Get Your Punk Ass Back To The Dog Show

Film Edition Of The Book Based On The Folksong

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:08:34 +1000

See meticulously researched historical fiction for what it really is- a gloriously inspired version of ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ given flesh. Lots of flesh. Civil war & the home front are faithfully physical while compromising none of Charles Frazier’s delicacy. Inman eats an egg from a hen who has pecked New Yorker guts. Ada masturbates: ‘Sometime long after midnight she took the easement of maiden, spinster, widow’. Between them runs a four year horror show, but it’s not just about them. Balis, Sara, Veasey, Sotrob and lots of nameless Appalachia folk besides are stones in the passway. And then, there are the actual stones, and trees, creeks, bears, taverns, cliffs, cabins, vines, weeds & flowers that are lovingly reproduced to make Cold Mountain a hardworking central landmark.

The cinematic 1997 novel screams ‘get T Bone Burnett on the phone!’ but I have a question for Hollywood: why’d you make Ruby white? Zellweger is cute with Jack White’s Georgia, & she won the Oscar, but, honestly, Ruby is a supporting academy award waiting to happen. Roles for women of colour are rare, it’s a shame to waste them.

Mississippi's Best Ever Baby Name Book

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:55:39 +1000

…the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it’s like a piece of machinery: it won’t stand a whole lot of thinking. It’s best when it runs along the same, doing the day’s work and no one part used no more than needed.

A Yoknapatawpha County procession through flood, fire, buzzard swarms & neighbourly judgment: welcome to the 1930s, William Faulkner says. Addie Bundren’s coffin is tenderly wrought & wrestled by her family because she wished to rest in Jefferson, but also because they individually hanker for town favours. She narrates, between their obstacles, how she took, had, chose and stayed with them through godlessness. The stream-of-consciousness method is prodigiously effective. Reworking the (selfish) stupidity of Anse & the (sweet) stupidity of Cash into spirited tracts on life & death is a sign of Faulkner’s genius. Darl’s chapters are more classical, and his sketch of family mechanics & deceit, recalling the time he realised Jewel was illegitimate, will have the horse lover in your life testifying. The truth is a puzzle in As I Lay Dying, and it’s distracted by talk of God; ‘God’s grace upon this house’ is used by Rev. Whitfield to actively trump it. For everything, Dewey Dell’s faith is rewarded by…a stepmother. Maybe they’ve displeased him, or maybe the Lord’s just forgotten his hillbillies.

Millenial Byronism Can Only Get Better

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 01:09:32 +1000

In The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger took the wankers of Byatt’s Possession, made them vulgar, borrowed a few themes as well, and wrote her own low-rent classic love story. The title is the plot. Science-fiction lends suspense to a series of enlivened domestic affairs: will Henry miss his wedding day?, the birth of his child?, the purchase of the marital home, which is by the way paid for by inevitable, ethically dubious means? The only life at stake is Henry’s, who at least admits that he sucks his own cock. A time traveller, he refuses the role of oracle except for sometimes when he delivers devastatingly bad news.

After 300 pages of awesome sex & coffee with Clare, things darken. Clare is apparently flawless- the beautiful, loyal wife whose fidelity bores & sometimes angers. Like Mr Edward Rochester, Henry has to be maimed to truly deserve her. So, that’s the love story. Very safe, very 2003. In terms of science, it’s gratifying to have master geneticist Kendricks’ established career rocked by Henry’s abilities. And, especially powerful, his homelife, by way of a simple hospital communication error.

Reading Uni Procrastination As My Own Uni Procrastination

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:38:25 +1000

And so Helen Keller’s letters accidentally become the first of anyone’s letters I read. Her 1903 autobiography, The Story Of My Life, is followed by a selection of letters prior to admission to Radcliffe College (after which ‘her mature letters should be judged like those of any other person’), and a secondary account of her education & character. These latter sections demonstrate that deafblind Keller, beloved the world over, thinks that life is better than it is.

Christian, activist, celebrity, sister, scholar: Helen Keller, & teacher Anne Sullivan, are many things to many people. I was tickled by Keller as doglover, first by her insistence that dogs respond thoughtfully to her disability, second by her preference for all, and unexpectedly sporty, breeds. Upon the death of her mastiff, Lioness, the national response was so generous that she gratefully directed all donations for her next dog towards the education of deafblind pauper Tommy Stringer.

Unrelentingly inspirational, the special moments of the book come from the cracks in her countenance. Keller knew that she was a naughty child before Sullivan provided communication tools. She knew that she remained privileged, in East Coast schools & in the Southern paradise of hometown Tuscumbia. When her memoir concludes she is 22, halfway through her Arts degree, and her discontent echoes every undergrad in history:

One’s brain becomes encumbered with a lot of choice bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use…Whenever I enter the region that was the kingdom of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in a china shop. A thousand hailstones, and when I try to escape them, theme-goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish- oh, may I be forgiven the wicked wish!-that I may smash the idols I came to worship.

Been there, Helen.

Goon Squad Practice

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 02:39:00 +1100

Replete with Wizard Of Oz reference, the 1993 Emerald City collection is a little too ‘Salman Rushdie’ for me. Modernity is a symptom of urbanity, sure, and Thoroughly Modern Jennifer Egan puts the characters of her short stories in Mombasa, Xian, San Francisco, Granada, Chicago, of course New York… One of them even pretends to go to Sydney (represent!). If nature exists, it’ll be a beach/bay/lake to accessorise their vapid existentialism. The best story, I feel, was “One Piece”, where Holly scales a favoured tree to better watch her brother swim, because ’a kind of magic’ keeps him safe so long as she can see him. She also helps him out, later, by falling out of one- because there can be no lovely incidental, natural trees in a book titled thus.

Egan is best a finding a pulse; holding the bones of a wrist fearlessly & demonstrating how clearly she can feel that radial artery work. There’s proper life in these short stories, and they’re not unhappy. The next stage is crossing these lives, these cities, into one super-story. It takes a few Emerald Citys to make A Visit From The Goon Squad. (And I can forgive centralisation if it has a soundtrack)

Dark As The Inside Of A Cow

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:39:00 +1100

The Crossing is a lonely beast of the Central American wilderness it details. Billy Parham crosses into Mexico from New Mexico in three futile missions. Overbearing philosophies- of his countrymens, & Billy’s own inarticulate ones- constricts the actual narrative to broad gestures that take years. A few agile episodes of adventure are interspersed with close attention to chores & lists of geographic landmarks. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Cormac McCarthy makes it slow going for all his skill, even if you decide not to run some of the Spanish dialogue through Google Translate.

The wanderers of this 1994 masterpiece are Mennonite, Mormon, Christian, Yaqui, Apache, Gypsies, tramps & thieves. As for them, there’ll be something in The Crossing to hook your faith onto- probably the wolf that started it all.

She carried a scabbed over wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

Despair overpowers The Crossing because the bulk of it is Billy’s attempts to flog a dead horse: to save the wolf, recover stolen horses, find his brother, join the army. The instinct-governed wolf demonstrates how natural this is, to grasp endlessly for that which can’t be restored. Consider the crimes she doesn’t understand:

The ranches said they brutalised the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

There was no cavalry recruitment for WWII: every decade sheds a little of itself to create history. Billy & his brother prove that this is no bloodless phenomenon.

It Will Always Be 'Too Soon'

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 01:50:00 +1100

It’s hard to forget a big fat ex-library book whose barcode causes a scene at uni & in shops up to 5 times a day. To carry Sophie’s Choice is to carry a veritable empire of cultural capital, one I have resisted because of its title (ominous in its simplicity, a spin-off idiom as dauntingly sucessful as ‘catch-22’, somehow implicitly about torture) and subject matter (Auschwitz).

There exists no catalogued guide to Nazi evil- any novelised account of it would be, by nature, reductive. This 1979 work is brave in its scope, and offers a fine glimpse of Occupied Poland. In flashbacks, Europe is patiently shaded as Sophie, Stingo & Nathan revel in shades of post-war USA. This as a social & geographic state, but also a lifestyle of industry & consumption. The men are in thrall of Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor, who is frustrated by their intellectual, psychoanalysed New York set. She sneers at their Oedipal complexes & oral fixations as ‘unearned unhappiness’. But then, she has faced indescribable horrors: horrors that, when actually described, kill her. She wasn’t supposed to, & wasn’t supposed to survive them. But then, who was?

FUCK God and all his Hände Werk. And life too.

Perhaps William Styron is relieving the middleclasses by emphasising the futility of guilt. He’ll allow us expensive therapies and twentysomething sexual disfunction, too, because why not, and because humans aren’t built for the ugliness of Lebensborn & Birkenau. Take away Stingo’s frustrated biography of Sophie and you still have Dr Blackstock’s alcoholic wife (and he still doesn’t have a final look at her head). History is built upon twists of the spirit. A war and a Reich can’t set the world straight, money can’t, love can’t.

Should I Be Satisfied That Ween Is Nearly A Household Name?

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:06:00 +1100

Camden Joy realises the ultimate futility of a Walkman that will break, a band that won’t crack the big time. Ephemerality is a property of life, and his Lost Joys compile stories & posters that are laden with this idea. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and Joy’s work embraces this senselessness.

‘She was better than Hendrix by as much as Hendrix was better than anyone else’, is a telling review of one band whose name he can’t remember- ‘does that count? Of course it does’. Joy rants about the relationship between music and (popular) attention. The bands are real, and really obscure: he was part of a collective that made 50 posters about Souled America (37 included here). His fictions give music to fans who are physically barred from listening, like hobos & prisoners. And when he likens the vinyl pressing process to the creation of candy his fantasy is only beginning.

A child is consolingly told that white boys grow into black men- considering his devotion to Al Green, this is scarcely more nonsensical & less magical a promise than the tooth fairy. A failed youth protest to eat ‘more candy than had ever been eaten’ is blamed on Donovan, who is playing as they vomit: a perfect fable for revolution. Creative writing is also deployed on real life absurdity, like the mythology of Pavement. Other stories could be easily real, like the man who nailed his Creedence albums to his wall to serve as windows. Camden strikes at the truth of music/life again & again- fearlessly direct hits:

Communism has gone down as a failure- why not also Love, old bastard? Love too hurts and disappoints, why not as well murder it, foolish History? But no- arbitrarily you steal from us communism and leave us Love!

Consider the target audience of his most successful novel, 1998’s Last Rock Star Book, which imagines Liz Phair as the child of Brian Jones & Anna Wohlin. Camden Joy’s readership is slim and, with the 90’s emphasis & the fact that all works are now out of print, getting slimmer. Joy writes with the basement understanding of his insignificance, and this frees 2002’s Lost Joys to treasure status.

We All Know A Farmer Who's Institutionalised For Phosphate Poisoning

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 02:16:00 +1100

Appealing to our sense of beauty, duty & survival, Rachel Carson’s iconic environmental text questions the enthusiasm for chemical use. Silent Spring was a divisive sensation in 1962, when a lot of the science was quite new- and this is the post-Hiroshima age of science. She decries the monopoly of commercial studies: because 98% of entomologists are employed by pesticide companies, only limited research is ever undertaken re: biological controls etc.

The book is a mixture of anecdotal & specialist opinion with biochemical fact, ordered under dramatic chapter headings like ’Indiscriminately From The Skies’, ‘Beyond The Dreams Of The Borgias’, ‘And No Birds Sing’. ‘Silent spring/And no birds sing’ is lifted from Keats, and Carson employs a bit of poetic choice in her own language use, substituting ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ for ‘fallacy’, for example. As well, the decades pictured in Silent Spring are related to countless naturalist episodes of modern literature, including the elm tree disease in The Virgin Suicides, and the opening Sr90 rant of the Drones’ Jezebel. As troubling as the public safety issue is, and the consequences of sterilising soil, it’s the noted effect on animals that had me appalled. Hint: it ain’t Godzilla. Suggested are possible springs with no robins, an America without eagles; sheep circling their paddock, trying to escape windblown poison; dogs, squirrels & foxes dying torturously for little gain; birds sitting overtime on eggs that never hatch. WHO’s DDT campaign’s in Java decimated the domestic cat, making them ten times more valuable. Makes for a distressing, mostly engrossing read.

There Are No Winners

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:09:00 +1100

Why was the one-eared girl friendless at school while the one-handed girl wasn’t? Both were assymetrical at an age when it’s cried for. A twist of personality divided them: the one-hand girl rocked the look (won netball prizes!). The one-eared girl was annoying, too much effort to talk or listen to; she’d be casually trampled in groups because, sticking so closely, she was’t seen while walking. Happy ending though, because in her first week of uni she met her future husband.

Of Human Bondage is about Phillip Carey, a boy much like my old collegian, except that he has a club foot and things don’t get better. You wish him the best, of course, and you wish him far away from you. But he takes you to Germany (actually it’s quite nice there) & Paris & London & he’s an accountant & he’s now a med student & I could’ve chosen anything from W Somerset Maugham but I chose to read all about Carey’s orphan life of pain and exploitation. It was a sensation back in 1915 but I much prefer Catalina from society Maugham a few decades hence. Everyone in Of Human Bondage was just so annoying. Queer aspects were blandly evident, yes, but give me Forster’s patient sensuality any day over Carey’s self-important crushes.

The main thing this novel gave me is the example of atrocious Mildred. Sickly, sociopathic, pathologically delusional & manipulative: I know a lady like Mildred that I hope follows her whore’s path to the grave. But that’s hardly a nice lasting impression, is it? Frankly, I expected more glee from a book that was one time pivotal to a Buffy storyline.

No Business Like It

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:00:30 +1100

This book was probably tossed to the op-shop upon Michael Jackson’s death, outmoded by that final scandal. Published in 2006, the journalism is dated but clear-headed:

At this point Michael Jackson’s damage is equal to what his talent was, and that means that it is extraordinary indeed. This is deeply upsetting to witness.

Margo Jefferson’s study is fixed on the child molestation charges, but circles the matter with a discussion on freak culture tradition from Phineas Barnum, child stars from blackface minstrelsy, stage cosmetology, and the Jackson family themselves. Among stunning revelations from the trial, there is an indictment on the media’s portrayel of mental illness: psychiatrists, like dermatologists of the decade before, offer impersonal soundbites of further, meaningless speculation. ‘He’s guilty of behaviour that makes him look guilty’ declare most of the 2200 reporters directly covering it. On Michael Jackson does not conclude strongly- we are all monstrous children?- but its slim attempt to understand the man ennobles him somewhat, without detracting from his oddity.

Get As Comfortable As Cadpig

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:43:00 +1100

The first dalmatian I met was a disappointment: he was a smoocher, yes, but quite obese, and two year later his owner fucked my boyfriend. Like most, I had fond childhood memories of One Hundred And One Dalmatians from the magical past when filmed animals were real animals.

The first Dodie Smith fiction I read was I Capture The Castle-and this fond childhood memory is with me always. In 1956, nearly a decade after this superb YA, she wrote One Hundred And One Dalmatians, and Smith’s pen has lost none of its sweetness. This, with similarly set Albion text Harry Potter, is rare in being a child’s book that I have unreservedly enjoyed as an adult. It is a fairytale for doglovers of all ages.

By conclusion, the Dearly’s have over a hundred dogs plus Cruella’s cat, so they move to Hell Hall in Suffolk. Heaven Hall now! Being knowingly ridiculous stops things from getting too sweet- as does Cruella, of course. That is a hilariously obscene number of dogs, no matter how intelligent. Pongo ‘had, as a young dog, devoured Shakespeare (in a tasty leather binding)’. Missis learns left from right, during which ‘Pongo and the Spaniel laughed in a very masculine way’.

Like all essentially gorgeous things, this book is restorative. Spent some time with your best friend lately?

A Bit Dicey

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:11:00 +1100

Elements of Rhinehart’s (George Cockroft’s) wacky psychotherapy are deadly refreshing. The idea that individuals can shrug a loaded fate by using dice to act on a numbered set of life choices: this has potential to be rewarding and productive (even if you list ‘doing nothing’ as an option). However, Luke Rhinehart’s rolled decisions involve ‘trying sodomy’, ‘playing rape’, ‘actual rape, ‘prostitution’ or murder during sex. Like, always.

I can see The Diceman’s appeal. It has a dozen or so sex scenes, each managing to be funny, original, subversive, sexy and, predominantly, semi-consensual. Which is where Cockroft shines in scene and dialogue (“Linda, I can’t…I’ve got my period”) Drenched in bodily fluids, it’s symptomatic of the pre-AIDS ’70s; but of course the best signifier of the decade occurs when Dr Rhinehart helps 33 mental patients (“hippies and blacks”) escape during a production of Hair.

Someday a higher creature will write the almost perfect and totally honest autobiography: ‘I live’.

Because yeah nah, cool Luke Rhinehart is no high creature.

To State Or Not To State

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:45:00 +1100

H G Bissinger’s 1990 account of his time in Odessa, West Texas, is a perfect little storm. Friday Night Lights gives a taste- a veritable buffet- of Texan values. Examined is the process by which children are compelled to (want to) play football through ferocious injury. Examined, too, is the process by which adults support the politicians that ruin them. ‘Counter-intuition’, after all, depends on the allying structure of a community’s intuition. The geography & demography of Odessa (‘There had been no reason for its original existence’) is paramount to understanding the success of the Permian High Panthers.

In the absence of shimmering skyline, the Odessas of the country had all found something similar in which to place their faith. In Indiana it was the pink-plink-plink of a ball on the parquet floor. In Minnesota it was the swoosh of skates on the ice. In Ohio and Oennsylvania and Alabama and Georgia and Texas and dozens of other states, it was the weekly event simply known as Friday Night.

The USA, of course, literally does have dozens of states. It is a treat to read about the swings of the Ector County football season; the swoops of the oil industry. Compared to the TV series, the book (epilogued by a stubborn defence of itself as journalism) has fewer happy endings. Unlike his screen adaptation, Smash Williams, Boobie Miles is legitimately, personally crippled by a knee injury. Another player loses a testicle. There is no Lyla Garrity: instead, a stunning expose of poor female student results & the culture that keeps many a Pepette out of college. High schools remained segregated until 1982, when zoning funneled blacks into Permian for perceived physical ability- a problematic culture, linked to how slaves were valued for their work but otherwise denigrated.

And yet, for all its stunning machismo, the scramble for a piece of the action is keenly alluring. Bissinger recalls, amid the threats on his life, how one reader quit his Brooklyn job to coach in Texas. Cowboy boots, steak, pecan nuts, stars & open space and how could you not be tempted?

Sisters & Saints Of The Streets

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:04:00 +1100

James Baldwin’s tale of John & his teenage Pentecostal experiences interacts wisely with an entire family history. His grandmother, step-father, aunt, mother, & father provide a tragic canvas for his uncomfortable Harlem adolescence: a cultist’s routine of home & church chores, physical abuse, and elementary sexual inclinations.

Go Tell It On The Mountain is a family saga teeming with the violent forces of the actual, right way of the world against what is righteous. From Florence’s emancipation comes civil rights struggles entangled with a fear of God which, for those afflicted, is never forgotten. The 1954 novel is fixed upon a single evening sermon, and the text pounds with astonishing references to God’s judgment, in the style of the King James Bible. Anodyne to this are the descriptions of African-American experience, South to North, and particularly of Elizabeth & the athiest Richard:

Little-bit: it had been his name for her. And sometimes he called her Sandwhich Mouth, or Funnyface, or Frog-eyes. She would not, of course, have endured these names from anyone else… ‘Concubine’, her aunt would have said, and at night, alone, she rolled the word, tart like a lemon rind, on her tongue.

This is not the only lemon reference, which is apt: this isn’t a sweet business. There is a lot of sin & injustice, and to Baldwin’s immense credit he fits everything neatly within 250 pages, even with the raging of hymn, prayer & persecution.

Crossing In An Age Of Crosses

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:46:18 +1100

When a bridge between Cuzco & Lima tumbles down in mid 1714, the affected Spanish colony includes an ambitious theologian, who researches the five victims. Why do bad things happen to good people? Thornton Wilder bookends his fable with ‘Perhaps An Accident’ & ‘Perhaps An Intention’. Nothing is proved except that the oft-quoted Pulitzer message that love bridges the living with the dead.

‘Lives by the bridge of San Luis Rey’…also means: under the sword of Damocles.

The reconstructed bridge gets the reputation of the original- a treacherous sort of Incan tightrope- but falling isn’t the only way to die. Death is the equaliser: the potently superstitious Inquisition generation is a brilliant setting for this reminder.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a single-setting story written in the mediated ’20s, about a place were media comprised Cervantes, Vittorio, & a series of love letters that miss their target. Foreign & very human, it was accidentally sympathetic to the recent passing of my dog.

The Attractions For A Northern Freelancer

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:04:00 +1100

It was time for something new…something that celebrated the virtues of the mods, of Sixties pop

Doesn’t sound very new to me, Stuart Maconie. Sounds like the type of hyped ‘guitar melody’ pastiche that Britain recycles every few years for a lark & a story- as was Maconie’s job at NME, until the daily grind & daily grunge became too much.

Anyone can make fun of the NME though & I won’t because it kept me such great company in 2006-2008. Some of the funniest moments of the Cider With Roadies rock memoir occurs under its influence, including Maconie’s first overseas assignment covering INXS’s ‘Kick’ world tour. He ‘sat for two hours in the lobby of the Four Seasons listening for pungent traces of ‘strine’ among the passing businessmen’: a strategy which successfully led him to tour manager Bruce.

This 2004 book deals largely in good anecdotes about enjoying music. As the title suggests, it’s very, provincially English. Chapters on Northern Soul, punk & the Smiths are prominent because what else even was there? He funnels childhood through a progressively obscure soundtrack of Beatles, Archies, Ireland’s Eurovision winner Dana… But I maintain that life is too short to bother with had-to-be-there bands T-Rex, Slade, & ELP etc. Of course, the little guys can make for the sweetest insights (the Gentle Giants need to change somebody’s life, after all). Maconie is fundamentally quite conservative in taste, with a lot of punchlines relying on the violent proper noun ‘Napalm Death’.

Taken as is, Cider With Roadies is a nice true story of the North in which rock n roll (and pop) provides for its disciple.

The Sacrifice Was All In Vain

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:42:00 +1100

To read Anne Frank’s diary is to, more often than not, share in her caged tedium. Nobody would volunteer to read how a teenager is misunderstood by her parents, or about her crushes, unless that teenager is remarkable.

The lasting, astonishing feature of 1947’s Diary of a Young Girl is its reality. The Franks’ experience in Amsterdam should be a dystopian fiction, not a primary document of the twentieth century. Anne never names the Final Solution, but she knows about the tragedy of her people- everyone knows. Horribly, when the SS first come, they come arbitrarily for lovely Margot, Anne’s sixteen year old sister.

I’d adore to go to Paris for a year and London for a year to learn the languages and study the history of art. Compare that with Margot, who wants to be a midwife in Palestine! I always long to see beautiful dresses and interesting people.

Stripped of citizenship, those in the Secret Annexe spend their months reading, conquering continental languages, and composing little stories & poems for others’ birthdays. Dutiful Europeans, regardless. Anne’s family and youth are, being sort of universal in essence, familiarly depicted- and even her culture, here, is in classical broadstrokes (middle-class, intellectual) we can understand. Anne’s world is unbelievable because it is so recognisable.

Sweet & Sea-Sickening Hijinks

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:34:31 +1100

There are a few parties in literature I really wish I’d gone to. Like Left Bank’s Christmas Eve singalong, of Trilby, and Lorelei Lee’s three-day debut in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

A High Wind In Jamaica begins with an earthquake, then the titular hurricane. The Thornton children, drunk on their first taste of nerve-calming madeira, are stunned by this violent Jamaican theatre: they spy a negro servant struck by lightning, & hear their Tabby torn to pieces by anxious feral cats. Their jungle home is flattened, in consequence and they are sent to England. In renegade fashion, Richard Hughes writes of adventure with contagious imaginative attraction. We are sharing in the danger & there’s no place we’d rather be.

When the children’s voyage is intercepted by doomed pirates, a series of misunderstandings serve the plot. And, excepting adults, no-one misunderstands quite like a child. Of them, only unpopular old Margaret seems aware of rape in its possible existence. Laura flouts seafaring superstition by declaring that the ship deck is a sea, and anyone working it who doesn’t paddle will drown! Rachel is upset when she drops a harpoon, slashing Emily’s thigh, because the harpoon was her baby doll.

The only other ship boarded contains a cargo of seasick circus animals. Its captain is left, by some default, guarded by Emily, who kills him in a wild panic because ‘there is something much more terrifying about a man who is tied up than a man who is not tied up- I suppose it is the fear he may get loose’. This unsentimental 1929 novel is a real trip.

Employee of the Master of the House

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +1100

Is Australia destined, ever, to feel ashamed of alcoholism? A barmaid’s autobiography is hardly likely to include happy truisms of pub culture- especially when the barmaid is banned, as a woman, from the public bars she services. Published in 1953, as the Royal Commission’s report on Liquor in New South Wales is, the decades previous are roughly brought to task for the corrupt & disgusting ‘hotel’ industry. For her children, Caddie involves herself in the cheating of customers & illegal gambling, in company of lechery & sin. She engages ‘Homes’ for Ann & Terry when she realises her babysitter is daily stupefied on gin, nearly killing Ann when she contracts diptheria.

Caddie herself avoids alcohol, after a night’s mopey partying with colleagues. These other barmaids offer rare companionship (“So long, tramps!”) until her future fiancee seeks to order an unfinished shandy. Naive Caddie writes of a crunchy, but delicate, age. The scars of war, evictions and sexual threat on one hand; dolly clothes, the fraught European postal journey, and a hesitation to repeat a curse-even for autobiography’s sake!- on the other. Buggary!

As the text closes in WWII (don’t worry, Dymphna Cusack fills in the gaps), it closes on a grungier time. Sydney shows how city Australia, then, was beholden more strongly to the rural nation. Language (‘cockatoo’ scouts, ‘Pure Merino’ aristocracy) is farm-bent. Unemployment sends slummers to distant, propertied relatives, or into ’on the track’ shearing. Most gorgeous are the rabbit-ohs of the streets, trading ‘wile rabbee!’ for a penny with bloodstained hands. Caddie winds up meeting her Come In, Spinner creative benefactors in the bush.

I’d like another single mother memoir, please, explaining what happened between then & now.