. There were two children but eventually the marriage ended when Hephzibah fell in love with another man. She continued with her music throughout her life. Though the life and times described are interesting, this biography lacked a compelling theme and the writing was rather bland.

Cassandra Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley. (University of Queensland Press, 1999) Borrowed from the City Library.

An account of the life of the Australian poet, James McAuley. McAuley fell in with the Catholic conservative movement led by B. A. Santamaria, and also worked in Alf Conlon's intelligence unit during the second world war. Though often admired for his poetry, McAuley was unable to resist the allure of the culture wars. He was the editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant and became professor of English at the University of Tasmania. A great book for anyone interested in the Australian culture wars that still rear their heads from time to time; a book about political intrigue especially within cultural organisations and universities and a portrait of a troubled man.

Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart - A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. (Knopf, 2002,pp. 756) Second-hand hardback.


It's taken me almost a decade to get around to reading this book. But now is a good time to read it if only because of the perspective it offers from the vantage point of a Labour government struggling to survive and get its message across to the electorate, when there is all din and noise on the airwaves and in the media drowning out the positive agendas that the government is trying to put forward. Seen from the Prime Minister's Office, the shouting takes its place as just one more element in the great game of politics. From 1992 until 1996 when the Labour government fell and John Howard became Prime Minister, Don Watson was Paul Keating's speechwriter and one of his political advisors. His account of the period describes Keatings successes and his failures and gives a sense of the complicated man and those who worked around him. It describes Australian society and the wider international context and places the business of politics in a wider historical context across time. Each chapter starts with a quote from a famous writer or activist and these quotes set the tone and focus for the chapter and the events described. In themselves they are something to be pondered and savoured, as is the quote from William Hazlitt that serves as the epigram to the book as a whole, suggesting the struggle that takes place in politics and in everyday life:

Man (sic) is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck
with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

Watson is a wonderfully clear writer with an ear for the humorous, the ironic, the ridiculous, the serious, the tragic and the most moving in human affairs. The book explains the policy directions and achievements of Keating's time as Prime Minister in clear, detailed and readable prose. It suggests the drama of life on the big stage shaping the 'big picture' that was Keating's perspective in politics. This surely is a 'must read' for anyone interested in contemporary Australian politics, a 'must read' for anyone contemplating entering that arena and a very enjoyable and instructive read for anyone who likes good prose writing.

HISTORY

Two books on the history of one event, the sacking of Sydney Sparkes Orr from the University of Tasmania, Chair of Philosophy in 1956.

The first by W.C.Eddy, Orr, (Jacaranda, 1961) is a big mess of a book that goes on and on insisting on Orr's innocence, but valuable as a historical document and for the detail of reports, hearings, court cases, arguments and so on at the time. To get some perspective on Eddy's harping I read Cassandra Pybus's analysis of the case:

Cassandra Pybus, Gross Moral Turpitude, (William Heinemann, 1993, pp. 238). Secondhand paperback.

Pybus burrows into the character and circumstances of Orr and emerges with a stinking body of human corruption and folly. A good read.

POETRY

Clifford Pannam, Music From a Jade Flute - the Ci Poems of Li Qingzhao. (Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 285). Hardback book borrowed from the Bendigo Library.

This is a beautifully produced book that features Li Qingzhao's poems, translated by Pannam, who also writes about the historical context in which each poem was written, the poetic references and traditions they draw on, and the challenges of translation.

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband - a fictional essay in 29 tangos. (Vintage, 2001, paperback, pp. 147) Borrowed from City Library.

My first reading of the Canadian poet, Anne Carson. The poems sketch out the progress of a passionate and tumultuous relationship. At its nadir the wife of the beautiful husband is bereft:

A cold ship

moves out of harbour somewhere inside the wife
and slides off toward the gray horizon

not a bird not a breath in sight.

Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard, Poems. (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2007, paperback).

This book was loaned to me by a friend who bought it from Square Books, a bookshop in Oxford, Mississippi. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the book explores a personal and national history in America's Deep South.

NOVELS

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood. (Bloomsbury, 2009) Hardback borrowed from the Bendigo Library.

A post-apocalyptic world of corruption, social decay, environmental destruction and the struggle to survive a very messy endtime. Atwood's heroes use herbal lore and gritty skills to make their way in a dangerous environment.

Ian McEwan, Solar. (Jonathan Cape, 2010) Borrowed from a friend.

Here the threat of environmental destruction also serves as the background to the novel. In this case we see the corrupt heart of a man who struggles to make a big name for himself (and a lot of money) in the world of new technology meant to 'save' the planet. My first go at the popular McEwan, and one that I liked a lot. I laughed out loud many times at McEwan's descriptions of the mad things people get up to.

CRIME

Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater. (Vintage, 1996) Secondhand paperback.

This crime novel was translated from the Swedish. I first read it years ago when it first appeared in English and I was keen to read it again. A gruesome murder takes place in a wilderness setting where communities of loggers and hippies exist side by side in an uneasy balance. Red herrings multiply as Ekman trawls the landscape describing family power structures and community tensions.

Looking back on my summer reading today, on International Women's Day, I think I can say that I've held up my end for reading women writers, but the men were pretty good too.

Alpine book trail

Last month I made a trip to the alpine country in Victoria's northeast, lovely country where the Ovens and King rivers flow - and, most recently, overflow into a flood. An area of luscious river valleys and high mountains like Mount Buffalo and Mount Hotham.

There's a book trail that extends through the area along an arc from Kilmore in the south to Rutherglen up north, to Beechworth, Myrtleford and Bright in the east and sweeping down to the southeast to Bairnsdale near the coast in Gippsland. Bookshops in these and other towns have joined together to put out a brochure that lists their locations, descriptions of stock and contact details. See www.alpinebooktrail.com

I visited some of these shops and made a few purchases: in Euroa I called in at Euroa Fine Books which is run by the well-known bookseller, Kenneth Hince OAM. What a lovely bookshop it is, located in Euroa's main street. Across the road is The Already Read Bookshop which is operated by members of the Friends of the Euroa Library; proceeds from that shop go to support the library. In Beechworth, the Quercus Bookshop is also run by volunteers to support the Beechworth Neighbourhood Centre.

Although I was keen to visit Bibliomania in Myrtleford, I only managed a look through the windows as its opening times were restricted. Luckily the small but well-stocked Books at Bright was open and I found a book I was interested in there.

In Bright I found the book, Orr, by W. H. C. Eddy. It is a very odd book that details the many law suits and events that surrounded the case of Sydney Sparks Orr, the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania from 1952 until he was dismissed in 1956. The book, published in 1961 by Jacaranda , features a lurid yellow jacket with an outline map of Tasmania surrounding a big red question mark. The cover suggests revelation and scandal and the author argues that Orr was the innocent victim of a conspiracy against him. The case caused an uproar in academic circles at the time and a ban was imposed on jobs in philosophy at the university. Eddy goes on at great length (apparently assisted by Orr according to a recent study of the case), but the book is certainly an interesting historical document pertaining to the history of universities in Australia in the 1950s.

In Euroa I picked up Greer: untamed shrew by Christine Wallace, a biography of Germaine Greer. It's an interesting read that details events in this famous writer's life into the 1990s. Greer emerges as a complicated figure who Wallace sees as more of a individualist than a feminist.

The work of another of our great women writers, Christina Stead, came my way at the Beechworth bookshop. I found a hardback edition of The Man Who Loved Children which is one of my favourite books, one that I intend to read again now I have a sturdy volume I can look into.

Finding Yeats continued

In his poem, A Prayer for my Daughter, written in 1919, Yeats writes about the conditions he wants for his daughter as she grows and the kind of woman he hopes she will become. He wants her to have a solid foundation so she might cultivate qualities of mind he approves: kindness, courtesy, merriment, innocence and beauty. These are to be cultivated in contrast to women of opinionated mind who risk everything for an old bellows full of angry wind.

Oh dear, these are not the sentiments likely to appeal to modern women who value their 'opinions' and do not appreciate being put down for holding them. Yeats is yearning for establishment values based on long-term land ownership from which custom and ceremony cultivate fine sensibilities. But how many people have such a solid base and what happens when the base is rocky? Are we all bound to fall into barbarism?

These sorts of questions led me into a search to find out more about Yeats and where he was coming from. First, though, I read a short novel by the Irish-born novelist Elizabeth Bown whose books I once looked into and enjoyed many years ago. In The Last September (published in 1929) Elizabeth Bowen describes life in an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy mansion of the type Yeats seems to have yearned for and which was indeed part of Bowen's legacy at Bown Court, her family's country estate. The story is set in 1920 when Ireland was rocked by the 'Troubles' between the British army and the IRA. This was part of the context in which Yeats sought the stability of old places and old ideas. In Bowen's novel the movement is forward with the young woman of the place set to move on into a wider world.

R.F. Foster's wonderful biography of Yeats considers the context of A Prayer for my Daughter in fascinating detail. Yeats appears to be reacting against his own 'troubles' with Maud Gonne and contrasting her radicalism with what he perceived as the kindness and courtesy of his young wife, George, who had given birth to the 'daughter', Anne, who is the child of the poem. The poem is also influenced by Yeats's acquisition of a 'castle' (his famous Tower), and his immersion in spiritualism at the time. All this plus 'his apprehension at a world descending into formless anarchy' as he expressed over and over again in his poems, as in The Second Coming which he composed around the same time as the Prayer:
Things fall apart; the centre can not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Being introduced to Yeats's poem through my poetry group led my to think a lot about the foundations (or not), of place, of belonging, of reactions when stability is threatened. It led me to Elizabeth Bowen and into a reading of Yeats's life and his poetry. The journey through words is a rich and rewarding one.

Text details for this post:
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. Vintage paperback novel (1998) with an introduction by Victoria Glendinning. pp. 206. Available Book Camel $8 plus postage and packaging.

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life 11: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Pulished by Oxford University Press, 2003. Copy borrowed from City Library, Melbourne.

W. B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, in W. B. Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan paperback. First published 1962.

Finding Yeats

I sometimes meet with a group of people who like to write poetry. The theme of place (special places, belonging to a place) was suggested for our most recent meeting. Someone had come up with the phrase dear perpetual place when the theme was being discussed. Later I discovered that the phrase was from a poem by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. I found the poem and also set out on a journey learning about Yeats. I'll start by typing out the long poem then share my reflections and some of the things I've been learning. This poem was written in 1919.

A Prayer for my Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack - and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatreds driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Reference: from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) in W B Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan, 1965

Knock Backs

We all have the experience of getting knocked back on some things; hopes dashed, dreams smashed. Writers typically receive piles of rejection letters or miss out on prizes or receive bad reviews for books.

In a letter to the American poet, Anne Sexton, in 1967, the English poet, Ted Hughes, wrote a list of the harms that can come from being reviewed favourably. His comments were meant to console Sexton for the bad reviews she received in England for her book Live or Die. Hughes's comments can be applied as a balm to all sorts of disappointments. It goes like this:

'They [favourable reviews] tend to confirm one in one's own conceit - unless they praise what you yourself don't like.

Also they make you self-conscious about your virtues - just as when you praise a child for some natural charm.

Also they create an underground opposition: applause is the beginning of abuse.

Also they deprive you of your own anarchic liberties by electing you into the government.

Also, they separate you from your devil, which hates being observed and only works happily incognito.'

Sexton's biographer notes that the poet posted this good advice over her desk, but that 'it was, unfortunately, to grow more and more pertinent'.

Anne Sexton. A Biography by Dianne Wood Middlebrook. Virago paperback, 1991. Available from the Book Camel. In good condition. Contains photos, appendix, sources and notes, bibliography, index. 488pp. Price: $15 plus postage and packaging.

Bright Star John Keats

Many friends have been to see Bright Star, the film about John Keats directed by Jane Campion. I wrote a poem about it:

Dressing for Keats

Emerging from my rock of penury
with nothing
and with no-one to inhibit me
I dressed as a poet
and took the train to see
a film about John Keats,
dressing for his memory.

On the silver screen
the storytelling mistress
flung out her mat of mystery
embroidered with flowery stitches
fabrics lifting
to petal faces
in beds of blossom.

She played his songs
in voices soft like pastel palates
words of vigorous youth that note the ghostly spectre
then hit on trees and birdsong rising from the land.
These words lift hearts with every beat
they bid us fly upon the music sweet.



What did Keats think about the purpose of poetry?

His idea of ‘Negative Capability’ now appears under the heading ‘Theory’ in relation to Keats and his poetry (see, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on Keats).

The phrase appears in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers, George and Thomas, in December 1817. He discusses a number of experiences in the letter before he comes to the phrase, and it is as if he is following a thread that leads him closer and closer towards a definition of what he values in life and in art.

He has been to see a painting called Death on the Pale Horse which he considers a ‘wonderful’ picture, especially if the painter’s age is considered ( I assume the painter, West, was young). But the painting does not satisfy him:
'…there is nothing to be intense upon, no women one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality. The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’,and you will find this exemplified throughout: but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness.'

Keats goes on to relate another experience, this time it is a social one when he dined with a group of men, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. This experience also gave him food for thought about what he really valued:
'They only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours,’ said I to myself!'

These thoughts begin to coalesce as he brings the letter to a close and moves towards that phrase which is now counted as part of Keats’s theory:
'Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.'

The Letters of John Keats, Vols 1 & 2, are available from the Book Camel.

In with the new

Before January passes completely from view I want to move the Book Camel blog out onto the track once more.

When the English author, Graham Greene, was having his long-standing love affair with Catherine Walston in the 1940s and 50s, he gave her a notebook diary each year in which he handwrote a quotation for every day of the year. Greene was obviously a very romantic fellow.

I was thinking about that endearing habit, and reading about Greene and Walston at the beginning of January and also wondering what quotes would be appropriate for the first few days of 2010. Here in the hills north of Melbourne the new year came in with a great rush of rain and a storm of thunder and lightning. A storm bold enough to wash away the old year and bring in the new. What words could describe that marvellous scene?

Dicctionaries of quotations offer up many possibilities for describing rain, thunder, lightning and storms. I liked Shelley, from The Cloud throwing up the echo of thunder:
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder...
Then his vigorous rhymes:
I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
That, I think, will serve quite well as my quotation for the start of the new year, 2010.

The book about Greene and Walston is The Third Woman - The Secret Passion that Inspired The End of the Affair. It's by William Cash and available from the Book Camel.

What's hot?

I don't have a lot of money to spend on new books these days. But I do like to keep up with new writing and the ideas going round. My solution is to spend money on a few subscriptions to magazines and journals that keep me in the loop. Add to this a glimpse at The Age book pages on Saturdays (minimal info there, alas), a free subscription to Readings monthly magazine and blessed Radio National (especially the splendid Book Show), and I feel I have my finger slightly on the pulse of our local literary culture.

Occasionally I will buy a new book if it's something I really want to add to my collection, and I'd love to be able to buy more new books, but I try to do my bit to support the new book trade by ordering them at my regional library which provides an excellent service. I find many of the titles I want to order in the Australian Book Review which is one of the magazines I subscribe to. Apart from alerting me to books I might want to read, I enjoy the quality of the writing in the magazine's reviews, essays and poetry. My other current subscriptions are to Meanjin, Island and Overland, all of which contain a variety of interesting writing.

I've subscribed to Meanjin on and off over the years and have been drawn back to it under its current editor, Sophie Cunningham. She's doing an excellent job with Meanjin which has been given a very pleasing new look and continues attracting some excellent writers and visual artists. The summer edition has just arrived in the mail and it's a lovely fat issue which promises hours of enjoyable reading.

The issue opens with a short essay by Chris Wallace-Crabbe in the 'Newsreel' section of the journal. Entitled Poetry and the Future, the piece explores the question, What can poetry do?- specifically, what poetry can do in response to the unhappy civic situation we find ourselves in today and a still grimmer future that appears to be opening up. For Wallace-Crabbe poetry's strength and its ability to influence its readers lies in its '...capacity to notice, and not to pass over the local or the familiar'. He offers a poem of his own, The Different Scales of Morning that ends with
Warm Gaia...grown sick of our
Casting the usual vote for selfishness
And flipping credit cards instead of thought.
This poet's keynote to the summer issue of Meanjin felt visceral as I read it on one of the hottest November days ever.

Chocolate Chip

I made chocolate chip biscuits for Orla's second birthday. The recipe is from the Aussie cooking bible, The Cook's Companion, by Stephanie Alexander. For all those who don't have the book on hand, here's the recipe.

Ingredients
125 g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
120 g roasted nuts (walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, almonds), chopped
170 g bittersweet chocolate, chopped
110 g softened unsalted butter
1/3 cup castor sugar
1/3 cup raw or brown sugar
1 egg

Method
Sift flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Add nuts and chocolate. In an electric mixer, cream butter, castor sugar and brown sugar until pale and fluffy. Add egg, then fold in chocolate mixture. Form into 2 logs about 4cm in diameter and wrap tightly in plastic film. Chill for 1 hour before baking.

Preheat oven to 175C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Unwrap logs and cut into 1.5cm thick slices. Place on baking tray, allowing room for spreading, and bake for 12 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

They're easy to make and they taste great. Stephanie adds that the mixture freezes well for at least a month. I substituted hazelnut meal for the nuts for the kids' party. That worked well too, but it makes the biscuits a little more crumbly.

Tis the season to be thrifty

What a gap I've had in blogging!

Now that Spring is finally arriving, and the footy season is finished, I hope I might get back into it with this small message that Christmas is coming along towards us and a shameless advertisement for buying secondhand books for Christmas presents in this era of austerity.

I was prompted to this thought by a list I read recently in an issue of
Zadok Perspectives, a magazine put out by the Melbourne-based, Zadok Institute for Christianity and Society. This handy list contains ideas for giving cheap, recycled, hand-made, but welcome Christmas gifts that do not chew up too many of our planet's resources. Good second-hand books are on obvious inclusion. Here's the list:

• Make a gift (make a card, frame a photo, bake some biccies, cook some chutney, collate a recipe book, write out a poem, bottle some jam - apricots are in season in December!)
• Give a voucher (babysitting, home made cake, a night at the movies)
• Recycle an old treasure (book, lamp, kitchen canisters, groovy retro plate)
• Pot a plant (take lavender, pelargonium or daisy cuttings, sow seed in a small pot ready to give away, prune and uproot an unwanted rose bush and give it to someone who'd love it)

• Reduce needless consumer spending (give a gift to a charity in someone's name, draw names instead of buying for everyone in a family, buy an edible gift and pay a fair price for it eg fair trade organic coffee).

You can also follow up with other suggestions at www.buynothingchristmas.org

My List

In some ways the last book I read is the one that influences me the most. That is, it influences my thinking, what I am thinking about at the time. Recently I read The Baader Meinhof Complex, by the German author Stefan Aust. That set me thinking again about the role of the individual in society and my own position as a subject in society and how one makes oneself into one's own subject. I've also nearly finished Peter Ackroyd's big biography of Charles Dickens. That book makes me think about the nature of the artist - that artist- and the contribution he made to the world of literature. What a man he was! And what a writer! It also has me think about the nature of biography as a form of writing, something Ackroyd specifically discusses in the book.

But when I think about the list of those books that have most influenced me I'm thinking of books that form the bedrock of my ideas. Books that shaped my world view and formed my taste for other books.

My list starts with The Bible. This is one of the first books I was introduced to when I went to Sunday School as a little kid. I particularly remember falling in love with a picture in the Bible which was the picture of Moses in the Bullrushes (see Exodus Chapter 2). As an adopted child I was undoubtedly predisposed to the image of a child being found by a protective person and it drew me into the idea of books as a place of refuge and comfort. I also loved fairy tales and comics as a young child. On Saturdays my dad took me to the Victoria Market where he bought me a few comics each week. I always chose the Classic comics which told the great european classic stories in words and pictures. These texts shaped my love of literature. My reading of the Bible persists. I'm always having to look it up to understand or write a poem and I have made a habit of reading the New Testament during Lent.

I first read War and Peace by the Russian, Leo Tolstoy, in my late teens. That book showed me how ambitious a novel could be and affirmed my idea that all beings were equally important in this world. It encouraged me to keep on questioning all statements about great men; great anything. Tolstoy makes plain the inter-dependence of all people. I read it again in a new translation last year and was astonished by its genius.

Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger showed me a funny, cheeky, voice in the world. I love all Salinger's books.

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner was the first book I read in the moment when I appreciated the full impact of the time and place in which it was written. I was working in a bookshop when the novel was published. It was eagerly awaited. I bought two copies and P and I sat on our front verandah for couple of days in beautiful summer heat, reading the novel side by side. Here was a voice from our generation, speaking the streets of Melbourne. That book set my temperature for finding out the books of my time in my own place.

T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets is another book I associate with reading with my loved ones. P and I went camping with our little girls on Mt. Kosciuszko one Easter. As we sat around the campfire the ABC radio broadcast a reading of Eliot's great poem. I treasure the memory of that time: the frosty air, the clear sky, the darlings, and Eliot's poetry:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.


These are books that have influenced me.

I invite others to give me their list.

Best Books- Carol's list

Louise got me interested when she told me how she'd written out of a list of the best books she had ever read and given it to a neighbour for a birthday present. She'd lost the list and couldn't remember what was on it but it set me thinking that I'd like to contact friends and ask them to set down those 5-10 books, more or less, that had influenced them most, or they most loved, or found most memorable (are all of these categories the same thing?).

Carol has already come good with her list, and with her reasons for loving these books.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (Published 1866) Carol says: 'This was the first book I read where I was so aware of the subjective voice and thoughts of the protagonist. I liked very much the moral questions and dilemmas raised for Raskolnikov and his inward questioning...'.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. (Published 1939) 'Again I read this when I was very young and it was probably my first introduction to American literature. The theme is daunting- and presented a world that had not been so clearly delineated for me before. The author's voice is both urgent and compassionate. I was very impressed and after 45 years or more can recall the ending of the story with clarity.'

The Outsider by Albert Camus. (Published 1942) 'I identified with the outsider and liked, (although liked is not quite the right word), the detached voice of the narrator and the vivid, yet harsh, description of the landscape. I have read the book three times: I know bits verbatim: When I looked up I was aware of the indifference of the universe.'

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. (Published 1949) 'Again it is the quality of the writing: the description of the Northern African landscape and the theme were close to my sensibilities.'

The Tree of Man by Patrick White. (Published 1955) 'A great theme...and for me it made the rest of Patrick White's novels accessible. It opened up a whole new world of literature.'

World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow. (Published 1985) 'This story is told through the eyes of a young boy. He most passionately wants to visit the World Fair that is on in New York at the time and the story is about how he achieves this and of courses the story includes many aspects of his life experiences as he is growing up. The narration of this story is therefore simple but profoundly rich and satisfying.'

That's a great list. Thank you Carol. I liked all of those books too, but haven't read World's Fair.

I hope Book Camel readers might leave lists either in the comments section or email them to me and I'll make a feature of them. Carol's list came by snailmail and I'm very happy to receive lists that way too and then type them out. Or stop me in the street and tell me your list. I'll make a note of it.

As it happens Carol's list is all novels. But the books that have influenced you most might be poetry, or essays; philosophy, art, how to do things...what are your best books?

A kind of heroine

Biography is one of the most popular genres for readers and book buyers. Most libraries have well-stocked and well-used shelves of life stories about all sorts and varieties of people. Isn't it a great escape to peer into the lives of others, to see what they have done, how they have lived and been shaped by their families, their relationships and the times they have lived through?

I recently picked up a copy of the life of Nancy Cunard (1896-1965). Published in 1979, the biography is entitled simply 'Nancy Cunard' and the author is Anne Chisholm. It is a clearly written work, enhanced by a number of photographs, that tells the story of one woman's remarkable life.

Nancy's great-grandfather on her father's side was Samuel Cunard, founder of the Cunard line of steamships, who was created a baronet by Queen Victoria. Her mother, the famous society hostess and patron of the arts, Lady Emerald Cunard, was from a wealthy Californian family. Thus Nancy, an only child, was born into wealth and its attendant privileges, especially the entry it gave her to a world of fashion, travel and the arts.

These interests dominated Nancy's life. She took to them with a passion in the context of troubled times - World War 1, the 'roaring twenties', the 1930's 'Great Depression', the rise of communism and fascism, the Spanish Civil War and World War 2. She turned out a rebellious, independent woman whose way of life often scandalised both her contemporaries and her elders, including her mother. When Nancy lived and traveled openly with her black lover in the early 1930s, it opened up a split with her mother that was never healed. Mother and daughter were never to speak or meet again. Lady Cunard died in 1948.

While Nancy was briefly married during the First World War, she could not conform to the limitations that marriage threatened to impose on her freedom to love, travel and express herself as she pleased. She was a complex person whose personality and interplay of her many relationships are explored in the biography. Late in her life, after a period of disturbing behaviour, she was certified insane and kept for some time in a mental hospital. Alcohol played a big part in her troubles at this time.

Nancy Cunard deserves attention and respect for her serious work as a poet, publisher and journalist. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published her long poem 'Parallax' at their Hogarth Press in 1925, and she continued to write poetry and sometimes have it published for the rest of her life. In 1928 she established her own 'Hours Press' at her home in Normandy in the French countryside. She learned the whole printing process, setting type and printing herself and turning out some significant publications including one of Samuel Beckett's first published poems, 'Whoroscope'.

Her fascination for African art and decoration led her to collect an enormous number of ivory bracelets and other items. She delved deeply into black culture through relationships with black people including jazz musicians, writers and civil rights' activists. In 1934 her encyclopedic book 'Negro' was published. This was an unwieldy project where she brought together black writers, commentators on aspects of black culture and images of black culture. The volume is now rare (most of the stock was lost in the London blitz in the Second World War), and first editions now sell for more than twenty thousand dollars.

By the late 1930s Nancy was very much involved in the anti-fascist movement in Europe. Like others of her generation, she was a passionate supporter of the republican side in the Spanish Civil War which she also reported from as a journalist.

Nancy Cunard, despite, or possibly because of her privileged inheritance, lived a life that connects her as a kind of heroine to the modern world. She was an enormously eclectic artist who championed poetry, black rights, freedom for women and anti-imperialist movements. She certainly had her blind spots and may have been difficult to know and impossible to live with, but I'm willing to place her in my pantheon of stars from the past whose lives become known to us through the scholarship of modern writers.

Miles Franklin Award

The winner of this year's Miles Franklin Award will be announced on June 18.

The list of five finalists for the Award is mildly controversial because all the writers are men. This is the list:

Breath by Tim Winton
Ice by Louis Nowra
The Pages by Murray Bail
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Wanting by Richard Flanagan

As someone commented, the titles are all very short. All very plain.

My choice for winner is The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, but as I've only read three of the five books I'm not in a position to judge, so let's say I'm barracking for The Slap. Whether it is judged to be the novel of the year which is 'of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases' (as the Award's web page notes), remains to be seen. I would certainly judge it to be of outstanding literary merit (if a wee bit too long) and definitely presenting Australian life in its contemporary phase among some families living in Melbourne. It's an ambitious realist novel with many different voices that move around questions of modern Australian sexual and family identity.

Life-long learning

I wonder how long it is since the idea of a 'workshop' as a learning setting came into our culture? Did it start up in the 1970s with therapy groups? Whatever the antecedents it is an idea that has gained full currency for learning all sorts of skills from fungi recognition, to crafts, yoga practices, spiritual development, growing or cooking food and writing. You name it and you can probably find a workshop about it.

I've been to a few workshops in my time, most of them connected with teaching and learning or with writing. I thought I'd given them up until I was tempted ('I can resist anything except temptation'), by one in the recent Castlemaine State Festival. It was a poetry workshop, 'Art into Poetry Now', held at the Castlemaine Art Gallery and conducted by poet Sandy Fitts. I was intrigued by the topic, the venue and the presenter, who had won the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. I also liked the price, a modest $30 (concession).

For that modest price our small group, about eight people, received four hours of professional attention from a poet and teacher who led us through a brief history of ekphrastic poetry and set us to write such a poem in relation to selected art works in the gallery.

Each of the particpants came up with their own special perspective on the paintings we looked at. There was plenty of choice in the subjects and each writer showed how pictures, especially those within our own culture, can set free so many rich and various ideas. Some carefully enunciated the images into words, another spoke of her situation today provoked by a scene in an old picture; someone attempted to draw them all together in an historical perspective, another took us on a journey to hidden depths inside a darkened vessel. We all listened and saw that there were the bones of a decent poem in every piece of writing.

'Life-long, collaborative learning' has been a powerful slogan for learning in adult education settings and also in schools where teachers try to equip their students for a future of learning. With a boom in workshops the time has come when our desire to go on learning, with others, can more easily be met.