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.